Walter Lantz article, 1978

[doctoon]

Here is a link to an interview Walter Lantz did with a newspaper in 1978. He explains his recent painting career and his editing of his cartoons for television. Interestingly, he talks about how much a cartoon cost to produce four years earlier (in 1974, I presume), and the article says his studio has been closed for the previous four years.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=CioLAAAAIBAJ&sjid=tFEDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5547,2668507&dq=chilly-willy

Let me know if the link doesn't work.

[Professor]

According to Lantz, who has only wispy gray hair himself, Woody's annual fortune is based on his starring role in 260 six-minute movies made between 1941 and 1974 and merchandising.Does anyone know which 260 cartoon shorts he is referring to? And is 1974 correct?

Another question: If there are 12,000 theaters paying $15 to show a Lantz cartoon, that's $180,000. Why does Lantz say he would never live long enough to recoup his money on an $85,000 cartoon? I know there are print costs and distribution costs, but the article does not say how much they are.

[The Coyote Never Wins]

This is not a subject I'm really all that familiar with, but I thought that rentals usually equal about 1/3rd of the gross for live action movies (no idea what they would be for shorts, though).

So if the same formula held true for cartoons, Lantz would have gotten $60,000 rather than $180,000 per cartoon. He'd make a small profit at $45,000 a cartoon (the stated budget in 1974 when he stopped making them, if I'm reading it right--also assuming that rentals would still have been at $15 per theater for three days in 1974 as it was for reissues in 1978), but at $85,000 a cartoon, there's no way it would have been profitable on first release. Reissues might have been able to pick up the slack but Lantz probably wasn't willing to take that risk.

Of course, I am not a mathmetician or a producer of animated cartoons, so this is just guesswork on my part. Guesswork which could easily be blown to smithereenies.

[Gasmask Ted]

"Does anyone know which 260 cartoon shorts he is referring to? And is 1974 correct?"

According to The Walter Lantz Story, they did close in 1972. He might have run numbers in 1974 to see if it would make sense to start again tho.

Another question: If there are 12,000 theaters paying $15 to show a Lantz cartoon, that's $180,000. Why does Lantz say he would never live long enough to recoup his money on an $85,000 cartoon? I know there are print costs and distribution costs, but the article does not say how much they are."

1) Not every theater was showing cartoons by the '70s. Not every movie they would have shown would have been an appropriate place to have a cartoon.

2) Currently, the movies in the most theaters in the US (actually probably the US and Canada) is under 4000.
According to
http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2004/02/07/news/top_stories/2_6_0422_35_12.txt
the most theaters in the US was in 1999 at more than 7000 (with 36,500 screens), which had fallen to 5700 (35,000 screens) by 2002.
According to
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/04/nyregion/movie-theaters-build-themselves-into-a-corner.html
there were only 25,000 screens in 1995. Unfortunately, stats about theaters in the early '70s are not jumping out at me. Multiplexes came to prominence after Lantz left the industry. It seems reasonable to assume that there were less than 7000 theaters in the US in the early '70s. And shorts were almost dead; there wasn't enough demand for other studios to even bother putting out catalog releases, like Lantz did. It seems reasonable to assume that few theaters were bothered with acquiring them. Lantz also depended on foreign screenings for recouping, which would boost his theater count.

3) Regardless of theater numbers, The Walter Lantz Story claims that Lantz had not yet recouped the cost of the 1960 theatricals by 1977 (and, as those cartoons largely were terrible, it's no wonder). Lantz was willing to take a long term view to profitability, and he was always about money; it seems reasonable to accept his position that it was not profitable for him to make cartoons by the early '70s.