However labor-intensive, they were actually cheaper to make than damn-the-budget live action. So in the 1990s animated features were enjoying a comeback after decades of eclipse. Today's overhead-color, special effects, union scale boosts-costs easily another fivefold. For an early-90s equivalent try multiplying by about 10. Someone less tactful once said Jack's suits had rubber pockets so he could steal soup. Well, it's just as easy to dream for $700,000 as for $1,500,000." (Meanwhile, over at the Disney dream-factory, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was running up a tab-for a venture in animation!-of more than the million-and-a-half that gave Harry Warner shudders at night.) He cited Harry Warner: "Listen, a picture, all it is is an expensive dream. Mustaches after all came cheap, and "cut-rate dreaming" was the Fortune writer's phrase for the whole operation. I am sure that the mustache is the thing for this picture." (That was Lives of a Bengal Lancer. Around the same time, Jack Warner's attention was being mesmerized by the tint of Errol Flynn's mustache: "The mustache certainly looks good. An in-house memo of 1937-not from a Warner but in the Warner spirit-instructs a director not to "pump too much fog into the foreground in gusts." Artistic criteria? Fiscal? Uncertain. They preferred, too, darkness and fog, because sets you couldn't see didn't need constructing. In the pre-war decade when the house style was established, the Warners tended to concentrate on pictures one male actor-Paul Muni, Jimmy Cagney-could dominate. avoided co-starred features because those would mean paying two stars. I didn’t know about his ability to engage people until after he died,” she said, adding she hoped the exhibition would provide “enjoyment, entertainment and inspiration to people to be themselves, to find genius in themselves."Īfter closing at the Museum of the Moving Image next January, the exhibition will travel to the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History and EMP Museum in Seattle, followed by stops at other institutions that have not yet been identified.Jack Warner, whom Fortune in 1937 called "a jocose penny-watcher," saw to it that Warner Bros. “He’s always been special to me, but he was my father. Linda Jones, Jones’ only child and a trustee of the Chuck Jones Center for Creativity, who worked on the exhibition for three years, said she was surprised by how much people cared about her father. He thought of cartoons as pieces of music. Like Keaton and Chaplin in silent films, he created universal, iconic characters. In an interview this week, Schwartz said that the “greatest aspect” of Jones’ art was “the personality of his characters. In addition to Lasseter, his many fans include directors Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard the late science fiction writer, Ray Bradbury and actors Whoopi Goldberg and Robin Williams, who presented Jones with an Oscar for lifetime achievement in 1996. Seuss his mastery of comic timing and the influence of slapstick and vaudeville on his work and his influence on contemporary animation. the films he made after leaving there, some done in collaboration with Theodor Geisel, the children’s book author, Dr. The exhibition looks at the development of Jones’ characteristic style at Warner Bros. The exhibit also features 136 original sketches and drawings, storyboards, production backgrounds, animation cels and photographs that illustrate how Jones and his collaborators worked and his creative legacy. Monitors and large wall projectors in the exhibition show six of his full-length films, including “What’s Opera, Doc?” and his Academy Award-winning short, “The Dot and the Line,” plus excerpts from 19 others and two new documentaries on him. In a career that spanned almost 70 years, Jones, who died in 2002 at the age of 89, made over 250 films and won numerous awards, working at the Warner Brothers animation studio from the early 1930s until it closed in 1962, then at MGM Studios and later at his own company. David Schwartz, chief curator of the Museum of the Moving Image and a co-curator of the exhibition, called Jones “one of the enduring geniuses of American comedy, as accomplished in the art of animation as his hero Mark Twain was in literature.” And John Lasseter, chief creative officer of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios and director of the first two “Toy Story” movies, said Jones’ cartoons are timeless, “as funny today as when they were made.”
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