Walt Disney

I

THE city bakes in an amber coastal plain, shut off from the world by a horseshoe of mountain to the north, east, and south, and by an ocean to the westward. The city is not Hamelin, in Brunswick, but Los Angeles, U. S. A., amid its litter of tributary towns. Two of them, side by side, are Hollywood and Burbank, and between the two, from the floor of the plain, crops up a mountain made of ultramarine and olive. They call the mountain ‘Lookout,’ but it might be the Koppelberg Hill itself. . . .

Walt Disney’s new studio, a jewel on the Burbank flat, has no apparent communication with the mountain, which stands so far away that its long afternoon shadows do not temper the 112-degree August heat. But it is near enough so that Mr. Disney could, within five minutes, attain the apron of the ridge, pass by sorcery through the sealed green door, and see how his Productions are proceeding underground.

For he is the Pied Piper of our time, perhaps of all time. ‘I’m able,’ said Robert Browning’s Piper, ‘By means of a secret charm, to draw All creatures living beneath the sun, That creep or swim or fly or run, After me so as you never saw.'

In his suave ‘modern’ office Walt wears a pied ensemble consisting of a tasty pair of wine-colored flannel trousers, a loose jacket to match, an oarsman’s shirt of cotton, and moccasins. His eyes are dark, his height is, say, five-ten, his weight one hundred and fifty. This Kansas City newsboy has been charming the children of all races and ages out of a melancholy world into a sanctuarymountain fortified against all attack. But the Pied Piper of Burbank has only just begun.

His first studio was in a corner of a garage. His gleaming newest cost two million dollars, covers several hundred thousand square feet, is as severely gay as a World’s Fair model, as immaculate as a hospital, and as functional as a research scientist’s dream laboratory. Five years ago the little band of Disney faithful totaled 200 souls; today the payroll shows 1100. Until three years ago the studio had never made a long picture; today’s schedule calls for three ‘features’ and twenty-six ‘shorts’ a year. That promises the final production of a serpent of celluloid 1900 miles long, of which each linear foot will consist of sixteen ‘frames,’ or individual pictures. These individual frames will be photographed from a single color drawing on a sheet of translucent celluloid, or from two, three, four, or five such drawings superimposed upon each other, and held before a fixed and opaque water-color drawing of the background of the scene. Pinocchio, for instance, required over half a million final drawings. And before each final single — or multiple — color drawing is ready for the camera it has been preceded by an incalculable number of preliminary sketches, moulding the characters, the situations, the action, the expression, to their final needle focus of perfection.

Wait’ll be thirty-nine this winter. He was born in Chicago, with Irish, Canadian, German, and American blood in his veins. When he was nine he had a paper route in Kansas City; when he was sixteen he had a train-butcher job. He studied photography in McKinley High in Chicago, and he had always liked to draw. That’s all you need to know to understand the man’s plot. To be sure, when he was turned down as too young to enlist, he got to France at the wheel of an ambulance, but when he came home he went to drawing again — catalogue illustrations, and free-lance commercial drawings, and finally cartooning for a company that made comical lantern slides. The problem of animating the action of the characters on successive slides absorbed him. He beguiled a group of cartoonists to collaborate with him in making films of fairy tales; the group sold the film to a New York company; the company went broke.

Armed with forty dollars, a suit, a sweater, and his drawing tools, Walt landed in Hollywood in August of 1923 to visit his brother Roy. Roy had a few more dollars of working capital, so the brothers, in a garage, made and photographed enough drawings to add up to a complete short film. Walt took it to the chief Los Angeles motion-picture theatre for a trial projection. The house manager took some urging, but agreed to project it after hours. Disney went into the theatre to watch a regular cartoon film on the bill. Instead, he suddenly saw his own baby projected on the screen. He leapt from his seat, scuttled down the aisle, and announced to the rather frightened audience that the film on the screen was his own. That was his first public showing of the Disney Production. Today that theatre manager is his vice president and sales manager, for Walt has a memory like an elephant, and the loyalty of adhesive plaster. Today the Idaho girl who answered an advertisement for an assistant in the garage is the first and only Mrs. Walt Disney, and the mother of his two daughters.

Cartooning or ‘comic-stripping’ in the American manner is very simple. All you do is to think up a character and then put it through the paces of three or four scenes, in your mind, just as a playwright takes his characters through three or four acts. Then you draw each scene in a simple pen-and-ink technique. If the action turns on words spoken by your characters, you draw a balloon with its string near the speaker and letter the words into the balloon. If your character is a familiar animal, so much the better, for animals are droll (‘ they look so much like humans’), animals are anonymous, and therefore out of reach of controversial prejudices (‘everybody loves animals’), and animals are highly animate. So Walt drew Oswald the Rabbit. The basic method of cartoon animation of which Oswald was a crude example is the basic method of the highly polished product of 1940. The Oswald saga was popular. Disney wanted to expand, kept trying to prove to his distributor that he needed more working capital. The distributor declined to put up the money. ‘If I cannot raise new money,’ reasoned Disney, ‘I’d better raise some new ideas.’ So he simply created Mickey Mouse, just as you would create Niagara Falls, the Tehachapi Mountains, the Panama Canal, or the Hope Diamond.

And then, as the silent-screen titles used to say, came sound.

Overnight, when the first raw sound began to bark at you from your favorite movie screen, it became evident that you wouldn’t long be interested in watching a silent mouse. Plane Crazy (‘Mickey builds a plane, goes on an adventurous flight’) was on release to the theatres; the little one-mouse-power factory was readying Gallopin’ Gaucho (‘Take-off on Doug Fairbanks. Mickey rescues Minnie from Pete in Spanish locale’); a third film, Steamboat Willie, as mute as the other two, was ready to go — when sound ‘arrived.’ Steamboat Willie was yanked back into the plant, its story torn apart, new sequences and new ‘gags’ were drawn in to show musical instruments, actual music to fit the instruments was recorded and patched into the film by a strange new device called a ‘sound track’ — and Steamboat Willie, delivered to the exhibitors on July 29, 1928, served notice that Walt thenceforth aimed to please not only the eye but the ear.

Today, after twelve years, this young man, who shyly professes his ignorance of classical music, has just made a twoand-one-half-hour picture, the body of which is a full-rigged classical orchestral concert by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Symphony, and the décor of which is a pictorial fantasy on the screen contrived to interpret, animate, enrich, expand, and vitalize the music as music has never before come to life. It is called Fantasia, and it is a revolution. It projects Creation, for instance, with a little help from Stravinsky. Up round Disney’s place it is only a stone’s throw from Steamboat Willie to Leopold Stokowski, Deems Taylor, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Creation. Mickey’s first sound voice in Steamboat Willie was Walt Disney’s voice, and so it is as Mickey plays the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Fantasia, and so it has always been and, please God, may always be.

II

It would help solve international problems if you were to understand the process of making a modern animated cartoon.

Having decided upon a story to tell, you talk about it with your associates. If you cannot kindle them all with enthusiasm for its graphic possibilities, you choose only those who seem to share your hope. Luckily these people can draw, and in the course of infinite experiment on paper and by voice they evolve a great many ‘sequences’ of interesting pictorial action, and they show them to you, and first thing you know you see before you tacked on the wall a series of sketches of the dramatic high spots of the story. If it is a pretty long story, too cumbersome for a single group of artists to digest, you choose four or five men as a ‘story crew’ and give them the first section of the story to sketch in further detail; to another crew you assign the second section. You have thus set twenty or twenty-five seasoned artists off prospecting along a single romantic trail. Each of your four or five crews, or scouting parties, keeps running to you at the head of the file to show you what new treasure it has unearthed. Each of the new sketches you tack in its proper place on a very long wall, and presently all the key pictures of the action of the story are in place before you, the characters are taking on the form of distinct personalities, and the picture has quietly gone into actual production.

Article I of the Disney constitution stipulates that every possible element of a picture shall be not a mere pictorial representation of the character or an element of scenery, but. an individual, with clearly defined characteristics. Disney lieutenants have grown gray in the service repeating that Mickey is ‘not a mouse, but a person.’ So your story crew will psychoanalyze each character, and from each man’s suggestion will evolve on paper a character with defined proportions and mannerisms. Before you set about drawing your semifinal story, therefore, you turn your characters over to your Model Department, where they not only make accurate portraits of the characters on paper, as a guide for the animators, but even model the characters in plaster so that they may incite the artists to the feeling of vitality that only a three-dimensional statue can give. You now understand why the shelves, the top of the grand piano in Walt’s office, the top of the master’s desk, and the window ledges hold a ceramic pageant of colored statuettes of kaffir warriors, pygmy pickaninnies, fauns; a noble portrait bust of Neptune; a ballet figure in which the coryphées are not human beings, but hippopotami, ostriches, and crocodiles slightly under the influence of Degas and Helen Hokinson. You now understand why the files of the Model Department are packed high with photostats of sketch sheets each containing dozens of character notes on each personage in each picture: one such here before me outlines the personality of a baby rabbit, M-9-B, Snow White — a character of the utmost triviality in the action of that extravaganza — and on this sheet are forty-three sketches of that single obscure rabbit. With the help of the Disney Model Department a left-handed plumber could draw the Durbar and make it human.

If it is to be a picture to run ten minutes on the screen, you know that you will ultimately have to show the audience 14,400 pictures. If it is a picture to run one hundred minutes, as a feature picture often does, you need only make 144,000 final drawings.

Remember that (thanks to sound) your characters may talk, laugh, sing, sigh, grunt, whinny, and quack; that the trains you draw may rattle and howl and puff and click, that the teakettle on the hob may whistle. For as you can draw with paint and brush, so you can paint with sound. And remember, too, that just as most music stimulates eye responses in most human beings, so most pictures are enriched in the seeing by complementary sounds.

So first you make your music. Just compose it to the precise length you want your picture to play, and, on the staff paper you give your musicians to write on, paste the key sketches of your story, at the minute-and-second points at which they should occur. Your musicians will then write the notes. You now have your orchestra rehearse it, to make sure that it really illustrates the picturestory your drawings will presently tell, and when the score is finally shipshape you bid the musicians blow their best for the final and imperishable recording of the music on the margin of a ribbon of film — a recording so narrow that to the naked eye the sound track looks like no more than a ruling made with a postoffice pen on the wrong kind of paper — a shaggy line not more than one eighth of an inch wide at its loudest.

Since the characters in the story may talk and sing, and since the devices you draw may make characteristic noises, you bid appropriate voices speak lines, or sing, or talk animal-talk, before microphones. You have a secret society of sound-effect men who can make a thunderstorm sound, not as a thunderstorm does on a microphone, but as a Thunderstorm With Personality should sound. They will work all afternoon for a proper recording of the word ‘Hello.’ They won’t tell you or anyone else how they achieve their sound effects; they are jealous as panthers. They will spend several hundred dollars to construct a three-foot metal fan operated by electricity so that a singer may chirp a ballad into a glass lamp chimney and thence into the whirling fan, in order that his song may be recorded with a certain querulous flutter. They will record all manner of synthetic sounds for you, and by replaying the music track on one phonograph, and the sound-effects track on another, both at once, and by fiddling with dials controlling each, you can blend the music and the talk so that each helps the other and makes a final master sound track.

Now some more drawings.

The first drawings will be made with black pencils on white paper. Our preliminary key sketch on the wall says that Mickey is wearing a centurion’s helmet. Minnie, a scarf thrown over her shoulder as a Roman maiden, appears before him. He takes off his helmet. It must be a courtly gesture. On the screen it should use, say, the whole of ten seconds. You ought to know that you will need 240 drawings to get Mickey’s helmet off his head and into the crook of his arm, in the approved polite-centurion-with-his-helmet-off attitude.

So one of your lieutenants, known as a head animator, sets out to make the 240 drawings. He makes first, on a sheet of translucent paper, Drawing No. 1 (Mickey with helmet on head). Over Drawing No. 1 he places a fresh sheet of paper, so No. 1 drawing will show through the sheet. He then draws Mickey-with-helmet-in-crook-of-elbow — the final drawing of the sequence, which is therefore Drawing No. 240.

Next, he draws the action logical at what we may call the ‘half mile,’ then the ‘quarter mile’; then he draws the ‘three-quarter-post’ action. He assigns each fractional series (1 to 60, 61 to 120, 121 to 180, and so on) to one of four assistants, and from his own start-and-finish guide drawings it is a simple matter for each assistant to produce his own series of final drawings. The 240 sketches are then assembled in sequence, given to the camera department, photographed in black-and-white only, one exposure to each drawing, to make a negative film ten seconds long.

If your name is Walt Disney, the animator team who have made this sequence will call your secretary, tell her they have something to show you. She says, ‘I’ll send him in.’ She does. The animator threads his ten-second film into a miniature movie projector. You say, ‘Let’s see it,’ and the 240 drawings, white-on-black now, and sketchy as can be, appear as motion-picture action on a small ground-glass panel.

If the assignment has been carried out with élan, the rest of the task is merely to do the 240 drawings all over again, in exquisite India-ink penmanship. These final black-and-white drawings will be sent to the inking division. There each will be copied by simple tracing, on a sheet of transparent and colorless celluloid. When the 240 drawings of this ten-second bit have been inspected for microscopic flaws, and passed, they will proceed to the coloring division, where young women of steady hand will apply water colors to the areas on the celluloid.

The pigments are made in the Disney laboratory. They are issued to the painters in numbered and sealed and inspected china jars, each containing just enough point to cover the specific task — not for parsimony so much as to ensure uniformity and permanence of color tone. The completion of the 240 ‘cels’ in color indicates that you’re not far from home with your picture.

But if the action has not been well drawn, or (which is more likely) if new ideas have darted in to make the action more effective as entertainment, back goes the assignment to the animators for resketching. If they go stale on it, the episode may go to a new animator group fresh to the problem. A story can go through miraculously from start to finish in a few weeks, or, which is more likely, it can be postponed for months and years while it is being reshaped. But not one of the two hundred odd films put into production and promised has ever been abandoned.

III

‘Story conferences’ obviously take place throughout the production of a Disney film, from the first consideration of the narrative to the final ‘cels.’ Let’s eavesdrop a random story meeting which took place on Wednesday, December 14, 1938, from 2 to 4.30 P.M. in Music Room No. 1. The stenographic minutes record that there were present Walt, Ben, Ted, Bill, Paul, Webb, Woolie, Dick, Joe, and Steno. (Steno signs the minutes on page 8 merely ‘irene.’)

The subject is Sequence 10 of Pinocchio. On the first board, third row, is pinned a sketch, which is the focus of the discussion.

WALT. We can get a funny action on that big one — the Japanese spider-crab. All his legs don’t work the same. Those legs all ought to be working like a piston in an automobile. One is up and the other is down. But it’s got rhythm to it. Not too mechanical. It should be a cycle. The minute you see it, it’s funny.

JOE. I’d like to see the procession start right off. The anemone should start with a small shot at the feet and come right back.

WALT. We should have that first thing, and then a close-up of Pinocchio walking. Cut back; they all follow. Suggest them following, but don’t show them gathered in the scene. Show them start to gather. He goes through more and more fish. In the close-up he goes by their eyes, and they follow. Then cut to a larger field and you see all these fish — then you’ve got the laugh. . . . I think it’s all right.

JOE. I wish it was the feet and the rock. I would like to see a continuity of business of him being smart with the lobster and just complete the idea of the rock and the Cricket.

WALT. The part where he is riding the seahorses is a spot I don’t like. It gets a little rowdy. I feel that they have lost their purpose. Cut to Pinocchio; he begins to float up; the Cricket is trying to push the sea-horses off him. Leave the Cricket down there pushing the sea-horses. . . . You shouldn’t show the fish until the Cricket pulls loose. It’s a surprise. You know how a fish goes along: here comes something and he just opens his mouth and swallows it. Maybe the gill would open up there, and the Cricket comes swimming out. But he forgot his hat inside, so he puts the cane in there and swims out to beat hell. The Cricket would have to make some remark as he swam away from the fish. It would have to be a quick thing.

TED. The thought is ’If it isn’t one thing, it’s another!’

That is how pictures are thought out before they are animated, and while they are being animated. How they ever reach the stage of approval for final drawing and coloring is the mystery of Burbank and the despair of Disney’s competitors, and the reason why Disney pictures draw audiences into theatres whether china dishes are being given away or not.

After the ‘cels’ are colored, the special-effects division seizes them and introduces shadows, and modelings, and predetermined devices altogether too complex to explain here, so that the finished drawing may contain its maximum of depth and harmony. Remember that the action of the character on this ‘cel’ may be played, in the final picture, against a second character, or group of characters, and that while you are making these 240 pictures of Mickey doffing his casque another animator team was making 240 more ‘cels’ showing Minnie bowing graciously to Mickey. A final ‘scene,’ one twenty-fourth of a second long, may consist, as it reaches the camera, of a ‘setup’ of as many as five or six ‘cels’ super imposed in a ‘cel setup’ upon a fixed background.

So your final ten-second series of ‘cels’ may really total from 240 to 1200. They will go to your particular cameraman in the Holy of Holies — the dust-proof, spy-proof, visitor-proof building which is an orderly catacomb of photographic dens, each the lair of a multiplane camera and its operator. Each scene will be ‘shot’ as a single frame of the endless serpent of Technicolor film which winds out of the Burbank Labyrinth and round and round the earth. But before it issues, remember, it must have a final wiggly pen-ruling traced along its margin — so the sound track is there recorded, to seal the perfectly timed triple alliance between Music, Sound, and Picture.

Picture sequences are elastic: you can make as many drawings or as few as you like to depict a given scene, but you cannot squeeze or stretch a recorded sound track. That is why you completed the sound first and drew the pictures later to fit the sound. To be sure, you had to have a clear conception at the start of precisely what music would best fit your story, but if you are Walt Disney, or one of his musical geniuses, that wasn’t really a problem. Walt has no musical training and perfect musical appreciation. His musical director is a prodigy of musical expertness, and his ear goes to an error in recording as unerringly as a wet spaniel puppy goes to a light and costly Aubusson rug.

IV

The only extant record of the pictures Walt has made since Steamboat Willie lies here on the desk, and shows that over two hundred shorts and two long features have spun down the twelve years. Let’s transcribe from that record a random outline of the plots of the early shorts, for in them you will see a strain of what makes Disney pictures: —

A battle between Mickey and his mice gang [sic] and a bunch of cats

Duck revue. Pig sings opera and Mickey sings and dances on piano Mickey as a train engineer Mickey plays organ to skeleton’s dance Mickey at beach — saves Minnie from drowning

Auto gags — insects and animals steal picnic lunch

Covered-wagon type of story — western locale

Mickey as taxi-driver Mickey goes fishing with Pluto Spring cleaning — gags with Pluto and lawn mower

Hunting — Mickey flying with ducks Burlesque on athletic events. Bicycle race Explorer — Mickey with the cannibals — musical ending

Mickey operates steam shovel. Minnie sells box lunches. Chase through steel building. Pete in funny riveter gag

Mickey as a cellist — sells Pluto to raise money for poor family — Christmas

And so on. Chivalry, the chase, a fool dog; gentle, keen, amiable satire of current tastes, of new books, new pictures, new inventions; sympathetic refraction of the minor ills that beset us all; heroism, an unwavering confidence in the ability of machinery to do anything at any time, right or wrong, which probably should be called gadgetry — these are disclosed by the record as a few of the blocks on which the Disney legend grew at the rate of 16 patient pictures a foot, 5280 feet to the mile. And under it all you hear the roll of a surf of laughter — the laughter of little children and very old men and women, the cleansing, tearful, roaring belly-laugh that remains one of civilization’s last claims on immortality.

The growth of the Disney project was pretty helter-skelter. From time to time actors who sing or who make other noises appear for an audition at the plant by the Koppelberg Hill. Years ago a Chautauqua ventriloquist, imitating animals in the playgrounds of public schools on behalf of a local milk company, came to the studio to offer his services. One of his exclusive specialties, performed by pursing his cheek, and by talking very fast in his throat as if he had a larynx full of hot golf balls, was an imitation of a little girl reciting ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’ Disney listened, mildly interested, and remarked, ‘Sounds like a damn duck.’ A year later, in need of a new character who might serve as salty foil to the gallantry of Mickey, Walt conceived the notion of introducing a hard-boiled, self-reliant, short-tempered and unquenchable duck into a picture called The Wise Little Hen. ‘Where’s that guy that did “Mary’s Little Lamb” like a duck last year?’ he asked. The ventriloquist’s name popped out of the casting file, and overnight the civilized world surrendered to Donald Duck. Walt forgets nothing except the unimportant, irrelevant, and unpleasant. Ruthless self-criticism, manic ingenuity, and precisionism are the assets no other animated-film team has been able to match. It is trite but true that each new film represented new and hardearned technical victories and was the best the camp could make, but it was admittedly only a step to the next picture, which would be better — ‘or else.’

As color multiplied graphic opportunities, so it multiplied problems. Every black-and-white sketch is susceptible of a thousand, ten thousand, interpretations in color. When Mickey’s familiar short pants first appeared in color, what color should they appear in? Of such grave issues are major crises born in Burbank, for in pictures, as in life, it is dangerous to swap trousers in the middle of a reputation.

Wholly aside from the solemn dictum of publicity policy which declares that ‘there is no one in the company except Walt,’ there are, as a matter of workaday fact, no surnames on the lot. The day after Deems Taylor started work on Fantasia in an office not far from Walt’s Corridor, he wanted to consult Walt about several little matters. ‘This,’ said he timidly to the operator when he picked up the telephone, ‘is Mr. Taylor. Could I speak to Mr. Disney’s secretary, please?’ ‘I’ll call you right back, Deems,’ said the operator; ‘her line is busy now.’ Walt’s secretary presently told him that Walt was tied up, and asked what he wanted. Oh, said Mr. Taylor, he would like to catch a moment of Mr. Disney’s time when he was free. ‘Okay,’ she replied; ‘the minute he comes back I’ll send him in.’ An hour later Walt came into the Taylor den, eased himself on to a corner of the Taylor desk, and said, ‘Well, Deems. How’s it going? Want me?’

Leopold Stokowski held out for a while, but became ‘Stokie’ to one and all. He even signed his photographs ‘Stoki.’ ‘“Stokie” would have to leave that e off,’ said Vern. (Vern hires the 650 artists.)

The telephone rings in the immaculate sweatbox where a film is being run. Janet answers: ‘Oh, yeah — Herb. I’m in l-B-9. Say, could you find out where Lorette is? . . . Lorette, is Al going to be free about 4.40? Swell, thanks a lot.’ A voice from the wall cracks over a speaker: ‘Say, Janet, what account do we charge this projection to?’ ‘Oh, publicity, I guess, Eddie — thanks.’ ‘Thanks very much,’ says Eddie.

At the office door of each of the inmates is a small card prettily lettered with the names of the occupants. One cubicle contains a certain two who have been a happy and facile working team for a long time. The card says: —

CARL SMITH
VS.
BOB JOHNSON

Another office is the fortress of five young artists. The card outside reads:

ERROL WALTZINGER
ERROL SHANAHAN
ERROL PRIEST
ERROL FLETSCH
ERROL PERKINS

On a desk in another office, in the manner of a Big Executive, is a name in 84-point type; instead of being on a detached fixture, this name is cut from a newspaper, and is pasted on the edge of the desk. The name is HEDY LAMARR, but the LAMARR is blue-penciled out. On the studio door of a talented Japanese artist whose name is Gyo is lettered: steGYOsaurus.

The waitresses in the cafeterias (of which there are roughly five on the premises) wear agreeable and washable uniforms like every other waitress’s uniform except that on their left collar tabs are embroidered their given names. You may eat today with the ministrations of Margaret, but tomorrow, like as not, you will be attended by Lucille, Marie, or (so help me) Hebe.

Gertrude Stein has pointed out that familiarity, far from breeding contempt, usually breeds the opposite. Every so often Disney gets tough. When he found out that an undue number of people were arriving too late in the forenoon, and leaving too early, he issued an Ultimatum. With no regard for multigraphing costs he circulated a Sermon on Tardiness. He pointed out its devitalizing effects. He put himself, as he cannot help doing, into the boots of the teno’clock scholars, and dramatized the reasons why they had probably been late. He whipped himself up to a firstrate pitch of stern plausibility, approached his grim climax, and rammed home his point by stating, ‘Those who can’t find time to do your errands before or after work, why not ask your wife to do them?’ Dreadful punitive measures were implied if Matters were not Corrected. Such drastic measures would probably have taken the form of, say, closing the men’s clubroom, free massage parlor, and squash court for a half day.

Punitive measures are not often necessary. One group of animators, envying a brother who was making an early sneak in the afternoon, crossed the wiring of his motorcar so that when he turned on the ignition a series of smart internal explosions, borrowed from the soundeffects department, would ensue, and clouds of black smoke would utter from the louvers. When he slid away from his drawing table about four that afternoon and climbed into his car, a noble bombardment drew every Disney employee on that side of the plant to the windows, cheering. He stayed long after fivethirty trying to find out what was wrong with the car, and he came in at eightthirty next morning. It was recently found necessary to turn out certain lights in the evening, and stop cafeteria service, in order to persuade certain of the brethren to go home from work.

Since celluloid film will burn, and though the new plant is fireproof, the chief engineer recently took it upon himself to lecture a group of staff heads on fire protection. One artist, chided because he had not been at the meeting, scoffed at his dutiful colleagues. ‘I should take,’ he said, ‘a boy-scout lecture on not rubbing sticks together.’ ‘Wait a minute,’ said one who had been present. ‘Wait — a — minute. Twenty bucks a month extra, just for doing firealert inspection twice a day. Is that so hard to take, twenty bucks, now?’ ‘Whaddye mean, twenty bucks? Twenty bucks for what?’ ‘Listen — for just stepping outside your office twice a day into the main corridor, and looking both ways, for fire — see? And if there is a fire you report it, and if there is no fire you go back. Not so hard to take, for twenty bucks extra.’ The absentee agreed that twenty bucks was not hay. ‘But you got to have the examination, that’s all,’ went on his adviser. ‘You just go down to the main Burbank fire station, and the firemen give you the exam, and you pay five bucks for your certificate, and then you’re in.’

Down to the main fire station went the applicant. The city firemen, apprised by telephone of their opportunity, stripped him, put a helmet on his head, a gas mask on his face, and boots on his nakedness, slid him many times down the brass pole. They thumped and measured him, blew smoke in his face, probed his heredity, borrowed his cigarettes, congratulated him, accepted his five dollars, and gave him a certificate. He came back to the Castle Disney proud as a crusader with a paynim scalp. The boys welcomed him to their brotherhood, and after a while they told him all, and paid him back his five dollars. The fire risk is negligible today, but the fire consciousness is pretty well developed.

Here is probably the only factory on earth where practical jokes are a part of the production line. It is inevitable that several hundred men whose lifework it is to produce humorous catastrophes in picture should try a few out on each other.

V

The Disney library contains all the durable children’s stories ever told. It also contains five hundred joke books and bound files of the notable humorous publications. It contains a battery of steel filing cabinets which hold a million and a half typed and classified jokes, each legally ascribed to the source from which it was set down. There are 124 classifications of such jokes, and each has from five to twenty subclassifications. A locked case protects first editions of Joe Miller, Alice, and the other important greats in the area of activity of Walt and His Friends. Along one wall is a steel file of sixteen solid cabinets of cartoon jokes, labeled ‘Inventions, Mountains, Costume, Mummies, Tunnels, Panthers, Astronomy, Liar, Household, Moderne, Local, Military, Party, Climate, Crime, Organizations, People, Radio, Real Estate, Scandal, Science, Sports, Fish Holidays, Art, Birth, Anatomy, Appearance, Baby, Ailments, and Dumb Dames.’ The library also boasts complete scrapbooks of the original key sketches and plots of all Disney pictures, and a lavish collection of old Sears, Roebuck catalogues.

Under the influence of such a source of inspiration, a man can never be sure, in a certain studio, that when he goes for a drink of water in the morning he will not find a school of pretty goldfish swimming about in the cooler. Word came to Walt one day that the boys in 4-B-16 had been developing a new character that they’d like to have him see. ‘Swell,’ said Walt. ‘I’ll come right down.’ They had gone to great pains, they said, to work up this unusual character, and to photograph a sequence of unusual animation for it. ‘Fine,’ said Walt. ‘That’s the stuff. Could a fellow have a peek?’ They turned the sketch film on t he screen, and the new character they had worked up for Walt proved to be his old friend Popeye the Sailor — perhaps the most popular animated character not made by Disney at all — and incidentally a character Walt loves.

Where do these people come from? They are not graduates of schools of business administration, or of advanced courses in motion-picture production. Some of the older heads are alumni of other animated-cartoon companies. The average age on the lot is not more than twenty-six or twenty-seven. Joe (and that is not his name), whom you might describe as chief technical engineer and who is festooned with academy awards for engineering triumphs, never had any technical training and never got beyond high school. The chief of the staff of guides is a youth just out of U. C. L. A. who did a good deal of writing and acting in college, and who knows he got ‘ a great break to get in here,’ where there is no market for actors on the hoof. The 650 artists, who are the backbone of the establishment (if you don’t let the soundeffect men hear you, or the musicians, the photographers, chemists, engineers, story department, traffic, color mixers, or air conditioners), come from wherever artists come from: from the art schools, from free-lancing, from the pages of magazines and books, from advertising agencies and commercial art agencies, and from half-a-dozen other nations as well as most of the States.

On the floor of a lumber room Gyo points to a pile of sketches and wants to know whether you saw Kay Neilson’s atmosphere drawings; on the wall is a Tenggren color sketch for the interior of the Dwarf’s house in Snow White. The preserve is knee-deep in masterpieces. Disney goes after top men in their specialties: he’ll be after Picasso, Grant Wood, and Ung any day now. One of the best volunteer ‘gag’ men is Alois, the Swiss gardener, who gives special coddling to the petunias under the open windows of the story department, for there he can eavesdrop, and into the problem of the story men he can inject a suggestion for a ‘twist,’ an ‘angle,’ or a gag suitable for special reward. He has won many such. His petunias are lush and brilliant, and those under the windows of the story department are the best. Two messenger boys thought up a Pluto short, and Walt put it into production.

To choose the 650 Disney artists, to regiment them without freezing their graphic muscles, to condition them in the shalls and shall-nots of the local rendering, to inspire them and above all to make them grow, is probably the nicest responsibility in the whole show. ‘Ducks I don’t like, I do not,’ says Emil, a grade-A animator. ‘Ducks I got no patience with.’ The fact is that this man can draw a magnificent duck. But Emil likes, he says, ‘to futz around with big characters,’ so it is Emil who created Stromboli, and The Giant; it is Emil who created for Fantasia a devil who will scare the whey out of you; it is Emil who created in Pinocchio the Whale to end whales. There are Duck Men and Mouse Men. Top Duck Men or Mouse Men wouldn’t ‘feel’ Emil’s characters.

Some artists have innate (probably optical) preferences for small, tidy, tight characters, like beetles and chipmunks. Some run to decorative miniatures. Some prefer long, limp, loose contrivances like Pluto. To discover in each artist the caprice he best likes to draw, then to harness that specialty, is just one more example of Walt’s determination to use the best available person for every task, even if he has to make that person the best. One man likes pretty girls, reels them off by the mile, and gets miles of them to reel off; another thinks they’re stupid. An artist especially expert in facial contortions wails: ‘They always give me the Inner Struggles to do.’ Another specializes in milkweed-down fairies.

Newcomers are put to school to learn the types of drawing, both as to Geist and as to specific application of lines and colors, which will evolve into the final celluloid. There are free night drawing classes for all who want to enroll, under competent instruction. New work by representative ‘academic’ painters and draftsmen of other sorts marches through the gallery in a constant series of wellattended exhibitions. At noon hour, in the theatre on the lot, a special program of motion pictures runs for thirty minutes. It may be a recent release from a five-action studio, an unusual sequence of exploration pictures of the private life of the Kodiak bear, the Florida alligator, the South African dik-dik, or the training of the Arabian saddle horse; it may be a good corny comedy from the full-life studios over the Koppelberg Hill, or a newsreel of skiing or surf-riding or the explosion of an atom; it is chosen because it is relevant somewhere to what the studio is currently producing.

Your correspondent walks on eggs for fear of accenting one division at the expense of another. It has been made clear that the graphic artist and his business of producing drawings for photography are the function without which there would be no Disney Productions. And yet one of the soberest analysts on the lot, who by virtue of his traffic-control job might be called Head Dispatcher, says that the supreme value of the Disney enterprise lies in the story department, and the supreme value in the story department is a man named Walt Disney. The story department, of course, consists not only of men of words, but of men who can translate words into picture action — artists who can tell stories as well as storytellers who can draw. For these men, battalioned into their four ‘units,’ exist the service departments: (1) the division which ‘inks and paints’; (2) the division which adds ‘special effects’ to the pictures; (3) the division which takes the photographs of the final drawings; (4) the division which develops and prints and cuts the film; (5) the division which provides the sound, both musical and otherwise; and (6) the housekeeping divisions which provide clean air (no air is used twice, on Walt’s order), empty wastebaskets, and look out for fire in corridors.

Somebody has made a successful effort not to festoon the place with the lambrequins and trappings of business pomposity. Walt is the president. Roy is the executive vice president. The rest of the official titles you can put in Mickey’s eye. ‘We’ve made a real effort to cut every possible bit of red tape,’ says the head of the red-tape division. The Chief Red-Tapir keeps lucid and intimate charts of the status of production of each picture. His charts show the number of film feet which the people and their methods, machines, and chemicals are able and expected to produce, and the performance against those quotas, and cousin charts sum up the hopes and deeds of the service divisions. But the Troupe Disney as a whole regards Herb’s charts as the funniest pictorial treasure in the gallery — perhaps because they are so eloquent with no animation. Herb himself is a little shy about them.

VI

Walt is the spark plug of production. No story starts toward a picture until Walt has bought it or invented it, shaped it, tried it out, and given it a push. The General Production unit is therefore responsible to Walt for getting the picture made. The utmost responsibility for efficient use of the myriad special talents thus rests upon the central casting bureau, which assigns men, squads and companies of men, to the given task which forms a fraction of the whole picture. Through the production pattern of every picture Walt threads in and out like a guiding outline. Having done single-handed, at one time or another, nearly everything that is being done in the studio, and having designed every functional fraction of the plant, Walt knifes into the most minute step of the most microscopic element in an effort to help, help, help. ’He knows every detail of every process in the place,’ they say. ‘Don’t look to me for the answers,’ he warns; ‘all I want you to use me for is approval.’

To the unending daily encounters with his people he brings not only the stimulus of working with a likable enthusiast, but uncanny accuracy. ‘He can top a gag like nobody else,’ says one, topping a gag being a certain divine ability to twist and sharpen a point so that its direction and timing pierce the human heart. Strangely, having The Boss bust in doesn’t make for shoddy politics. ‘We have our apple polishers,’ says never-mind-who, ‘but with Walt and Roy there is no politics net.’ When a boy or girl who just hasn’t made the grade is recommended to Walt for dismissal, Walt is more than likely to maintain that the suspect hasn’t been used right; often his recommendation for different work for the suspect proves successful, salvages a job. ‘That son of a gun can see good in a person when ninety per cent of the rest of the people can’t.’

When Walt laughs, he laughs inside; he doesn’t buckle walls, as Benchley (the Reluctant Dragon Benchley) does. In a rebuke Walt leaves no doubt: ‘You just don’t get the angle,’ he declares. His scoldings are often loud and clear, and then he is contrite and says, ‘I was just excited. When I am excited, I get loud. Getting loud when I am excited is just my nature. I just can’t help it.’ ‘We have never found Walt’s judgment lacking,’ his playmates say; ‘wouldn’t we be foolish not to use it all we can?’ ‘The only employee that’s against Walt is the electric elevator,’ they say. The staff voted not to unionize.

Among the other reasons why people like to work for Disney is money. The average pay is higher than the average in any other Hollywood studio. (We are now talking studios, and not star salaries.) It is a reasonable guess that none but the extreme peaks at the top of the enterprise draw more than three hundred dollars a week, and a certainty that the least-paid draw more than is paid for like work elsewhere. The employment mortality rate is strikingly low. Disney needs to spend no nights lying awake worrying about star salaries, for Disney’s stars are in his head, and in his eyes, and in the eyes and minds of 1100 people on the lot, and that saves him a lot of time to dream about new stars at night. Most of the profit the company has made has gone back into the business. The $1,500,000 borrowed to make Snow White was repaid within three months after Snow White reached the screen.

But of the elements that make for personal economic security, and relating to money, three systems sustain a high tempo of ambition and provide its outlets. One is a system of rewards for suggestions, which may range all the way from a routine matter of conveying paper from one side of the desk to the other (the basis of all American office organization) to a suggestion for a new method of changing a typewriter ribbon under water, suitable for animation. The suggestion system holds open house every working day. And it pays off.

The second system bases on the principle of bonuses customarily paid to contractors who complete their work, above standard, under the allotted time. Production units who make a picture better and faster for less than the budget share in the savings they make.

The third system is the familiar ‘periodic salary review’ common to enlightened business, except that in the Disney plant it is not periodic but constant: the man set to each task is recorded for his excellence in quality, quantity, and ‘savvy,’ and his status is automatically improved. ‘There are more jobs to be done perfectly here than there are people to do ‘em perfectly, so when they do ‘em perfectly they get more dough.’ It works.

‘Why do people work here? And that means you,’ your correspondent said to a responsible individual in the scheme. He tousled his hair, scowled hard into his coke to aid thinking, and answered: ‘You know, you and I have seen some outfits that had it. They had something. The thing here is like that — you know, you can’t help feeling that you’re going to grab that goddam Holy Grail. That sounds terrible. I just can’t express it exactly.’

‘Where are you going to be ten years from now?’ was asked of Walt. ‘Going along, I guess,’ he replied. ‘Doing the same sort of thing, only I hope it won’t be — and I know it will be better.’ Pause. ‘Or else,’ he added.

‘What are you doing about the war?’ was asked of a story man. ‘Trying to do our daily job as well as we can,’ he said. ‘ When the foreign market was cut off we stepped up production for the countries that haven’t gone crazy. If the government comes along and asks us to make propaganda films, okay, we’ll make propaganda films. Glad to. So far there’s only one man from Washington been out here, but he was from the Army, and he wanted to see something about the cameras, or something. . . . Look, Gyo, the more I think about that question of whether the music strip for the Fantasia book can run across each two pages in a tint block or a half-tone screen, the less I like the screen idea. Let’s see if we can’t . . .’

Let’s see if we can’t . . .

Let’s see if we can’t build a skyscraper of vitamins. Let’s see if we can’t have a dogfight of butterflies in the interest of peace on earth. Let’s have a conference of cattails and platypuses and bright new false teeth. Let’s get into an oyster and be a pearl, to dominate the diadem of the beautiful and tender Princess Caroline Elizabeth, who wears a hibiscus over one ear, and who is rescued by a prince named Gus, who is a centaur — a zebra centaur, and none of your black-and-white zebras, but an orange-and-black Princeton-Freshman zebra. Let’s go play badminton in a seven-billion-dollar sound-recording chamber. Let’s, by all means, have a rescue — and a chase. Let’s have a chase in which Stokowski chases Koussevitzky, who chases Barbirolli, who chases President Angell, who chases Einstein, who chases Mickey Mouse. Let’s have a rescue in which Donald sues the Secretary of the Interior for infringement of personality (Walt will kill this because it is too topical to be clear in Peru, and too political to be decent). Let’s see if we can’t turn music and science and sculpture and painting and writing upside down and shake them out and reassemble the pieces in a fashion which might make people sit still for ten minutes and giggle and weep, instead of bombing schools. If we could only get enough people to do that, multiplied by ten minutes, just think what Herb could do with his charts! The whole thing is simply a matter of production. The new plant can take it.

Let’s see if we can’t . . .

fret. — seemed like the orchards never bloomed the way they did that year, and the little girls put laylocks in the barrels of our muskets. And I remembered that and how it smelled and the cheerin’ while I was on this train goin’ to Worcester to look for work. I must have seemed kind of thoughtful, for a woman spoke to me — a real nice woman she was — and said, “Soldier, have you read this? I think it’s beautiful.” I don’t know how she knew I’d been a soldier. Perhaps I had on some old uniform clothes or maybe I limped a little, but she handed me a book or a magazine, I don’t know which, but I do know what the type looked like, and I read: —

PRESIDED LINCOLN’S BURIAL HYMN

‘“When laylocks” — he spelt it wrong, but I knew what he meant— “ When laylocks last in the dooryard bloomed . . .” Just those few words jumpin’ at me from the page, and first, thing I knew, or maybe didn’t know, I was standin’ in the aisle with my hands over my eyes and screaming, — so they said to me aherwerds, — “Oh, Jesus Christ, what have they done to me! Oh God, what have we done! ‘When laylocks last in the dooryard bloomed’” — and I kep’ cryin’ all the way to the hospital they look me to. I was sick there a long time, just from readin’ them few words. And no one answered my questions.’

After a while Corporal Hardy rose with some difficulty and said, ‘I have talked too much and I have talked foolish. Tell your Pa his cidy was too good for a tired man, but I thank him kindly for it. You forget what I told you, son,’ and he went his way.

A little later Father came in. ‘What did Nathan have to say?’ he asked me.

I said, ‘He told me about a man in Andersonville who had a sore toe and something about a poem he read in a train, but he got kind of excited telling about that.’

‘What sort of a poem?’ Father asked.

‘I don’t know, but it began, “When laylocks last in the dooryard bloomed.” ‘

Father said, ‘Not laylocks. Lilacs.’