Pat Powers
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- For the baseball figure of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, see Patrick T. Powers. For persons with the similar name Patrick Power, see Patrick Power (disambiguation).
Patrick A. Powers (1869 - July 30, 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.
Powers invested in what remained of the sound film company De Forest Phonofilm in the spring of 1927. Lee De Forest, on the verge of bankruptcy following a series of patent lawsuits with his former associate Theodore Case, was by that stage selling cut-price sound equipment to second-run movie theatrers 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 which he hired a former De Forest technician, William Garrity, to produce a cloned version of the Phonofilm sound recording system, which became the Powers Cinephone. By this stage, De Forest was in too weak a financial position to mount a legal challenge against Powers.
In 1928, Powers sold Walt Disney a Cinephone system so that he could make sound cartoons such as Mickey Mouse's Steamboat Willie. Unable to find a distributor for the sound cartoons, Disney began releasing his cartoons through Powers' Celebrity Pictures company.
After two years of successful Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies cartoons, Walt Disney confronted Powers in 1930 about monies he felt were due him 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. The Iwerks studio closed after 1936.
Patrick Powers died in New York City in 1948, aged 78 or 79.
