American Experience (1988) s28e01 Episode Script

1
FLOYD NORMAN:
Every time Walt
walked down a hallway,
he would give a loud cough.
It was a warning sign
so we would know that the boss
was in the area.
RICHARD SHERMAN:
In Bambi, there's a line:
when man is in the forest,
there was danger.
You have to be worried.
We'd hear Walt coughing
coming down the hall.
And one of the guys would say,
"Man is in the forest,"
and we'd all get ready for Walt.
ROLLY CRUMP:
He walked through the door
and, you know, pins would drop.
You couldn't hear anything.
His personal power
walked right with him.
SHERMAN:
There was no joking around.
He would sit down, he'd say,
"Okay, guys, what you got?"
And I would say,
"I got a great idea,"
and Walt would say,
"We'll tell you
if you have a great idea.
You have an idea."
NARRATOR:
Walt Disney was an international
celebrity by the time he was 30,
hailed a genius
before he was 40,
with honorary degrees
from Harvard and Yale.
He built a media
that stands as one of the most
powerful on the planet.
This little fellow is Bashful.
NARRATOR:
Won more Academy Awards
than anybody in history,
created a cinematic art form
(sneezes)
NARRATOR:
and invented a new kind of
American vacation destination.
Disney's work counts
adoring fans on every continent
and critics who decried its
smooth façade of sentimentality
and stubborn optimism,
its feel-good rewrite
of American history.
RON SUSKIND:
Disney's a Rorschach in America.
The love and hate,
it's off the charts.
But God, you have got to respect
the energy of this guy.
I mean, he is lunging every day
of his life.
Well, kids, Babes in Toyland
is finished,
and now it's time to celebrate!
RICHARD SCHICKEL:
Nobody who does stuff
on the scale that he did
is a sweetheart of a guy.
I think he wanted to be
what his image was.
He wanted to be thought of
as a "hale fellow well met,"
good-natured.
But he wasn't.
NEAL GABLER:
Walt Disney is in many ways
a very dark soul.
And one could say
that he fought that,
fought that darkness,
tried to find the light.
SARAH NILSEN:
He is feeling so much inside,
and he wants people to feel
what he feels is inside.
He could take those feelings
that were so central
to who he was,
put them on screen,
and allow other people
to also feel them
along with him.
GABLER:
Most successful people,
they get one thing right
and that's it.
But Walt Disney was a guy who
got a whole lot of things right.
What did this guy understand
about the human psyche?
SCHICKEL:
Walt Disney was as driven a man
as I've ever met in my life.
What he really wanted to do was,
as we used to say
in the Middle West,
make a name for himself.
He had a sort of
undifferentiated ambition.
He wanted to be somebody,
that's for sure.
NARRATOR:
Walt Disney was still a few
months shy of his 18th birthday
when he returned from France
after the First World War
in 1919,
and he was already better off
than most of the two million
other American boys
streaming back home.
"Diz," as his friends
called him,
had banked over $500
and had a place waiting for him
at a Chicago jelly factory,
where his father was part-owner.
The job offer was the best
most working-class boys
could hope for,
but Walt Disney was not like
most working-class boys.
DON HAHN:
He's got all these ideas
and he starts acting on them.
And where most people were
"ready, aim, fire,"
he was like,
"ready, fire, aim."
You know, he's like,
"Let's go."
Walt loved attention.
He was an extrovert.
He loved to be
the center of attention.
He wants to be an artist.
And I think he discovered
something early on:
that talent was his way
of getting attention.
He's a man of the times,
and the times are exciting.
NARRATOR:
Walt was determined
to do work he loved,
and he had been an enthusiastic
artist and cartoonist
from the time he was little.
He took a pass
on factory work in Chicago
and headed
for Kansas City instead,
where he had spent
much of his boyhood.
He moved into a house
with two of his older brothers
and landed a job as a commercial
artist for a local ad company.
Soon he was making enough money
for fashionable clothes,
fine cigars,
meals at nice restaurants,
and near-nightly trips
to the movie houses
springing up all over town.
Disney's evenings in these new
palaces of celluloid fantasy
included at least one
feature film,
maybe a serial short,
a newsreel,
and an animated cartoon or two.
TOM SITO:
It was an exciting
and very dynamic medium.
The industry was very young.
There was no regulations,
no customs, no conformity.
It was wide open to what people
wanted to make of it.
NARRATOR:
Disney was captivated.
His only formal training
was a few months
at an art school in Chicago
and a course at the Kansas City
Art Institute,
but he was convinced
he could make better
than what he was seeing.
He checked out
from the public library
Eadweard Muybridge's
Human Figures in Motion.
Then he borrowed a volume
that laid out the basics
of animation in filmmaking.
Disney read about
roughing out a storyline,
creating characters,
and carefully drawing
each individual frame
onto white linen paper.
By mounting each frame on pegs
just as the book instructed
and shooting them one at a time,
he began to create
the illusion of movement.
SARAH NILSEN:
He was really
into modern culture.
The pleasure of somehow engaging
with the potential of cinema,
the potential of animation
was exciting to him.
And he had this little ability
to draw.
He had a knack.
NARRATOR:
Disney's first efforts
were short cartoons he made
on nights and weekends
with a film camera he borrowed
from his boss at the ad company.
"I gagged 'em up to beat hell,"
he would say,
and then sold them to a small
Kansas City-based theater chain.
The fees
didn't even cover his costs,
but Disney gained something
more important than money:
attention, excitement,
a whiff of destiny.
"My first bit of fame
came there," he said.
"I got to be
a little celebrity."
At age 20,
Disney quit his day job
and started a company:
Laugh-O-Grams, Inc.,
Walter Elias Disney, president.
He hired a salesman,
a business manager,
and four young apprentice
animators.
HAHN:
I can imagine
a young Walt Disney
just, you know,
waking up at dawn
and going out with his friends
and saying,
"Well, let's shoot this,
let's film this."
And that kind of hunger
for not just expressing himself,
but finding out who he was.
He couldn't do enough.
STEVEN WATTS:
He has stars in his eyes.
He thinks he can do anything
and everything that he wants.
He has big plans.
He's gonna conquer the world.
NARRATOR:
Just as he was beginning
to get some traction
in the modern movie industry,
Walt's parents arrived
from Chicago.
Elias and Flora Disney
moved in with their sons
because they had
nowhere else to turn.
The jelly factory had failed,
the latest in a long line
of Elias's business disasters.
While Disney's mother
tried to be supportive
of Walt's new career,
his father took little joy
in his youngest son's
minor celebrity.
He told Walt not to expect
his new success to last.
Walt began to worry
he was going to end up,
once again,
in service to his father.
Disney lived a very,
very difficult existence
in Missouri as a kid.
He works all the time.
His father is an imperious,
withholding,
kind of brutal character.
"You're here to work,
and work to help me."
That's Dad.
GABLER:
It's hard to find a father
and son who are more different
than Elias Disney
and Walt Disney.
Walt Disney was fun-loving.
He loved practical jokes.
He was a kid
who just loved people.
Walt was antithetical to Elias
not only by temperament,
but also by will.
He determined, "I'm going to be
everything he isn't.
"I'm going to be
the antithesis of him.
"Look at his life.
I don't want to live that life."
He survives a life
of deprivation, of have not,
of no time to do the things
that kids should do
Play, enjoy, laugh.
And the minute he gets
into full upright adulthood,
whether he says it to himself
or not, he's like,
"I am going to make amends
for that in some way.
"I don't know how,
but I yearn for the things
that I didn't get as a child."
NARRATOR:
Disney and his
Laugh-O-Grams crew
secured a contract for six
animated fairytale shorts,
but when they delivered
the work,
the distributor stiffed them.
Walt could no longer
make payroll
or pay the rent on his office,
the phone bill,
the electrical bill.
Creditors began circling,
while Walt insisted
he had discovered the means
for a daring escape,
which he explained
in a Hail Mary letter
to one of the best-known cartoon
distributors in New York.
"We have just discovered
something new and clever
in animated cartoons,"
Disney wrote.
His big idea was to insert
footage of a real girl
into animated scenes.
Alice in Cartoonland, he crowed,
was "bound to be a winner."
"He was always optimistic
about his ability
and about the value
of his ideas,"
Disney's business manager
recalled.
"He believed in himself
and he believed in what
he was trying to accomplish."
Walt was able to scrape together
just enough cash
to complete Alice.
He finished his cartoon
experiment with little help
while sleeping at the office,
bathing at the train station,
subsisting on canned beans
and the charity
of a Greek diner.
But by the time
the cartoon short was finished
in the summer of 1923,
it was too late.
His company was headed
for bankruptcy court.
Alice in Cartoonland would not
save Laugh-O-Grams, Inc.
Walt Disney had suffered
his first real failure.
He packed his cardboard suitcase
with two spare shirts
and what was left
of his drawing supplies,
then headed for Union Station,
where he treated himself
to a first-class ticket
on the Santa Fe
California Limited,
straight through to Los Angeles.
WATTS:
Hollywood in the 1920s
is a beacon of the future.
It's this golden city
on the West Coast.
Hollywood, Los Angeles,
that's where the action is at.
And I think Disney senses that,
and that's where he wants to be.
GABLER:
He's not thinking
about animation now.
He's already failed
with animation.
So the next step is,
"I'm going to go out here
"and I'm going to become
a movie director.
That's what I'm going to do."
NARRATOR:
The wannabe movie man
walked past Charlie Chaplin's
studio along La Brea Avenue,
rode the trolley to Culver City
to see the set used in Ben-Hur,
and talked his way
onto the Universal lot,
where he wandered around
late into the night.
But after weeks of effort,
Walt had not been able
to talk his way into a job.
His older brother Roy,
who had moved to Los Angeles
for health reasons,
had little patience
for Walt's insistence
on finding a place
in the movie business.
Roy hadn't been star-struck
on arrival.
He sold vacuum cleaners
door-to-door
when he first got to town,
and he admonished his brother
to find a similar job
One that paid.
Walt was considering this advice
when a cartoon distributor
from New York got in touch.
Margaret Winkler,
the only woman in the business,
had remembered Walt's
Alice in Cartoonland pitch
and wanted to see how
the young animator's big idea
had turned out.
Soon after Disney shipped
his Alice reel
to Winkler's office in New York,
the distributor
wired back an offer.
She wanted Walt
to make 12 Alice shorts,
and was willing to pay
$1,500 per episode.
GABLER:
When he gets that telegram,
the first thing he does is
he goes to visit
his brother Roy.
And Walt is waving
this telegram, saying,
"Look! We've got a chance here!"
His brother is not enthusiastic.
His brother has no entertainment
ambitions whatsoever.
His brother is the pragmatist.
But Walt says, you know,
"We can do this.
I need you for this."
Roy, as much as he was
a naysayer,
he loved the enthusiasm of Walt,
and I think he thrived on it.
He got joy from participating
in the kind of wild schemes
of his brother
that he himself
would never have concocted.
Roy got release,
and Walt got protection.
NARRATOR:
The two brothers scraped up
a little cash
from friends and relatives
and set up a two-man operation
in the back
of a real estate office.
Walt was the artist
and idea man;
Roy was the fundraiser,
the bookkeeper,
and the all-around utility man.
But Walt recognized that
he needed the kind of help
Roy could not provide.
So he convinced an old friend
and collaborator, Ub Iwerks,
to relocate from Kansas City
to Los Angeles.
HAHN:
Walt loves to draw,
and he can draw,
and he gets attention
by drawing.
But how do I put this
discreetly?
Walt Disney wasn't the best
artist in the world.
He grew up in an era of
age of illustrators,
was surrounded by great art.
He wasn't that.
And I think he saw that
pretty early on.
ERIC SMOODIN:
Iwerks is incredible
and can work fast.
So it's an early sign
that Disney always wants
to work with the very best
and isn't afraid
of working with someone
who's better than he is
at many things.
NARRATOR:
Iwerks began restyling
the Alice's Wonderland shorts
as soon as he arrived,
creating films
with less emphasis on the girl
and more on the cartoon
characters.
The Disneys' distributor
loved the new look.
They wanted more, and faster,
and were willing to pay
good money to get them.
Walt recruited more
of his old gang from Missouri,
then hired some locals,
and the number of employees
at the Disney studio
swelled to a dozen.
WATTS:
The difference
between Laugh-O-Grams
and Disney Brothers is Roy.
Roy was in the latter,
and he was not in the former.
And from the very beginning,
I think Roy helped put financial
and business structure in place
that grounded the enterprise.
NARRATOR:
The brothers enjoyed
their early success
and expected it to continue.
Roy bought a stolid new sedan;
Walt a snazzy Moon Roadster.
They purchased adjoining lots
and built new houses
next door to each other.
In the spring of 1925,
Roy married Edna Francis,
his longtime sweetheart
from Kansas City.
Walt, sporting a rakish
pencil moustache,
acted as best man
while escorting his girlfriend,
Lillian Bounds.
The couple had met
in the office,
when Lillian was working
as an inker
at the Disney Brothers Studio.
"He just had no inhibitions,"
Lillian said of Walt.
"He was completely natural.
He was fun."
Three months
after Roy and Edna's wedding,
Walt and Lillian tied the knot.
The Disney Brothers Studio
was churning out
a new Alice short every 16 days
at the beginning of 1926,
and Walt and Roy were ready
to hang their shingle
on a more spacious building
in the Silver Lake neighborhood
of Los Angeles.
When they moved
from the Disney Brothers Studio
to the Hyperion Avenue facility,
a very striking and very
revealing thing happens.
Walt goes to Roy and he says,
"I've made a decision,
"and that decision is
from hence,
"this will be called
the Walt Disney Studio,
not the Disney Brothers Studio."
Walt Disney believed that it was
his vision of creativity
and entertainment
that was the engine
of this enterprise,
and that's what was being sold.
NARRATOR:
Disney was understandably
obsessed with his rivals
in the cartoon industry
by the end of 1926.
He could tell his Alice pictures
were running out of steam
and spent much of his free time
in darkened theaters,
assessing the work of the top
New York-based animators:
the Fleischer Brothers
and Pat Sullivan.
He was taking aim at the
industry's gold standard:
Sullivan's Felix the Cat.
If you look at animation
at that period,
it's extremely crude,
it's really violent,
it's really gag driven,
and it's very urban.
These are older men
making kind of crude,
hard animation.
And Disney steps in
as this young guy
and he's like, "Okay, well,
I see what you're doing,
"I'll try this out, and then
I'll figure out my own voice
in my other influences around me
to transform it."
NARRATOR:
The key to challenging the
supremacy of Felix the Cat,
Walt believed,
was creating his own compelling
and likeable character.
Disney's distributor suggested
he try a rabbit
"Too many cats on the market."
Iwerks took charge of Oswald
the Lucky Rabbit's look
while Disney wrote
the storylines and the gags.
The bosses at Universal Pictures
were so taken
with the first sketches
of Oswald,
they offered a contract
for 26 episodes.
Walt Disney Studios
seemed to be riding high.
But by the time the team
put the finishing touches
on the first order
of Oswald shorts,
the animators were increasingly
frustrated with the boss.
The old Kansas City hands
who had helped Disney
get started in the business,
and often without pay,
were working into the night
and through the weekends,
while Walt was taking
much of the money
and most of the credit.
WATTS:
I think the two sides
of Disney emerge.
You have on the one hand
Walt the inspirer.
The other side of Disney
was Disney the driver,
who demanded work,
who demanded creativity,
demanded productivity.
And if people
didn't meet his standards,
he could come down on you
like a ton of bricks.
NARRATOR:
Charles Mintz,
Margaret Winkler's new husband
and business partner,
saw an opportunity,
emboldened by the knowledge
that he owned the rights
to Oswald
and the Disney brothers did not.
GABLER:
Ub Iwerks comes to Walt Disney
and says,
"Walt, I've been approached
by Charles Mintz
"to essentially leave you
and to go to work for Mintz.
"And I'm not the only one.
"All of the animators have.
But they haven't told you."
WATTS:
Disney doesn't believe it.
He just sort of pooh-poohs
the whole thing
and doesn't really believe
Ub Iwerks,
who says, "No, there's
a problem brewing here."
NARRATOR:
Walt went to New York
in February of 1928
with big hopes for a new
contract from Mintz.
But it only took a few days
for Disney to realize
that Iwerks had been right:
Mintz had already poached
almost all of Disney's artists
except for Ub,
and the distributor told Walt
he was going to go on
making the Oswald cartoons
without him.
NILSEN:
Things are unfolding that
most people would understand,
and Disney comes into it
shockingly naïve.
It was pretty clear that people
were unhappy around him,
that he was pretty oblivious
to that.
He's very driven by his vision,
and when these kind of business
failings occur,
he is completely
caught off guard.
NARRATOR:
When Disney boarded the train
for the trip back
to Los Angeles,
he was despondent.
Almost all of his team
had abandoned him.
He had no distributor,
no Oswald,
and very little money
in the bank.
HAHN:
Oswald the Rabbit
gets taken away from him
like a kid
taking your lunch money.
They were looking the other
direction, and Oswald was gone.
NARRATOR:
It was a long
cross-country ride for Disney.
The train made stops at most
of the big cities along the way
and blew through countless
other small towns on the line.
One of them was
Marceline, Missouri.
Disney had first seen Marceline
at the age of four,
when his father had fled
the big city of Chicago
and moved him, his mother,
his three older brothers,
and his baby sister
to a little farmstead there.
It was a place Disney
never forgot.
(birds chirping)
WATTS:
Walt was living in the country
on the edge of this town,
and he was surrounded by nature.
He could romp through the woods
and run through the fields.
There were farm animals around,
and he loved animals.
Had a pet dog,
pigs, cows, horses.
NILSEN:
Marceline represents really
the one moment in his childhood
where he was a child,
the place where he really
was allowed to be free,
where he wasn't being told
what to do by his dad.
SUSKIND:
Marceline was this seemingly
idyllic place
hitting Disney at a certain age.
You know, the rhythm
and the beat of the place
is just right for a kid.
It's like
the last breath of something
that seems to resemble
a traditional childhood.
NARRATOR:
The Disney family business
was a tough go.
The margins were always slim,
and Elias wasn't much
of a farmer.
Just five years
after they arrived,
Disney's father announced that
the family was pulling up stakes
and heading back to the city.
DISNEY (on recording):
My dad sold the farm,
but then he had to auction
all the stock and things.
And it was in the cold
of the winter,
and I remember Roy and myself
going out and going all around
to the different little towns
and places,
tacking up these posters
of the auction.
GABLER:
Walt Disney once said that
he'll never forget his
days in Marceline,
and almost everything important
that happened to him
happened in Marceline.
But I think that has to include
also the losing of Marceline.
NARRATOR:
When Walt and Lillian
arrived at Union Station
in Los Angeles
in mid-March 1928,
Ub Iwerks detected
none of his friend's
trademark good cheer
and enthusiasm.
He looked like he'd just
run into a stone wall,
Ub would say.
GABLER:
Coming from the Disney family,
where his father had suffered
so many successive failures,
I think you can only imagine the
impact that had on Walt Disney.
Failure was a big thing
in the Disney family.
NILSEN:
Where his dad just continually
gets more and more depressed,
quits basically, Walt steps up.
Boom.
"You think Oswald was good?
"I can do much better than that.
I'll show you
what I'm capable of doing."
NARRATOR:
Disney held daily brainstorming
sessions with Roy and Ub
and a few other loyalists
who had not signed with Mintz.
Intent on dreaming up
a bankable new character,
and one they would own,
Disney's skeleton team
scoured popular magazines
for inspiration,
bounced ideas off one another,
and drew figures
on their sketchpads
until something began to emerge.
"Pear-shaped body, ball on top,
a couple of thin legs,"
Iwerks later explained.
"You gave it long ears
and it was a rabbit.
"Short ears, it was a cat.
With an elongated nose,
it became a mouse."
Walt suggested
they name him Mortimer.
Lillian thought
that was terrible
and came up with "Mickey."
As with Oswald, Ub took charge
of the mouse's look.
Walt gave him his personality.
He doesn't have
the financial backing
to support
what it is he's doing.
He wants to be
a bigger voice than he is.
And it's a perfect metaphor:
him being this small mouse,
this seemingly insignificant
figure or individual
within this big industry
that he wants to break into.
NARRATOR:
Disney was unable
to find a distributor
willing to take a chance
on his first two Mickey shorts.
But Walt refused
to give up on his mouse.
At a meeting with Roy one day,
as the tiny staff worked up
a third and still unsold
Mickey Mouse cartoon,
Walt suddenly blurted out,
"We'll make them over
with sound!"
NILSEN:
"How can I do something better
with animation
than what everybody else
is doing?"
He's always the person
looking for new technology.
He's always the person trying
to find the newest invention
to make animation better.
At the time, producing
a soundtrack in synch with
and music that makes sense
with the action on screen
is very difficult.
This was a very precise
and intricate process
that Disney
had to think through.
And also, it's unclear
that the money it costs
to make a sound film
can possibly pay off
with tickets sold.
NARRATOR:
Disney saw no good option
but to take the chance.
He headed back to New York
and signed a quick deal
with the licenser
of one of the most advanced
sound systems in town.
Walt didn't have
enough money in the bank
to pay for the recording
sessions, so he wired Roy
to do whatever he had to
to get the cash.
He told his brother to sell his
beloved Moon Roadster if needed.
Stuck in New York
to oversee the sound work,
Walt trolled desperately
for a distributor.
He carried his reels
from one office to another
for three long months
and came up empty.
He did manage to secure
a two-week run
at the Colony Theater,
Broadway and 53rd.
Steamboat Willie premiered
on November 18, 1928.
(boat chugging along)
(whistle blowing)
(whistling to music)
NARRATOR:
The crowd at the Colony Theater
was in thrall.
People had heard sound
in pictures before,
but never like this.
(whistles tooting)
The music and sound effects
were part of the gags.
"It knocked me out of my seat,"
one New York reporter wrote.
(playing "Turkey in the Straw")
A few audiences
begged the projectionist
to delay the start
of the feature
and rerun Steamboat Willie.
(music continues)
(drumming
in rhythm with the music)
(high-pitched drumming
in rhythm with the music)
SMOODIN:
Steamboat Willie
was such a huge hit,
and it gave Disney Studio
a really sort of a preeminence,
where suddenly this company
is now, like,
taking a step
to the front ranks.
This upstart from the West Coast
just erupts
in the middle of everybody
with this amazing character.
(singing)
NARRATOR:
Mickey was a multi-talented
charmer
A dancer, a comedian, a singer.
And within months, never mind
he was just a cartoon,
Mickey Mouse was the newest
Hollywood celebrity.
(singing)
(kids cheering)
NARRATOR:
While the country slid toward
economic disaster in 1930,
the fame of the Disney mouse
just kept growing,
as did Mickey's standing
as the archetype
of the American can-do spirit.
(roaring)
(laughing)
Mickey Mouse is scrappy.
Mickey Mouse is a survivor.
Mickey Mouse is somebody during
the years of the Depression
who takes
a limited number of skills
and a limited number
of resources,
and he always ends up on top.
SUSKIND:
Mickey's a little bit
in your face.
Howdy-do!
Mickey's like, "Hey, I'm smart.
"I can do anything.
"I get into trouble,
but I get out of it.
"I'm sort of rebellious.
You know,
I live by my own rules."
He's an adolescent dream
is what he is,
rebelling and making it work.
That's Mickey.
(laughing)
(screaming)
WATTS:
Walt Disney was certainly not
a social theorist.
He certainly didn't
think through the problems
of the Depression.
But what Disney did do
was to have a kind of
instinctive, impulsive feel
for the problems and the hopes
of ordinary people.
There's always mishap.
There's always sort of
the slapsticky bit
that interferes
with his success.
And then he triumphs
and he wins at the end.
And he usually
gets the girl, too.
Let's all sing the chorus again!
(singing)
NARRATOR:
Mickey Mouse Clubs
began sprouting up
at local movie theaters.
More than a million children
signed up.
Roy encouraged the clubs,
and saw in Mickey's
growing popularity
another possible stream
of revenue: licensing.
The Disneys had made
a few haphazard deals
to allow Mickey's likeness
on children's toys,
following the example
of other popular characters,
like Felix the Cat.
But the Walt Disney Studio
got less than five percent
of the take
and saw little revenue,
until they brought in Kay Kamen.
WATTS:
He was an ad man.
He was a marketer.
He had a very keen sense
of what we would call branding.
Kamen is a genius
for doing these
licensing agreements
with companies
all over the United States
who want to associate
their products
with the success
of the Disney studio.
NARRATOR:
The Disney brothers gave Kamen
the exclusive rights
to license Mickey Mouse,
along with his girlfriend
Minnie, his dog Pluto,
and later, Donald Duck.
The studio kept a tight rein
on how their products,
especially their mouse,
could be used,
and they demanded
a big cut of the profits.
But they had plenty
of willing partners,
because Mickey Mouse
moved product.
By the early 1930s,
fans could buy Mickey-adorned
merchandise by the scores.
The Mickey Mouse watch became
the most popular timepiece
in America.
(crowd cheering,
camera shutters clicking)
Fan mail for Mickey Mouse
poured into the studio
on Hyperion Avenue,
with postmarks
from across the United States,
from England, Spain,
the Philippines.
Some were addressed to Mickey,
some to Walt.
SMOODIN:
Mickey is understood as being
the creation of Disney,
and Disney is understood
as being the father of Mickey.
And combined, that makes for
a kind of international stardom
that we really
hadn't seen before.
HAHN:
When everybody else
is suffering,
Walt Disney is selling
consumer products
and making millions of dollars
out of Mickey Mouse.
And that's a huge story,
that this little mouse
turns into the future
of the Walt Disney Company.
Walt Disney always talked
about Mickey Mouse
as being his alter ego.
He would say that, you know,
"I'm closer to Mickey Mouse
than I am to anyone else."
(in high Mickey voice):
Hey, Pluto, here she comes!
SUSKIND:
Mickey and Walt
are talking to each other.
Hey, Pluto, here she comes!
SUSKIND:
So he's gotta do Mickey's voice.
Someone's gotta do it.
So of course Walt does it
because it's him
talking to himself.
"So, Mickey,
how you feeling today?"
(in high Mickey voice):
"You know, I feel great.
"Do you know
it wasn't an easy day?
"You know, maybe tomorrow,
who knows?
"You know, let's get into
a little bit of trouble,
you and me."
NARRATOR:
Walt Disney was not yet 30,
and he had made himself the
first celebrity of animation,
a film cartoonist
the public could name.
His studio stood
atop the industry
and was growing to meet the
demand for new Mickey cartoons.
The success of Mickey
lured plenty of good talent
to Hyperion,
some of the best
in the business,
but Disney insisted
on having the final word
on every foot of finished film
that came out of his studio.
He spent long hours
at the office,
often until 1:00 or 2:00
in the morning,
and still had a hard time
keeping up.
He was anxious and obsessive,
chain-smoking day and night,
drumming his thumbs impatiently
on the table in story meetings.
MICHAEL BARRIER:
His role was changing
in the studio.
He was leaving behind the things
that were so familiar to him
Working with his hands,
being an active participant
in the work
Becoming more and more a man
who was the intellectual
overseer,
evaluating, criticizing,
editing.
And as he stepped back from this
more active participation,
he initially was, I think,
very distressed by it,
felt uncomfortable doing it.
NARRATOR:
Disney had talked of having
a big family of his own
for years.
He wanted ten children,
he would tell his sister,
and he would spoil them all.
Lillian had her doubts about
raising any number of children,
especially when she considered
the office hours Walt kept.
But he talked her into it.
Roy and Edna had
had their first child already,
and by the spring of 1931,
Lillian was pregnant.
Walt was giddy.
He was already making plans
for a bigger house
to accommodate the new addition.
Then Lillian miscarried.
Disney waved off the
well-wishers and sympathizers.
He threw himself
back into his work.
He insisted he was fine.
He was not.
DISNEY (on recording):
In 1931, I had a hell
of a breakdown.
I went all to pieces.
It was just pound, pound, pound.
It was costs,
my costs were going up.
I was always way over
whatever they figured
the pictures would bring in.
And I cracked up.
I just got very irritable.
I got to the point
that I couldn't talk
on the telephone.
I'd begin to cry,
and the least little thing,
I'd just go that way.
NARRATOR:
In October 1931, Walt Disney
took his doctor's advice
and escaped on the first
real vacation of his life.
He and Lillian went across
the country to Washington, D.C.,
then to Key West,
and on to a week's stay in Cuba.
They rode a steamship
through the Panama Canal
on the way back to Los Angeles.
Once home, Disney told people
that the breakdown
had been a godsend.
Life was sweet, he said,
and there was more to it
than work.
He dove into a new
exercise regimen,
went with Lillian
on long horseback rides,
learned to play polo,
and joined a league.
GABLER:
Walt comes back
from his nervous breakdown,
and he does change
his lifestyle.
But does Walt Disney withdraw?
Does he delegate?
Does he do the things that one
might have expected him to do?
No, he does not.
(dramatic music playing)
(hooting)
NARRATOR:
Disney had never been shy about
spending money on his vision,
even when the studio
was cash poor.
He had already used up
his earliest Mickey profits
in the creation of a new series
of cartoon shorts
called Silly Symphonies.
(clock bell chiming)
(howling)
(growling)
SMOODIN:
The Silly Symphonies were much
more about animation as art.
So The Skeleton Dance
and others like them
were understood
as these wonderful,
almost avant-garde films
that merged music and dance
and made characters
out of nature
and also other kinds
of inanimate things
in ways that people
hadn't really seen before.
(harp notes chiming)
NARRATOR:
Silly Symphonies raised Walt
to near mythic status
among cartoonists and animators.
Artists from all over
the country packed their bags
and headed for California
just for the chance to work
with the great Walt Disney.
The Hyperion staff grew
to nearly 200.
(birds chirping in rhythm
with the music)
NARRATOR:
Men ruled the studio, as they
did all studios in the 1930s.
The women who came to work
at Disney
were relegated to the low-wage
ink-and-paint department.
In the middle
of the Great Depression,
few complained about
a steady job with steady pay.
NILSEN:
It becomes, like,
the studio to work at.
And all of those animators
just thrive
because Disney sets it up
as a legitimate profession.
"Here I step in.
"I will recognize your talent.
I will pay you well."
BOB GIVENS:
It was like a renaissance to us.
It was a flowering
of the animation industry.
It'd never been done before.
This was fine art,
not just dumb cartoons.
(chirping)
NARRATOR:
Disney's new series was
the test ground for innovation,
with firsts
in sound technique, color,
and multi-plane
camera technology,
which produced
a three-dimensional depth
never before seen in animation.
GABLER:
Walt intended the studio
to be the place
where you created great art.
(thunder rumbling)
(wind howling)
(dramatic music playing)
GABLER:
That was so instrumental
to Walt's understanding
of the studio.
And that became, in many ways,
the most powerful element
in how he dealt
with his workers.
They wanted to produce
great things.
He made them want to produce
great things.
(horn honking)
SITO:
He was very jovial.
He was very informal.
He's the one who first insisted
on only being referred to
by his first name.
RUTH TOMPSON:
Boss?
He wasn't boss.
He was a friend.
And everybody called him Walt.
If they didn't call him Walt,
that was the end of that one.
GIVENS:
We used to play volleyball
at noon,
over there across the street
in the annex.
And Walt used to come over there
and watch us.
He used to say,
"Don't play too rough,"
he'd say, you know?
And he wanted us to be careful,
not hurt our hands,
our drawing hand particularly.
And we loved to win,
because then he'd applaud.
But he was the big daddy there.
He didn't miss anything.
NARRATOR:
Disney offered drawing classes
at the studio
and brought in professors
from the Chouinard Art Institute
to teach them.
He invited experts to lecture
on Impressionism, Expressionism,
Cubism, the Mexican muralists.
HAHN:
He was always very much about
not only hiring the artists
but providing a safe place
for them to do their job.
And by "safe," I mean a place
to make mistakes
and a place to fail
and a place to take criticism
without the fear of being fired,
and a place to be able to learn.
(cheering)
SUSKIND:
He wanted a family,
a community, a place.
"I can actually create
a little world,
"bordered, mine,
"just what I need it to be,
inhabited by all these people.
A community marked 'Disney.'"
NARRATOR:
Walt Disney, not yet 35,
appeared to be in possession
of the magic beans.
His studio was
a Technicolor rainbow
in the middle of the pale, gray
Depression-era America.
His home life was thriving too.
Lillian had given birth
to a daughter, Diane,
and the Disneys would soon adopt
a second daughter, Sharon.
But Disney wasn't satisfied.
He needed a "new adventure,"
he would say,
"a kick in the pants
to jar loose some inspiration
and enthusiasm."
Disney's employees were still
telling the story decades later.
One evening in 1934,
Walt sent his entire staff out
for an early dinner,
but told them to hurry back
to the Hyperion soundstage
for an important
company meeting.
The room was buzzing
by the time Walt took the stage.
GABLER:
Disney is lit
on the sound stage,
and he then proceeds
to act out
Alone, just him,
a one-man show
The story of Snow White.
WATTS:
What he did was to go through
the whole movie as he saw it,
acting out all of the parts,
impersonating
all of the characters,
going through all the emotions,
all the ups and downs
The queen, the princess,
the seven dwarves,
even the animals.
NARRATOR:
What Disney was proposing
had never been done,
never even been tried:
a feature-length,
story-driven cartoon.
WATTS:
Roy Disney was pretty skeptical
about all of this.
And the more he thought
about it, actually,
the more convinced he became
that this could be a disaster
for the studio
because he was afraid that
it wouldn't sell,
that people wouldn't see it,
and it would drag the studio
down into bankruptcy.
And Roy dug in his heels.
NARRATOR:
Walt would not let it go.
He was convinced
this century-old
Brothers Grimm fairytale
about a virtuous princess
chased into a deep, dark forest
by her hateful stepmother
was a can't-miss proposition.
He must have told that story
after that first night,
you know, a thousand times.
People would always say
he'd collar them in the hallway
and tell the story
of Snow White again.
He'd have to repeat it
again and again and again
to keep them energized,
to keep himself energized,
and to review the film
in his head
so that it was always rolling.
This was obsession.
NARRATOR:
Walt's excitement was catching.
"We were just carried away,"
remembered one animator.
"I would've climbed a mountain
full of wildcats
to do everything I could
to make Snow White."
Roy grudgingly came around
and managed
to shake the money free
from their longtime lender,
Bank of America.
But he warned his brother
the bankers were very nervous
about this gamble,
and they expected Walt
to stay on schedule
and within
the agreed-upon budget.
The schedule, the budget,
the company's debt
were secondary considerations
to Walt, who was preoccupied
with a single
overriding problem:
how to translate his idea
to the big screen.
Snow White would have
to captivate its audience
in a way no cartoon
ever had before.
GABLER:
In the shorter cartoons,
you can make people laugh.
And the gag is the basic
component of these things.
You get people to laugh.
But Walt Disney now is asking
another question:
Can you make people cry?
Can you make people cry
over a drawing?
NARRATOR:
One key, Disney believed,
was to infuse his animated film
with a natural realism.
He brought live animals
into the studio
so his artists
could study their movement.
He had his animators
throw heavy objects
through plate glass windows
just to analyze
the shattering effects.
Disney hired a teenage dancer
to act the part of Snow White
so his animators could study
how she looked
when she leaned over
or laughed or smiled
so they could see the movement
of her dress as she danced.
WATTS:
They would bring in actors,
and they would have them
impersonate these characters
in front of the animators,
who would try to capture certain
qualities of their movements.
They would even film them to try
to get a sense of personality,
of movement, of realism.
BARRIER:
What he was after
was something different,
making thought
and emotion visible
in a way that seems natural
and not artificial.
Disney really kind of took
the art of animation
and pushed it towards
the animator as an actor
and about performance.
He wanted his animators
to take acting classes
Studying their facial muscles,
how you say certain words,
you know,
how is your lips shaped
when you say "V,"
or how is, like, "O," or "Ooh,"
you know?
How does it affect your eyes?
There were no rules.
They hadn't been
invented before.
So you're kind of free to do
anything you wanted to do.
Follow your instincts and do it.
NARRATOR:
Walt's stubborn insistence
on getting the story right,
on innovation,
and on attention to detail
meant the pace of production
at Hyperion was glacial.
GABLER:
To draw each of these
characters,
to draw these backgrounds,
to do it in a way
that transcends anything
that'd been done before,
is excruciating.
It's grueling.
It's painful.
It's tormenting.
GIVENS:
We were the crew that did most
of the Snow White drawings,
and we'd sometimes
take a whole day
for a close up of Snow White.
That's how intricate
the drawing was.
It was so precise.
It was like making watches,
you know?
It was just such fine detail.
You know, one little line
would throw the whole thing off.
NARRATOR:
The production process
did not change.
Key animators would draw the
main characters in Snow White.
"In-betweeners"
would draw the movements
between the key frames.
The ink-and-paint artists
would add color to the drawings
and transfer them
to the transparent sheets,
or cels, to go to camera.
At 24 frames per second and
often multiple cels per frame,
Snow White would require more
than 200,000 separate drawings.
SMOODIN:
Making the film required
an army of people,
and I'm not sure that Disney
thought of all of them
as talent.
There are real workers here
who are doing the grunt work.
NARRATOR:
The Disneys had already built
a two-story addition
at Hyperion,
but it wasn't near enough.
Roy was forced to rent bungalows
and other buildings
in the neighborhood
just to accommodate their staff,
which grew to more
than 600 people.
Poor Roy Disney.
You know, during this time,
there's tremendous expansion
and ideas and excitement
by everybody,
but Roy's the banker,
and he's the guy that has
to keep it all together.
And there's weekly discussions
about how to make payroll.
The feature was going
over budget.
The bankers from Bank of America
were there frequently.
And Roy's job was
to keep everybody calm
and to keep it all together
financially.
Supper!
(shouting excitedly)
NARRATOR:
As the production
dragged into its second
and then its third year, Walt's
demands began to look dangerous.
He repeatedly pushed deadlines,
and by the start of 1937,
with the premiere set
for that December,
the studio was behind
Way behind.
Ten months to the premiere date,
and not a single animation cel
had been shot on film.
But Walt insisted that
Snow White could not be rushed
and could not be done
on the cheap.
(orchestral music playing)
NARRATOR:
Walt kept upping the ante,
which meant Roy had to raise
Walt's original budget number
six times over.
The trade papers
were beginning to write stories
about the delays.
People were calling Snow White
"Disney's Folly."
Roy was worried
they might be right.
TOMPSON:
I was working the 12-hour deal,
where you come in at 8:00
and go home at 8:00.
And we really were cleaning cels
and patching cels,
fixing mistakes
and things like that.
There were a lot.
And the queen,
the queen was, uh
She had the kind of paint
that was kind of sticky.
And so those things
would come back from camera,
and we'd have to clean them up
and patch them
and send them back to camera.
DON LUSK:
I worked my tail off.
I was put in charge
of the clean-up and in-betweens.
That's where it was lagging.
We went in at 7:00
instead of 8:00,
and we went to dinner
and we came back and usually
worked till almost 10:00.
GIVENS:
The ink-and-paint gals were
some of them were losing
their eyesight.
It was a hell of a thing.
They were just slaves.
They were doing it, but they
believed in this thing so much,
they were willing to drop dead
on the job.
NARRATOR:
The animators finished
in early November,
but the last cels weren't
painted until November 27th.
Rumors were flying
around Hollywood
that there would be
no print of the film ready
for the December 21st premiere.
NEWS ANNOUNCER:
Blasé Hollywood,
accustomed to gala openings,
turns out for the most
spectacular of them all.
The world premiere
of the million-and-a-half dollar
fairytale fantasy
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Replicas from the first
feature cartoon thrill thousands
who turn out for a glimpse
of lovely Marlene Dietrich
with Doug Fairbanks Jr.
And a parade of stars.
Shirley Temple
is just as enthralled
as are the grown-up stars
and moviegoers
with the seven fantastic dwarfs.
GABLER:
Walt was in a state
of high anxiety.
He had no idea how the audience
was going to respond.
RADIO REPORTER:
Well, Walt, I think you're due
to do all the talking tonight.
Uh, tell us a little bit
about this picture, will you?
DISNEY:
Well, it's been lot of fun
making it,
and we're very happy that
it's being given this big
premiere here tonight
and all these people
are turning out
to take a look at it,
and I hope they're not
too disappointed.
REPORTER:
Well, I'm sure they won't be,
I've seen the picture, Walt
He didn't know
if it would really work.
And one part of him
was almost agonizing over,
"Well, if people don't buy this,
this will just fall flat,
and then I will be done."
NARRATOR:
Audience members gasped
at the opening shots
of the Queen's castle.
Slave in the magic mirror,
come from the farthest space.
Through in from darkness,
I summon thee, speak!
NARRATOR:
They howled in laughter
at the antic dwarfs.
(sniffing)
Ah, soup!
Hooray!
(shouting over each other)
SNOW WHITE:
Uh-uh-uh, just a minute!
The heart of a pig!
And I've been tricked.
NARRATOR:
They hissed disapproval
at the Evil Queen.
And still, Walt was anxious.
Don't let the wish grow cold!
Oh, I feel strange.
NARRATOR:
He sat gripping Lillian's hand
for nearly 75 minutes,
nervously anticipating the scene
that would put the power
of his personal vision
to the ultimate test.
(cackling laughter)
Now I'll be fairest in the land!
(solemn organ music playing)
NARRATOR:
When it arrived, the apparent
death of Snow White,
the theater was hushed.
(crying)
GABLER:
The audience started weeping.
And that's when Walt knew.
That's when they all knew.
The audience had suspended
its disbelief so thoroughly,
so believed in the reality
of the situation
and of the dwarves,
that they were crying.
That was really the triumph
of the film.
One song,
only for you ♪
One heart ♪
SUSKIND:
Clark Gable and Carole Lombard
are weeping.
They don't know what hit them.
You know, what hit them is that
they crossed a barrier
from the life they live
to the internal world,
where myth lives in all of us,
and Disney provides the passage.
And it ain't kid's stuff.
NARRATOR:
When the curtain came down,
the audience rose
from their seats
and broke
into a thunderous ovation.
Someday, when my dreams
come true ♪
NARRATOR:
"I could not help but feel,"
one rival movie producer gushed,
"that I was in the midst
of motion picture history."
SCHICKEL:
I know the first movie I saw
was Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs.
Now, I didn't know anything
but to be delighted with it.
It was wonderful.
I mean, I still think
it's wonderful.
Snow White lies dead.
TOMPSON:
I loved the queen.
She was so awful,
but she was just beautiful.
Behold her heart!
She was so beautifully drawn
and everything.
SCHICKEL:
Kids had to be carried screaming
out of Radio City Music Hall.
They were too frightening
for them.
That's an important aspect.
Disney understood that kids
could take more scariness
than people thought
they could take.
So they wet the pants
and wet the seat
in Radio City Music Hall.
(screaming)
But they'd had an experience,
you know?
That's what was important.
It was not just bland.
It was serious stuff going on
in their little heads.
SUSKIND:
Think about what he does.
Well, he's like, "These cartoons
don't have to be just slapstick.
"They can carry everything,
all the biggest stuff.
"They can carry ancient
and powerful mythologies.
They can carry everything."
My hands!
That was a huge leap,
and that's an artistic leap.
He's creating a new art form.
NARRATOR:
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
played at New York's
Radio City Music Hall
for five straight weeks
at the beginning of 1938.
No other film had ever run
more than three weeks there.
National and international
releases followed.
Lines wrapped around small-town
theaters in New England,
the South, the Midwest,
the Far West.
The film was a box office smash
in London, Paris, and Sydney.
It grossed $8 million
in its first year,
the equivalent of
over $100 million today
and more than any film
before it.
Roy paid off the studio's $2.3
million debt to Bank of America
while the film was still
in its first run
and helped oversee
an unprecedented
merchandising campaign.
SMOODIN:
There are Snow White jars
and Snow White jelly
and Snow White scarves.
There are Snow White shows
going on at department stores.
So the film and the space
of commerce are completely one.
It's a commercial triumph
for Disney
not just because
of the film itself,
but because of the way that
the merchandise is tied to it.
NARRATOR:
Walt Disney was celebrated
as a true American original,
a man capable of harnessing
the power of technology
and storytelling,
a man adept at art and commerce.
Harvard University gave him
an honorary Master of Arts,
and so did Yale, whose
trustees called Disney
"The creator
of a new language of art."
SUSKIND:
He's hailed in Paris.
He's hailed in New York.
He's living a dream.
And that's a moment where
he starts to think very boldly.
He almost is released
from hesitations.
He's like, "I am that guy
that I dreamed of.
"I am him.
So now what do we do?"
NARRATOR:
Disney cultivated the look
of the artist in public,
but at home,
he was just plain Dad.
Walt made a point
to drive his two young daughters
to school every day,
chased them around their house
cackling like the Wicked Witch,
and read them bedtime stories.
GABLER:
There's no question,
he adored them.
Absolutely adored them.
He was a man who had
a lively sense of play
that he'd never lost
from the time he was a child.
WATTS:
He was very domestic,
very nurturing
in a way that usually
in that day and age
was associated more
with mother's role.
Lillian was a bit aloof,
a bit reserved, a bit cool,
even with her children,
and Walt was just the opposite.
He was overflowing
with enthusiasm.
I think in a way,
he was reacting
against his own childhood
and against Elias.
Because Elias
was so stern with him,
Disney often said, "I want
to spoil my children terribly.
I just want to spoil them."
NARRATOR:
He had had only sporadic contact
with his own parents
since his move to California.
But the Disney studio's
new financial success
afforded Walt the chance
to draw them closer.
Walt and Roy moved
Elias and Flora to Los Angeles,
and as a 50th wedding
anniversary present,
the brothers
bought them a house.
In the middle
of the Snow White frenzy,
they also threw a golden wedding
anniversary party,
which they deemed worthy
of preserving for history.
DISNEY:
Well, you know,
here it is, 1937,
and you folks are almost ready
to celebrate your 50th
wedding anniversary.
FLORA:
We're not gonna celebrate.
DISNEY:
Why not?
FLORA:
Oh, what's the use?
DISNEY:
Well, Dad likes to celebrate.
He's always enjoyed a good time.
FLORA:
We've been celebrating
for 50 years.
Getting tired of it.
DISNEY:
What about you, Dad?
Don't you want to make
a little whoopee
on your golden wedding
anniversary?
ELIAS:
Oh, we don't want to go
to any extremes with it at all.
DISNEY:
Well, I expect you
I hoped you wouldn't go
to any extremes
if you're whoopeeing it up.
(laughing)
FLORA:
He don't know
how to make whoopee.
NARRATOR:
Walt sometimes seemed compelled
to talk about the old days.
Even as his fame grew,
his family's early struggle
remained a touchstone.
He held fast to the idea
of himself as a man
formed in the crucible
of want and deprivation
in the great forgotten
middle of the country.
HIGGINBOTHAM:
He feels it very important
to identify and to make note
of his Midwestern background
and to propagate that story.
He understood
the value of labor,
and that that is not something
he learned about
from somebody else;
rather it's naturally who he is.
NARRATOR:
Walt Disney had been a player
in the movie business
for more than 15 years
and a celebrity for nearly ten,
but the acclaimed filmmaker
still did not think of himself
as a Hollywood insider.
He complained that other
major film producers
refused to acknowledge animation
as serious cinema.
And he wasn't wrong.
When the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts & Sciences
announced the ten nominees
for the Best Picture of 1938,
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
was not on the list.
Instead, Disney was given
a special Oscar
for his pioneering work
in feature-length cartoons.
I'm sure the boys and girls
in the whole world
are going to be very happy
when they find out
the daddy of Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs,
Mickey Mouse, Ferdinand,
and all the others
is going to get
this beautiful statue.
Isn't it bright and shiny?
Oh, it's beautiful.
Aren't you proud of it,
Mr. Disney?
Why, I'm so proud,
I think I'll bust.
He got sort of
the honorable mention,
which is crap.
He doesn't want that.
He has created something
absolutely magnificent.
He knows it's magnificent.
Audiences have told him
it's magnificent.
He believed in this so much,
he put himself personally
on the line for his films
and his products,
and for animation,
and the furthering of animation.
And Hollywood just didn't seem
ready to view animation as art,
or as filmmaking.
It had to have smarted.
NARRATOR:
Disney had dreams of producing
a new feature-length
animated film every six months,
and almost all
from source material
that played to his strengths:
fairytales, folktales,
or popular novels
already familiar
to his audience.
His two projects
following Snow White
were coming-of-age stories.
First up was Bambi,
based on a novel
about a young deer
becoming a stag;
and then Pinocchio,
a popular late 19th century
Italian folktale
about a wooden puppet
who wants to be a real boy.
Disney hit snags right away
on Bambi,
and began to worry the story
was too complicated
and needed more time
in development.
So he moved Pinocchio
to the front of the production
line and hit more snags.
GABLER:
They struggled mightily
with the story of Pinocchio.
As Walt himself said,
he's not a very nice puppet
in the original story.
He's kind of a wiseacre.
So there was something they had
to tackle immediately, which is,
"How do you make this puppet
into someone likable?"
NARRATOR:
Disney was still puzzling out
the Pinocchio story
in the fall of 1938
when the phone call came.
His parents had suffered
carbon monoxide poisoning
caused by a malfunction
of the heating system
at the house Walt and Roy
had bought for them.
Elias had survived.
Flora had not.
Walt went to her funeral,
and then he went back to work.
He never talked
of his mother's death again.
NILSEN:
It was something he dealt with
within himself
as a private matter.
Even with his wife,
I don't think that relationship
he shared very much.
His emotions were internalized,
and that's why cinema I think
offered this way to emote
in a way that he couldn't emote
in his own private life.
GABLER:
Walt Disney once exploded
during a story session
and he pounded on the table.
And he said,
"We're not making cartoons here!
We're not making cartoons."
Walt Disney had made
this separation
between Mickey Mouse and some
of the early Silly Symphonies.
They're cartoons.
But now we're not
making cartoons.
We're making art.
And art has a higher standard.
And the standard
is the emotional response
that we get from people.
Can you make them feel deeply?
SUSKIND:
Art doesn't work
unless it gets to the big stuff.
Call it what you will.
Entertainment doesn't work
unless it gets at the core,
the stuff that we really,
really wrestle with.
Make you laugh, make you cry,
make you sing, make you sigh.
But you gotta get at it.
NARRATOR:
Disney wasn't thinking small
on Pinocchio.
Snow White had proved
that his animated films
could tackle the sweep
of the human condition
with all the light and shadow
of real life.
Now he went deep inside himself
for inspiration
and emerged
with a magical story elixir
that became
the Disney trademark:
outsiders struggling
for acceptance,
coming-of-age heroes
bucking authority,
temptation, loss, redemption,
and survival.
So now Walt's
wading through the story,
throwing things out
left and right and saying,
"What's the essence of it?
"What's this story about?
"Who's it about?
"Why do I care?
Why do I want to watch this?"
DOUGLAS BRODE:
Pinocchio becomes about
what it means to be human,
about how you have
to achieve humanity.
You have to earn it.
HANH:
They take huge liberties.
Walt Disney doesn't care.
He says, you know,
"We're taking the title,
"we're taking the puppet thing
and we're gonna make that
into our story."
NARRATOR:
Difficult as they were
and engaging as they were,
Pinocchio and Bambi
did not capture Walt's
undivided attention.
There was an enticing
new experiment going on
right down the hall.
The project had begun
as a cartoon short
based on a symphony titled
"The Sorcerer's Apprentice,"
starring Mickey Mouse,
with the backing of an orchestra
conducted by the celebrated
Leopold Stokowski.
Disney was so taken
with the first results
that he decided to expand it
into a feature-length film:
Fantasia.
He and Stokowski selected eight
separate classical symphonies
and Walt and his team began
thinking about imagery to match.
The Disney Studio was crawling
with musicians, dancers,
even famous scientists like
the astronomer Edwin Hubble.
HANH:
So here's Stravinsky,
and George Balanchine
comes by the studio,
"Well, let's choreograph
some dancing for us."
So these experts
are coming and going,
and there's a ballet company
in the next room dancing.
And here's Hubble talking
about theories of deep space
and where the cosmos came from.
And there's a dinosaur expert.
And it is this cultural
kind of petri dish
of people together
working and collaborating,
creating Fantasia.
And he loves it because
this is a huge, fun sandbox.
GABLER:
Well, he's dealt with realism
and realistic emotions,
but now he's trying
to get to emotion
in a different way,
circumventing realism.
This is absolutely alien
to the Disney process,
to try and see
if you can reach emotion
directly through abstraction.
He's saying, "I want to try
what heroes of art do.
"I want the great artists
of the time to join in here.
I want to create art
that lasts centuries."
NARRATOR:
The Disney studio
ran to the rhythms
of Walt's bursting energy,
which appeared to be spilling
beyond rational boundaries.
The boss had three
major productions
spinning simultaneously
and had nearly doubled the
number of full-time employees.
The Disneys were
in dire need of space
to house their
thousand-plus staff,
and another addition at Hyperion
was not going to cut it.
Without consulting with Roy,
who was in Europe at the time,
Walt selected
a 51-acre building lot,
empty but for a polo field,
on the other side of the
Hollywood Hills, in Burbank.
Then he went to work
making his dream studio.
GABLER:
It was designed
for absolute efficiency,
but also to engender this
wonderful sense of community.
In fact, there was one point
where he said,
"You know what'd be great is
if we build an apartment complex
here on the studio lot
so no one ever has to leave."
It's so that his employees
could become part
of this very insular community
where they would all work
together in this common mission
to make these great animations.
And that's what this new studio
was really all about.
It was really all about
creating a perfect place
to create perfect films.
NARRATOR:
The day after Christmas 1939,
most of the Disney staff
began the move from Hyperion
to Burbank.
The heart of the studio campus
was the three-story
animation building,
with Walt's office
on the top floor.
Each animator had a single big,
airy sunlit room to himself,
with an oversized work-table,
a stylish area rug,
an easy chair to recline in,
and drapes.
The entire facility
was air-conditioned.
Landscaped pathways
led to a theater, a restaurant,
a soda fountain.
LUSK:
It was wonderful.
We had things that
we'd never had before.
If you wanted a milkshake,
you'd call the little
coffee shop
right in the middle
of the place,
and then they had runners
that would run
these things to us,
a sandwich, whatever we wanted.
It was just heaven.
SITO:
It had a cafeteria.
It had a gymnasium
with an ex-member
of the Swedish Olympic team
as a personal trainer.
The studio had its own
gas station.
You know, you could get
your car repaired
while you're at work.
This is amazing.
Like a boat out of the blue ♪
Fate steps in
and sees you through ♪
NARRATOR:
By the time the studio
was ready to launch Pinocchio
in New York City
in February of 1940,
Walt Disney was selling hard.
Your dreams come true. ♪
NARRATOR:
He was singing the praises
of Jiminy Cricket,
Lord High Keeper of the
Knowledge of Right and Wrong.
Give a little whistle,
Yoo-hoo! ♪
Give a little whistle,
Woo-hoo! ♪
And always let your conscience
be your guide ♪
And always let your conscience
be your guide! ♪
(banging)
NARRATOR:
He was also talking up
the studio's breakthroughs
in camera technology
and special effects.
Wake!
The gift of life is bound.
Father!
NARRATOR:
"For the first time
in the field of animation,"
Disney proclaimed.
"audiences will see in Pinocchio
underwater effects
that look like super-special
marine photography."
Can you tell me
where we can find Monstro?
Gee!
They're scared.
You really have to stop yourself
and say,
"This was all blank paper.
This all began as blank paper.
It doesn't exist."
You know, we believe it's water,
and we believe
those characters are real,
and that's the summit
of the animator's art.
That's the pinnacle of what
we call personality animation,
which is creating a completely
artificial world that we accept.
Father!
Mm
SCHICKEL:
Pinocchio has richness
and dimensions
that other animated cartoons
don't have.
And when you are
growing too old,
you will make good firewood!
I mean, he's swallowed
by a whale, for Christ's sake.
He is in peril
throughout the movie.
Hey, blubber mouth, open up!
I gotta get in there!
And at the same time,
there's Jiminy Cricket,
you know, who's delightful
and charming
and takes some of the sting
off of this movie.
But that's a pretty dark movie.
Pinocchio is just a wooden boy
who's trying to be human.
One would think that that means
he can make mistakes,
that he would be allowed to have
the faults of being a boy.
Please, you gotta help me!
HIGGINBOTHAM:
And instead, any indiscretion
is met with the possible death
of his adopted father
or the transformation
into a donkey.
The stakes are so very high.
(braying loudly)
Oh! What's happened?!
I hope I'm not too late!
What'll I do?
Pinocchio is seeking a home.
He's seeking identity.
He's seeking place.
He wants to be real.
BLUE FAIRY:
Prove yourself brave,
truthful, and unselfish,
and someday
you will be a real boy.
SUSKIND:
That's what the goal is.
"I want to feel my life
most fully."
"And then once I feel my life,
"I will have a chance
to feel the big truths,
the things that give us
sustenance."
I'm alive, see?
And I'm
I'm real.
I'm a real boy!
GEPETTO:
You're alive!
And you are a real boy!
Yay! Whoopee!
(meows happily)
This calls for a celebration!
NARRATOR:
Audiences across the country
walked away from Pinocchio
emotionally drained
and enormously satisfied.
The critics raved.
"Walt Disney
has created something
"that will be counted
in our favor, in all our favor,
"when this generation
is being appraised
by the generations
of the future,"
the New York Times'
movie critic wrote.
Well!
This is practically
where I came in.
NARRATOR:
"For it will be said
that no generation
"which produced a Snow White
and a Pinocchio
could have been
altogether bad."
When you wish
upon a star ♪
NARRATOR:
The downside of Pinocchio
was apparent from the jump too.
Walt's insistence on innovation
had pushed production costs
to nearly twice that
of Snow White,
and the picture was not going
to earn back the investment.
Ticket sales
in the United States were slow.
In Europe, now at war,
they were moribund.
The Disneys had burned through
more than $2 million
of the net profits
from Snow White,
while borrowing heavily
from Bank of America
to fund the dream studio
in Burbank.
Walt Disney
is kind of under the gun.
The costs of Fantasia
and Pinocchio,
and even Bambi in its
early stages, are enormous.
And the war has cut off
the European market.
So Walt Disney has lost
a giant market,
and he is worrying about how he
can finance all of these films
under his new project to make
feature films constantly,
one every six months or so.
NARRATOR:
Roy Disney had a plan.
They would go public and issue
shares in the company.
His kid brother wasn't happy
at the thought of shareholders
sticking their noses
in his creative process,
but he saw little choice.
In April of 1940,
as the last of the staff
made the transition
to the Burbank studio,
Walt Disney Productions
issued 155,000 shares
of preferred stock,
netting the company
nearly $4 million.
Roy and Walt had both signed
seven-year contracts
as part of the deal.
Roy was guaranteed a salary
of $1,000 a week,
and Walt $2,000.
The company reassured investors
by taking out a $1.5 million
life insurance policy
on its key asset:
Walt Disney.
(Bach's Toccata and Fugue
playing)
WATTS:
Fantasia opens with the Bach
Fugue and Toccata in D minor,
but it is pure abstraction,
no characters,
no nothing that is recognizable
in the natural world,
which gets the movie off
in a very interesting vein.
(music continues)
(Tchaikovsky's
The Nutcracker Suite playing)
HIGGINBOTHAM:
Fantasia is wildly ambitious.
You can feel it in every scene.
But it's very uneven.
(music continues)
WATTS:
When the movie worked,
it's spectacular.
When it didn't work,
it's sort of dumb.
The critical reaction
was extremely divided.
Some people thought Disney
had pulled off this alliance
of visual art and music
and created something new
and compelling.
Other critics thought that
it was a disaster,
and they slammed the movie
very, very hard
for dragging classical music
traditions down into the dust.
Walt Disney had made
his reputation
in the intellectual community
as being unpretentious.
And when he makes Fantasia,
guess what?
He's pretentious.
HIGGINBOTHAM:
Fantasia raises
a number of questions
as to if Walt
is stepping beyond himself,
if he's not appreciating
his limits.
And Walt will take this
personally.
He didn't handle criticism
very well, ever.
And the criticism over Fantasia
I think really rankled.
And what it did was to encourage
a kind of anti-intellectualism
that was always there
with Disney,
but I think increasingly,
he drifts in the direction of,
"These are eggheads.
"They don't know anything
about ordinary people,
and to hell with them."
NARRATOR:
Fantasia's financial losses
were far greater
than Pinocchio's,
largely because so few theaters
had the expensive
new sound system
Disney required
to show his film-symphony.
The deficits left the company
unable to pay its guaranteed
quarterly dividend
to preferred shareholders.
And the expensive new studio
was already starting to feel
more like a dropped anchor
than a sail spread wide
to catch the creative winds.
WATTS:
The new Burbank studio was
a kind of a case study in
"Be careful what you ask for."
It was so nice
that it was almost sterile.
It was all rationalized.
It was all organized.
And something, the quality
of the creative experience,
was almost designed out
of the operation.
NARRATOR:
There was something
unmistakably mechanical
at the heart of Walt's
workplace utopia.
People were segregated by task,
as at an industrial plant.
Company hierarchy
was more rigid, more obvious,
and more carefully policed
by Disney administrators.
The tonier perks accrued
to the highest links
of the corporate pay chain.
Membership
in the Penthouse Club,
with its gymnasium,
steam room, and restaurant,
was reserved for top writers
and animators, all men still.
So were office niceties
like area rugs, drapes,
easy chairs and armoires.
When animator Don Lusk
started doing friends a favor
by picking up the slack
on lower-level jobs
like clean-up and in-between,
somebody above took note.
I came into the room
on a Monday morning,
and all that was in there
was a desk.
The rug was gone.
The coat closet was gone.
My easy chair,
fold-out chair was gone.
Everything was gone
except my desk and a chair.
I called up and thought
I said,
"What the hell is going on?
And they said, well,
I'm not animating,
so you don't get a rug
on your floor.
GIVENS:
I missed the old Hyperion place.
It was beginning to feel like
corporate America.
It was just getting too big
and losing the family touch.
The studio had grown so rapidly
that there were all of these
folks in the animation process:
the assistant animators,
the in-betweeners.
They didn't know Walt Disney.
And they weren't well paid
by Walt Disney,
as the master animators were.
I think Walt Disney's
attitude was,
"Look, anybody
can do that stuff.
"The master animators,
that's one thing.
"But doing in-between work,
"why am I going to pay them
top dollar?
They're not artists."
SITO:
Some of the people who told me
about the cafeteria,
they said the cafeteria
was wonderful,
but most of the rank-and-file
artists
couldn't afford to eat there.
They still had to go out
to the sandwich wagon
out on the street
'cause the salaries
were all over the place.
I mean, there were people making
$200 and $300 a week
and people making $12 a week.
NARRATOR:
Workers at the bottom
of the Disney ladder
were starting to grumble
in 1940.
Now that the company's
finances were public,
everybody knew the boss was
making five or ten times more
than the highest-paid members
of his creative team,
and more than 100 times that
of the women working
in ink-and-paint.
Disney, who still insisted
that all his employees
call him "Walt,"
was oblivious to the complaints
at his new studio.
It was no longer common
to see him wandering the halls,
engaging in idle chatter,
batting around story ideas.
He spent most of his time
in his own suite of offices,
with its private bath
and bedroom
and a team of secretaries
standing guard at his door.
Hollywood was famous
for its glamorous movie stars
and directors,
but it would not have functioned
without the men and women
working behind the scenes
building sets, adjusting lights,
drawing animation.
When federal legislation
had passed in 1935
allowing collective bargaining,
Hollywood's backstage hands
began to organize.
More than a half-dozen
Hollywood unions and guilds
emerged in the late 1930s
to bargain for better working
conditions and better pay.
Among them was
the Screen Cartoonists Guild,
which offered representation
for the animators,
assistants, in-betweeners,
and ink-and-paint artists
working across the industry.
By 1940, the Cartoonists Guild
had organized
the animation departments
at all of the major studios
except Disney's,
which employed
more than half the men and women
working in the field
of animation.
SITO:
Even after organizing MGM
and Warner Brothers
and Screen Gems and George Pal
and Walter Lantz,
it only came
to maybe about 150 people,
while Disney's was, like, 600.
If unionism was to work
in Hollywood,
Disney was the ultimate battle.
NARRATOR:
Walt Disney saw little reason
to be worried.
He was not like those other
fat-cat studio heads,
he told himself.
He and his "boys,"
as he called his animators,
were in this thing together.
HIGGINBOTHAM:
Walt sees himself as the father
of this company,
and that everyone
who works for him
believes in what they are doing,
the enterprise
of being animators,
of being artists,
and being part of a business
and part of the studio.
GABLER:
"Why in the world
would anyone need a union
when I'm giving you everything
you could possibly want?"
He didn't see paternalism
in this.
He saw kindness
and generosity in it.
NARRATOR:
There were plenty of people
at Burbank
who did not see the labor
situation as Walt Disney did,
and among them was one of his
best animators, Art Babbitt.
Babbitt had been with Disney
for nearly a decade,
contributing to every major film
and almost single-handedly
creating
the popular character Goofy.
He was one of the highest
salaried animators
on the Burbank lot,
but made little effort
to hide his sympathies
for other animators who had been
denied on-screen credits,
or for the hundreds
of assistants and inkers
who were barely
eking out a living.
GABLER:
He was rather a large
personality.
He wasn't subservient to Walt.
He didn't have that kind
of relationship to him.
He was his own man,
he was independent,
and Walt didn't like it.
SITO:
Babbitt used to tell the story
about a young painter
who was making $16 a week
whose husband had run off
because of the Great Depression.
And what she was doing is that
she was skipping lunches
because she wanted to keep
feeding her family.
And one day, she actually
fainted from malnutrition.
NARRATOR:
Disney didn't see the problem,
and certainly didn't want
to hear about it.
He was incensed
when he learned that
the Screen Cartoonists Guild
was trying to organize his shop.
He was certain he had the right
to run his own company
as he saw fit.
In February of 1941,
Walt decided
to make his case personally
to the men and women
working for him.
He gathered the staff in the
only auditorium at the studio
big enough to hold all 1,200
of his employees.
DISNEY (recording):
In the 20 years I have spent
in this business,
I have weathered many storms.
It's been far from easy sailing,
which required a great deal
of hard work, struggle,
determination,
confidence, faith,
and, above all, unselfishness.
Some people think that we have
class distinction in this place.
They wonder why some
get better seats in the theater
than others.
They wonder why some men
get spaces in the parking lot
and others don't.
I have always felt,
and always will feel,
that the men who contribute
the most to the organization
should, out of respect alone,
enjoy some privileges.
My first recommendation
to the lot of you is this:
put your own house in order.
You can't accomplish
a damn thing by sitting around
and waiting to be told
everything.
If you're not progressing
as you should,
instead of grumbling
and growling,
do something about it.
NARRATOR:
Much of the staff
left the auditorium infuriated.
"This speech recruited
more members
"for the Screen
Cartoonists Guild
than a year of campaigning,"
reported one left-wing magazine.
Babbitt was now convinced Disney
workers needed a real union and
signed his Screen Cartoonists
Guild membership card,
which made him the highest-
ranking Disney employee
to openly challenge the boss.
Walt Disney saw Babbitt's move
as a personal betrayal.
"I don't care
if you keep your goddamn nose
glued to the board all day
or how much work you turn out,"
he told Babbitt
in the hallway one day.
"If you don't stop organizing
my employees,
I'm going to throw you right
the hell out of the front gate."
At the end of May 1941,
Disney sent a letter
of termination to Babbitt,
citing as cause
"union activities."
Word of Babbitt's firing shot
through the studio in Burbank.
Disney employees
who supported the guild
met after work
the following evening
and by a vote of 315 to 4
determined to take a stand
against their boss.
(applause)
When he drove up to his studio
gate on May 29, 1941,
the picketers were already
on the march.
Walt Disney was forced
to wend his way
through more than 200
of his striking workers.
Nearly half of the studio's
art department had walked out,
and it wasn't just
the low-wage workers.
Some of Disney's
most trusted animators
were also on the picket line.
HANH:
The street's full of strikers,
not only from Disney
but from other studios,
parading back and forth
with signs,
and this wonderful, idyllic,
utopian place is in shambles.
All of a sudden,
the moment of the shared,
that "We are in this together,
the victories
are all of our victories,"
that spell gets broken.
NILSEN:
He poured his passion,
everything he believed in
into his studio.
It was the studio that went
against him at this point.
It was his own creation
that went against him.
BRODE:
A certain light,
if not had gone out,
at least dimmed
inside Walt Disney.
There is before the strike
and there's after,
and he was two different people.
NARRATOR:
Another man
might have walked away
from his shattered utopia
and called it a day.
But Disney still had work to do,
and woe be to the forces
that stood in his path.