I don't know how to pronounce Pádraic

John Musker

Bill: With all that animosity in the studio, how did you move on to direct Basil of Baker Street, or I should say The Great Mouse Detective?

John: At this point, Ron Clements had shown the book Basil of Baker Street, about a mouse Sherlock Holmes, to Joe Hale, and he liked it as a possible feature. It was decided that the malcontents on Black Cauldron should leave Black Cauldron to the other directors and form a small unit to work on Basil. Thus, Ron Clements, who was unhappy over the way the story of Cauldron was being adapted, was assigned to Basil along with me as director and veterans Pete Young, Vance Gerry, and writer Steve Hulett. And Ron Miller himself was going to personally produce it. This was Ron’s way of mentoring us I think. As I tried to shape the tone of the movie, I wanted to do more than put a mouse in a deerstalker cap. My tastes in British comedy at the time were heavily influenced by Monty Python and also The Goon Show (British absurdist radio satire with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan that the Pythons themselves had grown up on). And that was part of what colored my initial version of Basil. Basil was very “John Cleese.” He was manic (and depressive), abrupt, smart, and lacked social graces. Instead of the violin, he played the tuba, a mouse-sized tuba. The homely Dr. Dawson was kind of an unwitting ladies’ man. The opening of the film was a Citizen Kane parody where the story was told in flashback by a wheelchair-bound Dawson, now residing in a home for shell-shocked veterans of the Afghan war. It was boarded by the great Joe Ranft, who gave it many of his idiosyncratically funny and heartfelt touches. After about six months, we finally showed it to Ron Miller. We had sequences on storyboards, nothing on reels. Ron absolutely hated it! He thought it was too “out there.”

Bill: So you made the wrong choice?

John: Yeah, once again. He basically said, “Start over.” For me, that was difficult. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted out. But I backed off and let it move in a more traditional Disney direction. Vance Gerry did wonderful work bringing more charm and warmth to the story, the look, and the characters. That was Ron Miller’s ultimate criticism of my version: “This is Disney! Where’s the warmth?” He had a point. My version lacked that. Joe Ranft did a classic drawing based on Ron Miller’s reaction where Ron looks sort of like Frankenstein and roars, “WHERE’S THE GODDAMN WARMTH?” I still have that drawing, 30 years later, pinned up in my room. It’s a good reminder. In the final film of Basil, I was able to still inject some of the edge that I thought was in Doyle’s own writing of Holmes, some of the Cleesian persona I thought amusing, but the film was tempered by the warmth Vance added. At this same time, Brad Bird, who had a falling out of his own a few years before and had exited the studio, was developing with Jerry Rees an animated feature based on Will Eisner’s classic noir detective strip, The Spirit. I loved The Spirit, had envisioned making a version of it myself one day. In my spare time, I helped Brad get the project going, as did Glen Keane and others. I did animation, storyboarded a couple of long sequences, and was ready to jump ship and relocate to northern California with Brad and Jerry if it got funding. Word of this got back to management. Burny Mattinson was elevated to codirector partly because of my lack of firm commitment to seeing Basil through.

Bill: Then the sudden appearance of Eisner …

John: Sudden is right. But first, there were the threats of a takeover of Disney. Ron Miller was ousted and Michael Eisner and Frank Wells were brought in. And Roy Disney, who had earlier left Disney unhappy with Ron Miller’s direction of the studio, orchestrated Michael’s hire and returned to Disney himself. But we wondered, does anybody realize Ron Miller was actually producing Basil and now we are producer-less? We were like kids in a classroom who were the only ones that knew the teacher was never coming back. It was strange. For a moment, there was no supervision, no leader to look to. We were all in limbo. Shortly thereafter, we learned that we actually had to pitch the movie to Michael Eisner. Although we had been working on it for three years, it was very possible that it might get shelved in the wink of an eye.

Bill: Three years?

John: Three years in boards … I think we had a few reels. Ron was very distracted by the takeover attempts, and we were moving in slow motion. So we pitched Basil on beat boards to Michael Eisner, and he says, “OK, I see you got the comedy and the adventure. But what’s going to make us cry? You need something to make us cry.” He starts talking in a way that I never heard Ron Miller talk. He then calls in Jeffrey Katzenberg, and we show him everything that we have. This is our first meeting with him. Jeffrey looks at our bar room sequence, one where a plaintive woman mouse sings a Victorian ditty that gets a bit bawdy. Jeffrey’s response: “Why can’t we have Michael Jackson do a song for it?” We were totally thrown. Michael Jackson? Victorian England? It was then we realized that we were not in Kansas anymore.

Bill: Thinking outside the box.

John: There was no box. In hindsight, Jeffrey’s thought was not so wacky. It was risky in a kind of cool way (although hiring the biggest pop star on the planet to do a song isn’t entirely daring), but it was another universe than the Disney we had been working for. So they greenlit the movie, but cut the budget in half and gave us half the time. We had to knock a year off production and do the movie for ten million dollars, which was a tight squeeze budget-wise even then. Our roles also got shuffled around. Burny Mattinson was now producing the film, and Ron and Dave Michener became codirectors. I wasn’t the sole director anymore. I answered to Burny now. It wasn’t necessarily an ideal situation for me. Fortunately, Burny was very supportive, collaborative, and generous all in all. He was open to ideas, and had some fun ideas of his own that sent the movie off in a better direction. And in the meantime, Brad never did get The Spirit off the ground.

Bill: Is this when you and Ron began to work together as a team?

John: I think our teamwork was forged on Black Cauldron, as it were, ironically enough. We discovered we shared much of the same tastes in storytelling and writing. This was further amplified as we collaborated on Basil. I had always known Ron as an animator. He was a low-key guy with a good head on his shoulders. During the Bluth days, as much as Don tried to entice him, or anyone else for that matter, he was the guy that said, “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.” No matter what, he would question something if it didn’t look or feel right. And on Black Cauldron, we learned that we had similar ideas about how to adapt a book into a film and how to take a character from the page to the big screen.

Bill: But you ended up finishing The Great Mouse Detective.

John: We did. To us, though, it was always Basil of Baker Street. That’s what we called it.

Bill: And it did OK at the box office, right?

John: Well … it got really good reviews. The studio was excited. But both Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner were disappointed with how much money it made. People liked it. It was Glen Keane’s first chance to really design and develop a character, which he did with the villain Ratigan. It was a step in the right direction, especially after Black Cauldron.

Bill: And it set you on track to helm The Little Mermaid.

John: It did. Ron was the one that pitched The Little Mermaid. He found the original Anderson story in a book of fairy tales he read in a bookstore in North Hollywood, the Paperback Shack. He was in search of ideas for features to pitch at a “Gong Show,” a meeting with Jeffrey and Michael designed to unearth new ideas for films, a vehicle they had used at Paramount. Upon reading Mermaid, Ron loved the story’s visual qualities. In terms of animation, it had great potential, and he wondered, “Why has this never been made into a film?” Then he got to the tragic ending, and said, “Now I know.” Ron wrote a two-page outline of his version. After some delay, Michael and Jeffrey liked it enough to put it into development as a feature. It ultimately languished, waiting for Michael Cristofer, a fine actor and writer of Witches of Eastwick and writer-director of Gia, and a person whose tastes ran toward the dark side, to write Little Mermaid. He never quite got going on it, so Ron asked me if I would be interested in writing it with him, the two of us having collaborated amicably on Basil and Cauldron, if he could get Peter Schneider, who really ran feature animation for Jeffrey and Roy, to agree. Ron’s pitch to Peter was we’re here, we’re cheap, we’re rarin’ to go, whaddya got to lose? Peter said OK.

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Bill: With all this consistent collaboration, what would be an example of something that’s all yours?

John: Well, the caricatures I draw reflect a point of view that’s all mine. I also made this three-minute film piece for Joe Ranft’s funeral, a tribute to a great friend and an exceptional talent and human being who died too young. I drew and edited the whole piece. I was encouraged to post it on YouTube on Joe’s subsequent birthday, which I did. People can track that down to maybe get a little feeling for what Joe was like, and what he meant to me and the people around him. It pleased me that the people who knew and loved Joe could see him in that little film. In general, it pleases me when something you labor over seems to resonate with an audience. They see themselves in it and connect to the emotions.

Bill: I think you’ve succeeded. Mermaid, for example, was such a success. The audience just kept coming back to see it.

John: Yeah. I don’t think Michael Eisner initially saw animation as something that could be financially successful. Black Cauldron, which was their intro to Disney features, had cost a lot of money and not done well. I think Michael was quoted in one of the early press pieces as saying Disney needed to continue making animated films because of Disney’s legacy, but they weren’t expected to make money. When someone remarked how expensive an animated film was to produce, I think he was actually quoted as saying, “These are expensive to make, but we have to do it. It’s sort of our thing. It’s our obligation almost.” I don’t think Eisner initially saw animation as a big source of revenue. He just wanted it to break even. Jeffrey, who had not grown up around animation at all, saw it, I think, as a challenge to make it financially successful. Although Basil wasn’t particularly successful financially (so much so that a disappointed Jeffrey told us he thought the ticket prices for animated films might have to be raised to make them profitable), Spielberg and Don Bluth produced An American Tail, and it did better at the box office. It was very much made for a family audience. Even I went to see it on opening night, but it was sold out! I couldn’t believe it. Ultimately, its success helped us convince Jeffrey to put more production value into The Little Mermaid. Mermaid was definitely a surprise, even for Jeffrey. It expanded the traditional audience for animated films. It even became a kind of date movie for teens and adults. Of course, there was Roger Rabbit too, which came out before Mermaid. But Howard and Alan’s music for Mermaid was so infectious, smart, and fun that animation became kind of cool. And that gave us momentum. It moved the production of new animated films forward. Obviously, not everything hinged upon the success of Mermaid. But Rescuers Down Under and Beauty and the Beast were in development in various stages, and the success of our movie gave momentum to them and other upcoming projects (as well as increasing expectations for them, both creatively and financially). As Mermaid was winding down, but before it was released, the studio actually wanted Ron and I to take over Beauty and the Beast from the original director, Dick Purdum. He was a talented British-based animator who had been saddled with an early draft of the script that Jeffrey loved. He was told not to change a word. When Jeffrey disliked the reels that emerged from the “perfect” script, there was an emergency confab in Florida during the Mermaid press junket. It was there that Howard pitched his version of the story, which handled the characters and the tone (as well as plot elements) considerably differently. He pitched the villain Gaston being a hunter rather than a fop, and his Belle was an imaginative, independent lover of books out of step with her provincial neighbors. He thought the mute, enchanted household objects, which had once been human servants, should not only speak, but should sing and dance. And new directors Kirk Wise and Gary Trousedale and their great story team of Roger Allers, Brenda Chapman, Chris Sanders, et al., brought their own ideas to the project and brought it all to spectacular life (and we had nothing to do with it!).

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Bill: What was one of the toughest moments in making Aladdin?

John: We had a screening for Aladdin, the famous Black Friday screening. Ninety minutes of story reels, our first pass. On Basil, Jeffrey had shut the reels off after ten minutes when he wasn’t engaged and refused to watch the rest until we had a more compelling opening. These reels of Aladdin he watched in their entirety. At the end, his only comment was, “That’s a lotta movie,” and off he went. Ron and I lunched at El Torito, a little uncertain what to make of Jeffrey’s reaction, but cautiously thinking the screening seemed to go OK. After lunch we went to see Don Ernst who was our producer. “Any further word from Jeffrey?” we asked. “He hated it!” Don replied. What!? When we asked Jeffrey later why he hadn’t shut off the projector as he had on Basil, he said, “I got too much respect for you guys to do that. But I gotta tell ya, I was so bored I spent the entire screening working on the guest list for my wife’s surprise party!” So on Good Friday, even though the studio was closed, we came in to meet with Jeffrey. He said, “Listen guys, Steven Spielberg just made Empire of the Sun. The script, however, didn’t work. He went out, he shot it, edited it together. And guess what? It still didn’t work! But had anybody told him the script didn’t work? No! Because he is Steven Spielberg. Guys, I’m here to tell you, and I think of you as the Steven Spielbergs of animation, you just made Empire of the Sun.”

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Bill: The Genie gets so much attention, but the animation for the magic carpet was even more amazing.

John: Randy Cartwright animated the carpet. It was the first time, I think, that we used texture mapping. Neither Ron nor I is particularly technologically adept, but we were trying to stretch the boundaries, just like we did on Great Mouse Detective. If someone had an idea how to use technology in a cool way, we were open to trying. On Great Mouse, it was Mike Peraza and Phil Nibbelink who kept saying, “Wouldn’t it be cool if …,” which led to the interior of Big Ben being done on the computer. On Mermaid, Tina Price pushed us to make Eric’s ship a CG [computer graphics] model (which it is only in that first scene coming out of the fog). Tina was also involved in “roto-ing” Randy’s hand-drawn animation of the carpet and warping the intricately patterned carpet texture to fit the acting and movements that Randy created. Still, we had to sell this to Jeffrey. We loved getting this intricate pattern on the carpet, but according to the accountants, it was going to cost a lot of money to do this. Jeffrey was incredulous: “I’m paying all that dough for a bunch of squiggles?” He didn’t get it. But we fought for it and he gave in. I was very happy about that victory. Randy really “was” the carpet, or vice versa. I remember Randy acting out the scene as the carpet sadly slumps away after Aladdin dismisses it in the cave. I still see Randy doing it when I watch the carpet do that in the movie.

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Bill: If you could go back in time what advice you give yourself about directing your first feature?

John: If I could go back in time to Great Mouse Detective, the first feature I directed on really (I don’t think I can count Black Cauldron …) and advise myself about it, I’d caution myself to remember that the audience has a lot of material to absorb about characters, their problems, the world they live in, and the rules by which that world operates, in a very short amount of time. So extra care must be spent to make sure all that information gets communicated clearly and entertainingly. At times, the younger “me” might try, like younger animators sometimes do, to put too much into too little time, thus making it harder for the audience to jump aboard. I’d also remind myself to leave breathing room so there is a variety of pace, let some things should play out more slowly to give contrast in the film, which helps keep the audience engaged. And I’d remind myself how lucky I am to be doing this.

Ron Clements

Bill: Pastels, right? After all, no Photoshop back then!

Ron: Pastels, magic markers … and a hot press. I learned how to work a hot press. I shot a lot of slides. For every piece of artwork you did, you had to shoot a slide. And it would all end up on camera. I was still very interested in animation, though. I even brought in my Super 8 films and suggested we could do some commercials. In those days, everyone thought animation was a very expensive business, that without a bunch of fantastic equipment you couldn’t do it. My little Super 8 films proved otherwise, so I convinced them. Soon I was making little animated commercials. They even built an animation stand for me, which they let me use on my own after hours. When I was 18, I made a 15-minute animated short called Shades of Sherlock Holmes. It was in color. I did all the animation, cels, backgrounds, voices, and soundtrack.

Bill: Did you have pegs?

Ron: I had pegs … just two pegs. I did it with a two-peg system. They were just little wooden dowels. I punched the paper and cels with a regular paper puncher.

Bill: You made it yourself?

Ron: I made the cells. I painted them. I did everything.

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Bill: Do you remember your first tests?

Ron: My first test did not go that well. Eric Larson suggested that I do something with Sherlock Holmes, since my film featured that character. But my design was not at all a Disney-type design. I was frozen for three weeks. I was actually working on a walk cycle for three weeks. In the fourth week, I added a Watson character, who was a little King Hubbert–ish. I had more fun with him. But it was close. They saw a little spark with what I did in that last week, so I got to stay. That was enough for me to relax and start to feel more comfortable. Then I did much better on my second test, a test with the rabbit character from Winnie the Pooh. They liked that test. Before I knew it, eight weeks had passed. If you could make it through that, they hired you. That was the official start of my Disney career. I was an in-betweener at Disney working on Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too, a featurette at that time. And even though I was officially employed at Disney, I still did personal tests in my spare time. I had a fairly ambitious idea to do one with Cruella De Vil. It went over really well. Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston came into my room after they saw it and sort of bowed to me. That was probably the biggest thrill of my entire career. Suddenly, everyone at the studio knew who I was. It was definitely a transformative moment. At the same time, I was still scared. That test went over so well. But honestly, I still didn’t really know what I was doing. Frank asked me to work with him. He wanted to be my mentor. I had originally thought about working under Milt Kahl. But I soon learned that Milt didn’t really mentor anybody. You dealt only with his assistant, Stan Green. Working with Frank was a fantastic opportunity. He was a brilliant animator, actor, entertainer … just an incredibly smart, talented guy. I learned a lot from Frank as I became an animator on the Rescuers. Back then, there were only a few books on the animation process, such as the Preston Blair book, and Frank and Ollie wrote an amazing book after they retired. But animation is something you learn best from working with someone. You can get the ideas and concepts from a book. But in the end, you need a mentor, someone who can teach you how to do it, how to become an actor with a pencil. For me, that was Frank.

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Bill: When did you begin to work with John Musker?

Ron: Despite being one of the young rebellious CalArts guys, the studio made John a director on Black Cauldron. It was the idea of Tom Wilhite, a young executive who was open to new ideas. The older directors didn’t like that at all. After Frank and Ollie left, Don Bluth was running the show. But he clashed with the CalArts guys. They had different ideas and were not afraid to express them. Brad Bird was particularly outspoken. A schism developed quickly. Finally, Don Bluth and his people quit. The studio was then left with a bunch of talented, but unruly young talent, which could be quite scary for a fairly conservative company. Ron Miller, Walt’s son-in-law, who was now running things, thought the answer was to bring us all together on Black Cauldron under a group of older guys just promoted to director. But I don’t think that was a great experience for many of us. There was now a new schism between the younger and older guys. So John was pushed into the role of director and was also working on the story. That’s when we started to work together. I was also assigned to work on the story. That was my first time working with storyboards, and John and I had very strong ideas about the overall momentum of the narrative. But I think the older directors just wanted us to board the sequences and let them worry about the overall story.

Bill: Is this when you and John bonded?

Ron: Pretty much. We had similar ideas. Unfortunately, most of those ideas were not shared by the other directors. Eventually they put us in a room to work on stuff that was never going to be used in the movie. It was “additional story,” that is, story never intended to be used. That was a bad experience for both of us, but we discovered we did have a lot in common. We were almost the same age. We were both raised Catholic, and we were both from the Midwest. We both were even cartoonists for our school papers. John was also an incredible caricaturist. And caricature was what helped to eventually land me at Hanna-Barbera and then Disney. It was easy to be friends. Anyway, we were both put on probation on Black Cauldron.

Bill: They took you off the picture?

Ron: No, we were on the picture. But we wouldn’t be for long, if we didn’t change our attitude. It was that kind of probation. But it didn’t matter in the end. Joe Hale was the producer on Black Cauldron. He was very sympathetic to our group, but ultimately he had to choose between us and them. He chose the older guys. I guess it was a good thing, because there was no project slated for development after Black Cauldron. Since I’ve always been a big Sherlock Holmes fan, I had come across this book called Basil of Baker Street, which was about a mouse Sherlock Holmes. I thought it was perfect for a movie adaptation. But I was working on the Rescuers at the time and didn’t pursue it. Well, now seemed like the perfect time to pitch the idea. I brought it to Joe first, and he brought it to Ron Miller. Ron not only wanted to make the movie, but he also saw an opportunity to put all these young disgruntled people to work on an alternative project to Cauldron. So John became the director and I worked on the story. Later, Burny Mattinson was brought on to keep us from going too radical. Basil developed slowly over the next year and a half. Then everything changed overnight. Saul Steinberg, who was a corporate raider, was trying to take over Disney. Evidently, if he succeeded, he was going to dismantle the company and make a huge profit. All of us working on Basil had no idea what was going to happen. It was a precarious time. Finally, Roy Disney and the Brass brothers came in and saved the company at the last minute. And Ron Miller left. Bill: So, Eisner and Katzenberg came in.

Ron: Sweeping changes. For a time, they didn’t even know we existed. We were such a small group, and Ron Miller had been our producer. We used to joke about whether we should tell anybody we existed. A lot of stuff happened at this time. There are a lot of stories.

Bill: We should stay focused on your personal experiences.

Ron: We had to pitch Basil all over again to Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg. It was weird. We had worked on this film for a long time. Suddenly, we had to pitch it as if it were a new idea. Well, they liked it. It was greenlit. But Michael reduced the budget and gave us a strict time frame. We had ten million to spend, and we had to finish in about a year. So, we did.

Bill: You did Basil in a year?

Ron: We did. But we had previously worked on the film for over two years, so we had lots of boards, reels, and the cast. We jumped straight into production.

Bill: Basil himself is a manic-depressive. How different was he on the screen from what you guys originally envisioned? Didn’t they ask you to tone it down a little?

Ron: We had to tone it down. That’s why Burny Mattinson was put on the picture. Basil was indeed manic and eccentric. And we pushed that even more early on. Burny carefully pulled us back, allowing for some eccentricity and quirkiness, but nothing too extreme. The film was done very fast. Fortunately, it was animals wearing clothes, which is probably the easiest kind of animation to do. Everything turned out for the best, I think. Black Cauldron was costly and took four years to make. We finished Basil in a year, it was cheap, and it did better at the box office.

Bill: Don’t forget to mention the name.

Ron: Well, we did hate the title change. To us, it was always Basil of Baker Street. But there was a marketing issue. Eisner and Katzenberg had come to Disney from Paramount, which soon released Young Sherlock Holmes. Big names were associated with that film: Steven Spielberg, Chris Columbus, Barry Levinson. I think Basil was greenlit because they were still riding high on that movie. When it finally came out and didn’t do that well, Eisner and Katzenberg were worried about any association with Sherlock Holmes. So the title was changed to The Great Mouse Detective. We hated that name.

Bill: What about the secret memo?

Ron: I don’t think it’s a secret now that Ed Gombert wrote that memo. He was a very talented story guy at the time. Peter Schneider was newly installed as the head of production, and the fake memo was attributed to him. It basically said, “Not only are we going to change the title of Basil of Baker Street to The Great Mouse Detective, but we have also decided to go back and change the titles of all previous Disney films. From this point on, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs will be Seven Little Men Help a Girl; Pinocchio will be The Little Wooden Boy Who Became Real; Cinderella will be The Girl with the See-Through Shoes.” I think he changed all the titles except the Aristocats. Peter was incensed! They wanted to fire whoever wrote that memo. Eventually, it died down and nobody got fired. But that memo has a life of its own. It was eventually the basis for a Jeopardy! question, and the LA Times wrote an article about it.

Bill: Were you and John the sole codirectors of Great Mouse?

Ron: No. Burny and Dave Michener were also directors. John and I were sequence directors. And as for me becoming a director, I should backtrack and say that it was due to Ron Miller leaving. He was the original producer. When he left, Burny became the producer. But he didn’t feel he had time to both produce and direct, so they were looking for another director. I asked Burny to consider me, and he went with that. I guess that was my big break.

Bill: Did you and John do sequences together?

Ron: No, and we still work that way. We split a movie into sequences and then divide them up. We don’t actually work on the same sequences. That’s always been part of our process. There was also no screenplay on that movie. Most of the Disney movies didn’t have one at that time. We did our own writing for the sequences that we boarded. Somehow, we were able to maintain consistency. We both did a lot of writing on Basil. And that reminds me of the “Gong Show,” which was something Eisner brought with him from Paramount. Occasionally, they would gather a lot of the creative people at Paramount to generate new material by simply pitching ideas freely. This was called the Gong Show because the response required a simple gut reaction, yes or no. So we had to do this too. A bunch of us had two weeks to each come up with five ideas to pitch. As I was looking around for ideas, I found this book of fairy tales that included The Little Mermaid. I’d heard of it, but never read it. It didn’t take long to discover that Hans Christian Anderson’s writing was very visual, almost cinematic. It leapt off the page. There was so much potential, I was curious why it hadn’t been made into a movie yet. But as I read further, I could see why. It’s a story that starts out sad, and then it gets sadder and sadder. Then she dies in the end. Depressing, but it intrigued me. A few days later, I had an idea. I thought of making the witch a villain and putting this sort of ticking clock in the story. I wanted this ironic twist where the prince falls in love with her voice, but she gives up the voice. And I had a way to give it a happy ending. I got so excited that I couldn’t sleep. I wrote up two page treatments on five different ideas, but I thought Mermaid was the best. Two weeks later, when we gathered, Michael asked us to pitch our best idea, not all five. When I said The Little Mermaid, they immediately said, “No. That’s too close to Splash.” Nevertheless, they said they would read all the two page treatments. I was very disappointed. Then, two days later, Jeffrey Katzenberg said that he and Michael saw potential in The Little Mermaid. They wanted to put it into development. And for a while I was sort of in charge of that.

Bill: Was John involved with it?

Ron: John was not involved at this point. They were focused on finding a writer. Initially, they wanted Michael Christopher, the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer on the Witches of Eastwick. He was interested, but then backed off because he felt his take would be too dark. That’s when I went to John and suggested that we collaborate on the screenplay. We pitched the idea to Peter Schneider and he agreed. The Great Mouse Detective was also coming to an end, so both of us were looking for a new project. At the same time Jeffrey Katzenberg, prompted by David Geffen, was trying to lure Howard Ashman to Disney. They showed Howard a number of things in development, both live action and animation, and he was most interested in writing the songs for Mermaid. We met him in New York with a 12-page treatment and, for two days, we went over it, figuring out how and what songs could be worked into the story. And Howard a great idea. Howard went on to direct the musical “Smile” in New York while John and I returned to California and wrote the script.

Rob Minkoff

Bill: How long did you stay at CalArts?

Rob: I was there for three years. At the end of my second year at CalArts something kind of devastating happened. Disney didn’t hire anyone. That was a huge blow to the students. In my first year they hired nine people! That got us excited about our future prospects—then, suddenly, nothing. Worse still, rumor had it Disney didn’t like our films. Apparently, they were too dark.

Bill: Your sophomore film?

Rob: Yeah. It was kind of a Hansel and Gretel story. This devious candymaker invites two kids into his store in order to turn them into candy. He literally is going to pick them up and toss them into the candy-making machine. Well, I suppose it was a little dark. But we can probably thank Tim Burton for that! In our first year they showed Tim’s pencil test, and it was amazing. This little film essentially displayed every major concept that Tim is now known for. It was called Stalk of the Celery Monster. That film had a profound effect on us.

Bill: Did that influence your third-year film?

Rob: Well, before that, and after Disney chose not to hire anyone, Dan Jeup came in and announced that three people had been selected to do an internship. I was one of them. We got to do a summer internship with Eric Larson in the summer of 1982. This happened to coincide with the animation strike. No one was in the building because they were all out on the street picketing. That made the experience very strange. We actually had to cross a picket line to get inside the building. We weren’t scabs because we weren’t employed per se. We were just interns. But the nice thing was that we had Eric all to ourselves. He literally had nothing to do but teach us. At this time I also met Don Hahn, Ron Rocha, and Burny Mattinson, who wasn’t picketing because he was a director. Mostly the place was empty, and that gave us an opportunity to do something we couldn’t have done otherwise. We went into everybody’s office and looked at their stuff. We looked at Ed Gombert’s boards, Vance Gerry’s boards for The Great Mouse Detective, which at the time was called Basil of Baker Street. We saw boards hat Tim Burton had done for The Black Cauldron. One day we got very bold. We decided to march upstairs and meet Ron Miller. He had Walt Disney’s old office, and we just wanted to step into that room. So we went up to Lucille … Lucille was Ron’s assistant, right?

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Bill: Was this the very early stages of Roger Rabbit?

Rob: Yeah, before Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis were involved. Daryl Van Citters, Chris Buck, and Mike Giaimo had been working on it. They even shot a live-action test with Mike Gabriel as the detective. I was basically hanging out with these guys in the beginning. Joe Ranft had introduced me to them. I’d met Joe my first year at CalArts. He’d come back from Disney to give advice and critique the animation tests for some of the students. It was totally informal. Just something Joe wanted to do. We became very close after that. What an amazing talent and all-around human being he was. It was such a tragedy to lose him so young. I still think of him quite often. Anyway, I’d finally gotten a job at Disney and my first assignment was inbetweening on The Black Cauldron under Phil Nibbelink. It was a pretty tough job, except that Phil had all the cute girls working as his inbetweeners.

Bill: How long did that go on?

Rob: For about six months. To keep my sanity, I would take drawing breaks. I would stop inbetweening, pull out a fresh piece of paper, and draw something for fun. Then I would go back to inbetweening. After a while, I acquired a large stack of drawings, which sort of helped me later. There was a small group working on Basil of Baker Street—The Great Mouse Detective, that is. They were thinking about bringing in a new face for some character design work. Brian McEntee recommended me to John Musker. Eventually, John called and asked me to come to his office. He also told me to bring drawings. I reached into my desk, grabbed the stack, and walked upstairs to his office. About a week later Ed Hansen, who was running the animation department, called and said they wanted me as a character designer on the film.

Bill: So John saved you, huh?

Rob: Yes, he did. But it was only supposed to be for a limited time. Ed made it clear that as soon as I was finished it was back to inbetweening! They didn’t want me to get too comfortable! I didn’t care. I was just happy to get out for a while. But then the good thing was I never went back to inbetweening. Somehow I managed to stay on the movie.

Bill: What was it like, working on your first big production as a designer?

Rob: Basil had quite a history by the time I arrived. John and Ron had been developing the movie. It was edgy, adult, and very smart. Heavily influenced by Monty Python’s absurdist humor, which I loved! This was the vision I saw when I peeked at the boards during my internship. When they pitched it to Ron Miller, he basically made them start all over again. Joe Ranft had the funniest drawing of Ron Miller at the time. It didn’t look anything like him, but it was Ron as a giant blue man with blood vessels popping out of his head. The caption read, “WHERE IS THE GODDAMN WARMTH?!” So, Burny was brought in as producer, and Dave Michener also came on board as a director. We had three directors. The entire tone and feel of the movie changed. Ron Miller wanted it to be more “Disney.” But if you look back at Walt’s films, there was some incredibly interesting, dynamic, and scary stuff in those movies. Needless to say, everyone was frustrated. But that didn’t stop me from appreciating the opportunity I had. I got to be a character designer. This was my chance to move forward. Eventually, they assigned me to work on some animation, which pushed me into the role of animator. Then someone said, “You should be an animation supervisor.” I replied, “Sure. That sounds great!”

Bill: This was all on The Great Mouse Detective?

Rob: Yeah, it didn’t take the ten years that Bob McCray and Jack Hanna said it would. But any kind of sudden advancement was met with skepticism by the senior staff. That’s not an easy position for anyone to be in, but Disney was changing. There was a new generation of people that wanted something else, something better. And the frustration was often visible. I remember hearing a story about Brad Bird kicking a Sparkletts bottle down the hallway. But that’s how everybody felt.

Bill: But Brad had already left Disney before you’d got there.

Rob: Yes. But soon after starting, I began hearing that Brad Bird and Jerry Rees were going to make an animated movie, based on Will Eisner’s The Spirit, in Northern California. Brett Newton came to me and said, “Have you heard about this thing that Jerry and Brad are doing? It’s gonna cause a huge revolution in animation! They’re gonna hire everybody who’s any good out of Disney who wants to leave and go work on a movie that’s gonna break all the rules and be the salvation of animation.” Of course I thought it sounded fantastic. He put me in touch with Brad and Jerry, and I soon arranged a meeting up in Northern California. Unfortunately, things weren’t as bustling as Brett had claimed. It was very quiet there. It was just Brad and Jerry. They showed me the test, which I think John Musker and possibly Glen Keane had worked on. It was amazing stuff. But I didn’t get the feeling that production was going to take off anytime soon. And it never did. Eventually, I did end up working for both of them, Brad on Family Dog and Jerry on The Brave Little Toaster. I was still technically an animator at Disney, but I indulged in a little creative freelance work for them. I guess it helped with the frustration I felt at the time.

Bill: Didn’t you briefly leave Disney to work with Jerry Rees?

Rob: I did. I went to see Don Hahn, who was then kind of managing the animation department at Disney. I said, “I’ve got this opportunity to do designs on this Jerry Rees project.” Don was very gracious and understanding. I was very nervous about leaving. I had wanted to work at Disney for so long, and they took me in. But it wasn’t quite the place the literature promised. Don said, “If you want to go, go. It’s okay. You can come back anytime.” So I took a deep breath and left Disney even though there was no guarantee I would be taken back. The door could have been closed forever.

Bill: Did you go to Taiwan?

Rob: No, I didn’t. I spent about five weeks with Jerry up in Hollywood but going to Taiwan just didn’t feel right. So I went back to Don, who said, “If you want to come back, it’s totally fine.” I immediately jumped at my chance to go back.

Bill: Is this when the takeover occurred?