Disney's Most Notorious Film (44 page)

NOT
ES

INTRODUCTION

1
. Jonathan Gray,
Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts
(New York: New York University Press, 2010), 2.

2
. Ibid., 6–7.

3
. Christopher Anderson,
Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 155.

4
. Patricia Turner,
Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture
(New York: Anchor, 1994), 108.

5
. For more on the ambivalent and contradictory audience responses to the film (as well as a historical context for its release), see Matthew Bernstein, “Nostalgia, Ambivalence, Irony:
Song of the South
and Race Relations in 1946 Atlanta,”
Film History
8.2 (1996): 219–236.

6
. “White Regrets Film,”
New York Times
(28 November 1946), 2. The article in question quotes NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White’s press release on
Song of the South
.

7
. Neal Gabler,
Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination
(New York: Knopf, 2006).

8
. “Top Grossers,”
Variety
(7 January 1948), 63.

9
. Thomas Cripps,
Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

10
. “$7 Million Gross Expected from Disney Reissue,”
Los Angeles Times
(17 March 1972), H16.

11
. Peggy Russo, “Uncle Walt’s Uncle Remus: Disney’s Distortion of Harris’s Hero,”
Southern Literary Journal
25.1 (1992): 27.

12
. “Big Rental Films of 1972,”
Variety
(3 January 1973), 7.

13
. “All-Time Box-Office Champs,”
Variety
(5 January 1972), 46.

14
. “All-Time Film Rental Champs,”
Variety
(14 January 1981), 52.

15
. “All-Time Film Rental Champs,”
Variety
(13 January 1982), 54.

16
. “All-Time Film Rental Champs,”
Variety
(20 January 1988), 29.

17
. “Godfather: & Rest of Pack,”
Variety
(3 January 1973), 7.

18
. James Snead,
White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side
(New York: Routledge, 1994); Donald Bogle,
Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretative History of Blacks in American Films
, 4th ed. (New York: Continuum, 2003).

19
. Helen Taylor,
Scarlett’s Women: “Gone with the Wind” and Its Female Fans
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989).

20
. See, for example, Richard Dyer, “Paul Robeson: Crossing Over,” in
Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society
, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004), 64–136; Janet Staiger, “
The Birth of a Nation
: Reconsidering Its Reception,” in
Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 139–153; and Molly Haskell
, Frankly, My Dear: “Gone with the Wind” Revisited
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

21
. See, most recently, Douglas Brode,
From Walt to Woodstock: How Disney Created the Counterculture
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004); Brode,
Multiculturalism and the Mouse: Race and Sex in Disney Entertainment
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); Eleanor Byrne,
Deconstructing Disney
(Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 1999); Henry A. Giroux,
The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells, eds.,
From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture
(Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995); Annalee Ward,
Mouse Morality: The Rhetoric of Disney Animated Film
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); and Janet Wasko,
Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001).

22
. For work on Disney audiences, see Janet Wasko,
Understanding Disney
; Janet Wasko, Mark Phillips, and Eileen R. Meehan, eds.,
Dazzled by Disney? The Global Disney Audiences Report
(London: Leicester University Press, 2001); Jason Sperb, “Reassuring Convergence: Online Fandom, Race, and Disney’s Notorious
Song of the South
(1946),”
Cinema Journal
49.4 (2010): 24–44; and Karin Chyng Feng Sun and Erica Scharrer, “Staying True to Disney: College Students’ Resistance to Criticism of
The Little Mermaid
,”
Communication Review
7.1 (2004): 35–55.

23
. Damien Bona, “A Night to Remember,”
Variety
(28 February 2006); Ray Richmond, “The Love Bug,”
Variety
(25 November 1997); Keith Collins, “Disney Timeline,”
Variety
(27 October 2003).

24
. Taylor,
Scarlett’s Women
, 165.

25
. Bogle,
Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks
, 8.

26
. Quoted in Gabler,
Walt Disney
, 433.

27
. Taylor,
Scarlett’s Women
, 14.

28
. “Inside Stuff—Pictures,”
Variety
(19 January 1972), 32.

29
. Doug McAdam
, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970
, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

30
. Ibid.

31
. Ron Wise, “Disney Shelves Big Coin Film,”
Variety
(25 February 1970), 20.

32
. Jason Sperb, “Islands of Detroit: Affect, Nostalgia and Whiteness,”
Culture, Theory and Critique
49.2 (2008): 183–201.

33
. Henry Jenkins,
Convergence Culture: Where New and Old Media Collide
(New York: New York University Press, 2006), 2.

34
. Ibid., 104.

35
. Richard Grusin and Jay David Bolter,
Remediation: Understanding New Media
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 47.

36
. Svetlana Boym,
The Future of Nostalgia
(New York: Basic Books, 2001), xiv.

37
. Jenkins,
Convergence Culture
, 3, 27.

38
. Ibid., 26, 247, 98.

39
. Ibid., 20.

40
. Gray,
Show Sold Separately
.

41
. Turner,
Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies
, 106–107.

42
. Anderson,
Hollywood TV
, 142.

43
. J. P. Telotte,
The Mouse Machine: Disney and Technology
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 5.

44
. Jacob Smith,
Spoken Word: Postwar American Phonograph Cultures
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 8.

45
. See, for example, Michael Wallace, “Mickey Mouse History: Portraying the Past at Disney World,”
Radical History Review
32 (March 1985): 32–57; and Giroux,
Mouse That Roared
.

46
. Haskell,
Frankly, My Dear
, x.

47
. The bootleg versions are often copies of the movie from Europe and Asia, where Disney did release the full-length version to home video markets.

CHAPTER 1

1
. Bernard Wolfe, “Uncle Remus and the Malevolent Rabbit,”
Commentary
8 (1949): 41.

2
. Thomas Cripps,
Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

3
. Douglas Brode,
Multiculturalism and the Mouse: Race and Sex in Disney Entertainment
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 54. See also Brode,
From Walt to Woodstock: How Disney Created the Counterculture
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004).

4
. Quoted in Brode,
Multiculturalism and the Mouse
, 53.

5
. Thomas Cripps,
Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie
from
World War II to the Civil Rights Era
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

6
. Brode,
Multiculturalism and the Mouse
, 54.

7
. Ibid., 62.

8
. Robert Ray,
A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1980
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 57.

9
. Ibid., 56.

10
. Ibid., 68.

11
. Ed Guerrero,
Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993).

12
. Michael Dunne, “Bing Crosby’s Cinematic ‘Song of the South,’
”
Journal of Popular Film and Television
32.1 (2004): 30–38.

13
. Donald Bogle,
Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretative History of Blacks in American Films
, 4th ed. (New York: Continuum, 2003), 4, 6, 7, 8.

14
. Ibid., 9.

15
. Wolfe, “Uncle Remus and the Malevolent Rabbit,” 41.

16
. Ibid.

17
. Cripps,
Making Movies Black
, 75.

18
. Thomas Doherty,
Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 226.

19
. “Needed: A Negro Legion of Decency,”
Ebony
(February 1947), 36.

20
. Ray,
Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema
, 137.

21
. Steven Watts,
The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), xvi.

22
. Douglas Gomery, “Disney’s Business History: A Reinterpretation,” in
Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom
, ed. Eric Smoodin (New York: Routledge, 1994), 71–86; Janet Wasko,
Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001).

23
. Watts,
Magic Kingdom
, 79.

24
. Nicholas Sammond,
Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930–1960
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 14.

25
. Ibid., 78.

26
. Molly Haskell,
Frankly, My Dear: “Gone with the Wind” Revisited
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 14–15.

27
. “All-Time Box Office Champs,”
Variety
(3 January 1973), 30. By the end of 1972,
The Godfather
had already earned $81.5 million, compared to
Gone with the Wind
’s $77 million. This, of course, does not include inflation.

28
. “All-Time Top Film Grosses,”
Variety
(9 January 1957), 6.
The Robe
’s $17.5 million was a little more than half of
Gone with the Wind
’s $33.5 million.

29
. Susan Miller and Greg Rode, “The Movie You See, the Movie You
Don’t:
How Disney Do’s That Old Time Derision,” in
From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture
, ed. Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 89.

30
. Neal Gabler,
Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination
(New York: Knopf, 2006), 432. For historical information on
Song of the South
, I rely heavily on the exhaustive research detailed in Gabler’s recent book—not insignificantly because he is one of the few writers to be allowed access to the studio archives, which perhaps explains Gabler’s generously sympathetic hagiography of the studio chief.

31
. Ibid., 435–436.

32
. For more on
Fantasia
’s failure, see J. P. Telotte,
The Mouse Machine: Disney and Technology
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).

33
. Thomas Schatz,
Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 3.

34
. Christopher Anderson,
Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 136.

35
. “Disney Studios to Lay Off 400 of 1,000 Employees,”
Los Angeles Times
(30 July 1946), A1.

36
. Ibid.

37
. Thomas F. Brady, “Hollywood Labor Problems,”
New York Times
(11 August 1946), 1.

38
. “Heavier Costs May Force Disney to Drop Shorts,”
Variety
(6 November 1946), 9.

39
. Ibid., 9.

40
. “Production Costs of Unreleased Pictures Cut Walt Disney Net in 1946 to $199,602,”
New York Times
(10 January 1947), 32.

41
. Quoted in Gabler,
Walt Disney
, 434.

42
. Gabler,
Walt Disney
, 434.

43
. Michael Barrier,
Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

44
. James Snead,
White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side
(New York: Routledge, 1994), 84.

45
. Bosley Crowther, “The Screen: ‘
Song of the South
,’ Disney Film Combining Cartoons and Life, Opens at the Palace—Abbott and Costello at Loew’s Criterion,”
New York Times
(28 November 1946), 45.

46
. “White Regrets Film: He Finds the Disney Movie Helps to Perpetuate ‘Idyllic’ Slavery,”
New York Times
(29 November 1946), 45.

47
. Gabler,
Walt Disney
, 433. Two sentences later, Gabler then recounts separate instances where Disney used the term “nigger pile” and “pickaninny.”