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goddamn art classes. . . . I’d go into a class, and there’d be eight or ten guys standing around. I’d read off the list of twenty names, and every one would answer ‘here.’ We’d send a report back to Walt that twenty guys showed up to get their art instruction.” 29
    In early 1930, Walt and Roy Disney had a far more pressing problem than animators’ reluctance to attend art classes. They had been increasingly unhappy with Pat Powers, who wanted Walt to make the cartoons more cheaply (a lower negative cost would mean that Powers could pay Disney less and keep more of the advances from distributors). Powers’s wounded tone in a rare letter—usually it was Giegerich who wrote to the Disneys—at the end of 1929 was remarkably similar to Charles Mintz’s in many of his letters to Walt. Powers wrote of “the financial risk and burden of exploitation” he had assumed “after every distributor in the business had refused to handle the product under any kind of a basis which would enable us to get even the cost of it back. I know of no instance (and you, yourself, canvassed the entire trade) where they were even receptive or seriously considered handling the product.” 30
    The Disneys wanted Powers to pay them money they believed he owed them from rentals of the cartoons. Powers did not want to open his books until the Disneys had signed a stronger contract with him than their two letter agreements for the distribution of the
Mickey Mouse
and
Silly Symphonies
series. Ultimately, on January 17, 1930, Walt and Lillian Disney and the Disneys’ attorney, Gunther Lessing, took the train to New York to confront Powers directly. They arrived in New York on the morning of January 21—just about the time that Ub Iwerks walked into Roy Disney’s office and told Roy he was quitting. “Speed in getting away seemed to be the main consideration,” Roy wrote to Walt three days later.
    Iwerks’s defection was especially shocking and painful not only because of his ten-year association with Walt Disney but also because he was a partner in the Disney studio. 31 He had begun buying a 20 percent interest on March 24, 1928—that is, just after the blowup with Mintz, when the Disneys were especially grateful for his loyalty—through the deduction of twenty dollars each week from his salary. He began contributing thirty-five dollars a week as of May 19, 1928—an increase that probably reflected the Disneys’ increasinglydifficult circumstances and was further evidence of Iwerks’s friendship. By the time he walked into Roy’s office, he had applied $2,920 toward his 20 percent share.
    When Iwerks told Roy he was leaving, Roy asked him if Powers or Giegerich—or Hugh Harman—had anything to do with his departure. “Ub looked me straight in the face,” Roy wrote, and told him that none of them “had anything to do with it.” Roy asked him, “On your honor?” Iwerks replied: “Absolutely.” The next morning, Roy received a telegram from Walt telling him that Powers was indeed behind Iwerks’s move. Confronted with this, Iwerks “looked awfully sheepish,” Roy wrote, and told him, “I didn’t want to tell you.” 32
    Under his earlier agreement with the Disney brothers, Iwerks could not remain a partner after he left the studio. In a release dated January 22, 1930, the Disneys agreed to pay him exactly as much as they had withheld from his salary, in exchange for his complete surrender of any interest in the Disney studio. In a separate document bearing the same date, Roy (for himself and as attorney in fact for Walt) undertook to pay the $2,920 within a year, plus interest accruing at an annual rate of 7 percent. 33
    Iwerks remained on the payroll through Saturday, January 25 (he told Roy Disney that he would come back to the studio the following week to finish a
Silly