Just being in the Theater Talk Greenroom before a taping means hearing a dizzying amount of news, gossip and opinion, ranging from parody titles for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long-aborning Phantom Of The Opera sequel, Love Never Dies (Love Never Opens and Paint Never Dries) to the rumors about the Dumbo musical and the progress of The Addams Family musical since its lucrative, yet critically-panned Broadway try-out in Chicago … . And all in the space of five minutes! Whew!
Writer/reporter Patrick Pacheco, a Theater Talk regular, came by to discuss his new film, Waking Sleeping Beauty. With him was his new boss, Peter Schneider, former head of animation at Disney, an integral part of Disney Theatrical in its formative years, and the producer of Waking Sleeping Beauty. “I’m leaving journalism to make more money in documentary filmmaking,” quipped Patrick.
Their documentary is about the rebirth of Disney Animation, beginning in 1984 just after Disney’s The Black Cauldron -- according to Schneider, “the worst movie in the Disney canon” -- had crashed and burned. It was at this time that Schneider was hired as Disney’s President of Feature Animation. The film tracks the company for the next decade while it creates the hit films, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and The Beast, and The Lion King.
Waking Sleeping Beauty is also about the creative process at Disney at that time, which was not without conflicts, including those caused by the gigantic egos of the company’s executives: Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Roy Disney. The three were part of brutal corporate battles that received a great deal of press attention and caused a lot of personal pain.
The work that came out of that period was so extraordinary, however, that some of the old fires have cooled, and the participants cooperated in telling about this important time in their professional lives. Schneider brought Pacheco in to interview them for Waking Sleeping Beauty and structure the film – basically to “make it more dramatic and make it more emotional.”
That said, the “heart and soul” of this documentary is the late Howard Ashman, the brilliant librettist/ lyricist who had suffered a flop on Broadway with the musical Smile – and moved to Los Angeles to try his fortunes with Disney.
Ashman’s partnership with composer Alan Menken, and their working relationship with Schneider, was forged in 1982 with their hit Off-Broadway musical Little Shop of Horrors, for which Schneider had served as Company Manager. Their subsequent collaboration at Disney would bring a theater sensibility to the creation of animated works that would revolutionize the entire animation industry and revitalize the Disney brand.
“Howard could be difficult,” Menken says in the film. “He was a self-flagellating artist; the problem with working with self-flagellating artists is that sometimes they miss and hit you.”
Waking Sleeping Beauty opens in limited release on March 26, the day that Theater Talk’s Pacheco/Schneider interview premieres on PBS/Thirteen in New York and is uplinked to satellite for national syndication. (See list of member stations at http://www.theatertalk.org/news.php?cmd=detail&id=1.)
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