On Friday, February 22, 2002, Chuck Jones died. An Academy Award®-winning
creator of over 300 animated films in a career that spanned most
of the last century, he was without doubt one of the most creative
men ever to become involved in the animation industry. While the
Walt Disney Family Museum tends to concentrate on work done by
the Disney Studio, Jones' contributions -- through such unforgettable
characters as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Road Runner, Porky Pig, and
many more -- certainly hold a place in the public's heart and imagination
that ranks alongside the great characters from Disney's cartoon
shorts.
Though most of his career was spent at Warner Brothers,
Jones also worked for Walt for a brief period. Some of his recollections
of that time -- as well as thoughts about Walt Disney, himself,
and others in the entertainment industry -- follow. These interview
excerpts were extracted from a conversation held for the documentary
about Disney: "Walt, The Man Behind the Myth."

Although the on-camera interview was powerful --
as we hope you'll agree when you read on -- some of Jones' most
interesting thoughts came in casual conversation after the lights
were out and the cameraman was getting a snack. Unconstrained
by specific questions, his pungent wit and eclectic interests
led him to talk about some of his favorite topics, including Mark Twain. Sadly, these weren't recorded.
Q. Tell us a
little about how the Disney cartoons differed from those of the
competition in the early years.
A. They had an accent on character, personality. Walt certainly
showed it in "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." Nobody
else had ever thought of the idea of having seven different people
with seven different characteristics: one is laughing, one is hiccuping,
one is doing the various things, but each one has a clear call for
a particular human characteristic or attribute and there was no
effort to make them interlock. The person who sneezed did not laugh.
The result was, the seven of them brought together a great many
of the human attributes we recognize in everybody.
Q. You worked
in a number of studios, didn't you?
A. I've been everyplace. But mainly, I went to work for Warner's
in 1931 and I stayed there until 1965 then I went away and came
back. I went to MGM and I did certain films there, in fact I inherited
"Tom and Jerry" and I did a number of those. But I was
a director almost from the beginning and I was very pleased about
that because they let me do anything I wanted to do.
Q. Whereas,
at the Disney Studio, Walt was looking over everyone's shoulders?
A. Each studio was different, I mean, Walt Lance ran his studio
with an iron hand. I think by the time he died he thought he was
making the best cartoons ever: Woody Woodpecker. He wasn't, but
he never knew he wasn't. So he lived very happily and of course
he was one of the richest, because he owned all of his pictures.
Q. You were
only with Disney for a couple of months, when you left Warner Brothers.
How did that come about?
A. That was because Jack Warner, in one of his more idiotic moves,
decided somehow that all pictures were going to be made in 3D, and
that babies would be born with one green eye and one red eye, and
the audience would wear glasses to watch these first three-dimensional
pictures. And to give you an idea of how Jack Warner's mind worked,
when he decided to do this thing in three-dimensions, he looked
around to all his directors and selected one that only had one eye
to direct the film. It's really true. And I don't want to mention
his name because he's a very fine director. But that was typical
of Jack. Then, Jack decided you couldn't make three-dimensional
cartoons, so he fired the whole staff. And that's how I happened
to go to Disney's for a short time.
Q. Any memories
of your arrival there?
A. Walt hired me. Naturally, I went over there, drove over in
my car, went in the big gate and they told me what to do. I'd been
there before because I got to know Ward Kimball. He was a good friend
and, to me, one of the greatest animators that ever lived, and I
kind of followed him around. I don't think he knows it, how much
I admired him.
Q. And how
did you find your way back to Warner's?
A. Well, a few months after he fired everyone, he had to hire
them all back. At that time they had other jobs so he had to pay
more money to get them back, which again was a good indication of
the suavity of his intelligence. I don't mind criticizing Jack because
I think he was a thug ... But I do feel that I was very lucky
to work for Leon Schlessinger and there the directors had absolute
authority over every part of the picture. I doubt if anybody had
that authority at Disney's. At Disney, the key animators probably
had as much to do with the development of character as the director,
as far as I can see.
Q. Was it
frustrating for you at Disney to not have that kind of control?
A. That's the reason I didn't stay. When I first went there Walt
asked about the money I was getting and what I was getting as a
director, and he said, "Well that's fine, we'll pay you the same" and
that disappointed me. I thought he was going to give me more money
but he didn't. And a couple of months later I got well-acquainted,
I say particularly, with Ward Kimball and that was a great moment
for me because he drew so beautifully. But I discovered that the
key animators, the sequence animators, had a lot more control than
the actual director did. As far as I could tell the director had
creativity but he didn't have the freedom we had at Warner's, because
Leon Schlessinger didn't care what we made as long as he could sell
it. And that was why we tried so many, many things. Why we had
a great many more characters that were successful. I don't say they
were all great but they were all useful and I think we had, historically
there were about 40 characters that came from the Warner Brothers
Studio that are still recognized throughout the world.
There was no such thing as a script, ever, at Warner Brothers.
And nobody ever asked to see one until a man named Eddie Seltzer
came over there, and he was a nice-enough man I guess, but as one
of the fellows there said he went through life like an un-tipped
waiter. He was always very kind to the person above him. That was
the kind of man he was. He demanded to see scripts and he was kind
of disappointed, very much disappointed, when he found out there
weren't any scripts. We didn't have any. We just had storyboards.
Q. Tell us
the story of your actual departure from Disney.
A. Well, I just decided to go up and talk to Walt when I knew
I was leaving. So, he said, "Well, why are you leaving? Don't
you enjoy it here?" I said yes but I said, "Actually there's
only one job here worth having and that's yours." And he said,
"That's true, all right," he said. And he said, "Unfortunately,
it's filled." But he was very nice about it. We were good friends,
and then later when he got the idea of starting the art school,
the art center, he asked me to come over and be on the board.
Q. Do you
remember his vision for Cal Arts when he first approached you?
A. Yeah, yeah, I thought it was the greatest thing. And he said
that he thought that a great college would be one where people from
various branches would be able to pass each other and observe other
people at work. He said he thought it would be a great thing if
an animator happened to be walking by a musician who was playing
a fiddle. He said it would be great for him to stand there and watch
it for awhile, and sketch him playing, seeing what the position
is and so on, putting the handkerchief over the shoulder as they
do. And he said wouldn't it be great because he would learn and
the other guy would learn whatever it was the animator was trying
to find out about, musical instruments.
Q. You had
a somewhat earlier experience with Walt, before you went to the
studio, didn't you?
A. When I was a young, when I was an in-betweener, when I first
came in 1931 or 1932, not when "Snow White" came out but when the
couple of the great shorts came out of that time, "The Piano Movers"
and couple of other great ones, "The Clock Cleaners," I got so infatuated
with this stuff that I wrote a letter to Walt. A very effusive letter
because I really didn't know how the hell you did this stuff. The
astonishing thing was that about a week later I got a letter back
from Walt telling me how much he enjoyed the letter, and he really
appreciated my writing, that he was glad to have me in the same
business, and so on.
That letter lay around for a long time. I figured he was writing
letters to everybody. And then when "Snow White" came out I managed
to finagle a couple of tickets to it. I was really knocked out.
I was completely devastated in a wonderful way. Seeing "Snow White"
was so far from anything else I'd ever seen. If this was possible,
anything was possible. So I wrote another letter to Walt and got
another letter back. Like a damn fool, I tried to save it but you
know how those things happen. They just disappear.
Q. And much
later you found out something more about those letters you had written
to Walt?
A. When Walt was ill, I didn't know it, nobody else did either.
I was in the hospital across from the Disney Studio, St. Joseph.
So I was up there on whatever floor it was, and this nurse came
in and she says, "You know, Mr. Disney's on the same floor."
And I said "Really? My God, that makes it a worthwhile floor,
doesn't it?" And she said, "Well, he's all by himself.
Why don't you go over and say hello to him?" And I said "I
don't know him all that well." And she said, "I bet he
knows you." So I walked over there and there he was in the
bed, all by himself in a large room but not a devastating room.
And he looked up, he cocked his head, he had a characteristic of
looking at you like that. And then he finally realized who I was.
"Oh, Chuck, come on in." So I came on in and sat down
and he said, "Let's talk awhile about what we do, what field
we're doing work in." Here I was doing animated shorts and he was
doing features. But it didn't matter to him, as long as you were
working animation, by God, we were the same thing. We belonged to
each other.
Well, so I told him about the letters. I said, "You know you
must have written four letters to me." He said, "I did?"
I said, "What it meant to me, an in-betweener, then an animator.
It's like getting letters from Mark Twain, from Walt Disney."
And he looked at me quite quizzically and he said, "You're
the only animator that ever wrote to me." And that was staggering,
you know, I couldn't imagine that.
And then, I know I can't speak for myself or attempt to speak for
myself in the same light as Walt Disney, but I've only received two
letters from animators that worked for me in 70 years in the business.
Q. Any other
thoughts about Walt?
A. Chaplin said that he believed that Walt knew more about story
than anybody in Hollywood. At any time. And I think that's probably
true. He knew falseness when he saw it. And even though he was accused
of being a little too cute some of the time, maybe he was, but what
are we going to do? Throw him out the window because he was a little
too cute?
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