Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

Happy President’s Day

- Since it’s President’s Day, I thought I’d give you a small bit of the show I did this past year for HBO, I Can Be President.

Actually, this is a rough animatic for a sequence that was cut out of the show. Had it been approved, we would have animated it and properly finished it. We did about ten segments like this when we were forming the material, and it turns out we were taking the show in a direction that was not desired.
Sheila Nevins, HBO’s VP of programming wanted the show to not focus on the past (rightfully so as it turns out), and we had to dump any but a small part of the history of the Presidents. This show had a long history which took quite some time to get through the production. It was also done for a very low budget, but turned out quite well. Special thanks go to Matthew Clinton and Katrina Gregorius for their tireless and charming work.

We had sequences on John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams making a disastrous sea trip to Paris; there was another section on the animals kept by various Presidents at the White House (J.Q. Adams, himself, had a pet alligator at the headquarters. Coolidge had dozens of dogs, cats, birds, a wallaby, a baby hippo, a donkey and many other animals. He basically made a zoo of the White House.)

The sequence below shows a couple of actual stories about Franklin Delanor Roosevelt in a time before he caught polio and was crippled by the disease. He came from a wealthy family, and had more access to the world than your average would-be-President.

The bad temporary Voice Over is mine, the cheapest actor I could find. The plan was to replace mine with a celebrity voice.

Animatic version of sequence cut out of I CAN BE PRESIDENT.

The DVD, when it comes out, will have a whole slew of these eliminated animation pieces.

The gifted cartoonist, Tom Hachtman, did a number of caricatures of the Presidents for these sequences. It would have been nice to have used the material he delivered, but such is this type of production.

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Here are Tom’s sketches of FDR for the animatic.

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FDR narrates it as if it were a “Fireside Chat”.

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These drawings were for the animatic on John Adams and son, John Quicy Adams,
crossing the Atlantic to go to France – where they stayed for more than a year.

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It was a tough voyage. Storms, invading British ships and seasickness.

The show will air numerous times in March:

Sun March 4, 06:00 AM – HBO – EAST
Sun March 4, 09:00 AM – HBO – WEST
Mon March 12, 06:00 AM – HBO – EAST
Mon March 12, 09:00 AM HBO – WEST
Sat March 24, 06:05 AM HBO – EAST
Sat March 24, 09:05 AM HBO – WEST
Fri March 30, 06:45 AM HBO – EAST
Fri March 30, 09:45 AM HBO – WEST

- This final post featuring the work of John Wilson and his company, Fine Art Films, covers many varied film projects. Unfortunately, I found relatively few images available for posting especially considering the amount of film done.

The Sonny and Cher Show was a long running Variety program on television in the 70s. Most weeks featured an animated music video as done by John Wilson. Some examples of this include:

Helen Reddy’s song “Angie Baby”

Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”

Sonny Bono’s version of “The Candyman”

The Kinks song “Demon Alcohol”

Fine Arts Films also did some movie titles and trailers. We saw, recently, the long theatrical trailer done for Irma La Douce. Here are a few stills done for the main title sequence for the 1978 musical, Grease.

storyboard sketch for Grease.
Produced and Directed by John Wilson
Story and Layout by Chris Jenkyns
Music by Barry Gibb

John Wilson also directed a number of short films which appeared on television on the NBC program, “Exploring” between 1964-1966.

“Casey At the Bat”
Narrated by Paul Frees

“Johnny Appleseed”
Narrated by Dan Blocker

“The Fish and the Burning Stones”
Narrated by E.G. Marshall

Finally, for MTV’s “Liquid Television” in 1992 John Wilson directed some of the 10 episodes of a series called “The Specialists.”

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MTV Shows

Go here to see other episodes.

- Don Marquis‘ book, Archy and Mehitabel, garnered fame quickly and not least because of the extraordinary illustrations of George Herriman, the creator of Krazy Kat.

The first book was published in 1927 and others followed in 1933 and 1935. It wasn’t until the third book that Herriman took over the characters created by Marquis in his book of short stories, developed mostly, in poetry. An on-again off-again love affair, the story had two principal characters: a cat, Mehitabel, and Archy, cockroach. (You can read these poems on line here.)

In 1953, writer Joe Darion along with composer George Kleinsinger (the creator of Tubby the Tuba) wrote a musical theater piece. Tenor Jonathan Anderson played Archy and soprano Mignon Dunn was Mehitabel. At about the same time a recording of the showtunes was recorded with Carol Channing as Mehitabel and Eddie Bracken as Archy. The record was a success.

With the help of the young writer, Mel Brooks, they were able to get their show to Broadway in 1957, but it was now named Shinbone Alley. After 49 performances, the show closed, but the original cast album was recorded that same year. The songs stayed in the permanent repetoire of Carol Channing and Eartha Kitt.

In 1971, John Wilson directed an animated feature starring the voices of Channing and Brackett and using the songs from the musical. The love affair between Archy and Mehitabel was penned by Archy, the cockroach; his poems tell their story.

The film suffers from its music. The songs are simple and sound as if they’re written for children, but the lyrics pull from the poems which are definitely designed for adults. It gets a bit confusing, as a result, and is a bit picaresque; the poems are short and illustrating them in animation would take more adaptation than seen here.

John Wilson had developed his studio, Fine Arts Films, on the back of the weekly, animated, music videos he did for The Sonny and Cher Show, an enormous hit in the early 70s.

These music videos were loose designs animated quickly and lively around the songs Sonny & Cher would schedule each week. There would always be one or two of these pieces, and they were highlights in the weekly one-hour musical/variety program.

The graphics of Shinbone Alley aren’t too far from these Sonny & Cher videos. Loose design and animation with a design style not too far from the Fred Wolf’s made-for-ABC feature, The Point. This was the first feature made for television and featured the songs and story of Harry Nilsson, although Shinbone Alley featured a wilder color pallette.

Jules Engel, Corny Cole and Sam Cornell all worked in design on the film. The long list of animators included Barrie Nelson, John Sparey, Spencer Peel, Eddie Rehberg and Jim Hiltz. Mark Kausler was an assistant on the show.

The film wasn’t an enormous success, but that was probably explained much by the limited distribution and the poor marketing of the film. I saw the film when it came out; I was living in Washington DC at the time (in the Navy). I was very disappointed. The animation is very limited and the style was a real let-down having known the George Herriman illustrations from the Don Marquis book. We’d already seen those limited animation Krazy Kat cartoons from King Features, so I knew the style could be done adequately – even on a budget. The style in this film just seemed a little too Hollywood cute, at the time, and it felt dated when it came out. I don’t feel too differently about it watching the VHS copy I own.

the film’s poster

Here are some frame grabs from the first 1/4 of the film:

We’re introduced to Archy right off the bat as he
flies out of the river onto the dock. He realizes that he,
the poet, tried to kill himself and was sent back as a cockroach.

He soon finds a typewriter and goes straight back to work.

Mehitabel is a performer – with Carol Channing’s voice.

The two meet cute.

She has another boyfriend, voiced by Alan Reed,
who is also the voice of Fred Flintstone.

A song video takes us outside.

pan down.

Another music video brings us into Peter Max’s style.

Life in Shinbone Alley.

Part of this post was originally on this Blog in February 2010.

- This is the second half of the storyboard John Wilson created for the Mirisch Corp. A trailer to promote Billy WIlder‘s coming film, Irma La Douce. This was a film about a French prostitute, played by Shirley MacLaine, and a French gendarme, Jack Lemmon. Love blossoms.

As I wrote on part 3, the board comes in 18 pages of three storyboard drawings. Rather than post the sets of three images (and only being able to show them at a smallish size) I’ve taken each individual drawing and have blown them up to see them better on this blog.

Again, these were for a lengthy trailer for the film not the opening credits. The film’s credits do not use animation.

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Here’s a YouTube version of the trailer. Not the brightest quality, but you can see it.

- This week in my focus on John Wilson‘s early work with his company, Fine Art Films, let’s take a look at Irma La Douce. This was a racy film written and directed by Billy Wilder that starred Shirley MacLaine as a Parisian prostitute and Jack Lemmon as a French policeman who falls in love with Irma (Shirley MacLaine.) The film, for its time was daring, and came up with (heaven forbid) a “C” for Condemned rating from the Catholic church. This made it off limits for anyone under the age of 18. I was determined to go see the film, so I ignored the ban and went by myself. Naturally enough, no one tried to stop me. I wasn’t jaded by the movie anymore than I had been disturbed by the violence in all the Warner Bros. cartoons I’d seen. Looking back on Irma La Douce, it really is an innocent film, hardly risqué in any way shape or form.

The film started with some nicely drawn animated credits which were done by John Wilson’s studio. Until recently I hadn’t known that Wilson also produced an animated short promoting the feature for the Mirisch Company. I have some preproduction art from that short as well as the color storyboard. The board is large enough that I’ve decided to break it into two parts. We’ll see part one today and the second part next week.

Each section of three images is long enough that unless I post one drawing at a time, it’ll be too tiny to see unless enlarged. I’d like to post each storyboard sketch a nice viewing size and still give you the option of enlarging it.

Let’s start with some production and post production stills so you can see what it looked like.

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A couple of pre-production drawings:

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Then, there’s the storyboard. I’ll give an example of the three panel pull out and follow that with each individual image.

You can see why I’ve decided to enlarge the images.

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The remainder of the storyboard will be posted next Monday.

- Bill Peckmann sent me a number of scans on Hilary Knight, the noted illustrator who had gained fame in illustrating the Eloise books authored by Kay Thompson. On receiving them I suddenly remembered that I had animated a commercial done in the style of Mr. Knight’s poster for the Broadway show, Meet Me In St. Louis.

I had completely forgotten about that job which we did back in 1989. We’d been employed by a South African art director of the Broadway show to do an Overture and an Entr’acte for the musical play. The Overture would play to a Currier & Ives type animation we produced, then the scrim would lift revealing the town. For the Entr’acte, we would end with a group of people ice skating on a pond. It would be lit from behind, and our drawing would turn to live action as the actors skated on a simulated pond on stage.

With the job came a 30 sec. spot animating the poster that Hilary Knight had illustrated. I can remember just about nothing about the spot. The entire job, spot, musical and the entire experience was a horrible one. The client was nasty and moody and continually changed his mind about what he wanted. He thought of himself as an auteur and kept pulling ideas out of his hat while we tried to fight the low budget and tight deadline.

The one positive memory was going to see the rough film projected on the Broadway stage. While waiting for them to find the projectionist, I noticed one older man sitting across from me in the theater. I walked over to him and asked if he was Hugh Martin. He was, and I told him how glad I was to meet him. We spoke for another couple of minutes until the theater went dark and projection started. Martin was the composer of the show; he’d written all those great, original songs for Judy Garland and the others in the movie. I was pleased to have recognized him and met him.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to meet Hilary Knight, but I did have some of his original artwork in hand. He drew some models for us. They’re somewhere in our storage, and a quick search wasn’t able to turn up anything. Time is moving on, and I wish I had put more emphasis on preserving some of my art materials back when.

The parting note on that job was that they spelled my name incorrectly in the Playbill. How appropriate. They promised to correct it in future copies, but I didn’t even bother to see if they’d done the correction.

Here’s the material Bill Peckmann had sent me, starting with a comment from Bill:

In 1999 a collection of four of Hilary Knight’s “Eloise” books was published. Aside from it having all those great books between two covers was the fact that it also had Hilary’s eight page autobiography in it! And here it is.

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The book cover

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- For the next three weeks, I’m going to focus on director/designer/animator, John Wilson.
Amid Amidi presented me with some art that he thought might be a good match for this blog, and it is. So I’ll take advantage of the material and share it with you. With each week’s post I’ll hone in on one specific film and go from there. We’ll start with Wilson’s first solo film, Tara the Stone Cutter completed in 1955.

But first, let me share some bio information about John Wilson and his company Fine Arts Films.

- John Wilson was born in Wimbledon in 1920. He attended the Royal College of Art and was working by age 18 as a commercial artist with Willings Press Service. In WWII he served with the London Rifle Brigade in African where he was seriously wounded. Recuperating in hospital, he drew many cartoons of which several were printed. Eventually he would recover and get work at Pinewood Studios in the art department where he worked on GREAT EXPECTATIONS and THE THIEF OF BAGHDAD, among other films.

By the time he was 25, he was working in animation at Gaumont-British Animation, a newly formed division of J. Arthur Rank’s studio, working under the direction of David Hand on the “Animaland” series starring “Ginger Nut.”

In 1950 he moved to the United States working in layout and animation at UPA. He found himself working with Bobe Cannon, Pete Burness, Jules Engel, and Paul Julian. Eventually he left for the Disney studio working in Les Clark’s ‘Tinkerbell’ unit on PETER PAN and with Ward Kimball on TOOT WHISTLE PLUNK & BOOM.

He tried to sell Disney on the film Tara, the Stonecutter, but they weren’t interested. He completed it himself in 1955 using a Japanese style to tell the story. Wilson was impressed with the UPA style of modern art in animation, and that’s the route he took for his personal film. Thus his studio was born, called Fine Arts Films, in 1955. Tara had some success playing theatrically with the successful Japanese feature film, GATE OF HELL by Kinugasa (which had won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.)

Wilson in Korea with the Bob Hope Tour to entertain the troops.

This film led to his producing a verion of Stravinsky’s Petroushka for NBC which aired in 1956 as part of The Sol Hurok Music Hour. Notably, Stravinsky, himself, arranged and conducted the shortened version of the score suing the LA Philharmonic Orchestra. The film was designed by John Wilson and Dean Spille with anmation by Bill Littlejohn, Art Davis, and Phil Monroe. Chris Jenkyns, Dean Spille and Ed DeMattia designed the 16 minute show from Wilson’s storyboard.

Fine Arts Films had produced ‘Journey to the Stars’, a project for the 1961 World’s Fair, an animated voyage through space for NASA, which was seen in 70 mm Cinerama by ten million visitors to Seattle.

Billy Wilder employed Wilson to do the titles for Irma La Douce after which they did a six-minute trailer for this Jack Lemmon, Shirley McLaine feature. It was all about Parisian prostitutes romping about in Montmartre, and animation could apparently make it acceptable. Artists Ron Maidenberg, Sam Weiss, Sam Cornell and Bob Curtis caught the vivid nightlife of Paris in a sexually charged animated short. It was a huge success in promoting the feature.

In 1970 Wilson flew to Chicago to see Carol Channing and Eddie Bracken appearing in “archy and mehitabel in Shinbone Alley”. On the basis of this theatrical musical, Wilson bought the screen rights to the book “archy and mehitabel” by George Herriman and began work on an animated feature which was released by Allied Artists in 1971.

Fine Arts Films was also responsible for many animated commercials as well as weekly music video segments for the weekly CBS-TV series “The Sonny and Cher Show.” The songs included Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” and Jim Croce’s “Leroy Brown.”

Here are some storyboard sketches by John Wilson for his initial short film, Tara, the Stonecutter. This film started it all for Wilson.

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I haven’t seen the finished film, but I understand that Japanese decorative papers were used in the backgrounds and costumes of the characters.

Here are two press clippings for this film from California papers.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

- I’m sorry to report the sad news that Vincent Joseph Cafarelli died in his sleep yesterday.
He was 81 years old.

“Vinnie” was a principal mainstay in the New York animation industry. He worked at Famous Studios on classic characters Popeye, Little Audrey and Baby Huey.

Later he worked at Gifford Animation on such advertising campaigns as the Piels Brothers and TipTop Bread. Margaret Hamilton provided the voice for Emily Tipp! You can go here to see 3 examples of the TipTop Bread commercials produced in the 1950′s.

Vince joined Stars and Stripes Forever, Inc, as their first employee upon his return from London, England where he worked with Pablo Ferro. Stars and Stripes was owned by producer Bob Staats and designer Len Glasser. They became the hottest boutique shop in the psychedelic 60’s creating such classics as: Chicken of the Sea “Mermaid”, Speakeasy, Sparklettes, and Ortho.

While at Stars and Stripes Vince worked with designer, Hal Silvermintz and film editor, Buzz Potamkin. Those two left to form Perpetual Motion Pictures, Inc. and after Stars and Stripes folded, Vince went to join them. There he was responsible for many ad campaigns and co-directed Strawberry Shortcake in Big Apple City and animated on all 5 Berenstain Bears holiday specials. He co-directed Deck the Halls With Wacky Walls.

Ultimately, Vinnie joined with Candy Kugel to form Buzzco Associates where he remained to the end. The two of them worked together for many years. You can check out a gallery of his art at AWN.

I’ve known Vinnie for 35-40 years, and can’t think of a sweeter gentler soul in animation. Most recently we’ve met on a number of occasions at the Academy. We spent a lot of the ten hours watching the long list of shorts and had a good time talking about them. I’ll miss his presence. My heart goes out to his family as well as Candy Kugel and Marilyn Kraemer who’ve spent every day with him for the past forty-odd years together. The three were partners in business and friendship and were completely dependent on each other.

More details of his life as well as information on memorial services will be forthcoming later. Buzzco is intending a memorial to take place on the Epiphany, January 6th, 2012; I will make sure to post further information on this site.

- This was a packed week. I saw a lot of films; I mean a lot. Here are some short short comments.

Sunday: My Weekend with Marilyn The movie was good; Michelle Williams was out of this world. She’ll definitely be nominated. B+

Monday: Saul Bass Tribute The film titles were brilliant (though I would have had a larger assortment.) The logos were magnificent. All of the speakers were dull. B+

Tuesday: Puss in Boots Some brilliant design work, a few nicely animated scenes. Tiresome plot with an exhausting sound track. C-
Tin Tin The same problem as Puss in Boots. Go Go Go Go Go, then it’s over. LOUD sound track and never resting camera. Spielberg has it constantly moving around and over and under the characters. For no purpose other than to show that he can. Zero character development. C

Wednesday: The Descendants This was a very fine film. A seemingly relaxed pace to a somewhat chaotic story. George Clooney was fine in the lead role, and others around him were equally good. A-

Thursday: The Artist A fun and very romantic film. The 10 mins where they steal Bernard Herrman’s soundtrack from Vertigo was my favorite. Nice acting. B+ Harvey Weinstein threw a great after party.

Friday: Dinner with friends. A large contingent of Academy voters came down from Canada and are staying with Candy Kugel and George Griffin so they can attend the voting today. I joined Candy and the others at dinner and had a good time catching up. Three cheers for Candy for coordinating events with this group (Last night, there were 11 of us out to eat.)

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- Today there’s the Academy screening of animated shorts in NY – 45 of them. This is the first vote on the full list of those that have successfully qualified for the competition. It certainly doesn’t mean that any of them are good; it just means that they’ve followed the rules.

Today’s voters will select a group of 6 to 10 films to make the short list. These will be open to another voting in January to narrow it down to the five nominees.

45 shorts will probably take about six to seven hours to screen. All in one sitting with a one hour break for lunch. Usually, the lunchtime conversation isn’t about the films but about general conversation. You have to be careful not to insult any film makers who might be there.

The full list was laid out on Cartoon Brew this week. It was only two years ago that I listed those competing and received severe warnings from the Academy for having done so. Now, they release the titles, themselves. It’s something they should have been doing all along.

Hopefully, the films will be a better assortment than last year’s selection.

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December 16 to Thursday, January 12 will be Studio Ghibli time in NYC. G-Kids will present a retrospective of Miyazaki‘s feature films at the IFC Center in New York this Christmas. The titles to be shown include: Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Castle in the Sky, Ponyo, Howl’s Moving Castle and Kiki’s Delivery Service. All will be shown in both dubbed and subtitled versions.

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- The brilliantly funny Xeth Feinberg has been posting Reasons 2B Happy on a daily basis. It’s the only way to get through that first cup of coffee. Check it out . . . DAILY.

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- Leif Peng has posted four storyboards for Cheet-o’s Mouse commercials done by Bill Peckmann. They’re on the site: Storyboard Central. They were done in the style of Paul Coker Jr. for PK&A (Phil Kimmelman & Ass.)

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MTV has put up 20 episodes of The Head on their video website. If you’re a fan of this Eric Fogel show, you can now watch the online for free. The Head is the 5th series, joining Aeon Flux, The Maxx, Wonder Showzen, and Liquid Television on the site.

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- And Bill Benzon continues with his assessment of Fantasia’s Pastoral Sequence. He’s just finished his fifth piece and has one more left in him before wrapping up the entire film.

- Vinnie Cafarelli of Buzzco gave me these drawings by Lu Guarnier from an animated Alpha-bits commercial that Lu animated. Vince said that Lu gave him that scene to clean up and inbetween late one Friday afternoon and needed it for Monday. The spot features a caricature of comedian, Jack E. Leonard, who did the voice, and some of the actions were part of Leonard’s shtick in his comedy routine. They ran a number of these ads in the ’60s with the same two characters.

Lu always worked on the rough side, but his animation was usually dependably good. He started with Warner Bros in the 30s as an inbetweener, then assistant to Bob Clampett. After the Signal Corps, where he was stationed in NY at the Astoria Studios, he moved permanently to NY and became a solid part of the commercial scene. He was a mainstay at the UPA studio in NY, the only one to have a cubicle with a window. As a result, there were many in-house gags done about him. In the past, I’ve drawings from his work on Sendak‘s Really Rosie.

When I knew him, Lu made his living as a freelance animator with no permanent roots at any one studio. He would go from job to job, and many of them were from studios in LA. He had his contacts well honed. This was what most animators in NY did back then. Lu did quite a bit of work at the Hubley Studio, while I was there, and I assisted most all of his scenes during that period (1972-1977.)

This scene was scanned by Rick Broas at Buzzco. Unfortunately, the pegs were dropped so that the drawings could be scanned in registration. Many thanks to Candy Kugel for shepherding the art and scans to me and to Vinnie Cafarelli for the gift. Lu Guarnier worked on top pegs most of the time. Here he used Oxberry pegs. This is the scene from his Alpha-bits job:

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The following QT utilizes all the drawings displayed above.
On ones, except where there’s a missing drawing -
this is made up by adding one frame to the preceding drawing.

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You can see another spot with these same characters
in the following commercial for Alpha-bits.