The only time Kevin Costner met Walt Disney: “Everything stopped”
One criticism you can’t level at Kevin Costner is that he gives up on anything easily. A lot of people told him Waterworld was ridiculously expensive and would flop, and it was, and it did, but he did it anyway. Then he made some incredibly epic westerns nobody watched, so rather than just try another genre, he’s made another one.
Completely unperturbed by spending the equivalent of the GDP of a small country on two chapters of Horizon: An American Saga, not only does Costner plan to make another two of them, but he’s also going to be producing a US Civil War epic called The Gray House, which is narrated by Morgan Freeman and spans eight episodes.
Whether or not anyone will watch that one only time will tell, but at least, unlike Horizon, the money for it hasn’t had to come out of his own pocket. Then there was the fiasco with his other western, Yellowstone, the Taylor Sheridan creation that seemed to be going very well through five seasons for Costner, until several disagreements took place on set, and the veteran decided to walk.
What Costner is really doing is following a lifelong passion for American history and for the characters that roamed the vast spaces over the last few hundred years. He was doing it as far back as his breakout role in 1985’s Silverado and then, thanks to some big roles in movies including JFK, Bull Durham and The Untouchables, he was able to start to produce epic drama with Dances with Wolves in 1990 which he directed and starred in, a take on Cowboys and Indians that brought in half a billion at the box office and won seven Oscars including a Director gong for Costner.
He tried to repeat the trick twice in the ‘90s with Waterworld and The Postman, which were huge and very expensive productions which didn’t chime with the movie-going public and led to him taking on some more interesting roles in the 2000s, like the serial killer flick Mr Brooks, but by 2012, he was back doing westerns with the mini-series Hatfields & McCoys.
Costner’s obsession with all things western led to his being inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, and he took the opportunity to talk about his family’s struggle in California in previous generations, and of how he once met another famous film legend of that part of the world, Walt Disney.
He recalled being able to visit Disneyland at the time the theme park was in its early days in the late 1950s, and rather than wanting to see the Magic Kingdom castle, the four-year-old Costner preferred the old West of Frontierland, attempting to get into an attraction for the fifth time before some invited VIPs who were on their way to enjoy it.
Costner recalled, “I was certain we could beat them. They looked old, and they were just walking. My mother tried to stop me, but I ran ahead, determined to beat that large group of men, waving to my mom behind me… I flew under that ribbon and ran right into the men leading the group, he never saw me, but I must have hit him hard, right in the knees, because he buckled, and the men in that party all stopped, everything stopped. No one said a word. My mother’s hands were over her mouth. She was paralysed.”
Adding, “The man looked down at me, and I remember him being huge. And he wasn’t angry. And he asked me if I liked this ride. I told him that I loved this ride. He simply smiled and pointed to the other side of the ribbon and said, ‘I think your mother’s over there,’ she asked if I knew who he was, I shook my head. And then she told me – that was Walt Disney.”
Costner has often spoken about this early meeting and the impact it had on him, and he would go on to appear in several Disney-produced films, including Open Range, The Guardian and McFarland, USA.
