Wild Minds. Reid Mitenbuler
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Название: Wild Minds
Автор: Reid Mitenbuler
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Кинематограф, театр
isbn: 9780802147059
isbn:
Animation was quickly becoming a competitive field, full of new ideas. The new methods pioneered by men like Bray and Barré now allowed small crews of three or four animators to make a short cartoon in less than a month, compared with the eighteen months it took Bray to make The Artist’s Dream. Their upstart studios were able to release a regular stream of material to theaters, so long as they kept creating ideas. For his part, McCay continued down his own path, tackling ambitious material that he released only sporadically. Newcomers to the industry respected him for his artistry, but considered Bray's and Barré’s model the best way to make a living. They knew that, if animation were to survive and become more than a novelty, it would need to be profitable. The industry was still in its infancy but beginning to attract more and more talent.
Chapter 4
“The Camera Fiend”
One evening in 1914, Waldemar Kaempffert, editor of Popular Science magazine, took his wife to the movies. Before the main feature started, one of John Bray’s cartoons from the Colonel Heeza Liar series flickered up on the screen. Kaempffert’s wife responded by slumping down in her seat and groaning, “Oh, how I hate these things.”
The next morning at work, Kaempffert was complaining about how Bray’s cartoon had almost ruined his date night with Mrs. Kaempffert. Listening from the doorway was the magazine’s young art editor, Max Fleischer. Kaempffert explained that the cartoon’s concept wasn’t bad, but the execution was poor—the picture was wobbly and the movement jerky. He thought Fleischer might be able to do better. “Max, you’re a bright young man,” he said. “You’re an artist, you understand mechanics, and machinery, and photography, and you’ve got a scientific mind. Surely you can come up with some idea, some way to make animated cartoons look better, smoother, and more lifelike.”
Fleischer came from a long family line of people who enjoyed tackling such challenges. His father, a tailor by trade, was a constant tinkerer who had invented the detachable-faced brass buttons that allowed police officers to shine them without smudging their uniforms with polish; his brother Joe had built a wireless radio that allowed him to hear about the Titanic sinking before it was in the news; and his brother Charlie had invented the penny arcade claw-digger machine. Max likewise understood machines and instruments, loved touching them, loved the smell and language of workshops and labs. At thirty-one years old, he had spent the previous decade working, in one form or another, on all the different aspects that composed animation: drawing, photography, mechanics. In a previous stint as a cartoonist at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, he had even created a comic strip, E. K. Sposher, the Camera Fiend, specifically about photography. Now, animation offered Fleischer a chance to combine his two great loves: art and engineering. “To me, machinery was an art also,” he would later write. “I still see great art in machinery.”
Fleischer took up Kaempffert’s challenge by designing a machine consisting of a projector and a glass drawing board with a camera dangling above it. The idea was to film an action scene—a person dancing, for example—and then project the images onto the glass drawing board, where a person could then trace them. The timing of the camera would hopefully help smooth the motion. He called his device a “rotoscope.”
Illustration from Max Fleischer’s rotoscope patent application.
Fleischer’s younger brother Dave was excited when he heard about the idea. Both had seen Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur earlier that year and left the theater enchanted. The film inspired Dave to begin taking whatever paper was at hand—notebooks, phone books, etc.—and create flipbooks. His favorite subjects were scenes to accompany popular songs of the day, creating a kind of precursor to music videos. Earlier that year, Dave had taken a film-editing job for Pathé in Fort Lee, in the hope of starting a career in film. “Dave was fascinated by it,” Max recalled about his rotoscope idea. “He couldn’t sleep anymore.”
The brothers got to work building their rotoscope, enlisting the help of the three other Fleischer brothers, Charlie, Joe, and Lou. Because of their day jobs, they worked in Max’s living room until the small hours of the morning, often around four o’clock, trying not to wake Max’s wife, Essie, sleeping in the next room. Essie, “a five foot three firecracker with a constantly smoking short fuse and a slightly broken nose that was never properly set,” as her son Richard would later describe her, had a vicious temper that Max and his brothers didn’t want to upset. But besides her temper she was otherwise supportive. When Max told her he had spent all their savings, about $100, on his rotoscope idea, she didn’t blow up as the brothers expected; instead, she went off to the bedroom and came back with $150 she had saved on her own—she had a heavy gambling habit and was currently in the black. Handing the money over to Max, she told him, “This is for your crazy idea.”
Once the rotoscope was finished, Max Fleischer got hold of a Charlie Chaplin film. The brothers spent eight months tracing every move of the star’s jaunty waddle, feeling their way through the process, not always fully aware of other animators’ advancements—it was a learning time for all. Again, they worked in Max’s living room late into the night, bleary-eyed when the morning sun peeked through the curtains. Once they finished rotoscoping and tracing, the final cartoon was three minutes long. The brothers were pleased with the result.
Fleischer tried showing the cartoon to film distributors but could get meetings with only two. Once the first one saw it, he looked at Max and asked, “That’s very nice. What are you going to do with it?”
“I don’t know,” Fleischer answered. “I just thought it was something, that’s all.”
“Could you make one of these a week?”
Fleischer laughed at the question—this had taken him nearly a year. He could probably do it faster the second time, but not much faster.
“My dear fellow,” the distributor advised. “Go home and make something practical. If you had something we could offer for sale every week, or every month, you’d have something.”
Fleischer’s second appointment was with J. A. Berst, an executive at Pathé who admired the quality of the brothers’ animation but didn’t want to buy it—what if Chaplin sued? Fleischer was crestfallen, berating himself for not thinking of the legal angle. But Brest was encouraging nonetheless. He invited Fleischer to return once he had something original. After Max shared this news with Dave, Dave came up with an idea.
Max and Dave Fleischer were a good pairing, but not without their differences. Max dressed impeccably, his suits neatly tailored and his Chaplinesque dab of a mustache always precisely manicured. Dave was sloppier, his hair wild and his shirttails sometimes untucked—he had only a nodding acquaintance with decorum. Max’s courtship with Essie was relatively formal, while Dave had proposed to his wife, Ida Sharnow, on Halloween night by handing her a bag of candy with a ring at the bottom.
When Max presented the challenge of creating an original character, Dave recalled his days working as a clown on the Coney Island boardwalk. This was when Coney Island was a rough place of conmen and pickpockets, of lipstick-smeared prostitutes СКАЧАТЬ