3 The Value of Loyalty
IN 1924, MOVIE-STAR CULTURE was in full swing. Motion picture magazines glamorized young Hollywood to fans across the country. Movie startups dotted the Los Angeles landscape, and the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio was only one of many. These small, B-movie companies released independent films for the open market without a distributor and were so numerous that they shared a collective nickname: “Poverty Row.” Fame seemed to spring up overnight only to the chosen few, and many of these studios would go bankrupt within a year or two.
Fortunately for Walt and Roy Disney, their contract with Margaret Winkler kept them busy. Walt began growing a mustache and pomading his hair, though he kept it long in the front so that a single bohemian lock flopped haphazardly over his right eye. He now drove a stylish used Moon Cabriolet roadster. After the sixth Alice film was released on August 1, 1924, Walt was ready to negotiate a fatter contract. But there was a change at the distribution office: Margaret Winkler had given control of her company to her new husband, Charles Mintz.
Mintz, age thirty-four, was skinny, bespectacled, and had as much a yen for making deals as for asserting his weight. He informed Walt that the quality of his films was “lacking,” so he sent his brother-in-law, George Winkler, to the studio as an in-house film editor.
The subsequent contract Mintz offered to the Disney brothers was worse than the previous one. Walt wrote to Mintz, “I am perfectly willing to sacrifice a profit on this series in order to put out something good, but I expect you to show your appreciation by helping us out.”1 Mintz advised Walt to have patience.
Months of negotiations with Mintz left Walt exhausted. By December Walt had settled on a contract that would provide him the funds to make the films he wanted but at a cost of time. Rather than delivering one film per month, he now had a deadline every three weeks.
In early 1925 George Winkler returned to New York. In July Walt wed his secretary, Lillian Bounds, and they rented a home close to the studio. That same month, Walt and Roy placed a $400 deposit on a small, sixty-by-forty-foot lot on Hyperion Avenue, two miles from downtown Los Angeles.2 The property contained a one-story stucco building that used to be an organ factory, along with an adjacent vacant lot. This repurposed building would be the new site of their studio.
From January to early autumn 1925, twelve new Alice shorts had premiered in New York City and Los Angeles. Charles Mintz began talks of contract renewal, but Walt’s hopes for easy negotiations were soon dashed. Still, Walt stood his ground, and he eventually was able to sign with Mintz for a modest increase.
In February 1926 Walt and his staff used a borrowed truck to move their equipment into the new facility. Walt and Roy had agreed on a name change: Walt Disney Studios.3
In their new headquarters, Walt and Roy occupied desks in a back room. The animators, all young men, sat in rows side by side at their drawing tables. Walt led informal sessions for stories and gags for each cartoon.
Walt was already in the habit of staying at the studio after hours to scrutinize his artists’ work, but with the increased pressure from Mintz, that became excessive. His ever-critical eye was infringing on their drawing, and the staff started to consider it “snooping.”4
Soon the stress of dealing with Mintz’s constant criticisms was beyond what Walt could handle, and the young producer started to lash out at his staff. Even those who had been friends in Kansas City found him increasingly hostile. Walt began to yell and accuse people of double-crossing him, and one of his animators called the place a “den of strife and vexation.”5 By August, some were already plotting, unprompted, to walk out and open their own studio.
At the start of 1927, when the first animator Walt had hired decided to quit (he “couldn’t bear the abuse that Walt heaped upon him,” remembered a colleague),6 Walt wooed an old acquaintance, animator Isadore Freleng, to come over from Kansas City. However, in a few months he would quit as well.
In mid-January 1927 Mintz broke some big news to Walt. “A national organization” was hungering for a new star character to headline a series of animated cartoons. “They seem to think there are too many cats on the market,” wrote Mintz. “As long as they are doing the buying, naturally, we must try to sell them what they want.” Mintz asked Walt to pitch him a rabbit.7
Walt knew an opportunity when he saw it. He gave the assignment to his top man, Ub Iwerks (as he now spelled his name). Iwerks designed a stout, middle-aged character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and Walt submitted the design to Mintz.
Mintz responded with very good news. His “national organization” was Universal Pictures, one of the biggest studios in Hollywood, and after spending a year searching, they settled on Oswald as their cartoon star.
The Oswald contract stretched from April 1927 to April 1928, and it was Walt’s fattest contract yet. To help meet production demands, Walt hired a teenage artist, Leslie “Les” Clark, who was working at a local lunch counter.8 With all hands working on this cartoon, the studio took about five weeks to complete it. The opening title card read:
Universal Presents
OSWALD the Lucky Rabbit
in
“Poor Papa”
a Winkler Production
by Walt Disney
Walt wanted a glimmer of personality in the characters. “I want characters to be somebody,” Walt said then. “I don’t want them just to be a drawing.”9 It took a couple cartoons to get his personality right, but very soon Oswald emerged as a youthful, feisty hero who succeeded in spite of himself.
Meanwhile, on May 20, 1927, Charles Lindbergh, age twenty-five, piloted a solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean in thirty-three-and-a-half straight hours. He instantly became a global hero and a symbol of American courage and ingenuity, ushering in the age of air travel.
The event had a particular resonance with twenty-five-year-old Walt Disney. Lindbergh gave all young men permission to dream big, and validated the tenacity of “the little guy.” This was Oswald in the face of adversity, or Walt in the face of Hollywood.
That June, Walt and Roy bought a large property on a side street near the studio on which to build their new homes. The reviews for the Oswald cartoons started coming in later that summer, and Universal’s new rabbit was a hit.
Out in New York, Charles Mintz was reading the papers too. He also knew that Walt didn’t draw any of his cartoons, and he had grown tired of negotiating with him. It was evident that poor morale hung in the air; Walt’s studio appeared to have a high turnover. In July Mintz sent George Winkler back to the Disney studio. Secretly, he began asking the remaining animators about making Oswald cartoons without Walt. The Kansas City cohort was interested in the offer and, as an added insult, agreed to hide it from Walt.
In the fall of 1927 Warner Bros. released the first Vitaphone feature with a vocal soundtrack, The Jazz Singer. The motion picture soundtrack had been invented, and audiences were wowed. However, musicians who played in the orchestra pits for silent films began to fear for their careers and started to seek support from local musicians’ unions.10
A different sort of conflict was rapidly brewing at the Walt Disney Studio. The animators kept working diligently, but in two separate parties: those who were planning to stay at the studio and those who were not. In late January 1928, after more secret negotiations, Iwerks pulled Walt aside and told him about the insurgency.11
Walt was beside himself in shock. After February 2, when Mintz signed a new three-year contract with Universal Pictures to deliver Oswald cartoons, Walt decided to negotiate his new contract with Mintz in person. He was prepared to ask for an increase from $2,250 per film to $2,500. He invited Lillian on a trip to New York City—a second honeymoon, he said. Privately Walt thought that if things didn’t work out with Mintz, he would approach the animation studios in New York. It was a chance to hedge his bets.
Walt arrived with Lillian in New York during the bitter cold of late February, carrying two Oswald film reels and a book of press clippings. When Walt proposed $2,500 per film, Mintz counteroffered: $1,400 per film, plus a weekly salary as Mintz’s contracted employee. It dawned on Walt that Mintz would only keep Walt on his own terms.
Walt sent a telegram to Roy, ordering him to draft “iron-clad” two-year contracts and have his animators sign them immediately. But it was too late; the animators had already signed contracts to produce Oswald cartoons for Mintz. In a couple months, Walt Disney Studios would be empty and out of work.
During his next two weeks in New York, Walt continued negotiating with Mintz while desperately trying to hire animators from the city. There were no takers. On March 7, Walt wired to Roy, “We are still hanging around this Hell Hole waiting for something to happen.”12 In their final meeting, Mintz offered Walt $1,800 per film, 50 percent of the profits, plus a weekly salary. Walt refused to sign. He was furious, but powerless to keep his character or his animators.
Mintz was under no obligation to cater to Walt’s whims. This was business. Mintz already had the new contract with Universal to produce more Oswald cartoons—a character that Universal commissioned and that Mintz delivered. There was nothing in any of Universal’s contracts about who would produce the Oswald series, only that Mintz would distribute it. The little studio on Hyperion Avenue run by a twenty-six-year-old novice had the privilege to work on the Oswald series for its first run. His animators could choose to work where they wanted, and their experience with Walt had pushed them into Mintz’s arms.
When he boarded a westbound train with Lillian, Walt was fuming. Their “honeymoon” was over.13 However, by the end of the four-day train ride, he had decided to produce a new cartoon, this one based on the plucky exploits of “Lucky Lindy.” Like Lindbergh, Walt deemed himself a risk-taker, about to gamble it all and fly into the unknown.
When Walt returned to his studio in mid-March, just a month before the animators’ contracts expired, he immediately met with Iwerks. They would put another cartoon character on the market, one that belonged to the Disney studio. They still had a couple young assistants with them that Mintz hadn’t bothered with (like Les Clark). Walt would hire new artists, and Iwerks would train them.
A 1929 advertisement in the Universal exhibitor’s magazine for Oswald, soon after the Disney contract expired.
Walt and Iwerks kept to the back room, separated by a curtain lest the Mintz-bound animators share the information with their new boss. Iwerks worked furiously, averaging seven hundred drawings a day, as Lillian, her sister Hazel, and Roy’s wife, Edna, inked and opaqued the cels.14 After photography and film developing, they had a completed cartoon, Plane Crazy, starring an Oswald-like mouse named Mickey who aspires to be Charles Lindbergh. It cost $3,528.50.15
Walt wrote the premise of the second cartoon, and Iwerks drew the layout sketches that went along with the typed script. Called Gallopin’ Gaucho, it spoofed action star Douglas Fairbanks’s film The Gaucho and cost $4,249.73.16 When they were done, Walt peddled Plane Crazy and Gallopin’ Gaucho around Hollywood. The studio had resorted to releasing films to the open market. It had joined the forsaken ranks of “Poverty Row.”17
Weeks became months, and no distributor picked up Walt’s new cartoons.18 The Jazz Singer was changing everything. There was tremendous appetite for new talking pictures—distributors weren’t about to buy a couple silent cartoons from a no-name.
Walt went back to his studio. They would make a third Mouse cartoon, this time with the intention of adding synchronized sound. It would be a spoof on comedian Buster Keaton’s film Steamboat Bill, Jr. It would be called Steamboat Willie, and music would be prevalent throughout. Walt hired a few young artists, including wild-haired Johnny Cannon and redheaded Wilfred Jackson, who had an ear for music.
Iwerks and the assistants created the roughly nine thousand drawings that would make up Steamboat Willie. Each scene was broken up into several layers of drawings—anything that was moving with different timing. In the opening shot alone, one layer was placed for Mickey’s head and arms, one for his body and legs, and one for the ship’s wheel. There were also two background layers: one of the moving landscape and another of the stationary wheelhouse.
In August 1928 Steamboat Willie was completed, albeit without sound. The Disney brothers needed a very specific apparatus to embed a soundtrack on their film. But sound in films was a new invention, and the Hollywood studios were keeping their soundtrack gear proprietary.19 As September dawned, Walt took his reel of Steamboat Willie to New York in search of a soundtrack apparatus.
Motion picture businessman Pat Powers, a middle-aged opportunist who had helped found Universal Pictures, did indeed hold a patent on a sound apparatus. It was called the Cinephone system, and he was willing to license it to Walt for a whopping $26,000 a year. That was more than half of Walt’s annual budget for Oswald cartoons. However, Powers also had the connections and promised to introduce Walt to a top orchestra leader. Walt signed, and Powers took him to meet Carl Eduarde.
Eduarde was the pit conductor for the Strand Theatre in Times Square, located on 47th Street and Broadway. The maestro had composed music to accompany silent films like The Hunchback of Notre Dame, starring Lon Chaney. He assured Walt that he would lead the musicians who would perform the music for Steamboat Willie.
Shortly thereafter, Eduarde, Walt, and the musicians gathered in an informal recording booth. All the sound—music, sound effects, and vocals—was to be recorded at the same time on a single track. The musicians and their conductor had played for silent movies that were projected in front of them; Walt set up his projector to play Steamboat Willie the same way.
The cartoon played. Eduarde and the band followed along, but it was a failure—the music did not sync. And Walt had spent the last of his savings on this recording session.
Back at the studio, Ub Iwerks conceived of a bouncing ball on the side of the animation that showed each musical beat. He and Roy created a new print of Steamboat Willie with this bouncing ball. Walt ordered Roy to sell his Moon roadster to pay for a second recording session.20
By the time Walt received the revised print in September, he had encountered something unexpected: All over New York, the musicians’ union was at odds with cinema owners. New York, Walt was learning, was a hotbed of protest and union activity. The American Federation of Musicians was preventing its members from making prerecorded soundtracks. “Boy, the unions are sure tough on movie recording,” he wrote on September 20. “They are doing all they can to discourage the ‘Sound Film’ craze.”21
Luckily for Walt, Eduarde’s musicians were able to record for him. In the recording booth, Iwerks’s new film print was projected just in front of Maestro Eduarde. He conducted according to the bouncing ball, and the orchestra followed him. To Walt’s immense relief, this worked perfectly.
Now Walt had a finished reel of a sound cartoon. If he had learned anything from the Mintz disaster, it was to brand his name, not his character. From that point forward, the name “Walt Disney” would be inseparable from his work. The title card of this film read:
Disney Cartoons Presents
A Mickey Mouse Sound Cartoon
Steamboat Willie
A Walt Disney Comic
By Ub Iwerks
On October 1 the final film print was complete.22 Walt nearly landed a distribution deal with Universal Pictures, but Universal pulled out, telling him that its contract with Mintz imposed a conflict of interest. Walt took Steamboat Willie to other studios but could not land a contract.
Suddenly, the promoter for the Colony Theater in New York City made Walt an offer. For $1,000, Steamboat Willie would play for two weeks, accompanying the theater’s feature presentation.23
On November 18, 1928, Steamboat Willie premiered at the Colony. Walt was there in the darkened theater. This was the first synchronized sound cartoon that a public audience had ever seen, and the crowd’s reaction was beyond Walt’s expectations.
Almost instantly, this twenty-six-year-old cartoon producer was in the public eye. Audiences demanded Disney cartoons. His studio personnel enlarged exponentially as his distribution contracts grew more robust. Licensees began merchandising Disney characters, and fan clubs formed across the country. In less than three years, Mickey Mouse would be a household name. As one journalist summed it up in October 1931, “Almost overnight the Disney outfit became the outstanding producer of animated cartoons and took the lead as creators of short subjects.”24
In the summer of 1932, when Art Babbitt met Walt Disney, the press called Mickey Mouse “far and away, the most popular American star abroad” and Walt Disney “a man blessed by the gods.”25