Working with Disney (10 page)

DP:
Toot, Whistle, Plunk, and Boom?

MD:
Well, I worked on that, and it did win an Academy Award. It was fun to work on. I must say I enjoyed it. I worked on the one that was ahead of that, which was called
Melody.
I don't think Walt liked either of them. He tolerated them so that the guys could get it out of their systems. We did a duck picture
[Duck Pimples
(1943)] that Vip Partch did the story on [with Dick Shaw], and it was pretty bad. It was one of
those tongue-in-cheek things. Walt was never tongue-in-cheek, and I think our own development didn't permit it. It did with [Ward] Kimball, but Kimball was always kind of out on his own anyway. Kimball was always way over there. I think in a lot of instances, his animation was very inconsistent with the animation of other people in features. In later years, I don't think he tried to do anything but his own thing. I always felt that he was wrong in that. Yet he is one of the great talents—no question about that—an incredible draftsman and a fine animator. When he did something like
The Three Cabs
[
The Three Caballeros],
it had absolutely superb animation, surprising timing, amazing speed, and amazing ways of putting things together. But some of his work was very inconsistent with Walt's desire to bring something to life. When you began moving a shape around on the screen, you lost Walt, and also, I think, you lost our audience, because our audiences were so much more universal than the audiences for some of those other types of cartoons. UPA was great for the art houses, but they made very little money. I think the average person was not impressed. He would rather have seen Donald Duck squawk across the screen or one of our shorts like
The Clock Cleaners
[1937] or
Lonesome Ghosts
[1937], which had a story and some great humor. And there were many, many more great little films, a lot of which have been forgotten. They were based on telling a story and doing it with characters that you could believe in. At the time that
Snow White
was released, I asked a man who was about my father's age if he had seen the picture. “No,” he said, “I don't like cartoons. I like things that are real.” I think that this was something that Disney had: you brought something real to life, or if it wasn't real, you brought it to life anyway and you made people believe in it. The Bugs Bunny films were kind of a formula type of humor. They were well done for what they were. The Tom and Jerrys were also well done for what they were. A lot of the Harman and Ising cartoons were pretty artfully done. But Disney still had this one thing of developing character and bringing it to life, making you believe that this situation was real. It's so remarkable to have progressed from 1928 and a
Steamboat Willie
who just jumped up and down and squeaked to the brilliant
Snow White,
where you believed that these things came to life.

DP:
Audiences crying over the “death” of Snow White.

MD:
Right. You felt with the characters. The terror of Snow White running through the woods fleeing the huntsman—there was great emotion there. This is also true of the scenes when the witch finally finds her or when the dwarfs discover her. It was just a remarkable accomplishment for a man to have done in such a short length of time. Starting in a business where most of the men were comic strip artists animating
Mutt and Jeff
and similar films. These films were little fillers on a theater bill, along with a newsreel, a travelogue, or some type of film, and one feature. Of course, that all died. The Disney short died when there really wasn't a place for it anymore on the theater bill.

DP:
With the advent of the double bill?

MD:
Yes. The double bill just put them out of business, because the theaters wouldn't pay enough money. At the time, Walt was selling them through the RKO lease, and he was getting about fifty thousand dollars or fifty-two thousand dollars for a short. The cost was about fifty thousand dollars. He reached a point where he couldn't participate. When he didn't participate, they kind of went downhill.

DP:
What about the other studios?

MD:
I think that Warner Bros. was probably capable of turning out a short in one or two weeks. That was the competition that we couldn't meet, because they were not asking for the same level of quality. As I say, these things were awfully well done for what they were. They contained some clever things that we could not or would not do, because it was again inconsistent with Disney's type of storytelling.

DP:
In Bob Thomas's book,
Walt Disney: An American Original,
you were credited with this quote from Walt Disney: “Dammit, I love it here, Marc. WED is just like the Hyperion Studio used to be in the years when we were always working on something new.” Did you get that same feeling at WED?

MD:
Yes. About six months before Walt died, he came in one day, and he just flopped down in a chair in my room. He said, “You know, Marc. I like to come over here. You know, just like the old studio.” Well, he didn't
say any more, and I interpreted it as saying that he liked to come over there because it was fresh. What was happening there was something new. He said of the studio, “These guys know how to do these films.” I won't say that he lost interest in them, but he couldn't spend his time, because he added too much to the cost of them. These guys all knew how to animate, and they knew how to put a picture together pretty well. I do think a lot of the pictures suffered very much—and suffer still—by the lack of his attention. I think that the pictures are now talking themselves to death, whereas in his version of the pictures, you talked when you needed to talk, you acted when you needed to act, you had action when you needed action, and you used music when you needed music. But you never talked just to be talking, you never talked to be clever, and you never talked to make jokes. It was never the Bob Hope/Jack Benny type of humor nor the Fred Allen type of humor—standing up and making funny remarks. So at WED, we were doing things and finding better ways to do things. He was again demanding that we do more interesting things.

DP:
I read about your trip with him to the New York World's Fair. That must have been quite an exciting thing to do.

MD:
Exciting. Tense. To have been with this man for, say, ten hours straight was not the easiest thing in the world. For one thing, the man had practically total recall. He could remember something I had said three years before, and if I said something different, he'd call me on it. By that time, I must say, I had learned to be a little guarded in just not letting things roll off the top of my head and think I was going to be funny to him, because he wasn't a man who had a great deal of small talk. Yet this doesn't mean that he wasn't a very warm individual. He was a warm and a very generous guy in his own way. There was one image that he was looking for more than anything else, and this was his own. Going through the World's Fair with him was a marvelous experience and a very emotional one.

DP:
Did you just visit the Disney-designed attractions?

MD:
No, we went through a lot of things. We went through It's a Small World. When we went to the GE exhibit, I warned, “Well, now, look,
don't expect too much out of this animation.” “Why?” I said, “Well, it's kind of tired machinery. It's been here for two years, you know.” He said, “Oh.” We went in and sat in the back row. Together with Walt and myself were the guy who ran the pavilion and Bob Mathieson. He [became] one of the heads of Walt Disney World down in Florida. We went all the way through and when we came out, Walt said, “Hell, Marc! That doesn't look too bad!” But if I had said, “Oh, hell, it's great!” he'd have said, “Jesus Christ!” and so on. Then we went to the Miss Clairol exhibit, because we were thinking that they might be interested in coming into Disneyland. This exhibit was for women only practically, but we went through it anyway with the man who ran it. After seeing a few exhibits, we came into a room and there were quite a number of young girls there. They discovered Walt and they shouted, “Oh, Walt Disney! Walt Disney! Can I have your autograph, Mr. Disney?” I'd say he autographed maybe six or seven pieces of paper. Then a little girl came up wearing blue jeans, a sweatshirt, bobby socks, and tennis shoes. She said, “Oh, Mr. Disney, may I have your autograph?” He put his hands on her, and he said, “Look, honey, I just can't autograph any more. I'll be mobbed here.” She started screaming, “He touched me! He touched me!” From there, we went over to IBM to see their show. I'm not sure we didn't go to other places in the meantime. They had kind of a traveling wall that you sat in and you went up in and saw the sights. Nobody seemed to pay any attention to him at all. Finally, we got up, and at some point, I don't remember exactly where, they all stood up and applauded. Then we went to the Scandinavian thing for lunch. It was very nice. He was pretty much left alone, but you'd see a few people noticing who he was. We finally ended up at the Ford exhibit—I think we skipped Lincoln—and they wanted to VIP him. But he said, “No, I want to go through the whole thing. I want to go through like the public.” So the three of us, plus the man who ran the show and a couple of Ford managers went through the whole serpentine—

DP:
Was this in the car?

MD:
This was the long walk going in there. You're on your feet for a good half hour before you ever get up to those cars. There was that long
serpentine line going back and forth that eventually lined you up with the exhibit car. In the line were a heavyset but well-dressed woman and a well-dressed man with a hat—typical New Yorker types. I saw them look at Walt. We serpentined so that we were next to them. This woman looked at Walt, then she looked back at her husband, and she said, “It isn't either!”

We finally got into a car. There must have been seven or eight hundred people there, and they broke into tremendous applause. But not one person looked at him. Typical New Yorkers! You wouldn't have known that they even recognized him until he got into the car. And I thought about that woman. I told Walt about her later, and he got a big kick out of it. After the exhibit, we went up to the VIP room for a drink. Then we went our separate ways, but we were together from about 9:30 in the morning until 6:00 at night. We saw a lot of different exhibits, many of them designed by other people. He wanted to see them, and he wanted to see them as the public saw them. He didn't want special treatment. In every instance, as I recall, he did that. He liked to do that sort of thing.

DP:
I understand that he liked to do that at Disneyland as much as he could.

MD:
Yeah, as much as he could. Of course, he was recognized there. I went through there a number of times with him, too, and it got a little testy, because he would sign a few autographs, and then all of a sudden, he would be mobbed. He was down there for other reasons, and he could not stand there like a guy in a bookstore autographing books all day. It wasn't that he didn't want to do it, but he knew when it was a good time to pull away from it. But he liked to be recognized. He was going to Europe one time, so he went up to the barbershop at the studio to get a haircut. He said, “Give me kind of a short haircut. I don't want to be recognized.” So the barber said, “Sure, Walt. Why don't you let me shave off your moustache?” “No! No!” He didn't not want to be recognized that much!

DP:
Was your last meeting with Walt very shortly before his death?

MD:
About two weeks, I guess. I never saw him alive again. That is still a strange thing. He came in and he flopped down in a chair. He looked
like the wrath of God. He was skinny. He was always saying that you had to take off some weight and that he had to take off some weight and so on. So I made a comment and I could have bit my tongue off for it. I said, “God, they sure knocked a helluva lot of weight off of you.” He just looked at me with this thin face. Anyway, he saw the first drawings that I had done: a whole flock of this bear band [which eventually evolved from the Mineral King project into the Country Bear Jamboree], but many different versions from the final thing. God, he saw those, and he laughed like hell. He was very pleased with them all. Well, in the meantime, one of the executives came in. As soon as Walt came over, boy they had their spies out! “Oh, Walt's here!” He looked in at the door, and Walt kind of hit his stomach and said, “Look, I'm not here on business. I know you're a busy man, and you got a lot of things to do. I just want to talk to Marc.” So then after about fifteen minutes, I began trying to figure out how I could entertain him more than this. So I said, “Well, we have the animation set up for the McDonnell-Douglas Flight to the Moon.” After looking at that, I said, “Did you like it?” He said, “Oh, yeah. Yeah.” By then, we had gathered maybe seven or eight people. He was there maybe ten minutes and then he turned to Dick Irvine and said, “Dick, I'm getting kind of tired. You want to drive me back to the studio?” We all kind of stayed back. I started toward my room, and as he went down the hall, he turned and said, “Good-bye Marc.” He never, ever said good-bye to anybody. Whether he had some premonition or not, I don't know. But anyway, two weeks later, he was gone. It was a very touching thing. I think this whole business will wait in kind of a talent limbo until somebody else comes along who has that drive and says, “I'll risk everything on what I believe.” I think this young [George] Lucas who made
Star Wars
and who is, I understand, a great Disney fan, took a tremendous gamble on making a live-action cartoon, and yet I have read that he said that he wanted to do it like Walt Disney would have done it had Walt Disney been doing it.