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Interview with Leonard Maltin

Over the course of the years, dozens of books have been written about Walt Disney and his work. Only a relatively small number can truly be described as indispensable. One of these is The Disney Films, by Leonard Maltin.

Luckily for fans and scholars alike, Maltin has just released a new edition of the book, a complete one-volume guide to Walt's achievements in feature length films, complete with a detailed overview of every one of Walt's movies, as well as chapters that illuminate the work done at the studio after his death in 1966.

Of course, Maltin is also well known for his television work, his film reviews, and a number of other books, including the outstanding Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. In a lengthy interview for the upcoming feature documentary about Walt's Life - Walt Disney: The Man Behind the Myth - Maltin shared fascinating commentary about Disney's work in this area. The extracts below focus on his earliest efforts in creating live action films. In coming months, the Family Museum will feature excerpts from the rest of the interview.

If you're interested in owning the new edition of The Disney Films, you need only go to the end of the interview, and click the appropriate button there - or go directly to the Family Museum Gift Shop. You won't be disappointed.

Q: It wasn't easy for Walt to break into live-action films, was it?

A: Well here was the king of animated films, who had pushed the medium to heights no one had ever anticipated. So, all the movie industry wanted out of him was more of the same. And that's exactly what Walt never wanted to do. So when he was interested in live action, they weren't. He had to sort of force it on them, I guess you could say.

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Q: Didn't he originally want to make "So Dear To My Heart" a fully live action film?

A: There was some pressure brought to bear, I'm not sure by whom to put some animation in "So Dear To My Heart" and he reluctantly went along I gather - not that it hurt the film at all. Those are charming sequences, but it's you know, it's essentially a live action film. I think he got his way and he got to make a film he cared about very deeply.

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Q: The first fully live action film was Treasure Island. Tell us a little about its origins.

A: I think this was necessity being the mother of invention. After World War II, Great Britain and some other countries too, decided that they could not afford for their economic survival, they could not afford to allow American movie companies to make money in their countries and then take money out of the country. So they had what they called 'frozen assets'. That is to say, Walt Disney movies made a lot of money in England, in the UK, but that money would have to remain in the UK and be spent there. So that's what necessitated making some films there. And that led them to a classic, "Treasure Island."

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Q: Treasure Island was a very satisfying experience for him, wasn't it?

A: Well, first off, you had a great story which you know, will still be remade in the twenty first century no doubt, and still be read. He found the ideal actor to play Long John Silver, Robert Newton, who played it several times afterwards, he was so identified with the part. It gave a good role to his young discovery Bobby Driscoll who'd done so well for Walt in 'Song of the South' and other films, and gave him an excuse to go to England. And I'm sure he enjoyed that. And to put a really rousing, rollicking, good, old-fashioned boy's adventure tale on film.

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Q: Treasure Island was followed by a other British films, wasn't it?

A: Those costume pictures and swashbucklers that he made in the early fifties were notable for several reasons. One was, it brought him into association with a talented young director named Ken Annakin and Annakin would go on to direct a number of other films for Walt, most notably 'Swiss Family Robinson' but also, 'Third Man on the Mountain' and other movies. And so that was a strong and positive association that emerged from his English period. And the other of course was the incredible fortuitousness of - the other thing was the serendipitous hiring of a very talented matte artist named Peter Ellenshaw, who was able to create scenes and settings that looked real but weren't.

The other thing to be said about those swashbucklers is that they're great fun. I think the story of 'Robin Hood and His Merry Men' is one of the really unsung Walt Disney movies. It's a delightful film and it's got great villainy by Peter Finch. It's got great action scenes, great imagination, partly because they were trying not to copy the Errol Flynn movie. They didn't want to do the same thing that had been done before. And Walt's producer Perce Pearce and his director Ken Annakin found wonderful British actors. The casts of those films are just terrific and so I'd like to see those films be better known.

I think they're awfully good. 'The Sword and the Rose' is a wonderful film, a terrific piece of historical fiction and 'Robin Hood' is a delight.

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Q: Of course, as he was getting involved in his first live action films, he was also heading into television, wasn't he?

A: I was fascinated when I found out that Jack Webb shot his early black and white television series 'Dragnet' on the Walt Disney lot. I said, I wonder how that came about? And then I found out. It was a wonderful opportunity for two parties to take mutual advantage of one another in the best possible way. Jack Webb needed a place to shoot his series. Walt Disney needed to sort of break in his lot as a place where live-action could be produced. They'd never done it on a regular basis. They didn't have the equipment; they didn't have the facilities.

Well now, Walt realized he had to sort of ready the studio to produce live-action on the lot and so 'Dragnet' sort of gave them the chance to break in the studio. Get departments up to speed, hire technicians, build sound stages that were working and workable sound stages. So all of that happened because there was a TV series that was looking for a good place to shoot and they found it in Burbank.

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Q: Once he had his studio up and running, what did he do with it?

A: Well '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea' was the first, full, live-action film made completely at the Studio and on location as well. It was the first real homegrown feature. 'So Dear to my Heart' was made mostly on location; 'Song of the South' had location work as well. Here was a film that had to be done at the Studio by the Studio.

And he decided to pull out all the stops. It was done in CinemaScope, which was still new and exciting to audiences then, and in Technicolor and he hired 'A' List movie stars to be in it. Kirk Douglas, James Mason, Peter Laurie, Paul Lucas, these were all prominent names. And so this announced to the world and also to the Hollywood industry, that Walt Disney was now really in the business of making live-action movies and it was not a, he was no longer a dilettante, this was the real thing.

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Q: Would you tell us the story of the squid sequence in that film?

A: Well, Walt's hallmark had always been perfectionism and nothing ever made its way to the screen that wasn't right if he could do anything about it. And the lessons he'd learned in all those years of producing animation were useful to him as he moved into the live-action arena.

The fight with the giant squid just wasn't working and the special effects squid was kind of tacky looking and it just didn't come off the way it should've. Richard Fleischer, the director, and his collaborators came up with an idea to sort of obscure the action a bit by having it take place at night and in a rainstorm. Walt said, "Absolutely, that's the way to go. Do it."

He didn't say, "Do you know how much this is going to cost me?" I mean that was never his answer. If it was to make the movie better, then he was all for it.

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Q: There's been a lot of discussion about the ways in which Walt moved forward the art of animation. What were some of his major contributions to live action films?

A: One thing he may have contributed to the live action film that isn't widely recognized, is the use of storyboards. Directors today routinely storyboard either their entire films or all their action sequences. Hitchcock did that very early on because Hitchcock had been an art director and he liked to visualize his films that way but he was an exception to the rule.

Disney, of course, had perfected the storyboard process, first in his short subjects and then in his animated feature films, but no one had really leaned on that technique for planning out a live action film until he did.

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The Disney Films
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