Richard Schickel - The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney

IT IS HARD to believe that Walt Disney has been dead these thirty years, so ubiquitous does his name remain, so powerful is the corporation that continues to bear that name. It is just as hard for me to believe that the book about him that I began in the last year of his life, and published the year after his passing, is still alive, reissued now for the second time since its original edition went out of print.

The afterlife of The Disney Version is, naturally, pleasing to me. In Enemies of Promise the English littrateur Cyril Connolly set as hisanyserious writers only worthwhile goal the creation of a book that lasted ten years, the while decrying the forces that make its accomplishment so difficultespecially in modern times. Indeed, when I recall the breezy confidence of the fairly young man who did not yet know how difficult writing a book couldand perhaps shouldbe, and remember that this one was completed with what seems to me, looking back, alarming ease, its survival for a span exceeding Connollys ideal by a multiple of three is more than pleasing. It seems pretty close to miraculous.

For in the mid-sixties, when Richard Kluger, then an editor at Simon & Schuster, proposed that I write a book about Walt Disney and his works, it was not a self-evidently promising idea. In those days Disney was one of the great unexamined premises of American life. He was the man who had built a better mouse, and, in the postwar years, a betterif by more recent standards, quite modestentertainment conglomerate. He had therefore prospered, just as folk wisdom decreed that any talented inventor-entrepreneur inevitably must. There was no perceivable public demand for a closer examination of his success storymost Americans were completely content with their image of Uncle Walt as a benign purveyor of family entertainment who had been justifiably rewarded for his efforts. So the morally gratifying story of his rise and triumph was blandly, endlessly repeated in the popular press, which offers almost no thoughtful portrayals of the man or probing reports on his accomplishments. Worse, tales like Disneys were deemed uninteresting by the literary-intellectual community, which did not often apply its analytical skills to his creations or think at all seriously about what effect they might be having on the tone and texture of American life. It was smart and brave of Dick to believe there might possibly be a market for something that looked at Disney and his works a little more rigorously. And, if I say so myself, it was smart and brave of me to agree with him. But we got a lot of puzzled looks and dim responses when we discussed our project with friends and colleagues.

This indifference to what became for a couple of years my ruling passion turned into a benison. I became a man with a mission. I wanted to prove the doubters wrong. And, yes, I wanted to make a little fuss at the fringe of the Disney empire. Its always fun to make rude noises in pious realms. And, besides, I thought I might gain a little notoriety by so doingsomething largely unknown writers need to do.

But I never thought of The Disney Version as a radical critique of the man or the institution he ruled so obsessively. Im not a radical by naturecertainly not in the careless sense that the term was used in the sixties. I wasand ama liberal of what has become a rather outmoded sort. My ambition was social commentaryskeptical, iconoclastic, civilly controversialwithin a critical tradition I admired. So I was somewhat startled by the strong response to the book.

By the time it was published I had become a movie reviewer and found myself banned, for a time, from Disney screening rooms. This I wore as a badge of honor. On the other hand, the employee who arranged a weeklong tour of Disney operations in Los Angeleswhere Walt himself proposed that I ally myself with Readers Digest , whose publishing arm was thinking of doing a book about himwas fired for encouraging me. This, I thought, was a badge of shame on the company, though its behavior was perhaps predictable. Such criticism as it had previously endured had come from the cultural marginsMarxists, for example, and child psychologists, and other easily ignored sources. It had never dealt with lengthy, broad-scale criticism from a source that was both independent and mainstream. Moreover, the founder had died suddenly while the book was in preparation, and it seemed to his heirs, both corporate and familial, that something more hagiographic was in order at that moment.

The reaction from other quarters was more interesting. About time, was the line implicitly taken by many of the books reviewers, who were all in all quite welcoming. But the response of nonprofessional readers was even more heartening. I was doing some lecturing at colleges in those days, and inevitably some earnest film student would approach me after my appearance to tell me that the book had special meaning for him or her. They had all been raised on Disneys works and were now at that stage in life where, naturally, they were questioning the valuesand the cultural objectstheir parents, their society, had pressed upon them. As grown-ups some of these same people still seek me out to praise a book that struck a questioning note at a questioning and impressionable time in their lives. Similarly, for many years I served as a sort of anti-Disney for the press, constantly asked to comment on new developments in the corporate story. Nothing I have ever written has had this continuing relevance.

Not having reread The Disney Version for many years, a curious thing occurred to me when I did so recently; I had begun to forget what I had actually written, and had also begun to mistake other peoples readings of my work for my actual intentions and accomplishment. Looking at it now, the book seems far less an attack on Disney than either his supporters or his enemies took it to be, much more the judicious questioning of his myth and achievements that I always meant it to be. Indeed, I still feel now what I felt when I finished my workthat my portrait of Walt Disney flattered him precisely because it granted him a complexity of character and motivation that no one had previously offered. I also feel now, as I did then, that for all my criticisms, my portrayal was shot through with admiration for him and his achievements. We sprang from similar midwestern soil and had certain inhibitions and ambitions, certain blindnesses and visions in common. In other words, I thought an authentic sympathy mingled with the various exasperations of my portrait. The publication a few years ago of a scabrous biography of Disney, a book which had him wandering the underground passageways of his studio and theme park, drunk and raving paranoia, a figure partaking it seemed to me in equal measure of King Lear and Howard Hughes, further confirmed my belief in the balance and fundamental accuracy of my portrayal.

This is not to say that I would draw it in exactly the same way now. Witnessing the long, slow decline of his company in the two decades between Walt Disneys death and the accession of the Michael EisnerFrank Wells regime in 1984, a period in which a cautious and uninspired management overstressed one portion of Walts legacyhis moral and cultural conservatismat the expense of the otherhis innovative enthusiasmI came to think that I had been too critical of the young Walt. Yes, there was something all too often hard and joyless in his pursuit of his ambitions. And, yes, he was essentially an untutored man, whose taste was not without a broad vulgar streak. But when I wrote I did not sufficiently acknowledge, I think, the obstacles he had to overcome, particularly in establishing what amounted to a new movie formthe feature-length animated film. Certainly I was in those days unaware of how exceptional it was for a man operating a small, and by industry standards marginal, company to undertake such a daunting task. To put it simply, he was more entitled than I knew to his frets, frustrations and furies. Indeed, seen from todays perspective, when Hollywood is increasingly ruled by committees of development executives whose chief duty is to see that nothing untoward, or singular, develops on their watch, when the same cautious climate prevails over much of American life, his doughty independence seems even more admirable.