Working with Disney (18 page)

BJ:
I always felt that we made the best product, whatever it was, but I admired the different styles. For instance, I think there was some real fine animation in the Tom and Jerry series. And then, of course, Mr. Magoo and the things that were made at UPA were entirely different than the kind of things we were doing, and they had a charm to them. They had a different approach, really. Instead of trying to get natural action and more realistic personalities into the characters, they had more of a slapstick approach and what we might call limited animation that we weren't allowed to do. We didn't approach that kind of thing at all. It wasn't our bag. Then [John] Hubley made some pictures that were complete opposite of what Disney might do. I think some of the so-called sophisticates thought that was the way to go. I just don't think they have the charm. They don't have the heart to them, but I guess there is a market for all of them. One of my favorites was
The Country Cousin
[1936]. One of the most beautiful little cartoons you'd ever want to see. About a year ago, when I was down at Disneyland, I went into the Fantasyland
Theater. There were three short subjects running in there from the 1930s. One of them was
The Band Concert
[1935], another was
Mickey's Trailer
[1938], and there was—

DP:
Thru the Mirror,
with the Fred Astaire style of dancing.

BJ:
Yeah,
Thru the Mirror.
I sat in there and there were some young people—not just teenagers, but young adults in there—and they were just knocking themselves out. I thought, “God, these people haven't seen this stuff before!” This is one reason I was trying to get Mickey's Madhouse [a Disney parks attraction concept] going, and I think we still might do it.

DP:
I hope so. It sounds like a great idea.

BJ:
In contrast to Dumbo's Circus [another attraction concept], which would be all bright colors—gaudy circus colors—right next door to it we would feature Mickey's Madhouse in glorious black and white! It would be a ride-through. You'd see film clips of these old cartoons on each screen, there would be about five or six different scenes, and there'd be an overall music track. Fun music, with maybe Goofy playing a washboard here, and you'd hear the washboard sound, and maybe Mickey's on a bunch of pots and pans over there, and you would hear [the sound] from there. So as you go through, you'd see all these different things, and we'd have little animated figures, dimensional figures, that would keep time to the music, like [It's a] Small World.

DP:
Or the Mickey Mouse Review [then at Walt Disney World].

BJ:
Yeah. That would set the mood for this thing, and each time you'd go through there, you'd probably see a different scene on these screens, you see. Then in the second room, your car would start to climb up through an old dilapidated castle-looking thing. On the screens in there, there'd be ghosts and goblins and skeletons and black cats and torture chambers and all this weird stuff: lightning and thunder and screeches and screams and bats and all kind of spooky stuff. As you go through there, you climb, climb, climb, and then you get to the top of the building. When you break out of that, you come down through a thrill ride that takes you
through train tunnels and through a tornado from
The Band Concert.
The car would just break loose and go fast. We'd have projected things going by you.

DP:
That sounds great!

BJ:
I think it would be a wonderful ride. It would bring back memories to those people that had seen some of that stuff, and it'd be a whole new experience to the younger generation.

DP:
I think they would love it.

BJ:
It would be a different ride. I think it would be real popular. What I'd like to do out front [is use] the logo that used to come on the screen years ago. This was before your time. When a black and white Mickey Mouse cartoon came on the screen, the whole audience would scream, just like they do for Elvis or Frank Sinatra or somebody like that! That's what I wanted to have on the facade of the building. A great big head of Mickey Mouse, so that you'd see this thing from a block away, and I bet you kids would start running.

DP:
What were your first impressions of Walt Disney?

BJ:
I was there, I guess, about twelve or thirteen years before I was ever even in a meeting with him, because the animation directors and the story men would be in the meetings with him. Once in a while, the animators would be in a sweatbox with him where he was looking at a picture, but then they would have a meeting afterward and discuss what was wrong with the picture or how they could improve it, but the animators really weren't included very much in meetings with Walt. So although I worked there twelve or thirteen years, I really didn't know him at all until after I became a director, where I was more closely involved and was in many meetings with him. I got to the point where I wasn't afraid to talk to him!

DP:
When you did start to work with him, how did you find him to be?

BJ:
When I was first included in meetings, I wouldn't say anything. I'd just sit there and listen to what he had to say and whatever they were
discussing. And then finally one day, he turned to me and he said, “What do you think, Bill?” I told him what I thought, and I guess he liked it, because from then on, he would give me that funny look like, “Okay, let's hear it.” And I would talk. But it was strange. There were a lot of people that had to go to those meetings, and they would echo everything that he said, and he would really be rude to them, because he didn't want to hear what they had to say.

DP:
He didn't want yes-men, in other words.

BJ:
No. He'd cut that off; right as soon as they'd start to talk, he'd start talking. Everybody would listen to him; they'd just shut up.

DP:
The fingers would start tapping …

BJ:
Yeah, and coughing.

DP:
So your connection with him was more of a positive one than I guess some people had.

BJ:
I think he appreciated what I was trying to do, and he was wonderful to me, I mean, financially and every other way, and seemed to appreciate what I did, although he never came out and said it!

DP:
Well, I guess the fact that you remained over the years is a way of complimenting you. When you were working on the cutout figures, I gather that he was kind of intrigued with doing that kind of thing.

BJ:
I really know why, too, because what happened was that animation was getting so expensive, the short subjects that had a budget of say $40,000–$60,000 around the early 1950s were running $125,000-$200,000, and it was just getting to the point where it was almost impractical to make them because of salaries and everything else. They called me in one time in a meeting and said, “Bill, we want you to think about something.” I said, “What?” They said, “How can we make entertainment cheaper, Disney-quality film cheaper?” So I thought, “Gee, that's quite a problem!” I woke up in the middle of the night and I thought, “If I could make cute little things out of Necco wafers and cutouts and attach them with flexible things like rubber bands or chains
or things and move them [in] stop-motion, I might be able to make them fairly cheap. If I had a good story, maybe they'd be entertaining.” So I went in the following Monday morning and I told X [Atencio]. X was working with me at that time. I told him what I had in mind. He said, “Yeah, it sounds crazy. Let's try it.” So we went to the hobby shop and we spent about $4 or $5 and went back and started designing little things. We only spent a day or two monkeying around. We made some rabbits and some little Indians and several little characters. I called Dick Drills over in Camera, and I said, “I want to shoot some stuff, and I'm going to bring my backgrounds and I'm just going to move things one frame at a time or two frames at a time and see what I can do.” So he said okay. I went over the next day and I worked about half a day and I shot seventy-five feet of film, stop-motion. It didn't have any story to it or anything. It was just a bunch of crazy stuff, just to see how it would move. And it moved. I don't know whatever became of the film. I hope it's in the archives. But anyway, I showed it to Walt. He was fascinated with it and interested in it, and he asked me why I did it. I told him that Harry Tytle and some of the guys had asked me to think about something [that could be made cheaper], and this was my answer. He said, “Well, let's get a story going.” That's when we got into stop-motion. The first stop-motion were the titles for
The Shaggy Dog.
We made that dog out of an old shaggy mop and it had eyeballs in it and a tongue, and it chased a butterfly and all that. That was the first actual production that I did with stop-motion.

DP:
Was
Jack and Old Mac
stop-motion?

BJ:
No, that was just real simplified animation. That was the first thing I did really because of this thing they wanted, to do something cheaper.
The Shaggy Dog
thing was kind of funny. I shot all those titles. It took me a week to do it under the camera, because I'd animate the dog coming in and maybe sniffing something, and then we'd change the names behind him. He was big enough so that he would cover the credit and then at a certain point, I'd change the names that he was covering up. Then as he'd move out, he'd leave the new names there. That was the principle of the whole thing. Oh, I worked like a slave doing those things and trying
to get the most out of that dumb dog that I could, as much personality as I knew how to put into it as an animator. It came out pretty nice. I showed it to Walt, and he was real pleased with it. The following day, Bob Jabow, who was head of Camera, called me and said, “We can't use that film [for]
The Shaggy Dog
titles.” I said, “What? I just showed it to Walt yesterday, and he liked it.” He said, “Well, it's not of good enough quality. It's all underexposed. If we tried to show it in a drive-in, you wouldn't be able to see it.” I said, “Well, what can we do about it?” He said, “It'll have to be shot over.” I said, “The deadline's already passed. They didn't even call me to do it until it was really too late.” He said, “Well, we can't use it. You want me to tell Walt, or are you going to tell him?” I said, “It's my baby, I'll tell him.” So I called Dolores [Voght, Disney's secretary] and said, “I've got to see Walt.” She said, “Not today you don't.” I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “He's shooting live-action lead-ins. I understand he doesn't like the dialogue that was written for him, and he's having a hell of a time with it. He's not in a very good mood.” I said, “Well, I can't help it. I've got to see him anyway.” So I went over there, and I stood and watched him until he got through a take that he was having trouble with.

DP:
This was for the TV show?

BJ:
The TV show lead-in where he was at his desk and talking. So finally he made a good take, and he sat down. He looked over at me, and he said, “What are you doing here?” I said, “I've got to talk to you.” He said, “Okay, what is it?” I told him that Bob Jabow had called me and said the titles weren't good enough. He said, “Can you shoot them over?” I said, “Yes, I can shoot them over, and I think I can do a better job now that I've seen them.” He said, “Well, fine. How long will it take you?” I said, “It took me a week before. I think I can do it in maybe three days.” He said, “The deadline's pretty close.” I started to walk away, and he said, “Bill? By the way, when you redo them, put your names on the credits.” X and I and T[hornton]. Hee. So it wasn't such a bad day after all!

DP:
Catch him in a bad mood more often!

BJ:
We had some fun when we did credits for
Bon Voyage.
We popped champagne bottles, and we had escargot on the set where we show this
beautiful table setup. We did a lot of crazy things on that one. We also did
The Parent Trap.
That had kind of interesting titles. We made some little dolls that were supposed to be like Hayley Mills and her sister. They were kind of interwoven into the titles. The titles were all to a song. We also did—

DP:
Babes in Toyland?

BJ:
I never worked so hard in my life as I did on
Babes in Toyland.
All that stop-motion stuff. In some scenes, I had as many as forty soldiers marching and each soldier had twelve pairs of legs that had to be changed every two frames.

DP:
Sounds tedious.

BJ:
Oh, God! It would take me about fifteen minutes to change their legs, and to be sure, I'd have to put a magnet down. They had magnetic feet so they wouldn't fall over. The ground or the table they were performing on had a metal top covered with background paper in whatever color we were supposed to have. Then the magnet would hold the soldier up. I'd put the magnet behind his feet so his foot wouldn't slide, to mark him, and then put him back down in the same spot with his different legs. You'd change four in a row, four in the next row, and you'd have ten or twelve rows of those guys. It was tedious work. I'd have to move their arms just so, each frame, just like animation, only it was all up here.

DP:
I guess you'd have to have a good sense of timing.

BJ:
Well, twelve pairs of legs meant that he was marching in twelve tempo, so that the rhythm was always there. That way, it's easy to divide it down into musical beats. If music is on elevens or sevens or something like that, it just doesn't divide into twenty-four, and that's the reason. A lot of times in animation, you're animating to music, so that you have a beat on your exposure sheet every so many frames, and you make everything happen on those beats so those musical accents will stand out. If you're not animating to music, then the musician will write to your action that you have in your animation. But most of the things that I was involved in, except for the chipmunks [Chip 'n Dale], involved
music. For those special titles, they had to write a title song. For
Babes in Toyland,
there was “The March of the Toys.” All those things had a definite beat to them. We had to pay very close attention to that.