Working with Disney (5 page)
Read Working with Disney Online
Authors: Don Peri
DP:
From what I've read and heard about the strike and what led up to it, it seems like one of the hardest things is applying job security to something like talent that is so intangible. Like you were saying, if somebody does a better job than somebody else, they might have received a bonus or more money. How do you equate the two?
FT:
That's particularly difficult. Terribly difficult. So many egos. In my experience, a man's creative ability is in direct relation to his ego, and some of them handled it better than others. Many guys had more talent than they could handle, and it was just driving them and driving them, and they couldn't find a balance and they took to drink or to whatever. When you get a whole bunch of those guysânow, they were for the most part rugged individuals who had no use for a unionâand you balance them against what we call the hack artist, the commercial artist, the guy who's been making his little drawings day after dayâyou need a certain amount of those[, too]. They're looking for security. They know they're never going to make it big. They're going to hang onto anything.
DP:
If you could have changed Walt Disney, would you have changed him, or how would you have changed him?
FT:
I wouldn't tamper with him! No, there were many things which made me awfully mad, and many things which made me awfully upset, and he had a way of getting you so fired up and then letting you down, and sometimes he would do it on purpose and sometimes he'd do it just because his interest was in other areas. If you were mature enough and well enough balanced within yourself, you could laugh it off and absorb it. But if you're caught up in the whole thing and really got yourself in it, that's what he was able to do, to make each person contribute themselves. You were doing work above your head. You were thrilled with what you were doing. There was an excitement about it that you can't generate by yourself. He'd generate it in you. You'd get so high, it was awful tough to keep your balance, and when you'd be dropped, why, it was a shattering experience. He'd shelve the picture you were working on. He'd take you off an assignment and put someone else on it. That's what I mean by being dropped.
DP:
What was it like to work at the Disney Studios in the 1930s? I realize that this is a really broad question, but was that the kind of feelingâjust getting really excited about what you were doing?
FT: Yeah, and the fact that we were discovering things which had never been known before. Someone would run down the hall and say, “Hey, did you see the test Dick Lundy got?” “No, no, no! What's he got?” “Oh, wait 'til you see it!” Everybody would go running into Dick's room. Fifty guys would come in during the day to see his test. Word got around the studio. “How'd you do it?” “How'd you time it?” “Let's see the drawings.” Bill Roberts had a good one. Somebody else had a good one. There was all this excitement about what you were doing. The pictures you were making had never been made before. So everything about it. When you think of the good old daysâit's funny, it's those six years, from 1934â35 to 1940â41âjust that little pucker there that stands out above everything in the thirty years that followed.
DP:
The Golden Age that they refer to.
FT:
Yeah. Now, when you talk about the best pictures and when the zenith was reached and things like that, this might have an influence on that: the fact that during those years there was the excitement of discovery, while after that, there was the perfection of technique. But there is still some discovery going on even in the perfection of technique. But the big raw idea [was done]. I keep thinking of guys like Einsteinânineteen, wasn't he, when he had his big idea? He spent the rest of his life refining it. That's kind of the way Walt went, too. As creative people, weâthe two or three that I talk withâresented being forced to refine. We wanted to stay with the big ideas, keep going. And as I mentioned before, had
Fantasia
gone over, I think we would have found ourselves in another field. But Walt kept hunting himself. I don't mean to say that he curtailed his creative efforts. For instance, he loved Hiawatha.
DP:
The short subject?
FT:
No, just the idea of Hiawatha. He'd done that just as a short. No, but as an idea, the poem. He said, “Unlock your thinking. Try to think of something new. There is something in that that people like. There's a
magic to it. There's mystery to it. There's something in that subject matter.” He said, “I don't know what it is. Don't think film. Maybe it's live. Maybe it's in a theater out in the woods. Maybe it's on a mountaintop. I don't know where the thing is or what you do with it, but there's an idea there that someone could get hold of.” Well, this is the way he was all the time. “An idea there that somebody could get hold of.” No limitations on him.
DP:
Do you think that moving to Burbank took away some of that feeling or that excitement? Was it exciting to move here?
FT:
It was necessary! We were practically standing on top of one another.
DP:
I understand you had about six locations. People were all over.
FT:
Yeah, all over. It was like Parkinson said in his laws: the amount of output is in direct relationship to the number of phones in the building. If there's one phone and sixty people, you get a whale of a lot of stuff out. But when you have sixty phones and one person, no work ever comes out! However, while we were sitting on top of each other, we turned out a lot more exciting things than when we all had our own comfortable little rooms. And yet
Bambi
was made over here.
Fantasia
was made half over there and half over here, so I don't think the mood here really affected the product.
DP:
Probably everything that happened at the time, the warâ
FT:
I would say the two biggest things were the war and the social unrest that came with it, which brought about the union.
DP:
You had mentioned that Walt liked to put together people who didn't necessarily love each other's work.
FT:
Who were opposed. Basically, if you have two people who agree with each other, all they're going to put up is what they agree on. If you have two people who disagree, who say, “You're crazy, it shouldn't be that, it ought to be this,” then Walt felt that rather than sit in a corner and sulk, they were going to try to prove that their way was right and they were going to work harder to try to find a way to sell it. They were going
to try to get it past this other guy to Walt, or they were going to try to convince the other guy. They were going to work and work and work. So that was his theory, and it was 50 percent right. But no more than 50 percent! I think he wasted an awful lot of energy through that, but he also got some fantastic results. Well, he had his own way. Someone was saying the other day that he had his own way of reacting to each person individually, so if you have three hundred people, you have three hundred different Walts, because they all saw a different side of him.
Ollie Johnston was born on October 31, 1912, in Palo Alto, California. He attended Stanford University, where his father was a professor of romance languages and where he met Frank Thomas. Just shy of graduation, Ollie came to Los Angeles to take classes at the Chouinard Art Institute. He followed Frank and other Stanford alumni to the Walt Disney Studios, joining the staff on January 21, 1935. After learning the ropes of animation on short subjects, Ollie received his big break as an assistant to Freddy Moore on
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Ollie would treasure his time with Freddy for the rest of his life and subsequently kept Freddy's pencil taped to a window as a constant reminder of the magic that flowed from it. Over the years, Ollie, as one of Walt's famed Nine Old Men of Animation, went on to work on a total of twenty-four features, including
Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, Song of the South, Cinderella, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty, 101 Dalmatians, The Jungle Book, Robin Hood
(1973),
The Aristocats
(1970), and
The Rescuers.
After he retired, he and Frank Thomas produced four booksâ
Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life, Too Funny for Words, Walt Disney's Bambi: The Story and the Film,
and
The Disney Villain
âthat guided generations of animators and
artists. Ollie retired in 1978 after forty-three years with the studio and was named a Disney Legend in 1989. The last survivor among the Nine Old Men of Animation, he died on April 14, 2008. The celebration of life for Ollie at the El Capitan Theater in Hollywood that August was also a farewell to an era of giants who made animation the defining art form of the twentieth century.
I first met Ollie when he sent me two tape cassettes to record Ben Sharpsteen's answers to questions he and Frank had posed as part of their research for
Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life.
When I brought Ben's answers to the studio, I had lunch with Frank and Ollie, dressed in matching blue cardigan sweaters. I interviewed Ollie at the Walt Disney Studios on September 1, 1977. Over the years, I enjoyed exchanging letters with Ollie and treasured every opportunity I had to visit him. On one memorable visit, he brought out his electric train and we were his passengers on a ride around his Flintridge backyard. Then he let me take the controls and pilot the train around with my daughters as passengers, and then he even gave the controls to my oldest daughter, who was probably about eight years old at the time, and I was her passenger! On one of my last visits, Ollie, then age ninety, explained how Pinocchio looked back at the Blue Fairy through his legsâand demonstrated the pose. He was a wonderful friend, a great artist, and he left an indelible mark on all who knew him and his amazing animation.
DP:
The last time I was talking with you and Frank, I hadn't known that you had an interest in trains. Was your interest prior to Walt's interest that led to his
Lilly Belle
train?
OJ:
I had always been interested in locomotives, particularly steam locomotives, so in about 1946, I started building this backyard railroad. One Christmas, oh, maybe a year later, why, Ward Kimball came into the room and he said, “Hey, I hear Walt's got a Lionel [train] set up in a room off of his office up there for his nephew, Roy [Roy Edward
Disney]. Let's go up and see it.” So we went up and walked in. Pretty soon, Walt came in. Walt said, “Gee, I didn't know you were interested in trains.” I said, “Yeah, I'm building a backyard railroad.” He says, “Jeez, I always wanted one of those.” He'd always been interested in trains. He'd been out and ridden on Kimball's big one [narrow-gauge steam engine]. So anyway, he came out to where we were building mine in Santa Monica two or three times and watched the progress. Finally, he called in a guy from our [train] club who designed an old-fashioned locomotive that turned out to be the one that he eventually had running around his place. And so we used to exchange visits: he'd come up and ride mine, and I'd go out and ride his. So in a way, I kind of say, I stimulated his interest, which was already there. I wouldn't want to claim credit, because he used to ride the trains all the time when he was a kid.
DP:
Did you find him to be a different person when you were doing that than at the studio? Was he always essentially the same type of person?
OJ:
No, he was more relaxed. I would say you were kind of in awe of this guy all the time, even outside of the studio or wherever you met him, so it was a little difficult to get on the same basis with him that you would with some other worker here or some other animator. So I found I wasn't uneasy around him, but here was this famous guy, he's your boss, and you respect him a lot, and somehow I never could quite think of him as a friend! I guess I had too much respect for him, but he did relax a lot more, and we talked a little about work. He'd talk a little about a lot of the financial problems coming out of the war. Of course, there were the banks and stockholders and all kinds of things to deal with he'd never had before, and occasionally he'd comment on something about that, like, “Jeez, I hope I can get this place so it doesn't hang on a single picture one of these days,” which he did shortly after that [when he] brought out the nature stuff [True-Life Adventures].
DP:
Yeah and then Disneyland.
OJ:
Yeah, those things added up, too. And he used to talk a little bit about trying to finance the park. He'd talk about putting his railroad around
his new house and whether his wife was particularly enamored with the idea. But he was interesting to be with at any time.
DP:
I would assume that a lot of your fellow workers would envy you for having something special like that in common with him.
OJ:
I remember one guy who was head of the animation department at that time kidded me and said, “Don't dance too close to the queen!” Walt used to keep coming down to my room to show me every time he'd get a new part made or something, and that sometimes was a little touchy, but nobody really kidded me much about it. I didn't think there was any jealousy, because in the first place just because I had the same hobby with Walt didn't mean that I had any strength with him that I wouldn't have had otherwise, as far as my ability in animation. I think everybody knew that. There was no way you could butter Walt up. I would never have tried. I mean, it was obvious that you couldn't, and anyway, who would want to get ahead that way with a guy like that?
DP:
Going way back, I was wondering how you happened to go to work here?
