Wild Minds. Reid Mitenbuler

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      Walt Disney’s business card from 1921.

      Disney’s interest in animation quickly swelled into an obsession, consuming his nights and weekends. His parents had moved back to Kansas City after O-Zell failed to pan out, and he converted the shabby garage behind their house into a makeshift studio. He worked there at night, after a full day at the Slide Company, with Roy dropping by for late visits. Roy recalled later how the studio window was always the last on the street to go dark, with Walt inside, “puttering away . . . experimenting, trying this and that.”

      Disney learned the basics of animation by picking the brain of a former Slide Company artist called “Scarfoot” McCrory, who had left Kansas City to work at a New York animation studio but frequently returned for visits. He also began studying a book by Edwin Lutz entitled Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development; the work was a gateway read for many budding animators. Its advice included making films that satirized “topics of the hour,” prompting Disney and a handful of friends to make a series of shorts spoofing Kansas City’s potholes, local news, and slow streetcar service. They called them “Laugh-O-Grams,” and the local Newman Theater liked them well enough to place an order. For about an hour after the sale, Walt was ecstatic, “walking on air,” until he suddenly realized the price he had quoted the theater didn’t include profit—his greatest gifts didn’t involve finance, a deficiency that Roy would later help remedy. Still, the attention he got from the Laugh-O-Grams was worth it. “I got to be a little celebrity in the thing,” he remembered.

      In the summer of 1920, the Slide Company changed its name to the Kansas City Film Ad Company and began shifting its business from slides to movies. This was lucky for Disney, who now had access to more equipment that would help him pursue animation in his free time. He recruited a “staff”—mainly friends—for his own upstart studio, telling them that he could pay them only “in experience.” They didn’t seem to mind, though—“It was more fun than pay,” his friend Walt Pfeiffer charitably remembered. Profits, once they came, were razor-thin—exhibitors weren’t willing to pay much for material they considered little more than a way to kill time before the main attraction. Disney slept in his office on a few thin rolls of canvas and some moth-eaten old cushions. He couldn’t afford to heat the beans he lived on, prying them cold from the can. This didn’t bother him, however—“I love beans,” he said, keeping a positive attitude. (Even after he was a success, he often continued eating cold beans from a can for lunch, munching away on them while sitting in his spacious office.)

      Disney eventually decided to leave the Film Ad Company and start his own outfit, called the Laugh-O-Gram Studio. The tiny staff focused its efforts on gag cartoons similar to Paul Terry’s spoofs of Aesop’s fables, as well as inventive adaptations of other stories such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This is how he came to make the sample films he would later take to California. But Disney’s talent and drive notwithstanding, his cartoons failed to find a market and his studio was forced into bankruptcy—he still couldn’t match the quality of New York animation. It was time to admit the drawbacks of being in Kansas City. “Our ideas were great, but we were in the wrong area. Kansas City wasn’t the place for this kind of work,” animator Rudy Ising recalled.

      Refusing to quit, Disney decided to start anew and began evaluating new locations. All the great animators worked in New York, but Walt had reservations about moving there. The animation industry was there only because it always had been, close to the newspapers and art schools that provided talent. But the movie business, which it was a part of, had clearly migrated to California; there was year-round good light and a disdain for unions, allowing the studios to get away with paying lower wages. It seemed to Disney that it might make better sense to move west. He was torn, but California had one factor that tipped the balance in its favor: Walt’s older brother Roy was recuperating from tuberculosis there, thus ensuring that Walt would have a place to stay. Roy also had business acumen and would prove a valuable partner.

      When Walt announced his decision to his family, he was dressed in black-and-white-checked trousers, a mismatched checkered jacket, a gabardine raincoat, and an old brown cardigan—a look suggesting that he’d slipped into a clown’s closet and dressed in the dark. He didn’t own a suit of his own, and those close to Disney always remembered him as an eccentric dresser. His brother Herbert’s mother-in-law looked him up and down as he announced his news, then slipped out of the room and returned with an outgrown suit of her son’s. She also had three bags of meals for him to eat on the train; she hoped the food СКАЧАТЬ