The Animated Man (47 page)

In that interview, Haskin described a Disney almost wholly detached from the film, the writing and editing included. Such a Disney is radically at odds with the Disney seen by other people in work on other films, a Disney intensely concerned with details. It is thus easier to credit Gus Walker, the Scot who was in charge of building the sets for
Treasure Island
. He remembered that Disney had trouble believing that the tiles on a roof in the Bristol harbor set were painted, and not the real thing: “I had to get a ladder for Walt to go up . . . and have a look. . . . He hadn't had a lot of experience of construction for films. It was something new for him.”
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Treasure Island
differs strikingly from earlier Disney films in its matter-of-fact handling of the story's violence (at one point, the film follows the book by having Driscoll, as Jim Hawkins, shoot a pirate full in the face). For the most part the violence is neither glossed over nor dwelled upon, just as in the Robert Louis Stevenson novel itself.
Treasure Island'
s tone—serious and often foreboding—was new for a Disney feature, and it may be owing mainly either to Haskin or to Lawrence Edward Watkin, the former Virginia college professor who wrote the screenplay; but there is no reason to believe that Disney was not fully aware of it or that it did not have his approval.

Disney's attention to details was evident in his preparations for the 1949 trip itself, which reflected his concern about postwar shortages. “I remember Daddy sent over a whole lot of food,” Sharon Disney Brown told Richard Hubler. “All this canned bacon and canned hamburgers. You just couldn't get meat. . . . We stayed in London the whole trip. . . . And we stayed at the Dorchester Hotel almost the whole time because Daddy was making a picture. I remember the waiter was so nice. Every so often he'd come over and say, ‘Mr. Disney, I have two eggs.' And it was the biggest moment!”

The Disneys made driving or flying trips to northern England, Ireland, and the continent. But, Sharon said, “most of the trips were short ones. . . . He was there for a purpose and he didn't want to spend six months just traveling around. . . . We ate most of our meals at the hotel because he was tired at night and wanted to go to bed early. . . . He was an all day worker. He didn't slow down at all. But he wanted his sleep at night and he was always in bed early. He was always in bed by ten o'clock.”
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Treasure Island
was released in July 1950 to mixed reviews. It returned to the Disney studio and RKO gross rentals of $4.8 million, about two-thirds of
Cinderella
's total, and almost three times its negative cost ($1.8 million). Making
Treasure Island
consumed all of Disney's blocked sterling,
⁸⁹
but making films in Britain had proved its worth on other grounds, and Disney and RKO set out to make another in 1951.

For
The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men
, Disney cut back the American contingent to three: the producer, Pearce; the writer, Watkin; and the studio's production manager, Fred Leahy, all of whom sailed to England on the
Queen Mary
in January 1951.
⁹⁰
At first, Disney said later, the idea was to focus the story on Bobby Driscoll as “a young boy who hung around Robin's camp. . . . But the plan simply wouldn't jell.”
⁹¹
(Legal considerations may have weighed against using Driscoll. In September 1949, deep into shooting of
Treasure Island
, the boy was fined a hundred pounds for working in England without a permit from the Ministry of Labor. By the time the fine was upheld on appeal, Driscoll had completed his role in the film.)
⁹²

By the fall of 1950, Disney had settled on Richard Todd, a young British star, as his Robin Hood. Todd remembered how Disney applied his charm when Todd visited the Burbank studio to talk about taking the role. “I didn't want to do Robin Hood; I thought it was rather beneath me,” he said. “I didn't want to be an Errol Flynn—I couldn't be, anyway, physically. I wasn't up to it, at all. Walt himself persuaded me by saying he didn't want a heavyweight, he wanted a quick-witted, quick-moving welterweight, which is what I was.”
⁹³
After some hesitation, Todd accepted the role in January 1951.

When Pearce and Watkin arrived in London, Todd joined them in meetings to plan the film. “I was fascinated by the attention to detail,” he wrote in his autobiography. “At each [meeting] a sketch artist was present, and as each camera set-up was worked out and agreed, he produced a pencil-and-wash picture of exactly what would be in the camera lens. These sketches were photo-copied and bound into folders, and all of us at these meetings were eventually issued with the bound volumes, showing every single shot.”
⁹⁴

Here was how Disney could extend his control over live action into the actual shooting, through the planning of each shot on what amounted to storyboards similar to those he had used for almost twenty years in making his cartoons. Directors at other studios might prepare such storyboards themselves—Alfred Hitchcock was the most famous example—but on
The Story of Robin Hood
the director, Ken Annakin, found such preparation already completed when he came onto the film.

“Later,” Annakin wrote in his autobiography, “I was to discover that at least fifty percent of the reason for working this way was to enable Walt to exercise control, and supply his creative input from six thousand miles away. Each week during pre-production, the continuity sketches had been shipped back to Burbank and returned with Walt's suggestions and corrections. Now, these were handed to me as the Bible—even more important perhaps than the script.”
⁹⁵

Disney supervised preparation in other ways as well. On March 6, 1951, in a long, chatty memorandum to Perce Pearce and Fred Leahy, he responded to test footage of the film's principals. He was troubled by the costumes chosen for Joan Rice, who would play Maid Marian: “It seems that women of that period always have scarves up around their chins, but I think it does something to a woman's face. . . . Where we see Miss Rice disguised as page, this costume seemed bulky and heavy. The blouse or tunic was too long and hung too far down over her hips—it didn't show enough of her and I thought detracted from her femininity. I think a slight showing of the hips would help a lot.”
⁹⁶

With his control so firmly established, Disney had no need to hover over the set. Filming of
The Story of Robin Hood
began on April 30, 1951, but Disney did not leave Burbank until June 11, and then he sailed to England on the
Queen Mary
. While he was in Britain he came onto the set “from time to time; not often,” Richard Todd said. “He wouldn't linger all that much. . . . He wasn't obtrusive. He didn't discuss the picture, particularly, at least not with me. It was like a friend dropping in and having a chat, and that was that.”
⁹⁷

The resulting film is low-key, lacking the excitement generated by the Errol
Flynn version made in Hollywood and released in 1938. Disney had sought, in place of that excitement, a new authenticity, but the story of Robin Hood is inherently inauthentic because there is no historical record of such a person. The Disney film departs so far from any kind of authenticity that it offers Norman kings and queens who not only speak English instead of French but orate like Saxon patriots.

Disney financed a third British-based feature,
The Sword and the Rose
, a romance set in Tudor England, not in partnership with RKO but through a wholly owned subsidiary, Walt Disney British Films Limited.
⁹⁸
He left Los Angeles for London on June 23, 1952, to, as
Daily Variety
put it, “supervise production,” and returned to New York on September 3.”
⁹⁹
He arrived several weeks before shooting began in August and left before it ended. He also squeezed in visits with miniature-train enthusiasts in Britain and Switzerland.
¹⁰⁰

Ken Annakin was involved in the planning for the film from the first day. “As Larry [Watkin] fed us the script pages from Burbank, devised and approved by Walt,” Annakin wrote, “I worked alongside Steven Grimes, a young British sketch artist. . . . For four months we broke down the scenes into setups and sketches.” Richard Todd also remembered “frequent script conferences, in which every set-up was planned, sketched and photocopied into albums for each of us.”
¹⁰¹

There was, Todd wrote, a “special quality” of working on a Disney film, “quite unlike the atmosphere on any other production. There was very much a family ambiance, a feeling of harmony partly engendered by Perce Pearce's avuncular presence, partly arising from the fact that most of us had worked together and knew each other well—but mostly perhaps due to the smoothness with which the schedule rolled along as a result of the careful pre-planning of previous weeks.” This atmosphere was particularly beneficial to Annakin, who was, Todd wrote, “the kind of quiet, coaxing director who understood his actors and gentled the best from them.”
¹⁰²

It is not clear why Disney chose Annakin to direct his second and third British productions, although Annakin himself thought it likely that Disney had seen the short films he directed for two anthologies based on Somerset Maugham short stories.
¹⁰³
Annakin was exceptional among the directors Disney hired, earlier and later, in his sensitivity to the actors working with him.
The Sword and the Rose
benefits immensely from his attention to the characters' relationships and from the nuanced acting by the three principals (Todd, Glynis Johns, and James Robertson Justice). Unfortunately, the film lacks a sense of scale. Even though the cast is full of kings and dukes and other such personages (Justice plays Henry VIII and Johns his sister Mary
Tudor), an appealing intimacy is not balanced by a sense that the love story is taking place in the context of great events. There is no blaming Annakin for this; the fault is in the story. Disney had become too much of an Anglophile for his films' good.
The Sword and the Rose
cost more than
Robin Hood
but grossed only $2.5 million, half as much as its predecessor.

Disney and Richard Todd hit it off during the production of
Robin Hood
. “We saw a lot of each other when he was in England,” Todd said, “and then when I went to Hollywood, whether I was working for him or not, he just took me under his wing.” Todd was an exceptionally attractive figure, a dashing and handsome movie star, an Oscar nominee in his first Hollywood role, in 1948, who was also a true war hero (he was the first British soldier to parachute into Normandy on D-Day). “I'm not easily intimidated by anybody, no matter what their standing,” Todd said in 2004. “I mean, I had at that time—in the fifties, certainly—a lot of self-assurance. I think the war did that. You didn't stand any nonsense from anybody; you had a sort of authority about you.”

Todd found Disney—his senior by almost eighteen years—“very kindly. I think he respected me because—well, little things, like I wouldn't have a double to do stunts. They were very worried about that, because of the insurance problem. I think that rather tickled him. And he was a bit of a social climber—in England. What he was in America, I don't know, but in England he liked to be amongst very high-ranking people, and I happened to have access to some of them. He was very happy to join in some of the gatherings.”
¹⁰⁴

Disney planned to begin shooting a fourth British production,
Rob Roy the Highland Rogue
, in Scotland in the spring of 1953, with Todd as the title character. But however much he liked the country itself, he knew that shooting in Britain was only an expedient, and that a serious live-action program had to be based in Burbank. The question was, which feature would be his first domestic production entirely in live action?

The leading candidate was initially
The Great Locomotive Chase
, based on the same Civil War episode as Buster Keaton's silent feature comedy
The General
. In that episode, known as the “Andrews raid,” Union spies almost succeeded in stealing a Confederate locomotive and wrecking a vital rail line. Since two vintage locomotives would necessarily play a prominent part, the story's appeal to Disney was obvious.

Harper Goff, a sketch artist for Warner Brothers, was in England in 1951—evidently when Disney was there for the filming of
Robin Hood
—and he encountered Disney at a store called Basset-Lowke, famous for its miniature locomotives.
(Disney had just bought a locomotive that Goff, also a train fancier, coveted.) “He asked me what I did for a living,” Goff said, “and I told him that I was an artist. . . . He said, ‘When you get back to America, come and talk to me.' By the time I went to see him at the Studio, he was aware of my artwork in
Coronet
and
Esquire
magazines. . . . He explained that he was planning to go into live-action filming, and do motion pictures with actors and sets. This fit in with my experience at Warner Brothers.”
¹⁰⁵
Goff joined the Disney staff on October 22, 1951.

By February 1952, Goff—who identified himself in correspondence then as “director of production research for live-action pictures”—was scouting locations for
The Great Locomotive Chase
in Georgia. That project was still very much alive in October 1952, when the studio paid for Wilbur Kurtz, an Atlanta commercial artist and expert on the Andrews raid, to travel by train to Los Angeles. (Kurtz was the son-in-law of William Fuller, the Confederate conductor who foiled the Union spies' plans.)
¹⁰⁶

Locomotive Chase
's rival for a place on the schedule was
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
. Disney wrote of
20,000 Leagues
early in 1952: “We have added to our list of future productions Jules Verne's spectacular and adventuresome
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
. We have acquired the rights to this story, which can make one of the all-time great motion pictures. Our production plans are tentative at this stage, but the knowledge we have acquired in developing our True Life Adventure series will be extremely valuable in filming the fantastic under-sea creatures depicted by Verne. This feature will be all live action and except for the underwater scenes, which will be filmed somewhere along the trail of the
Nautilus
, will be shot in Technicolor in our own studio.”
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