Chapter 2 Page 4
In typical fashion, Cinetron charged ahead. Charlie placed a hurried call to Hewlett Packard in Atlanta and they agreed to let him pay for the computer when the installation was complete. The convention ended, the station wagon was re-packed and they headed for Buffalo, NY and on to Canada. Everything was set, Mr. Lesser had arranged for importing the Cinetron into Canada, all that they had to do was to call his Customs Broker at the border and no problems. Except for the Customs Officer…He was OK with the Computer, motors, tools, luggage, Illuminated sign and all that but that Sears Roebuck tool stand: that was a problem. Never mind that the $18 tool stand was made in Canada to begin with, something was sinister about bringing it into the country. So they were ordered to pull over while the bureaucracy s l o w l y ground to some sort of decision how to handle this attempted invasion. Charlie even offered to throw the thing into the river just to get going. Eventually, a proper government decision was reached: OK just go. And go they did, on to Toronto and the office of Film Effects of Canada. The system was installed, their operator was trained, and it was back to Atlanta with the check.
After the Film Effects sale, despite George being encouraged with the reception given the system by people who saw it operating in New York, he felt that it wasn’t a good fit for him to stick with us during those early days. Gene and Charlie wished him well and set about coming up with a plan that would allow them to continue to pull Cinetron up by its bootstraps.
The plan was that Don and Charlie would seek animation projects to shoot, Gene would stay at Lockheed and work as needed in his off time and while Don and Charlie weren’t engaged in animation production everyone worked on the system. Since Don was not directly involved in programming or designing the electronics for the system, he had a perspective that wasn’t clouded by being so close to technology of the system. This perspective and Don’s experience in animation allowed him to prod Gene and Charlie to slant their work to be much more user-friendly than it might have been otherwise.