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In the last thirty days two titans of animation passed away exactly a week apart, both starting in animation the same year, both living and prospering into their nineties.
Animator, director and long-time Guild supporter ED FRIEDMAN passed away on April 29 at the age of ninety-two. He had suffered a stroke about a year ago, and he had again been hospitalized earlier in April.
From 1933 until 1989 he worked for Iwerks, Mintz/Screen Gems, John Sutherland, Disney, UPA, Format, Bagle Productions, Ed Graham and Filmation. He was active in the Screen Cartoonists Guild and he served on Local 839's Executive Board for almost thirty years. He received the Golden Award in 1984.
Ed Friedman was an athlete in the reserve team at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, the same U.S. team that had Johnny Weissmuller and for which they built the Los Angeles Coliseum. Ed joked about being one of the first Jewish Olympians.
At Disney he was an assistant to John Lounsbery on The Sword in the Stone. He was a long-time animator and director at Filmation on the He Man and She-Ra series, where his casual approach and steady style proved a bulwark that got things done. That was Ed, he wasn't flashy or self-promoting; he just got things done.
Ed Friedman was a union man way back when meetings had to be held in secret at El Coyote or the Hollywood Mormon Temple. He risked his job for his fellow artists back then, as in later years he could be counted on to be at any meeting when benefits were endangered. He lived for his family and his friends, and God rewarded him with good health and a ready smile up to his ninety-second year. Adieu, old friend.
-- Tom Sito
I first got to know Ed Friedman when we worked together at Filmation in 1979, the year we sat more or less on the sidelines as all the other TV studios went on strike over runaway production. A couple of years later he and my mom compared notes, and realized they had crossed paths at Iwerks over forty years earlier.
I had the good fortune to see even more of Eddie after his retirement than I had when I was busy at the Guild and he was busy directing at Filmation. A month would seldom pass when he didn't stop in at the Guild to say hi, tell us all of his travels and show pictures of the kids and grandkids. Many of us wondered what kind of portrait must have been hanging in his attic for him to have looked so young for so long. People who had known him for years were gobsmacked to learn he lived to the age of ninety-two; until his final illness he looked twenty years younger.
How did Ed manage to get so much travel into his "sunset years"? Well, he had saved and managed his money and had assiduously refused all non-union gigs his entire career, so he was able to retire with a fat union pension and indulge himself in retirement activities that his less-vested contemporaries could only dream of.
In 1996, when Eddie was eighty-three, we were facing a contract negotiation in which the producers were threatening to cut pension benefits. Tom Sito had the idea of putting together a subcommittee of retirees, and Ed was the first person we thought to ask and the first to agree. At one of our sessions, Sito launched into one of his trademark stemwinders: "How dare you threaten the pensions of the very people who made you rich, while you drive away in your black Lexuses!" Later in the caucus room, Ed told us: "Gosh, I hope no one sees me pulling away in the parking lot 'cause I drive a black Lexus ..."
I can think of very few people in my experience who exemplified the spirit of unionism in animation more than Ed Friedman. He will be missed.
-- Jeff Massie
Legendary animation story artist, writer and character designer JOE GRANT died on May 6, nine days shy of what would have been his ninety-seventh birthday.
Joe was born in New York City, the son of an art director for William Randolph Hearst's newspaper the New York Journal. His family moved to Los Angeles where Walt Disney recruited Joe after he saw his cartoons in the Los Angeles Record newspaper.
Grant contributed to Disney films from the Three Little Pigs (1934) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) to The Incredibles (2004). Joe and his friend Dick Huemer took a small children's book and created the film Dumbo. He owned a cocker spaniel named Lady from which the idea for Lady and the Tramp derived. The maquettes created by his character models department spawned the Disney figurine market.
Grant left Disney in 1949 to start his own graphic design firm. He returned to Disney over forty years later to resume work on story. He contributed his expertise to Aladdin, The Lion King, Pocahontas, Toy Story, Toy Story II and A Bug's Life. He was the only artist to work on both Fantasia and Fantasia 2000. He came up with the name for Monsters Inc., which before had been called Scary Monsters. He contributed to last year's Academy Award nominee Lorenzo and was working on still more ideas up to the end.
Joe possessed the gentle humor that was quintessentially Disney, simple, visual and witty without becoming maudlin. His insight provided a direct link to Disney quality that prevented us from slipping off into a haze of pop wisecracks and fart jokes.
Joe had amazing clarity and health to the very end. He was what Frédéric Back referred to as "one of God's athletes." Rather than dwell on the past and what-was-Walt-like reminiscences, he preferred to talk modern politics, as in both Washington and Disney.
As a supervisor, Joe never joined the Screen Cartoonists Guild in the 'forties; he became a union member for the first time at the age of eighty-five. He told me: "I heard the retirement benefits were good."
Beloved by all in animation, Joe died the death all artists would desire: at home at his drawing board, pencil in hand.
-- Tom Sito
From the PresidentLast month at the Marc Davis Academy lecture honoring Frédéric Back, I had the honor of meeting the creator of The Man Who Planted Trees, Crac, and other equally brilliant films. He's eighty-one, and as articulate and passionate about art, animation, and the environment as ever. He now does illustration and is still quite busy. I was writing a letter on Mr. Back's behalf when I heard that Joe Grant had passed. Mr. Grant died at his drawing table, at the young age of ninety-six. It struck me that these two men are of a piece in many ways, and both are men I wish I were more like.
Mr. Back is that rare person who is so immediately open and accepting that deep conversation happens moments after meeting him. I came away with the sense that he is one of those too-rare people who have genuinely good souls. I never met Mr. Grant, but know many who knew him well, and I gather he was much the same - easygoing, intelligent, unaffected by tremendous personal accomplishments, and most of all genuine.
I had similar thoughts at our recent Golden Awards. We honored over seventy people who had loooong, productive careers in animation, and they seemed to have fond memories of it all. They worked on good shows and terrible ones, for good bosses and jerks, stayed in the rank and file or started their own studios, the whole spectrum. It was a little overwhelming for me as I contemplated my meager not-quite-one decade in animation.
I think of these two, and others like the late Ed Friedman, and I feel sheepish at how caught up I get in the trivial day-to-day nonsense at work. Mr. Back worked independently, almost single-handedly, and created masterpieces. Mr. Grant spent his animation career within the Disney machine, and made crucial contributions to some of the greatest features ever made. Mr. Friedman had a long productive career and a record-breaking term as a Guild officer. Each faced tall odds against successfully expressing themselves, yet all three did, beautifully, time and again.
What does it take to have these kinds of careers? How does one navigate around the minefields of animation without becoming negative, jaded, and burned out? We all know plenty of people who have succeeded in animation and, in the process, stopped being the open, humble people they started as. We know people who made it exactly because they were only too willing to climb over their peers and back stab their way to the top. And, or course, we've all had to work with plenty of production and management types who, let's say, don't get the difference between supporting an artistic process and running a cannery. So how do people like Frédéric Back, Ed Friedman and Joe Grant leave huge legacies, and not end up bitter and regretful?
I suppose the column is as much about me as it is about the giants of the field who have come before. I think I've gotten a little bit burned out lately, and I find some of the day-to-day nonsense of the biz less tolerable than before. I'm irritated (or worse!) too much of the time. Not that I still don't enjoy animation, or still get a charge out of working around dozens of people far more talented than I am. We all know that feeling we get when we see a bit of art or animation that's so right it makes our hearts sing. Being on the inside of the process, and knowing how hard and special that is, makes it all the more enjoyable. That's what keeps me going - when I see something that just makes me grin, or especially when it's something I've done that makes someone else smile.
My guess is that people who have been both genuine and productive were able to pour enough of themselves into their work to lift it from craft to art, and yet have not over-invested their passion into their jobs. That, I think, is the key: balance. We're generally too prone to making our work lives the end-all and be-all of our existence. It's easy, when you're working on cool movies and TV shows, and the people you work with are talented and fun to be around. How many of us have stayed later at work than we were paid for, simply because we wanted to? How many of us have taken it personally when a producer or director changed their mind about something, even though we'd done exactly what they'd asked for? How often have we been asked to give a hundred and twenty percent, and yet we never seem to quite get that in return?
This is a great industry, but it is an industry after all. Keep your life balanced, and don't let the small-minded people get you down
-- Kevin Koch
From the Business RepresentativeI make it a firm policy to never repeat a mistake, mainly because I have so many new mistakes to make that there's little time to do an old one over again. Below is a list of classic Hulett errors that I have field-tested in the course of my checkered career, also a few I have seen committed by others. I urge you to avoid making them yourself.
Don't be a professional hermit.
When I started in animation as a writer at Disney, I didn't know anybody
except my fellow Disney employees. I didn't want to know anybody
else. Why would I want to get to know other writers, animators and board
artists who labored at Hanna-Barbera, Filmation and all those other places?
I had lifetime employment at the finest studio on the planet, so it was
perfectly okay to only tend to my own knitting with my own tribe ...
wasn't it?
Nine years later, after my permanent layoff from that lifetime job, I found out otherwise. I discovered the joys and benefits of networking with my fellow animation professionals. When I started attending Guild meetings and participating in Guild affairs, I always made it a point to arrive early and leave late, and to spend as much time as I could in meeting and getting to know others in the biz. One of those very contacts from a Guild meeting led to my next animation gig.
Attend membership meetings, sign up for Internet forums like AnimationNation.com, participate in ASIFA Hollywood and Women In Animation and the Animation Co-Op, and never miss a social event -- like the Golden Awards, our holiday parties or the get-together preceding the première of Dan Lund's movie at the Alex on May 23 (see page 6). All these are ways to keep your ear to the ground and your eyes open for that next opportunity.
Make your job into a popularity
contest. Too many animation people (and I was one of them) lose
sight of the fact that being competent at the job is only half the battle.
You also have to please your boss and get along with your co-workers,
no matter what you think of them in your spare time.
I forgot this at one of the studios I worked for and made a habit of arguing and fighting to "protect my vision." And one day I found myself called into an executive's office and handed my walking papers. For some reason, management had decided it could do without me or my vision.
So if you must fight battles, choose them carefully. Ask yourself: "Is it more important for me to always be right, or to have a paycheck?"
Lower-paying job longevity trumps
top-dollar temporary employment. The job that pays less but lasts
longer is usually better than the high-price, high-octane assignment that
will be over in two months. When weighing different job opportunities, consider
three things:
If you can get three out of three, you're cooking.
Don't spend every nickel of your
paycheck. Pay yourself first. By that I mean, put a chunk of your
weekly wage away for a rainy day. If this means deducting three percent
(or more) into a 401(k) plan, do it. Your take-home pay will be reduced
very little. It's important to build up a sum of money in case a long stretch
of unemployment happens. This might mean eating at home more often, and
buying a car that's a year or two old so somebody else has absorbed the
depreciation, or maybe sending your kids to public schools. But save!
Work at least ten weeks a year
at a Guild shop, and keep building your pension. I know this is
sometimes easier to say than do, but every year that you can get in that
magic four hundred hours will give you one more qualified year on the road
to a livable pension.
The Guild's official policy is that we neither encourage nor discourage members from taking non-Guild jobs. If there is really, truly no alternative, you will never hear me say that you're better off starving than working non-Guild. But if you're deliberately choosing non-Guild gigs over Guild-shop work, either because the take-home pay is a little better or because the project is très cool and you think it might look good on your rèsumè, just be aware that you're cheating yourself in the long run.
Many unhappy people have come through my office over the years singing the blues about how they worked non-Guild for an extra hundred bucks a week, and now they have twelve years into their Guild pension instead of twenty-two. This is seldom seen as a problem when a person is in their twenties, but it haunts them when they're pushing fifty.
The same goes for the other boo-boos listed above. Many don't even seem like mistakes when they're being made, but morph into errors as the decades roll past. By the time middle age and wisdom is reached, it's a lot harder to correct the missteps. The solution? Strive not to make those missteps in the first place.
-- Steve Hulett
Important news for all Animation Guild 401(k) Plan participants: Our 401(k) Plan is changing administrators from Principal Financial Group to MassMutual. From May 16 until approximately June 12, there will be a "blackout period" when you will not be able to access your account.
During this blackout period, your account will continue to be invested and you will continue to collect interest on your investments. However, you will not be able to request loans or withdrawals, make changes to your investment selections or transfer monies until the move is completed and balances are reconciled.
The actual transfer of funds will take place on June 1. However, nobody will be able to access their accounts until new PIN numbers are mailed to them the week of June 12. (One of our mailings said that the blackout period would end on June 1; we apologize for any confusion.)
Contact Marta Strohl-Rowand at the Guild office, (818) 766-7151 or by e-mail, if you have any questions.
Guild members and others in the animation community are invited to the May 23 Los Angeles première of Dream On, Silly Dreamer, Dan Lund and Tony West's documentary about the demise of Disney's traditional animation department.
Told through an animator's sketchbook, the forty-minute film follows a group of artists as they recount their dreams of working for Disney, the joy of landing their dream jobs, and the gut wrenching news that studio management delivered to them on March 25, 2002.
The film will be screened at the Alex Theater, 216 N. Brand Blvd. in Glendale. You're invited to a pre-screening reception starting at 6:30 pm; the film will be shown starting at 8 pm.
Tickets are $7.00 each, available on the Alex Theater website or by calling (818) 243-ALEX. Check out the movie's website for more information about the film. Please help pass on the word!
Studio Arts is pleased to announce its Summer Session 1 classes and its first ever Flash for Television Animation course. This new class, which is covered by the CSATTF grant, will be taught by Flash artist and author SANDRO CORSARO, who co-wrote the definitive text Hollywood 2D Digital Animation: The New Flash Production Revolution.
The course costs $1,500 and will run for eight consecutive Mondays from June 13 to August 8, 2005. (There will be no class on July 4.) If you qualify for the CSATTF grant, your net cost for the course is $500 through a two-thirds reimbursement. Please note: you must be approved for the grant by CSATTF prior to taking the class.
Other classes offered in the Summer 1 semester that will be covered by the CSATTF grant will include Intro to Maya, Character Animation 1, Character Rigging, Maya Modeling, Maya Lighting, Textures and Materials, and Intro to PhotoShop. All classes run from 6 pm to 10 pm.
For more information please call (323) 227-8776, email, or check the Studio Arts website. CSATTF grant applications are available at the Guild office or on the members-only secction of the Guild website.
Q: In February I got a call from an old friend who said she had some cleanup work for me. I asked her if it was a union gig and she said sure, I would get health and pension.
I did about three weeks' work for her and never got paid. It turns out she was not signed to the Guild and she was lying when she said she could pay benefits.
The Guild should do something about this. (Sent anonymously)
A: The bottom line: if a job offer seems too good to be true, it very well might be.
If you're approached by an employer you've never heard of who says they're a Guild shop, immediately call the Guild to confirm they're on the up-and-up. Unless they are signed to the Guild contract or paying through a signator payroll service, they cannot pay Guild benefits even if they say they intend to.
As for what the Guild can do, the answer is ... almost nothing, when complaints are sent anonymously and without details.
Almost a thousand active and inactive Guild members get up-to-the-minute hiring leads and other information by subscribing to the Guild's free e-mail list. Just send a message from your home e-mail address (no studio e-mails) to us with your name in the body of the message. And please be sure to keep us up-to-date if you change e-mail addresses. NOTE: We do not sell or share our mailing lists with any outside groups or companies.
Congratulations to DORI LITTELL HERRICK on her appointment as chair of the animation department at Woodbury University ...
For all you golfers out there, the SCREEN CARTOONISTS GOLF CLASSIC will be held on May 21, 2005 at Indian Wells Golf Course in the Palm Springs Area. There are still spots available. Contact Lyn by e-mail or (818) 766-7151 ...
On June 18, Women In Animation Los Angeles will host a luncheon at the Smoke House restaurant honoring MARGARET LOESCH. Margaret has worked for Hanna-Barbera, Marvel, Fox Kids Network, Jim Henson, Crown Media and Odyssey, and launched the Hallmark Channel. She is currently the CCEO of The Hatchery LLC. The restaurant is located at 4420 Lakeside Drive in Burbank (across from Warner Bros.) Cost of the lunch is $20 per person (no-host bar). You may prepay (recommended) by sending a check to: WIA/Loesch Lunch, POB 251, Topanga, CA 90290 ...
JEAN WRIGHT's new book, Animation Writing and Development, has just been published by Focus Press.
Background artist DON SCHWEIKERT, who worked for Hanna-Barbera, Fred Calvert, Filmation and Warner Bros. from 1973 until his retirement in 2000, passed away on March 21.