Special Report From Rhett Wickham: Honing the Range (Part Two)
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RW
You can hear her with the sound down!

SANFORD
And then Will came up with the idea that well, if Rosanne is Maggie, Maggie doesn’t really belong on that farm. She doesn’t even really sound like she comes from there. So what if this animal..we were theorizing that Pearl at the beginning of the movie one of the animals comes to the farm so that we get to see how Pearl takes people in and it makes Pearl and the farm sympathetic. And so Will said "What if Maggie is that animal? What if Maggie’s an outsider? Caloway and Grace…Caloway is the leader of the farm, and they’ve always been there and here comes this outside cow that just shakes things up!" And it was like perfect!

FINN (laughing)|
Those are two really big ideas right there!

SANFORD
It required re-animating most of Maggie’s footage!

FINN
We knew that we’d be in trouble for about the …uhh… the first ten…fifteen minutes of the movie we’d have to reanimate a lot of stuff. The farm song was almost all in color, the Patch of Heaven song.

SANFORD
With Maggie in it.

FINN
We sat down with Dennis Blakey who was the Artistic Coordinator and said "Maggie’s in six scenes in this scene montage. Can we just re-comp them with her out?" He said "That’s easy." And he sat down and reworked them and sort of moved things around and Maggie’s disappeared. She’s not on the farm, she’s coming to the farm…she’ll be there.

SANFORD
If you look real close ...and we mention this on the DVD commentary… if you look real close you can kind of see where she used to be. (Laughter)

FINN
You know we sat down with David Steinberg who’s the Associate Producer and said "Okay, we know this sounds like a lot of money but…" and we had to do this really, really fast and I remember as I was sort of spitballing the idea "Well if we’re going to …. And we’re going to re-conceive the character…and she’s from the outside…." And I could see the wheels in John’s head were turning exactly as fast as I could say it and it’s like "Oh this is going to cost a lot of money..and we’re going to have to rework a lot of stuff and …oh…uh..yeah, let’s do it." And we proposed it to them. We came back with a scene count with what we’d have to remove, what we’d have to re-do. The middle of the movie was still kind of an open book, but I think the thing that gave us the strength to do that was that about six months prior to this they had forced us in to seclusion to write the last third of the move and that had really succeeded, and I think that because we conceived and outline and we scripted all the end of the movie it remained unchanged to this day. So I think on the strength of that they said "Well if you can do that with the last third, by re-writing the first third you can earn that last third better, so go do it." Again they got right behind us.

RW
When was this?

FINN
April of 2002.

RW
Wow!

SANFOR
Yeah, it was fast. It had to go fast.

FINN
I often think that we got that idea just in the nick of time. Not too late and not too early. Because…well picture this, if you pitched the movie, "Here’s the idea - three cows save the farm. The three cows are Judy Dench, Jennifer Tilly…..and Rosanne Barr!" (deadpan look) "Get out of my office!"

SANFORD
They’d think you were crazy.

FINN
The spontaneity of that relationship, and how we worked it out on the fly and how Rosanne contributed and how all the actors and animators and artists contributed to it at that point it was like that last penny and everybody got it and got everybody on the same page and everybody was contributing to it in the same way. And the other thing was that we always had a plot, but now we had a story. Because even if they save the farm, is this cow - Maggie - ever going to fit in with Mrs. Caloway who clearly has resentment because they both want to be the boss? So now you have a story and you’re at the beginning of the relationship. With the original concept of them all being from the same place what we had was more like a sitcom relationship.

SANFORD
It never changed. They began friends, they ended friends. Nothing changed. Nothing was added to the farm.

FINN
There’s the quote about how story telling is primarily about transformation. And we had a story that started with three cows on a happy farm and ended with three cows on a happy farm, and we kept thinking like "Can we give Pearl a new wagon?"

RW
(laughing) Anything for change.

FINN
But the idea was that she was different, and that she was an outsider and that she was going to struggle to fit in - even if they save the farm maybe she won’t. It sounds so quid pro quo but if you want to really see something transform there’s nothing like watching the beginning of a relationship. Again an established relationship - and GOLDEN GIRLS is a wonderful model - is great for a sit-com, nothing is ever going to change you’re basically going to get the same format from week to week.

RW
But in a movie you have to have change. And you have to raise the stakes for characters.

FINN/SANFORD
Absolutely

RW
It has to be a special day. Even in the most existential movie where you may watch a character in bed for 59 minutes doing nothing, so long as in the 60th minute he gets up out of bed you’ve been there for the one day, the most special day, in which something special and extraordinary happened and he made a decision that changed his life forever.

FINN
Yes, yes. That’s an excellent point. And when it’s done correctly you take it for granted, which you should. One of the great models for that, going back to Disney animation, is 101 DALMATIANS which opens with this incredibly passive and seemingly casual opening. But what is happening is it’s the day that Pongo decides that they’re going to go out and find mates. That’s huge! Even though he’s very blasé about the consideration, this is a big, big day.

RW
That also launches you. It’s the notion that out of this seemingly ordinary day suddenly their worlds begin to spin out of control. In fact they try and try and try to get back to the comfort of that "every day" and it is the reward they get. It’s not so easy to figure that out, however. So many good story ideas fool you into thinking that you’re making something happen when all you’re really doing is treading water - or dancing. Right? Dancing isn’t walking - in that it isn’t getting you anywhere. You’re not moving down the road.

FINN
We were getting that criticism a lot until we hit on this. But even people who needed some persuading on what the actual plan was agreed that it was time to do something. It was very, very fortunate and they were very, very generous about allowing us find a way to do it. Nobody ever gave us a mandate for the move like "this is what we decide you need for the movie, because we feel you’re not delivering it." They were very, very open and said go talk to people, go listen.

SANFORD
That was what was great. They didn’t prescribe it they said "You guys are smart. Here’s the problem, go solve it."

RW
And when you say "they" you’re talking about ….?

FINN
Pam mostly.

FINN
We’ve both known Pam (Coats) a really long time and worked with her. She was really effective.

You know it’s interesting. Because it’s such a deceptive thing, and I don’t know who said this on the TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE disc…it might have been Leonard Maltin…but basically the idea has always been that you can’t make a great movie by committee, but here was movie made by committee - SIERRA MADRE. TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE is an example of a great movie made by committee, and so is CASABLANCA, so are a lot of terrific old studio movies. The point is who’s on the committee and what’s the committee there to do?

SANFORD
It’s not really a committee, it’s a collaboration.

FINN
It is. The thing is that keeping variety in the mix is the heart of keeping something fresh and original. And we both gravitated to this idea because it was the first plot line for a Disney cartoon that sounded original and gettable in a long, long time. Now GROOVE was a very, very original story and a very very funny movie, but it wasn’t immediately gettable. You had Peru and llamas and a lot of things that people can’t really digest and they get discouraged and they don’t go. If they go they have a terrific time, because it’s a wonderful movie.

SANFORD
How do you sell it?

FINN
But everybody has an attitude about cows. And even though we kept getting "What can you do with cows? They don’t do anything but stand around and burp and pass gas." Ours don’t pass gas but they burp in the movie. Rosanne did all her own burping.

SANFORD
But that premise pitches in one sentence. And then you talk about who the cows are and who is playing the cows and people go "Oh, I’m there. I’m so there." I’ve never pitched the story to anyone and not had them smile. It’s just inherently comedic and inherently winning.

FINN
We both love Gary Larson, and he’s mined so much off of cows. It was funny that cows are going to be the heroes of the western!