She Saved Tom and Jerry

Joe Barbera’s book mentions that Tom and Jerry were saved from being one-shot characters because of a letter from Besa Short to MGM asking when more cat and mouse cartoons would be released. He told this story a number of times, including some years ago in a short interview with Jerry Beck.

Nobody today knows who Besa Short is. But in hunting around researching some other stuff, I found a feature article mentioning her. She certainly loved short films and promoted the crap out of them. I’m going to post the article because it’s an interesting footnote in the promotion of, and attitude toward, cartoons at the time. This is from ‘Every Week Magazine’, one of those syndicated weekend newspaper magazines that were popular at one time. The date is August 9, 1942.

Hollywood Hails Return of Shorts
By DEE LOWRANCE
HOLLYWOOD
The biggest news story in films since the war began is just now starting to leak out. Prepare for a shock—shorts are staging a comeback.
It’s been over 10 years since one- and two-reelers (with the exception of cartoons and newsreels) first took a back seat. Their forced retirement came at the depths of the Depression when movie men, desperate at the way audiences were staying away from theaters in droves, decided to hypo the box office. Taking a tip from the one-cent sales in drug stores, they hit on the idea of offering two films for the price of one.
The double feature was born. Triple, quadruple, quintuple features, all in one theater, appeared. “Bring a box lunch and stay all day,” advertised one movie house.
The competition became too tough. It soon dropped—two features were all any normal audience could take. Vaudeville acts fell by the wayside. Shorts were doomed.
Since then, no matter what happened—floods, drouth [sic], pestilence, or financial crashes, anything and everything to harass movie producers—all have been blamed on the double feature. Editorials have been penned, laws made, speeches ranted—but the double feature stayed put.
Shorts, the oldest film form, favorite son for so long, became the films’ stepchild. Short subjects producers were pushed into out-of-the-way parts of the studio, when they worked at all. Nary a line about then appeared in the papers—they were the Forgotten Men of Hollywood.
A FEW names did break through the great silence about shorts. There was Pete Smith, who started to kid serious subjects, giving his brief pictures a comedy smasheroo that put his name on the map. And long before Uncle Sam mixed into picture making at all, the Warner Brothers, with Gordon Hollingshead producing, began to make patriotic shorts in Technicolor to sell America to the Americans.
Newsreels, at the rate of two issues a week from five film companies, went along with every double-feature program and, hot on their heels, came the March of Time two-reel news coverage which rapidly forced itself into theater acceptance.
By and large, though, the double feature held a death grip on movie theaters. The return of shorts has been a long time coming. A straw in the wind was the rise of the news-reel theaters in the nation’s largest cities, with their added use of briefies. Super-duper length pictures like “Gone With the Wind,” which were too much in themselves to carry a B-picture, too, allowed a few shorts to be squeezed into a program.
Little by little, theater men have put out their own feelers. Wasn’t one really fine feature-length film, framed with excellent shorts, better than shoving two poor features down an audience’s throat? Some have tried, and the results have been on the whole most successful.
Down in Texas a real crusader, with a white banner lettered “Down With the Double Bill,” appeared. It might have seemed as if her name had ordained her crusade.
Miss Besa Short is responsible for all programs booked into 175 southwest movie houses. If you want to make her see red, hit the ceiling and lambaste the lot of you, just say “also selected short subjects” to her. That line is a battle cry to Besa Short. With the idea that dismissing shorts in those four words was entertainment murder, Besa Short started out some time ago on her campaign to make exhibitors, and through them the public, properly short-conscious.
Choosing her shorts with as much care as that given to full-length features, Besa Short booked them with an eye to balancing the programs evenly. A long comedy was surrounded by serious shorts; a heavy drama was relieved by bright featurettes.
Then she started a minor revolution in her part of the world. She went after publicity for shorts—newspaper notices, critical reviews. Next she saw that each theater had special lobby displays about the shorts they were playing; also advertised coming shorts in advance.
Naturally, Besa Short is a big name among Hollywood’s shorts producers, a heroine. Her work has been watched carefully by other theater bookers. The trend away from double features is beginning to gather momentum.
The war itself is having much to do with it. The defence shorts now being made at all Hollywood studios in co-operation with the United States government are being released all over the country. More are on their way. Made with the double-edged intention of entertaining while instructing the public, these shorts are playing a tremendously important role in keeping the public aware of all branches of the nation’s effort to halt Hitler and nip the Nips.
Experts on shorts are doing even more, which will not be seen by the public. Working with all branches of the service, they are making training films to be used to help whip our armed forces into shape.
The government-inspired shorts, made to entertain, too, will probably become the final blow against double features. For with each of them shown on a program, other shorts will be needed and the second, weaker features can be dropped. Few tears will be shed, for Hollywood and the film public alike are tiring of the two-for-the-price-of-one idea, especially as it often means two weak pictures instead of one good and an assortment of shorts.
With this in mind, let’s look at the present shorts picture. The production of shorts is divided between New York and Hollywood with the latter becoming more important all the time. Almost one-third of all cartoon shorts now being made are cartoons. Disney, with his Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, still holds the top spot in cartoons. Those that he is making for the government are blazing new trails in educational jungles. But, since Disney’s attention has been on feature-length cartoons and defense and training pictures, other cartoon producers have grabbed their chance to push ahead.
Right now Disney has been getting some stiff competition in comic cartoons from two particular talents. Leon Schlesinger has two series, making some 39 to 42 of them a year, that are giving Donald Duck a run for his money. These are his “Looney Tunes,” with that mad Bugs Bunny (did you see his “Any Bonds Today?” or “The Wabbit Who Came to Supper”?) and “Merrie Melodies” which often feature Porky the schoolboy piglet. The Tom and Jerry series at MGM, with that fearsome pair, the cat and mouse cavorting, also should make Disney watch out for his laurels.
Popeye the Sailor continues to have a fine, flourishing following among cartoon addicts and George Paal [sic], who takes puppets and makes pictures in the cartoon tradition, is striding along in a field all to himself. Two-reelers, shorts which run for up to 20 minutes, make up a third of the remaining shorts, with twice as many one-reelers being made. Outstanding in the two-reel class are the patriotic shorts mentioned before. Gordon Hollingshead, who has always produced them, worked with films overseas in the first World War. After the war he came to Hollywood where he got into film production first as assistant director on every film John Barrymore made. From there, he went higher in production.
While doing research for the Errol Flynn starrer, “Captain Blood,” Hollingshead got the idea for the first of the color patriotic two-reelers, which told the story of the way our national anthem was written. Since then these shorts of his have covered all aspects of American history, beautifully dramatized, superbly photographed. His latest had audiences cheering. Called “March On, America,” it summarizes the United States’ growth since the Pilgrims, bringing us right up to date in a stirring, heart-warming manner.
Another important branch of Hollingshead’s worth concerns a series of shorts designed to make the public better acquainted with various branches of the armed services. They have also been a great aid to swelling enlistment.
No story on shorts could be written without due credit to Pete Smith. His office bristles with medals and awards he has won for the excellence of his shorts and he has been elected by the other shorts producers as their spokesman. At a time when double features blanketed all shorts, word-of-mouth publicity boomed for this maker of unusual shorts, interlarded with high wit, amusing situations, fascinating subjects and a commentary spoken in his dry, arresting voice.
Perhaps one of the best proofs of the way his shorts are gobbled up is the fact that every other studio has, at one time or another, tried to copy them. But the real thing is marked by Pete’s own very gifted touch, probably because he is a one-man production company, writing, directing, producing each of his shorts with little if any help.
There is no end to the subjects covered in one and two-reelers. Sports, pie-in-the-eye comedies, musicals, travelogues, musicals, dances, all and many more appear. High on the honor role are several different stories that are made and released consistently and will give you an idea of the scope of shorts.
There is, for instance, the dramatic series—like “Crime Doesn’t Pay” and “Stranger Than Fiction:; the question-answering kind, topped by “Information Please” and “The Quiz Kids”; Robert Benchley’s self-acted monologues; old-time comics at work—“The Three Stooges,” Leon Erroll [sic], Edgar Kennedy, Buster Keaton, Charlie [sic] Chase and “Our Gang.”
For music lovers, all sorts of orchestras and bands are photographed in south while the dance made can have jitterbug or unusual dancing spectacles like the series now starring the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.
Now, more than ever, shorts are used as a proving ground for new talent. Until Dorothy Morris appeared in Pete Smith’s “What About Daddy?” no one paid much attention to her. Now she’s having a star build-up at MGM. Other stars who came through shorts are Deanna Durbin, Judy Garland, Robert Taylor, George Murphy, Ann Rutherford, Alexis Smith and countless others who met their first audiences in shorts.
Established stars, too, often work in shorts. And, as they continue to gain in popularity as they are now, bigger and bigger names will be seen in what was for so long Hollywood’s downtrodden stepchild.

Besa Short left Interstate Theatres in 1946 to work for MGM to handle short subjects promotion. She died in Dallas on August 19, 1974, age 79.