Out of the Inkwell: Max Fleischer and the Animation Revolution

4. Brimming with pride and high hopes, Max

Richard Fleischer 23 4 Brimming with pride and high hopes, Max couldn’t wait until he could show his creation to a film distributor. This is the way my father remembered that event: “I took the film to a distributor and in the blink of the eye, it was run off. He said, ‘That’s very nice. What are you going to do with it?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I thought it was something, that’s all.’ He said, ‘Could you make one of these every week?’ I laughed. ‘Why, no, it’s a physical impossibility.’ ‘How long did it take you to make this thing?’ he asked. ‘It took about a year.’ ‘My dear fellow , go home and make something practical. If you had something we could offer for sale every week or every month, you’d have something, but once a year—Nix.’” Max went home, depressed, but not dismayed. He knew he was on to something, something important. He began trying to think of shortcuts to get things done faster, of ways to bring down production time. He finally worked out a method that 24 Out of the Inkwell made it possible to produce about a hundred feet of film every fourth week. That made it a little more practical, but he still had a long way to go. What he needed was support from a big company so that he could continue his experiments. He felt that if he could get the right person to see the potential of what he had already accomplished, then he could revolutionize the field of animation. So he kept on showing his film to anyone who would look at it, but no one seemed interested—until one afternoon he went to the offices of Paramount Pictures Distribution in Manhattan . He’d been everywhere else, and this was the last stop. He didn’t even have an appointment; he was just waiting in the lobby outside the office of Paramount’s president, Adolph Zukor, on the off chance that someone, anyone, would give him an interview. The door to Zukor’s office opened, and, to his astonishment , out stepped his old buddy from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, John Randolph Bray. Serendipitous is a poor and meager word to describe this meeting. Earth-stopping comes a little closer. Of all the chance meetings that Max could have had at this moment, one with J. R. Bray was the most fortuitous. After leaving the Eagle about a year after Max, Bray went into the making of animated cartoons, and by this time, 1916, Bray Studios was by far the leader in the field. His Colonel Heeza Liar series was the most popular of his various productions. The reason he had been in Zukor’s office was that he had a contract with Paramount for all the cartoons and short subjects of any kind that he could make. When Max told him about his small piece of film, Bray said: “You’d better come over to my studio and let me take a look at it.” J. R. Bray now held Max’s future in his hands. Richard Fleischer 25 Look at it he did—and found Max’s cartoon funny and well animated. The really serendipitous part of the whole thing was that at his studio Bray had focused on finding ways to shorten production time and had, in fact, made tremendous strides in that direction. He was turning out cartoons so fast he seemed to be mass-producing them, and he was often referred to as “the Henry Ford of animation.” He wasn’t particularly pleased with that sobriquet because he would rather be known for the quality of his productions than for the speed with which they were made. Still, his biggest stride in speeding up production time was of historic proportions for cartoon animation. He and Earl Hurd, one of his employees, had developed and patented the Bray-Hurd animation process, which uses sheets of clear celluloid, or what are now known as cels, instead of sheets of paper.The savings in time are enormous. A background is drawn on one cel, and another cel, containing just the moving character, is placed on top of the first, superimposing the figure on the stationary background. To animate the character, you just keep replacing the top cel only. It is no longer necessary to redraw the background for...