The plot sound absolutely boring: PJ Travers goes to Hollywood and fights with just about everyone over Disney's plan to make a film about Mary Poppins.
Yet the film is surprisingly gentle toward it's characters, even though, as Travers later wrote to Brian Sibley, she was aghast at the make over of her plain spoken tart tongued nanny:
“The ways of film-makers are strange,” she wrote to me in 1968. “It is as though they took a sausage, threw away the contents but kept the skin and filled it with their own ideas very different from the original substance.” Chief among Travers’s catalogue of complaints was the way in which Mary Poppins “already beloved for what she was — plain, vain and incorruptible — was transmogrified into a soubrette”.
A lot of the success goes to Tom Hanks, playing Walt Disney, and the impeccable Emma Thompson as Travers.
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If you want to know about Travers, check out the (above) link by Sibley, along with these from his blog: LINK and LINK about her work "The fox at the manger". A list of articles labled Disney is HERE. including this one on the Sherman brothers.
And another article on Traver's attitude toward the movie is found on his Disney blog, along with the story of the (never filmed) sequel.
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Update:
The charity of Mr. Sibley is in contrast to the hit jobs on the UKMail and the UK Guardian.
The reason I say "hit jobs" is because the UKMail especially has lots of innuendo of sexual liasons etc. that would open them to libel if Travers was alive. I see a woman trying to cope, they see a slut.
Then they condemn her for adopting only one twin.
Reality check: Separating tiwns or children of the same family was commonly done in those days, as was not telling the child he was adopted. Even today, my two adopted sons were from a family of six, who were taken in by five different families to raise.
Of course, the UK elite seem to have a bias against adoption per se, as I pointed out here.How can you justify you (or your girlfriend's) abortions if you can show adoption by loving parents is a decent alternative? Steve Jobs anyone?
And contrary to the UKGuardian author's innuendos, alcoholism has more to do with family genes than upbringing.
It is well that several folks commenting on the hit pieces knew Travers and defended her against these fleetstreetsnobs. One example:
geoffreydegalles
I'll say this much for her:- I came to know P.L. Travers really rather well, albeit late in her life; and there is virtually nothing of the real person here to be recognized -- neither in the article, nor in all of the comments. All this here is no more than dreamsville, and worse still. And these few words I write out of respect for her memory.
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