88. Former Imagineer Mark Rhodes on Maelstrom, Splash Mountain, and 25 Years at Disney

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I’m fascinated by the different ways that people have become Imagineers. Very few plan for that role at a young age, and many don’t even realize it’s a possibility. Former Imagineer Mark Rhodes is a perfect example. He had written several novels and sold a screenplay prior to working at Disney. However, his early roles included bartending at Club 33. The chance to write SOPs for Tokyo started the process that led him to WED.

Rhodes is my guest on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast. We talk about how he got started and some key projects from his career. He worked at Disney for 25 years, so there’s far too much to cover within a single episode. This interview covers the tumultuous evolution of Maelstrom, which started out very differently with Art Director Joe Rohde interested in Vikings. We also cover Rhodes’ work on Splash Mountain, the Roger Rabbit Cartoon Spin, and other classic attractions.

What stands out from Rhodes’ time at Disney is all the great stories about Marty Sklar, Tony Baxter, and many other legendary Imagineers. I loved hearing anecdotes about what it was like to work at Disney during the ’80s and ’90s. He ultimately left to start his own company Rhodes to Imagination, which gave him the chance to work on projects for Universal like the Harry Potter attractions. It was amazing to have the chance to learn Rhodes’ story, and I hope to talk with him again in the future.

Show Notes: Mark Rhodes

Learn more about Mark Rhodes and his background on his LinkedIn page.

Check out Jack Spence’s conversation with Mark Rhodes on All Ears.net (March 2, 2010)

Make a one-time contribution to help the podcast and buy me a Dole Whip!

Transcript

Dan Heaton: Hey there. Today on the podcast, I talk with former Disney Imagineer Mark Rhodes about Maelstrom, Splash Mountain, and a lot more from 25 years working at Disney. You’re listening to the Tomorrow Society Podcast.

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Thanks for joining me here on Episode 88 of The Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. One of the things that I always enjoy is learning all the different ways that people ultimately become Disney Imagineers. From an outsider’s perspective, it’s easy to look at it and say they were destined to become Imagineers. Like essentially, someone when they were young said, I love Disney, or I love design and I want to be an Imagineer, so I’m going to dedicate my life to it. But it rarely is that simple.

Most of the time, especially I feel like people that joined in the earlier days, there’s a sense of stumbling into it. And I don’t mean that in a negative way, like they’re not deserving. It’s just these are people that should be Imagineers, but don’t go to Disney from a direct route like today’s guest, Mark Rhodes, who is a writer, but joins Disney as a utility man, working, doing dishes, becoming a bartender at Club 33, working on that side of it as a lead at the Blue Bayou, and ultimately ended up in Imagineering in kind of an odd way, where he was writing SOPs for some of the locations in Tokyo.

You had a case where his writing was pointed out because he was a good writer, and though he had written novels, Disney didn’t recognize that until much later. So Mark joined as a writer after doing different types of roles, but ultimately was able to do very well at Disney, working on Maelstrom and Splash Mountain, Roger Rabbit, so many attractions from the eighties and nineties in particular, after Michael Eisner took over and then started his own business, Rhodes to Imagination, where he worked on Harry Potter attractions and Transformers and other jobs for Disney.

And there is far too much to cover in one conversation with Mark, but I still love the chance to hear some of his stories from working with Legends at Disney like Marty Sklar or Tony Baxter, and then becoming part of that newer group of people like Tom Morris, Joe Lanzisero, so many others. Mark has a lot of really fun stories about his time at Disney. So let’s get right to it. Here is Mark Rhodes.

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Dan Heaton: There’s so many projects you worked on that we could talk about, but before we even dive into some of those, I’d love to go back and learn just how did you even get interested in working in theme parks or even for Disney when you were younger.

Mark Rhodes: I think it has to do more with luck than anything else. Unlike my good buddies like Tony Baxter and Joe Lanzisero, Tim Delaney, and Tom Morris. I wasn’t born in California. I was born in Colorado and grew up there, went to college here. But my first association with Disneyland, it opened in 1955, and I wasn’t quite four years old, but my father was just fascinated with this thing that Walt had come up with. And he said, all right, we’re going to scrimp and we’re going to save, and we’re going to go out there.

So it took us about four or five years. So I was around eight or nine, nine years old when we packed everything up into our station wagon and did the family vacation out to California. As it so happened, my mother’s brother, or actually her sister, was married to a man named Clyde Pollard, who was head of special effects for Warner Brothers at the time, and we were going to stay with them, so we stayed with them for the week.

I had two really great vivid memories of being out there. One was him telling me stories about his time with Warner Brothers. His first project that he worked on was The Wizard of Oz. He talks about the first day walking into this soundstage and seeing all these painters painting the air, and as he got closer, he realized it was the piano wire that was going to hold up the monkeys costumes. So he told us all these great stories.

My other memory was going to Disneyland, so it was like an hour drive from his house down to Anaheim. We got there an hour before the park opened at eight o’clock. And of course, we stayed there until past midnight, both nights. We rode the train around the park way too many times because my father had an affection for old locomotives. And he kept saying that once he retired, he was going to be an engineer on the trains at Disneyland because that had to be the best job in the world.

My younger brother and I, we probably spent way too much time at Tom Sawyers Island and riding the riverboat around the Rivers of America. And of course, I loved Dumbo and going on Casey Jr. My mother and sister rode the carousel over and over again. But my favorite ride was probably Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride with Peter Pan close second. It took us twofold days to see everything in the park.

That was at a time before there was small world, Pirates, Haunted Mansion, Big Thunder, Space Mountain, and Splash Mountain. None of that existed. And yet I loved being there and loved doing that. So now how I got to work as an Imagineer was a totally different thing. In 1976, I was still living in Colorado. I had had two novels published during that time, and I had just sold a screenplay to Richard Erdman who had a contract with Paramount to do a film.

So my brother and I were thinking, okay, we’ve always wanted to kind of work at Disney, so why don’t we just do that? So we decided to head out to California. My father loaned us his pickup, which had a little camper on the back, and my brother and I took off for California. So we thought, this is going to be fun. We’re going to work there this summer and everything’s going to be great. So anyway, we got there on a Monday, and in those days, the park was closed on Mondays, so we slept in the parking lot. And then the next morning we got up and we went in to apply for jobs. I went through the interview process and filled out the forms. And one of the spaces on the form asked, what job do you think you’d be best suited for?

Now, my brother had just graduated from Colorado University in finance, but he wrote, I’ll take anything. And me, on the other hand, I wrote, well, if it’s still available, I think I’d like Walt’s old job. So then we went and set up at my mother’s other’s brother’s place, and the next day we got a letter back from Disney. My brother was saying, yes, we want you to come in. We’re going to put you in cash control. And I got one that said, thanks, but no thanks.

So my brother goes, look, just go back in, fill out the forms again and put, I’ll take anything. So I went back in, filled out all the forms again, and this time I just couldn’t do it. And I, I think it’d be fun to be a Jungle Cruise skipper. Went home, waited several days in the May mail up comes my second rejection, saying, thanks, but no thanks.

My brother goes, just go in and put, I’ll take anything. So I went back in third time, filled out all the forms and put, I’ll take anything. Sure enough, I got cast. Now, it was interesting because the job, even though I had on there that I’ve been an actor, I’ve been a sculptor, I’ve been a musician. I had two novels. I had a screenplay that was about to be produced, and they said that they thought I was best suited to be a utility man. I’m going, that sounds really cool.

I don’t know what that is, but that sounds like that’s a really cool job. So I go there and I find out that I was going to be a utility man at Club 33, and a utility man was in fact a brand new designation because of the unions. You could either wash dishes or you could pick up the dishes, you could be a busboy or this new thing would allow me to do both busing and washing.

So I got that job, and I got to admit, that’s where I met Kevin Rafferty. He and I were busboy together at Club 33. I’ve got to go back and tell you another story. I have to tell you this story so I can tell you the next story. After my first novel came out, my father said, look, I like it. I think it is really good, but I don’t know that people are always going to read, and I know they’re always going to drink.

I’ll tell you what, if you’ll go back to school and get a bartender’s license, I’ll pay for it. I don’t want you living with me when you’re 40 years old and out of work. So I said, okay. So I went to Denver and Denver University and went to the bartending school there, got my bartender’s license, got to work one night at the Playboy Club when it was still there, which was a lot of fun.

But basically it was a great fallback job. I knew I could bar tend well, as it so happened, the bartender at Club 33 quit. Now, I was the only one there that had a bartender’s license, so I immediately became a bartender, which was unlike my father thinking that being an engineer on the train at Disney was the best job. Being a bartender at Club 33 was the best job. I love doing that. We got to meet so many. Cary Grant came in. Okay, I’ve got to stop and tell you another story.

This is my Cary Grant story. I had come in for a day shift and I was back in the bar setting up. Now all the bartenders and the maitre d’s wear tuxedos. Well, the maitre d’ had been sent off to do something else, and if you’re not familiar with Club 33, all the members have special cards that will open up the door.

They go inside and there’s a hostess downstairs that will escort them to this little elevator. It’s like a four-person elevator that was used in the movie, The Happiest Millionaire. And you get in this elevator and it takes you up to the second floor, which is where the restaurant’s located. So anyway, I get this call from in the bar that the hostess is trying to reach the maitre d’, but nobody’s answering. And she said, we’ve got a guest down here that needs to be escorted. Can you come out from the bar and do that? And I said, sure. So again, I put my jacket back on, put my tie back on and came out. As I’m walking towards the elevator, I see this just immaculate, gorgeous head of silver, gray hair coming up. I’m going, that is the neatest hair I’ve ever seen in my life.

I couldn’t believe it. And as the elevator comes up, it’s Carey Grant, and he’s there with his daughter, Jennifer, who was probably about 13 at the time. So the elevator came out and it didn’t quite land, it should have, it was maybe a half an inch off or so on instead of coming to a clean, smooth stop. When I opened the door, Jennifer started to step out and caught her foot on that and started to fall forward.

So I caught her and set her back up, and Cary Grant goes, oh, I bet all the girls fall for you. They I, Cary Grant just said that to me. So I fell in love with Cary Grant at that point, but it was a great time because Elton John came up one night, did a sort of a private concert for us. Francis Ford Coppola was there, Olivia de Havilland came in.

There was just so many celebrities that came because it’s the only place in the park where you could get alcohol. So I mean, that’s where I would go. Anyway, moving on. There came a time when I thought, okay, this is really good, but I’m not making a whole lot of money here. So there was an opening for what they call a lead. Now, in those days, before you became a manager, you became a lead. It was sort of a testing ground for people to go into management at Disney. I was saying, oh, I’m having a lot of fun here; I think I want to stay with Disney. I went into the lead program and I became the lead for the Blue Bayou Restaurant, the Mile Long Bar and Cafe Orleans in the New Orleans Square area. I’m going, okay, this is kind of cool.

It’s a little more money. Well, during that time, WED enterprises, I had no notion of what WED was or what they did, but they’re going to play an important part in my future because they had signed a contract with Oriental Land Company to develop Tokyo Disneyland. One of the requirements was that every restaurant shop and attraction in Disneyland or at Walt Disney World had to provide a detailed SOP or a standard operating procedure. Now, many of those at this time, this is 1977, ‘78, they didn’t exist because they had been written when the attractions and the shops and so on first opened, but they’d never been updated, and things changed all the time. If you’re familiar with Imagineers, they tend to change things. There was all kinds of changes, but the operational operating procedure manuals had never been changed. That became kind of a problem.

And Jim Cora, who was in charge of the, he was the liaison for Disneyland with Oriental Land Company. He was tasked with getting all these SOPs done. So what his idea was, he was going to go to the lead at every attraction shop and merchandise area and have them write the SOPs. So since I was the lead at those three, I wrote those and I get a call a couple of weeks later, the manager at the Blue Bayou said, I don’t know why, but Jim Cora wants to see you up in his office right now. He says, I hope you didn’t do anything that’s going to get you fired. I said, well, I hope I didn’t either. Jim Cora’s office at that time was what is now, it was always Walt Disney’s apartment above the fire station, but at that time, it was his office.

He was using it. So I go up there and in his office, he’s got hundreds of these SOPs spread all around him, and he’s got my three on his desk, and he says, look at this. I was looking at it, and he said, none of these are worth anything. You seem to be the only semi-literate person in this park. He said, I like what you’ve written here. He says, can you do this for all the others?

I said, well, maybe. He said, well, I’ll give you a staff. I’ll give you four secretaries and you can get an assistant. And I said, okay, yeah, that sounds like a great plan. So anyway, Bob Stevens, who was the other lead over at the Blue Bayou Cafe, we’d become good friends. And I said, okay, Bob, let’s do this. We can probably milk this assignment for three or four months.

I’d realized very quickly that we could set up a template. Most of these procedures were fairly standard. You started with safety. You went through kind of a checklist of how to open what you did during operations and how to close. And most of the restaurants rated it the same way most of the merchandise shops did. The attractions were a little different, but still it was a matter of just which buttons to push and when to push them. So Bob and I went about getting all this information, putting it together, checking it with the people in charge to make sure that what we’d written was correct. We had these four secretaries that were typing up everything that we did. So at the end of three months, we finished our attraction or finished our assignment, and Jim said, thanks, great job. This is just what we want.

And they shipped it off to Tokyo. So I go back to being a lead at the Blue Bayou and the other restaurants, and a couple of weeks later, I get a call and he said, you need to go back to Jim’s office. He said, he didn’t sound happy. I went, oh, no. What’s going to happen now? How’s this going to blow up on me? So I go back to Jim’s office and he’s got my three different applications for a job, and he’s sitting here reading and he says, you actually wrote two novels. And I said, yeah. He said, and he sold a screenplay. I said, yeah. He said, did anybody read this stuff before they cast you down in your job? I said, well, I assume somebody did. I probably just didn’t believe I did it. He says, well, I think you’ve been miscast.

He said, we’re going to transfer you to WED Imagineering. And I said, well, that’s great. What is that? He said, well, they’re the guys that actually come up with the attractions and the restaurants and so on. And he says, you’re going to start work there next week. I’m going, well, this is great. And he says, then there’ll probably be a pay raise in for you. I said, that is great.

So then I started at when, and it’s interesting because what I was hired for, I thought, again, I had two novels I thought I was going to go over as a creative writer. I did not. They loved what I had done for Tokyo on the SOP. So they thought I was a technical writer. So Frank Stanek, who was working with Tokyo, had come up with this format that he called scopes that kind of defined the scope of each project and tried to define at what level the work was at, like scope.

The first-level scope would be concept development. The second level would we be when you go into preliminary design, be working drawings for when you’re in construction, this opening it and getting it going. So he’d come up with this sort of scope thing, and they said, okay, Frank’s going to be working on Tokyo. We’re working on this new project called Epcot.

You’re going to be the scope writer for Epcot. And I said, okay. I met with a gentleman named Jim, who was the overall project director for Epcot. He says, look, he says, I’m having a real problem. I got ride guys that are designing rides that won’t fit in the buildings that the architects are designing that have nothing to do with the show that they show designers are designing. He says, what I need you to do is go around and talk to everybody and each of these disciplines, see what the hell they’re doing, and then report back to me.

I said, okay. So that’s where I started. It was great because at that time, so many of the original Imagineers, like Herbie Ryman and Claude Coats and Marc Davis and Ward Kimball were all there. And it was my job to go talk to these guys to see what they were doing. And of course, the young guys that were up and coming, Tony Baxter, Tim Delaney, Tom Morris, were all there, and I’m talking to these guys to get an idea of what they’re doing for the shows, and then I’m going over and talking to the engineers and the ride guys and so on. Sure enough, they were all doing kind of different things. So I give all this to Jim and he says, okay, I’m going to call in Marty Sklar. And I mean, at that time, I knew Marty was the vice president of Creative.

So Marty comes in and I felt like I just stabbed him in the back because Jim goes, look at this. This is what your people are doing. This is what these guys are doing. We’ve got to have a meeting and get this all together. And I think it was great in the sense that Marty didn’t get upset with me. He just looked at this and he said, okay, let’s take care of it.

He and Jim reorganized everything and got everybody working towards the same goal. So that was kind of cool. I mean, I liked that. So that’s what I did through the opening of Epcot. Well, actually what happened was there was so much work coming so fast, and I was the only scope writer within a month or so. They said, look, you need to hire a staff. You’re not going to be the manager of Scope Productions.

You need to start hiring people. So I brought Bob Stevens up, and Kevin Rafferty came over as the graphic designer on this thing. Then at the end, I think we had about 13 writers working on this thing before we finally finished, because we were also having to pick up a lot of Tokyo’s work too. So that was great. Then when Epcot opened, everybody was getting laid off. I mean, it was a sad, sad time.

One of the last people I had to lay off was my good buddy, Kevin Rafferty, and I said, Kev, as soon as I can, I’m going to bring you back, but I got to lay you off because right now, I’m the only person that’s left. Luckily, Bob Stevens had been able to transfer out of scopes and over into a project management area before Kevin. I had to lay him off.

Like I said, at that time, things were going a little crazy, and then Michael Eisner and Frank Wells came in and it became a whole different attitude in the company. Suddenly everything’s sad, everything’s bad, nothing’s working became a very, oh, we got a million things we need to do again. It became like when we were doing Epcot, suddenly these guys just wanted to turn this company around and do great things.

At that time, I think Marty had realized that I had probably been miscast, that I was in the wrong department. I shouldn’t be in project management, I should be in creative. So I went and talked to him and he said, yeah. He said, okay, Randy Bright is the director of Creative. He says, go talk to him, see what he has to say. So I went to Randy and Randy says, yeah, I read your stuff.

At the beginning of each scope, I’d write a synopsis, which was my chance to be creative, to describe what the project was in very fun-filled language. And so Randy says, okay, I’m going to give you a test. He says, I want you to compare and contrast Bambi and the Fox and The Hound, which is a movie that had just come out. And I’m going, what does that have to do with being a creative writer? I mean, that’s okay, I’ll do it.

So anyway, luckily the studio in those days would loan you 16 millimeter prints of films. So I checked out Bambi, and then I checked out the Fox and the Hound, and I write this five-page dissertation on comparing and contrasting Bambi and the Fox and the Hound. Now, I hated it. I hated having to do that. And I was going, this isn’t me.

So I wrote another one called “Where the Deer, The Fox and the Hound Roam”, and it was a humorous take on why I didn’t write it basically that, oh, I couldn’t check out the thing, so I just made it. I remember Bambi being something, I think the Fox and The Hound must be about that. So I write this up as a humorous parody on this dissertation I’ve just written. I sent it to Randy Bright, and I was told to CC Marty Sklar, which I did.

So I get called back into Randy’s office after he recently, he goes, okay, this first thing is perfect. It shows you can write. He says, this second thing, it’s terrible. I don’t know why you wrote this. He said, this doesn’t make any sense to me at all. I’m going to hire you as a writer, but don’t ever do anything like this.

He says, you don’t want to be Al Bertino, do you? Now, Randy used to throw around a lot of phrases like I dunno, je ne sais quoi. So when he said Al Bertino, I thought that was some other phrase, and I’m went, okay. I said, no, Randy, I don’t want to be an Al Bertino. Honestly, I do not, and I won’t be. So then after that, I ran into another really great writer, Scott Hennesy in the hallway, and I said, Scott, do you know what an Al Bertino is?

He says, well, it’s not a what. He said, who? Al Bertino is probably the funniest comedy writer Walt ever had. He said he did Bear Band. He said he worked on all the comedy. Al Bertino is like the best. I’m going. Well, that’s interesting. So I get back to my office and here’s my little piece that I had written that I’d sent to Marty, and Marty has written on it. This is great. I don’t care so much for the other one, but I really like this. Okay, I see. I’ve got a line to walk here.

Dan Heaton: That’s funny, right in the middle there. So I know with Epcot, you started, then you worked on Maelstrom, which is no longer there, but was there a long time and has a lot of fans. So I’d love to hear about how you ended up working on that attraction and the evolution. I know it changed a lot as it went along.

Mark Rhodes: Oh, yeah. Well, let me get you there, because I was the Senior Writer when I did Maelstrom, that was my first big project. But before that, Kevin Rafferty had managed to come over as a writer as well, and he and I teamed up and started doing a lot of things, little pieces. We probably wrote hundreds of things that we’ll never see the light of day, but one of our first projects was Disneyland was having a blast of the past 1950s kind of thing.

Randy Bright wanted us to write a spiel for the submarines that sort of had a fifties take on it. So Kevin and I wrote this thing, and then we went down and recorded. The idea was that there’s this old Halloween song where there’s an interviewer who’s talking to these people about this Martian landing. Then they cut into these different songs and we thought, okay, let’s do something fun like that about the whole sea voyage.

So we write this thing, put it up, we record it, we take it down to the park. I remember Dick Nunis not being real happy with it because we were messing with his attraction, but he’s going, okay, it’s only for three months, just the summer. We’ll go through it. So we made it work, and I think we got lots of letters done, lots of complaints and lots of, we thought this was the funniest thing ever.

So that was one of the first assignments that Kevin and I did. And then Joe came over for animation, and the three of us teamed up, and we were doing a tacky Tiki show. We’d been asked to take a look at redoing the Tiki Bird show. And so Joe came up with these just really funny caricatures of these birds. And so Kevin and I put together a show for that, and we did a Mickey and the Beanstalk concept.

We probably did about a hundred Winnie the Pooh rides. So we’re doing all these different things at the same time. And of course, Epcot was still looking for sponsors and so on. So while we’re writing this, I get a call that Norway is going to go. They got the green light to move ahead head with that. Joe Rohde had been put in as the art director, and that because I had a background writing dialogue, he wanted somebody to work with that could do dialogue.

He had this concept of doing a day in the life of the Viking, 24 hours from beginning to end. So I went over and met with Joe, and he’s talking, he’s telling me this great story that he’s got in mind, and Joe’s a vociferous reader. He gives me hundreds of books to read about Vikings. I call the IRC, which was our information resource center, and it’s like our research library.

Of course, they could send me dozens and dozens of things about Vikings. So I’m reading all this stuff, trying to get an idea of how to put together Joe’s story, doing these just gorgeous illustrations of these Vikings doing different things, the Viking burial and putting up a village. So I’m going, okay, I got to figure out how to do this morning tonight. And Joe says, this is going to be like a 15-minute pirate ride. Okay, alright.

So I got to figure out 15 minutes worth of stuff using this. So we put together this great show. As we got into it, Marty says, okay, you need to pitch this to Michael Eisner, Frank Wells, and Jeffrey Katzenberg. I mean, they’ve got a note. You guys are on the right track. We said, okay. So Joe’s giving the presentation. He’s going through his storyboards, and about halfway through Jeffrey Katzenberg goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s nice, but what’s the hook?

That was his big thing during that time, what’s the hook? What’s going to hook people? What’s going to bring ’em in? I think Joe improvised this on the spot. He just says, well, halfway through the ride, this troll is going to reach up, seize the boat, twirl it around, and the rest of the ride will be experienced riding backwards. And that seemed to make ’em real happy. They didn’t care about the rest of the, they’re just going, that’s a great hook. Now, where the troll came from, I mean, I vaguely, I remember I had some dialogue about a couple of Vikings talking about, it was just like a million trolls in Norway talking about a river troll. I am going, wow, that’s amazing that he could just grab this thing and sell this thing. Joe is probably one of the greatest pitchmen I’ve ever seen.

He always remind me of Orson Welles. He’s bigger than life. So anyway, we get past this big obstacle and we’re moving on. We’re going to do a 24 hours in the life of a Viking, except that at that time, another project in Texas, a text position, they called it, TPO came up and Joe was reassigned to do that because they thought, this is huge. We want Joe over there who’s going to take that.

So they assigned Bob Kurzwell as a new art director, and Bob again, great guy, but really into fantasy. So I’m taking him through the story that Joe and I have, and he goes, no, no, no, no, no, no. He says, the trolls are good. He says, the Vikings, nobody caress about Vikings. He says, troll, we’re going to do an entire show on trolls. There’s like thousands and thousands of Norwegian trolls.

So he gets me all this research on Norwegian trolls, and the library gives me research. So I rewrite this Viking show into a troll show. It’s all trolls beginning to end. And at that time, the sponsor for Norway was a group called Norshow, and it was a bunch of different companies that had come together and say, we’re going to put up the money for this, and we want to sponsor the show. So Marty calls ’em in and we take ’em through the troll show and they hate it. Marty says, okay, take ’em to the Viking show. So I take ’em to the Viking show and they hate it. They go, we are not about, we’re Norway, we’re not about trolls. We’re not about Vikings; we’re about North Sea oil drilling platforms. We’re going, what?

So Bob got really upset and said, no, we’re doing the troll show anyway. Bob is taken off the project. And so now Marty says, look, you need to come up with something that works for everybody. So I went back and kind of thought, okay, I can use this from the Vikings. I can use this from the trolls. I don’t want to do a walkthrough of an oil drilling platform, but maybe we can do something exciting because I got a research on that. Oh, lightning strikes it. That’d be cool. Stuff like that. So figured that out. There was polar bears. I went, okay, there’s all kinds of stuff. I put together a sequence of stuff, and what I’ll do is I’ll come up with a narrator that sort of takes you back to the beginning of Viking days and then talks you through all of Norway.

So I did that and everybody loved that. They’re going, okay, this is really great. This is good. And so the fun thing was I got to go to Norway to go over there because a lot of times the writer ends up being the show director on these things and directing all the talents. So I went over there and we got the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra to record all the music. It was so cool because I’m sitting in the middle of this orchestra right next to the conductor as they play around me. And then I record these, the Viking voices, and again, another great research thing, they hired a professor. I sent him over the script and he sent me back a script in Norwegian that we were going to have recorded. And I go, okay, great. So I recorded, and then he sends me another script.

He says, I made a huge mistake. I sent you modern Norwegian. He says, this is actually what I’m sending you now is the way Vikings would’ve talked. So I had to re-record everything I had just recorded. So we got that and it’s great, and now we’re starting to work on the production of this thing. It’s actually being built. I said, in the meantime, I’m coming in and out of all kinds of other projects, so you’re not constantly working on one thing. So by the time they were ready for us, I was ready to fly down to Florida to start working on the installation of this thing. Now evidently there was budget cuts and my 15-minute boat ride was actually seven and a half minutes long. So I go, okay, that’s not a problem. We’ll edit that before we go down there and get the track.

So it’s exactly seven and a half minutes. So we did that. We go down and we’re doing our part where I’m working with the audio animatronics guys to get the movements. I’m working with the sound guys to get that working with the lining guys. We’re working on all this stuff. We work in different shifts. So it is like you would have a midnight to eight o’clock shift, and then the boat guys would come in from eight to two, and then the other show installation guys would come in from two and so on.

So anyway, we’re working on this thing and the boat guys come over and he says, look, we can’t make this seven and a half minutes. The boats are going too fast. We can’t slow ’em down. You need to cut your show down to about five minutes. I want five minutes. That’s two and a half minutes.

So I fly back to California, cut off two and a half minutes of show. We get down there and we’re a couple of weeks out from opening and the ride guys go, we can’t slow this down anymore. You’re going to have to cut it again. Now, we didn’t have time to fly back. So we actually edited that in the field to work to their new timing, which I think was like three and a half, four minutes. And in those days, it wasn’t digital, so everything was done on tape. So we’re using razor blades to splice the tape and scotch, tape it back together and run the thing before we can go back and rerecord it, recut it in California, just so we can get the thing open. So that’s my Norway story.

Dan Heaton: That’s crazy. I’m trying to picture that happening and how you were able to get everything to come together, but I think it turned out pretty well. There’s also the film that happened afterwards, and I know I think there were some adjustments with that film originally being like a pre-show and then kind of being shifted around too, right?

Mark Rhodes: Yeah, absolutely. That was another one of those interesting things that was supposed to be the pre-show that set up everything so that when you went through, you’re going, okay, yeah, I see the Vikings, all this great stuff. Then when they couldn’t get it to slow down, they said, okay, it’s now going to be the post-show, and we’re going to put everybody in through the other way. We went, okay. It was just like one fun surprise after another.

Dan Heaton: Wow. That’s crazy. Well, I know another project you worked on around a similar time was Splash Mountain, working kind of on the early concepts for that and putting that together. So I’d love to hear more about your work on that.

Mark Rhodes: Okay, yeah. I love Splash Mountain. Again, while I was playing with Norway, Joe in the meantime had become a full-fledged art director, and he was assigned to do Splash Mountain in Tokyo. So he called me and he said, hey, we got this great project. I want you to come over and be the Show Writer on it. I go, oh, man, that’s great.

So one of the really fun things for me was when I was assigned, I went over to the studio library and I guess it was Walt’s old library, and they had all of the Brer Rabbit stories. It is like 20 books. I’m going, wow. I thought this was one story, and I’m going reading through ’em, and I find the one that they use primarily for Song of the South, and in it, there’s Ward Kimball’s pencil notes. I like this dialogue.

Let’s use this. I like, and I’m going, oh my gosh, it is in blue pencil like animators used to draw with, and I’m going, here’s all their original notes. I’ve got Walt Disney’s book and I’m reading Ward’s notes on these things. So that was really fun, and I thought, well, okay, he’s got a good idea. Let me figure out how to set this up into a sequence. Now, Tony Baxter did the original Splash Mountain for Disneyland, and the way he described it was much like Pirates of the Caribbean.

He was saying, Walt said, it’s like going into a party where there’s just conversations going in and out, and you hear bits and pieces, and you don’t really have to carry it, carry a true beginning, middle end story. You’re just at a party kind of thing. That’s how he approached Splash Mountain for Disneyland. But because now Michael Eisner and Frank Wells and Jeffrey Katzenberg were running, they believed in beginning, middle, and end.

They said, we want a story. We want to hear how this is thing is supposed to run as a story, which was another reason that Joe had called me in. So I said, okay, let’s figure out how to do this. And so Joe just does these beautiful drawings and they’re all in black and white. He said, I don’t want to sell the thing on the color.

He said, I know I can make gorgeous things that they’ll go, oh, this is great, but we need to sell ’em on the story. So I’m making all my pictures black and white. You’ve got to come up with a story that sells this thing. So we work it through, we get the story down and do our pitch to Michael and Frank, and they’re going, okay, this is good. We’re definitely going to do this. And so that goes into production.

Now, a couple months later, I get a call from Kathy Mangum, who was a show producer at that time, and she says, hey, we’re thinking about piggybacking Splash Mountain for Walt Disney World. The Magic Kingdom hasn’t had a new attraction in years. We want you to write the story. I mean, we know you’re doing it for Tokyo. We want you to come over and do it for Walt Disney World. We’re going to sign Don Carson as the art director. God, another brilliant artist.

Now, Don and Joe had two different takes on it because Tokyo was going in, it could be very cartoony. We’re creating a Critter Country, a whole new land. I worked with Joe on a lot of different ideas for the shops and so on, but it was massive. So he went with a really, really cartoonish style. Now, Don, on the other hand, had to go into Frontierland, which was an existing area and make his Splash Mountain fit with that, so it couldn’t just be this deep south look.

It had to fit with the whole Frontierland area. And consequently, I had to tweak the script to make it feel more like that. And so as we’re going along, we’re looking at the land and the way it sets up, and in order for Splash Mountain to fit where they had room, we had to flip flop the mountain. Well, if we flip flop the mountain, that means we had to flip flop all the scenes.

So suddenly all the scenes that were big in Tokyo became small at Walt Disney World, and we’re going, oh man, okay, we got to work this problem out. So we sat down and we figured out how to get the show to look as great as we could with the limitations of space, and it came out looking really great. Kathy Mangum says, alright, you need to pitch this to Frank Wells and Michael Eisner.

He said, okay, so you’re going to meet at, it’s like seven o’clock in the morning in Marty’s conference. Edie’s conference room. Edie was Marty’s secretary, so it was called Edie’s Conference Room. So it was just Kathy and I in there were setting up the storyboards, and in come Michael and Frank, and I don’t think Marty wanted to be any part of it, he stayed in his office and had the door shut.

They come in, Casey Kelly says, okay, Mark, take ’em through the show. So I start going through the show and I’m just a few minutes into it, Michael Eisner go, wait a minute, wait a minute. I already approved this project. And I said, well, no, you approved Tokyo Disneyland. This is for Walt Disney World. I said, and the reason we’re taking you through it is everything that was big is now small and then vice versa. We had to make a lot of changes, and we just want to make sure you guys were okay with that.

They said, okay, go ahead. So I take him through the whole show and he goes, great. This was fabulous. He says, we got to do it. Frank Wells goes, Michael, now this is like seven o’clock in the morning. He says, Michael, this is the third thing you said. Great. We’re going to do it. Well, actually, he never said great. He always said, fabulous. This is fabulous. We’re going to do it. He says, this is a third thing you said you’re going to do. You can’t do it. We don’t have enough money. You can do any three.

So you choose the three that we’re going to do. He says, okay, well, we got to do this one. I go, it’s good. Well, the others that he cut out were the ones that I was talking about, the Tacky Tiki Bird Show and the Hall of Presidents show that Joe and Kevin and I had been working on. So we lost those two immediately, but I got to keep the Splash Mountain for Florida. So that was great.

Dan Heaton: That’s funny. I think about all the different ideas that in a split second, they can be gone just through business and through everything. But I’m glad that Splash Mountain made it into Disney World. It’s still a gem.

Mark Rhodes: Oh, me too. I still love going on that whenever I’m back out in Florida.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. So speaking of Joe Lanzisero and something more cartoony, I believe you also worked with him on the Roger Rabbit Cartoon Spin, which is out at Disneyland in Toon Town, and I’m curious to know how that went. I think it’s a fun attraction.

Mark Rhodes: Oh, it is. It was a lot of fun, actually. Again, it’s another one of those that had this sort of weird evolution originally for Euro Disneyland, what they called Disneyland Paris. Now, they were going to put to town there a whole Toon Town. So we started, Kevin Rafferty and I working with Joe, started coming up with this idea of maybe we could do a simulator cartoon because they wanted a simulator somewhere, and we’re going, this is great.

Let’s take a bus and maybe we’ll have this bus chasing Benny the Cab that’s been kidnapped by the weasels, and Roger can fall all over the place. We can have a lot of fun with that. So we we’re working on this show, working on this whole idea, and finally they said, no budget cuts. We’re not going to do that. It’s out. I went, okay, well, that’s not happening.

So we’ll go on to other things. Well, in the meantime, one of the projects that Joe had been working on was a meet and greet. The parks were demanding to set up meet and greets with Mickey Mouse and all the characters. He said, we don’t have any place. Guests don’t like to just randomly wander into ’em. They want to be able to actually go meet them. So we said, okay, alright, not me, but Joe’s working on all these kind of meet and greet ideas.

I think he came up with the idea of, hey, what if we set up a, he was calling it Mickey’s Meet and Greet. Well, at that time, the movie was really successful, and we’d done some of this work for EDL. It kind of came back together and Joe became the art director for what was not Roger Rabbit’s Toon Town, but Mickey’s Toon Town.

And it was great. I remember the fun thing was we had moved next door to 1401 flowers where Imagineering is located. Well, right across the street is where the animators had been, and their building was finally finished at the studio. They were moved out. So we went next door where the animators had been, because it’s now this huge space, and that’s where the model work was done for Toon Town. Right next to us was Tony Baxter and his group doing the Indiana Jones ride. So we were both kind of getting to watch what each other was doing the entire time. So for Mickey’s Toon Town, Joe is just such a creative guy. We went down, we knew we didn’t have a whole lot of money for the ride system, that it was probably going to have to be one of the little dark rides.

Joe wanted to introduce something fun and something cool, and we were working with a guy named Dave Burkhart, who was kind of the Disneyland go-to guy. He could get things done. So one night we went down after the park was closed and took one of the Pinocchio ride vehicles and they put a teacup on it just to see if we could actually spin it in that thing. It just gave a whole new dimension.

At that point. Joe goes, this is great. This is what we’re going to do. And so then I sit down and wrote a script based upon being able to spin everywhere. That was a lot of fun. Although near the end of that project, as they were going into construction, I ended up being transferred to Florida. I think my good buddy, Kevin Rafferty, came in and did all the recording for that show.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I really liked that show. I think it sounds like that time with, you’ve mentioned so many of the names of people that were up and coming and then really took charge in kind of the late eighties, early nineties in Paris, which I know you had some work there, but I’d love to know what it was like to work among that group, like you’ve mentioned, like Tony Baxter, Tom Morris, Tim Delaney, all that group, and just the energy that with Michael Eisner in charge that you guys had when you were working on all these projects.

Mark Rhodes: We worked all the time, and yet it never felt like work. It was play. It was constant play. As I said, I was so lucky. I was at a time when I first came in, Marc Davis and Ward Kimball, Herbie Ryman, X Atencio, Claude Coats, John Hench, Bob Gurr, Harriet Burns, Joyce Carlson, Colin Campbell, all those people were there. And I got to work with people like Jimmy McDonald who did all the special effects, and it was the voice of Mickey Mouse and Ducky Nash who did the Donald Duck voice.

At that time, yeah, it was just like it was being in a room full of geniuses and you felt like, I got to live up to these guys. I’m nowhere near as good as any of these guys. I mean, here’s Tony Baxter and Joe Lanzisero and Joe Rohde, Kevin Rafferty, Wing Chao, Bob Weiss was there, and Kathy Mangum, Eric Jacobson, it just so many people that you looked at and just had such respect for what they could do that I kept feeling, God, I got to do better.

So I felt like I was working all the time, but yet I was never working. It was always just fun. It was just such a good time. And Marty Sklar, I mean, talk about the best leader anybody could ever have was probably Marty, but he had this just great sense of humor. I remember one time Kevin and I, we’d been asked to put up Bob McCall had done these gorgeous paintings for Spaceship Earth, and so we were going to put ’em up in this conference room.

Bob had done this huge painting that we had sitting on the floor, and Kevin and I had stepped back to look at the space to see how we might want to set the thing up. The back of Kevin’s heel was touching the painting. Marty walks in looks says, Hey, don’t worry, Kevin, that’s only a $10,000 painting you’re standing on and walks off.

He was great to work, but in fact, okay, I’ll give you one more, Marty. This is a Marty and Tony Baxter story. This is my first day at work. I thought I got fired by Marty Sklar. My first day of work when I was at Club 33, the ambassador of Disneyland at the time, had brought Tony and some other Imagineers up for dinner at the club. And again, I didn’t know what Imagineering was to me.

There were just a bunch of guys getting to eat at the club. Afterwards she introduced me to Tony because I got to know her because she was always bringing the celebrities up to the Club 33, and she had told him about me that I had written these books and so on. Tony goes, oh, that’s interesting. That’s great. So I gave him a couple of copies, and then when I got transferred over to WED, my first day, I’m kind of going around in the morning trying to figure out what my job is and what I’m doing.

About 11 o’clock I get this phone call and this Tony Baxter. Tony says, hey, Mark, can you come over and do me a favor? I want to show you something. I said, okay. So I went over to Tony’s office and he was working on the Imagination Pavilion, and he shows me all these, again, gorgeous drawings and models and so on. He says, I’m having trouble. The writer on this show just doesn’t get it at all. Now, the writer was Scott Hennessy, who is a brilliant writer. I mean, he is a great writer. He and Tony just weren’t seeing eye to eye at the moment, but Tony said, can you do me a favor? I just want you to go through. Let me tell you the story of this, and you kind of write it up for me and let me see it.

I said, okay. So he takes me through his version of the Imagination Pavilion, and I said, okay, yeah, I can write that up. So I go back, oh, this is my lunch hour. I go, I can do that. I can knock that out in about half an hour. So I write this thing up and I take it back over, and Tony’s not there.

So I just leave it on his desk. And then I go back to work doing my real work, my project scope work, and about three o’clock in the afternoon, I get a call, and it’s from Sandy Huskins, Marty Sklar’s secretary, and Sandy says, Marty would like to see you in his office right now. Now, this is my first day at work. I do not have any idea who Marty s Sklar is or where his office is. So I asked Sandy, she says, well, it’s on the Gold Coast now.

The Gold Coast is, it was named that because the carpet was gold, and it was just that entrance area in WED, and Marty’s office was at the end. So she gave me directions. So I walked down to Marty’s office, and he’s sitting behind his desk and he’s got this thing that I had written up for Tony. And he says, did you write this? And I’m going, wow, I’m getting recognition.

Immediately I’ve been told this is, and I said, yeah. He throws it down on his desk, and I’d never heard an executive swear before, but he started swearing at me about how unhappy he was that he couldn’t believe that I would do this kind of thing, that he was getting sick and tired of this kind of, and I’m going, boy, I did something wrong. I can tell. And about that time, Tony Baxter walks by, and here’s Marty yelling at me.

Tony storms into the office and goes right back at Marty goes, look, Marty, you told me I could have any writer. I wanted to write this thing. I want him to write it. Well, I did not see you could have any writer. I said, you needed to work with a writer. They’re just going back and forth, back and forth, and I’m kind of standing there watching this thinking maybe I should leave. But instead, Marty comes out from behind his desk as Tony’s moving towards the door, and the two of ’em are kind of like nose to nose yelling at each other as they go down the hallway and disappear.

In the meantime, Marty’s thrown my piece on the floor, and I thought, okay, well, I guess that was good fun. First day I’ll be looking for another job. So I picked up my little piece, put it on Marty’s desk, went back to my office, packed up all my stuff and went home.

So when I got home, my wife said, so how was your first day? And I said, well, I think I got fired. She said, somebody said they fired you. And I said, well, no. They didn’t say they fired me, but it sounded like it. She said, look, until somebody says you’re fired, you go back there. You haven’t got a paycheck yet. I said, okay. So I went back the next day and went to work.

Didn’t see Tony, didn’t see Marty, just did my work. And then the next day and the next day, two weeks go by and I haven’t heard anything. So I finally pick up the phone call Tony and I go, so I thought I got fired. He says, why would you think that? And he said, well, the way you and Marty were acting, he says, are you kidding? We were just having a discussion. Well, okay, you guys just have louder discussions than I was used to.

Dan Heaton: I love that. Especially the first day that really makes the story. That’s great. Well, I know there’s so many topics and so many projects that we haven’t even gotten discussed, but I want to make sure that I mention that you spent all that time at WDI, but also you started your own consulting business, Rhodes to Imagination in 2002 and did so many other projects for that. So I would love to learn. Just before we finish, just your decision to do that and how that went.

Mark Rhodes: Well, it’s interesting. I had 25 years with Disney at that time. It one of those situations where they were going, you’re at the top of your pay scale. We can’t pay you anymore for what you’re doing as a Senior Show Writer. We don’t have any positions available as show producers or thing that are open right now. He said, you could be a vice president in administration, which I did not want to do at all. So I turned all that down and then 9/11 happened and it seemed like this is not a happy part of the story.

All the people at my age that had those years were kind of laid off from Florida, and there was a huge lawsuit came out of that, which we won. But the nice thing, I mean, again, things that sound bad really aren’t actually. I think I’m the luckiest guy imaginable because as soon as I got laid off, Disney had work for me, and so they wanted to hire me back and I was making more money as a creative consultant than I was as a Senior Show Writer.

In fact, they told me that. They said, if you set up your own company, we can hire you back for three or four times what you’re making, and they did. So for the next year, I did a bunch of stuff for Disney. At the end of that year, I got a call from Dale Mason over at Universal. I guess Tony was trying to get Harry Potter into Disney and couldn’t get the management to agree with him.

So Universal snapped it up and they called me and asked me if I’d come over and work on putting together a script. He said, we’ve had a number of writers, we can’t get it past JK Rowling. He said, we can get all the vice presidents at Warner Brothers to sign off, but we can’t get her to sign off. So I went over and talked with them, kind of figured out what to do.

They sent it off. JK Rowling, said, okay, let’s do this now. So I got to work on the Harry Potter attraction, and then a lot of my good buddies from Imagineering, Mike West, Jason Surrell, Chaz McEwen, all ended up over at Universal. So I was doing work on King Kong and Men in Black and the Spider-Man redo. It was just suddenly lots of work, lots of fun work was coming out of Universal. So then every now and then I’d go back to Disney and do some mostly concept stuff with them. Not full project stuff, just coming up with different ideas and things to do.

Because of the work I had done with Disney and Universal, I got this chance to go over to China and do a full attraction over there. So I pulled together a team of former Imagineers and we went over and spent about a year in China putting together a really fun dark ride.

Lately though, I’ve been doing a lot of work with Bob Garner who did work as a filmmaker for Epcot and pitching ideas for the new Disney streaming. Disney Plus plus WDI’s 50th anniversary coming up, and we’ve got a pitch going into try and do some film work for those guys. So that’s been a lot of fun. Oh yeah. I forgot to mention the Imagineering the Magic, the DVD series that we did on the Magic Kingdom in Florida and the Magic Kingdom in Disneyland. So that was great.

I got to work with my buddies, Cameron Roberts and Greg Jones. They originally were working for Bob Allen on the Back Lot of the Studios when it first opened, and they were in a trailer called The Trailers were D1, D2, they were in D7. So when they left the company, that’s what they called their company D7.

And so we were with Marty Sklar basically. We did the pitch for Marty on how to do a Imagineering show that had the Imagineers talk about how they created all these different attractions, and Marty bought off on it. And we got to do this series with my D7, and I should mention Rich Skillman. Rich Skillman was a neighbor of mine who actually was in the DVD business. He was the one that had the contract to do Universal and SeaWorld and Disney, and he had been pitching for years to try and get the Imagineers to do something.

But he just kept coming up with ideas that Disney just wouldn’t go along with. So when I had left the company and set up my own company, he came to me and says, look, I really want to do this. Can you come up with something? So that’s when I came up with the Imagineering the Magic idea and pitched it to Marty and away we went. That was great. It was such fun to be able to go back and talk with all the guys that I had worked with and let them tell their stories, and now we will see where things go.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. Well, I have one of those Imagineering the Magic DVDs that I got at Walt Disney World, and it’s great. I love the idea of getting to, and now they’re doing on Disney Plus, like a whole Imagineering series and kind of a similar vein, which I think I can’t wait to watch. I think with a lot of the names we’ve talked about, it’s going to be super fun.

Mark Rhodes: Yeah, yeah, Leslie Iwerks did that. She’s a great documentarian. Again, she’s a daughter of Don Iwerks. I’ve worked with Don a number of times. In fact, I’ve interviewed him a few times for some of the things that we did. And her grandfather Ub Iwerks who was Walt’s partner, did the first Mickey Mouse cartoons. So yeah, if you get a chance, go see it. It’s a really wonderful series.

Dan Heaton: Oh, definitely. It’s on my list for this week, I think. So Mark, I just have one last question for you, and I know I would love to have you back at some point because I feel like we covered a little bit of your career, but there’s so much more to do. But I’m just curious for you, beyond the few things you’ve mentioned, I’d love to just learn what’s been another favorite project you’ve done or something else you’ve worked on that you just really feel proud of that you got to do.

Mark Rhodes: Okay. Well, this is one, it was really fun that never came about. Well, sort of came about. I’ll tell you. This was for the Studios. Now, Mike West had been assigned to do the sound show, the original with Chevy Chase and Martin Short. So he was working on that, and they wanted a pre-show that kind of introduced what sound effects were all about.

So he calls me and he says, hey, we’re thinking about maybe trying to get a hold of Jimmy McDonald, who was the head of sound effects and special effects or sound effects over at the studio and have him do kind of a little show for us if we could. He said, would you be interested in that? I said, boy, you bet. I got a chance to go meet Jimmy McDonald. I’d love that. So as soon as I hung up from Mike, I called Kevin Rafferty, he said, hey, Kevin, you want to come play with me on this new project?

Go see Jimmy McDonald. He goes, yeah. So anyway, we get Jimmy’s contact information and invite him to come down to Imagineering for lunch. Jimmy was just adorable. He was probably like five foot two, five foot three, but he had this great handlebar mustache and he is just the sweetest man you’d ever want to meet. He’s telling us all these great stories about Walt and his time over at the Studios.

Then he takes us over to the Studios where he’s got all his old props and they’re all this sort of ugly grayish green color. We asked him about that and he said, oh, well, I think it happened that one day when they were painting a set, they mixed all this stuff together and they didn’t know what to do with it. So they painted all my props, and ever since they’ve just been painting my props that color.

Okay, that’s pretty funny. So he starts taking us through his props and showing us how he came up with the idea for marching ants and the different types of gadgets that he built. He built all these just amazing sound machines for rain and for wind and so on. You’re going, this is really cool. So there’s this little Flubber sound and this Nautilus sound, and so we’re going, okay, we can put together a show for this.

So we went through and we picked out the props that were really cool looking, that had a great story. I think Paul Osterhout had ’em painted really bright, brilliant colors, so they look really fun. And then we did this set over at WDI, David Jones was a cameraman. I take, Jimmy threw this thing. I’m going to direct him, and it’s just going to be a quick about three, three-and-a-half minute show to kind of tell the story and show these things.

So we rehearse it and rehearse it going, okay, this is good. We’ll shoot this thing the next day. So I get a call from Jimmy and he says, I got to ask you a question. He says, do you know who David Letterman is? I said, yeah. He says, I don’t know who he is. He’s somebody you think I should go talk to. I said, what do you mean? He said, well, the studio wants me to fly out tomorrow to go on the David Letterman show.

I said, oh, well, yeah. Why don’t you do that? I said, that’d probably be a lot of fun. He’s a very funny comedian. I said, you’ll enjoy talking with him. You should have a good time. So he says, okay. So he says, but they got to fly me First Class. And I said, yeah, in those days they flew everybody first class.

They don’t do that anymore. But in those days, if you were on a project, well, that if you were going to be away from your family, you flew first class and you stayed in really nice accommodations. That was good up until Eisner and Wells came in. I mean, I understand you can’t afford to do that anymore, but boy, it was sure great during those days when we could. So anyway, they fly Jimmy out, he does the David Letterman show.

What he does is what I’ve just rehearsed him on. He does his three and a half minute bit for David Letterman that shipped all his props out there and so on. So they shoot that. So Jimmy comes back and he says, you know, that flight out there was really great. He says, I couldn’t believe it. He said, it’s like the stewardess says they couldn’t stay away from me.

It is like every couple of minutes they kept coming over and asking, could I give me a drink? Can they give me a blanket? Would I like a paper? Is there anything that they could do for me? He said, and I could tell that this kid sitting next to me was really embarrassed by how much attention I was getting. I said, this kid. And he said, yeah, he was on the show too. He was promoting, I guess, his new movie.

Do you know a guy named Tom Cruise? Said, yeah, I went, yeah, I do Jimmy. So he was quite sure that they were showing nothing but attention for him. But then we find out we’re getting ready to shoot the thing and we’re sold, wait a second. Jimmy was so good on David Letterman. We’re going to use that as the pre-show. So all that work we had done, actually it was good because the piece with David Letterman’s very funny. So that’s what went into the pre-show instead of what we were originally going to do.

Dan Heaton: Well, I remember that pre-show as you were. I was thinking in my head, I thought, I think David Letterman was involved somehow because you’re standing in line watching the screen. So that’s a great story. I love it. And the Tom Cruise part is just extra icing on the cake. So Mark, this has been awesome. If people want to learn more about you or even what you’re doing with your company, is there a good place they can go?

Mark Rhodes: LinkedIn is the closest thing. My wife, who’s my partner, Jeanie, she is actually the company. The reality is at WDI, we had this great infrastructure where they took care of everything. So all you had to do was play well. When I was no longer with WDI, Jeanie became my WDI. I mean, she handles the bills, the scheduling, so that I could continue to play only. I think it’s wearing her out and she’s going, I think we need to close down the company, and you just go freelance.

So I think that’s the process we’re looking at now, is shutting down Rhodes to Imagination and just becoming a Mark Rhodes freelance writer because there’s a couple of novels I want to play with. I got a script I’m dealing with, and if Bob Garner and I end up getting these gigs with Disney Plus or with WDI, that’s going to keep me more than occupied.

Dan Heaton: Oh, I’m certain. I can imagine. It’s all those sound like fun projects. But Mark, thanks for being on the podcast. It was awesome to talk with you.

Mark Rhodes: Oh, it was great talking with you. I said anytime in the future you want to do this again, just let me know.

Dan Heaton: Yes, I will definitely do. So there’s a lot more to cover.

Mark Rhodes: Alright, well great talking with you, Dan.