Waking Sleeping Beauty

Elton John, up at Pinewood on--

- What's the date? The 12th of--

Twelfth of March.

It's me, split track, 20-- Thirty-frame center track.

There's the tone.

Quiet, please.

Here we go.

It was the spring of 1994 and we were just finishing The Lion King,

which would go on to earn great reviews

and about three-quarters of a billion dollars at the box office.

Not bad for a group of artists who were kicked off the Disney lot

and an art form that was given up for dead just ten years earlier.

I produced The Lion King

and the cast-and-crew premiere was coming up fast.

It was tradition for all of us to get up on-stage

and give warm thank-you speeches.

But this time I decided to film all the speeches instead.

Whenever you're comfortable. - You are rolling?

Yeah. - Okay.

With all the many varied businesses this company is in, it is clear--

It becomes clearer every day that animation is its soul, heart,

and most of its body parts.

You guys have done an unbelievable job over the last decade,

culminating in Lion King,

in pushing forward the company, the culture and the quality of artistry.

Congratulations from me, from anybody who is not on this tape,

from our board, our shareholders and my children.

Congratulations.

- Thank you. - Thanks, everybody.

Thank you to everybody for another absolutely incredible job

on another marvelous movie on the way to the next great movie.

To an outsider, it looked like a perfect world.

- Thank you. - But backstage,

the tension had reached a peak.

Thank you. - Okay?

- That was it? - Yeah, perfect.

Even though it was the moment of our greatest success,

the wheels were coming off the car.

This is the story of how we got there.

Let's back up to the early '80s

on the Disney Studio lot in Burbank, California.

The animation band is spreading its holiday cheer to the employees

with banjos and jew's harps, as was the tradition.

And that's me on the right, trying to play "Jingle Bells" on the bass.

Like so many of us, I grew up on a diet of Disney films.

And every four years, I'd make a pilgrimage

to the drive-in theater to see their latest animated masterpiece.

When I was 20, I got a job at the studio

delivering artwork and coffee to the animators

and I felt like I won the lottery.

This was the house that Walt built.

Walt Disney, the toast of Hollywood, the genius behind Disneyland

and the producer behind the first animated feature, Snow White.

By the 1950s, Walt was losing interest in animation

and his attention turned to live-action films,

the new medium of television,

and building the first theme park, Disneyland,

and planning futuristic cities of tomorrow.

By far, the most important part of our Florida Project,

in fact, the heart of everything we'll be doing in Disney World,

will be our Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow, Epcot.

Walt died in 1966,

but the studio still made sweet, harmless, animated comedies for kids,

supervised by his master animators, the Nine Old Men,

and produced by Walt's son-in-law, studio head Ron Miller.

I'm Randy Cartwright and this is Ron Miller.

- How are you? - How are you?

- Good to see you. This is Randy. - Great way to start the film.

- Is this a new--? Your first commercial? - Ha, ha. Yup.

What is this for?

- Just home movie. It's a documentary.

- Home movie? - Documentary of the animation studio.

Hi, Mom.

Well, we're off to a good start.

Here it is, April 9th, 1980.

This is the past to all you folks out there.

And we're gonna go inside and see what it's like. Come on.

For some reason, the halls of the Disney Animation building

always smelled faintly of swamp coolers and pencil shavings and old linoleum.

This is the infamous Rat's Nest.

Animation had been in this slow downward spiral for a long time,

even since Walt Disney was alive.

As veteran animators retired, new kids,

mostly from the Disney-sponsored school, CalArts, filled the hallways.

Why, Rubén, you're from CalArts also.

- Right. - And who are you?

Me? - Yes.

I'm John Lasseter.

He's the cameraman. He's leaving in a little while.

- Could I show you animation? - He's got six days.

- Could I show you animation? - This is animation.

Could I flip something for you?

This is it. Look at that. Peter Pan.

- Oh, looks up and... Ah. Weird.

It's better than the magic we're making today,

but we can't help that.

We were full of a lot of pent-up youthful creative energy that had to go somewhere,

so it was channeled into things like long lunches, volleyball games,

the annual caricature show,

and my perennial favorite, the holiday show

that starred Eddie Fisher and Doris Day, for some unknown reason.

I hate Zsa Zsa.

This is one of our animators here. This is Ron Clements.

He's working on a scene of the Widow from The Fox and the Hound.

- Magically, here is Mr. John-ald Musker. - Thank you, thank you.

Another animator here at the magic factory.

This is Glen Keane. Keane.

He is a directing animator.

I've been here since 8:00 this morning.

Hi, Tim. This is Tim Burton,

another one of our people here.

Ron Miller knew that Walt's guys were retiring fast.

He had to raise a new crop of animators, but he was cautious about it.

He got burned five years earlier

when he entrusted a charismatic animator named Don Bluth to lead the department.

But Bluth polarized the animators.

Some adored him as the messiah of animation and others...

Well, others thought he was just another Walt wannabe.

Ironically, Bluth himself became disillusioned

with the studio's Animation Department.

So on his birthday in 1979, he resigned

and took half the animators with him to start his own studio.

The bombshell set back the release of The Fox and the Hound by six months

and left Miller and the studio betrayed.

It was this interesting cross-generational thing

where you still had a few of these legendary Disney artists

who were now in their sixties and approaching retirement

and then a bunch of young people in their twenties

who were really, really excited and sort of passionate about this medium.

It was thrilling to learn from the masters.

But there was a feeling like that somehow we could be making better films.

Around that time, the studio did a survey

that revealed a majority of teenage moviegoers

wouldn't be caught dead near a Disney movie.

We were just waiting, waiting for something, anything to happen.

On Monday, we reported that Walt Disney Studios

was on shaky financial ground, because of its troubled Film Division

and weak earnings from the Epcot Center in Florida.

However, since that report, there have been dramatic developments.

In just four days, Disney stock jumped 16 percent,

topping off at around $58 a share.

Analysts attribute the jump to two factors.

Splash, the youth-oriented comedy about a mermaid in Manhattan,

stunned Hollywood by racking up over $6 million in its opening three days.

That's the best opening for any movie in Disney's history.

Another surprise, the resignation of Roy E. Disney as chairman of the board.

He's Walt's nephew and son of Walt's brother, the company's co-founder.

The real heartbeat of this company was, is and will always be the film business.

Because from the film business comes the ideas

that then generate new things in the parks.

New promotions, new--

A kind of a sense of continuing newness about the company in general.

And when that began to fail--

And I actually, somewhere along the line, began hearing things like,

"Well, I don't think they really wanna stay in the movie business,

because it's not doing very well and we don't really even need it anyway."

And that gave me all sorts of problems, because I, you know--

I remember saying at one point, "Well, if you really think that way,

then what you're doing is running a museum."

People always talked about Roy as the idiot nephew.

That was his nickname.

Nothing could be really further from the truth.

He was smart, unassuming and powerful.

You could easily underestimate him, but you did so at your own peril.

In 1984, the corporate raider Saul Steinberg turned his sights on Disney.

He threatened to buy the company, break it up and sell the parts for a profit.

The board countered by paying Steinberg a premium to buy back his shares.

It was greenmail.

For years, Roy and his cousin-in-law, Ron Miller,

sat across the boardroom table.

And now the two were at odds

with how the board was handling the takeover threat.

And we finally came to the conclusion that we can't do anything on the inside,

because I'm the lone voice of dissent on this board.

So I resigned from the board of directors.

And it got enormous amounts of attention.

I had a stack the next morning of phone messages

that probably was three, four inches deep.

One of the messages in that stack was Eisner.

And I had known Michael

because he'd come maybe a year before that on to the board at CalArts.

Michael wasn't an M.B.A. He was an English major.

He grew up in New York,

where one of his first jobs was programming kids' television for ABC.

And Michael had an amazing track record coming from Paramount.

He'd had hits, Oscar nominations, Terms of Endearment.

He was a winner when he was hired to come in and run Disney.

He also was a man who liked to blow things up.

It was Frank Wells that gave Roy the idea of making Michael the chairman.

Frank and Roy were classmates at Pomona College in the early '50s.

I thought, you know, Frank's more of a businessman

and Michael is a little nuts.

And the two together kind of in some ways made me think of Walt and my dad.

So we began saying, "How would you two like to take this job?"

There's been a management shake-up in the Magic Kingdom of Disney.

Two Hollywood studio executives have been chosen

to run Walt Disney Productions,

the first time outsiders have been brought in at the top.

The Disney board of directors chose Michael Eisner

of Paramount Pictures as chairman,