Note
This was originally written for OSV Field Notes
Everyone seems to be reading Roll the Calls, Ari Emanuel’s new memoir, and I get why. It’s a loud, angry, very fun book. Emanuel, who co-founded the talent agency Endeavor and is now executive chairman of WME Group, writes about rolling hundreds of calls a day, and the pages are full of inside-baseball on how deals actually get done in Hollywood. He also has a favourite villain: Jeffrey Katzenberg. Ari calls him a “glad-handing phony,” lumps him in with Harvey Weinstein, and traces the grudge back to Katzenberg stiffing him on a packaging fee.
Regardless, I think Katzenberg deserves more than a punchline. He started at Paramount as Barry Diller’s assistant, ran Walt Disney Studios through The Little Mermaid and The Lion King, then co-founded DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen in 1994. Later came WndrCo, his investment firm, and Quibi (a phenomenal failure). On September 23, 2026, he posted a long essay on X telling Hollywood that AI is not going away (which I made a short video about).
For a fuller account of Katzenberg, there’s “The Men Who Would Be King” by Nicole LaPorte, a former Variety reporter who covered DreamWorks. It’s the best account I’ve found of how the studio was built, and it is largely Katzenberg’s story, although it does feature Steven Spielberg and David Geffen as well. LaPorte isn’t gentle with Katzenberg either, but she shows you how he works. The two-to-three-hour Monday morning meetings where Katzenberg would rule over worker bees and aesthetes. 100 to 150 phone calls a day.
There’s also the line he told the Pixar team when they met him while he was at Walt Disney: “Everybody thinks I’m a tyrant. I am a tyrant. But I’m usually right. I will give you a chance, if you think I’m wrong, to change direction, but you’d better be right.”
If you’re into Hollywood, and the media business, read this tale right next to Ari’s memoir. It will become very clear that like all industries, Hollywood is built upon the dreams and passions of people who often sit at opposite ends of the table.
Readings
📘 The Men Who Would Be King: An Almost Epic Tale of Moguls, Movies, and a Company Called DreamWorks by Nicole LaPorte (2010)
📕 Roll The Calls: A Memoir by Ari Emanuel (2026)
🎬 The Little Mermaid (1989)
🎬 The Lion King (1994)