Word: warners
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...this has come at a heavy price. Fogerty's wondrous new album, Blue Moon Swamp (Warner Bros.), follows a decade of anger, frustration, fear and hard-won resolution. But you don't hear the turmoil that went into the making of these songs. Instead you feel the confidence and ebullience of an artist renewed, covering the ground at the height of his power, even if the album's 12 tunes work out, on average, to one every 10 months or so. Ask him why the album took so long, and Fogerty, 52 this week, has an explanation as honest...
...evidence about a windfall he doesn't quite believe in. "I don't think it's hit this area yet," he says of the economic boom, one day after his sales of patio furniture jumped 100% over the same day last year. The next morning, Charles and Shirley Warner come in to buy their grandchild a swing set and walk out with $476 worth of green wrought-iron furniture. "I don't do this much, but my work is good," says Charles, who toils nearby at the huge Mead Fine Paper plant. In March, Orem sold every bag of Easter...
...stars" work for free; they have no agents; they can't extort you for a sequel. And as The Simpsons' Matt Groening has said, "Animated characters don't get busted, and they don't get old." As for the animators, salaries are a little higher than when Jones joined Warner in 1933 for $18.50 a six-day week. But until DreamWorks entered the picture, creators of even the most boffo animated films got no royalties. George Lucas made zillions from the Star Wars rerelease; the three directors of the 1961 One Hundred and One Dalmatians got none of the hundreds...
Cartoon directors are kids at heart, and the Warner aces (Jones, Avery, Friz Freleng, Bob Clampett) were brilliant kids, all in their 20s or early 30s, when they created Porky, Daffy and Bugs. Freleng was the anchor, making crisp vaudeville comedies. Clampett bent his stories and pummeled his characters into manic, surreal, endless inventive farce; his great period (1942-46) deserves a book of its own. Jones' films were about people--all right, barnyard critters, but human withal--who endured life's vithithitudes (as Daffy would say) with amazing grace and Charlie Chaplin's physical...
...even weirder at Warner. Harry Warner, the studio's money czar, said he knew nothing about his cartoon unit except that "we make Mickey Mouse." Leon Schlesinger, the stingy despot who ran the unit until 1944, would begin his viewing of dailies with a curt "Roll the garbage." Schlesinger did inspire his troops once: his lisp was the basis for Daffy Duck's voice. Schlesinger's successor, Eddie Selzer, hated the notion that his slaves might enjoy their work. He once sputtered, "What the hell has all this laughter to do with the making of animated cartoons...