At first, though, Disney groveled. When he wrote to Mintz on November 3, 1924, he praised George Winkler’s work as an editor, saying he had cut one film “down to its proper length.” He even credited George with help on gags. Disney’s tone in this letter is almost shockingly pitiable, particularly his constant invocations of George Winkler’s name as protection against Mintz’s aggressive demands—for example, that Disney include more live action, at the beginning and end of his films, and use a gang of kids instead of Alice alone. Disney protested that he wanted to add another cartoonist instead.60 Mintz, in a letter of October 6, 1925, contended that it was only because he had sent his brother-in-law to Disney’s studio that Disney was able to continue making films.61
Winkler Pictures had increased Disney’s payment for each Alice Comedy after the first six—he got eighteen hundred dollars instead of the original fifteen hundred—and by 1925, in Roy Disney’s accounting, each film typically showed a profit of more than six hundred dollars. Mintz wanted to shift to a profit-sharing arrangement for the third season, starting in 1926. In their correspondence in the fall of 1925 and winter of 1926, he and Disney wrangled over when and how they would share the rentals of their films, once Disney had received a reduced advance from Mintz (fifteen hundred dollars again, in two installments) and Mintz had covered that advance and the cost of making prints of the films. This was the sort of question on which disagreement and compromise were all but inevitable, but Mintz’s rhetoric was extreme, haggling taken to the point of caricature. In his letter of November 17, 1925, he lectured Disney about how single-reel subjects were failing.62 A week later, he took exactly the opposite tack, trying to talk Disney into waiting for his share of the box-office proceeds from the Alice Comedies— which would be substantial, he insisted—until Mintz had received fifteen hundred dollars in addition to all his costs.63 It was only through protracted effort that Disney was ever able to wring any concessions out of him.
In these dealings with Mintz, it was always Walt Disney himself who jousted with his prickly distributor. There is no sign of Roy Disney in this correspondence, even though he and Walt surely conferred on how to respond. When the Disney Brothers Studio became Walt Disney Productions in 1926, that change of name was a simple acknowledgment that in business decisions, as in the making of the cartoons, Walt Disney’s was the voice that mattered.
Disney’s position in his dealings with Mintz—and his posture in his letters—gradually grew stronger as his cartoons got better. By late 1926, Disney had made forty Alice Comedies, and everything about the few surviving cartoons from that period—animation, drawing, character design—is noticeably more polished than what Disney and his crew could do a year or two earlier. The shortcuts, if still plentiful, are no longer quite so blatant. In Alice’s Brown Derby (1926), Alice’s cat sidekick Julius rides his horse into the lead in a race, in cycle animation of the usual kind—but as he does that, in a side view, he passes between other horses, creating a fleeting three-dimensional effect. (There are three levels of cels, with Julius in the middle between two cels of the other horses.)
The improved quality of Disney’s films permitted Mintz to abandon states-rights distribution for the 1926–27 releasing season and sign up with a minor distributor called Film Booking Offices (FBO). A much bigger step forward was in store for the 1927–28 season. In January 1927, Mintz asked Disney to come up with a rabbit character—“I am negotiating with a national organization and they seem to think that there are too many cats on the market.”64 On March 4, 1927, Mintz signed a contract with Universal, one of Hollywood’s major studios, for a series of twenty-six cartoons starring, as Universal had specified, a new character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Disney would now receive an advance of $2,250 for each cartoon.65
At the Disney studio, Hugh Harman said, the switch from Alice to Oswald came without warning. “It was announced to us one morning, when we went in, that we were starting Oswalds,” he said. “So the time was right now to think of an Oswald story. We all got together in Walt’s little office . . . and dreamed up this first story [Poor Papa]. . . . We began to build on it, and about eleven o’clock, Walt said, ‘Why don’t we start animating?’ He said, ‘Hugh, the first part of that is pretty well worked out; you know what it is, don’t you?’ I said, ‘Yeah, that’s enough to start on.’ So I went in and started Oswald pacing up and down on the ridge of this roof.”66
Although Universal and Mintz were unhappy with that first Oswald cartoon (it was not released until 1928), subsequent cartoons in the series got warm reviews in exhibitors’ trade papers like Motion Picture News. Those reviews were not meaningless puffs; the reviewers panned later Oswalds, made after Disney had left the series. New York animators liked Disney’s cartoons, too, the Fleischer animator Dick Huemer said: “We used to seek them out and study them.”67
Story work on the later Oswald cartoons was not as casual as it had been for Poor Papa. Disney had started preparing brief scenarios during the last year or so of the Alice Comedies, and the surviving scenarios for the Oswald cartoons are more detailed. Sketches, six to a page, often accompany the scenarios, showing in general terms how the animator should stage the action in each scene. Despite such increased preparation, though, the Disney cartoons were in something of a rut, and it was Disney himself, more than anyone else, who was keeping them there, through his increasingly strong control of what got onto the screen.
A majority of Disney’s twenty-six Oswald cartoons have not survived, so generalizations are risky, but the sense from nine of the Oswalds is that Disney was slow to pick up on the possibilities for character comedy that he had opened up in some of the Alice Comedies. The problem was certainly not a lack of interest on his part. “Walt Disney just lived cartoons, that was his whole life,” said Paul Smith, who joined the staff in December 1926 as a cel painter (then the first stage in an apprenticeship that led to work as an animator). “He talked of nothing else, ever.”68 But it was simply too easy to seek laughs by breaking cartoon characters into pieces—exploiting their impossibility, instead of encouraging audiences to accept their reality—and so, in Oh Teacher (1927), Oswald removes his own foot, kisses it for luck, and rubs it on the brick he plans to throw at a cat rival during school recess.
This was besides, as Max Maxwell said, “the period when Walt was very intrigued with off-color gags, such as cows with swinging udders and little characters running into outhouses.”69 Disney had grown up as a farm boy, after all, and in the late 1920s his earthy sense of humor was as much a legacy of his years at Marceline as his nostalgia for small-town life would be in later years.
Paul Smith remembered the story meetings during the Oswald period: “We’d all be called into Walt’s office and hash over notes that he had made on the next picture. What did we think of this gag, was it too risqué . . . he was always putting in gags where a cow would get her udder caught in something.”70
Around this time, if only briefly, Hugh Harman may have passed Disney in his sensitivity to animation’s possibilities. Harman described an occasion in 1926 when Disney spoke of wishing he had the money to get out of animation and go into real estate. Harman responded by saying he wanted to stay in animation and eventually animate Shakespeare. “He looked at me,” Harman said, “as if I had a hole in my head.”71
Harman always spoke of his aspirations for his medium in such grand terms. Although he later produced many popular cartoons for Warner Brothers and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), most in partnership with Ising, he resented Disney’s much greater success, and he invariably placed the least flattering gloss on Disney’s words and actions. It is certainly true, though, that in the 1920s Disney conceived his future in animation mainly in business terms, so it is not at all unlikely that Harman’s artistic goals were loftier then. Bright Lights, which Harman animated in 1927 with Rollin Hamilton, has glimpses of an Oswald with an inner life, a character whose emotions are mirrored in his actions. It is much harder to find anything of the kind in the surv
iving Oswald cartoons dominated by Ub Iwerks, whose mechanical proficiency was reflected in his animation’s smooth clockwork quality. In the late 1920s it was Iwerks’s kind of animation, more than Harman’s, that was most in tune with Disney’s ambitions.
Harman complained that Disney pressed his animators to turn out more footage—more animation—and to simplify their drawings. Iwerks contributed to such pressure, no doubt unintentionally, through his great facility. Paul Smith remembered an Iwerks who “never sketched anything roughly in his life. He would write his drawings out, with no preliminary sketches. . . . That’s why he didn’t want to work with an assistant. He wanted to make all the drawings himself. He’d work clean, straight ahead.”72
As different as they were, Disney’s animators felt a common itch to break away. In September 1926, when the studio was closed for two weeks of vacation, Harman and Ising, joined by Iwerks and Rollin Hamilton, made another cartoon of their own, this time without Disney’s knowledge. They were again unsuccessful in finding a release, but they did not give up. On January 29, 1927, Ising wrote to his sister Adele in Kansas City: “We have a secret shop all equipped and can start immediate production on our own pictures in event of obtaining a contract. I hope this will be soon as we shall not make a name and fortune for ourselves working for Walt.”73
The Disney studio was not a happy place in 1927. Animators who knew Disney as “very much one of the boys” in Kansas City had come to resent him in his new role, as what they saw as an overbearing boss. The studio’s growth had given Disney no choice, however—he had to become more of a boss. Each contract with Mintz had brought a significant increase in the number of Alice Comedies he was obligated to produce, from twelve in 1924 to eighteen in 1925 to twenty-six in 1926. The Oswald contract covered twenty-six cartoons again, but for a more prominent and demanding national distributor. Disney’s staff had grown along with his output, until by 1927 he and Roy employed roughly two dozen people, most of whom had not known him in Kansas City. Delivery schedules could generate cash crises; that happened in 1926, when Disney had to build up a backlog of Alice Comedies to meet the heavier FBO schedule. He dueled continually with Charles Mintz, who despite occasional truces could never accept Disney’s insistence on behaving like an independent businessman, rather than an employee.
Disney was a successful filmmaker—his profit on each cartoon had risen to as much as a thousand dollars—but his success came at a price, part of which was estrangement from people who had been his friends, or might have been. On one occasion in 1927, Disney even reacted angrily to the caricatures that the animators drew of one another and pinned up for their amusement, a common pastime in cartoon studios. “One of the few times I ever saw Walt angry was one day when he got tired of seeing us waste time over those cartoons,” Max Maxwell wrote in 1973. “He stalked through the studio and tore them all off the walls.”74 Maxwell, another veteran of Laugh-O-gram, joined the Disney staff in May 1927, but he left after only nine months in this bruising new environment.
Isadore “Friz” Freleng, who joined the staff on January 15, 1927, lasted less than eight months, leaving on September 1. At Kansas City Film Ad, Maxwell said, Freleng was “this little red-headed Jewish guy, everybody picked on him.”75 Freleng was a year younger than Harman and Ising, who were both born in August 1903, and three years younger than Disney; he had not known Disney in Kansas City. Freleng himself told Joe Adamson: “I’d become very sensitive as a child, because I was much smaller than other kids, and I was always defending myself, because they’d pick on me. Walt picked this up, and he used to rib me quite a bit, maybe size, or whatever it was, I don’t think he really meant any harm. [But] when he’d make a remark, I’d take exception, and I’d make a nasty remark back to him.”76
One evening, Freleng called Disney at home, “telling him I had something on my mind which bothered me. . . . It took him just a few minutes to drive over to where I was living in a boarding house. He wouldn’t let me say a word until he arrived at the studio and opened the door. He got behind his desk and took out a cigar. He asked me to sit opposite to him, and said, ‘Now start talking.’ I told him how much he upset me emotionally, and reminded him of his letters to me expressing his patience in my learning animation. He apologized, and complimented me for having the nerve to speak my mind. He said he had a great respect for me, but I don’t think really, truthfully he did, because after that, things became somewhat more unbearable.” Finally, another confrontation led to Freleng’s leaving the staff.77
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.
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