Top Mouse (Published 1998)

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Work in Progress

By Michael D. Eisner

with Tony Schwartz.

450 pp. New York:

Random House. $27.95.

THE autobiography of Michael D. Eisner, the chairman of Walt Disney, is a true Disney production: a PG-rated adventure with broad family appeal where the hero, by dint of hard work, sound judgment and -- yes -- brilliance, triumphs over adversity. It's ''The Lion King'' in corporate America.

''Work in Progress'' tells the story of how a boy from an affluent Jewish family in Manhattan first succeeded in television, then in the movies, then in theme parks. Eisner's infatuation with the entertainment business began during a 1963 summer vacation when he was an NBC page on the set of ''The Price Is Right.'' After returning for his senior year at Denison University in Ohio, he had a passing romance with writing plays but realized he lacked the touch when he titled his first endeavor ''To Metastasize a River.''

Two years after graduation, Eisner landed at ABC, whose researchers had found that audiences preferred movies to any other form of programming. Eisner, whose rise was rapid, worked with Barry Diller to create films for television. They also improved the network's ratings with sitcom hits like ''Barney Miller'' and ''Happy Days.'' However, after Diller left to join Paramount Pictures, ABC bypassed Eisner, picking the more experienced Fred Silverman, the head of CBS, to take over. In 1977 Eisner followed his mentor to Paramount.

Their reign at that studio is the subject of some of the most entertaining pages of ''Work in Progress,'' in part because Eisner's boss was the irrepressible Charles Bluhdorn, the chief executive of Gulf and Western. During one afternoon of hot tub schmooze at Bluhdorn's home in the Dominican Republic, Bluhdorn proposed a film ''in which Sitting Bull meets Hitler. We ought to get Dustin Hoffman involved.'' Then, Eisner reports, ''he suggested a 'Bad News Bears' sequel set in Cuba, in which Castro hits the winning home run.'' Ever the diplomat, Eisner made but one suggestion: the Americans ought to win.

At Paramount, Diller and Eisner imposed their television experience on the film business. Having put together hundreds of hours of television shows on fixed budgets under tight deadlines, the pair chose to develop film projects internally. ''Why wait for writers to come to us with ideas or for agents and producers to put us into bidding wars?'' Eisner writes. He and Diller sought ''high concept'' stories that could be explained in a single sentence. Paramount's record -- ''Flashdance,'' ''Terms of Endearment,'' ''Ordinary People'' and ''Raiders of The Lost Ark'' -- was extraordinary, and in the early 80's the studio was a huge success.

But Bluhdorn died in 1983, and his successor, Martin Davis, was more envious of Diller's and Eisner's growing celebrity than pleased by it. Diller quickly decamped to run 20th Century Fox. In 1984 Eisner was forced out of Paramount and immediately accepted an offer from Roy Disney and his partner, Stanley Gold, to form a management team as a replacement for Disney's chairman, Ron Miller.