The Animated Man (14 page)

Jackson came up with the way to knit the music and the animation together, so that there was true synchronization. Using a metronome, he prepared “a little rudimentary bar sheet”—a sort of primitive score. “In the places where we had definite pieces of music in mind, the name of the music was there, and the melody was crudely indicated, not with a staff, but just with notes that would go higher and lower . . . so that I could follow it, in my mind.”
⁹⁵
Jackson prepared the bar sheet “almost simultaneously” with Disney's preparation of exposure sheets for the animators. For the silent
Alices
and
Oswalds
, Disney had made the exposure sheets after the animators did their work, but now it was the other way around, because the animators' timing had to be more precise. Jackson laid out a bar sheet for each tune Disney wanted to use; Disney used the bar sheet to indicate measures and beats on the exposure sheets.
⁹⁶
He did not describe the action in detail on the exposure sheets. Instead, a detailed synopsis of each scene was typewritten—almost certainly
by Disney himself—alongside Iwerks's sketches, each synopsis describing how music and action were to fit together (“Close up of Mickey in cabin of wheel'-house
[sic]
, keeping time to last two measures of verse of ‘steamboat Bill.' With gesture he starts whistling the chorus in perfect time to music”).
⁹⁷
Iwerks was going to animate most of the film, and those synopses, combined with the exposure sheets, told him what he needed to know.

“When the picture was half finished,” Disney wrote years later, “we had a showing with sound.” (The best guess for a date for that showing is July 29, 1928, when Roy Disney noted a two-dollar charge for a “preview” of the unfinished film.)
⁹⁸
“A couple of my boys could read music and one of them [Jackson] could play a mouth organ. We put them in a room where they could not see the screen and arranged to pipe their sound into the room where our wives and friends were going to see the picture. The boys worked from a music and sound-effects score. After several false starts, sound and action got off with the gun. The mouth-organist played the tune, the rest of us in the sound department bammed tin pans and blew slide whistles on the beat. The synchronism was pretty close. The effect on our little audience was nothing less than electric. They responded almost instinctively to this union of sound and motion. I thought they were kidding me. So they put me in the audience and ran the action again. It was terrible, but it was wonderful! And it was something new!”
⁹⁹

There is present in that account “some of his ebullience”—Wilfred Jackson remembered that the two Disney wives and Iwerks's wife and his own girlfriend “weren't particularly impressed; they were all talking about sewing, and knitting, and the things that girls talk about.” It also seems likely that Disney was wrong in remembering that his “musicians” could not see the cartoon as they played. Jackson said that Roy Disney projected the film onto a bedsheet hung in front of a glass pane in Walt Disney's office door, so that he and his colleagues could see the cartoon in reverse, through the glass, as they played inside the office.
¹⁰⁰
But Jackson did remember that Iwerks “rigged up a little microphone and speaker”; and there is no reason to doubt that Disney and his crew were elated by what they saw and heard.

Steamboat Willie
was complete in silent form by late August, when Disney took the train to New York to try to get his sound track recorded. Lillian was not with him this time. He stopped in Kansas City to see Carl Stalling, the organist at the Isis Theatre, whom Disney had known since he was working at Kansas City Film Ad in the early 1920s. “Walt was making short commercials at that time,” Stalling said in 1969, “and he'd have us run them for him. We got acquainted, and I had him make several song films”
¹⁰¹
—that is, sing-along
films, like the later
Martha
, that showed the lyrics on the screen while the theater musician played the song. After Disney moved to Los Angeles, Stalling lent him $250 (which Disney repaid). Disney left the two silent
Mickey Mouse
cartoons with Stalling so that he could begin writing scores for them.

Disney arrived in New York on September 4, 1928, the day after Labor Day; he remembered the crowds returning from the holiday. As he made the rounds of recording studios, he saw one cartoon, an
Aesop's Fable
called
Dinner Time
, with a sound track that engineers for Radio Corporation of America (RCA) had added as an experiment. The
Fable
s remained silent otherwise. So did Mintz's cartoons, not just the
Oswalds
but also the
Krazy Kat
cartoons that Mintz was making in New York. Disney heard of an effort to make a
Krazy Kat
cartoon in sound, with results so poor that the cartoon went unreleased, at least in its sound version.

Disney was not deterred by what he saw of this clumsy experimenting. Writing to Roy and Ub Iwerks three days after his arrival in New York, he embraced sound as a spur to growth: “It is not at all impossible for us to develop in this sound field the same as [short-comedy producers Hal Roach and Mack Sennett] and the others did in the silent.”
¹⁰²
A week later, he wrote again of his strong belief in the future of sound cartoons and the importance of quality—a belief he was going to back up by paying for a seventeen-piece orchestra (plus three effects men) for the recording of
Steamboat Willie
's score.
¹⁰³

Within a week of his arrival in New York, Disney had decided to record
Steamboat Willie
's sound track with Powers Cinephone, a sound system of dubious legality that had somehow managed not to run afoul of larger companies' patents (Disney noted, in a letter written shortly after his arrival, that “the Powers method is absolutely interchangeable” with the competing RCA and Movietone systems).
¹⁰⁴
Powers Cinephone took its name from Patrick A. Powers, a colorful Irish rogue who had been an important figure in the film industry early in the century, when he and Carl Laemmle battled for control of Universal. Disney was impressed by Powers's wealth and apparent influence in the industry and swept up by his charm—“He is a dandy. . . . He is a fine fellow”
¹⁰⁵
—but he also had very little choice. He had determined almost immediately that only Powers and RCA were good candidates for the kind of recording he had in mind, and RCA would have charged him far more than he could afford. The Disneys were by no means poverty stricken in 1928, but their assets were mainly their studio building and its equipment, rather than cash. They were not liquid enough to spend thousands of dollars on recording sessions.

The first recording session ran from 11:30 on the evening of Saturday, September 15, until 4:00 the next morning.
¹⁰⁶
Disney himself provided the voice of a parrot. He recalled in 1956: “I had to yell ‘Man overboard! Man overboard!' And I got so excited and I was right in the microphone and I coughed in it right in one of the takes. And that blew that take up and then they all turned to me and said, ‘Now who did that?' ”

The results of the first recording session were unsatisfactory, for reasons other than Disney's performance as the parrot. He had brought with him to that session a film a theatrical-trailer company had made for him, showing a ball bouncing in the musical tempo. He knew that some such device was needed during the actual recording if the synchronization was to be as tight as the bar-sheet system permitted. The conductor, Carl Edouarde, was apparently reluctant to pay strict attention to the ball, and as a result synchronization suffered. There were problems with some of the sound effects, too, and so a second recording session was scheduled for September 30.

Disney was strikingly cavalier about costs in a September 23 letter to Roy and Iwerks: “Why should we let a few little dollars [jeopardize] our chances. . . . We can lick them all with Quality.”
¹⁰⁷
Two days later, he wrote to Roy of pouring money back into the cartoons and making them as good as possible: “God help us put this thing over—we are sincere and deserve it.”
¹⁰⁸
On September 28, he brushed aside Roy's concern about expenses connected with the second recording for
Steamboat Willie:
“Forget these little details and concentrate on some good
GAGS
. . . . 
GAGS
are going to do more to put us over than all the little figures you could ever think of.”
¹⁰⁹
He had by then already given Pat Powers two checks for a total of fifteen hundred dollars. His letters to his brother and his friend were long and rambling—intense, but rambling, reflecting his frustration at having “absolutely no one here to talk to. . . . I feel lots of times like dragging a bell boy in and paying him to listen to me.”
¹¹⁰

The second recording session, which began at ten on a Sunday morning, was successful, with much better synchronization of sound and image. The bouncing ball had been superimposed on a print of
Steamboat Willie
, in the space for the sound track alongside the frames of film, and this time Edouarde took it seriously. The musicians played with their backs to the screen—only Edouarde saw the bouncing ball, but so tight was the synchronization that there was no need, for example, for the piccolo player who provided Mickey Mouse's whistling to see the character or the ball on the screen.
¹¹¹

“The only thing we lacked,” Disney wrote, “was the complete Orchestra score with all the effects written out accurately”—that is, sound effects that were integrated with the music. He was not completely satisfied with some
of the effects, he said, but
Steamboat Willie
succeeded where it was most important: “It proves one thing to me, ‘It can be done perfectly' and this is the one thing that they all have been stumped on.”
¹¹²

The orchestra was smaller, too, and, as Disney had written a few days earlier, the score itself had been “all rewritten to fit the action” by “the arranger,” an important but apparently never identified figure in the
Steamboat Willie
episode.
¹¹³
Wilfred Jackson's bar sheet would not have sufficed as a recording score, so someone had to translate what he and Disney had done into real music. Carl Stalling did not do it—he was in Kansas City, working on scores for the two silent cartoons—and there is nothing in Disney's letters that says who did. Disney credited the arranger with “a completely original score” that included no “taxable” music—that is, music under copyright: “The parts for Steamboat bill
[sic]
were all written by the arranger.” “Steamboat Bill” was still under copyright in 1928, however, and that song is a prominent element in the score. Disney's use of the song was not licensed by the copyright holder until 1931.
¹¹⁴

After several weeks in Powers's intoxicating company, Disney was thinking in rather grandiose terms of making fifty-two
Mickey Mouse
cartoons a year—one a week, the same schedule that Paul Terry was meeting with his
Aesop's Fables
. “I think we have the basis of a good [organization] by just adding a few good animators and [systematizing] everything,” he wrote to Roy and Iwerks—this at a time when he had lost most of his staff and had only one experienced animator.
¹¹⁵

In the weeks that followed, Disney showed
Steamboat Willie
to potential distributors in New York. “By gosh, it got laughs . . . but I was gettin' the brushoff,” he said in 1956.

Throughout the fall, in letters to his brother and Iwerks, Disney was unfailingly positive, writing enthusiastically about their chances for a major release even as one possibility after another withered away. He pounded on Iwerks, at great length and in near-manic tones, to finish animating a new
Mickey Mouse
cartoon,
The Barn Dance
, as quickly as possible—“Listen Ub—Show some of your old Speed. . . . Work like hell
BOY
. . . . It is our one
BIG CHANCE
to make a real killing”—so that he and Carl Stalling could record the score along with the scores for
Plane Crazy
and
The Gallopin' Gaucho
.
¹¹⁶
He was trying to compensate for his absence, since he certainly would have been egging Iwerks on if he had been in Los Angeles. His letters were typewritten now—in contrast to his handwritten letters on earlier visits to New York—and the greater speed the typewriter made possible encouraged the flow of his words. When Disney received a print of the first half of
The Barn
Dance
on October 22, he was predictably disappointed—this was, after all, the first of his cartoons to get this far in production with so little input from Disney himself.
¹¹⁷

On other occasions, when Disney wrote to Roy and Iwerks about Powers and other film executives, he was so enthusiastic that he sounded a little ingenuous; there was scarcely a trace of cynicism, even though he sometimes expressed a wariness born of his experience with Mintz. He was franker in his letters to Lillian, but even when writing to her, as he did on October 20, he regarded Powers as different from the rest:

I have certainly learned a lot about this game all ready
[sic]
. . . . It is the damndest mixed up affair I have ever heard of. . . . It sure demands a shrewd and thoroughly trained mind to properly handle it. . . . There are so damn many angles that continually come up that if a person hasn't the experience etc. it would completely lick one. They are all a bunch of schemers and just full of tricks that would fool a green horn. I am sure glad I got someone to fall back on for advice. . . . I would be like a sheep amongst' a pack of wolves. . . . I have utmost confidence and faith in Powers and believe that if we don't try to rush things too fast that we will get a good deal out of this.
¹¹⁸