When Highland Park native Adam Bezark works, sparks fly, people scream and youngsters gasp in awe.
Bezark was the creative genius behind the Hong Kong ’97 Spectacular on July 1. He turned the “Terminator” movies into the wild, futuristic, 3-D experience that has been breaking attendance records at Universal Studios’ Orlando area theme park since the ride opened last year. Anyone who has taken that park’s “Jaws” ride or Universal’s “Jurassic Park” attraction in the Los Angeles area has experienced firsthand his skill at bringing on the thrills and surprises.
“IllumiNations,” Walt Disney World’s famed nightly light and music show over the Epcot Center lagoon, has delighted millions of youngsters and adults since he developed the laser attraction in 1983. But those are just a few of the attractions and celebrations that bear his stamp.
In his converted garage studio behind his house in Glendale, Calif., he cooks up ideas for such clients as the artistically surreal Cirque du Soleil, Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks SKG, MCA Recreation, Mirage Resorts, Paramount Parks and Walt Disney Imagineering.
Scattered around are remnants from the “Terminator 2” 3-D attraction, including a plaster skull sporting a pair of 3-D glasses.
“I think the `Terminator’ attraction has the coolest 3-D movie ever made. Plus you have live actors running around in the theater and great special effects. It’s so dynamic. It feels like a ride, but the audience is sitting in a movie theater,” Bezark said with the enthusiasm of a child let loose in a wonderland. But, of course, wonder is his stock in trade.
The attraction, conceived in 1992, was the last of about 60 projects that Bezark developed when he was the senior show designer from 1990 to 1995 at the L.A.-based Landmark Entertainment Group, the world’s largest independent theme park design company.
Since he left, his titles are director, writer, computer guru, receptionist and lone employee of The Bezark Co. Just don’t call him a special-effects man.
“I spend a lot of my career fighting the label `special-effects guy.’ The shows I work on use special effects, but I don’t create them. I’m the guy who thinks of the wacky ideas, writes them out and talks to the special-effects people about what I’m looking for,” Bezark said.
In the kind of appealing, open-handed manner that marks his conversation, he added, “I’ve no useful, practical skills of any kind. Everyone else has real talent. I’m a creative guy, the communicator.”
Industry co-workers and friends dispute the self-deprecating assessment.
After working with Bezark on the Hong Kong extravaganza, Los Angeles producer Don Mischer, an 11-time Emmy winner, said he was impressed.
“He is a prolific idea man, but he also is one of the leaders in his field in creating elements out of light and lasers and smoke. He really knows his business,” Mischer said by phone from Los Angeles.
“I felt there were no limits on his imagination,” said Mischer, who has done countless television specials and produced the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics in Atlanta last year, with help from Bezark. “He stimulates the entire project. He’ll push you to go a little further than you might otherwise go and make you want to try a little harder to do something different. He’s a good person to have on your team.”
That expertise and the ability to create shows that startle the senses are no accident, according to people who know Bezark.
Highland Park attorney and boyhood buddy Tony Blumberg remembers the productions they mounted as campers and counselors at Camp Nebagamon near Hayward, Wis., and the plays that Bezark directed while a student at Highland Park High School back in the mid- to late 1970s.
“The shows he did always were imaginative. He is unfettered by any preconceived notions about anything. He has a broad sense of what can be done even if it has not been done before. He’s brilliantly creative,” Blumberg said.
It’s exciting to Bezark’s mom, Mary Jane, to see how the child who was enthralled by magic is creating magical scenes for the world to enjoy.
“It’s thrilling to see a project that you have been hearing about since its beginning. The Hong Kong celebration was gorgeous,” she said. Mary Jane and husband Leonard “Bud” Bezark, who still live in Highland Park, were part of a family entourage that traveled to Hong Kong to observe the changeover from British to Chinese rule and Bezark’s spectacular production.
“Adam has almost unlimited amounts of imagination, but early on he was into theater. When he was 4 years old he started doing magic tricks. Fortunately he could read early because I couldn’t make out what the instructions meant,” she said.
But any reference here to the passage of time should not lead to an assumption that at thirtysomething (Hollywood’s worship of youth precludes his stating exact age) Bezark is a grown-up, at least not in the this-is-the-way-things-are-done manner that is favored by “suits.”
“He hasn’t changed one bit,” said Bezark’s dad. “We don’t have one picture of him as a kid where he’s not in costume.”
Bezark’s wife, psychologist Carolyn Keatinge, a University of Southern California faculty adjunct, said that after almost 10 years of marriage, she can understand the compulsion and focus that he brings to his projects. “He’s very artistic, very creative. Adam was always fascinated about how things worked but not from a mechanical standpoint. I understand he used to spend hours and days working on puppets and homemade movies,” she said.
(Incidentally, Keatinge is seeing the same playful traits from one of their children, 5-year-old John. The others are year-old twins Catherine and Conner.)
But how this creative kid moved from high school and camp productions to mounting the $12.5 million Hong Kong spectacle and the $60 million “Terminator 2” attraction is a lesson in the lasting impression made by childhood experiences.
Family and friends point to Disneyland, which Bezark visited when he was 13, as the defining career factor. “Obsession” was the word they all use in describing the impact.
“He had an obsession about Disney. Talk to anyone who knew him–his best friends,” Keatinge said. “After he saw the haunted house (at Disneyland), he spent a year in researching how it might have worked.”
A call to Blumberg added firsthand insight. Blumberg’s family took the trip with the Bezarks.
“High school and camp were big influences, but Disney and the Haunted Mansion had the largest influence on him. He was fascinated by the Haunted Mansion and tried to re-create some of it at home,” Blumberg said.
“I wrote (Disneyland officials) a couple of letters,” Bezark said. “One was five pages long, saying, `Here’s what I think you’re doing; is this right?’ They sent me back a polite letter. It was the first time I heard the word `proprietary.’ They said, `You might enjoy a book we found very interesting.’ It was about techniques used in the 1939 World’s Fair. The Highland Park Library dug up a copy for me. It referred to the kinds of illusions that were used at the Haunted Mansion. The book was their way of hinting and a confirmation that I was on the right track,” Bezark said.
After that first trip to Disneyland, Bezark was stuck on the world that Walt created. “For the next three years you couldn’t have a conversation with me without my turning the conversation around to Disneyland,” he said.
But where does a Disney geek go to learn how to create theme-park attractions? Bezark found out that Disney attractions were developed by either the company’s animators or the musical entertainment department. But he was not considering art or music as a career. He just wanted to design the attractions.
“So I had to figure out where do you go to become a theme-park designer. The answer was nowhere. The only place doing it was Disney. And they just took people who worked in the specialty that was needed for different pieces,” he said.
Highland Park High School college counselor Jim Alexander suggested he find a school where he could combine what he thought he would need. They narrowed the search to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, which offers an interdisciplinary honors program and had the added advantage of being close to Disneyland in Anaheim.
“I had to be near Disneyland because I wanted to be in the theme park business. There weren’t any other places–just Disney. Since then themed entertainment has skyrocketed,” he said, pointing out themed Las Vegas and Orlando resorts, urban entertainment centers, other theme parks and such restaurants as Hard Rock Cafe and Planet Hollywood.
But even at USC he had to create his own major. “The people in it were combining biology and chemistry or history and pre-law. Here I come combining cinema, theater, English, architecture and design. I was a source of infinite amusement to them. But they were lovely and very helpful. They allowed me to set up field study courses at Disney and let me do an internship there.”
But after graduation, his farsighted background won him and his then Los Angeles partner, musician Don Dorsey, only a few consulting jobs until a few years later, when Walt Disney World accepted a proposal they submitted to do IllumiNations.
They continued the IllumiNations job for about seven years, until Dorsey went on his own. As a consultant, Bezark continued to develop rides and shows for Disney and then Universal and other theme park firms. Bezark also wrote and co-directed the closing ceremony that celebrated San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.
The rest, as they say, is history, up through the Hong Kong ’97 Spectacular that he arranged as artistic director.
That show was sponsored by the Better Hong Kong Foundation, a group of wealthy business people who wanted to stage a memorable show for the region as an expression of confidence in its future. The production had to honor the Chinese heritage and fill the space, the two-mile-long, mile-wide Victoria Harbor, with something large enough to be seen by people watching from distant hills. “It was very challenging,” Bezark said in something of an understatement.
His answer was a combination of traditional Chinese music coordinated with spectacular fireworks, lasers and 31 barges carrying 60-foot-long floats that had about three-story-high giant Chinese lanterns shaped in traditional symbols. Serving as the focal point was a 15-story-high tower in the harbor that featured a stylistic rendering of Hong Kong’s “pearl of the Orient” symbol.
“People were amazed. You kept hearing `Oh’ and `Wow,’ ” Bezark said.
Wow, indeed: To be involved in such historic moments as the turnover of Hong Kong and the Olympics. To travel and learn about such fascinating places as Hong Kong and Japan. And to work with such innovators as the Cirque du Soleil and Disney attraction creators and leading movie writer-directors Stephen Spielberg and Jim Cameron.
Earning the kind of esteem that brings in stellar clients from Hong Kong to Universal Studios theme parks might be enough to keep a person plugging away in the profession. But Bezark is not satisfied. Although mega-attractions have not lost their appeal, he also would like to write and direct movies. It is a bug he caught while working on the “Terminator 2” and “Jaws” attractions.
Big-screen dreams aside, a listener hearing Bezark’s reverence when he speaks about attractions at various theme parks has to wonder if the youngster who returned to Disney’s Haunted Mansion more than a dozen times would ever totally give up the chance to create another crowd-pleaser. And just the mention of a ride at any theme park in the world sets him off about its inception and creator.
Does he know them all? “Pretty much. That’s my job, ma’am. I’m a genuine theme-park nerd. I love theme parks. They are the ultimate playground,” he said. “They’re so much fun.”
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Bezark has a Web site at: members.aol.com/ajbezark/index.html
