Word: disneyized
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Nervous exhibitors expect Disney to exploit every potential selling point to whites. But Disney acknowledges there's a limit to what it can do. After all, the company can't put up billboards that say white people, this movie's for you! What the company has done is preview the film for free, on a double bill with its 101 Dalmatians, in an effort to generate good word-of-mouth--the most effective advertising of all. Another lure for audiences is the movie's sound track. Unfortunately for Disney, the record wasn't shipped by early November as planned...
...Disney studio chairman Joe Roth says he's betting that a family-friendly Christmas movie with two hugely popular stars, Houston's singing and Penny Marshall (Big, A League of Their Own) behind the camera will transcend color. "The biggest movies of all time have always defied conventional wisdom," he argues. Houston finds it discouraging that race is still an issue. "What's so alien about us?" she asks. "I don't understand why there's such a big thing about all-black casts. I've seen movies with all-white casts...It's a movie. Either you like...
...from an Uruguayan story by innovative stage director and designer Julie Taymor, it is a visually dazzling and utterly original piece of stagecraft. But perhaps more startling is what its creator is doing next. Taymor, a leading light of New York's experimental theater scene, has been picked by Disney to turn its all-time biggest movie hit, The Lion King, into a Broadway show...
...might appear that Disney has hakuna matata'd right off the deep end. Taymor's highly stylized theater work--using masks, puppetry, mime and other non-Western techniques--seems as far from classic Disney animation (and from those dancing teapots in Broadway's Beauty and the Beast) as one can imagine. Taymor admits she was surprised when Thomas Schumacher, a Disney vice president, first asked her if she would like to develop a theatrical concept for The Lion King. "I'm sure if they find something that doesn't work, they'll tell me," she says. "But they asked...
What she'll do for The Lion King (scheduled to open in Minneapolis next July, then move to Broadway in the fall) is create a world of animals onstage without hiding the theatrical trickery needed to do so. It's an approach that Disney chief Michael Eisner and other company execs grasped instantly, she says, when she presented it to them. "I showed them gazelles leaping across the horizon--and also the wheels turning the gazelles, and the person pushing the wheels. We're not hiding anything. You'll see it happen in front of your eyes." Eight new musical...