The Book of Mouse: A Celebration of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse (17 page)

Powers needed a high-profile project to help publicize and legitimatize his bootleg sound system, which is one of the reasons Walt’s cartoon intrigued him. Powers’ warm Irish charisma and s claims of acquaintance with important people in the business persuaded Walt that this was the man who would give his cartoon special attention.

Powers arranged for the services of Carl Edouarde, who most recently had led the pit orchestra at the Strand Theatre on Broadway. Despite Walt’s detailed instructions, however, Edouarde seemed disinterested in the flash Walt had put in the film print to mimic the beat of the metronome and allow synchronization of the sounds and the music.

An orchestra, which Walt later said had thirty players plus three trap drummers and effects men, was assembled for the recording session. The players were receiving seven dollars each per hour, the effects men ten, and Edouarde twenty.

As the morning wore on, the expenses quickly mounted, especially since Edouarde insisted on several rehearsals.

Projecting the film on the studio wall distracted the musicians; often, the film finished with sheets of music yet to be played. Further, the bass player’s low notes kept blowing out a bulb in the recording mechanism whenever he sawed his bass, so they kept moving him farther and farther away until he finally ended up outside the room.

One of the first musicians to show up was tired and unshaven from an all-night recording session. Upon opening his music case, he removed a bottle of whisky and took a swig.

In those days, no stopping, editing, or layering took place. Everything had to be recorded at the same time and in one continuous take. Once, a take was ruined by a loud cough near a microphone that blew out another bulb. The culprit? Walt himself, who accidentally coughed after doing a line for the parrot.

That morning session was a disaster. To finance another session, Roy had to sell Walt’s favorite car, a Moon Roadster. Walt wrote encouragingly to Roy:

I think this is Old Man Opportunity rapping at our door. Let’s not let the jingle of a few pennies drown out his knock.

For the next recording session, which began at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning, the orchestra was reduced in size and two of the sound effects men let go, with Walt performing some of their functions.

Iwerks had made another print of the cartoon without the flashes but with a bouncing line that indicated where beats should strike. The film was projected directly onto Edouarde’s sheet music. Following this new cue, the effects and music matched the action perfectly.

Carl Stalling, a theater organist from Kansas City and a former acquaintance of Walt’s, arrived in New York October 26, 1928, and moved in to Walt’s two-room suite at the Knickerbocker Hotel.

Walt had felt very lonely in New York, and was glad of Stalling’s company of someone he knew, and more important, the company of someone with whom he could discuss his ideas.

Stalling would later have an outstanding career as the musical director for Warner Brothers’ cartoons.

Once
Steamboat Willie
was finished, weeks passed with no sales.

Powers arranged special showings of the film all over town. While the bookers enjoyed it, no one bought it.

Finally, at one showing, Harry Reichenbach pulled Walt aside. Reichenbach had been one of the most successful press agents in New York and was now handling films for Universal Pictures through its Manhattan outlet, the Colony Theater.

He was a flamboyant personality who, as a young gallery assistant, had gained notoriety when he displayed a print of “September Morn”, a painting of a woman standing outdoors after a bath that was scandalously nude by the standards of 1913, even though all the objectionable areas were discretely covered. Reichenbach displayed the print in the window of the Manhattan gallery where he worked, and hired some young boys to crowd around and gawk. Then, he protested to Anthony Comstock who, as head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, launched a protest against the moral outrage of the lady’s nudity.

The ensuing publicity caused prints of the painting to sell like hot cakes, and it soon became available on postcards and calendars, the prototype for a century’s pinup calendars.

Reichenbach was quite the creative publicist. Samuel Goldwyn hired him to save
The Return Of Tarzan
(1913), a film that Goldwyn feared would die at the box office. Reichenbach took special delight in his strategy for publicizing this potential box-office bomb because he could employ tricks he had learned working in the circus.

A week before the first screening of the film, the Hotel Belleclaire in New York City received a guest named Zann who had with him an enormous box that he claimed held a piano. The hotel obligingly hoisted it into his room through an outside window.

On the following day, Zann asked room service to deliver fifteen pounds of raw meat. The hotel manager delivered it himself out of curiosity, and was surprised to find Zann had an adult lion in his room. The police and a boatload of reporters quickly descended, ensuring headlines. The advertisements promised the public that Mr. T. Zann (“Tarzan”) would personally attend the opening of the movie.

Reichenbach loved the challenge of marketing the synchronized sound cartoon, a gimmick he knew would attract appreciative audiences if he let them know about it. He advised Disney that he needed a good track record to entice distributors to take
Steamboat Willie
: “Those guys don’t know what’s good until the public tells them,” he reportedly told Walt.

Walt was concerned that a short New York engagement might discourage a potential distributor if a New York premiere had already occurred. In 1966, he stated:

Nobody wanted Mickey. Then a great exhibitor took a chance. [Harry] Reichenbach had a great talent for showmanship and exploitation. Harry sold the public on Mickey Mouse in just two weeks. Our red ink took on a blacker hue.

Reichenbach convinced Disney to forget about a distributorship until the public and the critics had a chance to see the new short. Part of Mickey’s phenomenal success was partly due to Harry Reichenbach’s shrewd publicity.

Steamboat Willie
was booked in the Colony Theater for a two-week run beginning November 18, 1928.

Walt told an interviewer in 1966:

We didn’t yet have a release for Mickey but Harry [Reichenbach] wanted to book him in the Colony regardless. At the time, we were in desperate need of five hundred dollars. To put it briefly, everything owned by Roy and me was mortgaged to the hilt.

So I asked Harry for five hundred dollars for exhibiting the first Mickey Mouse one week. I knew that the price was pretty steep. So did Harry. But fortunately for us, he said, “Let’s compromise. I’ll give you 250 dollars a week — and run the cartoon for two weeks.”

The payment provided much needed immediate income that enabled the Disney brothers to pay salaries and other expenses. In some interviews, Walt claimed that Reichenbach paid five hundred dollars a week for a total of a thousand dollars, but that was unlikely.

Steamboat Willie
debuted on a Sunday afternoon, November 18, 1928, at Manhattan’s Colony Theatre on 53rd Street and Broadway.

The show included music by Ben Bernie and His Famous Orchestra, live stage acts, and a Pathé newsreel with sound. Also on the bill was
Gang War
, a standard crime drama starring Jack Pickford, the younger brother of silent-screen star Mary Pickford, who wousoon become one of Mickey Mouse’s biggest fans.

Gang War
was primarily silent with some talking sequences. The film was directed by Bert Glennon, who directed fewer than a dozen mediocre pictures between 1928-32 and who was best-known as a cinematographer for other directors like John Ford and Cecil B. DeMille.

Glennon was later the cinematographer for the black-and-white portions of the behind-the-scenes segments in Disney’s
Reluctant Dragon
(1941) and for the full-color
Davy Crockett and the River Pirates
(1956).

The music for
Gang War
was composed by Alfred Sherman, the father of Disney songwriters Richard and Robert Sherman.

Carl Stalling recalled:

We [Walt and Stalling] sat on almost the last row and heard laughs and snickers all around us. Walt would continue to attend every performance for the entire two weeks.

In an ad in
The New York Times
, the Colony Theatre erroneously touted
Steamboat Willie
as the “FIRST and ONLY synchronized-sound animated cartoon comedy.” Paul Terry’s
Dinner Time
had been shown in theaters nearly six weeks earlier on September 1, 1928, but made no impact on audiences or reviewers.

Although technically not the first cartoon with synchronized sound,
Steamboat Willie
successfully integrated music, voice, and effects into an entertaining and believable product, featuring a likeable main character and a clear story, not just a series of unrelated gags. It was a huge hit — so much so that many critics ignored the accompanying main feature and the stage show altogether.

Variety
declared it “a high order of cartoon ingenuity” and “a peach of a synchronization job all the way.”

In his review the next day,
Times
critic Mordaunt Hall thought the feature film (
Gang War
) was fine but not memorable. He was, however, very excited about the Mouse:

On the same program is the first sound cartoon, produced by Walter Disney, creator of Oswald the Rabbit. This current film is called
Steamboat Willie
, and it introduces a new cartoon character, henceforth to be known as Micky Mouse [sic]. It is an ingenious piece of work with a good deal of fun. It growls, whines, squeaks and makes various other sounds that add to its mirthful quality.

The New York Times
was one of Mickey Mouse’s biggest supporters in those early years. Between 1934 and 1937, Mickey was featured in three articles in the
Times
’ Sunday magazine, one of them illustrated by Al Hirschfeld, their top cartoonist.

Weekly Film Review
said
Steamboat Willie
“kept the audience laughing and chuckling from the moment the lead titles came on the screen, and it left them applauding.”

Exhibitor’s Herald
said, “It is impossible to describe this riot of mirth, but it knocked me out of my seat.”

After its contracted two-week run,
Steamboat Willie
moved to the two-year-old Roxy Theatre.

By the way, after the cartoon’s debut at the Roxy, the Colony Theatre was eventually renamed the Broadway Theatre, and
Fantasia
(1940) premiered there twelve years later.

Walt was soon flooded with offers including one from Universal Studios, who were highly complimentary and made a generous offer to Walt but only if he surrendered the copyright and control of Mickey Mouse to Universal.

Walt seemed to have little choice, as every other distributor wanted control of the product as well, which was something he would not let happen again after his experience with Oswald.

Powers, who at the time needed Disney about as much as Disney needed him due to Powers’ desire to publicize his new sound system, was the only one who agreed to allow Walt independence as well as retaining the ownership of Mickey Mouse and the cartoons.

Taking 10% of the gross (plus a 10-year exclusive contract with Disney to use the Cinephone sound system for $26,000), Powers agreed to handle all expenses involved in the selling of the product via the “states rights” system. Under that system, Powers’ salesmen would market Disney’s cartoons to theaters in different territories. Most of the best theaters, however, were controlled by large movie production companies and were locked into exclusive block booking agreements.

Distribution of a cartoon was a crucial factor in its success and provided much-needed revenue for its producers, but while the states rights system allowed the cartoon to be seen, it also enabled Powers to perform financial shenanigans in determining fees and expenses before the Disney brothers would see any money.

To capitalize on Mickey’s success, sound tracks by Carl Stalling were added to the first two silent Mickey Mouse cartoons, and final preparations were made on a fourth cartoon,
The Barn Dance
.

When Disney archivist Dave Smith began the Disney Archives in 1970, one of his first tasks was to catalog what was in Walt Disney’s office, which had remained untouched since Walt’s death on December 15, 1966. Smith was surprised to find in a bottom drawer of Walt’s desk the original six-page illustrated story outline for
Steamboat Willie
. In a 1997 interview, Smith said:

Things were stolen from the company before the Archives was established. Included were some scenes from Steamboat Willie and the story sketches for several sequences of
Snow White
. We have the [story script] for
Steamboat Willie
and most of the other films. I found the
Steamboat Willie
script in Walt’s office which surprised me since everyone told me he wasn’t interested in the company’s past, only the next project.

In the Spring 1994 issue of
Sketches
magazine, Smith wrote:

Back in 1928, when Walt Disney was beginning work on
Steamboat Willie
, a script was his method of planning. Sticking a sheet of carbon paper in his typewriter, between two sheets of paper, Walt typed out the descriptions of each scene of the action on the left hand side of the page.

Then he handed his work over to Ub Iwerks, his chief animator, who illustrated the description with small drawings. The fact that he [Walt] saved the
Steamboat Willie
script proved to me that he did at least treasure this special moment in history, which had started him on the road to success.

In 1988, to celebrate the 60th birthday of its most famous cartoon character, the Disney Company donated to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History six original drawings from
Steamboat Willie
selected personally by Walt’s nephew Roy E. Disney.