AS OF NOW...

Well, Friends...

I didn't know I'd been away so long over the agony of defeat with my Kickstarter failure. The film will be finished, but not so gloriously.

I've taken a detour for awhile, and have kept busy. Here are three paintings I've done recently, as well as items from a band that uses Ginger as a mascot!

Also: A part of the autobio I've been teasing myself about writing. Now I am, in earnest!

More Later,

Milt!

BAKSHI

Clouded thoughts, bit first a preface:

My first conscious encounter with the work of Ralph Bakshi was about 1973 when FRITZ THE CAT was released. An “adult” animated feature was an eye raising concept (and ironically, still is). There was a two page article about it in Newsday. The photo, taking up most of the first page, was a still of Fritz and his companions in the bathtub. It's really something that the media was free and usual about such matters being visible for any ten year old like myself and today goes into terror seeing their own nipples in a mirror.

The feature was well pushed. I remember hearing a radio ad while my and my godparents were driving to a picnic. In said ad, a very old, street smart, AfAm man, one of the crows, was rasping about “Them hippie chicks. You know, them hippie chicks.” My godsister and I were convulsed with laughter all the way to the park.

Me being cartoon buggy as I was, my mother actually researched the feature to see if it was suitable for me to go to. As I said, the 1970s. She decided no, not now.

About 1980, there was an Evening with Ralph Bakshi at the School of Visual Arts. For whatever reason, I recall nothing of the onstage interview now (conducted by …or John Canemaker), and little about WIZARDS, besides one of my group marveling “Oh my Goodness” at a shoddy effect.

Flash forward to about 1985 and conversing with my old schoolmate's boyfriend conversing in the park. He was really stoked on FRITZ, pronouncing Ralph's name as Bokk-shi”. I don't know if he knew what color he is, but he felt that the Black Crows sequence was strong and smart, and felt that “Bokk-shi” was eloquent enough to animate for the Black Resistance. We never discussed COONSKIN; I hadn't seen it yet.

As “conflicted” as Bakshi is, his feature was much kinder hearted than Crumb's strips, which is probably what Crumb hated about it. He probably thought Bakshi was soft pedaling his original messages Hollywood-style, but Bakshi was Being Bakshi As crude as he is, he has a soft hearted, tender side that can be seen in all his pictures, mainly in the misty eyed memories of scuzzy New York City. His characters always has spasms of sentimentality. Sometimes it works.

His features have been the only ones to take a realistic interest in AfAm street life, and, again, that's still unique today even in light of the Soul Food Fairylands offered by Disney and the others today in their desperate quest for $ocial Consciousness.

He remains the only realist cartoon director. He took a sharp turn with his sword and sorcery sagas, and when he went back to “street” features it was never as effective. Like Bluth and Richard Williams, Bakshi insisted on writing his own material, and wasn't that good at it. Starting with a good scriptwriter and not straying from the overall message, his films could have been sublime.

It was not too long after that I got a call from one of Ralph's assistants floating the idea to bring me over to work on MIGHTY MOUSE. I was for it, but it went nowhere.

Soon I saw his HARLEM SHUFFLE video. It was badly timed to me; so fast and choppy I couldn't read the action. I shrugged and forgot it.

Not long after I got my first call from Ralph. I showed him my art in his van parked on a Manhattan street. He gave me an assignment to draw two pieces of development art; an insane city street and a group of cat jazz players. I inked these drawings in brush and colored them with Design art markers as I was doing then. An admiring person accidentally spilled one drop of water on it, meaning I had to re-marker the whole area. Markers are an expensive way to work.

Bakshi liked the pictures, particularly the female vocalist in the cat band. He said “The eye goes straight to her, ya know?” I was paid, and continued my New York drabble.

I spoke to Howard Chaykin over the phone (he admitted I “was not without talent”, from him a rampaging compliment): “No one wants your work in New York, Milton! Move here!” Things were actually going well, so I had to think about it.

I visited L.A. A couple of times; for the San Diego ComiCon and to meet fellow cartoonists. They took me on guided tours. Such a difference. The first thing I noticed were what looked to me like clean streets. The faux 50s aesthetic the triangles and pink flamingos and spiky letters. We went to 50s style diners with names like The 50s Cafe and Johnny Rockets.

Somewhere along the line I had another meeting with Ralph, this time in an office. It wasn't long after his MIGHTY MOUSE series. A good friend drove me, and I cruelly left him in the waiting room for two hours. To be frank, I'm glad I had, because it whipped up a new relationship than could have been made between three. He seemed overjoyed to to talk New York animation, and so was I. Nobody “knew” the stuff in L.A. We could admire the “crudities”. Bakshi mentioned the Terrytoons cats in zoot suits that were “hip” but really weren't. Terrytoons were as cornball as hell, and we loved them. It was before James Tyer had attracted the sycophants.

Ralph was between projects and spinning dreams. I didn't expect anything, nor did I need to hope. I was flush with TURTLES money. I was solvent for the first time in my life.

In a Manhattan bar, I said to an acquaintance, I'm dying here, I should go. He said I was the healthiest dead man he had ever seen on his feet. But I had heard about the big pay and big jobs could be had in L.A.. It was 1991. of ROGER RABBIT was a great success. A creative kettle was brewing.

I knew that in L.A., I'd be storyboarding a lot of garbage, but I said, I can use that money to spend said money to do the art I wanted to. Plus, I was still on the TURTLES, so I could coast awhile. I knew a few people, and a NY friend offered me a room to stay until I found myself a job. A direction sign was being planted for me. Plus my girlfriend had jilted me. The time was right.

I had such a miniscule number of boxes. Hard for me to believe now. Relocating was extremely simple. I didn't tell anyone I was leaving. Not even my mother, because she'd just load me with a ton of useless precautions. I called her after I was there, I don't remember her saying anything noteworthy. She probably knew it was a good decision.

My friend, Russell, lived in a cottage in West Hollywood. It was known as a sleazy area, but anything and everything looked good to me.I remember the cottage he was renting as looking like a Charles McKintosh house, but it's probably my murky rose memory. Everybody I knew there seemed jaded. I gleefully pointed to the “tiki” style sign of the Safari Inn! They were like, yeah.

The third day I was there, my friend Mike invited me to Bakshi's studio, where he was there working. He walked me around the studio; the first time I had visited a big one. Suddenly a voice over the intercom belted, “MILTON KNIGHT, COME UPSTAIRS” There I went, and Ralphie Boy was in a frenzy.

“You're hired! I'm hiring you!!”

“Ralph, I just got here...”

“No!”

I hadn't even begun to habitate myself; I had planned to coast a couple of weeks. But could I turn the offer down? Hell no!!

So, three days in town and I had a real job in animation! As advised by other animators, I moved to an apartment in Sherman Oaks, central to most of the studios. It was no trouble. The Valley was full of vacant apartments, and the rental companies were drooling for animators to move in. They were reliable tenants in what was at the time a booming business. The studios were flowing money like water. Weekly I was walking to my very convenient bank just down the street with checks from both Bakshi and TURTLES and whatever else. Everything was so damned RIGHT. Once, as I walked home from the bank, bright blue skies and bright green tries, I thought, finally I've found my place for my purpose! I also knew it wasn't going to be full blast forever, but I could never had predicted the crashing halt.

The project, COOL WORLD, had been in development for months. What could be more exciting than Ralph delivering what ROGER RABBIT had been coy about? No big titty tease from here. We were going to see what we all wanted to see: FUCKING!! Down and dirty, with Brooklyn abandon!!

I think, though, that by the time I arrived, the bloom was fading from the rose. The town talk was that the production was in confusion. I learned, to my shock, that movies being made without an ending having been nailed down, and COOL WORLD was all that and more. It was a record costing picture at the time, and when there's too much money, when pennies doesn't have to be pinched, Ralph loses his sense of efficiency. The focus was going every which way. He was gathering a very mish mosh melange of artists to stay interested. Ideas were mustered in and mustered out. Ralph himself was probably nervous.

A director, Kent Butterworth, a very patient man who had been key to the MIGHTY MOUSE series, winced and wryly rationalized, “Think of this as Ralph's Jackson Pollock.”

Ralph had taken me in to save the bloody thing!

The artists in charge knew their shit, particularly Kent B. and Bruce Woodside. They ware careerists who knew film production...and Ralph...every step of the way. Casually, they taught me so damn much. Barry Jackson and [wife] were in glory painting lush, skewered cityscapes at night. (So many films of the time were set in eternal nights, BATMAN and beyond.) George Bakes, a highly recognizable, learned prima donna who went back to the 50s, and had animated the Trix Rabbit and Lucky the Leprechaun for an eternity, was the specialist on the major character, Nails the Spider, and Louise Zingarelli, drew the initial designs of the girls, and story drawings, beautifully. Scores of effects animators and assistants were pouring their hearts out. Everyone had been hoping COOL WORLD was going to be a success, but it was giving way.

I was a fucking upstart without any film experience, and Bakshi treated me to a favoritism that was embarrassing. I didn't know how to drive,and as you probably know, living in L.A. without a car is unheard of. So he assigned a co-worker to be my chauffeur. On the cover of a circulating story treatment, Ralph stuck a MIDNITE panel. Ralph was Milton-happy.

My job? To animate Ralph's stream of consciousness vignettes and design extra characters. At this point in the production, Ralph was tossing in scenes for their own sake. They weren't really gags, they weren't really funny, and to those who had been woorking on the film since the beginning, were unlikely intrusions. Understand, most of them weren't cartoonists, per se; they were animators, mostly from Disney and Filmation (and there was a lot of overlap), whoo had accepted only a few schools of thought; the classical Milt Kahl and the very literal Filmation. If a thing was “funny”, it had to look like the highly carved Filmation buffoons, highly detailed and robotic. If REN AND STIMPY was on then, its influence had not taken hold. It was still a straight laced methodology.

I had shown one of them Tyer animation of a bear ranting, and he recoiled. “THAT IS NOT ANIMATION!! THAT IS NOT ANIMATION!!”

That was the way it was. The dam had not been broken yet, and I waltz in from the street, drawing whatever twisted shit I wanted, and obviously the boss' darling of the moment. Some people were nice, others not so much, but there was never a crisis.

Some of them were awed that an animation artist had a 'style of his own'.

Ralph was definitely not an elitist. His office was as large as a classroom, but in disarray. Messy bulletin board. Ralph was in love with the role of being cartoonist with a capital “K”, deadlines and the smell of ink, yet he was insecure about his own abilities as an animator. Ralph could have drawn all this nonsense stuff himself, but he seemed more comfortable in the role of 'director' calling out maneuvers and leaving the paper to others. He loved calling out to his assistant, already harried, “GET So-and-So ON THE PHONE”, a parody of a Hollywood deal maker. More and more he wanted to do live action direction for the inherent elevation. He directed the live action footage for COOL WORLD; a lot of it, hours more than he could ever use, and it was pretty bad.

He would feed me ideas of character types and I'd draw them. Street urchins, Salvation Army bands, parades. I was under the youthful misconception that drawing fast meant expression. The comparison, and a lofty one, that comes to my mind is to Albert Hurter, Disney's idea sketcher, the “He Drew As He Pleased” guy. Occasionally, Ralph would have me animate his hallucinations: Three bugs go into hysterical laughter over a cat on the pavement flattened by a car and a cow falls on one of them. He instructed me to reuse drawings like the 'old guys' did. Drawing a head once, and repeating the drawing in a different action. Just because 'the old guys' did it. They did it to save cels. For Bakshi it was nostalgia. That was my first scene for a studio. And it was going to the big screen. I knew how lucky I was.

Where was this scene going? What sense did it make? All I got was a photo indicating the horizon line. I didn't know. I don't believe he knew. No one did. The production people were getting scenes, not just mine, that they code numbered under “FNR”; “For No Reason”. With my stuff, he may have been culling neat drawings to sell later. Maybe it was just nostalgia for an aesthetic that was dying before it was entirely dead. One day I came to his office and found him trying to copy one of my drawings. He looked up and said “You can't do your stuff, Milt. I don't know what it is. Maybe the eyes.”

There was what I understand to be typical Ralph weirdness. He'd swipe anything that artists had around. I had a cutout drawing of a moon with a face tacked on my animation board. It disappeared after lunch one day, and reappeared on Ralph's office wall. Another animator got the same thing with a PLASTIC MAN figure. On another occasion I came back and he was openly reading a BRINGING UP FATHER book that had been in my briefcase! At least he didn't try to take it home.

Boundaries had been ignored. I knew of his reputation as irresponsible, and wasn't all that bothered. That another person was wrapped up in Geo. McManus was actually cute.

The worst of it was when, as usual after a flight, I caught some sort of flu and stayed home. He had his beleaguered assistant calling me and asking when I'd be returning, and how Ralph had stuck his neck out for me. Every fucking hour. She was forced into the position of pest and knew it. So I put my flu away and returned to work, which nearly cost me my life.