The Keys to the Kingdom (32 page)

Animators, often wed to tradition, resisted vigorously. “It was revolutionary,” said Glenn Keane, one of Disney's star animators. “There was a big battle.” But the animators found that doing some advance script work made sense—and Katzenberg found that he had to be flexible and allow for changes as the work progressed.

Nothing went smoothly in the making of
Oliver & Company
. While Katzenberg was intent on getting the writers to come up with a script he liked, the animation team played Trivial Pursuit for weeks. As work got under way, the picture didn't really click. The animators were unhappy and Katzenberg didn't particularly like what he was seeing on the screen. The animation was rather heavy-handed; one of the animators later concluded that Katzenberg “trusted us a little too much” and didn't interfere enough.
It was quite a revolution in the perception of a man initially seen as the likely murderer of the medium.

Despite the film's shortcomings, Disney was determined to give it a big push. The previous summer, Steven Spielberg had released
An American Tail,
the saga of a Russian mouse who emigrates to the United States, under the Universal studio banner. Directed by Disney defector Don Bluth, the film pulled in $40 million at the box office. That made it the highest grossing animated film ever (not counting revenue that other pictures had generated in repeat releases). “We said, ‘We've got to be able to top this,'” recalls Clements. With an expensive advertising campaign and a little pressure to get theater owners to keep the picture on the screen,
Oliver & Company
grossed $53 million.

B
ACK WHEN MICHAEL
Eisner was running Paramount, aspiring director Bob Zemeckis was chagrined to learn that Eisner thought he had no talent. True, the young filmmaker had two unsuccessful movies under his belt—
I Wanna Hold Your Hand,
about a group of teenagers going to a Beatles concert, and
Used Cars,
a dark little comedy starring Kurt Russell. But some people—including Steven Spielberg—thought Zemeckis had tremendous promise. Eisner believed the opposite. Paramount executives passed the word to Zemeckis's agent, Jack Rapke, at CAA: Eisner had decreed that Paramount Pictures had nothing to discuss with Zemeckis.

If Eisner didn't want Zemeckis in those days, Disney did. In 1980, Ron Miller had bought a book called
Who Censored Roger Rabbit?
and studio chief Tom Wilhite asked Zemeckis to direct this tale of intrigue in a fictional Los Angeles bedroom community inhabited by cartoon characters. Disney had made up a sculpture of a proposed Roger Rabbit character with a big red nose; Pee-Wee Herman was to provide the voice. The rabbit character wasn't to Zemeckis's liking. At the time he was developing
Romancing the Stone,
but Disney wanted him to commit full-time to the rabbit project. Forced to choose, Zemeckis concluded Disney would never let him make the movie as he saw it. Roger Rabbit would have to wait for new management.

With 1984's
Romancing the Stone,
Zemeckis finally showed that he could fulfill the potential that Spielberg saw. The romantic adventure starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner grossed $75 million. While other studios came calling, Zemeckis heard that Eisner thought the film was “a fluke.” Over lunch at the Palm, Katzenberg told an incredulous Zemeckis that Eisner's low opinion hadn't changed and that the studio still wouldn't
discuss any projects with him. “Those are the kinds of tasks Jeffrey had to do in those days—explain this inexcusable behavior,” Zemeckis says.

Zemeckis followed
Romancing the Stone
with the clever and engaging
Back to the Future,
a Michael J. Fox film that became the number-one hit of 1985. At this point Eisner dashed off a note offering a self-deprecating apology. He described a college experience in which he had written a paper about the “picturesque novel” when the assignment was to write about the “picaresque” novel. Perhaps that helped explain why Eisner had been mistaken about Zemeckis—but the director took the gesture as belated and “cynical.”

When Eisner and Katzenberg arrived at Disney, they concluded that the rabbit could become the first important new Disney character in years. Like
The Color of Money
or
Three Men and a Baby,
this project would require Disney to depart from its preferred way of doing business. To get the top-quality results it desired, the studio would have to pay for high-powered talent. Disney approached Spielberg about taking on the project. He agreed to produce and recruited Zemeckis to direct.

“There's a big problem,” Zemeckis told Spielberg. “Michael Eisner doesn't think I can direct.”

“You'll never have to speak to Michael Eisner,” Spielberg promised.

Zemeckis signed on, though he expressed a wish that the project could be done at Warner. Roger was going to mingle with other “Toons” in the film and Zemeckis thought the Disney stable of characters seemed boring. On the other hand, he thought, the Warner cartoons invented by Tex Avery—Daffy Duck, Roadrunner, and Yosemite Sam—were funny. Even Spielberg didn't have the clout to get the project away from Disney, but he did manage something the old Disney regime had attempted but failed to achieve: he got permission for non-Disney characters to perform in a Disney film. He even got Warner to allow superstar Bugs Bunny to appear in an unprecedented cameo alongside Mickey Mouse.

But Eisner wasn't willing to be quarantined. Zemeckis had put in a year of preparation and was about to leave for London (where he and Spielberg had decided to make the film, in part to stay far away from Disney) when Eisner demanded a meeting. He was going to talk to Zemeckis, or he wasn't making the film. To Zemeckis's surprise, the conversation went on for hours and wasn't nearly as bad as he anticipated. He had to call his wife to say he would miss dinner. It was the first time he had ever encountered
a studio executive who really wanted to know what he was doing. Eisner questioned him closely about the film's tone and even got down to some squeamish questions about the Eddie Valiant character, who was a down-on-his-luck drunk.

“How dirty will Eddie be?” Eisner asked. “Is he going to have dirty fingernails?”

“I never thought of that but I don't think so,” Zemeckis replied.

The bemused Zemeckis went on his way. He had been enthusiastic, even passionate, but Eisner's anxiety still ran high.

 

WHO FRAMED ROGER
Rabbit
was one of the most praiseworthy efforts of the Eisner-Katzenberg regime. Disney was doing what Disney ought to do—breaking the animation mold. The film offered a never-before-seen technique that blended animation and live action with a new realism. Instead of the flat cartoons seen in
Mary Poppins
more than twenty years earlier, the toons in
Roger Rabbit
were rounded and real. They cast shadows. They reached out and touched objects. They grabbed live actors by their lapels.

Spielberg and Disney concurred that the animation had to look great. To make it blend seamlessly with the live-action footage, the animation had to be drawn frame by frame, instead of drawing every other frame (as on other major animated features) or every sixth frame (out of twenty-four per second) as animators did for cheap television cartoons. But full animation—the old-fashioned way—meant that each minute of film took a team of about twenty animators a week to complete. And that cost money.

To develop the new blend of live action and animation, Disney brought in Richard Williams, an Oscar-winning Canadian expatriate living in London. His plan was to throw out “every rule that these stupid animators developed for working with live action.” The past approach had been to lock down the live-action camera so the horizon line remained steady. That way, the animated characters were the same size in each frame. Live scenes were lit with a minimum of shadow so the contrast between live actors and the animated figures was less striking. But Williams and Zemeckis thought such techniques were for the faint of heart.

The Disney and Spielberg camps didn't agree on everything. Spielberg, for example, wanted a star like Harrison Ford or Bill Murray to play the live hero, detective Eddie Valiant, opposite Roger. Katzenberg argued that
the spotlight should be on Roger; presumably, the cost of a major player factored into his thinking, too. The talented but comparatively inexpensive Bob Hoskins got the role.

Early in 1987, filming began on the live-action part of the film. The sets were built nearly ten feet off the ground so puppeteers could stand underneath, using robot arms and wires to move about guns and glasses and other props that would end up in the hands of Toons (who would be drawn in later). On the sidelines, comic Charles Fleischer read Roger Rabbit's lines while dressed in a rabbit costume. Hoskins found filming to be challenging and painful. “All kinds of wires were attached to me,” he said. “I had to bounce off the walls, same as the cartoons.” In the end, the role's requirement that he “see” still-invisible characters began to take its toll: he started to hallucinate.

Zemeckis moved the camera fast and furiously. The result would be more lifelike, but it also made it much harder for animators to achieve the desired effect as they adjusted the characters' size, lighting, and location to accommodate the camera's movement. This radical approach started tongues wagging in the animation community.

Zemeckis didn't really trust the Disney animators with the project.
The Black Cauldron
had been a disaster and he wasn't that impressed with
The Great Mouse Detective
. Disney allowed him to set up a temporary animation studio in a restored Edwardian factory in north London and he recruited a multinational animation army. The effort to lay in realistic-looking Toons was extremely labor-intensive: with special effects included, as many as eight thousand pieces of artwork might have to be assembled for a single thirty-second shot. From the beginning, Williams drove the Disney team crazy, starting when he took the animators out for a screening of his own work in progress,
The Thief and the Cobbler,
without first getting permission. “I'm not a corporation man,” Williams acknowledged. “They do things through channels and I don't know how to do that.” For him, it was astounding that Disney wanted the animators to sign in each morning.

Back in Los Angeles, word streaked through the animation community in the San Fernando Valley that Disney was undertaking a massive folly—“the
Ishtar
of animation,” people were calling it. It wasn't a compliment.
Ishtar
has been eclipsed by so many other expensive losers that it has been virtually forgotten, but in the late eighties, the Warren Beatty–Dustin Hoffman film had become the emblem of Hollywood excess. It led to a situation
that studios are desperate to avoid: a film better known for its price tag than its content.

For a time it seemed that the animators might be right.
Roger Rabbit
was running way over budget. If the film's cost had seemed high at its original $29.9 million, things only got worse—far worse. As the budget edged toward $40 million, Eisner became deeply concerned. Later, he said that Katzenberg hid the bad news from him. After he found out that the price tag was getting bigger, he cornered Spielberg at a Hollywood function and reproached him: “You promised me! You promised me I would never see a four!” Spielberg laughed and said, “Michael, you won't see a four.” Those were the right words for the wrong reason. Eisner wouldn't see a four because the film would end up costing more than $50 million—one of the most expensive films ever made at the time and certainly the most expensive movie in Disney history.

 

EVEN AS THE
clouds gathered, Katzenberg maintained a game face. “I believe we are the only company that could and would do this,” he said in an interview even while he was wrestling to get the film under control. “I don't know whether it's a hit or not. I know it's a wonderful, pioneering experiment. It is a quantum leap.”

After finishing up his shooting in London, Zemeckis returned to Los Angeles to edit, leaving Williams to oversee the animators in London. But to Katzenberg, the film seemed so entirely out of control that he couldn't figure out when it would be done, much less what the final tab would be. One afternoon, Katzenberg called Zemeckis to his office. He also summoned Frank Marshall, Spielberg's producer, who was then at work on
Empire of the Sun.

“We really have a problem,” Katzenberg said. “None of the animation is getting done on time.” It was four
P.M
. but Katzenberg told the group that they were going straight to London. Sure enough, they boarded a jet without even stopping to pack a toothbrush. But instead of going to London, the parties met in the middle. Katzenberg had awakened Williams and other key players in London and told them to jump on a plane to New York.

Before the meeting, the filmmakers had time for breakfast in a deli. No one was sure what Katzenberg would do. To Zemeckis's surprise, Williams spoke up. “I really like Jeffrey,” he said.

The others looked at him in disbelief. “We're going to get our asses kicked,” one said.

“If you're going to get your throat cut, wouldn't you rather have it done with a sharp razor instead of a blunt stick?” Williams replied.

In fact, Zemeckis says, Katzenberg stepped up and provided more production support. He told Williams to quit supervising and focus on animating two characters—Roger and Baby Herman. Marshall was assigned to ride herd on the project full-time along with producer Don Hahn.

Disney animation chief Peter Schneider was responsible for ensuring that the project stayed on schedule. Using a computer program to calculate the animators' productivity, he pushed relentlessly for more “pencil mileage.” Some of the animators were disgusted with Disney's approach. “It's now an accountancy agency and it's scheduled very much in the conveyor-belt fashion,” lamented one working on the project.

Williams also felt that Disney was putting too much emphasis on the number of frames produced without focusing on the special challenges that a particular artist may have faced in a given sequence. Those who appeared to have done less might in fact have accomplished more, he argued. Disney's attitude ultimately caused Phil Nibbelink, one of four supervising animators on the project and a ten-year Disney veteran, to depart after the project was finished. “It's just been a real sad situation at Disney,” he said ruefully. Schneider countered that getting Disney animation out of its “tail-spin” had been tough but the rewards were manifest: the studio was in “the most creative and most productive period in the last ten or twelve years.”

Zemeckis faced the full brunt of the animators' sour mood. Producer Frank Marshall convinced him to attend their Christmas party, during which Zemeckis unwarily decided to give a rally-the-troops speech. Unluckily, the troops had just run out of liquor and they became outright surly. “We're really doing something special…” Zemeckis began.

“Fuck you!” someone shouted.

“Who's going to get the money?” came another voice.

Zemeckis beat a hasty retreat.

 

JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS
, Zemeckis—now back in Los Angeles—had started shooting the last live-action sequence of Hoskins driving into Toontown, where the animated characters lived. He began with a $3 million budget. But it soon became clear that the real price would be $6 million.
Katzenberg—despite his good mood from the recent successful opening of
Three Men and a Baby
—flipped. This was a nightmare; as he saw it, talented people with the best of intentions had gone offtrack. They had underestimated the scope of what they were doing. He demanded that Zemeckis show him the film to prove that he really needed the sequence. Zemeckis complied. Katzenberg agreed to proceed but imposed a tight schedule. Zemeckis, working at Industrial Light and Magic in Northern California, was so pressed for time that the producers arranged for a police escort to the Oakland airport so he could get to his son's second birthday party in Los Angeles.