by Rees Quinn
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.
Steamboat Willie
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.
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 a
ll 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.