You can, but that’s not Jeffrey’s technique. I’ll say that his technique is not our technique. But at the same time there is an energizing thing coming out of that. If they love something it gets you excited, and if they hate something you work harder to make it better.

JM

I’d say that in the end a third of the movie is from the original, a third is entirely new, and a third is ideas we had re-worked and Ted and Terry had ideas.

RC

Well we actually had two story teams on that. Ed Gombert was the head of story in both cases. Most of the story crew in the first version for some reason we couldn’t put that together again. And there were some notable people in that first version. Chris Sanders was a board artist in that first version, Kevin Lima was a board artist on the first version. It wasn’t our choice necessarily to recast the whole story team, but for various reasons we had a whole new story team on the second one. Roger Allers was on that second story team, and he certainly brought a lot to that.

JM

Yeah, he brought a lot.

RC

And Burny Mattinson was also in the second team.

JM

And Kevin Harkey and Sue Nichols.

RC

Kevin was on both. But the good thing about it, one thing that I’m proud about but maybe nobody would care about because it’s just a production thing, but when BEAUTY & THE BEAST was finished we were pretty much able to employ that whole team. There were hardly any points where anyone didn’t have work which is what you always want to avoid because the scariest thing about story change in any situation you have the possibility of people just sitting in their rooms not doing anything while story changes are being made, and then the money just…that’s money that’s not making it up on the screen. So for all those reasons and Ted and Terry and everything pulled together that really didn’t happen. If we hadn’t been doing musicals we could have gotten into a lot more trouble, because the good thing about musicals is the songs are good, and you have songs, they were always anchors. A lot of people could go work on those songs while other story things and character things were being worked out simultaneously. So that saved us, really, the fact that it was a musical and we did have those songs to put into production. As well as the kind of middle of the movie, the Cave of Wonders sequence with the magic carpet and all that, that really didn’t’ change much so that was one of the first things put into production.

RC

I always thought ALADDIN was the film that turned me gray.

JM

No, I’d say HERCULES did it, even though working on it was an easier experience.

RC

And it didn’t explode. And the writers that came on – Don McEnery and Bob Shaw and Irene Mecchi - they came on after the first draft. There was only one draft we wrote on HERCULES and then we went right into storyboarding. They keep experimenting with the process. Now they’re going the other way where they now want to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite before you go in to boarding. At that point the idea was go in to boarding as soon as possible because I think they they had experienced, and we’ve experienced, that you can rewrite a script and rewrite a script and rewrite a script but no matter how perfect anyone thinks that script is, once you get it up on boards and on to reels it’s a whole different movie. So we were in agreement with that – just get it up on to reels, because the reels…I mean if everybody’s happy with the reels that’s a really good sign. Then it’s much harder to explode. But if everybody’s happy with the script it really doesn’t mean that much.