It's Great To Be a Bee
by Brian Tallerico

How can you make the promotion of a movie like Bee Movie stand out? There are junkets and screenings every day and they start to all feel basically the same. Right now, while you read this, some poor actor is either practicing his canned answers or giving them to journalist after journalist. What could make Bee Movie stand out in the minds and eyes of the people that write about movies? Jerry Seinfeld helps. The man who seemingly was involved with every element of Bee Movie from conception to catering has been taking clips around to critics and journalists around the world and sitting down afterwards to talk about the project. He also brought some "TV Juniors," innovative commercials airing on NBC for the last month, and the two directors of the film, Simon J. Smith and Steve Hickner. All three gentlemen sat down with us on the Chicago stop to talk about Bee Movie from origin to completion, which was mere days before they hit the road. This project has taken four years of their lives and it doesn't sound like anyone regrets a minute of it. They have put all of their hearts and souls into Bee Movie and hope to make a sweet treat for the entire family this holiday season.

Even Jerry Seinfeld had no idea how much time and effort Bee Movie would take and, at first, wasn't planning to be as involved as he was in the end. He told Richard Roeper before the clip presentation started in Chicago, "I actually never realized that this was going to be a huge animated DreamWorks project. I thought I was just going to write the thing. I'd just have "written by" and they'll make it and I won't really have much to do with it. But as I learned about the animation process I got interested in it and I met these wonderful directors and we joined forces and we just kind of made this our own thing."

Seinfeld himself wasn't really sure how the project could be accomplished even after he met the directors. He told the round table, "When you go to that studio and you look at these images and they show you how they do it and what they can do to create this whole world and create characters that look any which way that you want - I think what got to me was that you could let your imagination run wild here and do anything you wanted. You can’t do that really even if you are making King Kong - there are limits to what you can do - but there are no limits in this."

The directors, Simon J. Smith and Steve Hickner, who have experience as varied as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Shrek, and An American Tail, echoes Seinfeld's comments about how the piece evolved and came together. Jerry had greenlighted the fourth draft of the screenplay for Bee Movie when Smith and Hickner came on board, which, interestingly, they storyboarded and screened without changing a word and then took it from there. Smith said, "It was like this huge mound of clay. We ended up scraping away after the first screening, which was absolutely verbatim what the script was, because we wanted Jerry to learn how this process works and for us to learn how his material worked. And so we didn't want to shortcut by going "We want to change this and we want to change that." So, we'd move a step forward and then screen it again. Try it again. We did lots and lots of screenings that way. We'd put in different lines, different scenes, pull things out, things that didn't work structurally, and just keep going that way. Always, obviously with Jerry involved, we've got that lovely point of view and that lovely tone. That's what's so difficult to find in movies - a consistent tone that runs through the movie and permeates the movie, whether it's physical comedy or verbal comedy - whatever the characters are doing."

Much will be written about how Bee Movie plays in the landscape of animated film, particularly when the Animated Oscar category is taken into account, but Seinfeld had some clear non-animated inspirations when he wrote the script. Jerry says, "I started with The Graduate, which is my favorite movie - you can see that we imitated it in one scene. There is some similarity in the situation - he has graduated from college and his parents are expecting him to go to work in the factory like everyone else does but he isn’t so sure about it. There are some similarities there. The other movie, thematically, was How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, which is a story about how the company is everything. That is the bee life - they live for the company and die for the company. I guess those would be the inspirations."

Despite all the inspirations, Smith makes sure to note that the comedy came first. They weren't making a movie "about" anything. It just had to be funny. Smith says, "I've worked on things like Shrek and Antz and stuff and they were comedies but they weren't out-and-out - this is an out-and-out comedy. You really felt it towards the end when you are going "We've got to keep this going but how do we make this satisfying enough?" You want to feel the emotions at the end of the movie and still keep it funny."

And that's the hardest part. Co-director Steve Hickner knows the curse of all comedies - act three. As he told us, "Whenever you have a comedic premise it starts to run out of gas when you move into the third act. And what normally happens is it starts to develop some dramatic underpinnings in order to keep the movie going for 90 minutes or whatever. And when you do that, you start to lose the comedy. So, how do you keep it funny but also put some of that dramatic spine in the picture so it has some resonance and place to go for act three?"

Even Seinfeld claims that it was the writing and maintaining of that comedy that was the hardest part of the production. He says, "Here is the problem with writing a movie, which is the hardest thing that I have ever done and something that I don’t think that I am really cut out for, to tell you the truth. I had to struggle quite a bit to make this thing work the way that I thought it should work. It was extremely challenging, so I think I do have to go back on my statement about how I knew I could do it. It was much harder than I thought it would be and I now have much more respect for filmmakers than I ever had before. I will never walk out of a movie and go "Ahh, junk!" These things are so damn hard to do that anyone that does one accomplishes a lot."

How does a movie like Bee Movie with the Seinfeld sense of humor still appeal to families and keep the audience that knows Jerry so well? Smith told us that he came on board because of Jerry's involvement and thought he was the perfect fit. He said, "I knew that the one thing would be surely he's a good writer. That's the one thing to start with if you want a chance of making a good movie. Also, I've watched his show and I've really enjoyed his show. And when you're working with people who make good movies, we're not going to let him make it into a sitcom. So, I wasn't really worried about that. I was actually really happy that he was going to do a movie with us. His type of comedy isn't "low hanging fruit." It doesn't go for anything too crass in any way. It's more of a smart kind of humor. It's perfect for a family movie."