Bill Peet Unleashed
interviewed by John Province

Disney's renegade animator takes on the sheep mentality in animation, studio politics, and even Uncle Walt himself

Most artists would consider themselves fortunate to have enjoyed one successful career. Not so in the case of Disney storyman and sketch artist Bill Peet.

In the mid-1960s when many of his studio colleagues were savoring the advent of a comfortable retirement, Bill Peet was just getting his second wind. Leaving Disney Studios in 1964 after completing story and character work on The Jungle Book, Peet launched himself into another successful career as a popular author and illustrator of his own line of children's books. His first book, Hubert's Hair-Raising Adventure, appeared in 1959, and Bill Peet continues to enjoy an immensely popular following with millions of books in print both in the United States and in several foreign countries.

Although mostly remembered for his character and story work on the feature film Song of the South, during his years at Disney Studios Bill Peet provided a cavalcade of story sketch and character development work on many of the classic Disney films such as Dumbo, Cinderella, Alice In Wonderland, Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, 101 Dalmatians, and The Sword In the Stone.

When we met in November 1988, his latest volume, Bill Peet, An Autobiography, had been outfor two months and was selling well. As he later indicated, the life history came about in part as a rebuttal to the many Disney histories in which, in his opinion, Bill Peet feels he has either been ignored, misrepresented, or the victim of creative theft.

As the interview continued, it became clear that Peet, now an outsider and no longer required to recite the Disney party line, was letting the chips fall where they may in an attempt to set Disney history straight according to his experiences. A bear of a man with a twinkle in his eye, even the harsh words and occasional expletive fail to conceal the remaining traces of the Indiana farm boy still residing inside this now elderly frame. Even as he speaks, I realize that a tiny part of Bill Peet is still off in the countryside catching frogs in the creek.

Province: If you arrived in 1937, Snow White would have been in production. Did you do any work on it?

Peet: I worked at night tracing dwarfs for two weeks without pay. There was no [paid] overtime, and everybody was pressed into action to get this thing done in time for the premiere. They were down to the last few weeks in getting it down so prints could be run. It had gotten around to the theaters that there were no prints, and we were all scared to death.

There were rumors all over Hollywood that this thing wasn't going to go over and that Walt Disney had gotten too big for his britches. [They said,] "No one is going to sit through a full-length cartoon; it's all right for a few laughs." The big producers, of course, were hoping to see Walt Disney fall flat on his face.

They thought it was arrogant for the "Mickey Mouse Man" to rise up and compete. I think it angered them that he wouldn't stay in his place. He played polo with them you see, and they used to kid him about being a "Mickey Mouse third-rater." "The Little King" they called him because Walt's ego was quite large.

Province: Snow White was the big gamble for Disney. Do you think the studio would have survived if it had bombed?

Peet: Oh no, and no one would have dared make another full-length feature. Short subjects just weren't making it. Walt had even borrowed money on it, and a lot of the investors in Hollywood were waiting to buy him out. Giannini promised Walt, "You'll never be in hock to me and I won't take your studio." He had faith in the film.

Province: You did a great deal of work on Dumbo.

Peet: I was one of the "poor boys." They put all the rich boys, the top animators making the big salaries, working on Bambi. They wanted to make it a gem. Originally Dumbo was going to be only a half-hour, sort of a special. When Walt saw what we were doing with it, he said it might make a good feature. Well, Dumbo made money. In fact, it was the only Disney film to make money until Cinderella.

Province: Two of the best, Bill Tytla and Fred Moore, worked on Dumbo.

Peet: People were always amazed at Bill Tytla, that he could draw the giant devil for "Night On Bald Mountain," and the giant in "Brave Little Tailor;" these ponderous, muscled characters, and then do this little elephant. After he got his first scene on Dumbo, he passed me in the hall and said, "Y'know, Bill, I can't draw these goddamned little elephants. If I send Nick [his assistant] up with the scene, would you see if you could work it out?"

Nick brought up this stack of drawings, Bill's scene where the elephants first appear was just a mess. So I went over every one of them, probably a couple of hundred drawings, every damned frame in the picture, and redrew the whole scene. They shot the pencil test and showed it to Walt. He was ecstatic! Nick came up and told me, "Walt loved that thing, and I want to shake your hand!" Well, Bill never bothered to thank me, Walt either.

Province: Could we talk about the strike in 1941?

Peet: I was out there.

Province: And called back afterwards, which was uncommon.

Peet: I felt Walt had been damned unfair regarding the fact that since it was his studio, he only wanted to pay his favorites. Years later he told me how he hated like hell to have to pay non-creative people. But that's the nature of the business. Animation requires an array of manpower with a minimum of talent, the low-grade talent doing the simpler jobs. You can't just pay the talent at the top and say to hell with all the others. No matter how third-rate, you need them, too.

He didn't pay us any overtime. They used to work us on Saturdays, and if they wanted something done a little faster, they would pull us in at night. Some of the in-betweeners were only making $16 a week!

You could hire a hundred people no sweat and then you don't have to worry about a lot of details. You can get cheap labor to do all the coolie work. The government required overtime after 48 hours, but they got the studio on some sort of waiver to get around that. There was no sick pay. I remember coming to work so sick with the flu that I could hardly stand up.

And there was no screen credit. Walt figured people would be willing to take a beating just to able to work there rather at one of the other studios that perhaps offered a few more benefits. It was the old idea that scared people work better. Walt always had the big carrot out there: the future. No future at Lantz or Mintz or the other little studios because their limit was putting out shorts.

Province: Would you say Walt Disney had forgotten where he came from? After all, his own artistic ability was modest.

Peet: He couldn't do any of the things he was famous for. His humor was suspect. I would call it sarcasm at best. He also couldn't write or draw. I ran into a barber many years ago who had a Donald Duck drawing on the wall of his shop down in Hollywood. He said it was an original drawing by Walt Disney. It was from around '36 or '37. I thought it was funny because Walt could never have done that. He would sign the stuff, but he was always scared to death that somebody was going to ask him to do a drawing.

He was a catalyst. He could take a room full of people and organize them into doing it. He could spot talent and pick this guy as good for that and someone else would be good for this.

Peet: Another crisis was Cinderella. We were down to the point where we needed another Snow White, another success. Walt loved to tell me this story. Walt and Roy had been arguing for weeks. Roy told him that they couldn't afford to gamble everything they had on one film. If they would sell out now, they could live comfortably for the rest of their lives. Roy wanted to pick up the marbles and go home. Walt insisted they do just one more, and he chose Cinderella. Without that there would have been no Disneyland, no Epcot Center and no Disney Studio today.

Province: The popular version is that Roy Disney was often concerned with Walt's financial extravagances.

Peet: He was wrong most of the time. The only time he might have been right was with Fantasia. It was a gamble. They were all gambles. Anybody who tries to do anything great is gambling.

Province: Right after the war you worked on the film you're most identified with, Song of the South.

Peet: I did story-sketch on the sequences with B'rer Rabbit based on the Uncle Remus fables. The personalities were so rich and well-defined in the original stories. To me they were funnier than hell! I thought they were going to re-release it but the studio backed off because of the racial things. When it [originally] came out, the NAACP had strong objections to it. They felt Uncle Remus was treated as a slave even though it's post-Civil War, around 1910 or so.

Province: What kind of relationship did you have with the "Nine Old Men"?

Peet: That name has always bugged me because it gives people the idea that there were only nine animators and that they did everything. There sure weren't nine old storymen because it's the most precarious job in the business. When I left the studio, I was the only one left from the story department from Pinocchio.

Yet the Nine Old Men were there the entire time and they could do no wrong. They knew Walt wasn't going to fire them because of some piece of animation that didn't work. But a storyman was only as good as his last story. Walt always figured he could get a storyman, but he respected the animators and didn't want to mess with them. He figured they were the special talents. They had been there the longest, but that didn't mean they were great. There were two or three that were pretty mediocre, but they carried the load on the features. The storymen aren't given any credit or seen as being important in any of the Disney books. They never gave me any credit for any of my work on The Jungle Book.

Province: Your career in children's books has certainly been extremely successful.

Peet: There's life after Disney! I've gotten good reviews on my autobiography in all the big newspapers. Before I dared complete the manuscript, I had to show it all, including rough drawings, to the people in the Disney Permissions Department for approval. They agreed to the use of the characters as long as they remained under Disney copyright. They gave my editors fits before finally agreeing to it. The Mouse Factory has become an overpowering monster you don't mess with.

I was treated very badly in the Bob Thomas book [Walt Disney - An American Original]. He said that I left the studio because I wanted to do The Jungle Book my way and Walt disagreed. After I finished Sword in the Stone, Walt asked what I wanted to do next. I said we should do The Jungle Book. It was a natural for us because we could animate all the animals as personalities. Walt and Bob Thomas went to a meeting in Paris when they found they could buy the rights from the Kipling estate. When Bob Thomas told Walt they could get the rights, Walt said, "Hey, great, that would make a great live-action picture!"

Walt saw me a few weeks later and said, "Hey Bill, I got The Jungle Book for you!" and I pretended to be surprised. Bob Thomas has no idea what happened during our last meeting. But that's just the way I've been treated. It's aggravating to be misrepresented. My autobiography is not a Disney book. I wrote it to straighten a few things out.

This has been an excerpt of a longer feature in HOGAN'S ALLEY #1.

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