Old you is, folks, it's show tied. People say good money to
see this movie. When they go out to a theater, they want cold
sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters. In the protection booth, everyone
for tend. Podcasting isn't boring. Let it off. Love for you is
equal to a born out shoe, nago for you. It's like a cow
boy hanging around for you. It's like a velvet dry and positively the worst
piece of trash I have ever heard in my entire career. You lived before
the open road where you went? I didn't know, But now you said
your back. Isn't it good again? Isn't it Ridega? When you're going
account the day, thank you, mayor where you're prom must be, you'll
know. Isn't it good again? Isn't it ride? Why am I watching
this? Lost? No? I just don't know where I am. The
true path is not to be found outside but with Hey, folks, welcome
to a special episode of the Projection Booth. I'm your host Mike White.
On this episode, I am talking with Bill Plimpton. He is the director
of many things, which we definitely discuss during this interview, but we concentrate
on this nineteen ninety two film The Tune, which is available now on Blu
Ray and DVD from Deaf Crocodile. As I mentioned, mister Plumpton, I've
been seeing his stuff since the late eighties early nineties, so it was a
real pleasure talking with him. Thank you so much for listening, and I
hope you enjoyed this interview. Yeah, I've been a fan of yours for
years. It's so nice to talk with you. Wonderful. I love that.
Did you have stuff in Spike and Mike's a lot of them in Spike
and Mike and The Tornad of Animation also, and then of course I was
big and tim DV when I was younger as well, and seeing all the
bumpers and stuff that you did, I did a lot. So they never
gave me credit from those, which I thought was weird, but they were
set by a lot of people. Everybody knew my work, and they just
didn't know, Hey, who's that guy doing the color pencil all? It
must be the color pencil guy, that's till they knew. So I never
got credit on Poor Joy and that was MTV. I guess it was good
that I was seeing him at the animation festivals and stuff, so I can
actually make that connection. Yes, that's important. In fact, I showed
two excerpts from the tune on MTV the Push Jumps to Shoves, the two
guys fight which won the big prize that can that was a strange event,
and then the Wise Man and those were also on Torna and Spiking Mike.
I really remembered those. When I was rewatching the tune yesterday, I was
like, oh, these are Yeah. Where were you in your career when
the tune came about? I must admit that when I moved to New York
from Oregon and sixty nine, animation was pretty dead. There wasn't much going
on in animation Hannah Barbera, which I hated, so I felt, I
really want to be an animator, but there's no career there. So I
became an illustrator and I was somewhat successful. I did a lot of men's
magazines, Playboy, Panhouse through people like that, and then a lot of
straight arrow stuff New York Times and Rolling Stone, National Lampoon, places like
that, and I got by. But I just really had the urge to
see my drawings move since I was a kid watching Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons.
That was my goal in life, and it wasn't until nineteen eighty five
when this woman, Valeria vaz a Leski, who I did some brochures for,
asked me I do animate a song that her and Jule Spfeiffer had done,
and I thought, oh, this is my opportunity. She knew I
wanted to do animation, so she stepped in and hired me to do it,
and the film was quite successful. It played in cinemas all over the
US. It was very popular short film. And then once I knew how
to do it, then I did my shorts. I did my first short,
Your Face, which was a phenomenal success for the first film that you
do by herself. It's pretty rare that it's as successful as Your Face was.
And then I did was Chris Smoking How the kids one of those days.
Put them to a bunch of shorts and some music videos too, And
when I put those together on a video cassette, I realized, geez,
that's a feature film. I did a feature film in the last three years,
and so I said, why do I just do a feature film?
Is actually created one? And so my musician partner Maureen mckellarin, was hired
to work on the script and do all the music. We want to do
a musical along the lines of Yellow Submarines, because I love Yellow Submarine.
I love the Beatles, of course, and so we did a bunch of
songs and we wrote out of script and trying to sell it, and nobody
wanted to buy it, a course, because we were we had no money,
we were independent. Who knew who we were, We had no same
or anything like that. Fortunately, after Your Face came out of the Other
Felt, I started geting a lot of commercials and there were two commercials.
I got Trivial Pursuits and It's a Sweet And those two commercials gave me enough
money to finish the tune, and so it was finished around nineteen ninety one,
I think something like that, and we got into Sundance and Sundance I
think we were the first animated feature to get into Sundance because nobody was doing
animated features back then. Disney had done a few and maybe Japan, but
that's about it. And I remember going to a luncheon. They had a
luncheon for all the filmmakers, so everybody could meet and greet and exchange stories
and stuff, and this nerdy guy comes running up to me. Oh my
god, Bill Blimpett, Oh you're the man of your faments. I've seen
all your films I've seen. I had a kids one of those days to
Boomtown. That was the one I did independently, Boomtown. I saw that
and he started asking me technical questions about the films and how I came up
with the idea. And it turns out it was a Quentin Tarantino. And
this was before Reservoir Dogs had played, and as soon as that played,
everybody wanted to talk to him. He was like God was the star of
the festival. But we real mean friends. I see him in certain festivals
sometimes we hang out, but we never got to work together. I always
wanted to take one of the scripts that he never did to make an animated
film out of it, but I don't know if that's ever going to happen,
but anyway, it's It did very well at Sundance. It was a
lot of applause to state applause, and we were very popular there. But
it was an animated film that was not for kids, and the Siberians didn't
want to touch it. They said, we only do animations only for kids.
It's not a adult animation. They can't do that. And so I
was very disappointed that we didn't get a bunch of offers because that was when
Sundance literally was a big market. It was a all the distributors were there,
and we got one distributor, and the catch was the ship of the
film. But there was no money up front, and for an independent film,
everything is expenses, and all the money that US looked to get went
to expensive posters and film brands and all that stuff. But still it was
fun. We did a lot of festivals and Marina and I had some small
success with the tune, and it's still been in circulation. It still plays
a lot of places. And the Academy were really great. The Academy Board
of governors there decided to refurbish the film, so they got the negative,
they cleaned the negative, it re redigitized it, and thanks to them,
I got a beautiful new print. And that's what their distributing now on DVD
and Blu ray is the Academy refurbishment. We must come up with the idea
first, or do you come up with the drawings first? And then the
ideas flow from them. Well, certainly the idea we wanted to make an
American version of Yellow Submarine, which is one of my favorite films, and
with using all types of Americans like rockabilly, surf and music, country,
western blues, all the idioms that America has spawned. And her and I
wrote a script that was basically about a music writer or have you seen a
film, I'm sure, but this music writer, songwriter who has to get
a hit in forty seven minutes are he's fired? And so that was the
urgency where they had to do it. And once we did that, Marine
started doing all the songs, and I started writing the script with her help,
obviously, and I think it took about six months to do the script
and the plan out, the music and the dialogue. And we try to
sell it. Like I said, nobody wanted to buy it. So I
just said, screw it. I'm not going to sit on this for ten
years waiting for someone to buy it. I'm going to just make it.
And so I did all the drawing myself, every drawing the he's about forty
drawings. I did every drawing myself, and it's different techniques. Some is
paint on sales, and then there's also xerox the drawings water colored and glued
to the cell, and there's a color pencil on paper to the wise Man
and some other ones. So I wanted to vary the styles of the film
so that it would be more interesting and more entertaining, and I think that
worked out really well. Plus the music was different too, so there's always
something variety going on. And then I wanted to use a lot of my
weird sulil gag, try to get the crazy surmialism in there that people find
so funny. So there's a lot of ideas in there that I thought were
very funny. Some people didn't laugh, but I thought they were hilarious.
So who cares. How did you find your voice talent? My sound engineer
do some people, And I think I maybe put an ad in Variety or
one of those things, one of those magazines, And we had really good
voice talent Daniel Knighton It was really good, and some other people that did
Greater Marine did some voices. It was non fag. I couldn't afford that.
It was just too much money, so we had a hire actors that
were not fagging. Are you shooting this all on sixteen or thirty five.
No, that was shot at thirty five on our giant ROSTERM camera. One
thing is interesting is that I didn't know a lot of musicians either. I
wasn't plugged into the music world. And Marine knew soft musicians and they were
networked. I wanted a country Western thing, and so we got Hank Bones,
who now does almost online music with Marine, and Larry Campbell, who
I don't know if you know him, but he's one of the top pedal
steel players in the world. He played behind every little Harris and Willie Nelson
and a bunch of big names. He tours with all the biggies, and
I just thought he was a pedal steel player. But boy, he was
so good. That's from what I remember. You had Hank Bones, Larry
Campbell, was it Tom Malone? Is that right? Bones? Wow?
From the Blues Brothers band? He was good. He was very good.
And then Mark is it Rybo? Mark Mark Greebol. That's what I was
trying to remember, And I didn't know he was a lot of stuff.
People come to me, You had Mark Reebol on your band. Wow,
that's cool. So that was a real education for me. Are you still
doing all hand drawn things and then scanning them or yep, that's it.
That's it first the till and it wasn't scanned. It was shot on film
obviously. But from two thousand and five that's when I switched over to digital,
and that really made my life a lot happier. I tell people that
before digital, about seventy five to eighty percent of my costs went to technology,
going to the lab and getting the sound transfers and the video transfers and
all this stuff is a nightmare. Now like twenty percent goes to technology and
the rest of that money goes to my artists, which is what it should
be. That's what I said. So it was a nightmare doing the old
film technology. It just was so many roadblocks. You know, it's getting
that thing finished. Oh boy, I can't even imagine how that must have
been for you. You've got studio recordings for the voices, and then you
also have to worry about yes, music as well, and then yes wow
yes. And they all wanted money, of course, and fortunately I had
those commercials, those two commercials to help pay the way. It was a
tough time, but but I think I did five feature films and the old
technology. And it's interesting now because everybody's making their films on our iPad.
It's you can make a feature film there. And so now there's thousansands of
animated feature films coming out, not coming out, but being finished. And
I like to think that I inspired these guys that, hey, you can
make your own feature film by yourself. You don't need to book with Netflex
or Disney or anybody like that. Just go home, do drawing on your
iPad and scan it in. It's a really wonderful world. I can't even
imagine how much influence you and your fellow animators in the late eighties early nineties
had through things like liquid Television, which so many people say yeah and got
inspired by. I'm sure no. MTV was a big boost. That was
really I was really great working for them. I watch MGV constantly. I
really loved it back then. You're probably too young to remember, but it
was all the great music and the great art directors and the great animators.
That's where you see them would be on MGV. You do something in your
animation that I've always been curious about how you accomplish it, which is everything
pulses. There's that movement to everything. How are you accomplishing that? That's
because I'm cheap and lazy. Basically, if there's someone standing still, most
people would just have a scale drawing and they're frozen there. But I do
two drawings. Sometimes three drawings are the same post. I just retrace it
on another sale, and so I alternated on three. So there'll be three
frames of one drawing three frames and a drawing number two. Three frames are
drawing number three, and then let's just a cycle and it gives it a
throbbing kind of look, and you feel like you got to watch it all
the time because you may miss something. So it's a trick I use.
I didn't invent it. It's been around for a long time, but I
do use an extensively. Let's see between that and the colored pencils. I
could always tell what your work was as soon as it came up. Thank
you, Thank you. How has the process for you changed over the years.
You talked about the use of digital technology. You've made a ton of
short it's a ton of commercials and many more features since then. How has
that technology allowed you to continue your work? Work? The distribution is more
very now. There's a lot of markets to show my films and to sell
them, so that helps that I can make money on my films, and
that money obviously goes into the next film and so on. So leap looks.
But my process is this, after I do an outline, I'll do
the storyboards. In fact, I'm working on new short right now when I'm
right in the middle of the storyboards. And then once I complete that,
then I'll do an animatic. Do you know what animatic is that middle ground
between the two right? Maybe like moving storyboards exactly, moving storyboards with sound
and voices and music and stuff like that. But then if I approve that,
and sometimes I show it to people to get feedback, what do you
think about this? Is that you understand the idea and stuff, And then
I'll do the animation. We'll write to the animation, and I'll draw it
on paper eight and a half by eleven typing paper, and we test it.
And once I test it, I ink it with a ballpoint ten.
I love ballpoint tens are really great. And then we scan it on our
scanner and then my helpers they composite the drawings or they clean the drawings and
then they composite them and then they'll add color on top of that. Sometimes
I do the color when I draw on with color pencil, but other times
they do it digitally. They will digitally put the color on and that that's
a very quick way to the color a scene, whereas in the Disney days
where you had to have some artists do the ink and ink aligne outline the
black outline, and then the other artists would do the coloring all the all
the parts of the body. And that was very time consuming and they I
think that was the largest part of Disney's studio where the tinkers and painters up
to three hundred people filling in the color. But now we can do it
digitally. It's so fast, it's so quick. What was it like for
you when you would go into live action things. I love some of your
live action stuff like Hitler's Folly I think is fantastic. Thank you. I
thought that was really great. I may put it out there as sell it
actually at some point, because now the copyright lay a lot of change,
I can use Mickey Mouse and some of those characters without getting sued. But
I'll be honest with you, I haven't been so successful with live action films.
I like them. I think they're really good. I think Guns and
the Clack of Us is one of my favorites. Chilile was complete flop,
and then I did a little Curtis documentary about sixty minutes seventy gains something like
that, and that was really popular. I actually made money on that.
But the Hitter thing, I did it, and I think it costs about
ten thousand to make, and I never expected to make it money on it.
But I just thought it's such a wacky idea that Hitler was supposedly an
artist and wanted to be an artist. He didn't want to be a politician,
he didn't want to go to war. He just wanted to be an
artist and he was frustrated in art school, so he turned to cartoons.
He wanted to making joints move, and I thought that was such an absurd
basis for a film, that it would be lots of fun. I haven't
got any negative feedback on it yet. Fortunately it's been positive, but you
never know. But I've pained nine animated feature films, and I don't I
can't think of any director, maybe me as Zaki, who's an animation director
who's made so many feature films as I have, because usually in Hollywood they
use him for one or two films and they disappear because they want to get
someone younger or someone with different ideas himself. So really proud of the films
that I did. I'm proud of the tune. Started out this whole new
phase of my career and it was a semi success. I can't say I
got rich on it, but it was. It really got out there.
It was on video, cassette and d D and everything, and a lot
of people love it. A lot of people sing the songs to me.
I love that sort of thing. So for me, I was real proud
to make the tune. You don't seem like you're satisfied just doing the same
thing over and over again. Maybe it's an Angels was just such a quantum
leap. I was like, oh wow, yes it was. And also
cheating those both of those films that no dialogue in them, and I when
I give it a shot, it seems like I do. It's my I'm
not so good at writing strips. I just like to make the drawings,
and make the drawing is really crazy and bizarre. And beautiful, and so
if I why don't I make up idiots and angels and just have visual storytelling,
purely visual storytelling. And that was a success that got in a lot
of theaters. And then also Cheating did very well too. So but the
new one I'm working on now is called Slide, does have dialogue and it's
doing very well too, so I'm pretty happy. I've only seen the trailers
for it, but it looks fantastic. We're still doing a festival circuit and
so the producer, my producer, i should say, doesn't want us to
release it yet to regular people. They want to keep it under wraps.
So that's the plan. But we're hoping it comes out this time sometime that's
fall. How many years does it take to make a feature film for me,
it takes between two and a half and three years, but Slide took
seven years because of COVID. In the middle of working on it, COVID
hit and I had to shut down the studio and all my markets tried up,
movie theaters, film festivals, comic cons, things like that. They
all went away, so I had no money. So I had to take
commercial work like publicity and music videos and I worked on some documentaries and things
like that, so that's why it took so long, and I'm just finishing
it now. And then I had no money. I was really in debt
making this film, extremely in debt. And now I'm finally starting to stop
paying for flight and work and started doing commercial work and starting to pay off
the bills. So that's a good feeling that I can do that. And
also the film is very successful so far. It's gotten five awards and five
festivals. So really up popped in about the future. Mister Plimpton. Thank
you so much for your time. This has been so great talking with you.
You know, likewise likewise you seem to know what you're talking about.
That's your correct Thank you. I appreciate that. Okay, all right,
thank you so much, and hopefully we'll talk about release days. Okay,
all right. Your face is like a song, your sweet eyes whisper,
and now to sing alone, your feet choose on. Let's sing together every
month to ju your face hot. It makes me a happy fellow, no
singing out the pelon, no longer lonely loving you. Only your leaves with
mine will rise, and when they touch me, it's a something divine,
your cheap it choly show weave me a melody, a melody somewhere your face
ys home makes me a happy fellow. Go singing or the call London Loly,
loving you all me