 |
PIGS CAN FLY: It took 46 live
porkers and a dozen puppets to play Wilbur—and computer graphics
to help him do a flip. Dakota Fanning plays Fern.
Suzi Wood & Lisa Tomasetti |
When Jordan Kerner
was a sophomore at Stanford,
he wanted to be president. Not head of a successful film
production company about to release a $75 million adaptation
of Charlotte’s Web, but president of the United
States. To that end, he had a rather unusual plan. It
involved becoming a doctor, joining the American Medical
Association and “quietly working my way up the
ranks, hiding my politics, until I became president of the
AMA,” he
explains. “At that point I would come out with my plan
for universal health care and run for Senate.”
The dream
was real enough to propel Kerner, ’72, into
premed studies. Then, as he tells it, CBS newsman Jules
Dundes steered him away from that route. It was spring
quarter sophomore year, and Kerner was taking Dundes’s
course on mass communications. “He
asked me, ‘Do you want to be married? Do you want your
family’s every move scrutinized?’” Kerner recalls. “And
he basically said you can do a lot more by going into
TV or film than by taking office. My life took a 180-degree
turn.”
Kerner describes his turning point over lunch
at Campanile in Los Angeles, where the host knows to
give him a corner table. He speaks with passion, but
you have the distinct feeling he has told the story before.
And that it has served him well as an explanation
for how a young man with political ideals became one
of Hollywood’s
leading big-budget producers—or, conversely, how
the blockbuster producer happens to be so politically
engaged, known as a generous
supporter of Democratic candidates and NGOs like Human
Rights Watch and the National Resources Defense Council.
At first glance, his list of film credits doesn’t
give these interests away. Since forming his own production
company in 1986 (first called the Avnet/ Kerner company
in partnership with Jon Avnet; now known as Kerner Entertainment),
he has made several adult dramas, including Less
than Zero (1987), Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) and Up
Close & Personal (1996). But most of his movies are family-friendly extravaganzas.
In 1997, he produced George of the Jungle, Walt Disney’s
most successful film that year, which grossed nearly
$200 million. Back in 1992 he produced a very popular
movie that soon became a very popular franchise, about a
peewee hockey team known as the Mighty Ducks.
Charlotte’s
Web is poised to be another hit. Scheduled for release
on December 20, this adaptation of E.B. White’s
classic story of a spider who saves a pig from becoming
bacon features a mix of live-action sequences and computer
graphics animation, including “photo-real graphics.” Photorealism
was especially important in giving birth to the onscreen
Charlotte, who has the hairy texture and creepy moves
of a real spider. Wilbur, on the other hand, is played by
46 live pigs and about a dozen motorized puppets known as
animatronics,
with computer graphics inserted only to help him do a
flip. “This
is nothing like Stuart Little,” says Kerner. “People
will think we’ve made a live action movie and wonder
how we got the animals to do all of this.”
People may
also wonder how he got so many actors to do all of this.
The movie features Dakota Fanning as Fern, Julia Roberts
as the voice of the spider, and Oprah Winfrey, Robert
Redford, Kathy Bates, John Cleese, Reba McEntire, André Benjamin,
Thomas Haden Church and Steve Buscemi lending their voices
to assorted barnyard creatures. “Some people say they
got their dream cast,” Kerner says. “You can
tell we got ours. We have Robert Redford as the old
horse, and Steve Buscemi is the perfect rat.” When
asked how he landed such major names, he gives the book
all the credit. “I
think with Julia, especially, the story was really powerful.”
The
voices were recorded in a Los Angeles studio, but Kerner
traveled to Australia to film the perfect New England
landscape. He explains that fall colors were already
beginning to fade in Maine, where E.B. White lived, when
Kerner got the green light to start shooting. “I’ve
learned over the years that you don’t delay production
when you have the backing to go,” he says. So he set
up shop in the countryside
near Melbourne, which has the same rolling hills as New
England, and autumn when he needed it to be autumn.
Still,
he admits, turning southern Australia into New
England was a lot of work. The biggest nuisance? Having
to digitally remove hundreds of eucalyptus trees.
At press
time, the movie’s projected cost was running
just over $75 million—one sign of how much everyone
involved expects it to make in return. But to hear Kerner
talk, Charlotte’s
Web and most of his other films are not about the weekend
grosses or simply providing family entertainment. He
sees many of his movies as statements about acceptance
and love, or illustrations of how to live a more meaningful
life. His official biographical statement calls Less
than Zero the first “anti-drug
film,” and he describes Fried
Green Tomatoes as a “story
about racism, sexism and ageism.”
Kerner calls Charlotte’s
Web a cautionary tale “about
the dangers of racism, or rather species-ism. Because
she’s
a spider, everyone is prejudiced against Charlotte,
but they don’t really know her. The cow, Kathy Bates,
says that spiders eat their male folk. Another animal
calls them bloodsuckers. They don’t have their minds
changed until they encounter the nobility of the character.
That’s
a lesson that can’t be taught too early.”
Charlotte’s
Web was Kerner’s favorite book as a
child, but the idea of making the film did not occur
to him until reading the book to his 3-year-old daughter
about 6 years ago. When he had finished, she asked, “Why
did Fern leave her friend Wilbur before she knew that he
would be safe?” He
saw then that the book had more to say about the passage
of time than he’d realized. (Kerner later considered
casting his three daughters as the voices of the baby
spiders, but they turned him down. “They were intimidated
by the idea of reading out loud in front
of everyone.”) The fact that Paramount held domestic
rights to the book led Kerner into a long-term relationship
with that company, leaving Disney.
 |
|
Courtesy Jordan Kerner |
These days, he oversees
many big-budget movies and seems at peace with this choice. “Independent
films can be more politically direct, but they play
to a smaller audience,” he says. “I’m making
movies that are political with a small ‘p’ and
play to maybe 80 million people. That’s a different
model than Syriana, which probably only reached 4 or
5 million.”
Kerner has not, however, completely forsaken capital-p
politics. He supported Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, ’55,
in their successful U.S. Senate runs, and
he is active in the gubernatorial bid of California state
controller Steve Westly, ’78, MBA ’83. “I’m
contributing to his campaign and also working on
his fundraiser. My job right now is lining up some singing
talent to pull in the crowds.” |
