Every writer talks about influences, but the truth is that your earliest influences are the ones that happen before you understand there’s such a thing as writing. The sincerity of character and freewheeling show-must-go-on energy that Jerry Juhl and the other writers of The Muppet Show wove into their skits is an embedded part of my DNA at this point – I sincerely view Kermit the Frog as a role model in how to be a creative artist who balances personal decency with the never-ending desire to put on a good show.
And there’s all those Dr. Seuss books, and the young-reader mystery stories – how many storytelling tropes, how many special uses of language, mapped themselves into my brain as routines that satisfy even to this day?
Novelists do all right when it comes to recognition – at least compared with the broader set of writers as a whole. But in other fields, sometimes, just to honor someone who had an impact on you, you have to pay special attention just to know that one man did it at all.
So it was only as a grown-up that I realized that the earliest lasting impact on my life that a writer could claim credit for was caused by a man named Michael Maltese. Michael Maltese is anything but a household name – but I would bet you he’s made you laugh.
Maltese was a “story” man at “Termite Terrace” – the classic Warner Brothers animation unit that produced the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series starring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and legions of other immortal drawn characters. He was a combination storyboard artist and writer, who would be paired with one of the studio’s directors to hash out the scenario, gags, and dialogue for an animated short – which took an average of about six weeks to produce. In his time at the studio he wrote well over 150 shorts, and around 1945 he started working almost exclusively with the most famous director in the history of Termite Terrace, Charles M. “Chuck” Jones.
The directors of each unit obviously made major contributions to the creative content of what ended up on-screen, but the work Chuck Jones produced with his “unit” in the late 40’s through the 50’s – with Maltese on story, the brilliant Maurice Noble painting backgrounds, and the equal parts super-literate and anarchic in-house composer/arranger Carl Stalling creating the soundtrack – are what he is largely remembered for today.
Throughout the 50’s, budgets tightened at Warner Brothers, so the cartoons became more dependent on dialogue and less dependent on constant animation. Jones’s ability to sketch instantly-memorable extreme “poses” for his characters to communicate emotions, and his ability to use tense silence, small or rapid movements, and off-screen suggestion, was both economical and a perfect marriage to Maltese’s writing style.
Chuck Jones’ mastery of expression in Feed the Kitty, written by Maltese
When set loose with stars like Bugs or Daffy, Maltese penned dialogue that was a manic juggling act of parody, pun, and nonsense – I always remember when Daffy, spoofing Sherlock Holmes in Deduce, You Say, challenged a villain to fisticuffs by declaring “I’m as brown as a nut and fit as a lass!” Seriously – what does that even MEAN? And it always puts a smile on my face to think of Jones and Maltese, standing over a ream of storyboards, hashing out one of Bugs and Daffy’s famous “Wabbit Season/Duck Season” arguments. Yet when the time came for the visuals to take over, he was just as able to let the wordplay recede and just tell a great story, like in One Froggy Evening, the timeless fable of the frog who would only sing for one man, whose life is ruined trying to cash in on the trick.
Sometimes you need a collaborator that brings out the best in you – and Maltese was equal to the most extreme inspirations Jones had. He had the audacity to write new lyrics for Wagner in What’s Opera, Doc?, and did it so well that most people, on hearing Ride of the Valkyries, are still singing “Kill the Wabbit, Kill the Wabbit, Kill the Wabbit!” And in Duck Amuck – he and Jones created a 6-1/2-minute marriage of formal deconstruction and existentialist whoopie cushion that can still make me laugh out loud in a quiet room whenever it invades my brain.
And that’s why, even as I grew up and absorbed authors and screenwriters and directors, and starting studying and naming as my heroes artists like Billy Wilder and Woody Allen, in many ways they are all just guests in a space that was built long ago by the unheralded likes of Michael Maltese.
Michael Maltese’s IMDB.com credits
Duck Amuck, one of three Chuck Jones animated shorts preserved in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. All three – including One Froggy Evening and What’s Opera, Doc?, were written by Maltese