In 1939, I was working at the Broadway department store on Hollywood Boulevard. I was designing window treatmems and the interiors for occasions like Mother's Day and the Fourth of July. Disney had a recruiting office near where I worked, so during my lunch hour I went dovm with my portfolio to be interviewed. The rumor was they were making a film dealing with classical music, and I liked that sort of thing. I took a cut in pay and started painting backgrounds for Fantasia.
At meetings, if you were exposing a storyboard to Walt Disney you'd have to keepyour eye on him. His imagination was so powerful that he would go to that location in the story we would be discussing - to the extent where he lost contact with the room and the people around him. We had to wait for him to come out of this kind of trance. It was never more than five minutes, and when he'd come around he'd comeback with some new dialogue or some other great improvement in your story.[…]
