When Jordan Kerner was a sophomore at Stanford, he wanted to be president. Not head of a successful film production company about to release a $75 million adaptation of Charlotte’s Web, but president of the United States. To that end, he had a rather unusual plan. It involved becoming a doctor, joining the American Medical Association and “quietly working my way up the ranks, hiding my politics, until I became president of the AMA,” he explains. “At that point I would come out with my plan for universal health care and run for Senate.”
The dream was real enough to propel Kerner, ’72, into premed studies. Then, as he tells it, CBS newsman Jules Dundes steered him away from that route. It was spring quarter sophomore year, and Kerner was taking Dundes’s course on mass communications. “He asked me, ‘Do you want to be married? Do you want your family’s every move scrutinized?’” Kerner recalls. “And he basically said you can do a lot more by going into TV or film than by taking office. My life took a 180-degree turn.”
Kerner describes his turning point over lunch at Campanile in Los Angeles, where the host knows to give him a corner table. He speaks with passion, but you have the distinct feeling he has told the story before. And that it has served him well as an explanation for how a young man with political ideals became one of Hollywood’s leading big-budget producers—or, conversely, how the blockbuster producer happens to be so politically engaged, known as a generous supporter of Democratic candidates and NGOs like Human Rights Watch and the National Resources Defense Council.
At first glance, his list of film credits doesn’t give these interests away. Since forming his own production company in 1986 (first called the Avnet/ Kerner company in partnership with Jon Avnet; now known as Kerner Entertainment), he has made several adult dramas, including Less than Zero (1987), Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) and Up Close & Personal (1996). But most of his movies are family-friendly extravaganzas. In 1997, he produced George of the Jungle, Walt Disney’s most successful film that year, which grossed nearly $200 million. Back in 1992 he produced a very popular movie that soon became a very popular franchise, about a peewee hockey team known as the Mighty Ducks.
Charlotte’s Web is poised to be another hit. Scheduled for release on December 20, this adaptation of E.B. White’s classic story of a spider who saves a pig from becoming bacon features a mix of live-action sequences and computer graphics animation, including “photo-real graphics.” Photorealism was especially important in giving birth to the onscreen Charlotte, who has the hairy texture and creepy moves of a real spider. Wilbur, on the other hand, is played by 46 live pigs and about a dozen motorized puppets known as animatronics, with computer graphics inserted only to help him do a flip. “This is nothing like Stuart Little,” says Kerner. “People will think we’ve made a live action movie and wonder how we got the animals to do all of this.”
People may also wonder how he got so many actors to do all of this. The movie features Dakota Fanning as Fern, Julia Roberts as the voice of the spider, and Oprah Winfrey, Robert Redford, Kathy Bates, John Cleese, Reba McEntire, André Benjamin, Thomas Haden Church and Steve Buscemi lending their voices to assorted barnyard creatures. “Some people say they got their dream cast,” Kerner says. “You can tell we got ours. We have Robert Redford as the old horse, and Steve Buscemi is the perfect rat.” When asked how he landed such major names, he gives the book all the credit. “I think with Julia, especially, the story was really powerful.”
The voices were recorded in a Los Angeles studio, but Kerner traveled to Australia to film the perfect New England landscape. He explains that fall colors were already beginning to fade in Maine, where E.B. White lived, when Kerner got the green light to start shooting. “I’ve learned over the years that you don’t delay production when you have the backing to go,” he says. So he set up shop in the countryside near Melbourne, which has the same rolling hills as New England, and autumn when he needed it to be autumn.
Still, he admits, turning southern Australia into New England was a lot of work. The biggest nuisance? Having to digitally remove hundreds of eucalyptus trees.
At press time, the movie’s projected cost was running just over $75 million—one sign of how much everyone involved expects it to make in return. But to hear Kerner talk, Charlotte’s Web and most of his other films are not about the weekend grosses or simply providing family entertainment. He sees many of his movies as statements about acceptance and love, or illustrations of how to live a more meaningful life. His official biographical statement calls Less than Zero the first “anti-drug film,” and he describes Fried Green Tomatoes as a “story about racism, sexism and ageism.”
Kerner calls Charlotte’s Web a cautionary tale “about the dangers of racism, or rather species-ism. Because she’s a spider, everyone is prejudiced against Charlotte, but they don’t really know her. The cow, Kathy Bates, says that spiders eat their male folk. Another animal calls them bloodsuckers. They don’t have their minds changed until they encounter the nobility of the character. That’s a lesson that can’t be taught too early.”
Charlotte’s Web was Kerner’s favorite book as a child, but the idea of making the film did not occur to him until reading the book to his 3-year-old daughter about 6 years ago. When he had finished, she asked, “Why did Fern leave her friend Wilbur before she knew that he would be safe?” He saw then that the book had more to say about the passage of time than he’d realized. (Kerner later considered casting his three daughters as the voices of the baby spiders, but they turned him down. “They were intimidated by the idea of reading out loud in front of everyone.”) The fact that Paramount held domestic rights to the book led Kerner into a long-term relationship with that company, leaving Disney.
These days, he oversees many big-budget movies and seems at peace with this choice. “Independent films can be more politically direct, but they play to a smaller audience,” he says. “I’m making movies that are political with a small ‘p’ and play to maybe 80 million people. That’s a different model than Syriana, which probably only reached 4 or 5 million.” Kerner has not, however, completely forsaken capital-p politics. He supported Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, ’55, in their successful U.S. Senate runs, and he is active in the gubernatorial bid of California state controller Steve Westly, ’78, MBA ’83. “I’m contributing to his campaign and also working on his fundraiser. My job right now is lining up some singing talent to pull in the crowds.”
JORI FINKEL, MA ’94, is an art reporter based in Los Angeles.
