The Real Story: P.L. Travers, Walt Disney, and the Inside Story of “Mary Poppins”

Posted on December 18, 2013 at 8:00 am

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As “Saving Mr. Banks” shows, Walt Disney did really spend more than 20 years trying to persuade author P.L. Travers to let him make a movie from her story about the magical nanny, Mary Poppins. Many moments in the film are taken directly from the tape recordings Travers insisted on to document her disagreements with screenwriter Don DaGradi (Bradley Whitford) and the songwriting team, the Sherman Brothers (Jason Schwartzman and B.J. Novak). Travers did not like the movie. She would not allow a sequel and made it clear in her will that should a theatrical version be mounted, no American could control it.

Travers had a fuller and more fascinating life than this movie portrays.  She was an actress, poet, essayist, and critic.  She was enthralled by the work of the mystic G.I. Gurdjieff and studied with him and  she lived with Navajo, Hopi and Pueblo peoples to learn about their mythology and folklore. She never married.  She insisted on being called “Mrs. Travers,” as the movie shows, but Travers was her father’s first name.  In the movie, she does not answer a question about her family.  She did have romantic relationships with both men and women, and she adopted a son, selected according to the advice of her astrologer. He had a twin brother she chose not to adopt or even tell her son about until the brother came looking for him.

Her essays are collected in What the Bee Knows: Reflections on Myth, Symbol, and Story.  And her biography by Valerie Lawson is titled Out of the Sky She Came: The Life of P.L. Travers, Creator of Mary Poppins.

From a documentary about Travers:

For more about the Sherman brothers, see the excellent documentary about their partnership and estrangement.

 

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The Real Story

Saving Mr. Banks

Posted on December 13, 2013 at 5:17 pm

Saving Mr BanksFor most of this story, Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) and P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) are on opposite sides.  He has been trying for twenty years to persuade her to let him make a movie based on her books about the magical nanny, Mary Poppins.  She needs money, as her agent reminds her, which is why she has very reluctantly agreed to leave home and fly to Los Angeles to talk to him about it.  But she cannot bear the idea of losing control of the characters who mean so much to her and she abhors everything about Disney and California, including sunshine, cheerfulness, twinkling, music, and calling people by their first names.

But there is one moment when, in the midst of some obvious culture clash jokes, there is a quiet moment that shows they are both on the same side.  Disney tells Travers that he was in her position when someone wanted to pay him for Mickey Mouse and he simply could not bear the agony of allowing anyone else to make decisions about a character he had created.  Travers says that Mary Poppins and the Bankses are her family.  But in a very real way, the character these artist created are their own very souls.  “We restore order with imagination,” Disney tells her.  And, engagingly, throughout the film we see the process, the inspiration, the despair, the triumph, the necessity of creating art, from a father soothing his little girl with a story to songwriters puzzling out a way to show Mary Poppins’ upside down world by having the tune go up as she sings the word “down.”

We all know how it turned out.  Disney’s “Mary Poppins,” celebrating its 50th anniversary next year, is one of the beloved and honored family films of all time, with five Oscars (Best Actress, Song, Special Effects, Score, and Editing) and eight more nominations.  But anyone who has read the books knows that there are some major departures from the Travers version, and that the fears she expressed — as documented in tape recordings of her sessions with the screenwriter and songwriting team — were more than justified.

Some people have criticized this film as Disney’s burnishing of its own brand, with its founder portrayed as a decent man who is just trying to keep a two-decade old promise to his daughters to make a movie from one of their favorite books.  Amy Nicholson writes in LA Weekly that “Saving Mr. Banks” is “a corporate, borderline-sexist spoonful of lies.”  She says that Thompson’s “Travers is as unpleasant as a pine needle pillow, and she’s as far away from the actual woman as ‘supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ is from being a real word” when in fact she was a “a feisty, stereotype-breaking bisexual.”  I think this is a misreading of the film’s attitude toward Disney, Travers, “Mary Poppins” (the movie), and what it means to be a creative person in a world that is very imperfect when it comes to assigning monetary value to art (see also: “Inside Llewyn Davis”).  To come to Nicholson’s conclusion, one has to assume that the movie wants us to believe that Disney somehow outsmarted Travers by improving her work.  On the contrary, the movie makes it clear that the movie Mary Poppins was very different from Travers’ idea of the characters, moving them several decades earlier, for a start, and, crucially, as indicated in the title of this film, transforming an episodic storyline about children’s adventures with a magical nanny into a story about parents discovering the importance of being close to their children.  It is Nicholson who underestimates Travers by suggesting she was somehow snookered.  She made a decision that it was worth it to her to let that happen to get the money she needed to be as financially independent as she wished.  As is shown in the very first scene, she could have made money another way — by writing more books about Mary Poppins, for a start — but she chose to consent to the movie, and then to make absolutely sure that no American would ever touch her characters again.

colin-farrell-saving-mr-banks-gintyWhile the cute culture clashes and Travers’ resistance to Disney’s brand of pixie dust are featured in the movie’s trailers, the film itself devotes a substantial amount of time to Travers’ childhood, clearly taking her very seriously as a woman and an artist.  We see her as a child dearly loved by the father she adored (a superb Colin Farrell), a man of great imagination and charm, but, perhaps in part due to those same qualities, not able to manage life as a banker in the far reaches of Australia. As we see him sink from manager at a bank to manager at a smaller bank to teller, fans of the Poppins books will remember her description of what Mr. Banks did at the office (it is not coincidental that he shares a name with his profession).  He “made money.”  Meaning that, at least in his children’s minds, he sat at his desk cutting out coins each day.  Some days he was able to cut out many, and the family was quite comfortable.  But other days he was not as productive, and there were fewer coins to go around.

We can see the origins of this idea and many other Mary Poppins book details in Travers’ past, a seemingly bottomless carpet bag, a crisp “spit spot” from an imposingly organized woman who arrives to put the household in order.  But the most telling detail from the past is the key to the invention of Travers’ most important character: herself.  Her name is not P.L. Travers at all.  Nor is she Mrs. Travers, despite her insistence that Mrs. Travers is what she prefers to be called.  The Australian girl who would grow up to be the ultra-English P.L. Travers is named Helen Lyndon Goff, called “Ginty” by her dad.  His name was Travers Robert Goff.  She took his first name as her last name and put a “Mrs.” in front of it to create the character she chose to be.  This revelation, and Thompson’s brilliant portrayal of Travers show us a woman whose most important creation was the character she pretended to be — or became.

And of course Disney, too, played a character, the folksy host who was going to entertain you no matter how hard you tried to resist, and very well aware that these qualities were his best assets as a businessman.  He insists on taking Travers to Disneyland (beautifully recreated as it was in 1961).  Disney is persuasive enough to get Travers onto the carousel and canny enough to tell her the truth — that getting her on a ride won him a $20 bet.  And he tells her a story about his childhood, showing that just because he promotes an idealized vision of the world does not mean that he is unfamiliar with its harshness and disappointments.

Thompson gives one of the best performances of the year, showing us the insecurity and humanity and wit of a woman who is far more complex than she wishes to appear.  Jason Schwartzman and B.J. Novak as the song-writing Sherman Brothers and Paul Giamatti as the limo driver are all excellent as characters who underscore the theme of art as a path to meaning.  The glimpses of the “Mary Poppins” movie are so entrancing (okay, I had to come home and watch it again and am still humming “Step in Time”) that it is easy to be temporarily distracted from the bittersweetness of the story.  Hmmm, where have I heard that idea before?

Parents should know that this film includes the very sad death of a parent, substance abuse, a suicide attempt, tense confrontations, and some disturbing images.

Family discussion:  What did Walt Disney and P.L.Travers have in common?  What do you learn about her from her relationship with the driver?  How can you take details around you and make them into a story?

If you like this, try: the Mary Poppins books by P.L. Travers and the Disney musical film and the documentary “The Boys,” about the Sherman Brothers

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Based on a true story Behind the Scenes Drama Family Issues

Captain Phillips

Posted on October 10, 2013 at 6:00 pm

B+
Lowest Recommended Age: High School
MPAA Rating: Rated PG-13 for sustained intense sequences of menace, some violence with bloody images, and for substance use
Profanity: Strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs: Drugs
Violence/ Scariness: Intense, graphic, and disturbing violence including threats, torture, and guns
Diversity Issues: Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters: October 11, 2013
Date Released to DVD: January 21, 2014
Amazon.com ASIN: B008JFUNKU

captain phillipsMemorable movie villains tend to fall into two categories: volatile and violent or sociopathic and megalomaniac. Both kinds are caricatures, sketched in exaggerated terms to justify our feeling of triumph when the hero prevails. But in “Captain Phillips,” the true story of a US merchant ship taken over by Somali pirates, the villain is far more real and far more terrifying. Somali native Barkhad Abdi stars as Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse, the leader of a group of four teenagers sent to hijack ships for ransom money by elders in their village. Muse is the scariest of villains, someone with no other options and nothing to lose. Abdi’s performance in his first acting role is stunning, terrifying, and heartbreaking.

An awkward opening scene shows Captain Phillips (Tom Hanks) is at home in Vermont, preparing for his trip and driving to the airport with his wife (Catherine Keener), with some clunky, exposition-heavy dialog intended to foreshadow upcoming unrest.  Once he gets to the boat, called the Maersk Alabama, director Paul Greengrass locks into the taut, intimate style he showed in “United 93” and two Bourne movies.  The ship has a crew of 20.  They have been warned about the possibility of pirates and have had some training in how to respond.  Phillips orders a surprise drill to make them practice their defensive tactics.  But this is not a military ship. They are carrying 17 metric tons of cargo.  Their primary tactics are diversion and their primary weapons are their firehoses.

At first, the firehoses work.  But then the Somalis get close enough to the ship to attach their ladder and climb aboard.  “I’m the captain now,” says Muse.  His lack of affect is chilling.

Director Paul Greengrass has an intimate, documentary style that keeps even those who remember the details of the real story on edge.  The pirates search the ship, looking for the crew like a nightmare game of sardines.  Phillips leads them around, genial and cooperative on the surface, but always thinking about how to impede them without making them angry.  When their boat is destroyed, they take one of the lifeboats, more like a capsule than a ship, and they take Phillips as hostage.  For four grueling days, Phillips has to try to keep calm and do what he can to help the US Navy, which is assembling its response.  Hanks goes deeper than he ever has before, ultimately reaching a place of wrenching vulnerability.

After a shaky start, Greengrass and his talented cast make this into more than a story of courage and resilience.  While he clearly has a point of view and never pretends that the pirates are justified, he allows us to understand their desperate circumstances.

Parents should know that this is the true story of a pirate attack on a US ship, featuring intense and disturbing scenes of threats, torture, and violence with some graphic images and dramatic emotional breakdown.

Family discussion:  What was Captain Phillips’ most difficult decision?  What was the most difficult decision for the US military in responding to the pirates? Do you disagree with any of their actions?

If you like this, try: “United 93,” another true story from the same director and Captain Phillips’ book, A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS, and Dangerous Days at Sea

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Based on a true story Drama DVD/Blu-Ray Pick of the Week Thriller

The Real Story: Captain Phillips and the Somali Pirates

Posted on October 10, 2013 at 8:00 am

This week’s release of “Captain Phillips” is based on the real-life story of the 2009 capture of an American merchant ship by Somali pirates.  The title character, played by Tom Hanks, was kidnapped by the pirates and held for ransom.    Captain Richard Phillips was rescued by the Navy Seals after sharpshooters killed three of the four pirates.

Barkhad-Abdi-PirateThe leader of the pirates is played by Barkhad Abdi, a Somali immigrant who moved to Minnesota with his family when he was seven, in his first role as an actor.  In an interview, he explained that he was selected for the role following a casting call that included more than 700 other men who wanted to be in the film.  He trusted director Paul Greengrass to present the Somali characters without demonizing them.

One of his quotes, he said was just a simple man that was in a situation that was bigger than him. Because this piracy thing is basically international organized crime. The people that actually benefit out of it are not even in Somalia; they’re somewhere in Europe or America or some other country. And it’s a big corporation. And the people that actually take the risk don’t even take much.

He talked about how he put himself in the frame of mind of his character, a desperate young man.

That was important to me. Because as a person, I was born in Somalia, you know? I left Somalia when I was seven years old, but I witnessed a whole year in a war. I witnessed the war’s beginning, which was really extraordinarily crazy. Just the same neighborhood that you were born and you grow and the same good people. That’s all you’ve seen in the world — and just torn to a disaster overnight: killing and rape and all this unbelievable stuff going on.

I was lucky enough to have parents that took me out from country to country and go to school and learn how to be a better person. But, I used a lot of imagination. Like, what if that was me? What if I didn’t have the same parents I have? What if my parents would have passed away? I mean, this would have been about me. I know exactly the situation he’s in, because Somalia didn’t have a country for the last 24 years. There’s no jobs; there’s no hope. And besides the fact that all these guys become millionaires right in front of you — people that you know. That’s enough motivation to take your chance fully. You’re either going to live good or you’re going to die trying.

Greengrass kept his lead actors apart until they were filming their scenes.

It was really a great idea, because it’s not an easy task coming on as just a crazy guy that’s taking over and being so mean to someone that you know and you admire, you know? So it was good that I hadn’t met him.

A Captain's DutyThe movie is very true to the real story, as Richard Phillips described it in his book, A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS, and Dangerous Days at Sea.  It describes the takeover of the ship by four young pirates and their insistence on a ransom of millions of dollars.  Captain Phillips protected his crew and was taken hostage for four days of abuse and threats.  President Obama said after it was over, “I share the country’s admiration for the bravery of Captain Phillips and his selfless concern for his crew. His courage is a model for all Americans.”  Some members of the crew have filed lawsuits against the shipping company, alleging that their negligence put the crew at risk by going too close to the Somali coast, despite warnings to stay at least 600 miles away.  But there is no question that Captain Phillips’ courage and determination kept his crew safe at the risk of his own life and the extraordinary skill of the Navy Seals is what kept him alive.

Slate provides further information about Somali pirates.  The incident in this film was one of over 200 in 2009.

In the film, Muse briefly mentions foreign vessels coming to take away the fish off the Somali coast. Viewers new to the subject may not know what to make of these remarks, but they refer to what many observers believe was a precipitating cause of the uptick in Somali piracy roughly 20 years ago. When the regime of longtime Somali dictator Siad Barre collapsed in 1991, the country was plunged into ongoing violence between rival armed groups and left without a central government capable of defending the country’s economic interests—including the “exclusive economic zone” off the Somali coast. Fleets from Europe and Asia quickly moved in, depleting the supply of fish.

As an African Development Bank report from 2011 put it, “Fishermen, dismayed at the inability of the central government to protect their country’s EEZ, and at the number of foreign fishing vessels illegally exploiting their traditional fisheries, took matters into their own hands. Initially arming themselves to chase off the illegal foreign fishing vessels, they quickly realized that robbing the vessels was a lucrative way to make up for lost income. Seeing their success, land based warlords co-opted some of the new pirates, organizing them into increasingly sophisticated gangs.”

The efforts of a combined task force to combat piracy and changing circumstances in Somalia have led to a sharp reduction in the number of ships hijacked and held for ransom.  However, for other reasons, Navy Seals were back fighting in Somalia this week.

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The Real Story

Trailer: “Saving Mr. Banks,” When P.L. Travers Met Walt Disney

Posted on July 17, 2013 at 8:00 am

Coming in December is one of this year’s biggest holiday releases, “Saving Mr. Banks,” the story of Walt Disney’s efforts to persuade British author P.L. Travers to allow him to make a movie about Mary Poppins.  Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks star and it looks wonderful!

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