Fleischer eventually found himself in the most intimidating studio of all: Famous Players–Lasky, which was then in the process of integrating forces with Paramount Pictures Corporation. He stood in the cavernous waiting room, all marble and mahogany, of studio president Adolph Zukor, a man who communicated primarily through stares and frowns and was nicknamed “Creepy,” a reference to the way an Indian warrior might “creep” up behind you and slit your throat. Zukor had originally arrived in America penniless from Hungary in 1891, then built a company worth nearly $50 million before the movies even had sound. Waiting in Zukor’s intimidating lobby, Fleischer nervously shifted his weight from leg to leg. He didn’t have an appointment and was hoping to cold-pitch Zukor as he stepped out of his door.
Film mogul Adolph Zukor, who would rule over Paramount Pictures with an iron fist, deciding the fate of many animators.
But when the door opened, a surprising figure emerged: John Bray.
“What are you doing here, Max?” Bray asked, surprised to see him. The two men knew each other from working together more than a decade earlier, as newspaper cartoonists for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. They hadn’t kept in touch but had always been on friendly terms.
“Waiting to show Paramount a sample cartoon I’ve produced,” Fleischer answered.
“I’ve got an exclusive contract to handle shorts for Paramount,” Bray told him. “Why not come down to my studio and let me see it.”
This was a lucky break, for Bray was far more receptive than Zukor would have been. He thought the film was funny and well animated, not to mention he was interested in Fleischer’s rotoscope technology. He asked Fleischer to come work for him and Max agreed, starting as a production manager and animator on, ironically, the Colonel Heeza Liar series. Fleischer’s brothers didn’t join him—that would come later—but he finally had a foothold in the budding animation industry.
Chapter 5
“Cherubs That Actually Fly”
Two years after the release in 1914, of Gertie the Dinosaur, Winsor McCay found himself going through a professional rough patch. The relationship with his boss, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, was strained. Hearst thought McCay was spending too much time on animation and not enough on his comic strips. Winsor hadn’t come cheap, and Hearst didn’t think his work was as good as it used to be.
As one of the most ruthless moguls in a ruthless field, Hearst was not a man to tangle with. He had started in the newspaper business in 1887, at the age of twenty-three, when his millionaire father gave him control of the San Francisco Examiner after winning the paper in a high-stakes poker game. Hearst’s entry into the business was random—a rich kid inheriting a plaything—but he quickly developed a taste for it, shrewdly buying up competitors until he was the most powerful media baron in the nation. At the peak of his career, nearly a fifth of the U.S. population would subscribe to his newspapers. Politically ambitious, he twice won a seat in Congress and unsuccessfully ran for president in 1904, using his media empire to cudgel his political enemies. Not surprisingly, he demanded devout loyalty from anyone working for him.
Much of McCay’s time away from the office was spent on the road, where he showed Gertie in vaudeville theaters. It was a tough circuit; most performers spent years bouncing from one dingy theater to another, clawing their way up its ranks. But Winsor had shot straight to the top, from the start playing some of the most prestigious houses in New York: Proctor’s Fifth Avenue, the Alhambra, B. F. Keith’s Palace, and the Victoria, perhaps the most prestigious theater in the nation. “No one, however good an act, [is] important enough to play the Victoria unless he [has] a tremendous reputation,” theater owner Willie Hammerstein boasted. McCay shared bills with W. C. Fields, Will Rogers, and Harry Houdini—the top names in show business. “His act is one of the most interesting and novel seen in vaudeville in some time,” the New York Telegraph said.
The situation between McCay and Hearst boiled to a head one night while McCay was away performing his animated Gertie routine. Hearst was back at the office and had an editorial question about a cartoon that McCay had drawn for his star columnist, Arthur Brisbane. When Hearst asked where McCay was, the staff told him he was performing his vaudeville show at the Victoria. Handling the matter personally, Hearst phoned the theater and his call was answered by a stagehand.
Winsor “can’t come now. He’s busy,” the stagehand said abruptly before hanging up, unaware of who the caller was.
Hearst’s reaction was swift. The next morning, one of his papers, the Morning Telegraph, announced: “Hearst to Stop Vaudeville Engagements of Cartoonists.” Theater mogul Willie Hammerstein also discovered that advertisements for his vaudeville acts were banned from appearing in Hearst’s papers.
McCay returned to the paper, he was called into the office of Brisbane, who was not only Hearst’s top columnist, but also his chief editor and advisor. “Mr. McCay, you’re a serious artist, not a comic cartoonist,” Brisbane said, referring to Winsor’s highly regarded work drawing political cartoons. He wanted McCay to give up the distractions and focus on drawing “serious cartoon-pictures around my editorials.”
This was devastating news. Not only would it mean less time for Winsor to pursue animation; Brisbane was an angry blowhard and a horrible boss, a man who snooped through the trashcans of his subordinates looking for signs of disloyalty. A predecessor of overheated cable news pundits, his was an anger that was translated into a yearly salary of $260,000 through a hysterical style of spouting “half-baked theories” and “half-remembered fact and fiction,” according to one of his biographers. Winsor’s art, on the other hand, was whimsical and dreamlike, almost the exact opposite of Brisbane’s angry diatribes, which carried the tone of a man trying to win an argument by shouting louder than everybody else in the room. By assigning McCay to Brisbane’s desk, Hearst was clipping his wings.
William Randolph Hearst didn’t initially see the profit in animation, and thus didn’t pay it much mind. But he always appreciated the value in illustrated cartoons, which had helped him build his media empire. He understood that, in a nation of immigrants who couldn’t always read English, cartoons often had more influence than articles, and therefore more power. This had long been understood by politicians like Tammany Hall chieftain William “Boss” Tweed, who once said, “I don’t care what the papers write about me. My constituents can’t read. But, damn it, they can see the pictures.” (Ironically, when Tweed escaped jail in 1876, he was arrested by an official who recognized him from the caricatures in Harper’s Weekly, drawn by Thomas Nast.)
When Hearst entered the newspaper business, one of his earliest hires was a teenage cartoonist named James Swinnerton, known as Jimmy to some and Swinny to others. Swinny had previously worked at a racetrack, but joined Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner in 1892 after realizing that he preferred drawing to gambling. After spreading upcoming comic strips on the floor of Hearst’s office, Swinny would then watch as Hearst walked among them, enthusiastically scribbling notes in the margins. After Swinny’s hiring, Hearst continued acquiring top talent, often by poaching it away from his competitors. In 1898, Hearst hired Richard Outcault, one of the first cartoonists to use speech balloons, from his rival and fellow newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer. Done in order to acquire Outcault’s popular “Yellow Kid” character, the acquisition inspired the term “yellow journalism,” describing the newspaper industry’s breathless competition for market share, sensationalism, and profit. Hearst then rubbed Pulitzer’s nose in his victory by printing “eight pages of iridescent polychromous effulgence that makes the rainbow look like a lead pipe. That’s the sort of a Colored Comic Weekly people want—and—THEY SHALL