WDW Magazine April 2016 - Disney's Hollywood Studios | Page 109

Gavin - Interesting. And now, is everyone’s goal to get to where you are today? And when you
started, did you say, “Oh, I want to have a leading project someday?” And how did you start with
Imagineering?
Joe - Well, my early career is completely disorganized and accidental. So, I was recruited to be
just a worker when we were building up Epcot. I had been teaching set design and doing set
design at a high school in the San Fernando Valley. One of the executive’s kids went to that
school; he kind of recruited me. But then of course, for quite some time, I was no longer directing
anything. I came in at a very, very basic entry level job in the model shop. I did not have any kind
of cohesive vision of something I wanted to do or wanted to be at Imagineering. But I did know
that I had a body of skills to offer that at least my first job was not requiring of me.
And so, it probably took about four years for me to end up in a job where the skills that I had most
well developed were now being asked of me. And now, I could move forward into progressively
more and more directorial positions. And it probably took about eight years until the Adventurers
Club before I was like in-charge of something that was my idea, where the things that are going
to happen are going to be more or less described by me, and in the end, I’m going to be the guy
who says “I am responsible for that project” and it looks like what I thought it was going to be and
is a thing that I was in charge of. And that would be the Adventurers Club which opened in ’89,
and I started working on in ’86-’87. So, you can follow that timeline from starting here to being
in-charge of something–not a huge thing, but something. And then of course, the weird part is I
went from that to Animal Kingdom which is a giant jump.