Dream It! Do It! (Disney Editions Deluxe) (27 page)

Reflecting on the criticism that the overall financial performance amounted to overspending in the park, Eddie for one has a perspective: “The park has endured for the last twenty years without many major enhancements because of the wisdom of investing in a great show,” he maintains.

Eddie Sotto’s passion for new ideas and one-of-a-kind adventures was a creative leader’s dream. One day he stuck his head in my office and asked me to come out into the hallway, where he immediately lay down on his back, put his hands out as though he were steering a vehicle, and spun his new concept. “Imagine lying on your back inside a vehicle—a space capsule,” he pitched. “Watch—I’m handling the controls, because I’m the pilot. But next to me are the other crew members, each with his or her own assignment—and we’re
flying
through space, feeling the g-forces the astronauts experience!” We built a full-sized mock-up of the space capsule for a crew of four, consulted with NASA and its Astronaut Corps, designed the capsule’s interior, created a story built around a trip to Mars, engineered a new kind of motion simulator, and in 2003, Mission: SPACE opened in Epcot at Walt Disney World. My leadership lesson? Maintain an open-door policy—and make sure your hallways are clear.

Eddie Sotto’s view about Disneyland Paris is also mine, and I want to give credit where credit is due for the concept, design, and construction of the park in the face of many obstacles. In fact, our organizational start was headed for disaster until it was rescued by the leadership of one man—my partner, Stanley “Mickey” Steinberg.

Our creative team at Imagineering was absolutely first class. It was headed by Tony Baxter, the originator of Big Thunder Mountain Railroad and Splash Mountain in Disneyland, and co-creator with George Lucas and Tom Fitzgerald of Star Tours. The design leaders were Eddie Sotto (Main Street), Tim Delaney (Discoveryland), Jeff Burke (Frontierland), Chris Tietz (Adventureland), and Tom Morris (Fantasyland). In contrast, the project management and construction organization was a mess—and that’s where Mickey Steinberg entered the picture.

In his book
Work in Progress
, published in 1998 by Random House, Michael Eisner remembers Steinberg’s impact:

As our construction problems mounted, Frank’s solution was to bring Mickey Steinberg into the project late in 1988. A big, bluff man with passionate enthusiasms and a quick temper, Mickey had worked with the architect John Portman for twenty-seven years, running his company and overseeing the construction of its hotels. Now he was executive vice president of Imagineering under Marty Sklar. At Euro Disney, Mickey concluded very quickly that our organizational structure was dysfunctional. “You are headed for one of the biggest failures I’ve ever seen in construction,” he told Frank after visiting the site. “Unless something changes, you’re never going to get finished on time.” As Mickey analyzed it, the firm we’d hired were construction managers. “What we need are project managers who understand the whole process from construction to design to operations,” Mickey said. “If you want to spend more on some aspect of design, the project managers’ job is to help you find somewhere else to save money. It’s all about trade-offs. That’s not happening now.”

The situation Mickey Steinberg walked into was actually worse than that, both in terms of the perception of the Imagineering organization in Glendale and the way our hands had been tied by the construction management organization that had been set up in Paris. In the wake of four earlier projects that had gone well over budget, including Pleasure Island at Walt Disney World, Frank Wells had issued a “Black Book” of concerns—and sent Jeff Rochlis to Imagineering to organize and manage the division. Known at Disney as “The Terminator” for his role in firing many longtime employees at the Studio with the advent of the new management team brought in by Eisner and Wells, Rochlis had no background or understanding of a design and construction organization. He became known for issuing the “Triangle of Success,” emphasizing the obvious pillars a creative design organization always aims to achieve: “Design, Schedule, and Quality.”

The issue Mickey Steinberg found immediately was that Rochlis did not believe the Imagineers could live by these principles. Rochlis’s solution had been to turn the management of the park project over to a European construction firm, one that had never built a theme park or its rides before. Essentially, the Imagineers were being turned into “hired help” on a Disney job.

Mickey Steinberg had been recruited to Disney as a result of Frank Wells’s Black Book. What he found was a project management organization that had employed a “design-build” system for the projects Wells had analyzed, essentially turning over the project responsibility to outside builders. Mickey took one look and called the giveaway of responsibility for designing and building those projects “nuts.”

At Frank Wells’s request, Steinberg then focused on the Euro Disney project. In his book, Eisner notes:

“In the hotel business,” Steinberg said, “we concentrate on one icon—the lobby. At Disney,
everything
is a lobby. And only the Imagineers understand how to do it.” Mickey spent his first six months on the job making lists of unresolved issues. When his analysis was completed, he concluded that the budget for the park had been underestimated, and that it would require an additional $150 million to finish. He also convinced Frank that we needed to bring a far larger contingent of Imagineers over from Glendale. “I’ll take responsibility for keeping to the budget you give me,” Mickey said, “but our own people are the only ones who have the expertise we need to get this park built.”

It took guts—never an issue for Mickey Steinberg—but he also told Disney’s corporate management that there would be a one-year delay in the project “so we can finish the drawings.” Trained as an architect and engineer, Mickey had built hotels, convention centers, office buildings, and other large projects for the Portman organization, headquartered in Atlanta. He knew that the difference between a project that can be built successfully (you can insert here: “Meets the objectives of the ‘Triangle of Success’”) could not be accomplished without a great set of construction drawings, especially those that needed to be converted into metrics for building in Paris. The construction organization Rochlis had established had somehow overlooked the importance of completing those vital documents of the construction industry.

With his new responsibilities (and Rochlis gone), Mickey installed a new project management team. A former Portman hand, Fred Beckenstein, moved to Paris to head the field team, and Orlando Ferrante (production), Jim Thomas (estimation), and Matt Priddy (manufacturing) went from hired hands to leading key parts of the Imagineering organization. But it was Steinberg, a Southerner and proud of it, tough as the proverbial construction nails when he needed to be, understanding and supportive when the field team needed it, who saved the day—and the project. As the administrative, financial, and project leader, Mickey was the supreme supporter of the team, enabling me to concentrate on story development and new ideas.

When I asked for those stories from the Imagineers who spent two and three years in France building Euro Disney, I received this “Mickey story that was very personal to me” from Skip Lange, the quintessential rockwork expert, who has built mountains, jungle rivers, and themed environments around the world:

At the end of one grueling “Mickey Meeting,” after being beat up pretty good about problems concerning the rockwork effort, I was heading back out to the freezing cold, wet site, pulling on my huge coat, multiple scarves, and ski gloves and mumbling that I was getting blamed and beat up about many things that were really not in my control, being subject more to Project and Construction Management. Halfway out, I decided to make a stand, turned around, and headed back to Mickey’s office, peeling all my layers of clothes back off. Luck would have it that Mickey was just finishing up a meeting with most of the managers, and so accepted an impromptu meeting with me. I started making my pitch, which he got the gist of quickly and stopped me midsentence. He went to his support person and asked her to call all of the managers back.

Waiting for them, Mickey made small talk with me while I began to panic as to what I had just done to my Disney career. As soon as all of the managers crowded into his office, Mickey repeated my lament about not being in control of my own destiny and informed all of them that they no longer had to worry about any of the rockwork effort in their respective lands. I would be telling them how rockwork was to be planned, managed, and executed from then on. My elation lasted only a second when he then turned to me with, “Now, Mr. Lange, you do know what this means. I will not be coming to any of them about rockwork anymore, I will be coming to
you
. Do you understand?” With a “Yes, sir” and “Thank you, sir” I left the office (and the amazed managers) and began my trek back to the site, once again pulling the required clothing back on, thinking, “What the heck did I just do?” [and] fearing that I had just alienated the entire management team. It turned out to be the opposite; I think they were glad to be rid of rockwork and they proceeded to help me make it all happen as efficiently as possible. And Mickey, though not easy on me, was very supportive.

All the Imagineers in the meeting still talk about the following bit of “Mickey Magic”: in a project review, Steinberg became so incensed at a behind-schedule/overbudget report that he slammed his fist on the conference table. “His coffee cup jumped about two inches in the air,” a witness told me, “and the coffee it contained went skyward five or six inches. When the cup came down, it landed perfectly flat on the table, and all the coffee flowed down into the cup as though it was magnetized. There wasn’t a drop on the table!” We all took that as a sign from above that he was right. With his drive and leadership, we felt confident we could make that new Opening Day.

Typical of the challenges of the project was the variety of contractors employed. To build the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, the team had to manage an Italian contractor (steel), a Dutch contractor (ride system), a French contractor (rockwork), and an Irish contractor (electrical). Another Italian contractor met its match when it tried to intimidate Mickey Steinberg.

Another “issue” with some of the contractors was the authenticity of our theming. Knowing how much grand design, some centuries old, was part of everyday living and a prime magnet for tourism in Europe, our designers knew they needed to be inspired by the history and surroundings, but also to create something that was truly one-of-a-kind.

“In the end,” Fantasyland show producer Tom Morris told
D23
magazine, this was the result:

We opted for a fanciful castle that would seem to come right out of a European fairy tale. Mont Saint Michel’s manner of reaching for the sky, while coiling up on itself, was an early inspiration. I went on a tour of the castles in the Loire region west of Paris [inspiration for Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney World]. The windows of Chaumont were interesting, the tower at Azay-le-Rideau impressed me, some moats were superb, [and] a specific stained-glass window intrigued me. Inspiration was everywhere. Finally, we wanted to incorporate the “square trees” from Walt’s film
Sleeping Beauty
to give it an Eyvind Earle sort of look. [Eyvind Earle, the production designer for
Sleeping Beauty
, had taken inspiration from the tapestries in the Cluny Museum in Paris.] So the story had come full circle.

The dramatic Château de la Belle au Bois Dormant (Sleeping Beauty Castle) blends contemporary French building techniques (concrete, steel, and lots of digging and grading) with local European crafts: plaster-carving, stained-glass window-making, decorative metal work, patterned roof tiles, and tapestries (for the interior). Some of the companies that accomplished the work had been in operation for over five hundred years, notably the tapestry and roof-tile makers. But it fell to contemporary contractors to bring together all the pieces.

Six months before opening, a construction manager warned Mickey that word on the street was that the Fantasyland contractor would soon come to him and state that they couldn’t finish the project…unless, of course, they were paid a handsome bonus above and beyond the contract they had signed. Steinberg consulted the Disney lawyers, and was told that he could not act unless in fact the contractor did make that threat. As if on cue, the Italian contractor came to Mickey’s office and issued their ultimatum. On the spot, Steinberg fired them. The next morning, in their place was a new Irish contractor, Mivan, who’d been waiting in the wings just in case the threat was issued as anticipated. (The Irish turned out to be the best construction workers on the project. The workers brought their families to France, and every Friday night, they celebrated their week’s efforts with a giant beer party.)

Living full time in France over the last few months of construction, Mickey and the operations leader, Jim Cora, developed a close working relationship. So that Cora and his staff could train their attractions operating staff by day, the Imagineers took the night shift over the last two months.

“The entire two years that I was there was all pretty much six or seven days a week, ten-plus hours a day, but the last few months got even worse,” Skip Lange told me. “I remember that after the on-site cafeteria was opened, you could go there at all hours of the night and see fellow workers sleeping on the bench seating. Many of us were working twenty-hour days, going home only for just a couple of hours of sleep and a shower.”

The combination of winter weather, the schedule demands, and working the night shift caught up with many of our team, who were sick when Opening Day arrived. Yet—and this is true of every international project we have built, from Tokyo to Paris to Hong Kong—the experience of living for one, two, or three years overseas is always regarded as a valuable opportunity by almost every Imagineer I have talked to about this subject. That goes for families, too. Many children of Imagineer “ex-pats” have had formative learning experiences across the oceans, attending the American School, and learning a new language.