Max Fleischer filming How to Read a Contour Map, one of many military training films he made during World War I.
Although not as popular as Felix—a difficult feat to match—Koko quickly became one of his few notable competitors. Like Felix, he possessed a unique personality, much more than just a simple cartoon automaton performing simple gags and stunts. His films possessed a reflexive nature not seen in other cartoons; he was always aware that he was living as a cartoon, made of pen and ink. This concept, reflecting his creators’ sly self-awareness, thrilled audiences. The clown was “a living example of what can be accomplished by hard work and concentration,” according to Moving Picture World. The New York Times was also impressed, proclaiming that “Mr. Fleischer’s work, by its wit of conception and skill of execution, makes the general run of animated cartoons seem dull and crude.” Fleischer was pleased by the attention but was nagged by a question raised by another Times reviewer: “Why doesn’t Mr. Fleischer do more?”
Model sheet used by animators to standardize the appearance, posture, and gestures of Koko the Clown.
Max did want, very badly in fact, to do more. He tried to convince Bray that, even though Koko was already a star, he could be so much bigger—some theaters had even started advertising him on their marquees, which almost never happened for the opening shorts; it was meant only for main features. But Bray wasn’t interested. His success with military training films had convinced him that educational material was the future of animation. Such films might not have been as sexy as entertainment films, but they did offer steady and dependable revenue from government and corporate contracts. This was important to Bray because he was by now having financial difficulties. His expansion plans had included a production and distribution contract with the Goldwyn Company, a contract worth roughly $1.5 million, which required that he release more than 150 reels of film a year, a number he had trouble reaching. By 1921, he faced numerous legal threats for contractual breaches related to nonperformance and lack of delivery. He would ultimately survive his precarious financial predicament, but not by producing the kind of films that interested the Fleischers. By 1928, he would shutter his entertainment division in order to focus on military films, which he would make well into the Cold War. He would also become the auto industry’s biggest provider of training films.
Bray’s new priorities prompted the Fleischers to leave and start their own studio in 1921. Named Out of the Inkwell Films, Inc., it had humble beginnings, operating out of a dingy basement apartment at 129 East 45th Street, just beneath the groaning floorboards of an old brothel.
How Max Fleischer got the financing to start his own studio was never quite clear. Judging by the colorful stories passed around about the family’s gambling habits, this murkiness might have been intentional. Not only was Essie Fleischer a regular at the racetrack, she liked organizing poker games, where she smoked cigars and pipes alongside the men and ordered her scotch “neat—no water, no soda, no ice, just scotch,” according to her son. From what were probably gambling winnings, she had given Max the money he needed to finish designing his rotoscope, and perhaps a similar arrangement was in play with the new studio. Perhaps not coincidentally, Dave Fleischer won $50,000 gambling on horses just before the Fleischers left Bray. Whatever the case, the Fleischers were never particularly clear about their financing.
One of Max Fleischer’s children later speculated that some money might have come from a distributor named Margaret Winkler. A scrappy immigrant from Hungary, Winkler got her start in the film industry in 1912, at the age of seventeen, working as a secretary for Harry Warner of Warner Bros. When Warner decided to shed the studio’s cartoon distribution deals in the early 1920s—he was not yet convinced that cartoons had staying power—he gave them to Winkler. Not only did he admire her competence, but her bicoastal contacts—made during the years when Warner Bros. was expanding its business into California—were an important qualification for a good distributor. Soon she had worked her way into a deal distributing the Felix cartoons, the most popular series on the market. Signing a distribution agreement for the increasingly popular Fleischer cartoons, which the brothers were trying to distribute themselves, was likewise a shrewd business move.
The arrangement with Winkler was also useful for Max Fleischer. Good distribution could make or break a film’s success, and a skilled distributor like Winkler was crucial. The job meant navigating a complex set of rules known as the “states rights method,” a corrupt and murky system that guided how films were distributed. Under this system, film prints were first sold to brokers, who then distributed them to theaters in a given territory, oftentimes underreporting their numbers and skimming from the percentage owed to the producer. In other cases, brokers sometimes made illegal copies of a film, distributed those, and pocketed the full take. A successful distributor like Winkler had to be part accountant, part bouncer. Her colleagues noted that most of her success was because of her “quick mind,” though others added that her “short temper” also proved handy.
Winkler was also one of the few women in the industry with any real power or influence. Because she knew that some people were wary of doing business with a woman, she used the initials “M. J.,” in “M. J. Winkler Productions,” as a way of hiding her gender (The “J.” in her initials had been made up since she didn’t actually have a middle name.) “How did you do it?” a newspaper reporter once asked Winkler in 1923. “Are people surprised to find out that M. J. Winkler Productions is owned by a woman?”
Winkler would smile politely at such questions, well aware of the obstacles impeding women in her line of work. “I think the industry is full of wonderful possibilities for an ambitious woman,” she said. “And there is no reason why she shouldn’t be able to conduct business as well as the men.” Some men were threatened when they first met her, she explained, “but they got over it.”
As the Out of the Inkwell series grew in popularity, the Fleischers upgraded their studio in 1923. The space beneath the funky old brothel was exchanged for the spacious sixth floor of 1600 Broadway, an impressive tower of elegantly curved brick archways located near the bright lights of Times Square. The staff numbered nearly two dozen now, and included the important addition of Richard “Dick” Huemer, an animator who had previously worked for Raoul Barré. Huemer helped redesign Koko and conceptualize for him a pet dog named Fitz, a sidekick whose main role seemed to be getting Koko into trouble.
As the studio grew, Max and Dave settled into a division of labor. Even though Max’s name was bigger than Dave’s in the credits, the studio’s cartoons reflected Dave’s personality equally. Max handled a fair amount of creative work, but also most of the back-office administration: phone calls, payroll, meetings organized around lunch. Dave’s responsibilities were almost entirely creative: directing cartoons, initiating story ideas, dreaming up gags. His informal directorial style usually started with a general idea upon which the staff would riff—he avoided storyboards and most other forms of organized structure. Individual animators were free to add pretty much any idea, so long as it got laughs. In this way, what the films lacked in gloss they usually made up for in energy. The studio animators also reduced their use of the rotoscope, preferring instead to let their imagination steer the action.
In 1923, shortly after moving into his new studio, Max Fleischer decided to take animation in a new direction. This didn’t mean drastic changes to the Out of the