Once it was finished, Disney began shopping Plane Crazy around to distributors, announcing that he intended to “make the name of ‘Mickey Mouse’ as well known as any cartoon in the market.” But the distributors weren’t interested. Nor were they interested in The Gallopin’ Gaucho, another silent Mickey cartoon made on the heels of Plane Crazy. Not only were cartoons “on the wane,” as an executive from MGM put it, so were silents. Disney was planning for his third Mickey cartoon to have sound, however; he knew that this would be the future. He had even reprinted his business cards to read, “Sound Cartoons.”
While working on his first sound cartoon, Disney occasionally slipped out of the studio to go watch other animators’ efforts to do the same. But he was rarely impressed. MY GOSH—TERRIBLE—A LOT OF RACKET AND NOTHING ELSE. I WAS TERRIBLY DISAPPOINTED, he cabled to Roy after catching a sneak preview of Dinner Time, Paul Terry’s first synchronized sound cartoon. BUT HONESTLY—IT WAS NOTHING BUT ONE OF THE ROTTENEST FABLES I BELIEVE THAT I EVER SAW, he continued, unable to hold back. THE TALKING PART DOES NOT MEAN A THING. IT DOESN’T EVEN MATCH. WE SURE HAVE NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT FROM THESE QUARTERS.
His next Mickey cartoon, the third one, spoofed Buster Keaton’s film Steamboat Bill, Jr., and was called Steamboat Willie. Once the cartoon was animated, the soundtrack was recorded in New York during a troublesome recording session that lasted almost two months in summer 1928. The first musician to arrive, a bass player, had a bottle of moonshine tucked away in his instrument case and played so heavy that he kept blowing vacuum tubes in the recording equipment. There were also problems with the orchestra conductor; Carl Edouarde, a showy, artistic type who wore his hair long and fancied himself a maestro, kept bickering with Disney, saying that such “comedy music” was beneath him. Then there was the difficulty of playing the sounds so they synched to the preexisting images; this required the careful use of metronomes and bar sheets to match the timing of the measures and beats with the action. (Animators would quickly learn that recording the soundtrack first, then drawing the action accordingly, was easier.) Disney spent the entire time so preoccupied with getting everything right that he forgot to eat, losing ten pounds.
Disney was pleased with the finished results, but he and Roy had one final problem: they didn’t have a distributor. Walt traveled all over New York screening the film but was constantly rejected, told by potential distributors they would be in touch if interested, which meant they probably weren’t. Finally, in a stroke of luck, Harry Reichenbach, manager of New York’s Colony Theatre, attended one screening and was impressed by what he saw. After hearing Disney fret about the lack of distributor interest, he offered to host the film for two weeks. If it got a good reception, then perhaps distributors would be more interested. Lacking a better option, Walt agreed.
Steamboat Willie debuted at the Colony on November 18, 1928, alongside a feature film entitled Gang War, about a saxophone player whose love for a dancer named Flowers traps him in the middle of a gang confrontation. Walt sat in the back of the dark theater nervously watching the audience, which he knew was really there just to see Gang War. After the crowd was in place, the lights dimmed and Steamboat Willie started rolling. Then the darkness slowly began filling with chuckles, which soon snowballed into laughs, and then into knee-slapping guffaws. Disney’s anxiety melted into relief, then ecstasy when he later saw the reviews in the papers. “Not the first animated cartoon to be synchronized with sound effects,” Variety said, “but the first to attract favorable attention. This one represents a high order of cartoon ingenuity, cleverly combined with sound effects. The union brought laughs galore. Giggles came so fast at the Colony they were stumbling over each other.”
Before the two-week run ended at the Colony, Disney got phone calls from many of the distributors who had recently rejected him. Now they wanted the film but were still stingy over what they would pay for it; many in the film industry remained unconvinced of cartoons’ staying power. Disney eventually signed a deal with Pat Powers, a businessman whose company, in addition to selling Walt the sound recording system used for Steamboat Willie, also distributed films.
Shortly thereafter, in 1929, Disney began releasing the Silly Symphony series, whimsical cartoon shorts set to sound. With a few exceptions, they were one-off cartoons that didn’t feature recurring characters. The first, and still one of the most famous, was The Skeleton Dance, a spooky, trippy portrayal of skeletons dancing in a graveyard. Ub Iwerks animated most of it in approximately six weeks. Its relative lack of plot and of gags turned out to be to its benefit, focusing the audience’s attention instead on the film’s moody and breathtaking atmospherics. It would prove to be one of the most captivating films of Disney’s entire career, although many theater owners initially hesitated to show it because they thought it too gruesome. It was a clear demonstration of Disney’s dedication to craft and high production values, employing visuals usually seen only in live-action films—the use of shadows, creative camera angles—and proved a watershed moment. Disney was fast proving himself an industry leader, filling the creative void Winsor McCay had complained about during the dinner at Roth’s. Other animators began speaking of Disney as a genuine genius, with a knack for wringing every last drop of creativity from his collaborators with his out-of-nowhere inspiration. Many wanted to quit the studios they were working for and move to California to join Disney.
After a year of distributing his films through Powers’s company, Disney felt he was not receiving a fair share of profits, so he set out to find a new distributor. Thus, in 1929 he found himself showing his films to MGM studio head Louis Mayer, a grizzled mogul who wore double-breasted suits, stabbed the air with his cigar when he talked, and was full of strong opinions. Two of Mayer’s directors, George Hill and Victor Fleming, the latter of whom would go on to direct The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, had seen Disney’s work and enthusiastically encouraged their boss to take a look. The first film they showed him was a Silly Symphony set in a garden, featuring flowers and plants swaying in time to music.
“Ridiculous!” Mayer growled, reaching over and punching a button on the projector, bringing the film to a lurching stop. “Women and men dance together. Boys and girls dance together. Maybe in boarding schools girls dance with girls . . . but flowers? Bah!” He moved toward the door, glaring at Disney. “I should be interrupted from a conference for such trash?”
Fleming steered Mayer back toward his seat and urged him to watch another, this one featuring Mickey Mouse. “That’s money over the barrelhead,” Fleming confidently assured him.
Mayer roared even louder when the next cartoon started. “Goddamn it! Stop that film!” he shouted, belching cigar smoke. “All over this country pregnant women go into our theaters to see our pictures and to rest themselves before their dear little babies are born. And what do we show them on the screen? Every woman is scared of a mouse, admit it . . . and here you think they’re going to laugh at a mouse on the screen that’s ten feet high.” When his tirade was over, Mayer stomped out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
Walt Disney posing with Mickey Mouse for a magazine profile in October 1931.
Rejected by MGM, Disney next visited Columbia, meeting there with Frank Capra, a young Sicilian immigrant who had quickly worked his way up from writing gags for Mack Sennett to become the studio’s star director. Capra was unenthusiastic about taking the meeting, remembering Walt as a “scrawny, non-descript, hungry-looking young man, wearing two days’ growth of beard and a slouch cap.” But once he saw Disney’s cartoons, he was impressed enough to urge his boss, studio head Harry Cohn, to also watch. Cohn’s studio was relatively small compared with powerhouses like Paramount, making