Wild Minds. Reid Mitenbuler

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СКАЧАТЬ the earliest decades of the industry. After graduating from high school in 1907, he enrolled in night classes at the Thomas School of Art in Manhattan, “where they taught you to draw more ‘straight’” rather than cartoony, he recalled. Next came a job illustrating fashion catalogues for a company called the Acme Agency. “But I didn’t like that,” he remembered. “I kept thinking about cartoons.” By 1910 he had sold a few cartoons to Life, building a portfolio he could use to get a steadier job. His brief stint at Universal came several years later. Messmer had seen all of Winsor McCay’s films, along with Émile Cohl’s Newlyweds series, and had figured out most of the basics on his own. His father helped him build a special desk with a backlit glass panel and a wooden frame that would register drawings, similar to Raoul Barré’s peg system.

      Sullivan taught Messmer the techniques he had learned from Barré. “He taught me a lot of things about timing, [and] so forth,” Messmer remembered about one of his earliest assignments producing a dozen Charlie Chaplin cartoons. A movie producer had suggested featuring Chaplin as a cartoon character, an idea that Chaplin loved. “So Chaplin sent at least thirty or forty photographs of himself in different [poses] . . . He was delighted, cause this helped the propagation of his pictures, ya see?” Messmer studied the pictures in the same way a religious scholar pores over the Talmud, absorbing every lesson possible. “We used a lot of that kind of action in Felix,” he later said of the Chaplin films.

      After teaching Messmer the basics, Sullivan mostly left him alone. “I did it all practically by myself,” Messmer said. His mind was wild, good at dreaming up gags and clever scenarios that defied reality. He wasn’t a fan of devices like Max Fleischer’s rotoscope, which required filming one’s subjects in live action—“Why animate something that you can see in real life?” he asked. To Messmer, a cartoon was something that described the impossible. It was most effective when it ignored reality.

      The United States entered World War I, and Messmer was drafted right as he was getting his footing at Sullivan’s studio. As a corporal in the Army Signal Corps, he would see the worst horrors the war offered. Once, chatting with a buddy while scanning the smoky horizon for enemy troops, Messmer turned around to investigate why his friend had gone silent, discovering him slumped over with a bullet through his head. Another time, someone in his unit shot a German sniper who hadn’t yet died when the American troops reached him. Messmer, who spoke German, comforted him during his final moments, as the sniper showed the Americans pictures of his family. Just before he closed his eyes forever, he offered the Americans his last cigarettes, which otherwise wouldn’t get smoked. All these experiences made a deep and lasting impression on Messmer. He would rarely ever speak of the war, but glimpses of it would surface in his art once he returned to America.

      While Messmer was off fighting the war, Patrick Sullivan was in New York fighting a serious lawsuit. It started one day in April 1917, after Sullivan and another animator, Ernest Smythe, began flirting with two young girls they had spotted in a rented apartment opposite the studio, whistling and catcalling to them from across the courtyard. Dark-haired Alice McCleary and her blond friend Gladys Bowen were fourteen and fifteen, respectively, and had run away from home five days earlier. They were seeking an adventure in the city. The animators convinced the girls to meet them in a nearby bar and, once everyone was settled, ordered a round of crème de menthes. The girls sipped their bright green drinks and explained they wanted to be actresses. When Sullivan heard this, he turned on his charm and announced that he and Smythe were already in show business, as animators. Basking in the glow of the men’s celebrity, the girls agreed to go out again the next night. By the third night, Sullivan had convinced Alice to go out alone, just the two of them.

      A week later, police showed up at the studio and arrested the animators. Smythe was charged with “abduction,” a charge eventually lowered to “impairing morals,” while Sullivan was charged with statutory rape. During the trial that followed, animator George Clardy testified that Sullivan had shown up the morning after his outing with Alice, bragging that “he had screwed the dark one.”

      “He told me that if I didn’t undress he’d undress me,” Alice told the courtroom during the trial. “After he had intercourse with me the first time I bled,” she continued. “He got me a drink of water. Then he had intercourse with me again later on. Then he had intercourse with me again . . .” The next morning, Sullivan told her “that he had made a regular girl of me,” she quietly continued. The trial uncovered other details revealing that the encounter wasn’t consensual, not to mention that Alice was underage. After seeking help, Alice learned that she had also contracted a venereal disease, almost certainly from Sullivan.

      Sullivan’s wife, Marjorie, asked the judge for leniency in a letter written on studio stationery and decorated with images of Sammy Johnsin. Sullivan’s lawyer argued for the same on the grounds of his client’s budding career as an animator. Persuaded by this argument, the judge sentenced Sullivan to two years in prison instead of the maximum ten, calling him “a man of very considerable ability.” Within days, Sullivan was sent to Sing Sing Prison, a gray clutch of stone buildings on the bank of the Hudson River thirty miles upstream from New York City. Serving only nine months of his sentence, Sullivan appeared to spend more time corresponding with his lawyer than he did with Marjorie, decorating his letters with doodles of Sammy Johnsin living prison life. In one, Sammy wears a striped uniform while busting rocks in the prison yard with a sledgehammer. “Golly ids is a skinch!” Sammy says in his pidgin English. “Think ob de poor goop dats gotter dig dese hyah rocks outer de quarry fo’ me—an all ah gotter do is smash em!!”

      Sullivan’s studio disbanded while he was away but reopened when he was released from prison. On July 6, 1918, when the Motion Picture News announced Sullivan’s return to “Cartoon Making,” it didn’t mention where he had been in the interim, nor would any of the many articles that would come afterward. When Messmer returned from France eleven months later, he found the studio barely survivng. Needing a job, he went back to work for his boss, and their relationship returned to its former pattern: Sullivan drumming up new business while Messmer handled the creative work. They started making the Chaplin cartoons again, as well as short parodies of travelogue films, which had become popular in theaters.

      By 1919, the studio was so busy it sometimes had to turn away job offers. That year, Earl Hurd, who worked for John Bray and had helped come up with cel technology, approached the studio to ask if it had any extra material to sell. He was putting together a package of films for Paramount and was short some cartoons.

      Sullivan almost said no but hesitated because Messmer wanted to pitch something new. “If you want to do it on the side, you can do any little thing to satisfy them,” Sullivan told him. He then stressed that this wouldn’t be freelance work for which Messmer would be paid separately; Sullivan would still enjoy profits and credit on work Messmer did in his spare time. Messmer agreed.

      Messmer tackled the side job on nights and weekends. His first task was coming up with a new character; he settled on an all-black cat because that design required less time to draw. Using one block of color saved him “making a lot of outlines, and solid black moves better,” he recalled. His sample cartoon, called Feline Follies, featured the cat—which would soon be named Felix—committing suicide in order to avoid the drudgery of domestic life after he knocks up his girlfriend, Miss Kitty White. It pushed the envelope and might have been in poor taste, but Paramount executive John King, who couldn’t stop laughing, loved it anyway. This is when King told Messmer to “make us another.”

      Felix’s rise to fame was meteoric, a big bang moment. The name Felix was used for the first time in the character’s third film, The Adventures of Felix, released in December 1919, a date that sat on the edge of a new decade and big changes. The war was over and the world was ready to move on, to tip into the Jazz Age.

      Felix stars alongside an animated version of Charlie Chaplin in Felix in Hollywood СКАЧАТЬ