Disturbing
as these developments might have seemed to the studio
owners, there was at least one man in the audience that
night who had a
more optimistic appreciation of the future: Walt Disney.
Tellingly, perhaps,
he won no Academy Award that night. Instead, the Oscar
for best
animation was awarded to the Warner Bros. cartoon Tweetie
Pie.
Considered something of an oddball by the hardheaded
moguls, the
boyish-looking Disney had chosen to remain outside the
studio system.
Although his animation studio by now employed more than
one thousand
artists and technicians, he was not even a member of
the Movie Producers
Association or the distributor of his own movies. Instead,
he relied
on RKO to get his films into theaters.
Disney
had a different strategy from the other studio heads.
Unlike
them, he did not have any stars under contract or own
any theaters. While
their studios made their money from ticket sales, he
made most of his
from licensing Mickey Mouse and other characters for
toys, books, filmstrips,
and newspapers.
To
the other studio heads’ mystification, he was
enjoying success with
his seemingly crazy ideas. In 1934 Disney had begun
work on a featurelength
cartoon that the chiefs of the conventional Hollywood
studios derided
as “Disney’s Folly”: Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs. At the time,
the major studios believed that adults, not children,
were the principal
audience for movies, and that cartoons, which usually
ran no more than
five minutes, were merely adjuncts used to entertain
children during
weekend matinees. So Disney’s announcement that
he would make an
eighty-three-minute cartoon out of a Grimms fairy tale
seemed like
madness. Apparently confirming his perceived lack of
touch with reality,
Disney planned to spend three times the average Hollywood
budget making
the film. With the continuing Depression threatening
their viability,
the studio heads could not fathom how he could ever
earn back this sum
at the theaters.
But Disney was working from a different concept: he
believed that
children, with adults in tow, could be the driving force
of the entertainment
industry. His surprising success with Snow White
and the Seven
Dwarfs—which would become the first film
in history to gross $100 million
—demonstrated that the potential of the child
audience had been severely
underestimated by Hollywood: in the case of Snow
White and the
Seven Dwarfs, children were going to see it over
and over again, just as
they did with other cartoons. (Children’s tickets
on the average cost only
twenty-five cents; approximately 400 million of them
had been sold for
Snow White between 1937 and 1948).
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was more than
just a successful boxoffice
event, however. It was also the first film to have a
soundtrack—
including such hit songs as “Someday My Prince
Will Come”—that
became an enormously successful record, as well as the
first film to have
a merchandising tie-in. And, most important as far as
the Disney model
was concerned, it had multiple licensable characters—Snow
White, seven
dwarfs, and a wicked witch—who took on long lives
of their own, first as
toys and later as theme-park exhibits.
With Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Disney
had done more than
define a new audience for movies; he had suggested the
future course of
the entertainment business overall. In it, the real
profits would come not
from squeezing down the costs of producing films but
from creating out
of them intellectual properties that could be licensed
in other media over
long periods.
But even as the studio system tottered under the tripartite
threat of
television, HUAC, and an antitrust lawsuit in 1948,
this was not a future
Hollywood saw or, if it did—as when Louis Mayer
was advised by his top
executive that MGM was pursuing “business that
no longer exists”—
wanted to embrace. Disney was regarded by the moguls
who still ruled
the industry as a whimsical eccentric. Little did they
suspect that his Pied Piper strategy would prevail and
that they themselves would soon
enough be dancing to his tune.
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