How disney does it

A dazzling new theme park, saluting the movie biz, fulfills Waifs wildest dream.

Come behind the scenes at Walt Disney World near Orlando, where, at various locales, a Minnie head is getting a last-minute application of eye liner and ‘mouse-cara’ - and Michael Eisner, the chairman and GEO of the whole company, is checking out a part of the park that will be hidden from public view until the opening day.

‘You know what would look great over there?’ says the surprisingly tall (for those who’ve seen him introduce the Disney Sunday-night TV show), still boyishly affable 47-year-old executive. As he speaks, he is pointing to a space on the back lot of the Disney-MGM Studios Theme Park, a dazzling 135-acre high-tech playground that will combine rides, shows and exhibits - all ‘themed’, as the Disney folks say, to the world of movies and TV - with a tour of an actual film-production facility. ‘... an aircraft carrier!’ Eisner says.

‘You mean,’ says a clipboard-carrying aide, conscious that his superior earned $40 million last year, largely because Eisner seems, like no entertainment executive since Walt Disney himself, to have located the pulse of the American public - ‘you mean, next to the [replica of a] subway car?’

‘Sure, why not?’ Eisner says. ‘Call some naval bases and see if you can get an aircraft carrier and put it right there.’ ‘Sixty miles from the nearest ocean?’ ‘Yeah, it’ll be fun to look at, don’t you think?’

Others may deal in weightier matters than this always energetic, family- oriented fellow who worked his way up through the programming department at ABC Television, and then moved over to Paramount

Pictures, where he was the driving force behind such smashes as Terms of Endearment and Saturday Night Fever. But no one in America has a neater job than Michael Eisner. Besides making the movies for Walt Disney Studios and its somewhat more mature subdivision, Touchstone Pictures, he gets to pass judgment on the latest designs for Mickey Mouse watches and lord it over the company’s theme parks. These include Disneyland, the southern California original, and Disney World which may have started out t o be the East Coast version of the above, but has become, something much more - a kind of warp zone of warmth and, family values, similar to the Thanks-giving-dinner table, where people congregate to assure themselves that the world’s a fine place after all.

Tropical sun: Tourists patronise the 28,000-acre plot of central Florida bogland (all but 5,000 acres of which remains in its alligator-and-armadill⁰' infested natural state) with a passion that cannot be analyzed in terms of warm weather, Mickey Mouse-worship or humankind’s intrinsic heed to play. Now 25 million people pour through annually and leave behind close to $2 billion. Each year, in defiance of all logic, the lines get longer - and ‘satisfaction rate’ of the customers (as measured by exit polls) gets high# than ever before. People love Disney World so much they voluntarily change their money into ‘Disney Dollars,’ which are good only on the grounds and offer no advantages except the dubious thrill of owing expensive counterfeit currency. It’s a good thing, too. For many visitors are on the way, lured by the promise of mind-boggling new things to see and do. Indeed, Disney World, which is already the world’s leading consumer of fireworks ($30,000 worth a night), is about to experience the biggest boom in its history.

Fun machines: Forget the mouse ears, Disney heads, and consider wearing a hard hat. At Eisner’s urging, more man $1 billion worth of fun machines, multimedia pavilions, fairy-tale hotels and ersatz volcanoes are rising rapidly at a part that was, for goodness sake, already impossible to explore fully in the course of one human-size vacation. By the time this spasm of construction subsides, Disney World will have grown by 25 pel' cent, and the standard three-day admission pass ($78 for adults; $63 for kids) will have been replaced by a four-day version - that still will leave folks feeling that they aren’t seeing things as fast as Disney is throwing them up.’ Which is fine with Eisner. The sense that Disney World i^s overwhelming, too rich to consume - this is the effect that he strives for* ‘Subtlety,’ says Eisner, ‘is not one of our goals. We are in the business of exceeding people’s very high expectations.’

Thus has it always been. When Walt himself purchased the land for Disney World in the early ‘60s (for the more-than-reasonable price of about $200 an acre), he was frustrated by the lack of space at Disneyland, then already filled to overflowing. He envisioned a part that stretched out from Cinderella Castle toward the Orlando city limits and fairly bristled with fun stuff. It was the dream of a hardscrabble Midwestern farmboy. Now, under Eisner, a well-to-do lawyer’s son who grew up in New York City, it’s finally coming true.

Tour wars: Disney isn’t the first company to offer this kind of attraction. Universal Studios has operated a tour of its California production facility since 1964 - and announced that it will open a similar enterprise, about three miles from Disney World.

Eisner resents any implication, however, that Disney isn’t the leader in this field. He has a lot more on his mind than just movies. Soon he’ll be cutting a ribbon for an attraction meant to entice Disney’s toughest audience: teenagers. Typhoon Lagoon will be an elabourate, epic novel of a water slide with eight different flumes, a snorkeling area and a surf-making machine capable of sending out waves of up to seven feet. For those who still have energy to bum after the mechanical tide ebbs, Disney will be opening Pleasure Island, a cluster of 'themed¹ night-clubs for teens and adults. For those who, like most visitors, can barely drag themselves back to their rented Cutlass Cieras each evening, the property will include the elegant (and handy) Swan and Dolphin hotels, both the work of postmodernist architect Michael Graves, who will crown each creation with a striking representation of its namesake.

The rush to see all the new stuff, and revisit old favourites such as the Magic Kingdom’s Haunted Mansion and Big Thunder Mountain, is already under way. Each day, several hundred headset-wearing 'cast members’ (as Disney World’s 26,000 employees are called) sit in long rows and take reservations for 'on property’ hotels, ranging from the (also new) Caribbean Beach, where rooms start at $69, to the $205-a-night Grand Floridian. The vast majority of callers are repeat customers planning to travel a great distance, and their voices suggest a giddy anticipation of that morning when they pull into a space marked Goofy 23 or Minnie 4 and then wait (ah, that first line, like that first scent of salt water on those seaside vacations of yore) for the parking-lot tram.

Some say it’s all for the kids, the roughly $500-per-person they’re spending to see Disney World in style for a week, the perhaps $800 more for hotels and air fare. And yet adults outnumber children 4 to 1 at what has become, as Niagara weeps, the world’s leading honeymoon destination.

Big squid: Why? Disney has taken a lush tropical wilderness, paved it over and added flying elephants Dumbo (average waiting time 20 minutes) and submarine-size squid 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (usually a 30- minute wait). Booze and tobacco are hard to come by on the property, afld night life is virtually nonexistent, at least until Pleasure Island is completed- Td like to say that our show is entirely responsible for our success,’ says Tom Elrod, Disney World’s senior vice president for marketing. But he can’t; it’s not that simple. Over the years research has shown that the formal ‘attractions’ such as Space Mountain, Pirates of the Caribbean and Journey Into Imagination, beloved as they are for their lavish high-techness and ability to induce fleeting nausea, consistently rank a distant third in the hearts of the customers. What folks like even more, they say, is the friendliness of the employees and - this is invariably the first thing cited - the cleanliness with which Disney World constantly shines.

Disney World is a zone of almost perfect efficiency and order. In a place of queues curling and winding and switchbacking into Tomorrowland, line jumping becomes the crime that dares not speak its name. Anything worse is not even imaginable.

Line management. Egad, your high-school principal was right: ‘courtesy is contagious’. Not that the management believes it can sit back and l^et harmony happen. ‘There’s a real art to line management,’ says Dick Nunis? head of Walt Disney Attractions. For example, in order to make the experience less psychologically wearing, the waiting times posted by each attraction are generously overestimated, so that one comes away mysteriously grateful for having hung around 20 minutes for a 58-second twirl in the Alice in Wonderland teacups. (T used the same trick when 1 was trying to sell sitcoms to the networks,’ says Eisser, ‘I showed them a 23-minute Happy Days pilot and told them it was a halfhour. They thought it was the fastest-paced show they’d ever seen! ’)

The lines, moreover, are always moving, even if what looks like the end is actually the start of a second set of switchbacks leading to - oh, no! a pre-ride waiting area. Those little tricks of the theme-park trade mean a lot- Even during the peak periods of Christmas and Easter week - when the parking fields sometimes close at midmoming, causing Winnebagos to sadly turn away like bull elephants rejected by their mates - there are few complaints.

Nor is there much negative press coverage. This is partly due, no doubt, to Disney World’s policy of engendering good will by providing free passes to almost any reporter, photographer or TV technician who phones or writes ahead and asks. For some special events, the freebies are laid on even more lavishly. To help publicise the opening of the Disney-MGM Studios, several thousand media members are being offered free plane tickets and hotel rooms.

‘Exploiting the Disney mystique,’ it’s called. When an accident occurs on one of the rides or in a restaurant, or if someone gets mowed down by one of the clean-cut zealots constantly vacuuming up invisible litter on Main Street USA, Disney representatives have been known to rush to the scene with offers of free tickets and air fare home in exchange for an on-the-spot settlement. Only a few of the injured elect to file suits.

Disney died in 1966, two years before construction of his World started. He lives on, though, partly through Disney University, a training centre where cast members take courses designed, says director Valerie Oberle, ‘to help people do the hard work of helping other people have fun.’ Employees, most of whom come from outside the area (Disney, the largest nongovernmental employer in Florida, exhausted the local manpower supply long ago), take three days of motivational courses at the start of their careers, and refresher courses later. At least once during his or her career, every Disney World management employee must spend a day prancing around the property in an 80- to 100-pound character costume. Because it looks on its employees as playing showbiz ‘roles.’ Disney doesn’t hesitate to tell them that they are too overweight, too short, or in some other way not in sync with the theme of a particular attraction. (Those who don’t make the grade because of physical characteristics are offered behind-the-scenes jobs.) And a grooming code, even for those deep within the wool and wire of Pluto or Scrooge McDuck, is strictly enforced. Men cannot sport facial hair; women can’t wear heavy eye makeup or dangling earrings. It’s no secret where the money is coming from for Disney World’s growth and expansion. But Eisner isn’t just more successful than Walt ever was. He is, by consensus, more Walt than Walt. ‘He’s a genuine idea man,’ says Roy Disney. But, he might have added, one so unprima donna-ish that Eisner often roams the streets of Disney World at dawn, picking up the occasional gum wrapper and chatting with the cast members who work, as costume cleaners or cooks, in the labyrinth of tunnels below the Magic Kingdom. His ‘secret goal in life’ is to someday phase out hamburgers at Disney World and replace them with healthier turkey burgers. About the only thing that upsets him visibly is hearing someone use the term ‘Mickey Mouse’ to mean small-time or chintzy.

Eisner says, ‘We’re basically hardworking family people.’ The Disney top executives certainly fit that description. Eisner often takes his wife of 21 years, Jane, and their three sons, Breck, Eric and Anders, on business trips - and constantly alludes to them in interviews, speeches and even in the Disney-annual report, where he recently discussed company earnings in the span since ‘Breck started high school.’

Eisner knows so much about amusement parks, he says, ‘because it’s basically the same business [as making movies]. An attraction in one of our parks is like a firm story. And I know a good story always has a beginning, middle and end.’

At Disney World, the plot seems to have barely begun to unfold. At times it’s difficult to fathom its direction. ‘Occasionally I take my kids on canoe trips, down in the south end of the property, where there are still alligators around every turn’, says Eisner. “And I say, ‘Let’s figure out a way to get people down here so they can see things in this natural state.’ Meanwhile, things couldn’t be more civilised on 433-acre plot, where Disney is building the two Michael Graves hotels. Where are Walt’s heirs taking the Disney dream? Since the park is, basically, a reflection of our desires, perhaps we should all watch carefully as it continues to take shape. Is it headed toward turkey burgers and unspoiled scenery - or fast food and the fake thrills of Catastrophe Canyon?

Task 1. Answer the questions on the text

1. Who is Michael Eisner and what has he done for further development of Disney World?

2. Why did he start this project?

3. Why is Disney World so popular with customers?

4. What are the major attractions for tourists?

5. What is the main goal of the management?

6. How do they cater for different age groups?

7. What factors promote success of this tourist destination?

8. In what way do Disney traditions continue?

9. How are employees trained?

10. What does Eisner know about amusement parks?

271. Task 2. Find in the text the most impressive part and retell it (for each student it might be a different one).

272. Task 3. Comment on the following issues.

1. What do you think of the idea to combine a theme park with film- making industry?

2. Why does it appeal to so many tourists?

3. What features of the theme park do you find most entertaining?

4. What attractions would you like to visit? Why?

5. Are there any features that do not seem very good to you? What are they?

6. Why is the park considered good business?

7. What are the perspectives for the park? Give your reasons.