by Neal Gabler
The bigger change was philosophical—what Carl Nater, whom Walt had put in charge of the government films, called a necessary reprogramming of the employees’ “mental equipment.” The studio that had emphasized quality no longer put any premium on quality. Efficiency and economy were paramount. Early on, Hal Adelquist, the head of personnel, wrote Walt that the economies on The New Spirit—rushing animation through without sweatboxing, showing directors drawings instead of tests, having cleanup men touch up roughs as they were delivered—were to be standard operating procedure now. “We must throw out entirely the trial and error methods, the redo systems,” Adelquist advised Walt. “We must restrict Animators to one test. We must abolish layout cleanups and all animation must be restricted to 2’s [meaning two exposures] on a single cel. Complicated pans, difficult scene mechanics and multiplane planning, must, by necessity from the standpoint of cost and speed, go by the boards.” Simply put, the Disney studio, which had prided itself on its excellence, was now to be like every other animation studio, priding itself on its expedience. Or, as Roy proudly told Fortune, “I really believe that Walt is beginning to know what a dollar is.”
The irony, the terrible irony for Walt Disney, was that for all the shortcuts and economizing it had imposed, the war was the one thing that was saving him. Had he been dependent on his features and shorts, the studio almost certainly would have been driven into bankruptcy and forced to close. It wasn’t that Walt was making much on the government work; he charged the government an average of $12 a foot and sometimes as little as $4, where his commercial animations had cost roughly $65 a foot and sometimes as much as $250. (He wasn’t making as much income personally either, having voluntarily taken a cut from $2,000 a week to $850.) Though the Disneys added overhead charges, the studio, partly out of patriotism and partly out of naïveté, was still asking the government only for costs, which enraged Joe Rosenberg. At a meeting in January 1942, where George Morris and Gunther Lessing were discussing the Bank of America loans, Rosenberg snapped that he was “passing on loans every day to concerns doing government work and in not one instance was there any question of the contractor making a fair profit.” When Morris countered that the government films provided a “show case” for the studio, Rosenberg warned that he expected a profit anyway, and he would be watching them closely, with the threat of freezing the loan.
And there was one more irony. Though he had been failing as a commercial filmmaker, by the end of 1942 Walt Disney had become the leader of government movie production. “This past year has been not only one of the most exciting,” he wrote his uncle Robert at Christmastime, “but one of the most exhausting I have ever experienced. Since last January, when we made the Income Tax picture for the Treasury Department, we have plunged into a type of work I never expected to touch.” The plunge included nearly 300,000 feet of film produced that year, up from a prewar total of 30,000, which was why the shortcuts were so necessary. Over 75 percent of the studio’s output was now targeted for the government. With the training films demonstrating the educational potential of motion pictures, Walt was also increasingly recognized as, in Fortune’s words, “one of the great teachers of all time.” But even as Walt put a gloss on this renown and called it a great opportunity to “show what our medium can do,” it was a far, far cry from the great things he had always wanted the medium to do. “At times it seemed we had slipped over a parallel but slightly altered universe” was how studio executive Harry Tytle put it, “where the usual rules were changed or no longer applied.” Tytle was right. They had changed.
VI
Walt was busy. He ended 1942 with a two-week trip to Mexico accompanied by Lillian and twelve members of his staff to research a sequel to Saludos. He began the new year with another trip, this one east to attend the premiere of Saludos (which had been retitled Saludos Amigos), to discuss the other films to be produced for the coordinator, and to meet with a Harvard anthropology professor named Earnest A. Hooten who had written a book on Nazi racial theories that Walt was thinking of turning into one of his propaganda films for the coordinator. Though it was a compilation of animated shorts mortised together with those home movies that Walt had taken of South America, and though its intended effect was as much goodwill as entertainment, Saludos was nevertheless as close to a commercial feature as the studio was likely to produce now that Bambi was finished. It was also one of the few reasons for optimism. The critic Gilbert Seldes, long Walt’s champion, saw it that January and wrote him: “I hope it has all the success it deserves—and escapes all the troubles that you are afraid of.”
It didn’t. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times saluted the film as recording “one of the happiest missions ever dispatched from these shores,” and called its effect “one of ascending enthusiasm,” but his was a minority opinion. Critics who had carped at Walt’s pretentiousness in Fantasia and at his subdued realism in Bambi now decried his strained and strident joyfulness. James Agee, writing in The Nation, said the film “depresses me.” “Self-interested, belated ingratiation embarrasses me, and Disney’s famous cuteness, however richly it may mirror national infantilism, is hard on my stomach,” he said. John T. McManus in the left-wing PM agreed and admitted to a “mingled pride and sadness over the growing up of a beloved something we all foolishly hoped could stay young forever.” In other words, the famous Disney touch had become cloying.
But the film hadn’t been made for the critics, and Walt’s only comfort was that his patrons in the Coordinator’s Office had liked the film enormously and that the vice president had told Rockefeller it was the “outstanding achievement in the development of hemispheric solidarity.” More important, the South Americans had liked it too. Some theaters discontinued their double-feature policy so that they could show Saludos more frequently, and by one account, at least one audience had threatened to tear down the theater if the projectionist didn’t show Saludos again. One embassy official in Bolivia wrote Walt that Disney was “completely adored in South America since Saludos” and that his name “electrifies” the Bolivian employees at the embassy. In fact, the only problem with Saludos was that the countries that had not been represented in the film were complaining to the coordinator about the neglect, prompting one of his representatives to suggest leaking a report that Disney was at work on a sequel in which those countries would be shown, as indeed he was.
But Saludos and its sequel had never interested Walt much. They were essentially jobs to maintain cash flow. He was much more enthusiastic about Victory Through Air Power, to which he returned early in 1943. More than ever Walt was convinced that the war could not be won with land forces and naval attacks, and that in any case the country could not afford a fully equipped army, navy, and air force simultaneously. And he still believed that Victory could change not only the course of the war but also the course of the world. “It’s important,” he told The New York Times that February. “People need to know about it. A lot of them are still bound by traditional ways of thinking and a movie like this can break through a lot of misconceptions.”
The stumbling block was entertainment value. Victory was not another subsidized government film. It was being financed by the studio, and it had to return a profit. When he was shown finished reels and storyboards late in February, theater chain executive Spyros Skouras emphasized that the film had to be entertaining and not a “scientific exhibit.” Walt, who had always emphasized entertainment value himself until Fantasia, wasn’t so sure. This time there was something more valuable than entertainment. “Don’t you think that if the public after seeing this picture feel they have learned something—for once it’s clear in their minds,” Walt countered, “—isn’t that important?” And as Skouras kept hammering away about entertainment, Walt kept insisting that he was making the film not because it could provide escapism but because “we believe in the thing so badly. I felt HERE’S A MESSAGE THAT IS GREATER THAN A LOT OF THE STUFF WE’VE BEEN DOING HERE ON PROPAGANDA. I thought here was a message that mi
ght do some real good.”
Walt forged ahead, fending off the navy’s continuing objections and threats and working around Seversky’s increasingly heavy speaking schedule. That winter, after rethinking the film, he had decided to scrap the live scenes of Seversky he had shot in October and rewrite the script to reduce the major’s dialogue and simplify and strengthen his argument. Corralling Seversky for two months beginning in April 1943, Walt hired director H. C. Potter, fresh from Hellzapoppin’, and cinematographer Ray Rennahan, fresh off an Academy Award for Blood and Sand, to shoot the new scenes. Potter’s main tasks were to “smooth out” Seversky’s thick Russian accent and to make sure that the major hit his marks as he delivered his dialogue. When Seversky complained that it was too difficult to speak and hit the marks at the same time, Potter reminded him of how much Seversky had had to do simultaneously when he flew and told him, imitating Seversky’s accent, to “diwide the attention,” which the crew began to shout whenever filming began.
Working at breakneck speed—Seversky’s scenes were shot in six days—Walt managed to finish the picture by the end of May and then hosted a celebratory combination screening and bon voyage party for the major at the studio that June. Even before the completion, though, the publicity campaign had started. Roy was in New York that May flogging the picture and writing Walt delightedly that “I am sure we are going to raise a furor with it from coast to coast!” Perce Pearce had accompanied Seversky east to ghostwrite articles promoting the film, and by late June the studio was screening the movie in New York and Washington for assorted notables, among them the former advertising executive Albert Lasker, who was so enamored of the film and its theory that he organized a separate publicity campaign of his own for it. Lasker and his wife, Mary, called the film the “most powerful and vital document yet put before the American public” and predicted that its impact would be “dynamic.”
Lasker was right. Walt had wanted to change the world, and he got his opportunity. Even before the formal premiere in New York on July 17, 1943, Walt was receiving private accolades. Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst wired Walt after a screening that the film was a “truly great production” that had “rendered a valuable service to the community,” and Nelson Rockefeller said it was not only a contribution to the war effort but a demonstration of the limitless possibilities of motion pictures. At a gala preview hosted by Lasker and Washington social queen Elsa Maxwell, the audience applauded spontaneously throughout the showing and gave a sustained ovation at the end. Reviewers were equally enthusiastic, calling it “exhilarating,” “stimulating,” “ingenious,” and so simple that “even a youngster of 11 or so would have no difficulty in understanding what it’s all about.” The only dissents came from Agee again, who worried that he was being “sold something under pretty high pressure,” and the Communist Daily Worker, which objected that Seversky’s theories were fantastic and militated against a second front to aid America’s Russian ally.
But the most important reactions were those from the military, which would have to accept and then implement Seversky’s new policy. Vern Caldwell had screened the film for the navy, which had been so averse to the project, and wired Walt: “Response enthusiastic.” (Walt was at great pains in the film to reassure the navy that its missions were still necessary.) At the same time Henry “Hap” Arnold, the commanding general of the army air force and long one of the country’s leading advocates of air power, saw the film but didn’t convey his reaction—in Caldwell’s view, because Arnold, like Seversky, was lobbying for a separate air force and believed that his approval of the film might have been seen as a “tip-off.” Still, Arnold’s aide asked for a second screening the next day for a half-dozen other air force generals who, Caldwell said, applauded the film despite the fact that they didn’t hold Seversky in very high personal regard. Roy and Caldwell spent the evening with them until three A.M.
By some accounts, the most important official to see the film that summer was the commander in chief himself. Apparently Albert Lasker had managed to get a copy to British prime minister Winston Churchill, who was so impressed by what he saw he asked that a print to be shipped overnight to the Quebec Conference that August, where he was meeting with Roosevelt and where Roosevelt not only watched it but asked that it be screened for the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well. “I was assured,” Seversky wrote Elsa Maxwell proudly, “that this strengthened greatly the views of those who contended that invasion could not be undertaken until control of the air was achieved.”
Walt had made Victory for influence and for his own sense of usefulness, “Whether it makes money or not,” he wrote radio commentator Upton Close, “I shall be happy so long as it helps stir up the country and starts people thinking about the importance of real air power,” though just how much it really affected policy was a matter of debate since the government didn’t actually deploy the long-range bombing strategy during the war and since, as Woolie Reitherman, who had left the studio to join the air corps, said, “There wasn’t any doubt that we were going to have air power.” Still, for all the officials who praised it and for all the controversy it generated, the film did not find an audience. It had cost just under $800,000—only $5,000 of which went to Seversky. George Morris reported to the board of directors that fall that the film could wind up costing the studio between $400,000 and $500,000 in losses. In the end, years later, after its runs were completed, when Walt was carving it into pieces for other uses, it barely broke even—yet another failure in what was becoming a long string of failures for Walt Disney.
Now, without films to interest him but with a studio to maintain, he had become less a filmmaker than a salesman and a goodwill ambassador, attracting government work to the studio because he was Walt Disney, one of America’s favorite celebrities. His chief client remained the Coordinator’s Office, and Walt undertook yet another trip to Mexico that March to record music for the Saludos Amigos sequel and to gather material in preparation for a conference that the coordinator was hosting at the studio in May for the purpose of determining how best to eradicate illiteracy in South America—a project that promised as much as $500,000 to the studio in the first year alone. At the same time Walt dispatched Bill Cottrell and Jack Cutting to Central America and another delegation to Cuba to lay the groundwork for the pictures; and later that summer, in part to prepare for a $200,000 film on literacy financed by the coordinator and in part to receive an award from the Mexican government for his efforts, he, Clarence “Ducky” Nash, and studio public relations head Joe Reddy flew to Mexico City. In October, Walt and Lillian joined his staff in Mexico again for another “field trip,” as they called it, and had a scare when their return flight was grounded by a hurricane that wound up leveling the city of Mazatlán.
If Walt seemed to be commuting to Mexico, he was also still shuttling between Los Angeles and Washington, still trying to drum up more government business, still trying to keep the studio solvent, though at one point so much work was already pouring in that Roy and Walt had to issue an edict forbidding any contract that was not personally approved by one of them. In a way, the studio had become addicted to the government work, gorging itself on it both because it needed it and because it could do nothing else. Indeed, the studio had strayed so far from its original mission that Walt now began to entertain another idea he had long been urged to consider, and had considered, but had always finally rebuffed: commercials and industrial films for public relations rather than training purposes. The studio had produced a Mickey Mouse short for the Nabisco pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, but Walt had gently rejected other suitors. Now he hired a liaison named John Sheehan, whose job was to field offers. Among the companies wanting the Disney touch were Westinghouse, Firestone Tire, General Motors and the Ford Motor Company, Owens Glass, Standard Oil of Indiana, and National Dairy Products, most of whom wanted to deal with Walt personally. Walt even closed a deal to make a film for Coca-Cola, then solicited a series for its rival, Pepsi-Cola.
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Roy, looking for a way to streamline the process and to protect the studio “against making bad boners in presenting ourselves and our propositions to big accounts,” eventually suggested that the studio tie in with its advertising firm, Foote, Cone & Belding. But Walt—seeing no residual value in commercials and feeling vaguely humiliated about making them after years of bold pronouncements about greatness—vacillated, even as he instructed his staff to keep pursuing them. He told clients that they could find someone else to do the films more cheaply, or he told them that he could see himself making commercials for television someday, just not now; on the other hand, he also mused that commercials might help absorb manpower at the studio. In any case, making commercials was not what he wanted to do, and for all the work the studio discussed, little was actually contracted for and even less was delivered.
But, then, in 1943 the studio had only slipped further into the war morass, had only become more of a defense factory and less of a movie studio. Ninety-four percent of the output now went to the government, and in June 1943 alone the studio produced just 2,300 feet less film than it had produced in all of 1941. “If every American could visit the [Disney] studio,” Walter Wanger wrote glowingly that September in The Saturday Review of Literature, “he would have a new admiration for his country. There is nothing comparable to it in the world. More experts, scientists, and technicians operate under Disney’s roofs than in any other one organization in the universe.” Patriotic as he was, Walt nevertheless complained to A. V. Cauger’s wife, when she wrote asking whether Walt might have a job for his old Kansas City Film Ad boss, “We all have to adjust ourselves to the War capital conditions and await the time when the world once more returns to a state of normalcy.” Until then he just had to keep going.