Someone wrote to ask what will happen when there is no more Jim Korkis. The answer is pretty obvious. I and my work will quickly be forgotten probably within the first decade of my passing.
I will be as well remembered as movie historian Tony Thomas.
Do not confuse him with Tony Thomas, the son of comedian Danny Thomas, and the producer of television shows like The Golden Girls, Empty Nest, and the CBS live-action Beauty and the Beast series and others who was born in 1948, the same year movie historian Tony Thomas started his career at the Canadian Broadcasting Company doing radio shows on Hollywood history.
Over the years, historian Thomas wrote dozens of film related books including The Hollywood Musical, The Busby Berkeley Book, Film Score: The Art and Craft of Film Music, The West That Never Was and several “Films of” books including ones on Errol Flynn, Marlon Brando, Olivia de Havilland, Jimmy Stewart, Dick Powell, Gene Kelly, Ronald Reagan, and many others in the days before the Internet.
He was the host of a long-running radio show that he started in Canada called “Voices from the Hollywood Past” where he interviewed celebrities like Jack Benny, Edward G. Robinson, Stan Laurel, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, Basil Rathbone, and more, and discussed Hollywood history.
In May 1959, he did a series of interviews with silent film actress Mary Pickford. He interviewed songwriters Rodgers and Hammerstein in 1960.
Of interest to Disney fans, Thomas did a seven-minute, 46-second interview with Walt Disney in January 1959 at the Disney Studios in Burbank.
I don't know if all of Thomas' interviews are documented or even saved anywhere. This interview with Walt was saved because a copy was in the Disney Archives. Not all of Walt's radio interviews are there. This one got saved because it was released on a record album on the DELOS label in 1975 featuring several interviews Thomas had done from 1958-1964.
The Tony Thomas interview with Walt Disney can be heard on this record found at the Disney Archives.
On the liner notes for the album, Thomas says about Walt:
“Walt Disney was not an actor but no Hollywood personality was more of a star. To describe him as a man of talent is rather like describing the Empire State Building as tall. Disney had what precious few men ever have—the double gift of great artistic ability and an equal measure of great administrative creativity.
“He knew how to delight people and how to build an empire in the process. Perhaps the greatest tribute is that he did it within his own very well marked lines of good taste and basic morality.
“So exact were his standards and concepts that not even his death altered the course of his enterprises. His studio continued to make Disney films and the oasis of fun and fantasy at Anaheim known as Disneyland kept on developing almost as if he were directing it from beyond.
“To say that Disney was not an actor is not quite correct. He was, after all, the original voice of Mickey Mouse and he always knew how to tell stories. He was the host of the Disney television series and a very persuasive one. That in itself is a form of acting.
“In person, he was much the same. Quiet but firm, affable but decisive. The image of genial uncle slightly masked the fact that he was very much in control of a beautifully functional operation.
“Visiting him in his office at the Disney Studio in Burbank in January of 1959 was a pleasant bit of deception. He seemed so easy going, unhurried and not at all busy. But how could he not have been busy? Walt Disney truly had a touch of magic about him.”
Tony Thomas died of complications from pneumonia at the age of 69 on July 8, 1997. He was also considered an expert about music used in films and was the founder of the Society for the Preservation of Film Music.
While I never met him, those who did always described him as a warm, helpful, knowledgeable person.
He moved to Hollywood in 1966 where he continued his interviews and found constant work. He was a writer for the Academy Awards shows in 1979 and 1984 and served as a segment producer for the Oscar show since the late 1970s.
As an independent writer-producer, his films included Hollywood and the American Image, Back to the Stage Door Canteen and The West That Never Was, all for PBS; Film Score: The Music of the Movies and Wild Westerns for the Discovery Channel; and The Hollywood Soundtrack Story and Michael Feinstein: Sing a Song of Hollywood for American Movie Classics.
Thomas was a writer for the ABC special The Fifty Years of Warner Bros., a writer on the Steve Allen series Meeting of Minds, and a writer-producer for three years on the syndicated series That's Hollywood.
Today, less than 20 years after his passing, Thomas is generally forgotten, except by those of us who love early Hollywood and have his books on our reference shelves.
An image that people think of when they hear the name Walt Disney.
So to honor Thomas’ work and Walt, I have transcribed that “lost” interview, for MousePlanet readers to enjoy, from an old cassette tape from my collection made by a good friend many, many years ago. Sometimes if you hold on to something long enough, it increases in value.
Walt Disney: I came to Hollywood and arrived here in August 1923 with $30 in my pocket and a coat and a pair of trousers that didn’t match. And one half of my suitcase had my shirts and underwear and things…the other half had my drawing materials. (Laughs) It was a cardboard suitcase at that.
Tony Thomas: (Laughing) We don’t think of you in terms of the silent picture era. What did you do when you finally got out here?
WD: Well, I tried to get a job doing anything I could in a studio, so I could learn. I was a little discouraged with the cartoon at that time. I felt at that time that I was getting into it too late. In other words, I thought the cartoon business was established in such a way that there was no chance to break into it. So I tried to get a job in Hollywood, working in the (live-action) picture business so I could learn it.
I would have liked to have been a director or any part of that. It wasn’t open, so before I knew it, I had my drawing board out and I started back to the cartoon. And I was able to secure a contract for 12 of these short films. And I did all the drawing myself. I did. I had no help at all. I was all alone. I made the first six practically alone. Then, at that time, I was able to get some of the boys that had been with me in Kansas City to come out. So then, from the seventh on, I had some help.
And I got by the first year and they were fairly successful and that led to other things. And with some of the boys I’d worked with in Kansas City augmenting the set-up, I was able to eventually build an organization. And it reached a point that I had so many working with me and there was so much time and attention demanded that I had to drop the drawing end of it myself.
But I’ve never regretted it, because drawing was always a means to an end with me. And so through these other boys who were good draftsmen and artists in many different phases of this business…very talented people…and coordinating their talents is what has built this business. And if I hadn’t dropped the drawing end of it myself, I don’t think I’d have built this organization.
TT: When did you establish your own company to deal with that?
WD: 1923. My brother was here, and in effect, the government helped subsidize us. And I’ll explain that to you. My brother was a veteran of the first World War and he had been hospitalized and things and so he was receiving a certain disability compensation. It amounted to about $85 a month. And we lived on that while we established the studio. And from that time on, my brother Roy and I have been together in this business and until the year 1940 we didn’t have a stockholder.
TT: When was Mickey Mouse born?
WD: Mickey Mouse came about in 1928.
TT: With sound I presume.
WD: Well, no. The first Mickey Mouse was made silent and while we were making the first Mickey Mouse sound came. So we decided that there’s no sense in making anything more silent. We immediately switched to sound and we didn’t have any sound equipment or anything else but we went ahead and made ‘em for sound and we eventually got sound on ‘em. And of course it, I think, played the big part in establishing Mickey Mouse.
TT: Where did the idea for Mickey come from?
WD: Well, it came about through a situation that…I was contracting with a middleman for my films. They were being released through Universal and he was a rather unscrupulous character and he thought he could cut in and move in a little better. And I pulled away from him and I was left alone and he had a right to the character.
So that was one of the big lessons I learned and from then on I said, 'There’s no middleman.' He contributed nothing. We did everything. So I had to get a new character. I had been doing a rabbit. It was called Oswald the Rabbit. So I had to have a new character. I was coming back after this meeting in New York and Mrs. Disney was with me and it was on the train. In those days, you know, it was three days over, three days from New York and [that’s] when I said 'We’ve got to get a new character.'
I’d fooled around a lot with little mice and they were always cute character and they hadn’t been overdone in the picture field. They’d been used but never featured. So, well, I decided it would be with a mouse because at that time I didn’t have Mickey as more or less a normal scale human being. I had him as a scaled mouse with overscaled props. Well, that’s how it came about. And then the name came. What would you call him? And the euphony there of 'Mickey Mouse.' I had him 'Mortimer' first and my wife shook her head and then I tried 'Mickey' and she nodded the other way and that was it.
TT: Is it true that you did the voice for Mickey yourself in the early days?
WD: (in Mickey’s voice) Oh yeah. I still do it. (Laughs)
TT: I was going to ask you if you could and you still can. (Laughs)
WD: (in Mickey’s voice) Well, it’s just a falsetto. (in his own voice) And we were fooling around and trying to get a voice for a mouse and we didn’t know what a mouse would sound like, so I said, “It’s kind of like this”. And the guy said, “Well, why don’t you do it?” And I knew I’d always be on the payroll, so (laughing) I did it.
TT: When was Donald Duck born?
WD: Donald came about four or five years after Mickey Mouse and I heard the voice on the radio. It was, well, almost an amateur program and this boy was imitating animals and things and birds. He had this little gag that he ended his act with, about the little duck…he had it [as] a girl duck…
TT: A girl duck?
WD: …reciting 'Mary Had a Little Lamb.' It was an odd voice. When I immediately got in touch with that radio station, they didn’t know who he was. He’d gone. I traced him down and found he was working for a dairy. And he was doing little lectures in the schools on bird life, wearing the uniform of this dairy, advertising the milk. An indirect way of getting their advertising. And he’d move to his classrooms and tell about the birds and how the meadowlark would sound and all of that.
So he wasn’t making much money and I said, 'Well, I can pay yo a little more than they’re paying if you want to come over here and we’ll find out what we can do with that voice.' So he was here on the payroll for about a year before I…the thing that kept throwing me all the time was the girl duck. And finally I said, 'Well, it don’t have to be a girl. It could be a…boy duck!' You know? So, we ended up with Donald.
TT: What about the other characters, like Pluto? Did you think of these yourself or was it sort of a joint [effort]?
WD: Well, they evolved. Pluto. We were doing a short with Mickey Mouse I think was called “The Chain Gang” where he escaped from prison and they sent the hounds after him. And one of these hounds…we were fooling around with this hound…it was on the trail of this runaway mouse, and out of that came this friendly hound character. And from there on, we said, 'Well, we can use him.' And before we knew it, we had him in as Mickey’s pal. Oh, we had changed him a little bit from the hound but that’s how it started. And we’ll spring out of something. Now the Donald Duck came from this voice and we tried to find the character. Then I had a little subject come up where I used a duck and it was Donald. And from there on he blossomed out.
TT: And the family grew.
WD: Yeah.
TT: Where are they all now?
WD: Well, they’re very active right now. We do an awful lot with them in television and we do a certain number of short features to accompany our longer features.
TT: Mickey is still working then?
WD: Oh, yes.
TT: We’re very happy to know that.
WD: He’s 30 years old now.
TT: That’s a pretty old mouse, isn’t it?
WD: Well, through the years, he’s got…he’s a little better constructed mouse than he ever was. I think that’s he’s…
TT: He’s improved with age.
WD: He’s improved with age, yeah.
