Bray was bringing to animation the same mindset that Andrew Carnegie had brought to steelmaking, or that John D. Rockefeller had brought to oil production. Within a few years, animators would nickname him “the Henry Ford of animation,” a reputation he helped cultivate by appearing in magazine profiles dressed not as an eccentric artist, but as a shrewd mogul: a high collar riding halfway up his neck, every hair on his head nailed neatly into place. During interviews, he avoided speaking in the romantic style of Winsor McCay, and instead adopted the motivational style of language that captains of industry used to promote the American dream. “If you have faith in your dream, and faith that you can make it a reality, don’t be afraid to take a chance!” he told one magazine.
Bray modeled himself on moguls who didn’t just change industries, but owned them, building great monopolies and crushing their competitors. He saw animation as a frontier where the landgrab was only just starting. Soon he began patenting his processes, hoping to make a fortune by charging his competitors fees. Once his patents were registered, he then began suing. In 1914, Winsor McCay himself received in the mail a “citation of infringement,” claiming that he “would be required to pay royalties on all future productions of animated cartoons to the holder of the patent rights.”
McCay was furious. “He felt he was high-jacked and double-crossed,” according to his friend Isadore Klein, who would later become a cartoonist for the New Yorker. Bray responded carefully, never admitting that he had learned anything from McCay. “I didn’t know Winsor McCay was doing anything,” he told an interviewer in 1974, when he was ninety-four years old. “I just got the idea that I wanted to make animated cartoons for the movies. Winsor McCay never thought of that.”
Fortunately for McCay, Bray’s original patent, filed in February 1914, was rejected by the patent examiner. He had seen McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland and declared Bray’s process too similar. Both used cross marks to register stationary drawings, both had an assistant trace the nonmoving elements, and both had recycled drawings in order to use fewer of them. Bray’s lawyer, Clair W. Fairbank, counterargued that Bray’s process was actually quite different. He highlighted Bray’s various refinements, such as his method of printing multiple backgrounds, whereas McCay had simply retraced the background art for every frame. After six months of arguing, pressing his case and wearing down the bureaucrats, Fairbank eventually got the patent granted, along with several more patents, including one for the use of cels. Now, with the paperwork settled and in place, Bray resumed his legal assault.
What was perhaps most insulting to McCay was Bray’s tone during their fight. Bray was condescending, sneering that McCay’s cartoons were nothing more than “an interesting curiosity exhibited and lectured about,” as if they carried little more than academic value. Then he made a bold accusation, claiming that McCay’s inefficient methods had “caused the commercial failure of all attempts to secure animated cartoons prior to my invention.” He was basically saying that animation was something he had to rescue from McCay, and McCay fumed over the misrepresentation. He certainly wasn’t against Bray’s genuine improvements; he actually encouraged them, since they promoted animation as an art form. What offended him was the prospect of having to pay Bray royalties, as well as Bray’s insinuation that McCay was somehow degrading animation. Bray had even gone so far as to call his legal offensive a way to “uphold the dignity of the animated cartoon.”
To McCay, this condescending language was a way to obscure Bray’s true goal of establishing a monopoly. Bray was contributing useful new methods to animation but wasn’t necessarily using them for purposes that Winsor respected. Some of Bray’s cartoons were clever, but others felt like novelties built around cheap gags made to get quick laughs. Bray valued quantity over quality.
McCay avoided the lawsuit after his lawyers argued that Little Nemo in Slumberland was shown in theaters years before Bray filed for his patents. This protected him from further lawsuits but didn’t protect other animators. When McCay learned that Bray was planning to sue others, he didn’t protest, but instead responded contradictory to his professed goal of championing animation for its own sake. He secretly worked out a deal whereby he would get a cut of any settlements. The arrangement was kept quiet; historians wouldn’t know about it for decades, until letters from Bray’s attorney were discovered in McCay’s private papers. Even so, McCay’s cut would never amount to much. In 1932, the year Bray’s patents ran out, it was a mere $65.71—“McCay won a moral victory but about eighteen cents in cash,” Isadore Klein joked.
Bray would have a successful career in animation but would never rule over the entire industry the way he once envisioned. Other competitors had carved out their own niches before he could establish dominance. One of them, Raoul Barré, had opened his own full-time studio in the Bronx in 1914, around the same time Bray opened his. Independent of Bray, Barré and his partner Bill Nolan had pioneered their own distinctive advancements, including a clever way to keep stacks of drawings in register by using pegs to hold them in place, thus helping animators trace their drawings more easily. They also began using special desks equipped with both this peg system and panes of glass that could be illuminated from below.
Animation was quickly becoming a competitive field, full of new ideas. The new methods pioneered by men like Bray and Barré now allowed small crews of three or four animators to make a short cartoon in less than a month, compared with the eighteen months it took Bray to make The Artist’s Dream. Their upstart studios were able to release a regular stream of material to theaters, so long as they kept creating ideas. For his part, McCay continued down his own path, tackling ambitious material that he released only sporadically. Newcomers to the industry respected him for his artistry, but considered Bray's and Barré’s model the best way to make a living. They knew that, if animation were to survive and become more than a novelty, it would need to be profitable. The industry was still in its infancy but beginning to attract more and more talent.
Chapter 4
“The Camera Fiend”
One evening in 1914, Waldemar Kaempffert, editor of Popular Science magazine, took his wife to the movies. Before the main feature started, one of John Bray’s cartoons from the Colonel Heeza Liar series flickered up on the screen. Kaempffert’s wife responded by slumping down in her seat and groaning, “Oh, how I hate these things.”
The next morning at work, Kaempffert was complaining about how Bray’s cartoon had almost ruined his date night with Mrs. Kaempffert. Listening from the doorway was the magazine’s young art editor, Max Fleischer. Kaempffert explained that the cartoon’s concept wasn’t bad, but the execution was poor—the picture was wobbly and the movement jerky. He thought Fleischer might be able to do better. “Max, you’re a bright young man,” he said. “You’re an artist, you understand mechanics, and machinery, and photography, and you’ve got a scientific mind. Surely you can come up with some idea, some way to make animated cartoons look better, smoother, and more lifelike.”
Fleischer came from a long family line of people who enjoyed tackling such challenges. His father, a tailor by trade, was a constant tinkerer who had invented the detachable-faced brass buttons that allowed police officers to shine them without smudging their uniforms with polish; his brother Joe had built a wireless radio that allowed him to hear about the Titanic sinking before it was in the news; and his brother Charlie had invented the penny arcade claw-digger machine. Max likewise understood machines and instruments, loved touching them, loved the smell and language of workshops and labs. At thirty-one years old, he had spent the previous decade working, in one form or another, on all the different aspects that composed animation: drawing, photography, mechanics. In a previous stint as a cartoonist at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, he had even created a comic strip, E. K. Sposher, the Camera Fiend, specifically about photography. Now, animation offered Fleischer a chance to combine