[About Walt giving instructions]
Wilfred Jackson: Walt complained that he was often taken too literally. “Don’t do everything I say,” he’d tell me.
But in a conference or a sweatbox session he’d make a passing remark about something, and I’d forget about it. Later, when we’d look at the material in a sweatbox, he’d complain it wasn’t in. “Why wasn’t that in?” he would say. “We discussed it, didn’t we?”
The big part of my career was to decide when Walt meant it and when he didn’t mean it.
He was always thinking ahead. It was sometimes hard to get him slowed down and pin him down to the present. […]