Eisner Blasts Critics of Disney Virginia Park

The Walt Disney Co. is more determined than ever to build its theme park in Prince William County, Va., the company’s chairman, Michael D. Eisner, said Monday, expressing outrage at critics who question whether Disney’s America is a good idea for the region.

Eisner said that if he had foreseen that opposition would be so fierce, he would have delayed the project by a year and taken more time to prepare a public-relations campaign.

“I’m shocked because I thought we were doing good,” Eisner said in an interview with Washington Post editors and reporters. “I expected to be taken around on people’s shoulders” for Disney’s decision to spend $650 million on a “quality” project that will enable park visitors “to get high on history” and bring an estimated 19,000 new jobs to the area as well.

“If the people think we will back off, they are mistaken,” Eisner said, noting that the opposition “just makes me more excited about the project.”

Eisner said he wants Disney’s America to be the hallmark of his tenure as chairman of Disney, a position he has held for about 10 years, during which he has helped transform the company from a faded legend into a profit powerhouse.

But he expressed bitterness that the company is facing so many questions about its theme park. Next week, Disney executives are scheduled to appear on Capitol Hill for hearings on the park’s impact on Manassas National Battlefield Park, which is about five miles east of the Haymarket site.

Disney’s America also faces scrutiny under the federal Clean Air Act and an environmental impact statement that could take 18 months or more to complete.

Repeatedly, Eisner complained about critics who have predicted that Disney’s America will sanitize and plasticize history.

Questions about the substance of exhibits is legitimate, he said, but dismissing Disney’s America out of hand is not.

“The First Amendment gives you the right to be plastic,” he quipped.

“The fact that we are answering (questions) beyond transportation and clear air and sewage,” he said, is tantamount to the government meddling in the content of the theme park.

Eisner reserved his strongest words for well-connected Washington insiders whose opposition to the project, he charged, is motivated by a desire to protect the value of real estate that they own in the vicinity.

“If this was any other place in any other city in the country, the (federal government) wouldn’t even be interested in this. It would be nothing. But we chose to be close to the flame. It’s going to be hot close to the flame.

“We have a right to do it,” Eisner said. “It’s private land that is not in the middle of a historic area. . . . It’s not in the middle of a battlefield.”

He said the theme park is an example of his attempts to stretch the Disney company beyond its traditional emphasis on entertainment into projects with a higher educational purpose, and the primary motive is not profit.

Disney’s America will not, he said, deliver the return on investment of a single blockbuster movie by Disney studios.

His most withering comments were directed toward some of the country’s best-known historians, who have said the park’s existence will threaten dozens of nearby historical sites.

Disney’s America will offer an alternative approach to history that may have more effect on people than conventional history, he said.

“I sat through many history classes where I read some of their stuff, and I didn’t learn anything. It was pretty boring,” he said of the historians. “I guess I can say that I object to some of their stuff.”