Oh how the years go by amy grant

I

In Which We Are Introduced to Winnie-the-Pooh and Some Lawyers, and the Stories Begin

HERE IS EDWARD BEAR, known to his friends as Winnie-the-Pooh, sitting upright in an office chair at a Century City law firm. A lawsuit has been filed against the Walt Disney Company. The lawsuit sometimes makes Pooh feel like he's been dragged down the stairs, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, and sometimes it's hard to know if it is Walt Disney that Pooh feels dragged by or if it is someone else. Maybe the lawsuit is a bother and there is another way if only Pooh could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.

As Pooh tries to give his mind to the matter, Bertram Fields--the man who calls himself Pooh's lawyer--appears in the 20th-floor conference room of Greenberg Glusker Fields Claman Machtinger & Kinsella, where Pooh happens to be sitting. "Hello, ladies," the fearsome Hollywood litigator says to four women who sit around a circular table. Fields turns to a fifth chair, the one occupied by the huge stuffed bear. "Hello, Pooh," he says.

Pooh and Fields have something in common: They are septuagenarians, which is a long, difficult word that means they are Very Old. It was in 1926 that the British writer A.A. Milne first published Winnie-the-Pooh, which introduced Christopher Robin, Piglet, Eeyore, and other residents of the 100 Aker Wood. In 1928 came The House at Pooh Corner, which offered ten more stories about the beloved characters who talk in Capital Letters, make up silly poems, and misspell words in the nicest sort of way By 1929, when Fields-the-Lawyer was born, Winnie-the-Pooh had already celebrated his third birthday.

Things have changed a lot for Pooh since then. He's visited a lot of countries (dozens), made a lot of money (billions), and met a lot of attorneys 07, if he remembers correctly). There have been lawsuits (two) and accountants (seven), and sometimes Pooh feels like he's the bottom of a confused heap of everybody on the ground.

Fields never seems confused. He is a dignified, slender fellow--the sort who must do a lot of Stoutness Exercises--and when draped in charcoal pinstripes, like he is today, he looks awfully like Someone to Be Reckoned With. A Harvard Law School graduate, Fields has had many clients with names that Pooh, were he paying attention, would definitely know. Names like Hoffman and Beatty and Cruise. Names like John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Names like that. In 40 years, Fields has never lost a trial, and he has worked for every movie studio in town except one: Disney. Fields likes to sue the Walt Disney Company, and everybody knows the story of the last time he did it. It was 1999, when Michael Eisner, Disney's CEO, admitted under oath that he'd called Jeffrey Katzenberg (the former Disney executive who today puts the K in DreamWorks SKG) "the little midget." Several weeks later, when Disney settled with Katzenberg for reportedly more than $250 million, it was such a big Tra-la-la that for a moment even Pooh stopped humming a hum.

Now Fields says he works for Pooh, though his client in this case is really Shirley Slesinger Lasswell, the tiny, 80-year-old grandmother in the royal blue suit who today sits across the table from the huge stuffed bear. "The Pooh Lady," as she's been known for most of her life, owns the U.S. and Canadian merchandising, TV, and radio rights to Pooh and his friends. A very long time ago now, in 1961, she licensed those rights to Disney, and the royalties she's been paid since have made her rich, as in, she has Umty-tiddly Umty-too amounts of money.

In 1991 the Pooh Lady went to court to try to get Disney to pay her more (by last count, at least $200 million more). It seems to Pooh that the shouting hasn't stopped since. Depending on who is shouting, and sometimes Pooh has trouble keeping track, he and his friends generate anywhere from $1 billion to $6 billion a year in revenue for Disney That even rivals what Mickey Mouse makes and represents perhaps as much as a quarter of Disney's $25 billion annual operating revenue. Which helps explain why Disney executives get so bothered when Fields claims that if he proves his case, the Pooh Lady can terminate Disney's Pooh license. If Fields is correct, the Pooh Lady could grant some other Multimedia Conglomerate the right to sell Pooh T-shirts, sheets, toys, stuffed animals (known as plush), and thousands of other Things. Pondering that makes Disney executives Very Sulky indeed.

There are two pots of money to fight over. In one pot is revenue from merchandise on which Disney agrees royalties should be paid. The Pooh Lady says she's getting cheated on her part of that pot. Disney says she's Wrong in the Head. In another pot is revenue from sales of Pooh-related videocassettes, DVDs, computer software, and theme-park attractions. Disney says that's not merchandise, so the Pooh Lady deserves no royalties. The Pooh Lady says to believe that, she would have to be Foolish and Deluded and have no brain at all.

For years the Pooh Lady drove a Cadillac sporting the license plate POOH-1. To this day she sleeps in Pooh pajamas and hands out Pooh ballpoint pens to people she likes. Whenever she throws a party, she sets a place for Pooh at the head of the table--much like the place he's sitting at now.

The Pooh Lady, who wears large, diamond-studded teddy bear earrings, looks at her lawyer. "I told Pooh we were going to be talking about him. He wanted to come along," she says, explaining why she brought a stuffed animal the size of an eight-year-old child with her to Century City. The Pooh Lady always talks this way about the bear--as if he were real.

She's right, of course. In Los Angeles, where fame, fortune, and a big-name attorney are markers of success, Pooh is a Player. But there's more than that driving this Story, just like there's more than a boy, a bear, and a bouncing tiger that keeps us reading about Pooh. Listen closely, for the Pooh Lady's lawsuit--which is currently the oldest active case on the Los Angeles County Superior Court docket--can teach us one of Pooh's most cherished lessons: The surest way to Get Lost is to Get Complicated.

II

In Which the Sun Shines on the Pooh Files

RIGHT IN THE CENTER of downtown Los Angeles is a place that resembles nothing so much as a Very Deep Pit. To get there you board an elevator and ride three floors down to a dusty, airless basement called the Los Angeles County Superior Court Archives. It is here that the 44-volume court file for the Pooh Lady's lawsuit fills n tattered cardboard boxes, each one packed with arguments over what Pooh is worth.

As Pooh understands it, his value to Disney has a lot to do with something called Synergy. Pooh thinks about Synergy by imagining the Walt Disney Company as a forest. There's a tree for each Disney-owned movie studio, home video and cable operation, TV network, theme park, and retail store, and many of the trees are in bloom. There are trees full of Hundred Acre Wood Minute Maid Juice Boxes and Kellogg's-Disney Hunny B's cereal. There are trees laden with McDonald's Tigger Movie Happy Meals and Winnie-the-Pooh Band-Aids. Each tree makes a loud buzzing noise that says, "Buy me!" But when Synergy is really working, the trees join together to fill the forest with gentle sounds, which all seem to be whispering to Pooh and everyone else, "Don't go to Warner Bros. stores. Don't watch DreamWorks animation. Don't visit Universal Studios Hollywood or Knott's Berry Farm. Shop Disney."

Those trees, or trees very much like them, are discussed at length in the file titled Stephen Slesinger Inc. v. the Walt Disney Company. To review this file takes days and days and makes even a patient bear feel like his head has gotten stuck in a rabbit hole. Pooh has been stuck before, back when he ate too much honey and became, to use his own words, a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness. But even Pooh can see that Superior Court File No. BC022365 reveals much more than the tale of one bear. The newly opened court record, which Disney lawyers fought for more than a decade to keep sealed, allows visitors to wade into a Treacherous and Little-Explored Place: the Swamp of Hollywood Accounting.