Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks
In 1928, Powers sold Walt Disney a Cinephone system so that he could make sound cartoons such as Mickey Mouse's Steamboat Willie (1928). Unable to find a distributor for the sound cartoons, Disney began releasing his cartoons through Powers' company Celebrity Pictures.
After two years of successful Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies cartoons, Walt Disney confronted Powers in 1930 about money due to Disney from the distribution deal. Powers responded by signing Disney's head animator Ub Iwerks to an exclusive deal to create his own animation studio.
The Iwerks studio was only mildly successful, with cartoon series such as Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper, released through Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and the ComiColor cartoons, released by Celebrity Pictures. The Iwerks studio closed in 1936.
In his lifetime, Powers produced nearly 300 movies, most of them early silent films produced at Universal before 1913 or one-reel animated shorts. However, he is credited as a producer on Erich von Stroheim's The Wedding March (1928), along with Jesse Lasky and Adolph Zukor. (The latter was a former partner of Mitchell Mark who, like Powers, was from Buffalo, New York.)
Read more about this topic: Pat Powers (businessman)