'Saving Mr Banks' tells the back story behind 'Mary Poppins' screen rights
Makers of 'Saving Mr Banks' had to tread carefully in depicting how author P. L. Travers reluctantly surrendered her Mary Poppins character to Walt Disney, writes James Mottram
It was meant to be a glittering tribute: Meryl Streep honouring the talent of fellow actress Emma Thompson. The event was the National Board of Review's recent awards gala in New York and Streep was presenting Thompson with a best actress award for her work in Saving Mr Banks. The film portrays the frosty working relationship between Walt Disney (played by the ever-genial Tom Hanks) and author P.L. Travers (Thompson) during the making of Disney's 1964 adaptation of her novel, Mary Poppins.
After offering up some kind words for her friend Thompson ("she has real access to her own tenderness"), Streep then turned on Disney.
Forced to sell the rights due to her own precarious financial position, Travers wasn't going down without a fight, protesting against everything from the use of songs to the animated interludes.
Calling him "a gender bigot", she read out from a letter he had sent in 1938 to a young woman who'd enquired about entering the cartoon training programme. "Women do not do any of the creative work … as that task is performed entirely by young men."
Streep added that Disney "supported an anti-Semitic industry lobbying group".
It's enough to make any Disney executive choke - seeing the founding father of the company brought to task by a Hollywood legend. After all, Walt Disney is not just a name; it's a brand - one that stands for family values and entertainment. And in a year that marks the 50th anniversary of Mary Poppins - at the time the most expensive Disney Studios film - it risks sullying the image of one of its most beloved movies.
Even Hanks admits that playing Disney was "a burden", adding "I did not do it lightly", He is, after all, part of the family - voicing Woody from the Toy Story series, produced by the Disney-owned Pixar. "You see the history of the studio absolutely everywhere," he says.
Yet Saving Mr Banks is not Walt Disney's story. "It's not a Walt biopic. It's two weeks of his life in 1961," states the film's director, John Lee Hancock. Instead, it's really about Travers - here portrayed by Thompson as a prickly eccentric desperate to guard against the sugar-coating of her beloved creation, the stern children's nanny whose adventures were chronicled across eight books. And with good reason: "They're actually quite dark, the books," says Kelly Marcel, Saving Mr Banks' screenwriter (along with Sue Smith). "They really are. They're very, very different."