Free The Animated Man by Michael Barrier Page A

product as desirable to the exhibitor as we possibly can, feeling that if we can only ride out these present times we are really doing well in the final analysis. Then when better times do return, we will still be in the front and be able to take care of the old family sock.” 86 Roy, as much as Walt, wanted to go into color, and he was working hard to justify such a move, to himself as well as Lichtman. By November 1932, there was no longer any doubt—it would be wrong, Roy wrote to Lichtman, to do other than make all the
Silly Symphonies
in Technicolor. 87
    At first, when the Disney studio began making color cartoons, colors were set more in the story department than by the directors or layout men, but in this area, as in most others, the decisions were really being made by Walt Disney. Wilfred Jackson was a director then. “By the time I would talk to [Emil] Flohri [the principal background painter] about the backgrounds, Walt had been there,” Jackson said. “Flohri was telling me what he was going to do in the way of coloring, I wasn’t telling him.” 88
    In the early 1930s, Disney was still close to the people who worked for him, literally so in some cases. He lived just a few blocks from the Hyperion Avenue studio and across the street from Don Patterson—an assistant animator at the studio (and formerly an animator for Charles Mintz). 89 But with the studio more prosperous thanks to the UA release, Disney was ready to move again.
    In the spring and summer of 1932, Walt and Lillian Disney built their second new home, this one a twelve-room house described as “Norman-French” in style, at 4053 Woking Way in the Los Feliz Hills. 90 Like the Lyric Avenue house, it was on a winding street not far from the studio, but the new neighborhood, north of Los Feliz Boulevard, was, like the house itself, considerably grander than its predecessor. Roy Disney marveled in 1968 at the audacity of the construction: “He hung this swimming pool up on the corner of this darn thing. It’s a granite hill and we were taking bets to see if it would stand. It’s thirty-five years and it’s still there.” 91
    (Even in 1964, Disney was a little defensive about just how grand the house was. “Everybody gets mad at the rich for owning these big places,” he told the Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper, “but they forget how many jobs it creates. It takes a lot of people to run a big estate. I built a house in Los Feliz during the Depression. Men used to line up there in the morning hopingto get work. I found a graduate of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and had him paint my whole ceiling.”) 92
    By mid-1932, the enthusiastic, cheerleading voice in Disney’s 1928 letters from New York was being heard in the story outlines for new cartoons that were distributed throughout the studio with a request for help with gags. The outlines typically begin with a summary of the story—running as long as four pages—that was probably dictated by a member of the story crew, followed by notes that sound like Disney himself, right down to the profanity, as in the outline for
Mickey’s Mechanical Man
(“This could lead to a helluva lot of gags and a new type of Mickey”). 93
    In an outline distributed in July 1932, Disney scoffed at the doubters who said a
Mickey Mouse
cartoon called
Building a Building
could never be made: “Production has been started on it twice before, and it was side-tracked both times because it was thought to contain too much detail. I cannot agree with this. I believe it can be handled in a simplified manner and turn out to be very effective. . . . So let’s go after it with a vengeance and make something very good out of it.” 94 There was a disingenuous side to Disney’s cheerleading—who else but Disney himself could have “side-tracked” a cartoon because “it was thought to contain too much