Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  As always, he became obsessive. One employee remembered coming into Walt’s office and finding him disassembling a chair to determine how he could manufacture one that was more comfortable for the animators. Another recalled Walt entrusting Frank Thomas to design a prototype for a new animation table, which Weber then had fabricated. The new desks would have rotating disks, fluorescent lights, and larger animation paper—30 percent larger to make it easier to draw. On the Animation Building there would be slotted awnings designed specifically to let in light without letting in glare. Instead of cramped sweatboxes there would be two spacious projection rooms, one of them next to Walt’s office. (The name “sweatbox,” however, was still retained, as it had been for the projection rooms at Hyperion.) And after the stifling heat of the in-betweeners’ bullpen and the animation rooms at Hyperion, there would be humidity controls, temperature regulation, and an air-conditioner pumping 250,000 cubic feet of cool air. Walt was overlooking nothing for his dream world.

  II

  By the fall of 1938, when Walt was planning the new studio, the desultory, blissful post–Snow White respite had ended, and he was back at Hyperion piloting Snow White’s follow-up, Bambi. He had been working on the project in fits and starts since early 1935, when he met with producer-director Sidney Franklin, who held the rights and was eager to get the film into production. Preoccupied with Snow White, Walt had kept stalling and Franklin had kept pressing, even notifying the Disneys that he was considering an offer for the material from MGM, the studio to which Franklin was under contract, though Roy thought he was bluffing just to get the project moving. By the spring of 1937 it had gotten moving, and Bianca Majolie, who had been a classmate of Walt’s at McKinley High School in Chicago before petitioning him for a job and landing one in the story department, submitted a synopsis, which she continued to refine throughout the summer. In August, with Snow White sprinting to its finish, Walt met with Larry Morey and Dorothy Ann Blank, who were attempting to shape Majolie’s synopsis into a script, and by month’s end he had begun to organize the staff, though he was still loath to pull anyone off Snow White until it was completed.

  When Walt convened the first formal story conference for Bambi on September 4, and Dave Hand announced the schedule—animation to begin on December 1, with the release set for a year later—it was immediately clear that things were going to be very different from how they had been on Snow White, where the story had undergone not months but years of intense scrutiny. Walt was different too. “The staff looked hopefully to Walt,” Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston would later write, “but he was not giving his usual strong leadership this time. The storymen reported that he seemed troubled by the whole idea of the picture and was not sure which way to go.” Part of the problem was that Walt knew Franklin had been trying to lick the script for years without success; what Walt admitted that he liked in Felix Salten’s novel, a series of incidents rather than a narrative, were the “possibilities with animals” and “not with doing the book the way it was.” And part of the problem was that Walt was in a hurry to take advantage of the momentum created by Snow White. When Larry Morey suggested that they first work out the scene of Bambi and his mother walking through the woods, the sort of thing they did with the scene in which the dwarfs discover Snow White when they started Snow White, Walt countered that they should begin casting voices at the same time. “Let us start moving on this thing and not drag it out too long,” he advised. He didn’t want to waste time by designing the characters now. He said they should settle on the characters, write “business” for them, and construct the first half of the movie, then record the dialogue and music and make sketches afterward. “If we had on a track the music, the action, the dialogue, and the songs for your first 4000 feet,” he told the staff, “you should be able to visualize it without the sketches.” He even recommended that Luske use the voices they recorded for inspiration to draw model sheets of the characters, but he warned, “It is wisest to build through a few characters.” In short, he was working almost entirely from the aural to the visual, and he was trying to do it quickly.

  And the staff did work fast. Within two weeks of the story conference Perce Pearce, who was acting as the producer, constructed a rough continuity for the first section of the film, from Bambi’s birth to his first walk in the woods; scenes had been parceled out to various members of the story department; and voices had been recorded. A month after that the story crew was meeting with Franklin and picking his brain. Franklin had latched onto the idea of a comical hare who throughout the film tries to tell Bambi a story but keeps getting harassed by a fox before he can finish. Finally, he is shot by a hunter, and as he attempts one last time to finish his story before expiring, he gasps, “It wasn’t a very funny story anyway. There was no point to it.” The scene never made it into the final script, but it did have an effect. According to Johnston and Thomas, “[I]t showed us a new dimension that was possible for animation: real drama with the communication of an idea that would move the audience.” From his live-action experience Franklin was showing them how to move beyond Snow White into even more poignant and dramatic realms.

  Franklin seemed to spark Walt too. When they met for an extended story session on December 15, a week before the Snow White premiere, Walt was suddenly engaged with the material again, describing an opening montage of winter turning to spring virtually shot by shot just as he had done on Snow White and doing the same on a scene after a devastating forest fire. Franklin was impressed by Walt’s sensitivity to the treatment. “You have hit the story with this,” he told Walt. “This is Bambi. There is no gag that stands out above Bambi himself. He is part of everything.” But in some ways Franklin’s enthusiasm simply underscored Walt’s problems with Bambi. It required too much sensitivity, too delicate a hand. It wasn’t ready, and the studio wasn’t ready for it. The very day of his meeting with Franklin, Walt announced to the press that he would be postponing the film and slotting Pinocchio in its place.

  Pinocchio was supposed to be easier, and in any case, at the same time he was wrestling with Bambi, and partly because of his wariness about that project, Walt had been hurtling forward with it that fall. Animator Norm Ferguson claimed that he was the one who had given Walt a translation of Italian Carlo Collodi’s famous novel about the adventures of an impertinent puppet that turns into a real boy, and that after reading it Walt was “just busting his guts with enthusiasm.” Presumably thinking of it for his third feature, he instructed Lessing to secure the rights that September. By fall he had made the deal and assigned Majolie to synopsize the book, though Walt thought her outline was too faithful to the original text. “I think the thing to do is take the situations in the book and try to build the story around the ones that we can do something with and not feel bound to the book,” Walt advised a story meeting, before sending off the staff to work on individual sequences. At the time the storymen assumed they would have months to work things through. They didn’t. One day Walt walked into the music room, announced that Bambi was being postponed, and assigned Sharpsteen to be the supervising producer and Jack Kinney the animation director of its replacement: Pinocchio. Now speed was suddenly of the essence. As Kinney told it, “‘Crank it out’ was the word, so we did.”

  That winter, in hopes of releasing Pinocchio the following December, Walt was meeting with the story crew for hours at a stretch, often sounding like the Walt Disney of the Snow White story sessions, visualizing scenes, defining characters, performing business, and “plussing” gags. Usually the group gathered in Projection Room No. 4, then Kinney or Webb Smith or another storyman, Otto Englander, or Walt himself would begin reading the continuity, triggering an almost Talmudic disquisition on each story point, each line, each gag—just as they had done on Snow White. And as on Snow White, as they did so Walt would keep revisiting scenes, repeating lines or bits of business again and again and again, internalizing the film since he was the only one at the studio, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said in The Last Tyc
oon of the rare Hollywood executive, who was “able to keep the whole equation of pictures” in his head. Roy E. Disney, Roy’s young son, even remembered being bedridden with the chicken pox when Walt and Lillian visited his parents; Walt came in to see him, then sat on the edge of the bed and told the story of Pinocchio as he used to tell the story of Snow White.

  But as much as it may have seemed like Snow White, the schedule made it different. Walt needed to get the story going; there was no time for the months and months of refinements, no time to agonize over every frame. Even before a scene was fully conceptualized, he wanted it sent to the gag men, and as soon as an individual sequence seemed ready for animation, he wanted it sent to the animators, whether the rest of the film had been worked out or not. And even as they pored over the script, given the new time pressures the process was far more catch-as-catch-can than on Snow White: scenes were rapidly worked out and then just as rapidly discarded. Sketch artist Bill Peet remembered the staff being summoned to a Pinocchio meeting and the animators carrying what he estimated to be at least seventy storyboards as they huddled around Walt’s armchair in Projection Room No. 4. Walt’s mood, which had been lighthearted as the morning session began, gradually darkened. “There’s too much stuff here,” he barked, and every so often he would, as Peet recalled it, get up and rip a whole row of sketches off the board, summarily shortening the film. The only calm in the storm was when they came to the character of Honest John Foulfellow, a conniving fox who waylays Pinocchio, and Walt transformed himself into the villain to act out the scene. By the time the two-day session ended, Walt had eliminated half the boards, though as he left, “he turned to us with a satisfied smile and said, ‘That was a hell of a good session.’” To which Peet would write, “It left me wondering what a bad one would be like.”

  The bad sessions were to come. From January through June, while the animators worked simultaneously on sequences, Walt continued to meet with the story crew and sketch artists, working through the script more or less chronologically rather than conquering the key scenes first, as he had done on Snow White: puppetmaker Geppetto carving Pinocchio and then realizing his new marionette can move (but avoiding the sentimentality of the scene, because Walt felt there had been too much sentimentality in Snow White); Pinocchio getting waylaid by Honest John; Pinocchio getting sent to Boobyland (later changed to Pleasure Island), where he is allowed to indulge his desires and is turned into a donkey as a result; his escape from Boobyland; and his attempt to rescue Geppetto, who has been swallowed by Monstro the Whale. Occasionally Walt would recite scenes in minute detail, cut by cut. Other times he would establish the general motive and the meaning of the scene and leave the storymen to write the lines, then return to fine-tune them. As always his focus was less on the narrative than on the emotion and psychology of the scene. “I want to feel it before we start work on it,” he said of Pinocchio’s search for Geppetto.

  As they worked, there was the presumption that this was a story Walt did feel. After his impasse on Bambi, he had decided to forge ahead on Pinocchio because, as one storyman put it, “Pinocchio was a picture Walt knew how to make, while Bambi still baffled him.” The staff felt the same way. Emboldened by the success of Snow White, despite the expectations it imposed, they proceeded on Pinocchio with assurance. “[W]e were pretty cocky coming off of Snow White,” Ward Kimball later admitted. “We thought we could just sit down and do another feature. And we plunged into it.” In fact, Walt confidently predicted that the studio would be turning out a new feature every six months. But even as Walt tried to expedite the production of Pinocchio, he began encountering problems. Some were minor—having to recast the voices of Pinocchio and Geppetto or streamline scenes that moved too slowly in Walt’s estimation. Others, however, proved as intractable as those on Bambi. Ken Anderson felt there was a problem from the outset—a problem of spirit. Ben Sharpsteen had been the one encouraging Walt to push Pinocchio when Bambi was delayed, and because Sharpsteen rather than Walt assumed the role of point man to many of the staff, Anderson felt “it became more of a technical achievement than…[one of] the heart,” as Snow White so obviously was. Sharpsteen had his own analysis of why Pinocchio didn’t run smoothly: there were too many directors working simultaneously without the strong coordinating hand of Walt that had impelled Snow White. Instead, Sharpsteen was responsible for supervising the units, and Walt was now beckoned only if there was a serious problem or if the units needed a boost. The result was a kind of chaos.

  Walt had another perspective. He complained that in trying to keep his ever-growing staff engaged once Bambi had been postponed, he rushed Pinocchio into production without adequate planning, lest the animators sit idle. “We’ve tried to take care of the whole plant in Pinocchio and there’s where we got into trouble,” he told a meeting of the Bambi crew some months later. “Not having a thing prepared. Trying to build a story before we ever knew it.” Another time he complained, “We went through Pinocchio and didn’t plan any music to speak of at all. We didn’t plan our music and dialogue in between.”

  The major drawback to the lack of preparation was the failure to tackle fully the character of Pinocchio. As Walt put it bluntly at the outset, “One difficulty in ‘Pinocchio’ is that people know the story, but they don’t like the character,” who, in the book, is often cruel. It was a sign of his dissatisfaction with the character that Walt suggested they enlarge the role of the Blue Fairy and have her appear in different guises, including that of a blue cricket, to help guide Pinocchio and keep him on a righteous path. But that was only an expedient. Walt clearly had no handle on Pinocchio, describing him at one point as “fresh,” like ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s wise-cracking dummy Charlie McCarthy, or lusty, like Harpo Marx, grabbing for the fairy whenever she appears. He wasn’t even sure whether Pinocchio should act like a puppet or a small boy and whether he should appear wooden or flexible. When Frank Thomas, Milt Kahl, and Ollie Johnston took the former tack and animated 150 feet of the puppet early that February, Walt was displeased.

  As the story goes, including the official studio record, shortly after seeing Thomas’s animation, Walt decided to put Pinocchio on hiatus from February through September while the staff reworked the script. In fact, Walt kept working on, revising, and even sweatboxing scenes right through July, but he knew he had hit a wall. Ham Luske claimed that after looking at the storyboards of a scene in which Pinocchio terrorizes Geppetto’s cat, Figaro, he suggested to Walt that the audience would lose sympathy for Pinocchio unless the puppet had some way to discern right from wrong. That comment, Luske said, was the one that triggered Walt to begin thinking about reconceptualizing the film. As Ward Kimball told it, “[A]fter six or eight months, Walt looked at it and he says, ‘It’s not working right.’ So he threw it out and everybody had to start all over again.” This time he fastened on a character who had had only a minor role in Collodi’s novel—a cricket whom Pinocchio stomps to death. In a revised synopsis that June, a “little CRICKET, who is singing on the hearth,” makes his first appearance. This time, however, the Fairy appoints him as Pinocchio’s conscience. Now the storymen had to rewrite the entire script to incorporate the cricket. As Walt later explained it, “We said, ‘Here’s a guy we’ve got to take all the way through this thing,’ so we worked him back into all the sections.”

  Perhaps the real problem with Pinocchio, and with Bambi for that matter, and the primary reason that Walt wasn’t able to find solutions to the dilemmas they posed as he had on Snow White, was that he was overextended, which was why he had to delegate authority to Hand and Sharpsteen. Not only was he revising the scripts of Bambi and Pinocchio, he was sweatboxing scenes, designing the new studio, supervising the shorts production, and launching yet another film, his most ambitious yet, tentatively titled The Concert Feature, which, in Walt’s original plan, was to have been released after Bambi and Pinocchio. Indeed, in a single typical day in February, Walt was discussing a scene in which Pinocchio learns to pray, listen
ing to recordings for The Concert Feature, watching live action that had been shot for Pinocchio, and attending a story meeting on the shorts. Added to all these chores was Walt’s rededication to his family, though the family was always sacrificed when the studio called.

  Even before Bambi and Pinocchio had been temporarily shelved, The Concert Feature had loomed large in Walt’s consciousness. In a way, it was a fulfillment. Since The Skeleton Dance, Walt had harbored the dream of making Silly Symphonies in which, as he told an interviewer, “sheer fantasy unfolds to a musical pattern” without being restricted by the “illusion of reality”—in short, abstract films. With his obligations on Snow White, he hadn’t had the time to implement this idea until sometime probably in the summer of 1937, when he was dining alone at Chasen’s restaurant in Los Angeles, spotted the leonine Polish-born symphony conductor Leopold Stokowski, who was also dining alone, and invited him to his table. Walt already knew Stokowski, one of the most recognizable figures of high culture, with his long, wild hair and his tabloid romances; he had visited the Disney studio in 1934 and maintained an occasional correspondence with Walt. As Stokowski later told it, over dinner that night Walt discussed a project he was considering: a musical short of Paul Dukas’s symphonic scherzo “L’Apprenti Sorcier” or “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” about a powerful wizard in whose absence a curious pupil uses the wizard’s magical hat and scepter with unfortunate results. By one account, Stokowski offered to conduct the score for nothing. In another, he began expatiating on a dream of his own: to make an animated feature set to classical music. Either way, a collaboration began.

  With Snow White winding down at the time, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice seemed to strike a nerve with Walt. If the former was the story of Walt’s youth, the latter was the story of his new power and his vexed relationship to it. Bill Tytla would draw the sorcerer with Walt’s own famously cocked eyebrow and had named him Yen Sid, “Disney” backward, to make the connection between the sorcerer’s magic omnipotence and Walt’s. In the animation universe Walt Disney did control the elements as Yen Sid did in the cartoon. He was the master, the only one with the “whole equation” in his head, while his minions were the apprentices, helpless without him. But another possible interpretation may have been in Walt’s own mind as he awaited the reception to Snow White: that he was not the sorcerer but was himself the hapless apprentice who dons the sorcerer’s hat and summons the elements only to discover that they overwhelm him. As a continuity for The Sorcerer’s Apprentice described it, “It is the picture of the typical little man and what he would like to do once given complete control of the earth and its elements.” This turned The Sorcerer’s Apprentice into a portent for the studio. (With war brewing in Europe and Asia, it may have also turned it into a portent for the world generally.) Once Snow White was completed, Walt must have sensed that the studio no longer served Walt Disney; rather, Walt Disney increasingly served the studio, unable to manage the forces that he had unleashed. In effect, the cartoon, which was itself a form of hubris, might be seen as Walt’s own nightmare in which he is defeated by his own hubris.