Disney fans will finally get to know Howard Ashman on a personal level through the documentary film Howard, premiering on Disney+ on August 7th. The film was created by legendary producer Don Hahn, whose credits include Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Beauty and the Beast, The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Lion King, and the documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty about the Disney Animation renaissance that kicked off with The Little Mermaid. That film made it abundantly clear that one of the key players in the resurgence of top quality animated Disney films was Howard Ashman. Don Hahn recently shared details about his film Howard during a virtual press conference.
“It’s not consciously a sequel, but it relies on the same techniques,” Don Hahn shared about the connection between Howard and Waking Sleeping Beauty. “It’s a movie made with found objects. It’s really made with whatever we could find and no contemporary talking heads, no voiceover, and so stylistically it was the same. In a funny way, it’s an expansion of Waking Sleeping Beauty. You can say you have the foundation fairytale in Waking Sleeping Beauty, now here’s an insert of one person’s life who was probably so important to us that we wouldn’t be sitting here today talking about Howard, arguably. I think people will find it a comfortable fit if you liked Waking Sleeping Beauty because it’s told very much in the same style.”
The Disney Animation Renaissance was fueled by a lot of creative talent at the studio, but Don Hahn shared that Howard was the flame that really ignited the movement. “He really pushed us at a time when we needed pushing,” Don explained. “You have to remember, I started in the ‘70’s with Tim Burton and Brad Bird and John Lassister and all those people and we were hungry to show that we could make movies like Walt Disney made movies. Whether we did or not is another point, but we wanted to. And at the same time, a great group of executives showed up at the studio; Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenburg and Roy Disney… At the same time, Howard Ashman showed up, so you have all these elements happening… Howard was exactly what we needed at that time. You talk to anybody, any of those people that I just mentioned, he was the match that got thrown into the gasoline tank just at the right moment.”
For Don Hahn, who worked closely with Howard Ashman on two of his three Disney films, the project reconnected him with the musical theater genius in a new way beyond their professional relationship. “I was really inspired to make it because I felt like it was an untold story. I felt like no one had really written a book about Howard or a biography. He was important in my life, but I feel like people know his music but they don’t know this man. I was kind of afraid it would get lost, to be honest. So I started digging into it and I sat down with his sister, Sarah, and kind of blurted out one day at lunch, ‘I think I’m going to do a documentary about Howard.’ It was kind of an impulse that I said it and that was four or five years ago.”
“It really was those sit down interviews with his sister or his partner Bill that were on one hand difficult, I was intimidated by it to be honest, because you’re asking someone to tell you something really intimate about their family, but on the other hand they were really generous with me,” Don added about connecting viewers with the two people who knew Howard Ashman best. “And Howard’s sister reminds me of talking to Howard… You remember what an interesting guy he was and just how smart he was. We always said Howard could’ve been a trial lawyer, he was smart and prepared and learned and funny. It’s that great combination of all those things that made him memorable I think to us. Not always easy, he was not against throwing an ashtray every once in a while, but still a good collaborator.”
Howard is not only a touching tribute to an immensely talented man, but also a compelling film. “I had to establish a timeline of some sort just to say here’s the critical moments and the moments of conflict,” Don explained about all of the footage and interview pieces that didn’t make the final cut. “I structured it like an animated movie or any movie for that matter. Movies are about conflict and they’re about characters that have to bump up against each other and so it’s trying to find those moments where Howard had to push up against other characters for better or worse, whether it was Alan [Menken] or a director or Marvin Hamlisch or whoever and then you string all those moments on a line and say okay, here are the key moments and I have ninety-minutes. The directive in my own head is to say how can I string these together in a way that’s compelling and not boring.”
One of the most compelling moments in the film is when Howard Ashman finds out that he is HIV positive, which came on the same day as a public talk.“The 92nd Street Y is the day Howard finds out he’s HIV positive and that’s a discovery we didn’t make until we were deep in the movie,” Don shared. “Bill, his partner, said ‘You know, I don’t know exactly when Howard was tested and found out.’ And then he went home and found out it happened to be that day and so that 92nd Street Y appearance became haunting because Howard had to get up on stage in front of an audience and talk about his work while he was just diagnosed with a life threatening disease. Dispassionately as a filmmaker, that’s an amazing thing to have as a tool and we had no photographs. There were no photographs, there was no video of him at the 92nd Street Y… So it was a leap of faith that we could just do theater of the mind. That we could go into a radio show for a little while.” Don Hahn personally traveled to New York City to take photos of the venue, which were then recreated in a computer so the camera could move through the space, but the chairs on stage are empty while the audio plays.
“I want people to see Howard as an entire human being, to kind of humanize his story,” Don Hahn explained about his goal for the final film. “So on one hand you can say yes, he was a genius, because he was I think, but on the other hand you can say he had a lot of the struggles that you and I have. He was really insecure about his work, he was afraid of being humiliated sometimes and we say it in the documentary… I want people to see that we all have aspirations in our life and creative sides of our life and if Howard can go through some of these struggles, we certainly can, too. And Howard’s life was joyful, so interesting and learned. He went to Indiana University and he has his masters degree in the great American artform of theater and so he had this wonderful craft going along with his artistry and that was important to me, too. Sometimes we think of artists as just having this gift or not, you either have talent or you don’t, you either can draw or you can’t. But I want people to see that no, there’s work. There’s just plain work that goes into it and it’s hard work and it’s long hours and it’s a commitment and that’s part of genius also.”
Disney+ may seem like the perfect home for Howard, but that wasn’t something Don Hahn foresaw when he set out to make the film. “It was never a Disney film. I did it as an independent film, not with any evil purpose but just because I wanted to have license to put the story together in a way that I think is best and then if I do my job right, it will be an interesting story. Because it deals with some interesting issues, it deals with a gay man from Baltimore who writes songs for a Disney movie who is afraid of getting fired because he’s contracted AIDS and eventually dies of AIDS is a difficult subject, but it’s paired with a lot of joy and a lot of amazing work. So I made it as an independent movie, financed it and made it independently knowing or trusting that someday I’d be able to sell it to a streaming service. At the time, Disney didn’t have a streaming service, so it would’ve been Netflix or somebody else. And that, at least, allowed my mind to be clear enough to put together the story dispassionately. I didn’t put it together for any particular audience. It’s completely viewable for a Disney audience, but it just has more of an independent feel to it. So that’s how it started out and Disney+ has really embraced it and feel like it’s a film for them, which I’m really grateful for, because it speaks to issues that are human and everything that Howard was is things that our audience may be struggling with and I think will find inspiring.”
As for who at Disney decided the film would be a good fit, the message came from the top of the company. “The biggest piece of patience was to wait for it to get to Disney+ because Disney+ wasn’t really around when the movie was being made,” Don Hahn said about the period between finishing the film and its August 7th release. “I have to point out to Bob Iger because he’s someone I knew and trusted from my Disney days. I sent the movie to Bob and he saw it and wrote back. He just said, ‘We should get this on our streaming service because it’s our audience, it’s the kind of people we should be telling stories about.’ So that just meant we had to hold onto the movie for a long, long time and that was just an exercise in patience, but I’m glad we did because now it’s going to be seen by a lot more people and hopefully they’ll enjoy it.”
You can see and enjoy Howard when it premieres Friday, August 7th, exclusively on Disney+.
