Another good question from Brian Dreger. You should all thank this man because without him, this blog wouldn't be updated as often as it is…
In an old post you wrote: "…Joe Barbera thought of me as a live-action writer. At that time — it changed now and then — he felt live-action writers kind of automatically didn't know how to write for animation."
Is there that big of a difference, or was that just Barbera's paranoia/over-thinking of the writing process? I can see differences in maybe the length of scenes and the content between commercial breaks, but if a writer can write humor for a live-action sitcom, wouldn't that automatically mean you could do it for animation (provided you had an interest in the characters and their situations, etc). Is it just a difference in script structure, or do the jokes/situations need to be different?
There is/was an animated show called King of the Hill, and I always thought that the stories didn't really need to be animated because it was mostly just a sitcom about a family and their friends.
Is there a difference?
Well, first off, in writing — and also in acting and other arts — there's a tendency to define people by what they've done and especially by what they've done lately. You could be good at twelve different things but the folks who've only seen you do one of them might think that's the extent of your abilities. Each different kind of writing carries with it certain qualities that you may or may not be able to master.
One key difference between writing live-action and animation is a matter of budgets. If you write, "A 100-foot glowing green ape stalks up to a house and rips off the roof," that's kind of expensive and difficult to do in a live-action movie. In a cartoon, it costs exactly the same as "A man walks in to deliver a pizza." And in a cartoon, you're more concerned with visuals. You have to keep your characters moving and you don't want to spend a lot of time with them standing in one place and talking.
When I worked at or around Hanna-Barbera, there was an apocryphal story that Woody Allen had once been hired to write an episode of The Flintstones. This absolutely never happened but as the tale was told, he'd essentially written an episode of The Honeymooners but set in the Stone Age. It all took place in one room with the characters just talking and gesturing. Jackie Gleason and Art Carney were a lot more interesting and expressive in one room — and dare I say "animated?" — than Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble. Gleason's expressions and Carney's gestures provided the visual fun. Mssrs. Flintstone and Rubble couldn't do much of that but they could interact with dinosaurs.
Joe Barbera's beliefs about hiring live-action writers to write cartoons were based on past experiences…and those experiences were that some people who could write for Carol Burnett could write for Scooby Doo and some couldn't. But for reasons I'm not sure I can fully explain — and I doubt Joe could — there were times when they didn't want folks with live-action credits on their résumés and there were times when they very much did.
If you forced me to guess, I'd say it had something to do with what the buyers at the network wanted at any given moment. Saying, "We've got this writer who's worked on a lot of hit prime-time shows" impressed some people at some networks and it was a minus to others. When my most recent credit in television was Welcome Back, Kotter, that excited the execs buying cartoon shows at NBC and it may have been a negative with one guy over at CBS who, I think, only lasted in his job for a few months. This kind of thing changes as the personnel at the network changes…which sometimes is quite often.
When I was a story editor in animation, I employed some folks who were mainly writers for live-action and some who were mainly animation writers. Some in each category handed in great work and some in each category handed in pages that needed extensive revision. One of the writers I worked with on Richie Rich was Paul Haggis, who went on to a pretty impressive career writing and producing live-action movies. His cartoon scripts were fine, too.
But there was another guy — I won't mention his name — who had written some very successful TV comedy shows (live-action) but his animation scripts had the same problem as that mythical Woody Allen Flintstones script: All talk, no visuals. There are all these silly beliefs based on the notion that all writers who have something in common are the same…like "Women can't write action-adventure" or "Men can't write romance." The truth is always that some can and some can't. And even some of those who can't at some times can at others.
