The Nutty Producer Part Two

By: Paul Zimmerman
Date: Friday, December 28, 2001

Aside from his duties as writer/producer of the new CGI animated fest JIMMY NEUTRON: BOY GENIUS, Steve Oedekerk has been keeping busy recently with projects such as next year's comedy Juwanna Mann, retooling 1997's Santa VS. the Snowman into an Imax film, and writing, directing and starring in the upcoming kung-fu farce Kung Pow: Enter the Fist. Today, we continue our profile of the manic comedian and his first G-rated film.

Animation fans may find the origins of Jimmy in old cartoons and from the invaders of Mars Attacks. The difference here is the 2001 sensibility Oedekerk brings to the project. While no friend of the critics (both Ace VENTURA movies and the mawkish Robin Williams dramedy Patch Adams took a savage beating by the press), there's no denying Oedekerk knows what audiences want. Indeed, the man whose films have grossed more than 800 million dollars seems to have the mixture of sweet and sick down pat.

Of the balancing act Jimmy affords him Oedekerk says, "You know I think it's just digging into different parts of the brain." Drawing his chair closer he continues, "One thing that was a blast for me on Neutron is just to see my [two and six-year-old] girls have this great time seeing me go through the video footage. Normally I'll be going through, say, Ace [Ventura] 2 and have to go, 'Oh, honey, you've got to leave the room because Jim [Carrey] is coming out of a rhino [butt] in a minute.'"

Oedekerk makes

himself laugh a lot and after the rhino butt remark he guffaws and then says, "It's a blast working with Nickelodeon because this is clearly for kids but I am sort of obsessed with entertaining adults comedically, so between everyone involved and [director] John [Davis] and myself we just kind of hit everybody on some levels."

In the course of Jimmy's adventures there's slapstick, kid travails everyone can identify with and, thanks to Oedekerk, fart jokes, spit jokes and movie gags for the adults to appreciate. One scene even switches from campfire scare story to a nod to a recent horror film. Says Oedekerk, "It will work on a level for children, because they get the whole camp story and they get scared, but there's this whole higher level that those that have seen the Blair Witch will get an increased kick out of that scene. It's funny on an adult level."

In another scene a teacher is shrunk down to the size of rat, giving the filmmakers a chance to reference a 1950s sci-fi classic. "That's great and that's John," he says of the scene-within-a-scene. "The parents will be able to pick it up on another level with The Incredible Shrinking Man concept going on. We spent a lot of time making sure we covered everybody and hopefully it worked out."

While the film doesn't boast any Toy Story sized A-stars like Tom Hanks doing the character's voices, one audio attribute stands out: King Goobot, the nasty leader of the Yokians, who's voiced by Patrick Stewart.

"Patrick we

love," says Albie Hecht, president of Film and TV Entertainment for Nickelodeon. "We just thought that he was a great, perfect character for this villain. I mean, he's got the great booming British voice, which we thought was perfect because, I don't know, people think of Brits as bad guys all the time. And he's played captains and kings and [has] that great voice and he had a great sense about it."

Opines Oedekerk, "Absolutely. I mean to see an actor that talented and regal bring this gooey green guy to life was just great. And I think Patrick enjoyed not having that ceiling that he normally has of reality. So he was just really going for it."

Hecht jumps back into the verbal fray saying, "And he gets direction from these guys like, 'More gooey, more phlegm, more slimy!' He really reacted to that."

Laughs Oedekerk, "And a lot of people don't know he's actually a very gooey, sloshy man. So he was really typecast. When you physically push at him he very gooey."

And exactly why would someone best known for farting fat men (all played with gusto by Eddie Murphy) and talking-butt pet detectives want to do a G-rated film? At the question Oedekerk grows somewhat serious. "I jump around a lot," he says with a simple shrug. "I think everybody wants you to stay doing the exact same thing for some reason when people [bring] you in on projects in town and I always go to the thing that excites me the most. So even the comedies I've done, the tone of them has been pretty different. You go from Ace, which is just crazy, nothing to lose, to reality-based Nutty Professor, which is sort of a big visual comedy, to Patch ADAMS, which is more of a drama than a comedy. So every one of these was really more about 'I want to do THIS.'"

After talk

turns back to Kung Pow, someone brings up Jimmy's robot dog. "Thank you," Oedekerk says with mock relief. "You guys have no idea the heat you're putting on me here. I'm gonna be toast [always talking about Kung Pow]."

Picking up steam, Oedekerk says of the dog that can produce most anything from his metal innards, "Goddard is like Jimmy's Bat-belt and how cool is that? And one thing that should be mentioned is we're really driving the creative origins of this kid's fantasy of 'wouldn't it be great if...?' And that's the thing that I latched onto out of the gate that I loved. To be able to go back - and I'm probably not that far from being a kid anyway - but being able to go back to, 'O.K., but what would you do if the school bully was there, what would Jimmy do?' What if there was a jerky teacher that made you work overtime, what if you had a hypno-beam and you could like shoot her and suddenly she'd go, 'O.K., we're on a field trip.' So it really is for me this fantasy role-playing."