“Hatch! Brainstorming Secrets of a Theme Park Designer” Takes you Inside the Development of Twilight Zone Tower of Terror

Jim Hill

12 years ago

Chris sent me an e-mail earlier this week in regards to the “Unofficial Guide Disney Dish” podcast that I do with Len Testa, where he asked:

“Where do you get all of the stories that you tell on these podcasts? I’m a big Disney history buff. But you always seem to have these behind-the-scenes stories that I’ve never heard before. Where do you get your material?”

Thanks for the kind words, Chris. As to where I get the information that I used in those “Unofficial Guide Disney Dish” podcasts as well as the stories that I post here on JHM … Look, I’ve been doing this for a long time now. 30 years this year, to be exact. And over the past three decades, I’ve interviewed a lot of Imagineers and befriended a number of Disney Legends. And these people have been very, very generous with me when it comes to their time as well as the information that they’ve been willing to share.

But — to be blunt — a lot of this supposedly insiders-only info is already readily available to the public. You just have to know where to look.

Take — for example — C. McNair Wilson’s terrific new book, “Hatch! Brainstorming Secrets of a Theme Park Designer” (Books Village, September 2012). Now to be perfectly honest, the title of this self-help book is somewhat misleading. Given that “Hatch!” is — when you get right down to it — really more about brainstorming than it is about theme parks.

But that said, there are stories here in this 208 page paperback that every serious Disney theme park fan just HAS TO read. Take — for example — Wilson’s take on how the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror actually came into being. To hear C. NcNair tell this highly entertaining behind-the-scenes tale, the origin of this E-Ticket can be traced back to the time …

When Michael Eisner was wooing Mel Brooks to move his production company, Brooksfilm, to the Disney Studios lot in Burbank, he brought Mel over to Imagineering. Mel and his son, Max, love Disneyland. I was charged with assembling a small team of my fellow concept designers to met with Mel, Michael and Marty (Sklar), chief of Imagineering.

“Let’s do a Mel Brooks attraction for Disney-MGM Studios, Florida,” Michael said.
“How would we do that?” Mel asked immediately.
“McNair?” my boss, Marty, prodded.
“Well, Mr. Brooks …”
“Call me, Mel,” he said. “And you are … ?” (Looking at my name tag.)
“I’m Mr. Wilson.” He laughed big and we were off to a grand start. (I recall he also slapped me, playfully.)
“Think of it as telling a great Mel Brooks story,” I said. “But instead of telling it in moving images projected on a wall, we tell it with concrete walls and the technology of modern theme parks. Audio Animatronics, high-tech ride vehicles, Pepper’s Ghost …”
“Who’s Pepper?” Mel asked.
“Doesn’t matter. He’s dead.”

We spent several hilarious sessions with His Silliness, Mr. Brooks, over the next few weeks. It was a master class in “What makes funny.” The team reviewed every Mel movie. No single film lent itself to direct translation into a theme park attraction, but Young Frankenstein became our muse: silly and scary. We hit on the notion of a big, old, condemned, and humorously haunted hotel in old Hollywood — the Mel Brooks Hollywood Horror Hotel (original working title). As Mel often said, ‘Say ‘Horror’ slowly or it’s no longer a family ride.” To avoid that problem we nicknamed the project “Hotel Mel.”

Now where this section of “Hatch!” really gets interesting is when Wilson talks about how he and some veteran Imagineers came up with the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror’s heart-stopping finale in WDI’s cafeteria.

I doodled the rough layout of the hotel (on a series of napkins, of course) and told the engineers our idea of going past several haunted floors and then … “out of the shaft and down the hall.”

“Can we do that?” I asked one of them. “Can we take an elevator out of its shaft?”

“Sure,” Jack said. He said it easy, as if I’d asked, “Can I have the pepper?” After several “yes” answers to many more wild, impossible questions, the engineers had a question or two for me.

Mainly they asked: “How will you get everyone back down to the lobby?”

I actually had an idea. The team hadn’t thought that far. I was just hoping they wouldn’t think I was nuts for taking an elevator out of its shaft. I had been using a salt shaker as the elevator and my floor plans on two or three dozen napkins as the hotel. “Well,” I said,” what I’d like to do is crash through the outside wall of the hotel and …” moving the salt shaker (elevator) to the edge of the table I released it and let it drop to the carpet. “I’d like to drop the elevator, full of guests, over the edge of the building.”

… Silence.

“How many floors? How far do you want to drop them?”

“I dunno, six or eight stories.”

“Nah,” Jack — Disney Imagineering legend — said with a snarl, “Too short.”

“Ten stories?” I said.

“Come on Theme Park Boy, think!” (Apparently the engineer thought that I was the boring one.)

(Okay … thinking … it’s the “Mel Brooks Hollywood Horror Hotel”) “How about thirteen stories!”

“Good answer.” Jack took another bite of his pastrami on rye.

And this is just the beginning of the great behind-the-stories you’ll find in “Hatch! Brainstorming Secrets of a Theme Park Designer.” By that I mean, C. McNair (who had a hand in the development of 7 different Disney theme parks) can take you places that every Disneyana enthusiasts has just dreamed about.

Want proof? Check out this especially juicy excerpt:

I know exactly how Disney’s California Adventure sprang to life — I was there when it began.

There were just eight of us in the room when Disney CEO Michael Eisner drew two big circles, badly. Pointing at the bottom circle, he said, “If I gave you these one hundred acres of asphalt in front of Disneyland (a.k.a. the Disneyland parking lot) what would you do with it?”

“Another theme park?” Somebody asked.

“I don’t know.”

“But where will everyone park?” Someone had inadvertently invited a Type A to a creative meeting.

“Don’t think about that,” Michael said. “Give me a reason to move all those cars.”

“So it can be anything?”

“You tell me.”

And let me tell you folks something. If you’re looking for a genuinely entertaining & inspirational book about the subject of brainstorming that also includes some of the best behind-the-scenes stories about Walt Disney Imagineering that I’ve read in years, then you need to get your hands on a copy of “Hatch! Brainstorming Secrets of a Theme Park Designer” right now.

You can thank me — and C. McNair Wilson — later.