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UCLA alumnus Thomas Schumacher brings creative skills to Disney Feature Animation

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.”