Working with Disney (2 page)

I have concentrated on the people who created the Disney magic—on the big screen, on the little screen, or in the parks—and their relationships with each other and especially with Walt Disney. My interviews offer a fresh perspective on Disney, not only because of the range of people with whom I talked but also because of the subjects we discussed. I had the opportunity to interview many of them when they were still relatively young with sharp minds and vivid memories. Unfortunately many are gone now, but they will live on as they share their stories through the pages of this book.

Some of the interviews were conducted at the studio, some by mail, some by phone, and some at the interviewees' homes. At the studio especially, an interesting phenomenon would often take place during an interview when interviewees often would gradually slip from the past tense to the present tense when referring to Walt—not “Walt did this” or “Walt did that,” but “Walt does this” or “Walt does that.” (In the text, I have kept references to Walt Disney in the past tense.) In spirit, Walt was still there, and at times I almost felt like I would soon hear his signature cough as he came down the hall, about to rush into the room with some fantastic new idea.

If I ever needed a reason to pursue the people who knew and worked with Walt Disney, artist Herb Ryman (also featured in
Working with Walt: Interviews with Disney Artists)
summed it up very nicely when he said to me, “So each person that you talk to and each person you interview will have a little part of the puzzle, the jigsaw puzzle, that goes into the portrait of Walt Disney. It is for people like yourself to have the
privilege and the duty of presenting Walt as a human being and a person who can be known, a person who you can be close to.”

As I gathered the information and taped the interviews—analog recordings in the beginning, digital later on—I wanted and needed to learn as much as I could about this magical man. And a serendipitous result of all this was that I had an opportunity to meet and to know so many wonderful people—many unknown to most of the public then—who helped make the difference at Disney. The people you will meet in the book are not unbiased (if anyone ever could be). They admired, respected, even loved Walt Disney, but all of them experienced the full force of Walt's personality. I have conducted more than ninety interviews to date, and the word interviewees most often used to describe their feelings about Walt is
awe
. They were then and for the rest of their lives in awe of him.

When I conducted my early interviews, only a few books and magazines dealt with animation (the best of which was Mike Barrier's
Funnyworld).
In those days before the Internet, it was not easy to know who else was working in this field. I have often felt that we early historians were a little like medieval monks working on our own in our cells. Only later, when I started meeting other historians conducting similar research, did I realize the excitement of talking with kindred spirits, people who spoke my language. Now we have so much access to information that it is at times overwhelming, but back then, it was a much smaller world.

Each trip to southern California was a wonderful foray into the world of Walt Disney, as the people I met would reveal facets of Walt's personality and his style. I was discovering that each person had his or her own Walt Disney. No two people saw him in the same way. No matter how big or little a person's role, Walt touched his or her life, and the stories about him add to the mosaic of Walt himself. With each interview, I learned more about Walt, but I also came to understand that to have a complete understanding of the man would be an elusive dream. Yet I wanted to continue to pursue this dream. But that did not mean I should give up my dream. I “knew” Walt Disney as the avuncular host of his weekly TV show and thought of him as a warm and genial man who
seemed to have an endless supply of curiosity. For years, I only had that image of Walt and the Walt of the studio publicity department. But they were more than enough to keep my interest in him alive. After I began interviewing more and more people, my fascination with him grew by leaps and bounds.

Walt Disney was born in Chicago on December 5, 1901. He moved with his family to Marceline, Missouri, in 1906, where he spent the golden years of his childhood living in a rural and small-town setting. In 1911, the family moved to Kansas City, Missouri. Walt had many jobs as he moved from childhood to adolescence, most notably as a newspaper boy and a “news butcher” (vendor) on passenger trains. After serving with the Red Cross in France as World War I came to a close, Walt worked briefly as a graphic artist for Pesmen-Rubin, where he met another graphic artist and future animator, Ub Iwerks, whose career became forever linked with Walt's. Walt then moved on to the Kansas City Film Ad Company, where he became fascinated with animation. He formed Laugh-o-Grams Pictures and produced a few films before bankruptcy closed down the fledging studio.

At the time Walt Disney entered the world of animation, the art form had grown by leaps and bounds from the fledgling work of J. Stuart Blackton
(Humorous Phases of Funny Faces
[1906]) in America and Emile Cohl in France
(Fantasmagorie
[1908]) to Winsor McCay's triumph,
Gertie the Dinosaur,
which appeared as part of an interactive performance with McCay (1914). New York became the center of the animation business, and many early innovations, such as the use of clear plastic celluloid sheets (cels) so that animated drawings could be overlaid on opaque background drawings, were becoming standard industry practices. The output of Pat Sullivan, with his immensely popular Felix the Cat, Paul Terry and his Aesop's Fables, Max Fleischer and his Out of the Inkwell series, and a host of other studios producing animation fare for theater bills dwarfed tiny Laugh-o-Grams. Walt was influenced by the work of these men; for his Alice Comedies, he chose to reverse the novelty used in the Out of the Inkwell series. Walt recalled, “They had the clown [Koko the Klown] out of the inkwell who played with live people. So I reversed it. I took the live person and put him into the cartoon field.
I said, ‘That's a new twist.' And I sold it. I surprised myself.” Despite their prolific output of short-subject cartoons, the New York studios were not seriously regarded by most of the filmmakers or the distributors. For the most part, these cartoons served as fillers on theater programs, although some characters—most notably, Felix the Cat—became quite popular.

With a working print of
Alice's Wonderland,
Walt headed for Hollywood. In 1923, he and his brother, Roy O. Disney, formed the Disney Brothers Studio, which was renamed Walt Disney Productions in 1926. Between 1924 and 1927, the studio produced fifty-six Alice comedies, all of which combined live action and animation until their popularity waned. The Disney brothers then produced the animated series Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Both series garnered some success, but they were not the best cartoon series of their day. That would change soon. In 1928, Walt lost his access to the Oswald character and most of his studio staff to the series' distributor, Charlie Mintz. With only Iwerks and a small staff remaining, Walt launched his next cartoon creation, Mickey Mouse, who debuted with his girlfriend, Minnie, in
Steamboat Willie
(released on November 18, 1928), and the rest, as they say, is history. The film—third in the series but the first with sound and the first released as talkies swept the nation (sound was later added to the first two films)—was an enormous hit and began what would become the Golden Age of Animation at the Disney Studio. But at the time, Walt was in desperate need of staff to meet his production goals, so in addition to hiring raw local talent, he recruited animators with experience from the New York studios. In 1929, Walt launched a second series, the Silly Symphonies, with
The Skeleton Dance.
Iwerks, who animated almost that entire cartoon, left the studio to go into business for himself in 1930 but returned to the studio ten years later and remained there for the rest of his career, making enormous contributions in the development of animation technology.

With the success of the Mickey Mouse cartoons, Walt constantly pushed for better draftsmanship in the animated drawings, taking advantage of each innovation that came along, beginning with sound and then color
(Flowers and Trees
[1932]) and later the multiplane camera, which added three-dimensional depth. He stressed story
development and personality development at a level that was unique at the time.
Three Little Pigs
(1933) is the first film to succeed in creating characters with individual personalities. He wanted audiences to believe that his characters were real, and the success of the short subjects proved that he was on the right track. His success at branding the Disney characters was so great that the old
Life
magazine ran a cartoon in which a dejected would-be movie patron turns away from the box office, saying, “What? No Mickey Mouse?” In just a few years, Walt had almost single-handedly raised the quality of cartoons from a novelty to an art form. Other cartoon producers—Fleischer, Terry, Harman-Ising, Van Beuren—produced cartoons that in some cases rivaled Disney in artistic style (Harman-Ising) and had characters with popular followings (Fleischer's Betty Boop, for example), but Walt's mantra of “plussing”—constantly striving to improve every aspect of the cartoon medium—kept him at the forefront with audiences and critics as well as with his competitors. As Chuck Jones of Warner Bros. said, “Of course we stole from Disney then.
Everybody
stole from Disney then.” Walt received a special Academy Award for the creation of Mickey Mouse and dominated the short-subject category throughout the 1930s:
Flowers and Trees
(1931–32),
Three Little Pigs
(1932—33),
The Tortoise and the Hare
(1934),
Three Little Orphans
(1935),
The Country Cousin
(1936),
The Old Mill
(1937),
Ferdinand the Bull
(1938), and
The Ugly Duckling
(1939).

In 1925, Walt married Lillian Bounds, and they became parents to daughters Diane in 1933 and Sharon in 1936. Even though short-subject cartoons were immensely popular, Walt could not recover his costs because of the high quality he demanded for each cartoon output. As a huge leap forward in the development of animation, Walt launched his studio into feature-film production with the highly successful
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
(1937). The film was so profitable that Walt and Roy could afford to move from their studio on Hyperion Avenue to a new studio they designed in Burbank. With the success of
Snow White,
Walt embarked on several features, including
Pinocchio
(1940),
Fantasia
(1940),
The Reluctant Dragon
(1941),
Dumbo
(1941), and
Bambi
(1942). As would be the case throughout his career, wherever Walt directed his attention and energy, the studio shined, and that is where Walt's staff
wanted to be. Few other studios attempted animated feature films at that time, with the exception of a couple of rather weak productions emanating from the Max Fleischer Studio.

By 1939, World War II had begun in Europe, cutting off the highly lucrative foreign market; as a result, only
Dumbo
was a success on its initial release. The studio strike of 1941 was a very bitter experience for many of those who struck as well as for those who did not, and that bitterness persisted for many years. The studio had grown so quickly over the preceding dozen years that it had lost its intimacy, and some of the dissatisfaction was an inevitable result of that growth. But with Hollywood studios battling the union movement, some of the factors that led to unrest at the Disney Studio included a bonus system that had become dysfunctional as the staff grew very large with feature productions, a suspension of raises as the studio experienced financial challenges, a fear of layoffs, and a clash between staff who wanted to unionize and Walt and Roy, who had run the studio in a paternalistic manner when the staff was smaller and more manageable. (Many staff members liked the way Walt and Roy had run the studio.) The strike was ultimately settled through arbitration, but tension and anger remained. Among those who did not strike, sympathies ranged from strong support for the management position and hostility toward the strikers to an understanding of the point of view of those on the bottom rungs of the corporate ladder, who were paid the least and had little job security.

The attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into World War II brought the Disney Studio contracts for training films and public-service films, which became a mainstay of production through the war years. A few feature films were made:
Saludos Amigos
(1943),
Victory through Air Power
(1943), and
The Three Caballeros
(1945). In the first years after the war, with the exception of
Song of the South
(1946) and
So Dear to My Heart
(1948), which were combination live-action and animated films, Walt turned to feature films comprised of animated shorts:
Make Mine Music
(1946),
Fun and Fancy Free
(1947),
Melody Time
(1948), and
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
(1949).

During the 1930s and 1940s, other studios focused on short-subject cartoons, moving away from the Disney style of realism and personality
animation and pushing in different directions. Disney alumni Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising started animation studios within Warner Bros. and MGM that were in many ways the most successful rivals to the Disney style, offering a wackier, more brash and irreverent style that became very popular. Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck, and Tom and Jerry could hold their own with Mickey, Donald, Goofy, and Pluto. Many Disney animators enjoyed these films as members of the audience but felt that their studio was striving for something different. As Disney interest in short subjects waned with the ascendancy of feature films, Academy Awards for short subjects reflected this shift and the emergence of MGM and Warner Bros. as rivals in this field:
The Milky Way
(MGM, 1940),
Lend a Paw
(Disney, 1941),
Der Fuehrer's Face
(Disney, 1942),
The Yankee Doodle Mouse
(MGM, 1943),
Mouse Trouble
(MGM, 1944),
Quiet Please!
(MGM, 1945),
The Cat Concerto
(MGM, 1946),
Tweetie Pie
(Warner Bros., 1947),
The Little Orphan
(MGM, 1948), and
For Scent-Imental Reasons
(Warner Bros., 1949). The 1950s would be the last decade dominated by mainstream studio cartoons: double features and other changes in theatrical programming all but eliminated the market.