The Animated Man (13 page)

The limited evidence suggests that Freleng's animation for Disney was in the same vein as Hugh Harman's. Freleng later worked in animation for many years, mostly as a director at the Warner Brothers cartoon studio. There is no reason to believe that Disney singled him out for attack because his performance was lacking (or, for that matter, because he was Jewish). The growth of his studio and his battles with Mintz had put Disney under a strain, and he was responding to difficulty as he would in other circumstances, by turning on his employees.

Their growing bitterness over such encounters made a number of Disney's employees receptive when Charles Mintz approached them in the summer of 1927 about setting up a new studio to make the
Oswald
cartoons. Ising wrote in August to his and Harman's friend Ray Friedman in Kansas City:
“Winklers have made us a definite offer for a next years
[sic]
release. Winklers are thoroughly disgusted with the Disneys and with the expiration of their present contract will have no more dealings with them. Their present contract expires in April, 1928.” Iwerks was also planning to leave, Ising said, “to engage in a private enterprise.”
⁷⁸

While they talked with Mintz and George Winkler, Harman and Ising continued to pursue a release of their own, all of this without Disney's knowledge. In November 1927, Ray Friedman was in Los Angeles. Ising wrote to Freleng, who was back in Kansas City, that Friedman was “at present working on the general manager of Cecil DeMille Studios. . . . Ray is putting all of his time towards the securing of a contract and getting everything in shape for starting production. It shouldn't be long now.”
⁷⁹

Mintz, who visited Los Angeles occasionally in the 1920s, met and talked personally with the members of the Disney staff he was trying to lure away. “We met him at various places,” Paul Smith said. “He made telephone calls and arrangements to talk with us.”
⁸⁰
But Mintz and the disgruntled Disney people were stringing each other along, each side hoping a better deal would turn up—in Mintz's case, with Walt Disney himself.

After months of meetings and calls, Mintz had not signed contracts with any of the Disney animators, but in February 1928, everyone was ready to move. On February 10, Ising wrote to Freleng: “Our plans to get a contract to make our own pictures this year fell through, so we are taking the next best thing. Hugh, Max, Ham [Hamilton] and I are signing a one-year employment contract with George Winkler to make ‘Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.' ”
⁸¹
Iwerks would not be leaving the Disney studio with them; his “private enterprise,” whatever it was, had fallen through.

Ten days later, Disney arrived in New York, making what was apparently his first visit to the city since he passed through on his way to and from France, ten years earlier. He was there to negotiate a renewal of his contract with Winkler Pictures, but Mintz insisted that he renew on terms that amounted to a surrender of his independence. As Disney summarized their negotiations in a letter to Roy, “Charlie is very determined to get absolute control of everything and will do everything in his power to gain his end.”
⁸²
Disney, for his part, was determined “that if we did any business that it would have to be on a more equal basis.”
⁸³

Disney stalled, talking with Mintz—they saw each other repeatedly, by themselves and with their wives, at Mintz's office on West Forty-second Street and over lunch and dinner (once at the Mintzes' home), and always on friendly terms—while he scouted for another distributor. There were no takers. The
market for short subjects was weak, he was told, and Fred Quimby of MGM warned him that cartoons especially were in decline.
⁸⁴

It is not clear how explicitly Mintz threatened Disney with the loss of key members of his staff, but Disney was concerned enough that he wired Roy on March 1 to sign the “boys” to “ironclad” contracts. The “boys” refused to sign, and as Disney wrote to Roy on March 2, that meant “only one thing—they are hooked up with Charlie, because I know how the rest of the market is and they haven't a smell.”
⁸⁵
Disney wavered briefly; after talking with executives at Universal he considered signing up with Mintz for another year, in the hope that Universal would deal with him directly in 1929. But when he talked with Mintz again, he “found it impossible” to do business with him because Mintz's demands were so unyielding.
⁸⁶
After three weeks in New York, he broke off negotiations and left for Los Angeles on March 13, 1928.

Universal owned the Oswald character, so Disney had no choice but to come up with a new one. Returning home on the train from New York, Lillian Disney said in 1956, “he was talking about different things, kittens and cats and this and that. Well, a mouse is awful cute, and he just kept talking about a mouse. So that's where he originated Mickey Mouse, was on the train coming home all by himself without asking anybody. He just decided that was a cute idea.”
⁸⁷

Disney spoke later of the affection for mice he developed in Kansas City: “I used to find them in my waste basket in the mornings. I kept several in a cage on my drawing board and enjoyed watching their antics.”
⁸⁸
There was, however, nothing unusual in the choice of a mouse cartoon character. There were plenty of mice in cartoons in the 1920s. The very crude and simple drawing in most cartoons could make it hard to tell one animal from another, so a mouse's large ears, rendered as black circles or ovals, were a godsend. Paul Terry used a mouse couple—both apparently several feet high, like Disney's Mickey and Minnie Mouse—in several cartoons released in late 1927 and early 1928.

A fuller account of the return trip from Lillian Disney's point of view is part of that ghostwritten article in
McCall's
, and what it says about the naming of Disney's new mouse character—and, especially, Lillian's state of mind in 1928—is wholly plausible:

I remembered the early Hollywood days when Walt and Roy were so broke that they would go to a restaurant and order one dinner, splitting the courses between them. I knew I wouldn't care much for that. I couldn't believe that my husband meant to produce and distribute pictures himself, like the big
companies. He and Roy had only a few thousand dollars between them. Pictures needed a lot of financing, even in 1927
[sic]
. And what if Walt failed? He had insulted his distributor and hadn't even looked for a new connection.

By the time Walt finished the scenario [for
Plane Crazy
, the first
Mickey Mouse
cartoon] I was practically in a state of shock. He read it to me, and suddenly all my personal anguish focused on one violent objection to the script. “ ‘Mortimer' is a horrible name for a mouse!” I exclaimed.

Walt argued—he can be very persuasive—but I stood firm. Finally, to placate his stubborn wife, Walt came up with a substitute: “Mickey Mouse.” At this late date I have no idea whether it is a better name than “Mortimer.” Nobody will ever know. I only feel a special affinity to Mickey because I helped name him. And besides, Mickey taught me a lot about what it was going to be like married to Walt Disney. We've never been so broke since—at least quite so visibly. But I have been plenty worried on occasion. It has often helped to look back on that period.
⁸⁹

The defecting animators remained at the studio for a few weeks after Disney returned, completing the last five of the
Oswalds
due under his contract with Mintz. Starting in late April, Iwerks animated the first
Mickey Mouse
cartoon in a back room, with Ben Clopton assisting him in some fashion. Harman remembered work proceeding behind a curtain, but that may have been only temporary.
⁹⁰
Lillian Disney, her sister Hazel Sewell, and Roy's wife, Edna, inked and painted the cels in a garage at the Disney homes on Lyric Avenue (Lillian returned to the Disney payroll from April 28 to June 16, 1928). The animators who were leaving for Winkler's were not supposed to know what Iwerks was doing, but Harman told Paul Smith then that “Ub was animating a picture with a Mickey Mouse character in it.”
⁹¹
Clopton was probably the source of Harman's information; he left the Disney payroll on May 12, 1928, a week after Harman, Smith, and Hamilton.

That first
Mickey Mouse
cartoon,
Plane Crazy
, was completed and previewed by May 15, 1928.
⁹²
In it, Disney tried to exploit public interest in Charles Lindbergh in the wake of his transatlantic flight a year earlier. A second cartoon,
The Gallopin' Gaucho
, which Iwerks animated in June and early July, echoed the adventure films of Douglas Fairbanks, particularly
The Gaucho
(1927). The animation for the new cartoons, in Iwerks's clockwork manner, was arguably retrograde when set beside the subtler Harman-Hamilton animation in an
Oswald
cartoon like
Bright Lights
, but that was probably not why Disney got no offers from the distributors who saw the print of
Plane Crazy
that he sent to a film storage company in New York in mid-May. As Harman and Ising had already learned—and Disney himself had reason to
know, after his unsuccessful efforts in New York earlier in 1928—new cartoon series were simply not very attractive to most distributors. Cartoons' brief burst of popularity in the early 1920s was long past; of the major distributors, only Paramount and Universal now offered cartoons to theaters.

In the spring of 1928 the film industry was still absorbing the impact of the first few features made with sound. The first “all-talking” feature,
Lights of New York
, would not open in New York until July. Disney realized that adding sound to his cartoons would be one way to make them stand out, but it was still not obvious then that sound features, much less sound cartoons, would completely supplant silent films. Neither was it at all obvious how best to add sound to a cartoon, except perhaps as Warner Brothers had done with silent features like
Don Juan
, starting in 1926, by recording an orchestra whose music could take the place of a theater's own musicians.

Musical sound tracks had been recorded for a few of Max Fleischer's cartoons earlier in the 1920s with the De Forest process. Sound had also occasionally accompanied silent cartoons in more inventive ways. Frank Goldman of the Bray studio told of how a New York theater's orchestra vocalized “ah-ah-ah” during a showing of a Bray educational cartoon on the human voice and thus gave an “unexpected lift” to the film.
⁹³
But it was a long leap from such limited uses of sound to a cartoon with a fully integrated sound track, one in which animation was synchronized with music and sound effects. Disney's key insight was that such integration, and not sound alone, would be essential to a sound cartoon's success. By the end of June, he was writing to New York companies about what it would cost to add synchronized sound to a cartoon. On July 14, Roy Disney entered a charge of three dollars and five cents for “Sheet Music for Pic” in his account book.

Wilfred Jackson joined the Disney staff on April 16, 1928, just in time to see Disney and Iwerks make the first two
Mickey Mouse
cartoons. Thanks to his musical knowledge—limited but greater than that of other members of the Disney staff—he was intimately involved in making the third
Mickey Mouse
cartoon,
Steamboat Willie
, the first with sound, in the summer of 1928. He left this account:

The story work [for
Steamboat Willie
] began with a “gag meeting” at either Walt's or Roy's home. The entire animation crew: Ub Iwerks, Les Clark, Johnny Cannon, and even me, although I was just beginning to learn how to [animate], were there with Walt and Roy. The concept of the story—a situation, or perhaps just a locale, or take-off on a well-known person—was usually all Walt had in mind to start the meeting going on these early Mickeys. On
Steamboat
Willie
, it was just the idea of the song, “Steamboat Bill,” and the Mississippi riverboat locale. Everyone came out with any ideas he could think of on the subject, especially funny business that might get a laugh. I don't recall that many sketches were made of the ideas. I think, mostly, we just talked. Nor do I believe anything like a story line, or continuity, was developed at this preliminary meeting.

Ub left his animation desk and spent the next few days after this meeting working with Walt in his office. The next thing I saw on the picture was some sketches of Ub's on animation paper. . . . When Walt was ready to time the action and make out the exposure sheets he had these sketches on his desk, but didn't refer to them very much. He seemed to have the story line for the whole picture clearly in mind, as well as the details of each piece of business, and knew exactly what he was after without any reminders.

I helped Walt as he timed the action the best I could with my mouth organ and a metronome—performing the function that was done for later pictures by a musician playing a piano—and I was able to observe how he tried out parts of the action this way and that, discarding something here, trying some new thing there, rearranging the order of other pieces of business, until the whole thing seemed to work with the tunes he had selected and finally suited him as a workable cartoon continuity. When he was done, each last little thing that was to happen all through the entire short had been visualized in complete detail and the length of time each action was to take on the screen had been determined. Thus, while he was timing the action, Walt was also doing the final part of the story work, and the way it ended up was changed quite a bit from how it was when he started to time it—but, later, when the picture was all finished, it came out very much like what he now had in mind.
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