Careful what you
wish upon a star for.™

6 October 2002—Like you, probably, I know people with all sorts of familiarity with the law: Sarah has now taken the bar and is awaiting her results; my client Simons & Stein, LLP, is a successful entertainment law firm in the Bay Area; my dear friend Christine is a connoisseur of “Law and Order”; and then there are all the people I know who may have watched Judge Wapner at one point or another in their lives but other than that have minuscule interest in or knowledge of the way our legal system works.

Yet everyone, and I mean everyone, who took a look at what we had in mind for the poster for the next Impact show, Working for the Mouse —

— and said, Damn, you’re gonna get sued.

The show, a one-person piece by Trevor Allen, is about Trevor’s experiences working as a character in Disneyland. I wanted to come up with a graphic that would signify three things: Disney, mean bosses, and funny. The graphic came to me while I was eating lunch, and after work, it only took about an hour to come up with the draft shown above. Once I was done and looked at it all put together, the first thing that popped into my head was damn, we’re gonna get sued. Then I couldn’t wait to show it to everyone.

For some reason, everyone seemed to know that Disney is the one company you don’t want to cross. Even if the person you’re consulting can’t point to specific cases, he or she has heard things. Scary things. Severed horse head under the bedsheet, that kind of thing.

And then there are actual cases. Disney sued Air Pirates in 1972 for a series of underground comics involving several Disney characters, including Mickey Mouse. Disney won its copyright infringement claim but had its trademark infringement claim denied. The Air Pirates were fined $190,000 each, though Disney dropped the fine in 1979 after a lot of bad publicity.

Recently, Disney had until July 30 to decide whether to pursue action against the Flint (Michigan) Public Library over its “Book Mouse” character. It is unclear whether Disney decided to go ahead. It definitely is pursuing its case before the Supreme Court to extend its copyright on Mickey Mouse, which otherwise would expire in 2003.

Which wasn’t quite soon enough for our purposes.

Despite Sarah’s idea of a disclaimer on the poster and the likely response of a cease-and-desist letter from Disney’s lawyers rather than going straight to court — the prospect of which kind of excited Melissa, our artistic director — we decided finally against using the image.

I have to say that I was the one most nervous about using it. No one seemed to doubt that Disney would find out about it. The question was, rather, how soon would they find out? Even if the case went to court, we stood a good chance of winning, but Disney likely wouldn’t care about that; they could still tie us up in the meantime. Furthermore, I was a little afraid that our vendors might be liable as well.

(I’m going to make an aside here to note that I was over at Melissa’s house recently, and her son Jonah has no shortage of Disney toys, one of which is Mickey poised in his spaceship, which looks like the very identifiable love-child of the Starship Enterprise and the Millennium Falcon. Hi, pot. Hi, kettle.)

The final straw was that Trevor, though he loved the image, felt it didn’t quite represent the show’s focus, which is not so much about how mean the bosses were but how reality can invade a dream’s purity.

In the meantime, we also had great fun doing the publicity shots for the show. Kevin Berne, a rockin’ photographer with whom I worked when I was at A.C.T., has been working with us lately, and the results have been way-cool.

So I began again. I looked around to see how Disney had been treated by other authors, in the form of a search of titles and covers of books about Disney, not published by the company. Those approaches would be safe, ostensibly, since they were still in print. My survey seemed to indicate that the three circles representing head and ears were fair game, and so I went to work.

I thought a Mickey-Mouse-shaped balloon, deflated and on the ground, would serve well to represent a broken dream, a literally popped balloon. Finding one proved to be more difficult than I imagined it would be: after completely failing to find a simple balloon just in the shape of the head and ears, though I know they exist somewhere, I settled on a Mylar balloon with Mickey’s actual face. I had to drive to Alameda to get it, from a nice, if perplexed, woman who runs a wholesale balloon business out of her grand, partially restored Victorian home.

Disappointingly, the photos didn’t come out the way I envisioned them in my head. They really just looked flat, like a balloon lying on the ground. Some things are just more poignant in person.

Then Sarah suggested an ice-cream cone with scoops in the familiar head and ears shape, fallen on the ground and melting. It sounded a lot better than my next idea, which was a Mickey-Mouse-shaped pancake with a big bite taken out of it, so I tried it.

I have a newfound respect for people who arrange food for photo shoots. I tried first with rocky road ice cream and next with vanilla. (Though I was going to be dumping it on the ground, I still used Dreyer’s, one of the best commercial ice creams around here, just in case there was any left over that needed to be eaten.)

It was a rocky, rocky road indeed. I couldn’t get the shapes quite right, and it was melting all around me as I tried to get it into shape. I finally couldn’t get it any better than I had it, not that I was happy with the way it looked, and took some photos on the sidewalk. At least it melted nicely on the sidewalk.

Then I tried the vanilla. Everything came together: it shaped nicely into balls that, with a fair amount of wrangling, finally managed to look like Mickey Mouse circles. I took it outside, dumped it with precision on the gravel in the street, and shot the hell out of it. It melted beautifully.

When I got the pictures back later that afternoon, we had a winner, something we would all be happy with that represented well this fabulous show we’re so thrilled to present. Here’s the final poster image:

And throughout the whole process, I never lost the first tagline I came up with: Careful what you wish upon a star for. I’m real proud of that one. Maybe I should copyright it.

Working for the Mouse begins October 18 in Berkeley and November 22 in San Francisco. Click here for details.