The Animated Man

by Michael Barrier

  John Hench, one of the studio artists who joined the park’s design team, wrote years later: “To design most effectively for our guests, we learned that we had to observe them up close, waiting in lines with them, going on rides with them, eating with them. Walt insisted on this. . . . This was new to us; as filmmakers, we were used to sitting in our sweatboxes at the studio, passing judgment on our work without knowing how the public might actually respond to it. Going out into the park taught us how guests were being treated and how they responded to patterns of movement and the ways in which they expressed their emotions. We got an idea of what was going on in their minds.”79

  Once Disneyland was open, Disney continued his Saturday-morning visits in the company of a half dozen key people, now scrutinizing not the construction but the operation of the park. “He was always serious looking,” Bill Martin said of a photo of Disney taken during one of those walkthroughs. “We’d take notes and refer later to [photographs taken during the walkthrough], then start in on any modifications that came up as a result,” Martin told The “E” Ticket. “We would take these ideas back and in the next day or two we would drum up some drawings. Then Walt would take a look at them and he’d say, ‘Well, let’s go a little farther with this,’ or ‘Let’s change it to something like this.’ . . . About noon, we’d go to Harvey’s Lunchwagon and have hamburgers. . . . Walt loved hamburgers . . . he didn’t care about anything else. We’d eat there, and then we’d all go home. . . . He never complained [during the walks], as I recall, and he never complimented anybody either, to speak of.”80

  Some stories from Disneyland’s early years turn up repeatedly in memoirs and official histories. Van Arsdale France, who was in charge of training Disneyland employees for many years, offered one version of a cherished anecdote in his memoir:

  A “trip time” of seven minutes had been established for the Jungle Cruise ride. . . . When there were hundreds of people lined up on a hot day, the operators tended to speed up the trip, and Walt was a passenger on one of these abbreviated trips. Dick [Nunis, then the manager of Adventureland] was standing on the dock when Walt steamed up with his eyebrows raised. “Dick, what is the trip time for this attraction?” “Well, sir, it is seven minutes,” Dick responded. Mad as hell, Walt came back with, “Well, I just had a four-minute ride and went through the hippo pool so fast I couldn’t tell if they were rhinos or hippos.” After being completely chewed out by Walt, Dick made a very bright career decision. He asked Walt if he had time to ride with him and explain how he wanted the ride to work.

  Walt took the time. He spent an hour explaining how the sequences should work and how to play the show, because it is show business. “If the trip time is seven minutes, and you cut out three minutes, it’s like going to a movie and having some important reels left out.”

  Dick then instituted a concentrated training program. A week later, Walt came back for a review. Dick recalled, “Walt felt I might have stacked the deck with the best operator, so he went around with five different hosts.” Dick continued, “When he finally left after his last trip, Walt gave me a smile and a ‘thumbs up’ sign.”81

  It is safe to assume that each of those rides took very close to seven minutes.

  In this story, as in others, Disney is a model entrepreneur, acutely sensitive to how customers respond to his business. His attention to detail at the park extended to the sticks used in the ice cream bars—flat sticks, “nothing with round sticks, people trip on them.” Probably because Disney’s focus was so obviously and exclusively on the park and visitors’ experience of it, he seems never to have become the target of fear or resentment from Disneyland’s employees. “Nobody ever blamed Walt Disney for anything,” France wrote.82

  Disneyland did not get its first “thrill ride”—a roller coaster of sorts—until July 14, 1959, when two other major attractions, a submarine ride and a monorail, also opened. Although Disney had deliberately excluded thrill rides from Disneyland, he found a way in 1959 to introduce such a ride without obviously compromising the idea that the park’s entertainment would be themed. The roller coaster came enclosed in a mountain, a miniature of the Matterhorn, and the ride itself was costumed as a bobsled run. The submarine ride, like many other Disney attractions, was a variant on a successful attraction elsewhere. It recalled the glass-bottom boats at Florida’s Cypress Gardens, except that the boats had in effect been turned on their sides—passengers looked at an underwater show through portholes.

  Once the park was open, Disney continued to use his weekly TV show to promote it; at least one program in each of the next three seasons was devoted in whole or in part to Disneyland, in addition to the programs devoted to new theatrical films. But whatever its promotional value, television was expensive, and Roy Disney voiced concern about TV’s appetite for dollars a little more than a year after the first Disneyland show aired. He wrote in December 1955 that “our production costs to date have been substantially greater than the direct income. Fortunately we have been able to recover most of these excess costs from other revenue indirectly attributable to TV [the Davy Crockett movie would be an example]. However, with respect to future television production, unless we can realize a proper direct profit from television pictures our output in this medium will be greatly reduced.”83

  To complicate matters, Walt Disney had launched that fall on ABC a five-day-a-week, one-hour show aimed directly at children, Mickey Mouse Club. Disney had made notes of ideas for the show in the summer of 1954, linking it to his new park (“clubhouse at Disneyland”),84 but in strict economic terms the new show made little sense. Like the weekly show, it would cost more than the studio could recoup from ABC—Walt Disney said in November 1955 that a year’s programs would cost four million dollars, but that ABC was paying only $2.8 million for them85—with fewer promotional benefits. Disney had, however, been drawn to the idea of making a similar show since the late 1940s, and, as he had demonstrated, he rarely let go of an idea he liked.*

  Roy’s warning about reduced output was presumably a negotiating ploy directed at ABC (and perhaps his brother, too). Early in 1956 he negotiated new contracts with ABC for both Disneyland and Mickey Mouse Club. At the end of 1956, although he still expected “production costs for the current year’s program . . . to exceed domestic income by about $269,000,” Roy expressed confidence “that the programs will eventually return a good profit from subsequent uses at home and abroad.”86 One effect of the studio’s increased activity was visible in its payroll: between October 1955 and October 1956, the number of employees increased from 855 to 1,271.

  In the meantime, Walt Disney was proving less than sure-footed in live action, especially in the handling of his star, Fess Parker. In the two new Crockett episodes for the second season of Disneyland (down from the planned four, since the Crockett craze died rapidly in the fall of 1955), Disney and his director, Norman Foster, permitted Parker to be overshadowed by Jeff York, who played the boatman Mike Fink as the sort of crudely one-dimensional character already familiar from TV situation comedies.

  After the Crockett episodes were finished, Parker moved on to The Great Locomotive Chase, the film that had been elbowed aside by 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea a few years earlier. Filming began in Georgia on September 26, 1955.87 Disney was on hand for the first few days. Two vintage locomotives (one from the Baltimore & Ohio Museum, the other owned by Paramount Pictures) were the true stars, with Parker cast in a terribly misconceived lead role, that of the leader of a group of Union spies. The screenplay, by Lawrence Watkin, invited a positive response not to Parker but to the Confederates pursuing him. Parker was a “hero” who failed in his mission and was hanged for his pains.

  Shooting of Westward Ho the Wagons! Parker’s next starring vehicle, began just three and a half months later, on January 16, 1956—but he was cast again in a puzzling role, in effect playing in support of several of the child actors from the Mickey Mouse Club show.88 He did not have another feature assignment until Old Yeller, w
hich was filmed in the first few months of 1957. Although he received star billing, Parker had been cast in a supporting role again, in a film whose real stars were two children and a dog.

  In the summer of 1957, Parker joined the cast of The Light in the Forest, another film in which he ostensibly starred but that had him, again, in a de facto supporting role. The film’s true star was James MacArthur, the nineteen-year-old son of the actress Helen Hayes. When Disney tried to cast Parker in yet another supporting role with yet another very young actor—this time Sal Mineo, in a western called Tonka—Parker finally balked. He and Disney parted company in 1958. But the damage had been done. In four years, Disney had squandered Parker’s popularity and effectively destroyed the possibility that he would ever enjoy a major film career. There was no trace in Disney’s handling of Parker of the well-organized promotion of contract players into important stars that had been a hallmark of the big Hollywood studios in earlier decades.

  In other ways, too, Disney was surrendering any claim to be taken seriously as a producer of live-action films. None of the features he made in the years just after 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was nearly as ambitious. That film, as written by Earl Felton and directed by Richard Fleischer, had emerged as a handsome and intelligent spectacle, even though weighted down by a host of liabilities: serious mistakes in casting (only James Mason as Captain Nemo is wholly plausible as his character), heavy-handed music, a seal that mugs almost as energetically as Kirk Douglas. 20,000 Leagues was modestly successful, both critically and commercially—it earned $6.8 million in gross rentals—but not a hit big enough to justify the large amount (in proportion to the studio’s revenues) that Disney had devoted to it.

  By the mid-1950s, he understood that in contrast to his feature cartoons, many of his live-action films were likely to seem dated after a few years. “Live pictures are different,” he said. Their reissue potential was correspondingly limited (20,000 Leagues was a rare exception, earning more than two million dollars in a 1963 reissue). But they could smooth out the studio’s revenue stream, they could be recycled on the weekly TV series—and they gave the studio’s new distribution apparatus something to sell.

  Despite the success of the True-Life Adventures, RKO was cool to the idea of a True-Life feature, evidently for legal reasons. The Disneys wanted to package the feature with two short films, one of them a cartoon based on Robert Lawson’s children’s book Ben and Me, and RKO’s lawyers believed that it could not sell the films as a package without violating the terms of the Supreme Court’s 1948 antitrust decision, which had required the major studios to divorce production and exhibition.89 Roy Disney decided that the studio would bypass RKO and distribute The Living Desert, the first feature-length True-Life Adventure, through a new Disney-owned distribution company named Buena Vista, after the Burbank street where the studio was located.90 Released in November 1953, The Living Desert ultimately returned $6.8 million to the Disney studio on a negative cost of $293,000.

  RKO had been run into the ground by its eccentric owner, Howard Hughes, and in September 1954 the Disneys broke with their longtime distributor over terms for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Lady and the Tramp. Roy Disney asked for a $3.5 million advance on those films and a reduction in RKO’s fee from 22.5 percent to 20 percent of rental revenues; Hughes wanted an increase in the fee to 25 percent.91 There was no animosity in the breakup—Roy subsequently made deals with RKO for the distribution of 20,000 Leagues in Latin America and Asia—but The Living Desert’s success was powerful evidence that the Disneys did not need a middleman, especially at a time when Disneyland and the weekly TV show were imposing new demands on the studio’s finances.

  As for Walt Disney: his attention absorbed now by the Disneyland park; still determined that nothing of consequence should happen at the studio without his approval; and wary of high costs (except when he wanted to spend the money himself), he more than ever leaned toward live-action directors who would translate his wishes onto film quickly and efficiently, without leaving any traces of their own personalities. Directors who worked mostly in television were ideal for his purposes, and he watched television shows with that in mind.

  By the mid-1950s, Walt and Lillian Disney were heading for bed by 9:30 or so, and they were usually asleep by 10:30. They watched little television together, although they both liked the Groucho Marx quiz show, You Bet Your Life. When the Disneys ate dinner alone together, they usually ate in front of the TV set, “and then he looks at everything,” Lillian Disney said. He liked to “study” even bad programs, she said.92

  One director whose work he liked was Robert Stevenson, who had directed theatrical features but by the 1950s was a TV regular. Disney hired him in 1956 to make Johnny Tremain, a film about the American Revolution that was originally conceived as a two-part television show but was released theatrically instead, in June 1957 (it wound up on the Disney TV show in 1958). “Directing for Walt was very interesting,” Stevenson told Richard Hubler in 1968, “because, certainly the pictures I worked on, we worked much more thoroughly and much more creatively on the script than any other producer I’ve worked for. He would really be doing an awful lot of writing, even though he didn’t put it onto paper.”93

  No transcripts were made of such meetings, but Disney himself provided a glimpse of his “writing.” In 1956, the Texas novelist Fred Gipson came to the studio to collaborate with the screenwriter William Tunberg on a script based on his dog story Old Yeller, which was to be the second Disney feature Stevenson directed. After Gipson left the studio, Disney, Stevenson, and Tunberg made “a re-arrangement of the material to help out the production side of it,” as Disney put it in a letter to Gipson. Disney described the changes as “straightening out the story from a shooting-continuity point of view. Certain transpositions in the early stages of the story were done to make it play a little better. I do not believe we have lost anything in doing this and I feel it will improve the finished effect when put on film.”94 Gipson gave his blessing to the revised script, suggesting only that one scene be omitted, and to the finished film.

  Once a script was finished and shooting began, Stevenson said, “the extraordinary thing is . . . he would leave a director entirely alone. . . . He never gave any instructions during the shooting of a picture. . . . He would then come back very solidly in the editing.”

  Harry Tytle, who began supervising live-action films for the television show in the 1950s, concurred:

  Walt always insisted on plenty of coverage [that is, a great variety of shots that he could choose from in editing a film]. . . . He liked plenty of variety in the coverage of various actors, including listening and reaction shots of the other, non-speaking actors in a scene. . . .

  He was most interested in the editing of his pictures, that is, putting the film together to tell the story. Woe to the director who camera-cut a picture . . . converting the story directly to film so rigidly that there is no latitude for anyone to do other than just assemble the film. Such an approach gave Walt no room to get away from what he considered a poor performance, or to concentrate on a character who he thought was “coming off” well.95

  The fruits of such an approach, one that shrugs off the actual shooting as of limited importance, can be seen in Johnny Tremain. The acting—and behind it the direction—make ready resort to the obvious (Johnny, played by Hal Stalmaster, hangs his head and slouches when he’s rejected), and the actors themselves give every sign of being performers of the kind who are valued because they can master a role quickly, if superficially. Such filmmaking founders on anything the least complex or ambiguous. In Tremain, there is an unsettling contrast between the elevated sentiments expressed by James Otis (Jeff York), in particular, and the protracted ugliness of the colonists’ guerrilla attacks on British troops. The emphasis on British restraint, pronounced throughout the film, makes the sniper attacks that kill ordinary soldiers exceptionally unpleasant to watch.

  A creative director could have found any number of
ways out of this box, even though the final cut remained in the producer’s hands, as was ordinarily the case in Hollywood at the time. Disney was simply not interested in hiring such people, and he sometimes seemed to go out of his way to avoid them. To direct The Great Locomotive Chase, Fess Parker’s first theatrical starring vehicle, Disney chose Francis Lyon, a film editor with no directing experience. (As Parker said, “There was more tender loving care of the locomotives than of their live asset.”)96 Westward Ho the Wagons! the next Parker film, was directed by William Beaudine, a veteran who cranked out dozens of low-budget westerns in the 1930s and 1940s and by the 1950s was working almost exclusively in television. Before and after his feature assignment, he directed—with blazing speed—the serials running on Mickey Mouse Club. A 1963 TV Guide article quoted Disney’s admiring words about Beaudine: “When I came to Hollywood in 1923, I was wandering around the old Warners lot and I watched him shooting a picture with actor Wesley Barry. He’s still tops on the low-budgeted type of thing. That sort of fits his temperament. He wants to move. That’s why he’s so good in television.”97

  It was in making the True-Life Adventures that the editor’s role was particularly dominant, and that surely accounted for some of Disney’s warm feelings for the series. He resisted making the True-Life Adventures longer than a half hour, he said in 1956, until he had made seven of them and felt confident that he could assemble enough material and present it properly. “The biggest problem [with the wildlife photographers] was getting them to keep shooting. . . . They would be too conservative with film because when they were working on their own they had to buy that film. . . . It got to the point they’d never dare come in and tell me something that they saw that they didn’t photograph because I used to raise heck with them.”