A MOUSE CLUBHOUSE EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
HOWARD GREEN
talks about getting his start at Disney

by Scott Wolf

I've long known of renowned Disney animation expert Howard Green, whose official job is Vice President, Studio Communications for the Walt Disney Studios.

I had never met Howard but had heard nothing but great things about him. So when Kathryn Beaumont and her husband Allen offered to hook me up with him, I jumped at the chance.

After meeting him, it was plain to see why so many legendary Disney personalities raved about him. He's simply a great guy, instantly likable. It's a joy to share his stories with you. 

Scott Wolf: Were you a Disney fan before you worked for Disney, and how did you come to work for Disney?

Howard Green: Like every kid growing up when I did, I was born in 1954, Disney is a huge part of your lives.

The first movie I ever saw was “Sleeping Beauty,” 1959, so I was five years old and I remember that very vividly, and of course “101 Dalmatians” really hit me right at that main period and “Sword in the Stone,” I can remember buying all the merchandise for that and everything. So that was the period of my childhood where those are the movies that I remember vividly.

And “Darby O’Gill and the Little People” I saw when I was a kid. I remember seeing that on a New Year’s Eve and it scared the heck out of me. Those banshees… the imagery from that you just never forget.

So Disney did make a big impression on me when I was a child. By the time “Jungle Book” came around I was not seeing Disney films regularly. I was already past the age so there was a big gap in my Disney knowledge. I didn’t see “Aristocats,” I didn’t see “Robin Hood.”

By the time “Rescuers” came around I was out here. I came out here to go to grad school at USC and I went to undergrad at Temple University. I came out here for a one year MBA program and a friend of mine in the program was a Disney stockholder and he took me to a Disney annual shareholder meeting. I think it was at the Dorothy Chandler or the Ahmanson (theatre)… one of those, and they showed “The Rescuers.”

It was terrific and it sort of reconnected me with Disney, started me thinking about Disney again, and I knew by the time I came out to USC that I wanted to apply my business background to the entertainment industry because I loved movies. I was a movie buff from early on, really.

When I graduated from USC I sent out about 60 letters to every entertainment company… to heads of marketing, heads of distribution, heads of publicity, because that was the area that seemed to overlap best with my skills which were qualitative rather than quantitative. I was never good with math or anything like that but I could always write.

I was always interested in movie ads. Even as a kid I would pay attention to trailers and movie ads and it kind of registered with me, so it seemed like if I could combine that business background and marketing background with entertainment, then I’d have something really special.

I had interviews with Gary Kreisel who was with Walt Disney Records and Merrill Dean, head of the Music Company back then. They were trying to find a job for me, it didn’t quite work. But then Irving Ludwig hired me and liked me and actually created the position for me.

SW: What was Irving Ludwig's job?

HG: He was the head of distribution. I don’t know if he was actually given the title President then or not but he was certainly head of Buena Vista Distribution. Irving Ludwig went back to the days of “Fantasia” when he was hired to oversee the road show productions of “Fantasia” and set up all the 100 speakers or whatever in San Francisco and the various markets. So Irving was connected with Disney for a long time.

Irving was one of the great showmen of our time and I spent a year working for him at Buena Vista Pictures Distribution and I learned so much from him. He just enthused you. It was a great Disney spirit and a great Disney immersion working for Irving because he loved the company, he loved the films. It was so exciting to be there and to be part of it. It just reawakened my whole love for Disney being at the studio.

So that was the first job really that I took out of grad school. I started in November, graduated in the summer. I did a few little temporary things waiting for somebody to hire me and Irving was the first one to come thru and created the job for me.

I started as a sales trainee which meant I might have gotten shipped off to Ohio to sell films to the exhibitors and things like that.

SW: Exhibitors are the theatres?

HG: Theatre owners, yes. But I ended up falling in with a guy named Malcolm Barbour who was sort of the guy who was writing stuff within distribution, like coming up with contest ideas for local markets and writing the press books they used to do. A thing called a press book which gave exhibitors ideas and had sort of “canned” stories about how to promote the movie in the local market. So I started doing some of that, I started writing bid letters which is the letters that you would send out to the exhibitors telling them about the movie.

Mal was a really great punster and fun guy and I kind of picked up some of that. I was already a Marx Brothers fan so I knew all the puns in the world. I learned from that job how to have more fun with my writing and to write more of a “hypey” kind of publicity style.

So within a year of being in distribution I was able to switch over to Publicity. I worked for a guy named Bob King and Tom Jones and Leonard Shannon, some wonderful folks who went way back with the company. So I became sort of a bridge between the old and the new.

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