Written
by: Larry Doyle (The Simpsons)
Directed by: Joe Dante (Gremlins, Small Soldiers)
Music by: Jerry Goldsmith (Mulan)
Budget: $100+ Million
Production Start Date: August 12, 2002 (the movie's 68-day shoot
wrapped up in late November)
Release Date: November 14, 2003
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Bobby Delmont... Brendan Fraser
Kate Houghton... Jenna Elfman
Bobby Delmont's father... Timothy Dalton
Dusty Tails, a lounge singer... Heather Locklear
Mother... Joan Cusack
Daffy Duck/Tweety Pie/Sylvester/Marvin the Martian... Joe Alaskey
(voice)
Bugs Bunny/Elmer Fudd... Billy West (voice)
Porky Pig... Bob Bergen (voice)
and Bill Goldberg, Bugs Bunny, Taz and Tweety
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The
story line focuses on Bugs' jealous rival, Daffy Duck, who lobbies the
studio's vice president of comedy, played by Elfman, to turn a new Bugs
comedy into a starring vehicle for Daffy. Elfman orders D.J. the Security
Guard, played by Fraser, to eject Daffy from the lot. This leads the characters
on a quest for the fabled Blue Monkey Diamond, which is also being sought
by an evil corporate overlord, played by Steve Martin, and by D.J.'s dad,
the dashing star of a James Bond-style spy film series, who is played by
onetime "Bond" star Timothy Dalton.
The movie, which begins on a studio backlot and careens all over the
map in the time-honored style of the Looney Tunes, takes our celluloid
heroes from Hollywood to Las Vegas and into the jungles of Africa in search
of Brendan Fraser's character's missing father and the mythical Blue Diamond.
Joe Dante signed
on to direct Warner Bros' big-budget Looney Tunes project in April
2002. The script was being written at the time by John Recqua & Glenn
Ficarra, who wrote the studio's Cats &
Dogs, with help from Larry Doyle (The Simpsons, Daria)
who would later become the main writer.
Owen Wilson was
originally attached to this project as the human lead, and Jackie Chan
was reportedly considered for a while, until Brendan Fraser officially
stepped in in June 2002.
Director Joe
Dante talked about his next project at Wonderfest in Louisville, KY in
May 2002: with location work being shot in Prague, the film will be a live
action/animation mix starring all the classic Warner Brothers cartoon characters
(a la Who Framed Roger Rabbit?).
Dante called this project the "Anti-Space Jam" movie and says Warner
Brothers executives have acknowledged that the Michael Jordan film was
a real piece of crap that basically "homogenized the classic characters
to the point where they had no real personality or future creative potential."
Joe Dante wants to bring the "edge" back to the characters displayed in
the original cartoons. Still, he acknowledges battles with Warner executives
over issues like the inclusion of Speedy Gonzales, who executives feel
is a negative racial stereotype. Dante says, "Everyone in the world thinks
Speedy is a racial stereotype except in Mexico, where they love the character.
Go figure." He says the animation work in the film will be traditional
2-D animation, and sites The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle
as an example how some 'flat, 2-D characters should NEVER be produced in
3-D computer animation.
While announcing
the production of Back in Action in June 2002, Warner Bros. also
revealed that it would produce a series of animated theatrical shorts starring
the Looney Tunes that will share the marquee with other Warner Bros. Pictures
releases.
Director Joe Dante
revealed the direction he'd like to take the movie into during an August
2002 interview: "In [Space Jam], the Looney Tunes were kind of a
group of cartoon characters and this one really is about the rivalry between
Bugs and Daffy. I am really trying to differentiate between the two movies.
[In Back to Action], Bugs and Daffy work at a movie studio. Daffy
quits because he's tired of Bugs getting all the favorable treatment. He
hooks up with a stuntman [Brendan Fraser] who is also fired the same day
due to hanging around with Daffy too much, and gets involved in his adventure
because his father [Timothy Dalton] was a secret spy on the trail of a
mythical blue diamond. Daffy, of course, wants to go on the journey with
him but the studio decides they want Daffy back, so Bugs and a young studio
executive heroin have to go out and try to bring him back. It takes place
over several continents and it's quite a big deal."
Looney Tunes:
Back in Action will film on soundstages and on location in Southern
California and Las Vegas, Nevada, with animation production at the Warner
Bros. Animation facilities in Sherman Oaks, California.
According to a
June 2002 online rumour, Eric Goldberg (director of Pocahontas,
the "Rhapsody in Blue" and "Carnival of the Animals" sequences of Fantasia
2000, and supervising animator of the Genie in Aladdin)
) has left work on Where the Wild
Things Are for Universal to helm the Animation Direction of Joe
Dante's Warner Bros. feature. Disney veteran story lead Tom Sito is currently
doing storyboard work with Goldberg. Goldberg and Sito have previously
worked as Director/Head of Story on Disney's Pocahontas and Sito
was a story lead on Beauty and the
Beast. The insider comments that "both Goldberg's and Sito's facility
with classic 'looney' humor and ultimate 'cartoon animation make them particularly
well suited to guarantee extraordinary success alongside Dante in giving
life to Bugs and company in this project."
Joe Dante revealed
in a video introduction to a screening of The Howling in June 2002
that his next project "doesn’t have a [final] title yet, but that’s what
we’re calling it for now." In typical animated movie fashion, the production
team doesn't have a finished script or a finalized cast yet. Instead, they
are working on storyboard sequences. The story and script will evolve from
those. Segments that were introduced, and might or might not make the final
cut in the movie, include 1- Bugs and Daffy visiting Area 51, where they
are confronted with large, scary aliens and Marvin the Martian ("What’s
a Bugs Bunny movie without aliens?"); 2- a scene taking place at the Louvre
Museum, where Elmer Fudd will chase Bugs and Daffy in and out of famous
paintings; 3- the Tasmanian Devil will chasing Bugs and Daffy into deepest
Africa and attempting to boil them into stew in a big pot (sounds familiar).
When they escape, Bugs and Daffy stumble upon some ancient ruins. Dubbed
"Monkey Island," these backgrounds resemble the Peru sequence from Raiders
of the Lost Ark. Some Indiana Jones spoofing will take place here,
as Daffy is forced to run a gauntlet of darts and blades shooting out from
the walls. Monkey Island’s hidden treasure is a mysterious gem. This gem
has the power to evolve and “devolve” the characters. The big furry red
monster named Gossamer will make an appearance, along with Sylvester,
Tweety, and Granny. In closing, Dante said that he wanted to do a movie
with the tone and sarcastic wit of the Warner Brothers cartoons of the
40s and 50s. Something Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones, and Friz Freling would
be proud of, rather than the tame, watered down versions of the characters
we’ve seen in the last 10 years.
Casting calls
wente out for big names to play roles in the new movie that same month:
most accounts so far have stated the film is about the son of a missing
explorer (to be played by Brendan Fraser) teaming up with the LT gang in
search of the legendary Blue Diamond. However, in casting notices that
went out this morning to agencies, the story is described slightly differently...
Warner Brothers exec Kate Hanson, former studio security guard Bobby Delmont
and super spy/actor Robert Delmont share a harrowing adventure with various
cartoon characters and corporate villains, all after a priceless diamond,
in a chase that spans from Las Vegas to the 3rd dimension... The two parts
the producers are currently looking to fill are both described as star
parts for name actors only: Mr. Chairman: The greedy, power-crazed
head of Acme Corporation, a major manufacturing firm that uses Tunes and
child labor to test its various products. After intercepting a message
from Robert Delmont to Bobby, the nefarious Mr. Chairman enlists his henchmen
to locate the Blue Monkey Diamond which he intends to use to achieve world
domination.
Mother: This autonomous-sounding, 'voluptuous siren,'
who speaks in a Sgt. Joe Friday clip, is the overseer of the high tech
lab known as Area 52. Mom, as she is known around the office, screens our
heroes carefully before giving them the tour, and low down on her top secret
operation.
Harry Knowles
from AICN
said in August 2002 that he had "received many phone calls about the horror
that is the script for this project. Phrases like, 'Makes Scooby Doo
read like Shakespeare!' and '...this will kill all potential dead
from these characters,' to 'This is going to solve the energy crisis in
California, all we'll need to do is to attach magnets to Chuck Jones and
his grave spinning will power the entire state when this hits!' The phrasing
has been extreme... to say the least. I've also heard that Brendan Fraser
wanted out, but he ain't getting away. The word is that the script was
tossed out last week, and they start shooting this week. Well... Given
the word on the script, that'd be a good thing. I can't rail on this project
yet because frankly... I trust Joe Dante." Meanwhile, 'Devil Dog' reports
to the site that he has seen "several animation tests for the new Looney
Tunes/Live Action flick, but the most depressing thing is that 3 out of
4 of them have involved some serious product placement, like characters
exchanging dialogue about Coca Cola and going to a McDonalds restaurant."
The movie's 68-day
shoot wrapped up in late November, before moving into post-production for
nearly a year as animators create the cartoon characters and a visual-effects
team assembles roughly 1,200 special-effects shots.
The film's November
14, 2003 release date speaks volumes about its position in the Warner Bros.
firmament: 2003 is the year Warner Bros doesn't have a Harry Potter
film, so it's counting on Looney Tunes to provide the studio with
a big holiday season family hit.
Director Joe Dante,
who wasn't the studio's first choice, commented that "some of this would've
been pretty difficult for the hot-shot music video director they originally
had in mind. Just before I was offered the picture, [legendary Warner Bros.
animator] Chuck Jones passed away, and I
felt it was the right thing to do. I didn't want the picture to fall into
the wrong hands. Cartoons are fast. So the live action has to adhere to
the cartoon rhythm without seeming too manic." Size and perspective are
also a big issue. "The actors are 6 feet tall and the cartoon characters
are 3 feet tall," Dante explains. "So it's always a challenge to get everyone's
heads in the same shot."
Brendan Fraser
explained why choosing the Looney Tunes film was a no-brainer: "It was
the novelty of actually working with Bugs and Daffy, heroes of mine since
I watched their cartoons. I mean we’re bringing all of the classic characters
back to life in this movie, shining them up and buffing them up and putting
them out there again. They’re not being presented as any kind of plush
toy, which is okay, but I mean it's not so immediately consumable for just
a specific child audience. This is a cartoon film that's based on cartoons,
but still has all the integrity of what we remember from what they were.
These were cartoons that were subversive, that had an agenda that mirrored
the whole political meanderings of the day, and certainly, they were timely
and funny and I think that they just spoke volumes to what we as adults
know about the horizon of television that we watched as we grew up. So
I would be a fool to pass up the opportunity. The good thing is that my
job is to be a fool and I’m hoping I’m going to do it very well. Since
I’ve been making these films, the technology [to combine animation with
live action] has almost redoubled itself each time out, so it’s actually
getting easier."
Joe Dante revealed
that "It certainly seems like my life has pointed toward it. I mean, I
spent an awful lot of time watching these cartoons when I was a kid, and
was a friend of Chuck Jones's [and] Bob Clampett. It's sort of a sacred
trust. The main challenge is that these characters have primarily only
been seen in seven minute shorts over the years. Even when they made features
out of these pictures, they were always shorts that were connected with
little bridging scenes. This is an attempt to actually tell a 90 minute
story with Bugs and Daffy and all the other characters as real characters.
Warner Brothers doesn't like me to call it the anti-Space Jam but
to my mind, the thing I want to rectify from Space Jam is that that was
a movie where all the characters were generic. They all sort of banded
together as a group and they went and asked Michael Jordan for help. Then
it was a Michael Jordan movie that happened to have Looney Tunes in it.
This will be different. This is actually a movie that began as a Looney
Tunes movie and it happens to have human beings in it."
When it comes
time to actually insert the cartoon characters, this production will benefit
from the experience of cinematographer Dean Cundey. Having solved almost
every conceivable problem on Who
Framed Roger Rabbit, Cundey now has modern technology to aid him.
"The biggest change, I think, has been the computer and how it gives us
the ability to composite the animated characters in the live-action world
a little easier. Or, if we don't want to make it easier, we can do it with
more style. The characters can handle objects more freely because we don't
have to puppeteer real objects on the set. They can make computer-generated,
real-looking, real world objects and let the animated characters handle
it. So, that's one of the things that we can do. The fact that we can make
layers so much easier, with a little green screen we put in to the set
instead of building a big elaborate green screen shooting day or blue screen
shooting day. There are little short cuts that the computer has given us
to make it a little easier for us, but also a little more believable, but
it's still all about the storytelling. We have a little more flexibility
with the lighting, how much we can make the lighting more interactive.
On Roger Rabbit, because it was very labor intensive making the tone maps,
the shadings, the surroundings and so forth with the animated characters.
Here, they've developed a computer way to take still what is pencil-animation,
what we called cell animation, except, of course, they don't make cells
anymore, and add the tone mapping, the shading, the highlights and shadows
and stuff in the computer. So, it gives us a little more flexibility to
walk the characters in and out of pools of light and different lit environments."
Looney Tunes:
Back in Action will include cameos of creatures from famous 1950s SF
movies. Giving a tour of one set, Joe Dante said, "This is Area 52, the
place so secret that they invented Area 51 to cover it up. This is where
[the government] takes all the aliens, and we figured if they're all really
aliens from the '50s, let's really get aliens from the '50s. So we recruited
a bunch of characters from my youth, which was long ago, and we have the
Man from Planet X, who's made a return since his first picture in 1951.
Also making his first reappearance since 1951 is Robot Monster. And The
Thing Without a Face is here and another one is [an alien from] This Island
Earth." The original Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet and a Triffid
from The Day of the Triffids will also be seen in the Area 52 set. Production
designer Bill Brzeski said in an interview that these references are intended
for the film's older audience. "I don't think a lot of kids are going to
get any of it," Brzeski said. "But those are the layers you have to bring
to a movie to make it really good, and I think it's fun. Joe was very specific
in what he wanted and how he wanted to use these B-movie things. Our challenge
was how to make them not look [bad]. When they made these movies, they
were doing the best they could. They wouldn't fit to our standards nowadays,
so what we had to do was take the joke and move it to the 2002 visual standard
of moviemaking. That was our challenge. We went back and looked at a lot
of these movies, and they really don't look good. They're really badly
done compared to our standards today. We kept the [creatures]' silhouette
and shape, but we brought them up to our modern technology. I think they
look great now. They're really cute, and they're funny."
Matthew Lillard
revealed in a November 2002 interview that he would appear in the upcoming
live-action/animated film, lampooning his Scooby-Doo role of Shaggy.
"I play me talking with [an animated] Shaggy, so it's kind of funny," Lillard
said in an interview. "He's giving me the business, and I'm giving it right
back." In an interview, Looney Tunes producer Larry Doyle added, "Matthew
Lillard is actually having an argument with Shaggy, who feels he portrayed
him as an idiot in the movie, and [threatens] that he'll take him out if
he does it again."
AICN's
Harry Knowles expected in a March 2003 article the Warner Bros. movie to
do "a rather unfortunate nosedive at the Box Office this Holiday season.
Rumors are everywhere now that production has halted as Dante and Warners
retool and rework the blight upon mankind that was Larry Doyle's script,
to try and fix, what well placed spies in Warners tell me is unfixable."
However, an insider denied this rumor: "Production is not halted and never
was. Seen any screenings yet ? I think not."
Additional scenes
with the amorous Pepe LePew and his French cat love, who may be a femme
fatale spy, were shot in April 2003.
Jenna Elfman revealed
in a May 2003 interview that her character spoofs 007 and Indiana Jones.
"I got to wear this hot pink pushup dress and this big long blond wig that
made me into a Bond type of girl." Elfman's character, a studio executive
teaming up with Bugs Bunny to chase Brendan Fraser and Daffy Duck, also
gets to drive a "spy car" loaded with Bond-like gadgets. "There are all
these knobs with pictures. They put little pictures of bombs, so if you
push that button, it becomes a cartoonish and funny [gadget]." The film
culminates with all four going through a jungle temple filled with booby
traps, a la Raiders of the Lost Ark. "The things really worked.
All these booby-trapped things were stuff we really had to work with, so
it gave a sense of suspense and excitement to the filming."
The Looney Tunes
are featured on both Jeff Gordon's Dupont Chevrolet and on the pace car,
and Gordon himself has a cameo in the film. "I'm just really playing myself
at a casino at the valet, trying to get my car," Gordon said in a March
2003 interview. "Yosemite Sam and some of his ratty gang decide that they
need a faster car, or maybe mine's just the first one available, but they
jump in the Dupont Chevrolet and take off down the streets of downtown
Las Vegas. It's a pretty fun chase scene." For a five second scene, Gordon
was surprised how long it took to film. "What happened was they told me
the schedule. It was like show up 10 o'clock. Okay, I get there at 10,
okay, come back at 12. It's typical movie itinerary where everything's
going later and later and I end up shooting at like 3 a.m. I was there
for six hours and it took 30 minutes to shoot my part, or an hour I guess.
It's a pretty short part, but I saw Brendan and Jenna doing some of their
parts. My interaction was more with the animated characters than anything
else."
Jenna Elfman had
to learn to work against nothing, as all of the animated costars would
be added in later. "I had just come off doing Obsessed, which is like this
very dramatic thing, and four days later I started Looney Tunes which is
a completely different beat in terms of rhythm and timing," the actress
explained in a May 2003 interview. "To have to believe in something that's
not there and do high comedy, not just acting meaning talking to something
that's not there, I had to do physical comedy with something that wasn't
there. I was lucky because I started the film and then I had two weeks
off. I did a lot of research in that time to figure out how to do that.
I talked to friends who had done it and got some tips and by the time I
came back and had studied enough, it took a month before I was actually,
'Okay, I know what I'm doing and it's fun and I can believe in it.' You
had to go back to when you were five and you believed that Barbie was your
best friend and that it had a whole life." In other cases, practical sets
informed her performance. The film climaxes in a jungle temple complete
with working booby traps. "That was really good. It's the biggest stage
on the lot and they made use of that size. It was really fun because you
didn't have to work hard to believe your environment because it was so
created and so designed that you really believed you were in the jungle."
And she just couldn't have been more positive about her costar, Brendan
Fraser. "I was inspired because I felt like I was his Jane. He was my Tarzan.
I was his Jane. He's incredible. I admire him so much. I think he's great
and we had so much fun filming. We would do stuff that I would just start
giggling because it was so funny what we were doing, it was cracking me
up, and that's a good thing, when you're cracking yourself up."
A teaser debuted
with copies of Finding Nemo on May 30, 2003.
The first of a
new line of Looney Tunes cartoon shorts, called Museum Scream,
will run prior to Looney Toons: Back in Action. Warner Bros screened
it for the first time at Comic-Con in San Diego in July 2003. CHUD
reports that "Museum Scream featured Sylvester and Tweety chasing
each other through a museum. The short is incredibly violent, throwing
back to the good old days of cartoons, with Sylvester being cut into pieces,
separated into several cats by being thrown through a prism, and being
done in by a huge dinosaur skeleton. Great to see that the animators are
getting to have a bit more fun with their creations."
Former Star
Trek: Voyager star Robert Picardo stated in an August 2003 interview
that the upcoming film Looney Tunes: Back in Action will mark "at
least" his 10th collaboration with director Joe Dante. "It started with
The
Howling, and I've since been in Innerspace, The 'Burbs,
Gremlins
2 and several television projects. In Looney Tunes: Back in Action
I'm on the board of Acme Industries, and Steve Martin is the chairman of
the board. If you remember from the cartoon, Wile E. Coyote was always
sending away to Acme for something to attack Road Runner with. So I'm in
a few scenes with Steve, who's in full wild-and-crazy-guy mode. He is hilarious.
I also worked with Tasmanian Devil, but I didn't work with Brendan Fraser
or Jenna Elfman or Heather Locklear." The comedy mixes live action and
animation, much like Who
Framed Roger Rabbit? Picardo described one sequence in which he
infuriates Martin and finds himself wrapped head to toe in plastic wrap.
"I assumed that would be animated. But no. They wrapped me head to toe
in plastic wrap in about 30 seconds. It's a very funny scene. I was afraid
of getting suffocated and killed, but apparently that didn't happen, because
here I am talking now."
'Sir Farticus'
informed us in August 2003 that the crew listincludes Lead Animators Frank
Moleiri, Tony Derosa, Jeff Seirgy, Dave Brewster and Bert Klien. Animation
has now wrapped up and "clean-ups gotta haul to get done. Animation was
supposed to be finished about 2 or 3 months ago, [but] the problem is that
the film hasn't been treated like an animated film where everything--for
the most part--is locked down, they treat it like live action where footage
is expendable. Not so at all in animation! They're all so concerned about
saving money, but in reality they've spent a ton of it on all the redo's
and footage changes."
Animator Eric
Goldberg explained in a September 2003 interview that "Allison Abbate,
the animation producer, gave me a call. She said, 'Would you be interested
in coming over and doing some consulting [on Looney Tunes: Back in Action]?'
So I started doing some consulting--and more consulting--and more consulting...
and then it became permanent. The first stop was to bring me in and have
me meet Joe Dante and the other producers, Bernie Goldmann, Chris DeFaria
and Larry Doyle--at the time Paula Weinstein was not on yet--and make sure
they were comfortable with what I knew about the characters. That went
very well, and then we continued from there. I love working with [director
Joe Dante]. First of all, I knew before I even got to this project that
he was the right choice for it because he knows so much about the animation
medium and about Warners cartoons in particular. He's got so much film
knowledge at his fingertips anyway. But he has such a huge respect and
understanding of animation--particularly classical animation--that makes
him the right choice for this film. We're still animating furiously, but
it's going well. Like all movies of this nature that are expensive and
difficult to make because of the live-action/animation combination, there
are many changes that are still going on, all the way through production.
So we have to be flexible in terms of--'Uh, oh, that line of dialogue changed!'
I feel kind of like I'm a waiter who takes peoples' food away before they're
done eating it, but I have to say I’ve got a great crew and they really
do beautiful work. I think it's going to surprise people that it has the
Looney Tunes spirit. My biggest aim is to present these characters the
way people have loved them for years. It's actually very, very important
to me. I was friends with Chuck Jones, I know this stuff backwards and
forwards in terms of all the cartoons, the history and it’s very important
to me that feels like a Looney Tunes movie that satisfies Looney Tunes
fans. That Bugs and Daffy are who Bugs and Daffy are--not necessarily just
drawn well, but that they act the right way, that they say the right things,
that they move the right way. That their motivations are clear. It sounds
very high-falutin', but if you're going to have these characters sustain
a 90-minute movie, you've got to treat them as though they're real characters,
and you have to be true to who they are. Because the audience will smell
it a mile away if they're not. I keep feeling like Chuck is looking down
saying, 'OK, you'd better do this one right!' We've got a sequence in this
Looney Tunes film where Elmer is chasing Bugs and Daffy through the Louvre
museum and every time they jump into one of the paintings, they become
the style of the painting. They become Dali, they become Toulouse Lautrec,
they become Munch. When people see the final sequence, I think they'll
be very pleased with it. Stylistically, we're matching these things in
a way that you wouldn’t expect. That's one of the compelling things about
this medium. You really can go in different directions and still make it
entertaining."
Even before Joe
Dante's original cut of Looney Tunes: Back in Action was shown on
the Warners lot, studios execs were already insisting that this film had
to be "Bigger! Better!" Which is why they poured an additional $7 million
into the movie's budget for reshoots in late 2002--when they haven't actually
seen the picture yet!
JimHillMedia.com
reports that director Joe Dante and Eric Goldberg "insisted on being able
to have input on the picture. Even [the Warner Bros] execs' most idiotic
idea--adding a giant CG mechanical dog to the film's finale (to hopefully
give the end of Looney Tunes: Back in Action some more action and
drama)--was made to work by Dante and Goldberg. Joe and Eric decided to
redesign this computer-animated dog so that it now look more like a Chuck
Jones character. Which would make it a better fit (stylistically, that
is) in the Looney Tunes: Back in Action universe."
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