Call This Outbreak Simians’ Rainbow

Move over John Travolta, Hollywood has a new comeback tale--or, more accurately, tail.

On movie screens, at least, 1995 was the year of the monkey, with primates grabbing a surprising share of roles--and branching out with starring parts in two 1996 titles.

Whether sinister (“Outbreak”), homicidal (“Congo”), computer-generated (“Jumanji”) or comic (“Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls”), simians have rarely left the multiplex since last spring.

In the current “Cutthroat Island,” Geena Davis sports a capuchin sidekick whom some critics preferred to her actual so-star, Matthew Modine. “12 Monkeys” heightened its time-traveling suspense with mysterious lab primates and a creepy, omnipresent ape logo. Even the season’s top draw, “Toy Story,” dipped into a Barrel of Monkeys for a rescue scene.

So why are primates climbing the Hollywood success ladder 63 years after King Kong put them on the map?

“Studios are looking for things that endear themselves to children,” explains Rodney Liber, executive producer of 20th Century Fox’s orangutan comedy “Dunston Checks In,” starring Jason Alexander and Faye Dunaway. It opens Friday.

“Children love animals--but you have to pick something that’s both cute and something you can train. You can’t work with worms in movies.”

One top Hollywood ape creator, Rick Baker (“Gorillas in the Mist”), attributes their appeal to audience identification.

“Apes are so human. They started off being great evil characters in movies--God’s monster--but people realized you can look in this animal and see yourself.”

But bringing primates to the screen means choosing from a jungle of challenging options. For “Dunston,” director Ken Kwapis employed a real, 6-year-old orangutan named Sammy, who at 2 1/2 feet was a smaller version of Clint Eastwood’s former sidekick.

“It was a big deal for me to think that the central character of the film is a non-verbal character, so I looked at a lot of silent films,” says Kwapis, who last handled non-humans on the “Sesame Street” feature “Follow That Bird.”

“When I asked Jim Henson how to direct the Muppets, he said the key was in the eyes--and that’s certainly true here. I hate to make comparisons to Buster Keaton, who is incomparable, but there is a kind of deadpan quality, a kind of melancholy Sammy has that is quite beautiful.”

Building Sammy’s acting range to some 100 bits of business was the job of trainer Larry Madrid, who literally brought his work home with him by having Sammy live at his house for weeks.

“Dunston” co-star “Eric Lloyd was about 8,” Madrid recalls, “and bringing Sammy home was perfect, because I have two boys about the same age. I worked Sammy with my sons to see how the relationship would develop, how much time would need to be spent. Then I transferred that information to Eric.”

Madrid even persuaded Sammy to override his natural instincts against jumping, and leap off an eight-foot ladder to knock a stuntwoman into a cake.

“The look in his eye as he did it was incredible,” Madrid says. “He knew what he was going to do--he was gonna take her out.”

Even more extreme monkey business was needed for “Ed,” a comedy due out March 15 from Universal about a baseball-playing chimp who teams with Matt LeBlanc (“Friends”). The result--a totally animatronic star.

“We would be shooting for years if we tried to get an animal to do what we need in the film,” explains director Bill Couturie (“Sesame Street”). “Also, the character of Ed is a full-grown chimp, a 150-pound, five-foot-tall animal. Imagine something 10 times stronger than Schwarzenegger.”

Swinging to the rescue was Animated Engineering, a company that augmented Ed with innovative eye-lens technology created by Stan Winston’s team for “Congo.”

The computer-generated monkeys of “Jumanji” pushed reality further, as the staff of Industrial Light & Magic and director Joe Johnston devised new programs to created hair for their knife-throwing beasts.

According to sequence supervisor Doug Smythe, “Joe didn’t want them to look like any particular species. And he wanted the fur color to be fox red so they’d stand out. It was hard; I believe it’s the first time lifelike computer monkeys have been created.”

Despite such innovations, some movie buffs lament one endangered species onscreen: actors in simple gorilla suits.

“It’s kind of put old-timers like me out of business,” admits veteran TV ape man Bob Burns. “On my suits, only the mouth opened and closed; the rest was body English and eye expression. Now you have to have radio controls and 10 heads to do everything.”

But nostalgists take heart: The ultimate simian comeback may be just around the corner. Later this year, the film format of IMAX will offer a state-of-the-art, animated appearance from the Olivier of apes, King Kong--proving even veteran stars can survive movie evolution.*