F. SCOTT CROWHURST, SUPERINTENDENT OF CONSTRUCTION JAMES LILL, STRUCTURAL ENGINEER: KEM WEBER, INTERIOR DESIGNER
Home of Mickey Mouse, Fantasound, and armed forces training films, the world's largest animated motion picture studio is well equipped for its job of war production.
When Walt Disney moved into his self-styled "entertainment factory," he hired "a gentleman called Myron to massage the kinks out of my neck." This gesture was symbolic of the company"s expansive mood at the time of the change-over from the old Hyperion plant with its lack of space and stuffy reviewing room "sweatboxes," to feature-length Fantasia and the new studios in Burbank on the edge of Griffith Park. It was a move from the slums to Park Avenue at a single jump. In Burbank"s Animation Building there are sweatboxes too, but the name is used for sentimental reasons only. A draftless, humidified air-conditioning system keeps men and celluloid at perfect temperatures twenty-four hours a day.
This improvement in working conditions is typical of the planning that went into the new studios, where labor accounts for 90 per cent of the cost of any picture. The 51-acre Burbank lot was developed on the assembly line principle. Production flow determined the layout, the circulation, even the arrangement of the individual offices. One building—the largest—was set apart for the creative function from beginning to end. Across the street and connected by an underground passage is the inking and painting building. From this branches the process department, and so on through the camera and cutting divisions to the completion of the master reel. Each function is housed in a separate building and all had to be designed for resistance to heat and cold, dust and darkness, noise, decay and earthquakes.
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