Hollywood likes a cash cow, and especially one it doesn’t have to work on. Something with an existing fanbase, ideally, and definitely something that can spawn a franchise if the results pay off big-time.
Current blockbuster hit X-Men certainly fits the bill, tapping into the collective remembrance of Marvel Comics’ mutant superheroes and vamping it up for those people who, let’s face it, is most of us, hadn’t seen the 2-D originals in years.
And with the recent hysteria around the fourth Harry Potter adventure, the movie simply cannot fail.
But strangely, up until now, one of America’s most loved and respected writers seems to have been neglected in the bidding war. Although responsible for over 50 children’s books, including some of the country’s best-known, Theodor Geisel – who died in 1991, at the age of 87 – had only ever lent his name to a ragbag of movie titles that very few remember. And, curiously, that didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest.
“Ted was never much interested in the commercial end”, said his lawyer Karl Zo-Bell. “In fact, a couple of times he sent back a large sum of money because he was not happy with the way his work was being used.”
This Christmas, however, Geisel is headed back to the best-seller lists. Or rather, his alter ego is. Because to most people, Theodor Geisel is much better known as the cranky, inventive and insanely imaginative Dr Seuss, whose goofy and apparently simplistic tales belied a very singular intelligence.
Headed by How the Grinch Stole Christmas, starring Jim Carrey under a ton of green latex make-up in the title role, claims of a Seuss revival are backed up by news that Geisel’s estate has sealed a deal for a film adaptation of Seuss’s first big hit, The Cat in the Hat, about the gibberish-rhyming feline with the top hat and scarf.
Seuss was born in 1904, in Springfield, of all places – the Massachusetts town, not the fictional home of his bastard offspring The Simpsons. He studied at Dartmouth College, where he showed an aptitude for drawing, and it was here, in 1921, that he first used the pseudonym Seuss (his middle name).
The dean of the college knew Geisel was a keen sketcher of cartoon strips and as punishment for a minor infraction of school rules forbade him to supply them to the school magazine. He did so anyway and later added the Dr at Oxford University in honour of the degree he didn’t ultimately get.
After college, Geisel worked in advertising, and in the early 1930s made his debut with And to Think I Heard It on Mulberry Street, a surreal little story inspired by the noises he’d heard on a voyage to Europe. It wasn’t a success, and Geisel went into the army soon after, but when he returned from the army he returned to his former career as a draftsman. Geisel always had a yen to write, however, and his war experiences fed into some of his earliest and most overlooked material, which urged the American people to join the fight against Hitler.
Geisel had a strong sense of moral values and his later work – particularly The Star-Bellied Sneetches, a thinly veiled satire on snobbery and class/race divides – was actually concerned with teaching children very human lessons in life, not simply blowing their minds.
His breakthrough came in the late 1950s, with The Cat in the Hat. Geiser had been reading a report about declining levels of literacy in American schools and the implications depressed him.
Children were saying their schoolbooks were “boring”, and so, working closely with his publisher, Geisel came up with a list of 400 basic words that a first-grader could read with little difficulty. They cut the list to 250 and in 1957 The Cat in the Hat launched Random House’s acclaimed Beginner’s Book series.
Three years later Seuss accepted a bet that he couldn’t work with just 50 words and responded with the classic Green Eggs on Ham, still a comfort blanket to the great-grandchildren of Seuss’s original readers.
So why is Seuss creeping back into favour? After the inrush of irony into American culture, perhaps the time is right for something sincere and, underneath the wacky graphics and gobbledygook, actually rather meaningful.
In his own way, Seuss was an anarchist who wanted children to think for themselves and see language as a tool not a burden.
“I like nonsense,” he once said, “it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.”
Jim Carrey is undoubtedly a child of Seuss, as Geisel’s wife Audrey found when she visited him on the set of Man on the Moon to discuss the new movie.
“As I was leaving,” she recalled, “he put his hands on my shoulders, looked me in the eyes and scrinched and scrunched and scroonched his face into such a wicked smile that I gasped, ‘My God – it’s the Grinch!'”
The doctor would be proud.