Screen Gems, Inc. was an American animation studio and former film distributor, serving as the in-house animation division of Columbia Pictures during the golden age of American animation. Founded by Margaret J. Winkler and led during most of its existence by her husband Charles Mintz, it was best known for producing and distributing Walt Disney's works, namely the Alice Comedies and Universal Pictures' Oswald the Lucky Rabbit series, in addition to numerous series for Columbia Pictures such as the Krazy Kat, Scrappy, Color Rhapsodies, The Fox and the Crow, Phantasies, and Columbia Fables series.
Following Mintz's death, the studio underwent numerous leadership changes throughout the 1940s. Among those who headed the studio in the post-Mintz era were Leon Schlesinger Productions alumnus Frank Tashlin, Fleischer Studios co-founder Dave Fleischer, The Three Stooges producer Hugh McCollum, and Raymond Katz, brother-in-law of Leon Schlesinger. Alumni of Screen Gems would later found and work for Walt Disney Productions, Walter Lantz Productions and Warner Bros. Cartoons, all of which surpassed Screen Gems in popularity.
History
Founding (1921–1926) In 1921, New York City-based animation producer Pat Sullivan came to Warner Bros. Pictures president Harry Warner to sign a contract to distribute Sullivan and Otto Messmer's series of Felix the Cat animated short films. Warner declined to distribute the cartoons and instead told his secretary, Margaret Winkler, that she should form her own company and take control of the distribution of the series.
Winkler resultantly formed M.J. Winkler Productions; lacking a middle name, Winkler added the "J" initial for professional use and to partially disguise her gender. She found success distributing the Felix cartoons, and soon also took control of distributing Max and Dave Fleischer's series of Out of the Inkwell cartoons. By 1923, she and Sullivan were in constant dispute with each other, though they continued to work together; the Fleischer brothers broke from Winkler that year and formed their own distribution company, Red Seal. That same year, Winkler viewed a preview print of Alice's Wonderland, an unreleased short made by young Kansas City animator Walt Disney, which featured a live-action little girl superimposed into an animated world. Winkler signed Disney to produce a recurring series of these Alice Comedies, and Walt Disney set up a cartoon studio in Los Angeles with his brother Roy O. Disney and head artist Ub Iwerks to make the shorts.
In November 1923, Winkler married Charles Mintz, a film distributor who had worked for her since 1922. Mintz had quickly risen through the ranks within the Winkler organization; by the time of the marriage, he was sharing top management responsibility with Winkler.
In 1925, Winkler's renewal contract for the Felix shorts was drawn up, but she delayed signing due to the ongoing disputes with Sullivan. As a replacement, Winkler first attempted to get Disney and Iwerks to more heavily feature Julius the Cat, a supporting character in the Alice Comedies. Eventually, Winkler acquired the film rights to the Krazy Kat comic strip by George Herriman from King Features Syndicate. A former Sullivan animator and King Features Syndicate employee, Bill Nolan, was placed in charge of making the Krazy Kat cartoons at a studio in Long Branch, New Jersey in summer 1925.
As opposed to following the format of the abstract and esoteric comic strip, as two previous series of Krazy Kat cartoons from other filmmakers had done, The Krazy Kat Studio, as it was known, made cartoons under Nolan's direction that morphed Krazy Kat into more of a Felix the Cat clone. This and the prominence of Julius in the Alice Comedies angered Pat Sullivan to the point that he broke fully with Winkler and signed instead with rival distributor E. W. Hammons of Educational Pictures in 1925.
Winkler Pictures (1926–1931)
M.J. Winkler Productions became known as Winkler Pictures after Mintz took over in 1926, shutting down their distribution services and switching to production. Mintz had FBO distribute the Krazy Kat and Alice Comedies for the 1926-1927 season. The Alice Comedies concluded in 1927, and the all-animated Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was created in its place. Mintz would drop FBO for the 1927-1928 season, having Universal distribute the Oswald shorts, while Paramount distributed the Krazy Kat cartoons. Nolan was fired in favor of a new studio run by Ben Harrison and Manny Gould in the move to Paramount. Mintz also signed directors Harold S. Sintzenich and Andrew L. Stone to Paramount and produced numerous live-action short subjects they directed the same year.
In February 1928, when the Oswald cartoons proved more successful than expected, Disney sought to meet with Mintz over the budget, wanting to spend more on the cartoons. Mintz refused and hired away all of Disney's animators except Ub Iwerks, Les Clark, and Johnny Cannon. These three artists stayed on with Walt Disney, accompanying him to create the Mickey Mouse series, while Mintz moved the production of the Oswald cartoons to Winkler Pictures. Mintz's brother-in-law, George Winkler was installed as the administrative head, with veteran animator Walter Lantz and Disney defectors Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising as the creative heads.
Management disputes between Winkler and the team of Harman and Ising led to disharmony at the Hollywood Winkler studio, with Ising being fired in December 1928. In April 1929, Universal Pictures president Carl Laemmle terminated Winkler's Oswald contract after one year and 24 cartoons. A new in-house cartoon studio was established at Universal, headed by Walter Lantz and Bill Nolan, who hired much of the Winkler staff. The Hollywood Winkler studio resultantly shuttered. Harman and Ising, accompanied by fellow ex-Winkler animators Friz Freleng, Rollin Hamilton, Paul Smith and C. G. Maxwell, started a studio of their own in April 1929 and signed with producer Leon Schlesinger the following January to produce the Looney Tunes cartoon series for Warner Bros. Pictures.
Mintz responded to these events by focusing on the Krazy Kat Studio. Mintz partnered with Columbia Pictures for distribution of the Krazy Kat cartoons in 1929, and in January 1930 moved the Krazy Kat operation from New Jersey to Los Angeles, where it was set up in the building vacated by the Winkler Oswald crew."Winkler Pictures Moves West" - The Film Daily (12/14/1931) Mintz also moved the other Winkler operations to California, closing the New York office and consolidating the Krazy Kat Studio and Winkler Pictures under a new name, the Charles Mintz Studio.
With its Columbia deal, the Mintz studio soon found itself in the awkward position of sharing space on the Columbia release schedule with Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies cartoons, which Columbia distributed from 1929 until Disney signed with United Artists in 1932. To compete, Ben Harrison and Manny Gould slowly altered the Krazy Kat character even further; he now became a "cuter" character in the Mickey Mouse vein.
With Harrison and Gould focused on Krazy Kat, Mintz hired animators Dick Huemer and Sid Marcus from New York's Fleischer Studios, and teamed them up with animator Art Davis, a veteran of the Krazy Kat cartoons. The result was a series of 12 Toby the Pup cartoons for the 1930–1931 season distributed by RKO Radio Pictures. The series would be cancelled and replaced by the Scrappy series beginning in 1931 for distribution by Columbia. The Scrappy character quickly became the studio's most successful character during the 1930s, with creator Dick Huemer being quickly poached by Disney.
Becoming Screen Gems (1933–1940) Charles Mintz Productions was renamed Screen Gems, Inc. in 1933, although the name had been used in copyrights as early as 1931. The name was originally used in 1933, when Columbia Pictures acquired a stake in Charles Mintz's animation studio. The name was derived from an early Columbia Pictures slogan, "Gems of the Screen", itself a takeoff on the song "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean".
Mintz was nominated twice for the Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoons), both times as producer of Color Rhapsodies shorts. His first nomination was in 1935 for Holiday Land, with the second in 1937 for The Little Match Girl. Production would continue on the Color Rhapsodies, Krazy Kat, and Scrappy cartoons under Mintz through the end of the 1930s. Between 1936 and 1941, 16 of the Color Rhapsody films were subcontracted to Cartoon Films Ltd., Ub Iwerks' animation studio. Iwerks, who had broken away from Disney in 1930, produced and directed 15 of these shorts himself, starting with Two Lazy Crows in 1936. The final short, The Carpenters, was done by Cartoon Films' Paul Fennell in 1941 to close out the contract after Iwerks had returned to Disney in 1940.
The Color Rhapsodies shorts were well received, but some of its other cartoons were not, mainly the late-1930s Krazy Kat and Scrappy shorts. Animator Isadore Klein was particularly frustrated with the Krazy Kat cartoons because of how little resemblance they bore to the comic strip by the mid-1930s. In an attempt to reverse this, Klein convinced Gould and Harrison in making the 1936 Krazy Kat cartoon Li'l Ainjil, which attempted a return to the Herriman style. The final product was found to be disappointing, and the series quickly returned to its Disney-esque interpretation of Krazy.
Jules Engel, an artist who later worked at the Disney studio in 1938, talked about his time at the Mintz Studio in a December 1975 interview, saying that the experience was a "disaster" because of "people's lack of sensitivity of what the world was doing", and that "the whole place was very anti-intellectual, anti-sensitive to art, anti-art, anti-culture. [...] People were doing that because it was a job, but not with passion, not with tenderness."
Columbia had given Mintz strict budget advances per-short, which frequently ran over budget as a result. In 1939, having become indebted to Columbia, Mintz relinquished his remaining ownership of the studio and the Screen Gems name to Columbia to settle longstanding financial problems. Facing increasingly poor health, Mintz resigned from the studio soon after; he died on December 30, 1939 from a heart attack.
As Columbia took full management control of the Screen Gems studio, it promoted the studio's production manager, Jimmy Bronis, to general manager, though Bronis was quickly replaced by George Winkler. The Krazy Kat and Scrappy series were discontinued in 1939 and replaced by two anthology series of black-and-white cartoons: Fables, which would only remain in production for three years; and Phantasies, which would continue through the rest of the studio's existence. Both series featured both one-shot stories and recurring characters. Krazy Kat continued to appear periodically across both series through 1940, and Scrappy through 1941, before both were fully phased out of Screen Gems' output for good.
Brief revitalization by Frank Tashlin (1941–1942) In March 1941, Columbia hired Frank Tashlin, previously a writer for Walt Disney Productions and director for Leon Schlesinger Productions, to work as a writer at Screen Gems. Wanting to revitalize the studio as a serious competitor to other West Coast animation studios, Columbia shut down Screen Gems briefly in October 1941, laying off most of its Mintz-era staff, including Arthur Davis, Manny Gould, Lou Lilly, Sid Marcus, Ben Harrison, and George Winkler. Winkler was replaced by Ben Schwalb, a producer from Columbia's live-action shorts department, as general manager. Ben Schwalb replaced Winkler as general manager, and Frank Tashlin was promoted to producer and creative supervisor.