Experience Required

"If we thought that a roller coaster would help us tell the story of Lincoln's life, we'd build one," says Rogers, who has a round, rubbery face, close-cut salt-and-pepper hair, slate-blue eyes, and the smooth voice of a classical-radio announcer. To indicate that he's in charge -- but in a casual, southern California kind of way -- he often wears a sweater draped over his shoulders, with the arms tied across his chest.

"The invasion of theme-park technologies and techniques into the rest of the world is based on the notion that people have new ways of acquiring and digesting information," Rogers continues. "You either get with the program, or you plan not to reach those people."

All Business Is Show Business

Bob Rogers began his career creating and selling illusions. As a teenager, one of his first employers was Merlin's Magic Shop at Disneyland. Rogers has a great collection of well-burnished tales about his life and work, several of which involve this first job in the theme-park industry. "I'd perform a trick for the customers: That was the show," he says. "Then I'd drag them over to the cash register to sell them the trick: That was the business part. Show . . . business. It has made us a very results-oriented company."

Rogers proudly explains that he has been fired three times from Disney. Even people in the industry who do not know him well know his story. Rogers was first fired as a teenager, for what he himself describes as "deviant behavior." He was so curious about the theme park that he occasionally accepted assignments -- like working on the park's railroad -- for which he hadn't been trained. "I was totally fascinated by Disneyland," he says. "It was like a huge toy train set at 1:1 scale. I wanted to know what made the pirates move, where the parade went at night, where all of the cash went. I should have been put in management training, but instead I was fired and told not to bother trying to get a job there ever again."

Four years later, after attending Stanford University and the California Institute of the Arts, Rogers got another job at Disney -- as a screenwriter. Again he was fired, this time for not turning out the kinds of scripts that Disney wanted. He spent several years directing television commercials and short educational films ("I can tell you everything you need to know about longitude versus latitude") before landing a third job with Disney in the late 1970s, working with the legendary Imagineering group. At Imagineering, he helped develop film concepts for Epcot, which at the time was still in the planning stages.

After Rogers finished production on "Impressions de France," a film for the French pavilion at Epcot, Disney Imagineering chief Marty Sklar offered him the opportunity to go freelance. General Motors needed someone to develop two shows for its "World of Motion" attraction at Epcot, and Disney didn't have enough internal resources to "guarantee the result," Rogers explains. Rogers agreed to leave Disney (he concedes that he wasn't actually fired this time; "fired from Disney three times" just makes for a better story, he says) and start an independent firm to do the GM work. One project was "The Bird and the Robot" -- a humorous show about assembly-line automation that paired an industrial robot with a wisecracking "animatronic" toucan. The other project, "The Water Engine," was a rather derisive animated film about alternatives to the internal-combustion engine.

BRC, which started out in Rogers's garage, grew rapidly, doing work mostly for theme parks, expos, and world's fairs. For World Expo '86, in Vancouver, BRC designed three different attractions. One of them, a large-format film called "Rainbow War," was nominated for an Academy Award. Another, "Spirit Lodge," served as a test bed for a set of techniques that BRC trademarked as Holavision. Essentially an enhanced version of a 19th-century magic trick called Pepper's Ghost, Holavision uses projections against a sheet of glass to produce the illusion that humans onstage are interacting with spectral images. In "Spirit Lodge," an elderly Native American storyteller coaxes smoky pictures of people and animals out of a campfire. At the Lincoln library, Holavision will give visitors the impression that Lincoln is coming back from beyond through a portrait.

In the late 1980s, BRC began work on a new $70 million visitor's center for the Johnson Space Center, in Houston -- a project that would get other science centers, museums, and various nonprofit institutions interested in BRC's technology-rich, high-glitz, narrative-centric presentation style. At the center, a giant 870-millimeter film, narrated by real astronauts, describes what it takes to join the corps at NASA and to survive the rigorous training process. Interactive stations let visitors practice landing a shuttle at Kennedy Space Center, and a live show gives a sample of zero-gravity life in a space station. NASA approached BRC again when it needed a design for the Apollo/Saturn V Center, which opened in Florida in 1996. The center re-creates an Apollo-era launch and the Apollo 11 moon landing, including a full-sized lunar module that descends from a starry sky to the crater-scarred surface of the moon.