In the Land of Good Living

by Kent Russell

  This was midcentury, when a Florida vacation was seen as a marker of middle-class status. What’s more, a Florida vacation underscored one’s support of and participation in the American way of life. You drove your new car to new national wonders like Marineland, where intrepid scientists had trained bottlenose dolphins to perform tricks, and in exchange for your hard-earned money you got the sense that you were combatting global Communism.

  Around the same time, the superhighways were snaking their way into the peninsula. The interstate program—the most expensive and elaborate public works program of all time, mind—was at once a Keynesian economic driver and a geographic equalizer. The impeccable government roads stretched down the Gulf Coast, along the Atlantic coast, and across the gaps in between, buttressing Florida’s sky-high growth like a trellis around a sprout. Tourists no longer had to rely on railroads, bus schedules, or dicey Southern byways while traveling to the Sunshine State. Now, millions of them could pick up and go whenever the mood struck. They could chauffeur their families to difference within a matter of hours, riding the interstates the way aristocrats had ridden Flagler’s trains a generation prior.

  This democratization of travel was precisely what Walt Disney observed on November 22, 1963, when he flew over Orlando in a private plane, assessing the area’s potential for his Disney World project. He looked down and saw Interstate 4 intersecting with Florida’s Turnpike, both roads teeming with fast-moving traffic. Not far away from this hub, he eyed a vast stretch of virgin swamp. “This is it!” Disney exclaimed over the roar of engines.

  With such a combination of highways and undeveloped land, Disney could build his dreamed-of tourist mecca—America’s “total destination resort,” as his planners referred to it. He bought up 27,000 acres, anonymously and piecemeal, from Central Florida farmers, ranchers, and rural landholders. For two hundred dollars per acre, owners were more than happy to sell to one of the five dummy corporations orchestrating Disney’s clandestine “Project X.” In time, the locals noticed that the ground was shifting beneath their feet. Rumors ran rampant as to who or what was purchasing southwest Orlando. In October 1965, one headline in the Sentinel read: “We Say ‘Mystery’ Industry Is Disney.” A year later, Uncle Walt officially announced his plans for a “bigger and better” version of Disneyland in Florida. The Associated Press crowned him “the most celebrated visitor since Ponce de Leon.”

  While the Disney saga unfolded, many of Florida’s established attractions were being bled dry by the new interstates, which bypassed their locations along the old roads. Rainbow Springs, Sanlando Springs, Dog Land, Everglades Tropical Gardens, Florida Reptile Land, the Waite’s Bird Farm—they died off. Frog City, Sunshine Springs and Gardens, Atomic Tunnel, Shark World, Bongoland, and—alas—Midget City, too, went under. Times were tough in the early ’60s. Perhaps this explains why Disney’s announcement sounded like a godsend to these beleaguered mom-and-pop enterprises. “Anyone who is going to spend $100 million nearby is good, and a good thing,” the owner of Cypress Gardens was quoted as saying.

  And he was terrifically wrong. About his own prospects, but also about the size of the investment. Disney promised more than $600 million. He was going to build a Magic Kingdom five times larger than the one he’d created in California. He also vowed to construct a rapid transit system as well as a thousand-acre industrial park and a jetport. “But the most exciting and by far the most important part of our Florida project—in fact, the heart of everything we’ll be doing in Disney World,” Disney said in a promotional film, “will be our Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. We’ll call it Epcot.”

  Disney claimed that this model city would “take its cue from the new ideas and new technologies that are now emerging from the creative centers of American industry. It will be a community of tomorrow that will never be completed, but will always be introducing and testing and demonstrating new materials and systems. And Epcot will always be a showcase to the world for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise.”

  Sound familiar? Like the Spaniards and Flagler before him, Disney was taking his second chance in Florida. His grand design—the reason why he was clearing forests, draining wetlands, remaking the place in his image—was to fashion his idea of utopia. “I don’t believe there’s a challenge anywhere in the world that’s more important to people everywhere than finding solutions to the problems of our cities,” he said. “But where do we begin—how do we start answering this great challenge? Well, we’re convinced we must start with the public need. And the need is not just for curing the old ills of old cities. We think the need is for starting from scratch on virgin land and building a special kind of new community.”

  The way Disney sold it, Epcot would be a working community of twenty thousand. “It will never cease to be a living blueprint of the future, where people actually live a life they can’t find anywhere else in the world,” he said. “Everything in Epcot will be dedicated to the happiness of the people who will live, work, and play here.” The idea was to build high-density apartments surrounding a business center; beyond that would be a greenbelt and recreation area; the outermost rings would be low-density residential streets. There’d be “playgrounds, churches and schools…distinctive neighborhoods…and footpaths for children going to school” in Disney’s proposed utopia. A multimodal transportation system incorporating surface trains, a monorail, and a “webway people mover” would render automobiles unnecessary, à la Seaside.

  Then came the rub: “To accomplish our goals for Disney World, we must retain control and develop all the land ourselves.” Disney demanded municipal bonding authority, three highway interchanges, and the creation of two municipalities together with an autonomous political district controlled by the company. In effect, Disney wanted his own corporate-controlled state within the state. “A sort of Vatican with mouse ears,” the historian Richard Foglesong termed it. In return, Florida would receive a perpetual stream of visitors, more sales- and gasoline-tax revenue, a long boom in construction and service jobs. “You people here in Florida have one of the key roles to play in making Epcot come to life,” Disney inveigled, like a true confidence artist. “In fact, it’s really up to you whether this project gets off the ground at all.”

  And the people of Florida bit.

  Though Disney wouldn’t live to see it, he was granted his Reedy Creek Improvement District, which is still “governed” by a supervisory board “elected” by the landowners—i.e., the Walt Disney Company. As described by a former head executive, Reedy Creek “gave us all the powers of the two counties in which we sit to the exclusion of their exercising any powers, and of course it let us issue bonds. We could do anything the city or county could do. The only powers that still reside on us from outside are the taxing power of Orange County, the sales tax of the state, and the inspection of elevators.”

  Reedy Creek handles its own planning and zoning. It lays out roads and sewer lines, licenses the sale of alcoholic beverages. Building codes? Psh, Reedy Creek employs the building inspectors. It employs its own fire department. Contracts its own eight-hundred-member security force. Technically, it is within Disney’s rights to build an airport and a nuclear power plant within the Improvement District, if Disney so desired.

  But that whole utopian city thing? The enticement that ultimately sealed the deal for the people of Florida? It was all a ruse. The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow was just another theme park. And though more than 55,000 people work in the Reedy Creek Improvement District by day; and though more than 100,000 patronize its stand-alone restaurants, clubs, and theaters every night—Reedy Creek retains a permanent population of about fifty. Most of whom are company executives or their family members.

  Walt Disney demanded and received the powers of a democratically elected government, and his corporation ducked the botheration of, you know, constituents. Constituents who might challenge Disney’s to
p-down plans or even vote them out of power. The constitutionality of this arrangement has never been challenged. I suppose this proves no one minds the arrangement all that much. But I tend to think otherwise. I think it proves that the people of Florida are no different from patsies across time and space: too ashamed to admit when we’ve been had.

  “By turning the state of Florida and its statutes into their enablers,” T. D. Allman writes, “Disney and his successors pioneered a business model based on public subsidy of private profit coupled with corporate immunity from the laws, regulations, and taxes imposed on people that now increasingly characterizes the economy of the United States.”

  So, huh. I guess Disney did get his “showcase for free enterprise” and his utopia both, in the end.

  * * *

  —

  Along the north end of International Drive, things got a little scooter-trash. More frequent were the all-you-can-eat buffets, mini golf courses, and mirrored emporiums selling watches in bundles of threes. So, too, the Sunshine State–themed motor courts out of which lived the recently homeless or the soon-to-be. A few of the trolley’s children grew restless when we passed a museum that went by the name of “SKELETONS.” That’s new, I thought.

  I was put in mind of my own childhood trips to Orlando. (Hey—we are no more immune to the inveigle than the rest of you.) My parents would pile my sisters and me into our van predawn. We’d drive up, hit the parks, drive back in the gloaming. Grade school and high school graduations also included trips here. Likewise my college commencement. It’s a Special Place for us, too. Weird to think about, I know. Like seeing one of the cooks come round from the back of the house to dine at the counter.

  I stretched out as the Euros exited the trolley. To the driver they trilled thank-yous, their English scented with accents that sounded the way flavored waters taste. The driver looked at me in the rearview mirror. I twirled my up-pointed index finger. I rode until the sun went down.

  * * *

  —

  While I was out cruising, Glenn was being a professional, locking down our day with Jesus. The guy was surprisingly amenable, Glenn said. “Though I guess he’s supposed to be? I don’t know, you tell me.” Jesus agreed to meet us at Epcot the next day.

  We could’ve met him at the Holy Land Experience, where Jesus plies his trade, but Glenn wanted the juxtaposition. Christ and Mickey Mouse, et cetera and blah blah, a ham-fisted visual metaphor the Germans will probably love.

  The Holy Land Experience would’ve made for striking footage, though. The park was opened in 2001 by a Messianic Jew who believed his ministerial calling involved the conversion of his tribespeople to Christianity. Needless to say, the man’s attraction struggled to find its audience. In 2007, he sold it to the world’s largest religious TV conglomerate, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, for $37 million. Trinity decided to revamp the whole operation. “A faith-based version of Universal Studios” was what they envisioned.

  First off, the austere and historically accurate stage shows had to go. In their place: a dozen razz-dazz song-and-dance numbers performed at regular intervals throughout each hot Orlando afternoon. The tunes are originals and the actors blow-dried pros who perform with the verve of true believers. Their big crescendo is the bloody reenactment of the crucifixion occurring every afternoon at 5:00 p.m., when some fifteen hundred guests crowd around a loinclothed Jesus as he belts out his solo while being nailed to a cross. Six minutes after his body is delivered to the tomb, a shout—“I am alive!” A beaming, gold-spangled Jesus emerges from a cloud of smoke to announce that the sick shall be healed, the last shall be first, and the exit is through the gift shop.

  The Holy Land Experience attracts a quarter million visitors every year (and is exempted from its share of taxes thanks to a religion-related loophole), yet Trinity Broadcasting has claimed that their park is a money loser. Recently, Trinity auctioned off hundreds of ornate thrones, statues, and a winged Harley-Davidson in order to defray park costs. (Kept off the block: the network founders’ multimillion-dollar homes in Orlando, Texas, and Tennessee.) Trinity ran appeals for donations on crawlers below their programming. Programming in which—let me be clear here—these hydra-headed flimflammers preach a heresy that goes something like this: God has no use for the puny achievements of men (true) → yet the only way to know one’s standing in the eyes of God is to take stock of one’s worldly achievements (false) → and the only way to increase one’s worldly achievements and thus one’s standing in the eyes of God is to faithfully give what little one has to the Pharisees onscreen (false, God, false) → after which time, like a slot machine that always pays out, God’s favor and grace will redound at a rate of seventy times seven (Jesus, no).

  Trinity’s is an impressively diabolical shakedown. (Though to be fair, their shakedown is not exactly contrary to the Calvinist theology imported by the Puritans.) It capitalizes, quite literally, on an antique struggle within the wider church. For millennia, certain Christians have really, really wanted someone to tell them that the New Testament affirms who they already are, rather than—as is actually the case—affirming the kind of person they are not, and probably would not wish to be. They will pay good money to the confident charismatic who declares their version of the Good News: that by dying on a cross, Christ saved them from the burden of having to act like Him.

  These thoughts and others I was free to pursue while our Uber sped past acres of undeveloped and illegal-to-walk-through greenery surrounding Epcot. Walt Disney had chosen Central Florida for this negative space as much as anything else. No seediness, no disorder would be allowed to abut his realm, as had happened at Disneyland in Anaheim. Here in Orlando, a nimbus of pristine nothing rings his Magic Kingdom.

  It was not hard to spot Jesus at the gate, for he came robed in an off-white, shawly vestment. His hair was as you’d imagine, long and brown with chestnut strands that caught the sunlight. His beard, however, was…uncharacteristic. It blotted his pitted cheeks like lichen on a rock. Furthermore, the man was shorter than the inspirational posters had led me to expect. Swarthier, too. Kinda had a down-and-out Pete Sampras vibe about him. Which is probably closer to the historical Jesus, I rationalized as we approached.

  Glenn hailed him, shook hands, introduced us. “Rodrigo,” Jesus asked us to call him. “Though my friends can call me Roddy.” We paid for Roddy’s ticket, we had our thumbprints scanned. We spun the turnstiles. A wave of relief overwhelmed us as we plunged into Disney.

  Relief because little can possibly go wrong here. Relief because little can possibly happen here—at least insofar as “happening” involves “happenstance,” which requires some measure of chance or uncertainty.

  “How many of these people do you think secretly work for Disney?” Glenn asked as we made for the nearest Starbucks. “My guess is thirty percent.”

  We got our coffees, we directed Roddy to a relatively untrafficked section of the park’s lagoon to conduct a background interview. People rubbernecked, but not as many as you might think, since Roddy had donned a fitted baseball cap. Nor did our hobbles draw attention. It’s not like anybody else in Orlando was striding upright with the dignity of destination about them.

  Receiving permission to film on Disney grounds is famously difficult—nigh on impossible. We solved this problem by ignoring it completely. Glenn mounted his camera; Noah quickly miked Jesus up; I took a seat on the bench next to him.

  —

  EXT. EPCOT CENTER—EARLY AFTERNOON

  RODDY’S black, logoless cap is so large that its flat brim juts from the spot where his eyebrows should be. His RESTLESS HANDS reclasp over his lap as if he is intricately and continuously high-fiving himself.

  GLENN (O.S.)

  Roddy, OK. Could you tell us when you started acting?

  RODDY

  Man, yeah, I’m a natural actor.

  KENT

  How
about: What came first for you, religion or drama?

  RODDY

  Oh, drama, baby. That drama came first.

  KENT

  (blinks)

  RODDY (CONT’D)

  So like I first used drugs around this time. The high school time. Using took away the sense of alienation. I smoked weed and abused my prescriptions to cope with an alcoholic family. Not having friends at school, I felt like it was always “them” and “me,” you know? Like I was the fucked-up one.

  KENT

  Ahhhh…

  RODDY

  I ran away from home at twelve. I fell into a cycle of living on the streets. The first time I overdosed, I was fourteen. Then, you know, I robbed a convenience store at gunpoint for a book of matches. What the fuck, right? I knew I was crazy. But the drugs made it OK. Sleeping in dumpsters, freezing in garages, constant starvation. I was haunted by this feeling, you know. That I was different from other people. That I was an alien walking among the earthlings.

  KENT

  Why don’t you tell us what it’s like for you in the Holy Land Experience?

  RODDY

  Right, OK, so. Each day, five days a week, you know, Jesus gets there, he’s wearing his blue jeans, running shoes. Gold cross on the chain, all that. Change in the cast lounge, pray, put on microphones like this one. Then, showtime. Jesus’s got two shows in the marketplace, then two passion plays. Those last fifteen, twenty minutes. It’s a lot! You gotta rely on the Holy Spirit to do that!