A Story Is Born Part One

By: CHRISTOPHER ALLAN SMITH
Date: Saturday, November 03, 2001

Among screenwriters, it's an open secret. In Hollywood, a town that makes sport of putting roadblocks before the very creators on whose visions the entertainment industry makes its money, writers for animated films have a special advantage.

After reading trade journals and listening to enough screenwriters talk candidly over the years, anyone can begin to pick up the undertone, mainly from those working on live action films, directed at those penning animated spectacles. The undertone is a wistful, suppressed jealousy.

While story craftsmen working on a big summer "blockbuster" are under the gun by the whims of directors (whether or not they know how to craft a story with words), actors (whether talented in creating a compelling plot, or just in throwing fits to get more screen time), studio production chiefs ("We start shooting November 1 for a July 4 opening, even if the script sucks") and even marketing bean counters ("People like monkeys. Can the alien have like, I don't know, some kind of space monkey?"), writers working in animation enjoy a kind of financial judo. They use can use the forces which usually conspire to make a movie crap if you make it fast you can make it cheap even if it sucks to force a studio to slow down and care for the film's story.

How is this? If a studio

rushes a movie into production (and when don't they these days?) and the filmmakers realize halfway through a real movie they need to add a character, or change a motivation, they can rewrite and usually use most if not all of the footage already shot. If a studio rushes an animated film into production and makes the same realization halfway through, they have to start over from scratch. It makes financial sense to wait until the script is just right.

It's an advantage the storytellers at Pixar push to their fullest advantage, and it's evident in their product. Over the last decade, the computer animation studio has won almost as many Oscars as it's made films. From its famous shorts (LUXO, JR., TIN TOY) to their feature films TOY STORY, A BUG'S LIFE and TOY STORY 2, every frame has been conceived in terms of how it serves the story. Now they unleash on the world MONSTERS, INC., which by all indications won't break their string of box office and creative triumphs.

Hyped up entertainment writing hyperbole? Maybe. But true. Every word.

The question then jumps to mind, how do they do it? How come every studio doesn't push its writers to go though the same process in coming up with fun, light, wildly crafted scripts?

We can't answer the second question, but here's everything we've found on the first.

For those of you

who have missed the trailers, MONSTERS tells the story of monster friends Sulley (voiced by John Goodman) and Mike (voiced by Billy Crystal), creatures from a parallel world who come with their fearsome brethren to the closets of little boys and girls all over the world to scare the screams out of them. They work as scarers, monsters whose job it is to scare kids for reasons that will be clear later. Like TOY STORY, it's a tale everyone who was once a kid can relate to.

The film is co-directed by Pete Docter and co-written (with Docter and Dan Gerson) by Andrew Stanton, who sat down with Cinescape to let slip a bit on how they thrash out stories at Pixar. As they revealed, MONSTERS has been in the making for almost five years. Five years of constant work.

"It's hard to make a film period. Especially at this point in time," Docter told Cinescape about the birth of MONSTERS. "You know, say in 1950, people would see maybe at maximum a film a week. Now you're sitting in front of your TV an average of four hours a day. People are so saturated with film that it's harder and harder to surprise and engage people in a way they haven't seen before. The way we work up at Pixar is probably not too dissimilar to Disney or other places. I can only say it's due to the people... I started on this show five years ago. I came up with an idea, pitched it. We sit in a room, put our brains together, pitch it again. John [Lasseter, head of Pixar and director of BUG'S LIFE and both TOY STORIES] listens to it, says 'no' or 'what about this?' and we're constantly retreading - rework and rework and rework."

"At some point, I

think it's important to hang onto what excited you about the project in the first place," he continues. "In this case, the subject matter of MONSTERS was intriguing to me I think for a lot of reasons. One, the most important reason, is because after we did TOY STORY, the one thing I really loved is you'd go to people and friends and ask them what they like and they'd say, 'I loved the whole concept was something I imagined as a kid. I always knew my toys came to life.' I wanted to figure something else where viewers would say 'Oh, yeah, I had that same idea.' It seemed like monsters were a good way to tap into that shared experience of childhood. Early on I was excited about the idea [of monsters] that is cross-cultural, around the world. People have these ideas of monsters near them. Monsters represent our fears, and we've personified them in the way we have. In most cultures monsters are these huge beasts that are a combination of animals and fearsome and intimidating. It was that idea. That personification of fear."

"When we got into it, we realized the clichéd thing to do here is to have a WIZARD OF OZ type deal where we follow our lead kid, and they get stuck in the monster world and then has to return home," says Docter. "What if we spin that all on its head, and do a movie from the monster's point of view. That's where the whole idea of this came from. These are working Joes, they clock in, they clock out, they have union dues, talk about donuts, and their job is to scare kids. That was the second thing that seemed to grab everyone as we got into it, which was this juxtaposition of these fearsome, slobbering, toothy monsters with this everyday working situation. That leant itself to a lot of cool ideas."

Check back next week for part two of CINESCAPE's MONSTERS, INC. profile.