Chuck Amuck

a horse. Contempt comes naturally when the artist is opposed by someone who can’t write, draw, or laugh, and whose prime creative impulse is to say no. Fortunately for us, Leon Schlesinger was usually too lazy to even say no, but Eddie Selzer amply made up for this entrepreneurial deficiency. If Eddie was forced to reduce his entire vocabulary to one word, it would have been no contest—“no” would have won adverbially down. Anybody who hated camels, bullfights, and French-speaking skunks can’t, I suppose, be all bad. As I look back, it seems to me that some of our best pictures emerged out of our constant fight against negativism. Aristotle, I think, wanted to be “a gadfly on the rump of the universe.” Stimulating creativity is an admirable function. I suppose if the result is the same, the intentions of the fly are immaterial. So, even though I am reluctant to say it, Eddie Selzer, for all the wrong reasons, did all the right things to keep our creative nerves on edge and therefore active. If there is a puff adder loose in your house, you seldom get lazy.

“You cannot imitate a master, but you are a fool if you ignore him.”

It is difficult to be profound, analytical, or discerning about the art of Tex Avery, because profundity tends to interrupt laughter, and this is a poor trade indeed. Avery was a genius. As one of his animators in the later 1930s (at Warner Bros.), I was as ignorant of his genius as I suppose Michelangelo’s apprentices were oblivious to the fact that they, too, were working with a genius. But Avery’s brilliance penetrated the husk of my self-assured ignorance, the ignorance that encases most twenty-year-olds. In spite of myself, I learned from him the most important truth about animation: animation is the art of timing, a truth applicable as well to all comedy. And the most brilliant masters of timing were Keaton, Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Langdon—and Fred (Tex) Avery.

All the studios provided travelogues, apparently designed to give the theater audience a chance to go out and buy popcorn.* “Fitzpatrick Travelogues” became the generic name for all these films, just as, for many years, “Walt Disney” was the generic name for animation.

Tex Avery drove most travel shorts off the screen in this blistering series; Elmer Fudd’s forebear, Egghead, to the left

The “Fitzpatrick” technique pretty much ignored individuals; with voice-over only, the entire film could be shot with a silent camera. Mysterious Cairo, Gay Rio de Janeiro (“gay” in those days meant gay, not “gay”), The Wonders of Sandusky, The Happy Zulus, etc. Usually ending with “And so, as the sun sinks slowly in the west, we sadly say goodbye to beautiful Cairo, Rio, Sandusky, Zululand.”

Tex went right for the jugular. In The Isle of Pingo Pongo he had a running gag of a little man (actually an ancestor of Elmer Fudd) named Egghead continually wandering through, carrying a violin case and interrupting the narrator, “Now, boss?” The narrator impatiently replies, “No. Not now!” And then embarrassedly carries on, until the end of the film, when the sun is setting and the narrator sweetly says, “And so, as the sun sinks slowly in the west, we sadly say goodbye to the beautiful Isle of Pingo Pongo.” The sun suddenly stops in mid-descent. The narrator impatiently repeats the whole line, “And so, as the sun sinks slowly in the west…,” but the sun refuses to cooperate. The narrator in more and more irritated tones repeats and repeats. No movement in the complacently stubborn sun.

Egghead walks in. “Now, boss?” “Yes!” screeches the narrator. “Now!”

Whereupon Egghead flips open the violin case, comes out with a rifle, and shoots the sun in its vitals, watching it plunge into the sea.

He ridiculed every platitude implicit in these cliché-ridden “educational” films: a lizard doing a striptease while shedding her skin; different sides of a split screen for grownups and children; and after a description with loving detail of the heating system and absolute cold impenetrability of the polar bear, the bear in question looks sadly at the audience: “I don’t care what you say, I’m cold.”

—And the echo from Mr. Fitzpatrick must have been: “I don’t care what you say, I’m old hat.”

Oh, lightning doesn’t care where it strikes. But with Avery the lightning flashed in and out of the primal porridge of cute cartoons, sadly including early ones of mine, and out sprang a Crackpot Quail, a Haunted Mouse, a very, very Red Hot Riding Hood, a Satyr-Maniacal Wolf, a small Droopy, a canine cross between Muhammad Ali and Albert Einstein with a voice like a cooing dove. Dove? How about a 900-pound king-size canary? And the world’s smallest half-pint pygmy?

Friz Freleng’s sketch reduces me to moccasins

What I learned during those early years from Tex, Friz Freleng, Mike Maltese, Tedd Pierce, and others, on my way to becoming a competent director, was this:

1. You must love what you caricature. You must not mock it—unless it is ridiculously self-important, like those solemn live-action travelogues.

2. You must learn to respect that golden atom, that single frame of action, that 1/24 of a second, because the difference between lightning and the lightning bug may hinge on that single frame.

3. You must respect the impulsive thought and try to implement it. You cannot perform as a director by what you already know; you must depend on the flash of inspiration that you do not expect and do not already know.

4. You must remember always that only man, of all creatures, can blush, or needs to; that only man can laugh, or needs to; and that if you are in that trade of helping others to laugh and to survive by laughter, then you are privileged indeed.

5. Remember always that character is all that matters in the making of great comedians, in animation, and in live action.

6. Keep always in your mind, your heart, and your hand that timing is the