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Philip Johnson
Dean of American Architects
Exams are so stupid. I couldn't be bothered to work for them, so I kept flunking them. They were too simple-minded. So I went to a cram school. The cram school of course said, "You idiot, look at that piece of paper." I said, "Yes. It's a fine piece of paper." He said, "You've only got six lines on it." I said, "Yeah, the paper's so beautiful, what do you want to spoil it for by covering it with all these lines?" They said, "Look, you've got to pass the exam. You stop your damn theories and cover the sheet with extra trees, then. It doesn't make any difference, just fill it up. Put more bricks in or something." And then another clue, "How do you know how to get into that building?" And I said, "It's right here." They said, "No, you take a red arrow. And it doesn't matter if it's the only red thing you've got on the sheet, put that in, so the examiner will see it." I said, "Oh, I see, he knows where to go in." Those simple little tricks I had trouble at. I passed it by doing -- they wanted a house in the suburbs. So I did it, just out of my memory. I took a suburban house. Don't like them, would never build one, hated the whole thing. I used to go to an exam and do what I wanted to do. Of course they didn't like it, because I was always doing something different from other people. Anyhow, by knuckling under I had no trouble. You learn lessons, you see. Always give in. I mean at the proper moment -- when you have to.
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Philip Johnson
Dean of American Architects
You have to know those things. You have to know structure, and you spend nine-tenths of your time on that. You say you know structure, but do you know connections? What happens when the water gets in that little place? Only years and years of experience but that's nothing to do with the art. You've got to know all of that before you start. Painters have it easy; they've got to know what kinds of pigments will last. They don't know that even sometimes, but even that's not necessary. You repair a picture if it's bad, but in architecture, it falls down. That's a sociological crux. Then you've got the permits and things to go through with city hall that drive you up your wall. Then you have the clients. The care and feeding of clients is really one of the main obstacles, because you always have a client with some preconceived idea of what a house looks like, and all you want him to do is leave a check and go to Europe for a couple of years. Or leave two checks. But alas, life isn't simple. If it were, more people would be better architects.
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Chuck Jones
Animation Pioneer
I started reading when I was about three, a little over three. My father felt it was best if we did our own reading. He said he had too many things he wanted to read himself to waste his time reading to us. He said, "You want to read? Learn to read." He said, "Hell, you learn to walk at two years. You can certainly learn to read at three." And so we all did. We all learned to read very early. And he helped us by seeing to it that we had plenty of things to read. In those days people moved a lot. And very often people left their whole libraries. You must understand -- anybody living today, or the day of television or radio and stuff -- that in those days there wasn't any such thing. Reading was what you did, that's how you found out things.
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Chuck Jones
Animation Pioneer
Chuck Jones: Well, directing is doing the key drawings, not the key animation, mind you. If the coyote is falling, and he looks at the audience and holds up a sign saying, "Please end this picture before I hit." That's his way of expressing himself since he can't talk. He does a couple of pictures, but mostly he does not. But, I have to make that particular drawing to show the attitude I want on the drawing. Plus the action of getting in there, the action of running, if he's going to fly like Batman, or falling over the cliff. Also, I have timed the entire scene. It scares cameramen and anybody that works behind the camera to find out that in animation in Warner Brothers we weren't allowed to edit. You couldn't over-shoot, it was too expensive. So all of us as directors had to learn to time the entire picture on music, on bar sheets, just like you were writing a symphony. That's carrying it on a bit, but anyway -- so by the time it came out to 540 feet, that's six minutes. Leon Schlesinger wouldn't let us make them any longer than six minutes, and the exhibitor wouldn't let us make them any shorter than six minutes, so they had to be six minutes. So we had to learn to do that, and it drives people like George Lucas or Spielberg crazy. "How can you make a picture without editing?"
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James Earl Jones
National Medal of Arts
I think the extent to which I have any balance at all, any mental balance, is because of being a farm kid and being raised in those isolated rural areas. Even in Mississippi there was no immediate concern about social problems, you know. We were a feudal system of our own. Grandpa was a feudal lord, and we all did our work, you know. And there were 13 of us in the household. We were self-sufficient. My grandmother though, began to prepare us in her own neurotic -- and I think psychotic -- way to face racism. So, she taught us to be racist, which is something I had to undo later when I got to Michigan, you know.
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James Earl Jones
National Medal of Arts
When I was in New York after I left the Army, I studied for two years at the American Theater Wing, studied acting which involved dance and fencing and speech classes and history of theater, all that. I was preparing myself for the theater, and I got a little job here and a job there, but it wasn't going well, and I considered some time before the mid-60s that maybe I should consider something else. And I went to NYU for some vocational testing, vocational guidance. And they found that I had a talent, perhaps, in architecture. So I applied to Pratt and Parsons for that kind of training. And I was prepared to say bye-bye to acting, go on to something else, and before I joined my fall classes, I got a job out in Indiana that set me back on the track of acting.
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James Earl Jones
National Medal of Arts
So when a young man yesterday from Chapel Hill asked me -- you know, he said he's determined to be the best actor in the world -- "Where do I go?" He used the phrase "dream." He said, "I have a dream of being the best actor in the world." And I said, "If you can turn that dream to imaging, you can image yourself, imagine yourself, and then achieving it, being able to plumb the depths of human feeling as much as Marlon Brando's able to, and then on the other end, the technique. Find clarity and brilliance of language as much as Richard Burton did. Then you might be the best actor in the world." But it's doing real things. It's nothing about fantasy.
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