for: Patrick Power (disambiguation)

Patrick Anthony Powers (8 October 1870 - 30 July 1948), born in County Waterford, Ireland, was an Irish-American businessman, involved in the movie and animation industry of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s.

According to the Buffalo Courier-Express obituary dated August 1 1948 Buffalo Courier-Express, August 1, 1948., Powers was considered a native Buffalonian. His sister, Mary Ellen Powers, lived in Buffalo for her entire life.

Early Career

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. In 1910, Powers left Buffalo for New York City. He founded the Powers Motion Picture Company that merged with Carl Laemmle's Independent Moving Pictures Company (IMP) film company and others in 1912 to create Universal Pictures. He served as treasurer of the Universal Motion Picture Company.

The 1920s

Between the 1922 reorganization of Film Booking Office of America and October 1923, Powers, as one of the company's new American investors, was effectively in command. Powers had previously led his own filmmaking company, part of the multiple merger that created Universal Pictures in 1912. Powers apparently changed the name of Robertson-Cole/FBO to the Powers Studio for a brief period, though there is no record of the company ever having produced or released a film under that banner. In 1928, Joseph P. Kennedy and RCA head David Sarnoff merged FBO and the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater circuit to form RKO Radio Pictures.

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.

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.