The Animated Man

by Michael Barrier

  Disney never had any reason to believe that his director would use his grip on the “reins” to impose any distinctive ideas of his own on the film. He was making a trade-off. So Dear to My Heart and the live-action films that followed would lack the artistry that only a strong director could bring, but they would be more purely Walt Disney films. Since, as a practical matter, there was no way he could oversee most of the shooting of a live-action film, Disney would make his films his own by reducing the importance of what happened on the set as much as possible, and by elevating the importance of what happened before and after shooting. Whether such a tradeoff would result in better films was very much in doubt, but Disney’s preference for strengthening his control over his films was in keeping with his history.

  So Dear to My Heart, if no disaster at the box office, was by no means a success either, earning $2.7 million in gross rentals (shared by Disney and RKO) against a negative cost of $2.1 million.

  Animation was still the studio’s lifeblood, and in early 1947, when live-action filming for So Dear to My Heart had resumed for another seven weeks, Disney was completing another animated package feature, Fun and Fancy Free. It was made up of what was usable from the scrapped “Jack and the Beanstalk” feature with Mickey Mouse, plus “Bongo,” based on a Sinclair Lewis fantasy about a circus bear that had been published in Cosmopolitan in 1930. The two halves were stitched together with live action of Luana Patten, the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, and Bergen’s dummies Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd.

  By then, two more package features, All in Fun (released in 1948 as Melody Time) and Two Fabulous Characters (released in 1949 as The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad), were on the schedule. It was clear from the middling performance of Make Mine Music that package features were a financial question mark—they might turn a small profit or at least recoup their costs, but they held the threat, too, of losses that the studio could not afford. There was no reason to hope that any of them would be a breakout hit and put the Disney studio on sound financial footing.

  “I like our operation the way it is,” Disney said in 1955. “I wouldn’t want the responsibility of a big studio. We were asked to run RKO before Howard Hughes bought it [in May 1948], but I turned it down.”16 That was in all likelihood a fanciful interpretation of a desperate passage in the Disney studio’s fortunes, in the spring of 1947; or Disney simply may not have been fully aware of what was going on around him.

  Walt Disney Productions and RKO were in negotiations for two months, from April till June 1947, over a combination of some sort that almost certainly did not amount to Disney’s being “asked to run RKO.” Jonathan Bell Lovelace, a Los Angeles investment manager and a new member of the Disney board, was the lead negotiator on the Disney side. The idea seems to have been that the two studios would combine many overhead functions and perhaps share production facilities on the Disney lot.

  At RKO’s request, the Disney studio produced dozens of pages of detailed information about its financial status and production plans, a clear indication that Disney—which apparently initiated the talks—would have been the junior partner in such a combination. These negotiations took place, after all, only a few months after Disney was so desperate for cash that it pleaded with RKO for a million-dollar loan. Walt Disney was from all appearances only peripherally involved in the negotiations, but he was Walt Disney Productions’ most important asset. Correspondence among the negotiators reflected concern that he not be distressed by the outcome.17

  The negotiations apparently petered out in early June. It was around then that Floyd Odlum, RKO’s principal owner through his Atlas Corporation, took the first steps toward the eventual sale of the studio to Howard Hughes. On Disney’s side, receipts from Make Mine Music and Song of the South were providing a welcome breathing spell. Both films were modestly profitable, returning to the studio a total of more than a million dollars in rentals above their costs. In the fiscal year that ended in September 1947—the month that Fun and Fancy Free was released—Walt Disney Productions’ bank debt fell from an intimidating $4.2 million to a more manageable $3 million.18

  It was around this time—with the studio on reasonably solid financial footing but the prospects for its features dubious—that the Disney brothers had one of their loudest and most consequential disagreements. Even though Walt Disney Productions was now a public company and outsiders had been allowed to own common stock since June 1945—Odlum’s Atlas Corporation was the first such buyer, in a special transaction, of shares representing about 7 percent of the total—Walt and Roy and their wives still owned more than half the common stock, and so arguments about the company’s course had an intensely personal flavor.19

  “I wanted to get back into the feature field,” Walt Disney said in 1956—that is, he wanted to make more full-length features like Snow White and Bambi. “But it was a matter of investment and time. Now, to take and do a good cartoon feature takes a lot of time and a lot of money. But I wanted to get back. And my brother and I had quite a screamer. . . . It was one of my big upsets. . . . I said we’re going to either go forward, we’re going to get back in business, or I say let’s liquidate or let’s sell out. . . . I said, I can’t run this plant without being able to make decisions. I said, I have to plan not a year ahead but two years ahead. I have to take care of these artists, and overlap between productions. I have to keep the whole thing going.”

  Roy Disney remembered that disagreement as “one of the biggest differences we had in our lives. . . . I remember one night he came down to my office, we sat here from quitting time to eight o’clock or so and I finally said, ‘Look, you’re letting this place drive you nuts, that’s one place I’m not going with you.’ I walked out on him. So, I didn’t sleep that night, and he didn’t, either. So the next morning, I’m at my desk, wondering what the hell to do. . . . I heard his cough and footsteps coming down the hall. He came in and he was filled up, he could hardly talk. He says, ‘Isn’t it amazing what a horse’s ass a fella can be sometimes? . . . That’s how we settled our differences.”20

  By the beginning of 1948 the Disney studio was firmly on track to make its first full-length feature since Bambi. In Roy’s recollection, though, the substance of his disagreement with Walt was not over making such a feature but over whether the studio should resume work on Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, two features that had been shelved during the war. Roy found both subjects unappealing as film properties. Walt won the argument—“Walt always had his way around here,” Roy said—and Alice and Peter Pan remained on the schedule; yet the first full-length feature would be neither of those films, but Cinderella, another story that had been considered as a possible feature since 1938, at least.21

  Cinderella was Disney’s riskiest and most important—in terms of the studio’s fate—feature since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. There was, however, no excitement surrounding the start of work on Cinderella to match the fever that had attended the writing and animation of Snow White. To thrive, the studio needed a success, but no one thought Cinderella would be an equivalent leap forward in the art of animation.

  With his feature films a source of limited satisfaction, Disney had begun exploring other kinds of film—nature films, in particular. It was when he had live-action film of deer shot for his Bambi animators, Disney said, that he began thinking about the potential in nature films “because I did get some very unusual things. And I just had a feeling if we could get a cameraman out there to stay long enough we could really get some unusual things.” Disney was intrigued by Alaska, too. He watched sixteen-millimeter film from that remote territory as early as February 14, 1946.22 He had hired a husband-and-wife team to film Alaska, he said in 1956, to “see if I couldn’t do something in an educational way. . . . During the war I ran into a lot of educators, and they kept talking of the need of good films and kept emphasizing the fact that we could do a lot in that field.”

  The studio had bought hundreds of hours of such sixteen-millimeter film
; a May 1947 story inventory report said, “We have 482 rolls of Kodachrome shot in Alaska.”23 Disney’s film editors were then making a “rough edit” of that film and blowing it up to the thirty-five-millimeter size used in theatrical projection. One appealing possibility was to use it in a film resembling Saludos Amigos, tying together cartoons set in Alaska with live action filmed there.24 Any release made from this film would be a bargain; the studio had invested less than $75,000 in it.

  In the summer of 1947, Disney seized an opportunity to indulge both his curiosity about Alaska and his enthusiasm for aviation. He left August 10 on a three-week flying trip to Alaska with Russell Havenstrite, an oilman and polo-playing friend. When Lillian bowed out, Sharon, then ten years old, went with her father.

  “I enjoyed being with him and I was always game to go anyplace with him,” Sharon said in 1968. “When he’d want to go up in the airplanes I’d always go to the airport with him, and sit there and watch the airplanes come in. . . . He wanted to fly. He wanted to fly very badly. . . . He constantly talked about it. . . . He always wanted to get in a plane and fly.”

  The Alaska trip as Sharon remembered it took them—first in Havenstrite’s DC-3 and then in a smaller plane—from Juneau to Anchorage to Nome, and then to a tiny Inuit village “where we slept in an airplane hangar. . . . I thought it was all great fun, you know—it was filthy, but I thought it was great fun. And then from there to Kotzebue and Kobuk and we stayed in a camp at the base of Mount McKinley. . . . A lot of this was in single-engine planes, and it was quite a rough trip.”

  During the trip, she said, “Daddy was the picture of patience, really. I don’t know how he did it. You know, braiding my hair every morning—long hair down the back. . . . He took care of me . . . he did more, I think, than most fathers would do just as far as being a mother and father.”

  Sharon recalled “one incident. When we flew from Nome to Candle [the Inuit village], we had two very small planes. I think there was the pilot and room for three passengers. We took off and we lost our radio. We were above the clouds and we didn’t know where we were. Of course, I didn’t know this . . . but Daddy and [Havenstrite] . . . knew we might crash into a mountain. . . .[Havenstrite] had just become a grandfather for the first time and on that premise they decided to get loaded. . . . We finally came out of the clouds and landed in Candle. They put the steps down and Daddy took one step down and landed flat on his face.”25

  In April 1948, Disney floated vague plans for films about Alaska—a possible feature with or without animation, a possible short subject devoted to seals in the Pribilof Islands.26 Before long, “I abandoned the Alaskan [feature] project,” Disney said—much of the footage was just plain dull, apparently—but he followed through with the short subject. “I took the film that I’d shot about the seals on this island,” he said, and “wrapped it up and made it as an entertainment package.” By June, that film, Seal Island, photographed by the husband-and-wife team of Alfred and Elma Milotte, was complete except for the narration, and Disney was calling it the first in a series of documentaries, True-Life Adventures.27

  Seal Island won an Academy Award after it played for one week in December 1948 at a theater in Pasadena. Despite the Oscar, RKO resisted distributing the True-Life Adventures at first—Seal Island’s length, just under a half hour, was awkward at a time when many theaters showed double features—but finally agreed in May 1949 to distribute Seal Island and two more.28 This time RKO’s reluctance was misplaced: Seal Island, made at a cost of $86,000, grossed $434,000.

  James Algar, Seal Island’s director, wrote the next year that the True-Life Adventures series was “based on the premise that information can be entertainment if interestingly presented. . . . Too many so-called educational films fall under the supervision of people who know their subject thoroughly but their medium very little. They remind us in the film business of some of the technical advisers assigned to training films during the war. A technical expert usually loves his subject. . . . So he makes a film which takes for granted that you are interested and want to learn. And sadly enough, the thing turns out dull and fails of its purpose. One of the first lessons of film making in the entertainment field is this: you must win your audience. All entertainers know this, instinctively. And it is a discipline that can well be carried over into the teaching film of the future. It is in this respect, perhaps, that Seal Island offers something new.”29

  In other words, the True-Life Adventures were another channel for the impulse that had briefly made Disney enthusiastic about the potential for sponsored films around the end of the war. Now, though, his films could be “educational” without being subject to constraints imposed by third parties. Disney made the connection himself in an interview that coincided with Seal Island’s Los Angeles debut. “I learned much during the war years,” he said, “when we were making instruction and technological films in which abstract and obscure things had to be made plain and quickly for the boys in military services. . . . I began, with the return of peace, to plan the informative-entertainment series which now has jelled in the True-Life Adventures.”30

  The succeeding True-Life Adventures won more Oscars and a great deal of mostly favorable attention, as well as more than paying their way. Seal Island was no fluke: the second True-Life Adventure, Beaver Valley, cost only a little more, at $102,000, but grossed far more, at $664,000. Disney wrote in his company’s annual report for 1950, after the release of Beaver Valley: “In my years in the motion picture business I never had more enjoyment than I am getting out of the production of our True Life Adventure series. They have completely fascinated me.”31 There is no reason to doubt him, even though making a True-Life Adventure was very different from making an animated feature, or a live-action feature of the usual kind. Disney sent photographers into the wild for months at a time, or sometimes longer. He also pieced together films—Water Birds (1952) was one—by buying film from “these naturalists who’d shoot birds.” Although shooting would begin with a distinct end product in mind, Algar’s principal role, as director, was to sort through hour after hour of film in search of some kind of narrative.

  Disney found irresistible the temptation to manipulate film, as well as the animals themselves, to tell coherent stories. This is evident in Seal Island during an episode about a pup that cannot find its mother. Winston Hibler, who wrote the narration with Algar and then delivered it for the film itself, remembered that “we wrote the narration first and built the picture track afterwards.”32 The frequent cuts, the multitude of camera angles, the close-ups and long shots—all argue that the “story” has been at least as much manufactured as recorded, by taking advantage of how indistinguishable, to human eyes, at least, seals are one from the other. What is supposed to be one pup could just as well be several. There was more of the same in the True-Life Adventures that followed, and there was aggressive tinkering with the raw footage, too. Through optical printing, repeats and reverses and other patterns that had no parallels in nature could be imposed on animals’ movements.

  As much as he enjoyed working on the True-Life Adventures, their scale was too small to command Disney’s full attention the way his early feature films did. Disney, a man always happiest when he was excited about some new project, was primed for a fresh enthusiasm. He found it in a new hobby. Trains were it.

  It was sometime before Christmas 1947 that Ward Kimball alerted Ollie Johnston that Disney had a model train layout set up in his office suite. Disney wrote about the train layout to his sister, Ruth Beecher, on December 8, 1947: “I bought myself a birthday-Christmas present—something I’ve wanted all my life—an electric train. . . . What fun I’m having. I have it set up in one of the outer rooms adjoining my office so I can play with it in my spare moments. It’s a freight train with a whistle, and real smoke comes out of the smokestack—there are switches, semaphores, station and everything. It’s just wonderful!”33

  While the men were looking at the layout, Johnston said, Disney “turne
d to me and said, ‘I didn’t know you were interested in trains.’ I told him I was building a [miniature] steam engine. He said, ‘You are? I always wanted a backyard railroad.’ And so he came out to where we were building mine, out in Santa Monica, and looked at it. He came out two or three times, and he started getting his ideas on how he was going to build his.”34

  Not only had Disney bought a model railroad as a present for himself, but he had also bought three other Lionel train sets after asking Ruth, his brother Herbert, and Marjorie Davis, his sister-in-law Hazel’s daughter, if children in their families would like a train set, too.35 Roger Broggie, the head of the studio’s machine shop, had joined the Disney staff in 1939, but he remembered that he first had “direct contact with Walt” in the weeks before that same Christmas, in 1947, when “he came down to the shop and he wanted to [do] an HO gauge [the standard track size for small electric trains] for a nephew. . . . So we put it together on a track about as big as this table, on a thing that was supposed to be hoisted up in the garage. We put the trains together and he worked on it, the landscaping, the whole bit. . . . We got through with that and then . . . he wanted to know—’This is an electric train, now what’s for real?’ So I looked into what we call ‘Live Steam’ ”—that is, miniature trains that were functionally identical to real ones.

  Disney and Broggie looked at the “equipment that was available,” Broggie said, “and he didn’t like it. The style was more or less a modern steam locomotive, and he wanted something earlier.” Broggie showed Disney photographs of nineteenth-century locomotives, and Disney settled on Central Pacific Railroad no. 173, a locomotive built in 1864 (and rebuilt in 1873, after a fatal crash). “He liked the looks of the thing,” Broggie said.

  Broggie wrote to the Southern Pacific, which had absorbed the Central Pacific line, and “I asked them for any historical information about Locomotive no. 173 Central Pacific and we got a blueprint. And from that print and the photograph we then made drawings. The draftsman who did the job, Eddie Sargeant . . . was a very meticulous draftsman. With a glass, and the photograph and this blueprint, he made the drawings, then we made the patterns.” Sargeant began making the drawings in September 1948.36