The Animated Man

by Michael Barrier

  One project was The Reluctant Dragon, a live-action tour of the Disney studio itself (with animated inserts) that would tap the public’s strong, or so Disney hoped, curiosity about how animated films were made. The live action was shot in the fall of 1940, with Robert Benchley as the star. Benchley told his wife he found the experience disagreeable: “I know I have had to do a lot of stuff I didn’t like personally, and don’t think I want to keep on in the cartoon business. . . . They play too comical in cartoons.”116 Disney had said at a Pinocchio meeting on December 8, 1938: “Certain actors who want to do voices for our characters, they look at it differently than they used to.”117 But now, with the public markedly cooler to that second Disney feature than it had been to Snow White, the prestige of a Disney association was starting to shrink, too.

  Fantasia was Disney’s most ambitious film by far. It reached the screen in New York on November 13, 1940, in a two-thousand-seat theater called the Broadway. Its earlier name was the Colony—it was the same theater where Steamboat Willie had premiered a dozen years earlier. Disney had leased the theater for a year and especially fitted it to reproduce Fantasia’s multichannel Fantasound.118

  By then, Disney had so muddied and compromised his original vision of an equal partnership between music and images that the film defied admiration except as an exercise in a limited kind of virtuosity. Musically, Fantasia is false from the start. The musicians, as they take their seats in the introductory live action, are hopelessly misplaced, their instruments in positions that would never be duplicated in a real performance. Disney himself probably had little to do with the seating and lighting of the orchestra—Lee Blair, a color stylist, did most of the planning, working with miniature figures—but the introduction is in keeping with much of the rest of the film, where an enthusiasm for the purely pictorial overrode any musical considerations. If the idea originally was to integrate great music with pictures, by the time the film reached the screen the music was clearly subordinate to the cartoons—“Walt Disney plus Bach or Beethoven,” as one reviewer put it, noting that the opening-night crowd “applauded exactly where it would have applauded if the score had been composed by a Hollywood musician.”119

  Deems Taylor, acting as Fantasia’s master of ceremonies, reveals how flimsy had become its rationale. Of the film’s version of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, he says: “What you will see on the screen is a picture of the various abstract images that might pass through your mind if you sat in a concert hall listening to this music.” In other words, Disney’s toccata and fugue—and, by extension, much of the rest of Fantasia—was a gratuitous exercise, since why should an audience want a film to do its daydreaming for it? The more difficult and potentially rewarding task, to mirror on film the formal structure of Bach’s masterpiece and to make what was on the screen as powerful as the music—that task was not even attempted.

  Disney himself regarded Fantasia as an unsatisfactory compromise: “I wanted a special show just like Cinerama plays today [in 1956]. . . . I had Fantasia set for a wide screen. I had dimensional sound. . . . To get that wide screen I had the projector running sideways. . . . I had the double frame. But I didn’t get to building my cameras or my projectors because the money problem came in. . . . The compromise was that it finally went out standard [that is, standard screen dimensions] with dimensional sound. I think if I’d had the money and I could have gone ahead I’d have had a really sensational show at that time.”

  Fantasia got mixed reviews, but even admirers couldn’t help but voice reservations that were sometimes telling. Hermine Rich Isaacs, writing in Theatre Arts, praised many of the film’s segments, like “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and the ballet parody “Dance of the Hours,” as “pure Silly Symphonies,” but some of them, like “The Rite of Spring,” gave her pause:

  The moving celluloid picture can no longer be judged on its own merits; it is now successful only insofar as it is a successful complement to the music. Here then is the obstacle that Fantasia’s creators meet and do not entirely conquer in their pioneering effort: they are faced with an audience familiar with the musical score, and with many preconceived notions about it which Fantasia, with its own notions, cannot dispel. Every person who has heard the pieces has a definite idea of their interpretation, and although his conception sometimes coincides with Disney’s, more often it does not. Where Stravinsky’s [Rite of Spring] suggested the story of evolution to the filmmakers, to some of the listeners it is more suggestive of orgiastic dancing and festivals of springtime, and to others it is absolute music that cannot be interpreted in literal terms.120

  Fantasia cost almost $2.3 million, and even uniformly glowing reviews could not have saved it. Its road-show engagements were limited by the unavailability of enough Fantasound equipment—defense orders were taking precedence—and the studio’s receipts from the thirteen engagements were pitifully small, only about $325,000.121

  Disney—the entrepreneur who had been so doggedly optimistic in the 1920s—adopted the same tone in late 1940, when he wrote: “Instead of one feature-length picture every two years which seemed the limit of our capacity two years ago, we are now reorganized and equipped to release nine features in the next two years, each at a fraction of Pinocchio’s cost.”122 The reality was that as of February 5, 1941, the Disney studio owed the Bank of America $2,781,737.92, and its loan agreement permitted it to borrow less than $20,000 more.123 Simply completing the features then in production would be difficult enough.

  Although Disney stubbornly adhered to the idea that Fantasia could be made new every year by replacing some of its segments with new ones, he now spoke constantly of the need to cut costs in meetings on two contemplated additions to Fantasia’s program, “The Ride of the Valkyries” and The Swan of Tuonela. He did not want “Valkyries” to be made with a flurry of short scenes. “Quick cuts are very expensive,” he said in a meeting on January 27, 1941. “This thing depends on what it’s going to cost us.” He said of Tuonela: “You don’t have to animate that swan. You just get a very good model [that is, single drawing] of it.”124

  Disney expressed similar urgency in meetings on a short subject, Invitation to the Dance, that was to star characters from Fantasia. “You’re going to have to go through this stuff and see where you can get away from the two characters working together, because that’s what runs your costs up,” he said on April 24, 1941.125 As early as March 1941, Disney contemplated making a wholly live-action film, based on Felix Salten’s The Hound of Florence. He expected to make it for under $400,000—much less than he was spending on his animated features.126

  It was in the midst of this turmoil that some of Disney’s employees began thinking about how a labor union might protect them.

  In early 1941, most Disney employees had been represented for three years by an independent union called the Federation of Screen Cartoonists. The federation was a company union, in fact if not in name, but it had been installed with overwhelming support. On February 11, 1938, when the federation filed its petition with the federal government’s National Labor Relations Board, it submitted membership cards signed by 568 of the 601 employees in the bargaining unit it sought. Hearings were held in October 1938, and the NLRB certified the federation on July 22, 1939.127

  Even though the federation was the Disneys’ creature, they made no pretense of taking it seriously or even bargaining with it, and the union’s officers did not force the issue. “It’s maybe like some guys with their wives,” Ollie Johnston told Bob Thomas. “They want to be the ones to decide when she’s going to get a new dress instead of having her go out and buy it. I think that’s the way he felt”—that is, Walt Disney wanted to decide when someone got a raise, rather than adhere to a union contract. And raises were plentiful. As Jack Hannah put it, “every two and a half months, or something like that, you’d get a raise of two dollars a week. You always knew that you had a little raise ahead.”128

  New employees typically started their Disney careers by
doing boring and repetitive work on the bottom rungs of animation’s ladder, but always with the promise ahead of them that strong performance would soon be rewarded handsomely, with stimulating work and higher pay. Now they felt a cold wind on their necks. Gordon Legg recalled many years later that “the most militant union organizers” were found among the assistant animators and inbetweeners, those artists at the very bottom of the animation ladder. They were “newer guys who had never really known Walt,” Legg said. “He didn’t speak to them, unless he said, ‘Hi, fellas,’ because he didn’t know them.”

  Even so, Legg believed that if Disney “had called the people together more often, and talked to them . . . I think he could have laid people off and they would have understood why.”129 This was a persistent theme not just in Legg’s comments but in those of other employees: if Disney himself had known what was going on (and he did not, because the studio had gotten so much larger), he could somehow have made things right. “Guys who were working their tails off weren’t getting paid any more than some of the older guys who were goldbricking,” Legg said. “That wouldn’t have happened when the studio was smaller.”130

  Around the end of 1940, Disney set up several committees to review the work of animators and their assistants. The animation board, made up of ten senior animators, was charged with scrutinizing the work of the character animators and their senior assistants.131 Said Dick Lundy, a member of the animation board: “The place had gotten so big that management couldn’t look and say, ‘You’re doing great, we’ll see that you get a raise.’ They didn’t even know you.”132

  Disney often spoke as if he regarded his employees differently from outsiders like Charles Mintz and Pat Powers. In 1938 he told Douglas Churchill of the New York Times: “We don’t have to answer to anyone. We don’t have to make profits for any stockholders. New York investors can’t tell us what kind of picture they want us to make or hold back. I get the boys together and we decide what we want to do next. It is my ambition to set the thing up so that it belongs to the people in the organization.” Churchill noted that there were no time clocks in the Disney studio, thanks to Disney’s own resentment of time clocks at one of the first places he worked. “He feels that a time clock places a premium on deception and that it is no bar to dishonesty.”133

  Actually, though, there was a sharp demarcation in Disney’s mind between himself and Roy and the people who worked for them, as Churchill observed: “Disney’s regard for his men is a peculiar combination of wide individual latitude and rigid organization demands. A rugged individualist himself, he requires that his staff mold itself to his individualism.” Disney had no use for those who were reluctant to do so—especially those who expressed that reluctance by support for a truly independent union. “No matter who you were,” Ward Kimball said, “and what he paid you, somewhere in the back of his mind he figured he was doing you a favor because he was paying you money.”134

  By late 1940, a truly independent union was making headway. Early in December, the Screen Cartoonists Guild,135 which had already organized most of the other Hollywood cartoon studios, wrote to Disney telling him that it now represented a majority of his employees. On December 6, Disney hastily summoned the officers of the dormant federation and told them to “get busy . . . and we can stop this thing.”136

  By then, even employees who wanted no part of an adversarial union were growing discouraged. After their meeting with Disney, the federation’s officers gathered on December 16, 1940. It was the first time they had met in a year or more, and they sounded gloomy. Said the background painter Brice Mack: “I think one thing, that the people we represent in the majority don’t resent any of the pinching that we have had to take through salary”—salaries had already been cut—“or working harder but they do resent the attitude that they seem to get from the studio.” The director Bill Roberts decried Disney’s excessive interest “in what he calls the ‘creative and inspirational help.’ And he isn’t interested and doesn’t respect those jobs where there is tedious but absolutely necessary work and hard work.”137

  Art Babbitt, the highly regarded animator who was the federation’s first president and then its vice president, had suffered through a bruising encounter after he suggested that the studio’s lower-ranking employees deserved better pay. Many years later, Babbitt remembered meeting over lunch with Roy Disney and Bill Garity, the technical chief, and making “a pitch for a two-dollar raise for the inkers. Well, all hell broke loose, and that afternoon, Roy Disney called me on the phone. He said, ‘Look, if you don’t keep your goddamn nose out of our business, we’re going to chop your nose off.’ That sort of hastened my leanings toward a bona fide union.”138

  At the December 16 meeting, Babbitt lamented that Walt Disney shared his brother’s hostility toward unions: “As swell as Walt has been in the past . . . he’s never taken the trouble to see the other side. He’s firmly convinced that all unions are stevedores and gangsters. It has never occurred to him that he might find a decent person to deal with.”139

  In other words, Disney’s employees were already withdrawing from him when he delivered the speeches on February 10 and 11, 1941, that he hoped would turn them away from the Screen Cartoonists Guild. His speeches could not have been better drafted if the aim was to alienate as many workers as possible.

  Disney concluded with a mixture of belligerence and bravado, and only a trace of the optimism that was usually so dominant in his personality. Mostly he insisted that his employees must accept responsibility for the future of a business over which he had exercised complete control since 1923:

  Now in conclusion, I want to say that I have given twenty years of hard work, I have battled against some very heavy odds, I have sacrificed and I have gambled to bring this business to the place where it is now, and believe me, I don’t intend to do any differently now. To me, the future of the business has never looked better. The possibilities in this organization have never looked better. And I can assure you boys that I still have plenty of pep and fight left in me, and I have the utmost confidence in my ability to solve our problems and to run this business; and I want you to know that I am rarin’ to go.

  Here is the answer to the crisis with which we’re confronted. I’ll put it in a nutshell. There are three things: quality production is number one; efficient operation is number two, which leads to the third—production turnover. That is the solution to this whole thing.

  Simplifying it down to the individual, I would say that . . . the whole thing, is this: A good honest day’s work. Believe me, that will be a cure for all our problems. You can’t deny that it is individual efficiency that leads to collective efficiency. . . .

  This business has been, and still is, a pioneering venture. Every one of you men here today are pioneers. Most of you are young, and a big percentage of you—a very large percentage of you—have been in this business less than five years. Regardless of what you think, you’ve got a hell of a lot to learn. Regardless of what you think about conditions, every one of you should feel lucky that you’re in the business that you intend to make your career. We should all feel fortunate that we are here, that we have a chance, that we’re in on the ground floor. Probably throughout the country there are many men who are more capable than any one of us who don’t even have the chance to secure an art education, or even maybe a high school education. I honestly believe that instead of complaining, we should count our blessings.

  This business is ready to go ahead. If you want to go ahead with it, you’ve got to be prepared—you’ve got to be ready for some hard work—you’ve got to strengthen yourselves in every way—you’ve got to make yourselves strong. If the business is to survive the many storms that are ahead of it, it must be made strong; and that strength comes from the individual strength of the employees.

  Disney ended his speech with yet another appeal for strength, this one barely distinguishable from a threat:

  “Don’t forget this—it’s the law of the universe that t
he strong shall survive and the weak must fall by the way, and I don’t give a damn what idealistic plan is cooked up, nothing can change that.”

  CHAPTER 6

  “A Queer, Quick, Delightful Gink”

  On a Treadmill

  1941–1947

  In the spring of 1941, under pressure from the Bank of America and the holders of preferred stock, Walt Disney Productions agreed to scale back its production costs to about fifteen thousand dollars a week. According to Walt Disney himself, that meant he had to hold the negative cost of new features to around $700,000, or one-third the cost of Pinocchio or Fantasia.1 Since labor costs made up 85 to 90 percent of Disney’s total costs, implementing such severe economies would mean laying off more than half the staff.

  Disney loyalists later promoted the idea that the studio had been all but immune to layoffs until the 1941 crisis. “Employment by Disney was tantamount almost to a pension,” Gunther Lessing said, “as it was almost impossible to get Walt to fire anybody who possessed the least promise.”2 Hal Adelquist, Disney’s personnel manager, testified at a National Labor Relations Board hearing in 1942 that the layoffs in the spring of 1941 were the studio’s first.3

  That was not true. Low-key layoffs—not just individual firings, but small group layoffs that took place on what a 1951 union publication called “a fairly regular semi-annual ‘ax-day’ ”4—were routine at Disney’s in the 1930s. Isolated layoffs in response to the studio’s financial crisis had begun in 1940. By the spring of 1941, the staff had already shrunk by more than a hundred people from its peak of more than twelve hundred. What was new in the spring of 1941 was the prospect of much larger layoffs than ever before, with employee performance only one of many factors in deciding who was to leave (although Lessing, for one, could not resist turning up his nose at the “dead wood” that was being eliminated “because of inferior ability in most cases”).5