Wild Minds. Reid Mitenbuler

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СКАЧАТЬ the Fleischers. By 1928, he would shutter his entertainment division in order to focus on military films, which he would make well into the Cold War. He would also become the auto industry’s biggest provider of training films.

      Bray’s new priorities prompted the Fleischers to leave and start their own studio in 1921. Named Out of the Inkwell Films, Inc., it had humble beginnings, operating out of a dingy basement apartment at 129 East 45th Street, just beneath the groaning floorboards of an old brothel.

      How Max Fleischer got the financing to start his own studio was never quite clear. Judging by the colorful stories passed around about the family’s gambling habits, this murkiness might have been intentional. Not only was Essie Fleischer a regular at the racetrack, she liked organizing poker games, where she smoked cigars and pipes alongside the men and ordered her scotch “neat—no water, no soda, no ice, just scotch,” according to her son. From what were probably gambling winnings, she had given Max the money he needed to finish designing his rotoscope, and perhaps a similar arrangement was in play with the new studio. Perhaps not coincidentally, Dave Fleischer won $50,000 gambling on horses just before the Fleischers left Bray. Whatever the case, the Fleischers were never particularly clear about their financing.

      One of Max Fleischer’s children later speculated that some money might have come from a distributor named Margaret Wink­ler. A scrappy immigrant from Hungary, Winkler got her start in the film industry in 1912, at the age of seventeen, working as a secretary for Harry Warner of Warner Bros. When Warner decided to shed the studio’s cartoon distribution deals in the early 1920s—he was not yet convinced that cartoons had staying power—he gave them to Winkler. Not only did he admire her competence, but her bicoastal contacts—made during the years when Warner Bros. was expanding its business into California—were an important qualification for a good distributor. Soon she had worked her way into a deal distributing the Felix cartoons, the most popular series on the market. Signing a distribution agreement for the increasingly popular Fleischer cartoons, which the brothers were trying to distribute themselves, was likewise a shrewd business move.

      The arrangement with Winkler was also useful for Max Fleischer. Good distribution could make or break a film’s success, and a skilled distributor like Winkler was crucial. The job meant navigating a complex set of rules known as the “states rights method,” a corrupt and murky system that guided how films were distributed. Under this system, film prints were first sold to brokers, who then distributed them to theaters in a given territory, oftentimes underreporting their numbers and skimming from the percentage owed to the producer. In other cases, brokers sometimes made illegal copies of a film, distributed those, and pocketed the full take. A successful distributor like Winkler had to be part accountant, part bouncer. Her colleagues noted that most of her success was because of her “quick mind,” though others added that her “short temper” also proved handy.

      Winkler was also one of the few women in the industry with any real power or influence. Because she knew that some people were wary of doing business with a woman, she used the initials “M. J.,” in “M. J. Winkler Productions,” as a way of hiding her gender (The “J.” in her initials had been made up since she didn’t actually have a middle name.) “How did you do it?” a newspaper reporter once asked Winkler in 1923. “Are people surprised to find out that M. J. Winkler Productions is owned by a woman?”

      Winkler would smile politely at such questions, well aware of the obstacles impeding women in her line of work. “I think the industry is full of wonderful possibilities for an ambitious woman,” she said. “And there is no reason why she shouldn’t be able to conduct business as well as the men.” Some men were threatened when they first met her, she explained, “but they got over it.”

      As the Out of the Inkwell series grew in popularity, the Fleischers upgraded their studio in 1923. The space beneath the funky old brothel was exchanged for the spacious sixth floor of 1600 Broadway, an impressive tower of elegantly curved brick archways located near the bright lights of Times Square. The staff numbered nearly two dozen now, and included the important addition of Richard “Dick” Huemer, an animator who had previously worked for Raoul Barré. Huemer helped redesign Koko and conceptualize for him a pet dog named Fitz, a sidekick whose main role seemed to be getting Koko into trouble.

      As the studio grew, Max and Dave settled into a division of labor. Even though Max’s name was bigger than Dave’s in the credits, the studio’s cartoons reflected Dave’s personality equally. Max handled a fair amount of creative work, but also most of the back-office administration: phone calls, payroll, meetings organized around lunch. Dave’s responsibilities were almost entirely creative: directing cartoons, initiating story ideas, dreaming up gags. His informal directorial style usually started with a general idea upon which the staff would riff—he avoided storyboards and most other forms of organized structure. Individual animators were free to add pretty much any idea, so long as it got laughs. In this way, what the films lacked in gloss they usually made up for in energy. The studio animators also reduced their use of the rotoscope, preferring instead to let their imagination steer the action.

      In 1923, shortly after moving into his new studio, Max Fleischer decided to take animation in a new direction. This didn’t mean drastic changes to the Out of the Inkwell series, which had settled into a nice groove; it meant exploring ideas that weren’t strictly comedy.

      Ever since Albert Einstein published his general theory of relativity in 1915, Fleischer had been fascinated by it. The theory had revolutionized how scientists thought about space and time, but very few laypeople understood it. It was just the sort of puzzle Fleischer had once worked on as art editor of Popular Science magazine, and he thought animation might help explain the concept.

      He started by enlisting the help of Professor Garrett P. Serviss, a science writer for the New York American whose mind “worked at the speed of light,” Fleischer liked to joke. Soon after the two men began working together, however, they clashed over how best to translate Einstein’s complex ideas. Serviss was a literal-minded scientist, uncomfortable with making the leaps of faith that good storytelling often requires. Fleischer was sympathetic, but also knew that audiences become confused by too many details. After Fleischer suggested using a title card that read, “When you see the stars twinkle,” Serviss pounded his fists on the table in angry disagreement, arguing that stars don’t actually twinkle, and that such effects are actually just an illusion.

      Fleischer pleaded with Serviss to see things like a storyteller. “Poets make pictures,” Max explained. “They paint with words, but give you a mental picture nonetheless, and since the world has poets and people like poetry, in my opinion it is correct to say that the stars ‘twinkle’ as I think they do.”

      Serviss rose from his seat and continued pounding the desk. “I will not go any further, nor will I permit the use of my name in connection with a gross misrepresentation of scientific fact!” he roared. “It’s too bad that after sixty years of scientific writing for the public, here comes Max Fleischer trying to tell me what is right or wrong to say.”

      Fleischer gave Serviss a few days to cool off, then tried again. People can reread confusing sections of articles, he calmly explained, but they have a harder time rewatching films. “We must tell our audience these facts in a language they understand the first time,” he said. Serviss finally relented but refused to watch the “stars twinkle” segment whenever it came up on the screen. “It amused me,” Fleischer remembered. “But Professor Serviss was a true scientist.”

      When Albert Einstein saw the film, titled The Einstein Theory of Relativity, he was impressed enough to write Fleischer a fan letter. Other reviewers were equally positive, lauding the film for staying as simple as possible. “They have wisely confined themselves almost entirely to the more popular aspects of this complicated theory and have not attempted to delve deeply into the sections regarding the fourth dimension and the bending СКАЧАТЬ