Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

– On Monday night, there was a presentation at the Museum of Modern Art of a number of Hubley short films that highlighted their JAZZ SCORES series. The program was well organized by film curator, Josh Siegel.

Emily Hubley presented the films at the start and had a couple of words about her parents’ work. She was joined in the audience by her sister, Georgia Hubley, and her brother, Ray Hubley. Their families were also present. Only Mark Hubley wasn’t able to make it down for the show. ________________________________Emily talking in front of the auditorium

The films were presented in clusters of composer.
Tender Game, with music by Ella Fitzgerald and the Oscar Peterson trio, led off the program. With a newly constructed print the colors dazzled with depth and beauty. You could see the texture of the paper in the backgrounds and the beautiful brush strokes. The art couldn’t have looked more stunning.

Three Dizzy Gillespie shorts followed:
The Hat has an improvised voice track with Dudley Moore and Dizzy Gillespie. They also did the score – Dudley on piano, Dizzy on trumpet.
Date with Dizzy is a live action piece that promotes the “Storyboard” ads. A live action director, “Don Babbitt,” tries to get Dizzy and his group to perform a score to their animated ad. The ad was drawn and animated by R.O. Blechman.
____The Hat played on the big screen______Voyage to Next features Maureen Stapleton
_____________________________________and Dizzy Gillespie. Dizzy did the score with Dee Dee Bridgewater singing. (I did a lot of work on this one. I have a lot of Bill Littlejohn’s drawings, and I’ll show them off sometime soon.)

Following this, Benny Carter‘s widow, Hilma Carter, and Ed Berger, Carter’s biographer, introduced shorts that Carter scored.
Adventures of an * was the featured piece with a newly reconstructed print (I wrote about this here) and an out-of-this-world art exhibit of many backgrounds and cel paintings. (Actually cels weren’t used. The characters were colored on paper with crayon and wax and blackened all around their shape. This was then double-exposed into the backgrounds.)

Finally, Of Men and Demons, finished the night. This film was scored by the brilliant Quincy Jones, and the score is a major strong point. There is no dialogue, hence there are no voices heard. Tissa David animated a lot of this film and re-worked a lot of Art Babbitt‘s scenes in this film. Bill Littlejohn did much of the demons.

Tissa sat to my left along with her close friend Ruth Mane, who was a first class inker and checker in NY’s animation story. We worked closely at Raggedy Ann.

____Emily Hubley, Josh Siegel and Tissa David in the lobby of MOMA.
____I met them there when I arrived.

__A crowd after the screening.
__Left to right: John Canemaker, me, Ed Berger, Hilma Carter, Ron Magliozzi (Assistant
__Curator, Research and Collections, MoMA), Emily Hubley, Ray Hubley, Georgia Hubley,
__Josh Siegel (Assistant Curator, Department of Film, MOMA).

The screening was pretty much full, but I wouldn’t say the animation community was well represented. I saw a couple of young animators there including Tim Rauch and Emmett Goodman. Ray Kosarin, just back from viewing some 1700 films at Hiroshima’s prejudging, was also there and seemed charged by the Hubley films.

The museum had a dinner for some of the guests including John and me, Amid Amidi, the Hubleys and their families, as well as Hilma Carter and Ed Berger. Tissa had to leave right after the screening. It was a real treat of an evening.

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