Dream It! Do It! (Disney Editions Deluxe) (3 page)

A few weeks after Walt’s death, I inquired about a writer at the Walt Disney Studio; I had not seen or heard of him since that fateful day. “Oh, he’s still there,” I was told. “He’s forgotten—but not gone!”

In the days “after Walt,” it was not unusual to lose touch with and sight of Disney Studio personnel. Many of them got their assignments directly from Walt himself, thus leaving a huge void in key staffing assignments…and a “Who’s in charge?” question in the production of movies, television shows, and animation. Resolution was slow to come, and the decline in Disney films and television through the 1970s and early 1980s could be traced back to that period of indecision. Ultimately, it led to the conflict between the Walt Disney and Roy O. Disney sides of the Disney family, the ousting of Walt’s son-in-law Ron Miller as president of the company, and the Roy E. Disney-led charge that saw the installation of Michael Eisner as chairman and chief executive officer and Frank Wells as president.

At the time of Walt’s death, the theme park business accounted for 35.58 percent of the company’s bottom line. There were huge decisions to be made, but a path was in place. Pirates of the Caribbean was only months from opening at Disneyland and would achieve a new standard in the amusement industry. Ultimately, it would become the most valuable single property ever created in the theme park business. And right behind Pirates in development was The Haunted Mansion, soon to become the signature ghostly property in real estate history: it helped launch the Halloween celebration phenomenon that has challenged the Christmas season as a theme park attendance driver around the world. (There are now four Haunted Mansions in Disney parks, from California to Florida, and Tokyo to Paris.)

The future growth of the Disney theme park business hung on key questions answered by Roy O. Disney as chairman and CEO: would the company develop the 27,400 acres—twice the size of Manhattan Island—it had acquired in Central Florida for approximately $5 million? And what would become of Walt Disney’s concept for the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow?

Disney had acquired the Florida property through seven dummy corporations with business addresses in Kansas and Delaware. Disney attorney Robert Foster worked with two major Florida real estate organizations to purchase the land. The key was to keep hidden that Disney was buying. Many of the property owners had never even seen their land. They had purchased, sight unseen, ten- and twenty-acre parcels by mail order through promotional offers. Much of the “land” was actually under deep swamp water. But with nearly 28,000 acres, Disney now had “enough land here to hold all the ideas and plans we can possibly imagine,” as Walt had said during that last television appearance.

On November 15, 1965, Governor Haydon Burns announced that Disney was coming to Central Florida.

Asked by a reporter at the press conference, “Will you have a model community…?” Walt gave a hint of the direction of his thinking for what would become Walt Disney World.

We have done a lot of thinking on a model community, and I would like to be a part of building a model community, a city of tomorrow as you might say, because I don’t believe in going out to this extreme blue sky stuff that some of the architects do…I’ve had in mind one community called “Yesterday” and another one, “Tomorrow”… They [visitors] might come one time and they stay in “Tomorrow,” and their friends will say, “But have you stayed in ‘Yesterday’?” And they’ll have to come back.

I was chosen to create the presentation Walt would give at the November 1965 press conference at which Governor Burns would announce that Disney was coming to Central Florida.

It almost got me fired.

As part of the twenty-minute show, I had written a short script that Walt would record, accompanied by appropriate visuals. The overall concept was to glorify Walt, his brand of entertainment, and his entire career. Usually, he would have approved the whole script first and then looked at the entire presentation with a small group. For some reason, my boss, Card Walker, decided to skip that step; instead, he invited two hundred people to a soundstage for a preview of the Florida announcement.

WALT—WITH MICKEY AND THE FIRST OSCAR

WALT
:
That first Oscar was a special award for the creation of Mickey Mouse. The other Academy Awards belong to our group, a tribute to our combined effort.

BEHIND THE SCENES COVERAGE OF THE DISNEY TEAM

Various shots to show actors, writers, musicians, art directors, Imagineers, etc.
at work
on projects at the Studio, at WED, and at Disneyland.

ACTORS—WORKING ON SET WITH DIRECTOR

WALT:
You know, people are always analyzing our approach to entertainment. Some reporters have called it the “special secret” of Disney entertainment.

BEHIND THE SCENES—BUILDING OF SPECIAL EFFECTS

(such as Giant Squid, or Flying Model T)

WALT
:
Well, we like a little mystery in our films—but there’s really no secret about our approach. We keep moving forward—opening up new doors and doing new things—because we’re curious…

SCIENTIFIC-TYPE SHOT—RESEARCH

WALT
:
…and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths. We’re always exploring and experimenting. At WED, we call it “imagineering”—the blending of creative imagination with technical know-how.

EARLY CONSTRUCTION SHOT AT DISNEYLAND—WALT ON SITE WITH ART DIRECTORS

WALT
:
When you’re curious, you find lots of interesting things to do. And one thing it takes to accomplish something is courage. Take Disneyland for example. Almost everyone warned us that Disneyland would be a Hollywood spectacular—a spectacular failure.

WALT AND ART DIRECTORS INSPECTING DISNEYLAND—TODAY

WALT
:
But they were thinking about an amusement park, and we believed in our idea—a family park where parents and children could have fun—together.

DICK VAN DYKE—WORKING ON SET

WALT
:
We have never lost our faith in family entertainment—stories that make people laugh, stories about warm and human things, stories about historic characters and events, stories about animals.

LAUGHING SCENE FROM MARY POPPINS

WALT
:
We’re not out to make a fast dollar with gimmicks. We’re interested in doing things that are fun—in bringing pleasure and especially laughter to people.

WALT—LAUGHING WITH A GROUP OF ACTORS

WALT
:
And probably most important of all, when we consider a new project we really study it—not just the surface idea but everything about it. And when we go into that new project, we believe in it all the way. We have confidence in our ability to do it right. And we work hard to do the best possible job.

WALT—WITH ROY AND OTHER MANAGEMENT

WALT
:
My role? Well, you know I was stumped one day when a little boy asked, “Do you draw Mickey Mouse?” I had to admit I do not draw anymore. “Then you think up all the jokes and ideas?”

WALT—WITH SONGWRITERS—AT PIANO

WALT
:
“No,” I said, “I don’t do that.” Finally, he looked at me and said, “Mr. Disney, just what do you do?” “Well,” I said, “sometimes I think of myself as a little bee.”

WALT—ACTING OUT POINT IN STORYBOARD MEETING

WALT
:
“I go from one area of the Studio to another and gather pollen and sort of stimulate everybody.” I guess that’s the job I do.

In retrospect, I know I succeeded in our objective to glorify Walt. When it was over, Walt sought me out to give me his review: “I didn’t know anyone was writing my obituary!” he said.

As it turned out, the presentation I created helped successfully launch Disney in Florida.

The telephone message was waiting for me when I returned to the Zeta Beta Tau (ZBT) fraternity house at UCLA, after class in mid-May 1955. At first I thought it was a joke played on me by one of my ZBT fraternity brothers; after all, Lennie Kolod’s father was one of the executives at the original Desert Inn in Las Vegas…and who would have a name like “Card” except a Las Vegas dealer?

So I did not return “the card dealer’s call.” But fortunately for me, E. Cardon Walker called again. Card Walker was the head of marketing and publicity for The Walt Disney Company. I had just been elected editor in chief of the UCLA student newspaper,
The Daily Bruin.
Johnny Jackson, the erstwhile executive alumni secretary of the UCLA Alumni Association, who had recently left his UCLA leadership position to join Disney, had recommended me. I had known Johnny Jackson since 1952, when I received one of the prized UCLA Alumni Scholarships. It covered full tuition—a staggering $100 per year! (By 2011, California resident students were paying more than $14,000!)

At the Walt Disney Studio, I met with Card Walker and Jimmy Johnson. Johnson was soon to become the head of Disneyland Records, which was formed in 1956 to create albums of Disney standards by well-known artists, and to develop new material for popular Mouseketeer Annette Funicello (including songs that first brought Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman to the Disney Studio). The good news for me was that both Card and Jimmy Johnson were Bruins. Card began his forty-five-year Disney career in the mail room in 1938, and retired in 1983 as CEO of the company. When World War II began, he enlisted in the Air Force and served on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. His experiences when the carrier was attacked by Japanese kamikaze pilots would later color all of Disney’s early relationships for Tokyo Disneyland, almost killing the deal that became Disney’s first international theme park—an amazing business and cultural success.

My interview in Card Walker’s office in the old Publicity Department building at the Disney Studio lasted only twenty minutes or so—an eternity by Card’s standards, as I would learn during the next thirty years. When the meeting ended, I had my first real job: editor of the
Disneyland News
, which I would soon name, write, and edit. Then I’d lay out the twenty-eight pages and supervise its printing.

My Disney career, which lasted almost fifty-four years, had begun. A month before Disneyland opened its gates, I had become among the first one hundred “cast members” on the Magic Kingdom’s payroll.

* * * * * * * * * *

I was twelve years old in June 1946 when my parents moved our family from Highland Park, New Jersey, to Long Beach, California. My father, Leon George Sklar, was a highly respected teacher with fifteen years’ experience at New Brunswick High School in New Jersey. It was not easy professionally for my dad to move; California schools gave him teaching credit for only three of those fifteen years. Despite having spent nearly thirty-five years in classroom and administrative positions as teacher, vice principal, and principal in the Los Angeles schools, he retired in 1964 with only twenty-three years of tenure.

My mother, Lilyn Fuchs Sklar, had worked at Johnson & Johnson in New Brunswick until I was born on February 6, 1934. She became a stay-at-home mom thereafter. They welcomed my brother, Bob, on December 3, 1936. (More about Bob later. He became a highly respected teaching historian as professor of Cinema Studies at New York University.) In Long Beach, my parents rented and later purchased one of those little houses “à la Lakewood,” built just after the Second World War to attract the hordes of veterans who had passed through the Golden State while in military service. I still remember the sight of the first palms I ever saw, as my aunt and uncle, Frances and Bernie Dolin, drove us along Beverly Boulevard from Union Station to their Hollywood apartment, a block or two from the corner of Beverly and La Brea Avenue. (The Hollywood Freeway, from downtown Los Angeles to Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley, wouldn’t be built for another four years.)

My father didn’t have a job when we arrived in California. He was soon offered a position in the Long Beach school system, and it nearly dissolved our family. The job was on Catalina Island, and my mother refused to live there. Finally, just before school began in September, the Long Beach schools relented, and my dad began his California education career at Long Beach Jordan High School.

He inherited a pretty wild bunch of students at Jordan High, and by the end of our first year in California, he moved to Phineas Banning High School in Wilmington, an urban sprawl community outside Los Angeles. My father became one of the most respected members of the community, and his career in education flourished, earning him a promotion to principal at the school from which he eventually retired—Madison Junior High in North Hollywood, at the edge of the San Fernando Valley.

Years later, after my dad had passed away from a heart attack soon after retiring, my mom told Bob and me some of the stories about the school environment in the 1940s and 1950s at Banning High and Wilmington Junior High. Reluctantly, Dad would tell Mom about the guns and knives he took away from students, and the clothes—even underwear—he bought for kids whose parents could not afford them. In fact, my dad was so committed to serving that community of immigrants that he returned to Banning at night to teach English to Hispanics and Asians striving to become American citizens. Although I have little personal memory of this, I’m sure it established the example that informed my own commitment to community service when I became a parent and, among other community positions, was elected president of the school board in Anaheim, president of the Orange County School Boards Association, and served on Anaheim’s parks and recreation and cultural arts commissions. For me, that tradition continues to this very day: my wife, Leah, and I are cofounders of Ryman Arts, a program for talented young high school artists that has served more than four thousand students in Southern California during the twenty-two years since it was created.

One day in the late 1980s, when Disney was negotiating with the city of Long Beach to build a park in the harbor area, I was approached following a meeting by Jim Hankla, then city manager of Long Beach. “The reason I’m here today in this position,” Jim said, “is because of Leon Sklar. I was not a good kid at Banning High…in with the wrong crowd, not a good student. But somehow I got into your father’s speech and debate class, and it changed my life—motivated me to go on to college and do something positive with my life. I’ll always thank your father; I wouldn’t be here without his encouragement.”

My father’s high school experience also rubbed off on my brother and me. In the fall of 1951, Dad became advisor to the Banning High student newspaper. At the same time, Bob—a ninth grader—became editor of his junior high newspaper, and I was named editor of the Long Beach Poly
High Life
. It was a portent of things to come; two years after I was elected editor of the UCLA
Daily Bruin
, Bob was chosen chairman of the board of the
Daily Princetonian
at Princeton University.

But it was my mother who really and truly propelled the family’s writing careers. In 1946, I had entered a college football pool and somehow picked nine out of ten games correctly. I won a cash prize, which became the Sklar family’s first television set. I think my mom decided then and there that if a twelve-year-old could do it, imagine what she and my dad could do in the contest world! In those days, contesting was actually skill-based, versus today’s blind drawings. Most contests required you to write twenty-five words or less about something. My mom and dad became so proficient at the contest game that we learned never to be surprised when the U.S. mail delivered another prize. And these were not just trinkets: Mom and Dad won a car, cash, vacation trips, furniture, household appliances, and television sets.

Meanwhile, Bob and I were beginning to build on the foundations in education, values, and ethics our parents had created. I headed off to UCLA on that $100 Alumni Scholarship in 1952. Two years later, my brother received full tuition scholarship offers to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton valued at $1,300 each in 1954. Suffice it to say that on a teacher’s salary in 1954, Dad and Mom could only have dreamed of sending Bob to Princeton without that scholarship.

As it was, I had to earn a good part of my UCLA education. The summer after high school graduation, I was fortunate to be hired at Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach, bucking rivets being installed on (and inside) the wings of C-124 military transports. (Riveting was a manual operation in 1952.) Another summer I scooped ice cream at a 19-cent hamburger drive-in; one evening between 5:00 and 7:00
P.M.
I made seven hundred malts! During the Christmas season, I caught on as a seasonal temp delivering packages for the U.S. Postal Service, only because Dad let me use the family car (you had to have your own wheels to get the job). And during my last year at UCLA, I worked for a West Coast version of
Advertising Age
, a successful weekly called
Media Agencies Clients
(MAC Publications) in Los Angeles. I became assistant editor before resigning to rejoin the Disneyland staff in September 1956.

Today scholarships are still based on a variety of elements—academics, extracurricular activities, community service, athletics, need, and a live competition with other nominees. I’m not sure, after observing the UCLA Alumni Scholarship selection process as an Alumni Association board member, how my credentials of 1952 would hold up. Editing the school newspaper and captaining the high school tennis team, as I did, would certainly help. But as a loyal Bruin, when I was asked in May 2010 to speak at the luncheon where the UCLA Alumni Scholarships were announced, I couldn’t help but poke fun at our crosstown rivals by reciting the questions “purported to be asked” on the “Application for Admission” to the University of Southern California:

• “Have you read a book this year? If yes, why?”
  
• “Name five of the United States (for instance, California, New York, Texas, etc.)”
  
• “Are you a football player? If yes, skip to the last line of this application.”
  

To all my Trojan friends, “Just kidding!” (At least, that’s what I told the Bruin Alumni Scholarship recipients.)