Bringing the Cat to life

Step No. 1 in turning The Cat in the Hat into a movie was letting Mike Myers take control of the star's transformation.

LOS ANGELES - You don't put a leash on a cat.

That was the philosophy the filmmakers followed to transform the simple whimsy of Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat, which opens Friday, into an in-your-face comedy starring Mike Myers as the mischievous feline in a towering red and white cap.

Director Bo Welch said Myers designed the character himself, which meant ad-libbing jokes, writing gags for his independent-minded tail and contriving a voice.

"We agreed it would be a live-action cartoon and talked about the sound," Welch said. "Everyone thinks they know what the Cat in the Hat should sound like, but no one has ever heard him."

The Myers performance suggests the Cat hails from New York, with a laid-back version of the urban Jewish accent he used playing Linda Richman in the Saturday Night Live sketch "Coffee Talk" (or "Cawwfee Tawwk," as she pronounced it).

Other influences on the voice include a little bit of fussy comedian Charles Nelson Reilly and some Burt Lahr, who played another famous cat: the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz.

(Myers, who balks at all print interviews, refused to speak to the Associated Press.)

Apart from casting the lead, the filmmakers said they needed to craft a broader story.

The 1957 tale is tough to turn into a feature film: It's about two bored kids who learn how to have responsible fun on a rainy day, and it has various plot holes. For example, in its 61 pages of rhyme and drawings, the girl's name is mentioned (Sally) but not the boy's.

It was made into a television cartoon in 1971, but that was barely a half-hour. Producer Brian Grazer wanted something that could last roughly an hour and a half.

But the book by Theodor Geisel, who won a Pulitzer Prize writing under the moniker Dr. Seuss, is treasured by millions, and tinkering with its story is akin to challenging the childhood nostalgia of three generations.

The adjustments worked for many people in 2000, when Ron Howard directed Jim Carrey in Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which added pop culture jokes, a history about the Grinch's childhood and subplots about the Whoville residents.

Some Seuss purists regarded that movie as crass, but it was a hit. It earned $260-million domestically and became the year's highest-grossing movie.

Grazer, who also produced The Grinch, sought to follow that movie's formula. He hired a team of three writers to adapt Cat: Jeff Schaffer, Alec Berg and David Mandel, all former Seinfeld scribes who worked together on an uncredited rewrite of The Grinch.

"We pitched it almost as a kid's version of Ferris Bueller's Day Off," Mandel said.

Most additions were made out of plot necessity, the writers said.

They had to give the boy a name: Conrad. Then they had to give the kids distinct personalities. Then the writers decided to get the cat and kids out of the house and into the neighborhood. "You didn't want people sitting in their seats in a theater watching people sitting bored in the house," Schaffer said.

There is also some raunchy humor, which is why The Cat in the Hat is rated PG instead of G. Welch said only a few of those kinds of jokes are in the movie, and they are expected to fly over the heads of little ones.

Once the script was in place, construction began on replicating Seuss illustrations in the real world.

"He had a very sinuous line and drew very elegant curves that always came to slender points," said Alex McDowell, the production designer who created the film's neighborhood of identical violet houses and gravity-defying trees.

The set was built on a hillside in California's Simi Valley. Residents were reportedly alarmed, fearing that the garish housing development was for real.

When it came to building a costume for Myers, makeup artist Steve Johnson built several full-body suits covered with black and white yak hair, human hair and synthetic fibers. It was so hot that the interior had to be lined with tubes through which ice water could flow during breaks between shots.

The filmmakers decided to take a minimalist approach on the facial makeup, leaving Myers' real eyebrows and mouth exposed and covering his nose and parts of his cheeks. Around that, they constructed a giant cat head with remote-control ears and heavy magnets to grip the various off-kilter caps.

Because he expects box-office success, Grazer already has his writers working on a sequel.