The Keys to the Kingdom (31 page)

In the early going, at least, Disney made a conscious effort to depart
from the Paramount experience by fostering a greater degree of camaraderie and keeping the infighting to a minimum. “They were determined not to have it be the way it was at Paramount,” Kaplan says. “They were very explicit.” But executives were also expected to adopt the tone of outspoken challenge that Diller had demanded at Paramount. “Lou Kamer was encouraged to be Michael's equal at the table,” Kaplan recalls. “That's what got you ahead.” Eisner and Katzenberg held feisty staff meetings—called “gong shows”—in which people tried to run ideas up the flagpole before someone shot them down. Unpopular ideas were dismissed with a bluntness bordering on brutality. “I remember bringing up someone's name and Jeffrey barking,” says Rosenthal. “You had to be really fast. If you were at all timid and didn't want to argue in a group, you weren't part of the team.”

Staff meetings could be “vicious,” she says, but they were also funny to those who could handle the rough humor. Once, when the studio executives had a meeting with the Imagineers, Katzenberg found himself repeatedly interrupted by the head of physical production, Marty Katz, who was correcting some detail or interjecting a point. Finally Katzenberg told the group, “In case you don't know this person, this is Marty Katz, otherwise known as my hemorrhoid.” Later, Katz sent him a note: “Just remember—a hemorrhoid would be nothing without a big asshole to look up to…” Katzenberg returned the note with the inscription “Ain't that the truth!!!”

 

KATZENBERG AND HIS
crew had little inclination to make an expensive “event” movie. They weren't going to coddle the stars, as Warner famously did. They weren't going to give up big percentages of profit to Harrison Ford or Tom Cruise. Disney didn't develop an action franchise with expensive effects like the
Lethal Weapon
or
Batman
series. Katzenberg and his lieutenants were running a tight ship. “Jeffrey made you feel like you were working at the best studio in town,” says one former executive. “Let the industry go in [a different] direction. We were not. It wasn't haughty—it was just, ‘This is our point of view and it's going to work.'”

The studio had developed a “very polished system,” says Katz, and succeeded while surpassing its rivals in holding films to their budgets. “It was scary,” Katz says. “It was unbelievably superior to everyone else. If a filmmaker came in and wanted a certain cameraman or editor, and he thought he could demand a rate, we'd say to the filmmaker, ‘If you want him, convince him to do it.' In the early days, that was okay.” But it wouldn't
be okay forever. The studio was building up a store of ill will that would eventually overflow.

The Disney team unleashed its ruthless impulses on agents and the talent they represented. The studio might go easy on a respected director like Martin Scorsese or Peter Weir, who directed
Dead Poets Society
for Disney, but the lesser talent recruited for the mass-appeal films had to knuckle under. “They would really intimidate the hell out of 'em,” Rosenthal says. One producer remembers Katzenberg shrieking at him during a fight—just inches from his face, spraying saliva as he sputtered about some now-forgotten issue.

Every deal was negotiated to the last penny. “Within a year,” Kaplan says, “Disney business affairs had the reputation of being a nightmare to deal with. I remember Michael saying, ‘Every time I hear someone complain about Ricardo being a bastard in a negotiation, that means more money in Ricardo's bonus.'”

“Jeffrey once said, ‘Marty, you're getting the reputation of being a real production Nazi,'” remembers Marty Katz. “I said, ‘If I'm Goebbels, guess who's Hitler?'”

 

AT FIRST, THE
live-action slate absorbed most of Katzenberg's attention. But as time wore on, it became a side show, eclipsed by the original source of Disney magic.

Katzenberg's affair with animation began inauspiciously. Roy Disney and Michael Eisner were in the middle of a meeting when Roy received an urgent message. This was in the early days of the Eisner administration and the new regime was making its presence felt.
The Black Cauldron,
an animated film that had been in the works for more than ten years at a cost of nearly $40 million, had been snatched from its producer by Katzenberg, who decreed that it had to be recut. Katzenberg was right that
Black Cauldron
needed help: the animation was stunning but the picture was too dark to get a child-friendly G rating. Test audiences despised it. But producer Joe Hale protested that no one ever slapped an animated film into an editing machine and started chopping. Katzenberg refused to listen. Hale's appeal to Roy prompted Eisner to call the editing room. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“I'm trying to salvage this mess,” Katzenberg replied.

Indeed, animation—Walt Disney's single greatest legacy—had become
a sleeping beauty by 1984. And it wasn't something the Eisner-Katzenberg team particularly cared about. After all, their experience lay elsewhere. The chances that Katzenberg would turn out to be the man to salvage the mess seemed slim to none. But
Black Cauldron
's problems were so apparent that neither Eisner nor Roy could really protest when Katzenberg started tampering with it. Even so, Roy chided Katzenberg to be “more sensitive.” Thus began what Katzenberg later called “my sensitivity lessons from Roy.”

Meanwhile, the animators were starting to panic. They had heard that Katzenberg had not only ordered the film to be put on the editing machine, but had also asked to see outtakes. In animation, there were no “outtakes,” no finished sequences that had hit the cutting-room floor. Clearly, Katzenberg knew nothing about animation. The barbarian had entered the gates.

Eventually, Katzenberg had some scenes added to
Black Cauldron
, but he couldn't save the film. It was tagged with a PG rating and grossed only $21 million. It was not the kind of movie that would excite the new Disney regime by illustrating the potential value of animation. There were no
Black Cauldron
T-shirts or lunch boxes in the offing. In fact, the film wasn't even to be released on video until 1998—almost fifteen years after Eisner and Katzenberg arrived.

After the
Black Cauldron
experience, the already nervous animation community began to buzz with rumors that Eisner and Katzenberg, eager to avoid another debacle, planned to shut down the division altogether. And the animation department was already demoralized. Things had been going downhill at Disney for years. In 1979, animator Don Bluth and a team of about sixteen others had defected, complaining that Disney quality was slipping. As Eisner arrived, nearly seventy animators were working on
Black Cauldron
but others were idle. The old administration had nothing else in production.

At first, the animators had been convinced that whoever took the helm at Disney would recognize their value. But then reality hit. “It was like, does anybody know we're here? What we're doing?” says Disney animator Ron Clements. Soon enough, they learned that they had been noticed: Katzenberg fired some of the staff and moved the rest off the studio's Burbank lot to a refurbished warehouse in nearby, unglamorous Glendale. Eisner and Katzenberg told the animators that live-action film was in so much trouble that they needed to keep a close watch on that division while animation didn't need such careful supervision. But the artists didn't buy that line. “The feeling was, they're putting us out to pasture,” recalls one. In a
memo, new management promised that the exile from the main Disney lot would last only a year or two. It lasted ten.

Even if Eisner and Katzenberg weren't especially interested in animation themselves, they knew that keeping the division alive was part of their mandate. Animation was close to Roy Disney's heart. In fact, as soon as Eisner took over in 1984, Roy had asked to be named head of the animation department. He had never worked in animation before, but of course Eisner said yes.

Animators weren't especially consoled by the arrival of fifty-four-year-old Roy, who was still known as Walt's feebleminded nephew. But he won some of them over when they saw that he was committed to preserving Walt's heritage. An avid sailor, he worked from an office in Burbank designed to look like a ship's interior—complete with nautical maps, timbered walls, and a compass. He had another office in Glendale. He didn't show up at either very regularly but he made his wishes clear. At his prodding, the new regime committed to release an animated film every eighteen months.

Roy stood by when Eisner and Katzenberg watched animators Ron Clements and John Musker prop up storyboards in the wide main corridor of the original animation building and pitch a project that had been in development for two years about mice living in Sherlock Holmes's apartment. “I'm not sure that Michael and Jeffrey knew what they were looking at,” Roy told reporter Ron Grover in the book
The Disney Touch.
“But they said go ahead anyway.” Katzenberg says the project had been around while a team of animators sat idle: “Our attitude was, we're paying them to do nothing and we might as well pay them to do something.”

As animators labored over the film that would eventually be called
The Great Mouse Detective,
Eisner and Katzenberg ordered secret tests that played directly into the artists' worst fears. Television cartoons were far cheaper than animation for the big screen, so Eisner and Katzenberg wanted to know why movies were so expensive. “They said, ‘How much money do you think this is going to cost?'” Clements remembers. “We said twenty-some million. They wanted it for half that. We said it would take two years. They said, ‘We want it in one.'”

Eisner and Katzenberg were convinced they could beat the old Disney system. If they could get thirty minutes of television animation for $350,000 to $500,000, they wondered, why couldn't they get a movie that was less than an hour and a half long for $1.5 million? In fact, feature-length car
toons were costing far more.
The Great Mouse Detective
would have a $14 million price tag.

Obviously, Eisner and Katzenberg could see that television animation was of much poorer quality than Disney film animation. But what if television work was made twice as good? The film would still cost only $3 million. And if the quality were three times better than television, the film should cost $4.5 million. How bad could it be?

So during the making of
Great Mouse Detective,
different scenes were shipped overseas, where most of the inexpensive television work was performed, to see whether some parts of the animation process—background painting, layouts, effects—could be done on the cheap. But this was not a road Roy wanted Disney to take. He hadn't taken control of the company to see the quality of animation degraded. The experiments were dropped.

Roy says he told the animators that he wanted “to show these new guys that I'm part of the team.” But Katzenberg says it wasn't in Roy's nature to get deeply involved. “He is not someone who sets out goals and goes out to achieve them,” Katzenberg says. Indeed, an animator who worked on the picture says he didn't see Roy during production. Roy did, though, provide some feedback as the work moved toward completion.

“From the beginning, Roy and Jeffrey didn't get along,” that animator says. “Roy is soft-spoken and Jeffrey will dominate a room. So when they set up a screening for notes, Roy would always cancel at the last minute. Then he would reschedule and give us his notes. And their [comments] were not the same, so the project was going nowhere.”

In 1985, Disney hired Peter Schneider as vice-president of feature animation in part to resolve this conflict between Roy and Katzenberg. Schneider, whose background was in theater, had worked as theatrical coordinator for the Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival in 1984. “It fundamentally [made] no difference who was hired,” Schneider said years later. “They didn't care. Roy cared. But in retrospect, Jeffrey and Michael couldn't have cared less. Animation? Who cares? It wasn't making any money. As a matter of fact, it was losing money. I got lucky because they were not that picky.”

A former Disney animator says that even though Schneider was recommended by Roy, he immediately and enthusiastically signed on to Katzenberg's team. “You'd hear Peter starting to use a phrase and realize it was part of Jeffrey's vocabulary,” says the animator. He remembers that Roy continued to attend important screenings and offered notes on subsequent
animated pictures, but that “we generally ignored them.”
The Great Mouse Detective
wasn't a big hit but it managed to gross a decent $25 million.

Long before
The Great Mouse Detective
was in theaters, Eisner and Katzenberg had set up their first “gong-show meeting” with a group of animators to select projects that would follow it. “We want everybody to come up with five ideas,” Eisner said. “You've got two weeks to find five really good ideas. If we don't like something, we're going to say it right away. Don't take it personally.”

The first film put into motion was based on Katzenberg's own idea: an update of the Charles Dickens tale of an orphaned boy taken in by a gang of thieves. In
Oliver & Company,
the hero would be a kitten. In an attempt to add some hipness, the voices would come from Billy Joel, Bette Midler, and Cheech Marin. The songs were from Billy Joel, Barry Manilow, and the team of lyricist Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken, who had worked on the 1986 musical version of
The Little Shop of Horrors
(a film produced by David Geffen).

As
Oliver & Company
got under way, Katzenberg still wasn't particularly enamored with animation. “It was just part of the territory,” he says. “It came with the job. I didn't know anything about it.” But he made waves by insisting that the animators change their old formula of developing a story by creating extensive “storyboards” outlining the plot. This was time-consuming and expensive, as animators created perhaps seventy boards, each covered with fifty or sixty individual drawings. Traditionally, the animators wrote much of the dialogue as they created the boards. Katzenberg insisted that they write a full script before they started storyboarding.