Document details

George Harding Foster was a professor of English from 1947 to 1949 at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, before he went to work briefly for Disney in 1952 and 1953 as a scriptwriter. Harrison Kinney was his student at Washington and Lee.

Letter to Harrison B. Kinney written on February 14, 1953.

This letter is courtesy of the George Harding Foster Collection, Special Collections, Washington and Lee University.

Dear Harrison,

I promised to tell you about life in Disneyland and I would have sent some stuff sooner if I’d known what to say. It’s taken about six months to recover from the shock of Los Angeles, go through the usual phase of resenting the place bitterly, find out how they do things at this studio, and so on. What I say applies to the Disney Studio; it is not at all typical of Hollywood movie foundries, which are much tougher outfits. Or so I am told.

First thing I found out was that Disney was now blowing cold on the idea of making educational films. He had hoped to interest some of the foundations in a deal, but I think they smelled too much commercialism. Without foundation help he can’t make films for what they call “non-the- atrical audiences.” So then the problem was what to do with Foster, and to explain what happened I think I must describe the place itself.

[…]