And of course, Worth is an anti-factualist. I can’t imagine why he’s in charge of the ASIFA archives. sigh.

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“[Creedon] tried that way back when, but it didn’t work,” you say—so Disney kept Creedon, and other non-drawing writers, on staff for at least six verified years during the studio’s acknowledged golden age? Something doesn’t add up.
Mind you, I’m not saying non-drawing writers made the golden age what it was, or that they were any more important than writers who could draw. Just that if they were all such dead weight as you’re telling me, they’d have been thrown under the bus in no time.

I’ve found another reference to Creedon: Walt enlisted him as “story director” to instruct Carl Barks after one of Barks’ own unfinished cartoons, “Northwest Mounted” (1936), didn’t cut the mustard. At the time, Barks was an in-betweener hoping to become a full-time story man. Creedon’s notes about (relative) illogic in Barks’ story survive and were reprinted along with the storyboards in the 1980s.
After Creedon’s lessons, Barks submitted a new idea—for what became a segment of MODERN INVENTIONS (1937), and its success led to Barks’ instatement with Harry Reeves in the new Duck unit.
Whatever you may think of Creedon or Barks, Creedon’s role here appears both pivotal and indicative of some level of respect Walt (and Barks) had for him.

I’ve no intent to go ballistic here, but I’ve never actually known an artist who had the level of seeming scorn you depict for words as a medium. It’s as if words never had any power to conjure an image, or are somehow innately pretentious.
Would any artist worth his/her salt really tell, say, Dickens, Lewis Carroll, and John Updike to “keep it simple, stupid… if you expect this story to be adapted visually, boil it down to two sentences, then let me reinvent all the visual details”? It’s almost an unflattering portrait of artists: incapable of being inspired by anything complex.

K.I.S.S.: A hallucinatory man is pining for his lost love when a big, spooky bird lands on his house and won’t leave. The man goes berserk trying to interpret the bird’s presence in light of his loss.

>Squawk!< Nevermo— er, never mind. I say too much.

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Moving on—classy dismissal of that Pluto outline, especially as I didn’t give a single example past the introduction of how it fleshed out that simple plot and made it worth reading in extended form.

You: “When you hand all those words to an animator, all he gets out of it [is] a simple two sentence premise!”

So Creedon was wasting effort writing his long-form treatment just because the premise was fundamentally simple? I can boil Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” down into two sentences, too. But try and tell me an artist would not be well-served by reading the poem in its entirety and drinking in the atmosphere.
I don’t even like many Pluto cartoons as produced, but Creedon’s long description brought his plot to life in a way that a short description wouldn’t have.

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Steve, I am not boosting writing here to put down drawing. Not for a second. I know plenty of animators personally and understand George’s feelings 110%.

“And Leo Salkin wasn’t lying to me when he told me that they tried writing scripts for cartoons back in the early days and it just didn’t work.”

I didn’t say Disney used scripts. I’ve presented lots of written documents in this discussion, but I’ve never contended that a single one was a script.

“Otto Englander’s widow told me that her husband would come home cursing the incompetence of a particular story guy who didn’t draw but was good at taking three hour martini lunches while Joe Grant drew his work for him.”

One non-drawing story guy being incompetent (and a jerk, or so it sounds!) does not invalidate the role of words in the animation process. Please lay off the guilt by association. I’d have hated to work with Mr. Martini—but I’d also have hated to work with Burt Gillett, a story man who did draw and whose personal failings I’ve also heard a lot about.
Regardless, the fact remains that Englander’s incompetent jerk was a story guy who didn’t draw; showing that Disney definitely had such people on staff, regardless of the talents of any given one. This contradicts your earlier implication that the system had no place for these people.

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Was Creeden partnered with Joe Grant? Mrs. Englander was too polite to give me the name of the person her husband told her about. She described the guy as a Hollywood type with fancy three piece suits who would rush to the front whenever Walt entered the room to do Sarah Bernhardt style “acting” and spew flowery prose to sell his ideas- Then after Walt left, he would grab his hat and tell Joe Grant to sketch it all up while he took a three hour martini lunch. He had demanded that Grant be his “assistant” because he realized that he was probably the most talented story men at the studio. All the easier to coast through the workload.

Apparently, this guy got his when he was asked to pitch one of his boards (which he had never taken the trouble to look at before the meeting!) He stumbled and bluffed his way through it trying to figure out what the pictures meant as he went, but Walt stopped him and called for Joe Grant to pitch his board instead. Joe hit the ball out of the park and the hotshot “writer” was out on the sidewalk with a pink slip in his hand before the day ended.

Great story. Mrs Englander was a very smart and entertaining lady.

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I asked one of my production guys what was wrong and he said, “George lost one of his extremes and he freaked out. I don’t know what the big deal is, it’s just one drawing. He can just draw it again.” I grabbed the guy and two other production assistants that were working in the bullpen and took them to George’s office to help him find the drawing. After a half hour of digging they found the stray drawing.

George dissolved into a pool of relief on a couch and the production assistants came back to my office to let me know the drawing had been found. They asked why one drawing was so important to George. I explained to them that animators don’t animate one drawing at a time. They have a stack going that they flip. They work various elements in different overlapping passes. The movement of the head might be animated with a completely different timing than the movement of the body or the overlapping action of the folds of his clothing. If one drawing is missing, the only way to replicate it is to go back to square one and recreate all of those passes one by one. It might take almost as long as reanimating the entire scene.

The PAs had a general knowledge of how animation worked, but the nuts and bolts of how it is actually accomplished wasn’t obvious to them from watching from outside. There are some aspects of the animation process that are more understandable when you’ve worked closely with animators. The process of creating cartoon stories is self evident when you have been able to sit in on story meetings and work with the artists organizing their work. Looking at the various documents and detritus of the process from outside isn’t really going to give you a full understanding of how all those pieces fit together.

The modern process of writing TV cartoons is totally backwards. I’ve worked on a show under that boneheaded system too. But I’m not talking about that here. I’m talking about the golden age…

Walt definitely wasn’t lying when he said, “We draw our stories, we don’t write them in words.” And Walter Lantz wasn’t lying when he said that all of his story men drew the stories and didn’t write them in his TV show. And Frank and Ollie weren’t lying when they wrote in detail about the process in Too Funny For Words. And Leo Salkin wasn’t lying to me when he told me that they tried writing scripts for cartoons back in the early days and it just didn’t work. Otto Englander’s widow told me that her husband would come home cursing the incompetence of a particular story guy who didn’t draw but was good at taking three hour martini lunches while Joe Grant drew his work for him. Bob Givens made a horrible grimace when I asked him about writing cartoons with words. He wasn’t playacting. And the Disney tryout book for Snow White which was given to prospective employees wasn’t lying when it said that all story men had to be proficient with drawing skills. This isn’t just PR on the Disney TV show. It’s a broad spectrum of animators from many different studios all saying the same thing… Back in the old days, cartoon stories were created in drawings, not words.

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