The Man Who Was Never a Mouse

One hundred years after his birth on Dec. 5, 1901, Walter Elias Disney remains one of the most celebrated and recognizable figures in pop culture. His familiar, avuncular persona--the genial TV host whose name was synonymous with family entertainment and excellence in animation--belies the fact that much of his career was predicated on risk-taking.

An eternal optimist and a visionary, he gambled everything he had on a single film on three occasions--and won every time. “Steamboat Willie” (1928), “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937) and “Cinderella” (1950) were all make-or-break propositions. Had any of them failed, there would have been no “Mickey Mouse Club,” no Disneyland or Walt Disney World, no “Mary Poppins” or “Lion King.”

Despite the fortune he made, money was never Walt’s primary motivation: He was more interested in doing things that were newer and better than what anyone else could do. Marc Davis, one of the “Nine Old Men” who animated the great early Disney features, remembered, in an interview shortly before his death in January 2000, “I was in Walt’s office around the time he was starting Disneyland, and he was a little embarrassed, because he’d borrowed on his life. He looked out the window, turned to me and said, ‘I’d like to sell the property underneath the studio: We own all the improvements on it--we could lease them back. Do you realize the wonderful things we could do with all that money?’ ‘What we could do with all that money,’ not ‘I would be rich.’ I don’t think Walt ever cared about that; he was interested in what you could do.”

Disney decided to pursue a career in art after serving as a driver in the American Ambulance Corps in France at the end of World War I. While working as a commercial artist, he and his friend Ub Iwerks taught themselves animation by studying the one book that existed on the subject and the sequential photographs of Eadweard Muybridge. They and some friends founded a studio in 1922, but it went bankrupt within a year.

He moved to Los Angeles from Kansas City, Mo. to join his older brother, Roy Oliver Disney (father of Roy Edward Disney, current vice chairman of Walt Disney Co.). He soon found a distributor for a series based on his last Kansas City film, “Alice in Cartoonland,” which featured a live-action little girl in an animated setting. Roy became his partner and business manager, and spent the rest of his life finding ways to pay for his younger brother’s projects. Former Disneyland President Jack Lindquist once said that without each other, “Walt might have ended up working for Walter Lantz [animation producer and creator of Woody Woodpecker] because he wasn’t a businessman. And Roy could have ended up manager of a Bank of America in Glendale.”

The “Alice” shorts ran through 1926, and Disney followed them with a cartoon series about Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, which earned good reviews and modest profits. But Disney wasn’t satisfied. In an article in the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers in 1941, he recalled: “The cartoon business didn’t seem to be going anywhere except in circles. The pictures were kicked out in a hurry and to a price. Money was the only object.... Some of the possibilities of the cartoon medium had begun to dawn on me. And at the same time we saw that the medium was dying.”

In February 1928, Disney went to New York to ask distributor Charles Mintz to raise his price per film from $2,250 to $2,500. The distributor insisted that he take a cut or lose the Oswald character--and his studio. Mintz had covertly signed up all of Disney’s animators except Iwerks.

While the animators finished the last “Oswald” shorts, Iwerks worked alone in a locked room, animating the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, “Plane Crazy.” If anyone came in, he covered his sketches with Oswald drawings. (According to the famous story, Disney came up with a mouse character on the train ride back from Mintz’s office in New York; he wanted to call him “Mortimer,” but his wife disliked the name and suggested “Mickey” as an alternative.)

Around the time “Plane Crazy” was completed, the other artists left for Mintz’s new studio. Without the “Oswald” films, Disney had no source of income. Iwerks remained with him, animating the next two Mickey shorts, “Gallopin’ Gaucho” and “Steamboat Willie,” virtually single-handedly. Studio ledgers from 1928 reveal that Disney cut his own salary and even skipped occasional checks to pay Iwerks. Disney’s wife, Lillian, and his sisters-in-law--the only help he could afford and trust--inked and painted the cels for the film.

Distributors showed little interest in the first Mickey cartoons. They were very similar to the Oswald shorts; Disney wanted $3,000 a film and insisted on retaining the copyright to the character.

What saved Mickey--and Disney--was sound. Warner Bros.’ “The Jazz Singer” had premiered in October 1927, and the Hollywood studios were switching to sound film. Disney saw the possibilities the new technology offered and took “Steamboat Willie” to New York to record a soundtrack.

The first recording session was a flop, and Roy struggled to find the money for a second session. Walt wrote to Roy to sell Walt’s car, a Moon roadster he was proud of: “This may mean the making of a big organization out of our little Dump.... I think this is Old Man Opportunity rapping at our door. Let’s don’t let the jingle of a few pennies drown out his knock.... So slap a big mortgage on everything we got and let’s go after this thing in the right manner.”

The second recording session proved successful, and Disney managed to book “Steamboat Willie” into the Colony Theater in New York for two weeks.

Mickey Mouse debuted on Nov. 18, 1928, and the rest is animation history. “Steamboat Willie” wasn’t the first sound cartoon; other studios had been experimenting with sound systems since 1924, but Disney used sound’s potential more effectively. “Steamboat Willie” brought his “little Dump” to the forefront of animation.

The success of the Mickey cartoons allowed Disney to launch an unprecedented program of recruitment, research and training. Virtually every principle and technique of animation was discovered, invented or refined at the Disney Studio during the ‘30s; each cartoon represented a breakthrough of some sort. This ambitious program was expensive: Many cartoons didn’t earn back their costs until their second year of release. But the profits from Mickey Mouse licensing enabled Disney to continue pushing for innovations and improvements.

He was especially interested in new technologies. In 1939, he noted, “Everything we do in the future should include television rights. There might be a big angle on television for the shorts we have already produced.” Two years later, he wrote, “Our business has grown with and by technical achievements. Should this technical progress ever come to a full stop, prepare the funeral oration for our medium.”

Perhaps anticipating the look of computer-animated films, Disney concluded: “For the near future, I can practically promise a third-dimensional effect in our moving characters.”

All the aesthetic and technical wizardry his artists could muster would be needed for his next big gamble: “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Disney later commented, “We were practically forced into the feature field. We not only had to have its new story material, but also we had to have feature profits to justify our continuing expansion.... We needed this new adventure, this ‘kick in the pants,’ to jar loose some new enthusiasm and inspiration.”

But when he began “Snow White,” the idea met with skepticism and derision. Animator Davis remembered a neighbor telling him that no one would sit through an hour and a half of animation; the Hollywood press dubbed the film “Disney’s Folly.” The costs quickly passed Disney’s completely unrealistic estimate of $250,000. He later joked that “the banker was losing more sleep than I was,” and, “when costs passed the one-and-a-half million mark, Roy didn’t even bat an eye. He couldn’t; he was paralyzed.”

Walt poured every cent Roy could beg or borrow into “Snow White.” Grim Natwick, who animated the heroine, said in an interview several years ago that “Disney had only one rule: Whatever we did had to be better than anybody else could do it, even if you had to animate it nine times, as I once did.”

As the film neared completion and Roy was “sweating red ink,” they had to show an unfinished version to Bank of America executive Joseph Rosenberg.

Walt was loath to screen it, as the film included sequences of pencil animation and even storyboard drawings, but Roy insisted it was the only way to get the additional funds they needed. Rosenberg reportedly watched the film in silence but, as he was getting into his car, predicted, “That thing is going to make a hatful of money.” Rosenberg’s remark proved prophetic: “Snow White” premiered on Dec. 21, 1937, and earned $8 million, an enormous sum in 1937-38.

After repaying their creditors, Walt and Roy spent $100,000 on the 51-acre parcel in Burbank that remains company headquarters. Work proceeded on “Pinocchio” and “Fantasia,” both of which were released in 1940. Both films were expensive: “Pinocchio” cost about $2.6 million; “Fantasia,” $2.28 million. (“The Wizard of Oz” had cost $2.77 million the year before.) Although they set the standard by which animation is judged, both films lost money initially. Audiences did not find the new characters as endearing as Snow White and the Dwarfs. The outbreak of World War II in Europe closed most of the foreign markets that had supplied 45% of the studio’s income. Walt and Roy were soon $4.5 million in debt.

Helping erase those debts were the studio’s first stock issue in 1941, the modest profits from “Dumbo,” “Saludos Amigos” and “Three Caballeros,” and the government policy of budgeting all military training films at a small profit (the Disney studio made thousands of films for the U.S. Navy during WWII). In 1945, the studio reported a profit of $50,000. But Walt began work on several features immediately after the war and within a year had run up a debt of $4.3 million. A new feature would take three to four years and several million dollars to produce--more than Roy or the Bank of America would allow.

Instead, Walt made the “package features”: “Make Mine Music” (1946), “Fun and Fancy Free” (1947) and “Melody Time” (1948), which were essentially feature-length collections of short cartoons, most built around musical themes. Instead of the “highbrow” music of “Fantasia,” Walt turned to jazz and popular music scores featuring Dinah Shore, the Andrews Sisters and Benny Goodman. All three films performed indifferently at the box office.

The situation was growing desperate. Walt appeared to have lost both the big, general audiences who had supported his studio and the critics who had lavished praise on his work. He needed a hit on the scale of “Snow White” and decided once again to gamble everything on a single film. But which one? Pre-production work on “Alice in Wonderland,” “Cinderella,” “Lady and the Tramp” and “Peter Pan” had been going on for years.

Disney favored “Alice” and Roy “Cinderella” in what was apparently an unusually bitter disagreement between the brothers. Roy ultimately won, and it proved a wise choice: “Cinderella” (1950) earned more than $4 million in its initial release and saved the studio. “Alice,” which came out the next year, lost more than $1 million in its first run. Although Walt would later cite the scene of Cinderella getting her ball gown as his favorite piece of animation done at his studio, he apparently found the film too close to “Snow White.”

After “Cinderella,” Walt’s interest in animation waned, and new types of entertainment came to occupy more and more of his attention: nature documentaries, live-action films, television and Disneyland. The amusement park and TV shows represented major gambles when they began; typically, he insisted on filming the “Disneyland” TV program in color--before most Americans had color sets. These endeavors eventually made him rich, but permanent financial security came only after his most creative work was finished.

Animators and fans are fond of speculating on what Walt would have to say about the current state of animation, especially the state of Disney animation.

Disney Vice Chairman Roy E. Disney has repeatedly warned against trying to second-guess his uncle, but he’s also conceded, “Walt would probably say, ‘You haven’t gone far enough fast enough!”’ Walt came closest to summarizing his philosophy of animation in 1941, when he reflected on the very mixed critical reaction to one of his grandest experiments: “No doubt, some unimaginative critics will predict that in ‘Fantasia’ the animated medium and my artists have reached their ultimate. The truth is to the contrary. ‘Fantasia’ merely makes our other pictures look immature, and suggests for the first time what the future of the medium may well turn out to be.

“What I see way off there is too nebulous to describe. But it looks big and glittering. That’s what I like about this business, the certainty that there is always something bigger and more exciting just around the bend; and the uncertainty of everything else.”

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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presents “A Centennial Tribute to Walt Disney,” Wednesday, 8 p.m., Samuel Goldwyn Theater, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills. Sold out; call (310) 247-3600 for standby info.

Also, the new documentary “Walt: The Man Behind the Myth” is being released by Buena Vista Home Entertainment ($19.95) on Tuesday; and “Inside the Dream: The Personal Story of Walt Disney,” by Katherine and Richard Greene, was published last month by Disney Editions ($60).