Russell Merrit and J.B. Kaufman's book, Walt in Wonderland (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2000), a survey of the Disney silent-era work, discusses an interesting business arrangement between Schlesinger and Disney. Schlesinger occasionally subcontracted to animation studios to produce animated titles, and one of these was Disney's. Nat Levine's THE SILENT FLYER, a Universal serial of 1926, is one known product of this arrangement.
Legend has it that Schlesinger was one of the backers of the landmark Warner Bros. movie THE JAZZ SINGER, which earned him the gratitude of Jack Warner. While this may or may not have been true, it is certainly true that Jack Warner and Leon Schlesinger were on friendly terms. The book Hollywood Be Thy Name: The Warner Brothers Story (University Press of Kentucky, 1998) contains a comic photo of Warner and Schlesinger posing together in swimsuits.
Whatever the connection, Schlesinger was given the opportunity to manage production of cartoons for Warner Bros., starting in 1930 with Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising, who had split with the Disney studio some time before. The two brought Friz Freleng with them as one of their principal animators, and the Warner Bros. cartoon studio was born.
Schlesigner survived Harman and Ising's move to MGM in 1933, probably occasioned by Schlesigner's refusal to increase production budgets. He gradually built the studio into the industry leader it became in the early 1940s, before selling the cartoon studio to Warner Bros. in 1944. (The 1944 Annual Report of Warner Bros. lists the sale price as $700,000.) Schlesinger continued to do work relating to the merchandising of the characters before passing away in 1949.
Schlesinger's animators and directors had mixed views on him. On the negative side, he has been remembered as a fifth-rate Harry Cohn (the tyrannical head of Columbia studios, known as "White Fang") who knew nothing about cartoon production, save for the money they made him, and who dressed like a vaudeville hoofer who had recently come into money. Schlesinger is said to have not wanted his animators on board his yacht, because he did not want any "poor people" on board. After the late 1930s, Schlesigner took to indulging his passtimes of horse racing and sailboats rather than actually supervising the production of cartoons. Like Disney, however, it was his name that appeared on comic books as the author, as opposed to the real artists. Schlesinger was notoriously tight-fisted when it came to budgeting.
On the positive side, it was Schlesinger who selected the people that made Warner Bros. the cartoon studio that it was, giving the staff virtually no restrictions on material, aside from the pronouncement to put "loth of joketh" in the cartoons -- which leads to his most enduring memorial. Schlesinger had a noticeable lisp, and the staffers creating Daffy Duck in the late 1930s -- Jones credits Cal Howard -- decided to base the duck's voice on Leon. Expecting the worst, the animators screened the short. Schlesigner's reaction, far from being negative, was to declare enthusiastically "Jethuth Critht thath's a funny voithe! Where'd ya get that voithe?" Apparently it never even occurred to him that Daffy Duck's voice was a parody of his own.
Nominated for Short Subjects (Cartoons) 1931-32: IT'S GOT ME AGAIN - Producer
Nominated for Short Subjects (Cartoons) 1940: A WILD HARE - Producer
Nominated for Short Subjects (Cartoons) 1941: HIAWATHA'S RABBIT HUNT - Producer
Nominated for Short Subjects (Cartoons) 1941: RHAPSODY IN RIVETS - Producer
Nominated for Short Subjects (Cartoons) 1942: PIGS IN A POLKA - Producer
Nominated for Short Subjects (Cartoons) 1943: GREETINGS, BAIT - Producer
6 nominations