Word: caniff
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...keep his audience on the edge of their chairs, Caniff, a frustrated actor, has borrowed many a trick of stagecraft. He is a staunch Alfred Hitchcock fan, fond of the director's way of opening a suspenseful sequence with a silent sound track. He has aped the best Hollywood techniques (and some of the worst) by switches from closeups to long shots to trick camera angles-and fadeouts with profiles turned to a corn-tinted sunset. He depends on Leo Ardavany, a neighbor who manages the movie house at nearby Haverstraw, to tip him off when a useful picture...
...building up to a lovemaking crisis and not letting it come off-as Hitchcock did in Notorious-Caniff has become the best tantalizer in the profession. It is the same heartless treatment that keeps housewives suffering daily with radio's Young Widder Brown, and it has the same crass commercial purpose. "It forces 'em to buy the paper," says Caniff, "to find out what the hell is going...
...Grease Paint. Like millions of boys who wanted to be cartoonists when they'grew up, Milt Caniff never missed a day of Mutt & Jeff or Polly and Her Pals. But the Chicago Tribune's prize old political crosshatcher, John T. McCutcheon, was his ideal. Milt's, father took him west in 1916 and nine-year-old Milton worked for a short time as a child extra in two-reel movies. At twelve he created (for family circulation) his first cartoon, something known as Si Plug...
While still an insignificant Sig, Caniff imitated John Held Jr., tried editorial cartoons for the Columbus Dispatch. He was jobless in 1932 when the Associated Press Feature Service beckoned him on to New York...
...Caniff's dear, dead A.P. days will never be beyond recall. In the artists' bullpen on Madison Avenue, where Alfred Gerald Caplin (now Al Capp, creator of Li'l Abner) was also fenced in, Caniff launched a "kid strip" called Dickie Dare. A.P. artists got $60 to $85 a week and the greenest hand had to block out "the damn crossword puzzles." "They wouldn't even tell us how many papers were using our stuff," Caniff complains. "They were afraid we'd get big ideas...