Promises of a really big show

Near DeSoto, Kan., limousines, high-price suits, fancy pictures, and visions of glory and profit line the road Dorothy, Toto, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and the Scarecrow once tread. At the end of the road, a man still sits behind the curtain -- only we Midwestern rubes have yet to be able to pull back the curtain.

For the past decade, officials at the Oz Entertainment Company, d.b.a. The Wonderful World of Oz, have impressed Kansas legislators and local and state business leaders with expensive renderings, tales of development, and the promise of making Kansas a giant tourist destination with all the big business opportunities and profits that goal entails. Meanwhile, Kansas' state and local officials salivate at the prospect of increasing their tax revenue coffers.

Even so, nearly every local official with an interest in knowing about Oz asks what's become a standard question: "Who's the man behind the curtain?"

When it comes to Oz "visionary" Robert B. Kory, each layer of curtain is thicker than the last. Kory depends on some very savvy public relations people -- and an office staff that pushes pretty pictures of what looks to be a very expensive amusement park -- to help him stay under wraps.

Moreover, it's clear Kory doesn't talk to the media. While trying to run down Kory, I ran squarely into Oz PR man extraordinaire David Westbrook of the high-power Corporate Communications public relations firm. He is an amiable, soft-spoken man who has worked for Kory on the Oz project since 1998. The first call I made for this story was to Westbrook. I called his office as many as three times a day over a 10-day period in an effort to get an interview with Kory.

At first, Westbrook said that Kory wouldn't do an interview because of "the sensitive nature of negotiations" that involved the transfer of 9,065 acres of the old Sunflower plant from the U.S. Army to the state of Kansas, then to Oz.

After explaining to Westbrook that the scope of public subsidy and public expenditure for the project warranted an interview with what has been termed the "engine of the Oz project," Westbrook promised to make a "deal" with me. I had to interview Westbrook first so he could see where the story was going. Such screening is not uncommon in journalism, and mostly it's a way to determine if a story will be "safe."

After the interview with Westbrook, I continued with my phone exercise. Occasionally, calls were returned, sometimes by one of Westbrook's two assistants, sometimes by Westbrook. The calls yielded standard public relations promises of something soon. One promise hinged upon Westbrook's calling Kory's California office after it opened, then getting back to me with information on where Kory stood on an interview.

But the phone was silent -- until Westbrook called with a last-minute promise of answers to written questions I faxed to Kory's Los Angeles office. During the whole process, requests for Kory's biography and photograph were answered with promises of their being in the mail.

The mailbox is empty.

Robert Kory is a Los Angeles entertainment attorney. He received a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Yale University in 1973 and went on to the University of Chicago law school. According to various media sources, he became a devotee of Transcendental Meditation (TM), a program of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

TM is a mediation method that constitutes one to 20 minutes of meditation twice a day. Information from the TM Web site claims that TM is "the most effective technique available for gaining deep relaxation, eliminating stress, increasing creativity and intelligence, and attaining inner happiness and fulfillment." Kory worked for TM in the 1970s, and the program served as the foundation for six self-help books he wrote through the 1970s and 1980s, one of which is titled TM Program for Business People.

His first entree in local business came when he joined Michael Love, Thomas Hulett, and local businessman Gus Fasone in Sandstone Entertainment Group in the late 1980s. The company managed Sandstone and Memorial Hall in the early- to mid-1990s but ran aground financially and had to be bailed out by the Wyandotte County government.

Beyond that description, the man behind the curtain is an enigmatic figure loved and cherished by his friends but largely unknown to his critics.

Fasone pitched the Oz idea to a skeptical Kory in April 1991, according to Amusement Business magazine. Kory reportedly went through a period of due diligence to see whether the idea would float. Convinced it would, Kory latched onto Fasone's idea. Kory became the principal driver behind the project. Since 1991, Kory has developed a vision of a multi-million-dollar theme park based on the popular movie The Wizard of Oz and the late-19th century books by L. Frank Baum.

Kory negotiated rights to the Oz characters through Turner Entertainment. The full details of the deal with Turner, now Time Warner, are not public. But according to a feasibility study by Economics Research Associates (ERA), an L.A.-based land-use economic consulting firm specializing in recreation economics, the Oz project lists as expenses payments to Time Warner and the Baum family of $2.9 million.