Satisfying the Simpsons buffs

LOS ANGELES - Homer Simpson falls in love with a pig, Bart skateboards naked into downtown Springfield, and Green Day gets booed when the band starts talking about the environment. Beyond those bits and a few other snippets in a 10-minute preview shown in London a few days ago, filmmakers have kept a tight lid on the long-awaited big-screen adventure simply titled

The Simpsons Movie

.

"There's no paranoia you could ascribe to us that isn't true," laughs James L. Brooks, one of the movie's executive producers. "We had five previews for The Simpsons Movie and each screening started with: 'This is a work in progress. Please don't go online and give away the story.' We were so scared of that happening, but here we had 2,000 people in several locations and they kept the faith. They didn't want to spoil other people's fun."

Brooks' anxiety over leaked plot spoilers represents an obsession with quality control that included 21/2 years' worth of rewrites before the Simpsons brain trust even arrived at a suitably madcap story outline.

"The other day somebody guessed we did 100 drafts, and I would say it took us 70 before it began to look like we didn't give a damn!" says Brooks, ensconced in his bungalow on the 20th Century Fox lot. "It was daunting because we were very concerned about this passionate Simpsons subculture. We had to get past the white knuckles because this movie had to feel like we were loose and just letting it go."

Storylines, sight gags and action sequences came and went as Brooks, creator Matt Groening and current series producer Al Jean wrangled a herd of Simpsons alumni and current staffers to remake prime time's most enduring TV family (Homer, Marge, Bart and Lisa Simpson, voiced by Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright and Yeardley Smith, plus voiceless baby Maggie) as movie stars.

"The thing we had in common," says Brooks, 67, "was that we had worked on The Simpsons, and the other thing we had in common was that we had no idea of how to do this movie. We were humble before the task."

Armed with his feature-film experience on Terms of Endearment and the acclaimed Broadcast News and As Good as It Gets, Brooks steered the writers away from the 22-minute-episode mentality and toward more dramatic story arcs.

"My favorite quote about this line of work comes from either George Bernard Shaw or Lenny Bruce: 'If you're going to tell the truth, make them laugh or they'll kill you.' "So whatever got in the way of being funny went out, but at some point we had to go for some emotion and actually make this film be about something."

In its final form, The Simpsons Movie credits 11 writers. In addition, three consultants holed up in a "Joke Room" pelted the filmmakers with as many last-minute punch lines as they could muster.

"We were pressing against deadline," Brooks recalls, "and they'd be upstairs having probably the best time of anybody on the movie. They'd give us a list of 20 jokes to pick from for one spot. When you make a live-action picture, once principal photography is over, if you get a funny idea, you go, 'D'oh! Too late!' In this effort, 'too late' never quite happened."

Even Brooks, who executive-produced The Simpsons' first three seasons after earning a shelf full of Emmys (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi) and directing the Oscar-winning Terms of Endearment, had to pitch jokes like everyone else.

"We had the greatest straight line in the world but couldn't get a finish for it until the very end," he says. "It's this mob scene where everyone's shouting 'Kill, kill, kill!' My favorite, which didn't get a laugh at all, was the Springfield Dyslexic Society going 'llik, llik, llik.' "

Brooks says he's happy with the final product, which balanced elements near and dear to the hearts of the Simpsons fan club. "The debates that happened between myself, Matt and Al formed the shape of this film, because we all come at the characters from a slightly different prejudice. I would argue for heart and the importance of story. Matt always likes the percussive physical jokes. And for Al, if something's not funny, kill it. You throw everything into the pot, but finally what comes out of it is tone. Finally, the battle for any movie is over tone."

Brooks and company made sure the movie respected Simpsons mythology, which is where Homer's infatuation with the pig comes into play.

"When we started the series 20 years ago we had these rules," Brooks says. "The Simpsons don't go into outer space, they don't do anything people can't do, we don't ever show the actors because if you see their faces, that breaks the reality. These were religiously held convictions.

"At a certain point" he continues, "we gave those up but there are some rules we still stick to, like 'animals can't talk.' Matt is the one who argues longest for that, and I think one of the great things about this movie is that our pig doesn't do anything un-piglike, yet you feel you know him thoroughly!"

The filmmakers also took pains to include cameo roles for Springfield's several dozen recurring eccentrics, performed in large part by the versatile Harry Shearer and Hank Azaria. Thematically, the movie skewers politicians, organized religion and government incompetence.

But in the end, Brooks and company decided to put the focus on the Simpson family's perpetually dunderheaded head of household. Why has Homer Simpson managed to exert such a hold on the American imagination?

"Homer is absolutely self-indulgent and at the same time, completely innocent," Brooks says. "I think there's a part in each of us that pines for that."

He and director David Silverman (who is the TV series' supervising animation director) completed the final credit crawl only four weeks ago. Brooks says the down-to-the-wire attention to detail has resulted in Simpsons-style mayhem on an epic scale.

"To me, the beauty of the Simpsons has always been, no matter what kind of comedy you love - if you love high comedy, if you love burlesque, if you love satire, if you love spoofs, if you love low comedy - the Simpsons can do it for you because these characters and the actors who play them are so wonderful."