Friz on MGM and Tex

A number of the great Warner Bros. cartoon directors lived beyond the period where the only word in animation was “Disney” into a time of being honoured and interviewed about their cartoon careers.

Friz Freleng was one. He went on publicity tours and his thoughts were written in local newspaper feature columns.

There was a wonderful time, before the rise of the internet in the post-modem era, when fanzines flourished. My favourites were Mindrot/Animania and Animato!. The average fan didn’t have too much knowledge of theatrical animation history then, so every issue was, for me, a goldmine of information.

Happily, a number of the people who wrote for the publication 35 or so years ago are still with us, and still doing animation research.

With that brief introduction, let me pass along part of an interview published in Animato No. 18. It is from a chat between Jerry Beck and Friz Freleng on August 22, 1988. I hope I’m not violating any copyright by reproducing this portion, but some of what’s said may be news to some readers. The full magazine is available on-line at archive.org.

Jerry asked Friz a question about Chuck Jones, but it was never answered. Friz also doesn't mention, as he did in other interviews, his distaste at being assigned to direct The Captain and the Kids cartoons at Metro.

It's pretty well known now that Friz did not bring in Tex Avery for Meatless Flyday. Why Friz didn't correct Jerry on this, I don't know, but he went on to talk about another, unidentified cartoon.

You can see Friz wasn’t altogether enamoured at Tex’s style of humour.

You left Warner Bros. and took Hugh Harman's place at MGM for a while.

Fred Quimby tempted me to come over. He offered me a lot of money; for me at that time, it was a hell of a lot of money. I signed up in August, and my contract was up in October with Schlesinger. And Leon was madder than hell. He said, "You didn't give me a chance to compete before you signed up with him."
When I got there, Fred Quimby said to me, "Do anything you want to do. What are you going to do?" And I said, "I don't know. If I had something in mind, I would be making it over at Schlesinger's." He said, "You're right. Well, you can do whatever you feel is right."
I jumped from $250.00 a week to $375.00 at MGM. I thought it was going to be the same as over at Warner's: everybody cooperating with each other, nobody undermining the other guy. If they did [at Warner's], I wasn't conscious of it. I think Leon depended on me, and no one dared try to undermine me.
So when I got over to MGM, there was conspiracy right away. Joe Barbera, Dan Gordon, George Gordon, all them were working trying to put the New York people in front of the California people. And then there was real turmoil, because everyone was clamoring for position. I was so glad to get out of that place.

Did you last a year at MGM?

I was there about a year and a half [until April 1939]. Then one day I came home so disgusted with the whole thing I told my wife, "You know what? I'm going to swallow my pride, and call Schlesinger and see if I can get my job back."
And you know, that very evening, the phone rang. It was Henry Binder [Schlesinger's assistant]. I laughed, because nobody ever called me before. He was laughing, and I was laughing. He says, "I hear you're unhappy over there." So they must have got it through the grapevine.
So to make a long story short, I went over and talked to Leon, and said, "I don't want any more money. I'll take the money that I had before. I just want to get out of there." And he was very happy to get me back, because he tried two or three other guys there. A fellow by the name of Norm McCabe, and Ben Hardaway... And they were all making cartoons that just didn't have it. The cartoons never seemed to find the path, they kind of wandered about. There was no guide there. With Leon, it was like a ship without a captain. Everyone was going in different directions, and Leon just didn't seem to be able to handle that.
So I came back, and Tex started making better cartoons, and we all started imitating each other. We finally found a path.

There was that gag sensibility you got around 1940.

We finally found a direction. Clampett was very good at it.

What were your feelings about Tex Avery and Bob Clampett back then, and Chuck Jones even? What was your reaction to them as people?

I was so engrossed in what I was doing I didn't even care what the other guys were doing. You were always trying to do better than they were. Unconsciously, there was competition, naturally. We wanted to make the best pictures possible.
I think we all influenced each other. Without bragging, like where one guy thinks he created this and that. I don't think anybody created anything himself.
I think they were all little pieces of somebody else. I’d see something that Clampett did and I liked. I did it maybe in a little different way than he did. I'd see something that Tex Avery did, that Disney did... You don't create these things all yourself. They build from other people.
It was a creative thing. The guy who had the greatest imagination in the whole business was Walt himself. When I saw Snow White, it was an entirely different concept than anyone had ever thought of, ever. The concept of animation, even. Nobody animated like that; nobody drew characters like that; nobody put personality like that into the characters. It came from him.
I'm sure it influenced our thinking, and everybody's thinking in animation. They're still trying to imitate that.

Let me ask you some little specific questions. What happened when Tex Avery left Warner Brothers? Was it over them cutting a gag in one of his Bugs Bunnys? Do you know anything about that?

I don't think so. I think Bobby [Clampett] and Tex were always seeking something else. Because nobody really knew what the future was, and everybody wanted to be his own producer. But they didn't know enough about making deals, and they never really got anything out of it.
I think it was Speaking of Animals that Tex was working on before. I think in his book [Tex Avery: King of Cartoons, by Joe Adamson] he mentions that he proposed it to Leon, and Leon turned it down. I never knew what was going on, really.
The reason he went over to MGM was when I came back he knew there was a spot open. And when he asked me about it I said I left there because the politics were terrible. But MGM was the height of motion picture studios, and I said, "Tex, they'd love to have you there." I figured I'd warned him enough. He said, "You think so?" I said, "I know they'd be tickled to death to have someone like you."
Boom! He was over there, and he got the job. I didn't think he was going to go over there, because I told him about the problems I had. But I figured he must have figured, "Hell, that won't happen to me."
It happened to him. When he got over to MGM he was a very unhappy man, because Bill and Joe took over. He was second banana, no matter what he did. He tried desperately. I look at his cartoons and see elements of desperation.
He was afraid to do subtle things. Tom and Jerry had that. They had little personalities, and subtleties, and things like that. Of course they had the broad gags – they were stealing part of Tex's stuff, the broad stuff.

There was a cartoon about two or three years later, that you made about a spider, called Meatless Flyday.

Oh, it was terrible.

Well, I like that cartoon. And you used Tex's voice as the spider – did you say come over and do this for me, or something?

Yeah. I also had him do a character where he was supposed to sing in rhythm, and he just couldn't get the rhythm. I remember we put him in one of these booths you record in, and shook the booth, and said "Just sing to that rhythm." But he couldn't do it. He just never had a sense of rhythm.
He was a fun guy to work with. Everybody liked Tex, but Tex was so insecure. I felt about his cartoons that he overdid them because he was so insecure about them. He couldn't do a subtle cartoon. If he did something, it had to be twice as strong as anybody else, because he was insecure about what he was doing.
It seemed like he never came up with a strong personality after he left Warner's. Tex was so anxious to please he was overdoing everything. He should have come up with characters like Bugs Bunny, things like that...
But I think he created a kind of contemporary art with that desperation, when you look back. His stuff was nothing I admired.

What's great is that your stuff and Tex's stuff is different. It's different, and yet they're both funny, and they both use the cartoon medium to its potential.

Well, you put your own personality in. Tex was a very introverted man. I think he had real family problems. You didn't know Tex; I never knew him outside of his outer skin.

A lot of thanks should be given to people like Jerry and so many others who interviewed people in animation now long gone and laid the foundation stones of animation research. I appreciate them, anyway.