The Animated Man (34 page)

As if harking back to the late 1920s, he frequently came up with mild bathroom gags, as in the August 3, 1937, meeting on a
Mickey Mouse
cartoon called
The Fox Hunt
. He suggested that the foxhounds plunge into a body of water, with only the tips of their tails showing as they sniff along vigorously underwater. “The funny part would be to have all the tails converging on one tree and then the duck comes up and yells at them to come on.”
⁸⁹
(That gag is in the finished film.) “In the minds of those making our pictures,” Disney wrote in 1937, “there never have been any thoughts of vulgarity—merely humorous situations from life exaggerated—and, to me, dogs sniffing trees and fire plugs is very humorous.”
⁹⁰

“He had a very earthy sense of humor,” said Jack Cutting, who joined the Disney staff in 1929. “His humor was what I would call rural, or rustic. . . . It was an unsophisticated sense of humor, and because he had that, he instinctively sensed what might go over well with the average audience. Dick Huemer's sense of humor was sophisticated, and there were others there that had that sophisticated sense [of humor], but . . . Walt wouldn't try to step into the orbit of Dick's type of humor. Everything had to be basic, in Walt's way. He expected others to accommodate to him, but he wasn't going to accommodate to others.”
⁹¹

Many of the anecdotes about Disney from the years immediately following
Snow White
reflect attempts by his employees, the writers in particular, to manipulate him—usually for no more sinister purpose than self-promotion at a studio where the boss was increasingly worried and distracted and there were many more people, and thus more opportunities to lapse into invisibility,
than there had been a year or two earlier. Some members of the staff, justly or not, came to be regarded as particularly cunning. Perce Pearce, for example—admired during work on
Snow White
for his ability to assume the dwarfs' personalities—was, after he moved on to supervising the writing of
Bambi
, dismissed by many as a con man. Wilfred Jackson recalled Pearce's catching Disney's attention in noisy meetings by speaking much more quietly than anyone else—perhaps getting Disney to move into the seat next to his, in the bargain.
⁹²

Some of Disney's habits of mind all but demanded manipulation. Members of his staff cited one in particular: he could be difficult in a story meeting, showing no interest in what he heard, and then, a week or so later, Campbell Grant said, “he'd come into your room all full of enthusiasm, and he'd sell you back your own idea.”
⁹³
Other times, in a variant on this pattern, Disney heard someone else's ideas and then offered them as his own a short while later in the same meeting.
⁹⁴
“I've sat in story meetings with Walt,” Dave Hand said, “and heard someone . . . bring up a spontaneous gag, to go in a certain place. Walt's sitting there, frowning, looking usually someplace else, and before the meeting is over,
he
gets the idea out of the air, excitedly explains it, and it goes in the picture. He never even heard it mentioned earlier, except that he
did
hear it.”
⁹⁵
Only a few people—Joe Grant was one—ever so captured Disney's attention that he did not absorb and play back their ideas as his own.
⁹⁶

The writers tried to read his moods and play to them as they presented their storyboards, sometimes straining in their search for subtle clues in his behavior. “When you [presented a storyboard] to Walt,” Chuck Couch said, “it was grim. You'd have a story meeting set up, and you just got butterflies in your stomach. . . . You were always scared to death of him. . . . You'd start telling a story to Walt, and first of all, you'd look to see the expression he had on his face when he sat down in the chair; whether he was congenial to someone sitting next to him or just came in with a frown on his face. You'd start telling the story, and you'd always keep watching him. For one thing, if you saw his eyes go way ahead of you, that was all right, it caught his attention. But if he sat there and started drumming his fingers, you were in trouble.”
⁹⁷

Most writers, like Couch, sensibly interpreted the tapping of Disney's fingers on the arm of his chair as a sign of impatience (“Oh, God,” Jack Hannah said, “you'd have to go ahead and finish the story, hearing that rapping on the chair”),
⁹⁸
but T. Hee found variations in the tapping. He claimed that only a slow, steady tempo spoke of unhappiness, and that Disney bounced his hand up and down in a faster, lighter tempo when he was pleased. And
then there was the tapping of his ring. “He had this big ring on his finger,” Leo Salkin said, “and when he got restless you could hear him tapping that goddamn ring on his chair, and it'd drive you right up the wall.”
⁹⁹
Disney might also slap the side of the chair with his hand, “which he did when he enjoyed something,” T. Hee said.
¹⁰⁰
Bill Peet interpreted that slapping differently: “When he slapped the arms of his chair lightly he was the least bit impatient. When the slapping became ‘heavy-handed,' Walt was showing his irritation—ready to explode.”
¹⁰¹

Directors, too, tried to keep a step ahead of the boss. Dick Lundy, who was directing
Donald Duck
shorts by the time of the move to Burbank, said he “used an awful lot of psychology with Walt,” specifically by deferring to Disney on which gags to cut from a story that was running too long. Lundy believed that if he suggested which gags to cut, Disney would go “against me, to put me in my place.”
¹⁰²

Other employees, in other circumstances, believed they had experienced punishment of the same kind, for the same reason. During the planning for the Burbank studio, Ken Anderson wrote to Disney to remind him of his six years of education in architecture and to volunteer his services. “Boy, that was a death knell,” he said. “I never should have done that.” Anderson was excluded from any role in the design of the new studio.
¹⁰³

After
Snow White
demonstrated the viability of animated features, Disney at first considered expanding and remodeling the Hyperion plant.
¹⁰⁴
Then, when the huge dimensions of
Snow White
's success became apparent, he decided to build a new studio on a fifty-one-acre site in Burbank, in the San Fernando Valley, just over the Hollywood Hills from the Hyperion Avenue studio. Walt Disney Productions bought the property, until then used as a military academy's polo field, from the City of Los Angeles's Department of Power and Light in August 1938.
¹⁰⁵

“They thought they would be very happy if
Snow White
grossed three million,” Disney said to a small group of his key artists in January 1940—“they” being his brother and others on the studio's business side—“so when it went over that I said . . . I want to build a new studio. . . . But really, I have a hard time getting money out of them.”
¹⁰⁶

He succeeded, though, in extracting more than three million dollars for the new facility, at Buena Vista and Alameda Streets. Once some space in the new buildings could be occupied, the move from Hyperion took the better part of a year. Although the camera rooms at Burbank were in use by late August 1939, the inkers and painters and Roy Disney's offices still had not made the move by April 1940.
¹⁰⁷

At the heart of the new studio, whose resemblance to a college campus was widely noted, was the three-story animation building. Disney himself, his writers, and the model department were on the top floor. The directors and their layout artists were on the second floor, animators and their assistants on the first. A secretary was posted at the entrance to each wing, instructed to bar anyone from visiting the artists unless they had first been announced.
¹⁰⁸

Disney intended that the Burbank studio would be not just architecturally impressive—its sleek Art Deco styling extended all the way to the design of the animators' desks—but also uniquely well suited to the needs of people working in animation. For someone coming there after having worked at one of the other cartoon studios, as Fred Kopietz did in April 1940, the new plant could indeed seem heavenly, as Kopietz explained: “Everything was so relaxed by comparison with [the Walter Lantz studio], I couldn't believe it. . . . Everything was so easy-going, with no real push. . . . Here I was used to push, push, push, all the time.” There was, besides, much better equipment—at Disney, in contrast to Lantz, an animator could have a Moviola in his room, and the entire studio was air-conditioned.
¹⁰⁹

(Kopietz had animated at Lantz for years, but by 1940 such outside animators could not expect to join the Disney staff at the same level. Kopietz started with Disney as an assistant in special effects animation, and at much lower pay than he had been making, before advancing to character animation on the
Donald Duck
cartoons.)

Even the animators already working for Disney found the change dramatic, Jack Bradbury said: “When we went to the new studio, we went from a room that we had worked in with several guys to rooms all by ourselves, with drapes on the windows, carpeting all over the floor, a nice easy chair to sit in.” Each animator had a separate room, with two animators' assistants sharing a room in between. But the atmosphere was chilly, the writer Stephen Bosustow said. “It was cold, you didn't know who your boss was . . . it was just a cold-fish organization.” He spoke of “the impersonal feeling that came over the whole studio after being what we thought was a warm, big, happy family.”
¹¹⁰

It was not just the size and complexity of the new plant that were alienating. Status symbols were more important at the new studio than they had been on Hyperion. “The animators had carpets on the floor,” Ward Kimball said. “The assistants and inbetweeners had linoleum. Cold, hard, noisy linoleum.” Status at the Hyperion studio was determined “more or less [by] what you were doing,” Kimball said. “But when we got over to the Burbank studio, you acquired the status symbols—the car you drove, and so forth.”
¹¹¹

In the new studio it was not as easy as it had been at Hyperion to move freely, the assistant animator Van Kaufman said, in words that summon up memories of hall monitors in high school. “We never walked down the hall unless we carried [the animation drawings for] a scene under our arms. If you were just screwing off, and you were going over to see a friend in another wing, you took a scene with you.” Said Hawley Pratt, another assistant animator: “You'd get lost at Disney. You'd be down a corridor, in a little room, and nobody would ever know who you were or what you were doing. You didn't know what was going on—as we would say—upstairs. The second floor you would get to, once in a while, but the third floor—that was like going to heaven.”
¹¹²

The writer Carl Barks once recalled in a letter: “The physical layout of the Hyperion studio was very informal, and for that reason [it] was a more pleasant place to work. We Duck and Pluto crews got moved every few weeks into quarters that were still being hammered together by carpenters. At Burbank we were catalogued and classified and packaged like so many guinea pigs in quarters that seemed as friendly as hospital four-bed wards. Units lost personal contact with each other, and the only camaraderie was surreptitious sneaking back and forth with bets for the horse race pools.”
¹¹³

Disney's paternalism backfired comically in one instance described by Jack Hannah, Barks's partner as a
Donald Duck
writer. “He had a big soda fountain downstairs that catered room service to all units,” Hannah told Jim Korkis. “All you had to do was pick up a phone and say, ‘Send up a double chocolate malt and a tuna sandwich.' Any time of the day or night you could call and it would arrive with a cute little waitress in a fancy outfit. . . . It was just too good a thing. Walt would go by downstairs in the middle of the day and he would see the same people sitting there having a cup of coffee or whatever. They'd be sitting there half the day instead of working. Walt finally blew up and the whole thing was thrown out. The whole set-up. All those cute young things.”
¹¹⁴

The ironies were thick as Disney completed the move to his luxurious new studio in the spring of 1940. Instead of soaring aloft with grand new feature films, Disney was scrambling furiously to find some way to make less expensive features and bring in badly needed cash. His haste mirrored the haste he had shown in moving
Pinocchio
into animation early in 1938, but now his motives were radically different. At a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) hearing in 1942, Disney broke into tears as he began talking about this period in his studio's life: “In the spring of 1940 I was about going crazy—pardon me, excuse me, please?” The NLRB trial examiner ordered a recess of five minutes.
¹¹⁵

One project was
The Reluctant Dragon
, a live-action tour of the Disney studio itself (with animated inserts) that would tap the public's strong, or so Disney hoped, curiosity about how animated films were made. The live action was shot in the fall of 1940, with Robert Benchley as the star. Benchley told his wife he found the experience disagreeable: “I know I have had to do a lot of stuff I didn't like personally, and don't think I want to keep on in the cartoon business. . . . They play too comical in cartoons.”
¹¹⁶
Disney had said at a
Pinocchio
meeting on December 8, 1938: “Certain actors who want to do voices for our characters, they look at it differently than they used to.”
¹¹⁷
But now, with the public markedly cooler to that second Disney feature than it had been to
Snow White
, the prestige of a Disney association was starting to shrink, too.