TODAY, VEGAS: TOMORROW, THE WORLD! MEAN LITTLE GREEN GUYS ATTACK EARTH

By Cindy Pearlman

From Chicago Sun-Times, 12.08.1996, Late Sports Final Edition

People of Earth, get ready. Here comes another close encounter of the worst kind. Humongous spaceships are hovering over our atmosphere. Washington, Los Angeles, New York: all zapped and flambeed. Annoying tourists--ugly green guys with horrible manners--have arrived with ray guns to toast our buns.

Feeling a little paranoid? Like you've seen this one already? Tim Burton, whose new holiday film Mars Attacks! opens Friday, is not boldly going where we haven't gone before. Remember that other creature feature, Independence Day, which grossed $300 million this summer. Mars Attacks! also is a throwback to the B movies of the '50s.

But Burton doesn't care. "I didn't worry about the Independence Day comparisons," he says. "I just like monsters."

This outlandish big-budget comedy boasts an out-of-this-world cast of characters. Jack Nicholson plays President James Dale, "a guy worried about which is the best suit to wear to greet the Martians." Close is the snooty-to-the-max first lady, Marsha, who insists she will "not have those Things eating off the Van Buren china."

Dale's two closest advisors are Rod Steiger as "blow 'em back to Mars" Gen. Decker and Martin Short as the press secretary, who promises the media corps, "Of course they will do interviews."

Over in Las Vegas, Nicholson also plays real-estate slickster Art Land. Annette Bening is his alcoholic, harmonically converging wife, Danny DeVito is a nasty-mouthed gambler and Jim Brown is a former pro boxer. Tom Jones is . . . Tom Jones.

There is also Sarah Jessica Parker as a fashionable newswoman, Michael J. Fox as a reporter for GNN, Lukas Haas as a slacker stoner who works in a doughnut shop, Pam Grier as a gruff bus driver, and Burton's girlfriend Lisa Marie as a Martian hooker who vamps her way into the White House to off the first family.

Burton says he set out to make Mars Attacks! three years ago, before the space genre made its big Hollywood comeback. "I wanted to capture the spirit of those old '50s alien movies," he says. "Part of what was so beautiful about them was the cheese factor. Everything from the aluminum foil spaceships to the little green guys looked so cheesy that they had a certain kind of charm."

And Burton should know. He has been preparing to do this kind of movie since he was a kid in Burbank, Calif.

"I always thought these schlocky space movies were taking place right where I lived because the houses all looked like the houses on my block," Burton says. "The people in these cheesy space flicks kind of reminded me of my parents' friends. I honestly thought one day if some of my dad's friends took off their hats that underneath they would be Martians."

So something was triggered when Burton, who was looking for something to direct after Ed Wood (1994), ran into the trading-card series "Dinosaur Attacks!" issued by the Topps Co. in the late '70s.

"I remembered that about two decades earlier, Topps had the 'Mars Attacks!' cards," he says. In 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the Mars cards were created to depict a "War of the Worlds" type of Martian invasion. The cards were pulled off the market after parents protested the subject matter. (Death rays! Shrinking rays! Giant insects!) "Some of the images were so severe that they were never distributed nationally," Burton says. Naturally the ban meant instant cult status.

Warner Bros. secured the rights for the cards from Topps three years ago, and Burton was suddenly in pre-filming nirvana. The script was written when Burton tossed the cards in the air, watched them hit the ground and then picked out "a few of the ones that I liked." At that point Burton had three goals: (1) a big cast, (2) various locations including Vegas and Washington, D.C., and (3) Martians and more Martians in all their green glory.

"I wanted the ultimate freak show," he says.

Casting the 20 leads was enough to freak anyone out. Nicholson, who worked with Burton before when he played the Joker in Batman (1989), quickly said yes. "I gave Jack the option of playing any of the roles," says Burton, "and he came back and said, 'How 'bout me playing all of them.'"

Some actors, like Jim Brown, had to screen-test. "Tim calls one day and says, 'I saw you in The Dirty Dozen and I liked it. Want to be in my Martian movie?' " he recalls. Joe Don Baker, who plays what he calls "white redneck trash," says he and Burton had a hearty discussion about the possibility of alien life. "At the end of our initial meeting, I was checking the sky."

Others took roles for more selfish reasons. DeVito admits he did the movie "so I could stand around in Vegas and smoke cigars with Tom Jones."

On sets that traveled from Washington, D.C., to the Arizona desert, the cast got to observe Burton's not-so-unusual way of making a film. "Everyone thinks Tim must be some sinister, macabre figure," Baker says. "But the truth is that he walks around giggling a lot."

And why not, considering the subject matter? Brown recalls his days filming in a casino. "You've got little green stuffed animals that would signify where computer-generated aliens would later be put into the film," he says. "Tim is yelling, 'Look worried. Martians are landing!' "

Close says the Washington scenes were particularly amusing. "You have me, Jack Nicholson, Martin Short, Pierce Brosnan and Rod Steiger sitting in this fake Oval Office. Just the sight of that cracked me up." As for Nicholson, he received presidential treatment. "You knew when Jack arrived every day because someone would play 'Hail to the Chief' on a tape recorder," Close says.

Parker adds, "Even actors who would get very serious about their characters had to lighten up. I mean, we all had the same problem. You know, creepy little space guys were here to fry you."

Speaking of which, Burton says, in retrospect, he's glad that unlike a certain other recent space feature, his own has "more creatures and less ships." Burton decided his nitrogen-sniffing, green-goo-filled visitors would be three-dimensional images generated by Industrial Light and Magic. "I wanted the aliens to have personalities. I thought of them as bad, hyper teenagers who really weren't sure what they wanted, but they want everything."

A sequel? Burton has no plans for space invaders to bother us anytime soon. But we can see it now. ID5 meets Mars Attacks Again!

At first, Burton insists this is the final frontier for him when it comes to space creatures. "Then again, Godzilla vs. my aliens . . . hmmmm. It sounds so appealingly cheesy," Burton says with glee. "I mean, that's a movie I would pay to see."

Earthlings, be warned.