Walt Disney by Gabler Neal

Author:Gabler, Neal [Gabler, Neal]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2006-10-31T06:00:00+00:00

Nine

ADRIFT

For nearly four years Walt Disney had waited—waited to reclaim command of the studio from the soldiers and bankers who had taken over, waited to put his beloved features back into production so that he could be a filmmaker again, waited to restore his imaginative world, waited to blaze new trails. “I am now hoping that we can get out two or three features a year now,” he wrote his sister Ruth that December, “and are preparing stories for nearly five years ahead.” He already had in the hopper not only The Wind in the Willows but Alice in Wonderland; Peter Pan; the Mickey Mouse feature; a new set of Mickey Mouse shorts based on the stories of Horatio Alger; the Sinclair Lewis story “Bongo”; a biography of Hans Christian Andersen with animated sequences that he had been discussing as a joint production with producer Samuel Goldwyn throughout the war; Andersen’s story “The Emperor and the Nightingale”; a package of musical shorts; an Irish fairy story titled “The Little People”; Sterling North’s best-selling children’s novel Midnight and Jeremiah; an adaptation of Don Quixote; a series on American folk heroes; the Uncle Remus film that he had been preparing since 1940; and at least a half-dozen other projects he had acquired before the war in the glow of Snow White’s success. At the same time he told columnist Hedda Hopper that he planned to increase shorts production and, with his war experience, move into educational and industrial films, if only, he admitted, to keep his staff active. He was even investigating a Disney radio program again.

The war had boosted audiences and generated profits for the film business generally, if not for Walt, and though Walt believed that once the war was over the “motion picture business was gonna be really hit in the jaw,” he was nevertheless practically manic at the prospect of making real movies again.38 “I think we have a great future ahead of us,” he wrote Lee Blair, who had worked at the studio with his wife, Mary, before Blair joined the service, “and we have some marvelous plans with some good stuff in work that will be out during the coming year…. [T]here’s no doubt in my mind that when better cartoons are made, you know where they’ll be made!” To another correspondent he said that he was devoting his facilities “100% toward building up our inventory so we can get the company on a profit basis,” adding, “with the old profits rolling in, you’re in a position to experiment and do the thing you want.”

After the four years just past, doing what he had been doing before the war wasn’t enough. If only to demonstrate that he was not passé, Walt wanted, needed, to do something new, something different, something unusual. Sometime early in 1944, he had seen a book of surrealist paintings by the Spanish-born artist Salvador Dali lying on animator Marc Davis’s desk, and he asked Davis if he could take it home. That

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