Feature Film — 2015
Walt Before Mickey
Before the mouse, there was a man nobody believed in.
Adapted from Timothy S. Susanin’s book “Walt Before Mickey: Disney’s Early Years, 1919–1928,” the film follows Walt Disney from age seventeen to the eve of Steamboat Willie — the lean decade in which he failed, went bankrupt, and kept drawing anyway.
It is a portrait of persistence rather than legend: the animator who lost his first studio, slept in his office, and gave jobs to women animators in the early 1920s, years before the world knew his name.
Involvement
Bernstein executive-produced the film and shares screenplay credit with Diane Disney, Armando Gutierrez, and Timothy Susanin. He also appears in the film as Frank L. Newman, the Kansas City theater magnate who gave Disney his first real screen.
Press
Local Press
Movie producer talks shop to Boynton High students
“My passion is to make movies,” Bernstein told a black-box theatre full of Boynton Beach High School students, discussing Walt Before Mickey.
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