Chapter 1 Page 4
Another alumnus of Storer Studios, George Harris, was also an original founder of the new company that was to become Cinetron. George was a salesman for the studio and was also displaced when Storer Studios closed.
George, Charlie, and Gene were the original three who bootstrapped Cinetron. Don Hudgins continued working independently as a freelance Cinematographer and Director of Photography and Gene kept his day job at Lockheed.
The fledgling operation moved to its inglorious new headquarters in the basement of Charlie’s house. Of foremost concern in those days was the generation of capital to keep the lights on in the basement and sustain the company’s occasionally paid employees: Charlie and George.
One of the first orders of business to get the company moving was to decide on a name and become a corporation. Charlie and George met in George’s family room to discuss what needed to be done to get things underway. One of the early names considered for the animation system during the Storer days was Animatron (ugh). That name was quickly dismissed from contention and after much discussion and a Scotch or two, Charlie suggested combining Cine, (for film and a contraction for Cinema or movies) with electronics. Names like Eleccine, Cinematronics, Movietron and others were discarded in favor of Cinematron, which morphed into the more concise Cinetron.
Soon after, papers were signed, and the Georgia Corporation, Cinetron Computer Systems Inc. came into being with George Harris, Gene Nottingham and Charles Vaughn as officers and sole shareholders.
Charlie and George had already convinced a pioneering optical effects and animation company, The Optical House, in New York City to be the first customers for the newly redesigned, solid state version of the animation system. The Optical House owners, Dick Swanek and Dick Rauh were already impressed with the capabilities of the system, having seen it on a trip to Storer Studios earlier and were willing to purchase a system, provided it was installed in their New York office and was accepted by them and their camera operators. The price tag: $40,000.
A fit of activity followed the receipt of the Optical House Purchase Order, but there was just one problem: There were no real funds to pay for building the system and the purchase terms were payment in full upon installation and acceptance. Cinetron was a corporation all right but it was without financing. Many early attempts to secure bank financing had failed. Who was going to lend a brand-new company money to build something as preposterous as a computer animation system? Answer: nobody, even if there was a purchase order.