The Simpsons Movie

In July the long anticipated feature length movie of The Simpsons will come to theatres. I have several friends who have sworn that there is much theology discussed in this long-running t.v. show. This is no surprise because James L. Brooks, the producer who help Matt Groeling get Time Simpsons on t.v., is a very spiritual person (and MN native).

While I've never been a fanatic of the t.v. show, I have several friends who are. So for them, I will post this article about the making of the movie that is in today's New York Times...

D’oh! They’re Still Tinkering With Homer


By DAVE ITZKOFF
Published: May 6, 2007

OBSESSIVE fans of “The Simpsons” — and really, is there any other kind? — may remember an early episode of the show in which the denizens of Springfield brace themselves for the debut of a movie starring the cartoon cat-and-mouse pair Itchy and Scratchy. As the film’s premiere draws closer, the hype surrounding it becomes unavoidable, promotions and merchandising spin out of control and rabid moviegoers gather outside theaters in lines that stretch beyond the horizon.

Trailer
'The Simpsons Movie'

For its animators, the difficulty posed by a film was to depict the instantly recognizable faces of Homer and his yellow-skinned clan in ways audiences would still find surprising.

What happened inside those theaters, nobody fully knows. “We never actually showed the Itchy and Scratchy movie,” said Al Jean, an executive producer and longtime show runner on “The Simpsons.” “We knew that would be the hard part.”

This summer the writers and animators of “The Simpsons” have no such recourse: they have assured audiences that “The Simpsons Movie,” the first feature-length adventure of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie, will be released on July 27. Fans are anticipating the film as eagerly as their fictional equivalents did the Itchy and Scratchy movie, with the added dimension that it actually exists.

Yet like its imaginary counterpart, “The Simpsons Movie” is a project about which its staff is both excited and in denial; the film is simultaneously a diversion they have been working on for a fraction of the show’s history and a burden that has weighed on them almost since “The Simpsons” appeared on television.

“We’ve never been ahead of our deadlines, since the very beginning,” said Matt Groening, who created the cartoon family more than 20 years ago. “The show has been so ravenous as far as material that it’s easy to let a couple of decades go by and realize, ‘Oh, we haven’t done a movie yet.’ ”

As early as the fourth season of “The Simpsons,” when it was clear that the series was one of the biggest successes the Fox network had presented, its producers were contemplating a movie spinoff. An episode called “Kamp Krusty” (about Bart and Lisa’s exploits at a “Lord of the Flies”-like summer camp) seemed as if it could be expanded into a 90-minute vehicle.

But the producers soon determined it wasn’t worth pursuing a Simpsons movie just because it was easy. “We said, ‘We should stop doing that — we’re a television show,’ ” recalled James L. Brooks, the veteran director and producer, who developed “The Simpsons” with Mr. Groening and the comedy writer Sam Simon. “I think it took a half-hour to make the decision.”

Another decade and more than 200 “Simpsons” episodes later, the possibility of a film began to look more tangible. By 2001 the show’s animation and writing teams had grown large enough to accommodate the additional work, and its voice-acting cast — including Dan Castellaneta (Homer), Julie Kavner (Marge), Nancy Cartwright (Bart), and Yeardley Smith (Lisa) — had negotiated new contracts that would allow them to participate in a movie.

Most important, the producers of “The Simpsons” arranged a deal with Fox that permitted them to write a movie script, with the option of abandoning it if they weren’t satisfied with the results. Work on the screenplay began in late 2003, and didn’t stop. “There was never that moment,” Mr. Brooks said, “so we just kept working on it. The fact that we could say no meant that we never had to.”

For its animators, the difficulty posed by a film was to depict the instantly recognizable faces of Homer and his yellow-skinned clan in ways audiences would still find surprising.
“In any given episode, there will be sequences you really want to lavish your attention on, and you’ve got to pick and choose,” said David Silverman, the director of “The Simpsons Movie,” who has been working with the characters since they made their debut in a series of cartoon shorts on “The Tracey Ullman Show.” “My feeling was, well, it would be really great if we could lavish that attention with every single scene that we do.”

The additional resources of a movie gave animators some solutions to these visual challenges, allowing them to draw the Simpsons on wider CinemaScope frames, to color them with the largest palette they have ever used and to let their characters cast shadows throughout the movie (a technique used sparingly on television). For further visual reference, Mr. Silverman and his staff turned to recent animated features like Brad Bird’s “Incredibles” and Sylvain Chomet’s “Triplets of Belleville,” and even John Sturges’s 1955 thriller “Bad Day at Black Rock.” “It’s a great education in staging because of how the characters are placed,” Mr. Silverman said. “There are no gunfights in our movie.”

For the writers, a team of 11 current and former “Simpsons” producers supervised by Mr. Jean, the film raised a different question: how to tell a story that is more than just an hour and a half of strung-together jokes. “You don’t want someone coming into this and saying, ‘Eh, it’s too much, it’s just a warmed-over show,’ ” Mr. Jean said. “We want something where they’re going, ‘Oh my God, what happens next?’ ” The producers settled the problem in a more traditional manner: by sitting around a table, pitching ideas and trying to make one another laugh.
“Even though this is different than everything else, you still end up having the usual screenplay-writing experience,” said Mr. Brooks, whose credits range from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Taxi” to “Terms of Endearment” and “Broadcast News.” “It follows those immutable patterns: story, story, story and tone and character and emotion and pace.”

Yet even at this late stage, the writers are reluctant to discuss what, exactly, “The Simpsons Movie” story is about. Judging from snippets of movie trailers, news releases and Internet chatter, the plot seems to involve the town of Springfield dealing with an environmental disaster that Homer accidentally starts. (Also, for some reason, Homer has a beloved pet pig.)

But none of the film’s producers would confirm or deny these hypotheses, for fear of spoiling the audience’s expectations. “There was a trailer we showed in February alongside a ‘Simpsons’ television episode,” Mr. Jean said, “and it was amazing how much information some people got from a twentieth-of-a-second shot. Some of it incorrect, but some of it correct.”

It is also possible that sequences might still be rewritten or cut entirely before the film’s July release. Mr. Groening said that he had become particularly enamored of a scene involving Ralph Wiggum, an innocently stupid classmate of Lisa Simpson’s, but that there was no guarantee it would survive the editing process.

“That’s the problem we’re having now,” he said. “We’re doing jokes that we love for the first 150 times, and now we’re going, ‘Eh, change it.’ ”

What has kept “The Simpsons” lively and vital for 18 seasons and counting, its creators say, is their ability to revise scenes and add material, sometimes just a week before an episode is shown. And as they continue to tinker and fiddle with “The Simpsons Movie,” they can sense that window of opportunity slowly closing. “It’s very tempting,” Mr. Groening said, “to put my hand on an animator’s shoulder, and go, ‘Why don’t you just try ...?’ You can just feel the muscle tension ripple through the shirt. So I try not to do that, except when absolutely necessary.”
At the same time, those working on “The Simpsons Movie” must still fulfill their day-to-day responsibilities on the television show. Mr. Jean continues to run the television writers’ room, doing his best not to repeat jokes that have been written for the film. “Sometimes people will pitch something in the TV room,” he said, “and I go: ‘We can’t do that. And I can’t tell you why. But you’ll know someday.’ ”

And when Mr. Groening is not illustrating his “Life in Hell” comic strip, or working on new episodes of his science fiction cartoon, “Futurama” (a defunct Fox series that Comedy Central plans to revive next year), or driving his Prius back and forth between the animation studios and writing offices of “The Simpsons,” he is most likely watching some element of the film’s marketing campaign fall into place.

“I definitely, in this process, have dealt with a lot of people who I’ve never had meetings with before,” he said. “I don’t think anybody’s going to be surprised to find that ‘The Simpsons’ are a commercial entity who associate themselves with products you might want to eat.”
But participating in the more commercial elements of filmmaking, Mr. Groening said, “helps give us the green light to do the things that we want to do. Where we’re really left alone creatively, the movie and the TV show are very much what the team wants them to be.”
Mr. Silverman, who directed the animated features “Monsters, Inc.” and “The Road to El Dorado,” says he has enjoyed as much creative freedom on “The Simpsons Movie” as he has had on any of his previous films. “At Pixar,” he said, “I was answering to the creative brain trust of John Lassiter and Andrew Stanton. Here, it’s the creative brain trust of Jim Brooks and Al Jean and Matt Groening. We’re making this movie, and Fox is basically saying, ‘Have at it.’ ”

That flexibility has allowed him to focus on one of the few “Simpsons Movie” sequences he could safely discuss: a scene in which Homer is confronted by an angry mob consisting of nearly every character who has ever appeared on the show. (“My rule of thumb was, if the character is a Springfield resident, even if we only see them one time, they’re in,” Mr. Silverman said.)
And how long did that one sequence take to animate? “Oh, about a day,” Mr. Silverman said with heavy, Homer-sized sarcasm. “Two days.”