Mary The Making Of A Princess Full Movie 123movies
Natalie Omahony
In 1966, the year Walt Disney died, 240 million people saw a Disney movie, 100 million tuned in to a Disney television program, 80 million bought Disney merchandise, and close to seven million visited Disneyland. Few creative figures before or since have held such a long-lasting place in American life and popular culture.
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Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this film do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment For The Humanities.
Richard Sherman, Songwriter: 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.
Richard Sherman, Songwriter: 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."
Narrator: 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...
Ron Suskind, Writer: 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.
Richard Schickel, Writer: 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 hail-fellow-well-met, good-natured. But he wasn't.
Sarah Nilsen, Film Historian: 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 'em on screen, and allow other people to also feel them along with him.
Neal Gabler, Biographer: 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?
Richard Schickel, Writer: 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.
Narrator: 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.
Neal Gabler, Biographer: 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.
Narrator: 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.
Tom Sito, Animator: It was an exciting and very dynamic medium. The industry was very young. There was no regulations, or no customs, or no conformity. It was wide open to what people wanted to make of it.
Narrator: 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.
Sarah Nilsen, Film Historian: 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.
Narrator: 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."
Don Hahn, Animator: 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.
Narrator: 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.
Ron Suskind, Writer: 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.
Neal Gabler, Biographer: 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. Walt was antithetical to Elias not only by temperament, but also by will. He determined, "I'm going to be everything he isn't. I'm going to be the antithesis of him. Look at his life. I don't want to live that life."
Ron Suskind, Writer: He survives a life of deprivation, of have not, of no time to do the things that kids should do -- play, enjoy, laugh. And the minute he gets into full upright adulthood, whether he says it to himself or not, he's like, "I am going to make amends for that in some way. I don't know how, but I yearn for the things that I didn't get as a child."
Narrator: Disney and his Laugh-O-grams crew secured a contract for six animated fairytale shorts, but when they delivered the work, the distributor stiffed them. Walt could no longer make payroll, or pay the rent on his office, the phone bill, the electrical bill. Creditors began circling, while Walt insisted he had discovered the means for a daring escape, which he explained in a Hail Mary letter to one of the best-known cartoon distributors in New York. "We have just discovered something new and clever in animated cartoons," Disney wrote. His big idea was to insert footage of a real girl into animated scenes. Alice in Cartoonland, he crowed, was "bound to be a winner."
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