Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...build Disneyland, had been sharply cut back before Eisner came aboard. He promptly revived the Imagineers, but with a difference. The group began to collaborate with the hottest show-business talent available, a strategy that enabled Disney to give its theme parks an immediate injection of Hollywood hipness. Enter Michael Jackson, who was recruited by Eisner to help write and star in Captain Eo, a 17-minute, $17 million movie musical in 3-D. Even more spectacular is Star Tours, a $32 million thrill ride that opened in January 1987 at Disneyland. The ride employs the technology of flight simulators...
Walt Disney was of course more than America's story-spinning uncle; he was the canniest businessman in Hollywood. His credo might have been the Jesuits': Give me a child before he's seven, and he will be mine for life. Once this shaman-showman had seized kids' minds, he could raid their piggy banks. And on that mountain of pennies he could build an empire. His cartoons and feature films sired comic books, toys, hit songs (Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?, When You Wish upon a Star, Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah) and the ubiquitous Mickey...
...Film Historian Lewis Jacobs saluted Walt Disney as the "virtuoso of the film medium." Twenty years later, this Hollywood Paderewski was playing mostly Muzak. His studio's artistic growth had been stunted, by both the | demand for new product in two mediums and the creeping conservatism that afflicts almost any burgeoning corporation. Yet Disney was always a visionary entrepreneur; he still had magic to do. In the 1950s Disney made three business decisions that would sustain his company until the Eisner years. Decades later, they would profoundly affect the movie business...
...million on a $1 million budget (while the more costly animated feature Sleeping Beauty was earning only $5 million on a $6 million budget). The same elements of domestic fantasy, special effects and easy laughs were cloned over and over for Disney hits from The Love Bug to Splash. Hollywood's future auteurs were watching too. When they grew up they adapted the Shaggy Dog comedy-fantasy into one of the '80s' most reliable genres. What is Michael J. Fox's time-traveling De Lorean in Back to the Future, after all, but a retooling of Fred MacMurray's airborne...
Steve Blad was born in Iowa but raised from childhood in Hollywood, Fla., by "old-fashioned, God-fearin', all-American parents," he says. "I was the first member of my family to get divorced, to drink whiskey and to roll dice." He grins his lopsided grin. "You might say, I like to color outside the lines...