Via Jaime Weinman, I see that Hogan’s Alley has posted historian Jim Korkis’s 1982 interview with animation writer Bill Scott. Even if you’re not interested in his work for Jay Ward, there are still plenty of great anecdotes about him working as a writer at Warners, getting fired by Bob Clampett after asking for a raise, and how his status as a “Warner guy” at UPA was the “kiss of death”.
Below is the first cartoon he wrote for Art Davis (with Lloyd Turner), presented in all of its 16mm Cinecolor glory. Davis’s cartoons tend to be a little vacuous compared to the other directors, save when it’s a stronger story like Doggone Cats. In more Warner-centric interviews, Scott said Davis was more concerned with the layouts and animation than the story work, hence their visual sheen. Some animation fans rank Davis higher than Bob McKimson, another brilliant animator who became a director without a feel for story, but beneath the glitter of Emery Hawkins and Bill Melendez, a lot of Davis’s entries in the Warner canon are little more than trussed-up Screen Gems scripts (see Bone Sweet Bone, The Rattled Rooster, most of his Porky Pig cartoons). Unsurprising, of course, given Davis was a director of a sizable number of Columbia cartoons.
I’ve had an animator breakdown video for what’s arguably Davis’s best film, What Makes Daffy Duck, on my harddrive for almost two years now. I’ll dust it off and work on posting it sometime in the next week.
The Jay Ward stuff is interesting in its own right too, especially the part about Rocky and Bullwinkle being animated domestically towards the end.
I’m curious about the whole UPA thing. Didn’t Maltese, Piece and Chuck Jones moonlight on some of UPA’s earliest shorts? Didn’t Rod Scribner and Bill Melendez have tours of duty at UPA? Interesting to see what poor esteem WB was held in given that.
It was a matter of the way you were perceived. Melendez was very critical of Warners for years before changing his mind, and by the time Scribner was there, he was out of his mind and the studio was down the toilet anyway. Mike Barrier says in his book that the act of the Warner artists working on the story for ROBIN HOODLUM (really UPA’s pilot film with Columbia Pictures) was more or less like an electrician coming in to fix the wiring, and I think that’s a very astute comment regarding UPA’s attitude towards that episode.
Scott’s lack of aversion for Warner Brothers’ style cartoons and their humor no doubt goes a long way towards explaining why Rocky & His Friends were a success on TV, since he didn’t buy into the mindset that graphic design was the driving force behind a cartoon, and everything else was simply in service of showcasing that design. The Ward ‘look’ was UPA on a food stamp budget, but thanks to Bill, Jay and others (including bad Mexican animators), they understood that if the stories weren’t funny, the entire enterprise collapses.
UPA’s bile towards Disney is a tad understandable — Walt had canned or feuded with some of their key artists, and they saw him as risk adverse to new ideas. But their antipathy towards the Warners’ studio that basically spawned their style and mentored them through their earliest works, comes across almost like a studio-v.-studio version of the 1950s Bugs-Daffy rivalry, with the mallard-like UPA wondering why the other got all the audience appreciation while it was obvious their studio had all the talent (the highbrow critics could shower UPA with all the huzzahs in the world and the Academy could give them Oscars, but the audience knew better by the mid-50s — the TV debut in 1956 of “The Gerald McBoing Boing Show” is almost a perfect metaphor for Daffy’s Jeepers Creepers dance from “Show Biz Bugs”, generating all sorts of energy into the efforts and producing crickets from the crowd, while Bugs effortlessly sticks his head out from behind the curtain in the form of the 1956 AAP package of old WB toons and generates gianormous ratings, huge profits for Eliot Hyman, and spawns a 40-year network TV run in 1960. “Stop applauding! It’s a fake!”).
That was amazing.
I tend to enjoy Davis’s cartoons very much. They’re sort of in their own world, much different from the other directors, like you stated on here.
Aside from this cartoon, my favorite Davis Warners cartoons are DOUGH RAY ME-OW, BYE BLUEBEARD, ODOR OF THE DAY, THE FOXY DUCKLING, TWO GOPHERS FROM TEXAS, HOLIDAY FOR DRUMSTICKS and BOWERY BUGS. Of course, there were some misfires (I mean, what was the point of giving away the ending early in BONE SWEET BONE?) He may not have cemented a new, particular style in his cartoons, but I find he was actually a competent director, especially with clever storymen (Sid Marcus and Lloyd Turner/Bill Scott) and superb animators (Emery Hawkins and Bill Melendez) under his belt.
Davis’ style tends to be more scattershot than McKimson’s cartoons – it certainly hits its targets well, but the difference between him and Clampett … Clampett would push all the elements of a story into the same direction, and shoot them all in a row without aiming, and it’d be wild, but it’d hit. Davis would aim as carefully as he could, but when he fired – tried to make the cartoons – they turn into the not-shit-giving period of Screen Gems.
Davis’ cartoons with Lloyd and Bill have such wit to their writing, although most of the alliteration might have been Bill’s. When he brought in Sid Marcus (Bye Bye Bluebeard) , it was the cheapest of Lantz formulas – food and maniacs.
OH! The scene in ‘What Makes Daffy Duck’ – of the race to the old dead tree – is the bulk of that Melendez (as I’ve identified it) or Davidovich (as a friend of mine did)? It’s one of my favorite scenes in any cartoon anyplace….
Yes, a lot of that sequence is by Bill Melenedez. I wouldn’t sell Turner too short either. He wrote DOUGH RAY ME-OW solo, and that’s easily one of Davis’s best.
I wouldn’t be that down on Sid’s writing — his opening soliloquy for the Shakespearean dog for McKimson’s (nee Artie’s) “A Ham in a Role” is the most eloquent jibe at the budding anti-Warners style cartoon criticism from the ‘elite’ film critics that was bubbling under the surface even before UPA became UPA!
(…which, BTW, is one of the other annoying things about the studio’s mindset — while Avery, Clampett and others made fun of Disney, they never disrespected the effort he put into developing animation and the rules that Warners then used to make their cartoons. In contrast, as Scott notes, there was a mindset at UPA that didn’t just want to make different cartoons, they wanted to denigrate they styles of the others that came before them, even if the foundations of the UPA look came out of places like Disney (the Baby Weems sequence) and Warners.
There were already critics out there who — to paraphrase Leonard Maltin’s book — wanted to grind Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck into dust before UPA hit it big. The studio’s early success gave the critics a cudgel to use against Warners and Walt, and too many of those at UPA were perfectly happy to be the instrument to attack the works of their rival studios, to the point that those same critics didn’t care if UPA was producing stupefying crap — six minutes of wallpaper designs with the excitement of watching paint dry. It would be praised as long as it wasn’t that conventional drawing style or contained mindless cartoon violence).
To be fair, Robert McKimson had his own share of misfire cartoons as Davis did, but personally, I’d still consider Arthur Davis as one of the best “lesser” artists of the Termite Terrace, not just as a director, but also as an animator for Frank Tashlin and Friz Freleng’s units.
While Davis’ directional work was not up to the level of Chuck Jones or Bob Clampett, I still enjoy Davis’ cartoons almost as much as the other two directors. “Riff Raffy Daffy” is one of my all-time favorite LT shorts (The Daffy and Porky rivalry at its finest.