An Interview With Steven Davison - Part 1,

An Interview With Steven Davison - Part 1
Page 4 of 4

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Eureka! at night
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LP: Were they able to do most of what you asked them to do?

SD: Yeah, it took us a couple of weeks after we opened to finish the lighting piece because we were still in day rehearsals or day performances. Holliman would come in every night and he’d pull the floats out and they would just go through it again and again and again and really work through the bugs in the system and they finally got it. It all talks to each other now.

LP: How long was the development process for you then?

SD: I started on Eureka about two years ago as an initial thought and which way to go. In fact I developed several different parades for Paul Pressler. There was the character parade which was the epic California where the characters were going to tell you the making of California. Another one was the Latino Community. The third one was a tourist point of view of California where they brought in an artist from Mad Magazine to actually recreate like traffic jams and we had the Miss Natural Disaster Pageant. We did an ocean section about communities being in the oceans. Paul loved the Latino community piece and thought it would fit well but we expanded on that idea. Then moved it past that and developed the Eureka piece. A year ago, we met with Michael Eisner, took Michael through it and Michael liked it and we went into construction. Probably, starting in June, we were officially building steel and we pushed and pushed and pushed and got it through by November.

LP: Did you do one of your famous live pitches?

SD: Actually I did. Eureka is a hard pitch because - "Believe" is a lot easier because you’re going on a single sound track from A to Z and it’s a story. Eureka has seven sections and it was always my goal at the end of that presentation to always get that standing ovation. Can we move people and get them excited enough to be overwhelmed by the product. That’s the hope. I try not to say things that aren’t really in the parade. If people react to it positively then I feel really good about what we’re doing and not try to second guess it.
[Ed. Note: See the Related Links at the end of this article for a link to video of Davison doing his pitch for "Believe...There's Magic in the Stars".

LP: Is Eureka supposed to run every day?

SD: It runs every day from now on until it doesn’t. As of right now it’s probably going to run for three years. That’s kind of the shelf life of it. Usually after three years - parades are developed not to be like work horses. Attractions are built to last for tens and tens of years. Parades, because of their moving nature and the chassis they’re built on, have a lot of stress problems. Even Lion King Celebration, after the third year, it was really hard to keep it going but they did. I think after that, because of our local guests they’re ready for something new. We move onto something else.

LP: Will it ride in inclement weather?

SD: Depends on the inclement weather. We've played with that for the last month. If it’s a heavy rain we probably won’t run the parade. If it’s a misty light rain and it just rained and the rain has stopped we’ll do a modified parade. We send it out but we may cut some objects. We have inclement wind problems because some of the pieces do have some wind limitations so we might pull pieces off. Even people that know the parade - things might disappear from it and they don’t know because it’s so impactful visually. Your eye doesn’t know.

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Eureka!
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In part two of the interview Davison talks specific elements of Eureka! including the potentially controversial ethnic elements and the bikers and skaters. Davison also discusses his hit show "Believe ... There's Magic in the Stars" and the challenges involved in following that up. Look for it in the next few days..

Discuss It

Related Links


-- Posted June 5, 2001

-- Interview and sidebars by Doobie Moseley
-- Pictures by Rebekah Moseley and Doobie Moseley

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