Once the cartoon started rolling, it was immediately clear that no topic was out of bounds, no matter how tasteless or crude. There were glistening erections, fully detailed labia, mounds of pubic hair, endless ethnic jokes. Eveready Harton, the main character, has a penis so big he needs a unicycle to support it as he runs around trying to have sex with both people and animals, opening a Pandora’s box of gags involving venereal disease, bestiality, any and all types of sexuality. No fold, flap of skin, or bodily secretion went hidden.
“The laughter almost blew the top off the hotel where they were screening it,” one animator remembered. It provided a glimpse of what many animators of the era—mostly young men—thought was truly funny when left entirely to themselves. It was the equivalent of the filthy jokes stand-up comics tell to one another in the dressing room after their sets, trying to one-up each other.
Later in the evening, Max Fleischer motioned for McCay to come to the front of the room and give a speech. Winsor made his way through the crowd, unsmiling. The room quieted down once he reached the front, then the situation turned awkward as he started a dry lecture about the technical aspects of animation. Everyone there already knew the details of what he was talking about and became distracted; the room was soon lost, filling rapidly with the sound of scattered side conversations. Sensing that he had lost control, McCay regained everyone’s attention by abruptly changing the topic to what he really wanted to discuss: the current state of animation. “Animation should be an art,” he scolded the room, his voice cold. “That is how I conceived it. But as I see what you fellows have done with it, is making it into a trade. Not an art, but a trade. Bad luck!”
The night, which was supposed to be jovial, turned sour, as Izzy Klein recalled. The way McCay’s speech had ended—“Bad luck!”—didn’t even make complete sense. It sounded like a bad omen, or even a curse. But there was an uncomfortable grain of truth in McCay’s words. For all the inventiveness, imagination, and achievements of a handful of artists—McCay, the Fleischers, Otto Messmer, and now Walt Disney—the industry was slipping into a lull. In many ways, much of McCay’s work from a decade earlier was still the high-water mark of the industry. Animation hadn’t evolved at the same rate live action had during the same period. Many animation studios, particularly the ones operating in Paul Terry’s wake, were becoming overly reliant on the same formulas and patterns, based on the same repetitive gags. Theater owners were beginning to grow weary. The only major studios still bothering with cartoons at that moment were Paramount and Universal. If animation were going to blossom into something bigger, as McCay hoped, the industry would need something new to shake it up.
Chapter 11
“Giddyap!”
Long before Winsor McCay’s speech at Roth’s, Max Fleischer had been working on a novel way to improve cartoons. Starting in the early 1920s, he had tinkered with ways to give them better sound, synchronized with the action on-screen. It was a long, difficult process, involving one early experiment that had ended in disaster.
Dr. Hugo Riesenfeld, conductor at the Rialto Theater, a luxurious movie palace on Broadway, had hired Fleischer to animate a cartoon conductor that would direct his live orchestra from the screen. As Max set up for a rehearsal, he was startled by the sudden sight of an Apache Indian, tomahawk in hand, bearing down on him atop a white horse galloping at full speed. But the horse never got to him—it was on a treadmill, a setup devised by Riesenfeld to create a live soundtrack of a horse galloping for a later showing of The Vanishing American, a silent western featuring the lantern-jawed Richard Dix.
Fleischer watched as his young son, Richard, napping in the front row, was jolted awake by the noise. The horse was aimed right at him, and Fleischer realized that the treadmill setup was disaster waiting to happen. “You can’t do that!” he shouted at the director. “What would happen if, when the horse is going full gallop, the treadmill jammed? That horse would come flying off that treadmill right into the orchestra pit and probably into the audience too.”
Fleischer offered a solution: Position the horse sideways, which was safer and would allow the audience to see all its legs in motion. “All we have to do is turn the treadmill sideways, put the horse and rider on it, and say, ‘Giddyap!’” he explained.
The horse was shifted and brought again to a full gallop.
Then the treadmill jammed. The horse launched into the stage wings, hooves clattering, and smashed into a wall, breaking its neck; the rider jumped off right before the crash, sustaining only minor injuries. This was a story Fleischer liked to tell later, as a way to illustrate why movies needed to get the sound question figured out.
Riesenfeld was also drawn to the challenge of matching sound and film, and hired Fleischer as a creative technical consultant, introducing him to his friend Dr. Lee de Forest, a sound engineer.
Bushy-eyebrowed, with a push-broom mustache, Lee de Forest was something of a throwback, a man from that age of inventors who spent their time in laboratories crammed full of interesting gear. He held 216 patents, including one for the thermionic triode detector, an electric current amplifier that helped usher in the age of broadcast radio. Like Fleischer, de Forest had also been struggling with the many challenges of sound synchronization. If inconsistent hand-cranked cameras didn’t ruin the timing, then projectionists cutting damaged frames out of film reels did. Many notable engineers had failed to solve these problems, including Thomas Edison, who in 1913 invented the Kinetophone, a device composed of a phonograph placed near a screen and connected to the projector by wires running under the floor. His attempt was a failure—rats constantly chewed through the wires, and the sound was almost always scratchy, prompting annoyed audiences to boo. Defeated, Edison eventually began arguing that synchronized sound wasn’t desirable. “Americans require a restful quiet in the moving picture theater,” he reasoned. “For them talking from the lips of the figures on the screen destroys the illusion.”
Unlike Edison, de Forest wasn’t willing to give up so easily. All he needed was money, but American investors were wary. They feared de Forest was running a stock manipulation scheme, a crime he was narrowly acquitted of earlier in his career. He also had a string of bankruptcies to his name, and a history of getting swindled by his business partners. With his prospects of working in the United States thus limited, de Forest found financial backing in Berlin instead, working on his “Phonofilm” idea there. In Germany he made progress, solving many of the synchronization problems by imprinting the sound recordings directly onto the film instead of playing them separately. Returning to America in 1923, he began screening examples of what Phonofilm could do: a film of Calvin Coolidge giving a speech about the evil of taxes; another of singer Eddie Cantor warbling a song about “Georgie Porgie”, and a third showing performer DeWolf Hopper onstage reciting “Casey at the Bat.”
Fleischer was sold once he saw de Forest’s demos. Using his introduction from Riesenfeld, he enlisted the engineer’s help on an idea he was working up: the Song Car-Tunes series, in which audiences sang along to a ball bouncing across lyrics projected onto the screen. Their first film together was 1924’s My Old Kentucky Home, which was technically the first sound cartoon.
Even though My Old Kentucky Home was released in 1924, by 1927 the industry still hadn’t converted from silents to sound. Fleischer had been an exception, an early adopter of new technologies. But other industry leaders were wary. They worried that sound threatened their preexisting business models, criticizing it in the same way that high priests once called the printing press a passing fad. They ignored the potential and saw only the drawbacks, such as the hissy sound or the way actors’ voices garbled each other out.