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Bill Peet interview - continued
Peet: There's nobody that good. He was a great Mickey Mouse artist. He had the juices and was very creative. He created the dwarfs for Snow White, and he had a real loose, natural style and was a natural for animation. He gave a new flexibility to the whole art of animation. I think he was too young when he hit his peak, for one thing. He was only twenty-four. Freddy drank himself out of sight and got a little bit cocky and thought he was too good for the whole thing. He would hardly do any drawing, and his assistants would cover up for him. He thought you could draw and drink and you can't do that. I worked on the mouse [in Dumbo] a lot for Freddy. It was his last big animation assignment. Ironically it was the drunken mouse scene. The champagne bottle falls into the tub of water, and the bubble comes up and then the mouse falls into the tub. Freddy just couldn't draw a mouse that didn't look like Mickey. It was so ingrained in him after drawing just thousands of them. The nose was too round, so I went over Freddy's things including the storyboards. Freddy did a fine animation job on it, but I refined his drawings so they looked like Timothy. That was the last thing he ever did and it turned out to be one of his best jobs. Walt let him go on for a long time after that until it got to be too much. He went over to Walter Lantz and couldn't handle it over there either. He later died in an automobile accident. Province: Another great scene in Dumbo involves the crows. Were there problems with that at the time? Peet: Yes, about the voices. I directed the voice recordings and the point they missed was that the voices were actually done by black men who were just doing their thing. It was caricatured, but it was them. Province: That was a Ward Kimball scene. Peet: Yes it was, and it was a damned good one, too. Province: And after Dumbo? Peet: I continued to work as a full-fledged story man who did his own sketching. 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. Province: What about the official "Walt Disney" signature? Peet: Hank Porter created that. Walt signed his name and Hank worked with it and put some style into it. Province: Did you know Art Babbit5 well at all? Peet: I didn't like him. He tried to take too much credit for us going out. We didn't go out on account of him. We went out because of the unfairness. I got a raise during Dumbo, so I had no axe to grind regarding money. I went out because I felt to stay in would be betraying my principles. When they found out there might be a strike, they called us into the theater. Roy Disney addressed us and said that Walt Disney himself only made $500 a week and that they tried to be fair with everybody. He said if everyone would take a 10 percent pay cut, they could keep 400 people and not have to fire them. Okay, we all cheered and took the cut, even though I'd just gotten my raise. There was great applause. It was settled. One week later they started taking the cut and fired the 400 people anyway. When I went out, some friends told me, "Bill, you're making the mistake of your life. You're going to ruin your career, and you're just starting to take off." I couldn't help it. I could not honestly go back in there and ever feel right again. I've talked to many people over the years. They've told me that they would have felt better if they had gone out. They said they've always felt guilty about being a company man. Walt insisted they [the strikers] were all Commies. If you disagree with long hours and no sick pay, you must be a Commie. He also insisted that there wasn't any talent on the outside of the gate. Province: This must have been an agonizing period for Disney, though. Three flops in a row with Bambi, Pinocchio and Fantasia, and then the war. Peet: During the war things got pretty thin. There was no foreign income until the war was over. Audiences didn't go out during the war. They were at home glued to their radios wondering how far the Japanese had gotten in the Philippines. Province: What about the wartime South American films like "The Three Caballeros"? Peet: Those were subsidized by the government for good will. We did some war work, but those were done on very small budgets. The government gave us what they considered ample amounts, but they didn't understand animation, and Walt wasn't used to working in those narrow limits. 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.
COMMENTARY FEATURES INTERVIEWS SKETCHBOOKS CLASSICS LINKS Copyright@1997-99
Hogan's Alley Magazine. All rights reserved. |
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Province:
Fred Moore is often described as the boy genius of the studio. 
