The Animated Man (56 page)

No transcripts were made of such meetings, but Disney himself provided a glimpse of his “writing.” In 1956, the Texas novelist Fred Gipson came to the
studio to collaborate with the screenwriter William Tunberg on a script based on his dog story
Old Yeller
, which was to be the second Disney feature Stevenson directed. After Gipson left the studio, Disney, Stevenson, and Tunberg made “a re-arrangement of the material to help out the production side of it,” as Disney put it in a letter to Gipson. Disney described the changes as “straightening out the story from a shooting-continuity point of view. Certain transpositions in the early stages of the story were done to make it play a little better. I do not believe we have lost anything in doing this and I feel it will improve the finished effect when put on film.”
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Gipson gave his blessing to the revised script, suggesting only that one scene be omitted, and to the finished film.

Once a script was finished and shooting began, Stevenson said, “the extraordinary thing is . . . he would leave a director entirely alone. . . . He never gave any instructions during the shooting of a picture. . . . He would then come back very solidly in the editing.”

Harry Tytle, who began supervising live-action films for the television show in the 1950s, concurred:

Walt always insisted on plenty of coverage [that is, a great variety of shots that he could choose from in editing a film]. . . . He liked plenty of variety in the coverage of various actors, including listening and reaction shots of the other, non-speaking actors in a scene. . . .

He was most interested in the editing of his pictures, that is, putting the film together to tell the story. Woe to the director who camera-cut a picture . . . converting the story directly to film so rigidly that there is no latitude for anyone to do other than just assemble the film. Such an approach gave Walt no room to get away from what he considered a poor performance, or to concentrate on a character who he thought was “coming off” well.
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The fruits of such an approach, one that shrugs off the actual shooting as of limited importance, can be seen in
Johnny Tremain
. The acting—and behind it the direction—make ready resort to the obvious (Johnny, played by Hal Stalmaster, hangs his head and slouches when he's rejected), and the actors themselves give every sign of being performers of the kind who are valued because they can master a role quickly, if superficially. Such filmmaking founders on anything the least complex or ambiguous. In
Tremain
, there is an unsettling contrast between the elevated sentiments expressed by James Otis (Jeff York), in particular, and the protracted ugliness of the colonists' guerrilla attacks on British troops. The emphasis on British restraint, pronounced throughout the film, makes the sniper attacks that kill ordinary soldiers exceptionally unpleasant to watch.

A creative director could have found any number of ways out of this box, even though the final cut remained in the producer's hands, as was ordinarily the case in Hollywood at the time. Disney was simply not interested in hiring such people, and he sometimes seemed to go out of his way to avoid them. To direct
The Great Locomotive Chase
, Fess Parker's first theatrical starring vehicle, Disney chose Francis Lyon, a film editor with no directing experience. (As Parker said, “There was more tender loving care of the locomotives than of their live asset.”)
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Westward Ho the Wagons!
the next Parker film, was directed by William Beaudine, a veteran who cranked out dozens of low-budget westerns in the 1930s and 1940s and by the 1950s was working almost exclusively in television. Before and after his feature assignment, he directed—with blazing speed—the serials running on
Mickey Mouse Club
. A 1963
TV Guide
article quoted Disney's admiring words about Beaudine: “When I came to Hollywood in 1923, I was wandering around the old Warners lot and I watched him shooting a picture with actor Wesley Barry. He's still tops on the low-budgeted type of thing. That sort of fits his temperament. He wants to move. That's why he's so good in television.”
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It was in making the
True-Life Adventures
that the editor's role was particularly dominant, and that surely accounted for some of Disney's warm feelings for the series. He resisted making the
True-Life Adventures
longer than a half hour, he said in 1956, until he had made seven of them and felt confident that he could assemble enough material and present it properly. “The biggest problem [with the wildlife photographers] was getting them to keep shooting. . . . They would be too conservative with film because when they were working on their own they had to buy that film. . . . It got to the point they'd never dare come in and tell me something that they saw that they didn't photograph because I used to raise heck with them.”

Notes from a screening for Disney of what was probably a rough cut of
The Living Desert
show him approaching the music for that
True-Life Adventure
as he would have approached the music for any other live-action film. He was telling the composer, Paul Smith, what he wanted in the score.

In sequence where tortoises are courting, . . . they look like knights in armor, old knights in battle. Give the audience a music cue, a tongue-in-cheek fanfare. The winner will claim his lady fair. . . .

Pepsis
wasp and tarantula sequence: Our heavy is the tarantula. Odd that the wasp is decreed by nature to conquer the tarantula. When her time comes to lay eggs, she must go out and find a tarantula. Not strength, but skill helps her beat Mr. Tarantula. . . .

Then the hawk and the snake. Our other heavy is the snake. . . . With wasp
and tarantula it's a ballet—or more like a couple of wrestlers. The hawk should follow. Tarantula gets his and then Mr. Snake gets his. . . . 
Pepsis
wasp doesn't use brute strength, but science and skill. Should be ballet music. Hawk uses force and violence. One could follow the other and have a different musical theme as contrast.
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Smith followed Disney's instructions all too well: his tightly synchronized music, like Winston Hibler's jocular narration, gives
The Living Desert
a frivolous tone at odds with the grimness of much of what is on the screen. That incongruity was a nagging problem in the
True-Life Adventures
, but the frequent manipulation of both animals and film—the
Seal Island
pattern, imposing a story on the material whenever possible—was even more troublesome. And yet if Disney were to be more scrupulous, the result on-screen would inevitably be a harsher view of nature. That is pretty much what happens in
The African Lion
, the third
True-Life
feature, released in September 1955 and made when Disney was preoccupied with the construction of Disneyland. Manipulation is minimal, at least compared with earlier films in the series, and there is a straightforward emphasis on just how much killing the big cats do (swaddled in reassuring narration about “nature's way”).

Although Disney made three more
True-Life
features, this was not an avenue that he could pursue very far, and so he began to turn toward live-action animal stories—that is, fiction films with real animals. He was speaking of making such films in early 1953,
⁹⁹
and in 1957 he finally completed one:
Perri
, based on a story about a squirrel by Felix Salten, author of
Bambi
. Disney called
Perri
a “True-Life Fantasy”—the only time he used that designation for a live-action animal story—and the film is an unsettling mix of sugary sentiment and real death, as when a marten chases and kills the squirrel that is supposedly the heroine's father. As to how many squirrels died in the filming, that was a subject that the film's producer, Winston Hibler, preferred to avoid.
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Real life was a stubbornly resistant subject for Disney films. The
People and Places
series of half-hour short subjects, which Disney launched in 1953 as a companion to the
True-Life Adventures
, boasted on a title card that “All scenes are authentic and the stories are factual,” but the air of contrivance was even stronger than in the animal films. In
Switzerland
(1955), a goatherd tracks down and retrieves a lost kid in staged action, but what is ultimately most disturbing about the film is the pretense that it is eavesdropping (with CinemaScope cameras!) on unspoiled village life—making cheese, plowing a field with horses, practicing traditional crafts at Christmas. Not just in
Switzerland
, but in
People and Places
shorts made in Germany, Austria, Italy, and Japan, the sense is not that traditional ways have survived World War II, but that World War II never happened.

Perri
was released in August 1957, just before Walt and Lillian Disney left for a two-month trip to Europe.
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It was their first trip there in four years, since Walt had immersed himself in the planning and construction of Disneyland. In contrast to their earlier trips, this was a true vacation. They drove most of the time, visiting England, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy. It was “just too much all at once,” Disney wrote to his sister,
¹⁰²
but his appetite for Europe—and for filming there—had been whetted. Earlier in the year he had bought the rights to
Banner in the Sky
, a James Ramsey Ullman novel about the first ascent of the Matterhorn, as a vehicle for his new young star James MacArthur.
¹⁰³
His production manager, Bill Anderson, hired Ken Annakin to direct and scouted locations on a trip to Europe. Annakin then came to Burbank for several months of preproduction work with Disney and Anderson.

“This time,” Annakin wrote in his autobiography, “Walt seemed to have such confidence in me that so long as he was convinced that I knew exactly his approach to the story and how he envisioned the characters and scenes, he was not demanding the whole script should be storyboarded. He allocated three of his sketch artists to work with me, but we only sketched out the key scenes.”
¹⁰⁴

Most of the film was shot in the summer of 1958, in and around the ancient Swiss village of Zermatt at the foot of the Matterhorn. Disney himself had visited Zermatt—a picturesque place from which most motorized vehicles are barred—on earlier trips to Europe, the first time probably in 1952. He and Lillian spent several weeks on location in 1958, lodging at the town's oldest and most distinguished hotel, the Zermatterh of (he conceived the Matterhorn ride for Disneyland on that visit). In September, the cast and crew moved to London for a few weeks of soundstage filming.
¹⁰⁵

The film, released in November 1959 as
Third Man on the Mountain
, was a startling anomaly in a Disney theatrical program dominated increasingly by shallow, mechanical films. The scenery and the climbing scenes (many of these the actors themselves performed; others made artful use of doubles) were spectacular, but what really set the film apart was Annakin's direction. His skill with actors was here at its peak, so that the cast forms a true ensemble in a way that the actors do in no other Disney film; only a couple of Annakin's other Disney films come close. As Annakin's direction—along with the excellent screenplay, credited to Eleanore Griffin—makes clear, there are no villains in this story, only a group of fundamentally good people, bumping into one another as real people do.

Third Man on the Mountain
was a Disney live-action film that bore comparison with some of the better Disney animated features. Unfortunately, it did not do particularly well at the box office, with gross rentals of $2.4 million versus a cost of $1.6 million. Eight months earlier, in March 1959,
The Shaggy Dog
, produced at a cost of a little over a million dollars, had become Disney's highest-grossing picture ever in the United States and Canada, with gross rentals of more than nine million dollars. The animated feature
Sleeping Beauty
, released in January 1959 in a seventy-millimeter wide-screen process called Technirama, and with much ballyhoo, cost much more—roughly six million dollars—and was weaker at the box office, returning $7.7 million in gross rentals.

The combined effect of
Shaggy Dog
's spectacular success and the relatively poor performance of the other two features was to cement into place Disney's reliance on television-flavored films and on people whose experience was mostly in TV. Disney had conceived of
The Shaggy Dog
as a television series—what Bill Walsh called “a modernized teenage thing”—and he made it as a feature only after ABC turned it down.
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(It was based on
The Hound of Florence
, the Felix Salten story that Disney had considered filming in live action almost twenty years earlier.) “I was mad,” Disney said in 1964, “so I went back to the studio and called in Bill Walsh and said, ‘Let's make a feature of this.' He said, ‘That's what I've been telling you all the time.' ‘Let's go.' ”
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As a black-and-white theatrical release directed by Charles Barton—who was, like Bill Beaudine, a veteran of decades of work in low-budget movies and TV—
The Shaggy Dog
is powerfully reminiscent of the popular TV situation comedies of the late 1950s. That association presumably encouraged audiences to forgive its slack pacing and flatly played scenes. Disney recalled that its star, the veteran actor Fred MacMurray, complained that a policeman in an incidental comic role had a better part than he did; MacMurray had a point.

Disney had entered television in 1954 thinking that he could bend it to his purposes, but five years later it was he who was bowing to TV's demands. He may have underestimated just how voracious TV would be. By 1957, after only three years on the air, the weekly Disney TV show had already consumed most of the usable inventory of animated shorts. (
Mickey Mouse Club
was showing a cartoon almost every day, but many of those, particularly the black-and-white cartoons from the early 1930s, had always been deemed too antiquated for use on the weekly show.) As Harry Tytle wrote, “Walt was caught in a bind.”
¹⁰⁸
If fewer of the old shorts were used, the difference had to be made up with new animation—a very costly alternative, in TV terms,
if it was to resemble the old animation—or with live action that might be an awkward fit with the cartoons. Disney's freedom of action was thus severely limited, exactly the sort of situation that he disliked.