Frank Tashlin
From Free net encyclopedia
LtPowers (Talk | contribs)
/* Animator */ disambiguate link
Next diff →
Current revision
Frank Tashlin (February 19, 1913 – May 5, 1972) was an American animator, screenwriter, and director.
Animator
Tashlin drifted from job to job after dropping out of high school in New Jersey at age 13. In 1930, he started working for Paul Terry as a cartoonist on the Aesop's Film Fables cartoon series, but he was just as much a drifter in his animation career as he had been as a teenager. He moved to Hal Roach's studio in 1933 and started his own comic strip that same year. Tashlin joined Leon Schlesinger's cartoon studio at Warner Bros. in 1936, where his diverse interest and knowledge of the industry brought a new understanding of camerawork to the Warners directors. Tashlin was fired from the studio when he refused to give Schlesinger a cut of his comic strip revenues.
He worked briefly for Amadee J. Van Beuren, and in 1938, he worked for Disney in the story department. Afterward, he served as production manager in the animation studio of Charles Mintz in 1941. Tashlin rejoined the Warner directors of "Termite Terrace" in 1943. He stayed with the studio during World War II and worked on numerous wartime shorts, including the Private Snafu educational films.
Director
Tashlin quit animation for good in 1946 to become a gag writer for the Marx Brothers and Lucille Ball (among others) as well as a screenwriter. (His role at Termite Terrace was taken over by Robert McKimson.) His live-action films still betray elements of his animation background; Tashlin peppers them with unlikely sight gags, breakneck pacing, and unexpected plot twists. During his career, he wrote films for Bob Hope and Red Skelton.
Beginning with the 1956 film The Girl Can't Help It, with its satirical look at early rock and roll, Tashlin hit a stride of commercial successes with the Martin and Lewis film Hollywood or Bust in 1956, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? in 1957, and four of the best Jerry Lewis early solo films. Many of these have attained cult status. Rock Hunter's broad, colorful satire of Madison Avenue advertising was compared to the work of Preston Sturges, and Tashlin came to the approving attention of the French Cahiers du Cinéma in reviews that the director dismissed as "all this philosophical double-talk."
In the 1960s, Tashlin's films lost some of their spark, and his career ended in the latter part of that decade, along with that of most of the stars he had worked with. His final film was The Private Navy of Sgt. O'Farrell starring Bob Hope and Phyllis Diller in 1968. His film Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? was placed in the National Film Registry in 2000.