#158 Walt Disney (Disneyland)

What I learned from reading Disney’s Land: Walt Disney and the Invention of the Amusement Park That Changed the World by Richard Snow. ---- [1:29] In Disney's Land, popular historian Richard Snow brilliantly presents the entire spectacular story, a wild ride from vision to realization that reflects the uniqueness of the man determined to build “the happiest place on earth” with a watchmaker's precision, an artist's conviction, and the desperate, high-hearted recklessness of a riverboat gambler. [4:13] When he reached middle age it seemed that we were going to witness an all too familiar process—the conversion of the tired artist into the tired businessman. When in 1955 we heard that Disney had opened an amusement park under his own name, it appeared certain that we could not look forward to anything new from Mr. Disney. We were quite wrong. He had, instead, created his masterpiece. [4:58] Walt Disney was an obsessive with soul in the game. [5:26] Disney’s father didn’t believe children should have toys. [14:50] One small enterprise did please him, though, and it had little to do with the art he had done so much to invent and of which he was the undisputed master. [15:09] He was dismayed to find the man whose work he had long admired “seemed totally uninterested in movies and seemed wholly, almost weirdly concerned with the building of a miniature railroad engine and a string of cars. All of his zest for invention, for creative fantasies, seemed to be going into this plaything.” [17:15] Disney on his nervous breakdown: “I had a hell of a breakdown. I went to pieces. I kept expecting more from the artists and when they let me down, I got worried. Costs were going up and it was always way over what they figured the picture would bring in. I just got very irritable. I got to a point that it couldn't talk on the telephone. I would begin to cry.” [17:49] The money wasn't coming in. His last successful feature, Bambi, was six years in the past. [22:19] Why would you want to get involved in an amusement park? They're so dirty, and not fun at all for grownups. Why would you want to get involved in a business like that? He fielded the question the way he would countless times during Disneyland's germination. "That's exactly the point. Mine isn't going to be that way." [25:25] Disney’s friend’s reaction to hearing the plans for Disneyland: While he talked, becoming more and more enthusiastic by the minute, I began to grow more and more concerned. I hardly knew how to tell him that, for once, he was making what would probably be the biggest, most ruinous mistake of his life. What could I say? I knew he was wrong. [28:00] He never lost his calm understanding that the company's prosperity, rested not on the rock of conventional business practices, but on the churning, extravagant perfectionist, imagination of his younger brother. [38:48] You asked the question, What was your process like? I kind of laugh because process is an organized way of doing things. I have to remind you, during the “Walt Period” of designing Disneyland, we didn't have processes. We just did the work. Processes came later. All of these things had never been done before. Walt had gathered up all of these people who had never designed a theme park, never designed a Disneyland. So we’re all in the same boat at one time, and we figure out what to do and how to do it on the fly as we go along with it and not even discuss plans, timing, or anything. We just worked and Walt just walked around and had suggestions. [40:24] He told a parable. Two men are laying bricks. Somebody asked one of them what he's doing, and is told, “I’m laying bricks.” To the same question, the other man answers, “I’m building a cathedral.” [47:32] Disney was asked what he thought was his greatest accomplishment. “To be able to build an organization and hang onto it.” [48:00] The way I see it, Disneyland will never be finished. It's something we can keep developing and adding to. . . I’ve always wanted to work on something alive, something that keeps growing. We've got that in Disneyland. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  Hey there. Real quick before we get into this episode on Walt Disney, a few people reached out to me this week asking how to buy gift prescriptions. So I'm just gonna leave a link in the show notes if you're interested in doing that. And thanks, as always, for helping spread the word about Founders.

• 0:15David Senra?

  One day in the early 1950s, Walt Disney stood looking out over 240 acres of farmland in Anaheim, California, and imagined building a park where people could live among Mickey Mouse and Snow White in a world still powered by steam and fire for a day or a week, or if the visitor is slightly mad, forever. Despite his fame and success, exactly no one wanted Disney to build such a park. Not his brother Roy, who ran the company's finances, not the bankers, and not his wife Lillian. Amusement parks at that time were a generally despised business. Disney was told that he would be headed towards financial ruin.

• 0:56David Senra?

  But Walt persevered, initially financing the park against his own life insurance policy. He assembled a talented team of engineers, architects, artists, animators, landscapers, and even a retired admiral to transform his ideas into a soaring, yet soothing, wonderland. The catch was that they only had a year and a day in which to build it. On July 17, 1955, Disneyland opened its gates, and the first day was a disaster. Disney was nearly suicidal with grief that he had failed on a grand scale. But the curious masses kept coming, and the rest is entertainment history.

• 1:39David Senra?

  800 million visitors have flocked to the iconic park since then. In Disney's Land, popular historian Richard Snow brilliantly presents the entire spectacular story, a wild ride from vision to realization that reflects the uniqueness of the man determined to build the happiest place on Earth, with a watchmaker's precision, an artist's conviction, and the desperate, high-hearted recklessness of a riverboat gambler.

• 2:10David Senra?

  That was from the back cover of the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Disney's Land: Walt Disney and the Invention of the Amusement Park That Changed the World, and it was written by Richard Snow. So I actually found this book unexcited. I wasn't expecting to do this book this week. I was in a bookstore, just randomly looking through the biography in the business section, and I saw this book. I picked it up, read that back cover, I was like, "Oh, I'm going to buy this right now." And I started reading it, and I couldn't put it down. So that's a great indicator that that's the book that I should be talking about this week. And what I didn't realize until after I had already started reading the book was that I had read another one of Richard Snow's books. So I think all the way back on Founder's Number Eight, maybe? I read his book called "I Invented the Modern Age: The Rise of Henry Ford."

• 2:55David Senra?

  And there's a paragraph in that book that I thought was just hilarious. It's how he came up with the name of that book. I'm just going to read it to you real quick. "One day towards the end of his life, Ford was talking with a local high school boy named John Dallinger, and they got onto the subject of education. Ford spoke of the virtues of the McGruffins' reader era." That's how he educated himself when he was younger. "And that sounded pretty futzy to Dallinger. But sir, he protested, these are different times. This is the modern age." And, "Young man, Ford snapped, I invented the modern age. The claim is as preposterous as it is megalomaniacal. It is also largely true." That's one of my favorite paragraphs that Richard Snow ever wrote. I thought it was fantastic the way he summed that up. So back to Disney.

• 3:40David Senra?

  This is the third book I read on him. I was actually shocked. I went back. So I've done Founder's Number Two and Founder's Number Thirty-Nine on Disney, and I cannot believe I let this much time pass before reading another book on him. He's one of the most influential entrepreneurs and inspiring entrepreneurs to ever live. I want to read this quote that's at the very beginning of the book, which I found remarkable because- When I read Triumph of the American Imagination by Neil Gabler, that was the book I covered on, it's the most comprehensive biography of Walt Disney, I think, ever written. It was on Founder's Number Two. I was really shocked, because going into that book, I knew of Disney through animation, through cartoons. I didn't know

• 4:23David Senra?

  his favorite project he ever worked on was Disneyland. And so I want to read this quote that's right at the beginning of the book. He says, "When he reached middle age, it seemed that we were going to witness an all-too-familiar process: the conversion of the tired artist into the tired businessman. When in 1955, we heard that Disney had opened an amusement park under his own name, it appeared certain that we would not look forward to anything new from Mr. Disney. We were quite wrong. He had instead created his masterpiece." So I want to start with a good way to think about the importance of Disneyland and then getting into Walt's early life. So it says, "Disneyland is the extension of the powerful

• 5:04David Senra?

  personality of one man. It is not, like many perfectly good modern theme parks, a consensus on what might make a nice place." So if you're, this is the first time you're studying and learning about Walt Disney, he's an obsessive with Soul and the Game. I put him up there with people, the fanatical people, that were very concerned about the quality of their products, like Steve Jobs, Enzo Ferrari, Henry Royce of Rolls-Royce fame. He's the same exact breed of person. And so the idea that he's going to design from consensus is just not going to happen. "At the age of nine, Walt was climbing out of bed every morning at 3:30 in the morning to go to work. He was delivering newspapers in the snow. Disney's father didn't believe children should have toys, but on nice mornings, I

• 5:47David Senra?

  used to come to houses with those big old porches, and the kids would have left some of their toys out. I would find them and play with them there on the porch at 4:00 in the morning, when it was just barely getting light. Then I'd have to tear back and go back to my paper route again." More about his father, his joyless father. His father incubated a peculiar, joyless blend of grim Protestant work ethic and socialism. His mother did her best to soften things for the boys, sometimes handing them slices of bread buttered on the bottom so their father wouldn't see them being spoiled with such a luxury. So his father's a very hard man, just like Disney. Disney winds up being very stingy with praise.

• 6:28David Senra?

  And as soon as all of his sons got to the age, they tried to go as far away from him as possible. So it gives you an idea of his early life. Does not sound like a very nice person to be around. Their farm, this is before they moved to the city, they're working at the farm, Disney's really young. Their farm, like every farm, demanded hard work, which in this case was thankless. Elias Disney, that's his father's name, believed that using fertilizer on a crop was like giving whiskey to an alcoholic. He refused to do it with the predictable results. And this is where the author goes into, like, growing up in this kind of environment, how this probably influenced what Disney chose to work on later in his life. For one who spent so much of his working life celebrating the virtues of family, he

• 7:13David Senra?

  was eager to get away from his. He was turned down by the army because of his youth, so he forged an earlier date on his birth certificate. And in September of 1918, the 16-year-old joined the Red Cross as an ambulance driver. He arrived in France shortly after, which was very surprising to me. I read the biography of Ray Kroc, the founder of the McDonald's franchise system. And he talked about, he volunteered for the Red Cross and he served in France during World War I. And he says, "There was this strange kid," this is in his book, grinding it out. He says, "There was this strange kid that when we all went out and, you know, got drinks or went out to party at night, he would stay back in the barracks and draw cartoons." He's like, "His name was Walt Disney."

• 7:55David Senra?

  So they actually served in the same, the same Red Cross division, which was interesting. He talked to, so he comes back after the war's over. He talked his way into an enterprise called The Pezmin Rubin Commercial Art Studio. This is where he starts drawing and doing marketing for companies. For a few weeks, he had a fine time making advertising layouts, writing copy, and designing program covers for local movie houses. Disney, this was a seasonal job. So he winds up getting let go. Disney was out on the January streets along with another brief hire. This is somebody becomes rather important. It's just one of his first business partners. This is a guy named Oob Earwicks. Have no idea if I'm pronouncing that correctly, by the way.

• 8:37David Senra?

  Disney liked Earwicks and suggested the optimistic idea that they form a partnership. They did. The fetal business founded in weeks, but Disney wrangled a job that's, he has, I think, two, at least two failed companies before he starts the Disney company, maybe even three. The fetal business founded in weeks, but Disney wrangled a job at the Kansas City Film Ad Company. So before he moves to California, he's in Kansas City. And soon, he got the firm to hire Earwicks. Their new employer produced minute-long promotional films for local businesses that ran in the city's movie houses. Even for that morning time of animation, the very beginning days of the animation industry, these were crude. Disney, now the reason I bring this up is because the next paragraph, this is something Disney does his entire life.

• 9:22David Senra?

  Disney immediately sought more advanced technology, as he would for the rest of his career. He found books on animation, borrowed a camera, and started experimenting. From the time he starts working until the time he dies, he's always focused on improving his work. Soon, he was producing short cartoons, cartoon ads that he called "laughograms." Then he made longer cartoons drawn from fairy tales. He went bankrupt in 1923 after completing an ambitious project called Alice's Wonderland. But he doesn't give up there. He sends out his work on Alice's Wonderland to a film distributor, he sends it to a film distributor named Margaret Winkler.

• 10:04David Senra?

  She gave Disney a contract to make six Alice episodes. So these are the very first cartoons he's making. He began hiring a larger staff and persuaded Oob Earwicks to join him again. Alice's Wonderland ran out of steam in 1927. Margaret Winkler had then turned over the distribution business to her husband, Charles Mintz. This guy is going to be a scumbag. And a theme that we see through all these books is they're constantly lecturing us that you need to control. Anything that's important to your business or your work, you should control it. Disney says the same things is because this guy is going to wind up ripping them off. Who urged Disney to come up with something new that he could market through Universal Pictures.

• 10:44David Senra?

  Disney responded with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, which proved a solid success. He confidently went to meet with Mintz and asked for more money. Mintz offered him less money. Disney indignantly refused and discovered that not only did Universal own the rights to Oswald, therefore Disney didn't have control, but that Mintz had hired away his entire animation staff. The steely distributor told him, either you come with me at my price, or I'll take your organization away from you. Disney never hesitated. You're not going to say that to somebody like Walt Disney. He's like, alright, I'm out of here. I'm not coming with you. I'm going to start brand new. This is the lore of the creation of Mickey Mouse. He takes this long train ride back to California from New York City.

• 11:27David Senra?

  He's with his wife and on this, the myth, it could be true, it's purported to be true, that on that train ride is when he draws Mickey Mouse. He wants to name it Mortimer Mouse. And his wife's like, that's the stupidest name ever. Like, that's a terrible name. And she actually gave him the name Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse was introduced to the world. For his third Mickey short, Disney hired an orchestra and Steamboat Willie was the first sound cartoon. So we see him constantly wanting to innovate. He made the first sound cartoon. He doesn't stop there. And what's amazing about the career of Walt Disney is once he does something, he gets bored. He's not like, I'm not going to sit here and just make more sound cartoons. Then I'll make feature-length films.

• 12:09David Senra?

  And he just keeps going and going and always trying to expound on his ideas. Mickey Mouse has a bigger following. This is talking about how successful Mickey Mouse, you know, he built his entire empire. Later in his life, Disney has a great quote. He's like, I hope we never forget that it all started with a mouse. So anyways, this Hollywood reporter is talking about how important Mickey Mouse, like how big it was. He says Mickey Mouse has a bigger following than nine tenths of the stars in Hollywood. Disney's cartoons became subtler and more fluent. He added color to them and began to garner Academy Awards. In 1933, now keep in mind, this is 22 years before he starts working on Disneyland, right?

• 12:50David Senra?

  In 1933, he released what one media historian has called the most successful short animation of all time. That's The Three Little Pigs. The whole story of Disney is just one innovation after another, one accolade after another. It's really remarkable. Urged to make a sequel of The Three Little Pigs, he declined. His terse refusal, a fine showing business apathism? I don't know how to pronounce that word, but it's like a short saying. You can't top pigs with pigs. He was tiring of making short films. In 1934, he embarked on making the first feature-length cartoon. He had budgeted a half million dollars for Snow White and the Seven Choruses. It ended up consuming a million and a half. He was terrible with numbers. He has another great quote, he's like, "We're innovating, I'll tell you what it costs when we're done."

• 13:34David Senra?

  Same thing, I think he said, he thought Disneyland was gonna cost him like a million and a half, something like that. Let's say $2 million maybe, and it wound up being 17 million, which I think is the equivalent of like 160 million today. So this is not surprising. So yeah, Snow White, I'll do it for, I think I could do it for half a million dollars. Winds up being, what, three times that? So it takes a million and a half dollars in four years. By the time it was released in 1937, it had become known in Hollywood as Disney's folly, right? That's why I was like, oh, this guy's gonna fail. Wrong. Snow White was a triumph, the biggest hit of 1938, and the most profitable sound film ever made. The next couple of years were the most satisfying Disney would know until he began to toy with the idea of an amusement park. Things soured for him quickly.

• 14:19David Senra?

  His next two features performed tepidly at the box office, partly because of the war, that's World War II, partly because the war choked off his European market. Revenues dwindled, and he had to take his company public.

• 14:33David Senra?

  He almost lost his company, actually. And deep salary cuts triggered an ugly strike at the studio. The strike only lasted five weeks, but it left Disney with a lifelong grievance, one thing that he never got over. And this is where, the point in his life where he kinda, he's looking for something new. He's not satisfied with his work anymore. He kinda goes off into hobbies and I wouldn't say he becomes a recluse, but he's definitely withdrawn from the studio. This is what his daughter Diane wrote about this time. "I think it was just after the war when nothing seemed to stimulate him. I could sort of sense it. I could tell he wasn't pleased with anything he was doing. One small enterprise did please him, though, and it had little to do with the art that he had done so much to invent and of which he was the undisputed master." That is a hell of a sentence.

• 15:17David Senra?

  "The art, he had done so much to invent and of which he was the undisputed master." Completely turned his back on animation. "He was dismayed." So this is, some guy comes to visit him, a film critic. I think he's at his house. He says, "He was dismayed to find the man whose work he had long admired seemed totally uninterested in movies and seemed wholly, almost weirdly concerned with the building of a miniature railroad engine and a string of cars." I'm gonna pause here. I'll finish the rest of the sentence in a minute. That's when I first read Neil Gable's book. I was like, "Why is this guy spending so much time building this miniature replica of a railroad? I thought it was the weirdest midlife crisis one could have."

• 15:59David Senra?

  "All of his zest for invention, for creative fantasies, seemed to be going into this play thing." And what's really interesting is talking about how he felt before he found something he could pour all his love in. This is what I meant about an obsessive, a soul in the game. If they don't have an outlet, like the professional outlet is what they value most in life, besides their family. And in some cases, like in the Ferrari's case, more than their family, besides the son, obviously. He says he never loved anybody except his son. He's like, he didn't believe it was possible for a man to love a woman. I mean, that's how extreme he was, but he loved his cars. But anyways, there's, I wanna read this, this is where Disney's on the verge of a nervous breakdown before Disneyland, okay? So there's also something in this book, not in this book, the other two books I read about him, too.

• 16:45David Senra?

  He's got towards the end of his career. At the end of every day, on the studio lot, there's this, he has a professional masseuse. Her name is Hazel George. He meets with her every day, strips down naked, drinks Scotch and is massaged by this woman. She's the last person he ever says goodbye to when he leaves the studio for the last time. So I'm going to bring it, he's talking, I'm going to tell you what he's saying during one of these massage sessions. During their sessions in 1948, Hazel George began to sense that her boss was singing into what seemed to her to be a dangerous depression, perhaps a nervous breakdown. And this is not the first time in his career that this happened to him.

• 17:30David Senra?

  He'd had one, or something like one, back in 1931. He said at that time that I had had a hell of a breakdown. I went to pieces. I kept expecting more from the artist and when they let me down, I got worried. I would just pound, pound, pound. Costs were going up and it was always way over what they figured the picture would bring in. I just got very irritable. I got to a point that I couldn't talk on the telephone. I would begin to cry. Now it seemed again to be just pound, pound, pound. Once more, the money wasn't coming in. His last successful feature, Bambi, was six years in the past and Cinderella was nowhere near finished.

• 18:13David Senra?

  Disney was often aggrieved, abrupt, and when not angry, he was remote. And so it's just during this nervous breakdown, this depression, he starts spending less time at the studio, starts spending all this time building, he's going to call it the Lily Bell, named after his wife, this very realistic miniature railroad at the house he's building. It's got a tunnel, I mean, I think he spent like a couple hundred thousand dollars on this thing. And he's going to different places all across the country, researching, like he just came completely obsessed with locomotives and railroads. So he goes to this railroad fair with another one of his employees and this is where he gets the blueprints. These are the early blueprints, the early inspiration for what he's eventually going

• 18:58David Senra?

  to build at Disneyland. And he's at this railroad fair and his idea at the time, amusement parks were thought of like, you know, they're kind of ghetto, like shitty, just shitty places to go. Well, you'd have like, theme parks built upon a theme that were temporary. And they usually be like, a world fair, or a fair, like in this case, a railroad fair. And this is where he's gonna get a lot of ideas. So it says, "What impressed him most were the fair's ancillary exhibitions. One could see some of the spores that would blow into Disneyland in the guidebook's description." This is how they were marketing it. "In its acres of exhibits, the Railroad Fair offers hours of fascinating enjoyment, intriguing pageantry, invaluable education. Taken back to the early days when an unbelievable American..."

• 19:42David Senra?

  No, that's not... What's that word? I gotta go back on the page. Hold on. "When an unbelieving American looked askance at the first wood-burning locomotive, you will move rapidly forward to the mammoth streamliners..." That's what they're calling the railroads, the modern railroads they're building, or locomotives. "...that beckon the way into our own tomorrow. Each exhibit will prove an exciting and entirely different chapter in a stirring melodrama. One railroad will take you into a primitive Indian countryside. Another, a way to the playgrounds of Florida, or the romantic old French Quarter of New Orleans." So you have this circle. Think of it like a wheel with spokes coming out.

• 20:26David Senra?

  This is where you start, and then you have all these lands. That's exactly what Disneyland is, right? It talks about, they're dressed up. Everything in, if you're going to the French Quarter of New Orleans, the people are speaking the right language. They have the same uniforms on that people would have in the back of the day. So he really takes this idea and runs with it. "There was gumbo to be had in the recreated French Quarter, and the people who served it were dressed in period costumes. The exhibits added up to a coherent whole, the growth of America told in three dimensions, a history lesson you could walk through. Although the term's still lay in the future, Walt Disney was visiting a theme park." Kimball, that's who he's with, and Disney stayed at the fair for several days. And then they made another crucial stop on their way home at Henry Ford's 20-year-old

• 21:11David Senra?

  Greenfield Village. I do not think Henry Ford's still alive at this time. As the richest American, he was able to collect on a Titanic scale. So they're talking about the similarities between Henry Ford and Disney. And one similarity is that they are both nostalgic. So it talks about some of the things Ford purchased and sent to this Greenfield Village. He bought Thomas Edison's Menlo Park laboratory. He collected the homes of people he admired. Noah Webster's, Noah Webster's, which is the slave cabin where George Washington Carver was born, Harvey Firestone's childhood farm, a courthouse where Abraham Lincoln practiced law. These are actual buildings. He literally bought them and had them transported over here. He acquired not only the Wright Brothers' house, but the bicycle shop where they conducted their momentous experiments.

• 21:56David Senra?

  Ford was not recreating the past. Instead, he was building a vision of what most appealed to him about it. Ford's town was an entirely, this is the main point of why I'm telling you this about this section. Ford's town was an entirely personal reflection of the man. So would Disney's be the roadmap of Walt Disney's life? So one thing Walt had to overcome is everybody told him, it's like, this is a dumb idea. Why, like, why are you building an amusement park? They're terrible things. And I love this, like, they're saying something that's true. At the time, amusement parks were terrible. He's like, that's the point. I have an opportunity because there's so much room for improvement. That's a very powerful idea. Why would you want to get involved in an amusement park? They're so dirty and not, and not fun at all for grownups.

• 22:41David Senra?

  Why would you want to get involved in a business like that? He fielded the question the way he would countless times during Disneyland's germination. That's exactly the point. Mine isn't going to be that way. Mine's going to be a place that's clean, where the whole family can do things together. And that part reminds me of what Henry Royce said about his, he's like, I didn't innovate when I was building a Rolls Royce. He's like, I just made every single part of the, that goes into an automobile, better. And it was a combination of those improvements that created something entirely new. I feel that's what Disney was doing when he was building upon the lack of quality from amusement parks. Like, I'm going to improve every aspect of it, and I'm going to make it better. I'm going to make something new as a byproduct of that. This is how Walt described Disneyland a few years before it was built.

• 23:26David Senra?

  Walt was quoted as saying, "Disneyland will be something of a fair, an exhibition, a playground, a community center, a museum of living facts, and a showplace of beauty and magic." So as he gets going with the idea, he hires the Stanford Research Institute to find out where he should put the park. He hasn't done any research and stuff. First, I thought it was really interesting, the two people they hired, their names are Woody and Buzz, which I found fascinating, because you know, what, 55 years later Pixar's gonna make a movie? With the two main characters being Woody and Buzz, and then Disney's gonna buy that company? I just thought it was really weird, or really interesting, rather. And this is what, one of the guys, Buzz, his last name is Price, he's saying, he was like, "This is a bizarre..." This is his reaction to Disney's idea.

• 24:11David Senra?

  So it says, "It sounded strange, unlike anything you would expect in an amusement park. At the time when most parks were planned as a grid with four-side access, Disney outlined a design concept of a single park entrance passing through a turn-of-the-century Main Street, which would end in a circular plaza or town square. The area would then feed off radially into four thematic activity areas: The World of Tomorrow, Fantasyland, Frontierland, and Adventureland. Whereas most amusement parks wanted all the street visibility they could get, Walt's entire park would be hidden from the outside world. He was talking about customized rides, exhibits, and attractions, instead of the standard,

• 24:55David Senra?

  off-the-shelf Ferris wheel and tunnel of love. Rides would be subordinate to story and setting. Most shockingly, there were no thrill rides. Price could not imagine such a place without the roller coaster. But most alarming, this entertainment anomaly had to be open in just two years." So once he secures the land in Anaheim, which is like just Orange Groves at the time, he's bringing all, he's bringing a bunch of his friends out, you know, usually on 101, and he just brings them out there, he sees, the people he brings, he sees just a giant field, Orange Groves, right? But Disney is visualizing and telling the story of what this will, he's gonna transform this into. And this is, this was funny to me.

• 25:39David Senra?

  This is a friend's response to Disney's plan. While he talked, becoming more and more enthusiastic by the minute, I had begun to grow more and more concerned. I hardly knew how to tell him for once that he was making what would probably be the biggest, most ruinous mistake of his life. What could I say? I knew he was wrong. And I thought that was funny because that sentence, he's like, I knew Disney was wrong. I knew he was wrong. Everybody said that to him. So Disney sets up this secondary company outside of the Disney studio. He starts funding this through, he sells his house, he borrows against his life insurance. Eventually, he's got to bring his brother into this because his brother is the one that always took care of finances for the main Disney company. And so his brother's name is Roy.

• 26:22David Senra?

  And Roy just has a great way, he's telling the story about their relationship. He's Disney's older brother. And one, the story made me laugh. And two, it's a great way to think about Disney's life, just would not give up his persistent personality, always pushing forward. It is very interesting. So he says, Roy Disney once told him an incident that happened back in the days, 60 years earlier. Walt found a pocket knife. He was five years old and I was 13. I said, "Look, you can't trust yourself with a knife. You'll cut yourself." And I took the knife away from him. Roy was remembering this because the brothers had recently had a squabble and Walt accused me of bullying him and throwing my weight around. And he says, "You've been doing that since I was born.

• 27:07David Senra?

  I remember you took that knife away from me." Roy saw the fraternal equation differently. When Walt and I were on the farm, we had to sleep in the same bed. Now Walt was just a little guy and he was always wetting the bed. And he's been peeing on me ever since. And so as you imagine, Roy sees how determined his brother is. And this is really Roy on the futility of trying to stop Walt. And he's calling him Junior. And he's talking about his idea for a theme park. Junior's got his hand in the cookie jar again. He may have said it fatalistically because he knew that a determined Junior was almost impossible to dissuade.

• 27:47David Senra?

  And so you have to, when you're studying the career of Walt Disney, you have to bring up Roy because Walt would have never succeeded without his brother. There's two things that are happening on this page that I thought was interesting. This is the very early days of the Walt Disney Company. Walt eventually hires other animators and he stops drawing himself. And he says something that was surprising. He says, "I was never happy with anything I did as an artist." And then, this is Roy's perspective, understanding how valuable his brother was to the Disney Company. He says, "He never lost his calm understanding that the company's prosperity rested not on the rock of conventional business practices, but on the churning, extravagant, perfectionist imagination of his younger brother." Okay, moving on.

• 28:32David Senra?

  So, one of the smartest things I think Disney did was, he's like, "Where am I going to get the financing for this park? Banks will lend me a little bit, but I gotta have a major sponsor." So, at the time, Disney reminds me of George Lucas, where he was always, I think somewhere back in the 30s, maybe 35, Founder's 35, something like that, I read the biography of George Lucas. He was always focused on the next medium of storytelling. And he would, a lot of people ran away from it, but he would go towards it and try to improve on it. Disney was the same way. So, a lot of people, a lot of animators and people in the movie business thought television was terrible, like it's going to be bad for their business. He's like, "No, it's going to be good for our business."

• 29:11David Senra?

  So, at the time, all the different TV networks would want a TV show from Disney. And so, what Disney says, "Okay, I'm going to do a TV show, but to get my TV show, you have to finance my park." So, it's like the presenting sponsor of Disney then. And NBC turns him down. What's the other one? CBS, maybe? Yeah, CBS. ABC, which at the time had the moniker "Almost Broadcasting Company," because it was like the minor one, jumped at the advantage, excuse me, jumped at the opportunity, rather. And so, he just, I'm going to read, a bunch of stuff's happening here, but basically, Roy is about to go to the Northeast.

• 29:55David Senra?

  And pitch all the different networks on this new TV series that Disney's doing and saying, "Hey, to get the TV series, you need to pay for the park, too." Right? So Disney, before this can happen, though, they don't have, there's no, like, what's the idea? So Disney's like, "I'm gonna have a drawing done." Disney calls up a former employee on a Saturday morning. Okay? This guy does not work for him anymore. He meets with him to tell him about Disneyland. Then he asks him to draw a rendering by Monday, so Roy then could take it to pitch the TV networks, right? And the guy's like, "Hell, no. Like, I'm not doing this." And Disney offers to stay with him the entire time. So they wind up working 40 hours straight to get the rendering done, so Roy can take

• 30:40David Senra?

  it and see, "This is, you know, out of the mind of Walt Disney. This is what it's gonna look like." So it says, "40 hours after Disney's phone call, Ryman set down his pencil. The two men looked at the finished work. What they had conjured from Disney's vision and Ryman's patient skill was remarkably close to what, two years and many millions of dollars later, would rise from the vanished orange groves of Anaheim, California, to tease the imagination of the entire world." And so this is a little bit about Disney realizing the importance of TV early. And then just a great perspective on new industries that he's gonna end this section with. "One of the reasons Disney's broke with the United Artists in 1936 was their pushing

• 31:21David Senra?

  for the television rights to his films, something he refused to consider even at a time when there were perhaps 2,000 television receivers in the entire world. By 1948, he was saying publicly that the newcomer would help rather than harm the motion picture industry, a view that proved highly controversial in the next few years when the studios came to regard television as a homeowner does termites. Bill Walsh remembered that he was going through a period of frequently running into his boss in hallways and parking lots, when one day Disney stopped him and said, 'You, you're gonna be the producer of my TV show.'" This is the TV show he's making to advertise Disneyland, which is one big advertisement, but it's also like new programming for ABC, right?

• 32:08David Senra?

  So he says, "You're gonna be the producer of my TV show." Walt was dumbfounded. "Huh? But I don't have any experience as a television producer." And this is what I meant about, "This is just a fantastic perspective on new industries." "Who does?" Walt said, and that was that. Now, this next part, I absolutely love. These guys that he hired from the Stanford Research Institute are going to like an amusement park owner's convention kind of thing. And they give a presentation for what Disneyland, what it's gonna be, hasn't been built yet. And this is what other amusement park owners said, which I love. "The reaction was unanimous. Disneyland would not work."

• 32:51David Senra?

  They took, Buzz Price, that's the guy giving the presentation, took careful notes of the negative remarks. There were no positive ones. "Beginning with, 'All the proven moneymakers are missing. No roller coasters, no Ferris wheel, no carney games like the baseball throw.'" They said, "Without barkers along the midway," these are direct quotes from the meeting, right? "Without barkers along the midway to sell the sideshows, the marks won't go in." Listen to how they're describing their customers. Marks. What does that tell you? "There wasn't enough ride capacity to make a profit. But that was irrelevant because custom rides will never work. Anyway, they're too costly to build and liable to break down.

• 33:35David Senra?

  And besides, the public doesn't know the difference or care." Again, they're describing their customers. They have disdain for their customers. "Many of Disney's favorite projects made no sense at all. Things like the castle and the pirate ship are cute, but they aren't rides. So there's no economic reason to build them. And Main Street is loaded with things that don't produce revenue. Walt's screwy ideas about cleanliness and great landscape maintenance are economic suicide." Listen to everything they're saying. This is really wild. "He will lose his shirt by overspending on things the customer never really notices." Tell your boss to save his money. Tell him to stick to what he knows and leave the amusement business to people who know it.

• 34:18David Senra?

  The dire litany didn't frighten Walt Disney. That audience, those guys who called a paying customer a mark couldn't grasp what he had in mind. So now let me compare and contrast. You clearly see through their remarks how they think about their business, right? These are just shitty people and they have shitty products. This is how Walt is describing, this is before it's built. This is, I guess, as they're building them, right? This is how he describes it. And then at the end of this, who would you want, like, who do you want to support? Who do you want to give your money to? Who do you want to be a customer of? Listen to this. Walt wanted something more akin to a motion picture than an amusement park. This is a direct quote from him.

• 35:02David Senra?

  In designing Disneyland, we thought of the park as if it were a three dimensional film. We wanted everything that guests experience. Guests, he didn't call them marks, didn't call them suckers, didn't call them idiots. Guests. We wanted everything that guests experience, not only the show and the rides, to be an entertaining part of the story. This was a new idea. We took the most basic needs of guests and turned them into attractions. Okay, so moving on. The reason I think I love this book so much and the reason I recommend people to read it is because really it's the history of Disneyland, right? And you see the personality of the person that built it. I would say the history, the development and creation of Disneyland, it's like a microcosm

• 35:44David Senra?

  for the creation of any kind of worthy endeavor, like a new company or whatever the case is. And you see the inevitable ups and downs. It's just very interesting. And something I was, this next few sentences I'm going to read to you, what I really thought of was like, damn, this was not, it was not easy to not quit. It was an almost impossible goal to have. And I think reading about something that seemed impossible from the outside and being successfully completed is very inspiring. So he's about to run out of money again. So he says, "One day Disney took Harper Goff," this is one of his employees, "up to a temporary wooden observatory, observation tower his crew had knocked together in the middle of the site." So there's very little done, but he's spending a lot of money.

• 36:28David Senra?

  "I have half the money spent," he told Goff, "and nothing to show for it." Goff saw tears in his eyes as he repeated "nothing." So at the same time that they're developing Disneyland, they have to make an entirely new series. And when you figure out like, how important this TV show ends up being, it winds up being, when you, I think it was like 180 million Americans at the time, over 52% tuned in to watch the show. They said like, "That percentage has never been duplicated, no Super Bowl, no MASH, no anything." As far as like, a percentage of the total population that watched the same show. Right? And so that's also something that's unbelievably important.

• 37:10David Senra?

  And I think what Disney does here, more founders should do this. They're in the best, founders are in the best position to tell the customers why their product exists. Right? Instead of going to another website, you see some, you know, random template you've seen a million times, with a bunch of copy. Like, "Why isn't there a video of just the founder?" Or an audio, or whatever it is. It's like, "Hey, this is my name, this is what I built, but this is why." People want to understand why. And so they came to the conclusion, like, "We can't find a host." Like, "What other host can you get that's gonna tell people?" Again, this is his largest economic investment he ever makes. "Why you should come to Disneyland? Why you should support this project? Who's gonna be in a better position than Walt Disney?" So they realized that.

• 37:53David Senra?

  There had been a good deal of discussion around the studio about who might serve as the host. But as time drew near, Disney realized that if there was one, it was not a cartoon, and if there was a host and it was not a cartoon character, it had to be Walt. And this is his thinking, which I think is dead on, dead accurate. "I don't consider myself an actor or anything, but in trying to get a hold of these things, I can introduce them, get them going." Think about it. Who else has thought, spent more time thinking about Disneyland than Walt Disney at this point? Nobody! "I'm myself, and that's good or bad, I'll still be myself. It's the safest bet to get underway, and then we can develop new ways in other people that could take over. If we overuse me, I'll be the first to recognize it. I know my limitation. If it's my business, I can talk about it.

• 38:38David Senra?

  If it's what we do here at the studio, there would be no problem to do that." And now, this is a little bit about how Walt Disney worked. This is what I was just talking about. It's like, you know, pick up this book, because I think it's analogous to me about the creation of a company. And think about this, in their case, they're building something no one else has built before. So it says, "Disney said, 'I don't ever want to see an organizational chart.'" A veteran of these early months, meaning the creation of Disneyland, said, "You asked the question, 'What was your process like?'" I kind of laughed, because processes is an organized way of doing things. I have to remind you, during the Walt period of designing Disneyland, we didn't have processes. We just did the work. Processes came later. All of these things had never been done before.

• 39:23David Senra?

  Walt had gathered up all these people who had never designed a theme park, never designed a Disneyland. So we were all in the same boat at one time, and we figured out what to do and how to do it on the fly as we go along, go along with it, and not even discuss plans, timing, or anything. We just worked, and Walt just walked around and made suggestions. So when they think about the park as like a 3D movie, they realize, hey, we have to train the employees there to, they're really actors, right? They're playing a role. You can see this in, you know, they talk about, we don't have, it's, we don't have customers, we have an audience. They don't say, "We have employees, we have casts." When they talk about, hey, when you're moving to the park, make sure you go backstage. These are the terms they use.

• 40:06David Senra?

  So they come up with this idea, they found a school, this guy named Vans Ardsdale Francis is the one that Walt hires to run it. And he said, he has this great, this great little anecdote, anecdote, on perspective, the importance of the perspective you choose to look at, because you have a choice on how to look at the things that you're presented with. And I thought it was fantastic. So he talks, "The theme of our joint effort here will be that we create happiness. How do you manufacture that elusive intimate commodity? At Disneyland, I wanted people to feel that they were involved in something more than parking cars, serving food, or sweeping up popcorn." He told a parable, and this is what I, the main point of this section. Two men are laying bricks.

• 40:50David Senra?

  Somebody asks them, somebody asks one of them what he's doing, and is told, "I'm laying bricks." To the same question, the other man answers, "I'm building a cathedral." So the note I left on myself on this section is, which one are you? So I love this little story on they built these stagecoaches like they had in the Old West. And you know what? I'm going to read the section to you first and I'll tell you what I thought. "The stagecoaches were among the first of the park's attractions to be finished, but the pressure of time was already weighing on everyone. One day, John Hench stopped by to check the progress on the coaches and had an idea which he brought to his boss. Why don't we just leave the leather straps off, Walt? The people are never going to appreciate all the close-up detail.

• 41:35David Senra?

  The same scrupulousness that had recently made Disney refuse to license a Davy Crockett Colt revolver because the firearm hadn't existed in Davy's day treated Hench to a tart little lecture. You're being a poor communicator. People are okay. Don't you ever forget that. They will respond to it. They will appreciate it." Hench didn't argue. "We put the best damn leather straps on that stagecoach you've ever seen. That's soul in the game. These are the people that I want to buy products from. It's not, oh, let me assume that my customer's an idiot, that he's not going to notice. It's like, no, we're going to do the best job because that's the standards we set for ourselves. Everything Disney did was like that." There's a bunch of stories in the book.

• 42:20David Senra?

  Another one that just comes to mind is there's something that's like 40 or 50 feet in the air. I think it wanted to be like wrought iron or something like that, maybe on like the outside of a castle or something. And somebody gives them a suggestion, hey, let's just use plastic, Walt. It's cheaper, we're running out of money, you know, we're running out of time. It's so far away, the customer's not going to notice the difference. And Walt's like, no, like, I will notice the difference. I will know that we compromised our own high standards. We're not going to do that. Everything Walt did was like that. So if you've ever been in Disneyland or Disney World, they have this section called Autopia. You drive them around like these little cars are on a track. The note I left myself here is, I love this guy already. I actually might read his book for a future episode.

• 43:02David Senra?

  So it says, "Autopia," or "Auto-opia," I don't know how to pronounce it, whatever, "which would turn out to be perhaps the most popular of all the park's attractions, was in the hand of a 23-year-old who had been something of a child prodigy. Bob Gurr began his 2012 memoir with a proud statement." This is a direct quote from Bob. Trained as a car stylish, I contributed to ventures worth over $175 million, all without ever obtaining an engineering degree. In fact, my training was all free, because it was all learned on the job. No one ever asked for my qualifications. If I had no experience in a new task, I'd keep my mouth shut and go full speed ahead. So he gets recruited by that Oob Earwicks guy.

• 43:47David Senra?

  That's how he gets a job at Disney. And I just put a giant "yes" with exclamation points. Earwicks asked Ger if Ger did outside work. I did not, but I said yes anyway. And that leads him to, he said, worked for Disney for a long time. I forgot, maybe a few decades. And I think also, moving forward, studying the history and the development of Disneyland, you just realize, like, nothing's ever going to be perfect. And sometimes you have to go forward, even if things that are very important are not there yet. And just know that they will be there in the future. And really, this section is do what you can where you are with what you have. Disney had had land for a hotel, 60 acres, but no money.

• 44:31David Senra?

  He ran out of money. He's planning on building a hotel, right? You probably need a hotel. You're in the middle of nowhere at this point. I'll tell you more about that in a second. And yet, he ran out of money. So what are you gonna do? You gotta keep going forward anyways. But no money left to put one up. He knew it was needed. Anaheim's two motels and five hotels, so two motels, five hotels, still offered a total of 87 rooms. There's like, something like 50,000 people that show up on the first day. So there's entire chapters dedicated to the opening day and how big of a disaster it was. I'm just gonna list off some of the notes. They ran out of both food and water. There was not enough bathrooms.

• 45:15David Senra?

  People were peeing in bushes. The boat ran off the track. Guests had to swim to shore. Asphalt had not given enough time to settle, and it was still soft. So women would show up in high-heel shoes, and their shoes would be stuck in asphalt. It wound up being, unfortunately, over 100 degrees that day. There was a gas leak. There was minor car crashes led to people losing teeth and bloody shins. Walt had to resupply the bathrooms himself with toilet paper because they kept running out. And they also caused the worst traffic in Orange County history. And so it says from the book, "It was total confusion, both on camera and behind the scenes. But it was the celebration of the birth of a dream."

• 45:59David Senra?

  So even though all that crappy stuff happened, did not go as they wanted to, they said, "We had a park. It was a start." And so from there, they, and Walt did something smart too. He just viewed it as like a living thing. It's like Disneyland will never stop being improved. It's a product that will constantly move and change and outlive me. And I thought that was really interesting. But after a few months, they're improving a lot of things. And Disneyland becomes what Walt Disney said it would be, which is not like any other park. The story goes on with much that would have made Disney happy, especially in its insistence that Disneyland was not only a lot of fun, but something completely new.

• 46:40David Senra?

  Here, we first noted the thing which impressed us more deeply as the day went on. This is a review of the park. "The care and quality of materials which has gone into everything." Disneyland is not shoddy. It is not a carnival of concessions at the beach. It is also not false fronts and makeshift rears. It is carefully built by experienced workmen. Details are not forgotten and materials are of the highest obtainable quality." In this next section, this next quote from one of the first employees, "It's just a reminder that when you're doing something new, it's not supposed to be easy." "I ran my ass off," said one pioneer employee. "I lost 15 pounds in the first 60 days. You never walked.

• 47:24David Senra?

  You got behind the scenes and you ran. There was always a fire to put out. I went 14 straight months without taking a day off." And just a few more things here. This was actually a surprising answer. Disneyland had only one boss, and that boss did not welcome what he saw as a growing infringement on his authority. Disney, France, the guy that started the school, remembered Disney being asked what he thought was his greatest accomplishment. This was a surprising answer from Disney. To be able to build an organization and hang on to it. And that answer kind of informs why he did not. It kind of related to, you know, not welcoming growing infringements on his authority. And this is Disney's idea of plusing, which is just constant improvement for your product

• 48:09David Senra?

  over time. Disney was determined to keep it growing by what he called plusing, his term for improving what was already there and making constant additions. The way I see it, Disneyland will never be finished. It's something we can keep developing and adding to. A motion picture is different. Once it's wrapped up and sent out for processing, we're through with it. If there are things that could be improved, we can't do anything about it anymore. I've always wanted to work on something alive, something that keeps growing. We've got that in Disneyland. And it's very tragic that, at the time of his death, he was working on Disney World, which was, you know, orders of magnitude larger than what he was working on Disney. He wanted to expand, expand that idea.

• 48:54David Senra?

  I think he goes from like 160 acres to like 40 or 60,000 acres, something crazy like that. And unfortunately, he dies, he's a lifelong, you know, chain smoker of cigarettes, so he dies of lung cancer. He works up, you know, up until he can anymore, really. Disney's pace never slackened, but the cough that had alerted his colleagues to his approach for as long as anyone in the studio could remember got worse. He had made sporadic attempts to give up smoking, but none took. In early November, he went into the hospital for tests, and the doctor discovered a walnut-sized growth on his left lung. He had surgery and lost the entire lung. Two weeks later, he was back at work.

• 49:40David Senra?

  A couple of weeks after that, Disney was talking with Mark Davis, one of his favorite animators. John Hench was with him and Dick Irvine, and they were all examining a mock-up of an improved Moon Trip attraction. After a while, Disney said to Irvine, "I'm getting kinda tired. Do you want to take me back to the studio?" As he walked to the door, he turned and said, "Goodbye, Mark." It was the first time Davis had ever heard him say goodbye. His end-of-the-day Scotch and massage sessions with Hazel George had become increasingly important to him. The two called the massage room "The Laughing Place." Just after he'd finished with Davis's farewell, he showed up and said to Hazel, "Well, here we are in The Laughing Place."

• 50:24David Senra?

  He paused. "There's something I want to tell you." That was as far as he got. They wept in each other's arms. Then he left Hazel George and his studio forever. And that's where I'll leave it. For the full story, buy the book. There's a link in the show notes that if you buy the book using that link, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. Real quick, there's an afterword where the author talks about all the work he did on the book and a great bibliography, which I'm gonna grab a bunch of more books that I'll cover in the future on Walt Disney. But he says something that I think is important for us to support authors and make sure we're buying as many books as we possibly can. And he quotes George Orwell, who said, "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle,

• 51:06David Senra?

  like a long bout of some painful illness." So he says, "I haven't found it quite that harrowing, but like every writer, I've had my occasional fraught doldrums when the terrible two-word question looms. Who cares?" So authors put an unbelievable amount of time, effort, and research into distilling down and condensing down something that just can teach us a hell of a lot. And you know, a couple hundred pages, 10, 15, 20 hours, whatever it takes you to read. So please do buy this book on that link. You'll also see, you know, what is it, 100, however many books I've done so far, they're all on there. Great Christmas gifts, holiday season gifts, whatever you want to do, buy using that link. It supports the podcast at the same time.

• 51:50David Senra?

  That is 158 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.