An Interview with Leonard Starr
Submitted by: JGauth1458@aol.com
*You can visit his
website at www.thelastchance.com*
Someone I knew,
knowing that Leonard Starr and I are friends, asked about a couple of entries
on the "Thundercats" site, concerning Ted Wolf's daughter reminiscing
about sitting around their dining room table creating the characters in the
series. I'd dropped in on Leonard in the studio he was sharing with Stan Drake
often in the 80s when in addition to writing and drawing "Annie",
collaborating with Stan on "Kelly Green"; he was also working on
"Thundercats". I remembered him working on the "Bible",
drawing a map of 3rd Earth, there was a drawing he did of Lion-O looking
through the eye holes of the 'Sword of Omens' with the 'Eye of Thundera' to
give him 'Sight beyond Sight', that kind of thing. There were also photocopies
of Tcat type characters. I know, of course, that the
opening credits of the show say 'Created by Ted Wolf", but had no doubt
that Leonard was solely responsible for developing the show in the form that
went on the air. Still, I was remembering events of 20 years or so ago, so I
phoned him to ask about it, but then I thought, wait - the next time I come
over I'll bring a tape recorder so that you tell your side. He said "My
side? I have no side. It was a job and I did what I did, but okay if you want
to take the time."
So - a week or so later, I live farther from him now, I came over to tape the
session. (The clarifications in parentheses are mine.) I also brought printouts
of the Ted Wolf items from the Internet. He looked at them and laughed.
LS: "Ted Wolf? There really was a Ted Wolf? The first I ever heard of him
was when I saw his name on the opening credits of the first show."
(Leonard doesn't spend much time on the internet, just uses his PC for Email,
checking the programs on his local classical music station, research for
something he's working on, etc. He was surprised when I told him there was a
lengthy site about "On Stage". I'd be surprised if he ever checked it
out.)
Me: "So you never met him."
LS: I thought it might be a manufactured name, maybe for copyright reasons,
like…what was it…yes, "Alan Smithee", a
pseudonym movie directors used when they felt their work was tampered with or
for whatever reason didn't want their actual names on the credits."
Me: So…Wait. Let's go back to the beginning. How did you get into
"Thundercats"?
LS: Oh…Jules Bass (of Rankin/Bass) called me one day, said something had come
in that he'd like me to take a look at, but that they were in a bit of a time
crunch. Could I come in the next day? As it happened, there was an event at the
Illustrators (The "Society of Illustrators" in New York) that night, and we'd be coming in for it. Great.
If I could drop by the office first he'd wait for me. So, sure, I dropped Betty
(L's late wonderful wife) off at the club on the way, and got to R/B just
before six. Everyone was gone of course, just Jules there, and he had an easel
set up with posters, about a half dozen of them, with fully rendered drawings.
At least two were of Catpeople, a Lion man I
remember, maybe a Panther man, at least one Reptile man, a rendering of what
would later become the Thundercar or maybe the
Thundertank, and…I don't really remember what else except for the Thundercats
logo with that terrific lettering, rendered in color as all the posters were.
(These were probably the photocopies I saw in Leonard's studio) I think that
striking logo was as instrumental in the show's success as anything else. In
essence, what was happening was that they were brought this material, there was
a good chance of getting a show based on it on the air, but they didn't know
what the hell to do with it. R/B's long experience in animation had been
entirely in Saturday morning shows and specials and those, like "The
Jackson Five", "The Osmonds", would
have two musical numbers per half hour show, whatever plot there was pretty
much connective tissue to fill what remained of the 25 minutes without
commercials. This project would be for direct syndication, five days a week
from the outset. It would require a basic setup of situation and characters
that were capable of extension, very much like the way a continuity comic strip
works, my ballpark. Did I have any thoughts on what was there, Jules wanted to
know. What came to me immediately was Egypt, because of their ancient animal
Gods, jackal, cat, etc. It could also bring in mummies, tombs, things that twigged
me when I was a kid. The Tcats might be survivors of
a dying planet, etc. Could be a way to go, Jules said.
Could I do a treatment? But quickly, there was some kind of time pressure. So I
said I'd give it a shot, did it the next day, just a few pages, pretty much a
précis of what the first show would turn out to be, the imminent destruction of
Thundera, their Exodus and so on. Jules had wanted a team so I added the other Tcats, their specific weapons, Snarf for comedy relief,
named them, also the bad guys, Slythe, Monkian, Jackalman, etc, called them
Mutants because it was a word that resonated with kids as bad guys… like the Tcats weren't mutants, one critic later wanted to know?…
Mumm-Ra the Immortal…no, the Everliving because
"Immortal" had a benevolent sound to it, anyway, as the overarching
evil that awaited them on Third Earth, which was what remained of Earth after
two nuclear holocausts. I sent it in before the PO closed, and heard from Jules
the next day, saying they liked it so much they were even going to pay me for
it and could I come in the next day. I did, and when I got there Jules had had
a Deal Memo prepared, specifying a certain sum for agreeing to the Memo,
another for completion of a "Bible" which is a basic format for a
series of 65 half hour shows for other writers to base their scripts on,
another sum in the event of commencement of production, a price for each
following script, a specific percentage of any merchandising revenues, all else
to be further defined in, quote, "a more formal and complete contract now
in preparation", and so on. The merchandising percentage was okay, but
merchandising is iffy. I was more interested in residuals, like the downward
sliding scale on the contracts of the previous shows I'd done for them, so much
for the first run, less and less for the second, third, etc. showings, so that
if the Tcats ran at all, there would be additional
revenue. Jules said we'd work that out when we did the formal contract. Oh- and
there were consulting fees, as I'd asked him if he'd like me to ride shotgun on
the scripts. Oh, God yes! he'd said. It all seemed
okay, I'd done some specials that Arthur Rankin had asked me to write and
they'd all gone well, no money problems, so I signed it. For openers could I
give them a two-hour Tcat special, one that could
also be shown as four half hour and/or one hour shows?
Sure, so I rearranged my schedule, put in a couple of really heavy days and
brought it in. Wait…my memory is a bit hazy here…I don't remember if I did the
Bible or the show first … Maybe the show because we didn't know where we were
with this yet. The script went in pretty much unchanged, except for some vital
additions by Jules. He had Thunder…Thunder…THUNDER precede Thundercats HO!, the mummy Mumm-Ra transform into the monster Mumm-Ra and
for the Sword of Omens to grow and flash when Lion-O did the call. The
holocausts were cut because that might scare kids… Oh- he also changed Lion-L
as I had it because of a possible conflict with the toy train people, to
Lion-O. Um…Ah- he also thought there should be some juvenile Tcats, hence Wilykat and Wilykit, and…that was about it. Jules cast the actors to
record the script, got a composer to do that first rate score… I think Jules
himself did the lyrics… and off it went to Japan for animation. It doesn't seem
now as if it was very long before the film came back. An assistant ran it for
me the next time I went in, and it looked great. The Japanese had done a
terrific job designing the characters, the animation itself equal to or better
than anything else around, the only error a voice identifying "a tiny blue
planet" that had been colored green. More important to me was that my
credit should have been "developed by" in addition to "head
writer". Asked Jules about it, he said they had to do it that way. Why? He
shrugged as if he didn't really know himself, it was
out of his hands. Okay - I wasn't envisioning a further career in animation, I
had my own gig, and so the credit didn't really matter.
Me: And the show went on right after that?
LS: Soon anyway, though if it was shown in my area I wasn't told about it, but Dik Browne (the late great Dik
Browne - Hi & Lois, Hagar) called me from Sarasota, the family had seen it,
liked it a lot, but - it had been shown at 8.00 PM. Wasn't that a bad time slot
for an animated kid's show? Was it ever! The kiss of death! I figured that was
that, but a day or two later Dik called again. The
weekly ratings had been published in their local paper, Tcats
among them, and the ratings were excellent! The numbers must have been pretty
much the same wherever else it had played, because Jules called me to say it
was a GO and I guess it was at this point that I wrote the Bible. I also
decided that a map of Third Earth would be helpful to the subsequent writers so
I designed that as well…and…I think I started right in working on scripts.
Three scripts a week would have to be recorded by the actors in New York and
sent to Japan, so we had to start finding writers, not easy, because most of
the experienced animation writers were in California, plus, I discovered later,
their price per script was roughly twice what R/B paid. Anyway, somehow scripts
started coming in and …(laughs) …I made a discovery!
Writers hate to write! I shouldn't have been surprised because I'm one of them.
Dorothy Parker said it for all our ilk, to wit,
"I hate to write, but I like have written" Ah yes - it's that blank
sheet of paper. Hemingway called it "the White Bull". It was almost
as if some of the scripts were written the night before deadline. I'd send them
back for rewrite at first but then time would run out and we'd be hung up, so I
ultimately rewrote them myself, getting to see dawn from the wrong end a lot,
but hey- I'm a comic artist so it was by no means the first time. Jules must have
handled some of the editing because there was no way I could have could have
done it all on my own.
Me: So it was essentially you and Jules getting the scripts out.
L. I guess so, but it was just as well that we didn't have that schedule killer
- Leeway! Not that it didn't get scary. I remember
Jules' calling me one Saturday with a problem, adding "I'm getting too old
for this ****!". Just generally, it seems to me
now that I was on the phone half the day with Jules or writers or the really
first rate production staff. Stan was finding it disruptive, so I finally had
to take another studio down the hall to handle it all.
Me: I remember. You had Frank (Frank Bolle, Winnie
Winkle, Apt. 3G, etc. one of L's oldest and closest friends since their high
school days) help you on Annie at one point.
L: Yes, he penciled a sequence from my roughs and had to push his own killer
schedule around to do it. Well -that's Frank.
Me: Yes, I met him through you and now he's recently done the illustrations in
the book I wrote with Ed Martin, "The Last Chance".
L: Oh, right. Hope it's doing well, Jim. Uh…Anyway, we got through the first 65
shows, it was a hit, we were tired but exhilarated, and then another, I
think…40 shows were ordered, but now we were in a groove so it was going more
easily.
Me: You were on it for more than a year, weren't you?
L: Oh, sure, and here comes the fun part. After about two years I asked Jules
about residuals again. "Oh, we can't give residuals on a cheap show like
this." Oh? Well, has that "formal contract in preparation" been
prepared yet? "Look,"says Jules, "If
you want to sue us, sue us. It'll cost you a lot of money and you'll
lose." Huh. He jumps right from "how about the contract" to
"Sue us"? Oboy. There's a Mexican curse that goes, "May your life be
filled with lawyers", and here it was, lawyer time. So I took my sad story
to my local attorney, and he set me up with one of those lawyer factories in
New York, five floors or so on Madison Avenue. It turned out that the guy assigned
to my case, I forget his name, had represented R/B in a suit against Joe Levine
(Joseph E. Levine, the producer that had bought up those shlock
Italian muscle movies, "Hercules" et al, had them dubbed into English
and made a mint. He later, crazily enough, also produced "The
Graduate") and won it for R/B. Well, great, I figured. They know each
other, they'd had a good experience, they'll talk it out, come to some kind of
satisfactory resolution, and that will be that.
Ho ho. He set up a meeting with Jules, and called
later that day. How did it go? He said I asked Jules, 'What about this paper,
the Deal Memo?'. Jules said, "I don't know."
Oh? "What shall I tell my client"? Jules said, "I don't
know." So. There it was. There was nothing for it
but to sue. Papers were served, all that, lawyer stuff.
In the event, the suit didn't get further than the deposition. R/B's lawyer
started out by saying that Stan Weston, had told him
that, no question, I was almost totally responsible for the show in its present
shape. Stan Weston? He was a guy who had a company called "Leisure
Concepts". He'd shown up at the R/B offices once, maybe twice after the
show was a hit, happy as hell with the way things were going, complements to
me…nice charismatic guy. How did his name come into the suit? If he had any
connection to the show it wasn't mentioned. Did Tcats
come to R/B via "Leisure Concepts"? Well, who cares.
It was a promising beginning, but the promise quickly fizzled. It turned out
that a Deal Memo is a binding contract, news to me, despite having signed many
a contract in my life. It being my conceit that I could read a short sentence
in English comprised of words I was familiar with, I didn't realize that
"A formal and complete contract now in preparation" turned out to be
one of those complex legal terms that translates as
"Up yours." I did get the specified percentage of the merchandising,
future plus the revenue that had been accumulating for…Let's see…the date of
the Deal Memo was March '84, the suit was in March '87 to give you the time
frame…minus of course, a third to the lawyers.
Me: Bummer. You had to be furious!
LS: I guess so…but I mostly remember being disgusted, that such a fascinating,
frustrating, exhausting, exhilarating, ultimately successful venture should have
come to such a shabby end.
Me: This whole thing seems to have been entirely with Jules Bass. Boy, you must
really hate him!
LS: (laughs)…Jim, Jim…These stories are Legion in that business. In the
"How to be a Producer Handbook" a primary rule is that if you aren't
hated, you're not doing it right! Still - Jules goofed. I was so sure I was in Friendlyville,
that I would have gone into it with a verbal agreement and a handshake
and he could have aced me out of every cent, so there you go - nobody's perfect.
Me: You haven't said anything about Arthur Rankin. Where was he in all this?
LS: Arthur was barely around at all. I assumed that he was handling the
animation end in Japan, and I guess he was, because one of the very few, I
think maybe three, times he was there, he sat in at a writer's conference and
said… actually I think the only thing he said during what was a long
conference, was that the Japanese animators had requested that we scratch the
word "hordes" out of our dictionaries. We were all guilty of loading
the scripts up with characters, even me, who should have remembered that all
those mob scenes we wrote would have to be drawn.
Me: It doesn't sound like he had much say about the creative end in all that
time.
LS: Well…he may have had his hands full behind the scenes, who knows…but come to think of it all the other shows I'd done
for Arthur seemed to be for him alone. Jules was barely around for those,
so…Anyway, Arthur is a very likable guy, nice quirky sense of humor…I knew him
socially, was always pleased when he called me to do a script. It was a nice
change from my regular routine, fun to see it animated. Always
a pleasant experience.
Me: So you think the way it ended was all Jules' doing?
LS: Oh, how can I know. Maybe each had autonomous say
on their individual projects, but - Arthur's name was on the door. I would have
thought that he could resolve the whole sorry business with a phone call. There
was no call.
Me: So that was that…Oh- to backtrack, what do you think now that you know there
actually was a Ted Wolf?
LS. (Laughs) The actual Ted Wolf! Oh…what is there to think? You know…I just
saw 'Mystic River' and the crux of this longish movie is a very short scene,
almost a throwaway, where the daughter of Sean Penn's character comes into the
back of their grocery store to tell him she's leaving for the day. Penn is at
his desk, doing accounts or whatever, his back to her.
She comes up behind him, puts her arms around him, kisses
him on the forehead. Penn turns his head towards her, smiles, says "Have
fun" or something, his mind still on his deskwork. With just that,
absolutely no shmaltz, you feel this… profound bond
between them. Childless myself, I envied it, as I sometimes have of my lifelong
friends and their kids, feeling that I'd really missed something, something,
oh... primal…
Me: That kind of relationship isn't always the rule…
LS: Oho! Tell me about it! There were some real horror stories among them, made
me feel I was well out of it, but oddly, and happily, they all, with one tragic
exception, shaped up. In their forties now, pushing fifty some of them, they've
become responsible citizens, married with kids of their own, just as square as
the rest of us. The relationship between Ted Wolf and his daughter seems to be
one of the best ones though. One wants to be part of that gemutlich
setting around the dining table. Ted Wolf's bio shows him to be an estimable
guy, he clearly came up with the concept, received royalties for it, which
you'll have noticed, they don't hand out willy-nilly.
His daughter should never have occasion to be less proud of him. 'Created by
Ted Wolf' will be the opening credit on 'Thundercats' as long as it's being
shown. His is part one of the story, mine is part two. Part three is that it's
still being enjoyed, so all in all…a happy ending.
* * * * *
Transcribing the tape, I saw that I had answers to questions I didn't know I
had, and since there's still so much interest in Tcats,
I thought it should be in with the Tcat stuff on the
Internet. I called Leonard to see if he'd object to that. He said,
"Umm…what the hell. Why not."
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