Introduction: Charles C. Cristadoro

Lost to the rush and ruin of time, the world has forgotten artist Charles C. Cristadoro.  Beyond art he was an inventor, he brought the ideas of Hollywood royalty to life, and his legacy lived beyond his terminal existence through his mentorship.  Most assuredly, you have seen his work on the silver screen, but perhaps not his varying media: bone, ivory, bronze, wood, and everything in between.   His character models made an Italian boy come to life, his creator Geppetto carved by Cristadoro's hand, each danced in Disney's 1940 Pinocchio.  He contributed to Dumbo, Fantasia, and Bambi as well as work on the innovative Disney's audio-animatronic adventure, "Project Little Man."  Indeed, his audio-animatronics inspired Imagineers to imagine.  His sculptures made silent film cowboy William S. Hart cry as his personal artist and made Hollywood Starlet Fay Wray's stunt double (with thirty-two moving joints) in Kong's climbing of the Empire State Building in the 1933 film King Kong.  

Cristadoro was no stranger to the famed circles of Hollywood, paling around at Hart's mansion in the 1920s with Charlie Chaplin, Amelia Earhart, and Will Rogers who all frequented the home for social gatherings.  Hart's home embodied the American West and art with depictions by C.M. Russell, Frederic Remington, and James Montgomery Flagg (another frequent guest and famous for his Uncle Sam World War I recruitment poster, I Want You!).  Each rested alongside Cristadoro's work in the Newhall, California home now a museum under the management of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles.  In fact, Cristadoro was commissioned by Hart to memorialize C.M. Russell for his wife, Nancy, who was pleased there was a person "in the world who [modeled] a real likeness of the Charlie [they] knew."     

There is still uncertainty how or where Hart met Cristadoro, presumably at the same time he worked with the famed A. Stirling Calder at San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), or as one of the top ivory sculptors in the world, or after he saved the Panama-California Exposition parade with his sculpture of King Neptune.  Cristadoro found himself surrounded by the makers of culture and cities, acclaimed for his work at Spreckels Theatre with John D. Spreckels and Harrison Albright, who also built the U.S. Grant Hotel with the son of the former President of the United States.  While in San Diego, he headed the San Diego Museum of Art Artists Guild, and when work in San Diego did not suffice, he fed once art-starved Angelinos with the opening of Los Angeles' first art schools.  

As one of his mentors Gutzon Borglum, who attempted to recruit him for his monumental Mount Rushmore, stated, "Art exists to sweeten life; it is the dress of form, the color of expression."  This was indeed the case for Cristadoro's expressions, but right along with life and art was family — Cristadoro's reason for not joining Borglum's well-known project.  His family was his life, "the all-important thing" that in some ways adversely affected his life's trajectory and, in others, positioned him perfectly for the art movements along the West Coast that brought him covert fame.  One example is the PPIE, which brought him to know Blanding Sloan and, by default, to mentoring Sloan's adopted son, Wah Ming Chang.  Chang would become the man who made Star Trek come to life through the persistent sense of liberal progressivism and utopianism, which has remained a hallmark of Hollywood society.  There are hints to Cristadoro's fight for women's suffrage and grappling with issues of homosexuality, race, and labor of Progressive Era California forward.  Life through art, family, and utopian freedom would eventually come to drive Cristadoro to insanity.

His purpose in life was to live until the year 2000, a world where utopia started and unlimited expression began.  In his golden years, he sat at his table in1960s California and did the math on living to 2000.  In doing so, he realized the inevitability of his mortal life, and to live to one hundred and nineteen years old was a near statistical impossibility.   He chose that day to take his own life with pills, only extending the misery of his existence with innumerable health problems and hospital stays.  He would never recover, his life ending in 1967 at the age of 86.  As his father wrote of another loved one, fitting enough applicable to his son, "The maker...could go no further.  He had made his masterpiece," his legacy lives in bronze and the silver screen for all time — well beyond the year 2000.