Tuesday, June 09, 2009

Just for laughs

Michael Sporn posted a copy of a great, great article on his blog today. Working for Walter Lantz in the 1930's.. writen by Leo Salkin. I absolutely love stuff like this. An excerpt...
Out of the nonsense Walt (Lantz) would select the stuff that could be made into a film: comedy bits, funny lines, gags. The cartoons of that period were still being concocted and assembled in much the same way Mack Sennett had made live-action comedies: “Charlie, there’s some kid auto races going on down in Venice—grab a cameraman, go down there and see if you can come up with something funny.” Or, “Hey! They just drained Echo Park Lake, it’s all mud, that oughta be funny as hell!” That’s what we did. We took a locale, an occupation, a situation, or the basic premise of a popular feature and did a lot of gags, strung them together, built in a chase, and got out in under seven minutes.
There was no market testing, or who is our target audience, or will a sponsor buy this? Come on, fellas, it’s just comedy. Get some laughs. Walter was the judge. What he thought was funny was what got up on the screen.
Go read the rest.

ps: this is why you don't write off good blogs, even if they fry your biscuits now and then

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