Animation, Film Biographies & Interviews, Artists, Architects & Photographers - Biography
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Overview
Everyone remembers him as the creator of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Bambi, Dumbo, Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Fantasia. His films and characters inspired the great Disney theme parks. A creative genius, Walt Disney brought love and laughter to children everywhere. Now for the first time, Marc Eliot presents the real Walt Disney. The author reveals Walt Disney's twenty-five-year association with J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, serving as a Hollywood-based official informant before being promoted to the rank of Special Agent in Charge, rooting out Communists, subversives, and Jews. A lifelong anti-Semite, he absorbed his prejudice from his father, a strict fundamentalist who believed in corporal punishment and forced child labor. Walt Disney's phobic behavior is examined in detail, as is his obsessive hand-washing, heavy drinking, and sexual inadequacies. Unwilling to accept his father's violence as a form of love, and unwilling to "prove" his own identity, he feared he had actually been adopted in infancy and was illegitimate. He spent a lifetime searching for his real mother. Marc Eliot shows how these psycho-sexual conflicts drove Walt to the depths of lifelong despair and how they found expression in his "classic" animated characters and films, now so deeply embedded in American culture. In fact, they were created by a man who used the wealth and prestige they gave him to mold a nightmare empire of vengeance and power. Told against a panoramic view of Hollywood's golden age of glamour and backdoor politics, Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince is a fascinating work that concludes with a look into the Disney empire as it exists today.Editorials
Library Journal
This book is called the first truly unauthorized biography, and in the case of Disney, unauthorized is important because all previous ``authorized'' biographies had to pass the scrutiny of Disney Studios. Without manuscript approval, the Disney archives were off-limits to Eliot Down Thunder Road: The Making of Bruce Springsteen , LJ 8/92, although their contents could be gleaned from other works on his subject. This volume includes interviews--both anonymous and attributed--with former Disney animators. The darker side of Disney includes his cooperation with the House Un-American Activities Committee and the FBI, as well as ``Uncle Walt's'' strong antiunion campaigns. His troubled personal life is explored both as biography and as the source of his creative expressions. While not without flaws, this book is essential for any library that wants to provide an alternative to the sanitized versions of Dinsey's life.-- Sherle Abramson, Williamsburg Regional Lib., Va.Book Details
Published
December 28, 1994
Publisher
HarperCollins Publishers
Pages
400
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780061007897