Disney on Land and Screen

I will never be too old to love Disneyland, the pioneering theme park that opened in Anaheim, California just over seventy years ago, on July 17, 1955. How well I remember my first visit when the park had been open less than six months. I went with my best friend and her parents; her father liked to set out at the crack of dawn, so we were there when the gates opened, and had to leave—alas—long before all those magical lights came on.

 What I remember best from that first visit was all the attractions of Fantasyland, reflecting the fairytales that were so much a part of the Disney brand. There was the dizzying Alice in Wonderland Mad Tea Party ride, of course: the whirling oversized teacups were great fun for kids but were avoided by queasy grown-ups. And the King Arthur carousel, which turned out to be just an eye-catching merry-go-round. The big scare ride of that early era was, of all things, the Snow White attraction. You waited in a long line for what seemed like hours, in order to be frightened (or attempt to be frightened) by a dark ride that lasted perhaps three minutes. Some of Disneyland’s best attractions—like Pirates of the Caribbean, the Haunted Mansion, the Matterhorn bobsleds, and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad –were not yet in place, although there was a slow-moving mine train inching through the same basic Southwest landscape that hearty park visitors whizzed past years later. And Tomorrowland, which advertised a trip to the moon, was just a promise of future attractions, both real and Disneyfied.

 In early eras, Disneyland attractions outside of Fantasyland were not tied to Disney movies. The iconic Jungle Riverboat Cruise, for instance, reflected no other Disney creative product: no film, no TV series. The Pirates of the Caribbean ride (perhaps my very favorite) opened to great acclaim at Disneyland’s New Orleans Square in 1967. It took until 2003 for this watery tale of pirates marauding a coastal town to become a movie franchise featuring the roguish Jack Sparrow (memorably played by Johnny Depp). Now of course there are five Pirates of the Caribbean films, as well as a series of video games. And the Disneyland ride has been altered so that sightings of Depp’s character are featured.

 There have also been, over the years, a number of existing movie franchises that have metamorphosed into theme-park rides. Mickey’s Toontown (from 1993) is an adaptation for younger children of the Who Framed Roger Rabbit? film that Disney had distributed back in 1988. Next to the classic Jungle Riverboat ride there’s now an Indiana Jones adventure from 1995, based on characters from the Harrison Ford (and George Lucas) franchise that began in 1981. It’s one of the theme park’s best attractions, because of its use of interactive details to get Disneygoers fully involved.

 Much of Tomorrowland too has been turned into George Lucas territory, with Star Tours sending park-goers on a futuristic space ship ride that turns into a rollicking adventure in the Star Wars universe. And 2019 saw the addition of an entire Star Wars-themed land, Galaxy’s Edge, that has proved so popular that I’ve never made it onto the Rise of the Resistance attraction that apparently combines advanced animatronics and the voices of well-known Star Wars actors with a 28-minute thrill ride.

 All this is a long way from the quaint Main Street U.S.A. entry corridor lovingly designed by Disney himself to reflect his midwestern roots. But now Main Street contains a (well-disguised) Starbucks franchise, so at Disneyland anything is possible.

 

 

 

 

 

 

R.I.P. Val Kilmer (and Tombstone’s Doc Holliday)

Sometimes it seems that Val Kilmer made a specialty of portraying men who die young. At least, that’s the impression I got after watching his electrifying performances as Jim Morrison in The Doors (1991) and as a tubercular Doc Holliday in Tombstone (1992). Still, Kilmer remained very much alive as the warrior Madmartigan in George Lucas and Ron Howard’s fantasy epic Willow (1988), in which he was upstaged by tiny Warwick Davis but also chanced to meet his real-life wife-to-be, Joanne Whalley. (They fell for one another on the set, and Howard obligingly re-shot their love scenes to take advantage of the budding romance. Fairytales do tend to come to an end, however. Though they wed in 1988 and had two children together, the couple divorced in 1996.)

 Kilmer’s “Iceman” character in Top Gun (1986) was also a survivor, living long enough to show up in the film’s decades-later sequel, Top Gun: Maverick. Still, when the sequel was shot in 2022, Kilmer’s voice was so affected by treatments for throat cancer that it had to be digitally altered to add clarity. Sadly, Top Gun: Maverick was Kilmer’s final performance. He died on April 1, 2025: at sixty-five he was by no means a youngster, but many of us had hoped for additional cinematic brilliance from him.   

 Tombstone, at its essence, is essentially the story of two gangs—a group of local Arizona lawmen (three of them brothers) versus a loosely organized cluster of cattle rustlers and horse thieves who called themselves the Cowboys. At the infamous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, several men on both sides went down. The thirty-second shootout was followed up by later skirmishes, in which much blood was shed on both sides. Various versions of the story—which became widely known only after Earp’s death and a popular book about him—show up in a number of films, starting with 1939’s Frontier Marshal, which starred Randolph Scott and Cesar Romero. Then there was John Ford’s 1945 My Darling Clementine followed by the 1957 Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which starred Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as his buddy, Doc Holliday.

 I suspect that Tombstone, directed by George P. Cosmatos, was intended to be the last word on the subject. Certainly, its cast is chockful of famous names.  It seems as though every red-blooded male in Hollywood wanted to take part in this semi-true tale of law-and-order on the American frontier. In addition to Kilmer and top-billed Kurt Russell (as reluctant lawman Wyatt Earp), the film features such established names as Powers Boothe, Sam Elliott, Bill Paxton, Jason Priestley, Thomas Haden Church, and Billy Zane. Dana Delany of China Beach fame is the female lead in a movie that is predictably short on women’s roles. (Yes, she plays  a gal with a checkered sexual history.) Ageing Charlton Heston , not long before his 2002 retirement from acting, takes on a small but key part in the proceedings, and none other than Robert Mitchum serves as the film’s narrator.

 Though Tombstone pits lawmen against renegades, the story is such that it’s often hard to tell them apart. Earp and Holliday seem at times no less bloodthirsty than the Cowboys. This puts me in mind of the response, back in 1967, to Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, decried then by many for its level of on-screen violence. As film scholar Robert Alan Kolker put it, “Penn showed the way: Bonnie and Clyde opened the bloodgates, and our cinema has barely stopped bleeding since.”   Now Bonnie and Clyde seems rather tame. Today, there will be blood.  

 

“American Graffiti”: Where Were YOU in ’62?

Want to feel old? Ron Howard, once cherished by American TV viewers as little Opie Taylor on The Andy Griffith Show, is now in his seventieth year. And American Graffiti, the very last movie in which Howard was billed as “Ronny,” is now celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of its release. This meandering saga of one post-graduation night in a California town effectively launched the filmmaking career of George Lucas. Lucas was then a recent graduate of the famous USC film school. His Hollywood career began in 1971 when he expanded his eerily futuristic student film into the big-budget THX 1138. After it failed to measure up at the box office, he turned to his own earlier life in the Central Valley town of Modesto, California. Thus was American Graffiti born. Its young characters, who roam the streets of Modesto in their souped-up cars, all reflect aspects of Lucas’s own teen-age years: the hot-rodding; the shaky intellectual ambitions; the dorky phase; the urge to “get out of this turkey town.” 

 When I was researching my biography, Ron Howard: From Mayberry to the Moon . . .  and Beyond, I learned how Ron (then 18 years old and about to start USC film school himself) was surprised by George Lucas’s approach to moviemaking. The movie, shot in Petaluma, California (standing in for Modesto) over the course of twenty-eight nights, cost a mere $775,000. Auditioning for a part, Howard was asked to improvise scenes with other actors. This was his first hint that George Lucas didn’t do things the Hollywood way. Lucas shot take after take in what he called “documentary style,” hoping his actors would catch him by surprise, and then cobbled his film together in the editing room. The scene in which Howard and Cindy Williams, as Steve and his girlfriend Laurie, patch up their quarrel at the film’s end was improvised and shot in five minutes, to catch the light of dawn. Since the story is supposed to take place in one night, Lucas shot more or less in sequence, a choice that Howard belatedly learned to appreciate: “As the production wore on, we became more and more exhausted. By the end we all had circles under our eyes, and we looked like we’d been up all night. Well, we had been up all night for weeks! And it showed.”

 Though American Graffiti seems to be about small matters—like the klutzy Terry the Toad (Charlie Martin Smith) trying to impress a pretty but not too bright blonde (Oscar-nominee Candy Clark) and the local greaser (Paul Le Mat) stuck babysitting a gawky fourteen-year-old girl (Mackenzie Phillips)—it ultimately has more to say. Rewatching the film, I was struck by how few grown-ups are part of the story. It’s about kids trembling on the brink of adulthood. Once they leave this tiny burg and go off to college, as at least one will do, their parents will play a much smaller role in their lives. There’s also an underlying comment about this particular generation. Though they don’t realize it in 1962, Vietnam hangs over their future. The film’s famous final crawl makes that quite clear.

 The little film captured the hearts of baby-boomers, while also winning the respect of industry honchos. Though it took home no Oscars (this was the year of The Exorcist and The Sting), American Graffiti was the recipient of five nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay.  But after American Graffiti, perhaps Lucas had had enough of modest filmmaking. His very next project, in 1977, was Star Wars.

 

No Weeping for the Return of “Willow”

 Disney+ is kicking off the holiday season with Willow, a new series, based on an old movie. Back in 1988 (which I’m tempted to refer to as “olden times”), George Lucas persuaded a new young director named Ron Howard to  make a fantasy film with a little person at its core. Lucas had, while directing Return of the Jedi, been impressed by tiny WarwickDavis, a three-foot-four-inch bundle of energy who played Wicket the Ewok, among other roles. It was Lucas’s idea to star someone like Davis in a period adventure saga.

 But since Lucas was a shy man who lacked an easy rapport with actors, he  had gradually moved into the producer’s role. Howard at that time was still fairly new to movie-making on a grand scale: his Splash(1984) and Cocoon (195) had been mainstream hits, but Willow’s $50 million budget and sizable special effects demands gave him pause. Still, he was eager to work with the tech wizards at Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic. Moreover, he reasoned that his five-year-old daughter Bryce and his toddler twins (not to mention the little boy on the way) would soon be the perfect age to appreciate big-screen fantasy.

 Despite Lucas’s enthusiasm, Warwick Davis was not a shoo-in for the leading role of Willow Ufgood, who is forced by circumstance to journey far from his home among the Nelwyns, a race of little people under four feet tall. A farmer who dreams of becoming a magician, Willow suddenly finds himself entrusted with a full-sized (or “Dakini”) baby. This baby is none other than Elora Danan, whose survival spells doom for the evil Dakini queen, Bavmorda (Jean Marsh). In the course of his travels to return the infant princess to her rightful home, Willow encounters all manner of unlikely creatures: vicious deathdogs, frightening trolls, beautiful fairies, a sorceress trapped in the body of a rodent, and pugnacious brownies nine inches high who make the three-foot four-inch Willow seem like a giant. There are battles and breathless escapes aplenty before Willow uses his budding magic skills, along with his native wit, to defeat Bavmorda and restore the forces of good.

 When I spoke to Warwick Davis for my Ron Howard: From Mayberry to the Moon . . . and Beyond, he told me he was somewhat daunted by the demands of the title role. Despite all his experience on Star Wars films, here he would be without a mask and a creature suit, and the range of his emotions within the film would be huge. Howard too was worried about Davis’s suitability, because he was a mere seventeen years old. Not only did the part of Willow call for him to interact with a baby, but his character was supposed to be a loving husband and the father of two young children. Once he won the role, Davis, who had never before lifted a baby, was put through an informal training course on how to care for an infant, diaper-changing and all. Howard also arranged lessons in diction, horsemanship., and sleight-of-hand.

 Happily, Disney’s new series returns Davis to the title role. Now a 52-year-old with a long filmography to his credit, he occupies a world in which baby Elora Danan has become a grown woman and a queen, but still relies on Willow’s talents to help her fight off evil.. Long ago I wrote that the original film “is an uneasy blend of life-or-death adventure, heartfelt sentiment, golly-gee wizardry, and comic riffs.” Still, it found many young fans on video, and the well-regarded new series should bring in more.

 

 

George Lucas: The Unlikely Star of “Star Wars”

A few weeks back, amid all the doom-and-gloom stories about American politics, world affairs, and bizarre weather events, the Los Angeles Times featured a rare cheerful headline. the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art was heading for L.A.’s Exposition Park. The choice of Los Angeles over San Francisco as the site of filmmaker George Lucas’s self-financed billion-dollar museum was by no means a sure thing. Though civic boosters like L.A. mayor Eric Garcetti had pushed for this, various commentators opposed it. More important, Lucas has never had much affection for L,A. as a cultural milieu. Yes, he’s been extremely loyal to his film school alma mater, the University of Southern California, which has benefitted hugely from his largesse. But as soon as his career permitted, he abandoned Hollywood for the San Francisco Bay and his super-private Skywalker Ranch.

My friend and colleague, Brian Jay Jones, is the author of the fascinating new unauthorized biography, George Lucas: A Life. When we discussed the newly-announced plans for the museum, Brian admitted to being surprised. In his words, “I thought Lucas would surely want it in his backyard where he could piddle around with everything.” As I’d learned from reading Brian’s book, George Lucas is both a mild-mannered guy and the ultimate control freak.

Lucas started out in workaday Modesto, California as a mediocre student passionate about pop music and fast cars. American Graffiti, his first big hit, is a fair picture of his teen years. Early on, his imagination was shaped by comic books, TV, futuristic heroes like Flash Gordon, and an opening-day visit to Disneyland with his family. This trip took place in July 1955, when Lucas was an impressionable eleven-year-old. The now-long-gone Rocket to the Moon ride was one of his special favorites. It’s certainly fitting that, decades later, Lucas was able to participate in the launching of a more updated Tomorrowland adventure: Star Tours.

It was after he entered film school at USC that Lucas truly came into his own. At first he cultivated his skills as an editor. Later, after moving into directing, he continued to rely on his technical abilities, sometimes to the detriment of story and performance. Like my former boss Roger Corman (who was also particularly devoted to technical matters)  Lucas never developed a gift for working with actors. But there’s no question that he knew what he wanted.

I learned from Brian Jones’ biography that Lucas has never been happy writing screenplays. Yes, he’s cranked out a number of Star Wars scripts, but (especially as the Star Wars universe has continued to expand) he’s astonishingly willing to move into production without a finished screenplay in hand. As a longtime screenwriting instructor in UCLA Extension’s world-renowned Writers’ Program, I cringed in discovering how much Lucas exalts post-production over the rigors of the writing process: “The editing is how I create the first draft.” 

Of course Brian’s book is full of fascinating tidbits, like how C-3PO got his voice. (He was originally supposed to sound like a Bronx used-car dealer, not an English butler.) Brian also spends considerable time showcasing Lucas’s determination to upgrade every element of the original film to take advantage of technological breakthroughs since 1977. It’s certainly understandable that purists are not happy with alterations to a film they know and love. This is  especially true when Lucas’s tweaks seem to change beloved characters like Han Solo (who in Lucas’s revised version shot the bounty hunter Greedo only in self-defense). The last line of Brian’s author bio makes his own feelings crystal-clear: “He continues to believe that Han shot first.”