A Wile E. plan from the Warner franchise factory

“AAGGHH!” Jenna Elfman lets out a lusty, blood-curdling scream as a huge gorilla wearing a diving helmet picks her up and strides across a facility that looks like a cross between a retro sci-fi laboratory and a futuristic pet store. The gorilla lurches to a halt, just in front of a sign that reads “Area 52: Keeping things from the American people since 1947.”

Elfman and her co-stars, who include real-life actor Brendan Fraser and, to be added later, cartoon characters Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, have been under attack most of the day from a variety of sci-fi monsters -- in actuality hot, sweaty men dressed in sci-fi monster suits -- playing characters that date to such vintage sci-fi low films as “The Day of the Triffids,” “Forbidden Planet” and “The Man From Planet X.” Director Joe Dante seems to know every sci-fi movie ever made, so I ask him if there’s a secret to directing movie monsters. “You just yell at them,” he says. “Yell really loud.”

Dante stares fondly at the Metaluna Mutant from “This Island Earth.” “That’s the guy who gave me nightmares as a kid,” he says. “So now I’m getting my revenge.”

Call it sweet revenge. For the last two months, Dante has been here on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, making “Looney Tunes: Back in Action,” a $100-million-plus film that is perhaps the most ambitious combination of live action and animation since “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” in 1988. Bugs and Daffy aren’t here today -- they won’t come to life for six more months -- so for now the movie’s focus is on its live-action actors and monsters.

With an infectious laugh and a swirl of swept-back graying hair, Dante has the fast-talking energy of a cartoon schemer out of the pages of Mad magazine. If anyone was born to make a comedy populated with the entire gallery of Warner Bros. cartoon characters, from the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote to Tweety, Sylvester and the Tasmanian Devil, it’s Dante, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of cartoon movie history and has already worked cartoon characters into nearly all of his movies, which include “The Howling,” “Gremlins,” “Innerspace” and “Small Soldiers.” “Looney Tunes” is such a vast undertaking that even after Dante finishes his 68-day shoot later this month, the film will be in post-production for nearly a year as animators create the cartoon characters and a visual-effects team assembles roughly 1,200 special-effects shots. The film’s current release date -- Nov. 14, 2003 -- speaks volumes about its position in the Warner Bros. firmament. 2003 is the year Warner Bros. doesn’t have a “Harry Potter” film, so it’s counting on “Looney Tunes” to provide the studio with a big holiday season family hit.

“Warners is looking at this picture as a way of helping the studio own the Christmas season next year,” explains Bernie Goldman, one of the film’s producers. “And at a studio, let’s face it, there’s nothing better than a family-friendly franchise filled with characters that people love and adore.”

In the last few years, Warner Bros. has been Hollywood’s most single-minded franchise factory, persuaded that franchise films, though rarely artistically satisfying, represent the safest way for a media conglomerate to wring extra profits out of its home video, cable TV and consumer products subsidiaries. In addition to “Harry Potter,” the studio has been churning out sequels to “Cats and Dogs,” “Scooby-Doo,” “The Whole Nine Yards” and “Analyze This,” as well as new “Superman” and “Three Stooges” movies and remakes of such films as “The In-Laws” and “Around the World in 80 Days.”

Spirit of anarchy

When it comes to “Looney Tunes,” the brash spirit of anarchy that populates the original cartoons seems to have infected the otherwise blandly efficient Warner Bros. assembly line. In fact, the more time you spend on the set, the more you feel like you’ve stumbled onto a bunch of guys who’ve somehow convinced a studio to let them spend $100 million on a madcap Marx Brothers movie.

For years, the studio has been trying to revive the Looney Tunes characters, who were largely wasted in “Space Jam,” a 1996 film that made them Michael Jordan sidekicks. The characters remained dormant until “Simpsons” writer-producer Larry Doyle pitched Warner Bros. last year on the idea of making a new collection of “Looney Tunes” short films. After agreeing to move ahead, the studio asked him to take a whack at a feature too.

“The problem in the past was that the studio wanted all of the characters to go through personal growth and have a character arc, but cartoon characters don’t change. That’s part of their appeal,” explains Doyle, who has a team of writers from “The Simpsons,” “Futurama” and “King of the Hill” producing a dozen six-minute shorts that will debut early next year in front of Warner Bros. features.

Doyle says his script is like one for an old Marx Brothers or Hope-Crosby movie. “They were comedians who had the same persona in each film; it was just the places and story that changed.” He laughs. “I’m sure from the studio point of view, this is a plane crash waiting to happen, but I guess they’ve had to relax a little now, since we’re already shooting.”

After Doyle fleshed out a treatment, a separate team of writers, John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, wrote a first-draft script. Doyle did a second draft that got the movie up and running. Since then, the studio has brought in other writers to polish and punch up jokes. Holding a sheaf of new script pages, Dante cackles, “One day I even got a rewrite for something I’d already shot!”

Dante’s jest sounds like a line of dialogue right out of the script, which is crammed with mocking in-jokes about moviemaking. The story line, such as it is, focuses on Bugs’ jealous rival, Daffy Duck, who lobbies the studio’s vice president of comedy, played by Elfman, to turn a new Bugs comedy into a starring vehicle for Daffy. Elfman orders D.J. the Security Guard, played by Fraser, to eject Daffy from the lot. This leads the characters on a quest for the fabled Blue Monkey Diamond, which is also being sought by an evil corporate overlord, played by Steve Martin, and by D.J.’s dad, the dashing star of a James Bond-style spy film series, who is played by onetime “Bond” star Timothy Dalton.

The script lampoons Warner Bros.’ obsession with sequels (one scene has Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, dressed as toddlers, in a poster for the film “Lethal Weapon Babies: Nap Time’s Over”). Elfman’s studio exec character refers to Bugs as a studio “core asset,” saying, “I was brought in to leverage your synergy.” When things are looking particularly grim for the cartoon heroes, Elfman barks into her cell phone: “Sell all my Warner Bros. stock! I got an inside tip that Daffy Duck is about to die!” Daffy retorts: “Ha! So you do think I’m worth something to the franchise!”

As you can tell by the smart-aleck gags, this is not a movie just for fourth-graders. The Looney Tunes characters have a lot more in common with Bart Simpson and Groucho Marx than with the more homogenized sweetness of recent movie animation. “Most of the humor in the original Looney Tunes cartoons was for adults,” Dante explains. “It’s only in recent years that cartoon characters were juvenalized. My 10-year-old niece can watch one of Tex Avery’s Bugs cartoons from 1943 and still laugh.”

Brendan Fraser has no illusions; he knows who’s going to get the big laughs. “You never get a punch line in a movie with a cartoon character,” he says with a grin. “You are the punch line. You just try to make sure your eyes aren’t crossed.”

Acting with a puppeteer

It’s a particularly difficult style of comedy to pull off, because the film is being shot before the real stars -- Bugs, Daffy and company -- have materialized. At rehearsals, Fraser and Elfman play scenes with a puppeteer, who acts out the cartoon character’s part, armed with a life-sized rubber version of Bugs or Daffy. When the camera rolls, Fraser and Elfman are on their own. “You have to use your imagination,” says Fraser. “But that’s what makes it exciting.”

Before shooting each scene, Dante ponders: How much time does the cartoon character need to, say, jump off a chair, grab a fork and run out of the room? “Cartoons are fast,” says Dante. “So the live action has to adhere to the cartoon rhythm without seeming too manic.” Size and perspective are also a big issue. “The actors are 6 feet tall and the cartoon characters are 3 feet tall,” Dante explains. “So it’s always a challenge to get everyone’s heads in the same shot.”

Dante knows he wasn’t the studio’s first choice -- he’s directed only two features in the last 10 years -- but it’s hard to imagine someone without his wealth of experience and affection for the material handling the movie’s daunting technical challenges. “I think some of this would’ve been pretty difficult for the hot-shot music video director they originally had in mind,” he says. “Just before I was offered the picture, [legendary Warner Bros. animator] Chuck Jones passed away, and I felt it was the right thing to do. I didn’t want the picture to fall into the wrong hands.”

“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.