Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out (47 page)

59. Keunz, 153.

60. Personal interview with Sue Schiebler, Los Angeles, CA (May 31, 1994).

61. Keunz, 154.

62. Keunz, 154–155 (and endnote 36, 241).

63. Quoted in Keunz, 154.

64. Personal interview with Garth Steever.

65. Personal interview with Sue Schiebler.

66. Quoted in Keunz, 153.

67. Personal interview with Sue Schiebler.

68. Koenig, 209.

69. Personal interview with the author, name withheld by request.

70. Koenig, 134.

71. Koenig, 134.

72. Personal interview with the author, name withheld by request.

73. Personal interview with Sue Schiebler.

74. Personal interview with the author, name withheld by request.

75. George Herold, quoted in Koenig, 72.

76. Koenig provides a decent recounting of the history of this strike, and the fallout in workplace relations after the strike ended (68–77).

77. Quoted in Koenig, 76.

78. Personal interview with Sue Schiebler.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

1. Charles Isherwood, “Cel Division,”
The Advocate
(Dec. 1, 1992): 84–85, contains an interview with openly gay animator Andreas Deja; B. Ruby Rich,

“Lauren Lloyd: Disney’s Crossover Achiever,”
Out
17 (Nov. 1994): 81, details how film executive Lloyd’s lesbianism affects not only her choice of projects to put in development, but how it helped get her hired by the company; Bruce Handy, “He Called Me Ellen DeGenerate,”
Time
(Apr. 14, 1997): 50, is an interview with Ellen DeGeneres in which she explains her decision to make the character she played in the Disney-produced sitcom
Ellen
a lesbian. All of these individuals will be discussed at length within this chapter. Additionally, some employees working for the parks have spoken in confidence to me of parts of various attractions that express gay pride—but done covertly, and those interviewed did not want these details revealed for fear that the company would find out and eliminate these elements of the attractions.

2. The history of mainstreaming “camp” is too large a topic to go into detail here, but certain events point to “camp” moving out beyond the homosexual subculture: Susan Sontag’s popular essay on the topic, the growth of the 252

N OT E S TO C H A P T E R 4

midnight movie circuit (particularly
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
[1975] in the late ’70s), the movement in many areas of popular culture into postmodern pastiche and the recent “lounge” music trend.

3. Dan Rather, “The AIDS Metaphor in
Beauty and the Beast,
”
Los Angeles
Times Calendar
(Mar. 22, 1992): 42.

4. Cynthia Erb, “Another World or the World of an Other?: The Space of Romance in Recent Versions of ‘Beauty and the Beast,’”
Cinema Journal
34:4

(Summer 1995): 67.

5. Benshoff,
Monsters in the Closet,
3.

6. Rather, 42.

7. Rather’s sources are correct to an extent—the project of creating an animated version of the popular fairy tale had been in discussion even during Walt’s life. But, the project lay dormant until Ashman revived it, and quotes from collaborator Alan Menken indicate that Ashman was fully aware of his condition long before he revealed it to anyone at Disney. Exactly how much AIDS colored Ashman’s take on the tale is still up for discussion.

8. François Truffaut, “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,”
Movies
and Methods, Vol. 1,
Bill Nichols, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 224–236.

9. Andrew Sarris,
The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968

(New York: Dutton, 1968).

10. Bill Nichols,
Movies and Methods, Vol. 1
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 221.

11. Richard Dyer, “Believing in Fairies: The Author and the Homosexual,”

Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories,
Diana Fuss, ed., 185–201, makes a similar initial assessment of the status of
auteur
studies.

12. Butler, “Imitation and Gender Subordination,” 21, 28. Although Butler is writing specifically about gender and sexuality, her discussion of performance applies equally to issues of race according to social constructionist theories. The italics are mine.

13. Others have noticed that such concepts simultaneously withhold the mantle of “authorship” from women, homosexuals and non-Caucasian individuals just at the moment when there are more opportunities for these groups to have access to methods of production and mass distribution.

Amongst those who have lamented this double-edge are Patricia Waugh,
Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern
(New York: Routledge, 1989), 6; and Jeffrey Weeks,
Sexuality and Its Discontents
(London: Routledge, 1985), 200.

14. Dyer, 187.

15. Ibid., 188.

16. Isherwood, 85.

17. Deja reportedly modeled Jafar after not only Conrad Veidt in
Thief of
N OT E S TO C H A P T E R 4

253

Baghdad,
but (in a delightfully nasty comment by Deja) Nancy Reagan! (Janet Maslin, Review of
Aladdin, New York Times
[Nov. 11, 1992]: C15).

18. The most famous equivalent to Deja’s hypermasculine characters is Chernobog, the demon in the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence from
Fantasia
(1940). The only other comparable figure would be Brom Bones in the

“Sleepy Hollow” section of
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
(1949)—not a memorable character in Disney’s filmography.

19. Isherwood, 85. Ironically, Jeffrey Katzenberg initially wanted Deja to base his design of Gaston on Tom Cruise, a quite popular star in American gay male culture who
would
come to influence the design of another Disney animated character in future years.

20. Erb, 64.

21. The lyrics of the song, written by Ashman, also help create this simultaneous worship/ridicule of the male body. As the women in the inn delight that he’s “burly” and “brawny,” Gaston himself declares he has “biceps to spare” and boasts that “Ev’ry last inch of me’s covered with hair!” Ashman’s contribution to the character of Gaston, and to “gay readings” of Disney during this period, will be analyzed more thoroughly in the next section of this chapter.

22. Some feminist critics have found Disney’s version of
Beauty and the
Beast
to have progressive elements: Marina Warner, “Beauty and the Beasts,”

Sight and Sound
2:6 (Oct. 1992): 6–11; Harriett Hawkins, “Maidens and Monsters in Modern Popular Culture:
The Silence of the Lambs
and
Beauty and the Beast,
”

Textual Practice
7:2 (Summer 1993): 258–266. Others have responded negatively to its representation of women: Kathi Maio, “Mr. Right Is a Beast: Disney’s Dangerous Fantasy,”
Visions Magazine
7 (Summer 1992): 44–45; Elizabeth Dodson Gray, “Beauty and the Beast: A Parable for Our Time,”
Women Respond to the
Men’s Movement: A Feminist Collection,
Kay Leigh Hagan, ed. (San Francisco: Pandora, 1992), 159–168; Susan Jeffords, “The Curse of Masculinity: Disney’s Beauty and the Beast,”
From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender and
Culture,
Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas and Laura Sells, eds. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 161–172.

23. Clemente and Musker’s work on
The Great Mouse Detective
also presages the resurgence of the campy “gay-tinged” villain in Disney’s animated features, with the outrageous Ratigan voiced with exceptional verve by Vincent Price. Price’s camp villain persona is expertly analyzed in Benshoff,
Monsters in
the Closet,
208–219.

24. David Ansen, et al., “Just the Way Walt Made ’Em,”
Newsweek
(Nov. 18, 1991): 74–80; David J. Fox, “Looking at ‘Beauty’ as Tribute to Lyricist Who Gave

‘Beast His Soul,’”
Los Angeles Times
(Nov. 15, 1991): F1, 17; Janet Maslin, Review of
Beauty and the Beast, New York Times
(Nov. 13, 1991): C17; Review of
Beauty and
the Beast, Variety
(Nov. 11, 1991): 53.

254

N OT E S TO C H A P T E R 4

25. Erb, 59.

26. Mimi Avens, “Aladdin Sane,”
Premiere
6:4 (Dec. 1992): 67.

27. Oscar Wilde, “The Fisherman and His Soul,”
Complete Fairy Tales of
Oscar Wilde
(New York: Penguin, 1990), 129–179.

28. Erb, 70, footnote 35.

29. Ibid., 54.

30. Ibid., 60.

31. Jean Cocteau,
Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film,
trans. Ronald Duncan (New York: Dover, 1972), 67.

32. Joseph Boone’s article, “Rubbing Aladdin’s Lamp,” analyzes the homoerotic orientalism in Pasolini’s work; Michael Moon’s “Flaming Closets,”

Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture,
Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 282–306, examines the orientalism in Jack Smith’s avant-garde gay film and theatrical work.

33. Richard Burton’s sexuality has come under question in the late twentieth century, and two films explicitly use him as a quasi-homosexual figure:
Mountains of the Moon
(1990), directed by Bob Rafelson, about his relationship with John Hanning Speke, and
Zero Patience
(1994), directed by John Grierson, positing a fictional relationship between Burton and the infamous Canadian

“Patient Zero” who supposedly brought AIDS to North America (first described in Randy Shilts,
And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic
[New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987]).

34. Maslin, Review of
Beauty and the Beast,
C17.

35. For example, “Those Faces! Those Voices . . . ,”
People
32:24 (Dec. 11, 1989): 125; Elizabeth Brevitz, “A Little Attitude,”
Premiere
3:4 (Dec. 1989): 135; and Michael Wilmington, “‘Little Mermaid’ Makes Big Splash,”
Los Angeles
Times
(Nov. 15, 1989): F10.

36. Janet Maslin, “Cinderella of the Sea,”
New York Times
(Nov. 15, 1989): C17; Review of
The Little Mermaid, Variety
(Nov. 8, 1989): 32.

37. The only precedent to this number is “Cruella de Vil” in
101 Dalmatians,
which drips with camp potential, but is sung not by Cruella herself but by the lead human male, Roger, who is making fun of her without Cruella’s knowledge.

38. Erb, 62. Interestingly, although many “queer” readers view Ursula as a drag queen, this number also supports a lesbian viewpoint. Pat Carroll’s place in lesbian culture (having played Gertrude Stein in a one-woman stage show) takes on importance in this number as she attempts to seduce a young woman to the “dark side.” (My thanks to Sue Schiebler for pointing this out!) 39. Janet Maslin, Review of
Aladdin,
C15.

40. Although there are indications that Ashman’s original conception of the Genie was eventually modified, his seeming conception of the Genie as N OT E S TO C H A P T E R 4

255

“queer” definitely remained in the final version. These modifications will be discussed in chapter 5.

41. The spectacle of the male body has become a recently noticed phenomenon—but not just recently produced. Sticking to cinema history (the history of the male nude in art would take us back much farther), Miriam Hansen’s

“Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship,”

Star Texts: Image and Performance in Film and Television,
Jeremy G. Butler, ed. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 266–297, has analyzed the silent cinema star Rudolph Valentino as an object “to-be-looked-at,” as has Steven Cohen’s analysis of the image of William Holden in “Masquerading as the American Male in the Fifties:
Picnic,
William Holden and the Spectacle of Masculinity in Hollywood Film,”
Camera Obscura
25–26 (1991): 43–72. Hansen describes that the presence of a male body as spectacle announces a variety of subject positions, not exclusively engendered heterosexual and patriarchal. Although Laura Mulvey describes female spectatorship as “transvestitism”—taking on masculine subjectivity—the notion of “cross-dressing” in itself complicates the notion of essentializing subject positions.

42. Finch, 198.

43. For example, Donald Crafton, “Walt Disney’s
Peter Pan:
Women Trouble on the Island,” speaks of the “tradition of having him played by a girl or young woman” in stage productions (125).

44. Avens, 70.

45.
The Entertainment Weekly Guide to the Greatest Movies Ever Made
(New York: Warner Books, 1994), 203.

46. Erb, 61.

47. Erb, 63. Erb focuses on the film specifically as an expression of a gay male viewpoint. While I obviously share her assessment, at times—as I am pointing out in this example—Ashman’s gay-male outlook can find common ground with other non-straight identities.

48. Erb, 63.

49. Disney’s one stipulation in its agreement with Miramax was that Miramax could not distribute any film that had received an NC-17 rating. Consequently, when Harvey Weinstein, the president of Miramax, bought the distribution rights for the NC-17-rated
Kids
(1995), he formed a new label to release the film outside of Disney.

50. Rich, “Lauren Lloyd,” 81.

51. Review of
Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Variety
(Jan. 15, 1986): 23.

52. Russo, 256. Although Russo does mention that director Paul Mazursky is “usually very sensitive,” he discusses only this line of dialogue and nothing about the character of Max.

53. Byrne R. S. Fone,
Masculine Landscapes: Walt Whitman and the Homoerotic
Text
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), 46. The quote within 256

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the quote is taken from Caroll Smith-Rosenberg,
Disorderly Conduct: Visions of
Gender in Victorian America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 91.

54. Fone, 45.

55. Review of
Dead Poets Society, Variety
(May 31, 1989): 26.