This is about the so-called "catalytic personality." In entertainment this would describe people who are lucky in the sense that great things just seem to happen when they're around. Everybody just seems to do their best work when this kind of person's near, even if they're not working on the same project. Lorne Michaels, the producer of Saturday Night Live, is reputed to have had that quality. Very often the catalyst gets overlooked on the screen credits, yet the project would have been much poorer without him.
Clampett (director of all the cartoons on this page, save the stiff Daffy cartoon above) strikes me as someone who was a catalytic personality. Did he create Bugs Bunny? I'm not aware that any single person did, Bugs appears to have had several fathers (especially Tex), but it's impossible to imagine Bugs arising without Bob's influence, at least indirectly. Things happened around Bob. Look at the vibrancy of the other pictures on this page. What does that tell you about someone like Bob?
But this isn't a piece about Clampett, it's about catalytic personalities in general. It's sad to realize that catalytic personalities are so often overlooked and under-rated. There's no screen credit that reads: "The person who goaded, provoked, planted seeds, and gave away gags to friends that he would like to have kept for himself." That credit doesn't exist.
In animation a catalytic personality does more than contribute gags. His gags lead to something. They suggest a vision and and an over-all structure. You ask this kind of person for a gag, expecting to get something like, "How about if he steps on a rake?", and you instead get a gag that suggests a unique character doing something that only that character would do. You get an action that suggests a new way of pacing the scene, maybe the whole cartoon. The gag forces you to re-evaluate your whole way of looking at what you're doing. Catalytic personalities like to wrap up their gags in something larger and more useful.
One of the reasons catalytics can be so helpful is that they're constantly running story ideas and character types through their minds. These people don't offer gags, they offer pre-thought out worlds. The gag is often something deep that's been simmering in the pot for years. It may be a fragment of a structure they'd been painstakingly building for their own use. The risk they run is that you'll run away with the larger idea the gag implies, and then they won't be able to use it themselves. These are generous people who take big risks for no credit.
The person I know who best fits this description is John Kricfalusi. Things mysteriously happen around John. People get lucky around him. Ideas somehow improve. The man has contributed millions of dollars worth of ideas to projects all around town, but is probably officially credited mostly in the cartoons he's made himself.
I wonder what other people this would apply to. The big names are obvious but I'm thinking of less well-known names like Bill (Bob?)Nolan who worked on the early Lantz Oswalds.
Here's part two of that post, the one that contains what I believe is the best expression of friendship in all of English literature, the best I know of, anyway. Brutus and Cassius are allies and close friends but they have irreconcilable differences and they clash just before the play's final battle. The way Shakespeare has them reconcile is nothing short of brilliant.
It's a pity that I had to trim this to bare bones so that it would fit into YouTube's 10 minute limit. Now I have to decide whether to put up part one. It contains Marc Antony's speech to the crowd after the assassination of Caesar. It's probably the best speech in the English language, and this is a terrific version, but it depends on Brutus's speech to set it up, and I had to cut that for time. I put up this awkward,too-lean version on YouTube but I might refrain from running it here.
Aaaargh! I just watched the clip again and realized I said Marc Antony met with Brutus when I meant to say Cassius! Sorry, my mother had a stupid child!
Sorry about the excessive chatting. I'll try to make these introductions shorter. Also, I haven't given up on outdoor photography and printed posts. I just can't stop playing with the new built-in camera, but that won't last forever.
Eshniner wrote in with a link where Ellison damns to perdition all who would use his material without paying for it. I don't know if that includes blogs like this one but just to be safe I'll have to refrain from putting up more of the radio show. Too bad. It might have introduced the man to some people who didn't know about him before.
Ellison isn't only a writer, he's a performer. You can tell from listening to the video excerpts. Those clips were beautifully orchestrated to take advantage of Ellison's unique style of delivery. It's important to hear things like this because you get a lot more out of his written work, especially the essays, when you can imagine the way he'd read them.
More Ellison, more authorized Ellison, can be found on YouTube interviews and on his unofficial fan site: harlanellison.com/
The story of Little Miss Muffet is so delightfully primal and the spider is such a great symbol of maleness. I can only imagine what it must be like when a sheltered little girl wearing frilly petticoats and lace, fresh from a pink bedroom stuffed to the gills with glass unicorns, suddenly encounters the ultimate symbol for hairy, salivating, low-rent men. The experience is evidently so traumatic that it's found it's way into what might be the most frequently memorized poem in history.
This is about the golden age of newsreel and racetrack announcers, though I only have one example to cite. This guy was a genius! His fast style was all business. He flattered the audience by making it seem like their time was valuable, not to be wasted. He savored the odd names of the racehorses and made the names seem aristocratic and musical. He seemed to have deep knowledge of the sport, and the way he talked about it invested it with enormous dignity.
My guess is that Walter Winchell invented this style in the twenties. It was perfect for newsreels.
Just for fun, I also include the opening narrative of the recent film, "Nicholas Nickleby," the Alan Cummings-Anne Hathaway version. It describes the birth of Nicholas. Dickens manages to be playfull with words at the same time he's serious and sentimental.
Here's a quick, un-edited video on the subject of bullying. I made it for LadyMaryJay who's a schoolteacher in the UK, and who works for an anti-bullying program there. I almost didn't put it up here because it didn't seem relevant to a theory site, but I changed my mind when I realized that coping with bullies is actually a philosophical problem as well as a practical one.
The video's over nine minutes long. I should have have said it much faster. Oh well, here it is....
Somebody on the net "replied" to the French clip with a video of his own! The guy's kind of ugly, and he's pretty stingy with the compliments, but I was still glad to get it!
It's up! Ha! My first pantomime video, called "Uncle Eddie: Paris Love"! Unfortunately the double exposures were fragmenting so much that I had to stop shooting. What causes that? Anyway, there's enough there that you can see where the story was going.
I'm sorry that so many of my recent posts have been about me. Even my own mother wouldn't want to read about me all the time. Even I'm getting tired of me. I think this self-obsession came about because I've been on the computer so much lately. I got a manual and I was determined to learn everything I could. I didn't realize that doing that would make me such a dull person to talk to. All my most recent adventures have been inner ones. Oh, well. I'll put the book on the shelf for a while.
I just did another video, one that tells a story, but YouTube wouldn't take the upload tonight. I figured I'd better do two in a row so I don't forget how I did it the first time. Anyway, visiting YouTube so often made me aware just how many Uncle Eddie's there are. There are cartloads of us! Here's a few examples from the spots right next to mine....
The first is Uncle Eddie, the rich real-estate dealer from Ghana (above). This guy is rolling in dough! If I ever get hard up for cash maybe I'll visit him for a hand-out. After all, we're related!
Here's (above) the hundred year old Uncle Eddie who still manages to beat up muggers. Lots of Uncle Eddies are old, which gives me the creepy feeling that nobody's being named "Eddie" anymore. That's a pity. The lineage is so noble! I don't know of any kings named Eddie ("Edward" doesn't count) but lots of athletes were.
Here's (above) somebody's "drunken Uncle Earl." I thought the title said Eddie, which is why I imported it. I'll still put it up because Uncle Earl had the spot immediately above me when I started out. Believe it or not drunken uncle videos are a whole genre on YouTube. There's a million of them!
Here's the most modest of the Uncle Eddies. He sings behind a coffin lid and never emerges.
Here it is! Two minutes and twenty seconds long, it's my very first internet video! I just found it by doing a YouTube search on "Uncle Eddie." I can't believe it! I've finally lost my virginity in this medium!
It's a terrible film and I apologize for it. The sound is beyond bad and the clips sometimes have no relation to each other. That's because each shot was really an excuse to experiment with some different facet of the iMovie 08 program. Oh well, I'm glad I did it. Seeing it has taught me a lot about what works and doesn't work on YouTube, and I could only have learned that by putting something out there.
Thanks to the commenter who prompted me to look up this "Wacky World of Tex Avery" clip. Yeah, I worked on this title, along with Mike F., Glen Kennedy, and Mike Maliani. I had nothing to do with the title card that began and ended the clip.
The concept for the title was simple: Tex would do something right and the series villain would attempt to do the same thing and would botch it. The problem was that the time devoted to the title animation was compressed so things happened too fast and there was no time to make adjustments in the animation.
The thing I remember most about working on the titles was the difficulty of keying action in the film to the words of a song whose only lyrics were the word "wacky," endlessly repeated. You can't say to someone, "The character hits the ground at the start of the word "wacky," because every word in the song was "wacky." I can laugh at it now but it drove me nuts at the time. I actually ended up liking the song but maybe I'm a victim of The Stockholm Syndrome.
The series was done in a timeframe and for a budget that would make Clutch Cargo look like "Gone with the Wind," so any comparison with the original Avery cartoons is impossible.
Doggone it! The YouTube video I uploaded still hasn't appeared on YouTube yet. I'll post it here when it does. In the meantime here's a post devoted to two of my favorite news stylists, Walter Winchell and Edward R. Murrow.
I'm not aware that either one of them had a serious newspaper background before going into radio. Murrow arranged educational lectures and interviews, and Winchell was a vaudevillian and a gossip columnist. You could say that both were like actors who played the role of journalists and managed to beat the real journalists at their own game, at least where presentation was concerned. They both were good, but I'll start with my favorite, Walter Winchell (above), maybe the greatest news stylist in broadcast journalism.
Winchell (above, introducing the characters about a minute into the show, then leaving) saw the radio news as an entertainment medium. That's common today when when lots of people get their news from Comedy Central, but it was a relatively new thing in the twenties when Winchell did it. He had a fast, ratatattat way of speaking, and he combined serious news with gossip and human interest stories, giving equal emphasis to both.
They say that watching Winchell broadcast was a real experience. He'd prepare for every show like it was the most important thing in the world. He paced up and down, deliberately psyching himself into a nervous state, not allowing himself even the relief of using the bathroom. During the show he'd tap on a disconnected telegraph key, sit on his knee, throw papers on the floor...anything to sustain the mood of urgency. He frequently referred to the busy Jergens Newsroom, which is funny because Jergens was a lady's hand lotion and there was no newsroom. I love the way he started his show: "Good morning Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea!" Now THAT'S style!
Murrow was the master of understatement, of the pauses between words. He had a grave way of speaking yet his delivery had a note of self-parody in it, even when he was in earnest. It was a killer style that demonstrated that restrained under the top can be almost as drastic and surreal as wild over-the-top.
Murrow spawned a whole school of imitators including David Brinkley and Eric Severeid. The trick was to give every bit of the news that grave, measured, metronome beat. My guess is that Murrow's style came about as a reaction to Winchell's magnificent hysteria. Murrow decided to inhabit the silences that Winchell ignored.
Murrow was the kind of guy you'd watch compulsively. There was something magnificently awkward about him, the kind of awkwardness that translates into charisma. He had a thin, lanky body which required deliberate and thoughtful control to make it do the simplest things of life. He had to work at crafting facial expressions and he chain smoked to the point where he became a sort of patron saint to smokers everywhere. Cartoonists should study guys like this.
The "Person to Person"interview with Marilyn Monroe (above) is one of Murrow's best TV shows. You could argue that he didn't do very much in the interview but that would be a mistake. Murrow accomplishes a lot by simply transferring his awkwardness to other people. Marilyn was really spooked by it and so, apparently, were the other people in the room. We got to see a side of her that nobody else brought out.
I was dying to put up my first iMovie video today (Sunday) but it looks like that won't happen, so I'll shoot for Monday. It's just me sitting infront of the computer camera but I managed to bugger it up somehow. I'll see if I can fix it and get it up during the day...um, I mean get the film...well, you know what I mean.
Fascinating pictures on the net these days! On ASIFA-Hollywood's site, Steve Worth just put up some drawings by Clampett's writer, Warren Foster. As you can see, Foster was a pretty good draughtsman.
I talked to John K about these and mentioned with surprise that they seem to have been colored with ordinary crayons... or maybe pastels, I can't tell. John wasn't surprised at all. John once visited Tex at Hanna Barbera and asked if he would sign his copy of Adamson's book. Tex not only signed it, he did an elaborate drawing which he insisted on coloring with crayons. When he couldn't find any he begged John to wait while he hobbled down the hall (Tex was an older man by then) to find some. In Tex's view a drawing just wasn't complete until it was crayoned.
I agree! I love the way crayons enhance a pencil drawing. Crayon, when it's done with a light touch, reminds me of the way watercolors and pencil interact. Each emphasizes the delicacy and grace of the other. When my kids were little I used to give them a new box of crayons with great ceremony and fanfare. I explained that what they were getting was a professional tool, beloved by animation artists. They didn't buy a word of it. They thought I was just being cheap.
And talking about Tex, here's (above) a picture from Mike Barrier's site showing the young and vigorous Tex sitting on a rock with an animator friend. Holy Cow! Tex had muscles...and HAIR! Look at the cut of his bathing suit, which seems a little high and Gunga-Dinish compared to modern trunks, and check out the shoes (slippers?)!
Looking at this picture, and recalling how cool Red Hot Ryder's low-cut boots looked in the drawings I put up last week, convinced me that men should always wear black leather dress shoes with a bathing suit. Maybe even thin black socks. A sliver of jet black on the bottom of a character really separates him from the ground and makes a solid, here-I-am-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it kind of statement. Look what black hooves did for Porky!
Here's two version's of the Crispian's Day speech from Shakespeare's "Henry V." If you're like most people then you prefer the newer Branagh version (above), which is acted more naturally and some would say more believably. Branagh's is also more filmic, at least at the start. You feel like you're right there on the edge of the woods with King Harry. Me, I prefer the stodgy, static, orator's version served up by Olivier (below).
Watch both and compare. If you have time to watch Olivier's entire ten minute clip then take a close look at the charge of the mounted knights at the end. It's the best charge I've ever seen on film.
I prefer Olivier's version, not only because he was a better orator, but because he had more awareness of the subtext of the piece. In my opinion Shakespeare bought into the Greek idea that the form that language takes coveys meaning, not just the content. "I saw as through a glass darkly" conveys more than "I had difficulty understanding what I was looking at," even though the literal meaning is identical. The first is beautiful and poetic and makes us feel the speaker can be trusted. The first quote gives us pleasure and a glimpse into a better, more aristocratic world. The second conveys only information.
The thing is, that if you're using language that's better than the way people really speak, then you have to deliver those lines in a better way than people really speak. You have to use artifice that everyone accepts as real, but actually isn't. That's what Olivier did in this film.
Of course Olivier took it to an extreme. He figured that naturalistic sets would seem jarring if they were a backdrop to artificial dialogue, so he made the sets and costumes deliberately stage-like. Everything in Olivier's film is subordinated to Shakespeare's beautiful words. I think he did the right thing. What do you think?
ANNOUNCER: "Yes, it's THE SMOKER, and a smoker knows many things! Through the wisps of tobacco smoke he sees truth and error...and MURDER!"
ANNOUNCER: "In tonight's episode we find THE SMOKER skulking through the dark corridors of the abandoned farm house. If he's lucky, he'll find the kidnapped girl. If he's not lucky....."
THE SMOKER: "Who are you? Where's your body? I don't see a body!"
DR. SWEET: "I am Dr. Sweet. I don't have a body any more, but I get along alright..."
DR. SWEET: "...with a little help from my friends."
THE SMOKER: "Glad to meet ya! What a fine bunch of fellows, yessir!"
THE SMOKER: "Look, I'm not a cop! Somebody pays me and I do this stuff. I don't know why you took the girl, and I don't care. "
SMOKER: " Let me take her with me now and we'll call this square.
DR. SWEET: "Square? You'll call it 'square?' That's very funny! He'll call it square! (Laughs)"
MAN CREATURES: (They laugh)
(The laughter becomes a cacophony)
THE SMOKER: "Stop it! Tell them to stop it!"
DR. SWEET: "Stop."
THE SMOKER: "Look, I got $500 here. That was my down payment for getting the girl."
THE SMOKER: "Let me walk out of here with her now, and it's all yours. You better make up your mind fast, though, before I change my mind."
THE SMOKER: "No? Are you sure? Gee, that's too bad......then, how about............"
THE SMOKER: "....How about THIS!!!???" Get the girl NOW! We're leaving!!!!!"
DR. SWEET: "Oh you're leaving?"
DR. SWEET: "Did you hear that? We just met and now he's leaving! Maybe we can persuade him to stay a little longer!"
(The creatures go ballistic! Lots of growls and howls as they go on the attack!)
ANNOUNCER: "What's going to happen to THE SMOKER!? Where is the kidnapped girl? Who is Dr. Sweet!? How can he survive without a body? Why are his henchmen hideously deformed? Find out next week when we again present another exciting episode of...'THE SMOKER!' "
This is about the so-called "catalytic personality." In entertainment this would describe people who are lucky in the sense that great things just seem to happen when they're around. Everybody just seems to do their best work when this kind of person's near, even if they're not working on the same project. Lorne Michaels, the producer of Saturday Night Live, is reputed to have had that quality. Very often the catalyst gets overlooked on the screen credits, yet the project would have been much poorer without him.
Clampett (director of all the cartoons on this page, save the stiff Daffy cartoon above) strikes me as someone who was a catalytic personality. Did he create Bugs Bunny? I'm not aware that any single person did, Bugs appears to have had several fathers (especially Tex), but it's impossible to imagine Bugs arising without Bob's influence, at least indirectly. Things happened around Bob. Look at the vibrancy of the other pictures on this page. What does that tell you about someone like Bob?
But this isn't a piece about Clampett, it's about catalytic personalities in general. It's sad to realize that catalytic personalities are so often overlooked and under-rated. There's no screen credit that reads: "The person who goaded, provoked, planted seeds, and gave away gags to friends that he would like to have kept for himself." That credit doesn't exist.
In animation a catalytic personality does more than contribute gags. His gags lead to something. They suggest a vision and and an over-all structure. You ask this kind of person for a gag, expecting to get something like, "How about if he steps on a rake?", and you instead get a gag that suggests a unique character doing something that only that character would do. You get an action that suggests a new way of pacing the scene, maybe the whole cartoon. The gag forces you to re-evaluate your whole way of looking at what you're doing. Catalytic personalities like to wrap up their gags in something larger and more useful.
One of the reasons catalytics can be so helpful is that they're constantly running story ideas and character types through their minds. These people don't offer gags, they offer pre-thought out worlds. The gag is often something deep that's been simmering in the pot for years. It may be a fragment of a structure they'd been painstakingly building for their own use. The risk they run is that you'll run away with the larger idea the gag implies, and then they won't be able to use it themselves. These are generous people who take big risks for no credit. 
The person I know who best fits this description is John Kricfalusi. Things mysteriously happen around John. People get lucky around him. Ideas somehow improve. The man has contributed millions of dollars worth of ideas to projects all around town, but is probably officially credited mostly in the cartoons he's made himself. 
I wonder what other people this would apply to. The big names are obvious but I'm thinking of less well-known names like Bill (Bob?)Nolan who worked on the early Lantz Oswalds.
