Eugene Merril Deitch
Eugene Merril Deitch
- First: Gene
- Last: Deitch
- Born: August 8, 1924
- Died: April 16, 2020
- Occupation: Filmmaker
Bio
Gene Deitch is an Oscar-winning animation film director and scenarist. He is (was?) a voting member of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Scientists. In 1946 he started as an apprentice in the then cutting edge Hollywood animation studio, UPA, working as an assistant Production Designer on the first Mister Magoo cartoons for Columbia Pictures. Within five years he rose to be Creative Director of UPA's New York studio, where among his many gold-medal winning films were the famous Bert & Harry Piels beer commercials. His TV commercials were the first ever shown at the New York Museum of Modern Art; an entire month of screenings in 1954 (two more MOMA homages to Gene Deitch's films occurred, the most recent in April 1996). In 1956 CBS purchased the Terrytoons animation studio and named Gene Deitch as its Creative Director. Under his supervision and direction, the studio produced 18 CinemaScope cartoons per year for 20th Century-Fox, and won its very first Oscar nomination. He personally created and directed the TOM TERRIFIC series for the CBS nationwide Captain Kangaroo show. Tom Terrific, with Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog, was the very first animated serial for network television. In 1958 he set up his own studio in New York, Gene Deitch Associates, Inc.
Gene soon began directing a number of films on children’s picture books for Morton Schindel’s Weston Woods company, as listed below. Of special note was his adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, which took five years to complete (Deitch refers to as the “Mt. Everest of children’s books” ) due to Sendak’s penchant for changes.
Deitch’s most fascinating films, from our perspective, are Gene Deitch: the Picture Book Animated (1977), in which he describes graphically the painstaking process of designing a picture book, and Tomi Ungerer Storyteller (1981), an interview with the iconoclastic writer and illustrator, who insisted on partaking in a glass of whisky during the filming, ever-present just outside the frame.
Eugene Merril Deitch (August 8, 1924 – April 16, 2020)