The Animated Man Read online

  Although the Mickey Mouse cartoons and the Silly Symphonies were supposed to differ in their emphasis on music, the two series quickly became alike in their reliance on tight synchronization. (In the summer of 1929, Disney said he had “decided upon a policy that from now on all the action [in the Mickey Mouse cartoons] will be set to a definite [rhythm] and we will have no more straight action to a mere musical background”—that is, the Mickey Mouse cartoons would be as thoroughly synchronized as the Silly Symphonies.)10 None of the earliest Disney sound cartoons were overwhelmingly superior to competitors’ cartoons except in their use of sound, but that made all the difference. As other cartoon makers, ignorant of Disney’s system, scrambled to add sound tracks, the results were invariably noisy and distracting. Disney’s seamless synchronization was all the more impressive in contrast.

  Disney knew from the beginning that he was in a strong position, and he was eager to exploit it. Writing to Roy and Iwerks from New York in February 1929, he was encouraged by the favorable response to The Opry House and by what he had heard about Charles Mintz’s troubles (Universal was not renewing its contract with Mintz but was going to make the Oswald cartoons at a studio of its own instead). “Now is our chance to get a hold on the industry,” he wrote. He was buying sound equipment from Powers so he could set up his own recording studio in Los Angeles, and he was seriously thinking about making a series of live-action shorts—“dialogue comedies”—in addition to his cartoons.11 Those live-action comedies never happened, although the Disneys did set up a short-lived Disney Film Recording Company at 5360 Melrose Avenue after Walt returned to Los Angeles.

  Disney also knew he needed more help, since Iwerks was the only experienced animator on his staff, backed up by several novices—Wilfred Jackson, Les Clark, John Cannon. As he had in 1928, Disney talked with animators in New York about coming to work for him. (There was no place else Disney could have found experienced animators, apart from the few who had already left him to work for Mintz.) In March, after Disney and Stalling returned to Los Angeles, the Disney staff “heard that some real animators were going to be brought out from New York,” Jackson said. The first new hire was Ben Sharpsteen, a veteran of several New York studios, notably Max Fleischer’s.

  “He came in,” Jackson said, “and was given his place to work, and given a scene to do, and he spent the whole morning working on it. We were real curious to see what he had done, and so when lunchtime came, none of us wanted to go to lunch, we wanted to see what he’d done. And Ben was a new guy there, he didn’t want to be the first guy to go to lunch. So we were all there working, twenty minutes after our lunch hour, before Ben finally said, ‘Hey, don’t you guys ever go to lunch around here?’ And we all pretended, ‘Oh, my goodness, yes, it’s lunchtime.’

  “And Ben went out, and so we all went over to Ben’s desk to see what he had done. Ub took the drawings and flipped them, and we all stood respectfully back to see what Ub’s opinion would be. After he flipped them, Ub said, ‘Huh! They look just like the clown’ ”—that is, like the Fleischer cartoons. “Ben did draw Mickey with funny little eyes that were like the clown, and a kind of a pinched little nose, at first.”12

  When he was in New York, Disney had visited Pat Sullivan’s Felix the Cat studio, which was, thanks to Sullivan’s stubbornness, as committed to silence as Disney was to sound—and thus was the kind of studio that an animator with an eye on the future would try to escape. “I think he wanted to hire Otto [Messmer],” said Al Eugster, a young animator on the Sullivan staff—Messmer actually made the cartoons that appeared under Sullivan’s name—“and he took Burt Gillett with him.”13 Gillett, who had been animating for more than a decade, started work for Disney in April 1929 as the second New York animator to join the staff.

  Roles began to change in response to the Disney cartoons’ success. After the first few Mickey Mouse sound cartoons, Iwerks animated less, working instead with Disney and Stalling in the office called the “music room” because Stalling’s piano was there (that term was later applied to a Disney director’s room even after a musician no longer shared it). Iwerks’s principal duty now was to make sketches that showed the growing staff of animators how to stage their scenes. “Walt still handed out the scenes to the animators for the most part,” Jackson said, “but I believe Ub occasionally did this for him at this time.”14

  Disney had always been the de facto director of his cartoons—no one used that exact title—but sound had strengthened him in that role by giving him more control over the timing of the animation. His animators had to adhere to the timing on the exposure sheets, which Disney and Stalling wrote as they planned the music. Now, though, Disney was actually pulling back. Burt Gillett “moved into Walt’s music room to help prepare the shorts for animation very soon after he came out from New York,” Jackson said.15

  The division of responsibility between Gillett and Disney was indistinct, Ben Sharpsteen said: “There wasn’t anything formal in the division there, and Walt wouldn’t hesitate to criticize Gillett in front of one of us. . . . Nothing was sacred to anybody then.”16 All the lines between jobs were fluid in the late 1920s, as Jackson explained: “Each animator drew his own layout [a drawing that showed the staging of a scene], working from Ub’s little thumbnail sketch, each time he started to animate a scene—and the first animator, or inbetweener, who ran out of work as a cartoon was nearing completion was likely to be given the task of painting the backgrounds for the picture.”17 As the staff filled out with experienced New York animators, the animators’ responsibilities in particular came to be better defined. Carlos Manriquez, who had started in ink and paint, became the first full-time background painter, probably sometime in 1929.18

  The writing of the cartoons continued much as before. Sharpsteen remembered night meetings “for each new story concept. That’s how Walt would get going on a new picture. He’d let us know what he had in mind, and the possibilities he saw in it. We were privileged to sit there and make sketches of ideas as they came to us. Otherwise, we’d turn in something at a later date.”19 Dick Lundy, who joined the staff as an assistant in July 1929, remembered that Disney called such meetings “a ‘round table.’ We had it in the director’s room when we were small, but later on . . . they would have it in the sound stage, and the whole group would get a synopsis of . . . a story idea. ‘Now, what gags can you think of?’ ”20 As in the Oswald period, some gags came perhaps too easily. “In the early days,” Wilfred Jackson said, “we always figured that we had three laughs that were free, and we had to work for the other ones. One was the drop-seat gag, two the thundermug [chamber pot] under the bed, and three the outhouse.”21

  The Plowboy, from June 1929, is filled with just that sort of cheerful farmyard ribaldry. A cow’s udder is animated with great plasticity as Mickey milks it, and two of the cow’s teeth move up and down like window shades to let out a stream of tobacco juice. The cow literally licks Mickey’s eye shut—twice. The first time, he squirts milk from the cow’s own udder in its face; the second time, he pulls the cow’s tongue out to great length and wraps it around its muzzle. There’s an undercurrent of lasciviousness, too. When Minnie calls to Mickey and his horse, both wave back—then the horse hitches up his chest and starts to swagger over, until Mickey orders him back. When Minnie is singing, wordlessly, she puckers, her eyes closed, and Mickey, drooling with desire, seizes the opportunity to kiss her (she smashes him over the head with a bucket). The cow laughs at Mickey—a trombone provides the laughter—he gives the cow the razzberry, and she stalks away, first flipping her udder at him in disdain.

  The Plowboy ran afoul of a few censors, as did a couple of other 1929 cartoons. Disney expressed mystification that “anyone could take offense at any of the ‘stuff’ contained in our pictures; especially how anyone could be offended at anything pertaining to the milking of a cow.”22 Coarse, exuberant comedy of that kind was just what could be expected from a studio whose staff was made up largely of young men, most of wh
om, like Disney himself, had almost no formal art training, and limited formal education of any kind. Like so many schoolboys, the Disney animators ate their sack lunches behind the stage where Disney had filmed the live action for the Alice comedies. They also played horseshoes there—“Ub was the best,” Jackson recalled.23

  Some of Disney’s animators had fallen in love with the medium when they were children, seeing what must have been some of the earliest series cartoons, like those of J. R. Bray. Jackson remembered growing up in Glendale, California:

  We lived near the [trolley] tracks . . . and the conductors would tear all the transfers off, and they’d have a little stub left, about, oh, three quarters of an inch thick and half an inch wide, with a rivet through the middle, or a staple. But the ends you could flip, and so you could make any kind of a little drawing there, and make it move. So I used to walk up and down the car tracks, finding the stubs where they’d thrown them, and make my animation on those.24

  In the expansive atmosphere created by the Disney cartoons’ success and the growth of the staff, some of Disney’s young animators tinkered with ways to improve their work—for example, by shooting some of their pencil animation on film to see if it was turning out the way they hoped. The animators made such pencil tests of “isolated actions within a scene when the animator came up against some new problem and wanted to see how effectively—or otherwise—he was handling it before going ahead,” Jackson said.25 In addition, Dick Lundy said, the animators tested cycles; it was particularly important to catch any mistakes in cycle animation, because the same mistake would be seen on the screen over and over again.26 Walt Disney neither encouraged nor discouraged such tests. “We were allowed to use short ends of film that weren’t long enough to shoot a scene with . . . if we wanted to come back at night and develop them ourselves,” Jackson said.27

  By the late summer of 1929, both Iwerks and Gillett were performing all the functions of directors, Iwerks for the Silly Symphonies and Gillett for the Mickey Mouse cartoons. Disney called them “story men” because they were responsible for their cartoons’ stories, although that was the area where Disney himself continued to be most heavily involved. The two directors now made the layout drawings that showed the animators how to stage their scenes, and they worked with Stalling to prepare the bar sheets and exposure sheets.28

  As Disney’s involvement in the details of production receded, he began paying more attention to how he might improve his cartoons and achieve more of the “quality” he had fastened on as a crucial asset in the competition for audiences. Since the Laugh-O-gram days, he had been concerned with the poor drawing skills so evident in his cartoons and in most others, and in late 1929 he struck a deal with the Chouinard Art Institute, a school in downtown Los Angeles, to admit his employees to Friday-night classes.

  That arrangement continued for several years. Disney’s interest in the classes was no doubt sincere—he drove some of his employees to and from the school—but here, just as much as when he was a fledgling animator at Kansas City Film Ad, inertia was a powerful foe. Jack Zander, a Chouinard student in the late 1920s and early 1930s, remembered that as a duty under his working scholarship—this was probably in 1930, a year or so after the Disney people started attending Friday-night classes—“I had to walk around and monitor the classes and be sure everybody was there. It was my job to stay there at night and check on the Disney guys. He had about twenty guys there, and nobody wanted to go to the goddamn art classes. . . . I’d go into a class, and there’d be eight or ten guys standing around. I’d read off the list of twenty names, and every one would answer ‘here.’ We’d send a report back to Walt that twenty guys showed up to get their art instruction.”29

  In early 1930, Walt and Roy Disney had a far more pressing problem than animators’ reluctance to attend art classes. They had been increasingly unhappy with Pat Powers, who wanted Walt to make the cartoons more cheaply (a lower negative cost would mean that Powers could pay Disney less and keep more of the advances from distributors). Powers’s wounded tone in a rare letter—usually it was Giegerich who wrote to the Disneys—at the end of 1929 was remarkably similar to Charles Mintz’s in many of his letters to Walt. Powers wrote of “the financial risk and burden of exploitation” he had assumed “after every distributor in the business had refused to handle the product under any kind of a basis which would enable us to get even the cost of it back. I know of no instance (and you, yourself, canvassed the entire trade) where they were even receptive or seriously considered handling the product.”30

  The Disneys wanted Powers to pay them money they believed he owed them from rentals of the cartoons. Powers did not want to open his books until the Disneys had signed a stronger contract with him than their two letter agreements for the distribution of the Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies series. Ultimately, on January 17, 1930, Walt and Lillian Disney and the Disneys’ attorney, Gunther Lessing, took the train to New York to confront Powers directly. They arrived in New York on the morning of January 21—just about the time that Ub Iwerks walked into Roy Disney’s office and told Roy he was quitting. “Speed in getting away seemed to be the main consideration,” Roy wrote to Walt three days later.

  Iwerks’s defection was especially shocking and painful not only because of his ten-year association with Walt Disney but also because he was a partner in the Disney studio.31 He had begun buying a 20 percent interest on March 24, 1928—that is, just after the blowup with Mintz, when the Disneys were especially grateful for his loyalty—through the deduction of twenty dollars each week from his salary. He began contributing thirty-five dollars a week as of May 19, 1928—an increase that probably reflected the Disneys’ increasingly difficult circumstances and was further evidence of Iwerks’s friendship. By the time he walked into Roy’s office, he had applied $2,920 toward his 20 percent share.

  When Iwerks told Roy he was leaving, Roy asked him if Powers or Giegerich—or Hugh Harman—had anything to do with his departure. “Ub looked me straight in the face,” Roy wrote, and told him that none of them “had anything to do with it.” Roy asked him, “On your honor?” Iwerks replied: “Absolutely.” The next morning, Roy received a telegram from Walt telling him that Powers was indeed behind Iwerks’s move. Confronted with this, Iwerks “looked awfully sheepish,” Roy wrote, and told him, “I didn’t want to tell you.”32

  Under his earlier agreement with the Disney brothers, Iwerks could not remain a partner after he left the studio. In a release dated January 22, 1930, the Disneys agreed to pay him exactly as much as they had withheld from his salary, in exchange for his complete surrender of any interest in the Disney studio. In a separate document bearing the same date, Roy (for himself and as attorney in fact for Walt) undertook to pay the $2,920 within a year, plus interest accruing at an annual rate of 7 percent.33

  Iwerks remained on the payroll through Saturday, January 25 (he told Roy Disney that he would come back to the studio the following week to finish a Silly Symphony called Autumn, but he failed to show up).34 That Saturday morning, he and Roy had what Roy described, in a letter to Walt written later that day, as a “very calm, quiet” talk. “I told him frankly that the worst feature of this whole affair was the fact that a fellow as close to us as he had been should turn on us at a time like this.” Iwerks had begun negotiating for his own producing deal the previous September, Roy wrote, and “did not even know until two days before he received his contract that [Powers] was behind it. . . . We know how gullible and easily [led] Ub is, and we have a good dose of how two-faced Charlie Giegerich and P. A. [Powers] are. Not trying to excuse Ub, but just trying to size it up all the way around, I believe Ub at the start meant O.K., and I am sure that right now, even though he won’t admit it, he regrets very much the outcome.”35

  Powers had made a fatal misjudgment, since Iwerks was simply too reserved a personality—especially compared with Walt Disney—to succeed for very long as the head of a cartoon studio.* “Ub shunned responsibility,” Ben Sharpst
een said. “He’d be kind of generous on being solicited and he’d give all the advice he knew how, but he didn’t put himself ahead.”36

  Like the Mintz recruits in 1928, Iwerks cited his arguments with Walt Disney as his motivating force. Roy wrote: “Ub said when first approached, you and he had been having considerable friction and that he made up his mind it was best to step out.”37 For his part, Disney said in 1956 that he thought Iwerks had nursed a lingering sense of injustice. Disney believed that Iwerks was always troubled because he was far more experienced as a commercial artist—and surely more skilled—but was paid less than Disney after they both went to work for the Kansas City Film Ad Company.

  Carl Stalling also resigned from the Disney staff, the day after Iwerks did. “I thought something was wrong,” Stalling said many years later. “When Roy Disney told me that Ub was leaving, I told him, ‘Well, I guess I’ll be leaving, too.’ ”38 In Stalling’s case, as in Iwerks’s, arguments with Walt had made him eager to leave. Stalling had accepted Walt’s offer of a one-third interest in the Silly Symphonies—twenty-five dollars a week had been withheld from his salary since December 31, 1928—but as in Iwerks’s case, leaving the studio voided the agreement.39 Stalling had also invested two thousand dollars in the Disney Film Recording Company early in 1929, when Walt was trying to raise enough money to pay for the Cinephone equipment he needed on the West Coast. The Disneys repaid that money.

  More acrimony surrounded Stalling’s departure than Iwerks’s. When Stalling returned to the studio to remove his sheet music, on the same day that Iwerks said his farewell, Roy refused to let him take all of it. “He showed a disposition to get nasty and take it in spite of me,” Roy wrote to Walt, “and I thought I was going to have to resort to throwing him out!”40