Since December 1988, Feld Entertainment’s Bill Powell had been traveling to Buenos Aires every two weeks to put together a self-promoted production of Disney on Ice at a not-yet-built venue.
He had built the show promotion from scratch, but he couldn’t build the building. He was counting on the company that showed him a girder on the ground and a grand plan to host Disney on Ice starting July 1.
“First it was one little girder, then two, then three. Every time I went down, it seemed like there was another girder. It was still a skeleton, like Stonehenge. No sides. No roof. But this guy seemed to be getting somewhere.
“We had a mock ticketing system with inventory. Now, where do we get seats?”
Rental companies.
First they rented scaffolding, then they rented seats. Eighteen inches, that’s a seat. Then they tied the seats together.
“It was avant garde, but we didn’t have a choice. We weren’t going to have Hussey build us seats and ship them. And this guy wasn’t going to invest in retractable seating. We needed to find the seats.”
Once the girders were up, Powell and team got into the weeds of the building, figuring out entrances, bathroom access, insurance requirements. The builder worked with them. They wanted Disney on Ice. Everything was done to code – number of aisles, amount of space. You take an 18-inch seat times the amount of space and you have a row. Step by step he built a manifest. The side rows went about 15 deep, but the end sections went way up. They ended up with 4,500-5,000 seats, a good number for Disney on Ice in Argentina.
He saw more girders going up and then he paid attention to the roof and sides. It was getting into March, close to his May 1st drop dead date, at which point he would cancel the booking if he didn’t think the building would be ready.
Once the roof went on, we’d have stability, he thought. “This crazy guy just may pull this thing off.”
Disney Consumer Products turned on the gas. They got a deal with Channel 12 and with the newspapers. “They just backed up the truck and unloaded a whole bunch of media time for us.”
Esso stations, which were the ticket outlets, decided to do an extra display of Disney merchandise in celebration of Disney on Ice, which meant 30 prominent locations decorated with all things Disney.
They made a deal with a milk company and a bread company, and a bank and a credit card deal. It all came into place, except still no building.
Sponsor marketing machines started coming into play. “Instead of a deal for money, I wanted strategic assets. Disney worked with them on artwork approvals, expediting things.”
“If we never open the doors, we’re going to have a hell of a campaign,” Powell thought. “I was confident on all factors except we don’t have a building.”
In late March, they poured the floor at Centro Costa Salguero. Powell headed to the site for a “Come to Jesus” meeting.
“We have to ship or we don’t come. Is this building going to be open July 1? That is the only question on the table today.”
The building operator gave his guarantee.
“At that point in time we met with the powers that be on our end – Allen Bloom and Chuck Smith.
“Okay, let’s roll the dice. We’ll be there,” they said.
The advertising campaign kicked in. Tickets went on sale. It’s happening.
The consumer doesn’t know who’s behind the scenes making it work. They just want to see the show.
It was 60 days of exhilaration, except when Powell went to look at the building. “A week out, I’m having minor sleepless nights. The building is boxed in, but there’s still a lot to do. Landscaping went in the day we opened. We had a show that night at 7:30. That morning they were planting grass.
“It was unbelievable. These guys pulled it off. They had never run a building. They were running staffing drills right up to opening day.”
In the end, Disney on Ice played Centro Costa Salguero for five weeks at 98 percent capacity.
Takeaways:
If we can do this, anything is possible. I had a sense of what the force of will can do.
When a lot of people are interdependent and work together, when there is a hard deadline and we have to achieve our respective goals and when the stars align, anything is possible.
Why didn’t you walk away when you realized how bad it was?
It was a task. They said we really would like to do this. It became one of those things; we can make it happen. This is what we have to do.
The culture of Feld is synonymous with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. The circus people just manage to get things done.
Seeing one guy in a muddy field with a Delta Steel muddy girder – the easy ground would have been to say this isn’t ever going to happen. Instead, we figured out the inflection point, the point in time to focus on. That made it easy.
The people were great to work with.
“In the end, the only thing wonky about those performances – the building was at the end of an airport runway. Planes take off. All of a sudden, we’d hear ‘Zip a de doo dah, zip a dee ay’ — Whoooosh. The building would shake. We got used to it, but it was weird.”
Like that was all that was weird? What a story. — Based on a true story as told to Linda Deckard