By Chris Kornelis
The tram tour at Universal Studios didn't have a lot of in-house fans.
Movie stars didn't like being gawked at by tourists. Producers thought it got in the way.
When Jay Stein took over the tour in 1967 at the age of 26, it consisted of little more than a pair of trams. But Stein, who died Nov. 5 at the age of 88, had what his biographer, Sam Gennawey, called "the imagination of opportunity." He looked around the studio and saw leftover props, unused real estate, and the creatives and characters who made movies and television. Over the next quarter-century, he employed them all to turn the tram tour into a theme-park empire that included Universal Studios Hollywood and Universal Studios Florida -- now part of Comcast's NBCUniversal.
His parks were different from Disney's, his fiercest competitor. His theme parks didn't have to be as cheerful or family-friendly. Attractions could be startling, scary, even terrifying -- whatever it took for customers to feel more like participants in blockbuster movies than observers of the filmmaking process. He didn't want to just show you a shark that was used in "Jaws." He wanted to drop your tram toward a lagoon as you see blood float to the surface of the water.
"That scares the hell out of you," Stein told the Los Angeles Times in 2023. "That's what I lived for, to make this thing come alive."
A start in the mailroom
Jay Stein was born to Samuel and Sylvia Stein in New York on June 17, 1937, and grew up mostly in Los Angeles. He studied political science at the University of California, Berkeley, before dropping out. He joined the California National Guard and met a bunkmate in basic training who worked in the mailroom at Revue Studios, which was owned by MCA. In October of 1959, Stein got a job in the mailroom, too. It was his introduction to the industry, giving him proximity to executives and stars like Cary Grant and Alfred Hitchcock.
Stein worked his way into the production office at MCA, which, by the early 1960s, owned Universal Studios and Universal Pictures, before being offered a chance to run the studio tour. If there wasn't a TV show or movie in production -- or, if no actor was seen -- the tour could be a bit of a letdown. To create a more consistent experience, Stein looked for ways to use empty parts of the lot to build attractions related to TV shows and movies that would create a guaranteed look at the moviemaking process -- or an approximation of it -- like creating a flash flood that threatened the tram that he had built on an unused portion of the lot.
Slowly, Stein turned the studio tour into a theme park, with attractions built around movies and TV shows like "Star Trek" and "The Incredible Hulk," a long-running live show based on "Conan the Barbarian" and a face-to-face encounter with King Kong that brought customers close enough to smell the banana on the ape's breath.
A breakthrough came when Stein heard about a shark movie being made by a young filmmaker named Steven Spielberg. Stein got one of the sharks from the production. The animatronic Great White gave his engineers as much trouble as it gave Spielberg on set. But, once they got it working, it was a revelation, both for Stein and Spielberg, who became Universal's marquee theme-park collaborator.
"When they built the Jaws ride, I learned a big lesson," Spielberg said in the "Epic Ride: The Story of Universal Theme Parks" documentary series, "and that is if an audience really wants to participate in something and get really emotionally involved, they are going to suspend their disbelief."
Moving in on Disney
Stein, who eventually became chairman and chief executive of MCA Recreation Services Group, grew his mandate beyond the studio lot. He secured the rights for MCA to operate a variety of businesses for the National Park Service, including tours of the National Mall in Washington, D.C. He also won the concessions contract for Yosemite National Park, which included operating hotels, campgrounds and ski lifts.
"He could see things happening in places that other people couldn't quite see," Gennawey said in an interview. "He could see how, for instance, Yosemite is the equivalent of a theme park."
In 1981, Stein pitched Paramount on partnering on a Florida park while Michael Eisner was at the studio. Later, when Eisner was chief executive at Disney, Stein accused the company of stealing Universal's idea for USF and using it to build Disney-MGM Studios Theme Park (now Disney's Hollywood Studios) at Disney World, a claim Disney and Eisner rejected.
Stein said Disney lifted so many of their ideas that they had to redesign the whole park. Ron Bension, who worked closely with Stein and succeeded him in running Universal's parks business in the '90s, said that the fact that Stein was able to sell the idea for a Florida park not just to the company, but investors, then stick with it for more than a decade to get it open, says a lot about what made Stein successful.
"That kind of tenacity and attention to detail and creativity and ability to pivot and stay the course over 10 years, 12 years, and then succeed and prove that he was right, is just incredible," he said. "Very few people have that kind of patience or drive."
Stein's survivors include his wife, Connie Stein, his son, Gary, and his daughter, Darolyn Bellemeur.
Relentless Drive
Stein didn't have the resources or staff that Disney had. While Disney had an army of its famous Imagineers to develop rides and attractions, Stein had a small staff and outside vendors. Tom Williams -- who worked with Stein for years and later ran Universal's parks business -- said Stein knew how to drive people to create amazing things.
"What really separated him from others is he was unrelenting and absolutely uncompromising," Williams said. "For Jay Stein, perfection wasn't the enemy of great. He wanted perfection and he was uncompromising."
His drive was known to cross over into workplace viciousness.
"I watched him decimate a few people in a few presentations," said Gary Goddard, who worked with Stein on numerous attractions, adding: "It was tough sometimes being in the room with him when he was not happy with a particular person."
Stein could be impatient and demanding at home, too.
"There was no moderation to his priorities of items; everything, everything was due yesterday," Robert A. Finkelstein, who worked with Stein at MCA and counted him as a mentor, wrote in his foreword to Gennawey's book, "JayBangs." "I recall that Jay's first wife had to have the water running in the bathroom at the time he got home so that he would not have to wait for the water to get hot to wash his hands." (Gennawey said that Stein confirmed Finkelstein's recollection.)
Bension pointed out that Stein, who retired from MCA in 1993, could also be loyal, kind and generous. He said that his tough management style was in keeping with how Hollywood worked in the '60s, '70s and '80s, particularly under MCA bosses Lew Wasserman and Sid Sheinberg.
"Jay was intense and he could be difficult and he could be extremely tough and sometimes unreasonable, but when you look back at his body of work and successes, there was a means to the end," Bension said. "And, as they say, no animals were hurt in the filming of this movie."
Write to Chris Kornelis at chris.kornelis@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 07, 2026 15:22 ET (20:22 GMT)
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