The Animated Man (43 page)

Animation was always part of the plan. Although some early reports suggested that Disney's original thought was to make a combination feature with an animated lamb, the idea was probably always to add animation as musical inserts, similar to those in
Song of the South
.
¹²
Contractually, Disney had little choice but to add animation in some form. His distribution contract with RKO for four features provided that each feature,
So Dear
one of them, “shall be an animated cartoon or may be part animated cartoon and part live action.”
¹³
There was no provision for a feature wholly in live action.

Card Walker, then a rising young studio executive, remembered that the inserts, as brief as they are—about fifteen minutes in total—added a year to
production (the animation was not completed until August 1948, well over a year after the live-action filming ). “One picture he really spent a lot of time on was
So Dear to My Heart,”
Walker said. “Boy, he spent a lot of time. . . . He knew he had a problem. And that's when he went back and started building those little vignettes in there in animation. He was working to improve it, to make it better.”
¹⁴

Absent characters as strong as those in
Song of the South
's cartoon sequences, there was no way that animated inserts could give more spine to a sweet-tempered, sentimental, and very slight story in which Disney had indulged his nostalgia for his childhood.
So Dear to My Heart
, like
Song of the South
, is a movie populated mostly by children and old people—like the childhood Disney remembered in Marceline, when he spent much of his time with Doc Sherwood and Grandpa Taylor—with no young adults in sight. The animation is superfluous at best.

In his work on the dominant live-action portions of
So Dear to My Heart
, Disney refined the pattern for his involvement in live action he had begun to establish in work on
Song of the South
. He would be heavily involved in the writing of the screenplay and the casting of the film; he would hire a reliable journeyman director—for
So Dear to My Heart
it was Harold D. Schuster, who had directed the horse picture
My Friend Flicka
not long before—to do the actual shooting, with limited input from Disney himself; and he would be heavily involved again in the final phases, like the editing and musical scoring.

Schuster, who filmed most of
So Dear to My Heart
in the summer of 1946 at Porterville, in the San Joaquin Valley in central California (a stand-in for the book's Indiana), told Leonard Maltin that “Walt would come up sometimes on weekends, we would have Sunday breakfast, and talk over the [film that Schuster had recently shot]. . . . His suggestions were always presented as suggestions only. He left the reins firmly in my hands.”
¹⁵

Disney never had any reason to believe that his director would use his grip on the “reins” to impose any distinctive ideas of his own on the film. He was making a trade-off.
So Dear to My Heart
and the live-action films that followed would lack the artistry that only a strong director could bring, but they would be more purely Walt Disney films. Since, as a practical matter, there was no way he could oversee most of the shooting of a live-action film, Disney would make his films his own by reducing the importance of what happened on the set as much as possible, and by elevating the importance of what happened before and after shooting. Whether such a tradeoff would result in better films was very much in doubt, but Disney's preference
for strengthening his control over his films was in keeping with his history.

So Dear to My Heart
, if no disaster at the box office, was by no means a success either, earning $2.7 million in gross rentals (shared by Disney and RKO) against a negative cost of $2.1 million.

Animation was still the studio's lifeblood, and in early 1947, when live-action filming for
So Dear to My Heart
had resumed for another seven weeks, Disney was completing another animated package feature,
Fun and Fancy Free
. It was made up of what was usable from the scrapped “Jack and the Beanstalk” feature with Mickey Mouse, plus “Bongo,” based on a Sinclair Lewis fantasy about a circus bear that had been published in
Cosmopolitan
in 1930. The two halves were stitched together with live action of Luana Patten, the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, and Bergen's dummies Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd.

By then, two more package features,
All in Fun
(released in 1948 as
Melody Time
) and
Two Fabulous Characters
(released in 1949 as
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
), were on the schedule. It was clear from the middling performance of
Make Mine Music
that package features were a financial question mark—they might turn a small profit or at least recoup their costs, but they held the threat, too, of losses that the studio could not afford. There was no reason to hope that any of them would be a breakout hit and put the Disney studio on sound financial footing.

“I like our operation the way it is,” Disney said in 1955. “I wouldn't want the responsibility of a big studio. We were asked to run RKO before Howard Hughes bought it [in May 1948], but I turned it down.”
¹⁶
That was in all likelihood a fanciful interpretation of a desperate passage in the Disney studio's fortunes, in the spring of 1947; or Disney simply may not have been fully aware of what was going on around him.

Walt Disney Productions and RKO were in negotiations for two months, from April till June 1947, over a combination of some sort that almost certainly did not amount to Disney's being “asked to run RKO.” Jonathan Bell Lovelace, a Los Angeles investment manager and a new member of the Disney board, was the lead negotiator on the Disney side. The idea seems to have been that the two studios would combine many overhead functions and perhaps share production facilities on the Disney lot.

At RKO's request, the Disney studio produced dozens of pages of detailed information about its financial status and production plans, a clear indication that Disney—which apparently initiated the talks—would have been
the junior partner in such a combination. These negotiations took place, after all, only a few months after Disney was so desperate for cash that it pleaded with RKO for a million-dollar loan. Walt Disney was from all appearances only peripherally involved in the negotiations, but he was Walt Disney Productions' most important asset. Correspondence among the negotiators reflected concern that he not be distressed by the outcome.
¹⁷

The negotiations apparently petered out in early June. It was around then that Floyd Odlum, RKO's principal owner through his Atlas Corporation, took the first steps toward the eventual sale of the studio to Howard Hughes. On Disney's side, receipts from
Make Mine Music
and
Song of the South
were providing a welcome breathing spell. Both films were modestly profitable, returning to the studio a total of more than a million dollars in rentals above their costs. In the fiscal year that ended in September 1947—the month that
Fun and Fancy Free
was released—Walt Disney Productions' bank debt fell from an intimidating $4.2 million to a more manageable $3 million.
¹⁸

It was around this time—with the studio on reasonably solid financial footing but the prospects for its features dubious—that the Disney brothers had one of their loudest and most consequential disagreements. Even though Walt Disney Productions was now a public company and outsiders had been allowed to own common stock since June 1945—Odlum's Atlas Corporation was the first such buyer, in a special transaction, of shares representing about 7 percent of the total—Walt and Roy and their wives still owned more than half the common stock, and so arguments about the company's course had an intensely personal flavor.
¹⁹

“I wanted to get back into the feature field,” Walt Disney said in 1956—that is, he wanted to make more full-length features like
Snow White
and
Bambi
. “But it was a matter of investment and time. Now, to take and do a good cartoon feature takes a lot of time and a lot of money. But I wanted to get back. And my brother and I had quite a screamer. . . . It was one of my big upsets. . . . I said we're going to either go forward, we're going to get back in business, or I say let's liquidate or let's sell out. . . . I said, I can't run this plant without being able to make decisions. I said, I have to plan not a year ahead but two years ahead. I have to take care of these artists, and overlap between productions. I have to keep the whole thing going.”

Roy Disney remembered that disagreement as “one of the biggest differences we had in our lives. . . . I remember one night he came down to my office, we sat here from quitting time to eight o'clock or so and I finally said, ‘Look, you're letting this place drive you nuts, that's one place I'm not going with you.'
I walked out on him. So, I didn't sleep that night, and he didn't, either. So the next morning, I'm at my desk, wondering what the hell to do. . . . I heard his cough and footsteps coming down the hall. He came in and he was filled up, he could hardly talk. He says, ‘Isn't it amazing what a horse's ass a fella can be sometimes? . . . That's how we settled our differences.”
²⁰

By the beginning of 1948 the Disney studio was firmly on track to make its first full-length feature since
Bambi
. In Roy's recollection, though, the substance of his disagreement with Walt was not over making such a feature but over whether the studio should resume work on
Alice in Wonderland
and
Peter Pan
, two features that had been shelved during the war. Roy found both subjects unappealing as film properties. Walt won the argument—“Walt always had his way around here,” Roy said—and
Alice
and
Peter Pan
remained on the schedule; yet the first full-length feature would be neither of those films, but
Cinderella
, another story that had been considered as a possible feature since 1938, at least.
²¹

Cinderella
was Disney's riskiest and most important—in terms of the studio's fate—feature since
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
. There was, however, no excitement surrounding the start of work on
Cinderella
to match the fever that had attended the writing and animation of
Snow White
. To thrive, the studio needed a success, but no one thought
Cinderella
would be an equivalent leap forward in the art of animation.

With his feature films a source of limited satisfaction, Disney had begun exploring other kinds of film—nature films, in particular. It was when he had live-action film of deer shot for his
Bambi
animators, Disney said, that he began thinking about the potential in nature films “because I did get some very unusual things. And I just had a feeling if we could get a cameraman out there to stay long enough we could really get some unusual things.” Disney was intrigued by Alaska, too. He watched sixteen-millimeter film from that remote territory as early as February 14, 1946.
²²
He had hired a husband-and-wife team to film Alaska, he said in 1956, to “see if I couldn't do something in an educational way. . . . During the war I ran into a lot of educators, and they kept talking of the need of good films and kept emphasizing the fact that we could do a lot in that field.”

The studio had bought hundreds of hours of such sixteen-millimeter film; a May 1947 story inventory report said, “We have 482 rolls of Kodachrome shot in Alaska.”
²³
Disney's film editors were then making a “rough edit” of that film and blowing it up to the thirty-five-millimeter size used in theatrical projection. One appealing possibility was to use it in a film resembling
Saludos Amigos
, tying together cartoons set in Alaska with live action filmed
there.
²⁴
Any release made from this film would be a bargain; the studio had invested less than $75,000 in it.

In the summer of 1947, Disney seized an opportunity to indulge both his curiosity about Alaska and his enthusiasm for aviation. He left August 10 on a three-week flying trip to Alaska with Russell Havenstrite, an oilman and polo-playing friend. When Lillian bowed out, Sharon, then ten years old, went with her father.

“I enjoyed being with him and I was always game to go anyplace with him,” Sharon said in 1968. “When he'd want to go up in the airplanes I'd always go to the airport with him, and sit there and watch the airplanes come in. . . . He wanted to fly. He wanted to fly very badly. . . . He constantly talked about it. . . . He always wanted to get in a plane and fly.”

The Alaska trip as Sharon remembered it took them—first in Havenstrite's DC-3 and then in a smaller plane—from Juneau to Anchorage to Nome, and then to a tiny Inuit village “where we slept in an airplane hangar. . . . I thought it was all great fun, you know—it was filthy, but I thought it was great fun. And then from there to Kotzebue and Kobuk and we stayed in a camp at the base of Mount McKinley. . . . A lot of this was in single-engine planes, and it was quite a rough trip.”

During the trip, she said, “Daddy was the picture of patience, really. I don't know how he did it. You know, braiding my hair every morning—long hair down the back. . . . He took care of me . . . he did more, I think, than most fathers would do just as far as being a mother and father.”

Sharon recalled “one incident. When we flew from Nome to Candle [the Inuit village], we had two very small planes. I think there was the pilot and room for three passengers. We took off and we lost our radio. We were above the clouds and we didn't know where we were. Of course, I didn't know this . . . but Daddy and [Havenstrite] . . . knew we might crash into a mountain. . . .[Havenstrite] had just become a grandfather for the first time and on that premise they decided to get loaded. . . . We finally came out of the clouds and landed in Candle. They put the steps down and Daddy took one step down and landed flat on his face.”
²⁵