Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
Theme parks are more than just passive entertainment; they can inspire us and even change our lives. For a certain type of creative young person, that strong connection with the art plays a huge role. Josh Steadman built a lifelong passion for becoming a theme park designer that led him to Walt Disney Imagineering in 2011. He took a long road to reach that goal with its share of challenges, however. On this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast, Josh talks about how he got interested in theme parks and ultimately became a designer.
During this interview, Josh takes us through his jobs at Thinkwell; the International Shakespeare Festival in Gdansk, Poland; and on TV productions like Wipeout and Lincoln Heights before joining Walt Disney Imagineering in 2011. He also describes mentors like Don Carson that helped him along the way. Shanghai Disneyland was a massive project, and Josh explains both the excitement and the difficulties of working overseas. He worked as a Show Designer and Production Designer on the Enchanted Storybook Castle Walkthrough in Shanghai along with other projects.
Josh’s recent projects include his role as Director of Show Design and Production for Evermore Park in Pleasant Grove, Utah. He talks about what interested him about bringing Ken Bretschneider’s vision to life. The DIY approach to prepare the park for opening was very different from Shanghai DIsneyland. We conclude the podcast with some advice from Josh to artists hoping to work in the theme park industry. I really enjoyed the chance to talk to Josh and learn more about his career.
Show Notes: Josh Steadman
Learn more about Josh Steadman and check out his projects on his official website.
Follow Josh Steadman on his Instagram page.
Transcript
Josh Steadman: Sometimes it’s about just making cool stuff because sometimes that is all it’s about. Sometimes it’s about taking one and going, what can I learn from this thing? What is it going to teach me? But I want to make something really amazing and what is it going to teach you?
Dan Heaton: That is theme park designer Josh Steadman, and you’re listening to The Tomorrow Society Podcast.
(music)
Dan Heaton: Thanks for joining me here on Episode 149 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. I hope you’re all doing well out there. It’s kind of a weird time as we finish the summer and look to the fall in a lot of ways things seem fairly normal. In other ways, not so much, but I hope you’re all hanging in there and finding ways to enjoy however the world is for you. Right now, I’m really excited about today’s show with Josh Steadman. Josh worked at Walt Disney Imagineering on the massive project of Shanghai Disneyland, including the Enchanted Storybook Castle walkthrough in the giant castle there in Shanghai.
Also was the director of show design in production at Evermore Park and has been involved in a lot of other projects, and we dig into those. It’s fun to talk about some of the amazing things that Josh has been involved with, but what I really found interesting too was Josh’s path to get to being at Imagineering and becoming a successful theme park designer.
It wasn’t easy and Josh is really open about what his dream was and why it was so important to him, but also how much he had to sacrifice to get to it, and you can hear it in his stories that he talks about. It wasn’t easy and I really appreciate that because while it’s great, I love learning about what designers have done to create attractions and the behind the scenes stories. Sometimes we don’t always dig into how much they had to work, how hard it was to get to the point that they were at. It was cool to talk to Josh to learn more background on that part of the story and then how he ultimately was able to get where he is today.
During the interview, Josh also references several people who’ve been guests on the show. Brian Crosby known as Cros, who I know he’s really good friends with, and Chris Merritt and others, Don Carson, Chris Runco, so his career is definitely intertwined with a lot of guests. If you’ve been listening to the show for a while that have been so cool to talk with here on the Tomorrow Society Podcast, I hope you enjoyed this interview. Definitely one of my favorites that I’ve done on this show, so let’s do it here is Josh Steadman.
(music)
Dan Heaton: My guest today has worked as a set designer, art director, creative director, show designer, and illustrator on theme parks, TV, and theater for more than 20 years. With Walt Disney Imagineering. he designed and installed the enchanted storybook castle walkthrough at Shanghai Disneyland. Other projects including Evermore Park, Genting Sky Worlds, Warner Brothers Park in Abu Dhabi, he’s worked on and a lot more. It is Josh Steadman. Josh, thanks so much for talking with me here on the podcast.
Josh Steadman: It’s good to be here, Dan. Thanks for having me.
Dan Heaton: Oh, no problem. Your name has come up a lot when I’ve talked to other great designers and I’ve been wanting to talk with you, so I’m glad this worked out and there’s just a lot to cover.
Josh Steadman: It’s a good thing. There are good things hopefully that they’re saying that my name is being brought up in good light I hope. You always worry about that stuff, right?
Dan Heaton: Oh, definitely. It’s all positive, at least what I know. I can’t speak for anyone else, but what I know has all been positive, so it’s been good. But I want to start a little bit with your background because I’d love to learn how you got interested even just in becoming a designer when you were kind of growing up and originally years ago.
Josh Steadman: I’ve told this story a few times and forgive me for being repetitive, you’ve heard it somewhere else, but I grew up in Idaho, actually born in Spokane, Washington. We moved around a lot, but mostly lived in Idaho, so I was the odd kid, odd child back in the days where art wasn’t even provided as curriculum in elementary school actually, it was always the emphasis was science, math, and reading, at least in southern Idaho surrounded by potato fields and literally I would draw as escapism.
My parents took me to Disneyland as a young boy. I’ve said this story a few times, but I was six years old and I remember very distinctly seeing America Sings being influenced by the singing animals on stage, singing patriotic hymns more or less, which then they all went to Splash Mountain, pretty much those little guys, but then also seeing, having an image stuck in my mind, I do not remember where I saw this, I believe I saw it at Disneyland, but it stuck with me from six years old on, and that was the clock of tomorrow at the front of Tomorrowland.
I remember seeing that sculptural icon and I remember the numbers being on top of it and a friend of mine corrected me that that wouldn’t have been there in 1982, ‘83 when I was there. It would’ve been long gone. I saw it somewhere and that image stuck with me. It still does. I used to draw it and went home. I draw it all the time, which is very strange.
And I was going through decks of old drawings from when I was a child and I found one of those drawings, so somewhere in there it stuck and it became this repetitive design. I remember thinking as a kid, that’s great design and being only six and going, okay, they did this hourglass thing, but getting the visual language and the globe on top that then all of a sudden shadow plate on the ground; I just remember being so influenced by that.
Dan Heaton: I mean you mentioned Disneyland and of course that image, I mean, were you able to go to Disneyland and I’m sure if that already inspired you going there or even seeing videos probably made a difference too.
Josh Steadman: We grew up on the Disney Channel and the Disney Channel in the early ‘80s had Imagine This, which was these little snippets of Imagineering from home like, look, this is what we do. There are people who actually are paid to come up with great design that tells a story and a narrative and we get to build this thing on these things, and I remember other than the Imagineer, this episodes, all the old cartoons and shorts were a part of the Disney Channel. They were always being played. You could watch the old Mickey Shorts and old inserts of the Castaways with Haley Mills, all the old stuff that I think influenced a generation, a very huge influence, and Summer Magic is another one.
Knowing the Disney language and speaking that language, but knowing the treasure trove of storytelling and film and the Mickey Mouse Club was a huge influence, partly because I grew up in Idaho, conservative family, very conservative family, and I was the odd kid. I was the strange older oldest son, and my mom didn’t know what to do with me. She still doesn’t know what to do with me.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, well, I mean I’m here in Missouri, but we had the Disney Channel and at the same timeframe and all those, The Love Bug and all those kind of old movies or Apple Dumpling Gang, all the random movies that they showed, and like you said, they used to really show things from the history of the parks and stuff. It was very different.
So I’m right there with that same kind of, that was how they promoted the parks in a way because they couldn’t promote it through the Internet. That didn’t exist. That was the only way we really saw the parks. So when you were interested in that and then becoming an artist, how did you go about doing that? You mentioned you grew up in Idaho and I don’t know, even schools back then, colleges and stuff didn’t have programs like they do now for design and theme parks and all that. So how did you go about actually trying to make that happen?
Josh Steadman: Well, let me back up. I was a bullied kid. We moved by the time just for context. By the time I was 17 we had moved 19 times.
Dan Heaton: Oh my gosh.
Josh Steadman: And my parents had six kids, so that doesn’t mean 19 different states. There was one area that I lived in the height of my childhood for a good eight or nine years, and that was southern Idaho. We moved when I was 12 to Reno, Nevada and coming from the farmlands of Idaho and then going to a city environment, Reno is a weird place. It’s smaller.
Vegas basically was very interesting and because I was such an odd duck as it was and was always living in these escapist little realms of my brain, I was a target. So it’s funny, I’m writing a book actually about that very subject about being an artist and growing up the theme park geek and all those things, and using that as my level of escapism to survive bullying. And in the ‘80s there was none of this pronouns didn’t exist.
Let’s wave a flag for everything that makes someone different, and I don’t mean that in disrespect. I mean that did not exist. So being the odd child and being strange and creative was hard. I think especially the way I grew up in the denomination and religion I grew up in, that was also another challenge. That’s a whole ‘nother separate podcast. I won’t get into that, but so knowing all this Disney stuff and watching the Disney Channel and going to Disneyland, which I thank my parents for that, they took me to Disneyland and that provided kind of a visual outlet in my head and a purpose. I don’t think, honestly, I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for that. In context, having theme parks, having art, having illustration and drawing to clock at tomorrow 180 times how many times I drew it, it was survival.
So I did everything, literally everything I could find and put my hands on, get my hands on to learn about folks that were like, hey, I created this cartoon character. Okay, now I’m going to build this park or lemme go buy this ghost town and set it back up and be in a park I mean, that stuff is inspiring for me because by today’s standards you can’t do that. You can do it. People are going to think you’re crazy, and I did it. And I did it with Ken Bretschneider and Evermore and with our backs against the wall in every sense of the world.
I don’t want to jump forward, but that man has fought every battle possible to maintain his park and this vision and this dream that is people. I will tell you by today’s standards, people aren’t very supportive of those ingenious people anymore; I think we’ve become cynics to everything. It’s disappointing because I was not a cynic. I believed in these dream things that Disneyland was a place where I could go work one day, which I did.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, there’s a lot to cover there, but, but I think you make a great point just as far as Evermore, which you rarely see that you’re rarely seeing these, I mean, just talk about Disneyland event, you’re rarely seeing just this idea of is, I mean Walt Disney is a unique guy, there aren’t a lot of Walt, but there are people with those kinds of visions that could want to make things happen. The fact that you had that vision yourself even and were able to get there, though I know it was challenging.
It says a lot because like you said, things today is the way it is, but even back then, there was no path forward really to do what you wanted to do, at least in some sort of manual or book in a way.
Josh Steadman: There was no path, and it’s so interesting to me and I marvel literally, I marvel at people like John Hench, Harper Goff, Mary Blair, Eyvind Earl, these are heroes, and you said you had Chris Merritt, you had Brian Crosby, you had Don Carson, you’ve had Chris Runco on this podcast. Those guys. That’s my people, man. I get emotional about it because it was everything for me. It still is, and those are some of the dearest, kindest, most genuine designers I know because they are passionate and they design from the heart and it’s inspiring to me. I cry in all these podcasts because it hits, people ask these questions and I’m like, how do you do this thing?
It was so I cannot begin to convey the level of sacrifice I went through to work in theme parks. So I take it seriously sometimes a little bit too much, and I’m like, I have these days and truthfully and honestly, today was one of those days this morning I’m just like, what am I doing? Why am I doing this? Why don’t I just go work at a gas station or something?
Some days it’d be so much easier, but I’ve had a lot of those days actually, because you look at it and you go, okay, I’m surviving and yes, I’m grateful for my job and all these things, but because you care so much and are so driven by the passion of creating something different, new, unique, awesome, something to inspire another generation and people like me, this homely looking child in Idaho to become something better and to follow your heart.
I’m an idealist I guess, and I’m not going to apologize about it because we lack so much of that today and I don’t want to wax that poetic because that’s another podcast too, right.
Dan Heaton: Well, we’re covering a lot of different ones, but the group you mentioned though, I mean I think a lot of those guys from talking with them have a lot of similar feelings where you feel so strongly about it. Like I talked to Chris Merritt, that you feel so strongly about what you want to do and some people you work with feel are right there and then others aren’t. And I’m not picking on anyone in particular. I’m just saying that’s the nature of the world, but how do you navigate that, I guess you could say now or even when you were trying to enter the industry, how do you navigate that in a way that you can keep your sanity I guess?
Josh Steadman: I go to the gym a lot and I run and I lift weights to maintain my sanity and honestly movies, thank goodness for movies and comic books. It’s all this stuff that inspires these same people cross, and I go way back. Chris Merritt and I sat next to each other in Shanghai and Chris who had designed a walkthrough.
I leaned heavily on Chris Merritt because I was working on this walkthrough that had all these, it started out with a small team of three of us, four of us, and then exploded, and there were 67 members of this walkthrough team, and this child creative baby that you’ve given birth to all of a sudden is no longer yours. And Chris knows exactly what I’m talking about. You have to let go of this little thing and be okay with other people going, okay, it’s not yours anymore.
You need to let go. That’s hard, especially when it’s something you care. And all this sudden when Disney approached me to jump ahead a little bit and he said, Hey, we’ve got this thing and this castle. You are a theater designer, do you want it? Would you be interested? And it was princess-based. I’m like, oh crap, I hate the princess stuff. Which truthfully, I’m not a fan of princess stuff. I’m usually go the opposite in the Rocketeer and Captain America and all this very manish kind of masculine things.
So I bought into this princess ideology, I watched all the princess films back to back and over and over and over again. Research, you’re only as good as your research, so you’ve got to know it, and you’ve got to be the guy or the girl or the person in the room who knows that stuff better than anyone else because paying you to be the expert in that stuff and because it means so much to what it is you’re supposed to be doing and what it is you’re creating I think.
Dan Heaton: Let’s talk about that walkthrough because I mean you’ve brought it up and just you wanted to join Imagineering for so long, you were able to join that project, which I know any new park, anything involved with that is going to be challenging, but how were you able to, and then you ended up going to China. I mean there’s a lot to it there, but how did that project go and what was it like to get to ultimately work at Imagineering after wanting that for so long?
Josh Steadman: Well, the story goes, I had written my own curriculum in undergrad to be a theme park designer. The day I graduated, I found out that someone I went to school with had submitted a portfolio very similar to mine, and I had no clue about this Imaginations contest thing. It’s such a long, convoluted story. Let me just all fast forward. It put me back in my career a good eight to nine years. Not to mention September 11th was very new and no artists, creative people were being hired.
The young people who call me today are like, how do you do this? Covid is so hard, and nothing against that Covid is hard, but as an artist, I’ve been living Covid for my entire life. You’re forced to sit down, draw, be focused, turn off your outside. And I’m a social person. I like people. I’m not the typical artist who can zero in and cut out the world and forget what day of the week it is.
That’s not me. I like leading teams. I like working with people, so I really have to force myself to sit and focus. So the delay and the setback in the career was very real. I ended up, I worked with teenagers and taught high school and then worked with troubled youth in the deserts of Southern Utah and Western Utah and Cros and I had been in Ecuador in 1996 together. That’s how I met Cros.
And so I called my brother, my younger brother who was studying illustration at the same time that I was putting this project together. And I call Cros, I go, hey, I’ve got this idea. It was on the heels of trying to recuperate this very dramatic setback that I had experienced in undergrad with my work. So I literally sat in the deserts of Utah for two years and designed this thing and involved, got crossed doing all the storyboards, got my brother doing these, my brother’s this very…look, I can draw, but by no means do I sell myself as an illustrator.
I’m a set designer who can draw. So my world saw, let’s create the worlds and let’s build the worlds because if we sit and draw this one more time, I’m going to die, right? Am I going to gouge up my eyes? And there are people who love to do it. I’m not that type of artist. So I called my brother and I’m all, Luke, I need your help. We’re doing this Rocketeer thing. He immediately was like, yeah, let’s do it. This is awesome. So Luke did these amazingly intricate crafted POVs in marker.
By the way, in gray skull markers, there’s an artist named Nathan Schroeder who works in film and we were kind of admirers of his, and Nathan Schroeder did everything in graphite powder and still does a lot of it to this day and marker work. So Luke was just figuring out how this guy does these things. I was working with a friend on story writing and Cros was storyboarding the attraction. The rest of the story is pretty epic, but another kind of mini setback, at least for me. I ended up moving out to LA, I quit my job teaching high school. I didn’t like it anyways. In teaching teenagers is always difficult in a classroom setting. Packed up my car. I’m giving you the long story, by the way.
Dan Heaton: No, that’s fine. This is great.
Josh Steadman: Literally packed up my car. I sold everything I had and I just basically was like for almost four years I was rejected by the Disney company and rejected, not earnestly the first time around because I felt like it wasn’t the work, my work they were seeing were seeing someone else’s work that was actually very similar to mine. That’s like I said, another story. Then the second time around was I had already had a degree and the competition, the Imaginations competition, they were like, sorry, dude, you already have a degree. Peace. So me and Luke were totally disqualified for this Rocketeer ride competition thing. By the way, it’s still a gorgeous entry. I’m pretty proud of it even to this day. And now it’s been 20 years later and it still could be built.
We didn’t build a tangible model. I mean back then no one was using things like SketchUp and Lumion and all that crap. They were doing stuff. They were building actual models. That’s how you built a park. They still do that too. My thought was if I could just get to LA pound the sidewalk and the pavement with my own work, someone will give me a shot. I just look.
I wanted to become who I wanted to become and I didn’t need anyone else telling me how I should do it. So I went off and I just did it. And it takes a level of crazy to do that. It takes a level of not really caring where your meal’s going to come from. Now I know so many people that take very calculated risks. I am not a calculated risk taker. If it means there’s a one in 10 shot that something’s going to happen, then I’m willing to take that risk.
I would be a really bad gambler. Let me just tell you in Vegas. So I left and Cros was not disqualified because he was still an undergrad and he was local in Orange County anyways, and mine the fact that the guy’s incredibly talented, so he was starting at WDI and Cros was like, hey, come sleep on my couch. Let me help you. I had been online was a forum somewhere, and we’re talking, this is now 20 years ago, but there was a forum somewhere that listed theme park design studios. So there were like 10, that was it, right? Ten worldwide. And so I called and emailed all these people and somehow I got ahold of Don Carson. This is where the Don Carson bit comes in.
Don, well actually emailed Don and I emailed Marcello, Don’s good friend from WDI, who was a co-designer on an illustrator for Roger Rabbit’s Toon Town Spin and for Toon Town. Toon Town was still fairly fresh as far as design goes and its newness. But those guys’ illustrations were amazing. And so I’m like Don and Marcello, Marcello sent me a very polite email back and he was like, dude, you’re more of a renderer than you’re an illustrator. I can’t help you by. And I went, okay, nothing against Marcello.
He was right at the time. I didn’t know what I was doing even as an artist. But Don, bless his heart, was super patient with me and basically was like, how can I help? Let me give you some pointers. Let me tell you what you can do. I really believe it’s because Don’s an educator and a teacher in his heart.
He’s really good at that. And so he pointed me in a direction of, and this is where it gets really crazy, he sends me Kathy Kirk’s email. Well, Kathy Kirk was a producer, her husband, Steve Kirk, they had just come back from building the world’s most beautiful greatest theme park escape reality on this planet earth in my book. So they were like, he sends me their contact, I’m sure now that would never happen. But he sends me their contact. I cold called them and cold emailed them, and Kathy gets me on the phone with Steve, and then they loop in their brother, her brother-in-law, Tim Kirk.
So this is 2005, by the way, almost 2005. It wasn’t even then. It was 2004ish, the end of 2004. And they’re like, when can you be in Long Beach? They’re like, can you come to Long Beach and let’s do breakfast, all of us, and let’s give you a portfolio review. The fact that those people, I’m getting emotional again, took the time to give me such a shot is huge.
Because to me, and still to this day, they built the most beautiful park and most beautiful theme park. We were trying to do that with Shanghai. I think Shanghai is a beautiful park. It’s no Tokyo DisneySea in my book. Tokyo just kind of laid it flat. Come on, you want to do something amazing? We did it right. So I had $200, literally, I drove out to LA, moved to LA with $200, $250, something like that in my pocket, and no help.
I love my parents, but they’re like, okay, son, you’re on your own with this. They did that more than once. And I think in a pinch I could call them, but it would have to be a very desperate pinch being like, dude, I’m standing on the side of the street. I have no car. They might send me a hundred bucks. Back then I bought donuts, chocolate milk, orange juice, and I took it to the Kirk’s house.
And in their house, they invited me over and Kathy and Steve and Tim all sat there and they went through my work and they just said, this is great stuff. Oh gosh, talk about validation. I have two stories of that. The other time was I met Dave Stevens that same year at the ComicCon in San Diego, and he gave me a portfolio review and Dave Stevens drew me a picture of the Rocketeer of his helmet.
Dave was like, dude, you got chops, bro. And I’m all I do. I have chops because I didn’t think I did. I had failed so much that to hear those comments from these people in the industry that were my heroes was very much what I needed to hear to keep going. And so Kathy, Steven, Tim were like, look, there’s this start-up company. Why don’t we get you in touch with those people?
There’s this guy named Seth Cover, he’s great, we’ll get you on the phone with Seth and this good friend of ours, Mary Cluff, I didn’t know who they were talking about. So they gave me the contact for what was Thinkwell and Thinkwell had 10 employees, literally 10 or 12. They had just moved from Pasadena to Burbank. So I went over and I interviewed with them and Seth was like, we’d love to bring you in.
Mary was a delight. She was so kind. One year later they brought me out and I got to sit next to Topper Helmers, who’s this famous storyboard artist, illustrators, worked in theme parks for years who was also at Imagineering and everything. And Topper and I illustrated several pitch projects that Thinkwell was working on. That was 2005. Then I was working at Disneyland for the 50th anniversary selling tickets to make money. I was 28 years old, I was 28.
There are young people who are calling me right now who are 19 and 20, and they’re like, I’ve tried everything I’m saying. I’m like, you are a child. You figure it out. Do your homework. Go get a job. Whatever it is, make some money if you don’t already have it. I never had any of that. I was living off quarters, pennies and nickels and dimes and barely making it, but you have no excuse. If that is your world and good for you, don’t call me. You can’t figure it out. And no offense to anyone, anyone’s going to hear it. Good for you.
Dan Heaton: Well, during that time, I know you did a lot of different projects, like you did Shakespeare Festival, you worked on some TV shows like Wipeout and Lincoln Heights. And so all those experiences, I mean, how did that help you I guess to grow as a designer? Or what were those like to kind of build you up to where you ended up going to?
Josh Steadman: So after interning, I interned with Thinkwell, three times. Three times I interned. There was one point I was answering phones and to connect garbage sitting next to Mary Cluff actually, I was willing to do whatever it took to be in a space just to be involved. So after doing that a few summers in a row and coming, I went back to Utah actually to work with kids to supplement my income until things could work out.
And I decided 2006, I decided I needed a Master’s degree. I needed someone because up to that point, it was being taught by other people or doing it on my own. Then having those little stories I was telling you about at the very end of my late ‘20s, I still needed someone to kind of teach me the ropes and people are busy. No one has that kind of time.
So I had applied to graduate school. I had a degree in Illustration from BYU, and I made up my own emphasis in theme park design, entertainment design. So at that point in time, I got accepted to UC Irvine, Cal Arts, UConn, because they had a huge puppetry program for Jim Henson Studios and all of that. That was a huge interest to me designing for Sesame Street and all that kind of thing. And then NYU and UCI made the most sense because it was local to Southern California. The theme park industry was still primarily only heavily involved in SoCal. So I made the decision, moved to Irvine, and went to UCI and studied set design for theater. One of the greatest decisions I’ve ever made in my entire life was to get a Master’s degree for the reasons that it taught me how to think spatially.
I was thinking very dimensional, flat because I was an illustrator up to that point. It taught me how to design and tell a story for a stage in a box. Some of the advice I’d gotten from the Kirks and from Dawn and all these people was study theater. Theater teaches you how to tell a story in a black box, how to move guests or guests who are sedentary and just going to sit there and they’re just going to watch a show how to tell that story with movie scenery.
I still to this day tell young people all the time, look, if you can study theater, that’s the best way to learn about theme park design. Because theme parks are pure theater. Everything about them from main entry to the weenie to back of house, all of that is based on theater paradigm. Even the hierarchy of roles in how to build a theme park is based on film and theater.
So you have project managers, you have producers, you have stage managers, basically these people that guide you, that know the budget, that do something you’re not going to be very good at because you’re a designer, and then you figure out how to tell the story the best way possible. So grad school did that for me, and I studied with two mentors. Let me just say two, pause. I’ve had some incredible mentors in my career.
So other than these people that helped me get to this point, I studied with Doug Goheen at UC Irvine, who he’s been retired for over a decade, who was trained by Ming Cho Lee, who was American Theater’s greatest set designer, one of ’em. He taught me how to design scenery. He and Keith Bangs at UC Irvine, and then the Shakespeare Festival, all that stuff. I’m telling you the long answer, basically at UCI all of a sudden just sunk my life into theater.
And theater is a whole ‘nother community. Got these people who live and die for stage shows and musicals. And I went into it blind. I had no idea what a community that was. Now I fight for the theater community all the time because it changed my life for the better. And I was invited to design for the Gdansk Shakespeare Festival in Poland, which was epic. I was 30, I just turned 30, and I’m designing for the world’s greatest Shakespeare festival.
And we won Best in Show. My set was noticed all over the world. We beat out the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was this incredible experience for someone who had just been introduced to theater. So I started winning awards and getting noticed for my work. Then I submitted into an television Emmy contest and was a finalist for a student Emmy, which I was basically nominated for a student Emmy, which I was, that’s what happened.
And based off some of my theater stuff, all these little things gave me the oomph to keep going. And then John Iacovelli, who was the production designer and art director for Babylon 5, and for Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. He worked with Joe Johnson, who’s another hero of mine, and the man who directed The Rocketeer. This is where it starts coming bizarrely full circle John was, first of all, John’s philosophy is if I’m going to teach you how to be a set designer, you’re going to learn it the hardest way possible.
I’m going to throw you in the deep in the pool. I’m not going to throw you a life preserver. You have to figure it out. But I’m going to give you all the tools to figure out how to get that life preserver, right? Give you all those tools first. And working and studying for John Iacovelli was delightfully painful.
It was like old school Hollywood. And the man taught me how to hand draft scenery. His other philosophy was like, look, if you don’t want to do Vectorworks, you don’t want to do CAD, then you’d be the best damn hand drafting theater set designer the world has ever seen. And let me show you some examples. So John would pull out draftings and drafting sheet’s 18 by 24, or it’s 18 by 36, you can get these big pieces of bellum.
They’ve got the corners already printed on ’em and whatnot. So you know your guidelines to stay on there, to do top view, side view, front view, top view, side view, front view over and over and over again. And to learn how to hand draft theater scenery. So he showed me things from all the great set designers in the history of American theater and then started showing me stuff and teaching me stuff from the great production designers of American film.
So he taught me how to be a set designer, and it was intense. It was crazy. When I got done with school, it was because of John Iacovelli. He threw me the ABC bone, got me on Lincoln Heights, which was an ABC afternoon show, actually had lunch with Chadwick Bosman when he was working in that show as an actor. So that gives you a little bit of history. It’s really interesting. But I was the art department assistant. So I ran around, I picked up hardware from the valley, and I picked up wallpaper samples from Aztec wallpaper in North Hollywood and all the places that fuel the television industry in LA. John then got me in contact with Wipeout, and he goes, this is a great show. I think you’d be really good on this show. So they hired me as a production illustrator.
I was doing all their backdrops, all their illustrations for the set pieces. Then they had me start doing set pieces and designing them, and then I was doing props, and I did that for six of eight seasons with ABC on Wipeout working with those art directors and production designers. So I did that. And then I got in touch with a company in LA that did huge events, and I worked on the Contagion world premiere with Soderbergh’s production company.
I worked with EA games on a big opening concert grand opening spectacular with Jay-Z rapping on top of a Humvee. And I got to design that. Like I said, let me just say again, not a great illustrator. I am a great set designer and I’m proud of my set design work. So fast forward after all this stuff with Disney and ABC, and these spot projects, I one day just decided to call my friend Nina Ray Vaughn, who worked on Toon Town with Dawn, and I’d worked with her at Thinkwell, and I said, Nina, how do I get to WDI?
She’s like, dude, here’s what you should do. You got to email my buddy Bruce. And I’m like, who’s Bruce? I didn’t know she was talking about Bruce Vaughn. So she literally sends me an intro email to Bruce. She copied herself and the secretary, Bruce’s secretary. So I got an interview with Bruce Vaughn literally the next day. Bruce spent the whole day with me, took me to lunch, showed me all of WDI, and I have to tell you how surreal it was being finally at WDI after all these years. So all that long diatribe I just gave you, that’s like 16 years had passed.
And Bruce is like, here’s where you go and you buy your food for the cafeteria. Let me show Mickey’s of Glendale, and maybe you can buy a shirt or something. You got free time and I’m going to introduce you to some people. Oddly enough. So funny. I met all these people, all these leaders at the Disney company and WDI, and then I swung by Cros’ office and I knocked on his door. I’m like, Hey, Cros, look who’s here.
He was like, oh my gosh, you’re here, man, blah, blah. Anyway, such a circular event, pattern and path. Honestly, I think if you want something so bad every morning you wake up and you taste it and you’re like, this is what I’m going to do, man, and you’re going to write it down and you’re going to put it on your universal, “bring me all the things I need” board in your bathroom or wherever it’s at with all your visual images of who you think you need to be. That stuff works. And it worked for me, but it was a lot of hard work, the effort behind it. Like I said, I can’t even begin to describe how much work all that was.
And it’s funny, I kept pigeonholed quite a bit today because everyone’s like, they don’t realize I’ve been doing this for almost 22 years, and I’ve only really made money doing this for 11 years, less than that. By 10 years I was poverty stricken to a degree that was pathetic. I mean so pathetic. And so I’m really fortunate, extremely grateful. I hope that’s, it doesn’t sound like I’m leaving any of that out, but it was a lot of work.
Dan Heaton: Well, speaking of a lot of work, now you have to actually go to Shanghai and do, I mean eventually you went to China, you started out in California to do this project. I mean, great, but also how good and challenging maybe was it?
Josh Steadman: There’s a book I’m writing about that one. Honestly, Shanghai was a project that was the most epic of projects and freaking awesome and one of the worst projects of my life. So I think there was a realization being and finally getting to WDI where you get your role, you’re working, you’re way deep in your project.
I was, you’re excited to be designing stuff that have the Fab Five; I was working on Mickey Avenue, and that’s actually how I met Chris is because Chris came in on Mickey Avenue and I was able to pass what I had done to a certain level off the Chris and go, it’s all yours. I don’t have time; I got to focus on this other thing. Like I said, let me just tell you why I left. I’ll fast forward. I left Shanghai in 2015; I was beaten and tired, exhausted.
I was not myself anymore. And I spent two years recuperating from that project. Given all that backstory, I’ve given you how long it took me to get to WDI. It was heart wrenching at the same time to come back from that project and have to basically put my life back together. That’s another podcast, not for right now. But Shanghai, number one, China was very difficult.
And I can’t convey how difficult it was on this podcast. It was hard. And I was just telling a friend, my buddy Robert, who I worked with in Shanghai as well, we were just talking the other day, if I did another overseas project, I would not go by myself. I would take a therapy dog or I a partner or a friend or a family member. I made the world’s greatest mistake, I think, and you know this now after I’ve done this to never build an overseas park project alone.
Don’t go by yourself. The greatest words of advice someone gave me. I didn’t listen and I went and I didn’t do that thing. But I will say my first two years I was at WDI, almost four and a half years, and my first two years at WDI were incredible. Doris Hardoon, who was my mentor, and she literally, after meeting Bruce, Bruce gave my name to Doris and to Joe on Mickey Avenue, and Joe was retiring.
So Shanghai was his swan song. Basically Mickey Avenue was his swan song. Joe couldn’t, he was not ready to bring in my role yet. So Doris, I met with Doris, and I’ve told this story many, many times too. I showed her my portfolio and she was to her foresight, her and Michelle Malakoff gave me a portfolio review, and Doris knew she needed a theater-based set designer to be able to do the walkthrough.
And the castle itself had already been its architecture and all its levels had already been approved by Bob Iger and Coulter Win and all those talented people, and they needed a walkthrough and they had nothing. They had pitched some walkthroughs, so the interiors department did one and a few other people, and it just wasn’t right for the story of the building. Not to say they weren’t beautiful projects. So they had done a few iterations, and Doris looked at my portfolio and the stars aligned in the weirdest way possible, even though I’d been approved by Bruce and everything.
She just said, I think you’re the person I need. And in my soul, when she told me that in this meeting, I died and I went home and I fell on my knees and I just thanked the universe for this gift that I worked so hard for. Anyway, that was December 12th, 2011, and I’ll never forget that day because it was life changing in the greatest way possible. I didn’t know what the next four and a half years were going to bring, but I will tell you, the first two and first three years were incredible; I learned so much about myself. I got to work with Chris, sorry.
Dan Heaton: That’s okay.
Josh Steadman: I got to work with Chris Merrit. I got to work with Chris Runco. I sat in meetings with people I knew about. They had no clue who I was, but I knew who they were and I knew who they were from the time I was a kid. So anyway, we were off and running and we came up with a walkthrough, and it was just a small handful of us, so sorry. We created a walkthrough that worked, and I did seven iterations, story iterations with Pam Fisher and Doris that people never saw different princess stories to get to final product.
And one thing I had done is I always do a ton of research before I start drawing and drafting and coming up with scenery. And scenery is this great metaphor analogy for life. So everything in a facade, everything that is a set tells the story of a person who lives in that facade or that set and tells the story of an area or a region.
I mean, there’s so much detail and richness that can be brought to life in scenery. And so I had done a Tangled version. We had done a Mulan version for the castle, and we landed on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs because in my research with Doris, we discovered the only princess that the Chinese audience had been exposed to before the Japanese invasion was Snow White.
So we felt it would be Pam, Doris, and I, the greatest story to tell in that castle, two years after I started, a little bit less than two years after I started, Doug Rogers was brought in to be my art director. I had been the production designer, the show designer, concept designer, storyboard artist. I was building a mockup in full scale with the effects department in R&D to prove out all the effects; I was working with John Snoddy and David Allen.
And I can go down a list. Anyway, in the heat of the summer of 2012 to get, and it feels like yesterday, by the way, for me, because the memories were so intense and what we’re doing was so, so intense, amazingly intense. Anyway, it all got approved by Bob Iger, and that was at the end of 2012, and I was flying to China on a week every other week on business trips.
By the way, in Shanghai, we get to Shanghai and they had no clue who Disney was. You’d meet these people at bars and restaurants and why are you here? And I’m like, oh, I’m building the theme park for the Disney company. Oh, now sad part about being an Imagineer is I think when you’re going into a foreign space, no one cares. No one knows what you’re doing, and you rest on these laurels.
That Imagineering is this grandam of theme parks. We were in an area that was completed the Wild West. No one had any idea what we were building out by the airport. And so I came back 2015, I’d gotten all the walls, everything prepped for all the effects install and the main set install pieces that were still here in the US that Doug Rogers was art directing, and I was in the field art directing the walls and everything else. And Doug would come in, he and I would walk the walls, check everything, check all the packaging, making sure everything was looking right. But I did that for Gardens of Imagination, traveled all over China with Doris and with Michelle Malakoff looking at art glass, looking at mosaic tiles, building the Fantasia Carousel, which is this epic, all the architects that worked on that.
I mean, it’s an epic carousel, and it was the first Disney carousel that was not hand carved wood. Most of the time you build a carousel history of carousels, everything’s hand carved. We were doing it in FRP, which is fiberglass. And so I was hired, part of my job as being the PD was checking all the poles, all the molds in fiberglass to making sure that the creation that par had drawn back at home looked just like what we intended for the field. So it was incredible. It was exhausting and yeah, a great learning experience.
I learned a lot about myself, and I think the hardest thing was after all those years of struggle, you realize a job like that in many ways, and I don’t mean to put this down at all, because here I’m crying about all these amazing people. By the way, I cry about the people because theme parks are a collective company of talent. They don’t happen. They’re not built because of one ego, and they’re not built because of one person’s dream. I mean, it can be based on that, but it’s because you’ve got 200 people who are sacrificing so much time to make this thing look epic, whether you’re paying them, these people care about it.
Dan Heaton: Well, after you came back from WDI, like you mentioned, you referenced it earlier, a park that I have not been to, but I know Covid has kind of caused havoc with it, but is Evermore Park in Utah, which I think is just a really cool idea, and you were very closely involved in such a big project. I’d love to hear how you got involved in that and what it was like to play such a key role in a very different kind of park.
Josh Steadman: I got back from Shanghai. I took two years off and met with Ken Bretschneider, the founder of the park and another park through a friend who shot me his email. I have a friend who owns, he owns a pop culture site that features movies and things like that. Now it’s my regular go-to for movies. And he was like, look, Josh, you could call this guy named Ken Bretschneider, just shoot him an email and James Jansen. And so I did. I shot them both emails.
They were building something called The Void at the time, and I got to go and test The Void in 2015. Sorry, give me a minute. Right after building Shanghai. And so in doing that, Ken was like, dude, you got to do this thing where you’ve got this walkthrough. Ken kind of looks like Keanu Reeves, and he’s very charming and he’s very gregarious and he’s a fascinating individual and he wants to talk about aliens and ghosts.
He and I have become dear, dear friends. So we became friends talking about aliens and ghosts and theme parks, really quite honestly. And so he showed me a model and he rips off this canvas curtain thing on this giant model. They had already started trying to do evermore. I think it was in 2014 ish. I might not have that date, but it was when I was in Shanghai and they got funding so far, and then they were never able to accrue the ground that he wanted to build it in.
So then from that, he started The Void. It kind of planted the seed. That’s where The Void came from, was from Evermore. Actually, most people don’t know that, but we stayed in contact. I went to Hong Kong at that time to work with Cartoon Network and work on a big cruise ship called The Wave as a creative director.
And so I was in Hong Kong and emailing Ken and back and forth and someone who I’d met years before Josh Shipley was also of contact, and I emailed Josh. I saw that he’d just joined the team, and Shipley very kindly got me in touch with Ken and introduced me to Ken. And then in 2018, so many years had passed. It doesn’t feel like a lot of years.
It felt like a ton of years actually. I was driving to Evermore Park from this small town that my sister lives in here in Utah, and I was staying with her at the time, and I was literally working for Ken for free. Most people don’t know this. I was striving for Evermore and telling Ken, look, it’s great. You’ve got buildings. You’ve got no scenery inside these buildings. No plan for scenery. You have some, how are you going to do that?
He had one picture for one set, and it was beautiful. And I’m like, okay, so how are you going to build that? And he’s like, I don’t know, but we’ve got eight months. I’m like, Ken, you got to figure out number one, you have not named any of your buildings, so let’s start with that. So I put together a pitch to Ken and to Josh about how I should be involved as the director of show and production design, which is really the set design, right, set design, and all things creative that supports the story visually built.
The first thing we did was we put together a nomenclature guide. So we named all the buildings, and you can’t tell what a person’s going to be until you name that thing, right? You have a dog, you got to name the dog. If somehow that name takes effect and transforms this being, well, the same is to be said with theme park buildings and attractions.
So then me and Krista found a sign vendor that could do all the signage, and Krista had been working with Ken for a while. And then from there I took it and I created a program and created a calendarized deadline, how to get from March, that was where we were to September 8th, which is what’s today, ninth, September 8th and 9th, we were opening.
So it’s funny, we’re doing this conversation on the anniversary. That’s so many months to get from empty buildings to finished sets, buildings, dressing, props. Ken wanted 8,000 pumpkins. Plus we had 2,500 real pumpkins. I had 6,000 fake fun pumpkins. We had all these actors that were just kind of sitting around not doing anything that were writing story treatments. I don’t mean that that way. They were writing story treatments when we opened and rehearsing. So I was like, actors, I need your help.
Let’s carve these pumpkins. So we came up with templates. We’re carving pumpkins. They’ve got these little tools, carving ’em in the back. We had scarecrows, custom made scarecrows by miles, woods and the rest of the team. All of this fell under a storytelling circuit that I developed with Josh Shipley, and then I got approvals. Knowing George Lucas, I don’t know him personally, but knowing Lucasfilm, being obsessed with Star Wars and all that as well, I knew from people who worked at Lucasfilm that Thursdays and Fridays were buy offs in Lucasfilm art department, and they would buy George Lucas, the stamp that set approved.
So I did that. We had reviews every Friday, so reviews would happen on Friday. Everyone in my department, by the way, I had kids that were studying at BYU and studying at UVU that knew nothing about theme parks. I had guys I had stolen from, there’s a show on the CW or whatever, the WB, it keeps changing names called The Outpost that built a set, and they built it in record time.
So I stole three of those guys, two, three of those guys. I’m like, I didn’t need your help. You built TV. I know TV we’re building sets, and so it was pandemonium. It was amazing. Amazing. I have the Cecil B De Mille book. That was about the first time he made The Ten Commandments. He made that movie like three times. People don’t even know that. The last time was with Charlton Heston, right? The first two times were in the ‘20s. He made it every decade and each time the sets were equally enormous. So there was a time we were on park build, we’re on site, and the park site is only, how many acres is it? I’m trying to remember. I think it’s a little under 12 acres. I want to say it’s under 12 acres. Parking. Everything else is a lot bigger than that.
And back of house. Literally we had every construction company in Utah with cranes and steel going in the ground. So just so you know, too, I came home before we opened Shanghai. I finished the work for the walkthrough. They didn’t need me on gardens anymore. And based on stuff that I was going through in China and I just couldn’t take it anymore, I came home.
So that was way before the park even opened. I didn’t get to see that park open. I saw it on TV and on social media like everyone else. So being at Evermore with all this madness happening around us was epic, and being able to direct a team, half of which had never built a park before, and we’re running around and we’re dressing, we raided every antique store from south of Provo all the way to North Salt Lake in Ogden, Utah to get all our props for all our buildings.
Ken had a bunch of stuff he purchased in Europe. We were cobbling together what the antiques he had purchased anyways, it was epic and one of the funnest projects because Ken gave me carte blanche. As long as I got to tell Ken’s story visually best way possible, he bought off with green stamps every Friday, which then my team would start going into build on Monday. That was the schedule I sat so we could get to opening and we successfully got to opening. Not only did we successfully get to opening, even though we weren’t fully finished, we maintained all the set work for the time I was there. So we added to it, we plussed it. We still had seasonal overlay theming we had to develop. People have no idea unless you’ve seen the park. The nature of that project,
Dan Heaton: The DIY part of it, I think had to be fun. I think it’s what a lot of us envision Imagineering is like this you’re just coming up with, I mean, you’re not coming up with stuff, but you’re doing all that. And it sounds like though in this case, because it was so much, because like you said, it’s his vision, it’s not a giant entity creating it. I’m sure there was a lot more leeway to create, I guess in a way.
Josh Steadman: There was a lot of leeway. I think one thing I’ve never forgotten is that when a client hires you and you learn this over freelance, doing freelance as a designer, who’s the man? Who’s the person? Ken hired me. Josh referred me. And so I never debated that Ken was the guy. We needed to build these stories that Ken had pitched and make something incredible. And we did our best and it was a blast.
Dan Heaton: Awesome. Well, I hope to see it someday. I don’t know.
Josh Steadman: You got to come to Utah.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, got to make the trip. Okay. Well, speaking of just young people and working with ’em, you’ve already given some advice, but I’d love to know, I know you get this question probably five times a day, but I like to ask people what their kind of a few key bits of advice they would give to someone who’s interested in possibly working in this crazy theme park industry.
Josh Steadman: Oh, I have a bunch of advice and sometimes it’s way too blunt and it’s offensive in some ways. I think knowing my life story and the path of which I’ve taken and how hard it was, never give up. That’s one of ’em. Never give up, never surrender, which is a quote from Galaxy Quest, but it’s very true to life, right? Life isn’t easy. I mean, we’re all trying to figure out why we’re here.
And I would say as a designer and an artist, as someone who takes the world in visually, it’s a different way of seeing things. And so you have to be able to persevere and take it and learn from it and pick yourself up. I take things personally because an artist, so it’s part of being one, I would say, to never be too arrogant to not answer the phones and take out the garbage.
And I did that at the age of 29. If I can do that at 29 at Thinkwell when Thinkwell was gearing up on some really cool stuff, I think anybody can, and I would say humility starts at the top. That’s the other advice and that’s not really advice. It’s more than that. How a person who leads a company is how everyone follows that leader. In other words, if someone’s going to lead the company in a certain way, everyone’s going to follow suit. It’s the captain of the ship.
So the thing that I’ve learned building parks and following leadership is it’s got to start with that person. So my goal, and I’ve made it, my goal is to be that person, whether it’s my role or not, is to just do the best, but drink the Kool-Aid. That’s the other thing. Disney and Chris Merritt, and some of us could probably speak to this, there was an attitude when I was at Disney that if you were big about theme parks, there was something wrong with you.
It’s permeated. It existed way before I got there. It probably some of that might still exist. I think that’s utter BS. If you’re a doctor and you don’t really care about being a doctor and you just kind of do whatever you’re cooking up stir fry at night and you’re a surgeon, right? I’m sorry, you’re not going to be a good doctor. You got to be drinking the Kool-Aid to do it the best way possible and to turn out unusual product. And then that’s be the last piece of advice I have. It’s not always about making money. Now, having said that, no, I ate chips and Cheetos for years. That’s what I served, horrible, unhealthy stuff because this is all I could afford. But it’s not always about the money, and it’s not always about the ladder climbing in a mousetrap maze.
Sometimes it’s about just making cool stuff because sometimes that is all it’s about. Sometimes it’s about taking one and going, what can I learn from this thing? What is it going to teach me? But I want to make something really amazing and what is it going to teach you? I hate to say it, but sometimes those projects that are sounds so cool. People don’t know how little I made doing Evermore. I took a giant pay cut to do Evermore because I cared about the product and I cared about Ken and I cared about the team.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I think that’s great, and I think that’s a perfect place to finish up. So Josh, this has been great.
Josh Steadman: Thanks for having me.
Dan Heaton: Really appreciate the time and also if anyone wants to connect with you or check out your artwork, I know you have a website, I’d love for you to let ’em know where that is.
Josh Steadman: So it’s steadmanstyles.com. I have a website just to show some of the projects I’ve worked on, but that website shows purposely a very expensive project, a not so expensive project, and a bare bones project, because sometimes that’s the reality of the industry.
Dan Heaton: Totally. Well, thanks again. It’s been great. I really appreciate it.
Josh Steadman: Hey, thanks for having me.
Leave a Reply