Today, The Grandma is at home surviving the new heat wave that affects Barcelona. The temperature is extremly high and the humidity is a nightmare.
She has decided to watch one of her favourite cartoons, Walt Disney's Flowers and Trees, a masterpiece that was premiered on a day like today in 1932 and that became the first cartoon short to use Technicolor and the first Academy Award winning cartoon short.
Flowers and Trees is a 1932 SillySymphonies cartoon produced by Walt Disney, directed by Burt Gillett, andreleased to theatres by United Artists on July 30, 1932. It was the first commercially released film to be produced in the full-color three-strip Technicolor process after several years of two-color Technicolor films. The film was a commercial and critical success, winning the first Academy Award for Best Cartoon Short Subject.
During spring the flowers, mushrooms, and trees do their calisthenics. Some trees play a tune, using vines for harp strings and a chorus of robins. A fight breaks out between a waspish-looking hollow tree and a younger, healthier tree for the attention of a female tree. The young tree emerges victorious, but the hollow tree retaliates by starting a fire. The plants and animals try to extinguish or evade the blaze. By poking holes in clouds and making it rain, the birds manage to put out the fire, although the hollow tree perishes in the flames after getting caught up in them himself. The young tree then proposes to the female tree, with a caterpillar serving as a ring, and they embrace as a 12-color rainbow forms behind them.
In May 1932, the first three-strip Technicolor camera was completed. HerbertKalmus wanted to test it in the animation field, giving the company time to build enough cameras to offer the whole movie industry, but could not find any interested animators.
Finally Walt Disney agreed to try it as an experiment on Flowers and Trees,which was already in production in black-and-white, and ordered the cartoon redone in color. The color animation caused the production to run over budget, potentially ruining Disney financially, but the cartoon proved so popular that the profits made up for the budget overage.
As a result of the success of Flowers and Trees, all future Silly Symphonies cartoons were produced in three-strip Technicolor. The added novelty of color helped to boost the series' previously disappointing returns. Disney's other cartoon series, the Mickey Mouse shorts, were deemed successful enough not to need the extra boost of color, remaining in black-and-white until The BandConcert (1935).
Disney's exclusive contract with Technicolor, in effect until the end of 1935, forced other animation producers such as Ub Iwerks and Max Fleischer to use Technicolor's inferior two-color process or a competing two-color system such as Cinecolor.
Flowers and Trees was the first animated film to win an Oscar at the fifth Academy Awards in 1932. It won an Oscar for best Short Subjects, Cartoons, a category first introduced that year.
After an intensive night celebrating Saint John, TheGrandma is exhausted. Today, she has decided to relax at home and enjoy with one of her passions, classic cinema.
TheGrandma has started to watch MaryPickford's films, masterpieces of cinema, performed by one of the greatest actresses of the cinema. The Grandma admires MaryPickford and all the great silentfilm actors of her age. Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, William S. Hart, Richard Barthelmess, William Haines, John Gilbert...
On a day like today, Mary Pickford became the first female film star to sign a million-dollar contract, something amazing for a woman in this profession and in this age and The Grandma wants to homage her talking about her awesome career.
Mary Pickford is one of the greatest actresses of all times but she was also the founder of United Artists an independent cinema studio that helped actors and actresses to keep their jobs during the worst years of WWI and Post War.
Gladys Louise Smith (April 8, 1892-May 29, 1979), known professionally as Mary Pickford, was a Canadian-born American film actress and producer. With a career spanning 50 years, she was a co-founder of both the Pickford–Fairbanks Studio, along with Douglas Fairbanks, and, later, the UnitedArtists film studio, with Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and D. W. Griffith, and one of the original 36 founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who present the yearly Oscar award ceremony.
Pickford was known in her prime as America's Sweetheart and the girl with the curls. She was one of the Canadian pioneers in early Hollywood and a significant figure in the development of film acting. Pickford was one of the earliest stars to be billed under her own name, and was one of the most popular actresses of the 1910s and 1920s, earning the nickname Queen of the Movies. She is credited as having defined the ingénue archetype in cinema.
Mary Pickford & Frances Marion
She was awarded the second ever Academy Award for Best Actress for her first sound-film role in Coquette(1929) and also received an honorary Academy Award in 1976.
In consideration of her contributions to American cinema, the American Film Institute ranked Pickford as 24th in its 1999 list of greatest female stars of classic Hollywood Cinema.
Mary Pickford was born Gladys Louise Smith in 1892 at 211 University Avenue, Toronto, Ontario. Her father, John Charles Smith, was the son of English Methodist immigrants, and worked a variety of odd jobs. Her mother, Charlotte Hennessey, was of Irish Catholic descent and worked for a time as a seamstress. She had two younger siblings, Charlotte -Lotti- and John Charles, who also became actors.
After being widowed in 1899, Charlotte Smith began taking in boarders, one of whom was a Mr. Murphy, the theatrical stage manager for Cummings Stock Company, who soon suggested that Gladys, then age seven, and Lotti, then age six, be given two small theatrical roles -Gladys portrayed a girl and a boy, while Lottie was cast in a silent part in the company's production of The Silver King at Toronto's Princess Theatre, destroyed by fire in 1915, rebuilt, demolished in 1931, while their mother played the organ.
Pickford subsequently acted in many melodramas with Toronto's Valentine Stock Company, finally playing the major child role in its version of The Silver King. She capped her short career in Toronto with the starring role of Little Eva in the Valentine production of Uncle Tom's Cabin, adapted from the 1852 novel.
By the early 1900s, theatre had become a family enterprise. Gladys, her mother and two younger siblings toured the United States by rail, performing in third-rate companies and plays. After six impoverished years, Pickford allowed one more summer to land a leading role on Broadway, planning to quit acting if she failed.
In 1906 Gladys, Lottie and Jack Smith supported singer Chauncey Olcott on Broadway in Edmund Burke. Gladys finally landed a supporting role in a 1907 Broadway play, The Warrens of Virginia. The play was written by William C. deMille, whose brother, Cecil, appeared in the cast. David Belasco, the producer of the play, insisted that Gladys Smith assume the stage name Mary Pickford. After completing the Broadway run and touring the play, however, Pickford was again out of work.
Mary Pickford
On April 19, 1909, the Biograph Company director D. W. Griffith screen-tested her at the company's New York studio for a role in the nickelodeon film Pippa Passes. The role went to someone else but Griffith was immediately taken with Pickford.
She appeared in 51 films in 1909, almost one a week. In January 1910, Pickford travelled with a Biograph crew to Los Angeles. Many other film companies wintered on the West Coast, escaping the weak light and short days that hampered winter shooting in the East. Pickford added to her 1909 Biographs (Sweet and Twenty, They Would Elope, and To Save Her Soul, to name a few) with films made in California.
Actors were not listed in the credits in Griffith's company. Audiences noticed and identified Pickford within weeks of her first film appearance. Exhibitors, in turn, capitalized on her popularity by advertising on sandwich boards that a film featuring The Girl with the Golden Curls, Blondilocks, or The Biograph Girl was inside.
Pickford left Biograph in December 1910. The following year, she starred in films at Carl Laemmle's Independent Moving Pictures Company (IMP). Unhappy with their creative standards, Pickford returned to work with Griffith in 1912. That year, Pickford also introduced Dorothy Gish and Lillian Gish to Griffith, and each became major silent film stars, in comedy and tragedy, respectively. Pickford made her last Biograph picture, The New York Hat, in late 1912.
She returned to Broadway in the David Belasco production of A Good Little Devil (1912). In 1913, she decided to work exclusively in film.
Pickford left the stage to join Zukor's roster of stars. Zukor first filmed Pickford in a silent version of A Good Little Devil.
Pickford's work in material written for the camera by that time had attracted a strong following. Comedy-dramas, such as In the Bishop's Carriage (1913), Caprice (1913), and especially Hearts Adrift (1914), made her irresistible to moviegoers. Hearts Adrift was so popular that Pickford asked for the first of her many publicized pay raises based on the profits and reviews. The film marked the first time Pickford's name was featured above the title on movie marquees.
Mary Pickford & Charles Chaplin
Only Charlie Chaplin, who slightly surpassed Pickford'spopularity in 1916, had a similarly spellbinding pull with critics and the audience. Each enjoyed a level of fame far exceeding that of other actors.
Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, Pickford was believed to be themost famous woman in the world, or, as a silent-film journalist described her, the best known woman who has ever lived, the woman who was known to more people and loved by more people than any other woman that has been in all history.
Pickford starred in 52 features throughout her career. On June 24, 1916, Pickford signed a new contract with Zukor that granted her full authority over production of the films in which she starred, and a record-breaking salary of $10,000 a week. In addition, Pickford's compensation was half of a film's profits, with a guarantee of $1,040,000 (US$ 18,130,000 in 2019).
In August 1918, Pickford's contract expired and, when refusing Zukor's terms for a renewal, she was offered $250,000 to leave the motion picture business. She declined, and went to First National Pictures, which agreed to her terms.
In 1919, Pickford, along with D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks, formed the independent film production company United Artists. Through United Artists, Pickford continued to produce and perform in her own movies; she could also distribute them as she chose.
In 1920, Pickford's film Pollyanna grossed around $1,100,000. The following year, Pickford's film Little Lord Fauntleroy was also a success, and in 1923, Rosita grossed over $1,000,000 as well. During this period, she also made Little Annie Rooney (1925), another film in which Pickford played a child, Sparrows (1926), which blended the Dickensian with newly minted German expressionist style, and My Best Girl (1927), a romantic comedy featuring her future husband BuddyRogers.
Mary Pickford
The arrival of sound was her undoing. Pickford underestimatedthe value of adding sound to movies, claiming that adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo.
She played a reckless socialite in Coquette (1929), a role for which her famous ringlets were cut into a 1920s' bob. Pickford had already cut her hair in the wake of her mother's death in 1928. Fans were shocked at the transformation. Pickford's hair had become a symbol of female virtue, and when she cut it, the act made front-page news in The New York Times and other papers.
Coquette was a success and won her an Academy Award for Best Actress,although this was highly controversial. The public failed to respond to her in the more sophisticated roles. Like most movie stars of the silent era, Pickford found her career fading as talkies became more popular among audiences.
Her next film, The Taming of The Shrew, made with husband DouglasFairbanks, was not well received at the box office. Established Hollywood actors were panicked by the impending arrival of the talkies.
In 1933, she underwent a Technicolor screen test for an animated/live action film version of Alice in Wonderland, but Walt Disney discarded the project when Paramount released its own version of the book. Only one Technicolor still of her screen test still exists.
She retired from acting in 1933; her last acting film was released in 1934. She continued to produce for others, however, including Sleep, My Love (1948) with Claudette Colbert and Love Happy (1949), with the Marx Brothers.
Pickford used her stature in the movie industry to promote a variety of causes. Although her image depicted fragility and innocence, Pickford proved to be a worthy businesswoman who took control of her career in a cutthroat industry.
During World War I, she promoted the sale of Liberty Bonds, making an intensive series of fund-raising speeches that kicked off in Washington, D.C., where she sold bonds alongside Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Theda Bara, and Marie Dressler.
Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford & Charlie Chaplin
At the end of World War I, Pickford conceived of the Motion Picture Relief Fund, an organization to help financially needy actors. In 1932, Pickford spearheaded the Payroll Pledge Program, a payroll-deduction plan for studio workers who gave one half of one percent of their earnings to the MPRF.
As a result, in 1940, the Fund was able to purchase land and build the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital, in Woodland Hills, California.
An astute businesswoman, Pickford became her own producer within three years of her start in features. In 1916, Pickford's films were distributed, singly, through a special distribution unit called Artcraft. The Mary Pickford Corporation was briefly Pickford's motion-picture production company.
In 1919, she increased her power by co-founding United Artists (UA) with Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and her soon-to-be husband, Douglas Fairbanks. Before UA's creation, Hollywood studios were vertically integrated, not only producing films but forming chains of theaters.
United Artists broke from this tradition. It was solely a distribution company, offering independent film producers access to its own screens as well as the rental of temporarily unbooked cinemas owned by other companies.
Pickford and Fairbanks produced and shot their films after 1920 at the jointly owned Pickford-Fairbanks studio on Santa Monica Boulevard. The producers who signed with UA were true independents, producing, creating and controlling their work to an unprecedented degree. As a co-founder, as well as the producer and star of her own films, Pickford became the most powerful woman who has ever worked in Hollywood.
By 1930, Pickford's acting career had largely faded. After retiring three years later, however, she continued to produce films for United Artists. She and Chaplin remained partners in the company for decades. Chaplin left the company in 1955, and Pickford followed suit in 1956, selling her remaining shares for three million dollars.
Mary Pickford
After retiring from the screen, Pickford became an alcoholic, as her father had been. Her mother Charlotte died of breast cancer in March 1928. Her siblings, Lottie and Jack, both died of alcohol-related causes. These deaths, her divorce from Fairbanks, and the end of silent films left Pickford deeply depressed. Her relationship with her adopted children, Roxanne and Ronald, was turbulent at best.
Pickford withdrew and gradually became a recluse, remaining almost entirely at Pickfair and allowing visits only from Lillian Gish, her stepson Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and few other people.
Pickford believed that she had ceased to be a British subject when she married an American citizen upon her marriage to Fairbanks in 1920. Thus, she never acquired Canadian citizenship when it was first created in 1947. However, Pickford held and traveled under a British/Canadian passport which she renewed regularly at the British/Canadian consulates in Los Angeles, and she did not take out papers for American citizenship. She also owned a house in Toronto, Canada. Toward the end of her life, Pickford made arrangements with the Canadian Department of Citizenship to officially acquire Canadian citizenship because she wished to die as a Canadian. Canadian authorities were not sure that she had ever lost her Canadian citizenship, given her passport status, but her request was approved and she officially became a Canadian citizen.
On May 29, 1979, Pickford died at a Santa Monica, California, hospital of complications from a cerebral hemorrhage she had suffered the week before. She was interred in the Garden of Memory of the Forest Lawn Memorial Park cemetery in Glendale, California.
Today, The Grandma is still at home. She is a little tired and she has preferred to invite her friend Tina Picotes to watch a film on TV. They have chosen Three Little Pigs, an animated short film released on a day like today in 1933.
Three Little Pigs is an animated short film released on May 27, 1933 by United Artists, produced by Walt Disney and directed by Burt Gillett.
Based on a fable of the same name, the Silly Symphony won the 1934 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film of 1933. The short cost $22,000 and grossed $250,000.
In 1994, it was voted #11 of the 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time by members of the animation field.
In 2007, Three Little Pigswas selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.
Practical Pig, Fiddler Pig and Fifer Pig are three brothers who build their own houses with bricks, sticks and straw respectively. All three of them play a different kind of musical instrument –Fifer Pigtoots his flute, doesn't give a hoot and plays around all day, Fiddler Pigwith a hey diddle diddle, plays on his fiddle and dances all kinds of jigs and Practical Pig is initially seen as working without rest.
Fifer and Fiddler build their straw and stick houses with much ease and have fun all day. Practical, on the other hand, has no chance to sing and dance for work and play don't mix, focusing on building his strong brick house, but his two brothers poke fun at him.
An angry Practical warns them You can play and laugh and fiddle. Don't think you can make me sore. I'll be safe and you'll be sorry when the Wolf comes through your door!Fifer and Fiddler ignore him and continue to play, singing the now famous song Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?.
The Three Little Pigs
As they are singing, the Big Bad Wolf really comes by, at which point Fifer and Fiddler reveal they are in fact very afraid of the wolf.
Fifer and Fiddler each retreat to their respective houses; the Wolf first blows Fifer's house down, except for the roof, with little resistance. Fifer manages to escape and hides at Fiddler's house. The Wolf pretends to give up and go home, but returns disguised as an innocent sheep. The pigs see through the disguise, Not by the hair of our chinny-chin-chin! You can't fool us with that old sheep skin!, whereupon the Wolf blows Fiddler's house down, except for the door.
The two pigs manage to escape and hide at Practical's house, who willingly gives his brothers refuge; in Practical's house, it is revealed that his musical instrument is the piano. The Wolf arrives disguised as a Jewish peddler/Fuller Brush man to trick the pigs into letting him in, but fails. The Wolf then tries to blow down the strong brick house, losing his clothing in the process, but is unable, all while a confident Practical plays melodramatic piano music.
Finally, he attempts to enter the house through the chimney, but smart Practical Pig takes off the lid of a boiling pot filled with water, to which he adds turpentine, under the chimney, and the Wolf falls right into it. Shrieking in pain, the Wolf runs away frantically, while the pigs sing Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? again. Practical then plays a trick by knocking on his piano, causing his brothers to think the Wolf has returned and hide under Practical's bed.
The movie was phenomenally successful with audiences of the day, so much that theaters ran the cartoon for months after its debut, to great financial response. The cartoon is still considered to be the most successful animated short ever made, and remained on top of animation until Disney was able to boost Mickey's popularity further by making him a top merchandise icon by the end of 1934.
Animator Chuck Jones observed, That was the first time that anybody ever brought characters to life in an animated cartoon. They were three characters who looked alike and acted differently.
Other animation historians, particularly admirers of Winsor McCay, would dispute the word first, but Jones was not referring to personality as such but to characterization through posture and movement.
The Three Little Pigs
Fifer and Fiddler Pig are frivolous and care-free; Practical Pig is cautious and earnest. The reason for why the film's story and characters were so well developed was that Disney had already realized the success of animated films depended upon telling emotionally gripping stories that would grab the audience and not let go.
This realization led to an important innovation around the time Pigs was in development: a story department,separate from the animators, with storyboard artists who would be dedicated to working on a storydevelopment phase of the production pipeline. The moderate, but not blockbuster, success of the further Three Pigs cartoons was seen as a factor in Walt Disney's decision not to rest on his laurels, but instead to continue to move forward with risk-taking projects, such as the multiplane camera and the first feature-length animated movie. Disney's slogan, often repeated over the years, was you can't top pigs with pigs.
The original song composed by Frank Churchill for the cartoon, Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?, was a best-selling single, mirroring the people's resolve against the big bad wolf of The Great Depression; the song actually became something of an anthem of the Great Depression.
When the Nazis began expanding the boundaries of Germany in the years preceding World War II, the song was used to represent the complacency of the Western world in allowing Adolf Hitler to make considerable acquisitions of territory without going to war, and was notably used in Disney animations for the Canadian war effort.
The song was further used as the inspiration for the title of the 1963 play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Three cartoons inspired by this cartoon were produced by Warner Bros. The first was Pigs in a Polka which tells the story to the accompaniment of Johannes Brahms' Hungarian Dances. The second was The Three Little Bops, featuring the pigs as a jazz band, who refused to let the inept trumpet-playing wolf join until after he died and went to Hell, whereupon his playing markedly improved. Both of these cartoons were directed by ex-Disney animator Friz Freleng. The third film was The Windblown Hare, featuring Bugs Bunny, and directed by Robert McKimson.
In Windblown, Bugs is conned into first buying the straw house, which the wolf blows down, and then the sticks house, which the wolf also blows down. After these incidents, Bugs decides to help the wolf and get revenge on all three pigs, who are now at the brick house.
Charles Spencer Chaplin (1889-1977) was an English actor who famed in the silent film era.His childhood was hard and poor with his father absent and his mother committed to a mental asylum.
Chaplin started in the film industry at age 14 and since that moment his career was meteoric co-founding the distribution company United Artists in 1919 and playing successful films as The Kid, Modern Times, Limelight or The Great Dictator where he satirised Hitler and attacked fascism. His popularity declined when he was accused of communist and the FBI opened an investigation. Chaplin was forced to leave the US and he settle in Switzerland where he died on 25 December.
The king of the smile died
on Christmas Day but his legacy is eternal.
The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the
bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men
will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people
will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never
perish.
You, the people have the power - the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.
