Here was how Disney could extend his control over live action into the actual shooting, through the planning of each shot on what amounted to storyboards similar to those he had used for almost twenty years in making his cartoons. Directors at other studios might prepare such storyboards themselves—Alfred Hitchcock was the most famous example—but on The Story of Robin Hood the director, Ken Annakin, found such preparation already completed when he came onto the film.
“Later,” Annakin wrote in his autobiography, “I was to discover that at least fifty percent of the reason for working this way was to enable Walt to exercise control, and supply his creative input from six thousand miles away. Each week during pre-production, the continuity sketches had been shipped back to Burbank and returned with Walt’s suggestions and corrections. Now, these were handed to me as the Bible—even more important perhaps than the script.”95
Disney supervised preparation in other ways as well. On March 6, 1951, in a long, chatty memorandum to Perce Pearce and Fred Leahy, he responded to test footage of the film’s principals. He was troubled by the costumes chosen for Joan Rice, who would play Maid Marian: “It seems that women of that period always have scarves up around their chins, but I think it does something to a woman’s face. . . . Where we see Miss Rice disguised as page, this costume seemed bulky and heavy. The blouse or tunic was too long and hung too far down over her hips—it didn’t show enough of her and I thought detracted from her femininity. I think a slight showing of the hips would help a lot.”96
With his control so firmly established, Disney had no need to hover over the set. Filming of The Story of Robin Hood began on April 30, 1951, but Disney did not leave Burbank until June 11, and then he sailed to England on the Queen Mary. While he was in Britain he came onto the set “from time to time; not often,” Richard Todd said. “He wouldn’t linger all that much. . . . He wasn’t obtrusive. He didn’t discuss the picture, particularly, at least not with me. It was like a friend dropping in and having a chat, and that was that.”97
The resulting film is low-key, lacking the excitement generated by the Errol Flynn version made in Hollywood and released in 1938. Disney had sought, in place of that excitement, a new authenticity, but the story of Robin Hood is inherently inauthentic because there is no historical record of such a person. The Disney film departs so far from any kind of authenticity that it offers Norman kings and queens who not only speak English instead of French but orate like Saxon patriots.
Disney financed a third British-based feature, The Sword and the Rose, a romance set in Tudor England, not in partnership with RKO but through a wholly owned subsidiary, Walt Disney British Films Limited.98 He left Los Angeles for London on June 23, 1952, to, as Daily Variety put it, “supervise production,” and returned to New York on September 3.”99 He arrived several weeks before shooting began in August and left before it ended. He also squeezed in visits with miniature-train enthusiasts in Britain and Switzerland.100
Ken Annakin was involved in the planning for the film from the first day. “As Larry [Watkin] fed us the script pages from Burbank, devised and approved by Walt,” Annakin wrote, “I worked alongside Steven Grimes, a young British sketch artist. . . . For four months we broke down the scenes into setups and sketches.” Richard Todd also remembered “frequent script conferences, in which every set-up was planned, sketched and photocopied into albums for each of us.”101
There was, Todd wrote, a “special quality” of working on a Disney film, “quite unlike the atmosphere on any other production. There was very much a family ambiance, a feeling of harmony partly engendered by Perce Pearce’s avuncular presence, partly arising from the fact that most of us had worked together and knew each other well—but mostly perhaps due to the smoothness with which the schedule rolled along as a result of the careful pre-planning of previous weeks.” This atmosphere was particularly beneficial to Annakin, who was, Todd wrote, “the kind of quiet, coaxing director who understood his actors and gentled the best from them.”102
It is not clear why Disney chose Annakin to direct his second and third British productions, although Annakin himself thought it likely that Disney had seen the short films he directed for two anthologies based on Somerset Maugham short stories.103 Annakin was exceptional among the directors Disney hired, earlier and later, in his sensitivity to the actors working with him. The Sword and the Rose benefits immensely from his attention to the characters’ relationships and from the nuanced acting by the three principals (Todd, Glynis Johns, and James Robertson Justice). Unfortunately, the film lacks a sense of scale. Even though the cast is full of kings and dukes and other such personages (Justice plays Henry VIII and Johns his sister Mary Tudor), an appealing intimacy is not balanced by a sense that the love story is taking place in the context of great events. There is no blaming Annakin for this; the fault is in the story. Disney had become too much of an Anglophile for his films’ good. The Sword and the Rose cost more than Robin Hood but grossed only $2.5 million, half as much as its predecessor.
Disney and Richard Todd hit it off during the production of Robin Hood. “We saw a lot of each other when he was in England,” Todd said, “and then when I went to Hollywood, whether I was working for him or not, he just took me under his wing.” Todd was an exceptionally attractive figure, a dashing and handsome movie star, an Oscar nominee in his first Hollywood role, in 1948, who was also a true war hero (he was the first British soldier to parachute into Normandy on D-Day). “I’m not easily intimidated by anybody, no matter what their standing,” Todd said in 2004. “I mean, I had at that time—in the fifties, certainly—a lot of self-assurance. I think the war did that. You didn’t stand any nonsense from anybody; you had a sort of authority about you.”
Todd found Disney—his senior by almost eighteen years—“very kindly. I think he respected me because—well, little things, like I wouldn’t have a double to do stunts. They were very worried about that, because of the insurance problem. I think that rather tickled him. And he was a bit of a social climber—in England. What he was in America, I don’t know, but in England he liked to be amongst very high-ranking people, and I happened to have access to some of them. He was very happy to join in some of the gatherings.”104
Disney planned to begin shooting a fourth British production, Rob Roy the Highland Rogue, in Scotland in the spring of 1953, with Todd as the title character. But however much he liked the country itself, he knew that shooting in Britain was only an expedient, and that a serious live-action program had to be based in Burbank. The question was, which feature would be his first domestic production entirely in live action?
The leading candidate was initially The Great Locomotive Chase, based on the same Civil War episode as Buster Keaton’s silent feature comedy The General. In that episode, known as the “Andrews raid,” Union spies almost succeeded in stealing a Confederate locomotive and wrecking a vital rail line. Since two vintage locomotives would necessarily play a prominent part, the story’s appeal to Disney was obvious.
Harper Goff, a sketch artist for Warner Brothers, was in England in 1951—evidently when Disney was there for the filming of Robin Hood—and he encountered Disney at a store called Basset-Lowke, famous for its miniature locomotives. (Disney had just bought a locomotive that Goff, also a train fancier, coveted.) “He asked me what I did for a living,” Goff said, “and I told him that I was an artist. . . . He said, ‘When you get back to America, come and talk to me.’ By the time I went to see him at the Studio, he was aware of my artwork in Coronet and Esquire magazines. . . . He explained that he was planning to go into live-action filming, and do motion pictures with actors and sets. This fit in with my experience at Warner Brothers.”105 Goff joined the Disney staff on October 22, 1951.
By February 1952, Goff—who identified himself in correspondence then as “director of production research for live-action pictures”—was scouting locations for The Great Locomotive Chase in Georgia. That project was still very much alive in October 1952, wh
en the studio paid for Wilbur Kurtz, an Atlanta commercial artist and expert on the Andrews raid, to travel by train to Los Angeles. (Kurtz was the son-in-law of William Fuller, the Confederate conductor who foiled the Union spies’ plans.)106
Locomotive Chase’s rival for a place on the schedule was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Disney wrote of 20,000 Leagues early in 1952: “We have added to our list of future productions Jules Verne’s spectacular and adventuresome 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. We have acquired the rights to this story, which can make one of the all-time great motion pictures. Our production plans are tentative at this stage, but the knowledge we have acquired in developing our True Life Adventure series will be extremely valuable in filming the fantastic under-sea creatures depicted by Verne. This feature will be all live action and except for the underwater scenes, which will be filmed somewhere along the trail of the Nautilus, will be shot in Technicolor in our own studio.”107
By the time Disney spoke about the film at a sales meeting at the studio in June 1952, the estimated budget was $3 million to $4 million.108 By February 1953, The Great Locomotive Chase had been shouldered aside, and what the Los Angeles Times called “experimental underwater material” for 20,000 Leagues was being shot off Catalina Island.109 Disney began building a third sound stage specifically for 20,000 Leagues in the spring of 1953.110 The new stage held a water tank, measuring 60 by 125 feet, and 3 to 18 feet in depth, that could be used to film scenes supposedly taking place at sea.111 In late August 1953, soon after his return from Europe, Disney announced that he would not make another feature in Britain in 1954, devoting his attention instead to 20,000 Leagues, his first all-live-action feature made at the Burbank studio.112
The timing of Disney’s decision to make his most ambitious—and expensive—live-action feature was significant. It came when all of the film industry was under the growing shadow of television.
The Disney brothers had been interested in television since the middle 1940s, at least. The New York Times reported in October 1945 that Walt Disney Productions had recently “applied to the Federal Communications Commission for a television and FM band in Southern California preliminary to the establishment of three to five television stations in various parts of the country. . . . Current plans call for the use of the cartoon medium and the ‘live’ action and cartoon combination in the Disney brand of television entertainment.”113
Nothing came of that. Like most other Hollywood producers, Disney was not so much hostile to television as uncertain about how best to make use of the new medium. He was seriously considering entering television by the fall of 1948, although he worried about how to reconcile TV’s demands for low costs with his own preferences where animation was concerned.114 “When television hit,” Disney said in 1956, “I went back to New York and spent a week in New York just to study television. . . . It was ‘48, ‘49, somewhere in there. . . . I saw it here [in Los Angeles] and they said, ‘Well, you’ve got to see it in New York.’ It was basically the same, only more of it. And I had the feeling then that it was important and that we ought to get in it.”
Disney “got in it” on Christmas Day 1950, when the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) aired “One Hour in Wonderland,” a show built around the forthcoming Alice in Wonderland; Disney appeared on camera, as did both of his daughters, Kathryn Beaumont (the voice of Alice), and even the Lilly Belle. Said Bill Walsh, the show’s producer: “I think that was the first time Walt saw TV in its true light—as a promotion device for the studio.”115
Writing shortly after “One Hour in Wonderland” aired, Disney said, “I regard television as one of our most important channels for the development of a new motion picture audience. Millions of televiewers never go to a picture theatre, and countless others infrequently. . . . In these highly competitive days, we must use the television screen along with every other promotion medium, to increase our potential audience.”116
On March 30, 1951, Disney summoned four of his executives to talk about a possible half-hour show. “The plan of the program,” Harry Tytle wrote in his diary, “is to boost our theatrical attendance, exploit merchandising, etc., along with the selling of television shows. We mainly discussed various items that would go into the format,” like black-and-white cartoons, “very simple” animation done especially for TV, and “live-action subjects.”117
Again, nothing came of such ideas at the time, but the Disney studio was nibbling around the edges of television in other ways. Throughout 1951, Roy Disney wrote at the end of that year, the studio engaged in “small-scale production of live action films for television, particularly spot announcements, through a controlled subsidiary, Hurrell Productions, Inc., which operates on our studio lot at Burbank. This subsidiary is exploring the possibilities of producing serialized dramatic and comedy shows on film for TV.”118 (George Hurrell was a fashion photographer who was married to Lillian Disney’s niece, Phyllis Bounds.) The studio completed its first animated television commercials, for Mohawk Carpet Company, in September 1952.119
Disney’s interest in TV waxed and waned throughout the early 1950s. “I’m in no hurry to get into television,” he said in the spring of 1952, “although I do believe in cooperation with that medium. It’s very valuable in advertising a film.”120 He made a second Christmas show in 1952, to promote Peter Pan, and in the summer of 1953, a three-year deal with General Foods appeared to be in the offing.121 But still nothing jelled. (According to Bob Thomas, the General Foods deal foundered on the sponsor’s insistence that Disney make a pilot program.)122
It was while peppered by distractions of many kinds that Disney made Alice in Wonderland, finally bringing to film his version of a classic that had been a nagging presence since 1938—a film Disney felt he should make but did not really want to. The film went into production in the summer of 1949, just after Disney left for London and Treasure Island. Like Cinderella, it was shot largely in live action on skeletal sets, to guide the animators’ work. Shooting began on June 22, 1949, and continued until November 2, 1950. This time, many of the voice performers, like Kathryn Beaumont, the English girl who was Alice, and Ed Wynn, the veteran comedian who was the Mad Hatter, played the same characters in the live action, acting to playbacks of their voice recordings.123
In making Cinderella, Disney could use Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as a sort of template, but he had no help of that kind with Alice. Like Pinocchio, it was an episodic story that went against the grain of straightforward narrative as Disney practiced it; and again like Pinocchio, it demanded imaginative handling that Disney had neither the time nor the inclination to give it. During work on Alice, Disney said in 1956, “we got in there and we just didn’t feel a thing. But we were forcing ourselves to do it. . . . You’re in so deep sometimes you’ve got to fight it through. You can’t turn back.” He summed up his problem this way, years later: “The picture was filled with weird characters.”124
During work on Alice, Frank Thomas said, Disney “had trouble communicating to almost anybody what he really saw in the material. You could sense what it was, but every time you thought you had it, he would say, ‘No, no, you don’t want stuff like that in there,’ or ‘You’re missing the boat,’ or ‘That’s not what we want to do.’ ”125
In an interview with Christian Renaut, Thomas cited his difficult encounters with Disney over his animation of the Queen of Hearts: “He said, ‘Try some stuff. What is she doing in the picture?’ So I was supposed to take up a funny character and do some stuff that I needed to be kind of strong. He looked at it and said, ‘You’ve lost your comedy.’ So I tried it funny. ‘You’ve lost your menace,’ and I asked, ‘Now what is she doing in the picture? Give me some business and I’ll give you a character,’ and he said, ‘No, you give me a character and I’ll give you some business.’ ”126
Such difficulties were reflected in the film’s cost, which rose to more than three million dollars—almost a million more than Cinderella’s—before Alice was released in the summer of 19
51. The film’s box-office performance was disappointing, and the studio wrote off a million-dollar loss.
In the fall of 1951, shortly after Alice was released, Disney’s writers finally nailed down an acceptable continuity for Peter Pan, another story that had been a nagging headache since before World War II. Disney had bought Paramount’s rights to the James Barrie story in October 1938 and had signed a contract with the copyright owner, the Hospital for Sick Children in London, in January 1939.127 Disney did not mean to dawdle; as early as May 1939, with story work in the most preliminary stages, he already had in mind animators for the pirates (Bill Tytla), the dog, Nana (Norm Ferguson, the animator of Pluto), and Tinker Bell, the fairy (Fred Moore).128
For more than a decade, though, Disney’s writers generated huge quantities of paper—treatments and outlines, as well as storyboards—until the story was finally in a form that he could accept. Even then, Captain Hook, more so than the Queen of Hearts in Alice, was an unsettled character—alternately comedian and menace, his inconsistencies bridged only by Hans Conried’s highly colored vocal performance—but in 1952, when animation was under way, Disney was content to leave the resolution of such issues to his animators. Making animated features was by now a reflex activity for him; his real interests were elsewhere.
By 1952, Disney was absorbed by a new passion for miniatures, a passion generated by his success in building a miniature train, especially the miniature caboose that he made himself in 1950. Said Roger Broggie: “We started to build what was to be an exhibit of Americana in the same scale [as the caboose], an inch and a half to the foot, or one-eighth the full size. That means the figure would be nine inches tall.”129
Somewhere toward the end of 1950—probably after he finished his caboose—Disney had applied his new skills as a maker of miniatures to a diorama called “Granny’s Cabin”; it reproduced a set from So Dear to My Heart. When Disney exhibited Granny’s Cabin at the Festival of California Living at the Pan-Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles two years later, in November and December 1952, the Los Angeles Times described it as “an eight-foot-long replica of a Midwest pioneer farm home, handicrafted [sic] by Disney in every minute detail of structure and the furniture supplemented by objects from historical collections.”130
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