When Roy E. Disney personally called to borrow a conference room for a hastily convened meeting in San Francisco, the executive he hired to head his radio station group willingly obliged. "Roy, you own the conference room," Bill Clark replied, though his curiosity was piqued by the request.
Afterward, joining the group for dinner at an Italian restaurant, Disney graciously suggested that his colleagues brief Clark on the meeting's outcome. It was no ordinary agenda. In fact, the 1984 meeting was one of the first strategy sessions in an American-style palace coup: the management shake-up of the vulnerable Walt Disney Company to avert its breakup by threatening corporate raiders.
Though they couldn't anticipate the wild success of their ambitious plan--to invite in friendly investors and reanimate the company with new management--the conspirators' mood was ebullient..
Stanley Gold, the hard-edged lawyer Disney relied on to diversify and grow his personal family holdings, turned for wine advice to the late Frank Wells '53, already drafted to be part of the new team. "If I wanted a cheap wine, I could order it myself," Gold told him.
After listening to the qualities Wells sought, the wine steward recommended a bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild, priced at $500. Questioning the sommelier's judgment, Wells noted a Bordeaux of similar quality priced at $350. "For you, that price will be sufficient," the steward conceded. "We'll need a second bottle," Wells shot back.
Disney raised his glass first to mark the moment. Of all those present, he had the most at stake. His holdings in the company begun by his uncle and father had plummeted $21 million that day alone. But rather than a toast to soon-to-be vanquished corporate foes, Disney jovially congratulated Wells for masterfully negotiating a $300 savings on two bottles of wine.
The scene aptly reflects Roy Disney, a man who for years shunned the limelight sought out by his renowned uncle, preferring a behind-the-scenes role. Though serious in his purpose--whether it be rescuing the family legacy or shattering yacht-racing records--he also is known for informality and injecting a bit of comic whimsy into the most sober moment. "Are you having fun?" is a Disney refrain, one his uncle often repeated, too.
Now 70, Disney is uncharacteristically seeking the spotlight, partly to cement his own legacy and partly out of loyalty to his uncle and father, Roy O. Disney, the financier who turned Walt's dreams into an American icon.
Disney literally holds the keys to the Magic Kingdom, both as a large individual stockholder and as vice chairman of the Burbank-based entertainment company. But he still toils in its animation building at Dopey Drive and Mickey Avenue, doing his part to keep alive Walt's genius. Over the last decade, Disney coaxed forward one of his uncle's unrealized ideas: to add new segments to Fantasia, the ground-breaking 1940 animated feature set to classical music that nearly led to the company's financial collapse.
On June 16, Fantasia 2000, a nearly all-new version of the animated film, opened worldwide at theaters. To give the new film an attention-getting premiere, it was shown exclusively for four months on mammoth IMAX screens at 75 locations. The popular reception is so favorable, Disney, the film's executive producer, suggests the animators ought to begin work on a third remake for release in 2005 or so.
"Roy's the one who, through persuasion, pressure and cheerleading, got it back into the studio," said Ray Watson, a longtime company board member. He still admires Disney for the constructive influence he exerted 15 years ago--a time Watson calls the "holocaust"--to revitalize a company gone stale during the '70s after the deaths of its founders. "He wanted to bring the magic back. It was not an heirloom to him."
Yet pursuing the family business was not Disney's first preference. After breezing through high school and enrolling at Pomona at 16, he first pursued engineering and earned a pilot's license at Cable Airport in Upland. In his second year, nearly failing at calculus and physics, he listened as advisers strongly counseled an alternate major.
"It did me a lot of good," Disney said. "It taught me to focus. Why not do what I can do?" This time choosing English, he graduated in 1951. When Pomona gave Disney an honorary doctorate in fine arts two years ago, he emphasized that low point in his college career to graduating students. "I flunked out," he recalled of his speech. "Learn from it."
After college, Disney worked as a page for the local NBC TV and radio stations in L.A. Later, a producer friend helped him gain admission to the Film Editors' Union, hiring him as an apprentice on the Jack Webb series, Dragnet. When that series closed down at the end of its season, he had become an assistant editor and hooked on with the Disney editing department, working with the editors who were creating The Living Desert and The Vanishing Prairie, both of which went on to win Oscars as feature documentaries.
"I fell into it. I had no impulse towards it," Disney said. As a boy, though, he shot 16mm movies of neighborhood kids, such as "The Schnook Who Was a Thief." It featured a sheik-costumed Martin Milner, later a television actor. The title was a take-off on a then-current Tony Curtis picture, The Prince Who Was a Thief. "It was pretty stupid," he said.
Disney spent 25 years writing, editing, directing and producing more than 40 Disney "True-Life Adventure" films, both for theaters and for television, several of them award winners. "I was lucky enough to work directly for Walt," said the nephew, who for years wore a mustache that reinforced a strong resemblance to his uncle. "I got the benefit of his tender mercies. He could be very tough."
When something dissatisfied his hard-driving uncle, then near the end of his life, Walt's fingers would drum. "This is what you hated to hear in the sweatbox," said Disney, using a term for the unair-conditioned projection room. "He was probably sicker than anyone knew. He didn't have time to be polite."
The one-time Missouri farm boy who began cartooning in the '20s in a Hollywood garage died in 1966, just 11 years after Disneyland opened in Anaheim. Construction of Florida's 27,000-acre Walt Disney World, only a year under way, would be left to his older brother, who time after time would cobble together financing for Walt's fanciful schemes. Roy O. Disney's greatest achievement was pulling off the immense project by 1971, though the undertaking took its toll. He died the same year.
"My dad had better artistic judgment than people credited him with," said Disney, who described how his father creatively engineered the success of a pallid film, Alice in Wonderland. By doubling the number of film prints available, his father at least ensured a big initial audience for the film. "It's a pattern copied many times since then with weaker movies."
Aside from film, Disney's other passion remains sailing, one he took up during a Newport Beach vacation in the '50s. He's been at it ever since, most recently funding the high-tech design of so-called "ultra-light" displacement yachts such as "Pyewacket," named after a witch's cat in the movie Bell, Book and Candle. Unlike most "R.O.'s," as the rich owners of racing yachts are called by their hired crews, Disney is a real sailor. Since 1975, he's regularly entered the biennial 2,200-mile Transpacific Yacht Race from Los Angeles to Honolulu and holds title to nearly every blue-water yacht-racing record in the West.
One, though, he actually owes to his namesake son, Roy, one of four adult Disney children. The scion won the 1997 Hawaii race instead of his father, who was landbound due to an injury from a car accident in Ireland, where he owns a castle.
In 1992, in a high-seas race worthy of its own film treatment, Disney set out from Spain to retrace Columbus' route to the New World in a race organized by the Spanish government. Five hundred miles from Florida in hurricane-force winds, the rudder of his boat sheared mostly off. "There were a bunch of guys holding on for dear life," Disney recalled. Luckily, the storm passed. The damaged boat and bedraggled crew limped 250 miles to Grand Turk, in the Bahamas, never crossing the finish line.
Disney loved the original Fantasia. The new one's genesis, he said, evolved out of a weekly lunch with the company's chairman, Michael Eisner, who queried him about his favorite movie. "When I told him Walt intended it to be a work in progress, I saw his eyes light up," said Disney, who in November 1985 took over supervision of the company's animation unit, then nearly moribund and a candidate for closure.
The new managers, including Eisner and Wells, agreed with the need to restore the animation quality that had produced such richly detailed features as Snow White and Cinderella in earlier decades. "It was Roy's persuasion to pump money into it," said Bob Thomas, author of separate biographies about the brothers Disney. "He knew what Mickey Mouse meant to the corporation."
After investing an initial $10 million on computer equipment, a reinvigorated animation division would within a few years reinvent musical theater in animated film, annually spinning out popular hits including Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King. The company is credited with elevating the art beyond the realm of children's cartoons by incorporating Broadway-style music composed by popular songwriters like Elton John and using live-action film techniques, such as crane and dolly shots. So, too, is it credited with mastering commercialization of animated films, boosting the "want-to-see" factor with a now-mimicked marketing blizzard of fast-food and product tie-ins. "The economics of animation changed with video," said Harvey Deneroff, an animation scholar and author of The Art of Animation, published by Harper Collins in 1997. By the '80s, he said, even mediocre box-office performers, such as Disney's The Rescuers Down Under, could recoup their costs with videocassette sales. As the company started releasing animated films on video, Disney resisted releasing his favorite, believing Fantasia could not be appreciated on a small screen. When he finally relented in 1991, the film became the second-highest-selling video of all time, with 20 million copies sold.
The timing seemed auspicious for the nephew to fulfill the uncle's design. "I wrote a note to Michael saying, 'Now, we can afford to make a new one,'" Disney said. "I got a smile and a nod."
Eisner might have hesitated had he been more familiar with the grim details of the first film's history.
The original Fantasia was initially a flop, costing an exorbitant $2.3 million. At the time, a regular live-action feature cost about $50,000. Only 23 theaters showed the film, since Walt demanded operators install stereophonic equipment that then had no other use. Among those that did was the now defunct Carthay Circle in Beverly Hills.
His vision for the film can be glimpsed in a display at the corporate archives. From an original 1940 program listing the film sequences and musical selections, Walt Disney is quoted saying, "At last we have found a way to use in our medium the great music of all times and the flood of ideas which it inspired."
Though conceived as a prestige art film, some critics dismissed it as kitsch, deriding a Midwesterner for daring to tinker with classical music and pair it with cartoons. It wasn't helped by the film's talky narrator, Deems Taylor. Forty-two narrated minutes were cut from the original, now 1 hour and 30 minutes. "There were some odious reviews," Disney recalled. "There were some ecstatic ones. Most were somewhere in between. There was nothing to compare it to."
The movie made its first dollar of profit in 1957, he told Film Journal International, a trade publication, in January. "It came out about 10 years later during the psychedelic era, and it became very popular to sit in the front row and smoke a joint."
Each of the segments in the new 75-minute version differs in style. They include an abstract tale of good vs. evil evoked by Beethoven's Symphony No. 5; three-dimensional animation that gives volume to a whale sequence set to Respighi's Pines of Rome; and a Jazz Age homage to the flat, cartoon-like caricatures of Al Hirschfeld set to George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.
Deciding on the music for each segment was often more difficult than developing the stories. "We went through hundreds of pieces," said Don Ernst, producer of Fantasia 2000. "We were looking for pieces of music with enough character to tell a story, with peaks and valleys, emotional highs and lows."
Initially, he turned to a two-inch-thick binder of music compiled by Walt Disney and the original film's musical director, Leopold Stokowski. Roy Disney, though no musicologist, had a layman's familiarity with the medium, having regularly taken his wife, Patty, for picnic dinners from Colonel Sanders to the Hollywood Bowl. He suggested a Shostakovich piano concerto that elicited bounces from his daughter as a child. That piece set the tone for an adaptation of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, a story Walt had once considered but shelved.
Animators worked on new Fantasia segments in lulls between other films. Some segments were junked three times. So was the plan to retain four of the original film's segments.
"The more new stuff we made, the more the old stuff looked slow and stuffy," Disney said. In a preliminary screening including a combination of old and new segments, he recalled that much of the audience got up for restroom breaks during the old segments.
"It's a different audience," Ernst pointed out, one accustomed to MTV and computer-created effects.
The film's lineage is acknowledged now by including "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," where Mickey Mouse conjures magic only to be rebuked by an angry sorcerer. Older in style, the section was cleaned, brightened and color-saturated frame by frame so it could be properly projected in the large film format required for IMAX screens. "It was hell, but it was fun," said David B. Keighley, president of the Santa Monica-based IMAX post-production division.
While digital-age equipment is responsible for some of the technical innovations of the last decade, the new Fantasia cultivates its own liberating benefit that can't be measured at the box office. "If Disney keeps making Fantasia, it provides an ongoing opportunity for animators that isn't hidebound by formulaic Disney feature-films," pointed out Deneroff, the animation scholar.
Disney, too, sees an unexpected silver lining that this time is nearly critic-proof. "Fantasia is a big help to us," he said. "It reinforces us, what we are and what we stand for, without being arty."
Andrea Adelsen is a free-lance writer living in Laguna Beach.
