We had been doing work, of course, before the little red lights went on. But our energetic love for what we did we were reluctant to demonstrate in the face of the enemy. So the scene that invariably greeted the bulging eyes of Mr. Katz was always the same: one of us would be reading a newspaper, another energetically shining his shoes, another lazily drinking a Coke, another sleeping and making little whimpering sounds to prove it, and finally—aha!—one of us would actually be writing. However, he would stop at the advent of Mr. Katz, crumple up the paper, toss it in a desultory way into the wastepaper basket, and pick up the racing form. But the horror of the matter was that the storyboard was empty. Mr. Katz would then indulge in his only form of communication: rocking back and forth on his heels and toes and clucking like a hen. Whereupon everyone in the room would cluck back. In the face of this never-anticipated response, Mr. Katz would beat a hasty retreat, inadvertently triggering the “off” button in Elmer Wait’s cubicle as he passed to his sanctuary.
Fake Jones, 1941
Several hours later his door would slide silently open and he would tiptoe down the hall—red alert!—to find again his little elves hammering out drawings like the little machines he supposed them to be—and once again Mr. Katz would be completely unprepared for the dreadful experience in the story room: Mr. Katz would open the door and find the same person who two hours before had been shining his shoes still shining his shoes, the same person drinking the same Coke, the same person reading the same page of the same newspaper, and so on. A tableau of sameness, with one small altered detail: there were now forty or fifty sketches firmly pinned to the storyboard. If you have ever heard a six-foot blue chicken cluck in bewilderment, you will need no further explanation from me, but it may be that you have never heard five or six animation directors and writers sympathetically cluck back in response. I can tell you: that, my dears, is great music.
Those little dancing stick figures that most children learn to draw on the corners of tablets or textbooks are the essential tools of animation. The flipping of them into a gyrating frenzy is a precise parallel to putting them sequentially under a camera and, in essence, flipping them through a projector to a screen for the observation of larger audiences.
Hijinks: HIGH NOTE (1960)
Anyone but Ray Katz would gather then that flipping a sheaf of drawings is the classic test for the animator. Having completed a series of drawings for a given piece of action, before the in-between drawings are added, the animator becomes his own test camera by flipping his drawings, just as he did in grammar school. However, this constant and repetitive flipping by every member of every unit, sixty or seventy people, continued to be a mystery, a puzzlement, an enigma to Mr. Katz.
Eighteen years of observation eventually bore fruit: Mr. Katz decided to avoid licking this whole matter of flipping by joining it. He, too, would flip.
No sooner said than done. One fine memorable morning, with the enormous confidence born of sheer ignorance, he strode into the music room, where two directors and story men had joined our composer Carl Stalling to go over the score of a soon-to-be-recorded film. The music score of this film, thirty or forty pages of bar sheets, rested comfortably on the desk top as Ray Katz walked in, determined to become one of the boys; if they could flip, he could flip. Casually he picked up the unoffending music score and, under the fascinated and glazed gaze of those present, moved to the window for better light and carefully flipped the music score two or three times. Then nodding and grunting his appreciation of the artistry therein, departed, clucking to the group on his way out. The term “dumbfounded” found new meaning that day, as did “delight.”
Left to right, standing: (?) Jones (unrelated), John McGrew, Bob Givens, Richard Kent Jones (related), C. Jones, Alex Ignatiev, Roy Laufenburger, Rich Hogan, Ken Harris, Phil Monroe; in front: Jack Phillips, Bobe Cannon, unidentified, Phil DeLara, Rudy Larriva, Ben Washam, Paul Julian (1940)
And that is how it came about that every succeeding music score was presented to Mr. Katz to be flipped for his endorsement and his professional and artistic approval.
Another strange and wonderful denizen of our sacred halls was the patrician Edward Stacey Pierce III, as different from writer Cal Howard as Groucho Marx was from Harpo. If Edward Stacey Pierce (sometimes known as Tedd Pierce—with two “d”s) were to conduct a tour of the studio, it might have gone something like this:
“Here,” says Mr. Pierce III, taking your arm and entering a dark tunnel, “is the alimentary canal of this rabbit factory. On the right is the ink-and-paint department, peopled by a gathering of females unique in the world, topped only by the gin-alley sequence from Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress. It is overseen by Florence Finklehor. Out of these portals each week pour four to five thousand inked and painted ‘cels’—short for celluloids—ready to be gobbled up by the adjoining camera room. The camera crane upon which the camera sits is, aptly enough, an Acme, since every bit of hardware from an egg crate to a factory was always Acme. On the left side of this miserable hall is the larger sweatbox known as the projection room. As we enter this torture chamber you will note that the rabble sits in decayed church pews pirated from some decayed Warner feature, Our Dancing Dung Beetles or some such. At the back of this peeling parody of an auditorium you will note a golden throne, flaking and eczema-like to be sure, but nevertheless the
