Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  As the summer approached and the deadline loomed, Hand took drastic action. For over a year the animators had been viewing live-action films, not only of the dwarfs but of the witch, who was played variously by a stage actor named Nestor Pavia and by the man who would voice the Magic Mirror, Moroni Olsen, dressed in drag, and of Snow White, who was played by Marjorie Belcher, the teenage daughter of a local dance instructor. (She would later marry dancer and choreographer Gower Champion and form a popular dance team with him in the 1950s.) Walt had even attempted to combine live footage of Belcher with a model of the dwarfs’ cottage as designed by Albert Hurter. These films were intended to provide inspiration or suggest movement and behavior. “I think you can use this live action to get personalities, etc. that you are bound to absorb ideas that creep into your work,” Fred Moore said at one meeting, while Art Babbitt, saying that the animators had been focusing too narrowly on mechanics, claimed that “we are getting something now that would take us years and years to acquire.” By February all the important action of the dwarfs was being shot live first, and the animators were actually going to the soundstage and directing the live-action scenes themselves—with Pinto Colvig putting on a big nose and playing Grumpy or Sneezy or Eddie Collins playing Dopey or Dave Hand or Perce Pearce playing the other dwarfs to an audio playback of the dialogue. The animator then watched the developed film through a viewfinder and chose poses he liked. Walt feared that the animators would wind up copying the live action—“Stress the point over and over again that when drawing models, get the feeling behind the models instead of copying them,” Babbitt told one meeting in expressing Walt’s view—and explicitly ordered, as Sharpsteen recalled, that “he did not want any animators tracing that character and putting it on the screen as a tracing; they had to use it only as a guide.”

  But under the increasing pressure, Walt’s order was breached. The staff had to trace live action—what was called “rotoscoping”—to finish the film on time. “Live action is what is going to lick the picture,” Hand announced at one luncheon meeting in mid-February. Though Ham Luske was recommending that they bring in child actors to play the dwarfs in scale, this was especially true of Snow White and the Queen—the human characters that were still proving so difficult to animate well. Already by March, Perce Pearce was suggesting that they do more rotoscoping of Snow White—“There is a lot of Snow White that has to be worked out in rotoscope”—and by June, photostats of the Queen coming down the stairs were being given to the in-betweeners to trace. There were certainly misgivings about having to do this, a sense almost of cheating, though the live action often betrayed how far the animators still had to go to capture reality. “[Y]ou look at some of that live action,” Eric Larson admitted years later, “and it was actually more animated than we finally got on the screen in some, some instances.” Still, Walt was adamant that the rotoscoping be concealed from the public. In preparing the publicity campaign, he dictated that no live action be shown. “I want this definitely left out as people will get the wrong impression of it,” he wrote publicity chief Roy Scott. “The only thing we might say is that we use live models for the purposes of studying action, etc., but we do not photograph live action and blow up our drawings from same”—although, in fact, that was exactly what they did.

  There was so little time and now more measures were needed to meet the deadline and tighten the film itself. Scenes had to be “snapped up,” Walt said, “retaining all the good business, but snapping it up and taking out the excess dialogue.” And the snapping-up even extended to cutting scenes altogether. As early as November 1936, storyman Dick Creedon had suggested the possibility of lopping two scenes—one in which the dwarfs meet to discuss whether they should let Snow White stay or, fearing repercussions from the Queen, make her leave, and another in which the dwarfs, having resolved to let her stay, decide to build her a bed so that she will not want to leave. “I don’t think it has any purpose in the story now and will divert us at a point where we should start building our suspense tempo,” Creedon asserted. Unconvinced, Walt proceeded to have the scenes animated anyway, as well as another in which the dwarfs are eating soup under the reproachful eye of Snow White, who is trying to teach them manners, though he warned of the bed-building: “Take out all the superfluous stuff.” The scenes were still in the picture as late as June 1937—they hadn’t even been finalized until April—but Walt, like Creedon, finally decided they had to go because they disrupted the flow of the narrative. Ward Kimball, who had animated the bulk of the soup-eating sequence, was crushed. He had spent nearly a year and a half on the section.

  As Walt cut and rushed and pressed, the animators began to buckle under the pressure. As they fell behind schedule, one rumor had it that the Bank of America would soon take over the company—a prospect, wrote animator Shamus Culhane, that “created a feeling of tension in the studio that almost made the air crackle.” Yet even as they were urged to speed up, they felt dread in producing anything that might disappoint Walt and dread in letting anyone else clean up and possibly sap their drawings’ energy, so they withheld their footage from final cleanup even after it had been approved, resulting in a massive slowdown just when things should have been accelerating. “You fellows are all trying to get your work as good as possible,” Dave Hand told them ruefully after learning that they were spending an average of two hours on each drawing. “We are in sympathy with that, but we are not in sympathy with the fact that you are so carefully watching every detail that you are not allowing it to move through”—an odd admonition at a studio where everyone knew Walt himself carefully watched every detail. It was a sign of the growing desperation that by July animators were being asked not to have their scenes cleaned up but rather to “finish the details in the rough state as this will be complete enough for the Inking of this fast action.” By this point some of the animators were so benumbed that they found release by doing sketches of a nude Snow White surrounded by tumescent dwarfs—a way, opined Ward Kimball, to challenge the suffocating perfection of Walt Disney’s world.

  As they headed into the fall, the staff was working twenty-four hours a day in eight-hour shifts, and many of them worked on Saturdays and Sundays as well, for which, as further proof of their commitment to the cult, they received no overtime pay. The animation lightboards would grow so hot that the artists could burn their arms and hands. So many cels remained to be photographed that the camera department worked in two twelve-hour shifts—from eight o’clock to eight o’clock. Effects specialist Cy Young needed surgery but postponed it because he was working on the “ideal achievement,” and when one animator asked for a leave because he was having to support his two brothers and their families and because he felt he was in a “rut,” Walt snapped, “I suggest you get down to business and forget all about the situation and make the best of the opportunities you have here.” To help out in ink and paint, Walt borrowed girls from the Harman-Ising studio, headed by two of his old Kansas City colleagues who had recently lost a contract to produce cartoons for MGM. As for the shorts, Roy prepared to farm some out to Harman-Ising while the entire studio shifted to Snow White, opining that RKO should have no cause of action since Walt would remain the nominal supervisor. “With all this additional help,” Roy wrote Gunther Lessing, “it should increase our chances considerably of getting ‘Snow White’ out by Christmas.” In the event, the studio discontinued the shorts entirely until the feature was finished.

  But whatever pressures his staff suffered, the greatest pressures were on Walt Disney himself. Though he took a two-week business trip to New York in mid-May, in part to plan the publicity for Snow White with RKO, he was effectively holed up at the studio. “UNEXPECTED BUSINESS HAS COME UP THAT REQUIRES MY BEING AT STUDIO ALL DAY SATURDAY,” he wired one acquaintance that July, begging off a social engagement. “WORKING LIKE HELL TRYING TO GET FEATURE FINISHED.” Excusing himself from another social obligation, he wired film producer Hal Roach, “THE SUPER COLOSSAL SNOW WHITE HAS ME HOGTIED A
ND OUR ENTIRE STUDIO IS WORKING NIGHTS TO GET THE PICTURE OUT FOR CHRISTMAS.” And Walt was not working only on Snow White. That August he was already meeting with storymen to set the structure for the first part of Bambi, and in November he was devoting many of his mornings to a short adapted from Munro Leaf’s book Ferdinand about a shy, effete bull who didn’t want to fight in the ring.

  Added to all these demands was another, terribly familiar one: money. When, at the outset, Walt had told Roy that Snow White was likely to cost around $250,000, he was wildly miscalculating, as he later confessed, since by the late 1930s they were spending roughly that much on every three Silly Symphonies. Still, when Roy approached the Bank of America for a loan in August 1935, realizing that the entire financing would have to come from outside the studio, he asked for that amount. “Our only difficulty in securing the money,” he wrote Walt confidently, “I believe, will be because of the length of time involved in making the feature, and not the condition of our business.”

  But as the length of time in production dragged on, the budget was ballooning. They had been forced to take another loan from the Bank of America for $630,000 in May 1936, and yet another for an additional $650,000 in March 1937, to be secured by the residual value of the short subjects. (This was what Walt meant when he told a reporter that “I had to mortgage everything I owned, including Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and everybody else,” to make Snow White.) Now tensions with Roy surfaced. “Roy was very brave and manly until the costs passed over a million,” Walt said a few years later. “He wasn’t used to figures over a hundred thousand at that time. The extra cipher threw him. When costs passed the one and one-half million mark, Roy didn’t even bat an eye. He couldn’t; he was paralyzed.” In fact, Roy did everything he could to press Walt to reduce the budget, even inviting their Bank of America liaison, Joe Rosenberg, to the studio to have a talk with him, which was the ultimate ploy since Walt never dealt with the money men.

  The Yale-educated Rosenberg was new to Hollywood, though he was hardly a tenderfoot. As a young man, he had ridden a horse 320 miles from Nevada to Arizona and forded the Colorado River to claim a job a friend had promised, and he had worked as a surveyor for a Mexican railroad and as a mining engineer before changing course and entering banking. When Bank of America head Doc Giannini assigned him to the Disney account and to Snow White, Rosenberg began making calls to Hollywood notables. Some warned him off the project, but producer Walter Wanger, one of Walt’s polo cronies, told him, “Joe, if Disney does this thing as well as I know he’s going to do it, millions of people will love it.” Rosenberg later said that was all he needed to hear. But now Walt was chafing under the financial strain. As Rosenberg later remembered it, when he came to the studio early in 1937 to plead with Walt, Walt groused that bankers were all “a bunch of SOB’s.” Walt denied he said it, insisting he just called them “goddamn bankers.”

  Unfortunately, as Snow White inched forward, with Walt spending $20,000 a week, he needed the “goddamn bankers.” Though Roy had written Walt after the March loan that “we are confident it is sufficient for our purposes; at least, until way late in the year,” by September the studio was in need of another infusion of cash. That month, after the Disneys had asked for yet another loan, this one for $327,000, Rosenberg came to the studio one tense Saturday afternoon to watch a rough cut of Snow White, grudgingly hosted by Walt. Rosenberg sat through the screening silently while Walt nervously explained how certain scenes that were now just in pencil sketch would later be inked and colored. Even after the screening, as they headed to the parking lot, Rosenberg avoided talking about the film, only heightening the tension. When Rosenberg reached his car, he slid inside, said good-bye, and deadpanned, “That thing is going to make you a hatful of money.” Then he drove off.

  Or at least that was how Walt would tell it years later, as another example of his fortitude and the rightness of his vision. In fact, for all his professed reluctance to let anyone see Snow White before its completion, he had screened the color rushes of the film on the soundstage early one evening in September for the studio staff. (According to Frank Thomas, Walt was still so “innocent and unsophisticated” that he hurried Lillian from home for fear that they wouldn’t have a seat.) It was a triumphant evening. As Walt wrote RKO head Ned Depinet, “[D]espite the fact that most of the audience have been pretty close to the development of SNOW WHITE for the past two and a half years—their reaction was all that could be hoped for from any audience.” Walt had passed out a questionnaire—since Morkovin had worked at the studio, Walt routinely passed out questionnaires at the studio screenings—asking whether any sections seemed too long or whether any business was objectionable or whether any character’s personality seemed inconsistent over the course of the picture and also for a scene-by-scene analysis. Of the 359 respondents, only one said he didn’t enjoy the film. “Stick to shorts!”* the dissident apparently wrote on his card, words Walt would thereafter employ as a way of cutting anyone who displayed faulty judgment. “If you were trying to sell an idea that did not jell or go over in a meeting,” Thomas and Johnston remembered, “suddenly there would be this loud, ‘Ah haaa!’ and Walt’s finger would come shooting out toward you; in a triumphant voice he would explain, ‘You must be the guy who said “Stick to Shorts!” ’ And for that day you were the guy, and everyone else would keep looking at you and wondering.”

  For Snow White, however, the dissenters were few. Diane Disney, who wasn’t quite four years old at the time, watched the film at a screening on the soundstage while peeking through her fingers and began to bawl when the Queen turned into the crone. The child was promptly escorted from the room. “Obviously, my reaction didn’t deter my father from making the movie he envisioned,” she would later say. Nearly everyone else seemed elated by what they saw—even cautious Roy. “I am so glad you are so enthusiastic about the way Snow White looks,” Kay Kamen, the head of the studio’s merchandising arm, wrote him. “I am just thrilled—it’s really big time stuff.”

  When Walt screened one thousand feet of the film for Joe Rosenberg, Depinet, and several other RKO executives on that Saturday afternoon, September 14, they seemed equally enthusiastic. Depinet congratulated Walt on the picture and on his courage in making it and said it would make “plenty of money,” then fired off a telegram to RKO chairman M. H. Aylesworth raving about the film. “Ned says your investment will be returned many times over,” Aylesworth wrote Walt. In fact, according to Gunther Lessing, who also attended the screening, the only one who didn’t seem especially effusive was Rosenberg. He followed Lessing to his office, declared himself “satisfied” with the film, and then met with Walt to warn him not to spend any money on Bambi until Snow White was completed. He also expressed his own concern that the film wouldn’t be finished by Christmas. If he thought it would make a “hatful of money,” he didn’t appear to have told Lessing or Walt, despite Walt’s recollection.

  The fact that money was just instrumental for Walt, a way for him to make his films, explains why he was so often at loggerheads with Roy, who was charged with providing that money. “He keeps on hollering that I am spending too much money on Snow White,” Walt complained to his staff one day. “I can’t be strapped down by a limited budget.” At any other studio, where the moneymen typically held the upper hand, Walt would have been curbed long before. It was only because he owned the studio himself and because it was his brother who held the key to the treasury that he hadn’t been reined in and was allowed to spend. Among other things, Walt continued to insist that the staff be well compensated, despite the economic stringencies, both to get better work from them during the stretch run on Snow White and to fulfill his fantasy of a guild of happy artists. In February he tore up Sharpsteen’s contract and awarded him a new one at $200 a week for three years. By April he was already handing out salary adjustments on Snow White: $2,500 to Fred Moore, $3,900 to Dave Hand and Sharpsteen, and $5,200 to Ham Luske. Most of these were paid out as additional increment
s in salary, though Walt would also give an animator a cash sum, as he did for Bill Tytla that April, if he thought the employee was being underpaid, or an advance if a man needed it.

  Yet his generosity seemed to do little to energize the process, and the animators still seemed to be limping to the finish line. Though the average footage approved for cleanup should have been fifty feet a week if they were to make their Christmas deadline, the animators were averaging only half that as late as August. In a studio breakdown of how much footage each animator was producing each day, the results were startlingly low—among them, Tytla 1'10", Babbitt 2'2", Ferguson 4'7", Moore 2'1", Thomas 3'1". (Having worked on the picture the longest, Tytla and Moore would have the most final footage in the film—944 feet and 974 feet respectively.) Moreover, the cumbersome multiplane slowed progress even further. As late as September, many of the staff were conceding that the film probably wouldn’t be ready by Christmas, and the animators were drawing right through October and into early November trying to make the schedule. The final animation wasn’t completed until November 11, the last cels weren’t painted until November 27, and the final photography wasn’t done until December 1, just six days before the first scheduled sneak preview and just barely in time to make the general release. “It had gotten around to the theaters that there were no prints,” animator Bill Peet recalled, “and we were all scared to death.”