WHAT WENT WRONG - Shrek (Part 1)

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

Katzenberg's quest for revenge! The death of a beloved giant! A magical kingdom under siege! In Part 1 of our Shrek coverage, Chris & Lizzie explore the revolutionary film's humble origins as DreamWorks' inaugural "B movie" and try to determine what, exactly, the film would have been with its original star, Chris Farley. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong. This is, of course, your favorite podcast that just so happens to be about movies and how nearly impossible it is to make any of them, let alone a good one. And my understanding is that we have a real whopper for us today. So, Chris, I'm ready to get Shrek. How are you doing? Yeah. That is actually a verb that will come up in this podcast today. How could it not? I'm great. I am very excited to be discussing the 2000. one animated masterpiece, also known as Shrek.

Before we begin, Lizzie, had you ever seen this film before, I would have to imagine, yes. What were your thoughts upon watching it? And what were your thoughts upon re-watching it? Obviously, yes, I have seen Shrek before. As a child of the late 80s, early 90s, I feel that this is a seminal film for many of us. And, you know, I loved it then. I loved it now. It's definitely one of these sort of magical movies that kids can enjoy that is equally as funny for parents.

And honestly, feels geared towards parents. Like, this doesn't really feel like it's for kids, which is great. The only thing that I will say upon rewatching this time is that I was very grossed out by the amount of earwax and bodily fluids that happened in the first act. Otherwise, chef's kiss, but didn't love that. Well, that's probably the most lore-accurate component of the film. Because the film is based on a children's book, which we'll get to. We're the same age. And, well, you're six months younger than me, but we're the same generation.

And like you, I was about 12 when Shrek dropped. And I vividly remember thinking, I am too old to go to an animated fairy tale movie at age 12. I really thought I have graduated. I have watched Rated R consistently now for a couple of years. And whatever this Shrek thing is, is for children. And I went into the movie with a terrible attitude. And I absolutely lost my mind. I thought it was maybe the greatest movie I'd ever seen.

It's pretty good. Yeah, by the time Princess Fiona does the Matrix riff, like with the merry men, I was screaming and jumping in my seat with excitement. I liked it more than anyone out of my entire family. And I really enjoyed it upon rewatching it as well and researching it has only deepened my adoration for this film. Do you know what else it deepened my adoration for? Smash mouth. How could it not?

Yes. Which we will get somebody we will get to. And that's a very interesting part of this journey. The whole Shrek soundtrack is really remarkable. Yeah. I owned the soundtrack in early 2000s. It's great. There are a couple of songs in there that we will get to because there are a couple of songs on the soundtrack that either don't appear in the film or it's a different version in the film.

Yes, we noticed a big one. So I will wait until we get there. But I had a weird moment where we heard the song in the movie and I was like, this is not what I remembered. A little Mandela effects. Yes. Yeah, we will get there. All right. Before we dive in, two brief points of housekeeping.

First of all, this is a two-part episode, folks. Shrek is an incredibly well-explored film, and there is an absolute plethora of information available online and in book form. We have done our best to condense all of it into two tight episodes. Of course, if you are interested in learning more about Shrek upon completing this podcast, I would highly recommend The Men Who Would Be King by Nicole Leport. on the rise and fall of Dreamworks, Disney War by James B. Stewart, on the political intrigue and high-stakes corporate warfare inside and out Disney during the 80s and 90s and early 2000s,

making tunes inside the most popular animated TV shows and movies by Alan Newark, as well as, of course, incredible retrospectives by The Ringer, Empire, Entertainment Weekly Rolling Stone, and more, along with some great interviews I found as well. All right, let's talk about the details. Shrek is a computer-animated fantasy comedy. It was released on May 18, 2001 by DreamWorks Pictures. It was directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jensen, written by Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Joe Stillman, and Roger Shulman, and based on the children's book, Shrek, written and illustrated by William Stig. Produced by Jeffrey Katzenberg, most notably, the film stars Mike Myers,

Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, and John Lithgow, and as always, here is the IMDB logline for the film. A mean lord exiles fairy tale creatures to the swamp of a grumpy ogre who must go on a quest and rescue a princess for the Lord in order to get his land back. Spot on. Pretty good. Yeah. I feel like these are getting better. Little eminent domain, little BLM land dispute, Bureau of Land Management, not the other BLM. Yeah, it's a good tight log line. I think the movie is very simple, rewatching it. It's a really nice, tight 90 minutes.

Yes. Which I appreciated. I did not even like remember the actual plot of this movie, I think, because it's not particularly important as a kid when you're watching it. Exactly. It's a very out and back fetch quest that uses that as an opportunity to skewer anything and everything along its way. All right, Lizzie, Shrek, much like its titular hero, is a movie that many underestimated, including, as we'll discuss, its very creators, to a certain extent. This is a Hollywood fable, complete with a quest for revenge, the death of a beloved giant, and a true fairy tale ending. This is Shrek. Once upon a time, there was a jester of a man named William Styg.

His parents, Jewish immigrants from a land now known as Ukraine, had crossed a continent and ocean to ensure that young William would be born and bred in Brooklyn, New York in the year 1907. Raised by socialists, his parents. In fact, his father was a man after Lloyd Dobler's heart of Say Anything, Stig went into the arts because, as he later said, his father believed that you were being exploited if you worked a regular or ordinary kind of job, and if you were the boss, you were exploiting others. True. So the idea was to go into the arts. When my brother Henry declared that he wanted to be a dentist, we just laughed him out of it, end quote. Oh, no. So that's stable dental income.

As a result, the Styg family didn't have a lot of money. And the Great Depression hit. And so, William sold a cartoon to the New Yorker in 1930 trying to support his family through his art. Turns out he had a pension for cartoons. Over the next 70 years, the Vaunted magazine published more than 1,500 of his drawings. His art graced over 100 of their covers. Young Stig was a wizard with a pen and had an utterly unconventional style and tone. He was a master of dark comedy and irreverence.

And of course, much of his material was therefore too dark to print. And so he also took on advertising work to make ends meet because he did have one vice, marriage. William Stig was married four times, and he paid a sizable amount of alimony as a result. He was a purist, though, and he hated ads. So in the late 60s, when he was well into old age, he began writing and illustrating children's books. So he was actually in his 60s when he began doing children's books. He found a niche in this world with stories renowned for enthralling parents and children alike. Lizzie?

One reviewer describes his books as, quote, silly and sweet as books for children, should be, but they are also unsettling, strange, and sometimes scary. Beauty and dread coexist. There is whimsy, even silliness, but also palpable anxiety, peril, and despair in Stig's world. Or maybe this is just the real world. End quote. By his 80th birthday, he was a prolific and award-winning children's book author. In fact, two of his books had been adapted into short films, Abel's Island, a short story about a mouse stranded on an island, which won the Newbury Award, and was adapted into a 30-minute short featuring the voice of Tim Curry. As a mouse.

I would love to see that. And Dr. De Soto, about a mouse dentist who must help a fox with his toothache without being eaten. Oh. Again, Newberry Honor, National Book Award, and the short was nominated for an Oscar. So, in 1990, when Stig was 83 years old, Faris Strauss and Groh published a book that, unbeknownst to anyone, would change Hollywood forever. Shrek! exclamation point. that's the official title.

Derived from the Yiddish word for fear or terror was a slight 30-page book celebrating an ugly ogre's repulsiveness. And Lizzie, I'd love to read you the first page. Great. His mother was ugly and his father was ugly. But Shrek was uglier than the two of them put together. By the time he toddled,

Shrek could spit flame a full 99 yards and vent smoke from either ear. With just a look, he cowed the reptiles in the swamp, Any snake dumb enough to bite him instantly got convulsions and died. This page features a very ugly Shrek standing next to a convulsing snake while he's smiling. Nice. So the story is very straightforward. Shrek gets kicked out of the swamp by his parents who are basically like, go make something of yourself.

He meets a witch who's like, holy, holy moly, you're disgusting. Sweet Jesus, you are so gross. She then reads him a poem where she says, you'll. meet a donkey, defeat a knight, and rescue a princess. And he goes, princess, that sounds great. He goes on his journey. He grosses some people out. He has a nightmare where he's being hugged by children. Sounds right for me, yep. Yeah, meets a donkey who can speak. They go to a castle. He defeats a knight. And then it turns out the princess is actually even uglier than he is. And he says, I love it. And they get married and have ugly children. And that is the entire story. It's very simple. And it's not something that.

necessarily screams feature film. It would be about 15 minutes long in this form. But Lizzie, what's the one rule of Hollywood? Anything can be a movie? Yeah, if it's IP, you got to go for it. Several online sources, including Vison Empire, claim that it was actually Steven Spielberg, who first optioned Shrek in 1991 by way of his since-defunct animation arm, emblemation. Yep. According to these sources, he saw the film as a cell animated, meaning 2D animated feature film that would star Bill Murray as Shrek.

No. Nope. All right. And how about one Steve Martin as donkey? Yes. Okay. I'll green light that part. Green light that one.

This is entirely possible, but none of the articles that listed this information contain a primary source. So take that with a hefty grain of salt. What we do know is that Shrek made its way to the people who would make it, not via the hustling of agents or machinations of publishers, but rather through its intended audience, children. So producer John H. Williams, not the composer, John Williams, first met Shrek through his sons.

The boys absolutely adored this foul-mouthed creature and the tales of his exploits. His nose is so great. that lightning and thunder have a conversation about how nasty it is while they're raining on him. In what way? Like boils? Yeah, it's like, it's referred to as his hot knob, which is pretty gross in the book. Yeah, no, it's definitely his nose. Anywho, convinced that there was something to this utterly bizarre anti-fairy tale that seemed to stick its nose up at the very idea of sanitizing stories for children, a la Walt Disney.

Williams brought the book into work with him one day in 1994. It was there in the newly minted offices of DreamWorks pictures that he showed the thin tome to fellow producer Lori McDonald, who then suggested that he pitched the book to their boss, Jeffrey Katzenberg, as an animated film. And lucky for John H. Williams, the only person who hated Disney more than Shrek and William Stig was Jeffrey Katzenberg.

Oh, yeah, baby. He hates it. So in the early 1990s, New York, transplant, Jeffrey Katzenberg, a diminutive, but extremely tenacious and savvy Hollywood operator, found himself on the losing side of a regime change. We'll cover Katzenberg's early years in more detail when we get to Star Trek the motion picture, but suffice it to say his rise to power was quite meteoric, beginning his journey as a lowly assistant, a page boy, one might say, to producer David Picker in 1974, Katzenberg had climbed the ranks inside of Paramount Pictures, eventually securing the position of president of production under studio head Michael Eisner.

Rout row. Katzenberg followed Eisner to Disney in 1984 when Eisner became the CEO of the Walt Disney Company. As described in an incredible, excruciating, and hilarious detail in James B. Stewart's Disney War, a book I highly recommend, The Mouse House was a Vipers Nest in the 90s, far more Game of Thrones than the happiest place on Earth. And there were those within the company who felt that Katzenberg had taken far too much credit both internally and publicly for the success of Disney animation's unexpected Renaissance in the late 80s and early 90s.

We discussed this briefly in our Emperor's New Groove episode. Yeah, we're talking Little Mermaid and then sort of culminating in the Lion King, right? Exactly. Now, to Katzenberg's credit, he'd inherited the least successful studio in Hollywood in 1984, and by the early 90s achieved box office dominance by way of, as you mentioned, Lizzie, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin, not to mention the great mouse detective who framed Roger Rabbit and the yet to be released Lion King, which would come out in 1994.

That's quite a lineup. It's an incredible lineup. Further, Beauty and the Beast had been the first animated film to be nominated for Best Picture. Wow. And Katzenberg had been the one to broker a deal between Disney and Pixar to be the distributor for the animation studio's first film, Toy Story.

Damn. On the other hand, Katzenberg was reportedly a detail-oriented tyrant was an extremely heavy hand who knew little, at least initially, about the art of animation. His management style might be described as micro. Pun. According to a Hollywood reporter article by entertainment journalist Kim Masters, Katzenberg had been angling for a promotion, specifically he wanted to be president,

the number two position under Eisner at the company, a role then occupied by Frank Wells, who Eisner was close with. Frank Wells was also the more prestigious and pedigreed of the two. He went to Stanford Law School. I don't believe Katzenberg finished college. In October of 1983, while walking together in Aspen, Katzenberg claims that Eisner told him, quote, if for any reason Frank is not here, you are the number two person and I want you to have the job,

end quote. Presumably Eisner thought, Frank's not going anywhere. Unfortunately, tragedy struck and Frank Wells died in a helicopter crash six months later on April 3rd, 1994 in Nevada. Katzenberg waited for the call of succession the following morning, apparently sitting at his phone at 6 a.m. Okay, a little fast, but all right? Yep, only to receive a midday memo from Eisner to the whole company that he would take on Wells' responsibilities himself and he was not naming a replacement. Whoa. This article, by the way, you guys have to read it. Kim Masters, the epic Disney blowup of 1994. It is salacious. Katzenberg lasted another six months, but to make a long

story short, in August of 1994, he was fired from Disney. And to add insult to injury, Eisner refused to pay out a roughly $120 million bonus that Katzenberg believed he was contractually owed. I feel like the courts later said he was contractually owed that. Ah, yeah, we'll get to that battle. So after 10 years in the mouse house, Katzenberg found himself exiled from the Magic Kingdom, betrayed by his mentor, and ready to burn the whole thing down. But he couldn't do it alone.

Eight days after being fired from Disney, Katzenberg approached Stephen Spielberg and Music Mogul, and also his mentor, David Geffen, with a risk. proposition. Let's form a new house of production power. A movie studio that the three of us would own with our respective strengths, Geffen Music, Spielberg, Live Action, Katzenberg, Animation. It was a bold concept, one that was sure to rankle the feathers of the established players, and I highly recommend the book, as I mentioned, the men who would be king for more on the intrigue surrounding the formation of this company, DreamWorks, SKG, and of course, Lizzie, what does SKG stand for? Gilbert, Katzenberg, Geffen.

Bingo. A plus for me. Let's put all of our names on it. What went wrong? L, D, C. We'll go into more detail on the studio's roots when we cover either the Prince of Egypt or ants. However, most crucial to our tale

is Katzenberg's focus at this new venture, animation. Not only was Katzenberg suing Disney for breach of contract determined to claw back that 100 plus mill that they owed him, he began poaching Disney animators left and right, offering, quote, mid-six-figure salaries and long contracts, end quote. Katzenberg was so bullish on DreamWorks animation's

prospects he'd reportedly told potential investors that the studio's animated movies would generate at least 80% of what the Lion King had, which was nearly $2 billion at that point across theatrical, home video, and ancillary markets. He was able to, as a result, raise. $2 billion in investment funds. You know, Chris, you got to have faith in yourself, and Jeffrey had that in spades. He consistently has had that in spades. Sometimes to incredible effect.

Yeah, sometimes it's quibby. But, you know, sometimes you got to spend many billions of dollars to find out that people don't want short movies. What's funny is there was actually a predecessor atopop.com. I'm not going to go into it here. We'll, I think, discuss it more when we talk DreamWorks, but it was not a dissimilar concept to Quibi at the birth of the internet around the year 2000

that also similarly flopped quite quickly. Anyway, Katzenberg's bid to disrupt the hierarchy of animated feature films was placed on the shoulders of a noble champion. And that movie was the Prince of Egypt. I love that movie. It's a beautiful... It's really gorgeous, yeah.

I will always remember the shot where they're crossing the Red Sea and lightning strikes behind the wall of water and you see the whale and silhouette. Yeah. Just, it's really an incredible film. We will cover it. The 2D animated adaptation of the Book of Exodus reflected Katzenberg's dream to tell stories with universal themes that appealed to, again, Lizzie, adults and children alike. Katzenberg later claimed the story had been with him since his days at Disney, though I also

read it with Spielberg who pitched the idea. Either way, DreamWorks had its A movie, a prestigious biblical epic. So when John H. Williams pitched Shrek, he was really going out on a limb. How would the story of a flame belching ogre who finds the ugliest princess on, quote, the surface of planet Earth, fit in with Katzenberg's vision for mature universal stories aimed at all ages? Well, maybe it wouldn't have to, at least not at first. So Katzenberg liked Shrek, and he saw in Shrek. the chance to do something different to develop a B movie at the studio, a dark and edgy film

that utilized experimental animation and featured a contained cast of no more than 17 characters. Whoops. There's more than that, right? Maybe not, I guess. No, there are. There's a lot. We'll talk final cast list. Yeah.

I will say the final film is more contained than it seems. Most of it is actually just two or three characters walking, but there are certainly more than 17 characters. The mandate from Katzenberg was clear. The Prince of Egypt was the studio's darling, but $20 million was going to be allocated to Shrek, which is way less than half of the typical animation budget at the time. It was an unconventional gambit and would require an unconventional approach,

so Katzenberg reached out to a young order of newly minted wizards with the hope that they could provide the magic he believed his film so desperately needed. Lizzie, we've talked about this young man, before, and I was a bit surprised to see him show up today. And that is future lost co-creator J.J. Abrams. What? So in the mid-1990s, Abrams was a recent Sarah Lawrence College graduate who, along with three other alumni, Lauren Somon, Andy Weisler, and future goosebumps and shark tail director

Rob Letterman, formed a computer animation collective affectionately called The Propelor Heads. I read that Abrams was more the business guy in the crew, since he was already repped or had a relationship with Michael Ovitz, and Lauren Soman was the primary animator. The propeller heads had been experimenting with a new form of 3D animation called motion capture. So a few years ahead of Lord of the Rings and Andy Circus. Yeah. Katzenberg was shown a short test they'd made called American Voyer,

which featured a cigar-smoking, pigish host of a Smarmy Celebrity Talk Show moving about. You can see at least part of it on YouTube. And it is shockingly fluid for the time. So Toy Story, for example, used plastic, rigid toys to get around having to do things like, you know, showing skin flexing and fat moving and muscle rippling, et cetera. This kind of tackled all of those problems head on to relatively impressive effect for the time. What year are we right now? Like... 1999-94. 95. Oh, wow. That's a lot earlier.

than I thought. Okay. Yeah. So John H. Williams brings Shrek in in 94. Okay. Katzenberg, I believe, is meeting with Abrams at the top of 1995. And I think this short was around the same time. So Katzenberg brings the propeller heads in-house to work on a motion capture Shrek demo, partnering them with a small group of DreamWorks artists assigned to the film. The propeller heads are over the moon.

They went from sneaking into USC after hours to use their equipment to being paid by Katzenberg and being given access to the most expensive computer animation equipment that you could possibly buy overnight. The mood around DreamWorks was much more muted. Barry Jackson, Shrek's first production designer, recalled in a 20-23 interview that he was brought into a room with a group of 20 or so other artists. Remember, these are mostly people who Kastenberg had poached

from Disney or amblemation with the promise of high salaries, long contracts, and movies like the Prince of Egypt. and he pulls out William Stig's Shrek. Yeah. And he tells them the vision. It's got to be dark, edgy, and you have no money. Suffice it to say, not everybody wanted the gig. There were people who walked out.

One animator apparently later said, quote, Shrek was essentially the story of the ugliest guy in the world who meets the ugliest woman in the world to get together and have the ugliest children. I don't understand what the problem is. That sounds like a hit. Like, why would you not greenlight it off of that? I think... I mean, I know you're being facetious, but I do think now it actually...

Well, I think now it makes sense, but at the time, when Disney has just released the Lion King, which is a retelling of Hamlet, and it's become the most successful animated film of all time, the idea of doing the opposite of that is probably fairly terrifying. And this was also, like, a relatively prestigious profession at this point with the Disney Renaissance. I mean, these were true artists making a really breathtaking art form and the idea of doing fart jokes probably didn't appeal to folks. True. I will say, I think one of the most incredible things about this movie rewatching it

is the way it depicts Princess Fiona and the message that it sends to little girls. Yeah. So I don't know. I mean, I don't know if that's in there at this point. It was not. It's not, okay. No, so that's the other. So a lot of it's more.

progressive qualities just weren't in the original book because it didn't really have much of a plot. Sure. It's a children's book. Yeah. Like Fiona, the princess in the book, didn't really need rescuing. The whole, it's more just like, she's ugly, I'm ugly. Let's have ugly babies. Even that. I like even that. Yeah, it's fun. Another interesting point is that there were many artists who were simply uninterested in participating in a computer-generated project. It seems like, from what I read, in many corners of the creative community, the rapidly evolving world of computer animation was viewed with a similar wariness as AI-generated content is today. Makes sense. But Katzenberg was

determined, it was his way or the highway, the propeller heads were in, and enough artists stuck around to give the movie a go. Plus, they did have something truly beautiful going for them, a beloved monster. It's unclear exactly when Saturday Night Live star Chris Farley was first attached to Shrek. Some sources claim it was prior to Katzenberg hiring the propeller heads. Other states that it was Farley's involvement that greenlit the film internally. Be it 1994 or 1995, the film came at a particularly turbulent, and I would imagine, lonely point, in the beloved comedic performer's career.

Across five seasons of Saturday Night Live, Farley had charmed audiences by way of his over-the-top yet relatable characters. including my personal favorite Matt Foley, motivational speaker. Of course, a van down by the river. I just can't keep his pants up. A would-be Chippendale's dancer. And of course, a version of himself on the Chris Farley show, who asks the most incredibly stupid questions of his prestigious guests. Farley's first lead role in a feature film, 1995's Tommy Boy.

I love Tommy Boy. It's a great film. We absolutely will cover it. At some point, it did, however, at the time, proved to be a critical and somewhat commercial disappointment, though it has since become a cult classic and has been very successful on home video. That same year, 1995, he was fired by NBC, or as Adam Sandler later put it, quote, asked to quit Saturday Night Live. Like Shrek, Farley had a love for bodily functions normally confined to moments of solitude. Mike Myers did later mention how Chris Farley would strip down naked and tuck his junk and do the Buffalo Bill Silence of the lambs scene quite often.

Chris Rock also said, I've probably seen, I'm paraphrasing Chris Farley's penis more than his girlfriend has. He brought an unexpected depth and pathos to the characters that he portrayed, which were often underestimated and misunderstood, and he had a physicality and a vocal quality, I would argue, that fit the bill for the character. Yes. However, unlike the final version of Shrek, Farley was also known for his deep-rooted, perhaps even self-destructive desire to entertain those around him at all times. Now, according to storyboard artists, Ken Harsha, who was a former Disney employee, it was

Farley who provided a coalescing influence on how to design Shrek, a decision that would serve as the foundation for the film to build off of. Now, this is not the final design of Shrek, which looks more like Mike Myers. However, at this point, Shrek did evolve from the very small-headed, large-limbed ogre of the original story to a somewhat more appropriately proportioned, slightly larger noggened oaf with a Tommy Boy-esque haircut. He also developed a much softer look, and he was aged down a bit. So it seems like he was more of a teenage Shrek in the original rendition.

He became a bit more human and a lot more Farley. Storyboard artist Tom Cito later said that Farley was truly committed to the project and brought an incredible intensity to the voiceover sessions. I did read in one source, and it was not a primary source, but it came up a couple times that he would often leave the sound booth dripping sweat and out of breath because he put so much into these voiceover sessions. According to Cito, there was a scene in which Shrek was supposed to be speaking with his parents While holding a bowl of snacks, Farley reportedly requested real snacks to record the scene.

He was given a bag of peanut butter M&Ms, and in one hour, he went through three of them. Oh, my God. Shrek was also imbued with a bit more of Farley's persona. I couldn't find the original drafts of the script, and it's difficult to parse the exact storyline of the Farley version or versions of the film. But according to the film's final co-director, Vicky Jensen, Shrek was, quote, very earnestly trying to fit in with the humans, end quote, in this version of the movie from the very beginning. That makes sense, yeah.

So I think because Shrek's parents were part of the story and he was rebelling against the family business of scaring people, he wanted to be a part of the human world a little bit more like the Little Mermaid. And I think Farley's personality fits that really, really well. That's the thing. There's such a sweetness to Chris Farley that that completely makes sense. And I think Mike Myers is a very different personality. But yeah, Chris Farley just seem to have a heart of gold. Yeah. And if you're interested, guys, you can find some of the test footage and voice recordings

of Farley online. And you can hear them for yourself. But I agree. There's like a real heart, you know, to the performances, even though they're rough. and they're just to storyboards for the most part. There is even in Tommy Boy. Like, I know that movie is dumb, but there's some incredibly sincere moments in that

that I think are just wonderful. I think he was a really good actor. Yeah. Despite the guiding force of the source material and Farley's aura, as we've discussed, the team struggled to figure out exactly what it was that Katzenberg wanted. As Barry Jackson, again,

the original production designer later said, they had to deal with both, quote, the question of what it looks like and the question of how to make it, end quote, describing the processes feeling our way in the dark. Now you can find many of the early iterations of Shrek

and his world online, and dark is indeed how I would describe them. Not that the story was necessarily dark at the time, but the world itself was much more of a grim fairy tale, not the bright and sunny pastoral look that the final film would take on. It reminds me in some ways of something

like The Nightmare Before Christmas. Which is not surprising because at this point, Henry Selleck of The Nightmare Before Christmas was, I believe, one of the attached directors to the film. And that had come out, right? That had. That was 1993. So the idea was that Shrek himself would be animated through a combination of motion capture and sculpture modeling. Basically, according to Barry Jackson, quote, for the facial animation,

we used a variety of sculptures. we actually sculpted them, and those sculptures were then morphed in the computer to look seamless. So basically, it was almost closer to stop motion animation the way that they were doing the face. They would scan the face in the different expressive positions and then use a fluid morph between the different moments in order to make it look like there was no jumpiness in the motion capture.

Meanwhile, the propeller heads were working on animating the body through motion capture, and J.G. Abrams wrote the script for this test animation. As propeller head, Andy Wiseler explained, they also ran into the problem that DreamWorks was not set up for 3D animation. Quote, DreamWorks had a really robust 2D pipeline. That's what Jeffrey Katzenberg knew. With 2D, they knew how to deal with story, technical elements, what they could achieve emotionally. They would ask for something that was hard to do in 3D, but easy to do in 2D, end quote. Now, the biggest problem seems to have been Jeffrey Katzenberg himself. As Max Howard and animation supervisor who worked with Katzenberg at Disney put it,

quote, if Jeffrey gets too close, it suffocates the project. He takes over everything. He's an editorial. He's here. He's there. He's got an opinion. One of the rules with Jeffrey is that you don't do all the notes. End quote. So without somebody willing and powerful enough to stand up to Katzenberg, the production began to spin its wheels as everybody sprinted in different directions trying to figure out what he wanted. They didn't have a finished script. And at some point, director Henry Selleck left the project, replaced, I believe, by Matt O'Callaghan, who had worked as an animator on a number of Disney films, including The Little Mermaid, who framed Roger Rabbit and the Great Mouse Detective. As a result, according to storyboard artist Ken Harsha, Shrek was quickly deemed the, quote,

discount production of DreamWorks. It was referred to as, quote, the gulog, where you were sent if you weren't performing well enough on the Prince of Egypt. Great. And Lizzie, per the opening of this episode, they had a word for. for it. And that was getting Shrek. Oh, no. After roughly a year or more of work, so we're talking, I believe, late 1996 or early 1997 at this point. There was an internal division mounting between the producers and directors of the

film and the film's artists. The brass were becoming concerned about the dark look of Shrek in his world and wanted to pivot to something brighter and happier like Disney or Wizard of Us, whereas many of the animator. wanted to keep going with this grittier version. Meanwhile, the propeller heads were completely burned out. Apparently, J.J. Abrams was like, I'm doing screenwriting, I'm doing directing. I cannot do this animated stuff.

And I did find that I believe at least one pair of writers had come and gone. Tommy Swardlow and Michael Goldberg announced via a Hollywood Porter article in 1996. They did not receive credit on the finished film. So millions of dollars had been spent, and the entire gambit came down to this one minute Shrek test film. And I want to play it for you. Okay.

I gotta be honest with you. I don't know if I'm greenlighting it off of that. Well, Katzenberg felt the same way. The roughly one minute short, that's not the entire thing. You can find about, I think, 39 seconds online. Featured Shrek, as you saw Lizzie, that is much closer to how he looks in the book, by the way. Got a real cone head. Yep, pointy, comically conal head.

very squished-together eyes and an enormous mouth, walking through a medieval-style town environment dancing to, I feel good, being approached by a small creature or person named the mugger who attempts to mug him, at which point Shrek launches him into the sky. Another issue that we can't see in this version of the footage described by editor Sim Evan Jones is donkey.

Quote, what they wanted to do was use puppets for the four-legged characters. Shrek was accompanied by the donkey who was played by a person using their feet for the back legs and brooms for the front legs, end quote. What? Didn't move like a donkey, apparently. You guys can find the test footage online. I think you'll agree. It sits somewhat uncomfortably in the uncanny valley, although production designer Barry Jackson and others who worked on it, stand by its sophistication, specifically the facial animation, and maintain that it was ahead of its time,

and though a bit tonally strange in isolation, perhaps it would have worked, and to be clear, it was certainly closer to the tone of the book. So it's not too strange in the context of the book. Katzenberg, though, was not pleased and heads rolled. He fired a large portion of the team, resignations were tendered, and Shrek was, after, I believe, almost two years of development

for all intents and purposes back at Square One. Further, it was around this time that Katzenberg sued Michael Eisner and Disney for breach of contract. He was fighting battles on multiple fronts, and perhaps he began to realize that he couldn't fight this war alone. In the spring of 1996, a very important alliance was forged in Hollywood. DreamWorks Pictures bought a 40% stake in Pacific Data Images, a visual effects and computer animation firm based out of Silicon Valley, as part of a deal to partner on a series of animated films so they could compete with the likes of Pixar.

Traditional animation would take place at DreamWorks and CGI would take place at PDI. Their first project, Lizzie? No clue. Ants. Ah. Now, we'll get to ants versus a bug's life, which is an incredible story.

We all know which one's better. For the purposes of Shrek, the partnership with PDI served two purposes. First, it solved the 3D pipeline problem, and second, it largely moved the production further from Katzenberg geographically. In a sense, Shrek became more like Shrek's home, a backwater ruled by a tyrant, but at least the tyrant was in a castle far, far away. Now, in the fairy tale version of this story, it would be a mighty warrior or stately prince who would swoop in and save this troubled production from its dictatorial death by a thousand cuts.

However, this is no fairy tale. It's Shrek. And what did you expect, if not a humble animator from the opposite end of the earth with absolutely no interest in saving this movie whatsoever? Lizzie, Shrek co-director, Andrew Adamson, like so many of our favorite filmmakers and storytellers on this podcast, was born and raised in New Zealand. Where the best ones are. The best ones.

After missing the opportunity to study architecture due to literally missing the university enrollment date for that program, he had a car accident. Adamson answered a newspaper ad for a computer animator. He was told he didn't have the experience for the job because he had no experience because he didn't know what the job was, but he decided to show up to the office anyway to learn what this new field was. Having grown up around computers, he'd lived in Papua New Guinea for a spell while his dad installed a computer center there.

He was able to solve a problem for one of the animators during the visit. He was hired on the spot. Wow. Like William Styg, Adamson cut his teeth on commercials and in 1991 was recruited by the U.S.-based Pacific Data Images. He was the technical director on toys, the Barry Levinson, Robin Williams' nightmare fuel flop from the early 90s that you probably don't remember. Nope.

VFX supervisor on Batman Forever. Okay. And crossed paths with fellow Kiwi Peter Jackson while working as the digital effects supervisor on the frighteners. Ooh. It was on that project that he first caught wind of Shrek, meeting a producer who had worked in Katzenberg's Gulag for a, quote, short time. Adamson initially planned on taking a year off.

off from animating to work on screenwriting, perhaps in part, because his first real exposure to Shrek as a PDI employee was as an attendee of that propeller head's test screening. And he thought, I want nothing to do with this weird ogre monster movie. According to Adamson, quote, I sort of went into it kicking and screaming and then ended up doing it for the next three and a half years. Now, the timeline's a little murky, but what's clear is that Katzenberg always intended Adamson to be a co-director on the project. So at some point, Matt O'Callaghan was joined by former Disney storyboard artist turned art director, Kelly Asbury. It seems that when Matt

O'Callaghan left the project, Adamson replaced him joining Asbury as a co-director of the film. Wow. So there were at least four directors on this movie at this point. Henry Selleck, Matt O'Callaghan, Kelly Asbury and now Andrew Adamson and Kelly Asbury. If you remember from our episode on The Emperor's New Groove, it was very common, if not standard, to have two directors on animated films because they are just so overwhelming. And at face value, Asbury and Adamson feel like they brought

complementary strengths to the film, Adamson, computer animation background, Asbury, traditional animation pedigree. In Adamson, Katzenberg had chosen an unusual champion, perhaps someone he felt he could control to a certain extent. However, like Shrek himself, Adamson would prove to have a mind of his own. So in 1997, Adamson and Asbury regrouped the project

around a stripped-down crew with a new technological mandate. Motion captures out because it looks weird and creepy. And CGI and miniatures are in. According to production designer James, I'm going to pronounce his name wrong, Hegades. I believe, who it seems replaced Barry Jackson. Quote, I made a suggestion that we do miniature sets with CG animation.

So we did a little 10-second test with Illusion Arts that was designed to show a miniature set, including map painting, with a maquette stand-in version of Shrek that was presented and well-received. It was beautiful. End quote. So basically, they started building these miniature sets, sculpting them of like Shrek's home, for example, and then they would shoot them and then animate the characters. into the set. Cool.

And it was like a really remarkable effect. It was also extremely ridiculously expensive. So expensive, in fact, that they realized it would be cheaper to do the movie hyper-sophisticated all-CGI than it would be to do it this other way. So basically, because of ants, they had all of the pipeline and infrastructure that they needed to make a version of Shrek that they didn't know was even possible when they had greenlit. the movie. If you think about Toy Story, for example, versus Shrek, Toy Story uses toys to do like hard plastic surfaces, easy reflective surfaces, right?

With something like Shrek, you have to do skin, muscle, hair, grass, the breeze, dust, liquids, earwax, earwax, everything. There are all these things that Toy Story avoided, which, to be clear, is not to say that Toy Story was by any means easy. I use the wrong word. or not an incredible accomplishment. It's obviously one of the greatest animated films of all time, nor is it to say that Pixar wasn't obviously pioneering the same sort of stuff on a Bugs Life and Monsters Inc. I just mean to point out that with Shrek,

PDI was in completely unexplored territory. So with PDI and basically ants, because they had developed a system that had to create a lot of detail because there are a lot of ants in that movie, they were able to build off of that foundation for Shrek. Meanwhile, Katzenberg brings in some heavy hitters to take a crack at the script. Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, who if you guys don't know them, Pirates of the Caribbean, Treasure Planet, Deja Vu, What Went Wrong Episode, The Lone Ranger,

listen to it, and of course, Aladdin, which they had co-written under Katzenberg back at Disney. It's unclear exactly when they signed up, but their fifth draft of the script is dated March 28th, 1997, so I'm guessing early 97, late 96. Rossio and Elliott are also the first to admit that the story was not just theirs. It was shaped by the entire team from the directors to the storyboard artists and we'll get more to their contributions later. Now, missing from the movie at this point was the quote, fairy tale character parody stuff, end quote.

So Lizzie, at this point in the story, there's no fairy tale characters going to the swamp. Oh, wow. There's none of that. Yep, there's no riffing on, you know, Robin Hood. and his merry men, Princess Fiona singing to the birds until they explode. Yeah, I love all that.

Yeah, all of these jokes are missing from the movie. So according to storyboard artist Tom Sito, who joined the project in 1996, he said it took at least a year and a half to get to the idea of making fun of fairy tales. So that wouldn't be until 1998. He said that the early versions of the script were funny. Then the movie became more serious,

a straight hero story like Game of Thrones, with an ogre, which she described as, yep, flat soda and not that interesting. Yeah. The early versions of the script, as we mentioned, also featured Shrek's parents and a younger Shrek who was more of a straight man and the brunt of the joke, rather than the wise-cracking outsider that we know now. There was also a long opening sequence of Dama Fortuna putting the ogre spell on Princess Fiona.

You can actually see that sequence online. Cito also takes credit for the love story between Donkey and the Dragon, which was apparently inspired by the Italian film Seven Beauties. No. Yeah. I really enjoy the initially not consensual, but eventually consensual relationship between donkey and the dragon. Yeah. Also, apparently, Lord Farquod's name was originally evil Lord Hamilton, but Cito argued that Hamilton was not funny. And Farquod, which was the last name of a grad student he knew, Mark Farquod, was funny.

So they stole it for the film. He's right. Now, Lizzie, a quick note on Lord Farquod. I'm sure you've heard or read the rumors online about his inspiration. Would you like to give everyone like a brief primer on that? Sure. I don't know if this is true, but the thing I have always seen floating around online

is that he is based on Jeffrey Katzenberg's arch nemesis, Michael Eisner. Exactly. So Eisner's tall and Kastenberg's short. Many sources online claim that Farquod was modeled after, Katzenberg's nemesis, as you say, Eisner. I could find no primary source confirmation of that fact. I will say, just if you're looking at them, if you hold your hands up over Farquod's eyes

and do the same thing to Eisner, from the nose down, looks like the same person. It looks very much like him. It's Lithgow's eyes, but then it seems like it's Eisner's the rest of his face. Now, Andrew Adamson gave an interview to Entertainment Weekly at the time and stated, quote, no, it wasn't based on Michael Eisner. We always wanted Lord Farquod to be this diminutive persona.

He's always trying to make his world perfect, yet he doesn't fit with his own image of perfection. It's very common. Napoleon, Hitler, both of them were people who were trying to create perfect races, perfect people, but they didn't fit their own image of perfection, end quote. True. However, there is an interview with Terry Rossio in which he more or less confirms that Farquod was made short because Eisner, had somewhat infamously said of Katzenberg, quote, I hate that little midget, end quote.

Oh my God. This comment was actually leaked during the Katzenberg-Eisner trial because Katzenberg's legal team called Eisner's biographer to the stand. and Eisner's biographer had written that comment down in his notes while he was working on Eisner's biography in the early to mid-90s. They don't even have text messages at this point. Like you are being caught by your biographer for talking shit about Jeffrey Katzenberg. They just hate each other.

And apparently Eisner was furious at the biographer for taking notes at that point. Sure, how dare he? You can never know for sure. It feels like an Eisner dig to me. For sure. But you don't know for sure. Adamson says it wasn't the director, but just my take. Now, as the story and environments grew brighter and popier, so too did the character designs.

The cast, I couldn't find the exact dates at which these folks were brought in. 1996 slash 97 seems reasonable. Was rounded out. Lizzie, any guesses as to who would play Fiona? Sandra Bollock Janine Garofalo Wow, left field She would play Fiona

Linda Hunt would voice Dama Fortuna and Tom Bosley and Marion Ross were set for Shrek's parents Again, it's unclear exactly when this happened, but Eddie Murphy was hired while it was still the Chris Farley Shrek based on a Microsoft

pressed release touting the technology that Shrek was employing to make the film. At the point that press release, Kelly Asbury and Matt O'Callaghan were at the helm. Just to be clear, so there was a lot of directing shifting and seems like very shortly after that press release went out, or maybe even at the same time, Callahan was out and Adamson was in. So stuff was moving rapidly. The team cooks through 1997.

It's difficult to compare what exists of Farley's test footage to the finished product, but suffice it to say, he gives a surprisingly poignant delivery to the scenes you can find online, including a shortened version of the Onion scene. in which they're looking at the stars. We will play a brief clip of this scene. You can see the entire thing online. Go to YouTube, search Chris Farley-Strecht footage. But we'll play the full clip for Lizzie to get her reaction.

You're really mad at whoever did this to you. No one did anything to me. Yes, yes, yes. Someone hurt you so bad. Someone hurt you many years ago. Leave my parents out of this. Right through. Will you hug as a child, Shrek?

All right, all right. I want a home. and someone to share it with. That was very sweet. He's very sweet. He, I mean, you know, he's still crusty on the outside, but there's so much more like tenderness, and, you know, there's a longing for home that he's expressing.

There's wanting to make his family proud and find his place. It's really sweet. Also, he's so much less abusive to donkey, which is kind of nice. nice, he is terrible to donkey in the final result. This makes me sad. This would have been really good, I think. It would have been different. I'm not saying it would have been better than what we end up with at all, but this is definitely a case where I could see this being at least as good as what we got in the long run. I think it likely would have been more emotional and less

comedic. Because I think that Myers brought more of the wise cracking ogre and Farley brings more of the sad clown energy to the party. He had some good jokes in there though. I mean, fart wad instead of Farquod was pretty good. Fartwad was great. I do think it's interesting. It's obviously a younger Shrek. You can tell he's a younger Shrek. He references parents, which is not part of the final film. Whereas Meyer's character feels to me at least 15 years older. Well, he's an established home. Yeah. Exactly. He already has his home. And he doesn't want to share it with anyone. And his journey is to open his heart and let people in.

So. Yeah. The Shrek we get is like divorced dad, Shrek, I feel. This Shrek is more like 21 years old finding his place in the world Shrek. Exactly. He's taken that gap year, trying to figure out where he belongs, you know, as opposed to I'm 45. It didn't work out. And nobody's getting in here again. So I do think that this Shrek was obviously imbued with a lot of Farley's persona. It's difficult to parse the exact storyline of this version of the film. But according to final co-director Vicky Jensen, as we just discussed,

Shrek was, quote, very earnestly trying to fit in with the humans, end quote, in this version of the movie, which is very different than Myers-Trek, who is operating from the perspective of, I want everyone as far away from me as possible for this entire movie. The team broke for the holidays at the end of 1997, and on December 18th, editor Sim Evan Jones was on a flight back to England when he got some distressing news from a stranger sitting next to him on the plane. Chris Farley had died of a drug overdose. Like John Belushi, he was 33 years old.

Oh, my God. He was found by his brother. I believe. Oh, no. We'll cover Chris Farley's life and death in the detail it deserves when we get to, as we mentioned, Tommy Boy. But know that it rippled far and wide through obviously Hollywood, the comedy community, and of course, through the ranks of his co-workers on Shrek. Andrew Adamson, who had been on the film for less than a year, said of that moment,

quote, we kind of lost our way for a considerable amount of time. It was devastating on a personal level. I actually said to Jeffrey, can you please fire me? I can't bring myself to quit. End quote. Katzenberg did not grant him that wish. The team regrouped in early 1998,

continuing to review storyboards and hosting brainstorming sessions, but morale was as low as it had ever been. And remember, this is a production that had a failed test so bad that most of the employees were fired. According to Farley's longtime collaborator, David Spade, Farley had recorded most of the dialogue for that version of the script.

I've read numbers between 85 and 95%. Who knows? It's also an animated film. The script is always in flux. The producers, apparently, again, according to Spade, asked Farley's brother, Kevin, to record the remainder of the movie. They apparently sound similar enough for this to have theoretically worked. but Kevin was apparently too grief-stricken to do the job.

Yeah, there's no way. At some point in the following weeks or months, co-director Kelly Asbury also stepped away from the film to direct 2002's Spirit Stallion of the Simmeron. Asbury was replaced by Vicky Jensen, a story artist promoted from within the company. Like Adamson, she was also a first-time director who had been brought over from the road to El Dorado,

worked briefly on Shrek as a story artist after Farley's passing and was subsequently moved up to the directing chair. It is likely around this time that Janine Grofellow, and I'm guessing, much of the rest of the cast, with the exception of Eddie Murphy, was let go. However, Katsenberg was not ready to let Shrek go. As we discussed during our coverage of the Emperor's New Groove,

many a great animated film is burned to the ground only to be reborn from the ashes. The most successful animated film of all time at that point, the Lion King, cycled through multiple directors and scripts. Perhaps it was this knowledge that kept Katzenberg going. Perhaps he was just too stubborn to quit. Perhaps he couldn't imagine letting Disney win. The team needed direction.

They found it in a most unexpected yet obvious place. According to story artists, Ken Bruce, the team had a breakthrough in early to mid-nibed 1998. Quote, for some reason, we went and dug out the very first screening, meaning storyboard taping. You have to imagine we had completely forgotten what we had boarded. We put the tape in and it was like it had fallen from the heavens. It was like God had dropped the tape and said, here's the film you should work on. It had its problems, but we all looked at it and thought, what's wrong with this? Why can't we just do this film? This has got it all there, you know? When there's a problem,

we can solve it, but it's lean, it's mean, it's clean, it's clean. It's clean. it communicates. It's Shrek. Bruce went on to say, we spent two years going in the wrong direction, only to find out that what we had started with was pretty darn good. But that's the process. Sometimes you need to do it all wrong to find out what's right. The team had a direction.

Now they needed a Shrek. And that concludes part one of our coverage of Shrek. tune back in next week. That's right, we're doing weekly drops for this one, as we recount the tale of Katzenberg's dastardly release date chess match with Disney, the origins of Shrek's Scottish Brug, and how Smashmouth opened a film at Cam. Those were the days. I can't believe we're not even getting to Mike Myers yet. Well, we'll have to hear more about it next week. He's the next man up. Thank you, Chris. That was great. This is already a wild ride. I'm excited to see where we go from here. You know, it only gets darker. I'm just kidding, it doesn't it only gets crazier. That's all, guys.

We'll get back to you in one week. Should we announce the movie that we're doing in two weeks? Sure. Coming up after Shrek, Part 2, is one of my favorite movies of all time, an absolute masterpiece. It is American Psycho. We can't wait to get hip to be square with you in just a little while. Huey Lewis in the news. We're looking forward to it.

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See you next week. Go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support What Went Wrong. And check out our website at what went wrong.com. What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman. Additional research for this episode provided by Jesse Winterbauer.