The Arch Supporting Steve Franken

Television of the 1960s was awash with fine comic actors who were cast as one type of character and took it from show to show to show. Steve Franken was one of them. He died of cancer last Friday, according to TV historian and interviewer Stu Shostak of stusshow.com.

Franken was the small screen’s definitive spoiled, snooty mama’s boy, pretty much defining the character as Chatsworth on “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.” That was his big break on TV. He’d been a teenaged stage actor, appearing in productions of “Hansel and Gretel” and “Charley’s Aunt” as a member of the South Hills Players in Charleston, West Virginia in 1952. He parlayed that into a small role in Paul Muni’s “Inherit the Wind” on Broadway in 1955. Walter Winchell pointed out in a column that Franken was born an hour after his mother Edith had seen Muni in “Counsellor at Law.”

Franken was a New Yorker who grew up in the Eton Hall Apartments on 118th Street. He was the son of Merritt Franken, a newspaper reporter who later became director of publicity of Television Programs of America. His dad wasn’t crazy about his son’s chosen profession, as we read in this Panama City News Herald story dated July 7, 1963 about the things a guy has to do on his way to his big break.

YOUNG MAN WITH DOUBLE EXPOSURE
The “inch-by-inch” career of Steve Franken now seems to be leaping and bounding
BY REX POLIER
Fame of a strange sort has come at last to a diminutive former heel packer named Steve Franken.
The 28-year-old actor is known principally to TV viewers as the filthy rich Chatsworth on “The Dobie Gillis Show.” Brooklyn-born Steve made about 45 appearances on the Gillis series, which is now a-dying. He, Dwayne Hickman, and Bob (“Maynard”) Denver were known on the lot as "the world’s oldest teen-agers.”
After working at odd jobs to enable him to speak one-liners on stage in the evening—a career that has progressed “inch by inch,” the young man says slyly—he has now achieved immortality of sorts. Come fall, he’ll apparently be the first performer featured in two TV series at the same time. Both shows are NBC offerings. On one, Steve will have the roll of a wacky Marine lieutenant in a new comedy called “The Lieutenant.” The other show has him portraying a mild biology high school instructor who has Dean Jagger for his principal in “Mr. Novak.”
Steve didn’t deliberately set out to capture the two roles. His experience is typical of a business where you push and shove for a specific thing, only to have an advantage unexpectedly drop in your lap from left field. He did a pilot for one show, then was spotted by someone for the second show. Result: an envied TV double exposure.
A one-time NBC page boy who was almost fired for practicing his German accent on a German-speaking woman, Franken has succeeded in his career by sheer determination. His father, a well-known publicist, did not want him in show business and refused to help him.
Steve’s long, long trial included working in the complaint department at Macy’s in the daytime so he could utter his one-liner at night on Broadway in “Inherit the Wind.” He portrayed an eager-eyed youth who leaped out of the crowd and shouted: “Train coming and I see the smoke way up the track!” For that he got $16 per week. He also recalls standing behind some pretty distinguished actors in the Hollywood unemployment compensation line. “They pay the best unemployment compensation anywhere,” he said.
But Steve’s most fascinating sidelight was at an arch support factory. The factory was operated by some displaced Hungarians in New York, and Steve held the job while trying for the theater.
“I know it sounds like a ‘What’s My Line,’ but it's true,” he said. “I was a heel packer. I stood on my feet all day, and one day I got so tired I sort of sagged. The head arch support man, a master leather craftsman who looked like someone out of the Old Testament, asked: ‘Hey kid, you got hurt fits? Don't worry. I fix.’
“He made me a pair of elaborate arch supports, but when I put them on, they killed me. I stood them all day and almost died. I worried all that night about the sensitive old man, and how he’d feel if I didn’t wear them the next day. I just couldn’t face him, so I never went back.”

Franken soon moved on to play the best man who moves in with his buddy and his new brand-wife on the forgotten 1964 sitcom “Tom, Dick and Mary” (it didn’t have a prayer opposite “The Andy Griffith Show”). He played a doctor. Hollywood maven Rona Barrett, in her column of September 27, 1964, noted the irony that his parents wanted him to be a doctor in the first place (his grandfather was the chiropodist at the Hotel Astor for 33 years). And he was on the way there for a while. Here’s part of her story.

Physically he [Franken] doesn’t remind you of Kildare or Casey. He’s 5 feet 7, 140 pounds and has blue eyes that seem to pop cut at you. But the minute you hear him you can understand why momma and poppa Franken, the latter a Hollywood press agent, wanted little Stevie to be their son, the doctor.
HE’S a sensitive fellow, who’s probably too idealistic for his own good, but just the right type to fit into the idealistic profession of medicine. Only when he hears bells ringing and birds singing does he know he’s in love. At the moment all’s silent on the Franken front.
“I’m beginning to think monogamy is the answer to convenience,” he said staring after a pretty blonde who had just walked by. “It doesn’t pay to be too intellectual,” he then added.
“When I graduated from Cornell University (where he started out being a pre-med student, later switching to English), my BA degree couldn’t get couldn’t get me a doughnut.
“I do believe there’s some truth to the Hegelian theory that one must suffer a little in order to appreciate what he does get. But there is such a thing as diminishing returns. And I can remember in the beginning when going out into the cruel world that I ate less times than more.
“There were months and months during which I couldn’t get a job. When I finally did it was for a hand commercial. And wouldn’t you know it, when I went for the job, they told me my hands were perfect but my fingernails too short. And what made it even worse, I had just cut them for the first time in months earlier that morning.”
During the lean periods, Steve found happiness and contentment as a complaint adjuster at Macy’s and as a heel packer in an arch support factory run by Hungarians who couldn’t speak English.
For the experience in relationship to acting he said, “I’m happiest when I’m working. But an actor’s work is everyone’s business. No one asks the plumber how he fixes a pipe.
“However, it is far better than having a woman want to return her bed after four years because she’s just discovered bed bugs, or having to wear a pair of arch supports that don’t fit you in order to keep a Hungarian arch artisan happy so you can keep a job.”
HE constantly knocks wood in grateful appreciation of the day he finally made Broadway. His first acting experience was as a broom in the “Travels of Lucky Peter.” It wasn’t until after he appeared in “Inherit the Wind” as part of the scenery that his biggest break finally came: a part in Jose Ferrer’s “Edwin Booth.” [1958]
“I was introduced to Ferrer on the phone and before he could ask me any questions, I recited a speech from Richard III and got the part.”
When he finally landed in films, he said, “I had so much fun working that day I felt guilty about taking the money. I wanted to return some of it.”
And today you get the feeling that if he had to work in “Tom, Dick and Mary” for nothing he would. After all, not only is he satisfying his favorite vocation, but his folks can still call him, “Our son, the doctor!”

Franken may be best known for a pile of different roles on “Bewitched,” including one where he’s a smug client of Darren’s who hires a detective to snoop on Samantha. And he played against type in a great turn as the killer in an episode of “Perry Mason” (the one where Perry actually lost at the beginning).

As an actor, it probably gets a little disheartening and unsatisfying playing the same type over and over again. But someone has to have real talent to convince an audience of their portrayal so much they want to see it again and again. They may not be stars but they become a familiar presence in the living room that TV viewers look forward to seeing like a friend who pops over every once in a while. That was Steve Franken.

Les Alpes de Gribbroek Sans Skunque

Chuck Jones bragged that he had something like 108 backgrounds in “What’s Opera, Doc?” but he seems to have liked constantly cutting to different scenic drawings. He sure did in “Two Scent’s Worth” (1955). I’d count them all except there’s only so much of Mel Blanc’s unctuous French voice I can listen to in one sitting.

Fortunately, Pepé Le Pew shuts up for a while in this cartoon so we can enjoy some of the artistry of Bob Gribbroek and Phil De Guard. The short opens with a pan down a really nice drawing of the French Alps and stops as we look down on a village of tall buildings below. About the first half of the cartoon takes place in the village. The rest happens across the slopes.

The drawings below are from the second half of the cartoon. Gribbroek uses a variety of angles in his layouts—looking up, looking down, looking slightly up or down. There were a lot more backgrounds than these in the last three minutes; I just picked the ones I found the most interesting that didn’t have characters in them.












I presume at least some of Jones’ cartoons released in 1955 would have been on the drawing board before the Warners cartoon studio closed on June 15, 1953. It re-opened some time in the first half of 1954. Jones’ best-known layout man, Maurice Noble, left the studio about March or April 1953 and returned around July 1955. The list below of cartoons and their layout artist is in order of 1955 release, with the production numbers in parentheses.

Beanstalk Bunny (1332) – Bob Givens
Ready, Set, Zoom (1327) – Maurice Noble
Past Perfumance (1329) – Bob Givens
Rabbit Rampage (1341) – Ernie Nordli
Double or Mutton (1343) – Phil De Guard
Jumpin’ Jupiter (1338) – Ernie Nordli
Knight-Mare Hare (1349) – Ernie Nordli
Two Scent’s Worth (1377) – Bob Gribbroek
Guided Muscle (1344) – Phil De Guard
One Froggy Evening (1335) – Bob Gribbroek

A Phoney Trip Down Allen's Alley

Fred Allen’s full-time career on radio ended on June 26, 1949 but his most famous segment ended before that.

Allen’s Alley was Allen speaking through the characters of an elected Dixiecrat, a Jewish New York housewife, a rural New Englander and a happy Irishman on issues of the day. The premise of interviewer Allen knocking on doors of homes along an alliterative lane was changed in his final season to a man-on-the-street format called “Main Street” with most of the same characters. It doesn’t work as well. You can picture the front porches when you hear the door-knocking sound effect in the Alley; the Main Streeters just show up and it’s less visually evoking.

Though the Alley was gone, it was not forgotten. Jack Benny spoofed it on his show on February 12, 1950. About the same time, syndicated columnist Erskine Johnson did the same thing. In Johnson’s case, he lobbed softball questions about Fred’s pet peeves to Allen, then set up the responses in an Allen’s Alley interview format.

The column appeared in papers beginning February 21, 1950.

Johnson Goes to Fred Allen For Some Sprightly Comments
By ERSKINE JOHNSON
NEA Staff Correspondent
HOLLYWOOD—(NEA)—And now let’s peek in on Allen’s Alley.
Just because Fred Allen doesn’t have a radio show this season, there’s no reason the Johnson Network can’t bring him to you.
ANNOUNCER: “The Fred Allen Show!”
MUSIC: Fanfare to APPLAUSE.
ANNOUNCER: “Fred is packing his suitcase in his room at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel for the trip back to New York after a month of California sunshine and several radio guest appearances, including one with his old pal Jack Benny.
JOHNSON: “Tell me, Mr. Allen, why did you come to Hollywood?”
ALLEN: “I was sick for two months this winter and I worried about owing Jack Benny a guest appearance. In case I die, I don’t want any trouble at the grave with Jack's attorney about owing them a guest shot.”
JOHNSON: “Thank you, Mr. Allen. Now let me get your opinion on several subjects. For instance, Milton Berle.”
ALLEN: “I’m mad at him. He didn’t steal any of my jokes—he stole one of my people (writer Nat Hiken). I guess you’d call it ‘artistic kidnaping.’”
Milton’s television show:
ALLEN: “A formula that won’t last. You hire six vaudeville acts and get a guy with five fingers—like Berle—to point at ‘em.”
California sunshine:
ALLEN: “The sun is all right if you are a tropical plant. The sun doesn’t do anything for a microphone.”
Television:
ALLEN: “I look great on kinecope. It straightens me out. Portland thinks I should remain on kinescope and never come home. I look better than I do alive.”
Television viewers:
ALLEN: “I know a fellow who hasn’t even got a set, but his neighbors have, and he’s sick of television already."
Television’s pioneers:
ALLEN: “Pioneers never make any money. Take Daniel Boone. He went through all those forests and didn’t make a dime. Then the lumber companies came in and cleaned up.”
His radio version of “It’s in the Bag” on the Screen Directors Playhouse on NBC:
ALLEN: “I broke a chair over the head of a radio M. C. The fact that he was the M. C. of a giveaway show is not coincidental.”
Giveaway programs:
ALLEN: “They're tough on actors. All a sponsor has to do is hire an M. C. and eight ice boxes.”
Hollywood:
ALLEN: “Ninety per cent of the people are living off 10 per cent of the people.”
NBC executives:
ALLEN: “They’re all shaking so that if there’s ever an earthquake in New York the NBC men will be the only ones standing still.”
Unemployment:
ALLEN: “There has to be unemployment. If everyone who is unemployed suddenly went to work, all the people working in the unemployment bureaus would be unemployed.”
California smog:
ALLEN: “It’s the reason no one ever leaves California. They can’t find the railroad station.”
The growth of Los Angeles:
ALLEN: “Everyone who gets off the train here is carrying a hammer and a piece of board and builds something.”
Wrestling on television:
ALLEN: “If you can't afford a set, I know a couple of guys who will come to your home and wrestle in the living room.”
His motion picture plans:
ALLEN: “I auditioned for the Paramount commissary but I couldn’t make it.”
Hollywood dinner parties:
ALLEN: “There’s a regular circuit you have to play when you come out to Hollywood. You go to certain people's homes for dinner and then you never see ‘em again.”
Jack Haley’s ranch, where he spent several days:
ALLEN: “Jack raises cows. Cows are easier to get along with than people and besides, they give milk.”
His own future in television:
ALLEN: “I’ll probably go back on the radio next fall. Then when there are 15 or 20 million TV sets, I’ll try television. Out of all this confusion will come a technique.”

Allen’s radio career ended for a variety of reasons. His health wasn’t good. His ratings were even worse, thanks to the giveaway craze on “Stop the Music” on ABC opposite him (“Radio is the Marshall Plan with music,” Allen tartly observed). And radio itself was sputtering and coughing to a death and rebirth as a home for popular music, friendly patter and top-of-the-hour news. He was a semi-regular on “The Big Show” for the two seasons it was on the NBC, starting in fall 1950, before a brief career on television that never really tapped his talents. Death claimed him in 1956 before his TV technique could come out of the confusion.

Let's Not Make a Deal, Monty

If Monty Hall had his way, he wouldn’t have been pointing at Carol Merrill standing next to Door Number Three or handing $10 to a woman in the audience if she had a tube of toothpaste in her purse.

That’s because if Monty Hall had his way, he never would have hosted and produced “Let’s Make a Deal” as he never would have been on American television to begin with.

There’s a long list of Canadians in show business who have headed to the U.S. to find bigger fame and fortune. Long before Alex Trebek got his green card to make American game show greenbacks, Monty Hall did the same thing. But he really didn’t want to, at least if an interview in the Winnipeg Free Press is to believed. This is from August 21, 1959, a couple of years before his big fame on “Deal.”

TV Star Says CBC Cut Him Off
By GENE TELPNER
Free Press Staff Reporter
A Winnipeg entertainer who became a star in New York television said he was “forced into the big time” when CBC cut him off Toronto shows with no explanation.
Monty Hall, now in Winnipeg to visit his parents, Mr. and Mrs. M. H. Halparin, said: “I never wanted to leave Canada for New York. I was content here. But the CBC forced me to pull up stakes and leave. I've seen them take other people off the network without explanation, and once they cut you off, you're through.”
Daily Show
Friday was the last program of Mr. Hall’s popular Canadian radio quiz show, Who Am I, which he started back in 1949. “That was my last link with Canada, and now it’s gone.”
In New York, he has a daily hard-hitting TV interview show called Byline, Monty Hall. He also headlines some of the other big-name shows such as Strike It Rich, Monitor, Keep Talking, The Sky’s The Limit, and has worked on the now defunct quiz show Twenty-One.
Recently he was featured in Life for his introduction of television Bingo, and is considered one of the top master of ceremonies in New York. This fall he’ll resume Monitor, and at the same time work on three shows on three different networks.
“I’ve formed my own package group, Skyline Productions, and in the future I hope to be the man behind the scenes rather than the performer,” he said.
Monty Hall was well-known in Winnipeg show business, performing in university productions and radio plays. A science graduate of the University of Manitoba, he had planned to he a doctor but “radio got in my blood.”
After a successful stint at CKRC, he pulled up stakes for Toronto in 1946 to work for CHUM, and within four months he was manager. In 1953 he got a break in television with a successful future virtually assured.
“After a good television start in Canada, I was really looking forward to a big year in 1955. Suddenly CBC blanked me off all shows, and three shows that I was signed for suddenly unsigned me, according to CBC.”
Mr. Hall was to have originally handled the Pick The Stars show, and Matinee Party, which is now P.M. Party with Gordie Tapp. A third show went to Billy O’Connor.
Wall Of Silence
I spoke to a million people, asked a million questions, but no one would tell me why. They were just silent. Finally in the summer of 1955 I went to New York looking for a job. When the CBC cuts you off, you just can’t walk across the street because there’s nothing across the street.”
Finding a job wasn’t too easy in New York, and he had almost given up when two calls came Dec. 7, 1955. One wanted him to replace Warren Hull on Strike It Rich, and the other was to M.C. a television quiz show, The Sky’s The Limit.
Until this week, Mr. Hall commuted to Toronto from his New York home for the radio show, but now that is broken.
“Anyone who can make the grade in Canadian television and not get blackballed for some reason or other should stay in Canada. I’m not bitter, and if they want to talk to me, I’ll be glad to discuss the possibility of my returning. This is my country, and my family is keeping its Canadian citizenship.”
With Mr. Hall in Winnipeg are his wife and two children, Joanne, 9, and Richard, 2.

What would Monty’s career have been like if he had stayed in Canada? He could have asked his brother Bob, who was a panellist on “To Tell the Truth.” Not the one with Peggy Cass, Orson Bean and Kitty Carlisle. The one hosted by Norman Kihl, a 1962 made-for-Canada version that’s been forgotten by all but a handful of Canadians.

Monty Hall turned 91 today and he can look back on a full and happy career. And he can partly thank the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The Tuba Tooter

Early 1930s cartoons are all singing and dancing, with things coming to life and gags in between. Cartoons made on the West Coast were like that, and cartoons made on the East Coast were like that, but you’d never really mistake one for the other.

A case in point is the Tom and Jerry musical “The Tuba Tooter” (1932). You can’t mistake the New York look in this, the kind popularised by the Fleischers. But the Van Beuren shorts weren’t drawn as well or nearly as imaginative as what Max and Dave were doing. In this cartoon, the best little gag is a throwaway; Schultz’s dachshund is in a dog carrier that’s so teeny, the dog’s long front and back stick out either end.



There’s all-black cat with a Felix-like round head and pointed ears, with mice with semi-circular ears near the top of the head. At Fleischer’s, the ears sometimes had little points on them.



I love the all-head parrot. I’m not sure if those are wieners in a tray beneath him, but they come to life. There’s wide-open mouth singing. They loved showing mouth movements in the early ‘30s, especially at Van Beuren.



Tall buildings? You won’t find those all that often in the West Coast cartoons. Women in New York City all seemed to go to Olive Oyl’s seamstress.



The best-looking drawings are the twin dancers. Apparently women in Van Beuren cartoons didn’t have combs. The scrawny, Helen Kane-sounding dancing maid in “Piano Tooners” later in the same year has hair all over the place.



Ah, the pie-eyes that scream early ‘30s. Why is a pig living in an apartment building with children? Who knows? It’s a Van Beuren cartoon! The boy in the centre looks like a rejected drawing of Scrappy at Columbia (drawn by three ex-New York animators).



Hey, a march of characters at an angle, just like in a TerryToon! Tom and Jerry don’t look much like they did earlier in the cartoon. This is just plain ugly drawing. There sure was a quantum leap in quality by the time the studio was making the Rainbow Parades a few years later.



There actually is a thread of a story in this cartoon. Much like Warner Bros. cartoons were based around songs owned by Warners Bros., this song is based around the 1927 tune “Schultz is Back Again” written by Ed Nelson, Saul Bernie and Harry Pease. Van Beuren would have had to fork out money for the rights to use it. Schultz arrives back in New York on a boat. His oompah band greets him. They play. Everyone and everything sings and dances to their music. Apparently, they’re too raucous as the police raid an office building where they hide. Up top. There’s an impossible size-expansion gag.



Schultz’s band is non-violently arrested and placed on a paddywagon that’s actually a flat bed truck. Do they run away? Of course not. They keep playing. The bell of the tuba grows. Look! Tom and Jerry are inside it, singing. How can they fit? Don’t ask. It’s a Van Beuren cartoon.

John Foster and George Stallings get the credits, along with musical director Gene Rodemich. The singers are a mystery, at least to me.

This isn’t the best Tom and Jerry cartoon, or even the most fun, but there’s enough happening to please their fans.

Tex Avery’s Rejected Puns

Do I need to say it? Tex Avery made funny cartoons.

There was a laser disc set (we all got laser disc players, right?) something like 20 years ago featuring all of Avery’s MGM work. Then there was a French DVD set something like ten years ago. The discs contained some interesting things besides the actual cartoons. Facebook friend Silver Baritone sent me some snippings the other day. These are copies of layout drawings of gags that didn’t make it into Avery’s “Symphony in Slang” (released in 1951). It’s a cartoon consisting of little more than visual puns, with stylised designs by Tom Oreb. Why Oreb was brought in to design this cartoon is something I don’t understand; Avery had Ed Benedict in his unit and Ed could come up with flat, angular characters as well as anyone.

The plot of the cartoon is simple. A dead hipster from New York City (played by John Brown using his working-man character voice from the Fred Allen radio show) is explaining his life to the gatekeepers of Heaven. But he uses colloquial language known to Americans of 1950, confusing the hell heaven out of the guys hearing his story. Part of his autobiography involves falling in love, getting dumped and becoming an emotional wreck.

Here are some of the gags that missed the cut. Read the captions to yourself and see if you can hear Brown’s New York-ish voice saying them.



I was so nervous, I started mopping my brow.



It was like fate had brought us together.



She was a chain smoker.



I lost my head.



I started playing a one-armed bandit.



Drinks were on the house. (an Avery favourite, best used in 1945’s “The Shooting of Dan McGoo.”)

This may be Avery’s best example of limited animation. The final scene simply jumps from one drawing of a cat to another (used earlier in the cartoon), and there are others where just one or two body parts move, just like what Hanna-Barbera did on television. And there are some scenes that are simply static shots held for as long as Avery thought it took the pun to sink in.

All four of Avery’s cartoons for Walter Lantz are on DVD and it’d sure be nice if the rest of his were, too. Before my money runs out on me.

How MGM Made a Captain

When you think of how Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera churned out Oscar-winners and Tex Avery was creating some of the funniest cartoons of all time, it’s unbelievable how much turmoil happened before the M-G-M studio finally reached that point by the mid 1940s.

In a nutshell, the studio decided to sell cartoons once the sound era began, and distributed shorts made by Ub Iwerks from 1930 to 1934, then Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising from 1934 to 1937. MGM didn’t like Harman’s constant budget overruns, so it allowed the contact with Harman-Ising to expire and set up its own cartoons; Boxoffice magazine announced the plan May 29, 1937. After working in temporary headquarters, the animators moved into a brand-new building in Culver City on August 23, 1937.

That wasn’t the end of the problems. Factions instantly developed amongst the animators. Harry Hershfield was brought in to run the studio and fired. Milt Gross was brought in and fired. Hugh and Rudy were brought back as employees. All this happened by October 1938. Finally, Friz Freleng had enough and high-tailed it back to the comfort of the Schlesinger studio. Freleng had been hired in September 1937 and rolled his eyes at the prospect of animating what M-G-M bought as their starring characters—a carbon copy of the old Katzenjammer Kids comic strip (which had its own turmoil). An “animated turkey” he once called the series. He should have known the assignment was coming. Boxoffice announced on June 26, 1937 that rights to the Captain and the Kids had been purchased and Max Maxwell would be supervising them.

Of course, that was all behind the scenes. Publicly, everything was optimistic. The United Press even did a story on the newly-opened studio that started with a staff of 25; trade publications announced new hirings over the next few months. It’s interesting to note the only people mentioned in the story are the freelance voice actors, not studio head Fred Quimby, production manager Max Maxwell, or any of the directors or animators. And it was apparently impossible to do any kind of story about animation without mentioning Walt Disney.

They Make Faces At Themselves, Then Draw Movies
By FREDERICK C. OTHMAN
(U. P. Hollywood Correspondent)
HOLLYWOOD, Oct. 6— (UP) — Fifty profoundly serious men went to work here today, making funny faces at themselves in looking glasses.
They’re the animators at M-G-M’s new and ultra-modern cartoon studios and when all 50 of them really got going in front of their mirrors, they are quite a sight.
The studio intends to make movie stars of the captain, mama, the inspector, and Hans and Fritz, who have chasing one another across the newspaper comic pages these many years.
“The Captain and the Kids” first installment, now is in production. The resultant goings on inside a major studio nobody ever saw before.
There are first the authors writing the story of the captain and the brats. These writers don’t bother with manuscripts. They draw their stories in picture form, one panel after another, and paste ‘em on the wall.
The animators take a look and then they go to work drawing thousands upon thousands of separate pictures, each only slightly different from the next one, so that when they’re photographed on a strip of film and run through a movie machine, they look like they’re moving. It takes 11,600 separate drawings to make an eight minute show
The head animators, who are skilled artists and who earn a couple or three hundred dollars a week (according as to how expert they are) draw only the principal sketches, with the aid of their own faces, and their looking-glasses.
Whenever they’re at a loss, say, to depict mama in the act of weeping, they stop everything and weep themselves. Then they look in the mirrors and draw what they see.
They also have full-length mirrors with three panels, like tailors use, for struggling-with –tiger, slipping-on-banana-peel, and bucket-of-water-on-head scenes. They act these scenes out in front of the mirror, making mental sketches of what they see. They then run quickly to their desks and put pencil to paper before they forget.
Each animator has in front of him constantly a master drawing of the captain and each member of his family. This is so no artist will start drawing the characters to suit his own ideas. The work of each animator must exactly match that of every other, or the result is a mess.
When the head animators finish the key pictures, they turn them over to their assistants, who, without mirrors, put in the rest of the action. It takes about 30 pictures for the captain merely to scratch his head; 40 for mama to blow her nose, and 50 for Hans and Fritz to hand the inspector an explosive cigar.
After all the pictures are drawn on paper, a platoon of girls trace them with color on to celluloid, whereupon they are photographed, one by one, with a camera which rings a bell every time, the shutter clicks.
The studio had considerable trouble finding the proper voices for all the characters, but finally selected Billy Bletcher to growl like the captain, Martha Wentworth to bring mama’s voice to the screen, and the Misses Shirley Reed and Jeannie Dunn to impersonate respectively Hans and Fritz.
The head men were cogitating the hiring of small boys for the latter two parts, but decided that eventually that boys would turn into baritones. The Misses Reed and
Dunn won’t, hence their change of sex insofar as M-G-M is concerned. The inspector always has been a dummy, anyway, so he’ll have no voice.
The only other news about cartoons is the fact that Walt Disney, who started the whole business many a long year ago, has finished his first full-length, full-color cartoon feature, a task so prodigious that it almost gives you the willies to contemplate it.
Disney is holding a preview for his cartoon film, with all the trimmings that a Gable or a Crawford opus would get, later this week.

Billy Bletcher, not Mel Blanc, was the original cartoon voice acting super-star. He was Peg Leg Pete at Disney and seemed to work for just about all the cartoons studios of the ‘30s, providing dialects and growling bad guys. He found time for it in between on-camera work in both features and shorts. M-G-M (Tom and Jerry’s Spike) and Warners (Papa Bear) still used his services in the ‘40s. In the ‘50s, he added children’s records to his resumé. All the voice work seems ironic considering Bletcher started in silent films.

The Associated Press of November 27, 1937, had this to say about his work on M-G-M’s flagship cartoons.

Billy Bletcher Sells One Voice —That Leaves Him Just 999
BY ROBBIN COONS
Hollywood— The man with a thousand voices has just signed away one of them.
For 15 years—in vaudeville, on the air, in pictures—Billy Bletcher has been in show business. His weird ability to mimic anybody or anything practically stole away his own identity. He found himself becoming a “voice” — or many voices.
Once, on the air, he substituted for a famous comedian and 1isteners never knew the difference. When Hollywood’s animated cartoons began to talk. Billy spoke for all of them. Vocally, he has been pig, frog, dog, rabbit, mouse, horse, cat, practically all the creatures of the animated screen. In spare time he has played parts in feature pictures, sung on the air. His tenor is trained for music, too.
Metro was launching a new series of talking cartoons, “The Captain and the Kids.” For it, Bletcher was signed to a contract. He will speak for the Captain—and he cannot use that voice for any other purpose.
But he is still free to use the other 999 voices in his repertory. He calls it the ideal contract.

Only 12 Captain and the Kids cartoons were released in 1938 and three more in 1939. By then, Hugh and Rudy were back, with glacially-placed stories of animals and cutsie, faux Disney characters. But toward the end of the room, Hanna and Barbera were on their own developing a cat and a mouse. M-G-M’s time of turmoil was about to end.

Here’s a timeline, gleaned from a few months of stories in Boxoffice:

● April 17: Harman-Ising rushing seven shorts to completion this week, three with Bosko, two with the little pups and one each with Little Cheeser and a rabbit, and “Smoke Dreams” (Yes, I realise that’s eight cartoons. I imagine “Smoke Dreams” is actually “Pipe Dreams”).
● May 1: MGM and Harman-Ising terminate their contact “this week” after not coming to terms on a new one. The pact expires when 18 more shorts are delivered. 14 are to be made.
● May 29: MGM will establish its own cartoon department. Unnamed “top flight director” from another studio has been hired. Harman-Ising still has 16 shorts to deliver.
● June 26: Fred Quimby closes a deal to produce “The Captain and the Kids.” New cartoon unit will be supervised by Max Maxwell with an initial series of 13 one-reelers. Signed as story writers are Bill Hanna, Bob Allen, Fred McAlpin, Heck Allen, Charlie Thorson and Victor (Bill) Schipek.
● July 3: Ground has been broken on the new studio building. It will be 100 feet square and house 150 workers. Max Maxwell is preparing to start production on “Captain.”
● July 10: The studio building will be opened August 16 and cost $200,000.
● July 31: Karl Karpe signed as a cartoon director, Wilson Collison as a writer. Plans for early production are being rushed.
● August 7: Percy Charles joins the cartoon unit as a writer.
● August 14: Harry Hershfield arrived last week from New York to join cartoon unit. Will also be gag man and writer on the main lot.
● September 4: Animator Cecil Surry becomes father of a girl this week.
● October 9: Organisation of studio virtually complete. Bob Allen, Bill Hanna and Friz Freleng are directors, George Gordon is an associate on layouts and animation. Ray Kelly, Kin Platt and Henry (Heck) Allen added to the unit. The first “Captain” cartoon to be released in December in sepia platinum prints in a process developed by John Nicklaus.
● December 11: “Little Buck Cheeser,” Harman-Ising cartoon, to be released December 18, first “Captain” cartoon, “Cleaning House,” a week later.
● February 5, 1938: “Blue Monday” is set for release as the first “Captain” cartoon on February 5 in sepia platinum.

Lantz Camel Dance

The best part of Shamus Culhane’s “Abou Ben Boogie” doesn’t show up until about halfway through the way into the cartoon. We have to live with Ben Hardaway’s sign-puns and goofy-looking characters until Miss X appears and the great dance sequences begin.

It’s a shame Lantz only made two Miss X cartoons (this was the final one). The movement is superb in this and you can really feel Miss X and Abou Ben Boogie pulling each other on the dance floor thanks to the posing and timing. And their dance sequence is wisely interrupted by a comic dance by a camel introduced earlier in the cartoon. There’s some great rubbery movement here, thanks to that great animator Pat Matthews.



The camel is hiding in a mummy’s wrapping (did they have mummies in Arabia?) and is unravelled into action.






Culhane and layout man Art Heinemann go in for a solid background so nothing distracts from the action.




The camel twirls like a ballerina—in perspective. Nine drawings on twos. The head comes right at the camera and so does the toe.



Next, a butt wag. The camel turns his head to see the audience.



Next a little high-step off the stage, vaudeville style (the camel is wearing a straw hat), followed by a slip-step.



Landing his body parts perfectly to Darrell Calker’s beat, the camel flips over and then his hump turns into feet and he walks out of the scene. Great work.

Pat Matthews and Paul Smith get the on-screen animation credits. Matthews, as far as I know, did the Miss X dance sequence in this one which I’ll have to post some time.

Just a note about Matthews. His name wasn’t really Pat. The 1940 Census shows he is John R. Matthews; his son is named Pat (but has John H. crossed out in the report; see below). In-laws were living with him on Laneer Drive (you can see he was renting a house for $35 a month). He was at Disney at the time and the Census reports he was making only $888 in a 46-week year.

Mrs. Fang

It’s highly likely that none of the ladies who heard a six-year-old girl playing the saxophone at a Methodist Church club meeting on May 6, 1924 suspected she would go on to become a trailblazer and then to worldwide fame. Then, again, it didn’t happen because of the saxophone. Or the piano, which she also played for the church ladies. Or her soprano voice. Or her dramatic acting while in college.

Or her bi-weekly newspaper column, for that matter, though they might have got a hint. “Around the Horn” was inside the paper of Bluffton College in 1940 and written by a senior whose last name was Driver. She was nicknamed “Screwy” Driver, not because it’s an obvious pun, but because it described the content of her stories. Her name actually wasn’t Driver by then. The local paper in Lima, Ohio, which reported on almost her every move, had announced her wedding on November 4, 1939.

That’s when Phyllis Driver became Phyllis Diller.

There were women comics who headlined in vaudeville, in burlesque, on radio and on television. But until Phyllis Diller, few headlined in nightclubs, and she was the first stand-up comedienne to go on to enormous, lasting success.

It wasn’t without a lot of work. Diller had gone west and landed a job as a continuity writer at a radio station in Oakland; in those days it involved writing comedy material for shows like one called “Nick and Noodnick.” Salesmen sold the station. She sold herself. Constantly. She wrote gag letters-to-the-editor. One stated a crap game was more appealing to TV-watching kids than the puppet show Kukla, Fran and Ollie. She got noticed.

Here’s the Video Notes column by T.R. Temple in the Hayward Daily Review of November 19, 1952.

DILLER MAKES GOOD
The first letter I ever received from KROW’s female Barnum, Phyllis Diller, began with the salutation, “Lover Boy!”
Later her correspondence blossomed into a veritable garden of publicity releases, all unconventional, about the various radio personalities she was trying to make me listen to. After a while, by george, I did listen to them.
Now Phyllis has branched out. She’s currently filming a show for TV titled “Phyllis Dillis, the Homely Friendmaker.” It's enough to make Marjorie King’s hair turn grey.
Dillis [sic] portrays a bumbling fraud who can’t boil water. She urges housewives to try “something different”, and brother, it’s different all right. Hubby will get ulcers just watching her.
The show hasn’t been picked up by a sponsor yet, but we can almost promise you'll be seeing it soon. It’s a riot.
Miss Dillis, dressed in an evening gown, goes through the first demonstration in a nightmarish episode on how to make tossed green salad.
We have a female Robert Benchley, I think.
(P.S. Dillis in real life has five children, used to work for the San Leandro local newspaper and—she informed me—her house has termites).
The 15-minute series is a BART (Bay Area Radio-Television) production, directed for TV by ABC’s Jim Baker, and will be available outside Northern California via telefilm. Don Sherwood will be the announcer.
He just presents Phyllis and gets away as quickly as possible from the scene of action.

She changed radio stations. She judged a beauty contest—“Maid of San Leandro, 1954.” And she started working the local clubs; the Hungry i was the first. By August 1955, she was headlining at the Purple Onion in San Francisco (four shows daily) at a reported $500 a week. She stayed for 107 weeks. And she got her first national exposure—in a story by United Press, dated November 14, 1955. One would expect a wisecrack-filled interview, with the standard gags about looking ugly and her husband Fang. But she’s serious and subdued. She was only a regional comic. She wasn’t the Phyllis Diller yet.

She's Mother of Five During Day; Turns Comedy Artist Every Night
SAN FRANCISCO — (UP) — Phyllis Diller, 38, is one gal who could give even Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll lessons on how to live a double life.
By day, the willowy blonde is the stay-at-home spouse of an Alameda, Calif., insurance salesman and the hard-working mother of five children. But at night, it’s an entirely different story.
Each evening about nine, Phyllis trades her apron for a slinky gown and the rubber face of a night club comedienne to become the feature attraction at an intimate basement bistro here known as The Purple Onion.
Since Age of Three
“Sometimes I realize what I’m doing—cooking all day and clowning all night—is impossible,” she says. “But all the world’s energy is yours, and it’ll work for you if you only meet it half-way.”
Mrs. Diller sings, mimics and composes much of her own material.
“I’ve felt the need to be funny and musical—to make people laugh—since I was three,” she said. “Just last year I realized that it would soon be too late in life to build such a career, unless I went ahead and did the thing I’ve always wanted to do.
Co-operative Spouse
“Now instead of telling my grandchildren what a great comedienne I could have been,” she continued, “I can let my scrapbook speak for itself.”
Mrs. Diller’s husband really set the whole frenetic scheme in motion. He urged her to go right ahead and "be funny.”
“My husband’s a real doll,” Phyllis said smilingly. “He cooperates in every way possible to make our family life a happy, full one.”
And the children, ranging in ages from five to 15, are being taught self-sufficiency by their mother’s nightly trips to the microphone.
“The kids fix their own breakfast,” she said. “I feel I’m setting them a good example in fulfilling my deep personal ambitions,” she says.
“They will learn from me and this will lead them on the way to living satisfying lives of their own.”
Phyllis would like to keep going “right on up” in the entertainment world, but she never intends to lose sight of the fact she’s wife and mother.
“I don't believe in baby-sitters. But then, who needs them when your children are as level-headed as mine,” she said.
“Besides raising a fine family,” she says with a grin, “I’d also enjoy becoming the funniest female who ever lived.”

Finally in 1958, NBC gave her a national audience—at both ends of the broadcast day. In May, she guested as the Women’s Editor for a week on the “Today” show. And by the time this story appeared in print on December 27, Diller had made five appearances on the “Tonight” show with Jack Paar.

The Phyllis Diller Saga: From Kitchen to Comedy
By DICK KLEINER
National Enterprise Association Staff Correspondent
NEW YORK (NEA) — Shari Lewis got a letter from a young fan that read like this:
“Dear Shari:
“I like your morning program, but I have a problem. My father sleeps late, so I have to turn the sound on the program down. And I can’t hear you. Could you talk a little louder?”
If you’ve always had a desire to get into show business, but somehow never had the nerve to try it, take heart at the story of Phyllis Diller.
She’s a comedienne who got a big break with Jack Paar not long ago, and has since been back and back and back. And now she’s about set for a spot in the next edition of “New Faces” on Broadway. Yet, up to four years ago, she was a contented housewife, with five contented kids and a contented husband.
The story of Phyllis Diller, strange even in the strange world of show business, begins in Lima, Ohio. She was born there, grew up wanting to be a singer, but never got around to it. So she went to Bluffton, Ohio, college and just two months before her graduation, eloped.
For 10 years, she was strictly a housewife. There was a boy, three girls and then another boy. They’re now nine through 18, and her oldest son is in college.
"I was the kind who was funny at parties,” she says. “Gradually, I got asked to entertain whenever we went out, and I worked up something like an act. But still she never worked at it, nor thought she would. And then came a time of financial crisis for the Dillers—“the roof fell in on us”—and she had to work. At first, she tried advertising, and had progressed until she was merchandise manager of a San Francisco radio station.
“My husband kept after me,” she says, “to be a comedienne. Isn’t that a switch? Most husbands are after their wives to stay in the kitchen—and mine was kicking me out.”
Phyllis resisted. She says she thought, at first, that it would be “morally wrong” to leave the children to go on the road. But her husband persisted and finally she gave it a whirl. That was 3½ years ago, after she’d been married for some 16 years. Now, except for being away from her brood—“that's the thorn in my side”—she’s happy. She hopes to get to the point where she can settle down, reunite all seven Dillers, and live happily ever after. It should happen soon.

Her dream of reuniting her family didn’t last. She and Sherwood—who she later pointed out in interviews was not her husband “Fang” in her act—divorced. But she did accomplish something she hoped for in that interview in 1955: “I’ve felt the need to be funny and musical—to make people laugh—since I was 3.”

That’s why the world misses her today.