Wild Minds. Reid Mitenbuler

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      Chapter 6

      “This Place Is Full of Sharks”

      In 1914, William Marriner, a notoriously volatile cartoonist working for the McClure newspaper syndicate, committed suicide by lighting his house on fire and refusing to leave. As a result, the fate of Marriner’s comic strip, Sambo and His Funny Noises, was uncertain. Originally based on a book by Helen Bannerman, The Story of Little Black Sambo, the strip was an unfortunate example of the era’s casual racism—its main character exists mainly to mock African-American dialects (“Dere ain’t no room on dis earth fo’ dem white boys an’ me!”)—but was nevertheless quite popular. As Marriner’s affairs were sorted out, the strip was taken over by his former assistant, Patrick Sullivan, who immediately began seeking ways to boost its popularity. Intrigued by the potential of animation, he decided to adapt it into a cartoon.

      But first he would need to learn how to animate. Knocking on the doors of New York’s few fledgling animation studios, he began asking for a job.

      Australian by birth and twenty-nine years old, Sullivan had few qualities recommending him to an employer, although his résumé was no doubt interesting. It included a position he described as “gentleman in waiting and special valet to a boat load of mules,” referring to a job as a deckhand on a commercial ship traveling back and forth between London and America. Once he had grown tired of the job, he jumped ship into New York Harbor and swam to shore, which is how he had ended up in the United States. Work as a boxer soon followed, leading to a cauliflower ear and a flat nose from too many “left wings to the button,” he liked to joke. After tiring of boxing, he then took up work as a cartoonist, which he had some experience doing back home in Australia. He was not an impressive cartoonist, however; the earliest known example of his work, published in 1907 in The Gadfly, an Australian weekly, was sloppy. But it did give a hint of Sullivan’s character. Standing on the deck of a ship, a nervous woman warily eyes a pipe-smoking seaman. “Any fear of drowning?” she asks.

      “No,” he replies, “This place is full of sharks.”

      Regardless of his poor artistic skills, Sullivan had an easy charm and magnetic charisma. People couldn’t help leaning in when he told colorful stories about his boxing days and adventures sailing the seas on merchant ships—impressive tales that convinced the McClure Newspaper Syndicate to give him a chance and hire him as an assistant. This same charisma is what later convinced Raoul Barré to give Sullivan a chance as an animator, although Barré drove a harder bargain and insisted on paying him $5 less per week than he had made at McClure’s.

      Barré’s studio in the Bronx was located in the Fordham Arcade building, near the last stop on the old Third Avenue elevated line. Inside, the windows were painted in a grimy shade of green that cast an eerie glow on the animators’ faces. This kept the room dark, so the artists could better see the drawings on their light tables, which were arranged in long rows, as in a factory. The other animators at Barré’s studio all remembered Sullivan as a poor student who always showed up late and hungover, the alcohol vapors rising from his rumpled clothes like morning fog cooking off a pond. Animators generally weren’t known for their sobriety, so for them to have commented on Sullivan’s drinking habits suggests a pretty serious problem. Nor did his work impress Barré, who fired him after nine months.

      Nine months had been enough time for Sullivan to learn the basics, however. By the middle of 1915, he started his own studio at 125 West 42nd Street, located between Times Square and Bryant Park, and quickly charmed his way into contracts with the Efanem and Edison film companies, two early studios that would eventually go defunct. The latter was owned by Thomas Edison, who was then trying to patent equipment used in the film industry and create a monopoly (like Bray’s, his efforts to do so would fail). Edison had contracted a cartoon series at Barré’s studio called the Animated Grouch Chasers, which Sullivan had worked on. Once Sullivan started his own studio, he was able to negotiate his own deal to provide Edison with cartoon advertisements and entertainment shorts. He also adapted the Sambo comic strip into a cartoon, although he changed the main character’s name to Sammy Johnsin to avoid paying royalties to Marriner’s heirs.

      Of all the lessons Sullivan learned while working for Barré, perhaps the most important was that of delegation. Animation really wasn’t difficult if talented people were hired to do the work. Sullivan’s most important hire, made in early 1916, was a young artist named Otto Messmer. The two men were total opposites. Sullivan was raffish while Messmer was quiet and demure. Sullivan had traveled the world, while Messmer, who was twenty-four, still lived with his parents in New Jersey. When they first met, Messmer had just been fired from Universal, where he had attempted to start an animation unit but failed, and was glad to get the job.