"Where Movie Critics Get A Taste Of Their Own Medicine"
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AN INTERVIEW WITH:
JOE DANTE
by Peter Sobczynski

November 14, 2003

Long before Quentin Tarantino began receiving accolades for creating films inspired by the movies that he devoured as a youth, Joe Dante was doing pretty much the exact same thing. A lifelong movie buff, Dante turned his obsession into a career as a film director-first as a protege of Roger Corman’s with films like the goofy "Hollywood Boulevard" and the great "Jaws" knock-off "Piranha" and later as the man behind such quirky gems as "Innerspace", "Small Soldiers" and the two "Gremlins" films.

One of the key elements that he had paid tribute to in his films have been the classic animated films from the Warner Brothers studios-his films have not only featured characters like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck in bit roles but they also contain the freewheeling energy and anarchistic edge that made those cartoons so unique. Therefore, it is only fitting that he direct "Looney Tunes: Back in Action", the brilliant new comedy that takes those characters (as well as live actors like Jenna Elfman, Brendan Fraser and Steve Martin) and put them into a film just as strange, wild and pop-culture savvy as the shorts that inspired it in the first place. Those expecting another "Space Jam" debacle should rest easy-Dante has given viewers a film that, instead of simply being a marketing gimmick, is one of the most grandly entertaining films that you will see this year.

THE INTERVIEW

Over the years, your past work has shown a great fondness for the old Warner Brothers cartoons. When you first encountered them as a child, did they strike you even then as somehow different from the other cartoons or did that understanding come later?

Well, when I was a kid, we would go to the Saturday matinees and there would be cartoons. I remember that the only ones that ever got applause were the Warner Brothers cartoons. The other ones were things like Woody Woodpecker and Casper and Little Audrey and we would sort of suffer through those but the ones that really made an impact were the Warners cartoons. Walt Disney had the "Silly Symphony" cartoons that were often kind of square things that he used to make to try out techniques that he would use on his features. Obviously, Warners couldn’t compete with that level of artistry with their money and instead, they did with their cartoons what they were doing with their features and made them very brash and streetwise and blue-collar and along with that came a lot of anarchy and questioning of authority.

The odd thing is that of the competing groups of cartoons of those days, the only ones that haven’t dated are the Warner Brothers cartoons because the attitudes are still very contemporary. When you think about it, Bugs Bunny is 63 years old and anyone else who was a star in 1941, if they are still with us, doesn’t look the way they used to. Bugs, on the other hand, has the magical power of still looking the way that he did when he was young and he always will. He will outlive all of his directors and writers because he is that unique creation, like Mickey Mouse, that is an icon.

You actually got to work with the late Chuck Jones a couple of times over the years-he made cameo appearances in a couple of your films and later contributed some animation to the opening of "Gremlins 2: The New Batch"...

I met Chuck at the Telluride Film Festival one year and got very friendly with him and put him in a couple of my films. Anybody who was lucky enough to work with him knew that he was a very gifted guy and such a Renaissance man-he was so brilliant at things that went beyond being a cartoonist. He was fond of quoting Mark Twain and had an aphorism for every occasion. He was just a wonderful guy and of all his contemporaries, he managed to outlast the entire group. He was the last one and as a result, a lot of the accolades accrued to him while people like Bob Clampett and Tex Avery passed away before they got their due. Chuck knew and appreciated that and acted as sort of a surrogate survivor for all of those great cartoon makers.

When I heard that you were directing a Looney Tunes movie, I knew that you would be the perfect choice for the job but I admit that I was still a little bit surprised that Warners would give it to someone with a genuine interest in the subject. In recent years, I’ve gotten the sense that the studio really didn’t have much respect for the characters and were more interested in using them in things like commercials and the monstrosity known as "Space Jam" than in doing anything worthwhile with them. Was it hard convincing them to give you the job-especially considering the fact that they didn’t really seem to know what to make of such films as "Innerspace" and "Gremlins 2"?

They have basically become corporate symbols and the last ten years certainly have not been a high point in the development of the characters. There was a lot of flap during "Gremlins 2" over the fact that I was making fun of the merchandising, which was very sacrosanct at the time. That attitude has kind of passed-they didn’t seem to mind making the Warners characters seem like goofballs or any of the jibes at the studio.

The only thing that this particular group of Warner executives was objecting to was that they didn’t really understand the world of the cartoons-especially when you would have the characters break the frame and talk to the audience. They would say "If you do that, it will take you out of the movie!" and I had to keep explaining that this wasn’t that kind of movie. This movie was more like a long version of one of the 7-minute shorts where everyone was aware that they were in a cartoon. They are used to making live-action pictures where the audience is supposed to be drawn into the story on the screen and this is the opposite. It took a little while for them to come around.

Had this film already been in the works when you finally came on board?

After "Space Jam" made money, they thought that they probably wanted to make some more of these but they kind of dropped the ball. For five years, they were developing various scripts for Bugs Bunny to star in-there was one where he would have been opposite Jackie Chan-and they came and went. It wasn’t until Larry Doyle came up with this take on the Chuck Jones Bugs/Daffy relationship-where Bugs is supercool and Daffy is jealous-and put it in this picaresque story that had a lot of settings that made it seem like a series of cartoons. Then they finally got it and that sort of galvanized it.

Also, they had a hole in their release schedule because they didn’t have a "Harry Potter" picture-two years ago, they knew that this was the day it had to open.

For me, the high-point of the film is the trip to Area 52, the secret alien laboratory that seems to contain every single iconic screen creature from the 1950’s-a Triffid, a Metaluna, the Robot Monster and the Man From Planet X...

Not every monster-just the ones we could get the rights too.

How hard was it to get a scene like that into the film? Obviously, the film is mostly aimed at younger audiences and yet right in the middle is a sequence that works best if you have an encyclopedic knowledge of 50’s sci-fi films that the kids, not to mention most of the adults, simply won’t have.

They were happy when we were shooting it but they weren’t very happy with it when they saw it in the original rough cut. They complained that the monsters looked silly and that we should have scary monsters instead. I told them that these were the monsters from the period of the Bugs/Daffy relationship that we were doing and that the entire concept of Area 52 was sort of a Fifties concept anyway. They were pretty down on Area 52 for a while and it actually wasn’t in the movie for a couple of months-we had to shoot another scene to replace it. Ultimately, I convinced them that including it was the best thing for the movie-it was funny and people would like it. Even if kids don’t get the references, the creatures are just silly ones like Robot Monster-this was his first job in many years and he lost a lot of weight.

You also have an enormous amount of screen history in many of the actors who appear in smaller roles. Many of your regulars appear, such as Kevin McCarthy-still warning about the Body Snatchers-and Dick Miller, America’s finest actor...

I’m sure he would agree. I have my talismans and the people that I like to work with. It wasn’t easy on this picture because there weren’t that many parts for human beings.

Best of all, you get to stick in another bit, as in "The Howling", where you get to have Roger Corman show an on-screen display of his legendary cheapness...

The great thing about that line was that when I shot it on the set, I didn’t have Roger say anything. Then I decided that he needed to say something and I sent a guy with a tape recorder to his office and asked him to make something up and that is what he came up with: "Air bags cost a lot of money!"

Because of the millions of pop-cultural references jammed into the film, "Looney Tunes: Back in Action" is clearly more than just a movie for little kids, yet the advertising for the film seems to be pitching entirely on the level of a kiddie movie without even hinting at the considerable adult appeal of the film. Does this particular marketing approach bother you at all?

I don’t have much to say about it. You are always consulted about the advertising and the consulting consists of "Here’s the ad!". I agree, it is being marketed to a somewhat juvenile audience and the intent was to not necessarily have it be just for kids because parents would have to go to the movie as well. There are some children’s films where parents just want to drop the kids off and not see it because they don’t want to suffer through it-this was designed to be one for the whole family and that everyone would get something from it.

I’m trying to get them to use some quote ads because we have been getting a lot of good reviews, many of which indicate exactly what you are saying about the film being unexpectedly smart and one that even dating couples could go see. The point that I always try to make to them is that if you make a movie just for kids, then everyone will be getting in for half-price but if you can get the entire family, you have a chance of getting an audience at 9:00 PM. Basically, their approach is to take a whole lot of punchlines and string them together into an ad and they just aren’t funny because there is no buildup-it just looks like a lot of stuff. I used to do trailers and I know why they do them like that. You make the movie and then you have to give it up and send it out into the world.

Does the fact that the Looney Tunes brand is so well-known help with marketing a film like this or does it create a different set of expectations?

Well, it doesn’t hurt. There is a lot of goodwill that has built up towards these characters over the past 50 years. We have a little bit of a "Space Jam" problem in that a lot of people thought that film wasn’t what they were looking for-little kids liked it but older kids thought it was stupid. The fan base for the cartoons was very skeptical about this film from the beginning, thinking it was another effort by the studio to rape the characters and exploit them. However, we were committed to make a film of a stature enough to bear comparison with the original cartoons.

Considering the fact that "Looney Tunes" is already packed to the gills with stuff, what can be expected on the eventual DVD?

There are about 36 minutes of deleted scenes. There is an alternate beginning and an alternate ending-at one point, this film had an alternate beginning, middle and ending! There are a couple of things that I can’t put on the DVD because I couldn’t get the music rights. There was a scene in which Bugs, Jenna and Brendan did the manicurist routine-it was a funny bit but it needed the "You Oughta Be In Pictures" music in order to work and they didn’t want to pay for the rights. The original ending is pretty funny and that will be fun for people to see.

Dimension Studios has also been releasing the Rebel Highway films that were done for Showtime in the mid-1990’s. Any chance that "Runaway Daughters" will finally hit video?

You’d have to talk to Dimension-I have no idea. There are only a couple that haven’t come out and mine is one of them. I’d have thought that with Paul Rudd and Julie Bowen, they would have found a reason to release them. The problem with those is that they were never completed on film-they were shot on film and edited on video. When I asked if they were going to cut negative, they said it was too expensive. If you don’t cut negative, you won’t have anything in 20 years. I’ve heard that the quality of the ones that have come out is really quite bad and I’m not really looking forward to seeing it on a fuzzy, dupey DVD.

Before becoming a filmmaker, you toiled for several years as a film critic and the reviews that you wrote from 1969-1974 for Monthly Film Bulletin are being reprinted in Video Watchdog. When you look at some of those reviews, what goes through your mind and have you found that your opinion of some of those films have changed over time?

Well, in the next issue, they are printing my review of "Once Upon a Time in the West", which I now rank as a masterpiece, When I first saw it, I was a little disappointed and the review is lukewarm. When I look back on some of these reviews, I realize that I was a different person back then. As I said in the preface, having made movies, I would never be as flip as I was in some of those pieces.

What are your thoughts on the world of film criticism today? Thanks to the Internet, it seems as if almost everyone with a web site can be a movie critic.

Everybody is a film critic. If you read Aint-It-Cool-News and read the level of responses to the reviews, it is basically a chatroom. They aren’t really reviewing movies-it is more about the people themselves and how they are the first one to post and silly things like that. That kind of stuff doesn’t really interest me. I used to think that it was an important fan base for reviews but now I see that a lot of the Internet stuff is just a bunch of masturbatory raving.

What about more legitimate film criticism? After all, your films have been generally well-received by critics over the years.

They kind of do. You have people like Rex Reed-who has never liked anything I have done and never will-and they just aren’t on the same wavelength. Others do get it and they tend to be film buffs or a love of film history. Then there are those who just want to tell people if it is fast and fun and don’t care who directed it. Those people are reviewers and there is a difference between a critic and a reviewer. Critics actually dissect a movie-people like Jonathan Rosenbaum-while reviewers are people like Gene Shalit who only want to tell people if they will like a movie or not. I think there are less critics working today than ever before.

Part of that problem is that while the author may want to get into the more intellectual areas that touch on film history, they wind up being forced to cut such material by editors who only want to know if it is good or not.

I used to have that problem at Monthly Film Bulletin. I used to write these arcane things and all that stuff would be edited out. However, since the editor didn’t read the magazine, I would go back to the typesetter and put it back the way I wrote it. I managed to get a lot of esoteric stuff in a magazine that I am certain wasn’t actually read by anybody who appreciated it. It was the same thing that happened to me on the movie with Area 52-I wanted it in the film, they didn’t want it in and now many people are saying that it is the best thing in the film. You try to do your work and get your stuff through. There is always somebody over you with the ability to dictate to you what the contents have to be. You just have to fool them or trick them into getting what you want.

-- PETER SOBCZYNSKI

Copyright © 2003 Peter Sobczynski
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