Funny Aminals

We did marvelous Leica reels—did you ever see a Leica reel? It was an interesting device. They would photograph the [storyboard] drawings, one at a time, so you had this reel of drawings. It ran with a soundtrack, which we took from the Koussevitzky recording, and wherever there was a blank, a piece of tape, that would turn over the next drawing, so you got a feeling of movement to the music. It really was marvelous. Everything was there but the inbetweens. You saw the whole picture moving, to the music, and all you had made were maybe a couple of hundred still drawings.

Barrier: I understand you worked on the very first development of Lady and the Tramp, too.

Tashlin: That’s right, Sam [Cobean] and I did that whole story; I’d forgotten about that.

Barrier: Were you working from the story that Ward Greene wrote?

Clampett: I can’t remember when I didn’t. When I was in school, I drew a full-page comic about the nocturnal adventures of a pussycat that was published in color in the Los Angeles Sunday Times. King Features saw this and offered me a cartoonist’s contract to start at seventy-five dollars a week when I finished high school. They let me work in their L.A. art department on Saturdays and vacations. I had a drawing board between Webb Smith, who later became a key Disney gag man, the one who’s credited with the classic Pluto flypaper sequence, and Robert Day, later of The New Yorker magazine. I learned a lot from those two fine craftsmen. And from time to time the paper published one of my cartoons for encouragement. They also paid my way through Otis Art Institute, where I learned to paint with oils and to sculpt.

Barrier: Did you go with King Features when you finished school?

Clampett: No. I became so enchanted with the new medium of sound cartoons that I gave up the seventy-five dollars a week to join Warner Bros. cartoons for ten dollars a week.

Barrier: Why did you choose to work for Warners rather than Disney?

Clampett: Actually, I was working for Walt just a month or two before I joined Warners. Not in his cartoon studio—but in his doll factory. The first time I ever met Walt Disney was when I walked into his studio on Hyperion carrying the first felt Mickey Mouse doll, which my “Aunt” Charlotte Clark and I had made.

Barrier: How did this come about?

Clampett: Well, I had made and performed with my own hand puppets since I was a kid. Before I even reached my teens, I made my first Cecil the Sea Serpent stocking puppet, with my mother’s help, and many others. [That first puppet could more accurately be described not as Cecil, but, as Milt Gray puts it, as "a sort of prototype, a kind of nondescript dinosaur sock puppet that later evolved into Cecil." MB] Mrs. Clark, who sold cookies from store to store, thought she could sell an appealing doll if I would design one. I suggested a doll based on the new mouse character that was beginning to be so popular in the movies.

I couldn’t find a drawing of him anywhere. The local theater, newspapers, stores—no one had a drawing of Mickey Mouse! So, I took my sketch pad to the theater, and sat through several shows. I came out with sketches of Mickey, and Charlotte and I used them when we made the first Mickey Mouse doll. My dad walked in and said, “Wait just a darn minute! You can’t sell that without permission from the copyright owner.” So, he drove us to the Disney studio, which was then quite small. Walt and Roy were delighted, and they set Charlotte up in business in a house near the studio. We turned out meece by the gross.

In my spare time, I went there and worked a kapok machine, a foot-operated machine that brushed the stuffing off the Mickey Mouse dolls. There were six young French girls who did the sewing. I used to put my hand in the unstuffed dolls and amuse them by talking in the Mickey falsetto. Walt Disney himself sometimes came over in an old car to pick up the dolls; he would give them out to visitors to the studio and at sales meetings. I helped him load the dolls in the car. One time his car, loaded with Mickeys, wouldn’t start, and I pushed while Walt steered, until it caught, and he took off.

Barrier: When Harman and Ising split with Schlesinger in 1933, Schlesinger must have had to organize a whole new studio.

Clampett: Right, and he had a terrible mess at the beginning. Leon took over a building on the Warner Bros. Sunset [Boulevard] lot, put in a lot of unpainted desks—they smelled like fresh pine—and set about recruiting a staff away from his competitors. Jack King, who was one of the key men on Disney’s Three Little Pigs, was hired as head cartoonist. I was the first one of the original Merrie Melodies staff that Leon signed to a contract. I was put with Jack King and the two of us for a short time sat alone in this big building. At the same time, Leon was making low-budget John Wayne westerns, so young “Duke” would come ambling in and look over our shoulders.

Across the alley from us were sound stages, above which were the dressing rooms used by Busby Berkeley’s Gold Digger chorus girls. AI Jolson’s dressing room was in our building, and Cagney, Bogart, and other top Warner stars used to stick their heads in our windows to see how cartoons were made.

…

Gould: No. It had a very strange beginning and had I known the facts at the beginning I would just have told the guy not to waste his time. But I got a phone call one day and the voice said, “Mr. Gould, I’d like to see you sometime,” and I said, “What about?” and he said, “I can’t tell you over the phone. I’m under strict orders not to tell you and I’d like very much to talk to you either downtown or in your home, anywhere.” And I was suspicious as hell. I said, “If I don’t know what you want to talk to me about, I’m not about to meet you. I don’t understand what it can be that you can’t tell me.

“And he said, “I think you’d be very happy to know–this is good news. But I cannot tell you.