Working with Disney (17 page)

DP:
Pretty much every studio ended up having to do that. I am interested in the move from the studio to here. When did you come over to WED?

XA:
That was right after we finished
A Symposium on Popular Songs.
Bill and I then kind of split. We had done these things and we had done a lot of things for
The Mickey Mouse Club,
including the opening “Mickey Mouse March.” No, we finished
Mary Poppins.
I guess that was our last picture together, Bill and I.

DP:
You worked on the nursery scene?

XA:
We did the tidying up of the nursery scene, all the stop-action stuff. Yeah. Then I went to work in Woolie's unit again, in the story department this time. I did story sketch on
Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day
and things like that. Then we started another picture that had combined cartoon animation and stop-motion. It just wasn't coming off. The Sherman Brothers had some songs for it. So Walt decided not to do it. T[hornton]. Hee, I think, was working with us at the time on it, too. Walt said, “No, I don't think I'll do it. I've been wanting to get you over to WED for a long time.” His interests were over here pretty much at that time. We'd ask for a meeting [in animation], and we couldn't get him for two or three weeks. Come to find out after I came here why, because he was spending all his time over here. So they sent me over here. I'd been on the main lot about twenty-seven years at that time, so this was kind of a hard transition, then. As a matter of fact, driving home past the studio, I'd actually get tears in my eyes. And I'd go back every day for lunch. In a couple of weeks' time, [after] I got my feet wet here—and of course, I knew most of the people here anyway—and got into a project, why, I started weaning myself away from the studio, and I'd go back every other day, and then once a week, and then once a month, until I got to the point where I seldom went there unless I had something to do there—a recording session or working with the film editor or something
like that. But after I came here, why, this felt again as the studio was when I first went to work in 1938: a small little group and so many different things to do here—opportunities. For the first assignment I got from Walt, after I had worked around with the model shop—Claude Coats and the guys—he asked me to do the dialogue script for the pirate ride [Pirates of the Caribbean]. God, I've never done scripts like that before. Of course, I didn't say that to Walt. I knew damn well he knew what I could do. So I scripted one scene of the pirate ride and sent it over to him for his approval. He called me by phone and said, “See, I told you could do it.” That was it. I just went ahead. I'd pick up
Treasure Island
and books like that to get the feeling of the jargon. “Alas there, matey!” So that's how I started writing, and then I've been doing mostly writing since I've been here. I did a song for the pirate ride, you know, just an idea. I thought the Sherman Brothers or George Bruns or somebody could do it.

DP:
“Yo ho, yo ho—“

XA:
Yeah. I kind of sang a little bit to Walt one day when he was here. He said, “Hey, that's great!” Have George put some music to it. So that was it. I became a songwriter!

DP:
That sounds exciting.

XA:
Yeah. So it was all these little things, little opportunities that were offered here, again reminded me so much of the early days at the studio, the Hyperion days.

DP:
I imagine wherever you were, if he were interested in what you were working on, it would make it or break it. It would be exciting if he cared, and if he didn't, it would not be quite the same.

XA:
Yeah.

DP:
I was looking through one of
The Mickey Mouse Club
annuals that were compiled from
The Mickey Mouse Club Magazine
and I noticed that you had done some of the illustrations. When the club was on the air, was that something that would just be an extra assignment or something?

XA:
Yeah.

DP:
You mentioned that you are working on the Epcot (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) Showcase for Walt Disney World.

XA:
Currently, I have worked on the Transportation Pavilion that will be sponsored by General Motors. Ray Bradbury and I worked together on the Spaceship Earth. On the World Showcase, I've worked on the Mexican Pavilion. I did a concept. And now we are getting down to the nitty-gritty. Even though these concepts were done a couple of years ago, we've got to get down to it. We've got to face it! The next four years are going to be hectic around here. [Epcot opened on October 1, 1982.] I think in essence it is an exciting project. But we keep vacillating; we keep getting away from the original theme, which is discouraging to me. That's one of our big problems in working with industry: we not only have to please ourselves, but we have to please somebody else. When we make a motion picture, we please ourselves and hope that it pleases an audience. First of all, it's got to be entertaining. That's what our media is, entertainment. And if we can teach while we're entertaining, well, great! That's marvelous. That was always Walt's philosophy: Entertain them, and if you can teach them something while you're entertaining, well, then fine. But don't teach and hope to hell you can entertain them.

DP:
How did you happen to go to work for Disney?

BJ:
My sister was kind of an artist. She's older than I am. I used to sit and draw or try to draw anything she was drawing. When I went to high school, I took four hours a day of art for four years. When I got out of high school, I got a scholarship to go to art school. So I went to art school for five years in Indianapolis. I hustled around trying to find a job after I finished. The best job I could find was painting show cards for a department store, “Sale $1.98” or something like that. So I wasn't too happy with that. I also had another job. I was working for an ice company, and I worked there full time. They got me a job with their advertising agency as a part-time artist. So I was working there when I ran across an ad in
Esquire
magazine that Disney needed artists to help finish up on
Snow White.

DP:
Do you remember what year?

BJ:
1937. So I wrote in, answered the ad. They sent out a questionnaire, and they had different problems and things that you were supposed to draw. Then you sent in your drawings and you'd hear from them. The funny thing was that there were three or four other artists in the advertising agency, and [when] I told them that I had done this, they said, “Oh, you'll never hear from them. We've done that.” I thought, “Oh, well, I won't hear from them.” A day or so later, I got a telegram. “A letter will follow,” it said, “but please think about coming to California. We liked your samples.” I came out here on a trial basis. For a month, we got $12.50 a week, and we were supposed to go through this schooling to see if they wanted us or if we liked the work or whatever. So there were thirty of us in the class from all over the country, and at the end of the month, they hired twelve of us.

DP:
That must have been kind of a tense month.

BJ:
Oh, it was rough. We went to school or you might call it a training class all day, and then we spent three hours at night drawing from models and stuff, and half a day Saturday.

DP:
Was that with Don Graham?

BJ:
Don Graham. Yeah.

DP:
Was the daytime program with George Drake?

BJ:
George Drake was there, but he didn't have much to do with it. The guy that really criticized our inbetweens and everything else was John Donne. It was in the old annex on Hyperion. That's one of the buildings that they moved out to the new studio. It used to be Publicity and I think Personnel is in there now.

DP:
So when you came in, was this towards the latter part of
Snow White?

BJ:
The last six months of
Snow White.

DP:
That would have been an exciting time, I imagine.

BJ:
Oh, yeah. They had a big premiere and everything! It was the biggest thing that ever happened to Walt and his people.

DP:
Did you become an inbetweener?

BJ:
As soon as we got out of the training class, we learned to inbetween. I worked I guess about five months doing inbetweens on
Snow White.

DP:
Who did you work with?

BJ:
I worked first with Art Babbitt on the Wicked Queen. Then I got to do some inbetweens on some of the dwarfs. They were the ones that I really wanted to work on, because they were the cute ones. The Wicked Queen was just a bunch of little mouth movements when she was talking in the mirror. It wasn't too much fun to do.

DP:
Did you work with Frank Thomas?

BJ:
Later on, I worked with Frank and Ollie [Johnston] and Eric [Larson] when I worked on
Bambi.

DP:
That's right. They set up a special animation unit to work on that.

BJ:
I worked with Woolie [Wolfgang Reitherman] for about two and a half years. I was first his inbetweener, and then I was his breakdown man, and then I became his assistant. Then he told me I was ready to animate, so from working with Woolie, I went into animation as an animator.

DP:
You worked on “The Pastoral” in
Fantasia?

BJ:
Yeah.

DP:
It looks like you worked on all the features right through the war:
Bambi, Saludos Amigos, Victory through Air Power.

BJ:
I had screen credit on twenty features and forty-seven short subjects as an animator.

DP:
After the war, which sequence did you work on in
Make Mine Music?

BJ:
“All the Cats Join In.” I did a lot of the jitterbug dancing and the piano keys and things like that. That was a good little picture then. At that time, instead of making a complete cartoon feature, they made things like
Make Mine Music.

DP:
Many historians see that as a period where these films were economically feasible when a feature wasn't. As Walt Disney said, after the war, they were kind of picking up the pieces, trying to get going again. But then some critics see these films as well below the level of the prewar and some of the postwar work. Did you feel—

BJ:
I think some of these were pretty good, though. Like
Ben and Me
was a very good little short subject. “Pecos Bill” was pretty good.

DP:
I grew up with “Johnny Appleseed” and those other films. Was there a feeling around the studio in that postwar period that it was a struggle to survive, to come out of that period and get on your feet again?

BJ:
Well, we really weren't aware of that. The thing that really shook us up was the fact that years ago, when we were making short subjects—eighteen to twenty-four a year—there was a demand for them, because
the theatergoer would see a feature picture and a newsreel and a cartoon short subject or a live-action short subject, like the Pete Smith Specialties. That was the bill. The theater owners really kind of paid extra, as I understand it, for a Walt Disney short subject. Okay, so we had a good market for that. But when they decided to have the double features where they had two full-length live-action films, they didn't want any newsreels or cartoons or anything, because they wanted to get that audience out of there and turn over another audience. So we were just practically forced out of the short-subject business. That was about 1953–54, along in there, when that happened. I started directing in about 1954 until I came over here, which was 1965.

DP:
In discussing the short subjects—Disney's contribution and the contribution of other studios—one viewpoint among critics is that while Disney led the short subjects throughout the 1930s, as the studio turned to feature films and Walt Disney's personal attention turned to feature films, some of the other studios came up with characters and an approach that rivaled Disney. Some critics feel that they surpassed Disney.