Tag Archives: gregory la cava

Pioneers of Animation: Bray Productions

Posted on by under animated shorts, animation, pioneers of animation, saturday morning cartoons

We’ve talked previously on this blog about the influence of cartoonist/animation pioneer Winsor McCay, but I’m going to mention it again (and again and again and again), as it would be nearly impossible to overstate his importance in promoting animation as a viable artistic medium. Films like Little Nemo (1911) and Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) directly inspired countless young artists and cartoonists to try their hand at making their static pictures “move” onscreen. An entire industry was born off the scaly back of McCay prehistoric creation–an industry that, much to McCay’s chagrin, quickly became a highly commercialized one, one that remains to this day a huge moneymaker, inviting both inventive creations and hasty, ill-conceived attempts to capitalize on children’s short attention spans and rake in the dough.

jr bray

Even in its infancy, animation lured those with dollar signs in their eyes, men who perhaps cared less about making an artistic statement and more about churning out multiple reels of crude entertainment every week. John Randolph Bray, a contemporary of McCay’s, has such a reputation in the annals of animation history. The man who has been referred to as the “Henry Ford of animation” was instrumental in forming the production model that still serves as the basis for the industry today. But for all his undeniably important contributions to the growth of animation as a cinematic form, Bray also demonstrated a famously litigious nature (he was almost Thomas Edison-like in his attempts to corner patents for the animation process) and a sometimes heavy-handed rule of the animation studio that bore his name. The result is a series of conflicting portraits of Bray, ranging from the reverent to the disdainful, depending upon the source.

Like McCay, Bray started out in journalism and eventually created his own weekly comic strip, Little Johnny and His Teddy Bears, which capitalized on the fervor for the stuffed toy in the wake of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. The strip debuted in 1907, and several years later, Bray was inspired to try his hand at animating Teddy Bears. He was likely inspired by a similar short, the 1907 Edwin S. Porter release The “Teddy” Bears, which largely used puppetry to portray a satirical animated recreation of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. But Bray, unfamiliar with the process involved in transferring action to the screen, was unhappy with his own results and scrapped the project.

By 1913, in the wake of McCay’s success with Little Nemo and another short, How a Mosquito Operates, Bray was ready to give animation another try. Building off McCay’s model, Bray produced The Artist’s Dream, a live-action/animation combo in which Bray stars with a ravenous animated dachshund.

This relatively simple short led Bray to develop several innovations that would greatly impact the work of future animators. When Bray signed a deal with Pathé to distribute The Artist’s Dream, the company expressed an interest in distributing even more animated shorts. An eager Bray set to work figuring out a way in which he could meet the demand without collapsing from sheer exhaustion. Up until this point in time, animators typically would complete their shorts entirely by hand (sometimes with assistance, sometimes without), drawing and redrawing each individual frame, a process that added up to hundreds upon hundreds of drawings. Bray soon realized that by delegating work to other artists–essentially dividing the production of each cartoon into several different units who could work concurrently on multiple shorts–he could greatly streamline production, saving time and money.

His most important innovation, however, was born out of Bray’s decision to print the backgrounds as opposed to animating them by hand on each frame. Originally, Bray had the backgrounds–which were little more than simple zinc drawings–printed onto many individual sheets of paper with a blank space remaining in which the animated action would then be depicted. This allowed for a certain uniformity from shot to shot as opposed to the sometimes wavy or fuzzy backgrounds in earlier cartoons. In later years, when Bray began working with fellow animator Earl Hurd, the two of them collaborated on the creation of the cel animation process, which took Bray’s initial idea a step further by having the backgrounds reproduced on celluloid, which then allowed images to be layered over the background images, creating a more seamless sense of movement in a solid setting. Bray and Hurd patented their process in 1915, and it remained the standard for hand-drawn animation for decades.

john r bray

In 1914, Bray founded and incorporated one of the first full-fledged animation studios in Hollywood, Bray Productions. As the studio grew, Bray stopped animating and took on the responsibilities of running the studio full-time, adeptly managing promotions, marketing, and distribution of his shorts. By some accounts, Bray ruled with the proverbial iron fist, reportedly taking credit for work that his employees actually completed and even attempting to patent ideas that were not his own. [In fact, Bray attempted to patent practically every aspect of the animation process, even techniques that his predecessors like McCay had utilized for years before Bray ever animated his first frame. He sued anyone he thought had violated his patents--including McCay--until the patents expired in 1932.] Bray was largely responsible for animation becoming a formalized industry, and he played the part of big businessman well, separating himself physically and mentally from his employees and creating a stratification that separated the workers from the “front office.” He was, by some accounts, standoffish and cold, with a highly superior demeanor that was rather off-putting to some in his employ.

Bray’s wife, Margaret Till Bray–a successful businesswoman in her own right who also managed her own real-estate company while working alongside her husband–was instrumental in helping Bray run the new studio. She was given the title of production manager, which in actuality meant that she was little more than a glorified babysitter at times, as it was her responsibility to corral the animators on staff and ensure that they were meeting deadlines. She was well-suited to the position; like her husband, Margaret Bray was a no-nonsense type of personality who frowned upon wastefulness. When she realized that the animators would leave the studio on Friday, paychecks in hand, and spend the weekend blowing their money on booze and women before stumbling back to work late the next week, she changed payday to Monday to facilitate more productivity. She was also one of the strictest enforcers of Bray’s animation patents, encouraging him to pursue any perceived violation without delay.

heeza liar

In the studio’s heyday–from the mid-1910s through the early 1920s–Bray Productions released hundreds of animated shorts, and brought a number of popular series to theaters. The first series released under the new Bray Productions banner was Colonel Heeza Liar, who initially debuted in the 1913 cartoon Colonel Heeza Liar in Africa. The Heeza Liar shorts are notable for being the first animated series starring a recurring character, the titular big-game hunter/boastful Teddy Roosevelt caricature. The first cartoon was intended to be a parody of Paul J. Rainey’s African Hunt, a hugely popular 1912 documentary-type film that followed the titular hunter on safari, as he spent time with some native tribes and slaughtered more than his fair share of exotic creatures. The animated short’s success led to a series of nearly five dozen Heeza Liar cartoons, which followed the Colonel’s “daredevil” adventures around the world.

In 1915, Hurd began animating the studio’s second recurring character, a mischievous young boy named Bobby Bumps (some modern-day animation scholars refer to Bobby as the “Bart Simpson” of the 1910s). Young Bobby was not an entirely new creation–he was based, in part, on a character Hurd had created for another comic strip earlier in the decade. The Bobby Bumps shorts were the first to be wholly created using Bray and Hurd’s patented cel process. The series was popular from the start, and remained one of Bray Production’s biggest draws from his debut until 1919, when Hurd left Bray’s employ. Afterwards, Hurd animated only a couple of Bobby’s adventures each year (for other distributors) before the series came to a close in 1925.

When William Randolph Heart’s animation studio, International Film Service (founded the year after Bray’s studio), folded in 1918, its many popular series like Krazy Kat and Jerry on the Job were left virtually homeless. A year later, Hearst allowed Bray to license certain IFS properties to be released under the Bray Productions banner. In the process, Bray inherited Gregory La Cava, who had directed many of the cartoons for Hearst’s company; La Cava, who would later become an influential, Oscar-nominated film director in the 1930s, continued to direct some animated shorts for Bray for a couple of years before leaving animation altogether.

Bray may not have been an ideal boss, but he was singularly proficient in drawing talented artists into his crew. Bray’s studio, at one point or another, hired some of the most famous names in classic animation, many of whom got their start there: Walter Lantz (creator of Woody Woodpecker), Paul Terry (of “Terrytoons” fame), Max and Dave Fleischer (Betty Boop, Popeye, Superman), Grim Natwick (the “father” of Ms. Boop), and early Disney animator Burt Gillett, among others. Some of these artists even created their own indelible characters while under the auspices of Bray Productions–for instance, the Fleischers’ innovative Out of the Inkwell series, which ultimately ran for more than a decade, spent its first two years as a Bray production before the Fleischers opened their own studio, and Terry’s Farmer Al Falfa was created during the brief period in which the animator worked under Bray (Terry, unhappy working for the studio, barely lasted a year before striking off on his own. He and Bray subsequently spent years in court, as Bray alleged that Terry’s own studio, Fables Pictures, regularly violated Bray’s cel patent).

Conflicting accounts of Bray’s life and career indicate that the idea of Bray as the prototypical soulless businessman may or may not have been blown out of proportion over the years. History is subjective, dependent on memory, and Bray is remembered almost equally as a gallant pioneer of a new industry and a tyrant who stifled artistic intent. Still, there is little doubt that Bray began his career as a creative artist in his own right (if his early cartoons are any indication) and came to know his craft well. Nor is there any question that Bray was intent on improving upon the creative process so as to bring animation–and lots of it–to the masses. In many ways, it seems Bray set the stage for Walt Disney’s ascension and eventual stranglehold on the animation business in subsequent decades; at the very least, like Bray, Disney’s personal reputation is a veritable grab bag of both good and bad recollections, told by friends and foes, supporters and detractors alike. In the end, though, perceptions of his behavior and business practices are extraneous–what’s important is that animation, as it exists to this day on screens both big and small, owes an immeasurable debt to the work of John Randolph Bray.

 

Selected sources:
Bachman, Gregg and Thomas J. Slater, eds. American Silent Film: Discovering Marginalized Voices. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002.
Crafton, Donald. Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898-1928. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Sito, Tom. Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2006.
Stathes, Thomas J. The Bray Animation Project. 1 June 2011. Web.

 

“I guess rich people are just poor people with money.”

Posted on by under girls of summer, hahas

Alfred Borden (Walter Connolly) is having a bad day. His business is in trouble; his wife, Martha (Verree Teasdale), is cheating on him with another man; his son, Tim (Tim Holt), would rather play polo than work; and his daughter, Katherine (Kathryn Adams), is in love with Mike (James Ellison), the family’s disdainful, Communist-sympathizing chauffeur. Oh, and it happens to be Alfred’s birthday–which everyone but his secretary has forgotten.

Alfred takes a walk to Central Park and comes across a young woman named Mary (Ginger Rogers), who has lost her job. As a result of her troubles, Mary has a somewhat bitter outlook on the world. When Alfred realizes that Mary has nothing more to eat for dinner than a single apple, he asks her to accompany him to a fancy nightclub to celebrate his birthday and get a good meal. But things do not go exactly as planned–the pair gets roaringly drunk, and Alfred ends up with a black eye and his evening escapades plastered in the newspapers.

Martha is irritated by Alfred’s carousing–even though Martha herself had been at the club the night before with her lover–and becomes infuriated when Mary emerges from the guest room. Alfred decides to take advantage of his wife’s reaction to incite her jealousy further, and convinces Mary to pretend to be his mistress, inserting her into the household against the will of his family. Nothing at all could go wrong with that plan … could it?

Fifth Avenue Girl is not exactly what you would call a “memorable” entry in the list of films released during the storied year of 1939. It has been called a gender-reversed My Man Godfrey (1936), in that a virtual stranger is brought into the lives of a wealthy family, eventually changing things for the better. The thematic similarities in the film should come as no surprise, considering both were directed by Gregory La Cava, who also had a hand in writing both screenplays (though he was uncredited for these contributions). But while Godfrey is an undoubtedly classic screwball comedy with genuine heart and wit, Girl is a pale imitation of its predecessor, lacking that film’s warmth and humor. Rogers’ Mary is a dry, brittle counterpart to William Powell’s shrewd Godfrey, and the Borden family is not nearly as interesting as the clueless, careless Bullocks (with the possible exception of Connolly’s Alfred, who at times is almost on par with Godfrey’s fantastic patriarch Eugene Pallette).

Rogers is the center of the film–the character on which practically every element of the plot hinges–and yet she is perhaps the most lackluster character in the entire movie. Herein lies the problem with Fifth Avenue Girl. While part of Rogers’ charm as a comedic actress comes from her unparalleled ability to wield a tart tongue, that sharpness is typically paired with an innate vulnerability and a winking sense of humor that makes her standard characters appealing rather than off-putting. In this movie, however, there is nothing to blunt the edges of the character, and Mary comes across as wholly unpleasant and strangely drab in her utter unhappiness.

Though Mary indulges in snappy comebacks throughout the film, there is no spark to it. At times, her sense of humor even comes across as almost cruel and vaguely threatening (as when she tells the obnoxious Mike, “I think I’ll cut you a new mouth,” while picking up a knife). Rogers does her best with what she’s given, but in the end, there’s a kind of standoffishness to Mary, something beyond mere silent judgment of the other characters, that makes one wonder why La Cava and fellow writers Allan Scott and Morrie Ryskind ever thought she could be a sympathetic-enough figure to anchor the film. Compared to Rogers’ other major comedy that year–Garson Kanin’s delightful Bachelor Mother–Fifth Avenue Girl is relatively colorless, and the actress’ performance as Mary is completely overshadowed by her lovely turn as Mother’s equally poor, yet hopeful and exuberant Polly Parrish.

The problem with Mary is not the only issue here, however. Ultimately, it feels as though La Cava and company could not decide what they wanted this movie to be. Is it a romance? There’s not much that is strictly “romantic” about it–the film’s plot is based on falsehood and deceit, and the characters are (by and large) too selfish and lack self-awareness enough to really make the audience want to root for the couples. Is it a screwball comedy? The movie is missing a true element of slapstick-y humor that would anchor it firmly in that column. Is it an attempt at honest social commentary, contrasting Mary’s poverty and chauffeur Mike’s Communist leanings with the indolent Bordens? If so, it’s an ineffectual statement, because both characters are “rescued” (in the loosest sense) from their station by becoming members of the establishment–Mike marries into the family, easily abandoning his political principles in the process, and we are left to imagine that Mary, too, will find greener pastures as a member of the Borden family (at least, if Tim has his way).

And yet, with all of its problems, there is still something entertaining about the movie–and as I indicated earlier in this post, it all comes down to Walter Connolly. He was a noted character actor who began his Hollywood career with roles in a couple of silent movies in the 1910s before turning to Broadway, where he starred in a number of well-received productions. Connolly returned to film in the 1930s and went on to appear in more than fifty pictures during that decade, starring in some of the most notable and frenetic comedies of the period–movies such as It Happened One Night (1934), Twentieth Century (1934), Libeled Lady (1936), and Nothing Sacred (1937).

Girl presented Connolly with one of the actor’s rare leading roles. Here he plays a somewhat befuddled pater familias dealing with headstrong offspring and an inattentive (read: unfaithful) wife. In many ways, Alfred Borden is a more beaten-down–yet equally sly–version of Connolly’s Alexander Andrews from It Happened One Night. Both men eventually manage to manipulate their children into doing what they want them to do–while Andrews finally got his Ellie (Claudette Colbert) to marry the man he thought was best for her, Borden attains a simpler–though no less important–goal of merely getting his children to acknowledge his existence.

Fifth Avenue Girl was one of a handful of films Connolly made in 1939. Earlier in the year, he starred in MGM’s production of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, playing the “King,” one of the con men whom Huck encounters during his travels (incidentally, his partner in crime, the “Duke,” was playing by William Frawley of I Love Lucy fame). He appeared in two more films after Girl, the last of which, 1939′s The Great Victor Herbert (a musical in which Connolly played the title role) was released five months before his death from a stroke in May 1940.

Fifth Avenue Girl was a commercial success for its studio, RKO, though critical reception at the time ranged from dismissive to admittedly “charitable,” as film critic Frank S. Nugent stated in his 1939 review for The New York Times. He calls the movie ”cheerful and cheerfully unimportant,” clarifying that while it “may not be a strikingly good comedy,” Girl “isn’t militantly bad either.” Nugent’s somewhat damnable praise gets it exactly right. Girl is not a “bad” movie. It’s a middling one, at best. But slight though it is, it remains a mildly entertaining farce, and its redeemable elements (Connolly, the occasional witty rejoinder, a brief appearance from a ukulele-playing Jack Carson, and a welcome and amusing turn by Franklin Pangborn as the family butler) far outweigh the bad.