Saving Mr. Disney

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I kept getting invited to advance screenings of Saving Mr. Banks but deadlines and my knee kept me away from all of them. Finally, it's come to me: A screener DVD arrived in my mailbox yesterday and I'll probably watch it here this weekend instead of limping to a theater near me. I'm curious. The trailers and advance footage I saw made me think that Tom Hanks had way too much of the performer about him to be convincing as Walt Disney, a man who was famously awkward in front of a camera. But both Floyd Norman and Richard Sherman told me they thought Hanks was a perfect Walt…so what's my opinion compared to theirs? They worked with the real Walt. I just watched him on TV.

Being a writer, and having a natural belief that a writer's work should not be tampered with or wrested away by others, I've always been a little uncomfy with the notion that Walt took Ms. Travers' creation and did things with it that she hated. I think it's a great movie made from an unimpressive work, and I have no doubt that P.L. Travers profited mightily in many ways from the experience. Still, all the stories I've heard about the making of Mary Poppins leave me with an image of Walt saying to his staff — this is not an actual quote, just a figment of my imagination — "I'm gonna do what I want to that woman's work and I don't care how much it pisses her off." Given my profession, I have a bit of a hard time rooting for that attitude to succeed, even if it does result in a classic motion picture that I love very much. So I want to see how I feel about that after I see the movie.

I'm also curious to see how much, if at all, the Disney organization allows worries about its (and Walt's) image to get in the way of the real story. Back in the mid-eighties, I was hired by the studio to write a TV movie called The Duck Man. They had that title and a simple premise: One of the famous Nine Old Men (the legendary "A" Team of Disney classic animation) is about to be retired. This was not to be one of the real Nine Old Men. I was to make up one and we'd say he was one of the Nine Old Men. The whole film was to be a celebration of folks like that.

He was to be an eccentric old guy who talks to Donald Duck the way Elwood P. Dowd talks to his invisible rabbit friend in Harvey. In this case, Donald would be animated — and seen only by this one old animator — in an otherwise live-action movie that dealt with him coming to grips with his retirement. That was all they had story-wise, apart from the idea of having Fred MacMurray (or if he wasn't up to it, Dick Van Dyke in old man make-up that he would still need) play this animator being put out to pasture.

I still suspect I wasn't the first writer on the project and I may not have been the last. If there were others, I'll bet they encountered the same problems I did. I think I did six drafts of the script — for about the fee that should have bought them two — and each time, many folks at the studio loved it but it eventually made its way to one who was terribly, terribly concerned with how the Disney organization was portrayed. Comic books aside, I worked for Disney on three separate occasions, all of them major projects, and I had the same problem each time…

You'd hand in your script and if the person who read it liked it, he or she would pass it on to someone else to read and if that person liked it, they'd pass it on to someone else…and eventually, they'd find someone who hated it or who would at least say, "We can't make this!" That person would give you notes. So you'd rewrite to please that person and then the process would start all over again with everyone who liked it passing it on until they found someone on the premises who'd say "We can't make this!" And so on.

One of the three projects wound up getting made pretty much as I wrote it, but largely because the network insisted on that. One got made but not until I'd left it, removed my name and they brought in another writer to rearrange things. And The Duck Man didn't ever get off the pages. It was the only one of the three that was set in the reality of the Disney world and therefore subject to concerns about the company's rep.

The problem was that if the old guy is being retired against his will, then it makes the Disney Corporation look callous and ungrateful. Basically, it makes them the Bad Guys. But if the fellow is retiring on his own accord…well, then what's the story? What's so interesting about a guy who wants to retire retiring?  They'd somehow all okayed my outline in which the studio was nudging him out the door but once I made it into a whole script, this became an issue.

So then I did a draft where there's one officious, by-the-book Disney exec who insists on an obscure clause in some Disney Employee Manual that forces the old gent's ouster and at the end, with the aid of young Disney animators who worship the elderly artist and an assist from Donald, the senior Disney execs hear what's happening and immediately overrule the one zealot who insists on retiring The Duck Man. Six or seven mid-range Disney execs liked this version and some even congratulated me on solving an unsolvable problem.

Then it passed to someone who thought it still made the company look bad. This person actually wrote a memo that said, "Could we lose the part where even one Disney executive doesn't appreciate him?" I responded by asking, "Well then, why is he retiring against his will?" The answer was, "That's for you to figure out."  I tried a draft where the old man has a daughter, one he can't communicate with (that's why he talks to an animated duck all the time) and she's forcing his retirement.  The studio didn't like that because…well, I still don't know why they didn't like that.  It was something like, "Even an evil daughter who doesn't have his best interests at heart should recognize how good it's been for him to be part of the Disney organization."

At some point, I had to do one draft where The Duck Man himself feels it's time to retire but the studio, aware of his valuable contributions, is pressing him to stay and the whole film is about them trying to talk him out of it. I don't know how they did it but they managed to find someone on the lot who thought even that made the studio look bad.

My last draft was a mess where I tried to do a story about the old man retiring without him retiring and with his employers trying to keep him on but not if he wanted to retire and…oh, it was hopeless. It was like trying to write Snow White without the queen wanting her dead, lest it reflect poorly on royalty of any kind. I spent ninety pages trying to resolve a conflict without establishing one in the first place…and I was not surprised they gave up on me and maybe the whole idea. We should have given up four drafts earlier.

That was some time ago and I gather Disney the Corporation is no longer as worried about anyone believing they have skeletons that are not in the Haunted Mansion. So I look forward to Saving Mr. Banks. If they did it back when I was working on what felt like Draft #7846 of The Duck Man, it would have to end with P.L. Travers admitting Walt was right about everything, begging him to forgive her for ever doubting he could improve on her creation and asking, "Could you take me to Disneyland so we can ride those delightful teacups together?" I gather it doesn't.