This seldom happened. I seldom knew the end of the story when I started on it, and sometimes even a satisfactory beginning eluded me: the Bugs Bunny ending in Duck Amuck was not discovered until the last week of layout; the opening of The Scarlet Pumpernickel came after the film was half laid out.
Both Mike Maltese and I were devoted devotees of the cloak-and-dagger genre. From Fairbanks, Alaska, to Hollywood, California, is several thousand miles, but from Fairbanks (Doug) to Flynn (Errol) is only the difference in the length of a rapier blade. Our life spans comfortably encompassed the great precursor, Fairbanks, and his swashbuckling descendant, Flynn.
It was therefore inevitable that we would eventually try to demonstrate everything we knew and loved about adventure films in one six-minute cartoon, The Scarlet Pumpernickel. Just as we would later take the entire fourteen hours of The Ring of the Nibelung and squash it down to the six-minute What’s Opera, Doc?
This drama had to star Daffy Duck, because he, more than any other of our characters, aspired to be Flynn’s successor. So we started storyboarding all the lovely clichés characteristic of the Three Musketeers, Robin Hood, Captain Blood film form. Without really worrying too much about structure. Then one day we were startled to see that Daffy was succeeding—something he had never done before, and for good reason: Daffy’s entire persona is based on lack of success. He is a companion of Laurel and Hardy, Woody Allen, Buster Keaton. How could we let him succeed and fail at the same time?
Mike came up with the solution: Daffy is telling the story, narrating it to someone.
Who?
Why not Jack Warner, the paragon of creative encouragement. Why not just call him J.L.? We were safe there: Jack, on seeing the film, would never recognize himself beneath so obscure a pseudonym.
So it grew. The fruit was there, now we needed a believable shell. It became obvious. Daffy is sick of playing comedy. As he puts it, “Ah-ha, hoo-hoo, yuck-yuck, always comedy, ya just gotta give me a chance, J.L.!”
And so it went, occasionally flipping back to Daffy, the scriptwriter putting more and more heaving-ho into his telling to the unresponsive J.L. Finally, in an agony of frustration and chagrin, Daffy shoots himself through the beret, only to sit up with a last despairing remark, “Ya gotta kill yourself to sell a script around here.”
Bugs’s drawing board finale: DUCK AMUCK (1953)
“Ain’t I a stinker?”
When the ending came about in Duck Amuck, it was as a practical solution rather than a creative one. Duck Amuck happened almost exclusively on the drawing board as I drew, laid out, the key character poses and wrote the dialogue. Monologue actually, since Daffy was the only voice heard. Mike worked at my shoulder on this one, rather than on a storyboard. From the first scene, when Daffy leaps out, saber in hand, shouting, “Stand back, Musketeers—they shall sample my blade,” to the penultimate (“next to last,” I believe) scene, where Daffy is shouting in absolute frustration, “Who are you; I demand that you show yourself!!” he has been in conflict with the animator who is drawing him—in a word: me. Who else could it be? With Mike’s help, I had to meet each succeeding contretemps as it occurred, fighting our way out of one of Daffy’s frustrations after another. But what now? I couldn’t appear on the screen even if I was the opponent. There was only one person in the whole world who had known equal conflict with Daffy Duck. In Duck! Rabbit! Duck!, Rabbit Seasoning, Ali Baba Bunny, and others, he and only he knew how to deal with Daffy. So I simply pulled the camera back to find Bugs at the drawing board. He turns to the audience and, perhaps tickled, but a little ashamed, says, “Ain’t I a stinker?” It was the only ending possible.
C. Dialogue. During the growth and completion of the story-board, tentative dialogue was written beneath the story sketches. The final, complete dialogue always waited until the director had finished the 300 to 400 key sketches called character layout drawings.
Few screenwriters can write action and few story men can draw finished action poses. At Warner Bros., all finished action and all finished dialogue were fashioned by the director.
Only after the layouts and therefore the dialogue were complete did I simply hand the sketches over to a secretary, who put the dialogue onto dialogue sheets for the actors.
DUCK DODGERS IN THE 24½ CENTURY 1953
Writer: Mike Maltese PRODUCTION NO. 1264
1. DOCTOR: I have sent for you, Dodgers, because we are facing a crisis. The world supply of Illudium Phosdex, the shaving cream atom, is alarmingly low …
2. DOCTOR: Now we have reason to believe that the only remaining source is on Planet X … somewhere in this area …
3. DAFFY: … And you want me to find Planet X, eh?
4. DOCTOR: Can you do it, Dodgers?
5. DAFFY: Indubitibutly, sir…’cause there’s no one knows his way around outer space like … Duck Dodgers, in the twenty-fourth and a half century!!!
6. DAFFY: Are you ready, eager young space cadet?
7. PORKY: I’m r-r-re, r-r-read … all s-set, your heroship, sir!
8. DAFFY: Then make way for … Duck Dodgers, in the twenty-fourth and a half century!!
9. DAFFY: (Embarrassed) Oops! Had the silly thing in reverse!
10. DAFFY: Hello, calling Planet Earth! 3XAL calling … Hello … Hello …
11. DAFFY: Hey, that you, Earth? We have just passed the Dog Star at two million miles and shifting into second … and putting her in automatic pilot.
12. DAFFY: Jumping Jupiter going by now … Am putting her into automatic pilot.
[These last lines (10, 11, 12) were taken out before animation]
13. DAFFY: And now then, eager young space cadet, here is the course we shall pursue to find Planet X …
14. DAFFY: Starting from where we are, we go 33,600 turbo miles due up … Then west in an astro-arc deviation to here … then following the great circle seven radiolubes south by down-east … by astro-astrolabe to here … here … and here … then by space-navigo compass to here …
