Disney (4 page)

Disney was hesitant. He worried that releasing
Steamboat Willie
directly to a theater would preclude any chance of a distribution deal with a studio. Reichenbach argued that word-of-mouth would win over distributors. “These guys don’t know it’s good
until
the public finds out,” he said.

Steamboat Willie
premiered at the Colony Theater in New York City on November 18, 1928, ahead of a forgettable film called
Gang War
. The cartoon earned a rave review in
Variety,
which praised its ingenuity and its clever sound effects and reported, “Giggles came so fast at the Colony they were stumbling over each other.” It was hard to find a critic who wasn’t impressed. The
Weekly Film Review
found
Willie
“clever,” and
The
New York Times
said it was “ingenious.”

But the question remained how to distribute Mickey to a wider audience. Disney wanted $5,000 per negative, plus 40 percent of the profits. A few distributors hinted they would consider buying the Disney studio, but Disney had no interest in giving up control of his work. He decided instead to team up with industry veteran
Pat Powers
, who owned the Cinephone Equipment Corporation, which had developed technologies for putting sound on film. Powers helped Disney find recording space and covered some of the costs of producing the soundtrack for
Steamboat Willie
in New York. Disney appreciated how much Powers had done to get
Steamboat Willie
finished, and both men realized their relationship could be mutually beneficial: Powers needed a steady supply of sound pictures to promote Cinephone and Disney needed a distributor. For 10 percent of the profits, Powers proposed to sell Disney’s cartoons through independent distributors, each of whom controlled a specific territory. Disney, eager to get back to work and tired of haggling over business, signed with Powers. He stayed in New York long enough to record soundtracks for three more Mickey Mouse cartoons and finally went home. When Roy got a look at the contract he had signed with Powers, he was incredulous. “Did you read this?” he demanded. Walt admitted that he had not.

Roy was right to be alarmed. Powers was ruthless when it came to business. He had built his fortune in the early days of the movie industry, and he had a reputation for “innovative” accounting methods. When an irate producer once confronted Powers in his office, demanding to see the books, Powers threw the ledgers out a twelfth-floor window. In his deal with Disney, Powers introduced a new layer of middlemen - the independent distributors. The Disneys would have to rely entirely on Powers to keep track of profits. Meanwhile, the commitment to use Cinephone for their soundtracks was an outrageous $26,000 a year.

Walt was unfazed by Roy’s concerns. He promptly went on a hiring spree, adding both experienced animators and trainees. He gave Ub Iwerks a 20-percent share of the studio, and added his name to film credits. The Disney team produced ten more Mickey Mouse cartoons in 1929. They were extraordinarily popular.

In 1929, Disney launched a series of non-Mickey cartoons called
Silly Symphonies
. These were imaginative, sometimes dark, descents into fantasy worlds overrun by creatures of all kinds, from birds, fish, bugs and beasts to personified produce. There was no recurring hero and no dialogue.

The first was an amusingly macabre music-and-dance short called
The Skeleton Dance
.
The concept for the movie came from
Carl Stalling
, a composer Disney had known in Kansas City. Stalling, now in the business of writing music for cartoons, had created a spookily comical soundtrack for a scene in a church graveyard where four skeletons emerge from their graves to dance under the moonlight. The skeletons move with a fluid grace in perfect synchronization with the music. In four weeks, Ub Iwerks animated the film mostly by himself while Disney and Stalling recorded the soundtrack in New York. The five-and-a-half minute film cost $7,500 - roughly half as much as
Steamboat Willie
. After viewing it, Powers was sure it would not find a distributor, and a series of screenings in New York confirmed his opinion. Distributors thought the film was too ghoulish and offbeat. Powers told Disney to stick to mice.

Disney himself was unsure about
The Skeleton Dance.
He hinted to Iwerks that it hadn’t turned out as well as he hoped. His concept for the
Silly Symphonies
series remained vague. He wasn’t sure what he wanted, but he was certain that when they figured it out, the cartoons would find a wide audience. Disney decided to try the same approach he had used with
Steamboat Willie.
He convinced the manager of the Carthay Circle Theater in Los Angeles to give
The Skeleton Dance
a short run.

It worked. People loved
The Skeleton Dance. Film Daily
called
The Skeleton Dance
“one of the most novel cartoon subjects ever shown on a screen,” and the
Los Angeles Times
gave it a rave review. The Carthay extended its run, and next, the movie opened at the Roxy in New York, where the manager told Disney it was one of the cleverest films he had ever seen.

For the moment, all was well with the Disney Brothers Studio. Disney continued to hire the best animators he could find in California and New York, and by the summer of 1929, the studio had eight full-time animators. Disney even tried to hire industry’s titans,
Al Eugster
and
Otto Messmer
, who had worked on
Felix the Cat
, but they declined. Disney forged on, riding the tide of public affection for Mickey Mouse.

In July 1929, Mickey spoke his first words in his ninth short, “The Karnival Kid.” In the voice of composer
Carl Stalling
, Mickey bellowed from a food cart, “Hot dogs! Hot dogs!” Unsatisfied with the sound, and determined to find a better match for Mickey’s voice, Disney auditioned candidates for a week until, exasperated, he demonstrated in falsetto how he thought Mickey should sound. Someone on his staff suggested that Disney should just do it himself. “I knew I’d always be on the payroll, so I did it,” Walt joked.

Disney was becoming more preoccupied with work, which meant less time at home. Walt and Lillian’s dinner plans were often derailed by stops at the office. Walt would tell his wife that he only needed a few minutes in the studio, but as minutes turned to hours, Lillian would fall asleep on an office couch. When Walt woke her, often past 1:00 a.m., he would tell her it was only 10:30. Lillian sometimes joked that she had become a “mouse widow.” Walt sometimes brought peace offerings to make up for his long hours and missed dinners.

“I think the apology [one] time was a hatbox tied with a red ribbon,” Lillian said. “But don’t think there was anything as prosaic as a hat in it! It held a chow puppy, with another red ribbon around its neck.”

Walt loved animals, but Lillian needed convincing to add a family pet to their household. She argued that dogs smell and shed. Walt would not relent; he researched and found the perfect breed for Lillian: Chows don’t shed and have little odor. Lillian relented. She named the chow Sunnee and never let the dog out of her sight. Walt was just as smitten with the animal and was often seen feeding her ice cream on the curb outside their home on Lyric Avenue. The Disney pets later included two poodles named Duchess and Lady. Walt spoiled the dogs with meat from his refrigerator and let them curl up on the desk in his office.

The
Mickey
shorts were doing huge business in theaters, but they were expensive to make. Disney’s demand for the highest quality animation cost the studio $4,000 to $5,000 for each
Mickey
cartoon. Even though Powers had paid the studio $40,000 by the spring of 1929, money was going out faster than it was coming in.

To shore up the studio’s finances, Disney decided to negotiate a distribution deal with one of the major Hollywood studios. Powers would still be in, but he would have more formidable partners. Studio boss
Louis B. Mayer
chased him out of the screening room at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but he had better luck at Columbia, where a young director named
Frank Capra
helped seal a deal with Disney.

Even so, prosperity eluded the Disney studio. At the end of 1929, when Roy visited Powers in New York, he became convinced he and Walt were being swindled. Incredulous, Walt went to New York in January 1930 to see for himself. Roy insisted that he take a lawyer with him.

Powers got more than he bargained for in Mickey Mouse. Mickey was no longer just a marketing tool for the Cinephone sound system - he was a significant source of revenue. Powers wanted a long-term contract with Disney.

Powers offered to buy Disney out and hire him at the then-astronomical salary of $130,000 a year. Disney, of course, said no. He was not about to give up control of his studio.

Then Powers upended the negotiations. He showed Disney a cable from his west-coast representative saying that Ub Iwerks had agreed to leave the Disney studio to create a new cartoon series for Powers. Disney was stunned.

The Disneys bought Iwerks’ share in the studio for less than $3,000. With that, Iwerks was gone.

It took Disney several months and a small army of lawyers to resolve his split from Powers. The Disney Brothers Studio suffered another loss when composer Carl Stalling resigned. Ultimately, Disney signed a new contract with Columbia, which was already distributing the
Silly Symphonies
that Frank Capra admired so much.

Columbia paid the studio $7,000 up front for each cartoon, plus a percentage of the profits. Disney was happy to accept Columbia’s money, but drew the line at trusting them. Before long, Disney would resort to the kind of tactics that had been twice used against him. In late 1930, Disney negotiated a secret deal to leave tiny Columbia studios for industry giant United Artists.

The two-year deal with United Artists included a $50,000 guarantee for each cartoon. With Mickey Mouse on his way to becoming one of the best-known and most beloved film characters in the world, the Disney studio continued to grow and expand. By early 1931, the company had seventy-five employees, expanded the original building on Hyperion, and acquired the lot next door for an even larger two-story addition. Mickey Mouse even got his first pair of shoes.

Behind the scenes, 1931 was a miserable time in Disney’s life. He rarely slept and obsessed over Mickey cartoons and the visual gags that brought the stories to life. He was short-tempered with the animators, and worried constantly about the studio’s finances. He had trouble simply making a phone call, and cried over the smallest problems. “I guess I was working too hard and worrying too much. I was expecting more from my artists than they were giving me, and all I did all day long was pound, pound, pound. Costs were going up; each new picture we finished cost more to make than we had figured it would earn,” he said later.

At home, he was distant with Lillian, who had suffered a miscarriage in June. He wanted children and complained that all he had to show for being married was “a cute little wife and a dandy Chow dog.” Disney confessed later that, “In 1931, I went all to pieces.” Today, we know his condition as severe depression; then it was called a nervous breakdown.

Extended family offered some solace. Roy’s wife Edna had given birth to a son, Roy Edward, the year before. “Walt and Lillian are both crazy about him,” Roy wrote in a letter to his mother. “He seems somewhat afraid of Walt, but goes crazy over Lilly. Walt just doesn’t know how to play with him yet.” Walt built a Lionel model train set for his nephew and disappeared into the miniature layout for hours. The smallest details – the landscape and structures surrounding the track – fascinated him.

Lillian’s sister Hazel, recently divorced, had also moved in with her thirteen-year-old daughter, Marjorie. Walt doted on the girl like a surrogate father, but soon she went off to boarding school and was only home weekends.

As tension at work and home mounted, Walt’s health suffered, too. Two weeks after Lillian’s miscarriage, he was rushed to the hospital with inflamed tonsils. Roy was worried about his brother, who had “been hitting the ball too hard for a long time” and pressed him to take a break. Walt put it off, but finally gave in when his doctor ordered him to get some rest, take a vacation, and start getting some exercise. The doctor told Walt and Lillian a more active lifestyle could improve their chances of conceiving a child; this was incentive enough.

Walt and Lillian took a long, cross-country road trip and returned to Los Angeles by ocean liner via the Panama Canal. It was their first real vacation in six years of marriage. Walt had hoped to travel by riverboat down the Mississippi, but there were no riverboats to be had. Though it didn’t go exactly as the couple had planned, Walt declared it the “time of our life.”

Disney’s mood lifted. Back home, he became more active. He tried wrestling and boxing and gave up golf after countless mid-round tantrums and club-throwing episodes. “Walt would fly into such a rage when he missed a stroke that I got helplessly hysterical watching him,” Lillian said. His wife tagged along most of the time; she preferred to swim or go horseback riding. Eventually, Walt turned to another gentleman’s game - polo. Disney joined the Riviera Country Club and bought a stable, where he kept six of his own ponies and four for his brother, Roy. It seemed that he had found his sport, and in the process, his old self.

Russian filmmaker
Sergei Eisenstein
declared the animated film “America’s most original contribution to culture.” The creation process at the Disney studio had become every bit as complex and involved as that of a live-action film.

Each cartoon began with a “gag” meeting, where everyone threw out ideas for visual jokes and funny situations. Gradually, a narrative would emerge, and writers would draft a script. The Disney studio had an established library of gags it could draw on for its films, set aside or recycled from previous projects. Once a script was approved, a series of rough sketches reduced the story to an orderly sequence of scenes and specific shots. Then music, sound effects, and dialogue were recorded to be matched later with the completed storyboards. Artists then created the backgrounds against which the action would be set. Finally, the animators stepped in. A typical Disney cartoon required seventy-five animators, huddled over drawing boards and often peering through magnifiers to scrutinize every pencil stroke. This quiet study often erupted in a frenzy, as animators jumped to their feet to mock the movements of their two-dimensional creations. Working under a giant skylight, the primary arts drew the start and conclusion of each visual gag, then passed their work to the “in-betweeners,” who drew the connecting images, each ever so slightly different from the last, that brought the cartoon come to life. From there, each scene was transferred to a film strip by a test camera where flaws were rooted out in an editing process using a two-way projector called a Moviola. Drawings signed off on by Disney and the director went next to the painting department to be traced onto celluloid transparencies called “cels” and given color. This work required the delicate, nimble fingers of more than 150 women employees.

It took as many as 7,000 individual drawings to make a single-reel of a Mickey Mouse cartoon. With the studio was cranking out twenty-six cartoons a year - thirteen
Mickeys
and thirteen
Silly Symphonies
– the number of drawings totaled 180,000.

Disney’s deal with United Artists garnered considerable attention both inside and outside the movie industry. The opening credits of each
Silly Symphony
began with the words “Mickey Mouse Presents,” suggesting the mouse enjoyed executive status in the Disney Brothers Studio.
The
New York Times
noted that Mickey Mouse would now be a “producer” in the esteemed studio, whose founders included
Douglas Fairbanks
, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and
Gloria Swanson
.

With the Disney Brothers Studio’s perpetual financial crisis finally eased, Walt looked for a new challenge. For several years, moviemakers had been experimenting with color film, but no one could figure out how to produce more than a handful of colors, mostly reds and greens. This incomplete spectrum resulted in images that were smeared and garish.

The Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation was a pioneer in color films and had made some improvements to
Technicolor
over the years, but the breakthrough came in 1932, when the company invented a new camera that could film a full range of colors.

Disney immediately wanted to try Technicolor on his new
Silly Symphony
titled
Flowers and Trees
.
Roy objected. It would cost $6,000 more to make the film, plus added expense to make color prints for distribution. Beyond that, Roy was skeptical about how well animation cels would accept color inks. The brothers argued for days. Finally, Walt persuaded Technicolor to give him the exclusive rights to use their camera for animated shorts for two years.

Flowers and Trees
centers on two trees, one clearly a young man, the other a young woman. The male tree is smitten with the female tree, and she returns his ardor. But an evil tree - stump-like and ogreish - also wants the girl tree. When she rejects him, the male trees fight. The angry antagonist then sets fire to the forest, intent on destroying everything since he cannot have what he wants. But he is engulfed before a gentle rain falls, saving the two lovers.

Flowers and Trees
premiered in July 1932 at
Grauman’s Chinese Theater
in Hollywood, before
Strange Interlude
, starring
Clark Gable
and
Norma Shearer
. Disney’s first color cartoon was a sensation. Roy informed the executives at United Artists that all Disney cartoons would henceforth be made in color.

Nineteen-thirty-two marked a turning point in the evolution of the Disney style. Color was the most obvious example, but another development was the introduction of other leading characters. On the same day he released
Flowers and Trees
, Disney released another black-and-white
Silly Symphony
called
Just Dogs
.

Just Dogs
starred
Pluto
, a dog who had appeared in earlier Mickey Mouse cartoons. With Pluto, Disney began to feature other animal characters who were not Mickey Mouse. Pluto also represented Disney’s fundamental re-thinking of animation. Unlike Disney’s other animal characters, Pluto isn’t given human characteristics, beyond an expressive face. He walks on four legs. He doesn’t wear clothes. He is a dog.

Disney was not abandoning the anthropomorphism that had brought Mickey Mouse to life; that would express itself in other characters like
Donald Duck
and
Goofy
. Disney wasn’t after realism; animal characters with human attributes remained an essential feature of the
Silly Symphonies.
But he did want to break with some of the conventions of early animation - most notably formless and rubbery limbs and torsos. Ub Iwerks had created many of these traits in Disney’s cartoons; Disney may have wanted to put Iwerks’ contributions and style behind him. But he also understood that Mickey Mouse could not reflect the subtleties and sensitivities of a fully realized character. Mickey was lovable and funny and engaging, but he lacked depth. Disney wanted his animators to create characters people could relate to on an emotional level. In early 1932, Disney sent a memo to the staff ahead of a regular gag meeting that included a new policy. It stated: “ALL SCENES WILL DEPEND ON THE CHARACTERS ACTING AS NATURAL AS POSSIBLE WITHOUT ANY EXAGGERATED TRICKS.”

Disney’s animators would have to become better artists. Drawing a cartoon animal with only simple lines and shapes was not the same as drawing something lifelike. In 1929, Disney had started sending his animators to art classes in Los Angeles. As younger, more talented artists joined the studio, Disney hired a gifted art instructor from the Chouinard School of Art named
Donald W. Graham
to give regular classes in life drawing in the studio.

The Disney Brothers Studio released another color cartoon
in November 1932, featuring the giant King Neptune and the watery creatures who inhabit his undersea domain.
King Neptune sings lustily underwater and is serenaded by all kinds of fishes. The King’s subjects include a school of demurely animated mermaids. All is well until a shipload of pirates spy the mermaids singing, siren-like, on a rock. They attack and spirit one of the mermaids off to their ship, where the men leer and paw at her. The day is saved when the sea creatures fight back and defeat the pirates in a bloodless but ferocious battle. Some fish take on the attributes of cannons, firing bursts of caviar at the offending pirates. Others attack from the air like warplanes, taking off from the back of a jolly whale, made to resemble an aircraft carrier. Swordfish put their sharp beaks to work sawing down the pirate boat’s mast. Neptune ends the skirmish by causing a storm that sinks the pirate ship to the bottom of the sea, where he lounges on it like an arm chair.
King Neptune
was another hit.