Disney’s Hollywood dream elusive at park
Ex-MGM Studios evolves as original aspirations falter
The stars — Audrey Hepburn, George Lucas and Kevin Costner among them — arrived in limousines on a rainy day for the official grand opening of Disney’s new park in 1989.
Instead of roller coasters and thrill rides like a traditional theme park, Disney-MGM Studios aspired to be something different — a place to make movies and TV shows. Could it help Orlando become Hollywood East?
But that vision — a place where tourists could see real moviemaking magic at work — faltered over the years. The studios that were supposed to produce the hits shut down. The animators packed up their desks. The Mouseketeers from “The Mickey Mouse Club” grew up.
Almost 30 years later, the park’s identity is still changing, appealing to those who grew up on “Toy Story” and lifelong Star Wars fans as Disney prepares to open two new lands there by fall 2019. The dream of turning the park — now called Disney’s Hollywood Studios — into Hollywood East has long since faded away.
The park has evolved to become immersive, Disney says.
“Guests now more than ever before want to be in the middle of the action,” said Phil Holmes, Disney’s vice president of the park.
At 29, Merri Bennett, a former TV anchor from Michigan, packed her clothes in her 1970 red Chevrolet Chevette and left for an adventure — moving to Florida — in 1989. Having loved Disney since she was a kid, she checked into a hotel and auditioned for a job at the soon-to-be-opening Disney-MGM Studios.
Bennett was amazed by what she saw as she landed a job that put her within an arm’s reach of the famous.
“It was electric,” she said. “I’d never seen anything like that before in my entire life.”
The stakes were high as it was the first theme park that Disney CEO Michael Eisner built from scratch.
“That park could not fail,” said Ted Kaye, a retired vice president of film and tape production at Disney. “It was not allowed to fail.”
Paying the $29 admission, the crowds clogged up the theme park and flocked to the Great Movie Ride, which featured live actors and 100 new audio-animatronics that were the first of its kind at Disney.
The park had three sound stages, a promise of what it could become. A studio backlot tour also revealed an inside look at sound effects and how television was made.
It was so busy that sometimes the parking lot filled and visitors had to be turned away, said John Wilson, an operations manager at the studios in 1989.
“People had to go there,” he said. “It was organized chaos.”
The employees sensed the magic happening around them.
“You just got the feeling you’re working in the center of the universe,” said Wilson, who regularly led celebrity visitors such as Lucas, Harrison Ford, Warren Beatty and Danny DeVito on tours.
“Christie Brinkley. Absolutely delightful,” said Wilson, now 67, of Winter Garden. “Billy Joel? Not so much.”
The chance of seeing a real, bonafide celebrity was quite real. Maybe Orlando was becoming like the starfilled Los Angeles as Mary Tyler Moore, Molly Ringwald, Sylvester Stallone and others thrust their hands into cement at the star ceremonies held at the park’s replica of L.A.’s Chinese Theatre.
In 1990, there was even talk of Disney executives no longer calling it a theme park to emphasize the working studio to serious filmmakers.
It was Kaye’s job to sell producers on coming to Central Florida. Sometimes, the executive showed off Disney’s expansive property and the Central Florida scenery from a helicopter and would say, “There’s nothing you can’t do here.”
But 12 miles away, Disney faced competition from a rival. Universal Studios Florida had twice as much production space as Disney when it opened in 1988.
Universal’s produced shows included TV’s slimefilled “Super Sloppy Double Dare,” which became Nickelodeon’s biggest hit, and the movie “Parenthood” starring Steve Martin and directed by Ron Howard. At least some of Universal’s sound stages are still in use today. The company recently announced it has revived “Deal or No Deal,” with Howie Mandel as host, that’s being produced in Orlando.
The challenge for both Universal and Disney was drawing steady work.
“You can’t do one movie,” Kaye said. “You have got to have them constantly coming through.”
But the constant rapid-fire line of movies shooting never happened.
Producers and actors weren’t thrilled about tourists watching them on the job at the theme park, Kaye said. They felt like goldfish in a bowl, the world peering at them.
The sound stages weren’t always empty.
“The Mickey Mouse Club” was produced five days a week at the studios and became the launching point for several unknown future mega-stars such as Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake.
“There’s a reason Disney was able to move ‘The Mickey Mouse Club’ there,” said Kaye, now 70 and living in California. “It was a cable show on a Disney network and they controlled all the elements.’’
Yet, the dream of recreating Tinsel Town in Florida was falling short.
“Studios are not sound stages. Studios are where decisions are made,” Kaye said. “The people who are the real decision-makers are happy on the beach in Malibu, and that’s where they want to stay.”
Florida couldn’t compete with other states and Canada, which offered tax incentives, although he doesn’t think that would have been enough to significantly influence production at Disney.
“I was working with the team at Burbank. We spent a bucketful of money bringing producers down and trying to entice them ... At the end of the day, it wasn't to be,” Kaye said. “We gave it our best shot.’’
Some success stories happened.
Orlando animators contributed to some of Disney’s most beloved animated movies, such as “Aladdin” and “Beauty and the Beast.” In “Lion King,” 22 of its 85 minutes were produced at Disney-MGM.
At one point, Orlando had 350 animators — many of whom were in their 20s and too naive to realize the enormous pressure they faced. Pre-internet, they sometimes practiced making faces in the mirror to draw their characters’ expressions just right or studied nature documentaries frame by frame.
Their defining moment came with 1998’s “Mulan,” the first Disney animated feature made anywhere outside of Burbank, Calif.
A few years later, the Orlando animators created another surprise hit — “Lilo & Stitch,” which generated nearly $300 million at the box office.
“I started to think, ‘We’ve had such an amazing run. What happens if something changes?’ ” said Dominic Carola, a lead character animator.
But the business was evolving as 3-D computer animated movies such as the “Toy Story” franchise and “Shrek” made millions.
In 2004, Walt Disney Co. shuttered Orlando’s facility and announced that from then on, all animated films would be made under one roof in Burbank.
The announcement was “sad and disappointing,” but not a surprise, said Carola, who stayed in Orlando and formed his own production company where he sometimes works with former Disney colleagues.
“There’s still a number of people at the studios who believe if Disney had been smart, they would have left the Florida animation studio in place,” said Jim Hill, who runs a blog and podcast that covers theme parks. “They made some really great movies.”
Kaye doesn’t regard the park as a failure even though Hollywood East never materialized. It just morphed into something different than what the Walt Disney Co. originally envisioned, he said.
“Disney finally said, ‘This is a theme park. We have to treat it like one. It’s not really a production center,’” he said. “When they had to change it, they were bright enough and motivated enough to say, ‘OK. That didn’t work.’ ”
For Bennett, her time at Disney-MGM Studios was joyful. She remembers believing in the Hollywood magic with her group of tight-knit co-workers.
“I have no desire to go back,” said Bennett, now 56 and back in Michigan. “It was perfect. I don’t want to destroy those memories.”