Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  Amid the purported new efficiency Walt had not stinted on the amenities. There was not only an elaborate commissary, where Roy and Walt democratically took their own meals, but also a snack bar on the first floor of the Animation Building and a buffet in the penthouse. Anyone who wanted a sandwich or a milk shake could simply order one, and it would be delivered by a traffic boy to the office. There was a barbershop for anyone needing a haircut. Walt also provided a gymnasium on the top floor, where a Swedish exercise trainer named Carl Johnson led workouts and a roof deck where animators could and did sunbathe nude. Every noon in the studio’s theater there would be a thirty-minute show of animations, newsreels, and scenes from other features. In fact, though the studio had been modeled after a college campus and was still frequently described as one, it had so many frills that Walt himself compared it now to a “swank hotel.” The only thing missing, he felt, was housing on the lot for the employees so that they would never have to leave the studio, and he was contemplating how to do it. That was the last element of his old communitarian dream.

  Some felt that Walt had transplanted the feeling of camaraderie and fellowship from Hyperion. “The whole atmosphere is conducive to the lightheartedness and gayety that you find in Disney’s pictures,” gossip columnist Hedda Hopper chirped shortly after the move. “After lunch you’ll find executives playing everything from softball to ping pong with their employees.” She cited the oft-repeated fact that everyone called the boss “Walt.” A New York Times reporter visiting the studio later that year wrote in a similar vein that a “walk across the lawns at noon was like a walk through Central Park on Sunday. Employees sat or reclined leisurely on the grass; they called, ‘Hello, Walt…Hi, Walt…Walt…Walt.’ And Disney waved and halloed back”—an effect that was underscored by the fact that the studio’s streets were named after Disney characters: Dopey Drive and Mickey Avenue. Others described the same old practical jokes, the same collegiality, the same devotion, the same sense of purpose as at Hyperion. “[Y]ou can’t help feeling that you’re going to grab that goddam Holy Grail,” one employee told a writer doing a story on the new studio for The Atlantic Monthly. A dancer who had performed some live action for “Dance of the Hours” wrote Walt thankfully, saying, “Everyone seemed happy and contented” and attributing it to Walt’s “good humor, kindness and courteousness.”

  But something had changed—something ineffable but important that undermined the sense of happiness and contentment. After the initial flush of appreciation, some employees began to feel as if the studio were too good, too perfect. The “collegiate atmosphere became almost oppressive,” one employee complained. Another recalled, “Everything looked so nice I almost felt like wearing a tie.” Before the studio moved to Burbank, Joe Rosenberg, the banker, had warned Walt vaguely that the new plant would be so nice “you will cause discontent!” He was right. Some charged it to a new sense of impersonality now that the studio was bigger and more routinized. Ollie Johnston said that if you wanted to talk to a fellow animator, you now had to walk past secretaries or up and down floors. Even Walt now had two adjoining offices—one he called a formal office, the other a working office—down a long corridor and guarded by two secretaries who effectively cut him off from the rest of the studio. Another Disney employee believed that the attempts at greater efficiency, ineffective as they usually were, had nevertheless taken hold, sapping the new studio of the old Hyperion informality and spirit. Instead of what this employee called an “impromptu art form,” Disney animation had become an “efficient business.” At least one animator attributed the change to a change in Walt himself now that he was even more insulated from his employees and spread even thinner than before. “When Disney began to get the idea for this Burbank studio,” the animator said, “he became a different man. From a man who worked closely and collectively with his workers he got to be boss.” He even described Walt at Burbank as a despot.

  Whatever it was that had happened, many employees would, in time, come to think of the move to Burbank as, in the words of one, a “line of demarcation in the era of good feeling” and the “beginning of a loss of morale.” Just how thick the line of demarcation was, Walt would discover a year later.

  Walt himself noticed that something was changing. A year earlier, amid the production delays, he had been concerned about flagging morale and pushed Roy to rent a theater so that Walt could address the employees and announce a new wave of bonuses to be paid over time. “[I]t was his thought,” George Morris told Roy, “that he wanted to keep the spirit of the organization up so that he would get the full benefit of the announcement and later payment when he most needed that cooperative effort from those who participate in it.” That didn’t happen, but on January 30, 1940, after the move to Burbank and with Pinocchio finally about to be released, Walt convened selected employees in room 3C12 of the Animation Building. As he addressed them over the next two hours and forty-five minutes, in what may have been the single most exuberant and soul-baring performance of his life, he was bursting with confidence. The studio was now large enough, he said, that they could do whatever they wanted to do—whatever he wanted to do—and he described how they would henceforth have three units working simultaneously on three features. “This plant, this studio—it’s more than an ordinary thing,” he said with emotion. “There is a certain spirit that prevails here. I can see it in the guys. They have a feeling that it isn’t a racket.” But what he wanted, what he hoped for, what he may have begun to sense he was losing with the new divisions in the Animation Building and the rivalries that seemed to arise among the crews working on different features, was a spirit of collaboration. “I haven’t felt that Bambi was one of our productions,” Walt confessed. He wanted to change that. “I want a group of guys who will get together and will discuss their problems and we will take care of their recommendations,” he announced. “We want to find out what they think…and I want it first-hand from them.” He called for a “certain informality” in discussing ideas. And he went on: “I want the story groups to get together. I want them to talk over their work…. I want to get the directors together and layout and the background men…. We must find the most effective way to unify this plant. I want to unify it in such a way that everybody will be working together.” He wanted the fun to return.

  But this wasn’t just a pep talk to rouse the troops or a summons to regain what they had had at Hyperion during the making of Snow White. Walt wanted, he said, to create a financial community as well as an artistic one. He told the group that under the animation rating system he expected a salary adjustment of $150,000 on Pinocchio, and he wanted to pay it out to them in bonuses just as he had on Snow White. But even that was not the point. Walt said he had been working for some time on a larger scheme in which each employee would be rated by his value to the company, his tenure there, and his cooperation and ambition, then allotted a commensurate share of the profits. It was, Walt told his employees, the only way to ensure that the organization would remain strong and would continue to make quality films. It was, he even said, the only way to ensure that the company would survive him “in case I got bumped off.” “We’ve got to fix this thing so the business won’t collapse…. I’m afraid that this business will be thrown into the regular Hollywood groove and that they will start throwing these cartoons at the public,” he said. “Maybe I’ve had too many bad experiences. I know guys, though, who are like that. All they think of is how much money they can get out of a thing.” At Disney it would be different. Everyone would have a stake in the company’s ongoing success. Everyone would have a stake in maintaining quality, which Walt had always felt was the key to success. He wasn’t sure how he would distribute the money—whether he would issue preferred stock, which he hesitated to do, or set up an employees’ fund, which he also disliked, or some other mechanism—but he was sure he would do it. If this was Walt Disney’s utopia, then everyone at the studio would be part of it.

  What had made this sort of discussion p
ossible was Walt’s anticipation of some return—he was uncertain of how much—on Pinocchio after its seemingly endless problems and delays. A week after the meeting on February 7, 1940, Pinocchio premiered in New York, eighteen months after its original scheduled release date. (Walt, citing the recent move to the new studio, had begged off attending the gala.) But the delay hadn’t muted the critical reception. If in the critics’ eyes Pinocchio hadn’t quite the heart of Snow White or that film’s tight narrative, they recognized that it did have more breadth and was far better animated, sometimes breathtakingly so. “‘Pinocchio’ tops any animated cartoon I ever saw,” Los Angeles Times critic Arthur Miller wrote. Frank Nugent in The New York Times called it the “happiest event since the war” and “superior to ‘Snow White’ in every respect but one: its score.” Still, he concluded, it was the “best cartoon ever made.” Otis Ferguson, writing in The New Republic, found it episodic but thought it “brings the cartoon to a level of perfection that the word cartoon will not cover. We get around the problem of no old word for a new thing by saying, it’s a Disney.” Howard Barnes in the New York Herald Tribune went even further. He called Disney “infallible.” Congratulating Walt after the opening, Stuart Buchanan, the studio’s casting director as well as its musical director, said that if Walt had been there, “any worries you may have had about the success of Pinocchio would have ended. The reviews speak for themselves but I have never seen a more appreciative audience.” He pronounced himself “proud to be part of the Disney organization.” Even Roy, wiring Walt on his way to New York to discuss the issue of stock to employees, seemed pleased: “Everything from my viewpoint is going ahead OK in every way.”

  But Walt did worry—and rightfully so, it turned out. Despite the effusive reviews, attendance was well below that for Snow White, and by April, George Morris was already warning that the estimated revenue from Pinocchio would have to be cut by a million dollars, which meant, among other things, that Walt’s proposed bonuses would have to be eliminated. Morris now predicted a “severe loss” on the film. Something had gone wrong. Ben Sharpsteen attributed the disappointing audience reception to the fact that Pinocchio appealed only to children, whereas Snow White had greater adult appeal. “[T]he expression was at the Music Hall that the matinees were terrific at reduced children’s price,” Sharpsteen told an interviewer years later. “But, my God, you could shoot a cannon up the aisle at night!” Others would feel just the opposite: that Pinocchio was too dark and disturbing a film for children and presented, as one Disney scholar would put it, the “bleakest vision of any Disney feature.” Indeed, far more than Snow White, Pinocchio soberly limned the central Disney theme of the responsibilities of maturity and what one had to sacrifice to grow up, so that where Snow White provided relief for a Depression-weary world, Pinocchio seemed to serve as a reminder of the travails of the Depression and the war in Europe. Walt himself, though bristling at any suggestion that Pinocchio had not done well, had a simpler explanation. He blamed the competition from Gone with the Wind, the movie blockbuster that had been released just a few weeks earlier, and the war itself, which significantly cut profits. Because of the war, the film was translated into only two languages, Spanish and Portuguese, and received only 45 percent of its gross from outside the United States and Canada, significantly less than Snow White. In England alone, where Snow White had grossed $2 million, Pinocchio grossed only $200,000. When all was said and done, it took in roughly $2 million, out of which the studio received $1.2 million on a total investment of $2.7 million. Even so, many would regard Pinocchio as Walt Disney’s masterpiece, the pinnacle of animation art. Walt reluctantly disagreed. “Pinocchio lacked an intangible something,” he finally confessed to a reporter.

  Now, with the fresh defeat of Pinocchio having temporarily dashed Walt’s confidence, it was back to Bambi, which he had been dragging like a millstone for over two years. The Bambi story crew had been among the first to relocate at Burbank, in wing 3B of the Animation Building. With the move and with the completion of Pinocchio, Walt’s involvement intensified. By one account, whenever Walt approached the room, Perce Pearce would shout, “Man is in the forest!”—the line from Bambi that announces the threat of hunters. After all the fits and starts, and after Walt’s long absences from Seward Street, he was now promoting the idea that the staff was to work closely with him and, apparently realizing they might have been intimidated by him, that they were not to be afraid to speak up during meetings, at which point Pearce made a remarkable admission given the years they had been working on the script: “We would like to pull you in to the extent that we don’t feel we have to have the thing entirely making sense.”

  Obviously Walt understood that Bambi was difficult. He knew it had less a riveting story than a cycle and that it required subtlety. The characters couldn’t be too broadly drawn or the film would miss the poetic tone it needed to be great, and greatness was the goal, especially now that Pinocchio seemed to have fallen short of expectations. Though Walt vacillated between letting the story crew take even more time to shore up the continuity and urging them to pick up their pace, he always came down on the side of allotting more time, even suggesting that they think of making the film longer and presenting it as a “roadshow” picture with limited performances and reserved seating at theaters specially outfitted with his Fantasound multispeaker system and perhaps a special wide-screen projection. “These pictures represent a lot of work and a lot of thought,” he told the Bambi staff. “They’re not just an ordinary run-of-the-mill type of production that’s been coming from Hollywood…they stand out.” Striving to get it right, needing to get it right, he spent most of February in meetings analyzing and reanalyzing scene after scene, just as he had done on Snow White, and by the end of the month had concluded that the film would take at least another fifteen months—two and a half months for the special effects alone.

  He felt it had to be big. From working on Fantasia, Walt had become fascinated with the idea of presentation. It wasn’t enough for a film to be great. It had to be mounted in such a way that the exhibition of the movie was also great. “I wanted a special show” was how he later put it. That was part of the reason he had latched on to the notion of a customized sound system for Fantasia. In May 1939, a month after the recordings in Philadelphia, Walt had contacted David Sarnoff, the head of the Radio Corporation of America, proposing that RCA manufacture the new system, which, Walt wrote, would “create the illusion that the actual Symphony Orchestra is playing in the theater.” Sarnoff balked at the idea, saying that while it was technically feasible, it was commercially problematic, but Walt and Roy were persistent. Each visited RCA in New York that spring, and by July, Roy had reached an agreement by which RCA would make the equipment so long as they could hold down the costs, estimated by RCA’s engineer at $200,000. Walt had his six-track Fantasound.

  Given that it could be used only in a few selected theaters, Fantasound was a very expensive proposition. But then so was the new studio and Fantasia itself, as well as Bambi and the prospective Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland—all of which began to tighten like a noose around Walt, especially with the reduced receipts from overseas and with the diminished prospects for Pinocchio. Walt didn’t discuss the new economic contingencies with his employees; it had always been a point of honor with him that he could resist financial pressures, that he could shelter his employees and protect his films, and in any case he always expressed nothing but disdain for money. Dave Hand recalled a meeting where Roy complained, as he often did, that the pictures were costing too much. “There was complete silence,” Hand related. “Then Walt’s loose eyebrow shot up at an unusually sharp angle, and turning to Roy in an uncompromising matter-of-fact straight-from-the-shoulder answer, said quite simply, ‘Roy, we’ll make the pictures, you get the money.’ That was that.”

  Even before the success of Snow White, Walt himself made a generous salary—among the highest in the film industry. After Snow White his base salary was liste
d as $108,298, not including another $25,605 from the studio’s foreign corporations, and on March 11, 1940, he signed a seven-year contract with the studio at $2,000 a week, which again didn’t include compensation from the stock that he held. By comparison, Roy made $72,000, and Gunther Lessing under $15,000. Still, as much as he actively cultivated his image as an artist or at least an artisan rather than an entrepreneur, Walt was being honest when he said the money was a happy by-product of the work, not the motive for it. “I could buy a big place in Florida and fill it with expensive paintings and other junk,” he told a reporter who asked what he would do with his riches. “But what for? That’s for people who are bored or want to impress the neighbors.”

  He was also being honest when he said that he continued to reinvest most of the profits back in the studio. Money wasn’t for personal indulgence. Money was for quality, and money was for independence. “I belong to this studio, this ‘thing’ that has grown up here,” he once said. “This is where my money goes.” When the company had been formed back in 1923, it was a partnership between Walt and Roy, and later among Walt, Roy, and Ub Iwerks when he joined them in California. In 1929, after Iwerks had departed, Walt Disney Productions was incorporated and issued 10,000 shares of stock—3,000 each to Walt and Lillian and 4,000 to Roy. When the company was reorganized in 1938 and its real estate, merchandise, and production branches were consolidated, the new entity issued 150,000 shares of stock with Walt and Lillian each receiving 45,000 and Roy and Edna each receiving 30,000. No one but a Disney held any stake in the company, and with the exception of his employees to whom he was willing to grant stock, that was exactly how Walt wanted it. As early as 1928, when he let promoter Harry Reichenbach exhibit Steamboat Willie at the Colony Theater, Walt said he understood that one should never sell the rights to a film. After his experiences with Charlie Mintz and Pat Powers, he had the same philosophy toward the entire company. “We don’t have to answer to anyone,” Walt boasted after Snow White, conveniently ignoring the fact that he did have to answer to the Bank of America. “We don’t have to make profits for any stockholders. New York investors can’t tell us what kind of picture they want us to make or hold back.”