Amazon.com Review
Neal Gabler's meticulously researched biography, Walt Disney offers the full story (Gabler is the first writer to gain complete access to the Disney archives) of the American icon. Readers will discover the whole story, witnessing Disney's invention of a "synergistic empire that combined film, television, theme parks, music, book publishing, and merchandise." What fans don't know could fill a book (this book in fact), and we asked Gabler to point out a few of the juicy bits. Read our interview with him, and his "10 Things That May Surprise You" list below. --Daphne Durham
10 Second Interview: A Few Words with Neal Gabler
Q: Why Walt Disney?
A: When you write about someone as grandiose as Walt Disney, you may tend to get a little grandiose yourself, so forgive me. But I had always set the task for myself to examine the forces that helped define American culture in the twentieth century and those individuals who might be regarded as the architects of the American consciousness. Walt Disney was certainly one of those forces and one of those architects. His visual sensibility is arguably one of the two most important in the last century, along with Picasso's, yet Picasso has received dozens of biographies and Walt Disney had, when I began, not received a single full-scale, fully-annotated biography. I wanted to fill that gap in our cultural studies. I thought that if one could understand Walt Disney, one could go a long way to understanding American popular culture.
Q: One thing that strikes you when reading the book is that Walt Disney never had any money. With all his success how is that possible?
A: It
is astonishing that Walt Disney was always--and I do mean always--in dire financial straits until the opening of Disneyland. The primary reason wasn't that his cartoons weren't making money, because they were--at least until the war in Europe when the loss of that market meant disaster for the features. But even as they were making money, the studio was losing money because Walt was constitutionally incapable of cutting corners, enforcing economies, laying off staff. The only thing about which Walt Disney cared was quality. He thought that quality was the way to maintain his preeminence, though quality also had the psychological advantage of letting him perfect his world. The problem was that quality was expensive. To cite just one example, Walt spent more than a hundred thousand dollars setting up a training program for would-be animators, though even then the return was small because Walt was so picky that very few of the candidates actually qualified to work at the studio. Money meant very little to Walt Disney. It was only a means to an end, never an end in itself.
Q: When did Walt first conceive of the idea for Disneyland and what were the initial reactions to the idea?
A: It is very difficult to determine exactly when Walt hatched the idea for Disneyland, though he seems to have been thinking about it for a long time, at least since the early 1930s. Certainly by the time he was taking his daughters, Diane and Sharon, to amusement parks on Sunday afternoons in the late 1940s, he had formulated the idea to establish a park that was clean and wholesome and where parents wouldn't be afraid to take their children. The original plan was to build the park on a plot adjacent to the studio in Burbank, where there would be a train, a town square, an Indian village and kiddieland rides, but as Walt's ideas expanded, so did the need for a bigger plot. As for the reactions to his idea, Roy was initially reluctant, as usual, and Walt's wife, Lillian, was firmly opposed, though she had also been opposed to his making
Snow White. Still, Walt exaggerated the opposition as a way, I think of elevating his own foresight and determination. In fact, as the plan grew closer to realization, corporations sought to be included as lessees, and even banks, that had been skeptical, became more receptive. When the park opened, it was an instant success.
Q: What do you think has been Walt's most lasting impact/legacy on American culture?
A: One could answer this question in a dozen different ways depending on one's priorities, but I think his largest bequest is a matter of the American mind. Walt Disney helped change the national consciousness. He got people to believe in the power of wish fulfillment--in their own ability to impose their wills on a recalcitrant reality. That's what Walt Disney did all his life. He managed to replace reality with his illusions--what some people now refer to disparagingly as Disneyfication. He sold us on the idea of control because Walt Disney was himself a master of control. We see the results everywhere--from film to theme parks to virtual reality to virtual politics.
You Don't Know Disney: 10 Things That May Surprise You 1. He is
not frozen. His body was cremated, and his ashes are interred at the Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California, near his studio.
2. Mickey Mouse's original name allegedly was Mortimer but Disney's wife Lillian objected because she thought it too "sissified."
3. Some of the names originally considered for the dwarfs in
Snow White were: Deafy, Dirty, Awful, Blabby, Burpy, Gabby, Puffy, Stuffy, Nifty, Tubby, Biggo Ego, Flabby, Jaunty, Baldy, Lazy, Dizzy, Cranky and Chesty.
4. Walt Disney suffered a nervous breakdown in 1931 and descended into depression after the war, concentrating his attention on model trains rather than on motion pictures.
5. Fantasia was the result of a chance meeting between Walt Disney and symphony conductor Leopold Stokowski at Chasen's restaurant.
6. During World War II the Disney studio became a war factory with well over 90% of its production in the service of government training, education and propaganda films.
7. The studio stopped production for six months on
Pinocchio because Walt felt the title character wasn't likable enough. During this time he devised the idea of introducing Jiminy Cricket as Pinocchio's conscience.
8. Walt Disney received more Academy Awards than any other individual--32.
9. Disney modeled Mickey Mouse on Charlie Chaplin and that Chaplin later assisted the Disneys by loaning them his financial books so they could determine what kind of proceeds they should be getting from their distributor on
Snow White.
10. MGM head Louis B. Mayer once rejected the opportunity to distribute Mickey Mouse cartoons shortly after Walt had invented the character because Mayer said that pregnant women would be frightened by a giant mouse on screen.
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Few men could be said to have as pervasive an influence on American culture as Walt Disney, and Gabler (Winchell) scours the historical record for as thorough an explanation of that influence as any biographer could muster. Every period of Disney's life is depicted in exacting detail, from the suffering endured on a childhood paper route to the making of Mary Poppins. The core of Gabler's story, though, is clearly in the early years of Disney's studio, from the creation of Mickey Mouse to the hands-on management of early hits like Fantasia and Pinocchio. "Even though Walt could neither animate, nor write, nor direct," Gabler notes, "he was the undisputed power at the studio." Yet there was significant disgruntlement within the ranks of Disney's employees, and Gabler traces the day-to-day resentments that eventually led to a bitter strike against the studio in 1941. That dispute helped harden Disney's anticommunism, which led to rumors of anti-Semitism, which are effectively debunked here. At times, Gabler lays on a bit thick the psychological interpretation of Disney as control freak, but his portrait is so engrossing that it's hard to picture the entertainment mogul playing with his toy trains and not imagine him building Disneyland in his head. 32 pages of photos. 100,000 first printing. (Nov. 6)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post
There's nothing Mickey Mouse about this terrific biography of Walt Disney (1900- 1966), arguably the most influential figure in 20th-century American culture. The research is astonishingly detailed, whether Neal Gabler is deconstructing complex business and financial alliances, revealing the shifting inner dynamics of the Disney studios or describing, in page after mesmerizing page, the creation of such cartoon landmarks as "Steamboat Willie," the Silly Symphonies, "The Three Little Pigs," "Fantasia" and "Pinocchio." There's an entire 60-page chapter just on "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937), guiding the reader through the long gestation and realization of this masterpiece of animation, the very Chartres of cartoons.
That last analogy may sound almost sacrilegious, but Gabler convincingly compares Disney animation work during its glory days -- the 1930s -- to a collective endeavor rather like the building of a Gothic cathedral. Walt, as he calls him throughout the book, supplied the soaring, transcendent vision while his artists produced the thousands of drawings that turned follies into breathtaking realities. After all, the studio worked for years, with sacerdotal fervor, on early films such as "Snow White" and "Pinocchio" (1940). To many young people of today, I suspect that the Disney animation company in the 1930s will sound a lot like Apple Computer and Microsoft in their pioneering heyday. In both cases, a small group of excited and determined people, working out of the equivalent of a garage or warehouse, was on a mission to change the world. And they did.
Walt Disney grew up poor in Missouri, delivered newspapers and handed the money to his father, received only the most basic schooling, and drew pictures all the time. As a teenager in Kansas City, he started little advertising companies specializing in cartooning, comic strips and primitive animation, and he failed again and again. But this young go-getter was nothing less than indomitable. After his older brother Roy moved to Los Angeles (and took up selling vacuum cleaners door to door), Walt joined him and began working even more intensely on animation. Soon he and Roy formed Disney Brothers to peddle their short, silent films. Roy would be the improbable moneyman, Walt the creative genius. Such dreamers! Yet so it was to be, even when the pair ruled over an empire.
For today we regard the name "Disney" as synonymous with the term "vast media conglomerate." Yet only after the creation of Disneyland in the mid-1950s did the company actually find itself without serious debt. Walt was always overextended, convinced (rightly) that money was merely a tool to achieve one dream after another. For a long period he paid himself less per week than his new recruits, and he generally plowed almost everything he made back into the company. He might spend years on a project, going deeply over budget on the conviction that, say, "Bambi" (1942) would be a huge success. (And it wasn't -- only the rather simple "Dumbo" (1941) came close to matching "Snow White" as really boffo box office.) Refusing the trappings of the typical Hollywood mogul, Walt Disney thought and lived like an artist -- what mattered was creating something beautiful and perfect. And like all real artists, he always ended up convinced that he'd failed to capture fully the fire that was in his brain.
Still, before Walt was 40 he was adored by the public, acclaimed by the critics, envied by competitors such as Max and Dave Fleischer (purveyors of the classic Popeye and Superman shorts), and generally viewed as one of the great creative imaginations of the time. All that changed in the 1940s. It was an era of what Walt saw as betrayals and losses. By then his signature hero, Mickey Mouse, had lost his edge and become a bland milquetoast. At the same time, Walt himself was losing interest in short cartoons and spending less and less time overseeing their production. After "Fantasia" (1940), his third feature-length film, he began to lose interest in that animated form as well: He felt he could never again match the quality he and his wonder boys had achieved in "Snow White" and that anything less was hardly worth bothering about. Then in 1941 many Disney employees went out on strike and picketed for a union. Walt grew bitter at what he viewed as mass treachery (later blaming communist agitators). From then on, he began to behave more and more like an all-powerful god, capricious in his moods, jealous and easily angered when vexed, casually firing longtime staffers as "deadwood." The company stopped being fun and was suddenly a major corporation rather than an artistic community. "There's just one thing we're selling here," Walt told a new recruit, "and that's the name 'Walt Disney.' "
That same Walt remained the master of "imagineering," suggesting the projects and sometimes literally acting out plot-ideas for hours on end to inspire his animation teams. (Everyone agrees that he was an amazing storyteller.) But since Walt was no longer on the floor every day, his artists and directors would end up playing "guess what Walt wants" and when they guessed wrong would risk his wrath or a dismissal.
By the end of the 1940s the camaraderie of the previous decade was long gone, and with it many of the stalwarts of that earlier era. Indeed, Disney Studio's whole concept of animation was now regarded as rather saccharine and old-hat; the hot company was Looney Tunes at Warner Brothers, where Friz Freleng, Tex Avery and Chuck Jones had created the more anarchic comedy of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. A depressed Disney started spending more and more time puttering around in his workshop or tooling around on a model locomotive in his backyard.
Walt Disney Studios had also started to make live-action films such as "Treasure Island" and "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," neither of which Walt much cared about, though they brought in needed cash. Still, the man wasn't through reinventing himself or his company. His love for miniature railroads and gadgets, his memory of the small town he'd grown up in, and the popularity of his fairy-tale films soon merged in his mind to form an almost mystical vision of a new kind of amusement park, a clean wholesome park for the entire family. It would be, he dreamed, "the happiest place on earth."
To bring in cash for its construction and to help advertise this so-called Disneyland, Roy and Walt cut a deal with ABC to produce a weekly television series, a mix of old cartoons, occasional "True-Life Adventures" (i.e., nature documentaries such as "The Living Desert," 1953), and special TV movies. "Walt Disney Presents" proved a huge and immediate success, with "Uncle Walt" himself as its genial avuncular host. And after the show featured a series about a grinning frontier scout who was "born on a mountaintop in Tennessee," it was more than successful, it was the home of a phenomenon. The nation's children went crazy for Fess Parker's Davy Crockett. (There can be few men in their late 50s or 60s who didn't once own a coonskin cap, with a long, furry tail hanging from it.) Soon thereafter, the network wanted an after-school kiddie program, and so was born "The Mickey Mouse Club." (Sing it everyone: M-I-C, K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E.) The show was thrown together in an almost improvisatory manner, but kids adored it. Half the pre-pubescent boys in America fell in love with dark-haired Mouseketeer Annette Funicello (none more than a certain future book reviewer, author of Annette-inspired poems in praise of her charm, her grace, her eyes, her lips, her everything).
Once Disneyland finally opened in 1955, its creator often stayed there in his own special apartment, preferring his earthly paradise to his film studio or his actual home. Within a couple of years, Walt's grandest folly was the most popular tourist attraction in the West.
But overreachers seldom just settle back and retire. Before his death from lung cancer at 65, Walt began to acquire, surreptitiously, huge chunks of property in central Florida for an even greater project: Near Orlando, he would build a second and even bigger amusement park but, more important, attached to it would be a model city, an all-American utopia that he himself would design. When he died, the model city died with him (at least until his successors, decades later, unveiled the spanking fresh town of Celebration, Fla.).
As for that second park, now called Walt Disney World, it continues to grow and evolve and, some say, spread out tentacles. According to cultural critics, America has become a true Disney world -- increasingly obsessed with order and wholesomeness, eager for the cozily reassuring and the schmaltzy, safe in its art, conservative in its values and blithely unconcerned with global realities, human suffering and social inequities.
Periodically, Gabler re-emphasizes that Walt's achievements in animation, films and magic kingdoms are all fundamentally triumphs of relentless control. In his youth Walt might have been compared to the revolutionary genius of Charlie Chaplin, but as he aged he was more often likened to that uplifting painter of old-timey scenes of mom, the flag and apple pie, Norman Rockwell.
About this superb biography, one can hardly be temperate. Gabler's only obvious flaw is also his great strength -- the sheer amount of detail and material he presents to the reader. But his engaging, unobtrusive prose, his passion for his workaholic subject (whom he regards as both genius and monster), and his steady march through an amazing career all inspire trust and gratitude. Here, then, is the definitive portrait of Walt Disney, the Dream-King.
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
