Disney Bookshelf: Jack Lindquist, 'Pixar Treasures' and Inside the Walt Disney Family Museum

Happy 2011!  I hope it's a great year for you.

Santa was good to me this Christmas, dropping off three excellent books that you should add to your Disney collection as well.

In Service to the Mouse
Jack Lindquist (with Melinda J. Combs)

For 38 years, Jack Lindquist worked for the parks division of Disney. He began his career as an advertising manager at Disneyland just months after it opened in 1955 and stayed until Mickey Mouse's 65th birthday in the fall of 1993. Most of his time was spent at Walt's original Magic Kingdom, but Jack also did a significant amount of work at Walt Disney World in the 1970s and 80s before being named Disneyland's first president in 1988. In In Service to the Mouse, Lindquist recalls some of the highlights of a four decade-long career where he rubbed elbows with celebrities, world leaders and Walt Disney himself.

Lindquist earned a reputation for being an innovative thinker with a tenacious work ethic.  He rarely backed down from an idea he believed in, more than once putting his job on the line to prove a point. He was the driving force behind incredible marketing successes (Date Nite at Disneyland, the Gift Giver Extraordinaire, Disney Dollars) and immense failures (USC Trojan Nite, "Lifetime" passes to Disneyland). He idolized Walt Disney, respected Michael Eisner and was scolded by Imelda Marcos. He even went toe-to-toe against 60 Minutes reporter Mike Wallace...and won.

Lindquist tells all these stories--from the endless business hours to the late-night parties--with a generous combination of good humor and sincere honesty.  He's a straight shooter who knows he had the coolest job around and relishes passing his experiences onto you. Reading In Service to the Mouse is like inviting Jack Lindquist to your living room to share fascinating stories over a few cocktails. He's a welcome guest in my house anytime.

In Service to the Mouse is available from Amazon and at www.inservicetothemouse.com.

The Pixar Treasures
Tim Hauser

In 2003, Disney Editions published The Disney Treasures, a hefty volume of nostalgia that chronicled in scrapbook form the output of Walt Disney's life from his Midwest youth through the birth of Mickey Mouse through the early concepts for Walt Disney World. It was chock full of photos, correspondence and memorabilia, including reproductions of original studio materials you could pull out of the book.

Seven year later, The Pixar Treasures takes the same approach with the little Emeryville company that could, and in many ways exceeds what The Disney Treasures set out to do, personalize a golden age of family entertainment.

The Pixar Treasures has it easier by covering a shorter and more recent span of time. It also helps that almost all the major players at Pixar are very much alive. While Disney archivist Robert Tieman did an impressive job mining the vaults for The Disney Treasures, there's something cool about knowing that Pixar artist Ralph Eggleston personally turned over a copy of his 1983 hand-written note from Disney animator Glen Keane to Tim Hauser, or that Hauser, himself once a writer-animator for Disney, used his own copy of The Art of Animation for inclusion in The Pixar Treasures. Of course, all the sketches and concept art included from the likes of Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., The Incredibles and Wall*E don't hurt either.

Picturing the Walt Disney Family Museum
Jim Smith and Richard Benefield

The Walt Disney Family Museum recently released its second souvenir book, Picturing the Walt Disney Family Museum. It's an ideal companion to the museum's first release, The Walt Disney Family Museum: The Man, the Magic, the Memories. While the first book focused on the major events in Walt's life, Picturing shows how that life is actually presented at the museum.

Working primarily in the evening, after museum hours, photographer Jim Smith and his crew shot each of the ten galleries, capturing most of the multimedia displays and many of the artifacts. You'll see a close-up view of the earliest know drawing of Mickey Mouse, an overhead look at one of only three multiplane cameras in existence and multiple shots of the exquisite Disneyland of Walt's imagination, a three-dimensional rendering of how Walt might have visualized his original theme park in the last years of his life. You'll also see some spectacular views of the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco Bay taken from the museum grounds at the Presidio.

The Walt Disney Family Museum does not allow guests to take pictures inside the galleries, so if you're visiting, Picturing the Walt Disney Family Museum is the best way to take your experience home with you. And if you've never been, ordering a copy online will give you a nice taste of what the museum holds in store. It's a beautiful book.

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The Walt Disney Family Museum: One Year Later

Richard Benefield

Walt Disney famously said, "Disneyland will never be completed as long as there is imagination left in the world." In San Francisco, the Walt Disney Family Museum is taking a similar approach.  It continually tweaks things--adding additional seating here, moving a display there--to improve the appearance and flow of the ten galleries that trace Walt's life from his humble Midwest beginnings to his perch atop an entertainment empire.  "We've done a few very minor changes," says museum executive director Richard Benefield.  And many of those changes have come at the direction of the museum's co-founder, Walt's daughter, Diane Disney Miller. "She's so much like her father," says Richard. "She knows how things have to be presented really in a high-quality way."

Presentation is everything at the museum, with multimedia screens, listening stations and hands-on activities working side-by-side with the carefully preserved artifacts of Walt's life. I visited earlier this month as the museum was celebrating its first anniversary and had the opportunity to speak with Richard in person and catch up on the developments of the past year.

Business has been brisk, but not overwhelming, with just over 120,000 people visiting in the last 12 months. "It's not as much as we thought it would be," says Richard. Still, the museum has uniquely established itself as a destination museum attracting Disney fans and historians worldwide. "Just a little over fifty percent of the total visitorship comes from the Greater Bay Area," says Richard. The rest come from elsewhere. "There are a lot of people making a pilgrimage here."

Walt Disney's special Oscar for
"Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs"

The museum benefited in September from a free "Museum Day," a nationwide program put on by the Smithsonian Institution that brought a capacity crowd of 1,402 visitors to the museum in a single day. Movie screenings and educational events have also been driving traffic. Summer camp programs were introduced earlier this year, giving kids and teens the opportunity to try their hands at digital animation, sound design, pencil animation, claymation and stop-motion photography. The museum also stepped up its Internet presence, launching its Storyboard blog over the summer. The blog shares fascinating insight into Disney history and museum activities.

November 18 is Mickey Mouse's official birthday and he'll be in the spotlight throughout the month with museum screenings of his classic cartoons, including Steamboat Willie and The Band Concert. On November 13, Vincent Vedrenne with the Walt Disney Company will give a presentation on the Evolution of Mickey Mouse. Original Mickey Mouse Club Mouseketeers Bobby Burgess, Sharon Baird and Cubby O'Brien will be on hand November 20 to share their memories of working for Walt.

In December, the museum will bring back its popular film Christmas with Walt Disney, a compendium of winter-themed Disney cartoons and rare holiday footage of Walt at the studio and with his family. The film was produced by Don Hahn (Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King), who has become a good friend of the museum. Hahn compiled material for this weekend's HallowScreen presentation of spooky Disney cartoons and reportedly has a documentary about legendary Disney artist Mary Blair in development.

Between its special presentations and detailed exhibits, the Walt Disney Family Museum has committed itself to give the most accurate account of Walt that it can. Again, Richard gives much of the credit to Diane. "She wants to get the story so right that she doesn't even trust her own memory on a lot of things. She's always willing to consult with the other experts like J. B. Kaufman and Jeff Kurtti and other people at the company to make sure everything is exactly right."

For ticket information and a full calendar of museum events, visit www.waltdisney.org.

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Other articles about the Walt Disney Family Museum:
The Walt Disney Family Museum: The Smithsonian of Walt
A Conversation with Richard Benefield with the Walt Disney Family Museum

A Conversation with Richard Benefield with the Walt Disney Family Museum

When it comes to Walt Disney, Richard Benefield could really do without the urban legends. "We don't really talk about the fact that some people think he's frozen," he says. "We just state the fact that he's buried in Forest Lawn Cemetary in Glendale."

Not frozen after death, check. But, what about Walt's alleged anti-Semitism?

"It's an absolutely preposterous notion. That one still baffles all of us."

When you're the founding executive director of the Walt Disney Family Museum, there's more to your job than just preserving and showcasing the artifacts of one man's lifetime in entertainment. You're also tasked with protecting and defending his legacy.

"There are a few, weird, isolated rumors that no one seems to know exactly how they got started," says Benefield. "I met (Disney composer) Richard Sherman last December. I had lunch with him and with (retired Imagineer) Marty Sklar together in Los Angeles. Richard just looked at me from across the table and he said, 'Look, I just want to tell you something. This thing about Walt being an anti-Semite, look at us'--talking about him and Marty--'We're two of the biggest Jews in Hollywood! We loved him and we knew him, and he loved us and knew us, and we loved working with the man. So I don't know where that came from.'"

As the Walt Disney Family Museum begins its third month of operation in San Francisco's Presidio, it continues fulfilling its mission of revealing the man behind the myth. To some, it even proves that--SURPRISE!--Walt Disney was an actual person. Benefield says, "(The Disney family) learned through some market research and surveys that there was a whole generation of people who thought 'Walt Disney' was a made up name and it was just part of the brand name of the company. I think that this museum makes it really clear that there was a person behind it through every step of it, and that he really was the mastermind behind all that he oversaw."

With ten galleries chock full of Disney history and family memorabilia, the museum leaves no doubt that Walt was a real live boy, a creative, ambitious and complex person of many accomplishments. Benefield gives much of the credit for the look and overall flow of the galleries to the late Disney Imagineer Bruce Gordon, who was a consultant with the museum in its early development stages. "The ramp that takes you from the second floor down to the first floor through Gallery 9 was originally his idea," says Benefield. "Many, many of his ideas have just lived on through the project. It's a great testament to his imagination and his own storytelling ability, and Diane (Disney Miller, Walt's daughter) is always very careful to give him credit for that."

As the former deputy director of Harvard University Art Museums, Benefield came to the Walt Disney Family Museum more as an art historian and curator than a Disney historian. Like most of us, though, he still grew up exposed to Disney films and entertainment. The first movie he remembers seeing as a child is "Old Yeller," and "Pinocchio" remains one of his all-time favorites. "I'm just astounded every time I watch it at how incredibly beautiful it is just to look at," he says.

His artistic eye gives him a special appreciation of the museum's collection. "I came into this job from an art museum background in terms of how you care for original works of art and artifacts of all kinds, really, and how you manage the public aspect of the museum. But, I find some of the original animation art--things like the scene paintings, the concept drawings--are the things that I find absolutely the most fascinating."

Benefield is reluctant to name an item in the collection that is his favorite--it's an unfair question, really--but press him on the matter and he'll concede to having a preference for the work of Mary Blair. "I tend to gravitate a little bit more towards the original works of art that are in the collection," he says. The artwork that stands out most for him is a concept piece Blair did for "Peter Pan" showing the children flying over moonlit London. "I just think that it's a glorious work of art."

To mark the holidays, the museum will present in its theater "Christmas with Walt Disney," a film showing Walt at home and at work, celebrating the festive season. Narrated by Diane Disney Miller, it includes clips from Christmas-themed animated shorts and television programs. "The really great thing about the film," says Benefield, "is we have Walt's home movies from Christmas with his family. All of that has been artfully put together and culminates with an amazing reworking of 'The Nutcracker Suite' from 'Fantasia.'" "Christmas with Walt Disney" premieres at the museum on November 27th and will be shown six times daily most days through January 4th.

"Christmas with Walt Disney" is the latest in a series of monthly film presentations at the museum. In January, the museum will screen "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" followed by February showings of "Lady and the Tramp." Apropos for St. Patrick's Day, "Darby O'Gill and the Little People" will be featured in March. Says Benefield, "We've got some really great public programming going on along with this great museum."

Visit www.waltdisney.org for more information about the Walt Disney Family Museum and its many public events.

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