by Martin Sklar
We bit our tongues to keep from laughing at the question, but Eisner was serious. When we responded that “of course they do,” Michael asked Tom to call John Lasseter about a new film Pixar was creating called A Bug’s Life. That broke the creative logjam, and sent the Imagineering team off to develop our own story about the realm of bugs, inspired by the characters in the Pixar film, still in production. The show, called It’s Tough to be a Bug!, opened almost exactly one year after that meeting, with a cast of creepy-crawliness taking over the theater, complete with 3-D visual and physical effects such as the stinkiest smells ever experienced in the realm of themed entertainment. Rafferty, the writer, loved the research; he got to consult with some of the country’s foremost entomologists (continuing education is a bonus in the entertainment world). Our special effects team reveled in the fact that Tom, Joe, and I had to spend several hours inhaling horrible odors in order to select the number-one stinky.
Tom, Kevin, and fellow Imagineer George Scribner had a similar experience on a new show for Fantasyland in the Magic Kingdom. To answer guest requests for more characters, Imagineering created a new 3-D film centered around the Disney characters, from Mickey and Goofy to Simba the Lion King and Ariel the Little Mermaid. When Scribner reviewed the storyboards, which featured Tinker Bell as a central figure, Eisner was troubled by its being “too sweet.” “It needs some conflict,” he told the story team. He suggested giving Donald Duck his irascible role as the forever-jealous antagonist to Mickey Mouse.
By the time Scribner and Rafferty had finished their sessions, Donald Duck was the new star of Mickey’s PhilharMagic, an immediate hit across the Disney park world. One of Donald’s most electric moments in his illustrious screen history, which began in 1934, is his underwater attempt to kiss Ariel…a near-miss that instead connects with an electric eel. It’s a shocker for Donald—and a show-stopper for our audiences.
Michael’s strengths in finding the holes in our story development were often balanced, however, by some of his wild ideas. One that consumed a lot of effort was his concept for a “Disney car.” This was more a marketing opportunity than a design challenge; he envisioned the Disney brand appealing to the family market, with kids clamoring to ride surrounded by their favorite Disney characters. So our designers did some sample sketches, Disney hired a company that does focus groups, and (Michael thought) we would soon have the auto industry bidding for rights to “The Disney Car.”
The first focus group we watched was a room full of teenagers. At first, the girls—who liked the idea—seemed to carry the day, but it was the teenage boys who quickly made it clear that they “would not be caught dead” in a Disney car. And when the second group, composed of parents, made that issue the central discussion—“You don’t want to read about someone being killed in a Disney car, do you?”—the whole idea suddenly lost its luster. It was clear that branding has a negative side; there’s a reason there is no Disney car today.
Especially in the early days of the Eisner years, when only a handful of Imagineers were a known entity (John Hench’s pedigree went all the way back to Fantasia, for example, and Randy Bright wrote and directed The American Adventure in Epcot), Eisner’s instincts were often to reach into the Hollywood star system for key talent. More often than not, that talent had other creative favorites they preferred to work with. So when one of Disneyland’s biggest fans expressed interest in doing a show for the park, Michael Jackson said he only wanted to do it if he could work with one of his cinema heroes, George Lucas. In no time at all, Captain Eo was born.
When Eisner called to tell me about our new teammates, there was also a deadline: the definitive meeting with Michael Jackson was exactly one week away. Or, said more correctly, meetings. We quickly assigned an Imagineering team of Tim Kirk, Joe Rohde, Rick Rothschild, and Richard Vaughn, and they were amazing. Not only did they come up with the story idea that became Captain Eo, but their one-week effort produced three show concepts.
At noon on the appointed day, our team pitched the three concepts to Eisner, Frank Wells, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, the head of Disney’s motion picture unit. They eliminated one idea. We finished this discussion just in time: at one o’clock, the two remaining concepts were shown to George Lucas, who had to choose which of the two would be shown to Michael Jackson when he arrived for the two o’clock meeting. Captain Eo and his strange band of characters—including Fuzzball and Hooter—were soon on the way to “change the world.”
There remained, however, the assembly of a production team for the 3-D film. The easy choice was that both Michael Jackson, the star performer, and George Lucas, who would be the executive producer, wanted Francis Ford Coppola to direct the film. And Coppola wanted the great cinematographer Vittorio Storaro—winner of three Academy Awards, including the Oscar for Coppola’s Apocalypse Now—to be the color consultant (or as the film’s credits listed him, “visual, lighting, and photographic consultant”).
With Michael Jackson, as Captain Eo, moonwalking and singing two songs he wrote for the film to Angelica Huston, “the Supreme Leader,” you would think this production would set a new standard for 3-D films. But in 1986, when Captain Eo was produced, none of the major principals had ever worked in 3-D before. And Vittorio Storaro was known especially for his theories on the “psychological effects of color”—which often tended to produce a darker look. However, 3-D requires more light than a normal film. The result was that the strange and sinister world of the Supreme Leader was very dark and sinister in the theater as well.
As the very first attraction opened in the Michael Eisner regime, Captain Eo accomplished two important objectives. First, it was a huge success, establishing the Eisner years as a time of major additions with star power for the parks. And second, the time frame for creating new attractions for the parks had been shortened dramatically. When Captain Eo opened at Disneyland in September 1986, it was one week short of two years since the day Eisner and Wells had arrived at The Walt Disney Company. Only “it’s a small world” for the New York World’s Fair had ever been produced in a shorter time frame as a major Disney attraction.
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Involving Eisner’s family in the company proved to be both successful and popular with the staff—from that first meeting son Breck attended to the enthusiastic participation of Jane Eisner, Michael’s wife. In his book, In Service to the Mouse, Jack Lindquist writes about one of the major marketing concepts that Jane helped launch:
In early January of 1987, when we opened Star Tours, the George Lucas attraction, we had a big ceremony with Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager. In nine days, these two pilots flew the Rutan Voyager around the world nonstop without refueling: they had just finished their flight two weeks before, on December 23. Michael and his wife, Jane, invited Dick and Jeana to be their guests at the Plaza Inn for dinner.
Just after dinner, Michael approached me while I was talking with Tom Elrod, the marketing director for Florida, and said, “Dick Rutan was telling Jane and me about this trip around the world, and at the end of it, Jane asked, ‘That’s just an amazing story. What are you going to do next?’ and Dick replied, ‘I’m going to Disneyland.’ He said it without hesitation, without prompting.”
At that moment, Michael knew we had something big. So did Jane, Tom, and I.
Michael continued, “I want to use that as a major marketing campaign. How can we do it?”
That night, Tom and I talked about the upcoming Super Bowl and if we could gain access to the MVP while on the field at the game’s end and ask, “You just won the Super Bowl. What are you going to do next?” And the MVP would answer, “I’m going to Disneyland. I’m going to Walt Disney World.”
Almost a quarter century later, “I’m going to Disneyland/Walt Disney World!” is still going strong. Even GE no longer “brings good things to life,” and who can recall why it’s so important to have that “pause that refreshes”? Yet Super Bowl heroes, the MVPs of the big game, keep right on telling us, “I’m go
ing to Disneyland!”
Another of Michael Eisner’s innovations was the emphasis on each park location as a resort. He achieved this with a parade of some of the world’s biggest names in architecture, each hired to etch his signature style on “something Disney,” usually a new resort hotel. They included:
Robert A. M. Stern, dean of Yale’s School of Architecture, designer of the Yacht Club, Beach Club, and BoardWalk resorts at Walt Disney World; the Newport Bay and Cheyenne hotels at Disneyland Paris; and the Disney Ambassador Hotel at Tokyo Disneyland.
Michael Graves, now as well known for his product design as for his architecture, who designed the Team Disney headquarters in Burbank (renamed “Team Disney—The Michael D. Eisner Building” in 2006); John Tishman’s Dolphin and Swan resorts at Walt Disney World; and The Hotel New York in Paris.
Peter Dominick of Colorado, whose design of The Wilderness Lodge in Florida was so iconic that it brought him two major assignments: the Animal Kingdom Lodge at Walt Disney World and the Grand Californian Hotel in Anaheim.
Arata Isozaki, Japan’s best-known architect, who designed the Team Disney executive headquarters at Walt Disney World.
Canadian-born Frank Gehry, designer of the original Disney Village in Paris and the Team Disney building in Anaheim (as well as The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles—not a Disney company project).
French architect Antoine Grumbach, who designed the Sequoia Lodge at Disneyland Paris.
WATG and its principal architect, Gerald Allison, who worked closely with the Imagineers to achieve one Disney “Grand” hotel—the Grand Floridian at Walt Disney World; and two “Disneyland Hotels”: one in Hong Kong and the other at the entrance to the Disneyland Paris park.
It’s a fair question to ask why Michael Eisner, with so many in-house designers and others with vast hotel design experience available to him, chose the “star architect” route, even if they had no hotel design background. I think there are three logical reasons.
First was opportunity. As CEO of Disney for the first dozen years of Walt Disney World’s operation, Card Walker chose to direct the company’s finances toward building new attractions and new parks, notably Epcot. This left it to hoteliers outside the Walt Disney World property to meet the demand for accommodations created by the Magic Kingdom and Epcot attendance. And it left Walt Disney World with only two major hotels, the Contemporary and Polynesian—both of which opened in 1971—when Eisner became CEO in 1984.
Second, that truism “there’s only one name on the door” meant that the parks themselves would always be linked to one man: Walt Disney. Michael wanted a game he could play in, and win big. It’s been said that Victor Ganz, a close friend of Michael’s father, was influential in advising Eisner about the potential of making architecture a high-profile priority. The Ganz family and the Eisners, in Michael’s youth, lived in the same building in New York City. Ganz was vice president of the Whitney Museum of American Art and one of the country’s most astute collectors of twentieth-century art, owning works by Picasso, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella. When the collection was auctioned off on the death of his widow in 1997, it brought in nearly $200 million in sales. Victor Ganz was a man Michael Eisner listened to.
Third, of course, was the media attention these high-profile architects commanded—and not just in Variety and the entertainment world. Their buildings got the attention of Architectural Digest, The New York Times, and other major media. Theme park designers, by contrast, are practically anonymous.
There is a very interesting analysis of this period in Alan Lapidus’s book, Everything by Design: My Life as an Architect, published by St. Martin’s Press in 2007. Lapidus points out that Michael Graves, then teaching at Princeton’s School of Architecture, had designed only two large buildings when Eisner selected him for what became the Dolphin and Swan hotels. His two previous buildings were “both client-ego-inspired office buildings…and they had exceeded their construction budgets in awe-inspiring terms,” Lapidus wrote.
Since the hotels would be owned by John Tishman’s company, but were to be built on Walt Disney World property, Eisner and Tishman had to agree on the project. Tishman wanted an experienced hotel designer (Lapidus), so they functioned well as working hotels, while Graves’s design “was certainly eye stopping, but could not easily accommodate any hotel function,” according to Lapidus. The solution: “Graves and I,” Lapidus wrote, “would collaborate on the redesign of his concept to produce buildings that actually functioned as hotels.”
Lapidus goes on to describe the interaction between Tishman and Eisner:
At one meeting, a completely frustrated John Tishman asked Eisner why he was going through this expensive and tangled process. The hotels would look bizarre, which John acknowledged might be a plus, but they would cost a whole lot more and function, even with my input, nowhere near as efficiently.
Peering intently at Tishman, Eisner replied, “John, I’m forty-four years old, I’ve already made more money than I ever dreamed of. Now I want to be on the cover of Time magazine. By using the most controversial architects in the country, I will establish Disney as a serious patron of the arts.” So much for form and function! On a more practical note, Eisner was quoted as saying, “In movies, we use the finest minds, the best writers we can find. I don’t see why we shouldn’t use the best design minds.” Thus, calling in and publicly crediting renowned outside architects for the first time instead of using his in-house team, Eisner said his goals were to “build something people can’t see at home, buildings that make them smile,” and to “create a sense of place that is unique.”
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It’s been said that Michael Eisner and Frank Wells had a working relationship that resembled the time of Walt Disney and Roy O. Disney at the helm of the company, but I never saw it that way. Walt and Roy operated in very different spheres of influence, a clear separation between creating the product and financing and marketing it. Michael and Frank, in contrast, may have thought they were establishing something similar—Michael leading the product development, Frank heading the business side. But in fact, their working relationship crossed all dividing lines, real or imagined. I never heard of a story development meeting that Roy attended with Walt. By contrast, Michael Eisner and Frank Wells were frequently together in meetings, especially in the early years of their partnership at Disney.
In his book Working Together: Why Great Partnerships Succeed, published by Harper Business in 2010, Eisner writes of how the relationship began in September 1984:
We were headed into the toughest challenge of our professional lives, together. For the next ten years, that journey would be as exciting, enjoyable, rewarding, and triumphant as either of us could have dared to hope. From our first day in the office that fall, my partnership with Frank Wells taught me what it was like to work with somebody who not only protected the organization but protected me, advised me, supported me, and did it all completely selflessly.
I’d like to think I did the same for Frank, as well as the company. We grew together, learned together, and discovered together how to turn what was in retrospect a small business into indeed a very big business.
We learned that one plus one adds up to a lot more than two. We learned just how rewarding working together can be.
Michael defined Frank’s contributions toward their success in these clear terms:
Now, the most important thing that goes into creative success is having the people who can come up with the great ideas. But the next most important thing is often overlooked: having people who will enable those great ideas, and support those creative people—manage the creativity with real economic foresight. It’s not an easy thing to do—in every instance, it is a lot safer to say no, and it takes a special and gutsy kind of leader to say yes. That leader alongside me, that coach and that cheerleader at Disney, was Frank. Together with the countless movie and television show ideas and theme parks that he helped push forward, he s
upported me on smaller but memorable decisions as well, like the use of top-quality architects for new hotels at our theme parks and other projects, and moving Disney animation into the computer age at a large expense…
Frank was the one who helped push, pull, and enable all those ideas, managing the managers of all of creative and financial in the boxes of our projects. He was the catalyst who found a way to bring them to life. And he was thrilled to do it.
Frank Wells had arrived at Disney championed by Roy Edward Disney, the son of Roy O. Disney and nephew of Walt. Roy and his business partner, Stanley Gold at Shamrock Holdings, Roy’s family company, had led a revolt that removed Ron Miller, husband of Roy’s cousin Diane Disney Miller, as Disney’s CEO and president. Before becoming president and then vice chairman at Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., Frank was associated with Stanley Gold in the entertainment law firm Gang Tyre & Brown.
Frank attended Pomona College in California before becoming a Rhodes scholar for two years at Oxford and earning his law degree at Stanford. He left Warner Bros. in 1982 to realize an amazing ambition: to climb the highest mountain on every continent. Although he failed to scale Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world at 29,028 feet, he wrote about each challenge in his book, Seven Summits. The next adventure he faced was to scale the heights of Disney’s Magic Kingdoms.
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I have great memories of working with Frank Wells. He could be totally focused for a 6:00 A.M. meeting at his home about Euro Disney (he sometimes participated wearing his pajamas, bathrobe, and bedroom slippers), or completely unaware that he was calling you at 3:00 A.M. (Wherever he was in the world, that was the time it was everywhere in the world!) I watched him manipulate heads of corporations (he became the best salesman and steward of corporate alliances, signing multimillion, multiyear sponsorships for attractions in the Disney parks). And I was in the right place when he had to borrow $10 to pay for parking at the Century Plaza Hotel because he left home without his wallet. One morning in Tokyo, he asked me and Pete Clark, then responsible for park sponsorships, to jog with him around the Imperial Palace; the four-mile distance, and Frank’s slow pace, gave us plenty of time to resolve the issues he wanted to discuss. Pete, a jogger of some note, finally asked if we could pick up the pace for the last mile so we could work up a sweat.