THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, May 23, 1995 TAG: 9505240038
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 118 lines
A WHOLE GENERATION grew up humming the song about ``Cas-per, the friendly ghost. Friend-li-est ghost I know.''
Casper, though, always had problems.
For one thing, he's dead.
That never seemed to bother the cheery little wimp, but he was always mightily concerned that he didn't have any friends. ``Fleshies'' (live humans) avoided him, even though he meant well. Perhaps he was just too transparent.
Casper gets a new afterlife when Universal releases ``Casper,'' the big-screen, multi-special-effects movie, opening locally Friday.
``Casper'' is what they call ``the first digital performer ever'' - a 3-D computer creature created on a keyboard rather than with a pen.
Steven Spielberg is one of the producers, but even though he visited the set almost daily, he gladly left the problems up to his first-time director Brad Silberling and staff. Many of the creators of ``Who Framed Roger Rabbit?'' and ``Jurassic Park'' were called in; they say the computer-generated special effects in ``Casper'' were new, and unique, traumas.
`` `Roger Rabbit' was ink-paint,'' said producer Colin Wilson. ``With `Casper,' the character had to work with human actors, but he had to be both transparent and in 3-D. We didn't want the film to be similar to `Roger Rabbit.' We didn't want it to be flat. There are a bible of facial expressions. We put all of them into a computer. Then we could dial up Casper's emotions - using a keyboard rather than a pen.''
It wasn't easy.
On the morning after the film was unveiled, the creators sighed with relief. Casper looked other-worldly but real at the same time. Kids laughed. Some adults cried.
Bill Pullman (from the hit ``While You Were Sleeping'') plays a self-styled ``ghost therapist'' who arrives at moldy, haunted Whipstaff Manor in Maine to help noisy ghosts with dysfunctional afterlives. They are Casper's uncles, Fatso, Stretch and Stinkie, meanies who keep him working all the time, as if he were Cinderfella. Casper takes one look at Pullman's teenage daughter (Christine [sic] Ricci, who was Wednesday Addams in ``The Addams Family'') and flips his spirits.
The villainess is a rich heiress, played by Cathy Moriarty (Oscar nominee for ``Raging Bull''), who wants to boot the ghosts out and take the manor's treasure. Her henchman is played by Eric Idle, of Monty Python's Flying Circus.
Director Silberling had only worked in television and had no experience with special effects.
``I was panicked,'' admitted Silberling, 30. ``I had to direct two movies - one with the human characters and one with the ghost cast. One of my problems was in finding the voice for Casper. I listened to hundreds of kids. Most of them came in being so sweet. I knew their parents or managers had probably told them to mince it up. I went with 12-year-old Malachi Pearson. He had never worked in a movie before and had the right mixture of adolescent enthusiasm with the innocence of Casper.''
The ghostly trio of uncles got the raucous voices of stand-up comics.
The humans said their lines and were no trouble. The ghostly visages caused all the problems.
``The dinosaurs in `Jurassic Park' created movie history, but they never had to give a performance. They never had to show emotions,'' the director said.
``There were 50 shots involving the creatures in `Jurassic Park.' In `Casper,' there are 350 with the ghosts,'' he explained. One of the most difficult was a scene in which Casper lifts a dress out of a trunk and drops it over Ricci's head.
Silberling says he isn't worried that younger viewers probably have never seen a ``Casper'' cartoon and don't even know who he might be.
``I'm counting on it,'' he said with a laugh. ``It was freeing. I didn't have to worry about tampering with the image. Casper here is much more rambunctious and spunky than he was. Probably no one under 20 knows Casper, but most American kids, strangely, have heard of him. They know him from merchandising, I think.''
Casper first existed as part of a children's book written by Joe Oriolo and Sy Reit in the 1940s. The book was unpublished but was offered to a subsidiary of Paramount Pictures. In 1945, Paramount released the first Casper cartoon, ``The Friendly Ghost.'' The initial audience response was not enthusiastic. Nonetheless, Casper was revived in 1948 with the cartoon ``There's Good Boos Tonight,'' followed the next year by ``A Haunting We Will Go.''
In 1949, the first comic book, ``Casper the Friendly Ghost,'' was published.
Casper's greatest fame came with a Saturday morning TV cartoon show that ran from 1963 to 1967.
Moriarty, now Casper's film enemy, is the only cast member who was an original Casper fan.
``I still have video tapes of some of the shows,'' she said. ``Some of them were too precious. I didn't like Wendy, the good witch. But I liked Casper. He was very sweet and very pleasant. . . . Our movie, is much more '90s and hip.''
Ricci, 15, had never seen a Casper cartoon before being signed for the movie. ``I kept telling Brad to remember 1980 - that I was born in 1980 and that I know nothing before that,'' she said. ``He'd keep making references to things in the '50s.''
All the actors had to do scenes with creatures that were not there.
``It wasn't just a matter of saying lines to empty space,'' Pullman said. ``The ghosts move around all the time. We had to learn all their movements and every facial expression, even though they weren't there. Everything had to match when they came back later and added the ghosts.''
Idle had no complaints. ``It's even harder when you work with a real actress,'' he quipped. ``Some of the actresses with whom I've appeared were more lifeless than ghosts.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
The friendly ghost appears to Christine [sic] Ricci, playing the
daughter of a ``ghost therapist,'' in ``Caspet,'' which opens
Friday.
Photo
UNIVERSAL PICTURES
Casper's incorrigibly odious uncles, also known as the Ghostly Trio,
are, from left, Fatso, Stretch and Stinkie.
by CNB