What American experimental filmmaker, painter, and sculptor was best known for his films, which combine painting, hand-drawn rotoscoping, photographs, and other materials?
What photographer captured many of the defining images of the U.S. civil rights struggle, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his photograph of Coretta Scott King at the funeral of her husband?
After she entered her 80s this American artist, well known for her vivid Surrealist imagery, began to concentrate on writing: producing a novel, an autobiography, and poems that appeared in such periodicals as The New Yorker,The Yale Review and The Paris Review.
From 1935 to 1941, this renowned cartoonist worked for Walt Disney as a story man and animator, with credits on Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Fantasia; his work also appeared in comic books for the company that became DC Comics, and for Dell’s Animal Comics.
In 1900 Max began to work as an errand boy at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. By 1904 he was a staff artist. In 1905 he married his childhood sweetheart, Essie Gold; they had two children. After he left the Eagle, Max briefly did artwork for two companies and then became art editor of Popular Science Monthly in 1914. There his childhood interest in mechanical matters was reignited.
In fact, it was a mechanical problem that pulled Max Fleischer into the field of animation. Early animation was frequently very choppy. Max theorized that if live-action footage were traced, frame by frame, fluid motion could be achieved. He enlisted the help of his brothers Dave and Joe, and the three developed the Rotoscope, a camera mounted under a piece of frosted glass with a crank to advance the film, so each frame could be traced.
It took the brothers a week to build the Rotoscope, but it was a full year before they finished their first cartoon. Dave donned a clown suit, and Max and Joe filmed him. Then they traced the clown on the Rotoscope. Work on the cartoon was completed in 1916, and a patent for the Rotoscope came through a year later. FROMhttp://anb.org/articles/20/20-01567.html
The Fleischers put popular, modern music at the center of many of their films, building entire cartoons around jazz legends such as Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong and Don Redman. These cartoons often featured the Fleischers’ signature combination of live action and animation; in fact the earliest known footage of Cab Calloway in performance can be seen in the Fleischer classic Minnie the Moocher.
In 1929 the Studio made a major agreement with Paramount that would allow Paramount to distribute all Fleischer films. That same year the Studio changed its name to ‘Fleischer Studios.’ FROMhttp://www.fleischerstudios.com/history.html
In 1949, Clampett created “Time for Beany,” a 15-minute daily live puppet show for KTTV in Los Angeles. Played by legendary voice actor Daws Butler, Beany was a cheerful lad who flew with the help of his propeller-driven beanie. His devoted friend was Cecil the Sea-Sick Sea Serpent – voiced by the great Stan Freberg…”Time for Beany” quickly gained a following and graduated to daily syndication as part of the short-lived Paramount Television Network in an extended half-hour format.
By 1961, “Time for Beany” had been transformed from a live-action puppet show into a cartoon series, re-titled “Beany and Cecil” (ABC, 1962) and produced and directed by Clampett through his own Bob Clampett Productions…Although only a single season of “Beany and Cecil” was produced, the cartoon resided in syndication on the network’s daytime children’s lineup from spring 1962 through fall 1966.