Disney (3 page)

He later said, “You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.”

Disney bought a one-way ticket to Hollywood. Before he left, he visited the people who had lent him money and granted him credit – among them the barber and the Greek restaurateur. Disney asked if they would accept a partial settlement; most refused, saying he needed the money now and could pay them back later. In July 1923, with just $40 in his pocket, he boarded the Santa Fe Railroad’s California Limited. It was the same train line where he’d sold candy as a teenager. The sun beat down on Disney in his checked coat and mismatched pants. He carried a single, imitation-leather suitcase, packed with one shirt, a couple pairs of socks, some underwear, and a few drawing supplies. He also had a film reel – the unfinished
Alice’s Wonderland.
Walt Disney was twenty-one years old, with the worst of his struggles behind him and the glitz of Hollywood ahead.

Disney’s mind teemed with ideas for animated short subjects. When he failed to get a studio job, he and his brother Roy, who had been recovering from tuberculosis in Arizona, formed a partnership they called the Disney Brothers’ Studio.

It was a shoestring operation, but the division of labor was key to their success. Roy handled business, Walt the creative side. With Roy’s $250 savings and $500 they borrowed from their Uncle Robert, the brothers rented studio space in the corner of a real-estate office on Hyperion Avenue. It was nestled among wild oats, a pipe-organ factory, and a gas station in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles. Walt described it as “a little green and white structure with a red tile roof and a nice little plot of grass in front of us.” The rent was $5 a month. The location was unimpressive, but the work done there made movie history.

The brothers, hoping to launch the business on the one reel of
Alice’s Wonderland
, planned to spin off a series of live-action/animated shorts called the
Alice Comedies
. The concept of combining live-action footage with animated sequences wasn’t unique to Walt Disney; he had been inspired by Max and Dave Fleischer’s
Out of the Inkwell
, which typically opened with a live-action scene of Fleischer at his drawing table before blending into animation as his characters climbed from his inkwell.

Disney turned the formula around with his
Alice
shorts. In New York, Margaret Winkler finally agreed to be his distributor. With the backing of Winkler Pictures, Walt Disney asked the parents of his child star, Virginia Davis, to move from Missouri to Hollywood. The Davis family agreed.

As in
Alice’s Wonderland
, the
Alice Comedies
put Davis in the surreal world of animation, where she interacted with Disney’s cartoon characters and imagined landscapes. The early films were not particularly well done. Roy Disney’s inability to crank the hand-driven camera at a steady pace caused the action to speed up and slow down erratically. But the short films were popular with theater operators because they needed short subjects to “balance” programs anchored by feature films.

Winkler offered Disney $1,500 for the first six installments of
Alice Comedies
, and $1,800 for the next half-dozen. Disney was to deliver the first finished film by January 1924. Over the next four years, the Disney studio would produce twenty-four
Alice Comedies.

Disney shot many of the live-action sequences in a vacant lot in front of a white tarp. There were no rehearsals or retakes - Disney couldn’t afford to shoot anything more than once. A typical direction to young Virginia was to “look mad” or “look frightened.” The plots put the young Alice in constant, sometimes startling, peril. The doe-eyed heroine frequently found herself kidnapped by cartoon villains, and on at least one occasion, was in danger of being sawed in half while strapped to a log in a mill.

Money continued to be tight, as the Disney brothers poured scant profits back into production. “There was many a week when Roy and I ate one square meal a day – between us,” remembered Walt. But their little studio grew, and Walt recruited several former Kansas City colleagues to work for him, including Ubbe Iwerks. Walt made a pact with his animators when they arrived in Hollywood: They all would grow moustaches. It wasn’t all in fun; Walt was twenty-three and hoped a mustache would him look older and cause people to take him more seriously.

In 1925, the studio hired a young secretary named
Lillian Bounds
for $15 a week. The youngest of ten children born to a blacksmith and a U.S. marshal in Idaho, Lillian had grown up on the Nez Perce Indian Reservation and had moved from Idaho to live with her married sister, Hazel, and her seven-year-old daughter. The Disney studio was within walking distance of their home on Vermont Avenue. The proximity appealed to Lillian, and she took a job at Disney on a recommendation by a friend of Hazel’s, whose one condition was that Lillian could not flirt with the boss.

At the Disney studio, she worked in the ink-and-paint department. Petite and stylish, with short brown hair, she quickly caught Disney’s eye. And he caught hers.

Their courtship blossomed in a car. Disney often drove women employees home after work in his dilapidated Ford roadster. Lillian noted that he took the others home first, even though she lived closest to the studio. This gave them time to talk, and the chatty Disney quickly won her affection. He was, she said, a “wonderful man in every way.” Lacking clothes, Disney hesitated to take their relationship further. “We would sit outside the house in the jalopy because Walt had nothing but his old sweater and trousers, and he wouldn’t go in the house,” Lillian remembered. “Finally one evening he gulped: ‘If I get a new suit, will you let me come in and call on your family?’” Walt spent $40 on a new suit. Meeting his future in-laws for the first time, he blurted out, “How do you like my new suit?”

The couple went to the movies, dined at Hollywood tearooms, and for long drives through orange groves in Pomona, Riverside, and Santa Barbara. Walt rattled on about his work and plans for the studio. On one drive, he asked Lillian if he should buy a new car or a ring. Lillian chose the ring – a three-quarter-carat diamond on a thin platinum band that Walt said “looked like a locomotive headline.”

Walt and Lillian married later that year in Idaho. Lillian giggled through the entire service, and afterward, they boarded a train for Seattle. On their wedding night, Disney, afflicted with a toothache, sat up all night, helping a porter polish shoes. After the honeymoon, the couple settled into a Tudor-style prefabricated house in middle-class Silver Lake, between Hollywood and Los Angeles. It cost $7,000.

The
Alice Comedies
were successful, but Disney was increasingly preoccupied with animation. “Animation offers a medium of storytelling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure to people of all ages everywhere in the world,” he said.

Animation gained more screen time with each
Alice Comedies
installment. The third installment,
Alice’s Spooky Adventure
, introduced a plump, pointy-eared black cat who would become a fixture in the
Alice Comedies.
Margaret Winkler’s influence can be seen in this character, eventually named Julius, a blatant attempt to replicate the success of her successful
Felix the Cat
series. The brave and clever Julius increasingly became the focus of the
Alice
shorts, swooping in to rescue the young girl from cartoon calamity. In place of Felix’s bag of tricks, Julius had a detachable tail that could take on any form: a ladder in
Alice the Jail Bird
, a unicycle in
Alice Chops the Suey
, and so on.
Concerned about copyright infringement, Disney was at first reluctant to copy
Felix
, but before long, he was giving Julius more screen time than Alice.

Disney became convinced that the path to greater success lay in inventing and developing a captivating cartoon star. He and Iwerks came up with
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit
, a good-natured, intrepid creature who conquers adversity with ingenuity. Oswald’s first cartoon was five minutes of non-stop animated amusement called
Trolley Troubles
. More Oswald adventures followed.

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit
was an instant success with audiences across the country. Margaret Winkler’s new husband,
Charles Mintz
, now in charge of her distribution company, ordered more installments. The Disney Brothers Studio hired additional animators to meet the demand.
But Mintz secretly cut a separate distribution deal with Universal Pictures.

Tension was high at the Disney studio as mounting pressure from Mintz and Walt’s perfectionism demanded more and more of his staff. Calling Disney abusive and accusing him of harassment, animator
Isadore “Friz” Freling
conspired with a few others to quit the Disney studio to form their own. But Disney fired Freling first, and Freling headed to Warner Brothers to join former Disney animators
Hugh Harman and Rudolph Ising
, where he would become famous for his work on
Looney Tunes
.

In February 1928, when Walt traveled to New York to negotiate a fee increase with Mintz, Mintz told him that he was cutting the installment fees for
Oswald
instead
.
Disney was blindsided.

Mintz argued the market for animated shorts was shrinking and prospects were not good. He offered Disney only the cost of the Oswald negatives plus half of the profits. Disney insisted he had to have more to keep the studio afloat. Mintz eventually admitted he had been courting Disney’s animators and had put most of them under contract - the fiercely loyal Ubbe Iwerks and a few others being the notable and valuable exceptions. Mintz said he was prepared to open his own animation studio at Universal if Disney rejected his deal.

Disney realized he had lost control of the Oswald character. Universal, not Disney, owned the copyright. Battered and bitter, he walked away, painfully aware of all he had lost.

But again, Disney turned adversity to his advantage. As he said later, “I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn’t know how to get along without it.” He wasted no time. On the train trip back to California, Disney sketched his most iconic character. Disney recalled that it happened without effort: “He popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad.” Out of the trouble and confusion stood a mocking, merry little figure. Vague and indefinite at first. But it grew and grew and grew. And finally arrived, a mouse. A romping, rollicking little mouse. The idea complete engulfed me. The wheels turned to the tune of it. ‘Chug, chug, mouse, chug, chug, mouse,’ the train seemed to say. The whistle screeched it. ‘A m-m-mowa-ouse,’ it wailed. By the time my train had reached the Middle West, I had dressed my dream mouse in a pair of red velvet pants with two huge pearl buttons, had composed the first scenario and was all set.”

Disney showed the drawings to Lillian and told her he was going to call the little fellow Mortimer Mouse. She declared the name “too pompous,” and suggested Mickey instead.

Mickey Mouse sprang to life as the potential savior of the Disney studio. The Disney team went to work.

Iwerks tweaked Disney’s original Mickey to make him easier to animate. He simplified Mickey’s appearance - more precisely, his shape. A drawing of Mickey Mouse is an assemblage of circles and ovals standing atop stick legs. These shapes minimized the need for foreshortening and perspective, so cels could be produced quickly and uniformly. No matter which way Mickey turned or how he moved, not much had to change from frame to frame. His ears, for example, were simple circles - whether Mickey is seen head-on or in profile. To further simplify the animation, Mickey had three fingers instead of five, and lacked elbows and knees. His arms and legs simply bent like spaghetti.

Disney developed Mickey’s personality and supplied his voice. In the words of one Disney employee, “Ub [Iwerks] designed Mickey’s physical appearance, but Walt gave him his soul.”

Disney animator and composer
Wilfred Jackson
used his harmonica and the tick of a metronome to set the rhythm for the animation. Tin pans, slide whistles, ocarinas, cowbells, nightclub noisemakers, and a washboard were added to the soundtrack.
Steamboat Willie
, starring Mickey Mouse, was the first synchronized-sound cartoon.

Steamboat Willie
opens with Mickey piloting a riverboat, though he is only pretending to be its captain. The actual captain, a huge, gruff-looking fellow named Pete, sends Mickey flying from the bridge. In one sequence, Minnie Mouse appears onshore, and Mickey hauls her aboard with a crane. One sight gag after another follows, with songs and sound effects. The “voices,” mostly grunts and laughs, were all done by Walt Disney.

Disney and Iwerks worked on
Steamboat Willie
between July and September 1928 with a production budget of just under $5,000. Before the film was finished, Disney screened it for some of his employees and was delighted when the test audience loved it. “The effect on our little audience was nothing less than electric,” he said. “They responded almost instinctively to this union of sound and motion. I thought they were kidding me. So they put me in the audience and ran the action again. It was terrible, but it was wonderful! And it was something new!”

Disney took
Steamboat Willie
to New York to record the final soundtrack. To pay for the sessions, Roy had had to sell Walt’s car and wire him the funds.

Once the soundtrack was done, Disney made the rounds with the film, hoping to find a distributor. Distributors laughed at the cartoon mouse, but turned him down. The situation looked bleak until
Harry Reichenbach
, a press agent and manager of the Colony Theater, a screening of
Steamboat Willie
and thought it had potential. He offered Disney $1,000 for a two-week run
.