The Addams Family

The Charles Addams-inspired TV sitcom heads for the big screen.

By Sheldon Teitelbaum

Two sounds you will not hear in Paramount's $35 million Christmas pick-up of ailing Orion's film of New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams’ “The Addams Family.”

The first is of one hand clapping—one of the few visual puns mor attempted while depicting the severed sentient human hand who, in the film, plays a highly mobile, Lassie-like character called “Thing.” Shooting THE ADDAMS FAMILY, which took nearly 150 days to complete and involved sundry fits and false starts, was not a Zen-like experience foranyone; particulary not for first-time director and veteran cameraman Barry Sonnenfeld, for whom the film was an unusually ambitious and inordinately difficult directing debut.

The second sound is the resounding thud of Sonnenfeld’s head on solid Burbank sod, when he passed out cold on the set during the second week of production.

Some of Sonnenfeld’s associates appear to beasking whether art will imitate life when Paramount opens THE ADDAMS FAMILY November 22, with the film making as sickening a clunk as Sonnenfeld’s head at the boxoffice. According to a former

The New Yorker, associate of producer Scott Rudin, some are saying that Rudin may, in fact, best be described as the film’s uncredited director. “There isn ta shotin this movie that Scott didnt personally approve by looking through the camera,” said the source. Gale Tattersal, however, the second of the troubled film's two directors of photography, maintained that this was a malicious slur, or “Slag,” directed at someone who should be commended for having taken on—and having seen to completion—sochalleng-

Addams’ tamily, drawn for and collected in book form.

ing a screen debut. “Barry did as well as you'd expect a DP todo ona picture like this,” said Tattersal, “Sure it was running before you could walk, but remember that Scott [Rudin] wanted him in the picture. Sure they discussed a lot on the set, and Scott often disagreed with what was done, and so they did alternatives. But it was very much a collaboration rather than Barry beinga tool of Scott's.”

Having your directordeepsix so early on in the game, acknowledged Rudin, is not the kind of thing—however

quick his recovery—that inspires confidence in the suits and bean-counters in the front office. Especially when, as was the case with

Orion, they're already

hurting. “I was standing

next to him when he passed out,” recalled the bearded Rudin from his office at Paramount. “I wasa little bit panicked because he wasn’t particularly having a rough day. We were just talking, looking at the monitor, and I heard a thud, and he was on the floor. I thought he was joking at first, and I bent down and he was out, I smacked him a little and he came to quickly. We lifted him up, wrapped thecrewand got him to his little room.”

Sonnenfeld spent the rest of the

day in his hotel resting up and watching TV. “It was great,” said

The new movie family (I to r) Anjelica Huston as Morticia, Raul Julia as Gomez (with “Thing” on his shoulder), Judith Malina as Granny Frump, Christina Ricci as Wednesday, Care! Struycken as Lurch, Christopher Lioyd as Fester and Jimmy Workman as Pugsiey. Opening on November 22.

the impish, erstwhile director of photography on such films as RAISING ARIZONA, MISERY and WHEN HARRY MET SALLY, “cause I got to go home.”

There was indeed little sinister in Sonnenfeld’s brief but painful encounter with the floor. He had spent the night before struggling in his mind with a shot scheduled for the next morning, and had only fallen asleep fifteen minutes before his 5:30 a.m. wake-up call. The grinding and gnashing of teeth had already become a regular nighttime pursuit for him. He thought he was getting used to it.

But for Rudin, by then grappling with the likelihood that Orion might sell off his picture or, far worse, pull the plug on it, this was scary business. “I was worried about his health and | was worried about the movie,” recalled Rudin.“What the hell is going to happen if he cant make it through two weeks? What's it going to be like in week six or sixteen? We had no idea it would get to be 21." Rudin said he pushed Sonnenfeld to pace himself.

ctually, Sonnenfeld maintained he had always known that directing was too horrible and gruesome an occupation to ever seriously \, pursue, “I don't JtAe recommend it,” he said, dryly. “Making THE ADDAMS FAMILY was the longest thing I've ever done in my life. I've never committed to anything for cighteen months, except marriage. It'sa time-consuming and horrifying process—but so is the rest of movie making. It takes so long to write the scriptand cast it. Every shot—in this case 900 individual shots—can take an hour to six hours to set up, light, and film.”

Directing movies for Sonnenfeld was merely the means by which he sought to buy his freedom. “I wanted to direct forall the wrong reasons, “said Sonnenfeld in his trailer while shooting sequences last April in an elaborate full-scale facade of the Addams* haunted house high atopacold, blustery hillin Burbank. “And not just because being a director gets youa table

Christina Ricci as Wednesday tries out her own camera angle as cinematographerturned-director Barry Sonnenfeld plans a scene with Christopher Lioyd as Fester.

in all the best restaurants.

“I felt if Ibecamea successful director, | could work less frequently and spend more time with my wife and my children. I'm basically a lazy person —a great starter but not much of a finisher. I don’t feel | have a burning desire to make an important statement. I'm not an Oliver Stone. But Ido havea point of view, which is that people should laugh a lot and be happy.”

It is Sonnenfeld’s ideas about family which, aside from the integral charm of the late Charles Addams’ cartoons and, toa lesser extent, the "60s TV series, may prove to be one of THE ADDAMS FAMI- LY’s biggest saving graces. The plot of the movie concerns bald Uncle Fester’s return to the macabre embrace of the family he had been severed fromsome 25 years carlier after becoming lost in the Bermuda Triangle. Fester is played by Christopher Lloyd, eschewing a flesh-toned skull cap for a deep razor cut. Claiming amnesia, Fester is revealed to have made his living during these lost years as a con artist. It is up to the family—wraithlike family matriarch Morticia (Anjelica Huston) Addams, her husband (and Fester’s brother), the uninhibited and adoring Gomez (Raul Julia), Granny Frump (Judith Malina), the sorrowful Wednesday (Christina Ricci, last seen swimming off with accolades in MERMAIDS) and her mischievous brother Pugsley—to determine if he’s genuine, and thus trustworthy of redemption

Sonnenfeld and Rudin met on the set of RAISING ARI- ZONA, where Sonnenfeld’s kibbitzing often became frantic in Rudin’s company. Rudin said that as middle class, urban Jewish men from the East Coast, they shared an aesthetic sensibility and an outlook on life. It made, they both admit, for an interesting relationship. “Scott and are sort of an odd couple,” recounted Sonnenfeld (they have, in fact, been described as “The Sunshine boys”). “I spenta lot of my time on this production deliberately torturing him. Although we ve only known each other well for a year, it feels like twenty.”

Sonnenfeld got involved with THE ADDAMS FAM- ILY at the instigation of his agent, who promised the photographer he could get him a

directing job. “I'd always felt that as a cinematographer | was really a fellow filmmaker,” said Sonnenfeld. “I had worked with first-time directors Danny DeVito and Penny Marshall. I had seen howit was done. | felt most directors didn't realize the camera is their friend, and that it can be used to tella storyemotionally, and make a film happy or sad or funny. It wasn't just a recording device, and I knew that was what I could bring toa film. I knew I could direct I'm a narrative, story-telling kind of guy.”

Sonnenfeld’s decision to land a directing job was an event marked, he noted, by the devotion of subsequent weekends to the consumption of memorably bad scripts. One of them was an carly version of THE ADDAMS FAMILY screenplay, commissioned by Rudin and delivered by Caroline (EDWARD SCISSOR- HANDS) Thompson and Larry (BEETLEJUICE) Wilson. Sonnenfeld was at the Four Scasons Hotel in Los Angeles with his wife, in town color-correcting WHEN HARRY MET SALLY, and girding himself to prep MISERY, when he read the script for THE ADDAMS FAMILY. Underwhelmed, he called his agent and said he wasn't interested.

“It was not a good script at all,” recalled Sonnenfeld. “The villains were cartoony. Thing walked around with a mirror, holding it upside down so he could look up women’s dresses There was a talking moose on the wall. The level of humor was third grade. And the plot was not endemic to Charles Addams’ cartoons.”

Sonnenfeld did, however, like the structure of the screenplay. He particularlyapproved of the idea of bringing Thing out of the box he had inhabited in the TV show. And indeed, as the script developed, Thing became more integral to the plot. “But overall,” said Sonnenfeld, “It was just not hip The words were very flat, | was not particularly a fan of the TV show, but a huge fan of the cartoons as they appeared in The New Yorker. | love surrealism in humor. Charles Addams always played with scale, and was visually acute.

Best of all, he was also very, very dark. There is something in all of us—certainly in me that when you hear the screeching tires of two cars outside at night you feel a little disappointed if you don't hear the sound of metal rending. In the most horrible situations I always find something to laugh about.”

Rudin hooked Sonnenfeld merely by explaining that the script was a first draft that could be changed and rewritten, “When I'm hired asa cinematographer,” noted Sonnenfeld, “I'm usually sent a shooting script, and nota first draft As a cinematographer, | had no idea how much one could change a first draft.”

Rudin recalled that he had no problem casting Huston, Lloyd and Julia in the lead roles—each of them were first choices. “It wasn't that hard to cast,” said Rudin. “They all wanted to do it. They were attracted to do it, They were very attracted to the characters. If you offer Al Pacino a cop movie and he says he won't do it, so okay, he'll do another cop movie. You ask Anjelica Huston if she wants to play Morticia Addams, it’s not like it'll come along next year. It's now or never. She met Barry, we had breakfast, she liked him and what he had to say about it. He hada real idea for the movie. This was intimate, not the big splashy BATMAN or BEETLEJUICE version, It was going to be a domestic comedy, very funny and charming.” Rudin and Sonnenfeld said they sought actors with stage experience to provide, in Sonnenfeld’s terms, “a certain theatricality of performance.”

The rewrite process did not go smoothly, Sonnenfeld found that as one draft ran into the next, the original writers became wary of the need to change plot points because of the ripple effect such changes would have in the rest of the structure, “They started to become too fond of their own words,” said Sonnenfeld. “Their dialogue was always the weakest part of the script, which was punchline, setup, punchline,

“L wanted to make the script darker and more visual, less about the TV show and more about the Charles Addamscar-

Sonnenfeld, producer Scott Rudin, and child stars Christina Ricci and Jimmy Workman, obviously pleased with their work, review a take on a video monitor.

toons,” said Sonnenfeld. In fact, there are now perhaps twenty or so scenes in the film directly inspired by the cartoons, the rights to which Rudin secured fora hefty sum he won’ divulge, and at the cost of the protective input of Addams’ former wife Barbara Colyton.

amous cartoons tincorporated into the movie include a shot of members of the family atop their mansion, preparing todumpa boiling witches’ cauldron onto a group of Christmas carolers below and a scene in which Fester files the spikes atop the gates around the Addams’ mansion.

For help on the script, Sonnenfeld turned to Paul Rudnick, an established New York screenwriter, playwright and novelist. Rudin had worked with Rudnick and put his name forward as someone whocould help bail them out. “He's funny and fast,” said Rudin, “and he had experience writing for actors. When you have race horses like we had, you owe it to them to tailor thescreenplay to their strengths.”

Rudnick overhauled the entire screenplay, with rewnting continuing well into production. “The challenge was in setting the limits of the characters and the style,” said Rudnick “Some could be taken fromthe TV series but a lot of the work on the film was to go back to the original cartoons and capture an essence there that has made them into archetypes.”

One of the things Sonnenfeld wanted to ensure from the start was that he would not spend his time during the production fretting about the camcrawork. To free himself from worrying, he did something many still find odd: he hired Owen Roizman, who had photographed THE FRENCH CONNECTION, NETWORK and TOOTSIE. It was odd not because Roizman was, according to veteran production designer Richard MacDonald, “an awful cameraman, an awful man, too, a boring person, Didn't have an eye for anything, didn't see anything,” but because Roizman could only sign on for ten of what would become a 21- weck shoot. It was, said Mac- Donald, not only virtually unheard of for a director of

photography to intentionally shoot less than half of a movie. but “totally immoral of him [Roizman] to agree to such a thing atall.”

This was not, however, an opinion shared by cither Sonnenfeld or Rudin, who hired Gale Tattersal to take over from Roizman. Tattersal, whose credits include WILD ORCHID, HOMEBOY, and most recently, Alan Parker's THE COMMITMENTS, said that although he admires Rowman’s work, he also found the arrangement more than passing odd. “I found that most surprising.” said Tattersal. “If you take on a commitment, you see it through to the end It’s not like a bus that you just get off half-way through, when something else comes along.”

“What I made sure of was to hire someone so much better than | was,” said Sonnenfeld. explaining his decision to have Roizman. “It was very important to me to havea great director of photography, It was great to have someone who is brilliant to start out with Whenever you're nervous, it’s so easy to fall back on to something you know well, and | didn’t want that. I didnt want someone | could push around because | would stop paying attention to the actors.”

“Owen did virtually all of the big sequences,” explained Rudin, “and certainly did enough to determine the style of it. His work is extraordinary, first-rate. You'll never know what's his and what's Gale's.” Tattersal concurred “Owen was to have done all the interiors,” said Tattersal, “and as that represents a style change anyway, they didn't see any harm in that. Films being what they are, though, that all changed, and it ended up being a lot more tricky than one would imagine.”

Whoever was responsible for what, the experience of letting go was, for Sonnenfeld, profound, For others, like MacDonald, it was astounding. “Barry surprised me by how visually dumb he was,” recounted MacDonald. “Until he looked through the camera, he couldn't see it. He's been helpless at it. The editor called hima stills photographer.”

Though hardly as exuberant

in his self-criticism — Mac- Donald is a delightful British gentleman who can be quite crusty when so inclined— Sonnenfeld concurred. “Since directing, I've become so unvisual.” he said. “I start talking about using zoom lenses. Asa cinematographer | never used a zoom lens. lalways wanted to dolly in,and now I'mtelling the cinematogmpher, “Wouldn't a zoom be faster?’ I've become my worst nightmare —someone more concerned with the acting than with whethera pristine or perfectly lit image can be obtained. As a director of photography | was anal about framing and lighting.”

hough Sonnenfeld didn't get things moving visually in his movie, he did, at least. get Thing moving-—in a fashion, The movie might indeed have been called “Thing Unbound,” had effects envisioned for Thing worked out as anticipated. Alas, like the Addams mansion gate, which had initially been conceived as a versatile, high-tech concoction of hundreds of constantly opening and closing gates powered hyd raulically—and which ultimately drew its power from low-tech pieces of string and rods Thing never quite got off the ground. Not, at least, in the purely mechanical sense. “With Thing.” explained Sonnenfeld, who resorted largely to extensive rotoscoping ing of magician Chris Hart's hand to get Thing up and running, “I was able to put the camera low and wide and track. | knew that whenever you put a camera near the ground and move it, it’s very dynamic, very funny. It’s like the baby stuff in RAISING ARIZONA. If you want it handsome you should shoot it with long lenses at normal height. Thing gave me the chance to move the camera.” Unfortunately, it did not enable Sonnenfeld to step up the pace of production. THE ADDAMS FAMILY, already, long in the making by most standards, went five weeks over schedule. Although most directors would have killed for the freedom 120 days of shooting might have afforded them,

Sonnenteid directs Raut Julia as Gomez, getting a scalp massage trom “Thing,” the hand of off-camera magician Christopher Hart, disguised with makeup.

Sonnenfeld said he did not relish the added time. “I don’ think most directors would want to still be doing a film by day 120, unless they are Jim Cameron,” said Sonnenfeld. “It was to a certain extent the nature of the film that it would take so long. In fact, the original schedule we went to Orion with was seventeen or eighteen weeks and we shot for 21. We were asked to cut it down, and we tried to do it faster, but were unable to. We added a bunch of scenes that weren't in the original script. As the film developed, we realized there were characters we wanted on screen for more time.”

There were, however, other reasons attributed for the interminable shoot--the same that were said to account for Sonnenfeld’s mechanical difficulties with Thing and the gate, According to MacDonald, special effects man Chuck Comisky and others who toiled on THE ADDAMS FAM- ILY. the production was initially undermined by a dearth of prep time, and by the inadequate use of whatever time was unavailable. “It wasn'tatall well planned,” said MacDonald, and to an extent,

Sonnenfeld agreed. “There was a greatdeal of chaos, of last minute scrambling.” he said.

Another difficulty crew members encountered was Sonnenfeld’s often excessive reluctance to be tied down to decisions he could not change at the last moment. Sonnenfeld’s indecisiveness, observed costume designer Ruth Myers, reduced the business of directing. for Sonnenfeld, to a process of endlessly answering questions. “I heard him say he never realized he'd have to make constant decisions all the time,” recalled Myers. “In fact, he wouldn't have been answering questions if he said to people, “I trust you,” which he only did later on in the production. That was a trap he put himself into.

“I think that Barry was so overwhelmed by the bigness of this that he was resistant to suggestions,” said Myers. “He and Scott wanted to keep control. By the end, of course, they realized no one was going to steal their glory. The decisions were theirs, but they had to let you do your job.”

MacDonald wasn't quite so charitable. “What a stupid way of carrying on. He really had

no conception of what a director is supposed to do. You are supposed to make up your mind at the beginning of a picture of what you are going to see on the screen, All these mindless changes during the production stemmed from his own inability to visualize Time was wasted because he never made up his mind. He didn't use the time he had to build the film in his head.”

Sonnenteld and Rudin did, however. spend inordinate amounts of time visualizing the kind of film they did not want to sec. “It was strange because in the beginning, every fitting they came to, they would hit their fists against the walls and say, "We don't want this to look like a costume movie. said Myers. “I'd say, “But it iy a costume film. This is not kitchen sink cinema.” | couldn't get it into their heads what | was talking about until theend All they knew were things they had seen that they didn't want,”

Not surprisingly, Sonnenfeld was grateful when principal photography on THE AD- DAMS FAMILY ended carly last May. And even MacDonald believes that with the right editing, the film will be worth seeing. “This was more of a trial than it was fun,” acknowledged Sonnenfeld. “It was a difficult film, especially beinga first film, But I know what I have on my hands now, I think we have an incredibly warm and loving comedy. What will surprise everyone, | think, is the depth of emotion we have achieved.”

Sonnenfeld is convinced, in fact, that THE ADDAMS FAMILY has all the makings ofa hit Broadway musical. He, however, docs not anticipate taking this particular show on the road. He said he was paid very little for his work on this picture and hopes to recoup some of his losses both by shooting commercials and eventually holding out for far more on his next feature, should there be one. What that feature may be, Sonnenfeld doesn't even want to think about right now.

“There is some screwball stuff Id eventually like to share. Right now, though, | just want to go home.” o

PRODUCTION DESIGN

Richard MacDonald, raising the roof, among other Gothic constructions.

By Sheldon Teitelbaum

Richard Mac Donald isa builder, which is probably why he was hired as production designer for THE ADDAMS FAM- ILY. It helped, of course, that he had worked for director John Schlesinger, who had just done PACIFIC HEIGHTS for THE ADDAMS FAMILY producer Scott Rudin. MacDonald likes to build sets full scale and isnt keen on models, he said, because a few small companies like ILM in Marin County and Boss Films in Southern California have monopolized the field, making costs prohibitively expensive and, he believes, mucking up the business of filmmaking.

“You have to go to them because they hire all the model makers,” explained MacDonald, the veteran British production designer, who has worked on such films as ALTERED STATES, JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR, MARATHON MAN, and THE RUSSIA HOUSE. “But you have no control over what they do.”

It proved impossible, however, to find an appropriate house to stand in for the Addams* mansion on location, a search that MacDonald noted was a source of wasted time and money for the production. Producer Scott Rudin and Sonnenfeld dispatched some seven location scouts to scour the East Coast for a suitably Gothic American haunted house. That no such house was ever found didn't surprise MacDonald. “Charles Addams,” he

MacDonald designed the tacade (inset) for exteriors when no real location could be found.

noted, “had never really drawn one identifiable Addams House. Rather, he drew in whatever he needed.” Mac Donald designed his own version, incorporating the salient features of all Addams’ constructs. The result, however, was a tad over the top even for the pretensions of turn-of-thecentury American domicile architecture. “It was a bit morecartoony than real,”’said MacDonald, “so we built it.”

They also argued about it, said McDonald, interminably. Only McDonald did not, he recounted, have the luxury of waiting for Sonnenfeld and Rudin to pindown such issues as whether to shoot the film entirely out of doors, as was once Sonnenfeld’s intention. MacDonald knew he had to get the two-sided facade of the mansion up, and that it would not wait for the last moment,

“Look,” said MacDonald, “I had to build something. Youcan't get these buildings done in seconds, so I went ahead and built it. If |had waited to get itapproved or explainevery bit of it... ILmean, there was no time to do anything else.” MacDonald built his 75-foot-high facade of the Addams family mansion for $150,000 not much more, really, thana model might have cost.

Though British, MacDonald was familiar with the Charles Addamscartoons that would have to serve as his main visual source on THE ADDAMS FAMILY. The cartoons had run in the British satirical journal Punch while MacDonald had

MacDonald and the exterior of the Addams tamity mansion, constructed on a hill overlooking Burbank.

been working for the London office of an American advertising firm. He relied upon them heavily, though more for inspiration than as actual blueprints. An accomplished artist and architect, MacDonald was up to providing his own. MacDonald's stand-out set on THE ADDAMS FAMILY was surely his towering facade, built at Toluca Lake on a mountain overlooking Burbank, which made the cover of a local community paper, The Tolucan. A hundred feetaway, MacDonald built the castle turret from which members of the family prepare to pour a boiling witch’s brew upon Christmas carolers below, and from which Fester and Gomez drive golf balls into the family cemetery—an indoor set located elsewhere. Culled from Addam's cartoons are anassortment of gargoyles and decorative creatures, for instance, bats with human faces and menacing cat familiars. Although MacDonald found working with Sonnenfeld and Rudin to be occasionally trying, he said his nine-month stint on THE ADDAMS FAMILY was both fun and fecund. Though much money was wasted on indecision and on sets and gimmicks that didn’ pan out, enough got to the screen, he noted, to make THE ADDAMS FAMILY worth secing. “If Barry and Scott have the sense to cut the stuff that didn’t work,” he said, “jt should be quite a film.” Oo