Chapter 1. The lie? My work is who I am.

Ironically, the low point in my professional career was when I had the highest-paying

job and the most significant title I'd ever had. I was the head of sales at the Walt Disney

Company's movie studio. In the simplest terms, as President of Distribution, I sold movies

to theaters. I'd been doing this for seven years of a 17-year Disney career and we were

on a run. I don't mean we had some hit movies. I mean, we had all the hit movies. We set

every record. How could we not? I came into the job on the heels of the company's acquisition

of Pixar and not long after settling in, we acquired Marvel Studios and then Lucas

Film. In what will likely be regarded a hundred years from now as the beginning of the Golden

Age for any movie studio ever, the collection of Disney's live-action films like Beauty and

the Beast and Jungle Book and animated films like Frozen and Zootopia, combined with the

superhuman consistency from Pixar, Toy Story 3, Inside Out, the unprecedented Marvel

Run, roughly $10 billion in box office earnings during my time, and the phenomenon of Lucas Film,

all things Star Wars, came together to make box office history. While I was Distribution

Chief, we had the biggest year in the history of the business and followed that with the

second biggest year ever. We released nine of the ten most successful opening weekends

ever. We had the biggest overseas numbers. We established our brands as the most prolific

in entertainment, and in doing so, built something unlike anything the movie industry had seen

up to that point. I had the best team in the business, by a stretch. I was surrounded by the most

incredible leadership team I'd ever worked with and was reporting to people whom I not only respected,

but who created an environment that people genuinely loved working in. Being involved with these

epic brands also meant getting to collaborate with some of the greatest storytellers to work

...