[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.It seems to me that aside from its lack of story and continuity, it isa boisterous bore.Even when it becomes an animated travelogue it misses itsmark because one gets but a confused and sketchy picture of Latin Amer-ica. He was not impressed by the film s pyrotechnics, dismissing them as dull demonstrations of technical virtuosity. 82on a treadmi ll, 1 941 1 947 1 87The Three Caballeros performed indiªerently at the box office, its returnsto the studio falling almost $200,000 short of its cost.83 A third Latin Amer-ican feature, Cuban Carnival, was in the works throughout 1944, but it fellout of the studio s plans after Three Caballeros s disappointing results.Disneyhimself smarted under reviews that compared his new films unfavorably withthe features he made before the United States entered the war. I had a lot ofpeople just hoping that it was the end of the Disney studio, he said in 1956.Throughout the war, Disney could do no better than assign a few peopleto work briefly on stories for possible films that had long figured in the stu-dio s plans, like Peter Pan, Cinderella, and Alice in Wonderland.(Story workon Peter Pan was halted to make room, an internal Disney publication said,for Victory Through Air Power.)84 Of Alice in particular, Disney said in 1943that production might be postponed until, in a contemporary report s para-phrase, further development of methods which would sharply reduce pro-duction time and thus keep costs under control.85Any return to full-length animated features of the Pinocchio or Bambi kindwould require financial muscle that was simply not evident in the studio sannual reports to its stockholders.The idea of making cheaper features atthe Dumbo level, with budgets under a million dollars, never quite died, butDisney continued to regard such projects with little enthusiasm.In May 1943,one possible cheap feature dropped away when Disney and RKO canceledthe dormant distribution contract for the Mickey Mouse beanstalk feature.86By 1945, the Disney studio had begun to devote substantially all of its fa-cilities to entertainment product, as the company s annual report for thatyear said, because of the general lessening of the government s demand fortraining films.87 But, for the moment, Disney had embraced the idea thatanimated educational and training films could be a mainstay of his studio soperations in peacetime, too.Such films could speed up training, he said,and help trainees retain more of what they learned. The screen cartoon,he told a writer for Look early in 1945, has become so improved and refinedthat no technical problem is unsurmountable [sic]. 88 Disney had set up anindustrial film division by November 1943, when he visited Owens-IllinoisGlass Company in Toledo, Ohio, on what the Wall Street Journal called a preliminary investigation.of the place of motion pictures in the post-war industrial world. 89 Five large corporations contracted for Disney train-ing films by November 1944.90In September 1945, as the Disneys emerged from the war s hard grind, theyhired two professional managers to share some of their responsibilities.The1 88 a queer, qui ck, deli ghtful gi nkmove made sense, given the nature of the postwar studio as the Disneys en-visioned it.John F.Reeder assumed Roy s titles of vice president and generalmanager.Reeder had been vice president of the Young & Rubicam adver-tising agency, and he was thus accustomed to dealing with big businesses ofthe kind that were the likeliest customers for the studio s industrial and ed-ucational films.Fred Leahy, the new production manager, had worked in productioncontrol for eighteen years at MGM and Paramount, the biggest and mostprestigious of the Hollywood studios.He would in eªect serve as Walt s stand-in during work on films that inevitably would be, when measured againstthe prewar shorts and features, too dry and routine to absorb much of Walt sinterest.Walt himself gave up his title of president, surrendering it to Roy.91He was going to devote himself to new features. Commercial work answered our prayers, wrote Harry Tytle, who man-aged Disney s short subjects, as it not only supplied badly needed capitalduring the war, but also because the companies that were our clients gave usgreater access to film and other rationed materials.But while the studiomade money with this type of product.it was not a field either Walt orRoy were happy to be in.Their reasoning was sound.We didn t own the prod-uct or the characters we produced for other companies; there was absolutelyno residual value.If the picture was successful, the owners of the film got thererun value.If the films were unsuccessful, it could be detrimental to ourreputation.Worse, we were at the whim of the client; at each stage of pro-duction we had to twiddle our thumbs and await approval before we couldventure on to the next step. 92Disney himself said years later that he rejected the idea of making com-mercial pictures, saying to his investment bankers, I think that doing thatis a waste of the talent that I have here and I can put it to better purposes bybuilding these features that in the long run pay oª better. He made only adozen commercial films, for clients like Westinghouse Electric (The Dawnof Better Living) and General Motors (The ABC of Hand Tools), before de-livering the last of them in 1946.The rationale for hiring Leahy and Reeder thus evaporated within monthsof their hiring.In early 1946, Harry Tytle has written, Reeder wanted the[production schedule for a feature cartoon, apparently Make Mine Music]moved up so that it would fall on a more marketable release date, like Easteror Christmas.An earlier release date meant Walt would have less time to makewhat he felt was an acceptable picture.Reeder was circumventing Walt andon a treadmi ll, 1 941 1 947 1 89Walt didn t like it.Reeder, in a pattern that would repeat itself, was prov-ing inflexible, apparently intent on teaching Walt and Roy the ad business in-stead of learning the studio ropes. 93 (Reeder left the Disney staª in 1948.)As it happened, Make Mine Music did have its premiere in New York onApril 20, 1946, the Saturday before Easter, although it did not go into gen-eral release until August (possibly because of the difficulty in the immediatepostwar years of getting enough Technicolor prints).Joe Grant, who super-vised production of the film for Disney, spoke of being with him in NewYork then: Walking down a street once, during the Easter parade [on Sun-day, April 21, the day after the premiere], he demonstrated some story stuªby walking up and down the curb
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]