__ Inside Universal's multibillion- dollar push to kick Disney's theme-park ass. __
In the parlance of the thrill biz, it's a "dark ride," the roller coaster's indoor cousin - a Tunnel of Love gone mad, playing out at an amphetamine clip. It's also a $100 million investment in "The Theme Park of the 21st Century," a scream machine at the center of Universal's full-frontal assault on Disney's entertainment stronghold in Florida.
The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man places you inside "the Scoop," a 12-seat fiberglass-composite cabin that looks like a cross between a whitewater raft and a convertible sports car. And the Scoop - 20 of these will run simultaneously on an electric track - whisks you smack in the middle of a life-and-death battle between Spider-Man and a gang of vivid-as-hell menaces to society. The major innovation is what happens as the cars whiz along: For the first time in thrill-ride history, each car will move in sync with computer-generated 3-D images that flash onto huge screens.
Until now, combining mobility with 3-D has been considered improbable, if not impossible, because movement distorts the way 3-D images appear to a viewer. But thanks to techniques (now being patented) created specially for Spider-Man, the animation in the ride film adjusts to your perspective every step of the way, even as the Scoop mercilessly twists, pivots, and spins you. Add sound (with sonic vibrations under you) and moving sets and props (including a bridge that nearly flattens you), and the result is something close to that long-forsaken dream: truly compelling virtual reality. The vertigo seems terrifyingly real. And as gravity takes hold, you might just let out a literal scream.
Making it all work requires serious hardware. Once Spider-Man is operational, more than 70 networked computers - costing more than $15 million - will be deployed to integrate the ride's every element to within 5 milliseconds. "When it's finished, there'll be nothing else on the planet like it," says Peter Jelf, a control systems engineer Universal pulled in to build its one-of-a-kind systems. "Disney had better be afraid."
Scott Trowbridge sure hopes so. Trowbridge, 33, is the producer and co-mastermind - with Thierry Coup, a French set designer and Walt Disney Imagineering alum - of the new attraction, in Orlando. Given what it cost - enough to produce a summer blockbuster movie - Trowbridge isn't the only person who hopes it strikes fear in the hearts of customers and competitors alike. "If it works, it'll be like a good magic trick," Trowbridge says. "Even once you've seen how it's done, you only appreciate it that much more." Trowbridge and his team believe they can deliver on the Universal Studios claim that Spider-Man is "the greatest ride ever built." It's too soon to say if Spider-Man is the "greatest" anything, but it's certainly a contender.
Night. Distant horns, a fading siren, the rattle of a passing el. You're in the Scoop, careening through a seedy corner of un-Disneyfied New York. Without a sound, Spider-Man swings out of the shadows, lands deftly on the hood, and warns: "Man, you shouldn't be out here! With Doc Ock on the loose, this could be the most dangerous night of my life - and yours!"
But it's too late to turn back, especially once you smash through the doors of a warehouse that the Sinister Syndicate - a gang of superpowered villains - has claimed for its HQ. Using the dreaded Anti-Gravity Gun, the Syndicate has hijacked the Statue of Liberty and now intends to bring all of New York - and the world! - to its knees.
First, though, they're going to wipe you out. A thug named Electro strikes the opening blow, ripping a power cable off a piece of machinery and subjecting you to teeth-chattering shock therapy.
Making a getaway, the car spins into a dizzying series of 360s before plunging down a gargantuan sewer. You land with a crash; Hydro-Man rises from the depths of a subterranean reservoir, ignores two punches from Spider-Man, and nearly takes off your head with a giant pipe. The car climbs back to street level, where Hobgoblin wings in and tosses a few explosive jack-o'-lanterns - one of them erupts razor-burn close.
Then, for a moment, it seems like you're home free. But not quite: Doctor Octopus opens up with the anti-grav gun, levitating your car high above the neon wilderness.
Is it curtains? Nah, Spidey won't let you down. But for a moment, when you pitch forward and stare into a deep urban abyss, it feels like it.
If all goes as planned (which for most superheroes it rarely does), Spider-Man will start delivering the aforementioned thrills to ticket buyers later this month, part of the larger rollout of a billion-dollar theme park called Universal Studios Islands of Adventure. The Islands are really five mini-parks rolled into one. To island-hop all day, you'll first shell out $45 or so, and then pass through an ersatz Port of Entry.
Inside you'll find Seuss Landing, a candy-colored sculpture garden faithful to the children's books of the late Theodor Geisel. Here, almost nothing is linear: Walls bulge like squeezed marshmallows, trees curl (you'll see a few real palms warped by Hurricane Andrew), and there's a tremendous One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish fountain, a fantasia of larger-than-life bath toys. Beyond it lies The Lost Continent, a landscape featuring a wild mishmash of Greek myths and neoclassical anachronisms; Jurassic Park, a dinosaur wallow based on the movie based on the novel about an out-of-control theme park (just the thing to make postmodern scholars sweat); Toon Lagoon, a hyperrealization of the funny pages and TV cartoons; and, finally, Marvel Super Hero Island, a teeming urban square derived from the strange and kinetic Marvel Comics universe created by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and others.
Islands is just one component in Universal's attempt to mount a serious challenge to Walt Disney World: Universal Studios Escape, a decade-in-the-making, 840-acre, $2.5 billion expansion of Universal Studios Florida, its existing tourist trap. In addition to Islands and the original park, this emerging entertainment nation-state includes a monumental arcade of restaurants and nightclubs called CityWalk, five new resort hotels (two open this year with three to follow), and thousands of new, as-yet-unstained parking places. Essentially, in one give-'em-all-we-got package, Universal, its corporate parent Seagram Company Ltd., and the Rank Group Plc - a 50-50 partner in this venture - will try to establish Escape as a primary destination, rather than a side trip for the millions of people who travel to Orlando each year mainly to pay homage to the Mouse.
Central to Universal's strategy is targeting audiences Disney doesn't already "own" in its kids-and-parents demographic: classic rockers, the PG-13 crowd, and capital-G guys who are heavily into sports, noise, and babes. CityWalk boasts a Hard Rock Café and a 2,500-seat Hard Rock Live amphitheater. There's also a reggaepalooza called Bob Marley - A Tribute to Freedom; cafés with NBA, Nascar, and Motown themes; Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville; and even a Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz (the class act of the joint). Islands, designed to amp up the mall rats, is full of maniacal roller coasters, steep water rides, and, of course, Spider-Man.
Referring to Disney, Jim Canfield, Universal's VP of public relations, says, "There's no question we're hipper."
As they squint from afar, trade professionals are already impressed. "They really seem to have the right ingredients, and a lot of teenagers are going to go for it," says Marion Boucher Soper, an entertainment industry analyst with Bear, Stearns & Co., a Wall Street brokerage house. "My only concern would be oversaturation."
Neither Disney nor Universal share this concern - at least, neither lets it show. For its part, Disney is planning more new attractions in Florida this year than in any since it opened 26 seasons ago. Notably, its new-in-'99 additions include attractions that suggest Disney is shoring up its appeal to teenagers. Meanwhile, the official line on Universal's big push is predictably sunny. "We wish them every success," says a Disney flack.
Most industry observers expect Universal to do well with the expansion, figuring there's still room for another megapark in Florida, and that any cannibalization will mainly affect smaller fry struggling to hang on in the hypercompetitive Orlando market. At the same time, they're watching closely as the park wars go global. With both Disney and Universal moving dirt for new attractions in Japan, Disney in talks over a park in Hong Kong, and Universal's stake in a Spanish park, Wall Street sees Escape as a leadership test for Edgar Bronfman Jr., the president and CEO of Seagram. When Seagram acquired most of Universal in 1995, more than a few observers figured that Bronfman (who had a short-lived career in film; he produced The Border, with Jack Nicholson) would lose his shirt playing the Hollywood game, especially in head-to-head matchups with Disney's Michael Eisner. Under his watch, Universal hasn't tanked, but it hasn't soared either. Recently, it had a holiday hit in Patch Adams, but bombed with Primary Colors and Mercury Rising, all of which has made the healthy margins of its theme parks that much more important.
One thing a media empire is supposed to buy you - synergy - is lacking with the Amazing Spider-Man, because this is one blockbuster ride not accompanied by a blockbuster movie. To be fair, this was never within Bronfman's control. A Spider-Man feature, to be produced by Carolco and directed by James Cameron, fell apart in 1993. After years of litigation, it looks as if there will be a big-screen Spider-Man (from Sony Pictures Entertainment), but not until 2000 at the soonest. Meanwhile, Universal's wager is that the ride will carry its own weight.
Some observers bet they're right. "I don't think a movie tie-in is necessary," says Winslow Farrell, a consumer trends expert at PricewaterhouseCoopers and author of How Hits Happen. "If you look at what's happening now, with all the retro television, you can get a lot of goodwill just with nostalgia."
"Not having movie marketing tie-ins was an interesting decision that's playing out in the whole park," says Randy Pausch, codirector of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. "Universal is licensing characters, and the downside is that they can't cross-pollinate. On the upside, they've picked timeless figures. Spider-Man is the best-selling comic series of all time."
In the end, the flick deficit was an inspiration to make the Spider-Man ride more, not less, elaborate. If it was to succeed, the reasoning went, it would have to be very special. And soon after Trowbridge and Coup met, the ride took on a life of its own.
Trowbridge, who grew up in St. Louis but makes his home in LA, dresses casually and has the amiable-yet-intense manner of many SoCal professionals: ambitious, but not on edge. Get him talking about Spider-Man, and he lets rip with genuine enthusiasm, gesturing and mouthing sound effects to convey the experience of the ride.
"So we come into this scene and we're looking at this screen here," he tells me, midway through a leisurely tour of the Bowery section. There's a metal fire escape hanging off a building that extends into the room a couple of feet; smoke drifting in from above; and a wall plastered with funky billboards advertising cheap lawyers. "This screen starts out looking like a brick wall," he says. Sure enough, a brick wall materializes; somebody in the rafters is taking his words as a cue. "Doc Ock actually bursts through the wall and - buddooooosh - he makes a grab for our car. And then - kuddiiishjhh - he plays a little tug-of-war with it and then aims a flamethrower at us ... there's actually a huge heat cannon overhead and ... frrrrfffiffifiifighgh.
"Then we get knocked into the next scene," Trowbridge says. He laughs like a dastardly villain: "Heh heh hehhhhhh."
At one point during the tour, a set of Get Smart-style double doors, separating two scenes, doesn't open when it should. From up in the catwalks, a voice booms, "Ex-cell-ent! Not even Spider-Man can stop me now!" It's not clear if one of the crew is just goofing off or teasing Trowbridge specifically, but it doesn't matter. Trowbridge chuckles, and moments like this suggest why he's effective. He can take ludicrous things seriously enough to make them fly, but he can also laugh at himself.
After graduating from USC's film and television program in 1988, Trowbridge interviewed with Landmark Entertainment Group, one of the busiest theme-park contractors in the world, creator of such attractions as Caesar's Magical Empire in Las Vegas. Landmark shipped him out in 1989 to build attractions for Sanrio Puroland, a Hello Kitty theme park outside Tokyo.
He took to the field right away. Far from feeling like an auteur stuck in Cheez Whiz purgatory, he says he's always been fulfilled by designing parks and rides, a craft combining elements of theatrical production and moviemaking.
Besides which, you can get away with almost anything. "I just heard from a friend in Japan who was updating one of the shows at Puroland," he says, "and they have a ride film that pits Hello Kitty versus Godzilla. I'm not kidding! I'm dying to know how it turns out." Perhaps Godzilla is on a jealous rampage because Hello Kitty is cuter? "It's got to be something like that. Godzilla needs love. And Hello Kitty is just the cat to give it!"
Trowbridge returned to Los Angeles in 1991, crispy from the 60-, 80-, even 100-hour weeks during the pre-opening crunch at parks in Tokyo and Kyushu. He slowed down for a while - he briefly worked with the Groundlings, the famous improv comedy troupe in LA - but soon started pining for the challenges he'd faced in Japan. In 1993, he went back to work, on Porto Europa, a park outside Osaka. In 1994, as Universal was moving ahead with its plans to expand in Florida, he signed on. An old Marvel Comics fan, one of the first things he decided to do was pump up the volume on the Spider-Man ride, which began as a simplistic car-loop.
Six months into the job, Trowbridge met Thierry Coup, 36, who'd recently come to Universal from WDI, where he helped design theme parks, including Euro Disney. Coup and Trowbridge clicked right away, although Coup got off to a rocky start at Universal. Early on, he presented ideas for Spider-Man and its motion-sensitive 3-D imagery to a higher-up who didn't see the ride's potential. In fact, the supervisor fired off a memo explaining why the plans would fail.
"I thought my first week would be my last," remembers Coup. "He told me we couldn't do this. He said he couldn't believe we were wasting one dime on this."
In retrospect, the naysayers helped, because they motivated Trowbridge and Coup to become conspirators in the making of their ride. As the concept continued to take shape, they enlisted Phil Bloom, an architect who would eventually figure out how to pack the ride - with its sizable maintenance and emergency infrastructure - into a modest 50,000-square-foot building.
After months of brainstorming, Trowbridge got his big chance to present the trio's vision for Spider-Man in January 1996; he boarded the company's Gulfstream with senior management for a 75-minute flight from Orlando to New York, and pitched the notion as a virtual one-man radio show. The feedback was encouraging, but guarded. "It was like: 'Great, love it - if you can do it,'" Trowbridge recalls. He was given six months to show that he could.
Soon, Trowbridge, Coup, and Bloom began building a scale model of the ride that they would all but sleep in for the next two years. Fashioned from foam core and plywood, it sat on a 20- by 25-foot table whose top stood 4 feet off the floor. The tabletop was jigsawed with a cutout of the ride's track pattern. On a low stool with casters, the designers and execs wheeled about - with their heads where the Scoop would be - to get a feel for how the ride would look. The model was later destroyed as a rite of passage at a company picnic. (Coup keeps a fragment of it at his desk, and wishes he had saved the whole thing.)
The most critical early mock-up took place in a stifling hot Burbank soundstage. Ron Bension, a Universal president, and an entourage of VPs - Phil Hettama, Bruce Upson, David Coddiga - took a seat in a motorless jalopy and were pushed around by six hired hands through two scenes that Trowbridge, Coup, Bloom, and writer Ross Osterman had pulled together. Many scenes and transitions were scripted, tested, and dumped over the next months, but one they acted out that day made the final cut: Hydro-Man's pipe-swing attack.
Trowbridge and Coup helped provide the special effects. Trowbridge smashed the execs' jalopy with a two-by-four - Hydro-Man's pipe. Coup cooled them off with a C02 fire extinguisher - literally blasting them white in their suits - as a substitute for the water and steam that will douse riders in the real version. Impressed, the execs gave Trowbridge the go-ahead. He knew he was in for a high-pressure stretch, but that's what he came for. "So many theme parks to build," he jokes. "So little time."
Big, dark, dilapidated, the Mohawk cinema in downtown North Adams, Massachusetts, is a Loew's original, one of those grand deco jobs from the '30s that everyone hopes will get renovated someday. Closed for 20 years, the Mohawk's deep, musty theater hall, empty-but-for-a-sad-piano vaudeville stage, and trashed projection booth would make an excellent hideout for a Dead Poets Society - or for supervillains plotting world domination. In a way it was both throughout 1997 and '98. It was here that the animators at Kleiser-Walczak Construction Company (KWCC) brought in a few of their own projectors, rigged a screen that could handle 3-D images, and, dressed for the weather (the building had no heat), reviewed their imagery for Spider-Man at the required scale.
Founded in 1987 by Jeff Kleiser and Diana Walczak, KWCC creates digital effects for advertising, television (PBS's The Astronomers), feature films (Judge Dredd), and thrill rides. Four years ago the husband-and-wife team, who've kept studios in Hollywood, decided to set down roots in the dustbin-of-history mill town of North Adams. They realized that they could skip out on the worst of The Industry, nestling instead amid the pine-forested Berkshires. The location was fine by Universal; the company was pleased that KWCC was in the sticks.
"They loved that we were outside Hollywood, that our location could help to keep the project under wraps," says Patrick Mooney, KWCC's producer on Spider-Man. For Universal, having the Spider-Man work occur in North Adams meant that fewer Hollywood types would get wind of the ride before its time.
There were other reasons Universal went with KWCC: The company offered a team that could commit to nearly three years of continuous work (and gigabytes worth of continuous rendering); a team capable of producing vivid CG facial expressions and supernatural body language; and a team brimming with problem solvers.
To bring Spidey and the supervillains to life, KWCC first tried motion-capture animation, but the technique did not allow the animators to achieve the superhuman attributes they desired for the Marvel characters - above all, speed. For reasons that still frustrate animators on deadline, to make a person move faster than normal, you can't simply speed up an image derived from motion-capture techniques. The image simply looks like it's in comic overdrive - like Benny Hill slapstick. Eventually, they decided to scrap motion-capture altogether and switch to key-frame animation, meaning all the characters - and all their movements - would be generated from scratch by computer animators.
Once motion capture was ditched, KWCC animators like Derald Hunt, Jeff Lew, and Dana Peters set to work using Alias|Wavefront's Kinemation software. But they still weren't satisfied, and to get the movements they wanted KWCC eventually took a heart-stopping risk for a project that was its bread and butter at the time. It switched software midstream.
"We broke our own cardinal rule," says Mooney. A beta site for Alias|Wavefront's Maya software, KWCC committed to producing everything for Spider-Man on beta code - a move that could have cost them months of work if it hadn't panned out. "Maya was just so much better," Hunt says. "It allowed us to do animations that were rigid and fluid at the same time. Like Doctor Octopus's tentacles." Jeffery Williams, an industry veteran who served as Spider-Man's technical supervisor, still can't believe the animators relied on beta code. Shaking his head, he says, "It's unheard-of."
Didn't this freak out the client? Not really, Trowbridge says. "If you think about it, the whole project was done in beta. All the techniques and processes were beta techniques and processes. When [KWCC] first tried Maya," he adds, "they did it for one shot and had the other work to fall back on if it didn't work out. But once we saw it, we understood."
KWCC's greatest technical hurdle on Spider-Man stemmed from the fact that 3-D images are formed by projecting two images - one for the left eye, one for the right - which, with the help of polarizing lenses, converge "right before your eyes." (In Spider-Man, riders will wear snazzy dark sunglasses with these lenses.) If the overlap of these two images is spot-on, then no matter where you're sitting in the theater, you get the sense that the image is jumping out at you. But you can't get up and walk around without diminishing the effect. It requires you to sit still. In Spider-Man, Trowbridge and Coup had no intention of letting you sit still, and came up with the idea of manipulating the images in the computer before they went to film, so that they adjust to your perspective as you move around. To pull this off, they turned to KWCC ace Frank Vitz.
Perhaps the easiest way to visualize the challenge Vitz faced is to look out a window at an object outside - a building, say. If you were to trace the building's outline on the window with a Magic Marker, and then move about the room, you'd see that the building misbehaves: It doesn't stay in the boundaries of your tracing. By the same token, if you render a building in 3-D and have a carload of people moving past it, they'd see the static tracing, rather than the building outside that morphs with your changing perspective. It would look all wrong.
The answer was to calculate where an ideal viewer sat at any given moment and adjust the image from that perspective, and the next, and the next, so that the objects in every image align with your eyeballs.
"We did some tests and came up with a technique that allowed us to digitally predistort the imagery so that rather than appearing to be a projection onto a screen, the screen appeared to be a window onto a virtual environment," says Kleiser.
"As long as we knew exactly where the audience was going to be on each frame, we could calculate the image with the proper predistortion so that the audience sees the proper visual angle into the scene."
Vitz, who worked for Robert Abel & Associates in the heady days when computer graphics went from primitive to cool (his credits include Tron), did the trigonometry, and wrote an algorithm for the "predistortion" in the programming language C. Even when it did the trick, however, he wasn't done, because Trowbridge and Coup also wanted to use a couple of curved screens. Especially in the climactic scene - the free fall - they wanted the screen to take up a person's entire field of vision. So now the window in the analogy above becomes even more complicated: It becomes concave.
Fortunately, Vitz had created fish-eye - curved-screen - 3-D images for In Search of the Obelisk, a ride that Douglas Trumbull built for the Luxor hotel and casino in Las Vegas. Vitz reprised his fish-eye trig for the screens in Spider-Man. Because the image distortion depends on the distance between the projectors and the screen (expressed on the z-axis), he calls the program "z_fish."
You can get a sense of how much manipulation is going on if you watch the film from a fixed position: All the objects seem to compress and stretch, which is why the animators dubbed the process "squinching."
Armed with Vitz's squinching algorithms, Williams took the motion data from Universal - stored in data files - and used it to line up the animation to a theoretical set of eyeballs onboard the vehicle. He then kept long hours getting all the elements of the animation - the lighting, the textures - compiled, and kept even longer ones when the specs of the ride changed. Each time the ride's speed or motion changed, the animations had to be reanimated and re-rendered to fit the new specs. Given that single frames of Spider-Man took as long as six hours to render on the fastest Silicon Graphics processor, some at KWCC thought they'd end up in the funeral home across the street before the project was over.
Meanwhile, the Spider-Men at Universal - code-named 706 for the internal job-order number - endured two years of wearying transcontinental flights, motel rooms, and dog-and-pony shows, as well as the move to Orlando from Los Angeles. Steve Johnson, placed in charge of all the projectors, screens, and physical effects ("the captain of the big wow," Trowbridge says), and Carl Hartzler, an audio/video engineer, joined Trowbridge, Coup, and Bloom as high tech scavengers. When the men weren't at KWCC's offices in North Adams, they might touch down in Buffalo, New York, to visit Moog, the makers of the ride's motion base, the part of vehicle you don't see but that delivers all the dips, spins, and shakes. Or Vancouver, Canada, to meet with innovators at Richmond Sound Design, which furnished the customized 16-channel digital audio system that Hartzler is installing for the ride. This was another reliance on "beta" equipment.
The visits to Moog stand out in Trowbridge's mind. This Moog is not the synthesizer company, but a manufacturer of missile propulsion systems and tank parts. "We go to defense contractors more often than you'd think," says Trowbridge, "because they have the ability to do one-offs and new custom things. They've got these pictures of missiles hitting tanks and stuff. It's a little bit frightening. They talk about kill ratios ... and I feel like saying: 'Hey, I just want a bunny to pop up and sing.'"
When the scavenging was done, and all pieces had been gathered or ordered, the 706ers still had to coordinate everything so that the movies would roll, the motion-base advance, the stage doors fly open, the passenger cabin shimmy and shake, the fireballs explode - all on cue. To make this happen - to get the computers talking to one another and therefore coordinating the ride - they relied on Peter Jelf.
A 31-year-old Brit with eight years of experience in military R&D, Jelf serves as networking geek for Islands of Adventure. In addition to his work on Spider-Man, he came up with an ingenious, wicked bit of software for Dueling Dragons, a roller coaster on the Lost Continent. Not once, but three times, Dueling Dragons' double track affords riders the distinct impression that they're about to collide head-on with another tram of riders. Jelf came up with the algorithm that adjusts the ride's velocity for the weight, friction, and momentum of each load of passengers so they hit the loops simultaneously.
Each 7-ton Spider-Man vehicle, Jelf says, has one PLC, two PCs, and 12 digital motor controllers, all of which work together to control the Scoop's every move. (A PLC is a programmable logic controller - most often used in manufacturing and other high-speed processes.) Synchronizing the vehicle with the rest of the ride are sensors in the track and external sync signals that act as invisible trip wires for the sets. A couple of the moving props, such as the garbage truck that almost deposits a Dumpster in your lap, even have their own PLCs for brains. Data from all the computers is exchanged over an Allen Bradley proprietary network and gets archived, so engineers can "sleuth" malfunctions.
Jelf likes to grouse that the Ponytail Department - what he calls the "creatives" like Trowbridge (who does have a ponytail) and Coup (who does not) - give no thought to calling for stunts that defy the laws of physics. Still, even Jelf's exasperation has the relish of challenge in it. "Take Devin here," he says, pointing to Devin Boyle, a colleague sitting to his right. "He went and put a 15-Hz square wave into the heave. I expected all the actuators to drop their guts on the floor. All the engineers threw up on the spot!"
"It's still in there," Boyle grins. By introducing the 15-Hz square wave into the heave, Boyle had made the ride car thrust and shake with such force, it turned the vehicle into a veritable jackhammer. Jelf seems surprised to hear that the jackhammer is still in there and hasn't caused the machine to break down.
"Oh, it's in there," Boyle says. It's this square wave that passengers will feel when Electro gives them a shock.
At 24, Boyle's the youngest of the 706, but no rookie. Few can claim his esoteric experience, and in the three or so years he's been at it, he's learned of only two others who do the same thing that he does. Boyle programs all the ride movements, "motion-base profile" in ride lingo - everything the Moog makes the passenger cabin do. As such, he's the guy who makes sure the ride is exhilarating but doesn't leave you sick as a dog.
"I couldn't write a line of code to save my life," Boyle says, but he can look at a graphic user interface displaying the pitch, roll, heave, yaw, and velocity of the Scoop and anticipate how it will feel when it's rolling.
"It's definitely more of a black art than a science," says Trowbridge, decidedly happy to have found Boyle. Because Boyle relies on a highly attuned inner-ear and butt, the two areas that inform the brain most about its bodily relationship to the world, Trowbridge calls Boyle Motion Boy. For Spider-Man, Boyle estimates he'll have done the butt rumba 1,000 times before it opens.
For Boyle and the 706ers, Spider-Man became much more than a job - "Money's got fuck-all to do with it," Jelf says - and it's clear that when their work on Spider-Man is done, they'll miss it. Grown-up boys all, each man allows, with a sort of graduation-week wistfulness, that it won't be easy to re-create the challenges and camaraderie of Spider-Man.
But needless to say, for Universal, Seagram, and the Rank Group, money's got everything to do with it. To promote Islands, Universal launched the first national advertising campaign for its parks, a $50 million effort with TV spots and six-page foldout ads in Entertainment Weekly and People.
With billions at stake, Universal Studios Escape is sure to fascinate investment bankers and brand managers as well as fans of Dr. Seuss and Marvel Comics. As with almost everything these days, the merits of Seuss Landing, Spider-Man, and all of Escape will be measured in business terms: box-office receipts, the price of Seagram shares. But the measure of greatness that matters most to the 706ers is not entirely monetary. They'll be counting screams - the one thing no amount of hype can buy, business plans ensure, nor reactionary criticism deny.
"Am I in the business of making people scream?" Trowbridge says rhetorically as opening day approaches. "My job is to give people an experience they aren't having. I'm getting their brains to think things are happening that aren't happening. It's amazing, really, how willing a collaborator the brain is." Funny, but historian Daniel J. Boorstin identified this as the true genius of 19th-century circus impresario P. T. Barnum. "Contrary to popular belief," wrote Boorstin, "Barnum's great discovery was not how easy it was to deceive the public, but rather, how much the public enjoyed being deceived."
