THE MAN RE-ANIMATING DISNEY

IT IS 5 A.M. AT DISNEYLAND, five hours into the 24-hour celebration of the amusement park's 30th birthday. In the tepid dawn, half-empty boats sail the seas of Pirates of the Caribbean. The children -who should have been in bed - are asleep on the benches of New Orleans Square and on the front porches of Main Street. For one brief moment between darkness and daylight, it is too early or too late to eat, to buy, to ride. And the magic is peeling off the Magic Kingdom.

But not for Michael D. Eisner, the prince who must awaken Sleeping Beauty. The chairman and chief executive officer of Walt Disney Productions arrived soon after the birthday celebrations began at midnight and has already appeared on two television programs. As he eats a breakfast of popcorn, he holds hands with Jane Breckenridge, his wife Aljean Harmetz reports on the film industry for The New York Times and is the author of ''The Making of The Wizard of Oz.'' of 18 years. In his mushroom-colored suit, he strides through his fantasy world like one of those Arabian Nights caliphs who walked the midnight streets of Baghdad in disguise. In this case, the disguise is 43 years, 6-foot-3 of rumpled adulthood and a bald spot in the middle of his curly hair which almost nobody is tall enough to see.

His tie is forever askew and his expensive suits, disheveled. He has managed to preserve intact what his vice presidents characterize as ''relentless enthusiasm'' and his wife describes as ''that boundless enthusiasm that dissipates when you become an adult.'' When he was elected Disney's chairman in September 1984, he said that being asked to run the company was equivalent to being asked to spend his time in F.A.O. Schwarz. ''I don't know which toy to take home because they're all fabulous and they all work and I'm so excited I can't sleep at night.'' His most recent excitement comes from a billion-dollar deal made this month with the French Government for a Disney theme park outside of Paris, which is scheduled to open in 1990 or 1991.

Although his excited grin and squashed nose give him a resemblance to the television puppet Howdy Doody, he is a tough deal maker. In the words of Jeff Berg, an agent, Eisner is ''a more complex thinker than he appears to be and very seductive with talent.'' One of a number of top studio executives who have changed jobs recently and are beginning to manage the film industry in a new way, Eisner has a particularly challenging assignment. He is taking on an American institution and trying to make it work under Hollywood's new rules of distribution, technology, markets and financing. What Eisner and his management team are doing to make Disney into a major modern studio provides a clear picture of how business is done in the Hollywood of the mid-1980's.

Eisner's first important movie at Disney, ''Down and Out in Beverly Hills,'' starring Nick Nolte and Bette Midler and directed by Paul Mazursky, has been rated R. The ''restricted'' rating, Disney's first, foreshadows the changes in store. Although the picture won't be released until the end of January, and it will be 1988 before the company has the standard industry assembly line of 12 to 15 movies a year, Eisner has already managed to convince Hollywood that he is turning Disney into something it never was before, a major movie studio. In October, Daily Variety, the industry trade paper, casually identified ''the seven Hollywood majors'' as Columbia, Disney, M-G-M/UA, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Universal and Warner Bros. One key problem for new managements is that they get only stale projects that have been turned down everywhere else. But writers, directors and producers are coming to Disney as soon as they have been rejected by Warner Bros. or Universal - and before they go to studios perceived as less stable or less well managed.

Between 1966, when Walt Disney died, and 1984, his company was essentially in suspended animation. While the caretakers of Walt Disney's legend duplicated the silly comedies and lovable animated animals he had pioneered and spun the stale sugar of ''The Wonderful World of Disney'' each Sunday night on NBC, children brought up on television were growing too sophisticated for Disney. The real heirs to Walt Disney were creating ''Star Wars'' and ''Raiders of the Lost Ark.'' To the teen-agers who paid to see ''Star Wars'' half a dozen times, Disney was for babies.

The studio's status as the only brand name in the movie industry was no help. Nobody goes to a Paramount movie because it is made by Paramount, but people do buy records and coloring books and movie tickets because of the Disney name. The problem is that other people refuse to see movies because of the Disney name.

Last year, Disney's board of directors acted. In choosing Michael Eisner at the end of a six-month battle against corporate raiders, the board bought - for $750,000 a year plus a $750,000 signing bonus, options on 510,000 Disney shares, and a performance bonus that will amount to nearly a million dollars in 1985 -one of the three or four most credible executives in the movie industry. For eight years before he came to Disney, Eisner was president of Paramount, the bottom half of the Barry Diller-Michael Eisner team at that studio. Their extraordinary seven-year run of box-office successes included ''Saturday Night Fever,'' ''Raiders of the Lost Ark,'' ''Flashdance'' and ''Beverly Hills Cop.'' The hits were produced under a policy of penny-pinching control over budgets. There were, of course, some failures, in particular ''White Dog,'' a movie Eisner insisted on making. It involved a racist dog that attacked only blacks, and it was considered so bad it was shown only on pay cable.

In choosing Eisner to run an entertainment conglomerate that is perceived to be the most sentimental and old-fashioned of American companies, the Disney board also bought a rich boy who grew up on Park Avenue and a man known for movies that were glossy urban fairy tales, whose one inviolable rule at Paramount was ''No snow, no rural.''

The Eisner management team reshaping Disney is headed by Frank G. Wells as president and chief operating officer. Wells is a Stanford Law School graduate, Rhodes scholar and a former president of Warner Bros. He had left the movie industry at the age of 50 to climb the highest mountain on every continent; he managed to conquer six but failed in two attempts at Mt. Everest. After Wells and Eisner appeared together on television recently, Wells's mother complained that her son had sat up too straight. Eisner's wife said that Eisner had slouched. The strengths of the two are complementary. Wells describes himself as ''business- and administration-oriented,'' and he runs Disney's theme parks and real estate.

The third man, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the indefatigable chairman of Disney's movie and television division, came to the studio from Paramount where he was Eisner's head of production. Nicknamed the Golden Retriever, Katzenberg knows about every new script in town almost before it is photocopied and every deal that falls through an instant before it collapses. He has said that he would happily make at Disney all the films the team made at Paramount except ''Joy of Sex'' and ''Friday the 13th.'' Katzenberg has launched nearly 100 projects since coming to Disney and has enticed a number of hot young writers including Daniel Petrie Jr. (''Beverly Hills Cop'') and Sandy Kroopf and Jack Behr (''Birdy'') with promises that they can later produce or direct.

Because of his track record, Eisner's presence at Disney indicates that hit movies are still important. But Eisner's first executive actions demonstrate that the days are long gone when a movie studio lived or died by how its films performed in theaters.

BEFORE 1950, Hollywood studios owned most of America's movie theaters, thus controlling the distribution of their products.

A Government antitrust suit ended that era, forcing the studios to sell their theaters. Much of what happened in the following years can be seen as Hollywood's attempt to battle television. Much of what is happening now can be seen as attempts by the studios to reclaim the distribution machinery. ''Thirty years ago you made your movies and put them into theaters worldwide,'' says Barry Diller, Eisner's ex-boss, who is now chairman of Fox. ''Five years from now, a studio will be a full-service distributor into every ancillary market it can find.'' In all likelihood, he adds, studios will own more of the ''moving parts'' of the distribution chain, such as cable channels or television stations or the technology for ''pay-per-view,'' a system in which a customer orders a particular movie to be received on his home television screen and is billed for that show.

Sidney J. Sheinberg, president of MCA, the parent company of Universal, joins Diller in valuing control of distribution by the studios and sees fragmentation of distribution - video cassettes, cable television, syndication as well as theaters - as the most important fact for Hollywood's next five years. Almost alone, six years ago, Sheinberg and Diller prevented a major shift in power from the movie companies to Home Box Office, the pay-cable company, by refusing to make movies at Paramount and Universal unless the studios owned all the ancillary rights. Paramount then kept Showtime, another pay-cable company, competitive with HBO by selling Showtime exclusive rights to its movies in 1983. HBO responded by overpaying for films at a time when video cassettes were overtaking pay-cable, and the company now plays a considerably diminished role on the Hollywood scene.

Movie studios in today's Hollywood draw major revenues from video cassettes, cable ownership, television production, the mer-chandising of movie characters in the form of toys or books, real estate, new sophisticated methods of financing and, in particular, from their warehouses, the 50 years worth of movies and television programs they have stored away.

New movies have an afterlife on video cassettes and disks, on pay cable and in syndication to local television stations. A blockbuster is usually a blockbuster in every medium. ''Beverly Hills Cop'' and ''Ghostbusters'' earned their studios an extra $20 million on video cassettes manufactured and marketed by the studios' wholly- or partly-owned video cassette companies. However, cassette rights to even such marginally successful independent movies as ''The Cotton Club'' and ''Prizzi's Honor'' sold for more than $4 million apiece.

Eisner has pushed Disney into video in a dramatic way by putting on cassettes the classic animated film, ''Pinocchio.'' The net revenue to Disney so far is $11 million. No more cassettes of ''Pinocchio'' will be sold after January, in the hope that the more than 400,000 copies that have been bought will be damaged or overtaken by new technology before ''Pinocchio'' is re-released in theaters six years from now. Eisner has also pushed Disney's animation division full speed ahead. Eisner inherited one animated feature project, ''Basil of Baker Street,'' which will be released next summer, but to cash in on the explosion of video cassettes for children, he will be releasing a new animated feature film every 18 months instead of the every four years that had been customary. The pay-cable Disney Channel, a greedy consumer of the studio's old movies and television programs, is operating in the black, six months ahead of schedule.

Major studios are able to weather bad years at the theatrical box office because of the money earned by their television production and syndication divisions. Mirroring this, Eisner's first thrust was in television rather than movies. He considered a successful television series more important than a hit movie because the program could make as much as $200 million for the studio in five years after being syndicated - sold to local television stations. And Eisner hit the jackpot. His first prime-time series, ''The Golden Girls,'' is the undisputed success among this fall's new shows. Entering an arena that Disney had never tried before, Eisner sold two Saturday morning animated cartoons. In February, the ''Disney Sunday Movie'' will debut at 7 P.M. on ABC. The series, 10 two-hour and 13 one-hour made-for-television movies, is intended for children and their parents. Katzenberg says they will be nonsaccharine, contemporary pictures and not the familiar Disney nature films.

Since 1977 and ''Star Wars,'' merchandising characters from movies has become a big business. Walt Disney had pioneered character merchandising - from Mickey Mouse soap to Davy Crockett coonskin caps. By the 1980's, a number of movies were making almost as much money from toys and novelizations and coloring books as they did from film rentals. Disney's own film, ''Tron,'' was more successful as a video game than as a movie. But the Disney characters seem hopelessly old-fashioned compared to R2D2, E.T. and Indiana Jones. So Disney will use its Saturday morning programs to launch new characters, and the old Disney characters are being upgraded by being imprinted on expensive, high-fashion sportswear. At the theme parks, 1986 will be the year of Minnie Mouse. A little-used character up to now, Minnie will introduce her own line of clothes and, possibly, rock music. ''She will not spend the next 50 years sitting in the back behind Mickey,'' says Eisner.

Although Disney shares problems and opportunities with the rest of the movie industry, the studio is unique in the potential profits it can make from real estate. No other studio has 28,000 acres in central Florida. No other studio has the advantage of owning the country's two most successful theme parks. In addition to the just-announced park outside of Paris, there is a Disneyland in operation in Japan. The studio will break ground within a few months on a $300 million film studio at Walt Disney World in Florida. The public will be able to buy tickets and take a studio tour. In announcing this project, Disney effectively pulled the rug from under MCA/Universal, which had toyed with the same idea of a Florida studio for half-a-dozen years.

Eisner and Frank Wells have joined the film-industry mainstream in the techniques they are using to finance their films. The cost of the average major studio movie has risen astronomically in the last 10 years - to more than $15 million from $3 million, with another $8 million to $10 million spent on marketing each movie. So studios have searched for outside sources of money that will dilute their risk by paying 25 percent to 100 percent of the costs of making movies. According to Paul Kagan, a noted industry analyst, 1985 was the greatest year in the history of motion-picture finance, a result, he reported, of the great amount of money that was poured into studios and film production and of investors' optimism about all the new technologies. A deal involving Disney broke records. Silver Screen Partners II, a New York financing company, announced that it planned a joint venture with Disney to produce motion pictures. It then offered shares to the public and sold enough to raise $193 million.

The recent turmoil in the movie industry, in which nearly every studio has been sold or changed management during the last five years, has been fueled less by the expectation of hit movies than by the riches to be earned from the studios' vast warehouses of movies and television programs. The new technologies and the growth of local television stations willing to pay substantial syndication fees have tripled and quadrupled the value of the studios' libraries of old television series and movies.

M-G-M, now being purchased by Ted Turner, will use its vast inventory to feed the appetite of WTBS, Turner's superstation. Coca-Cola, which owns Columbia, paid $485 million for Embassy Communications in order to get its hands on a treasure of Norman Lear's old television programs, including ''All in the Family.'' Dino De Laurentiis, a producer who has previously had his films financed by major studios, then purchased Embassy Pictures, Embassy's movie production unit, from Coca-Cola. De Laurentiis says the money to be earned from cassettes and other nontheatrical markets makes it necessary for him to own his own distribution. Rupert Murdoch, the newspaper and magazine publisher whose purchase of 20th Century-Fox was completed just a few weeks ago, is spending $2 billion for six Metromedia television stations that can buy programs from the Fox library and for which Fox can make new programs.

At Disney, Eisner has moved quickly to exploit assets that were lying unused in Disney's vaults - 29 years worth of ''The Wonderful World of Disney'' and nearly 500 cartoons that had never been syndicated. Two packages of old movies and ''The Wonderful World of Disney'' television programs have commanded $40 million in just one month of syndication.

''These companies are nonduplicable resources,'' says Fox's Barry Diller.

Frank Price, chairman of Universal's movie division, agrees. ''We're still only in the early stages of new technologies,'' he says. ''Do you want an automobile company today? Do you want to buy an oil company? What other industry has this potential and doesn't pollute the environment?''

Almost every major executive has changed studios in the last few years. Hollywood is waiting to see if Frank Price at Universal, Barry Diller at Fox, Alan Ladd Jr. at M-G-M/UA and Michael Eisner at Disney will be able to recreate the success each had under different circumstances. Eisner's wildest ideas at Paramount were usually held in check by Diller. No one is certain how some of his more outlandish schemes will fare now that he is at the top.

FILMED ENTERTAIN-ment - which includes movies, television, video cassettes and cable -brought in only $33.6 million of Disney's $173 million in operating income in 1985. Nevertheless, Michael Eisner is aware that his most important and difficult job will be to create a successful movie company. ''That's why they hired me,'' he says.

Eisner has ''great instincts,'' says Michael Ovitz, an agent, whose phrase is echoed by a dozen producers and executives. Part of those great instincts is ''an innate feel for a good premise,'' according to Frank Price. And, says Larry Mark, a production vice president under Eisner at Paramount, ''an unbridled enthusiasm which makes him refuse to give up, even if an idea he thinks is good has never worked, like the script for 'Beverly Hills Cop,' '' As Barry Diller sees it, ''Michael has good taste, a good eye, and a good brain, and he's a little crazy and that always helps. Anybody who is good in this business is a little crazy.''

''My biggest break,'' says Eisner, ''was being born in 1942. When I was 21, that was the target audience for everything. When I was 35, the target audience was 35. I always felt and acted as though I was the audience.

''My first week at Disney, there was an employee recognition dinner. They sang Disney songs and I realized the newest song was 20 years old. And at the theme parks, Tomorrowland was looking a bit like Yesterdayland. My real challenge is to create the new without letting 'Disneyesque' vanish from the dictionary.''

Even as he walked through Disneyland on its 30th anniversary, Eisner was surrounded by changes he and his president, Frank Wells, hoped would give ''Disneyesque'' a contemporary meaning. The educational ride inside the atom was being replaced by a thrill ride to be designed jointly with George Lucas. It will feature ''Star Wars'' characters and a new technology similar to the simulators used to train pilots. Presumably, the movement of the ride will be augmented by the effect of space rushing by outside, just the way galaxies zoomed by Luke Skywalker in ''Star Wars.'' In another attempt at updating, Michael Jackson was starring in a 3-D movie being directed by Francis Coppola and produced by Lucasfilm that will open at Disneyland and Disney World in 1986. An unused meadow in the park had been turned into a video dance hall. Even homosexuality, until now hardly a Disneyesque idea, no longer seemed an issue. A year earlier, the park's refusal to allow single-sex dancing had brought on a court suit. Now, Disney security guards look the other way.

Although Eisner admits to being manipulative, his management style is two-thirds amiable - ''Demanding in a pleasant way'' - and one-third frenzied enthusiasm. ''I can't stand politics and in-fighting,'' he says, ''so I try to create an organization that precludes it.'' More than 20 Paramount executives, including Katzenberg, have followed him to Disney.

Despite the harmony, there are financial problems in fitting the world of Mickey Mouse into the mid-1980's. They surfaced at a ''Corporate Creative Seminar'' Eisner instigated last July at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Laguna Niguel, 20 miles down the freeway from Disneyland. The expensive weekend for 50 executives and their spouses at the luxury hotel would, Eisner said, ''cost less than one bad script one executive decides to have written for no apparent reason.''

Wearing a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt over a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, Eisner slouched on a couch. The other eight men in the room included Frank Wells, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Richard Frank, Katzenberg's second in command. Frank was wearing Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer's Apprentice on his black satin jacket, while Katzenberg had a small mouse on the pocket of his pink golf shirt. Wells was one of the few men in the room without Disney stamped somewhere on his clothes. In white cords and a blue denim work shirt, he looked as elegant and unrumpled as an Arrow-collar ad. The subject of this particular meeting was ''Wuzzles'' and ''The Adventures of the Gummi Bears,'' the two half-hour Saturday morning cartoon series the studio had sold for the fall of 1985.

On his first day at the studio, 10 months earlier, Eisner had said that his goal was to have one animated series on the air by that time. He had asked someone to find ''the six most creative people at Disney'' and have them at his house at 8 A.M. the next Sunday morning. The group brainstormed half-a-dozen ideas, including ''Wuzzles.'' These creatures are cuddly combinations of two animals - Eleroo, for instance, a mixture of an elephant and a kangaroo; and Bumblelion, part bumblebee, part lion. ''Wuzzles,'' the group agreed, could be turned into a line of stuffed toys as well as an animated television program.

''Gummi Bears'' was pure Eisner, the result not only of his instincts but of a curiosity that would be noteworthy anywhere but is remarkable in an industry built on narcissism. Until the age of 14, Eisner spent hours each week staring from his parents' New York apartment down at Park Avenue and 89th Street. ''It was like 'Rear Window,' '' he says. ''I watched the man with polio across the street, and I saw my first person dead. My sister never watched.'' Last spring, his 7-year-old son nagged him into going to a neighborhood drugstore to buy a particular kind of candy. He was curious about why his son was so insistent, and he got the idea for ''Gummi Bears'' the instant he watched his son's excitement over a pack of chewy drops in the shape of bears.

Disney is spending $285,000 on each half-hour episode of ''Wuzzles,'' $35,000 more than it is being paid by CBS. Such deficit financing is common in prime-time television, but not in the usually crude, low-cost Saturday morning cartoons that bring animators a quick profit. Disney-quality animation, however, even scaled down for television, allows characters more movements per frame and costs too much to be immediately profitable.

''Does it pay to spend twice as much as Hanna-Barbera? Do the kids know the difference? Should we not be in the business?'' asked Richard Frank at the corporate creative seminar.

''If you had the same great stories and the same marketing and characters, why not do it cheaper?'' said Wells, agreeing. ''Perhaps we should put on a different label, call ourselves Joe Blow for Saturday morning.''

''No upside,'' said Eisner from the couch.

''That would mean no characters for the parks,'' Katzenberg said. ''We need new characters for the parks.'' The Disney name on ''Wuzzles'' and ''Gummi Bears'' could be used to create new rides and merchandise.

In the end, Eisner - without sitting up straight or raising his voice -gave the Disney imperative. ''We can't go on television and look like trash.''

ALTHOUGH FRANK WELLS and Michael Eisner seem, so far, to work easily together, for several months in 1984, both were seeking the Disney chairmanship. Their competition began on March 9, when Roy E. Disney, Walt's nephew, resigned from the board. ''Roy's resignation was the crucial moment,'' says Raymond L. Watson, an interim Disney chairman. ''It signaled to the world what it had suspected for some time, that there was trouble at Disney.''

According to Roy Disney, who now heads the studio's animation division, he was hoping to make a leveraged buyout of the company, and he immediately invited Frank Wells aboard. Then Eisner called. There was trouble brewing at Paramount, despite that studio's box-office success. Charles G. Bluhdorn, chairman of Gulf and Western, Paramount's corporate parent, had died in 1983. The new chairman, Martin S. Davis, had personal and professional conflicts with Diller and Eisner.

''I feel sort of bad because I kept Michael on a string all through the spring,'' Roy Disney says. Between March and July, there was an extended crisis at Disney with corporate raider Saul P. Steinberg buying about 12 percent of the stock. Disney defended itself by acquiring the Arvida Corporation, a Florida land-development company principally owned by Bass Brothers Enterprises, a Texas investment company. This added 20,000 acres to Disney's real-estate holdings and put $200 million of stock in the Bass brothers' hands. There followed a Disney attempt to buy the Gibson Greetings card company as an additional defense; a ''greenmail'' payment that gave Steinberg a $32 million profit; stock purchases by Irwin L. Jacobs, another raider, and an embarrassing withdrawal from the Gibson purchase.

By August, it was obvious to everyone that Ronald W. Miller, Walt Disney's son-in-law and Disney's chief executive, could not handle the crises. Miller had cautiously tried to update Disney by creating a more adult distribution label for movies, Touchstone. And he had made one Touchstone box-office hit, ''Splash.'' (The R-rated ''Down and Out in Beverly Hills'' will also be released under the Touchstone label). Two years earlier, Miller had even tried to hire Eisner. Eisner had refused the offer then because Miller would not let him run the theme parks. Now, Disney needed revolution, not evolution.

''At some point,'' says Roy Disney, who returned to the board in June, ''I said to Frank and Michael, 'Why don't you guys spend a weekend together and see if you can work together?' '' The two men talked, but Eisner stubbornly refused to take the No. 2 position.

The board was worried about a mere maker of movies running the Disney empire, and a majority was in favor of a third candidate - Dennis Stanfill, a tough, cost-conscious businessman and a former chairman of 20th Century-Fox. In the end, Frank Wells told each member of the board to pick Eisner because ''good creative judgment is unique, even in this town.''

Sid Richardson Bass, at that time president of Bass Brothers Enterprises, agreed. ''I was taking a tour of the parks with Michael and he saw a pond that didn't have any boats,'' says Bass. ''He said, 'Let's get some over there' and hand painted a sign: 'Boat rents, so many dollars an hour.' Three hours later, there were kids on the lake. People with good eyesight can see what's wrong. Seeing what's absent is much more difficult.''

As soon as they were elected, Eisner and Wells flew to Texas to meet Sid Bass and an associate, Richard E. Rainwater. Disney was still under seige, with a large chunk of stock in the hands of Irwin Jacobs. ''After listening to Michael and Frank for a few minutes,'' says Bass, ''we walked out of the room for a 30-second caucus and then told them, 'Okay, we're with you for the next five years.' '' The Basses bought out Jacobs for a reported $61 a share and were left with 24.8 percent of the stock. Eisner and Wells were a team, and Eisner was in charge. MICHAEL DAMMAN EIS-ner's father, a Harvard-educated lawyer, required his son to read for two hours before the boy was allowed to watch a television program. Young Eisner wore a tie at dinner every night. He attended Lawrenceville prep school in New Jersey and then went to Denison, a small liberal arts college in Ohio. During the summer of his junior year, he found his career when he worked as a page at NBC. His first professional success was with ABC's Saturday morning cartoons.

He is extraordinarily intuitive. He redesigned the cover of Disney's 1984 annual report in 15 seconds. The stark result - a field of white with Mickey Mouse in one corner - won an award. When he was at Paramount, a friend who was a low-level script reader made dinner conversation about a funny script that no one wanted to buy. Eisner excused himself from the table and telephoned an associate, telling him to have the script on his desk in the morning. The result was ''Airplane,'' which cost Paramount $4 million and earned the studio $40 million in film rentals.

Poured out in torrents of memos that he types himself or scribbles on yellow pads or torn envelopes, his original ideas are sometimes grandiose and bizarre. He had to be dissuaded from driving his family across America in a Winnebago to get a feel for the average theme-park customer. He wants Disney to build a 44-story hotel in the shape of Mickey Mouse. He has seriously compared the theme of ''Footloose,'' a Paramount movie about a minister who banned rock-and-roll, to Hawthorne's ''The Scarlet Letter.'' ''If he weren't Michael Eisner, you'd think this guy was a lunatic,'' says one of his former vice presidents.

But he can take a seemingly mundane idea from someone else and transform it. Presented with a list of 15 possible marketing devices for 1986 at Disneyland, he picked the one nobody expected: flowers. And he expanded it to $2 million worth of flowers with a flower parade next Easter ''and all the best landscape people having their own nooks and crannies.'' Even though ''Flowers are not going to bring any kids here, there's going to be a letdown after the 30th anniversary and you can't hype something that isn't real,'' he says.

Prior to Eisner and Wells, Disney had never advertised its theme parks. At a cost of only $15 million in advertising, most of it for television commercials, Frank Wells has raised attendance at the parks roughly 10 percent. Eisner edited the commercials himself. One depicts a yuppie family too busy chasing success to care about the youngest child, a pre-school boy. Suddenly noticing the child's tearful face, the family decides to relax together at Disneyland. ''What Disney creates is an emotional response,'' Eisner says, ''and I wanted the commercials to elicit relief from everyday pressures.''

He is described most often as ''a regular guy'' and the happiest moment of his life, he says, was the day his first child was born. His unhappiest moment, he adds, ''hasn't happened yet.'' He has spent almost every Saturday morning for the last 10 years watching one or another of his three sons play soccer, football or basketball. His Bel Air house is surrounded by an acre of lawn for show and a second acre of turf for the boys and the dogs. Eisner impulsively bought the place five years ago without even seeing the inside of the house, ''because most people don't buy the expensive house until they're too old to appreciate it.'' He described a typical recent evening at home as ''Chinese takeout in bed watching TV with the cat, three dogs, three children and Jane, and I spilled the duck sauce.''

But those two hours of reading once demanded by his father have left their mark. Among Eisner's far-out ideas is that of a new Chautauqua to make Disney World a cultural center. ''Remember what Plato said some time ago,'' he says. '' 'Let early education be a sort of amusement; you will then be better able to find out the natural bent.' '' And one morning a few weeks ago, Eisner was contemplating the revenues Disney might take in by adding a new, more serious attraction to Disney World -the Industrial Kingdom, where people would ride through working factories and watch park employees making chocolate bars, golf clubs, stuffed animals or breakfast cereals.

''This would be the '60 Minutes' of our network schedule,'' he said. ''I think people feel after a week of frivolousness they will come to '60 Minutes' and be cleansed. Before you leave Walt Disney World, you can show your American family how the workplace works.''

Whatever will come of this idea is no more certain than whether there will soon be Disney Wilderness Inns, or a chain of hotels designed as Disney castles. And no one yet knows if new glory days will come to Disney by way of Eisner's new television programs and movies that will create new characters for theme parks that will sell cassettes of the movies that will then play on Disney's cable channel.

But Michael Eisner is sure that he has wished on the right star.