Over at the fine Cartoon Brew site, Amid Amidi has put up what he calls his monthly "things-could-be-so-much-better" post. This one waxes longingly for the days when Leon Schlesinger ran the Warner Brothers cartoon operation. Here's an excerpt…
Schlesinger recognized talent. He had the good sense of hiring Avery away from Walter Lantz. And then he built a team, partnering Avery with like-minded individuals such as Chuck Jones and Bob Clampett. But then he did one more thing that today's execs don't — he trusted his talent. He created the environment in which his talent could flourish; Avery, Clampett and Jones were willing to work all night because they knew their work wouldn't be trashed the following morning by Schlesinger. Sure, Leon may have spent his weekday afternoons playing eighteen holes or chasing the pretty secretaries around his yacht, but he'd already laid the foundation for the creation of great animated entertainment. The results of Schlesinger's business acumen? Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and some of the finest cartoons ever made.
I agree, natch, with the concept that good creative talents should be left alone to create. No argument there. But Amid has left out one other thing Schlesinger did. He allowed Jones and Clampett and Avery to make cartoons their way but he also paid them rotten money. And not only were the directors poorly compensated…so were the animators and inkers and background painters and storymen and everyone. Like many people who joined the work force during or around the Great Depression, they were all willing to work long hours for lousy pay and to not demand a piece of their creations, just to have any kind of job. They even, for a time, went along with the fiction that Leon Schlesinger — who couldn't draw or animate or write gags — was the head cartoonist there. Someone had to sign his name, a la Walt Disney, on the covers of the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies comic books.
So I'm not sure I'd salute Mr. Schlesinger under a heading of "Animation's Greatest Executives." The freedom he afforded his people was great…but couple it with the niggardly compensation, and you couldn't get anyone good to work for you for very long today. (And even back then, Schlesinger lost two of the three directors Amidi mentions. Avery left for MGM and slightly better pay before he did his best work. Clampett left at or around his creative peak and pretty much stopped making cartoons altogether. He instead went looking for a similar work situation, except with himself in the Schlesinger role.)
Ol' Leon enjoyed a position not available to most (any?) Animation Executives today: He owned his studio and had a sweetheart deal with his distributor so he couldn't be fired. As long as he kept his costs down (i.e., paid his people poorly enough), he couldn't not make a ton of money every month. Give any "boss" those terms today and, sure, he'd let the directors have all the freedom in the world, especially if they were handing him billion-dollar properties in exchange for minimal pay. Unfortunately, these days, creative types usually wind up working not for one Animation Exec but for many layers of them, all piled one atop the other in corporate America, all looking to climb over one another's body to higher positions. I concur that they micro-manage to an unhealthy degree but perhaps that's in large part because they get micro-managed…and tossed out if they don't get quick results.
This is not so much a disagreement with Amid as an add-on. Yeah, Schlesinger got wonderful results from his management style but I'm a little leery of holding him up as a great role model for today. For one thing, I'm afraid the people who now run the animation companies would learn the wrong thing from his example: Just the part about paying your staff poorly.