You’re an abomination of an adaptation, Mr. Grinch

https://film.avclub.com/you-re-an-abomination-of-an-adaptation-mr-grinch-1845716044

In 1991, Geisel died of cancer at the age of 87. Seven years later, his widow, Audrey, announced that she was ready to start licensing out her late husband’s works to Hollywood. But she had conditions. If someone wanted to make a big Hollywood movie out of How The Grinch Stole Christmas, a big star and a big director would have to be attached. The various Hollywood studios put together their pitches, and Universal won. Jim Carrey, the biggest comedy star in the world at that moment, charmed Audrey Geisel, as did director Ron Howard. (Mrs. Geisel told Time, “I like the grown Opie.”)

Geisel and Universal settled on a deal—$5 million, plus a big chunk of profits—and a script went into development. Who Framed Roger Rabbit writers Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman are credited with the screenplay, but Audrey Geisel demanded multiple drafts, vetoing the bawdy and scatological jokes that were all the rage at the time. She must’ve missed the incredibly strange key-party bit that Howard snuck into the final product.

This is how Dr. Seuss’ simple, beloved classic became a bloated, clanging, artless blockbuster—the highest-grossing film of the year 2000, incredibly. The grown Opie’s How The Grinch Stole Christmas earned about $260 million at the domestic box office. That wouldn’t have been enough to make it the biggest movie of 1999 or 2001. (In either year, it would’ve been No. 3.) But in a year without Star Wars or Harry Potter—when the vastly lucrative film franchises of the new century were still in their planning phases—Howard’s rancid, dog-ugly Grinch movie earned just enough to skate past Robert Zemeckis’ Cast Away and John Woo’s Mission: Impossible 2.

In a lot of ways, 2000 might be the last true movie-star year: the death rattle of an era when actors, rather than intellectual property, ruled the domestic box office. The year’s big hits relied on towering established figures, faces that had histories in the American dream-life. Tom Hanks in Cast Away, Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible 2, Russell Crowe in Gladiator, Mel Gibson in What Women Want—these men were well-known quantities with personas that anyone buying a ticket would readily recognize. In fact, the only movie on the year-end top-10 list without a single central star is the one that portended changes to come: Bryan Singer’s X-Men, the film that truly launched the superhero-comic feeding frenzy that has become the main story of this century’s cinema. (You could also argue that Scary Movie wasn’t a star vehicle, but I was in middle school when In Living Color was at its peak, and I can tell you that those guys were all supernovas. That, after all, is how we got Jim Carrey.)

How The Grinch Stole Christmas is a weird hybrid: It’s a movie-star movie and an intellectual-property movie. Both the Dr. Seuss book and the 1966 TV special were fully embedded in the national consciousness. You would’ve had a hard time finding anyone who didn’t know who the Grinch was. But you would’ve also had trouble finding anyone who didn’t recognize Jim Carrey, the antic, rubbery energy-bomb who had succeeded Robin Williams as Hollywood’s most lucrative physical comedian.

On a certain level, it made sense for Carrey to play a figure from a Chuck Jones cartoon. Carrey had built his career by basically working as a live-action cartoon—literally, in the case of 1994's The Mask, one of his biggest early hits. In the 1994 calendar year, the former Fire Marshall Bill had made Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and The Mask and Dumb And Dumber—the kind of dominant hat-trick breakout year that we will probably never see again. From there, Carrey’s big hits—Batman Forever, Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, Liar Liar—raked in amounts of money that are now mind-boggling to consider. Carrey also craved institutional approval, but his serious-actor moves, like 1998’s The Truman Show and 1999’s Man On The Moon, didn’t win him the Oscars that he so badly wanted. (He didn’t even get nominated.) So you can see why Carrey would’ve gone for a home run as obvious as The Grinch. After all, if nobody’s handing you any statues, you might as well go make some money.

Carrey was reportedly a nightmare on the Grinch set. The great makeup artist Rick Baker had designed utterly demented makeovers for everyone in the cast. For some reason, Baker and Howard envisioned the Whos down in Whoville as repulsive rat-faced mutants. Carrey, meanwhile, had to spend hours every day being coated in dyed-green yak fur, and he hated it. Years later, Carrey’s makeup artist, Kazuhiro Tsuji, told Vulture that the star would disappear from the set for hours at a time without explanation, and he’d return with his costume trashed. Tsuji also says that Carrey berated him so badly that it drove the artist to therapy.