SD: Well, why is 'purity' measured by commercial considerations? You said at the beginning of this conversation that, 'Independence is dead.'

JS: No, what I said was that whole environment that got us turned on to animation, that the films that we saw were independent films in a purer sense, and that doesn't exist now.

SD: When you say, 'purer,' does that mean that you're putting up a fence that has one group on one side and everyone else on another?

JS: It is a matter of degrees. The line has shifted. I don't think there's a fence, maybe it's a gulf of 256 shades of grey. Computers are part of it, which is why I think the 256 shades of grey seem to work as an analogy. I know artists who work exclusively with computers that I consider closer to independent than I consider myself at the moment.

SD: Because they're doing it all themselves, except they can afford a $10,000 desktop video system and $4K DV camera...

JS: Or maybe they teach in a school where they have access to it. Like Jim Duesing, for example. I can't think of a lot of people who are independent as opposed to commercial in their orientation working in the digital domain.

SD: There's one place where the line is very blurred.

JS: There's a price tag on it, but it's never been about having the right toys.

SD: Having a more expensive pencil doesn't make the films any better.

JS: Does it make 'em any worse? I sometimes think it does.

SD: You're over-intellectualizing. It's very easy to dismiss the people who follow you, by virtue of the fact that their circumstances are different, and maybe better than yours were. But the same bunch at NYU, shooting in Washington Square Park, are making the same stupid movies today... Back then we watched Point Blank and now they're watching Payback. They're also not watching the Hubley's Everybody Rides The Carousel, or Moonbird, or Tale Of Tales, or Starevitch, or George Dunning, or George Griffin.

George Griffin's Lineage. © George Griffin.

JS: Although Tale of Tales is out on a recent tape of Russian Animation. Carousel is now easier to get than it was when we were in school. We were watching Tale Of Tales at work, Willy Hartland brought in a copy, and some people half-watched it, and some people reacted like they'd never seen it before. Then they discovered it was cut-out and couldn't believe it. It's as powerful as it was when we saw it and it's easier to find now.

SD: So is Starevitch. Not that anyone cares. Has the world changed so much that something does not exist if it's not in Entertainment Weekly?

JS: The world has changed so much that clips from [Starevich's] The Mascot can be used in a music video by the hot group of the moment and kids would react to it and not know.

SD: We wouldn't have known either. If someone took clips from The Mascot and used it in a music video, kids would look at it and say it was a rip-off of the Tool video. Because people think Fred Stuhr came up with something new who never saw the connection between what he was lifting from the Quay Brothers, who called their stuff an 'homage' when they were lifting from Svankmajer...

JS: Well that's as old as the world. That hasn't changed.

SD: What's changed is the level of saturation by which people's level of cluelessness has actually gone up.