Few filmmakers have moved as easily between animated and non-animated work as New Jersey-born Frank Tashlin. A school drop-out at age 13, he drifted into a multitude of jobs before he went to work for producer Paul Terry at 17, as a cartoonist on Terry’s Aesop’s Film Fables animated shorts. Three years later he was working as a gagman for Hal Roach, and soon after began his own comic strip, which ran through 1939. He worked for Disney’s story department until the mid ‘40s, and later joined Warner Bros., where he became a director for Leon Schlesinger’s cartoon unit. But from the middle of the decade onward, he moved out of animated work entirely and into comedy screenwriting, adapting One Touch of Venus as a film vehicle, and then taking up writing for Bob Hope (The Paleface, etc.) and Red Skelton (The Fuller Brush Man, etc.), and later became a director for Jerry Lewis (Geisha Boy, Cinderfella), Hope (Son of Paleface), and Doris Day (The Glass Bottom Boat). His experience in cartoons… read more
