The Animated Man (33 page)

There were experiments in giving more roundness to the characters, the layout artist Dave Hilberman recalled: “For a while, we were exposing the original hard character, and then double-exposing over that a second, softer treatment—the shadows, and color, and everything else, to get this softness. . . . This was a very expensive experiment—if they had tried to do the feature that way, it would have cost an enormous amount of money. It meant at least four times the normal amount of work, right down the line—inking, painting, camera, everything. Except for some of the romantic musical sequences, where some of it was carried on, we just had to settle for the simplest solution, putting airbrush [that is, spray paint using a compressed-air atomizer] on some of the lower parts.”
⁶⁷

As work on
Fantasia
and
Bambi
proceeded,
Pinocchio
's performance was a growing shadow over the studio.
Pinocchio
opened at the Center Theatre in New York on February 7, 1940, to favorable reviews but also to what soon proved to be disappointing results at the box office. RKO had wanted to show
Pinocchio
at Radio City Music Hall, but the music hall, in an act of foresight,
would not guarantee an unprecedented ten-week run.
⁶⁸
(The Center, a huge theater—thirty-two hundred seats—was also part of Rockefeller Center, but it was a decidedly less prestigious venue.)

The two fat years after
Snow White
's release were now emphatically over—not only was the domestic audience lukewarm toward
Pinocchio
, but in the spring of 1940 European markets disappeared under the boots of the German army. By the fall, seven months after it was released,
Pinocchio
had returned to the studio less than a million dollars in rentals, and Disney was forced to write off a million dollars of its cost. His misgivings had hardened into a feeling that
Pinocchio
should never have been made, Ben Sharpsteen said. (Sharpsteen himself was the target of recriminations; Ham Luske, in a mid-1950s interview, blamed him for selling Disney on the idea of making the film.)
⁶⁹

In the fall of 1938, when the studio was flush with money from
Snow White
, Disney scorned the idea of sharing ownership through a public sale of stock. “You see,” he told a
Los Angeles Times
reporter, “this isn't ‘business' in the sense of primarily making money for shareholders who don't work at it. My brother and I own all the stock and I keep a controlling interest. We won't sell any to outsiders nor to employees. If either of them owned stock they might want the studio to make money first and good films would come second. We put the good films first.”
⁷⁰

As late as January 1940, Disney still resisted selling stock—“I wanted to build this in a different way,” he told some of his artists
⁷¹
—but by then his need for money was such that going public had become the lesser of evils. Preferred stock in Walt Disney Productions was offered to the public on April 2, 1940. The money raised helped pay for the Burbank studio ($1.6 million) and retired other debts (more than $2 million). The common stock remained in the Disneys' hands. The company took out a $1.5 million insurance policy on Walt's life.
⁷²

Disney remembered having lunch with Ford Motor Company executives a few days after the stock issue, when he passed through Detroit on his way back from New York. Henry Ford himself joined the group after lunch, and when Disney told the old autocrat about selling preferred stock, Ford said, “If you sell any of it, you should sell it all.” That remark, Disney said, “kind of left me thinking and wondering for a while.” Ford “wanted that control,” Disney said. “That's what he meant by that.” Disney shared the sentiment, even in relatively small matters. On July 1, 1940, he told the studio's publicity department: “From now on all publicity going out of this studio must have my O.K. before it is released. There shall be no exceptions to this rule.”
⁷³

People who joined the Disney staff after work on
Snow White
began typically saw very little of Walt himself. “I met him on a couple of occasions, in story meetings and so forth,” said Dan Noonan, who started as an inbetweener early in 1936 and eventually worked in the story department on
Bambi
. Said Marc Davis, who joined the staff in 1935: “Walt Disney was kind of an image; we might see him walking in or out. It was a long time before we got personal attention from him.”
⁷⁴

Disney added around five hundred people to his staff in the two years after
Snow White
, increasing its size in 1940 to roughly twelve hundred, half the industry's total.
⁷⁵
He became correspondingly more remote, having little or no contact even with people whose roles were such that they would certainly have seen much of him in earlier years. Norman Tate joined the Disney staff in July 1936 and rose through the studio's ranks to become an animator with screen credit on
Pinocchio
and a corresponding credit in the program book for
Fantasia
. But he never met Walt Disney, never spoke with him directly, until the two of them happened to be leaving the Burbank studio together—this was probably in the summer of 1940—and Disney, making conversation, showed Tate the script for the feature called
The Reluctant Dragon
and asked him how he liked the studio commissary's food.
⁷⁶

Even though many of the new employees barely knew Disney himself, Disney animation was for them a semimonastic vocation, and entering Walt Disney's employ was a veritable taking of orders. The 1938 booklet sent to prospective employees made such devotion all but mandatory: “Walt Disney assumes that every artist who enters the studio plans to make animation his life work.” At the time of the early Disney features, the animator Howard Swift said, “animation to us was a religion. That's all we talked. If we went to somebody's house—a bunch of animators, we all had wives and we would have a little party, a barbecue—the guys, all they talked was animation.”
⁷⁷

The Hyperion Avenue studio “was a drawing factory,” said Martin Provensen, who worked in the model department. “Drawing was everywhere; the walls were plastered with drawings. . . . You developed a certain attitude toward drawing: You saw drawing as a way of talking, and a way of feeling. Instead of regarding an individual drawing as a sacred thing it was waste paper.” At the studio, he said, “you had youth, and you had immense talent, all over the place—talent was taken for granted, no one thought much about it one way or the other.”
⁷⁸

Some artists had trouble adjusting to life in the “drawing factory.” “I worked very hard,” said Herbert Ryman, whose first story work was on
Pinocchio
. “I'd try to do a piece of artwork. Of course, all that would happen would
be, ‘Ah, we can't use that.' These things were yanked off and fell on the floor.”
⁷⁹
But most members of the staff got caught up in the studio's rhythms.

“Every day was an excitement,” Marc Davis said. “Whatever we were doing had never been done before. It was such a great thrill to go in there. . . . There was excitement and there was competition; everyone was young and everyone was doing something. We saw every ballet, we saw every film. If a film was good we would go and see it five times. . . . Everybody here was studying constantly. We had models at the studio and we'd go over and draw every night. . . . We would all study the acting of Charles Laughton. We all read Stanislavsky. . . . We tried to understand Matisse and Picasso and others, even though our end result shows very little of that literally. . . . It wasn't that you
had
to do these things—you
wanted
to do them.”
⁸⁰

It was not artists alone who submerged themselves in their work. The camera operator Adrian Woolery recalled that in the late 1930s, “it was not unusual to put in close to thirty-hour, round-the-clock sessions shooting camera. All we got for it was a fifty-cent meal ticket, which we took over to the old SOS Cafe, on Sunset Boulevard.”
⁸¹

In only one part of the studio, the model department, was there drawing that came close to being drawing for its own sake, as opposed to drawing that was measured, like Ryman's rejected drawing, against its potential usefulness in making a film. Formed originally to design characters for
Pinocchio
, the model department eventually branched into story work, putting up many of the sketches for several parts of
Fantasia
. Those seductive drawings could be maddeningly difficult to translate into animated film. Joe Grant, the model department's head, dismissed the concern about costs Walt Disney repeatedly voiced in meetings in the late 1930s and early 1940s: “That was his way of getting out of it if he didn't like it. . . . When he liked the pastel drawings and the color stuff in the model department, he never made such a remark. All he did is call in the ink and paint department and ask them, ‘Can you get that effect?' ”
⁸²

The model department's principal members differed markedly from other members of the Disney staff. Several of them had never worked in the inbetween department. John P. Miller, for instance, grew up as a banker's son in Westchester County, outside New York City; he was “aimed at Princeton,” he said, “and wouldn't go.” Miller referred to the model department as “sort of a goldbricking department,” used as a showpiece for prominent visitors because it looked like something creative was going on. His memories of his work there were “mostly social.” Said Martin Provensen: “I'm sure the rest of the studio—we all knew it at the time, in fact—saw us as just ridiculous.”
⁸³

Disney's principal role in the model department, as in other parts of the studio, was as an editor of ideas. That was what his “coordination” chiefly consisted of. He was very involved, said James Bodrero, another model-department artist, “in a critical sense.”
⁸⁴
However questionable the initial conception of a film might be, what wound up on the screen after Disney had gone to work was usually more economical and effective than the earlier versions of any given story that can be reconstructed from meeting notes and other sources. In work on
Pinocchio
, for example, he pruned away tedious exposition, and for
Bambi
he eliminated superfluous dialogue.

“He was very helpful,” Carl Barks said of Disney's role in story meetings on the
Donald Duck
cartoons. “Very seldom did he ever say a real hurtful thing to any of the story men, something that would cause . . . great discouragement. If he turned down a story completely, he would do it as gently as he could. As he walked out the door he would say, ‘Well, I think the best thing to do with that is just to shelve it for a while.' So you knew that was the end.”
⁸⁵

Sometimes in notes from story meetings there is a particularly strong sense of Disney himself and how he worked. On August 8, 1939, he reviewed what had been done on a cartoon then called
Donald's Roadside Market
(it was eventually released as
Old MacDonald Duck
). This was one of his first meetings on a short cartoon after he had left the shorts in Dave Hand's care for more than a year. In the meeting, Disney impatiently rejected what he called “old stuff,” thought aloud and at length, warmed up to an idea (making a full-fledged musical out of the story), and then got really involved in the possibilities (“Gee, I'd like to sit in with you and see what we could get on the start of that music”).

“Musical things can't miss,” he said (this was in the midst of work on
Fantasia
). “That is why you can sit and watch a tap dancer for ten minutes straight. . . . And then there is that old gag we used in a picture a long time ago and that is these hens laying eggs to music and it's funnier than hell.” He seized on music as a way to rescue the struggling shorts and steered discussion toward basing
Roadside Market
on either swing or opera. “I think it wouldn't hurt for us to make some musical things,” he said. (The finished cartoon,
Old MacDonald Duck
, is not a musical.)
⁸⁶

Those meeting notes also reflect Disney's abundant profanity, which everyone remembered, though the stenographers edited it out in many instances. The notes are sprinkled with hells and damns, and Disney sounds generally impatient and irascible—“Why do we have to have all these damn chases?”

Disney's most common expression—“Oh, shit”—survives in memoirs and
interviews but apparently not in any meeting notes. That was probably because Disney censored himself in the presence of female stenographers—sometimes ostentatiously, as when he apologized so profusely to a stenographer for using the word “prat” (for buttocks) that “the gal started blushing,” Gordon Legg said. To him, it appeared that Disney “was doing it purposely, to make her feel uneasy.”
⁸⁷
Disney was, however, notoriously and incongruously prudish in some respects—members of his staff learned quickly that he disliked jokes about sex—and it seems just as likely that he sincerely regretted what he regarded as a lapse in his deportment.

Disney's comments in meetings could be almost self-parodying in his repeated use of words like “fanny” and “cute,” as during a 1937 meeting on
The Practical Pig:
“We can get cute actions on the fanny. Arrange it so that the little guy gets in cute poses with that fanny. That is what will strengthen this picture a lot—cute actions of the little fellows. With cute actions it will make a very interesting picture.”
⁸⁸