Chuck Amuck Read online

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface to the Paperback Edition by Matt Groening

  Foreword by Steven Spielberg

  Caveat Emptor

  Johnson and the Birth of a Notion

  Uncle Lynn’s Stubborn Liver: Comic Tales and Comic Stars

  How to Become an Animator

  A Few Hours’ Incursion into a Rabbit Factory

  The Front Office

  The Directors: Friz Freleng, Tex Avery, and How I Grew

  The Writers: The Slum Kid, the Scion, and Me

  Duck Dodgers: A Case History—Story Through Animation

  Rabbit Transit

  Never Take a Right Turn at Albuquerque

  The Birth in Me of a Daffy Duckling

  Teddy and Charlie

  How to Make a Tennis Shoe for a Percheron

  Appendix

  Remembering Dorothy Webster Jones

  Filmography

  Major Characters

  Early Animation

  Photographs

  Acclaim for Chuck Jones and Chuck Amuck

  Copyright

  I dedicate this book to my wife, Marian, and to my daughter, Linda, who together through light touch, light heart, and deep love have made these past years the happiest, the best years of a happy life.

  (Je vous embrasse tendrement.)

  … and to Stefan Kanfer, whose determination that there was a book lurking in the shadows of my shadowy history put me, because of my love for him, into the uneasy position of having to try to prove him right.

  But without Linda Healey—superb editor, enemy of the false, friend of the true—even this wan hope would have been only fantasy.

  All events related in this volume are either real or fictional—the drawings have been changed to protect the innocent.

  From ROCKET SQUAD (1956)

  PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

  As the twentieth century whips around its final lap, we can start contemplating how annoying the next century is going to be.

  Let’s face it: in the years to come we’re going to be surrounded by increasing numbers of young whippersnappers who aren’t going to put up with our claims that, despite the wars and genocide and smog and infomercials and disco and car alarms, the good old days had some pretty great stuff going on.

  “Not the twentieth century again,” they’ll whine, rolling their eyes.

  But we’ve got Chuck Jones. And even though the immature ingrates of tomorrow will be marching to a different drum machine, no doubt they’ll unbegrudgingly acknowledge the joyful genius of his cartoons.

  And that’s because, among other miracles, Chuck’s animation continues to make audiences laugh, year after year, decade after decade, and soon enough, century after century.

  Comedy is a fragile enterprise, vulnerable to drastic changes in taste over the years, but nothing in the great cartoons of Chuck Jones ever seems musty or out-of-date. We can talk about the transcendental lasting artistic value of Chuck’s output, or better yet, we can screen Duck Dodgers in the 24½ Century and sit back and laugh.

  And that’s what’s great about the great art of Chuck Jones. You can’t pin it down—it’s too funny. The laughs sweep over you like a wave, bigger and more powerful than anything bubbling up from your own pitiful brain, with perfect timing, split-second pauses, and hilarious sight gags, all delivered with the relentlessly lively exuberance that came from the uniquely unsentimental imaginations of Chuck and his brilliant collaborators.

  For me, the cartoons of Chuck Jones are like wish-fulfillment dreams come to life. One of the thrills of the power struggles of Bugs and Daffy and Wile E. and the rest of the gang is that they capture the heedless glee and immaturity of recurring childhood fantasies. In these feverish, wild vignettes, all the subconscious malice and frivolity and charm and surprise take center stage, anchored in reality by the emotions of humiliation and anger and wit and triumph. As humans, or even as ducks or rabbits, we can all relate.

  But I’m getting carried away here. Chuck Jones is a genius—that’s for sure—but even more important, he makes us laugh our asses off.

  —Matt Groening

  FOREWORD

  When you hear the name Chuck Jones, what is the first image that comes to mind?

  For me, that generically American-sounding name always had the familiar ring of the family next door. One feels compelled to trust a name like that. It’s the type of person you might take a broken baseball bat to when your own dad is too busy to glue it … It’s the local Scoutmaster … the greengrocer … the best auto mechanic in town.

  It’s not the sort of name one instantly associates with pesky wabbits, neurotic ducks, or hard-luck coyotes, is it?

  If Walt Disney was the first animator who taught me how to fly in my dreams, Chuck Jones was the first animator who made me laugh at them.

  With the creation of Pepé Le Pew, Coyote, and Road Runner, and as part of the team that created Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and directed over fifty Bugs Bunny cartoons, Chuck broke away from the sweet preschool characters to whom Walt Disney Productions had given eternal life.

  Birdus Fleetus and Lupus Persisticus were my childhood heroes. It was out of a heartfelt respect for his cartoon wizardry that I begged Universal to pay Warners for those forty composite seconds of film that lent my first film, The Sugarland Express, its most poignant moment.

  Knowing Chuck has been a treat and I thank him for teaching me so much about breaking all the laws of physics … just for the joy of it.

  CAVEAT EMPTOR

  An autobiography that leaves out little things and enumerates only the big ones is no proper picture of the man’s life at all; his life consists of his feelings and his interests, with here and there an incident apparently big or little to hang the feelings on.

  —MARK TWAIN

  This book is not a record of facts, it is not exact; it makes no claim to being exact; it is, I hope, a fond catchall, a remembrance of events and people who, consciously or not, shaped my life and character.

  All memories are faulty, of course, and some autobiographies are bitter or rueful and waste valuable time seeking to identify those people who were, in the narrator’s memory, responsible for many of his stumblings and failures.

  This book has no one to blame and very many to praise and to love. Like my contemporaries Wile E. Coyote and Daffy Duck, I have little time and no inclination to find fault or failure in others, for I have too many abundant and stimulating faults and failures of my very own. Recognition of my own ineptitudes has always led me to better understanding of my trade. Jumblings, mistakes, and errors in judgment are the essence, the very fabric of humor.

  While I have not attempted a thorough and exact recounting of the facts of my life, I have tried to recapture something of the spirit of my involvement with animation. The odd and wonderful and curious truth is this: the animated cartoons I directed are now the facts—my report cards. The varied memories of their origins are often, and perhaps rightfully so, fictional.

  For me the startling, unbelievable matter is this: when I was nineteen years old, somebody offered to pay me to draw. For over fifty years and over 250 films, other somebodies have, amazingly, persisted in continuing to reward me for doing what I love to do.

  NOTE: For those who seek a chronological thread, no matter how thin, on which to hang the following
facts and figuratives, I nervously recommend the Appendix.

  Homes deducting the batty old income tax

  “Why do animated cartoonists use animals?” For the same reason that Aesop, La Fontaine, Kipling, Beatrix Potter, and Kenneth Grahame did: it is easier and more believable to humanize animals than it is to humanize humans.

  A young man came to work with us at Warner Bros. Cartoons as a writer shortly after World War II and promptly and proudly wrote home to his grandmother in Denver that he was writing scripts for Bugs Bunny.

  “I can’t understand why you’re writing scripts for Bugs Bunny,” the old lady replied with some asperity. “He’s funny enough just as he is.”

  Believability. That is what we were striving for. Not believability by the audience; that will follow. But belief in the life of characters—by the writer, the artist, the director, the animator. That, after all, is the dictionary definition and meaning of the word “animation”: to invoke life.

  What was implicit in what the old lady was saying was that our job was not to invent what Bugs Bunny did but to report his doings. Just as I, at seven, upon reading Tom Sawyer, would have been outraged at the suggestion that Mark Twain or anybody else invented Tom and Huckleberry Finn and their company. Tom Sawyer happened. He was not imaginary. He was real. He still is real. What else can he be but real? And there can be no doubt that Mark Twain shared that belief.

  Character always comes first, before the physical representation. Just as it is with all living things, including human beings. We are not what we look like. We are not even what we sound like. We are how we move; in other words, our personalities. And our personalities are shaped by what we think, by where we come from, by what we have experienced. And that personality is unique to each of us.

  Up to the advent of Johnson, I had little reason to doubt that the differences between cats were purely visual: size, color, sex (although sexual differences in cats seemed to be a secret guarded well by cats; I was not a precocious child at seven—just curious). If there were personality differences, I was unaware of them until Johnson padded in on little fog feet and taught me that first and most important lesson of animation: individuality. Yes, in looking back, I can see that it all began with Johnson, because Johnson demonstrated with such vivid certainty the whole truth of the matter: it is the individual, the oddity, the peculiarity that counts. If Johnson had stood up, which was unlikely since he was a cat, and pounded on the rostrum with his shoe, he could not have made his point more clearly to my seven-year-old mind: the only things worth watching in this or any other world are those that identify and overcome the ordinary. That summer morning in Balboa was a turning point for a small boy whose thoughts up to that time were concerned, like his cousin the shark, only with gastronomic matters.

  And so I was all unaware that the first step in my destiny to become an animation director would come silently out of a salmon-pink dawn, each step leaving a small, precise, dry paw print on the dew-moist sand. Through the gray salt-rimed boards of our back fence he moved with the self-assured, liquid, dignified delicacy of a world-class welterweight.

  With my fascinated nose waffled against the rust-brown screen of our second-floor sleeping porch, I watched him tiptoe through the dune grass and yellow oyster daisies to the foot of our back porch, then look appraisingly up at me and utter a single laconic “Mckgnaow.”*

  He moved into our house that morning, bag and baggage. The bag was that cat bag all cats live in, one of the few characteristics he shared with other cats. He sat fat and walked thin like other cats, but the resemblance to other cats stopped there.

  His baggage was what appeared to be a very old, very used tongue depressor, fastened securely about his neck with a bit of tarry string, bearing in violet indelible ink the crude inscription: JOHNSON. Whether this was his name, that of his former proprietors, or his blood type we were unable to determine, since he discussed his past not at all and responded to the name Johnson as well as any other, which was not at all; actually going in response to that name only to my mother and then only when she offered him grapefruit.

  For it cannot be denied that Johnson was a patsy for grapefruit. Many a battered mouse owed his life and his continued livelihood to an unknown grapefruit offered to Johnson by my mother. Johnson would leave a Bismarck herring, a stick of catnip, or a decayed sea gull for a single wedge of grapefruit. For a whole grapefruit, he would have committed fraud or practiced usury.

  I can only suppose that some vital juice necessary to cats was in short supply in the muttering Ferrari-like bowels of Johnson. He could easily devour a grapefruit a quarter his size at a sitting. Mother discovered this curious facet of Johnson’s metabolism one day at breakfast when Johnson sauntered up to the table and suggested sharing her breakfast, with his most ingratiating “Mckgnaow.” Mother, who was easily flattered, offered him a bit of bacon, a scrap of buttered toast, and the edge of egg white that remained on her plate, but Johnson insisted that she misunderstood his needs. After a brief conversation in different languages, my mother reluctantly offered Johnson the remains of her grapefruit.

  Johnson and the Great Grapefruit Wars

  There are historic moments, similar in nature to the Curies’ quantum leap from the sight of glowing pitchblende to the discovery of radium. That morning our family witnessed just such a moment. There was a sudden electric blue crack in the atmosphere like those preceding a tornado, as Johnson went at that innocent grapefruit like a tangerine-colored buzz saw: as the stripped shell of the fruit spun slowly to a stop like a twisting coin, Johnson sat staring dreamy-eyed, dreamy-grinned at Mother. As the reamed-out grapefruit rind whirled to a long loping stop, Johnson’s lox-pink tongue tenderly flicked a final golden drop from a whisker and whispered to Mother the single English word he knew: “More.”

  Johnson’s normal “Mckgnaow” had the same lisping slur later made popular by Humphrey Bogart, and like Bogart, his vocal impediment was due to a deadened nerve in his split upper lip. This honorable scar left a small Gothic window through which peered a scythe-like fang to inform the world that Johnson was not a cat to be trifled with. Mark Twain said that if you carried a cat home by the tail you would get information that would be valuable to you all your life. Such information could more conveniently be obtained by meddling with Johnson’s tongue depressor.

  Whatever else it represented, that bit of tongue depressor was Johnson’s sole possession: his entire estate, his chattel, his treasure. It was all he had to leave to his eldest son, and he treated it as a sacred object. Any attempt to remove it resulted in what can only be described as a physical threat of the most nerve-racking implications. Touch his treasure and Johnson simply went into a lightning somersault, coupled with a full-bodied, four-footed karate chop, in which the meddler suddenly found his hand caught in an inverted cat vise of sixteen needle-pointed claws, the offending hand flat against Johnson’s stomach, his eyes cobra-like, scythe-like slits of pure malevolence—one of Johnson’s feline canines caught on his lower lip, its amethyst point devoid of dentine, sharp as a scalpel, blue as a diamond. At this point the disturber of sacred tongue depressors was unharmed, but the slightest move elicited a corresponding slight extension of those sixteen curved stilettos. It was not unlike having one’s hand in a boxing glove full of fishhooks. If one wanted to get out—and one did—it would require the minimal help of four fearless human assistants of fantastic manual dexterity. It was possible to escape only if these assistants moved with split-second, simultaneous accuracy to pull Johnson’s paws apart. This method allowed one to escape with only minor wounds, but the safest yet and most unnerving way was to wait it out until Johnson had made up his mind that you were only kidding. This might take from five minutes to a half hour and few people had that kind of courage or were that free of panic or hysteria. So most unfortunates tried to snatch the hand free immediately upon being trapped, with results too bloodily ineffectual to be described. Only a half grapefruit gently dropped over his face like a
n ether cone would relax Johnson enough so his claws, like spines of a cactus, could be individually picked from the threatened extremity.

  In dubious combat

  Johnson’s invention of the space helmet

  While half a grapefruit would anesthetize Johnson, the most interesting way of serving Johnson his passion fruit was to present it to him in its glorious entirety: a whole unsullied, uncut, large grapefruit. The curved surface was too difficult for Johnson to achieve an effective toothhold, or clawhold; its broad surface was as difficult as it would be for a human being to try to bite a watermelon. It took him many frustrating hours of chasing grapefruits fruitlessly around the house before he recognized the wisdom of trapping it by dribbling this elusive adversary to the nearest corner. There it became possible for him to scratch a small flap of rind and thus burrow greedily in, ripping the innards out of the hapless fruit, often ending up with three-quarters of the rind cocked over his face like a small space helmet.

  A cat swimming is not a pleasant object

  On such occasions he seemed to enjoy this raffish adornment and would saunter out onto the sand, often with only one eye visible under the overhang, a curious sight to many people, a delight to our family, and a source of sheer terror to small dogs and old ladies.

  And so Johnson’s first lesson to me as a future animator was this: Eschew the ordinary, disdain the commonplace. If you have a single-minded need for something, let it be the unusual, the esoteric, the bizarre, the unexpected, such as a cat hooked on grapefruit. Somewhere along the line I realized that my insatiable and seldom-satisfied appetite for tuna fish, deviled eggs, popcorn, Delaware Punch, and sex never got me any points on the notoriety scale; too many people shared these appetites. Johnson demonstrated by precept, not pedantry, that only the peculiar will get you anywhere: if there are ten pictures hanging on the wall, only the one off-balance will get much attention, if only because it makes people uneasy, which can also be useful.