LOU SCHEIMER, WHOSE CARTOON STUDIO ENTERTAINED GENERATION X
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: October 21, 2013
- Lou Scheimer, an Emmy-winning producer of television cartoons whose company, Filmation, was once the largest animation studio in the United States, died on Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 84.
Los Angeles Times
Lou Scheimer, above in 1987, founded the Filmation studio.
Archie Comics, via Associated Press
Filmation produced “The Archie Show.”
Bounce TV, via PRNewsfoto
It also produced “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids,” among other television cartoon series.
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his wife, Mary Ann, said.
If baby boomers were weaned on Warner Brothers and Disney cartoons, then Filmation and its rival Hanna-Barbera were mother’s milk for Generation X. The studio’s best-known series include “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids,” based on the Bill Cosby characters and produced in association with Mr. Cosby; “The Archie Show,” based on the comic book series; “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe”; and the animated version of “Star Trek,” for which Mr. Scheimer and his co-producer Norm Prescott won daytime Emmy Awards in 1975.
With a $5,000 loan from his mother-in-law, Mr. Scheimer founded Filmation with Mr. Prescott and Hal Sutherland in 1962. At its height, in the early 1980s, the studio employed about 700 people, making it the nation’s largest animator in terms of staff size.
By the time Filmation ceased operations in 1989, The Los Angeles Times reported that year, it had “1,200 television episodes, 50 series and five feature films to its credit.”
Filmation was considered noteworthy on two counts: it kept production in the United States in an age of increasing outsourcing (then as now, the labor-intensive work of animating many American cartoons was done in Asia) and it sought to produce cartoons with a message of social tolerance.
The studio was among the first to make minority characters mainstays of the cartoon landscape, as the enduring success of “Fat Albert,” broadcast on CBS from 1972 to 1985, attests. It did likewise for strong female heroines, as in its feature film “Happily Ever After,” which began production the 1980s but was not officially released until 1993.
A de facto sequel to the 1937 Disney film “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,“ the Filmation version replaces Grumpy et al. with female “dwarfelles,” voiced by Carol Channing, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Tracey Ullman, among others. Snow White (voiced by Irene Cara) has little need of rescuing.
“She, in fact, is the hero of this tale,” Mr. Scheimer told The Orlando Sentinel in 1993. “It’s not the prince who is saving her. Little girls are frequently shortchanged in terms of the material available to them.”
Louis Scheimer was born in Pittsburgh on Oct. 19, 1928. As a child he loved to draw, and in 1952 he earned a bachelor’s degree in art from the Carnegie Institute of Technology there (now Carnegie Mellon University).
In the mid-1950s Mr. Scheimer moved to Southern California, where he worked for Warner Brothers and for Walter Lantz Productions, which supplied animation to Universal Pictures, before starting Filmation.
Filmation worked on commercials and documentary films before wading into the Saturday-morning fray with “The New Adventures of Superman,” broadcast on CBS from 1966 to 1970.
During his years with the studio, Mr. Scheimer often kept costs down by voicing characters himself; among them were Bat-Mite in “The New Adventures of Batman” and Dumb Donald in “Fat Albert.”
Filmation’s other work included the animated series “The Brady Kids,” “Shazam!,” “Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle” and “She-Ra: Princess of Power.”
Mr. Scheimer remained with the studio under various corporate parents, including TelePrompTer and Group W Productions, both divisions of the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company.
In 1989 Filmation was bought by Paravision International, a subsidiary of the French cosmetics giant L’Oreal, which closed the studio, seeking only to retain its library. The library is now owned by DreamWorks Animation.
Mr. Scheimer’s first wife, the former Jay Wucher, died in 2009; he married Mary Ann Wucher, his late wife’s sister-in-law, last year. Survivors also include a daughter, Erika Scheimer, and a son, Lane, both from his first marriage; three stepchildren, Brad Wucher, Kathy Martz and Scott Wucher; and five step-grandchildren.
Over the years, reviewers often faulted Filmation’s cartoons for lacking the nuance of Disney’s. Born, by Mr. Scheimer’s own acknowledgment, of the need for speed and quantity, Filmation’s work typically relied on broad rather than fine movement and the recycling of previously used film. The criticisms did not faze him.
“You won’t see any dewdrops glistening on cobwebs,” Mr. Scheimer told The Los Angeles Times in 1985, speaking of his studio’s product. “But I’m not sure that kind of effect really helps to tell a story.”
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AUGUSTO ODONE, FATHER BEHIND ‘LORENZO’S OIL’
Augusto Odone with Lorenzo, his son who died in 2008.
By PAUL VITELLO
Published: October 29, 2013
- Augusto Odone, an Italian economist with no medical training who flouted scientific protocol and doctors’ advice to help concoct an experimental medicine that extended the life of his terminally ill son and inspired a Hollywood film, “Lorenzo’s Oil,” died on Friday in Acqui Terme, in northern Italy. He was 80.
Universal Pictures
Susan Sarandon, Zack O’Malley Greenburg and Nick Nolte starred in “Lorenzo’s Oil,” based on the Odones’ experience.
The cause was heart failure, his daughter, Cristina Odone, said.
Mr. Odone (pronounced oh-DOH-nay), an analyst for the World Bank who specialized in East African economies, and his American-born wife, Michaela, a translator and linguist, became known internationally both for the ingenuity of the medicine they invented and for the bitter criticism they leveled at a medical establishment that they saw as hidebound and aloof.
The hit 1992 film based on their story, which starred Nick Nolte and Susan Sarandon, in turn drew criticism from medical experts for portraying scientists as unfeeling, and for suggesting that Lorenzo’s Oil was a cure.
Lorenzo’s Oil did not cure Lorenzo Odone, the couple’s son, who died in 2008 at age 30 from a rare neurological disease known as adrenoleukodystrophy, or ALD. But the movie, directed by George Miller, a former physician, produced a wave of financing for research that has confirmed the benefits of Lorenzo’s Oil in some cases, and has led to more promising treatments for the once neglected fatal disease.
Mr. Odone and his wife began noticing changes in their son when he was about 4. A high-spirited and precocious boy who spoke three languages, Lorenzo had suddenly begun slurring his speech, stumbling and having temper tantrums at school.
Doctors first ascribed the symptoms to a tropical disease, possibly contracted in Comoros, off the coast of Mozambique, where Mr. Odone had taken his family while working on a project for the bank. They had recently returned to Washington, where the World Bank has its headquarters.
After two years of testing, though, doctors told the Odones that their son had ALD. Because it was so rare, affecting one in 45,000 people, there was not very much known about it, and it attracted little money for research. What the doctors did know was that it was fatal and incurable, and that Lorenzo would probably not live more than two more years. “We were being told to go home and watch Lorenzo die,” Mr. Odone wrote in an essay published in 2011. “We couldn’t and didn’t.”
They began an improbable mad dash to find a cure. Mr. Odone began studying the biochemistry of the nervous system. He and his wife called doctors, biologists and other researchers around the world to assemble the few far-flung experts on ALD for a symposium, at which some learned of one another’s work for the first time.
By the late 1980s — distilling what they had learned, as they later recalled, through doggedness, serendipity and ignorance of their own limits — the Odones, with a few scientist allies, developed a chemical compound that seemed to slow Lorenzo’s disease. They called the medicine, an extract of acids in olive and rapeseed oils, Lorenzo’s Oil. It apparently worked by breaking down the long-chain fatty acids that are considered a major cause of damage to nerve cells in people with ALD.
The compound has been the subject of long-term studies, one still in progress. Another, completed in 2005, found that Lorenzo’s Oil helped children with ALD if used before they started showing symptoms, but that it was less effective once the degenerative process had begun. The Food and Drug Administration still considers the treatment experimental.
From about the age of 8, Lorenzo was paralyzed and blind, unable to speak, dependent on a feeding tube and kept alive by round-the-clock nursing care and the nearly full-time ministrations of his parents. They talked to him constantly and insisted that visitors do likewise, though no one could be certain about his level of awareness. His parents believed that Lorenzo recognized their voices, loved music and enjoyed being alive.
Mr. Odone conceded, mainly in interviews he gave after his wife died in 2000, that he had sometimes wondered if that was enough of a life to justify the extraordinary lengths to which he and his wife had gone.
“Lorenzo never regained his faculties,” said Cristina Odone, one of Mr. Odone’s two children from a previous marriage, in a phone interview. But she added: “If you had ever walked into the room and seen how Lorenzo responded to the way my father and Michaela embraced him in life, wrapped him in love, you would see he was a living being who knew he was loved. That’s what they gave him, but it was very difficult.”
Augusto Daniel Odone was born in Rome on March 6, 1933, to Angelo and Maria Odone. His father was a general in the Italian Army, and his mother was a novelist. He grew up in Gamalero, in northwest Italy, received a law degree from the University of Rome and studied at the University of Kansas on a Fulbright scholarship. He worked for a bank that specialized in reconstruction and development in southern Italy before joining the World Bank in 1969.
His first marriage, to Ulla Sjostrom, ended in divorce. His second wife, the former Michaela Murphy, Lorenzo’s mother, was born in Yonkers and died of lung cancer at 61. Besides his daughter, he is survived by a son, Francesco, and a granddaughter.
J. Michael Bishop, an American microbiologist who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Medicine, described “Lorenzo’s Oil,” the film, as misleading in its claims about the oil extract and “deeply troubling for its portrayal of medical scientists as insensitive, close-minded and self-serving” — a viewpoint he found to be encapsulated by one particular line spoken late in the film by Lorenzo’s father: “These scientists have their own agenda, and it is different from ours.”
But, writing in The Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995, Dr. Bishop cautioned fellow scientists against dismissing the public sentiment the film conveyed. “Here is a warning science cannot take lightly,” he wrote, “a warning to explain ourselves more clearly, a warning even to change some of our ways.”
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MANNA DEY, THE VOICE OF MANY A BOLLYWOOD STAR
By HARESH PANDYA
Published: October 31, 2013
- Manna Dey, an acclaimed Indian singer whose voice was heard in scores of Bollywood movies, died on Oct. 24 in Bangalore. He was 94.
Manish Swarup/Associated Press
The singer Manna Dey after receiving a film award in New Delhi in 2009.
The cause was cardiac arrest, his daughter Sumita Deb said.
His death was widely mourned in India, and his open coffin was carried to an outdoor theater for the public to pay its respects.
Mr. Dey sang hundreds of songs, for Bengali as well as Bollywood films, but like most Bollywood singers he was not seen on screen. He was what is known as a playback singer: he did the singing, and actors lip-synced to his recorded voice.
A versatile vocalist with a mellifluous voice, he was well versed in Indian classical music, which he incorporated into a pop framework. The trend in Bollywood in the 1950s and ’60s was to pair a particular singer with a particular lead actor, but because he was thought of as primarily a classical singer, Mr. Dey lent his voice mostly to character actors, starting at a relatively young age, in films like “Do Bigha Zameen” and “Parineeta,” both released in 1953.
Music directors called on him regularly when they needed someone to sing complex classical compositions. Although the Bollywood star Rajesh Khanna wanted another vocalist, Kishore Kumar, to do all his singing, Mr. Dey sang the challenging “Zindgi Kaisi Hai Paheli” for Mr. Khanna in the 1971 film “Anand.”
The president of India, Pranab Mukherjee, praised Mr. Dey in a statement as “a versatile artist of extraordinary ability and a creative genius who mesmerized listeners with his enchanting voice.” The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, called him “the king of melody.”
Manna Dey was born Prabodh Chandra Dey in Calcutta on May 1, 1919, the third son of Purna and Mahamaya Chandra. His father was an accountant. Influenced by his uncle Krishna Chandra Dey, a respected name in Bengali music, he developed an interest in music early on and decided to make it his career after graduating from Vidyasagar College in Calcutta.
Mr. Dey recorded his first Hindi film song, for the movie “Tamanna,” in 1943. He was paid $3. It would be seven years before he had another chance to sing in a Hindi film. But “Upar Gagan Vishal,” which he sang in the 1950 movie “Mashaal,” was his breakthrough.
While establishing himself in Bollywood, he built a parallel career in Bengali films. He sang in other Indian languages as well.
Mr. Dey married Sulochana Kumaran in 1953. She died last year. In addition to Ms. Deb, survivors include another daughter, Suroma.
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WILLIAM HARRISON, NOVELIST AND ‘ROLLERBALL’ WRITER
By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK
Published: October 29, 2013
- William Harrison, who adapted his fiction into the films “Rollerball” in 1975 and “Mountains of the Moon” in 1990, died on Oct. 22 at his home in Fayetteville, Ark. He was 79.
Merlee Harrison
William Harrison
Neil Liefer
James Caan in the 1975 movie “Rollerball,” adapted by Mr. Harrison from one of his short stories, a dystopian science-fiction tale set in the world of the roller derby.
The cause was renal failure, his daughter, Laurie Karnatz, said.
Mr. Harrison wrote dozens of short stories and nine novels, several set in Africa, where he traveled extensively. He founded the creative writing graduate program at the University of Arkansas in 1965 with the writer James T. Whitehead.
His short story “Roller Ball Murder” was made into the dystopian science-fiction film “Rollerball,” directed by Norman Jewison from a screenplay by Mr. Harrison. The film cast James Caan as a star of an ultraviolent roller derby that is used to placate the proletariat in a futuristic society.
The film became a cult hit, though the reviews were often harsh. In 2002 the film was remade by John McTiernan to even worse reviews.
Mr. Harrison and the director Bob Rafelson wrote the screenplay for “Mountains of the Moon,” a 1990 adaptation of Mr. Harrison’s novel “Burton and Speke” (1982). The film, about the 19th-century exploration of the Nile by Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke, starred Patrick Bergin as Burton and Iain Glen as Speke.
William Neal Harrison was born on Oct. 29, 1933, in Dallas, and was adopted by Samuel Scott Harrison and the former Mary Etta Cook. He graduated from Texas Christian and Vanderbilt Universities and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1961, where he published his first short story.
In 1958 he married Merlee Portman. They moved to Fayetteville in 1964, and Mr. Harrison began teaching. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973 and stayed at the University of Arkansas until he retired in 1998. His last novel, “Black August,” was published in 2011.
In addition to his wife and daughter, Mr. Harrison is survived by two sons, Sean and Quentin; three grandchildren; and a great-grandson.
In a 2000 essay, “What It’s Like to Be a Minor American Writer,” Mr. Harrison said he was content with his place in the literary world. “The short answer: it’s wonderful,” he wrote.
Ann
