My time at Goldsholl Design and Film

Notes for an interview on the Goldsholls by Byron Grush

My Background

I had studied Graphic Design at the School of Artand Design at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana and went onto graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where I became the first graduate with a degree that read “Photography/Filmmaking.” I studied there under the famous avant-garde filmmaker, Gregory Markopolous.

How that led to my joining Goldsholl & Associates

I was studying art at a time (the sixties) when Pop Art was very big. In graphic design the big names were Saul Bass, Paul Rand, Charles and Ray Eames(who also did films), and basically anyone from the post-Bau Haus era who, like Mort and Millie, had studied with Lazlo Maholy-Nagy. So it was a transition from the 1930s Bau Haus and Russian Constructivism sensibilities into the psychedelic, experimental, new media-is-the-message attitudes. Film was a big part of this.

So when I got my first tour of the Goldsholl studios in Northfield I marveled at the design samples I saw there…boxes of Kleenex and cartons of Seven-up that were works of art…some that never saw production because they were too artistic. There were pizza boxes that could have hung at the Museum of Modern Art.

But I was not coming there as a designer. All my artistic energies were given over to filmmaking. Before studying with Gregory Markopolous I was familiar with the work of Norman McLaren and the National Film Board of Canada filmmakers. I had seen films by Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard and Luis Buñuel. I deemed these non-Hollywood films to be art. Then at SAIC, Markopolous introduced me to the works of Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Keneth Anger, Shirley Clark, Jack smith, Maya Deren, and even Andy Warhol…people associated with the New American Cinema Movement and the New YorkFilm-makers Co-op. This was in 1967.

I learned about the Goldsholls

I was fresh out of grad school and casting about for some way to earn a living when I saw an article in the Chicago Tribune about the Goldsholls. It talked about how they were famous designers who also made films…experimental films. The article featured two brilliant employees at Goldsholls: Wayne Boyer and Larry Janiak, young men who were given free rein to experiment with animation. I got my portfolio together and called for an interview.

 My interview

Millie Goldsholl was in charge of the film area, the downstairs, and Mort ran the design area, upstairs. When I arrived for my interview, Millie was out of town so I showed my work to Bill Langdon. I had brought my student film, Hexagrams, which consisted of alternating single frames of various scenes. This technique found its way into several Goldsholl films later. Millie liked to call it “flicker frames.” Bill Langdon saw that in my film was an animated sequence of a chess set. “Do you play chess?” he asked. I did. Although I’m certain that Millie had the final word in hiring me, I always felt that the chess angle got me the job. Bill and I played many a game during lunch hours.

Bill Langdon

Was a seasoned artist with a very interesting background. He would tell great stories of being an apprentice in the Chicago art studios of the 1930s, how he had to come in early and fill the artists’ ink wells and shine their shoes. He palled around with Harold Foster, the artist who drew Prince Valiant, and had done the hand lettering on that strip for the first year. He and Foster got drunk at the Century of Progress World’s Fait in 1933 and rode out of the fair grounds on the back of a garbage truck. I worked with Bill very closely on many projects, including a commercial for Sears in which we animated, in stop motion, the contents of a socket wrench set.

The “good life”

Mort and Millie, to the rest of us, were very definitely “Mom and Dad.” We flew first class on film jobs and ate at expensive restaurants. They lived what their son, Harry, called “the good life.” They made art for profit, but that seemed secondary to them. They had a regard for us as creative people and could recognize what ever it was in us that was outstanding and bring that out. We would always get to do some part of each project in our own style. It wasn’t exploitive although they took credit for the end results. I guess that was part of the promotion of the firm…the family.

Mort

By the time I got there, Mort was already famous. He was considered to be in the top ten designers world-wide and was called “the Saul Bass of the Midwest.” He was a kind-looking man with a round face and a moustache that his children had never seen him without, until one day on a whim he shaved it off and they didn’t recognize him. He sat up in his office which was lined with bookshelves containing old books full of steel engravings which we sometimes copied and used in pan-and-zoom animation in the films. We would emerge from his office when a design had been produced in multiple versions by the staff and choose or refine the final product. If he was dictatorial I never saw it, but pleasing him was essential.

He was very inventive and experimented with optical effects and photographic techniques, achieving unique results which he would then adapt to some commercial use. He would bring in acquaintances from the old days to experiment in the studio with no actual project in mind. I remember one man setting up big strobe lights that looked like you could barbeque on them.

He had made a series of little experimental films he liked to show to clients: Intergalactic Zoo was made by animating key chains in stop-motion; Night Driving (shot by Millie) had a rock and roll soundtrack while you saw out-of-focus colored lights reflecting in the windows of a car as it drove through a rainy night. His interest in experimentation was key to his approach to design and film.

Millie

Millie was Mort’s counterpart, partner, and the driving force behind the film area. Mort would write and Millie would direct. There might have a little friction between the upstairs and Millie’s domain downstairs…I sometimes felt the designers resented us in the film area. Also, these were the days when women were rarely in charge in business or in the arts. Millie was a sort of pioneer in that. She did appreciate the skills and the ideas of others and saw to it that we all had input. Where Mort might have a specific thing in mind for a design and would tweak things to get what he wanted, Millie was fluid in her approach. Some thought she changed her mind too much while working but it was more of a progressive approximation than trail and error.

She was instrumental in a film society that functioned on the North Shore. They would meet monthly (?) to screen experimental and “art” films. They rotated hosting in there various houses…Highland Park, Kenilworth, etc. Frank Lloyd Wright houses. I got to show more personal work there as did some of my colleges. I think the admiration of her society friends was important to her and a catalyst for the making of Up is Down.

Worth How Many Words

Was a film we made for Eastman Kodak. I had two inputs into its making. It was about the different forms photography could take and the things about the word it could reveal. While I was still in school at SAIC I worked one summer for Cook County Hospital filming trauma surgery for a study they were doing. I would drive into Chicago in the middle of the night to film kidneys being removed from knife fight victims. Since I had this experience, I was assigned to take still pictures for the film of heart surgery being performed. Those are my photographs in the film. Secondly, the script called for high-speed photography which Millie thought should be of a diver entering the water. I became a location scout for this scene because I knew of an old stone quarry used as a swimming hole back in my hometown of Naperville. I made contact with the owners and Millie called the high school to get a young man to dive. The swimming coach was a man who had been the gym teacher years before when I had attended high school there. He was somewhat querulous and a bit opposed to his student being in our film. Just at the last minute before filming he forced the student to go downtown and obtain a hair cut. We had to wait on the shot.

Up is Down

Millie hired free-lance animator, Dan Bessie, to do the animation for Up is Down. Bill Langdon and I are credited as assisting. Hans Conred did the narration. Millie had found this children’s book by June Brindel called Luap and adapted the story. I’ve always felt Bessie’s animation was a little conventional. I think Paul Jessel, who came to work at Goldsholl, I believe, in the middle of the production (?) could have done a more dynamic job. However, it is what it is and it garnered much acclaim for Millie. I got to do the “electrocution sequence” in the film and of course all of us painted cells, painted cells, painted cells, painted cells, painted cells! Millie was influenced, I think, by the work of John and Faith Hubley, particularly their animation on paper with that look of being freshly painted.

Wayne, Larry, and Paul and Marie

You only have to look at the earlier Goldsholl films like Faces and Fortunes for Kimberly Clark, to see the creative legacy due, for the most part, to Wayne Boyer and Larry Janiak. I came to Goldsholls in 1967, about the time Wayne and Larry left. Larry began teaching at the Institute of Designat IIT where Aaron Siskind hired him to start an experimental live action and animation film area. Waynetaught at circle Campus. Together they start the Center Cinema Coop, an independent film distribution cooperative. When I left Goldsholls I returned to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where I started the animation area within the film department I had helped bring into existence so many years ago by being its first graduate. I feel a great bond between myself and these two men.

Paul Jessel and his wife, Marie Chenker, worked many years at Goldsholls as animators and later started their own film company, Animasuarus. Paul went on later to work on some important films such as The Nightmare Before Christmas, the Harry Potter film, and Sony’s computer animated features. I’ve known Paul and Marie since the Goldsholl days and keep in touch.