The Prince And The Promoter

By KIM MASTERS

Val Kilmer, in black sweats and no shoes, sits in a darkened sound studio. On the other side of the glass, Jeffrey Katzenberg watches nervously, clutching a toy red-and-yellow football. Today Kilmer is recording the voice of Moses, and Katzenberg is unflaggingly attentive as the famously temperamental actor dubs dialogue for the most personal high-stakes film that Katzenberg--former chairman of the Disney studio and a founder of DreamWorks SKG--has ever been involved in making, the eagerly anticipated animated epic The Prince of Egypt. Kilmer is not in the upbeat mood that the scene requires. He started off well enough--"It's fun to be Moses," he said at one point--but everyone in the control room can feel his spirits sagging.

"Fun, fun, fun," Katzenberg repeats. "I'm trying to enjoy myself," Kilmer answers moodily. The toys that Katzenberg brought to amuse the actor are not working. "You may want to stand up and get in the physical thing of it," Katzenberg says to Kilmer. "He ain't going to stand up," someone in the booth observes. Things go downhill from there, in a session that is something of a metaphor for the gargantuan struggle to make The Prince of Egypt.

The film is Katzenberg's beloved baby, and he has been willing to do whatever it takes--coaxing, coddling, bullying, praying, crawling on his belly--to make it a success. Before The Prince of Egypt opens on Dec. 18, he will have circled the globe--visiting six countries in six days in November and nine in 11 days in December--to publicize the film in some of the more than 50 countries where it will debut this month. He has met with nearly 700 clerics and scholars, journeyed to the Vatican, and addressed groups ranging from some faculty members of the Harvard divinity school (to seek their wisdom) to 4,000 Wal-Mart employees in Texas (to inspire them to sell a special Prince of Egypt promotional package). As the opening draws near, he is in an agony of suspense--a fact that he blurts out to virtually anyone. "I'm scared," he says plaintively.

Katzenberg, who during his 10 years at Disney was involved with the making of cartoon hits from The Little Mermaid through The Lion King, believes he has everything to prove. For years, he was known as "the golden retriever"--the superefficient executive who, revved up on diet soda, worked from dawn to dinner. But the nickname contained an implicit insult: Can a dog--even a clever dog--be creative?

The overall quality of the live-action pictures that Disney cranked out under Katzenberg made that a fair question. But when it came to animation, the dog had his day. After initial indifference, Katzenberg fell in love with the medium. Disney's animated films climbed an arc that peaked in 1994 with the $755 million that The Lion King grossed worldwide. But that film opened just weeks before Katzenberg was ejected in a play for advancement that went sour. Disney's subsequent cartoons--Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Hercules--failed to replicate that level of success. Was it animation burnout, or was Katzenberg the one with the Midas touch?

Obviously, Katzenberg hopes that The Prince of Egypt will answer the latter question affirmatively. It is a wish intensified by the fact that he is in the midst of a contentious legal battle against Disney chairman Michael Eisner, the man who didn't think Katzenberg was good enough to be his second-in-command. Katzenberg claims he is owed 2% of the profit from every project he put into production during his 10 years at the company--an amount that could reach $250 million or more.

Soon after he left Disney, Katzenberg formed DreamWorks with David Geffen and Steven Spielberg. He raided a goodly portion of Disney talent, including Prince of Egypt producers Penney Finkelman Cox and Sandra Rabins and composer Hans Zimmer. He readily admits that The Prince of Egypt has a special resonance for him; one of his animators has even drawn a cartoon of Katzenberg as Moses confronting Eisner as Rameses. But it's not just a matter of personal vindication. Animation is such a key part of the DreamWorks business plan that many in the industry believe a failure by The Prince of Egypt would be a bad omen for the future of the company. Katzenberg dismisses such speculation.

The Prince of Egypt was conceived, according to the DreamWorks founding trio, during the initial burst of excitement of inventing the company in 1994. In a meeting at Spielberg's house, the talk turned to animation. Spielberg said he wanted to do a project with the grandeur of The Ten Commandments. "What a great idea," Geffen said. "Let's do it."

At first, Katzenberg didn't recognize the risks of treading on such literally sacred ground. The Moses story is central to three of the world's major religions. "It is so much more complicated, so much more challenging than simply making a movie," Katzenberg says. Just putting together the script raised enough delicate questions to fill the Red Sea. How to portray the Egyptians as cruel slave masters without antagonizing the Arab world? "We were very careful with skin tones to show that the slave population was multicultural, multiethnic," says Tzivia Schwartz-Getzug, an expert in interfaith relations who was hired as liaison to the religious community. "And in the Exodus scene, you actually see some Egyptians going with the Hebrews."

The film begins with a sweeping seven-minute prologue that evokes the misery of the slaves, the grandeur of the Egyptian empire and the infant Moses' famous basket ride on the Nile, until he is rescued by the Pharaoh's wife. In the Bible, Moses is rescued by Pharaoh's daughter, but the filmmakers decided a close relationship between Pharaoh's son Rameses and an adopted brother Moses would be more compelling than their interacting as uncle and nephew. Some other dramatic devices were also invented. "We have 88 minutes to tell 70 years in the life of Moses," says Katzenberg. "We can never be a literal retelling of the Bible. We've edited God, but we have not rewritten him."

Making Moses a brother to Rameses allowed the filmmakers to deal with another sticky problem: how to make Rameses II, considered the greatest of Pharaohs, more than a one-dimensional villain. In fact, Katzenberg says, the filmmakers returned from an early field trip to Egypt so impressed with the majesty of the pyramids that "we found ourselves not wanting to simply portray Rameses as the bad guy." Casting Rameses as a contemporary of Moses' enabled the filmmakers to show him as a loving adopted brother who wants to carry on the great legacy of his father.

The voice of God was one of the more difficult choices in the film. "Every race and color and creed has a claim to the voice of God," Katzenberg says. Using an idea of producer Cox's, the animators put together a scratch track that was an eerily effective chorus of every character in the film, with the dominant voice morphing from man to woman to child. But consultant Schwartz-Getzug vetoed that approach, saying some people would be offended if the voice of God sounded--even momentarily--like a woman's. Kilmer ended up supplying the voice.

DreamWorks flew in dozens of religious experts and clergy for repeated discussions about the film. And Katzenberg did his homework, reading up so extensively on the Bible that he began to sound more like a yeshiva student than the college dropout he is. But as Katzenberg discovered, everyone's a movie critic. An elderly Fundamentalist minister didn't like the drawings; a rabbinical scholar complained that in the Bible "God has a great line" that wasn't in the film, and also objected to the fact that Moses, who should be around 80 when he returns to confront Rameses, looks too young in the film's version of the scene.

It quickly became clear that certain elements typical of Disney-style animated films would be out of place. A talking camel was cut. Comics Steve Martin and Martin Short, cast as charlatan priests, were directed to turn in subdued performances. Lucrative tie-ins were another sensitive issue. Katzenberg says, semiseriously, "We came up with the Red Sea boogie board. We had the 40-years-in-the-desert water bottle. We had the parting-of-the-Red-Sea shower curtain." But ultimately, both DreamWorks and its partner Burger King concluded that they would be doing themselves "a terrible disservice" if they pushed any kind of merchandise that would trivialize the film. Moses action figures were out. Instead, DreamWorks came up with a Wal-Mart package containing tickets to the film, a souvenir book and a sampler CD.

The Prince of Egypt is now an effects-laden extravaganza that undoubtedly cost far more than the $75 million claimed by DreamWorks. And the film seems to have the support of a goodly portion of religious communities, from liberal Christians to conservatives Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to Rabbi Norman Lamm, president of Yeshiva University, and Muslim leader Maher Hathout. "Hollywood got this one right," Falwell says. Evangelist Robert Schuller has even laid hands on Katzenberg and blessed him. The executive says he will gladly accept all the help he can get. If family audiences pause from their enjoyment of Paramount's Rugrats or Disney's A Bug's Life to commune with his version of one of the greatest stories ever told, then Katzenberg's prayers will truly have been answered.