THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, July 29, 1996 TAG: 9607270042
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Interview
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
LENGTH: 143 lines
Pinocchio, we hardly recognized you!
It's taken 115 years. But, at last, Pinocchio has become a real boy - a flesh-and-blood boy of THIS world.
The new film ``The Adventures of Pinocchio'' takes the tale of everyone's childhood and turns it into an eye-boggling, live-action version, photographed in a 15th century fairy-tale village near Prague, Czechoslovakia, with Oscar-winner Martin Landau as the lovable father-figure Geppetto and TV-teen-heartthrob Jonathan Taylor Thomas as the real boy himself.
It's not Disney. It's a throw-back to the original 1881 story written by Carlo Collodi, a disillusioned veteran of Giuseppe Garibaldi's revolutionary army who had darker things on his mind. In the book, Pinocchio was a much naughtier boy than the goody-goody version in the classic 1940 Disney version. He lied a lot, which made his nose grow. He also endured the bad-boy fate of being turned into a donkey, but in a manner not nearly so pleasant as depicted in the animated Disney edition.
And, then, there is the fact that Pinocchio, throwing a temper tantrum, stomped the cricket when the pesky little insect started preaching about a conscience.
Can you imagine what the Disney movie would have been like if Pinocchio had squished Jiminy Cricket in the first scene? For one thing, we would never have heard ``When You Wish Upon a Star.''
The new movie cops out on going that far. They didn't dare kill off the cricket. They didn't dare, either, to get too dark about the entire story. Yet, they forthrightly claim that they've gone back to the original book to tell the ``story'' and not ``the myth.''
For that matter, they didn't risk messing with the Disney empire's copyright infringement laws. It seems that Jiminy Cricket is purely a Disney creation. As a result, the cricket in the new movie is called Pepe. He still talks about having a conscience and about doing good, but he's also a modern wisecracker. Pepe looks a good deal more like a real cricket. Have you ever seen a cricket that looked remotely like Jiminy Cricket, who stood on two legs?
Jiminy, like Pepe, was no square. In escaping from the whale at the end of the Disney film, he yelled ``Hey, Blubbermouth, open up!'' Pepe keeps up the tradition by being the most modern jokester in this new British-French-German movie, which uses Jim Henson's Creature Shop muppets for most of the non-human beings.
The creators of ``Pinocchio'' met in New York recently to explain how, and why, the new movie is necessary. Speaking in his suite at New York's Regency Hotel, director Steve Barron said he ``always thought it should have been a live-action movie. I went to Jim Henson seven years ago and suggested it. It was perfect for Jim and the muppets. After all, it IS about a puppet, and a puppet who becomes a human. It seemed a great idea to me.
``I got nowhere with it - until now.''
Barron has a varied movie background. He did the music videos for Natalie Cole's ``Unforgettable,'' computer animation for Def Leppard's ``Let's Get Rocked'' and directed the underrated feature ``Electric Dreams.'' He's best known for making ``Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,'' which grossed over $300 million worldwide but drew controversy from parents' claims of violence.
He got more than he bargained for with ``Pinocchio.'' ``It took two years just to get the songs right,'' he said. Stevie Wonder wrote and performed two songs, ``Kiss Lonely Good-Bye'' and ``Hold on to Your Dream.''
``We planned to film it in six months,'' he said. ``It took longer. Most of the sets had to be build four and a half feet above the ground so that the puppeteers could get under them to work the puppets. At least 90 percent of what you see is done by puppeteers, some using animatronics. The facial expressions are controlled by motors. The body movement is done the old-fashioned way, with puppeteers moving the creatures. We used very few computer gimmicks. We wanted an old-fashioned, yet modern look.''
Barron said that the all-consuming initial push was to get the right look for Pinocchio. That was solved when he decided to hire teen superstar Thomas (from the TV sitcom ``Home Improvement'') for the role. ``We saw a number of unknown boys, but Jonathan, as it turned out, was so far superior in doing the voice. He had done the voice of Simba, the lion cub, in `The Lion King' and he was experienced in acting with just the voice.''
Thomas, 13, who had just returned from a fishing trip in Canada, was still in shock from seeing himself on screen as a pine-skinned puppet. Pinocchio's features were based on a mold made of Thomas' face.
``For 45 minutes, I had to breath through a straw while they did it. I recorded all the lines, but I never saw the puppet until I got to Prague. It was a little unnerving. It could move and talk and act - and it looked like me.''
While Thomas has been on the cover of every teen magazine, and gets hundreds of letters from girl fans every week, he said he's more interested in fishing than dating.
``I caught a 75-pound halibut in Canada!'' he exclaimed - and since his nose wasn't growing, you had to accept it as not just a fish story. ``As for girls, I don't have a real girlfriend. I'll deal with that when the time comes.''
Landau accepted the role of Geppetto a year ago. As preparation, he said he spent a lot of time talking to a wooden puppet. ``It was important that I believe that Pinocchio was real,'' he said. ``If Martin Landau believed it, the audience would believe it. I talked to Pinocchio a lot when the cameras weren't even turning. I said to him, `I've worked with a lot of wooden actors in my day, and you're very good.'''
There have been some famous conversations with Pinocchio. In 1940, a national radio network went blank when Mae West invited Pinocchio to ``come up and play in my woodpile.'' The comment was considered too racy and the plug was pulled before Pinocchio replied.
Landau sees Geppetto as ``a classic role, like Hamlet or Macbeth. You don't expect it to be played only once. Everyone knows who Geppetto is, but no one knows anything about him,'' Landau said. ``He's the old guy in the Disney film, but he, after all, did have a past.'' In this script, he almost has a love life. Geppetto, it seems, was in love with Leona, played by Genevieve Bujold, but was too shy to tell her. She married his brother instead. Now, he has a second chance for romance.
Playing against a puppet had its challenges. ``The puppeteers moved a great deal faster than the puppets moved, it seemed,'' Landau said. ``There would be all this movement from them as I tried to focus just on the puppet, not on all these other guys that were around. One of the trickiest scenes was one when I walk down the street with the wooden Pinocchio. Five guys in blue suits were with him. The blue didn't photograph - so that, in the movie, you don't see them.''
The actor doesn't feel that the new ``Pinocchio'' movie is very dark at all. ``I don't think there is anything that will unduly scare children,'' he said. ``Drama is drama. It has to have conflict.''
He is right in that the new movie doesn't, at all, capture the darkness of the original book. Most of the adventures were retained from the Disney version, but played with live humans.
Collodi used Pinocchio as an anarchist to express some of his displeasure at the way the Italian revolution had not resulted in an improved democracy. It was first released as ``Tale of a Puppet'' in 35 installments of ``The Children's Newspaper'' in 1881. Then, in 1883, it was published as a novel with the author stating that it was his effort to put realism into children's literature.
The new film, with all its innovation, keeps much of the lightness of the Disney version. No one wanted the young fans to find a splinter.
(MPAA Rating: G, some tense situations; MAL'S RATING: ) ILLUSTRATION: NEW LINE CINEMA
[Color Photos]
Martin Landau and Jonathon Taylor Thomas star in the live-action
version of "Pinocchio."
A series of puppets, a large team of puppeteers and a bit of
computer animation brought Pinocchio the puppet magically to life.
NEW LINE CINEMA
In preparation for his role as Geppetto, Martin Landau spent a great
deal of time talking to the wooden Pinocchio puppet. by CNB