At Rolly Crump’s memorial service a few months ago Disney legend, Bob Gurr, who had been heavily involved in Leslie Iwerks’ six-part documentary, The Imagineering Story (2019), approached the filmmaker/author to tell her how much a particular scene in the documentary had meant to him.
The scene, which Iwerks showed during her talk at the Walt Disney Family Museum on July 15th, 2023, followed Gurr as he takes Iwerks and her small crew inside the backstage areas of the classic Disneyland attraction, The Matterhorn Bobsleds (1959 — current) which he had designed. After showing Iwerks the fabled half-basketball court that takes up the break room area near the top of the mountain, he shows her a wall where Cast Members who have worked the attraction over the last 64 years had signed their names.
“Why have you never signed it?” she asked.
“I am not one of the cast members who have worked the attraction over the last 60 years.”
“Would you like to sign it?” she asks.
“As the designer of the attraction, yes I would!”
Evidently, Leslie Iwerks just asking opened something emotional up in the fabled Imagineer.
Iwerks’ nearly 90-minute discussion chronicling the journey of this film and book project which has occupied nearly a decade of her life was a fascinating follow-up discussion for fans of the project, peppered with these sorts of after-the-fact and left-on-the-cutting-room-floor anecdotes as well as some warm tributes to the Imagineers that had welcomed her into their process.
Starting with a discussion of her legendary family — her grandfather, the legendary animator and inventor Ub Iwerks (1901–1971), and her father, also a Disney Legend, Imagineer Don Iwerks (1929 — ). She told a number of anecdotes about the two men. She described how she and her sister, after finding rubbery versions of her father’s hands — famously used as the model for Lincoln in Disneyland’s Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln (1964 — current) — would hide them around their childhood home to shock guests. And in tribute to her grandfather, a titan in the field of both animation and Imagineering, she couldn’t help but toss in the myth-busting story of Walt Disney asking Ub to design four new creations after they had lost the rights to their prior hit character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and how Walt had then chosen, from these drawings, the mouse soon to be named Mickey.
After a history of her prodigious career as a filmmaker, Iwerks tackled the matter at hand, the Disney+ series and subsequent book: The Imagineering Story. With film clips, readings from the book, and stories that either hadn’t made the cut or had happened since the book’s publication, fans of the Disney parks got a richer view of the behind-the-scenes creative process than they ever had before. Breaking down the successes of Imagineering as a combination of three factors — Teamwork, Innovation, and Out of the Box Thinking — she gave examples from the series and book to demonstrate each.
For “Teamwork,” Iwerks chose the evolution of Disneyland’s Enchanted Tiki Room (1963 — current) — following an idea of Walt Disney’s for a restaurant in the park which then got refined by artist/Imagineers John Hench and Rolly Crump, dressed by costumer/Imagineer Harriet Burns, leveraged the audio-animatronic work of Imagineer Wathel Rogers and, finally, harnessed the narrative talents of the Sherman Brothers, Larry Clemens and Marty Sklar. Iwerks showed an attraction gaining its identity through the teamwork of a progression of different innovators across many disciplines: an idea far removed and much improved from its origin because of the liberal interplay of many ideas.
To showcase the idea of “Innovation” Iwerks told the story of the Mr. Lincoln animatronic, starting with a still shot of a scorched and melted early run of the figure. Through uncatalogued images that Iwerks had found in Imagineering headquarters and interviews, she could show the arduous trial and error that it took to invent this new form of sculpture/animation: audio-animatronics. No one had tried automation to this scale before and the Imagineers invented it from the ground up to serve the story need of the Lincoln attraction at the 1964 World’s Fair.
And for the idea of “Out of the Box Thinking”, Iwerks embraced the story of Joe Rohde and the pitch for Disney’s Animal Kingdom. Two challenges had to be overcome: why was this a different experience than other zoos — in what way was this special? — and how were they going to avoid the sort of stinging controversy they had just endured with the failed Disney’s America project?
Rohde and his team’s work with the finest animal experts in the world — a beautiful picture of Rohde and Jane Goodall underlined the process — solved both problems. By demonstrating the almost primal immediacy of invisible, landscape-based, separation between the guests and animal residents, a new experience could be had for both where visitors can feel a connection with — and perhaps respectful intimidation from — the animals who, without visible cages or constraints, are relaxed and comfortable. The process of pitching and building this park re-invented both what a human’s relationship to the creatures outside of their comfort zone could be as well as what constitutes “themed entertainment,” and it all emerged from a healthy skepticism about what Disney normally does and how animals are meant to interact with us.
Around this three-pronged framework for the success of Imagineering, Iwerks delighted the crowd with asides about famous Imagineers (“Kevin Rafferty started his career as a dishwasher at Disneyland and Tony Baxter was an ice-cream scooper.”), the parks (“Shanghai Disneyland opened on the hottest recorded day in Chinese history.”) and about her famous family (“Diane Disney Miller encouraged my dad to write the book about Ub.” “Walt and Ub had a business together for about minute. They called it ‘Iwerks-Disney’ because Walt thought ‘Disney-Iwerks’ sounded like some sort of optician.”)
A generous and insightful speaker, she spent a considerable amount of time with people signing books and chatting after the program ended.
It was a terrific day in beautiful San Francisco to see a great artist discuss her work about the creation process behind Disney magic. And if you haven’t seen the series or read the book, what are you waiting for?
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Kelly McCubbin is a columnist for Boardwalk Times
