'Hero' worshipers
Los Angeles Times

By Mary McNamara

September 14, 2006


And it clearly had his spirit, his message.
'EVERYONE'S Hero' is an unusual film in many ways. It manages to be rated G
without the aid of talking animals or singing princesses. Neither does it
rely on multilayered sarcasm, pop culture references, camp or the ability of
a lead character to channel Ed McMahon, Julia Child and/or Elvis.
Instead the Fox animated film is the straightforward, heart-on-its-sleeve
story of a boy who must find and return Babe Ruth's stolen bat (OK, there is
a talking baseball and a talking bat, but no animals were anthropomorphized
in the making of this film) though it means traveling from New York to
Chicago on his own and encountering all sorts of disparate characters - from
hobos to bullies to stars of the Negro Baseball League.

'Everyone's Hero,' which opens today, also raises the bar of the Hollywood
back story to a new level of poignancy. Every film is someone's dream, often
with a making-of narrative just as funny, dramatic, tragic or bittersweet as
the film itself, but it's hard to imagine one that will top this one's any
time soon. Written by Rob Kertz from a story that IDT Entertainment founder
Howard Jonas told his children at bedtime, 'Everyone's Hero' was the final
project of Christopher Reeve. The actor turned director, who continued to
work in Hollywood despite his catastrophic fall in 1995 from a horse that
left him a quadriplegic, was taken by the story of young Yankee Irving: that
no matter how bleak things look, you have to just keep swinging.

'Howard brought it to Chris because in Howard's mind, Chris is one of the
last great American heroes,' says Kertz, who worked closely with Reeve on
the story for eight months. 'One of the most inspirational and glorious
parts of working with Chris was how normal it was. He was a man who loved to
laugh and who really believed in the story.'

Reeve was in the midst of script revisions and storyboarding when he died
unexpectedly in October 2004. After his death, Dana Reeve, who also voiced
the mother in the film, took up the banner of executive producer in an
effort to ensure that her husband's vision of the film would become his
final legacy. Her death to cancer in March of this year made those involved
even more determined to see the project through.

'Chris wanted it to be finished,' says William H. Macy, who voices Lefty,
the villainous pitcher who steals Ruth's bat in an effort to defeat the
Yankees in the World Series, 'and so everyone pretty much said 'it will be
done.' '

Macy is part of a cast with a collective wattage - Rob Reiner, Whoopi
Goldberg, Mandy Patinkin, Robin Williams and Brian Dennehy - that reflects
more the admiration many in Hollywood felt for Reeve than the film's budget,
or even its ambitions.

'Chris kept saying he didn't want this to be 'Shrek,' ' Kertz says. 'He
wanted it to be a small movie about a father and son and the power of
perseverance.'

Macy, who knew Reeve back in their shared Juilliard days - 'He was this
impossibly tall, handsome, talented guy; oh how we all hated him' - was
approached to join the cast after Reeve's death. 'It came to me as a project
that had been his,' Macy says. 'And it clearly had his spirit, his message.'

For Reiner, who voices Screwie, the cynical, wisecracking baseball that
accompanies Yankee on his journey, the film combined pretty much everything
he loved: kids, baseball, humor and a chance to honor a friend. Reeve's
death, he says, 'emboldened us to get this project done, to get that message
out. It wasn't just his personal courage,' Reiner says of Reeve, 'but his
advocacy on the part of so many people, how he moved stem cell research up
the national agenda pretty much single-handedly.' Although Reeve had worked
with Kertz and animators for many months, and along with Colin Brady and
Daniel St. Pierre is credited as directing the film, much of the work,
including all of the voice recording, actual animation and some script
revision was done after his death. Goldberg's role as Darlin', the purloined
bat, was added for humor and texture, although Kertz says he and Reeve had
discussed the possibility of a talking bat.

'True to the period'

What didn't change, says producer Ron Tippe, was the tone and the vision of
the film.

'Chris said, 'I don't want to make a cartoon, I want to make a movie,' '
Tippe says. 'He wanted to take chances. Like the way the Negro Baseball
League is portrayed in the movie. Chris wanted to do something true to the
period. Some people would have said no, that kind of thing doesn't belong in
this movie, but Chris wanted to show how it was back then.' With Reeve as a
model, Tippe says, everyone was able to push harder, get the film done
faster; animated films are famously complicated because of all their moving
parts and the high concept of some of the characters. Reiner had done
animated work for television, but he was still surprised at how strange the
process is. 'There you are, all by yourself, saying your lines, trying to be
funny. There's not a heck of a lot of research on how to play a ball,' he
adds, with a laugh. 'I talked to a lot of balls, game balls, practice balls,
got different points of view and, you know, the ball gets a bum rap a lot of
the time.'

More important, Kertz says, Reeve's formidable reputation helped the
filmmakers maintain the story's original tone despite the overwhelming
forces of today's marketplace. 'At one point, someone suggested making
Yankee a squirrel,' he says. 'Because that's what kids films these days are
full of - sarcastic animals. But Chris wanted it to be about kids, he wanted
it to be a story for his son Will, about a real family, about a father and a
son.' The decision to have Yankee come from a loving home, rather than using
a more typical orphan-adventure scenario, was very conscious on both Kertz's
and Reeve's part. 'In the end, it's a happy story,' Kertz says. 'The mom and
dad are still alive, the kid is a good kid. We'll be able to walk out of the
premiere and say to Chris, 'It's a good movie, I know you'd like it.' '

mary.mcnamara@...

Copyright © 2006 Los Angeles Times, All Rights Reserved.


===

An Assistant to the Christopher Reeve Homepage
http://www.chrisreevehomepage.com/

A contributor to the blog Phillips Philes
http://phillipsphiles.blogspot.com/

"...We know it will be hard to make a nation that rules its own people
through force to cease using force against the rest of the world. But
we must try. This is not a role we sought. We preach no manifest
destiny. But like Americans who began this country and brought forth
this last, best hope of mankind, history has asked much of the
Americans of our own time. Much we have already given; much more
we must be prepared to give..."----President Ronald Reagan on 9/5/83

"...It is better to receive, than to give."--actor Christopher Reeve, 1990,
on award shows he presented at

IMPORTANT: Print and hang at your office with the labor laws
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