Waking Sleeping Beauty Page #2

---

but he was cautious about it.

He got burned five years earlier

when he entrusted a charismatic animator

named Don Bluth to lead the department.

But Bluth polarized the animators.

Some adored him

as the messiah of animation and others...

Well, others thought

he was just another Walt wannabe.

lronically,

Bluth himself became disillusioned

with the studio's Animation Department.

So on his birthday in 1979,

he resigned

and took half the animators with him

to start his own studio.

The bombshell set back the release

of The Fox and the Hound by six months

and left Miller and the studio betrayed.

CLEMENTS:
It was this interesting

cross-generational thing

where you still had a few

of these legendary Disney artists

who were now in their sixties

and approaching retirement

and then a bunch of young people

in their twenties

who were really, really excited

and sort of passionate about this medium.

It was thrilling to learn

from the masters.

But there was a feeling like that somehow

we could be making better films.

Around that time,

the studio did a survey

that revealed

a majority of teenage moviegoers

wouldn't be caught dead

near a Disney movie.

We were just waiting,

waiting for something, anything to happen.

On Monday,

we reported that Walt Disney Studios

was on shaky financial ground,

because of its troubled Film Division

and weak earnings

from the Epcot Center in Florida.

However, since that report,

there have been dramatic developments.

In just four days,

Disney stock jumped 16 percent,

topping off at around $58 a share.

Analysts attribute the jump

to two factors.

Splash, the youth-oriented comedy

about a mermaid in Manhattan,

stunned Hollywood by racking up

over $6 million in its opening three days.

That's the best opening for any movie

in Disney's history.

Another surprise, the resignation of

Roy E. Disney as chairman of the board.

He's Walt's nephew and son of Walt's

brother, the company's co-founder.

The real heartbeat of this company was,

is and will always be the film business.

Because from the film business

comes the ideas

that then generate new things

in the parks.

New promotions, new--

A kind of a sense of continuing newness

about the company in general.

And when that began to fail--

And I actually, somewhere along the line,

began hearing things like,

"Well, I don't think they really wanna stay

in the movie business,

because it's not doing very well

and we don't really even need it anyway."

And that gave me all sorts of problems,

because I, you know--

I remember saying at one point,

"Well, if you really think that way,

then what you're doing

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes