The Unhinged Animator: “Tex” Avery – Fred “Tex” Avery came to Hollywood at age 20 with friends from his hometown. Not finding employment, they soon went back home but Avery stayed in the film capital, loading produce on trucks and sleeping on the beach at night. Several years after landing a job at the Walter Lantz studio, an office prank firing papers clips across the aisles resulted in Avery’s losing sight in his left eye. Some critics have hinted that this lack of depth perception contributed to the flat plane look in his seminal work, although almost from the beginning, he and his animator ilk supported a deliberately flat-plane technique. It was a style that was the antithesis of the Disney Studios’ hyper-engineered multi-plane animation evident in their feature length films such as Snow White.
A Three Act Journey In The Land Of The Screenwriting Gurus – Among qualified experts, the screenwriting guru stands alone in his level of exaltation and influence. To obtain his title, the guru must have mastered the elusive craft of screenwriting, which sometimes, though not always, entails the actual selling of a screenplay. Always, though, it involves writing a book.
