Ollie Johnston, Frank Thomas and Ward Kimball (photo by Dave Mastanreh)

Ward Kimball: ...I don't know why all the animators are getting all the press now. Our comedy and what we did was...everybody thinks it's so great now. It was a result of Disney being there and furnishing the great ideas which made the place go up and we're now cashing in on this.

How long will Woolie keep working there?

Hulett: Maybe another five years...

Ward Kimball: Why did Frank and Ollie retire?

Hulett: They got tired of going to all of Woolie's damn meetings. (Hulett -- 28 years later -- I was more than a little wrong here. Frank and Ollie retired mostly because they had a book, "The Illusion of Life," that they wanted to write.)

Ward Kimball: Well, all you had to do, I used to tell them, you guys are crazy. How long have you been here? Since 1934 or 1935? And you put up with this sh*t? I said, "Why don't you guys speak up?" Ollie and Frank, if they got bored with a meeting, of COURSE they should have left. Milt Kahl used to do this: "Well, I've had enough of his sh*t!" and walk out.

Has Ken Anderson retired yet?

Hulett: Yes. (Ken had hung it up a couple of months before this interview. Apparently Ward hadn't gotten the memo.)

Ward Kimball: Yeah, Ken was so frustrated because Walt wouldn't accept Ken as any kind of a story man. Walt had that way about him. Once you did something, he wouldn't recast you. He never saw you as anything but an animator or a good story man or a mediocre assistant.

Of course poor Ken, like so many of the artists there, suffered and were second-class citizens when compared with Bill Peet. There was nobody at Disney's who was like Bill Peet, and nobody appreciated him. Peet was the closest thing to Walt we ever had story-wise, just a genius, and yet he's not getting any acclaim at all. He and Woolie, here you got these talented artists with ideas coming in against Woolie's scattered way of handling a situation. I don't think Woolie basically has a story sense, but anyway there was this conflict that built up, and Peet was drinking at the time, and so he says "f*ck it" and walks out.

(Hulett: Bill Peet left Disney's midway through "Jungle Book." Bill had creative differences with Walt, got increasingly frustrated, and decided to go his own way.)

Finally, after many false starts, it appears that negotiations will take place at the IA's West Coast offices in Toluca Lake...

The dates for talks (and these are set in moist cement) are October 12th and October 13th.

Ward Kimball: Woolie was a good animator, but I think he suffered with a little inferiority complex. He didn't think he was a good artist, even though he was. Basically I think underneath, he compared himself to Fred (Moore) or some of the others, which made him work harder.

But yet, because of this extra drive Woolie had, it reminds me of Pete Rose, the drive Pete had playing baseball. The guy, who is probably older than the others, but he's a student, and wants to be better and consequently he is. Woolie's stuff in "The Rite of Spring" in Fantasia [the battle of the dinosaurs] has a great monumental weight to it, because Woolie in his own way just kept after it.

Woolie was tenacious. He didn't have the quick facility or facile way of working as Fred Moore had (for instance), or the flamboyant, spontaneous timing of Norm Ferguson. And he had to work harder, but he ended up with good stuff. He did good stuff on Jiminy Cricket, for instance. The cricket jumping along pointing to the words of the Blue Fairy's letter with his cane, that's Woolie.

And of course, "How to Ride a Horse" (Goofy short) is a funny picture, one of the funniest shorts. As a shortism blockbuster, I know people who saw "How to Ride a Horse" in the theatre when it was released by itself ten or fifteen times. They would go just to see that and they would laugh and laugh 'til they cried.

Woolie was the Goof man after features he worked on. He was older than the rest of us, so I guess that's why he was put in as the director. (As an animator) he was always stuck with the chase stuff because most people hated to do that, but Woolie got a big kick out of doing fast, action, wild-out stuff and he did it well.

Another guy who did this kind of stuff and did it well was Bill Roberts, an old guy that was animating at the studio when I got there, and finally retired in La Crescenta. Roberts did a lot of great stuff on "Mickey's Polo Team." It's hard to do a crowd of guys, caricatures of famous Hollywood actors, all riding horses as a group. Roberts had that tenacious, almost crude but effective way of pursuing wild action material.

Frank, the story goes, didn't like the chase stuff Woolie did with Captain Hook in Peter Pan -- thought it was too wild and broad. Frank had a lot of Hook's dialogue, so the story maybe fits. I think Wolfgang's treatment of Hook escaping the crocodile at skull rock is wonderful fun. But what do I know? I was just a story guy.

Above: Goofy in the style of a 1910 tintype.

Below: "Old Gufbrandt", Goofy as Rembrandt might have pictured him.

Below: Goofy à la Honoré Daumier.

Below: Toulouse-LaGoof.

And last but certainly not least, Goofy Descending A Staircase (below), the Marcel Duchamp work that was rejected for the Armory Show because ...

... as we have delighted in constantly reminding you throughout this tour, Goofy is © Walt Disney Pictures.

Now the tricky part: does the movie-going public agree, or are they fatigued by the many CG features already released this year? The film is beautiful, with fantastic character animation and tons of humor, and in most any other year it would be a sure-fire hit. But this is a year where everyone's talking about a glut, and the end of September isn't exactly the choicest release date. From the early reviews over at Rotten Tomatoes, it appears at least some critics have been pretty glutted. We'll see what the public thinks, and update this post through the weekend...

Saturday Addendum: Open Season opened at the top of the chart on Friday with 6ドル.15 million. The Boxoffice Mojo forecast is for the film to make 24ドル million, which sounds pretty reasonable from the Friday numbers.

Sunday Addendum: SPA's maiden effort took an estimated 23ドル million for the weekend, handily taking first place. That's a solid put not-quite-spectacular effort, though it does put in in the top ten all-time September openings. Everyone's Hero dropped a huge 76% from last weekend, stumbling to 1ドル.1 million and a 13ドル.2 million total after three weeks.

I remember when I first went to work at Disney, cycle animation was kind of a no-no. If you used a cycle you shouldn’t make your audience aware of it. But you have to realize that when people started to animate, in the old days it was such a difficult process that they looked for simple or almost abstract ways of drawing characters, because the very basic nature of it was multiple drawings which were time-consuming to do. So you invented characters that were on the round side, because everybody knows that it’s faster to do anything if you roll and turn and spiral instead of going in straight lines, or cutting corners, or turning corners.

So your characters became very simple, almost abstract. And when you analyze Mickey Mouse he was two circles connected with two lines, and we had what we call rubber hose animation because Mickey’s and Minnie’s legs both look like black rubber hoses and they acted like sort of a whipping action.

But as we got into more realistic approaches, beginning with the little fairy and the flying mouse…those were the beginnings and you learned how difficult they were. And with Snow White, with the queen they used rotoscope for starters, rotoscoping a villain from a play called “The Drunkard” as sort of inspiration for the witch, but we never did trace them like we did Snow White. There we actually went over [the girl] with rotoscope prints. We changed the head and the proportions ...

So as animation became more of a movie illustration, we got away from that rubber hose arbitrary way of drawing ... The funny thing is, when you look at Winsor McCay’s animation it’s so startlingly real. The thing he did with the mosquito landing on this guy’s forehead was a beautiful drawing of a mosquito, but yet it has sort of a humorous charm about it. Well, he drew exactly like he did his "Little Nemo" strip, which was super illustration, a bit of color like a comic book, but McCay was a realist and didn’t follow the rest of the cartoonists.

The demand [in early animation] was that you had to draw like a comic strip character -- like Felix on the screen -- to be funny. And if you did it realistically you could not be funny. [Early cartoons] were just a series of one gag after another, so in order to make them funny you had to have gross characters done sometimes in an obscene amount of exaggeration. And then we got into more believable stories and plots, like Snow White, and personality development of those seven dwarfs, each one of them different, compared to the early Mickeys where everybody just bounced and played instruments.

SH: Talk about Fred Moore.

WK: Fred deviated from the rubber hose, round circle school. Fred was just right for the time. He was the first one to escape from the rubber hose school. He began getting counter movements, counter thrusts, in the way he drew. More drawing. He decided to make Mickey’s cheeks move with his mouth, which had never been done before when you drew everything inside that circle. He squashed and stretched him more.

And this was right at the time, but Fred was a high school-trained animator. He never went to art school, and he more or less emerged drawing that way. Nobody seems to remember any development. It just came there and started, but the interesting thing is he never went beyond that part. The rest of us came into that place. It was a strange place, we adapted to it and we kept trying to improve and change, and we became students of it. Milt Kahl, myself, Frank and Ollie. We knew it was a tough art, and there were many nuances of techniques and conceptions regarding the way you drew, and the thing we saw was that there were millions of things of things to be learned yet and to try.

Fred never thought of that. He wasn’t a student of animation, he was just a naturally gifted animator whose style and development was perfect, timing-wise, for that point of time of where the studio wanted to go. And when the studio kept going in that direction it became the students, the guys I named, who carried it on. And Fred, being the type of character he was, almost juvenile in a way, was not able to cope with this. He took to drinking instead of saying “Gee, this is interesting. I’ll sit down and explore it too, and improve and rise above what I’ve done.”

The idea was to try to do better than you did the year before, because it was such an open thing. We were pioneering techniques in animation styles that had never been done before. But Fred was content to stay at this one level, and he got all his adulation for The Three Pigs. Pigs isn’t bad. It’s wonderful for the time. It made everything that came before look very crude, and it gave the studio the shot in the arm that Walt thought was wonderful.

So Fred was the man of the hour and couldn’t handle it, really, if you want to know. He just expected to be the man of the hour forever, and then we began to notice that as we got more into the subtleties of animation, slowing in and out, and the little nuances which were not banging and jumping around all the time, Fred’s work began to look crude.

Now that’s a hell of a thing to say, but I’m talking relatively speaking. I noticed it on The Reluctant Dragon. Fred was given the knight with the little boy, and what had been the acceptable way on The Three Little Pigs and in some cases Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, there were parts, even though they were drawn well, that were crude, timing-wise.

Fred would hit a pose and just freeze there and while we were already loosening those things up and putting in the subtle things that would keep [the animation] alive a long time. That’s what I meant, that at that time Fred was drinking heavily, and I was secretly going in with his exposure sheets and adding these other little drawings that would make them work with the rest of the animation that was being done on the picture.

And more and more, Fred became defensive, and hitting the bottle and feeling sorry for himself. He’d come back from lunch and would want to talk about it, and of course we didn’t want to talk about it. And he wanted to talk about it every afternoon, how the place was giving him a bad deal, and all that, and Walt wasn’t good to him any more.

We just felt sorry for him. We didn’t know what to do and all of a sudden ... you know his brother and father, they had the same drinking problem. We didn’t know that. We’d all go out and have a martini, and with Fred it would become an obsession. And it became an escape when he couldn’t handle the situation in the studio.

The panel's moderator, E-Board member and trustee Stephan Zupkas, began things with a disclaimer that the Guild was not recommending any of the panelists, or endorsing any of their advice or strategies.

The three panelists, financial advisor Janet Gibson (818-239-3847), CPA and registered Personal Financial Specialist Ralph Bovitz (818-715-0819), and financial advisor/broker Shawn Loddy (619-384-3068), emphasized that their clients need to figure out what they spend (many don't have much of an idea) and develop a blueprint for budgeting, investing, and saving for the proverbial rainy day.

It was clear from members' questions that many in the Animation Guild struggle with bills, credit cards, and putting something away for their gray-haired years.

Bovitz explained that financial planning is simply doing "what it takes to make somebody independent." To do that, people have to be aware of the mistakes they're making; financial planners are good for helping individuals avoid major pitfalls.

Gibson said that her typical animation client is on his third job in two years and had credit card debt and minimal savings. She said that her first order of business is to "get her arms around" the state of a new client's finances and get him or her to chart what they spend for food, drink, and various extras over a week's time. Many, she said, are surprised how all those frappucinos from Starbucks quickly add up to real money.

Loddy said that he has his clients develop a comprehensive financial plan and have the discipline to invest. He pointed out that the name of the game today is to avoid big credit card debt and beat inflation. To do that, people need to look at both domestic and foreign stocks, since foreign countries were probably going to offer higher prospects for growth than U.S. stocks in coming years, since the United States is "a more mature market."

The three planners had different approaches to investing. Janet Gibson liked managed funds (these usually have higher administrative fees), Ralph Bovitz liked index funds (which have lower costs), and Shawn Loddy preferred to "build his own mutual fund" by putting together a group of stocks from different economic sectors that he knew well. All three like the "buy and hold" approach to investing.

All three admitted that with the hire-layoff cycle of artists and technicians in the animation biz, long-term planning is often tough; and makes it hard to build "a rainy day fund" for periods of unemployment when you don't know how long your job will last. Still, they said, people need to plan, budget, and get a general grip on where the money goes if they want to have a comfortable retirement.

Addendum: Kevin here, piggy backing on Steve's posting. I just wanted to add a few notes about some of the panelist's comments that struck me as being useful. One great quote, to which all agreed, was "You cannot have wealth if you have debt." That was identified as absolutely the first place for everyone to start before worrying about the best investment strategy.

Regarding eliminating debt, none of the panelists thought it was useful getting a consolidation loan if you owe on multiple credit cards. That can hurt your credit score, and it probably won't get you out of debt any faster. A simple strategy is to pay the minimum on the cards you owe the most on, and aggressively pay down the lowest-balance card. Getting that first card paid off will be a useful psychological victory. Then, attack the next smallest-debt card, and so on, till all your revolving credit is paid off.

As to credit cards, Janet Gibson urged people to avoid cards that use "two-cycle billing" in calculating interest payments. Those include MBNA, Capital One, First USA, and Discovery, among others. If you use a credit card regularly, use one that uses "average monthly balance" or "average daily balance" for calculating interest. You'll usually find those kinds of cards from the bigger banks and credit unions.

The point was also made that working class folks need financial planning much more than the wealthy, even though it's usually the wealthy who go in for professional help. As one panelist stated, if you make 300ドル grand a year and you make a 10,000ドル investing mistake, so what. But if you make 60,000ドル a year and you make that same mistake, it hurts.

Shawn Loddy also sang the praises of Roth IRAs (and Individual 401(k)s for those with substantial 1099 income). I won't go into the details, but it might be something to explore with your financial planner.

Finally, Ralph Bovitz emphasized that Social Security frequently has errors in their records regarding how much you have coming to you. Sometimes this is their mistake, and sometimes it's because some of your income wasn't properly reported to them by an employer. So carefully review those annual Social Security statements so you can catch any mistakes (and, frankly, you should be doing the same with you annual Motion Picture Industry Pension Fund statements, too).

Above: Goofy times three, Marx Bros. style.

Below: Smile when you say that, pardner ... A Goofy take on this movie.

Cleworth -- Sparey's boss in the mid-fifties -- started at the Mouse House straight out of high school in 1939, and worked his way up to animator after the war. Eventually, Eric told me, he tired of studio politics and battles with higher-ups, and in 1972, much to the surprise of colleagues, resigned from the studio. He cashed in his stock options (of which he had many), moved to Morro Bay, and lived the comfortable life of a millionaire until his death in 1999.

Except for a year or so at H-B in the 1960s, Lucas was also a Disney "lifer", an animator with credits on shorts such as The Truth About Mother Goose, Goliath II and Aquamania, and features from 101 Dalmatians to The Fox and the Hound.

* Cleworth was born on January 3, 1920 in Minneapolis, and not in 1939 as indicated in his IMDb listing. '39 was the year he began his Disney career.

Check out more of John Sparey's work on the TAG Blog.

Considering this was the portrait used for the one-dollar bill, it should be no surprise that Goofy is © Walt Disney Pictures.

Pixels to the people Animation used to be the province of big studios, but today the techniques are in everyone's hands How to animate a horde of orcs has finally found its way to the little guy. Not so long ago, digital animators had to be members of the big three -- Disney's Pixar division, DreamWorks Animation, and Fox's Blue Sky Studios -- to produce credible feature films. But in just a few short years, the field has been blown wide open ... With the increasing power of computers and availability of sophisticated software, animation techniques such as motion capture and interpolated rotoscoping -- the "painting over film" look seen in this summer's Richard Linklater film, A Scanner Darkly -- make eye-popping visuals significantly more affordable. High-tech animation techniques have spread from CGI-powered studio releases to videos and commercials to shorts on the festival circuit and now to indie features. Even teenagers goofing off with a video camera and processing the footage with off-the-shelf software can produce striking work, says Christopher Perry, assistant professor of media arts and sciences at Hampshire College and graphics software engineer at Pixar. "That's because the skills, the tricks used in big studios, there's a pretty good route the way they trickle down from Hollywood and other places to people who don't [have Hollywood ties]," Perry says. "That's exciting." First-time feature director Christian Volckman made Renaissance, which opens Friday, in a place far from Hollywood: France. At just 18ドル million, the picture's budget was a pittance compared to mainstream CGI blockbusters -- Cars cost 120ドル million, and even a middling effort like The Ant Bully set its makers back 50ドル million. "I was trying something else," Volckman says, describing his all black-and-white, futuristic thriller set in Paris of 2054. The film was made using motion capture, in which the performances of real actors, pinpointed with hundreds of sensors, were videotaped and then digitized. Then, dozens of animators manipulated the images frame by frame. The effect is cold, calculated, and a little eerie, but also visually arresting. "I was thinking about film noir," the French director says. That a newcomer like Volckman, who got his start making music videos and 16mm shorts, can produce such an accomplished work is largely a result of a suddenly level playing field in the animation industry. "Ten years ago, you had to create a lot of your own tools to do this," says Joe Letteri, speaking by telephone from Weta Digital in Wellington, New Zealand, famous as the upstart, home-grown effects house that won Oscars for its work on The Lord of the Rings. The senior visual effects supervisor likens the burgeoning digital climate to the period just after film's pioneer days. "You [once] had to build your own camera and grind your own lenses," Letteri says. "Now it's settled down to the major camera makers. Everyone got trained on them." Which means no one has to reinvent the wheel anymore. "The computer, in short, frees an animator from the heavy lifting of the stop-motion days and allows him to exert all his creative energy on creating a performance," says Rings animation supervisor Randall William Cook by e-mail. Like many from the stop-motion animation days, the former creature designer and sculptor went digital and never looked back. His work animating creatures like Gollum has come full circle: He recently embarked on a live action/CGI animation adventure fantasy with stop-motion master Ray Harryhausen. With Cook directing, the collaboration will revive Harryhausen's classic Sinbad series. But while computers can create whiz-bang images, the studio system isn't always compatible with personal vision. "Most [animators] are specialists working on assembly lines who are discouraged from stepping outside their specialties: The sculptor sculpts, the animator animates, the lighter lights," says Cook. "The disadvantage to the assembly line is that it often has a homogenizing effect, which results in so many of these films looking alike." Indie directors are solving the uniformity problem. But the marketplace is driven by the big studios' grip on feature-length animation, all targeted to one audience: children. Marc Dole, president of Hatchling Studios, based in Portsmouth, N.H., has been shopping his award-winning short The Toll around to investors, trying to get it made into a feature, but backers balked. "This could be a very good teenage and adult film if it's marketed the right way," says Dole. "[But] unless you're going for kids, you're not going to get the merchandising. All the people we've talked to, they want to know how you can 'moneytize' [the film]." While loath to make a "cutesy" film, Dole felt obliged to write a script "for the whole family." Volckman, 34, took a risk making his animated, dystopian science fiction feature. But he's convinced Renaissance will find its audience. "Today, no one has made a hit with adult animation," he says. "It's going to be a new field that's opening up." The director is lucky because he comes from a country with a deep appreciation for both graphic novels aimed far over kids' heads and, not coincidentally, grown-up animated works. According to the Hollywood Reporter, a dozen animated features are in development or production in France. With the exception of Luc Besson's 80ドル million Arthur and the Minimoys, all the upcoming films -- including The Illusionist, Sylvain Chomet's follow-up to his dark and quirky The Triplets of Belleville, which mixed traditional and digital animation -- have budgets between 3ドル to 30ドル million. Far from pushing up costs, new animation techniques can hold them down -- even compared with shooting a straight, live-action film. According to Linklater, going animated on A Scanner Darkly was a big part of what allowed him to make the movie for 8ドル million, a fraction of a typical sci-fi film budget. "I don't think we could've got the movie made [had it been live action]," Linklater says in an interview published on About.com. Scanner and his other digitally rotoscoped indie feature, 2001's Waking Life, were unexpected from someone who got his start with 1991's Slacker and has since made nine other live-action films, but they have built their own dedicated following. According to legendary animator Ralph Bakshi, however, being able to make films on the cheap doesn't always open doors in Los Angeles. The filmmaker couldn't get the studios interested in his latest project, the 5ドル million The Last Days of Coney Island. "I had about eight minutes of film and a completed script," Bakshi, 68, said by telephone from his home in Silver City, N. M. "I thought budget was a slam dunk. For a Bakshi comeback film, it seemed like a no-brainer." But the pioneer of controversial films such as Wizards and American Pop doesn't think his next will likely find industry support. "I asked one guy [in Hollywood], 'Should I have a budget of 150ドル million and pocket the rest?'" Bakshi says, laughing like a goofy cartoon character. "He said, 'Yeah, but you have to make it PG.'" (Bakshi's 1972 Fritz the Cat was the first cartoon given an X rating.) For Bakshi, whose films blend animation, live action, and traditional rotoscoping, the promise of low-cost technology is that it could allow outsider animation to rise again. His new Bakshi School of Animation and Cartooning teaches a hybrid of old techniques: hand-drawn 2-D, processed in computers using relatively inexpensive software like Toon Boom. "With [software like Toon Boom], I have a studio in a box," Bakshi raves. "Everything I used to spend million of dollars on I can do for nothing. I could do a film like Heavy Traffic for 100 percent better quality for a 10th the cost." Technology seems like the magic bullet for Bakshi's budget problems. All he needs, he says, is a little cash. "What does it take for Hollywood to take a chance? I think there's a huge audience for [sophisticated] animated films," the filmmaker says. But for a young director who has embraced digital imagery to make his new animated film, Volckman has a skeptical view toward the digital upheaval. "Technology fights against you. Computers run away from you. Software is getting more and more complex," says Volckman with a sigh, the six-year moviemaking process behind him. "But in the end, it's a guy behind a computer, telling it what to do." -- The Boston Globe, 9/24/2006

Holbein worked in the court of Henry VIII, and Goofy is © Walt Disney Pictures. Coincidence?

John drew this cycle after noting the transitory nature of Crump's facial and hair grooming:

Can you find Goofy in John Sparey's tribute to Paul Klee?

There's more Sparey on our blog.

Whatever you see is © Walt Disney Pictures. (And don't you ever forget it.)

• Nancy Stapp (front left), the daughter of industry vet Terrell Stapp, attended Chouinard and Occidental before starting at Disney as an inbetweener in 1954. She seems to have been let go in the "Black Friday" mass layoff at the end of Sleeping Beauty, after which she enrolled at USC and left the industry.
• Ruth Kissane (left rear), "one of the top women animators of the modern age" (Jeff Lenburg), went on from Disney to design the layouts for most of the classic Bill Melendez Peanuts specials and features. She directed Captain Kangaroo spots for John Sutherland and animated for John Hubley on Everybody Rides The Carousel and The Doonesbury Special. After her death in 1990, she received ASIFA-Hollywood's Winsor McCay Award.
• Janie McIntosh (center) was the secretary to animation administrator Andy Engman.
• Lyn Kroeger (right rear), who appeared as Snow White in this John Sparey pastel, left Disney in 1955. Our files show a long list of studios for which she inbetweened or assisted: Quartet, Melendez, Murakami/Wolf, Haboush, Levitow-Hansen, Duck Soup and Hanna-Barbera, until 1984, when she left the industry.
• We previously profiled Eva Schneider (right front), who appeared in this picture from our John Sparey collection. In case you missed Floyd Norman's comment on that post, after she left animation in 1981 she moved to New Orleans where she lives to this day. She refused to evacuate after Katrina, and Floyd says there was a picture of her and her dog in Vanity Fair a few months ago.

Here's more of the art of John Sparey.

Left: Roy Brewer at the White House with President Ronald Reagan.

Roy M. Brewer, a Hollywood labor chief in the 1940s and ’50s, whose leadership and outspoken anti-Communism during one of the most violent strikes in American history catalyzed Ronald Reagan into political action, has died in Los Angeles, aged 97. He passed away on Saturday, and the cause was complications from pneumonia, according to Brewer’s daughter, Ramona Moloski. Although Brewer never ran a movie studio or directed a picture, for about a decade he had as much sway in the film capital as any mogul or filmmaker. He came from humble origins in Nebraska, and traveled to walk the corridors of power, becoming a confidant and close ally with such figures as Cecil B. de Mille, John Wayne, Clark Gable and Walt Disney ...

-- John Meroney, National Review Online

Brewer was close friends with SAG union activist Ronald Reagan, and is credited with Reagan's 180-degree political shift to the right. Brewer was the unofficial commissar of the Hollywood blacklist. He was head of the West Coast office of the IATSE, a rival union to the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU) when it was allied with the Screen Cartoonists Guild.

After the CSU's defeat in the late 1940s, Brewer worked to form IATSE Local 839. Tom Sito quotes him at an open debate meeting, screaming "You are pathologically unfit to work in this industry!" at SCG activist Bill Melendez. Local 839 won NLRB elections at virtually all of the major studios, and was chartered in January 1952.

A couple of years later, Brewer's star in the IA declined somewhat after he lost an election for IATSE president against incumbent Richard Walsh. Brewer remained active in the IA as something of a gadfly; we can recall seeing him in the 1980s, getting booed as he made speeches from the floor of IA conventions.

There will be much more about Roy Brewer and his times in president emeritus Tom Sito's book, Drawing The Line, to be published next month.

... El Greco.

Another in our series of John Sparey's work.

We like to think that Goofy belongs to all of us. But he's still © Walt Disney Pictures.

We've said it before and we'll say it again -- Goofy is © Walt Disney Pictures

Far be it from us to deny that Goofy is © Walt Disney Pictures