Ray Bradbury Tells the Truth About Walt Disney (Creative People Need to Hear This!)
Bradbury’s Own Words
TRANSCRIPT:
I was Christmas shopping about 40 odd years ago. I saw a man coming across the store with a huge load of presents in his hands and his head tucked over the top. And I looked at his face and I said, my God! That's Walt Disney! My hero.
I've always wanted to meet him. I never have. So I ran up to him and I said, Mr. Disney? My name is Ray Bradbury. He said, I know your books. I said, oh thank God. He said, why? I said, can uh, we have lunch someday in the near future? And then he said tomorrow? Ha ha ha ha! How about that? Tomorrow! When's the last time you heard that? Don't people always say next week? Next month? Next year?
Well the next day I went to the studio and had lunch with Walt Disney set out on a card table with soup and salad. His secretary warned me before we went in. That he had a very busy schedule and at 1:00 I should jump to my feet, shake his hand and get out. I said, my God, of course! I'm so glad to be here just for an hour. I'll be a good boy.
At 1:00 I jumped to my feet, grabbed his hand, said thank you Walt. Goodbye. And started for the door. He says, wait a minute, wait a minute. I got a few things I want to show you.
So he took me out on the lot. He showed me the new hippopotamus. They're working on a new Lincoln robot. He had to show me that and the people mover. We came back to the office at 3:00. Two hours late. And the secretary looked daggers at me. And I said, no, him.
If there's any secret at all, it's because Walt, like myself, is not an optimist but an optimal behaviorist. Which means that every day of your life, if you behave well, you begin to feel well. So that's not false, that's real. You get your work done every day and at the end of a week, a month, a year, you'll turn around and say, hey, look what I did. So you feel good. That's real optimism. Optimal behavior.
He could look back at the end of each year and see his behavior and it made him want to go on. A lot of people are pessimists because they've never done anything. If you go to bed every night having not done anything, you're going to wake up unhappy, aren't you? So the answer to that is do something every day. Be busy, for God's sake, be busy.
People told him that he couldn't make sound cartoons. He made them. They said you can't make Snow White, it won't work. He put all of his money in that, got loans on his studio, put that out, very successful. Fantasia took a huge chance. It was years ahead of its time. It still is. It still is. He gambled on that and for a little while lost because the film didn't make that much money. But then about six years later it started going out in the world and people realized what he had done.
He wanted to change everything for the good. But not in any pontifical way, not in any serious way, but in the way in which you go to Paris or travel around France or England, London, and you come back and you look around and you say, hey, things are not beautiful enough. We need more fountains. We need more benches. We need more beautiful cities, more social life, more restaurants. And then you go out and try to create those. And those set an example and then you change your whole society that way.
When I first met him, I knew a lot of political people and the city (Los Angeles) was going to hell. And I attended a meeting of the Board of Supervisors. They were having a hearing for Alweg monorail who built the monorail out at Disneyland and up in Seattle. And I went down because I thought that monorail was the answer to our travel problems here. Nothing ever happened but during that time I met Disney and I told him about the monorail thing. And then I said, you know, what we need is Walt Disney as mayor of Los Angeles. He said, Ray, why should I be mayor when I'm already king?
Society is not changed by political activity. It's changed by indirect actions and by examples. And by inventions. Inventions change societies. But politicians don't. They have to follow after the inventions.
He went to the same kiddie ride that I did over at Beverly Boulevard at La Cienega. This is 35 years or so ago. And it was junky. It was horrible. And there was dreadful vinegary smelling people lurking in the shadows. You wouldn't want your kids around these people. They're all life's rejects. So he rejected the 'Dark Carnival' of 'Something Wicked This Way Comes' which I reject too.
And he says I've got to build a place that's clean and open and fresh and new and unlittered. And so he built Disneyland in the image where he thought, wouldn't it be nice to have it run by nice people?
The New York intellectuals hated him for it. Because they loved the cat piss. They loved all the negative things. They criticized him for having someone going around picking up the litter at Disneyland. It's too clean. Well how can anything be too clean? So he said, we can do better than that. And he proved it.
He built Disneyland. Because it was full of things we didn't need but really needed. We don't need a lot of trees. You plant them. We don't need a lot of benches. You put them down. You don't need a lot of flowers. You plant them. That's, that's French. That's out of Paris. The environment of Paris that Walt learned and grew up with. So he built Disneyland as an example, a way of living, not just an entertainment center. You can go there and sit on a bench and people watch because it's a happy experience. Why? The flowers, the trees, the fountains, all over and above all the other elements. So he was teaching us urban planning though he didn't intend to do it.
I came back from Paris one time about ten years ago, went to Disneyland, and I looked on the side of Sleeping Beauty's Castle. And I called John Hench over at Imagineering. I said, I just noticed something about Sleeping Beauty's Castle. There's a spire there that I saw last on top of Notre Dame in the Palais des Justices in Paris. I said, how long has that been there on Sleeping Beauty's Castle? He says 20 years. I said who put it there? He said Walt did. I said why? Because he loved it. I said ahhh, that's why I love Walt Disney. It cost $100,000 to build a spire you didn't need. The secret of Disney is doing things you don't need and doing them well and then you realize you needed them all along.
Do you remember the day Walt Disney died? Sure do. I was having lunch with Richard Schickel. We'd made the appointment two weeks before. And he called that morning and he was the one that told me that Disney was dead. He was one of Walt Disney's biographers? That's right. He was finishing the biography at that time. And he says, do you want to cancel lunch as a result of this? I said, are you kidding? All the more reason to see you. I want to tell you about Disney the way I saw him. So we had lunch. But the greatest thing happened two days later, the day of Walt's funeral. CBS radio called here at the house, live, on the air, asking to have me speak to people about Walt. And my wife was able to say, he's not here. And they said, where is he? She said, he's on his way to Disneyland with the kids. And this was planned weeks before. And when I got home that night and discovered they'd called and asked for me, I burst into tears. What a perfect answer! An unplanned thing. I'm on my way to Disneyland at the very moment they call.
I think I keep coming back to Disneyland because I find so much of myself here. I walk down the main street, I see a house that's very much like the house I was born in in Waukegan, Illinois. I find my childhood here. I find a lot of the present that I'm existing in here and especially I find a heck of a lot of the future I've been writing about for 20 or 30 years. It's a paradoxical place. It's a mixture of the fact that there is a lot of mystery to do with us, a lot of the ability to look back, but at the same time in looking back, be able to build for the future. I imagine that my children and I will be coming back here for a good many years.
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