The Animated Man

by Michael Barrier

  Disney himself said years later that he rejected the idea of making “commercial pictures,” saying to his investment bankers, “I think that doing that is a waste of the talent that I have here and I can put it to better purposes by building these features that in the long run pay off better.” He made only a dozen commercial films, for clients like Westinghouse Electric (The Dawn of Better Living) and General Motors (The ABC of Hand Tools), before delivering the last of them in 1946.

  The rationale for hiring Leahy and Reeder thus evaporated within months of their hiring. In early 1946, Harry Tytle has written, “Reeder wanted the [production schedule for a feature cartoon, apparently Make Mine Music] moved up so that it would fall on a more marketable release date, like Easter or Christmas. An earlier release date meant Walt would have less time to make what he felt was an acceptable picture. Reeder was circumventing Walt—and Walt didn’t like it. . . . Reeder, in a pattern that would repeat itself, was proving inflexible, apparently intent on teaching Walt and Roy the ad business instead of learning the studio ropes.”93 (Reeder left the Disney staff in 1948.)

  As it happened, Make Mine Music did have its premiere in New York on April 20, 1946, the Saturday before Easter, although it did not go into general release until August (possibly because of the difficulty in the immediate postwar years of getting enough Technicolor prints). Joe Grant, who supervised production of the film for Disney, spoke of being with him in New York then: “Walking down a street once, during the Easter parade [on Sunday, April 21, the day after the premiere], he demonstrated some story stuff by walking up and down the curb. People all dressed up for Easter were watching this man wearing a crushed felt hat of some kind, explaining to me this gag, for a feature, I think, and going through all the crazy antics that he would do, with his eyebrow up and down, and so on, and then get back on the street and go on, and probably wind up at the automat for some beans. We stayed at the Sherry-Netherland, or the Pierre, one of those hotels, and instead of eating there, we’d go down to the automat and he’d order chili and beans.”94

  Disney had been thinking about making such package features for years; he brought up the idea during a September 9, 1939, story meeting on Bambi. Both Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros had been package features of a sort, but Make Mine Music differed from them in having only “music” as a very loose theme. Many of the short cartoons that made up the film were clever but also rather broad and obvious compared with Disney’s prewar work, lacking both the emotional richness of a Dumbo and the sugared elegance of a Bambi. It was not a triumphant return to feature-length animation.

  After the war, Disney said in 1956, “it kind of seemed like a hopeless thing to begin to pick up again,” and even Roy “was kind of confused. He didn’t know what to do. . . . I knew I must diversify. I knew the diversifying of the business would be the salvation of it. . . . I tried these package things, where I’d put five or six things together to make an eighty-minute subject. Because I had a lot of ideas I thought would be good in the cartoon form, if I could go to fifteen minutes with it.”

  Wilfred Jackson spoke sympathetically in 1973 of Disney’s growing disengagement from what had been his passion: “Walt wanted so badly for each thing he did to top each thing that he had done before, and he didn’t ever want anything to look like a repeat of anything he had done. This made things more and more difficult, as time went on, because there’s really only so much you can do with cartoons”—at least, as Jackson wrote later, “along the lines that appealed to him.”95 The “lines that appealed to him” were, of course, those evident in early features like Snow White and Bambi—full-length stories, told through painstaking productions whose cost was now beyond the studio’s reach.

  “I think it was just after the war when nothing seemed to stimulate him,” Disney’s daughter Diane said in 1956. “I could sort of sense it. I could tell he wasn’t pleased with anything he was doing.”

  Disney was, from all evidence, always a loving and attentive father, whose struggles and reverses rarely impinged on his daughters’ lives unless they noticed that faint melancholy cast. In an August 1938 letter, Roy Disney mentioned to his mother, Flora, that he and Edna and their only child, Roy Edward, had met Walt and Lillian and the two girls at the merry-go-round in Griffith Park on a Sunday morning.96 Such visits to the park were a regular thing in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Diane recalled in 1956: “Daddy took us to Sunday school and afterward around to . . . Griffith Park, usually, to the zoo or to amusement parks or something, and he would sit and watch us. . . . Every Sunday we used to go with him. Wherever we wanted to go he’d take us. . . . And then he’d take us over to the studio. And we’d wander around with him from room to room, or while he was in the studio we’d roller skate around the lot. And as we grew older we’d . . . drive around the lot. . . . We learned to drive that way and we had several little disasters.”

  The girls went to a Christian Science Sunday school for a while. In the fourth grade, Diane attended a Catholic school, and perhaps, from her father’s point of view, liked it a little too much: “I wanted to become a nun. . . . I went around at my lunch hour saying prayers in front of statues and everything.” Disney sent her to a public school the next two years. Her father believed in God, Diane said, but never went to church. “Not that I remember—ever. I think he had had it and he felt that he wanted us to sample and to make our own choice.”97 Walt and Lillian did not have either daughter baptized. “Dad thought we ought to have our own church. He didn’t want anything in our early life to influence us.”

  The Disney girls remembered no playmates when they were children. On Woking Way, they lived “on the very top of a hill,” Sharon said, “and there were no playmates around us.” They had friends in school, but not in their own neighborhood, and so their father filled in as what Diane called “just a big playmate. I remember he could do anything. . . . He could throw us around by our heels, you know. I don’t know how he did it.” Sharon remembered her father as “a great rough-houser when we were little—tossing us up in the air and throwing us around. We loved it. Just loved it. Very patient in things like that.”98

  But not in everything. The temper he could show at work could flare at home, too. “He had quite a temper,” Sharon said. “If he was upset about something, Diane or Mother or I could make some comment at the dinner table and set him off and he’d get mad at us. He’d blow up. He would just blow up. And he’d go on about the women in the house and he usually would digress quite a bit. . . . I can’t quote him. But I just remember thinking, ‘Oh, oh, he’s in a bad mood tonight. Watch out.’ ”99 Diane also remembered bursts of temper “when my sister and I would monopolize the conversation or fight or something and then he would get furious.”100

  Another source of strain was the presence of Lillian’s older sister, Grace Papineau, after she was widowed. (Another sister, Hazel Sewell, and her daughter had lived with the Disneys in the early 1930s after Hazel’s marriage to Glen Sewell ended.) Grace “lived with us for ages,” Diane Miller told Richard Hubler in 1968. “And a lot of the tension in our home had to do with the fact that there was an outsider at the dinner table every night who couldn’t help but pass judgment in family arguments.”101

  In the middle 1940s, around the time World War II ended, Disney installed a projection room in his home. “I used to bring the dailies home” from his earliest live-action productions, he said in 1956—referring to the rushes, or film shot the previous day—but he stopped because “my family would come in” and “they’d get so critical” after seeing several versions of a scene. Diane, who was eleven then, remembered that her father “was so excited. And I would sit there . . . and say, ‘Oh, that’s corny. I don’t like that.’ I think I was embarrassed by the sentimentality of the scene. And it infuriated him and upset him.”102

  Disney described his daughters—in a wry tone—as “very severe critics” on a radio show in 1946. “They have a favorite expression they use. They say, ‘That’s corny,
Dad.’ ”103 Their target was Song of the South, a film roughly two-thirds live action and one-third animation that was based on Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories. It was the second of Disney’s postwar features, released in November 1946. An Uncle Remus feature had been part of the studio’s plans since the heady late 1930s; at least two research reports had been written by April 1938.104 He would have made Song of the South as an entirely animated feature, Disney said in 1956, but he “filled in” with live action because “I didn’t have enough talent.”

  Most of the writing of the film, live action and animation alike, took place in mid-1944. “When Walt started Song of the South,” the cartoon writer T. Hee said, “we thought he had guys there—including us [Hee and Ed Penner, who had both attended classes on play writing]—who could write the screenplay for it. . . . He said, ‘Aw, hell, we’ve got to get some real writers. You guys aren’t writers, you’re just cartoonists.’ ”105

  When Disney chose someone to write a treatment, though, it was not a seasoned Hollywood screenwriter but Dalton S. Reymond, a native Louisianan who since 1936 had served as a “technical adviser” and “dialogue director” for several films set in the South.106 He was from all appearances a sort of professional Southerner, but he had no screenwriting credits. His treatment passed into the hands of two real screenwriters, first Maurice Rapf and then Morton Grant, but neither of them had imposing credentials, Grant especially (his career had been devoted mostly to “B” westerns for Warner Brothers).

  As director of the live action, Disney chose H. C. Potter, who had directed the live-action portions of Victory Through Air Power—scenes shot on a sound stage, in which Alexander de Seversky expounded the ideas in his book. Potter was fired early in work on Song of the South, before location filming began—Hedda Hopper reported that “he and Walt couldn’t see eye to eye on handling of the story”107—and Disney handed direction to Harve Foster. There was nothing especially distinguished about Potter’s career, but he had directed a dozen features, whereas Foster had worked until then only as an assistant director. His elevation was clearly a matter of expediency.*

  Probably without giving the matter much thought, Disney was transferring to live-action filming attitudes bred in work on his cartoons. In the writing of his animated shorts and features, Disney had arguably contributed more, as an editor, than any of his writers ever had, and his directors’ decisions were likewise always subject to his extensive revisions. When he went into live action, he was not looking for writers or directors with strong ideas of their own. In any case, Song of the South’s live-action story—sentimental and patronizing toward its black characters, if not “racist” by any reasonable standard—was no more than a frame for the three animated segments based on Harris’s Brer Rabbit stories. (Reviewers were much kinder to the brisk and lively cartoons than to the rest of the film.)

  The animation got under way in October 1944. Disney was more involved in the details of Song of the South than he had been in work on some of the preceding films, said Wilfred Jackson, who directed the animation. “It was easier to get him in on meetings; he’d come in more times just on his own hook to see what was going on, and you had a chance to try things out on him instead of waiting until it was a stale thing and you couldn’t bother to bring it up at a meeting.”108

  The film’s live-action exteriors were filmed in Arizona early in 1945; Disney was there for four weeks in February and March. The rest of the film was shot at the Samuel Goldwyn studio in Hollywood. Wilfred Jackson remembered an incident during the filming that gives a rare glimpse of Disney’s mind at work in a more urgent circumstance than the transcribed story meetings. The scene involved was a central musical number in which Uncle Remus, played by James Baskett, would begin singing “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” as the background changed from the darkness of his cabin to a bright, rear-projected cartoon.

  “We had painted two backgrounds,” Jackson said, “and we had shot a rear-projection scene, which was timed, so that when you synchronized it with the clap-sticks and started the playback [the recording of the song] that Jim Baskett was to work to, it would have the last line of the story he was telling, and the beginning of the song. During the transition, we had a dissolve in the rear-projection background, from the background that was behind him, sitting in his cabin, talking to the little boy, and with the camera close on him, into this springtime scene. After the dissolve, the camera was to dolly back as Jim walked forward on the live-action set. We had the action all worked out so that the right things would be there, included in the camera, as it dollied back.”

  But there was a hitch:

  The rear-projection scene didn’t work because we couldn’t get the right color balance on the print out of Technicolor on time. . . . The technicalities of it kept putting this scene off, until we were right down to the very end of the live-action shooting. There was no more time on the schedule; the crew was going to be dismissed. The night before, we went down to the [Goldwyn] studio, where we were doing the live-action photography, and in their projection room, we saw the print that we got from Technicolor. It wouldn’t do. The cameraman, Gregg Toland, was going to go over to Technicolor to work with them to get a print that we could use the next day. I went home, and I didn’t sleep well, because I didn’t know just what we were going to do if that didn’t come out right. I slept with fingers and toes crossed, hoping we’d have a print we could use. I couldn’t think of a way out; I was cornered. . . .

  The next day, we came down [to Goldwyn], and Perce Pearce was there—he was Walt’s associate producer—and Walt was there. When I saw Walt, I thought, “There’s trouble.” And there was; the word was that the print wouldn’t do. Walt called everybody on the set, and he had them all sit around in chairs, and he had coffee served, and he started talking. First of all, he turned to me and said, “Jack, the print won’t do. What plans do you have to work this out, now that the print won’t do?” I said, “Walt, I’ve thought about it, and thought about it, and I don’t know what to do.” He said, “Well, let’s all talk about it, let’s see what ideas anybody’s got.” He called on different people, and some of them had some sort of a notion of just making a scene cut. Of course, I could think of that, but it wasn’t going to accomplish the purpose, it wouldn’t have given a nice effect. I didn’t have to tell Walt you could cut from one scene to another.

  Finally, after Walt had asked everybody else, Walt sat back, waited a while, and we all started to sweat. Then Walt said, “Would it be possible, Gregg, to arrange your lights in such a way that you could shine a light up on Jim’s face and it wouldn’t show on the background, and would it also be possible to have other lights that would light the set up, on signal? When I drop my hand, would it be possible for them to turn on all the other lights and douse that light, simultaneously, so that just in a flash the whole set would light up and you’d find him in this background?” Of course, we had a backdrop that we could use there, to replace the cartoon, because that was going to be used for other scenes in the sequence. Gregg said, “Sure that could work.” Walt said, “All right, when Jim sings ‘Zip,’ we’ll change the lights.” The thing was ten times as effective as what we had planned. This was Walt Disney at work.109

  (A cut was necessary when Baskett started walking toward the camera, but only because the blue backdrop wasn’t large enough to permit the camera to dolly back as planned. In addition, an animated sunburst was added around Baskett as the lights went up. But the basic effect is the one Disney proposed, and it is as striking and successful as Jackson said.)

  One complication was that some of the live action had to allow for animation that would be added later, so that, for example, Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit could appear on-screen together. During the live-action shooting, Jackson said, Disney “kicked Ken [Anderson] off the camera,” because he “was just sure that we were wasting a lot of time.” But since Anderson could not ride the camera boom, and give the operator a tap “at the right time to do certain thing
s with the camera to make room for our cartoon character,” the footage was unusable.110 Disney, confined so tightly by his studio’s precarious finances for the previous few years, could not have welcomed one more constraint. To plan the live-action filming so carefully was to acknowledge from the start that combination work was terribly confining; better to put off that acknowledgment until it could no longer be avoided.

  Peacetime did not bring an improvement in the studio’s finances. Without the prop of contracts for government and industrial films, and with foreign earnings once again possible but locked up by widespread embargoes on the export of currencies, the Disneys had to rely mainly on domestic receipts from their entertainment shorts and features. Only through reissues of Snow White and Pinocchio did the studio avoid showing losses in its 1945 and 1946 fiscal years (the Disney fiscal year ended around September 30). It was a measure of the Disneys’ difficulties that in March 1946, Roy Disney asked RKO for a million-dollar advance on the earnings from foreign distribution of Disney films whose release overseas had been held up by the war, and whose release would now be complicated by currency restrictions like those that prevented the exchange of British pounds for dollars.111 RKO’s executives were taken aback by the request; Ned E. Depinet, RKO’s executive vice president, wrote to N. Peter Rathvon, the company’s president, that “Roy’s proposal really baffles me . . . he is indeed asking us to assume a great burden.”112

  Harry Tytle wrote about that loan request in a diary entry of July 15, 1946, after Paul Pease, the studio’s controller, came to see him. Tytle reproduced that entry in his autobiography fifty years later: “Paul’s problem was money. It appears we are spending it much faster than we are getting it! Our salvation is a million dollar loan from R.K.O., and Paul indicates it is even possible for this loan not to go through. In that case, we are in bad straights [sic] and would have to cut [personnel] drastically. Also, the loan at the bank is $4,000,000 and his opinion is that it cannot be raised, and we are bouncing very close to that ceiling. Paul is scraping up all the possible funds in order to stall until the loan comes through. Two points that are making things increasingly difficult at this time (first) the live-action payrolls are very heavy and secondly, we may be forced to pay a large retroactive check, somewhere in the neighborhood of $200,000.”