by Martin Sklar
It took a healthy belief in the future of Disney Parks and Resorts for Card Walker and the Disney board of directors to make that call in the face of all the negatives we faced as a country and as a company in 1974. But we began.
Walt Disney’s concept for an Epcot community was a grand vision that drove the planning for all of Walt Disney World from the beginning. Transportation and energy systems; experiments in construction methods, such as the off-site building of completely furnished hotel rooms for Disney’s Contemporary Resort and Disney’s Polynesian Resort; the care and responsibility for maintaining the Florida environment and ecosystems—all had been thought through following Walt’s often stated desire: to “meet the needs of people” and set an example for planning and building for others to learn from and emulate.
Walt Disney did not go to Florida just to build another “theme park” or even a destination resort; he had something far more important in mind. This is what he said about EPCOT in 1966:
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. 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.
Today I believe that the creative insight that led Walt Disney to propose EPCOT is as valid as it ever was, and is needed even more than ever before.
What’s missing is the Walt Disney for our times and our challenges—the risk taker who loved to begin again and again with a new blank sheet of paper. Perhaps he was reaching for a “Waltopia”—a utopian world of Walt’s own creation. But in the words I wrote for Walt in the company’s 1966 Annual Report to shareholders and employees, he expressed his creative philosophy: “I have to move on to new things—there are many new worlds to conquer.”
I was so fortunate to board that speeding train at its first stop, in Anaheim, California, in 1955, and to retire fifty-four years later as the only Disney employee to participate in the opening of all eleven Disney parks around the world. This is my story of those parks as I lived their birth and growth, and helped shape them—the projects, the places, and especially the people who made it happen.
Welcome aboard!
“WALT’S DEAD.
WRITE SOMETHING.”
The paging system at WED was screaming my name. I picked up the nearest telephone. “Call Card Walker immediately,” my secretary said. I did and thirty seconds later, I was on my way to Card’s office at the Studio. The three-mile drive seemed to take forever.
It was a few minutes after 9:00 A.M. on Thursday, December 15, 1966, and E. Cardon Walker (who would become the chief executive of Walt Disney Productions, and was then head of marketing and publicity) needed to see me immediately. We had a close relationship: Card had hired me part time after my junior year at UCLA, just as I was about to become editor of The Daily Bruin, the UCLA student newspaper. I did finish my senior year and graduate from UCLA in 1956, but starting my Disney career at Disneyland the month before the park opened in July 1955 would shape my entire professional life.
“Walt’s dead,” Card said the moment I entered his office. “Write the statement Roy will sign and we’ll distribute it to the press and our employees.”
I admit I was rather shocked. It seemed implausible that Roy O. Disney, Card, and Donn Tatum (board of directors member at the time, and later chief executive officer and chairman of the board) were telling me that no one had prepared an official statement about Walt’s death. It was no secret Walt was dying.
Card said, “You’ve got an hour.”
And so I wrote:
The death of Walt Disney is a loss to all the people of the world. In everything he did, Walt had an intuitive way of reaching out and touching the hearts and minds of young and old alike. His entertainment was an international language. For more than forty years people have looked to Walt Disney for the finest quality in family entertainment.
There is no way to replace Walt Disney. He was an extraordinary man. Perhaps there will never be another like him. I know that we who worked at his side for all these years will always cherish the years and the minutes we spent in helping Walt Disney entertain the people of the world. The world will always be a better place because Walt Disney was its master showman.
As President and Chairman of the Board of Walt Disney Productions, I want to assure the public, our stockholders, and each of our more than four thousand employees that we will continue to operate Walt Disney’s company in the way that he has established and guided it. Walt Disney spent his entire life and almost every waking hour in the creative planning of motion pictures, Disneyland, television shows, and all the other diversified activities that have carried his name through the years. Around him Walt Disney gathered the kind of creative people who understood his way of communicating with the public through entertainment. Walt’s ways were always unique and he built a unique organization. A team of creative people that he was justifiably proud of.
I think Walt would have wanted me to repeat his words to describe the organization he built over the years. Last October, when he accepted the “Showman of the World” award in New York, Walt said, “The Disney organization now has more than four thousand employees. Many have been with us for over thirty years. They take great pride in the organization, which they helped to build. Only through the talent, labor, and dedication of this staff could any Disney project get off the ground. We all think alike in the ultimate pattern.”
Much of Walt Disney’s energies had been directed to preparing for this day. It was Walt’s wish that when the time came he would have built an organization with the creative talents to carry on as he had established and directed it through the years. Today this organization has been built and we will carry out this wish.
Walt Disney’s preparation for the future has a solid, creative foundation. All of the plans for the future that Walt had begun—new motion pictures, the expansion of Disneyland, television production, and our Florida and Mineral King projects—will continue to move ahead. That is the way Walt wanted it to be.
It was signed, of course, by Roy O. Disney, president and chairman of the board of Walt Disney Productions, and distributed to the media and all Disney employees.
As CBS newsman Eric Sevareid would note a day later:
He probably did more to heal or at least to soothe troubled human spirits than all the psychiatrists in the world. There can’t be many adults in the allegedly civilized parts of the globe who did not inhabit Disney’s mind and imagination at least for a few hours and feel better for the visitation.
It’s been nearly fifty years since that day in Card Walker’s office, but I can honestly say that I still resent being put in that position. The truth is they were all scared as hell. Disney without Walt Disney, its founder, leader, creative genius, and sole decision maker in the story, design, and invention business. Disney without “Uncle Walt” coming into your home on television every Sunday night to tell you what he was going to show your family that night, or open in a few months in movie theaters or Disneyland. Disney without the man with those thirty-two Academy Awards and more honors around the world than almost anyone.
In spite of my resentment, I know how I got there, and why it was me they called.
I had become the chief ghostwriter at Disney. It was pretty heady stuff for someone just closing in on his thirtieth birthday, and only six or seven years out of college, to be writing Walt’s and Roy’s messages in the company’s annual report; most of the publicity and marketing materials for Disneyland; presentations to the U.S. government (the Mineral King solicitation for a year-round resort in Central California); initiatives to obtain sponsors for new Disneyland developments; and, finally, the twenty-four-minute film I penned expressing Walt’s philosophy for the Wa
lt Disney World project and Epcot.
The seven pages of notes I took at my meetings with Walt about Epcot are still among my treasures. When I re-read them occasionally, I realize how easy Walt made it for me to write the script for the film. This was Walt’s favorite method of communication with his mid-1960s audience: film not only allowed him to introduce his concepts and plans, but also gave him the last word. He asked me to write two endings. One was aimed directly at audiences in the state of Florida, because the state’s legislature was then debating passage of a law that would establish the Reedy Creek Improvement District (RCID)—a key to Walt’s plans for Epcot as an experimental community. The law would give the RCID the power to establish building codes and zoning regulations—and Disney would be controlling the RCID. The second ending for the film was aimed at potential corporate sponsors. Having just completed the presentation of four major attractions at the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair, Walt was keenly aware that his ability to communicate with family audiences was highly desirable. As Walt said in his ending for the film: “No one company can do this project [Epcot] alone.”
Walt’s segments were shot on a stage at the Disney Studios on October 27, 1966. It was the very last day he appeared on camera, just a few days before he entered St. Joseph Hospital directly across the street from his studio lot. To look at that film today is to wonder how that man we see selling his ideas could be so ill. Yet seven weeks later, lung cancer claimed the life of this heavy smoker, and I was in Card Walker’s office typing that statement.
And then the Disney world we knew imploded.
FORGOTTEN BUT NOT GONE.
A few weeks after Walt’s death, I inquired about a writer at the Walt Disney Studio; I had not seen or heard of him since that fateful day. “Oh, he’s still there,” I was told. “He’s forgotten—but not gone!”
In the days “after Walt,” it was not unusual to lose touch with and sight of Disney Studio personnel. Many of them got their assignments directly from Walt himself, thus leaving a huge void in key staffing assignments…and a “Who’s in charge?” question in the production of movies, television shows, and animation. Resolution was slow to come, and the decline in Disney films and television through the 1970s and early 1980s could be traced back to that period of indecision. Ultimately, it led to the conflict between the Walt Disney and Roy O. Disney sides of the Disney family, the ousting of Walt’s son-in-law Ron Miller as president of the company, and the Roy E. Disney-led charge that saw the installation of Michael Eisner as chairman and chief executive officer and Frank Wells as president.
At the time of Walt’s death, the theme park business accounted for 35.58 percent of the company’s bottom line. There were huge decisions to be made, but a path was in place. Pirates of the Caribbean was only months from opening at Disneyland and would achieve a new standard in the amusement industry. Ultimately, it would become the most valuable single property ever created in the theme park business. And right behind Pirates in development was The Haunted Mansion, soon to become the signature ghostly property in real estate history: it helped launch the Halloween celebration phenomenon that has challenged the Christmas season as a theme park attendance driver around the world. (There are now four Haunted Mansions in Disney parks, from California to Florida, and Tokyo to Paris.)
The future growth of the Disney theme park business hung on key questions answered by Roy O. Disney as chairman and CEO: would the company develop the 27,400 acres—twice the size of Manhattan Island—it had acquired in Central Florida for approximately $5 million? And what would become of Walt Disney’s concept for the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow?
Disney had acquired the Florida property through seven dummy corporations with business addresses in Kansas and Delaware. Disney attorney Robert Foster worked with two major Florida real estate organizations to purchase the land. The key was to keep hidden that Disney was buying. Many of the property owners had never even seen their land. They had purchased, sight unseen, ten- and twenty-acre parcels by mail order through promotional offers. Much of the “land” was actually under deep swamp water. But with nearly 28,000 acres, Disney now had “enough land here to hold all the ideas and plans we can possibly imagine,” as Walt had said during that last television appearance.
On November 15, 1965, Governor Haydon Burns announced that Disney was coming to Central Florida.
Asked by a reporter at the press conference, “Will you have a model community…?” Walt gave a hint of the direction of his thinking for what would become Walt Disney World.
We have done a lot of thinking on a model community, and I would like to be a part of building a model community, a city of tomorrow as you might say, because I don’t believe in going out to this extreme blue sky stuff that some of the architects do…I’ve had in mind one community called “Yesterday” and another one, “Tomorrow”… They [visitors] might come one time and they stay in “Tomorrow,” and their friends will say, “But have you stayed in ‘Yesterday’?” And they’ll have to come back.
I was chosen to create the presentation Walt would give at the November 1965 press conference at which Governor Burns would announce that Disney was coming to Central Florida.
It almost got me fired.
As part of the twenty-minute show, I had written a short script that Walt would record, accompanied by appropriate visuals. The overall concept was to glorify Walt, his brand of entertainment, and his entire career. Usually, he would have approved the whole script first and then looked at the entire presentation with a small group. For some reason, my boss, Card Walker, decided to skip that step; instead, he invited two hundred people to a soundstage for a preview of the Florida announcement.
WALT—WITH MICKEY AND THE FIRST OSCAR
WALT: That first Oscar was a special award for the creation of Mickey Mouse. The other Academy Awards belong to our group, a tribute to our combined effort.
BEHIND THE SCENES COVERAGE OF THE DISNEY TEAM
Various shots to show actors, writers, musicians, art directors, Imagineers, etc. at work on projects at the Studio, at WED, and at Disneyland.
ACTORS—WORKING ON SET WITH DIRECTOR
WALT: You know, people are always analyzing our approach to entertainment. Some reporters have called it the “special secret” of Disney entertainment.
BEHIND THE SCENES—BUILDING OF SPECIAL EFFECTS
(such as Giant Squid, or Flying Model T)
WALT: Well, we like a little mystery in our films—but there’s really no secret about our approach. We keep moving forward—opening up new doors and doing new things—because we’re curious…
SCIENTIFIC-TYPE SHOT—RESEARCH
WALT: …and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths. We’re always exploring and experimenting. At WED, we call it “imagineering”—the blending of creative imagination with technical know-how.
EARLY CONSTRUCTION SHOT AT DISNEYLAND—WALT ON SITE WITH ART DIRECTORS
WALT: When you’re curious, you find lots of interesting things to do. And one thing it takes to accomplish something is courage. Take Disneyland for example. Almost everyone warned us that Disneyland would be a Hollywood spectacular—a spectacular failure.
WALT AND ART DIRECTORS INSPECTING DISNEYLAND—TODAY
WALT: But they were thinking about an amusement park, and we believed in our idea—a family park where parents and children could have fun—together.
DICK VAN DYKE—WORKING ON SET
WALT: We have never lost our faith in family entertainment—stories that make people laugh, stories about warm and human things, stories about historic characters and events, stories about animals.
LAUGHING SCENE FROM MARY POPPINS
WALT: We’re not out to make a fast dollar with gimmicks. We’re interested in doing things that are fun—in bringing pleasure and especially laughter to people.
WALT—LAUGHING WITH A GROUP OF ACTORS
WALT: And probably most important of all, when we consider a new project we re
ally study it—not just the surface idea but everything about it. And when we go into that new project, we believe in it all the way. We have confidence in our ability to do it right. And we work hard to do the best possible job.
WALT—WITH ROY AND OTHER MANAGEMENT
WALT: My role? Well, you know I was stumped one day when a little boy asked, “Do you draw Mickey Mouse?” I had to admit I do not draw anymore. “Then you think up all the jokes and ideas?”
WALT—WITH SONGWRITERS—AT PIANO
WALT: “No,” I said, “I don’t do that.” Finally, he looked at me and said, “Mr. Disney, just what do you do?” “Well,” I said, “sometimes I think of myself as a little bee.”
WALT—ACTING OUT POINT IN STORYBOARD MEETING
WALT: “I go from one area of the Studio to another and gather pollen and sort of stimulate everybody.” I guess that’s the job I do.
In retrospect, I know I succeeded in our objective to glorify Walt. When it was over, Walt sought me out to give me his review: “I didn’t know anyone was writing my obituary!” he said.
As it turned out, the presentation I created helped successfully launch Disney in Florida.
VEGAS CALLING—“CARD” IS ON THE PHONE
The telephone message was waiting for me when I returned to the Zeta Beta Tau (ZBT) fraternity house at UCLA, after class in mid-May 1955. At first I thought it was a joke played on me by one of my ZBT fraternity brothers; after all, Lennie Kolod’s father was one of the executives at the original Desert Inn in Las Vegas…and who would have a name like “Card” except a Las Vegas dealer?