Читать книгу Wild Minds - Reid Mitenbuler - Страница 10

Prologue

“Make Us Another”

Otto Messmer was eager—for fame, for riches, for his big break. At night he could look into the sky above West Hoboken, New Jersey, and see the glow from Manhattan’s lights—barely two miles east, and yet a world away. He was a struggling young newspaper cartoonist, only twenty-three years old, on the verge of joining that more dazzling world across the Hudson River.

This was in 1915, when the newspaper business was still healthy, at the peak of its clout and reach. Talented artists working within its system were rewarded handsomely. At the New York Journal, a star cartoonist like Winsor McCay made more than $50,000 a year in syndication—a sum that afforded him multiple homes, chauffeur-driven sedans, and the kind of bold wardrobe choices you don’t often find in the closets of people with less eccentric careers. It was a grand lifestyle, and one just starting to come within Messmer’s grasp. His work was occasionally published in the New York World and sometimes featured in Punch, Life, and Judge—the most prestigious humor magazines of the day. But there was a problem: these sporadic freelance appearances didn’t yet provide a stable living. Dry spells could mean washing his laundry in a bucket of cold water, or having to order the smellier cuts of meat from the butcher. Success seemed close, but he still needed a steady job.

One day, in search of additional work, Messmer packed a portfolio of drawings under his arm and headed to Fort Lee, New Jersey, several miles to the north. In the earliest years of the movie business, before people realized that Hollywood had better light and cheaper taxes, Fort Lee was a leading center of the film industry. Visitors there might catch a glimpse of glamorous stars like Lionel Barrymore posing for photographers, the wind dancing in his hair; or perhaps D. W. Griffith standing next to his camera, shouting into a bullhorn. Messmer hoped to show his portfolio of drawings to the studios and get a job painting background sets for the movies.

Messmer presented his work at Universal, then just an upstart studio. Among his sample drawings was a flipbook featuring a short cartoon about the war then happening in Europe. At this point, animation was still very new; some argued that it could blossom into a great art form, while others said it would never be more than a novelty—the debate was still up in the air. A few movie studios, including Universal, thought animated cartoons had entertainment potential, that they could be used as a kind of hors d’oeuvre before main features. When Messmer presented his little flipbook, the hiring man paused. “Look, don’t you know they’re starting animation?” he asked. “You look like you could fit in that.”

Messmer was excited, but also worried. He had included the flipbook only to make his portfolio look thicker. He had no real understanding of how animation was done on a larger scale, nor did he know whom to ask. It was still a new and mysterious craft; the few people doing it guarded their methods as secrets, the same as magicians with their tricks. Messmer told the hiring man he was interested but admitted he had no idea what he was doing.

The hiring man just shrugged. “Go ahead and see what you can do.”

Messmer figured out the basics and made a one-minute test cartoon, entitled Motor Mat, about a reckless driver who fixes a flat tire by blowing a smoke ring with his cigar and using it as a spare. To Messmer’s mind, this was what cartoons should be: wild and fantastic, immune to the logic of physics or reality. Animation could magically bring to life worlds and ideas that live action couldn’t.

When other Universal executives saw the cartoon, they gave Messmer a humble space where he could work on his ideas. It wasn’t even a proper office, just a rickety desk wedged into an open area between two film sets. Since movies were still silent in those days, the space was noisy from directors on different projects shouting over each other, competing to be heard. Amid this ruckus Messmer set to work drawing, trying to keep his pen from being jostled by crew members squeezing by. A few feet from his desk sat a caged lion, which the studio staff explained was used for jungle pictures and kept starved so he would “emote” more. Messmer, whose work often involved metaphors, no doubt wondered if this was some sort of omen.

Universal fired Messmer shortly after hiring him—not because he wasn’t talented, but because it was easier to just buy animated cartoons from outside studios that specialized in them. Messmer thus began floating among jobs at the handful of new animation studios trying to figure out the craft and become profitable.

Before any of his animation gigs was able to take off, Messmer was drafted to fight in World War I. He headed to Europe in 1917, dressed in his green wool Army uniform, keeping a diary of experiences that he no doubt hoped to some day use in his art. The diary’s early pages—full of beautifully looping penmanship and clever doodles­—­described a pleasant ocean voyage to France and then a march through a lush countryside of green hills and thatched-roof cottages. As the journey progressed, however, the diary’s tone darkened. Messmer began noticing artillery hidden among the wildflowers. He could hear the roar of battle off in the distance, and whiff the dry, sulfury smell of the guns. Once he joined the fighting, his penmanship grew thick and clumsy with descriptions of the war’s horrors: a friend’s pink brains splattered in the mud, the dying gasps of men’s last words. Atrocities were all around, but he sometimes found relief in the little things, like the moments when buried artifacts from medieval French cities would suddenly appear in the trenches, surfacing in the mud like lost treasure floating up from the seafloor. It was a moment like this that perhaps inspired Messmer to jot in his diary a possible scenario for some future cartoon: “Fearless Freddy. Digs for gold; digs up all kinds of things from the earth.”

By the time Messmer returned home, in 1919, animation had grown as an industry. It was beginning to offer a viable way to make a living, although some thought it was still just a novelty. Cartoons hadn’t yet ignited the public’s imagination, and no cartoon character had captured people’s attention in the same way as real-life celebrities like Charlie Chaplin or Mary Pickford.

Messmer resumed work in an animation studio run by Pat Sullivan, a convicted felon who had recently been released from prison. Sullivan was a rotten boss but allowed Messmer to work for other studios on his own time, so long as Sullivan made money from any deals. In this way, Messmer one day ended up at Famous Players–Lasky, the studio later known as Paramount, pitching an idea to an executive named John King.

King leaned back in his chair as Messmer loaded the projector with a cartoon titled Feline Follies, featuring a black cat that would eventually be named Felix. Translated from Latin, the name loosely meant “good luck,” an ironic way to name a black cat.

The film began with Felix being kicked out onto the street by his owner because he had failed to protect the house from mice. Distressed and worried about his fate, Felix wanders to the home of his girlfriend, Miss Kitty White, and begs her for a place to stay. It’s not a request Miss Kitty White seems excited about as she introduces him to a litter of neglected kittens and tells him he’s the father. Facing down this vision of a life shackled to domestic drudgery, Felix responds by rushing off to the local gasworks, putting a hose in his mouth, and committing suicide.

Once the cartoon finished, the end of the film reel flapped loudly in the projector. Messmer leaned over to switch it off and then glanced at King to get his reaction. It’s easy to imagine a film executive from a later generation becoming uncomfortable with the film’s subject mater, but this was a younger America, when people had higher tolerance, and perhaps even a taste, for this kind of darker material. Back then, the movie industry still existed on the untamed fringe of society and had a higher risk tolerance. King could not have predicted that Felix would soon become one of the most recognizable icons in the world, or that animation would ever become anything more than just a novelty. When he finally stopped laughing at the cartoon, he turned to Messmer with a demand: “Make us another.”

The origin story of Felix the Cat will be a surprising revelation to most. This and other early cartoon characters were often subversive and decidedly adult—not qualities usually associated with animation now. Many people today assume that cartoons have always primarily been children’s entertainment. However, this reputation—that there is something inherently juvenile about animation—is relatively new. It began in the 1950s, when the studios stopped making animated shorts for theatrical release, and cartoons moved to television. The natural habitat of cartoons was no longer in dark movie theaters, where profits were generated by admission tickets; it was now in living rooms, on television, where squeamish corporate advertisers had influence over what was presented. Those advertisers were also starting to notice how the postwar baby boom had created an enormous new audience of young people, and that their parents had plenty of disposable income. Once these new factors were understood, animation changed almost overnight. Before, it was something created by artists who saw themselves in the sophisticated mold of artists like Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton. After, it became a way to sell sugary breakfast cereal to kids. While recent history has seen a revival of some cartoons that echo the older sensibilities—glimpsed in the occasional feature, or in television shows like The Simpsons, South Park, or BoJack Horseman—the art form still carries a reputation from when it was disrupted.

This book is about animation’s origins and rise, the first fifty years, wild decades spanning the early twentieth century to the 1960s. The cartoons created then were often little hand grenades of social and political satire: bawdy yet clever, thoughtful even if they were rude. Some Betty Boop cartoons contained brief glimpses of nudity. Popeye cartoons were often loaded with sly messages about the injustices of unchecked capitalism. The teaming of animators with jazz musicians like Cab Calloway was, in the 1920s and ’30s, just as subversive as hip-hop would be in the 1980s and ’90s. The old Warner Bros. cartoons—Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and more—­occasionally offered some of the most perceptive social commentary of their era. Much of this color was censored when these old cartoons were repackaged for new formats and audiences, particularly television and young children. Much of their original spirit was reimagined, if not forgotten.

The people who made classic cartoons offer a treasure trove of colorful backstories. These wild minds occupied the same zip codes as stand-up comics like Lenny Bruce, Joan Rivers, Richard Pryor, or Dave Chappelle in years to come. Like much great art, their work could be controversial—much of it upsets the sensibilities of later generations fancying themselves as sensitive and enlightened. Understood in the proper context, however, classic cartoons reveal much about the past, its people, and American culture. During its first half-century, animation was an important part of culture wars about free speech, censorship, the appropriate boundaries of humor, and the influence of art and media on society. During World War II, it played a large role in propaganda and popular culture. Later on, it would demonstrate how the medium affects the message.

This book is a narrative history of the personalities behind animation’s first half-century, when the art was experimental, subversive, spooky, sometimes dangerous, and often hilarious. This is the tale of an older age and a younger nation, collapsed to the scale of a curious industry: the promise and ambition; fortunes made and lost; a rise and then the fall. It is also about art and how creative people work, how their art was shaped by its time, and how that art affected the future.