Pickets bug bow for Disney's 'Life'
NABET workers from ABC succeed
The demonstration succeeded in a threefold way: A major media event was co-opted to bring attention to the labor dispute; it put high-level Disney execs in an awkward position; and it scared the bejezzus out of a bunch of 5-year-olds who thought they were going to a party and had no idea why adults were yelling at them.
It's up to history to judge whether this was one of the American labor movement's more glorious moments, but the clamor did not deter Steve Jobs from modestly judging the film that his Pixar company created as "visually the most stunning animated movie ever made.''
Co-director Andrew Stanton thought the film had "an honest charm to it," and director John Lasseter described his team as "film geeks" who were influenced by a combination of Frank Capra, Buster Keaton, Chuck Jones, "The Wizard of Oz," Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki, the barn-raising scene in Peter Weir's "Witness" and " 'Star Wars' because we're all such nuts about that movie."
Among those nuts about "Bugs" were studio execs Michael Eisner, Joe Roth, Dick Cook and Peter Schneider; the pic's composer Randy Newman and voice actors Dave Foley, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and David Hyde Pierce; and 1,000 guests, including Tim Allen, Andy Garcia, Michael J. Fox, Antonio Banderas and Sandy Climan.
