The Animated Man (48 page)

By the time Disney spoke about the film at a sales meeting at the studio in June 1952, the estimated budget was $3 million to $4 million.
¹⁰⁸
By February 1953,
The Great Locomotive Chase
had been shouldered aside, and what the
Los Angeles Times
called “experimental underwater material” for
20,000 Leagues
was being shot off Catalina Island.
¹⁰⁹
Disney began building a third sound stage specifically for
20,000 Leagues
in the spring of 1953.
¹¹⁰
The new stage held a water tank, measuring 60 by 125 feet, and 3 to 18 feet in depth, that could be used to film scenes supposedly taking place at sea.
¹¹¹
In late August 1953, soon after his return from Europe, Disney announced that he would not make another feature in Britain in 1954, devoting his attention instead to
20,000 Leagues
, his first all-live-action feature made at the Burbank studio.
¹¹²

The timing of Disney's decision to make his most ambitious—and expensive—live-action feature was significant. It came when all of the film industry was under the growing shadow of television.

The Disney brothers had been interested in television since the middle 1940s, at least. The
New York Times
reported in October 1945 that Walt Disney Productions had recently “applied to the Federal Communications Commission for a television and FM band in Southern California preliminary to the establishment of three to five television stations in various parts of the country. . . . Current plans call for the use of the cartoon medium and the ‘live' action and cartoon combination in the Disney brand of television entertainment.”
¹¹³

Nothing came of that. Like most other Hollywood producers, Disney was not so much hostile to television as uncertain about how best to make use of the new medium. He was seriously considering entering television by the fall of 1948, although he worried about how to reconcile TV's demands for low costs with his own preferences where animation was concerned.
¹¹⁴
“When television hit,” Disney said in 1956, “I went back to New York and spent a week in New York just to study television. . . . It was ‘48, ‘49, somewhere in there. . . . I saw it here [in Los Angeles] and they said, ‘Well, you've got to see it in New York.' It was basically the same, only more of it. And I had the feeling then that it was important and that we ought to get in it.”

Disney “got in it” on Christmas Day 1950, when the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) aired “One Hour in Wonderland,” a show built around the forthcoming
Alice in Wonderland;
Disney appeared on camera, as did both of his daughters, Kathryn Beaumont (the voice of Alice), and even the
Lilly Belle
. Said Bill Walsh, the show's producer: “I think that was the first time Walt saw TV in its true light—as a promotion device for the studio.”
¹¹⁵

Writing shortly after “One Hour in Wonderland” aired, Disney said, “I regard television as one of our most important channels for the development of a new motion picture audience. Millions of televiewers never go to a picture theatre, and countless others infrequently. . . . In these highly competitive days, we must use the television screen along with every other promotion medium, to increase our potential audience.”
¹¹⁶

On March 30, 1951, Disney summoned four of his executives to talk about a possible half-hour show. “The plan of the program,” Harry Tytle wrote in his diary, “is to boost our theatrical attendance, exploit merchandising, etc., along with the selling of television shows. We mainly discussed various items that would go into the format,” like black-and-white cartoons, “very simple” animation done especially for TV, and “live-action subjects.”
¹¹⁷

Again, nothing came of such ideas at the time, but the Disney studio was nibbling around the edges of television in other ways. Throughout 1951, Roy Disney wrote at the end of that year, the studio engaged in “small-scale production
of live action films for television, particularly spot announcements, through a controlled subsidiary, Hurrell Productions, Inc., which operates on our studio lot at Burbank. This subsidiary is exploring the possibilities of producing serialized dramatic and comedy shows on film for TV.”
¹¹⁸
(George Hurrell was a fashion photographer who was married to Lillian Disney's niece, Phyllis Bounds.) The studio completed its first animated television commercials, for Mohawk Carpet Company, in September 1952.
¹¹⁹

Disney's interest in TV waxed and waned throughout the early 1950s. “I'm in no hurry to get into television,” he said in the spring of 1952, “although I do believe in cooperation with that medium. It's very valuable in advertising a film.”
¹²⁰
He made a second Christmas show in 1952, to promote
Peter Pan
, and in the summer of 1953, a three-year deal with General Foods appeared to be in the offing.
¹²¹
But still nothing jelled. (According to Bob Thomas, the General Foods deal foundered on the sponsor's insistence that Disney make a pilot program.)
¹²²

It was while peppered by distractions of many kinds that Disney made
Alice in Wonderland
, finally bringing to film his version of a classic that had been a nagging presence since 1938—a film Disney felt he
should
make but did not really want to. The film went into production in the summer of 1949, just after Disney left for London and
Treasure Island
. Like
Cinderella
, it was shot largely in live action on skeletal sets, to guide the animators' work. Shooting began on June 22, 1949, and continued until November 2, 1950. This time, many of the voice performers, like Kathryn Beaumont, the English girl who was Alice, and Ed Wynn, the veteran comedian who was the Mad Hatter, played the same characters in the live action, acting to playbacks of their voice recordings.
¹²³

In making
Cinderella
, Disney could use
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
as a sort of template, but he had no help of that kind with
Alice
. Like
Pinocchio
, it was an episodic story that went against the grain of straightforward narrative as Disney practiced it; and again like
Pinocchio
, it demanded imaginative handling that Disney had neither the time nor the inclination to give it. During work on
Alice
, Disney said in 1956, “we got in there and we just didn't feel a thing. But we were forcing ourselves to do it. . . . You're in so deep sometimes you've got to fight it through. You can't turn back.” He summed up his problem this way, years later: “The picture was filled with weird characters.”
¹²⁴

During work on
Alice
, Frank Thomas said, Disney “had trouble communicating to almost anybody what he really saw in the material. You could sense what it was, but every time you thought you had it, he would say, ‘No,
no, you don't want stuff like that in there,' or ‘You're missing the boat,' or ‘That's not what we want to do.' ”
¹²⁵

In an interview with Christian Renaut, Thomas cited his difficult encounters with Disney over his animation of the Queen of Hearts: “He said, ‘Try some stuff. What is she doing in the picture?' So I was supposed to take up a funny character and do some stuff that I needed to be kind of strong. He looked at it and said, ‘You've lost your comedy.' So I tried it funny. ‘You've lost your menace,' and I asked, ‘Now what is she doing in the picture? Give me some business and I'll give you a character,' and he said, ‘No, you give me a character and I'll give you some business.' ”
¹²⁶

Such difficulties were reflected in the film's cost, which rose to more than three million dollars—almost a million more than
Cinderella
's—before
Alice
was released in the summer of 1951. The film's box-office performance was disappointing, and the studio wrote off a million-dollar loss.

In the fall of 1951, shortly after
Alice
was released, Disney's writers finally nailed down an acceptable continuity for
Peter Pan
, another story that had been a nagging headache since before World War II. Disney had bought Paramount's rights to the James Barrie story in October 1938 and had signed a contract with the copyright owner, the Hospital for Sick Children in London, in January 1939.
¹²⁷
Disney did not mean to dawdle; as early as May 1939, with story work in the most preliminary stages, he already had in mind animators for the pirates (Bill Tytla), the dog, Nana (Norm Ferguson, the animator of Pluto), and Tinker Bell, the fairy (Fred Moore).
¹²⁸

For more than a decade, though, Disney's writers generated huge quantities of paper—treatments and outlines, as well as storyboards—until the story was finally in a form that he could accept. Even then, Captain Hook, more so than the Queen of Hearts in
Alice
, was an unsettled character—alternately comedian and menace, his inconsistencies bridged only by Hans Conried's highly colored vocal performance—but in 1952, when animation was under way, Disney was content to leave the resolution of such issues to his animators. Making animated features was by now a reflex activity for him; his real interests were elsewhere.

By 1952, Disney was absorbed by a new passion for miniatures, a passion generated by his success in building a miniature train, especially the miniature caboose that he made himself in 1950. Said Roger Broggie: “We started to build what was to be an exhibit of Americana in the same scale [as the caboose], an inch and a half to the foot, or one-eighth the full size. That means the figure would be nine inches tall.”
¹²⁹

Somewhere toward the end of 1950—probably after he finished his caboose—Disney had applied his new skills as a maker of miniatures to a diorama called “Granny's Cabin”; it reproduced a set from
So Dear to My Heart
. When Disney exhibited Granny's Cabin at the Festival of California Living at the Pan-Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles two years later, in November and December 1952, the
Los Angeles Times
described it as “an eight-foot-long replica of a Midwest pioneer farm home, handicrafted
[sic]
by Disney in every minute detail of structure and the furniture supplemented by objects from historical collections.”
¹³⁰

Granny herself was not represented in Granny's Cabin. At the festival, Beulah Bondi, who played Granny in the film, talked about pioneer life in a recording. Disney posed with Bondi and Kathryn Beaumont (who was the voice of Wendy in
Peter Pan
as well as the voice of Alice) in front of Granny's Cabin, which was recessed into a wall at eye level.

By then, Disney had been collecting miniatures for several years. His collection of miniatures had grown so large by early in 1951 that he was seriously considering sending it on tour.
¹³¹
It would go out as what Roger Broggie called “an exhibit of Americana”—that is, a set of dioramas, each furnished with Disney's miniatures. The
Times
described Granny's Cabin as “the first unit in [Disney's] miniature Americana.”

Disney's ambitions increased with each succeeding diorama. For an “opera house” miniature, Disney wanted a tiny vaudevillian to perform on stage, and so in February 1951, the actor and dancer Buddy Ebsen was filmed performing in front of a grid that Roger Broggie and Wathel Rogers used as a guide in reproducing his movements through a system of cams and cables.
¹³²
Although Disney himself built Granny's Cabin, his direct involvement seems to have diminished as each diorama became more mechanically elaborate. The initial sketches for the dioramas were made by Ken Anderson, whom Disney borrowed from the studio's staff for the purpose.

Work began on a third, still more ambitious diorama—a barbershop quartet—in June 1951. Actors were filmed in front of a grid, as Ebsen had been. After Harper Goff joined the Disney staff in October, he designed a tableau with five characters, a quartet whose mouths would be synchronized with their singing voices, and a fifth man who was getting a shave. “My wife Flossie made the clothes out of a very fine silk,” Goff said in an interview with
The “E” Ticket
, a magazine devoted to the history of Disneyland, “and I applied a varnish to the moving areas so the material wouldn't wear out too quickly. . . . I made a little model of the scene . . . it wasn't a very careful
model, but it was sized right. . . . The guys would sing, ‘Down by the old mill stream . . .' Their mouths didn't move in that first model I made. What I did was the setting . . . what the barber shop would look like, so you could visualize it. Walt then took it and had other people work on it.”
¹³³

When
Popular Science
published photos of Granny's Cabin in its February 1953 issue, it described the diorama as part of “Disneyland, a miniature historic America that is to cover a 50-acre tract in Los Angeles. . . . Its purpose is to entertain people of all ages and also to teach them by means of tiny but exact models how life in the U.S. developed to its present level.” The magazine reported that Disney had collected “miniature copies of antique furnishings from all over the country and built others in his studio workshops.”
¹³⁴

Popular Science
may have conflated two or more potential Disney projects, but that would have been easy to do, considering that Disney's plans were, to say the least, fluid in the early 1950s. He seems to have flitted restlessly from one idea to another, trying to find some way to put his enthusiasm for miniatures to work in an incongruously grand project. When he wrote to his sister, Ruth, about “my newest project”—the dioramas—on December 4, 1952, while the Festival of California Living was in progress, he wrote as if he thought a touring show of miniature Americana was a live possibility. He said he was “hoping it will become a reality, but at this point it's very much in the thinking and planning stage. . . . I've been collecting all sorts of miniature pieces for the past three or four years, with this project in mind. It's been a wonderful hobby for me and I find it is something very relaxing to turn to when studio problems become too hectic.”
¹³⁵