Original subtitles

Tonight...

WOMAN: It's a perfect metaphor, him being the small mouse

in this big industry that he wants to break into.

(high-pitched voice): Hey, Pluto, here she comes!

(blows)

Mother!

MAN: He pounded the table and he said,

"We're not making cartoons here!

We're making art!"

A two-night event,

"Walt Disney" starts now on American Experience.

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FLOYD NORMAN: Every time Walt walked down a hallway,

he would give a loud cough.

It was a warning sign

so we would know that the boss was in the area.

RICHARD SHERMAN: In Bambi, there's a line:

when man is in the forest, there was danger.

You have to be worried.

We'd hear Walt coughing coming down the hall.

And one of the guys would say, "Man is in the forest,"

and we'd all get ready for Walt.

ROLLY CRUMP: He walked through the door and, you know, pins would drop.

You couldn't hear anything.

His personal power walked right with him.

SHERMAN: There was no joking around.

He would sit down, he'd say, "Okay, guys, what you got?"

And I would say, "I got a great idea,"

and Walt would say,

"We'll tell you if you have a great idea.

You have an idea."

NARRATOR: Walt Disney was an international celebrity by the time he was 30,

hailed a genius before he was 40,

with honorary degrees from Harvard and Yale.

He built a media and entertainment company

that stands as one of the most powerful on the planet.

This little fellow is Bashful.

NARRATOR: Won more Academy Awards than anybody in history,

created a cinematic art form...

(sneezes)

NARRATOR: ...and invented a new kind of American vacation destination.

Disney's work counts adoring fans on every continent

and critics who decried its smooth façade of sentimentality

and stubborn optimism,

its feel-good rewrite of American history.

RON SUSKIND: Disney's a Rorschach in America.

The love and hate, it's off the charts.

But God, you have got to respect the energy of this guy.

I mean, he is lunging every day of his life.

Well, kids, Babes in Toyland is finished,

and now it's time to celebrate!

RICHARD SCHICKEL: Nobody who does stuff on the scale that he did

is a sweetheart of a guy.

I think he wanted to be what his image was.

He wanted to be thought of

as a "hale fellow well met," good-natured.

But he wasn't.

NEAL GABLER: Walt Disney is in many ways a very dark soul.

And one could say that he fought that,

fought that darkness, tried to find the light.

SARAH NILSEN: He is feeling so much inside,

and he wants people to feel what he feels is inside.

He could take those feelings

that were so central to who he was,

put them on screen, and allow other people

to also feel them along with him.

GABLER: Most successful people,

they get one thing right and that's it.

But Walt Disney was a guy who got a whole lot of things right.

What did this guy understand about the human psyche?

SCHICKEL: Walt Disney was as driven a man as I've ever met in my life.

What he really wanted to do was,

as we used to say in the Middle West,

make a name for himself.

He had a sort of undifferentiated ambition.

He wanted to be somebody, that's for sure.

NARRATOR: Walt Disney was still a few months shy of his 18th birthday

when he returned from France

after the First World War in 1919,

and he was already better off

than most of the two million other American boys

streaming back home.

"Diz," as his friends called him,

had banked over $500 and had a place waiting for him

at a Chicago jelly factory, where his father was part-owner.

The job offer was the best

most working-class boys could hope for,

but Walt Disney was not like most working-class boys.

DON HAHN: He's got all these ideas and he starts acting on them.

And where most people were "ready, aim, fire,"

he was like, "ready, fire, aim."

You know, he's like, "Let's go."

Walt loved attention.

He was an extrovert.

He loved to be the center of attention.

He wants to be an artist.

And I think he discovered something early on:

that talent was his way of getting attention.

He's a man of the times, and the times are exciting.

NARRATOR: Walt was determined to do work he loved,

and he had been an enthusiastic artist and cartoonist

from the time he was little.

He took a pass on factory work in Chicago

and headed for Kansas City instead,

where he had spent much of his boyhood.

He moved into a house with two of his older brothers

and landed a job as a commercial artist for a local ad company.

Soon he was making enough money for fashionable clothes,

fine cigars, meals at nice restaurants,

and near-nightly trips to the movie houses

springing up all over town.

Disney's evenings in these new palaces of celluloid fantasy

included at least one feature film,

maybe a serial short,

a newsreel, and an animated cartoon or two.

TOM SITO: It was an exciting and very dynamic medium.

The industry was very young.

There was no regulations,

no customs, no conformity.

It was wide open to what people wanted to make of it.

NARRATOR: Disney was captivated.

His only formal training

was a few months at an art school in Chicago

and a course at the Kansas City Art Institute,

but he was convinced he could make better

than what he was seeing.

He checked out from the public library

Eadweard Muybridge's Human Figures in Motion.

Then he borrowed a volume

that laid out the basics of animation in filmmaking.

Disney read about roughing out a storyline,

creating characters, and carefully drawing

each individual frame onto white linen paper.

By mounting each frame on pegs just as the book instructed

and shooting them one at a time,

he began to create the illusion of movement.

SARAH NILSEN: He was really into modern culture.

The pleasure of somehow engaging

with the potential of cinema, the potential of animation

was exciting to him.

And he had this little ability to draw.

He had a knack.

NARRATOR: Disney's first efforts

were short cartoons he made on nights and weekends

with a film camera he borrowed from his boss at the ad company.

"I gagged 'em up to beat hell," he would say,

and then sold them to a small Kansas City-based theater chain.

The fees didn't even cover his costs,

but Disney gained something more important than money:

attention, excitement, a whiff of destiny.

"My first bit of fame came there," he said.

"I got to be a little celebrity."

At age 20, Disney quit his day job

and started a company:

Laugh-O-Grams, Inc., Walter Elias Disney, president.

He hired a salesman, a business manager,

and four young apprentice animators.

HAHN: I can imagine a young Walt Disney

just, you know, waking up at dawn

and going out with his friends and saying,

"Well, let's shoot this, let's film this."

And that kind of hunger for not just expressing himself,

but finding out who he was.

He couldn't do enough.

STEVEN WATTS: He has stars in his eyes.

He thinks he can do anything and everything that he wants.

He has big plans.

He's gonna conquer the world.

NARRATOR: Just as he was beginning to get some traction

in the modern movie industry,

Walt's parents arrived from Chicago.

Elias and Flora Disney moved in with their sons

because they had nowhere else to turn.

The jelly factory had failed,

the latest in a long line of Elias's business disasters.

While Disney's mother tried to be supportive

of Walt's new career, his father took little joy

in his youngest son's minor celebrity.

He told Walt not to expect his new success to last.

Walt began to worry he was going to end up,

once again, in service to his father.

Disney lived a very, very difficult existence

in Missouri as a kid.

He works all the time.

His father is an imperious, withholding,

kind of brutal character.

"You're here to work, and work to help me."

That's Dad.

GABLER: It's hard to find a father and son who are more different

than Elias Disney and Walt Disney.

Walt Disney was fun-loving.

He loved practical jokes.

He was a kid who just loved people.

Walt was antithetical to Elias not only by temperament,

but also by will.

He determined, "I'm going to be everything he isn't.

"I'm going to be the antithesis of him.

"Look at his life.

I don't want to live that life."

He survives a life of deprivation, of have not,

of no time to do the things that kids should do--

play, enjoy, laugh.

And the minute he gets into full upright adulthood,

whether he says it to himself or not, he's like,

"I am going to make amends for that in some way.

"I don't know how,

but I yearn for the things that I didn't get as a child."

NARRATOR: Disney and his Laugh-O-Grams crew

secured a contract for six animated fairytale shorts,

but when they delivered the work,

the distributor stiffed them.

Walt could no longer make payroll

or pay the rent on his office,

the phone bill, the electrical bill.

Creditors began circling, while Walt insisted

he had discovered the means for a daring escape,

which he explained in a Hail Mary letter

to one of the best-known cartoon distributors in New York.

"We have just discovered something new and clever

in animated cartoons," Disney wrote.

His big idea was to insert footage of a real girl

into animated scenes.

Alice in Cartoonland, he crowed, was "bound to be a winner."

"He was always optimistic about his ability

and about the value of his ideas,"

Disney's business manager recalled.

"He believed in himself

and he believed in what he was trying to accomplish."

Walt was able to scrape together just enough cash

to complete Alice.

He finished his cartoon experiment with little help

while sleeping at the office, bathing at the train station,

subsisting on canned beans

and the charity of a Greek diner.

But by the time the cartoon short was finished

in the summer of 1923, it was too late.

His company was headed for bankruptcy court.

Alice in Cartoonland would not save Laugh-O-Grams, Inc.

Walt Disney had suffered his first real failure.

He packed his cardboard suitcase with two spare shirts

and what was left of his drawing supplies,

then headed for Union Station,

where he treated himself to a first-class ticket

on the Santa Fe California Limited,

straight through to Los Angeles.

WATTS: Hollywood in the 1920s is a beacon of the future.

It's this golden city on the West Coast.

Hollywood, Los Angeles, that's where the action is at.

And I think Disney senses that, and that's where he wants to be.

GABLER: He's not thinking about animation now.

He's already failed with animation.

So the next step is, "I'm going to go out here

"and I'm going to become a movie director.

That's what I'm going to do."

NARRATOR: The wannabe movie man

walked past Charlie Chaplin's studio along La Brea Avenue,

rode the trolley to Culver City to see the set used in Ben-Hur,

and talked his way onto the Universal lot,

where he wandered around late into the night.

But after weeks of effort,

Walt had not been able to talk his way into a job.

His older brother Roy,

who had moved to Los Angeles for health reasons,

had little patience

for Walt's insistence on finding a place in the movie business.

Roy hadn't been star-struck on arrival.

He sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door

when he first got to town, and he admonished his brother

to find a similar job-- one that paid.

Walt was considering this advice

when a cartoon distributor from New York got in touch.

Margaret Winkler, the only woman in the business,

had remembered Walt's Alice in Cartoonland pitch

and wanted to see how the young animator's big idea

had turned out.

Soon after Disney shipped his Alice reel

to Winkler's office in New York,

the distributor wired back an offer.

She wanted Walt to make 12 Alice shorts,

and was willing to pay $1,500 per episode.

GABLER: When he gets that telegram, the first thing he does is

he goes to visit his brother Roy.

And Walt is waving this telegram, saying,

"Look! We've got a chance here!"

His brother is not enthusiastic.

His brother has no entertainment ambitions whatsoever.

His brother is the pragmatist.

But Walt says, you know, "We can do this.

I need you for this."

Roy, as much as he was a naysayer,

he loved the enthusiasm of Walt, and I think he thrived on it.

He got joy from participating

in the kind of wild schemes of his brother

that he himself would never have concocted.

Roy got release,

and Walt got protection.

NARRATOR: The two brothers scraped up a little cash

from friends and relatives and set up a two-man operation

in the back of a real estate office.

Walt was the artist and idea man;

Roy was the fundraiser, the bookkeeper,

and the all-around utility man.

But Walt recognized that

he needed the kind of help Roy could not provide.

So he convinced an old friend and collaborator, Ub Iwerks,

to relocate from Kansas City to Los Angeles.

HAHN: Walt loves to draw, and he can draw,

and he gets attention by drawing.

But... how do I put this discreetly?

Walt Disney wasn't the best artist in the world.

He grew up in an era of... age of illustrators,

was surrounded by great art.

He wasn't that.

And I think he saw that pretty early on.

ERIC SMOODIN: Iwerks is incredible and can work fast.

So it's an early sign

that Disney always wants to work with the very best

and isn't afraid of working with someone

who's better than he is at many things.

NARRATOR: Iwerks began restyling the Alice's Wonderland shorts

as soon as he arrived,

creating films with less emphasis on the girl

and more on the cartoon characters.

The Disneys' distributor loved the new look.

They wanted more, and faster,

and were willing to pay good money to get them.

Walt recruited more of his old gang from Missouri,

then hired some locals, and the number of employees

at the Disney studio swelled to a dozen.

WATTS: The difference between Laugh-O-Grams

and Disney Brothers is Roy.

Roy was in the latter, and he was not in the former.

And from the very beginning,

I think Roy helped put financial and business structure in place

that grounded the enterprise.

NARRATOR: The brothers enjoyed their early success

and expected it to continue.

Roy bought a stolid new sedan; Walt a snazzy Moon Roadster.

They purchased adjoining lots

and built new houses next door to each other.

In the spring of 1925, Roy married Edna Francis,

his longtime sweetheart from Kansas City.

Walt, sporting a rakish pencil moustache,

acted as best man

while escorting his girlfriend, Lillian Bounds.

The couple had met in the office,

when Lillian was working as an inker

at the Disney Brothers Studio.

"He just had no inhibitions," Lillian said of Walt.

"He was completely natural.

He was fun."

Three months after Roy and Edna's wedding,

Walt and Lillian tied the knot.

The Disney Brothers Studio was churning out

a new Alice short every 16 days at the beginning of 1926,

and Walt and Roy were ready to hang their shingle

on a more spacious building

in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles.

When they moved from the Disney Brothers Studio

to the Hyperion Avenue facility,

a very striking and very revealing thing happens.

Walt goes to Roy and he says, "I've made a decision,

"and that decision is from hence,

"this will be called the Walt Disney Studio,

not the Disney Brothers Studio."

Walt Disney believed that it was

his vision of creativity and entertainment

that was the engine of this enterprise,

and that's what was being sold.

NARRATOR: Disney was understandably obsessed with his rivals

in the cartoon industry by the end of 1926.

He could tell his Alice pictures were running out of steam

and spent much of his free time in darkened theaters,

assessing the work of the top New York-based animators:

the Fleischer Brothers and Pat Sullivan.

He was taking aim at the industry's gold standard:

Sullivan's Felix the Cat.

If you look at animation at that period,

it's extremely crude, it's really violent,

it's really gag driven, and it's very urban.

These are older men

making kind of crude, hard animation.

And Disney steps in as this young guy

and he's like, "Okay, well, I see what you're doing,

"I'll try this out, and then I'll figure out my own voice

in my other influences around me to transform it."

NARRATOR: The key to challenging the supremacy of Felix the Cat,

Walt believed,

was creating his own compelling and likeable character.

Disney's distributor suggested he try a rabbit--

"Too many cats on the market."

Iwerks took charge of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit's look

while Disney wrote the storylines and the gags.

The bosses at Universal Pictures were so taken

with the first sketches of Oswald,

they offered a contract for 26 episodes.

Walt Disney Studios seemed to be riding high.

But by the time the team put the finishing touches

on the first order of Oswald shorts,

the animators were increasingly frustrated with the boss.

The old Kansas City hands who had helped Disney

get started in the business, and often without pay,

were working into the night and through the weekends,

while Walt was taking much of the money

and most of the credit.

WATTS: I think the two sides of Disney emerge.

You have on the one hand Walt the inspirer.

The other side of Disney was Disney the driver,

who demanded work, who demanded creativity,

demanded productivity.

And if people didn't meet his standards,

he could come down on you like a ton of bricks.

NARRATOR: Charles Mintz,

Margaret Winkler's new husband and business partner,

saw an opportunity, emboldened by the knowledge

that he owned the rights to Oswald

and the Disney brothers did not.

GABLER: Ub Iwerks comes to Walt Disney and says,

"Walt, I've been approached by Charles Mintz

"to essentially leave you and to go to work for Mintz.

"And I'm not the only one.

"All of the animators have.

But they haven't told you."

WATTS: Disney doesn't believe it.

He just sort of pooh-poohs the whole thing

and doesn't really believe Ub Iwerks,

who says, "No, there's a problem brewing here."

NARRATOR: Walt went to New York in February of 1928

with big hopes for a new contract from Mintz.

But it only took a few days for Disney to realize

that Iwerks had been right: Mintz had already poached

almost all of Disney's artists except for Ub,

and the distributor told Walt he was going to go on

making the Oswald cartoons without him.

NILSEN: Things are unfolding that most people would understand,

and Disney comes into it shockingly naïve.

It was pretty clear that people were unhappy around him,

that he was pretty oblivious to that.

He's very driven by his vision,

and when these kind of business failings occur,

he is completely caught off guard.

NARRATOR: When Disney boarded the train

for the trip back to Los Angeles,

he was despondent.

Almost all of his team had abandoned him.

He had no distributor, no Oswald,

and very little money in the bank.

HAHN: Oswald the Rabbit gets taken away from him

like a kid taking your lunch money.

They were looking the other direction, and Oswald was gone.

NARRATOR: It was a long cross-country ride for Disney.

The train made stops at most of the big cities along the way

and blew through countless other small towns on the line.

One of them was Marceline, Missouri.

Disney had first seen Marceline at the age of four,

when his father had fled the big city of Chicago

and moved him, his mother, his three older brothers,

and his baby sister to a little farmstead there.

It was a place Disney never forgot.

(birds chirping)

WATTS: Walt was living in the country on the edge of this town,

and he was surrounded by nature.

He could romp through the woods and run through the fields.

There were farm animals around, and he loved animals.

Had a pet dog, pigs, cows, horses.

NILSEN: Marceline represents really the one moment in his childhood

where he was a child,

the place where he really was allowed to be free,

where he wasn't being told what to do by his dad.

SUSKIND: Marceline was this seemingly idyllic place

hitting Disney at a certain age.

You know, the rhythm and the beat of the place

is just right for a kid.

It's like the last breath of something

that seems to resemble a traditional childhood.

NARRATOR: The Disney family business was a tough go.

The margins were always slim,

and Elias wasn't much of a farmer.

Just five years after they arrived,

Disney's father announced that the family was pulling up stakes

and heading back to the city.

DISNEY (on recording): My dad sold the farm,

but then he had to auction all the stock and things.

And it was in the cold of the winter,

and I remember Roy and myself going out and going all around

to the different little towns and places,

tacking up these posters of the auction.

GABLER: Walt Disney once said that

he'll never forget his days in Marceline,

and almost everything important that happened to him

happened in Marceline.

But I think that has to include also the losing of Marceline.

NARRATOR: When Walt and Lillian arrived at Union Station

in Los Angeles in mid-March 1928,

Ub Iwerks detected none of his friend's

trademark good cheer and enthusiasm.

He looked like he'd just run into a stone wall,

Ub would say.

GABLER: Coming from the Disney family,

where his father had suffered so many successive failures,

I think you can only imagine the impact that had on Walt Disney.

Failure was a big thing in the Disney family.

NILSEN: Where his dad just continually gets more and more depressed,

quits basically, Walt steps up.

Boom.

"You think Oswald was good?

"I can do much better than that.

I'll show you what I'm capable of doing."

NARRATOR: Disney held daily brainstorming sessions

with Roy and Ub and a few other loyalists

who had not signed with Mintz.

Intent on dreaming up a bankable new character,

and one they would own, Disney's skeleton team

scoured popular magazines for inspiration,

bounced ideas off one another,

and drew figures on their sketchpads

until something began to emerge.

"Pear-shaped body, ball on top, a couple of thin legs,"

Iwerks later explained.

"You gave it long ears and it was a rabbit.

"Short ears, it was a cat.

With an elongated nose, it became a mouse."

Walt suggested they name him Mortimer.

Lillian thought that was terrible

and came up with "Mickey."

As with Oswald, Ub took charge of the mouse's look.

Walt gave him his personality.

He doesn't have the financial backing

to support what it is he's doing.

He wants to be a bigger voice than he is.

And it's a perfect metaphor: him being this small mouse,

this seemingly insignificant figure or individual

within this big industry that he wants to break into.

NARRATOR: Disney was unable to find a distributor

willing to take a chance on his first two Mickey shorts.

But Walt refused to give up on his mouse.

At a meeting with Roy one day, as the tiny staff worked up

a third and still unsold Mickey Mouse cartoon,

Walt suddenly blurted out,

"We'll make them over with sound!"

NILSEN: "How can I do something better with animation

than what everybody else is doing?"

He's always the person looking for new technology.

He's always the person trying to find the newest invention

to make animation better.

At the time, producing a soundtrack in synch with

and music that makes sense with the action on screen

is very difficult.

This was a very precise and intricate process

that Disney had to think through.

And also, it's unclear

that the money it costs to make a sound film

can possibly pay off with tickets sold.

NARRATOR: Disney saw no good option but to take the chance.

He headed back to New York

and signed a quick deal with the licenser

of one of the most advanced sound systems in town.

Walt didn't have enough money in the bank

to pay for the recording sessions, so he wired Roy

to do whatever he had to to get the cash.

He told his brother to sell his beloved Moon Roadster if needed.

Stuck in New York to oversee the sound work,

Walt trolled desperately for a distributor.

He carried his reels from one office to another

for three long months and came up empty.

He did manage to secure a two-week run

at the Colony Theater, Broadway and 53rd.

Steamboat Willie premiered on November 18, 1928.

(boat chugging along)

(whistle blowing)

(whistling to music)

NARRATOR: The crowd at the Colony Theater was in thrall.

People had heard sound in pictures before,

but never like this.

(whistles tooting)

The music and sound effects were part of the gags.

"It knocked me out of my seat," one New York reporter wrote.

(playing "Turkey in the Straw")

A few audiences begged the projectionist

to delay the start of the feature

and rerun Steamboat Willie.

(music continues)

(drumming in rhythm with the music)

(high-pitched drumming in rhythm with the music)

SMOODIN: Steamboat Willie was such a huge hit,

and it gave Disney Studio a really sort of a preeminence,

where suddenly this company is now, like,

taking a step to the front ranks.

This upstart from the West Coast

just erupts in the middle of everybody

with this amazing character.

(singing)

NARRATOR: Mickey was a multi-talented charmer--

a dancer, a comedian, a singer.

And within months, never mind he was just a cartoon,

Mickey Mouse was the newest Hollywood celebrity.

(singing)

(kids cheering)

NARRATOR: While the country slid toward economic disaster in 1930,

the fame of the Disney mouse just kept growing,

as did Mickey's standing as the archetype

of the American can-do spirit.

(roaring)

(laughing)

Mickey Mouse is scrappy.

Mickey Mouse is a survivor.

Mickey Mouse is somebody during the years of the Depression

who takes a limited number of skills

and a limited number of resources,

and he always ends up on top.

SUSKIND: Mickey's a little bit in your face.

Howdy-do!

Mickey's like, "Hey, I'm smart.

"I can do anything.

"I get into trouble, but I get out of it.

"I'm sort of rebellious.

You know, I live by my own rules."

He's an adolescent dream is what he is,

rebelling and making it work.

That's Mickey.

(laughing)

(screaming)

WATTS: Walt Disney was certainly not a social theorist.

He certainly didn't think through the problems

of the Depression.

But what Disney did do

was to have a kind of instinctive, impulsive feel

for the problems and the hopes of ordinary people.

There's always mishap.

There's always sort of the slapsticky bit

that interferes with his success.

And then he triumphs and he wins at the end.

And he usually gets the girl, too.

Let's all sing the chorus again!

(singing)

NARRATOR: Mickey Mouse Clubs began sprouting up

at local movie theaters.

More than a million children signed up.

Roy encouraged the clubs,

and saw in Mickey's growing popularity

another possible stream of revenue: licensing.

The Disneys had made a few haphazard deals

to allow Mickey's likeness on children's toys,

following the example of other popular characters,

like Felix the Cat.

But the Walt Disney Studio

got less than five percent of the take

and saw little revenue,

until they brought in Kay Kamen.

WATTS: He was an ad man.

He was a marketer.

He had a very keen sense of what we would call branding.

Kamen is a genius

for doing these licensing agreements

with companies all over the United States

who want to associate their products

with the success of the Disney studio.

NARRATOR: The Disney brothers gave Kamen

the exclusive rights to license Mickey Mouse,

along with his girlfriend Minnie, his dog Pluto,

and later, Donald Duck.

The studio kept a tight rein on how their products,

especially their mouse, could be used,

and they demanded a big cut of the profits.

But they had plenty of willing partners,

because Mickey Mouse moved product.

By the early 1930s,

fans could buy Mickey-adorned merchandise by the scores.

The Mickey Mouse watch became the most popular timepiece

in America.

(crowd cheering, camera shutters clicking)

Fan mail for Mickey Mouse

poured into the studio on Hyperion Avenue,

with postmarks from across the United States,

from England, Spain, the Philippines.

Some were addressed to Mickey, some to Walt.

SMOODIN: Mickey is understood as being the creation of Disney,

and Disney is understood as being the father of Mickey.

And combined, that makes for a kind of international stardom

that we really hadn't seen before.

HAHN: When everybody else is suffering,

Walt Disney is selling consumer products

and making millions of dollars out of Mickey Mouse.

And that's a huge story, that this little mouse

turns into the future of the Walt Disney Company.

Walt Disney always talked about Mickey Mouse

as being his alter ego.

He would say that, you know,

"I'm closer to Mickey Mouse than I am to anyone else."

(in high Mickey voice): Hey, Pluto, here she comes!

SUSKIND: Mickey and Walt are talking to each other.

Hey, Pluto, here she comes!

SUSKIND: So he's gotta do Mickey's voice.

Someone's gotta do it.

So of course Walt does it

because it's him talking to himself.

"So, Mickey, how you feeling today?"

(in high Mickey voice): "You know, I feel great.

"Do you know it wasn't an easy day?

"You know, maybe tomorrow, who knows?

"You know, let's get into a little bit of trouble,

you and me."

NARRATOR: Walt Disney was not yet 30,

and he had made himself the first celebrity of animation,

a film cartoonist the public could name.

His studio stood atop the industry

and was growing to meet the demand for new Mickey cartoons.

The success of Mickey

lured plenty of good talent to Hyperion,

some of the best in the business,

but Disney insisted on having the final word

on every foot of finished film that came out of his studio.

He spent long hours at the office,

often until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning,

and still had a hard time keeping up.

He was anxious and obsessive, chain-smoking day and night,

drumming his thumbs impatiently on the table in story meetings.

MICHAEL BARRIER: His role was changing in the studio.

He was leaving behind the things that were so familiar to him--

working with his hands,

being an active participant in the work--

becoming more and more a man

who was the intellectual overseer,

evaluating, criticizing, editing.

And as he stepped back from this more active participation,

he initially was, I think, very distressed by it,

felt uncomfortable doing it.

NARRATOR: Disney had talked of having

a big family of his own for years.

He wanted ten children, he would tell his sister,

and he would spoil them all.

Lillian had her doubts about raising any number of children,

especially when she considered the office hours Walt kept.

But he talked her into it.

Roy and Edna had had their first child already,

and by the spring of 1931, Lillian was pregnant.

Walt was giddy.

He was already making plans for a bigger house

to accommodate the new addition.

Then Lillian miscarried.

Disney waved off the well-wishers and sympathizers.

He threw himself back into his work.

He insisted he was fine.

He was not.

DISNEY (on recording): In 1931, I had a hell of a breakdown.

I went all to pieces.

It was just pound, pound, pound.

It was costs, my costs were going up.

I was always way over

whatever they figured the pictures would bring in.

And I cracked up.

I just got very irritable.

I got to the point

that I couldn't talk on the telephone.

I'd begin to cry,

and the least little thing, I'd just go that way.

NARRATOR: In October 1931, Walt Disney took his doctor's advice

and escaped on the first real vacation of his life.

He and Lillian went across the country to Washington, D.C.,

then to Key West,

and on to a week's stay in Cuba.

They rode a steamship through the Panama Canal

on the way back to Los Angeles.

Once home, Disney told people

that the breakdown had been a godsend.

Life was sweet, he said,

and there was more to it than work.

He dove into a new exercise regimen,

went with Lillian on long horseback rides,

learned to play polo, and joined a league.

GABLER: Walt comes back from his nervous breakdown,

and he does change his lifestyle.

But does Walt Disney withdraw?

Does he delegate?

Does he do the things that one might have expected him to do?

No, he does not.

(dramatic music playing)

(hooting)

NARRATOR: Disney had never been shy about spending money on his vision,

even when the studio was cash poor.

He had already used up his earliest Mickey profits

in the creation of a new series of cartoon shorts

called Silly Symphonies.

(clock bell chiming)

(howling)

(growling)

SMOODIN: The Silly Symphonies were much more about animation as art.

So The Skeleton Dance and others like them

were understood as these wonderful,

almost avant-garde films that merged music and dance

and made characters out of nature

and also other kinds of inanimate things

in ways that people hadn't really seen before.

(harp notes chiming)

NARRATOR: Silly Symphonies raised Walt to near mythic status

among cartoonists and animators.

Artists from all over the country packed their bags

and headed for California

just for the chance to work with the great Walt Disney.

The Hyperion staff grew to nearly 200.

(birds chirping in rhythm with the music)

NARRATOR: Men ruled the studio, as they did all studios in the 1930s.

The women who came to work at Disney

were relegated to the low-wage ink-and-paint department.

In the middle of the Great Depression,

few complained about a steady job with steady pay.

NILSEN: It becomes, like, the studio to work at.

And all of those animators just thrive

because Disney sets it up as a legitimate profession.

"Here I step in.

"I will recognize your talent.

I will pay you well."

BOB GIVENS: It was like a renaissance to us.

It was a flowering of the animation industry.

It'd never been done before.

This was fine art, not just dumb cartoons.

(chirping)

NARRATOR: Disney's new series was the test ground for innovation,

with firsts in sound technique, color,

and multi-plane camera technology,

which produced a three-dimensional depth

never before seen in animation.

GABLER: Walt intended the studio to be the place

where you created great art.

(thunder rumbling)

(wind howling)

(dramatic music playing)

GABLER: That was so instrumental

to Walt's understanding of the studio.

And that became, in many ways, the most powerful element

in how he dealt with his workers.

They wanted to produce great things.

He made them want to produce great things.

(horn honking)

SITO: He was very jovial.

He was very informal.

He's the one who first insisted

on only being referred to by his first name.

RUTH TOMPSON: Boss?

He wasn't boss.

He was a friend.

And everybody called him Walt.

If they didn't call him Walt, that was the end of that one.

GIVENS: We used to play volleyball at noon,

over there across the street in the annex.

And Walt used to come over there and watch us.

He used to say, "Don't play too rough,"

he'd say, you know?

And he wanted us to be careful,

not hurt our hands, our drawing hand particularly.

And we loved to win, because then he'd applaud.

But he was the big daddy there.

He didn't miss anything.

NARRATOR: Disney offered drawing classes at the studio

and brought in professors from the Chouinard Art Institute

to teach them.

He invited experts to lecture on Impressionism, Expressionism,

Cubism, the Mexican muralists.

HAHN: He was always very much about not only hiring the artists

but providing a safe place for them to do their job.

And by "safe," I mean a place to make mistakes

and a place to fail and a place to take criticism

without the fear of being fired, and a place to be able to learn.

(cheering)

SUSKIND: He wanted a family, a community, a place.

"I can actually create a little world,

"bordered, mine,

"just what I need it to be, inhabited by all these people.

A community marked 'Disney.'"

NARRATOR: Walt Disney, not yet 35,

appeared to be in possession of the magic beans.

His studio was a Technicolor rainbow

in the middle of the pale, gray Depression-era America.

His home life was thriving too.

Lillian had given birth to a daughter, Diane,

and the Disneys would soon adopt a second daughter, Sharon.

But Disney wasn't satisfied.

He needed a "new adventure," he would say,

"a kick in the pants

to jar loose some inspiration and enthusiasm."

Disney's employees were still telling the story decades later.

One evening in 1934,

Walt sent his entire staff out for an early dinner,

but told them to hurry back to the Hyperion soundstage

for an important company meeting.

The room was buzzing by the time Walt took the stage.

GABLER: Disney is lit on the sound stage,

and he then proceeds to act out--

alone, just him, a one-man show--

the story of Snow White.

WATTS: What he did was to go through the whole movie as he saw it,

acting out all of the parts,

impersonating all of the characters,

going through all the emotions, all the ups and downs--

the queen, the princess,

the seven dwarves, even the animals.

NARRATOR: What Disney was proposing had never been done,

never even been tried:

a feature-length, story-driven cartoon.

WATTS: Roy Disney was pretty skeptical about all of this.

And the more he thought about it, actually,

the more convinced he became

that this could be a disaster for the studio

because he was afraid that it wouldn't sell,

that people wouldn't see it,

and it would drag the studio down into bankruptcy.

And Roy dug in his heels.

NARRATOR: Walt would not let it go.

He was convinced

this century-old Brothers Grimm fairytale

about a virtuous princess chased into a deep, dark forest

by her hateful stepmother was a can't-miss proposition.

He must have told that story after that first night,

you know, a thousand times.

People would always say he'd collar them in the hallway

and tell the story of Snow White again.

He'd have to repeat it again and again and again

to keep them energized, to keep himself energized,

and to review the film in his head

so that it was always rolling.

This was obsession.

NARRATOR: Walt's excitement was catching.

"We were just carried away," remembered one animator.

"I would've climbed a mountain full of wildcats

to do everything I could to make Snow White."

Roy grudgingly came around

and managed to shake the money free

from their longtime lender, Bank of America.

But he warned his brother

the bankers were very nervous about this gamble,

and they expected Walt to stay on schedule

and within the agreed-upon budget.

The schedule, the budget, the company's debt

were secondary considerations to Walt, who was preoccupied

with a single overriding problem:

how to translate his idea to the big screen.

Snow White would have to captivate its audience

in a way no cartoon ever had before.

GABLER: In the shorter cartoons, you can make people laugh.

And the gag is the basic component of these things.

You get people to laugh.

But Walt Disney now is asking another question:

Can you make people cry?

Can you make people cry over a drawing?

NARRATOR: One key, Disney believed,

was to infuse his animated film with a natural realism.

He brought live animals into the studio

so his artists could study their movement.

He had his animators throw heavy objects

through plate glass windows

just to analyze the shattering effects.

Disney hired a teenage dancer to act the part of Snow White

so his animators could study how she looked

when she leaned over or laughed or smiled

so they could see the movement of her dress as she danced.

WATTS: They would bring in actors,

and they would have them impersonate these characters

in front of the animators,

who would try to capture certain qualities of their movements.

They would even film them to try to get a sense of personality,

of movement, of realism.

BARRIER: What he was after was something different,

making thought and emotion visible

in a way that seems natural

and not artificial.

Disney really kind of took the art of animation

and pushed it towards the animator as an actor

and about performance.

He wanted his animators to take acting classes--

studying their facial muscles,

how you say certain words, you know,

how is your lips shaped when you say "V,"

or how is, like, "O," or "Ooh," you know?

How does it affect your eyes?

There were no rules.

They hadn't been invented before.

So you're kind of free to do anything you wanted to do.

Follow your instincts and do it.

NARRATOR: Walt's stubborn insistence on getting the story right,

on innovation, and on attention to detail

meant the pace of production at Hyperion was glacial.

GABLER: To draw each of these characters,

to draw these backgrounds, to do it in a way

that transcends anything that'd been done before,

is excruciating.

It's grueling.

It's painful.

It's tormenting.

GIVENS: We were the crew that did most of the Snow White drawings,

and we'd sometimes take a whole day

for a close up of Snow White.

That's how intricate the drawing was.

It was so precise.

It was like making watches, you know?

It was just such fine detail.

You know, one little line would throw the whole thing off.

NARRATOR: The production process did not change.

Key animators would draw the main characters in Snow White.

"In-betweeners" would draw the movements

between the key frames.

The ink-and-paint artists would add color to the drawings

and transfer them to the transparent sheets,

or cels, to go to camera.

At 24 frames per second and often multiple cels per frame,

Snow White would require more than 200,000 separate drawings.

SMOODIN: Making the film required an army of people,

and I'm not sure that Disney

thought of all of them as talent.

There are real workers here who are doing the grunt work.

NARRATOR: The Disneys had already built

a two-story addition at Hyperion,

but it wasn't near enough.

Roy was forced to rent bungalows

and other buildings in the neighborhood

just to accommodate their staff,

which grew to more than 600 people.

Poor Roy Disney.

You know, during this time, there's tremendous expansion

and ideas and excitement by everybody,

but Roy's the banker,

and he's the guy that has to keep it all together.

And there's weekly discussions about how to make payroll.

The feature was going overbudget.

The bankers from Bank of America were there frequently.

And Roy's job was to keep everybody calm

and to keep it all together financially.

Supper!

(shouting excitedly)

NARRATOR: As the production dragged into its second

and then its third year, Walt's demands began to look dangerous.

He repeatedly pushed deadlines, and by the start of 1937,

with the premiere set for that December,

the studio was behind-- way behind.

Ten months to the premiere date,

and not a single animation cel had been shot on film.

But Walt insisted that Snow White could not be rushed

and could not be done on the cheap.

(orchestral music playing)

NARRATOR: Walt kept upping the ante, which meant Roy had to raise

Walt's original budget number six times over.

The trade papers

were beginning to write stories about the delays.

People were calling Snow White "Disney's Folly."

Roy was worried they might be right.

TOMPSON: I was working the 12our deal,

where you come in at 8:00 and go home at 8:00.

And we really were cleaning cels and patching cels,

fixing mistakes and things like that.

There were a lot.

And the queen, the queen was, uh...

She had the kind of paint that was kind of sticky.

And so those things would come back from camera,

and we'd have to clean them up and patch them

and send them back to camera.

DON LUSK: I worked my tail off.

I was put in charge of the clean-up and in-betweens.

That's where it was lagging.

We went in at 7:00 instead of 8:00,

and we went to dinner

and we came back and usually worked till almost 10:00.

GIVENS: The ink-and-paint gals were...

some of them were losing their eyesight.

It was a hell of a thing.

They were just slaves.

They were doing it, but they believed in this thing so much,

they were willing to drop dead on the job.

NARRATOR: The animators finished in early November,

but the last cels weren't painted until November 27th.

Rumors were flying around Hollywood

that there would be no print of the film ready

for the December 21st premiere.

NEWS ANNOUNCER: Blasé Hollywood, accustomed to gala openings,

turns out for the most spectacular of them all.

The world premiere

of the million-and-a-half dollar fairytale fantasy

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Replicas from the first feature cartoon thrill thousands

who turn out for a glimpse of lovely Marlene Dietrich

with Doug Fairbanks Jr. and a parade of stars.

Shirley Temple is just as enthralled

as are the grown-up stars and moviegoers

with the seven fantastic dwarfs.

GABLER: Walt was in a state of high anxiety.

He had no idea how the audience was going to respond.

RADIO REPORTER: Well, Walt, I think you're due to do all the talking tonight.

Uh, tell us a little bit about this picture, will you?

DISNEY: Well, it's been lot of fun making it,

and we're very happy that

it's being given this big premiere here tonight

and all these people are turning out

to take a look at it,

and I hope they're not too disappointed.

REPORTER: Well, I'm sure they won't be,

I've seen the picture, Walt...

He didn't know if it would really work.

And one part of him was almost agonizing over,

"Well, if people don't buy this, this will just fall flat,

and then I will be done."

NARRATOR: Audience members gasped

at the opening shots of the Queen's castle.

Slave in the magic mirror, come from the farthest space.

Through in from darkness, I summon thee, speak!

NARRATOR: They howled in laughter at the antic dwarfs.

(sniffing)

Ah, soup!

Hooray!

(shouting over each other)

SNOW WHITE: Uh-uh-uh, just a minute!

The heart of a pig!

And I've been tricked.

NARRATOR: They hissed disapproval at the Evil Queen.

And still, Walt was anxious.

Don't let the wish grow cold!

Oh, I feel strange.

NARRATOR: He sat gripping Lillian's hand for nearly 75 minutes,

nervously anticipating the scene that would put the power

of his personal vision to the ultimate test.

(cackling laughter)

Now I'll be fairest in the land!

(solemn organ music playing)

NARRATOR: When it arrived, the apparent death of Snow White,

the theater was hushed.

(crying)

GABLER: The audience started weeping.

And that's when Walt knew.

That's when they all knew.

The audience had suspended its disbelief so thoroughly,

so believed in the reality of the situation

and of the dwarves, that they were crying.

That was really the triumph of the film.

¶ One song, only for you ¶

¶ One heart... ¶

SUSKIND: Clark Gable and Carole Lombard are weeping.

They don't know what hit them.

You know, what hit them is that they crossed a barrier

from the life they live

to the internal world, where myth lives in all of us,

and Disney provides the passage.

And it ain't kid's stuff.

NARRATOR: When the curtain came down,

the audience rose from their seats

and broke into a thunderous ovation.

¶ Someday, when my dreams come true... ¶

NARRATOR: "I could not help but feel," one rival movie producer gushed,

"that I was in the midst of motion picture history."

SCHICKEL: I know the first movie I saw

was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Now, I didn't know anything but to be delighted with it.

It was wonderful.

I mean, I still think it's wonderful.

Snow White lies dead.

TOMPSON: I loved the queen.

She was so awful, but she was just beautiful.

Behold her heart!

She was so beautifully drawn and everything.

SCHICKEL: Kids had to be carried screaming out of Radio City Music Hall.

They were too frightening for them.

That's an important aspect.

Disney understood that kids could take more scariness

than people thought they could take.

So they wet the pants and wet the seat

in Radio City Music Hall.

(screaming)

But they'd had an experience, you know?

That's what was important.

It was not just bland.

It was serious stuff going on in their little heads.

SUSKIND: Think about what he does.

Well, he's like, "These cartoons don't have to be just slapstick.

"They can carry everything, all the biggest stuff.

"They can carry ancient and powerful mythologies.

They can carry everything."

My hands!

That was a huge leap, and that's an artistic leap.

He's creating a new art form.

NARRATOR: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

played at New York's Radio City Music Hall

for five straight weeks at the beginning of 1938.

No other film had ever run more than three weeks there.

National and international releases followed.

Lines wrapped around small-town theaters in New England,

the South, the Midwest, the Far West.

The film was a box office smash in London, Paris, and Sydney.

It grossed $8 million in its first year,

the equivalent of over $100 million today

and more than any film before it.

Roy paid off the studio's $2.3 million debt to Bank of America

while the film was still in its first run

and helped oversee

an unprecedented merchandising campaign.

SMOODIN: There are Snow White jars

and Snow White jelly and Snow White scarves.

There are Snow White shows going on at department stores.

So the film and the space of commerce are completely one.

It's a commercial triumph for Disney

not just because of the film itself,

but because of the way that the merchandise is tied to it.

NARRATOR: Walt Disney was celebrated as a true American original,

a man capable of harnessing

the power of technology and storytelling,

a man adept at art and commerce.

Harvard University gave him an honorary Master of Arts,

and so did Yale, whose trustees called Disney

"The creator of a new language of art."

SUSKIND: He's hailed in Paris.

He's hailed in New York.

He's living a dream.

And that's a moment where he starts to think very boldly.

He almost is released from hesitations.

He's like, "I am that guy that I dreamed of.

"I am him.

So now what do we do?"

NARRATOR: Disney cultivated the look of the artist in public,

but at home, he was just plain Dad.

Walt made a point to drive his two young daughters

to school every day,

chased them around their house cackling like the Wicked Witch,

and read them bedtime stories.

GABLER: There's no question,

he adored them.

Absolutely adored them.

He was a man who had a lively sense of play

that he'd never lost from the time he was a child.

WATTS: He was very domestic, very nurturing

in a way that usually in that day and age

was associated more with mother's role.

Lillian was a bit aloof, a bit reserved, a bit cool,

even with her children, and Walt was just the opposite.

He was overflowing with enthusiasm.

I think in a way, he was reacting

against his own childhood and against Elias.

Because Elias was so stern with him,

Disney often said, "I want to spoil my children terribly.

I just want to spoil them."

NARRATOR: He had had only sporadic contact with his own parents

since his move to California.

But the Disney studio's new financial success

afforded Walt the chance to draw them closer.

Walt and Roy moved Elias and Flora to Los Angeles,

and as a 50th wedding anniversary present,

the brothers bought them a house.

In the middle of the Snow White frenzy,

they also threw a golden wedding anniversary party,

which they deemed worthy of preserving for history.

DISNEY: Well, you know, here it is, 1937,

and you folks are almost ready

to celebrate your 50th wedding anniversary.

FLORA: We're not gonna celebrate.

DISNEY: Why not?

FLORA: Oh, what's the use?

DISNEY: Well, Dad likes to celebrate.

He's always enjoyed a good time.

FLORA: We've been celebrating for 50 years.

Getting tired of it.

DISNEY: What about you, Dad?

Don't you want to make a little whoopee

on your golden wedding anniversary?

ELIAS: Oh, we don't want to go to any extremes with it at all.

DISNEY: Well, I expect you...

I hoped you wouldn't go to any extremes

if you're whoopeeing it up.

(laughing)

FLORA: He don't know how to make whoopee.

NARRATOR: Walt sometimes seemed compelled to talk about the old days.

Even as his fame grew,

his family's early struggle remained a touchstone.

He held fast to the idea of himself as a man

formed in the crucible of want and deprivation

in the great forgotten middle of the country.

HIGGINBOTHAM: He feels it very important to identify and to make note

of his Midwestern background and to propagate that story.

He understood the value of labor,

and that that is not something he learned about

from somebody else; rather it's naturally who he is.

NARRATOR: Walt Disney had been a player in the movie business

for more than 15 years and a celebrity for nearly ten,

but the acclaimed filmmaker still did not think of himself

as a Hollywood insider.

He complained that other major film producers

refused to acknowledge animation as serious cinema.

And he wasn't wrong.

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences

announced the ten nominees for the Best Picture of 1938,

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was not on the list.

Instead, Disney was given a special Oscar

for his pioneering work in feature-length cartoons.

I'm sure the boys and girls in the whole world

are going to be very happy when they find out

the daddy of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,

Mickey Mouse, Ferdinand, and all the others

is going to get this beautiful statue.

Isn't it bright and shiny?

Oh, it's beautiful.

Aren't you proud of it, Mr. Disney?

Why, I'm so proud, I think I'll bust.

He got sort of the honorable mention,

which is... crap.

He doesn't want that.

He has created something absolutely magnificent.

He knows it's magnificent.

Audiences have told him it's magnificent.

He believed in this so much,

he put himself personally on the line for his films

and his products, and for animation,

and the furthering of animation.

And Hollywood just didn't seem ready to view animation as art,

or as filmmaking.

It had to have smarted.

NARRATOR: Disney had dreams of producing

a new feature-length animated film every six months,

and almost all from source material

that played to his strengths:

fairytales, folktales, or popular novels

already familiar to his audience.

His two projects following Snow White

were coming-of-age stories.

First up was Bambi, based on a novel

about a young deer becoming a stag;

and then Pinocchio,

a popular late 19th century Italian folktale

about a wooden puppet who wants to be a real boy.

Disney hit snags right away on Bambi,

and began to worry the story was too complicated

and needed more time in development.

So he moved Pinocchio

to the front of the production line and hit more snags.

GABLER: They struggled mightily with the story of Pinocchio.

As Walt himself said,

he's not a very nice puppet in the original story.

He's kind of a wiseacre.

So there was something they had to tackle immediately, which is,

"How do you make this puppet into someone likable?"

NARRATOR: Disney was still puzzling out the Pinocchio story

in the fall of 1938 when the phone call came.

His parents had suffered carbon monoxide poisoning

caused by a malfunction of the heating system

at the house Walt and Roy had bought for them.

Elias had survived.

Flora had not.

Walt went to her funeral, and then he went back to work.

He never talked of his mother's death again.

NILSEN: It was something he dealt with within himself

as a private matter.

Even with his wife,

I don't think that relationship he shared very much.

His emotions were internalized,

and that's why cinema I think offered this way to emote

in a way that he couldn't emote in his own private life.

GABLER: Walt Disney once exploded during a story session

and he pounded on the table.

And he said, "We're not making cartoons here!

We're not making cartoons."

Walt Disney had made this separation

between Mickey Mouse and some of the early Silly Symphonies.

They're cartoons.

But now we're not making cartoons.

We're making art.

And art has a higher standard.

And the standard is the emotional response

that we get from people.

Can you make them feel deeply?

SUSKIND: Art doesn't work unless it gets to the big stuff.

Call it what you will.

Entertainment doesn't work unless it gets at the core,

the stuff that we really, really wrestle with.

Make you laugh, make you cry, make you sing, make you sigh.

But you gotta get at it.

NARRATOR: Disney wasn't thinking small on Pinocchio.

Snow White had proved that his animated films

could tackle the sweep of the human condition

with all the light and shadow of real life.

Now he went deep inside himself for inspiration

and emerged with a magical story elixir

that became the Disney trademark:

outsiders struggling for acceptance,

coming-of-age heroes bucking authority,

temptation, loss, redemption, and survival.

So now Walt's wading through the story,

throwing things out left and right and saying,

"What's the essence of it?

"What's this story about?

"Who's it about?

"Why do I care?

Why do I want to watch this?"

DOUGLAS BRODE: Pinocchio becomes about what it means to be human,

about how you have to achieve humanity.

You have to earn it.

HANH: They take huge liberties.

Walt Disney doesn't care.

He says, you know, "We're taking the title,

"we're taking the puppet thing

and we're gonna make that into our story."

NARRATOR: Difficult as they were and engaging as they were,

Pinocchio and Bambi

did not capture Walt's undivided attention.

There was an enticing new experiment going on

right down the hall.

The project had begun as a cartoon short

based on a symphony titled "The Sorcerer's Apprentice,"

starring Mickey Mouse,

with the backing of an orchestra

conducted by the celebrated Leopold Stokowski.

Disney was so taken with the first results

that he decided to expand it into a feature-length film:

Fantasia.

He and Stokowski selected eight separate classical symphonies

and Walt and his team began thinking about imagery to match.

The Disney Studio was crawling with musicians, dancers,

even famous scientists like the astronomer Edwin Hubble.

HANH: So here's Stravinsky,

and George Balanchine comes by the studio,

"Well, let's choreograph some dancing for us."

So these experts are coming and going,

and there's a ballet company in the next room dancing.

And here's Hubble talking about theories of deep space

and where the cosmos came from.

And there's a dinosaur expert.

And it is this cultural kind of petri dish

of people together working and collaborating,

creating Fantasia.

And he loves it because this is a huge, fun sandbox.

GABLER: Well, he's dealt with realism and realistic emotions,

but now he's trying to get to emotion

in a different way, circumventing realism.

This is absolutely alien to the Disney process,

to try and see if you can reach emotion

directly through abstraction.

He's saying, "I want to try what heroes of art do.

"I want the great artists of the time to join in here.

I want to create art that lasts centuries."

NARRATOR: The Disney studio ran to the rhythms

of Walt's bursting energy,

which appeared to be spilling beyond rational boundaries.

The boss had three major productions

spinning simultaneously

and had nearly doubled the number of full-time employees.

The Disneys were in dire need of space

to house their thousand-plus staff,

and another addition at Hyperion was not going to cut it.

Without consulting with Roy, who was in Europe at the time,

Walt selected a 51-acre building lot,

empty but for a polo field,

on the other side of the Hollywood Hills, in Burbank.

Then he went to work making his dream studio.

GABLER: It was designed for absolute efficiency,

but also to engender this wonderful sense of community.

In fact, there was one point

where he said, "You know what'd be great is

if we build an apartment complex here on the studio lot

so no one ever has to leave."

It's so that his employees could become part

of this very insular community

where they would all work together in this common mission

to make these great animations.

And that's what this new studio was really all about.

It was really all about creating a perfect place

to create perfect films.

NARRATOR: The day after Christmas 1939, most of the Disney staff

began the move from Hyperion to Burbank.

The heart of the studio campus

was the three-story animation building,

with Walt's office on the top floor.

Each animator had a single big, airy sunlit room to himself,

with an oversized work-table, a stylish area rug,

an easy chair to recline in, and drapes.

The entire facility was air-conditioned.

Landscaped pathways led to a theater, a restaurant,

a soda fountain.

LUSK: It was wonderful.

We had things that we'd never had before.

If you wanted a milkshake,

you'd call the little coffee shop

right in the middle of the place,

and then they had runners

that would run these things to us,

a sandwich, whatever we wanted.

It was just heaven.

SITO: It had a cafeteria.

It had a gymnasium

with an ex-member of the Swedish Olympic team

as a personal trainer.

The studio had its own gas station.

You know, you could get your car repaired

while you're at work.

This is amazing.

¶ Like a boat out of the blue ¶

¶ Fate steps in and sees you through... ¶

NARRATOR: By the time the studio was ready to launch Pinocchio

in New York City in February of 1940,

Walt Disney was selling hard.

¶ Your dreams come true. ¶

NARRATOR: He was singing the praises of Jiminy Cricket,

Lord High Keeper of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong.

¶ Give a little whistle, Yoo-hoo! ¶

¶ Give a little whistle, Woo-hoo! ¶

¶ And always let your conscience be your guide ¶

¶ And always let your conscience be your guide! ¶

(banging)

NARRATOR: He was also talking up the studio's breakthroughs

in camera technology and special effects.

Wake!

The gift of life is bound.

Father!

NARRATOR: "For the first time

in the field of animation," Disney proclaimed.

"audiences will see in Pinocchio underwater effects

that look like super-special marine photography."

Can you tell me where we can find Monstro?

Gee!

They're scared.

You really have to stop yourself and say,

"This was all blank paper.

This all began as blank paper.

It doesn't exist."

You know, we believe it's water,

and we believe those characters are real,

and that's the summit of the animator's art.

That's the pinnacle of what we call personality animation,

which is creating a completely artificial world that we accept.

Father!

Mm...

SCHICKEL: Pinocchio has richness and dimensions

that other animated cartoons don't have.

And when you are growing too old,

you will make good firewood!

I mean, he's swallowed by a whale, for Christ's sake.

He is in peril throughout the movie.

Hey, blubber mouth, open up!

I gotta get in there!

And at the same time, there's Jiminy Cricket,

you know, who's delightful and charming

and takes some of the sting off of this movie.

But that's a pretty dark movie.

Pinocchio is just a wooden boy who's trying to be human.

One would think that that means he can make mistakes,

that he would be allowed to have the faults of being a boy.

Please, you gotta help me!

HIGGINBOTHAM: And instead, any indiscretion

is met with the possible death of his adopted father

or the transformation into a donkey.

The stakes are so very high.

(braying loudly)

Oh! What's happened?!

I hope I'm not too late!

What'll I do?

Pinocchio is seeking a home.

He's seeking identity.

He's seeking place.

He wants to be real.

BLUE FAIRY: Prove yourself brave, truthful, and unselfish,

and someday you will be a real boy.

SUSKIND: That's what the goal is.

"I want to feel my life most fully."

"And then once I feel my life,

"I will have a chance to feel the big truths,

the things that give us sustenance."

I'm alive, see?

And I'm...

I'm real.

I'm a real boy!

GEPETTO: You're alive!

And you are a real boy!

Yay! Whoopee!

(meows happily)

This calls for a celebration!

NARRATOR: Audiences across the country walked away from Pinocchio

emotionally drained and enormously satisfied.

The critics raved.

"Walt Disney has created something

"that will be counted in our favor, in all our favor,

"when this generation is being appraised

by the generations of the future,"

the New York Times' movie critic wrote.

Well!

This is practically where I came in.

NARRATOR: "For it will be said that no generation

"which produced a Snow White and a Pinocchio

could have been altogether bad."

¶ When you wish upon a star... ¶

NARRATOR: The downside of Pinocchio was apparent from the jump too.

Walt's insistence on innovation had pushed production costs

to nearly twice that of Snow White,

and the picture was not going to earn back the investment.

Ticket sales in the United States were slow.

In Europe, now at war, they were moribund.

The Disneys had burned through more than $2 million

of the net profits from Snow White,

while borrowing heavily from Bank of America

to fund the dream studio in Burbank.

Walt Disney is kind of under the gun.

The costs of Fantasia and Pinocchio,

and even Bambi in its early stages, are enormous.

And the war has cut off the European market.

So Walt Disney has lost a giant market,

and he is worrying about how he can finance all of these films

under his new project to make feature films constantly,

one every six months or so.

NARRATOR: Roy Disney had a plan.

They would go public and issue shares in the company.

His kid brother wasn't happy at the thought of shareholders

sticking their noses in his creative process,

but he saw little choice.

In April of 1940, as the last of the staff

made the transition to the Burbank studio,

Walt Disney Productions issued 155,000 shares

of preferred stock,

netting the company nearly $4 million.

Roy and Walt had both signed seven-year contracts

as part of the deal.

Roy was guaranteed a salary of $1,000 a week,

and Walt $2,000.

The company reassured investors

by taking out a $1.5 million life insurance policy

on its key asset: Walt Disney.

(Bach's Toccata and Fugue playing)

WATTS: Fantasia opens with the Bach Fugue and Toccata in D minor,

but it is pure abstraction, no characters,

no nothing that is recognizable in the natural world,

which gets the movie off in a very interesting vein.

(music continues)

(Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker Suite playing)

HIGGINBOTHAM: Fantasia is wildly ambitious.

You can feel it in every scene.

But it's very uneven.

(music continues)

WATTS: When the movie worked, it's spectacular.

When it didn't work, it's sort of dumb.

The critical reaction was extremely divided.

Some people thought Disney had pulled off this alliance

of visual art and music

and created something new and compelling.

Other critics thought that it was a disaster,

and they slammed the movie very, very hard

for dragging classical music traditions down into the dust.

Walt Disney had made his reputation

in the intellectual community as being unpretentious.

And when he makes Fantasia, guess what?

He's pretentious.

HIGGINBOTHAM: Fantasia raises a number of questions

as to if Walt is stepping beyond himself,

if he's not appreciating his limits.

And Walt will take this personally.

He didn't handle criticism very well, ever.

And the criticism over Fantasia I think really rankled.

And what it did was to encourage a kind of anti-intellectualism

that was always there with Disney,

but I think increasingly, he drifts in the direction of,

"These are eggheads.

"They don't know anything about ordinary people,

and to hell with them."

NARRATOR: Fantasia's financial losses

were far greater than Pinocchio's,

largely because so few theaters

had the expensive new sound system

Disney required to show his film-symphony.

The deficits left the company

unable to pay its guaranteed quarterly dividend

to preferred shareholders.

And the expensive new studio

was already starting to feel more like a dropped anchor

than a sail spread wide to catch the creative winds.

WATTS: The new Burbank studio was a kind of a case study in

"Be careful what you ask for."

It was so nice that it was almost sterile.

It was all rationalized.

It was all organized.

And something, the quality of the creative experience,

was almost designed out of the operation.

NARRATOR: There was something unmistakably mechanical

at the heart of Walt's workplace utopia.

People were segregated by task, as at an industrial plant.

Company hierarchy was more rigid, more obvious,

and more carefully policed by Disney administrators.

The tonier perks accrued

to the highest links of the corporate pay chain.

Membership in the Penthouse Club,

with its gymnasium, steam room, and restaurant,

was reserved for top writers and animators, all men still.

So were office niceties like area rugs, drapes,

easy chairs and armoires.

When animator Don Lusk started doing friends a favor

by picking up the slack on lower-level jobs

like clean-up and in-between, somebody above took note.

I came into the room on a Monday morning,

and all that was in there was a desk.

The rug was gone.

The coat closet was gone.

My easy chair, fold-out chair was gone.

Everything was gone except my desk and a chair.

I called up and thought...

I said, "What the hell is going on?

And they said, well, I'm not animating,

so you don't get a rug on your floor.

GIVENS: I missed the old Hyperion place.

It was beginning to feel like corporate America.

It was just getting too big and losing the family touch.

The studio had grown so rapidly

that there were all of these folks in the animation process:

the assistant animators, the in-betweeners.

They didn't know Walt Disney.

And they weren't well paid by Walt Disney,

as the master animators were.

I think Walt Disney's attitude was,

"Look, anybody can do that stuff.

"The master animators, that's one thing.

"But doing in-between work,

"why am I going to pay them top dollar?

They're not artists."

SITO: Some of the people who told me about the cafeteria,

they said the cafeteria was wonderful,

but most of the rank-and-file artists

couldn't afford to eat there.

They still had to go out to the sandwich wagon

out on the street

'cause the salaries were all over the place.

I mean, there were people making $200 and $300 a week

and people making $12 a week.

NARRATOR: Workers at the bottom of the Disney ladder

were starting to grumble in 1940.

Now that the company's finances were public,

everybody knew the boss was making five or ten times more

than the highest-paid members of his creative team,

and more than 100 times that

of the women working in ink-and-paint.

Disney, who still insisted

that all his employees call him "Walt,"

was oblivious to the complaints at his new studio.

It was no longer common to see him wandering the halls,

engaging in idle chatter, batting around story ideas.

He spent most of his time in his own suite of offices,

with its private bath and bedroom

and a team of secretaries standing guard at his door.

Hollywood was famous

for its glamorous movie stars and directors,

but it would not have functioned

without the men and women working behind the scenes

building sets, adjusting lights, drawing animation.

When federal legislation had passed in 1935

allowing collective bargaining,

Hollywood's backstage hands began to organize.

More than a half-dozen Hollywood unions and guilds

emerged in the late 1930s

to bargain for better working conditions and better pay.

Among them was the Screen Cartoonists Guild,

which offered representation for the animators,

assistants, in-betweeners, and ink-and-paint artists

working across the industry.

By 1940, the Cartoonists Guild

had organized the animation departments

at all of the major studios except Disney's,

which employed more than half the men and women

working in the field of animation.

SITO: Even after organizing MGM and Warner Brothers

and Screen Gems and George Pal and Walter Lantz,

it only came to maybe about 150 people,

while Disney's was, like, 600.

If unionism was to work in Hollywood,

Disney was the ultimate battle.

NARRATOR: Walt Disney saw little reason to be worried.

He was not like those other fat-cat studio heads,

he told himself.

He and his "boys," as he called his animators,

were in this thing together.

HIGGINBOTHAM: Walt sees himself as the father of this company,

and that everyone who works for him

believes in what they are doing,

the enterprise of being animators,

of being artists, and being part of a business

and part of the studio.

GABLER: "Why in the world would anyone need a union

when I'm giving you everything you could possibly want?"

He didn't see paternalism in this.

He saw kindness and generosity in it.

NARRATOR: There were plenty of people at Burbank

who did not see the labor situation as Walt Disney did,

and among them was one of his best animators, Art Babbitt.

Babbitt had been with Disney for nearly a decade,

contributing to every major film

and almost single-handedly creating

the popular character Goofy.

He was one of the highest salaried animators

on the Burbank lot,

but made little effort to hide his sympathies

for other animators who had been denied on-screen credits,

or for the hundreds of assistants and inkers

who were barely eking out a living.

GABLER: He was rather a large personality.

He wasn't subservient to Walt.

He didn't have that kind of relationship to him.

He was his own man, he was independent,

and Walt didn't like it.

SITO: Babbitt used to tell the story about a young painter

who was making $16 a week

whose husband had run off because of the Great Depression.

And what she was doing is that she was skipping lunches

because she wanted to keep feeding her family.

And one day, she actually fainted from malnutrition.

NARRATOR: Disney didn't see the problem,

and certainly didn't want to hear about it.

He was incensed when he learned that

the Screen Cartoonists Guild was trying to organize his shop.

He was certain he had the right to run his own company

as he saw fit.

In February of 1941,

Walt decided to make his case personally

to the men and women working for him.

He gathered the staff in the only auditorium at the studio

big enough to hold all 1,200 of his employees.

DISNEY (recording): In the 20 years I have spent in this business,

I have weathered many storms.

It's been far from easy sailing,

which required a great deal of hard work, struggle,

determination, confidence, faith,

and, above all, unselfishness.

Some people think that we have class distinction in this place.

They wonder why some get better seats in the theater

than others.

They wonder why some men get spaces in the parking lot

and others don't.

I have always felt, and always will feel,

that the men who contribute the most to the organization

should, out of respect alone, enjoy some privileges.

My first recommendation to the lot of you is this:

put your own house in order.

You can't accomplish a damn thing by sitting around

and waiting to be told everything.

If you're not progressing as you should,

instead of grumbling and growling,

do something about it.

NARRATOR: Much of the staff left the auditorium infuriated.

"This speech recruited more members

"for the Screen Cartoonists Guild

than a year of campaigning," reported one left-wing magazine.

Babbitt was now convinced Disney workers needed a real union and

signed his Screen Cartoonists Guild membership card,

which made him the highest- ranking Disney employee

to openly challenge the boss.

Walt Disney saw Babbitt's move as a personal betrayal.

"I don't care if you keep your goddamn nose

glued to the board all day or how much work you turn out,"

he told Babbitt in the hallway one day.

"If you don't stop organizing my employees,

I'm going to throw you right the hell out of the front gate."

At the end of May 1941,

Disney sent a letter of termination to Babbitt,

citing as cause "union activities."

Word of Babbitt's firing shot through the studio in Burbank.

Disney employees who supported the guild

met after work the following evening

and by a vote of 315 to 4

determined to take a stand against their boss.

(applause)

When he drove up to his studio gate on May 29, 1941,

the picketers were already on the march.

Walt Disney was forced to wend his way

through more than 200 of his striking workers.

Nearly half of the studio's art department had walked out,

and it wasn't just the low-wage workers.

Some of Disney's most trusted animators

were also on the picket line.

HANH: The street's full of strikers,

not only from Disney but from other studios,

parading back and forth with signs,

and this wonderful, idyllic, utopian place is in shambles.

All of a sudden, the moment of the shared,

that "We are in this together,

the victories are all of our victories,"

that spell gets broken.

NILSEN: He poured his passion, everything he believed in

into his studio.

It was the studio that went against him at this point.

It was his own creation that went against him.

BRODE: A certain light, if not had gone out,

at least dimmed inside Walt Disney.

There is before the strike and there's after,

and he was two different people.

NARRATOR: Another man might have walked away

from his shattered utopia and called it a day.

But Disney still had work to do,

and woe be to the forces that stood in his path.

APPRAISER: Now, you told me there was an interesting story.

MAN: After the strike, Walt distrusted everybody.

Mother!

MAN: By the time the film came out,

it was almost as if Disney had become passé.

WOMAN: He said, "I want a place where people can take their family

and have a good time."

WOMAN: He affects all of us.

No one is untouched by Walt Disney.

The conclusion of "Walt Disney,"

on American Experience.

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Captioned by Media Access Group at WGBH access.wgbh.org