On this day 103 years ago, the Walt Disney Company officially began when Walt Disney signed a simple contract with distributor Margaret Winkler. He signed the deal at his uncle Robert’s home on Kingswell Avenue in Los Angeles, and it gave Walt and his older brother Roy the backing to produce a series of silent cartoons called the Alice Comedies.
From Bankruptcy to Hollywood
Only months earlier, Walt’s Laugh-O-Gram Studio in Kansas City had gone bankrupt, so he headed west to Los Angeles, where Roy was recovering from tuberculosis. Walt arrived with big ideas and an unfinished pilot called “Alice’s Wonderland,” which placed a real little girl inside a cartoon world. He convinced Roy to walk away from a steady banking career, and the two brothers set out to build a new animation studio together.
The pilot caught the eye of Margaret Winkler, one of the top cartoon distributors of the day, who handled both Felix the Cat and the Fleischer brothers’ “Out of the Inkwell.” Her relationship with Felix’s owner, Pat Sullivan, had grown rocky, which left her open to new properties. Winkler wrote back on October 15 to say they could do business, though Walt first checked her reputation with her former boss, Harry Warner. She billed herself as “M.J. Winkler” to hide the fact that she was a woman in a male-dominated industry, and the “J” didn’t even stand for a real middle name.
Four Pages and Four Signatures
The contract ran roughly four pages and set a starting payment of $1,500 per reel. Walt, Winkler, her future husband Charles Mintz and Uncle Robert, who served as a witness, all signed the document, which remains in the Walt Disney Archives today. Rebecca Cline, then director of the Archives, said in a 2023 D23 feature that the contract is “the most important document that resides within the Walt Disney Archives’ collections.”
Just a week before the deal, Walt rented a small back room at the Holly-Vermont Realty office at 4651 Kingswell Avenue for $10 a month. The brothers hung a curtain to separate their workspace from the real estate business, and that modest room became the first Disney studio. By February 1924, the growing team moved next door to 4649 Kingswell, where lettering on the window read “Disney Bros. Studio.” The company later moved to a larger lot on Hyperion Avenue in January 1926 and took the name Walt Disney Studio.
Where Alice Led
On the same day he signed the contract, Walt wrote to the mother of Virginia Davis, the young star of his pilot, asking the family to move from Kansas City. Her father agreed to leave his job, and Walt promised Virginia $100 a month, which made her the studio’s highest-paid employee. The studio went on to make 56 Alice Comedies between 1924 and 1927, and those shorts introduced Julius the cat, Disney’s first named recurring cartoon character. Walt then moved on to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and in 1928 Mickey Mouse arrived in “Steamboat Willie,” setting the stage for everything that followed.
Find the First Studio in the Parks
Disney still pays tribute to those humble beginnings inside its theme parks. At Disney’s Hollywood Studios, a door beside Peevy’s Polar Pipeline carries the Holly-Vermont Realty logo, a nod to the office where it all started. Over on Buena Vista Street at Disney California Adventure, signs for Hollymont Property Associates and the Kingswell Camera Shop reference the same block. Back in Los Angeles, the corner of Kingswell and Vermont avenues officially became Disney Bros. Cartoon Studio Square in 2024, so fans can visit the real birthplace too.
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