11 A Feature-Length Cartoon
Additional young artists seemed to be hired every day, many of whom with more schooling than Fred Moore, Dick Lundy, Norm Ferguson, and Babbitt. These art-school graduates, including Milt Kahl, Frank Thomas, and Ward Kimball, started their six-month rite-of-passage in the inbetweeners’ bullpen.1 Once at the top of their art class, they now did “assembly-line work” in crowded rows of drawing desks, without air-conditioning, in the Los Angeles swelter. They each made drawing after drawing of inbetweens, “like a drawing robot,” for $22.50 a week2 while dodging the wrath of the cantankerous department supervisor.3
Bill Tytla may have been the last animator Walt hired without a six-month trial in the bullpen. In November 1934 Tytla left Terrytoons and moved into the downstairs bedroom of Babbitt’s home on Tuxedo Terrace.4 Babbitt was thrilled. He now shared a home with his best friend.
Amid his busy schedule, Walt Disney frequented the studio soundstage where a new model, a teenage dancer, donned a fairy-tale dress. Some artists and directors sat close by with their papers and pencils, sketching her movements. Walt was very protective of her, and in a studio dominated by rambunctious young men, Walt made her and her father feel safe in his charge.5
The model, Marjorie Belcher, had been dancing her entire life. Her father, Ernest Belcher, was a Hollywood “dance director” (now called choreographer) who managed one of Hollywood’s most prestigious dance studios. British and very proper, he raised Marge with high standards of decorum, intent on sheltering her from Hollywood’s debauchery. He had a standing rule forbidding Marge from auditioning for screen roles—but having her movements drawn by Disney artists was permissible.
Marge arrived at the studio a couple days a month to model as Snow White for a very small group of Walt’s top creatives. She earned ten dollars a day to pantomime the princess in full costume so that the movements of her and her ruffled clothing could be carefully studied.6
While the Disney men who drew Marge remained on their best behavior, others were painting the town red. Employees hosted parties and went to dance clubs. Art Babbitt had built a reputation as the swinging bachelor of the Disney studio, inviting large numbers of coworkers to soirees at the home that he shared with Tytla, though Tytla would not always partake. There were drinks from the fully stocked bar, and guests splayed across the floor on pillows like a Persian harem. Music from his extensive record collection projected from his top-of-the-line Capehart Automatic record player, able to play up to ten records in automatic rotation. Guests would recall the decadence wistfully for decades to come.7
Babbitt’s gatherings evolved into grand salons, attracting Hollywood’s creative community. Musicians entertained on lute and his grand piano, authors recounted their adventures, and fine artists showed their handiwork. Babbitt’s parties were mentioned in the local high-society column of the Hollywood Citizen-News on multiple occasions. He had become a man-about-town, one evening the personal guest of Alexander Pantages (who owned the Pantages theaters), the next an honored “screen celebrity” guest at a Hollywood supper club. He kept company with Hollywood screenwriters like Leonard Spiegelgass, concert pianist Richard Buhlig, and actress Jeanne Cagney (sister of Jimmy). The press made him the most famous Disney animator.8
Models from the Disney art school also showed up. The head of the modeling agency, the curly-haired brunette Doris Harmon,9 performed a half-nude tribal dance. Another performed a reverse striptease on Babbitt’s bed while he filmed her for research (labeling the footage “dressing action”). Above Babbitt’s bed, festooned with pillows (and no headboard), was a print of Manet’s suggestive nude, Olympia, and his print of Cézanne’s The Green Jug.10 He pursued a passionate romance with one of the models, a raven-haired would-be starlet named Sändra Stark. (In her later days she would say that he was the only man she had ever loved.)11
Photo of Babbitt entertaining at his home, circa 1935. Babbitt is at left; Les Clark is at center, in front of Jeanne Cagney.
Babbitt was not prudish about his affections toward whichever woman had earned his attention. Oftentimes when Bill Tytla returned late to their darkened house, he begrudgingly had to use the back entrance lest he step on Babbitt and a paramour necking on the living room floor.12 At a time when people were holding fundraiser parties to help pay the rent,13 Art Babbitt, age twenty-six, was living like a Hollywood Jay Gatsby.
The lifestyle was completely contrary to his father’s values. Clearly, Babbitt took after his mother, down to her open-door policy for needy children. One day, an animator in Babbitt’s room said he knew a young single mother who had been hit hard by the Depression and needed someone to care for her two-and-a-half-year-old son for a couple of weeks. Babbitt volunteered. Soon a little blond boy named Dickie arrived. Tytla objected at first, but it wasn’t long until Dickie was a member of the household. Their housekeeper doubled as an additional caregiver. Months later, Dickie’s mother came to retrieve her boy, and Dickie and Babbitt remained close from then onward. (Dickie grew up to be Oscar-winning film editor Richard A. Harris and continued a relationship with Babbitt’s children.)14
Babbitt’s private exploits never interfered with his work. In January 1935 Disney management experimented with profit-sharing, introducing a “semi-annual bonus.” Babbitt received a percentage earned by the cartoons he had worked on since 1932. His work was rated “100% Plus.” Babbitt’s bonus check totaled $503.72, with his $125-per-week salary set to increase to $150 in February.15
The incentive-based bonus thrilled the artists. Now they were not merely hired hands but also personally invested in the success of each project. The Disney management took note of the morale boost and began brainstorming ways to expand it.
Snow White still had huge hurdles to overcome. The most glaring one was the problem of believable human animation. Walt wondered if they could even achieve drama or suspense without it. Sure, a drawing could make you laugh. But could a drawing make you cower? Or cry? In early 1935 Walt wasn’t yet sure his vision could be realized, and he stopped holding story meetings for Snow White.16
However, Walt did notice one particular phenomenon within his staff: as they trained and honed their skills, each artist began to have a different specialty. Previously, each artist was expected to be moderately versatile, but now everyone was handed a specific task. The studio was already structured like a mass-production assembly line. Now Walt saw it becoming even more so.17
Babbitt’s success with Mickey’s Service Station pinned him as a Goofy specialist. Around early March 1935 he began animating Goofy in the Mickey Mouse cartoon On Ice. Goofy attempted to ice-fish by baiting his hook with chewing tobacco and, when the fish surfaced to spit, clubbing it on the head.
The animators’ rooms were equipped with a full-length mirror for studying their movements in action. Babbitt had seen the movements of his own tall, thin body. It was a simple transference to animate Mickey’s Service Station as if the Goof were a tall, thin actor. But now that he had delved deep in the Goof’s psyche, he considered delving deeper into his body mechanics as well.
The animators had newly discovered a property that they called follow-through, in which a moving character had parts that dragged behind, like a tail or a skirt, settling a few frames after the main mass. This, thought Babbitt, could be leveraged into a personality trait for the Goof. Babbitt treated Goofy’s joints as if they were prone to drag in the air. This meant that, at moments, his legs and feet bent the wrong way. Goofy’s personality was distilled in this loose, gangly walk. Babbitt called this technique breaking the joints.
As Babbitt was animating Goofy in On Ice, the character was also being animated in Mickey’s Fire Brigade, albeit in a much smaller role. These supporting Goof scenes were assigned to Woolie Reitherman, one of the art-school graduates who had completed the trainee program. Reitherman’s Goof in Mickey’s Fire Brigade is treated like a glorified extra.18
Tytla animated on Mickey’s Fire Brigade as well, particularly a frantic sequence in which Mickey and his friends try to rescue a bathing Clarabelle Cow. It is hilarious and rich with personality; Tytla’s superior skills were already rising to the surface.
The Disney studio did not have its own commissary,19 but the employees of the “Mouse House” often congregated at one of the neighboring lunch counters that they affectionately nicknamed the “Mouse Trap Café.”20 Naturally, it was a good place to share studio gossip. One hot item that May was about Babbitt: he was suing the owner of a local hardware store for the sum of one dollar and twenty-nine cents.21
The discrepancy concerned the new California state sales tax, which took effect at the start of the year. Babbitt was adamant about the injustice of having to pay the 3 percent sales tax. He argued that the merchant ought to pay it, not the customer. One California newspaper wrote, “If Babbitt’s contention is upheld, it may bring about an entire adjustment of workings of the sales tax law in this state.”22 Many of his peers at the studio thought the suit was ridiculous,23 but that hardly mattered to Babbitt. He was willing to battle for his beliefs.
Babbitt was proud of this identifier. At one point, a young production control manager named Herb Lamb approached Babbitt and animator Frank Thomas. Ribbing them both, Lamb asked sardonically why animators were even necessary when a director can point a camera at an actor. Being one of the newly hired art-school graduates, Thomas began defending the value of artists in society when Babbitt interrupted him. Animation, Babbitt explained, is about capturing the impression of something. He pointed out that when Lamb looked at him, Lamb saw something more than glasses, a nose and a mouth. He saw something that said “stubborn,” “aggressive,” and “I fight for the things I believe in, no matter what.”24
Around this time, Babbitt became better acquainted with the company’s chief legal counsel, Gunther Lessing. Lessing was nearly fifty years old, stone bald, mustachioed, and impeccably dressed in a three-piece suit. He had worked for Walt since 1928 or 1929 and had a successful career as a Texas lawyer beforehand. He often recounted his days representing Pancho Villa during the Mexican Revolution. Babbitt sought Lessing out for legal and personal advice, and the two became friendly, even exchanging dinner invitations to each other’s homes.25 Lessing may have genuinely liked Babbitt. He also may have seen Babbitt as a convenient go-between with production staff.
Animating at the Disney studio could be grueling. There was a constant striving for excellence, and drawing did not always come easily. The animators spent hours at their desks, squinting through the light behind their animation discs, struggling to get each drawing perfect. Every blank page brought with it infinite possibilities. “Occasionally,” said Walt in 1935, “one [animator] will have an off day on which he can’t draw anything worthwhile. Then he has to be pampered and pulled out of his slump with all the diplomacy that would be used on a [movie] star.”26
The animators had ways of working through their animator’s block, blowing off steam during lunchtime on the studio lot. They tossed film canister lids like Frisbees, played volleyball, or rehearsed in Pinto Colvig’s marching band. They threw painted animation cels onto the linoleum floor and slid across them like ice skaters, or they played darts by throwing pushpins against storyboard corkboards. Babbitt preferred to be an observer, never competing and no longer participating in the band. He would often spend his weekend hours off work trekking in his outdoorsman’s jacket, camping, hiking, or canoeing in the hills of California. Sometimes he went with his friends Les Clark and Bill Tytla. Other times he took a female companion for an intimate rendezvous.27
A small enclave of Disney men was fond of polo, and Walt and Roy enlisted some staff to join their team and mingle with Hollywood royalty like Will Rogers. Babbitt and Tytla were invited to Rogers’ ranch to sketch him for an upcoming cartoon, Mickey’s Polo Team.28
But for Walt, the shorts were only stepping stones toward Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which was still in production limbo. He wanted to ensure its success. Forty-five percent of his cartoon distribution went to Europe.29 A European visit might indicate how well Snow White would run overseas, so that summer, Walt, Roy, and their wives took a grand tour of Europe. In Paris something unexpected caught Walt’s attention. Cartoon shorts had always been used for filler in every movie theater program, but one theater played an afternoon of Disney cartoons at a single run, and audiences were paying for tickets. Walt’s confidence was assured, and he sailed for home on July 24, 1935, ready to resume work on Snow White.30
While Walt was away, director Dave Hand was the creative supervisor of the studio. Because of his height and broad chest, some of the fellows called him “Shoulders.” It fit his style. He strove to inject a military-like structure into the studio—not an easy feat among the loose community of temperamental artists.31 Some animators considered him tough but fair.32 Babbitt called him “a boy scout.”33
Hand directed Mickey’s Polo Team that summer. The lead animators were now given scenes according to their strengths, as actors might be cast in roles. Because of the Goof, Babbitt was now considered a specialist in bumbling characters. He also had excelled in animating caricatures of W. C. Fields and Zasu Pitts in the short Broken Toys. It was a natural choice to have Babbitt animate Laurel and Hardy climbing onto their polo horses. Dave Hand planned the sequence to take up only a small portion of screen time and thus very little space on the exposure sheets.
A Disney animator was expected to complete about five seconds of footage a week.34 With twelve to twenty-four drawings per second, per character—not including pencil test do-overs and sweatbox notes—this was already fairly tight. For an animation director, especially one as organized as Hand, precise planning was of the utmost importance. Hand used a stopwatch to time each scene, half-second by half-second. Once the timing was settled, the animator would pick up the scenes from Hand’s music room. Hand and the animator would discuss the scenes, making any changes then, until both were on the same page.35
Babbitt didn’t often ask for changes in a director’s room. He simply sat his animation desk working on his Laurel and Hardy scenes, ballooning their length far beyond Hand’s allotment. Scene 17—a moment of Laurel helping Hardy onto his horse—expanded to 17, 17a, and 17b, tripling in length. Scene 18 doubled. Scenes 19 and 20 tripled. By the time the animation was completed, Babbitt had contributed more animation to the cartoon than any other animator.36
Babbitt had ignored the director’s exposure sheet and padded his sequence yet again. But it was excellent work. The caricatures of Laurel and Hardy appear not only to move like them but also to think like them, and he’d transferred the same behavior into their horses, all with perfect pantomime.
Hand was furious. His protocols had been completely ignored. However, Walt was pleased, and his opinion was the one that mattered. Padded or not, Babbitt’s animation stole the show.
In August 1935 Roy Disney asked the Bank of America for a loan to make a feature-length cartoon. He budgeted $250,000—ten times the cost of a short cartoon. The bank president, “Doc” Amadeo Giannini, granted the loan.37
Roy and Walt made it known throughout the studio about the loans they took out, traveling down the line like all studio gossip. The company’s financial risk was no secret, and everyone’s contribution was crucial if the company was going to survive this endeavor.38
Every month, as more Disney artists dedicated time to Snow White, the studio needed hands to complete the short subjects. Studio debt was skyrocketing as Walt demanded the hiring of three hundred more artists.39
One of them was a Dr. Boris V. Morkovin, a Russian-born professor of film studies from the University of Southern California.40 With a wide smile and broken English, Morkovin stiffly lectured the men on the elements of humor. He analyzed the different types of jokes in a cartoon, categorizing them and charting them on graphs. Behind his back, the animators mocked him as a blowhard, and Babbitt drew a caricature of him as a big-headed dimwit. Still, the Disney studio was looking more and more like a graduate school.
But there was more to learn. Babbitt had bought a small movie camera, another expensive luxury item, as a lark. Then he hit upon a momentous notion: a movie camera could be a valuable teaching tool.
In the fall of 1935 director Ben Sharpsteen gave Babbitt another sequence with the Goof in the cartoon Moving Day.41 In his scenes, Goofy had to move a piano. Babbitt asked Pinto Colvig, with his circus clown experience, to pantomime Goofy’s movements for his movie camera. Putting on his best “cornfed hick” performance, Colvig modeled Goofy’s gangly-legged walk and his frustrated stomp for Babbitt’s camera. When he was through, Babbitt watched the footage on his own 16mm viewer, one frame at a time, through its two-inch aperture. There were subtleties Babbitt saw in frame-by-frame analysis that he had never seen before. In fact, no animator had ever seen it before; Babbitt had filmed animation’s first live-action reference.42 Studying Colvig’s action frame by frame, he was shocked to find that real life sometimes violated the animation principles that animators had taken for granted.43
He shared his discovery with the head of the Disney art school, Don Graham. Graham was captivated and overnight began integrating frame-by-frame film analysis in his evening classes at Disney. Graham called this overall study “Action Analysis,” and in late October he began holding Action Analysis classes every Thursday night.44 The animators studied the way humans and animals moved, the way glass broke, the way fabric flowed, the way Charlie Chaplin anticipated his own action with a clearly readable gesture. (Walt noticed that the animators’ favorite action was that of a beautiful female model disrobing.)45
“Animation is based on caricature because it is based on good drawing, and good drawing is based on caricature,” Graham lectured. It was essential to differentiate artistry from simply tracing live action, or rotoscoping. “The rotoscope is a crutch, and any way one looks at it, the reason for its existence is that the draftsmen in the Studio are weak. . . . Caricature must be the expression of an artist.”46 Babbitt would eventually rue how right Graham actually was.
Meanwhile, in meeting after meeting, Walt and his top staff chiseled away at the visual script of Snow White. They sat in the music rooms with hundreds of storyboard panels on giant corkboards, figuring out the best cinematic way to present this film. Gag submissions came in throughout the studio. Dave Hand was enlisted as head director of the film.
Hand and the sequence directors, including Wilfred Jackson and Ben Sharpsteen, had narrowed down a list of dozens of possible dwarfs to seven. Character designs were discarded and replaced, then discarded again. All the while, more employees were rolling in.
When Harold “Hal” Adelquist had joined Disney as a Production Department office boy in mid-1934, Babbitt was one of the first people he met. Adelquist ran errands for six months before he was promoted to the Checking Department in 1935. There, he checked the serial numbers of all the productions on all the paperwork before it went out to the different departments. Adelquist was among the guests at Babbitt’s Tuxedo Terrace soirees.47
Adelquist’s sweetheart (later wife) was a friend of young Marjorie Belcher, the model for Snow White. One evening, after a night out, the Adelquists were walking together with Marge down Hollywood Boulevard when they ran into Babbitt. Marge and Babbitt were introduced there, and Babbitt invited them all up to his house.48
Babbitt was deeply intrigued by Marge. She possessed the kind of discipline that Babbitt himself cultivated. However, Babbitt had earned his through hardship brought on by his father’s disability; Marge had earned hers through her father’s love and guidance.
During Marge’s next scheduled trip to the studio, Babbitt visited her on the soundstage. With his movie camera in hand, he filmed her dressed in her princess costume, pantomiming to invisible dwarfs. She responded by putting her thumbs up to her head and wiggling her fingers at him.49
Image of Marge as Snow White wiggling her fingers at Babbitt.
Shortly thereafter, Babbitt and Les Clark took the movie camera to a Main Street burlesque house. In between dancing girls and stripteases, physical comedian Eddie Collins took the stage. At fifty-two years old, roly-poly, and dressed in baggy clothes, he moved like a graceful flour sack. Babbitt’s camera started whirring. Collins was a perfect reference for the dwarfs. Soon a bouncer caught on to the camera’s noise and threw the two animators out the door. But Babbitt had his footage of Collins and presented it to Snow White’s supervisors.50
While the reference film of Marge would be carefully followed, the footage of Collins was interpreted and caricatured. The animators watched Collins move in slow motion, frame by frame. They could analyze the action of his round body and baggy clothes and then apply those discoveries to how the dwarfs moved. Babbitt had discovered a whole new approach to animation. A breakthrough had been made.