The Animated Man (36 page)

Now in conclusion, I want to say that I have given twenty years of hard work, I have battled against some very heavy odds, I have sacrificed and I have gambled to bring this business to the place where it is now, and believe me, I don't intend to do any differently now. To me, the future of the business has never looked better. The possibilities in this organization have never looked better. And I can assure you boys that I still have plenty of pep and fight left in me, and I have the utmost confidence in my ability to solve our problems and to run this business; and I want you to know that I am rarin' to go.

Here is the answer to the crisis with which we're confronted. I'll put it in a nutshell. There are three things: quality production is number one; efficient operation is number two, which leads to the third—production turnover. That is the solution to this whole thing.

Simplifying it down to the individual, I would say that . . . the whole thing, is this:
A good honest day's work
. Believe me, that will be a cure for all our problems. You can't deny that it is individual efficiency that leads to collective efficiency. . . .

This business has been, and still is, a pioneering venture. Every one of you men here today are pioneers. Most of you are young, and a big percentage of you—a very large percentage of you—have been in this business less than five years. Regardless of what you think, you've got a hell of a lot to learn. Regardless of what you think about conditions, every one of you should feel lucky that you're in the business that you intend to make your career. We should all feel fortunate that we are here, that we have a chance, that we're in on the ground floor. Probably throughout the country there are many men who are more capable than any one of us who don't even have the chance to secure an art education, or even maybe a high school education. I honestly believe that instead of complaining, we should count our blessings.

This business is ready to go ahead. If you want to go ahead with it, you've got to be prepared—you've got to be ready for some hard work—you've got to strengthen yourselves in every way—you've got to make yourselves strong. If the business is to survive the many storms that are ahead of it, it must be made strong; and that strength comes from the individual strength of the employees.

Disney ended his speech with yet another appeal for strength, this one barely distinguishable from a threat:

“Don't forget this—it's the law of the universe that the strong shall survive and the weak must fall by the way, and I don't give a damn what idealistic plan is cooked up, nothing can change that.”

In the spring of 1941, under pressure from the Bank of America and the holders of preferred stock, Walt Disney Productions agreed to scale back its production costs to about fifteen thousand dollars a week. According to Walt Disney himself, that meant he had to hold the negative cost of new features to around $700,000, or one-third the cost of
Pinocchio
or
Fantasia
.
¹
Since labor costs made up 85 to 90 percent of Disney's total costs, implementing such severe economies would mean laying off more than half the staff.

Disney loyalists later promoted the idea that the studio had been all but immune to layoffs until the 1941 crisis. “Employment by Disney was tantamount almost to a pension,” Gunther Lessing said, “as it was almost impossible to get Walt to fire anybody who possessed the least promise.”
²
Hal Adelquist, Disney's personnel manager, testified at a National Labor Relations Board hearing in 1942 that the layoffs in the spring of 1941 were the studio's first.
³

That was not true. Low-key layoffs—not just individual firings, but small group layoffs that took place on what a 1951 union publication called “a fairly regular semi-annual ‘ax-day' ”
⁴
—were routine at Disney's in the 1930s. Isolated layoffs in response to the studio's financial crisis had begun in 1940. By the spring of 1941, the staff had already shrunk by more than a hundred people from its peak of more than twelve hundred. What was new in the spring of 1941 was the prospect of much larger layoffs than ever before, with employee performance only one of many factors in deciding who was to leave (although Lessing, for one, could not resist turning up his nose at the “dead wood” that was being eliminated “because of inferior ability in most cases”).
⁵

It did not help that the studio was much larger and seemed far more impersonal
to many employees than it had a few years earlier. “When they did start laying off some guys,” the animator Jack Bradbury said, “it seemed like the fellows up in the clerical type work, upstairs, never seemed to diminish at all. You'd see these guys running around with papers you'd have to fill out, duplicates for every bit of work you did, and they never seemed to cut down. There were always plenty of them.”
⁶

After Disney's speeches to his employees, sentiment swung sharply in the Screen Cartoonists Guild's direction. Art Babbitt epitomized the shift: not only did he leave the federation and join the guild on February 18, 1941—just a week after the second of Disney's two antiunion speeches—but in March he was elected chairman of the guild's Disney unit.
⁷

The guild had presented Disney with membership cards signed by a majority of the employees in its proposed bargaining unit, but Disney insisted on a secret ballot. This was probably not a negotiating ploy. Disney quite likely believed that his employees would choose him over the union if they could make their choice in secret. “My boys have been there, have grown up in the business with me,” he said in 1947, in a characteristic expression of his paternalism, “and I didn't feel like I could sign them over to anybody. They were vulnerable at that time. They were not organized.”
⁸
But of course many of them
were
organized, only not in a way that Disney approved; and a high percentage of the people who worked for him had not “grown up in the business” with Disney but had instead been hired during his studio's furious expansion after the success of
Snow White
.

On May 20, 1941, Disney sent this memorandum to about twenty employees: “Will you please be in 3-C-12 [a projection room] at 5:15 this afternoon?” There, Disney fired them personally, reading aloud a statement in which he assured them, “This release is not based on unsatisfactory performance on your part.” Steve Bosustow, one of those dismissed, remembered that another employee asked Disney, “What do we do now?” Disney replied: “I don't know. Start a hot-dog stand.”
⁹

It is not clear how many of the laid-off employees were guild members when Disney fired them (or exactly how many people were in the group). Lessing, the Disney attorney, contended later that only a half dozen were members but that many of the others joined the union after they were fired. Dave Hilberman, a leader of the guild as its secretary, said, to the contrary, that “eighteen or so” were members, and “that since the majority were union, we couldn't let it go.”
¹⁰
In any case, the guild, no doubt correctly, believed that the layoffs, in combination with Disney's refusal to bargain, were a challenge it had to meet.

When the guild's membership voted on the following Monday, May 26, to strike unless Disney met with a union committee, Disney upped the ante. He fired Art Babbitt the next day, through a letter from Lessing that the studio's police chief hand-delivered as Babbitt left the studio restaurant. Lessing told Babbitt he was being fired because he had disregarded warnings against proselytizing for the union on company time. Babbitt had admitted to Adelquist in a transcribed conversation that he had done so, but that was in March, and the timing of Babbitt's firing was a thumb in the union's eye.
¹¹
A picket line went up on May 28, 1941.

According to a memorandum by Lessing, 1,079 people were on the Disney payroll at the time of the strike; 294 employees within what he called the guild's “proper” jurisdiction went out on strike, 352 stayed in. Several employees—“perhaps five”—went out only one day; 37 others returned before the strike ended. Another hundred employees honored the guild's picket line.
¹²

“When the strike was called,” Hilberman said, “many of the people who had signed up stayed in, and many of the people who hadn't signed came out.”
¹³
The sense that working in Disney animation was more a calling than a job had by no means been entirely lost. The effects animator Jack Boyd voiced an attitude typical of many nonstriking Disney employees: “I figured I got the job on my own. They didn't ask me to come there, I would have worked for free—which we practically did.”
¹⁴

Disney later described the strike as a turning point in his own thinking. His father was “a great friend of the working man,” he said, “and yet he was a contractor and hired people. . . . I grew up believing a lot of that . . . but I was disillusioned. I found that you had to be very careful giving people anything. I feel that people must earn it. They must earn it. You can't give people anything.” His own experiences as an employer were such, Disney said, that “a lot of my dad's socialistic ideas began to go out the window. . . . Gradually I became a Republican.”

As the strike unfolded, the wounded feelings on both sides flared in outbursts like something out of divorce court, with Disney as the boorish husband and the union members his enraged spouse. Disney himself was a frequent target of taunts as he entered the studio (“Walt Disney, you ought to be ashamed,” Babbitt called out to him one day).
¹⁵
Disney was, as the animator Preston Blair noted, “a great Chaplin imitator and student,” and now he evoked Chaplin in confrontations with the strikers. One day, Blair recalled, Disney had driven through the picket line and was walking from his car to his office “when suddenly he cut loose with a wild Chaplin-like gesture of a man ripping off his coat to have a fist fight. Walt was suddenly the Tramp.”
¹⁶

Disney struggled to keep a feature schedule alive, but money was tight. By June 20, Roy Disney was in New York, trying to persuade not just RKO, the Disneys' current distributor, but also United Artists, their old distributor, to put more money into the Disney films. Roy told George Schaefer, RKO's president, that the Disney studio was planning three films—
Wind in the Willows, Bongo
, and
Uncle Remus
—to follow
Bambi
and an unnamed
Mickey Mouse
feature. Each film would cost $730,000 to $750,000, Roy said. But the Disneys were “without necessary finances to see this schedule through,” Schaefer wrote to another RKO executive, and were seeking financial aid from RKO, to the tune of thirty thousand dollars a week for fifteen months.
¹⁷
Schaefer was skeptical.

Four days later, Roy had a different offer for Arthur W. Kelly, UA's vice president. He wanted UA to put up half the cost—which he now set at a million dollars each—of three features (the rest would come from a bank loan). The list of planned features he presented to Kelly included not just the three that Schaefer listed, but also
Peter Pan
. Kelly was not interested in an investment that large.
¹⁸

The Disneys were in a bind. Even though they had planned to lay off many of their employees, they could not continue normal production with a reduced workforce during the strike. A critical factor was, ironically, that many strikers were from the studio's lower ranks—the very people, like the inkers and painters of cels, whose work was essential in the later stages of a film's production. The day before the strike, Disney had spoken to the inkers and painters to ask for their help in finishing
Bambi
, which by then was mainly in their department; he promised to support them if they crossed the picket line.
¹⁹
Every week of the strike pushed
Bambi
's release date further into the future and denied the studio desperately needed revenue. By August the studio's bank debt had risen to $3.5 million—$300,000 above the ceiling the Disneys had accepted just a few months earlier.
²⁰

On July 1, Disney outraged the guild by welcoming the intervention of Willie Bioff, a notorious labor racketeer who had been indicted in May on federal extortion charges.
²¹
Bioff and George E. Browne, president of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which embraced many of the movie industry's craft unions, were charged with (and eventually convicted of) extorting more than a half million dollars from producers by threatening strikes if they were not paid off. Bioff's involvement in the Disney strike was significant because of the control he exercised over other unions; by withholding support from the guild, he could make its position more difficult. On July 8, after the guild refused to let him negotiate a settlement, Bioff ordered
about a hundred union members who had been honoring the guild's picket lines to return to work.
²²

Roy Disney defended what he called “a lot of dealings with Bioff at that time. . . . As long as the guy's fighting with you, you welcome him on your side. Not to say that I was condoning Bioff. . . . But money was never the basic problem in this thing, as much as communism.”
²³
As far as the Disneys were concerned, Bioff's anti-Communist credentials were in order, whereas those of the strike's leaders definitely were not.

Dave Hilberman was a Communist Party member at the time of the strike,
²⁴
and a few other strikers and guild officials were party members or sympathizers. The guild was affiliated with the union that represented the painters of movie sets, and Herbert Sorrell, the painters' business representative, was repeatedly accused of being a Communist. Sorrell consistently denied the charge, but, in any case, his gravest offense was probably his longstanding hostility to Bioff. There has never been any reason to believe that the strike itself was called to serve Communist Party purposes.