The biggest opponents of sound, however, were the studio moguls. They already fretted about the new radio technology, fearful of families abandoning movies to stay home at night and listen to prizefights and concerts instead. To neutralize what they saw as a growing threat, they had even launched a stealth propaganda campaign against “the dangers of radio,” publishing alarming editorials about how radios “poisoned the air,” causing hearing loss and starting house fires. Their initial fear of “talkies” was similar; they worried that foreign audiences wouldn’t accept movies where only English was spoken. “Who the hell wants to hear the actors talk?” grumbled Harry Warner of Warner Bros.
Harry Warner’s fears quickly evaporated, however, once he realized how much money he could save by firing the thousands of musicians hired to play in his theaters. After that realization finally set in, sound was suddenly the future! In 1925, Warner Bros. met with Western Electric, where engineers were using de Forest’s triode detector to develop a public-address system that could also work for movies. The new system they created for Warner Bros., a system called “Vitaphone,” was announced in 1926.
The rest of the industry remained skeptical, and the other studios began organizing to fight what they called the “Warner Vitaphone Peril.” But their opposition soon crumbled after Variety, an important trade paper, called Vitaphone an impending revolution. The other moguls also no doubt noticed Warner Bros. stock soar from $8 to $65 per share in late 1926, another enticement to jump aboard the train. In a flash, every studio was suddenly advertising new sound systems: Movietone! Cinematophone! Cameraphone! Synchroscope! Phonofilm!
In October 1928, Warner Bros. released The Jazz Singer, widely credited as the first “talkie.” Audiences paid as much as $10 a ticket to watch Al Jolson in blackface, his arms outstretched and hands wagging, crooning, “You ain’t heard nothing yet!”
There was no looking back. Eighteen months after The Jazz Singer debuted, a mere three of the seventeen movie theaters on Broadway were still showing only silent films. With the industry disrupted, the old fears no longer mattered. But, despite Max Fleischer’s advocacy for sound, there was still one area of cinema where it had not yet flourished: cartoons. Since the images were drawn by hand, they were more difficult to synch than live action. Nor did audiences seem particularly eager for sound cartoons. Something about them just didn’t seem natural. “Drawings are not vocal,” animator Wilfred Jackson said. “Why should a voice come out of a cartoon character?”
Chapter 12
“That’s Money over the Barrelhead”
When Walt Disney saw The Jazz Singer, he wasn’t scared of how it might disrupt the industry, he was thrilled—and also, no doubt, curious about how it might help his career. Like Max Fleischer, he did not resist but embraced new technology. Sound offered him the perfect opportunity for reestablishing himself after his falling-out with Charles Mintz and loss of Oswald. He just had to create a new character he could use it with.
When Disney returned to Los Angeles from New York, still smarting from his encounter with Mintz, the atmosphere in the studio was tense. Only three of his top staff had remained loyal to him, including Ub Iwerks. The others had agreed to continue working for Mintz, who had set up an agreement to make cartoons, including Oswald, for Universal. Disney was still obligated to make three more Oswald cartoons under his old contract, but once those were finished, his staff would transfer to Mintz’s new studio; Disney and his loyalists would be left on their own.
Disney immediately began hiring replacement staff and working up a new plan. Not knowing whom to trust among Mintz’s people, he and his remaining loyal staff began creating their new character in secret. Iwerks erected big black curtains around his desk and always kept a pile of random drawings handy, throwing them over his sketches when others walked by. The men also worked in Disney’s garage, curtains drawn tight against the windows, where the atmosphere was more relaxed but still secret. This new character, which their livelihood depended on, soon became an obsession.
The exact origins of Mickey Mouse are murky—Disney knew that a good creation myth works best when left a little slippery. He was a performer first, never letting dry facts or details get in the way of a good story. Over the years, he would tell several different versions of Mickey’s origins, each of which would be clarified and challenged by his colleagues and family members, all of whom inevitably had their own versions.
The most popular version has Disney creating Mickey during that angry train ride from New York to Los Angeles, while fuming over his fight with Mintz. Disney claimed he spent the long hours sketching a variety of characters onto cocktail napkins, then holding them up for Lillian’s opinion. She paused when he held up a mouse named Mortimer. It was good, but a little “too sissy,” she said—a name you might associate with a soap salesman or an undertaker’s apprentice, not a cartoon character. Walt took a second to think and then suggested Mickey, a good Irish name, as well as an outsider’s name that carried a kind of plucky appeal. “It sounded better than Mortimer,” Lillian said, “and that’s how Mickey was born.”
At other times, depending on his mood, Disney put Mickey’s origins in Kansas City. Sometimes he said the inspiration came when a mouse scurried by a park bench he was sitting on. At other times he said it came after he heard a mouse in the Laugh-O-Gram office. In yet another version, he said the idea came while he was working for the Film Ad Company, after he made pets of the mice he found munching on lunch scraps in his wastebasket—these mice he trained to eat from his fingers so he could sketch them in different poses. In still another version, always told with great emotion, he spoke of having to set one of these beloved pet mice loose. “When I looked back,” Disney said, choking up, “he was still sitting there in the field watching me with a sad, disappointed look in his eyes.”
Ub Iwerks, Disney’s chief collaborator, typically laughed off these stories as “highly exaggerated publicity material.” Iwerks was also from Kansas City and had worked with Disney since the very beginning. The two were a good pairing, and even looked a little bit like each other, except that Iwerks’s hair domed up as if he had combed it with an electrical cord. He was the superb technical draftsman that Disney wasn’t, while Walt had the qualities—the storytelling gene, the showmanship, the gift for self-promotion—that the stoic Iwerks lacked.
As Iwerks remembered it, Disney didn’t return from New York bursting with confidence, strutting into the studio waving a cocktail napkin with a picture of Mickey on it. Instead, he wandered through the door depressed. According to Iwerks and several others, he, Walt, and Roy began meeting daily to brainstorm new ideas, sitting in the office, huddled away from the Mintz loyalists. Their research consisted of flipping through magazines and hoping an idea would grab them. After settling on a mouse, Walt took the first stab at designing it, but it didn’t look very good—long and skinny, more like a rat than a mouse. Then Iwerks took a turn, redesigning Disney’s idea into something rounder and cuter, which also happened to be easier to animate. If they were “to push out 700 feet of film every two weeks,” Disney recalled, “we couldn’t have a character who was tough to draw.” The circular ears could be drawn the same every time, saving animators the effort of adjusting for perspective required with more elongated shapes. Iwerks also gave Mickey four fingers instead of five, a modification that saved the animators even more time. Years later, after the Disney studio blossomed into a corporate empire, the four fingers would become an entertainment industry joke. “You realize now when you work for Disney why the mouse has only four fingers,” said one comedian. “Because he can’t pick up a check.”
Mickey first appeared in Plane Crazy, a silent cartoon spoofing Charles Lindbergh’s