Questions and Answers With Norman Lear

Norman Lear almost didn’t change the face of North American television.

Comedy on television in the ‘60s was either of the but-honey-the-PTA-is-coming-tonight variety or the my-daughter-is-a-reincarnated-Egyptian-cat type. Lear took an idea that wasn’t his, modified it for the U.S., then had trouble selling it.

Of course, we’re talking about All in the Family.

When Lear failed to sell a couple of pilots for the show, he considered another venue, as we learn in this syndicated story from July 11, 1969.

British TV Series Thence Of New Film
By FRED RUSSELL
NEW YORK (Special) – Producer Norman Lear and director Bud Yorkin have announced "These Were The Days" as their next project for United Artists release. Their most recent film was "The Night They Raided Minsky's, a Norman Lear-Bud Yorkin Production which was one of UA's most successful films of 1968.
Lear and Yorkin are currently at work on "Cold Turkey," starring Dick Van Dyke, which will start filming this summer as a joint venture of their Tandem Productions and Dyke's DFI Productions. This film also is for United Artists.
“Those Were The Days” originated as a British television series called, "Till Death Do Us Part." Underscoring the generation gap, it concerned a bigoted mother and father and their two liberal children. Lear states, "Just about every subject in the book including sex, race, and religion was treated with frankness rarely seen on the tube."
Setting of the motion picture is being switched from Britain to Brooklyn and the people caught up in the proceedings include the father, mother, and their daughters. Also involved is the girl's boy friend, who is a member of the S.D.S. [Students For a Democratic Society]
Shooting will begin in Brooklyn's Besenhurt [sic] area this fall.
Lear and Yorkin joined forces in 1959 to form Tandem Productions and their association resulted in various aspects of writing, producing and directing many important motion pictures such as "Come Blow Your Horn," "Never Too Late" and "Divorce American Style," In addition, they have been active on TV both with specials and series.

Another pilot was shot, CBS bought it, put it on the schedule in January 1971 and then saw ratings climb as audiences learning began to learn it was a comedy that didn’t involve a wife with a slapstick vacuum cleaner or an office Joe with a pet dog that could turn into a human at inopportune times. Lear wanted his comedy real.

This Q & A session was picked up by the Windsor Star and published August 5, 1972.

This man created your favorite bigot
By DIGBY DIEHL
Washington Post News Service
CENTURY CITY, Calif.—"A Hebe Hollywood egghead" is probably what Archie Bunker would call his creator, TV writer-producer Norman Lear.
Archie and All in the Family won seven Emmys at this year's awards presentation, which Johnny Carson dubbed The Norman Lear Show. Earlier this year Sanford and Son, produced by Lear's and Bud Yorkin's Tandem Productions, made its debut and bounced up to second place in the ratings—just below All in the Family. This fall yet another Lear outrage will be unleashed upon the television-watching public—Maude, a spinoff from All in the Family about an upper-middle-class, suburban New Jersey housewife, a cousin of Archie Bunker's wife Edith.
But the names Norman Lear, Bud Yorkin and Tandem Productions were well known in Hollywood before 1971. The team created and produced such television shows as Another Evening with Fred Astaire, The Many Sides of Don Rickles, An Evening with Carol Charming and the original Andy Williams Show. They were responsible for such films as Come Blow Your Horn, The Night They Raided Minsky's, Start the Revolution Without Me and Divorce American Style, for which Lear, as writer, received an Academy Award nomination.
Even before joining forces with Yorkin, Norman Lear had been active in television production. Born in 1922 in New Haven, Conn., Lear was a college dropout, an air force pilot and a theatrical publicist before he became co-writer of The Ford Star Revue, a weekly one-hour variety show on NBC starring Jack Haley, in 1950. Three months later, Lear and his collaborator, Ed Simmons, went to work for the Colgate Comedy Hour. Their task was to introduce a new young comedy team, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. After succeeding admirably, Lear doubled as a writer on the team's radio show and on some of their movies. Later, Lear directed and co-wrote (with Simmons) a series of one-hour live musicals starring Martha Raye for the 1954-55 television season. Later still, Lear directed and wrote the third and fourth years of the George Gobel Show on NBC.
Lear does his creating in a Century City office decorated with All in the Family memorabilia. Once seated before a tape recorder, the monarch of the boob tube is gently articulate and expresses a concern that an interview about his genius and his triumphs might sound self-serving. He's a rarity in television: A civilized, educated and thoughtful man who refuses to believe that the television set is just some new form of electronic billboard.
QUESTION: We've heard for years that the TV audience has a 12-year-old mentality. Evidently you don't agree.
LEAR: No, I think we've labelled the audience that way. But they're smarter than that. All of us have to remember that because we're better educated and have a higher income level, we have very definite attitudes about the people who have less education, and sometimes the attitudes are a little prejudiced. I try to watch it very carefully in myself I'm aware of it, anyway.
Q: Why do you think, then, that so much of what we see on television is disappointing?
LEAR: A lot of it has to do with network management. The people who think for big business really don't get out there wherever it's at and find out what the hell the public wants. Writers do, because they listen to people, and they care, and they read. Even watching television, writers are watching in another way. But I hate to isolate television from the rest of American business. I don't want to condemn management without remembering that Volkswagen sales went up, up, up for a long time before the American motor companies looked at each other and said, 'Hey, we'd better build a small car.' Well, television makes those mistakes, too. They don't give enough new things a chance.
Q: It had been some years since you'd worked in television when All in the Family came along. What was the genesis of that series?
LEAR: We were living in New York at the time. I was completing a long editing process on The Night They Raided Minsky's, and I read a little squib I forget in what publication about the English series, Till Death Do Us Part. It simply said that the series was a sensation over there and that it was about a cockney father with his son-in-law; they're living together, and it was about all the issues of the day. I was transported to my youth and I thought, My God, if that could happen on American television. I grew up on that. My father and I fought all of those battles. I had a ready image of the man, of a boy, of a girl and of her mother; the whole thing was there. So I was getting the rights to the series before I'd ever seen an episode. Later, much later, I saw one. If you're looking for where All in the Family began in American life, though, it began with Lenny Bruce. He really was a prophet. And I think he would have adored the success of the show, because it proves a lot of what he said.
Q: When you created the first pilot of All in the Family for ABC in 1965 [sic], how was it received?
LEAR: They commissioned the pilot, they laughed at it when they saw it, and said they loved it—but they didn't schedule it. It's really as simple as that. Then, when their option was about to lapse, they asked for another pilot. That's the only way they had of holding it a little while longer. Then CBS picked it up and we made a third pilot.
Q: How did you cast the show?
LEAR: Well, Carroll O'Connor and Jean Stapleton were people whose careers I had watched and I brought them in. Jean is brilliant, and Carroll is wonderful, and they were right. It was very important for Archie to have a likable face because, you know, I've never known a bigot I didn't like. They were all relatives and friends.
Q: There must have been times when you've had unfavorable audience reactions to something you've attempted?
LEAR: Strong reactions mean a few letters, out of millions of weekly viewers. But there are two areas of great sensitivity: God—not denominational religion—and sex. We hear from nuns all the time who adore the show, and Archie has been very vocally anti-Catholic. We hear from all minorities, and we've heard from leaders in all religions. But on our Christmas show last year, Archie and Mike had an argument about the existence of God. That argument—and it was in joke form—caused a flood of letters. That flood of letters, I might add, was 50 or 60 letters. But that's a great number of letters on a particular show. The other subject on which we have had as many as 50 letters on one specific subject was the area of sex. One show dealt with menopause. It was perhaps our most popular show, but it brought a spate of letters.
Q: Have you any theories of your own about why the show has been so successful?
LEAR: Well, television's always used the same things. Even Father Knows Best. All the humor, basically, is based on conflict. The conflict in a great many shows for a great many years was whether dad would give the kid the keys to the car, or whether the dinner would be ready in time for the boss to come over for dinner. We deal in conflicts that are more serious than that. The more serious those conflicts are, the funnier we can make the comedy, because the more people you touch with reality. I'm sure that its greatest appeal, though, is that audiences recognize their humanity—the realness of the characters. We ask you to believe, by virtue of what we're doing, that the Bunkers exist. That's what is hard for a lot of people to take. We're saying that we want you to believe that this lovable bigot is real.
People says [sic] to me, do you believe the show will have any effect? But what they do is make an unfair equation, in both directions. They say in terms of bigotry, let's say either the show reinforces racial stereotypes, or the show does good and will have some effect. I don't think either is true. How much could I expect to happen from my silly little half-hour television show, when the entire Judeo-Christian ethic for some 2,000 years hasn't budged in the area of race relations? I don't think there's much impact.
Q: I've been struck repeatedly as we've talked, by the fact that somehow you seem to associate writing and communication with a sense of conscience. You seem to have a sense of artistic duty, which I find unusual in television.
LEAR: No, not artistic duty. I would say that it's not possible to be 49 years old and live in this world with all its problems and not want to assume some responsibility. It seems to me that any fully grown, mature adult would have a desire to help where he can in a world that needs so very much, that threatens us so very much. Now, I write basically for television and I'm doing comedy; that desire for responsibility has to come out in whatever I do. I'm not altruistic in making an artistic contribution. It's a human response.

All in the Family lived for nine seasons, then morphed into Archie Bunker’s Place for another four. Viewers and critics debate how many of those seasons the show was running on fumes, but Carroll O’Connor did win an Emmy in Family’s final year. They also debate if the show would ever air if it were proposed today. I’ll, um, stifle my own thoughts on that matter, other than to say that television—and society—needs insightful social satire, if for no reason other than to point out our own failings.

Daffy's Surprise Package

Daffy Duck woo-hooing and running around is always lots of fun to watch.

Here’s our screwy duck in Daffy Duck in Hollywood (1938). He’s sorry (sure he is!) he’s heckled director Mark Hamburger and gives him a present. Daffy turns to walk away.



Guess what the present is? “It’s me again,” shouts the duck as he runs in circles in a woo-hoo celebration of another gag being pulled off. Unfortunately, the scene fades out as we get some twirling animation of Daffy.



Dave Monahan is credited with helping Tex Avery with gags, with the animation credit going to Virgil Ross. Mark Hamburger is a spoof on director/columnist Mark Hellinger, while the big studio boss dresses like Leon Schlesinger and has a Miss Morgan as a secretary, just like Ginger Morgan at the Schlesinger studio.

Sneaking in a Commercial

Jack Benny loved making commercials a part of his show. He was one of the first to do it in 1932 on radio and carried on into the late 1960s when he hosted television specials (he was fortunate that one sponsor picked up the tab, something TV pretty much abandoned due to cost).

The book A Decade of Radio Advertising, published in 1933, pointed it out and also quoted an example.

There are two things interesting about it. One is that Jack’s character isn’t what it later became. No one on TV would assume he was dating a bevy of women or investing money in stocks. The whole idea of Benny being hauled off to a mental hospital is completely improbable; even Dennis Day didn’t drive him that crazy.

The other thing is Jack and writer Harry Conn used this same routine, almost word-for-word, to open the show of March 18, 1934. The only difference was the sponsor and the actors. In the latter show, the announcer was Chevrolet-pushing Alois Havrilla, the band leader was Frank Black, and the singer was Frank Parker. In this one, the announcer is Paul Douglas, the band leader is Ted Weems, and the singers are Andrea Marsh and Parker Gibbs. Mary Livingstone is in both broadcasts, though she’s his secretary only in the first one.

An example of the dramatized form of commercial announcement is found in the Canada Dry program of January 19, 1933. This company was one of the pioneers in product dramatization, and originally featured the sound of ginger ale being poured into a glass. Later the sales appeal was shifted to that of emphasizing its fountain trade and the fact that five cents would be refunded for every bottle returned to the dealer. In the example in question this is the principal point of selling interest.
The announcement begins with a brief opening comment by the announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, a half hour of sparkling entertainment by Canada Dry—the Champagne of Ginger Ales. Canada Dry is now available in the large, as well as the regular size bottles for the home, and made to order by the glass at fountains. This program stars Jack Benny,—the Canada Dry Humorist—and Ted Weems' Orchestra.
Following this there is a brief musical interlude and the program begins. The announcer, a character by the name of Mary and another by the name of Andrea are hunting for Jack Benny. Finally Ted Weems tells them that Benny has been taken to a sanitarium. The scene shifts to the sanitarium where Mary questions Benny as to why he is there. From here they proceed as follows:

MARY— Hello, Jack. Don't you know me? I'm Mary, your secretary.
JACK—Mary ! How are you, dear?
MARY—Why .... why .... don't you know where you are, Jack?
JACK—Yes, Mary, I'm in a sanitarium.
MARY (whispers)— Gee, Paul, he seems perfectly sane. They shouldn't have him in here.
PAUL (whispers)—Wait—I'll find out .... how are you feeling, Jack?
JACK—Fine, Paul. I never felt better in my life.
PAUL—Well ....Well.... then why have they got you in here?
JACK—I don't know, Paul. All I know is that I'm in here. Oh, hello, Andrea.
ANDREA—Hello, Jack .... I'm awfully sorry to see you here.
JACK—That's all right, Andrea. They'll find out their mistake.
PAUL (whispers) Say, Ted, you ask him a few questions.
TED—Oh Jack, you remember me, don't you?
JACK—Sure, Ted Weems .... did you bring that fruit for me, Ted?
TED—Yes.
JACK—Then stop eating it.
TED (laughs at this)—There's nothing the matter with you, Jack. What have they got you in here for?
JACK—You're asking me? Say Ted, there are a lot of people here who don't belong.
TED—Yeah?
JACK—Yeah .... you see that fellow in the next cell?
TED—Yes, Jack.
JACK—Well, he thinks he's President. He leaves here March the 4th.
(Everybody laughs at this)
MARY—But you don't think you're somebody else, do you, Jack?
JACK—No, Mary, I'm Jack Benny.
MARY—Well, I'm going to see the superintendent and make him let you out. I'll be right back.
TED—There must be something wrong, Jack. Did you lose your money in the market?
JACK—Certainly not. I sold before the crash.
TED—Is it a woman?
JACK—Don't make me laugh I never have trouble with women.
TED—But you must be here for a reason.
JACK—I tell you—it's all a mistake.
PAUL—But it's not a mistake to buy Canada Dry Ginger Ale made to order by the glass, sold in the 5 -glass bottles, with a nickel back on each large bottle .... Canada Dry Ginger Ale .... Canada Dry Ginger Ale . . . .
[at the word “glass’] Jack starts to scream. That's it .... that's it. Take him away ... Canada Dry Ginger Ale ...
PARKER—Hold him, hold him, hold him.
ANDREA—Jack—Oh Jack ...

At this point, it didn’t matter how the Benny show sold soft drinks. Canada Dry had already announced the show was cancelled and would go off the air after January 26th. Benny had run afoul, as Variety reported on January 3, 1933, of the show’s agency because he insisted on deviating from the script. The agency actually had stenographers transcribe the show as it aired to see if it matched the script.

Benny wasn’t off the air for long. After failing to hook up with Old Gold cigarettes, a deal with signed by February 24th and he returned to the air for Chevrolet on March 3rd, replacing Al Jolson.

How Sound Changed Cartoons

Walter Lantz was a survivor.

His cartoons weren’t as wild and lippy as ones out of Warner Bros. They didn’t have the stunning animation of Disney. But he put them on the screen from the late ‘20s to the early ‘70s with, arguably, only one real A-list character after 1940.

He had an A-list character before 1940, who petered out as the 1930s moved along. His silent star, Oswald the rabbit, made the jump into sound. How much of a transition was it? Lantz himself supplies some answers in this story found in an Australian newspaper of July 17, 1937. It was no small accomplishment; the studio (and others) had to completely rethink how they put together a cartoon. Now everything had to be timed to the beat of the music.

ANIMATORS AT WORK
Looking In At The Making Of A Cartoon
THE animated cartoon was once a catch-penny device. It was thrown in with the rest of a picture programme. If you found the awkward, jumping pen-and-ink, figures amusing, you stayed to watch.. If not, you walked out of the theatre, feeling you hadn't missed a thing.
A radical change has occurred with the production of cartoons in atmospheric sound and speech effects, with the application of color, and the development of a psychology in the public demand for satire and fantasy in unique combination.

THERE were a few individuals, like Walt Disney and Max Fleischer," states Mr. Walter Lantz, who is producing Oswald Rabbit cartoons for Universal, "who dedicated their life's work to making the animated cartoon a thing of beauty, interest and artistry. So many improvements have been introduced in these crude, irregular short films that they have now become one of the most popular forms of screen entertainment. Grown-ups, no less than children, love the amusing drawings and the fleeting escape from a hard, practical world into delightful realms of fancy.
"To-day, from 40 to 200 people actually work on the making of a single cartoon feature, which usually runs from 600 to 800 feet in length, and costs from 1600 to 15,000 for the same amount of footage. Each cartoon screen strip contains from 12,000 to 15,000 Individual drawings, and an animator—the artist who executes the sketches—averages about 60 of these drawings a day.
"Besides the animators, there is a separate crew of musicians, vocalists and actors. Each of these men or women is a specialist chosen exclusively for the character sound effects required in the picture.
Synchronising the Music.
"The business of making animated cartoons with sound is a much more difficult and complicated process than in the silent picture days. Back in 1926 [sic], when I first started producing the adventures of Oswald, the Lucky Rabbit, for Universal, we never worried very much about a story plot. We just said, ‘This week we will make 600 feet of Oswald Rabbit going to the North Pole,’ and then permitted the story to take care of itself, ambling on in a rather haphazard fashion, in relation to the gags inserted. To-day the scenarios for film cartoons must be planned, written and set to music with as much care and thought as any screen drama. For instance, the action must exactly fit the sound track. Four hundred bars of music mean 800 feet of action, two feet of action being counted to every bar of music. If in the story also Oswald is required to run to a certain place, the music accompanying the running hops must be speeded up to synchronise with the ever-changing drawings to the exact moment of Bunny's arrival. The scenario is perfectly timed, and the tempo of the music in relation to it is tested repeatedly until both fit identically.



Magnified for Testing.
"Wherever talking is introduced a sound recording is made of the voice and the words to be used. Then the film is placed under a magnifying glass in order that each syllable of each word can be picked out separately and measured for length. Naturally, some of the syllables are long and some short, so the animator must accelerate or slow up his action drawings accordingly. Of course, no two of those thousands of pen-drawn pictures, which take on the movements of life when run off in rapid succession, are identical; each differs in a very slight degree from its preceding one. And when once the actual animating of the drawings begins no changes are made. So that not one foot of film is ever wasted.
"In the early stages of celluloid comics when only blacks and whites were used, a few sketchy lines were considered sufficient as backgrounds. Now photographic backgrounds are often combined with the drawings.
Application of Color.
"Color in its application represents another big progressive step. This is obtained by placing sheets of celluloid over the line drawings and painting in any desired color on the celluloid. In this way the original black and white lines are blotted out.
"The majority of creators of animated cartoons have entered the screen world after experience as newspaper comic strip artists. Besides developing a facility for drawing very rapidly, the cartoonist soon possesses an eye carefully trained to the foibles and frailties, the vanities, eccentricities and humorous quirks of his fellow creatures. He acquires a deep insight into human nature and, with tongue in cheek, he gets and gives a lot of fun by transferring his whimsical slant on human beings to animals and puppets.
"Two men right here on the lot both started out in life as ‘comic strippers,’ James Whale and Gregory la Cava. Long before he produced Journey's End and directed the film Show Boat, Whale drew 'funnies' for two publications in London, and la Cava, who directed My Man Godfrey, used to do comics for the New York American in 1915, when I, too, was drawing for that paper. Both of us gave up newspaper work with the intention of making screen cartoons."

Eventually, Lantz ran out of story plots for Oswald and tried a menagerie of unfunny characters. Fortunately, he was able to jump on the “brash heckler” bandwagon, thanks to a guy who came from Warner Bros., where he had put a rabbit in a duck suit. While Warners greatly modified its rabbit so he became a whole new character, Lantz put Ben Hardaway’s rabbit in a woodpecker suit and onto the screen for the next 32 years.

Cartoon Outline

The Last Mouse of Hamelin starts with an interesting premise—suppose the Pied Piper didn’t remove all the mice from Hamelin. Suppose a music-hating mouse plugged his ears and stayed behind.

This Terrytoon itself isn’t that great, though it borrows an explosion/outline gag that Tex Avery liked. The cats are battling each other for the one lone mouse to eat. In this scene, a cat substitutes a stick of dynamite for the mouse as it is about to be eaten by another cat. Cut to the next scene where the newly-fed cat explodes, leaving just an outline. No matter, he strolls around a building and out of the cartoon.



We don’t just get the Terry Splash™. We get the Terry Sewer Splash™.

Connie Rasinski directed this 1955 release. Dayton Allen is the Germanic narrator.

Goosed her Rooster

The sun rises in the Flip the Frog cartoon The Milkman (1932) but the rooster isn’t crowing. He’s still sleeping. A sun-singe to the butt takes care of that. The sun is delighted with being a masochist.



The odd thing is it’s not a real rooster. It’s actually a weather vane.

The cartoon features an obnoxious child and a horse that sings “damn.”

Durante

He moved to Hollywood in 1932 but Jimmy Durante never lost that 1920s New York speakeasy entertainer atmosphere about him, even four decades later.

His act was old-fashioned hokum when radio made his career explode again, but audiences loved it. They were taken in by Durante’s sincere enthusiasm for the old numbers and corny jokes. He was impossible to dislike.

In the late ’50s, United Press International put out on the newswire a three-part series on Durante. As is usual in show biz, with happiness comes sadness, too. You can read that in this first part that began appearing in papers on November 5, 1959. I’ll try to get to the other two parts in future posts.

THE PRIVATE LIFE OF JIMMY DURANTE
Comedian Soft Touch
By VERNON SCOTT
UPI Hollywood Correspondent
HOLLYWOOD – The curtain goes up, the ricky-ticky music blares out, “Who Will Be With You When You're Far Away?” and a ramshackle old man struts jauntily on stage.
The music fades away. "I'm walking into de theater mindin' my own business when dis man comes up and sez, 'I reconize the face, but the nose ain't familiar.' So I ups to him and he ups to me and I sez, 'Any friend of mine, is also a friend of thuh nose.' "
Cackling merrily, the bald little guy breaks into a dance. He pounds the piano. He sings off-key. He spouts another joke in a voice that cracks plaster. He's Jimmy Durante, 66 years old.
A secretive man who baffles even hit closest associates, the old Schnozzola is beloved but not well-known in Hollywood. Fifty years in show business has not separated fact from fiction, and Durante does everything possible to confuse legend with reality.
Example: Jimmy has lived in the same Beverly Hills house for 20 years. His friends insist the Schnozz never has been in the swimming pool. They say it's typical of Durante's eccentricities. But Jimmy swears he goes for a dip every morning.
"Sure I do," he said hoarsely. "Why else have I got a pool?"
His compatriots merely lift their eyebrows in resignation.
The softest touch in the warm-hearted society of entertainers, Durante denies his charities and good works, perhaps to minimize future handouts, but it is known he gives away some $15,000 a year to organized charities and an equal amount to down-on-their-luck buddies. This may not sound like a lot of money for a big star, but Jimmy is not as wealthy as his Beverly Hills Neighbors.
"Aw," he says of his generosity, "I don't like discussin' them things."
Pressed on the subject, Jimmy smoothed down a fragile wisp of hair atop his head. "Well, lem-me see. There's the Jewish Home for the Aged, the Thalians (mentally retarded children), the Lighthouse for the Blind in New York and the Catholic Church among others. But please don't talk about it no more."
Durante's perverse nature crops up whenever his passion for horse races is mentioned. He vows his bets are small and infrequent, and made only at the track.
But I’ve seen him in action during many a TV rehearsal when he spends as much time with the racing form as he does with the script. Jimmy’s sidekick and friend of 42 years, Eddie Jackson, shuttled between Durante and the telephone placing bets. On one occasion Jimmy was astonished to find he’d bet on every horse in a single race.
Yet he will tell you he’s not a real horse player.
“I don’t know how to gamble—and I never won on the horses during a season in my life.”
Then why is he the inveterate plunger?
“I like to see ‘em run,” he grinned sheepishly.
Purposefully or not, Jimmy Durante will twist and sidetrack a conversation so skilfully most people are unaware he is escaping painful subjects. And there have been many painful episodes in the comedian’s life.
His cheerful, raucous on-stage personality gives way to thoughtful reflection when Jimmy is alone. He speaks and thinks about the past a great deal, but not regretfully. He enjoys the nostalgia, re-living the good old days when Clayton, Jackson and Durante were the toast of New York.
Durante's life has been a series of professional and emotional ups of and downs. He's seen good times and bad in night clubs, movies, radio and television The death of his wife, the passing of his partner Lou Clayton, a disastrous love affair in his youth and other tragedies played an important role in shaping Jimmy's way of life.
Jimmy is fiercely loyal to his troupe of seven regulars who surround him on his night club and TV skirmishes.
"I gotta keep 'em workin'," he explained, before enumerating his tight little band. "My drummer, Jack Roth, has been with me 41 years. Eddie Jackson (with whom he squabbled last year) and I been together 42 years, and Jules Buffano, my piano player, has been around 17 years.
“Then there's Louis Cohen, he attended lots of things, and he's been working for me for 40 years. Lemme see. I think it's 24 years Bill Stocker has been driving me around and taking care of me. My press agent Joe Bleeden, has been with me nine years. Sonny King, my new singer, is a two-year man. They're all my boys."
The "boys" make the big-beaked word-mangler's home their own. They drop by at all hours of the day and night to keep the boss happy.
It's a surprisingly democratic clan, in contrast with the sycophants who generally congregate around a star. His pals adjust themselves to Jimmy's schedule which keeps them up until 5 and 6 in the morning hashing over the "good old days."

Inki Backgrounds

Chuck Jones’ unit was experimenting with various kinds of backgrounds during the war years. Some consisted of geometric patterns but all were not literal.

Here are some examples from Inki and the Minah Bird from 1943. They certainly don’t look like jungles you will find in other cartoons. The clouds are in patterns of three.

Jones was going through a bit of a transition around this time. Layout artist John McGrew went into the military, followed by background painter Eugene Fleury. Fleury’s wife, Bernice Polifka, was hired for background work. I don’t know which of these artists were involved in this cartoon.

Jones made five Inki pictures for Warners release. He told author Mike Barrier that theatre audiences liked them but nobody understood them, including him.

Lassoing a River

Life was not easy for pioneers heading West, we’re informed by the narrator of Homesteader Droopy (1954). “There were wide rivers to cross.” Director Tex Avery and gagman Heck Allen toss in a sight gag.



The animators in this short are Mike Lah, Grant Simmons, Walt Clinton and Bob Bentley. Your narrator is Paul Frees.

Canada's Million-Dollar Composer

It’s a tune that may be more Canadian than “O Canada.”

It’s the theme to “Hockey Night in Canada.”

Every Saturday night, there it was on the CBC to signal the start and end of a televised NHL encounter. Even die-hard hockey haters—what few of them there are in Canada—must have recognised the theme.

Music, as you know, doesn’t compose itself. The composer of the “Hockey Night in Canada” theme was a lady by the name of Dolores Claman. And I see that she has passed away just after her 94th birthday.

I had the pleasure of meeting her and her husband a little over 40 years ago. They had a company that sold LPs of music that you hear in the background of commercials and industrial films, and had a little office on the second floor of an old brick building in downtown Vancouver. I was a commercial announcer/producer at an obscure radio station which needed a production library, and I purchased one from them. Dolores admitted to me she wrote all the music but used pseudonyms to make her company look like it had a staff of composers.

Silly me, at the time I had no idea she was responsible for Canada’s most famous sports theme.

Claman was a native Vancouverite and was giving recitals by the mid-1930s. As time wore on, she ended up being responsible for a great number of commercial jingles heard at one time on Canadian television. If you were watching the CBC or CTV in the 1960s and 1970s, you could not avoid them.

Chatelaine magazine wrote this profile of her in its September 1966 issue:

Dolores Claman music to sell by

Dolores Claman and her husband Richard Morris head the company that writes the words and music for probably seventy-five percent of the English-language commercials for such firms as Imperial Oil (remember the original “Tiger in your tank” commercials?), Scott Tissue (with the “this old man” tune) and Black Magic chocolates. Working out of a drab office in a semislum section of Toronto, the Claman-Morris team average five new commercials weekly. Dolores writes the music, Richard the words, helping to sell cigarettes, soap, soup, candy, cars, beer and gasoline, and bringing in for Miss Claman alone close to $20,000 annually. Dolores, who is auburn, slim and nervously energetic, drives herself hard. She socializes little, spends no time at sports or hobbies, and employs a full-time housekeeper to cook and clean and care for the Morrises’ four-year-old daughter Madeline. She married Morris, an English playwright writing for TV shows, in 1957, when she was working in London composing music for TV shows, West End revues and special material for performers like Tallulah Bankhead. Born in Vancouver, Dolores studied music and drama at the University of Southern California then switched to the Julliard School of Music in New York to concentrate on the piano. In 1952 she produced her first big theatrical score, Timer, for Vancouver’s Theatre Under The Stars. Occasionally the Morrises return to their old love—theatre. They’ve contributed music to the CNE grandstand shows and, with fellow writer, Ted Wood, turned Dickens’ Christmas Carol into a musical, Mr. Scrooge, which CBC-TV taped in December 1964 starring Cyril Ritchard. They’re currently working on a musical based on the sourdough ballads of Robert W. Service. Like Scrooge, much of it is written at home, a roomy east Toronto house decorated with antiques, and an amiably ugly bulldog called Sheba. – Shirley Mair.

Her most famous work came about on an afternoon in 1968. A front-page story in the Toronto Globe and Mail in June 2008 explained Claman looked out her window at her garden and plunked away on her grand piano. She tried B-flat, then the key of C. She pictured Roman gladiators wearing skates; she had never been to a hockey game. Five notes came to her and it didn’t take long for the rest of the melody to be written.

She was paid $800 by a Toronto ad agency for writing it. That was the flat rate for a jingle. The 20 musicians who played it got residuals each time it aired. Among them were top Toronto session people like trombonist Rob McConnell and trumpeter Guido Basso. But in the early ‘70s, it was reclassified as a “theme,” meaning Dolores got music-use license payments. That worked out to around $4,000 a year on average. “Hold on!” said an agent in 1993, who told Claman to license the tune. That resulted in $500 for each hockey game; up to $45,000 a year.

In 2008 at age 80, Claman decided to sell the theme. By then, sports had changed in Canada. The CBC wasn’t the only outfit broadcasting play-by-play hockey. The Mother Corp offered $850,000. No deal, said Claman, who then accepted a minimum $1,000,000 from CTV. (The CBC reacted by staging a contest for a new theme).

Show business is littered with stories of people who don’t get rewarded or credit for their work. In this case, a friendly, honest woman got a nice windfall for a Canadian musical icon.

Farewell, Dolores.