Young man, if it is your ambition to handle ladies’ garments, may I suggest you take employment in a launderette?
I cannot begin to tell you how uninterested – no, positively sickened I am at the thought of visiting your dollar-printing machine.
Disappointments are to the soul what the thunderstorm is to the air.
I know what he’s going to do to her. She’ll be cavorting, and twinkling, careening towards a happy ending like a kamikaze.
Penguins! Penguins have very much upset me, Mr. Disney; ANIMATED, DANCING penguins! Now, you have seduced me with the music, Mr Disney, yes, you have. Those Sherman boys have quite turned my head but I shall NOT be moved on the matter of cartoons, Sir; not one inch!
You promised me… You PROMISED me that this film would not be an animation!
It is blasphemy to drink tea from a paper cup.
Because these books simply do not lend themselves to chirping and prancing. No, it’s certainly not a musical. Now, where is Mr. Disney? I should so much like to get this started and finished as briskly as is humanly possible.
Why did you have to make him so cruel? He was not a monster!
You all have children, yes? And do those children make letters for you? Do they write letters? Do they make you drawings? And would you tear up those gifts in front of them? It’s a dreadful thing to do. I don’t understand. Why must Father tear up the advertisement his children have made and throw it in the fireplace? Why won’t he mend their kite? Why have you made him so unspeakably awful? “In glorious Technicolor”? “For all the world to see”? If you claim to make them live, why can’t he… they live well? I can’t bear it. Please don’t. Please don’t. I feel like I let him down again.
I will not have her called Cynthia, absolutely not. It feels unlucky. It should be something warm, a bit sexy. How about Mavis?
Hold it. Now, I see that Cherry Tree Lane as not too townified on one side of the park. And we’ll get you a photograph of 50 Smith Street, in order to see that the house is really quite like that. But it has more of a garden than my house had. But it might be useful and amusing to put it in as my house. You see?
Now, go on. “At the end of the chorus…” There ought perhaps to have been people in this countryside, you see? Are you making note of it? And they would be the Pearly people. They’d be arriving and they’d come nearer and they’d see, “Ah. Hmm.” They know they are not grand enough to eat at this table. Have you got this on tape? Because I think it’s important. I’m not going to do this film unless I’m available for it.
Yes, yes. Well, anyway, it brings about whatever it is. Mr. Banks, um, is able. He has a tender, good heart, not a change of heart, because he’s always been sweet, but worried with the cares of life.
Gotcha, indeed! Mr. Disney, if you have “dangled”, it is at the end of a rope you have fashioned for yourself. I was perfectly clear when you approached me 20 years ago that she wasn’t for sale and I was clear again when you approached me the following year and clear again when you approached me every annum for the subsequent 18 years and quite honestly, I feel corralled!
My point is that, unlike yourself, Mary Poppins is the very enemy of whimsy and sentiment. She’s truthful. She doesn’t sugarcoat the darkness in the world that these children will eventually, inevitably come to know. She prepares them for it. She deals in honesty. One must clean one’s room, it won’t magically do it by itself! This entire script is flim-flam! Where is its heart? Where is its reality? Where… is the gravitas?
Being a mother is a job. It’s a very difficult job and one not everyone is up to, not one everyone should have taken on in the first place.
