Acquired
00:19:43 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[00:19:43] S0: Honestly, it's all physical comedy, sort of slapstick. It's the stuff that my toddler laughs at. You could resummarize every scene of every comic and most movies by going, oh, he fell down. [00:19:55] S1: Exactly. So in May 1922, at 20 years old, Walt decides that these laughograms that he's making are having enough success that he's ready to leave the slide company, go out on his own again, and he founds Laugh O Gram Films Inc. And once again, he convinces, BiWorks to quit and come along too, along with a few other animators from the slide company. And it's another failure because despite the Laugh O Gram's local popularity there in Kansas City, by the time we get into twenty two, nineteen twenty three, animation and cartoons in general around the country are starting to lose their appeal. The novelty is wearing off. The fad is dying down. There's actually a survey of theater managers right around this time in, like, 1922 or 1923, where one of the questions is, what filler options do your audiences like to see around the feature film that you're showing? Because it also would be newsreels or live comedies or short serials. Remember, there's no television. There's not even really radio at this point in time. If you wanna get news or any kind of entertainment, you go to movie theater. [00:21:09] S0: Alright. I got a stat on this. In the nineteen twenties, the average American went over 40 times per year to the theater. Wow. This is what you did every week for entertainment. [00:21:21] S1: Wow. Yeah. Compare that to today where, like, maybe you go once a year.
00:21:21 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[00:21:21] S1: Wow. Yeah. Compare that to today where, like, maybe you go once a year. [00:21:26] S0: It's two. The the American the average American goes to a movie theater twice a year now. [00:21:30] S1: Yeah. I mean, back then, it was like you could go to the movie theater, or you could go see a live show, ballet or opera or or like a sporting event, like a baseball game, or you go to the movie theater. [00:21:40] S0: That's it. And when you go to the theater, it was a bundle. I mean, yeah, you were there for a production, but I think the point you're trying to make is there were also these cartoons with gags. There were newsreels. There was the the feature you're there to see, but it's sort of this, like, bundle of, alright. Let's see what the theater has in store for me today. [00:21:56] S1: Yep. Exactly. So this survey of theater managers, only 23% of respondents say that they show cartoons as part of the bundle and that their audience is, like which is by far the lowest of any of the other filler options. So Laugh O Gram can't really find a market outside of their local popularity in Kansas City. And in 1923, the company goes bankrupt and shuts down. And Walt, there's now this sort of 1.5 times disgraced entrepreneur here in Kansas City. [00:22:27] S0: Falling back right in his dad's footsteps. [00:22:29] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. [00:22:30] S0: And he raised money from people in Kansas City, friends, family. He he went and lost people's loan capital that they gave him.
00:22:30 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[00:22:30] S0: And he raised money from people in Kansas City, friends, family. He he went and lost people's loan capital that they gave him. [00:22:37] S1: Yep. So Walt goes to rich uncle Robert for advice on what to do given his failure. And Robert says, you know, kid, best thing to do if I were you, I would just skip town. Get out of there. Which actually is really sound advice for back then. You know? People's reputations did not travel with them. [00:22:58] S0: Nope. Your credit was the credit locally that you had with the people in your town, and no other way to find you otherwise. [00:23:05] S1: Now it just so happens that both Robert and Walt's older brother Roy have just also skipped town from Kansas City and moved out west to Los Angeles. So Walt packs his belongings, which is basically nothing at this point in time, hops aboard the Santa Fe train bound for LA and joins them in Hollywood. And when he arrives there in the summer of nineteen twenty three, he's 21 years old, he stays with Uncle Robert, And initially, you really can't make this up. I I couldn't believe this when I read it. Walt, at first, thinks that he's come to Hollywood. He's gonna get a a directing job in Hollywood at one of the studios there. [00:23:52] S0: Well, yeah, he has abandoned the idea of animation. He basically thinks he's too late. He's seen some of the stuff that comes out of the New York cartooning scene, and he's like, well, I'll never be as good as them, so I need to go start over something completely new.
00:23:52 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[00:23:52] S0: Well, yeah, he has abandoned the idea of animation. He basically thinks he's too late. He's seen some of the stuff that comes out of the New York cartooning scene, and he's like, well, I'll never be as good as them, so I need to go start over something completely new. [00:24:05] S1: Right. Which is sort of, you know, silly and wrong in and of its own. But also, like, the hubris that he thinks that he could just show up in Hollywood with no directorial experience and become the next DW Griffith. That is Walt for you. [00:24:18] S0: Do you know the story of the Universal lot? [00:24:20] S1: No. No. No. [00:24:20] S0: So he rolls up to the Universal Lot after getting there, having no job, no money, borrowing a bed, and he goes and has fake business cards made that says he is with Universal. He's just the Kansas City representative, so no one at Universal would really know who he is. And he gives it to the receptionist on the Universal lot, and he walks in. And so he spends at least a day, from what I could tell, roaming around and learning as much as he could about film production and, like, internalizes a lot of those lessons. And he tries to come back in future days and say, like, oh, yeah. I'm sorta, like, with Universal, and now I have experience, and can you give me a job? And he ends up running out of money and doesn't get
00:25:03 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[00:25:03] S1: a job. But amazing. I didn't know that story. So once he inevitably gets rejected at all the major Hollywood studios, he says later, when things began to look hopeless, I got my cartoon things out again. And he sets up shop animating again. He's like, well, as you said, Ben, this is the one thing I know how to do. I should try that. And at this point, pretty much the only popular cartoon left in the industry is Felix the Cat Yep. Which is created by Pat Sullivan out of New York and distributed by the pioneering Margaret Winkler, also in New York. So Walt has one thing, one asset left over from his failed Laugh O Gram days, which is a reel of a hybrid live action cartoon short that he had created with Ub right before he left Kansas City called Alice's Wonderland, about a real life little girl who interacts on screen with cartoons that they've drawn over the film. [00:26:15] S0: Which is like completely pioneering technology. The the other people who were doing animation this time were just doing cartoons. These Alice comedies, as they came to be called, were a new process by which you could go and film a real life actor and then have them interact on screen with cartoon characters and put them in the cartoon. [00:26:34] S1: Yes. Very cool. And also had the unique property of being cheaper to produce than full animation, because you only had to animate the characters, not all the backgrounds and everything. Right.
00:26:34 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[00:26:34] S1: Yes. Very cool. And also had the unique property of being cheaper to produce than full animation, because you only had to animate the characters, not all the backgrounds and everything. Right. [00:26:45] S0: Yeah. There is this funny counterintuitive thing that live production is much faster and cheaper than animation. You just have a film camera, and you point it at something in the world that exists, and you kinda get everything that you're pointing it at for free. Yep. Like, the actor is interacting with a bunch of stuff. And when you're making an animated film, you need to draw literally everything from scratch. It's it's much harder, and [00:27:07] S1: you need to do [00:27:07] S0: it frame by frame by frame by frame rather than the world just sort of happening around you and you taking these exposures in a video camera. [00:27:15] S1: Yep. So Walt sends Alice's Wonderland off to Winkler, and she likes it. So she commissions Walt to create 12 more Alice comedies for, like, 15 to $1,800 each. She does. And, David, did you know we have seen this contract? Was this in the documents that we saw in the Disney archives?