Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  But that could be true only so long as the studio continued to make profits, and in the wake of Pinocchio suddenly a new financial crisis emerged. While the studio had awaited the results of Snow White, it had hesitated to put any new feature into full production; that may have been sensible, but it meant that when Snow White proved to be successful, the studio was in no position to take immediate advantage of that success—a situation worsened by the unexpected problems and postponements on Pinocchio and Bambi. It worsened even more with the effects of the war in Europe and Pinocchio’s disappointing returns. At the same time the Burbank studio, when all was said and done, had cost nearly $3 million, a million more than the projections, and Fantasia was costing well over $2 million—all of which meant that the studio had nearly $8 million in outstanding investments. From having reaped a profit of $1.25 million in fiscal year 1939, the studio was reporting a loss of $260,000 in fiscal year 1940. In addition, after paying off its loans with the profits from Snow White, the company had gone back into debt and owed the Bank of America $4.5 million. With so little money coming in, Roy was summoned to the bank’s San Francisco headquarters for a discussion of the situation, and described the atmosphere as “real cool,” until Doc Giannini once again came to the Disneys’ defense, asking his staff how many Disney pictures they had seen. When they collectively stammered, he said he had seen nearly a hundred, then declared, “I suggest that we give these boys a chance. This war won’t last forever.”

  But it wasn’t that easy. On top of the money hemorrhaging from the features, it also was draining from the shorts, which the studio was still contractually obligated to produce. Though Walt had delegated much of the responsibility for the shorts to his staff, he still met with the story crews, approved the scripts, and examined the storyboards. They did bring in over a million dollars in rental income, but the rentals didn’t keep pace with the costs—Walt estimated that he spent $45,000 on a typical short without factoring in the expenses for prints, marketing, distribution, or what Roy called “administrative overhead”—and the net income scarcely exceeded that from merchandise, comics, and licenses. Moreover, Walt had grown increasingly resentful of having to make them, not only because they gave so little return on the investment but because he felt he had outgrown them. Though many of the animators were idle while Bambi was being readied for production and Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland were being written, Walt complained to George Morris that he would not reassign animators from the features to the shorts because, he told Morris, “[Y]ou spend a hell of a lot of money and what have you got?”

  Once again the Disneys needed money. As early as February 1939 Roy had gone to New York to investigate the possibility of issuing long-term debentures, which were loan certificates backed by general credit rather than by specific assets. This way, Roy obviously felt, the studio would not have to assign the future profits on the features, as it had had to do to secure the financing from the Bank of America. By February 1940 rumors were circulating that the company was considering doing something that Walt had always insisted it would not do, issue stock to the public, and Roy had gone to New York again to consult with the investment banking firm Kidder, Peabody. It was a tough negotiation, but the Disneys had little leverage. In the end the studio arranged to issue 155,000 shares of preferred stock worth $3.875 million at 6 percent interest, convertible into common stock when the price of a share of the preferred stock reached 30.4 percent of the value of a share of common stock.* (Since the Disneys owned all of the common stock and didn’t want to dilute their holdings, Roy thought the percentage was too low, but Kidder wouldn’t budge.) Kidder also insisted on placing one of its own executives, Jonathan B. Lovelace, on the Disney board. And it asked the studio to buy a $1.5 million insurance policy on Walt’s life payable in trust to the stockholders should he die before April 1, 1944, four years from the day of the issue, and to the studio should he die after that date. In effect, Kidder was protecting the stockholders against the loss of the studio’s greatest asset: Walt Disney himself.

  “It will seem a little odd to run one’s finger down the columns on the financial page some day and see Mickey, Inc. (or Walt Disney Productions, if one insists on being formal) going up and down like a thermometer,” The New York Times commented in an editorial shortly after the offering. It was incongruous, but less because of Mickey Mouse than because Walt had never operated by standard business procedures and had always considered Wall Street anathema. Business was what got in the way of creativity. When Fred Moore, not the animator but a Kidder executive, visited Walt vacationing at Palm Springs the week before the offering, he found him much more interested in talking about skiing at the Sugar Bowl resort than about the stock deal. He was trying not to think about the issue. Walt clearly had misgivings about giving over his studio to the vagaries of Wall Street and the tyranny of profits. Three days after the issue he impulsively decided to go to New York to hear a demonstration of a stereophonic sound reproduction system at Carnegie Hall, wheedling Lillian and Ben Sharpsteen and Sharpsteen’s wife into joining him. On the way back the group stopped at Dearborn, Michigan, where Walt visited the Ford automobile factory and Greenfield Village, a historical park erected by Henry Ford. At the conclusion of a lunch in Walt’s honor, Ford himself, one of Walt’s heroes, made a surprise appearance. During small talk Walt happened to mention the recent stock issue. Ford was blunt. “If you sell any of it, you should sell all of it,” he warned. Walt admitted that “kind of left me thinking and wondering for a while,” wondering if he had crossed a bridge and could never go back, wondering if he had surrendered ultimate control.

  V

  If they had needed an infusion of money, they also desperately needed to rush a new feature into production after Fantasia to generate profits. Though Walt was already hurrying a version of Jack and the Beanstalk starring Mickey Mouse as Jack for release at Easter 1941 and though he optimistically thought Bambi might be ready by the fall of that year, he had, in the meantime, pounced on another project. He had read a slim new children’s book titled Dumbo, about a young circus elephant who gets ridiculed for his oversize ears, only to discover that those flapping ears can serve as wings. What Walt loved about the idea—after wrestling with Bambi, Pinocchio, and even his beloved Fantasia—was that it was so simple. “It’s there,” he pronounced to one Bambi story meeting. “I mean I can see personalities right away.” Conveniently Norm Ferguson’s crew was just finishing animating the hippopotamuses and elephants in the “Dance of the Hours” sequence for Fantasia so they could be shifted to Dumbo without months of having to learn how to draw the characters, and the studio had other animators as well, Walt believed, who might not be well suited to the realism and subtlety demanded by Bambi but could do the broader figures of Dumbo. Even better from Walt’s perspective, Dumbo required none of the special effects that had slowed the production and added to the budgets of Pinocchio, Bambi, and Fantasia. “Dumbo is an obvious straight cartoon,” Walt proclaimed. “I’ll deliberately make it that way. It’s the type to do that with. It’s caricature all the way through.”

  The object was to avoid the agonizing over the story that had plagued the other features and led to months and months of revisions and higher and higher costs. “He let me know very emphatically that this picture had to be made for $350,000,” said Ben Sharpsteen, who was assigned to produce the film, realizing that Walt couldn’t possibly hold him to that budget but that Walt was serious this time about things being done economically albeit without producing shoddy work. Walt had assigned the task of adapting the book to Joe Grant, who headed the model department, and Dick Huemer, and they submitted a 102-page treatment that January. “The reason we brought it in for a low price,” Joe Grant would say, “was that it was done quickly and with a minimum amount of mistakes. The story was clear and air-tight to everyone involved in the project. We didn’t do a lot of stuff over due to the story-point goofs. There were no sequences started and then shelved, like in Pinocchio. Walt wa
s sure of what he wanted and this confidence was shared by the entire crew. Dumbo, from the very opening drawing, went straight through to the finish with very few things changed or altered.” Ward Kimball remembered being waylaid by Walt in the parking lot one day and being told he was going to start on a circus picture, animating a scene in which crows sing a song about seeing an elephant fly. Walt then recited the entire story in five minutes. “And listening to him tell that story,” Kimball said, clearly recognizing that Walt had told the story in what for him was record time, “I could tell that the picture was going to work. Because everything sounded right. It had a great plot.”

  And there was another reason they were able to make Dumbo so quickly: Walt for the first time had removed the burden of expectation for perfect animation, meaning that the animators were not to agonize any more than the story crew had. In fact, he assigned many of the newcomers to the picture. “I was one of the ‘poor boys,’” animator Bill Peet recalled. “They put all the rich boys, the top animators making the big salaries, working on Bambi. They wanted to make it a gem.” This wasn’t entirely true. Bill Tytla, who was certainly one of the top animators and who had done the devil for the “Bald Mountain” sequence in Fantasia, animated the baby Dumbo, but even he admitted that “[i]t was in the nature of the film to go very fast and get it out in a hurry.” To expedite the animation, Walt used photostats of story sketches instead of the full layouts as on the other features, and he recruited some of his better animators to oversee younger, less experienced ones who had been put on the picture. One animator said he didn’t even draw key poses but animated “straight-ahead,” just as in the old days.

  But as rapidly as it sped forward, Dumbo still wouldn’t be ready in time to generate the income the studio needed then. Walt had to find another contingency, something he could get ready even faster. Earlier that year he had invited the humorist Robert Benchley to the studio to discuss Benchley’s possible narration of a cartoon titled How to Ride a Horse, starring a tall, flop-eared, dim-witted dog named Goofy who had previously been featured in Mickey Mouse shorts. After that meeting Walt hatched the idea of having Benchley appear in a combination live-action/animated featurette in which he tours the new studio, and by early May, Walt was fielding ideas on exactly what the content would be—“to figure something out,” as he put it. To his staff he was frank about the situation, espousing something he would have derided just a few months before but his endorsement of which now conveyed the gravity of their current condition: he would not just be rushing production, as he was doing with Dumbo; he would be making a film solely for profit as a way, he felt, of protecting the quality of the better features. “The answer [to the financial crisis] I thought was to get out a couple of things that we call ‘quickies’ and on low budgets, but which would be damn good entertainment.” The Benchley film was one of those quickies.

  Though Walt and the story crew batted around various ideas, he finally settled on what he called the simplest and most direct plot: Benchley has come to the studio to pitch a cartoon called The Reluctant Dragon, and in the process of trying to find Walt, he finds himself bouncing from one department to another, just missing the boss each time but essentially letting the audience see the entire studio and observe the process of animation. At the end, when he finally encounters Walt, he discovers that The Reluctant Dragon has already been made by the studio.

  The advantages, as Walt saw it, were not just that the film allowed them to cut corners, since it was much easier and faster to make a live-action film with a bit of animation than to make an animated feature. He also regarded it as a kind of advertisement for the Disney studio and recommended including references to Bambi and Dumbo as “teasers.” When one of the staff suggested that the movie might be better as a “how to” film about animation, Walt adamantly disagreed. “I don’t think you should have any cartoon studio,” he snapped. “I think it should be this studio. This studio is known all over the world…. There is audience value in showing this plant in operation if you properly present it.” In making the film, he had one other motive as well. At the very time when morale was beginning to sink and there were rumbles of discontent, Walt, ever the social engineer, wanted to show the world just how blissful a community he had created. “The thing we should play up throughout the entire picture,” he memoed Al Perkins, who was writing up the story, “is that the gang generally have a good time.”

  Though it obviously wasn’t the first time that Walt had tried to pick up the pace of production, halfhearted as his efforts often were, it was the first time it worked—in part because he wasn’t intimately involved enough to nitpick and slow things down. He did attend the main story sessions and made substantial points, but the live-action director Alfred Werker, who was borrowed from Twentieth Century–Fox, said, “Walt gave me a completely free hand in making the picture,” even though the live action, like the animation, was completely storyboarded. Production moved so quickly that Benchley arrived at the studio in mid-October to shoot his scenes, and by the end of the month Walt was watching a rough cut. He even thought it possible that the film could be released in time for Christmas.

  But not everyone at the studio was enamored of the idea. Some felt that in the haste of making it and in the shortcuts they had taken with the animation, they had made a film about the new Disney studio that was distinctly un-Disneylike. Ward Kimball, who worked on the film’s animated sequences, called it a “very revolutionary type of Disney cartoon” because it was minimalist rather than maximalist, some of it really only sketches with a sound track, making no pretense at realism, and he said that some of the “great brains” at the studio warned him that Walt would be incensed when he finally saw it. They were wrong. According to Kimball, “The first night we ran that at the Studio, it killed everybody. It was a milestone…. You can’t imagine the contrast it had to what we were doing when it came out.” In fact, Kimball remembered, “Walt thought it was great and made other people go in and look at it.”

  The urgency of The Reluctant Dragon that summer of 1940 was reinforced by the continued foot-dragging on Bambi, though Walt and the staff were meeting throughout June and had at long last finalized the continuity. “All remaining sequences of BAMBI are now in active story shaping,” Perce Pearce reported to Walt early in the month, “including the final sequence of the picture.” The last narrative sticking points had been the issue of the portrayal of Man and the staging of the death of Bambi’s mother at the hands of hunters. Walt felt they had to play up the threat of Man, “the dread of Man that they have,” and play down the natural hardships they faced. It was Man who was the real enemy. He was also keenly aware of the impact that Bambi’s mother’s death would have on the audience and kept returning to it at the story meetings. Do you see her getting hit? Does she get hit while she is protecting Bambi? Does Bambi see her fallen body? Walt finally decided that she would be shot while leaping a log but that the audience would not see her getting hit and would not see her body afterward. It was, he decided, more than an audience could bear—“sticking a knife in their hearts,” he said. Instead he opted for understatement. “He’s hunting for his mother, and he never finds her,” Walt described the scene at one session, “and the Stag just tells him…. He just sort of wanders around. The last you see of them is just some faint silhouette forms back of this blizzard and pretty soon they have disappeared and there is nothing but snow falling.” Yet again, in amplifying upon what his storymen had done, he provided one of the most famous and powerful scenes in the history of motion pictures.

  But if, after nearly three years, they had finally licked the narrative problem of shaping a plot out of a life cycle, one major problem remained, the one they had continually encountered in trying to find a style of animation that would fit the mood of the piece. It was what had made Bambi so intractable from the first. Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas wrote that “Walt was demanding eloquence from images that he hadn’t even imagined before. He was no longer pushing fo
r extra characters, comic situations, and funny attitudes as much as feelings and sensations we each carry away from visiting the deep woods.” Some animators, Johnston and Thomas reported, had become so frustrated that they begged off the project. The objective was to strike a balance. Walt wanted realism—it was the way he would advance animation—but he needed caricature too for appealing personalities. (The characters that had received the most favorable response at a showing of the Leica reels back in September had been the Skunk, designed by Marc Davis, and the Owl, both of which were broadly drawn.) “I’d like to see us find things, you know, that keep us away from just the naturalistic stuff—that has a certain amount of fantasy to it,” he told a meeting as late as February 1940, reversing direction slightly. Too much realism, he had finally come to realize, would be stultifying.

  Still trying to find a style that would combine realism and caricature and taking their cue from Davis’s drawings, Milt Kahl and Frank Thomas had each animated one hundred feet of the movie, and on March 1, 1940, they showed their footage to Walt in room 3C13. It was, Johnston and Thomas would write, “possibly the most important day in the history of the film.” Walt watched the footage, then turned to them, they said, with tears in his eyes—a highly uncharacteristic gesture from a man who, save for outbursts of temper, rarely showed emotion. “That’s great stuff—no kidding,” he told them. And Johnston and Thomas said he added warmly, “It’s your picture. You guys have a feeling for this picture. You belong to this picture,” which was no doubt how he had felt about Snow White, Pinocchio, and Fantasia. He left the meeting saying that he trusted the animators to do their own sweatboxing and even set their own schedule. He was so satisfied he said he could now take a trip.