#310 Walt Disney and Picasso

25:20So around the same time, Disney's original company, the Laugh -O -Gram Corporation, made short animation films, animation plus photography films, and they would also create advertising for brands using cartoon figures. And so that is the actual company that it's going to go bankrupt. So it goes bankrupt. from after the bankruptcy, all he has left was the camera and a print of Alice to use as a sample. So what does he do? Essentially, he just takes on free work, freelance work to survive before he's going to start another company. He's around 22 or 23 years old when his first company goes bankrupt.

25:53So it says he was forced to disband his team and use his camera for freelance news photography, making Kansas City his base and selling his footage to all these other. I'm not going to name the companies. There's a bunch of different names. And he's selling the footage to a bunch of these companies and these companies are all located in Hollywood. This is an undoubtedly low part of his life. He also took on private jobs. He would film weddings and funerals. He'd make 10 or $15 to film a wedding or a funeral. He often had so little money that he could only eat canned beans. And so he realizes, I got to get out of here.

26:27I got to go to where I'm making, the little money I'm making is coming from these news studios, right? So it says his contracts with news studios persuaded him that he had to establish himself and a new production company in Hollywood. So he sold his camera and with the proceeds, he bought himself a ticket and he headed to Hollywood with $40. He's got $40 to his name. And it was interesting. He traveled on the famous train, California limited in July 23rd, or excuse me, July 1923. If you think about all that happens after he moves to California, it shouldn't be called California limited. It takes many years for this to happen.

27:02She called California unlimited. The early 1920s full of hope and daring were a classic period of American free enterprise. And for anyone interested in the arts, Hollywood was a rapidly expanding focus of innovation. He has 40 bucks. He has the initiative. He's like, I need to go where I think is best for my career. That does not mean it's going to be immediately easy. This is a crazy thing. I'm about to read to you like all these companies. Imagine having the chance to hire a young Walt Disney, but nah, I'm good. The early 1920s, full of hope and daring, where a classic period for American free enterprise and for anyone interested in the arts, Hollywood is a rapidly expanding focus of innovation.

27:37But Disney had a very hard time getting work of any description in the movie industry, trudging from studio to studio and borrowing money just to eat. He had to go back to making animated cartoons. Now, this is incredible. This is the relentless resourcefulness of a young Walt Disney. you will find stories like the one I'm about to share with you in a lot of the biographies of filmmakers. I'll leave the links down below. George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg. I've read all their biographies, done episodes on them. They all have stories like this in their biographies. It's why filmmakers are one of my favorite people to read biographies.

28:14I have actually a bunch coming very soon, a bunch more. He also used his Alice sample to get a series going. The camera cost him $5 a day. He then drew cartoons around her. So the act, the actual actress, right? The physical person, he organized a group of local children and each and paid each 50 cents a day to act skits around Alice. And he trained his great uncle Robert's dog to be part of the fun. And this is what you do when you have no money. You're forced to be creative, forced to be resourceful. Each reel consisted of 900 feet of film of real children and the dog and 300 feet of animated cartoon.

28:49Disney wrote the script, built the sets himself. His studio was a small back room in a real estate office that he rented for $5 a month. He made all of the props he needed himself. He produced and directed and filmed it himself. And then he sat down and drew the animation himself. The first movie cost him $750 all in, and he sold it East, meaning to New York syndicate, who's going to wind up screwing him later on, for $1 ,500. This was his first real profit in his entrepreneurial career. Now, another interesting part of this essay, this is on the similarities of Disney and Picasso and the immense contribution to your collaborators, only keeping the very best people around you because they're going to influence the quality of your work and the trajectory of your business.

29:39He made a contract for a dozen movies and the first six he made entirely by himself. Or excuse me, he had a contract for a dozen movies. So he makes the first six by himself. He's like, all right, then I need help. He goes to this guy named Herb. Iwerks, he was working back with him in Kansas City. So he brings out Iwerks to Hollywood to help him with the animation. There is a curious similarity between his work with Iwerks and Picasso's collaboration with this, I'm not going to pronounce this guy's name, Georges, George Brack in the invention of cubism nearly two decades earlier. Okay, don't worry about the name.

30:11So closely did Picasso and Brack share their ideas and techniques that a few years later, it was sometimes impossible to tell which of them had produced a certain canvas or if both of them had. Neither painter could tell either. In some cases, the mystery remains to this day. Now, why is that important? Because you see the same thing in Disney's career. That's the precise roles of Walt and Iwerks in the early successful animations can no longer be determined with certainty. It is clear that the basic ideas came chiefly from Disney, but many of the most effective touches sprang out of the animation process himself, and here Iwerks was important.

30:47Now here's another comparison to Picasso that I would have never drawn this connection. The same, I guess, trait of human nature or this insatiable desire that humans have for novelty actually is going to lead to the creation of the greatest thing that Walt, the foundational character, Mickey Mouse, right? So it says it's impossible to exaggerate the need for a producer like Disney to respond quickly to changes in public taste and there in the public's need for novelty. Just as Picasso and Paris went from one phase to another to cater to the insatiable appetite for ideas of the art world, so Disney had to adapt and change his cartooning.

31:19The audiences were tiring of Alice and they needed more characters. They wanted a new character. Disney invents a rabbit called Oswald. And Oswald was so successful that it invited competition. The problem is he doesn't have the resources to fight back with competition. All he can fight back with is creativity. He's got to innovate his way out of this problem. It's another way to think about what's happening here. Oswald was a success, but Disney found that once his shorts acquired a reputation, other studios, bigger and with more capital, would raid his staff and steal his animators by offering them more money.

31:53He could frustrate this process by inventing a new character. The result was a mouse. And so 30 years after where we are in the story, Disney would later say, I love this idea. He says, I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing, that it all started with a mouse. And it also started with a terrible name for the mouse. And so God bless Walt Disney's wife, right? He chose, Disney chose the name Mortimer Mouse, but his wife Lily objected. And so that is when Disney picked the name Mickey. And why would Walt Disney 30 years later say, hope we never forget that it all started with a mouse. Another comparison to Picasso.

32:32Picasso had in fact turned the bodies and faces of his women models into characters, cubist cartoon characters animated awfully enough by contempt and even hatred, right? He's like the evil version of Disney. But Disney produced a mouse animated by admiration and even by love. It is significant that Mickey Mouse, in the year of his greatest popularity, which is 1933, received over 800 ,000 fan letters, the largest ever recorded in show business at any time in any century. Think about that. An animated character received more fan letters than any other celebrity or known person in one period ever.

33:16Therein lay Disney's genius. He could make people, especially children, love his creations. And so what I would summarize what he's trying to teach us about the difference between Picasso and Disney is this is love versus hate. You might get temporary attention by engaging in hate and negativity, but a durable, beloved brand can only be rooted in one thing, and that is love. And to fall in love with something takes time. So there's an element of what I'm about to read you is the importance of time, right? Because you look at what Mickey Mouse looked like when you first invented it, and when he comes to be lovable, it's like, oh, big difference.

33:53But also Disney realized that he still has no money. So I have to use speed as a competitive advantage. The earliest Mickey does not look lovable to our eyes nearly a century later. His jerkiness was technical rather than deliberate. Remember, this is the very beginning of animation. With every month that passed, animation was becoming more complex, and Disney, to outpace his competitors, forced the pace. Let's go. He used 16 drawings to make Mickey move once. About 14 ,400 drawings went into a 10 -minute cartoon short. So he uses speed, and he also, something that Disney does his entire career, he has this in common with a bunch of other great filmmakers, is he's always jumping on the new technology of his day.

34:32Warner Brothers released the first integrated sound picture called The Jazz Singer. This, I think, is 1927. Disney jumped for joy at the idea of talkies. Those are the funny name of movies with sound. Sounds ridiculous to us now, but at that time, that's what they're called. So Disney's jumping for joy at the idea of talkies because he had always believed sound to be the true third dimension of movie cartooning. Disney had no sound equipment and proceeded on a do -it -yourself basis, which is a model of entrepreneurial improvisation. Yes, it is. Amen. He got a person to play a harmonica. He bought nightclub noisemaker cowbells, tin pans, washboards for scrubbing noises.

35:11So he's just essentially trying to build this, you know, with very inexpensive tools, I guess, is the way you would think about this. Right. So I'm reading all that. Not so you memorize all that. But the main idea here is like this is just an unbelievable level of resourcefulness. I just heard Kevin Kelly on the podcast. It's like the best. It's episode 334. Highly recommend listening to that episode. I think Kevin Kelly's got a very unique way of just a philosophy on life. I took a bunch of notes on that episode. But one of my favorite things that he says is he studied the history of creativity to a great degree.

35:46And he's like, listen, lack of resources is actually a feature. It is the benefit. And for our purposes, that's why new, smaller companies can always usually outcompete and overtake larger companies if they remain focused because the lack of resources forces them to become more creative. Sam Walton talks about this even in his business the fact that Walmart starts out undercapitalized he not part of a large company and so he said that constraints were actually his friend because it forced him to learn it forced him to become resourceful and then this accumulation of knowledge that Disney is forced to learn like that becomes an asset he can use for his entire life and it's also I think illustrates just his he's just completely dedicated I think I have another highlight here that comes from a different book talks about you know he never the secret to his success was he was never doing things out to make money he was just obsessed with making the absolute best product he could it took a great deal of effort time and re -recording to get the system working smoothly and by the time the composite print was made with fully synchronized sound the disney brothers had run out of cash and even had to sell their father's car but here is the end result the first sound movie using the mouse was called steamboat willie i think a lot of people will be familiar with what that is even you know hundreds later and it came out in 1928 it was a huge success, not only because of Disney's technical triumphs of synchronized animation, but because of the ingenuity of what Disney got the mouse to do in producing noises.

37:08Therein lay his extraordinary gift, the imagination. What did Napoleon tell us a few weeks ago? Imagination rules the world. The imagination to enter into the head of a half mouse, half man, and devise weird and hilarious things to do as the mouse steered a boat down the river. Disney had invented the sound cartoon, a combination of imaginative drawing, scripting, and engineering science. It was and remains a wonderful example of creativity, the birth of a new art form. That is the startup paradox. This was not done by better funded competitors. By the end of that decade, Mickey Mouse was the best known figure in movies.

37:46Here's a little fun fact for you. Mickey's voice was originally done by Disney himself. And so if you study the very early parts of Walt Disney's career and as he starts out with not any money, not resources, he accumulates resources, the source of that inspiration remains the same. It's nature. This underlined Walt's emphasis on the study of nature for inspiration. The studio, his studio, regarded nature as the one and only true source of Disney art. Animators, led by Disney himself, constantly watched movies of animals and live animals were brought into the studio for study. It was Disney's view that nature was a richer source of humor than human imagination.

38:30What his and his team supplied was just the anthropomorphism. Back to the fact that Disney always embraced the latest technology, he regarded color as a godsend, almost as crucial as sound because it enormously increased realism. He experimented widely with color systems before he adopted Technicolor and signed an exclusive contract with its manufacturer. He spent money freely and as fast as it came in. There's another line in one of the biographies I've read on Disney in the past where him and his brother. So, you know, creative aspect of the business. It comes from Walt's head. And the finance part of the business is his brother, Roy.

39:06And they're having a fight about this. And he has a great line where he's like fighting with his brother for money, where he says something like, I'm innovating. I'll tell you what it costs when I'm finished. so that's a great like to me in my mind when you read about disney you study it was like oh that's disney through and through disney always bought the best paint the best film and other materials he insisted on reanimation however time consuming and expensive until the results were right in the early 1930s disney's production costs for an eight minute movie were 13 000 and over at a time when rival studios spent a maximum of $2 ,500.

39:45Disney put excellence before any other consideration. Disney put excellence before any other consideration. There's a great line in this biography that I've read, this line I've read multiple times. And here's the quote. If you want to know the real secret of Walt's success, it's that he never tried to make money. He was always trying to make something that he could have fun with or be proud of. Incoming cash instantly went for investment in new technology and better artists, the 1930s was not totally unlike the big European studios of the 17th century. Disney hired the best art. History doesn't repeat, human nature does, right?

40:21He's just doing the same thing that was happening, what, 300 years, 400 years before him. Disney hired the best artists he could get and gave them tasks to the limits of their capacities. The studio was a highly creative, interactive place, tense, and sometimes hysterical as new ideas were presented, debated, boosted, and discarded. There were arguments, and animators sometimes left after disputes. Disney and his studio, by trial and error, and of industry and skill, acquired the art of animating figures, making them seem as real as humans on the stage, in essentially the same way as the Florentine painters learned to reproduce people in fresco or on walls.

41:00What took the early Renaissance painters to, this is such a great, this is like the most Paul Johnson paragraph ever. What took the early Renaissance painters two centuries, the Disney studio did in a decade. But then Disney's animators had the whole tradition of Western art on which to build, just as the countless animators of today are inspired by Disney's work in the 1930s. And so then we get to the point where the technology finally catches up and he's able to invent yet another new art form. this is the note let me read it and then i'll read the note that i left to myself to like apply to my own work so it says the arrival of color the improvement of background technique the perfection of the soundtrack allowing high quality orchestra music and singing and financial factors persuaded disney to break out of the limitations of the funny cartoons and make a feature -length fairy tale the result was snow white and the seven dwarfs the idea was disney's of course He had been preparing for human animation for some time by holding live classes at his studio.

42:00Wait for this. I left myself. Wait for the technology to catch up. Ask yourself, what is possible today that I could not do a year ago? Start practicing that and wait for the technology to catch up. These ideas that are now accumulating. Snow White comes out in 19. I think he starts working on 1934 comes out in 1938. He had been thinking about some of these ideas for over 18 years up until that point. He just, again, I know what I want to do. Can't figure out how to do it yet. And this is the result. The movie introduced numerous artistic and technical innovations that transformed the art of movie cartooning.

42:36It involved over 2 million drawings and formed the largest single project in the history of draftsmanship. That is insane. Which had begun 40 ,000 years before in the caves of France and Spain. Again, that's why you got to love Paul Johnson. that's a very Paul Johnson Paul Johnson might be the only person that would write a sentence like that it was a huge critical and commercial success and marked the point in which animation achieved maturity as an art form he was the most the most financially successful thing I think he'd ever done by a long shot up until that point but the crazy thing is I have another I went through my Readwise and was searching for I know Steve talked about Walt quite a bit and so I've been thinking about that and I'm also compiling it for the research of this other Walt Disney episode I told you I'm working out or working on you know that thing might not be ready for like another month or two I have to figure it out but um I've just been like seeping myself on this uh little by little and what what's fascinating is like uh Steve Jobs talked about hey you know once they they figured out Pixar wasn't going to produce uh they were they were trying to sell hardware and then try to sell software to other companies like no no we're just gonna go all in on developing the first computer animated movie so steve does this like intense uh like research into the industry like how lucrative is is animation couldn't find anything because he says uh you can't you can't go to the the library and check out a book called the business model of animation because there's only one company has ever done it well which is disney and they don't want anybody else to know how lucrative it was and so he's discovering as he's researching this how lucrative it is and he's like this is insane because, again, you hold on as long as possible because you have no idea what new technology will be invented in the future that unlocks value in the business that you're creating.

44:20So at the time that he's doing this research, people are buying a ton of VHS tapes and DVDs. And he's like, wait a minute. Job says, good storytelling can last for decades. I don't think you'll be able to boot up any computer today in 20 years, but Snow White has sold 28 million copies and it's a 60 -year -old production. He's talking about the fact that they sold, when it was released on DVD or tape, I can't remember which one, they sold 28 million copies of a movie that they made 60 years ago. That is insane. I think he put the number on it. I think he's like, they made like a quarter billion dollars on that.

44:57So it's just wild. I love how all these things relate and everybody's learning from each other and studying. It brings a big smile on my face. All right, let's go back to this. Disney's instinct was always to get back to nature, whereas Picasso's was to get away from it. The success of Snow White financed a series of four big feature movies. All of them were made by Disney between the years 1938 and 1944. So they're talking about Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi. All of those movies wound up being massively successful, and every single one of them explored natural phenomenon. So let's skip ahead to when he's going to invent another unique art form.

45:39During World War II, Disney had brooded on the possibility of creating these worlds, meaning his animated worlds, not in the studio, but in real life. He thus produced the idea of a Disney park constructed around a theme. He recreated his, this is incredible, He recreated his scenery in three dimensions in the open air and invited the public to enter his first Disneyland open in 1955. So I want to pause here to tell you two things. One, if you're interested, I'd order this book immediately. I did an entire episode. There's this book called Disney's Land, Walt Disney and the Invention of the Amusement Park that changed the world.

46:20I'd read the whole book. Listen to the podcast if you haven't. It's episode 158. I think it's excellent. The book is fantastic. Like I've given that book to quite a few friends. It's all about the way he thought about Disneyland. But this is the other thing that came to my mind, which is like really important. It's like, listen, we want to move fast. We obviously speed is a competitive advantage in the early days of your company, but you want to maintain a speed that you can last for decades. Why? Because nobody creates their best product when they're 20, 25, 30. How old was Steve Jobs when the iPhone came out?

46:51He'd been making products, fantastic products for three decades, but his greatest creation came three and a half decades into his life. Disneyland was by far Walt Disney's greatest creation. And he was 54. Disney was 54 when he made his greatest creation. If he had lived, he winds up dying, I think at 66 from lung cancer. He smoked constantly, smoked cigarettes all the time. If he had lived, he'd been 71 when disney world would when disney world opened which is like the you know his he's like oh i proof my kind of like my proof of concept was disneyland and he took it to a like much greater scale and grandiosity in disney world he would have been 71 i love thinking about that like go and study somebody's career when did they do their best work think about if as the as an entrepreneur and a creator and an innovator the stuff that is in the 54 year old brain of Walt Disney compared to like the 25 -year -old brain.

47:48Knowledge compounds just like everything else. And just imagine if you could get inside that brain and that experience. I experienced this to some degree when I got to sit down and have a two -hour long lunch with Sam Zell. He's 81 years old at the time. I didn't know, but it happened a few months, unfortunately, before he passed away. And just the way his brain was working and the stuff that was in it and the business knowledge that came out of it effortlessly. The guy had been seeing deals and thinking about entrepreneurship for six decades. Like me sitting across from him is like we're a different species.

48:19It's incredible to think about the compounded business knowledge that was in his brain. Luckily enough, you know, he tried to document as much as he could in his autobiography, in speeches, you know, to some degree to the podcast. That's why he was, I don't know if I said this publicly, but I was supposed to have dinner with him. He, I was supposed to have dinner with him, a few, I had lunch with him. And then like two months later, I was supposed to have dinner with him because he literally wanted to give me more content to make an episode about what he learned so I could share it with you because he was like adamant about sharing everything he learned with future generations of entrepreneurs.

48:52Unfortunately, he wound up getting sick and then, you know, a few weeks later passed away. So just this idea, it's like, man, like that is such a fascinating idea. It's the amount of compounded experience and knowledge that was in like a 54 -year -old Disney. I don't know, I just got to this part and it really like struck and like had to sit here for a while and really think about what, like it just resonated with me. So when that happens, I obviously share it with you and hopefully like you find it valuable. Okay, this revealed, again, going back to Disneyland, you see the theme reappears. What is his main talent?

49:20It revealed, again, Disney's creative genius for satisfying the human demand for popular art as entertainment. And then they make the point. That's not just important because it's serving customers, making somebody else's life better, right, at the time that he lived. It's what that influences all the generations and all the entrepreneurs and creators that come and innovators that come after that. Clearly, the influence of Disney on the presentation of visual images in the 20th century and beyond was immense, almost past computation. Disney himself trained over a thousand artists, almost as many as the most successful art school in history.

49:56Disney was an entrepreneur and a highly successful one. The founder of a business which in his own day employed thousands of people and which in the first decade of the 21st century survives and flourishes. Disney pursued his own individual way until his death. Picasso, on the other hand, set his faith against nature and burrowed within himself. Paul's about to answer his own question that he started this. Who had a greater impact? Disney worked within nature, stylizing it, anthropomorphizing it, and surrealizing it, and ultimately reinforcing it. That is why Disney's ideas will continue to shine through, while the ideas of Picasso, So powerful, though, they were for much of the 20th century will gradually fade.

50:41In the end, nature is the strongest force of all. And that is where I'll leave it. I absolutely loved. I love I mean, I'm a huge fan of Paul Johnson's writing in general. I'd buy this book just as essay alone. The good thing about the book, I think there's 14 different essays in the book. You don't have to read it chronologically. he will reference past ideas from like, you know, episode or episode essay two into like essay 14 or whatever. But you really could just pick it up and be like, OK, I just want to learn about Shakespeare right now. Let me read about that. Or I want to learn about, you know, the chapter on Dior and Balenciaga or whatever you're interested in.

51:19I think Paul Johnson's work speaks for itself. It's worth, you know, the investment of buying the book if you buy the book using the link. And I'll include all his other books, too, because I think, you know, he writes these these fantastic like 180 200 page biographies anyways i'll leave all the those links down below too if you buy this book or any of the other books you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time and one more thing make sure you're already on my personal email list i sent out an email of the top 10 highlights that i do from every book and so i will leave a link down below it shows like a sample of what it looks like and then you just enter in your email and you'll get every book that i do from there on in so that is 310 books down 1 000 to go and i'll talk to you again soon