The Animated Man (44 page)

In April 1948, Disney floated vague plans for films about Alaska—a possible feature with or without animation, a possible short subject devoted to seals in the Pribilof Islands.
²⁶
Before long, “I abandoned the Alaskan [feature] project,” Disney said—much of the footage was just plain dull, apparently—but he followed through with the short subject. “I took the film that I'd shot about the seals on this island,” he said, and “wrapped it up and made it as an entertainment package.” By June, that film,
Seal Island
, photographed
by the husband-and-wife team of Alfred and Elma Milotte, was complete except for the narration, and Disney was calling it the first in a series of documentaries,
True-Life Adventures
.
²⁷

Seal Island
won an Academy Award after it played for one week in December 1948 at a theater in Pasadena. Despite the Oscar, RKO resisted distributing the
True-Life Adventures
at first—
Seal Island
's length, just under a half hour, was awkward at a time when many theaters showed double features—but finally agreed in May 1949 to distribute
Seal Island
and two more.
²⁸
This time RKO's reluctance was misplaced:
Seal Island
, made at a cost of $86,000, grossed $434,000.

James Algar,
Seal Island'
s director, wrote the next year that the
True-Life Adventures
series was “based on the premise that information can be entertainment if interestingly presented. . . . Too many so-called educational films fall under the supervision of people who know their subject thoroughly but their medium very little. They remind us in the film business of some of the technical advisers assigned to training films during the war. A technical expert usually loves his subject. . . . So he makes a film which takes for granted that you are interested and want to learn. And sadly enough, the thing turns out dull and fails of its purpose. One of the first lessons of film making in the entertainment field is this: you must win your audience. All entertainers know this, instinctively. And it is a discipline that can well be carried over into the teaching film of the future. It is in this respect, perhaps, that
Seal Island
offers something new.”
²⁹

In other words, the
True-Life Adventures
were another channel for the impulse that had briefly made Disney enthusiastic about the potential for sponsored films around the end of the war. Now, though, his films could be “educational” without being subject to constraints imposed by third parties. Disney made the connection himself in an interview that coincided with
Seal Island
's Los Angeles debut. “I learned much during the war years,” he said, “when we were making instruction and technological films in which abstract and obscure things had to be made plain and quickly for the boys in military services. . . . I began, with the return of peace, to plan the informative-entertainment series which now has jelled in the True-Life Adventures.”
³⁰

The succeeding
True-Life Adventures
won more Oscars and a great deal of mostly favorable attention, as well as more than paying their way.
Seal Island
was no fluke: the second
True-Life Adventure, Beaver Valley
, cost only a little more, at $102,000, but grossed far more, at $664,000. Disney wrote in his company's annual report for 1950, after the release of
Beaver Valley:
“In my years in the motion picture business I never had more enjoyment than I am
getting out of the production of our True Life Adventure series. They have completely fascinated me.”
³¹
There is no reason to doubt him, even though making a
True-Life Adventure
was very different from making an animated feature, or a live-action feature of the usual kind. Disney sent photographers into the wild for months at a time, or sometimes longer. He also pieced together films—
Water Birds
(1952) was one—by buying film from “these naturalists who'd shoot birds.” Although shooting would begin with a distinct end product in mind, Algar's principal role, as director, was to sort through hour after hour of film in search of some kind of narrative.

Disney found irresistible the temptation to manipulate film, as well as the animals themselves, to tell coherent stories. This is evident in
Seal Island
during an episode about a pup that cannot find its mother. Winston Hibler, who wrote the narration with Algar and then delivered it for the film itself, remembered that “we wrote the narration first and built the picture track afterwards.”
³²
The frequent cuts, the multitude of camera angles, the close-ups and long shots—all argue that the “story” has been at least as much manufactured as recorded, by taking advantage of how indistinguishable, to human eyes, at least, seals are one from the other. What is supposed to be one pup could just as well be several. There was more of the same in the
True-Life Adventures
that followed, and there was aggressive tinkering with the raw footage, too. Through optical printing, repeats and reverses and other patterns that had no parallels in nature could be imposed on animals' movements.

As much as he enjoyed working on the
True-Life Adventures
, their scale was too small to command Disney's full attention the way his early feature films did. Disney, a man always happiest when he was excited about some new project, was primed for a fresh enthusiasm. He found it in a new hobby. Trains were it.

It was sometime before Christmas 1947 that Ward Kimball alerted Ollie Johnston that Disney had a model train layout set up in his office suite. Disney wrote about the train layout to his sister, Ruth Beecher, on December 8, 1947: “I bought myself a birthday-Christmas present—something I've wanted all my life—an electric train. . . . What fun I'm having. I have it set up in one of the outer rooms adjoining my office so I can play with it in my spare moments. It's a freight train with a whistle, and real smoke comes out of the smokestack—there are switches, semaphores, station and everything. It's just wonderful!”
³³

While the men were looking at the layout, Johnston said, Disney “turned to me and said, ‘I didn't know you were interested in trains.' I told him I was
building a [miniature] steam engine. He said, ‘You are? I always wanted a backyard railroad.' And so he came out to where we were building mine, out in Santa Monica, and looked at it. He came out two or three times, and he started getting his ideas on how he was going to build his.”
³⁴

Not only had Disney bought a model railroad as a present for himself, but he had also bought three other Lionel train sets after asking Ruth, his brother Herbert, and Marjorie Davis, his sister-in-law Hazel's daughter, if children in their families would like a train set, too.
³⁵
Roger Broggie, the head of the studio's machine shop, had joined the Disney staff in 1939, but he remembered that he first had “direct contact with Walt” in the weeks before that same Christmas, in 1947, when “he came down to the shop and he wanted to [do] an HO gauge [the standard track size for small electric trains] for a nephew. . . . So we put it together on a track about as big as this table, on a thing that was supposed to be hoisted up in the garage. We put the trains together and he worked on it, the landscaping, the whole bit. . . . We got through with that and then . . . he wanted to know—'This is an electric train, now what's for real?' So I looked into what we call ‘Live Steam' ”—that is, miniature trains that were functionally identical to real ones.

Disney and Broggie looked at the “equipment that was available,” Broggie said, “and he didn't like it. The style was more or less a modern steam locomotive, and he wanted something earlier.” Broggie showed Disney photographs of nineteenth-century locomotives, and Disney settled on Central Pacific Railroad no. 173, a locomotive built in 1864 (and rebuilt in 1873, after a fatal crash). “He liked the looks of the thing,” Broggie said.

Broggie wrote to the Southern Pacific, which had absorbed the Central Pacific line, and “I asked them for any historical information about Locomotive no. 173 Central Pacific and we got a blueprint. And from that print and the photograph we then made drawings. The draftsman who did the job, Eddie Sargeant . . . was a very meticulous draftsman. With a glass, and the photograph and this blueprint, he made the drawings, then we made the patterns.” Sargeant began making the drawings in September 1948.
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In the meantime, on June 1, 1948, Walt and Lillian Disney had bought a five-acre lot at 355 North Carolwood Drive in Holmby Hills, a luxury residential development next to Beverly Hills, northeast of the campus of the University of California at Los Angeles. Once again, as with his previous two homes, Disney was building rather than buying an existing home—a pattern he observed with his weekend homes at Palm Springs as well as his principal residence. One attraction of the Carolwood lot was that it had room enough for a layout designed for trains one-eighth real size. Lillian and Diane
had found another site they liked, Lillian said in 1968, “but Walt said it was too close to Wilshire [Boulevard] and [had] no place for his train.”
³⁷

In August, Disney attended the Chicago Railroad Fair of 1948, the single most important driver in his growing enthusiasm for miniature trains. “The stated reason for the celebration,” Karal Ann Marling has written, “was the hundredth anniversary of the first steam locomotive to enter Chicago, the nation's greatest railroad center. The real reason was to revive an industry hard hit by competition and burdened with an inventory of rolling stock all but worn out by hard use during World War II. . . . Experts had put the number of railroad hobbyists and model makers at one hundred thousand; their total investment ran to some $10 million. Organizers of the Chicago fair of 1948 were eager to tap this reservoir of interest and goodwill. And so, with a perfunctory nod to tomorrow, they set out to indulge the growing American appetite for cow-catchers, pistons, smokestacks, old cabooses—and the fabled historical romance of the rails.”
³⁸

Disney invited Kimball, the Disney studio's most advanced railroad buff, to make the trip to Chicago with him. (Kimball owned not miniatures but real locomotives, which Disney had seen, and operated on at least one occasion, on visits to the Kimball home in San Gabriel.) They left Los Angeles for Chicago by train—of course—on August 19 and spent several days at the fair. Its highlight was a huge pageant, “Wheels a-Rolling,” that incorporated any number of historic steam locomotives as well as modern diesels. Pat Devlin, an actor in the pageant, remembered persuading Disney to perform on stage one night dressed in nineteenth-century costume (what Devlin called a “Diamond Jim Brady” outfit).
³⁹

Kimball's home movies from the trip “show Disney in a state of unrestrained bliss from the moment the Santa Fe Super Chief left the Pasadena station,” Marling has written. “The railroad knew he was coming; the engineer let him ride in the cab and toot the whistle at level crossings. The fair had acres of famous engines and working replicas thereof and Kimball's film suggests that the pair inspected every last one of them. Disney caught Kimball at the throttle of an ancient engine; Kimball, in turn, took pictures of Disney, in a top hat and vest [evidently the Diamond Jim Brady costume], acting the part of a hungry passenger stopping to dine at a trackside Harvey House,” in the eighth of the dozen scenes that made up the “Wheels a-Rolling” pageant.
⁴⁰

The fair included what the official guidebook called “fifty dramatized acres of exhibits”—“themed” exhibits, in fact, in which participating railroads recreated scenes that a rail traveler might see on their lines. The Santa Fe's exhibit
was an Indian village where members of six southwestern tribes practiced traditional crafts and performed traditional dances. At a trading post run by the Fred Harvey Company, visitors could buy Indian curios as well as admire displays of them.
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Before returning to Los Angeles, Disney and Kimball also went to Dearborn, Michigan, outside Detroit, and visited a village of another kind—Henry Ford's Greenfield Village, a collection of old and reconstructed buildings that included the Wright brothers' bicycle shop and a replica of Thomas Edison's laboratory. Greenfield Village, which Ford established in 1929, had a strong autobiographical element: many of its buildings were there because they had been significant in Ford's life, as with the school he attended and the scaled-down replica of his first auto plant. Greenfield was, besides, a make-believe village, a mixture of buildings spanning centuries. There was no pretense, as at Colonial Williamsburg, of re-creating the past.

Disney had visited Greenfield Village at least once before, in April 1940, but this time he returned to Burbank with his imagination stimulated. He was thinking now beyond a miniature train for his own home. He drafted a memorandum on August 31, 1948, in which he set out in detail what might go into a “Mickey Mouse park” on the sixteen acres the studio owned across Riverside Drive. Ford's influence can be felt in Disney's description of an idyllic small town, anchored by a city hall and a railroad station. There would have been a specifically Disney presence in the park only through a toy store that sold Disney toys and books and a shop where Disney artists could sell their own work.
⁴²

Disney had been talking about a park of some kind, on the studio lot or adjacent to it, for years, perhaps since the late 1930s, the idea being to have something to entertain visitors to a studio that was otherwise very much a workaday place. For the studio to embark on such a project in 1948 was impractical, though, given its financial condition, and Disney's memo had no immediate consequences.