Peter Pan (1953)

Cast _*Interesting Facts_*James Barrie's Life_*The Peter Pan play

Directed by: Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronimi & Wilfred Jackson
Written by: Milt Banta, Bill Peet
Music by: Oliver Wallace & Frank Churchill

Released on: February 5, 1951
Running Time: 77 minutes

Budget: $4 million
Box-Office: $88 million in the U.S.

CAST

Peter Pan helps Wendy fly! Peter Pan... Bobby Driscoll
Wendy... Kathryn Beaumont
Michael... Tommy Luske
John... Paul Collins
Captain Hook & George Darling... Hans Conried
Mr. Smee... Bill Thompson
Indian Chief... Candy Candido

Bobby Driscoll's life was a short and sad story. Charming as a child actor, he made his mark in films like Song Of The South, and Treasure Island before lending his voice to Peter Pan in the Disney animated film. He was the first actor to sign a long-term deal with Walt Disney's animation department. But as he got older and acting offers became rare, Bobby became involved with heavy drugs which ultimately ruined his health and reduced him to poverty. Years of drug abuse caused his heart to stop and he died alone in a vacant building in New York. His body was discovered dead by two children playing in an abandoned Greenwich Village tenament in New York on March 30, 1968--he was 31. Unidentified, Bobby was buried as a "John Doe" in pauper's grave. A year later, fingerprints finally revealed his identity. Bobby Driscoll is allegedly quoted as saying: "I was carried on a velvet pillow and dumped into a garbage can."

Katherine Beaumont (Wendy), was also the voice of Alice in Alice in Wonderland two years earlier.

INTERESTING FACTS

Walt Disney first came upon the idea of making an animated film based on "Peter Pan" around 1935. Four years later, he acquired the film rights to to Sir James Barrie's tremendously popular stage play (1904) and book (1911) from the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London for £ 5,000 -Barrie had given the hospital the rights to his play. Disney then ordered concept drawings for Peter Pan, which, offered a far darker rendering of the fantasy.

Walt Disney was always interested in acquiring James Barrie's Peter Pan as a property for his studio. In 1937, the year of Barrie's death and before Snow White was released, a Disney memo was sent to Disney's London representative to obtain the rights to PETER PAN immediately. Disney has two reasons for concern according to the memo. First, he feared that when Snow White came out and people saw what the studio had done, the prices for potential properties would soar sky high. Second, he feared that Max Fleischer would obtain the rights to Peter Pan and ruin the project. Disney was successful in finally obtaining the rights but it was over a decade before the animated feature was made.

The animated version of Peter Pan was one of many Disney projects cancelled or delayed by World War II. After the war, Disney and animators resumed plans for the film, and in 1950 it began in earnest.

The movie was shot entirely in live-action first: the actors recorded their lines, "performing" in costume for a movie version of "Peter Pan" that was made for the animators so they could capture the actors' expressions and movements.

Disney's version of "Peter Pan" marked the first time that Peter was actually played by a boy. In the stage versions and the silent movie version from the 1920s, a woman played Peter.

The name Wendy was invented by J.M. Barrie for his play Peter Pan. The name enjoyed a brief resurgence in popularity during the mid-1960s when the Beach Boys had a hit with the song "Wendy" (a name Beach Boy Brian Wilson gave to his daughter as well).

Tinkerbell Depicting the character of Tinker Bell in an animated film posed something of a challenge for Disney -- on stage she had always been represented by a spot of light and tinkling bells. Early conceptions of a visible, human-like fairy Tinker Bell were rejected for not being "sweet and dainty" enough, and for looking too much like "a little nite club dame". Eventually, as Canemaker wrote, "Tinker Bell was designed with the knowledge that her acting would all be done in pantomime, with a face that would register her emotions clearly, a simple costume that would not clutter up her movements, and sex appeal to charm the viewer." As rendered by animator Marc Davis, based on the model of actress Margaret Kerry (who also voiced a mermaid in Peter Pan), Tinker Bell became the now-familiar winged blonde coquette, her curvaceous figure clothed in a short green dress.

Tink's alter ego Margaret Kerry explained in a February 2002 interview: "Lots of people don't understand all this. They think the entire movie comes from the animator's head, but I say wait a minute--Marc Davis [Tinker Bell's animator] is a man's man--how does he know how a 31/2-inch sprite is going to move, get angry, or stamp her foot? And how does he know what kind of emotion would go behind that? How does he know how Wendy's skirt will wrap when she walks? Or flies for that matter? What Marc did was take something and then exaggerate it so it was more truly delightful." During her audition, Margaret Kerry says, it was her pantomime of Tinker Bell standing on a hand mirror sizing up her hips that got her the part. Other scenes such as that of the pixie stuck in a keyhole, hips gratuitously wriggling in a rear-angle shot lent an uncharacteristically saucy element to this Disney classic based on the James M. Barrie story. "You just didn't get shot like that in a family movie," she admits. "There were a lot of people who thought Tink was just a little too sexy. But what Marc [Davis] told me--how he got away with it--was keeping the bottom half womanly but drawing the top half as a little girl."

The original print of the 1924 silent movie Peter Pan was purchased by Disney in 1938 when it began developing the animated version of the James M. Barrie tale, finally released in 1953.

A sequel entitled Peter Pan: Return To Never Land was released theatrically in February 2002.

JAMES BARRIE'S LIFE

James Barrie (1890-1937) James Matthew Barrie was born in 1860 in Scotland. For the first six years of his life, he lived in the shadow of his elder brother David. Just before his fourteenth birthday, David was killed in a skating accident. Barrie soon realised that, by dying so young, David would remain a boy forever in the minds of all those who had known him.

In 1897, Barrie was a successful writer both in Britain and the United States. He was married to the actress Mary Ansell but they had no children. This didn't stop him from meeting children. One of these was a four-year-old girl called Margaret who called Barrie "my friendy". Because she couldn't pronounce her r's, the word "friendy" often sounded like
"fwendy" or "wendy". She died when she was six but Barrie immortalised her in Peter Pan by calling his heroine Wendy, a name that he created.

The lost boys Barrie's London home was very close to Kensington Gardens and it was here that he first met the Llewellyn Davies boys George, Jack and Peter. He described their mother as "the most beautiful creature I had ever seen" and soon he was a frequent visitor to their house where he would tell the boys stories. One of these stories was about the youngest boy, Peter, who, according to Barrie, would one day fly away to Kensington Gardens so that he might be a boy forever. When children died, Peter would take them on a journey to a place called Never Never Land. When George heard the story, he said that "dying must be an awfully big adventure!". Barrie wrote the words down. They would later became the most famous words spoken in Peter Pan.

Barrie wrote the story several times before he decided to turn it into a play in 1903. The play's producer thought it would be a disaster but the story of The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up was an instant success.

J. M. Barrie's relationship with the Llewellyn family continued and soon two more boys were born, Michael and Nico. Michael soon became Barrie's favourite and he even took photographs of him dressed as Peter Pan. The boys' father, Arthur Llewellyn Davies, who had always resented Barrie's interference with his family, died of cancer. When Sylvia also died of cancer, Barrie took on the role of the boys' father. But soon tragedy struck again. In March 1915, George was killed, a victim of the war. In May 1921, a few weeks before his 21st birthday, Michael, who could not swim, drowned in the Thames. Barrie later referred to him as the boy "that will never be old".

THE PETER PAN PLAY

Peter Pan was first performed on 27 December 1904. It was then performed every year until its run was interrupted by war in 1939-1940. It then continued until 1969. The play is usually performed at Christmas time: on average there are 25 productions of Peter Pan in Britain at Christmas.

In the theatre, the part of Peter Pan is usually played by a woman. This is because an old law said that child actors could not work after nine o'clock at night. The first actress to play the part was Nina Boucicault.

Each year on Christmas Day there is a Peter Pan swimming competition in London. There is also a car ferry called Peter Pan!

Barrie said that he wanted the royalties from productions of Peter Pan to go to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London. When this arrangement legally expired in 1988, the British parliament decided to change the copyright law so that the hospital would continue receiving money (including an estimated half a million dollars from Steven Spielberg's movie, Hook).

Charles Laughton is one of the most famous actors to have played the part of Hook. Barrie thought that Hook had to terrify both children and adults. The part of Hook is traditionally played by the same actor as Mr. Darling.

Barrie erected a statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. He did it in the middle of the night so that people would think it had appeared by magic. The statue was based on the photographs Barrie had taken of Michael Llewelyn Davies.

In 1920, Barrie wrote a film version for Paramount. Charlie Chaplin was going to play the part of Peter. A silent film was made in 1924 but not with Chaplin.