Today's Reading
PROLOGUE
A TALE OF TWO TITANS
It was hard to tell what shone most brightly that December evening in 1937. Powerful beams of light from the hand-operated spotlights searched the sky above the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles. Pure star power emanated from the red carpet. Flashbulbs popped as tuxedoed and bejeweled celebrities like Clark Gable, Marlene Dietrich, Cary Grant, and Shirley Temple made their way into the theater, past the thousands of fans who spilled into the street, craning their necks for a glimpse. But brightest of all, perhaps, were the hopes of thirty-six-year-old Walt Disney, the creator of the first full-length animated feature to be unveiled that night, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Entering the theater, Walt was both elated and profoundly anxious. Charlie Chaplin had wired him a telegram that morning: am convinced all our fondest hopes will be realized tonight. And over the course of the next eighty-eight minutes, they were. The audience even applauded the backgrounds, without a single animated character on the screen. When Snow White was poisoned by the apple and laid out on her funeral bier, audible sniffling and nose-blowing could be heard throughout the theater. Walt had been fretting for months over whether viewers would be emotionally moved by animated characters, but at the end of the film, when the audience leaped to its feet in a standing ovation, he felt a knot release within him. It was all right. People liked it. He hadn't failed.
Snow White might have been a historic success, but the road to that success was excruciating. Walt hired a small army of six hundred artists and drove them into the ground—three eight-hour shifts every day, around the clock—drawing, inking, and painting over a quarter million stills. The work hours totaled two hundred years' worth of labor. Furthermore, the film, first budgeted at $250,000, had exceeded its budget more than sixfold. His studio owed the bank a million dollars, a mind-bending sum during the heart of the Great Depression.
But to Walt, the time didn't matter. Money was no object. The only thing that mattered was that he had pushed and scraped and, through sheer force of will, achieved that elusive "just right" feeling. If the movie didn't feel right in his bones, not only would it fall short, so would he. He was his movies.
Chasing that feeling was intense and agonizing, not only for Walt but also for everyone around him. Since Walt couldn't draw each cel himself, he had to let go of absolute control, but he couldn't bring himself to trust the world-class staff he had so carefully handpicked. Even after animation began, Walt screen-tested more than 150 young women for the role of Snow White, a marathon time suck of exhausting comparison. When it came time to paint, Walt had the studio grind its own pigments, then painstakingly measured each with a spectrometer—one of only twenty in the world at the time—creating an expansive library of 1,200 different colors that pointlessly exceeded Technicolor's existing technology. Undaunted, Walt had the staff create a seven-foot-tall chart displaying exactly how each pigment would translate to the screen.
Even in the final, combustible days leading up to the movie's release, Walt couldn't stop micromanaging. "Have the hummingbird make four pick-ups instead of six," he corrected. Regarding one of the dwarfs: his "fanny in the last half of the scene is too high." The Queen's eyebrows were too extreme. One of Grumpy's fingers was too big. In an irony visible only to his exasperated staff, Walt worried aloud that the constant revisions would suck the spontaneity from the film. Far from Walt's office, on the studio floor, the supervising director threw drawing boards across the room, screaming, "We gotta get the picture out!"
When the film was finalized, Walt could only see the flaws. To a reporter, he admitted, "I've seen so much of Snow White that I am conscious only of the places where it could be improved. You see, we've learned such a lot since we started this thing! I wish I could yank it back and do it all over again."
Ultimately, the colossal success of Snow White publicly cemented Walt's place in cinematic history. For a time, it was the highest-grossing American film ever, making nearly $92 million in today's dollars during its initial release. Away from the spotlight, however, it solidified Walt's perpetual dissatisfaction. His triumph only set the bar higher for Disney magic. Despite Walt's carefully crafted public image of the sheepish, aw-shucks "Uncle Walt," a journalist visiting the studios noted that Walt "appeared to be under the lash of some private demon."
After the war, faced with the realities of budgets and bank loans, the studio went through a round of layoffs and budget cuts. Walt, demoralized, began to lose his drive. His future films, he fretted, would never be the jewel box masterpieces—painstaking, gorgeous, almost spiritual experiences—that the earlier ones had been. Rather than making the most of what he had or looking at the new constraints as a challenge to be mastered, he grew despondent: If the films couldn't be perfect, what was the point in making them?
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