I love pre-code movies. Some of my favorites are movies with Warren William and there is an MGM film called "Skyscraper Souls" which is the best Warner Brothers movie that MGM ever made.
Mike RoyerI know some stories about "liberation" and stuff that's been liberated by people who turn around and get on their soapbox about how it's unfair that the artists didn't benefit while they're sitting on stuff that they "liberated," but that's another story for another time.
Mike RoyerI remember on a Friday afternoon getting a phone call from Grant Simmons saying, "Mike," we got to be pretty good friends; "Mike, the Sheriff is closing us down on Monday. If you'd like to drive into the studio tomorrow morning, you can have anything you want." So rather than go in and take home piles and piles of cels of Spider-Man what did I take home? Two pages of original art that got sent out to the west coast. Now of course if I'd have taken all the rest of that stuff home I could probably have retired a lot earlier.
Mike RoyerI sometimes look at the careers of other... I guess I could call them contemporaries or maybe close artists; you know, the 4 or 5 guys who go to New York City and get a loft and work together and use each other as models and that sort of thing and wait for years and years to get married. Maybe I just wasn't that definite.
Mike Royer