by Martin Sklar
Certainly a key part of why we worked so well together was our communication. Everyone at Imagineering knew they could not play Mickey and me against one another—that Mickey respected my leadership of the concept work of designers, artists, writers, storytellers, and everyone who contributed to the creative process…and that I was ecstatic that I did not have to spend precious time selling the cost of great ideas internally at Imagineering—when “Uncle Scrooge” (Corporate Strategic Planning at the Studio) was the real audience. Mickey filled that role. He was not always successful. Disney’s corporate heads had established a “Good Guy/Bad Guy” system for approving projects; of course “strategic planning” were the “Bad Guys.”
It was not always pretty with Mickey Steinberg. You always knew where he stood on an issue—and sometimes that straight-shooting honesty made him a target for more politically minded executives in other divisions, which is why his tenure at the company came to an end.
During the five years or so that Mickey Steinberg and I were a team at the head of Imagineering, we built or set in motion over $4 billion in Disney park projects, including new attractions developed for the existing parks. While Mickey’s role in Euro Disney is well documented, his mark on Disney’s Animal Kingdom, although it opened four years after he had returned to Atlanta, was just as important. Three examples are especially noteworthy.
When the project was just getting under way, the gurus of Disney landscaping came to us with a passionate plea: give us a big down payment on the trees and vines, shrubs, and grasses that will make or break the environments that are being designed, especially for the main attractions of the Africa area: Kilimanjaro Safaris, Harambi Wildlife Preserve, and Pangani Forest Exploration Trail. As soon as we announce the project, prices for the “show” and “specimen trees,” and the “thematic area and backdrop trees,” are going to soar, they argued. Give us $3 million now, and we’ll collect and store the key elements that will make the adventures that Joe Rohde and his team are planning look real for Opening Day.
The petitioners were Bill Evans, one of the most respected landscapers in the world—a Disney Legend for his pioneering work at Disneyland, Walt Disney World, and Tokyo Disneyland—and his protégé, Paul Comstock, just returned from Paris to join the Animal Kingdom team. Their argument convinced us, and in no time they were buying trees and landscape material throughout the Southeast. One surprise was the discovery of an area in Georgia where a government program years before had helped create farms full of bamboo growth. In addition to their use as windbreaks, the stalks were harvested and sold to furniture manufacturers, but the area had fallen on hard times. The Disney landscapers made a deal: we’ll buy the whole field of bamboo plants, roots and all, but (and this was the clincher) you farmers can cut the stalks off and sell them separately to the furniture people. We wanted the root ball itself.
Here’s the way Paul Comstock described the purchase to me: the Giant Timber Bamboo we bought in Georgia, just south of Atlanta,…is native to China. Our plants escaped from a test planting done in the 1930s by the United States Department of Agriculture. The bamboo was being tested as windbreaks for the protection of agriculture. It thrived in the Georgia test, and quickly spread to cover vast tracts of land within a couple of decades. We offered to “mow” a couple acres of the giant grass to the ground and dig out the root systems. After cutting the sixty-foot tall bamboo to the ground, we then jackhammered the grove into seven feet long by three-feet wide by one-inch thick Georgia clay slabs of bamboo root rhizomes. We stacked the slabs like books on a shelf, thirty slabs per forty-foot-long flatbed trailer, and trucked them to the old Epcot Tree Farm. After two Florida sunshine growing seasons, the transplanted roots had shot up to twenty-five feet, on their way to the height of forty feet plus we see in the park today. We shipped a couple hundred slabs and turned them into thousands of mature bamboo culms, providing food, habitat, shade, scenery, and a “living show set” throughout Disney’s Animal Kingdom (DAK).
The second and most important decision was to keep a core team intact during a project hiatus of nearly one year. Although Michael Eisner had originally suggested the idea of a park about animals, the project was stopped and put on hold as a result of other corporate initiatives requiring key financing. But the DAK team had such a great start that Mickey was able to convince Frank Wells to continue working on the drawing packages for Harambi Village, Rafiki’s Planet Watch, DinoLand, the Maharajah Jungle Trek, and other key areas. As a result, when the project was “turned on” again, the Animal Kingdom went to the field for construction with what may have been the best drawing package of any Disney project, ever. The influence this had on contractors’ bids, and the schedule, was enormously positive.
A third key decision we made was to approve the research travel by Joe Rohde and his key Animal Kingdom creative team. The early Imagineers who came from art direction backgrounds in the motion picture field were older, and had frequently traveled widely; Herb Ryman’s early travels in Asia and Europe were typical. They could refresh their memories of design detail with a trip to the research library.
However, most of our younger designers of the 1980s and 1990s had not traveled widely before building their design careers. Joe Rohde was not just their advocate for true “boots on the ground” research; he was a veteran traveler to Asia and Polynesia. Joe’s belief that his team absolutely had to experience seeing lions and elephants on a real African safari, and travel to Asian byways far from civilization, carried the day. While the project was still on hiatus, we approved four different research expeditions. In total, before the opening and later additions of Expedition Everest to the Asian area of the park, Joe and his team took a dozen study trips to Africa and Asia. The authenticity of the Animal Kingdom’s designs and attractions (as well as the Animal Kingdom Lodge resort) speaks volumes for Joe Rohde’s travel advocacy.
So what happened to my favorite working relationship? Why did Mickey Steinberg go home to Atlanta? The answer is, he crossed swords with Peter Rummell, and Peter won. It was not a pretty picture.
Peter Rummell was the real estate developer in Michael Eisner’s entertainment court. He left a position as vice chairman of Rockefeller Center Management, which markets, leases, and manages buildings in midtown Manhattan, to become president of the brand-new Disney Development Company in 1985. The charge was to plan and develop Disney’s Florida land, and soon Euro Disney, with emphasis on hotel development (some would say “overdevelopment”), and ultimately the community of Celebration, a faux version of the Epcot community, on land de-annexed from the Walt Disney World property. A deep divide developed over the master planning of Walt Disney World involving new access roads and other infrastructure related to the Animal Kingdom project and nearby acreage. Eisner sided with Peter, and then took a step beyond: he decided to make Imagineering part of the Disney Development Company.
Despite Frank Wells’s warning that Mickey would leave the company (and, we were told, Frank’s own objections to the new organization), Michael persisted. One day Frank called to ask Mickey and me to have lunch with Peter to see if we could develop a working relationship. We met in the Executive Suite at the Disneyland Hotel. As Mickey and I drove the thirty-five miles back to Glendale from Anaheim, it was clear that his association with Disney was coming to an end. Days later, he was on his way back to Atlanta, and I (along with all of Imagineering) was now reporting to the real estate developers. Peter became chairman of the new organization. I received a fancy new title, which I wrote myself, to make sure I separated myself from the developers: vice chairman and principal creative executive. Ken Wong, also with a real estate development background, ultimately was given the title president of Imagineering.
I cannot remember having one discussion with Peter Rummell about a creative issue related to Imagineering’s role in the parks and resorts. And I never had the feeling that Peter really cared what happened inside the parks. By 1997, Peter had moved on, becoming chairman and CEO of Florida�
��s largest landholders, the St. Joe Company of Jacksonville. It seemed as though his major accomplishment from the merger of DDC and WDI was to drop the name Disney Development Company and rename the whole organization Walt Disney Imagineering. Wouldn’t you want to say to people, “I was a Disney Imagineer” rather than “I was a Disney developer”?
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When I think of Paul Pressler today, what comes to mind is this expression: “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” In retrospect, he certainly fooled Disney management a lot of the time.
Pressler joined the Consumer Products division in 1987, moving from Kenner-Parker Toys to become senior vice president of Disney’s Consumer Product licensing. Soon after the launch of the Disney Stores, led by Steve Burke, now chairman of NBC-Universal, Pressler became executive vice president and general manager, then president, leading the worldwide rollout that topped out at over 650 stores. Imagineering designers worked with Pressler on a number of special iconic stores, notably in San Francisco, Las Vegas, and on Fifth Avenue in New York—a gem of a design and representation of the company and what we thought was the direction of the Disney Stores’ business. The stores capitalized on the renaissance of Disney animation and the popularity of Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King. Ultimately, however, as the quality and variety of the merchandise declined (or perhaps there are only so many Disney character T-shirts a family wardrobe needed), the stores went into steep decline, until the company sold those remaining. By then, Pressler was long gone—from both Consumer Products and The Walt Disney Company.
In 1994, with the retirement of Jack Lindquist, Michael Eisner made Pressler the president of the Disneyland Resort. Four years later, with the retirement of Dick Nunis, Pressler became president of Disney Parks and Resorts worldwide. After two more years, he was named chairman, with an additional prize: forty-eight years after Walt founded WED Enterprises, we had become not just part of Disney Parks and Resorts (technically, The Walt Disney World Co.), but we now reported to the division chairman, Paul Pressler—along with all the ticket takers, ride operators, marketing, and other guest service functions.
It was interesting the way Michael Eisner chose to inform the leaders of Imagineering about this sea change. About a year earlier, responding to an issue I had raised, Michael had assured me that he would never have the creative organization—Imagineering—reporting to the operators. At Imagineering, we sometimes used the metaphor that this would equate to a movie director reporting to the manager of a movie theater in your local mall.
To keep some of our key talent working during a slow development period for our parks attractions and exhibits, we had taken on the design of a new children’s museum called “Port Discovery” in Baltimore, Maryland. The museum’s grand opening took place in December 1998. Ken Wong and I were there to celebrate the work of Doris Woodward and the Imagineering design team. Suddenly Ken and I were given an urgent message to call Michael Eisner’s office ASAP. As it happened, the only telephone we could find with any degree of privacy was an outdoor pay telephone nearby. It was there that Ken and I took turns being informed by Disney’s CEO that we—and Imagineering—now reported to Paul Pressler.
Pressler’s meteoric rise through the Disney ranks was the subject of much speculation, especially by the blogs. One of the most specific views was published two years after Pressler left Disney, credited to a “Tom Morrow.” The 2004 piece was entitled “The Fall of Walt Disney Imagineering.” It read in part:
From 1995 to 1999, [Pressler] squeezed every penny out of Disneyland, making dramatic budget cuts and focusing attention on merchandise promotions and suggestive-selling programs. Hard selling was never the Disney way—in fact it was the antithesis of Walt’s philosophy. Just like at the Disney Stores, Paul Pressler would impress his bosses by achieving short-term gains at the expense of the long-term health of his business unit. Stores became more important than attractions.
Some of Disneyland’s classic attractions would be shuttered to save costs, among them Skyway and Submarine Voyage; both closed without replacement.…
Many of the most significant budget cuts affected Disneyland maintenance. The financial price of these decisions is being paid today. Disneyland, long regarded for its cleanliness and efficient maintenance practices, is being forced into a dramatic refurbishment program to bring the park up to its old standards—including a twenty-eight-month refurbishment of one of its signature attractions, Space Mountain…
Pressler left Disney in September 2002 to become president and chief executive officer of Gap, Inc., the San Francisco-based retailer, operator of The Gap, Banana Republic, and Old Navy chain stores. During his last year at Disney, our Imagineering design staff at Disneyland had compiled list after list of maintenance items that had reduced show quality in the park to the lowest level any of us could remember. No argument to Byron Pollitt, Pressler’s chief financial officer, or Cynthia Harriss, Disneyland’s president, opened the purse strings. Wherever you looked—at paint, woodwork, iron railings, paving surfaces, etc.—the park set a new low in Disney quality.
Byron Pollitt had his Disney training in the “no” business with the corporate Strategic Planning group. Typical of his attitude was a discussion we had about the impact of new attractions. Byron claimed that it was marketing of the new attractions, not the experiences themselves, that drove attendance—even in the case of Pirates of the Caribbean. I pointed out that Buzz Price, the most respected economist in the parks and resorts business worldwide, had claimed that “the most impactful attraction” in the modern history of the park business—by far—was Pirates of the Caribbean. After all, without the adventure, what drove the marketing campaign? (Recall my earlier note that Disneyland’s attendance increased from six million to over nine million from 1966 to 1969 with the additions of Pirates of the Caribbean and The Haunted Mansion.) I received no response from Byron, but the company’s response since the departure of Pressler and his team has been to create blockbuster after blockbuster new attractions around the world, including the enormous Cars Land opened in 2012 at California Adventure; a whole new Fantasyland at the Walt Disney World Magic Kingdom (to be completed by next year); and major new areas in Paris, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. And to market the heck out of each one!
Cynthia Harriss had joined Pressler’s staff at the Disney Stores in 1992 after nineteen years with the Paul Harris Stores, a women’s clothing chain. Pressler named her executive vice president of Disneyland in January 1999, and by December she had been promoted to president of the resort.
I liked Cynthia, and thought she meant well—but she was truly a fish out of water in the park business. To support her, Walt Disney World sent Disneyland several of its best operating executives. Every one of them wanted out of the Disneyland Resort environment, where they felt top management lacked a basic understanding of the way a Disney park should be operated. They also were forced to make personnel decisions they felt were unfair to cast members.
Imagineers—especially Tony Baxter and I—were especially upset by the decision the Pressler regime made to close down the Submarine Voyage in Tomorrowland. Launched in 1959, Disneyland’s eight-vessel fleet was originally promoted as “the eighth largest submarine fleet in the world.” By the time of its closing in September 1998—Pressler promised a new attraction by 2003—more people, by a substantial number, had gone underwater in a submarine at Disneyland than anywhere else in the world!
The decision to shutter the attraction, leaving a big, empty lagoon as the centerpiece of Tomorrowland, was actually based on one factor: the cost of maintenance, reportedly nearly $3 million per year. Not too long after its closing, Disneyland’s management came after us to jettison the whole submarine fleet because of the cost and space required for storage. At that point, the Orange County Register correctly quoted me as saying that before we allowed the submarine vessels’ demise,
“I would throw myself across Harbor Boulevard!” (Harbor is the main thoroughfare running north-south adjacent to Disneyland.)
If those eight submarines had been destroyed, today there would be no Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage, where the iconic Pixar character takes you on a journey to the East Australian Current, mirroring the story of the clown fish, his father, Dory, and Crush the sea turtle.
It was no surprise when Pollitt left in January 2003, and Harriss in October of that year, both joining Pressler at The Gap. Fortunately, those long lists of show-quality-related maintenance items our staff made, as frustrating as that process was, were ready to go when a new leadership team replaced Pressler’s as Disneyland’s fiftieth birthday approached.
I made the argument on several occasions that while the fiftieth was an important celebration, we were really talking about the next fifty years in Disney fan attitude. We knew that the marketing campaign would make the fiftieth year a success, but the experiences our guests would have that year—including the visual appearance of the park as a result of the lack of maintenance—would set the tone for many years to come. The peeling paint and rotting wood on Main Street had to be fixed. “What would Walt think?” was a valid question. We all knew the answer.
The good news was the arrival of two top executives from other Disney assignments to run the Disneyland Resort. Number one was Matt Ouimet, who became president of the resort. His Disney career began as chief financial officer at Disney Development Company, but his reputation was based on his roles as chief executive officer of the Disney Vacation Club and president of the new Disney Cruise Line. Matt had led the staffing and operation of the two cruise ships, the Disney Magic and the Disney Wonder. Not only was the business a financial success from day one, but the ships became known as the “quintessential Disney experience.”
