From left: Disneyland Handcrafted director Leslie Iwerks; construction of the theme park; Walt Disney. Jeff Vespa; Courtesy of Disney (2) When director Leslie Iwerks decided to make Disneyland Handcrafted using archival footage to depict the eponymous theme park being built in 1954 and ’55, she had one lingering doubt: Are people interested in a movie about construction?
Based on the awestruck comments on YouTube, where the film can be viewed in full, the answer is yes. “I think new generations are like, ‘Oh, it’s always been there,’ ” says Iwerks. “But they’re actually seeing the origin of it before they were ever born and seeing Disneyland in a whole new way.”
Related Stories
Movies Film Academy Taps Glenn Close, Floyd Norman and Ridley Scott for Honorary Awards, Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler for Thalberg Award
Hollywood Flashback HBO Wasn't Built in a Day, and Neither Was 'Rome'
To make the 79-minute film, also available on Disney+, Iwerks and her small team combed through roughly 200 hours of 16mm footage they’d obtained from Disney’s archives. Most of the imagery was in good condition, but whittling it all down became a massive undertaking: It wasn’t in chronological order, and all of it was silent.
Fortunately, Iwerks knows a thing or two about Disney history. Her grandfather, Ub Iwerks, helped to design Mickey Mouse, and her father, Don Iwerks, spent 35 years as a camera technician at the company. She’d initially delved into Disney’s theme-park legacy when she directed 2019’s The Imagineering Story. The first episode of that miniseries details the advent of Disneyland, but without an emphasis on how deadline-driven its inception was.
For this project, Iwerks wanted to immerse audiences in the park’s real-time development, so she structured the film as a (fairly calm) race against the clock to meet the company’s targeted opening in July 1955. The 10-month timeline follows the methodical technical work that went into the process. Iwerks worked with Bonnie Wild, a sound mixer whose credits include multiple Marvel and Star Wars projects, to piece together all of the sound from scratch — every creak of metal, every footstep and hammer, and every tractor driving across concrete. Some of it they sourced from archival sound libraries, and some of it they generated via Foley.
In lieu of talking heads, Disneyland Handcrafted uses interview audio from a variety of sources. Iwerks had nearly 100 hours’ worth to choose from. Many of the voices were recorded by Dave Smith, the founder of the Walt Disney Archives, with additional commentary stemming from panel discussions and other documentaries.
“We really started to see a common theme, which was: It was so challenging,” Iwerks says of the park’s fast-paced progress. “The conflict really rose to the surface.”
The goal, Iwerks says, was to make a film that anyone — not just Disney obsessives — could enjoy. She has since heard of parkgoers who are pulling up Disneyland Handcrafted on iPads to compare the present-day facades to the old footage.
“I wanted you to really live in it,” says Iwerks of the finished product, “minimal cutaways, all vérité.”
This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
THR Newsletters
Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day
Subscribe Sign Up
