The Keys to the Kingdom (33 page)

Meanwhile, the animation was progressing too slowly for the film to make its June 1988 summer prime-time release date. “We've got all these things in position, all this merchandise, all these tie-ins,” Katzenberg said at the time. “We move the feature back two weeks and [we could lose] $40 million.” (In fact, Roger Rabbit was not only set to appear on wristwatches and lunch boxes, but McDonald's had committed about $15 million to promoting the newest addition to the Disney family.) Disney was becoming desperate to make the deadline.

If
Roger Rabbit
was becoming a grinding ordeal for Zemeckis and everyone else working on it, Katzenberg never confided what he was going through. In fact, he and Eisner were in the midst of one of their biggest fights ever. Even after their earlier meeting, Eisner still disagreed with Zemeckis's vision of the film and had provided the director with copious notes. He had tried to talk Zemeckis into making extensive changes, including the elimination of Eddie Valiant's love interest, played by Joanna Cassidy. Zemeckis had refused, arguing that Valiant's character needed a happy ending.

Eisner had instructed Katzenberg to get the film under control or he would take over himself. Katzenberg believed that Eisner simply wanted him to run over Zemeckis and Spielberg with the same heavy-handed brutality that was usually reserved for lesser talents. He wasn't prepared to do it. “I said, ‘I'm doing the best I can. If that's not satisfactory to you, then I'm not the person to do the job,'” Katzenberg says. The two men barely spoke for weeks.

When
Roger Rabbit
finally previewed for a test audience in late April, Katzenberg must have feared that Eisner would finally fire him. He later told Zemeckis that he saw his life flash before his eyes as the screening turned into an unmitigated debacle. Zemeckis and his crew had been feel
ing very upbeat about the movie. But when Disney loaded a San Fernando Valley theater full of fifteen-year-olds who thought they were going to see
Rambo III,
it quickly became clear that a mistake had been made. A good part of the movie wasn't fully animated and the teenagers weren't charmed by the line drawings that represented the cartoons. In the middle of the screening the film broke and half the audience walked out.

When the screening ended, Zemeckis and his associates stood with Katzenberg at the back of the theater. Katzenberg closed the door and turned to the group. “We have just had the greatest preview ever,” he said solemnly. “The movie just previewed through the roof.” He swore the filmmakers to secrecy and prevented the bad smell from escaping. Amazingly, he succeeded in keeping a lid on the screening.

The filmmakers retreated to L'Express restaurant in misery. They had invited their wives, anticipating a triumph; now it looked like the early rumors that the film was a disaster were dead-on. “Could we be this wrong?” they asked themselves. The next day the movie was to screen again in Pasadena for an audience of five-year-olds. “Jeffrey, don't make me go,” Zemeckis pleaded. But he went, and to his surprise, the five-year-olds seemed to like the movie. He rallied and started massaging the film, brutally cutting several minutes' worth of expensive animation. With each preview, the test scores went up. It also seemed to Zemeckis that the film was growing on Eisner.

By now, Zemeckis had bonded with Katzenberg. They had been through two years of hell, and Katzenberg's spirit had never flagged. In every meeting, Katzenberg would say, “We're here to talk about what will be the number-one film of 1988.” He had made encouraging calls to exhausted film editors who normally never heard from a studio chief. He had arranged for a cover story in
Newsweek
. He had been tough, but Zemeckis felt that he had never allowed the fights to become destructive.

And during the ordeal of making
Roger Rabbit,
something had started to happen to Katzenberg. “I saw Jeffrey transform before my eyes,” Zemeckis says. Katzenberg, the management robot whose creativity had been a question mark at best, was falling in love—at least after his own fashion. He had started to have fun on
Oliver & Company
and Zemeckis believed that
Roger Rabbit
pushed him over the edge. So Zemeckis was starting to feel bad about a little joke he and Spielberg had decided to play.

When Zemeckis filmed the live-action part of the film in London, he had decided to let Joel Silver play a producer who makes a brief appearance
with the rabbit at the beginning of the film. Zemeckis and Spielberg knew, as did almost everyone in Hollywood, that Katzenberg and Eisner had fought bitterly with Silver during the making of
48 Hrs.
and that Silver was anathema to both men. By now, Silver was producing the first in the
Lethal Weapon
series for Warner. He loved the idea of sticking himself into this big, expensive Disney baby and bought his own airline ticket so Disney would have no record that he was present on the
Roger Rabbit
set. His name was kept off the sheet of cast members. He also did something he had never done in anyone's memory. He shaved his black beard. Eisner and Katzenberg had actually seen the footage in which he appeared without recognizing him.

Then Katzenberg asked for a screening of the completed opening sequence—which included Silver directing Baby Herman in a cartoon. The footage was finally finished about three weeks before the film was to open. Zemeckis cringed as Katzenberg, sitting behind him in the theater, laughed at the scene. Then he said, “You know who this guy reminds me of? Joel Silver.”

“Is this a setup?” Zemeckis asked. “Jeffrey—it
is
Joel Silver.”

“Really?” Katzenberg replied. Zemeckis waited for the onslaught, but instead there was a more ominous silence. Katzenberg never mentioned it again.

Silver's old boss, Larry Gordon—now bitterly estranged from his former protégé—broke the news to Eisner. “Guess who's in
Roger Rabbit
?” he said.

“Who?”

“Who do you hate more than anybody in the world?”

Eisner immediately thought of
48 Hrs.
“Not Walter Hill!” he exclaimed.

“Worse than that,” Gordon said.

“Not Joel Silver!” Eisner said. He reflected a moment. “You know,” he mused, “he was pretty good.”

 

ROY DISNEY SAID
he liked the completed
Roger Rabbit,
but he was appalled that Katzenberg wanted it released under the Disney family banner. He felt that Jessica Rabbit was too sexy and Baby Herman was too vulgar. (Little did he know then that mischievous animators had dropped in a few frames of Jessica topless—too fast to be perceived by viewers but nonetheless visible if the film was slowed down.) Katzenberg wanted Disney to start associating its brand name with more sophisticated fare, but Ze
meckis secretly hoped for the more adult-oriented Touchstone label because he didn't want the movie to be written off as a kiddie film. After Eisner and Roy watched the film together, the question was resolved. The lights came up and Eisner declared, “It's a Touchstone movie.”

“I agree,” Roy said.

As it turned out, Katzenberg's prediction that
Roger Rabbit
would be the number-one film of 1988 was wrong. It was the number-two film, behind Barry Levinson's Oscar-winning
Rain Man. Roger Rabbit
was nominated for six Oscars and won three, but they were all in technical categories (Visual Effects Editing, Sound Effects Editing, and Film Editing). Still, this was the Eisner regime's best performance ever at the Academy Awards. More important to Disney, perhaps, the company made money. The picture grossed $154 million and inspired Disney to create a Mickey's Toontown attraction at Disneyland.

As for Zemeckis, he felt he had arrived when Eisner asked him to direct a video for the new Disney-MGM tour that showed Eisner interacting with Toons. But Eisner offered to pay only the minimum wage set by the Directors Guild. Zemeckis passed.

“Don't you want to be able to have that there for all time so your kids can go?” Eisner asked. This was an argument that persuaded many other major talents to work cheap. But not Zemeckis. To him, it was ridiculous to act as though Disney were some kind of charity.

“It's a lot of hard work,” he replied. “I'd rather do nothing.”

 

ZEMECKIS HAD BEEN
right. Katzenberg had become increasingly enamored of animation. Ron Clements, director of Disney's next animated release,
The Little Mermaid,
was a Disney veteran who saw it happen. Like many animators, Clements had mixed feelings about Katzenberg's growing involvement. “Jeffrey was right a good percentage of the time,” he says. “And sometimes he wasn't right at all. There was a fair amount of arguing. He would always back down if you could convince him he was wrong. We would back down and he would back down. I think it had a lot to do with the success of the films…. But he could turn up the pressure. There's good and bad in that. It got pretty stressful.”

Roy Disney had made another important contribution to the health of the division: he convinced Eisner to invest millions on the development of a sophisticated computer system that revolutionized production of the ani
mated films. Rather than degrade the quality of Disney animation, the new system—which would be first used on parts of
The Little Mermaid
—freed the artists to create previously unfeasible sequences.

Ron Clements had pitched the idea for
The Little Mermaid
in his first “gong-show meeting” with Eisner and Katzenberg. They were intrigued by the idea but wanted to bring in live-action writers to do the script. Clements convinced them to let him and colleague John Musker take a swing at it. Katzenberg liked their script. The project was a go, with Clements and Musker directing.

Perhaps Katzenberg's most important decision in animation came when he hired Howard Ashman and Alan Menken to write the music for
The Little Mermaid
. The Ashman-Menken collaboration would revitalize animation as a medium and bring back the musical as a popular form. The partnership also helped bring billions of dollars into the Disney coffers.

The first time Katzenberg heard Ashman and Menken's music for
The Little Mermaid,
Clements said, he was entranced. “He started to get more and more into it,” he says. “But I think live action was [still] much more important to him. Animation was fun, but that didn't put it in the same category as live action.”

Katzenberg's relationship with Ashman was sometimes tempestuous. “Howard and Jeffrey would fight like cats and dogs,” remembers one animator. But Katzenberg managed to bring out some of the team's most brilliant work. “Jeffrey knew how to edit, how to get a key change, knew when it wasn't working,” that animator says. With no musical training, Katzenberg learned to trust the gut that no one thought he had. If a moment didn't feel emotional enough, he pushed for something more.

As the film neared completion, Katzenberg told Clements that it would turn in a reasonable performance. But he warned that the movie probably wouldn't do as well as
Oliver & Company
because
The Little Mermaid
seemed likely to appeal primarily to little girls. Such films didn't perform as well as those that attracted boys.

Eisner took a few looks at the film as it progressed. In the first presentation, he heard some of the songs and listened to some of the voices. “Michael was really excited,” Clements remembers. But the second presentation, which involved showing him “story reels” of drawings with little animation, was a nightmare. The film was very rough and there were a number of technical glitches. Eisner was obviously displeased. He had issues with certain plot points. For example, Sebastian the crab initially did not
side with Ariel the mermaid; then he suddenly assists her in her plot to reach dry land. It was unclear what brought about the change of his crab's heart. “Why can't we solve these problems in the script stage?” Eisner demanded. Clements concedes that Eisner was right. “We wrote a new scene where Sebastian is on the beach with Ariel and he just sort of breaks down and gives in,” Clements says. “It really helped a lot. He wasn't involved a lot but his contributions did make a difference. His overview helped strengthen the arc on the characters.”

Roy Disney was not much more of a presence than Eisner, but, avid sailor that he was, he made sure that any nautical terms used in the film were correct. Harkening back to his early days working on Disney nature films, he also provided footage of an octopus that served as a model for Ursula the sea witch.

The first test screenings before recruited audiences were encouraging. Then the studio decided to do an all-adult screening with no children at all. “They had never actually done that before,” Clements remembers. The preview in the suburb of Sherman Oaks got an enormously positive response. “Jeffrey was just glowing,” Clements says. In the lobby, he told Clements, “We've got to rethink our marketing on this.”

Menken and Ashman collected two Oscars for
Little Mermaid
in March 1990. The picture also showed the potential power of animation. It grossed a record-setting $85 million and made more than $40 million in pure profit—not counting the enormous additional revenues that it produced in merchandise and home video.

Disney had not really been prepared for the bonanza and didn't have nearly as much merchandise on hand as it could have sold. (The toy manufacturer complained that a red-haired doll wouldn't sell well, so the first Ariel dolls were strawberry blondes. But the public wanted Ariel as she appeared in the film. Later, when the film was rereleased in 1997, Disney was ready with battalions of red-haired dolls.) Disney began to appreciate the staggering amounts that could be wrung from a medium that allowed the studio ultimate control and didn't include any live actors who were in a position to demand a percentage of the gross. And for Katzenberg, there was no turning back. Animation claimed an ever-larger share of his time and passion.