Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  And it wasn’t just perks Walt doled out. The studio paid well too. Animators generally made between $100 and $125 a week, a veritable fortune during the Depression, and the very top animators, like Art Babbitt, brought down as much as $15,000 a year, enough for him to afford three cars and two servants. Despite Roy’s repeated warnings to monitor money closely, Walt refused to skimp. He was constantly on the lookout for any employee who he felt might be underpaid, and he would then instruct the payroll office to make a salary adjustment. “His ambition,” wrote a reporter, “is to pay his employes [sic] well enough for them to save for old age and still enjoy living as they go along.”

  But if this was paternalism, it was paternalism in service of a higher principle—not just efficiency or happiness or public relations or even Walt’s revered quality but a new kind of business organization that promised a new kind of social relationship that harked back to Elias Disney’s old American Society for Equity: Walt Disney wanted to create a haven on earth as he had in his cartoons. He wanted an organization in which everyone would be selfless and happy. Joe Grant remembered working at his desk one Sunday when Walt approached. “‘You know, Joe,’ he said, with a sense of pride at the way things were going, ‘this whole place runs on a kind of Jesus Christ communism,’” doubtless without realizing that he was the Christ. Still, Walt was right that the Disney studio operated differently from any other studio, and from any other business generally for that matter, in its employees’ sense of commitment, and he was not the only one who recognized it. Left-wing observers particularly lauded him for his collective approach to art. New Republic film critic Otis Ferguson, calling Disney a “pioneer in more things than his conception of and tireless experiment with the animation cartoon,” cited Disney’s “conference method” in which artists selflessly pooled their individual talents to make a film. Another critic praised “The Communalistic Art of Walt Disney,” while a third, writing in the leftist New Theatre, extolled the “marvelous creative values engendered by collective collaboration” in Disney’s films. Although in truth the studio was still a cult and individual contributions were always subsumed under Walt Disney’s vision and usually under his name as well, Walt had come to view it as a community of artists united toward one goal. For a man who had long searched for escape into his art, the studio itself now had become an alternative world—a near-perfect world.

  Even so, the organization came no easier than the animations. The tension between creativity and commerce, between doing the work well and making sure it was done profitably, was constant. Although resources had been shifted to Snow White, the studio was nevertheless obligated with the Mickeys and Symphonies to produce a cartoon every two weeks, which meant it had to turn out roughly seventy-five feet of film every day. To meet the schedule, in-betweeners began working nights but now found themselves, as personnel chief Paul Hopkins wrote Walt, “physically unable to produce the work” during the day, since they were now “tired and worn out with the night sessions.” Even with the staff as committed and fulfilled as they were, and even as Walt tried to relieve the pressures of time as best he could, the situation was stressful given the demands of footage and of quality and of the self-imposed desire to do great work. Thomas and Johnston said that the animators felt they were only as good as their last scene and that they always fretted about slipping. Artist Rico Lebrun, who conducted art classes at the studio, claimed, “I have never found a more thoroughly self-critical bunch in my life.” One frazzled animator, asking for a leave to go to another studio, thanked Walt for the release, saying, “I believe it will help me recuperate to some extent.”

  As a utopian, Walt did not like being the taskmaster; he preferred being the muse. When the staff’s self-discipline didn’t suffice to keep them on schedule, he appointed Ben Sharpsteen to enforce some semblance of discipline. Sharpsteen’s own wife said of him, “Ben realizes he is not talented, that he can’t compete. He was fired off of every job he had until Disney.” Bald and bulb-headed with a tiny mustache, Sharpsteen—who had moved on from animation to become head of the training program and then the main director of the shorts and effectively their supervising producer while Walt was focused on Snow White—appeared to be a milquetoast, but he would tyrannize the other directors, who would in turn tyrannize the animators. Next to George Drake, he may have been the least liked person at the studio. Bill Peet said, “He’s OK. He just doesn’t mean well.” Another, less diplomatic underling called him a “son of a bitch,” adding, “and I’m one of his best friends.” Ward Kimball thought Sharpsteen was abusive, especially to younger animators, because he was sensitive about his own inability to draw well, but he also thought that Sharpsteen’s sadism was a payback for the tongue-lashings he suffered from Walt. “The verbal beatings and the sleepless nights I know he had (because I talked to his wife) were a hell of a price to pay for getting his name up there on the screen,” Kimball recalled. Sharpsteen himself said as much: “I was constantly called upon to make decisions in behalf of him. Good decisions rarely received commendation. Errors were dealt with, often rudely.”

  As for balancing creativity and cost, Walt’s constant bane, Walt and Roy hit on a bold new plan in light of the need to speed Snow White. They would take the 20 percent stake in the company that they had bought from Iwerks when he left the studio and hold it in a kind of trust for the employees, doling out bonuses to the best and most efficient of them, though even before the plan was fully implemented, Roy suggested it be revised so that bonuses earned remained with the company to help finance Snow White and then were “to be repaid to the bonus participants if and when the feature is finished and pays its way out.” In short, the staff would be well rewarded if the film was well received.

  Beginning in 1934, Walt had handed out bonuses, $32,000 that year, at his own discretion. “I was always trying to find ways that I could compensate my employees, if possible, that I was building the organization for them as well as myself,” he would later testify, not entirely self-servingly. But as the studio grew and as the need to expedite production intensified early in 1936, Walt felt he was no longer capable of determining who deserved compensation. Decisions on incentives had to be made objectively, even scientifically. Under the new bonus system, each animator’s salary was to be charged to an account. The animator and the director would settle on how much he was to draw. Once the cartoon—or in the case of Snow White, the scene—was finished, his work was to be rated on its quality by a panel of supervisors; a price per foot had been established for each grade on a sliding scale from eight dollars a foot for grade A animation to four dollars for grade C. To determine the animator’s bonus, if any, the grade would be multiplied by the footage he contributed. Anything that exceeded his salary would be paid to him, and anyone who consistently exceeded his salary would be awarded a permanent adjustment the following year.

  Not everyone appreciated the new system. “Nobody liked it really,” said Sharpsteen with some hyperbole, “except for a few smart chiselers who somehow had a way of making it look good for them.” Slower animators were obviously disadvantaged, which was the whole point, and some complained that better animators were forced to redo the work of poorer ones with no compensation. Moreover, those animators who worked on features felt that they were more difficult to rate since the work itself was more difficult than the work on shorts. Nor was the scale as objective as it was purported to be. Walt still closely examined each film and dabbled in making ad hoc adjustments, believing that the animators had to be amply rewarded if they were to do their best work. As Ward Kimball remembered it, “Some sort of magic light would shine over the studio…and all of a sudden you might get a raise.” Though the bonus system would later have some devastating repercussions, in the near term, for all its flaws, it had its intended effect. It seemed to expedite production, particularly on the shorts, without necessarily sacrificing quality. It seemed to rein in costs. It seemed to give the animators a greater financial stake in the studio. Above a
ll, it seemed to create an even deeper sense of loyalty and dedication. As one employee expressed it to Walt after receiving his bonus, “I definitely intend to do all I possibly can to uphold my responsibility to you and the firm.”

  Walt would need it.

  IV

  And so finally in February 1936—after nearly three years of incessant tinkering, after the training sessions, the ongoing recruitments, the expansion of the studio, and the establishment of the bonus system—the animation of Snow White began. But even as the staff drew its roughs and continued to experiment, Walt’s passion did not abate. He was still fiddling, still agonizing, still reviewing the script with his staff scene by scene for three or more hours at a time several times each week and on weekends too—scenes that he had already been laboring over and picking at for years. It was as if he couldn’t let go, possibly because he knew that since he couldn’t draw it himself, he would be yielding his absolute control over the film once it was being animated. Frank Thomas said that Walt was involved with Snow White “night and day, night and day. Walt lived every sprocket hole of this film.” Milt Kahl agreed: “It was the love of his life at that time.”

  Every week that winter right through the fall revised continuities would arrive from the story department, continuities that Walt had largely dictated, and every week Walt would pore over them again, making suggestions. “Open with dancing—Happy playing organ and different instruments by the various dwarfs,” he advised at one typical story session on the sequence in which the dwarfs stage an entertainment for Snow White, “—finish it—folk dancing idea—concentrate on the stuff that would fit that—then a specialty, each dwarf wrote himself—then get gadget stuff—then Snow White wants to hear something else—then the Lady in the Moon [a song]—when they finish—they want her to do something and she tells them a love story—‘Once upon a time’—very dramatic—we haven’t touched the possibilities.” Within a three-week period a single scene could be subjected to as many as five lengthy meetings.

  And always, as he had been doing for years now, he would recite the story to anyone who would listen and to many who had already listened, anything from a short version to the full three-hour performance. Even as late as December 1936, after much of the rough animation had been completed and some had been okayed for cleanup, Walt was still telling the story in its entirety at a meeting—every cut, every fade-out, every line of dialogue. “[H]e was telling it all the time,” Eric Larson remembered. “He would sit down and just talk to any of us about it, and he would tell the whole story maybe in five minutes. He was so enthused about it.” Joe Grant said he drove the staff crazy. “Every time he’d come into a room where the storyboards were, he’d tell the whole story of the film over again, from the beginning to the end, to make sure nobody got anything wrong.” Grant said he must have heard these performances three or four dozen times, but each was slightly different. Each time Walt would incorporate something new from the continuities, some small bit of business that one of the writers or animators might have added, so that he was constantly revising and refining verbally. As Sharpsteen described it, “Whether he used the idea in total or greatly modified, the idea had to become part of him.”

  Some of his contributions were conceptual. It was Walt who decided that the woods into which Snow White escapes should be alive and foreboding: “It would be good for her [Snow White] to be caught in the bushes showing these grotesque hands, then the wind and all the things that frighten her. Have it lead to things that make her think things are alive, but at the same time the audience should have a feeling that it is all in her mind…. Like the thorns changing back from hands to thorns.” Some were dramatic. Of the scene in which the Queen’s huntsman is about to kill Snow White before her innocence shames and converts him, Walt suggested that Snow White bend over to tend to a sick baby bird. “[S]he is stooped over which gives you a swell position for the knife in the back,” he suggested. “Let the menace come in there where she kissed the bird and the bird perked up and flew away—it has a connection for the Huntsman to soften.” Others were psychological. He was always thinking not only of what would work on the screen but how the characters would feel. It must be Grumpy, Walt decided, who cries when he finds Snow White comatose from eating the poisoned apple while the others’ eyes just mist up: “Let him break right down. Hard exterior, soft inside.” Still other contributions were minute details, some of which were debated endlessly. In the scene in which the dwarfs return to their cottage and realize that someone may be lurking inside, should a pair of empty shoes into which frogs had leaped chase Dopey, run past him, or keep in step with him? (In the final version, it was none of these.) Even so, Walt proclaimed, “I like good comedy stuff, but I think we will have to tie the shoes in differently…our continuity as a whole is more important than one gag.” And once done, nothing was too small for correction. Watching a sweatbox of an early scene animated by Eric Larson, Walt noted of a dwarf, “his fanny in the last half of scene is too high,” and “Have hummingbird make four pick-ups instead of six.” Even his offhand remarks could find their way into the film, as when Walt suggested during the scene of the dwarfs in the mine that “Dopey could come in and see two stones and clown. Put them in his eyes.” He was visualizing the entire movie, shot by shot, gag by gag, detail by detail, as if there were a projector in his head.

  And that is why, for all the talk of collaboration, no one at the studio doubted that the job was less to exhibit his own talent than to realize on screen what Walt was visualizing in his head. Indeed, there was a stenographer at each story session so that Walt’s suggestions could be distributed and interpreted like holy writ. When Walt was describing, this was easy. But when he was brainstorming, tossing out ideas one after another, it could cause problems. One of the most frequent complaints at the studio had always been that one often couldn’t know what Walt wanted because Walt couldn’t always articulate it unless he acted it out. On Snow White this was especially harrowing for the staff. “It was often difficult to know precisely what Walt saw in a piece of business,” Thomas and Johnston wrote, “and after each meeting there would be some disagreement over what he had said, and even more confusion over what he had meant.” It was Ham Luske who usually clarified. “Someone would say that Walt said he wants it like this. Ham would say, ‘No, that’s not what he means. This is what he means.’” What Walt meant was the guide.

  “What we are trying to do with Walt is build the picture as he sees it,” Dave Hand, Snow White’s supervising director, told the staff. “We have got to trust in one man’s judgment or we won’t have a good picture.” In later years the animator Joseph Barbera, a Disney rival, would joke of the old Disney animators he encountered that “everyone who had ever been associated with Walt Disney either created ‘The Three Little Pigs’ or Snow White.” But despite this arrogation Wilfred Jackson believed that the animators were really irrelevant and that Walt was the only one who really mattered. “It is my opinion,” he told Thomas and Johnston, “that if Walt had started in some different place at the same time with a different bunch of guys, the result would have been more or less along the same lines.” Snow White belonged to Walt Disney, just as Walt Disney belonged to Snow White.

  After months of preliminary animation, roughing out the action, and pencil testing, the artists began the final animation that summer of 1936* with almost as much trepidation as Walt was displaying in giving final approval to the story. Bill Tytla said that the animators were “all walking on tiptoes on that one. We didn’t know what to expect. We were full of all kinds of emotions.” Everyone realized that they were embarking on something new and important. “There is a lot of stuff you can get by with in shorts that you cannot get by with here,” Tytla told an action analysis class that December, “and Walt won’t let the poor stuff get by…. He has mentioned that certain business in sweatbox would be damned good for the shorts, but it would not do for the feature.” Drawings for shorts were predicated, he said, on the simple s
hape of the ball, which, when inked, yielded a “hard, incisive line.” For the feature there was a need for texture—“texture of the flesh, the jowls of the dwarfs, the drawing into the eyes, the mouth, the texture of the hair and of old cloth.” Tytla suggested that they even try to get personality in the texture of the dwarf’s hands. And he added menacingly, “[T]hey are strict with me in getting what they want—and that will go all the way down the line.” Ted Sears wrote a memo expressing similar concerns on the story side. The feature required subtlety, but there was always the danger of being too subtle: “I think they’re afraid that this subtleness cannot be fully brought out in a cartoon character.” At the same time Ham Luske warned putative in-betweeners and assistants that if they approached the feature with too much reverence and reservation, it would suffer. “The one thing I don’t want you to do is figure that this is a feature—and—consequently that we must make very careful individual drawings that are more carefully drawn than those on the shorts,” Luske advised. “We want good work, but not hair line stuff that will tighten animation up.”

  As the animation began in this state of tension and anxiety, rivalries gradually surfaced in a studio that only a few months before had prided itself on its collegiality—rivalries less for Walt’s favor than over who was better at realizing his ideas. Some storymen objected that the animators were not maximizing the material, and the story department posted a sign: “It was funny when it left here!” Among the animators themselves factions now emerged, which led to sniping. Sharpsteen said that the new recruits regarded themselves and were regarded by others as “arty,” while the old-timers, especially lower-rated animators and assistants, were “dedicated to getting laughs.” The first group thought that the second wasn’t up to the emotional demands of Snow White, while the second thought that the first didn’t understand entertainment. “I don’t know what they’re looking for around here anymore,” Burt Gillett, who had returned to the studio, complained. “Experience doesn’t seem to matter for anything. They’ve got a bunch of smart kids around here you’re not supposed to touch.” Animator Bill Roberts called the art school graduates a “bunch of Cinderellas.”