For the past half-century, American directors have stuffed their films with citations of other films, television shows, and pop-culture artifacts. In his 1982 essay “The Future of Allusion: Hollywood in the Seventies (and Beyond),” Noël Carroll argued that allusion “has become a major expressive device” in American cinema, with many popular films employing a “two-tiered system of communication” in which a subset of the audience appreciates the work as much for its knowing references as for its more familiar “action/drama/fantasy” pleasures. While much American film and television continues to operate on these two levels, subsequent decades have seen a kind of democratizing of allusionism, such that a large portion of the contemporary audience has come to expect and appreciate a weave of cross-references in their popular media. The intricate interconnections of the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” no less than Quentin Tarantino’s bricolage testify to this.

Over the years, Tim Burton’s films have helped to tutor the mass audience in the pleasures of allusionism. His earliest works, even those with “original” premises, rely almost entirely on allusions for their meanings and effects. His stop-motion short Vincent (1982) concerns a boy’s fascination with Vincent Price, particularly the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations he made for American International Pictures in the 1960s. The live-action Luau (also 1982) pastiches several genres of 1960s drive-in movies. Burton’s first features are less pure instances of allusionism, but only slightly. His breakthrough, Beetlejuice (1988), is a horror-comedy dense with references to The Wizard of Oz, The Fly, and The Exorcist. Edward Scissorhands (1990) might have been pitched as Frankenstein Meets Beauty and the Beast. Mars Attacks! (1997) is a parody of Cold War alien-invasion films.

Adaptations and remakes arguably represent one end-point of this reliance on allusion, and Burton took this short leap early in his career. His critical cachet and attraction to cultural recyclables made him an ideal director for studios’ efforts to revive valuable intellectual property. In 1986, for a rebooted Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Burton re-filmed the 1964 teleplay adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Jar.” Warner Brothers’ Batman (1989) was a landmark in corporate synergy for its integrated marketing and merchandising and for its legacy of comic-book blockbusters. Fox’s Planet of the Apes (2001) was a failed effort to reboot a franchise. Even outside of a blockbuster context, Burton has been drawn to familiar stories with prominent cinematic or televisual intertexts, from Sleepy Hollow (2009; it owes as much to the 1949 Disney animation as to Washington Irving’s story) to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005).

Burton’s association with Disney goes back 35 years, to his origins as an animator for the company in the late 1970s. Vincent was, in fact, a Walt Disney Production. His work has exhibited a scholarly devotion to Disney history, as in Corpse Bride‘s quotation of the 1929 Silly Symphony “Skeleton Dance.” The first feature Burton made for the company was Ed Wood (1994), distributed by Disney’s “adult” imprint Touchstone. Although the stuff of Ed Wood’s no-budget films would seem worlds away from Disney’s ethos, Burton’s biopic lightly sanitizes its subject, effecting a willfully ahistorical transformation of what Jonathan Rosenbaum has called Wood’s “miserable, abject failure of a career” into a postmodern “celebration” whose affected innocence is paradoxically a function of the film’s (and tacitly the audience’s) knowingness. In other words, Burton Disney-fies Ed Wood. This operation is akin to the remaking of Uncle Walt himself in 2013’s relatively edgy—for Disney—Saving Mr. Banks, which engages its audience’s knowing skepticism about Disney only to revise and revive his myth, as Mike Budd argues in a recent essay for Jump Cut.

Alice in Wonderland was thus not just a joining of two brands but a reunion, one that Dumbo will extend. It was also an especially profitable instance of the ubiquitous corporate practice of recycling intellectual property. The Walt Disney Company helped to popularize this strategy in the mid-20th century and has relied upon it more than ever in the 21st; witness their recent acquisitions of the Muppets, Marvel Entertainment, and the Star Wars franchise. Within this broad program of recycled properties is a systematic campaign, often credited to Walt Disney Pictures’ Sean Bailey, to reinvigorate interest in their “legacy” films through a new series of high-profile features. In addition to remakes of Alice, Cinderella (2015), The Jungle Book (2016), Pete’s Dragon (2016), and Dumbo Disney has produced a “re-imagining” of Sleeping Beauty (Maleficent, 2014) and a fictionalized “making-of” Mary Poppins (Saving Mr. Banks). There are a host of other, slightly more ambiguous cases in the works. These films not only generate or promise huge profits. They also turn the settings and characters of discrete stories into franchise fodder. In this context, allusions allow intellectual properties to exfoliate: Sleeping Beauty spins off Maleficent, which spins off a Disney Channel series, and so on. Films like Saving Mr. Banks and Maleficent also serve as feature-length advertisements for Disney’s film library, which had historically been subject to carefully-spaced-out theatrical revivals and then limited DVD and Blu-Ray editions. This new cycle of remakes and other franchise-extenders is, among other things, Disney’s response to a stagnating home-video market.

Disney has sought to validate its remake of Dumbo by reference to Tim Burton’s body of work. The WSJ report, no doubt inspired by a Disney press release, made sure to note that “[c]ircus motifs have been a favorite of Mr. Burton . . . going back to the Red Triangle Circus Gang in his Batman Returns.” This tenuous association appears quaint in light of the deeper connection that Burton has to Disney and the process that has governed his career for at least a quarter of a century: the aesthetic logic of allusionism converging with the corporate logic of franchising.

But there’s reason to appreciate Penn’s television work as an achievement unto itself. He directed dozens—likely over 100—episodes of live television between 1953 and 1958, working in the medium’s most prestigious genre, the prime-time anthology drama. In this format, directors had a week or two to read, cast, rehearse, and block a full play, which would then be aired live. Any bummed lines, missed cues, or technical mishaps were witnessed by an audience potentially numbering in the millions. Live anthology drama was a unique, and uniquely demanding, hybrid of cinematic découpage and theatrical immediacy and peril.

Penn’s first television job was on the West Coast, as a floor manager for the Colgate Comedy Hour. His ticket to New York and live anthology drama came courtesy of the NBC producer Fred Coe, who hired Penn to direct The Gulf Playhouse: First Person, a new, experimental series in which the camera assumed the optical perspective of each episode’s protagonist.

In 1953 Penn was promoted to one of NBC’s flagship anthology series, The Philco/Goodyear Television Playhouse (the show alternated sponsors). Penn helped develop a Philco “house style” featuring long takes and precisely calibrated camera movements delicately tracking the complexly choreographed movements of actors. This style was deliberately unshowy, placing the focus on the words and performances. Many of these performances were by a New York-based stable of actors trained in “the Method.” Walter Matthau, Martin Balsam, Eva Marie Saint, and Paul Newman were among those who regularly worked with Penn in live television, at the dawn of their careers.

Penn’s best Philco episodes are intimate dramas of everyday problems which evidence Penn’s extraordinary rapport with these young actors. “The Joker” (May 1954) is a two-hander starring Balsam as a man who regresses at every opportunity to adolescent ribaldry and pranks; this alternately charms and repulses his lover, played by Saint. The cameras follow the pair as they inch closer and then pull apart in a engrossing dance of affection and alienation. After Philco, Penn moved on to the ambitious Coe-produced series Playwrights ’56 and Playhouse 90. The latter, at 90 minutes and costing up to $500,000 per episode, was the Queen Mary of live anthology drama.

Despite being at the top of his profession through much of the 1950s, Penn did not then achieve the fame of his writer-collaborators like Robert Alan Aurthur, Paddy Chayefsky, and Horton Foote, who are often credited for sustaining a brief “Golden Age” of live television. Anthology drama was viewed as a “writers’ medium.” This idea is traceable to producers like Coe and CBS’s Worthington Miner, who promoted the artistic independence and integrity of the “tele-playwrights” to raise televison’s cultural profile.

This view remains largely in place today, and while defensible, it’s also served to obscure the role played by directors like Penn in forging the aesthetics of live television drama—and the continuities between their television, theater, and film work. Indeed, Penn’s first two feature films, The Left Handed Gun (1958) and The Miracle Worker (1962), were both adaptations of television plays. The Miracle Worker, in particular, is a fascinating example of re-mediation. It was originally an episode of Playhouse 90, then a highly successful Broadway play, then a feature film. Penn, Coe, and playwright William Gibson collaborated on all three versions, and the film kept the stars of the stage adaptation, Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. The film retains the stage play’s brutal bouts between Helen Keller and her tutor—a special case of the Method ethos of externalizing complex inner states—while largely extending the anthology-drama aesthetic of long takes and bold deep focus.

The stage adaptation of The Miracle Worker continues to be performed, most recently in a Broadway revival starring Abigail Breslin and Alison Pill. The Oscar-winning film turns up on American Film Institute lists and can be watched and rewatched on DVD. By contrast, kinescopes of the original Playhouse 90 version—along with thousands of other episodes of live anthology drama—are housed in a few archives and private collections, inaccessible to the larger public. Indeed, with the exception of a half-dozen canonical episodes recycled on home video (for example, on the Criterion Collection’s Golden Age of Television DVD set) this important moment in American media history has been invisible to several generations of consumers and scholars. One hopes that projects like the Television Academy Foundation’s Archive of American Television, which has issued several DVDs of live television, eventually release “The Joker,” “The Miracle Worker,” and other episodes of anthology drama, so that scholars and fans can begin to understand this period of Penn’s career—and the careers of other live-television directors such as Sidney Lumet, John Frankenheimer, Franklin Schaffner, and Robert Mulligan—as more than a stepping stone to Broadway and Hollywood.

Some Sources:
An interview with Penn concerning his television work is available on the Archive of American Television website. Two books of interviews with directors of live television, both featuring Penn, provide invaluable information about the medium: Ira Skutch’s The Days of Live (Los Angeles: Scarecrow Press, 1998) and Gorham Kindem’s The Live Television Generation of Hollywood Film Directors (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1994). Also useful is the autobiography of Penn’s colleague Delbert Mann, Looking Back… at Live Television and Other Matters (Los Angeles: Directors Guild of America, 1998).