Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  As it turned out, March 1 was a historic day not only for Bambi but for the entire studio: the beginning of a changing of the guard. What Walt had come to realize through Bambi, Dumbo, Fantasia, and even The Reluctant Dragon was that there could no longer be a Disney style since no single style could fit all the various projects that Walt had in mind. For years Walt had trained his artists in a method of drawing that kept inching closer to realism, and he had tried to impose that technique and goal on everyone; accepting these standards had become a condition of working at the studio. He had always felt that animation had to evolve, and in Bambi Walt clearly felt he had finally found something different, something exciting, even if he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. “This is opening up something here,” he enthused to the Bambi animators. “This is a new style,” one to which he said he would assign his very best animators like Davis, Thomas, Kahl, and Larson. “I think this is going to be one hell of a big step forward,” he told them.

  At the same time he had come to understand that a film like Dumbo and certainly the shorts didn’t require the subtlety of Bambi; demanding it would have been not only expensive but counterproductive. The less experienced animators and the animators who didn’t evolve and whose technique wasn’t as refined could be assigned to these pictures. By introducing the idea of different styles rather than a studio style, Walt had also created a pecking order not just between the supervising animators and the rest of the staff but between the first tier of supervising animators and a second tier. Bright young animators would now be in the studio vanguard. Some of the old-timers, including Norm Ferguson and Fred Moore, who had been the stars of Walt Disney Productions just a few years earlier, when the studio first embarked on realism, were relegated to a secondary role because they couldn’t master the Bambi style. As Walt now said of Ferguson, the man who had practically invented psychology in the animated cartoon, “He needs broader things.”

  With the story crew having conquered the narrative and the animators the style, Walt was confident enough to show a reel of Bambi to Bank of America executives late that June, and on Saturday, July 6, Joe Rosenberg came to the studio to view the footage. Roy and Walt were courting Rosenberg again because they had decided to hit the Bank of America for another loan. (The stock issue had helped pay off the debts, but it was not a fund on which they could continually draw.) “They have absolute confidence in us,” Roy wrote Walt the day before Rosenberg’s visit. “They rely on everything we tell them to the nth degree, but they are so pessimistic with regard to the outside world that they do not believe they are justified in loaning any money based on expectations involving foreign countries, no matter where they are.” The bank was willing to loan the studio another $2 million with a $250,000 cushion, but Roy warned Walt that the bank had already been told Walt was going to economize, cutting staff and reducing salaries. “I believe strongly,” Roy closed, “that the thing for us to do is not to cross them or even argue with them too much, but to go along with them.”

  VI

  If the studio’s desperation for more money never changed, another thing at the studio never changed either—the frenzied rushes to meet a release date. After much scheduling and rescheduling, the studio had decided to release Fantasia in November 1940 rather than rush Bambi or Dumbo, which was already moving at a breakneck pace. Deems Taylor arrived at the studio in mid-August to shoot narration while Stokowski headed off for a tour of South America with Walt’s assurance that “we are using our best judgment in making the picture and music blend together as it [sic] should.” As with Snow White and Pinocchio, the staff worked long shifts that summer and into the fall. One cameraman said he spent twelve hours each day for an entire year working on Fantasia because the special effects were so extravagant; a scene that might last only three seconds on screen might require twelve exposures. (Walt was especially keen on effects to evoke awe.) Unlike Bambi and Dumbo, Walt supervised everything. He would watch the dailies, the film that had been shot the previous day, every afternoon at three o’clock in room 3E down the hall from his office. Meanwhile the animators were working just as furiously. Years later, when college students would smoke marijuana while watching Fantasia for its wild hallucinatory effects, Art Babbitt would be asked whether he had animated under the influence of any drugs. “Yes, it is true,” he answered. “I myself was addicted to Ex-Lax and Feen-a-Mint,” two laxatives.

  Once again Walt had saved the most difficult scene for last. He had decided that the “Ave Maria” sequence should follow “Bald Mountain,” partly as an antidote: “We are portraying good and evil.” As Walt conceptualized it, the church bells in “Ave Maria” would sweep from the speakers at the back of the theater forward, chasing the demons of “Bald Mountain” offscreen. It would provide, he thought, exactly the sort of slow, somber note needed to end the film—the sort of grace note he lamented he didn’t have at the end of Snow White, where he thought he had raced too quickly from her sleep to her awakening. He also thought the scene would be commercial. “There’s still a lot of Christians in the world, in spite of Russia and some of the others,” he had said at a story meeting, “and it would be a hell of an appealing thing from that angle.” If it was being shown in a non-Christian country, Walt advised, they could simply snip it off.

  He had set himself and the staff a difficult task. Just as he hoped to create the feeling of being in the woods in Bambi, the effect Walt was looking for in “Ave Maria” was the “feeling that you are inside a cathedral without showing anything that is actually recognizable as a cathedral.” And it had to be a big climax: “It must be like a spectacle on the stage,” Walt ordered, something practically hypnotic in the spell it would cast. But Walt wasn’t just issuing general ideas to be implemented. He gave the director, Wilfred Jackson, detailed instructions on what he wanted, right down to the dissolves.

  If that weren’t enough, Walt had come up with one more idea for the sequence, an idea he thought would supply the necessary awe, even as the deadline was hard upon them. He decided he wanted a 220-foot tracking shot into the Gothic cathedral. To get it, he shut down one entire soundstage because he needed a space that large to move the camera through the panes of glass that constituted the planes into the church. By one account, it took six days with the crew working twenty-four hours each day in twelve-hour shifts to finish the shot. At one point the entire crew worked forty-eight hours straight without relief. When Walt heard that production was going to shut down briefly because one of the camera operators was going to be married, he offered to get Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra to play at the man’s ceremony if he and his bride would take their vows on the soundstage and keep the film in production. And yet after all that, when Walt saw the developed film, he decided it couldn’t be used because there was a jitter. “It’s a lousy job,” he told them, and ordered that it be done again. During the reshoot there was a small earthquake, and once again the scene was ruined and had to be reshot. By the time they got it right, it was the day before the New York premiere. Herb Taylor, who later became head of the sound department, remembered that a motorcycle was idling at the door to take the film to the airport so that it could be flown to New York and spliced into the last reel. Taylor didn’t leave the studio until eight o’clock the next morning. Writing Walt two days after the premiere, Stokowski lauded the film as “something that will arrest the attention of all classes of men and women in every part of the world,” but he felt that “Ave Maria” needed to be redubbed “to give it more appeal.” Walt declined. He had tampered enough.

  Now the film was in the hands of the public. Walt had long recognized that while Fantasia was going to be an aesthetic milestone and a completely new departure in animation, it was also going to be a “slow money maker, but a big money maker in the long run.” This was not exactly the kind of talk that endeared him to his distributor, RKO. With little prospect of an immediate return, they seemed to have little interest in the film, especially since, to enhance its prestige, Wal
t had always insisted that it be exhibited as a roadshow attraction with reserved seating in a limited number of theaters outfitted with his expensive Fantasound system. It was Roy who proposed as early as February that the studio find its own backers and then release the film themselves. He suggested that someone like Nelson Rockefeller, an heir to the Rockefeller oil fortune and a strong proponent of the fine arts, might want to become part of a joint venture. The Rockefeller name, he thought, would also help legitimize the film. In the end there would be no Rockefeller. The Disneys financed the film through their usual loans, but they hired a young film salesman named Irving Ludwig to arrange the distribution of the first-run exhibition in eleven cities.

  The problems with RKO, however, were a harbinger of things to come. At the very time they were quarreling with RKO about releasing Fantasia, Roy and Walt were also in negotiations with the company for a new contract. The previous December, RKO executive M. H. Aylesworth had written Walt a letter promising a “bang-up financing program” and joking that as long as Walt continued to work, “Roy and Gunnie [Lessing] have a living but if you lay off God knows what any of us will do.” By the summer, however, the sides were still trading terms, and United Artists, Warner Bros., Paramount, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer were all wooing the Disneys. Despite RKO’s misgivings about Fantasia—as late as July, RKO publicist Hal Horne was having second thoughts about the title as too upscale—they wanted to keep the Disneys and offered terms that allowed RKO to recoup the cost of prints, advertising, and promotion from the first proceeds but prevented them from collecting their distribution fee, 22.5 percent in the United States and Great Britain and 27.5 percent in the rest of the world, until the Disneys had recouped the negative costs of making the films, thus giving RKO a further incentive to promote the picture. Roy reluctantly agreed, saying that while he didn’t trust any distributor, he trusted RKO more than the others. But even as he closed the deal, he had already begun contemplating distributing their films themselves, just as they were doing on the first run of Fantasia.

  For Fantasia the Disneys had secured a year’s lease on the two-thousand-seat Broadway Theater at Fifty-third Street in New York, the same theater, then named the Colony, where Mickey Mouse had premiered twelve years earlier, and they had William Garity, the studio engineer, refurbish the theater for the Fantasound system. (The equipment weighed more than seven thousand pounds and, true to Disney form, took over a week of crews working round the clock to install.) After being hospitalized for two days with a severe cold, Walt himself left for the New York premiere on November 1 with Lillian, Ham Luske, and Bill Cottrell, taking a roundabout route via New Orleans and Atlanta, where he said he was soaking up atmosphere for a possible feature based on the stories of southern fabulist Joel Chandler Harris, also known as Uncle Remus. His New York schedule included an address to a women’s club, which, he joked, “only goes to show what FANTASIA has already done to me!” He spent much of the time in the city, however, at the Broadway, conducting runthroughs and talking to the press. “I don’t know how much money this picture is going to make or lose,” he told one reporter, hedging his bets. “But the boys and I have gained some incalculable experience.” He admitted he was taking a huge risk without a foreign market, but he felt he was “expanding, opening up new fields,” which was the aesthetic equivalent, he said, of plowing profits back into the company. To another reporter he was less grandiose and more edgy. With his leg thrown over one of the theater chairs and his hand nervously running through his hair, he declared, “We’re selling entertainment and that’s the thing I’m hoping Fantasia does—entertain. I’m hoping, hoping, hoping.”

  Rain fell hard the entire day of the premiere, November 13. Oddly, a man who had spent the last year completely immersed in his own work and scarcely acknowledging the tumult of the outside world, with the war raging in Europe, and whose work served as a kind of refuge from that tumult, would hold the premiere as a benefit for British War Relief. The patronesses of the event included Mrs. Henry F. DuPont, wife of the chemical company mogul; Mrs. Henry Luce, wife of the magazine publisher; Mrs. William Randolph Hearst, wife of the newspaper titan; Mrs. David Sarnoff, wife of the RCA head; Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt, wife of the philanthropist; Mrs. Paul Felix Warburg, wife of the investment banker; and Mrs. Kermit Roosevelt, wife of the former president’s son—which only further signified how far Walt and the animated cartoon itself had come since the early days of Mickey Mouse. Even Walt was impressed by the turnout, writing his old teacher Daisy Beck like a starstruck fan about the “gala premiere” and the “socialites” who attended.

  By any measure it was a triumphant evening. The audience thrilled to the film, and they thrilled to the experience; thanks to Fantasound, the seats actually vibrated when the music blasted. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, who attended, could barely contain himself in his review the next morning. He wrote that “motion picture history was made at the Broadway Theatre last night” and called Fantasia as “terrific as anything that has ever happened on screen.” He ended his notice with a nod to the war: “It’s a tremendous blessing these days.” The Times editorial page also praised the film for its “fusion of music, drama and graphic art” and, like Crowther, said that Walt Disney had made history by bringing them together.

  But if the evening and the early returns were triumphant, many of the later returns cast a pall.* While film critics were largely enchanted, some music critics complained that the film did a disservice to the classics. (As Stokowski had predicted, many of them were offended by Walt’s interpretation of the “Pastorale.”) Olin Downes of The New York Times lavishly praised the sound reproduction but found the film itself a mess, trying to do too much. “It is clear,” he wrote accurately a few days after the premiere in a Sunday consideration, “that in many cases Mr. Disney’s noble and highly provocative experiment separated certain lovers of the respective arts rather than united them.” Others thought that Disney hadn’t despoiled art but had finally capitulated to it. Otis Ferguson of The New Republic, who had been one of Walt’s most ardent admirers, called Fantasia “his first mistake” because it had pretensions. “First Chaplin learns about class struggle,” Ferguson wrote, referring to Chaplin’s Modern Times, “now Disney meets the Performing Pole,” meaning Stokowski.

  The harshest criticisms, however, were political. Harry Raymond in the Daily Worker grumbled that even left-wing critics were so beguiled by Fantasia’s technical achievements that they failed to recognize how reactionary the film really was, especially at a time of international crisis. “The forces of evil are not shown as the exploiters and war makers,” he said, “but as a mythical devil on a mountain top against whom human powers are helpless.” In short, Walt had abdicated personal and social responsibility for what Raymond, obviously thinking of “Bald Mountain” and “Ave Maria,” called “theology.” Far more stinging was nationally syndicated columnist Dorothy Thompson, who seethed that she had left the theater “in a condition bordering on a nervous breakdown” and felt as if she had been subjected to an “assault”—a “brutalization of sensibility in this remarkable nightmare.” Thompson’s complaint was that Disney and Stokowski seemed to extol the savagery of nature at the expense of man. (What Thompson missed was that Walt was extolling not so much nature as his own power to re-create the savagery of nature on screen.) In Thompson’s eyes, Disney’s nature was so overwhelming that man had no choice but to succumb, and like Raymond, she saw this as an abdication of responsibility that she obliquely connected to the Nazi terror in Europe. Along with Disney’s other recent work, the film was, she concluded, “cruel,” “brutal and brutalizing,” and a “caricature of the Decline of the West.”

  Walt professed to be amused by the controversy. Two weeks after the premiere he wrote a friend that the fray “couldn’t have been sweeter” because it generated so much publicity for the film. “The public responded by lining up at the box office with the result that our advance sale has been simply terrific. We’ve had
practically a full house every day with Saturdays and Sundays being sold out for at least a month in advance.” He said he left New York “walking on air.” As he headed to Los Angeles aboard the Twentieth Century for the West Coast premiere, he wrote Stokowski airily brushing off the criticisms of “Ave Maria” and announcing that he intended to concentrate on adding some new segments to the film.

  If anything, the audience at the Los Angeles opening at the Carthay Circle on January 29, 1941—it had been delayed by contractual problems in securing the theater—was even more enthusiastic than the one in New York, even though fewer celebrities attended. “The premiere audience was unquestionably enraptured by the production as a whole,” Edwin Schallert, a film reporter for the Los Angeles Times, wrote in an article titled “Fantasia Acclaimed as Cinema Masterpiece.” “The applause was enthusiastic during the majority of the interludes and even broke in from time to time on the action.” The film was, he said, “courageous beyond belief.” Arthur Miller, also writing for the Times, called it “an earthquake in motion picture history.” Director Cecil B. DeMille, who had been so enchanted by Snow White, said, “There is nothing in our earthly imaginings which can equal, let alone surpass, what Disney has accomplished.”

  Walt himself still seemed ebullient. Before its release he had called Fantasia the “big experience” of his life. After its release he claimed it was the apex of animation and doubted that it could ever be duplicated since the loss of the foreign markets would make any attempt to make a film as costly and ambitious as Fantasia “suicidal.” Yet as proud as he said he was of the film, he was deeply hurt by the criticism and began to harbor doubts about it himself. Roy would later say that Fantasia was a “disappointment” to Walt. “[I]t was that he saw more in it—the possibilities—than he got out of it,” Roy said, because Walt “didn’t really have the artists.” According to Joe Grant, for all Walt’s outward expressions of confidence, even on the way back from the New York premiere he was depressed. “He said something to the effect of ‘All that work and all that fanfare,’” Grant recalled. “He realized that he had gone over the public’s head with Fantasia, and that he had also disappointed them, because the film wasn’t what they expected from Disney.” Years later Walt himself would say, “Every time I’ve made a mistake is when I went in a direction where I didn’t feel the thing actually. And I did try to be a little smarty pants.”