Mr. Katz reared back on his fat feet. One thing one did not do is fool around with bar mitzvahs … Yahweh might be watching. Giving Cal an “Uh” of understanding and backtracking on crepe-lined shoes, he retreated to the safe harbor of his hidey-hole.
Inconsistency is the handmaiden of artistry, and the Warner Bros, directors, animators, and writers were indeed a laboratory for creative inconsistency, for unanticipated mutations, for happy accidents—a primal soup to discover the delight of the undiscovered. A place ideal for this ill-paid, enthusiastic, frolicsome group. Yes, a group never gathered before or since: how lucky we were.
Coyote demonstrating selfdestructive ingenuity
Elmer Wait was a fine young assistant animator who died very young, a lost talent who deserves some recognition, so I will say only that Elmer Wait couldn’t sleep at work. Insomnia is the most debilitating of all disorders, but to the young minds of young animators, almost any misfortune can, if carefully analyzed, be put to some use in the war with the front office. Wakefulness by itself is a hindrance rather than an advantage, but was it possible that there were other unexplored latent uses that could be tandemly harnessed to Elmer Wait’s insomnia that would serve for the good of all? Indeed there were: Smokey Garner, the dear Swamp Rabbit of sainted memory and equal genius, had among his many talents the necessary ability to weave tiny invisible wires through the cobwebbed metal rafters descending from the ceilings of our dusty habitat.
The command post was at Elmer Wait’s desk, which fortunately was in the first cubicle to be passed by intruders from the front office on their nefarious and intrusive incursions into our sacred domain.
McGrew’s pseudobiblical lament, 1939
Elmer Wait’s eyes would have done credit to a rattlesnake; he could detect a movement so slight that it might be the nervous tic on a butterfly’s face, and so Ray Katz, even though he wore gum shoes, was clearly mismatched in evading Elmer’s lightning-like peripheral vision.
Mr. Katz never was able to associate Elmer’s oily-tempered blue-steel eyes with his, Ray Katz’s, inability to ever catch any animator sleeping, loafing, daydreaming, or doing anything but working. The one thing that was clear to Mr. Katz was that animators should be drawing. What they should be drawing he did not know, but draw they must or he would know the reason why. Even the term “drawing” was a little obscure to Ray Katz, who once commented on a director’s observation that the brilliant designer John McGrew “can certainly draw, can’t he?” Mr. Katz would have none of this nonsense: “Of course he can draw; he’s an artist, isn’t he?”
So Mr. Katz knew not that Elmer Wait’s eye and Elmer Wait’s thumb were connected, or that when he, Mr. Katz, passed Elmer Wait’s doorway (there was no door—in Mr. Katz’s philosophy, privacy leads to trouble, as has been proven by the fat brains of fat brass in lavatories of any army camp), so, as Mr. Katz, like Pippa, passed Elmer Wait’s cubicle, Elmer Wait’s thumb would press a small red button under the angle of his drawing board and small red lights would pop on all over the studio, tucked under the lowest shelves of the drawing-and-animation boards of every animator, layout man, background man, director, and writer; and every animator, background man, layout man, director, and writer would either awaken or be shaken awake by an alert young associate, and any sign of lethargy was immediately dispelled, to be replaced by an entire staff drawing at such a breakneck pace they could have completed an entire animated cartoon in one day. This frenetic appearance, so endearing to the front office, was so patently false that an intellect only slightly more spry than a retarded wombat’s would have realized something was amiss. But Mr. Katz took only joy in this spurious scene.
A more observant executive in another studio had once noted that an animator who had been sleeping face-down on his peg-studded drawing board might appear to be working diligently but the two or three small red spots on his forehead indicated that he had certainly been sleeping only a few moments before. Not that we expected such deductive abilities from Mr. Katz, but just to be safe, doctoring those spots with a little panchromatic makeup was considered good form.
The euphoric placidity enjoyed by Mr. Katz at the sight of his industrious animators was soon shattered on his next stop by the scene that met his eyes, creating a puzzlement that he carried to his grave. This stop was at one of the large story rooms, where most of the writers and directors had immediately congregated at the tocsin call of the early warning system. If his knowledge of the duty of an animator was abysmal, his knowledge of what went on in the directional division was, on a scale of one to ten, a minus one. A sluggish slug would soon have discerned what escaped Ray Katz: writers and directors wrote and directed animated cartoons by the development of storyboards, very similar to gigantic Sunday comic strips—one hundred fifty 3 × 5 inch sketches thumbtacked to a framed 4 × 8 foot storyboard. It was somewhat difficult to grasp the fact that animation writers do not write but draw, and animation directors do direct but draw also. The only thing that Ray could gather from all this was that “lotsa” drawings were “good” and that no drawings at all were—as another intellect by the name of Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom once said upon noticing his first solar eclipse: “Gee, dat’s bad, ain’t it?”
So when, rich in the production euphoria of his view of his industrious animation staff, he burst into the story room expecting live energetic action, poor Ray Katz never, never in all those years found a writer or director working. Since he didn’t know
