Neal Gabler > Quotes

“He had passed beyond the afflictions of this world. Walt Disney had at last attained perfection.”
― Neal Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination

“...because television had become the primary means through which people appropriated the world, it promulgated an epistemology in which all information, whatever the source, was forced to become entertainment.”
― Neal Gabler, Life: The Movie - How Entertainment Conquered Reality

“Having invited these performances in the first place, the media justified covering them because they were receiving media attention... The result was to make of modern society one giant Heisenberg effect in which the media were not really reporting what people did; they were reporting what people did to get media attention.”
― Neal Gabler, Life: The Movie - How Entertainment Conquered Reality

“...the deliberate application of the techniques of theater to politics, religion, education, literature, commerce, warfare, crime, everything, has converted them into branches of show business, where the overriding objective is getting and satisfying an audience.”
― Neal Gabler, Life: The Movie - How Entertainment Conquered Reality

“Yet all of these accumulated contributions paled before a larger one: he demonstrated how one could assert one’s will on the world at the very time when everything seemed to be growing beyond control and beyond comprehension.”
― Neal Gabler, Walt Disney

“What Mayer did in the thirties― what he was situated to do as a Jew yearning to belong― was provide reassurance against the anxieties and disruptions of the time. He did this by fashioning a vast, compelling national fantasy out of his dreams and out of the basic tenets of his own dogmatic faith― a belief in virtue, in the bulwark of family, in the merits of loyalty, in the soundness of tradition, in America itself.”
― Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood

“Already at the turn of the twentieth century one analyst fretted in the Atlantic Monthly that images would eventually replace words and that visual symbols would become the primary form of discourse. Boorstin’s own concern was that the Graphic Revolution encouraged what he called image-thinking—thinking in terms of an “artificial imitation or representation of the external form of any object, especially of a person.” This came at the expense of what he called ideal-thinking—thinking in terms of some idea or value toward which one could strive.”
― Neal Gabler, Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality

“For a young man who had chafed within the stern, moralistic, anhedonic world of his father, animation provided escape, and for someone who had always been subjugated by that father, it provided absolute control. In animation Walt Disney had a world of his own. In animation Walt Disney could be the power.”
― Neal Gabler, Walt Disney

“He was a Horatio Alger hero whose life demonstrated social mobility. He was a naïve artist whose work demonstrated a Jamesian unpretentiousness and common sense. He was a visionary whose plans demonstrated the breadth of American imagination and the power of American will. And however he behaved privately at his studio, he was publicly a modest, affable, and decent man whose image demonstrated America’s own decency and generosity of spirit.”
― Neal Gabler, Walt Disney

“The only thing that mattered to him was that he had done everything in his power to make the cartoon as excellent as it could be.”
― Neal Gabler, Walt Disney

“Look, the thing that's going to make Disneyland unique and different,' he insisted, 'is the detail. If we loose the detail, we loose it all.”
― Neal Gabler

“he had become the patriarch of horseflesh.”
― Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood

“It made Disney at once a nostalgist and a futurist, a conservative and a visionary.”
― Neal Gabler, Walt Disney

“Listen, a picture, all it is is an expensive dream,” he later told a reporter. “Well, it’s just as easy to dream for $700,000 as for $1,500,000.”
― Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood

“The real tragedy, however, was certainly the Jews’. Their dominance became a target for wave after wave of vicious anti-Semites—from fire-and-brimstone evangelicals in the teens and early twenties who demanded the movies’ liberation from “the hands of the devil and 500 un-Christian Jews” to Red-baiters in the forties for whom Judaism was really a variety of communism and the movies their chief form of propaganda. The sum of this anti-Semitic demonology was that the Jews, by design or sheer ignorance, had used the movies to undermine traditional American values.”
― Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood

“fission,”
― Neal Gabler, Walt Disney

“A workhorse, not a show horse,”
― Neal Gabler, Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour, 1932-1975

“Walt was always the final authority, the one whom everyone had to please.”
― Neal Gabler, Walt Disney

“book, Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development, by Edwin G. Lutz,”
― Neal Gabler, Walt Disney