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Home on the Range

0:00:00 John Sanford: When I still had my office there in that hat building, the Director's offices were made in such a way that if you were agile enough, you could actually jump up on top of those offices. And I jumped up on top of my office and I took a sharpie and I wrote in 2004, and I gave the date that we approved our last scene. We completed the very last hand drawn animated movie that Disney will ever make and I signed it. And that doesn't mean anything 'cause they gutted that whole floor and threw everything away. [laughter]

0:00:31 Speaker 2: Before its release, 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' have been nicknamed Disney's folly, expected in many circles to fail and take casualties. Instead the film launched the company into the stratosphere in the world's zeitgeist. As of 2018, there have been 56 animated Disney feature films and there is no end in sight. It is the life blood of the Walt Disney company. But in 2004, Disney animation was facing an identity crisis, they were confronted with stiff competition and features for the first time in their history, from both inside and outside the company. The most obvious threat was former executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was dead set on revenge against his former employer after an ugly public and lucrative falling out with Disney CEO Michael Eisner.

0:01:25 S2: Katzenberg founded DreamWorks in 1994. Shortly thereafter, he made a biblical epic and a few films that were quickly forgotten. Then the studio stumbled upon Shrek in 2001. The film's earnings were massive, and even better for Katzenberg, the movies foundation was a bitter criticism of the sacred Disney classics, and even better yet, Michael Eisner was drawn as the evil villain. The second threat however was more dangerous and from inside the company. Disney had been distributing Pixar films since 'Toy Story' revolutionized the industry with computer animation. Pixar movies were doing monumentally better in the press and at the box office than Disney's own 2D films. 2D animation movies simply weren't the box office juggernauts they once were. In fact, the opposite was true. From 2000 to 2003, four Disney animated features earned less than $100 million in the States.

0:02:22 S2: Most famously there was 'Treasure Planet' nicknamed 'Treasure Plummet', which perfectly fit its $38 million gross. Worse yet, Pixar was thinking about leaving Disney and setting out on its own. Disney was only marketing and distributing the films, and Pixar was nearing the end of its 10 year, five film deal with Disney. Because of this relationship, Pixar was now an established household name. Disney's only leverage was that they owned the rights to the sequels and were threatening to make them without Pixar. So they pitted Pixar against itself instead of crushing Pixar movies with, say, Disney movies, as they would have in the past. It was in this climate that Disney's 'Home On The Range' hit theaters. Only a month before the film's release Disney closed its animation studio in Florida, firing 258 animators.

0:03:11 S2: Disney assured the press that it would continue to make traditional 2D animation, but the press saw blood in the water, and it would dominate the conversation about 'Home On The Range'. 'Home On The Range' wouldn't be completely savaged by critics, but there were plenty of cow based puns to express their distaste. Although most critics were simply nonplussed and bemoaned the rumored end of traditional animation and Disney. Coincidentally, the film happened to be about three cows trying to save their beloved farm, their home from destruction. The film didn't directly kill hand drawn animation at the company, but distinctly marked the end of an era. The Walt Disney Company was again in uncharted territory with its legacy on the line.

0:03:54 S2: But that's only part of the film's story, it's also the story of two directors, John Sanford, Will Finn, who tried to live up to the Disney legacy in the face of tremendous obstacles that impossible legacy creates. Disney animation directors are rarely lauded and hardly praised. If they succeed, they made a Disney film, not a John Muster film or a Clyde Geronimi film, or a Wolfgang Reitherman film, a Disney film, pure and simple. If the director fails, then and only then is it their film. Because to direct a Disney movie is at once a lifetime opportunity and a possible death sentence. And now the story of two directors, three cows, and a $110 million.

[music]

0:05:07 JS: Whatever you wanna know, it's up for grabs, I'll name names, I'll say uncomfortable things. So shoot. [laughter] One of my problems is I have a big mouth and I like to talk. I'll be honest, because I've discovered that honesty makes people laugh. I'm kind of one of those guys that will do anything for a laugh sometimes. So one of the reasons I'm dishonest about that movie and my career is that there are stories in it that make people laugh, and maybe people can take away a nugget of wisdom about how things went.

0:05:40 S2: That devil may care attitude belongs to John Sanford. Sanford shoots from the hip, he's a lifelong animator, a fierce Trump critic on Facebook, and is a chief purveyor of gallows humor.

0:05:52 JS: I don't think it's ever gonna find any kind of cult following unless somebody has a fetish for colorful westerns. It's meh. I've got 20 DVDs in my drawer, I hand them out as joke kits now. Any time there's a white elephant gift, somebody's getting a 'Home On The Range'.

0:06:08 S2: The man is his own biggest internet troll. Nobody wrote a review of 'Home On The Range' as savage as that. The way he looks at his biggest professional failure is a masterclass in humility and self-reflection. Then again, maybe he's separated himself from the film, and is still in denial that he directed it.

0:06:27 JS: Whenever I run into somebody and they say, "What have you done?" And I go through my resume, and then somebody will go, "Well, you know, he co-directed a Disney feature," and I went, "Yeah, I directed 'Home On The Range.'" And it went, "Really? I never saw it." And I said, "Yeah, because you weren't five." You know, whatever. [laughter]

0:06:45 S2: It's most definitely the former. His co-director on the film is Will Finn. Will has the same sense of humor, and pension for self-reflection. He's a little bit closer to the vest than John, and there's points when he has a little bit more difficulty talking about the film.

0:07:01 Will Finn: Like I said, I try to avoid making commentary about it a lot, because like I say, it's very hard to speak for yourself on something that's a collaboration, and something that has as much negative vibe out there as that film, which obviously I'm well aware of, and not happy about, but what can you do?

0:07:31 S2: To recall the film is an emotional experience for him, and yet he does it with dignity and grace.

0:07:37 WF: The thing about directing gigs is it's really hard to talk about them, because you don't direct alone. And the other problem is the only features I've directed have all been disastrous bombs. So, I can either be accused of falling on my sword and taking all the blame or I'll get accused to passing on blame to other people, which I don't want to do in either case. So, I'm grateful for having the experiences of directing on all three of the movies I've directed on, and I think they've helped me in the work that I've done since. But it's obviously a huge disappointment across the board when a film performs poorly. And they all performed quite poorly, and fortunately, most people sooner or later just wanna forget that they even happened. So I think what I learned from it is that I probably won't get to direct again. [chuckle]

0:08:41 S2: The years before 'Home On The Range' are crucial to their stories, because the Disney legacy they were chasing is one John and Will helped rehabilitate during the Disney renaissance.

0:08:51 WF: Well, I wanted to do animation from my earliest memory, because everybody in my family drew and I love to draw cartoons, and all the old classic cartoons were heavily on rotation. So I went to not the most prestigious art school in the world, it's Art Institute of Pittsburg. So, I went there in '76 to '78, but the single most remarkable thing to happen was, Eric Larsen, who was one of Disney's nine old men, visited the school to canvas for anybody who was interested in animation. And no one wanted to see, [chuckle] because if anything, the school back in the late '70s discouraged people from getting into animation, because people just all figured it was dying. So I got to monopolize his time for half a day and strike up a rapport with him, and he was very frank. I always say that the great thing about Eric was he offered me just as much encouragement as I deserved, because he told me my portfolio was weak and I wouldn't be able to get hired with what I had in my kit at the time. But he said, "When you do graduate, you gotta get out to California whatever way possible, and you can write to me, you can call me," he says, "'Cause despite the shortcomings in your portfolio, I can tell this is... Your passion for this is very genuine and that's as important in some cases."

0:10:07 WF: I managed to ride cheer out to California in October of '78, and couch surfed around LA. And the first time I got to visit the Disney Studio in person was on my 20th birthday in 1978, and I got to show Eric what I was doing, and I think I submitted three formal portfolios and five informal. So a total of five tries, and then finally I got a foot in the door at the studio and the training program. This is in '79 now. And that was sort of the start, it was a rocky start, 'cause I was kind of a borderline case. The training program was very strenuous and a couple of people I came through with got thrown off pretty quickly, but I managed to hang on by the skin of my teeth. But the competition was fierce. I'd been there a month when Tim Burton started. So Tim Burton came out of CalArts with an entourage already dusting his shoulders with a whisk broom, so he was already a superstar and I was a low man on the totem pole.

0:11:07 WF: What you did was, you were in there for eight weeks, and you worked with Eric. The trainees were in a room right off of his office. You're supposed to make a short piece of film that demonstrated something, and you could do whatever you wanted to. The first thing I did was around almost a minute, which was excessively long, but it was a little man who looked like Robert Benchley and he was having trouble with a vending machine. It's a long and unremarkable thing, but it was where I finally got to animate and get lessons from Eric. And I think the thing that I heard later, the thing that saved me was, there was a point where he took his coat off and rolled up his sleeves to punch the machine and that felt natural, and that little whatever that was, six seconds was what got me another eight weeks. Again, I just made it through on the skin of my teeth.

0:11:56 WF: The Bluth thing was going on at that time, the Bluth guys all quit. There was that war. Don had been a sequence director on 'Rescuers' and then he directed the animation for 'Pete's Dragon' and a short called 'The Small One', and he developed an incredibly loyal following, really talented up-and-coming artists, including John Pomeroy, and Linda Miller, and Skip Jones, and people like that. And the opposite side of the hall were the Brad Birds, the John Lasseters, the John Muskers, the CalArts crew. And they sort of... I think over the course of... I wasn't there yet, so I can only fill in from what I was able to figure out, but I guess there was a lot of division between the CalArts crew, who dubbed their group "The Rat's Nest" 'cause they didn't cooperate with him as readily as his own unit did, so there was a big division there. Don, overlapping with that time, started developing his own projects at his home and inviting people to come work with him on them after hours and on weekends, which of course all of his devoted followers did, but none of the CalArts guys wanted to do that.

0:13:05 WF: I don't wanna define this era for anybody, so I'll just leave it at this. I think Don had an incredibly reverent and traditional approach to animation that really revered looking backward, and a lot of the guys that were the hires and what he called "The rat's nest", were people that wanted to push into newer things. And Don's thing was always embracing classical Disney as Disney. There really was no other point of reference for him, and the other group wanted to bring in other influences and other ideas. Even referencing something as seemingly innocuous as Chuck Jones or Looney Tunes to Don was heresy, because to Don, Disney was everything, Walt was everything. I think I sort of wound up on the wrong side of that. I'd gotten kind of stridently pro-Bluth in the middle of this war, and it was not the way to be if you wanted to stay at Disney, and I think that was probably finally what sank me.

0:14:02 WF: They figured, "If you're so pro-Bluth, why don't you go work with him?" And when they all quit, I was still too green and untried to be part of the exodus of that. I kept feeling like the turtle in 'Snow White', I kept feeling like I'd made it to the top of the stairs just as all the animals were coming running down. And I always felt like I was a step behind everybody. I was really struggling, even though I'd gotten through the program and everything, I was still pretty green compared to most of the other talent in the studio. When I got let go I wasn't surprised, but it was devastating. [chuckle] The head of animation was a guy named Ed Hansen, who could be kind of a scary guy. He was affable enough, but he was a hard nose, he was... People towed the line when Ed walked down the hall. And when he let me go, I asked him if it was possible ever to get hired back, and he said, "Well, from time to the time that happens, but I don't think that's gonna be the case." [chuckle] I thought, "Wow".

0:14:55 WF: So I got let go in November of '79 and managed to talk my way onto the Bluth crew, and I was at that studio for the next five years. I got to do some animation, nothing really spectacular, and then I also got into the story department, writing some of the sequences for 'Secret of NIMH', and then some other things. Then I left and I freelanced around for a couple of years, and when I got hired back Ed Hansen was still the supervisor at Disney, and he was the one who called me and offered me the job back 'cause I'd submitted a portfolio that passed. Just proves time heals all wounds, I guess. I considered myself just lucky to be there. I was doing really like nothing sensational on 'Oliver'. I managed to pull off... Actually, the best scene I did was of the poodle, but it got cut out of the movie. Katzenberg took the original directors off 'Beauty and the Beast' and put Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale on, and they liked me, and they saw me as Cogsworth, and doing that character, which completely baffled me when they asked me to do it.

0:15:57 WF: I just didn't think 'Beauty and the Beast' was a good idea. [chuckle] When I first heard we were doing it, I think part of it is my prejudice for the old Jean Cocteau black and white movie which is so good, and I'd seen it a few years before, and I thought, "Why are we remaking a movie that's perfect?" But we were, and I had problems with the character design, the shape of the body on Cogsworth was really awkward and difficult to draw on, his arms were too long, and they wouldn't let me alter it. And then finally there was a big blow up, and I finally said, "Just give it to somebody else." And they said, "Well take one more stab at what you think would be a good design and we'll see whether we can settle this." Ultimately I solved the design problems to my own satisfaction and everyone else, and then from that point on I really had a ball doing the character. It was very rewarding because people were very complimentary of the work I did do on the movie. And the movie turned out great, obviously I was wrong.

0:16:51 WF: I would always look down the road, I'm always nervous about what's coming next. So, 'Aladdin' was being cooked up in another building, and I had seen the treatment of the outline for it and I liked the idea of the parrot character. It was like a Cogsworth character, he was sort of a fussy, dry butler character again. I asked John and Ron if they'd consider me for it, and they'd seen some of my footage of Cogsworth, which was a big improvement over what I'd been doing before. They said, "Yes." And to make a long story short, I got to do Iago right after that, which back to back, two of my favorite projects ever. So I got into story on 'Punch Back', then that led to a directing offer at DreamWorks. I was always on the short list to direct or co-direct, but never the actual bride, so I was antsy to see what that was like. That's why I really finally left, which was ultimately a disaster, and it's been up and down ever since. 'The Road to El Dorado', if you wanna call that a movie, which I was on for almost three years, and I resigned from 'El Dorado'. Really the less said about it the better, as far as I'm concerned.

[music]

0:18:15 JS: I got started in the film business like many of us do. I went to CalArts because I wanted to work in animation. It's the same old story, I grew up watching Warner Brothers cartoons, I loved those, those were inspiring. I loved Bullwinkle and Rocky. I liked the Disney stuff. Ironically, not as much, but there are two big sentimental things for me, 'Roger Rabbit' and 'The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse', which Ralph Bakshi, John Kricfalusi were a big part of, those were super inspirational for me. Then I was going to at the time, an art school in downtown Denver, and there was a lot of animation festivals that were playing at a theater that was right around the corner called the Ogden theater. There were all sorts of cool movies, they were crazy quirky things, and a lot of the films were from students that went to CalArts. People like Andrew Stanton, who went on to direct 'Finding Nemo' among other things.

0:19:03 JS: And so I thought, "That's the place to go." Also, I saw an interview with Glen Keane, he said he went to CalArts. So I applied and studied animation, I was in the same class as Craig McCracken, Genndy Tartakovsky. When you go into CalArts, every person that goes to CalArts was probably the best artist in their school. And then you discover that there's loads of people out there who are super talented, and you have to raise your game on a daily basis. While at CalArts, I managed to make a couple of films, one of which got into the Producers Show, which is the big show that they put on there at CalArts for all the animation studios and they come and they recruit. Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale, they directed 'Beauty and the Beast', liked my film, asked me to submit a portfolio to Disney, they hired me and hired me as a story trainee on to 'Hunchback of Notre Dame', and that's how I got into Disney, as a story board trainee. Those guys were my mentors.

0:19:54 JS: The training was interesting because at CalArts we had a class for story and story boarding. But when you go to Disney features as a story trainee, they treat you like you're a story artist. They're like, "Here's your office, here's your desk, here's your paper, this is the supply room, here's your time card." All that stuff. They treat you like an employee. And you're invited to story meetings and you're encouraged to give ideas and all that stuff. It was interesting to have to show up for work at 9:00 AM and stay till 6:00. [chuckle]

0:20:23 JS: Kirk and Gary gave me a scene. They were still developing Hunchback, and they were still going through script revisions, but they gave me a section of the script, and they said, "Board this, we wanna see a rough pass in two weeks." That was the way I was trained. They would give me assignments like I was a real story board artist. They would critique me like I was a real story board artist. That's kinda how it was, and then we would have reviews where all the directors would get together and we'd have to pitch to them. We'd leave the room, and then they'd talk about us, and review us, and say, "Ah, he doesn't draw very well." But we managed to get through that training program and were promoted to real story artists in, I think, six months. And then we were thrown right onto production. Went right onto 'Hunchback of Notre Dame', that was the first movie I ever boarded on. It was interesting, I enjoyed it because Kirk and Gary are good directors, they're very supportive. They also let you, as a story artist, play. There are a lot of directors who when you sit down with the sequence, they say, "Okay, let me tell you what I want." And they'll literally dictate the sequence to you shot by shot.

0:21:17 JS: Whereas Kirk and Gary will say, "These are the emotional beats that we wanna hit. Here's the dialogue, some of it's great, some of it's not. If you have a better idea, pitch it. Go have fun." That's an amazing amount of rope [chuckle] that you can hang yourself with or it's an amazing amount of freedom to show what you can do. I was a young guy and I learned a ton, but that was my experience on that movie, is I got to work with Will Finn, who's an animator on Cogsworth, animated Iago the parrot, he was head of story on that movie. I learned tons from Will, it was school all over again, but I got paid for it. Mulan ate up from '95 to '97, I think I was on Mulan which included some time in Florida. Then I was on Atlantis. I was just a story artist. But later I was promoted to head of story.

0:22:03 JS: It was a fun movie to make. We were making a big crazy action movie. I think the big problem we had, and the big mistake we made was it was a plot-driven movie and we didn't let the characters drive that movie that was a big mistake. We were thinking in terms of it being a Disney action movie. And so, if you put Atlantis next to say the action movies of the time it doesn't really compete it doesn't compete with Star Wars, it doesn't compete with Indiana Jones, it's just kind of like a... Filmically, it's really strong as far as cinematography and how shots one shot leads into another. And all of those choices, I think were really good. I don't think that the Atlantians are that interesting still. That crystal which we were in a room and we argued about it, I think we were erring on the side of ambiguity, because if you remember correctly, 'The Phantom Menace' had just come out, George Lucas decided to explain how the Force worked through midi-chlorians. We were kind of resistant to any super explain-y reason as to why that thing worked and how it worked, and I think we went too far the other way with that. [laughter] So it's not really clear what's going on with that thing. And after Atlantis, Don Hahn called me into his office and said, "So what do you wanna do next?"

0:23:18 JS: And I said, "Well, I'd love to work with Kirk and Gary, again, but I'm also keen to try directing something. I have a story idea." And so Don encouraged me to write it up and pitch it, so, I pitched an idea for a superhero movie back in I think this is '98 '99. I pitched it to then President of feature animation, Tom Schumacher, and Tom was... Tom is interesting because I worked with a development exact name Leo Chu, who's an awesome guy, great exec which you don't hear very often and you almost never hear from me. He warned me, he said "Okay, Tom hates superheroes." And I said, "Why does Tom hate superheroes?" and he said, "He doesn't think they are emotional, he thinks it's too serious and he doesn't think that they would work in animation, because we've already seen them in live action."

0:24:00 JS: And I said, "Let me go away and write something that will change his mind." Having worked with Chris on 'Lilo & Stitch', Chris developed 'Lilo & Stitch' was really interesting, because I'd never seen an animated movie developed this way before. He started with the two central characters, and just kind of developed outward from there. All the plot, all the story came from the needs of those two characters and where he wanted to go with them. Everything was character, character, character and relationship. So I sat down and tried to think of a relationship I wanted to tell a story about and I went backwards and made a relationship story that happened to be about superheroes, and they responded to that really well. Unfortunately, Tom sat me down and said, "Okay, we're already making a superhero movie at Pixar." And that was 'The Incredibles'. And he said, "You've managed to accidentally reproduce certain plot elements from that movie. So we love this, but put it aside, what else do you have?" And during the time I was trying to figure out what else I had, 'Sweating Bullets' hit a story snag.

[music]

0:25:04 JS: The original story of 'Sweating Bullets' was about... It was kind of like Captains Courageous, only in the Old West. So the story is about this rich young guy from the East Coast, whose dad sends him out to the Old West and he gets kind of shoved into a cattle drive. It was kind of an amazing little story they had, it was all with people, the stories centered on an actual guy. They still had the talking rabbit in there, but they also had ghosts. The villains in the movie were these ghosts who were stealing cattle. And so, you'd see all this amazing artwork in the hallway and you'd say, "Wow, we're doing a western with ghosts? That's cool." And Michael Eisner, when they gave him the big pitch, he went, "Oh, well, I thought this was gonna be a movie about cattle. Why don't you make the movie about one of the cows?" And so, they went, "Okay." And they started making the movie about this little calf named Bullet, that's on this cattle drive.

0:26:00 JS: So the whole movie shifted from the people down to this one calf named Bullet in the movie. So Michael back in those days was infamous for giving notes that upended productions. Like, on Chicken Little for instance, when they first started making the movie, the character was played by Holly Hunter, it was a little girl chicken and Michael for some reason, couldn't get it... Couldn't wrap his head around a female protagonist. Michael is a fairly savvy business guy, but when he'd come in to a creative meeting, he'd give like these really ham fisted notes to be honest. [laughter]

0:26:35 WF: For whatever reason, the studio gradually fell out of love with that story and added more people, then they took the people out, and then they added more animals. It was basically an animal story with a ghost villain. And then there was this almost mutiny in the story department where some of the newer story guys refused to embrace the ghost villain, because, how do you kill a ghost? And that became sort of a deadlock for months.

0:27:03 JS: If your directors don't have the confidence behind their vision, story artists will eventually kind of... They'll revolt. It happens on a lot of productions. You'll have a little mini kinda coup. The management team was already seeing a movie that wasn't making sense. So the story team would go into those meetings, those story meetings where everybody's there and just kinda hammer away at it until finally the management said, "Okay, this clearly isn't working. Everybody go away and come up with an idea for the movie." Literally, that's what they said. So everybody went away and a couple of the artists pitched the idea with the three cows, trying to save the farm, which is what the movie became. And they said, "Great, go, that's the movie." That story was kind of forced on Mike and Mike.

0:27:44 WF: Then it was at the point where he says, "Okay, you're up, you gotta go into production." [chuckle] And at that point I could tell Mike and Mike were really miserable on it, and they didn't... I'm not very close with those guys, it's not like I was talking to them, but I knew they were hating it. And the one thing I learned from directing on El Dorado was, you cannot direct material you hate. They were just going through the motions in my view. Not that they weren't dedicated and talented, but they really felt robbed of the movie they intended to make, and they were now just sort of being forced to make this other movie they didn't like.

0:28:20 JS: And they tried to make that work until they couldn't and were removed. And I think that that was a hard time. I think Mike and Mike kinda got a raw deal a little bit, but it's hard to say. I did say, and I believe this, that if they had given those guys the rope to make and the freedom to make that first movie they pitched with the guy and the ghosts, I think that could've been just as good a movie as Home On The Range. And I think it could've been as everybody is entertaining, maybe more so. I'd like to see that movie. On the other hand, I also say management was right to kind of move them off, they couldn't make any progress. So something had to change, and they decided to replace the directors, nice though, they were... Mike Gabriel is an amazing designer. Mike Giaimo is an amazing production designer and art director. But they couldn't get the movie to move forward. The movie was just awash in problems, and so they couldn't get the movie to go past act one. So they removed them, and they brought in Will Finn.

0:29:21 WF: And since I liked it. I thought, well maybe if I like this concept, I'll be able to bring something to it. So when they ask me about it, I said okay, because it was gonna happen. I've been around it that much to know the attrition level with directors. I think it engendered a lot of resentment between me and the Mikes, which probably exists to this day. I feel bad about that, but I didn't feel bad about taking over the movie, because I just... I could tell they didn't wanna make it and I did.

0:29:51 JS: They asked, "Will, who would you like to co-direct with?" And Will said, "How about John Sanford?" And they said, "Okay." And that's how I got... [chuckle] That's how I got to direct 'Sweating Bullets' which later became 'Home On The Range', is I kind of proved my mettle with both in story meanings on 'Atlantis', and basically writing that treatment and pitching it so they gave me a shot.

0:30:10 WF: We've been friends. John came in on Hunchback, he was a new hire, that was his first full time gig at the studio. And I always liked him, we always got along really well, and I could see they were trying to figure out where to bump him up to. So when I got offered that, I asked about it and they said yes, immediately. So we were already in production, and there was one sequence being made and there was nothing really of the story that worked, so we were gonna have to write the story as we went along, and it was just constant triage.

0:30:40 JS: It was really hard, especially said Mike Giamio was my favorite teacher at CalArts. He taught me characters design, for two years and I had to come in and take over, and then there was some people on the crew that were happy to see us take over. And then there's some people who are outwardly hostile, and didn't understand why we were there, and it's like "Why are you here? Why are you promoted?" What was interesting is, at the time I was 32, to most of the crew, just kind of promoted out of nowhere. They didn't know what I'd done, they didn't know me, I was younger than a lot of the folks I was directing, and that as we all know, goes over real well. When you're telling a guy whose [chuckle], the guy who's 10, 15, 20 years older than you are, has 15 years more experience than you do in the business and you have to listen to some punk. That's... [chuckle] That's hard for a lot of people to swallow.

0:31:31 JS: So what's interesting is that when I walk into situations like that, a lot of times I'm incredibly naive and don't see the problems, I'm kind of stupid that way. I just walked in and went, Okay, this is what I'm doing and didn't really see the problems until much later I went, "Oh wait. Hey. I think these people don't like me." [chuckle] And with the story team, fortunately with a lot of those guys I'd worked with them before and so they trusted us, and when they didn't, when they had questions, I remember... Will, and I had to go through a ton of meetings that first week. Will and I were with the story crew, we worked with them in the morning to work on a new beat outline that we were gonna pitch to the executives later that week and we had to go through some other things and we said, "Okay, you story team and had a story and writers work on this outline, we'll be back." I came back later that afternoon and they were all sitting around the table kind of just silently I said, "So how's everything going?" And I looked at the board, and they hadn't gotten past act one and they said, "Well, we've got some problems."

0:32:33 JS: And they started telling me what the problems were, and I said, "I hear you, but this is what we asked you to do, so do it." And I was basically too dumb to know that I was throwing my weight around, I guess [chuckle], so but that's what they needed, they needed somebody to tell them, "I hear your issues, but let's just do what we agreed to this morning and just start moving forward and once you have everything up, then we'll start to try and tear it apart." But what was interesting is this particular group of people would tear something apart before they could even get something done. If you ask any novelist, any writer, any musician, the hardest thing is just to get an idea on a page and get a complete thought on the page, so what you have to do is just get it down. Once it's down, once you got everything up there, then you can tear it apart and edit and tweak and stuff. But if you're gonna just say no to every idea that comes out of somebody's mouth, you're never gonna get something done. And I think that was the problem with this particular group of people was they just were really good at talking themselves out of ideas.

0:33:31 WF: Oh, we fired somebody which is not something I relish doing. And it wasn't like they were fired without warning, it was like there was a lot of sitdown and let's talk this through. And yet we were still getting tons of pushback.

[music]

0:33:46 WF: This just sort of just gets into the whole question of why did I say yes to this thing. I hate westerns. I really... I really think they're stupid, and it's just not... I'm not exactly a city boy but I'm definitely someone bound for the great indoors. I'm not an outdoorsman, or any of that. And the whole western thing just never really... I kind of liked the Italians spaghetti westerns 'cause they're just so off the wall but I didn't... We didn't play cowboys growing up. That was all very corny to me. So, I was intrigued because I thought well we can make an inside out Western, it'll be an anti-Western. Cows are the heroes and the cowboys are the bad guys, I thought that was really funny. But in order to do that, you have to understand what a Western is. And it took me over a year to figure out what a Western is frantically on my own time reading about them and watching them. And basically, a Western is the lone individual, against the group and the wilderness. And when I got that finally, I was like, "Okay. Well, then everything in this movie will be about the opposite of that. This will be about a group against lone individuals, mercenaries, and the ideal of the western the lone individual is the classic individual." But by turning it on its head, the individual becomes a mercenary.

0:35:03 WF: And so all the individual characters in the story are villains and all the good characters are community. And that's something that I believe to an extent, but it's not something I believe across the board, but I thought for the purpose of this story, we're gonna say the community is good, the individual is suspect at best. If I'd known that earlier on [chuckle].. I think that would have helped. But that for anyone who's bothered to sit through the movie which is not that many people, that's what's happening all through the movie is, individuals, as mercenaries, are making life difficult for community characters and the community has to pull together to thwart them. And then that sort of helped make sense for the cow story, it also made sense of the horse's story because the horse wanted to be with the cowboy, be the lone gun and all that, but then he realized that that guy was a fake and he had to come in and help the group and become part of the group and when that sort of came out, someone in development wanted to make the horse have a speech about that, and I was just like [chuckle].. No.

0:36:00 WF: The whole point of the story is to make the point. If we have to stop and say it, then we're doing a bad job which maybe we did anyway. So it was such a risky idea even though nothing panned out to make an anti-Western, where everything about a Western was going to be called into question. And so the cows which are usually just passive background characters, are gonna be the heroes and they're also female. Westerns, of course, are dominantly masculine. Here we're gonna make three females, the heroes, against a whole wilderness of hostile, masculine characters. I liked all those things. And on a purely just silly level, the idea that cows would be the heroes of their own western was funny to me because I like things that are silly. I'm a Gilbert and Sullivan fan and they always do the topsy-turvy world where the things are turned on their heads and that's immediately how I reacted to the story about the cows was that we were turning a western on its head.

[music]

0:37:08 WF: It was one of the things that appealed to me about the movie 'cause not only was it this topsy, turvy, very silly story but we had to do it for an extremely compromised budget, which isn't what shows up on paper but a lot of the money that is always quoted for that movie was already spent, so we had to do this on a lot less money than a lot of the other movies that have been made, and I thought that would be appealing because it would enable us to do things that were a little bit sillier and take the movie less seriously. I think from Pocahontas on there was a sense of grandeur, and gravitas which was the word that got thrown around a lot back then about Disney movies that was starting to make me sick to my stomach, frankly. And the one thing, that that the 'Home On The Range' story had was a complete absence of gravitas and I thought, "Great, let's make a Woolie Reitherman type stupid movie." For better or worse I kept thinking of the Woolie movies while I was making it and those are terribly uneven movies too. And I guess I just misjudged public because everyone wanted a full on musical with a fairy tale and a princess and the Prince and they really resented getting this stupid cartoon with Roseanne Barr. And a lot of uneven shenanigans. [chuckle] Yeah, you know what... That's as much as I'll say about that.

0:38:30 JS: There's a strange way that Disney makes movies. They kind of buy off on a plot. And then in the old days they used to approve it sequence by sequence into production, they would find what they called tent poles and it was usually song sequences. If you're at all familiar with the movie 'Home On The Range', there's a song sequence called Little Patch of Heaven, where they... All the animals sing and dance and sing about how wonderful that dopey farm is that they live on. They had recorded that song with Katy Lang, they'd approved character designs, they'd approved backgrounds, and so they were fast animating and laying out and all that stuff for that sequence. So when I got onto the movie, I was told, "Okay, you can't touch this... Because this is already in. Everything else is fair game but we're making this, this is gonna help you set the style of the characters, it'll help set the style of the movie, and it's a song and we've got it and so leave it alone." [chuckle]

0:39:21 JS: So we basically jumped onto a moving train. At the time they were telling us that the casting was set in stone too, but we later learned that that wasn't true. [laughter] One of the original cows was Grace the cow, which was the skinny yellow one, who was voiced by Sara Jessica Parker. We discovered that that wasn't working, it wasn't a clear characterization, and when we rewrote the character and made her a certain way, Will tried to record her, and she was like, "I don't understand this, this doesn't make sense." And we hired Jennifer Tilly. And Jennifer Tilly came in and was in like, "Oh I get it. I know who this is. Gotcha. Boom." And from the jump, Jennifer Tilly was great. Understood it, she was sharp, she always plays those ditzy characters, but Jennifer Tilly is no dummy, has this really smart way of approaching a dumb character, [chuckle] if that makes sense.

0:40:07 JS: And then, the main character Maggie the cow, was originally an actress named Ja'Net DuBois, who some folks will remember from Good Times, that TV show from the '70s. She was good, but we just needed something different. So when we started rethinking the character Maggie, we're thinking, "Well, what if she's from another farm, and she's bringing an alien point of view, and she doesn't quite fit in?" And I looked at the farm animals and how they were and I said, "You know what would really pop comedically? What if she was Rosanne Barr? What if that character was like Rosanne Barr and she comes in?" And Will said, "Well, why don't we try and hire Rosanne?" I said, "Do you think they'll let us do it?" And he said, "Well, why don't we try?" What's interesting is, Will gives me all the credit for the Roseanne thing, but I just remember all I kept doing was saying, "What if she was Roseanne?", and I guess just kept trying to write the character as Rosanne.

0:40:55 JS: I really think it was Will who said, "Let's cast her." And I went, "Okay." [chuckle] Will likes to give me credit for that, but it was really the two of us in a room figuring it out. Some people love that choice and some people hate it. So whatever. [chuckle] The very first time I met with Alan Menken, I argued with him, and I was told that I should not argue with Alan. So after that any time I was in a meeting with Alan, I kept my mouth shut. So that was a please your boss moment. Here, there, and everywhere, I've talked about Alan Menken, and I didn't enjoy a lot of my experiences with Alan because I was out of my depth. This comes as a surprise whenever I say this, having worked at Disney for 11 years, I'm not a fan of musicals, I don't like musicals, and I don't like songs and movies. For 11 years I worked on musicals, even though I hated musicals. I can tell you how to set up a song, how to ramp into a song, I can board a song, and I can get out of a song, but I don't like them.

0:41:50 JS: Here I am working with a guy who writes songs for movies, [chuckle] and I'm telling him I don't like it when characters break into song in movies. I actually said that to Alan Menken. This is a guy who has made some of the most famous songs in movies, he's got nine Oscars. Here I am telling him that I hate what he does. [laughter] That was me trying to be cruel, that was me like saying, "Man, I'm gonna do what I wanna do, and I'm gonna tell this guy what's up." I was basically told, "Don't argue with Alan Menken like that. You can raise your concerns, and please don't, that's not cool." Pretty much any time from then on when we were dealing with Alan, it was me in please your boss mode.

0:42:33 WF: The worst thing about directing an animated movie for a big studio is, it isn't really a creative job, it's a political job. And that's been my experience of it, and maybe that's my feeling as a creative person, but that's the way I always had to treat it. And I either survived or didn't, based on my ability to understand the politics of doing it. And one of the things I noticed at Disney during that time, in the Tom Schumacher years, was that as a director you could defend your own idea once. You could defend anybody else's idea, as long as it was clearly someone else's idea and you went to bat for it, but if you defended your own idea more than once, you were dead. Because the director could only stand up for themselves to a point.

0:43:17 WF: And if you kept coming back to something you really wanted to do, then that meant you were... What do they call it? Difficult? [chuckle] It's an incredibly stressful and tenuous job because there's tons of money on the line and nobody knows what's going to happen when the movie's done until it happens, and so nobody knows what the right decision to make at any given time is. Again, maybe it's just a feeling of my own personality, but I always had to come across as someone who was a partner and a collaborator in a team, rather than the person in charge, because that sort of thing didn't work for me.

0:44:00 WF: You know, this is why so many production assistants become producers is, they won't fire a production assistant unless they're incredibly incompetent, which you don't get to be a production assistant unless you are competent. They know where everything is, they know where all the numbers are, they know where all the scenes are, they know the flow charts. The director is just like, "You don't know anything. [chuckle] You're just the person ostensibly in charge." So they can put anybody in and have them start taking orders. I don't mean to sound so cynical and negative about it, but obviously, I didn't do a great job at it, and it wasn't fun. [chuckle]

0:44:40 WF: Well, the whole structure of directing on an animated movie at a studio, especially like Disney is that you're in peril the entire time. I'm not saying that speciously, you are the most replaceable person on the film as they'd already demonstrated, they'd replaced the two directors before and they would have happily replaced us at any given moment, and they nearly did. I know I was nearly let go at least twice, but I always found out after the fact. [chuckle] It wasn't like like, "Oh really?" I just assumed we were on the razor's edge the entire time anyway.

0:45:11 WF: There was a couple of different things. I'd said the wrong thing the wrong way at the wrong time to the wrong person. And I'm pretty circumspect about dealing with people in charge, so it was a surprise. One time it wasn't a surprise because I just lost my temper and said something glib I shouldn't have said, but the other time was not, and I was like really over that. And then there were plenty of times where I saw the writing on the wall, and I took John inside and said, "They're not asking us to do this, they're telling us." And we had to do things that really upset him. And so I think I was basically just tying to get us through to the end, which is sort of the... The endurance test is you get to put your name on the movie at the end, that's your consolation prize, I guess.

[music]

0:46:09 JS: You know, they kept saying, "You're making a Western," and I'm like, "Okay, cool. I know what a Western is." "But you can't have guns." "Okay, so Western without guns." One of the reasons why they changed the movie from 'Sweating Bullets' to 'Home On The Range' is because McDonald's would not sell Happy Meals with the words 'Sweating Bullets', 'bullets' on their Happy Meals. So that's why the title changed. One of the reasons why we knuckled under to McDonald's is that McDonald's represented $30 million of "free advertising". If McDonald's is selling Happy Meals with your toys in them, then they get to play a clip of your ad, and that's literally $30 million worth of advertising. Great.

0:46:48 JS: Well, we got the cows. What's the biggest threat to a cow? Being turned into steaks and hamburger. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you can't do that, you can't threaten them with eating them. And I said, "Really?" And I literally said this, I said, "That's like making Finding Nemo, only dad fish is never threatened with being eaten." The whole movie somebody's trying to eat that fish and they even get swallowed by that whale at one point. Can you imagine Finding Nemo if the dad wasn't threatened with life or death? There were no stakes. That's part of the problem, there was no stakes in that movie, and that's why it plays soft and that's why it plays dumb. Whenever we would try and put any kind of [0:47:24] ____ into the movie for any type of edge, it would always get ground off. In the movie we were like, "Well, what's the scariest thing Slim can do with an army of cows?" And somebody said, I think it was of all people Ralph Zondag, who was just on the movie for two weeks. He's like, "Well you know, General Custer really wanted to be President in the United States." We're like, "Whoa, what if Slim wants to take over the United States, and he's gonna do it with an army of hypnotized cows. Maybe that's why he's stealing the cows, maybe he was building an army so you can stampede Washington and insert himself as president." And that made him scary, that made him sinister, and it raised the stakes.

0:48:01 JS: But you gotta remember, this is when we had a Texan literally steal the presidency of the United States. So we were told, "No, that's too political. You can't do it." So we dropped it. And at a certain point I just kind of resigned myself to like at some point I probably should have went in and said, "You know what? This isn't for me, and I should quit." Pixar at the time knew how to make movies about stuff that made people go, "Ooh, what's that?" Like 'Monsters, Inc', it's about monsters, right there in the fucking title. Monsters. Yeah, I wanna see that. 'Incredibles', it's about superheroes. Fuck yeah. Nobody was making superhero movies back then except for Bryan Singer and those lame X-Men movies. When I heard about Finding Nemo, I'm like, "What's Finding Nemo about?" They were like, "Well, it's about fish," I went, "Oh." They were like, "Yeah, it's about fish and the ocean and this kid gets captured and put in a fish tank in Australia and he needs to get him back." I went, "Really? How the fuck is that fish gonna get that little kid out of that tank? I wanna see that movie."

0:48:53 JS: Just the problem, it's so insurmountable. It's like, "This guy has to go there to get his kid back? Sign me up. I'll see that movie. Who gives a shit about three cows?" We had a screening where Michael just didn't like the movie and the movie was very close to being finished. And he said, "You know what I think? Wouldn't it be funny if the whole movie was told from the point of view of those stupid nephew guys?" In the movie, the villain is Alameda Slim, and he's got these three idiot nephews. And for some reason, Michael got it in his head that the movie should be told from their point of view as a flashback, and they're in prison telling the story about how these cows bested them. And Will and I just went, "Oh my God." The interesting thing is that's kind of a funny idea, but when you've got six months left to production, you can't suddenly remake the movie. You just can't do it. So in the room we told Michael, "Well, that's an interesting idea, but maybe not." That was the weekend before we went away.

0:49:46 JS: We had this big creative retreat where they had all the then current directors are flown to Michael Eisner's property in Aspen, and we were to talk about the future of Disney feature animation. So it's a bunch of execs, a bunch of us directors, and we're in day-long meetings on Michael's beautiful property in Aspen, Colorado, talking about the movie. And so it's the last day and they're like, "Hey, we have cake and pie." So I went and got myself a piece of pie and a cup of coffee and I sit down at a table all by myself. And Michael Eisner, who's... I don't think much has been made of this, but Michael Eisner is a massive human being. He's like 6'2, 6'3, just giant. He's got hands as big as pie pans. And he sits down next to me, and I'm not a big dude. I'm 5'10. And at the time I weighed 145. He sits down next to me and it's like Andre the Giant sitting next to like "Mean" Gene Okerlund. He's just towering over me and he says, "Tell me why we can't do my idea?"

0:50:43 JS: And I had to carefully explain to Michael why we couldn't do his idea all by myself. I looked to... Like where's Will? Where's Tom Schumacher? They're like way across the way getting pie, and I had to like... Little old me has to look Michael Eisner in the eye and tell the guy who can fire me with a stroke of the pen or just pick me up by my collar and my belt loop and throw me into the Aspens, I have to tell him why we can't do his idea. So I very calmly explained to him, "Well, you know Michael, we've been doing this and we spent this much of the budget," and I just talked, I tried to talk in his terms. He went, "Oh, okay. Yeah, you're probably right." And he just left it be. I remember at the time when we did all the press for 'Home On The Range', this is years later, so I don't care, I'll say whatever I want. All the press kept asking was, "Is this the end of 2D? Is this the end of 2D?" And of course we knew, "Yes, it's the end of 2D." All the animators were being retrained, this cleanup crew was being laid off. 'Home On The Range' is gonna be the last movie animated on paper, it was the last movie using that pipeline, using that system.

0:51:42 JS: It was very clear that we were gonna make CGI movies from then on. I think it was two weeks in that Will intimated to me that he had a conversation with Tom Schumacher and they had decided that 2D was done at the studio and that they were gonna move to CG and that was just the way it was gonna be. If the movie had made like $300-$400 million, I don't think they would have gone back on that. I think they were ready to just move on to the next chapter.

0:52:09 WF: That sort of leaked out gradually. I think that's another thing of course, in my view, that hurt the film tremendously, because that became the story when the movie was released, "This is the last 2D movie." And that was terribly embarrassing because nobody, including myself, wanted to see a tradition that started with 'Snow White', 'Pinocchio' and 'Fantasia', and with this little farce about cows. And early on I asked if we could possibly make the movie in CG, and that was turned down flatly because I could just see the way the world was going.

0:52:42 WF: I always felt that if the movie... [chuckle] It's kind of a moot point. If you had made the same film frame-for-frame as 'Home On The Range' in CG and released in 2004, it would have made at least twice as much money, which isn't to say it would have been a huge hit, but it would have done better because CG had such a novelty at that point that almost any CG picture was getting an enormous pass.

0:53:08 JS: So we all knew at that retreat there was no arguing. I think the only person who said, "You know, I really think the public needs to see drawings," was Glen Keane. Glen's the only one who was still kind of really pulling for that system. And God bless him, I think in a way Glen's right. But at that time the public just didn't care. 'Iron Giant' came out and it was poorly promoted, but it was a great movie that at the time nobody went and saw. 'Lilo & Stitch' came out. 'Lilo & Stitch' is arguably one of Disney's greatest movies and it did moderately well at the box office. It was Chris Montana, who was the head of music, said to Roy Disney, "You know, if 'Lilo & Stitch' were a CG movie, it would have made $300 million." And Roy said, "Well, don't say that too loud. These guys aren't ready to hear that yet." Roy knew. Roy had his eye on the future. The public had kind of cooled on 2D animation. That can be argued that that was a thing. People were just kind of, "Oh, you know, what else is out there?" And then when you had put out a movie like 'Bugs Life', which is not a great movie, but it made tons of money, people got excited about it now because there's an immersive quality to CG. It was understood at that retreat that that was gonna be our future. The most contentious points at that retreat was, what kind of movies going forward, what kind of stories?

0:54:25 JS: I remember arguing vehemently that Disney had lost touch with the culture at large. There was a thing that Disney at the time did and they finally got past it, Disney had a problem at the time of thinking only in terms of Disney. Like, when we were making 'Atlantis', "This is Disney's big action movie." When they made 'Treasure Planet', "This is our science fiction movie." And they didn't seem to understand that outside the walls of the studio people were making action movies and science fiction movies that were far more daring, far more interesting. 'Hercules' came out and the very same weekend 'Men in Black' came out, and I think it was Ed Gombert that said, "You know what? 'Men In Black' should have been the movie we made," because it was interesting, it was dynamic, it captured the minds of the public, because it was a way of seeing the world that they weren't used to, whereas 'Hercules' was, "Oh, it's another one of those. It was another one of those Disney musicals. There's five songs, and who gives a shit?"

0:55:19 JS: That was kind of the wake up call. We put what we thought was our best foot forward as a company, and nobody cared. A lot of that retreat, I remember, was just trying to just discussing, "What does the public want from us? What should we be making?" And I can't remember whether we ever came down on anything. [chuckle] It was a really crazy strange weekend, 'cause we'd have these meetings and then Michael put us up in a house, bigger than any house I've ever lived in. In order to get to where the meeting was, they gave us an SUV that was parked out front.

0:55:55 WF: It was a group bonding thing, and it was very... It was two and a half days we desperately needed to get work done [chuckle] that we couldn't work. I just wanted to get back to the studio. I remember they made us sing karaoke at one point and I refused. And I think at one point Roy Disney was as turned off by the karaoke as I was. Sorta looked at me like, "You wanna give it a go?" And I just let it pass. So I never got a chance to sing karaoke with Roy Disney, which I half regret and half feel like maybe it was the right thing to turn down. John picked a song for my behalf which was very nice of him. They picked the song 'Life's Been good to me so far' by Joe Walsh.

0:56:33 JS: Generally speaking, previews went well overall, we had good scores. They were like, "Would you see the movie when it comes out?" "Yes." "Would you recommend this movie to a friend?" "Yes." Overwhelmingly, our scores were positive. Now, that means jack shit truthfully, because if you put out a movie and folks that don't know about the movie look at your poster and go, "I don't care." To be perfectly honest, it was a movie I wouldn't see. If I saw our poster, if I saw our billboards driving around in California at the time, I was 32 years old, I didn't have kids, I wouldn't wanna see it. What's interesting is that most people say, "Well, who cares? You're a 32 year old man. Who gives a shit?" But even as a 25 year old guy dating, I wouldn't take my date to see 'Home On The Range." I would have taken a date to see 'Aladdin', I would have taken a date to see 'Beauty And The Beast', I would take somebody to see 'Lilo & Stitch'. Me and my wife went and saw 'Ice Age' opening weekend. 'Home On The Range' didn't appeal to... It just didn't appeal to people.

0:57:30 JS: I remember Tom Schumacher at one point said, "It plays young and dumb." So it plays for little kids, and there are folks at Disney who said, "Well good, 'cause that's our core audience." And I used to say, "No, that's not... " Jeffrey Katzenberg knew well enough to know that when they made 'Little Mermaid', they said, "You're not competing with other animated movies, you're competing with the latest Tom Cruise movie. You're competing with Top Gun." That was a smart savvy thing to say. And what was interesting is, when I sat down with the marketing people, we were about to release 'Home On The Range' that weekend, we were going up against 'Hellboy', and I said, "Well, we're gonna lose all of the audience to 'Hellboy'." They were like, "That's really not our audience." And I said, "Bullshit that's not our audience. Those are people with money. People with money, you should wanna try and get everybody into your movie."

0:58:15 JS: Back then nobody wanted to hear that, but Jeffrey knew it. Well, back then they thought the core audience was 10 year olds, and that's why Disney nearly had to... It nearly shut the lights off. 'Home On The Range' didn't make money, 'Chicken Little' didn't make money, there was a long dry period of years there where the company was in trouble, and it's because they did not understand who their real audience was.

0:58:34 WF: One of the last memories I have of the movie is when marketing was doing the trailers. They showed us a bunch of trailers. And one of them was non-linear. And it was like, "Yes, this will sell this movie." And the others were all very straight forward, "This is the story of a cow. " And the non-linear one was Eisner's pick. And I was like, "Well, we agree with Michael," and we thought that would get it over, but marketing vetoed Michael and us, and got linear trailers, which was depressing.

0:59:05 JS: Would I still have my office there in that hat building? The Director's offices were made in such a way that if you were agile enough, you could actually jump up on top of those offices. And I jumped up on top of my office and I took a sharpie and I wrote in 2004, and I gave the date that we approved our last scene, we completed the very last hand drawn animated movie that Disney will ever make, and I signed it. And that doesn't mean anything 'cause they gutted that whole floor and threw everything away. [laughter] They had an animation open house when I was between jobs, and we were there on the second floor in what they call now the Caffeine Patch, which is, they renovated that building and it looks nothing like it did when I was there. And I swear I stood exactly where my office was, and I think there was a foosball table there and a bunch of chairs. [laughter] And it's just different, it's all different now.

1:00:01 JS: We got everything done on time, we delivered it under budget. I'm gonna tell tales out of school. We had a budget of 125 million for that movie, 'cause that's what animated movies cost back then. And we delivered it, I think at 115, maybe 120, because we were told to hold the line and try not to overspend, and we did what we were told. When you finish one of these movies, you're extremely happy, it's a jubilant time, so the premiere was lots of fun. The thing was that you don't realize until much, much later, [chuckle] that whether you've got a failure or a success, so everybody treats it like it's a success. We walked down the red carpet, I met Leonard Maltin who I loved.

1:00:42 JS: Maltin reviewed it and Maltin liked it. He thought it was a great movie, he told me that we had a movie that felt like one of the classics. I've had people tell me that since, they respond to the look of the movie, which I think the look of the movie is flawless. The art direction is great, David Cutler, and the background painters did a really great job with the look. Joe Moshier was a character designer, and he happened to capture a really classic yet stylized look for that movie. Story-wise, it's at least coherent. Maltin said he really enjoyed it. I think that other critics weren't so kind, and rightfully so. [laughter]

1:01:18 JS: Good or bad, we delivered the movie, it didn't perform. I think that the company was okay with just saying, "Okay, that's that chapter of animation done. We'll close the book and we'll move on." There are two different ways it used to go. Under Tom Schumacher, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Peter Schneider, because they understand that it's a collaborative medium, a lot of the way the movie is, is because of the notes they give. Tom Schumacher was very fond of saying, "We're gonna join hands and take this step forward together." And what that meant was, it was a team effort, and if the team won, the team won, and if the team lost, it was a team failure. He truly believed that the success was a team success, failure was a team failure, and you couldn't pin it on any one person, that was his philosophy. David Stainton on the other hand, you could tell that when the movie came out and the movie didn't perform, what was interesting is that our standing fell dramatically. Suddenly we weren't invited to meetings anymore. Will was pitching an idea for a movie and I don't think it was received very well. I pitched an idea for a movie and they were like, "Thanks, but no thanks."

1:02:22 JS: It was very clear that that regime run by David, if your movie didn't do well, he was gonna dump it in your lap. Pretty easy to blame us for the failure of that. He was like, "Well, it was begun under Tom and these two idiots. It was obviously their fault, and we're not gonna let them direct another movie." So yay, I worked on one more movie after that, it was pretty clear that they weren't really interested in having me around, and I wasn't interested in being there any more. So when I left, it was mutual. They offered me a bunch of things and so then I was like, "No, I'll just go." [chuckle] So I left.

1:03:00 WF: Well, he was there for a couple of years after. I was let go right away after the movie came out. We kind of went our separate ways after the movie finished. The movie was really wrapped six months before it came out. And John was already developing other stuff and we were friends, but we weren't like comparing notes, and he'd made it clear he didn't want to collaborate again, not with me anyway. Whereas, I think there's a good version of that movie. I don't know if John feels the same way. I think John basically said yes, and I don't wanna speak for him, but John wanted the opportunity to write and he was willing to do it with me, and so we did it together. But I think on some level he's probably more regretful about the whole experience than I am.

1:03:45 JS: I look back on it. I can't watch that movie, [chuckle] because to me it reflects a lot us trying to please our bosses and it also... I think there's a lot of learning that I did, but there's also stuff I'm very proud of in that movie. There are jokes that I can point to, there are sequences, there's characters that I can point to that I go, "I did that, that's my influence."

1:04:08 S2: If there's one thing that makes Disney, Disney, it's its ability to transport viewers from their own harsh reality to wonderlands, where happily ever after is just around the corner. It's a formula that's worked wonders since 1937. Interestingly enough, 'Home On The Range' had all the elements that Disney uses to create magical illusions. Talking animals, songs, villains, heroes, and that Disney happy ending. However, 'Home On The Range' doesn't manage to capture that blinding Disney magic. Because the film fails to take the viewer on the immersive vacation from reality, it actually grounds them in the stark reality of life, a reality in which you spend every day wondering if you'll be fired, a reality in which cows taking over Washington is too political, a reality in which McDonald's has a significant creative input on art. The circumstances that John and Will encountered were begging for that Disney happy ending that never came. Instead of that happy ending there are innumerable questions about the elusive nature of magic.

1:05:13 WF: I never hated it. Like I said, I always felt good about the things that appealed to me about the movie. It was difficult to be objective about the movie itself while making it, 'cause we were so steeped in it for so long and it was such an intense period. I think there's a good version of that movie, we just didn't manage to find it. I actually would like to think that under the right circumstances where fewer things were going drastically wrong and probably at a different studio, you could make that story into a very entertaining movie.

1:05:46 JS: I don't have any complaints about anybody on that movie. I think everybody worked hard. I mean, that's kind of the lesson there. Everybody did their best and yet the movie's not that good. That's the sort of thing that fascinates me, the fact that people can work so hard and everybody's trying hard, and there's no laziness at all. Everybody's doing their damnedest, and yet the movie comes out, it's not that good.

[music]

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