Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  Perhaps the criticism that stung the most was that of Igor Stravinsky, who may simply have been trying to distance himself from the film after so many music critics found fault with it. Walt recalled Stravinsky visiting the studio with the choreographer George Balanchine back in December 1939 when he showed them The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and the storyboards for The Rite of Spring. It was, by Walt’s account, a pleasant if uneventful meeting. Stravinsky would remember it differently. He said that he had received a request from the studio for permission to use Le Sacre “accompanied by a gentle warning that if permission were withheld the music would be used anyway,” since the piece had not been copyrighted in the United States. Walt proposed $5,000 for foreign rights, which, Stravinsky claimed, was reduced during negotiations. As he remembered it, during his visit he was offered a score, and when he said he had his own, he was told that the music had been changed. “It was indeed,” Stravinsky would write scornfully. The instrumentation was different, the order of the pieces rearranged, the difficult passages eliminated. As for the visuals, Stravinsky said, “I do not wish to criticize an unresisting imbecility.”

  Yet for all his alleged objections at the time, Stravinsky returned to the studio on October 12, 1940, to see the final cut, after which, he said, he stormed out. The studio’s version, once again, was different. When Walt suggested that Stravinsky visit the animators, Woolie Reitherman remembered them laughing and joking while the track of The Rite of Spring played backward on the Movieola. “Doesn’t sound bad backwards either,” Stravinsky quipped. Stravinsky returned to the studio yet again on October 23 to discuss the possibility of having the studio animate “Renard,” an old piece of his, and wound up selling the rights to that, Fireworks, and The Firebird. “Doesn’t sound as if he’s very sore, does it?” Walt remarked wryly to the Los Angeles Times.*

  Despite the carping about its pretensions, its naïve misunderstanding of the music, and its fascistic brutality, Roy was more than satisfied with Fantasia’s initial returns. “WILL FINISH THIS WEEK WITH TWENTY SEVEN THOUSAND [DOLLARS],” he wired Walt from New York after the second week. “ALL NIGHTS HAVE BEEN SELLOUTS AND MONDAY TUESDAY WEDNESDAY MATINEES ABOUT EIGHTY PERCENT.” With expenses at $11,000 a week, Roy thought the prospects were “VERY SOLID AND ENCOURAGING.” In its first sixteen weeks at the Broadway, where the demand was so great the theater had to add eight telephone operators to handle the calls and rent an adjoining store for the walk-up advance sales, it grossed more than $300,000. It netted more than $20,000 each of its first ten weeks both at the Majestic Theater in Boston and at the Carthay Circle, and it had netted nearly as much after only five weeks at the Geary Theater in San Francisco. Meanwhile Roy was pressing RCA to deliver Fantasound systems to the other first-run theaters so they could broaden the release. “I see no reason why we should not be able to get our full negative cost back by the end of 1941,” he wrote Walt gleefully. “We may do better than that.”

  Even before he knew the outcome, Walt had been planning a sequel, and as early as May 1940 he met with Stokowski to discuss it. At the time both were nearly giddy with enthusiasm, mulling over Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel, Brahms’s First Symphony, Respighi’s The Pines of Rome, Holst’s The Planets, and even Gershwin’s jazz symphony Rhapsody in Blue. When Stokowski suggested using Dvorak’s New World Symphony but cutting it, Walt countered that he didn’t think it should be cut and that some of the pieces in Fantasia, he felt, had been cut too much. “[W]e were frightened,” he admitted. And when Stokowski brought up Debussy’s La Mer, saying it was difficult to understand, Walt waved off the objection. “You said the RITE OF SPRING was difficult to understand, remember?” he told Stokowski. “Maybe we ought to open up on these things instead of playing down to our medium or our public. That’s the very thing we like to have, a challenge.”

  While he contemplated a sequel, Walt also thought of adding individual sequences to the original film, which had the advantages of being easier to do and of providing ongoing work for the animators when they needed it, always one of Walt’s major considerations. It also had the advantage of allowing Walt, who always hated to surrender a film, the opportunity to keep “plussing” it—making it better. By the time the film was released, Walt was talking about it as if it were analogous to an opera or ballet company with its own repertory. “The prospective patron will consult a program in advance, and determine his time of attendance at Fantasia on the basis of his preference in musical numbers and motion picture characters,” he told the Hollywood Citizen News. He even said that the film might vary from theater to theater, from week to week, day to day. At another point he said he was thinking of remaking the film each year. Stokowski, who was still attending performances and checking the sound levels at theaters more than a month after the premiere, heartily agreed that Fantasia should be an organic mechanism. “From all the talk I hear in and around New York about Fantasia I think if we put in one new number, almost everybody would go to hear the whole picture again,” he wrote Walt.

  When Walt returned to the studio after the Fantasia gala in New York, he immediately plunged into developing the new sequences. Whatever hadn’t been done right in the original Fantasia could now be made right in the additions. He was especially eager to do Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” because, he told his story staff, it would “stir up musical circles.” He was also excited about the prospect of animating Sergei Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.” As Walt would later relate it, some years earlier Prokofiev had visited the studio, played the piece for Walt while a translator narrated, and told him that he had written it expressly for the purpose of having Disney animate it. Now Walt intended to.

  But already that January, with his early fervor perhaps dampened by some of the critical brickbats hurled at Fantasia, Walt was raising the issue of costs. As much as he wanted to make “Valkyries,” he told his staff that it depended on whether they could make it within budget. “If we can’t do it for a set figure,” he said, “then we better forget it.” Similarly, discussing Sibelius’s The Swan of Tuonela, Walt suggested that they photograph a model of a swan and animate the ripples in the water. “[W]e don’t have to be making every drawing of that swan—which costs,” he told the crew, sounding very unlike himself. Discussing a sequence of Tchaikovsky’s “Humoresque,” featuring the mushrooms from the “Nutcracker” segment, he advised that the animators repeat cycles of action to save money and that of six mushrooms three replicate the actions of the other three so the animators would only have to trace the actions for one set rather than animate all six from scratch.

  By this time the heady excitement over the Fantasia returns had begun to deflate too. The Fantasound system, upon which Walt insisted, was proving prohibitively expensive, forcing the studio to exceed its loan limit from the Bank of America and preventing the film from being exhibited more widely and taking in more receipts. “It is my opinion that it is positively not in the cards for us to continue using Fantasound,” Roy wrote Walt that April, in what he must have realized would be a crushing blow. “I don’t think there is another spot in the country that will warrant the costs.” Meanwhile, in a defeat of his own, Roy was meeting with RKO head George Schaefer to discuss RKO’s taking over the film’s general release, though insisting that it continue to be exhibited on a roadshow basis with reserved seating, “down to the smallest town that can possibly stand such a show.”

  RKO did continue to distribute Fantasia that spring as a roadshow attraction, and RCA engineers even devised a modified sound system that was less costly than Fantasound and thus could be installed in more theaters. But the handwriting was on the wall. To put it into even wider release on a nonroadshow basis, RKO now insisted that the film be cut. Roy asked Walt to tell Stokowski, whom the studio was contractually obligated to notify of any changes, though it was Ed Plumb, the musical arranger, and not Walt, who passed on the news: “For most people,” Plumb wrote Stokowski, “the experience of Fantasia is more than they can take without f
atigue.” Stokowski wouldn’t be mollified, but Walt, who was equally distressed, felt helpless. “I frankly don’t know what to do about it,” Walt wrote Roy, saying that Roy might want to talk to Stokowski himself.

  If he didn’t want to talk to Stokowski, Walt would have nothing to do with the editing either. Ed Plumb and Ben Sharpsteen did the cutting without any input from Walt, trimming the film from its original two-hour-and-five-minute running time to an hour and forty minutes and then to an hour and twenty-four minutes, largely by scaling back Deems Taylor’s introductions. Walt was despondent. “We must remember there are a lot of people who have seen it,” he warned Roy, “and who will now come back to FANTASIA again, and we do not want to spoil it for those who appreciate the finer things to sell a few highschool [sic] tickets.” But they did, though even after doing so, Roy fretted: “I’m fearful for what it will do in general release.” At roughly the same time Stokowski pronounced himself ready to return to the studio to prepare recordings for the additional sequences. But the idea for a sequel had long since been dropped—“[T]he segments would now be thought of as ‘individual Specials,’” studio production control manager Herb Lamb informed the studio, and even the “Specials” were in jeopardy. If the film proved successful in its general release, Walt abjectly wrote Stokowski, “I am sure I will be permitted to proceed with the numbers that we had in work last Spring. Until that time, I shall have to hold everything in abeyance.” Speaking to The New Yorker, he was, if possible, even less optimistic. “That damn thing cost two-hundred thousand dollars,” he growled about “The Nutcracker Suite” and the difficulties in animating it. “We’re getting back to straight line stuff, like ‘Donald Duck’ and the ‘Pigs.’” It was a sad retreat for a man who had boasted for years about the new horizons that Fantasia would open.

  Barricaded in his studio while the world was roiling around him, Walt hoped, as always, to insulate himself from reality. Once, as he was arranging blocks representing the new studio’s buildings, he was asked how the war would affect things. Walt supposedly snapped, “What war?” This was the power of his wish fulfillment and one of the chief appeals of his work: contrary to Dorothy Thompson’s interpretation, Walt Disney’s animations continued to demonstrate man’s ability to construct his own reality. It was why audiences were still awestruck by what they saw. But if Walt had become more serious and less fanciful in Pinocchio and Fantasia than he had been in the Mickey Mouse cartoons or Snow White, it was also true that the social and political terms had shifted around him. As with the notion of responsibility, it was one thing to convey power to a nation hoping to vanquish the Depression and another to speak to a nation hoping to avoid getting ensnared in a war in Europe, which may have been another reason why audiences were cooler to Pinocchio and Fantasia than to Snow White. In effect, though the films were often regarded as relief for a troubled nation, Walt couldn’t protect them from social considerations. He couldn’t protect his studio either. Indeed, early in 1941 the world would invade even the Elysian Fields of Burbank, and when it did, everything in which Walt Disney had believed would be destroyed, all his illusions shattered.

  Eight

  TWO WARS

  The storm clouds had been gathering at least since the move to Burbank and possibly even before, as the studio plowed ahead on its features in anticipation of profits it would not receive. During Fantasia, Roy had ordered a belt-tightening, forbidding any new hiring, requisitioning of any new materials, or starting any new film without the approval of the business office—thus directly infringing on Walt’s power for the first time. Shortly after Fantasia’s release Walt pleaded with Roy to restore some merit raises to boost sagging morale yet again, but Roy, who had always capitulated in the past, was in no mood to humor his brother this time. Instead Walt, apparently without Roy’s knowledge, advised Herb Lamb, the production control department manager, to increase salaries gradually over an extended period to escape notice.

  In having to reward his employees surreptitiously, Walt’s concern was that the Bank of America would find out and “raise hell with us.” Though the studio had reported a pretax profit of $140,000 in the first four months of the 1941–42 fiscal year and though it had actually distributed $149,000 in bonuses to the staff, most of it in preferred stock, the bank was concerned again about the company’s financial prospects, especially with the war continuing to erode foreign receipts. Thanks to the stock issue in April 1940, the company had managed to retire all of its real property loans for the new studio and most of its production loans. But by August, with the losses from Pinocchio, the studio had been forced to increase its credit line and seek more funds, which it optimistically thought it would retire with the profits from Fantasia. With Fantasia a disappointment too and the debt edging toward $3 million, the Bank of America summoned Walt to its San Francisco headquarters on February 24 to institute some cost-cutting measures. It was not a pleasant encounter. When a business associate asked him if he’d won the battle, Walt snapped, “You never win with bankers.” The next month Joe Rosenberg visited the studio to continue his lecture on fiscal responsibility, and he and Walt had an argument in front of a reporter in which Rosenberg insisted that the company must toe the bottom line and Walt insisted that the business community had to expand its horizons rather than concentrate narrowly on immediate returns. As the reporter put it, “Between the two was a gulf as profound as the human mind.”

  “I know the bank is nervous now about our indebtedness,” Roy wrote in a memo to Walt early in March, “and are [sic] going ahead to a higher figure reluctantly because they are on the spot and can’t do much otherwise,” but Roy realized that the studio was on “very thin ice.” He recommended a 20 percent reduction in expenditures, in part by dropping every project save the shorts and the feature films due to be released over the next year—Bambi and Dumbo. He also advised that they close their film-processing lab and Walt’s cherished art school and that they run down the list of employees and terminate anyone who “can possibly be released without affecting the immediate work in process.” Unaware of Walt’s raises, he demanded that every employee take a salary cut. Roy acknowledged that these measures would no doubt undermine everything Walt had done to build his studio as a workers’ paradise, but he said the only alternatives were selling their films through a franchise at derisory terms or being forced into receivership or bankruptcy. The situation was so bad that when a film editor requisitioned a splicer, Walt felt he had to deny the request.

  Even before the new financial pressures, strains had begun to emerge between Walt and the staff. Part of it was a function of size. In just five years the studio had swelled from three hundred employees to twelve hundred, and where Walt had once known the name of everyone in his employ and had interacted with many of them as well, it was impossible for him to do so now. Indeed, at Burbank he was not only physically separated—on one wing of the third floor, unit 3H—from the animators on the first floor, but anyone wanting to reach his office had to go up two flights of stairs, down a corridor, and past two offices, a reception room, and a secretary’s cubicle. (Walt was aware of the isolation. The night before he moved to Burbank he told Joe Grant that he had had a dream that he was wandering through empty halls.) Part of it too was the competing claims on his attention and the necessity to delegate. “Walt began to become disengaged with the animations after Pinocchio,” Wilfred Jackson recalled, obviously forgetting Fantasia. “Up until Pinocchio, absolutely nothing happened without his being in on it. All the color models he saw before they got okayed. All the rough animation. We ran it for him before anything moved into cleanup, and ink and paint.” But “in later years there was a gradual withdrawal on Walt’s part of the intimate close working on all the details of every department, and he began to leave more and more to the judgment of the animators, to the judgment of the directors, and of the story department. He controlled things along a broader base.”

  But if Walt was, to the consternation of many of his staff, les
s visible and less personally engaged, it was in fact as much by choice as by necessity. Though he had loved the sense of community at Marceline and then at Kansas City and later Hyperion, he had no time now for japery or charm, and in any case he was more distrustful of associations once he had become “Walt Disney”—more distrustful of what people wanted from him. One production manager said that Walt “seemed to have trouble fully relating to his employees. He kept his guard up, his employees at arm’s length, and was more touchy.” Dick Huemer, the animator and storyman, recalled that Walt seldom engaged in small talk now and that it was tense being around him. Animator Milt Kahl said that no one at Burbank would ever have barged in on Walt or palled around with him, though that was exactly what the animators had once done. Surprisingly, it was draconian Roy who was much more accessible and likely to fraternize. “You could put your arm around Roy’s shoulder, too, and did,” Frank Thomas said. “Not with Walt.” For all his bonhomie and his insistence on being called “Walt,” he was now distant—if not exactly a despot, as the one employee had called him, then at least the “boss.”