“Is the studio contemplating an animated feature?” one might ask.
Leon Schlesinger, with unknown object in right foreground
Tedd’s reply: “Mr. Schlesinger’s initial response on seeing Snow White was delivered with his usual amazing grace: ‘I need a feature cartoon like I need two assholes.’”
On the next door, beneath the word Men, someone has written:
LES PECKERAYS DE CAVALIERS RELIEVES VOUS DANS CETTE ROOM
“Mike Maltese’s Pepé Le Pew fractured French,” Tedd might say. “It can be found throughout this theater of delights.”
He points across the hall. Across the way, another door displays this legend:
BEYONDEZ-VOUS CETTE DOOR EST LE BOX-D-SWEAT EXISTEZ ICI BEAUCOUP DE FILME-FLAMABLEZ-MUCHO DOWZEZ-VOUX TOUTE DE CIGARETTES BEFOREZ VOUS ENTREZ, SILVER PLATE
“Basically,” says Mr. Pierce admiringly, “it means ‘No Smoking.’ The sign on the ladies’ room upstairs more simply states:
“LA BELLE FEMME PUSSÉ RECLINEAU DANS CETTE ROOM.”
“Does everyone around here speak like Pepé Le Pew?” you ask.
“One nice thing about Pepé Le Pewese is it confuses management.” It is obvious that Mr. Pierce considers anything that confuses management automatically justified.
A pink guardsman’s mustache dominates the face of another young man hanging his body half out of a doorway and extending a handsome watercolor: “Would you say there is an ineluctable modality to these nimbi?”
“If you mean clouds, why don’t you say clouds?” says Pierce III. “You’ve been reading too much Joyce. Paul Julian, background artist or layout man. These strange creatures are a breed apart. This one also speaks Gaelic”—pause—“but with such a strong Erse accent that you can hardly understand him. On the left again, the murky habitat of Smokey, also known as Swamp Rabbit, aka Henry Garner, our test cameraman. The genius with the wonderful green thumbs of the inspired mechanic.”
Farther on the left, through an open door, a dark-haired young man can be seen furiously pursuing a fly with a rapier. “As you can see—a different breed,” Mr. Pierce III points out. “Old Bob Holdeman here, one of our layout men, once bisected a live light cord with that sword, improved the speed of his background output for several hours.”
A huge room is to the right, lined by a series of walled cubicles, each containing two desks, the backs facing outward, concealing the activities, illicit or otherwise, of the inhabitants.
“This is Chuck Jones’s animation unit, sometimes called Unit A,” says Mr. Pierce III. “Animators and in-betweeners live here. ‘In-betweener’ is an esoteric term for those who insert drawings between the animator’s drawings, which in turn are known as ‘extremes.’”
“Charlie. Dog. Easy!” an anonymous voice calls from behind one of the cubicles.
Unit A’s Christmas card to C.J., 1940—left to right, back row: Ken Harris, Keith Darling, Bob Givens, Ace Gamer, Richard Kent Jones, Alex Ignatiev, unknown (but a good caricature!); center row: Phil DeLara, Rich Hogan, Bob McKimson, John McGrew, Phil Monroe, Roy Laufenburger, Steve Milliman; front row: Dave Monahan, Paul Julian, Rudy Larriva, Bobe Cannon, unknown (looks like Ronald Reagan; seems unlikely), Ben Washam
“Submarine! You bastard, you got my submarine!” another anonymous voice indignantly answers.
“It’s a game called Battleship,” says Mr. Pierce III. “Keeps the natives amused in the early hours. Ever since management in its idiotic wisdom installed a time clock, no one works between eight and ten in the morning. Before the hated time clock was installed, everyone reported in at 9:00 a.m. and went right to work. No more. That clock is indeed a one-armed bandit, contradicting its very reason for being installed in the first place. By insulting the help with that cyclopean tyrant, management now loses about a hundred man-hours a day. Writers are exempt, of course—even management recognizing that no writer would have the strength to pull the arm of that digital indignity.
“There are usually three units like this—each composed of four or five animators, five or six in-betweeners, a layout man, and a background man. I doubt if any of them are working now, it’s only 9:45. Perhaps it would be well for me to set a good example by taking my pre-tiffin nap now. Adieu.” And Mr. Pierce dissolves into the woodwork.
It isn’t every studio that has a cameraman who once traveled a backwoods vaudeville circuit with a seal named Eunice. Our studio did. He was one of our proudest possessions. His name was variously Smoke House, Swamp Rabbit, Smokey Hank, or for short, Henry Garner. Although almost illiterate, he was a mechanical genius. It never occurred to him that you had to know the theory behind anything to make it work. It was supposed to function (“sposed to fiction”), so he would fix it; he once corrected a malfunction of the worm gear on our Acme camera crane with a beer-can opener, a patently impossible thing to do. Smokey used a beer-can opener the way an engineer uses a slide rule. If a problem couldn’t be solved with a beer-can opener, why, it couldn’t be solved at all—better buy a new whatever-it-is. Nothing mechanical at our studio ever went unsolved. Smokey would shuffle in (he never saw the sense in lifting his feet when he could slide them), move in on the problem (which could be anything from a recalcitrant electric eggbeater used in the ink-and-paint department to a hideously jammed ribbon-snarled typewriter), and fix it.
Bobe Cannon drawing of my ignominious advent as a director
Our producer, Leon Schlesinger, once ordered Smokey to fix his constipated Cadillac. It took Smokey Garner ten minutes to slither the necessary fifty yards and thirty seconds to get that huge eight-cylinder machine purring. In this case
