Today, Kaplan is a research professor at the University of
Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication
who holds the Norman Lear Chair in Entertainment, Media,
and Society. He is an accomplished screenwriter and producer
as well as a regular contributor to the Huffington Post. But he
was only in his 30s when, in the mid–1980s, he embarked on his
third career—as Disney Productions’ Vice President. He went
to Disney with a wide-ranging background—from biology to
the Harvard Lampoon, from broadcast and print journalism to
high-level politics. He knew a lot about a lot of things, but very
little about the movie business. His description of his self-
designed university illustrates how he accepted the responsibil-
ity for creating his own success:
“Before starting this job, I put myself through a crash
course, watching five or six movies every single day for six
weeks, trying to see every successful picture of the last several
years. Then I read as many of the scripts as I could get my
hands on, to see what made these particular movies great. I
kind of invented my own university, so that I could get some
sense of both the business and the art.... I’ve always been in
worlds where knowing the community has been important. In
graduate school, when I was studying literature, to know the
writers and critics was to know a universe. In Washington, I
had to learn the political players, and here I had to learn the
players. It became clear to me that there were about one hun-
dred core writers, and I systematically set out to read a
screenplay or two by each of them. When I got here, I was
told it would take me three years to get grounded, but after
nine months, the head of the studio told me I’d graduated and
promoted me. Within a year I found—with some stumbles
here and there—that I could perform the way my peers, who
On Becoming a Leader