Good Forward-Looking Indicator?

Today at lunch, a magazine editor said to me: "My kid's really anxious to see Madagascar II." So this story from MarketWatch might not be a fluke:

DreamWorks today announced that its highly anticipated sequel, "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa" made box office history yesterday in both Russia and the Ukraine. The continuing saga of the Central Park Zoosters bowed in Russia to the biggest opening day ever for an American film and set the record for the biggest opening day of all time in the Ukraine ...

In Russia, the film opened on 841 screens, grossing $2.81 million. This record establishes "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa" as the second biggest opening of all time in the country, besting all previous animated feature releases. In the Ukraine, the film opened on 92 screens to a gross of $396,000 ...

Okay, so $2.81 million isn't going to knock anybody on their keester, and $396,000 isn't totally overwhelming. But the first and second biggest openings in history? Those rollouts bode well, don't you think?

I'm betting that Madagascar Escape 2 Africa has a solid opening here in the S.S. of A. next week. And I'm hoping that there's plenty of room for Bolt in the animation marketplace when the Disney doggie bursts forth fourteen days later.

I'm funny that way.

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Sunrise ... Sunset

... Swiftly fly the renewal and pink slips.

American Dad, one of Fox Animation's ongoing success stories, has been picked up for a fifth season.

With most scripted series down this fall, "Dad" is growing -- up 6% over last year in adults 18-49, 8% in total viewers and 19% in teens ...

Co-creators Mike Barker, Matt Weitzman and the rest of the "Dad" writing team are already working on Season 5, while closely following the presidential race.

"If (Barack) Obama wins, that would provide an interesting wrinkle to the show as Stan is such a die-hard Republican," Weitzman said. Added Barker, "If (John) McCain wins, it would be great for the show and horrible for our grandchildren ..."

Elsewhere in the Fox empire, there is bad news.

After one three-month cancellation and several nerve-wracking waits for new-season pickups, King of the Hill is -- apparently -- coming to an end after 250+ episodes.

Complete finality is never certain when it comes to Fox animation. The net actually has canceled "King of the Hill" in the past only to turn around and pick up more episodes later on. And shows like "Family Guy" and "Futurama" have also been revived after cancellation.

But for now, the show's staff was informed of the network's decision Thursday not to pick up any more episodes.

"We've been here before," said exec producer John Altschuler. "When i'ts time for 'King of the Hill' to go, it will go. But I think with the ratings this good, and with quality that doesn't seem to be diminishing, it would be very odd for 'King of the Hill' not to keep going."

No series finale had been planned for "King," but that's by design, Altschuler said. Had a series finale run when "King" previously halted production, the show might not have come back, he said. And the same is true this time, he added.

In the meantime, faces are somber at Film Roman. (I found out about the cancellation from a director on The Simpsons.)

Condolences to the KOTH crew ... and may the series be uncanceled soon. It's definitely not easy being in television animation these days.

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Studs Terkel, RIP

One of the great advocates for those who work for a living has moved on.

Studs Terkel, born in 1912, died today at 96. I note his passing here because he stood with the hard-luck cases all his life, even when it was widely unfashionable, and never, never flinched:

... McCarthyism was a potent force and Terkel was outspoken politically, with a highly liberal tone. "I was blacklisted because I took certain positions on things and never retracted," Terkel once said in an interview about those times. "I signed many petitions that were for unfashionable causes and never retracted."

He had a hard time finding work, subsisting on small speaking fees and even smaller sums for writing book reviews. His wife, Ida, made enough to keep the family afloat.

I have one more reason for writing about him here. Studs was the centerpiece of one of my favorite show biz anecdotes ....

It seems that in the middle 1950s, when the blacklist was near its crest, Studs was a writer for Pearl Bailey (later the voice of Big Mama in Disney's The Fox and the Hound) on a network radio variety show that Pearl headlined.

The usual oily little herd of blacklist enthusiasts came to Studs and said: "We need you to sign the loyalty oath we have here ..."

Studs looked at the paper and politely told them "No." Whereupon they went to Ms. Bailey, the producer and star of the network show, and told her that Studs had refused to sign their loyalty oath and would therefore have to be fired.

Pearl Bailey told them "No."

Whereupon the group crawled back under their respective rocks, and made no further mention of Studs being fired.

Mr. Terkel remained with the show, American civilization continued to survive, and Ms. Bailey went on being a star. A half-dozen years later, the blacklist was on its way out.

And half a century further on, "Islamo-fascists" have replaced commies as America's "enemy du jour." The more things change ...

So Rest in Peace, Studs Terkel. You've surely earned it.

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Smaller Studio Walk Around

Today was my Universal Cartoon Studio day, high up in the Black Tower on Lankershim.

The main dish cooking at U.C.S. right now is Curious George. The series is now in its fourth season, and bopping right along. As one of the crew said:

"Our ratings are good, we've won some awards, and PBS seems to be happy. Maybe we can be like Sesame Street, and be on for twenty years ..."

In today's glorious economic environment, nobody is looking to jump from studio to studio chasing an extra $26.50 per week. Twenty years working on one series, or even seven years, is more than fine.

And Universal Cartoons is still working on the Curious George direct-to-video feature. This baby has been in work a while, and is now in the retake stage. Although the series is solid, I'm informed that the company isn't looking to greenlight another video George feature until this one rolls out and the suits see how it performs.

And yesterday at Warners Animation, I learned that storyboard work on Public Enemy (a Superman/Batman direct-to-video feature) is wrapping up, and work continues on Batman The Brave and the Bold:

"I've seen the first episode of The Brave and the Bold, and it looks really good. And the script's good. Second one's nice, too. I just wish that somebody at Time-Warner would crack Cartoon Network and Warners Animation on the head and get them to support each other. I walk around and see Warners characters everywhere, and I know T-W should be doing more with them. Makes me crazy that they're not."

The above is a long-time WA employee talking.

Warners, like Universal, doesn't have a lot of product in work just now. Both have items in development, but the low-hanging cupboards are mostly bare.

Warners does have a Scooby Doo direct-to-video feature poised to go into work (for you can never have too much Scooby Doo.)

Warners is now ginning up a raft of new projects; hopefully some of these will make it to series and video features and a new era of booming employment will happen at Warners.

In the meantime, there is Scooby Doo!

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Film Roman -- NOT For Sale

The last few weeks, rumors have been rampant that Starz Media was putting Film Roman -- their animation studio -- on the sales block. When I wandered FR's halls, any of number of artists said "The company is definitely selling us" ... "There are four bidders" ... etc.

Today a highly placed Romanian told me:

"Starz took the "For Sale" sign for Film Roman down last week. Execs here plan to do some interesting new things with the studio, and it won't be going to any bidders anytime soon ..."

This is great news, I think. But it points up the fact that all that scuttlebutt I heard? About Starz selling the place?

Apparently true.

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Movies Recession Resistant?

One of the great myths of Tinsel Town is that the movie industry weathers the bad times wonderfully well. But the L.A. Times puts that old actor's tale to rest:

Studio executives note that during the Great Depression, when more than a quarter of the country was out of work, people still scraped together dimes to see the latest motion picture ...

Although cinema attendance increased during five of the last seven recessions, a closer examination of movie box office receipts during the Great Depression seems at odds with Hollywood's conventional wisdom. Attendance soared in 1929 and 1930, after the advent of "talkies," but the novelty appears to have worn off amid hard times. By 1932, ticket sales had plunged and did not recover until 1940, just before World War II.

Of course, as the L.A. Times points out, there's a lot more competition for eyeballs than there was in 1933. Video games, YouTube, five jillion blogs, you name it. Hollywood just isn't going to have an easy time this time around.

But Hollywood didn't have an easy time of it at the bottom of the Hoover Depression, either. What you might not know is that Hollywood, seventy-five years back, was energetically sticking it hourly workers.

One of its Hollywood's manuevers then was to cut everybody's salaries, top to bottom, in half. The moguls said: "We all have to sacrifice in these hard times." Unsurprisingly, some were slated to make bigger sacrifices than others. The front office executive was certainly going to take a hit when his paycheck went from $1500 to $750 per week, but $750 was a fortune in 1933.

For the electrician, grip and cel painter who was making $25 per week and suddenly faced with living on $12.50, the sacrifice was a hell of a lot steeper. Because all of a sudden it was a question of having enough money to pay the rent and buy the groceries.

At the last minute, the studios rescinded the mandate to slash everybody's wages and exempted the people at the bottom. However, they didn't do it out of the goodness of their flinty hearts. They did it because the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employes, weaker in the studios then but strong in the movie theaters across the country (it controlled the projectionists) said:

Fine and dandy, you go ahead and cut the salaries of the electricians, editors, makeup artists, and the people working on the sound stages. But hey, how are you going to get your movies projected onto all those silver screens? Because projectionists won't be doing it ...*

And as if by magic, the studios found enlightenment. "Okay," they said. "You make good sense. We won't cut the lower-tiered wages. That would be bad. Thank you for showing us the way and the light." **

And the studios acted on their own economic self-interest, and did not cut the lower wages. Big of them, don't you think?

* Paraphrased.

** Also paraphrased. And the actual sentiments were probably a trifle different.

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All Disney? All the Time?

It sometimes feels that way.

Today, because of different commitments, I found myself at Disney Toons, Disney TVA, and the Disney Animation Studio.

At Diz TVA (the Sonora Avenue branch), the last of the My Friends Tigger and Pooh staff is being laid off. The mood: bitterness and wistful resignation, mingled together. (I can hardly fault them. I felt much the same way the times I was slipped the axe.)

By contrast, the still-working Mickey's Clubhouse group are relatively happy. And pleased to be working ...

And Disney Toons upstairs is a tranquil island of soft-light stability. The managers from the North have eliminated the harsh fluorescent glow of industrial tube lighting found downstairs; on the second floor, everybody works by the illumination of floor lights and hanging bubble lamps created by George Nelson (which must be breeding, as there seems to be more and more of them, hanging from the ceiling.)

But today, the first Tinkerbell DVD was released, which explained all the champagne and cork-popping that was going on. Not. A Toons artist looked up at me startled when I mentioned it was the launch date for their first movie.

"Oh yeah, the video comes out today, doesn't it? I'm so busy on the third one I lose track. But we're going to have a little event for it here tomorrow, when they're handing out the disks.

"The plan is to make five Tinkerbells. On the other side of the building, they're getting new ideas together to be pitched. Word is they want to get going on another franchise, maybe geared toward boys this time, instead of girls ..."

At Disney Animation Studios, I learned a lot about stereo animated features as a tag along to a print interview. One take away: Disey is doing ten stereo features next year, and live-action stereo movies are a lot trickier to make than the animated variety.

Some days you learn more new stuff than others.

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IA-AMPTP Negotiations

Word reaches us that the IA-AMPTP might be restarting negotiations in November ...

Then again, it might be January ... or February. There's the SAG talks, which never seem to have closure. They could get in the way.

And sometime before next summer, TAG will have to sit down to:

1) Hold a cooperative meeting with studios to talk about pesky things like unpaid overtime and overlong tests ...

2) Hammer out a new collective bargaining agreement.

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An Afternoon at the House of Mouse

I spent part of the afternoon at Disney Animation Studios (that's the hat building, if you're not quite sure.)

Some of the remaining Bolt production crew is now working on a c.g. short for the picture's DVD. As one of them said:

We're happy with the way the feature came out. It gets released near the end of November, two weeks after Madagascar, so maybe it will have a weekend sort of to itself ...

Disney artists, I think, are going to be happier and more relaxed after the new picture has a big opening weekend. The publicity machine has already cranked up, with stories in the L.A. Times and the Wall Street Journal:

"Pixar was the reincarnation of Disney," said Floyd Norman, a retired Disney animator who also worked on Pixar's hits "Toy Story 2" and "Monsters, Inc." "Now Disney is becoming the southern version of Pixar." ...

The film, perhaps not surprisingly, evinces a Pixar pedigree. The title character evokes "Toy Story's" Buzz Lightyear, a space ranger who believes he has super powers only to discover that he is merely a toy.

Catmull insists "Bolt" is no Pixar clone.

"There isn't any cavalry coming over the hill," he said. "They have the talent there, they just needed a philosophy that let the talent rise to the surface."

I don't think there's much dispute that the Disney Animation Studio is being remolded along Pixar lines. The point mainstream media scribes sometimes miss is that when you burrow in a little, it's clear that Pixar, DreamWorks Animation, and D.A.S. are all branches of the same mighty oak Walt planted on Hyperion Avenue, seventy-plus years ago.

It's hardly an accident that the key creative minds running the three major U.S. animation studios come originally from Disney. It's simply the way God planned it.

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My 2008 Political Post

These two short films, made eight years apart, pretty much say where we've been and where we are now.

They were created by movie maker (and animator) Charles Stone, and both have pretty much gone viral, but I put them up anyway because they plug nicely into the screed below ...

My first Presidential vote was cast for Richard Nixon. It was 1972. I was a Navy Swabbie. At the time, it seemed to me like the right thing to do.

This time around, my vote will be for Barack Obama.

Now I'm sure I'll get trolls who will call me a commie sympathizer and Muslim lover, a Librul, a Socialist, etc. etc. But let me explain anyway.

When a government has loused up as throughly as this one has, it's hard to get around the fact that all the damage will probably cause the general population to become ... I don't know ... pissed off. This is currently reflected in the poll numbers you find around the web*.

If Al Gore had become President, and versions of the disasters that have taken place under G.W. Bush had occurred with him, I've little doubt that the electorate would be on the cusp of riding Democrats out of town on a rail.

However, if we were in that alternate universe and the Democrats were about to become toast, I would not be one of the cooks burning them in the oven, because I'm not the man I was thirty-six years ago.

I am now middle-aged. A father and husband. A guy who has worked for a living for thirty-plus years, swimming against a rising tide of corporatism, where the top 1% earns the lion's share of wealth, where the government exists to protect and defend blue-chip companies and nobody else.

And I would still be voting the liberal, "spread the wealth around" line because I'm painfully aware that the United States has become -- in the words of novelist Gore Vidal -- a country devoted to "Socialism for the rich, and free enterprise for the poor," and I would like the equation to be redressed, at least a little.

Now I don't think Mr. Obama is the end-all and be-all as a Presidential nominee. And I don't believe John McCain is evil personified. But pushing income inequality to greater extremes -- as McCain's policies would do -- ends up making our problems worse. And sooner rather than later, more of us will end up like Dukie and his brethren: Out of a job, out of the house, and still in Iraq, being bled white to the tune of $10 billion per month.

There's not much time left before election day. Use it to make things better. And please vote.

* It's possible these poll numbers can change and Senator McCain might pull off a triumph. I doubt it, but it's possible.

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CG Viz Effx? They're Not Just In India ...

There are of course, the fears that more and more computer generated imagery will be migrating to Mubai. But another cluster of computer animators and programmers is out there:

... Many of the 24,000 frames of special effects used in the [the Russian historical epic "Admiral"] ... were created by Dago, one of Russia's leading private studios that also has a top visual effects department.

Alexey Kublitsky, vfx exec producer ... says that although standards were high in Russia's special effects community, with only 300-400 trained CGI artists, there were "not enough" people to satisfy demand ... Despite the stellar tech skills of [Russian] vfx crews, there is no concerted effort by the Russian entertainment industry to recruit and train artists, although newer studios and facilities, such as Russian World Studios, are keen to train people. India and Hong Kong look to outpace Russia in growing their post-production businesses.

Day by day, animation in all its forms is an increasingly global enterprise. (Like we didn't know already?) Games, visual effects, animated features and the rest get made in various shops around the world. Yet even as pressure increases to turn out work that is "better, faster cheaper", Los Angeles still has a growing animation* community.

Why is that? Because of the talent residing in the Southland. At the end of the day, studios dip into the wells that give them the greatest return on investment, and the Los Angeles springs run deep and rich ... and studio execs are loath to try higher risk strategies ("Let's ship everything to Moscow!") that could blow up in their faces and cost them their high-end jobs.

And yeah, the worldwide economic meltdown is going to present new challenges to L.A., but in the three decades I've hung around the cartoon business, it's continued to grow. I've been listening to people say "It's all over!" since at least 1976.

* Defined here as artists, writers and technicians employed in Southern California in television animation, theatrical animation, visual efects, games, broadcast graphics, etc.

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Your Weekend B.O.

Is as pungent as expected.

High School Musical, The Theater Version, takes off like the proverbial rocket as 'tweens shove through the turnstyles to see what they used to get on the Disney Channel for free. Friday's haul for the Mouse House totals $16.9 million.

Saw the Fifth hacks through rancid reviews and draws in the horror-pic set (who usually cause these pics to be heavily front-loaded), achieving a per-screen average only slightly below the teen-age singers and dancers.

Beverly Hills Bow Wow drops to fifth, but has now ticked over the $73 million threshhold, making Robert Iger one happy CEO.

Add On: The weekend is in, and we can safely say that musicals have resurged, big time.

High School Musical 3 drops a bit on Saturday, but still rakes in $42 million (on a purported $11 million budget.)

Saw V collects $30 million.

In fourth place, the semi-animated Beverly Hills Dhihuahua drop 39.5%, second lowest of any flick in the Top Ten, and now stands at $78.1 million.

New entry Pride and Glory lands with a dull thud, takes $6.3 million in a lacklustre frame.

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Trouble For Diz's Bollywood Dog Picture?

Uh oh.

According to some early reports, the House of Mouse's Indian animated flick seems to be running into headwinds:

Samir Karnik’s Heroes has opened to a fairly good response as compared to this week’s other release, Roadside Romeo. The Yash Raj – Walt Disney’s first joint venture, the animated film, Roadside Romeo has also been given thumbs down by the critics and its report isn’t encouraging ...

Roadside Romeo has got a very poor opening with just a 20-25% response. The reports are not encouraging and the film will find it hard to make a mark at the box office ...

Let's stipulate that I've got no clue what "just a 20-25% response" means. I'm assuming it indicates that the Mubai and Delhi cinemas showing Disney's animated offering are not ... uh ... Standing Room Only. But truth to tell, I don't know exactly what it means.

But here's my hope: I want Bolt to tear up the wickets when it debuts in the sub-continent. I want it to out-perform the Bollywood picture. I desire this for a very selfish reason: I think it's good for the Burbank-based animation studio if its product outperforms the overseas variety.

So go ahead. Call me selfish. Call me beyond the pale in wanting the home-grown product to continue to dominate worldwide box office. I'll just have to deal with it.

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Bolt Pushback

The Big Mouse has sunk big bucks into its next doggie picture, and it's pulling out all the stops. Apparently some of the theatre chains in and around the fruited plain aren't happy:

... [Disney] attached a six-minute-long promotion for the 3-D family flick -- about a superhero dog -- to film prints of its box-office hit "Beverly Hills Chihuahua," numerous theater owners said Disney had gone too far.

Theater owners said the "Bolt" spot intruded on their screen time and not only made "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" run longer than it should but also cost them time that the theater owners could fill -- with other showings or their own commercials.

Some of the nation's top theater chains complained to Disney that the extended trailer violated a long-standing agreement about where trailers can be placed and how long they can run ...

The studio has a lot riding on the Pixar team's first Disney feature out of the blocks. For obvious reasons, the company wants it to be a sizable hit, and if Diz ruffles distributors' feathers in order to get it, that's a price the conglom is willing to pay.

Madagascar Too is going to be out there offering hot competition, so the Mouse House is going to use all the tools at its disposal. If AMC and Regal don't like it, tough. I'm sure Disney's attitude is: "Suck it up."

Since I'm a self-serving twerp, I want both pictures to be major, box office hits.

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Octolinks!

Hey ho! Disney is up to its canine ears in dog pictures.

Now that I've returned to the Monday-Friday routine, we return you to the fabled Animation Link Fest.

Animation producer Don Hahn expounds on his book "Alchemy of Animation":

...the best thing you can do [in animated features] is try to keep reaching out in new directions. I think WALL-E is a good example. It's a film with no dialogue for a half-hour. Up is a film that that stars a man in his 70's. They're very unexpected. In its day, I think Lion King was probably unexpected. It was, you know, the Joseph story meets Hamlet in Africa with music by Elton John. It was a nutty concept in its time, but those risks, I think, are the kinds of movies that end up paying the biggest dividends.

Singapore rolls out its first English language animated feature:

Singapore's first English animated feature film "Sing to the Dawn" will open on October 30.

Dawn has finally come for the movie, which took over four years and S$7.5 million to make ...

The director draws inspiration from the "Jungle Book" movie, which he counts as the first movie he can remember watching and which also made a huge impression on him.

Former Mouseketeer Michael Eisner holds forth on what he's been doing -- in live action and animation -- with his new company Tornante.

WS: Tell us about the new sitcom, Glenn Martin DDS, for Nick at Nite.

EISNER: It’s pretty exciting. We had this idea—what job allows you to [pick up] and take your family on a cross-country trip? If I were a dentist I think I’d like to get away! So we have a dentist’s family traveling around America. It’s comedy. Nick at Nite’s prime-time schedule is for all of the family and not just for kids. They read the script, liked our idea. Then we shot the first act in stop-motion puppet animation. They said it was great, and we are doing 20 episodes.

We’re starting to show it internationally—Canada loved it. Hopefully we’ll deliver on the promise. The key is execution, always. You start with a very good idea, which I think it is. You put good people on it and then you have to hope that it gets executed up to the idea or better than the idea that you started with.

The Hollywood Reporter profiles John Lasseter, "Innovator of the Year."

... His voice trembling with emotion, [Lasster] spoke of how thrilling it was getting to know Johnston when he first came to Disney in 1979.

"We weren't embraced at that time by many of the people leading (Disney)," he recalled. "The Nine Old Men were starting to step away and retire. But it was the Nine Old Men who embraced us. They wanted to teach us everything that they knew. They recognized, more than anybody else, that they were handing the torch off."

Our friends to the north ramp up for World Animation Day:

The National Film Board is getting an early start on World Animation Day festivities and is turning the party out well after. From October 24 to November 12, Canadians in 13 cities will be able to enjoy free screenings of the Get Animated! series to celebrate World Animation Day (October 28).

Besides Bolt and Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Disney has yet another animated dog picture that you probably haven't heard quite as much about:

... With Roadside Romeo, Indian animation films have taken a giant leap forward and kudos to Yash Raj Films and Walt Disney Studios for being the one to raise the bar up by many notches.

Bottom line is the fact that Roadside Romeo is ultimately a movie that has stemmed from the land of masala films, so expecting anything different is sheer blasphemy. The film has lovers, a villain and great humor - the ultimate essentials for a Bollywood caper. But then being animated and convincing is what whisks this film away from clutches of the inane Bollywood film monster ...

The Washington Post reviews a newer collection of Looney Toons shorts that encompasses some of Warners' lesser known eight-minute wonders:

... [T]his "Golden Collection," releasing today, definitely offers its share of standard, delightfully Looney fare ... But we also get an entire DVD devoted largely to "patriotic" cartoons from the World War II era in which, among other things, Bugs Bunny impersonates Joseph Stalin, viewers are encouraged to buy bonds and an animated Adolf Hitler invariably gets whacked on the head with a mallet.

(Regarding some of the WB wartime shorts, the company failed to copyright a large number of these short productions, an error the craftier Disney never made.)

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Aniranter

Some of the things Mr. (or Ms.) Ranter puts up I agree with, other things not so much. For instance:

If Art Babbitt Were Alive Today...

...he would be "blacklisted" as a troublemaker.

BUT...

it wouldn't be a blacklist by the studios.

It'd be by the animation artists.

Yes, blacklisting is around, but is it generally started by the studios when an artist rightfully complains about being taken advantage of, or is it started by their fellow artists who don't want to "rock the boat" no matter how many unpaid hours are put in to meet unreasonable schedules?

I've not talked to an artist that wasn't hired by the studios for standing up for themselves, but I've certainly met artists who don't get recommended by other artists for their loudmouths.

If Mr. Babbitt were around today, the same career arc he had in the thirties, forties and onward would be pretty much the career he'd have ... today.

Because though animation technologies evolve, human passions and behaviors don't change very much through time.

Greed, lust, jealousy, back-biting, infighting, scheming, rage, sorrow, all pretty much the same in 1938 as in 2008. Hell, the same in 1248, for that matter.

So. What would happen to 21st century Art?

Oh, he would make enemies of management at one studio or another ... just as he enraged Walt in 1941. The only difference now? Management rotates through places a lot faster. Nobody stays top dog like Walt did for forty-plus years, and institutional memories are short. So Art would not be able to work for one or another studio topkick, but chances are the topkick would be gone after a few years, and Art would be back, because today's institutional memories are short, and studios operate more than ever under the old Jack L. Warner dictum:

"Don't let that bastard in here ever again.

"Unless we need him."

So Ranter is half right. The studios now are large, robotic conglomerates that don't personalize much and don't hold long grudges. (How could they? Few mucky mucks hang around long.) But Art would no doubt have a few Captains of Industry from whom he would have to steer clear.

But would he piss off his fellow workers? Probably some, because Art was a prickly personality. (I met him once.) But because many artists respect top talent, even when attached to disagreeable personalities, Art would keep working.

How do I know? Let's take a look at the old 20th-century Art, at the end of a long career. It's 1991, and he's not the animator of old, not by a long shot. He's elderly, wizened, stooped, shrunken and his drawing is not what it used to be. But he's got a job at Bill Melendez Productions.

Why? Because Bill Melendez loves and respects Art, knew him and admired him as a young artist during the '41 Disney strike, and has the wherewithal half a century later to employ Art and help him keep going ... until Art's death in the Spring of 1992.

So here, Ranter is three quarters wrong. Yes, there are artists who are fearful, selfish and petty, who would blackball a fellow employee. But there are many artists, artists like Bill Melendez, who wouldn't. And 21st century Art would end his days pretty much as his 20th century incarnation ended it.

Because human hearts, emotions, nerve-endings, don't change.

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The SAG-AMPTP Imbroglio, Part Ten

Back momentarily to labor stuff.

SAG and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers have agreed to sit down again after a three-month recess:

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers is expected to confirm as early as today that it has agreed to resume contract talks with the Screen Actors Guild with the help of a federal mediator. SAG’s national board issued the request for a mediator to step in following the guild’s board meeting last weekend.

What everybody assumes (probably correctly) is that neither side is going to budge very much, if at all. As a studio veep told me a few days back:

"SAG's leadership has painted itself into a corner. They're taking a stand on issues the AMPTP will probably never give them, and what are they going to do? Get the membership to vote to walk out? If they can't get 75% to vote for a strike, they're f*cked."

Yeah, I'd say.

I don't know enough about SAG's internal politics to know how this three-month fustercluck will shake out. 'Twere me in the SAG driver's seat, I would negotiate some fig leaf changes, proclaim victory, and go get a ratification vote.

Because the alternative is like, shutting the business down. Yikes.

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The Film of Roman

Interesting times at the studio by the Bob Hope Airport.

People are glad to be working, but morale is not at ... uh ... former highs.

"I don't know if they're going to keep the layout department here on The Simpsons going. They seem to be moving to just doing roughs here and do everything else in Korea." ... "Word's out that Starz Media has Film Roman up for sale, and they've got four bidders." ...

Longtime Film Roman/Simpsons producer Mike Wolf has just departed FR, and some of the employees I talk to are sorry over his departure.

"Mike wasn't perfect, but he always gave me a fair listen to when I had an issue, and he knew the show as well as anybody. It's too bad he's gone ..."

What I mostly pick up around the studio is the uncertainty of where the television series called The Simpsons is going. I hear things like: "We just don't know how much longer Fox is going to keep the show alive," and "They're squeezing the artists because they're paying so much to the voice actors, and they feel like they've got to hold the line somewhere. They figure we're an easier target."

Personally, I don't think News Corp. will be stopping episodes of the Yellow Family anytime soon (there's just too much money in those citizens of Springfield.) I ask one of the show's veterans if he believes that management is going to eliminate layouts in an attempt to cut budgets. He frowns and shakes his head.

"If they get rid of layouts, I think they destroy the character of the show. I don't know if The Simpsons could go on ..."

If the series doesn't continue for at least two more seasons, I'l eat my union card. Beyond that, there are those Simpsons animated features yet to be made. When I tell two anxious artists there is no way Fox is going to walk away from a feature franchise as lucrative as Homer's family, and more sequels are a dead-bang certainty, they don't disagree.

But how can they? If there's one thing that's bed-rock philosophy in Tinseltown, it's the love ... and continuation ... of a money-making franchise. Just ask Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.

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Followup on Corny Cole

Thanks to Cartoon Brew for updating us on Corny Cole, who lost his home and belongings in the Marek fire last week:

The Creative Talent Network is holding an online fundraiser. Donations can be sent to this Paypal account.

Jeff Pidgeon has informed us that if you don’t like sending money over the internet, you can make a check payable to Cornelius Cole and mail it to:

California Institute of the Arts ATT: Trish Patryla, Office of the Provost 24700 McBean Parkway Valencia, CA 91355

CalArts is providing housing for Corny, so he’s being well cared for. They’ve even stocked the place up with food for him. One of his cats has been found alive and well, and Jackie at Cal Arts is checking area animal shelters for more. So keep your fingers crossed.

Click here to read entire post

Around Cartoon Network

As most people know, the television side of the business has not been as robust as in previous years, but perhaps things are looking up at least a little. At least at CN. I had recent occasion to talk to a mucky-muck at the network of 'toons and he caught me up on what strategies the Time-Warner family member is now pursuing to grow its business:

"Clone Wars is an acquisition that we're using to build on. We're programming comedy shows on Thursday nights, and making Friday night an adventure program destination. We've increased our overall ratings a bunch since last year, so things are getting better ...

"In the development area, Craig McCracken and Rob Renzetti are in charge of the shorts development program. So far they've taken hundreds of pitches, and greenlit sixteen shorts for production. We've got a lot of money devoted to the program, and we'll probably be looking at animatics for various shorts and ordering short series orders from the ones that look most promising ..."

The network still hasn't pumped things up to where it would like them to be, but Clone Wars has been doing well for the net, so it makes sense to use the show as a cornerstone.

... a cumulative total of more than 27 million people have seen the first three episodes of Lucasfilm Animation’s weekly STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS animated series, and STAR WARS has become the biggest licensed toy property of the year ... Since its Sept. 16 release, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed has become the fastest-selling STAR WARS videogame in history, while the official novelization of the game rocketed to the top spot of the New York Times Best Sellers list in its first week of sales ...

With this kind of churn in the marketplace, Cartoon Network plans to ride the wave and attract more eyeballs for its other offerings. "We're going after the older demographic, nine to fourteen-year-old boys," says the mucky-muck, which sounds like a wise strategy to us. Particularly if it leads to higher ratings, more projects, and more work for animation artists.

Because higher employment is what, after the bark is stripped away, it's all about. (I mean, besides the art thing, and the "expanding people's minds" thing. We all have to eat, correct?)

Click here to read entire post

We're having Internet problems

UPDATE: It's all better now.

TAG's website at http://www.animationguild.org is down. (The TAG Blog is not affected).

The problem is also affecting our incoming e-mails. If you have sent an e-mail to the Guild at any time after midnight Monday, be aware that we may not have received it.

If you're a member, you should have received an e-mail blast with temporary addresses to use to contact Guild staff.

We'll post again when things are back up. Thanks for your patience and cooperation.

Click here to read entire post

Meeting panel: The Internet for Animators

The membership meeting panel "The Internet for Animators" on September 30 was zesty and informative.

Moderator Mark Farquhar hosted a free-wheeling discussion on how animators can use technology and the internet and thrive on it. The panelists were Rick DeMott, Kevin Freeman, Kevin Geiger, and Charles Zembillas ...

Farquhar, a veteran c.g. animator at various studios and now a prof at Cal State Northridge described how the internet as opened doors for independent animators.

There are more and more distribution channels for content, and its increasingly more easy to create content. Technology is more accessible. Chinese artists are now producing 3-minute shorts on-line that have captured a worldwide audience.

Kevin Freeman, proprietor of animationrigs.com and a veteran rigger and animator, talked about how the web has made it possible for him to work with aspiring riggers and provide them with the tools they need to learn and pursue the craft:

... "I began talking to my co-workers and friends about how they would like to contribute and ultimately decided to open the site for industry professionals to contribute anything they would like: how tos, interviews, work flows, tips and tricks, and more on the topic of character rigging" ...

Rick Demott, editor of Animation World Network, described AWN's newer animation website AWNTV.com and how it worked:

"We're distributing original content, providing an opportunity for artists to have a platform for their shorts. As for financing the site, pre-roll ads rather than banner ads provide more revenue to the site.

The internet launches people [and their creations] in different ways. There's guerrilla marketing, there's viral growth. AWN takes animation submissions from around the word. Fifty percent of our traffic is in north America ... "

Charles Zembillas, animation artist, teacher and the founder of AnimationNation.com, was delighted with the way the internet is shaking out:

"I started Animation Nation as an issue-oriented website. I think it's important to prepare students to be warriors. They can write a web log, and build a community. I had a lot of material in my files about aspects of animation, and I learned Photoshop and created a book, then created a website to promote it, and I'm now selling enough copies to recover the costs to publish it.

I don't think studios will disappear because of artists doing original content on the internet, but they'll evolve.

Kevin Geiger, a longtime c.g. supervisor who now runs his own consulting firm and will shortly be relocating to China to work on an animated feature, had this to say about the continually morphing internet:

"There's a lot of discussion now about artists' images being stolen on the internet, but Internet Opportunities puts a copyright bug on its images. You can also insert copyright data into data and jpeg image..

... There's going to be a huge market for content on the web. There's 1.5 billion cell phone owners in the world. Apple charges 99 cents for anything. For mobisodes, creators will get around 12 cents out of each 99 cents. Mobisodes could generate artists $100,000 per year. Lots of content will be distributed for free, with revenue generated by ads.

And the internet has made video conferencing very cheap. When I started at Disney, we had to go into the big conference room and conference on the big screen with lots of equipment. Now with Skype, you can now conference anywhere in the world for very little money. You can conference and work from West Los Angeles, Shanghai, the location really doesn't matter.

Members were encouraged to get started by signing up with a free bloging service (blogspot.com, AWN.com, etc) and start sharing your work and opinions.

Here is a list of the various sites that were mentioned during the discussion:

• afterworld (online computer animated series)
• aniboom.com (software website with free animation clips)
• animationcoop.org (currently on hiatus)
• Animationdb.net
• Animationmentor.com (online animation instruction)
• AnimationNation.com (Charles Zembillas; see above)
• animationoptions.com (Kevin Geiger; see above)
• animationrigs.com (Kevin Freeman; see above)
• Asifa-hollywood.org (Annie Awards, Animation Archive, etc.)
• awn.com (Animation World Network)
• blogger.com (to set up your own blog)
• Cartoonbrew.com (Amid Amidi and Jerry Beck)
• hulu.com (TV shows and other free content)
• mumuhug
• mytoons.com (short animation)
• pocoyo
• thundersquid.com (mobile phone animation)
• wordpress.com (to set up your own blog)

All in all, the panel was well-attended and useful for the members who attended. But for the members who didn't show up ...

(Apologies for the delay in posting this to the blog.)

Click here to read entire post

A Payneful b.o. weekend

As most prognosticators predicted, Fox's Max Payne topped the weekend theatrical box office with $18 million for Friday and Saturday, After opening in second place on Friday with a strong $3.8 million, W. slipped to fourth place for the weekend behind The Secret Life Of Bees and the ever-popular Beverly Hills Chihuahua.

Deadline Hollywood Daily says that 78% of those who saw W. this weekend disapprove of its title character, and "those who disapprove of Bush felt very strongly that the movie was not as good as expected".

Last week's #2 Quarantine slipped to seventh place, and Sex Drive opened in ninth, which leaves hope for the future of Western civilization.

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SAG board will ask for strike authorization

Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywood Daily reports that the Screen Actors Guild national board of directors has passed the following resolution by a 96% majority:

In hopes of moving the Theatrical and TV negotiations forward, the national board hereby takes the following actions:

SAG will formally request a federal mediator be brought into the negotiations.

The Board adds four new members to the National Negotiating Committee, two from the Hollywood Division, one from the New York Division and one from the Regional Branch Division.

The Board authorizes a referendum and accompanying educational information be sent to the members requesting their authorization for the National Board to call a strike in the Theatrical and TV Contract, at such time as the Negotiating Committee determines in its sole discretion that the mediation process has failed.

A few observations:

• A call for strike authorization is not the same as saying that a strike will happen.

• However, it ain't good news for avoiding one.

• Strike authorization requires a 75% vote of the SAG membership.

• I find it interesting that the resolution calls on a vote to authorize SAG's national board to call a strike -- not the Negotiating Committee (which in my experience is how it's usually done).

• SAG recently had an election which tipped the balance of SAG officers slightly towards the Unite For Strength slate (less militant) and away from the Membership First slate (more militant, including SAG president Alan Rosenberg). I don't yet know which slate is represented in the new Negotiating Committee members.

Click here to read entire post

Back Into The Maw

Now with vitamin-packed Add Ons.

For the last week and a half, I've been away from blogging, unioning and everything else work related (and kudos to Jeff M. for posting in my absence.)

Mostly I've been around a lot of retirees on a cruise ship. Care to guess what one of their chief preoccupations is? (It ain't shuffle board ...)

Response to the financial world’s meltdown runs the gamut among ... retirees or those near retirement. Some, though concerned and economizing, have held steady and continued to maintain their balanced portfolios.

Others ...restructured their holdings six months or even a year ago, anticipating problems.

Still others could not bear to see their nest egg rattled by the topsy-turvy market and cut sharply on their stockholdings. Many recall the lessons learned as children of Depression survivors ...

The first three seventy-somethings I met remarked how they were ... ah ... concerned about having enough to see them through retirement. ("We had 60% in stocks and for percent in bonds and without doing anything we now have 60% in bonds and 40% in stocks. Wow.")

But shrinking retirement portfolios are just one part of today's world. For those of us working in the entertainment industry, there's the nerve-jangling reality about what the Conglomerates that Rule Us will next do:

... Companies, many of whom had already begun trimming costs during the writers strike and earlier stages of the decline, are taking a hard look at their operations. Among the retrenchments: Paramount said it would trim its slate 20% to 20 pics a year, and 25 employees, to meet targets set by parent Viacom. Disney has put its makeover of Fantasyland at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom in Florida on hold, and J.P. Morgan has suspended efforts to raise DreamWorks coin for now ...

The animation sector of the business, both theatrical and television, has a long gestation period before product hits the marketplace. Balanced against the robust box office performance of theatrical animation are the long lead times and high costs. My educated guess is that there are just now lots of execs who tense up at the prospect of greenlighting projects that will cost $150 million (and more) and take three to five years start to finish, if they're lucky.

Lastly, there are upcoming and ongoing negotiations to be completed. Back east, I heard about the Screen Actors Guild negotiation committee punting to SAG's national board abot whether to authorize a strike vote of not. And this morning I read this:

Leaders of the Screen Actors Guild have recessed for the night without deciding on whether to ask members for a strike authorization.

SAG's national board will re-convene at 8 a.m. Sunday in Los Angeles ...

SAG's negotiating committee recommended that the national board seek a strike authorization two weeks ago.

It's not only movie execs who are tense. It can't be any walk through the daisies for a SAG officer right now ... or any union officer. Anyone think union rank and file are in a mood to hit the bricks and shut the movie industry down? In the midst of a financial tsunami? With their savings and retirement accounts melting away?

Don't think so.

In the next few days, SAG will have to make some hard decisions and deal with the studios, networks and the gale that is whipping around all of us. In the next few months, The IATSE and all its varied unions and guilds (us included) will have to sit down at the long oak conference table and hammer out new contracts that will carry us through the next few years.

Gonna be interesting. Gonna be real interesting. On every level.

Add On: What the hey. From the time I started writing this, to the time I posted it, SAG's board voted to go for the Big Enchilada.

Like people who have to work for a living aren't in enough deep crapola already. Now we might get a second strike?

Add On Too: Richard Verrier of the L.A. Times writes this piece, saying that it's Yes to a mediator, and MAYBE to a strike vote if the arbitration idea goes south:.

... the deepening recession has made the prospects of obtaining a strike authorization from members increasingly dim, and some board members fear that failing to muster the necessary votes for strike authorization would further weaken a union that has few remaining options.

You think?

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AB 10: The roll of (dis)honor

Earlier this month, Steve Hulett blogged about AB 10, the bill passed by the California Legislature and signed by Gov. Schwarzenegger that strips overtime protection from high-tech workers, including many non-union CG artists and technicians.

AB 10 passed the Senate by a vote of 28 to 8, and the Assembly by a vote of 56 to 19. AB 10 was virtually unprecedented in that it was a bill affecting private-sector workers that was rammed through as part of the state budget "compromise". Along with the entire Republican delegations of both houses, a large number of Democrats voted in favor of AB 10, most of whom were motivated by the push to approved a budget quickly under the threat of the Governor's veto pen.

Below, courtesy of the California Labor Federation, is the roll call of the Assembly and Senate on AB 10.

• The "no" votes in favor of protecting overtime are marked in blue -- these are the "good guys".

• The "yes" votes in favor of stripping overtime provisions are marked in red -- these are the "bad guys".

• Abstentions and absences are in grey.

To find your home district for either house, go to the Assembly home page and click on "Find My District" (the Senate home page uses the same search engine). Look at the list below to see if your rep is a "good guy" or a "bad guy". Follow the link to your representatives' website and e-mails, and respond accordingly.

We reward our friends and punish our enemies.

-- Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor

CALIFORNIA STATE SENATE

• 1st Senate District: Dave Cox ... VOTE: Yes

• 2nd Senate District: Pat Wiggins ... VOTE: Yes

• 3rd Senate District: Carole Migden ... VOTE: Yes

• 4th Senate District: Sam Aanestad ... VOTE: Yes

• 5th Senate District: Michael Machado ... VOTE: Yes

• 6th Senate District: Darrell Steinberg ... VOTE: Yes

• 7th Senate District: Tom Torlakson ... VOTE: No

• 8th Senate District: Leland Yee ... VOTE: No

• 9th Senate District: Don Perata ... VOTE: Yes

• 10th Senate District: Ellen M. Corbett ... VOTE: No

• 11th Senate District: Joe Simitian ... VOTE: Yes

• 12th Senate District: Jeff Denham ... VOTE: Yes

• 13th Senate District: Elaine Alquist ... VOTE: Yes

• 14th Senate District: Dave Cogdill ... VOTE: Yes

• 15th Senate District: Abel Maldonado ... VOTE: Yes

• 16th Senate District: Dean Florez ... VOTE: Yes

• 17th Senate District: George Runner ... VOTE: Yes

• 18th Senate District: Roy Ashburn ... VOTE: Yes

• 19th Senate District: Tom McClintock ... VOTE: Yes

• 20th Senate District: Alex Padilla ... VOTE: Yes

• 21st Senate District: Jack Scott ... VOTE: Yes

• 22nd Senate District: Gilbert Cedillo ... VOTE: No

• 23rd Senate District: Sheila Kuehl ... VOTE: No

• 24th Senate District: Gloria Romero ... VOTE: No

• 25th Senate District: Edward Vincent ... VOTE: Yes

• 26th Senate District: Mark Ridley-Thomas ... VOTE: Abstain

• 27th Senate District: Alan Lowenthal ... VOTE: Abstain

• 28th Senate District: Jenny Oropeza ... VOTE: No

• 29th Senate District: Bob Margett ... VOTE: Yes

• 30th Senate District: Ronald S. Calderon ... VOTE: Yes

• 31st Senate District: Robert Dutton ... VOTE: Yes

• 32nd Senate District: Gloria Negrete McLeod ... VOTE: Abstain

• 33rd Senate District: Dick Ackerman ... VOTE: Yes

• 34th Senate District: Lou Correa ... VOTE: Yes

• 35th Senate District: Tom Harman ... VOTE: Yes

• 36th Senate District: Dennis Hollingsworth ... VOTE: Yes

• 37th Senate District: Jim Battin ... VOTE: Yes

• 38th Senate District: Mark Wyland ... VOTE: Yes

• 39th Senate District: Christine Kehoe ... VOTE: No

• 40th Senate District: Denise Moreno Ducheny ... VOTE: Abstain

CALIFORNIA STATE ASSEMBLY

• 1st Assembly District: Patty Berg ... VOTE: Yes

• 2nd Assembly District: Doug La Malfa ... VOTE: Yes

• 3rd Assembly District: Rick Keene ... VOTE: Yes

• 4th Assembly District: Ted Gaines ... VOTE: Yes

• 5th Assembly District: Roger Niello ... VOTE: Yes

• 6th Assembly District: Jared Huffman ... VOTE: No

• 7th Assembly District: Noreen Evans ... VOTE: Yes

• 8th Assembly District: Lois Wolk ... VOTE: Yes

• 9th Assembly District: Dave Jones ... VOTE: No

• 10th Assembly District: Alan Nakanishi ... VOTE: Yes

• 11th Assembly District: Mark DeSaulnier ... VOTE: No

• 12th Assembly District: Fiona Ma ... VOTE: Yes

• 13th Assembly District: Mark Leno ... VOTE: No

• 14th Assembly District: Loni Hancock ... VOTE: No

• 15th Assembly District: Guy S. Houston ... VOTE: Yes

• 16th Assembly District: Sandre R. Swanson ... VOTE: No

• 17th Assembly District: Cathleen Galgiani ... VOTE: Yes

• 18th Assembly District: Mary Hayashi ... VOTE: No

• 19th Assembly District: Gene Mullin ... VOTE: No

• 20th Assembly District: Alberto Torrico ... VOTE: Yes

• 21st Assembly District: Ira Ruskin ... VOTE: Yes

• 22nd Assembly District: Sally J. Lieber ... VOTE: Yes

• 23rd Assembly District: Joe Coto ... VOTE: Yes

• 24th Assembly District: Jim Beall Jr. ... VOTE: No

• 25th Assembly District: Tom Berryhill ... VOTE: Yes

• 26th Assembly District: Greg Aghazarian ... VOTE: Yes

• 27th Assembly District: John Laird ... VOTE: No

• 28th Assembly District: Anna M. Caballero ... VOTE: Yes

• 29th Assembly District: Michael N. Villines ... VOTE: Yes

• 30th Assembly District: Nicole Parra ... VOTE: Yes

• 31st Assembly District: Juan Arambula ... VOTE: Yes

• 32nd Assembly District: Jean Fuller ... VOTE: Yes

• 33rd Assembly District: Sam Blakeslee ... VOTE: Yes

• 34th Assembly District: Bill Maze ... VOTE: Yes

• 35th Assembly District: Pedro Nava ... VOTE: No

• 36th Assembly District: Sharon Runner ... VOTE: Yes

• 37th Assembly District: Audra Strickland ... VOTE: Yes

• 38th Assembly District: Cameron Smyth ... VOTE: Yes

• 39th Assembly District: Felipe Fuentes ... VOTE: Abstain

• 40th Assembly District: Lloyd E. Levine ... VOTE: Yes

• 41st Assembly District: Julia Brownley ... VOTE: No

• 42nd Assembly District: Mike Feuer ... VOTE: No

• 43rd Assembly District: Paul Krekorian ... VOTE: Abstain

• 44th Assembly District: Anthony J. Portantino ... VOTE: No

• 45th Assembly District: Kevin de Leon ... VOTE: Yes

• 46th Assembly District: Fabian Núñez ... VOTE: Yes

• 47th Assembly District: Karen Bass ... VOTE: Yes

• 48th Assembly District: Mike Davis ... VOTE: Abstain

• 49th Assembly District: Mike Eng ... VOTE: Abstain

• 50th Assembly District: Hector De La Torre ... VOTE: Yes

• 51st Assembly District: Curren D. Price Jr. ... VOTE: No

• 52nd Assembly District: Mervyn M. Dymally ... VOTE: Yes

• 53rd Assembly District: Ted W. Lieu ... VOTE: Yes

• 54th Assembly District: Betty Karnette ... VOTE: No

• 55th Assembly District: Warren T. Furutani ... VOTE: No

• 56th Assembly District: Tony Mendoza ... VOTE: No

• 57th Assembly District: Edward P. Hernandez ... VOTE: Abstain

• 58th Assembly District: Charles M. Calderon ... VOTE: Yes

• 59th Assembly District: Anthony Adams ... VOTE: Yes

• 60th Assembly District: Bob Huff ... VOTE: Yes

• 61st Assembly District: Nell Soto ... VOTE: Absent

• 62nd Assembly District: Wilmer Amina Carter ... VOTE: Yes

• 63rd Assembly District: Bill Emmerson ... VOTE: Yes

• 64th Assembly District: John J. Benoit ... VOTE: Yes

• 65th Assembly District: Paul Cook ... VOTE: Yes

• 66th Assembly District: Kevin Jeffries ... VOTE: Yes

• 67th Assembly District: Jim Silva ... VOTE: Yes

• 68th Assembly District: Van Tran ... VOTE: Yes

• 69th Assembly District: Jose Solorio ... VOTE: Yes

• 70th Assembly District: Chuck DeVore ... VOTE: Yes

• 71st Assembly District: Todd Spitzer ... VOTE: Yes

• 72nd Assembly District: Michael D. Duvall ... VOTE: Yes

• 73rd Assembly District: Mimi Walters ... VOTE: Yes

• 74th Assembly District: Martin Garrick ... VOTE: Yes

• 75th Assembly District: George A. Plescia ... VOTE: Yes

• 76th Assembly District: Lori Saldaña ... VOTE: Yes

• 77th Assembly District: Joel Anderson ... VOTE: Yes

• 78th Assembly District: Shirley Horton ... VOTE: Yes

• 79th Assembly District: Mary Salas ... VOTE: No

• 80th Assembly District: Bonnie Garcia ... VOTE: Yes

Click here to read entire post

Coming up this weekend ...

Will Max Payne finally beat down the Chihuahua?

Opening today:

• It's never a good sign when a movie like Max Payne gets only 17% from Rotten Tomatoes. And then there's this love note from the Los Angeles Times:

  It's understandable that teenagers want to wolf down this stuff, but one has to wonder about the full-grown men who commit large chunks of their lives to turning out power fantasies for 13-year-olds. There's a case that still needs solving.

  But it nevertheless seems to be most prognosticators' pick for #1 this weekend.
• The big surprise in the reviews of Oliver Stone's W. is that it turns out to be a "surprisingly sympathetic" portrayal of 43. The question is whether movie audiences (as opposed to those of us who average an hour a day on the political blogs) are burned out on the subject at the moment.
• A (female) friend who caught a preview of The Secret Life Of Bees dismissed it as "the latest movie in which Dakota Fanning doesn't wash her hair". A exec at Fox, which is releasing both Bees and Max Payne, tried to convince Nikki Finke that the two movies will make "a nice dovetail", whatever that means.
• And Sex Drive gets 43% on the Tomatometer -- more than twice as much as Max Payne.

The numbers will speak -- and we will report them on Sunday.

Click here to read entire post

CTN steps up for Corny Cole

Our friends at Creative Talent Network have set up a fund to help out Corny Cole, who lost his home and all his belongings earlier this week in the Marek fire.

Here is a link to the PayPal account.

CalArts will be getting us word on an art auction to benefit the same worthy cause.

(Comments turned off ... go to the earlier post to reply.)

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Edie Adams, 1927-2008

The above is a clip from the last episode of the "Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour" that aired in April 1960. It features Edie Adams, who died yesterday at the age of eighty-two.

Those of my ancient generation most likely remember Edie Adams as the voice of the Muriel Cigar commercials of the 1960s and 1970s (Great voice, awful cigars. I couldn't find a YouTube of her signature line "Why don't you pick one up and smoke it sometime?")

Old-TV buffs remember her as the partner and widow of Ernie Kovacs, the brilliant TV comedian, and a great performer and comedienne in her own right.

Golden-age Broadway fans remember her as Eileen in the original cast of Wonderful Town and as Daisy Mae in the Li'l Abner musical.

All well and good, but how does her passing merit a mention on this blog?

Edie was a member of the Costume Designers Guild, Local 892 IATSE, having designed her own costumes for much of her career. When several IA locals (including ours) founded the Hollywood Hands On computer lab in 1991, she was one of our first and most active volunteers. She became a regular at the Guild headquarters where HHO was housed on the second floor.

She helped kick off a tradition of cooperation and participation in computer skills training among the IA locals that persists to this day. And she was a wonderful and fun person to have around.

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Meritocracy

Sometimes the animation biz is a meritocracy. But often not ....

A couple of weeks ago I ran into an artist, an old, old acquaintance, who's worked steadily for close to forty years. He's always done his job wisely and well, but he said to me:

Last month they were going to lay me off in favor of three guys that I trained, that don't have a fraction of the chops I do. But the supervisor knows them and likes them, and I'm just the guy in the cube down the hall working his ass off. They reversed the layoff at the last minute, but I'm still ticked off about it. I'm okay with getting let go for a reason, but I like to have a reason.

Oh, there was a reason. The artist had been around too long, and fell into the delusion that doing your job quietly and well is enough.

Seldom is it enough. More often that not, competency is just the beginning. You must also be young, and gregarious, and network energetically. People lose jobs because of too much incompetence or laziness. Nobody ever lost a job because of too much brown-nosing.

There are people I've met over the years who have disagreed with the above sentiment. They either lead sheltered lives or enjoy being wrong.

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Corny Cole has lost his home in the Marek fire

This just in from Cartoon Brew:

Legendary animator and CalArts faculty Corny Cole has lost his home and everything in it during the recent fires in Southern California. Corny evacuated before the fire hit and is unharmed, but his home, pets, and all of his artwork, save for what he has in his office at CalArts, are gone.

KTTV has a report with video.

The legendary Corny Cole is one of the great animators -- and characters -- in our business. He has worked in the business for over fifty years and has taught at CalArts for over twenty. It's good to know that he was uninjured, but our hearts go out to him for his devastating loss.

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A post about workers' compensation ... hey, pay attention!

To many people in the animation biz, workers'-comp may seem like a remote issue. After all, we never get injured on the job ... do we?

Well, yes, we do -- maybe not as frequently or severely as in other more hazardous occupations, but enough that the issue of workers' compensation ought to be as important to us as to other working people. (If you don't believe this, we have three words for you -- carpal tunnel syndrome ...)

In 2004, Governor Schwarzenegger signed into California state law an extensive overhaul of the state's workers'-compensation system. Under the law, your employer has the right to designate which physicians you can use under your worker's-comp claim. However, if you work for an employer that offers group health insurance (union or non-union), you can retain your choice of doctor by pre-designating in writing your choice of physician.

Here is a form that you can use to do just that. Remember, this form can be used for any employer (union or non-union) that offers group health insurance. Also remember that the form goes to your employer's H.R. department and not to the Guild.

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Dreamers and doubters, then and now

Mike Barrier has blogged about Phil Klein, an animator who went on strike at Disney in 1941 (he was the younger brother of I. (Izzy) Klein, storyman and New Yorker cartoonist best known as the originator of Mighty Mouse).

Canadian author and political activist Naomi Klein, had this to say in her book No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs:

My late grandfather, Philip Klein, who worked as an animator for Walt Disney, taught me a valuable lesson early in life: always look for the dirt behind the shine.

Barrier writes:

Most of the people working at Disney's—and no one more than Walt himself—cared a great deal about what wound up on the screen. When owners and employees share that kind of commitment, the inevitable sources of friction in a vast collaborative enterprise diminish in importance. The goals were less elevated at studios like Leon Schlesinger's, but there was much the same willingness to accommodate one another's needs. For leftists like Phil Klein, though, bosses of any kind were the enemy, no matter how benevolent or creative.

Most of the leaders of the 1941 strike, people like Art Babbitt and Dave Hilberman and others such as my father, were at least as motivated by their sense of betrayal of the "Disney dream" of animation as a communal art form, as they were by political class-warfare considerations.

Barrier sees a parallel with the attitudes revealed by commenters on blogs such as this one, and in the frustrations of contemporary creative animation people with their corporate bosses. In making his point he takes a swipe at Pixar and John Lasseter, but I think that studio (at least up to this point) has been an exception to his argument about contemporary animation workers feeling alienated from their bosses.

Not having lived through the the 1930s and 1940s, it's hard for me to say if animation workers are more or less political today then they were then. But I think nowadays we're more likely to separate our political leanings from our feelings about the art and industry of animation.

PS Of course, Tom Sito got to this before I did. It's been a week for that, blog-wise ...

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Weingarten is your friend

Did you know that if you're working at a Guild shop, you have the right to insist on having a Guild representative present when you're being disciplined by management?

Click on the graphic to link to a PDF of the Guild's Weingarten wallet card that we give out to new members.

Your so-called "Weingarten rights," named after the 1975 U.S. Supreme Court decision in NLRB vs. Weingarten, can (and should) be invoked whenever you are called in for an "investigatory interview". An investigatory interview occurs when a supervisor questions an employee to obtain information that could be used as a basis for discipline, or asks an employee to defend his or her conduct.

You should request your Weingarten rights before you answer any questions about your work performance. If (for example) management asks you why you were late to work, or calls you in to tell you the director didn't like your work, you have the right to say something like this:

If my responses to your questions could lead to my being disciplined or terminated, or adversely affect my personal working conditions, I respectfully request that you call my Guild representative. Until my representative arrives, I choose not to answer any questions.

When you request your Weingarten rights, management has three options:

1. They can call off the interview;

2. They can stop questioning until the representative arrives. If the Guild rep is not immediately available, management must have a compelling reason to insist on continuing the interview rather than postponing it;

3. They can tell you that they will call off the interview unless you voluntarily give up your rights to a Guild representative (an option you should always refuse).

When the Guild rep arrives, you will have the right to speak with him before the interview. While the interview is in progress the rep cannot tell you what to say, but he may advise you on how to answer a question. During the questioning, the rep can interrupt to clarify a question or to object to confusing or intimidating tactics. At the end of the interview the Guild rep can add information to support your case.

Although you have the right to Guild representation, management does not have to inform you of it before they start the interview -- so it's up to you to request it. That being said, in our experience many (but not all) Guild shops are aware of Weingarten, and in fact it's increasingly common for Guild-shop management to give us a "heads up" so we can be present at disciplinary meetings. Just don't count on it.

And one last very important point. In 2004, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that employees of non-unionized companies do not have Weingarten rights. Something to remember the next time someone sounds off that labor unions are worthless.

Here's an interesting quiz that answers some more detailed questions about how Weingarten rights work.

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Is Glen Keane "leaving" Rapunzel?

From Animation World Network:

Cartoon Brew and Ain't It Cool News are both reporting that Glen Keane is stepping down from directing Disney's upcoming animated feature Rapunzel.

Aint It Cool posted this memo from Ed Catmull, president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios:

For nearly two years, Glen Keane and Dean Wellins have been directing partners on Rapunzel. As Glen lessens his directorial responsibilities to attend to some non-life threatening health issues, their involvement on the project will shift. Glen will step back as a Director but stay attached to Rapunzel as an Executive Producer and Directing Animator. At the same time, Dean will move into development to pitch three new ideas for one of our future feature projects and focus on directing one of his CG shorts. We are happy to announce that Nathan Greno and Byron Howard have accepted to partner as directors on Rapunzel as we continue to hone the story in anticipation of our Holiday 2010 release. We want to welcome Nathan and Byron to the project and thank Glen and Dean for their great contributions to date on Rapunzel.

Thanks

Ed

Keane has been involved in Disney productions like Pete's Dragon, The Great Mouse Detective, The Little Mermaid, Beauty And The Beast and Aladdin. He helped write Pocahontas and Tarzan.

According to the memo, Keane's latest health problems are moving him off the director's chair, but a source told Aint It Cool that Keane and Wellins' version of Rapunzel wasn't working. Bryan Howard stepped in on Bolt when Chris Sanders' early work led execs to believe that film was not working.

Calls made by AWN to a Disney spokesperson were not returned as of Friday morning.

Interesting that although all these reports treat the story as if Keane is "leaving" the project, Catmull's memo as quoted by AICN says he is "stepping back" but still in the loop as a producer and supervising animator.

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Weekend B.O. goes to the dog(s)

As we make our way through the Indian-summer lull between the end of the summer releases and the start of the Oscar/holiday season, Beverly Hills Chihuahua leads a weak b.o. field for the second week running with $17.5 million, down 42% from its first week.

The cute-doggies-with-human-voices flick, which opened last week to unexpectedly rapturous reviews and significant Oscar buzz*, beat out the premiering horror cheapie Quarantine ($14.2 mil), which may or may not make it into second place ahead of the big-budget DiCaprio/Crowe/Ridley Scott thriller Body Of Lies ($13.1 mil).

Igor, the highest ranked animated feature this weekend, has dropped six places to nineteenth, with the lowest per-screen average ($446) of the top twenty.

As always, these numbers are subject to change; we'll see how this contest lines up when the final numbers come out tomorrow.

* yeah, right

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Loyalty

A couple of weeks back, an animation director/producer griped to me about staff leaving one of the shows he was supervising.

"We've got shows to get out, and some of the staff are applying for work at other studios. I wish they had more commitment for the series that they're working on here."

I told him that I sympathized, as I was one of those people who usually stays at the same job until he's carried out on his shield. But here's the deal ...

Animation artists have little faith in their employer to be loyal to them when times are tough. Even when times are good, most artists get shown the door as soon as the last design or story panel has been turned in to the production manager.

The point is, everybody is so battered and bruised today, they pretty much expect betrayal. Expect to be dropped overboard by the end of the week.

Then there's this larger reality:

Job losses in September were widespread as the weakness that began in the housing market expanded to other parts of the economy. Aside from a 9,000 gain in government payrolls, all major categories dropped except education and health care.

Edelmira Clark, 53, of Chicago, said she was concerned about losing her job as a hotel housekeeper. Her company has already cut her work hours to two days a week.

"I'm trying to find a part-time job in the morning to balance, because I can't do only two days of work,'' said Clark, who immigrated to Chicago from Belize in 1997. "But a lot of people, my friends, have lost their jobs for good.''

With the general destruction that's going on in the general workplace, it's easy to see why employees offer little loyalty to employers. None is offered to them.

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Demander le Représentant d'Affaires, la partie trois*

*ask the biz rep, part three

What does a union business representative DO? How do you spend your day?

A: Constitutionally speaking, I'm in charge of the Business Office, and with the approval of the Executive Board, have the power to engage and dismiss office employees.

.

I keep records of income and dismbursements. I represent TAG in all relations with and between members. I represent members at the studios, and enter into negotations and agreements with the studios. I get to chair negotiation committees for collective bargaining agreements. (Oh, what responsibilities I have ...).

There's a bunch of other duties (found on pages 15-18 of the TAG Constitution and By-Laws), but those are most of the main ones.

Day to day, my day rolls along in a kind of routine way.

I roll into work at 8:30 a.m., start going through e-mails, pick up phone messages, and go through whatever paperwork is hanging around. (This includes signing checks, reviewing immigration visas, doing correspondence, and endlessly talking on the phone. I plan to have carved on my tombstone: "Here lies Steve Hulett. He talked on the phone a lot, but has now mercifully stopped.")

The middle of the day -- from 10:30 to 3:00 -- I am out in the studios, chatting artists, writers and technicians up. Some days I hold 401(k) enrollment meetings, most days I just slog around with a bag of 401(k) books slung over my shoulder in case somebody wants them. Like freaking Santa Clause.

From 3:30 to a bit after 5:00 I am back in the office, returning phone calls, going through more e-mails, thumbing through incoming snail mail. Here and there I work on grievances that different members have with companies. Few grievances go all the way to full arbitration, but there is usually something percolating. Then there is the work of organizing non-signator studios. That's a job unto itself. I squeeze it in between the other stuff.

Then I go home. I lead an exciting life, no?

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South Park? "I am shocked -- SHOCKED!!!"

Don't get me wrong -- I think Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily blog is amusing and often informative, even when I disagree with her. And I have to give her props for her reporting on the story of Tyler Perry firing the House of Payne writers that supported the WGA.

But her shock and consternation over Wednesday's South Park episode is more than a bit overdone, imho. I mean, c'mon, it's South Park.

I do think it's funny that so many of the blog comments are about how badly the Indy 4 sequel sucked. And, of course, not even Ms. Finke talks about South Park being a totally non-union show.

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Fragen Sie den Geschäftsvertreter, Teil zwei*

*ask the biz rep, part two

So, how do grievances work?

Usually slowly. Grievances come about when somebody believes that they're legal or contractual right have been violated, and give their union rep (moi) a call ...

Grievances go through set stages. There is "Step 1",where I get the call from the member, take down details of what the grievance is (Unpaid overtime, non-payment of salary, termination without a writeup, etc.)

Sometimes grievances have a lot of merit and plenty of documentary evidence (or at least some) and I tell the grievant he has a good ... but not slam-bang --- chance of winning his issue.

Other times, the grievance is shaky at best, without much way of proving the issue at hand, and I tell the potential grievant he doesn't have much of a case.

Every grievance is different, and every grievance has some potential for success or failure. We have won grievances we thought we'd lose and lost grievances we were certain were in the bag.

Most times, I tell the grievant the chances of winning or losing his issue. But I never tell the grievant anything is a slam dunk, because there is always the possiblity of losing. This is because there is always the possibility that something could go wrong at any step.

And what are those steps?

Step one -- I find out the grievance from the grievant (the wronged studio employee), and call the studio about it. I talk it over with a person in labor relations, and they go off to "investigate the claim"

Step Two -- the studio representative comes back and tells me I'm full of it, there is no case, the studio is guiltless of any infraction (or not. Sometimes it goes the other way after the investigation. But not a lot.) I thereupon write up the grievance in letter form and demand an arbitration.

Step Three -- the company and TAG are unable to resolve the issue, have both dug in their heels, and proceed to a "Step Three" arbitration. This is an "informal" hearing at the Contract Services Administration Trust Fund -- CSATF to those in the know. This arbitration is usually kind of casual, heard by a studio rep and a union rep as arbitrators. They hear evidence, ask questions, and then MAY give a ruling on the case if union and company agree to let them make a ruling (which is binding). But if one side says "Ixnay", it's on to ...

Step Four -- This is a more formal hearing, with a tird party arbitrator and court-style stenographer, and it plays out like a day in court. Both sides call witnesses and give evidence, and when it's over, the arbitrator goes off and renders a written ruling. Once in a while, a settlement is reached, but mostly it's both parties making their case and the arbitrator making a ruling. Which is final.

Cases that we've done over the years have run a wide gamut: harassment, physical assault, an artist doing secretly naughty designs, you name it.

We've had more than one arbitrator say to us: "You know, I really like geting your cases. They are always interesting."

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401(k) Plan accounts back online

Following the transitional blackout that started over the weekend, Mass Mutual reports that about 98% of our 401(k) accounts are back online and are accessible. (A very few accounts aren’t online quite yet ... not because there’s anything wrong with the funds, just that they were unusually complicated to convert.)

If you have any questions or if you need help accessing your account, contact Marta Strohl-Rowand at (818) 766-7151 ext. 101.

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Where is this?

You may have thought it was two miles away ... but it was actually here, eighty-five years ago this month.

Above are the employees of Disney Bros. Studio (Walt third from left, Roy on right), in front of their first Los Angeles offices at 4647 Kingswell Ave.* in Los Feliz. They had moved from Kansas City and set up shop in back of the Holly-Vermont Realty offices:

Walt declared he could only pay $10 per month and the only place at that price was a room at the back of the real-estate office. The Walt Disney Company started in 1923 in the rear of a small office occupied by Holly-Vermont Realty ... It was there that Walt Disney, and his brother Roy, produced a series of short live-action/animated films collectively called the Alice Comedies. Within four months, the ever-growing staff moved next door to larger facilities, where the sign on the window read "Disney Bros. Studio." A year later, in 1925, the Disneys made a deposit on a Hyperion Avenue lot in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles.

* The webpage at studioscentral.com says it was located at 4469 Kingswell, but the bulletin board at the Extra Copy shop at 4647 has an article by Dave Smith from the Disney Archives newsletter, confirming that this is where the Disneys started their West Coast operations.

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Pregunte al representante de negocios, despide uno*

*ask the biz rep, part one

While I'm on vacation, let me regale you with answers to dandy questions that have cropped up over the years ...

Q: What's the point of you going to studios all the time, talking to people? What's up with that?

A: While it looks like I'm just stumbling around being annoying, I'm actually there in the work place for a bunch of reasons.

1) The studios are aware that I'm there talking to people and checking for contract violations, and it causes them to watch their Ps and Qs, if only a little.

2) It's the single best way I have of finding out what's going on throughout the biz. People tell me the problems and issues at the company, tell me how the latest projects are going, tell me which supervisors are good and which are difficult. I take it all in and keep most of it to myself. When I blog about it, nobody is every cited by name, and material is toned down. (I need more problems with studios like a I need a drill bit gnawing into my frontal lobes. So I stick with the good news for the most part, and no specific info about projects. I leave that to the fan sites.)

3) Sitting in the office taking phone calls and answering e-mails is bor-ing.

My opinion? Studio visits are the single most important thing a union representative can do with his time.

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Gerard Salvio, 1926-2008

Cartoonists union activist and officer Gerard Salvio died on June 23 at the age of eighty-two.

After a colorful youth spent as an amateur boxer and athlete, interior designer, upholsterer and construction engineer (he helped build the Throgs Neck Bridge), Salvio worked as an animation cameraman and joined Local 841, the NYC cartoonists' local (the New York union had a broader jurisdiction than ours – in Hollywood the animation camerapersons belong to the camera guild). In 1975 he succeeded Pepe Ruiz to become Local 841's second (and last) business agent.

Tom Sito tells this story in his book Drawing The Line, about the 1982 Hollywood cartoonists' strike:

Even MPSC Local 841 in faraway New York City agreed to stop doing the little bit of Ruby-Spears and Hanna-Barbera subcontract work that it made there. Rick Reinert's LA studio made small educational films and used freelancers in New York … Salvio telephoned animator Nancy Beiman at her Greenwich Village apartment.

Gerard told Nancy bluntly, "You gotta stop working for Reinert!"

Nancy replied, "Why, is he not paying my annuities?"

"No, you're all paid up."

"Then what's the matter?"

"839 is on strike. It's a sister local. You have to go out."

"Gerard, 839 is picketing because they don't want the work sent outside of Los Angeles County. I am in Manhattan. I'd be protesting myself! That do you want me to do, march around my living room hitting myself on the hammer and screaming, ‘I am unfair to me'?"

But Gerard was not amused. He insisted.

For those of us who worked in NYC in the seventies, Gerry Salvio was the first union representative most of us had ever met ... and believe me, he left an indelible impression. Among those who belonged to Local 841 and worked with him (including my mother who was a charter member), there was and is a wide range of opinions about him and his effect on East Coast unionized animation. He sounded and at times behaved like the clichéd dese-dem-and-dose union guy, but no one could question his commitment to his vision of the union.

After Local 841 merged into the camera guild in 1989, Salvio went to work for the IATSE as a Business Representative and trustee of the NYC lab local until his retirement in 1994.

The IATSE's obituary for Salvio can be found on page 70 of the latest IATSE Bulletin which can be found here. He is survived by his wife, three daughters and two granddaughters. His daughter Lenore Hinrichsen published a book about her father which can be found here.

Gerard was a tough labor rep, in a tough part of the business. He once told me when I was a young beardless youth:

Eh, youse animators act like children! Ya'd sell yerselves fer peanuts if I let ya!

I was offended at the time, but sometimes I don't wonder if he wasn't right.

-- Tom Sito

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Links To Believe In

I'm off at a secret location, and handing over the dashboard keys for the next ten days to my sterling assistant, the estimable Jeff Massie. So you'll see fewer posts from me, and more from him. Please play nice while I'm gone.

The Disney Co. has released Sleeping Beauty to Blu-Ray and the internets are abuzz:

BURNY MATTINSON: When we first worked on Sleeping Beauty we were trying to do a more classic approach to our animation. We were trying to be more exacting in the design aspects - that was strongly influenced. We were trying to learn our 'straights' against 'curves' to fit within Eyvind Earle's stylized backgrounds. This was a slow process. Later on we went to a looser approach on 101 Dalmatians, where we could speed up the process but we were also trying to get back into the classic style of animation. Even today, we still try to keep a classic approach - perhaps not as designed as on Sleeping Beauty, but we still try to keep a classic approach to our contemporary titles.

The Wall Street Journal examines adult-themed animations you might not have have heard much about:.

The protagonist of "Berni's Doll" is a loner who retreats to a grimy apartment in the evening after long tedious days at his factory job packing the remains of trapped rats into cat-food cans. Berni wants a girlfriend, and buys one, in various modular parts. It makes for an odd relationship.

Yann Jouette's latest work, short film called "Berni's Doll," is on view at the Woodstock Film Festival.

It's a challenging role -- not for any actor, but for the animator who drew Berni, Yann Jouette. It's also challenging to find a place to see the short film, which has too much sex, violence and grotesquery for American broadcast or cable television ...

And Japanese film producers plan to produce a c.g.i. animated feature they hope you'll hear somethig about:

Japanese broadcast major Fuji TV and animation house Production I.G have announced plans to co-produce a wholly CG animated feature film.

With a working title of Hottarake No Shima: Haruka To Maho No Kagami (Hottarake Island: Haruka And The Magic Mirror), the film will be directed by Shinsuke Sato.

The fantasy follows a female high school student and a fox as they search for the titular mirror in a land created from humans' abandoned possessions.

And Indian animation, even though it hasn't made much of a ripple beyond the sub-continent, is stirring the interest of some Hollywood majors, specifically Disney:

ndian movies for Hollywood, through all these years, are still at the low end of the revenue pie, even with all the languages they are now dubbed in. This, paradoxically, is also the reason why they have headed to Indian shores - some with JVs, some with tie-ups - trying to see if they can tap the right local talent and nurture it to grow as a good, sustainable entertainment business in India ... “Ninety per cent of what we make is made in Burbank and exported," says Andy Bird, president, Walt Disney International. "The way we saw the world evolving, we saw that technology was advancing and changing the very way consumers were taking in entertainment, markets were evolving and fast. We observed that Bollywood captures as much as 97% of the market ..."

Disney Contracts and Correspondence ('30s and '40s style) are offered up at the ASIFA Animation Archive.

Have a glorious week. I plan to.

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Ratifying Big Nick

Contract negotiations are always somewhat stressful, even ones that go smoothly. For the past month, we've been working on a new three-year deal with Nickelodeon Animation Studios, our third go-round with the Viacom 'toon factory.

Nick is an anomaly, because its three-year collective bargaining agreement begins and ends in October, while most other companies expire at the end of July ...

This afternoon TAG held a meeting of the crew at Nickelodeon's Burbank facility. We gathered in the basketball court (Yes, Virginia, the home of Sponge Bob Square Pants and Fairly Odd Parents has an on-site, indoor basketball court.) I answered questions about the new three-year deal:

Q: How does this new Nick M.O.A. differ from the previous contracts between Nickelodeon and The Animation Guild?

A: The Memorandum of Agreement for 2008-2011 is almost identical to the previous agreements:

1) It has the same simplified language regarding Technological change.

2) It has the same language about dismissal pay. (One week dismissal pay after six months; two weeks dismissal pay after one year. After ninety days, payable on request.)

3) It has the same language regarding sick days. ("Currently ten sick days.")

Q: What are the increases in minimum rates in the new agreement?

A: The rate increases are 3% in each year of the new agreement ...

Q: What are the increases (or changes) to the Pension Plan? The Health Plan?

A: The current pension and health package will continue until August of 2009, when new pension and health terms will begin. As of now, those new terms (2009-2012) have not yet been negotiated between the other studios and the I.A.T.S.E or The Animation Guild.

Nick and TAG have agreed, however, that the new NASI-TAG Collective Bargaining Agreement will incorporate whatever terms are negotiated for the 2009-2012 contracts.

Q: Why does the Nick-TAG agreement have different beginning and end dates dates than most of the other TAG agreements?

A: Because the original Nick agreement was negotiated and signed in the Fall of 2002 after a majority showing of interest for union representation was shown by Nickelodeon animation employees. The Fall dates have remained ever since.

After the meeting concluded, the employees voted on the contract by secret ballot. The new Nickelodeon deal was ratified 70-1, with one unmarked ballot.

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College Q & A, Part Deux

Last week I spent an afternoon as an animation panelist at Cal State Fullerton, answering questions from young artists, young animators, young computer tyros.

I worked the same venue a year ago, when the questions were weighted toward starting a business and jumping into the land of animation as an owner and captain of your own ship. What a difference a year ... and a different group ... makes.

There was a larger audience of students this year, and the questions centered on contracts, rights under contracts, and what exactly TAG (the union) does. I was happy to briefly review:

* Assisting with Personal Service Contracts.

* Filing grievances when the collective bargaining agreementing -- or state or federal labor law -- is violated.

* Providing legal help.

* Communicating with members about newer job openings.

We spent a lot of time exploring the different ways artists break into the industry. I explained that there's a thousand different entry points, and everybody has a slightly different route for getting in. In today's c.g. world, computer and programming skills are important, also artistic chops. If you don't have them, I said, it's harder to make a career.

Attorney Paul Husband, the other panelist, talked about agents and managers who represent animation employees. Mr. Husband confided that we're a lengthy marching distance from the glory years of the mid- 1990s, when every animation artist worth his salt had an agent, probably a manager, occasionally a valet, etc. Now it's a case of breaking in, getting production experience, and riding the project--to-project career trajectory.

It was a lively couple of hours. The most telling part of it for me was that students were more interested in the nuts and bolts of the industry, how to get in and stay in, what their rights were, than they were in October of 2007, when the focus was entrepreneurial.

But the times, as they say, are a-changing.

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At the Big Diz

Today was Disney Animation Studio day, and I hit three floors of the hat building in my never-ending quest to spread joy and goodwill wherever I go.

A few cryptic comments about the imploding financial system and stock markets ("I'm afraid to look at my retirement accounts...") but other than that minor hiccup, smiles were sunny ...

One of the survivors of the recent round of Bolt layoffs told me:

"The last two scenes of the doggie picture are at the render farm, and we're waiting for work on the next project."

Story work on Princess and the Frog is in the End Times, meaning that when revised panels from the last screening are complete, the boarding part of the flick is pretty close to complete. (Of course, you understand that most with most animated features, tweaks go on like forever ... or until a month before the epic is in theatres.)

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A transition period for our 401(k) Plan

A transition period for our 401(k) Plan that's been scheduled for months began on Friday afternoon, October 3. During this period, participants will not be able to access or change their accounts, either online or via the 800 number.

We've checked with the administrator, and it's unlikely this transition will last more than a few days. Mass Mutual has promised to expedite the process, and we'll send out another e-mail and post here when participants' accounts are back online.

If you were a participant in the Animation Guild 401(k) Plan as of last month, you received a letter in early September from Mass Mutual discussing this transition. A copy of that letter can be found here.

If you have any questions, please contact Marta Strohl-Rowand at (818) 766-7151.

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Animation Grosses Abroad

Wall-E still lags Kung Fu Panda on the international b.o. circuit, but it's rolling along:

Pixar/Disney's "WALL-E" claimed the weekend's second spot internationally with $10.9 million from 3,583 screens in 35 territories, hiking its overseas cume to $230.3 million -- $9.5 million more than the animation title's domestic take. The big contributor was Germany, where "WALL-E" beat its opening weekend by 10% with an estimated $5.4 million from 780 locations.

Panda has collected $412.5 million beyond our shores.

And that talking Chihuahuar has slurped up $4.8 million in selected foreign markets.

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The Jealous Among Us

When I was a lad working what turned out to be my final six months at the Mouse House, I one day fell into conversation with an executive secretary in the studio commissary. She told me:

"You know these new execs over from Paramount? They're rich, but they are like really jealous of the Bass brothers*. Because all the execs have are millions, and what they really want are the Basses' billions."

Which encapsulate the Hollywood ethos perfectly.

There is never enough. There is always somebody farther up the food chain, with lots more money, to envy and hate ...

Happily, that jealousy thing is just now helping animation:

It looks like Hollywood has chipmunk envy.

The surprise success of 20th Century Fox's "Alvin and the Chipmunks" last Christmas has studios sifting through their vaults looking for classic characters to bring to life. ... projects in the works include:

* Warners is developing "Yogi Bear" with Donald De Line for Ash Brannon ("Surf's Up") to direct a digital Yogi and Boo Boo in a real life Yellowstone, er Jellystone.

* Imagi Entertainment and Warner Bros. are considering a new live-action version of "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" after a feature-length toon in 2007 earned $95 million worldwide. The turtles and other characters would be CG, rather than men in suits, as seen in three previous pics during the 1990s.

* Sony Pictures Animation is looking to turn "The Smurfs" into its first hybrid pic.

* Nickelodeon Movies intends to feature Kidrobot's collectible Munny, Dunny and Labit figures, with the creatures running around live-action settings as CGI characters.

* Even Jerry Bruckheimer is getting in on the act with "G-Force," an actioner featuring a hamster and guinea pig as spies, that Disney will distrib next year.:

And of course there are new Yellow Family features from 20th Century Fox in the offing.

The point of all this is, Tinsel Town and it's avaricious execs are always on the hunt for Big Bucks (and I'm not talking about deers with antlers.) There's going to be a spate of animated theatrical projects over the next few years, but it's not because the humble, gentle folk laboring in those big corner ofices have some everlasting love for animation.

It's because animation makes money, and lots of it.

* The Bass brothers, well-known Texas billionaires, held a large chunk of Disney stock in the early eighties and were key players in bringing Messrs Eisner, Wells and Katzenberg into the House of Mouse.

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The B.O. of October

Now with Add On!

Friday results are perfectly satisfactory for this time of year, aided by seven new entrants into the frenetic box office derby.

The brand new (and semi-animated) Beverly Hills Chihuahua opens with $7.8 million to climb onto the top spot, while Eagle Eye hangs tough with a take of $5.5 million ... .

Religulous, though down at #10, has the second-best per-screen average wtih $2,241 and a $1.1 million gross.

What with all the new Fall traffic, Igor has vanished from the Top Ten.

Add On: B.H. Chihuahua inhales $29 million in its opening weekend ...

Eagle Eye declines a respectable 39%, and Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist* find $12 million worth of takers.

Sadly, Igor is mauled by the small Mexican dog and left bleeding in the rose bushes. The hunch-backed one is down 68.4% in his third go-round, by far the steepest drop of any movie in the Top Twenty. This weekend, he earned $1.7 million of his $17 million total.

The Master won't be pleased.

* For a heart-stopping moment, I thought William Powell and Myrna Loy were making a comeback ... but no such luck.

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Our Booming Economy

Robust economic activity for September. Not:

The U.S. economy lost 159,000 jobs in September, the worst since March 2003, the Labor Department reported Friday.

The economy has now lost 760,000 jobs this year, further evidence that the economy was in a recession even before the financial market crisis of the past few weeks.

Now that we've nationalized all the bad debts that investment banks and the rest of the gang created the past five years, I've got a fine solution.

We do what Sarah and John prescribe: Cut taxes.

If we cut those suckers to zero, especially for the upper brackets, we'll get this sorry-ass economy moving again. We're just not reducing taxes fast enough.

(Happily, the entertainment business is "recession proof". Everybody says so. And we believe that, right? Right?)

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Most Profitable Moom Pitchers

If you haven't seen this factoid, take a gander at it now. SNL Kagan has produced a study which finds:

... that animated films have the best average profitability among all genres. Animated films contributed $230.6 million under a major studio deal, Kagan found ...

Remember how it used to be for animation? (You can if you're old enough.) There were Disney animated features, and then there was ... an arid desert broken by Yellow Submarine, Fritz the Cat and a handful of other cartoons. Big studios didn't want to get into the game because the big profits weren't there. Disney had a nameplate, nobody else could compete. That was the received wisdom.

Then came the 1990s and the HUGE profits generated by Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Lion King and Aladdin (If not for the woeful Rescuers Down Under this would be a string of unbroken hits.) The money cascading in to the Mouse House's bank vaults grew so large and deep that other studios had a religious conversion:

"Sweet Jeebus! We can't let this kind of money go by! We have to get into the Church of Animation and make our own Lion Kings!"

And so it came to be. There was Page Master. There was Quest for Camelot. There were Anastasia and several others, but in the early to mid 1990s they all crashed and burned. Fox Feature Animation went belly up, as did Warner Bros. Feature Animation. Turner Animation came and went.

But now another decade has slipped by, and the magic of CGI has leveled the playing field. Where nobody could compete against Walt's hand-drawn product, now many reap millions from the pixels found in computer imaging. (Ironically, Walt's direct heirs have been struggling.

Magical! Simply magical! And the chart above proves it.

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At Imagi

Hulett's never-ending tour of animation studios took him to Imagi, where he held a lunch for new members, followed by a walk through the busy halls of the company.

I got to see some clips from Astro Boy, and it looks pretty damn good. Astro isn't in stereo, but a lead said to me: "I think the stereoscopic thing is a gimmick that won't last." (We'll find out if he's right or Jeffrey Katzenberg is right in three or four years.) One of the artists working on it told me:

"I've seen the reels a week or so ago, and the story's really shaped up. We've got five animators here working on it, the rest of the crew in Hong Kong. We're releasing it next October."

Other pictures in work at Imagi: Tusker, which migrated over from DreamWorks, and Gatchaman, which is still deep in story work.

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Our Charming Corporatist State

Don't kid yourselves. We live in a country and state of ... by ... and for corporations. To wit:

A number of technology companies, including Sony, Electronic Arts, Apple and Cisco Systems, had been tripped up by California's overtime regulations, which stated that highly skilled technology workers earning less than $75,000 a year, or $36 an hour, were entitled to OT.

Sounds simple, but the devil is in the math. Companies have contended that as long as the worker's annual salary was at least $75,000, he or she was exempt from overtime pay, regardless of how many hours the employee clocked. Labor advocates have countered that the number of hours worked matters very much: They argued that the regulation in fact required companies to pay $36 or more for each hour worked, or else the employee was due OT.

As a result, programmers, engineers and graphic artists have filed lawsuits in recent years demanding overtime compensation for working long hours without extra pay. Some, including Sony and EA, have paid tens of millions of dollars to settle those cases.

The new law, which Schwarzenegger signed late Tuesday and took effect immediately, eliminates the hourly calculation. It says employers can instead meet the overtime exemption by paying their workers a gross salary of at least $6,250 a month. That equals the same $75,000 a year, but it means that high-tech companies now don't have to worry about keeping track of the number of hours their employees work, said Carol Freeman, a partner at law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius in Palo Alto. "There was an ambiguity in the law, and this clarifies that," Freeman said.

Kindly note that the "clarification" bones tech workers in a wonderful new way.

Where once tech workers had to earn at least $36 per hour, they now have to earn a baseline $6,250 per month, or $1,562.50 per week.

So let's do a little comparative math. The old law required at least $36/hr. At that rate, a regular workweek gets you $1,440/week. And if you work 43.5 hours, you're up to the new weekly minimum for tech workers of $1,562.50/week.

Does anyone who's got functioning frontal lobes think for a nano-second that tech companies or game companies are going to let people go home after 43.5 hours or work in five business days? Hell no. Most folks will be working sixty to eighty hour weeks just like always, and they'll be earning maybe eighteen bucks per hour, and it will all be perfectly legal because our Republican governor and Democratic legislature changed the damn law.

The above applies, of course, only to those who have been saved from the corruption and tyranny of paying union dues and working under the iron fist of a big, bad labor organization and its oppressive contract.

Meanwhile, our United States Congress is just now falling all over itself to bail out domestic and foreign corporations who had the bad judgment to buy junk-bond quality paper and now want the Feds to save them. Which of course the Feds will.

In the modern corporatist state, it's rugged individualism and free enterprise for workers, and socialism for companies "too large to fail" (whatever the hell that means.)

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"Is Union Brotherhood Putting Us Out of Work?"

A commenter below asks:

Are we all out of work again because of 'union brotherhood?' Ain't showing up for support this time. Too f'ing busy trying to pay for the other group of a-holes that screwed the pooch over on Wall Street.

Unionism has little to do with the job market. Bad economic policies has a lot to do with it. Studios wrestling with a fast-changing entertainment market and distribution system has a lot to do with it.

Re the economic part:

Loan brokers originated lots of questionable loans (they got way more money for creating subprime loans than the normal kind, so guess what kinds of loans they floated?)

Regulations were eliminated or suspended of two and a half decades, so there weren't a hell of a lot of circuit breakers.

The rating agencies (Standard and Poor, Moody) rated subprime as AAA, enabling the garbage to be bundled and sold worldwide. If the rating agencies had simply done their jobs and rated the junk honestly, subprime wouldn't have been sliced, diced and repackaged as something it never was -- high quality debt.

Unsupervised investment banks leveraged the phony Triple-A paper; the Securities and Exchange Commission waived leverage ratio requirements and let them go wild. Those investment banks are now gone.

Housing appraisers committed fraud over-estimating house values.

Alan Greenspan declined to clamp down and fraud and abuse, also held interest rates below inflation.

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were encouraged by the Bush Administration to "get more creative" in the loans they handled, and did so.

We partied hardy for three years, and now have a huge hangover. And right now, the flow of credit has sort of dried up, which isn't real good for people who need loans or entertainment companies that want to finance movies and television shows.

But there's another problem that the entertainment congloms -- of which we're all a part -- wrestle with.

Yesterday I was at an industry lunch, and found myself seated at a table filled with high-level company execs. The talk, aside from how stocks were eating it big time, was how television ratings are tanking and the business models they have used for years are being chewed up by the internet, video games, and the omnipotent computer -- desktop, laptop, and hand-held.

Viewing audiences are down. Advertising dollars are down. And these gentlemen are flummoxed, because the old ways are not holding.

"Bridget Loves Bernie had a thirty-five share, and CBS cancelled it. The top-rated show today doesn't come close to a thirty-five share ..."

The networks would kill for a thirty-five share today, whether the program was getting hate mail or not. But those days are over.

So companies cast about for a new hit, something along the lines of Sponge Bob Square Pants or Fairly Odd Parents, and try desperately to keep costs down as they struggle to lift their market share.

If you wonder why employment is so choppy right now, if you scratch your head over the quick, project-to-project employment cycles and the close-to-scale wages, look no further than the cratering economy and the turbulent changes ricocheting through the entertainment industry.

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Panda Rides Again

Here's a surprise:

DreamWorks Animation is moving forward with a "Kung Fu Panda" sequel, slotted for release on June 3, 2011 ...

I only put this non-shocker up because a couple of months back, I made a passing reference to artists working on the new picture in a blog post. A week later I got a call from DreamWorks saying: "Uh, we haven't announced any new picture yet. You need to take that down."

Which I did. (And nobody noticed, because by then the post was a week old.) But now the sequel is "official," and I can note it without getting my fanny spanked.

So three cheers for KFP Deux.

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58 Years Ago Today

...an iconic group of cartoon characters ... and an empire ... were born:.

Originally called “Lil' Folks,” the strip was renamed “Peanuts” by United Feature Syndicate, the first publisher to syndicate the comic. According to the Schulz Museum, it was a name [Charles] Schulz never really liked.

Through five decades the "Peanuts" rolled on. From comic strip, to books, to gargantuan merchandising, then to Broadway and years of animated television specials.

"Peanuts" helped cement the fame and fortune of a young Latino animator named Bill Melendez who walked out on strike at the Disney Studios in 1941, and gave long-term employment to a lot of Los Angeles animation artists for a lot of years.

So here's to Charles M. Schulz, fifty-eight years after the births of his famous brain children.

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THIS Will Be Interesting ...

... If the boys and girls at Warners can pull it off:

Warner Bros. is taking a trip to Jellystone Park.

The studio is developing a feature version of "Yogi Bear," the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoon, and "Surf's Up" co-helmer/co-writer Ash Brannon is attached to direct ...

The project, culled from Warners' vast library*, is planned as a live-action/animated hybrid along the lines of Fox's 2007 hit "Alvin & the Chipmunks." Much of the movie will be live-action, but Yogi Bear and sidekick Boo Boo will be done in CG ...

Okay, so we know Yogi and the Booster won't be guys in bear suits ... despite the picture above.

But who do you see as Ranger Smith? Is it Tom Cruise? Ben Affleck? Shia LaBeouf? This could either end up like The Chipmunks' feature ... or Looney Tunes, Back in Action.

As my sainted father used to tell me: "You get awful tired of seeing that bear talk out of the side of his face." Have the producers thought of this?

* The vast library of Yogi properties came about when Ted Turner bought Hanna-Barbera, and then was absorbed by Time-Warner.

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