Walt Disney's Kansas City: The Studio That Failed Before the Studio That Didn't
Near Kansas City, Missouri
Before Walt Disney built his studio in Hollywood, he built one in Kansas City and watched it collapse. He arrived in the city in nineteen nineteen, still a teenager, and got a job as a commercial artist. By nineteen twenty-one he had co-founded a small animation company called Laugh-O-Gram Studios, making short animated fairy tales that he sold to a film distributor named Pictorial Clubs. Pictorial Clubs paid an advance and then went bankrupt before paying the balance. Disney could not meet payroll.
He kept the studio open for a year on will and borrowed money and the patience of the animators who stayed to work without pay, finishing a short film called Alice's Wonderland that he hoped would open the next phase of the business. In July of nineteen twenty-three, Laugh-O-Gram Studios filed for bankruptcy. Disney was twenty-one years old.
He took what he had of Alice's Wonderland in a suitcase and bought a train ticket to Los Angeles. He showed the film to a distributor named Margaret Winkler, who agreed to distribute a series of Alice comedies that combined live action and animation. That deal became the foundation of the Walt Disney Company.
The Laugh-O-Gram building on East Thirty-First Street in Kansas City still stands. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand eleven. Disney said that the Kansas City years, the commercial art work, the failed studio, the financial humiliation, taught him everything he needed to know about the business of making things. Marceline had given him the feeling. Kansas City had given him the discipline.
