Partners in Surrealism...Walt Disney and Salvador Dali
Wendy Zientek
This is an article that someone gave to me that I found to be quite
intersting so I decided to "b and type it up. It is from Volume two of
"Comics Yearbook" and is also quite long....
"Partners in Surrealism" - By Jordan R. Young
Only the force of "Destino" could forge an animated alliance
between Walt Disney and Salvador Dali.
Of all the strange liasons produced by Hollywood, the coupling of
Salvador Dali and Walt Disney was perhaps the strangest. While the
brainchild of that union was never given the green light, it neverthelsss
refuses to die; every two or three years, the project is retrieved from
oblivion and revived as a possibility.
To Disney, "Destino" was "just a simple love story-boy meets
girl." But to Dali, it was "a magical exposition on teh problem of life
in the labyrinth of time," in which limp watches fell from heaven,
monstrous telephones sprouted legs, sculptures sprang to life and a
trickle of ants became a swarm of bicycle riders.
The project was initiated in 1946 when Disney, who owned teh
rights to a Mexican love ballad by the same title, commissioned the famed
surrealist painter to do a story treatment based on his interpretation of
the song. Planned as a combination of animation, live action, and
special effects, the end product was to have been one segment (about six
minutes long) of a package film along tje lines of "The Three Caballeros"
or "Make Mine Music."
"The name of the song probably appealed more to Salvador Dali
than the music," asserts former studio artist John Hench, who assisted
Dali in the preparation of storyboards. "Dali had a thing for Destiny."
Hench, now senios VP of Walt Disney Imagineering, remembers Dali
as "a kind of renaissance man" who, unlike his public image, was
perfectly sane. "Dali said, 'The difference between me and a crazy
person is, a crazy person dwells in a kind of fantasy; he's in another
room from reality. When I walk into that room, I know where I am; I
leave the door open. A *real* crazy person can't get out; the door is
locked.'"
Dali was given complete freedom at Disney, Hench recalls. "Walt
came in and looked at teh work from time to time. He saw the storyboards
in progress and decided to let Dali go ahead and see what woudl happen.
Walt was entranced by the whole thing. They had a rapport right from the
beginning that was unusual. They got along remarkably, without much
conversation. There was sympathy there."
In addition to working on the storyboards, Hench had the task of
"trying to keep the project in some kind of shape we could handle. Dali
would usually do a key position and then I would fill in the in-betweens,
trying to segue from one area to another. He had a concept he was going
to stick to in a broad sense, but he shared a lot with Walt in his
inventive ability. Walt always came in with more situations than perhaps
a story could hold, and Dali wa sthe same way. Every morning he had new
ideas. I'm sure we could never have fit them in the original time
allowed."
The plot. as complicated as it became, couldn't accommodate the
fruit of Dali's unfettered imagination. "He was so prolific with ideas I
don't think even Luis Bunuel (who worked with Dali on "Andalusian Dog and
L'Age d'Or) could use them all," says Hench. "We would go see some
really mediocre Western at this littel thater in Monterey. Dali would be
absolutely entranced, and then afterward he would tell me what the
picture meant. The inevitable stampede of the bulls would be somebody's
libido, the short little man would be the alter-ego of the protagonist.
He built fabulous stories out of these really banal pictures."
"Destino" borrowed liberally from the proliferation of images
seen in Dali's canvasses. The heroine of the piece, a young girl drawn
to resemble the shadow of a bell in a church tower, was lifted from a
painting he had done a decade earlier. "Suburbs of the
Paranoiac-Critical Town." The idea of teh sculpture coming to life was
originally conceived for Ingrid Bergman while he was designing the dream
scenes for Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound" but was vetoed by the actress,
whom Dali wanted to cover with ants. One new idea for the Disney
scenario involved a group of baseball players, whose actions were
choreographed to resemble a ballet.
Dali traveled to the studio every day for a period of two months,
later going up to Monterey to finish the artwork. "He came in the
morning just liek a regular worker. He didn't punch a clock, of course,
but I don't think that he would have minded punching in," says Hench.
"He liked ritual."
At one point in their labors, Dali and Hench decided that Disney
deserved to see what they were up to, and made a 15-second test on color
film-the sole realization of the project beyond the storyboard stage.
The sequence, which was screened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
a few years ago, showed two grotesquely distorted faces mounted on the
backs of turtles, moving toward each other on a bleak landscape. As tehy
came together, the space between the profiles took on the shape of a
ballerina. Her head was a baseball on the horizon.
"Destino" was abandoned through no fault of Dali's, simply a
change of mind on teh part of huis employer. "Walt thought the market
for package films was gone," explains Hench. "He was an enormously
intuitive man; he could look into the future and project a trend. He
understood the package concept as communicating a certain thing, and he
figured the public needed something else."
Dali, who often sad his own destiny was "to save painting from
the nihilism of modern art," enjoyed little success in his ventures into
film. L'Age d'Or, on which he collaborated with Bunuel, was poorly
received when it opened. The dream sequences for "Spellbound" were
severely cut. And the "Marx Brothers on Horseback Salad", a scenario
that grew out of a friendship with Harpo Marx, was never realized at all.
Still, Dali and Disney remained friends over the years. On a
subsequent trip to Hollywood, Dali rode a miniature train in teh
producer's backyard but was frightened by it's realistic precision.
Disney visited the painter many times at his home in Port Lligat on teh
Spanish Costa Brava, once with a proposalto team up on an animated "Don
Quixote." It never reached the drawing board. They also discussed "El
Cid," for which Dali developed a story concept, but nothing came of it.
A few years after "Destino" was laid to rest, teh storyboard
sketches disappeared in a theft. "The whole portfolio was stolen. I
don't know how many hands it passed through, but whoever stole them was
discriminating. He kept the best ones," recalls Hench. Eventually, the
sketches were purchased by an art dealer in New York, who tried to get
Dali to autograph them The dealer couldn't distinguish between Dali's
work and Hench's, and many of the latter's sketches were authenticated as
teh work of teh master. The material that remained was returned to teh
studio, but many of the treasures-including the art for the film
test-were never seen again.
The sketches that survived teh theft (55 by Dali, 75 by Hench)
are preserved today in teh studio archives. A number of "Destino"
paintings, including a portrait of Jupiter that hung ijn Disney's office
until his death, are now in storage. The works have never been
appraised.
Ten years ago, studio publicist Bob Moore decided that it would
be nice to revive "Destino" and brought the idea to a marketing meeting.
The project was casually discussed and tabled once more. However, the
idea is still resuscitated every few years, and may eventually see teh
light of day, possibly as a segment in a new version of "Fantasia" being
contemplated by Roy E. Disney.
"The film is so short it would have to be incorporated with
something else, and nobody can make the decision as to what to package it
with," says Bob Moore, now retired. ""Destino" could be reactivated at
some point in the future,' he adds, "but teh film was so far ahead of its
time in 1946, I don't think people would have understood it then, and I
don't know that they would understand it now."
---End of article
Sorry for all of the typos
- Wen
*****Wen Zientek***********wr...@cybernet.cse.fau.edu*****
Out of the ash Never be afraid to love, no no no...
I rise with my red hair Never be afraid to just be
And I eat men like air. Just cast away the chains of doubt
Have the courage to be free.