Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

The Motion Picture Academy will screen the Oscar nominated shorts, both animated and live-action, on Saturday, February 25th. They’ll screen all ten nominees twice – at noon and at 4:00 pm. Admission is $5.00 for the general publicand $3.00 for Academy members (although Academy members should see the films for free Thursday, Feb 23rd at 7:00 pm).

Location is at the Academy Theater at Lighthouse International, 111 East 59th Street (between Park and Lexington avenues). You can reserve tickets by calling (888) 778-7575.

Happy Birthday, Heidi!

- Here’s another storyboard drawing by John Hubley from the UPA film, “Fuddy Duddy Buddy.”

I wasn’t able to remember if this gag was actually in the film. The only copy I have of it is an old vhs tape and had to search for it. However, I was able to scan through it to find that it was cut.

It’s funny; I hadn’t seen the film in at least 15 years, but the two scenes I did remember were the character (Click on images to enlarge them.) of the hotel detective and the animation of
Magoo playing tennis with the walrus.
The detective is a good memorable character, but the only time we see him in the chair is with him, newspaper in hand, peering through cut slits. Magoo and he aren’t in the same scene.

I guess there was once the thought that Magoo and friend would thumb their noses at the detective. Not a bad idea to have lost the gag.

- Amid Amidi at Cartoon Modern has posted some actual stills from Man Alive!, the short featured in the Life Magazine article posted below. A chance to see a storyboard drawing at Blackwing Diaries, what the final film actually looks like at Cartoon Modern, and some publicity posted below. The film must have gotten a bit of attention in its day.

- And to think a cartoonist created so much chaos! The New York Times has a good article today about visual media and the uprise it has created in the past. They remind us of the stir Chris Ofili‘s painting, Holy Virgin Mary, made at NYC’s Brooklyn Museum. The lines to get to see it were longer than the protests Mayor Giuliani tried to stir up. I’d also once posted Daumier‘s Gargantua, a charicature of Louis XIV. It created protests loud enough to have Daumier jailed for months. Is it actually the charicature of Muhammad that’s created such protests?

A couple of weeks ago, Jenny Lerew, posted a storyboard drawing from the UPA short MAN ALIVE! on her site Blackwing Diaries. I just came across an old clipping I had from a 1952 Life Magazine. Sorry that it’s so yellowed and beaten up, but you can still make it out. The pictures were spread out over five pages, and were obviously printed with a limited palette. I didn’t try to adjust for the yellowed paper.

Click on the images to enlarge them.

My first job in the film business was for Hal Seeger at his company Hal Seeger Studio (also known as Channel Films or Channel Sound). After coming out of the Navy in 1971, I contacted any studio – about 100 – that advertised themselves in the Backstage Listings as doing animation; I offered to do anything including sweeping the floors. A day after the letters went out, Hal Seeger called. “Did you mean it?” “Yes.”

I ended up working as a messenger for $69 a week, $10 less than unemployment was paying at the time. Two weeks later when asked to mop the floors for an additional $10 a week, I was in the money.

They no longer did animation there; predominantly they were a subdivision of ABC and outsourced editing for the News division. I was put in to help out Lenny Bird prepare trailers for the Friday, Sunday, Monday and “Wednesday Night at the Movies”. Lenny was enormously patient and incredibly helpful to an aspiring newcomer.

I learned to edit on an upright moviola. My first day I had to cut commercial spots out of 52 half-hour episodes of the King Kong animated show, so that the prints could be sent to South America. I assisted and worked the mixes with Lee Dichter, the top sound mixer in NYC. I delivered and picked up elements from the lab and delivered the final goods to ABC. Once, when Gil Hodges died, I went to Brooklyn to help PA on baseball interviews with Howard Cossell. I had to drive Jackie Robinson’s Cadillac back into Manhattan so Howard could interview him in a limo.
The key to the job, for me, was that I could ask Hal Seeger questions anytime I wanted, which, of course, I did. There was also the crusty, ex-Paramount animation cameraman, Seymour Mandel on staff. Hal had two cameras. I had lots of thoughts about the camera and got to talk for long stretches with Seymour about it.

Hal once gave me a scene of the Campbell’s kids, animated by Myron Waldman, and let me inbetween it. He then gave me some comments. That’s when Myron walked in. He gave me some quick comments too. Myron came by the studio about once a week, usually to talk with Seymour. In and out, very quick visits. I never got to spend a lot of time with him, but I did say hi and talked with Hal about him. Myron was friendly but quick paced, always with his brown leather briefcase.

Eventually, wanting to get out of film editing and sound effects recording (another part of my job) I quit. It took about two months to end up working for my hero, John Hubley.

Eventually, I got to meet Myron again – this time at length – when I went with Mike Barrier to sit in on an interview with him. Rosalie, Myron’s wife, was pleasant and gracious, Myron was courteous, and the stories flowed. It was a very pleasant afternoon.

NY Times Obituary

Jerry Beck emailed me this afternoon to tell me that Myron Waldman had died Saturday morning at age 97.

This is a blow to New York animation. Myron was seen as the wunderkind of the Fleischer studio, and he ends up being one of the longest lasting of the group. The best obituary posted at this point is on Mike Dobbs’ Out of the Inkwell blog. I urge you to go there and read about Myron’s productive and illustrative life.

There are some good photos of Myron on Mark Mayerson’s Al Eugster site. Worth visiting and revisiting.

- Congratulations to Bill Plympton for having won the Annie Award for Best Animated Short with his film, The Fan and the Flower. To see a list of the other award winners, go to Animated-News. This is a good site for hard news about animation. It’s worth visiting daily.

- Also on that site is an obituary for Al Lewis. Lewis, known to many as “Grandpa” from the Munsters, was an everyday sight in the West Village. For years, he had an Italian restaurant called, appropriately, “Grandpa’s” on Bleecker Street, about a block from my studio. He ran for Governor on the Green Party in 1998.

I first knew Lewis from “Car 54, Where Are You?” He was probably my first celebrity sighting. As a teenager, I worked in a cafeteria in the Bronx Zoo. On a quiet and rainy day, he was a customer. I not only got to talk to him when I served him, but he invited me over to his table to talk during my coffee break. If only back them I knew I was to run into him many dozens of times later in my life. Always a nice hello. I’ll miss seeing him on the street.

(Click to enlarge.)
A John Hubley Magoo gag cut from “Fuddy Duddy Buddy”.

- We’ve added a new page to our website.
Click on the highwire guy on our main page and it takes you to a The Man Who Walked Between The Towers.
If you click on the black cat it takes you to the Poe Page.

- Tonight ASIFA Hollywood hand out their Annie Awards. Three New Yorkers are represented in the animation short category. They are: John Canemaker for The Moon and The Son: An Imagined Conversation, Bill Plympton for The Fan and The Flower and John Dilworth for Life in Transition. We wish them all luck.
To see the rest of the nominees click the Annie to the right.

- It was a bit difficult watching the Werner Herzog documentary, Grizzly Man, on the Discovery Channel last night (repeated tonight at 8PM). There were more commercials than show, and they kept repeating the same ad for a firefighters documentary at every break. Not the way to see any film by Herzog. Any film (period!). I kind of expected it: 3hr. show / 1:42 hr movie.

- Meanwhile, on the Middleastern front, according to one report, “. . . More than 500 people, led by the extremist group al-Ghuraba, marched to the Danish embassy in Knightsbridge carrying banners calling on Muslims to “massacre” those who insult Islam . . .”

Yes, this is still over the controversy started when a Danish cartoonist drew an image of Mohammad (depicting the Prophet is verboten for many Muslims). The cartoons have been reprinted in numerous papers across Europe and as far away as New Zealand. Stones were thrown at the Danish Embassy in Gaza, and tempers are rising. The Danish cartoonists are now, reportedly, in hiding fearing for their lives. Dangerous, these cartoonists. More. (AP photo)

– If there was one injustice in this year’s Oscar nominations, it was the absence of Werner Herzog‘s film, Grizzly Man in the Documentary Feature category. Herzog has been, for me, the finest documaentary film maker in the past thirty years. This was not only the best documentary last year, it was one of the best films.

Herzog has completely changed and challenged the form, and the Academy continues to ignore him. Despite the success of this latest film, it somehow didn’t even make the shortlist for Oscar’s documentary contenders, but the cartoonish, March of the Penguins, will probably win! It’s confusing when art is ignored.

Grizzly Man is about a confused man who lives with bears. He photographed most of this documentary himself, before being killed, and Herzog assembles it. This continues Herzog‘s fascination with people on the fringe who are dedicated to their visions.

The film premieres tonight on the Discovery Channel at 8pm. Set your vcr’s.

After you watch that, go out and rent LA SOUFRIÈRE. It’s a longish short film, and will change what you think about documentaries.

– Here’s another posting from the Fleischer Animated News, - the in-house organ of the Fleischer studio. (Sorry, but this paper is entertaining me just now!) It’s from 1939.*

This is a notice that Max Fleischer is teaching classes in the studio. (I like that it indicates that there is no charge.)

It’s accompanied, here, by a Hal Seeger cartoon about the classes. The same cartoon comments on a parking ticket Dave must’ve received. Presumably, Hal Seeger was close enough with the brothers that he felt it was ok to jibe them.

click on these images to enlarge them.

*Corrected by Jerry Beck (see comments) as Oct 1935.

– Interesting to see cartoons in the news. Quite a stir seems to be brewing across Europe; the publication by a Dutch newspaper of a charicature of Mohammad had garnered protests from Islamic nations. Apparently it’s forbidden to print any resemblance of the prophet. In response, other papers across the continent are printing additional cartoons.

– For those into celebrity gossip, I found this funny post on the site Pinkisthenewblog. Betty Rubble has seen better days.

- David Byrne posts some funny/frustrated comments on his journal about the edited version of Terence Malick‘s film, The New World now playing in theaters.

-As they’ve done in the past, AWN has put up an Oscar showcase on their site. It features information about all of the animated features and shorts that are nominated for the Academy Award. For those who haven’t seen them, it’s a good way to get a flavor of some of the shorts. Thank you AWN.

- Yesterday, at the Brew, Amid Amidi wrote about PEUR[S] DU NOIR, a French animated feature in production at Prima Linea Prods. The film, apparently, features seven different segments designed by as many artists. One of those designers, Richard McGuire, and I have a bit of a history.

Years ago, I knew of a group called Liquid Liquid and loved one of their mini-albums produced by 99 Records. It turned out that my brother knew the owner of 99 Records, and he introduced me. We made a deal in which I would finance a music video, with all rights to the music on the record, and they would have all rights to the music video – for promotion.

It took a month to complete the video; I did all the animation by myself and featured some watercolor drawings of NYC by Pam Wilson, visiting from England. This was 1982 at the time “Beat It” was just starting to hit.

A lot of the production had to do with repetitive editing, which I planned in a tape house called The Tape House (owned by Hal Seeger - there’s history there, too). Hal’s son, David, was my video editor. We edited late night to keep the costs low.

I invited the band members to the editing session, if they wanted to sit in. Only one member showed up, Richard McGuire. Within that month of production, Liquid Liquid had split up. I got the video, Cavern, on a late-night ABC program that featured new videos. It wasn’t mainstream enough for MTV at the time.

Richard and I stayed in and out of contact through the years. This past summer, walking home from my studio, we bumped into each other on the street. He told me he was directing a feature in France and was very excited about it. I’m glad to see it showed up on Cartoon Brew so I could learn a bit more about it.

– Yesterday I posted Tom Johnson’s wife, Marianna’s clipping from the Fleischer Animated News. Today I post his. Obviously, the war is in the air, and he’s about to head off.

Tom Johnson was one of the star animators at the Fleischer studio. After the war he worked for Famous Studios , but he never seemed to gain fame outside of New York’s animation community. He was certainly a loved figure. Many of those I knew in the early days spoke about him. To me, he was a name I had memorized from all those Popeye and Paramount cartoons.

Click the image to enlarge it.

Peter Bart’s editorial in Variety re the mergers of Pixar/Disney and WB/UPN is entertaining and worth a look.

- Likewise, Michael Barrier, today, has posted a serious look at the business side of the buyout/merger.

- More of the same: if you haven’t seen this post yet, at O-Meon.com, it’s a report on the work John Lasseter will have in front of him as the Principal Creative Advisor at Disney Imagineering. (Looks like Cars will be the last film Lasseter directs.)

- It shouldn’t be such a surprise that the Golden Globes have announced the creation of a new catergory for the Best Animated Feature. The question, really, is why have they waited so long? Is this part of the outcome of Disney folding Pixar into its web? Another question is why do the SAG Awards feature so many cute clips of actors doing Voice-Overs, when they offer no Voice-Over category awards? Don’t these actors deserve honor too?

- A lot of unsung people make the movies we see and go without enormous accolades. That’s one of the nice things about the Annie Awards. Merits are rewarded.

- To that end, I’ve decided to post the following pages from the Fleischer’s Animated News, their monthly newsletter. It includes a lot of cartoons, poems and miscellaneous information by and about the studio’s talent. (I believe it’s a 1939 issue, but I can’t find a date.) Mariana Johnson was a longtime fixture in NYC animation. She worked in the I&P departments of a number of studios. I met her at the Raggedy Ann studio in 1977. In this piece she and her husband, animator Tom Johnson, are featured in the “Tintypes” column. I thought it worth posting. Tomorrow I’ll add the page about Tom.

Click the images to enlarge them.