Anne Adams Feb 3 2019

My friend Anne Anne M. Adams is in a hospice and is not expected to regain consciousness. She did an amazing job of fighting cancer and the chemo worked very well for years. She was completely Anne until less than a week ago when she stopped being lucid. I worked with Anne at Degraf/Wahrman and Viacom, and she worked at many of the early "multimedia" companies as well. She really did not deserve this. It makes me very sad. The picture is from her farewell party less than a week ago.

dWi Logo Courtesy of Jane Stephan and Greg Ercolano

Greg took this picture of the dWi logo that was on the black film bag that Jane kept the remainders of her fabulous film cartridge give aways.   I will at some point take pictures of the cartridge and film strip and post them here.   Until then, here is the logo.  Thanks Greg.  Thanks Jane.

Impromptu deGraf/Wahrman Reunion 2015

I apologize for being so late in posting this. I am recovering from the shock of SIGGRAPH, my own angst about my career, lack thereof, and the oppressive heat.

Out of the blue, there was an impromptu dWi (deGraf/Wahrman) reunion party at Greg Ercolano's house on the Saturday before Siggraph.

If I get your name wrong, or leave your name out entirely, please send me email so I can correct this.

Attendees included (in no particular order) Greg Ercolano, Anne Marie, Eve Lunt (and her husband, Andrew), Jane Stephan, Sally Syberg, Maija Beeton (and her husband Andre Bustanaby), Jim Hillin, Ken Brain, Jay Sloat, Allen Battino, Joseph Goldston, Larry Malone (and friend), and Kevin Bjorke (and friend).

I arrived rather late in the evening having taken the train from San Diego.

People who could not attend due to being out of town or prior engagements or other responsibilities include Brad, Kerry Colonna, Liz Ralston, Josh Pines, Jim Goodman and Emily, Adrian Iler, Marc Scaparo, Sari Gennis, Lynda Weinman, J Walt, Tom Betts, Don Rhodes (CPA), Wendy Elwell, Anne Adams, Ken Cope, Steve Segal, and Tuck Tucker. Dale Herigstad was in Europe I think. Richard Taylor helped out.  Ladd McPartland had recently passed away. Not all of these people may have received invitations in the last minute rush.

It was clear that I was not the only one suffering from career angst or dislocation. This is unfortunate because everyone there but perhaps myself is a respectable, knowledgeable, hard working citizen. who deserves to be doing fabulously well in our new digital age, but that does not seem to always be the case. I find this fascinating and unexpected. Even if we are not all where we might want to be at this point, I would have expected all of us to be valued in the marketplace.

I was astounded to get extra dWi film cartridges from Jane. Everyone was stunned to see a video that Ercolano had of a walk through of dWi sometime during the HB Attraction Period. Greg Ercolano seems to have acquired a fabulous classic contemporary mid-century house. Alhambra seems to be an interesting, Lauren-Canyon like neighborhood.

Probably it is best that I said nothing much at this event.  But if I had thought about it, I would probably have said something like, "There have been several periods of my life when I have been lucky to work with a group of people who turn out to be extraordinarily talented.   And as time passes it becomes clear how fortunate I was to be able to work with all of you.   I also feel that for a variety of reasons that were not exactly under the control of Brad and myself, we were not always able to provide the working conditions that everyone deserved to have.  It is one of the reasons that I did not want to start another production company, or even another company, as I did not want to repeat the same mistakes and without proper funding, that was the likely result.  Again, I want to say, it has been a privilege to work with all of you."

But I was too tired to even think about this until everyone had left.

I slept in the guest house and could not sleep a wink. Apparently the racoons drop things on the roof every 15 minutes or so with a bang.

Obviously we need to do this again so that more can attend.

I would like to encourage everyone there (and those who were not) to arrange to get together with me in the next year so we can catch up in more detail. It has been too long.

I need to get a copy of the Ercolano video.

Photographs to follow.

Ladd McPartland 1951 - 2015

I am sorry to have to report that Ladd McPartland passed away last week. Apparently he died unexpectedly in his sleep from causes that are still being determined.

Ladd was one of the nicest human beings that I have ever met. He ran editorial at deGraf/Wahrman and then went on to the same thing at Sony Imageworks and ILM. He lived in Darwin, a ghost town in California that he and several other people occupied.

His brother Tim McPartland wrote the following obituary for Ladd:

Ladd McPartland was born on March 29, 1951 to John and Eleanor McPartland. He died peacefully in his sleep on December 20, 2014. Ladd was highly creative as a photographer, filmmaker and in the way he crafted his own life.

After graduating from Pacific Grove High School in 1969, he attended UCLA Film School where he earned his Bachelors Degree in 1973. Many years later, Ladd completed coursework and projects to earn his Masters Degree in Film. As an undergraduate, he directed, shot and edited a student film entitled “Stillborn” that was screened worldwide, including at the Cannes Film Festival. and earned him respect and recognition among the creative community.

Ladd also worked extensively in the film industry as an editor and visual effects artist. At Industrial Light and Magic and Sony Imageworks, he contributed to films including Star Trek: First Contact, Look Who’s Talking Now, Speed 2: Cruise Control, Jetsons: The Movie and many other theatrical features. Ladd was for many years the editor of the prestigious SIGGRAPH conference on computer graphics. He later was videographer for the Institute of Noetic Science in Petaluma.

Ladd was beloved for his wry sense of humor and charmingly quirky approach to life. From early childhood, his uniquely creative sensibility astonished and amazed all who knew him and he remained true to his own vision of life until his untimely passing. Ladd is survived by his brothers Tam, Tip and Tor McPartland and his sister Jan. His ashes will be scattered in his adopted home, Sebastopol, California.

I am not sure when this picture was taken, but I would guess it might have been when he was attending UCLA.

Apparently the audio from the memorial service was recorded and can be found at: 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nyvs1b62j0kvw4r/LaddMemorial.wav?dl=0

Darwin, Ca on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin,_California

Janie Fitzgerald in the LimeLight

It happens, now and then, that someone I know and like, keeps coming into my life, but only briefly, and then disappears. But as time goes by the person, who I think the world of, with hard work and talent, becomes a successful working artist. I am just in awe of this, to do this in this changing economy and with the wild technology changes is completely exceptional.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I met a woman named Janie Fitzgerald. I don't remember the first time we met, but it might have been at Limelight. Ah, LimeLight. One of the most glamourous and successful of the music video production companies, with headquarters in London, and an office in LA.

The year must have been 1988 and Brad and I were just starting deGraf/Wahrman and had been invited to present our reel to them. They were casting for a music video, were thinking of using computer animation, which was a completely new and somewhat trendy art form, and somehow we had been recommended to them. So Brad and I showed up and sat in the most amazing waiting room in the world. No adolescent male in his wildest dreams could have imagined the situation. We were surrounded, literally surrounded, by an uncountable number of some of the most beautiful young women in Los Angeles. I would guess that they were all roughly 18-24 in age, dressed to kill, and that there were not less than 20 of them packed into this little room while Brad and I sat and waited for our turn and tried not to notice the potent pheremones that surrounded us. Packed like sardines in a can, literally sitting on a bench squeezed between not less than 10 or 15 of these archetypal objects of teenage lust, candidates no doubt for some insanely exploitative music video, we were completely immune to any distraction from our devotion to 3D animation.

And lording over it all was the receptionist, Janie Fitzgerald, who seemed to think that Brad and I waiting in this room with these actresses was very entertaining.

She seemed familiar somehow. Had I met her at a party recently? Maybe.

The next thing I knew, Janie was working at Homer and Associates, a semi-competitor of ours and owned by our good friend Peter Conn. Now Peter at the time was married to Coco Conn, who was acting social director for the huge computer animation community in Los Angeles which must have numbered at least 50 people, if not more. For those who do not know my sarcastic style, the point is the community was tiny and a few years later there would be a tsunami of people, 2,000 at least, which essentially crushed and destroyed our little community the way an elephant crushes a bug. This was before that tsunami, when we all liked or at least knew each other and would go to parties at Coco Conn's house, or Jeff and Diana Kleiser's house, or at Chris Casady's place with Lynda Weinman, or at Gorky's downtown. (1)

This was in the days when computer animation was considered unproven and risky and before it was accepted by the entertainment industry.  This was back when an experimental computer artist could stand shoulder to shoulder with an animator for a Budweiser commercial and discuss the semiotics of digital production or the failure of the cultural myth.  This was before the fall from grace.   Janie was part of our community. I would see her now and then at these parties and it was always a pleasure.

Janie was working at becoming a professional still photographer. And so after about 5 years with Homer, perhaps 1994 or so, Janie went independent as a photographer, one of the most difficult fields that I know of to succeed in and yet Janie has been successful. She has never had a normal job since she left Homer and has been able to buy a house in Burbank, in other words she is a working professional photographer.

For some reason the Limelight incident, and Janie, was always in my mind. I am not sure why exactly, but she was.

Many, many years later when I was living in New York and had an office at the NYU Media Research Lab, perhaps the year was 2000, one night, perhaps 9 pm or so, I came to the lab and was walking down the hall, when I saw a woman walking towards me who looked amazingly like Janie. Not possible I thought. But yes, the lattice of causality that underlies the apparent coincidences of the material world was acting up again, and it was Janie, attending some special event as part of an Apple conference ongoing in Manhattan, I think.

Sill later, I found her on Facebook, and I have found Facebook to be very useful to keep in touch and see the progress of some of my friends.

So there it is, a successful professional photographer, and a really lovely person, working in this down economy and doing what she loves.

Yes, of course, it is obvious. I have had a crush on her since I first saw her at Limelight. In a room literally packed with actresses, starlets and ingenues I only noticed Janie, and it is only Janie that I remember.

But none of that matters.

Janie's personal web site is www.janiefitzgerald.com

Her professional web site is www.axisimages.com

___________________________________________

1. Gorky's completely disappeared when I was in NY in some sort of hideous scandal. But by that time the scene that I knew in computer animation had been destroyed by its success and so it really did not matter.

Gary Goddard and Succes de Scandale

This post may not be suitable for children of any age.

I have met a number of interesting people during the course of my so-called career. And many of them are in the news now and then. But recently someone I know has been in the news in a very awkward way and I have been debating what to say, if anything, about it.

A long time ago, deGraf/Wahrman did two very long, involved theme park productions for Harper Films and Landmark Entertainment. Landmark was founded by two partners, Tony Christopher and Gary Goddard and we worked mostly with Gary.   These two 70mm, stereo ridefilms for Harper and Landmark were among the last projects we did at deGraf/Wahrman.  It wasn't a happy time for anyone, the client or us.  By no means did these projects put us out of business, but it was certainly part of the bad feelings that seemed to be everywhere.   The projects got done, they are beautiful.  I do not have copies of either of them.   But in spite of the awkwardness I can tell you that I enjoyed working with Landmark and Gary.

Gary is a complete character. He is larger than life and filled with that sort of self esteem that can be measured by the ton. He directed Masters of the Universe (1987) which was arguably ahead of its time and plunged into creating a mammoth company called Landmark Entertainment to provide design and production services to the themed entertainment boom of the 1980s and 1990s. I know that something happened such that Gary was no longer associated but the company still seems to be there and doing well, at least as far as you can tell from an internet web page. I had and have confidence that Gary would transcend whatever problems he might be experiencing and be back on the scene.

He has, he believes, the common touch. The ability to conceive of and design and to understand what the average man and woman, boy and girl, expects and needs to see and experience in a themed environment. 

Anyway, Gary seems to be in the news these days in a big way. Unfortunately, it is not the best news. There seems to be some accusations about sleeping with ... well I dont know. It makes no sense to me. I just hope that none of it is true, and that he goes on to use this unplanned publicity to his advantage and achieve his creative destiny, whatever that may be.

Gary Godard (left) and Bryan Singer out on the town

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/new-sex-abuse-lawsuit-targets-701110

My Favorite Story About Bill Hanna from Jetsons The Movie (1990)

[updated 3/15/2013 to mention Al Gmuer and Jerry Mills]

Many years ago, our little production company, deGraf/Wahrman, inc (dWi) ended up doing two Hanna-Barbara Projects at once. How it happened is a little complicated, but they were essentially two completely different projects: a motion platform ride for Universal Studios Florida and about 40 or so shots for the first Jetson's Movie directly for Hanna Barbara.

Our client for the latter was Bill Hanna personally, and it was one of the most endearing and positive client relationships we, dWi, or I, personally, have ever had. I have a few anecdotes from that project that is the point of the post, but I think it will be helpful to return to yesteryear and explain what was going on.

At the time, about 1989 or so, computer animation was not used in motion picture or animation production.

You might want to reread the above sentence a few times in order to get what I am trying to tell you, and then add a very important phrase: except for a few brave souls who would every once in a while try computer animation and see if it would work for them.   But when you examine those projects, good or bad, you can see that Hollywood is actually in its way trying to find a way to use this new medium.

Bill Hanna and Hanna Barbera was one of those brave souls / companies.

They had after many years managed to get Universal to finance a feature film around the Jetson's property and we were going to be included. I was and am such a fan of the Jetson's I can not tell you how thrilled I was.

It is now necessary to set the way-back-machine, Sherman, to get into the right mood. (3) In 1989, you could not easily use PC's in production like you do now, you had to use much more expensive machines such as Silicon Graphics and Symbolics. We had access to a factory floor of Symbolics Machines in Chatsworth (1), and about a dozen of various types of machines in West Hollywood. If you needed to record to film you had to provide your own film recorder, no motion picture oriented services were available. (4)

This is a good dWi image because it is dark and ambiguous

Above, a very low resoulution screengrab of a smoggy day in the Jetson's neighborhood, and the inspiration for the sequence from Los Angeles

The project was to do about 40 shots that were going to be BG shots with 2D animation on top. In a few cases we would composite George Jetson into his Jetcar while it whizzed past. Animation included a flock of Jetcars in a traffic jam, a hero jet car elevating out of the traffic jam, the Jetson's towers elevating out of the smog, and so forth. Many people worked on that project at dWi, all of them with distinction. I don't want to get the names wrong, so I will provide the names at a later date. (2)

Now for the anecdotes. The first one is minor, the second one will be hard to understand if you have not been in this or a related business.

One day while we were in a story board meeting with Bill Hanna, I got up the courage to ask him why they did not do more Jetsons and Flintstones, telling him honestly what a big fan I was of them. I could not understand how there could only be one season of The Jetsons and the Flintstones, one each.  He just laughed at me, and said, "We loved the Jetsons and Flintstones too.   But we never got the ratings. On the other hand, Scooby Doo is in its 13th season and we are happy to be working".

13 seasons of Scooby Doo but only one of The Jetsons?  No justice, clearly no justice in this world.

So after a rocky start having to do with the other project, the one administered by Universal Studios Florida, the project from hell, we start delivering lots of shots for the movie. And things are going along and, this is so amazing I can't believe it, one day I got a phone call from Bill Hanna.

And he said "Michael, you know those shots you just delivered?" I said, "Yes". "Well, it turns out that they are what it is we asked for, and of course we will pay you for them. But we think we would want some changes, and we wanted to know if you had the time to do some extra shots and if we could perhaps get a discount given that these shots will be very similar to the ones you just did" I was speechless for a few seconds and then either I, or possibly the producer, said "we would love to".

But what you may not appreciate is how unusual this is: He was not trying to get something for free.  He was not trying to blame us (believe me, we were not perfect). He was thanking us for our work, asking us if we had some more time, and wondered if he might have a discount.

It was such a change from the unbelievably evil project and people on the other side of the house that I had to sit down. Wait, a client saying "thank you"?   It does happen, that people say thank you in that business, but it is not all that common.   

We loved working for Hanna Barbera and for Bill.  I am sorry he is gone.

While I am on the subject, I do not remember all our friends at Hanna Barbera by name, but two names in particular stand out beyond Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, and that was Al Gmuer (sp?) and Jerry Mills.  Just wanted you guys to know how helpful I thought you were and what a pleasure it was to work with you.  (I am spacing out on the name of a third person, who I think was the senior Art Director there, but I can do some research and find it).  

William Hanna (1910 - 2001)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hanna

Jetsons The Movie (1990)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099878/

_______________________________________

1. Because the factory was in Chatsworth, and Chatsworth was where the farms were when I lived in Granada Hills as a kid, I called it the Render Farm. Years later, everyone was calling their render farm a render farm, but I doubt it was because of me. I think this is just a coincidence, I hope.

2. I think the people on the project included Jim Hillin, Phil Zucco, Ken Brain, Jay Sloat, Ken Cope, Michelle Porter, Allen Battino, Craig Newman, of course Brad and myself, and the usual crew of people who helped out on all our projects like Liz Ralston, our office manager and later producer, Anne Marie, Carter and Ladd McPartland. Who am I forgetting?   Did Greg Ercolano and J Walt Adamczyk work on this project?  How about Tom Betts (Did I get his name right, it has been a long time).  Did Steve Segal and Tuck Tucker work on this project?

3. This is of course a reference to Sherman and Peabody from Jay Ward.

4. The more I think about this, the more I realize that this could not be true.  It is true that excellent scanning and recording was not easily available the way it is today, as a commodity service.  But probably had we wanted we would have found someone who provided a film recording service on a CELCO or DICOMED or other device.   Nevertheless, we felt we had to do it ourselves.

Statement from Thrift Store Art Exhibition by Jim Shaw (1990)

In the early days of computer animation in Los Angeles, the community was made up of people who were interested in both technology and the visual arts.  Among our community were people who were interested in making a career in the complicated and challenging world(s) of "fine art".  Such people included  Larry Cuba, Rebecca Allen, Jennifer Steinkamp, Lev Manovich, Jim Shaw, Victor Acevedo, and Michael Naimark to name just a few that come to mind, but there were others as well. 

One thing that distinguished all the people I know who are successful in that world, is their immense dedication and single minded effort. Each of the people mentioned above are notable in this way, they are some of the hardest working people I know.

I found in my papers the other day, a handout from an exhibition curated by Jim Shaw on the topic of Thrift Store Art. The year might have been 1990, and Jim was working with us at deGraf/Wahrman as an art director on a huge and completely incomprehensible Japanese motion platform based stereoscopic theme park attraction. He was working with us for the money, while he worked on his real career.

It was all typical Jim Shaw.

Unfortunately, now that the field has matured, if that is what it has done, the artists are off in their own complicated world and I never see them.

Here is his listing on www.artnet.com

http://www.artnet.com/artists/jim-shaw/biography-links

Google Books has "Thrift Store Paintings" by Jim Shaw published in 1990.

http://books.google.com/books?id=yxQDAAAACAAJ&source=gbs_similarbooks

Amazon.com has the same book, out of print, with the subtitle "Paintings found in thrift stores"

http://www.amazon.com/Thrift-Store-Paintings-Found-Stores/dp/1879158000

A listing on Google Books has "A Primer on Thrift Store Art" by Jim Shaw, ICA London, September 28 - 5 November 2000.

http://books.google.com/books/about/Jim_Shaw.html?id=AY5PAAAAMAAJ

The Josh Pines Job Interview Technique

Today when one applies for a job you are rejected out of hand either by a computer, or in some cases, by a human resources person who is no where close to being qualified to evaluate your suitability for the job. The old system of working through colleagues and recommendations and then interviewing the human in person (or at least by telephone) is a practice that was abandoned long ago in America, never to return.

But in 1989, when my partner and I were trying to build a new production company in Los Angeles, we had the naive belief that it was important to find out who was right for the job and to interview them in person.   This was usually easy to do because most everyone we wanted to hire lived in LA or SF.  But there were two exceptions, and both worked at R/Greenberg in NYC.   

This is the story of the interview of one of them, Josh Pines.  The story has become for me the iconic job interview, the one by which all others are measured.   I tell the story of this interview to potential employers (the very few that bother to talk to me, that is, before rejecting me) to see how they react. 

deGraf/Wahrman (dWi) had been in business about a year, maybe a little longer, and with a lot of difficulty we were being considered for the very few entertainment projects that planned to use computer animation in their production.  It may be hard to believe or relate to, but in 1989 computer animation was far from an accepted technique in motion picture or other entertainment industries (e.g. theme parks).   There were very few projects, and we got awarded not one, but two of them, and so we had to grow and we had to get film capability in place.

Back then, film recording of computer imagery for motion picture use was rarely done.  There was hardware you could buy if you could live with the record times, but everyone who had ever successfully used that hardware for this purpose, and there were three companies in the world that had, had written all the software from scratch.   If one was starting from the raw hardware, I estimated that it would take at least six months before one could start recording film reliably and with the kinds of control we needed. 

I am also a film snob, which means that I believed (and still believe) that most computer people know nothing about film and unfortunately (back then at least) most film people knew nothing about computers.   But there were a few people who I felt knew film the way a film person did, yet also knew computers.   One of them, who might be available as the others were not, was the person who had made the film recording work at R/Greenberg, and he was the person we invited to come set up high quality film recording at dWi.

So we flew him out to Los Angeles from NYC and he spent the day with us.  I forget why it took all day, but probably because we had to fly him all the way out here, we thought it was right for him to have a chance to hang with us and see if he felt good about it.   

dWi had just recently moved to their second location, behind the Margo Leavin Gallery in West Hollywood (what is popularly known as the Norma Talmadge barn, although I don't think that Norma Talmadge had ever actually owned it).  It was a big wooden barn with a back patio with offices on two sides of a courtyard.  One side had a second story, on that second story was a hair salon.  dWi moved into the bottom floors of both sides of the courtyard.

The courtyard behind the Margo Leavin Gallery in West Hollywood, where deGraf/Wahrman was located.  My office was on the left, the hair salon was upstairs on the right.

So Josh shows up suitably scruffy, like a good anarchist from New York City should look, and we talk to him.   Then people go away for lunch, and we had another meeting scheduled with him later in the afternoon.   When he showed up at that meeting, he looked completely different.  During lunch time, he had gone upstairs to the hair salon and had his dark and scruffy hair chopped into a crew cut and dyed platinum blonde.

I thought it was very amusing.  This is our kind of guy, I said to myself.    I think it was also a way for him to communicate to us that if we hired him, that he was going to do things like this; things that many people would never consider doing.  My interpretation was that he wanted to give us "fair warning".   

So I always tell this story to potential employers to see if they understand the reason I am telling them this story.  Its something of an intelligence test.   In my own way, I am also giving them fair warning.

Does Zardoz Speak About Gun Control ?

My friend Ken Cope brought up the idea recently that anti gun control legislation activists might have been influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by John Boorman's brilliant and under-recognized 1974 masterpiece Zardoz.

[Addendum: I forgot to mention that this film seems to have been photographed in 70 mm.  This is particularly noticeable in the opening sequences as Zardoz drifts over the countryside.]

Zardoz speaks to you, his chosen ones.

Who could forget Sean Connery running around in a bright red jock strap? Or his pioneering role in cinema as a male sex-toy and lust-object for the various women protagonists of this ground-breaking film? Or of the incredibly stupid hair styles and costume choices of the citizens of the Eternal City?

There is one scene at the beginning of the film that is particularly memorable.   In this famous scene, God manifests himself as a large flying stone head which levitates around the countryside making house calls to the various tribes, spouting both wisdom and ammunition.

God says (in a slightly abbreviated form)

               Zardoz speaks to you, his chosen ones.

               You have been raised up from brutality to kill the Brutals, who
               multiply and are legion.  To this end, your God gave you the gift
               of the gun, the gun is good !

               The penis is evil !   The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life to
               poison the earth with a plague of men, as once it was.   But the gun
               shoots death and purifies the earth of the filth of the Brutals.  Go
               forth and kill.

               Zardoz has spoken.

When I wrote Ken to ask him to check whether I had accurately represented his ideas here, he wrote: "I would just say that Boorman was an acute observer of the human condition, for various values of "human," and also note that correlation is not causation."

That's too bad, it would be much more fun if this faction had actually been inspired by Zardoz.

Check out these perfect 70s hair styles and outfits.   Are they dressing for the disco?

The Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbGVIdA3dx0

The Wikipedia Page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zardoz