American Experience

Tonight...

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

in this big industry that he wants to break into.

: Hey, Pluto, here she comes!

Mother!

He pounded the table and he said,

"We're not making cartoons here!

We're making art!"

A two-night event,

"Walt Disney" starts now on American Experience.

Lift-off, the clock is running.

Schmeling is down!

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is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities,

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Every time Walt walked down a hallway,

he would give a loud cough.

It was a warning sign

so we would know that the boss was in the area.

In Bambi, there's a line:

when man is in the forest, there was danger.

You have to be worried.

We'd hear Walt coughing coming down the hall.

And one of the guys would say, "Man is in the forest,"

and we'd all get ready for Walt.

He walked through the door and, you know, pins would drop.

You couldn't hear anything.

His personal power walked right with him.

There was no joking around.

He would sit down, he'd say, "Okay, guys, what you got?"

And I would say, "I got a great idea,"

and Walt would say,

"We'll tell you if you have a great idea.

You have an idea."

Walt Disney was an international celebrity by the time he was 30,

hailed a genius before he was 40,

with honorary degrees from Harvard and Yale.

He built a media and entertainment company

that stands as one of the most powerful on the planet.

This little fellow is Bashful.

Won more Academy Awards than anybody in history,

created a cinematic art form...

...and invented a new kind of American vacation destination.

Disney's work counts adoring fans on every continent

and critics who decried its smooth façade of sentimentality

and stubborn optimism,

its feel-good rewrite of American history.

Disney's a Rorschach in America.

The love and hate, it's off the charts.

But God, you have got to respect the energy of this guy.

I mean, he is lunging every day of his life.

Well, kids, Babes in Toyland is finished,

and now it's time to celebrate!

Nobody who does stuff on the scale that he did

is a sweetheart of a guy.

I think he wanted to be what his image was.

He wanted to be thought of

as a "hale fellow well met," good-natured.

But he wasn't.

Walt Disney is in many ways a very dark soul.

And one could say that he fought that,

fought that darkness, tried to find the light.

He is feeling so much inside,

and he wants people to feel what he feels is inside.

He could take those feelings

that were so central to who he was,

put them on screen, and allow other people

to also feel them along with him.

Most successful people,

they get one thing right and that's it.

But Walt Disney was a guy who got a whole lot of things right.

What did this guy understand about the human psyche?

Walt Disney was as driven a man as I've ever met in my life.

What he really wanted to do was,

as we used to say in the Middle West,

make a name for himself.

He had a sort of undifferentiated ambition.

He wanted to be somebody, that's for sure.

Walt Disney was still a few months shy of his 18th birthday

when he returned from France

after the First World War in 1919,

and he was already better off

than most of the two million other American boys

streaming back home.

"Diz," as his friends called him,

had banked over $500 and had a place waiting for him

at a Chicago jelly factory, where his father was part-owner.

The job offer was the best

most working-class boys could hope for,

but Walt Disney was not like most working-class boys.

He's got all these ideas and he starts acting on them.

And where most people were "ready, aim, fire,"

he was like, "ready, fire, aim."

You know, he's like, "Let's go."

Walt loved attention.

He was an extrovert.

He loved to be the center of attention.

He wants to be an artist.

And I think he discovered something early on:

that talent was his way of getting attention.

He's a man of the times, and the times are exciting.

Walt was determined to do work he loved,

and he had been an enthusiastic artist and cartoonist

from the time he was little.

He took a pass on factory work in Chicago

and headed for Kansas City instead,

where he had spent much of his boyhood.

He moved into a house with two of his older brothers

and landed a job as a commercial artist for a local ad company.

Soon he was making enough money for fashionable clothes,

fine cigars, meals at nice restaurants,

and near-nightly trips to the movie houses

springing up all over town.

Disney's evenings in these new palaces of celluloid fantasy

included at least one feature film,

maybe a serial short,

a newsreel, and an animated cartoon or two.

It was an exciting and very dynamic medium.

The industry was very young.

There was no regulations,

no customs, no conformity.

It was wide open to what people wanted to make of it.

Disney was captivated.

His only formal training

was a few months at an art school in Chicago

and a course at the Kansas City Art Institute,

but he was convinced he could make better

than what he was seeing.

He checked out from the public library

Eadweard Muybridge's Human Figures in Motion.

Then he borrowed a volume

that laid out the basics of animation in filmmaking.

Disney read about roughing out a storyline,

creating characters, and carefully drawing

each individual frame onto white linen paper.

By mounting each frame on pegs just as the book instructed

and shooting them one at a time,

he began to create the illusion of movement.

He was really into modern culture.

The pleasure of somehow engaging

with the potential of cinema, the potential of animation

was exciting to him.

And he had this little ability to draw.

He had a knack.

Disney's first efforts

were short cartoons he made on nights and weekends

with a film camera he borrowed from his boss at the ad company.

"I gagged 'em up to beat hell," he would say,

and then sold them to a small Kansas City-based theater chain.

The fees didn't even cover his costs,

but Disney gained something more important than money:

attention, excitement, a whiff of destiny.

"My first bit of fame came there," he said.

"I got to be a little celebrity."

At age 20, Disney quit his day job

and started a company:

Laugh-O-Grams, Inc., Walter Elias Disney, president.

He hired a salesman, a business manager,

and four young apprentice animators.

I can imagine a young Walt Disney

just, you know, waking up at dawn

and going out with his friends and saying,

"Well, let's shoot this, let's film this."

And that kind of hunger for not just expressing himself,

but finding out who he was.

He couldn't do enough.

He has stars in his eyes.

He thinks he can do anything and everything that he wants.

He has big plans.

He's gonna conquer the world.

Just as he was beginning to get some traction

in the modern movie industry,

Walt's parents arrived from Chicago.

Elias and Flora Disney moved in with their sons

because they had nowhere else to turn.

The jelly factory had failed,

the latest in a long line of Elias's business disasters.

While Disney's mother tried to be supportive

of Walt's new career, his father took little joy

in his youngest son's minor celebrity.

He told Walt not to expect his new success to last.

Walt began to worry he was going to end up,

once again, in service to his father.

Disney lived a very, very difficult existence

in Missouri as a kid.

He works all the time.

His father is an imperious, withholding,

kind of brutal character.

"You're here to work, and work to help me."

That's Dad.

It's hard to find a father and son who are more different

than Elias Disney and Walt Disney.

Walt Disney was fun-loving.

He loved practical jokes.

He was a kid who just loved people.