Speranza
Forget the Spoonful of Sugar: It’s Uncle Walt, Uncensored
‘Saving Mr. Banks’
Depicts a Walt Disney With Faults
BURBANK,
Calif. —
In the film “Saving Mr. Banks,” a comedic drama about the
turbulent making of “Mary Poppins” in the 1960s, Walt Disney acts in a very
un-Disney way.
He slugs back Scotch.
He uses a mild curse word.
He wheezes
because he smokes too much.
.
The real shocker?
Walt Disney Studios
made the film.
“Saving Mr. Banks,” which stars Tom Hanks as the mustachioed
founder of the Walt Disney Company and Emma Thompson as the cantankerous
novelist Helen Lyndon Goff, is a small movie that cost less than $35 million to
make.
But its existence says something big about Disney.
Despite its well-earned
reputation for aggressively managing its image, it can get out of the way and
let film makers lead.
“Wow, this was so not the battle I anticipated,” said
Alison Owen, the independent producer behind “Saving Mr. Banks,” which also
pokes fun at Disney’s sometimes-syrupy brand of entertainment.
“Disney behaved
impeccably.”
Every studio is controlling, but Disney, with its vast
merchandise and theme park divisions, has a particular reputation in Hollywood —
fairly or not (and the studio argues not) — for having a more narrowly focused
and synergistic approach to filmmaking.
In recent years the studio has made some
headway in courting leading live-action writers and directors, but some still
self-edit.
Disney will never make this movie, so let’s not even try.
Those
involved in “Saving Mr. Banks,” which closed the London Film Festival,
were nervous even after the script was successfully lobbed over the Disney
transom.
Would the company try to turn the film into a type of corporate video?
“I was a bit afraid because we wanted to be honest about Walt,” said the
director, John Lee Hancock, who chose the film as his follow-up to “The Blind
Side” (2009).
“I imagined the moment when Disney would say, ‘Sorry, we like him
better as a god than a human.’
To their credit, they were smart enough and brave
enough to realize that a human Walt was not only a better character, but was
easier to love.”
Hancock gently added, “Sometimes somebody else can tell
you more about your father than you can.”
“Saving Mr. Banks,” which did not
arrive in theaters until Dec. 13 was already generating serious Oscar buzz,
in particular for Ms. Thompson.
It got its start at Disney one evening in November
2011.
Sean Bailey, the studio’s president for production, received a call from a
lieutenant, Tendo Nagenda.
There was a script, written by Kelly Marcel and Sue
Smith outside the Disney system, that required immediate attention.
It was very
good, Nagenda advised, but it also potentially touched a third rail: Walt
Disney was a lead character.
“It very quickly went all the way to the top,”
Mr. Bailey said, referring to Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chairman and chief
executive.
The company swiftly considered all of its options.
One of them was to
buy the script simply to park it, so that the movie’s portrayal of Walt Disney
never reached theaters.
“Do we buy it defensively?” Mr. Bailey said in an
interview, describing the discussions at Disney headquarters here.
“Do we say
we’re not going to buy it, but it could be difficult for you if you take it
anywhere else?
Or do we buy it and make it?”
Mr. Iger, who has made
balancing Disney’s heritage with innovation one of his hallmarks, asked what the
studio saw in the script.
Boring into Disney bedrock was worth the risk, the
movie team responded, because the project hit on multiple themes.
On its
surface, “Saving Mr. Banks” is about the lengths Walt Disney went to for “Mary
Poppins.”
But it also serves as “an exploration of storytelling, why
storytelling matters in the world, and how storytelling can change people’s
lives,” Mr. Bailey said.
It is also about coming to terms with one’s past,
he added.
Mr. Iger signed off and went an unusual step further, personally
calling Mr. Hanks to ask him to consider the Disney role.
“We have never
depicted Walt before, so you can imagine how much trust was needed,” Mr. Bailey
said.
Hanks and Disney’s studio chairman, Alan F. Horn, in turn went to
meet with Diane Disney-Miller, Walt Disney’s sole surviving child.
A spokeswoman
for Miller, who is 79, said she was unavailable for an interview because of
“medical issues.”
But she might be pleased.
For years, Miller has worried
that her father has become too much of a corporate mascot, even going as far as
to open a museum aimed at depicting his human side.
My kids have literally
encountered people who didn’t know that my father was a person, Miller,
who with her husband, Ronald, has seven children, said at the museum’s
opening.
It will be a busy couple of months for her father, who died in
1966.
An unrelated Disney film project, the new animated short film “Get a
Horse,” arrives in November attached to the full-length feature “Frozen” and
uses his old voice recordings for Mickey Mouse’s lines.
But while “Get a
Horse” is an overt celebration of the studio’s heritage, “Saving Mr. Banks” at
times lampoons the company’s style.
“I won’t have her turned into one of your
silly cartoons,” Ms. Thompson’s character says of Mary Poppins.
No, she says, a
visit to Disneyland would not change her mind; in fact, she would be “sickened”
to visit that “dollar-printing machine.”
And in one scene that has gotten
big laughs in early screenings, Ms. Thompson’s cranky writer arrives at her
hotel for meetings with Walt Disney to find her room stuffed with balloons,
caramel corn and toys.
Shoving a stuffed Mickey Mouse into a corner, she snaps,
“You can stay there until you learn the art of subtlety.”
Life imitated art
last year when Ms. Thompson arrived for filming and found that Disney had done
the same thing to her hotel suite. “Believe it or not,” Mr. Bailey said with a
twinkle in his eye, “we do have a sense of humor.”
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
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