Interview - Puppeteer Bob Baker on Walt Disney
Discussing Walt's Work Habits and Making Escape to Witch Mountain
Mar 10, 2009
Bob Baker was 18 when he first saw Pinocchio in theatres. Although he had been a puppeteer for the past 10 years, seeing the movie cemented his desire to make marionettes his life. He eventually worked at the Disney Studios, doing puppet work on Escape to Witch Mountain, Bedknobs and Broomsticks and the 2000 live-action films Geppetto, starring Drew Carey.
In Part #2 of this exclusive interview, Bob shared his memories of 'Uncle Walt' and the collectible Pinocchio marionettes he designed for the Walt Disney Company. In this segment, Bob talks about his experiences working on Disney films, and Walt's 'control freak' reputation.
You eventually worked on several Disney films, including Escape to Witch Mountain and Bedknobs and Broomsticks. What was that like?
"I did all the locomotion sequences for Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Then I did Escape to Witch Mountain, the first one, and they handed me a blank piece of paper and all it said was that the boy and girl were going to be in the bedroom and he does some things with his harmonica and they said, ‘Do something.’
"So I worked with the art director, we built the puppet stage, we had the puppets come out and we worked them so that the controls were floating around with no one working them. That sequence got a bit of applause, and they jump-cut it at the end so that the applause wouldn't disturb the picture. Jimmy MacDonald – who did the voice of Mickey Mouse after Walt decided he didn’t want to do it anymore – came up to me afterwards and said, ‘We had a touch of Disney in here today.’
"That was the greatest thing anyone could have ever said to me."
You also worked on the 2000 film Geppetto?
"Yes, I did the puppets sequence in that one. I made a bunch of puppets, and the dance director decided they should all be destroyed. So we had to make 2 or 3 of everything because we had more than one rehearsal. Then they’d say, “Do you have any more like this?” They wanted me to use some of my good puppets, and they told me, ‘Oh we’ll pay to have them repaired.’
"I said, ‘No way!’ Finally, the two big puppets were thrown in barrels and that’s the last I saw of them. I think the producers got them."
Some people have described Walt Disney as a control freak. What were your feelings about working with him?
"Walt was Big Daddy. A lot of the men didn’t like that, but he used to say to them, ‘If you weren’t pushing your pencil here, you’d be digging ditches,’ because it was during the Depression.
"And he took these guys to school, and he saw that they had lunches and money to buy gas. He’d look at their work and critique it and he’d drive them to do more, do more. And a lot of them were offended by this, but if he hadn’t had done it then they wouldn’t have done such a good job.
"He wasn’t demanding: he just wanted a fine product. When you’re putting out your own money on something, you want a lot for it, and you feel that it’s a part of you.
"It’s hard for other people to understand what he was going through: when things weren’t working, when he didn’t get the contracts, or when other people cheated him, and people left him thinking that they were going to get further ahead. And that hurt Walt because Walt depended on them. And he finally got to the point where he decided, ‘Doggone it, I’m going to do it my way.’ And many people were offended although, many times, his way was the right way.
"If Walt got something started and he didn’t like it, throw it out. And a lot of time, people were offended because their work was being thrown away. You could see that in “Trees and Flowers.” They had originally made it black-and-white, but then Walt got the deal to get Technicolor for 5 years before anybody else could have it. So he went back to the studio and said, ‘Put colour in it.’
"I remember when they did "Bumble Boogie" and he was not talking to Josh Meador because Josh hated being in a room by himself. He loved being in the studio where he had other people around him, being creative.
"And Walt used to tour the studio at night and he’d walk in Josh’s room and he’d look at the storyboard and he didn’t like something there, he’d take down the drawing and replace it with something he found in the waste basket and he liked better, so he’d put that up instead."
(In Part #4, Bob talks more about how the studio changed after Walt's death, and why Pinocchio is a classic)
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