Bob Welbaum: Rolly Crump, One Special Imagineer
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Part III – The Museum of the Weird
“Before we brought Small World back [to Disneyland], right after we came back from the World’s Fair, none of us had anything to do,” Rolly explained. Because of his earlier development work for the Haunted Mansion, Rolly just started drawing some unusual sketches. He was influenced by two films: “Juliet of the Spirits” by Federico Fellini and Jean Cocteau’s 1946 adaptation of “Beauty and the Beast”. He was especially inspired by the fantasy of Cocteau’s “Beauty”: the Beast’s hallways were lit with human arms holding torches, and they would lead him as he walked; a bowl of fruit was supported by an arm on a table, and when the Beast reached for a grape the arm would bring the bowl to him, etc. Rolly felt that these were exactly the kinds of effects the Haunted Mansion needed, as opposed to the way it was being designed with too many effects typical of any haunted house. So he made between 20 and 30 sketches of strange items: a “Candleman” whose fingers were on fire, an armchair that stood up and talked to you, a gypsy cart that came to life, and so forth. These designs were especially fitting considering the Haunted Mansion was being planned at that time as a walk-through attraction.
There was a meeting with Walt to present Haunted Mansion projects, and everyone else was doing those typical haunted-house effects. As Rolly remembers, “My management, Dick Irvine, wasn’t too happy with what I was doing. He thought it was too far out. And when we had the meeting with Walt, he kind of tucked it off into a corner, ‘Bring your stuff in, Rolly, but just stick it in the corner.’” That was okay with Rolly. No one, not even he, knew quite what to do with this; he just felt to could be used somehow.
There was about a four-hour presentation with everyone’s ideas being showcased to Walt. Rolly added, “And they were nice enough to put Walt facing away from my stuff, behind him.” (Rolly mentioned he “could go on forever” about the dynamics of meetings with Walt. For example, whenever there was a buy-off on ideas, many people disappeared because if Walt didn’t like it, they didn’t want to be around.) Finally Walt said “Is that all?”
And Dick Irvine replied, “Yes, that’s all.”
Then Walt motioned, “What’s this behind me?”
“That’s just some stuff that Rolly did.”
Of course, Walt immediately asked, “Well, what’s the stuff that Rolly did?”
“Well, Rolly, tell him.” It was a real “Oh, s___” moment as Rolly’s coworkers were most willing to let him try to explain what he had. Rolly did his best, telling about the “Beauty and the Beast” movie and how he thought the Haunted Mansion needed something weird.
Walt’s reaction was entirely predictable: “Yea, but Jesus, Rolly, how are you going to use it?”
Maybe architecturally? Have some of the objects come to life? The rest of the meeting quickly degenerated into multiple rounds of “What are you going to do with it?” “I don’t know.” In the middle of all this back-and-forth, Rolly remembers “Everybody’s sitting there looking like ‘Okay, ding ding, there it is, it’s yours!’”
Finally, Walt simply said “J____ C_____” and got up and left. Rolly recalls “Everybody said ‘You were a little frayed, Rolly.’ And I said ‘Yea, I know, but it’s just an idea.’”
“Well,” Rolly continues, “I came to work the next morning. I always got in there a quarter to eight, and Walt’s sitting at my desk. I go ‘Oh, god.’ He looked at me and he said, ‘You SOB, I didn’t sleep all night.’”
Rolly was very apologetic, but Walt quickly continued. “You know, that stuff that you showed me yesterday, I didn’t know what it was. But now I know what it is.”
With a mixture of relief and awe, Rolly replied, “Oh god, you do?”
“Yes.”
“Great! Will you tell me?”
Of course Walt did: “We’re going to pretend like we’ve collected all this stuff from all over the world. And we’re going to do a ‘Museum of the Weird’. And when you exit from the Haunted Mansion, you can actually wander through all of this. And these are big pieces of glass, and you can do your illusion work back in there and everything.”
Over the course of about two hours, Walt talked about his ideas. Then he had Dick Irvine get the Imagineers together – Marc Davis, Claude Coats, the entire crew – and explained the concept to them. This time the words Rolly heard from his coworkers were “Great!” and “Wonderful!”. When Walt finally left, they were all quick to tell him, “Jeez Rolly, we always knew you had something.”
“Needless to say,” Rolly told his NFFC audience, “it gave me a clue of my peers, how I could really trust them.”
Unfortunately, Walt’s death brought a halt to further development, although it did get a spot on the “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” television show. Otherwise, Rolly was convinced the Museum of the Weird would have been built.
As a final thought, when Walt had finished talking, Rolly said he did confide to Walt that perhaps his imagination had run a bit too wild, that maybe he shouldn’t have gone that far out. Walt’s reply was telling: “No Rolly, you go as far out as you want. I’m the one who will bring you back.”
Rolly told another story which illustrates the differences between the Disney he began working for and the Disney of today.
An early Disneyland job was the refurbishment and expansion of the Adventureland Bazaar in 1962 – his first chance to be an art director. He was finishing up the Bazaar, and on this particular evening there was going to be a Grad Nite. That afternoon, two nice ladies came into the Bazaar carrying hats, rubber lizards, and rubber snakes in boxes. “Can we put our hats and lizards in here?” they asked. Rolly said “Yea, are you going to sell them out of the Bazaar?” And they quickly replied “No, no, no, we’re selling them out of our hat shop out there.”
Rolly peered outside, about where the Jungle Cruise exit was. Nothing was there. So he asked the obvious: “What hat shop?” One of the ladies replied “Oh, it’ll be there this afternoon.”
Rolly kept looking outside at the empty space. Maybe they’ll bring a truck in and set a hat shop down, sort of like a ticket booth? In any event, Grad Nite was going to start at 7 pm.
As Rolly described it: “At 3:30 some carpenters showed up. Then the electricians showed up. Then the Drapery Department showed up. And it was almost like time-lapse photography with all these people… And in three hours they built a damn hat shop. And I hate to tell you this, but it’s the same hat shop that’s down there today.”
Rolly then speculated on what the procedure would be like in the present [1993] business environment. About a month just for the drawings and engineering? Then consumer panels? “And you’re lucky if you get a hat shop like that in six months. It’s a whole different time frame. In those days, it was a family. It was an incredible family.”
In 1995, the NFFC recognized Roland “Rolly” Crump as a Disney Legend for his multiple contributions to the Disney legacy. Rolly retired from The Walt Disney Company in 1998. For more on Rolly (including stories about his work on the “Enchanted Tiki Room”) and other Imagineers, see Walt Disney’s Imagineering Legends and the Genesis of the Disney Theme Park by Jeff Kurtti.
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-- Bob Welbaum Bob Welbaum is a longtime Disneyana fan and NFFC member from the Dayton, Ohio area. -- May 5, 2009
For more about the NFFC, its conventions, and its Disney Legends program, visit www.nffc.org.