by Neal Gabler
While MGM was firing its raucous fusillades, Warner Bros., an even bigger rival, took dead aim on the Disney aesthetic, not only by outgunning it but by outsmarting it. The difference between the animation departments at Disney and Warner Bros. couldn’t have been greater. Where the Disney studio in Burbank was sylvan and pristine, the Warner Bros. unit on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood was housed in an old building the animators called Termite Terrace that, according to one of its denizens, “looked and stank like the hold of a slave ship.” Its unpainted pine floors were cured with motor oil, the odor of which clung to the animators, and the planks were pocked with holes that the animators had drilled to see the floor below. The flimsy walls were made of composition board, which the animators would punch their fists through and which one of them once tried to light just to see if it would burn. Even Leon Schlesinger, the head of the department, who visited weekly to deliver checks, would comment, “Pew, let me outta here! This looks like a shit house.”
Befitting its office, the animations produced at Warner Bros. were equally unprepossessing. As Friz Freleng, who had worked for Disney on the Alice comedies, put it, “Walt spent more on the storyboards than we did on the films.” Where Walt’s extensive crews included as many as a half-dozen writers and gagmen on a short, at Warner Bros. a cartoon started with a single director, a single writer, and a single layout man. The director was assigned four animators, each of whom was assigned an assistant. There were four units in all. Animators were expected to turn out twenty-five to thirty feet of animation per week or twenty seconds of screen time, much more than at Disney, which may have added to the already antic sense.
The studio chiefs were also a study in contrasts. Schlesinger was a small, round, pompous man who, said one animator, “always smelled of Parma Violet” and “dressed like a vaudeville hoofer who had suddenly come into money.” Though he tried to maintain his dignity, he spoke with a thick lisp that was later immortalized in the voice of Warner Bros. character Daffy Duck. Schlesinger never recognized the affinity, leaping to his feet and saying, “Jeethus Christh, that’s a funny voice! Where’d you get that voithe?” after he saw the first Daffy short. And if his demeanor was the antithesis of Walt Disney’s unaffected midwestern style, so was his attitude toward his animations. “[H]is wallet spoke” was how Frank Tashlin put it.
Even with Schlesinger’s eye fixed securely on the bottom line, Warners was at first as much a Disney imitator as the other studios and just as unsuccessful at it. Then Tex Avery joined the department in 1936. As Avery later remembered it, Schlesinger told him that he had some boys—“they’re not renegades but they just don’t get on with the other two crews”—and he suggested that Avery work with them. Among these unsociables were two young animators named Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones. The teaming of Avery with Clampett and Jones was a signal moment in animation history. Working every night, pushing one another beyond the far reaches of acceptable Disney animation, beyond what one called the “cute stuff,” they created a loose, madcap, smart-alecky style that broke the plane of realism and intentionally defied Disney’s illusion of life. Looney Tunes, the rubric under which many of the Warner cartoons were produced, was a fitting name.
“The Warner Bros. animators didn’t have any delusions of grandeur that they were doing something special,” one of them later said. At Warners it was about having fun—about the staff making themselves laugh. “We were laughing ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day,” recalled Chuck Jones. “It never occurred to us that Warners and Walt were in the same business.” At Disney, even back in the days when the animators participated in juvenilia of their own, everything on the animations was carefully planned and endlessly deliberated upon in pursuit of perfection. At Warner Bros., Jones said, “directors, animators, and writers were indeed a laboratory for creative inconsistency, for unanticipated mutations, for happy accidents—a primal soup to discover the delight of the undiscovered.” “We did our thing and nobody seemed to say, ‘Don’t do this’ or ‘Don’t do that,’” Friz Freleng recalled. It would never even have occurred to the Warners crew to make a feature like Snow White, and Jones imagined that Schlesinger, if asked whether he had any feature aspirations, likely would have responded, “I need a feature cartoon like I need two assholes.”
But out of this unpretentiousness and chaos came something wonderful. The Warners artists embraced the contrary and the irreverent. If they had neither the resources nor the artistic talent to make Snow White, they could spoof it with Bob Clampett’s Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs, and if they had neither the resources nor the artistic talent to make Fantasia, they could puncture its pretensions with Clampett’s A Corny Concerto, in which a bulb-headed dunce by the name of Elmer Fudd played the role of Deems Taylor while a rabbit named Bugs pranced about as a ballerina. Meanwhile Tex Avery torpedoed Disney’s sentimentality in The Peachy Cobbler, and Frank Tashlin attacked Disney’s realism with self-reflexive shorts in which the characters kept addressing the audience and acknowledged that they were in a cartoon. These were clever, snappily paced animations full of cruelty, violence, and antisocial behavior, animations in which characters were dim-witted like Fudd, who took the obliviousness of Goofy to another level, or unmanageably wacky like Daffy Duck, who was a manic version of Donald Duck, or so overwhelmingly ineffectual like Porky Pig that he parodied the anodyne Mickey Mouse, or wickedly smart like Bugs Bunny with his trademark “What’s up, Doc?” who had been designed by Disney expatriate Charles Thorson after a rabbit in The Tortoise and the Hare but who had a mean streak and a quick mind that no Disney character had ever had.* And while Disney’s animations by design seemed to be the product of some invisible force, which was, after all, the point of realism, in the Warner Bros. cartoons the directors’ sensibility was nakedly evident, manipulating the action and spinning the gags. In effect, it was the return of the old animator’s hand that Walt Disney had banished long ago, only now it was the animator’s mind one saw at work.
Watching these cartoons with their wordplay and puns, their wise-cracking or tongue-tied characters, their adult acceptance of lust, their occasional Pirandellian twists, their satirical digs, their vicious wit, and their lunatic frenzy, the Disney animators were the envious ones. Speaking of their competitors, Jack Kinney admitted that “many of us wished we had the freedom they had” and applauded their “funny pictures—uninhibited, fresh, not worked over too much, as happened sometimes at Disney’s at that time.” Dick Huemer cracked, “It was like admiring the kind of dame that you couldn’t introduce to your mother.” Disney storyman Leo Salkin was more precise, saying how he and fellow staff member Milt Schaffer were “jealous of how funny the Warner Brothers cartoons were just before the war. We thought: ‘All this personality stuff isn’t really funny. It’s cute and people kind of chuckle at it, but Warners cartoons get laughs.’” In a reversal of the typical artistic flow, Disney did try appropriating some of the Warners spirit in cartoons like Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros, where Donald Duck sometimes seemed to have been possessed by Daffy, and in doing so Disney did advance the cause of surrealistic animation, but it meant trying to deconstruct what the studio had spent more than a decade carefully constructing, and they hadn’t the skill or the heart for it. Disney cartoons had many virtues. Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros notwithstanding, riotous energy was not one of them.
But it was riotous energy, not control, that most audiences as well as most critics now appreciated and applauded—riotous energy that captured the liberating force of a war that had, in the words of historian David M. Kennedy, “shaken the American people loose and shaken them up,” and it was riotous energy that made the more sedate Disney animations seem dull and anachronistic.
III
Walt Disney would not rest on the animations because he could not rest on them anymore. He needed something less costly, something new to restore the studio as well as his sense of self. Cartoons had become, Woolie Reitherman said, a “pain in the ass to Walt: the p
ersonnel problems, waiting around for animation to come in, changes, and all those things. I don’t know of any features that sailed through.” Reitherman might have added that the real reason for Walt’s dismay was that cartoons had become too expensive to do as well as Walt Disney had done them. But there was a way around these obstacles, and Walt had already been considering it long before the war, during the first economic pinch. He could reduce the amount of animation needed in a feature by combining the animation with live action, which was much cheaper and much faster to produce. He had thought of Alice in Wonderland as a prime possibility, with Alice as a real girl and Wonderland in animation—like the old Alice comedies he had made in the 1920S. But as the studio struggled with an Alice script, Walt seized on a new candidate: the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris. Walt would animate the tales themselves, but to accommodate the live action he would frame them in a melodrama about a bullied and neglected white boy who seeks solace in the wise Uncle Remus. Thus Walt would literally create two distinct worlds—a “real” one and a fanciful one. It was for Walt Disney, said animator Marc Davis, “a way to get into live action, and have his cartoon too.”
At least since 1939, when he first began negotiating with the Harris family for the rights, Walt had been considering these stories, told in black dialect by a retainer in the Reconstruction era, for an animated feature, and by late summer of that year he had already had one of his storymen synopsize the more promising tales and draw up four boards’ worth of story sketches. A year later, in November, while on his way to the Fantasia premiere in New York, Walt had stopped in Atlanta to visit the Harris home, to meet the Harris family, and as he told Variety, “to get an authentic feeling of Uncle Remus country so we can do as faithful a job as possible to these stories.” Roy had misgivings about the project, doubting that it was “big enough in caliber and natural draft” to warrant a budget over $1 million and more than twenty-five minutes of animation, but in June 1944, even before the war ended, Walt hired a southern-born writer named Dalton Reymond to write the screenplay, and he met frequently that summer with Reymond, his own staff, and director King Vidor, whom he was trying to interest in making the live-action sequences. It may have been the only time during the war after he had finished Victory Through Air Power that Walt seemed thoroughly engaged. Writer Maurice Rapf, whom Walt had hired to assist Reymond, called Walt “insatiable.” “He ended every conference by saying, ‘Well, I think we’ve really licked it now,’” Rapf would recall. “Then he’d call you the next morning and say, ‘I’ve got a new idea.’ And he’d have one. Sometimes the ideas were good, sometimes they were terrible, but you could never really satisfy him.” Rapf didn’t know it, but this was the Walt Disney of old.
As Reymond and Rapf finished the screenplay late that summer and the studio announced the project, a problem arose: members of the black community protested that any film version of the Uncle Remus stories was bound to portray black Americans in a servile and negative way. A “vicious piece of hocus pocus,” one group called it. Walt Disney was no racist. He never, either publicly or privately, made disparaging remarks about blacks or asserted white superiority. Like most white Americans of his generation, however, he was racially insensitive. At a story meeting he had referred to the dwarfs piling on top of one another in Snow White as a “nigger pile,” and in casting Song of the South he noted a “swell little picaninny [sic]” he had found. Like most Hollywood producers, he had also engaged in racial stereotyping, from a blackbird in the short Who Killed Cock Robin? who speaks in a thick drawl and blanches white when frightened, to the hipster crows in Dumbo, though the case has been made that the crows were sympathetic to Dumbo precisely because they understood what it was like to be ostracized themselves. Worse, in the “Pastorale” sequence of Fantasia, Walt enthused over the idea of a little black centaurette with a watermelon who is terrified when Pegasus gallops after her. “She sees him and Jesus! She goes like hell,” Walt said at a story meeting. “There would be a lot of laughs and it would give a definite lift to the whole thing.”
But if Walt had been racially insensitive, he now appreciated the minefield through which he was tiptoeing with the Uncle Remus film. “The negro situation is a dangerous one,” Disney publicist Vern Caldwell wrote producer Perce Pearce as the script was getting under way. “Between the negro haters and the negro lovers there are many chances to run afoul of situations that could run the gamut all the way from the nasty to the controversial.” Roy apparently had asked RKO, the Disneys’ distributor, to investigate “negro picture experiences” and said he foresaw interference from at least one organization, the League for the Advancement of the Negro; and Walt had instructed one of his publicists to meet with Bill Kupper, the sales manager of Twentieth Century–Fox, to hear their experiences in distributing Stormy Weather, which featured a black cast. Kupper said that in the South the film had to be booked into two theaters, one for whites and one for blacks; that the studio got grief from both whites and blacks; and that the film had to be made in such a way that scenes featuring blacks could be cut or southern exhibitors wouldn’t show them.
One of the reasons Walt had hired Rapf to work with Reymond was to temper what he feared would be Reymond’s white southern slant. Rapf was a minority, a Jew, and an outspoken left-winger, and he himself feared that the film would inevitably be Uncle Tomish. “That’s exactly why I want you to work on it,” Walt told him, “because I know that you don’t think I should make the movie. You’re against Uncle Tomism, and you’re a radical.” Rapf made small changes in Reymond’s script, omitting references to “negro boy” and “negro girl” as if the children were generic and cutting a line that a boy ran “like a black streak,” and he claimed to have made larger ones too—plunging the white family into poverty so that it would be clear the film was set during Reconstruction and Uncle Remus and the other blacks were not slaves scraping and bowing to white power, though in the final film the whites were so well-dressed and genteel that one couldn’t help but think of them as masters on a plantation.
In addition to hiring the radical Rapf—at a time when Walt was still steaming over what he had perceived to be Communist influence during the strike—Walt did something else that was uncharacteristic: he sent out the script for comment both within the studio (Gunther Lessing wrote Walt, “I can’t find a damn thing to criticize or suggest,” and fondly recalled his own black nanny) and outside the studio, to producers Sol Lesser and Walter Wanger, financier Jonathan Bell Lovelace, who sat on the Disney board, and Ward Greene, the head of King Features Syndicate. Most of all, he solicited comment from black Americans, among them the actress Hattie McDaniel, who had won an Academy Award for her supporting role in Gone with the Wind and who praised the script after taking a role in the film. He even invited Walter White, the secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, to come to the studio and personally work with Walt on revisions, though White begged off, saying that the NAACP had no West Coast representative and that he wouldn’t be coming out to California until November, and then as a war correspondent.
Meanwhile Joseph Breen, who was charged with approving scripts under the Production Code of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, had sent the Remus script to a Mississippi-born colleague for comment, and Walter Wanger had passed it along to Dr. Alain Locke, a prominent black scholar and philosopher at Howard University, asking that he write Disney directly with his criticisms. Breen’s colleague suggested a few changes—eliminating the word “darkey”—but he also warned that scenes of blacks singing happily could be resented by contemporary blacks. Dr. Locke wrote Walt that the film could do “wonders in transforming public opinion about the Negro” but only if he shunned stereotypes, and he advised that Walt consult other black representatives. But to Wanger, Dr. Locke confided that Walt had shown “bad judgment” in not having contacted black leaders before having the script written. Now, he said, there would be a controversy that could have
been avoided.
The controversy was gaining momentum. One correspondent wrote Breen that the black press was already prepared to launch an attack on the film and that the film might “cause serious trouble for the industry.” With this hint of trouble Walt reverted to form. He asked an associate to determine if the black newspapers leading the protest were Communist-controlled, and he apparently enlisted the FBI to find out why the black community was harassing him, once again suspecting that Communists were targeting him. The FBI responded that Leon Hartwick, the theatrical editor of the black paper Los Angeles Sentinel, had launched his own investigation into the Uncle Remus film and learned that the black actor Clarence Muse had been asked by the studio to “render an expert opinion on the contemplated picture.” Muse said he told the studio that the black characters were insufficiently dignified, an objection that he said Disney dismissed. Muse then appealed to black newspapers to protest the film. This was all Walt needed to know. In Walt’s version, Muse had come to him and said he wanted to play Remus. Walt refused, and now Muse had launched a personal vendetta with, no doubt, Communist assistance.
Ironically, Walt had had someone else in mind for Remus: the athlete, singer, actor, and political activist Paul Robeson, whose politics were well to the left of Muse’s. Walt had contacted Robeson as early as February 1941 after seeing him on the stage in George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, and Robeson had agreed to review the general outline of the script and offer suggestions or criticisms. Though the film was in hiatus after the war began, Walt nevertheless kept open his lines of communication with Robeson, apologizing when he was unable to attend a reception in Robeson’s honor and saying how much he was looking forward to working with him on Remus. Somehow, possibly because of politics, Robeson was no longer under consideration when Walt revived the film in 1944. Instead he tested a number of other black actors—“practically every colored actor,” he once said—before finding, virtually by accident, forty-year-old James Baskett, who had appeared on the Amos and Andy radio program but had no film experience.