Given the question: Build a movie plot around this: who is the enemy of sentiment and whimsy? Mary Poppins
The answer is:
In 1961, the financially strapped author Pamela "P. L." Travers reluctantly travels from her home in London to Los Angeles to work with Walt Disney at the urging of her agent, Diarmuid Russell. Disney has pursued the film rights to her Mary Poppins stories for twenty years, having promised his daughters that he would produce a film based on them. Travers has steadfastly resisted Disney's efforts because she fears what he would do to her character. However, she has not written anything in a while and her book royalties have dwindled to nothing, so she risks losing her house. Still, Russell has to remind her that Disney has agreed to two major stipulationsno animation and unprecedented script approvalbefore she agrees to go.Travers' difficult childhood in Allora, Queensland, Australia, is depicted through flashbacks, and is the inspiration for much of Mary Poppins. Travers idolized her loving, imaginative father, Travers Robert Goff, but his chronic alcoholism resulted in his repeated firings, strained her parents' marriage, and caused her distressed mother to attempt suicide. Goff died at an early age from tuberculosis when Travers was seven years old.In Los Angeles, Travers is irritated by what she perceives as the city's unreality and the inhabitants' intrusive friendliness, personified by her limousine driver, Ralph. At the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, Travers meets the creative team that are developing Mary Poppins for the screen: screenwriter Don DaGradi, and music composers Richard and Robert Sherman. She finds their presumptions and casual manners highly improper, a view she also holds of the jocular Disney.Travers' working relationship with Disney and his team is difficult from the outset, with her insistence that Mary Poppins is the enemy of sentiment and whimsy. Disney and his people are puzzled by Travers' disdain for fantasy, given the nature of the Mary Poppins story, as well as Travers' own rich imagination. She particularly objects to how the character George Banks, the estranged...