Working with Disney (6 page)

OJ:
When I was attending Stanford, why, they didn't have any life classes [in the art department]. Mrs. Stanford, way back in the early 1900s, had come in and found a nude model there, and she said no more models. So we had to drive up to San Mateo two nights a week to work from a model in a little small private art school. That was okay, except it was rather difficult to do. But we got credit for it in school. But anyway, Frank graduated and came down here. I came down as the manager of the football team to a [University of Southern California] game and visited him and saw the work he was doing. [I thought,] “Oh, my gosh! Look what I'm missing!” Just nothing up there comparable to this. So finally at the end of the quarter, I decided that that's what I wanted to do, and so I made arrangements to get credit at Chouinard's and that I intended to go back. All I needed was a little over a year to go back and graduate. I would spend a year at Chouinard's and then take a quarter back at Stanford and graduate. Well, while I was at Chouinard's, Jim Algar, a guy from Stanford, came down, and that was six months after
I'd come down here, and he got a job at Disney's in July of 1934. Then they were looking for people. And another Stanford fellow, Thor Putnam, went out there in early September, and then Frank went out later in September. They were all taken on. I kept getting the word back from them that they wanted more people and that I'd have a good chance, and so finally in January, I took my samples out and they said, “Okay, you can have a tryout.” So I tried out for a week, drawing three little pigs—a guy with a flute, another with a drum, and [another with] a flag. You had to do a drawing, an inbetween, in a half hour. By the end of the week, I was doing that, so I was hired. January 21, 1935.

DP:
Do you remember your first meeting with Walt Disney?

OJ:
The first story meeting I was ever in with him—I'd passed him in the hall, you know, and he'd always said hello, but I didn't know whether he knew who I was or anything—I became Freddy Moore's assistant, so I was called in to a big story meeting on
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
—how the dwarfs were going to walk and all that stuff. Everybody was acting out different walks and looking pretty ridiculous. Yeah, I remember that meeting. It was over on the soundstage, and Walt was telling us about the picture and asking for ideas.

DP:
As you got into animation, was it hard to have to act out something?

OJ:
They filmed some of it, but they found it wasn't too successful. The animators generally are what you'd call inverted actors. I mean, they have the ability to visualize, and they observe acting and all that, but most of them aren't what you'd call real good actors themselves. And if they are, they don't animate, they act. But Walt was a good actor. He did very well. As Fred's assistant, why, I was in on all the sweatboxes on
Snow White,
with Walt and Fred and Dave Hand. That was a real privilege.

DP:
I would think it would have been a real break to be his assistant.

OJ:
Oh, it was great.

DP:
I am impressed with how highly respected Fred is among animators. He's in a different class.

OJ:
A certain aura about Fred Moore. He was such a nice guy. Actually not a complex guy, but he had this ability to draw with so much appeal, and he also had so much facility in his drawing. His drawings were so pleasingly handled as far as the line went. But Walt really rode him during
Snow White,
trying to get the best out of him. Boy, those sweatboxes, every week practically, why, he'd pick on every little thing. Fred would get kind of upset, but it brought out the best in him.

DP:
The particular period that I find fascinating is the 1930s. What was it like to work here then?

OJ:
Well, that was awfully nice. The place was small, and if you were in the right spot, you had quite a bit of contact with Walt. He was so enthusiastic at that time—very critical, but he believed in what he was doing. Gee, I have the feeling that if the war hadn't come and the strike, why, we would have discovered a lot more things, because that was in a period of experimentation, and he was trying all kinds of things to get the right effect—I mean, every facet of the business. It wasn't just in animation, but it was in the effects and the music and the color and the story ideas.

DP:
It just seems like this burgeoning thing.

OJ:
Yeah, everything was blossoming up through
Fantasia.
I mean, there's a fantastic piece of stuff, and all the new ideas that we tried in there. You just can't believe it. Well, we've never gone back to that, because it wasn't financially possible. But if the war hadn't cut off the funds, it's possible that Walt would have tried and experimented more. I don't know how much longer he would have stayed interested to that extent, but he was certainly interested at that period.

DP:
I understand that after the experimenting, there was the refining of technique. Were you and the other animators aware that things had changed, or was the change kind of a gradual thing?

OJ:
Oh, no, you knew. It was just like chopping something off, because when the war came and we finished up
Bambi,
then that was it. We started to do a little on
Wind in the Willows
[part of
The Adventures of
Ichabod and Mr. Toad],
but it was obvious you couldn't go ahead with that. We went on to the training films and everything, and then there was an awful lot of apprehension about whether Walt was even going to keep the place. We used to hear these rumors from stockbrokers that Walt was going to sell. And it wasn't until I got to working on the locomotive with him that I heard enough directly from him that I knew he wasn't going to do that. But you could tell the approach, for instance, on
Cinderella,
the first complete [animated] feature after the war. Why, that was laid out practically in live action, as you may know. Walt said, “Let's have a script and stick to it.” And so that's what we did. That limits you in a lot of ways because [even if] you find a character that's coming off real well, you can only use him where he is in the script.

DP:
I would imagine that would have taken something away from the work. And like you were saying, you don't know how long Walt would have kept up his interest in animation.
Sleeping Beauty
is the film that's often mentioned where Walt was off doing other things, such as developing Disneyland. Did that create a certain insecure feeling for you animators?

OJ:
Well, it was frustrating because you couldn't get anything okayed until he had time to look at it and go over it, so I think that was one reason we spent more money on that picture, because we were on one thing too long. It was very hard to pry anything away from him. As he used to say to me when he was working out in the shop, “I've got to have a project, a new project.” And he was all wrapped up in the Disneyland project and the TV shows. So his interest was so divided—when he'd come into a meeting, he would be interested and all that, but he didn't give it the thought after the meeting that he usually would have. He didn't live that stuff anymore.

DP:
I have read of a story meeting that was held during the early production of
Snow White
at which Walt supposedly acted out the entire story. In one account, it said that it was so memorable that two years later people could remember how he did it. Do you recall anything like that?

OJ:
Well, I'm sure he did that for people around here that were higher up than I was at the time—and probably did it for a lot of his friends
on the outside! I know when he accepted the special Academy Award for
Snow White,
why, he told the whole story of
Pinocchio.
I'm afraid he might have bored the audience, because he went on at great length.

DP:
That's interesting, because all I know about is the footage of Shirley Temple presenting the award.

OJ:
He'd get so excited about this stuff. He wasn't quite that way on
Bambi.
I think he had a stronger feeling about
Dumbo
than he did
Bambi.
He actually left it pretty much up to us. He'd come in on meetings, and he offered a lot of helpful suggestions, but he wasn't in on it the way he was with
Pinocchio
and
Snow White.
I didn't work on
Dumbo,
but for some reason, I look at that picture and I can feel more of Walt in that than I do in
Bambi.
All that keen pathos that he got in there.

DP:
Did
Bambi
draw criticism for its perceived antihunting message?

OJ:
Yeah.
Field and Stream
or maybe another similar magazine or maybe more than one complained about it. Actually, on
The Rescuers,
in the window of the Pawn Shop was an old NRA (National Recovery Act) sign. Somebody from the National Rifle Association thought that we were taking a poke at them and said he'd never see another Disney film.

DP:
I have a question about the strike. On my last visit, you were talking about certain practices that went on before the strike that were discontinued after—something having to do with a coffee shop.

OJ:
There used to be a coffee shop right out here, down the main hall, and that was really nice, because you could get a milkshake any time of day, or coffee, or a sandwich. Of course, there were a lot more artists here then. There are more people here now, I guess, but then they were all artists. And we really appreciated it. You could call Traffic and they would deliver you a milkshake at three in the afternoon or whatever you wanted. But the same people were always sitting out there, and Walt saw them sitting there, so he finally closed it. The same thing happened to the commissary. We had a counter set up over there that was open at 7:15 in the morning or something like that. You could come out here and get your breakfast. Then it was open most of the day, I would say, until
maybe 4:00 in the afternoon. But when they closed this place, they all went over there. Just couldn't stand success.

DP:
That would be nice, having that kind of—

OJ:
Oh, yeah, it was great! You used to be able to eat up in the Penthouse Club most of the afternoons. You can still eat lunch up there, but you used to be able to go up in the morning and get a snack and go up in the afternoon and get a milkshake or something. But that's now just open for lunch.

DP:
Was the Penthouse Club just for the Animation Building or was it open to others?

OJ:
The Penthouse probably caused some problems. They had to draw the line somewhere, because there wasn't room for everybody, so you had to be making a hundred dollars a week to join the Penthouse, and that really bugged some people. How else could you have decided it? I don't really know. I suppose you could have put a high membership fee or something of about five hundred dollars, which would have done the same thing. Or, I don't know, it would be pretty hard to say only the top animators or something. So what they did was to do it by the amount of money you made, and I'm afraid that was one of the points in the strike that a lot of people believed in.

DP:
It amazes me because it was so long ago, but with almost everybody I've talked to, the strike seems to be still an emotional issue—emotional in the sense that everybody has vivid recollections of things involved with it.

OJ:
I could never forget it. I came through a picket line for ten weeks, and as I recall, the studio was closed down for three weeks while an arbitrator come out from Washington. It was scary to us, and I didn't like going through the line. There were a lot of my friends out there. A lot of them I used to see in the evening—you know, we'd get together. But it ruined a lot of families. There were a lot of divorces. Some guys never got financially back on their feet again. It was really a tragic thing. I'd say there were a lot of reasons for it.

DP:
There seem to have been a number of practices that went on earlier—the incentive system and some of those things—that in retrospect look like they would have naturally caused some problems when they probably weren't intended that way at all.

OJ:
Not in the least. Walt really tried to take care of everybody. There was just too much of an influx of talent all at once. The guys weren't patient enough to wait until he sorted things out, and I guess they didn't feel that one guy could make those decisions. I don't know, really. And then, of course, there were certain people who just felt there ought to be a union, period, because there was a union at MGM and Warner Bros. and the other studios, so they wanted a union here. They went about it all the wrong way and got tied up with [the Brotherhood of] Painters, Decorators, and Paperhangers [of America], which was a communist outfit. The only meeting I went to, where [Herb] Sorrell talked, he said, “By gosh, we're going to take care of our people. We're going to see that you have nice toilets.” Here we just moved into this beautiful new building! He was talking to a different type of person.

DP:
Of all these different films that you've worked on over the years, do you have particular ones that are your favorite films? Is there one of all of them that you feel the best about?

OJ:
I loved working with Fred on
Snow White.
I didn't get to do much animation, because Walt asked me to wait until the end of the picture and do the assistant work for Fred. I guess I have a real soft spot in my heart for
Pinocchio,
because that was the first feature I animated on, really. Gee, I lived every minute of it. I believed everything in it, and I felt like I was living in this world where Pinocchio lived. But actually, I've had a lot more interesting characters to work with than Pinocchio.