Before Beetlejuice, Tim Burton made the short film Frankenweenie – and its test screening nearly ended his career before it started.
Tim Burton seemed destined to work at Disney from the beginning. Born in Burbank, California, just over the road from Disney Studios’ offices, Burton first visited the studio in 1971 when he was around 13 years old. When he asked what he needed to do in order to get a job at the studio, he was advised to study at the California Institute of the Arts – or CalArts – the same school that had previously taught the likes of John Lasseter and Brad Bird.
The young Burton did as he was advised: went to CalArts, then managed to get a job at Disney Studios. As a young animator, he worked on such films as The Fox And The Hound – the 1981 family film that emerged in the middle of a fallow period for Disney, when several of its top animators followed Don Bluth and set up a studio of their own. Disney’s nadir in terms of popularity was perhaps 1985’s The Black Cauldron, a fantasy that was rather too dark for younger audiences; it wasn’t until the end of the 1980s that the studio finally got its mojo back with The Little Mermaid.
It may have been Burton’s dream to work at Disney, but his off-kilter imagination was an unusual fit for the studio. He’d worked on a Halloween-themed animated project called Trick Or Treat – a sort of dry run for The Nightmare Before Christmas, which came much later – but that project never got beyond the concept stage. He then made the six-minute stop-motion film Vincent in 1982, which showcased so much of what would later be recognisably Burton: a love of classic horror (it’s narrated by Vincent Price), macabre humour inspired by Frankenstein and Edgar Allan Poe, and a young, outsider protagonist.
Burton then directed a 35-minute TV special in 1983 – a version of Hansel And Gretel made with inexperienced Asian American actors, stop-motion, and a surprising amount of goo. Flashes of Burton’s surreal, Edward Gorey-influenced style are plain to see; it wasn’t a ratings hit according to its writer, Julie Hickson, however, and was only aired on the Disney Channel once before it was quietly shoved into the company’s archives.
All of those early projects helped pave the way for Frankenweenie – a 35-minute live-action movie that served as a love letter to Universal’s classic horror movies, in particular James Whale’s Frankenstein from 1931. Burton reimagined the gothic story as a miniature fantasy about a little boy’s friendship with his dog, Sparky. The boy – who happens to be named Victor Frankenstein – is grief-struck when his best friend is run over by a car one day. By employing some familiar-looking scientific equipment, though, he manages to bring the pup back to life.
Burton was just 25 years old when he made Frankenweenie, but he had two valuable allies at Disney – the aforementioned Julie Hickson, and Disney’s head of production Richard Berger. Both were impressed with Burton’s skill and imagination, and helped to get the short a surprisingly generous budget of $1m. Hickson, in particular, was determined to get some famous names involved – all the better to avoid the ratings funk of the Hansel And Gretel special from two years earlier.
Hickson had previously worked with Shelley Duval on another project, and somehow managed to convince Duval – who’d appeared in The Shining and Popeye a few years earlier – to appear in a short film made by a largely unknown director. (Duval ultimately played Victor’s mother, Susan.)
“I really believe that you can get anybody you want if you just get the right kind of material they can respond to,” Hickson told Cinefantastique magazine in 1985. “I only knew Shelley a little, but I just had the feeling that she’d understand what we were trying to do.”
Hickson also managed to secure the services of Daniel Stern and Paul Bartel; the former played Victor’s father, Ben, while the latter played a teacher, Mr Walsh.
“Basically, we got this cast for no money because they all wanted to do it,” Hickson said.
Burton’s relatively generous budget also allowed him to secure another coup: the same science lab props Kenneth Strickfadden created for Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein (this also made an appearance in Mel Brooks’ affectionate spoof, Young Frankenstein, in 1974). The result was the most beautiful-looking film of Burton’s young career to date – a shadowy, immaculately-lit homage to both Hollywood’s golden age and German expressionist cinema.
It’s all the more impressive given how quickly the film came together; in order to save on costs, it was shot in just 15 days, while post-production took about eight weeks.
“A lot of the rush was because Disney was trying to keep the production costs down,” Hickson said at the time. “There’s an enormous overhead at the studio so we couldn’t become official, because then all these numbers start to be attached and we couldn’t afford that.”
Disney initially planned to have Frankenweenie play in front of a new release of The Jungle Book, scheduled for the summer of 1984. It was then shifted to a re-release of Pinocchio that December. Both Hickson and Burton seemed thrilled with the decision.
“We’ll have a beautiful black and white film with one of the best colour movies ever made,” Burton told Cinefantastique. “Pinocchio is Julie’s and my favourite Disney movie, so we’re real happy about this.”
The happiness would, however, prove to be short-lived. In September 1984, Disney showed Frankenweenie to a test audience of parents and young children – aged between six and nine years old. The reaction wasn’t ecstatic.
According to Cinefantastique, “test marketing reportedly showed that mothers were worried about children possibly being led to try and play with electricity,” and that the film, with its deep shadows and themes of death and loss, was too intense for young children. A PG rating was slapped on the film, and Disney decided that screening it ahead of Pinoccho was too much of a risk.
There were plans to pair the film with the teen comedy My Science Project in 1985, but it was switched again to pair with the dinosaur adventure Baby: Secret Of The Lost Legend, released the same year – a film few bothered to see in cinemas.
Worse still, the expense of Frankenweenie prompted Disney to ask Burton to leave the company not long afterwards. “It wasn’t like Alan Sugar saying, ‘You’re fired,’” Burton told Yahoo in 2012. “I didn’t quite get it that strong… It was a ‘thank you very much, but you go your way and we’ll go our way’ kind of thing.”
At the time, it must have seemed like a huge setback for the filmmaker – though Burton wasted little time licking his wounds. By August 1985, he’d already directed his debut feature – the comedy adventure Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. It was a sleeper hit, endearing Burton to Warner Bros, which subsequently greenlit 1988’s Beetlejuice, whose success led to the pop cultural juggernaut that was Batman, released the following year.
In time, Burton also began working with Disney again. He made the wonderful biopic Ed Wood in 1994 (perhaps the best film of his career) for Buena Vista Pictures, later renamed Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. His Technicolor 2010 adaptation of Alice In Wonderland was also made under the same banner.
Bringing things full circle, Burton directed a feature-length, stop-motion version of Frankenweenie in 2012. Shot in black and white and exquisitely animated, it was a sign that Burton’s signature style was no longer quite so perplexing to Disney’s bosses. Nor was its chance of success torpedoed by a pesky test audience.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is out in UK cinemas on the 6th September 2024.
—Thank you for visiting! If you’d like to support our attempts to make a non-clickbaity movie website:
Follow Film Stories on Twitter here, and on Facebook here.
Buy our Film Stories and Film Junior print magazines here.
Become a Patron here.
