|
Contents
• WARD
KIMBALL's introduction at the 1978 Annie Awards (Anim.
P. 1)
• GRIM
NATWICK's Memoria (Animation
Page 2)
• DICK
HUEMER's recollections about his career (Animation
Page
3)
• JOE
ADAMSON's interview concerning the Fleischers (this page)
•
FILMOGRAPHY from Disney's (Animation Page 5)
•
OBITUARY from Daily Variety (Animation Page 6)
• DISNEY
STUDIO in WWII (Animation Page 7)
Working
for the Fleischers
An
Interview with Dick Huemer
by
Joe Adamson
(recorded
in 1968-1969 for the AFI/UCLA program)
|
Dick
Huemer made his deepest mark on
animated cartoons in the late Thirties
and early Forties, when he was story
director for such Walt Disney features
as Fantasia and Dumbo. Dumbo
in par-
ticular owes a great deal to Huemer
and
Joe Grant, who shared story direction
with
him on many Disney projects.
But
Huemer had already seen--and made
--a lot of animation history before he
joined the Disney studio. He started
in
animation in 1916, animating Mutt
and
Jeff cartoons for Raoul Barre,
and
worked for Max and Dave Fleischer off
and on during the Twenties. Later, he
directed cartoons for Charles Mintz,
before joining Disney's staff. With
Dis-
ney, he animated on many cartoons
before becoming a director of shorts
(he
directed the first cartoon in which
Goofy starred, Goofy and Wilbur)
and
then
a story director on features.
Joe
Adamson recorded six interviews
with
Huemer in 1968 and 1969, as part |
of
the American Film Institute/Universi-
ty of California at Los Angeles Oral
History program. The interview that
follows is an excerpt from that Oral
History, heavily edited and with addi-
tions by Huemer. In this excerpt,
Huemer discusses his work in the
Twenties and early Thirties, when he
was associated first with the
Fleischers
and then with Charles Mintz.
Another excerpt from the Oral
Histo-
ry, dealing with Huemer's earliest
work in animation, was published in
the summer 1974 issue of AFI Report,
the magazine of the American Film In-
stitute. Copies can be ordered for
$1.50
from AFI, Kennedy Center, Washing-
ton, D.C. 20566.
Joe Adamson is the author of a
cur-
rent book on the Marx brothers
(Groucho, Harpo, Chico and
Sometimes
Zeppo) and a forthcoming book
on Tex
Avery, as well as being a
prize-winning
filmmaker
(Political Cartoon). |
|
|
KLICK
for KOKO!
Watch
space at top left of page
Source: Theatre
Organ Bombarde, 11(5):6-7,
October 1969 |
|
CLICK this image to get
"Out of the Inkwell" VHS video from Amazon.com |
.
Adamson:
When did you start work-
ing for the Fleischers?
Huemer:
Around 1923.
Adamson:
Is this after Mutt and Jeff?
Huemer:
Yes. But I must have had
other jobs. After all,
I was still an artist.
I could decorate
lampshades, do com-
mercial art.
When I came to
work for the
Fleischers, Doc
Crandall was their only
animator. He used to do
the rotoscope,
as well as other bits
of animation.
Adamson:
There were only two of
you, then, when you
started with
Fleischer?
Huemer: No,
Burt Gillett had gotten
there just before me,
and he got me in.
He had been sort of a
shop foreman at
Mutt and Jeff. He was
head man for a
while, ran the place.
When it changed
hands, after both Barre
and Bowers
were out, Gillett ran
it for the Jefferson
Film Corporation. So
when he left that
place he went to the
Fleischers, then he
got me in there. It was
a very small
staff. I don't think
there were more than
about six people on the
staff.
Adamson:
The whole thing? Includ-
ing inkers and painters
and camera-
men?
Huemer:
Yes. Something like that.
Say ten at the most.
Adamson:
Not even as big as Barre's
place, then.
Huemer: No,
it was very small, a very
cozy cluttered little
place. They were
on the basement floor
of an old
brownstone building on
45th Street
right off Lexington
Avenue.
Adamson:
They were more or less
leading the field at
the time, weren't
they?
Huemer:
No, Terry was already doing
well. But actually he
was the only one
we considered serious
competition and
perhaps as having a
slight edge on
everybody else.
The Fleischers
were doing Out of the
Inkwell. Koko the Clown
and Max were
the main characters.
Then we in-
troduced other
characters as pro-
tagonists. For example,
once we took
Koko to Mars, and he
had Martians to
contend with. Those
Inkwells were ac-
tually quite good
cartoons, I still
believe. They were
definitely to my
mind a step above the
Mutt and Jeffs
They had better stories
for one thing.
Adamson: Were
the animators still
making up their own
gags, or did you
have a little bit more
supervision?
Huemer:
As I recall, I would work
with Dave Fleischer.
Max, of course,
acted in all the
pictures and had overall
say in production. His
brother Dave was
more or less the
director of the cartoon
operation. We'd get
together and talk
about what to animate.
The studio, you
see, was so small that
you could walk
from desk to desk. Not
like the Disney
studio became, full of
rooms, and where
nobody ever sees
anybody or talks to
anybody. Then, I could
yell across the
room, "Hey, Dave.
I want to talk to you.
Suppose we do
this." And then we'd sit
down and talk it over
and laugh our
heads off at our great
gags, and then it
would be my job to
animate what we
had threshed out. But,
of course, we al-
ways had a basic theme.
Generally
quite clever. Did you
ever see the one
about the fly? That's
the surviving Ink-
well that you see
around a lot. A fly is
bothering Max; gags,
complications, et
cetera, et cetera. Take
it from there. All
in all, it was very
relaxed working with
the Fleischers.
There was a funny
non-productive
incident that started
when I drew great
big teeth on Koko,
something the
Fleischers never had
done up to that
time. Well, Dave
started kidding me
about it, baring his
teeth at me every
time I looked at him.
Or he would draw
an enormous tooth on my
drawing
paper when my back was
turned. Then
finally one night on my
way home, I put
my hand into my pocket
and fished out
a handful of teeth.
Human ones. He'd
gotten them from a
dentist friend of his.
I forget what my next
move was -- pro-
bably slipping one or
two into his
dessert at lunch, or
some other disgust-
ing thing. And then
came the morning
when I raised my
drawing board to
switch on the light and
my hand
touched something
slimy. There,
draped over the light
bulb, was the
lower half of a cow's
jaw, replete with
great big yellow teeth
and shreds of
unhealthy-looking
flesh. Naturally I
couldn't let him quit
while he was
ahead. So I sneaked
down to the street
when he wasn't looking
and placed the
cadaver on the motor of
his Ford. I was
only sorry I wasn't
there when he
started to smell roast
beef on his way
home. That kind of
ended the whole rib.
Neither of us could
find a topper after
that. Although 30 years
later, when I
met Dave accidentally
in a theatre lob-
by, the first thing he
did was to make
big teeth at me and
look distressed.
|
 |
Dave
Fleischer
by RMH |
Adamson: How big a
part did Max
play in
these cartoons?
Huemer: He would always open the
picture,
then in some trick manner the
clown
would come out of the inkwell.
Max would
take the cork off the ink-
well, or
other cleverer ways, then
Koko'd be
loose, and he'd play against
Max. He'd
squirt ink at him, whatever
the gags
were. Then in the end he al-
ways dove
back into the inkwell, and
Max put
the cork back on. A sort of cir-
cular
effect, to complete the thing.
Adamson:
What function did Max
have in
the creation of the cartoons?
Huemer:
He had been the one to
create
the Inkwell series while he was
with
Bray. He even animated the early
ones.
Later on, he didn't mix in much in
the
cartoon production. I think brother
Dave
carried that on for the most part.
Nevertheless,
Max was there to render
final
opinions and decisions and as
president
to run the company. After all,
it had
grown and he always had ideas
on
expansion. He formed live-action
companies.
He bought French films.
And he
started Red Seal Film Corpora-
tion to
release this product. For a while
he was
doing, unsuccessfully I'm afraid,
what
Disney finally did very suc-
cessfully
-- releasing his own product.
His
wasn't successful for the reason
that in
establishing and maintaining
these
releasing agencies and booking
offices,
he paid out more than he took in
from the
films. Anyway, it just didn't
work out.
That's the story as I under-
stand it.
Adamson:
He spent most of his time
in the
front office and as an actor.
Huemer:
I never saw him much in the
drawing
rooms. I mean actively partici-
pating.
Dave took over that chore. Dave
handled
it. And very well. It was fun
working
with Dave.
Adamson: When you say
it was fun,
do you
mean ...
Huemer: Dave had good
ideas. We
laughed a
lot, and said, "Hey, that's fun-
ny!"
Or, "Great! Why don't we do that."
I guess
that's how the business of car-
toon
creation is carried on.
Adamson: What would
you say was
the major
reason for these cartoons
being
better than the others?
Huemer: They had more
interesting
ideas,
for one thing. They had live ac-
tion,
which is instantly understandable
to an
audience, right away. There was
Max, a
live person whom they got to
like
after a while. Max was not a great
actor or
comedian, but at least, if you
saw a few
of his pictures, you got to
know him,
and you were sympathetic
to his
troubles. Another thing the
Fleischers
did was something they
called
rotoscope. Max used that right
from the
very start. Dave Fleischer
would put
on a clown suit, and they
would
photograph him in some wild ac-
tion. And
then they would take those
films and
project them and draw over
them. A
simple enough process, but it
gave
astonishingly lifelike action.
That
would be only one little scene in
each of
the shorts. It was apparently too
expensive
to use more often. All the ac-
tion had
to be first shot, photographed,
and
projected, and then somebody
would
have to draw each frame. That is
to say,
somebody would have to change
it to
cartoon form, and somebody had to
ink and
fill in the blacks. All so that
when
completed it didn't look too
different
from the animation that was
hand-drawn
and not based on human
photography.
Adamson: Did you do any of it?
Huemer: No, I never did any of it.
That was
purely mechanical. You only
had to
follow what was on the film.
Incidentally,
McCay's animation was
very
lifelike, too, in some of his early
cartoons,
which was an amazing thing,
because
he didn't have rotoscope. He
didn't
base any of it on actual live ac-
tion. He
did a little cartoon about Nemo,
which was
very natural, some really
very
beautiful lifelike animation and
draftsmanship.
It's surprising, because
he did
that so long before anybody else.
And then
in between his time and when
Disney
came along, there was a lot of
raunchy-looking
stuff -- not good
drawing
or action either. McCay hit a
high peak
at the very start, after which
quality
went down and then surfaced
again
when Disney entered the picture.
Adamson: Winsor McCay
didn't use
the in-between'system,
did he? He
would go
straight from one drawing to
the next.
Huemer: That's right.
We found that
out at a banquet we
gave in 1928. It was
the first Animators'
Banquet, and he
was the guest of honor.
Adamson:
You didn't do this every
year, did you?
Huemer:
No, we were sort of dis-
couraged, especially
because after we
were through the owner
of the hotel
said, "'Raus! --
and don't come back!"
The last impression I
have of the night
of the brawl was
somebody trying to
high-kick the crystal
chandelier. Any-
way, during the
after-dinner speaking
McCay got up. He had a
few under his
belt, as we all did --
there were only
about 30 of us, that's
about all there
were in the business,
in those days.
NEXT
PAGE>>
|
