Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  And that mission was about to change.

  Six

  FOLLY

  Even when he was consumed by his work—and he was always consumed by his work—Walt Disney was restless, mindful perhaps, after the betrayals he had suffered at the hands of Charlie Mintz and Pat Powers, that the slightest complacency might lead to a setback. Sometime in mid-1933, at the very time he was enjoying the enormous success of Three Little Pigs, he decided that he needed to chart a new course for the studio—something big and dramatic. For years he had suffered from the vagaries of the business of producing shorts and from the relatively meager profits they delivered—which became more meager as his expectations and consequently his expenses grew. Though the Silly Symphonies fetched rentals that were 50 percent higher than those of competitors’ cartoons, they also cost appreciably more to make, as much as $30,000 by the mid-1930s, which meant that with overhead and expenses they had to gross around $100,000 to turn a profit. Under the best of circumstances this wasn’t easy, but it became especially difficult when theater owners, attempting to attract financially strapped viewers during the Depression, instituted double bills of two feature films, reducing both the time they had to show shorts and the money they had to rent them.

  As far as the Disneys were concerned, between their rentals and their royalties from merchandise, the studio had made roughly $600,000 in 1934, which certainly wasn’t bad during a depression. “The first decade was crawling—just bacon and eggs without the bacon,” Roy would later say of the studio’s early years. “Then the second decade when the country was in the doldrums—we were relatively prosperous, and while we were in small time…small money, we could pay all our bills, pay all our salaries. Up to that time we never drew a regular salary.” But Walt recognized that if he hoped to continue to grow the studio, shorts had little future. “The short subject was just a filler on any program,” he would recall dismissively. “And so I just felt I had to diversify my business and get into these other things, and it would give me a better chance.” The “other things” he was then considering daunted even his own colleagues. He had decided to make a full-length feature cartoon.

  While it was true that shorts couldn’t generate enough profits, economic considerations were, as always for Walt Disney, only part of the reason he was changing course. He also wanted the aesthetic challenge—to stay ahead of the pack and remain better than everyone else, which was now a source of enormous pride. Even more personally, the deeper into his fantasy world he drew, the more fully realized he knew it had to be. Like his old Alice character, he needed to construct a better imaginative world in which to escape.

  “I think that Walt was impatient with the restrictions of the cartoon,” Ken Anderson, an art director at the time, said. “He strived for more and more realism, more naturalism in the features.” Anderson remembered keeping a notebook of camera angles from live-action movies he had seen, and Walt being so impressed that he ordered others to keep similar notes. “He was always aiming at exceeding the limitations of the medium.” Walt admitted as much himself. “[W]e sensed we had gone about as far as we could in the short subject field without getting ourselves into a rut,” he wrote in 1941. “We needed this new adventure, this ‘kick in the pants,’ to jar loose some new enthusiasm and inspiration.” In effect, Walt wanted to rattle the studio with an earthquake.

  The idea of producing a feature, he once said, first occurred to him when he was in Europe and saw audiences sitting through a program of five or six Mickey Mouse cartoons in a row. The problem with this recollection is that three full years before he would visit Europe, he was already laying the groundwork for a feature, even dropping hints to the press. As early as June 1932 Roy was inquiring about the availability of the rights to Alice in Wonderland, which, he learned, was in the public domain. While the Alice project slowly advanced, M. Lincoln Schuster of the Simon & Schuster publishing house was prodding Walt to make a film of a Felix Salten novel, first published in Europe in 1923 and issued in the United States in 1928, titled Bambi: A Life in the Woods, about the life cycle of a deer. Though Sidney Franklin, one of the most highly regarded directors at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, acquired the rights to the novel while Walt dithered, Joseph Schenck of United Artists leaped in, offering to broker an alliance between Disney and Franklin. “Schenck talked like they would finance it for distribution and a share of the profits,” Roy wrote Walt eagerly from New York. “Would sure like to see you attempt a feature, and I believe it is highly desirable for that feature to be handled by the same source handling our other product.” Roy urged Walt to contact Franklin, who was apparently willing to cooperate, and get the ball rolling for a fall 1934 release. Walt evidently did talk to Franklin, though the project stalled, most likely because Walt feared the studio did not yet have the artistic capability to animate so realistic a story.

  Meanwhile, Walt was being inundated with suggestions for feature projects he could tackle. The old silent film director and actor Hobart Bosworth wrote Walt, “You can’t carry the animal and bird, and animated trees, flowers, etc. much farther,” and thought he should try “all of the elfin, goblin, faery, fay [sic] sprite stories of all the folk lore of all lands, in your medium!” Cartoonist James Thurber recommended that Walt animate Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey. Douglas Fairbanks had discussed the possibility of their collaborating on Gulliver’s Travels. And as early as April 1933 Fairbanks’s wife, actress Mary Pickford, was pressing Walt to do a combined live-action/animation of Alice in Wonderland. Pickford even offered to guarantee an advance equal to seven of his cartoons and underwrite the production costs, but Walt vacillated, fearing “great disappointment,” he wrote, “should the deal fall through.” When Paramount decided to put a live-action Alice film into production, Walt abandoned his plans with Pickford, prompting her to lament that “your apparent lack of enthusiasm on our last meeting, together with the many obstacles you seemed to anticipate was the crushing blow to my cherished hope.”

  In reality, that same week in May 1933 when he was exchanging letters with Pickford, which also happened to be the week that Pigs opened, Walt had already settled on his feature and had apparently instructed Al Lichtman of United Artists to register the title: Snow White. Walt would later say he had chosen the material on the grounds of its aesthetic potential. “[I]t was well-known and I knew I could do something with seven ‘screwy’ dwarfs,” he said. Another time, enumerating the elements of the story, he said, “I had sympathetic dwarfs, you see? I had the heavy, I had the prince. And the girl. The romance.” But the story also offered the lure of memory. Walt said he could remember seeing a Snow White play when he was a boy, though he was probably recalling a film version of the play starring Marguerite Clark that screened on January 27 and January 28, 1917, in the cavernous twelve-thousand-seat Kansas City Convention Hall when he was fifteen. The Kansas City Star had sponsored five screenings to reward its newsboys, and 67,000 of them showed up. To accommodate the crowds, the film was projected simultaneously on four screens arranged at right angles to one another in a kind of box. Because the projectors were hand-cranked and because the projectionists couldn’t maintain perfect synchronization, Walt, seated high in the gallery, said that he could see on one screen what was going to happen on the adjacent one, which made the show seem somehow even more magical. Writing to Frank Newman, for whom Walt had made the Laugh-O-grams in Kansas City, he said, “My impression of the picture has stayed with me through the years and I know it played a big part in selecting SNOW WHITE for my first feature production.”

  But if he cited the aesthetic elements of the material and its appeal from his childhood as the reasons for choosing Snow White, he may also have had deep-seated psychological reasons. Snow White had nearly all the narrative features—the tyrannical parent, the sentence of drudgery, the promise of a childhood utopia—and incorporated nearly all the major themes of his young life, primarily the need to conquer the previous generation to stake one’s claim on maturity, the rewards of ha
rd work, the dangers of trust, and perhaps above all, the escape into fantasy as a remedy for inhospitable reality. (In discussing fairy tale conventions, psychologist Bruno Bettelheim cited “stories that tell about an aging parent who decides that the time has come to let the new generation take over. But before this can happen, the successor must prove himself capable and worthy”—a scenario that more or less fit both Snow White and the life of Walt Disney, with the exception that in each case the parent was reluctant to yield.) Though some analysts would apply a Freudian interpretation—one saw Snow White as possessing “remnants of an anal obsessive personality” that she had to overcome to achieve sexual maturity, and characterized the dwarfs as desexualized children—and others imposed a cultural interpretation in which the film promoted Depression values of hard work and community, the cartoon would ultimately become a parable of Walt Disney’s own young life. He was Snow White, threatened by parental jealousy and capricious power and forced into his own world, the world of animation, where he would ultimately find nurturance, love, independence, and authority. Snow White was the story of Walt Disney’s personal growth, the story of what he had had to surmount and what he had achieved.

  Now he needed a version that would be adaptable for the screen. The original, as retold by the Brothers Grimm, was too rudimentary; the dwarfs weren’t even identified by name. The Marguerite Clark film may have had more vivid elements—the film had been lost by the time Walt decided to make his feature and he was relying on memory—and Walt did consult the Winthrop Ames play from which the film had been adapted, even eventually acquiring the rights for fear that he might be sued. Still, the similarities were slight. He had also examined another Snow White play, this one from 1913 by a woman named Jessie Braham White, and though he used very little from it, he did borrow a few small touches: Snow White kissing the dwarfs good-bye as they head off to work, and the Queen, who wants to kill Snow White to certify her own place as the kingdom’s reigning beauty, disguising herself as a peddler to gain access to the innocent girl.

  But whatever sources Walt Disney drew upon, by the spring of 1933 he was already synthesizing them in his mind and forging something entirely new—something he was beginning to internalize by reciting the story at every opportunity. “We had a business meeting today for no good reason,” one colleague that May wrote Roy, who was in New York at the time. “However, it was very interesting because among other things Walt told us his idea of developing the story, ‘Snow White,’ and honestly, the way that boy can tell a story is nobody’s business. I was practically in tears during some of it, and I’ve read the story many times, as a child, without being particularly moved. If it should turn out one tenth as good as the way he tells it, it should be a wow.” Animator Dick Huemer claimed that when he first went to work for Disney that same year, the two of them were sitting in Walt’s office and Walt began to expatiate upon Snow White. “Walt was such a wonderful actor that my throat started to get tight, and my eyes began to moisten,” Huemer recalled, “it was wonderful, the way he was telling it.” During a visit to his old friend Walt Pfeiffer, who was living in Chicago at the time and working at an advertising agency, Walt began performing Snow White as they toured the Field Museum of Natural History. When he reached the point where the vultures swoop down on the peddler woman as she escapes, Walt was so demonstrative that a security guard thought Pfeiffer was being attacked, and the two Walts had to slink away.

  It may have been as early as the winter of 1934* that Walt felt ready to make his first public presentation. As Ken Anderson remembered it, Walt approached a group of employees late one afternoon, gave each of them fifty cents, told them to grab dinner across the street and then return to the soundstage that evening. None had any idea of what Walt had in mind. When they arrived, about fifty of them, at roughly seven-thirty, and took their seats on wooden tiers at the back of the room, Walt was standing at the front lit by a single spotlight in the otherwise dark space. Announcing that he was going to launch an animated feature, he told the story of Snow White, not just telling it but acting it out, assuming the characters’ mannerisms, putting on their voices, letting his audience visualize exactly what they would be seeing on the screen. He became Snow White and the wicked queen and the prince and each of the dwarfs. Anderson said the performance took over three hours. “He was a spellbinder,” recalled animator Joe Grant. When it was over, the group was both enthralled and enthused. “[W]e were just carried away,” Anderson said. “We had no concept that we were ever going to do anything else or ever want to do anything else. We wanted to do what he had just told us!” “That one performance lasted us three years,” one animator claimed. “Whenever we’d get stuck, we’d remember how Walt did it on that night.”

  But if Walt had inspired his crew with the idea of a new mission, there were nevertheless doubts and trepidations. “We saw it at first as Walt’s folly,” said Joe Grant. Even Walt sometimes wondered whether anyone would want to sit through a feature-length cartoon, though at the same time he was telling the story of Snow White, he and Roy were also discouraging exhibitors from showing full programs of Disney cartoons for fear, as Roy wrote one of them, that they “may take the edge off this feature idea and give people the impression that a cartoon feature is merely a hodgepodge of several connected subjects.” There was also the issue of whether audiences, who, Walt had worried just a few years before, might not even accept a voice emanating from a drawing would have any emotional investment in drawings—an investment he felt was necessary to sustain a feature. And within the studio itself there was concern whether Walt, who had so many responsibilities, could focus on a single feature for what he said would be the year to eighteen months needed to complete it, while others debated whether his managerial style of constantly sparking new ideas and constantly changing his mind was compatible with the steadiness and certainty that a feature required. Despite his enthusiasm, Walt commented to a reporter in 1934, well after he had committed to Snow White, that he had to be certain the studio was up to it; otherwise “we will destroy it.”

  Finally, there was a more practical consideration: how would they finance the film? The Disneys had virtually no money of their own, reinvesting whatever they did have in the studio. For its part, United Artists, their distributor for the shorts, wasn’t obligated to finance or distribute a feature, though, contrary to later accounts, it was not opposed to a feature either, and one UA executive told Gunther Lessing that “foreign countries were yelling for a feature and that we would easily gross, without trouble, $1,750,000.00 world[wide],” which would have been an extraordinary return at the time. Still, given the uncertainty about how long it would take to make the film and exactly how much it would cost, UA didn’t seem eager to provide a substantial advance. Already by November 1933 Roy was meeting with Jock Whitney, the head of Pioneer Pictures and one of the nation’s wealthiest men, about financing the feature, and he was also talking with Darryl Zanuck, the head of production at Twentieth Century Pictures, and Joseph Schenck, their old ally, about putting up the money. Roy thought they all wanted too large a share of the profits, but he wrote Walt that “they seemed sold to [sic] the idea that the first feature cartoon, at least, would be a big success.” Even as the estimated budget kept rising, from $250,000 to $400,000, Schenck, who was one of the few executives the Disneys trusted, yielded and decided to underwrite the entire amount in exchange for a third of the profits, but when he suffered a sudden financial setback and had to pull out, the Disneys were forced to scrape together whatever they could for the time being and postpone getting the rest of the financing until they started actual production. When naysayers said that Roy was buying himself a sweepstakes ticket by investing so much of the studio’s profits in Snow White, he said, “We’ve bought the whole damned sweepstakes.”

  Meanwhile, by the spring of 1934, Walt had launched the first phase of the project: honing the story and writing the screenplay. At live-action studios, executives typically assigned a story to a wri
ter, who then produced a draft. Walt had a different process. He set up a small unit next to his office staffed by several of his cartoon storymen—Dick Creedon, Larry Morey, Harry Bailey—and then began funneling them various versions of the fairy tale with numerous variations, among them the Prince being imprisoned by the Queen, the Queen making three attempts on Snow White’s life, and the Queen dying by dancing herself to death in red-hot shoes. By the time the group began producing outlines that summer, however, Walt’s own recitation seems to have prevailed, and if anyone, amid the flurry of treatments and notes, can be said to be the author of the script, it is Walt Disney himself. When the group first met with Walt in October to review the treatments, Walt was already reprocessing and refining the material and making detailed suggestions: “Birds disturb dwarfs at work—‘The Queen!’ Wham! Over rocks—thru’ the trees—swing on vines—‘Tarzan’ to the rescue—slip off log over stream—down cliffs—sand banks—see Queen beating it.” Or after Snow White has taken a bite from the poisoned apple that the peddler/Queen has tricked her into eating: “Dwarfs back at house—‘Too late.’ Pull hats off—one leads in prayer—Sobbing pierces hush—all weep and sob.” Though they seemed to have sprung directly from Walt’s imagination, these scenes turned out to be very close to the ones in the finished film.