The Animated Man (17 page)

As Disney's involvement in the details of production receded, he began paying more attention to how he might improve his cartoons and achieve more of the “quality” he had fastened on as a crucial asset in the competition for audiences. Since the Laugh-O-gram days, he had been concerned with the poor drawing skills so evident in his cartoons and in most others, and in late 1929 he struck a deal with the Chouinard Art Institute, a school in downtown Los Angeles, to admit his employees to Friday-night classes.

That arrangement continued for several years. Disney's interest in the classes was no doubt sincere—he drove some of his employees to and from the school—but here, just as much as when he was a fledgling animator at Kansas City Film Ad, inertia was a powerful foe. Jack Zander, a Chouinard
student in the late 1920s and early 1930s, remembered that as a duty under his working scholarship—this was probably in 1930, a year or so after the Disney people started attending Friday-night classes—“I had to walk around and monitor the classes and be sure everybody was there. It was my job to stay there at night and check on the Disney guys. He had about twenty guys there, and nobody wanted to go to the goddamn art classes. . . . I'd go into a class, and there'd be eight or ten guys standing around. I'd read off the list of twenty names, and every one would answer ‘here.' We'd send a report back to Walt that twenty guys showed up to get their art instruction.”
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In early 1930, Walt and Roy Disney had a far more pressing problem than animators' reluctance to attend art classes. They had been increasingly unhappy with Pat Powers, who wanted Walt to make the cartoons more cheaply (a lower negative cost would mean that Powers could pay Disney less and keep more of the advances from distributors). Powers's wounded tone in a rare letter—usually it was Giegerich who wrote to the Disneys—at the end of 1929 was remarkably similar to Charles Mintz's in many of his letters to Walt. Powers wrote of “the financial risk and burden of exploitation” he had assumed “after every distributor in the business had refused to handle the product under any kind of a basis which would enable us to get even the cost of it back. I know of no instance (and you, yourself, canvassed the entire trade) where they were even receptive or seriously considered handling the product.”
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The Disneys wanted Powers to pay them money they believed he owed them from rentals of the cartoons. Powers did not want to open his books until the Disneys had signed a stronger contract with him than their two letter agreements for the distribution of the
Mickey Mouse
and
Silly Symphonies
series. Ultimately, on January 17, 1930, Walt and Lillian Disney and the Disneys' attorney, Gunther Lessing, took the train to New York to confront Powers directly. They arrived in New York on the morning of January 21—just about the time that Ub Iwerks walked into Roy Disney's office and told Roy he was quitting. “Speed in getting away seemed to be the main consideration,” Roy wrote to Walt three days later.

Iwerks's defection was especially shocking and painful not only because of his ten-year association with Walt Disney but also because he was a partner in the Disney studio.
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He had begun buying a 20 percent interest on March 24, 1928—that is, just after the blowup with Mintz, when the Disneys were especially grateful for his loyalty—through the deduction of twenty dollars each week from his salary. He began contributing thirty-five dollars a week as of May 19, 1928—an increase that probably reflected the Disneys' increasingly
difficult circumstances and was further evidence of Iwerks's friendship. By the time he walked into Roy's office, he had applied $2,920 toward his 20 percent share.

When Iwerks told Roy he was leaving, Roy asked him if Powers or Giegerich—or Hugh Harman—had anything to do with his departure. “Ub looked me straight in the face,” Roy wrote, and told him that none of them “had anything to do with it.” Roy asked him, “On your honor?” Iwerks replied: “Absolutely.” The next morning, Roy received a telegram from Walt telling him that Powers was indeed behind Iwerks's move. Confronted with this, Iwerks “looked awfully sheepish,” Roy wrote, and told him, “I didn't want to tell you.”
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Under his earlier agreement with the Disney brothers, Iwerks could not remain a partner after he left the studio. In a release dated January 22, 1930, the Disneys agreed to pay him exactly as much as they had withheld from his salary, in exchange for his complete surrender of any interest in the Disney studio. In a separate document bearing the same date, Roy (for himself and as attorney in fact for Walt) undertook to pay the $2,920 within a year, plus interest accruing at an annual rate of 7 percent.
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Iwerks remained on the payroll through Saturday, January 25 (he told Roy Disney that he would come back to the studio the following week to finish a
Silly Symphony
called
Autumn
, but he failed to show up).
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That Saturday morning, he and Roy had what Roy described, in a letter to Walt written later that day, as a “very calm, quiet” talk. “I told him frankly that the worst feature of this whole affair was the fact that a fellow as close to us as he had been should turn on us at a time like this.” Iwerks had begun negotiating for his own producing deal the previous September, Roy wrote, and “did not even know until two days before he received his contract that [Powers] was behind it. . . . We know how gullible and easily [led] Ub is, and we have a good dose of how two-faced Charlie Giegerich and P. A. [Powers] are. Not trying to excuse Ub, but just trying to size it up all the way around, I believe Ub at the start meant O.K., and I am sure that right now, even though he won't admit it, he regrets very much the outcome.”
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Powers had made a fatal misjudgment, since Iwerks was simply too reserved a personality—especially compared with Walt Disney—to succeed for very long as the head of a cartoon studio.
*
“Ub shunned responsibility,”
Ben Sharpsteen said. “He'd be kind of generous on being solicited and he'd give all the advice he knew how, but he didn't put himself ahead.”
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Like the Mintz recruits in 1928, Iwerks cited his arguments with Walt Disney as his motivating force. Roy wrote: “Ub said when first approached, you and he had been having considerable friction and that he made up his mind it was best to step out.”
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For his part, Disney said in 1956 that he thought Iwerks had nursed a lingering sense of injustice. Disney believed that Iwerks was always troubled because he was far more experienced as a commercial artist—and surely more skilled—but was paid less than Disney after they both went to work for the Kansas City Film Ad Company.

Carl Stalling also resigned from the Disney staff, the day after Iwerks did. “I thought something was wrong,” Stalling said many years later. “When Roy Disney told me that Ub was leaving, I told him, ‘Well, I guess I'll be leaving, too.' ”
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In Stalling's case, as in Iwerks's, arguments with Walt had made him eager to leave. Stalling had accepted Walt's offer of a one-third interest in the
Silly Symphonies
—twenty-five dollars a week had been withheld from his salary since December 31, 1928—but as in Iwerks's case, leaving the studio voided the agreement.
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Stalling had also invested two thousand dollars in the Disney Film Recording Company early in 1929, when Walt was trying to raise enough money to pay for the Cinephone equipment he needed on the West Coast. The Disneys repaid that money.

More acrimony surrounded Stalling's departure than Iwerks's. When Stalling returned to the studio to remove his sheet music, on the same day that Iwerks said his farewell, Roy refused to let him take all of it. “He showed a disposition to get nasty and take it in spite of me,” Roy wrote to Walt, “and I thought I was going to have to resort to throwing him out!”
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Walt Disney had now been in two partnerships with Ub Iwerks, one rather more nebulous partnership with Fred Harman, and a semipartnership with Carl Stalling. Two of those partnerships, the first with Iwerks and the one with Harman, had fizzled quickly, and the other two had ended in the rupture of long friendships. There would be no more partnerships. Although the Disneys seriously considered sharing ownership with outside investors in 1932, only Walt and Roy and their wives would own the company as long as it remained privately held.
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Disney spoke guardedly or misleadingly of all his former partners in future years (in 1956, he referred to Stalling as “the organist”), and, as one new employee learned in 1930, he was particularly bitter about the most important one, Ub Iwerks.

David Hand, an animator from New York, accepted a job on the Disney studio's staff on his thirtieth birthday, January 23, 1930. Unlike the New York
animators who preceded him, Hand had not been lured west by an offer from Walt Disney. Instead, he moved to Hollywood in the hope of making a career in live action. “But you couldn't get a job,” he said many years later, “so I went to Disney's.” Hand was hired on a Thursday—probably by Burt Gillett, who had known him in New York, since Walt Disney himself was not around to do any hiring.

When Hand finally met Disney, he said, “Walt was awful mad at Ub, because he didn't talk about anything else to me.” Disney complained to Hand—in an echo of his petulance in the 1920s—that Iwerks would not stay at his drawing board. Instead, he parked his car in the driveway beside the studio building and spent the day there, working on the car and ignoring Disney's plea that he animate and let a mechanic do the work.
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None of Disney's other employees followed Iwerks out the door. The New York animators had been recruited by Walt Disney himself and had relocated because of him. Like Ben Sharpsteen, who turned down a job offer from Iwerks, they may have felt justified skepticism about their former colleague's ability to run a successful studio. Sharpsteen summed up their attitude a couple of days after Iwerks announced he was leaving; as quoted by Roy Disney in a letter to Walt, he said, “We know that the difference of these cartoons over the average run is nothing more or less than Walt's personality, along with cooperation from his fellows.”
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The net effect of Iwerks's and Stalling's departures was to leave the Disney brothers in a stronger position, personally and financially, than ever before. What Walt heard in New York must have given him added confidence that he had outgrown a parsimonious, small-scale distributor like Pat Powers. “From what Dick [Huemer] and Jack Carr [another veteran New York animator] told us,” Lillian Disney wrote to Roy on January 30, “[the Fleischer and Mintz studios] get everyone
[sic]
of our pictures and run them for the crews over and over again.”
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The break with Powers was messy, to the point that Disney changed hotels and registered under an assumed name, the better to elude process servers, after he wrote to Roy on February 7, “Have definitely broke
[sic]
with Powers. Will deliver no more pictures.”
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On February 19, he signed his own contract with Columbia, which had been distributing the
Silly Symphonies
under its contract with Powers, and left for Los Angeles, ending yet another protracted stay in New York.

Although Walt had until this point taken the lead in business matters, it fell to Roy to go to New York in April 1930 to work on the settlement with Powers. Their correspondence makes clear that Walt still called the shots, but
Roy's background as a “money man” was finally being put to productive use. The three-sided negotiations, involving Columbia as well as the Disneys and Powers, had actually begun by early March, and Roy took part only for the last couple of weeks. What he saw left him skeptical about Columbia, which he described to Walt as not “overburdened with good intentions.”
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The settlement, signed on April 22, was expensive—the Disneys not only gave up their claims against Powers but had to give him fifty thousand dollars, money they borrowed from Columbia and would have to repay from their films' profits before they saw any profits themselves. But Columbia would advance the Disneys seven thousand dollars upon the delivery of each film—they would actually be able to spend more on each cartoon than they could when they were getting smaller advances from Powers and seeing none of the profits. “I honestly feel elated over everything,” Roy wrote to Walt on May 6. “Settlement going to work out good and future very bright.”
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At this point, Walt Disney may not have been ready to take full advantage of his improved situation. In the early 1930s, he could be strikingly conservative when he spoke for publication about cartoons. In a statement for
Film Daily
in April 1930, he was cautious about both color and the wide screen: “After all, in a cartoon comedy it is laughs and personality that count. Color alone will not sustain public interest.”
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About a year later,
American Magazine
quoted him as saying that it was a “mistake” to think “that American audiences always want brand-new gags—surprises and cute turns. We have found out that they want most to laugh. They easily forget the original turns, but if a picture has given them a good laugh, whether by old gags or new, they always remember it.”
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Disney remembered all the gags in his silent cartoons, or so it seems, because gags from
Alice
comedies like
Alice's Fishy Story, Alice's Orphan
, and
Alice's Brown Derby
can be identified in cartoons made years later—reworked and improved, to be sure, but still the same gags. “The best gag men are those with the best memories,” David Hand said in 1946, two years after he left the Disney studio. “Disney has the most marvelous memory—like an elephant he never forgets, and he remembers all the awful animation you ever did.”
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