Chuck Jones: Conversations

Okay. Amidst everything I'm supposed to be doing and everything that I'm actually doing, I've managed to get a bit of reading in. In the case of reading Conversations, I think I managed to do the bulk of it at work during a dry spell where the options were to either stand around and talk, throw a tennis ball into a garbage can for cans of pop or sit at my desk and read something I find really interesting. I would have dealy with customers if we had any, but alas...

Anyway, the book was really quite good. As many of you know, I'm an interviewer myself so I'm usually drawn to interview books. Sometimes it's the subject that interests me and sometimes I'm looking at other writer's techniques, but there's usually a format and way about them that I seem to like over your usual biography or historical text.

Conversations was a collection of interviews with animation director Chuck Jones from 1968 to 1999. From right around the time that he was being discovered by the critical establishment to his triumphant return as an animation director. Having read Chuck Amuck, his semi-autobiography, a lot of what he said to the respective interviewers was not anything that I had not already heard or read from him before. In fact, many of the stories were told just the same way in 1968 as they were in 1999, but they never became boring or trite. But with each retelling or each new interview there was always something to take away that added to the overall tapestry that is Jones' career and life.

The interviews cover a goodly chunk of Jones' career so you get to hear some of his thoughts on the occasional new project (somethihng you don't get too often) as well as the odd project that never made it out of the starting gate (one of the first interviews is with Jones and Bradbury who were to collaborate on a Halloween feature together), but most of the interviewers seem only interested in focusing on his Warner Bros. output. Definitely stuff I wanted to read and hear, but I was hoping for something that showed a more personal touch - an interview that dug a bit deeper than the usual "where did the Coyote come from?" question.

The closest the book came to something like that was the final interview which, I guess, was literally saving the best for last. Ron Barbagallo's unpublished interview was a treat to read. He was well informed, had clearly done his research and wasn't wasting his time with tired old inquiries. And to Chuck's credit, he was clearly in a good and talkative mood and freely discussed every question Ron had to ask. This is, by far, my favourite of the book and was a great one to go out on. You always want to leave them satisfied but wanting more, right?

If you're a fan of animation, Chuck Jones or interview books in general, I would seriously recommend checking this book out. It's not a really long read but it's an entertaining one, and if there's one thing Chuck can do it's keep a reader's attention for a couple of hundred pages - I'll guarantee you that.

On a bit of a side note, I've since moved on to reading Gerard Jones' Men of Tomorrow which is wonderfully entertaining but slow going as a result of the car business getting a bit of a boom at the dealership. I'm looking forward to talking about that one here when I make some more headway on it.

And with that...

mike