Max Fleischer

Max Fleischer (born Majer Fleischer ; July 19, 1883 – September 25, 1972) was an American animator, inventor, film director and producer, and studio founder and owner. Born in Kraków, Fleischer immigrated to the United States where he became a pioneer in the development of the animated cartoon and served as the head of Fleischer Studios, which he co-founded with his younger brother Dave. He brought such comic characters as Koko the Clown, Betty Boop, Popeye to the movie screen, and was responsible for several technological innovations, including the rotoscope, the " follow the bouncing ball" technique pioneered in the ''Ko-Ko Song Car-Tunes'' films, and the "stereoptical process". Film director Richard Fleischer was his son.

Early life

Majer Fleischer was born July 19, 1883, to a Jewish family in Kraków, (then part of Austria-Hungary: Austrian Partition). He was the second of six children of a tailor from Dąbrowa Tarnowska, Aaron Fleischer, who later changed his name to William in the United States, and Malka "Amelia" Pałasz. His family immigrated to the United States in March 1887, settling in New York City, where he attended public school. During his early formative years, he enjoyed a middle-class lifestyle, the result of his father's success as an exclusive tailor to high society clients. This changed drastically after his father lost his business ten years later. His teens were spent in Brownsville, a poor Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. He continued his education at evening high school. He received commercial art training at Cooper Union and formal art instruction at the Art Students League of New York, studying under George Bridgman. He also attended the Mechanics and Tradesman's School in midtown Manhattan.

Fleischer began his career at ''The Brooklyn Daily Eagle''. Beginning as an errand boy, he advanced to photographer, photoengraver, and eventually, staff cartoonist. At first, he drew single-panel editorial cartoons, but then graduated to the full strips "Little Algie" and "S.K. Sposher, the Camera Fiend". These satirical strips reflected his life in Brownsville and his fascination with technology and photography, respectively—both displaying his sense of irony and fatalism. It was during this period he met newspaper cartoonist and early animator, John Randolph Bray, who would later give him his start in the animation field.

On December 25, 1905, Fleischer married his childhood sweetheart, Ethel (Essie) Goldstein. On the recommendation of Bray, Fleischer was hired as a technical illustrator for the Electro-Light Engraving Company in Boston. In 1909 he moved to Syracuse, New York, working as a catalog illustrator for the Crouse-Hinds Company, and a year later returned to New York as art editor for ''Popular Science'' magazine under editor Waldemar Kaempffert.

Career

The rotoscope

By 1914, the first commercially produced animated cartoons began to appear in movie theaters. They tended to be stiff and jerky. Fleischer devised an improvement in animation through a combined projector and easel for tracing images from a live-action film. This device, known as the rotoscope, enabled Fleischer to produce the first realistic animation since the initial works of Winsor McCay. Although his patent was granted in 1917, Max and his brothers Joe and Dave Fleischer made their first series of tests between 1914 and 1916.

First venture

The Pathé Film exchange offered Max his first opportunity as a producer due in part to the fact that Dave had been working there as a film cutter since 1914. Max chose a political satire of a hunting trip by Theodore Roosevelt. After several months of labor, the film was rejected, and Max was making the rounds again when he was reunited with John R. Bray at Paramount. Bray had a distribution contract with Paramount at the time and hired Max as production supervisor for his studio. With the outbreak of World War I, Max was sent to Fort Sill, Oklahoma to produce the first Army training films on subjects that included ''Contour Map Reading'', ''Operating the Stokes Mortar'', ''Firing the Lewis Machine Gun'', and ''Submarine Mine Laying''. Following the Armistice, Fleischer returned to Bray and the production of theatrical and educational films.

The Inkwell Studios

Fleischer produced his ''Out of the Inkwell'' films featuring "The Clown" character, which his brother Dave originated; he had worked as a sideshow clown at Coney Island. It was one of the later tests made from footage of Dave as a clown that interested Bray.

Fleischer's initial series was first produced at the Bray Studios and released as a monthly installment in the ''Bray-Goldwyn Pictograph Screen Magazine'' from 1919 to 1921. In addition to producing ''Out of the Inkwell'', Max's position at Bray was primarily production manager, and supervisor of several educational and technical films such as ''The Electric Bell'', ''All Aboard for the Moon'', and ''Hello, Mars''. And it was as production manager that Fleischer hired his first animator, Roland Crandall, who remained with him throughout the active years of Fleischer's studio.

''Out of the Inkwell'' featured the novelty of combining live action and animation and served as semi-documentaries with the appearance of Max Fleischer as the artist who dipped his pen into the ink bottle to produce the clown figure on his drawing board. While the technique of combining animation with live action was already established by others at the Bray Studio, it was Fleischer's clever use of it combined with Fleischer's realistic animation that made his series unique.

In 1921, Max and Dave established Out of the Inkwell Films, Incorporated, and continued production of ''Out of the Inkwell'' through various states-rights distributors. "The Clown" had no name until 1924, when Dick Huemer came aboard after animating on the early ''Mutt and Jeff'' cartoons. He set the style for the series, redesigning "The Clown", and named him "Ko-Ko". Huemer created Ko-Ko's canine companion, known as Fitz, and moved the Fleischers away from their dependency on the Rotoscope for fluid animation, leaving it for special uses and reference points where compositing was involved. Because Max valued Huemer's work, he instructed Huemer to make just the key poses and have an assistant fill in the remaining drawings. Max assigned Art Davis as Huemer's assistant and this was the beginning of the animation position of "inbetweener", which was essentially another Fleischer "invention" that resulted in efficient production and was adopted by the entire industry by the 1930s.

It was during this time that Max developed rotoscoping, a means of photographing live action film footage with animation cels for a composited image. This was an improvement over the method used by Bray where a series of 8" x 10" stills were made from motion picture film and used as backgrounds behind animation cels. The Rotograph technique went into more general use as "aerial image photography" and was a staple in animation and optical effects companies for making titles and various forms of matte composites.

In addition to the theatrical comedy films, Fleischer produced technical and educational films including ''That Little Big Fellow'' and ''Now You're Talking'' for A.T.&T. In 1923, he made two 20-minute features explaining Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity and Charles Darwin's ''Evolution'' using animated special effects and live action.

Red Seal

In 1924, Fleischer partnered with Edwin Miles Fadiman, Hugo Riesenfeld and Lee de Forest to form Red Seal Pictures Corporation, which owned 36 theaters on the East Coast, extending as far west as Cleveland, Ohio. During this period, Fleischer invented the " Follow the Bouncing Ball" technique in his ''Ko-Ko Song Car-Tunes'' series of animated sing-along shorts. In these films, the lyrics of a song appear on screen and theater patrons are encouraged to sing along with the characters. An animated ball bounces across the top of the lyrics to indicate when words should be sung.

Of the 36 ''Song Car-Tunes'' 12 used the De Forest Phonofilm sound-on-film process, the first of which was ''My Old Kentucky Home'' in 1926. This preceded Walt Disney's ''Steamboat Willie'' (1928), which has been erroneously cited for decades as the first cartoon to synchronize sound with animation. The ''Song Car-Tunes'' series lasted until early 1927 and was interrupted by the bankruptcy of the Red Seal company—just five months before the start of the sound era.

Alfred Weiss, owner of Artcraft Pictures, approached Fleischer with a contract to produce cartoons for Paramount. Due to legal complications of the bankruptcy, the ''Out of the Inkwell'' series was renamed ''The Inkwell Imps'' and ran from 1927 to 1929. This was the start of Fleischer's relationship with the huge Paramount organization, which lasted for the next 15 years. After a year, the Fleischer brothers started experiencing mismanagement under Weiss and left the company in late 1928. Inkwell Films, Inc. filed for bankruptcy in January 1929, and Fleischer formed Fleischer Studios, Inc. in March 1929.

Fleischer Studios, Inc.

In 1935, the Mother Goose-themed short film '' The Kids in the Shoe'' was released.

Fleischer first set up operations at Carpenter-Goldman Laboratories in Queens with a small staff (see Fleischer Studios). After eight months, his new company was solvent enough to move back to its former location at 1600 Broadway, where it remained until 1938. At Carpenter-Goldman, Fleischer began producing industrial films including ''Finding His Voice'' (1929), a demonstration film illustrating the Western Electric Variable Density sound recording and reproduction method. Despite the conflicts with Weiss, Fleischer managed to negotiate a new contract with Paramount to produce a revised version of the "Song Car-tunes", produced with sound and renamed'' Screen Songs'', beginning with ''The Sidewalks of New York''.

At this early stage in the sound era, Fleischer produced many technically advanced films that were the result of his continued research and development that perfected the post-production method of sound recording. Several of these devices provided visual cues for the musical conductor to follow. As dialogue and songs became major elements, more precise analysis of soundtracks was possible through other inventions from Fleischer such as "The Cue Meter".

Betty Boop

Max Fleischer's Betty Boop character was born out of a cameo caricature in the early ''Talkartoon'', ''Dizzy Dishes'' (1930). Fashioned after popular singer Helen Kane, she originated as a hybrid poodle/canine figure and was such a sensation in the New York preview that Paramount encouraged Fleischer to develop her into a continuing character. While she originated under animator Myron "Grim" Natwick, she was transformed into a human female under Seymour Kneitel and Berny Wolf and became Fleischer's most famous character.

The "Betty Boop" series began in 1932 and became a big success for Fleischer. That same year, Helen Kane filed a lawsuit against Fleischer, Fleischer Studios, and Paramount claiming that the cartoons were a deliberate caricature of her, created unfair competition, and had ruined her career. The suit went to trial in 1934. An early-sound test film of an obscure Black performer, "Baby Esther" Jones, was shown as key evidence—disproving Kane's claims as originator of the singing style. Judge Edward J. McGoldrick ruled, "The plaintiff has failed to sustain either cause of action by proof of sufficient probative force." In his opinion, the "baby" technique of singing did not originate with Kane.'' The Mansfield News'', May 5, 1934.

Popeye the Sailor

Fleischer's greatest business decision came with his licensing of the comic strip character Popeye the Sailor

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