The Animated Man by Michael Barrier Read Free Book Online Page A

Iwerks.
    David Hand, an animator from New York, accepted a job on the Disney studio’s staff on his thirtieth birthday, January 23, 1930. Unlike the New Yorkanimators who preceded him, Hand had not been lured west by an offer from Walt Disney. Instead, he moved to Hollywood in the hope of making a career in live action. “But you couldn’t get a job,” he said many years later, “so I went to Disney’s.” Hand was hired on a Thursday—probably by Burt Gillett, who had known him in New York, since Walt Disney himself was not around to do any hiring.
    When Hand finally met Disney, he said, “Walt was awful mad at Ub, because he didn’t talk about anything else to me.” Disney complained to Hand—in an echo of his petulance in the 1920s—that Iwerks would not stay at his drawing board. Instead, he parked his car in the driveway beside the studio building and spent the day there, working on the car and ignoring Disney’s plea that he animate and let a mechanic do the work. 42
    None of Disney’s other employees followed Iwerks out the door. The New York animators had been recruited by Walt Disney himself and had relocated because of him. Like Ben Sharpsteen, who turned down a job offer from Iwerks, they may have felt justified skepticism about their former colleague’s ability to run a successful studio. Sharpsteen summed up their attitude a couple of days after Iwerks announced he was leaving; as quoted by Roy Disney in a letter to Walt, he said, “We know that the difference of these cartoons over the average run is nothing more or less than Walt’s personality, along with cooperation from his fellows.” 43
    The net effect of Iwerks’s and Stalling’s departures was to leave the Disney brothers in a stronger position, personally and financially, than ever before. What Walt heard in New York must have given him added confidence that he had outgrown a parsimonious, small-scale distributor like Pat Powers. “From what Dick [Huemer] and Jack Carr [another veteran New York animator] told us,” Lillian Disney wrote to Roy on January 30, “[the Fleischer and Mintz studios] get everyone
[sic]
of our pictures and run them for the crews over and over again.” 44
    The break with Powers was messy, to the point that Disney changed hotels and registered under an assumed name, the better to elude process servers, after he wrote to Roy on February 7, “Have definitely broke
[sic]
with Powers. Will deliver no more pictures.” 45 On February 19, he signed his own contract with Columbia, which had been distributing the
Silly Symphonies
under its contract with Powers, and left for Los Angeles, ending yet another protracted stay in New York.
    Although Walt had until this point taken the lead in business matters, it fell to Roy to go to New York in April 1930 to work on the settlement with Powers. Their correspondence makes clear that Walt still called the shots, butRoy’s background as a “money man” was finally being put to productive use. The three-sided negotiations, involving Columbia as well as the Disneys and Powers, had actually begun by early March, and Roy took part only for the last couple of weeks. What he saw left him skeptical about Columbia, which he described to Walt as not “overburdened with good intentions.” 46 The settlement, signed on April 22, was expensive—the Disneys not only gave up their claims against Powers but had to give him fifty thousand dollars, money they borrowed from Columbia and would have to repay from their films’ profits before they saw any profits themselves. But Columbia would advance the Disneys seven thousand dollars upon the delivery of each film—they would actually be able to spend more on each cartoon than they could when they were getting smaller advances from Powers and seeing none of the profits. “I honestly feel elated over everything,” Roy wrote to