Bill Walsh, Don DaGradi, P.L. Travers

Authorial Thunder from Down Under

Mary Poppins was a book before it became a movie. And its author was, apparently, not the easiest woman to get along with.

A wee bit of background: P.L. Travers had a tough childhood in Australia. Her father was a kindly man, but he was also an alcoholic. He died when she was a little girl. So, later in life, when she wrote Mary Poppins, she wanted Mr. Banks to become the same kind of dad her father had been, a kindly man with an enthusiastic sense of life. (Just with less of a debilitating disease.) (Source)

Her 1934 book Marry Poppins created most of the characters in the movie—and some who aren't in the movie, like the younger siblings of Michael and Jane, a pair of infant twins named John and Barbara. The story covers fairly familiar territory but with some different adventures and excursions thrown in, like an excursion to see different animals at the corners of the earth. But the basic idea of the movie is there.

Travers went onto write a series of Poppins books, and Mary P.'s later adventures got pretty trippy: some infamous plot points include a domineering sun who runs an interplanetary circus, alien cats, and creepy people who live inside the illustration on a ceramic vase and who kidnap Jane. (Source)

And Travers, unsurprisingly, had very strong ideas about what these books meant. In an interview with The Paris Review, Travers explained what she considered Mary Poppins basic appeal:

"How wonderful it was to be able to have somebody other than your parents that you could talk to, who treated you as though you were a human being, with your proper place in the world. Your parents did so, too (my parents were most loving, I had a most loving childhood), but the extra friend was a tremendous plus." (Source)

Seeing Red

Fast-forward, and Travers had sold the movie rights to Mary Poppins to Walt Disney. But she was still determined to have her say on how it would be filmed. And things between Mr. Mouse and a kindly children's book author got…surprising gnarly.

Travers headed to L.A., where Disney's studios were located, and got into a major power-clash—with none other than Walt Disney himself.

Disney had hired two screenwriters, Bill Walsh and Dom DaGradi, to adapt Travers work, along with the songwriting team, The Sherman Brothers. The Shermans had already written 32 songs for the movie, having worked on it for two years previous.

According to Richard Sherman, Travers immediately upset the whole creative team:

And her opening line to us was, "I don't even know why I'm meeting you gentlemen, because in fact we're not going to have music in this film and, in fact, we're not going to have any prancing and dancing." We were completely dashed. (Source)

But, of course, Walt completely overrode Travers' suggestions—which started to get pretty arbitrary. For instance, at one point, she demanded that the color red not be featured in the movie. Her squabbles with the other filmmakers were recorded on over 39 hours of audiotape—later used as the basis for the film Saving Mr. Banks, in which Tom Hanks plays Disney and Emma Thompson plays Travers. (Source)

Taking the Fun out of Dysfunction

Sherman said that he and the other writers came up with a plot for the movie in which the Banks were a dysfunctional family—the plot that was actually used to make the film. He stated that while Travers' original work was full of great characters and inventions, it was relatively plot-less. They needed to invent the tense Banks family dynamic in order to give Mary Poppins some problems to sort out—a way to propel the movie.

But Travers kept running interference, and the bad blood lingers to this day. Sherman continued to bash Travers in this interview:

[…] she was a walking icicle. She didn't like anything we did. She resented the fact that the father had been made into a flawed character who changes during the course of the film. She'd made him the hero, an idyllic man, and wanted that preserved; her own father had been a drunk. Showing her our ideas was like walking out of a hot shower and having cold water thrown all over you. Her opening line was that she didn't see why she should meet us since she didn't want music in the film. In the two weeks we spent with her, she managed to destroy all the dreams, hopes and love we had built up. (Source)

We'd try to provide a differing opinion on Travers, but it seems like everyone who worked with her on the movie tended to agree with Sherman's assessment. There aren't too many positive opinions out there…

But Travers should still be honored for, you know, creating Mary Poppins in the first place.