TEAM RODENT- How Disney Devours the World Read online

  Hell, those fabled "Imagineers" of his could have knocked off the liner notes on their lunch break, and had a hoot doing it. Who ever heard of white Detroit street rappers? And what's with the candy-ass faux-Kiss mascara? The songwriting is so strenuously witless that it's got to be a parody. How else to explain this ballad:

  I got shot, the murder was heinous

  It went in my eyeball and out my anus.

  On the day Disney yanked the Posse's CD, Messrs. Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope lashed out in cyberspace: "It all starts with a friendly big fluffy mouse named Mickey, who is really a lying rabid infested filthy rat in disguise."

  I wouldn't be surprised if that turned out to be an Eisner riff, tweaking all of us who harbor such acid sentiments. Undoubtedly he's aware that his empire is the subject of percolating distrust, hatred, and even fear. The question he probably asks himself is why. What has Disney really done but brought joy, wonder, and laughter to billions of people? What accounts for the rising backlash?

  Insane Clown Michael surely has his theories. My own virulence is rooted in this belief, based on what I've seen with my own eyes: Disney is so good at being good that it manifests an evil; so uniformly efficient and courteous, so dependably clean and conscientious, so unfailingly entertaining that it's unreal, and therefore is an agent of pure wickedness. Imagine promoting a universe in which raw Nature doesn't fit because it doesn't measure up; isn't safe enough, accessible enough, predictable enough, even beautiful enough for company standards. Disney isn't in the business of exploiting Nature so much as striving to improve upon it, constantly fine-tuning God's work.

  Lakes, for instance. Florida's heartland is dappled with lovely tree-lined lakes, but the waters are often tea-colored from cypress bark. For postcard purposes, tea-colored water was deemed unsuitable for Disney World's centerpiece, Bay Lake, so in the early 1970s Team Rodent sprang into action—yanking out many of the cypresses, draining the lake, scraping out the bottom muck, replacing it with imported sand, then refilling the crater. All this was done to make the water bluish and therefore more inviting to tourists. For good measure, Disney even added beaches.

  (My own Bay Lake fantasy: sneak in one night and dump a truckload of hungry bull gators in that lovely deep-blue water. I know friends who'd be thrilled to help, and who also have experience in the transport of large crocodilians. My conscience is all that's stopping me—the Magic Kingdom is not a safe place for a reptile, and I fear the alligators would be systematically hunted down and trapped, or worse.)

  In recent years Team Rodent has become even less bashful and more technologically advanced at superimposing its own recreation-based reality. Disney-brand fun needs a script, and a script needs performing, and a performance needs a stage. No one is fussier about the production details than Team Rodent, and it pays off. Operating profit from Disney's theme parks and resorts has risen steeply in recent years and now accounts for more than 25 percent of company earnings.

  One place the formula didn't work so well was France, where Disneyland Paris (then called Euro-Disney) opened at a cost of $4.4 billion in the spring of 1992. Dreary weather and a weak economy weren't the only reasons for disappointing attendance. The wine-loving French resented Disney's no-alcohol policy, while employees balked at the company's famous Aryan-android dress code, which forbids makeup, nail polish, and facial hair. Critics and commentators despaired that Disneyland Paris was a blight on native French culture, and the leftist newspaper Liberation harshly dubbed it "Mouse-witz." At one point the park was losing the equivalent of $1 million a day, and was reported to be on the verge of closing. It was saved by a complicated financial restructuring and a grudging decision by Disney executives to act more European and loosen up the rules. Today wine is served at Disneyland Paris restaurants, and revenues at the park are rising. Beyond the rare movie flop, Disney is unaccustomed to failure. It prizes its reputation for profitability almost as much as its reputation for wholesome entertainment. No other company so zealously endeavors to live up to its own hype—and manages to come so close. Success after success has turned Team Rodent into a ravenous, fearless beast, and that's why many of us now cheer those infrequent occasions when it is rebuffed, humbled, or gored.

  Bull Run

  DATELINE: HAYMARKET, VIRGINIA, November 1993.

  For many months the Walt Disney Company has been anonymously snapping up property in the Piedmont, just as it did many years ago outside Orlando. This time, though, Disney's got something different in mind: a 150-acre amusement park with a history theme, to attract day-tripping tourists from Washington, D.C. Also in the works are a campground, a golf course and resort, twenty-five hundred new residential homes, and a boggling two million square feet of office and commercial space. The three-thousand-acre, $650 million development is announced with fanfare and the promise of many new jobs—and within months comes under blistering attack from all over the country.

  The outcome proved genuinely historic, though not in the way CEO Eisner foresaw. At issue was the proposed theme park's proximity to the Manassas National Battlefield, scene of the battles of Bull Run. Although the nucleus of Disney's "America Project" was to be six miles from the Civil War memorial, many Virginians felt it was close enough to be a desecration. This time it wasn't Nature but American history that Disney sought to polish up and market as a fun ride. Opponents said Manassas was no place for a massive theme park/golf resort/subdivision, and predicted the surrounding hillsides would be ruined by the same type of tacky runaway sprawl that had surrounded Walt Disney World. The rape of Orlando was invoked constantly as a battle cry.

  Another sore point was money, specifically taxpayers' money. Disney attorneys had nonchalantly demanded more than $200 million in state funds for new roads and highway improvements around the park and office complex. Meanwhile the residents of Prince William County would be expected to contribute another $75 million for water, sewage, landscaping, and other necessities. "It was not a request, it was not respectful and it was confidently stated," recalled Prince William County executive Jim Mullen, writing in Public Management magazine.

  He and other planners visited their Florida counterparts to quiz them about how Team Rodent operates. "Arrogant, demanding, aloof, confident, efficient, powerful, successful and profitable were the words used to describe Disney," Mullen reported. But in Orange County, as in Prince William, the prevailing view was that government was wise to make Disney comfortable, even if groveling was required; anything less could jeopardize an economic windfall for the community. So Mullen and his colleagues began working nonstop to improve Disney's master plan in ways that all sides might find acceptable. The task would prove impossible in the face of a growing outcry from environmentalists, Civil War historians, and nearby landowners, some of whom had influential political connections.

  Despite the resistance, in March 1994 the Virginia General Assembly approved $163.2 million in benefits for Disney. Almost immediately a citizens' group filed two lawsuits in an effort to halt the America Project. Eisner assured the Washington Post that the Walt Disney Company was solidly committed to its northern Virginia theme park:

  "If the people think we will back off, they are mistaken."

  They weren't mistaken. Three months after Eisner's vow, Disney backed off. The company was taking a publicity beating worldwide and could not overcome the perception that Mickey and Minnie soon would be dancing on the graves of Civil War heroes. So, only days after $130 million in road-building funds had been authorized for the America Project, Disney decided to retreat from Prince William County.

  Today Virginians still argue about whether the megadevelopment would have been a blessing or a debacle. It's undeniably true that some folks would have gotten rich, because that's what happens when Mickey comes to town. It's also true that lots of folks soon would have found their town unrecognizable: congested, noisy, tackified, and tourist-trammeled. As for the Manassas battlefield memorial, the six-mile distance would have provided no buffer whatsoever
from the Disney outfall. One hundred miles is too close, if the desired atmosphere is a dignified quiet.

  Good for all those people who fought back against Team Rodent. It was about time somebody did.

  Enough Orlandos, already.

  Republic of Walt

  IN THE MID-1960S farmers, ranchers, and other rural land holders in central Florida began receiving inquiries from prospective buyers. The offers were fair, though not high enough to attract suspicion. Even at $200 an acre, most owners were happy to sell. The transactions seemed routine, and it was a while before folks realized what was happening.

  By then, roughly twenty-four thousand acres had been acquired in methodical quilt-patch purchases by Walt Disney Productions. Realizing that the price of land would have shot up if his involvement were known, Walt Disney had kept his role a strictly guarded secret. The payoff was an incredible real-estate coup that eventually would transform forty-three square miles of pastures, woods, and swamps into the world's most popular tourist destination.

  Walt died five years before Disney World opened, but its future was secure. That's because Florida's legislators blitheringly agreed to give the company virtually whatever it wanted, and the main thing it wanted was autonomy: a private government for constructing and managing an amusement park. Thus was born the Reedy Creek Improvement District, an innocuous-sounding title that belies unheard-of powers. "The Vatican with mouse ears," says Richard Foglesong, a Rollins College professor and longtime Disney watcher.

  Reedy Creek takes in all the land purchased by Walt's secret agents in the 1960s. The district is "governed" by a supervisory board elected by the landowners, meaning the Walt Disney Company. Its borders contain two shell municipalities, Lake Buena Vista and Bay Lake, which have a combined permanent population of fewer than fifty souls, mostly company executives and their families. Everybody in Orlando knows that Reedy Creek is Disney and Disney is Reedy Creek, although for legal reasons both claim to be separate. That's because Florida requires municipal governments to conduct their business in public, and for competitive reasons Team Rodent would rather not.

  Never before or since has such outlandish dominion been given to a private corporation. Disney runs its own utilities. It administers its own planning and zoning. It composes its own building codes and employs its own inspectors. It maintains its own fire department. It even has the authority to levy taxes.

  Florida's starstruck lawmakers didn't stop there. They also gave Disney's puppet government the authority to build its own international airport and even a nuclear power plant—neither of which the company has needed … yet. Reedy Creek is further empowered to have cemeteries, schools, a police department, and a criminal justice system—services that Disney has so far chosen not to assume.

  Reedy Creek does, however, "contract" with Disney for an eight-hundred-member security force that patrols Epcot, the Magic Kingdom, hotels, shops, restaurants, and roads—everywhere on company property. The "hosts" and "hostesses" wear blue uniforms and carry badges, just like real cops. Legally they're not, although they sometimes forget.

  Two friends of mine, Charlie and Cheryl Freeman, once took their son and daughter to Church Night at Disney World. They went on a bus with seventeen other children and several parents. Charlie drove.

  Outside Tomorrowland, the Freemans had a run-in with another group of youngsters on an escalator. The kids were swearing loudly. When Charlie asked them to stop, one of them swung a leg and caught Cheryl in the ribs. Charlie thought it was an accident until the kid got in his face and said, "What's your problem, you fucking geek!"

  That's when Charlie "grabbed him by the breastbone and pushed him back." Moments later Charlie found himself in the custody of Disney security guards. The kid said Charlie had tried to choke him. Charlie denied it. "I was wrong to touch him," he said, "but he kicked my wife." And there were witnesses.

  It didn't matter. The guards took Charlie to a small room, where he was interviewed and photographed with a Polaroid camera. Then he was escorted out the front gate and informed he was banned from Disney World for twelve months. His picture would be posted, the guards warned, and he would be arrested for trespassing if he was spotted anywhere at the park.

  On the long drive back to Jacksonville, Charlie kept saying, "I got thrown out of Disney World on Church Night!" He was so angry that he phoned the newspaper when he got home. Columnist Robert Blade wrote about the incident in the Florida Times-Union. Readers clipped the article and mailed protests to Disney. Soon afterward Charlie received a letter from the company's chief of security: "This is to notify you that, effective immediately, the trespass warning against you for Walt Disney World Resort Complex has been lifted."

  Officially Disney says its security forces work closely with local police. A sheriff's deputy is assigned to the grounds to make arrests or otherwise assist the guards, if needed. All crimes in the Reedy Creek Improvement District are supposed to be reported promptly to law enforcement authorities. That doesn't always happen, due to Disney's fanatical obsession with secrecy.

  In 1991 the company learned that one of its wardrobe assistants was spying on female performers at Cinderella's Castle. The young man would masturbate while surreptitiously videotaping the women as they changed costumes.

  One phone call to the local sheriffs office could have ended the peep show, but Disney security officers chose to conduct their own surveillance, which went on for three months. According to court records, the company deliberately didn't inform the women at the castle about the investigation, and in fact permitted the secret taping to continue. Eventually Disney's security guards photographed the wanker in the act, confronted him, and got a confession. He later was arrested by a sheriffs deputy, who'd allegedly overheard employees talking about the illegal videos in the coffee room of the Disney security office.

  Six female dancers from the Kids of the Kingdom chorus later sued, demanding $37.5 million in damages. They asserted that the dressing areas in Cinderella's Castle had been plagued by Peeping Toms, who carved small eyeholes in the walls, and that Disney had known about the problem.

  As for the sting operation, in which the company used its own video camera, the dancers charged that on January 8, 1992, Disney security allowed the suspect "to remain in this hidden place, masturbating, observing and videotaping the female Kids of the Kingdom cast in states of partial or total nudity for over one hour and 15 minutes and did not apprehend [him] until the female performers left for their 11 o'clock performance."

  Disney acknowledged it didn't tell the performers they were being spied upon, but the company said it acted properly. Moreover, the company preposterously claimed the dancers had no cause to sue, because they had "a diminished expectation of privacy in their particular job requirements and … therefore knowingly assumed the risk of the matters alleged."

  In refusing to dismiss the lawsuit, the judge said ordinary citizens would find the company's conduct "outrageous." On the eve of trial, Disney's attorneys settled the case with the Kids of the Kingdom for an undisclosed sum.

  Litigation and rotten publicity often go hand in hand, and Team Rodent is ever-wary of both. Several employees caught exposing themselves to tourists have been quietly fired but not turned over to the police. Yet even in such a rigidly monitored setting, events sometimes occur that can't be covered up.

  On the night of August 31, 1994, Disney World guards spotted two young men goofing around on the roof of a covered walkway at the Contemporary Resort. The young men quickly scrambled to the ground, ran to a pickup truck, and sped away. A Disney security van pursued, its red lights flashing.

  The chase reached speeds approaching eighty miles per hour. A mile outside Disney World's gates, the pickup crashed, killing the passenger, eighteen-year-old Robb Sipkema.

  In Florida, all traffic deaths are investigated by the state highway patrol. The troopers assigned to the Sipkema case found Disney not at all helpful. Incredibly, the company refused to let them interview Susan Buckl
and, the "security hostess" who was at the wheel of the van during the pursuit. Disney also declined to release transcripts of the radio communications between Buckland and the company dispatcher during the fatal chase. The lead investigator, Florida Highway Patrol Trooper Scott Walter, complained to the Orlando Sentinel that Disney officials "would only release the information that wouldn't hurt them."

  Robb Sipkema's parents sued, setting off a legal battle that has partially raised the curtain on Disney's private government. The Sipkemas charged that the security guard caused their son's death by pursuing the pickup truck, even though she was not a sworn law enforcement officer. Buckland said she did nothing wrong and never drove her vehicle off Disney property that night.

  Florida has a broad public-records law that applies to all state and local government entities—including, one would reasonably assume, the Reedy Creek Improvement District. Because Disney provides policelike services for Reedy Creek, the family of Robb Sipkema demanded a copy of the company's security manual and policy on traffic control.

  Disney said no. Its attorneys asserted that, as a private corporation, Disney wasn't required to open its records.

  Eventually Team Rodent voluntarily produced the security manual, but the Sipkemas pressed for more files. Their lawyers noted that Disney and Reedy Creek were one and the same, and that Disney security guards acted as a de facto police force. The "hosts" and "hostesses" conducted traffic stops, answered 911 calls, and investigated crimes "to the point of arrest." When communicating over the radio, they even spoke in the same 10-codes as real cops.

  It wasn't enough to convince Orange County Circuit Judge Belvin Perry Jr. He sided with Disney, ruling that its law enforcement activities at Reedy Creek were part of a private security arrangement—in other words, a contract with itself. Bottom line: The public, including the Sipkemas, would not be allowed to see internal company documents.