Most movies based on books — even the massively successful or critically acclaimed ones — will always be considered books first, movies second. However, there are those few films borne from works of literature with stories so perfectly suited to the medium that it’s difficult to imagine the book ever even existed in the first place. The Wizard of Oz is one, and so is Jurassic Park.
Another adaptation that belongs to this rare category is the 1988 Academy Award winner Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Although it was one of the biggest films of the late 1980s, most people don’t know that Who Framed Roger Rabbit began as the book Who Censored Roger Rabbit? by author Gary K. Wolf. This is in part because Who Censored Roger Rabbit? was never a bestseller. It’s also just hard to imagine that the concept of a hard-boiled detective teaming up with a living cartoon character could be anything but a film. But it was. Roger Rabbit, Jessica Rabbit, Eddie Valiant and even Baby Herman first appeared in Wolf’s book — as did some of the film’s most memorable lines, such as Jessica’s “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way,” and Baby Herman’s “My problem is I got a 50-year-old lust and a three-year-old dinky.”
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Wolf, the author behind the unlikely book that was destined for movie stardom, recently spoke with me about his utterly unique creation and how it became a blockbuster hit.
The Inspiration Behind ‘Who Censored Roger Rabbit?’
When I was a kid, I read a lot of comic books. I read Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, all the Disney stuff. I read Mad magazine. I read Cracked. My mom never once said, “Hey, don’t read that stuff. It’ll rot your brain.” As long as I was reading, she was okay with that. My other source of reading material was from my dad, who read true-crime magazines — I don’t think they exist anymore. They were magazines that focused on true crimes, and they had horrific photos of real murders. Later, I graduated to a better class of murder mystery: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain.
I also got into science-fiction and started writing science-fiction short stories. Then I got into writing science-fiction novels for Doubleday. For the fourth novel in my Doubleday contract, I wanted to do something that incorporated the loves of my youth: comic books, cartoons, comic strips and noir mysteries — not easy concepts to interrelate. And so, I was watching Saturday morning cartoons, truly for research, and I found that the cartoons themselves were pretty simplistic. But I became fascinated with the commercials, where I saw cartoon characters like Tony the Tiger and the Trix Rabbit talking to real kids and nobody seemed to think that was odd.
I thought to myself, “What a great idea that would be for a novel.” So I started researching all of the conventions of comic books and comic strips. In my book, they’re not movie characters like they were in the movie, they’re comic book and comic strip characters. When they talk, a word balloon comes up, and you read their word balloons. I had a lot of fun with that. I also came up with a hard-boiled private eye named Eddie Valiant, who I named after my father.
Getting Roger Published
Again, this was the fourth novel of my four-book deal with Doubleday, and for the first time in my writing career, I got a rejection. I called my editor, and I said, “Sharon, why did you reject this? This is clearly the best thing I’ve ever written.” She said, “Oh yeah, we all agree. We all thought it was really funny. It’s so unique. That’s the problem. It’s so unlike anything you’ve ever written before — so unlike anything anybody’s ever written before — that I had to take it to the marketing department. I showed it to them, and they were the ones who rejected it.”
I called the head of marketing, “Chuck, why did you reject my book?” He said, “We all really liked it. It was very funny. But there’s no category for this on the bookstore shelves. We can’t sell this book. It’s not a regular mystery. It’s not a regular fictional novel. It’s not a children’s book. It’s not science fiction. There’s no category for this.”
I went to my agent and said, “Bill, what are we going to do here? If I can’t sell this book and if I can’t write more like this, I don’t want to be a writer because this is what I want to do.” So he started sending it out to other editors. It got 110 rejections until it wound up on the desk of Rebecca Martin, who was the editor at St. Martin’s Press. She had just published a major bestseller for them and the president of the company gave her a vanity project. He said, “Rebecca, whatever book you want to publish next, you’ve got my blessing.” At that time, Roger Rabbit came across her desk. She read it and loved it. She took it directly to the president of the company and said, “Here’s the book I want to publish.”
He took it home, read it, came back and said, “You can’t publish this because I can’t sell it. There’s no category for this on the bookstore shelves.” But Rebecca stepped up to the plate and said, “Either publish that book or I quit.” So they published the book.
Why Roger Is a Rabbit
I wanted a character that would be kind of a Disney character, but that wasn’t a current Disney character. Disney had a duck. They had a dog. They had a mouse. They had the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland and they had a couple of rabbits that hopped around in Bambi, but they didn’t have a superstar rabbit. I thought, “I’m going to make my lead character a rabbit because that’s a character people would believe as a Disney character.”
Also, because Disney already had a white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, I made the character in the book a brown rabbit. When we were making the movie, Dick Williams, who was the lead animator, suggested we change his color to white because he said it would pop off the screen better. I didn’t have a problem with that.
Creating Jessica Rabbit, Baby Herman and Eddie Valiant
I based Jessica Rabbit on Rita Hayworth, Betty Grable, Marilyn Monroe and Veronica Lake, especially, who was an actress in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s who always wore her hair down across her eye. I also based her on Red Hot Riding Hood, a Tex Avery character.
Baby Herman I based on all of the grown-up babies that were in comic books and cartoons when I was growing up. There was a Baby Hugo, a Baby Huey — I just thought it was funny if you had a guy who was 35 years old who was still a baby and would always be a baby. To my mind, the best line in the book is “I’ve got a 35-year-old lust and a 3-year-old dinky.” (Editor’s Note: In the movie, it’s changed to “50-year-old lust.”)
As for Eddie Valiant, he’s a combination of every private eye you’ve ever seen in your life: Philip Marlowe, Mike Hammer, Sam Spade.
How the Book Got to Disney
St. Martin’s bought the book in 1980, and it took a year for it to come out. In that year, I got a call at home, and the guy on the other end said, “Hi, this is Roy Disney from the Disney Company.” I said, “Yeah, right. You’re Roy Disney calling me at home on my home phone, right? Who is this?” He said, “No, no, no, this is really Roy Disney. I read your book, Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, and I think it would make a wonderful Disney movie.” I said, “Yeah, right. The book hasn’t even come out yet. How’d you read my book?”
It turns out that someone at St. Martin’s sent a copy of the manuscript to Disney and said, “We’re going to publish this book, and we think it would make a wonderful Disney movie.” Disney read it, and they agreed.
There were a lot of reasons for Disney to want to do this movie back in 1980. For one, they were in desperate need of a major hit. They were producing movies like Flubber, The Nutty Professor, Herbie, The Black Hole and The Black Cauldron. They were making movies that were the second half of double features, and there were no more double features. They’d also been offered E.T., but turned it down. They’d been offered Jaws, but turned it down. They were offered Star Wars, but turned it down. So, they really needed something that would reestablish them as a major player in the film industry — and they saw Roger Rabbit as being that movie.
They also saw Roger, Jessica and Baby Herman as new characters they could merchandise, and they told me they were committed to making this as a live-action/animated movie. They offered me more money for it than I had made on everything I’d written up to that point, so who was I to say no? I didn’t, though, really believe that Disney had the clout or the creativity to bring that movie to the screen in the way that I envisioned it.
How Steven Spielberg Finally Got It Made
My biggest issue was that I didn’t think Disney could do it technically. I didn’t think they could do a movie where cartoons and humans would interact in such a way that people wouldn’t immediately be put off by the fact that this was a cartoon character and a human. It had to be seamless in order for it to work. And when they first started working on it in 1980, they really couldn’t put it together. They tried to do some live-action/animation stuff, and it just didn’t work. It looked phony. Admittedly, there was technology that didn’t exist until 1985, when Steven Spielberg got involved. And in fact, there was technology that George Lucas at ILM invented for this movie.
They had a rough road to hoe. They tried and failed so often that, at one point, Roy Disney came to me and said, “Hey, look, we’re not having any luck doing this as a live-action/animated movie. What would you say if we did this as an all live-action movie and had the animated characters in costumes like they are in Disneyland?”
I said, “Geez, Roy, don’t you think that compromises the principle just a little bit?”
I’m not sure they ever would’ve gotten it right, but in 1985, Roy got booted upstairs, and Michael Eisner came in to replace him. Mike brought with him Jeff Katzenberg, and they threw out every movie that Disney had in production at the time. They kept only one — Who Framed Roger Rabbit — because they knew they had to make that movie. Then they did something that no one at Disney had ever done before: They brought in an outside producer who, of course, was that little known guy named Steven Spielberg. And when Steven Spielberg gets involved in your movie, things immediately start to happen.
Finding Eddie Valiant
For Eddie Valiant, we needed someone who was able to convince the audience that all these cartoon characters were real. If Eddie Valiant couldn’t convince the audience the characters were real, the whole premise would fall apart. I wanted Harrison Ford, but when he found out it was going to take five years to film, he couldn’t do it. Paul Newman, same thing. Eventually, we found the guy everyone thought would be bankable because no one knew if this movie was going to be any good. That guy was Bill Murray.
It then became really obvious that Bill Murray not only couldn’t make audiences believe these characters were real, but he didn’t believe these characters were real. He was constantly doing double takes. “You’re a talking rabbit! You’re a talking pig! What are you doing here?” So, they bought him out of his contract.
We found another guy, very bankable, with a good reputation: Eddie Murphy. But, in short order, it turned out that Eddie Murphy wanted the script rewritten because Eddie Murphy wanted Eddie Valiant to be funnier than the toons. That doesn’t work, so they bought Eddie Murphy out of his contract.
Then somebody said, “Hey, we should bring in this Bob Hoskins guy.” I said, “Oh, Jesus, I’m a big fan.” I’d seen everything he’d done, but I said, “He’s a fantastic actor, but he’s British. There’s no way that he’s going to convince me or an audience that he’s an L.A. private eye.” They said, “Let’s just bring him in.”
We brought him in, and he stood on a bare stage doing a reading with someone who was doing the rabbit’s voice, and he made you believe that rabbit was real. I spent some time with Bob after the movie, and he told me that, by the end of the movie, he was able to see the rabbit and, after it was over, it took probably three or four months before the rabbit finally disappeared.
On His Creation Becoming ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’
I knew that the story would change. Fortunately, they kept me involved all along. They even tried to use word balloons, but they were never very successful at it because they didn’t have the technology to make them look realistic. And the way they were using them, it would have made the movie into a silent movie where you had to read it. It’s okay. I have no problem at all with any of the changes they made.
They could have changed it in such a way that it would be unrecognizable, but they didn’t. They kept all my characters and they kept their names and their species. I mean, that could be Roger Raccoon, but it’s not. They could have done any number of things to change it, to make it less of my concept and my vision, but they didn’t. They took my book, which I think is a cult classic, and they made it into a masterpiece of a movie.
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