After Walt Disney died in 1966, his grieving staff sealed his office suite in Burbank, and even as work proceeded on “The Jungle Book” there was anxiety that the company’s past might be brighter than its future.
Four years later, those worries deepened as key executives approached retirement, including Walt’s older brother, Roy O. Disney. That’s why, in 1970, the company handed the key to Walt’s still-sealed office to a former UCLA research librarian named Dave Smith, who was sent into the chamber to learn its history.
“I didn’t expect this to become my life’s work, but it did,” Smith, 69, said on a recent afternoon as he gave a tour of the Disney Archives, a massive collection spread across several in-house libraries and high-security warehouse space filled with Disney movie props, costumes, toys, art, animation, vintage theme-park gear and company publications.
It all began with the items that Smith found in Walt’s desk all those years ago.
“It was an eerie thing to sit … in his chair and count the paper clips in the drawer,” Smith recalled with a nervous chuckle. On the bookshelves, he discovered books and letters given to Walt by Upton Sinclair, Winston Churchill and C. S. Lewis, who inscribed one of his books of poetry with the words: “From one visionary to another.”
Friday, 40 years and a day after he was hired, Smith will announce his imminent retirement from a corporation that, as he put it, “reuses and returns to its past more often than any company in the world.”
On a recent afternoon at one of the archive’s secret Glendale warehouses, Disney archive manager Becky Cline held up one recent find — a cache of storyboards and concept art for the 1964 classic ” Mary Poppins.”
“This hasn’t been seen or touched since the movie came out, and it’s never been reproduced in any way,” said Cline, who will take over Smith’s title as official archivist after his departure in October. “This is simply amazing stuff. And we’re going to get to show it to the world.”
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Fri, Jun 25, 2010
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