Charley Bowers (1889 – 1946) is one of the most enigmatic personalities in the history of American cinema. A part of his work has disappeared, and certain periods of his life remain unknown, for lack of written records and testimonies. Charley Bowers was endowed with an insane imagination, and the smallest anecdote quickly took on the appearance of a totally amazing story.

The king of liars

The rare accounts of his life are as incredible as his work was innovating. Bowers was crafty, boastful, a clown and an awkward character, a confabulator on the fringes of mythomania. He adored recounting his exploits, each one more unbelievable than the next, but he knew how to captivate his audience.

Bowers was born in 1889 in Cresco, Iowa, the son of a French countess and an Irish physician. At the age of 5, he met a former circus performer who initiated him in the art of tightrope walking. The following year, a circus manager, fascinated by his talent, kidnapped Bowers and for two years exploited him as a child prodigy of the tightrope. But one of Charley’s uncles tracked him down and took him back to his family, just before his father’s death. 

So at the age of 9, Charley Bowers found himself responsible for looking after his family, performing a multitude of menial jobs: lift boy, shop assistant, gardener and even guard on a freight train! He also worked as a theatre usher, occasionally playing certain child roles, while continuing to display his talent for tightrope walking in fairs and amusement parks whenever the opportunity presented itself. Several years later, while climbing two seven-floor buildings in Chicago to promote his performance, he was almost killed, which brought this career to an end.

Charley also boasted of having been a jockey and training 500 wild horses, before returning to work in the theatre. Employed as an actor, then director, he soon devoted himself to the costume and scenery design. His talent for stage design brought him to the attention of an advertising agency, with which he acquired certain renown.

During a banquet held in his honour, he drew caricatures of several of the personalities present and was soon after published in the Jersey City Journal. The newspaper’s official caricaturist for eight years, and highly appreciated by the public, he subsequently held the same position at the Chicago Star, the Chicago Tribune and the Newark Evening News.

Around 1912, at the age of just 23 , Charley Bowers began to take  a closer interest in cartoons. He worked for several studios, adapting a hundred or so comic strips for the cinema.

According to Louise Beaudet, in 1916 he created the Mutt and Jeff Inc. company and began to produce a series of cartoons recounting the adventures of the comic strip characters of the same name. To increase production capacity, the company merged with the Raoul Barré studio and was later taken over by Bud Fisher, author of the original cartoon strip.

The Barré-Bowers-Fisher studios were highly prolific (around 300 episodes of Mutt and Jeff). Often not given credit, sometimes signing someone else’s work (for Charley could also be disloyal), Bowers is believed to have contributed to more than 250 episodes of the series. These were early days for the genre: the animations were as limited as the scripts, and the films rarely attained the same level of success as the comic strips that inspired them.

In 1918 Barré was ousted after a bout of depression, quickly followed by Bowers, accused of embezzling money from the studio. The studio became Fisher-Mutt and Jeff Inc., producing new episodes for William Fox. But shortly afterwards, having won Fox’s confidence, Bowers returned to working on Mutt and Jeff at home, employing Isidore Klein, a former Fisher animator.

In 1920, Bowers set himself up again in New York in a two-floor studio. One floor was dedicated to the production of Mutt and Jeff, while Bowers himself used the other for new experiments. He had already imagined live action films using animated puppets, and finally closed the animation studio to devote himself fully to his research.

He began working on the production of his comedies in 1924, after developing the Bower Process, a cinematographic technique enabling astonishing special effects by combining live action shots with animation, image by image.

In the years 1926 and 1927, he wrote and directed with Harold L. Muller and Ted Sears a dozen short films including Now You Tell One, A Wild Roomer, He Done His Best, Fatal Footsteps and Egged On. His comedies revealed an imaginary and surreal world, disturbed by naive and complex mechanical machines that made a mockery of the new golden age of industry.

In 1928, as the principal shareholder of Bowers Comedies, he was simultaneously scriptwriter, animator, actor and producer of a new series of short films directed by Muller: Goofy Birds, You’ll Be Sorry, Say Ah-h !, Whoozit, There It Is, and Hop Off.

Less is known about Charley Bowers’ life in the 1930s. There are hardly any documents relating to this period. We do know that in 1930 he made It’s a Bird, his very first sound film. This film would be honoured several years later by the French surrealists, André Breton in particular.

He worked for a short time making animated films under the direction of Walter Lantz at Universal, wrote and illustrated several children’s books. He also produced advertising films (now lost) for Pride Of Newark beer, Johnson’s wax and some major American oil companies. The recent discovery of Pop And Mom In Wild Oysters and Believe It Or Don’t proves that he was still making animated films during this period.

In 1941, serious illness forced him to stop all professional activity. His wife tried to fulfil his current contracts, but despite her drawing talents, the contracts were broken.

Charley Bowers died on 26 November 1946, aged 57 years, leaving his wife as his sole heir.

Since 1992, Lobster Films has been searching the world over for the last remaining copies of these missing works.