Inside the Dream: The Personal Story of Walt Disney
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(c) Disney

Inside the Dream: The Personal Story of Walt Disney

One hundred years after Walt Disney's birth, and some seventy five-plus years after the founding of the Walt Disney Studio, it is an unquestionably daunting task to separate the man from the corporate iconography that now seems to engulf the modern world. In the year Walt would have celebrated his 100th birthday it is particularly appropriate that Disney Editions, under the editorial stewardship of the increasingly prolific Wendy Lefkon, supported the efforts of authors Katherine and Richard Greene and Roundtable Press editor John Glenn to have a go at it. The result is "Inside the Dream: The Personal Story of Walt Disney," a book that is both rewarding and disappointing. It is rewarding for the elegant and deceptively simple approach taken by the authors. It is disappointing for two reasons; first, it's difficult to ignore the fact that the book is the product of the very corporation from which you must separate Walt in order to get the clearest picture of him. But this is a paradox we have to live with if any author is to have the kind of privileged access to the essential source materials like the Walt Disney Archives, the Disney Family Archives, or the willing participation of current and past studio personnel. The second disappointment is that the book is actually intended as a compliment to several other works which are increasingly difficult if not impossible to acquire.

The full set includes this handsome and ultimately very readable book, a now out-of-print CD-Rom entitled "Walt Disney: An Intimate History of the Man and His Magic" (Pantheon Productions Inc., 1998), and a documentary film "Walt Disney: The Man Behind the Myth" (Pantheon Productions Inc, released September of 2001 and co-produced by the Greene's and Walter Miller - Walt's grandson and son of Diane Disney Miller.) Because the book is only one portion of this set, I have to preface the column by noting that it is almost unfair to review it as a stand-alone. Nevertheless, since it is being marketed all by itself, it will have to stand the test by itself as well.

"Inside the Dream" is a fiercely well-organized history of one man's personal and professional accomplishments and a richly illustrated scrapbook assembled like a documentary film (for obvious reasons) that relies heavily on interviews about the man and just the man, Walt Disney. Happily, the authors have done better than previous "authorized" biographers at putting the light in front of Walt rather than behind him. As previously stated, separating Walt from Walt Disney Enterprises is daunting. The founder and his brother Roy have taken on an elevated status of almost mythical proportions, Walt in particular. This book and the film and the CD-Rom all grew out of the efforts of Walt's daughter Diane to "create an honest portrait of my Dad." I will leave it to psychologists to decide whether or not progeny can have true objectivity about their parents, and I'll leave it to Wall Street analysts to decide whether or not any arm of a corporate entity could ever entertain a similar objectivity about its founder. Instead I'll applaud the authors and Ms. Miller for their efforts to take Walt Disney down from the pedestal and delivery him in a fairly un-gilded form.

The temptation for previous Walt Disney biographers have been to do one of two things - to either cloud Walt's accomplishments further by shrouding him in the mist of platitudes or to take the debunking route and try and expose some calculating swindler behind the curtain. Katherine and Richard Greene take neither route, and instead they simply wash away all the polemics and all the lofty praise and show us just plain Walt. So if you can set aside expectations of any in-depth probing of the man's psyche or hopes for a more academic analysis of some Machiavelli of Hollywood kitsch, this book can be a wonderful sort of "Walt unplugged." It's assembled as if the writers decided to stroll through someone's hometown, stop folks on their way to the store or pop into the local diner, and ask, "So, what was Walt really like?" The variety of responses is as satisfying as it is enlightening. It leaves you smiling and sighing with a kind of wistful resignation to the fact that true creative genius is indeed a very rare thing.