Doing Animated Films for Cash (Not Credit)
Animated films can take years to make, giving producers endless chances to rethink, recast, revise, and test the film before audiences. The original screenwriter is often unavailable (or unwilling) to make these changes, so the work is done by some anonymous hack.
Meet the anonymous hack. I’ve done punch-up and rewrites on animated films too numerous to mention.
All right, I’ll mention them: Despicable Me and Despicable Me 2, Minions, The Secret Life of Pets, all five of the Ice Age films, The Lorax, Horton Hears a Who, Kung Fu Panda 3, Rio, Rio 2, Rango, Robots, Epic, Gnomeo and Juliet, Hop, Everyone’s Hero, and The Simpsons Movie. My films have a worldwide gross of $11 billion. I’m bigger than Pixar, baby!
I also wrote the “Ice Age Christmas Special.” If you’re wondering how you can set a Christmas special ten thousand years before Christ . . . well, you just do.
I’m a handyman, called in when things go wrong. Sometimes I’m sent a list of jokes in the script that need to be funnier. Other times they ask for a whole new scene to clarify a story or round out a character. Then there are the times they just send the whole script and say, “Save it!”
I contributed a lot to Despicable Me, including the final scene where the villain, Gru, reads a bedtime story. I also wrote every kid’s favorite line, where Gru unveils his evil plan: “I fly to the moon, I shrink the moon, I grab the moon, I sit on the toilet!”
But my most lasting contribution was to Despicable Me’s Minions: I gave the little bastards names. Throughout the script, Gru would always refer to them collectively as “boys,” but I thought it would be funny to address them each by name, since, to me, they were alike as a pile of little yellow Advils. In order to contrast their weirdness, I gave them bland white-guy names. I chose from the blandest white guys I know: Simpsons writers. I used the first names of staff members like Kevin Curran, Stewart Burns, Bob Bendetson, and about ten others.
None of this seemed like a big deal until the Minions movie came out years later. Each poster for the film featured a single Minion, with the slogan, “Meet Kevin,” or “Meet Stewart,” or “Meet Bob.” I couldn’t tell them apart, but the kids could. It’s like how my father felt about the Beatles.
Often, rewriting can be frustrating work. Although filmmakers know they’re in trouble and they’re paying me to help, they’re still reluctant to fix what’s broken.
The producer of Horton Hears a Who came to me and said, “There’s a line in this film that makes me sick. I literally want to vomit every time I hear it. Can you do better?” Write something better than an emetic? You bet!
I gave him twenty alternatives to the line, and yet, when I attended the premiere of the film, I saw that line was still in there! I swear I heard the producer barfing in the balcony.
The line, if you’re curious, was something an imaginative child said about a clover: “My best friend, Thidwick, lives on that!” I did write a line that came after it: “In my world, everyone’s a pony, and they all eat rainbows and poop butterflies.” I tend to write a lot of toilet jokes for these films, and, by God, they always get in.
On the next film I worked on, no matter what I wrote, the script never changed. I tried to quit repeatedly, telling the producers, “You don’t need to use my jokes, but you need to use somebody’s.” Each time, they begged me to stay, saying they really needed the work I was doing. When the film wrapped, I found out there were nineteen other writers working on the script at the same time. Nineteen!
When they were starting a sequel to this film, I said no thanks. Two years later, I got a heartfelt call from the producer, saying, “We’re finishing the sequel, and it’s just not working. It needs the Mike Reiss touch.” (That’s a phrase never used before or since.) He went on, “I know there’s been some bad blood in the past, but we wondered if you might come on board and help us.”
I was touched. I said, “I’d be happy to do it. I’ll even do it for free.” (That’s another phrase never used before or since.) I went on, “But you know that long list of thanks at the end of every movie? Where you thank Dollar Rent A Car, and the state of Georgia, and the assistant studio nurse? Put me on the ‘Thanks’ list.”
The producer called me back the next day. “No deal,” he said.
I wrote the greatest joke of my career for The Lorax. In that film, and the Dr. Seuss book that inspired it, people are obsessively buying something called thneeds. There are billboards reading THNEED all over the film. So I suggested that at the end of the movie, the Lorax move the N in THNEED to the right, so it now reads . . . THE END.
Perfect, right? It’s the kind of joke writers call a “find.” Remember, the one out there waiting to be discovered?
The Lorax producer loved the joke, animated it, put it in the film, took it out of the film, and replaced it with nothing at all. Why? I’ll never know.
For some reason, studios will use any excuse to avoid ever putting in a new joke. Here are some of the best excuses I’ve heard:
My three-year-old won’t get it.
It won’t translate into Portuguese.
That joke will lose us a hundred million in Korea alone. (NOTE: No film has ever grossed a hundred million in Korea.)
And the most popular excuse:
We can save it in animation.
Oh, that line. Cartoon directors believe they can make a bad joke work by adding a grace note after a failed punchline: a long pause; a character blinks; a fish tank bubbles; a bit of snow falls off a tree. You can see it all over Gnomeo and Juliet, a fine piece of family entertainment from Harvey Weinstein.
Former Simpsons director Jim Reardon bears this out. After he left our show, he went off to work on classic animated features, like Zootopia, Wreck-It Ralph, and Wall-E. (He cowrote the last one and got an Oscar nomination for his script.) I asked Reardon if he learned anything from his Simpsons experience. He said, “You taught me that if a joke doesn’t work, cut it.” He said other animators killed themselves trying to save a bit that just wasn’t funny.
Why do studios hire consultants when they’re so loath to use their work? I suppose it’s like asking for advice. You’re hoping the answer will be “Here’s an easy fix to make everything all right,” or even better, “Don’t change a thing. You’re perfect.” Any input offered beyond that is not welcome at all.
Of all the films I’ve been a part of, the toughest job I ever had was on an animated film called Everyone’s Hero. You don’t remember it? It was about the bickering relationship between a baseball (Rob Reiner) and a bat (Whoopi Goldberg). That’s why you don’t remember it.
I spent six months writing snappy banter for these two:
BASEBALL: Suck my stitches.
BAT: Bite my knob.
That’s about it.
When the movie came out, nobody in America saw it. Nobody in Europe saw it. The original director died before the film came out, so even he didn’t see it. Everyone’s Hero was no one’s movie.
A few years later, my wife and I were visiting Iran. Why? Because our idea of a vacation is most people’s idea of a hostage situation. If refugees want to get out of a place, we want to go there. Anyway . . . in every city and village in Iran, in every shop and market stall, vendors were selling bootleg DVDs of this film. One day, we climbed a mountain outside of Tehran; at the top of that mountain was a cave; and at the back of that cave was a blind Muslim cleric standing by a wooden table. He was selling two things: copies of the Koran and DVDs of Everyone’s Hero.
This movie is the reason Iran hates us.
If working on that film was a forgettable experience, working on Ice Age was a remarkable one. The series was created by a brilliant woman named Lori Forte—I’d known her years before, when she was the network executive on ALF. Lori treats writers with respect, never piling them onto a project. There are only five or six of us who write all those films, and none of us mind that we’re rewriting each other’s work. And when a joke needs fixing, it gets fixed.
I like to think this has helped make Ice Age the most successful animated franchise of all time—bigger than Toy Story and Shrek. Weirdest of all, the biggest hit was the third one, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.
When I saw that title, I told the producer, “There were no dinosaurs in the Ice Age. They’d been dead for sixty-five million years.”
The producer said, “Nobody knows that.”
So I plugged away at the script for a year, occasionally dropping in dialogue like, “Why are there dinosaurs in the Ice Age?” and “I thought these guys were extinct.”
Those lines always got cut. “Nobody knows that,” the producer told me again.
Two weeks before the film came out, the studio had a test screening of the film. Ten minutes into the movie, a little boy shouted, “Why are there dinosaurs in the Ice Age?”
But the producers were right: none of this hurt the film. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs was a success in America; overseas, it was the third-biggest film of all time, behind Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
When reporters asked why the movie was so successful, the filmmakers all had the same answer: “We have no friggin’ idea.” The best explanation I ever heard came during another one of my fun vacations: Ukraine. I’d gone to visit Chernobyl, for Simpsons research—yes, it’s their hottest tourist attraction, in every sense of the word. Afterward, I went to a park in Kiev that was filled with statues of Scrat, the Ice Age squirrel who’s always pursuing an acorn but never quite getting it. I asked a Ukrainian woman why they loved Scrat so much. She said, “He teaches children that life is hopeless.”
From Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs: Sid the sloth and the three eggs I named: Egbert, Shelly, and Yoko.