August 25 - Tim Burton

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On this day, in 1958, Timothy Walter Burton was born in Burbank, California. It’s hard to say what influenced Tim’s decidedly quirky, fairly macabre worldview the most, but the fact that his mother once owned a gift shop themed entirely around cats gives us a good start (although growing up at the epicenter of the entertainment industry would probably have darkened even the perkiest of kids). Tim began experimenting with stop motion animation in his backyard at a fairly young age. He spent a lot of time making soundless super 8 films that could have been spent shoring up his mediocre grades, but then we might not have ever gotten to experience some of my favorite movies.  Tim’s grades were good enough, however, to allow him to move on from Burbank High School to study character animation at CalArts, and really that’s all that matters in the long run.

While at CalArts, Tim wrote, directed and drew the animation entirely by himself for an animated short that caused quite a stir among his fellow students. Stalk of the Celery Monster depicted an unconventional dentist office that employed the titular monster as a sort of dental hygienist. Only fragments of it survive, but in the minute and a half that does, you can see most of the signature Burton aesthetics are already in place. Which really makes what happened next kind of strange: because of the glimmers of strange brilliance evident in Celery Monster, Disney offered Tim an animation apprenticeship.

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At the tail end of the Seventies, Tim started a relationship with the Walt Disney Company that, quite frankly, was doomed from the beginning. Over the next several years, he would be tried out in several different roles, none of which bloomed into anything. He spent time as an animator on The Fox and the Hound. He was moved to the art department and became a conceptual artist on The Black Cauldron, except none of his concepts were ever used (and that film could have used a whole lot of different concepts). He was given storyboard, graphic design and even some art direction work. None of it seemed to fit. And things didn’t get any better when Tim worked on projects of his own.

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In 1982, Tim was able to complete his first short, a stop-motion animated piece called Vincent. It’s a brilliant six minute poem about a little boy who likes to pretend that he is Vincent Price and the best part is that Tim got Vincent Price to narrate it. Disney played it for two weeks in exactly one theater in Los Angeles before the movie Tex (remember that one? Yeah, neither do I). Tim then directed a live action adaptation of Hansel and Gretel for The Disney Channel. Given a distinctly Japanese flavor, the movie features and all Asian cast and culminates in a kung fu fight (even though that martial art is really Chinese) between the siblings and the wicked witch. Disney aired it one time on Halloween 1983 with little warning and no promotion. Tim’s next project was the 1984 live action short Frankenweenie. It’s both a spoof and an homage to the original Frankenstein. Although Frankenweenie was later seen in the United Kingdom in front of Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend (another film you won’t remember, although this one you don’t want to), it was never shown in the United States, in spite of the fact that it cost nearly $1 million to produce. Those two facts apparently gave whoever in management who didn’t like Tim all the ammunition they needed. He was accused of wasting company resources on a picture that was deemed too scary for kids and fired. The good news for his fans is that the spark that fueled his subsequent fire had already been made.

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Paul Reubens was one of the few people who actually got to see Frankenweenie and he loved it. Paul was looking to put his popular character Pee-wee Herman into a big screen romp of some sort and decided that Tim was just the guy to direct it. Tim in turn asked one of his favorite rock stars, Oingo-Boingo front man Danny Elfman, to write the music. The rest, as they say, is history. Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure was a bona-fide hit, taking in $40 million on an $8 million budget, putting Paul, Tim and Danny firmly on the entertainment map and Tim and Danny forged a relationship that has seen Danny score all but three of Tim’s films.

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Tim took a breather, directing some episodes of a new version of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and , before moving on to another feature film. He took a quirky script that was languishing around the offices of Warner Brothers, gave it a rewrite with a lot more comedy thrown in, cast a bunch of folks who were relatively unknown (but wouldn’t be for much longer) and spent the most money he’d ever been allowed to, $15 million. The result was Beetlejuice, a classic comedy that grossed over $74 million worldwide and convinced Warner Brothers that Tim was ready for what they called the big leagues: they gave him the greenlight on his version of a Batman movie.

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Tim had been developing his concepts for the Caped Crusader for a couple of years before getting the go ahead. He was making his superhero a much darker entity than the Superman of the Seventies and wasn’t afraid to court controversy. He insisted on making Batman a regular guy who used super gadgets and cast Michael Keaton, who he’d just worked with on Beetlejuice, as his lead over the objections of every fanboy out there who cried over a comedic actor landing the role. Then he cast Jack Nicholson as his villain, who came with a cloud of demands that threatened to overwhelm the production. Tim then had to constantly butt heads with Warner Brothers’ management to keep the tone of the whole thing from getting campy. And then the budget ballooned from thirty million dollars to forty-eight. The whole thing could have been a disaster. But it wasn’t. Batman opened to good critical reviews, Keaton and Nicholson were both praised for their performances and the film grossed over $400 million. Tim was now an established Hollywood director, one that even Disney was willing to listen to.

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As Tim was ramping up production on what is arguably his best film to date, Edward Scissorhands, he couldn’t forget about a little project he’d left behind when he’d been forced out of Disney. It was a three page poem, titled The Nightmare Before Christmas, that he first thought would make a great children’s book but might also work as a half hour television special. He asked around about it and discovered that Disney still owned the production rights to it. However, his former company was interested in talking to him about producing something based on it (isn’t it amazing what success will do for people’s perceptions of you?). Tim was interested but had a magnum opus to finish first. He hired a young Johnny Depp for his lead, converted a Florida subdivision into a giant movie set (in one scene you can see a sign for Publix in the background; that might not mean something to most of you but Floridians love it) and managed to get Vincent Price in for his last major film scene before he passed away. Edward Scissorhands is probably the most autobiographical film that Tim has ever made and is one of his biggest critical successes as well.

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After Edward, Tim found himself with two projects on his plate. At Disney, The Nightmare Before Christmas was becoming a feature length film. At Warner Brothers, a second Batman movie was being developed. Wanting to avoid the tediousness of three years of stop motion animation work, Tim opted to produce Nightmare and direct Batman Returns. He handed the reins of his holiday extravaganza over to another former Disney animator, Henry Selick, who created one of my favorite films of all time. Nightmare did moderately well at the box office in its initial run but has since become a cult classic that seems to continue to grow with each passing year. In a karma fueled twist of irony, Tim’s name, once derided at Disney for being too dark and weird (and therefore easily fireable), had to be put in front of Nightmare’s title in an attempt to draw in his growing fan base. Three years later, Tim and Henry would collaborate again (as producer and director respectively) for Disney’s second big stop motion feature, 1996’s James and the Giant Peach.

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Meanwhile, over at Warner Brothers, Tim demanded and received total control over Batman Returns. The result, much to the dismay of studio executives, was an even darker movie than the first one, with overtly sexual overtones. The sequel was a critical and financial success (albeit at half the rate of the original) but left management too worried about the direction Tim was taking the superhero. For the third installment, they relegated him to the role of producer only and after that he wasn’t even allowed to do that. I’m not saying the franchise suffered because of that decision, but I’m guessing we wouldn’t ever have had to see Batman and Robin if things had gone down differently.

In the decades since leaving Gotham City, Tim has directed 14 more films, all but one of which have been commercially successful. The lone money loser, Ed Wood, is actually one of his biggest critical successes (and a Touchstone Pictures movie). It’s a pretty good film but it’s also a biopic about an obscure director of terrible movies. If you aren’t interested in the subject (and even now, most people would be hard pressed to tell you who exactly Ed Wood is), you just aren’t going to care. Outside of that, Tim’s movies over the years have appealed to a wide swath of the viewing public. Whether you’re interested in summer popcorn fare (Planet of the Apes, Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children), quirky bios (Big Eyes) or more of his signature macabre (Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride, Dark Shadows), he’s done something for just about every taste, a sentiment boosted by the fact that his films have grossed over $4 Billion. That figure has been greatly helped along by the three pictures he’s done for Disney since Nightmare: a live action Alice in Wonderland, an animated Frankenweenie and, his latest project, a live action Dumbo which have a combined box office of nearly $1.5 Billion (and, incidentally, are all kind of remakes that were done in the opposite medium from the originals). There is currently no word on what might be up Tim’s sleeve for his next project, but we know that whatever it is, it will not only be fun to watch, but probably more than a little bit off the beaten Hollywood path and that makes the anticipation just that much sweeter. Happy 61^st birthday, Tim!

May 29 - Danny Elfman

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On this day, in 1953, Daniel Robert Elfman was born in Los Angeles, California. As the child of teachers, Danny spent much of his childhood hanging around the local movie theater (not surprisingly admiring the scores of movies more than the actors in them) and hanging out with the band geeks. While in high school, he started a ska band, dropped out of school and followed his older brother Richard to France for a while. Upon his return to the States, he sort of sat in on a few classes at CalArts (not having a high school diploma prevented him from actually enrolling). Then, when he was nineteen, a formal education ceased to matter all that much. 

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In 1972, Richard formed a band/performance art troupe he called The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo.  Danny was off in Africa at the time studying the violin and percussion instruments, but joined the group when he got back to America. The Mystic Knights played a variety of genres of music, mostly wearing clown makeup, with original performance bits thrown in. Needless to say, they didn’t make any recordings of their shows, in spite of their growing popularity. In late 1975, Richard’s interests began to drift towards filmmaking and he passed the mantel of leadership of the group on to Danny. The Mystic Knights really began to gain a following in Los Angeles and even appeared on the Gong Show in 1976, winning their episode. Over the next few years, they began appearing in independent films and the group’s style began to lean toward pop artists. In 1980, Richard released a film called Forbidden Zone, which was supposed to represent the surrealism of one of the Mystic Knights’ stage performances. It was the first time that Danny would write the score of a movie. Despite receiving poor reviews, the film has become a cult classic and provided a boost to Richard’s film career and Danny’s music career. 

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Following the release of Forbidden Zone, The Mystic Knights shortened their name to Oingo Boingo, dropped most of the theatricality from their performances and became a pop octet with Danny as lead singer, rhythm guitarist and songwriter. Oingo Boingo was frequently called a new wave band but in reality, their use of a horn section and continuously surreal imagery put them pretty much outside of that, or any, rock classification. The group would play together for fifteen more years, releasing several  albums, appearing in several films (including Weird Science and Back to School) and influencing future groups like Nirvana and Fishbone. What seemed like an abrupt retirement in 1995, later turned out to be a move of pure self-preservation by Danny. His hearing was shot after all those years in a rock band, and rather than damage it more, he walked away, the group dissolving with his departure. Thankfully, Danny’s second career was well established by that point. 

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In 1985, Tim Burton and Paul Reubens asked Danny to write the score for Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Tim’s debut as a feature director. Danny was reluctant to take the project on because of his lack of formal musical composition training, but he got orchestration help from Steve Bartek, Oingo Boingo’s arranger, and pulled it off. Danny has called the moment he first heard a full orchestra playing something he wrote the best moment of his life. Tim was more than thrilled with his work. Danny has written the score for all but three of Tim’s movies in a collaboration that is still happening today. His distinctive style melds well with Tim’s and can be heard in classic films like Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice, Batman, Batman Returns, Corpse Bride (for which he also provided the voice of Bonejangles) and Sleepy Hollow. 

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Danny became part of Disneyana way back in 1990 when he wrote the score for the Warren Beatty blockbuster Dick Tracy. Three years later, he played an integral part in one of my favorite films, The Nightmare Before Christmas. Not only did he write the music for the film but he provided the singing voice for the lead, Jack Skellington, and the voices for Barrel, one of Oogie Boogie’s henchmen, and the Clown with the Tear Away Face. His other Disney film scores include Flubber, Meet the Robinsons, Good Will Hunting, 2010’s Alice in Wonderland, 2012’s Frankenweenie, Oz the Great and Powerful, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Alice Through the Looking Glass and this year’s Dumbo. In 2015, for all of the delightful music he’s contributed to the company (and will most likely continue to bring us), Danny was declared an official Disney Legend.

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Outside of Disney, Danny has had all kinds of success. Over the course of his career he's earned 24 BMI Awards, two Emmy Awards, a Grammy, an Annie Award, six Saturn Awards, a Sierra Award and a Satellite Award (he's also gotten an additional 39 nominations outside of those 36 wins). Highlights from the dozens of film scores he’s done include the Men in Black series, the first Mission: Impossible, two of Sam Raimi’s Spiderman films and the Fifty Shades of Grey series. He’s written multiple theme songs for television shows like Tales from the Crypt, Batman: The Animated Series, Desperate Housewives and, maybe his most famous composition of all time, The Simpsons. Danny has also been commissioned to compose several classical pieces, not associated with any film or show. So far he’s written a serenade, an overture (to a non-existent musical as he put it), a concerto and a piano quartet. Later this year, we’ll be able to enjoy his work in the fourth MIB movie and he’s already logged in a Doctor Dolittle film that’s slated for next year. We wish Danny a happy birthday and can’t wait to hear where his music will take us next.

March 13 - Joe Ranft

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On this day, in 1960, Joseph Henry Ranft was born in Pasadena, California. As a kid, Joe developed two great passions in his life: magic and film. By the time he was 15, he was a member of the Magic Castle Junior Group (which, as anyone who is into magic knows, is a big deal). Unlike most of the members of that group, who go on to become professional magicians, Joe felt the pull of comedic storytelling a little bit more and enrolled at CalArts to study character animation. Working alongside fellow students like John Lasseter and Brad Bird, Ranft eventually caught the eye of Disney with a student film called Good Humor. After graduating in 1980, he moved right into the Television Department at the Disney Studios (knowing full well that if it didn't work out, he always had a bit of magic in his back pocket to rely on).

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The first five years of Joe's career weren't exactly what anyone would call auspicious. He worked on all kinds of projects, developing stories and creating storyboards to go along with them, but none of them were ever actually produced. Eventually Joe was transferred into the Feature Animation Department where he had the good fortune to apprentice under one of Walt's Nine Old Men, Eric Larson and his prospects picked up considerably. Joe spent the rest of the Eighties and early Nineties working on the stories of films like Oliver and Company, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King. He was Story Supervisor on The Rescuers Down Under and Storyboard Supervisor for The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach.

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In 1991, Joe's old schoolmate, John Lasseter, asked him to join his new venture, a studio called Pixar. The move earned Joe his only Oscar nomination (for Best Original Screenplay on Toy Story). In addition to being Story Supervisor on Toy Story and A Bug's Life, he began to get more heavily into voice work (hey, Pixar was a small place at the time; everyone had to do multiple things). He'd already provided some screams in Beauty and the Beast and was Igor, Dr. Finkelstein's assistant, in The Nightmare Before Christmas, but now he actually got dialogue. Joe is the voice of Lenny the Binoculars in Toy Story, Heimlich in A Bug's Life, Wheezy in Toy Story 2, Pete "Claws" Ward in Monsters, Inc., Jacques the Shrimp in Finding Nemo, and Doggy Loggy in Chicken Little.

In the early Aughts, Joe was elevated to co-director on Cars. He provided the voices for Red and Peterbilt, but never got to see them on the big screen. Tragically, on August 16, 2005, Joe was a passenger in car that lost control, crashed through a guardrail and fell 130 feet into the Navarro River in Mendocino County, California. Joe and the car's driver were killed on impact. Both Cars and Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (which Joe had been executive producer for) were dedicated to his memory. He was posthumously made a Disney Legend in 2006 and given the Windsor McCay lifetime achievement award at the 2016 Annie Awards. He was only 45 at the time of his death and was a loss felt throughout the entire industry.

October 29 - The Nightmare Before Christmas

On this day, in 1993, one of my favorite films of all time, Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, opened in theaters. In 1982, when Tim was an animator with Disney, he wrote a three page poem about a Halloween skeleton who discovers Christmas, takes it over and the chaos that ensues. He'd had some success with his delightful little short Vincent earlier that year and thought maybe his poem could be developed into a half hour special or something. The studio, however, didn't think it (or Tim, for that matter) fit in with the Disney aesthetic and fired him instead. The poem decided that it wouldn't let Tim forget about it.

After the major successes of Beetlejuice and Batman, Tim's thoughts kept returning to Halloween Town and its Pumpkin King. It turned out that Disney still owned the production rights to his poem, but now that he was a big time movie director, suddenly the studio thought that a deal could be made. Tim teamed up with another former Disney animator, Henry Selick, to flesh things out. While Tim would produce the movie, he wasn't interested in the long process of stop motion animation, so the directing chore fell to Henry.

As work on the story progressed, Tim became convinced that it should be a musical and knew that Danny Elfman, who has done most of the scores for Tim's films, would be able to make that happen. Danny once said that writing the eleven songs for Nightmare was one of the easiest gigs he ever had. And he got to be the singing voice for Jack Skellington.

Filming began in July 1991 in San Francisco, California. A crew of over 120 toiled away, using 20 sound stages simultaneously. 227 figures were created for all the characters and Jack Skellington alone had over 400 heads that could be swapped out to represent any emotion or facial expression. By contrast, Sally only had around 110 heads.

When Nightmare opened, it was the first feature length stop motion animated film by a major US studio. And even though some Disney executives felt it would showcase the fact that the studio could think outside the box when it came to kinds of entertainment, they still didn't know what to do with it. They even released it under the Touchstone Pictures name because they thought it would be too scary for kids. Without a whole lot of support from the studio, Nightmare would still earn 50 million dollars on an 18 million dollar budget. The initial reviews were positive and, since then have basically recognized the brilliance of the film. It was nominated for a Best Visual Effects Oscar, a Best Musical Score Golden Globe and won the Saturn Award for Best Fantasy Film.

Since its initial release, Nightmare has grown almost exponentially for Disney. It's been re-released several times in theaters and is the only stop motion feature to be converted into 3-D.  It is both a bona fide cult classic (I count myself among the people who have loved it since day one and just smile knowingly at more recent fans, especially if they're old enough to have seen its debut) and a commercial success. The only question that remains about Nightmare: is it a Halloween movie or a Christmas movie?

Also on this day, in American history: Black Tuesday