Walt Disney
Page 20
Meanwhile Walt was in New York recording the sound tracks for the new Mickeys and enthusing over the reception of the Mickeys already in release. Seeing The Barn Dance at the Strand, he wrote Lillian proudly that there was a large cardboard cutout of Mickey in the lobby, and he enclosed the theater’s program as evidence of Mickey’s growing popularity. “[H]e is what is known as a ‘HIT,’” he declared with more than a little hyperbole. The distributors, he crowed, “give me lots of praise for their cleverness,” and he admitted that he hoped to prove that the quality of the first Mickeys “is not an accident but a consistent standard.” He added that one selling point was Ub Iwerks—not only his animation, to which, Walt said, “New York animators took off their hats,” but also his name, which made people “look twice when they see it.”
But while Walt was recording the Mickeys and soaking up praise, he had another, bigger mission in New York—a personal mission. During his first New York trip, when he was pushing Mickey and facing rejection, one distributor picked up a package of Life Saver candies. “The public knows Life Savers,” he told Walt. “They don’t know you. They don’t know your mouse.” That made an impression on Walt. As he recalled it years later, he said to himself, “From now on they’re going to know, if they liked the picture—they’re going to know what his [the producer’s] name is.” So on this trip he had decided to stage a full-scale assault on the animation industry and establish “Walt Disney” as its undisputed leader—the Life Savers of animation. The timing was propitious. During his stay he learned that Charles Mintz had lost his Universal contract, a fact that obviously had Walt reveling, and that the Fleischers had lost their contract too, narrowing the competition considerably and leaving him with an irresistible opportunity. “Now is our chance to get a hold on the industry,” he urged Roy and Ub. “So let’s take advantage of the situation.”
Part of his strategy was to gain a foothold in sound recording. Having been rescued by sound himself, Walt now decided to open a recording studio in California for other independent producers on which, Walt had written his partners, “We should be able to clean up a nice sum.” This also meant that Walt would no longer have to spend so much time in the East, where he had lived for five of the last six months—all without Lillian. As early as October, during his last trip, he was arranging to have Jimmy Lowerre, who was running the camera at the studio, come to New York, learn sound recording, and become the studio’s resident sound engineer.
In this endeavor Walt was strongly encouraged by Pat Powers, and for good reason. Powers would be furnishing the recording equipment and was even negotiating to lease the Marshall Neilan studio on Glendale Avenue, where Walt was planning not only to set up the recording studio but to relocate his entire organization for the bargain rental of $100 a month. Powers was also arranging to lend Walt his own sound specialist, William Garity, for six months at a salary of $150 a week. Walt was so enthused—or Powers had gotten him enthused—that he was even talking of optioning at least two more sound outfits from Powers, another on the West Coast and one in the Midwest. But none of this came cheaply from a sharpie like Powers. In addition to the 10 percent distribution fee he was to receive for the Mickeys, Powers demanded a royalty of twenty-five cents per foot of finished negative, plus—and this was the kicker—$13,000, a very substantial sum in 1928, each year for a term of ten years, whether Walt used Cinephone or not, whether any other producers used Cinephone, and whether Cinephone later proved obsolete or not. He also demanded $5,000 upon signing—$5,000 that Walt did not have. In short, Powers was essentially pulling in the line on which he had Walt Disney hooked.
The terms were onerous, but Walt, ever the go-getter and an enthusiast rather than a pragmatist, was not about to let money stop him from what he was now confident was an extraordinary opportunity to become a sound expert. He wrote Roy desperately asking him to badger Cowles or Cauger or Stalling, even Stalling’s father-in-law, for funds, using a second mortgage on the studio as security. “But we must raise the Dough,” he insisted. Stalling, in fact, did loan them $2,000. For the remainder Walt did something that must have been terribly difficult for him: he asked Elias, who, resettled in Portland, Oregon, with Flora, owned several small apartment buildings. Elias likely took a second mortgage on one of them to furnish Walt with a $2,500 loan that February—a loan Walt justified by telling his father that the recording studio is “no gamble but an opportunity.” The very day he received the loan, February 14, he signed the contract with Powers, though he had done so, again, without consulting Roy, who was livid. “Did you read this?” he shouted when Walt returned to California later that month. “Of course I didn’t,” Walt responded. “What the hell! I wanted the equipment!” It was shipped out from New York that week.
Walt Disney, who had always eschewed the business side of his studio and depended upon Roy to raise the funds he needed, was now not only an animation producer but a sound recording entrepreneur as well. The month after he returned to California, he and Roy rented the Tec Art Studios on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood for the sound operation, though the animation operation remained at Hyperion. (Powers’s deal for the Neilan studio had fallen through at the last minute.) In the meantime Jimmy Lowerre went to New York to learn how to use the system, and in April William Garity, Powers’s sound man, arrived at the studio to supervise the use of the equipment. “When completed,” Roy wrote one prospective customer, “this stage will be equal to any sound stages so far constructed.” Intending to provide full sound services, the Disneys began outfitting two old trucks with recording equipment for location shooting, though what they were also doing was further indebting themselves to Powers.
While Walt was arranging this salient of his assault to make himself animation’s indispensable man, he was having less success with his Stalling-inspired new series, which he called Silly Symphonies. He had had Ub rush the animation of The Skeleton Dance so that he could begin recording Stalling’s track and show the film to prospective distributors, and Powers was already talking about a twelve-cartoon package, but Walt admitted that he was disappointed in what he saw. He sent it back to New York in early March after it had been completed, and had Powers screen it, but distributors found the dancing spooks odd and even gruesome, and Powers couldn’t get a sale. Walt tried to get an exhibitor to show it in Los Angeles and met the same reaction. Yet he maintained an unwavering, instinctive confidence in the Symphonies. “It’s hard to explain just what we have in mind for this series,” Walt confessed to Giegerich, “but I feel, myself, that it will be something unusual and should have a wide appeal.” Several months later, hoping that he might get Fred Miller, who managed the prestigious Carthay Circle Theater in Los Angeles, to watch it as he had gotten Harry Reichenbach to watch Willie, Walt buttonholed a friend who knew a film salesman who knew Miller. Walt found the salesman in a pool hall. He agreed to take a look, liked it, and got it to Miller, who also liked it and agreed to run it at the Carthay on a temporary basis, where it became the first cartoon ever programmed there. The audience responded positively, but Walt, who attended the screening with Iwerks, wasn’t certain. “Are they laughing at us or with us?” he asked.
Giegerich was less than pleased with Walt’s efforts, thinking that the showing at Carthay would undermine his efforts to sell the Silly Symphonies nationally, but Walt countered that the cartoon was “making a big hit” and “attracting an unusual amount of attention,” including a favorable notice in the Los Angeles Times, that could only help their prospects. When Fred Miller asked to book the cartoon for an extended run, Walt wrote Powers that “Fox officials will be sold 100 percent when they hear the audience reaction opening nite.” Walt was right. Where exhibitors had hesitated over the cartoon’s macabre escapades, audiences and critics seemed to swoon. “Here is one of the most novel cartoon subjects ever shown on a screen,” gushed Film Daily. Samuel “Roxy” Rothapfel, the impresario at the grand Roxy Theater in New York, booked it and then wrote Walt that it was “without exce
ption one of the cleverest things I have seen, and as you know, the audience enjoyed every moment of it.” One young aspiring animator named Joseph Barbera sat in the Roxy’s third balcony watching The Skeleton Dance “about seventy miles from the screen” but said the “impact on me was tremendous nevertheless. I saw these skeletons dancing in a row and in unison, and I asked myself: How do you do that? How do you make that happen?”
As another prong of his assault, all the time that Walt was manically promoting his new sound operation and the Silly Symphonies, he was also replenishing his staff with top-rated animators in expectation of having to produce both the Mickeys and the new series—as many as thirty-six new cartoons that year. While he had been in New York in February, Walt, again with the encouragement of Powers, who seemed to want the Mickeys as quickly as possible, had interviewed potential recruits and wound up hiring Burt Gillett, an animation veteran who was working at Pat Sullivan’s studio drawing Felix the Cat (“which he says are not so hot”) and whom Walt described as a “damn clever fellow.” Gillett recommended Ben Sharpsteen, who had worked under him years earlier animating the Mutt and Jeff series. When Walt returned from New York, he wrote Sharpsteen, then freelancing in San Francisco, and invited him out to the studio. Before meeting with Walt, Sharpsteen had dinner with Bill Nolan and Walter Lantz, another animator, both of whom advised him not to join Disney because sound cartoons were too limited to succeed. But when Sharpsteen met Walt—he walked a mile from the streetcar stop to Hyperion—Walt was so excited about sound that he grabbed several Mickeys and drove Sharpsteen to a downtown theater to show them. (The studio still did not have its own screening room.) Sharpsteen was impressed by the quality and joined the studio late in March at $125 a week, more than twice as much as Walt himself was earning in salary at the time.
Over the next several months Walt added Jack King, a highly regarded animator from New York, and Norman Ferguson, another New Yorker, who had animated the Aesop’s Fables that Walt had so admired. Walt also attempted to recruit the primary animators for Felix the Cat—Al Eugster and Otto Messmer. “It was pressure!” Messmer remembered. “He begged and pleaded.” But Messmer was settled in New York, and in any case he felt that Felix would continue forever. Later that summer of 1929 Roy went to New York and continued the recruiting drive, even attempting to pry loose veteran animator Dick Huemer for a possible Mickey Mouse comic strip, without success. Even so, by August Walt was employing eight animators on a staff of twenty—eight of the top animators in the business.
The studio to which the newcomers came, set in the hinterland of the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles, which one visitor described as “one of those endless suburban settings of Barcelona bungalows, pink roses and red filling stations,” was still, after three years, physically underwhelming. It consisted of the one stucco building, the original bungalow, with offices for Roy and Walt and a large room that was divided by a partition down the center—ink and paint on one side, animation on the other. Next to this main building was a small shed where canisters of film and old drawings were stored, and behind that was the stage on which Walt had shot the later Alices. By the spring of 1929 Walt had begun making small additions as the need arose. There was what Sharpsteen called a “nubbin” for a camera room to shield the animators from the disturbance of the camera’s noise, though a chimes factory next door once tested a doorbell all day, nearly driving the artists crazy. There was also another addition, about fourteen feet square, that Walt called the “music room” because he kept a piano there for Stalling to use, and shortly afterward a larger addition for more offices. All told, these later constructions tripled the original space.
But if the effect was slapdash and haphazard, the operation inside was anything but—at least compared to the low standards of the rest of the animation industry. When Sharpsteen had met Walt that afternoon at Hyperion, Walt had passionately expressed his longstanding conviction that “his salvation was in making a product that so excelled that the public would recognize it and enjoy it as the best entertainment and that they would more or less demand to see Disney pictures.” From his own experience in animation, where everything seemed to be done on the fly, Sharpsteen thought that Walt was being overly ambitious, but he soon realized that the Disney studio was a “complete reversal” of what he had found in New York. At Disney the atmosphere may have been casual, but when it came to work, everything was carefully planned. Every cartoon had an exposure sheet precisely outlining each scene, each movement, and each individual drawing. At first Walt had all of the animators spend a portion of their time doing the layout work—laying out the backgrounds and the precise positions of the characters on those backgrounds—but he soon instituted one of his early divisions of labor by hiring a separate layout artist, Carlos Manríquez, for this task. As the staff grew, Iwerks too no longer provided all the basic animation but instead provided key sketches that other animators would then execute. At night he presided over animation classes. By the end of the year Iwerks was concentrating on preparing bar sheets and exposure sheets and heading up the Silly Symphonies unit, while Burt Gillett headed up the Mickey Mouses.
The biggest difference, however, between the Disney studio and the animation studios in New York was not in preparation or specialization; it was in expectation. Walt Disney had to be the best. As he had with the Alices and the Oswalds, though with indifferent results, Walt insisted upon excellence, and Sharpsteen admitted that he soon had some misgivings about joining the studio when he came to realize how high Walt’s standards were. Assigned what he believed was a run-of-the-mill scene in one of the early Mickeys, he saw that Walt did not regard it or any scene that way. “In Walt’s estimation, everything that was done had to be executed with a great deal of thought toward finesse in order to make it better.” It could be a struggle convincing men who had spent their careers thinking of animation as a throwaway that they could and must accomplish something better. “I have encountered plenty of trouble getting my new men adjusted to our method of working,” Walt complained to Giegerich that April, “but things are clearing up now and it looks like we are going to be able to sail along smoothly from now on.”
Part of Walt’s secret was that in insisting on quality from individuals of whom it had never been required, he inspired commitment. “We’d hate to go home at night,” Iwerks recalled, “and we couldn’t wait to get to the office in the morning. We had lots of vitality, and we had to work it off.” Though only a short time earlier the atmosphere at the studio had been dismal, the success of the Mickeys lifted spirits. The animators would now play pranks on one another—pouring water on a chair as someone was about to sit in it or putting cheese on the light under a colleague’s animation board or Art Gum eraser shavings in his pipe tobacco. “But all the horseplay and jokes,” Iwerks said, “never got in the way of the work. We all loved what we were doing and the enthusiasm got onto the screen.” Indeed, when a reporter glowingly described the carefree atmosphere at Hyperion, Walt actually took offense, griping to Giegerich that “one would gather we are nothing but a happy-go-lucky bunch of fellows without any system or organization about us, and that all I do is sit on my fanny and pass out the checks to the fellows.”
There was something else too that gave the Disney studio an esprit and sense of fraternity: Walt’s own informality. Freed from the constant demands and financial tensions of the Mintz era, he was a different man. He prided himself on being one of the guys, even cultivated it. “We haven’t any president or any other officers,” he told a visiting reporter proudly. “In fact, we are not even incorporated. I guess you couldn’t call us a company. We voice our opinions and sometimes we have good old-fashioned scraps, but in the end things get ironed out and we have something we’re all proud of.” Most of the employees even had a key to the studio’s front door. Walt could still be demanding and caustic, especially with longtime associates like Iwerks, but having learned from his experience with the mutineers who detested him, Walt drew closer to
his animators, stopping by their desks to talk not just about their work but about their interests and making suggestions to them without seeming overbearing. “The men loved it,” Iwerks said, “and they all responded.”
But as smoothly as Walt had the new operation running, his pursuit of excellence eventually ran up against an intractable reality that always seemed to bedevil him: money. Quality was expensive, and there never seemed to be enough money to support it. The early Mickeys cost between $4,180 (Mickey’s Follies) and $5,357 (The Karnival Kid) to produce, which didn’t include the royalties to Powers for the Cinephone system, or the onerous yearly $13,000, or the debt to record Steamboat Willie, which the Disneys were still paying off nearly a year later. By May, Walt had received nearly $40,000 in fees and rentals from Powers, but he had to pay distribution costs and expenses, and had to retire loans, leaving him virtually nothing, especially since he had expanded his staff and was paying the new animators well. “The money has been coming in at a pretty fair rate,” Roy determined later that summer, saying that Willie alone had grossed $15,000 and might eventually gross $25,000, “the question is what are the expenses—and they are enough you can bet.” At the same time Walt was carrying the expenses of the recording studio, which despite his sunny predictions had yet to turn a profit and was draining money. He had, in fact, tried to borrow $2,500 from Powers to help keep it afloat.
To extricate himself from his financial predicament, Walt thought of trying an old remedy—turning out the Mickeys faster, one every two weeks, and making a Silly Symphony every month, adding up to thirty-eight or thirty-nine cartoons annually in all—but he would have needed another infusion of $10,000 to do so, and Powers refused, sticking to the original twenty-six shorts. Trying another tack, he had a friend make newsreels to sell to Powers, but Giegerich and another of Powers’s associates, Ed Smith, “queered it.” That June he even shot a sound short of film stars—Al Jolson, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Joan Crawford among them—attending a movie premiere, and Will Rogers delivering an informal dinner speech, for a series he called Hollywood Screen Star News, and dangled it before Columbia Pictures, but they too demurred.