The Script

CinéMagique, starring Martin Short and Julie Delpy, proudly pays tribute to the magic of cinema in a unique and captivating performance that takes you INTO the movies!

An interrupted performance of some classic black and white pictures quickly leads to an action-packed journey through movie milestones from around the world. From the heart of a Wild West shoot-out you're blasted into the sky above London with Mary Poppins, before climbing onboard a disaster-struck Titanic and landing in the dark domain of Darth Vader! With a romantic pursuit of true love and and a pin-sharp wit, this triumph of special effects and imagination leads you all the way to a fairytale finale on the Yellow Brick Road!

WARNING: If you haven't seen CinéMagique for real yet, we recommend you stop reading here. The first viewing of the show in particular is a true milestone of Disney Imagineering magic.

Production Guide

The Magic of the Movies

From the flashy, neon-lit art deco entrance canopy, you step inside the Studio Theatre screening room through a pair of heavy wooden doors. At the end of a short corridor, the gigantic theatre opens up before you, and you choose your cinema seat as music from Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Les Parapluies de Cherbourg circles through the air.

With all the guests seated, it's time for the screening to begin. The music fades and the lights dim, then a spotlight appears centre stage. Your host for the presentation steps up on stage to introduce the special film being screened today, as the golden curtain slowly lifts:

"Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to CinéMagique, our celebration of the magic of the movies. At this time, we remind you that no flash photography or video taping is permitted and please - turn off your cellphones.

And now, Walt Disney Studios proudly presents... CinéMagique!"


The Silent Era

The title 'CinéMagique' bursts onto the curtain, which then opens to let the classic movie scenes begin. We begin in the silent era, with clips from 'Le Voyage dans la Lune', 'Nosferatu' and even Mickey's black and white 'Plane Crazy' short. Just as you're settling into the vintage film memories, a shot from sci-fi Metropolis is interrupted by a modern day horror of sound - the mobile phone - ringing amidst the audience below. As the film clips continue to play, a scuffle begins amongst the seats as a tourist fumbles for his phone and is followed across the theatre by your host as he attempts to answer it.

To get a better signal for his connection to the airport baggage claim, the man (George) jumps up on stage and the host has no choice but to call security. "Cherchez les baggages?" he shouts in broken French, as the actors on screen suddenly become aware of the introduction. The Arabian sheikh punches the screen with no luck, at which point the he takes his damsel to the Magician, who prepares a spell... "Frankfurt? How did my bags get to frankfurt?!" and with that, "POOF!", a thundering bang and a blast of smoke transports George from the auditorium to the screen, where he is duly thumped by the aggravated sheikh.

Lying on the floor, Marguerite kneels down to check no harm has been done and shares a look of love with George, before the sheikh reappears with a machete and narrowly misses George - and then his phone. Chased into an alternate film set, George finds himself in a towering American office and has no choice but to climb out of the window. As he perches perilously on the window ledge and narrowly misses more swipes from the sheikh's machete through the swinging window, Harold Lloyd hangs off of a clock nearby and points George to the fire escape.

As he reaches the street below, George is immediately hit in the face by a giant cream pie and in seconds has joined the 'Battle of the Century' against Laurel and Hardy, hitting a number of unsuspecting victims in the process. As Charlie Chaplin joins the fight, his cream pie misses George and lands in the face of an unhappy gangster leader. "Wait... I didn't do anything!" George pleads, before rushing over to the audience in joy at being able to talk again. At the same moment, he's caught in a crossfire with James Cagney, before finding himself in the garage gangster scene of 'Some Like It Hot'.

With attention diverted to Joe and Jerry, George makes his escape - only to smash into a pile of petrol cans and end up jumping through the glass window in an outpour of gunfire.

The Advent of Cowboys & Colour

George picks himself up from the glass-smothered ground and the picture expands to full, widescreen cinemascope, with the warm tones of the Wild West flooding the screen. A passing train pulls away to reveal three cowboys staring him in the face from across the railroad tracks. "I don't think this is my stop!" George sheepishly shouts, before his cellphone rings again and he's forced into a classic far West standoff with his new partners. Unable to resist the call, he answers and is met with a barrage of gunfire, running for cover as he shouts "now isn't such a good time!" to the airline clerk.

He drops his phone in the scuffle and, as he runs to retrieve it, finds himself in the crossfire of the good, the bad and the ugly - and countless other dangerous Western stars. Gunfire shatters through the screen and creates small blasts of smoke on stage, before George finds refuge in a hidden storage barn... filled with dynamite! One blast from a double-barrelled shotgun it is all it takes to shoot him into the next production (via a chimney), and, as he floats down onto a smoky London rooftop, he remembers the scene perfectly. "Mary Poppins?" he asks, as Julie Andrews nods in reply. Then, before he knows it, he's whipped up into "Step in Time" and is swung through the air by the boisterous chimneysweeps. As he flies off the screen, a nasty smashing sound takes us back to the Wild West...

A black and white Marguerite looks through the window of the Western shack longingly, before stepping through the broken panes and being transformed to a full colour, cinemascope cowgirl. Finding George's phone amidst the tumbleweed, she cries a small tear which leads us to the rainy streets of 'Les Parapluies de Cherbourg', where George sighs at the final moments of "amour" between Geneviève and Guy. Walking back along the street, the heavens open onto the screen - and the theatre - but luckily Marguerite arrives just in time with a trusty umbrella. Finally, the couple are reunited.

"It's you!" exclaims George, asking "How did... vous... find... moi?" as Marguerite hands him his cellphone and suggests they find somewhere drier. Stepping out to get a taxi, George lays down his jacket and proclaims "Mon fromage, mademoiselle!". But, as he steps into the street himself, he is submersed entirely into the curb-side puddle. Marguerite runs back to try it herself, but with no luck. As the looks helplessly into the puddle, the scene swirls deep underwater...

The Productions of Titanic Proportion

The murky depths of the ocean are broken by the deep black shadow of a submarine. On-board, Sean Connery as Captain is franticly looking through the periscope, before he focuses in on George swimming, who waves. Startled, Captain Marko Ramius closes the periscope in shock and steps back. After giving the "ok" to a diving team, George hears shouts from deeper below and swims down to discover the animated Pinocchio, looking for Monstro. Almost before he has time to reply, George is swept up in a speedy current as Montro approaches. Rushing for the surface alongside Pinocchio, George eventually reaches air and is delighted to see a ship heading right past.

As he climbs aboard, soaked, and is reminded "The swimming pool is on the middle deck, sir", the ship smashes into a huge iceberg. Emergency rings through the air as the passengers of the vessel rush for the lifeboats and George finally realises where he is - Titanic! Hearing cries from inside the ship, he fellows the voices and remembers who it must be - "Jack, is that you? I hear you! Tell me exactly where you are!". However, with water filling the deck behind him, George has no time to lose and bursts through the first door he comes to, beginning a series of unforgettable movie encounters. First, John Cleese with his trousers down in 'A Fish Called Wanda', followed by the "shushing" from 'Trois Hommes et un Couffin' (Three Men and a Baby) at the next door and the clumsy attack of The Pink Panther's Inspector Clouseau. A chilling encounter with Hannibal Lecter follows, before George's screams of exasperation are matched by Sulley's roar in 'Monsters, Inc.' and 'The Exorcist' provides a horror-fuelled vomit finale.

George reaches the end of the corridor and looks up to see the entire set being crushed, door by door, as an enormous wave crashes towards him. The upsurge causes him to fall backwards, and, as he does, the door behind him opens in two halves in true sci-fi style...

The Grand Adventure to Find True Love

He lands on his back in a new universe, knocking a small canine-styled droid out of the way. Jumping up and shouting "sorry!", he realises he has landed in the universe of 'Star Wars' with a boyish smirk. The smirk is soon wiped off his face, however, as Darth Vader himself comes striding along the corridor just as a rogue Stormtrooper pulls George into the shadows to save him from the darkness. "Aren't you a little short for a Stormtrooper?" he questions, to which his saviour replies "Me, small? Are you sure you're looking right?" as she removes her helmet and reveals herself to Marguerite in a supporting role!

As the intruder alert is sounded, George and Marguerite are chased through the glowing corridors by an army of Stormtroopers, until they reach a vast never-ending chasm. With no other option, they swing across the great void and straight into their next grand adventure - a medieval fantasy. Picking themselves up from the grassy meadow, a trio of horsemen stand in front of them. George's fear is quickly dismissed, as the head Knight runs over to investigate his strange attire and the miniature size of the audience. Marguerite helps explain George is looking for a way out - "You want to go there?" asks the Knight, "Yes, I want to go there! I want to go there!" George replies, and the Knight pulls out his sword... only to be interrupted by cannonfire!

A fierce battle soon rages all around them, pulling together an endless list of medieval classics in the greatest battle since cinema began! As an arrow is fired into the wooded glade, Marguerite is trapped in the line of fire as it slices through the air toward her. Then, at the final moment, her own knight in shining armour, George, jumps in front to save her life and is hit in the heart by the arrow himself. As the warriors gather mournfully and Marguerite cries another tear, the Knight painfully pulls the arrow from George's chest - only to reveal it was stopped by his cellphone, which rings and wakes him up, unharmed! "Mon coeur, t'es vivant!" exclaims Marguerite, as the Knight destroys the ringing cellphone.

Whilst they smile together, the Knight climbs the tallest hill and holds his sword high in the air, conducting a huge bolt of lightning as the sky darkens and clouds form. Then, as the couple look on in surprise, he throws the electrified sword towards the audience and it lands on stage, ripping the screen. "Bon chance!" shouts the Knight, as Marguerite says "go on, what are you waiting for?" and George steps through the screen and back into the real world...

The Goodbye, the Kiss and the Happily Ever After

He calls after him for Marguerite to follow, but, as she nears the rip in the screen, the picture returns to its original size, black and white, silent... Marguerite is forced to accept the situation - that she and George were simply never meant to be. She turns her back on the audience and George falls to the floor calling her to try again, as a sweeping montage of famous farewells floods the screen, Doctor Zhivago to Casablanca.

When the montage fades, Marguerite reappears to try again - "There has to be a way! Yes, that's it - rip it!" shouts George, before she gives up once again. At the same moment, the Magician finally reappears, and with a click of the fingers transforms the picture to colour, widescreen and sound. "It goes without saying," he says, "with the magic of cinema, anything is possible." With a final sparkle of magic, a giant wooden door appears in the screen. After some encouragement, George opens it, peers inside, and steps through to meet his love. Finally, as he holds Marguerite in his arms, the lights dim and music swells, he rips the door off the screen, throws it behind him and kisses his true love.

A second montage sweeps through the musical suite of 'Gone With the Wind', as countless couples from movies past and present join together in a screen-filling finale of romance, including a cameo from Mickey & Minnie and Roger Rabbit. When the montage ends with one final kiss, lights rise on George and Marguerite, revealing they're standing on a tulip-filled hillside, both in new fairytale costumes. As they rush up the hillside, the camera follows to show the Yellow Brick Road from 'The Wizard of Oz' stretching into the distance.

Finally united in their cinematic world, George and Marguerite skip off along the road towards their very own happily ever after.

The End.

Production footnotes

Cast includes:
Martin Short ........ George
Julie Delpy .......... Marguerite
Alan Cumming ..... Magician
Tchéky Karyo ...... Knight
... along with "cameos" from all actors of the featured movies

CinéMagique takes its main theme from 'Les Parapluies de Cherbourg' (1964), with additional original music by Bruce Broughton (Le Visionarium, Honey I Shrunk The Audience). Music from Star Wars and Gone With the Wind is also used during the film.

The art deco Disney Studio 2, or the 'Studio Theatre', is thematically the main screening room of Walt Disney Studios - the place where crew gather at the end of a shoot to review their footage, or where old films are screened for reference.

When George returns through the screen thanks to the Knight's sword, his suit is ripped and torn exactly as it was whilst he was in the film, such as by the Arabian suitor's machete. Whilst Marguerite's costume changes for each picture she steps into, since she is a part of "the magic of the movies", George's costume only changes right at the end, when he kisses Marguerite before 'The Wizard of Oz', signifying his acceptance into the world of movies for happily ever after. As he grows closer to Marguerite, George's competence in French also improves rapidly.

The lighting of the angular exterior marquee entrance was designed to resemble that of a true Art Deco theatre marquee (for example the exposed neon lights to form the film title), whilst many of the lights resemble a filmstrip - in particular the square recessed lights brought from Belgium, installed like the sprockets (holes) of a celluloid film.

In 2003, the Themed Entertainment Association presented its annual Attraction of the Year 'THEA' award to CinéMagique, a highly prestigious accolade from people in the themed entertainment industry, to people in the themed entertainment industry.

CinéMagique had already been an attraction at Disneyland Resort Paris before 2002, over at Discoveryland in Disneyland Park. It was entirely different to the current attraction, however - CinéMagique was simply the name for the European version of Michael Jackson's Captain EO 3D film, located in the current building of Honey, I Shrunk The Audience between 1992 and 1998.

Did you notice...
The carpet in the theatre, the queue railings and the heavy wooden doors all feature the same 'Sunset' design as the fence and lights of La Terrasse/Tower of Terror. Various cellphone rings can be heard over the final credits soundtrack when the screening ends. The artwork of the entrance sign, updated in 2004 with images in the sketch style of classic film posters, features several movies which never made it into the final cut of the picture, such as Disney's '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea' and Hitchcock's 'North by Northwest'. Several of the key costumes from the production can be seen on Studio Tram Tour: Behind the Magic - originally in one of the large glass window boxes, they can now be seen in the windows of the costume workshop itself.

History

Often referred to as a 'big screen version' of Disney's The Great Movie Ride, CinéMagique does indeed find its roots at Disney-MGM Studios Florida. The centrepiece of the Florida studios since opening has been The Great Movie Ride, a lavish and lengthy guided tour through recreated Audio-Animatronics versions of classic movie scenes, with a live host providing commentary for each of the large ride vehicles. At CinéMagique, George effectively plays this role as he stumbles through the various films.

Contrary to popular belief, CinéMagique was actually planned as a key attraction for Paris' studio park from the outset, rather than its Great Movie Ride cousin. The original late 1980s plans for Disney-MGM Studios Europe featured Florida's Grauman's Chinese Theatre recreation as its centrepiece, albeit with a cinema show inside rather than an Audio-Animatronics dark ride (at least for the park's opening day). The 'Grand Movie Palace' was to have taken its cue from The Great Movie Ride's finale, which features the vehicles stopping beneath a giant movie screen playing a series of vignettes from classic movies.

Imagineers were faced with the problem of how to make a 30-minute show of film clips entertaining and enthralling for a captive audience. The idea for a live actor to enter the screen appeared at a very early stage - whilst researching European film, the Imagineers stumbled upon Le Ballon Rouge (1956), a French film involving a child who has a grand adventure with a simple red balloon. Taking this concept, the Imagineers then planned in depth a concept whereby the audience would become annoyed with a parent unable to keep a child's balloon down. As the situation got out of hand, the balloon was to have been sucked into the film to ultimately depart on a grand adventure through movie classics, blundering parent in tow. Despite an entire storyboard and presentation video being created for this concept, it was eventually abandoned when Imagineers decided an audience would not become emotionally involved with the balloon or parent, fearing cries of "Just buy your kid another one!" from guests. Instead, they looked for love...

Nothing captivates an audience like a love story, but how could the star get on screen? After a trip to the cinema, Senior Creative Executive Tom Fitzgerald knew exactly what the key would be: a mobile phone. The team set about drawing up lists of the greatest Hollywood and European films, before having to consolidate their choices down to those they could fit into a workable story. With this done, the huge legal team were tasked with acquiring the license rights from the studios, producers, directors, actors and music composer of every single shot used. This was without doubt the biggest single grouping of licenses ever collected for use in a motion picture. Where there was uncertainly whether an agreement could be made with other studios, however, such as The Good, The Bad and The Ugly sequence, a reserve sequence was also designed (in that case a generic Western).

In addition to the rain, bullet holes, dynamite flash, door and sword, several other in-theatre effects were considered during the attraction's design phase, such as a UFO crashing through the building or a man riding a horse through the theatre during the Wild West sequence. Another idea involved a man being thrown out of a door in the screen to land on the stage, though all were eventually dismissed as too impractical for an hourly show.

With the script written, actors and supporting artists could be found. Martin Short was chosen for his good commitment to several other Theme Park Productions projects at Walt Disney World in the past, as well as his very emotive facial expressions, essential for the multilingual audience. He agreed to the project after reading plans to use a scene from Harold Lloyd's 'Safety Last'. Principal photography began just six months before the first previews of the park and lasted only two weeks. Indoor sets and greenscreen where shot on two soundstages in downtown LA, whilst the outdoor medieval segment was shot on location elsewhere in California. Swordfighting choreography and extras were provided by SwordPlay Fencing Studios, Inc. For the Pinocchio and other underwater sequences, Martin Short (luckily a qualified diver) filmed in a giant water tank with special underwater cameras and lighting equipment created by HydroFlex,Inc. for an entire day to get the right effect of him actually being underwater. Shots were planned in advance so that the very minimum of background sets needed to built, whilst many of the later segments use greenscreen.

The film footage licensed from other studios had to be completely cleaned up and remastered to make it suitable for the huge, unforgiving 70mm digital projection screen used in the theatre. The production crew even went to the effort of tracking down the original matte painting of the Yellow Brick Road and Emerald City from 'The Wizard of Oz' to re-photograph it digitally. In contrast, the new footage filmed to match these archive films had to be downgraded until the two matched perfectly. The films were researched in-depth so that wherever possible similar lenses, lighting and film stock could be used for the new scenes.

The release of Monsters, Inc. in November 2001 allowed the production team to swap out a segment from the Titanic doors sequence that wasn't playing very well amongst themselves. The scene originally featured Scream (1996), but the release of Monsters, Inc. brought a perfect, family-friendly replacement in the form of Sulley's roar, whilst also introducing the important modern form of computer animation by Pixar into the production.

Between guest previews in February 2002 and the park opening on 16th March, another scene was changed - in the underwater sequence, an encounter with the Nautilus from Disney's '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea' was swapped out for Sean Connery's 'The Hunt for Red October', leaving just three Disney films in the entire production.

The Disney Studio 2 theatre has played host to countless events and film previews over the years, such as exclusive screenings of the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy for cast, crew and invited guests, or various previews of new Walt Disney Pictures films for shareholders. During the grand opening event of the park, the theatre hosted a special press conference with Jay Rasulo and various other important figures in the creation of the park.

The Ciné-Classics Band performs several well known movie hits before every Cinémagique show since 2007.

© WDS Fans