Dream It! Do It! (Disney Editions Deluxe)

• Title Page
  
• Dedication
  
• Copyright
  
• Acknowledgements
  
• INTRODUCTION BY RAY BRADBURY
  
• INTRODUCTION BY RICHARD M. SHERMAN
  
• THE BLANK SHEET OF PAPER
  
• 1. "WALT'S DEAD. WRITE SOMETHING."
  
• 2. FORGOTTEN BUT NOT GONE.
  
• 3. VEGAS CALLING—"CARD" IS ON THE PHONE
  
• 4. "FAILURE TO PREPARE IS PREPARING TO FAIL." —COACH JOHN WOODEN
  
• 5. "I'M NOT WALT DISNEY ANYMORE!"
  
• 6. "JUST DO SOMETHING PEOPLE WILL LIKE!" —WALT DISNEY
  
• 7. "THE GREATEST PIECE OF URBAN DESIGN IN THE UNITED STATES IS DISNEYLAND."
  
• 8. "TWENTY-SIX! YOU'RE YOUNGER THAN MY SON!"
  
• 9. THEY LEFT ME BEHIND—AND WENT HOME!
  
• 10. "TELL IBM TO GO TO HELL!"
  
• 11.
  LOST IN TRANSLATION
  WAS A LATE COMER TO OUR TOKYO EXPERIENCE.
  
• 12. THE ELASTIC E: "I'VE BEEN KNOWN TO CHANGE MY MIND."
  
• 13. EDIE'S CONFERENCE ROOM: "YOU ARE CARRYING MY LOGIC TO TOO LOGICAL A CONCLUSION!"
  
• 14. THE FRENCH HAD A TERM FOR IT: "A CULTURAL CHERNOBYL."
  
• 15. THE SUN NEVER SETS ON THE DISNEY PARKS
  
• 16. RIDING MICHAEL'S ROLLER COASTER
  
• 17. "YOU ARE THE HARDEST WORKING AMBASSADOR IN THE WORLD!"
  
• 18. MICKEY'S TEN COMMANDMENTS
  
• 19. THE BLACK SHEEP
  
• 20. "I'M WAITING FOR A MESSAGE."
  
• Photos
  

When I retired from The Walt Disney Company on July 17, 2009, I announced that a primary goal would be writing this book. In the four years since, hardly a day has gone by when someone—Imagineering colleague, Disney fan, theme park industry associate—has not asked me: “How’s the book coming?” “When will your book be available?” I thank all of you who made it clear that what I have to say is something you wanted to read. And I thank some extraordinary people who helped make this book possible.

For their introductions to this book, I am greatly indebted to two world-renowned talents who became friends through our Disney relationship. The stories and prose of the late, inimitable Ray Bradbury inspired me long before we met, and continue to, to this day. With brother Robert, Richard Sherman’s storytelling through songs and music brought new magic to Disney films and television, and to our Disney park attractions.

Richard Curtis, president of Richard Curtis Associates, my literary agent, gave me early lessons in Publishing 101. I appreciated his honesty. This is good, Richard said, as a Disney park history,
and
as a business book. And then he dropped the other shoe: “But it still needs a good editor, and lots of work.” He was correct.

When we contracted with Disney Editions, a key reason was the promise that Wendy Lefkon, editorial director at the Disney Global Book Group, would be my editor. Wendy and I had worked together on many successful books about the Disney parks—I often wrote introductions, setting the tone or the historical context—including two wonderful hardcover books about Walt Disney Imagineering,
Walt Disney Imagineering: A Behind the Dreams Look at Making the Magic Real;
and a reprise of the same title, adding
Making MORE Magic Real.
Together, they have sold over 150,000 copies.

As I anticipated, Wendy was the editor I needed: honest and direct, smart and clear, knowledgeable and supportive. Her structural flow, title, and content ideas were always reasoned, and usually reasonable. If you enjoy this manuscript, don’t forget to thank Wendy, too!

My daughter, Leslie Ann Sklar, and my wife, Leah Regina Sklar, were big supporters—and very active critics. (Nothing new there!) Leslie took my handwritten copy—I wrote the whole manuscript longhand—and did lots of editing and suggesting as she computerized the manuscript. Leah, Leslie, and my son, Howard, have been “cleaning up my act” for many years (Leah and I were married in 1957); in this context, “my act” was my writing. I never wanted for input from “the two Ls”—always direct, considerate, and fun to argue with. (Yes, we differed on a number of issues; they even won a few!) Howard, an excellent wordsmith, lives with his family and teaches in Helsinki, Finland, and was not available to defend me—or join the critique.

Finally, I owe a great big debt to so many mentors, teachers, and colleagues who helped shape my fifty-four-year Disney career. You will meet them throughout this book. Walt’s best writers and songwriters could never have scripted the scenario of talented associates Disney wrote for my career. As I have written, “they were my mentors, my friends, and in their golden years, my staff,” as I grew up from staff writer to vice chairman and principal creative executive (my favorite title) at Imagineering.

I owe them all a great debt. I only hope that I passed on their amazing standards to a new generation, and left the Imagineers at least as respected and admired as the organization they helped Walt Disney create. Walt created Imagineering, but the Imagineers made it sing and dance.

Marty Sklar

Disney Imagineering artists thrive and pomegranate-seed explode inside a nondescript Glendale, California, building that looks as if it might house a thousand endless noon board meetings. There is no sign out front to indicate that at Christmas and Easter, here hides a madhouse of costumes and ambulatory self-wrapped gifts.

No hint that, at Halloween, Imagineering becomes a ghost manufactory, a giant Ouija board that summons up ghouls, skeletons, a mirror with a grotesque mask frozen in it that runs about telling folks they “are not the fairest of them all,” while Maleficent the Dragon inflates herself to tower above the outside parking lot.

Who are the maniacs in charge of this madhouse? John Hench, sent by Disney to study at the Sorbonne in 1939, and the nearest thing to Walt himself. Beyond eighty, John, as he chats with the inhabitants of this millrace, scribble-sketches blueprints and critters with a fine-artist’s hand.

Marty Sklar, the quietest of maniacs, keeps Imagineering off the rails but on the tracks. Hired at age twenty-one, while editor of the UCLA
Daily Bruin
, Marty remembers that Disney gave him—a raw, untrained reporter—a chance to edit a Disneyland newspaper the month before Disneyland opened, thirty-six years ago. On Walt’s behalf, he gives other young people a chance to jump off cliffs and build their wings on the way down, at Imagineering.

Between these two, Disney Imagineering has hired some fairly improbable, as I mentioned before, gentlemen golfers, to tee off mind-grenades instead of golf balls.

Item:
Tony Baxter, whose career was popping popcorn at Disneyland in his spare time, built a working model of a gravity-fall train. This 3-D calling card gained him the Imagineering job of creating the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad that roars down mountain tracks at Disney theme parks. Its twin will soon be built at Euro Disney, and the chief designer for this new Magic Kingdom will be…Tony Baxter.

Item:
Harper Goff, lover and collector of miniature model railroads. Walt Disney and Goff met in a London railroad-model toy store and saw the glazed stare of an amateur locomotive fiend in each other’s faces. Goff wound up helping art sketch-design the Adventureland Jungle Cruise and making sure Disneyland’s locomotives ran on time.

Future item:
Tom Scherman. The young man was so enamored of Jules Verne that he secretly converted his Hollywood apartment into a clone of Captain Nemo’s
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
submarine with portholes, periscope, and seashell telephones. His landlady, unaware of the transformation, blundered into the apartment one day and, stunned, threw Scherman out and dismantled the submarine. Scherman wound up with Disney Imagineering, building
Nautilus
submersibles and dreaming up the Jules Verne Discover World.

And so it went and so it goes.

Sklar and Hench, then, are curators of a vast and vital storage hall of history, a living museum, a World’s Fair unto itself.

In sum, the Renaissance did not die, it just hid out at Imagineering Inc. You need but ask for Sleeping Beauty’s castle, the turrets of Pierrefonds, Mad Ludwig’s towers, or touches of Vaux le Vicomte. So summoned, they will sprout in a Glendale back lot to be truck-transited down freeways to Anaheim, Orlando, or across the ocean airs to Japan.

Ray Bradbury

Glendale, California

1991