Um, Tony Dean, and today we'll be calling history to speak with Walt Disney. He'll be answering our call on february 24th, 1939. The day after winning the academy award for snow white. If you're young enough, you might not even know that Disney world and all these wonderful Disney movies all started because of one extraordinary man named Walt Disney. Despite the fact that the Disney corporation is $175 billion entertainment, behemoth. Well, Disney was a terrible businessman.
And in fact, he lost the rights to the first draft of Mickey mouse, which was actually a rabbit named Oswald. But despite his shortcomings, Walt Disney was a visionary, able to tell stories that would bring simple drawings on a piece of paper to life. He was a man that believed in himself completely and would bet it all to create something truly magnificent.
He knew that if the work was good, It would pave the way to future success that would allow him to tell more stories, stories that to this day, withstand the wear of time, giving us unforgettable characters that allow us to dream. Explore. And sometimes even believe in magic, ladies and gentlemen, fellow history, lovers, and newspaper boys everywhere. I give you Walt Disney. Hello, is that you, Mr. Disney? Hello there. Yes, this is me. Sir, I am thrilled to be speaking with you today.
My name is Tony Dean, and I'm talking to you from the future, in the 21st century. The device that you're holding is called a smartphone. It is similar to the telephones of your time, but it also has Enough technology in it to do in a day what might take you months or sometimes even years.
But more importantly, it allows us to speak as if you and I were sitting in the same room together, and it allows me to share a record of our conversation with people around the world so that they can hear your amazing story. And sir, I was hoping that I could ask you some questions today, but before I do, I understand this is a strange introduction. Are there any questions that I can answer for you first? Oh, not yet. I'm just, I'm enjoying this device as you'll hear from me.
I am always looking at the cutting edge technologies that can change the ways we tell stories. Yeah, it seems that technology was a really important part of your life, and I think if you were to hop into my time for two seconds, you'd be so happy and overwhelmed and overjoyed because there'd be no end to what you could do with the imagination that you have. So I'm curious, what is it about technology? , what caused you to jump so far ahead of everybody else?
Well, as one of my animators, Ward Kimball will say of me I've never really set out to make money and that's perhaps the secret of my success. I have always been first and foremost concerned with the quality of my work how we can create the best picture possible.
And oftentimes creating the best picture involves not only just recruiting the best artists that you can find, which I have is involves going out there and figuring out different ways to actually create the stories and investing in those opportunities, whether that be technology, whether that be training whether that be just finding the right story to tell and going out and purchasing those things. So I've had fantastic success, not looking at the.
The price tag on things, but just looking at what we need to tell the best story. As my brother, Roy will tell you happily, I am not a great businessman and you'll, you may hear some things that illustrate that point. But I do think I'm a great storyteller and finding the right people to help me tell my stories has been a part of that journey, but finding the right technologies to tell those stories has been the other part.
Well, it's good that you were able to surround yourself with people that could fill in the business side of the equation. Because , if you were to go into an investor presentation with a bunch of people wanting to spend money and tell them a story about, Hey, look, I'm not worried about money. I'm just going to get it right. You'd never would have found a single investor. I'm guessing. Oh no. And, and, uh, I've had some experience trying to raise funds for my films.
And frankly, if investors were to look back at my track record they might not be too eager to invest with me based on what happened with Laugh O Gram and other places. But the product speaks for itself, and we've been very fortunate that in working with, , Bank of America, as we produce Snow White, that we were able to build faith even when we were spending a whole lot more money than anyone thought we could or should on the production.
Tell me when you said the Laugh O Gram, tell me a little bit about that. Oh, sure. Laugh o gram was, well, no, it wasn't quite my first company. My first company I started with my dear friend of iWorks. We were working together at a company called Pestman Rubin. And we decided that we should go into business together. We thought we would be one of those great companies that would stand the test of time. And instead we folded after a month.
But that very first company we had was called iWorks Disney. Now I'm a big fan of using my name on things. I like to take credit where I feel credit is due to me. But in that one instance, I realized if we called ourselves Disney eyeworks, people were going to think we were optometrists rather than artists. So in that one instance, I let of his name go before mine. But that company, it didn't pan out. So we decided further along I knew I wanted to start something bigger and something real.
And I really wanted to get into this new animation thing. I'd seen a few cartoons. I had read every book on the subject that existed, which was just one at that point. But I knew I could make a go of it with a company like that. And so, when I was living in Kansas city, to start Laugh O Gram Studios.
We worked with a local theater owner, and I convinced him that we were going to get some great animators together, and we were going to make these animated shorts for his movie theater chain, the Newman movie theater chain. And I was very proud and speaking of my business acumen, I went in, I met with him in the theater and my friend Carl had helped arrange this meeting and I went in and he's, he was interested in the idea of having these cartoons he could show before his feature films.
And he asked me what. What it would cost, what I would charge him, and I was so flabbergasted that he was interested in working with me and that my company was going to sell something that I quoted him at the production cost, forgetting to factor in any profit at all, but the deal was done, so we had to move forward with it. I convinced some local business owners, some family friends to invest in me. And I raised 15, 000. We had our own studio space.
We actually had our own camera in that studio space. And I went around and I hired some fellows that I knew were great artists. Some of whom for instance, that I'd worked with over at the Pestman Rubin advertising firm. And we were going to make these animated shorts. Of course we didn't have any money for intellectual. Property, I guess you might say. So we had to come up with stories that were uh, free.
Uh, So we looked at stories like the musicians of Bremen and we looked at stories like Little Red Riding Hood that we could animate pretty cheaply. So that was our goal was to sit out there and animate these these short films to show before the features and we were having a fantastic time. , I never really spent a whole lot of time in school. Even as a young man, my, my time in school was sort of, Interrupted by family business and other concerns.
So for me, when I hear fellows talk about the time they spent in college and being in a fraternity or what have you, Laugh O Gram was really that time for me, I was great friends with everyone in the studio. We, We had a spectacular time. We would go out and we would do our little animated shorts, but we also would do some live action things. One time we were doing an advertisement for a Insurance firm and there had been a car accident, but we had our press credentials.
So we went over and we got in the car after the folks had already cleared out in the accident was cleaned up a little bit in terms of people being moved away. We just jumped in and took some photographs and some video that we could use for our insurance commercial. Of an actual car of an actual car crash. Yes. It was not a terrible car crash. It's a little fender bender, but it provided us with an opportunity to get some perhaps practical effects that didn't cost us any money.
So Yeah, you didn't have to stage exactly we just jumped right in and we had a blast with the thing in terms of being out there and making movies, but that business part was really the, the Achilles heel, if you will of my business. Sweet. didn't know what it was that we were getting into. We knew we wanted to make animation but to be honest, we weren't even sure how to do that at times. With the success I've had, people oftentimes are giving me credit as being the father of animation.
And truly I jumped into this game late with Laugh O Gram, and I really believe when Laugh O Gram collapsed, I thought part of the problem was that I had gotten to animation too late. I thought the Fleishers have already got this thing and I'm just getting in the game too late and it's not going to work out. When I left Missouri, my plan was to get to California and be an actor at that point. I was actually giving up the idea that I needed to be an animator.
Of course, I'm very grateful that I came back around to that, but Laugh o gram was a fantastic learning experience for me when the business started to falter and it faltered for a few reasons. One was generally my perhaps inattentiveness to the business aspects of the business. I had also hired a sales manager, a man named Leslie Macy and Leslie's job was to go out there and drum up business. Now this is of course, Snow White being our first feature.
We. We're looking at just shorts, things to show before the animated productions, and a lot of that related to advertisements and what you might call industry reels. So he went out to New York. We paid plenty of money for him to go out to New York, put him up in a nice hotel, and he was our sales manager, and he made a big sale. He had a huge contract that he got with the Pictorial Clubs, and we were supposed to create, I believe, around 17 cartoons for them. And he asked for a deposit.
of, I believe it was around 200. So it was almost nothing in terms of the down payment that we are going to get on these things. And the rest was to be delivered upon completion of all the films. So we were going to extend ourselves to create all these films and then they were going to pay us at the end. So we, Found more money. you remember what that dollar amount was? We were supposed to get 11, 000 total. Which is a fantastic sum. I mean, that it would have set us up quite nicely.
With that, had we gotten it as an advanced payment, or even if we had gotten it at the end of things, we would have been okay, but what happened was that pictorial folded in the middle of animation, they went bankrupt And Leslie left after making that fantastic deal for us. He left I was in such debt. I gave up my apartment. I was sleeping on the floor of the studio. I bathed at a bus station once a week. I was eating pork and beans daily, which.
Frankly, I didn't mind pork and beans are my very favorite meal, but it was tough times for sure. I remember one time one of the creditors, he came, he kept coming to the door and he would knock at the door and I would answer and he would say, excuse me, is there a Mr. Dinsey here? And there I would be, I didn't have a penny to my name, and I would just say to him, You know what, I'm very sorry, but there is no one by the name of Dinsey who works here.
Ha. Eventually, one of the days he showed up, he knocked at the door, and I answered. And I was speaking to him, explaining, of course, Mr. Dinsey hadn't arrived yet. And one of my friends yelled out, Hey, Walt! And he caught on, he said, Are you Walt Disney? I said, Yes. It's Walt Disney. There is no one named Dinsey. I am Walt Disney. Well, then he had me and he served me with my papers and on from there. But it was it was again, it was a mixed feeling for the times.
It was, Such great fun working with those young men, and perhaps in a way that I've lost now, I was truly their colleague as opposed to their boss at that time. And so the camaraderie I felt working there at Laugh O Gram with Ub and Hugh and the other fellows, it was just something I miss greatly. Well, that is a Is that your favorite time of everything up to this point so far? great question. I would say it is my, it is a fond memory for the camaraderie. Being able to make.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves has really been the highlight of my career. It's been stressful, there's no doubt about that. We have been through the ringer in making this picture, but to be able to tell a story exactly the way that I want to tell it has been the most gratifying artistic experience of my life. Let's talk about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs for a minute. So, and, let's get everybody caught up on, like, the timeline.
My understanding, yesterday was a pretty important day for Snow White and the Seven It was, yes, we were given an Academy Award Miss Shirley Temple presented it to me, it was for a special achievement. Now I'm very grateful for that award, I think it's a very nice trophy and it's it's wonderful to be recognized in that way. I am still convinced that Snow White should have won Best Picture.
I think in our time a lot of people even agree with that now to be quite honest with thank you, I'm happy to hear that. Tell me about the actual award. , I saw some pictures of this recently. The award's a little bit different than the other Academy Awards, isn't it? It is, yes, there's one full sized Oscar and then there's seven little Oscars next to it. For each of the For each of the dwarves. Are they named? Do they look different?
Or did they all look like the same They all look like the same statue, but yes, they're just yeah, representationally to, to count up the dwarves. I wonder in the future if they're going to do that for all the other shows, you know, depending on how many actors they got three or four surrounding them. Oh, don't give them any ideas there. Yeah, no kidding. That's the last thing they need.
So I'm very interested in something you said a while back ago, and you had said that here you are, , starting this company. And you felt like you had come into the animation business too late. I mean, that's, that is stunning to me. So here you are with all of this talent and all of this creativity, and you just felt like it was over, like the best had already happened for I did, yes coming in when I did I, the Fleishers had a great running start ahead of me.
And a lot of what we were doing in those early days with Laffagram, , we did these little pictures that or more advertisements things like Tommy Tucker's tooth and so on. Where we really found our footing was right as Laffagram was starting to collapse, and that was with the Alice Comedies. Now the Alice Comedies we're going to combine. live action and animation. And I did that for two reasons. One, I thought we could create fantastic stories.
The other is that a live actor is much cheaper to animate than drawn animation. So there was some cost savings there. That idea did not come to me in a dream or anything. It came to me, frankly, from watching what the Fleishers were doing. The Fleishers had a very successful series called Out of the Inkwell and Out of the Inkwell was just that a cartoon character inhabiting the real world. We flipped that. So we put the human character in the animated world with ours.
But yes they had great success in animation at that point. It was a New York industry. It wasn't something that was really being done as much in California. So I thought I was in the wrong place for one thing. I was in Missouri, Kansas City, Missouri. This isn't where animation is happening. It's happening in New York.
And I thought with the advancements they had already made and with their characters already gaining great popularity Whether I could actually catch up with them was not guaranteed for sure. the record. Missouri hasn't made any ground as far as being the headquarters of animation in the world, nothing's changed there. Well, perhaps if I'd moved back, but yes um, Yeah, probably. So , if that's the case, and New York is the place to be, why did you eventually move to California?
I don't understand that. so the move was inspired by a few things. One was that I thought I was going to be an actor. So when a Laugh O Gram folded, I I, of course I lost a lot in the bankruptcy proceedings and so on, but I managed to hold onto my camera. And so I went into town, found the richest neighborhood in Kansas city. And I found somebody who wanted a film done of their child. So they wanted a home movie to be filmed professionally. So I went and I did that.
I charged them when I could get them to pay. And then I sold the camera for more money than I'd paid for it to begin with. And I took all the money and I bought one first class train ticket to California. Now I chose California for the film industry and also because. I had a free place to stay. My, my big brother, Roy had gone West years earlier. he served in the Navy and later was diagnosed with tuberculosis.
They determined that the only place he could have I'm going to talk a little bit about what happened to my uncle Robert when he was in the Navy. And so, for that reason, it became the Veterans Administration's responsibility for the treatment. There was a respite home in California, and Roy was sent there. And I crashed at the respite home for a little bit, perhaps not entirely legally. And my uncle Robert was also out that way, and so I stayed with my uncle Robert for a bit.
Well, he was out there and I was going try just making it in the movies. I had always loved the movies. I was a huge Charlie Chaplin fan. I still am. And so I thought, you know, I'll sneak onto movie sets for my Laugh O Gram days when we were doing those videos, we had press credentials. I didn't throw them out. So I took my Kansas city press credentials and when I got to California, I would use them to get onto movie lots and I would just go and watch them make movies.
Just prowling around, watching directors, seeing how they talk to their actors, how they managed things. I did get cast in one movie. I was , an avid horseback rider for my days growing up on the farm in Marceline. And so I got casted a film where they needed somebody who could ride a horse. And of course. Not many rainy days here in Los Angeles. But the one day I was hired to ride was the one day it rained and then they didn't call me for the reshoot.
And that was the end of my illustrious acting career. Wow. That did not end as you had planned. not at all. You'd mentioned uh, Roy served in the Navy and did you serve in the military? I was a member of the Red Cross Ambulance Service. so the family we lived in Marceline and that was my favorite place in the whole world is still to this day, Marceline, Missouri. I just have so many fantastic memories of that.
But we later , we moved to Kansas City for a while and we had a paper route and then we moved to Chicago. I was born in Chicago. We moved back to Chicago. My father had bought stock in a jelly company at that point. And so we were in Chicago. I was taking some art classes and The war was happening and I knew Roy was in the Navy. I wanted to be a part of this, , the biggest thing that's happened in my life. But the Red Cross ambulance enlistment age was 17 and I was only 16.
The thing is I'm pretty good with a pen. So on the enlistment form I just went ahead and I moved my birth date back just a little bit and yeah, it's just one number. And so, voila, there I was able to join the Navy. I went for basic training, had good friends there. But I came down with the flu there in 1917, of course, a terrible year for the flu. And I was laid up for quite a while. My friends all deployed without me. And by the time I got overseas to France, the war was about over there.
They were just doing cleanup. So I still had my ambulance and I rode around and one of the officers had a a kid who he kind of needed babysat and so I drove around with him a little while. We saw the sites and toured around France and I had a lovely time. And then I got homesick. So the enlistment was up and I decided to come on home to Kansas city at that point. I'd saved everything that I had made while I was in the service. And that's really how I began my career as an artist.
I, I decided to take that money and I was going to stake myself. I thought I'm going to take this money and I'm going to just see what happens. Can I make it as an artist? Of course, I've been sending the money home to my father, Elias and Elias and I have very different feelings about money. And so Elias felt that it was his obligation to invest my money for me in companies. He was refusing to give me my money back. And I got a little bit crossed with him and I had to get.
pretty demanding in my letters home to say, this is my money. I served I generated this income and he will give it to me. And eventually he gave me a portion of it back so that I could stake myself as an artist. , so your father would not give you your own money back. No Elias is. Track record with money is perhaps even more precarious than my own. He believes himself to be a great investor. And I will say this candidly Elias perhaps never reached the financial goals he had for himself.
His brother, Robert. My uncle, Robert very successful. And part of the reason we moved to Marceline, my uncle, Robert owed a huge tract of land out there in Marceline. He'd made his his mark in real estate and was doing quite well. He married Margaret, my, my very favorite aunt, aunt Margaret. And Elias was always trying to kind of catch up to his brother. I think my father perhaps envied Robert a little bit in that respect.
My father was trained as a carpenter, but when we moved to Marceline, he had this big idea that he was going to become a farmer. And one story I will tell about my father, which I think is perhaps a metaphor for his parenting as well, is that as a farmer, he refused to fertilize the ground in which he was growing crop because he thought it would spoil the ground he became ill for a time when we were in Marceline and that's how we lost the farm. We had to auction everything we owned.
You know, I'm I have three brothers, everybody knows about Roy, Herbert and Raymond were older than Roy and I I'm the youngest of the brothers, Roy, and then Herbert and Raymond they worked on the farm with us for years. But they were grown at that point. They wanted to be compensated and they were promised compensation by my father and he just wouldn't pay them. So one evening they. literally snuck out a window in the middle of the night and left to go make their living.
They just couldn't survive under Elias's roof anymore. And it was challenging that regard. So when we, when we were in Marceline, money was tight, of course, but there was just so many fantastic times there. And I always, I love to reminisce about Marceline. And if there's one place in this world I could recreate, it would be Marceline, Missouri at that time. We moved from there when we lost the farm, Elias had taken some money and he'd bought a paper route in Kansas city.
And that's what eventually brought us over there to Kansas city. So Elias you had mentioned that he had bought stock in a jelly company in the middle of all of that story. How was that relevant? Were you trying to tell me that he was a terrible investor or that panned out at some point? Oh, the jelly company did not pan out. Okay, I mean to say that. My father, he was an entrepreneur. I will give him that he was an entrepreneur in the sense that he was always looking for the next big thing.
And he invested boldly in things. And he put his back into it when he invested in something. I don't know that he had. The vision to create the kinds of success he wanted, though. So, from Marceline, we went to the paper route, and the paper route, I will say, was successful. I will also say that part of that success is that he had a very good paper boy who would deliver the papers for no money at all, and that was me. Elias would, he would not pay me for my paper route in the morning.
So I would go out, I woke up at three 30 in the morning to do my paper routes. It was so cold in those Missouri winters. I will tell you the best Christmas gift I have ever received to this very day was a new pair of boots for Christmas, just so that my toes would not freeze. When making that paper route but Elias was so strange about money, the paper company, they even offered that if boys wanted to, they could do the evening edition.
They could go out and they could buy their own newspapers and they could make money doing that. They could deliver them in the evening. So I took a second route that was not under Elias's watch. And he still, he demanded that I would give him that money for him to invest for me. from you being ambitious me being ambitious, . He was a tough tough person to be around at times.
We did not see eye to eye on things and who knows, perhaps part of the way that I am with money now is maybe a bit of a reaction to the way. Um, then of course, he hired me to work at the jelly company for a time and that was That, that was interesting. I worked at the jelly company a little bit, didn't care for it too much.
I also had a job briefly working for the postal service and that was all right, except for I was nearly blown up at one point working as a postal worker when somebody sent a bomb via a package Later, from what I understand, it was believed to be the mafia had sent it. It blew up just as I was leaving a room too. But I did survive that and without a scratch really just heard the noise.
But yeah, there were quite a few adventures even that time of being 17, I'd had quite a few jobs and been under Elias's roof enough to know. A thing or two about what to do and what not to do in entrepreneurship. well, and that is kind of the question. I wanted to ask you about him because as challenging as , living with your father sounds like it was. It also seems like there are some good lessons that came along with the bad. For example.
It appears to me when you describe him, as putting his back into it and going all in when he goes all into something. And it seems like you do the same thing. I mean, you take some pretty big risks and put yourself out there and hire people before you have money. It sounds like it, what are some of the other qualities that come to mind about him that you think that you absorbed both maybe positive and negative?
Well, and I don't know if I would attribute this to him specifically, but I will say , the family that, that Elias , gave me has been a huge influence in my life. Roy, of course, and I are business partners. My little sister, Ruth very dear and close to me.
My uncle Robert became perhaps more of a supporter than he would have been because he perhaps saw that I needed some of that support financially primarily uncle Robert was , a great resource when I moved out to California he allowed me to stay with him for a while. But he had some of my family. Father's tendencies as well. They could both be quite stubborn. He and I got into a fight one time about which road you could take heading out of California and the fight became so heated.
We were discussing a traffic pattern and he became so heated that we didn't speak to one another for weeks and Roy had to intervene and sort of make peace between us over that fight, Californians are perhaps particular about their their roadways, I suppose, I think so. There, there is a short about that now in our time that is just hilarious about that exact concept. right? There is. Yes. Yeah. And it's ridiculous and hilarious too. So I'm not, I'm actually not surprised to hear this.
At least maybe I know the origin of this now. So what about Roy? What kind of guy was Roy? ? Tell me a little bit about him. Roy is a quite a few years older than me. But he he really stepped in to be a father figure in some ways when I was very young.
You know, he was off In the world, as I was still a young man there in Marceline and Ruth was even younger than us when Roy would come home, he had a job at a bank and he would come home and he would take that money and he knew that we weren't going to get a lot of spending money. And so he would take us to the movies. He would buy us candy. He would go for walks with us into town and was really just a. a wonderfully supportive pleasant presence in my life when I was very young.
And as I got to be older, he became my greatest champion. Roy and I are close as brothers can be, which means sure we, we fight and I'm sure we'll have some rows going forward as well. But for our differences, we work very well together. I think when I first got out there to California and I let Roy know that we were going to start, our own studio he was he was skeptical of it. He still had tuberculosis. He was, , recovering from that. He needed a lot of time to rest.
And so I said, well, we'll get a studio close to the apartment. That way you can go home and you can nap in the evenings or in the afternoons if you want to. And I'll come in here and work. Roy was our business manager though. He was our camera operator at Disney brothers. He was our janitor for a time, , we couldn't afford new celluloid sheets for every every cartoon.
So Roy would go in there with into the sink and he would scrub them clean when we finished an animation so we could start over again. He just looked at what I could do and he believed in me and he saw what I couldn't do and he filled those gaps. Incredible. So lucky to just have that person that you know you can trust.
Somebody in your family that can pick up that slack because as you know one person can accomplish so much but two people like making up the difference for each other's weaknesses can accomplish what 20 people can accomplish. Maybe more. Oh, yes. Yeah, so celluloid sheet. I haven't, you just said celluloid sheet. I have no idea what a celluloid sheet is. Is this, I don't know if this is something that you lay across your bed when you sleep at night or something you're drawing on.
You could, it wouldn't be very comfortable though. That doesn't sound like it. I'm curious what this whole process looks like, the animation process. So maybe we could start there. What is a celluloid sheet? One of the earliest innovations within animation was this idea that how do we create the background? Do we have to draw the background of an image every time, or can we just draw the character? That's going to be you know, shifted throughout each image.
To do that, we use clear plastic sheets that we draw and paint onto. Those are made from celluloid. So when we're animating, we have a background image that's going to be beneath the camera. And then laid on top of that is a clear piece of plastic or celluloid with the character drawn onto it. And when we. Take the image you can see through the plastic to the background image beneath and that way you don't have to change the background every time you're you're moving the character, so to speak.
So it makes the process a lot quicker, a lot cleaner and the background image is more stable. if you are making, let's say you've got Mickey mouse and Mickey mouse is just going to walk and in the background, there's a picture of a barn and Mickey mouse is going to walk from one side of the barn to the other side of the barn. , you've got the barn in the background and then on the celluloid sheet, you draw Mickey mouse and then.
You have another sheet where you have him moving a little bit and then you have just a bunch of those one after the other. Is that how it works? Yes I believe you've described correctly there. Yes, the the background image of course does have to move if he's walking along, but we can paint the background and then move that beneath the camera as well. And so the camera is pointing directly at your drawings and you're just replacing one drawing after the other.
Wow, is built so that it takes an image of one frame at a time. So the camera is set up over, , over the desk of the cameraman. He will take the image and then he pulls the celluloid sheet off. He enters the next celluloid sheet underneath, clicks the camera, and moves, so on and so forth. It is A bit of a tedious process, for sure. To look at something like Snow White, we're talking about 250, 000 drawings. that is unbelievable.
So how many people do you have drawing all day long to prepare the next piece that you put in front of the camera? Well, to get Snow White up and going, we had 750 artists working on that. That seems like one of the hardest things to convince. investors to get into it just sounds impossible what you're describing.
So when the time came for you're thinking you're going to make Snow White, you know, from doing all these shorts that you've done throughout the years, you know that this is going to be an absurd number of drawings. So then you go to the investors and say, we're going to need. How much money, how much did you ask for? the way that I, I factored the original cost of Snow White, was to take what we were spending on a five minute short and then multiply that to get up to about 85 minutes or so.
So when I did that, the cost should have been 250, 000. That's what I believed it would cost. And that was using , our figure for a short and just multiplying it. What I did not take into account when I created that initial figure, Was how much development would happen around the characters and around the process. In creating a full feature. I am an innovator in a lot of ways.
I feel one of the first innovations was to have story artists previously when animation was done, you had one artist who would sit down and they would. Create an animation, start to finish. We really began segmenting animation so that it was more of a collaborative art and having one person whose job was to think about this as a complete story. How does this character behave? What is their role in the story? What is their objective? So to speak in the story we had all these.
Things that we had to manage throughout the production and those things changed quite a bit from the start in Snow White. So we, there was a lot of starting and stopping in Snow White. There was a lot of reanimating things. There was a lot that had to happen to get the picture to where it's, where it is now. Those changes balloon the cost quite The total for Snow White, I had asked for 250, 000. What we needed to complete it was one and a half million to get that money.
Roy and I mortgaged our homes. We put up the studio as collateral. We had to put everything into this. So you speak of , my father's tenacity for really putting himself into it. And truly that's what we had to do. We had to bet on ourselves. But I've always been for betting on myself and to my credit, that's been part of this studio success.
, when other folks were taking their money and they were going out and studio heads were buying lavish cars and houses, I never was, went in for any of that. When folks saw the stock market booming in the twenties and they wanted to put all their studio money in there, I never did. I just always reinvested in myself. And when the stock market crashed, I was the better for it.
Yeah. The Disney Brothers, we weren't exposed at all when the stock market happened because we didn't put any money in there. Every dollar we made went back into that studio. I wonder if you look at all of your father's flaws, didn't pay you for your route, , it sounds like he's practically having you deliver papers in the freezing cold without proper shoes.
I mean, all the struggle I wonder if this one thing is worth ignoring everything else, because not everybody is capable of betting it all and going in with that level of confidence. And to say, if I do this, I lose my house. I lose the studio. I'm starting from scratch. I wonder if just that one quality was worth all the other bad stuff. Perhaps. Yes, it was The experiences with my father and also, you know, the experiences I had gone through in creating the studio.
I had reason to believe that I was right about stories. And I say that the whole Charles mince affair. Really solidified my belief in myself that even if somebody came in and they tried to take everything from me, that I had something up my sleeve that I could produce that would show them all, When did you feel this confidence? Cause this confidence is important. Obviously. When did you develop this? Where did it come from?
well, I'm going to go back a little bit and I'm going to tell you the story of a little character that people seem to love quite a bit called Mickey Mouse. So. Mickey Mouse, and I'm going to start a ways back if you'll indulge me Mickey Mouse came about through a contract dispute, more or less. So what had happened when we moved, when I first moved to California, Laugh O Gram had gone under, we had just finished the first short of the Alice series.
I began shopping around the Alice series, looking for a distributor. I found a wonderful woman named Margaret Winkler Margaret Winkler was a distributor of a few different animated cartoon characters and their shorts. And she was looking for leverage against another cartoon Creator that she had another animation studio and particularly the creator of the characters who had become a little bit unwieldy. So she needed something else more or less as leveraged to keep them in line.
So I wrote to her about , Alice. And she said, well, sure. Send me the real, and I'll take a look at this thing. I said, absolutely. I will send you the real. And I wrote to up back in Kansas city. Part of the trouble was that the real. Wasn't quite hours at that point. A lot had been seized in the bankruptcy as well as that the reel of the film that we'd done, but we managed to pry it loose. We sent that to Margaret Winkler and she said, yes, I will distribute this.
So that was our first big contract. We actually moved the young lady from Kansas city to come out to California. Who had played Alice, so she could continue playing Alice for us. And those films took off a bit there. When I met Lily, my wife was around the same time that Margaret got married. And she married a man named Charles Mintz. Mintz and I Didn't get along very well. We had different ideas about production timelines.
We had different ideas about what quality was necessary and what the budget should be to create that type of quality but by and by we continued on with these Alice series. And then Mintz had an opportunity with a new character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. And so we started creating this Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and it became very successful. Right around that time, our contract was coming up for renewal.
Well, Lily and I, you know, we were, Still newlyweds in a way, just a married a little while. And we sort of thought, well, this is a great chance for a second honeymoon. We'll go to New York. I have to renegotiate my contract anyway. We'll spend some time there. We'll have a great train ride, and I'm going to get more money. I'm going to go in, I'm going to tell Mintz that this is what the cartoon character needs. This is what my boys need to make the art. And this is what I need.
And so I went into that meeting and discovered that Mintz has secretly sent people to my studio to convince my animators that they should be working directly for him. His feeling was that The real talent in this studio was Abai Works and all these artists around me, and he was going to just go ahead and move on with the artists and had no need to pay a Walt Disney. What could he possibly contribute? And it succeeded. He signed most of my artists away from me, but he couldn't get up.
There were a few artists who are loyal to me. Up was one of them and up was kind of the grand prize. He could not pull up. I works away. When that happened, I was devastated coming out of that meeting, Lily and I got on that train. We were young. We had no idea what was going to happen. We didn't know if I could keep the studio together. Now he didn't own the studio.
He just owned our biggest And at that point, our only character, really uh, the Alice series were dying down and we were sort of all in on Oswald. And I was pacing up and down in that train car. I was just so upset, and I kept repeating over and over again, I will never work for anyone else as long as I live. Wow. And I started to sketch just what sort of character could we have. And I sketched a mouse that I thought we should call Mortimer.
But Lily said we needed something shorter, it had to have more, more pluck to it, I believe she said, and we should try Mickey Mouse. Now, when I got that back to the studio, Ub helped me redesign the character. He knew that the character would need to be circles, mostly. If you drew it in circles, you could drop a quarter on a piece of paper and trace it to get the exact size of the character's head. It would speed up the animation. Wow. we were still under contract.
We had to do more Oswald cartoons. So we would go in during the day and we would work alongside these other artists who had already agreed that they didn't need Walt Disney. They were going to go off with Charles once we were, , wrapped on this then at night um, and I, and a few others, we would come back and we would work on this new Mickey Mouse character. And we did a few animations that were all right.
We did one called playing crazy galloping groucho that used Mickey mouse and they were fine, but they were just, they weren't really anything different. It was what we'd already done with Oswald. We were more or less just changing the ears and the tail and then running with it. Then I saw a film called the jazz singer. And when I saw the jazz singer, I knew Mickey mouse. He had to be different. We needed to create a sound cartoon and we would have sound that would run in sync with the animation.
There'd be music, there'd be sound effects voices eventually. It would be a new way to tell a story. So we went ahead and we created this animation and then We brought the boys into the studio at night and we had their wives come out and we projected it on the screen and we played everything live live music, live sound effects. It was one of the, those revelatory experiences in my life, seeing this thing come alive on the screen and we knew this is it. This will change cartoons.
We've got to go all in on this. So we took everything we had at that point, all of the money, and we were going to put it toward this new cartoon called Steamboat Willie. Now, the orchestras at that point, all the musicians, again, animations, mostly New York based, all the good musicians are in New York. So I had to go to New York, which I did not care for. I don't care for being away from Lily very long, and I really don't care much for big cities in general. I'm a country boy at heart.
So I went and I stayed in New York and we met with the the musicians and the conductor kept playing it and the timing was wrong over and over again. It just was not timing out. And finally we had this idea to add. A little bouncing ball at the bottom of the film strip so that the conductor could keep time with the film. And that worked. And of course the rest is history. We put Steamboat Willie out there and it, well, it changed everything for us.
When you have time go to the web and look up Oswald the lucky rabbit, and then compare him to Mickey mouse. It is stunning how similar the two of these are when I listened to wall, I'm inspired because he does the one thing that very few people do. He believes in himself all the way, but instead of just saying it, then he acts on it. And because of that, people everywhere know his name and they always will.
In the next episode, he's going to talk about his falling out with Eyeworks his plan to revolutionize the industry and the seven academy awards he's already won. Which he doesn't know this yet will eventually become a record setting. 22 before his death. I'm glad you're enjoying this podcast. And if you haven't yet subscribed now, and we'll see you at the next episode of the calling history podcast with part two of Walt Disney.