Thoroughly Modern Mighty Joe

Make no mistake about it; Joe is the star of this show.

Oh sure, that’s “Titanic” star Bill Paxton who’s wheeling around the set in a golf cart. And yes, that’s up-and-coming actress Charlize Theron (“Devil’s Advocate”) hanging out at the crafts service table cracking Elvis jokes with crew members. But it’s Joe, or “Big Joe” as he’s known around the set, who gets all the attention between takes.

Three attractive young women in jeans and tank tops rush up to Joe when the first assistant director yells “Cut.” One of them grooms his beard with a long-handled comb. Another brushes his thick chest hair. The third moistens Joe’s lips with K-Y lubrication jelly--a must when your lips and tongue are made of latex.

Big Joe, you see, is a 15-foot animatronic gorilla, and the title character in Disney’s remake of the RKO B-movie classic “Mighty Joe Young.”

The original film is about a giant mountain gorilla and his caretaker Jill (ingenue Terry Moore in the original), who are lured from their bucolic home in Africa to perform in a Hollywood nightclub, where Joe is put on display, jeered at and kept in a cage. It’s being updated for the 1990s.

In fact, the famous scene of Joe holding up a piano with Moore playing “Beautiful Dreamer” won’t be in the remake. Says producer Ted Hartley: “That’s something that everybody remembers; it’s anchored in the mind. But the whole idea of having a one-of-a-kind [gorilla] put in a nightclub and holding up a piano in the 1990s is totally unacceptable.”

In the remake, both Joe and Jill (Theron) are orphaned in Africa on the same night. Jill’s mother is a Dian Fossey-like researcher who is killed by poachers, along with baby Joe’s mother. Ten years later, zoologist Gregg Johnson (Paxton) discovers the giant gorilla (normally mountain gorillas grow to be 6 feet tall) and persuades Jill that for both her and Joe’s safety, they should move Joe to a conservancy for endangered species in California.

“The challenge of working on a film like this, where I have a lot of admiration for the original, is to create the kind of moving experience for the audience that I had when I first saw ‘Mighty Joe Young’--where you care so much about this gorilla,” says director Ron Underwood (“City Slickers,” “Heart and Souls”). “And in that film, on a technical level, what they achieved was really remarkable. It won the Academy Award for best special effects.”

This production, however, has the benefit of technologies unimaginable in 1949.

Joe, the latest creation by makeup artist Rick Baker, who also made the gorillas for “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes” and “Gorillas in the Mist,” may be just a mass of intricate machinery covered in a thick coat of horse and yak hair. But when Baker’s team of puppeteers starts to rouse the beast for his next take, he truly looks alive.

At 2 a.m. on a hot summer night in Playa del Rey, in the same airplane hanger where Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose was built, Joe looks a little sleepy, as do some of the others. He blinks his great brown eyes and stretches his jaw. He flares his nostrils, furrows his brow and smacks and puckers his lips.

In the scene being rehearsed and then filmed, Joe has just been sedated and is behind bars after creating havoc at a black-tie benefit dinner at the conservancy. His future looks grim, and Jill, Gregg and a veterinarian played by Regina King (“Jerry Maguire”) are trying to break him out of his lockup. In this short scene, Joe’s expressions range from sulkiness at being locked up, to gentleness and affection when he sees Jill, to anger when a security guard tries to foil their escape. He’s almost, well, human.

“I really didn’t want to do another gorilla movie because when I did ‘Gorillas in the Mist,’ I thought I did the best suits you can do,” says Baker. “But I was always fond of ‘Mighty Joe Young,’ and I played King Kong in the Dino De Laurentiis ‘King Kong’ back in 1975, and I thought it would be interesting to do the two giant gorilla movie remakes. I got some of my crew members together and we watched a laserdisc of ‘Gorillas in the Mist,’ and there were just enough things I thought we could improve upon.

“One of the things were the eyes. Usually eyes for mechanical heads are complete spheres because it’s a lot easier to make the eyelid blink, but real eyes have a corneal bulge.”

So Baker, who has won five Oscars (most recently for “Men in Black”), took the job so that he could perfect the corneal bulge of a make-believe gorilla?

Well, yes. “We worked for months just making the eyes themselves. They’re actually better-made than the artificial eyes that they make for people. . . . We actually sculpted the iris and pupil area and cast a dimensional piece. It was a lot of work, but so much of the soul is in the eyes.”

But Mighty Joe is a complicated character to bring to life, and the animatronic Big Joe who is working tonight will only get about 20% to 25% of Joe’s total screen time, according to producer Tom Jacobson. The balance of Joe’s screen time will be computer-generated animation by Disney-owned Dream Quest Images (“Total Recall,” “The Abyss”) and the real performance of “suit actor” John Alexander. Alexander does his scenes either in front of a blue screen or on one of the “40% sets,” specially crafted sets that are identical to the ones the other actors use except that every object has been scaled down to 40% its normal size, because, when in costume, Alexander is only 40% the size of Big Joe.

The job of the suit actor is so specialized in fact, that Baker, who has used Alexander on several other films, insisted that Alexander be hired if he was to do the film.

“John has a horrible job, I know from the experience of wearing the King Kong suit in the ’75 remake. It really is tortuous because . . . the head itself weighs 10 pounds in front of the face because of all the motors--and he gives a performance, too.”

Jacobson agrees. “John really is the character of Joe, so whenever we’re planning any shot with Joe, John is there to advise. John’s not in the suit tonight, but Joe is working, so when we go to set up the shot, Ron will talk to John. And he might say, ‘Now when Joe does this, how would his shoulders move?’ It’s like working out a performance with an actor. We have to treat Joe like a character.”

Underwood points to the story and the relationships between the characters when conveying what he thinks movie audiences will most connect with. “We believe in Joe because Jill and Gregg believe so deeply in Joe. Charlize is just incredible in the way she believes in Joe when she’s on screen, and it makes us believe.”

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Unlike most of the others involved in the film, Theron never saw the original while growing up in Benoni, South Africa. “We didn’t get a lot of movies, so I never saw it until I read the script. I thought it was great, and through my friends I learned what a cult classic it’s become.”

One of the biggest fans of the original is Disney Studios Chairman Joe Roth. “Growing up in New York, we had RKO on Channel 9, I guess it was, and they used to show these million-dollar movies seven or eight times in the same week. So as a kid, when I saw this movie, it really had a strong impact on me.”

A few years ago, when RKO Pictures decided to start remaking some of the movies in its extensive catalog, Roth, then head of Caravan Pictures, approached Hartley (who, as well as being a producer on this film, is CEO of RKO) about remaking “Mighty Joe Young.”

“I felt it would be a really terrific movie to update,” says Roth. “You look at a lot of [old] movies and you come away saying, ‘Well, for whatever reason, I don’t think the audience today will feel the same.’ But this movie has great heart. It’s about humans versus animals, and animals being pure and doing the right thing under any and all circumstances, including self-sacrifice. I think those kind of themes are just as valid today as they were 50 years ago.”

The film’s budget has been reported at $80 million, a figure the filmmakers wouldn’t confirm.

Hartley, however, is generous with budget details of the original film, which he dug out of the RKO files. Director Ernest B. Schoedsack was paid $7,516.67; the location expense of filming in Africa was $20,644.96; Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen’s Academy Award-winning special effects cost $23,415.25; and the total budget was $2,345,456.26.

Fragile budget documents aren’t the only ghosts of “Mighty Joe Young’s” past wafting around the set. Harryhausen and Moore, the original Jill, both have cameos in the new film.

“This will be a different Mighty Joe than we made; it’s a different approach, as it should be, because times have changed,” says the 78-year-old Harryhausen. “Our Mighty Joe had a lot of naive qualities, just as King Kong did. But it’s very hard to instill naive qualities into a film today because people have seen so much. I think it’s a heartwarming story.”

Paxton points out that while the story line has changed, the core of the film has not. Including the innocent but palpable romantic relationship of Gregg and Jill. “There’s a lot of wit and double entendre. It’s one of the sexiest movies I’ve been in.”

Theron also embraced the idea of bringing touches from the original film into the remake. “We wanted, without pushing it too far, to be able to celebrate the ’49 film.”

Theron wears an elegant white satin gown during the benefit dinner scene and wears her hair in a short, Lana Turner-type cut throughout. “I thought we should try to find something from the 40s. I wanted that classic look, and the makeup and hair kind of followed.”

But the new “Mighty Joe Young” is not about being merely a pastiche of the 1949 film. It’s about making the audience love Joe.

Says Jacobson, “All of this craft and technology is all about creating an emotional, realistic character.”

Adds Hartley, “I think when people see this movie they’re really going to believe that we have found a 15-foot gorilla.”