The Animated Man Read online

  After several weeks in Powers’s intoxicating company, Disney was thinking in rather grandiose terms of making fifty-two Mickey Mouse cartoons a year—one a week, the same schedule that Paul Terry was meeting with his Aesop’s Fables. “I think we have the basis of a good [organization] by just adding a few good animators and [systematizing] everything,” he wrote to Roy and Iwerks—this at a time when he had lost most of his staff and had only one experienced animator.115

  In the weeks that followed, Disney showed Steamboat Willie to potential distributors in New York. “By gosh, it got laughs . . . but I was gettin’ the brushoff,” he said in 1956.

  Throughout the fall, in letters to his brother and Iwerks, Disney was unfailingly positive, writing enthusiastically about their chances for a major release even as one possibility after another withered away. He pounded on Iwerks, at great length and in near-manic tones, to finish animating a new Mickey Mouse cartoon, The Barn Dance, as quickly as possible—“Listen Ub—Show some of your old Speed. . . . Work like hell BOY. . . . It is our one BIG CHANCE to make a real killing”—so that he and Carl Stalling could record the score along with the scores for Plane Crazy and The Gallopin’ Gaucho.116 He was trying to compensate for his absence, since he certainly would have been egging Iwerks on if he had been in Los Angeles. His letters were typewritten now—in contrast to his handwritten letters on earlier visits to New York—and the greater speed the typewriter made possible encouraged the flow of his words. When Disney received a print of the first half of The Barn Dance on October 22, he was predictably disappointed—this was, after all, the first of his cartoons to get this far in production with so little input from Disney himself.117

  On other occasions, when Disney wrote to Roy and Iwerks about Powers and other film executives, he was so enthusiastic that he sounded a little ingenuous; there was scarcely a trace of cynicism, even though he sometimes expressed a wariness born of his experience with Mintz. He was franker in his letters to Lillian, but even when writing to her, as he did on October 20, he regarded Powers as different from the rest:

  I have certainly learned a lot about this game all ready [sic]. . . . It is the damndest mixed up affair I have ever heard of. . . . It sure demands a shrewd and thoroughly trained mind to properly handle it. . . . There are so damn many angles that continually come up that if a person hasn’t the experience etc. it would completely lick one. They are all a bunch of schemers and just full of tricks that would fool a green horn. I am sure glad I got someone to fall back on for advice. . . . I would be like a sheep amongst’ a pack of wolves. . . . I have utmost confidence and faith in Powers and believe that if we don’t try to rush things too fast that we will get a good deal out of this.118

  Stalling joined Disney in New York on October 26, 1928. “It sure seems nice to have someone near me that I know,” Disney wrote to his wife that evening.119 He and Stalling shared a two-room suite at the Knickerbocker Hotel—“we both washed our socks in the same bathroom sink,” Stalling said—and worked together on the scores for Plane Crazy, The Gallopin’ Gaucho, and The Barn Dance.120 They viewed the films on a Moviola, a machine used in editing film that back-projected the picture onto a tiny screen. Disney was impressed by the machine: “We will have to get one to use at the studio.”121

  Disney was not paying Stalling any salary yet, only his hotel and living expenses, but the hotel suite alone was going to cost Disney a hundred dollars a week. “Be sure and have Roy look into the matter of selling my car and getting set for an additional Loan on our property,” Disney wrote to Lillian on October 27. Disney’s car was, he said in 1956, “a beautiful Moon roadster that I was so proud of”—presumably the car that Lillian remembered. “Cabriolet with the top that went down.” Disney had bought it secondhand: “I never owned a new car until way after Mickey Mouse. I always would buy a second hand one . . . then I’d trade my old second hand one in on a new second hand one.” But he had to sacrifice the Moon: “I had them send the pink slip [registration] to me. . . . They’d sold my car to meet payrolls before I ever got out of [New York].”

  Harry Reichenbach, best known as a colorful press agent, was in Disney’s recollection managing the Colony Theatre on Broadway. He was among the many people in the film industry who saw and liked Steamboat Willie. “He came to me,” Disney remembered in 1956, “and he said, ‘I want to put that on.’ . . . I said, ‘Well, I’m afraid that if I run it somewhere on Broadway that it’ll take the edge off of my selling it and getting the distribution.’ . . . He said, ‘These guys don’t know until the public finds out. . . . Let me have it for two weeks.’ . . . Finally, he said, ‘I’ll give you five hundred for two weeks.’ And we needed money like what and I said, ‘Five hundred a week.’ And finally he said, ‘O.K., five hundred a week.’ They gave me a thousand bucks to run it. And that was the highest price that anybody’s ever paid, up to that time, for a cartoon on Broadway.”

  However much Reichenbach paid to exhibit Steamboat Willie, it was probably not a thousand dollars.122 Disney later spoke of receiving half as much: “We didn’t yet have a release for Mickey but Harry wanted to book him in the Colony regardless,” he said in 1966. “At the time, we were in desperate need of five hundred dollars. To put it briefly, everything owned by Roy and me was mortgaged to the hilt. So I asked Harry for five hundred dollars for exhibiting the first Mickey Mouse one week. I knew that the price was pretty steep. So did Harry. But fortunately for us, he said, ‘Let’s compromise. I’ll give you 250 dollars a week—and run the cartoon for two weeks.’ ”123

  Disney may even have let the Colony show his cartoon without paying him anything at all. That is what Universal—which had been leasing the Colony for about two years124—was asking of him in October.125 Since Disney’s Oswald cartoons were Universal releases and were shown at the Colony, Universal’s executives and the theater’s management had good reason to think that a new Disney cartoon would be well received there. Universal’s argument to Disney was that he would benefit so much from a Broadway showcase that he should let the Colony run the cartoon for free. (Universal itself was probably precluded under its contract with Mintz from signing a deal with Disney for a series of cartoons.)126

  In any case, Disney had agreed by early in November to let the Colony have Steamboat Willie.127 After the long slow month of October, matters were now moving much more rapidly. On November 13 and 14, in the week before the premiere, Disney and Stalling oversaw the recording of the sound tracks for Plane Crazy, The Gallopin’ Gaucho, and The Barn Dance. In California, Iwerks had done preliminary work on the story for the fifth Mickey Mouse cartoon, The Opry House, and Disney was anxious to get back before work on it went much further.

  Steamboat Willie premiered at the Colony on Sunday, November 18, 1928, and ran for thirteen days, sharing the bill with an early sound feature called Gang War and live stage acts. An opening-day advertisement in the New York Times proclaimed Disney’s film the “first and only synchronized-sound animated cartoon comedy.”128 Carl Stalling remembered seeing it the first day, sitting “on almost the last row and [hearing] laughs and snickers all around us.”129 Steamboat Willie got excellent reviews (Film Daily called it “a real tidbit of diversion”)130 as well as enthusiastic audience response. When his cartoon was showing at the Colony, Disney said in 1956, “I was there every day.”

  Steamboat Willie was in some respects a curious breakthrough. Its comedy was as rough-hewn as almost anything in the Alices and the Oswalds, and the animation, almost entirely by Iwerks, was just as backward-looking. Near the start of the film, the steamboat’s cat captain stretches Mickey himself wildly out of shape. The captain subsequently spits tobacco after one of his teeth rises like a window shade, only to have the wind blow the blob back in his face. The story is minimal, merely an excuse for gags that rely overwhelmingly on the crude manipulation of some animal’s body. Mickey cranks a goat’s tail, turning it into a sort of hurdy-gurdy after it has eaten some sheet music; he picks up a nursing mother pig and p
lays her teats as if he were playing an accordion. But all of this rude action was synchronized with music and sound effects, its precision entirely novel in the fall of 1928, not just for cartoons but for films of all kinds. This Disney cartoon combined sound and pictures with a seeming effortlessness that no other sound film matched. It was no wonder that critics and audiences alike loved it.

  Pat Powers had broached the idea of representing Disney immediately after the September 30 recording session, and Disney had signed a two-year letter agreement with him on October 15, the idea being that Powers would help Disney find an outlet for his cartoons.131 When he talked to distributors after Steamboat Willie’s successful Colony debut, Disney said in 1956, they wanted to make a deal—to hire him, not to make a contract that would leave him independent. There was irony here, because Disney’s association with the legally dubious Cinephone system quite likely made some distributors reluctant to sign with him.

  After Disney had spent about three months in New York, he and Stalling finally left for Los Angeles. At that point, Disney still hoped that Powers could make a deal for him with a national distributor. Instead, Powers quickly made a deal with the Stanley Fabian Warner chain of theaters wired for sound.132 Charles J. Giegerich, who dealt with the Disneys for Powers, told Walt on December 31: “The prospects of making national distributing arrangements for any of the big companies at the present time were so doubtful that we considered it best to make arrangements for state right distribution.”133 Disney’s new sound cartoons were being distributed just as his Alice Comedies had been—not just a less prestigious method of distribution, but one with problems of its own. With states-rights distribution there could be no nationwide release date. If Disney was eventually successful in finding a national distributor, there was the risk that its releases of his new cartoons would collide with states-rights releases of cartoons he had made a year or two earlier. The older cartoons would dilute the market for the new ones.

  Disney’s immediate challenge was to find ways to put his powerful new tool, synchronized sound, to its most effective use. Even Wilfred Jackson, new to animation, was aware of how hard that might be. “For most of us . . . when I first came to the studio,” he said, “if it seemed to move it was animation—and if it looked funny to us when it moved, that was good enough.” Disney, he said, was “not . . . so far ahead of the rest of us in knowing how to achieve convincing action and characterization with animation.” The studio’s “library” reflected Disney’s lag. It consisted of a folder of clippings of magazine and newspaper cartoons, along with two books—Lutz and Muybridge, or something very similar—like those that had been his instructors almost a decade earlier.134

  Just how limited Disney’s horizons were at this time was revealed in a remark he made “sometime in 1928 . . . after viewing one of his last Oswald cartoons or one of his first Mickeys,” Jackson recalled. Disney said to Jackson: “Some day I’m going to make a cartoon as good as a Fable.”135 That was not much of an ambition. Paul Terry’s Fables were furiously busy cartoons, but that was about all. As animation’s equivalents of the most brutal slapstick live-action comedies, they were populated by characters distinguishable from one another not by how they moved or what they did, but mainly through their starkly simple designs. There is, however, no reason to doubt Jackson’s memory on this point, or to believe that Disney was being facetious. More than ten years later, Disney himself wrote: “Even as late as 1930, my ambition was to be able to make cartoons as good as the Aesop’s Fables series.”136

  CHAPTER 3

  “You’ve Got to Really Be Minnie”

  Building a Better Mouse

  1928–1933

  Walt Disney and Carl Stalling disagreed over the music for the Disney cartoons almost from the day they began working together in Los Angeles in December 1928. “Walt was a person with no musical background at all,” Wilfred Jackson said. “He was also not a person to recognize any limitation as to what could be done. When he thought a piece of action should be extended or shortened somewhat beyond what would fit with some certain part of a piece of music, he expected his musician to just simply find some way or other to expand or shorten that part of his music.”1

  Jackson remembered “a tremendous outburst of bickering” between Stalling and Disney “about whether some music should be changed; and it’s my recollection that a kind of compromise was arrived at, in that if Carl would make his damned music fit the action Walt wanted in this Mickey, Walt would make a whole series . . . where the music would have its way.”2 The Mickey Mouse cartoon in question was almost certainly The Opry House, the first cartoon that Stalling scored in Los Angeles. The Skeleton Dance, the first cartoon in the new music-dominated series called Silly Symphonies, went into production next, before The Opry House was finished.

  Disney later spoke of the Silly Symphonies as if those cartoons had been more his own idea—“We wanted a series which would let us go in for more of the fantastic and fabulous and lyric stuff”3—but Stalling had suggested such a series months earlier, probably when Disney stopped in Kansas City around the first of September on his way to New York. Disney told Roy and Iwerks about three weeks later that there was “a damn good chance to put over a series of Musical novelties such as [Stalling] had in mind. . . . We will have to make one and show it before we can talk business. . . . We have in mind something that will not cost much to make. . . . It would only be good in Sound Houses and the field is limited. . . . Therefore it would have to be inexpensive to make—What he has in mind sounds like it wouldn’t cost much to make.”4

  (Disney’s words might seem to apply to Steamboat Willie, too, but he prepared a silent version of that cartoon that differed a little from the sound version. He also prepared silent versions of the next few Mickey Mouse cartoons.)

  Disney wrote to Roy on September 28: “Carl’s idea of the ‘Skeleton Dance’ for a Musical Novelty has been growing on me . . . I think it has dandy possibilities . . . It would be dandy with all the different effects in it.” The eccentric punctuation here is Disney’s. He used strings of dots freely, but not carelessly, as an aid to a kind of free associating. He let his mind roam as he thought about what might go into a “Skeleton Dance” short: “I think we could Cartoon the Skeletons—and double print over a real background . . . Also used Stuffed OWELS [sic] . . . BATS . . . and other spooky things . . . Weird music . . . The Skeletons playing a tune on their ribs . . . Playing a tune on different sized Tombstones . . . Dancing and rattling of bones . . . Some of them playing instruments and all kinds of goofy gags. It wouldn’t be so terribly hard to make if we made use of repeats . . . and music is full of repeats.”5

  He talked as well as wrote about story ideas in much the same way. There is abundant evidence of that in the transcripts from meetings later in his career.

  Disney and Stalling returned to New York late in January 1929 to record the sound for both The Opry House and Skeleton Dance. Iwerks animated almost the entire Skeleton Dance while they were gone. Thanks to the system that Disney and Jackson had devised for Steamboat Willie, there was no need to complete the animation before the music was recorded. All that was needed was for the musician’s bar sheet and the animator’s exposure sheet to align, so that music and drawings were synchronized when combined in the finished film. Disney left Iwerks a highly detailed, single-spaced, typewritten scenario for The Skeleton Dance that covered seven pages.6

  While Disney was in New York, he was in no position to supervise Iwerks’s animation closely, but an ongoing conflict between them festered even while they were a continent apart. Their continuing disagreement was over whether Iwerks would animate “straight ahead”—leaving to an assistant only details like the skeletons’ ribs—or as Disney wanted him to, with what were called extremes and inbetweens, the latter provided by an assistant called an inbetweener.

  When animators first began using inbetweeners in the 1920s, the idea was that they could increase their output by delegating the less important
drawings to less-experienced artists. The animators would draw the extremes, the key drawings that defined movement, while the inbetweener made the drawings needed to fill out the animation so it did not look jerky on the screen. That potential increase in productivity was an important consideration at a studio that relied so heavily on one animator, Iwerks, even though he already animated so rapidly. For Iwerks, though, the costs of the change were unacceptably great. His objections were summarized in notes from an interview with him around 1956: “Ub said he’d lose direction of action—he got better feeling of action [when] he animated straight ahead and left details to be filled in. Walt could never see this method.”7

  It was only when Iwerks’s drawings were tightly synchronized with music that the dominant characteristics of his animation—smooth and regular and impersonal—became unmistakable virtues. What might have seemed merely mechanical was instead precise and pointed. The Skeleton Dance had no plot and few real gags, only simple and repetitive dances by skeletons with rubbery limbs, but so closely did the skeletons’ actions mirror the music that they tracked not just the beat but the individual notes.

  Disney said in 1956 that he had considerable difficulty getting The Skeleton Dance into theaters, citing one theater manager’s complaint: “It’s too gruesome.” He spoke of tracking down “a film salesman” in a pool hall and, through him, getting the cartoon seen by the manager of the prestigious Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles. In early May, Disney let the Carthay Circle book The Skeleton Dance for what he called “an extended pre-release showing.” Disney wrote to Charles Giegerich of the Powers organization about the “unusual amount of attention” the cartoon was receiving during this run and urged him to “close a national release” for the Silly Symphonies “on the strength of this one subject, plus the reputation that we have created with the quality of our ‘Mickey Mouse’ series.”8 A second showing, in New York at the Roxy on Broadway, was equally successful. In August, Giegerich signed a contract with Columbia Pictures Corporation for thirteen Silly Symphonies.9