Dustin Hoffman has created a new character for his repertoire of unforgettable film roles. In Mandate Pictures’ “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium,” Hoffman plays a 243-year-old toy store proprietor, which came from the imaginative mind of 23-year-old screenwriter-director Zach Helm.
“I think audiences will get the chance to see him do things in his performance they’ve never seen him do in his 40-year career,” Helm said. “He is simply amazing.”
Natalie Portman also admired her co-star’s acting abilities.
“Dustin is much like his character, in that every single second he’s using the utmost of his creative powers,” Portman said. “To see someone squeezing that much joy and effort out of every second was pretty inspiring.”
A wondrous setting in a toy store with everything a kid would want, “Emporium” offers a delightful holiday movie for the young at heart. The plot is simple. Mr. Magorium wants to retire and leave the management of the store to his beautiful young assistant Mahony (Portman).
She’s reluctant to take over and has little confidence that she can run such an emporium. When skeptical young accountant Henry (Jason Bateman) comes in to do an audit, all the toys are drained of their color and energy and collapse into a gray funk.
It is up to Henry, Mahony and a youngster (Zach Mills) to revitalize the toys by finding magic within themselves.
Stories sometimes come out of amazing circumstances. When Helm was studying acting at DePaul University in Chicago, he had a part-time job in a toy store.
“The toy store I worked at was similar in its eclecticism to Magorium’s Emporium, but it was much, much smaller,” Helm said. “Then, on one particularly slow, rainy, afternoon when nobody was coming into the store, I just started writing in my journal. That’s when I came up with the basic outline of a toy store owned by a 243-year-old man.”
When Helm arrived in Hollywood, he started to put together a screenplay inspired by the madcap humor of the Marx Brothers and The Muppets.
“This movie is a cornucopia of all the things that I love and that I find exciting, thrilling and playful,” he said.
Producer Richard Gladstein enthused about the film as well.
“The wonderful tone of the screenplay was amplified even more in the making of the movie ” so that it remains very funny and heartwarming and poignant, but most importantly, real “¦ the Emporium becomes a place people can truly believe in.”
Building the set fell to the imagination of production designer Therese Perez (“Dark Water”) and set decorator Clive Thomasson (“Man of the Year”). Making a store that was dazzling from top to bottom and whimsical and astonishing took all the designers’ creativeness. They had to create a 7,100-square-foot set like no other.
“I had a pretty great sense of what I wanted to achieve right from the start, but Therese gave me ten times more than I ever imagined it could be,” Helm said.
“We both agreed that the store should have a combination of realism, surrealism and nostalgia built into it,” Perez said. “The Emporium represents the magic that happens in everyday life.”
The style of the set took clues from the art nouveau architecture of Amsterdam as well as the famous San Francisco Victorian “Painted Ladies.” Many of the colors used reflect the old Barnum & Bailey circus posters of yesteryear.
All of the huge set, with 30-foot ceilings, was built by a crack team of carpenters and painters in a mere nine weeks.
Bateman has been a staple on television since he was a kid on “Silver Spoons.” He has just the right dopey look on his face to be both funny and appealing.
After making a great impression on movie producers with his hit series “Arrested Development” in recent years, he has been working nonstop in feature films. His latest films include “Smokin’ Aces,” “The Kingdom,” “Juno” and “The Remarkable Fellows.”
He is currently on a Sony Pictures sound stage filming “John Hancock” with Will Smith and Charlize Theron.
This is the season for colorful, youth-oriented films to make their debuts, and “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium”will be at the top of the list of every kid who loves the wonder of magic. It’s an awesome film to look at, and the toys are every kid’s dream of owning.