[…] It turned out it was a very good thing, it put us in a situation of having a deadline, which is always good. It’s terrible,...

[…] It turned out it was a very good thing, it put us in a situation of having a deadline, which is always good. It’s terrible, but it’s good. Cartoons, at the beginning, people paid so little it didn’t matter if it ran for seven minutes or eight minutes. […] But, he [Leon Schlesinger] realize if he made them shorter it would cost less […] About that time, he ran into somebody else, that was the exhibitor. The theater owners demanded six minutes or longer, cause they had to put out a program and run two hours of the feature and two or three short subjects. So, he said “we don’t want them any shorter than six minutes”, and Leon said “I don’t went them any longer than six minutes”. So, in the middle of that, in my book, is a picture of the director caught between these two forces. You’d have to make them six minutes, now that’s all very well, if you can edit them. Make them eight minutes and then cut them, but we weren’t allowed to do that. You had to make them six minutes, and plan them six minutes when they went into animation […] If you couldn’t make them to six minutes, you couldn’t stay there. So we stayed there and learn how to do it, nobody else in the industry ever had to do that. Disney ran also long as eight minutes, and I think Hanna and Barbera ran seven or seven and a half minutes, and so on. So we learn how to do that. And, at the time, we didn’t think much of it. You know, today when I look back on, I’m like “how did we ever learn to do that?”, a very unique trade indeed. And, as I said, we weren’t allowed to do any editing at all. In fact, Friz and I use to cut our own test reels and splice them, because he wouldn’t hire anybody to do it for us. Test reel, sometimes called a “pencil test reel”, but it’s actually taking picture of the drawings that were made for the whole picture, without background, without music, without sound effects.

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