A TRIBUTE TO ROBERT RISKIN

A lot of fans don't like Frank Capra, the director of films like "It Happened One Night," "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" and "It's a Wonderful Life." I guess he's too sentimental for some people. That's a pity. His best films always feel directed and they always feel written, and that's no small achievement.


A lot of the credit goes to his long-time collaborator, writer Robert Riskin. I just saw "Mr. Deeds" and I have a copy of the screenplay in front of me so I thought I'd pick a couple of pages and talk about what I like about them.


Synopsis of the sequence: Mr. deeds takes his girl to a restaurant where a bunch of writers make fun of him for being a greeting card poet. When he realizes what they're up to he stands up and gets mad.



Let me digress for a moment because the context of these pages is important. Immediately before the restaurant sequence people in a cramped, crowded car driving in the rain were frantically yelling, "Hurry! Hurry!" Capra fades to the dry and spacious restaurant interior where dreamy, romantic music is playing and the camera tracks past busy waiters and customers to Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur.The sequence is wonderful already, and nobody's even said anything yet!

I forgot to say that the restaurant is neat, beautiful and civilized but not gaudy. The film celebrates civilization. Capra (as he always does) fills the scene with a kazillion extras and the gypsy violin music is to die for. What a contrast to the frenzied shouts in the last sequence!

The cuts are incredible! The shots are clipped and have an avant-garde feeling but the gypsy violin and the friendly faces of the stars soothes over the drastic cuts and we hardly notice them.

So what does all this have to do with Riskin's script? Everything! The script allows the visuals and the ambient sound to carry the beginning of the sequence!!!! Nobody says, "Isn't this a beautiful restaurant?" The waiters don't talk to each other. The script knows how to be quiet! It's a cinematic script!

There's some terrific dialogue between Cooper and Arthur, and that part has it's own build and climax, then the wicked, big-city writers invite the couple over to their table.

The writers speak fast and furious and each taunts Deeds with his own style of speaking. The word music is incredible! Imagine that! The writer wrote this section with word music in mind! When has an animation writer ever done that? This whole part of the script is a set-piece to show off the sound of the human voice!

OK ,that takes us to the beginning of the script that I reproduced below.

Mr. Deeds gets mad and the word music shifts to oratory as he scolds. I love oratory! I read a how-to book that advised writers to avoid it...bad advice! Audiences love to hear the roar of the aroused (the right word?) lion!

Deeds punches everybody out and one of the writers apologizes and offers to take him and his date out on the town. This doesn't exactly move the story forward but the dialogue is beautifully written and the actor that delivered it did a tour de force job. He was able to do such a good job because the writer had the courage to write a literate and complex piece of word music for him.

I also call your attention to the fact that Riskin gave this beautiful performance piece to a non-essential actor who we hardly see again in the film. Animation story editors would delete set pieces like this without hesitation which is why the Deity will no doubt send them all to Hell someday. Screen writing is more akin to opera than to straight narrative, as Riskin rightly perceives.

SHORT-LEGGED GIRLS ARE SEXY!

OK, long legs are sexy but we know that already.

What I'm here to say is that short legs are sexy too. Anyone who likes Fred Moore's girls knows that. I wish I could have found an example of the way Moore draws thick arms and thick, short legs on a slender body. It shouldn't work but it does.

Here's a short-legged girl compliments of Kelly from the Kelly Toons blog. Click to enlarge. BE SURE to click to enlarge! When I saw this I almost fell off the chair! Man! If this is an example of short legs then count me as a believer! If this girl's legs were longer she'd still be beautiful, but she'd be...how can I say it?... merely beautiful...not falling down voluptuous as she is here. It's harder for a long-legged girl to be voluptuous.


Well. I made my point I guess. As an afterthought I'll mention that whoever took the black and white picture above was pretty smart. look at the way the legs serve as a foil to the top and the way the shoes serve as a foil to the legs. And the background: the wall is perpendicular to the camera but the desk and chair make a "V"-shaped chevron. For an amateur photographer like myself that's interesting. To judge from the shadows the main light seems to come from the right. Either there's one elevated diffused light close to the model causing the floor shadows to fan out or there's two main lights and the floor shadows were manipulated in Photo Shop. I don't know which.

HOW walt BECAME WALT

Here's an interesting question for Disney afficionados: when did Disney the businessman who flirted with the idea of bailing out and going into real estate, become Disney the visionary? According to Barrier's "The Animated Man" it came about as a result of a nervous breakdown sometime in 1931 at the new (well fairly new) Hyperion studio (above).

Up until 1931 Disney was a hands-on producer who did a lot of nuts and bolts jobs at the same time he was agonizing over the cost of the films. By this time he'd acquired heavy hitters like Freddie Moore, Art Babbit (actually Babbit came on in '32) (both shown below), Norm Ferguson, and the like. Thanks to guys like this and relentless pounding from Walt the whole tone of the studio had begun to change. The word got around that you had to be good to work at Disney's. This should have made made Walt deliriously happy but instead it made him miserable.

I think I can imagine how he felt. Think of the awesome pictures he must have seen on the walls, of the conversations he must have had! Everybody else seemed to have the interesting jobs. He's the guy who had to worry about quality and deadlines and the cost of paperclips. It got to the point where he'd cry on the telephone. Finally he walked out and took a trip with his wife across the continent.

Apparently the new Walt came out of what he saw and thought of on that trip. Nobody knows the details. What we do know is that he returned full of enthusiasm and energy and with a new conception of himself as a kind of coordinator and full-time visionary. He delegated everything that could be delegated and threw himself into "conducting" the artists. This meant intense sweatbox sessions which stimulated immense creativity among the artists. Rudy Zamora came up with overlapping action, Ferguson with moving holds, and Moore with big improvements on squash and stretch.

The culmination of this effort can be seen in "Three Little Pigs" (1933). To see how far Disney had come in a short time compare that film to "Steamboat Willie" which was done only four years earlier. While we're at it lets compare Steamboat Willie (1929) to Fantasia which was on the drawing boards in 1939. That's a difference of only ten years!!!!!

To be fair to Fleischer fans I have to add that Betty Boop's stunning "Snow White" was done in 1932 and was also the result of an amazing evolution of technique. Why the Fleischers caved into Disney's less funny and cartoony style is hard to understand. Was it the Hayes Office? Did the Hayes people make it difficult to use jazz soundtracks? I don't know.

Thanks to Jenny Lerew for the photo of the animators and to Fred Osmond for the caricature of Disney.

MORE LIFE DRAWING REFERENCE

Here's some more pictures from my favorite reference book for life drawing. I don't have the book at hand but the author/photographer's name is John Everard. It's a British book from the 50s but some libraries have it and there's always ABE Books. Click to enlarge.

Sorry a couple of the pages are crooked!

DAUMIER AGAIN

Are you tired of seeing this stuff? I love it myself. Daumier was instrumental in beginning newspaper cartoons so every cartoonist should raise a glass to him occassionally. Here he is (above) on a roof striking a heroic pose for his fans.

This bust (above) was in the Daumier book but it doesn't look like Daumier did it. I include the caption in case that helps. Anyway, it's a terrific caricature isn't it?

Here (above and below) are three drawings by Daumier. Boy, Daumier and Thomas Nast together certainly were a scourge on the back of bureaucracy.

Bill linked to some of these on his site but I thought I'd publish them again because these copies seem to be larger with more detail.

VISIT FROM A THEORY CORNER READER

It was a dark and stormy night; black storm clouds raced before the moon like ghost riders across the sky. I didn't notice the figure at the door til it was too late and she was already in the room.

Uncle Eddie: "Waddaya want Babe? I'm busy!"

Reader: "Well maybe you're not too busy for this, bucktooth! I came to thrash this thing out

once and for all!"

Uncle Eddie: "Honey, go home! There's nothing to thrash here!"

Reader: "I was on Theory Corner! You didn't answer my comment about about the monkey and the potato salad. You answered Jorge but not me! What am I? A nothing? Is that all I am to you?"

Uncle Eddie: "First of all I'm gonna relieve you of that toy! There! Now we're gonna talk."

Reader: "Ha! you think I need a gun to deal with you!? I'm goin' to the newspapers and show up this site for the hell hole it really is! Now take your hands off me!"

Uncle Eddie: "Do you really want me to take my hands off?"

Reader: "Well I... I...."

Uncle Eddie: "Yes?"

Reader: "I... I... Ooooh, Uncle Eddie!"

THE PAST AND FUTURE OF STORIES

I don't believe I'm attempting something this ambitious in just a few paragraphs. Please be forgiving. I'm not an historian and I'm just winging this without benefit of book or Google search. OK, here goes...

It's hard to imagine but a little more than a century and a half ago the modern adventure story didn't exist. Oh there were stories about Ulysses and King Arthur and Tom Jones and the like but they were long and padded and the highlights were scattered islands in a sea of words.


So far as I know the lean, modern adventure story began with Alexander Dumas, maybe with "The Three Musketeers." That book must have gone off like a bomb in a tea shop! Imagine it, a story consisting of all highlights and almost no filler! A rush to publish followed. Every 19th century writer wanted to try the new technique and whole genres were invented in just a few decades. Poe, Verne, Scott, Doyle, and Sabitini became household words. The public couldn't get enough!



The phenomenon that interests me were the penny dreadfuls and dime novels that sprang up in Dumas' wake. In America they began with Westerns, then the Westerns morphed into short crime stories bundled up into pulp magazines. The public went nuts over the stuff! Cheap, illustrated stories that really delivered the goods; in the days before electronic media the impact must have been enormous!



It wasn't long before the pulps developed colorful covers with bold offset printing. Newsstands sprung up everywhere! Adventure, sex, sci-fi, romance, horror...all for just a few cents! Then, just when story consumption was at its peak and nobody thought it could go any farther....radio and film weighed in. That meant even more venues for stories! It must have been a heady time for writers!

Now in a general way the story revolution was positive but there were some casualties. Short, silent comedies gave way to long, feature-length comedy with disastrous results. It wasn't sound that killed the shorts, (look what The Three Stooges did with sound) and it wasn't problems with exhibitors. It was the public's taste for long-form stories!

The pulp-reading, novel-buying, penny dreadful-excited public craved long-form stories! Long-form comedy was inferior but it didn't matter. The public voted with their dollars!

Cartoons came up against the same problem. The public craved long-form stories and Disney gave it to them with "Snow White." Superb short cartoons re-emerged at Warners and MGM but in a subsidiary role to features. Shorts, whether live-action or animated, were the orphaned children of this era.

I'm running out of space so I better wrap this up. Where do stories stand now? Interesting question! In a word the 150 year story explosion has run its course. Story magazines have folded and only Harry potter novels seem to get lines around the block. Theater attendance isn't what it used to be (though it's getting better) and even television is worrying. Amazingly shorts, whether fiction or non-fiction, are back with a vengeance. Electronic media dominates and shorts are its favorite child...

Oddly enough, maybe for reasons only Marshal McLuhan understands, television now demands personality intensive stories. In the new media story exists as an excuse for performance. That's why the Oscars are so popular. Actors are more popular than presidents.

The immediate future of animation in my opinion favors acting-intensive shorts, anywhere from 6 minutes to half an hour in length. In animation that means short scripts with plenty of room for virtuoso performances by artists.

ARE KIDS MORE CREATIVE THAN ADULTS?

Are kids more creative than adults? Of course they're not! How did such an absurd idea ever get started anyway?

Kids aren't wired yet. They're the seed not the fruit. Who wants to be a seed?

Really, if kids are so creative then how come they're so messy?

Maybe they just can't imagine the future, even if it's only an hour later, when they'll have to live with the consequences of their mess.

I think what kids are good at is storing vivid memories of pleasant times, memories that will come in useful when they become creative adults.

Kids are all anxious to become adults and who can blame them? Kids are tribal, are quick to ridicule other kids who don't conform, and are especially vulnerable to trends and fads. Does that sound creative to you?

Now adults on the other hand...like (ahem!) me...that's different.

Adults are fine and noble chaps! They're good conversationalists. You can talk to an adult. You can reason with them! And the ideas! They have SUCH ideas!

I think the reason why kids' creativity is so over-rated is that they make bold drawings on art projects. Maybe that's because they don't have to pay for the pigments. If I were to think about making a bold, red background like the one above I'd be calculating the cost. Kids don't have to do that.

One last point: people are always saying that kids are born creative and society knocks it out of them. Is there any evidence for that? The reason playfull kittens turn into sleepy adults probably has nothing to do with the way cats are socialized. Aren't they just playing out their biology? Maybe human kids are doing the same thing.

Don't get me wrong about all this, I love kids even if they're a bit spaced-out. They're cute little buggers aren't they?

WELCOME TO "THEORYLAND!"

"Greetings viewers and welcome to "Theoryland," the thinkingest place of them all!"

"Every week we'll take you to one of several exciting lands. This week come with us to 'Fromteerland,' where young people can relive the thrilling days of yesterday when our pioneer ancestors hunted down polecats like predatory animation writers."

"Here to tell you more about it is our host, Uncle Eddie..."

"Hello folks and welcome to the show. Here at Theory Corner we always strive to top ourselves and 'Theoryland' is our latest effort. We've chosen to begin the show here in Fromteerland but I thought you might like to get an overview of the whole series. Follow me and I'll see what I can do."

"Of course the cornerstone of our show is good, solid family entertainment...art, history and science combined, something for the mind as well as the eye. Here for example is an organ derived from a male T-Rex. What organ we don't know but our staff is consulting with paleontologists about it right now and when we find out we'll do a show about it."

"Occasionally we'll have visits from Theoryland regulars like Darnold Mallard. Here you see the reaction of Darnold's doctor when he discovers a human face in Darnold's throat. Click to enlarge."

"Expect lots of hair-raising adventures in Fromteerland episodes. Those wily animation writers are always up to no good and it's up to the stars of our historical adventures to ferret them out and bring them to justice."

"Well here's my transportation now! It looks like that's all we have time for this week!"

" Bye for now and remember... KEEP THEORISING!"




Note: Except for the first two drawings all pictures are copyrighted by the Disney company.