The Animated Man Read online

  In another segment, to evoke the turmoil in the Kansas City police department in February 1921,73 Disney shows policemen being thrown out of a station, as cutouts of the kind he had been using at Kansas City Film Ad. Just before that, he shows the policemen walking into the station in a few repeated drawings representing a step. This may have been his entry into “real” animation.

  This sole surviving example of Disney’s filmed editorial cartoons has been plausibly identified by Russell Merritt and J. B. Kaufman, authors of a book on Disney’s silent cartoons, as a “sample reel” that he used to sell a series.74 But it may have been a sample reel of another kind, one Disney took with him to California as a sample of his work more than two years later; that may be the only reason it survived. It is impossible to be sure; new titles were added by someone at the Disney studio decades ago, and the reel itself may have been reworked.75

  Disney made his first film, whatever was in it, not just as an experiment in animation but as a speculative business venture. He titled the reel “Newman Laugh-O-grams,” using the name of the Newman Theatre, one of Kansas City’s grandest movie houses, in the hope that he could sell the reel as a regular feature. “So they looked at it,” he said in 1956. “The fellow who was running the theater, Milton Feld . . . was very interested in it and he said, ‘Send that kid up to see me.’ So I was scared to death.” So frightened, he said, that when Feld asked him about the cost of the reel—the cost to the theater, that is—Disney blurted out his own out-of-pocket cost. When Feld agreed to that figure, Disney was stuck with making his films at no profit.

  “But I didn’t care,” he said, speaking still as a man who, as Roy Disney said, had no patience with “business.” The money he would get “was paying for my experiment.” In his indifference to money Walt Disney stood in sharp contrast not just to his brother but to his father, whose parsimony was of a piece with his grim persistence. “He was very thrifty,” Walt said of Elias. “He wouldn’t spend anything on himself. . . . I didn’t inherit any of that thrift.”

  The first Newman Laugh-O-gram probably debuted at that theater (in the company of a number of newsreel segments) on March 20, 1921, on the bill with a Constance Talmadge feature called Mamma’s Affair.76 Disney remembered making one Laugh-O-gram a week—highly unlikely but not impossible, considering his work habits—at night while he was still an employee of the Film Ad Company. He enjoyed modest local fame as the films’ creator, and Cauger made a point of exhibiting the young animator to his visitors. Even so, Cauger remained cautious about moving in the direction that Disney wanted to go. He approved buying only a few sheets of celluloid, and those turned out to be scratched discards. “We made a few things for him,” Disney said, “but he never went for it too much. . . . He just didn’t want to do it.”

  Disney eventually saved enough money (from his Film Ad job, where his salary had risen to sixty dollars a week) to buy a Universal camera and rent “this little shop” where he worked on his own films at night. “Then I put an ad in the paper, any boys wanting to learn the cartoon business and things, so they came up and they worked with me at night.”

  At this point, in the fall of 1921, tracking Disney’s career becomes more difficult and his own memories more questionable. Who those “boys” were—Disney spoke of “two or three”—and how much they contributed to Disney’s film, a version of Little Red Riding Hood, is a mystery. It seems unlikely that any of them worked for Disney on any of his later films. He spoke of Rudolph Ising as one of the “boys,” but Ising almost certainly was not one.

  It was an unsettled time for Walt Disney. Herbert, a mail carrier, moved his young family to Oregon in July 1921, and Elias and Flora followed them to Portland, probably in the fall, although once again there is a cloud of uncertainty about just what happened.77 There is not even a record that Elias ever sold the Bellefontaine house, although city directories suggest that Walt moved by late in 1921 to the first of a series of rented rooms. He probably rented his “little shop” around the same time, since the family garage was presumably no longer available.

  Disney spoke in 1956 of grooming Fred Harman as his replacement before he left the Film Ad Company (“They brought this young fellow in to take my place. . . . I had quite a time with him. He didn’t know proportions and everything”). But in Harman’s recollection, the two young men went into business together, as Disney and Iwerks had earlier, while they were both still working for Verne Cauger. Harman’s younger brother Hugh remembered their collaboration in the same terms. “They were determined they were going to quit as employees and become their own Paul Terrys,” he said.78 Terry was an animation pioneer—still a young one, only thirty-four, when his weekly Aesop’s Fables cartoons began appearing in theaters in June 1921, just a few months before the ostensible Disney-Harman partnership came into being.

  Hugh Harman, a high school student then, spent afternoons and evenings at the new Kaycee Studios. As he remembered it, Fred Harman and Disney set up their first studio—this may have been the shop that Disney spoke of renting—in office space over Kansas City’s streetcar barn. They soon moved to at least two other locations, the last in the 3200 block of Troost Avenue. Hugh remembered Fred and Walt working together on a cartoon, probably never finished, in which an artist’s painting came to life on his easel.79

  Fred Harman wrote many years later that he and Disney “secretly rented a studio, bought a used Universal movie camera and tripod and a secondhand Model T Ford coupe,” and tried to shoot film for Pathé News of the first American Legion convention, held in Kansas City in October 1921.80 In 1932, Harman wrote to Disney himself about that venture: “You can imagine the kick I get from seeing your films and news strip [the Mickey Mouse comic strip] and never loose [sic] an opportunity to stretch my suspenders when telling some of my friends about you. In fact, I’ve told them all of our ventures and never omitting the air flight with Cauger’s camera.”81

  Disney also remembered the “air flight,” describing it in 1956. He and Harman went up together during the legion convention, he said, Harman holding the tripod while Disney operated the camera. The pilot “had a hell of a time because of the two of us in the back there,” but Disney was sure he had some wonderful shots. He had taken bad advice, though, and his camera settings were such that none of his film turned out.

  Fred Harman, who gained his own measure of fame as the creator of the Red Ryder comic strip, wrote in 1968 that he and Disney “quit our jobs at the Film Ad Company. . . . We had been working very hard, traveling all around the neighboring towns in Missouri and Kansas signing up movie theaters for film ads we hoped to make, but we just couldn’t swing it. Our rent was due and finally the Ford was repossessed.” Harman’s account is problematic on several counts—for one thing, Disney probably did not quit his Film Ad job until the spring of 1922—but Roy Disney also spoke about Walt’s efforts to sell his own film ads: “In fact, the old man [Cauger] had a lot of theaters lined up for his slide films and Walt figured, ‘Well, they’re not selling to this theater over here so I can sell ’em over here,’ so he bought a car, hit these little towns, little theaters, and tried to sell stuff he made.” At that point, Roy said, “Cauger sensed he was his competitor” as well as his employee.82

  Whatever its exact form, this was another Disney partnership, like the 1920 Iwerks-Disney combination, that was very short-lived, probably lasting no more than a few months in late 1921. By 1956, Disney had long since soured on partnerships of any kind, except for the one with Roy, and that may account for the way he brushed past his collaboration with Harman.

  Kaycee Studios’ last location, as Hugh Harman and Rudolph Ising remembered it, was on the upper floor of a two-story building at 3239 Troost Avenue, above a restaurant called Peiser’s.83 “For the most part,” Hugh Harman said, “it was just bare floor—just a couple of cubicles partitioned off for their desks.” By the time the eighteen-year-old Ising answered a newspaper ad for work as an artist there, probably in early 1922, Fred Ha
rman was no longer involved. As Ising told J. B. Kaufman in 1988, “Walt had a little art studio. . . . He was doing sort of a newsreel insert for Newman theaters. . . . The only guys in the studio were Walt and myself. Red Lyon was probably also there at that time. He was the cameraman at Film Ad. Walt was working at Film Ad too, during the day. . . . I would go to the studio during the day, built some of the equipment or helped Red with the stuff, but mostly it was at night. That went on for three or four months.”84 Ising traced Disney’s drawings in ink and operated the camera after Lyon quit. Disney was still shooting film “on spec” for Pathé News.

  On May 18, 1922, Disney incorporated Laugh-O-gram Films. He probably left his job at Kansas City Film Ad around the same time. Laugh-O-gram was capitalized at $15,000, divided into three hundred shares of stock at a par value of fifty dollars each. At the time of incorporation, 51 percent of the stock issue was subscribed, giving the company assets of $7,700. Only $2,700 was in cash, though, with the remaining $5,000 in physical assets: equipment that Disney had bought—a camera and camera stand, three animating stands, seven chairs, and so on—plus one completed short cartoon and a few even shorter Lafflets, animated jokes. Oddly, the completed cartoon—which with the Lafflets was valued at $3,000—was identified in the incorporation papers not as Little Red Riding Hood, but as The Four Musicians. Disney was the largest stockholder, with seventy shares.85

  Laugh-O-gram Films moved into the new McConahy Building at 1127 East Thirty-first Street, just one block east of Troost Avenue in the heart of an outlying commercial center a couple of miles south-southeast of downtown Kansas City. Laugh-O-gram occupied a suite on the two-story brick building’s upper floor.

  Disney was becoming a filmmaker and entrepreneur on the Elias Disney model. That is to say, he had created a business even though he had limited experience and limited capital, trusting to the strength of his desire for independence to make up for those shortcomings. That any investors should have been attracted to the new venture may seem surprising, but Disney had already enjoyed modest success as a filmmaker, thanks to the Newman Laugh-O-grams, and he had shown by making Little Red Riding Hood that he could produce a longer film as presentable as many of the short cartoons being made in the East. Add to that record the young Disney’s enthusiasm and self-confidence, and investors could reasonably conclude that the risks attending a small investment in Laugh-O-gram Films were acceptable.

  The new cartoon producer announced its birth in the trade press in June 1922. Supposedly, six films had already been completed, but that was not true. “They will be released one every two weeks,” one article said. “Announcement of a plan of distribution will be made shortly.” That plan had still not been announced in August, when Leslie Mace, the sales manager, and J. V. Cowles—a Kansas City physician and “well-known figure in the oil business” who was now Laugh-O-gram’s treasurer and had presumably become an investor in the company—were in New York, as another article said, “arranging for distribution of a series of twelve Laugh-O-grams.” The idea was still to release a cartoon every two weeks.86

  Disney, a green animator himself, shepherded his very small, very young, and even greener staff through the production of his first few cartoons, rapidly burning through his capital as he did. He showed himself still hungry for instruction. C. G. “Max” Maxwell recalled that when he went to Kansas City to attend junior college and wound up taking a job at Laugh-O-gram, “I had a little portfolio of the [W.] L. Evans School of Cartooning on animation that had come with my correspondence course in cartooning, and when Disney saw this little portfolio that Bill Nolan [a leading New York animator] had got out for Evans, he grabbed that thing, and that was the last I ever saw of it.”87

  Hugh Harman, not long out of high school, became an animator on Disney’s staff. “Our only study was the Lutz book,” he said. “That, plus Paul Terry’s films.”88 Terry was Disney’s unmistakable model in one major respect because Disney’s cartoons were modernized fairy tales, just as Terry’s were modernized versions of the ancient fables. But Disney and his artists borrowed from Terry’s cartoons on a more intimate level, too.

  Disney knew Nadine Simpson, who worked at a local film exchange, and she let Disney, Ising, and others on the Laugh-O-gram staff borrow Terry’s Aesop’s Fables to study “over a light,” Ising said. “A lion or something was always chasing [Farmer Al Falfa, a continuing character in the Fables]. We never could figure out how they did that sudden twist-around. Then we found out these were cycles”—short pieces of animation that could be repeated endlessly, seeming to form continuous actions—“and we could cut out a cycle; they never missed it.”89 Harman remembered clipping “maybe fifty or seventy-five feet” from the Terry cartoons. “They needed editing, anyway.” Simpson joined the Laugh-O-gram staff in the fall of 1922 as its bookkeeper.

  Although Harman and Ising remembered the Laugh-O-grams as being photographed mostly as inked lines on paper, with what Hugh Harman called “just occasional” use of celluloid,90 only the first one, Red Riding Hood, is unmistakably of that type. The other surviving examples appear to rely heavily on celluloid—the drawings have been traced in ink on the celluloid sheets, painted, and photographed over background drawings. Using cels gave an animator much more freedom than working on paper, but it was not a step to be taken lightly in Kansas City. Celluloid had to be bought in large sheets and cut to the right dimensions, then punched with holes for the pegs that assured the proper alignment of the drawings.91 Disney’s use of cels was probably another sign of Terry’s influence—the Fables were made with cels from the start—as well as Disney’s ambition.

  Four of the six completed Laugh-O-gram fairy tales have survived, and the cartoons are notable mainly for their strained efforts to be “modern.” Cinderella, a little girl with dark hair fashionably cut, goes to the ball in a big car, with her pet cat as her chauffeur, and Red Riding Hood’s “wolf” is a lupine predator of the human kind. The cartoons make heavy use of animation-saving devices, especially cycles. The drawing is invariably crude, too, even measured against the heavily formulaic drawing that dominated most cartoons made in the early 1920s. Cartoonists who could draw well while cranking out enough drawings to fill a one-reel cartoon were not plentiful in 1922, and on the evidence of the Laugh-O-gram fairy tales, none of them lived in Kansas City.

  However lacking their cartoons, the Laugh-O-gram staff had a good time making them. “Walt was very much one of the boys,” Maxwell wrote in 1973. Disney and his crew “would often get together on Sundays, to pretend we were shooting Hollywood type movies.” Photos survive of such mock shooting on the roof of the McConahy Building. “Hugh Harman and a friend of his, Ray Friedman, had built a tiny log cabin in Swope Park,” south of Kansas City, Maxwell said, “and that was a favorite rendezvous. . . . The movie camera used on these outings was a phony, built by Ub out of a box, a crank, and two film cans on top to represent magazines.”92

  It was not until September 16, 1922, that Laugh-O-gram finally signed a contract with a distributor for its cartoons. That company, Pictorial Clubs, distributed films to schools and churches, rather than theaters. Pictorial Clubs obligated itself to make only a hundred-dollar down payment for six cartoons, with a balance of eleven thousand dollars not due until January 1, 192493—an astonishing arrangement that could not possibly make sense unless Disney had other sources of cash, as he did not. In accepting such a contract, he was amplifying the mistake he had made by selling his original Newman Laugh-O-grams at cost.

  By October, Disney was completing Puss in Boots, the fifth of the six cartoons covered by the contract, but Laugh-O-gram’s money was gone, and the company was rapidly descending into debt. Red Lyon, Laugh-O-gram’s cameraman (or “technical engineer,” as his business card had it) wrote to his mother in mid-October that the company was “worse than broke” and going into debt “about four hundred more each week.”94

  The search for additional sources of income began late in October. Laugh-O-gram announced t
hen that the company had, in the words of a Kansas City Star report, “added the feature of photographing youngsters to its regular business of making animated cartoons. An admiring parent wishing to preserve the native graces of his progeny’s actions” had only to get in touch with Disney and Lyon. “Then comes the stalking of the baby.” A private screening in the parents’ home was part of the package. Few if any doting parents took the bait.95

  For reasons never explained, Ub Iwerks left his job at Kansas City Film Ad and came aboard Laugh-O-gram’s sinking ship early in November 1922. Max Maxwell remembered that after Iwerks came to Laugh-O-gram he invented what came to be called the “biff-sniff,” a device for reducing or enlarging animation drawings: “He put the film in the projector, at the back of the machine, projected it up onto the glass, where the pegs were, and we could make it bigger or smaller.”96

  By the end of the year, after delivering Cinderella, the last of its cartoons for Pictorial Clubs, Laugh-O-gram had stopped paying its employees.

  Laugh-O-gram did make a few more films, some for money and some as samples that went unsold. Around the end of 1922, Disney made an educational film on dental care, Tommy Tucker’s Tooth, for which a local dentist paid five hundred dollars. In March 1923, Laugh-O-gram tried unsuccessfully to interest Universal in a sample reel of Lafflets, the very short comic films; none of them have survived. Around that time, Laugh-O-gram also made a “Song-O-Reel” called Martha, a sing-along film in which Ub Iwerks appeared in live action.

  Disney was shameless in other efforts to keep Laugh-O-gram afloat. At one point, he offered a mail-order course in animated cartooning, using the letterhead “Animated Cartooning Studios” and listing himself as general manager and Ising as educational director. A promotional piece dangled the lure of “large earnings,” saying: “The remuneration to be derived from taking this training will amaze you.”97 That was undoubtedly true.