November 6, 2024 • 44 mins
On February 24, 1939, Walt Disney was relaxing after his recent Oscar win for Snow White when he received a call from the future …
In this episode, Walt will tell the story of how he lost the rights to one of his first successes, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a character that looked a lot like Mickey Mouse. He’ll also explain how he recovered from Bankruptcy, and he’ll talk about the enormous task of drawing 250,000 pictures to create Snow White.
Start the episode now to join the conversation.
-----
It would take a very talented person to capture the creative, visionary essence of Walt Disney, but in this episode, James Froemel does exactly that. James is an actor, storyteller, narrator and is the 4X winner of the “Biggest Liar in West Virginia” tall-tale competition. Originally from New Jersey, he has called West Virginia home for nearly 20 years. James is a graduate of West Virginia University’s BFA Acting program and the Williamstown Theatre Festival Acting Apprentice program. As an actor, he has worked with The Footlight Players, Greenbrier Valley Theatre, The West Virginia Humanities Council, History Alive! program and West Virginia Public Theatre. He was invited to perform in 2024 as part of the National Storytelling Festival, Exchange Place series and is a professional audiobook narrator with titles now available on Audible. He can be reached through his webpage www.jamesfroemel.com .
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:28):
Um, Tony Dean, and today we'll be callinghistory to speak with Walt Disney.
He'll be answering our call on
february 24th, 1939.
The day after winning theacademy award for snow white.
If you're young enough, you mightnot even know that Disney world
and all these wonderful Disneymovies all started because of one
(00:49):
extraordinary man named Walt Disney.
Despite the fact that theDisney corporation is $175
billion entertainment, behemoth.
Well, Disney was a terrible businessman.
And in fact, he lost the rights tothe first draft of Mickey mouse, which
was actually a rabbit named Oswald.
(01:10):
But despite his shortcomings, WaltDisney was a visionary, able to
tell stories that would bring simpledrawings on a piece of paper to life.
He was a man that believed in himselfcompletely and would bet it all to
create something truly magnificent.
He knew that if the work was good, Itwould pave the way to future success that
(01:32):
would allow him to tell more stories,stories that to this day, withstand the
wear of time, giving us unforgettablecharacters that allow us to dream.
Explore.
And sometimes even believe in magic,ladies and gentlemen, fellow history,
lovers, and newspaper boys everywhere.
I give you Walt Disney.
(01:54):
Hello, is that you,
Mr.
Disney?
Hello there.
Yes, this is me.
Sir, I am thrilled to bespeaking with you today.
My name is Tony Dean, and I'm talking toyou from the future, in the 21st century.
The device that you're holdingis called a smartphone.
It is similar to the telephones of yourtime, but it also has Enough technology
(02:15):
in it to do in a day what might takeyou months or sometimes even years.
But more importantly, it allows us tospeak as if you and I were sitting in
the same room together, and it allowsme to share a record of our conversation
with people around the world so thatthey can hear your amazing story.
And sir, I was hoping that I could ask yousome questions today, but before I do, I
(02:36):
understand this is a strange introduction.
Are there any questions thatI can answer for you first?
Oh, not yet.
I'm just, I'm enjoying thisdevice as you'll hear from me.
I am always looking at thecutting edge technologies that can
change the ways we tell stories.
Yeah, it seems that technology was areally important part of your life,
and I think if you were to hop into mytime for two seconds, you'd be so happy
(02:59):
and overwhelmed and overjoyed becausethere'd be no end to what you could
do with the imagination that you have.
So I'm curious, whatis it about technology?
, what caused you to jumpso far ahead of everybody
else?
Well, as one of my animators, WardKimball will say of me I've never
really set out to make money and that'sperhaps the secret of my success.
(03:21):
I have always been first and foremostconcerned with the quality of my work how
we can create the best picture possible.
And oftentimes creating the best pictureinvolves not only just recruiting the
best artists that you can find, whichI have is involves going out there and
figuring out different ways to actuallycreate the stories and investing in those
opportunities, whether that be technology,whether that be training whether that be
(03:44):
just finding the right story to tell andgoing out and purchasing those things.
So I've had fantasticsuccess, not looking at the.
The price tag on things, but just lookingat what we need to tell the best story.
As my brother, Roy will tell youhappily, I am not a great businessman
and you'll, you may hear somethings that illustrate that point.
(04:05):
But I do think I'm a great storytellerand finding the right people to help
me tell my stories has been a partof that journey, but finding the
right technologies to tell thosestories has been the other part.
Well, it's good that you were able tosurround yourself with people that could
fill in the business side of the equation.
Because , if you were to go into aninvestor presentation with a bunch
(04:29):
of people wanting to spend moneyand tell them a story about, Hey,
look, I'm not worried about money.
I'm just going to get it right.
You'd never would havefound a single investor.
I'm guessing.
Oh no.
And, and, uh, I've had some experiencetrying to raise funds for my films.
And frankly, if investors were tolook back at my track record they
might not be too eager to investwith me based on what happened
with Laugh O Gram and other places.
(04:50):
But the product speaks for itself,and we've been very fortunate that in
working with, , Bank of America, as weproduce Snow White, that we were able to
build faith even when we were spending awhole lot more money than anyone thought
we could or should on the production.
Tell me when you said theLaugh O Gram, tell me a little
(05:11):
bit about that.
Oh, sure.
Laugh o gram was, well, no, itwasn't quite my first company.
My first company I startedwith my dear friend of iWorks.
We were working together at acompany called Pestman Rubin.
And we decided that we shouldgo into business together.
We thought we would be oneof those great companies that
would stand the test of time.
And instead we folded after a month.
(05:31):
But that very first company wehad was called iWorks Disney.
Now I'm a big fan ofusing my name on things.
I like to take credit whereI feel credit is due to me.
But in that one instance, I realizedif we called ourselves Disney eyeworks,
people were going to think we wereoptometrists rather than artists.
So in that one instance, I letof his name go before mine.
(05:52):
But that company, it didn't pan out.
So we decided further along Iknew I wanted to start something
bigger and something real.
And I really wanted to getinto this new animation thing.
I'd seen a few cartoons.
I had read every book on the subject thatexisted, which was just one at that point.
But I knew I could make a goof it with a company like that.
(06:12):
And so, when I was living in Kansascity, to start Laugh O Gram Studios.
We worked with a local theater owner,and I convinced him that we were going
to get some great animators together,and we were going to make these
animated shorts for his movie theaterchain, the Newman movie theater chain.
And I was very proud and speaking of mybusiness acumen, I went in, I met with
(06:33):
him in the theater and my friend Carlhad helped arrange this meeting and I
went in and he's, he was interested inthe idea of having these cartoons he
could show before his feature films.
And he asked me what.
What it would cost, what I would chargehim, and I was so flabbergasted that
he was interested in working with meand that my company was going to sell
something that I quoted him at theproduction cost, forgetting to factor
(06:58):
in any profit at all, but the deal wasdone, so we had to move forward with it.
I convinced some local business owners,some family friends to invest in me.
And I raised 15, 000.
We had our own studio space.
We actually had our owncamera in that studio space.
And I went around and I hired somefellows that I knew were great artists.
Some of whom for instance, thatI'd worked with over at the
(07:19):
Pestman Rubin advertising firm.
And we were going to makethese animated shorts.
Of course we didn't haveany money for intellectual.
Property, I guess you might say.
So we had to come up withstories that were uh, free.
Uh, So we looked at stories like themusicians of Bremen and we looked at
stories like Little Red Riding Hoodthat we could animate pretty cheaply.
(07:40):
So that was our goal was to sit outthere and animate these these short
films to show before the featuresand we were having a fantastic time.
, I never really spent awhole lot of time in school.
Even as a young man, my, my time inschool was sort of, Interrupted by
family business and other concerns.
So for me, when I hear fellows talk aboutthe time they spent in college and being
(08:01):
in a fraternity or what have you, LaughO Gram was really that time for me, I was
great friends with everyone in the studio.
We, We had a spectacular time.
We would go out and we would do ourlittle animated shorts, but we also
would do some live action things.
One time we were doing anadvertisement for a Insurance firm
and there had been a car accident,but we had our press credentials.
(08:21):
So we went over and we got in the carafter the folks had already cleared out
in the accident was cleaned up a littlebit in terms of people being moved away.
We just jumped in and took somephotographs and some video that we
could use for our insurance commercial.
Of an actual car
of an actual car crash.
Yes.
It was not a terrible car crash.
It's a little fender bender, but itprovided us with an opportunity to
get some perhaps practical effectsthat didn't cost us any money.
(08:45):
So
Yeah, you didn't have to
stage
exactly we just jumped right in and wehad a blast with the thing in terms of
being out there and making movies, butthat business part was really the, the
Achilles heel, if you will of my business.
Sweet.
didn't know what it wasthat we were getting into.
We knew we wanted to make animationbut to be honest, we weren't even
sure how to do that at times.
(09:08):
With the success I've had, peopleoftentimes are giving me credit
as being the father of animation.
And truly I jumped into this gamelate with Laugh O Gram, and I really
believe when Laugh O Gram collapsed,I thought part of the problem was that
I had gotten to animation too late.
I thought the Fleishers havealready got this thing and I'm
just getting in the game too lateand it's not going to work out.
(09:29):
When I left Missouri, my planwas to get to California and
be an actor at that point.
I was actually giving up the ideathat I needed to be an animator.
Of course, I'm very grateful that I cameback around to that, but Laugh o gram
was a fantastic learning experience forme when the business started to falter
(09:50):
and it faltered for a few reasons.
One was generally my perhapsinattentiveness to the business
aspects of the business.
I had also hired a sales manager, a mannamed Leslie Macy and Leslie's job was
to go out there and drum up business.
Now this is of course, SnowWhite being our first feature.
We.
We're looking at just shorts, things toshow before the animated productions, and
(10:13):
a lot of that related to advertisementsand what you might call industry reels.
So he went out to New York.
We paid plenty of money for him togo out to New York, put him up in
a nice hotel, and he was our salesmanager, and he made a big sale.
He had a huge contract that he gotwith the Pictorial Clubs, and we
were supposed to create, I believe,around 17 cartoons for them.
(10:35):
And he asked for a deposit.
of, I believe it was around 200.
So it was almost nothing in termsof the down payment that we are
going to get on these things.
And the rest was to be deliveredupon completion of all the films.
So we were going to extend ourselvesto create all these films and then
they were going to pay us at the end.
So we, Found more money.
(10:56):
you remember what that dollar amount was?
We were supposed to get 11, 000 total.
Which is a fantastic sum.
I mean, that it would haveset us up quite nicely.
With that, had we gotten it as an advancedpayment, or even if we had gotten it at
the end of things, we would have beenokay, but what happened was that pictorial
folded in the middle of animation, theywent bankrupt And Leslie left after
(11:20):
making that fantastic deal for us.
He left I was in such debt.
I gave up my apartment.
I was sleeping on the floor of the studio.
I bathed at a bus station once a week.
I was eating pork and beans daily, which.
Frankly, I didn't mind pork andbeans are my very favorite meal,
but it was tough times for sure.
I remember one time one of thecreditors, he came, he kept coming
(11:43):
to the door and he would knock atthe door and I would answer and he
would say, excuse me, is there a Mr.
Dinsey here?
And there I would be, I didn't havea penny to my name, and I would
just say to him, You know what, I'mvery sorry, but there is no one by
the name of Dinsey who works here.
Ha.
Eventually, one of the days he showed up,he knocked at the door, and I answered.
(12:04):
And I was speaking to him,explaining, of course, Mr.
Dinsey hadn't arrived yet.
And one of my friendsyelled out, Hey, Walt!
And he caught on, hesaid, Are you Walt Disney?
I said, Yes.
It's Walt Disney.
There is no one named Dinsey.
I am Walt Disney.
Well, then he had me and he servedme with my papers and on from there.
(12:25):
But it was it was again, it wasa mixed feeling for the times.
It was, Such great fun working with thoseyoung men, and perhaps in a way that I've
lost now, I was truly their colleagueas opposed to their boss at that time.
And so the camaraderie I felt workingthere at Laugh O Gram with Ub and
(12:46):
Hugh and the other fellows, itwas just something I miss greatly.
Well, that is a
Is that your favorite time ofeverything up to this point so far?
great question.
I would say it is my, it is afond memory for the camaraderie.
Being able to make.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves hasreally been the highlight of my career.
(13:07):
It's been stressful,there's no doubt about that.
We have been through the ringer inmaking this picture, but to be able
to tell a story exactly the way thatI want to tell it has been the most
gratifying artistic experience of my life.
Let's talk about Snow White andthe Seven Dwarfs for a minute.
So, and, let's get everybodycaught up on, like, the timeline.
My understanding, yesterday was apretty important day for Snow White
(13:30):
and the Seven
It was, yes, we were given an AcademyAward Miss Shirley Temple presented it
to me, it was for a special achievement.
Now I'm very grateful for thataward, I think it's a very nice
trophy and it's it's wonderfulto be recognized in that way.
I am still convinced that SnowWhite should have won Best Picture.
I think in our time a lot ofpeople even agree with that now to
(13:51):
be quite honest with
thank you, I'm happy to hear that.
Tell me about the actual award.
, I saw some pictures of this recently.
The award's a little bitdifferent than the other
Academy Awards, isn't it?
It is, yes, there's one fullsized Oscar and then there's
seven little Oscars next to it.
For each of the
For
each of the dwarves.
Are they named?
Do they look different?
Or did they all look
like the same
(14:12):
They all look like the same statue, butyes, they're just yeah, representationally
to, to count up the dwarves.
I wonder in the future if they're goingto do that for all the other shows, you
know, depending on how many actors theygot three or four surrounding them.
Oh, don't give them any ideas there.
Yeah, no kidding.
That's the last thing they need.
So I'm very interested insomething you said a while back
ago, and you had said that hereyou are, , starting this company.
(14:36):
And you felt like you had come intothe animation business too late.
I mean, that's, that is stunning to me.
So here you are with all of thistalent and all of this creativity,
and you just felt like it was over,like the best had already happened
for
I did, yes coming in whenI did I, the Fleishers had a
great running start ahead of me.
(14:57):
And a lot of what we were doing inthose early days with Laffagram, , we
did these little pictures that ormore advertisements things like
Tommy Tucker's tooth and so on.
Where we really found our footingwas right as Laffagram was
starting to collapse, and thatwas with the Alice Comedies.
Now the Alice Comedieswe're going to combine.
live action and animation.
(15:17):
And I did that for two reasons.
One, I thought we couldcreate fantastic stories.
The other is that a live actor is muchcheaper to animate than drawn animation.
So there was some cost savings there.
That idea did not come tome in a dream or anything.
It came to me, frankly, from watchingwhat the Fleishers were doing.
The Fleishers had a very successfulseries called Out of the Inkwell and Out
(15:38):
of the Inkwell was just that a cartooncharacter inhabiting the real world.
We flipped that.
So we put the human characterin the animated world with ours.
But yes they had great successin animation at that point.
It was a New York industry.
It wasn't something that was reallybeing done as much in California.
So I thought I was in thewrong place for one thing.
(15:59):
I was in Missouri, Kansas City, Missouri.
This isn't where animation is happening.
It's happening in New York.
And I thought with the advancementsthey had already made and with their
characters already gaining greatpopularity Whether I could actually catch
up with them was not guaranteed for sure.
the record.
Missouri hasn't made any ground asfar as being the headquarters of
(16:20):
animation in the world, nothing's
changed there.
Well, perhaps if I'dmoved back, but yes um,
Yeah, probably.
So , if that's the case, and NewYork is the place to be, why did
you eventually move to California?
I don't
understand that.
so the move was inspired by a few things.
One was that I thought Iwas going to be an actor.
So when a Laugh O Gram folded, II, of course I lost a lot in the
(16:45):
bankruptcy proceedings and so on,but I managed to hold onto my camera.
And so I went into town, found therichest neighborhood in Kansas city.
And I found somebody who wanteda film done of their child.
So they wanted a home movieto be filmed professionally.
So I went and I did that.
I charged them when Icould get them to pay.
And then I sold the camera for moremoney than I'd paid for it to begin with.
(17:07):
And I took all the money and I bought onefirst class train ticket to California.
Now I chose California for thefilm industry and also because.
I had a free place to stay.
My, my big brother, Roy hadgone West years earlier.
he served in the Navy and laterwas diagnosed with tuberculosis.
They determined that the only placehe could have I'm going to talk a
(17:29):
little bit about what happened to myuncle Robert when he was in the Navy.
And so, for that reason, it becamethe Veterans Administration's
responsibility for the treatment.
There was a respite home inCalifornia, and Roy was sent there.
And I crashed at the respite home for alittle bit, perhaps not entirely legally.
And my uncle Robert was alsoout that way, and so I stayed
with my uncle Robert for a bit.
Well, he was out there and I was goingtry just making it in the movies.
(17:52):
I had always loved the movies.
I was a huge Charlie Chaplin fan.
I still am.
And so I thought, you know, I'llsneak onto movie sets for my Laugh
O Gram days when we were doing thosevideos, we had press credentials.
I didn't throw them out.
So I took my Kansas city press credentialsand when I got to California, I would
use them to get onto movie lots and Iwould just go and watch them make movies.
(18:13):
Just prowling around, watchingdirectors, seeing how they talk to
their actors, how they managed things.
I did get cast in one movie.
I was , an avid horseback rider for mydays growing up on the farm in Marceline.
And so I got casted a film where theyneeded somebody who could ride a horse.
And of course.
Not many rainy days here in Los Angeles.
(18:35):
But the one day I was hired to ridewas the one day it rained and then
they didn't call me for the reshoot.
And that was the end of myillustrious acting career.
Wow.
That did not end as you had
planned.
not at all.
You'd mentioned uh, Roy served in theNavy and did you serve in the military?
I was a member of the RedCross Ambulance Service.
(18:57):
so the family we lived in Marcelineand that was my favorite place
in the whole world is still tothis day, Marceline, Missouri.
I just have so manyfantastic memories of that.
But we later , we moved to KansasCity for a while and we had a paper
route and then we moved to Chicago.
I was born in Chicago.
We moved back to Chicago.
My father had bought stock ina jelly company at that point.
(19:17):
And so we were in Chicago.
I was taking some art classesand The war was happening and
I knew Roy was in the Navy.
I wanted to be a part of this, , thebiggest thing that's happened in my life.
But the Red Cross ambulance enlistmentage was 17 and I was only 16.
The thing is I'm pretty good with a pen.
So on the enlistment form I justwent ahead and I moved my birth
(19:40):
date back just a little bitand yeah, it's just one number.
And so, voila, there Iwas able to join the Navy.
I went for basic training,had good friends there.
But I came down with the fluthere in 1917, of course, a
terrible year for the flu.
And I was laid up for quite a while.
My friends all deployed without me.
And by the time I got overseas toFrance, the war was about over there.
(20:02):
They were just doing cleanup.
So I still had my ambulance and I rodearound and one of the officers had a a
kid who he kind of needed babysat and soI drove around with him a little while.
We saw the sites and toured aroundFrance and I had a lovely time.
And then I got homesick.
So the enlistment was up and I decided tocome on home to Kansas city at that point.
(20:26):
I'd saved everything that I hadmade while I was in the service.
And that's really how Ibegan my career as an artist.
I, I decided to take that moneyand I was going to stake myself.
I thought I'm going to take this moneyand I'm going to just see what happens.
Can I make it as an artist?
Of course, I've been sending the moneyhome to my father, Elias and Elias and I
(20:46):
have very different feelings about money.
And so Elias felt that it washis obligation to invest my
money for me in companies.
He was refusing to give me my money back.
And I got a little bit crossedwith him and I had to get.
pretty demanding in my lettershome to say, this is my money.
(21:08):
I served I generated this incomeand he will give it to me.
And eventually he gave me aportion of it back so that I
could stake myself as an artist.
, so your father would notgive you your own money
back.
No Elias is.
Track record with money is perhapseven more precarious than my own.
He believes himself tobe a great investor.
(21:29):
And I will say this candidlyElias perhaps never reached the
financial goals he had for himself.
His brother, Robert.
My uncle, Robert very successful.
And part of the reason we moved toMarceline, my uncle, Robert owed a huge
tract of land out there in Marceline.
He'd made his his mark in realestate and was doing quite well.
He married Margaret, my, my veryfavorite aunt, aunt Margaret.
(21:51):
And Elias was always trying tokind of catch up to his brother.
I think my father perhaps enviedRobert a little bit in that respect.
My father was trained as a carpenter,but when we moved to Marceline,
he had this big idea that hewas going to become a farmer.
And one story I will tell about my father,which I think is perhaps a metaphor
for his parenting as well, is that as afarmer, he refused to fertilize the ground
(22:16):
in which he was growing crop becausehe thought it would spoil the ground
he became ill for a time when we were inMarceline and that's how we lost the farm.
We had to auction everything we owned.
You know, I'm I have three brothers,everybody knows about Roy, Herbert
and Raymond were older than Roy andI I'm the youngest of the brothers,
Roy, and then Herbert and Raymond theyworked on the farm with us for years.
(22:38):
But they were grown at that point.
They wanted to be compensated andthey were promised compensation by my
father and he just wouldn't pay them.
So one evening they.
literally snuck out a windowin the middle of the night and
left to go make their living.
They just couldn't surviveunder Elias's roof anymore.
And it was challenging that regard.
So when we, when we were in Marceline,money was tight, of course, but there
(23:01):
was just so many fantastic times there.
And I always, I love toreminisce about Marceline.
And if there's one place in thisworld I could recreate, it would be
Marceline, Missouri at that time.
We moved from there when we lost thefarm, Elias had taken some money and
he'd bought a paper route in Kansas city.
And that's what eventually broughtus over there to Kansas city.
So Elias you had mentioned that hehad bought stock in a jelly company
(23:24):
in the middle of all of that story.
How was that relevant?
Were you trying to tell me that he was aterrible investor or that panned out at
some point?
Oh, the jelly company did not pan out.
Okay,
I mean to say that.
My father, he was an entrepreneur.
I will give him that he was anentrepreneur in the sense that he was
always looking for the next big thing.
(23:44):
And he invested boldly in things.
And he put his back into itwhen he invested in something.
I don't know that he had.
The vision to create the kindsof success he wanted, though.
So, from Marceline, we went tothe paper route, and the paper
route, I will say, was successful.
I will also say that part of thatsuccess is that he had a very good
(24:05):
paper boy who would deliver the papersfor no money at all, and that was me.
Elias would, he would not pay mefor my paper route in the morning.
So I would go out, I woke up at three30 in the morning to do my paper routes.
It was so cold in those Missouri winters.
I will tell you the best Christmas giftI have ever received to this very day
was a new pair of boots for Christmas,just so that my toes would not freeze.
(24:28):
When making that paper route but Elias wasso strange about money, the paper company,
they even offered that if boys wantedto, they could do the evening edition.
They could go out and they couldbuy their own newspapers and they
could make money doing that.
They could deliver them in the evening.
So I took a second route thatwas not under Elias's watch.
And he still, he demanded thatI would give him that money
(24:51):
for him to invest for me.
from you being
ambitious
me being ambitious, . He was a toughtough person to be around at times.
We did not see eye to eye on thingsand who knows, perhaps part of the
way that I am with money now ismaybe a bit of a reaction to the way.
Um, then of course, he hired me to workat the jelly company for a time and
(25:22):
that was That, that was interesting.
I worked at the jelly company a littlebit, didn't care for it too much.
I also had a job briefly working forthe postal service and that was all
right, except for I was nearly blown upat one point working as a postal worker
when somebody sent a bomb via a packageLater, from what I understand, it was
(25:42):
believed to be the mafia had sent it.
It blew up just as Iwas leaving a room too.
But I did survive that and without ascratch really just heard the noise.
But yeah, there were quite a fewadventures even that time of being
17, I'd had quite a few jobs and beenunder Elias's roof enough to know.
A thing or two about what to do andwhat not to do in entrepreneurship.
(26:04):
well, and that is kind of the question.
I wanted to ask you about him becauseas challenging as , living with
your father sounds like it was.
It also seems like there are some goodlessons that came along with the bad.
For example.
It appears to me when you describe him,as putting his back into it and going
all in when he goes all into something.
(26:26):
And it seems like you do the same thing.
I mean, you take some pretty bigrisks and put yourself out there and
hire people before you have money.
It sounds like it, what are some of theother qualities that come to mind about
him that you think that you absorbedboth maybe positive and negative?
Well, and I don't know if I wouldattribute this to him specifically,
(26:47):
but I will say , the family that,that Elias , gave me has been
a huge influence in my life.
Roy, of course, and Iare business partners.
My little sister, Ruthvery dear and close to me.
My uncle Robert became perhaps moreof a supporter than he would have been
because he perhaps saw that I needed someof that support financially primarily
(27:10):
uncle Robert was , a great resourcewhen I moved out to California he
allowed me to stay with him for a while.
But he had some of my family.
Father's tendencies as well.
They could both be quite stubborn.
He and I got into a fight one time aboutwhich road you could take heading out of
California and the fight became so heated.
We were discussing a traffic patternand he became so heated that we didn't
(27:34):
speak to one another for weeks andRoy had to intervene and sort of make
peace between us over that fight,Californians are perhaps particular
about their their roadways, I suppose,
I think so.
There, there is a short aboutthat now in our time that is just
hilarious about that exact concept.
right?
There is.
(27:54):
Yes.
Yeah.
And it's ridiculous and hilarious too.
So I'm not, I'm actuallynot surprised to hear this.
At least maybe I knowthe origin of this now.
So what about Roy?
What kind of guy was Roy?
? Tell me a little bit about
him.
Roy is a quite a few years older than me.
But he he really stepped in to be a fatherfigure in some ways when I was very young.
(28:15):
You know, he was off In the world, as Iwas still a young man there in Marceline
and Ruth was even younger than us when Roywould come home, he had a job at a bank
and he would come home and he would takethat money and he knew that we weren't
going to get a lot of spending money.
And so he would take us to the movies.
He would buy us candy.
He would go for walks with usinto town and was really just a.
(28:38):
a wonderfully supportive pleasant presencein my life when I was very young.
And as I got to be older, hebecame my greatest champion.
Roy and I are close as brotherscan be, which means sure we, we
fight and I'm sure we'll havesome rows going forward as well.
But for our differences,we work very well together.
I think when I first got out thereto California and I let Roy know
(29:01):
that we were going to start, our ownstudio he was he was skeptical of it.
He still had tuberculosis.
He was, , recovering from that.
He needed a lot of time to rest.
And so I said, well, we'll geta studio close to the apartment.
That way you can go home and youcan nap in the evenings or in
the afternoons if you want to.
And I'll come in here and work.
Roy was our business manager though.
(29:22):
He was our camera operatorat Disney brothers.
He was our janitor for a time, , wecouldn't afford new celluloid
sheets for every every cartoon.
So Roy would go in there with intothe sink and he would scrub them
clean when we finished an animationso we could start over again.
He just looked at what I could do andhe believed in me and he saw what I
(29:42):
couldn't do and he filled those gaps.
Incredible.
So lucky to just have that personthat you know you can trust.
Somebody in your family that can pick upthat slack because as you know one person
can accomplish so much but two peoplelike making up the difference for each
other's weaknesses can accomplish what 20
(30:03):
people can accomplish.
Maybe more.
Oh, yes.
Yeah, so celluloid sheet.
I haven't, you just said celluloid sheet.
I have no idea what a celluloid sheet is.
Is this, I don't know if thisis something that you lay across
your bed when you sleep at nightor something you're drawing on.
You could, it wouldn't be very
comfortable though.
That doesn't sound like it.
I'm curious what this whole processlooks like, the animation process.
(30:24):
So maybe we could start there.
What is a celluloid sheet?
One of the earliest innovationswithin animation was this idea that
how do we create the background?
Do we have to draw the backgroundof an image every time, or can
we just draw the character?
That's going to be you know,shifted throughout each image.
To do that, we use clear plasticsheets that we draw and paint onto.
(30:45):
Those are made from celluloid.
So when we're animating, wehave a background image that's
going to be beneath the camera.
And then laid on top of that is aclear piece of plastic or celluloid
with the character drawn onto it.
And when we.
Take the image you can see through theplastic to the background image beneath
and that way you don't have to changethe background every time you're you're
(31:07):
moving the character, so to speak.
So it makes the process a lotquicker, a lot cleaner and the
background image is more stable.
if you are making, let's say you've gotMickey mouse and Mickey mouse is just
going to walk and in the background,there's a picture of a barn and Mickey
mouse is going to walk from one side ofthe barn to the other side of the barn.
, you've got the barn in the backgroundand then on the celluloid sheet,
(31:29):
you draw Mickey mouse and then.
You have another sheet where you havehim moving a little bit and then you have
just a bunch of those one after the other.
Is
that how it works?
Yes I believe you'vedescribed correctly there.
Yes, the the background image of coursedoes have to move if he's walking along,
but we can paint the background and thenmove that beneath the camera as well.
And so the camera is pointing directlyat your drawings and you're just
(31:52):
replacing one drawing after the other.
Wow,
is built so that it takes animage of one frame at a time.
So the camera is set up over, , overthe desk of the cameraman.
He will take the image and thenhe pulls the celluloid sheet off.
He enters the next celluloid sheetunderneath, clicks the camera,
and moves, so on and so forth.
(32:14):
It is A bit of a tediousprocess, for sure.
To look at something like Snow White,we're talking about 250, 000 drawings.
that is unbelievable.
So how many people do you have drawingall day long to prepare the next
piece that you put in front of the
(32:35):
camera?
Well, to get Snow White up and going,we had 750 artists working on that.
That seems like one of thehardest things to convince.
investors to get into it just soundsimpossible what you're describing.
So when the time came for you'rethinking you're going to make Snow
White, you know, from doing all theseshorts that you've done throughout
(32:56):
the years, you know that this is goingto be an absurd number of drawings.
So then you go to the investorsand say, we're going to need.
How much money, how much did you ask for?
the way that I, I factored theoriginal cost of Snow White, was to
take what we were spending on a fiveminute short and then multiply that
(33:17):
to get up to about 85 minutes or so.
So when I did that, the costshould have been 250, 000.
That's what I believed it would cost.
And that was using , our figure fora short and just multiplying it.
What I did not take into account whenI created that initial figure, Was how
much development would happen aroundthe characters and around the process.
(33:43):
In creating a full feature.
I am an innovator in a lot of ways.
I feel one of the first innovations wasto have story artists previously when
animation was done, you had one artistwho would sit down and they would.
Create an animation, start to finish.
We really began segmenting animation sothat it was more of a collaborative art
and having one person whose job was tothink about this as a complete story.
(34:06):
How does this character behave?
What is their role in the story?
What is their objective?
So to speak in the story we had all these.
Things that we had to manage throughoutthe production and those things changed
quite a bit from the start in Snow White.
So we, there was a lot of startingand stopping in Snow White.
There was a lot of reanimating things.
(34:26):
There was a lot that had tohappen to get the picture to
where it's, where it is now.
Those changes balloon thecost quite The total for Snow
White, I had asked for 250, 000.
What we needed to complete it was oneand a half million to get that money.
Roy and I mortgaged our homes.
(34:47):
We put up the studio as collateral.
We had to put everything into this.
So you speak of , my father's tenacityfor really putting himself into it.
And truly that's what we had to do.
We had to bet on ourselves.
But I've always been for bettingon myself and to my credit, that's
been part of this studio success.
, when other folks were taking their moneyand they were going out and studio heads
(35:08):
were buying lavish cars and houses,I never was, went in for any of that.
When folks saw the stock market boomingin the twenties and they wanted to put all
their studio money in there, I never did.
I just always reinvested in myself.
And when the stock marketcrashed, I was the better for it.
Yeah.
The Disney Brothers, we weren't exposedat all when the stock market happened
(35:30):
because we didn't put any money in there.
Every dollar we made wentback into that studio.
I wonder if you look at all of yourfather's flaws, didn't pay you for
your route, , it sounds like he'spractically having you deliver papers in
the freezing cold without proper shoes.
I mean, all the struggle
I wonder if this one thing is worthignoring everything else, because not
(35:55):
everybody is capable of betting it all andgoing in with that level of confidence.
And to say, if I do this, I lose my house.
I lose the studio.
I'm starting from scratch.
I wonder if just that one qualitywas worth all the other bad stuff.
Perhaps.
Yes, it was The experiences with my fatherand also, you know, the experiences I
(36:18):
had gone through in creating the studio.
I had reason to believe thatI was right about stories.
And I say that the wholeCharles mince affair.
Really solidified my belief in myselfthat even if somebody came in and they
tried to take everything from me, thatI had something up my sleeve that I
could produce that would show them all,
(36:40):
When did you feel this confidence?
Cause this confidence is important.
Obviously.
When did you develop this?
Where did it come
from?
well, I'm going to go back a little bitand I'm going to tell you the story of
a little character that people seem tolove quite a bit called Mickey Mouse.
So.
Mickey Mouse, and I'm going tostart a ways back if you'll indulge
me Mickey Mouse came about througha contract dispute, more or less.
(37:05):
So what had happened when we moved, whenI first moved to California, Laugh O
Gram had gone under, we had just finishedthe first short of the Alice series.
I began shopping around the Aliceseries, looking for a distributor.
I found a wonderful woman namedMargaret Winkler Margaret Winkler was a
distributor of a few different animatedcartoon characters and their shorts.
(37:27):
And she was looking for leverageagainst another cartoon Creator that
she had another animation studio andparticularly the creator of the characters
who had become a little bit unwieldy.
So she needed something else more orless as leveraged to keep them in line.
So I wrote to her about , Alice.
And she said, well, sure.
Send me the real, and I'lltake a look at this thing.
(37:49):
I said, absolutely.
I will send you the real.
And I wrote to up back in Kansas city.
Part of the trouble was that the real.
Wasn't quite hours at that point.
A lot had been seized in the bankruptcyas well as that the reel of the film that
we'd done, but we managed to pry it loose.
We sent that to Margaret Winkler andshe said, yes, I will distribute this.
So that was our first big contract.
(38:11):
We actually moved the young lady fromKansas city to come out to California.
Who had played Alice, so she couldcontinue playing Alice for us.
And those films took off a bit there.
When I met Lily, my wife was around thesame time that Margaret got married.
And she married a man named Charles Mintz.
Mintz and I Didn't get along very well.
(38:32):
We had different ideasabout production timelines.
We had different ideas about whatquality was necessary and what the
budget should be to create thattype of quality but by and by we
continued on with these Alice series.
And then Mintz had an opportunitywith a new character called
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
And so we started creatingthis Oswald the Lucky Rabbit,
(38:55):
and it became very successful.
Right around that time, ourcontract was coming up for renewal.
Well, Lily and I, you know, wewere, Still newlyweds in a way,
just a married a little while.
And we sort of thought, well, this isa great chance for a second honeymoon.
We'll go to New York.
I have to renegotiate my contract anyway.
We'll spend some time there.
(39:15):
We'll have a great train ride,and I'm going to get more money.
I'm going to go in, I'm goingto tell Mintz that this is what
the cartoon character needs.
This is what my boys need to make the art.
And this is what I need.
And so I went into that meetingand discovered that Mintz has
secretly sent people to my studioto convince my animators that they
(39:36):
should be working directly for him.
His feeling was that The real talent inthis studio was Abai Works and all these
artists around me, and he was going tojust go ahead and move on with the artists
and had no need to pay a Walt Disney.
What could he possibly contribute?
And it succeeded.
(39:56):
He signed most of my artists awayfrom me, but he couldn't get up.
There were a few artistswho are loyal to me.
Up was one of them and upwas kind of the grand prize.
He could not pull up.
I works away.
When that happened, I was devastatedcoming out of that meeting,
Lily and I got on that train.
We were young.
We had no idea what was going to happen.
We didn't know if I couldkeep the studio together.
(40:18):
Now he didn't own the studio.
He just owned our biggest And at thatpoint, our only character, really
uh, the Alice series were dying downand we were sort of all in on Oswald.
And I was pacing up anddown in that train car.
I was just so upset, and I kept repeatingover and over again, I will never work
for anyone else as long as I live.
(40:40):
Wow.
And I started to sketch just whatsort of character could we have.
And I sketched a mouse that Ithought we should call Mortimer.
But Lily said we needed somethingshorter, it had to have more, more
pluck to it, I believe she said,and we should try Mickey Mouse.
Now, when I got that back to the studio,Ub helped me redesign the character.
(41:02):
He knew that the character wouldneed to be circles, mostly.
If you drew it in circles, youcould drop a quarter on a piece
of paper and trace it to get theexact size of the character's head.
It would speed up the animation.
Wow.
we were still under contract.
We had to do more Oswald cartoons.
So we would go in during the dayand we would work alongside these
other artists who had already agreedthat they didn't need Walt Disney.
(41:23):
They were going to go off with Charlesonce we were, , wrapped on this then
at night um, and I, and a few others,we would come back and we would work
on this new Mickey Mouse character.
And we did a few animationsthat were all right.
We did one called playing crazy gallopinggroucho that used Mickey mouse and
they were fine, but they were just,they weren't really anything different.
(41:44):
It was what we'd already done with Oswald.
We were more or less justchanging the ears and the
tail and then running with it.
Then I saw a film called the jazz singer.
And when I saw the jazzsinger, I knew Mickey mouse.
He had to be different.
We needed to create a sound cartoonand we would have sound that would
run in sync with the animation.
(42:05):
There'd be music, there'd besound effects voices eventually.
It would be a new way to tell a story.
So we went ahead and we created thisanimation and then We brought the boys
into the studio at night and we hadtheir wives come out and we projected it
on the screen and we played everythinglive live music, live sound effects.
(42:26):
It was one of the, those revelatoryexperiences in my life, seeing
this thing come alive on thescreen and we knew this is it.
This will change cartoons.
We've got to go all in on this.
So we took everything we had atthat point, all of the money, and
we were going to put it toward thisnew cartoon called Steamboat Willie.
(42:46):
Now, the orchestras at that point,all the musicians, again, animations,
mostly New York based, all thegood musicians are in New York.
So I had to go to New York,which I did not care for.
I don't care for being away fromLily very long, and I really don't
care much for big cities in general.
I'm a country boy at heart.
So I went and I stayed in New Yorkand we met with the the musicians and
(43:08):
the conductor kept playing it and thetiming was wrong over and over again.
It just was not timing out.
And finally we had this idea to add.
A little bouncing ball at the bottomof the film strip so that the conductor
could keep time with the film.
And that worked.
And of course the rest is history.
(43:29):
We put Steamboat Willie out there andit, well, it changed everything for us.
When you have time go to the web andlook up Oswald the lucky rabbit, and
then compare him to Mickey mouse.
It is stunning how similar the twoof these are when I listened to wall,
I'm inspired because he does theone thing that very few people do.
(43:51):
He believes in himself allthe way, but instead of just
saying it, then he acts on it.
And because of that, people everywhereknow his name and they always will.
In the next episode, he's going to talkabout his falling out with Eyeworks his
plan to revolutionize the industry andthe seven academy awards he's already won.
(44:13):
Which he doesn't know this yet willeventually become a record setting.
22 before his death.
I'm glad you're enjoying this podcast.
And if you haven't yet subscribednow, and we'll see you at the next
episode of the calling historypodcast with part two of Walt Disney.
Um, Tony Dean, and today we'll be callinghistory to speak with Walt Disney.
He'll be answering our call on
february 24th, 1939.
The day after winning theacademy award for snow white.
If you're young enough, you mightnot even know that Disney world
and all these wonderful Disneymovies all started because of one
(00:49):
extraordinary man named Walt Disney.
Despite the fact that theDisney corporation is $175
billion entertainment, behemoth.
Well, Disney was a terrible businessman.
And in fact, he lost the rights tothe first draft of Mickey mouse, which
was actually a rabbit named Oswald.
(01:10):
But despite his shortcomings, WaltDisney was a visionary, able to
tell stories that would bring simpledrawings on a piece of paper to life.
He was a man that believed in himselfcompletely and would bet it all to
create something truly magnificent.
He knew that if the work was good, Itwould pave the way to future success that
(01:32):
would allow him to tell more stories,stories that to this day, withstand the
wear of time, giving us unforgettablecharacters that allow us to dream.
Explore.
And sometimes even believe in magic,ladies and gentlemen, fellow history,
lovers, and newspaper boys everywhere.
I give you Walt Disney.
(01:54):
Hello, is that you,
Mr.
Disney?
Hello there.
Yes, this is me.
Sir, I am thrilled to bespeaking with you today.
My name is Tony Dean, and I'm talking toyou from the future, in the 21st century.
The device that you're holdingis called a smartphone.
It is similar to the telephones of yourtime, but it also has Enough technology
(02:15):
in it to do in a day what might takeyou months or sometimes even years.
But more importantly, it allows us tospeak as if you and I were sitting in
the same room together, and it allowsme to share a record of our conversation
with people around the world so thatthey can hear your amazing story.
And sir, I was hoping that I could ask yousome questions today, but before I do, I
(02:36):
understand this is a strange introduction.
Are there any questions thatI can answer for you first?
Oh, not yet.
I'm just, I'm enjoying thisdevice as you'll hear from me.
I am always looking at thecutting edge technologies that can
change the ways we tell stories.
Yeah, it seems that technology was areally important part of your life,
and I think if you were to hop into mytime for two seconds, you'd be so happy
(02:59):
and overwhelmed and overjoyed becausethere'd be no end to what you could
do with the imagination that you have.
So I'm curious, whatis it about technology?
, what caused you to jumpso far ahead of everybody
else?
Well, as one of my animators, WardKimball will say of me I've never
really set out to make money and that'sperhaps the secret of my success.
(03:21):
I have always been first and foremostconcerned with the quality of my work how
we can create the best picture possible.
And oftentimes creating the best pictureinvolves not only just recruiting the
best artists that you can find, whichI have is involves going out there and
figuring out different ways to actuallycreate the stories and investing in those
opportunities, whether that be technology,whether that be training whether that be
(03:44):
just finding the right story to tell andgoing out and purchasing those things.
So I've had fantasticsuccess, not looking at the.
The price tag on things, but just lookingat what we need to tell the best story.
As my brother, Roy will tell youhappily, I am not a great businessman
and you'll, you may hear somethings that illustrate that point.
(04:05):
But I do think I'm a great storytellerand finding the right people to help
me tell my stories has been a partof that journey, but finding the
right technologies to tell thosestories has been the other part.
Well, it's good that you were able tosurround yourself with people that could
fill in the business side of the equation.
Because , if you were to go into aninvestor presentation with a bunch
(04:29):
of people wanting to spend moneyand tell them a story about, Hey,
look, I'm not worried about money.
I'm just going to get it right.
You'd never would havefound a single investor.
I'm guessing.
Oh no.
And, and, uh, I've had some experiencetrying to raise funds for my films.
And frankly, if investors were tolook back at my track record they
might not be too eager to investwith me based on what happened
with Laugh O Gram and other places.
(04:50):
But the product speaks for itself,and we've been very fortunate that in
working with, , Bank of America, as weproduce Snow White, that we were able to
build faith even when we were spending awhole lot more money than anyone thought
we could or should on the production.
Tell me when you said theLaugh O Gram, tell me a little
(05:11):
bit about that.
Oh, sure.
Laugh o gram was, well, no, itwasn't quite my first company.
My first company I startedwith my dear friend of iWorks.
We were working together at acompany called Pestman Rubin.
And we decided that we shouldgo into business together.
We thought we would be oneof those great companies that
would stand the test of time.
And instead we folded after a month.
(05:31):
But that very first company wehad was called iWorks Disney.
Now I'm a big fan ofusing my name on things.
I like to take credit whereI feel credit is due to me.
But in that one instance, I realizedif we called ourselves Disney eyeworks,
people were going to think we wereoptometrists rather than artists.
So in that one instance, I letof his name go before mine.
(05:52):
But that company, it didn't pan out.
So we decided further along Iknew I wanted to start something
bigger and something real.
And I really wanted to getinto this new animation thing.
I'd seen a few cartoons.
I had read every book on the subject thatexisted, which was just one at that point.
But I knew I could make a goof it with a company like that.
(06:12):
And so, when I was living in Kansascity, to start Laugh O Gram Studios.
We worked with a local theater owner,and I convinced him that we were going
to get some great animators together,and we were going to make these
animated shorts for his movie theaterchain, the Newman movie theater chain.
And I was very proud and speaking of mybusiness acumen, I went in, I met with
(06:33):
him in the theater and my friend Carlhad helped arrange this meeting and I
went in and he's, he was interested inthe idea of having these cartoons he
could show before his feature films.
And he asked me what.
What it would cost, what I would chargehim, and I was so flabbergasted that
he was interested in working with meand that my company was going to sell
something that I quoted him at theproduction cost, forgetting to factor
(06:58):
in any profit at all, but the deal wasdone, so we had to move forward with it.
I convinced some local business owners,some family friends to invest in me.
And I raised 15, 000.
We had our own studio space.
We actually had our owncamera in that studio space.
And I went around and I hired somefellows that I knew were great artists.
Some of whom for instance, thatI'd worked with over at the
(07:19):
Pestman Rubin advertising firm.
And we were going to makethese animated shorts.
Of course we didn't haveany money for intellectual.
Property, I guess you might say.
So we had to come up withstories that were uh, free.
Uh, So we looked at stories like themusicians of Bremen and we looked at
stories like Little Red Riding Hoodthat we could animate pretty cheaply.
(07:40):
So that was our goal was to sit outthere and animate these these short
films to show before the featuresand we were having a fantastic time.
, I never really spent awhole lot of time in school.
Even as a young man, my, my time inschool was sort of, Interrupted by
family business and other concerns.
So for me, when I hear fellows talk aboutthe time they spent in college and being
(08:01):
in a fraternity or what have you, LaughO Gram was really that time for me, I was
great friends with everyone in the studio.
We, We had a spectacular time.
We would go out and we would do ourlittle animated shorts, but we also
would do some live action things.
One time we were doing anadvertisement for a Insurance firm
and there had been a car accident,but we had our press credentials.
(08:21):
So we went over and we got in the carafter the folks had already cleared out
in the accident was cleaned up a littlebit in terms of people being moved away.
We just jumped in and took somephotographs and some video that we
could use for our insurance commercial.
Of an actual car
of an actual car crash.
Yes.
It was not a terrible car crash.
It's a little fender bender, but itprovided us with an opportunity to
get some perhaps practical effectsthat didn't cost us any money.
(08:45):
So
Yeah, you didn't have to
stage
exactly we just jumped right in and wehad a blast with the thing in terms of
being out there and making movies, butthat business part was really the, the
Achilles heel, if you will of my business.
Sweet.
didn't know what it wasthat we were getting into.
We knew we wanted to make animationbut to be honest, we weren't even
sure how to do that at times.
(09:08):
With the success I've had, peopleoftentimes are giving me credit
as being the father of animation.
And truly I jumped into this gamelate with Laugh O Gram, and I really
believe when Laugh O Gram collapsed,I thought part of the problem was that
I had gotten to animation too late.
I thought the Fleishers havealready got this thing and I'm
just getting in the game too lateand it's not going to work out.
(09:29):
When I left Missouri, my planwas to get to California and
be an actor at that point.
I was actually giving up the ideathat I needed to be an animator.
Of course, I'm very grateful that I cameback around to that, but Laugh o gram
was a fantastic learning experience forme when the business started to falter
(09:50):
and it faltered for a few reasons.
One was generally my perhapsinattentiveness to the business
aspects of the business.
I had also hired a sales manager, a mannamed Leslie Macy and Leslie's job was
to go out there and drum up business.
Now this is of course, SnowWhite being our first feature.
We.
We're looking at just shorts, things toshow before the animated productions, and
(10:13):
a lot of that related to advertisementsand what you might call industry reels.
So he went out to New York.
We paid plenty of money for him togo out to New York, put him up in
a nice hotel, and he was our salesmanager, and he made a big sale.
He had a huge contract that he gotwith the Pictorial Clubs, and we
were supposed to create, I believe,around 17 cartoons for them.
(10:35):
And he asked for a deposit.
of, I believe it was around 200.
So it was almost nothing in termsof the down payment that we are
going to get on these things.
And the rest was to be deliveredupon completion of all the films.
So we were going to extend ourselvesto create all these films and then
they were going to pay us at the end.
So we, Found more money.
(10:56):
you remember what that dollar amount was?
We were supposed to get 11, 000 total.
Which is a fantastic sum.
I mean, that it would haveset us up quite nicely.
With that, had we gotten it as an advancedpayment, or even if we had gotten it at
the end of things, we would have beenokay, but what happened was that pictorial
folded in the middle of animation, theywent bankrupt And Leslie left after
(11:20):
making that fantastic deal for us.
He left I was in such debt.
I gave up my apartment.
I was sleeping on the floor of the studio.
I bathed at a bus station once a week.
I was eating pork and beans daily, which.
Frankly, I didn't mind pork andbeans are my very favorite meal,
but it was tough times for sure.
I remember one time one of thecreditors, he came, he kept coming
(11:43):
to the door and he would knock atthe door and I would answer and he
would say, excuse me, is there a Mr.
Dinsey here?
And there I would be, I didn't havea penny to my name, and I would
just say to him, You know what, I'mvery sorry, but there is no one by
the name of Dinsey who works here.
Ha.
Eventually, one of the days he showed up,he knocked at the door, and I answered.
(12:04):
And I was speaking to him,explaining, of course, Mr.
Dinsey hadn't arrived yet.
And one of my friendsyelled out, Hey, Walt!
And he caught on, hesaid, Are you Walt Disney?
I said, Yes.
It's Walt Disney.
There is no one named Dinsey.
I am Walt Disney.
Well, then he had me and he servedme with my papers and on from there.
(12:25):
But it was it was again, it wasa mixed feeling for the times.
It was, Such great fun working with thoseyoung men, and perhaps in a way that I've
lost now, I was truly their colleagueas opposed to their boss at that time.
And so the camaraderie I felt workingthere at Laugh O Gram with Ub and
(12:46):
Hugh and the other fellows, itwas just something I miss greatly.
Well, that is a
Is that your favorite time ofeverything up to this point so far?
great question.
I would say it is my, it is afond memory for the camaraderie.
Being able to make.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves hasreally been the highlight of my career.
(13:07):
It's been stressful,there's no doubt about that.
We have been through the ringer inmaking this picture, but to be able
to tell a story exactly the way thatI want to tell it has been the most
gratifying artistic experience of my life.
Let's talk about Snow White andthe Seven Dwarfs for a minute.
So, and, let's get everybodycaught up on, like, the timeline.
My understanding, yesterday was apretty important day for Snow White
(13:30):
and the Seven
It was, yes, we were given an AcademyAward Miss Shirley Temple presented it
to me, it was for a special achievement.
Now I'm very grateful for thataward, I think it's a very nice
trophy and it's it's wonderfulto be recognized in that way.
I am still convinced that SnowWhite should have won Best Picture.
I think in our time a lot ofpeople even agree with that now to
(13:51):
be quite honest with
thank you, I'm happy to hear that.
Tell me about the actual award.
, I saw some pictures of this recently.
The award's a little bitdifferent than the other
Academy Awards, isn't it?
It is, yes, there's one fullsized Oscar and then there's
seven little Oscars next to it.
For each of the
For
each of the dwarves.
Are they named?
Do they look different?
Or did they all look
like the same
(14:12):
They all look like the same statue, butyes, they're just yeah, representationally
to, to count up the dwarves.
I wonder in the future if they're goingto do that for all the other shows, you
know, depending on how many actors theygot three or four surrounding them.
Oh, don't give them any ideas there.
Yeah, no kidding.
That's the last thing they need.
So I'm very interested insomething you said a while back
ago, and you had said that hereyou are, , starting this company.
(14:36):
And you felt like you had come intothe animation business too late.
I mean, that's, that is stunning to me.
So here you are with all of thistalent and all of this creativity,
and you just felt like it was over,like the best had already happened
for
I did, yes coming in whenI did I, the Fleishers had a
great running start ahead of me.
(14:57):
And a lot of what we were doing inthose early days with Laffagram, , we
did these little pictures that ormore advertisements things like
Tommy Tucker's tooth and so on.
Where we really found our footingwas right as Laffagram was
starting to collapse, and thatwas with the Alice Comedies.
Now the Alice Comedieswe're going to combine.
live action and animation.
(15:17):
And I did that for two reasons.
One, I thought we couldcreate fantastic stories.
The other is that a live actor is muchcheaper to animate than drawn animation.
So there was some cost savings there.
That idea did not come tome in a dream or anything.
It came to me, frankly, from watchingwhat the Fleishers were doing.
The Fleishers had a very successfulseries called Out of the Inkwell and Out
(15:38):
of the Inkwell was just that a cartooncharacter inhabiting the real world.
We flipped that.
So we put the human characterin the animated world with ours.
But yes they had great successin animation at that point.
It was a New York industry.
It wasn't something that was reallybeing done as much in California.
So I thought I was in thewrong place for one thing.
(15:59):
I was in Missouri, Kansas City, Missouri.
This isn't where animation is happening.
It's happening in New York.
And I thought with the advancementsthey had already made and with their
characters already gaining greatpopularity Whether I could actually catch
up with them was not guaranteed for sure.
the record.
Missouri hasn't made any ground asfar as being the headquarters of
(16:20):
animation in the world, nothing's
changed there.
Well, perhaps if I'dmoved back, but yes um,
Yeah, probably.
So , if that's the case, and NewYork is the place to be, why did
you eventually move to California?
I don't
understand that.
so the move was inspired by a few things.
One was that I thought Iwas going to be an actor.
So when a Laugh O Gram folded, II, of course I lost a lot in the
(16:45):
bankruptcy proceedings and so on,but I managed to hold onto my camera.
And so I went into town, found therichest neighborhood in Kansas city.
And I found somebody who wanteda film done of their child.
So they wanted a home movieto be filmed professionally.
So I went and I did that.
I charged them when Icould get them to pay.
And then I sold the camera for moremoney than I'd paid for it to begin with.
(17:07):
And I took all the money and I bought onefirst class train ticket to California.
Now I chose California for thefilm industry and also because.
I had a free place to stay.
My, my big brother, Roy hadgone West years earlier.
he served in the Navy and laterwas diagnosed with tuberculosis.
They determined that the only placehe could have I'm going to talk a
(17:29):
little bit about what happened to myuncle Robert when he was in the Navy.
And so, for that reason, it becamethe Veterans Administration's
responsibility for the treatment.
There was a respite home inCalifornia, and Roy was sent there.
And I crashed at the respite home for alittle bit, perhaps not entirely legally.
And my uncle Robert was alsoout that way, and so I stayed
with my uncle Robert for a bit.
Well, he was out there and I was goingtry just making it in the movies.
(17:52):
I had always loved the movies.
I was a huge Charlie Chaplin fan.
I still am.
And so I thought, you know, I'llsneak onto movie sets for my Laugh
O Gram days when we were doing thosevideos, we had press credentials.
I didn't throw them out.
So I took my Kansas city press credentialsand when I got to California, I would
use them to get onto movie lots and Iwould just go and watch them make movies.
(18:13):
Just prowling around, watchingdirectors, seeing how they talk to
their actors, how they managed things.
I did get cast in one movie.
I was , an avid horseback rider for mydays growing up on the farm in Marceline.
And so I got casted a film where theyneeded somebody who could ride a horse.
And of course.
Not many rainy days here in Los Angeles.
(18:35):
But the one day I was hired to ridewas the one day it rained and then
they didn't call me for the reshoot.
And that was the end of myillustrious acting career.
Wow.
That did not end as you had
planned.
not at all.
You'd mentioned uh, Roy served in theNavy and did you serve in the military?
I was a member of the RedCross Ambulance Service.
(18:57):
so the family we lived in Marcelineand that was my favorite place
in the whole world is still tothis day, Marceline, Missouri.
I just have so manyfantastic memories of that.
But we later , we moved to KansasCity for a while and we had a paper
route and then we moved to Chicago.
I was born in Chicago.
We moved back to Chicago.
My father had bought stock ina jelly company at that point.
(19:17):
And so we were in Chicago.
I was taking some art classesand The war was happening and
I knew Roy was in the Navy.
I wanted to be a part of this, , thebiggest thing that's happened in my life.
But the Red Cross ambulance enlistmentage was 17 and I was only 16.
The thing is I'm pretty good with a pen.
So on the enlistment form I justwent ahead and I moved my birth
(19:40):
date back just a little bitand yeah, it's just one number.
And so, voila, there Iwas able to join the Navy.
I went for basic training,had good friends there.
But I came down with the fluthere in 1917, of course, a
terrible year for the flu.
And I was laid up for quite a while.
My friends all deployed without me.
And by the time I got overseas toFrance, the war was about over there.
(20:02):
They were just doing cleanup.
So I still had my ambulance and I rodearound and one of the officers had a a
kid who he kind of needed babysat and soI drove around with him a little while.
We saw the sites and toured aroundFrance and I had a lovely time.
And then I got homesick.
So the enlistment was up and I decided tocome on home to Kansas city at that point.
(20:26):
I'd saved everything that I hadmade while I was in the service.
And that's really how Ibegan my career as an artist.
I, I decided to take that moneyand I was going to stake myself.
I thought I'm going to take this moneyand I'm going to just see what happens.
Can I make it as an artist?
Of course, I've been sending the moneyhome to my father, Elias and Elias and I
(20:46):
have very different feelings about money.
And so Elias felt that it washis obligation to invest my
money for me in companies.
He was refusing to give me my money back.
And I got a little bit crossedwith him and I had to get.
pretty demanding in my lettershome to say, this is my money.
(21:08):
I served I generated this incomeand he will give it to me.
And eventually he gave me aportion of it back so that I
could stake myself as an artist.
, so your father would notgive you your own money
back.
No Elias is.
Track record with money is perhapseven more precarious than my own.
He believes himself tobe a great investor.
(21:29):
And I will say this candidlyElias perhaps never reached the
financial goals he had for himself.
His brother, Robert.
My uncle, Robert very successful.
And part of the reason we moved toMarceline, my uncle, Robert owed a huge
tract of land out there in Marceline.
He'd made his his mark in realestate and was doing quite well.
He married Margaret, my, my veryfavorite aunt, aunt Margaret.
(21:51):
And Elias was always trying tokind of catch up to his brother.
I think my father perhaps enviedRobert a little bit in that respect.
My father was trained as a carpenter,but when we moved to Marceline,
he had this big idea that hewas going to become a farmer.
And one story I will tell about my father,which I think is perhaps a metaphor
for his parenting as well, is that as afarmer, he refused to fertilize the ground
(22:16):
in which he was growing crop becausehe thought it would spoil the ground
he became ill for a time when we were inMarceline and that's how we lost the farm.
We had to auction everything we owned.
You know, I'm I have three brothers,everybody knows about Roy, Herbert
and Raymond were older than Roy andI I'm the youngest of the brothers,
Roy, and then Herbert and Raymond theyworked on the farm with us for years.
(22:38):
But they were grown at that point.
They wanted to be compensated andthey were promised compensation by my
father and he just wouldn't pay them.
So one evening they.
literally snuck out a windowin the middle of the night and
left to go make their living.
They just couldn't surviveunder Elias's roof anymore.
And it was challenging that regard.
So when we, when we were in Marceline,money was tight, of course, but there
(23:01):
was just so many fantastic times there.
And I always, I love toreminisce about Marceline.
And if there's one place in thisworld I could recreate, it would be
Marceline, Missouri at that time.
We moved from there when we lost thefarm, Elias had taken some money and
he'd bought a paper route in Kansas city.
And that's what eventually broughtus over there to Kansas city.
So Elias you had mentioned that hehad bought stock in a jelly company
(23:24):
in the middle of all of that story.
How was that relevant?
Were you trying to tell me that he was aterrible investor or that panned out at
some point?
Oh, the jelly company did not pan out.
Okay,
I mean to say that.
My father, he was an entrepreneur.
I will give him that he was anentrepreneur in the sense that he was
always looking for the next big thing.
(23:44):
And he invested boldly in things.
And he put his back into itwhen he invested in something.
I don't know that he had.
The vision to create the kindsof success he wanted, though.
So, from Marceline, we went tothe paper route, and the paper
route, I will say, was successful.
I will also say that part of thatsuccess is that he had a very good
(24:05):
paper boy who would deliver the papersfor no money at all, and that was me.
Elias would, he would not pay mefor my paper route in the morning.
So I would go out, I woke up at three30 in the morning to do my paper routes.
It was so cold in those Missouri winters.
I will tell you the best Christmas giftI have ever received to this very day
was a new pair of boots for Christmas,just so that my toes would not freeze.
(24:28):
When making that paper route but Elias wasso strange about money, the paper company,
they even offered that if boys wantedto, they could do the evening edition.
They could go out and they couldbuy their own newspapers and they
could make money doing that.
They could deliver them in the evening.
So I took a second route thatwas not under Elias's watch.
And he still, he demanded thatI would give him that money
(24:51):
for him to invest for me.
from you being
ambitious
me being ambitious, . He was a toughtough person to be around at times.
We did not see eye to eye on thingsand who knows, perhaps part of the
way that I am with money now ismaybe a bit of a reaction to the way.
Um, then of course, he hired me to workat the jelly company for a time and
(25:22):
that was That, that was interesting.
I worked at the jelly company a littlebit, didn't care for it too much.
I also had a job briefly working forthe postal service and that was all
right, except for I was nearly blown upat one point working as a postal worker
when somebody sent a bomb via a packageLater, from what I understand, it was
(25:42):
believed to be the mafia had sent it.
It blew up just as Iwas leaving a room too.
But I did survive that and without ascratch really just heard the noise.
But yeah, there were quite a fewadventures even that time of being
17, I'd had quite a few jobs and beenunder Elias's roof enough to know.
A thing or two about what to do andwhat not to do in entrepreneurship.
(26:04):
well, and that is kind of the question.
I wanted to ask you about him becauseas challenging as , living with
your father sounds like it was.
It also seems like there are some goodlessons that came along with the bad.
For example.
It appears to me when you describe him,as putting his back into it and going
all in when he goes all into something.
(26:26):
And it seems like you do the same thing.
I mean, you take some pretty bigrisks and put yourself out there and
hire people before you have money.
It sounds like it, what are some of theother qualities that come to mind about
him that you think that you absorbedboth maybe positive and negative?
Well, and I don't know if I wouldattribute this to him specifically,
(26:47):
but I will say , the family that,that Elias , gave me has been
a huge influence in my life.
Roy, of course, and Iare business partners.
My little sister, Ruthvery dear and close to me.
My uncle Robert became perhaps moreof a supporter than he would have been
because he perhaps saw that I needed someof that support financially primarily
(27:10):
uncle Robert was , a great resourcewhen I moved out to California he
allowed me to stay with him for a while.
But he had some of my family.
Father's tendencies as well.
They could both be quite stubborn.
He and I got into a fight one time aboutwhich road you could take heading out of
California and the fight became so heated.
We were discussing a traffic patternand he became so heated that we didn't
(27:34):
speak to one another for weeks andRoy had to intervene and sort of make
peace between us over that fight,Californians are perhaps particular
about their their roadways, I suppose,
I think so.
There, there is a short aboutthat now in our time that is just
hilarious about that exact concept.
right?
There is.
(27:54):
Yes.
Yeah.
And it's ridiculous and hilarious too.
So I'm not, I'm actuallynot surprised to hear this.
At least maybe I knowthe origin of this now.
So what about Roy?
What kind of guy was Roy?
? Tell me a little bit about
him.
Roy is a quite a few years older than me.
But he he really stepped in to be a fatherfigure in some ways when I was very young.
(28:15):
You know, he was off In the world, as Iwas still a young man there in Marceline
and Ruth was even younger than us when Roywould come home, he had a job at a bank
and he would come home and he would takethat money and he knew that we weren't
going to get a lot of spending money.
And so he would take us to the movies.
He would buy us candy.
He would go for walks with usinto town and was really just a.
(28:38):
a wonderfully supportive pleasant presencein my life when I was very young.
And as I got to be older, hebecame my greatest champion.
Roy and I are close as brotherscan be, which means sure we, we
fight and I'm sure we'll havesome rows going forward as well.
But for our differences,we work very well together.
I think when I first got out thereto California and I let Roy know
(29:01):
that we were going to start, our ownstudio he was he was skeptical of it.
He still had tuberculosis.
He was, , recovering from that.
He needed a lot of time to rest.
And so I said, well, we'll geta studio close to the apartment.
That way you can go home and youcan nap in the evenings or in
the afternoons if you want to.
And I'll come in here and work.
Roy was our business manager though.
(29:22):
He was our camera operatorat Disney brothers.
He was our janitor for a time, , wecouldn't afford new celluloid
sheets for every every cartoon.
So Roy would go in there with intothe sink and he would scrub them
clean when we finished an animationso we could start over again.
He just looked at what I could do andhe believed in me and he saw what I
(29:42):
couldn't do and he filled those gaps.
Incredible.
So lucky to just have that personthat you know you can trust.
Somebody in your family that can pick upthat slack because as you know one person
can accomplish so much but two peoplelike making up the difference for each
other's weaknesses can accomplish what 20
(30:03):
people can accomplish.
Maybe more.
Oh, yes.
Yeah, so celluloid sheet.
I haven't, you just said celluloid sheet.
I have no idea what a celluloid sheet is.
Is this, I don't know if thisis something that you lay across
your bed when you sleep at nightor something you're drawing on.
You could, it wouldn't be very
comfortable though.
That doesn't sound like it.
I'm curious what this whole processlooks like, the animation process.
(30:24):
So maybe we could start there.
What is a celluloid sheet?
One of the earliest innovationswithin animation was this idea that
how do we create the background?
Do we have to draw the backgroundof an image every time, or can
we just draw the character?
That's going to be you know,shifted throughout each image.
To do that, we use clear plasticsheets that we draw and paint onto.
(30:45):
Those are made from celluloid.
So when we're animating, wehave a background image that's
going to be beneath the camera.
And then laid on top of that is aclear piece of plastic or celluloid
with the character drawn onto it.
And when we.
Take the image you can see through theplastic to the background image beneath
and that way you don't have to changethe background every time you're you're
(31:07):
moving the character, so to speak.
So it makes the process a lotquicker, a lot cleaner and the
background image is more stable.
if you are making, let's say you've gotMickey mouse and Mickey mouse is just
going to walk and in the background,there's a picture of a barn and Mickey
mouse is going to walk from one side ofthe barn to the other side of the barn.
, you've got the barn in the backgroundand then on the celluloid sheet,
(31:29):
you draw Mickey mouse and then.
You have another sheet where you havehim moving a little bit and then you have
just a bunch of those one after the other.
Is
that how it works?
Yes I believe you'vedescribed correctly there.
Yes, the the background image of coursedoes have to move if he's walking along,
but we can paint the background and thenmove that beneath the camera as well.
And so the camera is pointing directlyat your drawings and you're just
(31:52):
replacing one drawing after the other.
Wow,
is built so that it takes animage of one frame at a time.
So the camera is set up over, , overthe desk of the cameraman.
He will take the image and thenhe pulls the celluloid sheet off.
He enters the next celluloid sheetunderneath, clicks the camera,
and moves, so on and so forth.
(32:14):
It is A bit of a tediousprocess, for sure.
To look at something like Snow White,we're talking about 250, 000 drawings.
that is unbelievable.
So how many people do you have drawingall day long to prepare the next
piece that you put in front of the
(32:35):
camera?
Well, to get Snow White up and going,we had 750 artists working on that.
That seems like one of thehardest things to convince.
investors to get into it just soundsimpossible what you're describing.
So when the time came for you'rethinking you're going to make Snow
White, you know, from doing all theseshorts that you've done throughout
(32:56):
the years, you know that this is goingto be an absurd number of drawings.
So then you go to the investorsand say, we're going to need.
How much money, how much did you ask for?
the way that I, I factored theoriginal cost of Snow White, was to
take what we were spending on a fiveminute short and then multiply that
(33:17):
to get up to about 85 minutes or so.
So when I did that, the costshould have been 250, 000.
That's what I believed it would cost.
And that was using , our figure fora short and just multiplying it.
What I did not take into account whenI created that initial figure, Was how
much development would happen aroundthe characters and around the process.
(33:43):
In creating a full feature.
I am an innovator in a lot of ways.
I feel one of the first innovations wasto have story artists previously when
animation was done, you had one artistwho would sit down and they would.
Create an animation, start to finish.
We really began segmenting animation sothat it was more of a collaborative art
and having one person whose job was tothink about this as a complete story.
(34:06):
How does this character behave?
What is their role in the story?
What is their objective?
So to speak in the story we had all these.
Things that we had to manage throughoutthe production and those things changed
quite a bit from the start in Snow White.
So we, there was a lot of startingand stopping in Snow White.
There was a lot of reanimating things.
(34:26):
There was a lot that had tohappen to get the picture to
where it's, where it is now.
Those changes balloon thecost quite The total for Snow
White, I had asked for 250, 000.
What we needed to complete it was oneand a half million to get that money.
Roy and I mortgaged our homes.
(34:47):
We put up the studio as collateral.
We had to put everything into this.
So you speak of , my father's tenacityfor really putting himself into it.
And truly that's what we had to do.
We had to bet on ourselves.
But I've always been for bettingon myself and to my credit, that's
been part of this studio success.
, when other folks were taking their moneyand they were going out and studio heads
(35:08):
were buying lavish cars and houses,I never was, went in for any of that.
When folks saw the stock market boomingin the twenties and they wanted to put all
their studio money in there, I never did.
I just always reinvested in myself.
And when the stock marketcrashed, I was the better for it.
Yeah.
The Disney Brothers, we weren't exposedat all when the stock market happened
(35:30):
because we didn't put any money in there.
Every dollar we made wentback into that studio.
I wonder if you look at all of yourfather's flaws, didn't pay you for
your route, , it sounds like he'spractically having you deliver papers in
the freezing cold without proper shoes.
I mean, all the struggle
I wonder if this one thing is worthignoring everything else, because not
(35:55):
everybody is capable of betting it all andgoing in with that level of confidence.
And to say, if I do this, I lose my house.
I lose the studio.
I'm starting from scratch.
I wonder if just that one qualitywas worth all the other bad stuff.
Perhaps.
Yes, it was The experiences with my fatherand also, you know, the experiences I
(36:18):
had gone through in creating the studio.
I had reason to believe thatI was right about stories.
And I say that the wholeCharles mince affair.
Really solidified my belief in myselfthat even if somebody came in and they
tried to take everything from me, thatI had something up my sleeve that I
could produce that would show them all,
(36:40):
When did you feel this confidence?
Cause this confidence is important.
Obviously.
When did you develop this?
Where did it come
from?
well, I'm going to go back a little bitand I'm going to tell you the story of
a little character that people seem tolove quite a bit called Mickey Mouse.
So.
Mickey Mouse, and I'm going tostart a ways back if you'll indulge
me Mickey Mouse came about througha contract dispute, more or less.
(37:05):
So what had happened when we moved, whenI first moved to California, Laugh O
Gram had gone under, we had just finishedthe first short of the Alice series.
I began shopping around the Aliceseries, looking for a distributor.
I found a wonderful woman namedMargaret Winkler Margaret Winkler was a
distributor of a few different animatedcartoon characters and their shorts.
(37:27):
And she was looking for leverageagainst another cartoon Creator that
she had another animation studio andparticularly the creator of the characters
who had become a little bit unwieldy.
So she needed something else more orless as leveraged to keep them in line.
So I wrote to her about , Alice.
And she said, well, sure.
Send me the real, and I'lltake a look at this thing.
(37:49):
I said, absolutely.
I will send you the real.
And I wrote to up back in Kansas city.
Part of the trouble was that the real.
Wasn't quite hours at that point.
A lot had been seized in the bankruptcyas well as that the reel of the film that
we'd done, but we managed to pry it loose.
We sent that to Margaret Winkler andshe said, yes, I will distribute this.
So that was our first big contract.
(38:11):
We actually moved the young lady fromKansas city to come out to California.
Who had played Alice, so she couldcontinue playing Alice for us.
And those films took off a bit there.
When I met Lily, my wife was around thesame time that Margaret got married.
And she married a man named Charles Mintz.
Mintz and I Didn't get along very well.
(38:32):
We had different ideasabout production timelines.
We had different ideas about whatquality was necessary and what the
budget should be to create thattype of quality but by and by we
continued on with these Alice series.
And then Mintz had an opportunitywith a new character called
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
And so we started creatingthis Oswald the Lucky Rabbit,
(38:55):
and it became very successful.
Right around that time, ourcontract was coming up for renewal.
Well, Lily and I, you know, wewere, Still newlyweds in a way,
just a married a little while.
And we sort of thought, well, this isa great chance for a second honeymoon.
We'll go to New York.
I have to renegotiate my contract anyway.
We'll spend some time there.
(39:15):
We'll have a great train ride,and I'm going to get more money.
I'm going to go in, I'm goingto tell Mintz that this is what
the cartoon character needs.
This is what my boys need to make the art.
And this is what I need.
And so I went into that meetingand discovered that Mintz has
secretly sent people to my studioto convince my animators that they
(39:36):
should be working directly for him.
His feeling was that The real talent inthis studio was Abai Works and all these
artists around me, and he was going tojust go ahead and move on with the artists
and had no need to pay a Walt Disney.
What could he possibly contribute?
And it succeeded.
(39:56):
He signed most of my artists awayfrom me, but he couldn't get up.
There were a few artistswho are loyal to me.
Up was one of them and upwas kind of the grand prize.
He could not pull up.
I works away.
When that happened, I was devastatedcoming out of that meeting,
Lily and I got on that train.
We were young.
We had no idea what was going to happen.
We didn't know if I couldkeep the studio together.
(40:18):
Now he didn't own the studio.
He just owned our biggest And at thatpoint, our only character, really
uh, the Alice series were dying downand we were sort of all in on Oswald.
And I was pacing up anddown in that train car.
I was just so upset, and I kept repeatingover and over again, I will never work
for anyone else as long as I live.
(40:40):
Wow.
And I started to sketch just whatsort of character could we have.
And I sketched a mouse that Ithought we should call Mortimer.
But Lily said we needed somethingshorter, it had to have more, more
pluck to it, I believe she said,and we should try Mickey Mouse.
Now, when I got that back to the studio,Ub helped me redesign the character.
(41:02):
He knew that the character wouldneed to be circles, mostly.
If you drew it in circles, youcould drop a quarter on a piece
of paper and trace it to get theexact size of the character's head.
It would speed up the animation.
Wow.
we were still under contract.
We had to do more Oswald cartoons.
So we would go in during the dayand we would work alongside these
other artists who had already agreedthat they didn't need Walt Disney.
(41:23):
They were going to go off with Charlesonce we were, , wrapped on this then
at night um, and I, and a few others,we would come back and we would work
on this new Mickey Mouse character.
And we did a few animationsthat were all right.
We did one called playing crazy gallopinggroucho that used Mickey mouse and
they were fine, but they were just,they weren't really anything different.
(41:44):
It was what we'd already done with Oswald.
We were more or less justchanging the ears and the
tail and then running with it.
Then I saw a film called the jazz singer.
And when I saw the jazzsinger, I knew Mickey mouse.
He had to be different.
We needed to create a sound cartoonand we would have sound that would
run in sync with the animation.
(42:05):
There'd be music, there'd besound effects voices eventually.
It would be a new way to tell a story.
So we went ahead and we created thisanimation and then We brought the boys
into the studio at night and we hadtheir wives come out and we projected it
on the screen and we played everythinglive live music, live sound effects.
(42:26):
It was one of the, those revelatoryexperiences in my life, seeing
this thing come alive on thescreen and we knew this is it.
This will change cartoons.
We've got to go all in on this.
So we took everything we had atthat point, all of the money, and
we were going to put it toward thisnew cartoon called Steamboat Willie.
(42:46):
Now, the orchestras at that point,all the musicians, again, animations,
mostly New York based, all thegood musicians are in New York.
So I had to go to New York,which I did not care for.
I don't care for being away fromLily very long, and I really don't
care much for big cities in general.
I'm a country boy at heart.
So I went and I stayed in New Yorkand we met with the the musicians and
(43:08):
the conductor kept playing it and thetiming was wrong over and over again.
It just was not timing out.
And finally we had this idea to add.
A little bouncing ball at the bottomof the film strip so that the conductor
could keep time with the film.
And that worked.
And of course the rest is history.
(43:29):
We put Steamboat Willie out there andit, well, it changed everything for us.
When you have time go to the web andlook up Oswald the lucky rabbit, and
then compare him to Mickey mouse.
It is stunning how similar the twoof these are when I listened to wall,
I'm inspired because he does theone thing that very few people do.
(43:51):
He believes in himself allthe way, but instead of just
saying it, then he acts on it.
And because of that, people everywhereknow his name and they always will.
In the next episode, he's going to talkabout his falling out with Eyeworks his
plan to revolutionize the industry andthe seven academy awards he's already won.
(44:13):
Which he doesn't know this yet willeventually become a record setting.
22 before his death.
I'm glad you're enjoying this podcast.
And if you haven't yet subscribednow, and we'll see you at the next
episode of the calling historypodcast with part two of Walt Disney.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.