The Animated Man (41 page)

Another source of strain was the presence of Lillian's older sister, Grace Papineau, after she was widowed. (Another sister, Hazel Sewell, and her daughter had lived with the Disneys in the early 1930s after Hazel's marriage to Glen Sewell ended.) Grace “lived with us for ages,” Diane Miller told Richard Hubler in 1968. “And a lot of the tension in our home had to do with the fact that there was an outsider at the dinner table every night who couldn't help but pass judgment in family arguments.”
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In the middle 1940s, around the time World War II ended, Disney installed a projection room in his home. “I used to bring the dailies home” from his earliest live-action productions, he said in 1956—referring to the
rushes
, or film shot the previous day—but he stopped because “my family would come in” and “they'd get so critical” after seeing several versions of a scene. Diane, who was eleven then, remembered that her father “was so excited. And I would sit there . . . and say, ‘Oh, that's corny. I don't like that.' I think I was embarrassed by the sentimentality of the scene. And it infuriated him and upset him.”
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Disney described his daughters—in a wry tone—as “very severe critics” on a radio show in 1946. “They have a favorite expression they use. They say, ‘That's corny, Dad.' ”
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Their target was
Song of the South
, a film roughly two-thirds live action and one-third animation that was based on Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus stories. It was the second of Disney's postwar features, released in November 1946. An Uncle Remus feature had been part of the studio's plans since the heady late 1930s; at least two research reports had been written by April 1938.
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He would have made
Song of the South
as an entirely animated feature, Disney said in 1956, but he “filled in” with live action because “I didn't have enough talent.”

Most of the writing of the film, live action and animation alike, took place in mid-1944. “When Walt started
Song of the South,”
the cartoon writer T. Hee said, “we thought he had guys there—including us [Hee and Ed Penner, who had both attended classes on play writing]—who could write the
screenplay for it. . . . He said, ‘Aw, hell, we've got to get some real writers. You guys aren't writers, you're just cartoonists.' ”
¹⁰⁵

When Disney chose someone to write a treatment, though, it was not a seasoned Hollywood screenwriter but Dalton S. Reymond, a native Louisianan who since 1936 had served as a “technical adviser” and “dialogue director” for several films set in the South.
¹⁰⁶
He was from all appearances a sort of professional Southerner, but he had no screenwriting credits. His treatment passed into the hands of two real screenwriters, first Maurice Rapf and then Morton Grant, but neither of them had imposing credentials, Grant especially (his career had been devoted mostly to “B” westerns for Warner Brothers).

As director of the live action, Disney chose H. C. Potter, who had directed the live-action portions of
Victory Through Air Power
—scenes shot on a sound stage, in which Alexander de Seversky expounded the ideas in his book. Potter was fired early in work on
Song of the South
, before location filming began—Hedda Hopper reported that “he and Walt couldn't see eye to eye on handling of the story”
¹⁰⁷
—and Disney handed direction to Harve Foster. There was nothing especially distinguished about Potter's career, but he had directed a dozen features, whereas Foster had worked until then only as an assistant director. His elevation was clearly a matter of expediency.
*

Probably without giving the matter much thought, Disney was transferring to live-action filming attitudes bred in work on his cartoons. In the writing of his animated shorts and features, Disney had arguably contributed more, as an editor, than any of his writers ever had, and his directors' decisions were likewise always subject to his extensive revisions. When he went into live action, he was not looking for writers or directors with strong ideas of their own. In any case,
Song of the South
's live-action story—sentimental and patronizing toward its black characters, if not “racist” by any reasonable standard—was no more than a frame for the three animated segments based on Harris's Brer Rabbit stories. (Reviewers were much kinder to the brisk and lively cartoons than to the rest of the film.)

The animation got under way in October 1944. Disney was more involved in the details of
Song of the South
than he had been in work on some of the preceding films, said Wilfred Jackson, who directed the animation. “It was easier to get him in on meetings; he'd come in more times just on his own hook to see what was going on, and you had a chance to try things out on him instead of waiting until it was a stale thing and you couldn't bother to bring it up at a meeting.”
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The film's live-action exteriors were filmed in Arizona early in 1945; Disney was there for four weeks in February and March. The rest of the film was shot at the Samuel Goldwyn studio in Hollywood. Wilfred Jackson remembered an incident during the filming that gives a rare glimpse of Disney's mind at work in a more urgent circumstance than the transcribed story meetings. The scene involved was a central musical number in which Uncle Remus, played by James Baskett, would begin singing “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” as the background changed from the darkness of his cabin to a bright, rear-projected cartoon.

“We had painted two backgrounds,” Jackson said, “and we had shot a rear-projection scene, which was timed, so that when you synchronized it with the clap-sticks and started the playback [the recording of the song] that Jim Baskett was to work to, it would have the last line of the story he was telling, and the beginning of the song. During the transition, we had a dissolve in the rear-projection background, from the background that was behind him, sitting in his cabin, talking to the little boy, and with the camera close on him, into this springtime scene. After the dissolve, the camera was to dolly back as Jim walked forward on the live-action set. We had the action all worked out so that the right things would be there, included in the camera, as it dollied back.”

But there was a hitch:

The rear-projection scene didn't work because we couldn't get the right color balance on the print out of Technicolor on time. . . . The technicalities of it kept putting this scene off, until we were right down to the very end of the live-action shooting. There was no more time on the schedule; the crew was going to be dismissed. The night before, we went down to the [Goldwyn] studio, where we were doing the live-action photography, and in their projection room, we saw the print that we got from Technicolor. It wouldn't do. The cameraman, Gregg Toland, was going to go over to Technicolor to work with them to get a print that we could use the next day. I went home, and I didn't sleep well, because I didn't know just what we were going to do if that didn't come out right. I slept with fingers and toes crossed, hoping we'd have a print we could use. I couldn't think of a way out; I was cornered. . . .

The next day, we came down [to Goldwyn], and Perce Pearce was there—he was Walt's associate producer—and Walt was there. When I saw Walt, I thought, “There's trouble.” And there was; the word was that the print wouldn't do. Walt called everybody on the set, and he had them all sit around in chairs, and he had coffee served, and he started talking. First of all, he turned to me and said, “Jack, the print won't do. What plans do you have to work this out, now that the print won't do?” I said, “Walt, I've thought about it, and thought
about it, and I don't know what to do.” He said, “Well, let's all talk about it, let's see what ideas anybody's got.” He called on different people, and some of them had some sort of a notion of just making a scene cut. Of course, I could think of that, but it wasn't going to accomplish the purpose, it wouldn't have given a nice effect. I didn't have to tell Walt you could cut from one scene to another.

Finally, after Walt had asked everybody else, Walt sat back, waited a while, and we all started to sweat. Then Walt said, “Would it be possible, Gregg, to arrange your lights in such a way that you could shine a light up on Jim's face and it wouldn't show on the background, and would it also be possible to have other lights that would light the set up, on signal? When I drop my hand, would it be possible for them to turn on all the other lights and douse that light, simultaneously, so that just in a flash the whole set would light up and you'd find him in this background?” Of course, we had a backdrop that we could use there, to replace the cartoon, because that was going to be used for other scenes in the sequence. Gregg said, “Sure that could work.” Walt said, “All right, when Jim sings ‘Zip,' we'll change the lights.” The thing was ten times as effective as what we had planned. This was Walt Disney at work.
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(A cut was necessary when Baskett started walking toward the camera, but only because the blue backdrop wasn't large enough to permit the camera to dolly back as planned. In addition, an animated sunburst was added around Baskett as the lights went up. But the basic effect is the one Disney proposed, and it is as striking and successful as Jackson said.)

One complication was that some of the live action had to allow for animation that would be added later, so that, for example, Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit could appear on-screen together. During the live-action shooting, Jackson said, Disney “kicked Ken [Anderson] off the camera,” because he “was just sure that we were wasting a lot of time.” But since Anderson could not ride the camera boom, and give the operator a tap “at the right time to do certain things with the camera to make room for our cartoon character,” the footage was unusable.
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Disney, confined so tightly by his studio's precarious finances for the previous few years, could not have welcomed one more constraint. To plan the live-action filming so carefully was to acknowledge from the start that combination work was terribly confining; better to put off that acknowledgment until it could no longer be avoided.

Peacetime did not bring an improvement in the studio's finances. Without the prop of contracts for government and industrial films, and with foreign earnings once again possible but locked up by widespread embargoes on the export of currencies, the Disneys had to rely mainly on domestic receipts from their entertainment shorts and features. Only through reissues
of
Snow White
and
Pinocchio
did the studio avoid showing losses in its 1945 and 1946 fiscal years (the Disney fiscal year ended around September 30). It was a measure of the Disneys' difficulties that in March 1946, Roy Disney asked RKO for a million-dollar advance on the earnings from foreign distribution of Disney films whose release overseas had been held up by the war, and whose release would now be complicated by currency restrictions like those that prevented the exchange of British pounds for dollars.
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RKO's executives were taken aback by the request; Ned E. Depinet, RKO's executive vice president, wrote to N. Peter Rathvon, the company's president, that “Roy's proposal really baffles me . . . he is indeed asking us to assume a great burden.”
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Harry Tytle wrote about that loan request in a diary entry of July 15, 1946, after Paul Pease, the studio's controller, came to see him. Tytle reproduced that entry in his autobiography fifty years later: “Paul's problem was money. It appears we are spending it much faster than we are getting it! Our salvation is a million dollar loan from R.K.O., and Paul indicates it is even possible for this loan not to go through. In that case, we are in bad straights
[sic]
and would have to cut [personnel] drastically. Also, the loan at the bank is $4,000,000 and his opinion is that it cannot be raised, and we are bouncing very close to that ceiling. Paul is scraping up all the possible funds in order to stall until the loan comes through. Two points that are making things increasingly difficult at this time (first) the live-action payrolls are very heavy and secondly, we may be forced to pay a large retroactive check, somewhere in the neighborhood of $200,000.”

That “retroactive check” would go to members of the Screen Cartoonists Guild, which was insisting on a 25 percent increase in base pay, part of it retroactive, as a condition of continued negotiations. “The emotional climate at the studio during this time was extremely tense,” Harry Tytle wrote. “I noted at the time that one of our cartoon directors ‘almost poked someone' from the cartoonist's
[sic]
union who was talking strike.”
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In August 1946, the Disney studio laid off 459 employees, leaving 614 on the staff. RKO eventually agreed to Roy's request, advancing the money on October 15, 1946, and getting in return expanded foreign distribution rights. Thanks presumably to this loan, by the end of the year the net reduction in the number of employees was smaller, but still more than three hundred. The total number on the staff was now under eight hundred, or about two-thirds the prewar total.
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As employment bobbed up and down, an inevitable effect was to fray any ties of loyalty that many Disney employees may have felt to their employer. Such fluctuations banished remnants of the idea that employment
at the Disney studio was a higher calling. For most of the people working there it was, by the mid-1940s, emphatically a job; to regard it as something more was to solicit disappointment.

In these difficult times, Walt Disney's habits of command were increasingly troublesome to some of those who worked for him. One “dilemma we faced with Walt,” Tytle wrote, was that “for him, making the picture was ‘job one'—the budget ran a distant second. But as we had seen with the shorts program, if the budgets were ignored long enough, we all suffered.” The Disney shorts cost about twice as much as the shorts made by the other cartoon studios, and by 1946, both Disney brothers had concluded that short subjects were a losing proposition.
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