Working with Disney (14 page)

DP:
But as far as say the attitude towards the films or degree of perfectionism, was there a big difference between Disney and Hanna-Barbera?

LN:
Yes, some, but Joe Barbera was a perfectionist. You had to please Joe in your layout. Bill Hanna handled all of the animation. He was the director of the animation, the whole bit, and Joe handled story and layout. But if we had a particular question in layout concerning the design say of a prehistoric automobile, we'd go to Joe, and he'd work very closely with us. He was a very fine designer himself, and he had a great story mind. No question about it.

DP:
The reason I ask about Hanna-Barbera is that they are often regarded as somewhat of a factory-type operation, or at least not of the same quality as Disney. I was wondering if you found it to be that way.

LN:
No, they try for perfection, as close as they can, but they have a tremendous program, a tremendous program. It is an insatiable appetite, this animation at H and B. You simply can't fill it up. There is always a demand for more artists, and frankly, all of the key artists, key animators at Hanna-Barbera, were Disney-trained men. All of them. There's Volus Jones, Bill Kyle, and a number of other fellows who were Disney-trained, and they grew up in that thing. So actually, pressure will bother anybody, but it will bother a Disney man less, because he's been through it all those years. It was a transition, I'll tell you.

DP:
It wasn't necessarily going from good to bad or anything like that?

LN:
No, no, because, you see, actually Hanna and Barbera are the two men who kept us all in the cartoon business by cutting down costs. Now on
Sleeping Beauty,
there is some animation in that picture that cost as high as two hundred dollars a foot, and that's prohibitive with the average studio. Walt Disney, the Disney people, always had enough money that they could experiment and get perfection. No other studio had that kind of money that they could spend months or years perfecting a character or perfecting a story.

DP:
I guess Hanna-Barbera was under more pressure with television schedules—

LN:
Yes. After the animation and the inbetweens are done, then it reverts back to the same system as any other studio—Disney and all the rest of them—of ink and paint, background painting. Background painters at Hanna-Barbera develop their own style, and of course, on
The Flintstones
it was a prehistoric approach. Actually it was fun to work on. It was a lot of fun to draw that stuff.

DP:
I think
The Flintstones
was pretty clever.

LN:
Yes. There was one man besides Joe Barbera, a fellow named Dan Gordon, who designed
The Flintstones
characters and a lot of the
backgrounds, the different props, and so forth. He was a very clever man. He has passed away. He had a brother, George Gordon, who worked mostly at UPA on the [Mr.] Magoo series, as I remember.

But as we go along, we look back at the years at Disney, and I tell you, Disney, there's no question, was one of our modern geniuses. No question about it. And if you worked with him, he demanded perfection. He was a perfectionist. You might think it's perfect, but Walt had another idea. But he always knew what he wanted, and he could tell you. Now, if they know what they want and they can tell you, you can do it, but if you're always groping and trying to find the solution to the thing without help, it's difficult. But Walt could walk in and he had that sixth sense of knowing what would go in a story and also what the public would appreciate. He had that. I think he must have had that from the very beginning, even as far back as
Steamboat Willie.
I think that Walt could look at a story and tell whether or not it was going to go. He's the only man I've ever known who could do that.

DP:
Somebody was saying that you would show him a storyboard and while you would be explaining, he'd be already picking out something.

LN:
Right, way ahead of you.

DP:
I was going to ask you what you thought of him as an individual, because I am fascinated with him. He's such a complex person. Everybody has a slightly different image of Walt Disney.

LN:
Yes, well, that almost answers it. He was complex, and he was hard to understand, but I tell you, if you pleased him, he would reward you. He was fair. I say this: that anyone who worked for the Disney Studio, if they had anything on the ball at all, they would eventually get to show it or get to try. They were given a chance at Disney's. If you wanted to be a story man, a layout man, an animator, you'd get your chance. If you could fulfill the bill, why, you were on, you were a member of the staff. If you said, “Oh, well, I'm here in the Disney Studio, I haven't got a chance in the world, I'm too far down the ladder,” but if you had an idea and you wanted to present it, you'd get a chance to show if you could do something. And that's fair enough. Nobody could ask for a better chance than that.

DP:
Do you remember the first time you met Walt Disney?

LN:
Yes, I do. I remember the first time I met him. I was working on
Pinocchio
and he was in the next room going over another picture with a man named T[hornton]. Hee. [Walt was saying,] “Now let's do it this way, and this one, pan down here.” T. Hee yelled to me, “Lance, would you make up a sketch of this,” and he explained to me what Walt had just said. So I did, and I took it in, handed it to the director, and he went in and showed Walt. This was my first experience with Walt. I was a little nervous, I can tell you. Walt said, “Well, that's not bad, but we're not going to do it that way.” I was crestfallen, and the whole thing went out the window then. I thought I had done something that might be accepted, but he wasn't blunt or anything like that. He was very kind. He said, “Well, there's another way we can do it, so let's do it this way.” I had actually, in my drawing, not interpreted his idea the way he was putting it over, so I just missed. But he wasn't unkind about it or belligerent. He just went right ahead with the story and laid my sketch aside, and then he made another little rough of more what he wanted, and we went right on. That was my first experience.

Well, I had a sort of a Texas drawl in those days, and Walt had a lot of fun out of it. I didn't take it personally. If I would tell a story, I'd say, “You all do this” or “They're gonna do this” or “Over yonder.” I'd go along and Walt would sit there patiently, go through the whole thing with me, and then after it was all over, he'd say, “Well, sho' nuff!” I felt a little taken aback, but I knew that he was kidding. It was his way of having fun. So he was a fine man. When he passed away, actually I felt like—I wasn't working there, I was over at Hanna-Barbera—but you know, I felt very sad. I felt like I had lost a real close friend. However, we were never real close friends. I talked to Walt from a standpoint of man to man, and he liked that. He liked the approach of you being able to tell him in your way so he could understand what you were after, what you were trying to do. But he was a charming man to the public. When a stranger or a visitor came through the studio and Walt met them, he could be the most charming man. He wasn't always that way. In a story meeting or a layout meeting, he was right straight out. I wouldn't say he was tough or mean, but he knew what he wanted, and
he would say what he wanted. Sometimes he'd use pretty strong words in trying to get his point over.

DP:
I was wondering if you had experienced the Disney wrath that I have heard about from different people—that he was really good at telling off somebody if he really was upset with them. Is that what you are talking about at the story conferences?

LN:
Oh, yes. I remember one time, one man in particular wasn't pleased with the way Walt was criticizing his work, and he just said, “Well, Walt, it just doesn't seem like I'm able to please you.” Walt said, “Well, if you don't think you can please me, maybe we'd get along better without each other.” And that's all there was to it. That was his way of dismissing the man, and the fellow knew it. That was the end of it. Walt didn't use strong language; he just told him.

There were a lot of very funny situations and cases. Walt smoked a lot, a heavy smoker. Ken Anderson, a fine artist and a great fellow, was one of Walt's favorites as far as presenting and drawing, because this guy could really do it. But one time in a sweatbox, Walt had a cigarette and he was reaching for a match. Ken was sitting on his right, and Ken smoked also. He lit his lighter and held it over for Walt to get a light, but Walt was looking this way, to the left, and the lighter came in right under his nose. When Walt turned back, it damn near set his moustache on fire! Walt let out a yell, “What the hell you trying to do? Trying to set me on fire?” And of course, the whole sweatbox, we had to stuff our fists in our mouths to keep from screaming out loud. Well, naturally, Ken was embarrassed to tears. Another time, Joe Rinaldi, who was a hell of an artist and a great story man, was working with Ed Penner on
Lady and the Tramp.
The boards were just perfectly drawn by Joe Rinaldi. One noon hour—Joe had been celebrating a little the night before, and he had a long ways to drive back and forth to Malibu—so he laid down. We had the storyboards slanted up against the wall. Joe crawled in behind them to lie down and take a little nap. This is on the noon hour, but before he could get out, boom, in came Walt and Ed Penner and several other people—the animators—and they sat down and started going over the boards. Joe couldn't come out! He had to
lay there that whole meeting until they were gone. Oh, he was a funny guy, but he could draw like nobody's business. Joe Rinaldi and Bill Peet were two of the finest sketch men, and Tom Oreb, too. They could draw directly—directly. They never erased. What they put down stayed, and I tell you, that's something when you can take a pencil and lay it down and draw what you want to without having to go back and change it—directly. They were great.

DP:
What was your reaction to the studio strike?

LN:
Oh, that was a terrible thing, terrible thing. I wasn't a member of the union. Art Babbitt sort of headed that part of it—the strikers. I didn't go out. I stayed inside, but it was a terrible thing. We had to ride through that picket line, and they would holler, yell obscenities at us, and what they thought of us. I had a yellow automobile, [and they would say,] “There goes the yellow man in the yellow car.” I mean, friends—we were good friends. Well, the studio, of course, is over it now, but it left a mark. It left scars. Friends who used to be friends. The government settled the thing, and they would swap a striker for a nonstriker, in and out like that. I got called outside. But I was very fortunate. I went to work for Walter Lantz. I worked for him about six months, and then I think Hal Adelquist called me at home and asked if I wanted to come back to the [Disney] studio.

DP:
So you were part of the settlement when they laid off one nonstriker—

LN:
Yes. Swap a striker for an inside man.

DP:
That must have been terrible for them to lose people that they wanted because of the settlement.

LN:
Yes. When I came back to the studio, Ben Sharpsteen greeted me and shook hands with me and told me, “Well, now, we're awful glad to have you back.” And I said, “Well, of course, I'm glad to be back.”

DP:
Working in layouts and art direction, did you find that the freedom you had varied depending on who the director was?

LN:
Yes. You mean the approach that we would take depended on the director?

DP:
Yeah. When the storyboards came down, as I understand it, the director and the layout man would get together.

LN:
Yes, that's right.

DP:
Would some directors want to control everything themselves, and would others give you more freedom in your layouts?

LN:
Right. That's very true.

DP:
I don't know which directors you worked with, but what were they like?

LN:
Well, the fun man who would just turn you loose and let you go your way and depend on your good sense of drawing and ability was Jack Kinney. Now, Jack Kinney directed practically all of those “How to do” [shorts] with the Goof—you know, like
How to Play Baseball.
He knew what he wanted, and he had animators like John Sibley, who was a fun animator. He could take a situation and make it funny, no matter what it was, by his animation and by his drawing and design of the characters. Wilfred [Jackson] was a little more thorough. His approach was a very serious approach, that everything depended now on how we're going to do this. He would go over the layouts very carefully, and usually you'd even thumbnail in a layout before you made a final drawing and showed it to him. He would approve it or make some changes. He was a very thorough worker.

DP:
Did you work with Ben Sharpsteen?

LN:
Yes. But at the time that I worked for Ben Sharpsteen, he was more or less a supervisor or associate producer, I would say, in that capacity.

DP:
Did you find him difficult to work with or easy to work with?

LN:
Well, Ben was a disciplinarian. He wanted you to come to work at eight o'clock, go to lunch at twelve, be back at one, and quit at five. He wanted you to sit there and work. That's fair. I mean, you came there to work, so you should, and he didn't want any horsing around. He wanted
the work done, and you produced it, put out, turned out, in the best manner that you could. He was fair. He didn't have a happy disposition. He was pretty serious all the time, very serious about everything.