The Animated Man (63 page)

What we must have, then, is a completely new approach to training in the arts—an entirely new educational concept which will properly prepare artists and give them the vital tools so necessary for working in, and drawing from, every field of creativity and performance.
¹⁰⁵

On August 16, 1966, Disney called James Algar, once a cartoon director but now one of his live-action producers. He wanted to talk about a promotional film for CalArts, and about his doing an introduction for it like those he did for the weekly TV show. His ideas, as Algar summarized them, again emphasized the arts' practical applications:

Everyone says do we need artists? Let's make the point that we need
all
the arts; in medical research, in space travel, we need artists to help
visualize
things. Notice how much of the moon story in the papers is visualized through artist's renderings. . . .

Walt would tell the need for artists, how important they are, the CalArts theory of education, his own experience at the studio in working with all the arts, never dreamed at the start he'd be this involved with all the arts; problems today in this complex world of communication, educational TV, world problems of illiteracy—pictures communicate instantaneously—the CalArts approach to professional competency, the training of teachers, professionals as practitioners, a College of Arts for tomorrow, heart of it talent.
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Buzz Price, from the beginning a member of CalArts' board, wrote of a Disney “whose personal art preference was representational and whose social values were essentially conservative, launching a complex inter-art school the stated intent of which was to be out-front in innovation, combination and presentation of art forms.”
¹⁰⁷
On the evidence of Disney's own words, though, he envisioned not such a school but rather one that could produce people like those who had been so useful to him at Disneyland; that is, exceptionally versatile and flexible commercial artists whose skills extended across a range of disciplines.

As for the school itself, ideas resembling Disney's were in the air in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when performing-arts complexes like Lincoln Center in New York (with its Juilliard School component) and the Kennedy Center in Washington were being planned and built. Even earlier, the composer Richard Rodgers had pressed for an arts complex in New York.
¹⁰⁸
It was a given, in the demented city planning of the period, that it was desirable to segregate such functions into their own precinct, just as it was desirable to separate and isolate all the other strands of urban life—residential, commercial, governmental, and so on. It made sense, on such terms, not just to combine two schools that had very little in common but to seal them off from their surroundings.

In 1965, Walt Disney Productions—and presumably Walt Disney himself—took the logical next step and decided to take the school out of the city altogether and build it on a thirty-eight-acre tract cut out of the studio's 728-acre Golden Oaks Ranch at Newhall, northwest of Los Angeles. That would, at the least, be simpler than trying to raise the millions of dollars that would be required to build near the Hollywood Bowl.
¹⁰⁹
Whether students would really benefit from such isolation, or from enforced exposure to one another's disciplines, was another matter, but Walt Disney took such gains for granted. In his planning for the school there were echoes of his planning in the late 1930s for the Burbank studio, a facility that he also expected to be an ideal environment for artists of various kinds.

The same impulse—to plan comprehensively and impose order—was at work in the mid-1960s as Disney approached the development of a much larger project.

*
To set Disneyland apart from the tawdry amusement parks of the past, the official Disney position has always been that it is a “theme park,” and that its rides are “attractions.” Walt Disney often ignored such distinctions.

Even before Disneyland opened, Walt Disney identified Florida as the only possible location for a second version of the park. “You have to have a year-round business to make money from such a large investment,” he told Bob Thomas in the spring of 1955. “The only other place it would be possible is Florida. In the East, you could get only three or four profitable months.”
¹

Late in 1959, Disney's WED Enterprises and Buzz Price's Economic Research Associates prepared what Price later described as “an economic and physical master plan for the City of Tomorrow at Palm Beach, Florida, on 12,000 acres owned by John McArthur, the billionaire insurance man.” This would have been, Price said, “a four-way deal” involving Disney, RCA, NBC, and McArthur. “We put our effort together with WED in determining what kind of an interrelated park and city could be developed on that site. Walt wanted to emphasize future development in urban living. . . . The park would take up some 400 acres. A town base of 70,000 people would take up the rest.” The deal fell through. “At the presentation, no one seemed to rally to what Walt was talking about.”
²

Price's report, titled “The Economic Setting of the City of Tomorrow” and dated December 14, 1959, suggests that Disney actually had narrower concerns at that time (and it puts the total acreage involved at five thousand to six thousand, not twelve thousand). One question the report addressed was whether “the local and tourist populations in Florida will provide adequate support for a major park development.” Another was whether a new Florida park would cannibalize Disneyland's business. (Both answers favored a Florida park.) As far as the City of Tomorrow was concerned, the idea was to incorporate “advanced
concepts of architectural design and technological improvement . . . in all phases of the town development,” but there is no hint that Disney would have been deeply involved in that aspect of the development.
³

The City of Tomorrow fizzled, evidently when RCA backed away, but Walt Disney's interest in such a city had been piqued. With Disneyland a huge success and an eastern version clearly practicable, Disney was now contemplating Florida as the setting not just for a second theme park, but also for a sort of large-scale, working version of Tomorrowland. In particular, his success in manipulating people's movements at Disneyland may have encouraged him to believe that he could do the same thing in an entire city. Although cars and the adjacent freeway were both critical to the success of Disneyland, the park itself, as Karal Ann Marling has pointed out, “offered a utopian alternative to the ongoing erosion of city centers by cars.”
⁴
Public transportation of a sort—the monorail, for instance, and the PeopleMover, small, constantly moving vehicles propelled by the electricity in their track—was the rule at Disneyland.

Disney asked Price to study Florida locations in 1961 and then again in late 1963, when Disney's work for the New York World's Fair was almost done. The second study, Price wrote, identified “Orlando, centrally located, [as] the point of maximum access to the southerly flows of Florida tourism from both the east and west shores of the state.”
⁵
In 1964, Walt Disney Productions began quietly assembling thousands of acres southwest of Orlando. The eventual total was around twenty-seven thousand acres, a much larger tract than would be needed for a theme park alone.

In 1965, his interest in a city of the future quickening, Disney flew east for a week to meet with the developer James Rouse and tour Reston, Virginia, and Columbia, Maryland, two “new towns” that Rouse had developed.
⁶
Disney had been praised by Rouse, who famously said at a 1963 urban design conference at Harvard University that “the greatest piece of urban design in the United States today is Disneyland. If you think about Disneyland and think about its performance in relation to its purpose; its meaning to people—more than that, its meaning to the process of development—you will find it the outstanding piece of urban design in the United States.”
⁷

By November 15, 1965, when Walt and Roy Disney and Governor Haydon Burns announced plans for the Florida development, Walt Disney was thinking in more specific terms about his City of Tomorrow. He was deliberately vague, though, when asked at that press conference whether such a city was in his plans. “Well,” he said, “that's been the thing that's been going around in our mind for a long time and there's a lot of industrial concerns
that would like to work on a project of that sort. The only problem with anything of tomorrow is at the pace we're going right now, tomorrow would catch up to us before we got it built.”

In the same news conference, Disney said that his new amusement park would not be “another Disneyland” but rather “the equivalent of Disneyland. . . . This concept here will have to be something that is unique, and so that there is a distinction between Disneyland in California and whatever Disney does—and notice I didn't say Disneyland in Florida—whatever Disney does in Florida.”
⁸

In fact, a second Disneyland—or something immediately recognizable as Disneyland's very close kin—was essential to Disney's plans for his city of the future. “Walt was so smart,” said Richard Nunis, by then one of Disney's theme-park executives, of the planning for what was to be called Disney World. “He said, ‘We've got to put Disneyland, which everybody will know, at the very upper end of the property because that will be the weenie”—the term Disney liked to use for conspicuous landmarks that drew people toward them, like Sleeping Beauty Castle at the end of Disneyland's Main Street. “Then whatever we build after that, the public will have to drive by to get to the Park.”
⁹

The scale of the Florida development, and the nature of its city-of-the-future component in particular, made it highly desirable that Walt Disney Productions have quasi-governmental powers over the property, so that local governments could not throw up roadblocks. The Disneys thus had to bargain with state government to a much greater extent than they had in California. By the middle 1960s, the brothers had settled into a good cop—bad cop routine both within the studio—where Roy was the affable, sympathetic one—and outside it, where Roy assumed a more forbidding role. Once the Florida project was public knowledge, they played those parts in dealings with Florida officials. As
Fortune
reported in the spring of 1966:

A Florida state delegation sent to California to talk to the Disneys came back awed by the brothers as negotiators. “I think those two men offer as effective a combination as I've ever worked with,” says one member of the delegation. “It is more effective than any I have seen in Wall Street, Miami, anywhere. Roy Disney is the hard shell, the tightfisted conservative businessman, the financier. He'll keep asking when are you going to be specific. And Walt is the best politician I ever saw. The night we said goodby, he came in and said, ‘Let me show you what we can do with a mallard duck.' He had some plastic ones. We have a lot of mallards in Florida. He said, ‘How do you think 500 of these would look on the lake near Kissimmee?' He described how he would put lights
on the lake so it would be pretty at night. Then, later, when Walt was not there, Roy was back in business asking, ‘What about those tax liabilities?' Walt keeps giving you confidence that they are going to be there and Roy keeps sharpening the pencil.”
¹⁰

Walt Disney had by this time become something like a highly unusual real estate developer, one who specialized in unique projects, and the Florida project was only the largest such.

Disney had been a skier since the 1930s, when he helped finance the Sugar Bowl resort, and he had been delighted with Zermatt, the Swiss ski town he visited several times in the 1950s, starting in 1952 and culminating in his filming there of
Third Man on the Mountain
in 1958. Buzz Price wrote: “The things he liked about Zermatt were simple: a great mountain, no autos, entry by shuttle train, and dual season operation with a base development full of charm and activity in both summer and winter. The village at Zermatt reflected the qualities of a Disney style and ambience.”
¹¹
Disneyland's success had confirmed, in the most emphatic fashion, Disney's good judgment about what would draw visitors. Now he decided to transform the ski business by creating a resort that would mimic Zermatt.

Through his own company, WED Enterprises, Disney commissioned Price to study the ski-resort potential at several locations, over a five-year span beginning in 1960. One of the earliest of those studies, in 1960, concerned the Mineral King Valley in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, but it was not until 1962, Price wrote, that Disney began the “serious final quest for Mineral King . . . after a fruitless search throughout the rest of the U.S. for a comparable resort site.” In Price's account, the United States Forest Service (part of the Agriculture Department and committed to the productive use of the national forests under its control) encouraged Disney to pursue development of Mineral King. “Late in 1964, under Walt's instruction, we began the assembly of the private acreage holdings on the floor of the Mineral King valley, a 26-acre site essential for the project base village. One of our group . . . succeeded in buying out the Forest Service leasehold positions of 18 families.”
¹²

On December 17, 1965, after competitive bidding, the Forest Service designated Walt Disney Productions to develop Mineral King Valley and the surrounding slopes. The Disney proposal called for spending thirty-five million dollars. In a brochure published the next year, the company laid out plans for a development that would resemble Zermatt. “Mineral King is perhaps more similar to the European Alps than any other area in the western United
States,” the brochure said, and, accordingly, all structures would be “styled along the lines of the Swiss chalet.” As at Zermatt, automobiles would be barred from the valley.