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In the early months of 1987, Burbank city officials worked toward an agreement with Disney to build a theme-park-slash-shopping-center in their downtown district, an agreement that would go through nine drafts. At issue was the money: Disney wanted to buy the land for next to nothing. Disney also wanted the city to pay for a parking structure large enough to hold 3,500 cars, which it would rent back from the city for roughly a million dollars a year. In February, when talking to the press, Disney CEO Michael Eisner hinted that a studio tour attraction might be built somewhere in Southern California: “We are pretty well committed in the Los Angeles area,” he told one reporter, “Orange County, the San Fernando Valley, Burbank and so forth—to creating a second attraction.” Though Eisner didn’t name the site under consideration, the reporter understood that any studio park in that area would put Disney into “head-to-head competition with MCA on both coasts.” […]