Val Kilmer, in black sweats and no shoes, sits in a darkened sound studio. On the other side of the glass, Jeffrey Katzenberg watches nervously, clutching a toy red-and-yellow football. Today Kilmer is recording the voice of Moses, and Katzenberg is unflaggingly attentive as the famously temperamental actor dubs dialogue for the most personal high-stakes film that Katzenberg--former chairman of the Disney studio and a founder of DreamWorks SKG--has ever been involved in making, the eagerly anticipated animated epic The Prince of Egypt. Kilmer is not in the upbeat mood that the scene requires. He started off well enough--"It's fun to be Moses," he said at one point--but everyone in the control room can feel his spirits sagging.
"Fun, fun, fun," Katzenberg repeats. "I'm trying to enjoy myself," Kilmer answers moodily. The toys that Katzenberg brought to amuse the actor are not working. "You may want to stand up and get in the physical thing of it," Katzenberg says to Kilmer. "He ain't going to stand up," someone in the booth observes. Things go downhill from there, in a session that is something of a metaphor for the gargantuan struggle to make The Prince of Egypt.
The film is Katzenberg's beloved baby, and he has been willing to do whatever it takes--coaxing, coddling, bullying, praying, crawling on his belly--to make it a success. Before The Prince of Egypt opens on Dec. 18, he will have circled the globe--visiting six countries in six days in November and nine in 11 days in December--to publicize the film in some of the more than 50 countries where it will debut this month. He has met with nearly 700 clerics and scholars, journeyed to the Vatican, and addressed groups ranging from some faculty members of the Harvard divinity school (to seek their wisdom) to 4,000 Wal-Mart employees in Texas (to inspire them to sell a special Prince of Egypt promotional package). As the opening draws near, he is in an agony of suspense--a fact that he blurts out to virtually anyone. "I'm scared," he says plaintively.
Katzenberg, who during his 10 years at Disney was involved with the making of cartoon hits from The Little Mermaid through The Lion King, believes he has everything to prove. For years, he was known as "the golden retriever"--the superefficient executive who, revved up on diet soda, worked from dawn to dinner. But the nickname contained an implicit insult: Can a dog--even a clever dog--be creative?
The overall quality of the live-action pictures that Disney cranked out under Katzenberg made that a fair question. But when it came to animation, the dog had his day. After initial indifference, Katzenberg fell in love with the medium. Disney's animated films climbed an arc that peaked in 1994 with the $755 million that The Lion King grossed worldwide. But that film opened just weeks before Katzenberg was ejected in a play for advancement that went sour. Disney's subsequent cartoons--Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Hercules--failed to replicate that level of success. Was it animation burnout, or was Katzenberg the one with the Midas touch?