“A cartoonist’s sense of humor”: Gregory La Cava the Animator

Delightful illustrative image of La Cava directing his Katzenjammer animations from the August 1918 issue of Picture Play magazine.¹

It would be hard not to see the cartoonist in the films of Gregory La Cava; part of what makes his screwball comedies unique is that sense of human elasticity – a wonderful sense of cartoon reality in his players’ performances. A type of performance that feels as meticulously planned as it does off the cuff.

La Cava’s career as a cartoonist and animator from around 1913 to 1918 is crucial, I believe, to his identity as a filmmaker and his approach to directing. Surprisingly, it was something he appeared to have fallen into. As I discussed in my previous post about his studies in fine art, the career of a cartoonist came to La Cava after struggling financially to pursue his ambition to become a painter. Gregory La Cava, in a 1933 interview with Mary A. Roberts for Broadway and Hollywood “Movies,”² discussed his journey to animation:

“I’d work here and there. For a while I was a ticket taker in the Garrick Theater, in Chicago. Later, I was sort of a supernumerary with the Lewis Waller Repertoire Company, in New York. Even this slight theatrical experience was to prove a help later to me.”

“But, as you may know, Art is something that demands all of you, and canvases and oils take money to buy. I was up against it, for a time, and that’s how I happened to start making comic strips. Doing that, took all of my time, and then I had the idea of making animated cartoons.”

“Do you remember the old Mutt and Jeff cartoons on the screen? Those were mine. Working with those things, I started to write scenarios for other cartoons. In them, I treated the characters as though they were genuine actors, and applied the pictorial and dramatic values, as one would, working with people. While I was doing this, I was given the opportunity to write a series of two-reelers for Johnny Hines. They were successful, and because of that, I was signed to direct Charlie Murray in several shorts. That started me as a director. I’ve been working at it ever since.”

La Cava approaching cartoons from the perspective of a live-action motion picture director, and possibly vice versa, showed his interest in extending the limits of a medium. La Cava perceiving his characters as “genuine actors” shows this belief he had in his later actors being able to articulate clearly his artistic intent, and how he could transform an action or a character into being something human and believable. Winifrid Kay Thackrey, stenographer, script girl, and friend of La Cava, supports this idea that working in cartoons influences La Cava’s career in Hollywood, writing that he “brought a cartoonist’s sense of humor to motion pictures.”³ La Cava the cartoonist and La Cava the screwball director appear to go hand in hand. The zany antics of his later work in Hollywood can be traced back his work in animation. Nick Pinkerton’s discussion of La Cava’s comic beginnings for Artforum’s coverage of the UCLA Film & Television Archive presentation of a Gregory La Cava programme entitled “Our Man Gregory La Cava,” this blog’s unintentional namesake (it was too good not to have had been thought of before), also brings focus to how La Cava was first a cub reporter for the Rochester Evening Times, then began working as a newspaper political cartoonist (I believe La Cava was a political cartoonist for the New York World, as Morrill Goddard reportedly listed that La Cava worked with him⁴) after attending the Art Institute of Chicago and Art Students League of New York.⁵ In understanding the type of work her undertook, his time a political cartoonist specifically, his later presentation of reporters, political figures, etc., are brought to life.

La Cava’s transition to animation wasn’t too much of a drastic leap, as he observed it as a secure business in comparison to painting, and animation studios in the 1910s were based in New York City (Hearst International, J. R. Bray Studio, and Raoul Barré Studio), so he didn’t have to leave what had been his home for two years. Leonard Maltin discusses in Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons that Barré Studio was the first studio, and that Gregory La Cava and Frank Moser were the first cartoonists Barré hired in around 1914.⁶ A word that tends to be thrown around in publicity marketing is “pioneer,” which is an exaggeration most of the time, but in the case of La Cava he was indeed part of some groundbreaking work in animation. Barré Studio was commissioned by Edison to create a combination of animation and human reels; a live-action animation, in early 1915. La Cava worked chiefly as an animator from around 1914 to 1917, few of La Cava’s work at Barré Studio prior to 1916 has survived, however, the aforementioned pioneering work has survived. Preserved in Paul Killiam’s Movie Museum (1954), the segment “Cartoons on Tour” (1915), was one of several entries following The Animated Grouch Chaser in combining live action segments with animation. It can be found on YouTube, with commentary, ⁷ and on “Cartoon Roots,” a compilation of early cartoons, featuring Raoul Barre’s animations for Edison, released by Tom Stathes’ Cartoons On Film. I believe several of these shorts that La Cava was an animator on are included in “Discovering Raoul Barre: A Creative Mind, A Brand New Century.” It is more difficult to distinguish La Cava’s voice in the animation directed by another hand, but these early animations of La Cava are important to understanding La Cava’s later directing style and how his productions operated, as it was crucial for the animation department to maintain a cohesive environment.

The reason Hearst hired La Cava and Moser from Barre Studio was, arguably, not due to their talent but rather to their experience in the field of animation, which was still in its relative infancy. Maltin notes that in 1916, Hearst, who was “then enjoying great success publishing and syndicating comic strips, decided to open an animation studio to bring these cartoon properties to the screen. He called his company International Film Service and hired La Cava, Moser, and Bill Nolan away from Barré. LaCava was put in charge, and, possibly through his intervention, some of this studio’s work load was “farmed out” to Barré.”⁸ La Cava ensuring that the animators of his first studio received work was partially because of the lack of experienced animators at this period, but it was also something part of his character, as La Cava later sought ought and hired Grim Natwick, a friend from his Art Institute of Chicago days. La Cava in Hollywood habitually worked with the same writers, script girls, and actors of his previous films, what Thackrey called La Cava’s “stock company.”⁹ It is surprising that Hearst turned to a 24 year old La Cava to lead his comics into animation, but La Cava lived up to the expectations of weekly releases so presumably that youthful eagerness La Cava displayed in subsequent interviews was particularly noticeable. Isadore Klein over the years, as Donald Crafton notes, detailed his time working under La Cava at Hearst’s studio; that he started work as a tracer, earning $4-$5 a week, and in a short few months was asked to be an animator at $15.¹⁰ Crafton’s interpretation of Klein’s accounts depict La Cava’s running of the studio as pretty true to character: “The atmosphere at the studio could best be described as “ad lib.” Everyone played it by ear and, although there seemed to be a lack of organization, the films always came out on time.”¹¹ Walter Lantz, too, later said: “I don’t think La Cava knew any more about animation than we did. We might start with the idea of having to go to the North Pole, but that was as far as we would go in working out the story. There weren’t enough people in the organization to make the story department of a cartoon studio today. Bill Nolan would say, ‘Walter, I’ll pick up the scene with Happy Hooligan coming in from the left. When you finish your scene, be sure he goes out to the right.’ That’s all I had to remember. If I didn’t know, I’d bring him up out of the ground. If one artist figured out how to make a character jump, he’d do a jumping sequence.”¹² La Cava and his team’s experience resulted in this collaborative atmosphere as they were learning the medium together.

La Cava’s inexperience directing and managing a studio, and the freedom La Cava was given, resulted in an ambition to improve. The “off the cuff” style directing is one aspect to his style, his planning and intense involvement in the script another, show the identity of a meticulous animator–he wanted his films to be elastic and alive. La Cava’s involvement in nearly every stage of production, in the case of The Age of Consent (1932) casting director too with choosing a former secretary of his for the lead role, are indicative of his animation days and show an artist keen in making film identifiably his own. La Cava’s dedicated involvement in each individual component of the animation was remembered by his animation team. Adamson writes that La Cava did continue to work on the animation level and focused on story lines, too, “figuring that a little preplanning in this department could only better the impact of the finished cartoon. Rather than leave the whole business of creation to the individual animator, as was being done everywhere else, he began sketching out gags and sequences he wanted to see in the picture and talking them over with the artists involved.”¹³ Storyboarding animations was relatively new, and shows how it was naturally fitting for La Cava to become a live-action director.

The improvements in La Cava’s studio’s animations are notable in The Spider and the Fly (1917) and The Breath of a Nation (1919), which I have attached links to here and in the “Filmography” section of this blog, where you can tell that La Cava and his animators studied the movement and performance of Charlie Chaplin.¹⁴ In The Spider and the Fly, directed by Bill Nolan, there is an evident change in animation and the technical interest beyond regular static movement of the drawings. The story glimmers with the sly humour and interest in human nature that La Cava became known for. Happy Hooligan, in a Bartleby-like tale, refuses to work and follows a spider who begins building a web ladder to Heaven, which he climbs, to find he is expected to work there too. Thrown down to Hell, Happy still refuses to work. The short is much more engaging than I make it sound, as you can see in the screen captures below, and what is possibly most notable about the short is the Rembrandt lighting. André Martin discusses the impressive lighting and shading of Happy’s scene in Hell, that this sequence “set the stage for all the scenes of burlesque and controlled excess which would be the hallmark of American animated film for the next fifty years.”¹⁵

La Cava told his animation team that “We want our characters to act like human beings. We want the audience to see them thinking. We want to put blood in their veins.”¹⁶ The abstract movements of his animations were less to emulate human movement and more to create the feeling of life. The Breath of a Nation (1919) is, from this animations that have survived, his most human animation. Solely directed by La Cava, The Breath of a Nation is peppered with the wonderful wordplay and visual gags that La Cava became known for. In a dynamic that reminds of So’s Your Old Man (1926) and Running Wild (1927), this short responds to the newly established Prohibition Law, which came into effect on July 1, 1919, a few weeks after the release of this animation. Grim Natwick, and Gregory La Cava animate Thomas A. Dorgan’s cartoons to comedically explore the “alternatives” that quickly came into place after the establishment of Prohibition Law. Judge Rummy, ordered by his wife to attend to attend a temperance lecture, gets sidetracked with seeing numerous patrons of Silkhat Harry’s Soda Fountain acting increasingly erratic. Rummy talks to soda fountain owner Harry and finds out he has developed an alcoholic substitute. As Scott Simmon notes for the National Film Preservation Foundation, La Cava’s alcoholism lends a touch of realism, not only to this animation, but also to his later films¹⁷ regarding depictions of alcohol related liberation, and degradation, and sanatorium visits. It’s a delightful animation that is a lot more amusing than I make it sound, so, out of all of La Cava’s animations, The Breath of a Nation is the one I most recommend watching.

The focus on the minute is where this animation truly shines; such as a mouse once drinking the “alternative” paces around waiting to fight the cat, and the short ending with Judge Rummy, quite literally, jumping on the wagon is the perfect end to La Cava’s animation career and a brilliant taste of what’s to come.

The perceived importance of La Cava in animation ranges and this is mainly due to La Cava’s limited time working in animation, just about 5 years, and that La Cava’s talent laid in story rather than design. In Wild Minds: The Artists and Rivalries That Inspired the Golden Age of Animation, a wonderful book by Reid Mitenbuler that came out a few years ago that Joseph Elliott recommended to me, Mitenbuler discusses how the animations weren’t particularly well drawn.¹⁸ In the later animations under La Cava, it is the story and flexibility in comedy that particularly stands out, rather than the skill of the drawings themselves. Maltin similarly expressed that whilst La Cava was a “proficient cartoonist,” it was obvious that his talent laid elsewhere in the field of comedy,¹⁹ and that the creation process of animation slowed him down. La Cava’s penchant for wordplay hindered his early cartoons for Hearst; anchored down by speech bubbles, his early directed cartoons like Krazy and Ignatz Discuss the Letter ‘G’ (1916) show La Cava still learning to adapt to the medium of the motion image and the position of director. It is wonderful that one of his earliest directed animations has survived so that we can see this evolution in style and skill.

La Cava’s success can be attributed to his investment in animation as an art form and treating his cartoons as like real actors. There was a definite peak in interest in his work between the periods of 1917 and 1918, arguably due to Hearst’s influence, but the publicity surrounding the name behind the animations is particularly interesting. The suspected interest the public would have in the man behind the animation resulted in several interviews with La Cava. Columns, such as “Flickerings from Filmland,” described La Cava as “one of the best known cartoonists in the country”²⁰ by 1917. It’s possible if International Film Service hadn’t folded that La Cava would have stayed to become known today as a cartoonist, but it is evident in La Cava’s sentiments during and after his time as a cartoonist that it is live action films, human films, where he belongs. In a 1926 biographical column of players and directors in Hollywood, La Cava image as an animator pioneer is continued further, detailing that La Cava “became interested in the possibilities of combining the black and white sketches with real actors and in 1915 made the first 500-foot reel for the Edison company, using their stock players for his cast. The idea won favor and became extremely popular with film and audiences.”²¹ La Cava was a small player at Barré, so it’s an implausible claim that La Cava “single handedly” came up with this idea, but his noted interest and later animation directing style does show an interest in revolutionising the medium. A 1918 interview with La Cava for The San Francisco Examiner, conducted around the time his screen shorts began being distributed by the Educational Films Corporation of America, writes that his enthusiasm for animation did not come entirely from the financial success he gained as studio manager and director, but due to “his intense interest in his work and his delight in improving it,” which “are an essential part of him.”²² It’s true this enthusiasm is probably a publicity spin, but his pride in his work during this period is evident in his remarks later in his career. La Cava’s interest in revealing the labour and process behind each animation in these interviews is also interesting. Also in this 1918 interview, La Cava he tells the reporter that, “you have noticed, perhaps, that in a great many scenes of a cartoon only part of the figures are in motion. Head and arms may be in violent motion, but the legs and body will be at rest, as will of course the background. So, to avoid drawing or even tracing these stationary parts, they are drawn on celluloid sheets and are placed in turn, while under the camera, on top of drawings made on cardboard which represent different positions of the members in action.” La Cava’s interest in informing about the advances in animation as a comedic art form equivalent to the silent live action comedy of the day shows his invested interest in animation beyond the adequate salary comics gave him to support him and his family. A career far distant from his plans to be a painter, but his plans to be an artist are not.

Lastly, I mentioned how La Cava’s son similarly attended the Art Students League of New York, in my previous post about La Cava’s fine art studies, and I wanted to mention how I recently found out that his son also followed his father in becoming a cartoonist. Bill La Cava worked as a comic book artist in the early 1950s through Iger Studio and worked on Marvel comics, so, for any old comic collectors reading this, keep a lookout for La Cava.

Works cited:

Joe Adamson, The Walter Lantz Story: with Woody Woodpecker and Friends (1985), Donald Crafton, Before Mickey: The Animated Film: 1898-1928 (1982), Photoplay magazine (July 1926), Picture Play Magazine (August 1918), Broadway and Hollywood “Movies” magazine (October 1933), Winifrid Kay Thackrey, Member of the Crew (2001), Leonard Maltin, Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons (1980), Andre Martin, In Search of Raoul Barré (Barré l’introuvable) (1976), Reid Mitenbuler, Wild Minds: The Artists and Rivalries that Inspired the Golden Age of Animation (2020), Nick Pinkerton, “Comic Justice,” Artforum (November 10, 2013), The San Francisco Examiner (12/03/1917), The Plain Dealer (02/07/1926), The San Francisco Examiner (19/04/1918).

Notes:

1.  Arthur Gavin, Jr., “Stars Shot from Ink Pots,” Picture Play Magazine, August 1918. I believe the first time a fan movie magazine interviewed La Cava. ↩︎
2. Mary A. Roberts, “Gregory the Great: an interview with Gregory La Cava,” Broadway and Hollywood “Movies” magazine, October 1933. ↩︎
3. Winifrid Kay Thackrey, “Member of the Crew”, p. 183. Thackrey and her husband were longtime friends and collaborators. I believe, along with W. C. Fields, they were the closest to La Cava. ↩︎
4. Joe Adamson, The Walter Lantz Story, p. 33. ↩︎
5. Nick Pinkerton, “Comic Justice,” Artforum, November 10, 2013, <https://www.artforum.com/columns/nick-pinkerton-on-gregory-la-cava-at-the-ucla-film-television-archive-218396/>. ↩︎
6. Leonard Maltin; Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons, p. 12. ↩︎
7. Cartoons on Tour (1915), Paul Killiam’s syndicated “Movie Museum” in 1954, https://youtu.be/ADy4NXvaDgI?si=1AgxbEmcMgbU1r_l. ↩︎
8. Of Mice and Magic, p. 12. ↩︎
9. “Member of the Crew,” p. 303. ↩︎
10. Donald Crafton, Before Mickey: The Animated Film: 1898–1928, p. 203. ↩︎
11. Donald Crafton, Before Mickey, p. 203. ↩︎
12. The Walter Lantz Story, pp. 36-37. ↩︎
13. The Walter Lantz Story, p. 39. ↩︎
14. Ibid. ↩︎
15. Andre Martin, In Search of Raoul Barré (Barré l’introuvable), p. 11. ↩︎
16. The Walter Latnz Story, p. 39. ↩︎
17. Scott Simmon, Film Notes: The Breath of a Nation, <https://www.filmpreservation.org/dvds-and-books/clips/the-breath-of-a-nation-1919#:~:text=Running%20Time%3A%206%20minutes.,its%20release%20on%20June%2029.>. ↩︎
18. Reid Mitenbuler, Wild Minds: The Artists and Rivalries that Inspired the Golden Age of Animation, p. 37. ↩︎
19. Leonard Maltin, Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons, p. 15. ↩︎
20. “Flickerings from Filmland,” The San Francisco Examiner, 12/03/1917. ↩︎
21. Who’s Who on the Screen: A Series of Biographies of Players and Directors, The Plain Dealer, 02/07/1926 ↩︎
22. “Tells How Cartoons are Filmed: International Film Service Studio Furnishes Inside Information on Making Movies”, The San Francisco Examiner, 19/04/1918. ↩︎