A few years ago, Scott Rudin, then head of production at 20th Century Fox, was driving back from a screening in a van packed with other film executives and their families when the 10-year-old son of one of the executives started humming a song.
One by one the others started humming along with him, gradually tossing in some of the song`s instantly recognizable lyrics: ”mysterious and ooky . . . altogether spooky.”
And then everybody, including Rudin, joined together in snapping their fingers at those key punctuation points.
”I knew we had a movie,” says Rudin, the 33-year-old producer wunderkind who, while at Fox, oversaw ”Aliens,” ”Wall Street,” ”Big,”
”Die Hard” ”Working Girl” and ”The Fly,” among others.
Five years, at least $30 million and enough headaches for 10 movies later, ”The Addams Family”-the film-is finally here. (It opens Nov. 22 in Chicago.)
It`s a testament to the uncanny optimism and true American grit it takes to be a successful Hollywood producer that Rudin can say with a straight face, ”This entire picture turned out to be one of those situations where everyone felt they were in on something special.”
They also were in on a shooting history arguably more Gothic than anything from the pages of cartoonist Charles Addams. After complicated negotiations to secure the rights to the Addams` cartoons and the television show, filming began with a first-time director, cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld, who has ”Miller`s Crossing” and ”Big” to his credits. Two weeks into shooting, after losing sleep all night over an error he`d made during the day, he came to work the next morning and fainted.
Before the picture was finally over, his wife would suffer two miscarriages, endure a misdiagnosis for cancer and undergo major surgery. The movie lost its first cinematographer to another picture, and the second had to be hospitalized. And then came the coup de grace.
Sonnenfeld, his cast and the entire picture, in fact, found themselves on the auction block, sold away in mid-shoot to another studio.
Orion Pictures, which had financed the movie, was confronting huge financial difficulties (from which it`s still trying to recover) and sold the movie last winter to Paramount Pictures.
Nerve-wracking? Spooky? Altogether ooky? You bet. Did anybody ever think to compare the ghoulish goings-on to the subject matter of the movie? ”I did,” Sonnenfeld answers emphatically.
And yet the producer and the director wax sincere when they speak of the result.
”Ultimately, I`m happy about the change in studios because Paramount is a very healthy, wealthy company and will spend a lot of money getting the picture to the public,” says Rudin. ”But I`m also sad because there aren`t a lot of studios that would have hired Barry as Orion did, and they did it on their faith in me. They took the risks, and in Hollywood it`s nice when the risk-takers are rewarded.”
Taking a campy, venerable sitcom and turning it into a big-budget movie is fraught with risks. From the beginning, the idea was to echo both the series and the Addams` originals in a way that would charm the now-grown baby boomers while at the same time reach a younger, uninitiated audience.
One of Rudin`s earliest decisions was to stay more faithful to Addams than to ”The Addams Family.”
”We could have taken a completely different angle and made a movie with Catherine O`Hara, John Candy and Dan Aykroyd,” Rudin says. ”But I decided I didn`t want people to say, `Well, it`s fun, but too bad it wasn`t an ”SNL”
sketch.` We took the high road, and the picture is more faithful to the original cartoons as a result.”
Another early stumbling block, of course, was casting. Who could play the parts so singularly created by John Astin and Carolyn Jones? ”Once you decide to go for the high road, if Anjelica Huston isn`t Morticia, then who could be? She is that hothouse flower, that exotic the part cries out for.”
Actually, Cher was another early option. Orion, who even then had its eye on the pocketbook, had just done ”Mermaids” with Cher and felt she might be more commercial. But Sonnenfeld, who agreed with Rudin that Huston was the better choice, spied a spread on the ”Prizzi`s Honor” Oscar-winner in Vanity Fair that included one telltale Morticia-like picture. He flew from his home near New York to Hollywood, where he held the magazine picture of Huston in front of studio executives and said, ”See, here, this is what we mean.”
Huston herself, every bit the porcelain, haunting hothouse flower in person, says, ”I`d come off `The Grifters` and felt I`d done enough soul-searching. I wanted to play something light and liberating. Little did I know that getting into that costume would be a matter of semi-bondage. But it was emotionally liberating.”
She brought another odd advantage. She was truly an initiate, because she grew up in Ireland and simply had no knowledge of the old show. ”I did watch two episodes once I took the part, just to get an idea,” she says. ”But I consciously avoided doing a Carolyn Jones imitation. She was quite the perfect Morticia. I went back to the cartoons.”
Raul Julia, as Gomez, if anything seemed more of a natural-a Latin lover with the acting skills to pull off broad comedy. ”He has this great theatricality that fits with the heightened style of the whole thing,” says Sonnenfeld.
There are a host of key casting goodies as well-eerie, creepy Christopher Lloyd as ghoulish Uncle Fester (Jackie Coogan`s part on television); Judith Malina, longtime partner with the Living Theatre and one of the zombies brought back to life in ”Awakenings,” as Granny; theater and film veterans Dana Ivey and Elizabeth Wilson as two new female characters; and Dutch-born actor Carol Struyken, a 7-foot lookalike to the late Ted Cassidy, as Lurch the butler.
Even more crucial were performances by actors we never get to see-the Thing, the weird hand that performed such helpful duties as answering the telephone (”Thank you, Thing,” Carolyn Jones would coo), and Cousin It, the ambulatory fur ball.
”We were working on Cousin It`s costume, and I decided to check out the TV show for ideas,” recalls Sonnenfeld. ”Five minutes later I told Scott,
`Whatever they did on TV, forget it. It was incredibly cheap-looking.` ”
The movie It is played by 5-foot John Franklin, a Hollywood cartoon vocalist and actor who grew up in Blue Island and played, among other roles, the young beast on television`s ”Beauty and the Beast.” For ”The Addams Family,” he wears a $25,000, 45-pound costume made of human hair.
Thing is even more special. Thanks to modern wizardry, Thing (actually the dexterous hand of stage magician Christopher Hart) no longers lives in a box, but spider-walks all over the Addams home (and the movie screen), racing around like a five-digit rug rat and, in one spectacular sequence, leaving home and darting through Los Angeles traffic on a rescue mission-”the Thing as `Lassie Comes Home`,” as Sonnenfeld puts it.
Some of the budget, in addition to an array of special effects (and one not-so-special hurricane sequence near the finale), went toward the house. The Addams manse is a cavernous, richly appointed haunted house of our dreams.
”Richard MacDonald, who designed the sets, is somebody who used to be a major designer but who fell out of favor because his shows got to be too expensive,” says Rudin. ”He did `Day of the Locust` and I think that`s one of the most beautiful jobs ever. We took a chance, and the result is sensational.”
Another stroke of genius could have been the casting of Christina Ricci, the young swimmer in ”Mermaids,” as Wednesday, one of the two Addams offspring. Ricci`s deadpan deliveries of some of the movie`s darker jokes are among the film`s better moments.
She also gave the beleaguered Sonnenfeld some of his better memories.
”Her mother told me that on the plane from the East, where she lives, to L.A., she became Wednesday. On the second day of shooting, I told her to try and be sadder in a scene and she said, `No, Barry, sadness is an emotion and Wednesday shouldn`t have any.` This, on the second day, from an 11-year-old.” There`s also a daughter-of-Addams quality to her. In one scene she`s supposed to lie in bed and try to sleep. The script calls for her to lie flat on her back; she improvised the part, now in the film, where she crosses her arms on her chest, a la a corpse on display in a mortuary. It`s classic Addams` macabre.
”That`s the kind of ad lib you hire Meryl Streep for,” says Rudin.
In the end, Rudin is unafraid of comparisons or complaints the show should have been left alone.
”No one will say that,” he predicts. ”It`s not like we were remaking
`Guernica,` for goodness sakes. It was never high art. It was just a TV show.”
