The Animated Man (3 page)

Disney had used much of his profit from
Snow White
not to enrich himself but to build the new studio. Its construction was a carefully planned undertaking, in contrast to the haphazard growth of the old Disney studio on Hyperion Avenue in Los Angeles. Everything—north light, recreation facilities, air-conditioning—had been conceived with the artists' comfort in mind. Some of the artists found the new plant inhumanly perfect and preferred the old studio's jumble of buildings, but no one doubted that Disney had tried to construct an ideal environment for his staff.

The splendid new physical plant spoke of Disney's self-confidence and his mastery of a difficult medium, but by early 1941—less than a year after his employees moved into their new quarters—everything was turning to ashes in his mouth. By then, it was clear that
Pinocchio
and
Fantasia
, the two costly features that followed
Snow White
into theaters in 1940, were not going to recover their costs at the box office. Along with the new studio, they had drained away all the money Disney made from
Snow White
. The war in Europe had cut off the major part of overseas revenues, and now Disney was being squeezed by fickle audiences, anxious bankers, and, most of all, the contradictions that had emerged in his own ambitions.

Disney's aims, when he was starting out as a filmmaker, were almost entirely those of a businessman—he wanted to own an animation studio that cranked out a cartoon a week. He had achieved extraordinary business success not by compromising his artistic ambitions but by expanding them. The 1930s were one of those rare periods when artistic quality and broad public acceptance coincided much more closely than usual. Jazz musicians like Duke Ellington might play one-night stands for dancers who were indifferent to art of any kind, but their music also had many sophisticated admirers. Movies that embodied the unique visions of such creators as John Ford and Howard Hawks drew large crowds. No one thrived more in that environment than Walt Disney.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
is as intensely personal as any film ever made.

Disney had shrugged off many business decisions, leaving them to his long-suffering brother Roy. The two brothers (and their wives) owned all of the business, but Walt and his wife owned 60 percent of it. Roy's task was to find the money for Walt to spend. But with twelve hundred people on the payroll, and multiple features and short cartoons in production at the same time, Walt Disney had no choice but to think harder about what had been receiving only his spasmodic attention. He had to balance the demands of art and business with much more adroitness than had been required of him before.

By early 1941, as his financial difficulties worsened, Disney was finally thinking more and more like a businessman. For him to approach his employees in that role was problematic, though, because they were accustomed to him in his role as an artist. He could not lay off a large part of his staff—and save badly needed money—without jeopardizing much of what he still hoped to accomplish. If Disney reduced his staff, he would be dismantling a structure that was uniquely suited to making the kinds of films he wanted to make.

War-related prosperity had touched off a wave of union organizing efforts and strikes across the country. At the Disney studio, union organizers—spurned a few years before—had found newly sympathetic ears. In January 1941, a few weeks before Disney's speech, a union called the Screen Cartoonists Guild asked the federal government's National Labor Relations Board to designate it the bargaining agent for the studio's artists.
³

The many members of Disney's staff who were still intensely sympathetic to their boss were troubled by the gulf they saw growing between him and them. On February 4, one of them, George Goepper, wrote a memorandum to Disney about the studio's difficulties. Goepper was an experienced assistant animator—one of the people who followed behind the animators, completing their drawings and adding new drawings to fill out a character's movements—but he was also a highly respected manager. In early 1941, he was supervising other assistants who were working on a new feature,
Bambi
. Morale was poor, Goepper wrote to Disney, especially among the animators and their assistants, and production was suffering as a result. He said that it would help if Disney himself “would personally talk to the group of men most involved with these situations.” Such a speech, he suggested, “would throw a different light on this ‘Union business.' ”
⁴

On Thursday, February 6, before Goepper sent his memo, Disney himself circulated a memo throughout the studio. Production had dropped 50 percent, he complained: “It is obvious that a great deal of valuable studio time is being consumed in discussing union matters that should be taken care of on free time.” His memo was brusque and condescending: “Due to world conditions, the studio is facing a crisis about which a lot of you are evidently unaware. It can be solved by your undivided attention to production matters.”
⁵

The next day, Goepper sent his original memo to Disney, but he added another one in which he suggested that the sharp drop in production had to be “a product of a state of low morale, which caused discussions of a Union to become started among certain groups.” As Goepper said many years later, he did not expect Disney to respond, “but he called me, and he was upset. It was about four o'clock, and I didn't get out of [Disney's office] until about six, just
he and I talking. He said, ‘I don't know about talking to these guys. They always twist things around. . . .' I said . . . ‘
You
, who own the place, telling what your problems are, might have an effect and straighten up some of these guys.' ”

As Goepper correctly remembered, “it was the following Monday we all got called out in the theater, and Walt got up there to read a speech. He gave a pep talk, sort of, but it was a little too late, I thought.”
⁶

Walt Disney's growing friction with his artists in early 1941 presaged struggles that would occupy him for more than a decade. Speaking to his artists on that February afternoon, Disney stood at the very fulcrum of his own life.

He insisted as he began his speech that he was addressing himself only to the studio's financial crisis, even though everyone knew that it was the union that was really on his mind. He had written his remarks himself, he said—“It's all me”—and, as if to prove the point, he peppered them with his customary profanity. (Someone removed the cursing from a mimeographed version of the speech that was later distributed to the staff.) The speech was being recorded on acetate discs to forestall any legal difficulties.
⁷

Disney painted a dramatic picture of his own past:

In the twenty years I have spent in this business, I have weathered many storms. It has been far from easy sailing. It has required a great deal of hard work, struggle, determination, confidence, faith, and above all, unselfishness. Perhaps the greatest single factor has been our unselfish attitude toward our work.

I have had a stubborn, blind confidence in the cartoon medium, a determination to show the skeptics that the animated cartoon was deserving of a better place; that it was more than a mere “filler” on a program; that it was more than a novelty; that it could be one of the greatest mediums of fantasy and entertainment yet developed. That faith, confidence and determination and unselfish attitude has brought the cartoon to the place that it now occupies in the entertainment world.

As if he were a much older man—not thirty-nine, barely older than many of his employees, whose average age was twenty-seven
⁸
—Disney reminisced about the days when he had to scratch and fight to get a few hundred dollars more from the distributors of his short cartoons. As archaic as such battles must have sounded to many of his listeners, they were a good measure of how much Disney had accomplished. Only a few years before, a success like
Snow White
—or even a prestigious failure like
Fantasia
—had been unimaginable.

Disney was not particularly concerned, though, with the struggles he had gone through to make better films. Instead, he revisited hard times of a sort endured by many other small businessmen, especially during the Depression.
He spoke not of battles that he had fought alongside the artists who shared his ambitions for the “cartoon medium,” but of battles that, he clearly believed, he had fought and won alone (with some help from Roy). As he spoke, his voice hardened even further. Genuine outrage threatened to break through.

I have been flat broke twice in this twenty years. Once in 1923 before I came to Hollywood I was so broke I went three days without eating a meal, and I slept on some old canvas and chair cushions in an old rat-trap of a studio for which I hadn't paid any rent for months.

Again in 1928 my brother Roy and myself had everything we owned at that time mortgaged. It wasn't much, but it was all we had. Our cars had been sold to meet payrolls. Our personal insurance was borrowed on to the limit to keep the business going. . . .

It was over a year after Mickey Mouse was a success before we owned another car, and that was a truck that we used in our business on weekdays and for pleasure on Sundays.

As for what had emerged from those early struggles, Disney painted a picture that day of a happy studio where faithful employees, grateful for their boss's sacrifices, got regular bonuses. It was an idealized picture, but it was largely accurate. What had kept many of his employees satisfied, though, was not money so much as the sense that they had embarked together on a great adventure, the creation of a new art form—character animation. Artists who were working at other cartoon studios routinely accepted large pay cuts and took lesser jobs when they went to work for Disney. They came to learn.

Disney had nothing to say about such sacrifices, however, as he praised his own benevolence while the studio was passing through its financial crisis: “There was one thing uppermost in my mind while trying to solve this problem. And that was, I did not want to spread panic among the employees. I kept the true conditions from them, feeling that if they didn't thoroughly understand things, it might work against us instead of for us.”

As Disney's ambitions had expanded in the years just after
Snow White
's success, his concern for his employees had gradually metamorphosed into a suffocating paternalism. Now he was refusing to accept any responsibility for the studio's difficulties, even while taking credit for its successes. He congratulated himself for rejecting “obvious easy ways” to deal with the financial crisis. Drastic salary cuts “might have caused panic and lowered morale.” Limiting production to “proven money-makers . . . would have meant the laying off of possibly half our studio staff,” turning them loose on a cartoon industry that could not absorb them.

Worst of all, Disney said, would have been selling “a controlling interest” to another company or a wealthy individual.

I made up my mind that if this business was ever to get anywhere, if this business was ever to have a chance to grow, it could never do it by having to answer . . . to someone with only one thought or interest—namely profits. . . . For I have had a blind faith in the policy that quality, tempered with good judgment and showmanship, will win against all odds.

Such indifference to profit and scorn for outside financing were tenable, though, only when money was rolling in. Already, in 1940, the Disneys had been forced to sell preferred stock in their company to outsiders—and they had started paying bonuses to employees in preferred stock, too. In his speech, Walt Disney's choice of words—“blind faith,” “tempered with good judgment”—was telling. What he had achieved with
Snow White
had in fact unbalanced his judgment. He was not the first entrepreneur to misread the permanence of a single great success.

It was, however, as he attempted to “set to rest” various gripes and rumors that Disney signaled most clearly his estrangement from his staff. He showed no understanding, for one thing, of the discontent that a new regime of status symbols had created.

Some people think that we have class distinctions 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 can't. I have always felt, and always will feel, that the men who are contributing the most to the organization should, out of respect alone, enjoy some privileges. . . .

Definitely there is no “closed circle.” Those men who have worked closely with me in trying to organize and keep this studio rolling, and keep its chin above water, should not be envied. Frankly, those fellows catch plenty of hell, and a lot of you can feel lucky that you don't have too much contact with me.

Disney went on to address directly the subject of his own growing remoteness, the chasm that Goepper hoped such an appearance would close.

Here is a question that is asked many times, and about which I think a complete misunderstanding exists. . . . The question is: “Why can't Walt see more of the fellows? Why can't there be less supervisors and more Walt?”

The real issue was one of artistic control, and whether Disney was willing to surrender any of it, now that the company had grown too large for him to
supervise everything himself. If Disney insisted on retaining control—if his decisions were to be, as always in the past, the only ones that mattered—his employees would naturally seek to involve him in their work as much as possible. They would want “more Walt.”

Again, Disney refused to give any ground. He rationalized his refusal to give his employees either more power or more of himself. He had realized “in the early days,” he said, that it was “very dangerous and unfair” for him to get too close to any of his employees: