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09/15/2006

Walt Disney, Part I

In the book “1,000 Years, 1,000 People,” the authors rank Walt
Disney #494.

“Disney’s Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck appeal to children of
all ages. He mixed sound and animation to introduce the world’s
most famous mouse in the 1928 cartoon phenomenon ‘Steamboat
Willie.’ Next, he mastered color with his premier full-length
cartoon, ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’ Disney
immortalized on film such childhood classics as ‘Cinderella,’
‘Sleeping Beauty,’ and ‘Winnie the Pooh.’ He then turned his
Midas touch to live-action films. Perhaps most spectacular was
Disney’s transformation of the ideal family vacation from a week
at the beach into total immersion in his fantasy worlds. When
Disneyland opened in California in 1955 to a never-ending
stream of oh-so-happy patrons, Walt planned a bigger and better
theme park in Orlando, Florida. After he died, rumors spread
that he had his body frozen until medicine advanced enough to
thaw him out. We still don’t know if that’s true, but we think
that’s a Goofy idea.”

For those of us of a certain age, can you believe it’s been 40
years since Walt Disney died in 1966? Sometimes it seems like
yesterday, but then I remember the other programs that were on
when I was watching “The Wonderful World of Disney” on
television, now incredibly dated programs like “Lost in Space,”
“Time Tunnel” and “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,” and so,
yes, it does seem like 40 years.

Then again, the beauty of Walt Disney is that his work was
timeless.

I admit to knowing little of Walt Disney’s life until picking up
Harold Evans’s book “They Made America,” which focuses on
the great innovators of the past two centuries. He has an
extensive segment on Disney from which the following is largely
based. The other sources listed have more to do with part II of
this tale.

Walter Elias Disney was born on Dec. 5, 1901, the fourth of five
children produced by his father, Elias, and mother, Flora. Walt
was preceded by Herbert (1888), Raymond (1890) and Roy O.
(1893), but Herbert and Raymond would run away when Walt
was growing up so they have zero to do with the story. Roy O.,
on the other hand, ends up being the financial mastermind. The
last sibling was Walt’s sister, Ruth (1903).

Elias Disney (1859-1941) participated in the building of the
Union Pacific rail line through Colorado. The bulk of his life,
though, he wandered between Florida and the Midwest, holding
jobs from mail carrier to schoolteacher to cabinetmaker, and all
manner of other things in between. As for Walt’s mother, Flora,
Roy E., son of Roy O. and a source of much of the material for
Walt’s biographers, remembers Flora as a “dream grandmother,
very warm with a great sense of fun.”

Elias, though, was stern and humorless and took to beating Walt
with his belt. While not unusual for the time, Walt didn’t take it
real well.

At the same time Elias did have his kids’ best interests at heart
and he was always looking to better their lives, so he moved the
family from Chicago to a 40-acre farm in the community of
Marceline, Missouri.

The older boys were stuck with the hard chores as Walt was too
young for much of the work, so as Roy E. told a writer once,
“Because Walt didn’t have to work with animals the way the
older boys did, he became friends with the animals instead.”

Walt was intrigued by animal behavior, whether it was a bird or
squirrel, and all their characteristics would later find their way
into his animated movies.

But as noted earlier the two oldest boys ran away and Elias
moved the remainder of the family to Kansas City where he
distributed the Kansas City Star.

Walt, now in grammar school, spent his free time doodling,
sketching flowers and trees. Later, the restless Elias moved the
family back to Chicago where Walt attended night classes at the
Illinois Institute of Art. It’s now 1917-18; Walt tried to enter the
Army a year earlier than allowed by falsifying his birthday but he
didn’t get to Europe until after the armistice because he suffered
from influenza. He ended up driving Red Cross trucks and
chauffeuring officers in Paris.

Walt was becoming an adult and he deserves major kudos for
winning $300 (a huge sum for the times) at an all-night poker
game.

Now back in the States, in 1919 Walt returned to Kansas City
to look for a job at the Star as an artist. When he was turned
down for that he applied for every job imaginable at the paper,
but he came up empty.

So he walked into Pesmen-Rubin Commercial Art Studio and
was hired to prepare advertisements. Walt only lasted six weeks
here but in that time he made a critical connection, Ubbe (“Ub”)
Iwerks (1901-1971), who taught Walt the tricks of the trade. Ub
was amused that Walt kept playing around with his name –
Walter, W.E., Walt, Walter Elias – and finally Ub convinced him
he should call himself Walt Disney. As Harold Evans observes,
even then “Walt was into branding.”

After being released from Pesmen-Rubin following the
Christmas rush, Walt got a job as a mail carrier. But when
Iwerks was fired a few weeks later, the two decided to form
Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists in January 1920. They
picked up a few contracts but they were bankrupt a few months
later and both ended up at the Kansas City Film Ad Company.

Disney and Iwerks hung out at the public library and pored over
the latest in animation. At the Kansas City Film Ad Company
the work was crude but the two smoothed it out.

Harold Evans:

“The method was to cut human and animal figures out of paper,
film them in one position, move them slightly and film them
again to create the illusion of movement. This required the
concentration of the two of them, one to crank the camera and
the other to move the drawings. To make this easier, Ub rigged
up a telegraph-key switch to activate the camera so that one of
them could do everything while just sitting at the animation
table. It was a classic Iwerks solution.”

Disney wasn’t half the artist that Iwerks was, but Walt was the
storyteller. Outside of their formal job the two then began to
work on one-minute animated jokes called Laugh-O-grams.

In May 1922, Walt left his buddy Iwerks to set up Laugh-O-gram
Films, backed by $15,000 from Kansas City professionals. He
hired a dozen young people to work on a series of animated
stories that included ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Jack and the
Beanstalk.’

Walt signed a distribution deal with a New York company called
Pictorial Clubs and Laugh-O-gram films was to be paid $1,800
for each of the first half-dozen cartoons. Iwerks came back at
this time and they put together a slew of Laugh-O-grams for
Pictorial.

But Pictorial had paid only a $100 deposit and never came
through with the $11,000 they owed Walt and Ub so both Laugh-
O-gram and Pictorial went bankrupt by the middle of 1923.

Walt Disney was so broke he slept in his office and showered at
Union Station. “It was probably the blackest time of my life,” he
later told an interviewer. No kidding.

But then a local dentist signed Walt for $500 to produce a little
film on dental hygience, ‘Tommy Tucker’s Tooth,’ which was
enough to allow Walt to work on his next big idea, ‘Alice’s
Wonderland.’

So around now you might be thinking, hey, where’s brother
Roy? Wasn’t he supposed to be part of the story?

Roy was back in California, flat on his back in a sanatorium, a
victim of tuberculosis acquired while in World War I. Roy told
Walt to file for bankruptcy, again, and move to Hollywood.
Walt was down to his last $40, but as Roy would later say,
“Tomorrow was always going to be the answer to all his
problems.”

The Hollywood of 1923 was one of Rudolph Valentino, Clara
Bow, Tom Mix, Cecil B. DeMille, D.W. Griffith, and the likes of
Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg; the latter two going on to
form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

But as hard as Walt tried to find a job, any job, he came up
empty and was forced to go back to cartooning. It’s here that
Harold Evans makes an important point.

“The idea that it was his life’s dedication from day one is
moonshine. Had he been given any job in Hollywood, he would
have cheerfully abandoned animation in light of the intense
competition from New York’s cartoon factories.”

Walt set up shop in his father’s brother’s garage and he set to
sketching out some one-minute gags. Then, out of nowhere, a
woman by the name of Margaret Winkler offered $1,500 for six
‘Alice Comedies’ for national distribution. Upon hearing this,
Roy, ignoring his doctor’s orders, got out of bed and invested
$285 he had saved and rounded up another $2,500 from a
mortgage on his parents’ home and $500 from the uncle who was
letting Walt use his garage.

Walt and Roy then rented a storefront in Hollywood and
stenciled a sign in the window: DISNEY BROTHERS STUDIO.

Walt was newly married and when he returned from his
honeymoon, Roy suggested the name be changed to Walt Disney
Studios. That was Roy. The two recognized each other’s
strengths and weaknesses and in the case of Walt, he knew his
animation just wasn’t that great.

So he sought out old friend Ubbe Iwerks and got Ub to leave
Kansas City and head to Hollywood. Walt wrote him “Go West,
young man .Hooray for Hollywood!”

Iwerks was amazing. It’s said he could finish as many as 700
rough drawings a day, filled in by others.

But while the Alice Comedies were a success, Walt Disney
Studios still wasn’t turning a profit. And then Walt learned a
powerful lesson.

Margaret Winkler had handed over her business to a new
husband, Charlie Mintz, whom Evans describes as “a natural
predator.”

It’s kind of complicated but the bottom line is Mintz asked Walt
and Ub to come up with a new cartoon series. The two created a
rabbit (at the suggestion of Carl Laemmle, head of Universal
Pictures), and Mintz then called it Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
Laemmle agreed to pay a $2,000 advance for the first film, but
then Laemmle wasn’t excited by the initial effort.

So Walt and Iwerks came up with a sleeker “Ozzie” and the
second effort, ‘Trolley Troubles,’ got rave reviews.

But then the two got a big surprise when their contract with
Mintz came up for renewal. He had secretly stolen Walt’s entire
staff of animators to join a proposed Charles Mintz Studios, and
all but Iwerks and two apprentices agreed to join him. To make
matters worse, Mintz demanded to be a partner of Disney
brothers. Heck, he owned all his animators. Then Mintz pointed
out that Walt didn’t own the copyright to Oswald, he did. [Poor
Walt hadn’t read the fine print.]

Harold Evans:

“Mintz had Walt in a vise. Walking away from the deal would
leave the Disney company with no characters, no contracts, no
cash flowing in and virtually no animators. When Walt phoned
Roy to confirm the wounding defections [ed. Walt was in New
York with Mintz], Roy urged him to make the best settlement he
could. Walt went back to Mintz’s office with a different purpose
in mind. ‘Here. You can have the little bastard!’ he reportedly
told Mintz, ‘He’s all yours and good look to you.’ His rejection
of Mintz was the turning point in the history of the Walt Disney
Studios. ‘Never again will I work for anyone else,’ Walt told his
wife, Lillian. Taking the gamble of starting all over again was
reckless, but cleaving to his independence became central to all
of Disney’s subsequent successes.”

Walt needed a new character, but cartoonists had “emptied the
menagerie.” “About the only thing they hadn’t featured,” wrote
Walt, “was the mouse.”

Ah yes, the mouse, and so on the long train ride back to
California with Lillian, he sketched out a little mouse that had
once been bold enough to cross his desk in his old Kansas City
studio.

“He seemed to have a personality of his own,” recalled Walt. He
then dressed him up in red velvet pants and called him Mortimer
Mouse for all of five minutes until Lillian said it sounded
stuffy. “Why not Mickey Mouse?”

Ub Iwerks recalls the genesis of Mickey a little differently, later
saying Hugh Harman had sketched out a mouse around
photographs of Walt, but who is right really doesn’t matter in the
grand scheme of things; though Harold Evans weighs in that
Walt’s story makes more sense and, regardless, the partnership
was about Ub’s drawings and Walt’s ideas anyway.

But Walt couldn’t find a distributor for the first two Mickey
Mouse cartoons, ‘Plane Crazy’ and ‘The Gallopin,’’ while he had
to keep raising money for a third, ‘Steamboat Willie.’

And that’s where we’ll leave off for now.

Sources:

“The Oxford Companion to United States History,” edited by
Paul S. Boyer
“They Made America,” Harold Evans, with Gail Buckland and
David Lefer
“1,000 Years, 1,000 People: Ranking the Men and Women Who
Shaped the Millennium,” Agnes Hooper Gottlieb, Henry
Gottlieb, Barbara Bowers, Brent Bowers
“The Century,” Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster

Part II next week.

Brian Trumbore




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-09/15/2006-      
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Wall Street History

09/15/2006

Walt Disney, Part I

In the book “1,000 Years, 1,000 People,” the authors rank Walt
Disney #494.

“Disney’s Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck appeal to children of
all ages. He mixed sound and animation to introduce the world’s
most famous mouse in the 1928 cartoon phenomenon ‘Steamboat
Willie.’ Next, he mastered color with his premier full-length
cartoon, ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’ Disney
immortalized on film such childhood classics as ‘Cinderella,’
‘Sleeping Beauty,’ and ‘Winnie the Pooh.’ He then turned his
Midas touch to live-action films. Perhaps most spectacular was
Disney’s transformation of the ideal family vacation from a week
at the beach into total immersion in his fantasy worlds. When
Disneyland opened in California in 1955 to a never-ending
stream of oh-so-happy patrons, Walt planned a bigger and better
theme park in Orlando, Florida. After he died, rumors spread
that he had his body frozen until medicine advanced enough to
thaw him out. We still don’t know if that’s true, but we think
that’s a Goofy idea.”

For those of us of a certain age, can you believe it’s been 40
years since Walt Disney died in 1966? Sometimes it seems like
yesterday, but then I remember the other programs that were on
when I was watching “The Wonderful World of Disney” on
television, now incredibly dated programs like “Lost in Space,”
“Time Tunnel” and “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,” and so,
yes, it does seem like 40 years.

Then again, the beauty of Walt Disney is that his work was
timeless.

I admit to knowing little of Walt Disney’s life until picking up
Harold Evans’s book “They Made America,” which focuses on
the great innovators of the past two centuries. He has an
extensive segment on Disney from which the following is largely
based. The other sources listed have more to do with part II of
this tale.

Walter Elias Disney was born on Dec. 5, 1901, the fourth of five
children produced by his father, Elias, and mother, Flora. Walt
was preceded by Herbert (1888), Raymond (1890) and Roy O.
(1893), but Herbert and Raymond would run away when Walt
was growing up so they have zero to do with the story. Roy O.,
on the other hand, ends up being the financial mastermind. The
last sibling was Walt’s sister, Ruth (1903).

Elias Disney (1859-1941) participated in the building of the
Union Pacific rail line through Colorado. The bulk of his life,
though, he wandered between Florida and the Midwest, holding
jobs from mail carrier to schoolteacher to cabinetmaker, and all
manner of other things in between. As for Walt’s mother, Flora,
Roy E., son of Roy O. and a source of much of the material for
Walt’s biographers, remembers Flora as a “dream grandmother,
very warm with a great sense of fun.”

Elias, though, was stern and humorless and took to beating Walt
with his belt. While not unusual for the time, Walt didn’t take it
real well.

At the same time Elias did have his kids’ best interests at heart
and he was always looking to better their lives, so he moved the
family from Chicago to a 40-acre farm in the community of
Marceline, Missouri.

The older boys were stuck with the hard chores as Walt was too
young for much of the work, so as Roy E. told a writer once,
“Because Walt didn’t have to work with animals the way the
older boys did, he became friends with the animals instead.”

Walt was intrigued by animal behavior, whether it was a bird or
squirrel, and all their characteristics would later find their way
into his animated movies.

But as noted earlier the two oldest boys ran away and Elias
moved the remainder of the family to Kansas City where he
distributed the Kansas City Star.

Walt, now in grammar school, spent his free time doodling,
sketching flowers and trees. Later, the restless Elias moved the
family back to Chicago where Walt attended night classes at the
Illinois Institute of Art. It’s now 1917-18; Walt tried to enter the
Army a year earlier than allowed by falsifying his birthday but he
didn’t get to Europe until after the armistice because he suffered
from influenza. He ended up driving Red Cross trucks and
chauffeuring officers in Paris.

Walt was becoming an adult and he deserves major kudos for
winning $300 (a huge sum for the times) at an all-night poker
game.

Now back in the States, in 1919 Walt returned to Kansas City
to look for a job at the Star as an artist. When he was turned
down for that he applied for every job imaginable at the paper,
but he came up empty.

So he walked into Pesmen-Rubin Commercial Art Studio and
was hired to prepare advertisements. Walt only lasted six weeks
here but in that time he made a critical connection, Ubbe (“Ub”)
Iwerks (1901-1971), who taught Walt the tricks of the trade. Ub
was amused that Walt kept playing around with his name –
Walter, W.E., Walt, Walter Elias – and finally Ub convinced him
he should call himself Walt Disney. As Harold Evans observes,
even then “Walt was into branding.”

After being released from Pesmen-Rubin following the
Christmas rush, Walt got a job as a mail carrier. But when
Iwerks was fired a few weeks later, the two decided to form
Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists in January 1920. They
picked up a few contracts but they were bankrupt a few months
later and both ended up at the Kansas City Film Ad Company.

Disney and Iwerks hung out at the public library and pored over
the latest in animation. At the Kansas City Film Ad Company
the work was crude but the two smoothed it out.

Harold Evans:

“The method was to cut human and animal figures out of paper,
film them in one position, move them slightly and film them
again to create the illusion of movement. This required the
concentration of the two of them, one to crank the camera and
the other to move the drawings. To make this easier, Ub rigged
up a telegraph-key switch to activate the camera so that one of
them could do everything while just sitting at the animation
table. It was a classic Iwerks solution.”

Disney wasn’t half the artist that Iwerks was, but Walt was the
storyteller. Outside of their formal job the two then began to
work on one-minute animated jokes called Laugh-O-grams.

In May 1922, Walt left his buddy Iwerks to set up Laugh-O-gram
Films, backed by $15,000 from Kansas City professionals. He
hired a dozen young people to work on a series of animated
stories that included ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Jack and the
Beanstalk.’

Walt signed a distribution deal with a New York company called
Pictorial Clubs and Laugh-O-gram films was to be paid $1,800
for each of the first half-dozen cartoons. Iwerks came back at
this time and they put together a slew of Laugh-O-grams for
Pictorial.

But Pictorial had paid only a $100 deposit and never came
through with the $11,000 they owed Walt and Ub so both Laugh-
O-gram and Pictorial went bankrupt by the middle of 1923.

Walt Disney was so broke he slept in his office and showered at
Union Station. “It was probably the blackest time of my life,” he
later told an interviewer. No kidding.

But then a local dentist signed Walt for $500 to produce a little
film on dental hygience, ‘Tommy Tucker’s Tooth,’ which was
enough to allow Walt to work on his next big idea, ‘Alice’s
Wonderland.’

So around now you might be thinking, hey, where’s brother
Roy? Wasn’t he supposed to be part of the story?

Roy was back in California, flat on his back in a sanatorium, a
victim of tuberculosis acquired while in World War I. Roy told
Walt to file for bankruptcy, again, and move to Hollywood.
Walt was down to his last $40, but as Roy would later say,
“Tomorrow was always going to be the answer to all his
problems.”

The Hollywood of 1923 was one of Rudolph Valentino, Clara
Bow, Tom Mix, Cecil B. DeMille, D.W. Griffith, and the likes of
Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg; the latter two going on to
form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

But as hard as Walt tried to find a job, any job, he came up
empty and was forced to go back to cartooning. It’s here that
Harold Evans makes an important point.

“The idea that it was his life’s dedication from day one is
moonshine. Had he been given any job in Hollywood, he would
have cheerfully abandoned animation in light of the intense
competition from New York’s cartoon factories.”

Walt set up shop in his father’s brother’s garage and he set to
sketching out some one-minute gags. Then, out of nowhere, a
woman by the name of Margaret Winkler offered $1,500 for six
‘Alice Comedies’ for national distribution. Upon hearing this,
Roy, ignoring his doctor’s orders, got out of bed and invested
$285 he had saved and rounded up another $2,500 from a
mortgage on his parents’ home and $500 from the uncle who was
letting Walt use his garage.

Walt and Roy then rented a storefront in Hollywood and
stenciled a sign in the window: DISNEY BROTHERS STUDIO.

Walt was newly married and when he returned from his
honeymoon, Roy suggested the name be changed to Walt Disney
Studios. That was Roy. The two recognized each other’s
strengths and weaknesses and in the case of Walt, he knew his
animation just wasn’t that great.

So he sought out old friend Ubbe Iwerks and got Ub to leave
Kansas City and head to Hollywood. Walt wrote him “Go West,
young man .Hooray for Hollywood!”

Iwerks was amazing. It’s said he could finish as many as 700
rough drawings a day, filled in by others.

But while the Alice Comedies were a success, Walt Disney
Studios still wasn’t turning a profit. And then Walt learned a
powerful lesson.

Margaret Winkler had handed over her business to a new
husband, Charlie Mintz, whom Evans describes as “a natural
predator.”

It’s kind of complicated but the bottom line is Mintz asked Walt
and Ub to come up with a new cartoon series. The two created a
rabbit (at the suggestion of Carl Laemmle, head of Universal
Pictures), and Mintz then called it Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
Laemmle agreed to pay a $2,000 advance for the first film, but
then Laemmle wasn’t excited by the initial effort.

So Walt and Iwerks came up with a sleeker “Ozzie” and the
second effort, ‘Trolley Troubles,’ got rave reviews.

But then the two got a big surprise when their contract with
Mintz came up for renewal. He had secretly stolen Walt’s entire
staff of animators to join a proposed Charles Mintz Studios, and
all but Iwerks and two apprentices agreed to join him. To make
matters worse, Mintz demanded to be a partner of Disney
brothers. Heck, he owned all his animators. Then Mintz pointed
out that Walt didn’t own the copyright to Oswald, he did. [Poor
Walt hadn’t read the fine print.]

Harold Evans:

“Mintz had Walt in a vise. Walking away from the deal would
leave the Disney company with no characters, no contracts, no
cash flowing in and virtually no animators. When Walt phoned
Roy to confirm the wounding defections [ed. Walt was in New
York with Mintz], Roy urged him to make the best settlement he
could. Walt went back to Mintz’s office with a different purpose
in mind. ‘Here. You can have the little bastard!’ he reportedly
told Mintz, ‘He’s all yours and good look to you.’ His rejection
of Mintz was the turning point in the history of the Walt Disney
Studios. ‘Never again will I work for anyone else,’ Walt told his
wife, Lillian. Taking the gamble of starting all over again was
reckless, but cleaving to his independence became central to all
of Disney’s subsequent successes.”

Walt needed a new character, but cartoonists had “emptied the
menagerie.” “About the only thing they hadn’t featured,” wrote
Walt, “was the mouse.”

Ah yes, the mouse, and so on the long train ride back to
California with Lillian, he sketched out a little mouse that had
once been bold enough to cross his desk in his old Kansas City
studio.

“He seemed to have a personality of his own,” recalled Walt. He
then dressed him up in red velvet pants and called him Mortimer
Mouse for all of five minutes until Lillian said it sounded
stuffy. “Why not Mickey Mouse?”

Ub Iwerks recalls the genesis of Mickey a little differently, later
saying Hugh Harman had sketched out a mouse around
photographs of Walt, but who is right really doesn’t matter in the
grand scheme of things; though Harold Evans weighs in that
Walt’s story makes more sense and, regardless, the partnership
was about Ub’s drawings and Walt’s ideas anyway.

But Walt couldn’t find a distributor for the first two Mickey
Mouse cartoons, ‘Plane Crazy’ and ‘The Gallopin,’’ while he had
to keep raising money for a third, ‘Steamboat Willie.’

And that’s where we’ll leave off for now.

Sources:

“The Oxford Companion to United States History,” edited by
Paul S. Boyer
“They Made America,” Harold Evans, with Gail Buckland and
David Lefer
“1,000 Years, 1,000 People: Ranking the Men and Women Who
Shaped the Millennium,” Agnes Hooper Gottlieb, Henry
Gottlieb, Barbara Bowers, Brent Bowers
“The Century,” Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster

Part II next week.

Brian Trumbore