Real monkeying around

WHEN George, the impetuous storybook monkey famous for his curiosity, finally reaches the big screen this week, there will be few outward signs that his journey into theaters has been, perhaps, his most challenging saga.

In the short, simply drawn tales that have introduced him to children for 65 years, Curious George has traveled from Africa to an American zoo, gone up in a spaceship, even signed a movie contract and played himself in a biopic. But it’s been tough going for the little monkey in the real-life world of modern Hollywood. It’s taken 16 years, 42 writers or writing teams, nine animation studios, a bevy of directors and millions of dollars to help him make his way to the multiplex.

In fact, the attempt to turn “Curious George” into a feature-length film marks one of the longest -- and possibly most exhausting -- endeavors in the history of Hollywood animation. Over the years, the “Curious George” project, developed by Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment and Universal Pictures, has reflected almost every trend in animation except anime. It’s been envisioned as a live action-drawn combination like “Osmosis Jones”; a live action-CG comedy like “Garfield”; and a computer-animated feature like “Toy Story.” Abandoning animation altogether, it’s also been conceived as a live action film with costumed actors, as in “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”

Writers with credits including “Police Academy,” “Monsters, Inc.” and “Shrek” have brought their varying sensibilities to the story of George and his friend and protector, the Man in the Yellow Hat.

And today, “Curious George” reflects none of those once-tempting paths. Instead, its makers say, it’s a sweet, uncomplicated children’s film whose plot unfolds in song and traditional “2-D” drawn animation -- a rarity in computer-happy Hollywood.

As if to make up for more than a decade of lost merchandising opportunities, Universal Studios will unleash a torrent of Curious George-themed products and programs, enough, perhaps, to push the little monkey into the high-profile pantheon of characters such as Mickey Mouse, Snoopy and Winnie the Pooh that have generated billions of dollars in licensed goods. The new-generation Curious George is debuting as a leveraged 21st century brand.

He will still grace the books, of course. But he’ll also be on the shelves at Wal-Mart, Target and similar outlets, in new lines of Curious George toys, clothing, games and toys. At upscale department stores and specialty boutiques, the classic Curious George characters will appear on Raw 7 cashmere sweaters for $398, Leslie Newton handbags and accessories for $48 to $330, and Puchi pet accessory bags for $265.

PBS will bring the franchise even more exposure this fall, when it broadcasts 30 half-hour episodes of a new animated Curious George show aimed at preschool children. The series, narrated by William H. Macy, will introduce preschoolers to basic concepts in math, science and engineering technology. Airing five days a week, it’s expected to reach 93 million homes.

As for the feature film, Universal Pictures is rolling it out Friday in theaters nationwide. Perhaps unavoidably, after kicking around Hollywood for so long, this George has had a little work done -- he now has eyeballs, for instance.

But studio officials say the new-look character will be more accessible to children, while not losing his appeal to the parents and grandparents who grew up reading their young ones the classic stories of H.A. and Margret Rey. If they’re right, they’ll have solved the daunting problem at the center of “Curious George’s” long, strange adventure.

Big plans unfulfilled

PLUCKY George, like a certain celebrity rodent, was once envisioned as the public face of a corporation. Five years ago, after the French media giant Vivendi bought Universal, then-chairman and CEO Jean-Marie Messier announced plans to use him as the company icon.

“There were, at various times, bigger tent-pole ambitions for Curious George,” says Stacey Snider, chairman of Universal Pictures. But those ambitions proved “too hard to fulfill.”

The studio quickly realized that a number of hurdles stood between it and its desire to position George to step into the shoes of Woody Woodpecker and the stable of animated characters Walter Lanz had created for Universal in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Obstacle No. 1: Making the curious structure of George’s stories work as a movie.

The Curious George books are all variations on one basic scenario: George’s inquisitive nature leads him into trouble. His friend, the Man in the Yellow Hat, helps him get out of it. The end. No lessons, no real character development, just a relationship that George, and his readers, can count on.

The stories, says Snider, have a “timeless graspability” for young children, which translates to the lasting popularity that attracted Universal. “Unlike other children’s properties, Curious George doesn’t get corny,” she says. “Even as you grow older, you don’t fall out of love with him.”

But once you try to take him off the page, a couple of potential problems come into bold relief: George doesn’t speak, so other characters have to do it for him by reacting to his antics. And his stories, in the parlance, have no arc.

Legions of imaginations over the years struggled to make a movie that could blossom within those constraints. According to the Writers Guild of America, West, the list includes Brad Bird (“The Incredibles”), William Goldman (“The Princess Bride”), Pat Proft (“Police Academy”), Babaloo Mandel and Lowell Ganz (“A League of Their Own”), Joe Stillman (the two “Shrek” features), and Daniel Gerson and Rob Baird (“Monsters, Inc.”). The number who tried was enormous, even by contemporary Hollywood standards.

“I don’t think all of us wanted to go through all the writers we did,” says David Kirschner, one of the producers on the film. “The first script I worked on and was closely involved with was by Mike Werb (‘Face/Off’),” he says. “It was pretty good. ... Pat Proft did a [live-action] draft on this that had a lot of really funny, funny stuff, but in the end, what we really wanted was the special relationship between this man and this little monkey. As simple as those pages are, and they look like a rather short children’s book, it was really difficult to capture the innocence of that.

“There was also a great script done by Brad Bird [before] he got a call from Pixar and had this amazing opportunity to direct ‘The Incredibles,’ ” Kirschner adds. “At that point, the studio said.... Maybe it should be in 2-D.’”

David Brewster, who joined the production in fall 2003 as animation supervisor, recalls that “something like 16 writers” went through while he was there “and I don’t know how many storyboard artists.”

The film’s odyssey was highly out of the ordinary in his experience. “I never heard of a production going 16 years in search of the story,” he says. “Usually they start with a story and end up searching for design and casting and that sort of thing.”

After more than a year of working on a script commissioned from Goldman under then-director Jun Falkenstein, Brewster says Imagine and the studio fired the director and brought in Matthew O’Callaghan, who completely revamped the story, bringing it back to its original source material.

Brewster says Goldman’s script seemed darker and more adult: “We referred to it as ‘Furious George.’ ”

In that version, a character named Ivan the Doorman was afraid George was going to attack him and bite his nose off. “This was the central problem,” Brewster says. “They were trying to create something that had the feel of the book but wasn’t like the book.” (Goldman declined to comment.)

Coming up with the story

THE next pass through the story was more productive.

“When Matt came on,” says Brewster, “he locked himself in a conference room with [screenwriter] Ken Kaufman and hashed out the story in two weeks.” The film’s final writing credits have Kaufman and Mike Werb receiving a “story by” credit.

O’Callaghan says that producer Howard took him into a meeting with Kaufman, who had worked with Howard on the live-action western “The Missing,” and, after acknowledging the problems with previous scripts, asked them for their take on the story.

“We sat in a room for a couple of weeks, we sort of took some elements from the existing structure and created new characters, simplified things, put our heads together and came up with what ultimately was the story of the film,” he says.

The final script, according to O’Callaghan, contains certain iconic moments from the books that people remember: George flying away with a bunch of balloons, George flying a kite, George painting the interior of an apartment to make it look like a jungle, George getting into a rocket ship, George at the zoo.

Will Ferrell was brought on board as the voice of the Man in the Yellow Hat -- now called “Ted” -- who takes George from his native jungle to the big city, and with that kind of star power, O’Callaghan says, he realized that they couldn’t just “bookend” the movie with his appearances, as it is done in some of the books. “You couldn’t introduce his character at the beginning of a 70-minute movie, let George run the course of the whole movie, and then again bring in Will Ferrell. So what I think we wanted to do was make kind of a buddy movie.

“We know that in the books, the Man in the Yellow Hat goes to Africa, he brings back George, and now George is like a fish out of water, a typical monkey in the city,” he continues. “And I think we wanted to stay true to that. By the end of the movie, the man has accepted him and gets a companion who understands his innocence and curiosity rather than a monkey who is obnoxious and mischievous.”

The studio filled out the cast with voice talent including Drew Barrymore, Eugene Levy, Dick Van Dyke and Joan Plowright, and in a move it views as a real coup, it hired Hawaii-born musician and surfer Jack Johnson to supply original songs.

Kathy Nelson, president of film music at Universal Pictures, says she learned that Johnson, who recently scored Grammy nominations for pop singing and for his work with the Black Eyed Peas, was “obsessed by Curious George.” Johnson wrote 13 songs for the soundtrack album, nine of which are included in the film.

“Music is so important to the movie,” Nelson says. “Our main character doesn’t speak. He makes little noises. He squeaks. ... Since George doesn’t speak, Jack decided he wanted to be the voice of George. So his songs provide the narrative.”

Story in place, the rush was on to animate it. “At some point ... well before I came on the project, they decided to make it traditional animation, which I think, having been through the process, was the right move,” says O’Callaghan. “If you throw out a really sophisticated rendered George, people will say, ‘Wait a minute. That doesn’t look like the book.’ ”

Universal had originally planned to have about 40% of the work done in the L.A. area, but because so much time had been spent on previous versions, the final film had to be made at a breakneck pace to meet the release date of February 2006. So most of the work was farmed out to eight studios on three continents. Animators from Canada, France, Taiwan and Korea contributed to the final product.

It’s not uncommon to divide up animation tasks that way, especially as the Internet and video conferencing make it easier to collaborate across time zones. But it’s a process that’s worlds away from the tight, long-term teamwork that produced landmark animated features like “The Lion King” in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Ken Tsumura, one of the film’s four credited executive producers, came on board only last April.

“I was brought on to help the production, basically just to get the picture done,” Tsumura says. “They needed more horsepower to jump-start it ... .”

Universal officials say the film cost “under $50 million,” but that figure has raised eyebrows within the animation community, where there’s skepticism that it could cover the current film, let alone the earlier attempts.

Roots of the project

IT’S been a long slog for the film’s producers, Jon Shapiro, Kirschner and Howard, who was stepping into his first animated project. Shapiro contacted Margret Rey about turning her books into a feature film in 1990.

“I promised I would be responsible to her and the character for finding others like myself who wanted to make the best version of ‘Curious George’ possible,” Shapiro says. “Ron Howard personally explained his love for the book and its characters and how he felt it would make a terrific movie and how he, himself, would be involved personally” to ensure the movie was done right.

Notably missing from the current list of producers is Brian Grazer, Howard’s partner at Imagine, who was involved with the film for more than a decade. Back in 1990, Grazer “came to my home for lunch and we chatted about a lot of things,” Kirschner says. “One of the things we discussed was ‘Curious George.’ In theory, [Grazer] thought it would be great for Imagine.”

When Imagine took on the project, Grazer said he had read the books as a child and come away thinking George was “the coolest.” He said he’d introduced his then-4 1/2 -year-old son, Riley, to the cartoon character and announced that Howard and his kids were “major” George fans.

But by 2002, Grazer’s mood seemed to have changed. He told The Times: “It’s been really hard for me. I tried to do it live action, then mixed media, then live action with digital effects, then I realized it might look old-fashioned.”

Grazer did not return phone calls seeking his comments. Howard, the studio says, has been busy working on his latest film, “The Da Vinci Code.”

A certain stoic weariness sets in as executives look back on the marathon process of arriving at the movie, which is yet to be seen by critics but clearly hit its mark with the 8-and-under set that cheered as Curious George came to life at a recent screening.

Asked how so many writers could be attached to one film, Universal’s Snider concedes that “it is rare that you have so many conceptual approaches to a move.” She adds: “We had chances to make this movie many times over the years. We didn’t until it was the right movie.”

There were many “blind alleys” as the film wandered from CG to live-action combinations to 2-D, she says: “I do think there was a lot of experimentation and debate on the general direction of the movie.”

Shapiro points to the painstaking (and painful) process of finding the right tone for the film. “We could have produced a movie based on the very first script that was written,” he said. “This is a little bit like that commercial, ‘There will be no wine before its time.’ I have to take my hat off to the studio, which stuck with this project.”

Marketplace visibility

UNIVERSAL never pushed him to create scenes with the sole intent to “sell Happy Meals” or a new line of Curious George toys, O’Callaghan says. But as the marketing machinery rolls into place, it’s clear that one of the engines keeping the project alive over 16 years was the vision of just such spinoffs. And there will be plenty. Licensing deals for “Curious George” have reportedly topped $500 million.

Expect the postage stamp and cellphone, the cereal box and cold-medicine promotions, the Curious George stickers on 100 million Dole bananas, and even a bit of product placement: In the film, when George is brought from jungle to city, he’s sitting on a crate of Dole bananas on the cargo ship.

Beth Goss, executive vice president of Universal Studios consumer products group, notes that for decades George, as “wasn’t really managed” as a brand.

“Somebody would call a licensing agent and say, ‘Oh, I want to do such and such,’ and maybe that licensing agent could get it sold into the mom-and-pop store on the corner,” Goss says. “There wasn’t anybody who had taken a real look at the property and said, ‘There’s a legacy for it ... that has value. As a studio, we saw that.”

Since acquiring the rights to Curious George from publisher Houghton Mifflin in 1997, Universal has licensed the monkey to more than 100 vendors worldwide who are churning out all things Curious George in a two-tier character line.

High-end stores will continue to stock the traditional George, but at Kmart and similar stores, he’ll have a slightly different look, with eyes that look more like eyes, for instance.

“This George is also a monkey,” Goss says of the new line of toys, “ ... but this George is meant to feel like a friend. The classic George was never really a play pattern, it was a story pattern. You understood George and you put him into situations, but you never really put yourself in there with George.”

Today, “play patterns” abound. One stuffed monkey called “Tickle ‘n Giggle Curious George” has six tickle spots so that when a child touches a spot, the monkey giggles.

It goes for $24.99.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

George on their mind

Travel back in time for scenes from the long, complicated journey undertaken to get “Curious George” on the screen.

1990: Producers Jon Shapiro and David Kirschner confer with Margret Rey and convince her that Hollywood can make a quality movie based on the classic children’s stories she wrote with her husband, H.A. Rey.

June 1990: Imagine Entertainment secures the rights for “Curious George” and plans a live-action feature, to be produced jointly with Hanna-Barbera Productions. Imagine Co-Chairman Brian Grazer tells The Times that he read “Curious George” as a child and introduced his son Riley to the character. Ron Howard (his partner at Imagine) and his kids, he says, are also “major” George fans.

September 1997: Universal Studios Consumer Products Group acquires licensing rights to “Curious George” from publisher Houghton Mifflin.

March 1998: Larry Guterman, who directed several sequences of DreamWorks’ “Antz,” is signed to direct. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the project “should get underway in July.”

January 1999: Daily Variety reports that “Curious George” has been put in turnaround at Universal. That week, Variety publishes a correction stating “Universal Pictures says that the epic continues to be ‘in active development’ at the studio.”

November 1999: Universal Pictures and Imagine are reported to be finalizing a deal with “The Iron Giant” director Brad Bird to develop the feature version of “Curious George” as a combination of live action and CG.

July 2001: The runaway success of DreamWorks’ “Shrek” prompts Universal and Imagine to shift “Curious George” to CG.

December 2001: Universal is in negotiations with “Monsters, Inc.” co-director David Silverman to direct an all-CG adaptation of “Curious George.”

June 2002: Imagine signs Michael McCullers (co-writer of “Undercover Brother” and “Austin Powers in Goldmember”) to write the script.

August 2002: Grazer is reported to be still “chipping away” at the problem of getting “Curious George” to the big screen.

January 2003: Hanna-Barbera Productions Inc. and Shapiro, who acquired the rights to “Curious George” in 1989, sue Universal City Studios Inc. and Imagine for breaching a contract to pay them more than 1% of merchandising fees related to the monkey.

September 2003: Universal had first announced (on Aug. 8, 2003) a release date of Oct. 7, 2005, for the movie, but when DreamWorks positions the Wallace and Gromit movie a week earlier, Universal shifts “George” to Nov. 4, 2005.

September 2003: Will Ferrell signs to provide the voice of the Man in the Yellow Hat. Jun Falkenstein will direct from a screenplay by McCullers, Daniel Gerson, Rob Baird and Joe Stillman.

November 2003: Universal Home Entertainment Products says it is developing an animated preschool television series based on the Curious George character in conjunction with Imagine and PBS affiliate WGBH in Boston.

The TV version will be animated and voiced by a different team than the theatrical films.

March 2004: The movie’s credits reflect still more change. McCullers has been dropped, Karey Kirkpatrick added.

May 2004: Jim Whitaker is promoted to president of production at Universal-based Imagine Films and is reportedly overseeing the production of “Curious George.”

August 2004: Director Falkenstein released from the project; Matt O’Callaghan succeeds her. Release date is moved to February 2006.

October 2004: Daily Variety notes that Steve Bencich and Ron J. Friedman have rewritten “Curious George.”

February 2005: Universal Studios Consumer Products Group announces a worldwide licensing agreement with Toy Biz, a division of Marvel Enterprises Inc. Toy Biz will act as the master preschool toy licensee for the feature film and PBS series based on Curious George.

March 2005: Variety publishes a two-page ad announcing the commencement of principal animation on the “Curious George” film and confirms that the voice cast will include Drew Barrymore, David Cross, Eugene Levy, Dick Van Dyke, Joan Plowright and Ed O’Ross.

-- Robert W. Welkos

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

A husband and wife’s literary creation

He had been a bathtub salesman, she an art student, German Jews from Hamburg who’d met briefly as children and reunited years later while working in Rio de Janeiro.

Their names were Hans Augusto Rey and Margarete Elisabeth Waldstein -- but the world would forever know them as the husband-and-wife literary team of H.A. and Margret Rey, creators of one of the most beloved characters in children’s literature: Curious George.

As the story goes, Hans and Margret were married in Rio in 1935 and moved to Paris after falling in love with the city during their European honeymoon. A French publisher noticed some newspaper cartoons Hans had drawn of a giraffe and backed his first children’s book, “Raffy and the Nine Monkeys” (known in American and British editions as “Cecily G. and the Nine Monkeys”).

But on the morning of June 14, 1940, German troops advanced on Paris. Hans and Margret, knowing they had to escape, set out on two bicycles he had cobbled together from spare parts. Wearing only warm coats and carrying a bit of food and five manuscripts -- one of which was “Curious George” -- they rode for four days until they reached the French-Spanish border. They sold their bikes for train fare to Lisbon, and from there they made their way to Brazil and then New York City, eventually settling in Cambridge, Mass.

“Curious George” was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1941. It has sold more than 25 million copies.

In their books, Hans usually was in charge of the ideas and illustrations while Margret handled the plot and the writing, but their publisher notes that their lines of responsibility were often blurred.

Hans died in 1977 and Margret in 1996.

-- R.W.W.