Meryl Streep's harsh words about Walt Disney.

It's entirely possible for those things to be true but for performers to have had a good experience with him.

Not trying to be apologist here but Walt Disney lived in a different time and this isn't exactly black-and-white. There is a book called Hollywood's Dark Prince all about this.

I'm not sure who she is to throw rocks, but he was not the saint he's been immortalized as.

That said, I don't know how you reconcile his affiliation with anti-Semitic groups/treatment of women with his trusted relationship with the Jewish Sherman Brothers and Mary Blair.

And MOST of your own relatives that were around during that era were also Anti Semitic and crappy towards women. Not defending... BUT THEY WERE.

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Updated On: 1/8/14 at 01:54 PM

Julia was nice to me at the Star Market. Oh wait. That illustrates what PalJoey said.

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And the important corollary: Nice is different than Good.

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Does Meryl know that women got the vote in 1919 in the United States? Is she aware that those ads for male animators were running less than 20 years after women were allowed to vote---and it was still illegal for blacks and whites to marry in many states?

Does she always throw 21st century PC perceptions at people who lived in other eras and worked under entirely different conditions?

Here's another shocker ... Walt Disney smoked! A lot! Cancer, you know.

EDIT: Oh, by the way, almost the entire Ink & Paint department at Disney back then was women. Good luck getting a job as cell inker then if you were a guy.

The Help Wanted ads in all newspapers back then would say "Help Wanted Male" and "Help Wanted Female." Employers were allowed to decide which were appropriate jobs for men and for women, and they could advertise accordingly. That was for all professions, not just Walt Disney animators.

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Updated On: 1/8/14 at 02:55 PM

Such vehemence about Disney from the woman who bent over backwards to speak thus about that vile bigoted bitch Margaret Thatcher:

"But to me she was a figure of awe for her personal strength and grit. To have come up, legitimately, through the ranks of the British political system, class-bound and gender-phobic as it was, in the time that she did and the way that she did, was a formidable achievement. To have won it, not because she inherited position as the daughter of a great man, or the widow of an important man, but by dint of her own striving. To have withstood the special hatred and ridicule, unprecedented in my opinion, leveled in our time at a public figure who was not a mass murderer; and to have managed to keep her convictions attached to fervent ideals and ideas -- wrongheaded or misguided as we might see them now ... I see that as evidence of some kind of greatness, worthy for the argument of history to settle. To have given women and girls around the world reason to supplant fantasies of being princesses with a different dream: the real-life option of leading their nation; this was groundbreaking and admirable.

I was honored to try to imagine her late life journey, after power; but I have only a glancing understanding of what her many struggles were, and how she managed to sail through to the other side. I wish to convey my respectful condolences to her family and many friends.”

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Updated On: 1/8/14 at 03:15 PM

Disney definitely wasn't a saint, but he most assuredly was a product of his time ... as are we all.

Here's another shock for everyone. Those guys (all guys) who ran every other studio in town? Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, Harry Cohn, Carl Laemle, D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Jesse Lasky ...

... they weren't saints either. They very likely had more enemies than friends. They ran huge movie studios. So did Walt Disney.

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I don't know. I think it's also possible that actors ... even really good, legendary actors ... can stay really stupid things sometimes. Just because they can act doesn't mean they can think either rationally or intelligently.

I love the anti-Semitic comments too. A lot of people were confronted with their own bigotry and prejudices before and certainly during World War II, Walt Disney included. Has Meryl seen the many short films he made during the war? The anti-Nazi films? Does she realize that Disney's golden composers, the "boys" he used more often than any other composers, the real stars that so many others on the lot were jealous of, were Jewish guys?

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Being nice to people doesn't really have much to do with prejudice. A lot of bigots are nice to the people they don't want to treat equally.

To me, actions always speak louder than words. It's not so much "what did he say" as "what did he do?"

Did Disney hire women? Yes, but only in specific jobs, just like every other company in the United States back then.

Did Disney hire Jews? Yes, on screen and off. He also made many anti-Nazi propaganda films (some Oscar-winning, like Der Fuhrer Face), as did every other studio in town.

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As one trained in history, I tend to try not to make value judgments of people based on today's standards if they lived in a different era. That's just how I am. Am I claiming Disney was a saint? Nope. But, I think he was very much a product of his time. There were prejudices and stereotypes prevalent then (just as there are now). I'm not justifying it, but I think Meryl Streep needs to take into account that socially and culturally it was a very different time. (My paternal grandfather gave my grandmother a 'weekly allowance' to run the house. She was a housewife until both my father and aunt were in school, then she was able to work part time while they were in school. It was expected that she have a hot meal waiting for him when he got home from work. Was he a bad person? He was a product of his time. Period.)

Yes they would.

(The Irish one was replaced subsequently by "Italian" and other ethnic groups who came later.)