Working with Disney (4 page)

DP:
How did he sleep at night with all these problems?

FT:
Yeah! At the time, none of that impressed me at all. I probably was cocky enough to figure I could do it, too, if I wanted to.

DP:
In some of the articles I've read, some people say the shorts are the best that Disney did, and after that, the pictures were becoming too realistic. Other people single out
Pinocchio
as the best. Some people I've talked to think that no zenith has been reached and that maybe the next film will be the best. Do you see a peak in the art?

FT:
No, that oversimplifies it too much. The way I size it up, at the time Walt started, the potential of animation—no one realized what was there really. He just figured, “Here's something that I can use.” He was always looking for what can you do with it, [thinking,] “What can I make of this thing?” He never took a thing as it was and sold it. There was always his curiosity about what can you do. So he got interested in animation, [thinking,] “What can we do with this?” getting new ideas and stimulating thought. To me, he reached his peak really of what I like to do in animation with
Snow White,
because it was the richest in personality development and yet the simplest and strongest in story concept. Its popularity over the years makes me feel that I'm right in feeling that this was a peak. Now, that is not to say that it in any way reached a peak in the whole art of animation, because Walt never wanted to do the same thing twice. He was always going on to something else. So we went on to
Pinocchio.
It was the most elaborate picture, but it was quite weak story-wise. But as far as elaborate stuff to look at—pretty stuff on the screen—it was just a knockout. It cost too much money to do any more of that, so we simplified it, and we went to
Fantasia
and
Bambi
and
Dumbo.
If there had not been the war, which is what ruined
Fantasia,
and if
Fantasia
had gone over better, we've often wondered where would we be today, because Walt was reaching out and reaching out and reaching out. Because of the war, he had to turn around and come back in. He could no longer expand. But the possibilities—oh, it's just unlimited! Guys have said, “Whatever you can dream of, you can do in animation.” From that point on, [after]
Fantasia,
there's been very little searching, really. He did it with a lot of those package pictures—
Make Mine Music, Melody Time,
things of that sort—where he could take little shots which were different and which might have been Silly Symphonies in the old days and experimented with them to see what he could do with them. But he was always reaching out, always searching—a terrifically creative mind.

Well, now, if you could have gone on with the staff he had—twelve hundred well-trained men, very creative men—he could play them against each other, he could shock them, and he could do all sorts of things, who knows where we would have gone. So I don't feel that you ever reached a zenith. I feel that you were expanding like this, and
because of economics, you had to turn back in on yourself. When he did
Cinderella,
he had to be sure it was a safe picture because his market was still uncertain. Well, it was solid—the returns on
Cinderella—
so now he was back in business, but he couldn't experiment as wildly as he had before. So he went on to
Peter Pan
and began doing these other pictures, like
Alice in Wonderland.
So by then, he had used up the ideas that he had always had about cartoons, and by the time he got to
Sleeping Beauty,
he said, “Well, I've never had a chance to think this one through,” which meant to me this was the end of the line. He'd also thought of [the stories] “Beauty and the Beast” and “Reynard the Fox.” He'd thought of a half a dozen things, but he'd never got hold of them. Now, all these other pictures in his own mind he'd got hold of. He knew kind of what he wanted to do with them. But by the time he got to
Sleeping Beauty,
that was the end. Well, at the same time, he was finding out that there was a great interest in all these other things: the TV show, the park, the live-action pictures,
The Mickey Mouse Club.
So while some of us wanted to go the way we'd been going after
Fantasia,
he didn't have the interest to go that way. He'd say, “Oh, oh, I don't know.” He was harder to sell on a new idea. He'd say, “Why don't you do this? It's a good product.” And so we made good pictures. One thing that he kept asking for was refinement, refinement, refinement, until somebody joked that the last picture we would make would be
The Life of Christ.
And someone said, “Yeah, on the head of a pin!” It was no longer the broad cartoon. Well, that's another way to go, the perfection of illustration. If you go to any of these animation festivals and see the work that's being done around the world, all the different mediums that are explored, all the different ways of doing things—drawing direct on film, all sorts of combination things, double exposures, tricks under the camera—ways of saving money, ways of getting different effects. My golly! When I think of the different things I've seen over forty years of showings and festivals, lots of them, I don't know how they did it. So much is being done and experimented with, and no one knows. There's never been a central agency to collect it all. Each person did it his own way. Now, the things we did in
Fantasia,
the art has been lost.

We see broken, rusted equipment out here in back. “What was that?” Someone says, “Oh, I think they used that as a tub to wash something or other. They had some kind of acid in there.” “What'd you use it for?” “Oh, I don't know. I can't remember.” We see results on the film. We say, “Now, this is what we want to do in this sequence here.” A guy says, “Well, the fellows who did that are all gone. I don't know how you do it.” So it's hard. You lose the technique unless you're going to be using it.

So to get back to your original question, what was the zenith? When did you make your best picture? I think the pictures we made were almost all the best possible for what we tried to do and the conditions under which we did them. Now, to compare them, which was the best picture, I don't think you can do that.

DP:
The depression certainly made people more available.

FT:
It made artists available. If there hadn't been the depression, Walt wouldn't have had all these artists to draw from. But today, you try to get artists, and you get a different breed. Very talented fellows, but they've got different drives and different disciplines. The fellows with the talent that Walt had partly came out of a different type of training—what they could make themselves do, what they would do to achieve a goal—which the kids today don't have. They're looking for a different type of result.

DP:
I was interested in what you thought of some of the work that other studios were doing in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Was there a competitive feeling, or did people here enjoy these cartoons but figure, “It's just not ours, but it's okay for what it is”?

FT:
Individually, we laughed as hard as anybody at the work those guys did. I loved Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. I thought some of the things were kind of childish, but some of the things that we were doing were kind of childish—again in the matter of taste, personal opinion, judgment in these areas. For instance, there was a gag in the
Three Little Pigs,
the wolf goes down the chimney and sits in the pot of boiling water that has turpentine in it. Well, that gag must have been used twelve times by other studios, and each one trying to top it. Norm Ferguson had done the scene where [the wolf] was running along dragging his fanny on the
ground. The other guys carried it further than that and had him hit rocks and go over sharp things and try to get more out of the gag. It just gets over the hill in the matter of taste and judgment and wasn't any funnier. It just became more specialized.

During the war, I was down in San Antonio, Texas, and saw a Tex Avery cartoon in a big theater. The place was just packed on a Sunday afternoon. I can't remember what the feature was, but this came on and I thought, “Oh, boy! This is going to kill 'em. This is really going to kill 'em. I love Tex Avery.” And the house was absolutely quiet the whole ten minutes, because it was too sophisticated for them. And I realized—and I'd heard [it] before, but it had never really dawned on me as such before—how easy it is to be specialized, to be a professional. You laugh at things within the industry and forget that the poor audience out there, it's way over their heads. They don't know what you're talking about.

So, what do you think of the other pictures? That gets back to I like
Snow White
the best and I told you why. I love to work on funny stuff, and I thought we made some awfully funny pictures, and I thought that on the outside they made some funny pictures. But my own taste went—as you say, we were going in a different way—well, we weren't entirely because some of our Donald Ducks were as funny as anything that Tex Avery or Chuck Jones did.

DP:
I was wondering if there was a rivalry, a competitive feeling that “It's our product, so it's better because it's ours.”

FT:
At that time, you didn't have very much exchange between the studios. We had siphoned off some of the better men around there, and maybe there was a little indignation about that, from their standpoint. I don't know that we looked down on them so much; we just didn't know who they were. They were shooting for a different type of picture than we were, generally speaking. When they got something funnier than we had, we laughed our heads off at it. I do think there was a feeling from their standpoint that Disney, they are the big snobs up on top of the hill.

DP:
But probably everybody does that with the one that's on top.

FT:
Yeah. Once the union came in and the cutback here at the studio, particularly after the war, then there was a lot more moving from studio
to studio. And the way things are set up, you don't lose your insurance and your sick pay and your benefits. You can go from studio to studio without losing any of those now. So now everyone in the industry knows everybody else. You see a piece of work and you would say, “Hey, that looks like so-and-so's,” and you find out it was.

DP:
I gather from some of the articles I've read that there were certain perimeters within which a more realistic approach was used here and that other studios would sometimes focus more on impossible gags: going from one spot to another faster than possible.

FT:
Most of those speed gags came from
The Tortoise and the Hare,
and once again, we were the first to do it. Ham Luske is the one who did it, and he did it because of a test that Frank Oreb, an assistant to one of the animators, did. He did a test and he just had the character—a fish, as I recall—just practically disappear, he went so fast. Ham was quick to appreciate the value of that, so when he did
The Tortoise and the Hare,
he had the hare go that fast, and then he got the credit for having established it. So zip gags are still going on today. It's the cheapest way to cover the ground.

We look on those things partly as a swipe of someone else's idea but mainly as a cheaper way of obtaining a result. And if a guy will stoop to taking somebody else's stuff and do it cheaper, well, then, naturally you don't think as much of him as you would if he added something to somebody else's idea.

DP:
I am interested in the studio strike because I understand from talking to people that not only were feelings strong at the time but that it was a real crisis. I have read accounts that portray Walt Disney as a tyrant because of the way he treated people and other accounts that say he was just a victim of a lot of things that were happening. I was wondering what was your reaction to it?

FT:
At the time, I was very emotionally involved, as all of us were. When we first moved into this building, we had our coffee shop; we had our switchboard girl at the end of each wing who was supposed to know where we were. Anything you wanted, you just picked up the phone and said, “Hazel, get me a milkshake.” “Hazel, get me the Buick place.”
“Hazel, get my car greased.” “Hazel, buy a dress for my wife.” Anything you wanted, you just picked up the phone and went on working, because that's what Walt wanted. He wanted the best for his guys. Well, that's real paternalism. To me, I thought, “This is terrific.” To someone else who reads it as paternalism, [he might think,] “He's not going to tell me what to do.” It's hard for me to understand, but I know an awful lot of people felt that way. If you combine that with the fact that because of the war coming on, he had to cut his staff in half, he had to lay off six hundred people, [the worry about] which of the six hundred it is going to be makes for a terrific amount of unrest. Because we had ballooned up to so many people, there were inequalities in salaries. We were trying to work that out, and Walt was trying to set up boards at the various levels with the guys he could trust to work out the salary things, guys who knew who did what work. So all of this was real good thinking on Walt's part, but at the same time, he was the boss, and he wanted to be paternalistic, and he wanted to run things his own way. So, naturally, as the representatives from the union pushed him, he fought back instead of bending with it and saying, “Okay, you guys do this, and how about working out some kind of a deal?” which would have been the easy way to do it. At the same time, I think it's been pretty well proven that [there] was communist leadership of the whole union thing and the membership did not realize it themselves. They were being taken. They were being controlled. They were being duped. But the guys that Walt saw were the leaders. They came up and pounded on his desk. The guys in the union membership wouldn't do that. Walt said, “There are a lot of guys in this business who are no good at it. If I found out I wasn't right for a business, why, I'd go do something else.” A guy said, “Like what?” He said, “Well, I don't know. I'd open a hamburger stand or something,” which to us made perfect sense, because many of us felt that way: “Well, I'm certainly not going to spend my life in a business I'm no good at. I'd do anything else and get out of it.” But an awful lot of people felt, “I've put in ten years in this business, it has to take care of me. I've got a car, I've got a wife, I've got a house, I'm not going to give up.”