"MAN:" "Walt Disney could deal with anything creatively." "He could yell and scream." "That's where he wanted his energies to be devoted." "But he didn't want to be devoted to this, and he couldn't understand it!" "NARRATOR:" "Employees at the Walt Disney studios had been begging for better wages, extra pay for overtime and a uniform system for determining job titles and screen credits for months." "Walt had waved this off as the hobby-horse of a few hotheads and union agitators, right up to May 29th, 1941, the day nearly half of his art department walked out to take up positions on the picket line." "The strike demonstrations got bigger in the first weeks, and louder, and so did the threat to the already shaky studio." "Disney's last two feature films - Pinocchio and Fantasia - had both lost money and investors were fleeing." "The company stock had dropped from $25 dollars a share to $4." "Walt Disney needed a box office hit soon, and his own workers seemed intent on derailing the studio's only two hopes " "Dumbo and Bambi." "MAN:" "As the strike lingered and kept going, the mood of everybody started to get ugly, and people started to get angrier, and then Walt was getting angrier." "A month into the strike," "Disney refused to recognise the union representing his workers, the Screen Cartoonist Guild." "He refused to negotiate with the guild's representative," "Herbert Sorrell." "And he refused to make apologies to the man whose firing had prompted the strike, long-time Disney animator Art Babbitt." "MAN:" "There was one day where Art Babbitt noticed Disney driving to the gate." "And Babbitt just kind of blew his stack and just jumped over and grabbed the bullhorn and shouted out loud so everybody could hear," ""There he goes, the great man,"" "and basically just heaped abuse on Disney." ""Shame on you, Walt Disney."" "As the crowd cheered, Disney jumped out of his car and charged at Babbitt." "The two men had to be pulled apart." "Walt Disney could not believe that so many of his workers had actually taken sides with the union and against him." "Disney sniffed conspiracy, and a big one." "He went public with his pet theory in a full-page advertisement in a Hollywood trade paper, Variety." "WOMAN:" "He needed to have a bad guy." "He needs to blame it all on a villain." "And in this case, the new flavour of the month in Hollywood at that time and later, would be the shadow or spectre of Communism." "MAN:" "He becomes, then, like a typical industrial boss." "Most American executives at the time blame unionisation on Communists." "So, in this way, Disney becomes completely conventional." "(SHOUTING)" "Walt Disney is being bombarded by all of this negativity." "And it's just not something he was accustomed to." ""The entire situation is a catastrophe," he wrote to a friend." ""The spirit that played such an important part" ""in the building of the cartoon medium" ""has been destroyed." ""I have a case of the D.D.'s - disillusionment and discouragement."" "(AEROPLANE ENGINE ROARS)" "The next day, Disney skipped town for a 10-week working tour of South America, and left the headaches to his brother and long-time business partner, Roy." "MAN:" "What Walt Disney was doing was getting away, period." "He just was sick and tired of the whole business, and he wanted to go away and do something else." "GABLER:" "South America is a real relief for Walt Disney." "Wherever his plane lands, people are there to greet him." "Dignitaries invite him to dinners." "Everybody loves him." "And I think the contrast between the affection with which he's greeted in South America and the kind of hostility with which he'd been greeted in Los Angeles isn't lost on him." "Disney was still on the road in South America when his father, Elias, died unexpectedly." "Walt declined to cut his trip short and return home for the funeral of the man with whom he had clashed much of his life." "This was just fine with Roy." "He was happy to have Walt and his explosive temper remain at a safe remove while he tried to make peace with the Screen Cartoonists Guild." "WATTS:" "Roy Disney sees the writing on the wall." "He sees that unionisation is coming into the studios, whether we like it or not, and he wants to settle this." "He wants to get things up and running." "By the time Walt did finally return at the end of October," "Roy had resolved the strike." "The workers had been granted almost everything they had asked for." "The Disney art department was back on track." "But the studio would never again feel like family to Walt." "The gal I married was a secretary in personnel." "She was called up to Walt's office to help on the files." "And she would go through and find people that were out on strike." "And they were moved from here to this file." "Walt came in and said, "How's it going?"" "She just said, "What are we doing this for?"" "And he said, "Well, these are the people that are true to Disney." ""These are the people who, at one time or one day, will not be here."" "SITO:" "After the strike, Walt distrusted everybody." "One of the great animators who worked on Snow White said, "Walt Disney was a great man." "Walt Disney was a genius." ""If you were his friend, he was a warm friend." ""If you crossed him, he was a mean SOB."" "(MAN CHANTS MARCHING INSTRUCTIONS)" "Just a few months after the bruising strike," "World War II arrived at the Disney Studios, much of which was commandeered as a base for anti-aircraft troops." "Walt kept up a happy front, especially for his two daughters, but things were not great on the Disney lot." "Funding for feature film production had dried up by the summer of 1942." "The company was limping along on revenue generated by government contracts for propaganda and training films." "(SIGHS)" "Winter sure is long, isn't it?" "It seems long." "But it won't last forever." "Walt was counting on a big box-office hit to revive his faltering studio, and he believed that Bambi could fill that bill." "He had nurtured the film for nearly five years, kept the project alive through the worst of the strike." "Bambi?" "Bambi, come here." "Look." "New spring grass." "When it was finally released in August of 1942," "Bambi stood out as the most ambitious feature-length film in the history of the studio." "An artist's rendering of the natural world in all its beauty and peril." "(SINISTER MUSIC PLAYS)" "Bambi..." "Quick!" "The thicket!" "(GUNSHOTS)" "Faster!" "Faster, Bambi!" "Don't look back!" "Keep running!" "Keep running!" "(LOUD GUNSHOT)" "We made it!" "We made it, Mother!" "We..." "Mother?" "Mother!" "Mother, where are you?" "Mother!" "MAN:" "A generation was, and still is, traumatised by that moment in Bambi." "Mother!" "Mother!" "And it's done almost in pantomime, with the snow falling." "Fearless filmmaking." "Absolute fearlessness." "Mother!" "(SOBS)" "(GASPS)" "Your mother can't be with you anymore." "Come... ..my son." "GABLER:" "Bambi is a triumph for Disney in the sense that it probably extends realistic animation as far as it had gone, up to that point." "But by the time the film came out, it was almost as if Disney, in the course of a couple of years, had become passe." "Bambi did not make back its costs in its initial run." "Disney could tell his investors, as he could tell himself, that the war was to blame for the deficit." "But that failure, coming so close on the heels of the strike, made it impossible for him to deny the obvious." "He had invested too much in animated features - money, energy, effort, his own heart - and what did he have to show for it?" "A crippled company filled with people who had turned on him." "A mountain of debt." "Scorchings from the political press, the art world, film critics." "SITO:" "One of the things that was lost was the great period of Disney experimentation." "The first five Disney features is known in the business as "The Big Five."" "# Hi-ho!" "Hi-ho!" "#" "And The Big Five is Snow White, Pinocchio," "Fantasia, Bambi and Dumbo." "# Hi-ho!" "Hi-ho!" "#" "Now, if you look at those films individually, they don't look anything like one another." "When you talk about the Disney style, there was no Disney style back then." "Pinocchio looks nothing like Bambi." "Bambi looks nothing like Dumbo." "GABLER:" "The paradise that Disney had at Hyperion and into the early days of the Burbank studio is gone." "And with that paradise lost, the sense of the animations and the greatness of the animations is also lost." "(DRAMATIC MUSIC)" "It's never going to be the same." "MAN:" "Walt, how did you happen to choose the tales of Uncle Remus as the story for Song of the South?" "WALT DISNEY:" "Well, Johnny, I first heard the stories of Uncle Remus when I was a boy down in Missouri." "And since then, they've been one of my favourites." "Your favourites, and a million others'." "WOMAN:" "The Uncle Remus stories are a piece of American folklore, and that is the kind of story Walt is interested after World War II." "It's a way for him to start to break away from the European fairytale as the foundation of his narratives." "He sees it as being very personal and speaking to his own sense of boyhood." "Disney took a cost-conscious approach on Song of the South, mixing cheaper live-action sequences with animation, and for good reason." "His bankers were no longer willing to risk their money on the Disney studio's full-length animated features, even after the war was over." "Many of the first generation of Disney animators had left Burbank, and his once cutting-edge equipment was rusting like a junk-heap in a back lot." "By Walt's reckoning, the studio had only one reliable and undiminished asset from its pre-war glory days - his own instincts about what story to choose and how to tell it." "WATTS:" "It's the story of outsiders." "A young white boy who's dreadfully unhappy, a young black boy who is his good friend," "Uncle Remus, the wise old black storyteller, and, in the animated sections, Br'er Rabbit himself." "And in all of these things, what you get is a typical Disney populist story of the triumph of the underdog, outwitting your powerful opponents, manoeuvring, doing what you had to do to triumph." "Disney had been thinking about the Joel Chandler Harris stories for years." "He had optioned them during his 1939 spending spree following Snow White." "The Uncle Remus stories were uncomplicated." "The politics were not." "Harris had set the action on a plantation in the Deep South just after the Civil War, which meant Disney's adaptation would have to negotiate the questions of slavery and race in America - a dicey proposition after World War II," "when white supremacists in the South were fighting tooth and nail to maintain racial segregation." "HAHN:" "The core issue is, is it OK to be an African American and have this kind of joyous sense of storytelling about you, knowing that you went through the most horrific chapter of American history?" "Civil rights was not in full bloom, but certainly the NAACP and men coming back from war were saying, "I fought for an America that was...that was equal." ""And this is a part of our history that we have to deal with." ""A very profound social pain that we all share." ""And we don't want to whitewash it" ""into something that is this jolly story."" "HIGGINBOTHAM:" "Walt Disney has never been, up until this point, really concerned about social issues." "And to present the black body in the South the way he wanted to, through a folktale which was going to rely very heavily on stereotype, he was going to need to vet that from some source." "Disney solicited notes from well-known African American intellectuals and activists, including the head of the NAACP." "One scholar told Disney," ""He could do wonders in transforming public opinion,"" "but only if he avoided the most hurtful stereotypes, like scenes of former slaves belting out happy songs on Southern plantations." "Disney took the notes, and then trusted his own instincts." "As usual, when Disney got advice, he often didn't pay much attention to it, and he just sort of went ahead with how he envisioned things." "Disney chose to celebrate opening night of Song of the South in Atlanta, Georgia, where the celebrated epic of the Civil War South, Gone with the Wind, had premiered seven years earlier." "The actors who played the major white roles in Song of the South were all there." "But not James Baskett, who played Uncle Remus." "Georgia law barred the movie's star from entering the segregated theatre." "# Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" "# Zip-a-Dee-Ay!" "# My, oh, my, what a wonderful day" "# Plenty of sunshine heading' my way" "# Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" "# Zip-a-Dee-Ay!" "#" "It is as if Walt has divorced himself from social context." "It's sort of stunning." "# It's the same ol' thing" "# Want to get a bag of something for the hungry lord" "# Look up!" "#" "Critics were split." ""The whole film is beautifully produced," wrote one." ""The plantation is traditional Deep South " ""a dream place of magnolia blossoms and darkies singing' all day long."" ""Don't let the children miss it."" "# Go fly away!" "# Had the trouble with the weaver!" "#" "I sure is sorry, Miss Sally." "No, it's my fault." "I should have known you couldn't stop telling your stories." "I don't like to say this Uncle Remus, but from now on, I want you to stay away from Johnny." "Others, like the usually friendly New York Times, hit Disney hard." "Yes." ""The master-and-slave relation is so lovingly regarded in your yarn" ""that one might almost imagine" ""that you figure Abe Lincoln made a mistake."" "The NAACP decried Song of the South as a "dangerously glorified picture of slavery,"" "and many of its local chapters called for a boycott." "HIGGINBOTHAM:" "Disney was utterly dismayed by the negative reaction to Song of the South." "He very much believed in the narratives that it was offering." "He believed that these were American stories finally getting an opportunity to be on the big screen and in a feature film." "And so Walt is sort of shocked and disheartened by the responses that he's getting." "Disney decided the attacks were being engineered by his old foes, Communists, who had been waiting for another chance to take a whack at him since the strike." ""Hollywood was loaded with 'em," Walt would say." ""I had a lot of people just hoping it was the end."" "(CHEERFUL MUSIC PLAYS)" "There was a hot new animation studio in town by 1947 " "United Productions of America." "UPA and its founders had very different ideas from Walt Disney's, and it looked like they were leading a creative revolution against everything Disney had stood for." "SITO:" "Who says the natural goal of animation is realism?" "Why can't we use the trends that are entering into modern art?" "Why can't we do cartoons like this instead of trying to make everything so damn realistic all the time?" "And UPA was the place where, suddenly, people were free to experiment." "MAN:" "We had a whole new approach, which was nothing like Disney's." "We looked at the great guys - Picasso and Miro and those." "So, we invented a whole new way of doing it." "It was now West Bank animation." "Modern art, really." "Disney was keeping an eye on UPA." "He wasn't so much threatened by its work as he was galled by its principal talent." "Art Babbitt was on the UPA payroll, along with a number of other artists and animators who had fled the Disney studios or been ushered out after the strike." "The Burbank River goes past the Disney Studio and then it goes a mile or two down by where the UPA studio was." "And Disney used to call UPA "those damn Commies down river."" "Walt was curious because he'd send his spies over there to see what us Communists over by the river were doing, you know." "He called us the Communists." "REPORTER:" "Labor strife on the movie front." "California studios picketed in a dispute between rival unions." "Hollywood had been hit by another wave of strikes in the first few years after the war, and studio bosses were determined to blunt the unions." "Walt Disney was among them." "He was a founding officer of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals - an organisation sworn to protect the movie industry from what the alliance called "communists, radicals and crackpots."" "In October 1947," "Walt was offered a chance to hit back at his imagined antagonists." "He was invited to Washington to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee on the subject of "Reds in the Movies,"" "and what might be behind the new wave of labor strikes against the Hollywood studios." "Disney, along with a dozen other high-profile Hollywood executives and celebrities, was deemed one of the "friendly witnesses."" "MAN:" "And at the present time, you own and operate the Walt Disney Studio at Burbank, California?" "The first thing Disney did was reassure the committee that he was running a clean shop in Burbank, free of any Communist taint." "WALT DISNEY:" "They bought The Three Little Pigs and used it through Russia." "But then he started to name names, among them one of the leaders who had organised the 1941 strike against the Walt Disney Studios." "I believed at that time that Mr Sorrell was a Communist because of all the things that I had heard and, uh..." "..and had seen his name appearing on many of Commie front things." "And when he pulled the strike, the first people to put me... ..to smear me and put me on the unfair list were all of the Commie front organisations." "Some of my boys, my artists, came to me and told me that Mr Sorrell, Herbert Sorrell, was..." "Is that Herbert K. Sorrell?" "Herbert K. Sorrell." "He laughed at me and told me that I was naive, I was foolish." "He said, "You can't stand a strike," that "I'll smear you" ""and I'll make a dust bowl out of your place if I choose to."" "SITO:" "All his testimony was focused on the union leaders." "It wasn't just politically who's a Commie or who's... ..politically who's left or who's right." "It was all the union leaders." "GABLER:" "The HUAC testimony is 1947." "The strike is 1941." "So, we're talking a six-year period." "But I think it goes to show just how long Walt holds a grudge, which is forever." "He basically had this narrative in his mind of how he saw the way things happened." "And that's when he decried that Sorrell was a Communist." "..called them all a bunch of Communists, and I believe they are." "He couldn't actually prove he was a Communist." "He just said, "I don't know if he's a Communist or not but he probably is."" ""You think I'm a communist, don't you?"" "And I told him, that "All I knew is what I'd heard and what I'd seen."" "That's not enough for a trial." "Disney and other friendly witnesses, like Ronald Reagan and Gary Cooper, won plaudits for their performance and provided cover for the studio bosses' next move, which was intended to crush labour union activists." "MAN:" "The black list is designed to rid the industry of leftists." "And, in fact, it says that the studios would themselves agree not to hire anyone who was understood to be, alleged to be, a Communist." "So, Disney is not responsible for this but he's part of a movement that produces it." "It means that any number of people lose their means of making a living." "And, so it, in effect, ruins careers." "Walt Disney beat a hasty retreat from the political battlefield after his public testimony." "He had no stomach for an ongoing fight over ideology, and no interest." "He just wanted to get back to work." "MAN:" "Mr Disney, give me some more details of your leprechaun hunt." "I just hope that I can find that leprechaun with the pot of gold, because I could really use that in Hollywood with the cost of production going up the way it is." "Disney was producing more than ever by 1948, but he was all over the map, in search of the studio's next big thing." "He travelled to England to launch a series of live-action films, starting with the pirate story Treasure Island." "He made others in the US, including So Dear to My Heart, a nostalgic look at turn-of-the-century small town America." "He spent a week holed up in a hotel room in New York watching television, to see if there was anything to be done in the new medium." "He took his daughter Sharon on a trip to Alaska, scene of his first attempt at making a nature documentary, Seal Island." "HAHN:" "If Disney's going to make nature movies, he has to do what he does naturally." "Walt Disney tells stories." "So he looks at this thousand feet of footage for seals, and to him, he's looking for, "Oh, well, that's the mom seal," ""and that's the daughter seal and that's the bad guy seal," ""and they fight later on - they should fight." ""If you don't have that footage, go out and shoot it."" "And he turns it into a narrative." "(PLAYFUL MUSIC)" "'SEAL ISLAND' NARRATOR:" "Since no-one else will nurse him, let's hope Mother comes home soon, for if anything has happened to her, this pup will surely die." "(BLEATS)" "There are no orphans on Seal Island." "HAHN:" "So, to him it's a way of getting an animated film, but out of live footage." "(BLEATS)" "'SEAL ISLAND' NARRATOR:" "Yes, here they are at last, right on schedule, swimming and diving playfully, as though glad their journey is over." "But they don't seem in any great hurry to go ashore." "HAHN:" "He has to diversify." "He has no money." "They're really cheap to shoot." "I mean, the seals don't go on strike." "..having a final fling of single blessedness." "Seal Island won an Academy Award, and launched Disney's new and profitable line of nature documentaries " "True Life Adventures." "But Walt missed the excitement of feature animation, and by 1949, he was ready to start anew." "Roy baulked - too expensive, too risky, he said - and the brothers fought an epic, screaming battle." "Walt gave Roy an ultimatum - find the money for animated features, or sell off the business." "Roy walked out on him." ""You're letting this place drive you nuts," he said on his way out." ""That's one place I'm not going with you."" "Roy did eventually relent to Walt's desire, as always, and agreed to raise the $2 million they needed for a new animated feature - Cinderella." "But once production on the new film was up and running," "Disney was uncharacteristically distant from his studio's signature undertaking." "That old Snow White feeling of excitement and new possibilities eluded Walt." "He seemed wary of fully investing himself in the film, and left most of the hard work to his staff." "Nearing 50, Disney was also beginning to wear down, and so precipitously that he made sure to keep a trained nurse on the studio payroll." "Hazel George came to Walt's office every afternoon at 5:00 to give him heat treatment for his back, a Scotch mist or two and a friendly ear." "MAN:" "She was a very pleasant lady." "Walt, because he had hurt himself playing polo, almost every night or every other night, he would go to Hazel and she would...she'd massage his back and his hips because he was in great pain." "GABLER:" "Hazel George becomes one of those very few figures in his entire life to whom he can talk." "It wasn't a sexual relationship, it wasn't anything like that, but she was someone to whom he could say anything and everything, and he could say it in confidence." "WATTS:" "He's very famous." "He's very powerful." "He absolutely runs the show." "But it's difficult to say, if Walt Disney had any close, close friends, bosom companions that he could really talk to and share things with." "GABLER:" "Walt Disney is at low ebb." "He said, "I realise that I'm never going to make" ""anything as good as Snow White."" "When you think of Walt Disney as the guy who's always looking at the next horizon, the guy who's always trying to break a new path, the guy who's lived for excellence..." "..and then he can say, not only to himself but publicly," ""I'm never going to make anything as good as Snow White..."" "You want to hear a man in crisis?" "That's a man in crisis." "In the fall of 1948, as he had done nearly two decades earlier," "Walt followed doctor's orders and departed on a vacation." "Hazel George, who had seen the enormous new toy train layout" "Walt had installed in his private office, had suggested he take a trip to a railroad convention in Illinois." "Walt had invited a fellow train enthusiast to travel with him." ""Goddammit, you have more fun than anybody I know,"" "Disney told animator Ward Kimball." "As the two men rode the rails drinking Scotch mists," "Walt regaled Ward with his life story, from Marceline to Hollywood." "(RAILWAY CROSSING BELL RINGS)" "(TRAIN HORN BLARES)" "By the time they arrived in Chicago, Disney was giddy." "WATTS:" "It's Disney returning to his roots." "The train is something that he associates with his childhood, with growing up where the railroad ran next to his house, right through the centre of Marceline." "The train is something he associates with that vanished age of his childhood." "Disney arrived home with a new obsession - having his own large-scale model train - and he ordered one built at the studio in Burbank." "He made it his business to stop by the studio machine shop most days, just to check in on the progress." "He was soon spending three or four hours at a time in the shop, and then more hours in the evening, and then all day on Saturday." "The head machinist had assigned Disney his own bench and toolset by then, and put him to work." "Walt Disney was building these trains with his own hands." "Manual labour." "The great Walt Disney was now devoting his energies to toy trains." "When a film critic from the New York Times visited during production on Cinderella, he found Disney, as he wrote, "Wholly, almost weirdly, concerned" ""with the miniature railroad engine and his cars." ""All of his zest for invention, for creating fantasies," ""seemed to go into this plaything."" "When Walt's oft-neglected progeny, Cinderella, finally premiered at the beginning of 1950, critics hailed it as the long-awaited return of the classic Disney form and a must-see." "Now, let's see dear." "Your size and shade of your eyes." "Mm-hm." "Something simple, but daring too!" "Just leave it to me!" "What a gown this will be!" "Bippity-boppity, bippity-boppity, bippity-boppity-boo!" "Oh!" "It's a beautiful dress!" "Roy optimistically told Walt that Cinderella would gross $5 million or $6 million after those first reviews." "It made nearly $8 million." "It's like a dream." "A wonderful dream come true!" "Yes, my child." "Walt was happy to have the financial cushion the film provided his studio, and happy to have the good reviews." "But he saw all the movie's imperfections and every corner cut." "It was no Snow White, as far as he was concerned." "His interest remained elsewhere." "WATTS:" "He builds a scale model of the old Marceline barn out behind his house, in the middle of Holmby Hills." "And he's out there in overalls and a flannel shirt and a train engineer hat, just monkeying around for hours with designing the track and building the engine." "It was funny, you know." "You would see those pictures of him with his train, you know - ch-ch-ch-ch - the train that went around his house, and I think there was pleasure in that for him." "It was the toy he never had as a little kid." "It was something that was just pure fun and pleasure for him to do." "There was more in that train than just fun and games for Walt." "When Salvador Dali made a visit to Walt's house, the famous painter understood what Walt was up to." "Disney was seeking an ideal, and Dali was taken aback at the ambition of it." ""Such perfection," the surrealist told Walt," ""did not belong to models!"" "KOEHN:" "It's comfort and salvation and a working surface for the disappointments and confusion that comes to him in that period of his life." ""I can't control my workers, it turns out." ""I can't control the larger stage right now." ""I can't even completely control my company." ""So here's a world I can re-create, down to the smallest detail," ""down to tunnels under my wife's flowerbed..." ""..that is mine and perfect and brought to life and safe."" "Hey, Agnes!" "That's our train!" "Lillian Disney could sense something big brewing in early 1952." ""It was one of those moments," she would say," ""when Walt's imagination" ""was going to take off into the wild blue yonder," ""and everything will explode."" "Walt, Lillian noted, was liquidating long-held family assets." "Her husband sold their Palm Springs vacation home and borrowed $100,000 against his life insurance policy." "He even sold rights to his own name, to Walt Disney Productions." "Then he started an entirely new company, for an entirely new enterprise." "GABLER:" "He gets a little building, the back part of the studio lot, and he creates this organisation called WED, which were his initials - Walter Elias Disney." ""I'll get a few guys," ""just like we did when we were making Mickey Mouse," ""and we'll come up with some ideas."" "So that's what WED is." "WED is the old days." "Walt Disney had one very specific vision in mind, and he had already drawn up plans for building this new project on a vacant lot he owned next to his studio." "Disney had actually been kicking around the idea for years." "WOMAN:" "When he had his girls and they were very young, he wanted to take them to places they would have fun, but every time he'd go to see a carnival or something else, the men were all filthy, dirty-looking," "and the place was filthy." "And he said, "I want a place where people can take a family" ""and have a good time."" "Whenever he thought of something, it kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger." "Disney first dubbed the park 'Mickey Mouse Village', but then hit on 'Disneyland'." "By the end of 1952, the plans for Disneyland had outgrown the little eight-acre lot next to his studio." "He started culling talent from the Disney production team and sending them to WED." ""I want you to work on Disneyland,"" "he told one slightly confused layout artist," ""and you're going to like it."" "Roy thinks it's a nutty idea." ""An amusement park?" "No." ""An amusement park that's going to cost tens of millions of dollars..."" "And, you know, "It's not gonna work."" "WOMAN:" "Amusement parks were carnival-esque places." "These were places where you went to have your sensations stimulated by very, very fast rides..." "..by carnival barkers inviting you in to see Tom Thumb or the Giant Lady." "These were places where you went to have the rules not apply." "When Walt told Mrs Disney that he was going to start a park... ..she said, "Why would you want to do that?" "They're not safe." ""The people in them are not people you want to be around."" "And Walt said, "Mine's not going to be like that."" "Disney's newest notion was not unlike his very first commercially successful idea." "Just as he had inserted the real Alice into a cartoon world," "Walt thought he could put real people inside a new adventure - live and three-dimensional." "He would construct the make-believe world for them, just as he had constructed his railroad." "This is a leap-from-the-tub, eureka, run-down-the-street moment here." "I mean, just think about that." ""I am going to take what these movies have done," ""these landscapes that we've invented" ""that are just drawings on paper and coloured pencils " ""I'm going to create a place where you can actually walk within it."" "This is kicking down many walls of perspective and reality." "Disney has this great idea for building Disneyland." "Now, one problem - where's the money gonna come from?" "So, you see, this is the result of being a good boy for 30 years." "Santa finally came across." "See the little traveller in there?" "See that thing, right?" "And this up here, this is the, uh... (TOOT!" ") ..whistle." "Mr Disney!" "Disney had been looking for the best way to exploit the new medium of television since the late 1940s." "He had even taken it for a test drive in 1950, hosting a one-off Christmas special, One Hour in Wonderland, to promote one of his films." "The Disney program drew 90% of the viewing audience and gushing reviews." ""Walt Disney can take over television any time he likes,"" "The New York Times suggested." "You kids help me with the magic words." "Bippity-boppity..." "ALL:" "Boo!" "The three major networks had been asking Disney for more shows ever since, and by the summer of 1953, Walt was hot to make a deal." "Roy travelled to New York to make an offer to each of the major television networks." "The Disneys were willing to produce a weekly show, but for a price - the network that got the show would have to provide much of the $5 million the brothers needed for the construction of Disneyland." "Just two days before the pitch meetings, on a Saturday," "Roy decided he needed a sales tool that didn't yet exist - a drawing of the entire park." "Disneyland, at that point, was still largely in Walt's head, and his head alone." "Roy called Walt, and Walt called an old Disney art director and begged him to help." ""Like a little boy with tears in his eyes," Herb Ryman recalled." "Walt stayed at Ryman's side for more than 42 hours straight, delivering him sandwiches and milkshakes, and describing what he wanted through billows of cigarette smoke." "So, Walt can stand there and direct him around and say, "No, make the castle bigger," ""and let's put a Frontierland over here," ""and maybe this could be an Indian village,"" "and direct the orchestra." "It's like Walt can stand there and go, "A little more viola, please,"" "and have Herb Ryman lay out this whole plan." "The two men put the drawing on a plane that Monday, but Roy still had a hard time sealing the deal." "NBC and CBS had no interest in putting up the money for something called Disneyland." "It took Roy months to convince the perennial third-place network, ABC, to take the bait." "Walt later joked," ""ABC needed the television show so damn bad" ""that they bought the amusement park."" "SCHICKEL:" "That was a probably pretty dangerous moment for him, corporately-speaking." "Will it be a success?" "Will it be a failure?" "If it's a failure, you know, the whole company is kind of on the line." "HIGGINBOTHAM:" "He saw this as his personal statement about who he was, who the Walt Disney company was and who he thought America was." "He believed in this so strongly." "Disney's plans for the 160-acre building site in Anaheim, California, called for 5,000 cubic yards of concrete, a million square feet of asphalt pathways and acres of flowers and greenery." "The designs included a three-quarters scale replica of an 1890s Main Street, suspiciously similar to Walt's memories of Marceline, man-made riverbeds for the steamboat in Frontierland and the Jungle Cruise in Adventureland, and a Bavarian-style castle towering 80 feet above Fantasyland." "There were also plans for more than a mile of narrow-gauge railroad track ringing the park, and beyond that, a 20-foot high berm, so that the real world could not intrude." "MAN:" "The first time I ever saw Disneyland, it was a great big dusty place full of bulldozers and orange trees being knocked down and concrete forms being built." "And when I first saw it, I thought, "We're gonna open in six months?" ""How in the world are they ever gonna do this?"" "The desire for escape and amusement was growing in mid-'50s America, and more and more people had the means of pursuit." "Americans were fanning out into the suburbs." "More families than ever before had a television set in the living room and extra cash in the family pay cheque for entertainment, travel, toys." "The biggest generation America had ever seen, the Baby Boomers, had reached school age." "These children were not yet old enough to drive the family car, but they were old enough to drive family spending." "DOUGLAS:" "These kids are eight and nine years old." "And they're looking for a kind of set of cultural values that are a bit different from the privations of the Depression and the war." "TV ANNOUNCER:" "American Motors, builders of Nash Automobiles," "Kelvinator home appliances and Hudson Motor Cars... ..present Walt Disney's Disneyland!" "# When you wish upon a star" "# Makes no difference who you are. #" "Each week, as you enter this timeless land, one of these many worlds will open to you." "Here now to tell you about it is Walt Disney." "Welcome." "I guess you all know this little fellow here." "It's an old partnership." "SKLAR:" "I think he was one of the great salesmen of our time because he never tried to sell something he didn't personally believe in." "Now we want you to share with us our latest and greatest dream." "That's it, right here." "Disneyland!" "Seen from about 2,000 feet in the air and 10 months away." "GABLER:" "Now, Walt Disney is creating anticipation for Disneyland." "And he's making people feel - particularly children " ""This is the most magical place." "You have to come here."" "He makes it a destination." "We hope that through our television show that you will join us and take part in the building of Disneyland, and that you will find here a place of knowledge and happiness." "He was very humble and open, and seemed very accessible." "At the same time, he'd never condescend." "He always talked to children as peers, as equals." "But this year..." "HIGGINBOTHAM:" "Walt becomes the master of dreams and hopes." "Not in a...off-putting way, not in a way that feels unrelateable." "Now, at the foot of Main Street, about where you're sitting, is the plaza." "He's actually an individual who could make your dreams come true." "Shooting out from here, like the four cardinal points..." "The Disneyland TV show featured a different hour-long offering every week, each show mapped onto one of the four realms at the theme park Walt was building." "They are Adventureland... ..Tomorrowland..." "..Fantasyland... ..and Frontierland." "It was a Frontierland offering " ""tall tales and true from the legendary past" - that became the talk of the schoolyard." "Now, in our TV series from Frontierland, we're going to tell about these real people who became legend, like Davy Crockett." "Davy Crockett aired on three separate Wednesdays from December of 1954 to February of 1955." "ANNOUNCER:" "Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter." "Children across the country fell hard for the larger-than-life frontiersman." "DOUGLAS:" "Davy Crockett was homespun, plain-spoken, tough, enterprising." "He was the rugged individual who triumphed over everything." "He really embodied a nostalgic, idealised view of American male values." "MAN:" "Davy Crockett is incredibly anti-authoritarian in a way no other western hero for kids were at that time." "When Davy Crockett arrives at Andrew Jackson's camp, the first thing he does is disobey orders." "Excuse me, General." "Well, what do YOU want?" "!" "Nothing much." "Dropped in to say goodbye." "Goodbye?" "Where do you think you're going?" "Home." "You're going after Red Stick with the rest of my command." "This war isn't over yet." "I ain't quitting the war." "Me and my neighbours will be back directly." "You see General, we only volunteered for 60 days and that's long since up." "Catching Red Stick's liable to take up the rest of the year." "We've gotta see our families is took care of before we start out on anything like that." "Well, Major?" "Desertion is a serious crime in the army, Crockett!" "We ain't quitting the war." "I told you we's coming back." "You're confined to this camp." "That's an order!" "My missus would worry about me." "Sorry, General." "BRODE:" "Disney films told children to emulate Davy Crockett and that means listen to your own inner self." "Do not do what authoritarian figures tell you to do if you believe they're wrong." "Pa!" "Pa!" "Pa's back!" "Pa's back!" "Oh, Davy, you're back!" "Hi, Pa!" "Hi, Pa!" "WATTS:" "The ratings just went through the roof, and as the serialised segments came on, they got bigger and bigger and bigger." "By the time the third and final episode of Davy Crockett aired, a quarter of the entire American population was tuned in." "# Born on a mountain top in Tennessee... #" "The show's theme song became a number one hit record." "Boys and girls across America were sporting coonskin caps, just like the one their hero wore." "# Davy!" "# Davy Crockett" "# King of the Wild Frontier... #" "GABLER:" "The Davy Crockett series was one of those things that hits American culture in a way that only a handful of things ever hits American culture." "Elvis Presley, the Beatles." "You know, Davy Crockett was kind of like that." "It was a sensation." "Davy Crockett even proved a powerful pop culture symbol in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, a battle of ideologies fought with words and pictures and stories." "Davy Crockett's famous saying was, "Be sure you're right," ""and then go ahead."" "And I think that's what Americans wanted to think about themselves in the Cold War." ""We're sure we're right and, by God, we're gonna go ahead."" "GABLER:" "His animations created a perfect and artificial world." "And what he was really doing is he was making that material in Disneyland." "He always thought of Disneyland as a living animation, a living movie." "And he thought people would love to enter a film, not just watch it." "SKLAR:" "You're walking into the story." "And the things that we worked so hard...and this was Walt " "..that we worked so hard to avoid is letting people out of the story with discordant details - something out of the time period that doesn't work." "Even the trash cans in the park are for that particular story, that theme." "Walt was down in Anaheim almost every day." "He would walk every inch of the construction site, barking orders." ""Move that gazebo!" "It's blocking the view of the castle." ""Can we make that lake bigger?" "Move the train wreck 50 feet!" ""That tree's too close to the walkway!" "How about moving it?"" "Never mind it weighed 15 tons." "GURR:" "Walt was literally down there every day, watching everything..." "..but never distraught, never negative." "Just urging everybody on, exploring all the ways how to fix stuff." "GABLER:" "Walt is interested in every blade of grass." "He's interested in every leaf on a tree." "He's interested in where everything is placed." "There's not an attraction that Walt Disney isn't deeply involved in." "Disney's constant demands put the entire operation behind the eight-ball, as did his stubborn insistence to get Disneyland up and running in a hurry." "Six weeks from his announced opening date, panic was starting to set in." "The entrance plaza was not yet landscaped," "Main Street was unpaved, the castle unfinished." "The Jungle Cruise boats were moving, but the robotic animals had yet to be installed." "As opening day approached, less than half of the planned attractions were ready to receive visitors, and members of the WED staff were lobbying to push back the opening." "Walt was uninterested in the naysayers." "He just kept pushing harder." "The construction crew tripled in the final weeks, to 2,500 men, many of whom were working 16 hours a day." "Costs climbed to more than $17 million, more than three times the estimate made when construction began." "SKLAR:" "So many things were finished at the last minute." "There was a plumbers' strike in Orange County, which was settled about a day before Disneyland opened." "So, Walt had the choice of finishing the bathrooms or the drinking fountains." "And, of course, he chose the bathrooms." ""People can buy Pepsi-Cola," Disney explained," ""but they can't pee in the street."" "GURR:" "Well, the interesting thing about Walt, just before the park was getting ready to open, he was so excited." "Like a proud father." "Look what he's got now!" "That was Walt at his best." "His enthusiasm of pursuing where he wanted to go, and everybody was just going to follow him right along." "The park was a-bustle the day before the opening." "ABC was setting its cameras and running rehearsals for the next day's broadcast, which was planned as the biggest and most ambitious live telecast ever." "One work crew was frantically trying to dig out the 900-pound mechanical elephant that was sinking into the Jungle River." "Another was adding lead weights to the front of the train engine to make sure it didn't tip backward." "Painters were settling in for an all-nighter." "Walt himself put on a mask and helped spray-paint backdrops for the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea exhibit." "He was still at Disneyland at three o'clock in the morning, walking the grounds, barking orders." ""We need new murals for the trains!" "Get me an artist!"" "July 17th, 1955, dawned unusually hot in Anaheim, California." "The temperature was already nearing 100 degrees when word came that traffic into the park was backed up for seven miles on Harbour Boulevard." "When the gates opened that afternoon people flooded in, many of them waving counterfeit tickets." "You are now in the press room of Disneyland, which is equipped to service over 1,000 members of the worldwide press here to cover this truly great event." "And to start the proceedings, we take you to the entrance of Disneyland and your host, Art Linkletter." "Well, this job in the next hour and a half is going to be a delight." "I feel like..." "Well, I feel like Santa Claus with a $17 million bundle of gift packages, all wrapped in whimsy and sent your way over television with the help of 29 cameras, dozens of crews and literally miles and miles of cable." "Now, of course, this is not so much a show as it is a special event." "Hello, Walt!" "Hello, Governor!" "Hi!" "Hi, Art!" "Hi!" "How'd the run go?" "Oh, fine, fine!" "The Governor had her round through Frontierland and then Fred Gurley there, he took her round." "I picked her up and brought her in." "High-ballin' in, boys!" "WATTS:" "They have dozens of cameras all through the park." "And the hope is that they will go from this scene to that, and here to there, and show all parts of the park." "And about half of it worked and half of it didn't." "Technology, of course, in the TV age in that period was very crude." "It was live TV and there were a lot of screw-ups." "Sure." "Bob Cummings up at the pirate ship." "We're back to you, boy!" "(QUIET CHATTER)" "Oh!" "You're waiting for me?" "Oh, thank you!" "Everybody is waving at Bob Cummings over here, so I guess I'm back on." "Well, ladies and gentlemen, it's Bob Cummings again, back with you." "And like the Peter Pan Fly-Through..." "I'd like to read these few words of dedication." ""A vista into a world of wondrous ideas" ""signifying man's achievements..."" "I thought I got a signal?" "The audience for the live broadcast that Sunday was double Disney's normal number." "Nearly half of the American population took in Disneyland from the comfort of their own living rooms, which had its advantages." "Fantasyland was closed by a nearby gas leak." "Mr Toad's Wild Ride succumbed to an overload of the park's power grid." "GURR:" "It was so hot!" "It was just not a day you want to have that much heat." "The asphalt was still soft." "And the gals with the high heels were going down in the asphalt." "The lines were so packed, we didn't try to eat because it was..." "The lines to get food was ridiculous." "The whole thing was a bit of a nightmare." "SKLAR:" "Oh, it was awful." "It was terrible." "There were rumours that some of the Hollywood personalities were using language that shouldn't be heard by children." "(LAUGHS)" "Newspaper reporters were crawling all over the park that day, filling their notebooks with mishaps and misadventures for their next day's stories." "Walt didn't care." "His daughter Diane said she had never seen him happier." "Walt, you've made a bum out of Barnum today, but we've gotta go." "I know, but I just want to say a word of thanks to all the artists, the workers, and everybody that helped make this dream come true." "Let's go into Fantasyland and have some fun." "Have some fun!" "Let's go." "Goodbye, folks!" "Disneyland was thrown open to the public the day after the gala opening, and people began lining up at two o'clock that morning for the chance to be the first ones through the gate." "The park drew a million visitors in its first 10 weeks alone," "Pretty soon, there were five million per year, and Walt's paradise had become a must-see for foreign dignitaries on tour in the US." "Prime Minister Nehru of India touched down in the park, as did the King and Queen of Nepal, the Shah of Iran, political leaders from Europe, Africa and South America." "Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev threw a fit when the US State Department, citing security concerns, quashed his planned visit to Disneyland." "These world leaders saw Disneyland as a quick and easy window into the US psyche." "The Cliff Notes version of American history and culture." "Walt's countrymen, meanwhile, were enticed to this new vacation destination by a simple promise - a day's escape from the cares and concerns of everyday life." "WATTS:" "What introduces all of it, that you have to go through when you come into the park, is this idealised rendering of small-town America." "The values, the feel, the ethics, all of that." "What Disney's trying to do at some level of awareness is to create an image of America that people would like to think exists." "(BOAT'S WHISTLE TOOTS)" "ANNOUNCER:" "On Tom Sawyer's Island, you see Old Fort Wilderness." "Shelter and protection for the hearty pioneers, pushing ahead into unsettled territory." "Off the port bow, a friendly Indian village where members of many tribes gather to perform ancient ceremonial dances." "HIGGINBOTHAM:" "Disneyland is a space in which American ideals are celebrated." "So, you have Frontierland and you have gestures to America's past, and not the complicated moments, not the moments that are about pain and suffering." "If there's a Native American presence at Frontierland, it's not about the contest." "It's about resolution." "Frontierland and Adventureland pointed back," "Fantasyland inward." "Tomorrowland compassed advances in science and technology that assured better days to come, and all under the guidance of corporate America." "ANNOUNCER:" "Welcome to Monsanto's Plastics Home of the Future." "As you entered this experimental model home, perhaps you noticed that the house itself is constructed entirely of plastics." "HIGGINBOTHAM:" "Disneyland is the idealisation of the past and the hopeful regard for the future." "It is not about now." "It is a complete release from all of those burdens." "GABLER:" "What people find there is a perfection that you can't find in real life." "It's odd to say that something's better than real, because after all, what's better than real?" "But Walt Disney was the man who helped discover things that are better than real." ""Disneyland materialises bigger than life and twice as real,"" "one magazine writer gushed." "Another praised Disney for tending his creation" ""with the sureness of a mature master" ""who can still retain the vision of a child."" "There were a handful of early critics." ""The whole world, the universe," ""and all man's striving for dominion over self and nature,"" "wrote a journalist," ""have been reduced to a sickening blend" ""of cheap formulas packaged to sell." ""Life is bright-coloured, clean, safe, mediocre, inoffensive."" "Walt Disney wanted bright and clean and safe." "He loved the place." "GURR:" "Walt treated that park as his personal toy." "Over the firehouse there, next to the City Hall, they had a little apartment." "He and Lilly would go down there on a Friday or Saturday night." "He'd get up early in the morning before anybody showed up, and he'd go over to a little store where they had orange juice being freshly squeezed, and he'd go out there in his bathrobe and get it" "and come back up to his little apartment." "MAN:" "It was a good place for Walt to relax, get away from the crowd." "But it was adjacent to the jungle ride." "All night long, you would hear... (CHANTS) "Ha-ya-ya-ya!" "Ha-ya..." (LAUGHS)" "All night long." "CRUMP:" "If you saw him in person, you'd never recognise him from the man that was on TV." "Walt was really quite bent over." "With his little sweater that he wore, his little golf sweater, and he never combed his hair, he'd wander around Disneyland and nobody knew who he was." "He used to get in line and stand in line for as long as it took to see the attraction, and just listen to what people had to say because there might be something that he would hear that would spark him into some of the attractions that he was doing." "At a dinner party one evening, a friend suggested to Disney that he was popular enough to be elected President." "Walt fixed him with an incredulous stare." ""Why would I want to be President of the United States?" ""I'm the King of Disneyland."" "In July 1956, the summer after his theme park opened," "Walt Disney alighted in Marceline, Missouri, the town where he had briefly lived a half-century earlier." "He had been asked back to dedicate a park named in his honour, and surprised the town fathers by accepting the invitation." "(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)" "Marceline accorded Walt and his brother, Roy, a hero's welcome, and Disney luxuriated in the glow of the town's adoration." "The reception seemed to confirm Walt Disney's fondest idea of himself." "He was the exemplar of the simple and steadfast virtues of middle America - a small-town boy made good." "It didn't matter that Walt had spent nearly his entire childhood in Kansas City and Chicago, and his entire adult life in Los Angeles." "He was reclaiming Marceline as home." "This was classic Disney - an act of will and of imagination." "He was rewriting his own childhood with a happy ending." "HAHN:" "Mark Twain had his Hannibal," "Walt Disney was going to have his Marceline." "He could go out and just play." "And sit in his wishing tree." "And hear the trains go by at night-time, trains that could take him anywhere in the world." "NILSEN:" "For him, everything springs out of Marceline." ""This is the place you need to represent and signify" ""as the one where I came from."" "HIGGINBOTHAM:" "It almost feels like it's locked in time." "It's frozen." "And he can relive it over and over and over again." "I think that is the appeal of it." "It's a romanticised period of his youth." "And he accesses it." "He can go back to it and use it as a touchstone for his understanding of what an ideal childhood should be." "By 1960, Walt Disney stood atop one of the world's most profitable entertainment enterprises." "The steady stream of revenue from Disneyland meant Walt was free from interference from his bankers for the first time in his 40-year career." "But whether he was making improvements on his theme park or overseeing his TV shows and the half-dozen movies his studio was producing every year, he was always thinking about protecting his legacy." ""Disney is something we've built up in the public over the years,"" "he explained to one young writer." "Disney "stands for something."" "SUSKIND:" "Brand wasn't used back then, but, you know, "I now am a symbol," is what he's saying." "And I think what he's trying to wrestle with is how does it feel to be a symbol?" "How does it feel to be, essentially, a one-word representation of a lot of stuff?" "ANNOUNCER:" "Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse present the Mickey Mouse Club!" "# M-I-C-K-E-Y" "# M-O-U-S-E," "# Mickey Mouse!" "# Donald Duck!" "# Mickey Mouse!" "# Donald Duck!" "# Forever let us hold our banner high, high, high, high!" "#" "HIGGINBOTHAM:" "He starts to internalise that sense of he's standing for something more." "And it's not shareholders." "Those are not who he feels responsible to." "KIDS:" "Yay, Mickey!" "Yay, Mickey Mouse!" "As he solidifies as a brand, you don't have that risk-taking that you felt in the early years of his career." "MILLER:" "He invited Diane and I over to watch a film." "The film was To Kill a Mockingbird." "He said, "Boy, that was a hell of a picture." ""I wish I could make a picture like that."" "And you could feel that he felt restricted in what he... ..how far he could go." "And one more thing we want you to always remember..." "# M-I-C..." "See you real soon!" "# K-E-Y... #" "Why?" "Because we like ya!" "HAHN:" "It is entertainment that is bounded by Walt's ethics and his aesthetics and his perception of what a family audience wanted and needed." "You're going to see the happy ending." "You're going to see a film or a theme park or a place to go where it shows the hope of the human spirit excelling and winning at the end of the day." "'Cause that's who he was." "SONG: # Colour... #" "Disney made no apologies for his work, whatever his private misgivings." "He would sometimes say, with more than a little revisionist history, that he had never thought of his movies as art, but as show business, and could point to his huge box-office take as proof that he was serving" "an appreciative public." "WALT DISNEY:" "Hello!" "I'm sorry you got lost." "When ABC expressed frustration over the falling ratings of his television show," "Disney simply moved it to NBC's Sunday evening line-up and stayed on as host." "Now, in a few moments, we'll go over to Stage Two for the filming of the final scene of Babes in Toyland." "SCHICKEL:" "He liked his fame." "He was comfortable with it." "He liked introducing the TV show." "He liked the character he created of the avuncular Uncle Walt." "The motion picture set is probably the most expendable part of filmmaking." "CRUMP:" "They would write scripts and have a monitor for him to read when he was on TV, and then he'd just forget it, he just would wing it." "So, he loved winging it on TV." "Time to shoot the final scene." "All the cast and all the crew are on Stage Two." "HIGGINBOTHAM:" "There's something very affable about Walt Disney, the host." "He's there every week." "He's a regular part of your living room experience." "Well, this is how a busy movie set looks to the man behind the man behind the camera." "HIGGINBOTHAM:" "He speaks to you as if you mattered to him." "But it's actually a well-organised and efficient operation." "HIGGINBOTHAM:" "Is it really him?" "I don't know." "I want to believe it's him." "I hope it's him." "And I think audiences hope it's him as well." "Walt was aware of the gap between himself and the persona he had created for public consumption." ""I'm not Walt Disney," he once told a friend." ""I do a lot of things Walt Disney wouldn't do." ""Walt Disney doesn't smoke." "I smoke." ""Walt Disney doesn't drink." "I drink."" "He told himself he was the same regular guy he had always been." "He got his haircuts at the company barbershop, drove himself to the office every day, and carried cans of his favourite chilli-and-beans on trips to London or the French Riviera." "But he was not like everybody else, and he knew it." "MAN:" "Every time Walt walked down a hallway, he would give a loud cough." "Naturally, you'd think Walt's coughing because he was a smoker." "But his cough was not necessarily due to smoking." "It was a warning sign so we would know that the boss was in the area." "MAN:" "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." "He walked through the door and, you know, pins would drop." "You couldn't hear anything." "His personal power walked right with him." "You knew you were sitting with Walt Disney." "And there was no joking around." "He would sit down, he'd say, "OK, guys, what you got?"" "Disney's company was bigger than ever in the early 1960s, with money to burn." "But Walt was as restless and driven as always, and still difficult when things were going against him." "He quit speaking to his brother Roy for months during a contentious contract negotiation." "He still chain-smoked through every story meeting, always aware that the clock was running." "MILLER:" "For the most part he was patient, but when somebody was really off base, his eyebrow would go up and..." "..his fingers would start tapping." "That was the sign." "NORMAN:" "Walt was not generous with praise." "If he was pleased with something, he would simply say, "That'll work."" "If you could get "That'll work" from Walt Disney, you knew you had done your job." "That was a good day." "That was a good meeting." "SHERMAN:" "Walt Disney could be very hard on someone if they weren't cooperating in his way." "He'd jump on them really very badly." "Because if somebody's, "Nah, just doesn't hit me." ""I just don't like it,"" "he'd say, "If you can't think of a way to improve it, or try to," ""then keep your mouth shut."" "Oh, he got very upset with them." "I only saw him..." "in the seven years that I knew him," "I only saw him unload twice." "And I thought," ""God, I'll never reach that point to where he unloads on me."" "But the people that he unloaded on deserved it." "I was there." "Once he's made a decision, you abide by it." "Whether you agree with it or not, he's the boss, for godsakes." "SCHICKEL:" "I don't think he was totally grounded." "I think he wanted to be what his image was." "I think he wanted to be thought of as "hail-fellow-well-met,"" "good-natured." "But he wasn't." "Nobody who does stuff on the scale that he did is a good-natured, sweetheart of a guy." "He was a hard-driving guy." "And I don't think he ever resolved those conflicts." "(HORN HONKS)" "Walt Disney had no real intimates outside his own family and made little room in his life for friends." "But he wanted acceptance and love and acclaim with a greediness that would have looked pathetic in a less successful man." "At age 61, he had won more Academy Awards than any other film producer in history, but it irked him that he had never even won a nomination for the most coveted prize - the Oscar for Best Picture." "The boss's increasing engagement in one particular film in the Disney pipeline started to create buzz around Burbank in 1963." "Mary Poppins was based on a favourite children's novel of Disney's daughters, and a project Walt had started thinking about 20 years earlier, back in that long-vanished era of limitless possibility after the worldwide success of Snow White." "And memories of that formative era seemed to be tugging at Walt." "MILLER:" "There was no animation in Mary Poppins." "I'll never forget, one time, we're going over a scene and Walt said, "By the way, Ron, would you look up Song of the South," ""and reel two, a hundred feet into it?" ""Put it in a projection room." ""I would like to run it for the guys."" "They looked at each other." ""What the hell is this all about?"" "And we went into the room, and it was live action and animation." "And he got up and left." "Didn't say a word." "And about three weeks later, the same thing happened." ""Ron, will you put that reel up again?"" "And the lights came on, and that's when he told the boys," ""I have an idea for animation in this."" "(CHEERFUL MUSIC PLAYS)" "SHERMAN:" "He's basically a story man." "He wanted the song moving story, developing story, pushing story." "And that was very, very important to him." "# The children must be moulded" "# Shaped and taught" "# That life's a looming battle to be faced and fought!" "#" "Mary Poppins is not a children's story." "It's a story about a dysfunctional family that was not paying attention to the most important thing they had, and that was their children." "And Walt knew that, and that's what the story was." "# It's time they learned to walk in your footsteps" "# My footsteps" "# To tread your straight and narrow path with pride" "# With pride" "# Tomorrow just as you suggest, pressed and dressed" "# Jane and Michael will be at your side." "Splendid!" "You've hit the nail right on the...." "At my side?" "Where are we going?" "To the bank, of course, exactly as you proposed." "I proposed?" "Of course!" "Now, if you'll excuse me." "Tomorrow's an important day for the children." "I shall see they have a proper night's sleep." "Mary Poppins debuted in the summer of 1964 and became a box-office smash." "It was also Walt Disney's most deliberate refashioning of the hard-hearted father story - a miraculous parental transformation." "# With tuppence for paper and strings" "# You can have your own set of wings" "# With your feet on the ground" "# You're a bird in flight" "# With your fist holding tight" "# To the string of your kite." "# Oh, oh, oh!" "# Let's go fly a kite!" "# Up to the highest height!" "#" ""You have made a great many pictures" ""that have touched the hearts of the world,"" "wrote legendary producer Samuel Goldwyn." ""But you have never made one so completely the fulfilment" ""of everything a great motion picture should be."" "# Up where the air is clear Oh, let's go...#" "He is able to produce a film on his terms that has a narrative that is very much about family." "# Let's go fly a kite!" "#" "About the healing of the family." "# Up to the highest height!" "#" "So, he's staying true to what he believes personally that has woven itself into all of his films." "# Up to the atmosphere... #" "Mary Poppins was nominated for 13 Oscars, including Walt Disney's first and only nomination for Best Picture." "Mary Poppins is validation for Walt Disney." "# Up to the atmosphere!" "#" "He's finally being embraced by those whose validation he has always sought." "# Oh, let's go" "# Fly a kite!" "#" "(SCREAMING)" "Mary Poppins premiered into a different America than had Mickey Mouse, Snow White and Pinocchio." "American teenagers were discovering The Beatles and Bob Dylan... ..and James Brown... ..and beginning to worry about a growing war in a place called Vietnam." "(SIREN WAILS, SHOUTING)" "The entire country, meanwhile, was convulsed by momentous new civil rights laws." "Riots in New York and Los Angeles and segregationist intimidation in the Deep South were beamed into television sets in living rooms across the country." "DOUGLAS:" "The gap is growing wider and wider between Disney's version of America, and what's really going on in the country, which is all of these fissures being exposed." "# O beautiful, for spacious skies... #" "Walt's defenders pointed to his movies as "sanctuaries of decency and health" ""in the jungle of sex and sadism created by Hollywood producers."" "How lovely it is!" "Makes you feel proud, doesn't it?" "Hi down there!" "Oh, Ned, look out!" "Critics slammed him." ""Genuine feeling is ignored," said one," ""the imagination of children bludgeoned with mediocrity."" "# Let's get together Yeah, yeah, yeah!" "# Think of all that we could share!" "#" "NILSEN:" "Watered down, no edge, devoid of any kind of distinctive ethnicity, any kind of diversity." "This white, middle-class, Protestant value system is what he really gets identified with." "Many of those people that celebrated the '30s Disney as this visionary are now saying, "You're conservative." ""The values you're selling are conservative." ""We no longer agree with them." "Those are not our values."" "The next number will be a ladies' tag dance." "The truth was, Disney's commercial success depended on a certain set of traditional values, which were sometimes racist and sexist." "DOUGLAS:" "There were a lot of ways Disney ignored major differences in our society, sought to erase them, or sought to keep marginalised people in their place." "I didn't say I was going to take the position." "All I said was..." "Betsy, no wife of mine is going to work." "Not as long as I have a spark of life left in my body." "Disney was aware of the knocks against him, but he wasn't going to let the critics change his work." "# Bon Voyage!" "Bon Voyage!" "# Have a gay holiday!" "#" "MILLER:" "There was a film critic for the New York Times, Bosley Crowther." "There was this film, and Bosley was criticising the film for corn." "Too much corn." "Just corny." "# Kiss me on the Eiffel tower. #" "Walt and I happened to have lunch that day, and I said, "Did you happen to see the review?"" "and he said, "Yeah."" "He said, "He's got to realise, I like corn." "I love corn." ""That's what I'm all about."" "# Bon Voyage!" "Bon Voyage!" "# Have a gay holiday and don't forget to write" "# Bon Voyage!" "#" "Word started to get around in 1965 that Walt Disney was buying up enormous tracts of land in central Florida." "By the time Disney was ready to go public, the company already owned 27,000 acres, giving him a building lot bigger than the island of Manhattan." "Walt Disney, who will bring a new world of entertainment, pleasure, and economic development to the state of Florida." "Walt Disney." "(APPLAUSE)" "Thank you, Governor." "What type of attraction or what type of usage will be made at this great location?" "We have many things in mind that could make this unique and different than Disneyland." "Will it be a Disneyland?" "Well, I've always said there will never be another Disneyland, Governor." "Walt remained cagey about the scope and outlines of what he called Project Future." "We know the basic things that have this what I call "family appeal"." "Only a handful of company insiders knew what he was planning - the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT." "HAHN:" "It's like, "I did the mouse." "That was great." ""Yeah, I affected popular culture." "I made movies and things." ""But is that a real contribution or is that just popcorn?" ""Am I just this fugitive guy" ""that is doling out popular culture for people to consume" ""and it's here today and gone tomorrow?" ""Is it fast food?"" "And I think that turns to thoughts of," ""Well, if it is, then what is my legacy?"" "KOEHN:" "What can you leave the world?" "What can you create for the world that will outlast you?" "Well, the city of the future." "A city where there is prosperity and possibility and hope." "GURR:" "A lot of people had talked about it, nobody had really done anything about it, and I got the impression Walt felt that, well, by golly, he could do this." "NORMAN:" "He was now being a futurist, a visionary, and building a functioning, working city of tomorrow, a city that would be a model for the United States and perhaps even for the rest of the world." "CRUMP:" "He used to get so goddamn excited about EPCOT." "When he'd talk about it, it was like he'd just come back from the moon yesterday." "He was just so thrilled." "ANNOUNCER:" "No city of today will serve as the guide for the city of tomorrow." "EPCOT will be a planned environment, demonstrating to the world what American communities can accomplish through proper control of planning and design in the area of business and commerce." "Disney's design called for a high-density town centre with hotels and corporate offices, a greenbelt for recreation and entertainment, and a low-density residential area with schools and parks and playgrounds." "It would all be knit together by the most efficient and convenient public transportation, and by a common purpose - progress, Disney-style." "CRUMP:" "He wanted all the major companies in the United States to have research and development organisations as part of EPCOT right next door to each other." "So GE would be right next door to Ford." "Ford would be right next door to General Motors." "All these research divisions for all these big companies would become close." "ANNOUNCER:" "But most important, this entire 50 acres of city streets and buildings will be completely enclosed." "In this climate-controlled environment, shoppers and theatre-goers and people just out for a stroll will enjoy ideal weather conditions." "Walt's got these drawings of EPCOT laid out on the table, and we're all talking about everything, and he was pointing out what's going to go here and what's going to go there." "And he kind of tapped the drawing kind of funny, and, uh, he said," ""Well, I'm going to put this little park bench right here," ""and Lilly and I are going to sit here we're going to watch people."" "He's seeing it as a giant project, but he's seeing it as a place where he knows he's going to put his own park bench." "Disney allowed himself a rare treat in the summer of 1966." "He left his studio for a two-week vacation with his wife, daughters, Diane and Sharon, and their growing families." "MILLER:" "This gentleman offered Walt his yacht to tour the coastline of Canada and up into Alaska." "We had Sharon and Bob and her child, and then we had all our kids." "His room was right next to our room, and he was coughing an awful lot, all night long." "Diane was very concerned." "But he had fun." "He said, "We're gonna have to do this more often."" "Welcome to a little bit of Florida, here in California." "This is where the early planning is taking place for our so-called, uh, "Disney World Project."" "On October 27, 1966," "Walt Disney spent the day on the studio soundstage shooting his part in a promotional film about his new pet project." "The most exciting, by far the most important part of our Florida project - in fact, the heart of everything we'll be doing in Disney World - will be our Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow." "We call it EPCOT." "The effort winded the 64-year-old so badly, he needed oxygen between takes." "..Prototype Community of Tomorrow." "GURR:" "He didn't look good." "He didn't feel good." "He just seemed to be almost permanently grumpy." "The word around the lot was, "Well, he's not feeling too well."" "Disney's old polo injury was giving him trouble." "His neck hurt, his shoulder hurt, he was having trouble with his hip and sometimes dragged his leg when he walked." ""My nerves are shot to hell," he admitted to Hazel George," ""and the pain is driving me nuts."" "He finally gave in and scheduled spinal surgery, but in the pre-operative exam at a hospital across the street from the studio, doctors discovered something else to be worried about - a mass on one of his lungs." "The diagnosis was cancer." "The prognosis was bad." "Doctors told him he had two years at most." "MILLER:" "Walt, the optimist that he was, felt he was gonna lick it." "He said, "You know, it's one of these things." ""I've smoked all my life," ""and I've seen people who have smoked all their life" ""and they didn't have lung cancer." ""I thought it would never happen to me." ""And it happened."" "Nobody let us in on it." "Maybe some of the inner circle might have known it was more serious." "But I didn't." "And one day, we were looking at a rough cut of this film, and Walt was there in the hall." "And as he passed us, in the hall, we were standing there, he looked at us and he said, "Keep up the good work, fellas."" "It's the first time, and the only time, he ever complimented our work." "And he winked at us and walked down the hall." "Walt did not return to the studio as usual the next day." "He checked himself back into the hospital instead." "Roy would get up very early in the morning and go to see Walt." "And Walt always complained about his feet being cold, so Roy would stand there and rub his feet and get them warm." "On the night of December 14th, 1966," "Walt sent Lillian home from his bedside to get some rest." "He promised her he was feeling stronger." "Roy stayed behind and sat at the bedside while his kid brother, flat on his back, pointed up to the ceiling tiles, trying to explain the vision of Disney World and EPCOT that shimmered before him, trying to make Roy see it as he did." ""Now there is where the highway will run," he explained." ""And there is the route for the monorail."" "I went down to get my hair cut." "And it was a gal in the barbershop, and she was cutting my hair and she says, "Too bad about Walt."" "And I said, "Oh, he's going to be OK." ""He'll be back next week."" ""No." "He died."" "Well, I couldn't get out of that chair quicker to get home." "And my mother, my cousin, are just like this." "They wouldn't even talk to me." "Well, that was a bad day." "I was next door at the studio." "And, uh, I rushed over and... ..he was gone." "SHERMAN:" "I heard somebody shrieking and running down the hall." "It was one of the secretaries." "And I opened the door, and everybody was rushing into the hallway." ""Walt died."" "Nobody could believe it." "And we all gathered in Bill Anderson's office, a whole bunch of us." "And they were crying." "Men were crying." "I was crying." "It was terrible." "It was horrible." "It was just horrible." "CRUMP:" "I was in my office in the model shop and John Hench came out and told me, "Walt passed."" "And everybody was just, you know..." "It was just like it'd taken the breath out of us." "It was like the end of the world." "Like the end of the world." "REPORTER:" "Walt Disney is dead tonight, at the age of 65." "..undergone surgery last month for removal of part of his left lung... ..he won 29 Oscars, 4 Emmys, the Irving Thalberg Award..." "Walt Disney, Hollywood's Prince of Fantasy." "Walt Disney's death was front-page news the next day, across the country and around the world." "REPORTER:" "Of his success, Disney has said, "There's no magic formula." ""Children all over the world have one thing in common " ""love of laughter."" "In the year after he died, nearly seven million people visited Disneyland." "Tens of millions around the world listened to a Disney record or bought Disney-licensed merchandise or tuned in to Walt's television show." "Hundreds of millions saw one of Disney's movies." "HIGGINBOTHAM:" "That sense of happiness, that sense of American identity - those are things that you want to achieve and Disney offers that to you." "GABLER:" "He's either the man who ruined American culture and brought all of this fakeness into our lives, or he's the man who inspired us and gave us hours and hours of entertainment." "HAHN:" "Walt Disney represented more than just a guy." "He was an ethos." "He was a way of approaching life." "And whether you hated him or loved him, there was no-one that could argue with his effect on 20th-century culture." "I can move!" "I can talk!" "NILSEN:" "How do we deal with growing up?" "I can walk!" "Bambi!" "What does it mean when we leave childhood behind?" "How do we deal with death?" "They're questions all humans deal with, no matter what period, no matter what culture." "SUSKIND:" "Disney goes back and taps old myths and old narrative arcs that are deeply rooted in all of us." "What is the meaning of my life?" "What is my journey really born of?" "How can I discover who I am?" "HIGGINBOTHAM:" "He affects all of us." "No-one is untouched by Walt Disney." "GABLER:" "There aren't that many figures in American culture who cover as many bases, who do as many things, as Walt Disney." "Disney was somebody who understood the American psyche." "He was also someone who anticipated the future of the American psyche." "He understood a whole lot about us." "Supertext Captions by Ericsson (c) SBS Australia 2015"