That's a photo of me with Lou Scheimer, who ran Filmation Studios, producers of hundreds if not thousands of hours of Saturday morning-style TV cartoons. Lou passed away Thursday just a few days shy of what would have been his 85th birthday. He'd been ill for some time with Parkinson's Disease and he'd been declining public appearances. So this was not unexpected.
Filmation Studios is a controversial topic in some circles of the animation community. Here are some positive things you hear: They produced a lot of shows that a lot of people remember fondly, including the first Superman and Batman cartoons made for television, the Star Trek cartoons, Masters of the Universe, many different programs featuring the Archie characters and the show I thought was the best thing they ever did, Fat Albert. They gave an awful lot of work to an awful lot of artists and writers. In some cases, they gave new people an important break. In others, they gave old-timers a place to earn a paycheck after other studios had closed. Lou was very proud of all those breaks and paychecks.
Virtually alone among producers of animation for TV in their time, they fought to keep work in Los Angeles rather than farm it out to overseas houses. One time when the Animation Union struck over this problem, Lou — as a member — was put in the awkward position of picketing his own studio. No one would have faulted him if he'd not done this but instead, he went out, picked up a sign and marched around his own building, demanding that management (i.e., him) cease this pernicious practice that it was not committing. Lou had a good sense of humor and a friend of mine who worked long and hard at Filmation said, "To the extent it didn't get in the way of making a profit, it was a fun place."
The negatives? Well, they produced TV cartoons with all the restrictions and problems that TV cartoons had in those days. There were times when their shows were better than others who had to operate under all these handicaps and times when they weren't. Still, if you cringe at most animation of the seventies and eighties, Filmation offered you much to cringe about. Someone once said of Lou, "He knows how to take the impossible deal and make money off it." Some of his shows were produced on budgets that would have caused any other studio to say, "It can't be done for that" and pass. Depending on your point-of-view, it might be a negative that he didn't do that.
This article will tell you more about the history of Lou Scheimer and Filmation, though it repeats the oft-made claim that the studio never sent animation work out of this country. They did but only rarely and when desperate. And this obit in the L.A. Times will tell you more. So I think for the rest of this piece, I'll just tell you about my own path-crossing with Lou Scheimer.
Every time I saw him in the last twenty or so years, he'd throw an arm around me, hug me and tell everyone within earshot that I was one of the many talented writers who'd started with Filmation, done wonderful work for him and then gone on to bigger and better things. "I'm so proud of Mark and guys like him," he'd say. He was so happy and complimentary that I never had the heart to tell him the total amount of work I'd done for his studio. It was one script…and he hated it. I was offered work there on many occasions but, to put it simply, I always had better offers, both in terms of money and in the chance of doing my best work. Once though, I was trapped.
Filmation had a series that they were trying to sell to CBS. CBS was reticent to buy it. Filmation was getting desperate. They were counting on selling that series so they would not have to lay off one entire division. Lou went to CBS and said, in essence, "Tell me what I have to do to get you to buy this show." At the time, I was doing a lot of development work for CBS, which meant I'd write a bible (outline of the format, description of the characters and how they operated, sample plot ideas) and a pilot script for a potential series. I'm not sure who it was at CBS but someone there suggested I might be the guy who could whip it into a shape that the network could purchase.
I was sitting at home one day here when my phone rang. The voice on the other end of the line identified itself as Lou Scheimer…and it sounded like Lou Scheimer. I'd once interviewed Lou for a magazine called The Monster Times and I'd heard him speak at animation-related gatherings. Yes, it sounded like Lou Scheimer but it also sounded like my friend Frank Welker's impression of Lou Scheimer. Frank is arguably the best mimic alive and inarguably the most in-demand cartoon voice guy, and a few weeks earlier, he'd done a medley for me of his impressions of people who'd hired him, Joe Barbera and Lou Scheimer among them. The Lou Scheimer on my phone sounded less like the real Lou Scheimer than he did like Welker's impression of Lou Scheimer.
Certain it was Frank, I decided to play along. I said, "Hi, Lou! What can I do for you?" Before I realized it wasn't Frank, I was half-committed to write this pilot for the real Lou Scheimer. Later in the day, a fellow at CBS called and asked me, as a favor to the Children's Programming Department at his network, to do this development for Filmation even though the money was a bit on the thin side. So, blaming Welker and not myself of course, I committed the rest of the way. Filmation sent over what they'd done so far on the idea and I instantly saw the problem.
The show was overpopulated. As developed so far, it had about 30 regular characters, 25 of which didn't contribute much, if anything. The concept was lost in the crowd, so to speak. Lou had left the U.S. on a business trip and I'd been told to deal with his second-in-command, a lovely gent named Arthur Nadel. I told Arthur what I wanted to do and he said, "Okay, we trust you." Emboldened by that trust, I rewrote the bible so the show had but five regular characters. When I wrote up suggested plot outlines, I used about five more of those extra players as characters who might appear once…but I basically threw out 20-25 characters as superfluous.
CBS liked the bible. I got the go-ahead to write a pilot script. I did. They liked it and they committed to the series. This was all while Lou was still in Europe. A few days later, I got a call: Lou was back in town and would like me to come in and see him.
I went in, figuring there'd be confetti and party hats for my having sold the show and saved the day. Instead, Lou's first words when I stepped into his office were, "Ah, here's the man who killed twenty toy deals for me." I thought he was kidding but he wasn't. To try and sell the show, he had lowered its price down to a level he felt CBS couldn't refuse, a level that would force him to produce the show at a loss. To then get the show above water, he'd made a deal with a toy company to put out action figures of all the characters…but the deal called for all those characters to appear a certain number of times in the first season. The math didn't work if every episode didn't feature a lot of them.
Remember what I wrote earlier about how Lou could take an impossible deal and figure out how to make it work? Well, this show was an impossible deal but in pruning all those characters, I'd gotten in the way of what he was counting on to make that particular deal work.
I told him I was sorry but my assignment had said nothing about toy deals. My job was to get CBS to commit to the series and they had. Lou admitted I was right and I got a grudging "thank you" — but he also told me that he had to get a lot of those characters back into the show. Which is what he did. Once CBS had signed the paperwork and the show was officially on their schedule, he began convincing them the show needed this guy and that gal and this monster. Eventually, it was so unlike what I'd written that my pilot script was never produced. I had nothing to do with any of this. I was contractually entitled to a screen credit every week — "Developed for Television by Mark Evanier" — but I never got it and never made an issue of not getting it. I watched one episode and it had very little to do with what I'd done.
In spite of this, I liked Lou. He and his partners Norm Prescott and Hal Sutherland fought like crazy to build his studio and keep the doors open over the years. They were the little guys in a field where the biggies had the power to step on them but they succeeded, nonetheless. In a sense the whole studio was an impossible deal but Lou and his cronies found a way to make it work.