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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Mom’s A Nervous Rex Amid Chomping And Stomping, Spielberg’s ‘Lost World’ Features A Dinosaur Family-Values Theme

Bob Strauss Los Angeles Daily News

Escape was impossible. The ravenous, implacable creatures would not give up until their appetites were satisfied. It was, they understood on some irrational, primal level, a matter of species survival.

Yep, those Universal Pictures executives sure know how to pester people.

“It kind of felt like we had to make a sequel,” understated Kathleen Kennedy, executive producer of “The Lost World: Jurassic Park,” Steven Spielberg’s follow-up to the most successful motion picture in history.

“Certainly, you’re gonna get pressure, with studios having to rely on these big blockbuster movies as much as they are now.

“If they’ve got something which already has this huge, built-in (audience) awareness,” she continued, “you can bet there’s going to be some discussion of a sequel.”

Having generated $915 million in worldwide ticket sales and untold millions on ancillary merchandise, the 1993 dinosaur disaster epic was certainly ripe for revisiting. Indeed, Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp were brainstorming concepts for the second movie a year before Michael Crichton’s follow-up novel was finished.

That’s one reason why those familiar with Crichton’s sequel will find that much of the book has been, well, lost in the translation.

“From the time that there was talk of a sequel, everybody had their own ideas of what it should be,” said Koepp, who took solo script credit this time after co-writing the first “Jurassic” screenplay with Crichton. “So, we started spitting ideas at each other - that’s a disgusting image - while Michael was writing the book.

“Then, Steven and I read the book to see what of our ideas meshed with his ideas,” Koepp continued. “Michael’s great big achievement was twofold. First, he justified the idea of continuing the story, which is the hardest thing in the world for a sequel. Other than for reasons of corporate greed, why in the world should there be another movie?

“The second thing (Crichton) did was to find what the story was about, which is parenting and nurturing. He identified what the human issues and the dinosaur theory issues were going to be. That’s a sizable portion of your work done right there; you can always figure out who gets munched.”

A lot more folks than in the last movie, as it turned out. Consider: Instead of a small group of scientists trapped on an island full of rampaging, DNA-derived monster lizards, “Lost World” has two human food groups on the menu - and at least twice as many dino-diners to serve.

Most of the action takes place at “Site B,” a second island where the InGen Corp. was cloning dinosaurs. Abandoned after a hurricane wrecked the facility, the reptiles set up their own, undisturbed prehistoric environment and started breeding like scaly bunnies.

The first expedition back to Site B includes one survivor of the first movie, Jeff Goldblum’s chaos theorist Ian Malcolm; his preteen, African-American daughter, Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester); and Dr. Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore), an enthusiastic paleontologist and the concerned Malcolm’s love interest. They’re there to study and help preserve the pristine habitat.

But InGen also sends a larger, heavily equipped contingent of big-game hunters (Pete Postlethwaite, “Fargo’s” Peter Stormare) and ruthless capitalists (Arliss Howard plays “Park” founder John Hammond’s greedy nephew). They want to capture a bunch of dinosaurs for an easier-to-get-to, if less sensible, proposed Jurassic Park location: San Diego.

(Arliss Howard plays “Park” founder John Hammond’s greedy nephew).

Essentially, the battle cry for “Lost World” was more of the same, with an emphasis on more.

“Although we didn’t make the first movie thinking it was going to be a gigantic, gigantic hit, we knew that we had a pretty solid commercial idea,” Kennedy, once again displaying her gift for understatement, said. “I’d say that was probably one of the surest concepts I’ve ever worked on with Steven. If we could achieve, artistically, a believable dinosaur on screen, we knew that that would be quite a breakthrough. Our challenge was to try to do that in the best way that we possibly could.

“Our challenge with the sequel was we didn’t have the novelty of just putting dinosaurs on the screen. We had to sit down, look at what the elements were that worked in the first movie and come up with an entertaining, fun, involving story, knowing that we were going to use many of the same elements, story-wise, that were derivative of the first movie.”

So, “Lost World” serves up two rampaging rexes instead of one. Raptors now attack in swarms, not tag teams. There’s an extended stegosaur family and a whole bunch of hungry little fellas that look like skinned chickens with teeth.

To create these and other monsters, Spielberg brought back the Oscar-winning special effects teams of Industrial Light and Magic’s Dennis Muren, creature shop proprietor Stan Winston and practical effects wizard Michael Lantieri.

“Steven was pretty much under tight constraints making the first movie, not knowing what could happen and what we could do,” said Lantieri who, among thousands of things, wrecked a city bus and whipped up a high-tech, double-length trailer (the better to hang over a cliff) for “Lost World.” “The challenge here was, literally, to ask Steven what kind of movie he wanted to make and let him direct it. We used all these things that we’ve learned over the last four years to do that.”

For ILM’s computer graphics artists, this meant designing and animating 80 dinosaurs of 10 species, as opposed to “Jurassic’s” 27 of five species (multiples - yes, CG clones! - account for both films’ higher overall creature counts).

“Since the shock of the new wasn’t new this time, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what we could do,” Muren said. “The tools have gotten better since ‘Dragonheart,’ ‘Jumanji’ and ‘Casper,’ so things can go faster. We’ve got better skin, better rendering of the characters, the lighting is more elaborate. And the performance of the animals, the way they move, is more complex than it was before.”

Winston’s life-size robot dinosaurs were greatly improved as well. And in very real ways, more dangerous.

“The redeveloped T-rexes wound up being twice as heavy as the one in the first film,” Winston explained. “That one weighed 9,000 pounds; in this film, each one weighs 9 tons. These were able to move faster, we had much more finesse and ability to make the characters more violent and stronger, but at the same time be able to stop on a dime and do exactly what they had to do.

“But this machine could exert 2 G’s of force,” Winston continued. “For comparison, a 6.9 earthquake can collapse a freeway with 1.5 G’s. An animal that had this ability also had to have the controllability to be able to take ahold of an actor’s leg and perform safely. We treated these things with a lot of respect.”

On a smaller but equally impressive scale, Winston and company developed a fully functional little snapdragon.

“The other huge, huge breakthrough was a self-contained, baby T-rex that could be carried around by actors,” Winston said. “We created a robot that had some 45 points of motion and could be externally radio-controlled. I mean, it was a living animal in an actor’s arms, and that was something we’ve never done before.”

All this and much, much more for the bargain price of around $75 million.

We’re not being facetious. With close to a dozen summer films costing near or more than $100 million apiece - and James Cameron’s “Titanic” tickling the all-time record price tag of $200 million - the pre-sold “Lost World” is in fact an example of Hollywood megabucks wisely spent.

“There’s a huge financial challenge with these kinds of movies,” Kennedy noted. “The thing is, it’s almost a very succinct, mathematical process now that we’re dealing with the digital age. It’s almost like the way animated movies get planned out, where they have very detailed series of storyboards. You know the basic length of shots and you know where they’re going to cut in.

“But sticking to the plan is sometimes the hardest thing, because we’ve all been spoiled by being allowed to continue to create in the process of making the movie,” added Kennedy, who brought in the first “Jurassic” for $59.6 million (Spielberg deferred salary for a percentage of the box-office gross of each film). “Now, you’ve got to get your creative juices going up to the point of shooting, then you’ve got to basically execute what you’ve planned. If you go outside those boundaries very much, you’re in trouble.”

Acknowledging that approach limits a director’s creative options, Kennedy also noted, “it doesn’t mean that you can’t change things, as long as you work within the parameters you’ve set up. That’s a creative ability, too.

“I mean, let’s face it. If any one of us got handed a couple hundred million dollars and the right people and could just shoot anything, we could probably make a fairly decent movie. That’s not the point; it’s certainly not the way movies should be made, and good movies don’t come out of a process like that.”

Speaking of plans, “Jurassic Park 3” should be on the drawing boards soon, corporate greed being what it is and all.

“There are no screenplay drafts, there aren’t even any good ideas,” writer Koepp insisted. “It’s so hard to make one good movie that it’s bad luck to even think about it.”

Graphic: Something survived in Jurassic Park