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Michael Eisner became an undergraduate major in Theater at Denison University in Ohio after boarding at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. At Denison, Eisner tried his hand at writing plays (Flower 1991: 37). While growing up, like Eisner, on Park Avenue, Jeffrey Katzenberg attended Horace Mann, a distinguished New York City independent school, and then New York University before he dropped out. Frank Wells, Eisner’s first President and Chief Operating Officer, had the highest grade point average in his class at Pomona, a prominent liberal arts college in Los Angeles, before becoming a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and returning to Stanford Law School. Eisner met Michael Graves during a performance at the Metropolitan Opera; his affection for Broadway theater dates to his childhood, and he grew up with a Picasso hanging in his bedroom. Trained in “the classics,” Katzenberg and Eisner have broad tastes: the first film for Touchstone Pictures that they produced (Down and Out in Beverly Hills) was based on a 1932 film by the French director, Jean Renoir; Eisner approved the idea for Footloose because it reminded him of The Scarlet Letter and “The Maypole of Merrymount” (Grover 1991:31–33, 53, 86, 219).
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