Dream It! Do It! (Disney Editions Deluxe) (19 page)

• I was shocked to see my copresenter, Jack Martin Smith, who’d been nominated for Academy Awards as a motion picture art director, suddenly down on his knees in front of our storyboard illustration of the dinosaurs in the Universe of Energy pavilion. “These,” Jack gushed to Chairman Cliff Garvin and President Howard Kauffmann of Exxon, “are the Marilyn Monroes of our project!” This was
  not
  something we had planned.
  
• Harry Gray, CEO of United Technologies (UTC), was the most thorough, committed, and involved CEO we dealt with in the development of Epcot. As the head of a technology company—Otis Elevator, Pratt & Whitney jet engines, Carrier air, and other environmental systems for buildings—he had a special concern for all the life-support systems designed for The Living Seas pavilion. When Harry summoned us from California and Florida to UTC headquarters in Hartford, Connecticut, we knew the key moment in our plans (and our schedule) had come.
  

The controversy was not insignificant—not when
5.7
million gallons of seawater was involved. Kym Murphy, our marine biologist, who had worked at several aquatic and aquarium projects before joining Disney, led our engineers away from a chlorine environment because of the negative effects on the ocean creatures he had observed. But his proposal—the use of ozone—had never been attempted in so large an area.

At UTC, there was a divided house. The senior, retiring head of research and development supported our team’s recommendation. UTC’s new R & D leader, either not wanting to take a chance or hoping to distance himself from his predecessor, recommended against it—thus Mr. Gray’s call for a decisive meeting in Hartford. Tempers flared during the spirited discussion, and Harry Gray pushed and prodded, mostly yanking our chains. I was seated next to Ray D’Argenio, UTC’s senior public relations executive. As he listened, he drew a picture that looked like this:

I asked Ray for an explanation. This is what he drew:

It was clearly a lesson in who’s the boss. There was no question with Harry Gray, as we were to find out over and over again—even though we won this major battle, and ozone became the vital living environment for our sea life “stars.”

During a presentation to Kraft of our concepts for The Land in a conference room at our offices in Glendale, Chairman and CEO William O. Beers received a telephone call, which he took in my nearby office. As we walked back to the conference room, Bill Beers stopped for a moment and confided in me:

Marty, each of those nine people in that conference room runs a key division of Kraft, Inc.—and they never get together to address the challenges we have. That’s why I want to be part of Epcot: it gives each of them a chance to work together on a high-profile project, and focus on communicating our company’s leadership in the food business!

It may have helped when, an hour or so earlier, as we began our concept presentation to a very tense audience of those Kraft leaders, I had instructed Hong Kong-born designer Doris Hardoon Woodward to make the presentation in Cantonese. “But Marty,” Doris protested, “they won’t understand anything I’m saying!” Doris was correct, as I knew she would be. But by the time I had stopped her and asked for the English version, the tension in the room was gone. Smiles and a bit of laughter replaced those frowns. We made the sale.

When we made our final presentation to GE’s chairman and CEO, Reginald Jones, he had asked his three vice chairmen to attend the meeting. Shortly after GE signed its participant agreement, Jones retired, and the vice chairman who had been the most inquisitive and critical of our plan became chairman and CEO. His name was Jack Welch. Although GE was in, our concept was out—as were many of the old ways at General Electric. We didn’t have to go through “Six Sigma” training, which became one of Jack Welch’s signatures at GE, but we certainly knew who was “bringing good things to life” as we developed the Horizons pavilion, since replaced in Epcot by Mission: SPACE after GE’s original participation contract ended.

* * * * * * * * * *

John L. Tishman, the longtime chairman and chief executive of Tishman Construction, has written a fascinating memoir entitled
Building Tall—My Life and the Creation of Construction Management
. Among his interesting reflections is a comparison between New York’s World Trade Center—Tishman Construction built the Twin Towers that were destroyed on September 11, 2001—and Epcot Center, for which Tishman Construction also acted as construction manager:

Disney’s Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow was actually a larger construction project than the World Trade Center had been in terms of the amount of area covered, the number of buildings—each one distinct—and the complexity of all the elements…

…The whole would cover some six hundred acres, which was to be carved out of very swampy land, including some large sinkholes…

Smack in the center of the six hundred acres was a huge sinkhole. Sinkholes are geological formations that can be as old as fifteen million to twenty-five million years. This one had been waiting for us quite a while, and its boundaries were not fixed—regularly, cars and trucks that we thought had been on safe, solid ground would start to sink in and would have to be rescued by a tow truck. The sinkhole was full of organic silt and peat, and the sand underneath went down as far as three hundred feet. Nothing solid could be built on it, since the underlying sand could not support the weight of a building. The most logical thing to do with the largest sinkhole of all was to dig it deeper and make it into the lagoon around which the World Showcase pavilions would be situated.

Simple idea, difficult thing to do. Under our direction, three general contractors specializing in heavy construction worked on the area. First, they had to construct a bathtub containing an area that could be filled with enough water in which to float a dredge to excavate and remove the muck. The muck was five feet thick and there was a million cubic yards of it to be removed so that the underlying sand could properly serve as the lagoon bottom. Complicating the task of removal were two huge “root islands” in the muck. Unable to get them out, we eventually poured onto them a half-million yards of sand taken from another part of the lagoon. Then, top-heavy with sand, the root islands sank beneath the surface of the water and stayed there. Today, looking at the lagoon, you see no evidence of them. But they are there, beneath the surface…

Each pavilion was to appear physically very different from the other nineteen, and many of them were to be quite intricate and unusual, containing such machinery as moving platforms, as well as theaters, restaurant facilities, carnival-type rides, and the largest aquarium in the world.

The way that the Disney Company worked, its “imagineers” first created the basic design for each pavilion, sort of impressionistic sketches for freestanding sculptures and their surrounding environments. Then these sketches were turned over to outside architectural firms that would complete the actual working drawings and details that construction teams could execute. They awarded the design for each pavilion to a different architect… For us, this Disney design system meant that for each pavilion in Epcot, we had to deal with separate architectural and engineering firms
.…

Our production schedules were at the heart of our work for Disney on Epcot. Such schedules are the guts of any construction management job; everything flows from them—the final revisions of drawings, the assembling of bid packages for the multiple contractors and materials, and the development of strategies for contracting, purchasing, and staffing. Eventually we produced hundreds of schedules interrelating about two thousand different activities.

The method of scheduling was the same as for the World Trade Center towers, but while during the WTC project the logistics had a vertical axis, at Epcot the need was to plan the logistics on a horizontal axis. In turns, this meant such things as having to plan for and carve out parking lots for the construction workers’ cars, some 2,500 of them each day. We had to create those lots, and a lagoon (where there had not been one) and a major monorail system, as well as major access roads leading to and from Epcot to the nearby highways—and all of this had to be done before any pavilions could be erected…

Design and construction of Epcot was done on a crash basis—in three years, a very rapid timetable for so sprawling a project.

* * * * * * * * * *

While Tishman Construction and the general contractors hired for each part of Epcot struggled with sinkholes and the delivery of steel, the Imagineers raced to complete everything from the Audio-Animatronics figures of Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain in The American Adventure to the zoetropes and Magic Palette “hands on” (the term was current at that time) interactive fun in the Image Works area of Journey into Imagination. There were so many innovations that we stopped counting, from the amazing Leapfrog Fountains at Journey into Imagination to the largest continuous projection surface in the world for The American Adventure attraction. Sequentially, it opened from seventy-two feet early in the show to 150 feet wide during the finale.

At times, there was so much going on that our management lost track.

“We hired Mark Fuller [to create the Leapfrog Fountains] because of his work on laminar flow fountains,” Orlando Ferrante, vice president of production, recalled nearly thirty years later, when Fuller received the Themed Entertainment Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award. “Soon, Mark came to me and said he would need ‘a few engineers’ to work with him on Epcot’s special water projects. That turned out to be nearly one hundred engineers, plus the production people to produce the designs!”

In concept, Spaceship Earth began as another descriptive written idea: let guests entering Epcot walk under an icon suggesting our planet itself. The engineers were not enthusiastic about this major challenge, but John Hench, Epcot’s chief of design, saw the importance of what he called “the geosphere that is the symbol of Epcot.” In
Designing Disney
, John wrote:

Spaceship Earth offered an impressive invitation to adventure and equally impressive design challenges. We assumed from the beginning that we needed a large sphere for the Epcot icon, and we wanted one with enough space inside for an attraction. We were familiar with architect Buckminster Fuller’s experiments with building the geodesic dome he had invented in the 1940s, including the one he had constructed for the Ford headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, in 1953. Fuller’s famous phrase “spaceship earth” also appealed to us.
[Fuller actually visited Imagineering during the project’s design phase.]
But he had never made a complete sphere as large as the one we hoped to build. Our engineers said that if we constructed only three-quarters of the sphere, our dome could support itself on a base, leaving the interior space clear…

At our first design meeting, the engineers showed a drawing that pictured a dome sitting directly on the ground. We needed a sphere, however; I asked if the dome could instead rest on a round platform with legs underneath to hold it up, which would allow us to suspend the bottom quarter of a sphere from the underside of the platform, completing the sphere.

After several days, the engineers concluded that yes, my idea could work, but that it would be expensive.

The geosphere we built was 164 feet in diameter, standing eighteen feet off the ground on three sets of double legs, with more than two million cubic feet of interior space. It has so far withstood winds of up to two hundred miles an hour. It wasn’t complicated at all, really. I was simply able to visualize how the self-supporting dome could be built as a perfect sphere seeming to float on its legs.