Patrick Anthony Powers (8 October 1870 - 30 July 1948) was an Irish-American businessman, involved in the animation industry of the 1920s and 1930s.
Born in County Waterford, Ireland, he founded the Powers Motion Picture Company that merged with Carl Laemmle's IMP film company and others in 1912 to create Universal Pictures. He served as treasurer of the Universal Motion Picture Company.
According to the Buffalo Courier-Express obituary dated August 1, 1948 [1], Powers was considered a native Buffalonian. His sister, Mary Ellen Powers, lived in Buffalo for her entire life. Powers partnered with Joseph A. Schubert, Sr. and sold phonographs from 1900-07. In 1907, they formed the Buffalo Film Exchange, which purchased films from producers and rented them to nickelodeons. Powers left Buffalo in 1910 for New York City.
Powers invested in what remained of the sound film company DeForest Phonofilm in the spring of 1927. Lee De Forest was on the verge of bankruptcy, due to legal fees from a series of lawsuits against former associates Theodore Case and Freeman Harrison Owens. DeForest was by that time selling cut-price sound equipment to second-run movie theaters wanting to convert to sound on the cheap.
In June 1927, Powers made an unsuccessful takeover bid for De Forest's company. In the aftermath of the failed takeover, Powers hired a former DeForest technician, William Garity, to produce a cloned version of the Phonofilm sound recording system, which became Powers Cinephone. By this time, De Forest was in too weak a financial position to mount a legal challenge against Powers for patent infringement.
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 Ub 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 were early silent films (produced at Universal before 1913) or one-reel animated shorts, but he is listed as a Producer on Erich von Stroheim's The Wedding March (1928) along with Jesse Lasky and Adolph Zukor (a former partner of Mitchell Mark who, like Powers, was from Buffalo, New York.
The New York Times obituary of 1 August 1948 notes that Powers, at the time of his death, was president of the Powers Film Products Company of Rochester, New York [2]. He also had homes in both New York City and Westport, Connecticut.
Patrick Powers died on 30 July 1948 at the Doctors Hospital in New York City after a brief illness. He was survived by his sister and a daughter, Mrs. Roscoe M. George of San Fernando, California. He is interred at Holy Cross Cemetery near Rochester, New York.
References
- ^ Buffalo Courier-Express, August 1, 1948.
- ^ New York Times, August 1, 1948.
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