Saving Mr. Banks : 'The ship has sailed'

'The ship has sailed'

I swear the way Disney said that to Pamela, I wanna Just slap him. If he had said that to me, I would have attacked him and said "the ship has not sailed!! I said no animation in the film!! Now take it or I will sue you for not keeping your promises! I have it all on tape your promises!! You promised!!" I'd even grab him by his suit until it was wrinkled if he said that to me. He made this woman a promise and lied. He promised her no animation. How dare he say "the ship has sailed."

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It's a sequence. The actors are real.

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It doesn't matter. She said NO animation. None.

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I think they were quoting what he says in the movie...

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It absolutely happened in real life. She probably felt like doing all the things you said, but her upbringing and manners didn't allow it. Plus she probably sensed that it was a losing battle. This was the premiere of the finished film, not a screening of a final draft before the finished film.

Well, the city's being built and I'm winning this game. So don't interrupt us with trifles.

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She made a fortune on this movie. That prob helped her get over it

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Buy she never got over it. Never.

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But

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I know. But it made me sick he pulled that. He felt he could get away with anything. He didn't care about her beloved father. All he wanted was money. All he wanted was the title.

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He didn't care about her beloved father.


How could he care about someone he didn't know ANYTHING about?

http://www.orlandoweekly.com/orlando/fact-checking-saving-mr-banks-with-disney-historian-jim-korkis/Content?oid=2240838


Film: Travers left Hollywood without signing the rights agreement, and Walt Disney flew after her on the next plane. Disney finally persuaded her by bonding over their mutual daddy issues.
Fact: “Walt did not immediately hop on a plane to follow her to England when she left, but the contract was quickly signed. … It is doubtful that Walt even knew anything about her father or her issues about him. There is certainly no evidence that the topic ever came up. Travers herself was prone to denial about anything unpleasant. … Walt never considered his years delivering newspapers for his father in Kansas City as traumatic, but just considered it hard work. As a skinny 9-year-old boy, he did struggle with snowdrifts higher than he was.”



All he wanted was money.


What money? The money it made at the box office? You can't predict the amount of money a movie will make while making it. NO ONE can predict the success or failure of a film. If that were true, then the studios would make nothing but money-makers.

We get it. You despise Walt Disney. Just post it once, and be done with it. What do you hope to achieve by posting the same stuff over and over?

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He knew it was gonna be a success. He was a successful, money making businessman. So yes, he knew it was gonna be huge at the box office. He only cared about making money.

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He knew it was gonna be a success. He was a successful, money making businessman. So yes, he knew it was gonna be huge at the box office.


I have two books on Walt Disney and the studio sitting in front of me, and both say otherwise.

Neal Gabler's Disney biography (http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51LNqvt%2B3oL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg) says this (page 600):


...everyone seemed to know that the film was special. Even at a rough screening at the studio for the sales force before the score or animation had been added, Walt reported to Bill Anderson that the reaction was "terrific," though Walt was still so afraid that he might be deluding himself that he asked a longtime exhibitor to see it.


The Disney Studio Story by Richard Holliss and Brian Sibley(https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51YcO0L4R5L._SL500_SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg) says this (page 83):


"As the original Mary Poppins budget of $5 million began to grow," Walt later recalled, "I never saw a sad face around the entire Studio and this made me nervous. I knew the picture would have to gross $10 million for us to break even. But still there was no negative head-shaking. No prophets of doom. Even Roy was happy. He didn't even ask me to show the unfinished picture to a banker. The horrible thought struck me- suppose the staff had finally conceded that I knew what I was doing?"

Walt began worrying in case the picture was running too long (it eventually ran for 139 minutes plus an intermission), and he contemplated cutting the lullaby 'Stay Awake" and the episode in which Mary Poppins takes the children to visit her Uncle Albert and they become infected with laughing gas, but Walt eventually relented and decided to let the film run to its completed length. However, he continued to fuss about the film. "The suspense, Walt later said, "was too much." He decided to consult an old friend, exhibitor David Wallerstein of Balaban and Katz, who could "smell a hit-or a flop-through a six-foot wall." After seeing a screening of part of the film, Wallerstein told him: "You can relax, Walt. The picture will be a tremendous success." Only then did Walt start "smiling right back at the staff."


Both prove that he was initially nervous about the film's chances. You might want to do some research before you become too confident in your knowledge.

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All the same, he was still a Jerk, a monster, a traitor and a liar. He promised her nothing happens without her consent. She got all of his promises all on tape and he lied with the tapes. Even though he made promises no cartoons and all on tape, he still put it in. He also didn't invite her to the premiere originally. After she sold him her rights he dared to not invite her. He's a monster. If I was her, I Would've done exactly what she did in the film. I would've gave him back the contract and stormed out with a huff with no signature. Also, Disney has hurt her three times. He destroyed her Mary Poppins, Disney has portrayed her the wrong way in Saving Mr. Banks. Now Disney is making a sequel to Mary Poppins after P.L. Travers wrote in her will very demanding that her work can never be made into media ever again. Disney only had the rights to the one film. Hell, Walt Disney even tried to persuade Travers to let him make sequels but she refused (Good woman). And her will cannot be gone against or they can get in trouble.

I love you, Kristen Stewart. :) You are so beautiful and talented. I would love to perform with you.

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I can see what you are saying in these posts. That Disney has produced some wonderful, amazing things is beyond doubt. Of course they did. But your point is valid. I've known people who knew Disney and confirmed that this is exactly the kind of guy he was. He was in breach of contract a lot of times and got away with it because he was W*A*L*T D*I*S*N*E*Y.

But it doesn't really do much good to get too outraged. Any time a film is made based on an existing novel, things get jazzed up for dramatic effect. Stories are told way out of sequence. Things that didn't happen in the book get added in.

And a lot of what happened between P.L. and Disney is just the way big "f you" movie studios are. MGM and L.B. Mayer, for God's sake. It's Disney's "wholesome family entertainment" image that infuriates us when things like this come to light. Disney was just another film mogul in business to make $ -- all that stuff about magic and dreams and all, he may really have believed those on some level, but mostly that was just his schtick to get publicity. And "f you" if you were a creator who objected to what he did to your work.

Breach of contract was pretty normal for Walt and continues at Disney Studios. Look up Peggy Lee's lawsuit for Lady & the Tramp.

Saving Mr. Banks of course also goes off the track and includes things that didn't happen or that happened differently. (It's not a documentary, and somebody should make one.) But the story of her work with Disney is pretty accurate. There's an article called "Becoming Mary Poppins" in the New Yorker that reveals more about Travers' real childhood and adult life as well as her work with Disney and those tapes.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/12/19/becoming-mary-poppins

Well, the city's being built and I'm winning this game. So don't interrupt us with trifles.

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We get it. You despise Walt Disney.

I don't think you do get it. It's not about despising Disney, which is a very childish argument (sorry!) in the reductio ad absurdum vein. As is your protestation about Disney's expectations of money -- of course he expected money out of it, or he wouldn't have invested time, staff and money in making the film.

So: not about despising Disney, but about trying to balance the register of the victor writing the history, as the Disney Corp. has done with Yravers. For years they've been making her out to be a bitch, impossibly difficult, stubborn, wilful and ignorant of the movie business, implying that she was so inherently stupid as to go against Uncle Walt's wishes and have her own point of view. It essentially covers up the fact that Disney gave her a whole string of promises and didn't keep any of them; that they just expected her to fall into line without any sort of explanation about how they liked to work, and when she didn't (because, truthfully, she didn't know much about the movie business and had a lot of unrealistic expectations) she was shunned, badly treated, laughed at and complained about quite openly, and the subjected to decades now of character assassination and corporate myth-making. All to cover up the fact that Disney broke his promises, and then didn't know how to work with someone who didn't say yes to his every expectation.

I can see why you might not understand, though, if you expect someone with a counter-opinion to yours to just go away and stop posting. But why should the threads about this film only be populated by people intent on slighting Travers' character?



You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.

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I never said that Walt didn't expect money out of it-all I said was he didn't know HOW MUCH the film would make, or if the public would even take to it at all (Walt, like any other filmmaker had his fair share of flops- PINOCCHIO, FANTASIA, BAMBI, SLEEPING BEAUTY, etc. didn't make money until reissues/video).

I never intended, in my posts, to slight Travers' character. That was the farthest thing from my mind, and I'm truthfully sorry if they were taken that way. I also don't expect anyone to go away and stop posting.

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