Out of the Ink Stain

Here’s a feature story about Max Fleischer from Picturegoer and Film Weekly, a British publication, dated January 13, 1940. It’s actually one of two stories the newspaper wrote; an article the following April 20th gave profiles (accompanied by drawings) of the characters in Gulliver’s Travels.

This feature story starts off with an incident early in Fleischer’s animation career. It doesn’t attempt to be a history of his studio. Gulliver gets only a passing mention. To say the film “adheres strictly to the line laid down by Swift” is, well, not altogether true, even if you set aside all the travels that don’t involve Lilliput.

He turned ink into Gold
THE living-room of the little apartment on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn looked like a Heath Robinson drawing. Electric wires were hung on chandeliers, picture frames and any other place that would support them. Drawing boards were propped up on chairs, the drawings at first glance looking so alike that an outsider would have wondered why so many sketches of the same subject had been made.
An upright piano huddled timidly in one corner as if trying to escape the attention of three brothers working in the room.
The brothers were busy with a motion picture camera in the opposite corner. They were Max, Dave and Joe Fleischer. The camera poked its lens in between improvised standards bearer electric lights which glared at the drawings on one of the boards.
Max was at one side of the board. A pile of drawings lay on a small table beside him. Dave was on the other side of the drawing board and Joe stood at the side of the camera. Max would pick up a drawing and place it on the board. He and Dave then would fit it carefully within marked boundaries.
“Turn,” Max would say.
Joe would turn the crank carefully until the handle reached a mark on the side of the camera.
“Okay,” he would say.
Then the process would be repeated.

It was three o’clock in the morning. The brothers had worked steadily for honours. Max’s wife had long ago retired, after giving reluctant permission for the brothers to work in the living-room. Max had to plead with her.
“We have worked for months drawing these pictures,” he argued. “We have no money to rent a place to work and everything is read now to photograph them. Let us work there. We won’t hurt anything.”
“All right,” she had said finally. “You can work there tonight, but it you damage that rug of mine, out you all go.”
And so they had worked far into the night, trying to get as much done as possible. It was going to take several nights to complete the task.
“Hand me a wrench, Max,” said Joe. “This handle is loose.”
All of them were physically exhausted, so Max wasn’t as careful as he should have been. He turned to pick up the wrench from the table, his elbow struck a bottle of ink, and the bottle landed with a sickening thud on the beloved rug.
THE three brothers gasped in dismay as the pool of ink slowly but relentlessly spread on the rug. Suddenly they were galvanised into action. They grabbed blotters and pieces of paper to blow the flow of the ink. They stemmed the tide and mopped up the pool, but the blot was still there.
Max had become imbued with the conviction that characters could be drawn by artists and photographed in a series to make those caricatures move with human action across the screen. If he was right, as he had informed the brothers, there was a fortune in his idea. If he was wrong, all that they stood to lose was their labour.

And now disaster threatened to offset their months of labour. They were so tired that the inclination was to walk out of the room, go to bed, and take the consequences—which meant expulsion from the house and the abandonment of Max’s idea.
They slumped into chairs, so despondent that not one of them said anything for a few moments. Suddenly Max saw the way out. In whispers he convinced his weary brothers that too much was at stake to abandon the idea and sacrifice the time which they had spent upon it.
They unlocked the door to the dining-room and locked the door to the bedroom where Mrs. Fleischer lay asleep. Then, on tiptoe, they carried the furniture, the paraphernalia, and even the upright piano out of the living-room. They turned the rug around and then restored the furniture and the paraphernalia to their places. The tell-tale spot of ink was hidden under the piano.
That was twenty-five years ago. Since that time, the amazing combination of the Fleischer brothers has invented and developed virtually every piece of equipment which is essential in the making of animated cartoons. Dave directs the pictures and turns such problems over to Max. Max invents the equipment needed or adapts existing equipment to the problem. Joe then rebuilds it.
There are more than seventy-five patents, on everything ranging from drawing paper to rotoscopes, held by the Fleischers.
Today, twenty-five years after the ink bottle, Max and Dave have achieved their greatest success by producing, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, Gulliver’s Travels for Paramount.

Employed in the Fleischer plant are seven hundred artists. In addition to the full-length feature, the Fleischers are under contract to make thirty-eight one and two-reel animated cartoons for Paramount release.
Max Fleischer was born in Austria in 1885, but was taken to America by his parents when he was four or five years old. He studied art in the Art Students’ League and mechanics in the Mechanics’ and Tradesmen’s School in New York.
Even as a boy, Max was determined to become a cartoonist and obtained a job in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle art department as an errand boy. On the same paper was J. R. Bray, also a cartoonist. Bray and Max began talking about the possibilities of animating cartoons for the screen. They began their experiments separately.
The Fleischers were almost a year making a piece of film 150 feet long. Max took the film to a distributor and screened it. It lasted one minute. The distributor was interested and asked him if he could make one a week.
“No,” laughed Max. “That’s a physical impossibility.”
“How long did it take you to make this one,” the distributor asked.
When Fleischer told him that it took almost a year, the distributor told him that if he had something he could offer for sale once a week, or once a month, he would be interested.
So that work started over again and Fleischer finally worked out a method whereby he produced a hundred feet every fourth week. Then Bray became interested in the Fleischer process and the two brothers went into partnership with Bray. Eventually, Fleischers broke away from the Bray organisation and formed their own corporation, retaining the title “Out of the Inkwell.”
It is general believed that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first full length cartoon feature. This is not true. Max Fleischer produced two seven-reel features, virtually all done by hand drawings, many years ago, and both of them were very successful. Each of the pictures capitalised upon discussions which were in the public print at the time.

The first full length cartoon feature was titled Relativity. This was produced by Fleischer with Dr. Garrett P. Serviss, a science writer of the New York American, shortly after Dr. Albert Einstein announced his famous theory.
Fleischer’s second feature was Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and was produced with the co-operation of the American Museum of Natural History, at that time that William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow waged their famous battle in the Scopes trial in Tennessee.
Ever since the advent of sound, Fleischer has wanted to make a full length feature based on the famous Jonathan Swift satire, “Gulliver’s Travels.”
The picture adheres strictly to the line laid down by Swift. However, Swift wrote the story from the standpoint of Gulliver. Fleischer made the picture from the standpoint of the Lilliputians.
One of the most noteworthy things about the Fleischer organisation is the permanency of a job there. Many of the employees have worked for Fleischer for twenty years, at least twenty-five of them have been with him for twelve years, and there are more than forty that have been with him more than seven years.