Disney

by Rees Quinn

  Discovering Animation

  Disney heard of an opening at the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio, a commercial art shop. He went in with samples of his work – mostly cartoons he had drawn while stationed with the ambulance corps in France – and to prove himself, he worked a week at the studio for free. For $50 a month, he worked mostly on advertising layouts for newspapers and magazines, including pencil sketches of farm supplies and equipment. The work wasn’t challenging, but Disney appreciated it. “When you go to art school you work for perfection,” he said later. “But in a commercial art shop you cut things out and paste things over and scratch around with a razor blade. I’d never done any of those things in art school. Those are timesaving tricks.”

  The shop suited Disney. Here he met Ubbe “Ub” Iwerks, another eighteen-year-old born in Kansas City to German immigrants. While their artistic sensibilities were complementary, Iwerks was shy and reserved where Disney was an extrovert.

  The November 1919 Christmas rush on advertising didn’t last. Disney was laid off after just six weeks on the job. Iwerks followed not long after.

  Disney went back to work at the post office, but spent his evenings working on his portfolio, using the tricks and techniques he had learned at the print shop to clean up his samples. Just after Christmas, he and Iwerks decided to strike out on their own, and in early 1920, they formed Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists. Disney wrote his mother, asking her to send him the $500 he had left with her; when he told her he was starting a business for himself, she sent him half.

  The owner of The Restaurant News gave Disney and Iwerks office space to work in, rent-free. Disney’s $250 paid for drawing boards, an air brush, and a tank of air. Iwerks-Disney made $135 in its first month with some of the business coming from $10 engravings for The Restaurant News. The publication’s owner also drummed up customers by recommending the studio to its advertisers.

  Halfway into their second month, Iwerks and Disney saw a classified advertisement by the Kansas City Film Ad Company seeking an artist for $40 a week. Disney and Iwerks tried to convince the firm to hire them both, but when that tactic failed, artists had to make a choice. Iwerks left the decision to Disney, who took the job. Without Disney, who was the better salesman, Iwerks-Disney lasted only a few more weeks, a setback softened by the fact that the principals were still teenagers.

  The Kansas City Film Ad Company produced animated short commercials using a primitive stop-motion technique. Paper cut-out dolls, on wooden dowels, were moved slightly between individually photographed frames so that they appeared to spring to life when the film was run. It was a crude process, not much more advanced than the flipbooks Disney used to doodle in his school textbooks, but it embodied the fundamental principle of animation: a sequence of stills that creates the illusion of movement. It was also cheap; finished film cost thirty cents a foot. Local theaters showed the animated shorts, typically a minute in length, before feature films.

  Disney was captivated by animation and learned everything he could about it. Within a few months, he convinced the Kansas City Film Ad Company to hire Iwerks. The former partners improved on their employer’s animation techniques almost immediately by making the cut-out dolls move more naturally and fluidly by concealing joints and other mechanics.

  Soon, Disney became convinced that a process called celluloid animation was superior to using cut-out figures. Celluloid animation, drawing directly on a clear material made of cellulose nitrate and camphor, had been invented in 1914 in Kansas City by film producer John Randolph Bray and his chief animator, Earl Hurd, who had developed a series of animated short films called Bobby Bumps. Disney became Hurd’s eager apprentice.

  The owner of the Kansas City Film Ad Company loaned Disney a camera to experiment with on his time off, and he promptly came up with a series of animated shorts. These shorts, played at Kansas City’s Newman Theater, were called Newman Laugh-O-Grams.

  The theater was owned by Milton Feld, who started as an usher and would go on to produce stage shows and films in Los Angeles. Feld contracted with Disney for twelve shorts, including some created specifically for the Newman. One of these depicted movie stars jumping out of a cake to celebrate the theater’s anniversary. Another short joked that the theater seats were rigged to drop, through a chute, any audience member that read a movie’s title cards aloud. Although Feld had told him to name his price, Disney lost money on the Laugh-O-Gram project because he underestimated costs and failed to factor in a profit.

  But this job led to others, and before long, Disney bought his own camera and was ready to open a new studio. Through his connections with the Newman Theater, he found a number of investors and raised some $15,000.

  In May 1922, Disney opened Laugh-O-Gram Films. The studio occupied the second floor of the McConahay Building, a warehouse on East 31st Street in Kansas City. He hired Iwerks and Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising, Friz Freleng, and Carman Maxwell, animators who would eventually form the nucleus of the Warner Brothers studio. He paid some of his recruits little or nothing at first, banking on their desire to learn on the job. There were also promises of a share in future profits, but Disney was a shrewd negotiator. His apprentices turned out quality work very cheaply.

  The company contracted with a local theater owner to produce seven cartoons based on popular fairy tales, including Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, Puss ‘n’ Boots, and Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Disney’s senior apprentices shared in the company’s success, earning a salary for the first time.

  Disney’s Laugh-O-Grams were popular, and with the help of a distributor in New York, began to make the rounds of other theaters. Four other animated shorts, this time political satires, found an audience on this circuit. But Disney’s share of the grosses never made it back to Kansas City. The distributor went bankrupt, and Walt was forced to lay off some of his animators.

  To keep the business going, Disney moved out of his apartment and into the Laugh-O-Gram offices, where he slept on a pile of pillows. This experience also inspired his most enduring creation. “They [mice] used to fight for crumbs in my wastebasket when I worked alone late at night,” he said. “I lifted them out and kept them in wire cages on my desk. I grew particularly fond of one brown house mouse. He was a timid little guy. By tapping him on the nose with my pencil, I trained him to run inside a black circle I drew on my drawing board.” Disney named the mouse Mortimer.

  Despite Disney’s efforts, Laugh-O-Gram Films had trouble breaking even. Orders for fairy-tale films were steady, but expenses ran high. Walt appealed for a loan to his brother, Roy, who was in Arizona recovering from a bout with tuberculosis. “I was just helping him like you’d help a kid brother,” Roy later recalled. He sent Walt a book of blank checks and gave him permission to fill them out, in amounts up to $30, when necessary. Many of these checks, often in the maximum amount, went to appease the owners of a Greek restaurant where Walt was allowed to run a tab. The restaurant was on the lower level of the McConahay Building beneath the studio. Disney’s credit there was $60; when he exceeded that, the owners cut him off. When that happened, he lived on bread and beans, though he didn’t regard it as a hardship. His tastes were never very refined, and he used to say about this period in his life, “It wasn’t bad, I love beans.”

  Disney was well-liked by his neighboring merchants, whose generosity made a big difference. Disney paid a local barber with cartoons, which were displayed in the barbershop window. A local dentist named Thomas McCrum paid him $500 to make an educational cartoon, teaching children about dental hygiene. When McCrum asked Disney to meet him at his office to discuss the job, the mortified Disney admitted he could not leave his studio because his shoes were in a repair shop and he didn’t have the $1.50 needed to reclaim them. The two met at Disney’s studio instead. The cartoon, titled Tommy Tucker’s Tooth, was intended for the Missouri school system.

  With the $500 from Tommy Tucker’s Tooth, Disney began work Alice’s Wonderland, a live-action/animation hybrid
. Disney hired a teenage girl named Virginia Davis to star in the film and agreed to pay her 5 percent of the film’s profits. The film features Disney as one of a few animators who shows Alice around their studio. During this tour, Alice gets a peek at drawing boards displaying cartoon cats dancing and playing in a band, and a pair of mice boxing. That night, live-action Alice dreams she is on a train to Cartoonland. Upon arrival, she’s thrust into a cartoon parade on the back of an animated elephant. The girl dances with her new cartoon friends until lions break out of the zoo and chase her, first into a hollow tree, then into a cave and down a rabbit hole. She ultimately escapes by leaping off a cliff, waking up safe in her bed. The film was only twelve-and-a-half-minutes long.

  Before Alice was complete, Disney wrote to Margaret Winkler in New York looking for a distributor.

  Winkler got her start as the personal secretary of Harry Warner, one of the founders of Warner Brothers, who at the time was strictly a film distributor. Warner, impressed by Winkler’s talents, encouraged her to form her own company, Winkler Productions. At twenty-eight, she became the first female film producer and distributor.

  Winkler liked Disney’s idea of merging live actors with animation, and wanted to see a print of Alice’s Wonderland. But before Alice could be completed, Laugh-O-Gram was forced into bankruptcy. Disney decided his next stop would be Hollywood – home of the burgeoning film industry. To raise the money for the trip, he took his $70 movie camera and hawked his services to Kansas City mothers, filming children at their homes for movies the parents could project in their living rooms. He also freelanced for newsreel companies, which had him racing toward various calamities, most often some natural disaster. He was paid a dollar for every foot of film he produced. Typically, an assignment called for 100 feet of film. If his footage was not acceptable, the company reimbursed him for the film he used. None of his efforts raised enough for a ticket to Hollywood. He had to sell his camera.

  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. Lill
ian 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.