Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  But Walt wasn’t thinking only in terms of new narrative departures. He was thinking of The Concert Feature as an entirely new kind of theatrical experience. Watching a Pete Smith short called Audioscopiks, for which he donned special glasses to see a three-dimensional effect, Walt got the idea of using a similar effect for a sequence in his film and attaching glasses to the top of the program, and he set one of his special effects men to work on it. He also discussed with Stokowski the possibility of wafting perfume into the theater during the scenes with flowers. “I’m serious about this whole perfume idea,” he told Stokowski. “You could space the perfume to come in only at certain times.” Most of all, he latched onto the idea of devising a new sound reproduction system for the movie, one with a speaker at the front and center of the theater and other speakers to the left and right and down the sides to convey a sense of a full orchestra. “It would be quite a sensation if you get that dimensional thing on the screen and have the horns working with it,” Walt said. “The sound and pictures will be around you.” He called it Fantasound.

  That fall, as he was concocting new ways of presenting his film, he began working through the visuals with the same determination and enthusiasm that he had lavished on the music. For “Toccata and Fugue” he had decided to put the oscillations of the optical sound track on the screen and dispense with any representational depictions, but he warned special effects man Cy Young, “We don’t want to follow what anyone else has done in the abstract.” For “Night on Bald Mountain,” Walt had the idea of having the devil playing either a violin or an organ and rising from the depths of a volcano—“a sort of mad musician, gloating over the effect his music has on the spirits.” Later—in fact, at a three-and-a-half-hour-long meeting on the afternoon of the studio concert—he had elaborated the idea into the devil as a “huge Gulliver in the village with his cloak blowing and all these spirits around these houses,” which would be accompanied by the sound of a wind sweeping across the theater, thanks to the new sound system. For “Cydalise,” Walt thought of centaurs and fauns frolicking on an Elysian Field where an old faun is holding class at a mythological music school and keeps having to scold a smart-alecky young faun; then he decided to add a scene with centaurettes and a finale in which the fauns chase the centaurettes. But he had doubts about the fauns—“If you treat them as being cute, you can’t be too cruel to them”—thinking that centaurs might serve just as well, and he began to doubt whether the music itself fit the images he had in mind. When Dick Huemer suggested that they hire Stravinsky to write something, Walt countered, “Those guys don’t work that way,” though he was so confident of his efforts that he told Huemer he could foresee the time when composers would write for animation as they wrote for the stage.

  For “Dance of the Hours” Walt, citing the illustrations of Heinrich Kley, imagined a ballet of animals, with each group representing a different time of day—ostriches (dawn), hippopotamuses (day), elephants (evening), and alligators (night)—but he objected to any “obvious slapstick type of stuff” to which the animals might lend themselves. “I think the main thing we must keep in mind is that the animals are serious,” Walt told his story crew. “They are not clowning.” He wanted real personality. “It could be some big fat person up there trying to do a ballet. That’s what we are going to drive for, and we will have animators who can give us that.” By November Walt was having young Marjorie Belcher, who had served as the live model for Snow White, perform on film to give the animators suggestions, though Walt himself seemed inspired too, tossing off ideas with the same excitement and detail as he had on Snow White. Visualizing a dance between a hippo and the alligator, he said, “I think there at the end the guy finally just lets her drop, boom, and it bounces everything in the background…. You see the expression on her face—blank and immediately she goes into one of those poses.”

  “The Nutcracker Suite” was harder, in part because it had several sections. At first, Walt had the idea of fading in from Stokowski leading his orchestra to his leading an orchestra of bugs in a kind of overture. That would lead into a March Processional, the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy with dewdrops, and a Russian Dance with turtles that would segue into the Chinese Dance featuring “lizards with flowers on their heads like Chinese hats,” who perform before a mandarin frog, and the Arab Dance using “little animals.” The finale would be a Flower Ballet following the blossoms through the seasons. As Walt described it, a “ballerina comes out—a graceful, beautiful girl—and she puts a little sex into the damn thing…. When she whirls up, you see the panties and her little butt—it will be swell! The audience will rave if you can make them feel Sex in a flower.” At the end leaves would fall over the dancers as the flowers exhaust themselves. As the leaves continued to fall, the film would return to the orchestra, now in shadow.

  But on The Concert Feature nothing was set in stone. By November, Walt had reconsidered, then reincorporated, and finally dropped the overture entirely (“You mean it’s okay?” Walt asked his staff incredulously as he would never have asked on Snow White. “I expected a battle”), replaced the turtles of the Russian Dance with thistles, and eliminated the little animals of the Arab Dance for what he called “an underwater extravaganza embodying all types of marine plant life and beautiful fish.” The one section that still troubled him was the Chinese Dance. He felt that they hadn’t quite found the exact visual correlative. But he did fasten on one element he liked. “[T]here’s something very valuable in these little mushrooms that look like Chinese characters,” Walt said at the story meeting. “Take the little mushrooms—there’s something there that will be very cute, and people will remember it—every time they look at a mushroom after that they’ll try to see those Chinese.” By January 1939, the March Processional had gone the way of the overture, the lizards and the frog mandarin were gone, and the mushrooms had become the stars of the segment.

  The sequence that really fired Walt’s imagination, however, was Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Walt had already contacted Stravinsky in April 1938 about the possibility of using The Firebird in The Concert Feature, though that plan was ultimately scrapped. But Stravinsky’s name arose again in September, when Walt, Taylor, and Stokowski were poring over scores and Walt suddenly asked if there was a piece of music to which they could stage “something of a prehistoric theme—with prehistoric animals.” Taylor immediately answered, Le Sacre du Printemps,* and Walt, without pausing, began to visualize: “There would be something terrific in dinosaurs, flying lizards and prehistoric monsters.” When Stokowski had the piece played, Walt was ecstatic. “This is marvelous!” he said, and once again described prehistoric animals and cavemen. “This prehistoric thing would be something entirely different from anything we have done. It would be grotesque and exaggerated.”

  Now Walt was soaring. If The Concert Feature provided a new direction from his previous work, The Rite of Spring provided a new direction from anything else in The Concert Feature. When some who had attended the studio concert griped that the piece was too long and downbeat, Walt dismissed their complaints—“The happy ending again!”—and rhapsodized, “I feel there is an awful lot that we have wanted to do for a long time and have never had the opportunity or excuse, but when you take pieces of music like this, you really have reason to do what we want to do.” What Walt wanted to do was trace the history of the earth beginning with the creation and ending with man triumphing over his environment by using his intellect—not only animation as an act of creation but animation as Creation itself. It should look, he told one animator, “as though the studio had sent an expedition back to the earth 6 million years ago,” and at Joe Grant’s suggestion, he decided to ask the esteemed science fiction writer H. G. Wells to vouch for the film’s scientific accuracy. Though Walt later gave up the idea of man’s evolution and triumph—one associate said he didn’t want to antagonize Christian fundamentalists—he never surrendered the basic idea of a cosmic cataclysm that would test the bounds of animation. �
�That’s what I see in the last half,” he said. “Continual volcanoes—the sea was lashed into a fury. Get the volcanoes and the lava and the sea and everything—the animals trying to escape. End that with the big blowup somewhere. Something blows up big to finish the fourth side [of the record] there.” In effect, Walt was playing the sorcerer’s apprentice, orchestrating the forces of nature.

  Of course, this was Walt’s personal interpretation of the music. Stravinsky had written The Rite of Spring not as a musical rendition of creation or evolution but as a celebration of American Indian rituals, and some on Walt’s own staff felt that reimagining the score this way did an injustice to the music, though Walt tried to justify himself by saying that Stravinsky had once admitted he was striking primitive themes. Others objected that no one would take the dinosaurs seriously and that the segment would be derided. Walt pondered this charge and for a while he considered making the whole sequence comic. “It will be safer and we will have more fun making it, and I think we will make something good,” he told his story department in an abrupt about-face, and then began imitating how dinosaurs walked, hobbling around the room with bent knees and sticking out his rump. Within a week, though, Walt had regained his bearings and was back uninhibitedly free-associating to the music: “Something like that last WHAHUMMPH I feel is a volcano—yet it’s on land. I get that UGHHH WAHUMMPH! on land, but we can look out on the water before this and see water spouts.” At the end, he said, “there’s a sort of stop…. pulsating like an old steam engine…. Chuh! CHUH!…CHSSSSSH.” He got himself so worked up as he listened that he blurted, “Stravinsky will say: ‘Jesus, I didn’t know I wrote that music.’”

  By this time Walt’s mother had died and Stokowski had left the studio to fulfill other obligations, though he told Walt that he could always be there within a few hours should Walt need him, and the film was in a temporary limbo. When Stokowski returned in January 1939, Walt was ready. Together over the next two months they reviewed the scores, reexamined the continuities, looked at Leica reels, and organized the sequences so that there would be a rhythm to the film. They even decided to remove “Cydalise” and replace it with a segment from Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the “Pastorale,” for the faun and centaur section. “If you had selected any other Beethoven Symphony,” Deems Taylor wrote Stuart Buchanan, who was in charge of the musical rights at the studio, “I would say nix; too dangerous. You can’t monkey with the Master.” But the “Pastorale,” he felt, was lighthearted enough for one to take some liberties with it, besides which, “Beethoven was a good deal of a pagan himself, and would have liked nothing better than to meet up with a gang of fauns and centaurettes.”

  By March, Stokowski had departed once again, this time to return to Philadelphia to record the sound track. Walt joined him a few weeks later for the sessions at the Academy of Music, and though the maestro chafed at some of the restrictions—he had to station different sections of the orchestra between partitions for better sound reproduction and had to listen to a “click track” as he conducted to keep the tempo for the animation—Stuart Buchanan wrote Walt that “Mr. Stokowski is a little difficult at times, but I think we are managing him alright.” In fact, by at least one account, Stokowski was happier with the recordings than were Bill Garity, the studio’s engineer, and Leigh Harline, its musical director. In any case, at the end of April Walt was heading back to the studio with the recordings finished. Now all they had to do was animate the film.

  But he also had Pinocchio to contend with, and he needed to get it finished before too much time had elapsed and the studio lost its momentum. In just over six months he had managed to work out The Concert Feature. Pinocchio had always been a much more stubborn proposition, and even before the key animation had started, the film was already well over budget. He spent much of the summer and early fall sweatboxing scenes and presented a rough assemblage to his employees on the studio soundstage that September. The response was less than enthusiastic, though Walt dismissed most of the criticism. “There’s certain guys that write you these long letters…and they’ll criticize everything up and down,” Walt sniped, even though his was the most critical voice at the studio, “and I have known certain ones that go for art, and they don’t even know what the hell art is themselves.” In any case, he left a few days later with Lillian for a three-week vacation to Hawaii. He would be less dismissive when he returned from his holiday and showed the rough to Joe Rosenberg of the Bank of America and Ned Depinet and George Schaefer of RKO on October 26. “These people had come to examine the picture under special and very unusual circumstances,” publicist William Levy wrote Walt later that week, clearly trying to rally him from what had apparently been a less-than-satisfying preview, and closed, “I consider it can and should outgross ‘Snow White’ in every normal market by a considerable margin.”

  But Walt himself wasn’t so sure. He bragged to the Bambi crew that the enforced extra time on Pinocchio, when they had had to reconceptualize the film, had actually paid dividends because the animators, with the benefit of live action and dialogue tracks, now had a firmer grasp on the characters—firmer even than they had had on the characters in Snow White. Rather than operate within the kind of loose arrangement that had prevailed on Snow White, where animators were often shuttled where they were needed, the directors of Pinocchio were working with the animators in small units on single characters and even doing their own sweatboxing so that there was never a need to call in, say, Fred Moore to explain the characters as Walt had had to do on Snow White. Walt was so satisfied with the way the directors and animators had internalized the characters that he thought every feature should be organized this way from now on: a director and a chief animator responsible for each character working with his own crew of checkers, in-betweeners, and cleanup men.

  Yet Walt knew the system sounded better and more efficient than it really was. He admitted that because some animators could only draw Pinocchio and others only the cricket, certain scenes didn’t “jell so well.” Worse, because directors and animators were working exclusively on their own sequences without much coordination among them, they were blindered to the rest of the film, especially since Walt, who had provided this coordination on Snow White, was preoccupied at the time with The Concert Feature. “The whole damn thing was a mixed-up operation,” animator Milt Kahl later said. “They had multiple directors…. Either four units or five directorial units. And then each guy was inclined to…I don’t know, his sequence became the most important in the picture…. If you were left with all the sequences [at] the length the directors wanted them, the picture would have run six hours.” Art director Ken O’Connor agreed that the film was something of a muddle: “You had people trying to outdo each other…. I always found it remarkable that the features hung together as well as they did.”

  With Pinocchio’s release targeted for Christmas 1939, the studio found itself once again racing toward completion. “We worked every night all through the preceding months, and we were all just absolutely exhausted,” remembered painter Jane Patterson. Though the release was rescheduled to February, the staff still had to work on Christmas Eve. But that night at about nine-thirty the doors of the ink and paint department opened and in came Walt, a porkpie hat on his head, silently pushing a laundry cart. In the cart were Christmas presents for the girls—compacts and cigarette cases, each “beautifully wrapped.” “Walt didn’t wish anyone a merry Christmas,” Jane Patterson recalled. “He didn’t chat…. He just passed the presents out to all the girls and left,” though in doing so, she said, he had lifted their morale considerably. In the end, despite the round-the-clock labor, the studio missed the original Christmas target by over a month. Walt was both weary and discouraged. As he lamented to Gus Van Schmus of Radio City Music Hall, “It’s the toughest job the animators have ever had, and I hope I never have to live through another one like it.”

  While Pinocchio was barreling to its finish, Walt was focused on his true passion of the moment: The
Concert Feature. Now, in Stokowski’s absence, the studio faced an urgent task. It needed a title for the film. Since its inception, it had been called The Concert Feature or Musical Feature, but as it proceeded, RKO publicist Hal Horne was pushing for something more euphonious—something, he hoped, that they might copyright to preclude any other animation studio from using it. His own suggestion was Film-harmonic Concert, but Stuart Buchanan decided to conduct a contest at the studio for other possibilities. Two hundred and fifty-nine employees submitted nearly eighteen hundred titles, including Bach to Stravinsky and Bach and Highbrowski by Stokowski. Still, the favorite among those supervising the film remained a very early working title, Fantasia. By the time of the contest, even Horne had warmed to it. “It isn’t the word alone but the meaning we read into it,” he wrote Buchanan that May. Writing at the bottom of the same letter, Roy gave his approval: “‘Fantasia’ has grown on us until it seems appropriate, has a nice sound & is intriguing.” Only Stokowski seemed unconvinced. That October he suggested he and Walt bat around titles themselves “by trying to find what we want to say to the public through this picture and its name.” Whether or not they did so, the title remained. The film was thenceforth known as Fantasia.

  By this time the animation on the film was well under way, and Walt was deeply involved despite periodic detours for Pinocchio and Bambi. He was aiming for greatness. For “Toccata and Fugue” he had enlisted a German animator named Oskar Fischinger, who was well known in animation circles for his abstractions. Though Walt liked Fischinger’s work, he wasn’t impressed by Fischinger personally—he was a large, pompous man who dressed entirely in black—and Fischinger returned the compliment, complaining that there were “no artists” at the studio, “only cartoonists.” Jules Engel, another fine artist who had gotten work on Fantasia, said he had been warned never to use the word abstract at the studio because, he was told, “you’re going to have people look at you like you’re a strange character.” In point of fact, while Walt advised the animators to eschew what he called “wild abstraction,” he was even more wary of figurative animation for the section. “You bring figures in and it gets common,” he told a story meeting that August. “We’re going to sell this thing for five million dollars and not cheapen it and sell it for peanuts.” Despite Fischinger’s and Engel’s complaints that Walt wouldn’t let go of representation, the opposite was in fact true. In “Toccata and Fugue” Walt was not trying to actualize his conscious vision, as he had done with Snow White and Pinocchio; he wanted to plumb his psyche. “This is more or less picturing subconscious things for you,” he told his staff after describing how the music seemed to come to him “through the skin.” “It’s a flash of color going through a scene, or movement of a lot of indefinite things. It’s the nearest I can come to giving a reason for abstract things.”