In October 1976, I flew to California and joined Milt Gray for a couple of intensive weeks of interviewing Hollywood animation people. We started north of San Francisco, with Ben Sharpsteen, and worked our way down the coast, seeing Dave Hilberman, Bob Carlson, Lee and Mary Blair, and Howard Swift before arriving in Los Angeles, where we recorded two and three interviews every day.
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It was Frank and Ollie whom Milt and I interviewed first. We joined them for lunch on the patio at the old Disney commissary in Burbank on October 27, 1976. Unlike Milt Kahl, who had been forced out of the studio earlier that year and was very outspoken, Frank and Ollie were still active Disney employees. The Rescuers had not yet been released—I would see Frank and Ollie again in June 1977, when they attended the film’s premiere at the Kennedy Center in Washington—and The Fox and the Hound, their swan song, was little more than a gleam in Woolie’s eye.
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The transcript as presented here incorporates the relatively few changes that Frank and Ollie made, almost all of them for the sake of clarity or accuracy. A few excisions were obviously intended to avoid giving offense to present or former colleagues, Ward Kimball especially. Since everyone involved is now deceased, I’ve noted what Frank and Ollie said on the tape, as well as in the revised transcript.
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