“Remember, I did that,” Eisner countered, referring to Raiders of the Lost Ark, which Spielberg directed and Lucas produced.
Their collaboration was doomed when Venturi, the more senior of the two architects, insisted on a competition to choose a single architect. So Eisner had Levitt organize one. Tishman insisted that his own architect, Alan Lapidus, be included, someone who was far more developer-friendly. Eisner agreed, though he viewed Lapidus with thinly disguised contempt. Lapidus’s father, Morris, designed the flamboyant Fontainebleau and Eden Roc hotels in Miami Beach, exactly the kind of “schlock” that Eisner was determined to avoid.* Disney’s own Imagineers also contributed a design.
All the models were displayed in a conference room next to Eisner’s office in the old animation building. Though Graves’s models were sidetracked to Memphis and barely arrived in time, Eisner was immediately drawn to his unconventional but stylishly postmodern plans, one for a giant pyramid, the other a vault, two iconic classical shapes. The pyramid had a giant fountain at its apex. Tishman was aghast. “This design is outrageous and impossible,” he said. “The buildings make no sense practically or economically.” But Eisner was delighted, and asked only that Graves “lighten them up.” The architect responded by adding giant dolphins to the top of one pyramid building, swans to the other (inspired, Graves said, by the fountains of Bernini, the Italian Baroque master). Despite arguments and cost-cutting efforts by Tishman that continued throughout construction (some of which had to be countermanded by Eisner), the Swan and Dolphin hotels were essentially built as Graves designed them, down to the smallest details of the interior decor.
During his first week at the company, Katzenberg asked to see what the animators had in development, and they arranged a screening of The Black Cauldron, which had been ten years in the making and was scheduled as Disney’s animated 1984 Christmas season release. Black Cauldron was the work of the Old Guard; the younger animators scoffed at it.
In the years after Walt’s death, animation had split into two uneasy camps. The legendary and much revered “Nine Old Men” who worked closely with Walt had mostly died or retired. Their successors were a group of older animators who tried to resist the changes sought by a group of twenty-something renegade artists, most recently hired from the CalArts program, among them John Lasseter and Tim Burton. Lasseter’s 1979 animated film at CalArts, Lady & the Lamp, had won the Student Academy Award for Animation. He was talented, affable, and wore Hawaiian shirts. Burton, by contrast, dressed formally in black, and sometimes disappeared into a closet, where he’d stand for hours. After some dental surgery, he returned to the office and delighted in dripping blood on his colleagues’ desks. Lasseter left Disney shortly before Eisner arrived.
The Black Cauldron was almost completed, and Roy had already seen it. He’d been disturbed by the graphic violence in the opening sequence, in which a flying dragon swoops down on a young boy, sinks his talons into him, and flies off. Roy insisted that a few particularly bloody frames be cut, but he didn’t know what else to do. Apart from the violence, “I just don’t understand the story,” he told the writer and producer, Joe Hale.
When Katzenberg saw it, he was even more dismayed, and blunter about saying so. The dark and forbidding story was unsuitable for small children. Katzenberg didn’t see how it could garner a G, or general audience, rating, which had always been affixed to the Disney animated films. It would be a disaster for the Disney brand.
“This has to be edited,” he proclaimed as soon as the film ended.
Hale objected. “Animated films can’t be edited,” he insisted. There was no “excess” footage in an animated film, all of which was painstakingly hand-drawn and colored. You couldn’t just cut scenes and add new ones, not with the release just weeks away.
“That’s ridiculous,” Katzenberg retorted. “You can edit anything.”
“No, you can’t,” Hale persisted. “It’s seamless.”
“Yes you can, and I’ll show you how,” Katzenberg said, as tension mounted. “Let’s go into the editing room.”
As Katzenberg began work, Hale rushed to a phone and called Roy, who was having lunch with Eisner. “He’s butchering The Black Cauldron,” Hale fumed about Katzenberg. Yes, The Black Cauldron was dark, but it was an attempt to give Disney animation an edge, to be more contemporary. The animators were in an uproar. Eisner called and got Katzenberg out of the editing room. “What are you doing?” Eisner demanded. “Everybody’s upset.”
“I’m trying to salvage this mess,” Katzenberg replied.
Eisner told Katzenberg to calm down and said he wanted to speak to him in person. For the time being Roy, as head of animation, could deal with The Black Cauldron. Katzenberg left the editing room, but not before some succinct parting words: “It’s bad. Fix it.”
More frantic calls ensued, complaints about Katzenberg that Roy passed on to Eisner. Katzenberg embodied all the animators’ fears that philistines had taken control, people who didn’t have the slightest understanding of animation and the hallowed Disney traditions. But when he spoke to Katzenberg, Eisner seemed amused by the turmoil. “Good,” Eisner said. “That’s what you’re here for.” But he reminded Katzenberg that they wouldn’t be at Disney if it weren’t for Roy. “Be deferential,” he said, “but get in there and fix it.”
At the same time, Eisner assured Roy that he’d spoken to Katzenberg and warned him not to overstep his bounds. Still, “I can only control him so much,” he said with a shrug. Katzenberg heeded Eisner’s advice and invited Roy to have dinner, and Roy found himself agreeing with many of Katzenberg’s points. In any event, Katzenberg was head of the motion picture studio, which made him Roy’s boss. Roy had agreed to the arrangement when Katzenberg was hired, and he intended to honor it.
In the end, there wasn’t much that could be done with The Black Cauldron, though it was postponed until the following summer for some rewriting and editing. Despite Katzenberg’s insistence, Hale was more right than wrong about editing animated films. Katzenberg managed to cut just a few minutes, and by his own admission, could only make it slightly less bad. Roy received a film credit for “additional dialogue.” Still, when Roy appeared on the “Today Show” to promote the opening, he drew a blank when the host asked, “What’s The Black Cauldron about?” He still wasn’t sure. The film grossed almost $22 million, but far less than it had cost to make. Even more discouraging to the animators was the fact that The Care Bears Movie, based on the American Greetings teddy bears, was made using cheap foreign labor for just $2 million, but grossed more than Black Cauldron at the box office.
Joe Hale was already at work on his next project, Mistress Masham’s Repose, a sequel to Gulliver’s Travels, in which Lilliputians come to England and live on a country estate. Roy thought the idea had charm, but when Hale described it, Katzenberg said simply, “I hate it.” After the Black Cauldron episode, Roy wasn’t surprised. Hale was fired shortly after, along with most of the Black Cauldron team. Mistress Masham languished. More cutbacks were in the offing. Katzenberg asked Roy for a list of people he wanted to save.
After the layoffs and the fiasco of The Black Cauldron, Roy felt he was fighting for the future of animation, which he still believed had the potential to once again be the heart of the company. At about the same time as the disastrous screening of Black Cauldron, Roy invited Eisner, Wells, and Katzenberg to a viewing of storyboards from a new project called Basil of Baker Street. While most animators had been painstakingly toiling on Black Cauldron, two dissident animators who had been cut from the Cauldron team, Ron Clements and John Musker, both former altar boys from the Midwest, had been developing a story based on a book about mice living under Sherlock Holmes’s London flat. They’d used Ron Miller as the model for the villain, Professor Ratigan (“big, hulking, handsome, and personable”), and Miller had been the film’s producer until he was abruptly dismissed. Clements, bearded and redheaded, and Musker, taller and more talkative, set up nearly fifty storyboard
s that snaked through the corridor and in and out of rooms in the old animation building. Unlike live-action features, Disney’s animated films had rarely started with scripts; storyboards had scores of cartoonlike drawings that mapped out the story, and dialogue was added later by the animators as they drew. Eisner, especially, seemed puzzled by this. “We should begin with a script, just like with our other movies,” he insisted.
As they wandered along the storyboards, neither Roy nor the animators could figure out if the executives were really following the story. Eisner startled them at one point by wondering aloud whether a song in a bar that had already been scored by composer Henry Mancini could be turned over to pop star Michael Jackson. Clements and Musker froze, their dismay evident. Finally Eisner said, “Part of your job is to talk me out of bad ideas.”
Eisner found Basil cute but confusing. He liked the Sherlock Holmes angle; he’d produced “The Young Sherlock Holmes” while at Paramount. But he thought it lacked dramatic structure, the traditional three-act “beginning, middle, and end” that had served him so well when judging scripts at Paramount. But he and Katzenberg agreed that, at the very least, it would not be another Black Cauldron. Roy pressed for a green light, pointing out that Disney risked losing its most talented animators if they didn’t have something to work on.
Eisner asked the animators how much more time they needed.
“Two years,” Clements said.
“I want it in one. How much will it cost?”
“About $24 million.”
“Nope,” Eisner said, “$12 million.”
In the end, they got the green light and a budget of $10 million.
Katzenberg moved quickly to put his stamp on the animation division. He scheduled his first major meeting for a Sunday at 7:00 A.M. Not yet familiar with Katzenberg’s work habits, Roy and the animators took this as an affront. Patty Disney told Roy, “Tell Jeffrey that if he ever makes you do this again, you’re going to show up in your pajamas.” The meeting got off to a bad start when Katzenberg discovered that no one had stocked the room with Diet Coke.
A few days later, Eisner issued invitations to one of his “gong shows,” a first for the animators. He told them he wanted five new ideas from each of them. Clements went to a bookstore and started leafing through a book of fairy tales. One caught his eye: Hans Christian Andersen’s “Little Mermaid.” Though the fairy tale had a sad ending—the mermaid dies—Clements wrote a two-page treatment in which the mermaid becomes human after meeting her prince. He was also a big fan of science fiction at the time, so his other ideas were all science fiction, including one he jotted down, “Treasure Island in Space.”
Eisner and Katzenberg went around the table, and the animators got a crash course in “high concept.” When Clements’s turn came, he said, “The Little Mermaid….”
“Gong,” Eisner and Katzenberg said in unison. “Too similar to Splash.”
“Okay, how about ‘Treasure Island in Space’?”
“Gong.” Eisner knew that Paramount was already developing a Star Trek sequel with a Treasure Island angle.
Pete Young, another animator, suggested “Oliver Twist with dogs.” Everybody waited for the gong, but none came. Then Katzenberg said he loved it. He’d wanted to do a live-action film version of the Broadway musical Oliver! while at Paramount, but it had never gotten out of development. Now Katzenberg had the idea that they could do a Broadway musical as an animated feature—with dogs in the main roles.
“Oliver Twist with dogs” got the go-ahead.
Clements left the meeting depressed; he’d been “gonged” after only a few words. But Roy came up to him afterward and said he liked the “Little Mermaid” idea. And the next morning, Katzenberg called to say he’d read all five of his ideas overnight. He, too, said he liked the mermaid idea and suggested that Clements expand his treatment. Clements was amazed and impressed that a high-ranking executive like Katzenberg had actually read his material and reacted to it so quickly.
Another idea Eisner and Katzenberg liked was a project already in development from the Ron Miller era, a live action–animated hybrid based on a book called Who Censored Roger Rabbit? Part of the plot hinged on the lack of public transportation in Los Angeles, a theme that resonated with Eisner, who still missed New York’s public transport system.
As Katzenberg spent more time with the animators, he started browsing in the Disney animation archives. He was amazed to discover that Disney maintained a vast trove of documentary material that included practically everything Walt had ever written and said. Stenographers had been employed to follow Walt around and take down everything, so there were long transcripts of Walt analyzing the making of all the Disney classic animated films. There were also thousands of archival photos. Disney still employed a staff of sixteen full-time still photographers whose sole responsibility was to document the work of the studio. Katzenberg considered it a monument to Walt’s ego; Paramount had had none of this. But since it was there, Katzenberg decided to take advantage of it. In the midst of shelves filled with dusty cartons that looked as if they hadn’t been touched in years, Katzenberg began systematically retracing Walt’s career in animation. It was all there, neatly cataloged: Walt’s files on “villains,” “heroines,” “lyrics,” “music.”
He also discovered a book written by two of Walt’s disciples called The Art of Animation. Katzenberg made a point of rereading it every four to six months. He spent hours in the archives, often in the early morning or late at night when no one else was around; he typically slept just five hours a night. He came to view the experience as the college education he’d never gotten, and a refuge from the stress and hectic pace of the studio.
Far from wanting to shut down animation, as Eisner and Wells had initially proposed, Katzenberg began to see it as a unique Disney asset. Just because Disney had failed to generate a new classic since Walt’s death didn’t mean it never would again. In any event, Eisner had told him to keep Roy happy, and Roy believed in animation. On a flight to Tokyo to visit Tokyo Disneyland, Katzenberg talked with Roy about how to ramp up production at the animation division. “You need your own Katzenberg,” Katzenberg told him. “Somebody like me, to get things done for you.” So at the behest of Bob Fitzpatrick at CalArts, Roy interviewed Peter Schneider, whose background was in live theater, not animation. Still, he’d just run the arts program for the Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival. Roy liked him, so Schneider met with Katzenberg—a 5:30 A.M. interview—and then Eisner. “Either it will work out or we’ll fire you,” Eisner said breezily. Schneider got the job, but he sensed that Eisner had little interest in either him or the money-losing animation division.
Eisner was far more interested in reviving Disney’s live-action film and television divisions, businesses he knew well from his stint at Paramount. He had Katzenberg and Kinsey develop a master plan for the studio, which called for tearing down the old, unused “Zorro” set and building bungalows to house live-action producers on the lot. As live-action film production ramped up, office space grew tight, especially in the coveted area close to Eisner and Wells. So the animators had to move. The decision was highly symbolic, since Walt’s office had always been in the animation building at the heart of the studio. Roy objected, but finally agreed when Eisner personally promised that they’d be brought back to the Burbank campus as soon as a new building could be built.
The move was demoralizing. Roy kept his office in the old animation building, but everyone else moved several miles away to a dreary, nearly windowless warehouse in Glendale. Tim Burton left to direct Pee Wee’s Big Adventure for Warner Bros. Despite assurances that the move was temporary, the animators concluded that their days were probably numbered. Apart from Basil, they had so little work to occupy them that they passed the time with chair races, cell-sliding contests, and Trivial Pursuit games.
After hiring Katzenberg, Eisner and Wells moved quickly to remake Disney, especially the studio, into something closer to the Paramount mold.
The theme parks, the only division making money, were spared, at least for the time being, and continued under the leadership of Nunis, who remained on the board. Indeed, Eisner was exceedingly careful about board members. He added Wells and Wilson from the company; Sharon Disney Lund represented the Walt side of the family; and Roy, of course, had rejoined at the same time as Eisner. Though Stanley Gold had stepped down as part of the compromise to elect Eisner and Wells, he, too, returned in 1984. With such staunch allies, Eisner had effective control of the board, not that the old guard, represented by Walker, Watson, and Nunis, were likely to challenge his leadership.
In contrast to his handling of the board, and despite the reassuring words to longtime employees in his first-day speech, Eisner was impatient with the leisurely hours and work habits of many Disney old-timers, even though the afternoon card games had vanished the day he and Wells arrived. But firing people was not something Eisner enjoyed. It was the kind of distasteful but sometimes essential task he handed off to Wells. Wells continued to probe Stan Kinsey for information and gossip about longtime employees. As Wells zeroed in on theme parks head Nunis, Kinsey finally said, “I’m not your guy. I don’t feel comfortable discussing people like this.”
A culture of “survival of the fittest” soon developed. Two people would be assigned the same tasks, and whoever prevailed kept his job, at least temporarily. One afternoon Katzenberg told Kinsey he wanted him to analyze Disney’s international distribution, an operation run by Harry Archinal. Kinsey blanched at the request. The genial Archinal had practically invented the business, and was well known and highly regarded in Hollywood and abroad. He had also been especially gracious toward Kinsey when he came to the company. So Kinsey hated the idea of going behind his back. “Why don’t you call Harry?” Kinsey suggested to Katzenberg. “Tell him I’m going to be working on this and you want me to help him evaluate the business.”
DisneyWar Page 10
