Read 21 Great Leaders: Learn Their Lessons, Improve Your Influence Online
Authors: Pat Williams
Walt and Ub created a popular cartoon character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, only to have the character stolen from them by an unscrupulous distributor, Charles Mintz. (Nearly eighty years later, the Walt Disney Company would trade ABC sports commentator Al Michaels to NBC for the rights to Oswald.) After losing Oswald, Walt and Ub created a new character, Mickey Mouse, inspired by a mouse Walt had tamed at his Kansas City studio.
Other Disney characters followed—the Three Little Pigs, Donald Duck, Goofy, and Mickey’s pal Pluto. Walt could have amassed a fortune by churning out an endless supply of animated short features. But a visionary is not content to rest on his or her leadership laurels.
So Walt envisioned a project that was completely unprecedented—a full-length animated feature based on the Brothers Grimm tale
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
. Skeptics dubbed the project “Disney’s Folly.” Walt’s wife, Lillian, and brother Roy tried to dissuade him, but Walt’s vision possessed him and wouldn’t let go. He hired an instructor from the Chouinard Art Institute to teach his animators new techniques for drawing animals and human beings in a realistic way. His technicians invented new special-effects processes.
Snow White
began production in 1934—and by mid-1937, the studio was out of money. Walt had mortgaged the studio and his own home. He had nothing left to hock. The scheduled release was a few months away. If Walt couldn’t borrow more money and complete the film, the Disney Studio was doomed.
At Roy’s insistence, Walt screened a rough cut for Joe Rosenberg, head of studio loans at the Bank of America. They met in the screening room of Walt’s Hyperion Avenue studio. The film contained patches of crude pencil animation; some sequences were spliced out of order. After an hour, the film came to an abrupt halt—the ending hadn’t been drawn yet. Walt acted out the ending—then he waited for Rosenberg’s answer.
“Well, Walt,” Rosenberg said, rising, “thank you for showing this to me.”
Walt searched Rosenberg’s eyes for a positive sign. He found none. He accompanied the banker to the parking lot. Rosenberg got into his car then leaned out the window and said, “Walt, that picture is going to make a hatful of money. You’ll get your loan.” Those words saved the Disney Studio.
As Joe Rosenberg predicted,
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
made a hatful of money—enough for Walt to build a huge new studio complex in Burbank. More full-length features followed—
Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, Bambi
—creating a pantheon of Disney characters, generating enormous wealth through merchandising, theme parks, and television.
Walt’s vision of Disneyland goes back to his boyhood and a place called Electric Park—an amusement park at 46th Street and the Paseo in Kansas City. Walt and his younger sister, Ruth, often rode the trolley to Electric Park. Like Disneyland, the place featured thrill rides, band concerts, shooting galleries, penny arcades, ice-cream shops, boat rides, nightly fireworks, and a scenic railroad around the park. Walt treasured the memory of sitting beside the train engineer, pulling the cord that blew the steam whistle. Electric Park opened in 1907, at the dawn of the electric age, and featured a hundred thousand electric lightbulbs that transformed it into a fairyland at night.
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By the time Walt was in his early thirties, he envisioned building an even greater park of his own. In a news story before Disneyland’s grand opening, the
Long Beach Independent-Press-Telegram
(Friday, July 15, 1955) reported, “Plans for this wonderland first began to go on paper as far back as 1932 when Walt’s magnificent dream began to take form. In cleaning files at the Burbank studio recently, original Disneyland sketches, bearing the 1932 date, were found.”
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The dream of Disneyland grew stronger after he became a father. Walt recalled:
Well, it came about when my daughters were very young and Saturday was always Daddy’s day with the two daughters…. I’d take them to the merry-go-round…and as I’d sit while they rode the merry-go-round and did all these things—sit on a bench, you know, eating peanuts—I felt that there should be something built, some kind of amusement enterprise built, where the parents and the children could have fun together. So that’s how Disneyland started.
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In the summer of 1948, Walt took a train ride that put his Disneyland vision on a fast track. Accompanied by animator and fellow railroad enthusiast, Ward Kimball, Walt boarded the Santa Fe Super Chief, bound for the Railroad Fair in Chicago. There Walt and Ward toured vintage railroad locomotives and cars and talked to old-time railroad men. Each night, the fair put on a dazzling fireworks display over Lake Michigan. Walt was especially impressed by a replica of President Lincoln’s funeral train. Lincoln was one of Walt’s heroes, and boarding the black-draped train as a band played “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” moved him to tears.
After the fair, Walt and Ward took the Wabash Railway to Dearborn, Michigan, where they visited the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village. Exhibits included historical buildings that Ford had moved to Dearborn from their original sites, including Noah Webster’s Connecticut home, the Ohio bicycle shop where the Wright Brothers build the first airplane, and some of the original structures of Thomas Edison’s New Jersey laboratory complex. An 1870s steam train circled the grounds.
Walt returned to California with a vision for a project he called Mickey Mouse Park, which he planned to build adjacent to his Burbank studio. Walt’s brother Roy dismissed the plan as a “screwball idea.” It would be the height of irresponsibility, he said, to risk studio money on Mickey Mouse Park. Walt agreed he wouldn’t spend studio money on the park. Out of his own pocket (and without Roy’s knowledge), Walt paid Disney artists to draw up plans for his Disney-themed amusement park.
It didn’t take long for his vision to outgrow the little patch of land across Riverside Drive. Walt no longer dreamed of a park. He dreamed of a kingdom—a magic kingdom. And circling Walt’s enchanted domain like a fire-breathing dragon was a steam-powered train.
Harriet Burns was a set painter for Disney’s
Mickey Mouse Club
when Walt recruited her to design attractions for his theme park. She told me, “Walt was a simple, honest, basic person with midwestern values. An ethical man. Nothing he did was about money. It was always about the project.” It’s true. Walt had almost no interest in money, except as a means to finance his expensive visions. Money was his brother Roy’s problem. The only currency Walt cared about was imagination. “I plow back everything I make into the company,” he said. “I look at it this way: If I can’t use the money now, if I can’t have fun with it, I’m not going to be able to take it with me.”
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Walt always dreamed beyond his means. Disneyland was a dream so vast, so expensive, that it was absurd to think he could ever afford it. Yet it exists—because Walt dreamed it.
There was a mule-headed obstinacy to Walt’s visionary genius. He once said, “If management likes my projects, I seriously question proceeding. If they disdain them totally, I proceed immediately.”
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Walt believed that if Roy and the board of directors approved his ideas, his vision wasn’t big enough. He was satisfied only when his dreams drew active opposition.
In 1952, Roy earmarked $10,000 of studio money for the Disneyland project. It was a tiny sum, but it signaled a huge shift in Roy’s thinking. Walt knew that once Roy was in for ten grand, he was in to stay.
Walt created a separate company, WED Enterprises, to design his park, and he recruited top Disney artists and technologists to lend their imagination to the project. Walt invented a concept now called “cross-functional” or “interdisciplinary” teams, drawing people from different fields of expertise to work toward a common goal. His handpicked teams of artists, sculptors, engineers, and machinists combined their creativity to build structures, transportation systems, and thrill rides that had never existed before. Because his WED Enterprises innovators combined functions of imagination and engineering, Walt called them Imagineers.
Harriet Burns told me, “I worked in the art department at WED. Walt would sit on a stool and relax with us because we were so informal. He was always positive, always encouraging us, always contributing his own ideas.”
Construction costs for Disneyland far exceeded Walt’s original projections. Roy would have to come up with ever more creative sources of funding before the park could open, so he met with executives at all three networks to pitch a
Disneyland
TV show. He came away with an offer from ABC worth $5 million. In exchange, ABC got a sure-fire hit TV show and one-third ownership of Disneyland. The
Disneyland
series convinced powerful financiers that the project was on a firm footing. Soon investors were lining up to lend Walt money.
Disney quietly bought up a patchwork of orange groves in Anaheim, California. As workers began removing trees and excavating land, Walt took his close friend, TV personality Art Linkletter, to the Anaheim site. Linkletter told me about that visit.
“We drove for miles,” he said. “When we got there, I couldn’t believe what I saw. There was nothing but orange groves and bare dirt. We were miles from any big population center. I thought Walt had lost his mind. Why would anyone want to put a bunch of roller coasters out in the middle of those orange groves? Why would anyone drive for miles to get there?”
Walt took Art on a tour, describing all the lands of his Magic Kingdom: Main Street U.S.A., Adventureland, Frontierland, Fantasyland, and Tomorrowland. “You’ve got to get in on this, Art,” he said. “Buy up all the property around the park, and just hold it for a few years. Once Disneyland is up and running, you’ll be able to sell it to developers for a hundred times what you paid for it.”
“I just couldn’t see what Walt saw,” Art Linkletter told me. “I should have listened to him, but I couldn’t grasp his vision. Years later I did a calculation. Every step I took that day was worth about $3 million—or would have been had I taken Walt’s advice, I would have been a billionaire. I let it slip through my fingers.”
Walt wanted Art to buy property around Disneyland to control the environment around Disneyland. Walt wanted clean, family-friendly surroundings—not the cluster of seedy motels and miniature golf parks that eventually sprang up. As former Disneyland President Jack Lindquist put it, the park was surrounded by “ugly urban sprawl at its worst.”
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On Sunday, July 17, 1955, Walt hosted a live TV preview of Disneyland. The hour-long TV special was cohosted by Walt’s friends Art Linkletter, Robert Cummings, and Ronald Reagan. It was the fulfillment of a vision Walt first glimpsed when he beheld the wonders of Electric Park.
At first, Walt said he’d never build another park. But by the late 1950s, he was dreaming even bigger dreams—a Community of Tomorrow in Florida. In 1963, after commissioning numerous studies, Walt was leaning toward Orlando, a sleepy little citrus town in central Florida, as the site of his new project. In November 1963, Walt and his associates flew cross-country in a private plane and viewed the property from the air. “This is it,” he said.
Within two years, the land acquisition for the Florida project was nearly complete. The Disney Company had assembled nearly 27,400 acres of Florida real estate—about 43 square miles (for comparison, Manhattan is less than 34 square miles). In October 1965, the Orlando
Sentinel
published speculation that the mysterious Orlando land buyer was Disney. The price of Central Florida real estate skyrocketed—but by that time, the land acquisition was 99 percent complete.
I have studied the plans for Walt’s grandest vision. He envisioned nothing less than a futuristic planned community in which thousands of people would live, work, play, and dream. His gift to the human race would be a clean, healthy, utopian community—an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT. Science-fiction writers have envisioned such a future, but only Walt Disney dared to build it.
Walt’s City of Tomorrow would have consisted of fifty well-planned acres, a climate-controlled city beneath a glass dome, with walkways laid out in concentric circles and monorails circling the city. The gentle whoosh of Disney’s mass-transit system would eliminate noise and smog. The city hub would feature gleaming high-rise office buildings and entertainment complexes, and one of the outer circles would consist of tree-lined neighborhoods with schools, churches, shopping districts, and parks.
Corporations would test new products in Walt’s City of Tomorrow, and their sponsorship would underwrite the city’s expenses. Walt devoured every book on urban planning he could find, becoming a self-taught expert on everything from infrastructure to emergency services.
Ralph Kent of the Disney Design Group told me, “Walt Disney was a humanitarian and a utopian. That’s what his dream of EPCOT was all about. He was always thinking about how to make life better for the people of the world. He was promoting peace, understanding, and human progress. We’d tell him, ‘No one will be interested in that stuff.’ Walt said, ‘I’ll teach by entertaining people.’ And he did.”
In October 1966, Walt made a promotional film in which he laid out his vision for EPCOT, the City of Tomorrow. In that film, Walt introduced a scale model of his utopian community. He spoke excitedly about his vision for his signature achievement—but just two months after he made that film, Walt Disney died.
After his death, Walt’s successors scaled back his dream. His City of Tomorrow was downsized to a theme park. The EPCOT Park opened in 1982; it was a futuristic place, dominated by a 180-foot-tall geodesic dome called Spaceship Earth. It was impressive—but it was not Walt’s EPCOT. Without Walt at the helm, his successors didn’t know how to build Walt’s dream, so they settled for a theme park.