Mr. Pressler’s Wild Ride at Disney

Paul Pressler strapped himself into a para-sail on a Sun Valley, Idaho, mountainside and leaped into an expanse of blue sky, all in the name of research and development.

The Walt Disney Co. theme park chief flew for 20 minutes, feet dangling in the air as the pine trees, snowdrifts and craggy rocks rushed by far below.

“It took my breath away,” said Pressler, chairman of Disney’s Parks and Resorts Division. A year later, he’s copying the same thrill in Soarin’ Over California, the signature ride at Disney’s California Adventure opening today in Anaheim. Comparatively inexpensive to reproduce in other theme parks, Soarin’ is everything Pressler wants in an attraction.

As other top executives streamed out of Disney in recent years, Pressler, 44, has had a meteoric rise, leapfrogging over other executives, including managers of the much larger Walt Disney World in Florida when he became chairman of Disney’s theme park division in 1999.

Pressler is now a key member of Disney Chairman Michael Eisner’s brain trust--the man, Eisner says, who knows the most about marketing the Disney brand. Pressler determines what tens of millions of theme park visitors experience worldwide.

He’s also the Disney executive who bears the brunt of the responsibility for the mishandling of the 1998 death of a tourist and an accident at Disneyland that left a 5-year-old blind and brain-damaged. State safety probes in both cases found fault with the park’s operations.

Executives within the company, speaking on the condition of anonymity, now question whether Disney made matters worse by failing to put Pressler or even Eisner in front of television cameras to accept responsibility, express sympathy for the families and promise a full safety review.

The company’s cautiousness and reticence left a public impression of Disney as a callous corporation worried about limiting its liability, these executives said.

A lawsuit, reportedly asking for $100 million in damages, is pending against Disney in the case of the injured boy.

“Liability is part of the discussion that we have,” Pressler said. “You do have to be cautious.” The question, he said, is whether Disney was too cautious. “One of the lessons learned is that you will see more of us in the future,” he said.

Within Disney, Pressler already is extremely visible. His empire accounted for $6.8 billion of Disney’s revenue and $1.6 billion, or 40%, of its operating profit last year. More than two-thirds of Disney’s 120,000 employees work in Pressler’s divisions, which include the theme parks and resorts in Anaheim; Orlando, Fla.; Tokyo; Paris and one under development in Hong Kong.

He oversees two cruise ships, hotels totaling 30,000 rooms around the world, the Anaheim Angels and Mighty Ducks sports teams, the DisneyQuest virtual reality centers and the ESPN Zone restaurant chain.

“He is a general leading tens of thousands of troops,” said former Disney Studios chief and current DreamWorks SKG partner Jeffrey Katzenberg. “He instills loyalty and ambition. People want to deliver for him.”

That’s a widely held assessment today. But when Eisner named Pressler president of Disneyland six years ago, some wondered whether Pressler’s experience as Disney’s retailing czar gave him the insight to run what was once the personal venue of Walt Disney. The most creative achievement on Pressler’s resume was as a producer of a long-forgotten Care Bears animated film.

“Initially, we had issues,” said Marty Sklar, vice chairman of Walt Disney Imagineering, the division that designs Disney’s theme parks and attractions, who added that he viewed Pressler’s appointment to run Disneyland as a “gamble” because of his lack of theme park experience.

Sklar said his Imagineers had to persuade Pressler to approve more elaborately decorated shops on Main Street and in Frontierland. The conflict resulted from clashing perspectives. The Imagineering division looked at how the stores fit into the theme park while Pressler’s approach relied more on what works at a store in a shopping mall.

“Over a period of time, we worked out these issues,” Sklar said.

The heart of such tension is often budgetary. “Part of managing that well is to put the right amount [of money] into the creative without going out of business. Paul does that well,” said Richard Nanula, chief executive of Broadband Sports in Santa Monica and a former Disney chief financial officer.

Pressler comes to his job with what colleagues describe as a genial personality, experience running the Disney Stores chain and an ambition the size of the Matterhorn. Instead of moving his family to Anaheim when he took over Disneyland, Pressler made the 90-minute Anaheim-Pacific Palisades commute twice a day, intending to one day make it back to an office near Eisner at the company’s Burbank headquarters.

Pressler’s Anaheim mission was enough to keep him on Eisner’s radar--expand Disneyland into a full-fledged tourist resort and save the company’s crown jewel from the urban decay of the surrounding Anaheim neighborhood.

He delivered California Adventure. The companion theme park for Disneyland opens in a greatly expanded resort now designed to hold the attention of tourists for three to four days. Pressler’s management of Disney’s $1.4-billion backyard investment has spurred another $3 billion in public spending to make massive freeway improvements, enlarge the adjacent Anaheim Convention Center, build a 10,000-space parking garage and give the entire district a unified, landscaped look.

His “Farewell to the Main Street Electrical Parade” marketing campaign in 1996 set attendance and financial records at Disneyland. Under Pressler’s watch, Disney acquired a 52-acre strawberry field where Disney plans a third Anaheim theme park following decades of rebuffs from the property’s owners. Pressler is quarterbacking construction of three new parks, including the politically sensitive development of a Hong Kong Disneyland.

Pressler has also suffered flops.

The Pressler-directed remake of Disneyland’s Tomorrowland section failed to attract the expected attention both inside and outside the industry, and the land’s centerpiece ride Rocket Rods remains closed almost three years after the area opened. The technological white elephant cost the park more than $20 million. Designers in the company’s Walt Disney Imagineering Creative division complained that budget cuts hurt the project. Pressler now compares the Rocket Rods to Walt Disney’s failed Flying Saucer ride.

“Sometimes we fail,” Pressler said. “That’s show business.”

Another expensive misstep was Light Magic, a parade intended to take the place of wildly popular Main Street Electrical Parade at Disneyland. Panned as an underwhelming and confusing mess, it closed following a four-month run in 1997.

Regardless, Pressler still seems to enjoy the creative end of the business, said John Lasseter, the Pixar Inc. executive who directed Disney’s “Toy Story” animated hit. Lasseter is working with Pressler’s group on a new California Adventure attraction based on the upcoming Pixar film “Monsters Inc.”

“Theme parks are what happens to our characters after a movie is completed,” Lasseter said. “Paul knows it takes three years to do a good attraction, but if Imagineering hears about a movie only a year in advance, all they can do is a show or a parade.”

Pressler is particularly fond of film-based theme park attractions. Once developed, a special-effects film is typically less expensive to replicate at other parks compared with big dark rides such as the “Indiana Jones Adventure” and other massive bricks-and-mortar attractions.

California Adventure has four film-based attractions, including two lifted from Disney’s Florida theme parks. Of the four, Pressler has lavished the most attention on Soarin’.

“This gives us a new platform to go and immerse our guests in other stories,” Pressler said. “We are testing 3-D effects, what digital animation might look like with it and how we can add new stunts.”

At one point in Soarin’s development, he killed plans for a new retail warehouse in Anaheim and redirected the money to the attraction. Near the end of the show’s creation, he asked the Imagineers to digitally insert a golf ball flying up at the audience from a Palm Springs golf course, a touch of humor and surprise.

“I can’t think of anything better than being in a business that puts smiles on people’s faces,” said Pressler, who expects to add new attractions to California Adventure in each of the next two years. If financial and attendance projections hold true, Disney will push into an adjacent 28 acres within three to four years.

Just a block away, Pressler has assembled about 76 acres that could be used for a third theme park, turning what is now called the Disneyland Resort into a five-to-six-day tourist destination. Disney is looking at interim uses for the site--everything from parking to a water park to a golf course--while it evaluates the feasibility of a third theme park.