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Jewish World Review Dec. 6, 2001 /21 Kislev, 5762
Michael Ledeen
All through my childhood
we were an adjunct of the Disney universe. We got wonderful Christmas
cards, with sneak previews of forthcoming movies. My bedroom was stocked
with Disney creatures, from Mickey and Donald to Pooh and Eeyore. When
we went back to southern California, we visited Walt and Roy, and I got
to see Walt's "secret room," which you got to by pushing a button
under his desk and then a wall panel opened and revealed a playroom full
of all kinds of toys and gadgets. And his house was really a playhouse;
there was a model train that ran from the kitchen out to the backyard,
and on a good day the train would come puffing out with hamburgers and
cokes. Such fun.
Then in college I
had pretty much free run of Disneyland, and got to go on all the rides
even before the park was entirely open. So I'm a Disney friend and a Disney
fan, although the days of those privileges are long gone. But not my appreciation
of Walt's genius. (Nor my refusal to believe the "scoops" according
to which he was a vicious anti-Semite. He was certainly good to my Jewish
family.) He was a great American with our passion for happiness (a truly
revolutionary idea), and an insistence that any dream could be fulfilled
if you just worked hard enough.
Most of all, he and
Roy who really ran the place insisted on high quality. When
they made Fantasia, they hired Leopold Stokowski to conduct his orchestra.
And there were other cartoons, rarely seen nowadays, built around fine
music (Make Mine Music, for example). Indeed, in a typical Disney cartoon,
the soundtrack came first, and then the artists drew the celluloids so
they fit, not the other way around.
My father used to
tell the story of the day when one of the early television entrepreneurs
came to the Disneys with a merger proposal. It looked like big money,
and, as more modern financial wizards would say, a perfect fit: The TV
network had the medium, and Disney had the product. Walt turned it down,
because he instantly saw that television, with its voracious appetite
for material to fill up its tiny screen for 24 hours a day, would corrupt
the quality of his product. He believed that a great movie was always
produced according to its own internal deadlines, not those of a broadcaster,
and if he accepted the television deal, his movies would get worse.
I think that story,
more than any other I know, shows us the source of Disney's consistently
high quality, and holds a lesson for us all. No one, not even the greatest
genius, can hope to produce masterpieces on demand. Even the best columnists
run out of things to say from time to time, and we would all be better
off if they were permitted to be quiet on those occasions. This insight,
or something akin to it, underlies the good intentions that created academic
tenure, and I suspect that the great sponsors of the arts, from the Medicis
to the Rothschilds, understand it well, which is why they kept artists
afloat during the bad years.
But it's rare indeed
to find someone who sticks by this principle when offered enormous rewards
to join the trend and cash in. Walt Disney stayed out and stayed great.
Would that his successors had done as
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