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| Disney Museum Recalls Genius, Grit of Man Behind Mickey Mouse By Daniel Taub Sept. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Mounted on a wall in the Walt Disney Family Museum is a yellowing page filled with doodles of a cartoon rodent. While its nose is elongated and its ears a bit small, there’s no mistaking its identity: Mickey Mouse. The sketches, from 1928, are the earliest-known drawings of what would become in a few years -- and remain to this day -- one of the most-recognized cartoon characters in the world. The San Francisco museum, housed in three buildings at the 1,491- acre Presidio national park, opens Oct. 1. It’s filled with animation cels, awards, film gear, family mementos and video and audio displays about Walt Disney. That’s Disney the man, not the company, the museum’s founders stress. Too many people associate the name only with the business he built, Walt Disney Co., and forget the man behind it, said Diane Disney Miller, 75, a daughter of Walt Disney and a board member of the foundation that funded the $110 million museum. “I think a lot of people don’t know he’s anything but a brand,” Miller said, in an interview. Some people aren’t sure there ever was a Walt Disney and assumed he was “like a Betty Crocker or something.” A Pioneer In many ways, Walt Disney was larger than life. Born in Chicago in 1901, he rose from being a Missouri farm boy to one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood, a pioneer in the worlds of animation, film production, amusement parks and television. Since his death in 1966, however, his achievements have been overshadowed by the films Walt Disney Co. produces and amusement parks it operates around the world, Miller said. “I want people to know who he really was,” she said. At the museum, visitors can listen to hundreds of audio clips of the man himself and family members and colleagues talking about Disney and his studio’s history. More than 200 monitors throughout the museum play video clips of both Disney and his animated and live-action movies. The collection, housed at a former army barrack with a view of the nearby Golden Gate Bridge, includes the 1939 “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” Academy Award featuring one full-size Oscar and seven miniature castings, a newly commissioned 12-foot model of Walt Disney’s original vision for Disneyland, a child- sized red car from the park’s Autopia ride, a book with a Salvador Dali drawing the artist gave to Disney, and assorted storyboards, a film innovation credited to him. Signed ‘W.E. Disney’ Disney’s love of drawing began during his boyhood days on the Missouri farm, according to materials from the museum. After moving with his family back to his birthplace, the teenage Disney attended night classes at the Art Institute of Chicago; a sketch Disney did for his high-school yearbook, signed “W.E. Disney,” is on display. During World War I, the Army rejected Disney for being underage, and he instead joined the Red Cross’s American Ambulance Corps after lying about his age to join. A Model T ambulance similar to the one he drove for the Red Cross in France is on exhibit at the museum. Disney’s first film company, Laugh-O-gram Films in Kansas City, went bankrupt in 1923 -- Laugh-O-gram drawings are on display at the museum -- and Disney moved to Los Angeles with $40 in his pocket, according to the museum. “I think it’s important to have a good, hard failure when you’re young,” Disney says in an audio clip that plays during the elevator ride to the museum’s second gallery, devoted to the years 1923 to 1928. That’s when Disney went to Hollywood, started his next film company, made the “Alice” cartoons and created Mickey Mouse. Donald Duck, Goofy By the end of the decade, Disney was internationally famous for introducing moviegoers to Mickey, later joined by pals Donald Duck, Minnie Mouse, Goofy and Pluto. Disney’s innovations were plentiful, including the first animated film to synchronize image and sound (1928’s “Steamboat Willie”), the first animated film in three-strip Technicolor (1932’s “Flowers and Trees”) and the first animated feature film to use CinemaScope widescreen (1955’s “Lady and the Tramp”). One of Disney’s original multi-plane camera cranes, used for shooting animated films, is in the museum’s collection. The museum also has a 114-seat screening room, a learning center, a café and a gift shop. A glass curtain wall at the rear of the museum, part of a 15,000-square-foot addition to the brick building, provides a panorama view of the San Francisco Bay and Golden Gate Bridge. A former gymnasium building dating from 1904 houses the Walt Disney Family Foundation’s offices as well as a 2,000- square-foot hall that will be used for concerts and other programs until it begins hosting temporary exhibitions in January 2012. The Disney campus’s third building houses the museum’s mechanical equipment. No Opposition The Walt Disney Family Museum is close to where Gap Inc. founder Don Fisher had wanted to build a contemporary-art museum. Facing opposition from community organizations, Fisher withdrew his plan in July. The Disney museum had no similar opposition, partly because it entailed restoring existing buildings rather than building anew, said Craig Middleton, executive director of the Presidio Trust, which oversees the facility. “There hasn’t really been any controversy about this museum at all,” Middleton said in an interview. The Disney museum satisfies two of the trust’s missions: finding public uses for the Presidio and preserving its historic buildings, he said. “This is really a pretty perfect use of both.” The Disney family had thought of locating the museum in Kansas City or Los Angeles, a city more associated with Walt Disney than San Francisco is, said Miller. In the end, the Presidio won because it had the best available building and the collection was already stored nearby. Also, the Bay Area, home to studios such as Pixar and Lucasfilm Ltd., has become an animation hub, she said. “I hope that people will leave here feeling happy and inspired to do what they want to do,” she said. |