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During our trip to Walt Disney World® we were lucky enough to meet up with Imagineer Jason Surrell. Jason is an author, screenwriter and show writer for Walt Disney Imagineering where he develops concepts, scripts and storylines for new attractions, shows, shops, restaurants and resorts on land and sea. He’s also the author of the Haunted Mansion - From the Magic Kingdom to the Movies, The Art of the Haunted Mansion, Screenplay by Disney, Tips and Techniques to Add Magic to Your Movie Making, and contributed to an essay To the Imagineering Way.

Jason is also the author of a new book Pirates of the Caribbean from the Magic Kingdom of the Movies. Now without further adieu here is part one of our interview with Disney Imagineer Jason Surrell.

Lou: We want to welcome Jason Surrell author, screenwriter, Imagineer and author of Haunted Mansion from Magic Kingdom to the movies, The Art of the Haunted Mansion, Screen Play By Disney Tips and Techniques to Add Magic to Your Movie Making, and contributor to the book The Imagineering Way and he has a new book out Pirates of the Caribbean From the Magic Kingdom to the Movies and we want to welcome Jason to the show.

Jason: Hey guys how are you?

Lou: Good Jason How are you?

Jason: Welcome to sunny Florida.

Lou:We’re actually sitting up here in the Tamu Lounge at the Polynesian Resort on a beautiful day here in central Florida. We’re fortunate to have Jason on the show today. Jason why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background.

Jason:Well I actually started out with Disney in the College Program back in the summer of 1989 during the first Bush administration. There was trouble in Iraq, the economy was shaky, it was a different world then. But yeah that was my first Disney job; I was at the Jungle Cruise so it was actually a really cool first Disney job to have. Then I came back the next summer first to the Jungle Cruise and then I transferred over to entertainment as a performer and spent the summer there. Then about a year or so later I moved down here full-time starting with the entertainment department and that’s really when I started pitching creative ideas. I had my first show produced for Christmas of 1991, it was a character Christmas show at Epcot called “From All of Us to All of You”. And basically that’s what got me started on the creative end of things at Disney and then over time I continued on in live entertainment and gradually made the transition over into attractions which is of course what Imagineering does.

Lou:That’s great. I didn’t realize that cast members, that it’s a way to get yourself higher up that they are receptive to ideas like that to concepts?

Jason: Well it’s interesting because a lot of the time when you bring up a creative idea including at our place in Imagineering, there is a tendency to go “Whoa, whoa, whoa I can’t listen anymore” because there are legal issues. But I think because I worked within the entertainment department and had an idea that would implemented by the very department that I worked for somehow that managed to slip through. So I think for people who are interested in pursuing that kind of thing it becomes a matter of getting yourself into a position where you can come up with ideas that get you in direction you want to go in. And then once you’re in place like that you just have to throw everything at the wall and see what’s going to stick. That’s what I did and it’s really a matter of perseverance and hanging in there…literally.

Lou: It’s funny that you mention that because that was my next question. One of the things people ask me about a lot is “How do I become an Imagineer?”And I’m sure there are people listening who are saying, yeah that’s what I want to do I want to be a cast member and eventually become an imagineer. People just don't know the steps to go about doing that.

Jason: Well it’s interesting because you could talk to 10 imagineers and you could get 10 different stories. We have people like Tom Fitzgerald who’s our top creative executive right under Marty Sklar; he started at Walt Disney World during his college years. He’s from upstate New York and he made the drive down here in the summers and he worked at the Haunted Mansion as a butler in fact. So we all kind of have those stories. You know Marty Sklar was plucked right out of UCLA by Walt Disney himself to be in charge of the newspaper on Main Street at Disneyland in 1955. And even here at Walt Disney World Imagineering in our Florida office we do have a lot of people that either worked their way up through the ranks or came over from Walt Disney World. I had a slight detour; I went over to Universal Studios for awhile as a writer, producer, director…

Lou: What’s that?

Jason: A little carnival down the road. No, I’m kidding of course but you have to go where the work is where the experience is and that is what enabled me to come back to Disney in one of the capacities I had always dreamed about which is of course Imagineering. I was one of those people that always wanted to be an Imagineer but figured I couldn’t because I wasn’t an artist, and engineer or an architect. And it wasn’t until much later that as a writer, director I had every bit as much an avenue to pursue Imagineering as anybody else; as an engineering student or an architect major. So you have to broaden your thinking a little bit. We have a 140 some disciplines in Imagineering, so literally you can take almost any job out there in the real world and find some sort of application for it in Imagineering. You just have to open up your mind a little bit and look at things with broader view.

Lou: What are some of the other products you worked on while working for Imagineering?

Jason: I’ve actually been pretty fortunate. I actually got to contribute a couple of enhancements to the Haunted Mansion which is of course, as you can imagine one of my top two favorite attractions. You can guess what the other one is. I worked on the haunted tombstone that we have up here at the Walt Disney World version of the show. The tombstone features a sculpted face that opens its eyes or doesn’t. It’s fun to watch kids and parents get into arguments about weather or not the thing actually opens its eyes. The reason that was fun for me was because I got to compose an epitaph for Madame Leota. So it’s a thrill to walk through the family plot and see an epitaph that I wrote sitting along side the classics by X Atencio. I really get a huge thrill out of that. And then I also worked on the recent enhancement at Disneyland in the séance circle scene where Madame Leota’s crystal ball floats around the room. I got to work on the spell book that was added to the scene. I composed the spell for it and got to work on the design a little bit. So for someone who grew up loving this stuff I can’t describe the thrill of going through one of our classic attractions and seeing something I got to contribute to it. It’s just amazing.

Lou: I’m sure there are people out there that would love to be in your position. Not only did you get to be a cast member, you got to work on and have a permanent fixture at a classic Disney attraction.

Jason: Exactly. And this summer I got to work on one of my first e-ticket projects at Disney and that was an absolute thrill and I can’t talk about it of course, but it was just a thrill of a lifetime. Even getting to do these books is wonderful because I get to spend time with the Imagineering legends who built the place. And they’re not here in the office everyday anymore. We lost John Hench earlier this year and Marty Sklar is really the only link to Walt that we have in the office everyday. Some of the people that I worked with, that trained me did get to work with X Atencio, Claude Coats, and Mark Davis on a daily basis. We are really third generation imaginers, so while I didn’t get to spend everyday in the office with them I do get to spend time with them in the course of interviews for the books. So there is nothing better for someone like me then to sit a the feet of Exetencio for hours on end and then to hear stories about Walt and the creation of Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Caribbean. You know Harriet Burns, Alice Davis, Blaine Gibson our master sculptor. Those are really priceless moments for somebody like me.

Lou: And how actually did the idea of the book come to be? Is it something you pitched?

Jason: Well oddly enough it was a classic situation of I didn’t necessarily want to write the book I wanted to read the book. I believe I was talking to my wife one day and I said I really wish there was a book on the Haunted Mansion specifically that talked about the history that collected all that wonderful Mark Davis, Claude Coats art. And she said why don&'t you pitch it? Then the light bulb went off so I went by the office of our Vice President here in Florida Don Whitten and I said hey Don how do we go about pitching a book? He shrugged his shoulders and said I don’t know, e-mail Marty. It was really that simple, that casual. So I e-mailed Marty this was in the summer of 2002, so the movie was still about a year and half away. I said I had an idea about a book that would be about the history of the Haunted Mansion in all 4 of the Magic Kingdoms and the second half of the book would be about the making of the film. Marty thought it was a great idea, especially with the film angle because he knew that would get the Disney marketing machine behind the whole thing because it would be considered a movie tie in. So he said yeah write me a proposal, so I said great!How do I do that?You know because I had never done a book proposal before. So I basically went home and wrote up what I thought would make a good proposal which is essentially just an outline of the book I wanted to read. So I sent that into him, he helped me tweak it a bit and then he said ok now write a query letter, a proposal letter to Disney Editions. Great! How do I do that? Because I've never done that before either. So I went home and just wrote a very passionate level headed letter about why I think this book belongs in the marketplace and who I think will respond to it. Then about two weeks later I got a call from them saying we love it we’re taking it to our editorial meeting on Wednesday and we’ll let you know. So at the end of that Wednesday I got a call saying we love it, we’re doing it. This is October mind you and they say the good news is we want the book; the bad news is we need the manuscript in January. So right then I knew this is how I would be spending my Christmas vacation. And basically that is how it came about. That was the holiday season of 2002 did most of the writing and then in January of ’03 I went out to the film set in California for a few weeks and spent a lot of time out there did all my interviews. Then throughout the spring of that year, the book’s designer and I spent a lot of time going through the archives and pulling all the artwork and photography for the book. And then it came out later that year.

Lou: After you got over the initial shock of having two months to write the book, how did you actually go about starting to do your research for it?

Jason: Well as a Disney fan I had a nice base to work from because a lot of that was in my head already. So it was really a matter of going back, you utilize every Disney history book that’s out there. One book that I think is invaluable, especially when you’re talking about Disneyland is “Disneyland the Nickel Tour” by Bruce Gordon and David Mumford. I mean that’s just an exhaustive chronicle of Disneyland history, and if you’re a fan of Disney and that park in particular and I think everyone is I can’t recommend it highly enough. So that was a great starting point. Then you do all your interviews of course with the people who are still with us and then there are actually a lot of magazines like the E-Ticket out of Northern California, those guys Leon Janzen and Jack Janzen have done a wonderful job collecting stories, collecting history from imaginers and other Disney legends before we lost them. So that’s a great starting point, then I do my own interviews of course and went to the Walt Disney archives and then our own libraries at Imagineering. We have an extensive art library, extensive slide library where all the photography is and slowly but surely the story starts to come together.

Lou: Did you find that there were some areas that you may have had a tough time finding either concept artwork or any kind of areas where things may have been lost or destroyed or things like that, that weren’t available in the archives?

Jason: Well I found there were ideas that people would talk about and then you could never find any visual representation of it. We know that at one point they considered a water ride through the Haunted Mansion. I believe it was Claude Coats who said well the house could be falling into the bayou and we could make this a water ride, and I don’t think I was able to find one piece of artwork to illustrate that idea. But a lot of people will refer to water cooler conversations you know something they mention to someone in passing in the hallway so some of the stories are out there. They are ideas that were never really fleshed out. I wish there was artwork of a water ride through the Haunted Mansion. The other thing to is you find conflicting accounts of what happened where one imagineer will say one thing and another imagineer will say another thing and their telling the story from their point of view. So at a certain point there’s an element of investigative reporting to all of this, where I have to gather all the accounts and then try to figure out what happened.

Nathan: For instance to decipher the rumors from the facts. One thing that has always been said, I’ve even heard cast members say wedding ring outside the Haunted Mansion. And those are totally fan based.

Jason: Yeah, it’s an urban legend. If you look closely it’s just a hole in the pavement where I believe a gate was supposed to lock when they open and close the gate. From what I heard what happened was the worker the worker that was creating the hole, I guess the drill bit or something; I am definitely not a Tim Allen type. But apparently a drill bit or something snapped off in the hole while they were drilling the hole and that’s what looks like a wedding ring. And you know the cast members have fun with it and that’s great, but you know one of the things we wanted to do with the book is separate the facts from the urban legends. And it’s not that were trying to take the fun away from anybody but we’re trying to present what the real story is and then if the fans or the cast members want to have around that or beyond that, that’s great.

Nathan: Well for instance how did you go about taking what was fact and what was fiction?That probably involved a lot of research because there is so much lore around the Haunted Mansion or for instance the pirates ride that because it’s been repeated so much people think it might be fact. When in fact it is just a legend.

Jason: Exactly! A great example of that is the whole Gracie family thing, the Master Gracie thing. That goes back to one of X Atencio’s epitaphs. Yale Gracie who is one of our master illusioneer at Imagineering who was instrumental in developing a lot of the special effects. His tombstone, his tribute in the family plot happens to say Master Gracie. X probably did that because it helped him make a rhyme, but over time people say oh that must be the master of the house, that’s the ghost host. It became such a part of the Haunted Mansion lore that when the screenwriter was working on the screenplay for the film he actually named the master of the house Gracie because of that. So that’s actually, if I had to pick one thing that has kind of worked it’s way into Haunted Mansion canon that would be it. One of the things that irritate me a little bit is the hitchhiking ghosts that are my favorite characters as a matter of fact; their names are not Ezra, Phinneas and Gus. I don’t know where it came from. I know at one point cast members contributed to this website that names all the ghosts and gives them back stories, none of those have any basis in imagineering story or anything like that. But somehow Ezra Phinneas and Gus in particular managed to stick, so in the book about the only thing I could do is acknowledge that and say it’s not official but acknowledge it at the same time.

Lou: I never realized that it wasn’t something that came from imagineering. I had known the story about Gracie and how it had kind of taken on a life of its own and there were many different cast members stories that kind of filtered down to a general thread that carried through. But originally weren’t there a lot of different story lines for the Haunted Mansion, that the raven was going to be the host?

Jason: Yeah Ken Anderson generated a lot of those original storylines in the late 1950’s before the team that went on to do the Haunted Mansion were even on the scene. And elements of those stories work their way into the urban legends, you know the sea captain the bride, he killed her on their wedding night all that stuff. A lot of those elements did have their basis in legitimate stories and I all the original treatments at home. You know so I could see the progression and some of the treatments were literally only weeks apart when Ken worked on these. And you know we never throw anything away at Imagineering, ideas never die so to speak. So when Mark Davis and Exetencio and Claude Coats came on the scene in the 60’s they went back to all that original material and that’s why you do find things that go all the way back to the beginning of the Haunted Mansion that did manage to make it into the show like the bride in the attic and the sea captain that hung himself after he killed his bride. That became the corpse in the stretcher that is the ghost host if you listen carefully to the narration.

Lou: It’s a great tribute you brought up Yale Gracie’s tombstone and it brought me back to the recent tombstone auction that took place. I know I saw this; and being the huge Haunted Mansion fan that I was, I though I’ve got to have this. Unfortunately I don’t know about you, I was surprised about how the price escalated. But the opportunity to be apart of Disneyland history and especially such a classic attraction that the Haunted Mansion is was amazing.

Jason: Absolutely. I didn’t bid on it because I knew I’d get thrown right out of the house if that happened. But I went out to California to do some interviews the day of the auction and what I told everyone then is true now. I was surprised as were a lot of us at the numbers, you know what started to happen. What didn’t surprise us was the interest and the enthusiasm because we’re all Disney fans and we know how great it would be to be immortalized so to speak in an attraction especially such a fan favorite. Yeah but I think the numbers took us all by surprise but you know it’s a chance to be part of Disneyland history and it was a chance to be part of a really good cause too.

Lou: Is that something you think you’d ever do at Walt Disney World, as my wife shudders; knowing, seeing where my mind is going.

Jason: Honestly, something like that did some much for the Boys’ and Girls’ club of America in that particular example that I wouldn’t rule out anything like that. I think it’s just a matter of finding the right thing to do with the right charity as that certainly was. So never say never, but no plans that I’m aware of.

Lou: And be sure to tune in next week for the conclusion of the interview with Disney imagineer and author Jason Surrell. Where he talks a little bit more about the haunted mansion and his new book “Pirates of the Caribbean from the Magic Kingdom to the movies”.

....continue to part 2 of our interview with Disney Imagineer and Author, Jason Surrell.

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