A Rich Green Beast on the Great White Way

It's been about 14 years since Jeffrey Katzenberg left the Walt Disney Co. (in his well-publicized feud with Michael Eisner) and helped found DreamWorks SKG. Yet some people still think he's part of the mouse house.

Katzenberg took part in a panel discussion Monday night in New York about the development of DreamWorks' most successful property, Shrek, into a Broadway musical.

A man in the audience asked Katzenberg, who revived Disney's animation unit in the late 1980s and early 1990s, how much it cost to make a Pixar-animated film compared with a regular, live-action movie.

"I can't answer for Pixar as that's made by the other D company," Katzenberg said good naturedly. Pixar, the maker of Toy Story and The Incredibles, is owned by Disney.

Katzenberg said the cost to make one of the Shrek movies is between $150 million and $160 million. "It's very expensive to do what we do," he said.

The investments, however, have paid off mightily. The three installments of the Shrek franchise have collectively earned $2.2 billion in theatrical realize worldwide. That doesn't include the various editions of the DVDs, or the video games, or the Christmas special on ABC.

Each of the movies takes four years to make. "Here's irony for you," Katzenberg told the audience at the Jewish Museum. "If you asked 100 people who know me best in all the world to name 10 attributes — so that's 1,000 quotes — not one single person would pick patience. And yet I find myself in a business that demands unlimited patience."

And now, the green ogre moves to Broadway. The show will be DreamWorks Animation's first foray into legitimate theater, though it won't be the first time an animated film has made the leap.

That other D company, Disney, has already turned several of its animated movies into Broadway musicals, some successfully (Lion King and Beauty of the Beast), some not so (Tarzan).

After a try-out run in Seattle in late summer, Shrek the Musical is set to open on Broadway on December 14. It boasts an impressive creative team — film and theater director Sam Mendes came up with the idea for the musical and is a producer, Pulitzer Prize winner David Lindsay-Abaire wrote the book and lyrics, and Tony-nominated Jason Moore is directing.

The Broadway show tells a similar story as the first Shrek movie, which was a retelling of the illustrated book Shrek. The late William Steig created the character and wrote the book in 1990 (a retrospective of Steig's work is now on display at the Jewish Museum).

No one Monday night put a price on how much it will cost to interpret the Shrek story on stage. One woman in the audience asked Katzenberg if the Steig estate was getting any compensation for the latest version.

Katzenberg leaned into the microphone in front of him, said "yes" to laughter from the audience, and the moderator quickly moved onto the next question.

by J. Jennings Moss

Photograph of Dreamworks executive Jeffrey Katzenberg with Shrek at a film premiere in Sydney by Patrick Riviere/Getty Images