“Every day was an excitement,” Marc Davis said. “Whatever we were doing had never been done before. It was such a great thrill to go in there. . . . There was excitement and there was competition; everyone was young and everyone was doing something. We saw every ballet, we saw every film. If a film was good we would go and see it five times. . . . Everybody here was studying constantly. We had models at the studio and we’d go over and draw every night. . . . We would all study the acting of Charles Laughton. We all read Stanislavsky. . . . We tried to understand Matisse and Picasso and others, even though our end result shows very little of that literally. . . . It wasn’t that you had to do these things—you wanted to do them.”80
It was not artists alone who submerged themselves in their work. The camera operator Adrian Woolery recalled that in the late 1930s, “it was not unusual to put in close to thirty-hour, round-the-clock sessions shooting camera. All we got for it was a fifty-cent meal ticket, which we took over to the old SOS Cafe, on Sunset Boulevard.”81
In only one part of the studio, the model department, was there drawing that came close to being drawing for its own sake, as opposed to drawing that was measured, like Ryman’s rejected drawing, against its potential usefulness in making a film. Formed originally to design characters for Pinocchio, the model department eventually branched into story work, putting up many of the sketches for several parts of Fantasia. Those seductive drawings could be maddeningly difficult to translate into animated film. Joe Grant, the model department’s head, dismissed the concern about costs Walt Disney repeatedly voiced in meetings in the late 1930s and early 1940s: “That was his way of getting out of it if he didn’t like it. . . . When he liked the pastel drawings and the color stuff in the model department, he never made such a remark. All he did is call in the ink and paint department and ask them, ‘Can you get that effect?’ ”82
The model department’s principal members differed markedly from other members of the Disney staff. Several of them had never worked in the inbetween department. John P. Miller, for instance, grew up as a banker’s son in Westchester County, outside New York City; he was “aimed at Princeton,” he said, “and wouldn’t go.” Miller referred to the model department as “sort of a goldbricking department,” used as a showpiece for prominent visitors because it looked like something creative was going on. His memories of his work there were “mostly social.” Said Martin Provensen: “I’m sure the rest of the studio—we all knew it at the time, in fact—saw us as just ridiculous.”83
Disney’s principal role in the model department, as in other parts of the studio, was as an editor of ideas. That was what his “coordination” chiefly consisted of. He was very involved, said James Bodrero, another model-department artist, “in a critical sense.”84 However questionable the initial conception of a film might be, what wound up on the screen after Disney had gone to work was usually more economical and effective than the earlier versions of any given story that can be reconstructed from meeting notes and other sources. In work on Pinocchio, for example, he pruned away tedious exposition, and for Bambi he eliminated superfluous dialogue.
“He was very helpful,” Carl Barks said of Disney’s role in story meetings on the Donald Duck cartoons. “Very seldom did he ever say a real hurtful thing to any of the story men, something that would cause . . . great discouragement. If he turned down a story completely, he would do it as gently as he could. As he walked out the door he would say, ‘Well, I think the best thing to do with that is just to shelve it for a while.’ So you knew that was the end.”85
Sometimes in notes from story meetings there is a particularly strong sense of Disney himself and how he worked. On August 8, 1939, he reviewed what had been done on a cartoon then called Donald’s Roadside Market (it was eventually released as Old MacDonald Duck). This was one of his first meetings on a short cartoon after he had left the shorts in Dave Hand’s care for more than a year. In the meeting, Disney impatiently rejected what he called “old stuff,” thought aloud and at length, warmed up to an idea (making a full-fledged musical out of the story), and then got really involved in the possibilities (“Gee, I’d like to sit in with you and see what we could get on the start of that music”).
“Musical things can’t miss,” he said (this was in the midst of work on Fantasia). “That is why you can sit and watch a tap dancer for ten minutes straight. . . . And then there is that old gag we used in a picture a long time ago and that is these hens laying eggs to music and it’s funnier than hell.” He seized on music as a way to rescue the struggling shorts and steered discussion toward basing Roadside Market on either swing or opera. “I think it wouldn’t hurt for us to make some musical things,” he said. (The finished cartoon, Old MacDonald Duck, is not a musical.)86
Those meeting notes also reflect Disney’s abundant profanity, which everyone remembered, though the stenographers edited it out in many instances. The notes are sprinkled with hells and damns, and Disney sounds generally impatient and irascible—“Why do we have to have all these damn chases?”
Disney’s most common expression—“Oh, shit”—survives in memoirs and interviews but apparently not in any meeting notes. That was probably because Disney censored himself in the presence of female stenographers—sometimes ostentatiously, as when he apologized so profusely to a stenographer for using the word “prat” (for buttocks) that “the gal started blushing,” Gordon Legg said. To him, it appeared that Disney “was doing it purposely, to make her feel uneasy.”87 Disney was, however, notoriously and incongruously prudish in some respects—members of his staff learned quickly that he disliked jokes about sex—and it seems just as likely that he sincerely regretted what he regarded as a lapse in his deportment.
Disney’s comments in meetings could be almost self-parodying in his repeated use of words like “fanny” and “cute,” as during a 1937 meeting on The Practical Pig: “We can get cute actions on the fanny. Arrange it so that the little guy gets in cute poses with that fanny. That is what will strengthen this picture a lot—cute actions of the little fellows. With cute actions it will make a very interesting picture.”88
As if harking back to the late 1920s, he frequently came up with mild bathroom gags, as in the August 3, 1937, meeting on a Mickey Mouse cartoon called The Fox Hunt. He suggested that the foxhounds plunge into a body of water, with only the tips of their tails showing as they sniff along vigorously underwater. “The funny part would be to have all the tails converging on one tree and then the duck comes up and yells at them to come on.”89 (That gag is in the finished film.) “In the minds of those making our pictures,” Disney wrote in 1937, “there never have been any thoughts of vulgarity—merely humorous situations from life exaggerated—and, to me, dogs sniffing trees and fire plugs is very humorous.”90
“He had a very earthy sense of humor,” said Jack Cutting, who joined the Disney staff in 1929. “His humor was what I would call rural, or rustic. . . . It was an unsophisticated sense of humor, and because he had that, he instinctively sensed what might go over well with the average audience. Dick Huemer’s sense of humor was sophisticated, and there were others there that had that sophisticated sense [of humor], but . . . Walt wouldn’t try to step into the orbit of Dick’s type of humor. Everything had to be basic, in Walt’s way. He expected others to accommodate to him, but he wasn’t going to accommodate to others.”91
Many of the anecdotes about Disney from the years immediately following Snow White reflect attempts by his employees, the writers in particular, to manipulate him—usually for no more sinister purpose than self-promotion at a studio where the boss was increasingly worried and distracted and there were many more people, and thus more opportunities to lapse into invisibility, than there had been a year or two earlier. Some members of the staff, justly or not, came to be regarded as particularly cunning. Perce Pearce, for example—admired during work on Snow White for his ability to assume the dwarfs’ personalities—was, after he moved on to supervising the writing of Ba
mbi, dismissed by many as a con man. Wilfred Jackson recalled Pearce’s catching Disney’s attention in noisy meetings by speaking much more quietly than anyone else—perhaps getting Disney to move into the seat next to his, in the bargain.92
Some of Disney’s habits of mind all but demanded manipulation. Members of his staff cited one in particular: he could be difficult in a story meeting, showing no interest in what he heard, and then, a week or so later, Campbell Grant said, “he’d come into your room all full of enthusiasm, and he’d sell you back your own idea.”93 Other times, in a variant on this pattern, Disney heard someone else’s ideas and then offered them as his own a short while later in the same meeting.94 “I’ve sat in story meetings with Walt,” Dave Hand said, “and heard someone . . . bring up a spontaneous gag, to go in a certain place. Walt’s sitting there, frowning, looking usually someplace else, and before the meeting is over, he gets the idea out of the air, excitedly explains it, and it goes in the picture. He never even heard it mentioned earlier, except that he did hear it.”95 Only a few people—Joe Grant was one—ever so captured Disney’s attention that he did not absorb and play back their ideas as his own.96
The writers tried to read his moods and play to them as they presented their storyboards, sometimes straining in their search for subtle clues in his behavior. “When you [presented a storyboard] to Walt,” Chuck Couch said, “it was grim. You’d have a story meeting set up, and you just got butterflies in your stomach. . . . You were always scared to death of him. . . . You’d start telling a story to Walt, and first of all, you’d look to see the expression he had on his face when he sat down in the chair; whether he was congenial to someone sitting next to him or just came in with a frown on his face. You’d start telling the story, and you’d always keep watching him. For one thing, if you saw his eyes go way ahead of you, that was all right, it caught his attention. But if he sat there and started drumming his fingers, you were in trouble.”97
Most writers, like Couch, sensibly interpreted the tapping of Disney’s fingers on the arm of his chair as a sign of impatience (“Oh, God,” Jack Hannah said, “you’d have to go ahead and finish the story, hearing that rapping on the chair”),98 but T. Hee found variations in the tapping. He claimed that only a slow, steady tempo spoke of unhappiness, and that Disney bounced his hand up and down in a faster, lighter tempo when he was pleased. And then there was the tapping of his ring. “He had this big ring on his finger,” Leo Salkin said, “and when he got restless you could hear him tapping that goddamn ring on his chair, and it’d drive you right up the wall.”99 Disney might also slap the side of the chair with his hand, “which he did when he enjoyed something,” T. Hee said.100 Bill Peet interpreted that slapping differently: “When he slapped the arms of his chair lightly he was the least bit impatient. When the slapping became ‘heavy-handed,’ Walt was showing his irritation—ready to explode.”101
Directors, too, tried to keep a step ahead of the boss. Dick Lundy, who was directing Donald Duck shorts by the time of the move to Burbank, said he “used an awful lot of psychology with Walt,” specifically by deferring to Disney on which gags to cut from a story that was running too long. Lundy believed that if he suggested which gags to cut, Disney would go “against me, to put me in my place.”102
Other employees, in other circumstances, believed they had experienced punishment of the same kind, for the same reason. During the planning for the Burbank studio, Ken Anderson wrote to Disney to remind him of his six years of education in architecture and to volunteer his services. “Boy, that was a death knell,” he said. “I never should have done that.” Anderson was excluded from any role in the design of the new studio.103
After Snow White demonstrated the viability of animated features, Disney at first considered expanding and remodeling the Hyperion plant.104 Then, when the huge dimensions of Snow White’s success became apparent, he decided to build a new studio on a fifty-one-acre site in Burbank, in the San Fernando Valley, just over the Hollywood Hills from the Hyperion Avenue studio. Walt Disney Productions bought the property, until then used as a military academy’s polo field, from the City of Los Angeles’s Department of Power and Light in August 1938.105
“They thought they would be very happy if Snow White grossed three million,” Disney said to a small group of his key artists in January 1940—“they” being his brother and others on the studio’s business side—“so when it went over that I said . . . I want to build a new studio. . . . But really, I have a hard time getting money out of them.”106
He succeeded, though, in extracting more than three million dollars for the new facility, at Buena Vista and Alameda Streets. Once some space in the new buildings could be occupied, the move from Hyperion took the better part of a year. Although the camera rooms at Burbank were in use by late August 1939, the inkers and painters and Roy Disney’s offices still had not made the move by April 1940.107
At the heart of the new studio, whose resemblance to a college campus was widely noted, was the three-story animation building. Disney himself, his writers, and the model department were on the top floor. The directors and their layout artists were on the second floor, animators and their assistants on the first. A secretary was posted at the entrance to each wing, instructed to bar anyone from visiting the artists unless they had first been announced.108
Disney intended that the Burbank studio would be not just architecturally impressive—its sleek Art Deco styling extended all the way to the design of the animators’ desks—but also uniquely well suited to the needs of people working in animation. For someone coming there after having worked at one of the other cartoon studios, as Fred Kopietz did in April 1940, the new plant could indeed seem heavenly, as Kopietz explained: “Everything was so relaxed by comparison with [the Walter Lantz studio], I couldn’t believe it. . . . Everything was so easy-going, with no real push. . . . Here I was used to push, push, push, all the time.” There was, besides, much better equipment—at Disney, in contrast to Lantz, an animator could have a Moviola in his room, and the entire studio was air-conditioned.109
(Kopietz had animated at Lantz for years, but by 1940 such outside animators could not expect to join the Disney staff at the same level. Kopietz started with Disney as an assistant in special effects animation, and at much lower pay than he had been making, before advancing to character animation on the Donald Duck cartoons.)
Even the animators already working for Disney found the change dramatic, Jack Bradbury said: “When we went to the new studio, we went from a room that we had worked in with several guys to rooms all by ourselves, with drapes on the windows, carpeting all over the floor, a nice easy chair to sit in.” Each animator had a separate room, with two animators’ assistants sharing a room in between. But the atmosphere was chilly, the writer Stephen Bosustow said. “It was cold, you didn’t know who your boss was . . . it was just a cold-fish organization.” He spoke of “the impersonal feeling that came over the whole studio after being what we thought was a warm, big, happy family.”110
It was not just the size and complexity of the new plant that were alienating. Status symbols were more important at the new studio than they had been on Hyperion. “The animators had carpets on the floor,” Ward Kimball said. “The assistants and inbetweeners had linoleum. Cold, hard, noisy linoleum.” Status at the Hyperion studio was determined “more or less [by] what you were doing,” Kimball said. “But when we got over to the Burbank studio, you acquired the status symbols—the car you drove, and so forth.”111
In the new studio it was not as easy as it had been at Hyperion to move freely, the assistant animator Van Kaufman said, in words that summon up memories of hall monitors in high school. “We never walked down the hall unless we carried [the animation drawings for] a scene under our arms. If you were just screwing off, and you were going over to see a friend in another wing, you took a scene with you.” Said Hawley Pratt, another assistant animator: “You’d get lost at Disney. You’d be down a corridor, in a little
room, and nobody would ever know who you were or what you were doing. You didn’t know what was going on—as we would say—upstairs. The second floor you would get to, once in a while, but the third floor—that was like going to heaven.”112
The writer Carl Barks once recalled in a letter: “The physical layout of the Hyperion studio was very informal, and for that reason [it] was a more pleasant place to work. We Duck and Pluto crews got moved every few weeks into quarters that were still being hammered together by carpenters. At Burbank we were catalogued and classified and packaged like so many guinea pigs in quarters that seemed as friendly as hospital four-bed wards. Units lost personal contact with each other, and the only camaraderie was surreptitious sneaking back and forth with bets for the horse race pools.”113
Disney’s paternalism backfired comically in one instance described by Jack Hannah, Barks’s partner as a Donald Duck writer. “He had a big soda fountain downstairs that catered room service to all units,” Hannah told Jim Korkis. “All you had to do was pick up a phone and say, ‘Send up a double chocolate malt and a tuna sandwich.’ Any time of the day or night you could call and it would arrive with a cute little waitress in a fancy outfit. . . . It was just too good a thing. Walt would go by downstairs in the middle of the day and he would see the same people sitting there having a cup of coffee or whatever. They’d be sitting there half the day instead of working. Walt finally blew up and the whole thing was thrown out. The whole set-up. All those cute young things.”114
The ironies were thick as Disney completed the move to his luxurious new studio in the spring of 1940. Instead of soaring aloft with grand new feature films, Disney was scrambling furiously to find some way to make less expensive features and bring in badly needed cash. His haste mirrored the haste he had shown in moving Pinocchio into animation early in 1938, but now his motives were radically different. At a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) hearing in 1942, Disney broke into tears as he began talking about this period in his studio’s life: “In the spring of 1940 I was about going crazy—pardon me, excuse me, please?” The NLRB trial examiner ordered a recess of five minutes.115
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