DAVE R SMITH (1940-2019)

News today of the passing, at the age of 78, of another friend of Disney: Dave Smith, founder of the Walt Disney Archive and, for forty years, its champion, defender and gatekeeper. His knowledge of all matters Disney and his passion for sharing that knowledge were unrivalled.

David Rollin Smith was born and raised in Pasadena, California, and was a youthful admirer of Disney movies and a frequent to Disneyland. Later graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, he spent eighteen months as an intern at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Moving back to California he worked as a librarian at UCLA for five years; then, in the late ‘60s, while working on a bibliography on Walt Disney, Dave heard that The Walt Disney Company was considering establishing an Archive and wrote a letter to the Disney Company offering his services. The rest is Disney history!

Apart from his huge contribution, through his work at the Archive, to preserving the history of Disney’s contribution to film and animation, Dave disseminated much of that story through his many books, including Disney A to Z (going through numerous editions), The Quotable Walt Disney, Disney: The First 100 Years, Disney Facts Revealed, his multi-volume The Ultimate Disney Trivia Book and many other books, articles and contributions to other publications.

Dave, was an essentially a shy and very private man; as a result he was – sometimes – a rather prickly customer, requiring careful handling, but those of us who got to share a personal friendship with him also knew him to be an entertaining and often wickedly funny man.

For example, I remember, during one of his visits to the U.K., my husband, David Weeks and I took him on a jaunt around the South of England visiting, among other places, Hever Castle (historic home of Anne Boleyn and her family); it was spring and the flowerbeds were a riot of blooms; admiring them, Dave said: "Well! There are more pansies here than in Disneyland!"

The existence of the Walt Disney Archive is a testament to Dave's determination and work, as well as to the vision of Walt's brother, Roy O. Disney, who appointed him to a job that had didn't at the time exist and let him set about preserving the company's phenomenal legacy.
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RON W MILLER (1933-219)

It is with great personal sadness that I note the passing of Ron Miller at the age of 85. Ronald William Miller was an American businessman and former professional American football player. Married to Diane Disney Miller, Walt Disney's eldest daughter, he worked for his father-in-law on numerous film projects and later became President and CEO of The Walt Disney Company from 1978 until 1984, when he was ousted following an internal power struggle that saw the company pass into the control of Michael Eisner, Frank Wells and Jeffrey Katzenberg supported by Walt's nephew Roy E. Disney.

Ron Miller's achievements, during the difficult years following Walt's death were hugely significant and have yet to received their due credit. As his father-in-law had done before him, he pushed the Company to expand and explore, creating, in 1983, the Touchstone label (with its first stand-out hit, Splash!) and launching the Disney Channel. He was an innovator (although, again, unacknowledged), experimenting in early computer animation in Tron (1982); funding an unlikely collaborator, the renegade Tim Burton, for stop-motion animation shorts Vincent (1982) and Frankenweenie (1984); and sowing the seeds for several future hit projects, among them Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988).

Following the 1984 company coup, Ron and Diane left Hollywood and settled in Nappa Valley where they had already established the now internationally successful Silverado Vineyards.

Ron was a gentlemanly giant, a man of great personal charm and graciousness whose company I enjoyed on several occasions. The first in the late '80s – in company with my friends Richard Holliss and his wife, Chris – on a visit to the Miller's then home in Hollywood and later, on various visits to San Francisco. He will be remembered (apart from his valiant attempts to reinvigorate the Disney studio following Walt's death) for his service to the Disney legacy, tirelessly supporting Diane's various projects devoted to her father's memory, including the documentary film, Walt: The Man Behind the Myth (2001) and the visionary project, The Walt Disney Family Museum created in 2009 in San Francisco where the Millers had a penthouse apartment overlooking the Bay. Following Diane's tragic death in 2013, Ron became president of the Museum's board of directors.

He had agreed to write an introduction to a book of Walt Disney's letters that I am currently editing and I am saddened that this will, now, never be the case.

I am pictured below with Diane and Ron in 2001 at the premiere of Walt: The Man Behind the Myth, in which I made a cameo appearance.

ADVANCE BOOKING

Each year brings, it seems, a new batch of Disney books on an increasingly diverse range of topics.

Just out from Disney Editions...

 

As the new Disney Alice through the Looking Glass is about to plunge headlong through our movie screens, Tim Burton biographer and film historian, Mark Salisbury, gives an engaging account of Walt Disney's long and passionate involvement with Lewis Carroll's 'Alice' books.

In Walt Disney's ALICE IN WONDERLAND: An Illustrated History Through Time, Mr Salisbury chronicles the Disney-Alice story form the early silent, black-and-white 'Alice' comedies that helped establish Disney's reputation in the 1920s, via the celebrated 1951 animated classic, through to the 2010 Burtonesque adventure in Wonderland and its current sequel.

There are also interesting side-excursions with Mickey Mouse Thru the Mirror, Donald Duck (in Alician drag) in Donald in Mathmagicland as well as TV shows and commercials featuring Wonderland characters and Alice's appearance in Disney theme-park rides and attractions.

The promotional stuff (puff?) on the new film is pretty bland – though it does contains some stunning visuals of the Looking Glass settings that combine grandeur with what might be called Middle-earthiness. But the book (sadly only available in paperback) is worth the admission price for the historical sections that comprise an important piece of Carrollian-Disney history.

Among other titles coming from Disney Editions over the the next few months are...

Who doesn't like Disney dragons and villains? Both obvious musts for every Disney aficionado!

I've been intrigued by the process of mapping Disneyland and the other parks since I first pored over the fold-out map in the August 1963 issue of The National Geographic. 

Years later I had the privilege of meeting Herb Ryman who mapped 'The Happiest Place on Earth' for Walt Disney before it was even built (!) and Sam McKim who created many of our treasured Disney maps.

To look at a map of a Disney park is to relive visits past and dream of visits yet to be... 

This book promises to satisfy those twin emotions!

But perhaps the book I am most looking forward to seeing is this...

Back in 1988, Richard Holliss and I wrote The Disney Studio Story. When we wrote, the Studio was on the cusp of a transformation with the arrival of Michael Eisner and Frank Wells. 

In the 28 years that have followed, the studio has undergone a great many more changes than any of us could have imagined, and the story we started recording is long overdue for an update which, hopefully, this book will provide.

Also coming later this year, from Chronicle books, is the next volume in Didier Ghez' They Drew As They Please series: The Hidden Art of Disney's Musical Years (The 1940s - Part One). It's cover features a previously unseen piece of concept art for Peter Pan by David S Hall – whose preliminary art for Alice in Wonderland is featured in Mark Salisbury's Alice book I was discussing earlier.

DISNEY IN-DUCK-TION!

It was 1982, and I was on my first visit to Los Angeles. Unlike other holidaymakers who were making an immediate, predictable, bee-line for Hollywood Boulevard, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Universal Studios and the other attractions of Tinseltown, I jumped in a yellow cab and headed off to “beautiful down-town Burbank” which as well as being the sometime home of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, is the location of the studio known in the business as the Mouse Factory.


I had made a pen-pal of the Disney archivist, David R Smith, and as soon as I’d booked my trip to California, I blagged an invitation to visit the archive. And now here I was, in a state of bleary-eyed wonderment, staring into cabinets containing such holy relics as early Mickey Mouse watches, toys and comic books when I suddenly heard an explosive outburst of spluttering and squawking.

Turning around, I found myself looking at a dapper little man, at the time almost eighty years old, whose face was contorted into a shape that any gurning champion would be proud to have pulled, in order to produce the strangulated voice that could only belong to Donald Duck!

To my astonishment, I found myself being introduced to Clarence Nash who, for nearly fifty years, had been responsible for Donald’s impenetrable vocal tirades and who, rather sweetly, was known to everyone around the studio simply as ‘Ducky’.

So, what do you say to a man who’s spent his life playing a duck (or, more accurately, a ‘drake’) in a sailor suit? Fortunately, there was no need to say anything beyond the basic civilities, because Mr Nash was as loquacious as his fine-feathered friend.

He whisked the archivist and myself off to the Disney commissary where, over lunch, he retailed his history: his early career in vaudeville; his days as a bird impressionist on an LA radio show; his experiences as ‘Whistling Clarence’, touring local schools promoting the products of a local dairy; and his audition for Walt Disney when he had recited ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ in the voice of a baby goat and got re-cast as a duck in the Silly Symphony, The Wise Little Hen.

Mercifully, these anecdotes were not recounted in ‘duckese’ but in English (or, at least, American), and Nash explained that - alone among the Disney voice talents - he had personally dubbed all Donald’s foreign language soundtracks, learning the dialogue phonetically, and then delivering it in French, German, Italian, Spanish and several dozen other lingoes. Then, to the great amusement of the other diners, Nash slipped back into duck-talk and gave a vocal demonstration of his skills.

Whilst, frankly, it was impressive - and the most wonderfully eccentric beginning to any American holiday - the truth is that when Donald Duck flew off the handle in Serbo-Croat, he was as just as unintelligible as in his native tongue. But then maybe the fact that we never really understood was part of his charm.

Blind fury is not the most engaging of attributes, but Clarence Nash at least made it funny. Apart from which, seeing Donald Duck incandescent with rage can only make our own most intemperate outbursts seem positively innocent by comparison!

Here's a treasured memento of my encounter with Ducky Nash...