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When creating theme park attractions, you can have amazing ideas. That’s only part of equation, however. There’s still the matter of making that vision a reality. The teams of talented Imagineers that work in the field deserve more attention. During his 25 years at Walt Disney Imagineering, Mark Gilbert was responsible for producing Show Elements for countless major projects. His work on managing the design, fabrication, installation, and more played a key role in their success.
Mark is my guest on this episode of the Tomorrow Society Podcast to talk about his background and many projects on the ground for Disney. He started on Disneyland Paris and was closely involved in Disney’s Animal Kingdom, Hong Kong Disneyland, and Tokyo DisneySea. Mark explains the challenges of bringing those complex parks to life sometimes far from home. Working in Tokyo did lead to cool moments like meeting the real Mecha Godzilla at Toho Studios (pictured above).
We also talk about two of Mark’s big recent projects with Seven Dwarfs Mine Train at New Fantasyland and Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance at Galaxy’s Edge. Mark managed all the show disciplines for both projects, and each had its own challenges to overcome. He describes the evolution of Rise of the Resistance, one of the most complicated attractions ever built. The work of so many teams came together to deliver a stunning and groundbreaking experience. We conclude by talking about Mark’s current work at Universal Studios Hollywood, including Halloween Horror Nights. I really enjoyed talking with Mark and learning what it was like to work on site as theme parks came to life.
Show Notes: Mark Gilbert
Check out recent Tomorrow Society Podcast interviews with Disney Imagineers like Jaime McGough, Scott Hennesy, and Ray Spencer.
Read about my original visit to Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge in this trip report from late 2019.
Support this podcast through a one-time donation and buy me a Dole Whip.
Note: Photos in this post were used with the permission of Mark Gilbert.
Transcript
Mark Gilbert: It’s this graceful symphony of so many instruments working at the same time that of course, you need a good conductor, but every musician has to be at the highest level of talent at the same time.
Dan Heaton: That is Imagineer Mark Gilbert, and you’re listening to The Tomorrow Society Podcast.
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Dan Heaton: Hey there, thanks for joining me here on Episode 181 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. On this show, I’ve been really fortunate to talk to a lot of talented artists, many of them who worked on concepts for some of the attractions we love at theme parks. What I haven’t done as much is talk to people that work on the ground that are out there working to make sure that these wonderful creations actually are able to be built and can be installed on time and with budget and everything else, while also still maintaining that original design. That’s why I’m really excited to get a chance to talk to Mark Gilbert, who worked for 25 years at Walt Disney Imagineering.
He produced show elements for so many cool projects, fabrication, design, installation, graphics, so many other elements of what makes attractions cool, and we talk all about Mark’s history and working on big parks like Hong Kong Disneyland, Animal Kingdom, Tokyo DisneySea, and on two big projects, Seven Dwarfs Mine Train in new Fantasyland, and Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance at Galaxy’s Edge, where he managed all the show disciplines for both projects and was closely involved on the ground with making these happen.
Currently working for Universal Studios Hollywood, including Halloween Horror Nights, and has a really interesting perspective as someone who is there every day trying to make these projects happen. So let’s get right to it. Here is Mark Gilbert.
(music)
Dan Heaton: So Mark, I’d love to know upfront, I mean, how did you get interested in working? You went to school for environmental design and when you were growing up, what kind of led you into that field originally when you were getting ready to choose a career?
Mark Gilbert: Absolutely nothing. It was, I don’t know, a happenstance. I actually went to school. Again, I don’t like to talk about myself, but I also don’t like to blow my own horn. However, I was a pretty good volleyball player, and at one time I was actually wanting to be a coach. So I actually went to school. Well, I’ll leap forward just a little bit. I was accepted to USC because I was so inspired by the early George Lucas and Steven Spielberg movies and that sort of thing. I wanted to get into film.
It’s always fascinated me, and I was accepted to USC and when I got into it, or I didn’t get into the school, but when I got into what it entailed and the amount of money that it costs on them. So I didn’t accept the offer to go to USC, which is maybe one of the greatest regrets of my life, although there’s a bunch of UCLA people out there going, what are you talking about?
But that was something I wanted to pursue, which was a creative endeavor early on. But again, I just didn’t take that path. So again, I was a pretty good volleyball player. I thought, well, I could make a life; I was good at coaching other people to be good volleyball players. I was a golfer early on, that sort of thing. So I was also a previous life that I had.
I was a horse trainer, quarter horses in Western reining and trail and equitation, that sort of thing. And I was training kids and that sort of thing. So I thought it was a great segue to be a coach. And so I went to San Diego State, which is at the time the premier athletic university in one of them in Southern California. I got into the physical education program and within one semester I knew this is just not for me.
And I did 180 degree about face and thought, I’m going to try my hand at art. Why not? Because I was going to do something creative before. Let’s try something creative. So I got into the art school and quickly discovered there was this great old Louisiana hippie, which is its own thing named Eugene Ray, who he created a curriculum called Environmental Design within the art department. And to give you some idea, his Master’s thesis was called the Electric Love Garden.
So I’ll tell you exactly where you stand time-wise and thought process. And he was the greatest guy. He was an architect, but he was an architectural sculptor, kind of like a Frank Gehry kind of a character. In fact, he built his own house on the side of the hill in La Jolla, which every doctor and lawyer absolutely hated because it was this piece of art hanging on the side of the hill, and they all thought it was a piece of trash.
Here’s this guy, this Electric Love Garden guy making this spectacular piece of art on the side of the hill. And so he created this curriculum, which it’s just so funny what he had us doing. We were doing some basic architecture, of course did. We did drafting and design for architecture, but he focused us more on environment and the feeling what you do, how you feel when you’re experiencing something, which just strangely coincidentally, is exactly what the wonderful people at Meow Wolf are doing right now, creating these unbelievably immersive environments that you walk through and they give you these feelings of wonder and joy and whatever emotion that they’re trying to make you feel.
And that’s exactly what we were doing in environmental design back in the early eighties at San Diego State. So it was something, again, it was a 180-degree turn from what I was originally going to do.
But what that did was that it led into an early career in architecture. And I tried my hand at that for a while and pretty quickly realized that, okay, this is great. Architecture is a noble profession, but the amount of responsibility that architects have and what they have to go through versus at least in the real world, let’s not talk about the themed entertainment world, the real world, what architects have to deal with and how they get compensated for what they have to deal with and how their amount of responsibility that they have. It’s not, is the proper word, disparate.
It’s just not right. And I thought to myself, I’m not sure I could do that as a profession, but it was strange as I was working as an architectural designer working my way towards getting my license, I read an article and I believe it was Time Magazine about Imagineering, and I grew up in southern California, grew up in the Inland Empire.
They call it the 909 now. It was a 714 when I was living there. And so I went to Disneyland a few times and liked it, but I read about Imagineering and I thought, now these guys are something else. This is a whole different level of doing, and I can latch onto something like most people and obsess. And so I started obsessing, how do I figure out how to work here?
So I spent about three years trying to get into Imagineering in the late ‘80s and to no avail, absolutely to no avail. I interviewed and interviewed and talked to different people. What is this environmental design? Where do we put you? Do we put you in show set? Do we put you…not real sure. Finally, a gentleman named Greg Paul, who was running the graphics program for Euro Disneyland in 1990. I had given up by the way, I’d stopped trying to get into Imagineering and thought, okay, this isn’t for me.
I don’t have the right education or the right, whatever they need, whatever that is. And I was going around to job fairs and giving my resume to job fairs, and all of a sudden I get a call from an agency that says, well, we have this odd job. It’s kind of in the drafting world, but it’s kind of not. How would you feel about working for this place called Imagineering?
I said, well, I never thought about that. Let’s sure, why not? So I interviewed with Greg Paul, who was running the graphics department graphics, the full program for Euro Disneyland. It was being billed, this was in 1990. And Greg needed somebody who understood design but wasn’t necessarily going to be designing, understood how to put a package together, that what he was doing was he had all these designers and these people working in this giant warehouse, and they were cranking out these unbelievable designs.
I mean, again, when you’ve got Eddie Sotto walking in and saying, I want this to be, and these guys are designing all these fantastic things, Tim Delaney and Discoveryland, it’s like, oh my goodness, look at this stuff. They were cranking it out in this mass volume, and they needed somebody just to organize it, to help organize it and put it together so they could send it to Europe to get it built.
And then the poor people in Europe are going, what kind of garbage did you say? Look at this. I got to figure out what vendors to get this to and that sort of thing. So my job was to try to put it together in a cohesive manner for Greg’s wishes and for the designer’s wishes and everybody to try to make it buildable. And that was kind of my first introduction into, okay, so how do you get these fantastic things built?
That segued into, okay, then I started helping with the drafting of different signs and that sort of thing. I kind of stayed within the graphics world; I got laid off twice as a contractor, which it always hurts, but when you’re young, you can bounce around and figure things out. I actually went to work for one of my vendors who was a local here in Southern California who he asked me to be a project manager, and that helped me a lot; I learned how to actually build the things that I was drafting, right?
Oh, so this is why you always tell me that it’s ridiculous to draw it that way because it has to be practical. It has to be held up, it has to attach somehow. If you want to hide it, then you have to figure out different ways of that. So you have to be really creative and you’ve got to please the creative people, but you’ve got to make it real at the same time.
I think somehow that clicked in me, this is fascinating. How do you do both? How do you ride that fence? And after a couple layoffs worked down at, they called it SQS, Show Quality Standards, down at Disneyland, which is the WDI entity that lives there in the park and does things for the park. And that was some of the most fun times I’ve ever had, just doing small projects and always on the fly and always in a hurry and always with no budget, but got to please Eddie Sotto was of course the lead creative down there and Kim Irvine, two giants in the industry, and they were giants even back then.
I mean, they were just forces and trying to, again, just make things, keep the show quality up to our, and it sounds so snooty, up to our standards. Well, the standards that we created this, it has to be to those standards. It has to be, even the smallest little operational sign has to be to theme. It has to be what the creative people want, and it has to be wonderful, the amount of thought process that goes into even the smallest thing. That’s what really, really hooked me at Imagineering.
Dan Heaton: That’s great that you were able to work on the ground there because I feel like a lot of people probably don’t have that experience. So I mean, when you ultimately were able to, I guess it’s hard to say how each step went, but ultimately become a show manager and really be working that way? How important was that time at Disneyland for all of your future roles? Because you were able to see all the things a lot of people who are doing concepts might not see.
Mark Gilbert: Oh, very much so what you learn boots on the ground in a park, and we’ll talk about it later. It’s kind of what I’m doing right now in a different manner. But what you learn real quickly is that you can be a pie in the sky designer. You can be, I’m an Imagineer, I’m the boss, I’m the design police. We’re the guys who we dream this, right?
But the reality is you’re in the park with people who are trying to operate a theme park that has millions of people going through it every year, and their needs are not necessarily on the same tracks as the ideal that Imagineers want to hold in their heads for. This is how things have to be. You have to operate this thing and it has to work, and it has to work for the guests, and it has to work for the, we call it the owner. You guys are the owner of the park, so we’ve got to make this work for everybody.
That’s a lesson in sometimes in humility and also sometimes, and you’ll learn diplomacy really, really well doing that sort of thing. It’s like, okay, I get that. I hear you. Here’s what you’ve got to do. Here’s what I’ve got to do. Let’s try to find some sort of middle ground here so that we can make this work for everybody. And that doesn’t mean let’s make it vanilla. That means, no, let’s make it the best possible thing we can do and make everybody happy at the same time. That is truly was the greatest learning grounds I could have had. Fortunately, I was able to do that. Unfortunately, it only lasted a year, but it really was an incredible education for my future career at Imagineering.
Dan Heaton: Well, how did you ultimately, I believe 1995 was kind of the year when you joined officially or joined full-time, and I know your role was the show manager, but so I’m curious when you started there or those early projects and how you got your foot in the door and started to work on bigger things when you were there.
Mark Gilbert: Yeah, that’s interesting. Again, I was hired officially in ‘95 to work on the Animal Kingdom project, which had, if anybody knows the history of Animal Kingdom, it was on, it was off, it was on, of course, Imagineering rolls with the tide of economic downturns and that sort of thing, so you have to put things on the shelf. Fortunately, Animal Kingdom was too good to leave on the shelf, and I started as, as they called it, the fabrication designer, which was, I can’t say that the role kind of existed as the guy who we figure out what creative needs the designers create, the signs and the designs.
The fabrication designers have this knowledge of how things are built and materials and hardware and attachments and that sort of thing, and work with the draftsmen. Back in those days, everything was on vellum. We used to hand draw everything and they were, oh, they were beautiful, beautiful drawings that would be masterpieces hanging in a gallery somewhere if they could pull them out of the vaults.
We were responsible, fabrication designers were responsible for getting it built and hiring the vendors, working with the contracts to say, okay, I know vendors who can build these sort of things. Here’s the big marquee is a piece of iconography. So we need a vendor who really knows how to sculpt and knows fiberglass, FRP, different materials as someone who’s got a great paint department, someone who knows how to gold leaf, that sort of thing, versus smaller size operational or that sort of thing. Separate it out and take it to some smaller companies who were good at sign systems and that sort of thing, and not necessarily the big pieces of art.
So we had to figure out how to separate these things out, create production strategies for how do you get these things built? Of course, we’re working, nobody thinks about it, but of course we have a budget that we have to stay within, so we have to bid things. We have to make sure that we weren’t way off in how we estimated it. And then sometimes you have to fade and punt, okay, you can’t have gold leaf here. We have to go with gold paint. I’m sorry, but this is just an example is bringing the cost of this way over what we anticipated. So we have to compromise. So there’s compromise with the creative. There’s compromise with the production. There’s diplomacy with the vendor. That was the sort of thing.
That’s what a graphics fabrication designer did. I later kind of segued that into, okay, the graphics production manager, which was that. But of course, now I’m responsible for the contracts. I’m responsible for the entire production and installation of a project. And Animal Kingdom was kind of my testing ground for that, which later led to after that was Tokyo DisneySea, which was a whole different animal because we built very little of what we designed and drafted in the States.
A lot of it we built in Japan. I can’t say very little. It is probably half and half, but it was different to working with somebody else who was producing what I would normally have control of. So that was a segue later into show management. It was essentially the same thing, is taking responsibility for the contracts, being responsible for the budget and the schedule, but also the aesthetics of it as well, and keeping my creative directors and my designers happy at the same time.
Dan Heaton: Well, you mentioned Tokyo DisneySea, which I have not visited yet, but I’m very fascinated by it. Just incredible looking park every time it comes up a lot.
Mark Gilbert: Unbelievable.
Dan Heaton: Just looks incredible. And I’m curious to know a little more about that, because you mentioned too, a lot of things being created there and just such an ambitious park, but it’s not doing as much like, oh, this is like X. It seems to be kind of its own thing, but I’d love to know more, elaborate more too on how challenging it might’ve been to have to go over there and do that and to make that work from what you were doing.
Mark Gilbert: It was educational to say the least. I consider my entire career to be an education and my entire life to be an education. So this was another schooling that I got that was unlike anything else. And to start, it was when we started on Tokyo Disney Sea, they built this model and the model makers at Imagineering, unbelievable. Almost everything’s digital now, but there’s nothing like a dimensional model for you to look at and go, this is unbelievable.
We stand around this model and we’d all go, this is unbelievable. There’s no way, is there any way we’re going to get this built? There’s no way we’re going to get, this is stunning. Okay, we’ll give it our best shot. Right? And then every day when I was living there, I lived there for a couple of years. Every day I’d walk out on site and no joke, the second I’d walk out on site, I’d look around and go, I cannot believe we’re building this.
It was the most immersive, beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. And I dare say we really haven’t done anything that spectacular since I’ve never went to Shanghai Disneyland. Everyone says that it was spectacular and beautiful, but there’s something about TDS that is just magical, unbelievable. And yeah, learning the things that I learned there, working with a different culture is a challenge in itself.
You have interpreters. All your meetings last twice as long because everything has to be stated twice. They are business people in Japan are extremely, there’s nothing negative I can say about it, but it’s so different. They’re formal. We would wear suits and ties. I never in my life, I aspired to never wear a tie in my entire life. My uniform was a shirt and blue jeans and no, we had to wear it when we were doing the early design phases and a lot of the negotiation, we wore ties, we presented in ties and suits, and we had our name badges, and it was something that I wasn’t used to.
It quickly gets you ready for the formality of what you’re dealing with when you’re building something like this. And of course, there you’re on a harbor, so you’re having to deal with corrosion issues that we don’t even have in. Well, Disney World, your direct salt sea spray. So all your metals are going to rust. So okay, they have earthquakes, they’re on a ring of fire, and more so than us, their engineering standards are ridiculous because everything, every bit of land that Tokyo DisneySea is on is landfill.
Some of our first meetings were sitting there and they’re driving these giant piles into the ground and it would rattle the entire building. And it’s really, really hard to concentrate, especially when you’re in a hot room in a tie and you’re saying everything twice because you’re being interpreted. And the wham, wham, wham of all these piles being driven into the landfill to stabilize the earth.
So the engineering standards were unbelievable in how we had to design things. And that of course affects the aesthetics. The creative directors, they want it to look like this. But when you’ve got a ton of three 16 L stainless steel holding the thing together and holding it up and you’re trying to hide fasteners and keep things aesthetically pleasing, it’s a fine line to walk. And even more so in Japan, because again, they’re very exacting and fascinating to work with out there.
The thing that was the most fun for me as I was working with my installer was Toho Studios, and if Toho, the guys that created Godzilla. So I’m a huge Godzilla fan, and they found out about that. They invited me to went to their studio, but I actually got to go. I have a picture of me kissing the Godzilla costume standing next to Space, Godzilla and Godzilla and Mecha Godzilla, and I’m here with all my idols, right going, this is the greatest thing I’ve ever experienced.
Standing in the water, Godzilla where they film and walking through the ocean and things, it’s like, oh, this is a real treat for me. Amazing. And the people at Toho Studio are, you don’t think of it. They’re ridiculously progressive. They were started off as a, if I’m not mistaken, I’m pretty sure I remember the story, right? They started off as a woman’s kabuki troop, and it was not allowable that women would act would be even in women’s roles in kabuki. And Toho started off that way. And my leads, my paint lead and my fabrication or my installation lead, they were women and they were just fantastically talented and very, very, very, very strong and very articulate in how they wanted things done and how they could do things at the same time, very reverent of Disney.
Everybody just loves Disney. They were reverent of everything the Imagineers said and did. And at the same time, they were walking the fine line as well of I have to make this practical. I have to live with this because it’s staying here and my country, so we’ve got to do it this way. So there was a lot of diplomacy going on in how we got things built at Tokyo Disney Sea, the end result. Unbelievable. You’ve got to go.
Dan Heaton: Oh yeah. I mean, even just seeing videos of it and everything, you look at it and I’m like, still, my brain has a hard time realizing that that exists. That was built. It’s like that’s not a movie set. That’s like a permanent place.
Mark Gilbert: That’s right.
Dan Heaton: You could think that a little bit with Magic Kingdom or with Animal Kingdom a little bit, but with this, it’s like, oh my gosh, it’s something I’m glad you got to work on it. I mean, it sounds like you said there were challenges, but also, I mean, Godzilla, I mean, come on. That’s amazing.
Mark Gilbert: Oh, the greatest. That was the greatest thing ever. They gave me a jacket that says, as gold lamé with a green screen printed Godzilla on the back, and it’s one of my prize possessions. I would never wear it outside, but it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever been given.
Dan Heaton: Well, you mentioned that Tokyo DisneySea kind of led you more towards show management and kind of building that up. So how did that work? As you work through that and then as your career progressed, where did that go?
Mark Gilbert: Right. I say, again, I, not blowing my own horn, I kind of created this production manager role for graphics. It didn’t really exist at the time, and that kind of segued into, at the time things shift within Imagineering. We’re going to, okay, we’re going to throw the theme lighting department in on this, which my mentor and a person who hired me originally, Greg Paul, he branched off and he was a spectacular graphics designer. I mean, unbelievable. A lot of the posters that you see for any of the attractions in the ‘80s and ‘90s, he designed an unbelievable designer, but he segued off into being the master of theme lighting, which was what in the world.
And theme lighting is a whole different discipline that is just crazy out there. One day when you go to Disneyland, just look at light fixtures and look at how unbelievably well detailed they are. And you think about that. You don’t just manufacture light fixtures. There are different manufacturers of light fixtures, and you have to figure out what fits the theme and then how can I modify it to make it better fit the theme? And so Greg Paul took that on as the master designer for that. Unbelievably well done. But after took it, you see Imagineering kind of melded graphics and theme lighting.
There were these oddities, these outliers, graphics, theme lighting, and lighting and art glass. You go to any castle and you look at the stained glass windows, or actually even in light fixtures, you look at some of the glass and you go, holy cow, that’s beautiful. Who makes that? How in the world do you design something like that. And there was this fantastic designer that focused like Greg Paul did on theme lighting. She focused on, her name was Miriam Ben-Ora on art glass, and she became an expert in glass.
So building specialties is what the managers at the time decided to call this group now graphics theme lighting. And I became the manager of essentially that, and I was focused, I was asked to change from being the graphics fabrication designer into being a show manager. They called ’em program managers at the time by Craig Russell. It was essentially a move in divisions within the company.
The Hong Kong Disneyland project was coming up, and the theme lighting program was massive for that, and it was difficult and they needed help. And so I went and learned that, and at the same time, working with Miriam on the art glass, and she was also a light fixture designer. She was the lead light fixture designer for Disney’s Animal Kingdom. So we were all kind of this nice little tight group that learned how to work with each other over the years.
We had this shorthand and eventually that segued into, we had to produce all of the light fixtures for Hong Kong Disneyland, which by the way, for the first time ever in the history of theme lighting design, we had it all built and warehoused nine months before our first install, which to somebody who produces things, that’s an impossibility. That’s ridiculous. It was the first time we had ever been able to do that. They realized how difficult the discipline is, and we created a team that was sharp enough to figure out how to get this done.
That was kind of my next step into taking on more responsibility. I was asked to help install graphics to be the manager of the graphics part of Hong Kong Disneyland, as well as the theme lighting in the field in Hong Kong. So of course, I didn’t really want to go to Hong Kong, but at the pleading of the company and the situations that happened, I essentially lived there as a guest in the Conrad Hotel for two years, flying back and forth and racking up hundreds and hundreds of thousands of frequent flyer miles. When you get to a certain level, they just throw you in first class every time with your normal ticket, and it’s kind of nice.
Dan Heaton: Oh yeah.
Mark Gilbert: But you’re still flying too many thousands of miles ahead of time.
Dan Heaton: That’s a long flight. That’s not an easy flight, I’m sure.
Mark Gilbert: No, it’s not. And when you’re doing it every six to eight weeks, my family didn’t move out with me, so it made it real tough. This is part of the thing that I’m sure some of your listeners, they aspire to be Imagineers and that sort of thing. There are things in any career where you have to make sacrifices and is it for the company? Is it for your professional life? What does that mean?
And Imagineering is certainly no different. These are difficult giant projects with hundreds of people working on it, and hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars on the line. And people have to, there are deadlines and things you’ve got to get done, and sometimes you have to bite the bullet and do something that you don’t necessarily want to do, but you’ve got to go get it done. And it’s a fantastic experience, and at the same time, it’s a sacrifice, and that’s the nature of doing something on that scale.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I mean, I can’t imagine doing that and I mean, even though I’m sure there’s cool elements too, but just the challenges of that side of it. So I mean, Hong Kong, I think a lot of people like myself and others who haven’t worked in the industry don’t really have a great understanding of what it’s like to be on the ground doing that every day, creating a park. So I’m curious for you just, I dunno, it’s such a big question to say what is it like, but I’m just curious when you’re doing that every day, I mean, it’s so different than doing concepts or designs or everything else. That’s such a slow process. I’m curious to know a little bit about what it’s like to put together something like this just day by day by day as something comes together.
Mark Gilbert: It’s a painfully slow process referring back to what we talked about earlier, working at SQS, right? This is, let’s crank this out. This ride operator needs this sort of thing. We got to do this fast and get it done, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Your projects are short and fast and satisfying to a certain extent that you’re getting something done like that.
But when you’re dealing with a big park, of course you’re designing for a couple of years, you’re designing, you’re drafting, you’re strategizing, you’re putting things together, you’re figuring it out, and then when you go to implement it, yeah, it slowly starts coming out of the ground and you have to make sure that everything that you planned is in the right place and everything. You’ve got to hang, set work off of this, so let’s make sure that all the steel’s in the right place before cad, when everything was just hand drawing, it was a lot tougher.
And kudos to everybody who worked in that era to where you can’t just pull out your device and look at your model and say, oh, yeah, okay, this is that. No, no, no. You had to pull out your drawings and you had to, what sheet was that? Okay, 25 sheets later and figuring out how to integrate things. Again, back to Tokyo Disney Sea, that was a really, really difficult task because of the nature of the corrosive environment. Every building had a vapor barrier, they call it, right? Of course, it had water protection for water seepage, and that means that you can’t improvise a thing.
Let’s just talk about graphics, right? You’re hanging something on the wall. Here’s a graphic. Well, it would look better if it were over here. Well, in Tokyo, you can’t do that because anything that’s holding it up, first of all, has to be engineered for earthquakes and hurricanes and corrosion, which means that all of the things that you’d think would be just a normal bolt sticking out of the wall or something, that you could drill a hole into the wall and put a molly bolt in there and connect that thing.
You can’t do that there. It all has to be preset. So you’re there, you talk about painful and slow. You’re there while this thing’s being built, and you’re making sure that every single bolt is in exactly the right place for how you designed it and how you negotiated it with your creative director, because you’ve only got, it is not like you have one shot at this. You have to go make sure it’s in the right place. Then you have to make sure that your creative director, who they’re geniuses, for example, on the genius creative director at American Waterfront, has to look at thousand signs on all of these buildings without looking at the building being finished. Okay, so this is how we negotiated it on paper.
This is what it looked like on paper. Everyone knows how it looks on paper and how it looks in reality is going to be different, slightly different. And you want to tweak things, but you have to negotiate because you can’t change it once you get it in there. The nature of the air quote, vapor barrier is that we had to preset the entire thing, and that’s where you trust the vision of your creative directors, and that’s where they really, what people revere them for goes so much deeper because these people have visions of things that aren’t even there. They’ve got to say, this is what I can compromise with.
This is what is not. Well, I can’t compromise. I believe we’re going to do this the correct way. We have to go with our gut. What do you think? What do, that’s the whole thing about Imagineering is that you talk to a lot of individuals who are spectacular. Rick Rothschild, my goodness, the most talented people at the same time, he’ll be the first to tell you that it’s just such an incredible team effort.
Everybody’s got to be working together. Everybody’s got to get along. We all have this goal for, we’re trying to get the best possible thing we can in front of the guests, so let’s not fight about it. Let’s figure it out. And that’s where you really learn that sort of thing. On the ground is where you really learn a genuine, not compromise, but where you see real genius at work, because I’m working on something that you can’t see the finished product, but when it’s done, you stand back and you go, oh my goodness, you were right. You’re a genius.
Dan Heaton: It’s sometimes hard. The more I learn, it’s like I’m almost amazed that an attraction or land ever gets built or ever gets built perfectly, because there’s just so many layers to it. Like hundreds, sometimes thousands of people working on projects. And like you said, it’s high level thinking on all parts from people on the ground, everyone else, it’s kind of mind boggling to think about.
Mark Gilbert: It really is. Imagineering is, it’s no longer unique in that aspect, but it certainly was the creator of that type of process. Amazing. The different disciplines, the different things they have to come together, the different things that you have to know a little bit about or know enough of to not necessarily be able to speak the language, but to know and appreciate.
So you can know what the roadblocks are, say for your audio team or your lighting team, and the different ways that you have to work around not only your issues for how to build it, but their issues for what they’re trying to do as well. It’s a ridiculously difficult collaboration, but it’s this graceful symphony of so many instruments working at the same time that of course, you need a good conductor, but every musician has to be at the highest level of talent at the same time.
Dan Heaton: Yeah. Well, I want to ask you about a few attractions that I know they’re more recent. We’re jumping ahead a little bit, but one of them is Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, because I know you were involved in managing the show disciplines for that, and that seems like a fairly modest coaster, but a giant footprint, and especially being in the middle of essentially the Magic Kingdom and Fantasyland. We’d love to know a little bit about that project and how that went for you.
Mark Gilbert: Well, that one was unique. If you remember the history of the New Fantasyland, the original design, and it was wonderful. It was all about princesses and the beautiful pastel world of wonder and beauty and fairytales, and it was great. And Tom Staggs, who was the head of Parks and Resorts at the time, he loved it. He was one of our biggest advocates ever. He was something else.
We liked him a lot. But he went out there and he said, this is really great, but there’s nothing here for my boys to do, because I think he had one or two sons. He says, we love princesses. Everybody loves princesses, but we need maybe something a little more rough and tumble. We need to shake this up a little bit. So this was his pet project, the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, and we all knew that.
And I came in at a time where it was right at the time where we were trying to decide, it was very specific, Showbox, we called it right where the coaster goes through the rock work. The coaster itself is cool because it rocks and all this, but it slows down, goes through the main show scene of the dig scene with the dwarves, and how do we do that?
And I honestly can’t remember who came up with the idea of the, I think that the R&D, and they were working on this rear projected face, new way of doing things, and it hadn’t been perfected, but we decided, I think Tom was looking at some things and he pointed over to this, I’m pretty sure it was a Bashful or a Grumpy, that they had done a mockup on that they were trying to figure out how to do it. And he says, I want that. We all went, oh crap, okay, okay, alright. You got it. You got it, pal. We’ll figure it out. So it hadn’t been done before.
It is one thing to make a mockup of something static that’s not moving, but now make it on something that’s articulating and moving and sinking with the show. And that’s where I got to work with the great Ethan Reed, who you’ve had on your show a couple of times, unbelievable designer, and he’s done it all. And every promo shot of some iconic piece of animation that’s being programmed, there’s Ethan in the foreground on his board, programming a figure. He is in every shot. I don’t know how he does that.
We worked with Ethan on this, and of course with the special effects team and projection, how do you figure out how to make this thing, how do you sculpt this space that has a little bit of detail, but not too much detail because of the way the characters, because of the animation. There are all sort of course, there were all sorts of forces and outside forces working as well with the animation itself, with the animation department of the Walt Disney Company and the character models and that sort of thing, and how do we do this and how do we convince people that this is going to be up to the standards of these characters?
And it was, that’s fascinating, right? I mean, trying to figure this out, unbelievably hard, unbelievably difficult. It proved itself to be so difficult that we were working against a timeline because we had to open New Fantasyland. It’s starting to look like, my goodness, this is so hard trying to figure out these characters that we’re not going to make it. It’s too difficult to put all of the things together in this linear format of, okay, this has to be rendered by this character artist, and then we have to figure it out on the figure, and how’s it going to be animated? And it was this thing of back and forth.
It goes from one artist to computer, a CAD person, back to an artist, back and forth and back and forth. One of those things where, okay, we will get this done, but we’re going to get it done about a year after we’re supposed to open. So, okay, here I am, one of my earlier forays into being just a pure show manager for outside of the building specialties, which is my bailiwick, taught graphics, steam lighting, and art glass. Okay, I’m down. I got you. Let’s go. But when you’re talking about animated figures, this really was my first job with dealing with the ridiculous difficulties and nuances involved with figures, and now something that we’d never done before.
But looking back at the person who’s charged with trying to figure out how do you figure out how to make this happen in a condensed timeline where everybody has their same say, but at the same time, not in a linear manner. How in the world do you do that? Well, it’s strange because the world of lean manufacturing and lean production, that sort of thing was just getting a foothold in construction and that sort of thing. And before that became a paradigm at Imagineering trying to figure out how do you do things in a lean manner? And they still do things like that today.
But with my incredibly gracious and human friendly coordinator, her name was Robin Blackburn. She was so charming and so able to get anybody to be happy about doing what we needed to do. She was my perfect right hand in what we had to do, which was we had to figure out how to condense this process in a ridiculous timeline in order to get these things designed to where we could get them built.
And doing it the normal way of one person takes it, next person takes it, goes back to the other person, goes to another person, goes back. We couldn’t do that. So Robin and I came up with a plan, we’re going to put all these people in one room together at the same time. We’re going to move all their equipment, we’re going to take their computers, we’re going to take, we are going to sit their managers down and say, I’m taking this person. And Imagineering, you’ve got 45 different jobs going on at the same time. And especially people in the animation department, they’re working on a million different things. So we figured, I called it the sequester. We sequestered all of these people, and boy did we make their managers mad.
They did not want to give up these people and their time and moving their equipment and all this stuff. And we took over a conference room inside the building where they build the animated figures, and we closed it and we ordered lunch for them every day. We kept them fed, we kept them, but we put them all in one room and they were firing ideas back and forth at each other. And sure enough, with all the trouble we got, I had to be the guy that was sitting there fighting, fighting the management at the same time, keeping ’em away. I was the shield for everybody, getting stuff done, fighting in the upper direction in order for the people who are actually the geniuses to put things together. I later used that term for everything that I did at Imagineering, because that’s essentially what I was.
But we created Robin and I, the first ice session in Lean technology and the inner something engineering. It was essentially, that was a term in Lean manufacturing and production reduction. That came to be a big thing later on. But we did that without knowing what we were doing. And sure enough, it worked. We got in there just under the wire and those things, they were something like no one had ever seen. And they’re still making other figures, Elsa, I think in the Frozen attraction and other characters, they’ve perfected it along the way, but boy, trying to figure it out the first place was crazy hard.
Dan Heaton: So I think the complexity you’re describing leads really well into the huge project Rise of the Resistance, which you also led the show disciplines on, because I feel like everything you described, I mean, I can’t imagine because having experienced it, I talked earlier about DisneySea and kind of being like, I can’t believe this exists. You get done with the Rise of Resistance and you’re like, okay, I know I saw this, but I don’t, I mean, so I’d love to know your experience on that because talk about an ambitious attraction that was being put together.
Mark Gilbert: Unbelievable. If you could see early iteration of it, it was even bigger and more spectacular. But yeah, I was the first show manager on that project. I was coming off of the Disneyland 60th attractions, which is such a shift because those were small projects and they were, were ridiculously fun working with, again, the great Ray Spencer and the great Larry Nikolai on the Matterhorn rehab and the new Snowman figure, you don’t call him Yeti because they’re in the Himalayas.
With Larry on the rehab that we did on Peter Pan, those were, oh my goodness, they were hard, but they were fun. Small team going fast. Satisfaction level was just ridiculously high on that. And then, okay, and then right after that, boom, Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, holy cow, really? Okay, this is cool. We’d actually worked a little bit on earlier iterations of that.
There were going to be Star Wars entities in Walt Disney World. There was going to be a different one in Disneyland. Iger came in while we were working on all that. He came in and he said, put everything away. I’ve seen the layout for the next three. I’ve seen the script. We’re going to build something. We’re going to do something completely different, and eventually we’re going to make two of ’em. It’s like, okay, okay, great.
So that started up while I was working on the 60th projects, and then I was essentially the first full-time show manager that came onto that project, and I had to figure out, okay, we’ve got three entities essentially. We’ve got the village, we’ve got the Falcon ride, we’ve got the Rise of the Resistance ride. How do we get these built?
How do we break ’em up into, we knew we were going to have three separate teams within the larger team. So I was tasked with creating the production strategy for all of show, for all three of those. And then later, as the team grew, which it had to, this is in 2015, I want to say, the team had to grow. So I focused on Rise of the Resistance, which was certainly the bigger challenge, and I won’t diminish the challenge. That was Millennium Falcon and the village.
Those were ridiculously hard, all of them hard. I went with the team working on Rise of the Resistance, John Larena as the Creative Director and trying to figure out how in the world are we going to get this built and the massive scale, but the difficulty, the complexity of the show itself. And the only way, thank goodness, I thank every day for a gentleman named Paul Bailey, who was my technical director on Rise of the Resistance. I’m a show art guy.
You can see by my career, we talked about things that are dimensional, things that are in front of guests, things that are tangible. That’s my bailiwick, environmental design environments. I am an unabashed show art guy, show tech. One of the things that the light that went on in earlier part of my career is when I was working on the DCA remodel, I was responsible for everything but Cars Land, and I was tasked with working with the audio engineers on their audio base, and I knew nothing about that.
But I sat in meeting after meeting with these guys and these engineers, they get in there and they talk in a language that floated somewhere over my head. I likened it to the scene and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory where Mike TV is zapped, and he goes from a big Mike TV into this little TV over here, but in the meantime, all of his molecules are floating over everybody’s head and they’re looking up there. That’s what I was seeing when the audio engineers talked.
It’s like, I see these molecules. I know that they’re speaking, they’re speaking English, but I don’t understand the damn thing that they’re saying. And that’s when, because they’re brilliant people and they’re brilliant in their discipline. That’s when the light turned on for me as to, okay, I’ll never be able to speak their language, but I will be able to understand what they’re dealing with and why it’s important to them.
And then later that segues into, we talk about Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, the technical aspect of that was immense. There were, thank goodness for having a team. And again, Paul Bailey as the technical director who did speak that language, he was a special effects guy, worked for many, many years at Imagineering and special effects. We were able together to strategize how we’re not separating this out. I was still the person responsible for every contract. It was my name on all the contracts. And it was not just the show art, not just the nine and a half acres of scenery that we built. You’ve put that in your head for a minute, think about nine and a half acres, how big that is. And that’s just the inside of Rise of the Resistance of the two that we built.
Dan Heaton: Yikes.
Mark Gilbert: But also, you look at things, you ride through that ride and you see sparks flying off of a blaster mark on the wall, and you’re going, how did they get real sparks to fly on the ground like that? And that’s the technical aspect of laser projection and that sort of thing. The languages that I don’t speak that Paul spoke well, and we had this incredibly just well-balanced partnership trying to put the practical and the clearly impractical and crazy, and how the hell did you do that technology together? And it was just about a five-year endeavor. We talked about the length of how a project goes, and we knew from the start what we were up against; we’re Imagineers.
We know what real Disney fans are like. What we didn’t know we suspected, but we didn’t know for sure was what Star Wars fans were like, and then what Disney Star Wars fans were like, combine those together. So we knew what we were up against. We knew how difficult this was going to be, and it’s hard for me to say this, but upper management was smart enough to know how to budget what we were doing. Now, that’s not to say that there weren’t compromises made.
There were a lot of compromises made. We had to change the Millennium Falcon ride, its layout at one time, which meant that we had to make the Alcatraz, it was our code name for Rise of the Resistance. And we had to make that building smaller. We had to make changes, unfortunately, because of the complexity of Rise of the Resistance, and that was a bit of an internal battle.
Some of the other teams had to maybe give up some things because of what we had to create at Rise of the Resistance, you can see that it’s well worth it, but the public doesn’t see the negotiation and the hardships that other teams have to endure because of here’s the big bully in town, the Alcatraz attraction need, needing all these resources because it’s so ridiculously complex. But it was a good negotiation without the team working really, really, really tightly together knowing what we were up against. Again, the public expectation, it was pressure every day, but we loved each other. We genuinely got along because we could laugh and joke and let off steam and act as a real team. And that was the only way to survive a project that complex.
Dan Heaton: Well, I think the results, I mean the raves, I thought it was incredible, and a lot of people just love it. So I think all that hard work and challenges led to something that’s going to stand the test of time. That’s really cool. So I just have one more question, mark. I know now you are doing a different role. You referenced earlier for Universal, and I’d love to know just what you’re doing now, because I know you’re staying busy, that’s for sure.
Mark Gilbert: Well, that’s the thing, is I wanted to stay busy. I wasn’t done contributing. And Universal had this wonderful job working at the park itself, working on the projects. What I’ve been doing without getting too far into detail, which nothing I’ve talked about has gotten too far into detail, more about the difficulties of how to get things done.
Dan Heaton: Sure.
Mark Gilbert: But actually Universal, just a wonderful group of people. Very, very different from what I was used to. It’s not a giant machine. It’s more of an intimate experience of people working day-to-day on park operations. Very much like I described when I was at SQS back in the mid-‘90s. It’s a day-to-day operation, and you work with people throughout the park, the owners of whatever the costume shop, the pets ride, whatever it is they need.
I’m one of the managers who works with, for the first time in my life, works with a union labor force, which is a fascinating thing and something that requires a different aspect of my negotiation skills to figure out. And it’s this incredibly vivacious, mostly young team. You’re looking at me, your audience, but I’m no Spring Chicken anymore. I have to hand it to Universal for being probably the most diverse and wonderfully open group of people that I’ve ever seen in this business.
In fact, this is a weird thing, and I’m sure people need to hear it, is when I, because of Covid, I had to leave Disney. It was a situation and everybody knows that what happened there, but again, I wasn’t done contributing. But I have to say that I tried out for a few different roles here and there and was met with, and whether you want to put this in this podcast or not, I was met with ridiculous age discrimination, and that’s okay.
I get it. It’s my turn. I understand people’s reticence for, well, is this person serious? How much time is he going to give us? What does this mean to the Universal people? They were just so wonderful. When I asked them about this and I told them about my experience, they said, everybody’s got a story and we respect everybody’s story individually. And I thought, that’s just so wonderful. What a wonderful way to run an organization. So they were very gracious and they brought me on, and I had the great fortune of working, not having any idea what Halloween Horror Nights are. Some people are nutty about this. I find out one of my first and biggest jobs was working on Halloween Horror Nights, the Maze for the Celebrity Maze, the weekend.
I don’t know if you know what’s going on over there, but the musical performer the Weeknd is a big fan, and he wanted his own maze in there. So the scenic install was my responsibility on that, and it was great. We’ve been working hard on that. It’s a crazy, it’s one of those crazy, do it real fast kind of a thing, but you got to have the quality. But at the same time, what are the guests looking at? Because they’re getting the bejesus scared out of them, but how do you make it durable? Turns out that guests don’t destroy these things. It’s the scare actors that destroy them because they’re banging on things so hard that they want to startle people.
So my beautiful sets get all beat up because the scare actors are banging on it. Okay, that’s a great lesson to learn. But the thing that was really cool is the art director brought the weekend through. One day he came and he wanted to see his maze, and he said, I got the call last night, weekend’s coming in, and we need to show him his maze, Abel’s, his name, and it’s like, oh, holy cow.
Well that’s awesome. So sure enough, we brought him through, I don’t want to speak out of school, but what was really funny was is that he and several of his people that work with him went through the maze, but his bodyguards didn’t do it. Big guys that weigh probably 300 pounds and could, I’m six foot three, and I’m looking up at him going, oh my God, this man is a mountain. They wouldn’t go through it because it’s really scary and bloody and gory and it’s crazy.
He went through it and at the end of it, he turned around and he looked at those of us who were helping out, and he looked and he gave us a thumbs up, and that was really, really satisfying that he was happy with what we had made for him. And apparently guests really, really love it. It seems to be one of the favorites of the, I believe we have nine mazes. Again, that’s not my thing. I don’t like to be scared. So this is the first time I’ve ever experienced this Halloween Horror Nights. It’s a phenomenon.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I haven’t gone again because I don’t love to be scared and none. My wife, my family, they’re not really into it. But I will say that, I mean, like you said, it’s such a cool thing. I mean, people love it and every year they keep raising the ante and I know the Weeknd house is one of the ones that always gets talked about or the weekend hunt. So
Mark Gilbert: It really is cool. It’s fun. It’s fun to see how Universal does things. And at the same time, they’re right across the street from the Weeknd’s maze is their new Nintendo land that’s going in and the big Mario Kart ride. And it’s so funny, the parking area or the place where you go, it’s an alleyway between the two projects and it’s so funny. I’d see my, oh, look, it’s my vendor on Rise of the Resistance, who did all of my scenery. How are you guys doing? What are you doing?
Oh, then they’d take me in, they’d show me the Mario Kart stuff and it’s like, okay, this is incredible. And so many of the industry’s very small, and so you see so many different people from different vendors and different parts of my 30-year career in the industry. Everybody works on the same things. It’s great.
Dan Heaton: Well, Mark, this has been great. So many great stories. I’m glad I got to learn a bit about what you’ve done on the ground. This has been awesome. Thanks so much for talking with me.
Mark Gilbert: Thank you so much. Like I say, I wasn’t able to get into too much detail. I think maybe the message is not necessarily the exact hows of how this was built, but the philosophy that goes behind the diplomacy and the difficulty of understanding, the difficulty of what it takes to put together something so ridiculously complex and the different aspects, the people who are actually in the weeds on the ground and maybe if anything to take away is that everybody has their dragons to slay, right?
Everybody’s discipline is difficult. Everybody has the most important thing to them is what they do, and in my role, I had to respect every aspect of that. At the same time, balance the fine line between their art and the commerce of actually getting it done and what it costs and what it takes to do that. So hopefully the message came through that there are doers out there who aren’t necessarily the ones who are in front of the camera that the good talkers.
I’m not a good talker. Maybe I talk too much, but I’m not necessarily a good talker. But there are so many people that you don’t know exist that are in there just doing, getting it done and fighting the good fight to put as much as they possibly can, their life and their soul, fighting to get as much as they can in front of the guest, whether that be what it sounds like, what it looks like, how it feels, the emotion you get out of it, the environment. There’s a lot of us and hopefully I represented fairly well the difficulty and the trials and tribulations that entails.
Dan Heaton: Definitely. No, it’s been great and I really appreciate the time and all the insights because it’s not an easy job all the time, and I appreciate learning about that.
Mark Gilbert: It’s not easy, nothing easy about it.
Dan Heaton: Wanted to give a big thanks to Mark and to Ethan Reed for helping to make this show happen. Check out Ethan’s new little golden book, Santa Stops at Disneyland. It’s very cute. It would make a perfect holiday gift.
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