It was in New York that she met Walter Zwicker, an engineer with the air force. The two married there in 1951 but with Walter’s position in the military, they knew they were not likely to stay in one place for long. Sure enough, Walter was transferred to Texas, and soon afterward, in 1953, Liz gave birth to a boy. The young family moved to Glendora, California, where Walter took a job at Aerojet General and Liz had their second child, another boy. On the surface they were a quintessential family of the 1950s, but in truth, their five-year marriage was crumbling. Liz was deeply unhappy, and so the couple made a decision unusual for the era: they split up.
As the divorce proceedings began, Liz knew that she needed an income to support herself and her children, so she decided to respond to an advertisement in the men’s section of the classifieds that read “Fine Artists Wanted.” Elizabeth was told to report to the studio with her portfolio. She had little idea what a portfolio should contain, so she went out to the art store, bought a leather case, and did her best to fill it with her work. Armed with drawings, most of which she considered only “cute,” she entered the studio at Burbank. The interviewer immediately took note of her divorced status and asked, “Do you have any other source of income? We don’t pay very much.” The salary they were offering, thirty-five dollars a week, certainly wasn’t enough to live on, but Liz was desperate for the position. She told them not to worry, that she received child support from her ex-husband.
Salaries at Walt Disney Studios had fallen dramatically. When Ethel Kulsar, also a single mother of two children, was working as an assistant to Sylvia a decade earlier, in 1946, she had made $67.50 per week. Now Liz, hired as an assistant animator, was making half that. Part of the reason for the discrepancy was the soaring cost of the Sleeping Beauty feature, which was rapidly becoming the most expensive film they had ever produced. The fact that Liz was a woman also hurt her salary. Many employers justified lower pay for women by noting that the ones who were married shared in their husbands’ income, the ones who were divorced received alimony, and ones who were unmarried had no family to support and therefore should be paid less. A woman simply couldn’t win.
Although Liz was disappointed by her paycheck, her children would later find the benefits of her new job priceless. When the family visited Disneyland, her boys delighted in the live mermaids who swam in the lagoon and loved waving to them through the portholes in the Submarine Voyage attraction. Unbelievably, the teenage girls the children admired, with their long flowing hair and custom-fit neoprene tails, made forty-five dollars a week, more than their mother earned in animation.
The work at the studio was not easy. Liz found the pressure of CinemaScope tremendous. The process doubled the width of the projected image and then optically enlarged the format from 35 mm to 70 mm film. Each panorama required countless drawings done in the most exquisite detail. Liz was put in charge of birds, and she took the task seriously, spending hours with research material in the studio library and drawing them meticulously. She was disappointed to learn there was no possibility of advancement. The Nine Old Men occupied every senior animator position, and so the most a new hire could hope for was to work alongside the masters, cleaning up the action of their animation by tracing over their lines and removing stray pencil marks. Occasionally the assistant animators would be offered smaller scenes and minor characters to work on. Even saying hello to one of the Nine Old Men in the hallways might get you in trouble, and inbetweeners learned to avoid them.
At work Liz was playful. She quickly made friends with the fresh group of hires, and they teased and played pranks on each other in the same spirit that had prevailed among young artists at the studio for decades. At six foot one and with a fondness for heels, she soon became known among her friends as “Big Liz.”
There were women too—many more than Liz had expected to see. While the story department had been drained of many of its female writers and the ranks of senior animators had closed, the number of women working as assistant animators, in layout, and in backgrounds was expanding. As she looked around the studio, Liz wondered if they were all like her, immersed in their art, struggling to make a decent wage, and full of gratitude to be within Walt Disney’s walls.
Mary was reveling in life outside the borders of her native country. In 1956, as the studio continued to struggle with Sleeping Beauty, she, Retta, and a friend from art school named Virginia toured Europe. It wasn’t yet common for women to travel without men, especially abroad, but the three relished the time they spent together without husbands or children. They rented a car and drove around Spain, France, and Italy, visiting museums, eating delicious food, sketching, and drinking wine on wrought-iron terraces. As Mary sat in the sunshine of southern France with her friends, she felt the darkness of the past few years lifting. Nothing could take away the hardship she had experienced or the pain that might still be to come, but with Retta and Virginia, she felt she could finally breathe.
Chapter 14
Dalmatian Plantation
All day, Liz had been getting calls to bring her drawings down to the camera room. The requests had gone from urgent to insistent to desperate, and Liz was working as fast as she could. As Sleeping Beauty neared completion, she wasn’t concentrating only on birds and animals but also animating Prince Philip’s horse and the jester character. There was much to do, she was under heightened pressure, and Liz could feel the stress radiating off her hand as it gripped the pencil.
When she was done, she gathered up her heavy load of artwork to rush it over to the camera room for filming. Frustrated to find the elevator busy, she decided to use the stairs in order not to lose another minute. Women’s fashion in the 1950s was not well suited to dashing up and down stairwells at top speed. Liz had embraced the clothing of the era, as she believed that dressing like a stereotypical secretary would help her fit in and perhaps soften the impact of her silly antics at the studio. That day, she was wearing three-and-a-half-inch heels, a wide-skirted dress over layers of petticoats, and a belt that cinched her waist tight. She ran up the stairs, her hands so full of drawings that she could barely see what was in front of her. Just as she stepped out of the stairwell, Fess Parker Jr., the actor playing Davy Crockett for the Disneyland television series, came out of the makeup department and started rushing down the stairs to the back lot where the show was filmed.
The six-foot-seven actor and the six-foot-one animator collided and went tumbling. Liz’s skirts flew into the air while Parker’s coonskin cap soared down the stairs. With a ding, the elevator doors opened in the middle of the chaos and there was Walt, at first shocked by the scene. He stepped out of the elevator and saw three hundred drawings scattered about the open stairwell. It was too much for him; he started laughing uproariously. Liz looked up at him with apprehension—this was the first time she was meeting the boss—but she soon overcame her embarrassment and started chuckling too while they scouted the stairs to retrieve her drawings.
The women of Ink and Paint put the finishing touches on Sleeping Beauty, curling Princess Aurora’s eyelashes with expert, delicate strokes of their pens. Yet all the artistry of the department was about to disappear. This would be the last feature film at the studio to be graced by their work. Three intruders had entered their midst, and the women in the building eyed their robotic competitors uneasily. It was clear that everything was about to change.
In 1958, three Xerox machines were introduced to the Ink and Paint building. The technology was based on the electrophotography technique that inventor Chester Carlson had nearly given up on in 1942 after he was rejected by every corporation he applied to.
The technology took advantage of the fact that negatively and positively charged objects attract each other and that some objects conduct electricity when exposed to light. The machine works by exposing a document to be copied to a bright light, which casts a kind of electric shadow onto a charged cylindrical drum; the shadowed areas on the drum—the text of the document—are positively charged. Negati
vely charged toner, which adheres only to the dark, positively charged parts of the shadow, is then added. The negatively charged toner is transferred to a blank piece of paper and then heated so that the toner fuses to the page, creating a copy.
In 1946, the Haloid Photographic Company saw promise in Carlson’s patent and decided to refine the technology for commercial use. They invented the term xerography, the Latin roots of which loosely translate to “dry writing.” The Xerox photocopier was born and was ready to radically alter workplaces everywhere.
The challenge at the Walt Disney Studios was to find a way to photocopy not onto paper but onto plastic cels. Ub Iwerks traveled to the East Coast and began working directly with the Haloid Photographic Company on a way to alter its commercial copiers so the studio could use them. It was clear that the quality of the reproductions would worsen with Xerox machines, but significant financial savings balanced this loss.
While the earliest machines could copy only in black and white, the studio was already betting that in the future they would be able to copy in color. The technology could potentially eliminate the need for the Ink and Paint department by copying the animators’ drawings directly onto the cels. A single machine could churn out a thousand cels per day, easily putting an inker, who could produce only fifty cels a day, out of work. Ken Anderson, a longtime employee who bounced around from writing to animation to directing, brought Walt the financial verdict: if they eliminated Ink and Paint, they would save over half the cost of their pictures.
The copiers got their first try at making movie magic at the end of Sleeping Beauty, where a crowd of people walk across a bridge toward the castle. It was the sort of scene that required long hours of work, with each face needing detailed outlining. The machines did their job, and because the scene was shown from a wide angle, no difference in detail could be detected. The animators challenged the Xerox again, this time on the drawings of Maleficent as a dragon in the film’s climax. Once again the machines performed well, with the dark shading that characterizes the scene mostly unhampered by the mechanical process, although the animators noted that the black lines produced by the Xerox were not as smooth as those drawn by hand. The copiers hummed with activity, working far more hours a day than a single person ever could, and their human operators came and went in shifts. While a portion of the women of Ink and Paint copied on the Xerox, most continued their work as they always had, but now with the premonition that their days at the studio were coming to a close.
After nearly eight years in production, Sleeping Beauty premiered at the Fox Wilshire Theater in Los Angeles on January 29, 1959. The film was the most expensive animated feature of its time, costing roughly six million dollars to make, twice as much as either Peter Pan or Alice in Wonderland. The Sleeping Beauty Castle, built from brick and mortar at the center of Disneyland, had been completed four years earlier and was still awaiting its princess.
The critical response to the film was mostly positive, although some reviewers noted the elements borrowed from previous films, particularly Snow White. Yet, with the film’s modern midcentury look, it could not help but stand out as significantly different from anything the studio had made previously. That wasn’t enough to sell tickets, however, and the film earned just $5.3 million at the box office, far short of Cinderella’s $8 million. By the end of its first run, the film had lost over a million dollars.
In contrast was Disney’s The Shaggy Dog, a movie loosely based on the 1923 novel The Hound of Florence by Felix Salten, author of Bambi. It tells the story of a teenage boy who is transformed into a dog and was the first live-action comedy film produced by Walt Disney Studios. It cost a mere one million dollars to make, and it was one of the top-grossing films of 1959, pulling in over eight million dollars. The lesson to studio executives was clear: Hand-drawn animation could not sustain itself. The studio needed to clean house.
The letters went out alphabetically; if your last name began with an A, then you were one of the first to find out you were cut. Liz, with the last name Zwicker, knew the envelope was coming long before the words were typed. As she waited for her letter to arrive, she watched as artists who had worked for the studio for decades were fired. It was a hopeless feeling, as if you were standing on the bow of a ship about to sink into the ocean and could only watch your torturously slow progress into the waters below. In the winter of 1959, Liz received the news she dreaded: she was being laid off as an animator. The studio offered her a job in layout, this time for more money, but she turned it down. If she wasn’t in animation, she’d rather not work on movies at all.
Liz certainly wasn’t alone; the studio fired all but seventy-five of its five hundred and fifty artists and animators. Even the jobs of those select few men and women who remained were under threat. Walt’s brother Roy suggested that they do away with the animation department altogether, as both their animated feature films and animated shorts were losing money. He implored Walt to focus his efforts where the profits were: on live-action television and feature films.
Walt wasn’t ready to let go, so the animation department survived, but at a fraction of its previous size. It was the Nine Old Men who went through the records of the animation department and decided which lucky artists could stay and which had to leave. While Liz turned down the opportunity to work in layout, other women were not so fastidious. Men had dominated that department since its inception, as it played a coveted role in production. The layout artists were responsible for staging every shot and plotting the action of the characters in each scene.
Two of the women advancing into openings in layout from their positions in Ink and Paint and animation were Sylvia Roemer and Sammie June Lanham. A benefit of the massive layoffs, if one wanted to look on the bright side, was all the extra space. No longer were they crammed into small offices and meeting rooms. The women spread out their pencils and paper in the capacious 2C wing, previously used only by directing animators.
Along with the exodus of talented animators was the near dissolution of the Ink and Paint department at the studio. Ink and Paint, the division that hired more women than any other, was slowly being stripped clean. Painters held on to their jobs for the moment, as the studio’s copiers were not yet able to reproduce in color, but they all knew their time was coming. The company line was that people weren’t losing their jobs; they were merely being retrained as Xerox technicians. The reality was more painful. A small number worked with the machines, and some found their way into other departments, but many left altogether. Of the once vital crew of inkers, at one time totaling more than forty, just two members remained. In the departed workers’ place stood massive hunks of plastic, glass, and metal. Many women from all over the studio watched the rooms empty with tears in their eyes.
As if brought in on purpose to cheer the forlorn staff, the studio was suddenly full of black-and-white-spotted puppies. They ran around the studio wildly, played in the halls, and sometimes just napped quietly under the animators’ desks. There were adult dogs too for the artists to admire, their coats shiny and their tongues hanging out in pure canine contentment. Walt was smitten with a book called The Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith. This time the studio was not adapting a fairy tale that had been retold over thousands of years but a novel published in 1956. It included modern elements they had never incorporated into their movies before, such as television, neon lights, and contemporary music. The story felt refreshing to the artists; it was just the change they needed and ideal for adaptation.
There was a reason the book felt tailored to them. Dodie Smith had written the text with animation in mind, hoping the Walt Disney Studios might pick it up. She made the plot tight, in a slim volume of just 199 pages full of personality, animals, and a villain that was suitably horrible. Yet despite the story’s advantages, the studio could not even have contemplated making the film just five years earlier. It would have been astronomically expensive for animators to draw ninety-nine puppies over and over again, each one car
efully inked. Now the new Xerox machines made such concerns vanish; nothing could be simpler than making copies of drawings of black-and-white puppies.
The story department no longer housed rooms of writers and artists eager to debate the merits and faults of each scene. Where forty men and women had once ripped into a book eagerly, this time the manuscript was handed to a single artist who had worked at the studio since 1937, Bill Peet. Without the collaborative story meetings that had previously characterized script development, Peet had only himself to consult. He did it all, constructing storyboards and writing the script without either harsh criticism or the stimulation of new ideas. Wisely, Peet stayed close to the book’s narrative; he recognized the power of its simplicity and made few changes.
In animation, the path was unusually smooth. Marc Davis, the master of female villains, was able to copy Cruella De Vil’s inimitable style directly from the book, from her hair (half black and half white) to the smoke from her malodorous cigarettes to her long fur coats. Where Marc’s genius shone was in the subtleties of her appearance—he made Cruella’s face skeletal and her eyes wild with rage.
Those designing the look of the film were highly influenced by the Xerox technology. Eyvind Earle was not among those designers; he had left the studio a year previously, before Sleeping Beauty was even released. He left voluntarily, but his departure was likely encouraged due to the expense of his detailed backgrounds, and his attitude, which many coworkers felt was arrogant, probably didn’t help either. Before leaving the studio, he described his work there as “not Walt Disney. It was one hundred percent me.”
Instead of the lush, romantic look that defined Sleeping Beauty and many of the studio’s earlier films, the designers were going with a rough, pencil-sketch appearance that played to the strengths of the Xerox. The machine couldn’t hide the lines the animators made while drawing the film and that had previously been carefully traced and inked by female employees. With this in mind, production designer Ken Anderson decided to embrace the lines, giving the film a raggedy look in comparison to previous features. For the first time, they would show the pencil marks of the animators directly on-screen.
The Queens of Animation Page 24