The happiest man on Earth

Thomas Schumacher, one of Disney Feature Animation’s most
influential creative forces and president of Disney Theatrical
Productions, briefly escaped the Broadway lights earlier this year
to handle a speaking engagement at the UCLA Anderson School of
Management.

He arrived on campus early and used the free time to walk
through the North Campus Student Center, one of the main eateries
for the liberal arts crowd. Schumacher brushed past Northern
Lights, which wasn’t built until after 1983 — when he left
UCLA with a theater degree in hand. Instead he went straight to the
now-somewhat dingy, cavernous recesses of the campus eatery and was
ecstatic.

“All the same fixtures were there!” he said, still
in amazement as he spoke to me over the phone from his office
several months later. “Same displays, same everything.
Shocking how it’s all the same stuff.”

One of his many on-campus jobs was as a busboy at this eatery.
He spent hours toiling away in the kitchen, so the return was a
sort of homecoming, perhaps a comforting reminder that some things
never change.

But many things do. For one thing, during that chunk of time
between Schumacher’s busboy days and now, the enterprising
theater-lover, now in his mid-40s, helped guide the creative
success of Disney by serving various posts. As producer and
president of feature animation for 21 feature-length films, he
presided over the course of 15 wildly prosperous years. Some films
made under his watch, like “The Lion King” and
“Toy Story,” have become landmarks in American
filmmaking.

During the latter half of his professional career, Schumacher
has devoted his time to running Disney Theatrical, whose musical
productions of “The Lion King” and “Beauty and
the Beast” have each grossed more than $1 billion
worldwide.

But Schumacher’s surprise at the eatery’s
resemblance to the past is a reminder that much has changed on
campus, from the theater department to all of academia, at
least in the eyes of those old enough to have noticed it.

In the late ’70s and early ’80s the theater school
was producing students that faced less pressure to attend graduate
school and were equipped with balanced training in all fields of
the trade, from directing, musical theater and lighting to critical
theory.

Students now are leaving the school with mountains of debt,
declining values of their degrees, and with a transcript more
focused on depth than breadth for the purpose of wooing graduate
schools. The growing pressures at the university level may actually
be leaving students less prepared for the real world than their
predecessors.

The theater department of yore churned out real movers and
shakers: among them Academy Award-winning actor Tim Robbins, voice
of Bart Simpson Nancy Cartwright and Thomas Schumacher. Gradual
changes in the academic and outside world have had former students,
current students and educators struggling with one question: To
what extent have they succeeded because of the social and economic
climate and their university experiences, and to what extent have
they succeeded because, frankly, they were Tim Robbins, Nancy
Cartwright and Thomas Schumacher?

“(In our day), student activism and student uprising had
led to the end of the Vietnam War, a president resigning, the
government restoring itself, the people taking power back,”
said Schumacher, who gave the commencement speech at the USC School
of Theatre’s graduation ceremony in May. “There was a
sense that a fundamental fairness existed. You must want to just
jump off a bridge. I mean, really.”

Schumacher’s early years had a storybook beginning ““
he grew up in San Francisco with the dream of one day running his
own theater company and, accordingly, he paid his early dues. He
got involved in the theater world in every possible way, he said,
participating in every play his community theater group held,
volunteering for productions, selling tickets, and taking dance
classes.

But if Schumacher’s childhood activities and aspirations
seem a bit too picture-perfect, his first year in college
wasn’t. After choosing UCLA over UC Berkeley (which was too
close to home for his liking), Schumacher moved into Dykstra in the
fall of 1976 and faced the traditional struggle of choosing a
major.

“Even though my entire life prior to that had been 100
percent about the theater, I thought I should take myself more
seriously when I came to school,” he said. “I thought I
would become a teacher.”

It didn’t last long. After a year mired in post-adolescent
ambivalence and toying with the idea of studying psychology or
sociology, Schumacher applied to the theater school and found
himself under the tutelage of instructors that would eventually
help shape his career. Current Vice Chair Gary Gardner was one.

“He doesn’t have any idea that this is the case, but
he made a gigantic impression on me,” Schumacher said.
“He taught a playwriting class and much of what I know about
playwriting, I learned from (him).”

Other influential professors include John Cauble and the late
Mel Helstein, whose puppetry program was a key influence on
Schumacher’s approach to the Broadway production of
“The Lion King” he produced.

But much of what Schumacher learned at UCLA came from a
distinctly hands-on approach. It takes a number of specialized
skills to put together a theater production, and Schumacher was
involved in all of them. While today’s theater students
specialize in a certain field (most choose acting or musical
theater), discouraging them from learning all aspects of the trade,
the theater department of the past focused on breadth. Looking
back, Schumacher doesn’t regret the work it took.

“There was no question that I was going to work in the
theater,” he said. “While most are going to school to
get a degree, they don’t know what the hell’s going to
happen. I knew what I wanted because in my (major), I was training
in a field.”

He will be the first to tell you that his career trajectory also
took a little luck. Upon graduating the summer of 1980, Schumacher
took a job working for the theater department as a carpenter. One
day in October a phone rang backstage; it was a former student
looking for someone ““ anyone ““ who would be willing to
take a two-week chauffeuring job at the Mark Taper Forum.

Schumacher did this and more ““ he would hang around after
his chauffeuring duties were completed and simply fill in at the
Taper wherever help was needed.

“His work ethic, his attitude and his general overall
demeanor were so impressive that we just kept hiring him
back,” recalled Madeline Puzo, dean of the USC School of
Theatre, who ran the Taper and was Schumacher’s first
boss.

Schumacher eventually became head of the youth theater
department at the Taper, sharing an office with a man named Peter
Schneider. After they produced the Olympic Arts Festival together
in 1983, Schneider was subsequently hired by Disney to head the
animation department. Schneider envisioned running Disney animation
like a theater company, which led him to hire Schumacher as his
partner in 1988.

“He was extremely smart and creative,” Schneider
said. “That’s a good combination to work
with.”

Together they produced “The Rescuers Down Under,”
setting off a string of films that would eventually lead Schumacher
to where he is now, having accomplished his goal of one day running
his own theater company.

His career trajectory is a thing to marvel at, but could the
same sequence of events have happened in today’s cutthroat
academic climate? Certainly, the prospect of making very little
money right out of college was a little more bearable back then
than now.

“(Schumacher) understood that he needed to be a
gopher,” Puzo said. “But the pressure to get going on
your career is much stronger now for the students than it was.
There were pressures on us, but not the kinds of pressures that
students have today.”

Not only that, but graduate schools have also influenced the
typical student’s undergraduate career. Many of the
professors that roamed the halls of MacGowan in the late ’70s
still do so today, many noticing an evolution in the theater
department’s approach to the undergraduate experience.

“The way all universities operate now, not just UCLA, is
we let our students specialize more,” Gardner said. “So
sometimes you come out and you specialize in musical theater but
you know diddly-squat about what the lights are doing to you, about
the costumes you are wearing, or the fact that the play
you’re in sucks.”

Schumacher notes that the university was also less strapped for
cash at the time, enabling students to participate in much larger
and complicated productions, which certainly helped him as he
trained to run a theater.

But it’s dangerous to get tied up in the effects of money
or careerism, especially when the core purpose of the university
““ to foster the mind so it’s capable of independent
thought ““ is still far from lost on the faculty.

“It’s not so much what we teach; we just teach you
to love the art,” Gardner said. “That’s the great
thing about the university; we don’t tell (students) what to
think, but to think. I don’t think the students are as well
prepared when they come into the university and when they leave the
university as they were 15 years ago, but I also think that might
be my age saying that, because I’ve gotten older.”

Comparing the past to the present can be tricky business, and
perhaps not all that worthwhile. After all, much of what Schumacher
and his mentors attribute to his success ““ his work ethic,
his enthusiasm and his brazen intelligence ““ are hardly
products of an era gone by.

“He was very well prepared coming out, but I also suspect
that it had as much to do with who (Schumacher) was than it had to
do with the program,” Puzo said.

Also, theater wasn’t all that Schumacher did during
college. He paid most of his own bills by working. Perhaps it was
just a matter of time before he received his ticket to success.

“If I had not been backstage, and answered the pay phone,
I wouldn’t be sitting here today producing Broadway
shows,” Schumacher said, almost as a reminder.

Maybe it’s easy to place him in a different, simpler era.
But his aspirations and anxieties as a student also seem oddly
familiar. There’s some comfort to be gained from these
shared experiences, because Schumacher’s story leaves the
impression that with age-old problems come age-old solutions.

“My experience is always that you get out of something
what you put into it,” he said. “And I had the most
extraordinary experience at UCLA. But beyond that, I learned that
it’s through your own resourcefulness that you make things
happen, and I made stuff happen.”