See Eisner promise anything but sabotage anyone foolish enough to trust him, from old friends like Jeffrey Katzenberg, who had to sue to get his contract honored, and Michael Ovitz, who wouldn't leave the building after he was fired, to old Disneys like Walt's nephew Roy and his business partner Stanley Gold, who brought Eisner to Anaheim in the first place and for their pains were purged, to such brilliant and abused collaborators as Steve Jobs at Pixar and the Weinstein brothers at Miramax, to all the talented hired hands for whom Disney was a revolving door, lynching bee and trampoline on their way to DreamWorks, Comcast or Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. They must have been out to get him, or disagreed with something he said, or reminded him that someone else deserved some credit, or turned out to be "wimps." But he does not play well with others, and the others are gone like Shane.

Weird. Because a shareholder revolt stripped Eisner of his chairmanship last year and forced him to promise to replace himself as C.E.O. in 2006, James Stewart is reminded of Henry IV, Richard III and other Shakespeare monarchs. But there is not enough noble rot to begin with. And while mention is made early on of a demanding father who insisted that his son call him Lester, and David Geffen is later quoted darkly suggesting something "very, very damaged in his background," not a single Freudian bean is spilled. In this motion picture, there is no smoking Rosebud.

Those of us with a professional interest in how big-screen movies, small-screen TV programs and Broadway musicals get made will devour Stewart's lubricious details on what Eisner, with help, got right: "Good Morning, Vietnam," "The Little Mermaid," "The Lion King" and the New Amsterdam Theater. And on what, with avarice and arrogance, he shouldn't have done but did: Euro Disney, Fox Family, "Pearl Harbor." And on what he should have done but, with cruelty and condescension, didn't: "The Lord of the Rings," Yahoo, "Fahrenheit 9/11," "CSI." How nice to know that Lloyd Braun deserves the credit for "Lost" and Susan Lyne for "Desperate Housewives"; how un-nice that it cost them their jobs. And if Eisner is to be congratulated for brushing off Steve Case of AOL as if he were a vampire bat, he is to be reviled for letting Jimmy Kimmel instead of Jon Stewart replace Bill Maher on late-night ABC TV.

Those of us with a taste for abuse can revel in what James Stewart expertly culls from a multitude of interviews, the verbatim notes the journalist Tony Schwartz took for Eisner's autobiography, transcripts of court hearings and correspondence with lawyers. About Katzenberg, a colleague for 19 years, Eisner says, "I hate the little midget." About Ovitz, a friend for 30: a "cancer" and "a psychopath." About Apple's Steve Jobs, who bought out the George Lucas share of Pixar when Eisner wouldn't: "It's impossible to negotiate with Steve Jobs. Jobs is a Shiite Muslim." Still, who knows? As Stewart reluctantly concludes, Eisner's "most glaring defect" is "his dishonesty."

But those of us who grew up dreaming of teaching, journalism or nonprofit social service, for whom the point of an economy is to provide jobs, food, medicine and space for its citizens, for whom leveraged buyouts, hostile takeovers, prestaggered cash flows and capital liquidity ratios were a superstitious sort of Pythagorean number mysticism -- who have always rooted for Jesse James, Calamity Jane and Willy Loman against railroads, Daddy Warbucks and J. R. Ewing, who have lined up with deerslayers and river pirates against J. P. Morgan as immortalized by Steichen, the avatars of Donald the Vulgarian and the severed ear of a kidnapped Getty -- are nauseated by the celebrity chic of the megapolists who show up every year at Herb Allen's Sun Valley media and entertainment conference to get their mugs shot by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair, who would have fired Franz Kafka for looking in his mirror, seeing the modern corporation and inventing workmen's comp, who might even have been happier in Regency England, when the poor were hanged for poaching rabbits. But then we have also wondered why the downsized and homeless haven't stoned the smoky windows and slashed the radial tires of every stretch limo on the streets of the imperial city.