But I did land a large consulting contract with the Madison Avenue ad agency, Cunningham & Ross for their Folgers Coffee account, and that gave me the base to get my company set up. So Gene Deitch Associates, Inc. moved into an upper floor of the Sophia storage building on Manhattan’s west side. Jules Feiffer made a brilliant series of promotional mailing pieces, (several reproduced in this book) and we were off to a grand start.

Also from my Terrytoons staff, Al Kouzel became my staff director and George Singer head animator. With Allen Swift. I created a character named Captain Folger for our first series of commercials, and the storyboards for Samson Scrap & Delilah and Jules Feiffer’s Munro went up on my office wall, waiting for some rich angel to fly in and feather them with financing. That was the real goal of GDA, inc. I’ve told this story before in my book of memoirs, For the Love of Prague.

While awaiting cash-heavy angels, my little group was relegated to the bread and butter business of TV commercials. I was not at all happy being the president of a company. I am no businessman, and the weight of responsibility was unnerving, even though we started with some lucrative contracts. What I wanted to do were story films, which I had so much fun doing at Terrytoons. The bitterness of my expulsion made even my name, glistening over the door of my own studio seem a bringdown, and nixing what had seemed like my ticket to the Big Time with Screen Gems, just added to my funk.

Into this gloom materialized William L. Snyder. He did not at all look like your average angel. He was 40 years old, prematurely gray, wore a striped seersucker suit and expelled paralyzing clouds of smoke from his illegal Cuban cigars. His most penetrating features were his Paul Newman-blue eyes. He was a man who could talk anybody into anything, as I was soon to find out. He exuded confidence, enthusiasm and charm. He referred to himself as “beautiful,” and considered himself irresistible, and a mover and shaker in one body. He had earlier phoned, claiming he had been looking for the best animator in New York. I didn’t inform him that he possibly had the wrong number. What he had was an unappealing proposition.

“I have some animated films in production,” he began, “but they’re in trouble, and I’m told you’re the only one who can straighten them out.”

“If you mean you’ll assign your films to my studio, I’ll gladly look them over and decide if we can do what you want done with them.”

“That’s the only catch,” he said, delicately drawing on his stogie. “The work has to be done in my facilities.”

“Well, that’s out. As you can see, I’ve got my own studio to keep busy. I can’t undercut my staff by directing films elsewhere. Anyway,” I said, “I have no interest in kibitzing to another animator’s films!”

He kept after me. Showing up nearly every day for a couple of weeks. “Look,” he insisted, “These are very interesting children’s films, beautifully done, but they just don’t have the timing and pizzazz that I need.”

But what I wanted to do were the two projects pinned to my wall. My phone rang, and, as I spoke, I noticed Snyder was looking over the two storyboards. The moment I hung up he turned toward me with an offer he was sure I couldn’t refuse.

“I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do,” said Snyder, exhaling another numbing cloud of smoke. He then proceeded to make me the Golden Proposal: “If you will help me with my films, I will finance your Munro and Samson Scrap projects. You can direct them, and if they don’t come out the way you want, you can throw the film in the garbage, and keep the rights.”

“Why shouldn’t they come out the way I want?” I asked.

“Well, it is barely possible that you may not like the way the animators in my facilities do them. If I back the films, they must be produced in my facilities.”

“So just where are your facilities?” I asked, succumbing inevitably to Snyder’s persistence, but hoping it would at least be within walking distance or a short taxi ride from my GDA studio.

"In Prague," he said, coolly examining the "Munro" storyboards at closer range.

Prague? I was incredulous. My mind flashed back to my Army days in World War II. I'd done my basic training at Camp Gruber - which looked just like it sounded - in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Look at the map: Just a few miles to the south-west is a poke town named Prague, where we used to go to a bar while on weekend leave.

"Come on!," I hooted, at last catching on that this was some sort of gag. "You're not going to tell me that you have an animation studio in Prague, Oklahoma?"

"No, no!" Now he thought I was the one who was joking. "My studio is in Prague, Czechoslovakia.

"What??!! Isn't that one of those communist countries?" I had, after all, heard of the country whose betrayal at Munich had precipitated World War II, and which ultimately fell into the red clutches of the Soviet Union. "I am certainly not willing to go there! Finito!" But he wasn't about to give up now.

"It's not what you think! There are some great people over there, and this has nothing to do with politics. They need hard currency; I need films. It's strictly business. They've even set up a special 'Snyder Unit' to do my films.

In the years leading up to that fateful day, Bill Snyder had been a marginal distributor of 16mm films, specializing in the educational and institutional markets. This was long before video. After World War II, he began scrounging around Europe, looking for bargain films he could acquire for U.S. distribution. He had a special love for puppet films, and had been looking for some in Munich. "The very best puppet films," he was told, "are by Jirí Trnka of Czechoslovakia. But unfortunately, no one can go there."

That was all Bill Snyder needed to hear: that there was somewhere he "couldn't" go. The challenge was irresistible. But he soon found he could hardly even telephone there. In fact, it took all day to finally arrange a call for the following day to Czechoslovak Filmexport, the official state-run film trade organization. His smooth talking and broad hints of Big Money actually elicited a business visa-the first, Snyder later claimed, issued to an American since the Communists seized power in 1948.

The great man first arrived in Prague in 1955. He screened films for days, buying many. He had excellent taste, and had good results with the magical puppet films of Jirí Trnka, along with several other cartoon gems. They sold well in the school and library market, and some did well in art house movie distribution, receiving rave reviews. Seeing that he had stumbled onto a good thing, and beginning to scrape the bottom of the barrel of existing films, he wondered if the Czechs might actually produce new films for him, on order. For as beautiful as those early Czech classics of animation were, they were not American in character or pace, and their U.S. distribution possibilities were limited. It was clear the Czechs could do beautiful work, so why not do it on stories supplied by Snyder?

One of the why-nots was that this was a "socialist" country with a "socialist" cultural agenda. Why should they lower themselves to produce bourgeois stories for "imperialist Amerika?" But when Snyder mentioned what he would pay for such work, ideology quickly took a back seat to pragmatism. Actually, it was peanuts for Snyder, but even a few dollars were hard to come by in Czechoslovakia during the 1950s.