The Animated Man Read online

  A fuller account of the return trip from Lillian Disney’s point of view is part of that ghostwritten article in McCall’s, and what it says about the naming of Disney’s new mouse character—and, especially, Lillian’s state of mind in 1928—is wholly plausible:

  I remembered the early Hollywood days when Walt and Roy were so broke that they would go to a restaurant and order one dinner, splitting the courses between them. I knew I wouldn’t care much for that. I couldn’t believe that my husband meant to produce and distribute pictures himself, like the big companies. He and Roy had only a few thousand dollars between them. Pictures needed a lot of financing, even in 1927 [sic]. And what if Walt failed? He had insulted his distributor and hadn’t even looked for a new connection.

  By the time Walt finished the scenario [for Plane Crazy, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon] I was practically in a state of shock. He read it to me, and suddenly all my personal anguish focused on one violent objection to the script. “ ‘Mortimer’ is a horrible name for a mouse!” I exclaimed.

  Walt argued—he can be very persuasive—but I stood firm. Finally, to placate his stubborn wife, Walt came up with a substitute: “Mickey Mouse.” At this late date I have no idea whether it is a better name than “Mortimer.” Nobody will ever know. I only feel a special affinity to Mickey because I helped name him. And besides, Mickey taught me a lot about what it was going to be like married to Walt Disney. We’ve never been so broke since—at least quite so visibly. But I have been plenty worried on occasion. It has often helped to look back on that period.89

  The defecting animators remained at the studio for a few weeks after Disney returned, completing the last five of the Oswalds due under his contract with Mintz. Starting in late April, Iwerks animated the first Mickey Mouse cartoon in a back room, with Ben Clopton assisting him in some fashion. Harman remembered work proceeding behind a curtain, but that may have been only temporary.90 Lillian Disney, her sister Hazel Sewell, and Roy’s wife, Edna, inked and painted the cels in a garage at the Disney homes on Lyric Avenue (Lillian returned to the Disney payroll from April 28 to June 16, 1928). The animators who were leaving for Winkler’s were not supposed to know what Iwerks was doing, but Harman told Paul Smith then that “Ub was animating a picture with a Mickey Mouse character in it.”91 Clopton was probably the source of Harman’s information; he left the Disney payroll on May 12, 1928, a week after Harman, Smith, and Hamilton.

  That first Mickey Mouse cartoon, Plane Crazy, was completed and previewed by May 15, 1928.92 In it, Disney tried to exploit public interest in Charles Lindbergh in the wake of his transatlantic flight a year earlier. A second cartoon, The Gallopin’ Gaucho, which Iwerks animated in June and early July, echoed the adventure films of Douglas Fairbanks, particularly The Gaucho (1927). The animation for the new cartoons, in Iwerks’s clockwork manner, was arguably retrograde when set beside the subtler Harman-Hamilton animation in an Oswald cartoon like Bright Lights, but that was probably not why Disney got no offers from the distributors who saw the print of Plane Crazy that he sent to a film storage company in New York in mid-May. As Harman and Ising had already learned—and Disney himself had reason to know, after his unsuccessful efforts in New York earlier in 1928—new cartoon series were simply not very attractive to most distributors. Cartoons’ brief burst of popularity in the early 1920s was long past; of the major distributors, only Paramount and Universal now offered cartoons to theaters.

  In the spring of 1928 the film industry was still absorbing the impact of the first few features made with sound. The first “all-talking” feature, Lights of New York, would not open in New York until July. Disney realized that adding sound to his cartoons would be one way to make them stand out, but it was still not obvious then that sound features, much less sound cartoons, would completely supplant silent films. Neither was it at all obvious how best to add sound to a cartoon, except perhaps as Warner Brothers had done with silent features like Don Juan, starting in 1926, by recording an orchestra whose music could take the place of a theater’s own musicians.

  Musical sound tracks had been recorded for a few of Max Fleischer’s cartoons earlier in the 1920s with the De Forest process. Sound had also occasionally accompanied silent cartoons in more inventive ways. Frank Goldman of the Bray studio told of how a New York theater’s orchestra vocalized “ah-ah-ah” during a showing of a Bray educational cartoon on the human voice and thus gave an “unexpected lift” to the film.93 But it was a long leap from such limited uses of sound to a cartoon with a fully integrated sound track, one in which animation was synchronized with music and sound effects. Disney’s key insight was that such integration, and not sound alone, would be essential to a sound cartoon’s success. By the end of June, he was writing to New York companies about what it would cost to add synchronized sound to a cartoon. On July 14, Roy Disney entered a charge of three dollars and five cents for “Sheet Music for Pic” in his account book.

  Wilfred Jackson joined the Disney staff on April 16, 1928, just in time to see Disney and Iwerks make the first two Mickey Mouse cartoons. Thanks to his musical knowledge—limited but greater than that of other members of the Disney staff—he was intimately involved in making the third Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie, the first with sound, in the summer of 1928. He left this account:

  The story work [for Steamboat Willie] began with a “gag meeting” at either Walt’s or Roy’s home. The entire animation crew: Ub Iwerks, Les Clark, Johnny Cannon, and even me, although I was just beginning to learn how to [animate], were there with Walt and Roy. The concept of the story—a situation, or perhaps just a locale, or take-off on a well-known person—was usually all Walt had in mind to start the meeting going on these early Mickeys. On Steamboat Willie, it was just the idea of the song, “Steamboat Bill,” and the Mississippi riverboat locale. Everyone came out with any ideas he could think of on the subject, especially funny business that might get a laugh. I don’t recall that many sketches were made of the ideas. I think, mostly, we just talked. Nor do I believe anything like a story line, or continuity, was developed at this preliminary meeting.

  Ub left his animation desk and spent the next few days after this meeting working with Walt in his office. The next thing I saw on the picture was some sketches of Ub’s on animation paper. . . . When Walt was ready to time the action and make out the exposure sheets he had these sketches on his desk, but didn’t refer to them very much. He seemed to have the story line for the whole picture clearly in mind, as well as the details of each piece of business, and knew exactly what he was after without any reminders.

  I helped Walt as he timed the action the best I could with my mouth organ and a metronome—performing the function that was done for later pictures by a musician playing a piano—and I was able to observe how he tried out parts of the action this way and that, discarding something here, trying some new thing there, rearranging the order of other pieces of business, until the whole thing seemed to work with the tunes he had selected and finally suited him as a workable cartoon continuity. When he was done, each last little thing that was to happen all through the entire short had been visualized in complete detail and the length of time each action was to take on the screen had been determined. Thus, while he was timing the action, Walt was also doing the final part of the story work, and the way it ended up was changed quite a bit from how it was when he started to time it—but, later, when the picture was all finished, it came out very much like what he now had in mind.94

  Jackson came up with the way to knit the music and the animation together, so that there was true synchronization. Using a metronome, he prepared “a little rudimentary bar sheet”—a sort of primitive score. “In the places where we had definite pieces of music in mind, the name of the music was there, and the melody was crudely indicated, not with a staff, but just with notes that would go higher and lower . . . so that I could follow it, in my mind.”95 Jackson prepared the bar sheet “almost simultaneously” with Disney’s preparation of exposur
e sheets for the animators. For the silent Alices and Oswalds, Disney had made the exposure sheets after the animators did their work, but now it was the other way around, because the animators’ timing had to be more precise. Jackson laid out a bar sheet for each tune Disney wanted to use; Disney used the bar sheet to indicate measures and beats on the exposure sheets.96 He did not describe the action in detail on the exposure sheets. Instead, a detailed synopsis of each scene was typewritten—almost certainly by Disney himself—alongside Iwerks’s sketches, each synopsis describing how music and action were to fit together (“Close up of Mickey in cabin of wheel’-house [sic], keeping time to last two measures of verse of ‘steamboat Bill.’ With gesture he starts whistling the chorus in perfect time to music”).97 Iwerks was going to animate most of the film, and those synopses, combined with the exposure sheets, told him what he needed to know.

  “When the picture was half finished,” Disney wrote years later, “we had a showing with sound.” (The best guess for a date for that showing is July 29, 1928, when Roy Disney noted a two-dollar charge for a “preview” of the unfinished film.)98 “A couple of my boys could read music and one of them [Jackson] could play a mouth organ. We put them in a room where they could not see the screen and arranged to pipe their sound into the room where our wives and friends were going to see the picture. The boys worked from a music and sound-effects score. After several false starts, sound and action got off with the gun. The mouth-organist played the tune, the rest of us in the sound department bammed tin pans and blew slide whistles on the beat. The synchronism was pretty close. The effect on our little audience was nothing less than electric. 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!”99

  There is present in that account “some of his ebullience”—Wilfred Jackson remembered that the two Disney wives and Iwerks’s wife and his own girlfriend “weren’t particularly impressed; they were all talking about sewing, and knitting, and the things that girls talk about.” It also seems likely that Disney was wrong in remembering that his “musicians” could not see the cartoon as they played. Jackson said that Roy Disney projected the film onto a bedsheet hung in front of a glass pane in Walt Disney’s office door, so that he and his colleagues could see the cartoon in reverse, through the glass, as they played inside the office.100 But Jackson did remember that Iwerks “rigged up a little microphone and speaker”; and there is no reason to doubt that Disney and his crew were elated by what they saw and heard.

  Steamboat Willie was complete in silent form by late August, when Disney took the train to New York to try to get his sound track recorded. Lillian was not with him this time. He stopped in Kansas City to see Carl Stalling, the organist at the Isis Theatre, whom Disney had known since he was working at Kansas City Film Ad in the early 1920s. “Walt was making short commercials at that time,” Stalling said in 1969, “and he’d have us run them for him. We got acquainted, and I had him make several song films”101—that is, sing-along films, like the later Martha, that showed the lyrics on the screen while the theater musician played the song. After Disney moved to Los Angeles, Stalling lent him $250 (which Disney repaid). Disney left the two silent Mickey Mouse cartoons with Stalling so that he could begin writing scores for them.

  Disney arrived in New York on September 4, 1928, the day after Labor Day; he remembered the crowds returning from the holiday. As he made the rounds of recording studios, he saw one cartoon, an Aesop’s Fable called Dinner Time, with a sound track that engineers for Radio Corporation of America (RCA) had added as an experiment. The Fables remained silent otherwise. So did Mintz’s cartoons, not just the Oswalds but also the Krazy Kat cartoons that Mintz was making in New York. Disney heard of an effort to make a Krazy Kat cartoon in sound, with results so poor that the cartoon went unreleased, at least in its sound version.

  Disney was not deterred by what he saw of this clumsy experimenting. Writing to Roy and Ub Iwerks three days after his arrival in New York, he embraced sound as a spur to growth: “It is not at all impossible for us to develop in this sound field the same as [short-comedy producers Hal Roach and Mack Sennett] and the others did in the silent.”102 A week later, he wrote again of his strong belief in the future of sound cartoons and the importance of quality—a belief he was going to back up by paying for a seventeen-piece orchestra (plus three effects men) for the recording of Steamboat Willie’s score.103

  Within a week of his arrival in New York, Disney had decided to record Steamboat Willie’s sound track with Powers Cinephone, a sound system of dubious legality that had somehow managed not to run afoul of larger companies’ patents (Disney noted, in a letter written shortly after his arrival, that “the Powers method is absolutely interchangeable” with the competing RCA and Movietone systems).104 Powers Cinephone took its name from Patrick A. Powers, a colorful Irish rogue who had been an important figure in the film industry early in the century, when he and Carl Laemmle battled for control of Universal. Disney was impressed by Powers’s wealth and apparent influence in the industry and swept up by his charm—“He is a dandy. . . . He is a fine fellow”105—but he also had very little choice. He had determined almost immediately that only Powers and RCA were good candidates for the kind of recording he had in mind, and RCA would have charged him far more than he could afford. The Disneys were by no means poverty stricken in 1928, but their assets were mainly their studio building and its equipment, rather than cash. They were not liquid enough to spend thousands of dollars on recording sessions.

  The first recording session ran from 11:30 on the evening of Saturday, September 15, until 4:00 the next morning.106 Disney himself provided the voice of a parrot. He recalled in 1956: “I had to yell ‘Man overboard! Man overboard!’ And I got so excited and I was right in the microphone and I coughed in it right in one of the takes. And that blew that take up and then they all turned to me and said, ‘Now who did that?’ ”

  The results of the first recording session were unsatisfactory, for reasons other than Disney’s performance as the parrot. He had brought with him to that session a film a theatrical-trailer company had made for him, showing a ball bouncing in the musical tempo. He knew that some such device was needed during the actual recording if the synchronization was to be as tight as the bar-sheet system permitted. The conductor, Carl Edouarde, was apparently reluctant to pay strict attention to the ball, and as a result synchronization suffered. There were problems with some of the sound effects, too, and so a second recording session was scheduled for September 30.

  Disney was strikingly cavalier about costs in a September 23 letter to Roy and Iwerks: “Why should we let a few little dollars [jeopardize] our chances. . . . We can lick them all with Quality.”107 Two days later, he wrote to Roy of pouring money back into the cartoons and making them as good as possible: “God help us put this thing over—we are sincere and deserve it.”108 On September 28, he brushed aside Roy’s concern about expenses connected with the second recording for Steamboat Willie: “Forget these little details and concentrate on some good GAGS. . . . GAGS are going to do more to put us over than all the little figures you could ever think of.”109 He had by then already given Pat Powers two checks for a total of fifteen hundred dollars. His letters to his brother and his friend were long and rambling—intense, but rambling, reflecting his frustration at having “absolutely no one here to talk to. . . . I feel lots of times like dragging a bell boy in and paying him to listen to me.”110

  The second recording session, which began at ten on a Sunday morning, was successful, with much better synchronization of sound and image. The bouncing ball had been superimposed on a print of Steamboat Willie, in the space for the sound track alongside the frames of film, and this time Edouarde took it seriously. The musicians played with their backs to the screen—only Edouarde saw the bouncing ball, but so tight was the synchronization th
at there was no need, for example, for the piccolo player who provided Mickey Mouse’s whistling to see the character or the ball on the screen.111

  “The only thing we lacked,” Disney wrote, “was the complete Orchestra score with all the effects written out accurately”—that is, sound effects that were integrated with the music. He was not completely satisfied with some of the effects, he said, but Steamboat Willie succeeded where it was most important: “It proves one thing to me, ‘It can be done perfectly’ and this is the one thing that they all have been stumped on.”112

  The orchestra was smaller, too, and, as Disney had written a few days earlier, the score itself had been “all rewritten to fit the action” by “the arranger,” an important but apparently never identified figure in the Steamboat Willie episode.113 Wilfred Jackson’s bar sheet would not have sufficed as a recording score, so someone had to translate what he and Disney had done into real music. Carl Stalling did not do it—he was in Kansas City, working on scores for the two silent cartoons—and there is nothing in Disney’s letters that says who did. Disney credited the arranger with “a completely original score” that included no “taxable” music—that is, music under copyright: “The parts for Steamboat bill [sic] were all written by the arranger.” “Steamboat Bill” was still under copyright in 1928, however, and that song is a prominent element in the score. Disney’s use of the song was not licensed by the copyright holder until 1931.114