BY Samuel D Osborn

Rarely do big studio executives step away from their desks and onto sets to direct a movie of their own. But for the first time in over fifteen years, Bob Shaye, co-chairman and founder of New Line Cinema, has directed his own picture. And it’s a film some people have hailed as the next E.T. We sat down with the Big Suit and spoke about his new film, THE LAST MIMZY, the fourteen years it took to get moving, the danger of online word-of-mouth, and Dwight Schrute’s bare, white ass.

FEARS: Somebody just told me it took you fourteen years getting THE LAST MIMZY off the ground. What took so long?

ROBERT SHAYE: Well, yeah, but it wasn’t a day and night endeavor. First of all, I had a pretty involved day job, being co-chairman of New Line. And there was a lot going on with New Line in those years. The second reason was that MIMZY is based off a great story (“Mimsy were the Borogoves” by Lewis Padgett) that captivated me as a fourteen year old boy in Detroit. But it ended with the kids becoming super-geniuses, with all kind of super powers, then stepping into a circle made out of the toys that made them that way, and disappear. That’s the end of the story. So that raised a lot of issues about what happens afterwards. Do they come back? Do the parents follow them? It just raised way too many questions.

FEARS: In fixing the ending, is MIMZY a great departure from the original source material?

ROBERT SHAYE: Well, as it turns out, that short story part represents only the first twenty minutes of the movie. After that we had to create a satisfying last two acts of the movie that would justify adapting it into a feature film. And we went through, like, nine or ten drafts of the scripts with five different writers. Bruce Rubin, who actually wrote two different scripts, was hired twice, Toby Emmerich, president of our production company, wrote two more extensive drafts, and then in the middle of all this we had three other writers. And there were several chunks of time, two or three years, where I had decided that MIMZY was just a nut that couldn’t be cracked. I mean, there are certain things that are written that cannot satisfactorily be translated into film. Everything that’s great in literature isn’t great on film. But Michael Phillips (MIMZY’s producer) was very persistent and he would call every so often with new ideas, get me fired up again. I’d hire another writer, and it all went in circles like that until it eventually ended here.