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When Marty Sklar was a student at UCLA, he was editor of the university's newspaper, the Daily Bruin. He got a call from one of Walt's executives asking him to come by and interview for a job putting out a tabloid newspaper which would be sold on Main Street in Disneyland. He went to work for Walt a month before Disneyland opened, and is still with the company some 46 years later. Along the way, Marty rose through the ranks, and did an enormous amount of writing for Walt - including the script for the famed film that explained Walt's vision for EPCOT to the world. In his work with Walt Disney's Imagineering division- which culminated in his heading that portion of the company - he contributed concepts and scripts for untold theme park shows, including those for the 1964 World's Fair.

Marty Sklar

Talking to Marty about his years with Walt is like opening a treasure chest of anecdote and memory. As one of the youngest men to have worked this closely with Walt, his memories of Walt are still very fresh - and his intense affection for the man shines through as he speaks.

Marty Sklar

 

Q. Tell us about your first job with Walt.

A. Two weeks after I went to work I had to present the concept to Walt, which was a little frightening for a 21 year old who'd never worked professionally. But I got my first lesson in what Walt felt about what people did. He didn't care about what your background was or how old you were or anything like that. He just wanted to know what you could do. And the good news was that he liked what I had come up with as a concept.

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Q. And what was the concept?

A. It was called the Disneyland News and it was sold for ten cents on Main Street and it was treated like an old-time newspaper. In fact . . . we used wooden type for headlines and we really made it look authentic. And I remember very well that it sold 75,000 the first couple of months that Disneyland was open. You could get your name imprinted in the headline. We'd take off the main headline on the front page and you could say, John Smith or Marty Sklar visits Disneyland.

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Q. How did people react when Walt announced his plans for the 1964 World's Fair?

A. The World's Fair was a great opportunity for Walt and he saw something that none of us realized at the time. He already was planning to do something in the eastern part of the country. So he was taking his entertainment directly to all the sophisticates who sometimes criticized Disney entertainment, right in their homeland, right in New York.

And beyond that he had the idea that he could expand Disneyland, which he wanted to do by using other people's money - those were the big corporations like General Electric and Ford and Pepsi Cola.

General Electric had come into the fair in a big way because they'd been involved in a price-fixing scandal in the late 50s, early 60s, and they had a real public relations problem. And they did surveys about the attitude of the public toward General Electric before the fair. And then they did a survey after the fair. And the attitude toward General Electric had turned around entirely. It went from negative to 85 percent positive. And they attributed it entirely to the association with Walt Disney and his name and his entertainment during the New York World's Fair.

It was a real quid pro quo in the sense that Walt got what he wanted: the General Electric Carousel of Progress, and the Dinosaurs from the Ford Pavillion, and It's a Small World, that Pepsi Cola paid for, and the Lincoln show all came back to Disneyland and we had great new entertainment, and the companies got what they wanted which was the association and the goodwill from the Disney name
.

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Q. What was the difference between Walt Disney as the man and the corporate icon?

A. In the mid-sixties, one of the things that I was asked to do for the annual report was to write about other producers, directors, etc. in the studio. And we took the concept to Walt after we'd worked it out . . . and we explained it to him. And Walt said, "No, I don't want to do it that way." He said, "I don't want to have to name everybody in the studio. They're great talent but I've worked my whole life to establish the name Walt Disney."

He said, "I am not Walt Disney in that sense. Walt Disney is a thing, it's an image that people have and as a person I'm not exactly that person. And it's not important because the public persona that we built all these years is really what's important, from a company standpoint. And I can be a different person than that but I don't want you breaking it down by talking about a Bill Walsh Production for Walt Disney, etc. Everything we do here as a team, everything is Walt Disney. And it's not just me, it's all of us.

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Q. Was it frustrating for people to have their work appear under Walt's name?

A. Well, for some people, not having their name in lights is very difficult in Hollywood. But for other people, and many of us even today, when I think about the things that many of my associates and I have done, and it's all under the name Walt Disney, it's not important that they know who Marty Sklar is or John Hench or any of us who've done really wonderful work, but it's a bigger thing. We've all been enlarged by association with that name and the magic of that kind of entertainment. And the people that needed the ego satisfaction left. And a lot of them became great stars in their own right in Hollywood.

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Q. So, the question of working well with Walt had a lot to do with personal ego, didn't it?

A. It had totally to do with ego. And a lot of people chafed at not having the recognition that they felt they deserved, but the more important thing was that all of us contributed to the entertainment that came out and still comes out under the name Walt Disney. And we know we can't be that big but we can be a part of something that is truly important and significant and exciting. You know, in most things in life, teams achieve more than individuals. But you have to have a certain mindset and not be concerned about having your name in lights.

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Q. Was Walt involved in all the major projects going on?

A. Well, we all knew that Walt was going to come in and put the whipped cream and cherries on top of everything we did and that was exciting. You know when you thought you'd done your best and he would walk in and say, "Is that all it does?" You knew he would force you to go beyond where you'd ever gone before . . . You knew it was going to get better when Walt came into a meeting.

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Q. Was he as concerned about individual staffers as he was about teamwork?

A. Yes, and I could cite many examples. One that stands strongly in my mind is we were working very hard at the New York World's Fair to complete the four Disney shows. And some of my colleagues had been there two and three months and away from their homes in Los Angeles. . . . And about three weeks or a month before the fair opened Walt came through to review all the shows and when we were through, a few of us took him back to his hotel. And on the way back he said, "Well, how are your spouses enjoying New York?"

And nobody said a word and we didn't have to say a word because he looked at us and he said, "Oh, I get it." And the very next morning, every one of us got a call from somebody in administration and the question was, "When do you want your spouse to arrive in New York?" And Walt had just taken care of it. And that concern for us as human beings and as family people was very clear to him
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Q. Why was Walt concerned about having enough land for the "Florida Project"?

A. He wanted so much land in Florida because he had seen what had happened around Disneyland when he didn't have the money to acquire enough land. Along Harbor Boulevard, in Anaheim, it was this neon jungle of signs, everybody shouting for attention as you came to the front door of Disneyland. So every time. . . they would come back and say, "Well, we got this piece of property, Walt," he'd say, "Fine, now what about this piece over here?" And this went on and on until finally there were almost 28,000 acres.

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Q. Is it true that his major interest was the community of tomorrow -- EPCOT?

A. With Walt Disney World, you know, Walt didn't spend any time on the park. In a press conference, when he announced Walt Disney World in 1965, he said, that people would expect certain attractions that had been at Disneyland and we were certainly going to bring them there. But his whole focus was on EPCOT, as an experimental prototype community of tomorrow. And he kind of used the words city and community interchangeably. But it really was about finding a way to bring new technology that would influence and inform people's lives in a way that they would understand and perhaps be introduced to.

And I think a lot of these ideas came because every time Walt visited the laboratories of the great corporations, the Sarnoff labs at RCA and the General Electric labs and IBM, they would trot out all the great things that they were working on for the future. And he would ask them, "When can I buy something with this technology?" And quite often they would say, "Well, we don't know if the public's interested in this." And so I think this really became the genesis of a lot of his thinking for EPCOT. That he could be, in a sense, a middleman between the public and these corporations.

I remember him coming in one day and apparently he and Mrs. Disney had stayed with Ron and Diane's children and the trash trucks had come down the alley and woke him up at six o'clock in the morning or something like that. And he started thinking, "Isn't there a better way to collect trash?" And ultimately that ended up with our finding a Swedish trash collection system which we implemented at Walt Disney World. And so his mind was constantly on finding those kind of things and bringing them to the public in a way that they could see, understand, touch and live in.

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Q. You had an alternate name for EPCOT, didn't you?

A. Oh, yes. I remember when Dick Irvine first talked to me about some of Walt's ideas for Epcot and I went back to my office and I don't think I was in my office an hour when I came back to him and I said, "I don't think EPCOT's the right name, Dick." Irvine was in charge of design at WED, and I said, "This should be called Waltopia." Because it was Walt's utopian vision of what the world could be. Not should be, but what it could be.

 

Thank you very much.

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