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.50 Released in color in the summer of 1955, Davy Crockett, King of theWild Frontier grossed $2.5 million on the tickets of customers who had mostlyseen the shows before, but only in black and white.Disney spent more on the Crockett shows than other TV producers didon comparable fare, not just by shooting in color but also by shooting on lo-cation in North Carolina and Tennessee.There is, however, no confusingthose shows with more polished Hollywood theatrical products.The climacticbattle at the Alamo, in the third episode, was all too obviously shot on aconfined sound stage.Writing about the Crockett craze more than thirty yearslater, the newspaper columnist Bob Greene was undoubtedly correct whenhe pointed to Fess Parker himself as the critical element in the TV showssuccess: In his portrayal of Crockett, Parker brought to the small screen apresence that was palpable; people looked at him, and they listened to him,and they tingled.The face and the voice combined to represent everythingthat was ideally male in the United States. 51Although he leaped to celebrity in a TV show, Parker s impact was that ofa bona fide movie star.He was tall (six foot five) and handsome, but so weremany other young leading men in the 1950s.Parker brought to the screen twopriceless assets in addition to his good looks.For one thing, he was relaxed infront of the camera as few actors are, especially in TV, where the demands forspeed and efficiency have always encouraged actors to be tight and guarded.For another, he could deliver dialogue with complete conviction, as in his stir-ring speech to Congress attacking President Andrew Jackson s treatment ofthe Indians in the second Crockett episode.Parker seemed emotionally open,as good actors must, but the emotions were those of a strong and even stoicman one with a sly sense of humor, suited to grinnin down a bear. Disney had gone into television expecting to manipulate it to his own ends,by promoting his park and his theatrical films, but television had demon-strated through the Crockett craze how unpredictable it really was; and ithad bestowed on him a full-fledged star whom he had signed to a personalcontract, rather than a contract with the studio, and whose career was in hishands. We ve had lots of oªers from other studios wanting to borrow FessParker, Disney said in May 1955, but we ve got four Davy Crockett picturesto make, and they ll have to wait until next winter for Fess. The idea ini-250 he was i nteres ted i n s omethi ng els e tially was to film four more Crockett episodes for Disneyland.The first twoof the second batch were filmed on location, in Ohio and along the Missis-sippi River, starting in June 1955.52In mid-July, Disney pulled Parker and his costar, Buddy Ebsen, away fromlocation shooting and back to Los Angeles to sing at the Hollywood Bowlon a Thursday and Friday evening, July 14 and 15.Each evening s Tributeto Walt Disney, made up of music associated with Disney films, concludedwith The Ballad of Davy Crockett, sung by Parker, Ebsen, and the RogerWagner Chorale.53 The occasion was the official opening of the Disneylandpark the following Sunday, July 17, an event that would be nationally tele-vised by ABC.The park would not be completed on its opening day and not just be-cause Disney frequently emphasized that he considered it a work perpetuallyin progress, in language like this: The park means a lot to me, in that it ssomething that will never be finished, something that I can keep developing,keep plussing and adding to. Disneyland was not finished in any sense, andnot really ready for guests, but they were coming anyway.The constructionschedule had proved to be difficult and finally impossible to meet.Certain stories turn up in almost every account of Disneyland s con-struction, and sometimes they tell more than might first appear.Randy Brightwrote that Disney found it very difficult to understand the necessity for cer-tain costly building materials and methods.As a longtime filmmaker, Walthad imagined that Disneyland would be built more like a motion-pictureset, on a temporary basis.He had to be introduced to the real world of oc-cupancy regulations and building codes.One day, on a walk-through of theconstruction site with [Joe] Fowler [a retired navy admiral who supervised con-struction] and Dick Irvine, Disney became furious when he saw the amountof concrete that was being poured for the Main Street train station founda-tion. By the time Joe gets through burying all our money underground, hesnapped, we won t have a thing left for the show! 54Disney was similarly incensed by the excavation for a dry dock for the MarkTwain, a scaled-back stern-wheeler: Joe Fowler viewed the hole, a dry dock-to-be for the Mark Twain during its important maintenance overhauls, as anoperational necessity.To Walt Disney, it looked more like the excavation forKing Tut s tomb. By the time you get through with that damn ditch, wewon t have any land left! exclaimed Disney.For a long time thereafter, hecalled it Joe s Ditch and gave him, perhaps, one final sarcastic jab by officiallydubbing it Fowler s Harbor. 55es capi ng from fi lm, 1 953 1 959 251 The extremely tight schedule virtually guaranteed that there would be costoverruns and that the park would not be ready on its opening day both ofwhich happened but Disney, anticipating the construction of what hethought would be something like a huge movie set, may not have realized justhow tight the schedule really was, or how ominous the threat of cost over-runs.(For one thing, the schedule was an invitation to labor problems, whicharrived in the form of a plumbers strike shortly before the park opened.)As it happened, the estimated cost of building the park roughly quadru-pled in the year construction was under way, as Joe Fowler explained toBright: At ground-breaking, I had a budget of four and a half million dol-lars.That was before we had any plans at all.Two months later, in September,it went up to seven million dollars.In November, it was up to eleven mil-lion.We were still talking eleven million dollars in April [1955] when I waswalking down Main Street with Roy and a representative from Bank ofAmerica who scanned the project and said it looked closer to fifteen million.But by the time opening day had arrived, we had spent seventeen milliondollars [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]