Original subtitles

Tonight...

Mother!

WOMAN: He affects all of us.

No one is untouched by Walt Disney.

MAN: He's either the man

who brought all of this fakeness into our lives

or he's the man who inspired us

and gave us hours and hours of entertainment.

Part two of "Walt Disney," on American Experience.

NASA ANNOUNCER: Lift-off, the clock is running.

RINGSIDE ANNOUNCER: And Schmeling is down!

Exclusive corporate funding for American Experience

is provided by Liberty Mutual Insurance.

In 1906, radio brought us together.

is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities,

bringing you the stories that define us.

American Experience is also made possible

by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting

and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

MAN: He wants to be an artist,

and I think he discovered something early on:

that talent was his way of getting attention.

Walt loved attention.

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

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

in this big industry that he wants to break into.

MAN: His role was changing in the studio,

becoming more and more the man

who was the intellectual overseer.

WOMAN: It become, like, the studio to work at,

and all of those animators just thrive.

MAN: He didn't know if it would really work,

and one part of him was almost agonizing over,

"Well, if people don't buy this, then I will be done."

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

MAN: He's hailed in Paris, he's hailed in New York,

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

He almost is released from hesitations.

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

"I am him.

So now what do we do?"

MAN: Walt Disney once exploded during a story session.

He pounded the table and he said,

"We're not making cartoons here!

We're making art!"

I'm real!

I'm a real boy!

MAN: You have on the one hand Walt the inspirer.

The other side was Disney the driver,

who demanded work, who demanded creativity,

demanded productivity,

and if people didn't meet his standards,

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

WOMAN: He poured his passion,

everything he believed in into his studio.

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

It was his own creation that went against him.

(crowd chatter)

NEAL GABLER: 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 them 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 29, 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 four.

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.

TOM SITO: 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.

NARRATOR: A month into the strike,

Disney refused to recognize the union

representing his workers, the Screen Cartoonists 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.

SITO: 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."

NARRATOR: 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.

NANCY KOEHN: He needed to have a bad guy.

He needs to blame it all on a villain.

And in this case,

the new flavor of the month in Hollywood

at that time and later

would be the shadow or specter of Communism.

ERIC SMOODIN: He becomes then like a typical industrial boss.

Most American executives at the time

blame unionization on Communists.

So in this way, Disney becomes completely conventional.

(whistle blowing)

GABLER: Walt Disney is being bombarded

by all of this negativity,

and it's just not something he was accustomed to.

NARRATOR: "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 DDs:

disillusionment and discouragement."

The next day, Disney skipped town

for a ten-week working tour of South America

and left the headaches to his brother

and long-time business partner, Roy.

STEVEN WATTS: 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.

NARRATOR: 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 unionization

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.

NARRATOR: 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."

(commander shouting march cadence)

NARRATOR: 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.

NARRATOR: Walt was counting on a big box-office hit

to revive his faltering studio,

and he believed 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

Bambi...

Quick!

The thicket!

(gunshot)

Faster!

Faster, Bambi!

Don't look back!

Keep running!

Keep running!

(gunshot)

We made it!

We made it, Mother!

We...

Mother?

Mother!

Mother, where are you?

Mother!

DON HAHN: A generation was and still is traumatized

by that moment in Bambi.

Mother!

Mother!

HAHN: And it's done almost in pantomime

with the snow falling.

Fearless filmmaking.

Absolute fearlessness.

Mother...

(crying)

(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 passé.

NARRATOR: 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... ¶

SITO: And The Big Five is Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia,

Bambi, and Dumbo.

¶ Hi ho, hi ho... ¶

SITO: 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.

It's never going to be the same.

JOHNNY MERCER: Walt, how did you happen to choose the tales of Uncle Remus

as the story for Song of the South?

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 among my favorites.

MERCER: Your favorites and a million others'.

CARMENITA HIGGINBOTHAM: The Uncle Remus stories are a piece of American folklore.

And that is the kind of story Walt is interested in

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.

NARRATOR: 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 Studios 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 junkheap 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, maneuvering,

doing what you had to do to triumph.

NARRATOR: 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 okay 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 equal,

"and this is 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

NARRATOR: 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 theater.

¶ 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! ¶

HIGGINBOTHAM: It is as if Walt has divorced himself

from social context.

It's sort of stunning.

¶ It's the same ol' thing ¶

¶ Wanna get a bag of something for the hungry lord ¶

¶ Look up! ¶

NARRATOR: 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 singin' all day long.

Don't let the children miss it."

¶ Had the trouble with the weaver... ¶

I sure is sorry, Ms. Sally.

No, it's my fault.

I should've 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.

NARRATOR: Others, like the usually friendly New York Times,

hit Disney hard.

"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.

NARRATOR: 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."

¶ ¶

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.

ROBERT GIVENS: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

SITO: 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."

GIVENS: Walt was curious, because he'd send his spies over there

to see what us Communists over by the river were doing.

(laughing): He called us "The Communists."

NEWS REPORTER: Labor strife on the movie front.

California studios picketed

in a dispute between rival unions.

NARRATOR: 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 organization 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."

And at the present time, you own and operate

the Walt Disney Studio at Burbank, California?

NARRATOR: The first thing Disney did was reassure the committee

that he was running a clean shop in Burbank,

free of any Communist taint.

DISNEY: They bought the Three Little Pigs

and used it through Russia.

NARRATOR: But then he started to name names,

among them one of the leaders who had organized

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 the 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 organizations.

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 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.

SITO: 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.

...call them all a bunch of Communists,

and I believe they are.

SITO: 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.

SITO: That's not enough for a trial.

NARRATOR: 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 labor union activists.

SMOODIN: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

REPORTER: Oh, 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.

NARRATOR: 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 traveled to England to launch a series of live-action films,

starting with the pirate story Treasure Island.

He made others in the U.S. 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 gonna 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.

DOCUMENTARY 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.

(seal braying)

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.

(seal braying)

DOCUMENTARY 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.

DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR: ...having a final fling of single blessedness.

NARRATOR: 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 balked-- 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 two million dollars 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.

ROLLY CRUMP: 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 massage his back and his hips

because he was in great pain.

GABLER: Well, 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 realize 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

(horn blowing)

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 center of Marceline.

The train is something he associates

with that vanished age of his childhood.

NARRATOR: 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.

GABLER: Walt Disney was building these trains

with his own hands.

Manual labor.

The great Walt Disney

was now devoting his energies to toy trains.

NARRATOR: 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 the shade of your eyes...

Mm-hmm.

Something simple,

but daring too!

(gasps)

Just leave it to me.

What a gown this will be!

Bippity-boppity,

bippity-boppity, bippity-boppity-boo!

Oh, it's a beautiful dress!

NARRATOR: Roy optimistically told Walt

that Cinderella would gross five or six million

after those first reviews.

It made nearly eight million.

It's like a dream!

A wonderful dream come true!

Yes, my child.

NARRATOR: 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.

RICHARD SCHICKEL: It was funny, you know,

you would see those pictures of him

with his train, you know,

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.

Something that was just pure fun and pleasure for him to do.

NARRATOR: 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 confusions

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 recreate

"down to the smallest detail,

"down to tunnels under my wife's flower bed

that is mine and perfect and brought to life and safe."

NARRATOR: 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.

WATTS: He gets a little building, the back part of the studio lot,

and he creates this organization called WED,

which were his initials: Walter Elias Disney.

GABLER: "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.

NARRATOR: 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.

ALICE M. DAVIS: 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.

NARRATOR: 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."

GABLER: Roy thinks it's a nutty idea.

"An amusement park?

"And an amusement park that's going to cost

tens of millions of dollars, and it's not going to work."

SUSAN DOUGLAS: 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."

NARRATOR: 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.

RON SUSKIND: This is a "leap from the tub,

eureka, run down the street" moment here.

I mean, just think about that.

"I am gonna take what these movies have done,

"these landscapes that we've invented

"that are just drawings on paper and colored pencils,

"I'm gonna 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 going to come from?

So you see, this is the result

of being a good boy for 30 years.

Santa finally came across.

See the little shovel in there?

See that thing there?

This up here, this is the...

(whistling)

...whistle.

Mr. Disney...

NARRATOR: 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-boo!

NARRATOR: 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 traveled 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 five million dollars 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.

HAHN: So Walt can stand there

and direct him around and say, "No, make the castle bigger,

"and let's put Frontierland over here,

and maybe there's gonna 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.

NARRATOR: 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 damned bad

that they bought the amusement park."

SCHICKEL: That was a pretty dangerous moment for him,

corporately speaking.

Will it be a success?

Will it be a failure?

If it's a failure,

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.

NARRATOR: 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.

BOB GURR: 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 going to open in six months?

How in the world are they ever going to do this?"

NARRATOR: 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 paycheck

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. ¶

ANNOUNCER: 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 ten 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.

SARAH NILSEN: 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 an 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.

HIGGINBOTHAM: He's actually an individual

who could make your dreams come true.

DISNEY: Shooting out from here, like the four cardinal points.

NARRATOR: 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.

DISNEY: They are Adventureland...

Tomorrowland...

Fantasyland...

...and Frontierland.

NARRATOR: 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.

NARRATOR: Davy Crockett aired on three separate Wednesdays

from December of 1954 to February of 1955.

TV ANNOUNCER: Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter.

NARRATOR: 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, idealized view

of American male values.

DOUGLAS BRODE: 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?

Well, 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 neighbors will be back directly.

You see, General, we only volunteered for 60 days,

and that's long since up.

Catching Red Stick

is liable to take up the rest of the year.

We've gotta see our families is took care of

before we start in on anything like that.

Well, Major?

Desertion is a serious crime in the army, Crockett!

I ain't quitting the war.

I told you we was coming back.

You're confined to this camp.

That's an order!

My misses 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's back!

Oh Davy, you're back!

Hello, Pa!

Hi, Pa!

WATTS: The ratings just went through the roof,

and as the serialized segments came on,

they got bigger and bigger and bigger.

NARRATOR: By the time the third and final episode

of Davy Crockett aired,

a quarter of the entire American population was tuned in.

¶ Born on the mountaintop in Tennessee... ¶

NARRATOR: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

WATTS: 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 going to 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

NARRATOR: "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.

NARRATOR: 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 3:00 in the morning,

walking the grounds, barking orders.

"We need new murals for the trains!

Get me an artist!"

July 17, 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 Harbor 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 gonna 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, 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.

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.

Bob Cummings up at the pirate ship,

we're back to you, boy!

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?

NARRATOR: 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 gals with the high heels were going down in the asphalt.

CRUMP: The lines were so packed, we didn't try to eat

because 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 rumors that some of the Hollywood personalities

were using language that shouldn't be heard by children.

(laughs)

NARRATOR: Newspaper reporters

were crawling all over the park that day,

filling their notebooks with mishaps and misadventures

for their next-day 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.

Goodbye, folks!

NARRATOR: Disneyland was thrown open to the public

the day after the gala opening,

and people began lining up at 2:00 that morning

for the chance to be the first ones through the gate.

The park drew a million visitors in its first ten 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 U.S.

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 U.S. State Department, citing security concerns,

quashed his planned visit to Disneyland.

These world leaders saw Disneyland

as a quick and easy window into the U.S. 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 idealized 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.

(riverboat horn blowing)

RIVERBOAT 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.

(singing)

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 is a Native American presence at Frontierland,

it's not about contest.

It's about resolution.

NARRATOR: 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.

DISNEYLAND 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 idealization 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.

NARRATOR: "Disneyland materializes 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 colored, 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.

RON MILLER: 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, "Ha-ya-ya-ya, ha-ya ya-ya."

All night long.

CRUMP: If you saw him in person,

you'd never recognize 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.

NARRATOR: 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 honor

and surprised the town fathers by accepting the invitation.

(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 gonna 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 romanticized period of his youth.

And he accesses it, he can go back to it,

use it as a touchstone for his understanding

of what an ideal childhood should be.

NARRATOR: 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?

TV 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 internalize

that sense of he's standing for something more.

And it's not shareholders.

Those are not who he feels responsible to.

ALL: Yay, Mickey!

Yay, Mickey Mouse!

HIGGINBOTHAM: 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 how far he could go.

And one more thing we want you always to remember:

¶ M-I-C... ¶

See you real soon!

¶ K-E-Y... ¶

Why?

Because we like you!

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,

because that's who he was.

NARRATOR: 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.

DISNEY: Hello!

I'm sorry you got lost.

NARRATOR: 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.

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 is something very affable about Walt Disney the host.

¶ ¶

HIGGINBOTHAM: 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.

It's actually a well-organized 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.

NARRATOR: 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 favorite chili and beans

on trips to London, or the French Riviera.

But he was not like everybody else, and he knew it.

FLOYD NORMAN: 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.

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

"When man is in the forest," you know, 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 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 and say, "Okay, guys, what you got?"

NARRATOR: 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 a 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, you know?

Whether you agree with it or not,

he's the boss, for God's sake.

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 does stuff on the scale that he did

as a good-natured sweetheart of a guy.

He was a hard-driving guy,

and I don't think he ever resolved those conflicts.

(honking)

NARRATOR: 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 favorite 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 were going over a scene

and Walt said, "By the way, Ron,

"would you look up Song of the South,

"reel two, 100 feet into it?

"Put it in a projection room.

I would like to run it for the guys."

We 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."

¶ ¶

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 molded, shaped and taught ¶

¶ That life's a looming battle to be faced and fought... ¶

SHERMAN: 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.

NARRATOR: 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... ¶

¶ Let's go fly a kite ¶

¶ Up to the highest height... ¶

NARRATOR: "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 fulfillment

of everything a great motion picture should be."

¶ Oh, let's go... ¶

HIGGINBOTHAM: 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... ¶

HIGGINBOTHAM: About the healing of the family.

¶ Up to the highest height, let's go... ¶

HIGGINBOTHAM: So he's staying true to what he believes personally

that has woven itself into all of his films.

NARRATOR: 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.

He's finally being embraced

by those whose validation he has always sought.

¶ Oh, let's go fly a kite! ¶

(cheering)

NARRATOR: 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 wailing)

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... ¶

NARRATOR: 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!

NARRATOR: 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.

NARRATOR: 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 marginalized 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.

NARRATOR: 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 criticizing 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 realize, 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... ¶

NARRATOR: 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.

HAYDON BURNS: Walt Disney, who will bring a new world of entertainment,

pleasure, and economic development

to the state of Florida.

Walt Disney.

Thank you, Governor.

(applause)

What type of attraction and what type of usage

will be made of 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.

NARRATOR: 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."

NARRATOR: 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'd 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.

NARRATOR: Disney's design called for a high-density town center

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 organizations

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 theater-goers and people just out for a stroll

will enjoy ideal weather conditions.

GURR: 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 he said, "Well, I'm going to put

"this little park bench right here,

"and Lilly and I are going to sit here

and 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.

NARRATOR: 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 going to 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 Disney World Project.

NARRATOR: 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.

NARRATOR: The effort winded the 64-year-old so badly

he needed oxygen between takes.

DISNEY: ...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."

NARRATOR: 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 going to 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

NARRATOR: On the night of December 14, 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 haircut,

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 okay.

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 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.

TV ANNOUNCERS: Walt Disney is dead tonight at the age of 65...

...had undergone surgery last month

for removal of part of his left lung...

He won 29 Oscars, four Emmys, the Irving Thalberg Award...

Walt Disney, Hollywood's prince of fantasy.

NARRATOR: Walt Disney's death was front-page news the next day,

across the country and around the world.

TV ANNOUNCER: Of his success, Disney has said, "There's no magic formula.

"Children all over the world have one thing in common:

love of laughter."

NARRATOR: 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 into 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!

NILSEN: 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.

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

is provided by Liberty Mutual Insurance.

In 1906, radio brought us together.

is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities,

bringing you the stories that define us.

American Experience is also made possible

by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting

and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

There's more American Experience online at pbs.org,

where you can find out how to join the discussion

on Facebook and Twitter.

American Experience, "Walt Disney," is available on DVD.

To order, visit shopPBS.org, or call 1-800-play-PBS.

American Experience is also available for download

on iTunes.

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