Tag: Walt Disney

December 6, 2015 /

Bullock’s Wilshire was the first department store designed to accommodate the car. Huge artfully dressed windows faced the street to attract traffic and the entrance was in the back under a porte-cochere where liveried attendants parked your Nash or Packard. Architects John and Donald Parkinson – built 1929 – architectural…

September 16, 2014 /

While we credit David Wark Griffith with creating the visual language of filmmaking in America – the father of Hollywood as a cultural force, a purveyor of dreams, a life style – is Cecil B. DeMille (August 12, 1881 – January 21, 1959). In the teens DeMille came West with…

March 20, 2014 /
January 16, 2014 /

Just a thought, why do animators refer to their work places in terms such as these; The Termite Terrace, The Crypt, Mauschwitz, etc.? It’s kind of gloomy this morning in LA (as this is an update in January 2014, it’s most likely sunny and warm out, unseasonably warm…) — so…

December 6, 2013 /

I am fascinated by an upcoming film project, SAVING MR. BANKS. It promises to illuminate the contentious relationship between Walt Disney and the author of the “Mary Poppins” series, P.L. Travers. Apparently Travers cried through the premiere of what she thought an “appalling” film. I would say there was, perhaps,…

October 8, 2013 /

Two kids at the Academy Awards: Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. judges the net – mixed doubles. “Big Bill” Tilden (standing far left), the first American Wimbledon champion, taught tennis to movie stars after he retired from competition. This photo was taken by Len Weissman and is dated 1940: Studio Portrait: Singing…

December 19, 2012 /

The Disney’s at a ranch in Palm Springs – 1948:

December 6, 2012 /

Season’s greetings, poppets! This is an image floating around the interwebs from the January, 1940 edition of Better Homes and Gardens. A year or two ago this same house sold to a perfectly beguiling man who fully appreciated the home’s heritage. He did a sensitive restoration, and, when he happened…

December 6, 2012 /

That’s the standard line, anyway. Disney’s animation was happy and Fleischer’s was hallucinatory. Frankly, when I was a kid early animation freaked me out. Only when I was older did I appreciate what innovators both these men were – and by then my dad had stopped grousing about Walt, possibly…