Legends - Linda Jones Clough

By Vance Durgin / Photograph by Don Whitlow

 

Walk into the Tustin headquarters of Linda Jones Enterprises, and you’re immediately surrounded by the cartoon art of famed Warner Bros. animator Chuck Jones. That’s hardly surprising, since Linda Jones Clough is his daughter. What makes the scene remarkable, though, is realizing that the lucrative market for the product Clough sells—animation art—didn’t even exist 30 years ago.

Jones, of course, was one of animation’s most famous directors. The creator of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, he also brought the Grinch to TV. Although Jones died in 2002, his work is alive due in large part to his daughter’s company, which issues limited-edition cels signed by the artist three new cels were released Sept. 16 to mark the 60th anniversary of “Fast and Furry-ous,” the first short film starring Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote.

Cels—hand-painted drawings on clear plastic or cellulose, comparable to lithographs from painters—once were a standard form of animation art and can sell for thousands of dollars. Vintage art can bring even more.

“I wanted to get animation art into people’s homes where they could enjoy it,” says Clough. “It was a very limited market, and no one was selling limited editions.” Mostly, she says, collectors were selling to one another.

That began to change in the late 1970s. First, a Midwestern art dealer who sold items through a catalog sought used production cels from Jones’ TV work at the time. Jones was busy doing half-hour specials based on Rudyard Kipling characters, so he asked Clough, who was working for him part time, to handle the details—finding the cels, sorting them, and shipping them to the dealer.

Next, Neiman Marcus had Jones create the cover for its 1978 Christmas catalog featuring Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. The retailer liked the cover so much that it decided to sell copies. Jones again asked his daughter to handle the details, so she set to work producing 50 signed and numbered cels. (A dealer recently offered one of them for $6,000.)

About that time, Ed Summer, who co-owned a New York collectibles shop with a guy named George Lucas (yes, that one), called on Jones. Summer wanted to sell drawings from Jones’ classic cartoons. Good idea, Jones told him. But there was a small problem.

No classic Warner Bros. cartoon art existed. The studio destroyed its old cels when it ran short of storage space in the 1960s. Countless images of such beloved WB characters as Bugs, Daffy, and Porky Pig, dating back to the 1930s—gone. Daffy would have called the situation “dethspicable.”

But the studio’s decision was hardly surprising. At 12 to 24 cels per second, anywhere from 5,000 to 8,000 individual drawings were used to film a short. Cels weren’t seen as rare or valuable. Disney used to sell its cels for a few dollars each at Disneyland. The only way to generate saleable cels with WB characters from classic cartoons was to produce new ones.

Jones was up to the task. “How many do you want?” he asked Summer.

Summer thought he could sell 500, so Jones came up with a cel of Bugs Bunny and Marvin the Martian. By then, Clough was handling deals for her father. She licensed the characters from Warner, oversaw production of the cels, and even created the backgrounds.

Sales were not exactly Road Runner fast. “It took five years to sell those 500,” Clough recalls.

Still, interest was growing and the Kipling cels were selling well. In 1977, Clough established Linda Jones Enterprises. Six years later, she made a deal with Circle Fine Art, which put the Jones cels in 34 galleries nationwide. Animation art had arrived.

Since then, Clough has moved into retail with the Chuck Jones Gallery stores, first in Newport Beach, now in Orange, San Diego, and Santa Fe, N.M. Clough says the galleries foster strong relationships with their best clients, hosting gatherings that feature special art.

Clough also was the first to market cels by other classic WB animators, including Friz Freleng (Tweety and Sylvester) and Bob McKimson (Foghorn Leghorn). By then, other studios were putting out their own limited editions, but the roots of the industry trace right back to Clough.

Today, she consults for the business now run by her son, Craig Kausen, who recently relocated the operation from Irvine to Tustin. “If there’s any question beyond our capabilities of answering, she’s got the answer,” says Robert Patrick, the company’s director of marketing and wholesale.

And that’s not all, folks. Through the nonprofit Chuck Jones Center for Creativity, Clough is advancing her father’s legacy by encouraging young talent through workshops. Ultimately she’d like to build something similar to “Peanuts” creator Charles M. Schulz’s museum and research center in Santa Rosa that not only would house Jones’ work, but make his materials available to artists and offer classes. “He wanted people to tap into their own creativity and imagination,” she says.

Right now, the center is based at Linda Jones Enterprises, but Clough envisions a separate $50 million facility. Dreams are hardly out of place here. At the old Irvine headquarters, the company had re-created Jones’ studio—complete with books, a Royal manual typewriter, African sculptures, an Emmy, and an animator’s table. You could almost picture Jones at work there, and suddenly the idea of a multimillion-dollar center dedicated to his art doesn’t seem unlikely at all.


Vance Durgin is an Orange Coast contributing writer.