Leon Schlesinger Productions

Where Warner Brothers cartoons were made!

OLLIE: And what is it they do?
JULIE: They’re animators. We make the Warner Brothers cartoons here. You know, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck…

Asked to identify the company associated with the cartoons that featured Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck et al, most people would answer “Warner Brothers.”

This is because these brilliant animated shorts were commissioned by Warners and would be shown in theaters before Warner feature films. But up until 1945, they were not actually produced by Warner Brothers, but by a firm called Leon Schlesinger Productions. It was at Schlesinger that Looney Toons and Merrie Melodies came to be, where Bugs, Porky, Daffy and company were born, and where many of the geniuses behind the Golden Age of Animation — Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, Friz Freleng, Bob Clampett and many more — came into their own. (In 1945, Leon Schlesinger sold the company to Warner Brothers. At that point the cartoons were produced as well as distributed by Warners.)

This legendary animation studio was often referred to as “Termite Terrace,” the name the animators called their previous building on the Warner Hollywood lot, a tiny one made of clapboard and infested with termites and other insects. After the company moved into the larger, better constructed space on Van Ness, the nickname persisted as a moniker for studio as a whole.

Leon Schlesinger was not an animator, but a businessman and entrepreneur who, in 1919, founded “Pacific Title and Art Studio,” the main business of which was producing title cards for silent films. In the early 1930s Schlesinger moved into the animation business, partnering with animators Hugh Harmon and Rudolf Ising to make animated shorts for Warners. (The label “Looney Tunes” was created to compete with Disney’s “Silly Symphonies.”).

After Harman and Ising left and took their characters and operation to MGM, Schlesinger set up his own studio at the Warner Hollywood lot and began wooing animation talent away from other studios — Friz Freleng, Bob Clampett, Robert McKimson, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and Frank Tashlin. He also hired composer Carl W. Stalling and voice actor Mel Blanc. “Schlesinger took a ‘hands-off’ approach to the animation unit, allowing his directors freedom to create what they wished, provided that the resulting films were successful.”

While a hard-nosed businessman who was tight on salaries and resisted unionization in the early 40s, Schlesinger had “a wry sense of humor comparable to that of his staff. He was a fan of Porky Pig and would regularly demand his presence in shorts to absurd levels, despite Porky being intended as a caricature of him; he also eagerly participated in Christmas gag reels produced by the studio in 1939 and 1940, which portrayed him and the rest of the staff to be comedically inept in their positions.”

(Quotes above are from the Wikipedia article on Schlesinger.)

If you want to get a amusing sense of Leon Schlesinger and his studio, watch You Ought To Be In Pictures. In this 1940 mix of live action and animation, a conniving Daffy Duck convinces a gullible Porky Pig (the studio’s undisputed star) to quit in order to pursue a feature film career at other studios. (Daffy is hoping to take Porky’s place as top dog.). The film not only features fun shots of the inside and outside of 1351 Van Ness Ave., but several wonderful scenes of Leon Schlesinger meeting with Porky or Daffy.

(It’s hard to find a full version of the film on YouTube. The above link is to one on Facebook. Be sure to click on the full screen icon. If you don’t have the time for the whole thing, this Link will take you a search page that lists a number of excerpts.)

What I love about “You Ought To Be In Pictures” is that its live action images of the studio allow me to imagine Ollie arriving at and entering the building… or Julie working away at her drawing board.

Gratitude to the late Martha Sigall, who worked in Ink and Paint at Leon Schlesinger Productions and other animation studios and who documented her career in the autobiography “LIVING LIFE INSIDE THE LINES: Tales from the Golden Age of Animation (2005).” Sigall paints a entertaining portrait of what it was like to work at this hotbed of creativity. She also confirms something that I learned from other sources: The animators at Leon Schlesinger Productions were enthusiastic and clever pranksters!