Yesterday's Tomorrow

CHPATER 12
TUTTI HIRES THE SHERMANS

In 1950, Roy asked Jimmy Johnson to head the studio’s new music publishing division, as well as business affairs for the new Walt Disney Music Company. When the unit became profitable in 1954, Johnson started building toward a goal that would be a huge benefit to the company: he wanted Disney to have total ownership and control of its music and characters in publishing and music.

That same year, he and Bill Walsh brought in talent like Jimmy Dodd, who was initially hired as a songwriter and then host of the Mickey Mouse Club. Separately, Davy Crockett first aired on ABC around the same time, and “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” became a musical phenomenon. That single hit record, along with Johnson’s desire to have the company control the studio’s assets, emboldened Walt and Roy to enter the record business. In May of 1955, weekly music magazine Billboard reported that Disneyland would have its own retail record store on Main Street called the Wonderland Music Store. The article noted the store would carry current records as well as vintage 78s and possibly piano rolls.30 

Charles Hansen was a New York music publisher who for years was the sole selling agent for Disney music. He and Johnson were looking for a producer who could run a new record label for Disney. Disneyland Records would of course release movie soundtrack albums, but he also wanted to produce new material for young Disney stars like Mouseketeer Annette Funicello. To achieve this, he hired Salvatore “Tutti” Camarata.

Camarata was a violinist and Juilliard alumnus who switched instruments in his teens to play the trumpet in big bands. It was Jimmy Dorsey who gave him the nickname Tutti. After a stint in the US Army Air Corps as a flight instructor, Tutti joined Decca Records, where he arranged and conducted for some of the biggest names of the time, including Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Louis Armstrong.

On Camarata’s first visit to the Disney studio, Jimmy Johnson screened Song of the South for him. “He shocked the crew by ‘watching’ the film with his eyes closed. He wasn’t really watching, he was listening,” said Johnson. Camarata put together an LP of the Song of the South score and it became the first soundtrack in the Disneyland Record catalog.

The new record label took off fast with hits by Mickey Mouse Club breakout star Annette Funicello, so Camarata hired a young songwriting team, brothers Richard and Robert Sherman, to write for her. It was the beginning of a historic collaboration between the brothers and Disney. Their first song for her was a top-ten hit, 1958’s “Tall Paul.” Walt had covertly been listening to their songs and asked the brothers to come to his office for a meeting. At that meeting he offered the Sherman brothers a life-changing job: staff composers for the company. Their work for Disney became legendary, reaching new heights of worldwide renown with scores for films like Mary Poppins and tunes for attractions such as the Enchanted Tiki Room and “it’s a small world.”

Camarata also brought Sterling Holloway to Walt’s attention and helped get Louis Prima and Phil Harris interested in voicing The Jungle Book characters King Louie and Baloo, respectively. With the sheer volume of records and licensed music growing, Tutti lobbied Walt and Roy to build a recording studio. But when they balked, he set up shop himself, buying a building on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and opening Sunset Sound. It was home to the most memorable recording sessions from then on for films like One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Jungle Book, and Mary Poppins.

The principal client for Sunset Sound was Disneyland Records, but Tutti opened the doors to others, and some of rock’s biggest names, including the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, Prince, and Van Halen, became regular customers. More than fifty years later, Sunset Sound is still in business on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and home to bands and singers like Maroon 5, Rascal Flatts, Kelly Clarkson, and many more. . . .


CHAPTER 16
CALARTS

In the 1930s, Walt knew that the theatrical-shorts business was limited, and he saw animated features as a natural expansion of his animation expertise. But the skill level of his artists was limited to simple cartoon drawing and had to be elevated if they were to make feature films a new business of the highest quality. The key to elevating the success of his artists and art form was a woman named Nelbert Chouinard. Chouinard was herself an artist and graduate of the Otis Art Institute, who in 1921 founded her own school, the Chouinard Art Institute which soon was deemed one of the most respected art schools in America. For years she had offered classes to Walt’s artists, sometimes for free if they couldn’t pay; the artistic elite of Disney Studio—Marc Davis, Joe Grant, Mary Blair—all went there.

By 1950, however, Chouinard was in deep financial trouble, having been swindled out of tens of thousands of dollars by her accountant. Disney, out of his longstanding loyalty to the institute, started helping Chouinard navigate through their financial crisis in 1956, even sending studio moneymen Royal Clark and Chuck Romero to thoroughly check her books and financial records.
By 1957, the studio was subsidizing the school to keep it alive and virtually controlling the management of the institution for the aging Chouinard. At the same time, the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music (founded in 1883)—an acclaimed academy of music run by social doyenne Lulu von Hagen—was available for acquisition, so Walt took steps to combine both schools into one cross-disciplinary arts institute that would be what CalTech was to the science community. Incorporated in 1961, the combined schools would form the first college in the United States created exclusively for the visual and performing arts—the California Institute of the Arts—which became known to all as CalArts.

There were harsh protests from faculty and students, who saw a Disney-controlled art school as an abomination during an era of conceptual and nonrepresentational art. But Disney prevailed and the school planned on moving to Cahuenga Pass in Hollywood on a hilltop opposite the Hollywood Bowl venue. CalArts, the Hollywood Bowl, and a proposed Museum of Motion Picture History were meant to complement each other and be a center for music, art, dance, and film. The plan went public in an elaborate promotional film shown at the premiere of Mary Poppins to raise funds for the project.

The land in Hollywood, however, never materialized and instead the trustees broke ground in May of 1969 on a hilltop plot of land in Santa Clarita, California. When the school opened in 1971, its first president, Dr. Robert W. Corrigan, former dean of the School of Arts at New York University, fired most of the faculty and began reworking the combined schools into his and the boards’ combined vision of a feeder school for the industry with the motto “no technique in advance of need.” His colleague Herbert Blau, provost and dean of the dance school, brought in a strong faculty of established educators, but also counterculture and avant-garde voices from the art world.

Besieged initially by not only protest but also financial problems, the board of CalArts considered selling the school to the University of Southern California or the Pasadena Art Center, but soldiered on with no takers. In 1972 Walt’s son-in-law William S. Lund took on the institute’s presidency, fired 55 of the school’s 325 faculty members, and introduced a structured schedule for classes and a balanced budget. His tenure was seen as either the salvation of the school or the end of an idealistic experiment, depending upon your point of view. 

Ultimately the school from the 1970s on produced brilliant artists, such as director Tim Burton, actor Don Cheadle, Oscar-winning director Pete Docter, and others who would later lead a renaissance in the entertainment and animation industries and validate Walt’s dream of higher education in the arts.