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*dreamy music
-[man] Are you hungry, Al?
-Well, yeah! I could-- I could use a...
ham sandwich, mmmm.
-[snorts]
[groans]
-Where's that chicken? What is going on?
-[Will VO] Characters have a simplicity to them and a
complexity to them.
-[grunts]
[screams]
[chicken screams]
[knocking on door]
-[woman] Who's here?
-[woman] Here comes the director!
-[man] I can't hear anything!
-[woman] Quiet on the set!
-Hey, have you guys finished that shot yet?
-[Will VO] Interesting characters often have a simple
goal and a simple purpose,
but it's in great conflict with
either the world around him, with other people.
One could say that the story makes the character or the
character makes the story.
*driving ambient music
-[woman] Please, raise your right hand.
Do you solemnly swear that this testimony taken will be the
truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth
so help you God?
-I do.
-[man] Good morning, Mr. Vinton.
-Good morning.
-[man] Are you aware that you have sued Mr. Knight for
$3,000,000?
-Yes. There were extraordinarily
strange happenings
and amazing manipulation
led by -- without question -- led by Phil Knight,
who had other motives for the company.
-That reflects a dispute, wouldn't you agree?
***
-Yeah.
-It still remains to me stunning really that the founder of the
company could basically ignore the interests of shareholders
other than Will Vinton or myself -- the employees,
the creditors -- ignore all their interests and put this
company on the threshold of bankruptcy
for no logical reason.
-[Vinton] No, that's not correct.
It's definitely, absolutely the other way around.
*"I Heard It Through the Grapevine" by Isaac Brock*
***
*ethereal music
[tv clicks on]
-Were you one of those kids that always played with the home 8mm
movie camera and was making projects all the time?
-Projects, yeah, a lot of projects when I was a kid.
***
Grew up in McMinnville, Oregon...
classic Small Town, U.S.A.
***
I never really had much interest in film production
until I actually went to college and became very,
very interested in it.
My sister, who was in Berkeley, strongly encouraged me to be a
part of this scene that was Berkeley in the '60s.
There was just so much going on.
*psychedelic rock
The whole Claymation thing really evolved
out of studying architecture.
I was very fascinated with Antoni Gaudí who had done
extraordinarily organic shapes in architecture,
things that had to be sculpted.
And that got me messing with plasticine clay,
and the filmmaking and the clay got together and-- for some
early experiments.
My father used to shoot 16mm film as home movie.
I asked him if I could use his camera,
so I got this great little filmmaker kit and kind of
instantly became a filmmaker.
My father was really hoping I would be,
you know, a corporate executive or something,
but he also really encouraged me to explore and try things and,
you know, give it a go.
And if you believe in something strong enough,
you'll find a way to make it happen.
So first thing I started doing is shooting a lot of stuff on
the Berkeley campus.
This is the '60s; things were getting pretty wacky.
*rock music
I was really fascinated by what cameras could do,
and, in particular, stop motion.
You know, setting a camera on a tripod and shooting one frame at
a time, making things move.
And animating human bodies.
You know, sort of looked at this stuff and I said,
"Whoa, that's pretty cool!"
I learned really quickly how you cut,
how you focus an audience's attention,
the language of film and the power of film.
I wasn't a storyteller, but I saw the power of storytelling.
[clap]
There was a very active film community in Berkeley --
filmmakers, people that did various kinds
of experimental films.
*funky ambient music
I organized evenings where I'd stick an animation camera on the
table, give everybody a beer in one hand,
blob of clay in the other, you know, getting a little
inebriated... taking a puff, as well.
And, of course, most of this stuff became
a little pornographic.
[glug and swallow]
[vomit]
That was the beginning of claymation for me.
It was a real epiphany to see these very,
very crude things happening on this tabletop,
to see these characters evolve in this incredibly simple and
non-planned sort of way.
[man laughs]
[birds chirp]
What I was most amazed about was how this completely
inanimate wad of clay could move and be imbued with life.
*upbeat piano music
It's the fascination one has with magic.
*dreamy music
When I first saw this stuff, it really made an impression on me.
And I felt -- even then -- that if I could marry the magic that
I saw with really solid film skills,
I could be really powerful.
-[man VO] Kneel down in the dust!
Toiling over a lump of clay 'til he shaped it!
-[Will VO] In order to do the kind of experimenting that I
wanted to do, taking it to the next level,
I really kind of needed a little studio.
And actually managed to buy a small house in Portland,
and it ended up being my future animation studio.
Well, for several years while making live-action and a few cel
animated films, I was working on a technique of clay animation.
It was a technique that Bob Gardiner-- a sculptor -- and I
worked on during college.
*mellow ambient music
Bob was crazy, wonderful artist
-- really out there -- and just
a kind of a wild energy that was intoxicating,
and classic artist with a capital A.
I happened to know that he would be -- and was -- not
doing anything.
"Say, why don't you come on up, and let's make a film?"
So Bob came up and lived at my place and ended up living there
for like a year and a half, [laughs]
much to my wife's chagrin.
Because Bob's lifestyle is loose with various psychedelics,
which I was dabbling in at the time too,
but not as intensely.
[laughs]
But I always liked working with really good artists.
Bob was absolutely one of those people,
in the sense that he was intensely on another plane.
-[Bill VO] Bob was a really charming guy.
He was a mad genius.
Together they were the perfect team.
You had the wild, crazy artist with the organized producer.
***
-[Will VO] We spent a lot of time in that basement
experimenting with clay...
metamorphosis, lip-sync, cutting techniques.
Clay animation had been around forever.
People ask if we invented it.
No, but what we did was brought it to the forefront by doing a
lot of experimenting.
*contemplative music
I decided to do a little short short film that really showed
off some of these techniques.
[projector whirs]
[door creaks]
[man grunting]
We had trouble keeping the characters very stable and
steady, and so we tended to make the characters all be winos so
they could stumble around.
[man cackles]
-Thank you for turning me on.
I am a replica of the model 5-0-5 Type C electro-brain
correct, error key muta-- muta-- mutation,
mutations, metamorphological mutations,
mutations of reversal, comparing mutations,
mutations, metamorphology, push and program,
push and as the-- as the-- as the world turns...
-[Will VO] We were real excited about getting it done in
time for this local film festival here in Portland,
and it was rejected.
We were just devastated.
It was a sad time, but never stops me.
So I made as many prints as I could afford and started sending
it around to film festivals.
And suddenly we started getting amazing response.
Top prize at major, big-time festivals,
and it got nominated for an Academy Award.
-The winner is 'Closed Mondays,' Will Vinton and Bob Gardiner.
[applause]
*upbeat orchestral music
-I'd like to thank family and friends,
and uh, Will.
Thank you very much.
-Thanks members of the Academy for an incredible honor.
And hello and thank you to all our friends back home in Oregon.
[applause]
-[Will VO] After the win, we were partying at the
Governor's Ball.
Bob's mother came up to him with quite a serious face,
and she said this was too much too soon,
and this is the kiss of death.
It made me really concerned about what ultimately happens
with Bob.
Winning an Oscar was huge.
Seemed to me kind of an opportunity
to explore things further.
I was just itching to do more projects.
But for Bob, winning the Academy Award was such a heady thing.
[pop, horn blows]
He was off doing all sorts of crazy things.
Bob would walk around town with his Oscar in his pocket and
stick it up on a bar and see who'd buy him drinks.
That was the way he saw what he was gonna do with this Oscar.
It got to be so hard that I couldn't count on him.
It was just such a clash of working styles.
We felt it was good to do our own things and then help each
other out.
-[Bill VO] Bob set up his own little studio and he got
a commission from Rolling Stone to do a TV show.
*rock music
I got to visit his studio and see what he was doing,
and I was really impressed.
So he did get work after he left Vinton,
but he wasn't a good businessman and he couldn't follow through
on it.
I think he was bipolar, so unfortunately he descended into
this drunken stupor, and he would rail at Vinton and claim
that he was really the artistic genius behind 'Closed Mondays,'
that he developed the Claymation technique and that Vinton never
gave him credit.
Will and him separated, but Will filled the vacuum left by Bob
with really great animators.
-[Will VO] Everything I did after that was Will
Vinton Productions.
-[man] Will Vinton interview, take one.
[clap]
Second camera.
[clap]
And the third camera.
[clap]
*groovy ambient music
-That was the beginning of this wonderful,
delightful collaborative kind of phase
where the goal was to try to find some way we could
push the Claymation into some new areas.
-[Bill VO] He had this little studio that was
behind a barbershop.
Walk past the barbershop and up these steps and into this secret
domain, and suddenly there's an animation studio.
And so it was like going into a James Bond movie.
[high-pitched swirling noises]
It was like magic.
You would not believe what it felt like to walk
through that place.
[bike bell rings]
-[Melissa VO] The studio was like the mother-ship.
I remember clearly one day thinking,
"We're all gonna end up being old together and having an old
persons' home-- retirement home.
We're all gonna be living together."
Because it all felt very close.
***
-When you walk away, you track it out.
-[Chuck VO] It was very hippie-like.
-Can you smell that?
-[Chuck VO] A sort of commune.
-Huh?
You got some of it, don't you?
-[Chuck VO] I have my actual contract.
It doesn't even have my real name on it.
It was for fun.
There was nothing legal about it.
It was just like, "Hey you wanna work here?
Okay, well what's your name?
I'll just make one up."
The word "corporate" didn't exist.
It just didn't feel like a business.
It felt like art school plus vacation.
***
-[Will VO] We weren't a very sophisticated business.
We were a collective of artists focused on doing
good creative work.
-[Michele VO] The energy was so melodic and forward-moving.
I felt like I was working with a master who was creating
something really wonderful that was gonna endure for a
very long time.
-On those cues, we're gonna turn on the lights.
*delicate ambient music
-Maybe have some [clapping] ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba.
*jaunty driving music
[hammering]
-[man VO] Will Vinton's characters seem almost human,
partly because they are.
-[woman VO] In fact, the entire production is shot and
soundtracks recorded with live actors before animating begins.
-You keep looking out the window because--
-I thought that I-- that you were--
[laughter]
-[Will VO] That whole first decade was all about
trying to see what we could do, see how far we could go.
*psychedelic rock music
What's gonna be different about it?
What are we gonna learn from this one that we didn't learn
from previous ones, and what can we take forward into the
next project?
*epic rock music
I hardly even remember thinking about making money.
The thinking was always about what we could do to make the
projects as cool as they could possibly be.
[water bubbles]
We did so many things as creatively as we did by virtue
of the fact that we were doing them very,
very inexpensively.
[dinosaur growl]
[slurps]
Lower the budget is, we could get creative control and do
wonderful things.
-Then they go to the bar and drink on furlough and they fight
the air force, they fight the navy--
[shouting and commotion]
Of course, there's no coast guard.
Oh, and then, of course, you know, back home there was the
Andrews sisters singing "Bugle Boy" of Company C.
*female chorus singing
-[Will VO] We knew we were pioneering something.
We were doing something that had never really been done before,
during which we picked up four more Academy Award nominations.
Nobody ever told me I couldn't do it.
All I've seen in my experience -- in my life -- has been that
if you put your mind to it, and believe that you can do it
-- and want to do it -- you'll do it.
*uplifting orchestral music
-[man] Let her go!
-[girl] You can make it, fly!
***
[bells chime]
-[Will VO] We all charged ahead,
expanding it and trying to grow it and move it in whatever ways
we possibly could.
[rattles]
[glistens]
[slides click]
-Will loved the fact that he didn't have to be in Los Angeles
to do this kind of work and to get noticed.
-[man VO] Has there ever been a temptation for you to move from
Portland to Hollywood where all the big film business is?
-Well, in all honesty there's some small amount of temptation.
-[Craig VO] Here you are in Portland,
which is hardly a film center.
Lifestyle mattered more than money, and
what people did on the weekends mattered more than
their jobs.
-What I can surmise from what you're positing is like,
Portland's almost an alternative universe.
It's almost like cars don't exist, right?
-Yes!
-You can ride bikes, or double decker bikes.
They ride unicycles, they ride the tram,
they ride skateboards.
-Exactly!
-'Portlandia' is almost like a documentary as far as I'm
concerned in terms of showing how eccentric and unique
Portland is, and how much everything's kind of a one-off.
Will's Claymation studio's like that too.
Nobody else is doing anything like this.
He wanted to do his own thing, he created it,
and he gave us all these jobs.
The best stop-motion animators from around the world all
gravitated to the famous Will Vinton Studio.
-[Will VO] I'm really committed to working here,
and there's really no reason that you have to produce a film
in Hollywood.
*mellow ambient music*
-Will the entrepreneur -- Will the guy who started something
from nothing and did it just because he wanted to -- if
you're gonna be an entrepreneur, you're gonna start a company,
you're gonna be the man.
-The first time I really met Will,
the two words that came to mind were "white heat,"
a burning ambition to make a brand,
to make a name.
He just wanted to conquer.
-[Jeffrey VO] A good decade before Will got started,
there was another eclectic long-shot small business here
in Oregon.
It was a guy selling shoes, and it was Phil Knight,
and that company became Nike.
-Oh sweat! Oh sweat!
Oh sweat, it's Nike!
You gotta hook me up!
*hip hop beat
-[Jeffrey VO] It absolutely came to dominate.
***
It became this world-eating company.
And there's an interesting parallel between Phil and Will;
they pioneered an industry and they stuck with it,
and against all odds they built something pretty special.
And then they sort of came together and disasters result.
-[woman] Mr. Knight, please raise your right hand.
Do you solemnly swear that this testimony will be the truth,
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,
so help you God?
-I do. -[woman] Thank you.
-Mr. Knight, would you explain what first interested you in
investing in Will Vinton Studios?
-Wil Vinton had approached me in the spring of '98 about the
possibility of investing in Will Vinton Studios,
and I was intrigued.
-And what intrigued you?
-Well, first of all, profitable.
They had been in existence a long time,
they had won an Academy Award, and
they'd had considerable artistic success in the creative field,
and I was interested in that.
-Was there any intent to do future Will Vinton Studios
animation outside of Portland?
-What do future plans outside of Portland have to do with any
subject matter of this lawsuit?
-Well I have a theory, but I don't need to go into it.
*tense ambient music
-Um, how would you characterize
your level of frustration
over Will Vinton?
***
-High.
*news program jingle
-[man VO] Portlanders Will Vinton and Susan Shadburne have
made animated films Walt Disney would've envied.
-Your working relationship, you're married but you also
work together.
I would think that it would be hard to separate the two.
-[Vinton] It is.
-And we really live two separate lives.
When we were working really intensely on something -- I
should point out the 'Rip Van Winkle' script got started on
our honeymoon--
[laughter]
He kept telling me that was a deadline [laughing]
and things like that. [laughs]
*mellow ambient music
-Will's extraordinarily focused -- one of the most focused
people I've ever met --
but if his focus shifts,
he really is able to kind of cut the traces of what came before,
totally cut them.
***
-[Will VO] When things get kind of easy or a little
rote, I find myself going kind of somewhere else.
-[Susan VO] I mean, all the times I knew him,
I don't remember us ever having to wrestle with his conscience.
It is, "This is what's being done.
This is what I'm doing."
I didn't ever see him waver on that.
***
The ending of it came as a complete surprise to me.
He had a wife prior to me.
He left her in exactly the same way.
12 years...
no discussions about it,
no looking back.
He was a mystery to himself.
-[Michele VO] He's a very complex man.
The place he felt most free to express himself was in his work.
***
-[Mary VO] Will on one hand showed himself to
the world through his art.
He had all of these characters who, of course, were expressing
facets of himself.
And yet he was also a very private man.
There's a lot of people, maybe most of the people who know Will
who might say, "I never really quite knew him.
I could never quite figure him out."
He had trouble expressing emotions
when it wasn't with clay.
***
-I see Will as a character, a character with a dream,
with a character flaw, and with a kind of a sadness.
-[Will VO] Characters have an infinite range of
emotions and expressions, but there aren't an infinite number
that they use.
A character usually stays in character.
*chimes ascend
-[woman] All together now!
-Ho ho ho, hee hee hee, ha ha ha!
-[Will VO] The pressure on this first creative phase is
that we wanted to keep the bar extremely high,
and we wanted to do feature films.
-As things began to get bigger and bigger and pretty soon he's
having what he wants -- which he always told me was to be the
second Walt Disney -- and it looked as if maybe that
were happening.
*uplifting ambient music
-[Jerry VO] There were definitely parallels between the
young Will Vinton Studios and Walt Disney Studios.
Each success followed by a way to follow up on that in a
commercial way, and then if you can do that,
you can experiment and make 'Fantasia' or build
a Disneyland.
Will had it. He was actually doing it.
He won his Oscar.
He was making shorts.
He was making a feature, which was 'The Adventures of
Mark Twain.'
-A man with a new idea is a fool...
until the idea succeeds.
-[Will VO] 'The Adventures of Mark Twain' was the zenith of
Claymation because the whole kitchen sink
was thrown in there.
A lot of the techniques that you saw in some of the short films
that came before it.
-[Craig VO] Clay painting from 'The Creation...'
metamorphosis from 'The Great Cognito...'
special effects that we used in things like 'The Little Prince.'
There's nothing like it.
There's nothing even remotely like it.
Will wanted this to feel like you were in his clay world.
Furniture was made out of clay, the walls were clay,
the pictures on the wall were clay.
-It is a landmark achievement in the motion picture field,
and that is because it is the first clay-animated feature
movie ever made.
-[Melissa VO] A lot was riding on 'The Adventures
of Mark Twain.'
It was in production over five years with a small crew toiling
over this very tedious process of making this movie.
-The basic philosophy has not changed.
Vinton and his staff hope to continue to be a form of
entertainment primarily for adults.
You'll never see Will Vinton's name on the kind of things that
you're seeing now on Saturday morning TV.
-[Melissa VO] Will felt that this is a sophisticated
film that should appeal to adults.
And it just didn't get marketed in that way.
-The interesting thing is the movie,
it's kind of a dark story, and there were warning labels on
those cassettes that say, "This may not be suitable for your
child," which was the kiss of death if you're trying to
release a children's movie.
*melancholy ambient music
-[Melissa VO] 'Mark Twain' had a really disappointing premiere.
People would take their children,
or they didn't always get the next level of
humor or sophistication.
-[voice on speaker] Welcome to the mysterious stranger.
[children whispering]
-Hello.
-Who are you?
-Satan.
-Uh oh.
-[Will VO] Well, there's no question I was hoping
'Mark Twain' would be the beginning of doing more
feature projects.
***
I think above all I was disappointed with what happens
in the world of distribution.
-That was a real sad thing that nobody seemed to know what to do
with this magical stuff.
He had a capacity to put things in a place where they wouldn't
interfere or slow him down, but in his private place with just
himself, he and him, it hurt him very much.
-I did a bit of soul searching and thought about how the
creative process works, and I've come up with what I think is my
most creative project to date, which I would like to introduce
to you at this time.
[applause]
This is Billy.
Say hello! [chuckles]
Let's look at the creative process and how it works.
[audience laughter]
It all starts with an idea.
Perhaps nothing more than a twinkle in your eye.
And in time, with a little give and take,
assuming the idea finds fertile ground,
it may soon be fully conceived.
But you still don't know what you've got.
[audience laughter]
As the concept goes into a gestation period,
it grows and it modifies.
Finally, the project is fully realized with a tremendous
amount of effort.
And is released-- [Billy coos]
Yeah. [audience laughter]
And is released for all to see.
To the creators it's hard to be objective,
and it often looks pretty bad when it first comes out.
But at that point, one can't help but sort of feel like
you're-- question what it is you've really done as a creator,
and before long a strong sense of pride generally results to
the point where you may even consider doing it again.
[laughter]
We have Mummy.
-[laughs]
-[Will] And Billy.
-Let me stand up and show how pregnant.
-[Will] Very pregnant.
There it is.
That's Jesse.
-Yeah, this is Jesse.
Oh my God, there they go!
-[Jesse VO] He was always interested in looking
for projects that we could do with him.
Even though he wasn't the kind of person that would really say
a lot of "I love yous"
or really kind of show affection...
[drumming]
You know, he had his own way of constantly showing us that he
loved us.
*mellow ambient music
The best times that we had with one another,
we were actively trying to accomplish a goal,
making something, creating something.
Going to cut down a Christmas tree,
we would literally hack down like a 20-foot tree,
and we'd bring it home.
Billy and I were six and eight years old and we were like up on
the balcony with like a rope-pulley system that my dad
had like showed us how to like rig on the top of the tree,
and he's down below trying to like push the tree up.
-[woman] There's Will.
-[man] There's Will.
-[woman] The man with the camera,
and now we're moving in on him, because-- Billy don't pull on
the camera!
-[woman] Get a close-up of him so that we know that Daddy was
here too.
-[Jesse VO] Things were really taking off for the
studio, and it was growing rapidly.
He spent an enormous amount of time at the studio,
and maybe prioritized that over family a little bit.
I think that's what he had to do.
***
-Oh, look at the...
-[Melissa VO] After 'Mark Twain' had a really
disappointing premiere, we were all depressed.
Will came back, and was like, "Well,
let's get to work," like undaunted.
[claps]
-"Okay, let's get rolling," and he would say that without fail.
And so that's just the kind of guy he was -- it was like,
[clap] "Okay, let's get rolling."
-[Hal VO] I've never seen him exhibit frustration or anger
or being down.
So it is hard to sort of see him as a fully rounded human being,
because he's always got that outward-facing,
optimistic demeanor.
You wonder, "What are the secret doubts?"
*anxious ambient music
-[Will VO] My parents were always just so supportive
of trying things, of experimenting.
What they would say, "Yeah okay, what's next?"
And I'm like that myself, like, "That was cool.
That was really fun. Okay, let's see what's next."
[laughs] Kind of look around.
The California Raisin Advisory Board came to us with the idea
of personifying raisins that moved to
"I Heard It Through the Grapevine."
*Ooh, I heard it through the grapevine*
*Raised in the California sunshine*
-I was the director on the first California Raisins spot,
and I thought, "Man, what a dorky commercial.
Nobody's ever gonna see this commercial.
I'm wasting my time."
-[Will VO] A tiny, tiny little advertising campaign
just took off.
It went viral in an era where "viral" didn't exist yet.
-It seems almost everyone is wild about these raisins and
their hip sales pitch.
-[Will VO] The fact that it's taken the nation by storm
is kind of quite a surprise.
-[man VO] Raisins are more popular with youngsters than old
favorites like Charlie Brown.
A true advertising phenomenon.
*groovy music
-[man VO] America has gone raisin crazy.
We have raisin t-shirts, raisin sweatshirts,
raisin coffee mugs.
-[Will VO] Claymation was on people's tongues
in a way that it never had been before.
I can't tell you how many times people said,
"Wow, what's it like to be an overnight success?"
-[woman VO] Well, we've all heard of
the overnight sensation--
-And I'm going, "Yeah, after 15 years of doing this."
You know?
-Will Vinton is an Academy Award winner,
but hardly anybody knew his name until he made a
television commercial.
-[Will VO] To me, commercials were little films,
using characters to really connect with audiences.
-We have a hit now, and it's opening up all these new doors
for us, and we're a busy studio.
[squeaky laughter]
-[man VO] Meet the Noid...
the star of Domino's Pizza commercials.
-The Noid happened the same time the California Raisins happened
and just blew up.
They were huge.
But we won an award for being the stupidest ad campaign.
I don't get it. He hates pizza?
He loves pizza? He wrecks pizza?
So why should I get Domino's?
[zapping]
[grunting]
-[man] Does it sell pizzas? -Oh, absolutely.
Like crazy.
-[Melissa VO] People became aware of this process of
Claymation, and they wanted to be part of it.
-[man VO] Nike makes aerobic shoes...
tennis shoes...
-[Will VO] There was a lot of capital.
One of the accountants said, "What are you guys doing over
there? You printing money?"
He was so surprised at the level of profitability.
My father finally [laughing] stopped wondering when I was
gonna get a real job. [laughs]
And he said that to me.
-I'd like to thank our family and friends...
and Will.
-Bob Gardiner saw that Will moving forward with their idea
and creating a company that didn't include him,
he felt that he had been slighted or robbed of something.
-[Susan VO] Everybody knew Bob was kind of crazy.
Crazy Bob, funny crazy Bob, who wasn't so funny after a while.
-[David VO] His activity would flare up whenever the
studio was getting a lot of press.
It seemed to agitate him.
-"Claymation" -- you coined the phrase?
-Yeah, right. -[Barbara] It's just clay--
-It comes from "clay animation."
-[David VO] You'd come to work in the morning,
and there'd be graffiti on the wall outside that was clearly a
message from Bob.
-[Susan VO] He wrote "Swill Vinton,
Mediocre Crap" like in five-foot high letters.
-[David VO] He would call Vinton up in the middle of
the night, yell at him, and threaten him.
-Hello?
-[Melissa VO] There would be death threats--
-Yes, uh huh.
-[Melissal VO] And the studio had to take those seriously.
Will carried a gun.
-Okay, yeah.
-My name is Nicolle Gardiner-Sampson,
and Bob Gardiner was my father.
I probably won't ever meet anybody like my dad.
If you approached him, he would often have a story to tell,
or he'd play the piano for you.
He would draw with you and doodle with you.
Nothing was ever typical.
It was magical.
I knew that Bob and Will had a falling out since
I was a little girl.
I think it was always a ghost that haunted him,
and he struggled letting go.
*moody music
-By the way, is Mr. Gardiner the one who is the true creator
of Claymation?
-Um, why would you ask that?
-I don't want to hear, "Why would I?"
because your complaint alleges that you are widely recognized
as a creative genius and the developer of Claymation.
Answer the question.
-Mr. Gardiner, absolutely not.
-[man] Did you develop it jointly with Mr. Gardiner?
-Absolutely not.
Claymation was developed, five or-- several years after I
worked with Bob Gardiner-- coined.
-See, that wasn't hard.
***
-[David VO] Bob was an incredibly creative artist,
somewhat mad, somewhat delusional.
He was good with inspired ideas, but he couldn't execute on them.
So you gotta give Will credit that probably 'Closed Mondays'
got executed at all.
If it was up to Bob, that film probably would never
have been made.
As much art as he put into it, he needed someone to guide him
through actually finishing something.
-Will produced it -- that's what he did -- and a lot of the stuff
you see there is Bob.
The stuff that people go, "Ooo-ooo!"
-- that's Bob.
*jaunty music
-What was that guy thinking of?
Puh.
-With most things in life, there was a grain of truth to
some of it.
Was this just a really angry guy who was making up all these
ideas about what had happened in that relationship,
or was he really an aggrieved creative who felt he didn't get
his due?
*news jingle
-Portland's own California Raisins are
back in the news again.
They have a new home video out, and to give you an idea of how
good it's selling, it reached platinum even before it hit
the stores.
-One of the first productions we did as an entertainment project
was a CBS primetime special called 'Meet the Raisins!' and
it was done rockumentary parody of 'Meet the Beatles.'
-The California Raisins, these four working class musicians
have risen from garden variety band to pop phenomenon.
But what are the roots of such genius?
From whence doth it spring?
-[Will VO] First time I'd gotten into primetime television.
-It's a movie camera!
So do something.
[clonk]
[growls]
-[man VO] We bear fortunate witness to the youngsters'
discovery of tonal resonance and harmony.
-So far we had had anonymous raisins in all of these spots,
and we wanted to kind of create distinctive characters
for entertainment purposes, so we created the California Raisin
Band with--
-[man VO] A.C., Beebop, Stretch, and Red.
-That four, you know?
-*Like a fool I went and stayed too long*
*Now I'm wonderin' if your love's still strong*
-*Ooh, baby, here I am
*Signed, sealed, delivered, I'm yours*
[cheering]
-[Will VO] The show won a Primetime Emmy,
and that was a really, really successful project in terms of
popularity, and in terms of moving the Raisins to a new
level, which was just pure music entertainment.
[gunfire]
-Upcoming projects include a number of television
commercials, a music video -- that for reasons of secrecy we
can only say is for a major pop star.
[beep]
-[Michael Jackson on answering machine] Will, I really need you
to call me. This is very important.
Thank you, bye.
[beep]
This is Michael calling again.
Please don't think I'm being a nuisance.
Let's do something here, be pioneers.
So thank you, bye.
[hangs up]
[beep]
-[Scott on answering machine] Will, this is Scott Norton from
work, and um, Michael Jackson just called.
[beep]
-[Michael on answering machine] Will, it's Michael calling.
Are you there?
Will?
[hangs up]
-[Webster VO] Michael was a big fan.
He saw Will as a Disney figure, and he was a big fan
of the work.
-[Will VO] He got around to saying how much he loved the
California Raisin commercials, so I realized where he was
going, and I said, "Michael, you should be a Raisin."
-The rap raisins materializing behind me.
I wanted to define the character and find his expression,
which is 99 percent of it.
The one guy has the glasses, and he has the type of attitude
that-- he's so cool that I'm fortunate that he's here.
And he's much too cool for, like, one of these.
It's like, "What you lookin' at?"
The other raisin would be this style,
no glasses, so his eyes-- it's mostly the expression.
*"I Heard It Through the Grapevine" by Michael Jackson*
*I heard it through the grapevine*
*Raised in the Califonia sunshine*
*Heard it through the grapevine, baby*
[fireworks explode]
-[woman VO] There's no way these princes of produce are
going to rot.
They are one of the hottest headliner acts in the country.
You may be wondering who has the rights to
all that Raisin paraphernalia.
Well, it's the California Raisins Advisory Board,
not Will Vinton.
-This is the famous blunder that he regretted,
where he didn't get a portion of the licensing,
which nobody thought was gonna be a big deal, really.
-Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
We're talking about $400,000,000 in products that we could've had
a piece of.
-Oooh, this is a harbinger of things to come.
I can feel it.
*wistful music
-It was really hard after a while to pull people's teeth
[laughs] and to work on the next Raisin show because we had
already done that, and our culture was built around,
you know, "Do something different."
You know, "What else can we do?"
***
-The studio was trying very hard to create some intellectual
property of its own, and they wanted to try and create their
own characters that they would own all the merchandising on,
their own Mickey Mouse.
-[Will VO] We have a character I'm very,
very fond of.
He's just been signed to a very, very big role in a major feature
that we're developing right now, and he and we are very excited
about that.
-I'm invincible!
I feel like I could climb every mountain!
-[Chuck VO] The dream behind Wilshire Pig was to be
Will's Mickey Mouse.
Instead of Mickey Mouse ears we had rubber pig noses.
-[Melissa VO] Will would used to say that Wilshire
Pig was his alter ego.
-You get offered five million bucks to do a commercial,
and you turned it down?
-There's the tycoon element to that character.
He sort of like the greedy capitalist.
That might be the way that he thought of himself as Wilshire
Pig, probably as not as the good parts of himself but rather the
kind of dirty things he had to do to find success at the level
that he found it.
[explosion]
-He was building this idea of, "If I create these characters--
[rumbling]
[shouts]
--then after that I can make a bunch of films with those
characters, and from that I can make an amusement park."
-The point of amusement rides is not amusement.
The point of amusement rides is making money!
[gears crank]
[coins jingle]
Perfect!
[explosion]
-[Chuck VO] They were always trying to get the thing
that would make the amusement park.
It's like he was looking down a checklist,
and he was ticking off the boxes of what he needed to
become Disney.
-[man's voice on TV] Will Vinton -- the creator of Claymation --
is now creating Claymation Station,
a year-round entertainment park.
It would be on 15 to 20 acres behind Union Station,
serving as a depot to transport people to real places,
to other worlds, and to the far reaches of imagination.
There would be rides and shops, a 3-D movie theater,
restaurants, a large hotel, and motion picture studios.
Can Will Vinton make it a success?
Well, he's already made raisins dance,
so who's to say his latest brainstorm is pushing the
imagination too far?
[static]
*moody ambient music
-[Bill VO] Bob Gardiner would call me in the middle of
the night from some ghost town where he was doing tours of the
empty mining shafts.
He'd still complain about Will Vinton and how he got
ripped off.
-[Nicolle VO] My dad kind of picked up this
day-job lifestyle.
It just kind of seemed like him letting go.
He let go of his creativity.
He talked a lot about Will, and that was it.
-Good morning everybody, and welcome to Portland,
Oregon for the Grand Floral Parade which is
about to get underway.
-[Bill VO] Bob Gardiner threatened to assassinate Will
Vinton at the Rose Festival Parade.
[gun clicks]
*ominous strings
Gardiner was gonna have a scope rifle up on the top of the Meier
& Frank Building and off him.
-[man VO] And there he is, you heard it through the
grapevine, folks.
That's Will Vinton, the Grand Marshal of the parade.
-[Bill VO] Will -- to be safe -- got the FBI to patrol
all the rooves of the buildings along the parade route.
***
-[woman VO] You've certainly seen his work with the
California Raisins.
Looks like he brought a few of his friends with him today.
-[Bill VO] For something to do with cartoons,
it just seems really out of whack.
-[Will VO] Bob and I did a wonderful thing together.
I wish that we could've both cherished that into the sunset.
It's hard for me to talk about it because it was such
a sad thing.
I knew that he was in a lot of pain.
When I heard that he had, uh, committed suicide, um...
I was...
I was...shocked.
I guess I-- you could say, but...
somehow strangely not completely surprised.
I wished so much at that time that I really could've helped to
celebrate who he was as a person,
as an artist...
and tell him how sorry I felt about the whole thing.
***
-I went to help pack up his stuff and being in his place --
boxing everything -- was really haunting,
looking at all the stuff that he left out.
He had Marvin Gaye "Heard It Through the Grapevine" sitting
open on his little piano.
That particular song
was this, like, goodbye to Will.
My dad's work will always keep him alive.
I can always go back and look through his writing.
I can look through his drawings.
I can watch 'Closed Mondays.'
The expressions through his drawings or his animation,
you get to see him in that, and so that's where the artist
is alive.
[chimes]
-This is it...where the rubber meets the road.
[mechanical whirring]
[rattling]
[snorts]
-[David VO] Wilshire Pig and the licensable characters
weren't that interesting to the animators.
-What's that?
[screams]
[pins clatter]
-[David VO] More talking animals;
Warner Brothers and Disney already covered
that pretty thoroughly.
Is there something else we could do?
-[Webster VO] The ideas just weren't progressing.
-Test results...inconclusive.
[snorts]
Aw, dang!
Why does it keep happening to me?
This should've worked!
-[Webster VO] People just stopped giving a shit
because they were just so disenchanted with what was
going on.
Important people started to leave the studio.
-It was reaching that point where you finally realized how
much work you were doing, and you weren't getting credit for
all the man hours you were putting in.
-[Bill VO] He felt it important --sometimes -- to
overlook some of the credit that should perhaps have been given
to many of the talented people actually making the work.
-He would actually say, "It's Will Vinton Studios.
We're all successful," but I do think he also had that personal
drive that he himself wanted to be seen as the
driving creative force.
[electricity sparks]
-[Bill VO] Certainly Walt Disney did a great job of
forging that visionary personalization of his own name
as a brand itself.
[claps]
-[in Mickey Mouse voice] Hey Pluto, here she comes!
-The general perception was Walt Disney drew every comic book,
made every short film and feature film -- in fact the
studio perpetuated that myth.
Of course that's why the signature is the logo.
He was an artist and he signed his artwork.
But when the artist looks at Walt Disney to emulate,
that usually doesn't work out too well.
-People resented that he had these big goals,
and yet at the ground level where we were working on stuff,
we just didn't like it that much.
-Here's some Raisin news right off the press for you;
starting this fall the California Raisins will be added
to the Saturday morning cartoon lineup.
Will Vinton will produce the show.
It won't be done in Claymation, but cel animation.
-*It's the California Raisin Show!*
-That really was against our grain,
because it was Saturday morning, because it really was kind of
for kids.
-And so it was less than a success.
-Whenever you get really successful --
we were kind of the flavor of the month --
you go out of fashion.
*melancholy piano music
-Guess those wrinkled rockers were just a flash in the pan.
-[cartoon VO] Ouch!
-[Bill Fiesterman VO] They were saying,
"There's a lot of Claymation on TV now,
and advertising agencies are looking for something that looks
a little different."
***
-You know, I think we ought to...
I don't wanna put it in the negative.
***
-[Will VO] People had always come to us for something
that was really unique and creative,
but people were starting to say we were all about raisins.
Suddenly there was this kind of myopic sense about what we do as
filmmakers, and that was tough for me -- a double-edged sword,
as they say.
-The whole Claymation look had kind of run its course,
and it dropped out of style, and the studios fell on pretty
hard times.
-Despite our limitations as artists,
and our foibles like not wanting to lay anybody off,
period -- which is just totally a non-concept when it comes to
proper business -- you don't have the work,
get rid of people, you know, it's the mantra -- it wasn't
even considered.
-They were having a really hard time getting commercial work,
and there was very little demand for what they were doing.
Will saw the logic in expanding their look and style and tools.
-[Will VO] When I first picked up clay...
while the material was crude, lumpy, didn't stand up straight,
rather quickly, I could really see that the
possibilities were phenomenal.
I feel that we're in exactly the same place
with computer animation.
-[Chris VO] Computer animation was brand new.
There had yet to be a computer-animated movie and
computer animation was just kind of a novelty.
-We really did embrace the digital tools,
thinking this could really bring some new energy,
some new life, some new ways to bring to life characters.
*funky music
One of the old-time advertisers that wanted to move into the
digital world was M&M's.
It was a big campaign, and a lot of production companies
jumped on it.
So we actually had to compete, but then nobody thought of us as
a computer company at all, as even having the tools.
And the truth is [whispers] we didn't really have the tools.
[laughs]
***
Our pitch to them was, "Anybody can do the 3-D animation.
This is what we'd like to see you doing.
Name them -- Red, Yellow, Green, Blue -- give them character,
give them attitude, give them backstories,
but above all just fill them full of attitude."
-*Yes it's true, yeah, we're totally blue*
-I wanna be in this commercial.
-You ain't getting this job, 'cause you're not blue!
-Great.
-[Will VO] It's so cool to see the exact same characters
that we pitched have endured to this day.
-[David VO] M&M's are a huge story.
They came because Will had successfully sold the image of
Will Vinton as a creative force.
It's a really really important pivot because that was a cash
cow and a proving ground for what the studio could be and
became all throughout the '90s.
-[Chris VO] Everything shifted during this time period.
They were sticking in photographs.
They were making characters out of cardboard flats.
They were experimenting with all these different materials to
make stop-motion puppets and different graphic looks.
-Al, I'm wood.
What have I got to lose?
[mechanical whir]
[saws buzz]
Oh, no!
-[Chris VO] In trying all these different looks,
they really revitalized interest in the studio and was pretty
successful again.
We kept getting more and more accounts,
and they started hiring people like crazy.
Most of the hiring that they did was for full-time,
full-benefit staff positions.
It exploded in size.
-[Chuck VO] Will was always supposed to just have a small
group of artists that love what they do,
and he loved what he did.
I don't think Will was a businessman.
He was just more of a creator and an artist and a guy with
ideas, and he had fun at it.
-[Will VO] As we grew the company,
it was becoming a little less creatively satisfying for me.
I was doing a lot of stuff that was not the things that excited
me about being an artist, about being a creator,
so I was looking for more creative things that I could do.
-We have a special guest tonight on Oregon Art Beat,
the man who made Claymation a household word.
Casey is with Will Vinton.
-That's right, I am.
Thank you very much, Mike, and thank you for joining us.
-Oh, a pleasure.
-[Casey] We've got some tape that shows a little bit of
the process.
Why don't we roll that tape so we can see it,
and you can kind of narrate it as we go along.
-[Will VO] What you see here is Thurgood
who is in 'The PJs' which is our television show.
-What happened is, I described what the guy was like,
what his personality was like, and Will Vinton would go,
and he'd make up sketches.
Then once I looked at him, then I'd come up with a voice that
looks like what he would sound like.
-Hello, projects!
[cheering]
I am the Reverend Thurgood Stubbs.
-I worked very closely with Eddie to do the pilot,
and that was fun, and that was really creative,
and that was me getting my feet back into it.
[helicopter sounds]
-I can't take this anymore!
I can't take it!
-But not as satisfying for for me personally as doing
my own thing.
-[Casey] What can we look forward to seeing from you in
the future?
-We have another show that'll be launching called 'Gary & Mike'
that's gonna run on Fox through the summer.
-There ain't nothing but open road from here on out.
[car sputters]
-[Will VO] We really scaled it up.
We did 13 half-hour shows of 'The PJs'--
-Don't worry. I know exactly what I'm doing.
Whoops! [grunts]
-[Will VO] Eight of 'Gary & Mike'--
-Good luck!
-You're the one who's gonna need it!
-80 or 90 major commercials, all in a year's time.
They also were significant revenue generators,
but I was definitely into a new mode.
I'm not the filmmaker-entrepreneur at all.
It was kind of a beast with a life of its own that didn't
really equal me so much anymore.
-When you started, you were a very small shop,
and now -- I think you were telling me -- you have three
buildings in northwest Portland?
-[Will VO] Yeah, we have three buildings,
sometimes four.
-[Casey VO] And how much of a staff now?
-[Will VO] Well over 300 artists and animators and
staff-people.
-Well, we'll be seeing lots of you as the years go by.
Will, thank you so much for joining us on Oregon Art Beat.
-My pleasure.
*"You've Got a Friend in Me" by Randy Newman*
-[Charlie VO] 'Toy Story' made history last year as the
first computer-generated feature film.
Joining me now, Pixar's chairman and CEO,
Steve Jobs.
-We're about putting stories into the culture,
that's what we're-- We're about telling stories.
And you know--
-I'm gonna come back and interview you in five years and
find out you're in some other business and you found some
other well to go fishing in?
-You know, I tend to stay where I start until somebody
kicks me out.
[laughter]
-[Will VO] Steve Jobs seemed to have an interest in us
as a television organization.
After quite a bit of due diligence between the companies,
they came back and floated the idea that Pixar would purchase
us and purchase all of my stock for Pixar stock.
I'm going, "Well, what- you know, okay, I'm sitting on
millions of shares of Will Vinton Studios stock and there's
this company called Pixar, so I'd be trading that for
millions of shares or something of this Pixar stock,"
and basically just rejected it out of hand.
Well, jump forward about [laughs] 10/15 years.
If I had taken that deal, I'd be probably arguably be one of the
largest, maybe the largest shareholder of Disney.
[laughs]
-[man] You've been a businessman for many years.
-[laughs]
Of sorts.
-Why did you step down as CEO in 1997?
-I really wanted to get back to doing what I had always-- what I
used to do, which was more development and directing and
focus on that, on the creative side.
-[Will VO] I was really eager to get back into being a director,
and I was kind of ready to shed responsibility.
I ended up deciding that I really did need to bring in a
CEO that could come in and handle the business side.
We actually came up with a guy that I thought the world of
named Tom Turpin.
-[David VO] Tom Turpin was a Gentleman's Quarterly
version of your ideal CEO candidate.
He looked good, he could say the right things,
he was always very warm in a Hollywood way.
-People were leery when Tom Turpin started because he was
just this dashing, charming, fast-talking guy.
And Will just loved him.
We were like, "The guy just says whatever you want to hear."
-Are you ready to make your wildest dreams come true?
Of course you are!
-Whoa!
-I actually joined April 1st, 1997 -- April Fools Day --
and I dug it.
I just thought it was a cool place, very cool.
The ad division was really a cash cow,
and it really covered a lot of the overhead,
so when the TV shows came in, they started making
a lot of money.
We actually made a lot of money.
-[Will VO] One of the things that our CEO felt we should do
is raise capital.
Well, that's a completely different concept than what we
had ever had.
You know, what are we gonna do with this capital?
And of course the mantra was, "You raise capital when you
don't need it."
[laughing] Oh, okay, all right.
I think that sounds right. [laughs]
-[man] Take a look at exhibit four, please.
-[Tom VO] Phil, I couldn't think of a more
prestigious investor than that.
We reminded him of when he was at the beginning of his career,
and there was something fun in that for him.
Company like Nike is so big; it just turns into a monster
business, and your role changes, right?
He just remembered that kind of entrepreneurial juice,
and he saw it in us -- let's just do it.
For $5,000,000, Phil acquired 15 percent of the company.
-[man] I heard you got offered five million bucks to do one of
those tennis shoe ads, is that true?
-Whoa, $5,000,000?
-I still liked the idea of getting in the feature
film business.
-[Tom VO] To move into features,
you need to have a deep pocket behind you.
Pixar had Steve Jobs, and now Vinton has Phil Knight.
-[Jeffrey VO] I can't think that any other business that
he's invested in is stayed.
It was totally out of character for Phil to do that.
Knight had so much money; it was going to be a great partnership.
-[Will VO] Having built this company, and 25 years later I
actually was looking at a kind of exit strategy to slip into a
different role and allow me the time to do my own projects.
-[Tom VO] I think that Will's real dream was to be
making feature films.
[chimes]
-[man VO] Will Vinton Features presents 'The Frog Prince.'
-We've taken the timeless appeal of the Brothers Grimm story and
made it into this expansive, magical,
emotionally engaging musical comedy.
-He was so optimistic and excited and enthusiastic about
everything that he did.
Not only were we gonna have 'Gary & Mike' and 'The PJs'
running, but we had three pilots that were in production.
And at the same time, it was looking like some of these
feature films were gonna happen; 'Corpse Bride' started
to happen.
It felt like all of Will's dreams were coming true.
-Mr. Knight had been a shareholder since 1998, correct?
-Correct.
-[man] And he had been very hands-off, hadn't he?
-Yes, that's correct.
-And his son had been an employee from about that same
point in time, correct?
-That was one of the things that Phil wanted as part of that
first investment was for his son to have employment there.
*moody ambient music
-Phil Knight just said, "I have a son who's in the
creative world.
He likes animation; he's rapping now."
-*Nikes on my feet, kick your seat*
*Through the right or the left*
*Imma keep it slick
*You thought that I was whack, money [indistinct]*
*Another name for Richard is Dick*
*So get off mine
-[man VO] Although he's got his own state-of-the-art recording
studio and indoor tennis and basketball courts,
all this millionaire homeboy really wants is to have his very
own posse.
I mean what's your response to the kind of support or lack of
support you've had from Portland?
-A lot of people have a problem with me just because
they think I'm tryin' to front or tryin' to fake or tryin' to
be Black or whatever.
Think I'm tryin' to be something I'm not.
-[man] So you're kind of like a homeboy without a posse
in a way.
-Yeah pretty much.
-Any young person, especially any young son of a really
successful wealthy person, it's a struggle to find an identity,
and Will hasn't wished to be a great rapper.
But he found his niche and he went to work for the company
that his dad's invested in.
[record scratches]
-[Tom VO] He started like everybody started.
You don't need to know anything; come and sweep the floors,
see if you like it.
Will and I thought the best way to support Travis is not to tell
anybody that Phil Knight's his dad.
I don't think anybody knew for three years.
-To Travis's credit, he seemed to really,
really love the animation and took to it right away.
-[man] What are your goals or plans as far as Travis's
involvement in the company?
-Well they're not my plans; they're his plans,
that essentially his plan is to be an animator.
That's what he loves doing.
He doesn't have management ambition at the present time.
He doesn't even want to be a director at the present time.
He wants to be an animator, which he's very good at.
*moody ambient music
-[Chris VO] Will's enthusiasm was the company's
greatest asset and probably the greatest danger.
Both Tom Turpin and Will Vinton were just raving and so excited
about what was happening.
And there were all these dreams and goals,
but they never seemed to have a plan B.
You know, what are you gonna do if it doesn't happen?
He's like, "It'll happen."
-When Tom Turpin came in, it became a very corporate place.
The whole structure -- the feeling -- was different.
I would say it was a completely different company.
-The "MBA" approach to CEO is as all-powerful management,
we know best.
-[man] Why was Mr. Turpin's contract not renewed?
-Primarily because of his performance.
As Tom's policies began to take effect,
we started losing money and started spending an awful lot
of money.
-[David VO] Tom Turpin wasn't making great decisions.
A lot of money was being thrown in a lot of stupid places.
There's the legend of the million dollar escalator.
They had rented two levels of an office in an LA to look
impressive as they were seducing and wooing studios.
Tom had the great idea to put in an escalator between the two
floors because it would be a dramatic entrance,
sort of like going up the escalator to creative heaven at
Will Vinton's Hollywood swanky pad.
-[man] When was 'The PJs' cancelled?
-It was the early part of 2001.
-What was the name of the other television series?
-'Gary & Mike.'
-And when did it cease being on TV?
-I believe it was right around the same time.
-[Tom VO] TV shows get cancelled.
These TV shows were like two-thirds of our revenue --
$10,000,000-a-year projects -- and then if they go away it's
like, "Boom, $10,000,000 is gone."
-The pilots -- one by one -- don't get picked up,
and then the feature films they've been talking about,
none of those come to fruition.
And then everything started to come apart.
-How would you describe the financial condition of Will
Vinton Studios during the spring of 2002?
-It was [clears throat] struggling, not good.
-[Melissa VO] We have to support all these people,
and suddenly your money-making machine stops,
but you're still spending money,
you're literally bleeding money.
-If it had been Hollywood, it would have been a totally
different deal, because all of these guys would have been on
contract -- they would have been temporary workers -- and the
minute the work went away, they would be gone.
-Was it in that context that the company approached Phil Knight
about a possible additional investment?
-Yes.
-He had an army of really smart businesspeople putting together
the contracts to protect his investment.
There were stacks like this of contracts,
you know, that I didn't even read,
you know, when we probably signed up the thing.
-When you want a loan, there's only one person you need to
see-- [quirky sound effect]
The Brains.
-It was not an investment I wanted to make.
It was not a good economic investment,
in my view.
Will Vinton seemed to me to be trying to commit suicide for
the company.
-He thought that Phil Knight would be a benign benefactor who
knew the shoe business. [laughs]
I remember Will saying to me, "There's no business like
shoe business."
***
-I was aware of the fact that if we had a downturn,
that he would be able to take certain kind of control.
But we'd been profitable 23 years out of 25,
so what was I worried about?
-Do you remember him telling you that if he was to make an
additional investment, that he would drive a very hard bargain?
-[Will] Yes.
-Do you think Mr. Knight drove a hard bargain?
-Sure, absolutely.
-He was driving a very hard bargain, correct?
-[Will] That's correct.
Could I get a little more water, or-- could I?
-[man VO] Phil Knight versus Will Vinton was sort of like the
great white shark versus a guppy.
[water bubbles]
-[Melissa VO] Will must've been somewhat
blindsided, or maybe didn't understand that Phil Knight
would play hardball with him.
-Were you aware at the time you signed the employment agreement
that it authorized your termination without cause?
***
-Sure.
-Did you have an understanding what "without cause" meant?
-Um, a basic understanding, I guess.
-Did you understand that it meant any reason or no reason
at all?
-[laughs]
-[Will VO] Now we're into some really heavy-duty
business stuff.
The company's losing money, and we had a lot of commitments.
-[Tom VO] They were hemorrhaging money like crazy.
-In business, the best deals are kind of win-win deals.
That's not the way they liked to play.
If somebody's winning, that means you're losing.
-[Jeffrey VO] Phil Knight slowly started taking possession.
He acquired a lot of it without Will knowing about it.
Phil Knight soon had a majority of the stock.
-[man VO] Why were you interested of taking voting
control of the company?
-I had to get something for my investment.
If it had just been the economics of the situation,
I would never have done it.
But I had a son that worked there that loved the company,
that loved his job, loved the people he worked with,
had a chance to work with Tim Burton -- who's probably the
ultimate in terms of animation, creative,
respect, and talent -- and I concluded that I would try and
keep the company alive.
Why on earth did you not just say thank you?
-[man] At this point in time, had you resigned yourself to the
fact that your days were numbered at Will Vinton Studios?
-I really couldn't believe that would be an outcome of
this business.
Nobody in their right mind would lay off the founder of the
company and the rainmaker for most of the business,
except somebody who had other motives and some deep pocket to
back it up and go somewhere else with it.
It was clear that Phil had made up his mind that he was going to
take that company.
[clamoring]
-[disembodied voice] Fools!
[people praying]
-[lman] Were you terminated from your employment at Will
Vinton Studios?
-[sighs] Yes, I was.
-What is the factual basis for your assertion that Phil Knight
wanted to take control of this company to turn the company over
to Travis Knight?
-Well, the fact that Phil requested Travis's
employment way back.
The fact that Travis stayed a part of the organization,
you know, the Chilly Tee fiasco happened.
Which I suspect that this was a little more compatible way to
use money to get into the business.
Heck, it's hard to imagine any other motivation,
to be frank.
-[Jeffrey VO] There are these issues of nepotism.
There are these issues of, "Did Phil Knight take advantage
of Will?"
*dark string music
This collision of Phil Knight and Will Vinton -- creativity
versus commerce -- they were at odds,
and...
Will came out the loser of that battle.
-[man] You're aware that you're entitled to a termination
payment, correct?
-Yes.
-You got the $50,000, correct?
-[Will] That's correct.
-You never got the $150,000, isn't that right?
-[Will] That's correct.
-And that's because one of those conditions was that the 'Corpse
Bride' contract be signed, correct?
-[laughs] Yes.
-Was it only coincidental that the 'Corpse Bride' contract was
signed the day after Mr. Vinton's was terminated?
-Yes.
-[Jeffrey VO] He walked away with $50,000 for a lifetime
of artistic and creative struggle.
That's ridiculous.
-[Michele VO] There was no need to do that mean stuff.
They took Claymation, the name-- they took everything.
They didn't need to do that.
I think that's really "poor paper,"
as my grandma would say.
-Are you happier today that you are no longer employed by
that company?
-I absolutely did not want to leave that company.
-And you have told the public or people that you are happier
today that you're no longer employed by the company.
-How could I be happy about having left the company that I
built, that I am so close to?
It was like a family, and I had my entire net worth wrapped up
in that company.
I...
My...
Yeah.
-[man] That's all I have for today!
-[laughs]
*"RIP Coyote Condo #5" by Grandaddy*
-He just didn't know what was happening,
and his studio was just gone.
***
-[Melissa VO] The next thing I know,
Vinton Studios belongs to Travis Knight,
and that between Travis and his father Phil,
it's Laika.
-[reporter VO] It's the little studio that could -- Laika --
the CEO of the company is Travis Knight.
He joins us now from Portland, Oregon.
-Something just evolved.
It was an opportunity that came up that I-- you know,
who would think you could actually make a living
doing this?
It does not seem like it's a plausible life plan,
but it's something I always loved.
And when I had the-- when the opportunity was presented to me,
I took it-- I took, you know, grabbed it and ran with it.
-[reporter] So was Laika the opportunity,
or was there another thing before that?
-No, I was-- I worked at another animation house before then.
-Travis -- by all accounts -- is a talented guy and transcended
any sort of talk that this was all about finding sonny
boy a job.
-[Melissa VO] It's just sad that Will was able to take
his dream to a certain point and was not able to go to that
next level.
Somebody else took it there.
-[Tom VO] For Will to build it up to this point where
it got as big as it was ever gonna get,
and then ka-blooey, then lose the thing.
How could he build all this up and then it gets taken away?
-[Chuck VO] It goes back to the Disney thing.
It's great that he had that dream,
but he couldn't do it.
It's sort of this Disney ghost that haunted him.
-I was all broken up after he got let go,
and I went to see him at a little farewell party.
He said, "I just feel relief."
He said, "I've been so worried about how I'm gonna pay the
bills, how I'm gonna keep these people employed."
-[Craig VO] We hopped in his motorboat and zoomed into
Portland up the Willamette from his house.
I'm like, "Dude, you're cut."
And he's just like, [motorboat sound] in his motorboat,
and I'm like, "Man, clearly this guy-- the worst things can
happen to this guy and he's gonna bounce back."
-[Mary VO] He was never vengeful.
He was certainly never self-pitying.
And I remember him taking a fair amount of responsibility.
He made mistakes; yeah, he made some bad mistakes.
But the beauty is, when men get older and they've lost lovers,
friends, businesses, they get humble,
and then the best of them comes out,
and the best of what it means to be a father.
-[Jesse VO] I did get to see him a lot more.
There was a transformation emotionally in him.
He knew better than ever that family was
the most important thing.
***
-[nurse] Okay, so spell your last name for me.
-V-I-N-T-O-N.
-[nurse] Spell your first name.
-[laughing] Seeing if I can spell, or what?
-I gotta do it for the bracelet. -W-I-L-L-I-A-M.
Actually it bothers me to see needles on somebody else,
or even my dog.
God, I about passed out one time when I took my dog
in for something.
[both laugh]
-I was gonna say, this has never bothered you.
-[nurse VO] How are you feeling today?
-[Will] Kinda sluggin' around a little bit.
-[nurse] You have a transfusion today, right?
-[Will] Uh, tomorrow.
-[nurse] Okay, any pain today?
-[Will] A little in the back.
-[nurse] Any change in medications since we saw
you last?
-Maybe dropped the-- I'm a little confused;
I've got a lot of doctors.
-[nurse] Pointer...
So yeah, you won't be as short
of breath after that transfusion.
Have you had a transfusion before?
-Yeah, just-- yeah.
Not that long ago.
-You're-- hang on, you are a pioneer,
and I'm excited to say that we're giving you our lifetime
achievement award.
[applause]
-[Will] Thank you everybody.
[applause]
-I think most of you know, Will Vinton Studios was acquired by
Phil Knight, and subsequently
the name was changed to Laika.
There are those out there who think that I should not be very
comfortable with that.
[laughing] So I'm gonna set the record straight,
um, right here.
The truth is -- you know -- I couldn't be more pleased that
under such strong financial leadership,
that Laika has been able to continue to grow and really
expand on the world of stop-motion.
-Need a-- need the cigar.
-[Will VO] For me, all of this activity, I feel like a
proud father, or bastard father in this filmmaker scene.
-Michele!
-Oh Will, thank you.
-[Will VO] And that's been a continually gratifying
aspect of this company that we created.
But what pushes me and gets me excited are -- frankly -- my
own projects.
See something else come to life in a new way.
One that I'm extremely excited about is this musical project
called 'The Kiss.'
I'm not a puppeteer but there's a lot of time that a frog spends
just sitting there.
And that's one of their charms is that they're just
sitting there.
And frogs are-- real frogs, when they move,
they're sudden a lot.
You know, they hop or they move or something,
and then their backend is completely still again.
-[Melissa VO] It's an idea that he was working on when
he was at the studio -- 'The Frog Prince' -- that he wanted
to do as a feature film.
Now he's metamorphosing that to now he sees it as a musical.
*"Sugar Lips" by David Pomeranz and Will Vinton*
-[Will VO] It's really about all the things we've been
talking about.
It's about characters and stories and entertainment,
about music.
It's about comedy.
It's about great conflicts that characters have to face.
***
As long as I'm alive, I'm gonna keep making things.
I just love it.
I don't know what else to do.
It's just great fun.
It's just great, great fun.
[drips]
The condition I have -- it's multiple myeloma -- is a blood
cancer -- blood and bone.
And I've sort of done in the past is ignored and not talked
about health issues.
And if you don't talk about it, people don't pick up on it,
and so a lot of people -- even good friends -- might not even
know that I have this condition.
If you did mention it to somebody,
suddenly that was everything.
It's all anybody talked about, and it's all anybody asked you
about, and so forth.
There are so many more things I'd rather have them ask me
about, like how's-- like, you know...
about the lead character in 'The Kiss...'
you know, how does he really...[chuckles]
is he really the captain of the football team who's been
handicapped by being a frog?
I mean, that's fascinating, that's good stuff to talk about
to me, but...
during a lot of that time, I forget about it myself.
Can't forget about it now because I'm kind of into it
intensely with this new treatment,
so we'll see how that goes.
I've been a regular for a long time, so...
-2006
-I think that Will becoming very ill with this secret,
internal disease and having a company that is also sick at the
same time with internal strife, we don't know if those two
things are related, but it feels like they are,
doesn't it?
What would it have been like if he had been able to say,
"I'm scared to death" or "I'm really angry?"
If I could go back in time, I'd shake him,
and I'd say, "Tell me know you really feel about all of this."
-[woman] Bye, Will. -Bye-bye!
-[woman] Have a great week. -See you, thanks.
-[woman] You're welcome.
-[Jesse VO] Dying was very confusing for him.
He would say, "If only this was easier,
if only I knew kind of what to do."
[breathes out]
-I'm gonna cry. I miss him.
He's my friend.
Thank you, Mr. Will...
for everything.
*slow synthesizer music
-[Will VO] Everything I've done is a build.
There's something that I've built,
one thing on top of the other.
I love being able to feel like my life is a continuum.
That things that maybe felt like they might have been missteps
was not at all a misstep.
***
-[Michele VO] Will was an amalgam of all
of his characters.
It's almost as though you took all that clay and you squished
it back together in a big multicolored ball,
you'd have Will with his big white mustache and his smile and
his blue eyes.
His work -- every time someone discovers it --
that pure childhood glee and knowing that there's magic.
There absolutely is magic.
***
-[Will VO] One of the coolest things about being an
artist is the thought that you can create some of these things
and it can go on and live way beyond you.
It's all such an intense web of human life and human existence.
[fire crackles]
[chimes glisten]
*"Dazed Inn Daydreams" by Ariel Pink*