Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  Walt desperately wanted to press on, though the technology was lagging. “I am convinced that good color, not too hard on the eyes, would be of value to a cartoon subject,” Walt wrote one prospective color laboratory, “however, all samples of color prints that I have seen to date would detract rather than add anything to a cartoon.” Still, Walt kept searching, and when Technicolor, a company dedicated to color film, announced a three-color process early in 1932 that promised to reproduce tones more faithfully, Walt was said to have declaimed, “At last! We can show a rainbow on the screen.”

  Whether he could show it, however, was a point of contention with Roy. Walt admitted that color animations were prohibitively expensive—three times as much as black-and-white in lab costs and about a fourth more in production costs—with little chance of recovering those expenses in the short run, especially since the United Artists contract didn’t call for color or for any adjustment should Walt decide to deliver his cartoons in color. Roy was adamantly opposed and asked others to dissuade Walt, but Walt was not to be dissuaded, arguing that color cartoons would have a longer life than black-and-whites. “I found out the people who live with figures as a rule, it’s postmortem, it’s never ahead, it’s always what happened,” Walt would say dismissively of Roy’s objections. “Well, in my particular end I was always ahead.” Walter Lantz at Universal had already made a Technicolor sequence for The King of Jazz starring Paul Whiteman. Now Walt felt it was his turn.

  For its part, Technicolor was eager to assist, since it had had difficulty convincing live-action studios to bear the tremendous expense of color; in 1932 the company lost $235,000. Walt had already begun the next Silly Symphony in black-and-white, a story about two trees who fall in love, only to find their romance threatened by a jealous gnarly tree. Now, with Technicolor’s cooperation, he decided midway to convert it to color. So he had the ink and paint department wash off the reverse side of the black and white cels, the side with the white and gray shades, leaving only the black outlines on the other side. Then he had the cels repainted in color on the reverse side. Walt was so excited by the outcome that he invited Rob Wagner, a friend, writer, and well-connected Hollywood bon vivant, to view scenes from the film. Wagner, in turn, recommended that the film be shown to Sid Grauman, Los Angeles’s leading theater impresario and the chief of Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Grauman was as floored as Walt and Wagner and booked it that July at the Chinese with MGM’s Strange Interlude, a major release that ensured Flowers and Trees would receive wide attention. “Everybody is of the opinion that it will create quite a sensation,” George Morris wrote Roy after a studio screening, correctly as it turned out. Grauman called it a “creation of genius that marks a new milestone in cinematic development.” Walt later claimed that the showing at Grauman’s brought “an avalanche of orders and bookings.” Flowers and Trees would also win the Academy Award for animated short subject.

  Now Walt was hooked, just as he had been hooked on sound with Willie. Black-and-white cartoons suddenly seemed antiquated and stylized, more drawing than life. “A black and white print looked as drab alongside Flowers and Trees as a gray day alongside a rainbow,” he later wrote. “We could do other things with color! We could do many things with color that no other medium could do.” The wheels, however, turned slowly. Nearly a year later Walt was still lobbying within the company to convert the entire program to color, whether UA would change the contract to compensate or not, whether the studio would have to stand the entire expense or not. “Walt is very hot on color,” Gunther Lessing wrote Roy, who was in New York at the time. “He wants it.” What Lessing couldn’t convey was how badly Walt wanted it. He was so intent that even without the prospect of any additional compensation from UA he began negotiating with Technicolor for an exclusive right to use their process; he hoped to seal a deal when Technicolor head Herbert Kalmus met with his board of directors and feared that if he didn’t close a deal soon, some rival animation studio would. Roy thought Walt was needlessly nervous, since everyone knew the Disneys weren’t getting any larger advances for color cartoons than for black-and-white, but Roy, bowing once again to Walt’s wishes, nevertheless met with Kalmus to discuss terms.

  Roy was right that no other studio seemed to be beating down Technicolor’s door and that Technicolor was even more eager than Walt to conclude an agreement, since Disney’s cartoons were a way for them to showcase their process. In fact, Technicolor offered to loan the studio money to help offset the additional costs—complete conversion to color would have required an extra $195,000—and at one point proposed to foot the entire bill for the conversion in exchange for a 50 percent interest in the studio, which Walt politely declined. (Lessing was less polite.) Instead, Walt agreed to make thirteen Silly Symphony cartoons in color in exchange for the exclusive use of the three-color Technicolor process in animation for two years, enough to give him a significant head start over rivals, but he rejected any financial assistance from the company.

  Roy was already edgy at the prospect of the new expenses and even convened a meeting of the staff on the soundstage, admonishing, “We’ve got to quit spending money on these films or we are going to go broke.” Writing at the same time to his parents, he complained that Walt “continually (without letup in the least) always strives for something that has not been done before. That sort of policy, of course, is always costly.” As always, Roy was charged with coming up with the money to finance Walt’s ambitions. With UA reluctant to pay more for color, Roy, clearly scrambling to appease Walt, approached a New York investment banker named Rosenbaum to whom he had been introduced by a mutual friend, but the terms for the loan were usurious and the bank was said to be unscrupulous, and Roy broke off negotiations. There was even a press report, which the Disneys vehemently denied, that Roy would be forced to take the company public.

  What complicated Roy’s task was that at the very moment he was trying to secure financing for color, the remainder of the $195,000 loan that UA had advanced the studio under its revised contract was, according to a provision of that contract, coming due if UA decided to call it in. Roy and Walt both wanted to renegotiate with UA, hoping that they might be granted a two-year extension that would give them the resources to convert to color, and Roy went to New York that May to discuss terms. But UA—“depression-minded,” Roy said—was not inclined to grant an extension, in part because it doubted that Walt could continue to deliver cartoons of such high quality. “They seem to think there must be a slipping point,” Roy wrote Walt, “or that you will go stale, or go Hollywood, or some place else, but [not] to continue making good pictures.” Since Roy, having taken up his brother’s cause, believed that they had never “missed in the past by taking our gamble on ourselves and our product,” he suggested that they forget an extension with UA and look elsewhere for funds. He left New York with another small loan from UA—$12,000 per film on those delivered between May 10 and June 27, when the balloon payment was due—and the determination to find another benefactor to support Walt’s new obsession.*

  As it turned out, the benefactor found them. Attilio Giannini, the son of Italian immigrants, was nicknamed “Doc” because he had earned a medical degree before entering his older brother Amadeo’s California-based banking firm, the Bank of America. In Los Angeles, Doc Giannini had become legendary over the years for making loans on character rather than collateral, and he was especially esteemed in the motion picture industry, where he was among the first to provide capital for budding studios when no one else would. The Disneys had already secured small loans from the Bank of America, and while Roy was in New York, George Morris was holding discussions with the bank, seeking financial advice. (Hearing that UA was balking at an extension, Giannini told Morris that UA needed Disney more than Disney needed UA and that Morris should “[t]ell those sons of b’s to go to Hell!”) In late May, during one of these sessions at the Bank of America with an officer named Normanly, Dr. Giannini appeared, shook Morris’s hand, and abruptly asked him
“if United Artists would be sore if we pulled away from them,” intimating that the bank might be willing to pay off UA’s loan. When Morris said that he thought they would actually be relieved to have the loan—$112,000 of which was outstanding—repaid, Normanly and Giannini left for the latter’s office to consult. When Normanly returned, he told Morris that the bank now wanted to assume the entire UA debt. Morris wrote Roy excitedly that this “absolutely severs any hold that United Artists may have on us,” but, contrary to what he had told Giannini, he couldn’t see why UA would possibly agree. UA, however, did agree. Not only did the Bank of America assume the loan, to be liquidated within six months, it also agreed to loan the studio $12,000 per cartoon on the rest of the contract. A week later Roy met with Dr. Giannini to negotiate a general loan credit, irrespective of the delivery of films, that would allow the studio for the first time to borrow as it wished.

  Now the Disneys finally had the resources they needed to make color cartoons or anything else they wanted to make. Under the deal with UA, which was still distributing the studio’s films though no longer financing them, the Mickey cartoons were to remain in black-and-white for the foreseeable future—Roy saw no benefit in tampering with success—but the Silly Symphony series would henceforth be in color. In the end, then, despite Roy’s misgivings, Walt Disney had gotten what he wanted, as he usually did.

  II

  By the time Walt was granted his exclusive from Technicolor, the Silly Symphony series had already begun to rival Mickey Mouse, if not yet in popularity, then at least in critical reception. Critic Gilbert Seldes, writing in The New Republic in June 1932, declared the Symphony series the “perfection of the movies,” going on to say that the cartoons had “reached the point toward which the photographed and dramatic moving picture should be tending, in which, as in the silent pictures, everything possible is expressed in movement and the sound is used for support and clarification for contrast.” The line between these critical hosannas and popular ones was crossed decisively the very week Walt closed the deal with Technicolor, with the release in May 1933 of one of the most extraordinary cartoons the studio would ever produce.

  The project, about three fraternal pigs terrorized by a voracious wolf, apparently originated from a story in Andrew Lang’s Green Fairy Book that had circulated through the studio the previous December with an outline and a long critique attached, probably from Walt, noting that “[t]hese little pig characters look as if they would work up very cute” and adding, apropos of the studio’s new focus, that “we should be able to develop quite a bit of personality in them.” When Three Little Pigs was storyboarded—by one account, it was the first of the animations to be given this treatment fully—Walt took special interest. Ben Sharpsteen recalled that “Walt practically lived in the music room while the director [Burt Gillett] was working on it…. He visualized the entire picture, and he spent more of his time on it than he had on any other picture up to that time.” It was even animated somewhat differently than previous films with a small crew consisting primarily of Norm Ferguson and Dick Lundy, assisted by Art Babbitt and Freddie Moore, instead of the typically larger group in which each individual contributed a scene or gag.

  Of the four, Moore, the youngest, would most distinguish himself. Moore, who had joined the studio in August 1930 just before his nineteenth birthday, was short, frumpy, and bulbous-nosed—in fact, he looked like a cartoon character himself. But his appearance notwithstanding, he was a graceful man and a natural athlete who picked up polo as soon as he grabbed a mallet, and he was just as much a natural when it came to drawing. “Animation came too easily to him,” said Les Clark, whom Moore originally assisted. “He didn’t have to exert any real effort.” Moore’s easy facility with the pencil made him especially adept at the new looser style at Disney introduced by Ferguson, and one eminent animation historian gave him the largest share of credit in displacing the old “rubber hose” animation at the studio with the more sophisticated “squash and stretch.”

  Moore’s real forte, however, wasn’t realism. It was charm. He had a knack for creating appealing characters who were soft, round, and cherubic and who seemed to exude the personality Walt so desperately wanted. While Ferguson drew the wolf in Three Little Pigs, Lundy most of the dance steps, and Babbitt the two action sequences, it was Moore’s design and animation of the pigs that provided the film’s core and that would prove so striking, indelible, and for the studio, iconic. Moore’s pigs were a benchmark of personality animation just as Ferguson’s Pluto had been a benchmark of psychology. Animator Ollie Johnston said of Moore that “[u]nder his influence the style of Disney drawing changed markedly for the better.” Another animator, Marc Davis, went further. “The drawing that people think of when they think of Disney,” he observed, “was inspired by Fred Moore,” which is to say that his style, as evidenced in Pigs, quickly became the studio style. After Pigs Moore became such a dominant influence at the studio that even Walt would drop by Moore’s animation table just to watch him.

  Yet for all the obvious appeal of Moore’s pigs, another element contributed just as mightily to the cartoon’s success. During one storyboarding session Walt had perused the continuity and suggested that a little song should be inserted. Frank Churchill, who was now the studio composer, immediately began pounding out a tune on the piano. Ted Sears provided a couplet, and when he ran out of lyrics, Pinto Colvig, the storyman and voice artist, improvised a whistle to complete the musical line. Later two freelance singers were hired for a one-day recording session at ten dollars apiece, and “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” began its march on musical history.

  Walt, always notoriously dissatisfied with anything the studio produced, pronounced himself happy with Pigs. “At last we have achieved true personality in a whole picture!” he was said to have written Roy after seeing it. Roy, who was at the time in New York meeting with UA on the contract extension, relayed Walt’s enthusiasm to the distributor’s salesmen. But when they screened the film themselves, they complained that it was a “cheater,” meaning the studio had cheated them because Pigs had fewer characters than the previous Silly Symphony, Father Noah’s Ark. It took UA publicist Hal Horne to defend the film as “the greatest thing Walt’s ever done.”

  Audiences seemed to agree with Horne’s assessment. Even at the very first preview, Dick Lundy recalled, moviegoers left whistling “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” The film had been open only a short time when the song began sweeping the nation—not just a musical phenomenon but a cultural one that played incessantly. “[Y]ou cannot escape,” New York Herald Tribune film critic Richard Watts, Jr., complained.

  It bursts out at you in almost every film theater; the radio hurls it in your direction; try to escape from it by adjourning to a speakeasy and some unfortunate alcoholic will begin to sing it at you; you pick up a paper for relief and you will find it shrieking out at you in a cartoon on the editorial page. At teas, otherwise harmless men and women will suddenly burst, either coyly or determinedly, into its unceasing strains or its coy lyrics. Go to the theater and you will find it played by the orchestra in the intermission, while the handsomely clad men and women about town in the audience join merrily in humming it, just to show you that they are dashing sophisticates.

  J. P. McEvoy, writing for the New York Daily Mirror, agreed. “Personally, I would like to get you into a corner and ask you if you have seen the ‘Three Little Pigs,’ and I would like to go on asking you about one hundred and fifty times,” he grumbled. “This would give you some idea of what I have been going through for the last month [listening to ‘Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?’].”

  United Artists, caught short by the demand for the cartoon, had too few prints and in some neighborhoods was forced to shuttle them between theaters by bicycle messenger. They even began running French and Spanish versions—anything they could get their hands on. One New York theater showed it for weeks, finally putting whiskers on a poster of the pigs outside the theater
and lengthening the whiskers as the run continued. That fall, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst personally suggested that there be a Three Little Pigs comic strip, an idea Walt said he would entertain only if he got a full page in the comic section. The film industry took note as well. Walt was already a minor folk hero in Hollywood for Mickey Mouse, but shortly after Pigs he was feted by the Writers Club, where Chaplin, who rarely performed in public, climbed onto a small stage and did a pantomime in Walt’s honor and where toastmaster Rupert Hughes announced that he would read a poem to Walt, took a stack of papers from his pocket, sipped from a glass of water, cleared his throat, and then said simply, “‘Walt Disney…Well, isn’t he?’” as if there were nothing left to say. The next year Pigs won Walt another Academy Award.

  Oddly enough, between the cost of the film, which George Morris put at $15,568, and the cost of the prints, which came to nearly $14,000, Morris worried that the studio might not break even on the picture, and when UA, taking advantage of the demand, began charging as much for Pigs as for some of its feature films, Walt felt compelled to issue an apology to the exhibitors in The Hollywood Reporter, saying that he had thus far failed to cover his costs and needed the money.* But whether it turned a profit or not, Pigs, like Willie before it, was widely regarded as a signal achievement in animation. “I realized something was happening there that hadn’t happened before,” animator Chuck Jones said of the effect of Pigs. It demonstrated that “it wasn’t how a character looked but how he moved that determined his personality. All we animators were dealing with after ‘Three Pigs’ was acting.” Jones even believed that personality animation really began with Pigs.