173. Adam Bezark on Terminator 2: 3D, the Amazing Spider-Man, and Shanghai Disneyland

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The world of themed entertainment has expanded beyond resorts and parks. Museums, zoos, aquariums, and other destinations present well-crafted exhibits to convey their message. One reason for their success is the work of skilled professionals behind the scenes. These artists work on projects for Disney and Universal as well as smaller attractions. A perfect example is Adam Bezark, who has built a unique career on cool projects as the President and Creative Director of the Bezark Company.

Adam is my guest on this episode of the Tomorrow Society Podcast to talk about his background and career. On this podcast, we discuss challenges getting started during a different era. Adam joined Landmark Entertainment Group as a Senior Show Designer and supported attractions for Universal Studios. These projects included Jurassic Park: The Ride, Terminator 2: 3D, and the Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man. During this interview, he describes his experiences on those Universal attractions.

Later on, Adam was a Show Writer for the Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Sunken Treasure at Shanghai Disneyland. This new take on the Disney classic uses innovative technology in clever ways. Adam describes his role and the creative process for this breakout hit. In addition, he worked with Don Dorsey on early nighttime spectaculars for EPCOT at Walt Disney World including the original Illuminations. We also chat about attractions like the Space Shuttle Atlantis at Kennedy Space Center and Independence Hall in Philadelphia that connect to real history. I really enjoyed talking with Adam and learning more about his career.

Show Notes: Adam Bezark

Learn more about The Bezark Company and their excellent projects on their official website.

Find out about Adam Bezark and his background on his biography page.

Support The Tomorrow Society Podcast and buy me a Dole Whip!

Note: Photos in this post were used with the permission of the Bezark Company.

Transcript

Adam Bezark: The other thing that I think is super interesting these days is small. I’ve spent my whole life doing gigantic things and we always felt like, and our company, we’ve got this lovely company here in Glendale with 15 amazing creative people and producers, and we can take on gigantic projects, huge mega spectacular projects with a fairly small group, but we always sort of say that it takes a hundred acres and a billion dollars to do what we do. But that’s not true anymore. I think something has changed. I think that over the last 30, 40 years, technology has liberated every form of entertainment.

Dan Heaton: That is Adam Bezark, president and creative director of the Bezark Company who’s here to talk about so many cool attractions from Disney, Universal, and a lot more. You’re listening to the Tomorrow Society Podcast.

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Dan Heaton: Hey there, thanks for joining me here on Episode 173 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. Really excited about this week’s show where I’m talking to Adam Bezark, who has had such an interesting career and worked on attractions for a wide range of places, including Walt Disney Imagineering where he was involved with some of the nighttime spectaculars at Epcot. He also worked more recently on Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle of the Sunken Treasure at Shanghai Disneyland, and we talk about that.

Also worked at Landmark Entertainment Group, where he worked on a lot of attractions for Universal, including Jaws, Jurassic Park: The Ride, Terminator 2: 3D, and the Amazing Spider-Man, which is a classic attraction, but beyond Disney and Universal. What I find so interesting about what Adam and his company have done is they’ve also worked with clients like Kennedy Space Center or Independence Hall in Philadelphia, so many other entities.

And it’s just a good reminder that we talk about on this episode, there are the big players, Universal and Disney and others, but then you also have all these other places, museums and zoos and other cultural institutions that are using themed entertainment to tell stories in a variety of different ways. A perfect example being Kennedy Space Center and what they’re doing with the spatial experience where they’re using the skills that Adam and others bring to the table as themed entertainment experts, creative directors, writers, and making them tell historical stories.

Companies like the Bezark Company play such an important role not only in helping to create these classic attractions at theme parks, but also to as we go forward, to create cool things for regional attractions or places like we talk about stunning historical experiences. There’s so much out there and I think as we go forward, Adam has a really interesting perspective as someone that’s worked in a wide range of areas of the industry about where we’re heading, including like you talked in the intro clip towards a smaller approach and possibly immersive entertainment and other things that we may be considering more as you want to have this type of experience, but you can’t go to Walt Disney World or Universal all the time.

You have to do other things and have different kinds of experiences. I think that Adam digs into a lot of that during our interview and really happy we got the chance to talk about his career and we only scratched the surface, so hopefully we’re able to talk more in the future, but everything he’s done and also his perspective on the industry as someone who’s just been closely involved for such a long time. So let’s get right to it. Here is Adam Bezark.

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Dan Heaton: My guest today is the President and Creative Director of the Bezark Company and has more than 35 years experience in the world of themed entertainment. Past projects included Terminator 2: 3D, Jurassic Park: The Ride also has done work at Shanghai. Disneyland was involved with the original illuminations for Disney. So much more. It is Adam Bezark.

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Dan Heaton: Adam, thanks so much for talking with me here on the podcast.

Adam Bezark: Oh, dude, thanks for having me. This is amazing. I love what you’re doing and it’s really fun talking to you.

Dan Heaton: Oh, definitely. I mean, there’s so much to cover from what you’ve worked on more recently and even from the past, but I would love to know for sure, you started out at a time when education and themed entertainment was very different and there wasn’t much there. So what got you interested in actually working in the world of themed entertainment as you were kind of growing up?

Adam Bezark: First of all, you’re right, it has changed a lot and I think like a lot of people in our business, it was a trip to Disneyland that sort of knocked me out. I was a weird nerdy little kid. A lot of us are, and I was always, when I was a kid doing shows in the backyard, making movies with the Super 8 cameras and making puppet shows and doing magic shows for the local kids and just anything that anybody would let me do, I would do.

Then one year my parents took me to Disneyland and I thought it was amazing and I had a weird sense of self showmanship that I wanted to save something that looked cool for the end. So I waited to go on the Haunted Mansion until the very last thing, and we went through the Haunted Mansion and my little brain just blew up because everything that I love was in that one building.

It was magic and special effects and puppetry and design and things I didn’t even know. I loved architecture and design and scenic and graphics and lighting and all these things were sort of just exploding inside of me, and I was so excited by it. I immediately got off the ride and ran back around to the gate to try and ride it again, but I had left it to the end, so Disneyland was closed and I couldn’t go on it again.

It was the perfect setup for a 13-year-old kid to get an obsession because I was fascinated by this ride. I knew what I had seen was beyond what I could explain with my limited knowledge of magic and special effects and stuff, but I couldn’t go look at it again. We had to go back home to Chicago where I grew up, so I couldn’t come back the next day and it was like four years before I could come back.

I just developed this must have been completely irritating obsession that any of my friends, family, relatives, and teachers would roll their eyes because there was no conversation you could have that I couldn’t steer around within about 30 seconds to the Haunted Mansion and the special effects in it. And had you seen it and did you know how that crystal ball effect was done?

I thought I had an idea how it might’ve been done and I was insufferable, and it wasn’t until, and that was in junior high. Then as I got into high school and they started talking about careers, it didn’t even occur to me that that was a thing I could do until one day my dad said, well, if you like that stupid Disneyland thing so much, why’d you just go do that? I said, really, I could do that? And I became obsessed with trying to figure out how to become an Imagineer.

I knew they existed, but I didn’t know how to become one. I wrote to them and I would ask them, how do you become an Imagineer? And they would write back and say really annoying things like “there is no way to become an imagineer”. You just have to, they would say like, “well, young man, just follow your dreams and if you have what it takes, then someday you could be an Imagineer too”.

I’d think, shut up, just tell me how to be one of what you do. But there weren’t any college programs that taught theme design. It wasn’t even a thing. There was only one company in the world that did it at the time, and that was Disney. And it was just a few group of folks that Walt had picked from the studio and the animation crowd and other studios and navy admirals and stuff like that he found to build this stuff. And there was no answer to that question. So I wound up just beating my head against a wall until eventually I found out that USC had this sort of create your own major interdisciplinary degree program.

They let me, I was a great curiosity to them and they let me put together bits and pieces of architecture, theater, cinema, graphic design, urban planning, anything I could get my hands on. Plus I managed to wrangle some internships down at Disneyland where I’d go down every week and follow different people around for the day and see what they did. Eventually they let me help on some of the shows and things and eventually I got to pitch some projects and eventually got to do work for them.

But they never hired me for the longest time. They wouldn’t hire me as an engineer, they didn’t know what to do with me. So I was always sort of a freelancer, a consultant, and was sort of an early contractor for them. And a lot of the stuff that I did was as an independent rather than as an in-house person.

Dan Heaton: That’s interesting because like you said, it’s still, I mean, it wasn’t the Wild West, but it was very different than now where you have these programs from certain colleges and even different companies that, because a lot of the parks, even the biggest parks are farming things out to various companies like yours and Thinkwell, and BRC and so many others. So I mean, when you’re trying to get involved, you ultimately, then you started your own company, but then I believe you also joined Landmark Entertainment Group around that similar time in the ‘80s, early ‘90s. So how did you kind of carve out your role at that time to where you could do this full time versus projects here and there?

Adam Bezark: It never occurred to me to do anything else. I had no other interest, so that was all I could do when Disney didn’t hire me. I made some great friends during those internships and I met a terrific guy named Don Dorsey, who you may know who is a composer. He did the music for the Main Street Electrical Parade. He was about my age.

We were both nerdy and crazy and stuff, and we just got along. So we stayed in touch. And after I graduated and Disney didn’t hire me, I went and worked as a tour guide at Universal Studios. I was doing tram tours and they let me work on some of the projects there and literally at Universal, they didn’t care back then, but I would just sort of help with whatever they wanted me to help with between tram tours. And then Don and I started pitching ideas to anybody that would listen to us.

So we just sort of went around at different parks and other places to try and get attention. And then we heard about Epcot opening and we saw that there was a this amazing big lagoon in the middle of Epcot, and we said, oh, that lagoon should have a show in it. Let’s design a water show to go in that lagoon. We put together this massive presentation that would’ve put World of Color or anything like it to shame these days. It would’ve been a $30 trillion show.

And we pitched it to the very head of entertainment at the time, who sat very nicely and listened. He said, that’s great, fellas. We’re doing one. We already have a lagoon show. They actually called us back and said, well, okay, we’re not going to let you do that crazy thing you pitched, but you can do some tweaks to this show.

We got to work on fixing up the show. And over several years we grew it and grew it and grew it until it eventually became the Illuminations show. And it was really fun doing that with Don, and we would do crazy stuff together. Then Don went on to do the Reflections of Earth show. That ran for a long time too. So there’s a great legacy there. There’s still pieces even today in Harmonious of little bits and pieces of our show are still out there on that Don and it got us started, so it was a place to begin.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I love that. I mean, when I was younger, seeing that original Illumination show, it was the first one that actually used the countries very well and had their own, each country had their own theme, which I know they really never did to that level again, even with Reflections of Earth.

Adam Bezark: Illuminations, it was a good name.

Dan Heaton: Wasn’t it? Before that it was like there was some lasers and some fireworks and you’re like, oh, and classical music. So this was another level, so nothing against those early shows, but it was…

Adam Bezark: No, we worked on those too. That was us too. All those lasers we put in the lasers, I was climbing around on top of the Mexico pavilion and in The American Adventure, and we put in the search lights over the thing, and the original search lights were supposed to be automated, but they weren’t ready in time.

So we had, for one summer, we had what we called the pitch people who people came from other shifts around the park and came at night to operate, manually operate search lights and point them over the skies, and we rehearsed them for weeks so they would know which way to point at with beat of the music so that you’d have apparently automated stuff. It was pretty primitive in those days, and it got more sophisticated with each generation. We did, I don’t know, four or five different versions of it over time until it finally hit its stride.

Dan Heaton: I mean, yeah, I don’t think with Harmonious there’s still hand moving those big arms and everything. I think there’s a little guy inside who’s banking it.I like that idea though. So you went on to Landmark Entertainment Group where you worked on several large attractions for Universal, including one that I find especially interesting, which is Terminator 2: 3D, just because I know they’ve recently in Florida replaced it with the Borne Spectacular, which I’ve heard is even more kind of mind boggling with a similar kind of approach. But at the time just seemed the technology was crazy for the time. So I mean, I’d love to hear a little bit about joining Landmark, but especially that show.

Adam Bezark: Well, that was great. Well, Landmark was an amazing company at the time because they were getting a lot of work from Universal as well as other places. And it was a very sort of wild and wooly time again in the industry. It was the beginning of the independent theme park design business. There were a few companies just getting into the business who were all Disney alumni. What happened was Disney created or Tokyo Disneyland or Disneyland Paris that each time they would build a new park, they would hire thousands of people and expand the size of Disney engineering. Then it was over.

They’d say, okay, thanks everybody. Bye. And lay off nine tenths of those people and send them packing. Some of those people would leave the industry, but some of them would start their own companies. And that’s how this ecosystem of design began that among other places helped Universal turn into the place it became, because a lot of those talents would go and create amazing stuff for Universal, but also started changing the museum business, the retail business.

We were all just looking for work wherever we could find it. Landmark was one of those pioneering companies that was never particularly well run as a business, but it was a really fun place to work because they would get these crazy jobs and we were all young and none of us knew what we were doing, but they would just let us run with stuff. So I was super excited about these things and I had already done a Ghostbusters show and the Jaws ride, and then Terminator came along.

They said, hey, Universal said, we think we can get the rights to the Terminator movies, and we have this theater. It was actually in Hollywood that was the old screen test theater. They said, we think could you do a Terminator stunt show in the old screen test theater? I got that assignment and I thought, what are you supposed to do that?

Because if you think about it, Terminator movies, in addition to having great sort of action, they’re also inherently road movies. Every Terminator movie is a chase across great, great bath swaths of land, whether future or present, and it’s about dramatic car chases and explosions and stuff like that, and how are you supposed to do that inside an indoor stunt theater? But at the same time, I thought, oh, well, 3D was just taking off and 3D special effects hadn’t even happened yet. It was all just what you could do in the camera.

But I thought digital effects were just starting to happen. I thought, well, what if you could take these digital effects that were being pioneered by Jim Cameron in T2 in the movies and generate them in 3D? That would be interesting. What if you could do the road trip elements in the movie, but then when you wanted to have a stunt show, you could actually have things come out of the screen and into the theater. There were a few precedents for this in weird European theater cinema of the 1960s, there was this guy who did the Laterna Magica in Prague where he had a slotted screen and people would jump in and out of his movie screen in a very primitive way and sort of jump in and out of movies.

I thought, what if you could do a high tech version of that and then you could do the morphing on screen and all the special effects on screen, but then you could pop into the theater and have live theater and go back in. So we pitched that to Universal and they said, okay, no, they weren’t excited by it. They said, well, but you’ll never get Arnold Schwarzenegger to be in it, so maybe you should just shoot up his face so you can’t recognize him and it won’t be a Terminator.

But when we pitched it to Jim Cameron, he totally got it, and he lit up and said, this is great. You understand the brand, you understand what it is. It’s sort of the high point of your life when the owner of an IP blesses you and says, oh, you get it. You actually are doing it right, and this is cool, and this is something that he wanted to be involved in and be part of it.

And he said, I can get you Arnold, and we’ll get the cast. If we’re going to get the cast, let’s get the cast. So it became sort of an epic thing to have the full cast of a movie. I don’t think that had been done before that maybe to get a megastar Captain EO had had Michael Jackson in it, but it wasn’t based on anything. This was the first time a real movie had sort of taken that great leap forward and it made a huge difference to do that.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I mean, it’s one of those too where I think because it was, and also people love T2 so much, and this was kind of an interesting thing where it wasn’t a book report, it was continuation. It was like an offshoot, almost like a sequel, which I don’t know, I think at the time was still fairly rare. I mean, I’m not saying it would never happen. I mean, you had things like Your Honey I Shrunk the Audience or something, which was kind of like that. But this is on another scale. And because people liked T2 so much, I mean, I suspect that that played a big role in the popularity,

Adam Bezark: And I think that also helps sort of set a precedent. I had worked earlier on the Ghostbusters show, and the first version of that show, which I was not involved in, was more or less a recreation of the last scene of the movie with sort of lines and dialogue and action from the movie and the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man.

And it never quite clicked because you’d already seen the movie and you’d seen Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray doing the movie, and now you were seeing some Florida actors lip syncing to some voices that weren’t Dan Akroyd and Bill Murray. It just never clicked. So as we were playing with it, we said, well, what if it wasn’t that? What if it was a sequel? What if it’s a new story in the world of the movie and you get to see your favorite stuff?

We came up with this goofy idea of it being the Ghostbusters have fallen on hard times and they’re trying to sell Ghostbusters franchises in your hometown, and the local fraud guy comes and tries to shut them down and then oh, ghosts get out. So you get to see all your favorite Ghostbuster things, but with a different setup, but with the same flavor of humor. And so T2 was taking that to the next level. And again, Cameron got it immediately and he said, I love this. This is the next Terminator movie won’t be in theaters, it’ll be at Universal. It’ll be a legit sequel, but we designed it to be a non-invasive sequel.

It’s kind of like if you were ever in comics when you were kid, they would have the Fantastic Four would have its normal sequence of events, its normal continuity, but then once a year they’d do the Fantastic Four Annual and it would be a special event that would sort of go off and do something crazy, but by the end of it, they’d be right back where they were. So it didn’t mess up anything else we said, this’ll be like that. This’ll be a movie that goes off, does something crazy and big, but it won’t interfere with any future plans for Terminator movies. At least that was the plan. We didn’t know they were going to kill Sarah Connor or any of the other dumb things they did in the later movies, the many later movies.

Dan Heaton: By now. So speaking of…

Adam Bezark: That wasn’t Jim’s fault, Jim would’ve made it work, I’m sure.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately he produced maybe Terminator 3, but he wasn’t directing and it was very different. So speaking of that, another attraction we worked on, which I mean is pretty timely given that the VelociCoaster just opened and they’re still doing so much. And then the Jurassic World movie just came out, but was the original Jurassic Park: the Ride, which at the time, Jurassic Park, super popular movie. And I’m curious for a little bit, I mean how that developed where you were involved with the artistic team and developing the storyline, how that ended up being kind of a water attraction, and did you run into similar kind of, I wouldn’t say challenges, but issues with trying to figure out what the story should be from that movie?

Adam Bezark: Yes. That was one of the rare cases where a studio committed to making their ride before they even made the movie, because it was this blockbuster book by Michael Crichton and Spielberg had agreed to direct it, and they just said, okay, this is going to be a ride. Usually they wait to see if the ride’s any good before, if the movie’s any good before they make a ride or attraction out of it, because you could wind up with Waterworld where you have an attraction that is better than, nobody remembers the movie, but the attraction is good.

They came to Landmark sort of in the dead of night, and one day somebody from work came up and snuck a book into my head and said, go home and read this. Don’t show it to anybody. I said, what’s going on? They said, the Universal just bought the rights of this movie.

Spielberg’s going to direct it and we’re going to make a ride out of it. And the great Bob Ward, who you probably know who was one of the master planners of Universal, had already taken a first pass sort of a napkin sketch pass at doing a kind of water ride. I think they just decided they wanted it to be a water ride, and the book mentions a water ride in it. So they’d sort of based it on that, but it was just kind of dinosaurs chasing you. We thought, well, what would make that more interesting would be if it paralleled the movie more, where you sort of create that false sense of security that everything is great, and then it goes off the rails.

And again, I don’t think this is the first time that anything like that had happened in a ride. There had been the old, I don’t know, the old Mission to Mars at Disneyland where you go to Mars and then uh oh, there’s meteors, you have to go home. But I think we sort of pushed it to a new level where we said, you’re going to start off on this innocuous journey. Then you accidentally get bumped off course by a curious herbivore who knocks you backstage, and now you’re going to see the back side of a theme park, and you actually get to see what it’s like behind the scenes at a theme park.

We could use the back side of the actual rock work and the ride to look like you’re going behind the scenes. And it was cute. Somewhere in there, some wag coined the phrase, well, you could start out nicely and then something goes horribly wrong. And from that day forward, that phrase has haunted me forever. Something goes horribly wrong, but something goes horribly wrong in every story. It always happens. Dunno why people accuse us of that. Right?

Dan Heaton: Yeah. It keeps going and lots of Universal attractions too, and Disney.

Adam Bezark: Well, and it definitely started a sort of cascade of you set up one expectation and then flip it in another direction and something, and it goes off the rails in an interesting way. But yeah, lots of things have been, that happened in T2, it happened in Ghostbusters. It was just more visible and dramatic in Jurassic.

Dan Heaton: Well, I want to make sure we have time to talk about some more recent projects, but before we do that, I did want to ask you about your involvement in one more Universal attraction, the Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man, which even before it was digitally upgraded and everything to me still it was one of the more mind blowing cool attractions still is, I mean, still just blows me away every time. And I’m curious…

Adam Bezark: Oh, it’s gorgeous.

Dan Heaton: I know many people were involved in that, but I would love to know your experience of just being involved with some of the concepts for that.

Adam Bezark: Right. Well, I mean the real credit for that ride goes to the group that did it. Scott Trowbridge, Thierry Coup, and Eric Parr and all the guys who designed the ride did the real work of doing it. And it is the first great ride of the media era. But my role was early on, it started at the same time we were working on T2, Universal was starting to work on the Islands of Adventure design and Landmark got the chance to design the concepts for the Marvel land.

And my boss, Gary Goddard, said, we’ve always wanted to do a 3D ride. Let’s make Spider-Man a 3D ride. I went, okay, let’s do that. And we had learned enough about 3D from T2 to know what the inherent challenge of that was going to be is. One of the things about 3D is 3D doesn’t behave the way you might think it should.

There’s a lot of technical stuff, but an image, you can only fix an image relevant to the real world in one place, which is at the place where the actual physical movie screen is. If something appears to be in front of the screen or in back of the screen, its position will be relative to where the audience is sitting.

So if I’m sitting on the left side of the screen and a finger is pointing out at me, that finger’s going to point right at me. If I’m on the little right side of the screen and the finger’s pointing out at me, the finger will be pointing right at me and if I move, that finger will appear to track with me from left to. And so it’ll be really hard to line up movie characters in the film with scenery from sets. There was no real way to do that, and we couldn’t figure out how to do that.

So our solution in the first pass was to not have a connection between the set and the characters. The characters would just all have to be leaping around in the sky and not touching anything, which was very frustrating. And we didn’t know quite how to solve that, but we developed the basic story for what became their ride. It was Spider-Man versus a group of enemies that our theory, my theory was Spider-Man is one of those characters.

Batman has one enemy, the Joker who everybody knows, and a bunch of minor enemies, doesn’t have one enemy. He has got a whole city full of enemies, so he should fight a lot of people and try to keep up with them. So there’s this group called the Sinister Six that we pulled up from the archives and said, well, let’s have ’em fight those guys and maybe they can do something like have a big fight and wind up fighting at the Statue of Liberty for a big finale and stuff like that.

So that basic structure became the structure of the ride. But the real nut to crack was that whole connection between the film and the scenery, and it was Scott Trobridge who had a revelation. He was in the shower one day when he suddenly realized, oh, well, if it looks like the scenery is moving when you put it in 3D, what if we just animate the scenery to move in the opposite direction that your eyes tell you it’s moving in so that the scenery will look like it’s standing still when you track through the scene? That’s hard to explain, but that’s what they wound up doing.

They actually, it’s that thing they called “squinching” where they actually shifted the scenery in the film from left to as you move through the scene, but when you watch it in the ride because you’re moving in the opposite direction, it looks like the scenery is rock solid. And it became this beautiful extension of physical scenery in the movie scenery with the characters in it, and they solved it. That was the magic sauce that made it work. And then Thierry Coup design did wonderful, incredible things with flipping your head inside out and upside down and stuff, and it just became beautiful.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, it’s one of those where like I said, my brain, what you described makes sense logically, but when you’re on the ride your brain, you kind of look around, you’re like, okay, I know there are physical sets here. I know that there’s other things. It’s not like a Star Tours where you’re like, okay, I know what it’s happening. I’m in the simulator. There’s a screen. This is kind of one of those, and I know they did it again with Transformers, but it’s one of those where it’s like, wait, okay, we’re dropping.

Adam Bezark: It’s better.

Dan Heaton: Spiderman’s better. It’s something that gets Transformers, but especially when you drop and you’re like, I can’t convince my brain. I’m not falling right now. It’s a real mind bender. But I think that’s a testament to how cool, like you said, the problem that was solved that is so hard to solve, I guess.

Adam Bezark: It is. It’s very hard to explain without my waving my hands or drawing you a picture. It’s kind of like trying to explain Pepper’s Ghost to somebody if they haven’t seen it or if you don’t have a window or a piece of glass to play them. But it made a huge difference. The other thing that I think that made Spider-Man successful that I do think I had a little something to do with, and that is something I’ve always believed in, is the theme park attractions should have stories that have a shape to them that have big and small and quiet and loud and crazy and serene. And not every attraction does that. If you compare Spider-Man to Transformers, Transformers, people love Transformers. But from my taste, it’s super kinetic all the time.

It’s turned everything up to 11 and there’s no breathing room in it to really take things in. I think Spider-Man has a lovely build where it starts quiet and gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger then crazy, and then settles down to a fun little ending. And if you can shape the story of a ride in a way that has a real arc to it, people will remember better what they’ve seen. It’ll last. It’ll stick with you more.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, it’s like the Haunted Mansion, for example, where even you go through and there are parts where you’re going down the hallway and then there’s the ballroom, but then you get outside and I mean, there’s nothing on track forward level, but it’s like it builds up so well. But then like you said at the end, it’s like, oh, and now you’re going to have the Hitchhiking Ghosts and it’s going to be a little crazy. It’s a terrible example.

Adam Bezark: No, actually the Mansion is a great example. It has a very complicated sort of energy arc to it where it starts crazy with the big Stretching Room, then it gets quiet and anticipatory, and you build slowly up all those hallways as you go past the endless hallway, and then you get to Madame Leota and it gets more dramatic, and then boom, you’re looking at a big ballroom full of ghosts, and that’s a huge moment of spectacle.

Your jaw just hits the floor and then you back away and go into the relatively quiet attic, which is a sucker setup for the even bigger wow moment when you come out of the attic and see the balcony off the balcony and seat ghosts rising in the air and hundreds of ghosts swimming boogieing down in the graveyard. That’s an amazing story arc. And so we always try to remember that when we’re crafting stuff like that that was try to do that for Shanghai Pirates. So we tried to do something that had a build to it that wasn’t all just yelling at you the whole time, but that got crazy, got quiet, got crazy, got quiet, got even more crazy and paid off.

Dan Heaton: Well, you’re leading really well into what I was about to ask because I was going to mention Shanghai Pirates because I have not ridden that unfortunately. I haven’t been to Shanghai yet, but there are moments in that early on where you’re going through and then all of a sudden you go and there’s the giant screen and the battle, and then there’s the battle with Davy Jones and Jack Sparrow. So speaking of attractions with technology that again is a different scale, what was it like to be involved with that direction for that attraction because it’s something and it’s so different from the other Pirates?

Adam Bezark: Yeah, it’s amazing to be part of anything that’s part of such a big legacy like Pirates, right? Again, that was one of the two rides that inspired me to be here. And a lot of us, a lot of us are here because of the Pirates or the Mansion are both, and got invited by Luc, the Creative Director for Treasure Cove and for the Pirates ride, who’s an old pal of mine from Landmark.

We worked together there on T2 in fact. And so we were the first two people to sit down and think about that ride. He’d been thinking about it for a while. We sat down one day and said, okay, a ride for Pirates, a new Pirates ride. And Luc said, I want to go under water. I said, oh, that’s cool. I want to go to a sea battle, but I want to go between two boats instead of having just one boat shooting at me.

He said, okay. And then more and more people started coming onto the project and just building on it and adding their talents. Rick Turner is an amazing illusion designer, and he came up with some of the crazy effects like the skeleton Jack Sparrow turning into real character and with some of the really smart ideas about how to use those giant screens. He came up with the idea of the boat ride that could spin and turn around backwards. John Larena and Kevin who went on to work on Rise of the Resistance were the set designers.

So there was just an all-star team of people that were involved in it, and my job was to just keep up with the ideas and capture them and try to shape it into something that was a narrative with good timing, and then eventually write the script that went with it and make it all make sense. But when you do that, you’re always part of a group. There was a group of maybe eight people that sort of hatched the basic shape and story of that attraction, and it was incredible to be there.

Dan Heaton: Well, you mentioned it being, I mean, I’ve talked to a decent amount of people, Imagineers and others like yourself, and almost everyone mentions Pirates and Haunted Mansion as kind of the two markers, not surprisingly, but you’re going in and coming up with a new Pirates and you and the team. How challenging is that to reimagine something? I mean, because one of those where you want to make it new, but you also don’t want to veer so much where people don’t recognize Pirates at all.

Adam Bezark: Oh, it’s a little scary for a thing because afraid you’re going to screw it up and people will be mad at you. But there was good incentive from the project level to do that because when Disney was making their deal to build Shanghai Disneyland, they did it like they did with Tokyo. They did it with the help of investors in China who were bringing the money to build the park, and they were showing the rides and showing the Chinese partners around Disney parks, and they said, oh, of course we’re going to put in a Pirates of the Caribbean ride. Everybody loves that. And the Chinese folks said, why? That seems boring to us. We went, it’s the most famous ride of all time.

But if you sort of step back and think about it, if you didn’t grow up with Pirates and it’s 2010, 2015, and the world has moved on and there’s all these new pirate movies that are much more dynamic, if you sort of compare the old ride, the original Pirate’s ride feels, it plays out the way a pirate movie of the 1960s would play out where the camera is almost always at eye level on a tripod, not moving around too much, and you’re moving into nice steady pace through things.

And it has a feeling of films and stuff made at that time, and Pirates movies had changed that Johnny Depp was doing it, and Jerry Bruckheimer was doing it, so you had to step up your game. When we did that, we said, no, we could do something that’s really different and dynamic. They said, oh, well then we want it. Yeah, they’d be happy to do it. So they wouldn’t have let us do the original one.

Dan Heaton: I know we’ve talked a lot about attractions at Universal and Disney based on films and everything else, but I did want to mention just because I know there are a lot of projects you do at the Bezark Company that are very different, and one of them is the Space Shuttle Atlantis exhibit. Just connecting that to history and especially with the shuttle and everything, and I know you worked on some of the multi-screen media for that. I’m curious for you, just because we haven’t really talked about it to be able to work on an attraction that connects to the space program. It’s something that’s such recent history, how do you go about doing that versus a lot of the things we’ve talked about are more related to films and fictional creations in a way,

Adam Bezark: Right, right. That’s the big difference is when you shift from the world of fiction to the world of nonfiction, the storytelling techniques don’t change, the design doesn’t change. Your sense of showmanship doesn’t change, but your obligation to research and history and authenticity changes. You have to make sure you get the story and you have to do justice to stories sometimes that are very important to history.

So we also worked on, and we still are involved with the folks in Philadelphia Independence Hall, who wanted to tell a nighttime story of the Declaration of Independence, the days leading up to the Declaration of Independence, that forced us to look at that story in a whole new way and try to understand what it was really about at a human level and make it come alive. And the same thing was true with Space Shuttle Atlantis, and again, I want to be clear, that wasn’t all us by any means.

The designers of the building and the exhibit were a great company that we love called PGAV, their architects and master planners who did the building and the media was produced by our friends over at Mousetrappe who are great. Our job was to help again, develop the story and the journey and what would get you in the right mindset to see something as important as one of the last remaining space shuttles. And it wound up being a journey.

After talking to NASA a lot, they said, we don’t want this to just be about the astronauts. We want this to be about everybody who was part of the space shuttle, from the engineers to the ground crews, to the maintenance people and the astronauts, everybody who made that bird dance. So it became a multi-part journey where first you see the idea hatching on the engineers’ drawing boards and then coming to life in meetings and then solving the problems of how to get it to cycle through space.

Then eventually you get into this big dome theater that surrounds you, and that’s when you can really experience the life cycle of the shuttle going into space and coming back and going up again, and then you’re ready to have it revealed and see it, and it’s much more meaningful than if you just walked into a room and the shuttle was just sitting there.

It’s a much more dramatic experience, and one of the most rewarding things we ever did was we were all there the day the head of NASA came to see the show and the screen rose and the shuttle was there and the audience gasps and walks out, and he stayed behind and he had to sort of turn around and he couldn’t look at all of us and we realized he was crying. He couldn’t, was really touched by it. And then he came out and he was really very effusive in his delight for seeing what it happened.

Dan Heaton: You mentioned PGAV, which is a St. Louis company where I live, and I’ve noticed even with just using them as an example, we have a local zoo where they’ve done exhibits, there’s a lot of things, and it seems like a lot of, like you mentioned in the ‘80s, people not really hard to even come up with a program, and it was so new with Imagineering, it seemed like themed entertainment is spreading to so many different types of locations. Now, beyond those parks, I mean, I’m sure you’ve probably seen that with trends like that. Do you foresee that will continue, that themed entertainment is really becoming just entertainment in a way in so many different locations like museums and zoos and everything else? Is it just going to keep expanding?

Adam Bezark: I hope so, both because I like it and because it’s my living, but it’s what we do. We love doing it, but there’s a reason for it. I think we talk about there are different types of ways people entertain themselves, and years ago, Michael Eisner from Disney drew a grid on a wall that was four squares, and he said, in this square, there is entertainment you can do that you experience at home by yourself. Here’s entertainment you experience at home with your family and with friends. Here’s entertainment you experience out of the home by yourself, and here’s entertainment that you experience out of home with your friends. And we live in that last quadrant.

The first two quadrants are things like video games or watching TV, stuff you can do at home. The third quadrant us things you do by yourself on the home is going shopping or going hiking or exercising, but the last square is kind of where magic happens. That’s where you create memories with your family and your friends that last a lifetime. So creating entertainment that happens together with other people out of your home, getting you up and out and having an adventure with friends and family, I think it’s kind of one of the coolest things you can do.

It’s why we’re in this business, that’s why we like this. So I certainly hope there’s more of it going forward because I think we’ve just scratched the surface of ways you can use real space as opposed to virtual space to create really exciting experiences. We still play around with virtual stuff too, but there’s something delightful about going to a real place and having something really happen to you.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I think especially after, with so many of us being home in the last few years, that going to a physical space that is really special. Well, on a related note, I mean as you look to what’s going in the future, I mean, what excites you or interests you in terms of trends we’re seeing or technology or what you would like to see happen, even just going forward short term or long term?

Adam Bezark: Oh, wow. Well, that was open-ended. Yes. Lots of…

Dan Heaton: Now you will talk for an hour. Right?

Adam Bezark: Right. And now let’s begin hour two. Well, I think we’re at some kind of inflection point right now where the world is changing, coming out of the pandemic. I think it’s sort of anybody’s guess where everybody’s taste is going, but we have some instincts about things that we’re seeing happening that are cool. I’ve always been interested in the combination of theme park type techniques that are used in rides combined with the magic of live performance and bringing the human performances together.

So if you’ve ever seen a show like Sleep No More in New York, that’s the big immersive theater experience where you walk around a giant warehouse filled with a hundred different rooms. You’re seeing the story of Macbeth played out in a 1940s Alfred Hitchcock hotel, but with dance and nudity and all kinds of amazing things happening going on around you. It’s very artistic, but it’s also kind of like a Disney attraction that really fired us up.

I think there’s a lot to explore in that area of mixing spaces and people and performance. That’s kind of what the Galactic Star Cruiser is, right? In fact, sleep, no More people were involved in that show along with a bunch of wonderful Imagineers. The idea of being able to tell stories in space where you’re in control, the ride isn’t in control. I can go anywhere I want and find out the story I want to find out. That’s super interesting, and that’s driving a lot of what we’re doing with some very big companies. This is where we start getting into NDA territory, so we can’t really talk about it, but there’s some, we and some other very big companies are playing together in some really interesting ways with that stuff. The other thing that I think is super interesting these days is small.

I’ve spent my whole life doing gigantic things, and we always felt like, and our company, we’ve got this lovely company here in Glendale with 15 amazing creative people and producers, and we can take on gigantic projects, huge mega spectacular projects with a fairly small group, but we always sort of say that it takes a hundred acres and a billion dollars to do what we do, but that’s not true anymore. I think something has changed. I think that over the last 30, 40 years, technology has liberated every form of entertainment.

The first one to go was publishing, remember desktop publishing computers came along and all of a sudden, anybody with a laser printer could create a magazine quality publication in their own home. And it changed and it shook up and disrupted publishing forever. Then came the music business and people could make their own movie, their own music with Garage Band, and then people could make movies with iMovie on their home computers.

Every one of those things changed the nature of the business that brought down the great gatekeepers that regulated who could tell stories or who could make records, or who could publish magazines. Now, anybody could do it for a very affordable price. The last thing to go has been our world of theme parks, because it was always seemed like you needed so much money and so much land and so much space to do it. But now that’s changing too.

And if you see things like Meow Wolf, the guys out of New Mexico creating this amazing world to explore with, just they got an old bowling alley and a couple of dollars, and they just made art. You could go in it and live in it and be amazed by it or something even smaller, like the Lost Spirits Distillery that’s started off near me in LA’s downtown LA, but is now in Las Vegas.

It’s an amazing trip through a distillery where you can sample spirits, but also in it with themed environments, entertainment, and even a little boat ride. It’s incredible in a relatively small space, or it’s something even smaller than that, like the, there’s a show called The Nest here in Los Angeles that was actually created by, you’ve heard about it.

It was created by two young Imagineers who were just messing around in their garage, and they created this beautiful experience for one or two people to have where you go through a storage unit that was supposedly left to you by a distant relative, and you go through it, you find out the story of this woman’s life over the course of an hour, and it’s beautiful, and it’s moving and it’s artistic, and it costs nothing to build and took up no space at all, but it’s a beautiful, pure, powerful piece of entertainment.

So now that has taught us that there is an opportunity for folks like us to take the tools we know from creating these gigantic things and create smaller things that can happen not in giant theme parks, but in small retail spaces, malls, downtown areas, in people’s backyards, wherever it wants to happen. So we as a company are looking at being able to create things that we can design and even own ourselves, which had never occurred to us that we could do. When that happens, the sky’s the limit, because now there’s nobody to tell you that you’re off brand.

You could just create anything you want that is your piece of art and go wherever you like. So we will always be doing the big spectacular stuff. We love that for the big folks like Disney and Universal and in China and stuff, but we’re also increasingly interested in finding ways to create these smaller things just for our joy and to own something that we make ourselves and that we can just put out in the world and see how people like it. That’s going to be fun.

Dan Heaton: Well, Adam, that was great. I’m really excited after hearing that for so many things.

Adam Bezark: Oh, good. Buy a ticket when we figure out what it is. You can buy a ticket and come see it.

Dan Heaton: I definitely will. Well, thank you so much, Adam. This has been awesome, and I know we only covered a small percentage of what you’ve worked on, but this was great. Thanks so much for talking with me.

Adam Bezark: Oh, it’s a pleasure, and happy to chat again anytime. This is really fun.