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The Washington Post (28/Jan/1989) - The Dali-Disney Duo

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The Dali-Disney Duo

An Animated, Uncompleted Collaboration

Of all the strange liaisons produced by Hollywood, the pairing of Salvador Dali and Walt Disney was surely one of the strangest. The film they joined forces to make in 1946 was never given the green light, but it refuses to die; every two or three years the idea is revived.

To Disney, "Destino" was "just a simple love story — boy meets girl." But to Dali — who died this week at 84 — it was "a magical exposition on the problem of life in the labyrinth of time," in which limp watches fell from Heaven, monstrous telephones sprouted legs, sculptures sprang to life and a trickle of ants became a swarm of bicycle riders.

The project was initiated when Disney — who owned the rights to a Mexican love ballad of the same title — commissioned the famed surrealist painter to do a story treatment based on the song. The result, planned as a combination of animation, live action and special effects, was to have been a segment about six minutes long in a package film along the lines of "The Three Caballeros" or "Make Mine Music," two Disney features of the period.

"The name of the song probably appealed more to Salvador Dali than the music," asserted former studio artist John Hench, who assisted him in preparation of story sketches. "He had a thing for destiny."

Hench, now senior vice president of Walt Disney Imagineering, a studio subsidiary, remembered Dali this week as "a kind of a renaissance man" who, his public image to the contrary, was perfectly sane. "Dali said, `The difference between me and a crazy person is, a crazy person dwells in a kind of fantasy — he's in another room from reality. When I walk in that room, I know where I am; I leave the door open. A real crazy person can't get out — the door is locked.' "

Dali, he recalled, was given complete freedom at Disney: "Walt came in and looked at the work from time to time; he saw the storyboard in progress and decided to let Dali go ahead and see what would happen. Walt was kind of entranced by the whole thing. They had a rapport right from the beginning that was unusual. They got along remarkably, without much conversation — there was a sympathy there."

In addition to working on the story sketches, Hench had the task of "trying to keep the project in some kind of shape we could handle. Dali ... had a concept he was going to stick to in a broad sense, but he shared a lot with Walt in his inventive ability. Walt always came in with a lot more situations than perhaps a story could hold, and Dali was a great deal the same way. Every morning he had new ideas. I'm sure we could never have fit all of them in the original time allotted."

The plot, as complicated as it became, could not accommodate Dali's unfettered imagination. "He was so prolific with ideas I don't think even Luis Bunuel could use them all," said Hench, referring to the esteemed Spanish director and Dali collaborator. "We'd go see some really mediocre western at this little theater in Monterey. Dali would be absolutely entranced, and then afterward he'd tell me what the picture meant; he'd redo the story. The inevitable stampede of the bulls would be somebody's libido, this short little man would be the alter ego of the protagonist ... he built fabulous stories out of these really banal pictures."

"Destino" borrowed liberally from Dali's creations. The heroine, a young girl drawn to resemble the shadow of a bell in a church tower, was lifted from a painting he had done a decade earlier, "Surburbs of the Paranoiac-Critical Town." The idea of the sculpture coming to life was originally conceived for "Spellbound," Dali's much-publicized 1945 collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock. For the dream sequences in that film, Dali envisioned Ingrid Bergman as a statue coming to life and also planned to cover her with ants. That idea was vetoed by the actress. One new concept for the Disney scenario involved a group of baseball players whose actions were choreographed to resemble a ballet.

Dali traveled to the studio every day for two months, later going to Monterey to finish the artwork. "He came in the morning just like a regular worker," recalled Hench. "He didn't punch in, of course, but I don't think he'd have minded punching in. He liked ritual." Dali was paid a substantial sum, though Disney never revealed how much.

At one point in their labors Dali and Hench decided that Disney deserved to see what they were up to and made an 15-second test on color film — the sole realization of the project beyond the storyboard stage. The sequence showed two grotesquely distorted faces mounted on the backs of turtles, moving toward each other on a bleak landscape. As the two came together, the space between the profiles took on the shape of a ballerina. Her head was a baseball on the horizon.

"Destino" was abandoned through no fault of Dali's; his employer simply changed his mind about the project. "Walt thought the market for package films was gone," explained Hench. "He was an enormously intuitive man; he could look into the future and project a trend. He understood the package concept as communicating a certain kind of thing and he figured the public needed something else."

Dali and Disney remained friends over the years. On a subsequent trip to Hollywood, Dali rode the producer's backyard miniature train but was frightened by its realistic precision. Disney visited the painter many times at his home in Spain, once with a proposal to team up on an animated "Don Quixote." It never reached the drawing board. They also discussed "El Cid," for which Dali developed a story concept, but nothing came of it.

A few years after "Destino" was laid to rest, the storyboard sketches disappeared in a theft. "The whole portfolio was stolen. I don't how many hands it passed through, but whoever stole them was discriminating — he kept the best ones," recalled Hench. Eventually the sketches were purchased by an art dealer in New York, who tried to get Dali to autograph them. The dealer could not distinguish between Dali's work and Hench's, and many of the latter's sketches were authenticated as the work of the master. The material that remained was returned to the studio, but many of the treasures — including the art for the film test — were never seen again.

The art that survived the theft is preserved today in the studio archives. A number of paintings, including a portrait of Jupiter that hung in Disney's office until his death, are now in storage. The works have never been appraised.

Ten years ago studio publicist Bob Moore decided it would be nice to revive "Destino" and brought the idea to a marketing meeting; the project was casually discussed and tabled once more. But the idea is still resuscitated every few years and may eventually see the light of day — possibly as a segment in a new version of "Fantasia" being contemplated by Walt Disney's nephew Roy Jr.

"The film is so short it would have to be incorporated with something else, and nobody can make the decision as to what to package it with," said Moore, now retired. "But the film was so far ahead of its time in 1946 I don't think people would have understood it then, and I don't know that they would understand it now."

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