Don Bluth & Gary Goldman: Long-running Fun

Gary Goldman (left) takes care of the business details, while partner in animation Don Bluth contemplates what he will sketch for a customer at Dragoncon 2001. (Photos by Jean Marie Ward)

Good friendships make bad partnerships — or so the conventional wisdom goes. How, then, do you explain the complementary careers of Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, creators of some of the most beloved animated films of the last thirty years, including Anastasia, An American Tail, All Dogs Go to Heaven, and Secret of N.I.M.H.?

Their shared passion for the art and technique of animation, coupled with an abiding commitment to providing high quality entertainment for children of all ages obviously plays a major role. But don’t overlook the goofy sense of fun that shines through their groundbreaking arcade games, Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace. Crescent Blues found plenty of evidence of both at Dragoncon 2001, where Bluth and Goldman were talking to fans and gearing up for the 3-D and movie version of Dragon’s Lair.

Crescent Blues: What brought you guys to Dragoncon?

Don Bluth: Ed Kramer contacted us during the 2000 Comicon, in San Diego. Ed said, what you guys want to do is come to Dragoncon, because we have a great, just a great group there. It’s so exciting, and it’s so much more fun than Comicon. We got excited about doing it, so we talked to Ed on the phone a couple of times and said, what the heck, let’s go see what the people are like there in Atlanta. So Gary and I started doing preparations to come out here, looking forward to it but not knowing what to expect.

I have been completely gratified by coming here — sitting in the booth and doing drawings and talking to the people — because these are the people who watch our movies. We need a periscope up, so to speak, to listen to what they’re saying and hear their reactions to the films. Sometimes, we’re working in a closet or in a vacuum, and [without feedback] we wouldn’t know what we’re doing.

So these past three days have been just really, really great for me, and the people are really sweet and wonderful.

Is the audience different than you would find at Comicon?

Don: I think so. In California, what I find is a lot of the business people — people who are in comic businesses and who are in show business and working in Hollywood and so forth. Comicon is huge. It’s so big that it’s hard to comprehend what’s going on in that room. And many of [the people attending] are fierce competitors.

Whereas the people I’ve met here in Atlanta, I think a lot of them are families. They’re grassroots people, and I love that. I think that’s the greatest part about Dragoncon, because I’m seeing people — not peers who are just out there trying to make a buck — because when you deal with artwork, you’re really trying to communicate with people. I think that’s the difference.

How important is audience input to the films you make?

Don: Really, really important. Years ago, I had a live theater. We used to put on plays every night. You memorized the words, you put on the play six times a week, and every time an audience came in, the reaction was different. But I found that the reaction of the audience was what made the actors do better on the stage — or not. The actors feed off the audience reactions.

The same principle applies here. Listening to the families — moms, dads and particularly the kids — how they react to what we’ve created, tells us where to go. Without that we’re groping in the dark.

You guys really do have the partnership routine down. I know you met at Disney Studios, but what made you decide to get together and put on your own show?

Gary Goldman: Don’s a manipulator, and he tricked me into it.

Don: And he’s really glad I did.

Gary: I’m really glad he did.

Don: You never know what you’re getting into when you begin a journey. You just go full of hope and great aspirations. When we were there at Disney, what we wanted more than anything was to recapture some of the beautiful things that had influenced us during our lives. We had watched the Disney product, the things that Walt [Disney] made.

When Walt died in 1966, a man by the name of Woolie Reitherman — Wolfgang Reitherman, took over. What Woolie did was bring his personality to the table. Woolie was a World War II fighter pilot and very shy of expressing emotions. I don’t think that was Walt.

Woolie finished off Jungle Book and went on to make Aristocats, The Rescuers and several other pictures. Woolie was a very different guy. We noticed that “corporately” — and he was really hooked into the corporate — he began to cut corners. Everyone began to say the words: That’s too expensive; we can’t do that nowadays. Woolie obliged.

We questioned that. Is it true? You can’t do that nowadays? So at some point we decided we would experiment.

We were new going into the Disney studios, brand new. We knew a little bit about animation. We knew a little bit about drawing. But how much we were going to learn there in a very quick, few years was really up for grabs. We didn’t know quite what questions to ask. And as for these old guys, who’d been there for years and years, it didn’t occur to them what things to tell us. It was so familiar to them that they didn’t say, “Oh, by the way, you should know this.” They didn’t do that, and we didn’t know what to ask them.

So I said, “Gary, why don’t we go out to my garage and start making a picture. And as we make the picture, we’ll come to big walls of things we don’t understand. Then we’ll have a question, and we can go back and ask them the question. That way we’ll siphon out of their experience what we need to know.”

It took us about four years to make a little project called Banjo the Woodpile Cat, but questions just came up and up and up. We knew that when these Nine Old Men, as they called them, retired, we would not only have to animate, but we would have to direct and do all those other jobs that no one was addressing. Disney at that time was spending about $250,000 a year on their training program, which really isn’t that much money at all. (That was back in 1971-72.) So we decided we needed to prep ourselves.

All of this was driven by a love for the art.

Gary: We were told we would have six years to digest this and prepare ourselves, because these men were going to retire. It frightened me because I could see how slowly I was progressing. Don was actually way ahead at that point. But to be given only six years to figure out how you were going to be the ones to take over was really, really difficult. Continue, Don.

Don: Oh, now I can go on. [Laughter from all sides.]

So at some point we would ask the questions, and Frank Thomas or Ollie [Johnston] or anyone we would ask the question would go: “Oh, that’s easy. This is what you do.” They would explain it. We would write it down.

This is an interesting anecdote. We said, “You know the water in Fantasia — where the little broom is hauling the little buckets of water around. That water looks so wet. It looks so great on screen. How did you do that?”

Frank said, “I don’t know. It’s been so long, and the guy who did that, he’s no longer alive. I don’t remember how we did that. I think we dyed lacquer and painted the cells with it. I don’t remember.”

That kind of frightened me, because it meant that all the things they’d learned over the years, no one’s written down. Well, some things had been written down, but some things had not. So we started writing things down, just to make sure if somebody got hurt, somebody would remember.

We began to try out new things too. We found out that if you wanted to do a reflection of somebody in water, you had to draw all those drawings again as a reflection. But we figured out, while we were working in the garage that, if you took the same cell that was painted, and you just turned it upside down and repositioned it and shot it again. In the camera, you could achieve the same thing, and you wouldn’t have to do all the drawing. This discovery convinced us that there must be other methods we may discover that would enable us to do the things that were considered too expensive to do in the ‘Seventies. You just have to want to do them. I’m referring of course to all those wonderful production values, details and special effects animation we marveled over in pictures like Pinocchio, Bambi and Fantasia.

They’re using these discoveries all over right now. But we went in and discovered something that was hidden under a rock. We just kept doing that. I think over the length of our careers that we’ve always been doing that — hunting for some way to get the best effect on the screen.

The way I look at it, animation is a really, really powerful tool. Like you said this morning, your children look at it again and again. They memorize it. They know it very, very well. That’s not just innocent. What that’s doing is forming them.

If we’re going to make something for the kids, you have to make it good, because it’s educating them. I see so many television producers who’ll say, “Why should we pay more for a TV program, when the kids aren’t paying anything, and they’ll watch anything anyway.” I think it’s atrocious to say that. It’s irresponsible. I think the kids are worth more than that. You should spend more there than anywhere else, because they’re absorbing it. It’s forming their personality and who they’re going to be. Why skimp on that?

Gary: Don always makes that statement, pointing a finger at young directors and producers, saying, “You have a responsibility to your audience.” I think that’s really more important for people involved in animation and stories focused towards families, because it will end up on DVD and video, and end up as what some people refer to as a “babysitter.” We like to refer to it as entertainment. [Chuckles.] But in that “entertainment,” we’re hoping that there are lessons and there are messages that are hidden in that entertainment that will help form that young brain into a responsible person. You can only do that by being responsible in the first place.

[Sotto Voce.] I used to watch Secret of N.I.M.H. A lot.

Gary: That’s because you’re still a child in there somewhere.

Don: There are messages in Secret of N.I.M.H. If you see the story line, you’ll see there are all these little junctures along the way where you have a little message that is not entirely obvious. The novels do the same thing. If you re-read a novel, you’ll find all these things that you didn’t see the last time you read it.

I know if you read the Bible stories [as an adult], for example, or the fairy tales, what happens is that you go: “I never remembered that. I never got that.” It’s because your psyche and development have progressed to the point where your understanding has increased. Then you begin to see things that you didn’t see before.

The movies have that in them. I was surprised yesterday when I was talking to people. I was drawing Nicodemus from Secret of N.I.M.H. I said, “You know Nicodemus and the owl are actually the same person.” Nobody knew that. I said, “They are the same person. We obviously made it so it’s like a shape-shifter.” Mythologically, that’s what it is.

The owl is trying to get Mrs. Brisby to stop saying, “Help, help, help,” and to look inside herself and find her own strength. That’s what he’s trying to do. So then he tells her to go the rats. He is there himself in the guise of Nicodemus. He appears to her again and says, “OK, you have to help yourself.” But he makes her go on this journey, because it’s by going on our daily journey or our life’s journey that we learn things that we have to know. And if we don’t take the time to go on those journeys, however hard they may be, then you don’t pick up all the little treasures you need to be a really whole person. That’s what I think.

Gary: Mrs. Brisby didn’t know that she had the strength to do what she had to do, and that journey got her there.

I’ve got to admit, I love that owl. He was genuinely beautiful and scary. Then there were the backgrounds, how he moved…

Gary: Those were specific choices. You asked earlier how you direct an animated movie. Those were up-front choices in pre-production where you decide where it’s going to be dark, where it’s going to be bright, where it’s going to be blue, where it’s going to be red-orange. Those choices are like orchestrating the music so it will help touch your audience’s emotions.

There’s a moment in there where the owl kills a spider. And you say, “Eew, why did you put that in there?” The spider was coming after Mrs. Brisby, and the owl protected her outright. Right there. So he went splut and squashed the spider. There are some cruel things that happen in this world, depending on your point of view.

I saw Secret of N.I.M.H. with my kids, and when the owl ate the bug, all three of us squeaked.

Gary: When the owl ate the moth?

It was so creepy. It was just wonderful.

Gary: I really enjoyed watching the audiences for Secret of N.I.M.H. I saw it in 26 different theaters around the United States on the promotional tour. We’d do the interviews all day long. Then in the afternoon, they’d say, “We want you to go see the premiere performance and say a few words before it starts.”

I would stay in the back of the theater and watch the reactions. You know how in some animated features the kids are crawling all over the seats, because it’s talky and boring? These kids never took their eyes off the screen.

We were about 25 minutes into the movie, and this little girl and her dad were walking up the aisle backwards. (She had to go to the toilet.) They were actually walking up the aisle backwards, and then they got to the exit. They stood there for five minutes, continuing to watch the movie. She did not want to leave the theater, because she was afraid she was going to miss something. This girl was only about six years old. Then they ran out the door, and they were back in about 45 seconds.

And I kept thinking how much they missed in 45 seconds. Forty-five seconds for us is a week’s worth of work with over a hundred people. Don’t blink your eyes, or you’re going to miss somebody’s engaging little drawings.

Talking about directing and performing, we’ve been really fortunate in that most of the actors that we’ve selected just fell in love with what we were trying to achieve and brought so much to the characters.

You mentioned Dom DeLuise doing the part of Jeremy the Crow. After the first recording, we started rewriting. We were working with a young artist named Will Finn, who’s now done a lot of other projects with Disney and Dreamworks. Will’s a good writer, and he had a knack — at least for Dom DeLuise — for writing dialogue, that when you read it, you thought that Dom DeLuise was saying it. So the next time we went in with Dom DeLuise to direct him at the voice recording session, he looked up and said, “Oh, I get this. Not a problem.” And sometimes he would add to it or ad lib.

That’s another thing that’s cool. These actors have had so much experience with their careers and their own lives that once they catch on to what you’re trying to get across to your audience, they’ll bring a new flavor, a new spice to the mix.

Don: The Dom DeLuise part was not written with all that stuff in it. In the book, he was pretty much a straight character — just a crow that came in to the story, sort of a “walk on.” But the more we worked with him, the more he got funnier and funnier.

There were two people [who played a big part in that.]

During the production of the animated sequence for the movie, Xanadu, we worked in my house and we had a lady who cooked for us. This lady kept talking about “the call of the wild.” She talked about that while she was washing dishes — singing and talking about “the call of the wild.” Little did I know that she was attracted to me. I had no clue that was what was going on, but she kept talking about “the call of the wild.”

And it got worse and worse.

Then there was one of the young animators, who went around saying he loved pretty girls. “They’re pretty.” And his little phrase was: “I have to find Miss Right. I’ve got to find Miss Right.” He went around saying that, and the other lady was always saying “call of the wild.” We thought both of those were pretty funny, so we put them together and we had a crow that was looking for “Miss Right” and “feeling the call of the wild.”

Dom, of course, hooked right into that train of thought. But Dom would bring things to the table like: “Excusemepardonme.” That wasn’t in the script. He said, “We’re doing a lot of that around our house right now. We’re all saying, ‘Excusemepardonme.’”

Gary: It became one word.

Don: So Dom brought stuff that was in his household and put it in the personality of the crow.

Gary: I think that’s where you connect with an audience — where you’re doing normal things. With each of these characters, you’re trying to create a personality that your audience can relate to, not up here somewhere (motions above his head). Hopefully, your story is up here somewhere, so people are reaching up to it, and you’re not talking down to the audience.

Don: Talking down to the audience was something we tried to avoid from the beginning, because that was our problem at Disney. At that time that we were there, they were making pabulum — babysitting material — and not willing to take risks with a project, because they couldn’t afford to.

Gary: Gotta keep that stock up. Strange, but back when Walt started the company, he took a lot of risks. Maybe that is why he stated that he regretted ever going “public” with the company.

Getting back to the discussion about journeys, you made a physical journey — to Ireland. Why did you move your company to Ireland, and why did you come home?

Gary: It was economics to start with, because in 1984-85, animation was suffering. Not only was it in the doldrums, there was a lot of unsuccessful animated films. When [Steven] Spielberg saw The Secret of N.I.M.H. in 1982 at the request of Jerry Goldsmith, the composer, [Spielberg] fell in love with it. He said, “I can’t believe you can still do this. I thought this quality died with Walt Disney.” He said, “I want to work with you guys.”

And we went: “Oh, we’ve got 10 or 12 projects we want to do.”

“Nah, nah, I’ll set the project.” It was two years before he came back to us with a project. During those two years — at least 14 months of those two years — we produced the three video games: Dragon’s Lair, Space Ace and Dragon’s Lair II. Then we went into a period where we had to do commercials, anything we could do to keep our crew together and stay alive. Then, all of a sudden, in December 1984, Steven came back and said, “I found a project.” It was An American Tail.

But our budget showed that a movie of this scale in the United States would cost about $11 million, whereas Universal [Studios] only wanted to put up $5.5 or $6 million, because they’d never worked in animation before. They knew [animation] was sort of in a dip at this point, and they weren’t willing to risk the kind of money that it was going to take to make the picture.

As we went into this picture, our senior business advisor, Morris Sullivan, said, “We don’t know how long this perspective on animation is going to exist. We need to look into a way to reduce the cost.”

So we started looking into going off-shore. We looked into the benefits of going to Australia, Mexico, Canada and Spain. When suddenly, the Irish government poked its head in and said, “Come look and see what we’ve got to offer. We’ve got a lot of artists over here, and we’ve got a great economic program and tax provisions for you, if you bring your company here.”

We didn’t leave America; we took America with us. We took 87 artists, their families, 17 dogs and cats, and moved everybody to Ireland, where we proceeded to teach the talented Irish artists how to deal with what we do. Within a year and a half, we were 400 strong. We were the largest animation studio in Europe.

We did five pictures in Ireland. We did The Land Before Time, All Dogs Go To Heaven, Rock-a-Doodle, A Troll in Central Park and Thumbelina in the Irish facility. We were working on a picture called The Pebble and the Penguin, which the two of us did not finish. MGM/United Artists stepped in and started changing our story. We said, “Hey, wait a minute!” — but, they had the right to do so, according to the way the distribution contract was structured.

Twentieth Century Fox brought us back to America. Actually, they asked us if we would help them create an animation studio. We suggested that they let us produce for them in Ireland, but they insisted that we needed to be located close to their main offices in southern California. So in 1994, we returned. We had lived in Ireland almost eight years.

What about East of the Sun and West of the Moon?

Don: East of the Sun and West of the Moon is a delightful story. It’s a great fairy tale about a girl who gets lost and loses her true love and is overcome by curiosity. She meets this bear and finds out it’s an enchanted bear. Actually, he’s an enchanted prince, and he comes back into human form at night. He tells her, “You must never look upon me at night, or our relationship will be doomed.”

Well, she can’t stand that, so in the middle of the night, she sneaks in, lights a candle and sees him, falls madly in love. But what happens is that he’s whisked away someplace east of the sun and west of the moon. Then she must journey to find him and undo what she has done.

And she’ll have to wear out seven pairs of iron shoes and seven iron staffs before she can find him. It was one of my favorite fairy tales.

Don: We wanted to do it very badly, and we started doing it. But because of an animation union strike in late 1982, our funding got very shy and pulled away. We felt kind of abandoned and lost, and we hunted around for other work. Then the game idea came up. We still had an in, as Gary explained, with Spielberg, but that was two years away. So we did the games.

We managed to stay alive. We knew we weren’t going to just leave the business. But we had such high expectations for The Secret of N.I.M.H. We thought when we went out and made this film that, for sure, the world would beat a path to our door, and everything would be great. All the crew thought it was going to happen. So when they showed it to the press at MGM, I went down and rode around on my bicycle just to see if I could hear what anybody was saying, because they wouldn’t let us go to the press screening. I got nothing.

But the press loved it. The press came out with all kinds of really nice accolades about it, but the studio did not promote it. There’s a big story about what happened at the studio. Our contract was with United Artists. United Artists got sold to MGM, because of a movie called Heaven’s Gate. So our movie went with the purchase to MGM and it became the poor stepchild or the unwanted bastard child. It was the head of MGM/UA, David Begelman, who said, “I don’t like animation. We’re not going to put any money into distributing that movie. When their advertising funds are spent, no MGM/UA funds will go into the marketing of this film.”

After that, it didn’t look like we were going to get funds to make another picture, although we had high hopes. We headed into East of the Sun and West of the Moon, but it never materialized. The film is the property of Aurora Productions. So when we became free and independent again, we couldn’t go back and retrieve it. It wasn’t ours.

Gary: We have asked Aurora about it. They have no interest in funding it today, and they would want an ownership position and a return of the money spent on the development of it back in 1982, if we were to try to do the film now. They’re investment people. They had raised about $7 or $8 million of the $11 million they needed to fund that project.

It was the 1982 union strike that pulled it all apart. The union was demanding a 12 or 15 percent raise each year, and the investment group felt, gosh, if [the union wins] this debate, it could increase your labor cost by as much as 45 percent over three years. Actually, more like 54 percent. And they got very nervous about where the budget was going to go, and they asked us to abort it. It was a long union strike. It went on for 72 days. It was pretty scary.

Don: Another thing — when we made An American Tail, Universal wanted to make it for not too much money. We wound up making it for about $9.5 million. But to get that picture made, we had to go to our crew and say, “Look, we have to freeze all of our salaries to make it for what they (Universal) want. The crew is not going to get any pay raises during the time we’re making this. Are we all willing to do this?”

The crew all got together and said, “Yes, we’ll agree to freeze our salaries.” So we did it. So when we were almost done making An American Tail, Steven Spielberg said, “Why don’t you guys come with me and George Lucas, and let’s make our dinosaur movie. We’ve been trying to get that off the ground for a long time.” We said, OK, that’s great. But he suggested that we try to do it for the same budget as An American Tail.

We went back to the crew, and they just wouldn’t do that again. So we wound up saying: “There must be somewhere else we can go, which will give us a way to pull this off, economically and still give the crew their correct wages.” That’s when the off-shore search started.

Even when we knew we were going to go to Ireland, Universal would not give us what is called “pay or play,” which means “green light” — a written commitment to do the movie. So we kept waiting. As I recall, it was about four months that we waited and waited and waited, and we couldn’t get ready. You know you have to sell or rent your houses and make preparations. You have to get to Ireland, and Ireland has to know you’re coming.

All of this takes a lot of work, but they wouldn’t give us a “pay or play” contract. And we didn’t want to wind up with all these people in Ireland and have [Universal] pull the plug and say, “We’re not going to make [the film].” We needed “pay or play” to be able to move everybody that far away.

Gary: Going to Ireland did get raises for the American staff in that budget. I think that budget was almost…not double, I think it was $13-14 million for the second picture (Land Before Time). But what was interesting was that Universal demanded that the Irish government grants be applied in the budget. So our efforts to go to another country to provide security for the employees and the company actually ended up going into that budget.

Don: Our money went into the movie. These things happen all the time. Anytime I’m in some of these rooms talking to people who want to be filmmakers — these kids keep coming up, and I say, “Gee, if you only knew.” The journey is a difficult one, and you have to be kind of resilient. When you’re in the middle of all this business stuff, you have to be sure you don’t get angry or embittered or anything like that, because that will stop your art. You have to be flexible. You have to give and take and make it happen.

We’re not wealthy — Gary and me — by any means, and I’ve had to sign away every character I’ve ever designed to a studio, except for —

Gary: The games…

Don: The video games and Banjo [Banjo the Woodpile Cat]. So we don’t own the rights to any of the characters from the feature films.

Even Secret of N.I.M.H.?

Don: Even Secret of N.I.M.H. For the right to make those 11 movies we made, we had to sign away all those rights. It’s a trade-off. If you get really stubborn about it and say, “No, I want the rights to all my characters.” The movies may have never happened. Once you have built up a trained crew and you want to protect that investment of time and energy — plus the friendships, it is difficult to play hard ball in negations. You have to be able to walk away from a bad deal. If you are alone, that’s easy to do. With a group it is very difficult.Gary Goldman: You may not get your chance to make a film. It’s a bit ugly. No picture, no budget, no money to pay the crew.

Have you thought about television?

Gary: Television is a real lucrative medium for filmmakers, but the reason it’s lucrative for the producers is because they are willing to create it for so little. We’re more about the art of animation than the business of animation. Obviously, if you do a TV series, and it’s successful, it could last for 15 years. When it’s done, and when it finally pays for itself, from that time on, it’s all gravy. But what have you really created?

That’s why I asked. I remember the old Johnny Quest. Remember Johnny Quest? I would watch that show religiously. I would kill myself getting home on my bike to watch Johnny Quest. But I look at the cartoons nowadays, and it’s like someone said, “Oh, yeah, let me scribble this here.” And that’s it.

Gary: Partly it’s economics, and those people are willing to work in that economic structure. Because if you’re there trying to create a classic — or something you feel is classic — that has performance and art involved with it… Now I can’t say that some of that’s not art. It’s still art. There are different varieties of animation art. But the fact is, that they produce, for TV, a half-hour for the same cost of two or three minutes in a feature film. It’s a huge difference in economics.

I feel bad for them sometimes, but everybody has choices in life, and they make that choice. Sometimes they just feel that’s the most lucrative way to go. Or maybe it’s the only way to go — the only way to get a chance if they’ve got something new and different that some TV executive says, “That would look good on our programming.”

Don: Also, because of our culture in the United States, animation is aimed directly at the children. So many people have tried for the brass ring, to see if they could try to get it to grow up, so that’s actually for adults, because adult tickets cost more. So many of the things you watch on television — and a lot of the things you see on Cartoon Network — are very economically made, because it’s for kids. And kids don’t really see the difference. But I believe, Cartoon Network is trying to grow it up. They’ve been introducing anime to the American public.

You go to another culture like Japan or South America, and the adults appreciate comic art and animation art as an art form. We in America, for some reason, cannot get that. We’ve got it so categorized into the nursery that even the kids know it. So when they get to their adolescent years, they say, “Get me away from animation. I don’t want to go anywhere near it, because that means I’m still a little kid.”

Gary: In the U.S., it’s almost a rite of passage to get away from animation. That’s because it’s the only kind of films some parents will allow their children to see from the first time they enter a theater, when they’re about four or five years old until they’re about 11 or 12. When they finally get to go to a PG or PG-13 movie, that’s where they want to go.

Don: The film is secondary.

Gary: Oh yeah, this gets around to Titan A.E. Fox asked us — we weren’t the first producer/directors on Titan A.E. We were actually in the wings, waiting for our next project. We had been working on a project entitled, Bartok the Magnificent, which was something Don came up with, because they didn’t have a project for us, at the end of Anastasia.

Don: And there we sat with 315 people waiting for work.

Gary: We kept saying, “You’ve got to put a little more urgency in what you’re doing. We need product.”

Don: Tell them about the budget. The crew was sitting there, taking money.

Gary: There was an item in the budget called “holding costs.” It’s a term in budgeting for when you have a person sitting there, being paid, but he isn’t producing anything. When you have 315 people, and you have a cash outflow of somewhere around $450,000 – $500,000 a week, going through the door, you want to be producing at least a couple of minutes of animation each week. You need a continuity of product to avoid this situation. And, you do not want to lose your trained staff.

Fox finally came at us with a project (Planet Ice) that had been in the works for about a year and a half, but they really had nothing to show for it other than a lot of pre-production art like inspirational drawings, set designs and paintings that were ideas of what the outer space film would look like. They had three or four sequences that were recorded, and radio tracks were made, but they very flat. They didn’t really have much energy to them. They had some storyboarding on videotape that all had to be redone. And, they had already spent about $30 million on it. We were given a budget of $55 million to finish the project. We basically had to start from scratch and move very quickly. The project is 95 minutes long and we did it in just 19 months, that’s got to be some sort of record. However, the total cost, with the $30 million in pre-production costs was now $85 million. It was going to take a powerful marketing campaign to recoup that investment.

When they came and asked us to do it, we said, we’re not really big into sci-fi. We go to see those movies, but we’re not really aficionados. We didn’t know the ins and outs. We might do something that’s already been done before and not even know it.

Luckily, we had a heck of a lot of people on the crew who were sci-fi freaks, if you will. If Don got an idea and said, “We ought to go here.” They’d say, “No, no, no, no. That was done in Star Trek IV.”

Don: We aimed it at teenagers.

Gary: The key was, Fox was going to be different than the rest of the animation studios. This was the thought of [former Fox Filmed Entertainment Chairman] Bill Mechanic and the president of the animation division, Chris Meledandri. The point is, they both said — and the marketing people agreed with them — that they were going to make this movie for teenagers, the 14-year-old boys.

We went, “Wait, wait a minute! Guys, that’s the age group — the 11-and-a-half to 19 year-olds do not want to go to an animated movie. By college, it’s OK to go back to animated movies. But in that period of their puberty and young adulthood, they want to go see PG-13 and R-rated movies, not animation. At least not in public.”

But they said, “No, no, no. We’re going to go here.” They really kind of forced us to go there, and when we did it, they created their ads and then they started reacting. About two weeks before the movie came out, somebody raised their hands and said, “The moms don’t like these commercials.”

We said, “That’s OK. If you want the teenagers to go to your movie, you don’t want the moms to like the commercials. If you want the six-year-olds to go to your movie, then you want the moms to like your commercials. Teenagers and moms don’t agree on anything anyway.”

So they panicked. Suddenly, we see the commercials they’d done for more adult channels, on Nickelodeon. Now all their 14-year-olds are seeing this and saying: “I’m not going to that movie. It’s for kids.” Fox didn’t stick to their target, and the whole marketing program fell apart. The day after we opened at only $9.8 million, on opening weekend, they shut the advertising down. Nobody knew about the movie. It was the biggest secret in Hollywood. Titan A.E. — what’s that?

This would turn into a disaster for the chairman, Bill Mechanic…and for our crew. By shutting down the advertising, they basically killed any chances for the film to succeed in the market place, worldwide theater or home entertainment (video and DVD). The events that followed were sad indeed. Bill was asked to resign, and the state-of -the-art Phoenix animation studio was shut down.

For months after, Newscorp claimed that the failure of the motion pictures Fight Club and Titan A.E., plus the high cost of animation had hurt the earnings of 20th Century Fox.

The fact is that there wasn’t any real interest in traditional animation other than Bill Mechanic and those close to him. He’s the one that knew and believed that the medium could bring enormous profits to the company, if they could market it properly. He’s the one who brought Don and I in to start Fox Animation Studios. He was well experienced from his tenure at Disney, as President of International Distribution and of Worldwide Video. But he really didn’t have a team that understood the animation territory. And they never really anticipated the battle they would encounter with Disney over the animation domain. Disney is very protective of their dominance in the animation world.

It’s kind of funny how we work to restrict animated films to kids on a number of levels. Every science fiction and fantasy writer wants to see their book filmed, but the costs for live-action are so prohibitive. You’d think animation would be the ideal way to translate sci-fi and fantasy books into film. Why is there so much resistance to the idea?

Gary: People don’t really know how huge science fiction, fantasy and horror can be. But it does need to be promoted. I’ll give you an example. Since the release of Titan A.E. on video, last November, it has only sold about 2.8 million videos domestically and about 600,000 units in Europe. Anastasia sold 13 million units worldwide, since the summer of 1998 and continues to sell, three years later. Titan A.E. only sold a quarter of what Anastasia did. There is really no promotion for the product. Anastasia reached beyond just fantasy, it went to the families. The families grabbed it and held it, even though it didn’t do that great in the box office (Anastasia only did about $60 million at the box office), the video’s been really successful. That project was heavily promoted for the theatre and for the video release.

I’m sure live action science fiction — films like Star Trek — probably sold 20 or 30 million video units. But I don’t really know how big it is, and I don’t know how many science fiction fans saw Titan A.E. The promotion it got was very little compared to Anastasia.

I looked for Titan A.E. [in the theaters], and I kept thinking it hadn’t come out yet. Then I heard it had come and gone.

Gary: Once the advertising stops, the theaters go, “Well, if you’re not going to help me out with advertising, why should I keep this in my theater? Nobody’s going to know about the movie unless you give me some kind of promotional assistance.” The same thing happened to Warner Brothers’ Iron Giant.

Don: It’s all driven by money.

Gary: It is. It’s driven by money. The theaters also get money from popcorn sales and things like that. But if that movie’s not bringing in the popcorn buyers…they need support [i.e., advertising] from the distributors.

The audience won’t go if they don’t know the movie is there.

That’s a great closing line, but is there anything else you’d like to add?

Gary: You know, we were given a Lifetime Achievement Award just after we shut down the Fox animation studio. At the time I was a little in shock, almost like the lemming that had just gone off the cliff, and I was in free-fall. We went to this Lifetime Achievement Award given by Animation Magazine, and we kept saying, “Does this mean it’s time for us to sit down and shut up — because we’re not ready to sit down.” We really didn’t think it was time for a Lifetime Achievement award.

Don intends on working on until…they’ll probably find him someday lying over his desk. But I’m sure that’s not for another 20 or 30 more years.

Don: One more thing, and this is important. We live in an electronic age, a computer age, and because of that, so many young people are starting to go there, exclusively, instead of learning the real, fine skill of drawing. Drawing is a wonderful experience, and it helps you express yourself in a most amazing way.

I once asked a good friend of mine, Chuck Jones, if he could give advice to all the young people out there, who want to enter the film world or the movie world, about animation, what would he say?

He said, “Two things, really. One of them is learn to draw. Get away from this damned computer and learn your drawing skills, because that will serve you on the computer. It’s a very human thing to do: learn to draw.”

“And number two?” I said.

“Number two,” he said, “is get an education, because if you have nothing to say, drawing’s not going to serve you at all. You can’t just draw and live in that fantasy world. You have to go to school, and you have to get some stuff to put in your head so that the drawing language will serve you.”

Those two things, I think, are really good advice. That’s all I have to say.

Jean Marie Ward & Teri Smith

In addition to editing Crescent Blues, Jean Marie Ward writes for a number of Web-based and print magazines, including Science Fiction Weekly. She is the author of Illumina: the Art of Jean Pierre Targete (Paper Tiger) and several short stories, including “Most Dead Bodies in a Confined Space” in Strange Pleasures 2 (Prime Books). Her first novel, With Nine You Get Vanyr, written with Teri Smith, is scheduled to be released by Samhain Publishing in late 2006.

By day a financial assistant, by night the assistant editor for Crescent Blues, Teri Smith somehow finds the time to write and sell short stories (“The Visit” in Let Us Not Forget: A Tribute to America’s Twentieth Century Veterans, “Magic” in Strange Pleasures III and “Dragon Bait” in the upcoming Strange Pleasures VI and work on her first novel. Rumors that she is totally crazed are mostly untrue.