Trouble in ‘Toon Town

For nearly two decades, Gene Ware devoted his life to rendering some of the most recognizable characters in the world. His cheery depictions of Mickey, Donald, Pinocchio and other Disney favorites have adorned everything from commemorative plates to children’s books to McDonald’s Happy Meal boxes.

But Ware’s wife, Darlene, says she has little to be happy about these days. After he died suddenly, she found herself not only without her husband, but without any money.

“After he passed away . . . I was shocked. I had nothing,” said the 63-year-old Dana Point resident.

Ware worked for the Walt Disney Co. as an independent contractor from 1977 to 1995, when he died of colon cancer. He drew illustrations of Disney’s copyrighted characters that were later used to decorate Disney merchandise.

The royalties Disney collected from Ware’s work are estimated to exceed $100 million to date, said Adam Springel, the attorney representing Ware’s estate and his widow. In April, she filed a lawsuit in Orange County Superior Court against Disney seeking half of those proceeds.

“She just wants what’s fair,” Springel said. “Her husband gave his life to Disney.”

A Disney spokesman declined to discuss the case, citing the company policy not to comment on pending litigation.

Although the characters are Disney’s copyrighted material, Ware’s final renditions--which in some cases included background art, or showed the characters in motion--are not, Springel said. Ware should be entitled to joint copyright to those works, he said.

Typically, artists employed by studios have no ownership rights to their work. But under a federal copyright law passed in 1978, independent contractors must waive such rights for each work, something Ware never did with Disney, Springel contends.

Ware signed a form letter when he began working with Disney granting all copyrights to the company. But Springel argues the letter is invalid because Disney “inertially misled” Ware into believing he held no more claim to the works than “an employee for hire.”

He alleged Disney took advantage of a naive artist who was not fully aware of all his rights. “The day he stopped drawing was the last time he got paid,” Springel said. “He was like a cereal box that after it was spent, they just discarded him.”

Robert Lind, a copyright law professor, said it is true freelance artists must waive their rights for each piece of work, but that does not preclude a single contract from covering a large body of work such as in Ware’s case.

It will depend on what a judge or jury believes Ware’s state of mind was at the time he signed the letter, and whether both he and Disney had an explicit understanding of the contract, said Lind, who teaches at Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles.

“All these cases are determined in a case-by-case basis,” he said.

Ware commuted daily from his Dana Point home to office space he rented in Burbank, and toward the end of his career made $40,000 to $50,000 a year, his widow said. He worked up until the day he died, and despite the modest income, supplemented by his wife’s part-time work as a real estate agent, Ware provided a good life for his wife and their two children, Darlene Ware said.

“He was a really good family man,” she said.

Darlene Ware said her husband of 41 years preferred not to discuss work with his family, and she was unaware of the letter he signed with Disney.

In the Dana Point home that Darlene and her husband shared, a wall in the airy living room is decorated with many of Ware’s works: Snow White and the cherubic seven dwarfs, a young Simba from Lion King, Mickey and Minnie in a disco dance. . . . These samples, along with a few others, are the only mementos she has from her husband’s nearly two decades of work with Disney, she said.

She said she found out her husband had no title to his creations shortly after his death, when she went to her husband’s studio in Burbank to collect his belongings. There she was told all royalties from her husband’s work belonged to Disney.

“It made me so mad,” she said.

The Wares were married at Knott’s Berry Farm in 1954. He was a Korean War veteran and a farmer’s son, with a talent for drawing. She was the daughter of an oil worker and a nurse.

She helped put him through art school and the couple slowly rose from their modest backgrounds to a fairly comfortable life until his death at age 61, she said.

Her attorney, Springel, acknowledges that Disney might argue Ware knew what he was doing when he signed the letter, but he maintains the company took advantage of a struggling artist hungry for work.

For Darlene, the issue is simple justice--and, she says, a matter of leaving something for the couple’s children and five grandchildren. Because Ware was a freelancer, the family receives no pension or other financial compensation from Disney.

“I don’t want to give Mickey a black eye,” she said. “But I really believe that what I’m asking for is fair.”