Happy Friday, everyone— and welcome, new subscribers! Most of you found me from my opinion piece on CNN this week. Thanks for reading, and welcome to the club!
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There is a lot of Disney news making headlines right now— in less than 48 hours since that piece was published Wednesday night, Disney has canceled plans for a $1 billion campus in Orlando and announced the closure of its Galactic Starcruiser hotel next September.
But what I want to talk about today is Howard.
As early as next week, Disney will be removing a slew of streaming titles from Disney+ and Hulu, including Howard, Don Hahn’s documentary about famed lyricist Howard Ashman (Little Shop of Horrors, The Little Mermaid), which was released on Disney+ in 2020.
This is just not ok.
For me, this is both personal and scholarly.
I vividly remember how Ashman changed Disney and the tragedy of his death. I was born in the late 1970s—close to the nadir of Disney animation.* When I was a kid, Disney movies were—to put it mildly— terrible.
But then Jeffrey Katzenberg— the new head of the Michael Eisner-era studios—interrupted Howard Ashman’s Passover seder (really!), pushing Ashman to come work for Disney. It wasn’t his first call to Ashman. But soon, Ashman and his writing partner Alan Menken were in Burbank, writing songs for The Little Mermaid (1989)— and the Disney renaissance was born.
In the fall of 1991, I read about a new Disney film called Beauty and the Beast. It had just premiered as a rough, unfinished cut—many of the scenes were still black-and-white drawings—at the New York Film Festival, and critics were already enchanted.
Its lyricist, Howard Ashman, had died of AIDS the previous March.
I was a young teenager as both the Disney renaissance and the AIDS epidemic hit their cultural peak.
(For the AIDS epidemic, I don’t mean its epidemiological peak—I mean representational— how much we were seeing depictions of it in popular culture, and how much I— as a kid who read the news but who was, in the words of William Finn, “very Jewish, very middle class, and very straight”—knew of the world—became really aware of it. The 1990s saw a host of films, plays, television arcs, and other media about AIDS. The history goes back to the early 1980s, and the global epidemic goes on much longer/later).
Ashman’s death, and the impact of Beauty and the Beast, hit me hard. I was a brown-haired nerdy overweight kid who felt like she didn’t fit in and just wanted to escape New Jersey. How could Belle do anything but immediately transfix me? I can still remember what it was like to watch the trailer, to see her crack open the door to the Beast’s castle, letting in a shaft of light.
“Is anyone here?”
It was how I felt. Being a teenage girl sucks. Being an introspective writerly type was worse. Was anybody there? Out of the darkness, Ashman gave me connection. I identified with the Beast as much as I did with Belle. To be loved as one was… it was not a message I had seen in a film before. It wasn’t simple. “Bittersweet and strange, finding you can change, learning you were wrong,” is one lyric from Ashman’s pen. He showed a world with more grayness than a Disney movie had showed before. He showed a world where people could transform.**
Howard, the documentary, is beautiful. It tells about his childhood in Baltimore, his time spent acting, his friends and loves, his family. It includes, as much as possible, recordings of his voice. It does not hide his gayness (which, as was true for a lot of creatives at the time, was not widely public until his AIDS became advanced) or his Jewishness. (I knew nothing of the Jewishness when I was a teen).
In the documentary, there’s a clip of Roy E. Disney— Walt Disney’s nephew, an active part of the company at the same time as Ashman. He says:
“I don’t want to compare him to Walt, but on the other hand, he had that kind of influence on everybody. It was a remarkable amount of influence. If Howard said it, it was gospel.”
This was a storyteller so masterful that even a close Disney relative made these kinds of comparisons (I’ll just let the “gospel” part sit there for fun).
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In my “Sex, Gender, Jews” course, the last few weeks are about Jews, gender, and popular culture. For fun, I make one of the final days about Disney.
One of the assignments is a very short piece about Howard Ashman.
I always poll the students and ask if any of them had heard the name “Howard Ashman” before learning about him for my class.
As usual— this year in a group of 43 students— no hands went up.
(And yes, these students partake of Disney. They had all seen The Little Mermaid. At least half had been to Disney World).
His story happened before they were born. (Many of this year’s first year students were born in 2004; seniors, 2000). But it’s a vital one. He wasn’t perfect, and this kind of documentary is as much about telling a particular story about Disney’s history as it is about Ashman’s. Documentaries tell stories, too.
Yet this one haunts me. Perhaps it is because Ashman was one of those people who—by necessity—understood human fragility.
Howard Ashman was born on May 17, 1950. This week—a week before the live-action version of The Little Mermaid arrives in theaters—would have been his 73rd birthday.
So today, though there are more pressing issues in the world and in Disney World, I am thinking about Howard.
Go watch his story before it fades away.
*I would place the absolute lowest moment for Disney animation at 1985’s The Black Cauldron.
**Yes, now, absolutely, we can see issues in the film regarding consent, domestic violence, the fact that in the end the Beast transforms back in a handsome prince, etc. In 1991—compared with Snow White and Cinderella— this film was a really big deal.
I know what I’m watching this weekend. Thank you.
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