Subscriber Exclusive: Imagineer Steve Tatham on the making of Disneyland Paris’s CinéMagique

The Great Movie Ride had a montage at the end, that was done by Chuck Workman, and we worked with Chuck Workman on this one as well. He was great at making those montages. The one at the end of The Great Movie Ride didn’t have any European film, it didn’t have any art film. It was Wizard of Oz—we all know Wizard of Oz—and if you look at those scenes, [there are] gangster movies, Tarzan movies, Footlight Parade, Busby Berkley musicals, and big Disney movies, of course. But I was excited to look at world cinema.

There were two things [about creating CinéMagique] that I thought were interesting, and that I carried forward for the rest of my career.

I worked with a professor of film at Chapman University, who has long since retired. His name was Paul Frizler. We sat down and we [asked ourselves], “What are the greatest movies of all time? What are the greatest moments of the greatest movies of all time?” We talked about, not just the house flying and the witch in Wizard of Oz, but we talked about [the moment] in Madame Du Barry, when she puts the earrings to her ear…these films, a lot of them are obscure to American audiences, some of them really resonate with European audiences, and some of them don’t. But we started with the ones that resonated with us. I made a list of all the great moments, and we said we’ve got to see if we, first of all, we’ve got to see if we can get the rights to any of these.

I worked on that with an attorney named Mary Lippold, who has long since retired. She and I went to every studio, and I would pitch the creative and Mary would deal with the legality and negotiate the deal. Think about it; we’re going to every studio and asking if we can use their crown jewels. We go to Paramount and ask if we can use The Godfather in Disney…they’re just like, “Take a hike!”

Some of them were responsive and some weren’t, but what was great about that relationship, and what has annoyed me ever since then, is when I hear somebody say, “I have this idea but the lawyers won’t let me do it. Legal department says ‘No’.” I’d say, “That is not their job to tell you ‘No.’”

What Mary explained to me was, “You’re the creative. You tell them the idea. My job is just to make the deal and tell you what the risks are that you might be exposing the company to. If you want to put something in there, I’m not going to tell you not to put it in there. But I’m going to tell you, if you put it in there you’re exposing the company to risk, and they might get sued by this actor, or the content might offend…” whatever the legal risk was.

She said, “If you want to use Jack Nicholson in a clip, I’m not going to tell you you can’t do that,”—even though we asked him six months ago for another show, and his manager said he wanted a percentage of the gate. He wanted to get paid for every click of every person who came into the park, and we’re never going to do that—“But I don’t know if he has a new manager today. I don’t know if he changed his mind. I don’t know if he’s going to respond to this project and have a different answer. That’s not my job. My job isn’t to predict what somebody’s going to say. My job is to tell you, here’s what we’ve done, here are the risks, and you tell me what you want to do.”

And I was like, “Oh my god, Mary, can you work with me on everything?”

Then she retired, and I’ve never had that experience with another lawyer. They’re always like, “You can’t do that.” I’m like, “Don’t tell me I can’t do that. Tell me what the risk I’m putting the company is and we will decide whether or not we do that. A legal department doesn’t make the decision on whether or not creative is the appropriate thing for us to do in our park.” But that ends up how it works. That’s the short-cut. They’re like, “No, you can’t do that because of our previous experience.” I don’t think that’s the way it should work.

Anyway, [Mary and I] had a great experience.

Then we worked with Gaumont Studios, a French film company. I’d go over to Paris and say, “Okay, we’re getting the rights to these movies. Here are the clips we want to use.” And we developed the “Oui or No” list. I’d just say, “I’m going to say somebody, and you tell me if you think the French audience will know this person, respond to this person…”

“Sophia Loren?”

“Oui.”

“Wizard of Oz?”

“No.”

And I would go through the list, because I didn’t want it to be Disney’s perception, or my perception of what I think a European audience’s reaction would be. I wanted their perception.

The challenge of getting rights from Europe is so steep, because you have to get five different “auteurs,” the authors of the works. So you may want Les Enfants du Pardis—The Children of Paradise—a French movie that’s much more iconic to them than Wizard of Oz or The Godfather. They like The Godfather, but they don’t like Wizard of Oz that much, even though I think we did end up with Wizard of Oz because everybody in America said, “You’ve got to have Wizard of Oz!” I said “No, you don’t!” But then I would get overruled, because somebody would say, “No, I think we gotta have it.” We originally had it because Disney had a deal with MGM when Disney-MGM Studios opened.

In any event, we would have this “Oui or No” list, and then you’d have to get the rights from these five auteurs. So if you’re getting, say, Les Enfants du Paradis, you have to get the rights from the director of the film, the screenwriter of the film, the composer of the film, I think maybe the cinematographer. You have to get the rights from the original author who wrote the source material. Les Enfants du Paradis is based on the novel by Victor Hugo, and it was written centuries ago, so you have to track down his heirs. You have to get Victor Hugo’s great-great-granddaughter, or whoever is managing the rights, to get their permission. You can get permission from the copyright holder, and it doesn’t matter if the movie is 100 years old, which some of these are, you have to get permission from all these…so it’s very, very challenging.

I was super proud of what we ended up with, and that was before we added Martin Short and Julie Delpy and made this wonderful film that integrated with the clips. And then we had some props on stage—the knife that pops through the screen. It was a lovely little show that was incredibly challenging to put together. It was emotional. And I just really connected with it, because I loved the material but I also had all those other reasons. It was such a labor of love.

Even though it wasn’t the biggest, it wasn’t the most popular, I just thought it was a lovely experience, and something you could only do in a theme park. It wasn’t a movie, it also wasn’t a ride, it was a different kind of experience.