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Chuck Jones
Animation Pioneer
Chuck Jones: You cannot take anything for granted. The fact that he was different than other cats. If you see a cat, you do not necessarily see all cats. He was not every cat, in other words, any more than any of us are really every man, or every woman. We do take that for granted, too. That laid the groundwork, so when I got to doing things like Daffy Duck, or Bugs Bunny, or Coyote -- that's not all coyotes, that is THE particular coyote. "Wile E. Coyote, Genius." That's what he calls himself, at any rate. He's different. He has an overweening ego, which isn't necessarily true of all coyotes.
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Chuck Jones
Animation Pioneer
Often, when I'm halfway through a picture, I don't know how the hell I'm going to end it? And, then I have to think more carefully, "What would Bugs Bunny do in a situation like this?" In other words, I can't think of what I would do, or what I think Bugs Bunny should do. I have to think as Bugs Bunny, not of Bugs Bunny. And drawing them, as I say, is not difficult. Just like an actor dressed like Hamlet can walk across and look like Hamlet. But boy, when he gets into the action, he has to be thinking as Hamlet.
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Chuck Jones
Animation Pioneer
When I went into animation I was like 17, and the old man of the business was Walt Disney, who was 29. Walt Disney was not 40 by the time he finished Fantasia, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and Pinocchio. And the people that worked with him were younger than that. So it takes young people. And that's what I'm -- I think I've just about gotten to where I've finished to work out a deal with Warner Brothers to do some more films. But I want to be the old man that pulls together the young guys today. If I can, I want to be a magnet, pulling in creative young people from the art schools, and get them started again, doing some of the old characters, but in new stories, and so on. But new characters too, and hopefully a Warner Brothers feature. That's what I'd like to do. And I've written a couple of scripts that are not too bad, I think.
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James Earl Jones
National Medal of Arts
James Earl Jones: Donald Crouch in high school said, "Do you like these words?" And, I was then writing words of my own. He said, "Do you like these words? Do you like the way they sound in your head?" He said, "Well, they sound ten times better when you give 'em out in the air. It's too bad you can't say these words." He began to challenge me, to nudge me toward speaking again, and by using my own poetry and then other poets because he himself was a compatriot of Robert Frost, he himself was a poet. He himself said he learned a poem a day, in case he went blind, he'd have a whole book of poems in his head. And he nudged me toward that, toward acknowledging and appreciating the beauty of words.
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James Earl Jones
National Medal of Arts
I happened to happened to land in a time, in the middle '60s, that without knowing it, and without being told by the history of theater -- which we now see from a historical point of view was an explosive time. I got out of the Army -- in my world -- I came to New York, for instance, when the civil rights movement was just beginning, and that created a certain energy, a certain rumble, a certain impetus for black actors. And the game was not to get caught up in it, not to get swept away by it, but to keep on track of what you wanted to do. You weren't going to the theater to change the world, but you had a chance to affect the world, the thinking and the feelings of the world.
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James Earl Jones
National Medal of Arts
I met the whole avant garde world, and in England it was referred to as the "angry young men" period. In Europe it was avant-garde, and we were "theater of the absurd." Put together, you saw, internationally, theater now being available to the proletarian, that anybody could be an actor. You didn't have to have the elite family background of the Barrymores. The door was open for Marlon Brando, you know, real common man. When Marlon did his work, when he did his Stanley Kowalski, every truck driver in New York said, "Hey, I could do that! That's me, I could do that!" And that was very important. It was a very, very important movement, the "I can do that" movement, you know. And I was a part of that, you know. So that included women could play men's roles, and blacks could play white roles, and truck drivers could play Marlon Brando roles. And I think that's what sort of opened life up for me, opened up that artistic life up for me.
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Quincy Jones
Music Impresario
One night we went and broke in another door, and I broke into this door and there was a piano there, and I just walked around the room to see what was there first, and then hands kind of hit the keyboard and I remembered from Chicago next door when I was a kid, there was a little girl named Lucy that used to play piano, and it brought everything back because I was never very good at music when I was little. I never paid any attention to it in school. And, from that moment on when I touched those keys, I said, "This is it. I'm not going to do the other thing again. I'm going here." And, that's what happened.
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Quincy Jones
Music Impresario
Lionel Hampton's band came through Seattle then too. That was a very significant thing in my life because as I said before we played with Bumps Blackwell's band and Charlie Taylor's band for Billie Holiday, and then Billy Eckstine, at 14 and 15 years old. So, Hamp came through there then, and that was my dream to be with that band, more than any band because I saw every band that came through: Stan Kenton, Basie, Duke, Louis Armstrong, everybody. I was out in front hypnotized every night. I just couldn't believe it, that there is the way to be a man, to have your dignity, to be proud of what you do. And there were 18 musicians -- there was something about that kind of unity, too -- that were really playing good, and made military bands look like military bands, or the white traveling bands, you know. But, there was something about it that just really hit a serious chord in me, and I wanted to know everything about it. That's why I wanted to write so quick. As soon as I picked up the trumpet I heard arrangements in my head of those ensembles. How do you write for 18 musicians, or eight brass and five saxes, and not have them playing the same notes?
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Quincy Jones
Music Impresario
So far, I haven't found any experience that is more pleasurable than trying to -- it takes you three, two nights to sit down at the blank page of score paper and then try to imagine and hear that orchestra sound in your head and put what you think is going to sound like you think it sounds on that paper for each instrument. And, finally having the orchestra there, and when you do the down beat -- to hear that sound -- there's no experience in the world like that.
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Quincy Jones
Music Impresario
If it's in human nature, or nature, or just to pay attention to see what it's all about because I think African music is so powerful and probably governs the rhythm of every music in the world is because it's taken straight from nature, you know. You know that the birds did not imitate flutes. It's the reverse. And thunder didn't imitate the drums. It was the reverse. And so, the elements of nature, what it comes from, that's the most powerful force there is. It's like a melody. You can study orchestration, you can study harmony and theory and everything else, but melodies come straight from God. There's really no technique for melodies, really. I guess there's something about music that's always fascinated me and I apply what the essence of what that's about in everything I do, whether we do film or magazines or whatever it is. You can't touch it, you can't taste it, you can't smell it, you can't see it. You just feel it and it hangs in the air. It owns -- it dominates -- every time period. String quartets had its own time period and nobody can ever change it, because it's hanging up there in heaven some place.
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