To celebrate our fourth wedding anniversary last month, my husband Matt and I flew to San Francisco, rented a car and drove all over the state of California, visiting friends and family who graciously hosted us at their homes. One of our most anticipated destinations was The Walt Disney Family Museum located in San Francisco’s picturesque national park, The Presidio, which previously served as an army post. Apart from the museum itself, what amazed us was the vast knowledge of its Content and Research Manager, Bri Bertolaccini, who answered any questions we had while illuminating countless fascinating aspects of Walt’s story—the raw artistic impulse that ultimately built an empire, the number of times he had to “fail forward” throughout his career, the fact he always put his money back into his projects and didn’t make a fortune until the opening of Disneyland, etc.
So impressed were we with Bri’s insights that as soon as we returned home, we knew that we had to schedule an interview with her. Last week, Matt and I had the pleasure of speaking with Bri via Zoom about the phenomenal work she’s done at the museum, as well as some of the female trailblazers spotlighted throughout it.
Rebecca Martin Fagerholm (RF): What first got you into the world of Disney?
Bri Bertolaccini (BB): I was a student at San Francisco State University, and I really did not know what I wanted to do. I grew up in Bakersfield, which is a very small valley town in California, and it did not have a lot of opportunities for me to become involved the arts. I didn’t even know what my heart desired, and as I was away at school, I was struggling to connect with people and build a community. That is when I remember thinking, ‘I just wish I had a little bit of Disney in my life.’ I had grown up going to Disneyland with my family, and I decided to buy my first Disney history book. I began memorizing it and if you look at it now, it’s all highlighted up. One day, I was sitting at a bus stop and saw a banner for The Walt Disney Family Museum. They were having an exhibition on the Disney artist Mary Blair, and I was like, ‘This is in San Francisco?!” I didn’t even want to buy a ticket to the museum—I wanted to be a part of it.
I got involved with their volunteer program, which changed my whole trajectory in school. I became especially interested in marketing, and how that related to Disney history. At the time, I was 19, and social media was still kind of building. I felt that, if channeled in the right way, social media could make Walt Disney’s story more relatable. The museum itself was still kind of struggling with how to achieve this, so I just saw an opportunity and started bugging people, asking, “Do you need help? I’m willing to do anything.” That is how I came to the attention of Caitlin Moneypenny-Johnston, the museum’s Director of Marketing & Communications, who is still my boss and mentor. She gave me the opportunity to transcribe a twenty-hour interview that Walt Disney had done, which has been a huge asset to the museum. People began to see how knowledgeable I was about Disney history, and whenever I couldn’t answer a particular question, I knew that I could find the answer.
RF: How do you go about presenting all of this information in a way that is fun and relatable?
BB: There are a lot of different avenues and channels that I think are super-useful. Disney is such a huge institution, and there are so many topics within Walt’s life to break down. Some of that lends itself to our blog for longer form explorations, whereas social media provides us with other ways of engaging with people. Certain audiences will relate to the nostalgia of an archival photo that we post. People’s attention spans are not as big these days, and I have someone on my team who really understands short form video content. We’ll talk about different ideas, and then the next day, she’ll have made a beautiful video based on what we discussed. I never could’ve done that on my own. One of our most watched videos was an interview clip of Margaret Kerry, the woman who did the reference footage for Tinkerbell in “Peter Pan.” She recently passed away, so we did a memorial post on her, and I was surprised by the level of interest it received from people. In just a couple minutes, you get to hear about her experience of working with Walt Disney.
Matt Fagerholm (MF): I’d love to hear more about Mary Blair and a name that stuck in our minds from the museum tour, Margaret Winkler.
BB: Most people do not understand the impact that Margaret Winkler has had on film, cartoons and animation. The animation industry as a whole can tie itself all the way back to her. Even though Margaret was New York-based, she was the first female producer and distributor of animated films in Hollywood, as well as the first woman to become a member of the Motion Picture Producers Guild. She gave Walt Disney really strict parameters regarding the things that she wanted. After seeing his animated short, “Alice’s Wonderland,” which featured a live-action girl, Virginia Davis, in an animated world, she told Walt, “I’ll pay to distribute your cartoons, but you need to cast in them the same little girl who was in the short. Then we have a deal.”
I think you see a lot of Walt’s ingenuity and passion in the letter he wrote to Virginia’s parents—which we have on display at the museum—where he is trying to convince them to move their family all the way from Kansas City to Hollywood. The fact that they did is pretty remarkable, and it was all because of Margaret Winkler. She would also go on to pitch Walt and his studio to animate the character of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit for Universal Pictures, and if we didn’t have Oswald, we wouldn’t have Mickey Mouse. Her life is interesting because even though it does unfold like many women’s stories of the time—she got married and her husband took over her career and business—for the handful of years that she did spend working in the industry, she was really impactful, making characters like Felix the Cat household names.
As for Mary Blair, she’s really known as a colorist, and Walt Disney was fascinated with her art style. He said she was one of the studio’s most influential artists, though in the beginning, her work didn’t jump off the page. She was working with her husband at Disney, and was actually about to leave the studio when she heard about a goodwill trip to South America being organized. Walt was picking out some artists to go with him on the trip, and Mary felt that she needed to join him. That trip changed her entire art style, and the colors you get in “Peter Pan” and “Alice in Wonderland” are directly from her.
Her style has been dubbed as “childish” because it involves a lot of easy shapes and colors without a ton of detail, but it’s very appealing. She ended up illustrating a bunch of children’s books, and you can see her designs in the “It’s a Small World” ride. What frustrated Walt was the fact her concept drawings couldn’t be animated in the exact same way. There are a lot of arguments that were recorded of animators being upset that Walt wanted them to animate how Mary Blair drew, and then Walt being upset when the animators wouldn’t do it. The relationship that Walt had throughout his entire life with Mary was really interesting.
MF: Among the clips seen throughout the museum is one from the 1935 short, “Who Killed Cock Robin?”, which is glimpsed in Alfred Hitchcock’s film, “Sabotage,” a year before “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was released.
BB: The popular culture at the time was not like today, where we have so much at our fingertips in terms of content. There were only a handful of cartoons in theaters, and that’s all you were really able to see. I think Disney’s cartoons may have had even more of a cultural impact at that time than their films do today, so I think it was a common thing for people to reference those shorts at the height of their popularity. For seven consecutive years, Walt won the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film, and “Who Killed Cock Robin?” was one of his nominated works, so it doesn’t surprise me that it would pop up in another filmmaker’s work.
MF: We just found that Walt Disney’s Birthplace is located not far from our favorite bike trail, The 606, in Chicago. Tell us about the presentation you’ll be doing at the D23 Expo about Walt Disney’s houses.
BB: I think there’s always been an interest in where Walt Disney comes from, and certainly the museum has a vested interest in that personal side of his story. The Walt Disney Birthplace is a completely independent nonprofit organization that holds incredible community events throughout the year. That particular house in Chicago was designed by Walt’s mother, Flora, and then built by his dad, Elias, so it’s a really interesting piece of history that still exists. It’s where Walt Disney was born along with a few of his other siblings, and he spoke about it a lot throughout his life. He later moved to Marceline, Missouri, and lived on a farm there for only a couple of years, yet the experience was so formative for him that he referenced it in his work. The Main Street in Disneyland is directly inspired by the one in Marceline, which is the location of The Walt Disney Hometown Museum.
For this week’s D23: Ultimate Fan Event, we created a miniature model of one of Walt Disney’s houses that he built around the height of his career, right before he built Disneyland. He finally had made enough money to buy some land, and built a miniature railroad around the house that unfortunately no longer exists—it was demolished when the property was sold and turned into a mega-mansion. I’ve been going down my own rabbit holes, including a file with around 150 photos that have never been scanned before of Walt’s final home, the Carolwood Estate. The Walt Disney Company does such a great job of keeping his legacy alive through their intellectual property—the early films that Walt Disney did—but what I think the museum can really do is highlight him as a person. A lot of people like to point to him as a statue or a figurehead of a company, and when the museum was founded, it was pretty common for people not to realize that he was an actual person with a family himself. So for this presentation, I thought it would be interesting to highlight a couple of the houses that Walt was influential in designing for his own family.
MF: Walt Disney’s love of miniatures is apparent in the museum’s wonderful collection, which includes items evocative of the Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago.
BB: When Walt visited Treasure Island in San Francisco during the 1930s, he saw Narcissa Niblack Thorne, who created these miniature rooms and was traveling around with them. Her miniatures are smaller than those he later created, and I’m dying to see them in person! He was really inspired by what she created, and since his doctor had been always telling him, “You need a hobby, you can’t work yourself to death,” he decided to pick up the hobby of miniature-making and collecting. Everywhere he went, he would collect and bring home miniatures, amassing around over 15,000 of them.
He had an entire room outside his office at the Walt Disney Studios dedicated to his miniatures. It was a hobby that informed a lot of things for him, and what’s interesting is that Walt always wanted to involve the public in his hobbies. Initially for Disneyland, there were plans to have an area named Lilliputian Land, which would have been made entirely of miniatures. It eventually evolved into the Storybook Land Canal Boat ride where you see all these miniature scenes and dioramas from Disney films. It was apparently the attraction that Walt was most involved with when the park was being developed, because he had become an expert in miniatures.
RF: What upcoming talks do you have going on at the museum that you’re excited about?
BB: The “Labyrinth” talk on August 22nd is going to be really incredible. Dave Goelz and Brian Henson will both be panelists for the talk, which will honor the fortieth anniversary of Jim Henson’s film. The talks I’ve personally had with Dave have been such a delight. He has been so generous with his time, and we’re so grateful that we’ve become such good pals with him.
RF: Is there anything you’re personally working on that you’d like to share with us?
BB: Oh goodness! The D23 Expo is taking up most of my brain space at the moment, but I am always promoting the book I did with the museum, Walt Disney Treasures: Personal Art and Artifacts from the Walt Disney Family Museum. We split it up into a handful of different chapters in order to organize the 250 objects in a way that tells a story. For example, the chapter entitled “Heart” includes all of the things that were closest to Walt’s heart. I think my favorite chapter is “Innovation,” which highlights all the different objects that represent the many ways that Walt innovated throughout his life.
RF: Is there a dream project that you would like to do someday that you have always been kind of circling?
BB: I used to work at Walt Disney World. I did the Disney College Program back when I was still in college, and was just there for a semester, but kept coming back to volunteer there. In a little spot at Hollywood Studios, they have an exhibition space highlighting Walt’s life called “One Man’s Dream.” I think it could be so much better, and I have always wanted the museum to get involved in it. Walt Disney World gets so many eyes and so much foot traffic, and it has been my dream to have a better presence of Walt Disney and his story at the park. Right now at Disneyland, we’re part of a little exhibition there that highlights the audio-animatronics that are a part of the “Walt Disney—A Magical Life” presentation. I would love to develop more exhibitions like that, and we have one coming up called “The Art of Eyvind Earle,” who did all of the background art for “Sleeping Beauty.” That was a fun project to work on. As I’ve learned, you could fill an entire museum with Walt Disney’s story, and it’s still almost not enough.
For more information on The Walt Disney Family Museum, visit their official site.
