Original Screenplay by Nat Mauldin
Undated Draft

It’s probably a fair assessment that there haven’t been too many successful new animated characters created in the last 30 years or so.

Since the early 1970s, only Scooby-Doo, The Simpsons and Family Guy has really shown any kind of longevity with successive generations of animation fans. Beyond nostalgia value would anyone watch an episode of Jabberjaw (a Scooby-Doo knock off with a talking shark instead of a dog), Thundar the Barbarian, Carebears or Smurfs today? Probably not. There really hasn’t been many cartoon character from the 70s, 80s or even 90s that was created by an American animation studio lasted long enough to create an impression in pop culture besides the aforementioned three shows and considering the number of original animated series that was created over that time that is a depressingly low number.

So it’s doubly unfortunate that the battle of wills that controlled the fate of Roger Rabbit has only succeeded in insuring that no new projects featuring the stuttering `toon star of the hit film Who Framed Roger Rabbit would ever come to fruition. But for a brief moment it did look as if we would see a continuation of Roger’s feature length adventures in addition to the annual shorts that Disney was producing. That follow-up story would have looked at how Roger came to Hollywood and fought in World War Two.

The script for Roger Rabbit II: Toon Platoon opens on the Kansas farm of the Randall’s, Roger’s adopted family. It is Roger’s 18th birthday and his parents decide to tell him that he was left on their doorstep when he was a baby and that he isn’t even a human. “Now I know why all the guys at school stare at me in the shower,” realizes Roger.

Roger decides to head out into the world to find his mother. While hitchhiking, Roger is picked up by Richie Davenport an aspiring actor on his way to Hollywood to make it big. Acting is Richie’s second choice of a career, as his fear of heights has blocked his desire to follow his father’s footsteps into the Army Air Corps. Richie doesn’t take much of a liking to Roger, especially after the ‘toon destroys his car.

The two make their way to Hollywood and then go their separate ways. Roger hears an episode of the radio series Mr. Keene, Tracer of Lost Persons and, assuming that the radio character can help him, heads to the radio station and disrupts the live broadcast. There he meets the future Mrs. Rabbit, though she’s not as we know her from the first film. Jessica Krupnick may have her same sultry voice, but is dressed in some less than flattering clothes and seems oblivious of her own charms.

Meanwhile, Richie is not having much luck getting acting work, discovering that good looking guys are a dime a dozen in Hollywood. He’s reunited with Roger when the ‘toon saves him from a fight with three Air Force recruits. He reluctantly moves into Roger’s apartment, where he meets Jessica and her human roommate Wendy who share an apartment in the same building. As Richie and Roger continue to their individual quests, they also begin to court Jessica and Wendy, even going on a double date to the movies.

Richie finally gets cast in a film but Roger, who has stumbled into the studio thinking he saw his mother entering the lot, disrupts shooting. Although the director and a visiting studio executive think Roger has a future as a cartoon star, Richie is furious with him. Before he can yell at Roger for spoiling his big break, a nearby radio announces the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Meanwhile, Jessica, who has been growing suspicious of Otto, her boss at the radio station, has discovered that he is actually a Nazi spy. Otto kidnaps Jessica and Wendy and takes them to Germany, forcing Jessica into servitude as a Tokyo Rose-like propaganda personality.

Eighteen months later finds Richie enlisted and with the army in Europe. When his fear of heights endangers his platoon in a firefight, he is reassigned to the same supply base where all the enlisted `toons have been assigned. It turns out that although `toons can’t be harmed by enemy bullets and bombs, human commanders couldn’t figure a way to get them to attack an enemy. It seems that the `toons innate urge to entertain was too difficult to overcome.

At the supply base, Richie is reunited with Roger who is depressed that he has not received any letters from Jessica. While listening to the radio, Roger hears one of Jessica’s broadcasts. He convinces Richie and the `toons Blackie Cat and Swiftie Turtle to help him go AWOL and rescue her. Along the way, Richie conquers his fear of flying and the whole crew manages to foil a plot by Otto to assassinate Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin at their famous conference at Malta.

Returning home to a parade down Hollywood Boulevard, Roger is finally reunited with his mother who points out Roger’s father- a carrot chomping Bugs Bunny who looks out at the audience and delivers his famous line “Gee, ain’t I a stinker?”

Writer Nat Mauldin, who had previously worked on the sitcoms Barney Miller and Night Court, crafted a script that not only captures the spirit of the first film, but also manages to expand on the concept of a world where humans and cartoon characters interact. What military commander wouldn’t love to have troops that could be repeatedly shot or blown up without being hurt? Of course, given the nature of most `toons, it’s obvious that putting them into combat would be the worst idea on record from a military standpoint. Of course, from a comedy stand point, the idea is pure gold.

Mauldin has also added two new characters to Roger’s world- Swifty Turtle and Blackie Cat. Swifty bears a strong resemblance to the Warner Brothers character Cecil Turtle so much that as I read his dialog I heard it in Cecil’s voice. Blackie Cat is a hepcat who, in accordance with the laws of cartoon physics, is able to manifest bad luck, usually in the form of a falling flowerpot, for whomever’s path he crosses.

Mauldin is also not afraid of taking a bite at the hand that was feeding him with a reference to the “Buena Vista Room Partitions Company.” Their motto? “We divide and conquer.”

The only real criticism I have for the script is that compared to Who Framed Roger Rabbit’s frenetic opening, Toon Platoon’s opening “Fade In on a Kansas Farm” just doesn’t pack as much punch. Given the influence the Warner Brothers cartoons have on the script, perhaps swiping the framing device from the Bugs Bunny short “A Hare Grows In Brooklyn,” where Bugs Bunny tells his life story to a Louella Parsons-type gossip reporter, would have been appropriate.

By Mike Myers, Jack Handy and Michael McCullers

Mike Myers has always been a hit or miss comic for me. His work, both during his tenure on Saturday Night Live or in his various film projects, have been either perfectly funny or dreadful and gratingly over the top. (And in the case of the Austin Powers films both perfect and annoying with the first being masterful while the sequels remain uninspired rehashes.) So it seems like a particularly cruel joke that the funniest script that Myers ever wrote would go unproduced.

But before we get into the particulars of the script, let’s review the events that have lead to this project being shelved . . .

Following the success of the first Austin Powers film, Imagine Entertainment made a deal with Myers to develop a movie based on his Saturday Night Live character German talk show host Dieter. According to an April 1998 Variety article, Meyers was to have been paid the greater of $10 million or 10% of the box office gross in addition to a further, undisclosed fee to write the film. Imagine’s Brian Glazer was attached to the project as Producer.

By mid-August 1999, Universal and Imagine issued a press release stating that Myers had officially signed to do the film, referred to as “Dieter Project”, and one other project for $20 million each. The following May, Universal greenlit the film and announced that the cast will include Will Farrell as Dieter’s American cousin, Bob, and Baywatch star David Hasselhoff. Another announcement at the end of the month stated that Jack Black had been added to the cast. A rumor also had begun to circulate that Canadian pop band Barenaked Ladies were approached to write the film’s theme song.

Then, just as the production was gearing up for a Summer 2000 shoot, things began to fall apart. On May 30th, Meyers walked off the project claiming that the script needed to be rewritten. A week later, on June 7th, Universal filed a multi-million dollar suit against Myers claiming breach of contract. Meyers countered with a suit against Universal for fraud stating that his contract allowed him complete creative control over the script.

As the accusations continued to fly, Universal shut down the film’s pre-production unit and laid off all 25 crew members on June 16th. In a statement Universal chairman Stacy Snider was quoted saying, “While we are extremely disappointed that we are not able to make this film, we are particularly anguished when considering all the talented individuals who came on board based on Mike Myers’ commitment to this project and as a result, gave up other opportunities in order to do this film.”

On July 7th, The Hollywood Reporter reported that Imagine Entertainment had also filed suit against Meyers, this time to the tune of $30 million plus punitive damages. Meyers’ camp again responded with a countersuit.

In mid-August, the dust finally cleared with the announcement that a settlement had been reached. While most details went undisclosed, Meyers committed to writing his next original character based comedy as a co-production for DreamWorks and Universal with Imagine Entertainment producing. That project has yet to be announced.

But when the smoke cleared, dieter was dead and the question remained was the script so bad that it warranted all the aggravation and legal trouble?

Honestly, I’d have to say no.

The undated, 116 page draft that I’ve read is perhaps the funniest piece of writing Meyers has produced (along with co-writers Jack Handy and Michael McCullers) barring the script for the first Austin Powers movie. At times, dark, surreal and inspired, this script would have led to a film that could have been funnier on more levels than more straight forward fare like Wayne’s World or the dreadful So I Married An Ax Murderer. It certainly stands light years ahead of other Saturday Night Live spin-off films like Superstar, A Night At The Roxbury, It’s Pat, and Stewart Saves his Family.

Dieter (Mike Myers) is the host of a stark, expressionist German talk show called Sprockets. The show is the second most successful show in Germany, right after Baywatch. In an effort to boost ratings, Dieter’s boss suggests giving more airtime to his sidekick, the monkey Klaus. Dieter reluctantly agrees but when it looks like Sprockets is about to triumph in its ratings war, Klaus disappears. Dieter soon discovers that his simian friend has been kidnapped and follows the trail to Los Angeles.

While it doesn’t take a genius to see who Myers is sitting up as the evil mastermind of the film, the script plays with the concept, even dragging out the old evil twin cliché that works within the confines of the film’s skewed world.

Still, a primary concern for all involved had to have been would parody of such art house fare as the films of Fassbinder and Herzog play well in middle America? Honestly, it wouldn’t have mattered if subtle pokes at Wim Wenders’ Wings Of Desire went right over the average mall cineplex patron or not. The fish-out-of-water humor of Dieter at-first aghast with and then trying to adapt to American culture would have carried the movie for the average viewer.

Original Screenplay by Tab Murphy

Draft dated September 10, 1997

If it seems like there is unending parade of cartoon and comic book adaptations making its way to movie screens, just remember that there are hundreds more that never it make it out of development and into active production. Fortunately, one of those projects that never saw the camera is Disney’s attempt at a live action adaptation of the classic 1970’s Japanimation import Star Blazers.

For the uninitiated, Star Blazers is the American retitling of the Japanese animated series Space Cruiser Yamato. Its first season premiered in Japan in 1974 and made its way to the States in 1979. It told the story of a future earth under attack from the evil Gamilon Empire (How do we know they’re evil? Well, ummm, their skin turned from fleshtone to blue about a third of the way through the first season for no apparent reason. That’s got to be evil…).

The Gamilons have just about nuked the hell out of Earth and radioactivity will render our planet lifeless in one year’s time. Things look pretty hopeless until Earth receives an offer of help from the Princess Starsha of planet Iscandar. If the Earth can get a ship to Iscandar, Starsha will give them the Cosmo DNA, a device that will rid Earth of radioactivity and make it habitable again. She also supplies some technology to help the small band of adventurers make the perilous journey. Since most of the Earth’s fleet has been wiped out, the sunken WW2 battleship the Argo (Yamato in the original Japanese version) is retrofitted for spaceflight. The crew, known as the Star Force, are led by the wise and fatherly Captain Avatar and include the impetuous fighter jockey/weapons officer Derek Wildstar, his best friend Mark Venture, hottie nurse Nova, the frequently drunk Dr. Sane (although it wasn’t absolutely stated on the show, it was strongly implied), the engineer Orion, and the annoying (though not as annoying as that ‘bot over on Battle Of The Planets) comedy relief robot IQ-9.

Just ten years old when the show premiered, I thought it was fantastic. Each day, my friends and I would barrel home from school and head to one of the two houses on the block that had cable. Star Blazers was a core part of our afternoon TV diet- along with Speed Racer, Ultraman, The Space Giants and Battle of the Planets (The only American cartoons we would watch were the classic Bugs Bunny and Daffy Ducks from the 40s.). Star Blazers‘s mixture of outer space high adventure with a storyline firmly rooted in the mythic-quest tradition (The ship wasn’t renamed the Argo by accident) made a potent brew for a group of kids who were looking for a daily dose of Star Wars-type adventure.

Tab Murphy had the unenviable task of compressing the show’s first season, the entire “Quest for Iscandar” storyline, from 26 half hour episodes down to an entertaining 2-hour film that remains faithful to the original material. Unfortunately, his Sept. 10, 1997 draft doesn’t manage to do it.

The first half of the script roughly follows the storyline of the series’s first handful of episodes. Faced with annihilation, the Earth receives a visit from a mysterious alien woman with a message of hope and an offer of help. A battleship is retrofitted for spacetravel and crewed by a group of brash, young warriors. But unfortunately, the devil lies in the details, or in this case, the changes that Murphy has made.

Some of these changes are cosmetic name changes. Derek Wildstar is now Derrick Wilder, Nova is now Jo and the Princess Starsha character is now called Nova.

But the most glaring name change is the renaming of the Yamato/Argo to the Arizona. Yes, the same Arizona that was sunk at Pearl Harbor. While some might like the nationalistic imagery of such a change, on a surface level it does subtract from the mythic underpinnings of the story. By changing the ship’s name to the Argo, the American producers of the cartoon created a link to the classic Greek tale of Jason and the Argonauts and the implication that the heroes of many lands are making this journey. Naming the ship to the Arizona subtly refocuses the story from the desperate race by people of many nations to save the planet to the United States saves the world. Again (See Independence Day.). It doesn’t help matters that Star Force headquarters is now located inside Mount Rushmore, parodied in last year’s Team America: World Police.

On a second level, changing the ship’s origin is a huge slap in the face to original series creator Yoshinobu Nishizaki. Nishizaki is reported to be a die-hard, anti-American patriot and the series can be viewed as a rather unsuitable metaphor for the post- World War II American occupation. Throughout the course of the series, the crew of the Yamato, an actual Japanese battleship sunk in the closing days of World war II, come to realize that by trying to totally annihilate the Gamilons, they would be no better than their enemies (Of course, such a culturally entrenched subtext would have been impossible to translate for American audiences, hence the renaming of the ship in the first place.).

The cartoon’s Captain Avatar was missing in action in the script for a proposed live action version of Star Blazers.

But there are also changes that are far less subtle, the most glaring change being the elimination of the Captain Avatar character. Avatar was the weathered and seasoned space captain who served as a mentor figure to the crew of the Argo, developing a fatherly role towards Derek over the course of the show’s first season. This elimination, again, undermines the mythic structure of the story. Avatar was the teacher figure in the tradition of Merlin, Gandalf and Obi-Wan Kenobi. It was his character that helped Derek grow over the first season and to overcome his anger over his brother’s death in combat with the Gamilons. With Avatar’s elimination, Wilder comes off as a brash hotshot who doesn’t really develop any further over the course of the film.

Another change to the character of Wildstar/Wilder, is the addition of a kid sister, Erika. Once she is introduced, you know that it’s only a matter of time before she stows away aboard the Arizona, not that her stowing away carries any major plot significance. She seems to be there just to have a kid aboard.

Unfortunately, the crew of the Arizona doesn’t rate much better in the characterization department. Rather than being the best Earth has to offer, they’re now a group who had mutinied aboard their own vessel two years earlier and have been languishing in the stockade ever since. Why is Wilder forced to use these men as crew? Why wouldn’t the best of Earth’s warriors want to participate in a last desperate gamble to save their planet? I couldn’t really tell you, because the main reason no regular soldiers would volunteer for the Iscandar mission (“I was born on Earth, I’m gonna die on Earth,” states an incidental character referred to as Fat Mechanic) doesn’t make much sense to me. Since we only have about two hours for this story and the rest of the crew are introduced about a third of the way into the movie we don’t even get to find out much about them as characters.

Once the Star Force is on its way to Iscandar, Murphy takes a radical left turn from the source material. Since in the film version, Nova personally delivers the offer of the Cosmo DNA, she now joins the crew for the trip back. With the ship damaged during their escape from Earth, the Arizona makes a stop for supplies at the planet Sega (No doubt named in a triumph of product placement over good taste!). The crew gets the needed supplies, but not without a deadly run-in with the local insectoid population.

Returning to the Arizona, Wilder and company manage to head off a boarding attempt by some Gamilon soldiers. It’s also around this point that Murphy realizes he has to wrap things up fairly quickly. Nova reveals herself to be the half-Gamilon daughter of Leader Desslock, the Gamilon’s commander. She reveals that she is actually taking the Star Force to the planet Gamilon itself to retrieve the Cosmo DNA.

Somehow, the Arizona makes it into the Gamilon system undetected and members of the Star Force are able to infiltrate Desslock’s headquarters and steal the Cosmo DNA. Meanwhile, Derrick has a face-to-face meeting with Desslock while disguised as a Gamilon officer. A race back to Earth ensues, followed by a battle in which Nova sacrifices herself to ensure victory. It is also discovered that someone in Earth’s High Command is a traitor and has been hindering the Star Force from the beginning, though the script makes it pretty obvious who it is from the beginning. A quick coda featuring the activation of the Cosmo DNA and restoration of Earth wrap the story up.

The basic failing of the second half of the script is that with all the set up of the first hour, Murphy is under pressure to reach a speedy conclusion. Thus we have the cheat of never getting to Iscandar and having our heroes fight their way back to Earth. It is all set up and resolution, no complication. As the old saying goes, “It’s not the destination that’s important, it’s the journey.” Also, the mythic structure of the original is shot to pieces. The changed ending also invalidates the entire setup of the film, promising us one thing and than telling us “Just kidding!” There’s a difference between plot twists and just plain bad plotting and this definitely falls into the latter category.

Ultimately, the idea of turning Star Blazers into a live action film may sound fun at first, but the two-hour film format doesn’t contain enough room to do the concept justice. Disney would be better off developing the material as a six to ten hour miniseries for television. And we could end each evening with the cartoon’s chilling closing voiceover, “Can the Star Force do it? Earth has only X days left!”.

Original Screenplay by
Joan O’Brien and Charles Denton

Making a film is a substantial financial investment and no matter how bad the final product is it will still get at least a cursory release in an attempt to at least recoup a small fraction of its cost. But there are still a few films that, for whatever reasons, never see the light of a projector bulb and Jerry Lewis’ The Day The Clown Cried is certainly the most famous and if not the most infamous.

Let’s face it, for better or worse, the description “Jerry Lewis is a clown in a Nazi concentration camp” is an attention getter.

Harry Shearer, one of the very small handful of people who has actually seen the film in rough cut form described it in an interview on radio’s The Howard Stern Show as, “If you say ‘Jerry Lewis is a clown in a concentration camp’ and you make that movie up in your head, it’s so much better than that. And by better I mean worse. You’re stunned.”

How did such an audacious sounding project ever come about?

Well, here’s what the Official Jerry Lewis Comedy Museum and Store has to say about the film-

In 1971, producer Nate Wachsberger asked Jerry to direct and star in The Day the Clown Cried, based on Joan O’Brien’s book by the same name, about a German clown who was arrested by the Gestapo, interred in a concentration camp, and used to march Jewish children into the ovens. Jerry lost close to 40 pounds to play the role. The shooting began in Stockholm, but Wachsberger not only ran out of money to complete the film, but he failed to pay Joan O’Brien the money she was owed for the rights to the story. Jerry was forced to finish the picture with his own money. The film has been tied up in litigation ever since, and all of the parties involved have never been able to reach an agreeable settlement. Jerry hopes to someday complete the film, which remains to this day, a significant expression of cinematic art, suspended in the abyss of international litigation.

Maybe that’s how Jerry remembers it, but a little research will reveal a much larger picture.

The Day The Clown Cried had its origin with publicity agent Joan O’Brien who conceived the story while working for famous sad-eyed clown Emmett Kelly and spending her free time reading about the Holocaust. Teaming with TV critic Charles Denton, O’Brien penned a screenplay about an unlikable gentile circus clown named Karl Schmidt who, after being caught satirizing Hitler by members of the SS, is sent to Auschwitz and forced to lead unsuspecting Jewish children to the gas chamber.

The script made the usual Hollywood rounds and at various points had reportedly been considered by such names as Dick Van Dyke, Milton Berle and Austrian-born Joseph Schildkraut.

In 1966, Jerry Lewis’ long time sound engineer Jim Wright signed onto the project as a co-producer. The film was set to film in Europe that spring with director Loel Minardi (Sinderella and the Golden Bra) and producer Paul Mart (Sinderella and the Golden Bra, For Men Only). But for unknown reasons, the production fell through.

By the spring of 1971, Belgian producer Nathan Wachsberger (The Sea Pirate (1966), Starcrash) had picked up an option on the screenplay and approached Lewis to star and direct. Wachsberger had a long, if undistinguished career first as an importer of European films to the United States in the `30s and as a partner in comedian George Jessel’s production company before directing several forgettable features in Europe.

Wachsberger convinced Lewis that he had met with O’Brien and the two agreed that he would be perfect for the lead. Since he had no other projects in development, Lewis agreed to look over the script. As Lewis recalled saying to Wachsberger in his 1982 autobiography –

Why don’t you try to get Sir Laurence Olivier? I mean, he doesn’t find it too difficult to choke to death playing Hamlet. My bag is comedy, Mr. Wachsberger, and you’re asking me if I’m prepared to deliver helpless kids into a gas chamber. Ho-ho. That’s some laugh—how do I pull it off?

Wachsberg sweetened the deal by telling Lewis that he had secured financing from French and Swedish backers and the filming would use the resources of Europa Studios in Stockholm, where Ingmar Bergman had shot several films. Lewis finally agreed and the August 1st, 1971 issue of Variety announced that Jerry Lewis Productions and Wachsberg were joining forces to produce The Day The Clown Cried with a start date of sometime later in the year.

It was an ambitious schedule that Lewis would not be able to meet. Jerry was at the end of a three-year contract with Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas stipulating he had to appear for four weeks a year. He would renew the contract for an additional year that winter, obligating him to get his entire month in before leaving for filming. Lewis also took advantage of the delay in the production start to work on a rewrite of the script.

By February 1972, pre-production had started up with Lewis and his new publicist Fred Skidmore heading to Stockholm. Lewis put himself on a grapefruit diet in an effort to drop some of the weight he had been putting on over the past few years. Ultimately he would drop 35 pounds for the role. The two also toured concentration camps in Germany and Poland. Lewis also assembled his cast, which was to feature Bergman veteran Harriet Andersson as Helmut’s wife Ada Doork, French comic Pierre Etaix, Ulf Palme and Sven Lindberg.

Reportedly Lewis also shot some footage for the film while performing with the Bouglione Cirque d’Hiver in Paris.

With a production set a $1.5 million, principal photography for the film began on April 5th at Studio Europa. But it was obvious that within the first couple weeks that something was wrong. Lewis was starting to get reports that film and equipment suppliers hadn’t been paid and the paychecks issued to the crew were bouncing. Lewis made some calls to Wachsberger in the south of France, who assured his director that money was on its way.

However, Wachsberger wasn’t being honest with Lewis. At the time that production started Wachsberger’s option on the script had already expired. He had paid O’Brien the initial five thousand dollar fee, but not the fifty thousand dollars due her once production commenced. Lewis was producing a film that he had no legal right to make. Whether Lewis knew of this turn of events is unknown, though O’Brien believed that he did. As she was quoted in Shawn Levy’s Lewis biography King Of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis, “Jerry knew that the option had expired, but he decided to go ahead.”

When it began to appear that money was not forthcoming from Wachsberger, Lewis began to pay for the production out of his own pocket. This exacerbated the strain that Lewis would place upon himself when directing a film. Reportedly this took a toll on his performance. Lewis saw it another way, as he is immodestly quoted in Levy’s book-

The suffering, the hell I went through with Wachsberger had one advantage. I put all the pain on the screen. If it had been my first picture, the suffering would have destroyed me. But I have the experience to know how to use suffering… I was terrified of directing the last scene. I had been 113 days on the picture, with only three hours of sleep a night. I had been without my family. I was exhausted, beaten. When I thought of doing that scene, I was paralyzed; I couldn’t move. I stood there in my clown’s costume, with the cameras ready. Suddenly the children were all around me, unasked, undirected and they clung to my arms and legs, they looked up at me so trustingly. I felt love pouring out of me. I thought, ‘This is what my whole life has been leading up to.’ I thought what the clown thought. I forgot about trying to direct. I had the cameras turn and I began to walk, with the children clinging to me, singing, into the gas ovens. And the door closed behind us.

By June, principal photography had wrapped and Lewis had already voiced his dissatisfaction with Wachsberger to the Swedish press. Wachsberger in turn instructed his lawyers in London to sue Lewis for breach of contract, feeling that he had could finish the film without Lewis’ services.

Lewis continued working on the film, editing throughout the following winter and spring with editor Rusty Wiles. Reportedly, Lewis was in a foul temper for most of that time. When viewing footage where one young Swedish extra made the mistake of looking directly into the camera, he is reported to have let loose a string of foul invectives and raged “She pulled that same thing in another sequence, remember? I told her to keep her ****** eyes to the front. That it wasn’t a beauty pageant… There’s no room for Shirley Temple in a concentration camp.”

Ultimately, all of Lewis’ work would be for nothing. Claiming that the production still owed them over six hundred thousand dollars, Europa Studios refused to release the negative, though Lewis did have duplicates of most of the footage, including all the elements from the last three days of filming. O’Brien and Denton refused to renew their option with either Wachsberger or Lewis, even after Lewis showed them selected scenes. This was a move that would ultimately backfire on the director. “It was a disaster,” O’Brien was quoted in Levy’s book. Denton added, “In one scene, Jerry is lying in his bunk wearing a pair of brand-new shoes after theoretically having been in a concentration camp for four or five years.”

And so the film has languished, edited without a soundtrack or credits, in several film canisters in a safe owned by Lewis. Following the European success of Lewis’s Hardly Working in 1980, Europa Studios announced their intention to shop the negative around for a studio willing to finance its completion and distribution. O’Brien quickly put a stop to it.

Over the years, there have been several attempts to make a new version of the story. In 1980, Wright announced that he was still developing a screenplay with the possibility of Richard Burton in the lead, but the project went no further. In 1991 one of Wright’s original partners Tex Rudloff and Michael Barclay announced plans to film the story in the Soviet Union in conjunction with the Russian production company Lenfilm, but the plan fell through. Robin Williams was touted to star in a production directed by Jeremy Kagan (The Chosen) the following year, but again no film ever materialized. Williams would go on to star in his own concentration camp drama, Jakob The Liar, in 1999.

As time passed, Jerry Lewis became increasingly reticent about talking about the project, oft times greeting interviews questions on the subject with silence and a withering stare. Very few of Lewis’s inner circle have seen the film. Among those who have include comedian Harry Shearer and 1979 Muscular Dystrophy Association telethon director Joshua White and Rolling Stone writer Lynn Hirschberg, who interviewed the comic in 1982.

When approaching the script, one has to remain in the frame of mind that this will not be The Nutty Professor Goes To Auschwitz. This was not an attempt to do a comedy set against the backdrop of the horrors of war, something that was adroitly handled on TV’s Hogan’s Heroes. Instead, Lewis was definitely trying for pathos, the way that many comics long to show the world that they are capable of delivering a serious performance. Unfortunately, even though Lewis himself reportedly heavily reworked the latter half of the script, it still just fails miserably.

Lewis is Helmut Doork, a struggling clown in a German circus. Once a great star, he has been reduced to second banana status by his current employer. Doork dreams of regaining his lost star status, but can’t seem to motivate himself to recapture it. One night while getting drunk in a bar, Doork is overheard making some derogatory remarks about the Furher by some Gestapo agents.

In short time, Doork is shipped off to a prison where he is tormented by the guards who hold out the possibility of release to the deluded Doork. Eventually the prisoner commandant discovers that his clowning keeps the children quiet and forces him to entertain the tykes on their way to the gas chamber.

Sounds really tasteful, doesn’t it?

Lewis wants us to be sympathetic to Doork’s plight. However, the scriptwriters have not given Doork one redeeming feature that allows the audience to care for him. Doork is cowardly and self-centered. On the rare instances that he stands up for himself or another prisoner, he gets hit and immediately castigates himself for showing some backbone.

Lewis clearly seems to be striving for some kind of Chaplin-esque Little Tramp feel, but fail miserably. Chaplin’s Tramp character manages to put on a brave face and struggle through his circumstances through sheer force of will. Lewis’ Doork (now THERE’s a phrase I never foresaw myself writing . . .) just meekly accepts his situation and hides behind a vast wall of self-denial. There’s no way a viewer of this movie could be sympathetic towards him. It almost comes as a relief when the Germans chuck him into the oven at the end of this 164-page monstrosity.

That’s right, this script clocks in at an over-sized 164 pages and not because there’s an epic storyline here, either. The story is actually pretty thin. But almost every page of this script is crammed with unnecessary description, notations and camera direction.

Another failing of this script is its complete inability to mix drama and comedy. Benigni’s clowning in La Vita e bella (Life is Beautiful) is plot driven, deriving from his character’s desire to shield his son from the horrors surrounding them. Doork’s comedy bits are often set up by the guard’s cruelty. In one segment early in the script, a guard removes a blanket from Doork while he sleeps, allowing a cold draft to enter the barracks. Doork soon awakes and does some shtick with socks and other assorted clothing that are frozen stiff, eventually going to the off screen bathroom from whence issues the sound of crushed iced hitting the bowl, presumably Doork urinating! Not only is the comedy business old and tired, I’m sure it has been done to death before the advent of talkies, the frozen pee joke is just a bad cap to the scene. (Don’t get me wrong. I’m no prig. I’ve been a die hard Howard Stern fan for almost 15 years and love a well-crafted raunchy joke. This isn’t one though.)

I’ll admit it. There is a part of me that desperately wants to see this film. Why? Well I could adopt a high minded attitude and say something along the line of “How can you can judge a film that is good unless you have an idea of what a bad film is like?” or “It’s important to see this film as part of cinema history” or whatever. Truth is, there’s a disturbing blob of morbid fascination inside me that craves a viewing of this film. Can it be as truly horrible as legend says? Well, if they do the script any justice, it most assuredly is.

One would think that if a film pulls in over $325 million dollars at the worldwide box office, a sequel would be quickly put into production. But in Hollywood, the only thing that can overcome studio greed is ego. And in the case of 1989’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit it was a clash between some of the biggest names in Hollywood – Steven Spielberg and Disney studio head Michael Eisner – that squashed any hope of further feature length adventures of the loony `toon.

To fully understand how such an impasse came about, we have to go all the way back to the beginning of the first Roger Rabbit film.

It is 1980 and then-Disney studio head Ron Miller is given galley-proofs for the soon to be released Gary Wolf novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, a surreal and satirical take on crime noir novels that featured tough guy detective Eddie Valiant trying to solve the murder of comic strip star Roger Rabbit. Miller saw possibilities in the novel and, over the objections of Disney CEO Card Walker, paid $25,000 for the film rights to the book.

Miller passed to project onto Mark Sturdivant, a young Disney production executive, for development. Sturdivant assigned scripting details to Jeffrey Price and Peter Seaman, two former advertising copywriters, while Disney animator Darrell Van Citters began work on designing the various characters.

Price and Seaman would go through ten drafts of the script, eventually junking most of Wolf’s original plot, which owed much to pornography/blackmail storyline of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. What they did do was change Roger and his companions from actors who posed for the photos that would become comic strips to cartoon actors and setting the story in 1947 at the height of animation’s Golden Age. This change of setting would allow the screenwriters to go all out with the concept of cartoon characters existing in the real world and feature cameos from the greatest cartoon stars of the era.

This would also be the biggest stumbling block the production would have to get around.

Sturdivant approached Warner Brothers, Paramount and Universal Studios about loaning out some of their characters to appear in the film, but was turned down by every one. Nevertheless, Miller had Sturdivant and Citters shoot some footage of a live action actor and had it combined with combined with pencil test animation to see if they could convincingly combine a cartoon rabbit into real world surroundings. This footage even aired on the Disney Channel’s Disney Studios Showcase in April 1983.

Combining live action and animation wasn’t necessarily a new idea. As far back as 1923, the Fleischer Studio had their Out of the Inkwell series that featured the animated Koko The Clown wandering off of animator Max Fleischer’s drawing pad out into the real world. Gene Kelly had danced with Jerry Mouse in 1944’s Anchors Away. Disney itself had put out several pictures that combined the two including Song of the South (1946), Mary Poppins (1964), Bedknobs And Broomsticks (1971) and Pete’s Dragon (1977). But never had such a project demanded such a high level of interaction between real life characters and their animated counterparts.

Anxious to get a director signed on board the project, Miller sent copies of the test footage and the script to Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante and Robert Zemeckis. Although Miller had promised a budget of $25 million dollars, all three passed on the project. (Remember, at this time Disney was not the powerhouse that it would be just a few years later.) In spite of this set back, Miller continued to press forward on the project, instructing Citters to start looking for vocal talent for the film. Citter’s eventual choice to voice Roger was a then-unknown member of the Los Angeles improv comedy group “The Groundlings” by the name of Paul “Pee Wee Herman” Reubens.

Unfortunately, while Miller believed in Roger Rabbit, the Disney Corporation didn’t believe in him and he was ousted in September 1984, leaving Who Framed Roger Rabbit in limbo.

A year and a half later and relatively new Disney head honcho Michael Eisner has started to turn the troubled studio around with the modest success of the films Down And Out In Beverly Hills and Ruthless People. Now, Eisner and Disney Studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg were looking for a film that would take that success one step further. They wanted a blockbuster.

And that’s when Katzenberg discovered the script for Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Realizing that the script had tremendous crossover audience appeal, Katzenberg and Eisner were anxious to put the project into active pre-production. The only hitch is what had stalled the project when Miller was working on it, getting other studios to agree to loan out their classic 1940s era `toon characters.

Eisner had an ace up his sleeve that Miller didn’t have- a friendship with filmmaker in Steven Spielberg. The two had first met in 1980 when Eisner was head of production at Paramount Pictures. Spielberg and George Lucas were looking for a home for their pet project about an adventuring archaeologist named Indiana Jones. While every studio in Hollywood wanted to produce the film, only Eisner wasn’t hesitant about the film’s large proposed budget and the steep financial terms that Lucas and Spielberg were asking.

Eisner was now anxious to see if Spielberg would return the favor and help get his dream project into theatres. Spielberg remembered having been offered the Roger Rabbit script a few years earlier and though enthused by the idea of the film, he knew that mixing live action and animation in a convincing way would be expensive and time consuming. Eisner countered with a proposal that Disney and Spielberg’s production company Amblin produce the picture together. Disney would be able to supply the animation expertise needed while Spielberg would be able to get Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic special effects house to handle the rest of the visual effects. Eisner was also banking that Spielberg would be able to use his considerable cache to persuade other studios to allow their classic cartoon characters to appear in the film.

Spielberg agreed, but with one caveat- Amblin and Disney would share the copyright on any characters that were created for the film. While that means that the two studios would split the profits from the film and all it’s ancillary merchandise like toys, t-shirts and the like, they would also have to completely agree on any project featuring the characters before it could move forward.

And with Eisner quickly agreeing to these terms, the seeds were sown for a rather tumultuous relationship.

Spielberg’s assistance on the production was invaluable. He was able to secure the rights for all the non-Disney characters from the various studios for an unbelievably low licensing fee of $5,000.00 per character. Needless to say, Warners did put a stipulation on the use of Bugs Bunny, demanding that the character could only appear in scenes opposite of Mickey Mouse and that the characters must have the same number of words of dialogue.

Production on Who Framed Roger Rabbit sprang into high gear, but the complexity of the project soon caused the film’s budget to creep upwards from its initially projected $30 million to $50.6 million. Things also fell behind schedule so much so that in the early weeks of 1988 it was beginning to look that it wouldn’t make it’s announced June 24th opening date. Since Disney had several multi-million dollar cross-promotional deals with the likes of Coca-Cola and McDonalds depending on the film opening on time, Katzenberg was feeling pressure from Eisner to meet the looming deadline. With Katzenberg driving the production crew, the film just barely made it into theatres on time.

The film was an immediate hit and with the receipts from ticket sales and ancillary merchandise climbing higher by the day, Disney and Spielberg were anxious to give the public what they wanted- more Roger Rabbit. With Spielberg’s approval Disney began production on the short Tummy Trouble. The studio also started plans to add some Roger themed attractions to the still under construction Disney/MGM Studio theme park. When Tummy Trouble appeared in the summer of 1989 attached to the front of Disney’s Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, audiences once again crowded theatres. To all involved, it appeared that Roger Rabbit definitely had “legs” and a series of short cartoons could become a perennial treat for filmgoers.

Disney and Spielberg quickly fixed a deal for a feature length Roger Rabbit follow up and announced that the series of shorts would continue with an installment entitled Roller Coaster Rabbit that would be produced at the Disney/MGM animation studio in Florida.

And that’s when the problems that were seeded in the Amblin/Disney partnership began to show fruit.

Spielberg wanted Roller Coaster Rabbit attached to the film Arachnophobia, which Amblin was producing for Disney’s new Hollywood Pictures division. However, Disney had sunk $47 million on Warren Beatty’s troubled comic strip adaptation Dick Tracy. Since many in the Mouse House felt that the $124 million that Honey, I Shrunk The Kids made at the box office was in part due to Tummy Trouble being attached to it, there was hope that Roller Coaster Rabbit would give Dick Tracy a perceived much needed similar push at the box office.

Disney got what it wanted and Roller Coaster Rabbit premiered on June 15, 1990 in front of Dick Tracy. While the movie did not do the box office business that Honey, I Shrunk The Kids did, it still grossed $103.7 million. Arachnophobia, despite being the better reviewed of the two movies, barely broke even. It had cost $31 million but only pulled in $53.1 million. It was felt that if the Roger Rabbit short had been attached to it instead, that Arachnophobia would have performed much better.

Since Spielberg is a man who is used to getting what he wants, he was miffed that Disney went and used Roller Coaster Rabbit to boast the box office on their own film over his production company’s film. He was now motivated to flex his muscles as co-owner of the franchise. Disney had already launched into production on the next short, Hare In My Soup, when Spielberg announced that he didn’t like the story and demanded that production be shut down. Disney had no choice but to comply. The studio then pitched other story ideas to him, but Spielberg shot down every one. By the time Spielberg finally approved a storyline, entitled Trail Mix-Up, two years would pass.

(The film that Hare In My Soup was scheduled to be attached to was the comic book adaptation The Rocketeer. Since that movie only grossed $46.7 million at the box office, many felt that it would have benefited from the boost Hare In My Soup would have generated.)

At the same time that Disney was busy developing a feature length follow up to Who Framed Roger Rabbit entitled Roger Rabbit II: Toon Platoon. The film was set to be a prequel, set in 1940, that detailed Roger’s journey to Hollywood, meeting future wife Jessica and his involvement in World War II. Unfortunately, it was that last storyline that caused Spielberg to scuttle the picture.

With the production of his film Shindler’s List in 1993, Spielberg had gone through a spiritual awakening and an embracing of his Jewish heritage. As such, he decided that Nazis will no longer be used a villains in his movies. Since part of the plot of Toon Platoon involves the unmasking of the manager of the radio station that Jessica works at as a Nazi spy, Disney was forced to go back to the drawing board for another premise (For a review of the script to Roger Rabbit II: Toon Platoon, click here).

New scripters Sherri Stoner and Deanna Oliver were brought in and they pushed the prequel’s setting back a few more years to the great Depression and shifted the setting to the East Coast, specifically New York City during the Great Depression. The film was now titled Who Discovered Roger Rabbit. Some elements from Mauldin’s script remained- Roger is still looking for his long lost mother while wooing Jessica. However, this time, in an attempt to get closer to Jessica, Roger takes a job as a stagehand at the Broadway show she’s appearing in. One night Roger is trapped on stage when the curtain rises and a star is born.

The script is reported to be a loving send up of period Hollywood musicals, so much so in fact that when Disney composer Alan Menkin read a copy he penned five songs for the project and volunteered to serve as an executive producer.

By 1997, Disney was anxious to get to work on the film. However, there was a new wrinkle. Michael Eisner’s former studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg is now a partner with Spielberg at Dreamworks SKG. Katzenberg’s departure from Disney had been anything but amicable and it is thought that Eisner was worried that Katzenberg might try to influence Spielberg to scuttle the project. In perhaps what may have been a move to help stay in Spielberg’s good graces, Eisner hired Spielberg’s two former Amblin producers Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy to serve as producers on the new film. For whatever reasons, Spielberg OK’ed the script and permitted Disney to start with pre-production.

Thoughts of the cost overruns from the original Roger Rabbit were chief in Eisner’s mind and he was anxious to keep to that from happening again. He ordered a production test done to see if any of the new animation techniques the studio had developed during the `90s could be adapted for the production.

The test was produced at Disney Feature Animation in Florida in the spring of 1998. Animator Eric Goldberg, who was first hired at Disney to work on the original Roger Rabbit feature, drew up a new model sheet for a younger Roger.

The test scene consisted of two animated weasels bursting into the office of a Hollywood agent to “persuade” him to audition their friend Roger. Roger then bursts into the room and proceeds to cause the kind of havoc only a ‘toon like he can. The test was designed to see if traditional animation and computer-generated images could be successfully combined with live action footage of the agent and his office. Roger and the weasels were realized through traditional animation while the weasels’ Tommy guns and a table that Roger breaks were rendered through CGI. Unfortunately, the result was not as successful as hoped for, so another test was ordered. This time both characters and props were animated with a computer and produced a much better result.

The second test was enthusiastically received by Eisner, until a projected budget that placed production costs for Who Discovered Roger Rabbit at over $100 million dollars. Faced with what he thought to be an extravagant cost for a sequel to a 12-year-old movie, Eisner cancelled the project. Having lost money on Another Stake Out and The Rescuers Down Under, sequels released six and thirteen years respectively after their original films, Eisner was unwilling to commit that much money to a character who last appeared on screen in a short film 5 years ago. Add in the general Hollywood thinking that a sequel generally pulls only 2/3rds of what its originally grossed, Eisner felt that it was too risky a project to undertake and in the summer of 1999 suspended pre-production.

Since then, no new news has emerged on a possible future for Roger, Jessica and friends. But in Hollywood, the one firm rule is that anything can happen and something may come along that could cause Disney to reassess the viability of making a new Roger Rabbit film. Unfortunately, the box office failure of Monkeybone and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, two films that combined animation and live action, aren’t about to inspire anyone at Disney to greenlight a similar project anytime soon.

In 1991, Gary Wolf released a second Roger Rabbit novel, Who P-p-plugged Roger Rabbit?, that combined elements from his original novel and the film version. In this new story, Roger hires Eddie Valiant to try and find out who his competition is for the role of Rhett Butler in Gone With The Wind. Soon, murder victims begin to stack up and Eddie looks to be the culprit. Eddie has to prove his innocence before the cops catch up with, along the way encountering Hollywood legends like Clark Gable, David O. Selznick and Baby Herman’s latest girlfriend, Carole Lombard. Wolf also introduced some new characters including Eddie’s sister Heddy Valiant, Jessica’s little (literally!) twin sister Joellyn and the shadowy Kirk Enigman.

This book and Wolf’s original novel are unfortunately currently out of print, since this may be the only way that fans can get a further adventure of Roger Rabbit.

One would think that if a film pulls in over $325 million dollars at the worldwide box office, a sequel would be quickly put into production. But in Hollywood, the only thing that can overcome studio greed is ego. And in the case of 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit it was a clash between some of the biggest names in Hollywood – Steven Spielberg and Disney studio head Michael Eisner – that squashed any hope of further feature length adventures of the loony `toon.

To fully understand how such an impasse came about, we have to go all the way back to the beginning of the first Roger Rabbit film.

It is 1980 and then-Disney studio head Ron Miller is given galley-proofs for the soon to be released Gary Wolf novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, a surreal and satirical take on crime noir novels that featured tough guy detective Eddie Valiant trying to solve the murder of comic strip star Roger Rabbit. Miller saw possibilities in the novel and, over the objections of Disney CEO Card Walker, paid $25,000 for the film rights to the book.

Miller passed to project onto Mark Sturdivant, a young Disney production executive, for development. Sturdivant assigned scripting details to Jeffrey Price and Peter Seaman, two former advertising copywriters, while Disney animator Darrell Van Citters began work on designing the various characters.

Price and Seaman would go through ten drafts of the script, eventually junking most of Wolf’s original plot, which owed much to pornography/blackmail storyline of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. What they did do was change Roger and his companions from actors who posed for the photos that would become comic strips to cartoon actors and setting the story in 1947 at the height of animation’s Golden Age. This change of setting would allow the screenwriters to go all out with the concept of cartoon characters existing in the real world and feature cameos from the greatest cartoon stars of the era.

This would also be the biggest stumbling block the production would have to get around.

Sturdivant approached Warner Brothers, Paramount and Universal Studios about loaning out some of their characters to appear in the film, but was turned down by every one. Nevertheless, Miller had Sturdivant and Citters shoot some footage of a live action actor and had it combined with combined with pencil test animation to see if they could convincingly combine a cartoon rabbit into real world surroundings. This footage even aired on the Disney Channel’s Disney Studios Showcase in April 1983.

Combining live action and animation wasn’t necessarily a new idea. As far back as 1923, the Fleischer Studio had their Out Of The Inkwell series that featured the animated Koko The Clown wandering off of animator Max Fleischer’s drawing pad out into the real world. Gene Kelly had danced with Jerry Mouse in 1944’s Anchors Away. Disney itself had put out several pictures that combined the two including Song Of The South (1946), Mary Poppins (1964), Bedknobs And Broomsticks (1971) and Pete’s Dragon (1977). But never had such a project demanded such a high level of interaction between real life characters and their animated counterparts.

Anxious to get a director signed on board the project, Miller sent copies of the test footage and the script to Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante and Robert Zemeckis. Although Miller had promised a budget of $25 million dollars, all three passed on the project. (Remember, at this time Disney was not the powerhouse that it would be just a few years later.) In spite of this set back, Miller continued to press forward on the project, instructing Citters to start looking for vocal talent for the film. Citter’s eventual choice to voice Roger was a then-unknown member of the Los Angeles improv comedy group “The Groundlings” by the name of Paul “Pee Wee Herman” Reubens.

Unfortunately, while Miller believed in Roger Rabbit, the Disney Corporation didn’t believe in him and he was ousted in September 1984, leaving Who Framed Roger Rabbit in limbo.

A year and a half later and relatively new Disney head honcho Michael Eisner has started to turn the troubled studio around with the modest success of the films Down and Out In Beverly Hills and Ruthless People. Now, Eisner and Disney Studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg were looking for a film that would take that success one step further. They wanted a blockbuster.

And that’s when Katzenberg discovered the script for Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Realizing that the script had tremendous crossover audience appeal, Katzenberg and Eisner were anxious to put the project into active pre-production. The only hitch is what had stalled the project when Miller was working on it, getting other studios to agree to loan out their classic 1940s era `toon characters.

Eisner had an ace up his sleeve that Miller didn’t have- a friendship with filmmaker in Steven Spielberg. The two had first met in 1980 when Eisner was head of production at Paramount Pictures. Spielberg and George Lucas were looking for a home for their pet project about an adventuring archaeologist named Indiana Jones. While every studio in Hollywood wanted to produce the film, only Eisner wasn’t hesitant about the film’s large proposed budget and the steep financial terms that Lucas and Spielberg were asking.

Eisner was now anxious to see if Spielberg would return the favor and help get his dream project into theatres. Spielberg remembered having been offered the Roger Rabbit script a few years earlier and though enthused by the idea of the film, he knew that mixing live action and animation in a convincing way would be expensive and time consuming. Eisner countered with a proposal that Disney and Spielberg’s production company Amblin produce the picture together. Disney would be able to supply the animation expertise needed while Spielberg would be able to get Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic special effects house to handle the rest of the visual effects. Eisner was also banking that Spielberg would be able to use his considerable cache to persuade other studios to allow their classic cartoon characters to appear in the film.

Spielberg agreed, but with one caveat- Amblin and Disney would share the copyright on any characters that were created for the film. While that means that the two studios would split the profits from the film and all it’s ancillary merchandise like toys, t-shirts and the like, they would also have to completely agree on any project featuring the characters before it could move forward.

And with Eisner quickly agreeing to these terms, the seeds were sown for a rather tumultuous relationship.

Spielberg’s assistance on the production was invaluable. He was able to secure the rights for all the non-Disney characters from the various studios for an unbelievably low licensing fee of $5,000.00 per character. Needless to say, Warners did put a stipulation on the use of Bugs Bunny, demanding that the character could only appear in scenes opposite of Mickey Mouse and that the characters must have the same number of words of dialogue.

Production on Who Framed Roger Rabbit sprang into high gear, but the complexity of the project soon caused the film’s budget to creep upwards from its initially projected $30 million to $50.6 million. Things also fell behind schedule so much so that in the early weeks of 1988 it was beginning to look that it wouldn’t make it’s announced June 24th opening date. Since Disney had several multi-million dollar cross-promotional deals with the likes of Coca-Cola and McDonalds depending on the film opening on time, Katzenberg was feeling pressure from Eisner to meet the looming deadline. With Katzenberg driving the production crew, the film just barely made it into theatres on time.

The film was an immediate hit and with the receipts from ticket sales and ancillary merchandise climbing higher by the day, Disney and Spielberg were anxious to give the public what they wanted- more Roger Rabbit. With Spielberg’s approval Disney began production on the short Tummy Trouble. The studio also started plans to add some Roger themed attractions to the still under construction Disney/MGM Studio theme park. When Tummy Trouble appeared in the summer of 1989 attached to the front of Disney’s Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, audiences once again crowded theatres. To all involved, it appeared that Roger Rabbit definitely had “legs” and a series of short cartoons could become a perennial treat for filmgoers.

Disney and Spielberg quickly fixed a deal for a feature length Roger Rabbit follow up and announced that the series of shorts would continue with an installment entitled Roller Coaster Rabbit that would be produced at the Disney/MGM animation studio in Florida.

And that’s when the problems that were seeded in the Amblin/Disney partnership began to show fruit.

Spielberg wanted Roller Coaster Rabbit attached to the film Arachnophobia, which Amblin was producing for Disney’s new Hollywood Pictures division. However, Disney had sunk $47 million on Warren Beatty’s troubled comic strip adaptation Dick Tracy. Since many in the Mouse House felt that the $124 million that Honey, I Shrunk The Kids made at the box office was in part due to Tummy Trouble being attached to it, there was hope that Roller Coaster Rabbit would give Dick Tracy a perceived much needed similar push at the box office.

Disney got what it wanted and Roller Coaster Rabbit premiered on June 15, 1990 in front of Dick Tracy. While the movie did not do the box office business that Honey, I Shrunk The Kids did, it still grossed $103.7 million. Arachnophobia, despite being the better reviewed of the two movies, barely broke even. It had cost $31 million but only pulled in $53.1 million. It was felt that if the Roger Rabbit short had been attached to it instead, that Arachnophobia would have performed much better.

Since Spielberg is a man who is used to getting what he wants, he was miffed that Disney went and used Roller Coaster Rabbit to boast the box office on their own film over his production company’s film. He was now motivated to flex his muscles as co-owner of the franchise. Disney had already launched into production on the next short, Hare In My Soup, when Spielberg announced that he didn’t like the story and demanded that production be shut down. Disney had no choice but to comply. The studio then pitched other story ideas to him, but Spielberg shot down every one. By the time Spielberg finally approved a storyline, entitled Trail Mix-Up, two years would pass.

(The film that Hare In My Soup was scheduled to be attached to was the comic book adaptation The Rocketeer. Since that movie only grossed $46.7 million at the box office, many felt that it would have benefited from the boost Hare In My Soup would have generated.)

At the same time that Disney was busy developing a feature length follow up to Who Framed Roger Rabbit entitled Roger Rabbit II: Toon Platoon. The film was set to be a prequel, set in 1940, that detailed Roger’s journey to Hollywood, meeting future wife Jessica and his involvement in World War II. Unfortunately, it was that last storyline that caused Spielberg to scuttle the picture.

With the production of his film Shindler’s List in 1993, Spielberg had gone through a spiritual awakening and an embracing of his Jewish heritage. As such, he decided that Nazis will no longer be used a villains in his movies. Since part of the plot of Toon Platoon involves the unmasking of the manager of the radio station that Jessica works at as a Nazi spy, Disney was forced to go back to the drawing board for another premise (For a review of the script to Roger Rabbit II: Toon Platoon, click here).

New scripters Sherri Stoner and Deanna Oliver were brought in and they pushed the prequel’s setting back a few more years to the great Depression and shifted the setting to the East Coast, specifically New York City during the Great Depression. The film was now titled Who Discovered Roger Rabbit. Some elements from Mauldin’s script remained- Roger is still looking for his long lost mother while wooing Jessica. However, this time, in an attempt to get closer to Jessica, Roger takes a job as a stagehand at the Broadway show she’s appearing in. One night Roger is trapped on stage when the curtain rises and a star is born.

The script is reported to be a loving send up of period Hollywood musicals, so much so in fact that when Disney composer Alan Menkin read a copy he penned five songs for the project and volunteered to serve as an executive producer.

By 1997, Disney was anxious to get to work on the film. However, there was a new wrinkle. Michael Eisner’s former studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg is now a partner with Spielberg at Dreamworks SKG. Katzenberg’s departure from Disney had been anything but amicable and it is thought that Eisner was worried that Katzenberg might try to influence Spielberg to scuttle the project. In perhaps what may have been a move to help stay in Spielberg’s good graces, Eisner hired Spielberg’s two former Amblin producers Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy to serve as producers on the new film. For whatever reasons, Spielberg OK’ed the script and permitted Disney to start with pre-production.

Thoughts of the cost overruns from the original Roger Rabbit were chief in Eisner’s mind and he was anxious to keep to that from happening again. He ordered a production test done to see if any of the new animation techniques the studio had developed during the `90s could be adapted for the production.

The test was produced at Disney Feature Animation in Florida in the spring of 1998. Animator Eric Goldberg, who was first hired at Disney to work on the original Roger Rabbit feature, drew up a new model sheet for a younger Roger.

The test scene consisted of two animated weasels bursting into the office of a Hollywood agent to “persuade” him to audition their friend Roger. Roger then bursts into the room and proceeds to cause the kind of havoc only a `toon like he can. The test was designed to see if traditional animation and computer-generated images could be successfully combined with live action footage of the agent and his office. Roger and the weasels were realized through traditional animation while the weasels’ Tommy guns and a table that Roger breaks were rendered through CGI. Unfortunately, the result was not as successful as hoped for, so another test was ordered. This time both characters and props were animated with a computer and produced a much better result.

The second test was enthusiastically received by Eisner, until a projected budget that placed production costs for Who Discovered Roger Rabbit at over $100 million dollars. Faced with what he thought to be an extravagant cost for a sequel to a 12-year-old movie, Eisner cancelled the project. Having lost money on Another Stake Out and The Rescuers Down Under, sequels released six and thirteen years respectively after their original films, Eisner was unwilling to commit that much money to a character who last appeared on screen in a short film 5 years ago. Add in the general Hollywood thinking that a sequel generally pulls only 2/3rds of what its originally grossed, Eisner felt that it was too risky a project to undertake and in the summer of 1999 suspended pre-production.

Since then, no new news has emerged on a possible future for Roger, Jessica and friends. But in Hollywood, the one firm rule is that anything can happen and something may come along that could cause Disney to reassess the viability of making a new Roger Rabbit film. Unfortunately, the box office failure of Monkeybone and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, two films that combined animation and live action, aren’t about to inspire anyone at Disney to greenlight a similar project anytime soon.

In 1991, Gary Wolf released a second Roger Rabbit novel, Who P-p-plugged Roger Rabbit?, that combined elements from his original novel and the film version. In this new story, Roger hires Eddie Valiant to try and find out who his competition is for the role of Rhett Butler in Gone With The Wind. Soon, murder victims begin to stack up and Eddie looks to be the culprit. Eddie has to prove his innocence before the cops catch up with, along the way encountering Hollywood legends like Clark Gable, David O. Selznick and Baby Herman’s latest girlfriend, Carole Lombard. Wolf also introduced some new characters including Eddie’s sister Heddy Valiant, Jessica’s little (literally!) twin sister Joellyn and the shadowy Kirk Enigman.

This book and Wolf’s original novel are unfortunately currently out of print, since this may be the only way that fans can get a further adventure of Roger Rabbit.

One of the most sought after short films by fans of the silent era is the 1910 production of Frankenstein from Thomas Edison’s Edison Studios. For many years the only image thought to exist from the 15-minute feature was a single photo of wild haired, shambling monster grimacing at the camera. Fortunately, recent years have revealed that it’s not as lost as one would think.

Frankenstein was filmed at Edison Motion Picture Studios located on the corner of Decatur Avenue and Oliver Place in the Bronx, New York, one of several dozens pictures the studio produced that year. The studio was built between 1906 and 1907 in response to the growing demand for films. Edison had been the leading pioneer of first kinetoscopes and then projected motion pictures. His first film studio, located near his laboratories in Orange, New Jersey, was too inconvenient to the majority of actors based in New York City. A studio opened on the roof of a building on 25th Street in Manhattan proved too small to keep up with the demand. The Bronx location was designed to be a state of the art facility to handle all of the Edison Company’s production requirements. It’s proximity to the end of the recently constructed Third Avenue El subway system is believed to have been so actors could slip away to make films without attracting the attention of their peers who may have disapproved of participating in the new and vulgar medium.

By 1908, the studio was in full operation, putting out several short, one-reel films a week. The motion picture arm of Edison’s business was also quickly becoming its most profitable- pulling in $200,000 plus an additional $130,000 from the sale of projectors. Still, Edison was losing his grip on being the sole technological innovator for the new medium as more studios sprang into existence with legitimate rights to certain patents.

To combat the problem, in 1909 Edison and his lawyers approached nine of the other top studios with the plan to form The Motion Picture Patents Company, commonly known as The Trust, to share patents, pool resources and keep control over everything from the manufacture of production equipment like cameras to film production itself. The Trust then set up the General Film Company to buy out the 52 leading film distributors, just so they could control the distribution of their films. Theatre owners were forced into paying a $2 a week fee for the rights to screen Trust films. (Never mind the fact that Edison’s company was earning almost a million dollars a year on from the other Trust members through patent royalties.)

As the popularity of motion pictures grew, so did the attention they received from moral crusaders and reform groups, who decried the new medium as being dangerous and encouraging of immorality. Some called for strict laws governing film content and some communities banned theatres all together. Knowing that these groups could pose a serious threat to his bottom line, Edison ordered that not only the production quality of his films be improved, but also their moral tone. The Trust even set up the first Board of Censors, consisting of film executives and religious and education leaders.

Frankenstein was the perfect choice to kick off production under this new moral banner. It’s a story that deals with the extremes of the human condition, life and death, and the dangers of tampering in God’s realm. Plus, Edison made sure that publicity stressed that some of the more sensational elements of the Mary Shelly’s novel had been toned down. The March 15, 1910 edition of The Edison Kinetogram, the catalog that the Edison Company would send to distributors to hype their new films, described the film as such-

To those familiar with Mrs. Shelly’s story it will be evident that we have carefully omitted anything which might be any possibility shock any portion of the audience. In making the film the Edison Co. has carefully tried to eliminate all actual repulsive situations and to concentrate its endeavors upon the mystic and psychological problems that are to be found in this weird tale. Wherever, therefore, the film differs from the original story it is purely with the idea of eliminating what would be repulsive to a moving picture audience.

One of those changes made to the narrative concerns the creation of Frankenstein’s monster. While Shelly’s novel did not go into specifics about the monster’s creation, the creation scene in the film certainly owes more to alchemy than science. The film certainly didn’t stress the danger of unchecked scientific experimentation, not when the boss has transformed the world with his own scientific marvels. Instead, the monster is cast more as a reflection of Frankenstein’s baser instincts and dark reflection of a mind that presumed to meddle in God’s domain.

The part of the monster was portrayed by Charles Ogle. He joined the Edison Stock Company Players in 1909 and had essayed parts as far ranging as Scrooge in a 1910 production of A Christmas Carol to George Washington in a series of films on the history of the United States. Since actors at the time were responsible for their own wardrobe and makeup, Ogle was probably the one who developed the monster’s shambling appearance, perhaps inspired by drawings of how actor Thomas Porter Cooke looked for an 1823 English Opera House stage production of the novel called Presumption or the Fate of Frankenstein.

Edison Stock Company Player Augustus Phillips was chosen to portray the role of the monster’s creator Frankenstein. Very little is known about this actor beyond the films that he made at Edison and then Columbia Pictures. He continued to make features into the early `20s at Pathe, Metro and Goldwyn studios.

Rounding out the cast is Mary Fuller as Frankenstein’s fiancée Elizabeth, though she is never referred to by name in the film. She had joined the Edison Stock Company Players in 1909 and would ultimately appear in a reported over 500 productions, often with Charles Ogle. She was also one of the first motion picture stars to receive an on screen credit in 1911 for her lead role in Aida.

The film’s director was J. (James) Searle Dawley and had started at Edison as a writer in 1907. He was soon apprenticed to director Edwin S. Porter who had shot the landmark The Great Train Robbery in 1903. A quick study, Dawley was soon directing his own films at Edison within a year. Stylistically, Dawley was the antithesis of Porter though. Porter is generally credited with the development of much of the language of cinema including matched edited shots and the close up. Dawley preferred to shoot each scene as if it were a play, with the camera stoically removed from the action.

As director of the film, Dawley was responsible for personally overseeing every aspect of the production from writing the script to approving the set construction and Ogle’s makeup design. In this respect his job was more synonymous with what both a producer and a director would do today. He was only answerable to studio head Horace Plimpton. As was the case with most of his films, it is assumed that Dawley wrote the scenario for the film himself. It is unknown whether Edison himself encouraged or approved the production at its start as he made only rare appearances at the Bronx studio. More than likely, the go ahead was given by the Studios managers, making sure that the script would conform to the decrees of the Trust’s Censor Board.

The film opens with Frankenstein leaving to study at University, bidding goodbye to his sweetheart. Two years pass and Frankenstein has finished his contemplation of the mysteries of nature and seems ready to try his own hand at God’s work. However, his attempt at creating life goes awry, with a hulking, twisted creature emerging from the alchemical vat. Aghast at his creation, Frankenstein returns home to marry his fiancée and escape his mistake. But the creature follows him and confronts his creator, tormenting him. But, as the film’s final title character tell us, the creature “is overcome by love and disappears” into a mirror in Frankenstein’s study.

Most films were shot in a day, but due to the special effects work involved Frankenstein’s production lasted nearly a week, stretching from some time between January 13, 1910 to January 19, 1910. (What little records survive are unclear. It is known the Dawley was out of the country filming in Cuba by January 19th. Some sources state that studio head Plimpton approved the film’s scenario on January 14th.) The film was completed and sent over to the Orange County, New Jersey offices for approval on January 28th and received that approval on February 1st. Over the next two weeks, musical accompaniment was picked and certain scenes were run through a stenciling machine to be tinted.

Edison had pioneered the idea of tinting films to add color in 1884. Edison Studio’s Annabelle the Dancer, featuring music hall performer Annabelle Moore recreating her stage act “The Butterfly Dance,” was one of the first commercially projected motion pictures and was first exhibited at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia in mid-September 1885. Since her act used a projection of colored stereopticon slides as she danced with long silk draperies, Edison touched on the idea to have prints of the film hand painted frame by frame, in the same manner that some photographs and portraits were tinted at the time. By 1910, tinting of films had become common, with blue often being used for night scenes, green for woodland scenes and so on.

In the second half of February, the film was assembled with each scene was pasted together to form a complete print. In early March, Edison Studios copyrighted the picture and submitted paper prints of several scenes to the Library of Congress. In a cost cutting measure started right before the turn of the century, the studio had begun to have a positive print of each film developed on sheets of paper instead of actual film prints for submission for copyright. (The studio would later switch to paper rolls.) That a number of Edison films that have survived did so mainly through the existence of these paper prints. Currently, the Library of Congress only has selected scenes from Frankenstein, not a whole copy.

The film premiered on Friday, March 18, 1910, a mere two months after it had finished shooting. Such a quick turnaround was not uncommon at the time. There was great demand for films and the week of Frankenstein’s release there were over 30 films released by Trust members. The film was received favorably by critics. The New York Dramatic Mirror in a review published on 3/26/10 stated “This deeply impressive story makes a powerful film subject, and the Edison players have handled it with effective expression and skill.”

However, Frankenstein did not generally do well with audiences. There are several possible reasons that may have contributed to its less than stellar reception. Frankenstein was the first horror movie and audiences possibly weren’t sure what to make of this weird story. Moving pictures were already becoming more sophisticated with the use of close-ups and editing within a scene becoming more common. It’s possible that audiences found director Dawley’s stage-y, wide shots to be old fashioned.

It has also been reported that in some communities there was objections to the film due to its perceived blasphemous content. Debates were ongoing around the country over Darwinism and a film that could be seen as mocking the creative power of God was sure to draw fire from the pulpit. Regardless of the reasons, the film made its distribution rounds and was then withdrawn from circulation. While some films like 1903’s The Great Train Robbery remained popular and in circulation for years, Frankenstein quickly faded from the public’s minds.

At the time, Edison Studios would only strike approximately 40 prints of each of their productions, which would then be sent out for distribution. After the films had circulated for seven months or so, they were returned where they were stripped for their silver content. The films were quickly forgotten by the studio and the public and no thought was given to any future value they may hold. That even a handful of Edison Studios films still exist on celluloid is only due to the efforts of private collectors.

And the fact that just a single print of Edison Studio’s Frankenstein still exists is all due to one Wisconsin film collector, Alois Felix Dettlaff Sr., and a little bit of luck. The print in his possession had originally belonged to his wife’s grandmother who used to screen it along with a silent version of Hiawatha. As he relates in Frederick C. Wiebel Jr’s self-published book Edison’s Frankenstein, “She dressed up as an Indian and danced on the stage, and she had short subjects along with it, and one of them was Frankenstein.”

However, the film would take a roundabout way to Dettlaff’s possession. After his wife’s grandmother left show business, she passed her film collection and projector to her son, who in turn passed them on to his son, Dettlaff’s brother-in-law. Not knowing what he had in the collection, Dettlaff’s brother-in-law sold the entire collection to a film collector, who then sold it to another collector of Dettlaff’s acquaintance, from whom Dettlaff purchased them in the mid 1950s. Since he was running silent films for his children as a way of teaching them to read, he did screen the film. However, noting that the film had some wear and tear, and about 8% shrinkage due to age, he placed the print aside, so as not to damage it further.

It was in 1963 that a film historian discovered the March 15, 1910 edition of The Edison Kinetogram with its picture of Charles Ogle in full make up on its cover in the Edison archives in New Jersey. The picture was published in numerous magazines and books, sparking interest among film buffs worldwide. But no print could be found. In 1980, the American Film Institute declared the 1910 production of Frankenstein to be one of the top ten most “Culturally and historically significant lost films.”

When Dettlaff heard of the film’s placement on the AFI’s list, he announced that he had indeed had a copy. However, knowing the worth of such a treasure, Dettlaff has been reticent about releasing the film to be seen. In the late 1970s he had allowed a few minutes to be shown as part of a BBC documentary, later released to home video. These snippets would later wind up in various silent cinema video compilations without attribution or payment made to Dettlaff. Feeling slighted and perhaps not appreciated for his archival efforts, Dettlaff has been guarded in allowing the film to be screened. In 1986, he donated a “copyright protected” version of the film, with a copyright notice that scrolled across the center of the film making viewing difficult, to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. He has also reportedly made numerous safety copies of the film on 16 and 35 mm.

In 1975, at the urging of TV news photographer Charles Sciurba, Dettlaff undertook making a copy of the film with the aid of Clarence Stelloh, who had worked as an engineer at Western Electric duringthe early days of sound film. Working over several weekends, the pair used a 16mm camera and a modified step printer to copy some 14,000 to 15,000 images at a rate of one to two frames a second to create a 16mm backup copy of the film. Complicating the project was the fact that the film had shrunk by up to 8% at some spots, necessitating Stelloh to make changes to the printer to accommodate for the varying space between the sprocket holes.

Detlaff held the first public screening of Frankenstein in decades on October 30, 1993 at the Avalon Theater in his hometown of Milwaukee. It was the first of several annual screenings at various venues in the city. In April 2003, Dettlaff screened the film at the Landmark Loew’s Jersey Theatre in Jersey City, New Jersey as part of a weekend long festival of Frankenstein films. Both evenings’ shows were packed with people curious to see the fifteen-minute short that has so captured the imaginations of film buffs through just one frame. The screening was also used to launch the film’s release on DVD, available from Dettlaff’s own A. D. Ventures, International.