from 2008
LEONARD MALTIN
talks about his start in journalism and Disney's role in it

by Scott Wolf

I was familiar with Leonard Maltin's work before I ever met him. I've seen him on Entertainment Tonight and have owned some of his books and trusted his opinion on movies. He's also popped up in plenty of documentaries I've seen, and not all Disney-related. When I first met him, he was easy enough to talk with. After all, he's so passionate about many of the things I'm interested in as well, from Disney to the Our Gang comedies to our mutual friend, the late jazz pianist Page Cavanaugh. It was when I produced a tribute to Page that I learned what a true professional Leonard is behind the scenes! With Leonard as the host, it was certain to be a great event, and as always he brought his own knowledge, charm and infectious enthusiasm to the stage to captivate the audience. As someone who's interviewed some of the greatest names in entertainment history, Leonard was kind enough to turn the tables and let me interview him, and I'm so pleased to be able to share the conversation with you!

Scott Wolf: Where did you grow up?

Leonard Maltin: I was born in Manhattan. When I was four and my little brother was born, we moved to the suburbs, to Teaneck, New Jersey, which was a very nice suburban town, just five miles from the George Washington Bridge. For many people it was a commuter community, but it was very much an American post-war, baby boom suburban town... a really nice place to grow up. I walked to school, I walked to the local library, I could ride my bike to junior high school.

We had a movie theatre on our main street. It was a healthy walk, or I could take the local bus. The next town over, Hackensack, had two even bigger theatres, so I was set.

SW: What did your parents do for a living?

LM: My father was an immigration judge with the Department of Justice. He retired after thirty years and then went into private practice, but while I was growing up he was an immigration judge. My mom had been a professional singer. She started singing in nightclubs and playing the accordion when she was a teenager, made some radio appearances, was in the chorus of Carousel on Broadway after it had been running for almost a year. John Raitt was still in it, so she got to watch him every night and told me great stories about that. She retired from show business to raise a family, but kept doing occasional club dates, so there was music around.

SW: Were you always a Disney fan?

LM: Yes. I can trace it back to when I was five or six. I had a very nice fairy tale book, a collection of Grimm's Fairy Tales illustrated by Gustaf Tenggren. At the end of one of the stories where it says "The End" there's a lot of blank space and I drew in crayon a border around those words and wrote "A Walt Disney Production." So I guess you can say I was indoctrinated early.

The first movie experience that I have any memory of is my mother taking me to see "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" in the mid 1950s at the Guild Theatre, which was a little movie house right behind Radio City Music Hall. In those days there were continuous showings of films; they didn't clear the auditorium and wait for the next show, so you could actually stay and watch a show over and over again. The peril of it was that when everyone was rushing out at the end of the film, we went in. I remember my mom leading me by the hand, and the first thing I saw was the last shot of Snow White as the prince takes her off into the golden sun. So the first thing I saw was the very end of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. But, I do remember that image, burned in my consciousness.

I was the right age to be growing up watching The Mickey Mouse Club every day and Disneyland, Walt Disney's weekly show. That's really what hooked me more than anything else, especially when he would do shows that gave some sense of the studio history or the history of animation, and I loved when he would take us behind the scenes and show us how animated films were made. I thought that was just great.

I used to get Walt Disney's Magazine, and I still have my Mickey Mouse Club annual which was collected from those magazines in the late '50s. They would have features like "How to Draw Mickey" or "How to Draw Pluto" and I would try to do that. I never quite could, but that fascinated me.

SW: Didn't you do your own magazine?

LM: Yes, when I was in the fifth grade, a friend and I wanted to create our own sort of newspaper, so we did. We made an original and two carbon copies. We had three copies to circulate among our schoolmates.

Then we got ahold of something somebody told us about, a hectograph. A hectograph was a nine by twelve, very shallow tin of hardened gelatin. You would take a ditto stencil--remember ditto machines?

SW: Sure.

LM: If you wrote or drew or typed on a ditto stencil and then lightly sponged down the gelatin and then laid the ditto stencil face down on it and rubbed very hard, when you peeled it up, the impression was left in the gelatin. Then if you got ditto paper, which was a slightly coated paper, and you put down one sheet at a time, when you pulled it up… voila! A copy!

“Hecto” I think means 50, but we called it the 35ograph because by copy number thirty one or thirty two it started getting blurry, but we could get about thirty copies of every issue.

We lived in Bergen County, New Jersey and we called it the "Bergen Bulletin." It wasn't a newspaper at all. It was cartoons I would draw and articles my friend would write about this and that, and it was great fun. We just loved doing it. I wanted to be a cartoonist when I was a kid and that was my first pursuit. I also liked to write, so this allowed me to do both of those things.

About a year later we inherited a mimeograph machine which was a foul machine to work with; you got ink under your fingernails, but we had to learn to work with that stencil and we kept publishing. We thought we'd stop when we got to junior high school because there would be a school paper that we could work on, but when we got there as freshmen they had no use for us, so we kept publishing.

We then changed the format into more of a magazine called "Profile" because I was becoming more and more interested in movie history. I had gotten the bug. I was fascinated with Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy and silent films in general. My parents had an 8mm movie projector for showing our home movies and I found that you could buy films on 8mm, so that's what I would save my money for. That's what I'd ask for on my birthdays, and I started to accumulate a collection of 8mm films. That set me in that direction of writing about the subject that now consumed me.

Around that time, when I was thirteen, I was an avid reader of Forrest J. Ackerman's "Famous Monsters of Filmland." like a lot of people my age. There's a whole generation--Stephen King and Spielberg and Lucas and a whole bunch of people who grew up on that magazine because it was available where you bought comic books and it was all about the classic horror films. It was a conduit to movie history. In one issue they did a survey of fanzines and I found out that there were all these amateur magazines being produced by enthusiasts on various subjects. Two of them looked particularly interesting and I wrote to both of their editors. One was was called "The 8mm Collector," published by a furniture dealer in Indiana, PA. The other was called "Film Fan Monthly" and it was published in Vancouver, Canada. I wrote and offered my services as a writer but I didn't tell them how old I was. I submitted articles and they both accepted my articles. There was no money involved; this was a labor of love for everybody. Then I told them how old I was...and it didn't matter to them. The fellow who was publishing "Film Fan Monthly" was nineteen. So I became a regular contributor to both of those magazines while I was continuing to publish "Profile."

After writing for "Film Fan Monthly" for two years, Daryl Davy, its editor, wrote to me and said, "I'm out in the world now making a living, and I'm so busy I just can't keep up with the pace of doing this magazine, but I would hate to see it fold. I've put too much into it over five years’ time. Would you like to take it over?" Well, he was professionally printed, which meant he had photographs and artwork, and he had four hundred subscribers. I had inched my way up to a hundred subscribers which was pretty good, but he had four hundred subscribers. So I said, "Yes! Absolutely." It didn't even cost me anything because he said, "I think $175 would be a fair price. There's $400 in the treasury, so I'm going to send you a check for $225." So I got a treasury and a mailing list and inherited this magazine. I put out my first issue in May of 1966 when I was in the tenth grade. I was fifteen, and I continued to edit and publish that for nine years, every month. I also stuffed envelopes and licked stamps and did all that. But, what a wonderful experience that was.

That was a spoiler, really, because once you've been your own boss in doing something creative like that, it's very hard to submit to other people's ideas, which is why I went back into publishing myself. I went back into the fanzine world again.

About six years ago I got frustrated that even with all the wonderful outlets that I have, and I've been very lucky, there's no place to talk about movie history which is still my first love. I've done freelance writing from time to time for different magazines, and I had a great article idea. I sold it to a major outlet, but then the magazine fiddled around with it for months; they paid me but killed the story. I tried sending it to another magazine and they wanted to completely change it. I said, "I'm going to go back into the self-publishing business." So I started a quarterly newsletter, and nothing has given me so much satisfaction in years, because once again I'm the boss. ("Movie Crazy" is available at leonardmaltin.com.)

That's been very rewarding. Not financially rewarding—in fact, it's financially draining—but it gives me tremendous satisfaction. I love doing it and my readers are like-minded people so I’ve tapped into a wonderful community or network of diehard movie buffs.

Dark Horse Comics has a publishing division and Mike Richardson, who runs it, agreed to do an anthology, so just a few months ago we published a "Movie Crazy" book that's made up of the first seventeen issues of my newsletter. That's very satisfying because a lot of people are finding that book who never even knew I was doing a newsletter. I don't have the time or the energy or the money to go out and advertise it and promote it, but this book has gone out into the world and introduced it to a lot of people. It's been wonderful.

SW: What ever happened with "Film Fan Monthly"?

LM: The day Walt Disney died I was home sick from school and I heard the news, I guess on the radio. It was a major news story, of course, and I started wondering what I could do in "Film Fan Monthly" to commemorate and celebrate Walt Disney.

The idea came to me to do an annotated filmography, a list of every Walt Disney movie with a capsule description of the film. So I picked up the New York phone book and I called Walt Disney Productions, as it was then called, on Madison Avenue in New York. I don't even know what I asked for, if I knew to ask for the publicity department or if that's where they sent me, but I got a very nice woman on the phone. I told her what I wanted to do and she said, "Whatever you need, let me know any way I can help you." That was Arlene Ludwig.

I said, "I've got most of my research," which I was doing at my local public library, "but I could use some photographs." She said, "Tell me what you need." I told her, she sent them, and I used them in the magazine. When it came out I sent her a copy and a thank you note. She phoned me and said, "This is fantastic. We don't have anything like this. Can I buy more copies from you? We can use this around here." I was just stunned. "What do you mean, you don't have a list?" Apparently they didn't. So I happily sent them extra copies and then a year or two later when I made my first trip to Los Angeles, Arlene arranged for me to go to the studio for a day and meet her boss, Tom Jones, whom she talks about very warmly in your interview. (Arlene Ludwig interview)

He was a delightful guy, a very warm and very friendly guy and he set me up with a VIP tour of the studio. I met Ward Kimball that day. Tom said, "Is there any Disney film you've always wanted to see?" and I said, "Yes, The Reluctant Dragon." Remember, this is long before home video. He said, "Uh huh," and at the end of the day he set up a special private screening for me in one of their screening rooms. A 35mm print of The Reluctant Dragon. I think that might have been on my second trip.

When I was talking to Tom in his office he said, "This issue is just great. You should expand this into a book." I said,"(reluctantly) Well..." He said, "No, I'm serious. You should really turn this into a book." He was the one who planted that idea.

Then in 1969 I had my first book published and another one in 1970; that was for a paperback company, Signet Books. Then I was introduced to an editor at Crown Books, a hardcover publisher, and he asked if I had any ideas. I gave him several and one was to be a book called "The Disney Films" and he liked the idea. At that point Arlene said, "What do you need now?" I said, "I need to see the films. Every one of them.”

It turned out in those days they had a very successful non-theatrical film business in 16mm. They rented films to schools and Cub Scout groups and churches and civic organizations. They didn't rent the golden titles. You couldn't rent Snow White or Fantasia or Bambi but most of the live action films and a handful of the animated films were available, and a lot of the shorts and featurettes. It turned out they had regional depositories for the 16mm business because it didn't make sense in those days to ship them all out of California for a booking in Maine, so they had regional offices, and one of the offices was in New Jersey, not far from my house in Paramus, New Jersey. I had a 16mm projector by then in my parents’ basement where there was a good throw, so you could screen films.

I was given permission to go once a week and pick up a film and screen it, and then when I brought it back pick up another one. So for about the next year and a half, that's what I did. I watched every Walt Disney feature film, in order. I wanted to see them in chronological order to be able to track the development and the growth of the studio. The night I showed Dumbo at home I had a packed house. The night I showed White Wilderness it was just me. By the time I got to a lot of the '50s stuff and the nature films I was all alone, but I went through each one of them. I would make notes and I would write up my notes right away and then do independent research, but I wanted to collect my thoughts based on impressions of seeing these movies.

Again, I have to emphasize that this was before cable TV, before the Disney Channel, and long before any kind of home video, because now you can download things on YouTube and there's DVDs galore. None of that existed, and I was given a golden pass by Arlene. I wasn't borrowing the circulating prints; they had a VIP library of Technicolor prints. In fact, one of the shipping cases I picked up had just been to the Gracie Mansion, the home of the mayor of New York City. So when a VIP wanted to screen a Disney film they would ship one of these prints; they had house prints of titles that in many cases they didn't rent out to the public, so it was just a wonderful, wonderful opportunity. I borrowed a Cinemascope lens from a friend and put up a big sheet so we could see Westward Ho, The Wagons and The Great Locomotive Chase. It was quite a time, an incredible adventure.

Then I had another adventure. In the interim, the Disney Company had arranged with Harry Abrams, the famous art book publisher, to do a book called "The Art of Walt Disney." They had never done a book like that before. Bob Thomas had written "The Art of Animation" which was a great book, the first Disney book I ever read and a very influential and important book to me and to a lot of other people. But because they had made this deal with Abrams they were now concerned with my book being competitive.

There began a lengthy series of phone conversations with an executive at the studio here in Burbank. My attitude was I was asking for their cooperation and their blessing. His attitude was that I needed their permission to write this book. I did a lot of homework about this; I didn't want to offend him and I didn't want to be rude but I kept trying to make it clear that there still is a first amendment and I didn't need their permission to write about these films. The grayer area was the use of photographs, but I emphasized to him that I was only going to be using black and white pictures. I said, "I'm sure you're doing an elaborate color coffee table book, this is not meant to be that. This is a book for people who are film buffs." I said, "I don't think these two books will intrude on one another at all." Well, it took a lot of talking. He never cut me off. He never slammed the phone down or ended the dialogue and finally the compromise we reached was that they would give their permission. They had the right to check my biographical chapter on Disney, and that checking was done by Dave Smith who had now been hired and was operating the Archives, but that I had to do the book on my own. I would not have access to any Disney staff, any Disney Archives, any Disney records, any Disney employees. So I had to research the book independently and I did, and fortunately Disney is so well-documented that I was able to do that.

Then I made another discovery which was that most of the live action films had been directed by freelancers. Until people like Robert Stevenson and James Neilson came along, most of them were directed by freelancers, many of whom were still alive and only too happy to talk to me. So I lucked out there and got wonderful interviews and correspondence with people like Ken Annakin, Byron Haskin who directed Treasure Island, Harold Schuster who directed So Dear to My Heart, Alfred Werker who directed the live action in The Reluctant Dragon, H.C. Potter who directed the live action in Victory Through Air Power, Francis D. Lyon who directed The Great Locomotive Chase, etc. So it was quite a saga.

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