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Feature of the Month

INSIDE THE DREAM: The Personal Story of Walt Disney

Katherine and Richard Greene, who are also curators of The Walt Disney Family Museum, and co-writers of the documentary, "Walt: The Man Behind the Myth" have just published a new biography of Walt Disney, "Inside the Dream." It is available in the Museum Gift Shop, as well as in most bookstores near you.

Lavishly illustrated with over 400 photographs - many of which have never before been published - the book draws upon the scores of interviews the Greenes compiled in creating the documentary to provide a heavily anecdotal, very personal portrait of Walt. Even readers familiar with the standard biographies of Walt, including Bob Thomas' authoritative "Walt Disney: An American Original," will find scores of new anecdotes, and insights about Walt here.

The book also features an introduction by Walt's daughter, Diane Disney Miller, as well as a number of observations from her sprinkled throughout the book.

Following is a brief excerpt from "Inside the Dream."

WED: Walt's Sandbox

"When Walt wanted to build Disneyland, he realized that he had to form his own design company," recalls longtime Imagineer Rolly Crump. So Walt gathered together a small band of prized studio employees and dubbed the new entity with his own initials-WED.

Walt loved WED. While the studio had grown large and somewhat bureaucratic, this was a place where he could have fun. It was a small company doing what it wanted to do. According to Bill Cottrell, Walt's brother-in-law and first president of WED, "Nobody had to ask anyone at the studio for permission. If you wanted to start developing a thing like Audio-Animatronics, you'd do it as long as you had the money to do it. And by this time Walt had the money. He had borrowing power. WED was a wonderful thing for Walt."

He called it his "sandbox." Others called it his "laughing place." "He sort of hung out," remembers model-maker Harriet Burns. "He seemed to like to relax at WED because he didn't have meetings like the ones that were scheduled in the animation building. He could be just one of us, and kick stuff around. When we'd be working on a project he could hardly stand it. If I was soldering something, he'd want to solder it himself. When I was trying to get air into polyester to make permanent bubbles, he said, 'Let me try it.' He was always intrigued."

This hands-on attitude could lead to the occasional problem, as when Burns, who was working on an intricate stained-glass window, left it out for soldering. "I had 358 pieces of lead, and he came in and picked it up." Of course, the window splintered into 358 pieces. Burns: "So finishing that the next day was out."

In assembling his staff for WED, Walt drew on some of the most creative talents at the studio. Crump recalls hearing WED referred to as "Cannibal Island," because it "was gobbling up all the people that were in animation"-people like Marc Davis, John Hench, X Atencio, and Bill Justice. "In those days," recalls Bob Gurr, who worked on a number of Disneyland attractions, "Walt was gathering people almost like instruments in an orchestra. He put us all together, but he never passed out the music. Oddly enough, I think he was the only one who knew where he was going to go. He knew the different skills that all the different folks had, and he put them all together. But only he knew what the outcome was going to be."

Once the artists chosen for WED arrived, they were often put to work on projects unlike any they had encountered before. X Atencio tells a typical story. He had been an animator at the studio until the day Walt called him up to his office and asked him to move over to WED. "I went over to WED," Atencio says, "and nobody over there seemed to know what I was supposed to do. About a month later, Walt called over and he says, 'I want you to do the script for the Pirates ride.' I had never done any scripting before, but I had done storyboarding at the animation end of it, so I said, 'OK.' I put on my pirate hat and I researched all the pirate stuff I could get hold of. The first thing I worked on was the auction scene, and when I was finished I sent it over to Walt. 'Fine,' he said, 'go right along.' So, I went with it. And when the scripting was finished, I said to Walt, 'I have an idea for a song-a song would be real good in this.' I had a melody in mind and sang it for him-it started with a 'Yo ho ho ho, a pirate's life for me.' And Walt said, 'Hey, that's fine. Get Joey to do the music for it and we'll put it in the show.' I thought he was going to tell me to get the Sherman brothers to write the words, but he didn't. So after becoming a scriptwriter, I became a songwriter."

Rolly Crump tells a similar story: "When Walt wanted to do the Tiki Room, he asked me to design some of the pre-show Tikis that you stand and listen to before you go in. I did some very crude little pen-and-ink sketches and showed them to Walt, and he said, 'Great. Let's go with those.' We only had one sculptor at that time and his name was Blaine Gibson. 'Blaine,' I said, 'Walt wants us to go ahead and get these sculpted.' I hand him the sketch, and Blaine says, 'I don't have time for that.' I said, 'Well, who's going to do this?' He said, 'You are.' I said, 'I've never sculpted before in my life.' And he said, 'Well, you're going to sculpt now.' I sculpted about 80 percent of the Tikis in the Tiki Room. Other people were brought in to help, and none of us had ever sculpted before. In those days we did a little bit of everything, which was marvelous. I did ticket booths. I did trash barrels. I did Sunkist, on Main Street. I did the Bazaar. Walt had never built a theme park before, so we just made things up as we went along."

Flexibility was a valued requirement in WED staffers. Walt was not particularly patient if his WED employees-who would come to be called Imagineers-hesitated about jumping into something entirely new. John Hench experienced Walt's impatience firsthand: "I came to Walt once when he'd asked me to oversee a change we were making in the restaurants. I tried to explain to him that I was the wrong person for the job because I couldn't understand anything the food people were talking about. He wasn't at all sympathetic. He said, 'Don't expect me to understand that language either-just go and find out about it.' So I took a restaurant management class at UCLA and had no more trouble. I learned the difference between a bain marie and a salamander. But Walt was like that. If you didn't know something that he wanted you to know, you'd go find out about it. He insisted on it."

To order a copy of "Inside the Dream," click here


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