A twisting gray trunk reaches out from between the bars of the cage to rock a lonesome elephant baby. The eyes and ears of the mother are obscured but everything you need to know about her emotional state is conveyed in the way she holds her little one, in the twitch of her muscles, and the distraught bend of her trunk. Mary Blair watched Walt looking at her sketches with a flutter of anxiety. He didn’t have to say a word. If Walt merely raised an eyebrow, she knew she was in trouble. But instead, a smile formed on his lips.
The pace of Bambi’s production had been glacial, but the feature Dumbo was moving swiftly and surely. The writers and artists were working with a slim volume, Dumbo the Flying Elephant, by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl. The children’s book was a mere thirty-six pages and printed as a roll-a-book, an uncommon format in which the words and illustrations were printed on a scroll of paper in a box. The scroll was then unrolled by the reader using a small wheel. There was scant material to work with, but the story department managed to turn the minimal lines of text into a treatment of over a hundred pages. None of it would have been possible without Bianca.
The feature they were writing leaned heavily on Bianca’s Elmer Elephant. She had written numerous scripts for the character, but the little elephant with a big heart who didn’t fit in had made it into only one short despite his popularity and the merchandise bearing his image. Among the other animal children, Elmer is an outsider, taunted for his trunk. When flames in her tree house surround Tillie the Tiger, it’s Elmer who comes to the rescue, using his trunk as a fire hose to save her. The elephant who overcomes ridicule, who uses his awkward physical features to help others, had always been the basis for a powerful narrative, but it had taken this long for Walt to recognize it.
Story artist Mary Goodrich worked on the script, keeping Bianca’s themes in mind. Goodrich had just written a treatment for the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Snow Queen.” The title character initially appears in the fairy tale in the form of a snowflake; it grows in size “until at last it turned into a woman, who was dressed in the finest white gauze, which looked as if it had been made from millions of star-shaped flakes. She was beautiful and she was graceful, but she was ice-shining, glittering ice.” Alas, the project was stuck in development, so Goodrich turned to Dumbo, glad to work on a story that was moving to production so rapidly.
Much of Dumbo’s appeal at the studio lay in this speed. Thanks to Bianca’s previous work, the script was temptingly simple. “Dumbo is an obvious straight cartoon,” Walt said. It could be made much as the Elmer Elephant short had been, without the complexity of their recent features. Unlike Bambi, there was no extensive animal anatomy to study, as the animals would be drawn as caricatures. The backgrounds would not have Tyrus Wong’s impressionistic quality—they would be simple watercolors. There would be none of Pinocchio’s involved special effects, which had taken years to develop, nor would the feature require the artistry and interplay with music that Fantasia had. It would be cheap and quick to make.
Cost was paramount in Walt’s mind because the studio was drowning in debt. The phenomenal success of Snow White had proved difficult to replicate, and while the company was proud of its beautiful new space, it lacked the resources to pay for it. It wasn’t for lack of trying. The studio’s efforts on Pinocchio had been extreme; story, animation, and special effects had all combined to produce a truly memorable film. Unfortunately, it wasn’t making much money. Snow White had earned millions, but Pinocchio was still in the hole.
Mistakes had been made with Pinocchio right from the start. Walt and his brother Roy had spent an enormous sum to make Pinocchio, $2.6 million, whereas Snow White had cost only $1.5 million, so they decided to raise ticket prices. They charged $1.10 a head, more than twice the price of a typical theater ticket. Adults and families wavering about what movie to see would simply pick the cheaper option. Walt lowered prices in response to the lackluster ticket sales, but the damage had already been done.
This snafu, however, was nothing compared to what was happening overseas. The grip of World War II was tightening across Europe, and American cinema was just one of its victims. While Snow White had been dubbed in twelve languages, Pinocchio was dubbed in only two. The critics had praised it highly, the New York Daily News calling it “the most enchanting film ever brought to the screen,” but it quickly became clear that the movie was a financial flop.
With Bambi still in production and Fantasia slowly tiptoeing to release, Walt needed cash fast, and it seemed that Dumbo, with only a smattering of effort, could be the answer. Four years after writing the story treatment for Bambi, Bianca watched the feature get bumped yet again, this time to make way for an awkward elephant based on her own design.
The film had no special effects or attempts at sophisticated artistry, so capturing the emotional impact of the story was critical. The team had little time for character development—the movie was their shortest yet, just sixty-four minutes, far less than the hour and a half of Snow White and Pinocchio. To build a world in one hour and make the film more than an extended Silly Symphony cartoon, they had to portray the characters in an endearing fashion and give the simple script poignancy.
One of Mary Blair’s greatest strengths as an artist was the emotion she was able to render in a single scene. Her watercolor paintings conveyed distinct stories with strong, lifelike characters, their feelings evident on their faces. In her sketches for Dumbo, she harnessed this talent, framing shots in such a way that the bond between mother and child emerged clearly.
Hunched over her desk now with paper and pencil, Mary worked on the “Baby Mine” scene. In it, Dumbo is visiting his mother in solitary confinement at night. Since she is locked in her cage, the baby elephant can’t see her face, so he slips his small trunk questioningly through the bars. His mother tries to reach him, but the chains fastened around her feet hold her in place. She can only stretch her trunk back through the bars in response, the movement filled with deep longing, until she finally touches his face. Their trunks twist together and tears seep from Dumbo’s eyes as the lullaby “Baby Mine” plays. Mary worked closely with Frank Churchill, the in-house composer of the stirring melody. The scene itself is only a few minutes long, and yet, thanks to Mary’s concept art, it perfectly communicates the enduring bond between mother and child. When Dumbo’s mother cradles her son’s small body with her trunk and rocks him in time to the music, the love and despair felt by the pair are captured more completely than any dialogue could describe.
Mary knew about longing. As she created the scene, she was experiencing her own heartbreak. She was able to conceive, but she had had several early miscarriages, and the doctors could not explain why, leaving Mary feeling helpless and full of yearning. At the time, it wasn’t the kind of thing women talked about, even to each other, despite the high prevalence of first-trimester miscarriages. She could not grieve openly for the loss of her babies, so Mary channeled her sorrow into her sketch pad and brushes. She painted the scene between mother and child in a dark, moody palette, the images destined to become iconic. Yet at the edges of her paper, the watercolors pooled like tears running from her eyes, betraying her own sorrow.
The emotional scenes of the film were coming together well, the whole staff working speedily, but Retta soon noticed that the colors were off. In the studio, the cels on which the animators’ drawings had been traced and colored by the Ink and Paint department looked vibrant. On film, however, the images seemed dull; the elephants became a washed-out gray, barely distinguishable from the muddy backgrounds. The excitement of the circus in all its color and action had faded into a boring homogeneity.
A decade earlier, in 1930, few working in the film industry could have predicted the enormous impact color cinematography would have on entertainment. Actors complained that color washed away the mysterious dance of shadow and light that black-and-white features had; projectionists criticized color’s technical difficulties, and executives noted that the technology had no bearing on ticket sales. Among the few early believers in the power of color were Walt Disney and his group of artists.
In 1932 Walt secured an exclusive contract for a new three-strip color process. Making a color picture required a camera with a double-prism beam splitter right behind the lens. A portion of the light that came through the lens was reflected by a gold-flecked mirror and sent through a magenta filter, which removed the green light and transmitted the red and blue light onto two 35 mm strips of film, one sensitive to red light and one to blue. The rest of the light passed straight through a filter that transmitted green light only onto a third strip of film. The three strips made for a bulky camera that weighed between four hundred and five hundred pounds, and the process yielded three sets of exposed film. While each one looked like regular black-and-white film, the gray tones differed depending on the color filter; blue elements appeared white on the blue-filter film; red elements appeared white on the red-filter film; and green elements appeared white on the green-filter film. Each strip of film was then dyed with its complementary color—the blue was dyed with yellow, the green with magenta, and the red with cyan. The whitest portions of the film would absorb the least amount of dye, so that meant that, for instance, the red elements would absorb very little of the cyan dye. The three strips would then be layered one on top of the other to form a color palette that was vivid and not at all true to life. The movie was now “in glorious Technicolor,” as the advertisements proclaimed.
Walt’s early negotiations had been with Herbert Kalmus, who, along with two other men, formed the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation in a railroad-car laboratory in Boston and named the technology partly after Kalmus’s alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Walt’s exclusive license to use Technicolor for animation had run out but his close relationship with the company continued. When Walt complained to Kalmus that they were having difficulty with washed-out color, an unusual problem to have with the normally intense, saturated hues of Technicolor, the company sent Natalie Kalmus to help.
Natalie was no longer married to Herbert at the time. The two secretly divorced in 1921 but continued to live together and develop the Technicolor technology. When a studio used Technicolor, it did not simply buy the cameras; the technology came with a team of more than a dozen technicians who ran the cameras and processed the film. The service also included a color director, who would read the script, make a chart of colors for the film, and discuss with the production crew—particularly the costume and art departments—which colors would go best together.
Technicolor was tricky to work with. It required extensive set lighting and an intimate knowledge of the technical capabilities of the process. Technicolor often dictated the look of a film. For The Wizard of Oz, for example, Dorothy’s classic slippers, whose heels she must click together three times, were originally supposed to be silver. Some historians have noted that in L. Frank Baum’s original book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the silver slippers and the gold tone of the Yellow Brick Road can be read as representing the contentiousness between the gold and silver standards that dominated the banking world of 1896. But the political interpretations of the novel would be lost to the wonders of color film, as silver in Technicolor would look like nothing at all. With Natalie Kalmus consulting on the movie, the shoes were changed to ruby red, which would contrast nicely with the Yellow Brick Road.
Natalie Kalmus called herself the “ringmaster to the rainbow” and as such played a critical role in many films of the era. She made decisions about makeup, pushing for more natural skin tones so that cheeks, eyes, and lips wouldn’t look oversaturated. She changed lighting and sets and replaced costumes, such as those in Gone with the Wind, for which she insisted on more muted tones to balance the vivid Technicolor process. She occasionally went behind the camera and played the role of cinematographer, taking particular interest in how color influenced emotion and elevated tension in a scene.
But the self-assured, capable Kalmus was not always welcome on film sets. She clashed with makeup artists and set designers, who, from their stage experience, were accustomed to making far bolder color choices. Producers and directors also resented working with such a powerful, opinionated woman. On the set of Gone with the Wind, director David O. Selznick complained, “We should have learned by now to take with a pound of salt much of what is said to us by the Technicolor experts. I cannot conceive how we could have been talked into throwing away opportunities for magnificent color values… We might just as well have made the picture in black and white.” In the 1940s, most filmmakers did choose black-and-white. Only 12 percent of Hollywood films were made in color.
But at the Walt Disney Studios, Natalie Kalmus was appreciated. The shade constraints Technicolor imposed on live action largely evaporated in the medium of cartoons. Here, the potential of color was wide open. With no inherent pigment to get in the way and no annoying need to adhere to reality, animation was Technicolor’s best friend. Except for Dumbo.
Like Retta, those who worked with color at the studio, especially in the Ink and Paint department, were worried about how lackluster the elephants looked. They talked over the problem of paint colors at teatime, which the all-female department was treated to twice daily—a uniformed maid served them from a china pot, and occasionally a platter of Lorna Doone shortbread cookies was provided. The department’s isolation was magnified in the new Burbank studio; it was housed in a building on the other side of the lot from Walt and the animation and story departments. The separateness of the building, complete with its own lunchroom and outdoor patio, soon led to its nickname: the Nunnery.
The women of Ink and Paint wore silky smocks and thin white cotton gloves so that no bit of lint or fingerprint would mar the smooth surface of the plastic they worked with, although they each wore one glove with the ends of the thumb, pointer, and middle fingers cut off so that the fabric wouldn’t interfere with the grip on a paintbrush or quill. The inkers were nicknamed “the Queens” due to their ability to trace the animators’ sketches while not making a scratch on the easily marked surface of the cel plastic.
Every detail of how paint was applied had been addressed. The colors themselves were manufactured in-house, and the artists made sure not to add too much water to their paint pots before applying the paint with fine sable-hair brushes. They used the most vivid colors first, pulling the paint close to the edge of the ink lines and then dabbing with a rag to blot the excess liquid. The paint appeared custardy in texture before the planes of glass hovering below the multiplane camera pressed down on the cel, releasing a hidden vault of moisture that gave a smooth, opaque finish to the art.
Producing its own paint not only saved the studio money but also ensured stringent quality control. The pigments’ chemical composition, surface tension, reaction to humidity and temperature, and suitability for use on cellulose were all carefully optimized. Given this and their own diligence, the women of Ink and Paint knew that their colors were not to blame for Dumbo’s dull palette. Nor did the difficulty seem to be with the cameras. The problem must lie with the cels themselves.
The studio’s recent switch to cellulose acetate had been heralded as a significant advance in safety. But the reduced fire hazard came with an unexpected cost: colors weren’t popping the way they used to. The studio turned to Natalie Kalmus and her ingenious color wheel. To simplify their experiments, the Ink and Paint department chose just one hundred and fifty colors, a fraction of the thousands used previously, but the limited palette dovetailed with the minimalism of Dumbo’s story and animation style. With Technicolor in mind, Ink and Paint played with shades of gray, finally selecting the perfect hues so that Dumbo and his friend Timothy Mouse could stand out on-screen.
Financial woes at the studio deepened. Given how his feature films tended to drag in development, Walt needed cash to keep his doors open, so in 1940 he decided to make a move he had long avoided: taking his company public. The decision would allow Walt to raise money by offering shares of the studio, bringing in banks and investors willing to take a chance on an enterprise that had been incorporated only two years earlier. But with this move came a new transparency. The way the company spent money, particularly on salaries, was now open for all to see. Employees of the Walt Disney Studios found a surprise lurking in the numbers. In 1940 Walt took home two thousand dollars a week, and that did not include his stock options. It was an enormous sum, even by Hollywood standards.
The introduction of Wall Street changed the atmosphere at the studio. The illusion that they were a family of artists all sharing equally in lean times, working toward a common ambition and against the establishment, was shattered. In the lavish new offices, resentment stirred. Walt might be bringing home a comfortable salary, but many on the staff were not.
As part of the New Deal, President Roosevelt had been pushing to protect labor in the United States. During FDR’s reelection campaign in 1936, a young woman in Bedford, Massachusetts, had pushed toward the president with an envelope in her hand. A police officer held her back but Roosevelt told one of his aides to get the envelope from her. It contained this note:
I wish you could do something to help us girls… We have been working in a sewing factory… and up to a few months ago we were getting our minimum pay of $11 a week… Today the 200 of us girls have been cut down to $4 and $5 and $6 a week.
It was a poignant impetus for the president to institute protections for workers, including women and children, who had previously been largely ignored. As part of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, Roosevelt outlawed oppressive child labor and instituted the country’s first minimum wage, twenty-five cents an hour. Roosevelt also defined what a fair workweek should look like. He first considered a thirty-five-hour week reasonable but ultimately compromised on five eight-hour days, a forty-hour workweek. American workers were getting needed protections and higher salaries to boot. Employers, however, found much to criticize in these new rules.
Employees at Walt Disney Studios, especially those in the story and animation departments, worked far more than eight hours a day and certainly were not confined to five days a week. Saturday meetings were as common as the Snow White special, a popular chicken-salad sandwich available at the cafeteria. Salaries varied widely; a small number of top animators brought home two to three hundred dollars a week, while a woman in Ink and Paint earned a meager twelve dollars. The average artist at the studio made eighteen dollars a week, slightly higher than the median male income of the era.
The animators at the Walt Disney Studios were not the only ones dissatisfied with their lot. In 1938, the Screen Cartoonists’ Guild was formed in Los Angeles, led by Bill Littlejohn, an animator working on the new Tom and Jerry shorts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. As the guild’s ranks grew, so did its reach, and Walt, employer of more animators than any other studio in town, was in its sights.
The tidal wave of turmoil about to wash over the studio started slowly. Demands began to increase, and although Walt made promises and even cut his own salary, he gave his staff no extra money. The public offering had not gone well. Stocks initially valued at $25 a share quickly plummeted to $3.25 a share.
At the same time, Fantasia, the studio’s artistic darling, was proving a disaster. Finally released on November 13, 1940, it was introduced as a road show, moving among only thirteen theaters. This was due to the expense of the surround sound, or Fantasound, that the movie required. Fantasound necessitated eleven amplifier racks, dozens of loudspeakers, four hundred vacuum tubes, and a team of specially trained technicians to maintain and operate the equipment. The system weighed fifteen thousand pounds and took more than a week to install. At a cost of eighty-five thousand dollars per theater, it was an investment that few movie-house owners were willing to make.
Not only hampered by limited screenings, Fantasia was also eviscerated by critics, with Newsweek stating, “Where Disney misses is in the creation of the smirking centaurs, the ‘art calendar’ cupids, the coy and flapperish centaurettes, and the comic-strip Bacchus, who all desecrate the Olympian background chosen for Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.” In the New York Herald-Tribune, columnist Dorothy Thompson wrote, “The illustrations of the Beethoven ‘Pastoral’ are sufficient to raise an army, if there is enough blood left in culture to defend itself.… The clean, pure sounds—the unbearably clean, pure sounds—fall about us while we gaze on the raspberry and marshmallow Olympus, and the pure, strong music seems to be dropping cold and frustrated tears.” Then as now, the weakness of Fantasia lay in the misguided, and later considered sexist and racist, Pastoral Symphony scene.
The film had cost $2.3 million to make, a million more than Snow White, and it seemed the studio would never recoup the loss. It was now imperative to hurry Dumbo and even the idealistic aspirations of Bambi along. Under such pressure, Walt had little incentive, and even less capital, to respond to the needs of his staff. The studio was $4.5 million in debt to Bank of America, and the freedom to raise salaries Walt had enjoyed just the year before was now gone. The stockholders had effectively seized control of his company, and unless something dramatically shifted, they would be the ones to have final say on all future feature projects. Walt’s studio was no longer truly his.
The focus on money jarred some artists, many of whom could make more as clerks at retail stores than they made working at the studio. Mary Blair was as discontented as most of the employees around her, but for different reasons. She wanted only a decent salary and cared nothing for seeing her name on-screen. But she still felt removed from the studio, as if she didn’t belong. It was only when she sat next to Retta, the two of them sketching a live elephant named Mabel brought in to aid the artists, that she found happiness in her job.
Unlike Mary and Retta, Bianca felt life at the studio was nearly torture. Story meetings, always a wearying exercise in personal criticism, had become even more intense. Instead of smoothing her path, Bianca’s success in Fantasia and her inspiration for Dumbo had hardened the men to her, and they took every chance to heap on more disparagement. She knew her ideas had potential, and yet she couldn’t advocate effectively for their production.
Bianca was working on two projects, both based on stories she loved: Cinderella and Peter Pan. It seemed to her that Cinderella had the same dramatic potential as Snow White had had—a princess in distress, with the promise of evocative imagery. They could use animals in the story, and there were scenes she was sure would create dramatic tension. On her sketch pad she drew Cinderella running down a dark flight of steps in a voluminous blue dress, a glittering slipper lying behind her.
She was also working on a character from Peter Pan that was of particular interest to her. Bianca had always been drawn to fairies, and here in the book was a mischievous one named Tinker Bell. She drew the tiny fairy again and again, giving her an impish expression and surrounding her with flying children and golden fairy dust.
Bianca had been developing the projects for years at the studio without gaining traction. Her newest story treatments didn’t draw Walt’s notice. She wondered if the only way to get him interested in her ideas was to have them presented by someone else. Feeling frazzled and unappreciated, she decided to take a vacation and refresh her artistic sensibility. When she’d first moved to Los Angeles, she felt the city was “young, beautiful, and full of angels,” but now she was desperate to leave town, if only temporarily.
But when she returned to the office after her vacation, she was confused. Her office was not as she had left it. Her pencils, sketchbooks, and story notes were all gone. Sitting at her desk was a man she had never met. In astonishment, she backed out of the room, believing that she must have made a mistake; perhaps she had entered the wrong office. But no, this was her room. In the hall one of the men saw her stunned expression and told her, “You know you’re fired.” But Bianca hadn’t known. No one had bothered to tell her. And her high-school friend Walt did not take the trouble to say goodbye.