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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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Quincy Jones
Music Impresario
I was 14 years old when Ray [Charles] came to town from Florida. He wanted to get away from Florida and he asked a friend of his -- because he had sight until he was seven -- to take a string from Florida and get him as far away from Florida as he could get and boy, Lord knows, that's Seattle! If you go any further you're in Alaska and Russia! So Ray showed up, and he was at 16 years old, and he was like -- God! You know! He had an apartment, he had a record player, he had a girlfriend, two or three suits. When I first met him, you know, he'd invite me over to his place. I couldn't believe it. He was fixing his record player. He'd shock himself because there were glass tubes in the back of the record player then, and the radio. And, I used to just sit around and say, "I can't believe you're 16 and you've got all this stuff going," because he was like he was 30 then. He was like a brilliant old dude, you know. He knew how to arrange and everything. And he used to -- taught me how to arrange in Braille, and the notes. He taught me what the notes were because he understood. He said, "A dotted eighth, a sixteenth, that's a quarter note," and so forth. And, I'd just struggle with it and just plowed through it.
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Quincy Jones
Music Impresario
Quincy Jones: I guess 1947 we got our first job for seven dollars, and the year after that we played with Billie Holiday, you know, with the Bumps Blackwell - Charlie Taylor band, and our confidence was building, because we danced and we sang and we played all -- we played modern jazz, we played schottisches, pop music at the white tennis clubs: "Room Full of Roses," and "To Each His Own," and all those things. And, we played the black clubs at ten o'clock, and played rhythm and blues, and for strippers, and we'd do comedy and everything else. At 3:00 o'clock in the morning we'd go down to Jackson Street in the red light district and play be-bop free all night because that was really what we really wanted to play, like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Dizzy and all those people, and they'd come through town. And in the following year Bobby Tucker -- who was Billie Holiday's musical director -- came back, and he liked what we did evidently, and we played with Billy Eckstine, and then Cab Calloway came through and we opened for Cab Calloway. So, our confidence was very strong.
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