by Neal Gabler
But as uninspired as it was, Walt moved rapidly to sell it because he had to. Virtually as soon as it was finished, he set up appointments in Los Angeles with Felix Feist and Howard Dietz of Metro Pictures, though he was also lugging it around town to distributors and theaters hoping to generate a buzz. One Glendale exhibitor recalled Walt personally taking the can of film down to the theater and convincing him to show the cartoon, which he did, asking the audience to applaud if they liked it. (As the exhibitor remembered it over twenty-five years later, “It was applauded more than the feature film.”) According to Iwerks, Walt also previewed the cartoon at a Hollywood theater, coaching the organist to provide the proper accompaniment. At the same time he made an arrangement on May 21 with a New York agent named Denison to represent Plane Crazy with distributors in the East. When Feist and Dietz screened it, they told Walt they liked it enough to show it to Nicholas Schenck, Metro’s president, and Robert Rubin, its vice-president. Elated and already anticipating a deal, Walt asked for a negative advance of $3,000 per film, adding in a wire to Denison that he intended to “make the name of ‘Mickey Mouse’ as well known as any cartoon in the market.” But a week later Walt’s hopes were dashed yet again. Metro decided against taking Mickey Mouse.
Since he had no alternative plan, Walt had little choice but to keep forging ahead, making new Mickeys and depleting his treasury. But the same week he received the rejection from Metro, he got another brainstorm that in its own way was just as monumental as the invention of Mickey himself. Lillian recalled that it happened during a conversation between Roy and Walt, when Roy was again dejected over Mickey’s faltering future. Walt suddenly blurted, “We’ll make them over with sound.” Roy had a different version. He said that they had screened a cartoon after The Jazz Singer, the Al Jolson film that is credited with being the first motion picture to synchronize the spoken word and the image. “That’s it. That’s it,” Walt allegedly said. “It looks realistic, it’ll be realistic. That’s what we’ve got to do. Stop all these silent pictures.” As Wilfred Jackson remembered it, Walt first broached the possibility to his staff at a gag meeting for the second Mickey Mouse, which most likely was held on May 29, 1928, at Walt’s house. Everyone was immediately energized, which may have been part of Walt’s calculation to keep his crew’s spirits from flagging. Jackson said he was so excited by the idea of a sound cartoon that he could not sleep that night.
Walt, however, was not the only animator thinking of sound. The Jazz Singer, after all, which was acclaimed as having ushered in the sound era, had premiered the previous October, and the Fleischers had already worked with a sound system called DeForest Phonofilm, while Paul Terry had a synchronized sound film in production with the RCA Photophone sound process. Even Mintz and Winkler were planning a sound project. But deploying sound was not just a matter of slapping a sound track onto a silent cartoon, even though that was precisely what Walt would later do with Plane Crazy. In the first place, there were psychological hurdles to overcome in the very notion of talking animations. Though audiences expected to hear people talk or sing, they were not initially accustomed to hearing voices from drawings. “Drawings are not vocal,” Wilfred Jackson said. “Why should a voice come out of a cartoon character?” Animators were concerned that it would seem unnatural, peculiar, and off-putting, which was one reason why Walt insisted that his sound had to be realistic—in Jackson’s words, “as if the noise was coming right from what the character was doing.”
In the second place, there was the daunting technical matter of how one synchronized the drawings with the sound—an area in which no one, Walt Disney included, had any expertise. “Damn it, I know how fast film goes,” Jackson overheard Walt griping one day, “but how fast does music go?” Jackson was still among the lowest in the Disney hierarchy, but he popped his head in the door, said his mother was a piano teacher, and suggested that Walt use a metronome to determine the number of frames of animation per beats of music. In short order Jackson devised a “dope sheet,” later called a “bar sheet,” that indicated the number of measures in each piece of musical accompaniment and then related the cartoon actions to the music. “We could break down the sound effects so that every eight frames we’d have an accent, or every sixteen frames, or every twelve frames,” Les Clark said. “And on that twelfth drawing, say, we’d accent whatever was happening—a hit on the head or a footstep or whatever it would be, to synchronize the sound effect to the music.”
It was the prospect of sound now that motivated the staff—the prospect of doing something no one had done. They finished animating the second Mickey, The Gallopin’ Gaucho, a silent that was already in production when Walt hatched his plan, then eagerly moved on to the third cartoon—the sound cartoon. Just as Walt had spoofed Lindbergh in Plane Crazy and swashbuckler Douglas Fairbanks in The Gaucho, he decided to spoof comedian Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. for Steamboat Willie. Eager to test the proposition of sound, once again the staff worked quickly. Iwerks said that they resolved the story in a single night, and within weeks he had animated a musical test sequence of Mickey/Willie at the steamboat’s wheel, tooting the pipes and whistling. Eager to see whether sound would augment the cartoon as he had anticipated, Walt had the scene inked, painted, and filmed even before the rest of the animation was completed, then recruited Jackson, who was the only member of the staff with any musical talent, to play “Turkey in the Straw,” one of Jackson’s favorite tunes, and “Steamboat Bill,” Walt’s choice, on the harmonica.
One night, probably in late June, at about eight o’clock, Walt had a projector set up in the yard behind the studio bungalow so that the whirring of the machine would not contend with the accompaniment.* The image was thrown through a window and onto a bedsheet hung in a large room off of Walt’s office where the backgrounds were drawn. He stationed Jackson with his harmonica, animator Johnny Cannon, who could make sound effects with his mouth, and several other staff members behind his office door, which had a window in it that allowed them to see the back of the bedsheet. When Roy started the projector, Jackson played his music, Cannon made his sounds, and the others banged pencils against spittoons that served as gongs—all synchronized to Mickey’s actions. They performed repeatedly so that each of the participants could witness the effect for himself. And with an appreciation for the magnitude of the event—the fate of the studio rested on the outcome—they had an audience. Walt had invited Lillian, Edna, Iwerks’s wife Mildred, Hazel Sewell, and Jackson’s girlfriend, later wife, Jane Ames, to watch what he hoped would be a historic occasion.
“I never saw such a reaction in an audience in my life,” the usually taciturn Iwerks would recall, citing encore after encore. “The scheme worked perfectly. The sound itself gave the illusion of something emanating directly from the screen.” Walt was exultant. He kept saying, “This is it, this is it! We’ve got it!” By the time the show finally ended, it was two in the morning, and the guests, hearing Jackson play his two tunes and hearing the staff hit the spittoons again and again, had gotten bored and drifted into the hallway, which only antagonized Walt. “You’re out here talking about babies and we’re in here making history,” he reportedly groused. Iwerks said he had never been so exhilarated, claiming years later that “nothing since has ever equaled it.” It was “real intoxication,” and like Walt, he said he knew they had been vindicated. “It was terrible, but it was wonderful!” Walt would say, criticizing the quality of the cartoon but appreciating the significance of the showing. “And it was something new!” which was, of course, the main point for the struggling studio. The staff were so jubilant that they reassembled at the studio at six in the morning, just a few hours after they had left, to finish the cartoon.
It would take another four weeks, during which Walt and Roy refinanced their Hyperion mortgage to raise money. On July 14 Walt requisitioned sheet music, and by month’s end they held a second preview like the first, only this time of the entire cartoon. In the meantime Walt had become practica
lly messianic about sound. He had his business cards reprinted. “Sound cartoons,” they now read. As for Steamboat Willie, the eminent animation historian John Canemaker called it the “Jazz Singer of animation” for the effect it would have. After the loss of Oswald and most of his staff, Walt had, in a few short months, reinvented his studio and, he thought, the cartoon itself. Now all he had to do was find a way to get the sound and music on the film itself so that he could get a distributor to release the cartoons before his money was exhausted.
II
The race began. Even as he was making Willie, Walt was desperately soliciting distributors for his two silent Mickey cartoons, just as he had back in the days of Laugh-O-Gram for his fairy tales and just as he had when he arrived in Los Angeles with Alice’s Wonderland. But he was having no success. The problem in landing a new distributor, he wrote one prospective company, was, oddly enough, the sound that he himself was so vigorously pursuing. “They are all afraid to tie up with silent product until they find out how far the sound idea is going,” he complained, but they were equally wary about sound. He felt that sound was a “wonderful thing” so long as it was used judiciously, which it frequently was not, but he concluded that “things will shortly be back to normal, and they [distributors] will be considering the quality in a silent product instead of going crazy over a lot of useless and irritating noises.” Of course Walt was hedging out of self-protection since he had yet to complete his own sound film, though he was among those who were going crazy over noises, and he was scheduled to go to New York after Labor Day for the express purpose of meeting with sound companies to determine how best to put a sound track on Willie.
He arrived on September 4 and immediately contacted his erstwhile mentor and matchmaker, Jack Alicoate of Film Daily, who arranged meetings for Walt with various sound companies—meetings that wound up only confusing him with the variety of rates and the differences in technologies. After his rounds and after rejecting the idea of synchronized recording disks, Walt all but decided to throw in his lot with Pat A. Powers, who was licensing a sound-on-film system called Cinephone that generated sound through optical impulses printed on the margin of the film, which were then read by a sound head in the projector. But Walt was clearly in uncharted territory and knew it. “I hope I have not stumbled,” he wrote Roy and Iwerks uncertainly, before ending with his typical morale-booster: “All of you just hold your shirts on and believe me when I tell you that I think we have got something good.”
Still in many ways a naïf, Walt had placed his faith and his fate in the hands of Powers, whose bonhomie had proven irresistible to more hardened men than the young animator. Powers was the very image of an Irish cop, which was what he had once been many years before. At fifty-nine he was tall and broad-shouldered with a square cleft chin, a wide nose, dancing eyes, thick brows, a bush of hair, a glad hand, and a welcoming smile. Walt called him a “[b]ig lovable friendly Irishman” and said, “You couldn’t help but like him.” To Roy and Iwerks he wrote that Powers was a “good natured cuss” who was “always in a good mood.” But this bonhomie was deceptive. For all his outward affability, Powers was also one of the most notoriously belligerent figures in the entire history of the motion picture industry. Born in Buffalo, New York, he worked as a policeman, a foundryman, and a union organizer before contracting to sell phonographs in suburban New York City and eventually forming a small studio to produce motion pictures when films were just beginning to boom early in the twentieth century. When Universal Pictures was formed, Powers became a partner, quickly schemed to force out two other partners, and then had a falling out with Universal head Carl Laemmle, even hiring goons to cart off the props from one of Laemmle’s Universal films while it was in production. “When in doubt,” wrote one contemporary film historian, “Powers attacks.” During the company’s annual meeting at Universal’s headquarters at 1600 Broadway in New York, Powers, in an incident that would become legendary in early movie lore, grabbed the books and tossed them out the window to an accomplice below.
By the time Walt met him, the dust of Powers’s pitched battles had long settled, but the old movie veteran had lost little of his rapacity, and he knew a mark when he saw one. Twenty-six-year-old Walt Disney, who always seemed to be searching for a paternal figure from whom he could win approval and to whom he could attach his fortunes, was trusting and easily conned, and he had clearly fallen for Powers. After spending most of the day with “the good-natured cuss” shortly after arriving in New York, he wrote Roy that Powers regaled him with an account of his various travails at Universal with Erich von Stroheim, a director and actor known for his perfectionism and extravagance, and then introduced him to the general manager of Tiffany-Stahl Productions, who happened to stop by, which clearly impressed Walt. A few days later when Walt revisited Powers, the actor George Walsh was in the office, chatting up Walt about polo, as was the orchestra leader from the lavish Capitol Theater, Carl Edouarde, who, Walt said, was “very enthused over the possibilities of the picture.” “Has oodles of Jack,” Walt wrote Roy of Powers glowingly.
By this point Walt was just about snared. He visited RCA, which tried to stall him on making a decision on a sound system, and let him see a sample film, the Aesop’s Fable. Walt found it appalling. “A lot of racket and nothing else,” he wrote Roy. “We have nothing to worry about from these quarters.” The demonstration apparently convinced him. That same afternoon he returned to Powers’s office and closed the deal to use Cinephone for Willie. Powers was charging only fifty dollars for his technical expertise behind the microphone, while Walt would be responsible for the musicians and sound effects men, though even here Powers offered to recruit a small orchestra at a cut rate and expected the entire recording session to take no more than three to four hours. Walt estimated the cost at $1,000, including a royalty of one cent per foot on all prints. “My idea is to get the thing scored and preview it in a Broadway house and get the critics [sic] opinions and then get busy on a deal for a good release,” he wrote Roy after closing his agreement with Powers.
Four days later, when Walt gave Powers a $500 check as a deposit—“Be sure and have enough money in the account to meet the check,” Walt warned Roy, evidence of their precarious financial situation—the terms had abruptly shifted from Powers’s flat fifty-dollar fee to a royalty of one dollar per foot of film, but even with this increase Walt was still convinced that “our best bet is Powers,” and he prepared nervously for the grand recording session scheduled to begin early on the morning of September 15. Powers had arranged for Edouarde, the ruddy-faced, white-maned conductor whom Walt had met at Powers’s office, to lead the orchestra, which consisted of seventeen musicians abetted by, as Walt effused, three of the “best Trap Drummers and Effects men in Town” at a rate of ten dollars an hour per man, all crammed into a tiny recording studio.
In its implications for the studio, September 15 was a day almost to rival the Willie experiment earlier that summer. Right from the outset, however, the signs were not encouraging. The first musician to arrive was a bass player with a bottle of whiskey in his case who blew a vacuum tube in the sound recording equipment every time he played, forcing the engineers to move him out of the room. Then Walt began fighting with Edouarde over incorporating “too many Symphonic effects,” since the maestro seemed to believe that comedy music was beneath him. But there was worse to come—much worse. To assist Edouarde, Walt had provided a blank film with markings on it in India ink for the beat, but as the strip was projected, the conductor could never manage to get the orchestra to hit the marks and finally prevailed upon Walt to let him try it his own way. Yet as the time ran on and the costs mounted, Edouarde could still not get the orchestra in synchronicity with the film. By the end of the session Walt himself had blown a take when he coughed into the mike while providing the voice for a parrot, and the music and sounds still did not gibe with the cartoon. Walt had spent over $1,000 that the studio could scarcely afford and had nothing to show for it.
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br /> Walt recognized the magnitude of the calamity. Even before the session he had been anxious and distraught. He hated New York; hated being away from home; hated having to talk up people he barely knew, after years of having enjoyed doing so; hated not having anyone to provide counsel; hated the lonely nights; even hated Steamboat Willie, which he was now sick of watching and whose print he thought was “lousy.” He was so busy that he often forgot to eat and had lost ten pounds, and he was so restless that he could not get to sleep before two or three in the morning. To make matters worse, he had been walking the city so much in a new pair of shoes that he had developed a painful abscess on his big toe, for which the doctor prescribed a wet dressing every hour. All of this was on top of the disastrous recording session. “If you knew the entire situation as I do,” he wrote Roy and Ub with uncharacteristic gloom, “I feel sure you wouldn’t be able to Sleep or Eat…. I can’t.”
Now they needed another session. Powers, obviously looking to the long-term rewards of having Walt sell his cartoon series and use the Cinephone process, had agreed to foot the bill for the technical expenses, and Edouarde, presumably embarrassed, had offered to try again, but Walt still had to pay for the musicians. Unfortunately he had virtually exhausted the studio’s money, which forced him to hector Roy to do something the studio had heretofore refrained from doing: apply for a bank loan. “GET AS LARGE A LOAN AS POSSIBLE,” Walt wired Roy a week after the botched session. “DON’T THINK THIRTY FIVE HUNDRED ENOUGH TRY FOR MORE OUR FUTURE DEPENDS ON FIRST PICTURE THEREFORE AM NOT SPARING EXPENSE TO MAKE IT GOOD.” Two days later, again both cheerleading and dunning, he wrote Roy that this is “Old Man Opportunity rapping at our door” and urged him to “slap as big a mortgage on everything we got and let’s go after this thing in the right manner.”
The group assembled for the second session at ten o’clock on the morning of September 30. This time, however, Walt had devised a new system to crack the problem of synchronization, which had been vexing not only the Disneys but all the animation producers. He had a ball printed on both the sound track and the film that rose and fell to the accent of the beat, creating a visual signal and a soft audio clack. All Edouarde had to do was watch the ball on the screen and change the tempo of the orchestra when the tempo of the ball changed. “It worked like clock works,” Walt wrote the studio staff ecstatically later that day. “It saved this picture.” With the ball system the entire recording session took only three hours and everything synchronized beautifully. “It proves one thing to me,” he added. “‘It can be done perfectly’ and this is one thing that they have all been stumped on.” The next day he closed another letter to the studio, “All together now—‘Are we downhearted’? HELL NO.”
