The Animated Man (52 page)

Disney summoned Ryman—a highly facile illustrator who had a particular gift for romantic, atmospheric drawings of unusual places—over the weekend of September 23–24, 1953, to collaborate with him on an aerial rendering of the proposed park. This very large drawing—the image area is 39 inches high by 67 ½ inches wide on a slightly larger sheet—is one of the most celebrated relics from Disneyland's early history. It shows a park divided into various “lands” that open off a hub—Frontier Country, Fantasy Land, Lilliputian Land, True-Life Adventureland, and so on, all dominated by a castle at the end of Main Street. Visitors would enter through one entrance, under an elevated railway station; the tracks would encircle the park.
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A “pitch kit,” prepared around the same time (it bears a 1953 copyright date), described Disneyland's “lands” in considerable detail, and the park itself in fulsome language:

The idea of Disneyland is a simple one. It will be a place for people to find happiness and knowledge.

It will be a place for parents and children to share pleasant times in one another's company, a place for teacher and pupils to discover greater ways of understanding and education. Here the older generation can recapture the nostalgia of days gone by, and the younger generation can savor the challenge of the future. Here will be the wonders of Nature and Man for all to see and understand.
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It is not clear what kinds of meetings Roy Disney held during his September trip to New York, but, in any case, there were no immediate takers for a Disney TV show with park attached. NBC and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) were the dominant networks, with far more affiliates than the also-rans, the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) and DuMont. Neither of the two big networks was interested.

In November 1953, Roy was back in New York. He said in
Motion Picture Daily
's paraphrase that “work is progressing on a format for a Disney television show to emanate from the studio. When the format is completed . . . network affiliation will be sought.” As far as the Disneys were concerned, Roy said, TV would be what
Motion Picture Daily
called “an exploitation
medium for theatrical pictures.” The article made no mention of the Disneyland park.
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In the official Disney version, a frustrated Roy Disney, fed up with NBC's stalling, called ABC's president, Leonard Goldenson, and ABC leaped at the chance to strike a deal.
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Goldenson's version differed. When the Disneys called him in late 1953, he wrote in his autobiography,

ABC was really [Walt] Disney's last hope. He'd gone to the banks, and when he tried to explain what he wanted to build, they just couldn't grasp the concept. They kept thinking of a place like Coney Island. Very risky. They turned him down. . . .

I offered to take the Disneys in to see our board. But as a condition, I said, “I want a one-hour program, every week.” . . . At first my board opposed the deal. After all, they said, CBS had turned Disney down. NBC had turned him down. And the banks had said no. More to the point, where were
we
going to get financing? . . . 

Then I hammered out a deal with the Disneys. We would put in $500,000 and guarantee [bank] loans [of $4.5 million]. In exchange we took 35 percent [actually 34.48 percent] of Disneyland, and all profits from the food concessions for ten years. I knew that could be a gold mine.

And of course there was programming. That's what I really wanted from them. We agreed to a seven-year deal, with an option for an eighth, at $5 million a year. At $40 million, it was then the biggest programming package in history.
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ABC and Disney were actually a good fit. ABC had been frozen in place for two years, until early in 1953, while the federal government scrutinized its merger with United Paramount Theaters. It desperately needed not just high-profile programming like a Disney show, but programming of any kind. Moreover, Goldenson was an early advocate of filmed programs—the Disney show would be one—at a time when most TV shows were “live.” The Disneys needed a network that would put their show on the air, with minimal interference, and invest some money in the park, and ABC had every incentive to do both.

Even so, the negotiations evidently took several months. Finally, in March 1954, the Disneys signed a contract with ABC for an hour-long weekly series, starting in October. On April 5, immediately after both boards had approved the deal, Roy Disney said the TV show would be “made to serve our motion picture program.”
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Walt Disney spoke in similar terms near the end of his first season in TV: “We went into it in the belief it would help our [theatrical film] business.”
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Unquestionably, though, it was the opportunity
the contract provided to build and promote his park that was most important to him.

The show, like the park, would be called
Disneyland
, and its four “lands” would mimic the four—Fantasyland, Frontierland, Tomorrowland, and Adventureland—into which the Anaheim park would be divided. “I had a contract that said I had complete say of what we produced,” Disney said in 1956. “So I just sort of insisted that my Disneyland park be a part of my television.”

In addition to the corporation that eventually became WED Enterprises, Disney had formed another corporation, Disneyland, by August 1953.
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He was the owner of “substantially all” of the stock of Disneyland, Incorporated, and he transferred from WED to the new company what a corporate document called “the plans, models and other properties for the Park.”
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Disney probably set up the Disneyland corporation in anticipation of what happened in May 1954. It was then that it became a real company, with Disney as president and board chairman. His board was made up mostly of representatives of ABC and his other principal financial backer, Western Printing and Lithographing Company, which had been for more than twenty years the publisher of Disney books, comic books, puzzles, and games. Besides Disney himself, the only member of the board from Walt Disney Productions was Paul Pease, who had been the studio's treasurer since 1947.
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As ABC had, Walt Disney Productions bought 34.48 percent of Disneyland's stock. Western Printing bought 13.79 percent, and Disney himself, personally and through WED, retained ownership of 17.25 percent. The four owners invested almost $1.5 million in the park, providing leverage for the bank loans that would pay for most of its construction. So the deal with ABC did require a dilution of the control Disney valued so highly. He remained completely in control of WED Enterprises, which planned and designed the park under a July 1, 1954, agreement with Disneyland, Incorporated, but ownership of the park itself was divided.

As construction approached, Disney sent teams of his employees to inspect other attractions that might hold lessons of some kind for the Disney park. Such visits had been taking place at least since the previous fall, when Price explored sites in the United States as well as Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. “The highlight of our feasibility analysis,” Price wrote many years later, “took place at the amusement park annual convention and trade show in November 1953 at the Sherman Hotel in Chicago. There we cornered four of the nation's leading amusement park owners and fed them Chivas Regal and caviar in our suite. Dick Irvine, Nat Winecoff, Bill Cottrell and I presented the concept
of the park in a two-hour evening session,” with Ryman's bird's-eye drawing as a visual aid. “The reaction was unanimous:
It would not work
.”
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Disney rejected the doubters' arguments—for example, that he was planning to spend too much on aspects of the park, like landscaping, that would produce no revenue—but not the doubters; he hired two of them as consultants. And as Randy Bright has written in his authorized history of the park, Disney took advice that he thought made sense: “One constructive point that Disney did pick up quickly from nearly all of the amusement park operators was the need for efficient high-capacity operations. It was very apparent that a few seconds lost in loading each ride vehicle translated into major attendance loss at the end of each day.”
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Disney had an advantage in that his people were visiting more attractions, and scrutinizing them more carefully, than any operator, preoccupied with his own business, could hope to do. Harper Goff remembered that during the summer and fall of 1954, “Walt sent us all around to every amusement park in the country. We would take pictures and come back and tell Walt all about what they were doing. One of the main things we tried to get was their ‘gate' . . . how much they charged, how many people came through, and how much they made. Also what kinds of operating problems they had, such as dishonesty.”
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Borrowings from existing attractions were inevitable, given the tight schedule. Much of Disneyland's novelty would have to arise from how cleverly it combined such elements in a way that made sense for a park opening in 1955.

Roger Broggie was in charge of making a direct connection between Disney's backyard railroad and his new and much larger layout: “In 1954, when they said, ‘we're now going to do Disneyland,' I pulled out all the drawings on this
Lilly Belle
and there were a very few modifications required to blow it up to a three-foot gauge,” the standard for a narrow-gauge railroad. “All we actually did was take those drawings of the
Lilly Belle
and blow it up five times and it came out 36-inch gauge.”
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After visiting Palm Springs for a decade or more, Disney had built a vacation home there in 1950, at a private development called Smoke Tree Ranch. It was to pay for two locomotives and the track surrounding the park that Disney sold his home at Smoke Tree in 1954. The railroad was the property not of Disneyland, Incorporated, but of his personal company, WED Enterprises.
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The steam railroad would remain Walt Disney's property, through WED, even after he transferred his minority ownership in the park to Walt Disney Productions.

In 1950, when Disney built his Carolwood Pacific layout at Holmby Hills, “I got the power company and paid them a good price to remove or build a new power line behind me,” he said, so that the lines would not interfere with the illusion he wanted to create. He linked that early effort to exclude the outside world to what he planned for Disneyland, where he would exclude the outside world with a berm. “It's like setting atmosphere,” he said. “You're doing a mood. You don't see the city out there.”

On-site construction began in July 1954, about a year before the opening date to which Disney had committed himself in his contract with ABC. Meanwhile, Disney was scrambling to fulfill another part of that contract, to deliver a weekly TV show. “When I went into television,” Disney said in 1961, “it was a sudden thing, and I had to improvise. . . . I found myself with a contract and I had to start to deliver in October and it was April.”

When the show was being put together, Disney said in 1956, “I know I was dying for somebody to suggest my doing the emceeing.” That he would be the host seems never to have been seriously in doubt. He was not a neophyte; besides his frequent appearances on radio throughout the 1930s and 1940s, he had appeared on a few television shows in addition to his own two Christmas specials.

A crucial decision was that Disney would speak directly to his audience. As he said, the Christmas shows “were impersonal. We let the audience look in on something we were doing but we didn't talk to the audience. . . . I was talking with some friends in the advertising business and they . . . said, ‘Look, Walt, you talk to them.' Television is a very intimate thing. So they said, ‘Talk to them.' ” He had done that on some radio broadcasts, but not on TV. For that reason, perhaps, Disney said he was “scared to death” when he was filmed for the first
Disneyland
shows; but he soon came to enjoy being his show's host. He acknowledged that “I have a nasal twang. It's a Missouri twang. And my diction—I get sloppy. . . . I say, ‘Now we're gonna . . .' ” His diction was in fact a little peculiar; he tended to drawl, stretching out words in no discernible pattern. But in his early appearances he never seemed stiff or nervous or tense. When he addressed his audience, it was as a relaxed, low-key camera subject who was especially suited to television, that “very intimate thing.”

The first
Disneyland
show, on October 27, 1954, opened with a studio tour, the sort of amiable behind-the-scenes humbug that purports to show people at work when the only work they are doing is performing for the camera. The real business of the premiere was to cement the identification between the show and the park to come. Disney spoke of the park in the grandest terms, as “a fair, an amusement park, an exhibition, a city from the Arabian
Nights, a metropolis of the future—a place of hopes and dreams, fact and fancy, all in one.” He said that in the future the TV show itself would originate “from this Disneyland”—which never happened—“but this year we want you to see and share with us the experience of building this dream into a reality. “

Here, more successfully than ever before, Disney was transforming the promotion of his products into something else, an ostensible sharing of what would ordinarily be secret. He made it seem as if he were taking his viewers into his confidence. There was no sense in what he said that by revealing how his park was built—or his films made—he might prevent anyone from sharing the illusion, the “dream” or the “magic.” Instead, what he showed of the park's construction would itself become part of the “magic.”

Disneyland
broadcast only two additional progress reports on the construction of the park before it opened in July 1955, but there were, besides, two shows promoting
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
(which was released in December 1954), two promoting the
True-Life Adventures
, and one promoting
Lady and the Tramp
, an animated feature scheduled for release in the summer of 1955. In most cases, the full hour was not devoted to such previews—but each week's broadcast also ended with a trailer promoting a current Disney theatrical release.