The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 500

KSI i 4.1 by Michael Fessier Jr. i "So," I asked the lady, "what's happening?" She smiled. It was so quiet in the tomb of an office you could hear the drone of cars going by on Buena Vista two blocks away, beyond all the sound stages and parking lots. "Not a thing," she said. "You know it all used to happen here.

Nothing went on in this studio that didn't go through this office. Now on a big day, if I'm lucky somebody may come by to say hello." She swiveled back to her typewriter, clackety clacking her way through a mountain of letters. We the Disney press agent and I went out through the glass door, past the trophy case jammed with high-gloss tributes from an appreciative world and out into the hall there on the third floor of the Disney animation building. "Somebody suggested we turn it into a shrine," he said soberly of the late Walt Disney's office we had just visited. "But that's a little too much, don't you think? And there are the persons who want to name streets and even towns after him but we discourage it.

You go and name every hot dog stand after him and the name isn't going to be worth very much, is it?" I agreed with him. I was at Disney studios gathering material for a story on the making of Jungle Book, the last animated feature to be produced under Disney's supervision. Walter Elias Disney had begun in Kansas City with Laugh Grams in 1921 and had finished with Kipling. I had great plans for the story yet I kept getting detoured onto the subject of Disney himself and how the Disney empire, which at his death was approaching the dimensions of the third major world power, would function without its great sad-faced, Missouri-born Caesar. I asked the press agent what he thought.

He cleared his throat and fingered his maroon tie. "Well," he said finally, "there isn't the clearing house for ideas there used to be, and it's strange not seeing Walt around the studio anymore, but really Like everyone else there he was forced into the uncomfortable position of tightroping between two loyalties. One was to Disney's memory course he was and the other to the studio as it now was. Management, concerned with the now and the future, did not need its troops moping about pining for the days when their Uncle Walt made everything happen. So mostly at Disney they talk about the "team" veterans well-grounded in the Disney methods and attitudes.

And they talk, but not so much, about the "committee" which now makes the studio's major creative decisions. On it are seven executives and producers, among them Disney's son-in-law, Ron Miller. If you want an answer you go to them, even though Disney himself had said many times "a studio cannot be run by committee. Somebody has to make the final decisions." Disney, who did not draw or write per se, through his unchallenged genius for utilizing the genius of others had personally constructed, vision by vision, a realm with subjects and property and considerable in- PAINTING BY EOWINA GAINES 16.