by Jeff Baham
It was [Jean] Cocteau who made the film Beauty and the Beast , back in the ’40s. I’d seen it, and I remembered it, and I thought just the fact that there were human arms holding torches in the walkways, and human heads on the walls over the fireplace—I thought, “That’s the kind of stuff we’ve got to put into the Mansion.” So I started drawing up all these things that I thought were kind of weird, along those lines, because I wanted something almost surrealistic.
Prior to devoting most of their time to the World’s Fair, the Imagineers working on the Haunted Mansion project had been assigned to study the latest in popular horror, and many had seen William Castle’s 13 Ghosts in 1960 and Robert Wise’s The Haunting in 1963. Rolly Crump remembers seeing 13 Ghosts with Walt Disney himself, and—as an aside—Disney historian Ed Squair recently discovered a gag in Dick Irvine’s archived Haunted Mansion files that would use a canopy bed for murderous intent, in a scene seemingly inspired by one found in that film. [5] An interoffice memorandum, also from Dick Irvine, notes that a special showing of The Haunting was hosted in the WED projection room in January 1965, so it’s likely that most of the crew developing the attraction saw that film, at least—and the parallels to that film and some scenes in the Haunted Mansion are obvious. Those will be discussed later.
Japanese horror was also considered by the WED team for inspiration, albeit briefly. In the late ’50s and through the ’60s, the horror genre was moving in a number of directions in Japan, and the Japanese horror anthology Kwaidan received an award at Cannes and an Academy Award nomination in 1965, proving the movement’s influence on the horror genre at large. One of Japan’s most prolific horror filmmakers of the era was Nobuo Nakagawa, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to speculate that some WED staffers likely viewed one or more of Nakagawa’s horror films, as it has been said that Nakagawa “shaped the future of the genre in Japan by moving it from the staid, traditional ghost story to more shocking and graphic depiction of the supernatural.” [6]
But that “graphic depiction” was enough to turn the WED team away from any ideas that may have otherwise surfaced from the Japanese storytelling. “[We looked at] some pretty macabre stuff that came from Japan,” said Imagineer X. Atencio. “We thought ‘No, this is too gruesome.’ Bloody heads, blood oozing out of somebody’s eye sockets.” [7] However, it seems possible that Atencio was at least reminded of one of Nakagawa’s films when writing his initial draft of the Haunted Mansion’s script. In Mansion of the Ghost Cat (1958), Nakagawa created a film in which “the descendant of the servant of a cruel and vicious samurai returns to the town where she was born, only to find that a cat who is possessed by the spirits of those murdered by the samurai is trying to kill her,” according to the Internet Movie Database. Coincidentally or not, Atencio’s early draft of the Haunted Mansion script contained a repeating character that would lead you through the attraction, in a sense. That character was a one eyed cat. “You’d see the eye, you’d establish it was this cat, but then through the ride, you’d just see the eye,” Atencio explained. [8] The concept was discarded, but one has to wonder if the Japanese horror which Atencio dismissed became lodged in his subconscious.
Back to Rolly Crump, who had been working wholeheartedly with Yale Gracey before the World’s Fair to make the various story ideas and concepts into something tangible and unique. Despite everyone’s best efforts, Walt Disney never signed off on any specific direction, and after the Fair (but before Disney promoted the attraction on his Tencennial World of Color show), WED seemed to be at a crossroads. So Crump set off on his own to devise something fresh—something less reliant on standard Halloween contrivances.
Armed with a vision for the Mansion inspired by surrealists like the aforementioned Cocteau and Federico Fellini, another director from whom Crump has claimed inspiration, Crump started to draw. Human body parts used as decor. Eerie furniture that has come to life. A man made of dripping wax, deadly plants, a grandfather clock formed from a coffin stood on end. The weirder, the more surrealistic—the better, in Crump’s opinion:
I did the “candle man” first, and from then on I took off and started doing the other ones. What I was doing at that time was building the concept for the seance room…which would be the perfect place to allow this kind of surrealistic weird stuff to take place. And so that was one of the first sketches that I [showed to] Walt. But I didn’t discuss with him at the time that this might be the seance room. I just said that I think we need to trickle [these ideas] through the whole Mansion.
Crump was developing a number of set pieces that he believed could improve the entire attraction. So, once WED Imagineer Jack Ferges took Crump’s ideas and turned them into small scale models in the WED model shop, Crump prepared to demonstrate them to Walt Disney. But Crump’s eerie, otherworldly samples didn’t sit well with the rest of the Imagineers working on the attraction, who were still aiming to create a more traditional haunted house.
Let’s back up a few months. After WED’s World’s Fair duties had ended, Walt added more Imagineers to the project—notably Marc Davis, X. Atencio, and Claude Coats, all of whom had worked and were working on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, and after turning their attention toward the Haunted Mansion, attempted to pick up the trail from all of the various ideas and concepts that preceded them. Davis had originally been brought to WED by Disney for the specific purpose of making the park more entertaining and to add some sorely-needed humor to some of the attractions which, if they had personalities, would likely be said to take themselves too seriously. So by July 1964, Davis quickly developed his own treatment for the Haunted Mansion, mostly drawing on ideas that had come before in an attempt to pull them together into a coherent experience, including elements from Rolly Crump’s seance concept and Ken Anderson’s murdered bride storyline. Notably, Davis is also credited for first imagining the guide that leads you through the attraction as a disembodied Ghost Host, rather than a physical tour guide of some sort. [9]
Davis’ new script hadn’t solved the storytelling dilemma. One of his ideas was to add a constant threat to the guests’ tour through the Haunted Mansion, which was that they were being pursued by the “worst” of the numerous ghostly inhabitants of the house. In Davis’s vision, guests would enter the Haunted Mansion and come into the portrait hall, which was filled with “living” portraits that would interact with each other as well as the guests. But one of the portraits would simply host a shadow where its subject had been seated, this being the “worst” of the Mansion’s ghosts, which was now frightening the other ghosts and chasing after you. But apart from this gimmick, Davis’s script echoed many of the ideas and concepts put forward by the Imagineers that had worked on the project before him. [10]
Atencio, previously an assistant animator at the Studio, was pulled into WED by Disney to eventually write the script for the Ghost Host. “I’d never done writing before, but I did it,” Atencio recalled. “Walt really found talent in people that we didn’t know we had. I never did any scripting, and I’d never done any songwriting, but I did it and it worked out very nicely.” [11] Atencio also contributed some concepts and sketches to the team for the Haunted Mansion, though his role as the script writer would become his primary focus later on.
Coats, a background artist for the Studio before being brought to WED by Disney to become a show designer, also added a new perspective to the Haunted Mansion. With a knowledge of architecture, Coats could visualize large spaces and how lighting, color, and perspective could impact one’s view of any given construction. For example, while working on the animated feature Lady and the Tramp , Coats constructed models of some of the backgrounds to better visualize the scenes from a dogs-eye view. Imagineer Tony Baxter, who was mentored by Coats, described the importance of Coats’s understanding of the background by saying that backgrounds are more important on an attraction set than in an animated film. “While backgrounds support the animation in film, the backgrounds are what rides are all about,” Baxter said. “You
are the animation going through the ride, and the ride is the background come to life.” [12] Baxter continued:
Claude would always find unique ways to do things. For Lady and the Tramp , he built models, which would later be an asset at WED because he built models of everything. In fact, he demanded his office be down at the model shop, not up in the executive row where Marc Davis and everyone else was. He could run out, cut something on the saws, and bring it back. For Lady and the Tramp , he made the model, then took his camera out there and shot from the dog’s perspective of everything, which was brilliant, because you were already halfway home then in trying to figure out “How would this stairway look if you were only ten inches off the floor?” He had a willingness to not be locked in, not feel like he had reached the high point of his career. He was always looking for the next thing to play with or invent. [13]
Coats takes a more nuanced view of his place in the big picture. “I have always believed that the story is the thing that is really first, and the animation is the thing that tells the story,” said Coats, talking to author Randy Bright in his book Disneyland: Inside Story . “The background has to support all that, it has to add the proper mood and give the characters the proper space and lighting to work in...but you can’t make them overdone to the point of being distracting.” [14]
Coats is also credited with pioneering the use of ultraviolet light in live special effects and three dimensional environments—with the help of Ken Anderson—proving him well-suited for designing for the dark ride format. [15] Many of Coats’s conceptual sketches for the Haunted Mansion were drawn with pastels on black art board, demonstrating his technique of pulling detail and atmosphere out of darkness. Having been very successful in creating a convincing atmosphere for Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean attraction, Coats sought to work in the same vein for the Haunted Mansion, creating an eerie space full of unexplainable occurrences and shadowy environments, with the viewers attention directed to various areas in the sets by Coats’s clever use of lighting.
It was time to update Walt Disney on the Haunted Mansion progress. Dick Irvine convened a meeting with Disney for the various Imagineers to present their latest ideas and directions. Rolly was prepared to present his surreal ideas, but Irvine didn’t think the oddities were worthy of Disney’s time, and placed young Crump’s work in a corner of the room, which would be behind Disney’s back as he attended to the rest of the presentation.
“[Irvine] thought it was too far out,” Crump recalled. “And when we had the meeting with Walt, he kind of tucked it off into a corner, ‘Bring your stuff in, Rolly, but just stick it in the corner.’” [16] Crump complied, being much younger than his co-workers yet, perhaps, a bit wiser, having studied Disney up close for years now.
The meeting was a four-hour marathon, in an attempt to both bring Disney up to speed and get some sort of guidance for the next step in the Haunted Mansion’s development. “Is that everything?” Disney asked. “Yes, that’s all,” Irvine responded. Then, noticing Crump’s table off in the corner, Disney inquired about it. “Oh, that’s just the stuff Rolly’s been working on,” Irvine said. Disney, who had brought Crump to WED years earlier specifically to exercise his distinctive skills, wasn’t about to overlook Crump’s presentation. So Crump proceeded to show his offbeat creations to Walt Disney, explaining everything from the cinematic influences he utilized to his intention to make the Haunted Mansion more surreal and less of a stereotypical Halloween attraction. “Okay, so how are we going to use this stuff?” Disney inquired. According to Crump, this resulted in a somewhat perplexing discussion in the room, while everyone tossed their ideas into the ring. Finally, after uttering a mild oath, Disney claimed to have had enough and left the meeting abruptly, leaving Crump a bit unsure about where to turn. The other Imagineers seemed to have taken a “told you so” stance, and Crump was left to his own inner thoughts for the night.
The next day, Crump arrived at his desk in the morning to find Disney sitting in his chair, waiting. “You son of a bitch!” Crump recalls Disney saying, a note of exasperation in his voice. “I’ve been thinking about your stuff all night!” It turned out that Disney was enthralled with Crump’s designs, and needed time to figure out what to do with them. “We’re going to take all that stuff, and we’re going to make a museum out of it all. A ‘Museum of the Weird.’” In Disney’s mind, the museum would become an adjunct to the Haunted Mansion that would contain such Crump-designed displays as man-eating plants, a gypsy cart come to life, perhaps a seance circle…essentially, a Robert Ripley-esque life-sized cabinet of curiosities that could have been developed as either a part of the queue or an adjacent attraction.
As Crump tells the story, his co-workers had an immediate change of heart, patting him on the back due to his success with Disney—though it’s unlikely that everyone else’s sensibilities suddenly changed overnight with Walt’s. Crump’s reputation as one of Disney’s favorites was beginning to grow, and with it, the likelihood that he would eventually have personal conflicts with his co-workers, most of whom were twenty or more years older than Crump and some who had known Disney for decades.
Different Imagineers seemed to pick up different directions from Walt Disney. Crump was still convinced that his effects would work best as a walk-though exhibit. Davis believed that his role at WED was to create vignettes that would quickly entertain, and he believed that since Disney included him on the Haunted Mansion project, Disney must have wanted the attraction to follow that formula. And Coats seemed to have great success creating dank, eerie surroundings in the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction, and felt that he should keep his sails set on the same course. Each thought they were following Disney’s desires, and each were aiming for a head-on collision of ideas .
“Marc was a master of staging,” said Disney animator Andreas Deja, who knew Davis well. “He staged things very clearly. To create a situation that is based on one drawing that just communicates an idea in a second—you know what’s going on and you don’t have to search.” Davis’s solution for the Haunted Mansion was to set up a full show of vignettes, based both on the work that had been done before he had come onboard, and his own conceptual designs. “He was so good at that, and things needed to be staged that way in these rides, because [when] the vehicle is going by, you don’t have a lot of time to take in what is happening,” Deja said. “You have to get it. And [Marc] was just perfect to do this kind of work for Imagineering.” [17]
But Coats knew that Disney greatly admired his own strong atmospheric work. He knew that Disney understood his sense of color and mood, and his means of communicating the emotion of a scene simply by creating the proper aura. Rather than lighting up a series of animated vignettes, Coats envisioned atmospheric effects that would build dread in the guests. A master of light and space, Coats wanted to build a feeling of dread in the Haunted Mansion’s visitors—an aura of foreboding, if you will.
Moving forward while still disagreeing on the direction for the Haunted Mansion, plans continued to be developed. Scenes were designed and special effects tested. And then, like a candle being extinguished, Walt Disney died on December 15, 1966.
“Walt’s death did affect us all at WED, and some openly cried at the news,” recalled WED Imagineer Paul Saunders, who had been working on the construction of the Haunted Mansion. “Four of us just got into a car and drove around Los Angeles for a good part of the day, not saying much.” [18]
And the Haunted Mansion’s shell, erected more than three years earlier at the end of Disneyland’s New Orleans Square, sat unoccupied for almost another three years.
A team, fractured. Rolly Crump, who had been looked upon as someone favored by Walt Disney—probably because that was exactly true—was running into roadblocks everywhere he turned. Imagineer Tony Baxter, who started with Imagineering when he was in his twenties, as did Crump, has spoken many times about his mentor Claude Coats, and what a positive experience he had with that relationship. But in conversati
ons with Crump, he found that with Disney at the head of the organization, WED wasn’t prepared to embrace Crump as the “next generation,” perhaps because Crump’s mentor appeared to be Walt Disney himself. “It was an age gap thing,” Baxter told the Season Pass podcast. “Rolly was in a really difficult situation, because Walt really liked him, and when Walt died, the others were jealous, because he was younger, and he was sort of Walt’s son, in a way.” [18]
So shortly after Disney’s passing, despite Walt’s approval of Crump’s Museum of the Weird concepts, and despite his years of work on the project, Crump was removed from the Haunted Mansion development for good. For his part, Crump believes that Dick Irvine was responsible for his removal from the project, an idea hard to dispute, since Irvine was in charge of determining which WED staffer would be assigned to which project at the time.
“There’s a political reason that the [Museum of the Weird] wasn’t built,” Crump said. “The fact that Walt liked it but some of the other designers were jealous of it…and Dick Irvine never wanted me to build anything.” Crump began to analyze Irvine’s possible reasoning for his dismissal. “It’s really sad. I think what happened—well, I love Dick because he was a good administrator. But he wasn’t a good designer, and he used to get really upset about it. He was an administrator, and he was trying to be a designer,” Crump concluded.
“The interesting thing about it is that every assignment that Dick Irvine gave us came from Walt. So he, as far as I was concerned, was a male secretary.”
Of course, a measured look at the situation would indicate that while Walt Disney did select Crump to be at WED for talents that may have been overlooked by Irvine, there had to be a reason that Disney also trusted Irvine to run WED Enterprises in his stead. But after Disney died, Irvine reassigned Crump to work at Disneyland park, as a sort of intermediary between WED and the park—a role which had become necessary after Disney’s passing, as the corporate temperament in the company was, to personify the situation, struggling to find its footing. Despite the debatable value of his new relegation, Crump took it as a personal downgrade. And besides, in Crump’s view, this result had been a long time coming. Even before the World’s Fair assignments, Crump believed his favor with Walt Disney was causing conflict between Irvine and himself.