So here we are hanging on to what seems like a recession that never ends. By now you’ve probably heard enough times that you have to “make do with less.” You’ve come to feel that such a phrase is probably code for “layoffs are around the corner.” The effect is demoralizing, and you wonder when things are going to turn around. In trying to find some escape, you’ve gone to a Disney Website looking for something with a happier ending. And what do you find? An article about “making do with less” at Disney, no less.
Well, “making do with less” is a reality even for the “Happiest Place on Earth.” It’s been around the Walt Disney Company for as long as there has been a Walt Disney Company. Between fantastic hits like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Mary Poppins and Pirates of the Caribbean were somber, difficult times where the budget was hacked and people had to “make do with less.”
Such a time came about not too long after Michael Eisner came aboard the company. That’s when a certain screenwriter named Leslie Dixon was hired. In the 1980s and into the 1990s Dixon became somewhat of a poster child for “making do with less.” She is a screenwriter and was the granddaughter of landscape painter Maynard Dixon and photographer Dorothea Lange (you’ll perhaps recall her work reflected in Disney’s California Adventure attraction, Golden Dreams, with the migrant woman having her picture taken along with her children during a time of great depression). Given that legacy, however, didn’t mean opportunity would come on a golden platter. Dixon would pay her dues like any other, particularly in getting her break into show business.
Her first solo opportunity was to write the screenplay for the 1987 film, Outrageous Fortune. You may recall that movie starred Bette Midler and Shelly Long, that is, assuming you were east of the Mississippi. If you were west of the Mississippi, it starred Shelly Long and Bette Midler in that order. Neither would concede on top billing, hence the compromise as to who would receive top billing where.
There is a scene toward the first of the film where Shelly Long was going to approach her parents about borrowing $5,000 so she could study with the great theater professor Stanislav Korzenowski. Dixon’s script called for the scene to take place in her parent’s apartment where Long would plead to her parents. In trying to cut back on the film’s budget, it was determined that it was not worth the cost of building a set like that for such a fairly small scene. Dixon was asked to go back and rewrite the scene some other way so that it could be filmed for less money.
Dixon resented having to do the rewrite, which she would eventually place out on the street in front of the parent’s apartment complex. But the rewritten scene is actually quite funny, and largely because of how the location was changed. You can view it here on YouTube at around the 2:45 mark. It certainly shows Dixon’s resourcefulness in doing more with less. In fact, the scene is probably better than what it would have been if it had been filmed with a bigger budget using the apartment as the backdrop.
That’s not to say that she liked doing it. She found Disney to be a real tightwad, and frankly a pain to deal with. but she concedes that the pain of doing more with less forced her to be more creative than she would have other wise. Moreover, the film was a box-office hit. To date it has grossed domestically some $53 million, not a lot in today’s terms, but not bad for a film that was created for a fraction of its return. Dixon was under contract to write another screenplay for Disney. She resisted taking on the assignment, but she eventually gave into the contract. That turned out to be Big Business, which also was a hit for Disney at the time.
In Eisner’s memoir Work in Progress, he noted that Dixon became a hot item in Hollywood, and that she vowed she would never work for Disney again. Indeed, she compared her experience at Disney to indentured servitude. She left to go write comedies for other studios. Her success there did not come so easily. In the end, she came to realize that maybe all of the tightwaddedness she found at Disney was not as unreasonable as it initially seemed. She stated:
“Was [working for Disney] a good experience for me?” she replied. “No. If I were them, would I have done the same thing? Probably. Would I write for them again? Well, let me just say that time and wisdom have made me miss their marketing department with every fiber of my body.”
Leslie Dixon would eventually go on to provide the screen plays of some great films like Mrs. Doubtfire, Hairspray, Pay it Forward and even Disney’s remake of Freaky Friday. Disney would go on to do some very expensive films, some of which did great in the box office like Pirates of the Caribbean and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Disney would also forget that lesson and go on to do some very expensive movies that somewhat tanked in the box office like Pearl Harbor.
Such was the case when a few years after Outrageous Fortune Disney would go on to do a very expensive film called Dick Tracy. Starring Warren Beatty, this comic strip film was to be a Disney blockbuster. Disney was disappointed in the end with the results, compared to Batman with Michael Keaton, which was a runaway hit the year previous.
Jeffrey Katzenberg expressed disappointment when he said “We made demands on our time, talent and treasury that, upon reflection, may not have been worth it.”
Of this Eisner noted in his book of a memo he wrote at the time:
“Our initial success at Disney was based on the ability to sell good stories well,” the memo began. “Big stars, special effects and name directors were of little importance. Of course, we started this way out of necessity. We had small budgets and not much respect. So we substituted dollars with creativity and big stars with talent we believed in. Success ensued. With success came bigger budgets and bigger names. We found ourselves attracting the calibre of talent with which ‘event’ monies could be made. And more and more we began making them. The result: costs have escalated, profitability has slipped and our level of risk has compounded. The time has come to get back to our roots.”
The roots however are in Walt Disney, who himself learned about how to manage the bad times as well as the good. He of course, wanted quality as do most people. He certainly achieved that with a film like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs which was coincidentally re-released at the same time Outrageous Fortune was initially released, and still managed to bring in $45 million from just that release.
But Walt Disney also experienced the reality that spending money alone did not a successful picture make. He reasoned that if Snow White was an artistic achievement, then Pinocchio, which followed, should be an even greater artistic effort. But all the beauty and artistry (and the costs associated) didn’t save Pinocchio in the box office. So they took a different approach on their next film. Making do with less, they released Dumbo, which would only cost Walt one-third of Pincochio‘s cost to produce. Yet it grossed more in theaters.
Walt experienced the same effect with Sleeping Beauty, which tanked at the time after a very laborious effort to bring it to life. Sleeping Beauty is an exquisite film. It’s practically an artistic canvas brought to life. But audiences didn’t care that much when it was finally released. That film was followed by the success of 101 Dalmatians, which was far more successful in the box office, as well as profitable. In order to do more with less, the film utilized a new technology that would save time in clean up and inking. We know that invention in its current form today as the Xerox machine.
So ask yourself:
- Are you being asked to make do with less? Do you resist having to do so?
- Do you feel that the only way to succeed is by investing as much money and time as possible?
- Are there creative ways to make do with less?
At the end of the day, it’s about quality…and about being creative around making do with less. It’s simply how you approach those ventures creatively that makes the magic in your business.
