The Animated Man
Page 8
In May 1924, Ub Iwerks wrote to Disney telling him he was ready to leave his Film Ad job a second time and join the Disney staff as an animator. Disney was delighted, and he encouraged Iwerks to come to Los Angeles as quickly as possible (“I wouldn’t live in K.C. now if you gave me the place”).20 With Iwerks on his staff, Disney could finally cut back on the live action in his films, first making it a true framing device—short segments before and after the animation—and then getting rid of it altogether, except for increasingly brief appearances by Alice. Iwerks was now a more accomplished animator than Disney himself, and his technical skills were immediately useful, too. The Disneys’ camera had to be hand-cranked to shoot the animation frame by frame, but Iwerks converted it to a motor drive, so that each frame could be photographed by pressing a telegraph key. He also drew the posters and lettered the titles and intertitles (the title cards in the body of the film) for the Alice Comedies.21
While their business was getting under way, the Disney brothers lived together nearby for more than a year. “First,” Roy said in 1968, “we had just a single room in a house”—this was across the street from Uncle Robert at 4409 Kingswell, the home of Charles and Nettie Schneider, where the brothers probably moved in the fall of 1923 around the time they started their company. Later, Roy said, “we got an apartment”—the address is unknown—“and I used to go home in the afternoon and take a sleep because I was convalescing.” Roy returned to the studio for a couple of hours before going home again to prepare dinner.
One night Walt “just walked out on my meal,” Roy said, “and I said, ‘Okay, to hell with you. If you don’t like my cooking let’s quit this business.’ So I wrote my girl in Kansas City”—Edna Francis, to whom he had been more or less engaged since before he entered the navy—“and suggested she come out and we get married, which she did, and she and I were married on April 11, 1925. So that left Walt alone. So apparently he didn’t like living alone, even though he didn’t like my cooking.”22 Shortly afterward, Walt Disney proposed to Lillian Bounds, and she accepted.
Lillian Marie Bounds was from Idaho, where her father had worked as a blacksmith. She had followed her older sister Hazel Sewell to Los Angeles and taken a job at the Disney studio soon after she arrived. The studio was close to her sister’s home, and she could walk to work. She was a slender, dark-haired girl, a head shorter than her boss and future husband. He stood around five feet, ten inches, and his slicked-back hair was light brown. Disney was slender himself then, so much so that in photos from the time his features seem sharper and his nose more prominent than in later years.
Disney’s wardrobe was extremely limited when she first knew him, Lillian said. “He didn’t even have a suit.”23 He wore a tan gabardine raincoat, a brownish gray cardigan, and a pair of black-and-white checked pants. He did not own a car, either, until sometime after Lillian was hired.
“We used to work nights,” Lillian told Richard Hubler in 1968. “By that time he had a Ford roadster with one seat and an open back. He used to take us home after work. He took the other girl home first. When he got to my sister’s he was embarrassed to stop in front of the house. One night he asked me, ‘If I get a suit can I come and see you?’ ” The Disney brothers both bought suits at the same time, but Walt’s had two pairs of pants to Roy’s one. “Walt always got the best,” Lillian said.24
“He just had no inhibitions,” Lillian said of Walt. “He was completely natural. . . . He was fun. Even if he didn’t have a nickel. . . . We would go to see a picture show or take a drive”—Disney had graduated to a Moon roadster by then. “We would drive up to Santa Barbara sometimes.” On their dates, she said, “He was always talking about what he was going to do. He always wanted to do the talking.”25
Although Disney was making films that were seen throughout the nation, he was well short of being any sort of celebrity.26 An article about her marriage, ghostwritten from Lillian Disney’s point of view, was published in McCall’s almost thirty years later. Although bearing a title—“I Live with a Genius”—that inspires skepticism, the article is persuasive in many of its details, as in this account:
The first time Walt ever saw one of his cartoon shorts in a theater was [in 1925], just before we were married. My sister and I were visiting a friend that night, so Walt decided to go to the movies. A cartoon short by a competitor was advertised outside, but suddenly, as he sat in the darkened theater, his own picture came on. Walt was so excited he rushed down to the manager’s office. The manager, misunderstanding, began to apologize for not showing the advertised film. Walt hurried over to my sister’s house to break his exciting news, but we weren’t home yet. Then he tried to find Roy, but he was out too. Finally, he went home alone.27
Disney was not a prepossessing figure financially or otherwise in 1924 and 1925, and he was still very young. He was twenty-three when he and Lillian married, almost three years younger than his wife. The mustache he added by the spring of 1925 (he is wearing it in home movies from Roy’s wedding) may have been in part a means of closing that gap, although Lillian said many years later that he had grown it when he and members of his staff “made a bet. They all grew mustaches. Walt wanted to shave it off later, but we didn’t let him.”28
Disney’s optimism and charm were sufficient to overcome any reservations Lillian may have felt. “He said he married me because he got so far in debt to me,” Lillian said in 1956. “He’d come around and say, ‘Hold your check, again.’ . . . Roy would tell him, ‘Now don’t let Lilly cash her checks.’ ”29 As evidenced by Roy Disney’s account book, it was very common during this period for members of the animation staff to take salary advances. Walt and Roy, on the other hand, often took less money out of the company than their salaries entitled them to, and they sometimes took their salaries a week or more late—three weeks late in May 1926—because of cash-flow problems like those that led to their pleas to Lillian.30
Walt and Lillian were married in her brother’s home in Lewiston, Idaho, on July 13, 1925. On their return to Los Angeles by train, the newlyweds stopped in Portland, Oregon, where Lillian met Walt’s parents for the first time. “They were just ordinary people,” she said in 1986. “Very warm and very friendly and they loved him very much.”31 Disney, as a newly married man whose wife had left the payroll June 1, gave himself a twenty-five-dollar raise, effective July 3, to seventy-five dollars a week. Roy’s salary remained at fifty dollars.32
Although Lillian had known her new husband as her boss, she was still jarred by his work habits. “When we were first married,” she said in 1956, “my gosh, he didn’t know what it was to go to sleep until two or three in the morning. I used to get so mad at him because he was in the habit of working so late at night.” Invariably, she said, they wound up back at the studio in the evening. “We’d go out for a ride, we’d go any place—he’d say, ‘Well, I’ve got just one little thing I want to do.’ ” She often slept on a couch until Disney was ready to leave, sometimes after midnight.33
Before they married, Walt and Lillian looked for a home to buy, and Walt recalled in 1956 that they had found a house they liked and were trying to estimate what the costs of home ownership would be. Lillian said that Walt could care for the yard himself, eliminating the need for a gardener, but he rejected the idea, clearly in the voice of Elias’s son, the boy who had delivered newspapers in the snow and otherwise had his fill of manual labor: “I said, ‘I’ve done too much of that all my life, hauling ashes, cutting lawns, doing things. . . . I’ll never cut another lawn.’ And I haven’t.”
Instead of buying a house, the newlyweds moved into rented quarters, first at 4637 North Melbourne Avenue, one street up from Kingswell and just a block away from the studio, and later at 1307 North Commonwealth Avenue.34 They did not move into a home of their own until 1927. Walt’s hacking cough was again a cause of alarm, this time to a landlady: she thought his coughing so severe that he must have tuberculosis.35
Two of Disney’s former colleagues at L
augh-O-gram joined his staff in Hollywood on June 22, 1925, shortly before he left for his wedding in Idaho, bringing the total on the staff to a dozen. Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising had found other work after Laugh-O-gram’s collapse; Ising had a photofinishing business, and Harman animated at Kansas City Film Ad. At night, though, they worked on a film of their own with Max Maxwell, who was still attending college in Kansas City.36 They used Laugh-O-gram’s camera stand and other equipment that Fred Schmeltz had taken as collateral for his loans. Their cartoon, Sinbad the Sailor, enjoyed only one theatrical showing, in October 1924 at the Isis Theatre at Thirty-first and Troost, a block away from Laugh-O-gram’s old quarters in the McConahy Building. Disney knew what they were doing and encouraged his own distributor to look favorably on their efforts. “They are three very clever, clean-cut, young fellows,” he wrote to Margaret Winkler, “and I would like very much to have them out here with me.”37 But no distributors were interested.
Their own hopes in abeyance, Harman and Ising were receptive to Disney’s offer to join his staff as animators (and, in Ising’s case, as a camera operator). Hugh’s younger brother Walker came with them to work as an inker. Hugh Harman’s and Ising’s memories, and Ising’s correspondence from the 1920s, are among the most reliable windows into what the Disney studio was like at the time.
“When we first came out here,” Hugh Harman said, “nearly every evening we were at Roy’s house, with Walt and his wife, and the three of us, Walker and Rudy and I. Or they were at our apartment; or we were at Walt’s apartment. . . . We used to play tennis in those early days, every morning, including Saturdays and Sundays. Every morning, up at six, playing tennis.” When everyone was together in the evening, Harman said, “we would do nothing after dinner but start thinking of stories and acting them out. We got to thinking to ourselves, well, here are cartoons, they’ve never acted. We resolved we were going to make them act.”38 Ising also remembered being with the Disneys “practically every night of the week. He was either at our place or we were at their place. This was when he first got married, for a couple of years.”39
Not that long, surely—Disney fired Ising in March 1927 (he tended to fall asleep while operating the animation camera), and the studio had changed in other ways by then. But in 1925, there was still a chummy atmosphere very much reminiscent of the Kansas City days. So small was the staff, and so undifferentiated their duties, that Roy Disney washed cels for reuse until a janitor was hired in November 1925.40 (Roy no longer photographed the live action of Alice, though—a professional cameraman was hired for the few days of shooting necessary.)
By the time Harman and Ising moved to Los Angeles, Walt Disney had stopped animating,41 and his drawings were not much in evidence otherwise. As a guide for the animators on the Alice Comedies, Disney projected the live-action film of the girl through the animation camera and made rough sketches of her key positions in the scenes that would combine live action and animation.42 “Maybe he had made a drawing showing her positions as they varied every three feet [of exposed film] or so—just high spots,” Harman said.43 Disney had probably drawn the model sheets for the Laugh-O-gram characters in Kansas City, but in Hollywood such drawings were most likely by Iwerks. As Ising said, those sheets showed “the walk, and the run, and the head and the body in a complete turn.”44 The drawings were reproduced in three different sizes so that the animators could trace them—as most of them did, although tracing gradually diminished.45
After he stopped animating, Disney assumed more control over the animation done by others. In Kansas City, the animators had written on the bottom of their drawings what the cameraman should do. For example, an animator might specify how many times a cycle was to be repeated. Ising, as the camera operator, might accept or amend such decisions: “If I thought a thing was good, and [the animator] said, ‘Repeat two times,’ I might repeat it four times. Or, if he said, ‘Repeat eight times,’ and I might think it was not that good, I’d cut it down.”46 In Hollywood, Disney began making what came to be called exposure sheets, which amounted to more formal instructions to the camera operator. “He would take the animator’s drawings and time them,” Ising said, “whether it was to be shot on one turn or two turns, or how many times a cycle was to be repeated.”47 Disney altered the drawings themselves “very, very little,” Harman said, except to add “flicker marks”—a burst of six to eight drawings around a character’s head that represented surprise or distress or inspiration.48 “We got so we put them in to save him the trouble,” Ising said.49
Disney also devoted more of his time to stories—“he was the one who really sort of put the story together” and assigned sequences to the animators, Ising said50—but shooting the live action first for the Alice Comedies did not mean that stories had to be planned in any detail. As the series advanced, Alice (three other girls succeeded Virginia Davis in that role) became more and more superfluous, her scenes fewer and fewer, and her filmed actions more and more generic, so that the live action could be combined with animation of almost any kind. Disney continued to trace the live action, providing rough sketches of the girl’s position, but that task made fewer demands on his time as Alice’s role in the films shrank.51
Gradually, as Disney added more animators and his animators gained more experience, the Alice Comedies looked better, with fewer obvious shortcuts, but they still suffered by comparison with some of their competitors. The level of invention in the Felix the Cat and Out of the Inkwell cartoons was simply higher—more interesting things happened than in Disney’s. But even the characters in those cartoons had only traces of individuality; they were mostly vehicles for gags that took advantage of the characters’ unreality. Felix’s body, like everything else in his universe, was infinitely plastic, and KoKo, the clown star of the Inkwell cartoons, always materialized on the screen as a drawing on paper, one that could be crumpled or erased. For the most part, animators relied heavily on characters whose simply designed black-and-white bodies (Felix the Cat was typical) stood out clearly on the screen. The gags usually just piled up, instead of telling a coherent story.
The Alice Comedies offered few witty transmutations like those in the Felix and Inkwell cartoons. What happened much more often was that a body came apart and reassembled itself with remarkable ease. In Alice Picks the Champ (1925), a bear boxer’s hand literally shatters on the head of a turtle sparring partner; the bear scoops up the pieces and clumps them together on the stump, as a fist again.
Occasionally, though, Disney’s story ideas clothed themselves in more promising expression. In Alice’s Balloon Race, released in January 1926, a hippopotamus, as he sits and smokes his pipe and spits, misses a spittoon; the spittoon grows legs and moves to where the spit fell. The hippo spits again, and again he misses. This time the spittoon grows arms as well as legs and points to its opening—and the hippo finally hits it, on his third try. Such a situation was as fanciful as anything in the Felix cartoons, but there was something real about it, something that originated not so much in the characters themselves or in what they did as in how they responded to each other. There was no playing to the audience, as Felix did so often: instead, the hippo looked perturbed as the spittoon dressed him down, then brightened as he assured the spittoon that this time he’d hit it. Here was a thread that Disney was just starting to pick up: when the characters on the screen seemed to believe they were real, the audience might be encouraged to accept their reality, too.
By the summer of 1925, Disney felt secure enough in his new situation not only to hire more animators and get married but also to build a new studio. On July 6, shortly before he left for Idaho, he and Roy deposited four hundred dollars toward the purchase of a vacant lot on Hyperion Avenue in the Los Feliz district east of Hollywood, roughly a mile from the Kingswell studio.52 By early in 1926 the new Disney studio building at 2719 Hyperion Avenue was ready for occupancy. “They rented an old Ford truck,” Hugh Harman said, “and we moved the stuff in that.”53 The Disney staff moved to its n
ew quarters in a mid-February rainstorm, the rain so heavy that the studio’s furnishings got soaked and stubbornly refused to dry.54
At the old studio, the Disneys had rented a vacant lot about three blocks away to shoot the live action for the Alice Comedies against white canvas strung up on the backs of billboards. At the Hyperion studio, the new prosperity asserted itself in the construction of an actual outdoor set. “We had to whitewash it every time we used it,” Rudy Ising said.55
Walt Disney’s new office impressed Ising, who wrote to his family that it “looks like a bank president’s loafing room. Desk and chairs in walnut, large overstuffed divan and chair, floor lamp etc.”56 The Disneys’ growing prosperity also permitted them to build new homes of their own, twin houses side by side on Lyric Avenue where that street ended at Saint George Street in the Los Feliz district. Construction began in August 1926 and ended in December.57 Early in 1927, Walt and Lillian moved into 2495, on the more desirable corner lot, while Roy and Edna moved into 2491. Roy Disney put the cost of the land and the two “kit” houses, from Pacific Ready-Cut Homes, at sixteen thousand dollars.58 Lyric is a narrow, winding street that leads southeast down a hill to Hyperion Avenue, just a few blocks from the studio’s new location. The shorter (a half mile) and more direct route, though, and the one that the Disneys probably drove most often, took them northeast on Saint George to Griffith Park Boulevard; the studio was a right turn and a long block away.
If there was a cloud over the Disneys’ success, it arose from their relations with their distributor. From the beginning, it is clear from Margaret Winkler’s early letters to Disney, the final cut on the Alice Comedies was to be hers; she told Disney to send her “all the film you make, both negative and positive.”59 In 1924, her brother George went to the Disney studio to edit the films there. Starting in August of that year, Disney’s dealings with Winkler Pictures were mainly through Margaret’s new husband, Charles Mintz, who adopted a brusque, condescending tone in his letters. He often sounded wounded and indignant where money was concerned, in the manner that immediately raises suspicion about a correspondent’s motives.