Jim Hill: From the Archives
Page 5 of 6

By then, Steven was also holding up production on a proposed sequel to the original feature film. Its title was to have been Who Discovered Roger Rabbit?

Steven's explanation for stalling the Roger Rabbit feature length follow-up was that he had issues with Nat Mauldin's screenplay. The script (which - by the way - wasn't a sequel, but a prequel: its storyline took place well before the events featured in Who Framed Roger Rabbit) dealt with Roger's early days in Hollywood as he struggled to make it as a star.

There are several different storylines that ran through Who Discovered Roger Rabbit? One covered Roger's courtship of Jessica. Another dealt with his search for his long-lost mother. And - because the film was set during World War II - still another story-line dealt with a popular radio host that Jessica worked for who was eventually revealed to be a Nazi spy.

Now keep in mind that we're talking about Steven Spielberg circa 1993 here. This is a guy who's just had a major spiritual awakening due to his work on Schindler's List. Having embraced his Jewish heritage, Spielberg announced that - due to the atrocities his people had suffered during the Holocaust - he could no longer allow Nazis to appear as stock villains in his films.

Okay. I can respect that. (Though - if I were a mean and petty person - I might point out that less than four years later, Spielberg did another film called Saving Private Ryan. And weren't the villains in that movie well, Nazis? But I digress.)

Anyway, Spielberg says "No more Nazi villains in my movies." Disney has to honor the request of the co-owner of the Roger Rabbit copyright. So they began reworking Mauldin's script. The Nazi sub-plot got cut, but so did the film's Hollywood setting. The time period shifts back a few years and...

Presto Changeo! What was once a World War II comic adventure was now a Busby Berkley movie musical. Now set in New York City during the depths of the Depression, Who Discovered Roger Rabbit was the story of Roger as a young toon bumbling around Broadway - looking for his big break.

Mind you, not everything from Mauldin's story had been changed. Roger still courts Jessica while searching for his long-lost mother. Only this time around, he lands a job on the stage crew of the musical Jessica performing in. One night, Roger's trapped on stage as the curtain goes up and... a star is born.

This story line might sound a bit shopworn and tired. But the new version of Who Discovered Roger Rabbit (reworked by Sherri Stoner and Deanna Oliver) is actually a funny and affectionate tribute to those old movie musicals. There are lots of great jokes as well as some fun character moments for the toons. Best of all, it retains Mauldin's terrific end gag for the film: revealing the identity of Roger's long lost father.

This version of the script (Which - for a short time - was considered as a direct-to-video project) impressed a lot of people at Disney. In fact, someone liked the screenplay so much that they slipped a copy to Disney's house composer, Alan Menken. Menken was so impressed with what he read that - in addition to writing five songs for the film - he signed on as executive producer.

This brings us up to 1997. 

The Mouse is anxious to finally get production underway on their Roger Rabbit prequel. But now there's another hitch. Jeffrey Katzenberg now works with Spielberg at Dreamworks SKG. Given Jeffrey's animosity toward Disney in general (And Eisner in particular), Uncle Mikey worries that Katzenberg could deliberately bad-mouth the project, compelling Spielberg to pull the plug on the prequel.

But Eisner has a plan. He recruits two of Steven's long-time Amblin associates - Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy - to serve as producers on the Roger Rabbit prequel. Surely Spielberg won't say "no" to a film shepherded by his loyal former assistants. Particularly given that Marshall and Kennedy are planning on using the Roger Rabbit prequel project to establish themselves effective producers outside of Amblin.

Eisner's ploy works. Though Spielberg does have reservations about the revised script, for the sake of Kennedy and Marshall's big break, he keeps his mouth shut and allows pre-production work to proceed on Who Discovered Roger Rabbit.

However, since the original Roger Rabbit feature had gone so horrendously over-budget way back in 1988, the Mouse was determined to keep costs down this time around. Before committing to full-scale production on the prequel, Disney wanted to do a production test. Their mission was to see whether all the new animation techniques the studio had developed in the 1990s would have a positive impact (read that as "show us a cheaper way") to combine live action and animated footage

This test quietly got underway in the spring of 1998 at Disney Feature Animation in Florida. Master animator Eric Goldberg (who actually got his first opportunity to work for the Mouse when he was hired to animate Roger in the original movie) put together a new model sheet for the wacky rabbit, making Roger younger looking as well as easier-to-draw. (After all - since Who Discovered Roger Rabbit was set a full decade before Who Framed Roger Rabbit - it stood to reason that Roger should look younger, shouldn't he?)

The test footage Disney put together was deceptively simple. A live action actor - playing a big-time Hollywood agent - sits behind at a desk in his office. Suddenly, the door flies opens. Two menacing weasels enter, armed with Tommy guns.

The weasels "persuade" the agent into letting their friend, Roger Rabbit, come in for an audition. Roger now burst into the room and - surprise, surprise - thoroughly destroys the office. Papers fly off the desk and knickknacks get shattered as he dances on the desktop. It's just another day in ToonTown.

The purpose behind this particular test was to see if traditionally animated characters and computer animated props could fit together cohesively on top of live action footage. So the machine guns that the weasels aimed at the agent were CGI, as was a small table Roger breaks while trying to demonstrate an ill-conceived magic trick.

Unfortunately, the computer generated props and the more traditionally animated rabbit & weasels didn't exactly mesh with each other in the initial test footage. So the Feature Animation folks in Disney / MGM took another pass at the test. This time around though, both the characters as well as the props they handled were done using computer animation.

This version of the Who Discovered Roger Rabbit test was initially met with a lot of enthusiasm back in Burbank... at least until someone slipped Eisner a projected budget for the film. Using computer animation to do all the toons in the film would drive the cost of the Roger Rabbit prequel well north of the $100 million mark. As soon as he heard that, Uncle Mikey pulled the plug on the project.

According to Eisner's way of thinking, $100 million was just too much to pay for a sequel for a twelve-year-old movie.