November 20–27, 1997
critical mass
movies
No wonder there were some heated discussions over the Anastasia script—it's not easy to render the bloody story of the Romanov massacre for young kids, especially when you have to keep stopping for songs.
Bruce Graham and daughter Kendall.
Julia Lehman/City Paper
Battle Royal
Local playwright Bruce Graham enters the cartoon kingdom as co-writer of Anastasia.
When you're a serious playwright whose first screenwriting credit was Dunston Checks In—"the Citizen Kane of orangutan movies"—it helps if you have a razor-sharp sense of humor. Bruce Graham, as local and regional theater audiences know, has few equals in that department. But even though he's now associated with a film that's decidedly more noteworthy—he co-wrote the animated Anastasia, opening this weekend—he's not about to diss Dunston.
"I have a 'Dunston Room' in my house," says the Media-based author of such plays as Desperate Affection and Belmont Avenue Social Club. "We knocked off this little tiny crappy porch we had and made this glass-enclosed hot-tub/bar with a totally tiled, heated floor area 'cause I got my name on the screen from that bonus. And over the bar is the movie poster. And so when people come over and they're sittin' in my hot tub bustin' my balls about aw you used to write serious plays, well? kiss the monkey's butt, pal."
Graham's house will apparently not be overrun with monkey's-butt theme rooms: With Anastasia and several other promising projects in development or pre-production—none of them starring lower primates—his screenwriting career is heading for a higher, classier profile. Additionally, his latest play, Coyote on a Fence, is getting ready to open in New York.
Graham is one of four writers credited for Anastasia, though he says he was calling the shots from day one.
"Fox Family Films sent me an early draft of the story," he recalls, "and I read through it and said I'm really wrong for this; I think you should have a woman write this. It's a woman's story, she's the main character; I don't know what it's like to want to be a princess."
He recommended Susan Gauthier, a veteran TV writer who'd written for Carol Burnett and Tracey Ullman, but was soon persuaded to collaborate along with her on the screenplay. Long after the two of them delivered their product, two other writers, Bob Tzudiker and Noni White (collaborators on The Hunchback of Notre Dame), worked on the script, making small cuts or paraphrases here and there.
From the film: Anastasia (not "Russian Revolution Barbie") with her grandmother and Bartok, Rasputin's albino bat sidekick.
Though Graham is obviously peeved at the listing of these two as co-writers, he shrugs it off. "I'm not going to take it to arbitration," he says, noting that thanks to Walt Disney, "animation is not covered under the Writers' Guild."
As if to prove his level of involvement in the movie's inception, he shows me a transcript of one of the early story meetings between him, Gauthier and Anastasia's producers, notably Don Bluth and Gary Goldman. He freely (and frequently) admits to being "obnoxious" in such sessions, and points out examples of such behavior in the transcript.
It's no wonder there were some heated discussions over the Anastasia script—it's not easy to render the bloody story of the Romanov massacre for young kids, especially when you have to keep stopping for songs.
"The biggest problem," he notes, "was that animated musicals are now the only three-act musical form left. And think about it: Rodgers and Hammerstein had three hours to do it in—we have 90 minutes, max."
Second to that problem, of course, is the fact that they were going up against Disney. This was a type of story Disney would probably never even attempt, yet the final product would be measured against the Big Mouse's glib, multimillion-dollar blockbusters. It had to be not only good but different.
"We so specifically wanted not to imitate Disney," he explains. "We went through these meetings saying, you can't do that, Disney did it. Can't do that, Disney did it."
First and foremost, they wanted a hero with human foibles and a human countenance. Though the Anastasia who survives the massacre is only a legendary figure, she is grounded in 20th-century reality. They certainly didn't want to do a latter-day Pocahontas, replacing Disney's "Native American Barbie" with a "Russian Revolution Barbie."
"Susan [Gauthier] was adamant about that [distinction]," he recalls with a characteristic chortle. "She'd say, 'That girl was missing ribs! How'd she get her ribs removed in 1600?'"
Graham had the most fun with the character Bartok, the reluctant sidekick of the villain Rasputin. Bartok, a clumsy albino bat voiced by Hank Azaria, serves as a nervous foil to Rasputin's overblown malevolence; Graham wrote him with Woody Allen in mind. If the notion of Woody doing voice work for a feature cartoon seems unlikely, Graham reports that there's already one in the works? for Disney.
"Everybody's in this thing," he says with a hint of envy, "Danny Glover, Gene Hackman? I think because everybody's got kids now, suddenly animation is the hot thing to do for your kids. We met with Meg Ryan [who voices Anastasia], and she was very intrigued with the whole process, but also the fact is that she's got a young kid at home, and she thought it would be cool to do—we all want to do something to impress our kids. You know, when I did, say, Devil's Own [which Graham rewrote but was uncredited for], my kid couldn't see it, my kid wasn't impressed."
"I wasn't either, to tell you the truth," he adds ruefully. Graham's young daughter, who he says is "definitely in that little princess mode," will surely be impressed by this work with its vivid, dramatic storytelling. But does he worry she might learn her "history" from this?
"I don't lose any sleep over it," he confides. "The party line is that while this version may not be true, it will get kids interested in finding out the real story." Leaving the party line, he talks at some length about the complexities of mixing fairy-tale-style princesses with the violent history of the Russian Revolution, and winds up on somewhat of a tangent:
"When I originally balked at doing this, I said, 'You don't understand, I think royalty are absolutely useless! I would have been one of those people out at the gates there!' When I hear people sobbing, 'Oh Princess Diana, oh'? I love the fact that these idiots signed all these books and they threw them in an incinerator! I am so glad those morons stood in line for 12 hours? What the hell—these people [royalty] are better than us? Are you kidding, with that interbreeding? How can any family with those ears be better than me?" Then again, maybe it's not a tangent. Who has bigger ears, after all, than the icon of America's animation dynasty?
Graham and his cohorts are at the gates already. While they may not bring on the revolution, a lot of people will be forced to question the stability of the established order. And that's something that will, no doubt, make Bruce Graham chortle in his beer.
Anastasia opens at area theaters on Friday, Nov. 21. For Vance Lehmkuhl's review and a list of theaters showing the film, see this week's Movie Shorts.
