Screen Gems (animation studio)

Founding (1921–1926)

In 1921, New York City-based animation producer Pat Sullivan came to Warner Bros. Pictures president Harry Warner to sign a contract to distribute Sullivan and Otto Messmer's series of Felix the Cat animated short films. Warner declined to distribute the cartoons and instead told his secretary, Margaret Winkler, that she should form her own company and take control of the distribution of the series.^[1]

Winkler resultantly formed M.J. Winkler Productions; lacking a middle name, Winkler added the "J" initial for professional use and to partially disguise her gender.^[2] She found success distributing the Felix cartoons,^[3] and soon also took control of distributing Max and Dave Fleischer's series of Out of the Inkwell cartoons. By 1923, she and Sullivan were in constant dispute with each other, though they continued to work together; the Fleischer brothers broke from Winkler that year and formed their own distribution company, Red Seal.^[3] That same year, Winkler viewed a preview print of Alice's Wonderland, an unreleased short made by young Kansas City animator Walt Disney, which featured a live-action little girl superimposed into an animated world.^[4] Winkler signed Disney to produce a recurring series of these Alice Comedies, and Walt Disney set up a cartoon studio in Los Angeles with his brother Roy O. Disney and head artist Ub Iwerks to make the shorts.^[2]

In November 1923, Winkler married Charles Mintz, a film distributor who had worked for her since 1922.^[4] Mintz had quickly risen through the ranks within the Winkler organization; by the time of the marriage, he was sharing top management responsibility with Winkler.^[4]

In 1925, Winkler's renewal contract for the Felix shorts was drawn up, but she delayed signing due to the ongoing disputes with Sullivan. As a replacement, Winkler first attempted to get Disney and Iwerks to more heavily feature Julius the Cat, a supporting character in the Alice Comedies.^[5][2] Eventually, Winkler acquired the rights to another cartoon cat - the titular star of the Krazy Kat comic strip created by George Herriman. A former Sullivan animator, Bill Nolan, was placed in charge of making the Krazy Kat cartoons at a studio in Long Branch, New Jersey in summer 1925.^[3]

As opposed to following the format of the abstract and esoteric comic strip, as two previous series of Krazy Kat cartoons from other filmmakers had done, The Krazy Kat Studio, as it was known, made cartoons under Nolan's direction that morphed Krazy Kat into more of a Felix the Cat clone. This and the prominence of Julius in the Alice Comedies angered Pat Sullivan to the point that he broke fully with Winkler and signed instead with rival distributor E. W. Hammons of Educational Pictures in 1925.^[6]

Winkler Pictures (1926–1931)

M.J. Winkler Productions became known as Winkler Pictures after Mintz took over in 1926, shutting down their distribution services and switching to production. Mintz had FBO distribute the Krazy Kat and Alice Comedies for the 1926-1927 season. The Alice Comedies concluded in 1927, and the all-animated Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was created in its place.^[7] Mintz would drop FBO for the 1927-1928 season, having Universal distribute the Oswald shorts, while Paramount distributed the Krazy Kat cartoons. Bill Nolan’s Krazy Kat Studio was replaced by a new Krazy Kat Studio run by Ben Harrison and Manny Gould in the move to Paramount.^[8]

In February 1928, when the Oswald cartoons proved more successful than expected, Disney sought to meet with Mintz over the budget, wanting to spend more on the cartoons.^[8] Mintz refused and hired away all of Disney's animators except Ub Iwerks, Les Clark, and Johnny Cannon. These three artists stayed on with Walt Disney, accompanying him to create the Mickey Mouse series, while Mintz moved the production of the Oswald cartoons to Winkler Productions.^[8] Mintz's brother-in-law, George Winkler was installed as the administrative head, with veteran animator Walter Lantz and Disney defectors Hugh Harman and Rudolph Ising as the creative heads.^[9]

Management disputes between Winkler and the team of Harman and Ising led to disharmony at the Hollywood Winkler studio, with Ising being fired in December 1928.^[9] In April 1929, Universal Pictures president Carl Laemmle terminated Winkler's Oswald contract after one year and 24 cartoons. A new in-house cartoon studio was established at Universal, headed by Walter Lantz and Bill Nolan, who hired much of the Winkler staff. The Hollywood Winkler studio resultantly shuttered.^[9] Harman and Ising, accompanied by fellow ex-Winkler animators Friz Freleng and Max Maxwell, started a studio of their own in April 1929 and signed with producer Leon Schlesinger the following January to produce the Looney Tunes cartoon series for Warner Bros.^[9]

Mintz responded to these events by focusing on the Krazy Kat Studio. Mintz partnered with Columbia Pictures for distribution of the Krazy Kat cartoons in 1929,^[10] and in January 1930 moved the Krazy Kat operation from New Jersey to Los Angeles, where it was set up in the building vacated by the Winkler Oswald crew.^[11] Mintz also moved the other Winkler operations to California, closing the New York office and consolidating the Krazy Kat Studio and Winkler Pictures under a new name, the Charles Mintz Studio.^[10]

With its Columbia deal, the Mintz studio soon found itself in the awkward position of sharing space on the Columbia release schedule with Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies cartoons, which Columbia distributed from 1929 until Disney signed with United Artists in 1932.^[10] To compete, Ben Harrison and Manny Gould slowly altered the Krazy Kat character even further; he now became a "cuter" character in the Mickey Mouse vein.^[10]

With Harrison and Gould focused on Krazy Kat, Mintz hired animators Dick Huemer and Sid Marcus from New York's Fleischer Studios, and teamed them up with animator Art Davis, a veteran of the Krazy Kat cartoons. The result was a series of 12 Toby the Pup cartoons for the 1930-1931 season distributed by RKO Radio Pictures.^[12] The series would be cancelled and replaced by a series of cartoons featuring a young boy named Scrappy beginning in 1931 for distribution by Columbia. The Scrappy character quickly became the studio’s most successful character during the 1930s.

Becoming Screen Gems (1933–1940)

Charles Mintz Productions was renamed Screen Gems, Inc. in 1933, although the name had been used in copyrights as early as 1931^[13]. The name was originally used in 1933, when Columbia Pictures acquired a stake in Charles Mintz's animation studio.^[14] The name was derived from an early Columbia Pictures slogan, "Gems of the Screen", itself a takeoff on the song "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean".^[15]

Mintz was nominated twice for the Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoons), both times as producer of Color Rhapsodies shorts. His first nomination was in 1935 for Holiday Land, with the second in 1937 for The Little Match Girl. Production would continue on the Color Rhapsodies, Krazy Kat, and Scrappy cartoons under Mintz through the end of the 1930s. Between 1936 and 1941, 16 of the Color Rhapsody films were subcontracted to Cartoon Films Ltd., Ub Iwerks' animation studio. Iwerks, who had broken away from Disney in 1930, produced and directed 15 of these shorts himself, starting with Two Lazy Crows in 1936. The final short, The Carpenters, was done by Cartoon Films' Paul Fennell in 1941 to close out the contract after Iwerks had returned to Disney in 1940.

The Color Rhapsodies shorts were well received, but some of its other cartoons were not, mainly the late-1930s Krazy Kat and Scrappy shorts. Animator Isidore Klein was particularly frustrated with the Krazy Kat cartoons because of how little resemblance they bore to the comic strip by the mid-1930s. In an attempt to reverse this, Klein convinced Gould and Harrison in making the 1936 Krazy Kat cartoon Li'l Ainjil, which attempted a return to the Herriman style. The final product was found to be disappointing, and the series quickly returned to its Disney-esque interpretation of Krazy.^[16]

Jules Engel, an artist who later worked at the Disney studio in 1938, talked about his time at the Mintz Studio in a December 1975 interview, saying that the experience was a "disaster" because of "people's lack of sensitivity of what the world was doing", and that "the whole place was very anti-intellectual, anti-sensitive to art, anti-art, anti-culture. [...] People were doing that because it was a job, but not with passion, not with tenderness."^[17]

Columbia had given Mintz strict budget advances per-short, which frequently ran over budget as a result.^[18] In 1939, having become indebted to Columbia, Mintz relinquished his remaining ownership of the studio and the Screen Gems name to Columbia to settle longstanding financial problems.^[19] Facing increasingly poor health, Mintz resigned from the studio soon after; he died on December 30, 1939 from a heart attack.

As Columbia took full management control of the Screen Gems studio, it promoted the studio's production manager, Jimmy Bronis, to general manager, though Bronis was quickly replaced by George Winkler. The Krazy Kat and Scrappy series were discontinued in 1939 and replaced by two anthology series of black-and-white cartoons: Fables, which would only remain in production for three years; and Phantasies, which would continue through the rest of the studio's existence. Both series featured both one-shot stories and recurring characters. Krazy Kat continued to appear periodically across both series through 1940, and Scrappy through 1941, before both were fully phased out of Screen Gems' output for good.

Brief revitalization by Frank Tashlin (1941-1942)

In March 1941, Columbia hired Frank Tashlin, previously a writer for Walt Disney Productions and director for Leon Schlesinger Productions, to work as a writer at Screen Gems. Wanting to revitalize the studio as a serious competitor to other West Coast animation studios, Columbia shut down Screen Gems briefly in October 1941, laying off laying off most of its Mintz-era staff, including Arthur Davis, Manny Gould, Lou Lilly, Sid Marcus, Ben Harrison, and George Winkler.^[20] Winkler was replaced by Ben Schwalb, a producer from Columbia's live-action shorts department, as general manager.^[21] Ben Schwalb replaced Winkler as general manager,^[21] and Frank Tashlin was promoted to producer and creative supervisor.^[22][23]

Tashlin had a profound effect to the studio, and he raided the Disney studio for new talent, hiring away many of the animators who had participated in the Disney animators' strike the previous summer. These recruits included artists such as Phil Duncan, Grant Simmons, Louie Schmitt, Volus Jones, William Shull, Pat Matthews, Howard Swift, John Hubley, Zack Schwartz, Chic Otterstrom, Basil Davidovich, and returning animators such as Emery Hawkins and Ray Patterson.

As creative supervisor, Tashlin delegated directorial duties to Bob Wickersham and Alec Geiss (the father of Tony Geiss),^[24] and directed a small number of cartoons himself as well.^[24][21] Among these was The Fox and the Grapes (1941), Based on the Aesop fable of the same name. The short inadvertently spawned Columbia's most successful characters with The Fox and the Crow, a comic duo of a refined Fox and a streetwise Crow.

Despite proving to be an influential figure for the studio, Tashlin’s tenure at Screen Gems proved to be short-lived. In April 1942,^[21] he was demoted from producer, with Ben Schwalb taking on the title. Tashlin left altogether in June 1942 following an argument with Columbia higher-ups.^[21][25] When interviewed by animation historian Michael Barrier, he said that the management "can't stay happy long when things are going well, so we ended up in another fracas and I left."^[22] He soon returned to Schlesinger Productions, joining several ex-Columbia artists who successfully made the transition. Meanwhile, Schwalb was replaced by Dave Fleischer, previously the co-founder and head supervisor of Fleischer Studios. Fleischer had already been hired as an executive producer in April of that year, with him producing the 1942 World War II-themed short Song of Victory with Tashlin's supervision. By the end of the year, he effectively took full control of the studio amid Tashlin's absence.

Later developments and internal affairs (1942-1945)

To increase cartoon production, Fleischer established a third unit helmed by John Hubley and ex-Terrytoons/MGM animator Paul Sommer. Hubley was an artist who became unhappy with the ultra-realistic style of animation that the industry was utilizing, so he decided to craft up shorts with an art style comparable to Warner director Chuck Jones. As a result, the Hubley-Sommer shorts begun to steer away from the typical style of the studio and focused more on stylized human characters and minimalistic backgrounds. This was short-lived, as Hubley later left after being enlisted in the United States Army, leaving Sommer to direct solo.^[26]

In another interview with Michael Barrier, Hubley described Fleischer as a man very detached from his employees, and referred to him as "one of the world's intellectual lightweights". Howard Swift recalled how Fleischer also fancied himself as a good editor by editing completed cartoons in a way that broke continuity.^[27] Fleischer's detachment gave the staff greater creative freedom, but resulted in final products that were more misguided and dialogue-heavy.^[28][29]

Fleischer was later fired in late-1943 and was succeeded by a revolving door of producers.^[23] Initially, he was replaced by studio musician Paul Worth, who was then replaced by The Three Stooges producer Hugh McCollum after Worth was convicted of forgery.^[30] Geiss was also fired following a series of poorly received cartoons, with his role as director soon given to Swift. The studio had created several more recurring characters during this time period, including Tito and His Burrito, Flippy and Flop, Igor Puzzlewitz, Willoughby Wren, Professor Small and Mr. Tall, and an adaptation of Al Capp's comic series Li'l Abner, with varying levels of success.

Animation historians note that the quality of the Screen Gems cartoons began to decline soon after Frank Tashlin's 1942 departure; film historian Leonard Maltin said that the studio "tried to maintain some spirit on-screen [after Tashlin left], with varying results. Screen Gems cartoons of the 1940's feature some of the least-endearing cartoon characters ever created and suffer from misguided story direction."^[31] Hubley later admitted to Barrier that he disliked his work at the studio in retrospect, and alluded that Columbia did not like the cartoons they were making.^[27] Capp was also reportedly displeased with the quality of the Li'l Abner cartoons, which were discontinued after five cartoons.^[32] Beginning in 1945, all mentions of Columbia were removed in any future cartoons released.

In addition to Tashlin's departure, several of the more daring ex-Disney animators that were hired also left for other studios, including Duncan, Davidovich, Schwartz, Hawkins, Matthews and Patterson. Columbia was unable to find any more experienced artists who were willing to stay for the long term, but the studio did manage to gain a few leverages. Milt Gross, a cartoonist who previously directed the Count Screwloose cartoons in MGM, would co-write the partially lost WWII short He Can't Make it Stick with Stephen Longstreet in 1943. Sid Marcus also returned as a storyman before being promoted to director in 1945 after Bob Wickersham’s departure, while Alex Lovy would succeed director Howard Swift. Walter Lantz composer Darrell Calker was also brought in to score music when Eddie Kilfeather retired after suffering a stroke in 1946.^[33]

Final Years and Closure (1945-1946)

By the summer of 1945, McCollum was replaced by Henry Binder and Leon Schlesinger's brother-in-law Ray Katz, both of whom were previously associate producers for the Looney Tunes shorts. ^[34] Katz and Binder would bring in several staffers from the Warner studio, including former director Bob Clampett, and writers Cal Howard and Dave Monahan. They also brought in alumnus animator Manny Gould and writers Michael Maltese and Tedd Pierce as moonlighters.^[35] Clampett was appointed as the studio's creative head and gag writer for a short period before he left to briefly form his own animation studio for Republic Pictures.^[36] Clampett, Maltese, Gould, and Pierce, did not receive credit for any cartoon they were involved in.^[37]

As a result, the tone and direction of the Katz-Binder shorts had a much closer similarity to contemporary Warner or MGM shorts, to the point of creating characters strikingly similar in appearance to Sylvester the Cat (with "Klever Kat", who appeared in three shorts) and Daffy Duck (with "The Witty Duck" in Wacky Quacky).^[38][39] Most of these shorts were also thinly-plotted "chase cartoons", particularly with shorts like Kongo-Roo, Loco Lobo, The Uncultured Vulture and Big House Blues. Maltin considered these cartoons as "pale carbons of the Warner Brothers shorts."

Screen Gems, in an attempt to keep costs low, was the last major American animation studio to stop producing black-and-white cartoons. The final black-and-white Phantasy shorts appeared in 1946, over three years after the second-longest holdouts (Famous Studios and Schlesinger Productions), with the subsequent shorts being produced in Cinecolor. Columbia was still dissatisfied with the studio's output, so they ultimately decided to shut its doors for good in November.^[40] By the time it closed, Screen Gems had produced a backlog large enough for Columbia to release for the next three years. The last cartoon from the studio, Cat-Tastrophy, was released in June 30, 1949.

Aftermath

Following the studio's closure, the former Seward Street facility, which Screen Gems occupied since 1940, was taken over by Walter Lantz Productions in 1947.^[41] The Screen Gems name would later be reused for Columbia's television subsidiary Pioneer Telefilms, which wouldn't start operating under that name until April 15, 1949.^[42]

Most of the remaining animators moved to other studios; Grant Simmons would become an animator for Tex Avery at MGM Cartoons alongside ex-Columbia animators Louie Schmitt and William Shull, Paul Sommer would move back to the East Cost and returned to being an animator for Terrytoons, and Sid Marcus would move to Warner Bros. Cartoons as a writer for fellow alumnus Arthur Davis and later Robert McKimson. Howard Swift would continue to work for Columbia as an effects animator for the Superman serial series in 1948.^[43]

Columbia would continue to have a cartoon output following Screen Gem's closure by becoming a distributor for United Productions of America.^[44] Founded in 1941 during the wake of the Disney animators' strike, UPA deviated from the typical realistic animation seen from other studios. It presented a newer, limitedly animated art style with stylistic concepts and storytelling instead of traditional slapstick and gags. John Hubley and Zack Schwartz had previously experimented with this style in their Screen Gems cartoons and were also keys figures to the development of UPA. Columbia began releasing the UPA shorts in tandem with the last Screen Gems cartoons in 1948. There shorts, which included Gerald McBoing-Boing and the Mr. Magoo series, were major critical and commercial successes, leaving a profound influence to the animation industry by the 1950s. Following UPA, a deal with Hanna-Barbera was made in 1957, which lasted until 1967.

In additional to the UPA shorts, Columbia would also re-release a number of Screen Gems cartoons for theaters under the Columbia Favorite banner, as well as for television by their TV subsidiary.

Producers

• Margaret J. Winkler (1921-1924)
• Charles Mintz (1924-1939)
• Jimmy Bronis (1940)
• George Winkler (1940-1941)
• Frank Tashlin (1941-1942)
• Lawson Harris (1941) (Via Contract Work - Iwerks Studio)
• Ben Schwalb (1941-1942)
• Dave Fleischer (1942-1943)
• Paul Worth (1943-1945)
• Hugh McCollum (1945)
• Ray Katz (1945-1946)
• Henry Binder (1945-1946)

Directors

Animators

Additional Staff

• Chuck Jones (inbetweener)
• James Culhane (inker)

Storymen

Backgrounds

• Al Boggs
• Phil Davis
• Ed Starr
• Clark Watson (Color)

Layouts

• Zack Shwartz
• Clark Watson
• Bill Weaver
• John Hubley
• Jim Carmichael

Voice Actors

Music

• Joe De Nat (1929-1941)
• Eddie Kilfeather (1937-1945)
• Paul Worth (1941-1945)
• Maurice de Packh (1943)
• Darrell Calker (1945-1946)