Lee Orgel, The Man Behind the Musical, part II

Second in a two part series

Joining UPA

Orgel was hired as Director of Program Development and Producer for his projects that made it into production.  He arrived as The Mr. Magoo Show, which already had a producer, was nearing the end of production.  Having developed live-action properties prior to his arrival, he continued in that vein at the animation studio and in December of 1961, pitched a series of four shows to be called “Spectaculars”.  They were to be one hour specials and lit by famed stage lighting designer, Jo Mielziner.  The first one, “Solo”, was to involve individual recording stars, two of which were approached-Lena Horne and Peggy Lee.  The second, “Fashion”, would feature Miss Teen-Ager.  The third was to be Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol, while the fourth was to be a Milton Berle spectacular, “Berle’s World”, featuring animated sequences within a live action episode.  The proposed series was never produced although Christmas Carol was to have its own future. 

His first big animation project, in which he packaged Chuck Jones, Judy Garland and Robert Goulet with the Wizard of Oz songwriting team of Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg was for the animated feature, Gay Purr-ee, released by Warner Bros. in late 1962.  (Left to right in the photo above are Lee Orgel, Judy Garland, Hank Saperstein, Robert Goulet, Abe Levitow and Chuck Jones.)  Despite his role as creative center and producer of the project, he was only given Associate Producer credit.  Long time Saperstein associate and co-purchaser of UPA, Peter DeMet, was to have been given Producer credit but receded from UPA’s affairs around this time leaving no one with Producer credit.  Following on the heels of this project was his idea for an animated Christmas special, the first of its kind, which would arrive just a few weeks after the feature's release.

Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol

Those familiar with my book  will already know of Orgel’s inspiration and tenacity in finding songwriters and in getting Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol sold and produced.  With the groundbreaking special’s huge success, the show went on to become a Christmas perennial.  NBC was so pleased they asked UPA for more Magoo and Lee complied, developing the 1964 series, The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo.  Orgel hoped to build on his success and continued to develop new projects for the UPA studio.  One, another holiday project entitled Christmas with Grandma Moses, was to be a one hour animated musical TV special based on the paintings by Anna Mary Robertson with a score and lyrics by Christmas Carol lyricist, Bob Merrill.  He also remained good friends with his collaborators from Gay Purr-ee, Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg, and initiated discussions with them regarding a musical on Lewis Carroll, whom he acknowledged was “dull, dull, dull” as a subject.  Lee enlisted Christmas Carol scribe Barbara Chain to write a treatment and, although he was unable to generate enough interest in the project to get it produced, continued to shop the project for much of his career. 

Leaving UPA

Orgel, as part of his deal with Hank Saperstein, had been promised profit participation in projects he originated.  After having initiated and produced the feature length, Gay Purr-ee, the TV special, Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol, and developing The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo with no financial remuneration to show for them, Lee knew it was time to strike out on his own. 

Orgel's first success, with his newly formed company, JoMar Productions, was developing and selling the animated series, The New Three Stooges, which featured live-action wraparounds with the Stooges themselves.  The show was produced by Cambria Studios (who had also done Clutch Cargo) where a few Christmas Carol alumni also picked up work on the series.  Following this, his next project was an animated series on Abbott and Costello, and although he had planned on producing the series at Cambria, the show sponsor insisted it be done entirely at Hanna Barbera.  (The above still was an early publicity drawing, the final designs were far less caricatured and interesting.)  It seems that Orgel had an affinity for comedians as there are two storyboard pilots in his files, one for a Burns and Allen animated show, with George and Gracie appearing as a dog and a cat respectively, and one for a Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance show featuring Morey Amsterdam as their agent.  There’s also a budget for a later proposed Red Skelton project.

Later years

Lee once again turned to live-action in the years after UPA.  The producers of the Batman TV series asked Orgel to partner with neophyte screenwriter Stanley Ralph Ross and the two collaborated on the first two Catwoman episodes.  Ross caught on so quickly he went on to solo for 27 episodes, more than any other series writer.   They also collaborated on an episode for the series, Mr. Roberts.  Other shows for which he pitched episode treatments were The Dick Van Dyke Show, F Troop and Bewitched.

Orgel with the Christopher award

Although Orgel had left UPA, he remained on good terms with Saperstein and in 1969, was asked to produce Hank’s concept for a TV special, Uncle Sam Magoo, which later won the Christopher Award, given for media that brings “positive and constructive values into the mainstream of life”.   Lee reassembled some of the crew from Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol, including director Abe Levitow, for the NBC show.  Taking a break from animation in 1973, Lee returned to his first love, live theater, and produced the well received George Bernard Shaw play for Broadway, “Don Juan in Hell”, directed by John Houseman and which starred Edward Mulhare, Ricardo Montalban, Paul Henreid and Agnes Moorhead.  For the second tour the following year, Myrna Loy replaced Moorhead.

However, Orgel never strayed too far from animation and in the mid-70s, did freelance writing for Hanna Barbera on The Scooby-Doo/DynoMutt Hour.  Around the same time, Hank Saperstein enlisted Orgel to find a licensee for a new Magoo series and the result was the 1977 DePatie-Freleng produced Saturday morning series, What’s New, Mr. Magoo?

Over the years, Lee Orgel continued to develop and sell a project he started in 1963, a show based on the Universal monsters, which were making a comeback in the early 60s.  The show began as a live-action series, Monsters Unlimited, hosted by Boris Karloff and was to have an animated intro using Charles Addams’ characters from his “New Yorker” cartoons.  Addams and his advisors at the magazine rejected the use although it was not long after that an entire series based on his work debuted.  Orgel’s show later evolved into one about a vampire, entitled Dracula A Go Go with Jonathan Winters proposed as the voice of the Count.  The title changed in 1970 to Pardon Me, Sir-Your Fangs Are Stuck in my Neck, which became All in Vein by the time it was pitched to DePatie-Freleng in the late 1970s.  After almost 15 years in development, it appeared that Lee had finally made a sale, only to have it canceled at the last minute much to his disappointment.  Never one to give up, he continued to pitch it, even to Showtime but the show never saw the light of day, so to speak.

By this point, Orgel had spent a long career in animation and had tired of the grind of developing and pitching projects.  In 1986, he joined Marvel Studios as a producer and writer on the action series, Defenders of the Earth, which featured such familiar comic strip characters as Flash Gordon, The Phantom and Mandrake the Magician.  A few years later, Orgel fell ill with a kidney issue, which was preliminarily diagnosed as cancer.  It later turned out to be a “football-sized” cyst on his kidney and both it and the kidney were removed.  However, the illness had taken its toll and he became weaker and weaker, culminating in a two year deep depression in which he didn’t work at all. 

Finally, a friend at Hollywood Film Laboratory offered him a job in Sales. Lee resisted at first, feeling the position wouldn’t utilize his creative skills, but later relented.  The job did make use of his contacts acquired through a long career in the entertainment industry and, more importantly, got him out of his funk.  He later moved to competitor Crest National as Vice President of Sales, where he spent the next 15 years, working with colleagues in the film business and USC Film School students, many of whom found a mentor in Lee.   He worked until just two weeks before his death from emphysema in May of 2004. It was clear from the attendance at his memorial service that he had touched a lot of people.  In recent years, interest has started to build  over his signature effort, Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol, and Lee Orgel has begun to gain recognition for his contributions to animation and pop culture.

Abe Levitow, director

During my interviews with some of the artists and production personnel who worked with Abe Levitow, it became apparent that despite being a highly regarded draftsman, he was a man of few words.  Annie Guenther, color modelist on Christmas Carol, who lived near him in Northridge when they both worked at UPA, would sometimes drive him to work when his sports car was experiencing trouble.  She remembers that during the lengthy drive to Burbank, Abe spent the entire time thoughtfully puffing on his pipe, never uttering so much as a word.  Although every single artist and administrator praised him as being a kind and an unusually supportive director, few could tell me much about him as a person.  With enough anecdotes and access to his well kept archives, I was able to form a fairly clear picture of the man but I felt that when it came time to consider candidates for profiles on this blog, perhaps the people most qualified to provide insight into the artist who directed Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol were his family.  Following is a remembrance by his three adult children.

“REMEMBERING THE MOOSE” by  Judy, Roberta and Jon Levitow

They called him “Moose” in the Army, and the name just stuck.  During World War Two he worked for the animation branch of the Signal Corps, the Army’s motion picture division, in New York's Astoria Studios making training films with other writers and cartoonists such as Stan Lee (Marvel Comics), Sam Cobean (The New Yorker, The Naked Eye) , and George Baker (Sad Sack) as well as many other Hollywood animators .  There are hundreds of caricatures of our dad as a moose with a huge nose and antlers planted on his head, towering over everyone.  He sent our mom Valentines and Anniversary cards with himself as a giant, awkward moose and our mom as a dainty damsel.  The caricature really fit him since he was tall, gentle, shy and funny.  (Above and below, drawings by Chuck Jones.) 

Often he communicated better through drawings than through conversation.  “Moosey” wasn’t prone to blowing his own horn, but worked with a quiet pride.  Even many years later, we’re told of the fierce loyalty he instilled in those who worked with him.  People tell us how he encouraged creativity in others and always tried to get the best work from them.  When he died too soon in 1975, just short of his 53rd birthday, he fell into a quiet obscurity undisturbed by the animation revival of the 1980’s.  It’s thanks to animation historians like Darrell Van Citters that our dad Abe Levitow’s loving contribution to the field will at last be remembered.  

Conceived in Ostrolenka, Poland, near the Russian border, our Dad was born in Boyle Heights in East LA in 1922.  William Levitow, his very pregnant wife Sarah, and their 2- year- old daughter Frances were part of an early wave of Jewish immigrants leaving Eastern Europe due to the upsurge of anti-Semitism amidst constantly changing borders, armies and governments.   “Willie” was originally a Talmudic scholar in Vilna, Lithuania, but left to avoid conscription in the various Russian armies to become an artist in a new media…photography.  He loved to tell us grandchildren that back in the Old Country everyone thought he was some kind of magician because he could superimpose an image of a man and make him look like he was sitting on a horse.  When he came to Los Angeles, he worked as a photo-retoucher for 20th Century Fox and made all the stars’ defects disappear.   Willie joined the IATSE #683 film laboratory technicians strike in 1945, found himself on the blacklist and never worked again for the studios.  As far as we could tell, from then until after “Willie” grew too weak to lift boxes at his brother-in-law’s grocery store, our grandparents lived on the rents in the little quadraplex they owned on Fountain Avenue in Hollywood.   

It was our grandmother who really nurtured our father’s drawing talent.  Sarah was passionately involved in Los Angeles’ early Yiddish culture scene and she counted many artists among her friends. She encouraged young Abe to pursue his evident talent and sent him to Saturday art classes.  As a teenager, Dad sent away for and completed mail-order cartooning classes from the W.L. Evans School of Cartooning.  After he graduated from Roosevelt High School, Dad won a scholarship to Chouinard School of Art (which eventually evolved into the California Institute of the Arts).  Our grandmother encouraged Abe to walk his drawings virtually across the street to the Leon Schlesinger studio on the Warner Bros. lot.  It was long spoken of as one of the family miracle stories that, on the spot, Chuck Jones hired him as an in-betweener.  Dad never left the animation business after that.  In gratitude, Chuck got one of our grandmother’s delicious European-style cheesecakes every Christmas time. We never knew if it was the cheesecakes or not, but they marked a long alliance between Chuck and our father.  They worked together at Warner Brothers, MGM and ABC.   Another benefit of animation was that Abe met our mother Charlotte, an award winning artist in her own right, who was an ink & painter at Warner Brothers.   They married in 1949.  (Below, a 1954 shot of Abe at Warner Bros., just after he began receiving screen credit.  Seated at the desk is animator Dick Thompson.)

Dad was always a little self-conscious about not having gone to college.  But he never stopped educating himself - reading, seeing plays or movies.  Throughout his career he continued life-drawing classes.  Our Sunday afternoon family outings were most likely to be a trip to the latest exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  Fine art books filled our family bookshelves, and Dad had a particular love for the work of powerful draftsmen like Mexico’s Francisco Zuñiga and David Siqueiros.  

 

Abe Levitow’s career went on to span over 35 years.  He progressed from in-betweener, to animator, to animation director.  (Above, some of Abe's late '50s doodles.)  Besides his work with Chuck Jones, he spent a number of years at UPA and worked with Richard Williams in London and LA (below, an original cel setup from Richard Williams' version of A Christmas Carol).  We couldn’t be prouder of him and his accomplishments.  He’s listed as an animator on eight of Jerry Beck’s “The 100 Greatest Looney Tune Cartoons”,  although he had begun animating years before he received screen credit.  He directed late-UPA favorites Gay Purr-ee and Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol.   Many kind testimonials fill our guest book at www.abelevitow.com, a website we created to help bring his wonderful talent back to aficionados of animation history.  

In 1971, after decades of supporting so many other studios' efforts, he finally struck out on his own, forming Levitow/Hanson Films.  But just two years after realizing that dream, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a bone cancer that painfully reduced his former Moose-like stature.  Dad loved animation and never stopped working until he just couldn’t manage the effort, finally succumbing in 1975.  (Below, Levitow and crew in front of their office in the Walter Lantz building in Hollywood.  Christmas Carol alums Tony Rivera and Steve Clark are on the left.)

We remember our father as a homebody, not much of a traveler - someone who loved nothing more than spending the evening and weekends doing ink drawings with his kids, working on clay sculptures, and exploring his oil paints.  He even painted sets for the local Northridge Theatre Guild.  He charmed our mom’s huge extended family and especially all the kids and cousins.  He enjoyed summers in San Diego, where we shared an extended-family house at the beach and where he delighted in beach softball and water sports.  For  a towering man of 6’4”, he was surprisingly gentle.  Sometimes he seemed lost in his own thoughts,  but if he was in the mood, he could keep the kids and grown-ups laughing hysterically at funny stories or his funny voices.  At family gatherings, “Moose” was always the large man with all the little kids crawling all over him, shooting hoops with the older kids in the backyard, or drawing a funny picture of Bugs Bunny or the family dog—whatever struck someone’s fancy. 

"Remembering the Moose" copyright 2010 by Judy Levitow, Roberta Levitow and Jon Levitow

Bob Singer, layout artist

In 1960, job opportunities abounded at UPA due to the studio’s sharp refocus from theatrical shorts to TV animation.  The Mr. Magoo Show and The Dick Tracy Show , each with an order for 130 five minute shorts, necessitated a hiring binge.  Corny Cole had called ex-roommate Bob Inman to come over and around the same time, layout artist Sam Weiss told his friend Bob Singer of an opening in the layout department.  Singer, who was working at Warner Bros. as a background painter, was just beginning to cross over into layout and jumped at the chance to pursue it full time.  He spent the next five years as a layout man at UPA.  

Bob Singer started his career as a background painter for Shamus Culhane on the Bell Science films and also painted on the titles for Around the World in 80 Days.  He was recommended for a storyboard job on the Bell films at Warner Bros. by Ben Washam, an animator in Chuck Jones’ unit, who had freelanced for Culhane.  When those films finished, Bob began painting backgrounds for the McKimson unit, occasionally painting for the Jones unit and finally for Abe Levitow on A Witch’s Tangled Hare.  He had just moved into layout and was about to join Freleng’s unit in that capacity when Sam Weiss made his fateful call to join him at UPA.

Between the conclusion of the TV shorts and the ramp up on Gay Purr-ee, Singer filled his time doing layouts for General Electric commercials featuring Mr. Magoo.  On Gay Purr-ee, he was handed sizable sections of the film to stage and layout.  Bob remembers:

Since Chuck Jones wrote the story as a writer's storyboard, it was not suitable for production. We had to re-board most of it. I was assigned to do all the sequences occurring in the loft in Paris where our heroine was kept captive by the bad guy.  Then I did all the layouts for that area, including following Musette as she escaped and ran through the streets. Another area I boarded and laid out began in a cafe where Jaune-Tom and his sidekick (Robespierre) were drinking and had a drunken spree that introduced a song sequence ending in a burst of fireworks. Also, near the end of the picture there was a sequence in Alaska, ending on a ship at sea which I again boarded and laid out.

When production began to wind down on the feature, Bob was picked to move on to Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol, the film that was moving through the studio right on the heels of Gay Purr-ee.  Sequences Bob laid out were the titles, credits, the prologue with the song "Back on Broadway", Scrooge’s office, the graveyard and the epilogue after the play ends.  Singer’s character and background layouts are highlighted throughout my book.

The year 1963 was a slow one at UPA and appears to have been primarily filled with the production of GE commercials.  When The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo was given the greenlight at the beginning of 1964, Singer was asked, along with Marty Murphy and Corny Cole, to help board the premiere episode, William Tell, and also laid out a chunk of the film.  Bob worked on many of the episodes such as the four part Robin Hood, Paul Revere, Treasure Island and several others.  Production had begun in January and although there were 26 episodes in the series, they were all completed and the entire artistic staff was laid off before the series made its debut in mid-September that same year.  The last man out was Bob Singer, who fell back on his background painting skills to finish up a GE spot on his way out the door. Below is a page of Bob's storyboards from the William Tell episode and a layout from the Robin Hood episode.

From there, he briefly went to Tower 12, Chuck Jones’ operation which became the new incarnation of MGM, but left after a few short weeks due to what he felt was a creatively constrictive atmosphere.  In October 1964, Bob began the longest stint of his career, at Hanna Barbera, eventually rising to the head of layout there.  He worked on dozens of shows from Jonny Quest to Scooby Doo and everything in between.  Of all the productions Singer worked on at HB, the one he was most proud of was art directing the feature, Charlotte’s Web.  Bob finally decided to retire from the business in 1993.  

Since then, he has kept active by writing and self-publishing a book on storyboarding and doing commissioned art featuring the Hanna Barbera characters.  Although the book details the television production model for storyboarding, it’s recommended for its solid approach to production boarding, still applicable even with today’s technological methodology.  If you would like to order a copy of the book or inquire about a personalized commissioned piece of art, you can contact Bob here.


In looking back on his career, Bob felt the artistic high point of his career was at UPA:

Abe (Levitow) was fortunate that he had assembled an excellent staff of artists who did good work in a timely fashion.  Being an excellent artist himself, we all had a great deal of respect for him. With a boss like that you worked hard to please him and there was a good working environment in the studio, although filled with deadlines. I have worked in at least 16 different studios around town, as we all did, but I look at my time at UPA as the most pleasant and rewarding.  Abe allowed his artists to have the freedom to invent, contribute and create without feeling the heavy hand of supervision and the ego that goes with it.