Floyd Norman: Every time Walt walked down a hallway, he would give a loud cough. It was a warning sign so we would know that the boss was in the area. Richard Sherman, Songwriter: In Bambi, there's a line when "Man is in the forest," there was danger. You have to be worried. We'd hear Walt coughing coming down the hall, and one of the guys would say, "Man is in the forest." And we'd all get ready for Walt. Rolly Crump, Imagineer: He walked through the door and, you know, pins would drop. You couldn't hear anything. His personal power walked right with him. Richard Sherman, Songwriter: There was no joking around. He would sit down, he'd say, "Okay, guys,
what you got?" And I would say, "I got a great idea," and
Walt would say, "We'll tell you if you have a great idea. You have an idea." Narrator: Walt Disney was an international
celebrity by the time he was 30, hailed a genius before he was 40, with honorary degrees from Harvard and Yale. He built a media and entertainment company that stands as one of the most powerful on the planet... Walt Disney (archival): This little fellow
is Bashful. Narrator: …won more Academy Awards than anybody in history, created a cinematic art form, and invented a new kind of American vacation destination. Disney's work counts adoring fans on every continent and critics who decried its smooth façade of sentimentality and stubborn optimism, its feel-good re-write of American history. Ron Suskind, Writer: Disney's a Rorschach
in America. The love and hate, it's off the charts. But, God, you have got to respect the energy of this guy. I mean, he is lunging every day of his life. Walt Disney (archival): "Well, kids, Babes
in Toyland is finished, and now it's time to celebrate!" Richard Schickel, Writer: Nobody who does stuff on the scale that he did is a sweetheart of a guy. I think he wanted to be what his image was. He wanted to be thought of as a hail-fellow-well-met, good-natured. But he wasn't. Neal Gabler, Biographer: Walt Disney is in
many ways a very dark soul. And one could say that he fought that, fought that darkness, tried to find the light. Sarah Nilsen, Film Historian: He is feeling
so much inside and he wants people to feel what he feels is inside. He could take those feelings that were so
central to who he was, put 'em on screen, and allow other people to also feel them along with him. Neal Gabler, Biographer: Most successful people, they get one thing right -- and that's it. But Walt Disney was a guy who got a whole lot of things right. What did this guy understand about the human psyche? Richard Schickel, Writer: Walt Disney was
as driven a man as I've ever met in my life. What he really wanted to do was, as we used to say in the Middle West, make a name for himself. He had a sort of undifferentiated ambition. He wanted to be somebody, that's for sure. Narrator: Walt Disney was still a few months shy of his 18th birthday when he returned from France after the First World War in 1919, and he was already better off than most of the two million other American boys streaming back home. 'Diz,' as his friends called him, had banked
over $500, and had a place waiting for him at a Chicago jelly factory where his father
was part-owner. The job offer was the best most working-class boys could hope for, but Walt Disney was not like most working-class boys. Don Hahn, Animator: He's got all these ideas, and he starts acting on them. And where most people were "ready, aim, fire," he was like, "ready, fire, aim." You know, he was like, "Let's go!" Neal Gabler, Biographer: Walt loved attention. He was an extrovert. He loved to be the center of attention. He wants to be an artist. And I think he discovered something early
on: That talent was his way of getting attention. He's a man of the times. And the times are exciting. Narrator: Walt was determined to do work he loved, and he had been an enthusiastic artist and cartoonist from the time he was little. He took a pass on factory work in Chicago and headed for Kansas City instead, where he had spent much of his boyhood. He moved into a house with two of his older brothers, and landed a job as a commercial artist for a local ad company. Soon he was making enough money for fashionable clothes, fine cigars, meals at nice restaurants, and near-nightly trips to the movie houses
springing up all over town. Disney's evenings in these new palaces of
celluloid fantasy included at least one feature film, maybe a serial short, a newsreel, and an animated cartoon or two. Tom Sito, Animator: It was an exciting and
very dynamic medium. The industry was very young. There was no regulations, or no customs, or no conformity. It was wide open to what people wanted to make of it. Narrator: Disney was captivated. His only formal training was a few months at an art school in Chicago, and a course at the Kansas City Art Institute, but he was convinced he could make better than what he was seeing. He checked out from the public library Eadweard Muybridge's Human Figures in Motion. Then he borrowed a volume that laid out the basics of animation in filmmaking. Disney read about roughing out a storyline, creating characters, and carefully drawing each individual frame onto white linen paper; by mounting each frame on pegs, just as the book instructed, and shooting them one at a time, he began to create the illusion of movement. Sarah Nilsen, Film Historian: He was really into modern culture. The pleasure of somehow engaging with the potential of cinema, the potential of animation was exciting to him. And he had this little ability to draw. He had a knack. Narrator: Disney's first efforts were short
cartoons he made on nights and weekends with a film camera he borrowed from his boss at the ad company. "I gagged 'em up to beat hell," he would say, and then sold them to a small Kansas City based theater chain. The fees didn't even cover his costs, but
Disney gained something more important than money: attention, excitement... a whiff of
destiny. "My first bit of fame came there," he said. "I got to be a little celebrity." At age 20, Disney quit his day job, and started a company -- Laugh-O-grams, Inc., Walter Elias Disney, president. He hired a salesman, a business manager, and four young apprentice animators. Don Hahn, Animator: I can imagine a young Walt Disney just, you know, waking up at dawn and going out with his friends and saying,
"Well, let's shoot this. Let's film this." And that kind of hunger for not just expressing himself but finding out who he was. He couldn't do enough. Steven Watts, Historian: He has stars in his eyes. He thinks he can do anything and everything that he wants. He has big plans. He's going to conquer the world.
