Once upon time in New York City during the Great Depression, a poor tailor made a baseball uniform for his son and took him to Yankee Stadium for his birthday. When the boy made an amazing catch in the stands, the Yankees invited him to take part in the game. The next day at school, no one believed the boy’s story — until the Yankees arrived with presents for everyone.
Once upon a time in Hollywood during the 1970s, a young actor became an overnight star by portraying Earth’s greatest superhero. When a tragic accident left him paralyzed, he displayed such grace and courage that everyone who met him realized he was a true superhero. For the rest of his days, the actor lived his life to the fullest, facing challenge after challenge with an indomitable spirit that was an inspiration to the entire world.
The first story, about a child named Yankee Irving is make-believe; the second, about an actor named Christopher Reeve is true. The two stories became one when Reeve signed on to direct an animated feature that would come to be known as Everyone’s Hero.
Yankee Irving’s adventure began as a father’s bedtime story to his children. The father in this case was Howard Jonas, the founder of telecommunications giant IDT and its animation-focused subsidiary IDT Ent.. When it came time for IDTE (recently acquired from IDT by Liberty Media Corp.) to produce its first feature, Yankee Irving’s story was, if not The Natural, a natural.
“Howard told me the story, and I was intrigued,” says Robert Kurtz, the film’s co-scripter. “I loved the little boy being the hero, the father and son story and the time period. I told him, let me think about it.” Kurtz, an experienced TV writer/producer with a background in family-focused series like The Cosby Show, Grace Under Fire, Boy Meets World and the WB animated series Baby Blues, had recently joined IDTE’s creative development department. “This was my first animated film, but I knew enough to know the boy needed a journey, he needed a problem. If you have a father-son story I wanted something to go wrong with the bond between them that leads to the journey.
“My uncle Al Brodax [yes, that Al Brodax] once wrote short story about a little boy who goes to England to bring the queen a fish. I always loved that story when I was a kid. I liked the idea of a little boy traveling across America to bring a special gift to his hero. In my script the father was a tailor working on Lou Gehrig’s uniform who would lose his job unless his son got the uniform to Gehrig in time.”
In terms of a finished screenplay, Yankee Irving’s story had barely reached first base. Lou Gehrig and his uniform fell by the wayside, replaced by Babe Ruth and a one-of-a-kind bat that shares credit with the Babe for his slugging success. In the finished film, Yankee has to retrieve the stolen bat and return it to Babe Ruth in Chicago in time for the Yankees to win the 1932 World Series.
“My first treatment was over 100 pages long,” Kurtz continues. “Howard read it, and being Howard found a way to get it to Christopher Reeve. He loved Chris and thought of him as the last great American hero.
“Chris read it and loved it. It’s a story about a kid who won’t quit, who keeps swinging.”
It’s tempting to assume that Reeve’s directing credit is more a sentimental gesture than an actual measure of his work on the film; other than a few TV movies, Reeve had little directing experience and none in animation. However, everyone contacted for this article agreed that Reeve’s participation in the film was genuine and his title in the credits honestly earned.
“Chris knew he hadn’t worked on an animated film before, so he was open to suggestions and advice,” recalls Ron Tippe, one of the movie’s producers. “He had no problem making decisions. A director is a director — animation is just a process, it doesn’t take away from the fact you’re making a movie. The fact that it was animated was secondary to Chris. The movie was about ‘how do I tell a great story with great characters, and make sure the comedy organic to the story and its characters?’“
According to Tippe (who produced 2D and CGI animation for Space Jam), Reeve directed via the film’s storyboards, making sure each panel captured the script’s emotion and story progression, as well as providing input on character design and art direction. “He wasn’t alive to follow through, but he helped us set the tone for the picture.”
The producer describes his first meeting with Reeve as, “one of those absolutely unbelievable moments. I went to his house the day after I was hired. I was waiting inside the front door for him with the sunlight coming in from the second floor window. About 100 feet away I hear somebody say, ‘You must be [here Tippe pauses for a whispered breath] Ron.’ He was blowing in his tube, which is how he manipulates his chair, and out of the sunlight comes Christopher Reeve. It was one of those times in your life when you knew you were about to embark on something that was going to be fantastic.”
Kurtz spent close to eight months developing the film’s story with Reeve, traveling to the actor’s Bedford, New York home. When asked what beyond the man’s handicap accounted for the tremendous impact Reeve had on everyone involved in the project, he pauses for a moment, then answers.
“There was no handicap. With Chris, it was the gracefulness of his life, the ease of his personality, his sense of fun. He was the opposite of a difficult Hollywood star. Think of the best times you ever had hanging out with buddy from high school or college. That’s what it was like. The handicap disappeared, the wheelchair was gone. He’d have juice or a glass of water and I’d bring it over to him. He’d take a sip and say, ‘Thanks Rob,’ and that was it.”
After Reeve’s death in late 2004, the project briefly lost momentum. Janet Healy, producer of DreamWorks’ Shark Tale [4] had recently joined IDT as its president of animation. Healy brought aboard two experienced animation pros to continue work on the film, Daniel St. Pierre (who also served as production designer) and Colin Brady. St. Pierre’s credits include overseeing the “deep canvas” look on Disney’s Tarzan [5], while Brady’s roots are in the 3D world, with a co-directing credit on Toy Story 2 [6] to his name.
Healy also brought in Igor Khait (whose own animation résumé dates back to Steven Spielberg’s animated Family Dog series, and who contributes a brief blues guitar number to the soundtrack) to make sure the film was completed in time for its fast-approaching fall 2006 release. “It took us a couple of months to retool and refine the movie that Chris had started making,” Khait explains. “Animation movies always evolve; you’re always discovering new stories as you go along. We started to deconstruct and rebuild, while trying to stay true to the story’s original theme — persevere. We had to make sure we didn’t stray from that and tell the story in limited time we had left until the film’s release.”
Everyone’s Hero was scheduled for a fall 2006 premiere, just in time for the baseball playoffs and World Series. (“It’s not a Christmas movie,” Khait notes.) For the next year and a half Khait lived in Toronto, riding herd on the film’s day-to-day production at IDT Ent.’s DKP Studios. (In order to meet the release date, some scenes were lit, rendered and textured at Reel FX in Dallas, Texas.) The film was animated in Maya 6.5, with some proprietary plug-ins to create hair and skin textures. Cloth simulation was done with commercially available Syflex software, “tweaked” by the effects department to the movie’s needs; lighting and rendering were handled by off the shelf Mental Ray software.
Fusion software was used to composite the many layers of animation, including a complex train sequence. “Those shots were challenging,” Khait recalls. “The train was transitioning through different environments. We had to be careful to make clear the progression from inside the station out to ever more rural areas, and balance out the changing light in different environments. We also used moving light sources to create an illusion of speed. It was really a combination of 2D and 3D in those shots — it involved a lot of painting that had to be planned very carefully.”
While Khait took care of logistics and scheduling, Tippe was on hand as well, overseeing the film’s creative aspects. In the film’s publicity materials, Brady notes that St. Pierre’s background is in art direction and production design, while his own work tends towards the cartoony, and compares their working relationship to Lennon and McCartney’s: “Our differences were really the strengths of the film.” Tippe offers his own perspective on the dynamic between the two directors. “It’s important to get people to lay out their points of view, to and then get them to compromise. Otherwise why have two directors? My job is to get the best out of them. I worked hard to get them to articulate what they both really wanted, and when they disagreed, come to happy medium they both could live with. Nobody’s going to be 100% happy unless they’ve been working together for five years.”
In many ways, Everyone’s Hero is a throwback to an earlier age of animated features, and not just because of its 1930s setting and “G” rating. There’s a refreshing absence of cynicism, over-the-kids’-heads throwaway lines, pop-culture quotes or smarmy, clueless parents in the film. The bond between Yankee Irving and his folks is warm and palpable, and while the boy goes on an amazing and perilous journey that no 10 year-old is ever likely to attempt, he’s always presented as brave and resourceful child, not a miniature, wise-cracking adult. The wisecracks belong to Whoopi Goldberg, who voices Babe Ruth’s bat “Darlin’“ and Rob Reiner, aka a sarcastic New York baseball named “Screwie.”
“Screwie’s the kind of character I love,” says Kurtz. “I was really thinking of Danny DeVito or Billy Crystal, but Rob was absolutely perfect. He did this wonderful, cigar-chomping seen-it-all voice.” Tippe shares Kurtz’s enthusiasm for Reiner, even though the actor replaced Tippe’s scratch track. “Rob was phenomenal, he was so collaborative. You go in with the script and record the lines, but an actor who’s engaged says ‘Can I try something else?’ In the film Screwie bounces down a flight of steps. The original script was just a series of “‘ow-ooh-ahs’, but Rob turned that into ‘My head! — My butt! — My head! — My butt!’”
According to Kurtz, Reeve always wanted Mandy Patinkin to play Yankee’s father Stanley. “An hour after getting the script, Mandy called back to say he had to play the part. Chris never suggested it, but when I asked if [Reeve’s wife] Dana would like to play the mom, he said, ‘I was really hoping you would say that.’ Chris was the kind of guy wouldn’t necessarily assume that, given who he was, he could just call that as the film’s director.”
William H. Macy, who seems to specialize in playing hard-luck losers in live-action, voices a cartoon version as the bat-swiping Chicago pitcher Lefty Maginnis. (In one of Hero’s best-animated sequences Maginnis, riding atop a train in pursuit of Yankee Irving goes through a series of wild contortions in order to dodge the overhead signal lights whizzing past him. “That scene was Jan’s baby,” says Tippe, crediting Jan Carlee, the film’s head of layout and one of its directors of photography.)
The biggest surprise in the voice cast however, is only referred to as “Surprise Guest” on the movie’s website. Much as Robin Williams portrayed Aladdin’s genie while keeping his name out of the credits, one of Reeve’s classmates from their Julliard drama school days portrays Napoleon Cross, the villainous owner of the Chicago Cubs. The pudgy character’s pompous boasting and gleeful bobble head doll-abuse (“Stop hitting yourself,” he tells two Babe Ruth dolls while banging them together) provide some of the film’s funniest moments. After letting the actor’s name slip, Kurtz adds that, “Chris wanted [his colleague] to do some sort of fun cameo, to enjoy this project with him because they were the best of friends.”
Hero avoids giving its 1930s, depression-era setting the sepia-toned nostalgia treatment. Instead, the impoverished time period is evoked via a reference to the absence of available jobs and Yankee’s friendship with three good-natured, freight train-hopping hoboes (one of whom is voiced by Tippe himself). When Yankee hitches a ride with an all-black baseball team, the movie doesn’t grind to a halt for a history lesson about the segregated “national pastime” of the day; instead, a stadium banner reading “Negro League” in the background is all that’s necessary to tell the story.
In a fascinating sequence for any architecture buff, Yankee sneaks aboard a train leaving from New York City’s long-demolished Pennsylvania Station. The film’s meticulous CGI reconstruction of the station is as close as anyone in 21st century will ever get to seeing the place with their own eyes. Tippe credits St. Pierre and the film’s art team for going “back to photographs and architectural drawings — they did a huge amount of historical research for the film. When Yankee walks into the train station it’s beautifully lit and you get a sense of how vast and ornate it was.”
As Tippe sees it, “What makes us different from the other [animated] movies is that people usually go for comedy first — we didn’t. We went for story first and foremost. Once we got the structure down, then we went back in and asked ourselves, what’s funny about this situation? The tension between Darlin’ and Screwie for example — can it be funny? What makes it funny?
“Chris had a lot to do with that attitude, and we just carried it on after he passed away. Don’t forget Dana was one of the executive producers, along with Chris. I updated her on a weekly basis and we spoke regularly.”
There’s another difference between Everyone’s Hero and its animated competition, one that Tippe is passionate about. “We made this film in two years, for less money than 99% of the movies out there. Every company should do this — say, ‘We’re giving you two years to make a movie and X dollars’ — then let them make the movie and don’t interfere. To their credit, the executives at IDT for the most part let us make our movie and didn’t second-guess us. This is not a movie made by committee, this is a movie made by filmmakers — and I think it shows.
“That’s a critical paradigm shift in my opinion, that these people fully trust the creators. We’re not going to spend $100 million and do this for four or five years. That’s one of the things that interested me in this project. We were going to be creatively challenged by having to work with less. Our crew was 25% smaller than on a comparable project. That’s very freeing. You realize your only option is to make good decisions. You realize you can’t spend five months or 10 months or two years designing one character — and I’ve seen it done like that.”
Everyone’s Hero, dedicated to both Chris and Dana Reeve (who died of lung cancer in March 2006) opens on Sept. 15. “Dana was very involved up until the very end,” recalls Khait. “As a member of the cast and as one of the exec producers, she was always present. She was very supportive; she knew we wanted to, and she made sure we did, make Chris’ movie.”
Joe Strike is a regular contributor to AWN. His animation articles also appear in the NY Daily News and the New York Press.
Links:
[1] http://www.awn.com/imagepicker/image/11549
[2] http://www.awn.com/imagepicker/image/11550
[3] http://www.awn.com/imagepicker/image/11551
[4] http://mag.awn.com/index.php?article_no=2245
[5] http://mag.awn.com/index.php?article_no=1193
[6] http://mag.awn.com/index.php?article_no=1087
[7] http://www.awn.com/imagepicker/image/11552
[8] http://www.awn.com/imagepicker/image/11553
[9] http://www.awn.com/imagepicker/image/11554
