by Neal Gabler
Once again Walt seemed to have averted disaster. But as thrilled as he was with the results of the new Willie, there was still one enormous hurdle to leap, the same old hurdle, before he could parlay the film into the revenue the studio so badly needed: he had to find a distributor. Reinvigorated from his doldrums, he felt that all they had invested in Willie, all they had scraped together, was money well spent because, he insisted, they now had an animation of superior quality, and he firmly believed, as he had with the Alices, that “[w]e can lick them all with Quality.” Even before completing Willie, he had an intermediary approach Universal, which he knew admired his previous work, and he had continued investigating a relationship with Metro, despite being continually spurned there. When those efforts failed to pan out, he accepted an offer of help from another eager Samaritan: Pat Powers. Walt’s admiration for Powers had if anything grown, even after the recording debacle. “What better salesman could we want than PAT POWERS,” he wrote Roy and Ub. Powers, Walt thought, had the clout to get the “Big Boys” to see the film—the very top executives. “I am going to stick as close to him as I can without getting in his clutches,” he said, apparently beginning to recognize how insidious Powers could be.
But Walt was already in Powers’s clutches. By mid-October Powers had arranged to have Walt show Willie to Universal president Robert Cochrane and other Universal executives, and the reception was enthusiastic. “This is the original OSWALD,” one kept repeating, while others remarked on its cleverness and perfect synchronization. “I have never seen an audience of hard-boiled Film Executives laugh so much,” Walt wrote Lilly that night. Walt was invited to visit the Universal office the first thing in the morning to discuss a deal. He immediately hurried to Powers’s office to tell him the news, and in the heat of the moment, without consulting Roy, he did something that he would come to regret deeply: he wound up signing an agreement with Powers that afternoon empowering the mogul to serve as the studio’s sales agent for two years in return for 10 percent of all the monies Walt received.
Walt arrived at the Universal office the next day, obviously beaming and ready to bargain. By sheer coincidence he found Charlie Mintz sitting patiently in the waiting room, a reminder of what Walt was about to vanquish. Though Mintz was understandably sheepish, Walt made a point of smiling and greeting him cordially—a gesture of magnanimity he could now afford. Knowing how quickly word spread in the animation community, he was sure that Mintz had heard about the impending Universal deal. But when Walt met with a Universal executive named Metzger, it turned out that Universal did not want to distribute Mickey Mouse, at least not just yet. Instead, without paying any compensation to Walt, they wanted to put Willie on the bill with a Universal picture, Melody of Love, playing at the lavish Colony Theater, and see how the audience and the reviewers reacted. Then, assuming a positive response, they would contract for twenty-six Mickeys in 1928 and fifty-two the next year. Walt may have been disappointed, but he was receptive, and Universal prepared an option agreement. “I guess that means Charlie is out,” he wrote Lillian with more than a tinge of vengeful gloating, noting that Mintz was still cooling his heels in the waiting room when Walt left.
The next day, however, Walt had second thoughts. What if Universal showed Willie and didn’t make a deal with him? Wouldn’t that undermine his bargaining position with other distributors? When Walt expressed his sudden change of heart to Universal, Metzger was enraged, though Walt just grabbed his hat and exited the office as Metzger boiled. But while Walt was waiting for the treasurer to return his option, Metzger reappeared and attempted to mollify him. Walt left Universal without signing a contract but leaving the impression that he had reconsidered. The next morning he headed to Powers’s office for advice. Powers told Walt that Universal was trying to “pull a fast one” and counseled him to pretend he was negotiating with another distributor, hoping that this would force Universal’s hand. Obviously parroting Powers, Walt wrote Lillian that “if I got down on my knees to them it would be far worse for us on this deal,” and he was not going to let Universal “bulldose” [sic] him. “They are all just a bunch of schemers,” Walt concluded, “and just full of tricks that would fool a greenhorn,” which is what he realized he was. He was just lucky, he said, to have a friend and adviser like Powers.
The sparring continued over the next week. Universal said that it needed to make more calculations before it could make an offer, while Walt said he could not wait, though privately he was certain Universal would eventually capitulate, and he was meeting daily with Powers to map strategy. “In this game the guy with the most patience seems to win out,” Walt wrote Roy. Meanwhile Walt showed the film to Paramount executives who were “amased” [sic] and to executives of the Film Booking Office who “became very enthused.” By the end of October, though, neither Paramount nor FBO had made an offer, and Universal finally decided that their contract with Mintz precluded them from distributing any other cartoons. Walt was crushed—his high spirits once again flattened.
Because he was so short on money, all this time Walt had been goading Iwerks to finish the fourth Mickey, called The Barn Dance, so that he could have that one scored and recorded along with musical tracks for Plane Crazy and The Gallopin’ Gaucho before returning home. “If you ever worked like HELL in your life, do it now,” he wrote him. The music for all the cartoons but The Barn Dance had already been written by Walt’s old musical colleague Carl Stalling. On the train out to New York, Walt had stopped in Kansas City and proselytized Stalling on the future of sound movies, then left Plane Crazy and The Gallopin’ Gaucho for him to score while Walt continued on to arrange to have Willie recorded. Stalling arrived in New York the morning of the day before the Universal verdict and holed up with Walt in his hotel room past midnight talking and working. Three days later a print of The Barn Dance had arrived, and they prepared to record the scores. Powers agreed to foot the bill for the recording so long as Walt paid the other costs. Walt saw this as a lifesaver. “I didn’t tell him how bad we needed his help,” he wrote Lilly.
Again, he was in dire financial straits. Between the musicians’ fees and Stalling’s salary, Walt estimated that he would need another $1,200 to $1,500 for the recording session, on top of the nearly $6,000 he had already spent on the trip. Several weeks earlier the brothers had taken out a second mortgage on their Lyric Avenue homes, which pumped another $4,000 into the company, but most of that was now depleted. Walt urged Lillian to have Roy take out an additional loan against their property and “dig up all the spare cash he can.” It was a sign of just how the financial noose had tightened that Walt finally instructed Roy to sell the beloved Moon roadster with its red and green running lights and its folding top—the car in which Walt had courted Lillian.
But after nearly two months in New York, two months away from the studio and his home and Lillian, and after all the financial maneuvering, and after even the efforts of Pat Powers, Walt had four Mickey Mouse sound cartoons and still had no company to distribute them. He was running out of money. He was running out of time. He was running out of patience. He was even beginning to run out of confidence.
Then came Harry Reichenbach. Reichenbach, forty-four and prematurely silver-haired at the time he met Walt, looked like a diplomat, which belied the fact that he was actually a self-professed ballyhoo artist and proud of it. Born in Frostburg, Maryland, in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains, where he was raised on “nickel thrillers” and dreams of the larger world, Reichenbach ran off with a carnival as a boy and became a performer there, then worked as a magician’s assistant before leaving the stage and entering the nascent profession of press agentry. Brazenly duplicitous, he was soon a legend. As he once boasted of his exploits, “I took a young man who could wear plaited pants and in three weeks made him America’s matinee idol. I changed the name of Michigan Avenue to Dream Street by popular vote, organized a cannibal tribe at Tarrytown, New York, to advertise a picture, turned a failure into a national success by havin
g a lion stop at a first class hotel and even got Rudolph Valentino’s heart to lie in state in a California museum.”
When Walt met him in New York, Reichenbach, after years of representing a variety of film companies in promotional stunts, had become manager of the Colony Theater on Broadway, the very place where Universal had hoped to screen Willie before negotiations broke down. Ever since the recording session, Walt had been taking his print of Willie from distributor to distributor, sitting in the projection room while the cartoon was run and looking through the portholes to see the executives’ reaction, only to be told they would be in touch if they were interested. Reichenbach happened to attend one of these screenings and was impressed enough to approach Walt about the possibility of showing Willie for two weeks at his theater. When Walt fretted to Reichenbach, as he had to Universal, that the showing might harm his chances to land a distributor, Reichenbach told him that distributors never knew if a film was good until they heard the public and press response, and he assured Walt that “they’ll like it.” Reichenbach offered him $500 for the run. Somewhat bravely by his own admission, Walt countered with $1,000—“the highest price that anybody’s ever paid up to that time, for a cartoon on Broadway”—and Reichenbach, who obviously saw potential in Willie, agreed.
Willie debuted at the Colony on November 18, 1928, before the feature film Gang War starring Olive Borden, Eddie Gribbon, and Jack Pickford.* With the studio’s future now riding on the audience’s reaction, Walt and Stalling sat nervously near the rear of the theater and, as Stalling recalled, “heard laughs and snickers all around us.” (Walt would attend every performance those two weeks.) In fact, the reception was astonishing. Even before the engagement ended, Walt was receiving accolades from the trade press and calls from some of the same distributors who had brushed him off. “Not the first animated cartoon to be synchronized with sound effects,” raved Variety, “but the first to attract favorable attention. This one represents a high order of cartoon ingenuity, cleverly combined with sound effects. The union brought laughs galore. Giggles came so fast at the Colony they were stumbling over each other.” The reviewer for Exhibitor’s Herald said it “knocked me out of my seat.” And even The New York Times took note, calling Willie “an ingenious piece of work with a good deal of fun. It growls, whines, squeaks and makes various other sounds that add to its mirthful quality.”
Steamboat Willie seemed a slight film for such enthusiasm, much less for a cinematic milestone, which is what it would become. Scarcely six minutes in length, it had little narrative—essentially Mickey, in the throes of musical passion, carouses on a steamboat and turns everything he sees into an instrument: a goat into a hurdy-gurdy, a trash can into a drum, a set of pans into chimes, and a cow’s teeth into a xylophone. With a bit of casual sadism, he also yanks a cat’s tail to elicit yowls, uses a hapless goose as a trombone, and presses the teats of a sow to turn her into a kind of piano bleating notes. The only plot elements are a hulking cat of a captain who terrorizes Mickey—the intrusion of reality—and whose severity he escapes through his music, and Minnie Mouse, who joins his recital when Mickey swings her aboard with a loading hook. But what made it different from its animation forebears and competitors was the extent to which Walt had imagined it fully as a sound cartoon in which the music and effects were inextricable from the action—truly a musical cartoon rather than a cartoon with music. As Wilfred Jackson later analyzed the Disney musical technique, “I do not believe there was much thought given to the music as one thing and the animation as another. I believe we conceived of them as elements which we were trying to fuse into a whole new thing that would be more than simply movement plus sound.” Even Mickey’s walk was conceptualized musically, according to two veteran Disney animators. It had a bounce to it from the beat.
Just as The Jazz Singer had sent shock waves through the film industry a year earlier, rival animation studios immediately recognized that Willie had wrought a revolution in their art. “It became the rage,” wrote one producer. “Everybody was talking about it and raving about the funny action this mouse character did.” Other studios raced to catch up, but Disney had both a head start now and his special synchronizing system, and it would be a year before competitors were making musical cartoons of their own with anything like the fusion of Willie. Some never could catch up. Felix the Cat animator Hal Walker lamented that “Disney put us out of business with his sound.”
Now Walt, or more accurately Powers, was fielding offers, but what should have been triumph led again to disappointment. The problem was that the distributors, all of them, wanted to buy Walt’s studio, not just his cartoons. After his experience with Mintz, he was adamant about not selling, not surrendering control, no matter how badly he needed revenue, because he didn’t want to be just another animation producer. He wanted to be the king of animation. “I knew that I would be restrained as to what I could spend on pictures,” he would write a few years later, “and held down to what their idea of cartoon costs should be.” Walt, as fervent as ever that quality was his only real advantage, was determined to spend as much on his cartoons as producers were spending on their live one-reel comedies. As a consequence, instead of selling the studio, Walt, clearly emboldened by Willie’s reception, told distributors that he insisted on a negative advance of $5,000 against a sixty-forty split of profits in his favor after the distributor had recovered the advance and expenses. Every distributor declined. With Walt seemingly defeated, Powers offered to step into the breach. Already Walt’s sales agent, he would also distribute the film on a states’ rights basis, essentially franchising the picture to state and regional distributors in exchange for 10 percent of the gross he collected from them. Walt had been saved again by Pat Powers. Or at least he thought he had.
And so now in mid-December, more than three full months after he had arrived, three lonely and agonizing months, Walt could finally return to California with at least the promise of distribution—a promise that luckily began to be fulfilled a few weeks later. Just before Christmas Charles Giegerich, Powers’s right-hand man, closed an agreement with the entire chain of Stanley-Fabian-Warner Theatres, a chain that included the prominent Strand Theatre in New York, for $3,000 per subject. “With this is [sic] the bag,” Giegerich wrote Walt, “everything should go airplaning from now on.” By the end of the month Giegerich had finalized several states’ rights agreements, including upstate New York for $4,200. A few weeks later he sold the foreign rights to the Mickey Mouse series, and a month after that he sold western Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Cleveland and was about to sign contracts for Minnesota and Illinois. By May Powers’s California representative had signed up the entire West Coast. “We give them the stuff, and we won’t have to worry much,” Walt would write confidently to his partners, oblivious to the fact that he was in Powers’s hands and that Powers, given his track record, was not to be trusted. “[A]ll we want to worry about is the pictures.”
III
He wasn’t home long. Since Powers had no recording capability in California, by the end of January Walt was on his way back to New York to score two more Mickeys and to promote other projects. Having had Oswald wrested from him, Walt was already worried that he would be too dependent on Mickey and that if he didn’t diversify, he would be putting himself and the studio at risk. Before returning to New York he had begun considering a series of one-reel live-action talking comedies and had written his old investor John Cowles asking if he might be interested in financing it. (He even stopped off in Kansas City to consult with Cowles on his way to New York.) At the same time, he was also working on another cartoon series, one without a single central character, that he hoped would be sufficiently different from the Mickeys that it could be run in theaters that competed with those showing the Mickeys, providing him with another stream of revenue.
The idea for the new series had originated with Carl Stalling the previous September when Walt visited him on the way to New York, and Walt had apparently floated i
t to distributors during his stay. What Stalling had proposed was a “musical novelty”—a cartoon that began with the music and had the action animated to it. And he had a subject for the first installment as well. As a child Stalling had seen an ad in The American Boy magazine for a dancing skeleton and had badgered his father to give him a quarter to send for it. The image had stuck with him, and he suggested that Walt animate a group of skeletons dancing to one of Stalling’s own compositions that incorporated passages from Edvard Grieg’s “March of the Dwarfs.” The image stuck with Walt too. As early as September he wrote Roy that “Carl’s idea of the ‘Skeleton Dance’ for a Musical Novelty has been growing on me,” and he cited what he called “dandy possibilities” that he evidently conveyed to Powers, who expressed interest. On January 1 the studio began animating the film, and two weeks later, just before he arrived in New York again, Walt wrote Giegerich that he had something “quite out of the ordinary,” though Ub hadn’t finished enough for Walt to show anything yet.