Mary Poppins (film)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Mary Poppins, the 1964 film directed by Robert Stevenson and produced by Walt Disney, had its premiere on the 27th of August 1964 at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. It earned thirteen Academy Award nominations, a record for any film released by Walt Disney Studios, and walked away with five of them. But none of that was supposed to happen. The woman who created Mary Poppins spent more than two decades refusing to let Walt Disney anywhere near her books. And even when she finally agreed, she walked into that premiere party and loudly announced that the animated sequence had to go. Disney turned to her, said "Pamela, the ship has sailed," and walked away. How did a film born from that much conflict become Disney's highest-grossing release to that point? And what happened to the author who spent the rest of her life trying to undo what had been done to her creation?

• 2. Two Decades of Refusal

  ›

  Disney first approached P. L. Travers about the film rights in 1938, when the ink on his animated films was still fresh and he had yet to produce a major live-action work. Travers said no. She said no again, periodically, for more than twenty years, through visits to her home in Chelsea, London, through letters, through persuasion. She did not believe a film would do justice to her books. Disney finally succeeded in 1961, but only because Travers drove a hard bargain: she demanded and obtained script-approval rights and was brought on as a formal consultant to the production. The Sherman Brothers had already been at work shaping the project, suggesting that the story be moved from the 1930s setting to the Edwardian era. Pre-production and music creation consumed roughly two years before a single frame was shot. Travers's discomfort ran through every stage of that process. She disapproved of the softening of Mary Poppins's character, felt ambivalent about the music, and hated the animation so intensely that she later refused all further adaptations of the later novels in the series. In a 2013 interview, Dick Van Dyke recalled that Travers believed neither he nor Julie Andrews were right for the lead roles. The correspondence between Travers and Disney, which documents this long tension, is held in the Travers collection of papers at the State Library of New South Wales in Australia.

• 3. The Woman Who Played Poppins

  ›

  Julie Andrews came to the role through a painful detour. She had originated the role of Eliza Doolittle on Broadway in My Fair Lady, but when Warner Bros. adapted the show for film, Jack L. Warner passed her over and cast Audrey Hepburn instead. Disney approached Andrews shortly after that rejection, when she was three months pregnant. Rather than withdraw the offer, Disney told her he was willing to postpone filming until after she gave birth. Andrews accepted. Filming ran from May through September 1963 in Burbank, California, using painted London background scenes rather than location work. Andrews's performance extended well beyond the title role: she voiced the whistling harmony for the robin during "A Spoonful of Sugar" and sang among the Pearly singers in "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious". The casting process had been broad. Among the names considered for the role of Mary Poppins were Julie Harris, Angela Lansbury, Bette Davis, Judy Garland, Barbara Eden, Elizabeth Taylor, Jayne Mansfield, Natalie Wood, and Elizabeth Montgomery. Andrews won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her work, and in a quietly pointed footnote, Hepburn was not nominated for My Fair Lady in that same category. Andrews had previously beaten Hepburn for the Best Actress Award at the Golden Globes for their respective roles in those two films.

• 4. The Accent That Became Famous

  ›

  Dick Van Dyke was cast in the main supporting role of Bert after Walt Disney saw his work on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Van Dyke then lobbied to also play Mr. Dawes Sr., the elderly bank director. Disney felt he was too young, but Van Dyke convinced him with a screen test. The dual role produced a small joke in the credits: during the end titles, the name "Navckid Keyd" appears first, an anagram of Dick Van Dyke, before the letters unscramble to reveal his name. His Cockney accent, though, became something else entirely. English character actor J. Pat O'Malley provided coaching, but the result is considered one of the weakest accents in film history. In a 2003 poll by Empire magazine, it ranked second among the worst film accents of all time. At a BAFTA ceremony in 2017, Van Dyke was given an award for television excellence. He used the occasion to say, "I appreciate this opportunity to apologise to the members of BAFTA for inflicting on them the most atrocious cockney accent in the history of cinema." Van Dyke later claimed O'Malley did not do a Cockney accent any better than he did.

• 5. Making the Magic Visible

  ›

  Filming was complete by September 1963, but post-production and animation consumed another eleven months. The visual centerpiece of the animated sequences was achieved using the sodium vapor process, a method chosen over the more common bluescreen approach. The actors were filmed against a white screen lit with sodium vapor lights, which emit a yellow hue. A special camera fitted with a prism filtered that light onto a separate reel, producing a matte precise enough to isolate even the partially transparent veil of Mary Poppins's costume. The film won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects in 1965 for this technique. The rooftop dance sequences presented a different kind of difficulty. Chimney sweep dancer Peter Menefee, one of the twelve supporting Bert in that sequence, described rehearsing for weeks on plywood floors only to arrive on a cobblestone street on the first day of filming. Walt Disney himself attended rehearsals for the rooftop scenes every day. The film's choreographers were Dee Dee Wood and Marc Breaux, who were married to each other. Irwin Kostal arranged and conducted the score, while the Sherman Brothers drew musical inspiration from Edwardian British music hall traditions. The soundtrack was released by Buena Vista Records in 1964 on LP and reel-to-reel tape. The songs were covered widely, by artists including Johnny Mathis, Louis Prima, Ray Conniff, and even cartoon characters such as The Chipmunks and The Flintstones.

• 6. Box Office and Legacy

  ›

  Mary Poppins earned $44 million in worldwide theatrical rentals in its original run, making it the highest-grossing film of 1964 in the United States and Disney's highest-grossing film at the time. Made on an estimated budget of $4.4-6 million, it was reported to be the most profitable film of 1965, earning a net profit of $28.5 million. Walt Disney used those profits to purchase land in central Florida and finance the construction of Walt Disney World. The park carries a small trace of the film to this day: the MAPO safety system on all Disney monorails takes its name from the first two letters of each word in Mary Poppins. Disney's steam locomotives at Walt Disney World are also fitted with a boiler safety device marked MAPO. In the United Kingdom, the film ranked as the 20th most popular sound film of the 20th century, with admissions of 14 million. The Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the United States National Film Registry in 2013, citing its cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance. Travers, for her part, never reconciled herself to the Disney version. When producer Cameron Mackintosh approached her in the 1990s about a stage musical, she agreed only on the condition that he use exclusively English-born writers and that no one from the film production be directly involved.