The Three Oval Circus

Since the death of Steve Bosustow on July 4, 1981, something approaching 50 boxes of his materials were housed in the home of his eldest son, Tee Bosustow, first in his garage, then, when he moved it all went into a storage facility, and finally in 2002, everything was moved into the second bedroom of Tee’s new apartment in Van Nuys, California, and it filled that second bedroom, floor to ceiling, no exaggeration.  It was nearly impossible to start sifting through those boxes back then, but when he did, Tee began to discover the first items of a massive collection of UPA materials, which his dad had collected to write about about UPA, and apparently one handwritten note suggested that he was going to call it The Three Oval Circus, a play on words between the Three Ring Circus of Barnum and Bailey’s Big Top, and the three ovals of the UPA logo.

When Tee moved in 2011 to his present location in Burbank, he began to make a little more headway and discovered more notes his dad had jotted down for his book, and a few other titles he came up with, plus piles of photos, news articles, and letters.  Between these rare materials and Tee’s early interviews, he switched from his notion of creating a short documentary about his dad, to a feature length documentary on the larger story of the legendary days of UPA, from the early 1940s to the end of the 1950s, as he discovered that a documentary had never been done on UPA.  And, although documentary productions were Tee’s expertise, he felt he had to honor his dad’s desire to write a book on UPA, so he decided to start assembling a book utilizing all those materials, at least any of them that didn’t make it into the doc.

Category: Collection