by Bob Thomas
The small unit working next to Walt’s office was joined by other animators and background artists until by the spring of 1936, the feature cartoon occupied the talents of virtually everyone in the studio. Making of the shorts continued, since they sustained the flow of much-needed cash. But the real sense of pioneering excitement centered on Snow White, and each breakthrough in technique and character delineation was greeted like a new weapon in a holy war.
Walt was selecting his animators with the same thoughtful care that another film producer would exercise in choosing human actors for an all-star movie. Freddy Moore, Bill Tytla, Fred Spencer and newcomer Frank Thomas proved to be the animators who could instill humor and individual characteristics in the Dwarfs. Norm Ferguson superbly limned the menace of the Witch. Ham Luske accepted the formidable challenge of making Snow White move with human grace. Grim Natwick also contributed to Snow White and animated the Prince, the least successful of the human figures. Snow White’s animal friends were entrusted to three young artists, Milt Kahl, Eric Larson and Jim Algar. All of the animators and the background artists, too, drew inspiration from the preliminary sketches of Albert Hurter and Gustaf Tenggren, whose European origins and training helped provide the flavor and mood of a fairy tale.
The controlling hand of Walt Disney followed every phase of production. He realized the need to test each sequence as it was developed, and the story sketches were filmed on a “Leica reel,” as the rough sequences had come to be called, so it could be judged before being committed to the final process of animation. These were viewed in the sweatbox by Walt, by supervising director Dave Hand, and by the individual sequence directors—Bill Cottrell, Wilfred Jackson, Ben Sharpsteen, Larry Morey and Perce Pearce. Walt also looked at reels of rough animation, known as “pencil tests.” He screened preliminary footage for many of the creative workers, and they were asked to respond to such questions as: Does any section seem too long or too short? Did any of the business strike you as being objectionable? Were there any spots where the audience would laugh at the wrong time? Do you recall any gags where you thought the point was missed? Is the personality of each character consistent?
As each sequence was approved for production, new ones were being prepared. Almost every working day through the last half of 1936 and into 1937, Walt held story conferences with members of his staff. A storyboard meeting on November 24, 1936, concerned the scene of the Witch preparing the poisoned apple:
WALT: The thought just struck me on the buildup of the music to where she says, “Now turn red, etc.” that where it starts you might go into innocent, sweet music while she is saying something about how innocent it looks. The music changes as the apple changes and could stay that way until she says, “Have a bite.” It would be a good contrast.
HAND: You mean the innocence of the apple or of Snow White?
WALT: The apple. You have seen the poison seeping into it and the buildup on the hocus-pocus around it. Then some innocent little theme there, coming back to the heavy music after she says, “Have a bite.”
RICHARD CREEDON: Admiring the apple as if she’d like to eat it herself—“Pink as a maiden’s blush.”
WALT: Something to show how tempting the apple is, how tempting it would be to anybody she offered it to.
BILL COTTRELL: Wouldn’t you want that when you are back on her? She even goes sweet herself. She’d change her personality into the peddler woman. Then look over at the raven for, “Have a bite?”
WALT: It would be part of her sales talk here. The apple has just changed from this terrible thing in blowfly colors and the skull to a beautiful red. There wouldn’t be too much of it; just enough for contrast….
FERGUSON: Would it be too much of a burlesque on her if when she said, “I’ll be the fairest in the land,” she started to pretty up, fixing her hair?
WALT: Why not? She’s clowning. Take that attitude with her in it.
Walt’s initial estimate of $500,000 for Snow White proved absurdly low; it was going to cost three times that amount. United Artists executives exhibited little enthusiasm for the project, and influential figures throughout the film industry doubted the wisdom of the Disney experiment with a feature cartoon. Walt learned that it was being called “Disney’s Folly,” and there were predictions that Snow White would sink him into bankruptcy. He expressed his concern about the negative publicity to Hal Horne, the exploitation manager of United Artists who had first recognized the worth of The Three Little Pigs. Horne had become a good friend of the Disney studio, and Walt often sought his advice. “What should I do about all this bad talk about the feature?” Walt asked.
“Nothing,” Horne replied. “Keep them wondering. Let ‘em call it ‘Disney’s Folly’ or any other damn thing, as long as they keep talking about it. That picture is going to pay off, and the more suspense you build up, the more it’ll pay off.”
Not all of the important people in the film industry lacked faith in Snow White. W. G. Van Schmus, who managed the nation’s largest movie theater, the Radio City Music Hall, had long been friendly with the Disneys and paid the highest rental for the Mickeys and the Symphonies. Whenever he came to Hollywood, he paid a call to the Disney studio. Walt showed him the work in progress on Snow White, and Van Schmus was impressed. “Walter, it’ll be a success,” he said. “I’ll book it for the Music Hall.”
Encouragement also came from Walter Wanger, a distinguished producer who played polo with Walt and Roy. Wanger assured Joseph Rosenberg, the Bank of America executive who supervised loans to Walt Disney Productions: “Joe, if Walt does as well on the feature as he has done with everything else he’s made, the public will buy it.”
Still, Rosenberg retained a banker’s normal caution. When Roy asked for more money to complete Snow White, Rosenberg was reluctant. Roy advised Walt, “You’ve got to show Joe what you’ve done on the picture so far.”
“I can’t do that,” Walt insisted. “All I’ve got is bits and pieces. You know I never like to show anybody a picture when it’s all cut up. It’s too dangerous.”
“Walt, you’ll have to,” Roy replied. “The only way we’re going to get more money is to show them what they’re lending money for.”
Walt grudgingly agreed. He ordered his staff to work overtime to prepare a presentation that contained the essential elements of Snow White. Since only a few of the sequences had been completed, the action had to be bridged by pencil sketches and rough layout. Finally enough film was collected to provide a rough impression of Snow White, and Walt arranged to show it to Rosenberg at the studio on a Saturday afternoon.
Only the two men were present in the projection room. The room darkened and on the screen came the scene of a fairy-tale book opening. What followed was a jumble of fully animated sequences in color alternating with long stretches of penciled sketches of static figures. The sound track was fragmentary, and Walt filled in the gaps with his own recital of the dialogue and action. Despite Walt’s energetic performance, Rosenberg’s response was only an occasional, “Yes, yes.”
Finally the showing ended with Snow White and the Prince living happily ever after. The lights came on in the projection room, and Walt searched the banker’s face for a sign of approval. There was none.
Walt followed him out the door, down the studio street and into the alley where Rosenberg’s car was parked. Rosenberg talked about Roy, the weather, anything except what he had just seen in the projection room. He climbed in the car, started the motor and said, “Thanks—goodbye.” Then he added: “That thing is going to make a hatful of money.”
With financing assured, production on Snow White accelerated. Artists worked uncomplainingly on Saturdays and Sundays, and at night, too; all were imbued with the crusadelike mission to make the first feature cartoon a success. Only one negative note appeared. Among the written responses to a showing of partly finished film was an anonymous “Stick to shorts.” Walt was upset for days. Years afterward whenever an employee responded negatively to a Disney idea,
he pointed a finger and exclaimed: “I’ll bet you’re the guy who wrote ‘Stick to shorts’!”
As Snow White was being completed, the Disneys came to the end of their association with United Artists. They had been dissatisfied with the distributor’s terms, and the proposals for a new contract offered little improvement. United Artists insisted on the television rights to the Disney cartoons, and Walt refused to part with them. “I don’t know what television is, and I’m not going to sign away anything I don’t know about,” he reasoned. RKO offered much more favorable terms, and the Disneys signed a releasing agreement for the shorts and for Snow White.
The studio was racing for a Christmas release of Snow White, but when Walt reviewed a nearly completed version of the film, he noticed something disturbing: When the Prince leaned over to kiss Snow White in her glass coffin, he shimmied. Something had gone wrong in the camera work or the animation. “I want to make it over,” Walt announced to Roy. “How much will it cost?” Roy asked. Walt replied that it would require several thousand dollars. “Forget it,” said Roy, who had borrowed all he could. “Let the Prince shimmy.” And ever afterward he did.
The sales force of RKO began discussions on how to sell the film. One of the distribution executives told Walt: “We’ve got to play down the fairy-tale angle.” When Walt asked why, the man replied: “Because audiences don’t buy fairy tales. We’ve got to sell it as a romance between the Prince and Snow White and play down the Dwarfs. We can call it simply Snow White.”
“No, it’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” Walt insisted. “It’s a fairy tale. That’s what I put a million and a half into, and that’s the way it’s going to be sold.”
Finally on December 21, 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was seen by the public in a glittering premiere at the Carthay Circle Theater in Los Angeles. The great names of Hollywood and the leaders of the film industry stepped out of their limousines to praise Walt Disney on the radio. Inside the Carthay Circle they laughed at the floppy antics of Dopey and some cried when the Dwarfs found Snow White in a deathlike sleep. When the movie ended, the audience stood and cheered.
Many years later, Walt reminisced in wonderment: “All the Hollywood brass turned out for my cartoon! That was the thing. And it went way back to when I first came out here and I went to my first premiere. I’d never seen one in my life. I saw all these Hollywood celebrities comin’ in and I just had a funny feeling. I just hoped that some day they’d be going in to a premiere of a cartoon. Because people would depreciate the cartoon. You know, they’d kind of look down.
“I met a guy on the train when I was comin’ out. It was one of those things that kind of made you mad. I was out on the back platform—I was in my pants and coat that didn’t match but I was riding first class. I was making conversation with a guy who asked me, ‘Goin’ to California?’ ‘Yeah, I’m goin’ out there.’ ‘What business you in?’ I said, ‘The motion-picture business.’ Then all of a sudden, ‘Oh, is that right? Well, I know somebody in the picture business. What do you do?’ I said, ‘I make animated cartoons.’ ‘Oh.’ It was like saying, ‘I sweep up the latrines.’
“Sometimes people make you mad, and you want to prove something to them even though they mean nothing to you. I thought of that guy on the back platform when we had the premiere of Snow White. And the dam thing went out and grossed eight million dollars around the world.”
THE two million drawings that made up Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs had been combined to produce eighty-three minutes of superlative motion-picture entertainment. Critics were unanimously enthusiastic, audiences were enthralled. All attendance records were broken in an unprecedented three-week run at the Radio City Music Hall; the attraction could have run longer, but the Disney brothers believed it should play the New York neighborhoods while the public interest was still high. The Seven Dwarfs, especially Dopey, became immediate folk figures, and the film’s songs, particularly “Heigh Ho, It’s Off to Work We Go” and “Whistle While You Work,” were heard from every radio. Walt and Roy Disney enjoyed the unique experience of watching money pour into their corporation. Within six months after the release of Snow White, they had paid off all their bank loans. The $8,000,000 that the film earned in its first release was a phenomenal sum, considering that the average price for theater admission in the United States in 1938 was twenty-three cents—and a heavy percentage of those seeing Snow White were children admitted for a dime.
Walt was euphoric. To see “Disney’s Folly” turn out so magnificently well was dreamlike. The experience erased all the bitter happenings of his early career: the bankruptcy of Laugh-O-grams; the loss of Oswald; the defections of the animators he had brought into the business; the chicanery of Pat Powers.
He was enormously proud of his artists. They had worked long hours at salaries that were modest compared to similar work in other industries, although higher than those paid in other cartoon studios. Some of the Disney animators were so eager for Snow White to succeed that they tacked up advertising posters on fences and telephone poles when the movie opened in Los Angeles.
The Disneys had instituted a system of bonus payments to employees when the studio fortunes were prospering, and with the Snow White success, surprise amounts appeared in paychecks. Walt also wanted a dramatic way to show his appreciation for his workers’ efforts, and he announced a festive weekend for the entire studio staff at the Lake Norconian resort, east of Los Angeles. It was a mistake. The latent bohemianism of the Disney artists sprang forth fullblown. Legends of the riotous happenings were repeated for years. The event was not.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs indicated the direction in which the Disney organization had to go. Short cartoons would continue to be the staple product, providing a steady income and permitting Walt to train new animators and develop fresh techniques. But the shorts were sold to theaters in blocks, and even the exceptionally good ones earned very little more than average cartoons. (Walt sometimes mused over how much more money Three Little Pigs might have amassed if it had been feature-length.)
Features had to become the creative thrust of the studio. Walt realized that the company could expand only by producing full-length movies to compete for theater rentals with the topflight attractions of the major studios. He began devoting his major attention to features, paying less heed to the shorts. Thus began the pattern of his creative life: As he discovered each new, unexplored medium, his interest dwindled in the one that he had previously conquered.
Again Walt pressed for expansion. He hired more and more artists, looking ahead to the time when the studio would be producing several cartoon features simultaneously. Obviously the Hyperion Avenue plant could no longer accommodate his ambitious program. It had grown chaotically, spilling to adjoining lots and across the street. In 1937 and early 1938, the studio had added a feature building, three film vaults, part of a sound stage, test camera bungalow, camera building, projection booth, electric shop, sound shop, paint lab and inking building, as well as several nearby bungalows which were used for various purposes. Air conditioning was nonexistent, and work on cels had to be suspended during the summer’s hottest days because the artists’ sweat dripped on the ink and paint.
Walt and Roy agreed that they needed to build a new studio. They found fifty-one acres for sale on Buena Vista Street in Burbank, just over the hills of Griffith Park. On August 31, 1938, they put a deposit of $10,000 on the property, the purchase price to be $100,000.
Walt and Lilly now had a second daughter, Sharon Mae, born on New Year’s Eve, 1936. The Disneys did some entertaining at home, mostly for relatives and close friends at the studio. Walt and Lilly went to the studio at night to play badminton with other husbands and wives. Although Walt was now accepted as one of Hollywood’s most successful and creative film makers, he rarely mingled with Hollywood society. He went each year to the Academy Awards banquet and usually came home with an Oscar. For Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs he received a special one, consisting of one full-s
ize and seven dwarf Oscars mounted in a stair-step arrangement. Such appearances before his peers caused an uncommon lack of ease. The ten-year-old Shirley Temple, noticing his demeanor when she presented him with the Snow White Oscars, commented, “Don’t be nervous, Mr. Disney.”
The Oscars brought new fame to Walt Disney, and he found himself being recognized when he appeared in public. He was not entirely pleased. “I never have time to ponder over the fact that I may be what they call ‘a celebrity,’” he wrote in response to an inquiry from Arnold Herrmann of Elmhurst College, Illinois. “And if I am one it has never helped me make a better picture, nor has it ever bettered my polo game, which I certainly wish it would! Here’s once when it happened, though—it did get me a good seat to one of the football games last winter. But then, what about the mob that pounced on me for autographs after the game! No, being a celebrity doesn’t mean so much!”
Walt had to give up polo. Roy had urged him to do so, arguing that the man on whom their enterprise relied for its creative direction should not risk his health in such a dangerous sport. Walt resisted until he played in two matches in which horsemen suffered fatal injuries. Then he himself was involved in an accident and crushed four of his cervical vertebrae. The injury might have healed if he had been placed in a cast. But he consulted a chiropractor, who manipulated the broken bones and contributed to an arthritic condition that pained Walt Disney until the end of his life.
Both Walt and Roy became increasingly concerned about their parents, who were living in Portland and, despite the advance of their years, were working as hard on the small apartment houses they owned as they had on the Marceline farm. When Flora Disney’s health broke down, Roy flew to Portland to convince his parents that they could no longer exert themselves. Walt wrote his mother: “…We have been worried for some time for fear you and Dad have been attempting too much and jeopardizing your health. I was glad that Roy was able to sit down and talk things over with you and reason things out. I think you should keep in mind that your health is worth far more than any money that might be derived by trying to do too much with your own hands. After all, money is no good to us if we do not have good health to enjoy it. I would a lot rather be poor and healthy than rich and have ill health. Anyway, I want you to know that we have been praying and hoping that everything would turn out for the best, and it is a big relief to us to know that you are getting along so well….I hope Dad will listen to reason and stop doing the heavy work that he has been doing. It might lead to complications with his rupture. I can’t understand why he won’t take things easier and behave himself. It may be that the trouble you had will be a warning to him…”