Walt Disney

by Bob Thomas

  After the constrictions of dealing with two classics, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, Walt felt comfortable with a subject that he could mold to his own patterns. He was at his dramatic best in a story meeting about the scene in which the Tramp kills a rat that is menacing the baby at Lady’s house:

  Lady’s barking, trying to get Jim’s attention, then you see the light coming, his shadow coming up—she’s waiting when the door opens. She barks, starts up the stairs, he tries to grab her, says, “Girl, what’s the matter?” Jim Dear chains Lady to a doghouse outside in the rain because of her barking. She has to get Tramp’s attention instead.

  She says, “A rat!” Tramp says, “Where?” She says, “Upstairs in the baby’s room!” He says, “How do you get in?” She says, “The little door in the back.” He runs right through the door in the back….

  It’s quick, short things. He’d go right in there. We have this guy cautiously coming up the stairs—remember, he’s an intruder. He doesn’t know which door it is. Then he picks up the scent, and he comes in the room and there’s the baby’s crib. We get suspense for a moment. The baby’s crib, and it’s dark. He starts looking around the room, and suddenly he sees two eyes glowing over there. He begins to growl and his hair bristles. Then you see the form move, and he runs over there.

  It has to be like a couple of guys fighting in the dark and not knowing where the other guy is. A hell of a realistic fight there. We can do it in the shadows from the window onto it—shadow forms against silhouette forms, against the light. Certain lighting effects will make it very effective….

  You actually want to put on a thing like he’s a damn good ratter. The rat, of course, always faces him. When the rat moves, he goes—grabs him—gets him—throws him. A nervous thing—when the rat goes over here, he won’t go after it….One thing about a ratter, he’ll never attack when a rat or a mole is on its back. He waits for the thing to get on its feet to go, and he grabs at the back of the neck. The dog that’s not a ratter will just bite him in the stomach, and the rat will come up and go through his cheek with its teeth. The rat gets a death grip on the dog’s cheek….

  Walt produced two more adventure films in England, The Sword and the Rose and Rob Roy. He contemplated two other projects to film at the studio: Jules Verne’s classic adventure 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Great Locomotive Chase, based on an incident during the Civil War. Both had special appeal for Walt; the first for Verne’s remarkable anticipation of submarines, atomic power and self-contained underwater suits; the second for its Civil War lore and the chance for him to play with full-sized trains. Harper Goff was assigned to create story sketches for both projects, and Walt presented them to a group of visiting theater executives. They decided in favor of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and their preference helped Walt decide to go forward with it.

  The production would be expensive, Walt realized. It required construction of a new stage with a huge tank for underwater filming; important stars for the four leading roles; locations in the Caribbean, where water was clear enough for filming; costly effects photography with storms and a monstrous squid; expensive sets, including the submarine Nautilus itself.

  Because of the cost, Walt was hesitant about mentioning the 20,000 Leagues project to his brother. Later Walt commented about Roy’s surprising reaction: “I first told him it was going to cost three million with all we had to do. It wasn’t contested, and as time went on, I went down to see him and I’d say, ‘Looks like that thing’s going to run three million, three hundred thousand.’ He’d just nod and smile. And then as I kept going along, we got to where it was three million, eight hundred thousand. He still nodded and smiled. And finally it got to four million, two hundred thousand, and he was still smiling. It was the first time he ever did that on a picture. For some reason, he believed in it from the very start. I got worried then. I thought there was something wrong with him. But he just had faith and confidence in it.”

  A special kind of director was needed for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the studio’s most ambitious production. Walt and his staff viewed the movies of numerous directors before the choice was narrowed to three. Films of each were screened, and Walt asked his staff members to vote on a selection. All selected Richard Fleischer. “That’s fine,” Walt commented, “because I’ve already picked him.”

  Fleischer came to the studio, and Walt made the offer for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. “Do you know who my father is?” the director asked. Walt smiled and said that he did.

  “I cannot direct the picture unless he gives his permission,” Fleischer said. “I know he will have strong feelings about it, and I must abide by his decision.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” Walt said. “Go ahead and ask him.”

  The director’s father was Max Fleischer, the pioneering cartoon maker. During his youth, Richard Fleischer had often heard his father inveigh against Walt Disney for borrowing techniques and raiding the Fleischer studio for animators (although Fleischer in turn lured away Disney personnel when he opened an animation studio in Florida). Max Fleischer had sought to make the first sound cartoon, and later the first cartoon feature; both times his releasing company, Paramount, refused approval, and Walt Disney accomplished the innovations. When Richard Fleischer asked if he should go to work for his father’s arch-rival, Max Fleischer replied, “Of course you should. And tell Walt that I think his judgment is very good.”

  For a year Walt worked with Fleischer and the screenwriter, Earl Felton, in developing the script of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Harper Goff designed a Nautilus to fit Jules Verne’s description of a submarine disguised as a sea monster. The interior, devised by John Meehan, was decorated in lush Victorian style, with velvet-colored furniture and a pipe organ. For the first time, Disney hired important Hollywood stars: James Mason as Captain Nemo; Kirk Douglas as harpooner Ned Land; Paul Lukas as the gentle scientist, Professor Aronnax; Peter Lorre as his assistant, Conseil.

  Filming began in the clear Caribbean waters near Nassau, then shifted to Jamaica for the cannibal-island sequence. The company returned to the studio to begin shooting the fight with a giant squid on the newly completed Stage 3 with its 90-by-165-foot tank. As Walt watched the rushes, he realized the scene wasn’t working. It was being filmed on a flat sea at sunset. The studio technicians had constructed a realistic squid, but it became unwieldy when the kapok in its tentacles soaked up water. After a few days of shooting, Walt visited the set and told Fleischer, “I want you to start on the dramatic scenes and postpone the squid fight until later. This stuff is awful.” The director agreed: “It’s phony as a three-dollar bill; the wires are showing, and there’s no illusion at all.”

  Production shifted to another stage for interior scenes with the principal actors. Walt put his technicians to work on a more maneuverable and convincing squid. They produced a two-ton beast with eight forty-foot tentacles and two feelers fifty feet long. Twenty-eight men were required to animate the squid with hydraulics, compressed air and electronics. With hideous yellow eyes and a snapping beak, it presented a fearsome menace for Nemo and his submariners. To add to the horror, the squid attack was filmed not in the pink calm of sunset, but in a howling storm. Tons of water hurtled down on the tank, wind machines whipped the spray, and arc lamps sent lightning flashes through the dark.

  The sequence required eight days to film and added more than $250,000 to the budget. The increased cost strained Roy Disney’s warm feelings toward 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and tried the bankers’ patience with Walt’s spending. He was required to show them the early footage from the film before they would agree to lend him more money. The added expense was a worthwhile investment; the squid fight proved to be the visual highlight of the film.

  The success of the True-Life Adventure films prompted naturalists to submit movies to the Disney studio. One of the offerings was ten minutes of desert film made as part of a doctoral thesis by N. Paul Kenworthy, Jr., a student at the University of California
at Los Angeles. He had painstakingly photographed a sequence in which a wasp stung a tarantula into paralysis and laid its eggs inside the spider’s body; when the young wasps hatched, they fed upon the preserved body of the tarantula, then flew off.

  “This is good stuff,” Walt said enthusiastically when he reviewed the film. “Let’s get hold of this young man and set him up out in the desert and see if he can come up with other good stories. We could build the whole thing around the desert.”

  Kenworthy and a colleague, Robert H. Crandall, spent months in the desert filming animal life, and the studio solicited film from other nature photographers. They produced exciting sequences—a family of peccaries treeing a bobcat; a kangaroo rat protecting its young by kicking sand at a sidewinder; a red-tailed hawk in a death battle with a rattlesnake. Walt viewed the footage and told his producer, Ben Sharpsteen: “This is a feature. This is where we can tell a real, sustained story for the first time in these nature pictures.” Jim Algar directed The Living Desert and wrote the narration with Ted Sears and Winston Hibler, who had been the voice of the True-Life Adventures from the beginning. As with the other films, the talk was minimal. The Disney philosophy likened narration to rolling a hoop with a stick; if the film was well edited, the hoop needed only an occasional hit to keep it rolling.

  Predictably, RKO salesmen were opposed to the idea of selling a full-length documentary to theaters, and their reluctance added to the Disneys’ growing discontent with the distribution company. The sales force was tough and thorough, and the contract terms were favorable, but RKO began to decline in morale and efficiency after Howard Hughes bought control of the company in 1948. Hughes tired of running the film company and offered to give it outright to the Disneys, along with a $10,000,000 bank-credit line, but there was a catch: RKO had incurred heavy liabilities during its decline. After a meeting with Hughes to discuss the offer, Walt told Roy, “We’ve already got a studio—why do we need another one?”

  With The Living Desert nearing completion, Roy realized that RKO had neither the enthusiasm nor the know-how to sell such an attraction. He established a small sales organization called Buena Vista, after the street where the studio was located. The Living Desert was first booked into the Sutton Theater in New York, along with a cartoon featurette, Ben and Me. It was an immediate success, and Buena Vista added more salesmen and released The Living Desert in a careful, deliberate way throughout the country. Proportionately, it became the biggest profit-maker in Disney history, earning $4,000,000 after a production cost of $300,000.

  Howard Hughes’ neglect of RKO had caused the company to deteriorate rapidly, and Roy decided to seek another distributor for the studio’s product. He and Card Walker went to New York for discussions with the major film companies, and the results were discouraging. Although the companies were eager to have the prestige of the Disney name, their terms seemed excessive. Roy recognized the drawback of releasing through a major company; the distributor naturally favored its own studio’s product, giving less favorable playdates to independent producers.

  Roy summoned the key salesmen of Buena Vista and told them they had proved with The Living Desert that they could distribute a film successfully. Roy pointed out that the company had two attractions of great promise—20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Lady and the Tramp. “Now if you have the guts and the vision and are willing to work, do you want to go forward with our own distribution company?” Roy asked. The salesmen readily agreed, and thereafter all the Disney films were distributed by Buena Vista.

  While The Living Desert proved an immense success with the public, some reviewers in intellectual journals criticized its anthropomorphism. This was part of a growing trend as the Disney product became more popular and more diverse. The same kind of critic who had embraced the Disney cartoons in the 1930s began to attack Disney films as sentimentalized and corny. Walt was at first perplexed, then hurt by the critiques, some of which seemed political in nature.

  One evening as the studio nurse was applying the heat treatment to Walt’s neck, he grumbled about a bad review The New Yorker had given a Disney film. Hazel George answered him, “Why should you care what those urban hicks say?”

  “What did you call them?” Walt asked.

  “Urban hicks.”

  Walt laughed with delight and said admiringly to Hazel, “That’s what an education will do for you.”

  THE vision of an amusement park grew in Walt Disney’s mind. On each trip to Europe and during his travels through the United States, he attended outdoor attractions of all kinds. Zoos, especially. Before leaving on another journey to Europe, Lilly warned him, “Walt, if you’re going to look at more zoos, I’m not going with you!”

  He visited county fairs, state fairs, circuses, carnivals, national parks. He studied the attractions and what made them appealing, whether people seemed entertained or felt cheated. His most depressing experience was seeing Coney Island. It was so battered and tawdry and the ride operators were so hostile that Walt felt a momentary urge to abandon the idea of an amusement park. His spirit revived when he saw Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen; it was spotless and brightly colored and priced within the reach of everyone. The gaiety of the music, the excellence of the food and drink, the warm courtesy of the employees—everything combined for a pleasurable experience. “Now this is what an amusement place should be!” Walt enthused to Lilly.

  Walt realized that he would have to provide his own financing and planning for the park, since Roy maintained his opposition. To Lilly’s dismay, he began borrowing on his life insurance; before he finished, he was $100,000 in debt. He started assembling a staff to help in planning. Among the first to be recruited was Harper Goff, an illustrator who played with Disney animators in the Dixieland band Firehouse Five Plus Two, which had created a national sensation. Walt assigned Goff to create preliminary drawings of the park.

  Walt continued collecting miniatures of all kinds, even animals. In Europe he became fascinated with tiny Sardinian donkeys and shipped four of them to the studio. Harper Goff told him about a Shetland-pony act in a horse show at the Pan Pacific Auditorium. Walt watched the ponies draw a wagon in intricate maneuvers, and he talked to the trainer, a retired welder named Owen Pope. Months later, Walt invited Pope and his wife Dolly to bring their ponies to the studio and start training other animals for an amusement park. In 1952, the Popes moved into a trailer under the water tower, becoming the studio’s only residents. One day Roy came down to look at the ponies and chat with the Popes. Later Walt asked Pope, “What did you say to my brother?” Pope asked if he had offended Roy. “No, not at all,” Walt said. “It’s the first time I’ve seen him express the slightest interest in my park idea.”

  By this time Walt had decided on a name for the park: Disneyland. As his concepts grew, he realized that he needed an organization to help him create Disneyland, and in December of 1952, he founded Walt Disney, Incorporated, with himself as president and Bill Cottrell as vice president. Later, because Roy feared that company stockholders might object to use of the Walt Disney name, the title became WED Enterprises, the initials of Walt’s name.

  WED was a personal corporation for Walt’s activities outside the studio. He bought the rights to the Zorro stories, which had provided film vehicles for Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Tyrone Power, and prepared fourteen scripts for a television series to be produced by WED. But when Walt made his presentation to the television networks, the answer was the same: “You’ll have to make a pilot film.”

  “Look, I’ve been in the picture business for thirty years,” Walt replied. “Don’t you think I know how to make a film?”

  “But this is different; this is television,” he was told. Walt argued that entertainment was the same in any medium, but network thinking was inelastic. No pilot, no series. Walt set aside the Zorro project. There was plenty for WED to do in the planning of Disneyland.

  Richard Irvine was newly arrived at WED. He had been an art director on Victory Through Air Power
, then moved to Twentieth Century-Fox when Disney production stalled during the war. Walt had invited Irvine back to help design Zorro, and later assigned him to Disneyland. One of Irvine’s first duties was to act as liaison with the architectural firm of William Pereira and Charles Luckman, who were making preliminary studies of Disneyland. Walt dissolved the contract with Pereira and Luckman when their concepts failed to match his. Walt’s close friend, architect Welton Becket, advised him, “Walt, no one can design Disneyland for you; you’ll have to do it yourself.”

  Irvine was joined by another art director from Twentieth Century-Fox, Marvin Davis. They collaborated with Harper Goff in expanding the original drawings that Goff had conceived for Disneyland. They studied the Disney feature cartoons for ideas to use in amusement-park rides. They drew storyboards of the rides, and Walt contributed his storytelling talent. He described the entire Snow White ride as if it were a movie cartoon, visualizing all the park’s attractions for the designers just as he had brought cartoons to life for his animators.

  Walt and his planners drove to Pomona to watch how people at the Los Angeles County Fair responded to the attractions. They traveled to Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park and measured the walkways and observed how the traffic flowed. Walt was particularly interested in the movement of people. He watched them as they walked freely from one attraction to another, then pointed out how they grew irritated when crowds jammed up.

  The plans for Disneyland grew, even though Walt had not decided where it would be located. He had abandoned the idea of building it at the studio, not only because of the lack of cooperation from the City of Burbank but because his ideas had outgrown the Riverside Drive property. He continued to pour his creativity into Disneyland—and his money; when he had borrowed the limit on his insurance policies, he sold the house he had built at Smoke Tree Ranch in Palm Springs.