After choosing six winning architects—Stern, Graves, Gehry, Aldo Rossi, and Antoine Predock—Eisner plunged into planning for the new park with an enthusiasm that eclipsed even his interest in film. He began spending extended periods with the Imagineers in Glendale, sometimes in meetings that continued for days. He seemed to love his time there, finding in the Imagineers kindred creative spirits. The Imagineers eagerly seized on this burgeoning interest, recognizing it as a way to stave off cost cuts and staff reductions.
Eisner obsessed about design details, even the ashtrays in the hotel rooms. He wanted working fireplaces in the hotels and real logs in the rustic Sequoia Lodge. As he described it, “Unlike producing movies, here we could be producer, director, editor, and even the actors in every foot of the film. Designing parks was more exciting than anything one could do in the proscenium world, where two dimensions was the rule.” Eisner rented an apartment in Paris during the summer of 1988, moved there with Jane, and took French lessons.
All this personal attention from the company chairman was not to every architect’s liking. Aldo Rossi ended up rejecting the assignment. “I am not personally offended and can ignore all the negative points that have been made about our project at the last meeting in Paris,” he wrote in a letter to Eisner. “The Cavalier Bernini, invited to Paris for the Louvre project, was tormented by a multitude of functionaries who continued to demand that changes be made to the project to make it more functional. It is clear that I am not the Cavalier Bernini, but it is also clear that you are not the King of France. Aside from the differences, I do not intend to be the object of minuscule criticisms that any interior designer could handle. It is my belief that our project, notwithstanding the specialists, is beautiful in its own right and as such will become famous and built in some other place.”
Emblematic of Eisner’s approach was the Disneyland Hotel, a turreted, pink wedding cake of a hotel that bore no resemblance to anything designed by the prominent architects. It was solely the creation of the Imagineers, with substantial input from Eisner himself. The fanciful structure had originally been conceived as a grandiose ticket booth at the main entrance, but Eisner insisted that such coveted real estate be used for rooms. The hotel straddles the park’s main entrance, just as Eisner had wanted the unbuilt Mickey Mouse Hotel to straddle Disneyland’s Riverside Drive.
The plan for the hotel triggered fierce debate. Venturi warned that it would obscure sight lines toward Sleeping Beauty’s castle from the park entrance. Wells feared that park visitors would look up and see hotel guests in their underwear. Others complained about the high cost of the design and the need for another hotel. When a vote was taken of the working group planning the park, it was nineteen to two against building the hotel. Eisner’s vote was one of the two (Wilson’s the other), and so it went forward.
As plans for Euro Disney picked up steam, the Basil animation project was nearing completion. It had been renamed The Great Mouse Detective because Eisner thought the name Basil was too English. Despite a constant effort to control costs, it was not meeting its $10 million budget. Eisner had trouble understanding why a half-hour of television animation could be produced for a half-million dollars, but a ninety-minute Disney feature couldn’t be made for twenty times that. To the Disney animators, this attitude showed a lack of understanding that bordered on contempt. Disney animation featured seamless motion, not the crude, jerky movements of Saturday morning television. Shapes were delicately outlined and richly shaded; they were not “cartoons.” Backgrounds were carefully rendered to suggest three-dimensional depth and perspective. The thousands of cels were hand-drawn and colored and sequences were drawn and redrawn until the directors were satisfied. This is why The Black Cauldron, for all its shortcomings, had taken ten years to produce, and why Disney produced only one animated feature every four years.
To most of the animators and to Roy, Mouse Detective became an ominous experiment in cost control. The same low-cost laborers who did television animation performed much of the hand-coloring. Shapes were boldly outlined in black and filled in with simple flat colors. While Roy was dismayed by the quality of some of the drawing, he told the animators that they had to go along to show Eisner and Katzenberg that they were “team players.”
Despite all the cost-cutting efforts, The Great Mouse Detective eventually cost $14 million and took two years to produce. By the time it was released, there was little enthusiasm for it within Disney, though Roy thought the film was delightful. Even without much marketing it grossed $38 million, a modest success.
The poor quality of the animation gave Stan Kinsey another opportunity to push for the new computer project he was developing with Pixar, even though it became clear that the price tag was going to be more than $12 million. Rochlis, during his brief tenure as head of new technology, had vetoed it as too expensive. Kinsey couldn’t elicit any interest from Katzenberg, Eisner, or Wells, so finally he went to Roy. “I’m going to need your help on this,” he said. “I can’t seem to get this going. Rochlis is trying to kill it. Can I show you what we’re working on? Come up to see Lucas with me and take a look.” Roy joined the delegation for their next visit, and he, too, was won over by the potential to reinvent animation. When he got back, Roy tried to make the case to Wells, but Wells and Eisner balked. While willing, even eager, to take creative risks, Eisner was wary about spending money on something no one would see. In this instance Wells agreed. “We’re not an R and D company,” he said. “It’s going to cost twice as much as they say, and I don’t believe it will ever save us a dime.”
Roy and Kinsey refused to give up. At one of their meetings at Pixar, Ed Catmull, Pixar’s acting chief executive, indicated that Lucas was facing a financial restructuring due to his pending divorce, and Pixar needed capital to replace Lucas’s stake. Kinsey immediately sensed opportunity in Pixar’s distress. Disney was contemplating spending $12 million anyway, and now Catmull indicated that for an investment in the neighborhood of $15 million, Disney could own half the company. “We need the money, and this would be a perfect fit,” Catmull argued.
When he got back, Kinsey scheduled an appointment with Katzenberg. On the way to the meeting, he ran into Rochlis, and excitedly told him about the chance to buy Pixar. “I think we should,” Kinsey said. “If we do a deal with them, we’re going to be funding them anyway. If we owned them, we could negotiate better fees. I’m going to present this to Jeffrey.” As they got to Katzenberg’s office, Kinsey paused to exchange some pleasantries with one of the secretaries, and Rochlis got into the office ahead of him. As Kinsey walked through the door no more than thirty seconds later, he heard Rochlis say, “I think we should buy Pixar. It’s an incredible deal.” Kinsey stopped in his tracks. Rochlis was brazenly stealing his idea! Rochlis wasn’t interested in Pixar’s technology. He’d never even been there.
It turned out it didn’t matter. “No, no, no,” Katzenberg said. “We don’t want to mess with this.”
“Do you know the background?” Kinsey asked.
“Yes, Jeff told me,” Katzenberg said. “I can’t waste my time on this stuff. We’ve got more important things to do.”
Kinsey finally called Catmull and said he couldn’t interest Disney in a deal. Eventually it was Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Computer, who saw the potential in Pixar and bought out Lucas’s stake.
In the meantime, Kinsey and Roy doggedly pursued a deal to license Pixar’s technology. Roy was convinced that with the investment in this new technology, Disney could both manage the soaring costs of traditional hand-drawn animation and reverse the alarming decline in quality that had begun with Mouse Detective. He brought the subject up at every opportunity. Katzenberg resisted. He insisted on comparing hand-drawn cels to those drawn by computer, skeptical that a machine could duplicate the quality. But over time, he became persuaded. And Eisner and Wells relented. “Roy wants to do this, and he believes in it,” Eisner argued. “I think we have to take a deep breath and say yes.”
/> Peter Schneider, hired to be Roy’s “Katzenberg,” had only been at Disney a week when Katzenberg asked him to represent the animation department at a meeting on the Universal lot with Steven Spielberg and producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall to discuss the Roger Rabbit project. When their initial budget came in at an eye-popping $50 million, the project nearly died. But the producers finally whittled it down to $29.9 million, which at the time still made it the most expensive animated movie ever green-lit in Hollywood.
Despite the price tag, Katzenberg was determined to bring the prestige of Spielberg to Disney, and he also argued that the hybrid of live action and animation would “save” the animation department from extinction. Eisner and Wells were apprehensive, but agreed, largely because of their confidence in Spielberg. But Eisner warned Katzenberg he’d have to ride herd on costs.
The Rabbit deal was an unusual partnership, which gave Spielberg and director Robert Zemeckis final creative control and a share in any profits. Disney kept all merchandising rights. Spielberg had recruited director Robert Zemeckis fresh from the huge success of Romancing the Stone and Back to the Future, and Zemeckis had insisted on hiring the man he considered “the best animator in the world,” a commercial artist and animator in London named Richard Williams, best known for the “Pink Panther” cartoons. Part of Schneider’s job was to manage Williams and coordinate with the Disney animators. Casting character actor Bob Hoskins in the lead role rather than Harrison Ford, Spielberg’s choice, saved some money.
But keeping the budget under control was a nearly impossible task, given that Spielberg and Zemeckis had creative control, which meant de facto control over the budget and schedule (something Eisner had learned in his hotel partnership with Tishman). Williams saw himself as an artist, openly disdainful of the Disney bureaucracy, incredulous that Disney animators were expected to clock in when they arrived at work. On one of his first days at the Disney studio, he gathered all the animators to watch a screening of The Thief and the Cobbler, an animated labor of love on which he had been toiling since 1968. Williams told Schneider that in return for doing Roger Rabbit, Disney and Spielberg would help him distribute Thief. He refused to work in Los Angeles, and to accommodate him and his animators, production was moved to London.
Schneider soon realized that for every day spent working on the film, they fell another day behind schedule. The film had been budgeted for a lock-stop camera, but Zemeckis insisted on a moving camera, which doubled costs. Finally Katzenberg told Eisner and Wells that the budget was nearing $40 million, and Eisner exploded, accusing Katzenberg of hiding the bad news from him. “Nothing upsets me more than finding out about a problem when it’s too late to do anything about it,” he fumed. He ordered Katzenberg to immerse himself in the project and slash costs or else he’d either take control himself or shut down the production.
In a dramatic gesture even by his own standards, Katzenberg summoned the top people involved, including Williams, Spielberg, Zemeckis, Marshall, and Schneider, to a meeting in New York, halfway between Los Angeles and London. The California contingent had to take an overnight flight while the others flew from London. “This isn’t working,” he began, once they had assembled. “Michael has given me an ultimatum.” Schneider had felt the only solution was to fire Williams, but instead Katzenberg told Williams to finish drawing the two major cartoon characters, Roger and Baby Herman, and relieved him of his management duties, which went to Schneider.
In the wake of the meeting, word coursed through the animation community that Roger Rabbit was in serious trouble, which prompted a call to Katzenberg from Kim Masters, a reporter for Premiere magazine who was working on an article about the mounting disarray. Desperate to stave off bad press, Katzenberg offered Masters exclusive access to the set, animators, and production process if she’d agree not to print anything until the movie was finished. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when she agreed.
Eisner remained skeptical of both the costs and the quality of the film. He flooded Zemeckis with production notes and complained to Katzenberg when Zemeckis ignored them. Katzenberg argued that Eisner couldn’t simply substitute his judgment for that of major talents like Spielberg and Zemeckis. “I’m doing the best I can,” Katzenberg finally said in exasperation. “If that’s not satisfactory to you, then I’m not the person to do the job.” After that exchange, Eisner stopped speaking to him—the first serious rupture in their partnership.
But the silent treatment only lasted a few days. Roger Rabbit’s first screening before a test audience of mostly teenagers was in April. Much of the animation wasn’t finished, the teenagers grew impatient, and the film broke halfway through. Desperate to prevent any bad word from leaking, Katzenberg summoned everyone to the rear of the theater. “We have just had the greatest preview ever,” he said solemnly. The film and audience reactions steadily improved. Roy was delighted with it, though he took Eisner aside in the parking lot after a screening. “This is too risqué for the Disney label,” he warned.
“Why?” Eisner asked.
“You know, Jessica’s line: ‘Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?’ ”
Eisner was happy to oblige him, since he thought marketing the film as a Touchstone release would broaden the appeal to adults. Katzenberg, too, was delighted. “This is going to be the number one film of 1988,” he confidently predicted.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? opened in June to ecstatic reviews. Newsweek did a cover story. Rita Kempley, writing in the Washington Post, raved that
“Roger Rabbit” took an army of artists, 1,000 special effects and more technology than a nuclear submarine. But this humanimated miracle is more than razzle-dazzle. It’s also a landmark of high spirits. You get the feeling that everybody involved was in love with the notion—from director Robert Zemeckis of “Back to the Future” to animation director Richard Williams. Hoskins, who reacted to thin air during the filming while a comic in a rabbit suit read Roger’s lines off camera, is wonderful. And the chemistry is there—the effervescent essence of Roger, his unbearable lightness really, at odds with Hoskins’ stolid fireplug physique. Indeed, Toontown is a new Wonder-land, a rowdy, jellybean and yellow-brick-road-colored piece of property, where the flowers dance and the sun has a face and the theme song is “Smile, Darn You, Smile.” And that’s the best way to get in the mood for this overwhelming charmer.
Roger Rabbit grossed $154 million, and was hugely profitable despite its final cost, which was pretty much the $50-plus million that had been Spielberg’s first budget proposal. Eisner and the Imagineers were soon at work on a “Mickey’s Toontown” attraction for the theme parks. Rabbit merchandise flew off the shelves.
Though he won an Academy Award for his work on Rabbit, Williams seemed indifferent to the critical and box-office success, feeling that the film was no longer the picture he’d envisioned. When Katzenberg asked for changes in his beloved Thief, Williams refused. Neither Disney nor Spielberg ever distributed the film, which, in a much-altered form disowned by Williams, was eventually released by Miramax under the title Arabian Knight. Williams later contended that many elements of Thief reappeared in Disney’s Aladdin. “We took the best out of Richard,” Schneider conceded ruefully.
As Roger Rabbit opened, the Oliver Twist project, now titled Oliver & Company, was nearing completion. In keeping with Disney tradition, the main character was now a kitten, and the action had been moved from London to New York City, but it was still a musical. Katzenberg had the idea to bring in a group of big-name singer/songwriters, each of whom would contribute a song: Billy Joel, Barry Manilow, Huey Lewis. At the suggestion of his close friend David Geffen, Katzenberg brought in lyricist Howard Ashman for the song “Once Upon a Time in New York City.” Soon after, Geffen also recommended Katzenberg use the composer Alan Menken. Ashman and Menken had written the lyrics for Little Shop of Horrors, which Geffen produced off-Broadway, with Schneider as the company manager. Roy’s son Tim earned a writing credit on Ol
iver. Schneider thought the resulting production lacked continuity, and coming from a theater background himself, thought it was the wrong way to approach a musical. Still, it was Katzenberg’s idea, and Schneider did his best to make it work. A lot was riding on the project. Much of the animation in Roger Rabbit had been contracted out to Williams’s people; Oliver, by contrast, was entirely a Disney production.
Like Mouse Detective, no one at Disney was entirely satisfied with the finished Oliver & Company, including Katzenberg. But he was impatient with artistic reservations. “Do you want to win the Academy Award or the Bank of America award?” he asked so often that it became a refrain. In that regard Oliver & Company had two marketing advantages: the classic Dickens story and a pop score by well-known composers. Katzenberg insisted that Disney put some aggressive marketing behind it. Oliver opened in November 1988 and, to everyone’s surprise, grossed $53 million, setting a new record for an animated feature.
Katzenberg was not only emboldened by the success of an animated movie that had been his idea, but also by the growing realization that Disney had a virtual monopoly in animation and that it could be even more profitable than live action. After all, there were no high-priced stars or blockbuster directors demanding a percentage of the gross revenues. With almost no demand for their skills beyond Disney, the animators were barely paid above scale, and lived so modestly that at a retreat for the top artists at the Santa Barbara Biltmore, several asked if they could keep the soap and shampoo from their hotel rooms.
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