Quotes from Neal Gabler

He had passed beyond the afflictions of this world. Walt Disney had at last attained perfection.

because television had become the primary means through which people appropriated the world, it promulgated an epistemology in which all information, whatever the source, was forced to become entertainment.

Having invited these performances in the first place, the media justified covering them because they were receiving media attention... The result was to make of modern society one giant Heisenberg effect in which the media were not really reporting what people did; they were reporting what people did to get media attention.

the deliberate application of the techniques of theater to politics, religion, education, literature, commerce, warfare, crime, everything, has converted them into branches of show business, where the overriding objective is getting and satisfying an audience.

Yet all of these accumulated contributions paled before a larger one: he demonstrated how one could assert one's will on the world at the very time when everything seemed to be growing beyond control and beyond comprehension.

What Mayer did in the thirties? what he was situated to do as a Jew yearning to belong? was provide reassurance against the anxieties and disruptions of the time. He did this by fashioning a vast, compelling national fantasy out of his dreams and out of the basic tenets of his own dogmatic faith? a belief in virtue, in the bulwark of family, in the merits of loyalty, in the soundness of tradition, in America itself.

Disney reconceptualized the amusement park as a full imaginative experience, a theme park, rather than a series of diversions, and just as his animation revised graphic design, his park eventually revised urban design.

Walt Disney seldom dabbled. Everyone who knew him remarked on his intensity; when something intrigued him, he focused himself entirely as if it were the only thing that mattered.

How much the clubs were responsible for propelling Mickey and how much Mickey was responsible for propelling the clubs is difficult to determine, but the promotion took off immediately and kept growing, giving theaters revenue from Saturday matinees, parents a three-hour respite from their children, the film industry a beacon of wholesomeness to which they could point to deflect critics, and Walt Disney a powerful means of promoting his creation and himself.

If you want to know the real secret of Walt's success," longtime animator Ward Kimball would say, "it's that he never tried to make money. He was always trying to make something that he could have fun with or be proud of.

Look, the thing that's going to make Disneyland unique and different,' he insisted, 'is the detail. If we loose the detail, we loose it all.

he had become the patriarch of horseflesh.

It made Disney at once a nostalgist and a futurist, a conservative and a visionary.

A workhorse, not a show horse

Part of Walt's secret was that in insisting on quality from individuals of whom it had never been required, he inspired commitment.

I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create. —WILLIAM BLAKE, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

For a young man who had chafed within the stern, moralistic, anhedonic world of his father, animation provided escape, and for someone who had always been subjugated by that father, it provided absolute control. In animation Walt Disney had a world of his own. In animation Walt Disney could be the power.

the most powerful source of his appeal as well as his greatest legacy may be that Walt Disney, more than any other American artist, defined the terms of wish fulfillment and demonstrated on a grand scale to his fellow Americans, and ultimately to the entire world, how one could be empowered by fantasy—how one could learn, in effect, to live within one's own illusions and even to transform the world into those illusions.

In numerous ways Disney struck what may be the very fundament of entertainment: the promise of a perfect world that conforms to our wishes.

I was taught to believe, "If you work hard, you will be successful. If you are not successful, it is because you didn't work hard enough."