Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  By the time he began making assignments, Walt had settled on four supervising animators—Luske, Moore, Tytla, and Ferguson—who would be responsible for scenes and to whom the other animators would report. He still needed a supervising director to coordinate the supervising animators and make certain that the film was of a piece and not a collection of scenes with distinctive styles. Initially, he appointed an old animator-turned-storyman, Harry Bailey, because, Dick Huemer surmised, Bailey was tall and handsome and Walt was impressed by good looks. When Bailey faltered, Walt approached Bill Cottrell, his longtime employee and at the time the suitor of Lilly’s sister, Hazel. Cottrell admitted that Dave Hand, who was directing shorts and who was a tough political infighter, wanted the assignment, so Walt turned to him. (Disappointed, Cottrell said that if Walt had really wanted him to direct, he would have said no to Hand.) Hand said that “all the key animators were thought of as ice cream sundaes, and I was described as another one, except with the cherry on top,” but he modestly emphasized that “I was honestly never conscious of existing jealousy between any of the other coworkers and me—only full cooperation always.” As a consolation and because there was far too much for one man to direct, Walt divided the scenes, thirty-two of them including the titles, among Cottrell, Ben Sharpsteen, Jaxon, a sententious, pipe-smoking storyman improbably named Perce Pearce, and Luske, who now doubled as animator and sequence director.

  But even with all the talent now in place, one giant logistical obstacle remained. In making the shorts, the animators had never felt any confusion between drawing a scene and drawing the characters within it, because the scenes generally contained so few characters that one man could do most of the work. In making his assignments on Snow White, Walt married certain animators to certain characters (for example, Moore to the dwarfs, Babbitt to the Queen, Natwick to Snow White), but he also delegated animators to draw certain scenes. Since characters obviously appeared in more than one scene, the two approaches conflicted. You could have different animators drawing the same characters in different scenes and hope for continuity, or you could have the same animators drawing the same characters in each scene and hope that the scene itself would maintain its integrity and that the individual drawings would relate to one another. Oddly enough, as important a question as this was, Walt never satisfactorily resolved it, creating a good deal more confusion and chaos than the hierarchy would have suggested, since some animators sought to follow their character from scene to scene while others worked on entire scenes.

  And to this chaos was added one more crisis just as they embarked on animation early in 1936. For all the recruiting and all the training, the studio simply did not have enough animators to do the grunt work of in-betweening and cleaning up, much less the secondary animation. They needed animators, and they needed them very quickly. By one account, Walt called in Don Graham and said, “I need 300 artists—get them.” By this time Sharpsteen, with his obligations on Snow White, had been relieved of overseeing the training program. (He later made a point of saying that Walt never thanked him for what he had done.) In his place was a screaming hatchet-faced martinet named George Drake whom Sharpsteen had originally brought into the studio as an in-betweener and whom he then assigned to supervise in-betweeners-in-training while Sharpsteen himself broke in the greenhorns. (Drake was widely believed to be Sharpsteen’s brother-in-law, which was a source of his authority, though he was only a distant relative and no real friend.)

  With their seemingly impossible assignment, Drake and Graham left for New York that March and set themselves up in a seven-room suite in the RKO Building that M. H. Aylesworth, RKO’s chairman, had secured for them at the last minute. By placing ads in New York papers, they attracted would-be animators for what amounted to a trial course, though Drake and Graham were so discriminating that out of the seven hundred initial applicants they chose only thirty-two, thus underenrolling their courses. Walt wrote back suggesting not that they compromise their standards—Walt would never have advised that—but that they stay longer, which they did. When the mission ended, on July 1, it had cost the studio $15,000 and had provided many fewer than the hundreds Walt had wanted, while incurring some resentment at the studio among the young animators already there. Though it was difficult to determine the yield, especially since Walt was asking that promising candidates immediately be sent to the studio, the final group that Drake and Graham dispatched to California consisted of only twenty-two—out of more than two thousand hopefuls.

  Even then the recruits weren’t secure. The earlier group of prospects—among them Reitherman, Larson, Kimball, Kahl, Thomas, Johnston, Lounsbery, and Davis—had been indoctrinated by Graham and then mentored by Walt’s first generation of master animators: Ham Luske, Fred Moore, Norm Ferguson, and Grim Natwick. But the current novitiates were entrusted to George Drake, once called the most hated man at Disney, who kept them under his whip hand during what amounted to a one-month trial that consisted largely of animating test assignments. “George had huge ears, great and red and wiggly,” recalled Ken Anderson, one of his trainees, “and they lit up as he jumped up and down while screaming.” Drake terrorized them, but he was the one they had to please, even though his own work was less than stellar. “During that one month period Drake kept us on edge by continually pacing the hall and popping in on us at odd moments,” wrote Bill Peet, another trainee. “Every few days one or two of the group were let go, and as it came down to the last week we wondered if Drake would fire all of us.”

  It was agonizing, but those who survived moved on to Graham’s classes and the other benefits that the studio showered upon its employees. Those who survived entered the very privileged precincts at the very apex of animation.

  III

  To be one of the roughly five hundred employees at the Walt Disney Studio in the mid-1930s as it began Snow White was to be swept up in a frenzy of exhilaration. One observer said that it was “so far in advance of the times that it became a place of pilgrimage, not only for Mickey devotees but for anyone interested in the growth of a contemporary experiment in art and entertainment.” Grim Natwick called it a “mythical sun around which the other studios orbited.” “Each new picture contained breathtaking improvements,” Thomas and Johnston would write, “the effects were better, the animation had more life, and the whole studio had an upward momentum. It was like being a player on a winning team! To us, all this was pure magic.” Another compared the animators to the disciples of Michelangelo: “We were part of a thing that was maybe going to last.” There was very little griping and virtually no competition among the employees, only camaraderie. Work was joy. “It wasn’t that you had to do these things,” Marc Davis said. “You wanted to do them. You were so proud. Every write-up the studio got, everybody went out and got it. Very few people have ever, as a group, experienced that type of excitement.”

  The spirit was so immense that it could barely be contained within the studio, almost as if it were pushing Hyperion’s physical boundaries, which in some sense it was. With the anticipation of Snow White, said background artist Maurice Noble, “the whole studio grew like Topsy.” After erecting a two-story animation building in 1931, with the neon sign on top, the Disneys had bought lots along Hyperion Avenue and purchased other tracts on Griffith Park Boulevard, which angled down from the north to Hyperion. The adjoining organ chimes factory at the intersection of Griffith Park and Hyperion that had driven the animators to distraction for so long was either razed or renovated for Roy’s new office, a dining and conference room, and the accounting department. When the staff outgrew the first animation building, another two-story building with 11,200 square feet of space, the centerpiece of the entire studio, was constructed directly behind it in the spring and summer of 1934, shortly after production on Snow White commenced. The animators were stationed on the first floor, and the projection rooms, replacing the sweatboxes though still called by that term, were located on the second. An ink and paint building was erected in the spring
of 1935, beyond the soundstage, followed that fall by an apprentice animators’ building, known variously as the annex or the incubator—because its roof reminded Walt of the chicken coops in Marceline—across the street. This was the place where George Drake held forth and where the in-betweeners—who had been toiling in the sweltering basement of the animation building, nicknamed the “bullpen”—now slaved. To accommodate the growing staff, two low-slung temporary wooden structures called “boxcars” were erected at the back of the lot on Griffith Park Boulevard. Still, there was not enough room for the Snow White army, and the studio spilled down the street and through the neighborhood into apartment buildings, offices, and bungalows—“any structure that was near and could house artists and storymen,” as Thomas and Johnston put it. The story department was relocated across the parking lot to an old two-story stucco apartment house along Griffith Park Boulevard where the writers, according to one, “occupied all of the living rooms, bedrooms, dining rooms, and kitchenettes.” By the time the expansion was finished, the studio had twelve buildings on five acres with a total replacement value of $187,000.

  Yet for all its apparent clutter and jumble, most visitors found it, as Bill Tytla enthused, “a beautiful plant,” with its little grass courtyard off Hyperion, a Ping Pong table on one side and a small garage with miniature cars for Mickey and Minnie on the other, and its flagstone walkway leading to the new animation building. One observer said it looked like a “small municipal kindergarten with green grass for the children to keep off of and, on the roof, a gigantic glorious figure of Mickey to show them the best way.” Another visitor called it a “quaint, cozy look appropriate for a company dealing with fun and fantasy.”

  The interiors were no less fanciful, at least after the construction of the new animation building. “In the first place, everything was painted in bright tints of raspberry, light blue, and gleaming white, no institutional greens or bilious browns like the other studios,” recalled Shamus Culhane, a young animator then. Where furniture at the New York studios looked as if it “had been stolen from the Salvation Army,” at Disney “[e]ach animation team had its own room with three beautifully designed desks, upholstered chairs, cupboards for storing work in progress, and most amazing of all…each room had a moviola.” “The desk furniture was something!” Ward Kimball concurred. “They decided to use a Spanish motif because the first building that was built on Hyperion had the Spanish roof tile, so this tile prevailed throughout the studio.” In keeping with the style, the animation desks were painted white with sienna red trim. “Then they sprayed a kind of dirty umber mixture inside the shelves and in the corners to give an aged or antique effect. Early Hyperion Spanish!”

  When most recalled the studio, however, it was not as a kindergarten or hacienda but as a college campus—“maybe an Ivy League campus,” said one employee, “as there was a feeling of exclusivity.” For all the intense pressures to get the work done and do it well, hard backbreaking work that required one to sit hunched over a hot drawing board hour after hour—in fact because of the pressures—the old spirit of collegiate jocularity and informality prevailed, intensified, no doubt, by the relative youth of the staff; by one report, the average age of the employees in the mid-1930s was twenty-five. Walt’s secretary, Carolyn Schaefer, issued a mimeographed newsletter each month called The Mickey Mouse Melodeon that spread studio gossip. With Walt’s blessing Pinto Colvig, a storyman and voice artist, started a twenty-five-piece studio band. At lunchtime the staff might head across the street to the annex, where Walt had set up a volleyball court for a match, or they might hurry to the vacant lot next to the soundstage or, when that was built upon, to the lot on Hyperion for a game of baseball, with the married men usually playing the single ones. Walt often played too, invariably getting on base thanks to his employees’ largesse, even though he was still a clumsy athlete. “If he was called out, he was furious,” remembered one player.

  As the vise tightened with Snow White, the sophomoric pranks only became more frequent and elaborate. Fred Moore, who had mastered the art of throwing the pushpins that held drawings to the storyboards, would take two in each hand and fling them at the ceiling so that the ceiling tiles were eventually dotted with pushpins. Or Ward Kimball and fellow animator Walt Kelly would play football in the hallways. Or Kimball would arrive at work dressed in a gorilla outfit. Or Milt Kahl would back up to the vent leading from the lavatory to the in-betweeners’ bullpen and pass gas. Or some pranksters would put a goldfish in Art Babbitt’s water cooler. One storyman who kept a small pet turtle at the studio couldn’t understand why the turtle grew so rapidly nor why it then just as rapidly shrank. The fellow’s colleagues had substituted a series of other turtles for the pet. A visiting reporter described the studio as a “psychiatrist’s heaven” and a “madhouse,” and one new artist wrote friends, “If this is not a crazy house, then I don’t know what is.” Walt didn’t intervene, though he did complain about the pushpins in the ceiling, and he was forced to issue an edict against “too much visiting from one room to another…I don’t mean by this that in order to be conscientious you have to stick to your drawing board every minute of the day; but if you want to get up and relax, don’t do it at someone else’s expense.” More commonly, after some prank he would say, “Why don’t you get some of that in the pictures?”

  Animators and storymen found two more consolations from the pressures—drink and sex. Typically animators drank heavily, both to relieve their tension and to loosen their inhibitions; alcoholism was practically an occupational hazard, though it may also have had something to do with the fact that the kind of men who were attracted to animation were likely to be emotionally stunted and loners, lost in their own heads. Every afternoon at four o’clock a traffic boy delivered beer to the animators, and they often retired afterward to Leslie’s Bar near the studio. “Maybe more ideas were quenched than born in our frequent forays to favorite bars for liquid inspiration,” recalled Jack Kinney. “But somehow the next day we’d pour out new ideas like the bartender had poured drinks the night before.” As they were boozy, they were also randy. Occasionally someone would bring a stag film to the studio, and the animators would sit enthralled. Other times, to relieve the stress, they would spend hours drawing pornographic cartoons featuring the Disney characters. Though an informal policy forbade mingling between male and female employees (a large group of young women worked nearby in ink and paint), the animators never lacked female companionship—what Jack Kinney called “dipping your pen in company ink.” (According to Kinney, animators who took their girls to hotels often signed the register “Ben Sharpsteen,” using the name of their erstwhile supervisor, who was their antagonist.) One employee said he knew of at least thirty-five couples at the studio where “Cupid’s arrows struck hard and often.” Many of them wound up marrying, though casual sex was the more likely outcome. Answering a questionnaire, Milt Kahl listed his hobby as “sexual intercourse,” and Art Babbitt gained a certain prestige among his colleagues for his reputation as a playboy.

  Yet for all the daily hilarity and fun, the ease and informality at the Disney studio had never been accidental or incidental. It was essential to Walt Disney—even more essential now that they were making Snow White. If the film, through the character of Snow White, traced Walt’s own maturation, it also limned his own sense of insecurity within his family and his ongoing search for a community or surrogate family to which he could belong and from which he could draw emotional sustenance—the family that Snow White finds in the dwarfs. Walt Disney, then, was not just producing a cartoon. In the very organization of the studio and in the means of production, he was creating an environment, the establishment of which was in its way every bit as important a mission for him as the cartoon feature itself. Put simply, the studio would replicate the cartoon.

  From the Red Cross to DeMolay to Laugh-O-Gram to his first studio in Los Angeles on Kingswell Avenue, Walt had always loved social organizations, always loved to forge people i
nto a happy unit—“Walt’s big happy family,” one reporter described the Hyperion studio. Some regarded it as paternalism, and certainly his management style contained an element of that. “Dad wanted to take care of everybody,” his daughter Diane said. “He wanted to know if an employee was sick or needed something. He knew about everybody’s personal lives.” From this same impulse he made sure that working conditions at the studio were exemplary. As the rather haphazard arrangement for Snow White indicated, the studio had no formal organization chart, just Walt’s hunches. It had no time clock to punch either, because Walt had resented having to punch one at the Kansas City Film Ad Co. Employees could take three sick days in any given week with full pay before anyone investigated, and if the excuse was legitimate, they would continue to be paid while they convalesced. Before Snow White Walt typically closed the studio in mid-August, giving his employees a long vacation, and select employees were granted even longer breaks. “I want you to take advantage of this vacation period to the fullest extent,” he wrote Bill Garity, the onetime sound engineer who became Walt’s production manager early in the summer of 1934. “Get out and go some place—the World’s Fair is still on—then there’s Hawaii, Cuba, New York, Alaska and many, many other places of interest—anyway do something that you will enjoy and come back to the Studio feeling great and rarin’ to work.” Even as they were gearing up for Snow White, anyone who had been with the studio a full year as of July 1, 1935, was granted a two-week vacation.