The Animated Man by Michael Barrier Page A

liked the outside, he always liked . . . the dressy nice sides of life.” His attire was almost always California casual—a 1935 interviewer found him wearing “a gray polo shirt, tieless and open at the neck, light gray slacks and brown suede sports oxfords” 7 —but in photos from the time, he is clearly a man who enjoys well-made clothes.
    In the middle 1930s, the studio itself was, in the eyes of many of the people who worked there, a place made warm and inviting by its new prosperity. James Culhane, who worked for the Fleischer and Van Beuren studios in New York before joining the Disney staff in 1935, was struck by how different the Hyperion studio
looked:
“Everything was painted in bright tints of raspberry, light blue, and gleaming white, no institutional greens or bilious browns like the other studios.” 8
    There was also, at least in the upper ranks of animators and assistants, much less of the brute pressure for footage that was so common at other studios. That is not to say that Disney’s employees had no incentives to work hard. By 1934 he was paying semiannual bonuses, based on profits and on a rating determined by five factors, including “importance to the organization” and “production department rating as to footage and quality of work.” But Disney “was the first one to introduce the idea of relaxing the grim grind on people,” the animator Dick Huemer told Joe Adamson. “And as a result he got more work out of them, because they worked out of love for what they were doing. And the fact that they were doing something a lot of them thought would be imperishable.” 9 So relaxed was the atmosphere in the middle 1930s, the animator Grim Natwick said, “at one time there was quite a lot of dice rolling in the animation rooms. We heard that it disturbed Walt, and Jack [Campbell], who was a rather astute fellow, came in one day with big rubber dice that you couldn’t hear rolling.” 10
    The studio, until then populated almost entirely by people with no more than high school educations, was beginning to see an influx of new employees with college degrees. They tended to arrive in small waves, as word spread among friends—at Stanford University, for example—about the opportunities at Disney’s. In 1933 and 1934, beginners at Disney’s—one small group at a time, perhaps three or four men—got a brief “trial without pay.” They were trained to draw inbetweens by a man named George Drake, and at the end of a week, or perhaps two, were either dismissed or hired, at fifteen dollars a week. 11
    There were variations in this pattern. When he started on June 1, 1933, George Goepper said, “it was sort of a revolving door, hiring and firing. Ben Sharpsteen would say to George Drake, ‘Who are we going to let go today?’ ” Goepper remembered Sharpsteen’s telling him, “If you want to try it for nothing, we’ll let you do that.” Goepper “started on a Wednesday, and at that time they worked until noon on Saturday, and paid then. It surprised me when I got a Mickey Mouse check, for eight or nine dollars.” When Sharpsteen asked him to work for nothing, Goepper concluded, “they were testing my attitude, too.” 12
    The trainees were separated from the inbetweeners already on the payroll by what Eric Larson called “a little line of demarcation.” Larson, who also started on June 1, 1933, remembered being one of a handful of inbetweeners in this “bullpen,” “working like hell, waiting to be assigned to a unit, waiting for an animator to say, ‘I want that guy.’ ”
    It was during the “trial without pay”—and then in new hires’ continuing work as inbetweeners under Drake—that the Disney studio adhered to something like the old “grim grind.” Drake himself was disliked by most of his charges.