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Obviously, Katzenberg hopes that The Prince of Egypt will answer the latter question affirmatively. It is a wish intensified by the fact that he is in the midst of a contentious legal battle against Disney chairman Michael Eisner, the man who didn't think Katzenberg was good enough to be his second-in-command. Katzenberg claims he is owed 2% of the profit from every project he put into production during his 10 years at the company--an amount that could reach $250 million or more.
Soon after he left Disney, Katzenberg formed DreamWorks with David Geffen and Steven Spielberg. He raided a goodly portion of Disney talent, including Prince of Egypt producers Penney Finkelman Cox and Sandra Rabins and composer Hans Zimmer. He readily admits that The Prince of Egypt has a special resonance for him; one of his animators has even drawn a cartoon of Katzenberg as Moses confronting Eisner as Rameses. But it's not just a matter of personal vindication. Animation is such a key part of the DreamWorks business plan that many in the industry believe a failure by The Prince of Egypt would be a bad omen for the future of the company. Katzenberg dismisses such speculation.
The Prince of Egypt was conceived, according to the DreamWorks founding trio, during the initial burst of excitement of inventing the company in 1994. In a meeting at Spielberg's house, the talk turned to animation. Spielberg said he wanted to do a project with the grandeur of The Ten Commandments. "What a great idea," Geffen said. "Let's do it."
At first, Katzenberg didn't recognize the risks of treading on such literally sacred ground. The Moses story is central to three of the world's major religions. "It is so much more complicated, so much more challenging than simply making a movie," Katzenberg says. Just putting together the script raised enough delicate questions to fill the Red Sea. How to portray the Egyptians as cruel slave masters without antagonizing the Arab world? "We were very careful with skin tones to show that the slave population was multicultural, multiethnic," says Tzivia Schwartz-Getzug, an expert in interfaith relations who was hired as liaison to the religious community. "And in the Exodus scene, you actually see some Egyptians going with the Hebrews."
The film begins with a sweeping seven-minute prologue that evokes the misery of the slaves, the grandeur of the Egyptian empire and the infant Moses' famous basket ride on the Nile, until he is rescued by the Pharaoh's wife. In the Bible, Moses is rescued by Pharaoh's daughter, but the filmmakers decided a close relationship between Pharaoh's son Rameses and an adopted brother Moses would be more compelling than their interacting as uncle and nephew. Some other dramatic devices were also invented. "We have 88 minutes to tell 70 years in the life of Moses," says Katzenberg. "We can never be a literal retelling of the Bible. We've edited God, but we have not rewritten him."