Rocket-bye Baby Exteriors

Ernie Nordli worked on several cartoons for Chuck Jones at Warner Bros. when the cartoon studio re-opened after being closed in the second half in 1953. Jones liked stylised backgrounds in the early ‘40s and he started going for them again in the early ‘50s with Maurice Noble as his layout man.

One of the cartoons Nordli laid out is a one-shot called ‘Rocket-bye Baby’ (copyright 1956). Here are a few of the settings he designed and handed off to Phil De Guard to construct.








It appears this is the third-last Warners cartoons Nordli worked on. It has Production number 1395. His final cartoon was number 1399. Noble was back to do layouts on number 1400 (“Deduce, You Say”). He also came up with designs for number 1397 but Noble tossed them out and started over. The cartoon was “What’s Opera, Doc?”.

Ban Rochester Van Jones

Everyone loved Rochester on the Jack Benny show. Almost everyone.

We don’t know if Lloyd Binford actually disliked Eddie Anderson. But I strongly suspect he’d certainly want Anderson to, as some odiously put it back then, “know his place.”

In looking for stories about Rochester and the Benny show, I stumbled upon this column from the Scripps-Howard News Service that appeared on editorial pages beginning November 14, 1950. That was almost four score and seven years to the day that President Abe Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address.

Is TV a Modern Abe Lincoln in Dixie?
By ROBERT C. RUARK
MEMPHIS.—Mr. Lloyd T. Binford, the bull censor of Memphis, is confronted with a new and horrifying medium to test his mettle, and may wind up as the most frustrated censor in the land.
Television has come to Memphis, thereby posing quite a problem for Mr. Binford, who has long fought a valiant battle against anything in the entertainment business which might show the Negro in the light of equality.
When he banned a film called “Imitation of Life,” he said it illustrated “one of most disgusting cases of racial equality I have ever seen.” He also slew a comedy called “Curley” because, he said, it showed equality between children of different races.
Mr. Binford has a long, proud record in the banning business. He cut an oldie called “King of Kings,” a Biblical show. He banned “Lost Boundaries" while approving “Pinky,” a story of a Negro girl who was light enough to pass for white, but decided not to.
He also banned a road show version of “Annie Get Your Gun,” because “Negroes sing, and dance on equal terms with white performers.” He killed “Duel in the Sun,” one of the dullest hoss-operas ever compounded and in this instant did the town a favor.
But in the case of television, Mr. Binford is undecided. He tells me he has never seen a television show which is just as well for his heart because all sorts of horrifying examples of racial' equality are in daily evidence.
Mr. Arthur Godfrey, who get into more Southern homes than the South’s entire population of meter readers, steadily employs a mixed quartet called “The Mariners.” Horrors of horrors, the Mariners are composed of two white, two black, and they sing on equal term with Mr. Godfrey and his other white associates.
* * *
Then there is the awful example of Jack Benny and Rochester. Rochester is declaredly a Negro and often winds up as the sly superior of his boss, Mr. Benny. He is sarcastic with Mr. Benny, and taunts him all the time, and makes cracks behind his back. This would be unsettling to Mr. Binford, I am sure.
Then you got Ethel Waters, Negro actress, playing a recent TV show called “Beulah”; and, of course, most of the talent variety shows feature Negro entertainers. Recently, on a Cedric Adams talent show, a little Negro boy who won hands down over flock of white competition.
We have also the reissuing of the old movies for the Video screen possibly many of the very movie banned by Mr. Binford. The equalizing effect on Memphis' children must be terrifying indeed, since note that the old “Our Gang” comedies are being replayed for TV—over, of all things, Howdy Doody, a children’s program. If I remember rightly, the most appealing member of the gang was Farina, a little Negro girl with a runny nose.
* * *
Mr. Binford tells me he does not believe that he can censor television so long as people see it a home, and is also somewhat dubious about the possibility of banning it in public places.
“I will cross that bridge when I come to it,” Mr. Binford says. "But I imagine some sort of legal structure could be set up to protect the public, if this becomes necessary.”
Television is red hot in the South, and on its screen, at least, equality is rampant. It would be odd indeed if the coaxial cable eventually takes up where Abe Lincoln left off, despite the valiant effort of Mr. Binford in other fields of artistic endeavor.

Ruark, for what it’s worth, was from North Carolina. Lest anyone think from the column above that he was a raving small-l liberal, a month earlier he penned a snide and smug piece about Paul Robeson not winning the Nobel Peace Prize, succumbing to the red-baiting of the day.

As for Mr. Binford, his muzzling mantra became much quieter soon after this story. He spent his last few years in arthritic pain and died in 1956. Remarkably, he was a member of several service clubs and fraternal orders which champion equality amongst humanity. You can read about him at this site.

Eddie Anderson’s Rochester is still loved by countless fans of TV and old radio shows. No one can ban that.

Lew Who?

Fans of old-time cartoons know who Warren Foster, Mike Maltese and Tedd Pierce are. They came up with some of the funniest cartoons ever made.

They’re the writers that people associate most with the Warner Bros. studio. There were others, of course, if a fan was pressed to name them. Bill Scott and Lloyd Turner went on to bigger fame with Jay Ward and sitcoms respectively. Bugs Hardaway’s name was tagged on to a certain rabbit. But the name of one writer probably doesn’t come immediately to mind.

Lew Landsman received one lonely screen credit. He wrote “Porky at the Crocadero,” released in 1938.

That begs the question—why? Why only one? Was that his only cartoon? What happened to him? And who is Lew Landsman anyway?

I’m afraid most of those questions may never be answered. Too much time has passed. But a little jaunt around the internet has produced a bit of information about him, though hardly the full story.

Landsman could be best described as a parody artist. He sold comic drawings to magazines but then took it a little further. His work was so good he had a number of showings in the 1940s and ‘50s in the Los Angeles area. One close to April Fool’s Day in 1948 attracted a lot of media coverage. It displayed his parody impressions of movie and radio artists. He drew Ed Gardner, Archie of “Duffy’s Tavern,” as a phone with a hat answering itself (the radio show always opened with Archie answering the phone). “What happens on my canvas shouldn’t happen to Picasso. It never did, either,” he joked to the Los Angeles Times.

Here’s the United Press story about the exhibit.

Screwball Artist Prepares New Show Ribbing Filmites
By ALINE MOSBY
HOLLYWOOD, Mar. 31—(UP) — Folks who dilate their nostrils when a “modern” artist changed a carrot to a glob of paint don’t know the half of it. Wait’ll they see what a guy here is doing to “portraits” of movie stars!
This character is busy at home daubing oil on canvas. He chuckles fiendishly. He says his portraits will cause numerous crises in Hollywood.
In a couple of months, Artist Lew Landsman will hang his pictures in the ultra-modern Hall of Art in Beverly Hills. Then he’ll sit back to await the repercussions.
* * *
THE MOVIE people will rush over figuring he’s painted their likenesses from glammer photos. Most of the stars will snicker, he hopes. Some might not.
Lana Turner, for instance, will nearly pop her big, blue eyes out at the picture we saw that Landsman painted of her. It’s a candle brightly burning at both ends.
The painting of George Raft we could tell without the label. It shows a guy with big feet and a pin-striped suit His head consists of a huge hand which is flipping a coin. That trick made Raft famous in “Scarface.”
Garry Moore turned out to be a big question mark with crew-cut topknot standing before a microphone But take a peek at the painting of Frank Sinatra. He’s just a microphone, with bow tie and curly hair.
* * *
RAY MILLAND wishes people would forget that bottle-on-the chandelier stuff from “The Lost Week-End.” It’s doubtful they will now. Artist Landsman painted Ray as a big eye peering over the edge of a ceiling fixture.
It’s easy to guess which picture is Harpo Marx. A fuzzy-topped character with a huge harp for lips and teeth. Humphrey Bogart’s is even nuttier. He’s just a canvas with four bullet holes in it.
This won't be the first time Lew has stuck a wacky finger in art and stirred rapidly. He has some other paintings hung in the Hall of Art now that turned Hollywood on its ear.
* * *
LEW USED TO BE a magazine cartoonist with a subtle sense of humor. Then an artist friend suggested he turn real artist because everybody else was. Landsman daubed up a stack of canvasses and took ‘em to the Hall of Art.
This institution, being brave and new, gave him an exhibition. They called it “Landsmania.” The place drew record-cracking crowds. The customers roared. Even the art critics snickered.
“The Spike Jones of Art;” “The Poor Man’s Dali,” they called him. One horrified writer, tho, said Landsman’s paintings “shouldn't happen to a critic. They're like those little guys in the corners of a Smokey Stover comic strip only bigger."

Lewis Landsman was born in New York City on November 19, 1901; his parents were Hungarian. He was still living there in 1930, and married to his wife Elsa, who was Hungarian as well. We first find him in Los Angeles in the 1936 City Directory. The 1939 directory (which mentions both of them with information likely compiled the previous year) lists his occupation as “artist,” but the 1942 edition reveals he is a salesman for the Kater Engraving Company, a block from Jimmy Durante’s home. Unfortunately, he can’t be found in the 1940 U.S. Census. Perhaps not coincidentally, Warners animator Virgil Ross is in the census at Landsman’s address in the 1939 Los Angeles phone book. It’s the only other connection I’ve found between him and the studio. How he got hired and why he left, I don’t know.

There’s little else I’ve been able to find about him. He illustrated a parody version of the Sears catalogue, published in Los Angeles in 1962. And don’t believe any of those make-up-history sites on the internet that claim Landsman wrote a “Scrappy’s Trip to Mars” (1938) for Columbia. The U.S. Government Copyright Catalogue states the writer was Allen Rose.

The self-proclaimed “Poor Man’s Dali” died in Los Angeles on April 4, 1977.

Late note:To add to the confusion, a Louis Landsman, listed as "painter, picture studio" can be found in the 1940 Census at 5722 Harold Way, Los Angeles. However and his wife Rose are Russian, and he was born in 1888 or 1889. Both Landsmans have listings in the 1939 Directory.

False Vases Backgrounds

Poor Felix. Goes to all the trouble of replacing his wife’s vase (which breaks after it falls while dancing to his piano playing) only to have a mouse break it and Mrs. Cat taking it out on him. That’s the plot of “False Vases” (1929).

Since it’s a Chinese vase, Felix goes to a Chinese store which doesn’t have a vase in his price range. So he convinces a dog to dig through the world clean through to China and steals a vase.

Silent film backgrounds aren’t known for their elaboration, but the simple drawings in this cartoon (which are shaded so they don’t completely look like line drawings) work well and set an appropriate mood. I especially like the elaborate tree.










It seems odd to have piano playing in the plot of a silent cartoon, but there would have been musical accompaniment in the theatre. As pictures on the bill with Felix were advertised as “all-talking musical drama” or “talking comedy,” the soon-to-be-obsolete organ or piano player was probably happy to have something to do.

Fraidy Cat

“The more pantomime, the better” seems to be the operative slogan at the MGM cartoon studio until Tex Avery got there, when it changed to “the more gags, the better.”

Disney cartoons had “personality” ever since Norm Ferguson had Pluto stop and take up time going through easily recognisable actions and reactions. MGM did the same thing. “Fraidy Cat” (1942) is a good example. The bulk of the cartoon involves Jerry putting a sheet over a vacuum cleaner to make Tom think it’s a ghost. One scene has Jerry turning the vacuum switch on and off. Then he laughs. Then he looks at Tom. Then he plays with the switch some more. Then he points. Then he laughs again. Then he plays with the switch some more. Then he laughs again. Then he plays with the switch again. Then he slows down and realises he saw Tom. Then he looks back. Then he looks at the audience. Then—well, you get the basic idea. Lots of pantomime. Lots of personality. But not a whole lot of action.

The same sort of thing happens in another part of the cartoon where Tom is running away from the vacuum cleaner which, for reasons of comedy only, is powerful enough to suck up rugs, telephones, books, pots and the nine lives out of a cat. Tom reacts over and over in different ways.

Here’s one of a bunch of drawings of Tom running in place. The multiple eyes and paws are fun.



He grows extra eyes as his head moves up.



There are some great drawings in this sequence. Tom’s eyes grow wide. The top of his head balloons. Tom’s eyes grow wide in a different way. The head changes shape in a different way. Finally, we come up with three wild consecutive drawings below. Great brush-work.





So Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera justifies the stand-there-and-emote routines of Jerry with frantic drawings of Tom which get lost because they go by so quickly.

There are no animation credits here but just about anything with huge eyes and huge pupils in an MGM cartoon can be pretty safely pinned on Irv Spence.

Don't Call Her Mrs. Camel

It’s feast or famine in the freelance world, and no one learned that better than actress Sara Berner. By 1940, she had been appearing on radio and in cartoons but the Census report for that year shows she made only $1000 from all her jobs in 1939 and hadn’t worked in ten weeks when the census-taker came around. (She did a short tour in a stage show, “Temptations of 1939” and had one shot in a summer replacement show called “Man About Hollywood” among her work that year).

But things picked up. We’ve talked about her career on the blog before, but I’ve saved a couple of newspaper clippings. First comes this column from the National Enterprise Association, March 16, 1944.

IN HOLLYWOOD
Erskine Johnson
NEA Staff Correspondent
The girl with the most photographed voice in America could bite through a nail every time she thinks of it. Why, it was awful. For years she wanted to meet a big studio executive. Then the casting office made a date for her to meet Buddy de Sylva, the big man at Paramount who could make you a star overnight. Her heart started thumping as a casting director took her to de Sylva's office,
“Mr. de Sylva,” said the casting director, “I’d like you to meet Mrs. Camel.”
“Oh-o-o-o-o-o, it was terrible,” Sara Berner said. “I talked to de Sylva for 20 minutes. But everybody called me Mrs. Camel. It was Mrs. Camel this and Mrs. Camel that. Nobody even mentioned my name. Nobody called me Sara Berner. Just Mrs. Camel. Even today when I see Mr. de Sylva on the lot he says, ‘Hello, Mrs. Camel.’ It’s heart-breaking.”
De Sylva, you see, had to approve Sara’s voice as Mrs. Camel for that gag sequence in “The Road to Morocco,” which is why the casting director took Sara to his office.
A Thousand Voices
Her name probably doesn't mean much to you, either. But you’re familiar with her voice in a thousand forms on screen and radio. In fact, she has the most famous voice in Hollywood. She’s the voice of Red Hot Riding Hood in those M-G-M cartoons, the voice of Little Jasper in George Pal’s Puppetoons. She’s Josephine of the Amos and Andy show, Gladys Zybisco of the Jack Benny show.
Being just a voice in a town where faces are so important is paving Sara big dividends.
“I can get even with a lot of people,” Sara chuckled. For instance, those “Speaking of Animals” shorts in which the animals speak. “If I don’t like a girl because she’s catty or something. I just copy her voice for a cat or skunk.”
On The Way Up
Like a lot of other young ladies who are attractive—Sara is very much so—and talented, she wanted to be a great actress when she left home in Tulsa, Okla., for New York. But she got only as far as Philadelphia, where she sold hats in a department store. Then she got an acting job on a radio station, later joined a stage unit and was playing the Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles when Hollywood discovered her.
Not long ago Sara received a call from a studio for a role in a picture. “I was thrilled,” she said. “At long last I was to appear in a picture. To have my face on the screen. You don’t know what that means to a voice. Well, the makeup man spent over an hour fixing my hair and putting on my makeup. But all they shot was the back of my head. I was a long distance telephone operator!”
When George Pal first started to make the Little Jasper films they hired a little Negro boy for the voice. By the time they got though, the boy had grown a head taller and his voice was different.
They sent for Sara Berner in a hurry.

And the United Press put this in papers starting December 26, 1944. The reference to Betty Boop is confusing; the Boop cartoons were done on the East Coast and the series had ceased several years before this story was written.

Versatile Sara: Camel One Day, Hippo the Next
By HAZEL HARTZOG
Hollywood, Calif.—(U.P.)—Moviegoers have never seen her face, but just about every one of them has heard Sara Berner’s voice at one time or other. Maybe it was a turtle doing the talking, or a chipmunk, camel or hippo or other animals—but the voice was always Sara’s.
Sara provides vocal chords for most of Hollywood’s familiar cartoon characters. She’s spoken for Red Hot Riding Hood, Little Jasper, Betty Boop and Mother Goose.
And she has verbally caricatured almost every animal known, including the turtle in “The Tortoise and the Hare,” the hippo, elephant and camel in “Speaking of Animals, and the baby panda in the Andy Panda series.
Voice Behind Voice
Currently, Sara is the voice of Jerry Mouse, Gene Kelly’s dancing partner in the cartoon fantasy which high lights “Anchors Aweigh.”
“I’ve been putting words in animals’ mouths for eight years,” the pint sized brunet said.
One of her performances helped win an academy award—that was “Mother Goose Goes Hollywood,” a Disney picture in which she vocally imitated top feminine stars from Shirley Temple to the late Edna Mae Oliver. This winner also spotlighted another Berner talent, that of impersonations.
Has 22 Characterizations
Sara started doing voices for screen animals after a cartoon producer nabbed her from a vaudeville act where she was impersonating Katharine Hepburn. Her first job was being the voice of a baby panda.
From her first cartoon stint, Sara concentrated on animated animals’ voices. She now has 22 characterizations ranging from the thin chirp of a quail to the guttural groan of a crocodile.
Her attorney husband confesses he never knows whose voice will answer the telephone when he calls home.
“It might be Mae West or Bugs Bunny at first,” he said, “but in the end it always turns out to be Sara.”

Incidentally, the man who played Bugs Bunny, Mel Blanc, uniquely listed his occupation in the 1940 Census as “dialectician.” The word certainly fit Sara Berner, and she was one of the best.

Ed Looks at Camera

If there’s one cartoon character who gave reaction looks to the camera more than Wile E. Coyote, it had to be Ed Jones the Typical American Sportsman in Tex Avery’s “Field and Scream.” A bunch of gags end with him just staring at the camera.



Other fishermen zoom into his secluded early morning fishing spot.



Fish ask Ed where the kid was that was reeling in their brothers and sisters before Ed got there.



A fish jumps out of the lake, attracted by the lures on Ed’s hat, and swallows Ed’s head.



Ed tries the middle of the lake. The other fishermen zoom in when he catches something.



Ducks are attracted to the Marilyn-esque decoys of Ed’s and fly away with them.



Ed’s elephant gun develops an elephant’s trunk and stuffs Ed’s mouth full of grass.



What would an Avery cartoon be without a mother-in-law gag? Ed dresses his as a deer. She’s shot off frame and brought on before being hauled away. Even she stares at the camera.



About the only time Ed doesn’t stare at the camera is at the end. That’s because a deer has shot him and is driving away with him in Ed’s car.

Ed was designed by (and likely named for) Ed Benedict. Avery was into stylised designs by the time he made this cartoon (Ed has a zig-zag of hair on his thumb). The short was copyright 1953 but wasn’t released until 1955, when Avery’s career at MGM was as dead as Sportsman Ed. The graphics may be modern but some of the gags are old (a boat’s “horsepower” gag is what you might expect).

Grant Simmons, Walt Clinton and Mike Lah were the animators; Simmons and Lah had their own companies by the time the cartoon hit theatres. Johnny Johnsen did the backgrounds.

Confusions of a Nutzy Smear

It’s really tough judging how good of a director at Warner Bros. Norm McCabe could have become. “Daffy’s Southern Exposure” is a funny cartoon by any standards but, more often than not, McCabe got saddled with stories that were heavy on war-time references or outright propaganda and not much else.

“Confusions of a Nutzy Spy” (copyright January 30, 1943) could have been a pretty good cartoon but it suffers because of the characters. Porky’s a clueless dope. His dog is a sneezing dope. The bad guy has a goofy German accent which hardly makes him threatening. Don Christensen gives us more of a situation than gags (other than bad puns in the opening). Oh, well, we beat the Nutzy in the end and that’s the only thing that mattered to the producers and distributors.

While Chuck Jones and Frank Tashlin get praise for experimentation, they weren’t the only Warners directors using stylised backgrounds and odd camera angles. McCabe has them here, too, thanks to layout man Dave Hilberman. And some of the animation’s pretty good, despite the fact McCabe wasn’t working with A-list animators.

Here’s a great take when the Nutzy realises the bomb-in-a-briefcase he threw away has been retrieved by Porky’s dopey dog. First, the realisation.



Then the anticipation.






Now, the big take.




McCabe engages in some smears as the Nutzy juggles the briefcase around before throwing it away.






Izzy Ellis gets credit for the animation. Cal Dalton was in the unit as well but I couldn’t tell you who else (Jack Carey?) was there.

Irving Fein

Who came up with the phrase “Quick as a flashlight”?

If you said Samuel Goldwyn, you’d be wrong. The answer is Samuel Goldwyn’s assistant publicity man in the 1940s, Irving Fein. Fein admits he made up Goldwynisms because it would get Goldwyn’s name into the papers, not that Goldwyn really needed much help.

Fein’s best-known employers didn’t help getting publicity, either. They were Jack Benny and George Burns. When each of them died, Fein was the one who gave the confirmation to the media.

Fein died last Friday morning at the age of 101.

Some super-agents don’t mind being in the spotlight themselves. Here’s an interview with Irving Fein in the Wisconsin State Journal, November 3, 1963. You’ll notice how Fein’s still in there punching for his client; he turns it from an interview about Irving Fein into an interview about Jack Benny. But we learn about Fein, too, though it doesn’t mention he was hired by CBS in March 1950 to run a west coast promotion bureau and then put in charge of radio publicity on the coast in June 1952—all while still employed by Jack’s company.

A ‘Beatnik’ of the 1920s Comes Home
By ELIZABETH GOULD
(State Journal Staff Writer)
“Guinea pigs,” the campus called them irreverently.
“They were the beatniks of their era,” Irving Fein, who was of them, says with a twinkle.
They were the students of Dr. Alexander Meiklejohn’s famous experimental college which existed on the University of Wisconsin campus from 1926 to 1932. One hundred twenty male students— all of them intellectually superior, most of them determined individualists—lived and worked together in their own dormitory, studying Greek and Roman civilization the first year, American society the second, before they were absorbed into the university proper.
Set apart from the rest of the school as they were, they were regarded by many of their contemporaries as wild-eyed eccentrics.
Heads J and M Productions
There is nothing of the eccentric about Fein today. Lean and casually well-groomed, with a hearty laugh, an easy manner and a tolerant twinkle in his eye, he is the executive producer of the Jack Benny program and the president of J and M (for Jack and Mary) Productions. He now lives in Beverly Hills, Calif.
He came back to Madison last week for the first time since 1939 to visit his daughter Patricia who entered the University as a freshman this fall and is living in one of the new private dorms.
“It’s like the Beverly Hilton,” her father says, shaking his head. “Those kids don’t need all that luxury.”
His Room Shrinks
He himself paid a nostalgic visit to Adams hall to look at his old room there.
“I remembered it as about twice as large as it is,” he grinned. “But the furniture’s the same—same metal desk, same kind of bed.
“My friends advised me not to come back. You know Thomas Wolfe and ‘You Can’t Go Home Again.’ But in spite of all the changes around here, a lot of it looks the same. And it still looks like a great school to me. It is a great school—one of the greatest in the county. [sic] I’m glad I sent my daughter here.”
Fein, whose family home was in New York, went back there after leaving the university and got a job with Warner Bros, doing advertising and publicity. After being transferred to California, he worked for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and later for Columbia Pictures.
In 1947 he and Jack Benny founded a company which was sold to the Columbia Broadcasting System, and Fein became vice president of CBS in New York, in charge of advertising and promotion [in 1955].
The J and M Production Co. came into existence in 1956 and, besides the Benny show, has produced “Checkmate,” the Marge and Gower Champion show, the Gisele MacKenzie show, and Wayne and Shuster’s “Holiday Lodge.”
The famous comedian who has built much of the humor of his programs around jokes about his own penuriousness, emerges as a warm, generous, and intensely loyal person, as Fein talks of him.
“A lot of people—and not just in the entertainment world—once they’ve made money, are inclined to forget their old friends. But not Jack. And a lot of stars, at the end of the season, will fire the whole crew of writers and start fresh next year. Not Benny. Two of his writers have been with him for 20 years, and the other two for 14 or 15.
They’re still the new writers.
Raised $3½ Million
“And did you know he’s raised almost 3 ½ million dollars for charity as soloist with the big symphonies—most of it for their pension funds? He loves doing it, Of course, he’s no Heifetz, but he’s a pretty able musician, for all his clowning, and when Isaac Stern wants to raise some money, he calls on Jack. They charge $100 a ticket, and that includes an invitation to a party for Jack afterward, so everyone has a chance to meet him.”
Hartford, Conn., Fein said, was raising money for a new music school and was offered a $400,000 contribution by the president of the Fuller Brush Co., on condition that the city could match that amount. A single concert, with Benny as soloist, raised $438,000 in one night.
Concert in Milwaukee
Fein left Madison Tuesday to join Benny in in Pittsburgh, where he was to play a concert this
week. Then come concerts in Minneapolis and Milwaukee, which will be the end of the concert appearances with the big city symphonies, although there are at least 500 requests from smaller communities.
“We’ll do the Milwaukee concert Nov. 10,” Fein said, “and we'll be out late at the party afterward, then up at 6:30 to catch a plane for Hollywood, and we’ll rehearse that afternoon for a show that’s on the next week. That Benny’s remarkable. He’ll be XX in February, but he acts and work like a 39-year-old fellow.
A sparkle came into the Fein eyes, as he thought of that next Sunday date in Milwaukee.
“Makes it kind of convenient,” he laughed. “With Homecoming Nov. 9 (Saturday) in Madison.”
After all, a man who has a daughter here at one of the greatest schools in the country should get back to visit when he can. Especially since he’s proved to his own satisfaction that you can go home again.

Of Jack’s wife, Mary Livingstone, Fein told the Archive of American Television: “she was a nice lady.” The admiration wasn’t mutual. Livingstone and her brother Hickey Marks were livid to learn a few weeks after signing a deal to write Jack’s biography that Fein had already done the same thing. They refused to mention Fein in their book, despite the fact he had been Jack’s personal manager for almost three decades and began working for him in 1947. And the actor who said “Yeeeeeeees?” on Jack’s show said “No” when it came liking Fein. Frank Nelson felt Fein wasn’t quite honest in his version of the Benny biography and accused the J & M boss of shaving his paycheque to save money.

However, you can hear Fein’s thoughts for yourself. The aforementioned Academy interview can be found HERE. One click and you’re there as quick as a flashlight.

Random M-G-M Cartoon Clippings

The Tom and Jerry series at MGM couldn’t have been more successful. And it had a far-reaching effect. If directors Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera had flopped with the cat and mouse, do you think they’d have built up enough capital and fame to open their own studio in 1957 and set the course for made-for-TV animation?

Hanna and Barbera never got on-screen credit for the first short in the series in 1940, but that year, an Associated Press reporter ferreted out the information that they, and not Rudy Ising (credited on screen) were responsible. It’s intriguing to speculate who leaked the info to the wire service. Producer Fred Quimby’s re-hiring of Ising (and Hugh Harman) in October 1938 after MGM dumped the Harman-Ising studio the year before must have been uncomfortable at best. No doubt, Quimby would be quite happy to promote someone else over Ising, especially if he could imply that he discovered the Oscar-winning directors.

That’s more or less what he did in this AP column dated June 2, 1944.

Hollywood
‘Oscar’ Goes To Author Of Cartoon
By FRED QUIMBY
(The producer of the Academy Award Winning Cartoon, “Yankee Doodle Mouse” writes today for Robbin Coons. This is the fifth in a series by award winners.)
HOLLYWOOD — Like Jennifer Jones and Paul Lukas, there were two other Hollywood stars who won an Academy Award this year. But little was said about them. Withal, each mail brings requests for their photos. They’re known from Teheran to Terre Haute — from Paraguay to Podunk.
>Success is theirs yet these stars work for nothing. They are never given a vacation — they never complain. Actually, they don’t even know the meaning of the word “temperament.” Neither are they ever bedecked in sable or ermine, nor do they attend the swank night clubs, albeit they were born in a bottle!
* * *
Yes, they emerged from an ink bottle, Feb. 10, 1940. Though christened “Tom Cat” and “Jerry Mouse” they are more familiarly known to millions of fans as just “Tom and Jerry.” Their introduction to the world was in the cartoon “Puss Gets the Boot.” Men, women and children laughed as the brash, bullying Tom tortured the meek mite, Jerry, through the early stages of the film, but the rascally rodent managed to master the situation before the end.
Were they gifted with vision, Tom and Jerry would see their prototypes in the men who direct them—Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera. As is customary in cartoon production, humans first enact the roles of their pen-and-ink creations, thus aiding the animators who draw the animal characters. Hanna is the smirky, blustering Tom Cat. He stands before a mirror and muggs to his heart’s content. Barbara is the Jerry Mouse. With exaggerated facial contortions, he is submissive to Tom's harrangues—while the story is in preparation.
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In reality, neither Hanna nor Barbera is an exhibitionist. Rather would you regard them as the type to inherit the earth, were you to meet them socially. The boys joined my cartoon staff in 1937 as story and layout men. Their ability was soon discernible and promotion to the directorial ranks followed.
We were all very proud of Tom and Jerry for the award—the first ever won in Academy competition with Walt Disney. Could they have made an acceptance speech, I’m sure they would have said, with typical Hanna-Barbera modesty, “Thanks, folks. It’s a great honor. I guess we were just lucky.”

Hanna and Barbera might have been modest, but Fred C. wasn’t. The way some newspaper stories read, you’d swear Quimby himself was at a light board crafting all those funny scenes. There was never a mention of guys like Irv Spence or Ray Patterson. Quimby loved leaving the impression he was a creative force. One 1957 review of “Invitation to the Dance,” the Gene Kelly experimental film that combined animation and live action, wrote “Kelly dances a nimble series with cartoon characters executed beautifully by Fred Quimby, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera.” The words “Mike Lah” were nowhere to be found. Lah was the one apparently responsible for the serpent dance.

Quimby is not only creative but happy-go-lucky in this syndicated news story of July 7. 1947. By all accounts, neither term could be applied to him in real life.

Pair of Film Stars Win Academy Award But it Means No Raise in Pay for Them Because They Are Cartoon Characters
By VICTOR GUNSON
Central Press Correspondent
HOLLYWOOD — Not every Academy award winning star gets fame and fortune—and an oversized swimming pool.
You get a day by day account of the doings of the Ingrid Bergmans, the Greer Garsons, the Ginger Rogers, the Spencer Tracys and the Jimmy Cagneys.
But what about Tom and Jerry?
They are the heroes of an animated cartoon which won an Academy award for their bosses. Besides that, like Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Pluto the Pup and Donald Duck, they have brought many a laugh to millions of youngsters—and oldsters, too.
Because they are “Oscar” winners, it is well to look behind the curtain to see how Tom and Jerry come into being as you see them on the nation’s screens.
The studio has been releasing cartoons for many years, but it was not until 10 years ago that a building devoted to this sole entertainment field was erected. Occupying 12,000 square feet, the two-story structure houses a personnel of more than 200 persons, each a specialist in his particular field, since cartoon production is a highly creative art.
Of this number, 110 devote their time to Tom and Jerry.
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JUST LIKE Joan Crawford has Jerry Wald as her producer, Tom and Jerry have their guiding genius, too. He is Fred Quimby, a happy gentleman with a full head of hair and a sense of humor.
Tom and Jerry have their own directors as well. They are William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. Both are comparative youngsters but veterans in the cartoon field.
Like any other screen production, the first step in making a cartoon is writing the story.
Unlike any of the others, the authors do not bother with a manuscript. Instead, they rough out their stories in picture form, one panel after the other, and tack them up on a large board.
Quimby likes to be sure of the action, just like he might be if he had Humphrey Bogart or Errol Flynn, so frequently he has co-directors Hanna and Barbera go through parts of the action.
When the trio is satisfied, the animators enter the scene.
Animators take a look at the drawings—or story. Then they go to work making hundreds upon hundreds of separate pictures, each slightly different from the other. This is so when they are later photographed on a strip of film and run through a projection machine, they look as though they were moving.
This film—it is called a story reel in the trade—offers excellent opportunity for each member of the staff to study the story minutely.
It requires more than 16,000 drawings, each photographed separately, to complete an eight-minute cartoon.
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HEAD ANIMATORS draw only the principal sketches, while their assistants, the “in-between workers,” complete the continuity of the scene.
For example, a sequence may require Tom to walk from one side of a room to the other. The head animator makes sketches of Tom as he enters and as he leaves. The “in-betweeners” then fill out the rest of the pictures.
As he works each animator constantly has in front of him master drawings of Tom and Jerry as well as all the other members of the cast. This is done so no artist will start drawing characters to suit his own ideas.
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KEY MEN are those layout artists who plan the backgrounds and plot the action; the technical advisers and the musical director, who is not only a musician and composer but a man long experienced in cartoon procedure.
Sound technicians on cartoons must be the top of their trade. Split-second accuracy is required in giving sound to the little animated figures.
Then there are the people who give voice to the dialogue.
After all the pictures have been put on paper, a group of women artists trace them with water colors to celluloid. They become the finished product when they are photographed on regular movie film.
The cartoon producers admit they have a lot of problems. But, they have one big “break.” Their stars never are afflicted with temperament.

Hanna and Barbera got other mentions in the popular press during their MGM years, but not all that many. Disney got the P.R. by ably spinning each feature release into something new and, therefore, worth writing about. MGM was in the shorts business, and shorts weren’t exactly high in the box office food chain. Here’s a clipping from United Press dated April 16, 1949.

Censors Frown on Nudes—Even in Cat Cartoons
HOLLYWOOD, (UP)—A buxom movie queen lolling in bed isn't the only item that gets axed out of the movies. The long arm of the censors reached out to the love life and hip wiggles in the cartoons, too.
The two guys who create Tom and Jerry, the Oscar-winning cat and mouse, sigh they have to worry about slipping gags past the censors just like the big directors do.
“We have to be careful about Jerry kicking Tom in the backside. Those gags don’t get by so much any more,” says Joe Barbera, who writes and directs the cat and mouse series at M G M with William Hanna.
Tom and Jerry usually don’t wear a stich of clothes in their movies, unlike Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. But in “Springtime for Thomas” Tom had to crawl into trousers while he yowled his love to a lady cat.
Tom wears goatskin pants and Jerry a Robinson Crusoe outfit in their next movie. But Barbera and Hanna undressed them in a hurry so the 125 animators wouldn’t have to draw clothes in all the 15,000 “frames” that make one cartoon.
Once the Johnston office turned thumbs down on a scene in a cartoon, not of Tom and Jerry, which showed a dog sniffing at a man disguised as a tree.

There was, at one time, an event which brings back wistful memories to those old enough to remember called “The Saturday Kids Matinee.” Local theatres had special programmes for kids consisting of a bunch of old cartoons, some live-action shorts (usual the Three Stooges) and maybe an episode of a serial. TV eventually killed the concept. Alas!

Here’s a column from Madison’s Wisconsin State Journal of April 4, 1953, giving a free plug to a matinee. No doubt part of the information came from an MGM handout. Why else would Fred Quimby get credit?

TOM AND JERRY, funmakers from the MGM cartoon studio, will celebrate their 13th birthdays and their sixth “Oscar” award with two parties Monday at the Orpheum theater.
Tom and Jerry were “born” when Fred Quimby produced their first picture, “Puss Gets the Boot,” in 1940. They became stars at the film’s first showing, when a preview audience laughed long and applauded heartily.
With that sound in their ears, Quimby and Co-Directors William Hanna and Joe Barbera laid plans for a long-range future for the cat-and-mouse team.
So far, there have been 96 Tom and Jerry pictures, and 20 more are in various stages of production on the MGM drawing boards—which produce 11,200 different camera setups for each cartoon comedy. Each release plays about 22,000 bookings in the United States’ 15,000 theaters, figures which indicate many repeat bookings.
Last month. Tom and Jerry won their sixth “Oscar” with “Johann Mouse,” a Viennese caper with Tom playing Strauss music for Jerry’s dancing.
At Monday's parties, the Orpheum will show 25 Tom and Jerry cartoons — three hours of films. Cousin Henry of WISC will be master of ceremonies, and a big bir day cake will be on display in the theater lobby.
The parties will start at 10 a.m. and 1 p. m., with doors for the first one open at 9 a. m.

Fred Quimby was gone by 1955. So Bill and Joe don’t share the credit for their cartoons in this United Press story from somewhere in September 1955.

Cat, Mouse Hold Oscar Honor Record
HOLLYWOOD (UP) – Which performers have won the most Academy Awards?
Nope, not Bette Davis, Frederick March or any other living actor.
The champs are a cat and mouse—“Tom and Jerry.”
Those cartoon characters have copped seven golden statuettes — more than any performers in the business.
Behind this game of cat and mouse are a couple of easy-going, good-nntured guys named Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera who have worked together for 18 years. During that time they've turned out 125 “Tom and Jerry” rib-ticklers for MGM.
“We’ve been working across a desk all that time and never had a beef,” Joe said happily. “I don’t think there’s another team in town ,who can say that.”
“When we started out with Tom and Jerry, mice and cats were strictly passe,” Bill put in. “Thanks to Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat.”
“Yeah,” Joe laughed. “Cartoonists were going crazy looking for other animals to use—giraffes, zebras, dodo birds and gosh knows what.”
“We decided to stick with the cat and mouse idea because you don’t have to waste time getting into the story. The minute the cartoon starts with the cat chasing Jerry the audience understands the situation”
“What’s more,” Bill added, “The mouse is the eternal ‘little guy’—getting picked on by everyone. Besides, mice and cats are known the world over. We never use much dialogue and foreign markets are as good as domestic releases.”
Barbera and Hanna take 18 months to turn out a single seven-minute picture.
“Of course,” Bill said, “we have several in production at once. Each film contains about 57,000 drawings, which means a total output of a million and a half individual drawings a year.”
How do cartoonists dream up their laugh-getters?
“We sit across from one another and kick around ideas until we get something of a story line. Then as we go along we make faces and expressions we want the characters to have—while one of us makes a face, the other pencils it down.”
“People think we're crazy when they come into the office. They find a couple of grown men making faces at one another and speaking in sound effects,” Joe said.

Within two years of this story, Hanna and Barbera followed Quimby off the MGM lot, along with the rest of the cartoon studio’s staff. The doors were bolted. Metro had become penny wise and pound foolish, deciding all it had to do was spend a few bucks making prints of old cartoons and watch the money roll in. It never counted on the huge windfall television could have provided from the sale of future MGM cartoons. It was a point gladly proven by another studio, one run by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.