1953 Los Angeles, California

Susan Plumb
1938
Los Angeles CA
Interviewed on Feb 21
by Katherine Sylvester

I was born in 1938, and Daddy was working at Disney studios, but we didn’t go to the movies that much. We just didn’t as kids, we didn’t have the money. The first thing I remember was probably in grammar school. We had a movie theater just a couple blocks away from our home in Studio City. We’d go on Saturday afternoons and they had what they called serials, which I remember were mostly westerns. And you would go for maybe an hour or so, and then they would end—like this guy was ready to murder somebody, and then it would stop, and you’d have to go back the next Saturday afternoon. The same movie would go on for weeks and weeks. I would go with my girlfriends down the street. We had Gene Autry’s horse ranch near us, so we knew about the cowboys and the westerns. He was a cowboy, a singing cowboy.

We lived close to Hollywood, so the big deal was I remember my parents took me to see Shane. I was probably in junior high, and we could go to the Chinese Theater, we could take a bus. Shane—that one movie came to me because at the very end, as the cowboy, Alan Ladd, is going off into the sunset, everyone is going “Shane! Shane! Shane!”

A lot of the dads in my neighborhood growing up, they all worked in the movie industry, behind-the-scenes type of stuff. The movie stars, the wealthy Hollywood people, would live in Hollywood or Beverly Hills, and the behinds-the-scenes—some of the actors, but mostly the behind-the-scenes workers—lived in Studio City and North Hollywood, or Burbank.

I remember Daddy would take us, a couple of times, over to the studio. I don’t know if you know much about making movies, but in those early years when they would do a movie, the animators would do all the drawings in, frame by frame, to make the animals move. And then Daddy would go in with a stopwatch so he could time it, and he would write the music so that the music would make the rabbits jump out, or the birds tweet. And he’d have to time it so that the music would begin in perfect timing with what the animators wanted to happen on the screen. That was very critical. That’s why he always said that math was a big part of music. And Daddy would always say that the music—not the songs, but the music—carries the motion, the story along. And people don’t realize how critical that music is. Now today it’s done by computers; Daddy used to by hand, with a pencil, write the parts for each instrument, for the whole orchestra.

There were several other musicians that composed like he did. And they took turns; they worked together but they took turns for who would get their names on the movie. They didn’t go for the cut, they didn’t realize that it was a big deal. They could only have one or two names on the screen, even though there might’ve been a couple of them. But he was always working. Always writing for different movies. For Bambi he got an Academy Award nomination, that was huge. I remember as kids, my sisters and I, when he was working on Cinderella, we would sing Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo. Even though he didn’t write those songs, he had to incorporate the orchestra with it. Fantasia [which he was music director for] was huge, but it was not successful in those early years. It was way ahead of its time.

I have pictures of him with Walt. Walt had some very definite thoughts—and I remember especially on Bambi—how he wanted the music to sound. Walt was amazing in his creativity. He worked very closely with all of the composers, especially in the early years; it was a small studio in the beginning. I don’t think he had any music background, he just knew what he wanted them to come up with. Daddy didn’t take us to the studio that often, but I remember one time taking us over, Walt was there and he waved at us. That’s why I call him Walt, because he insisted on first name, and I was Susan— “hello Susan,” “hi Walt.” I was a little girl. And that was before the TV, Sunday night Walt Disney, and before Disneyland and everything, so I didn’t know he was that big a deal.

When he was younger, Daddy went to Dartmouth and had a dance band, played the clarinet and the saxophone. And of course he played piano; at home when he wrote the music, then he could play all the notes and hear how it’s supposed to sound and stuff like that. After graduating, he was in New York City, a struggling musician, and he met my mother and they got married.

One of his fraternity brothers from Dartmouth was out here working with Walt, and they were looking for somebody that could work with stereophonic sound. Walt wanted to do Fantasia, which was the first full length film like that—that was in 1937. John gave Walt my dad’s name and Walt reached out and said you’ve got a job, and so Mother and Daddy packed up and moved out here. I don’t know that he ever thought—I have no idea if he ever thought he would work on the movies. They were too new. He wanted to write music for theater in New York City, but it was a little after the Depression, so he didn’t have too much going on for him financially. So they moved to California and never went back.