This time, though, Kenan has a few forces of nature on his side. Spielberg and Zemeckis hold as much currency with family audiences as Pixar and DreamWorks, and this summer they’ve got the better movie. Filmed with the same technology that Zemeckis used on “The Polar Express,” “Monster House” tells the story of three kids (newcomers Mitchel Musso, Sam Lerner and Spencer Locke) who suspect that the creepy domicile across the street, owned by a nasty old kook named Nebbercracker, is actually a people-eating monster. (Steve Buscemi plays the kook, Kathleen Turner plays the house. And Maggie Gyllenhaal kills as the babysitter from hell.) It’s a wisp of a story, but just as his bosses did in their early 1980s adventure films, Kenan tells the stuffing out of it. He shares their gift for evoking the cozy tedium of suburban life–and the flights of imagination that kids use to escape it.
Zemeckis and Spielberg selected their prodigy on the strength of his UCLA senior thesis, a 10-minute live-action and animation blend called “The Lark,” about an unhappy couple and their anthropomorphized home. It was “Monster House” Lite–or dark, more accurately–and it convinced them that Kenan was up to the task of a feature film. “I guess there are stories about first-time directors who crack under the pressure,” says Zemeckis. “But I’d rath- er bet on Gil than on an established filmmaker who doesn’t have his passion.”
Kenan, who has thick Muppet eyebrows and a laser-beam stare, isn’t sure where that creative passion comes from. His father is a commodities trader, his mother a Holocaust historian. He bounced around as a kid, moving with his folks from London to Tel Aviv to Los Angeles before settling in Reseda, a scorching burb inthe San Fernando Valley with a single Hollywood claim to fame: it’s the home of Daniel-san, Mr. Miyagi and the Cobra Kai dojo in “The Karate Kid.” At the age of 5, he had a life-changing conversation with his mom about mortality. “I remember it to this day,” he says. “It really changed who I was as a kid.” What kind of kid was he before? “The kind who ate mud.” He laughs. “I became convinced–completely certain–that I would die in a nuclear holocaust.” So he’s survived the cold war, a major earthquake and his debut film for a Hollywood studio. Tom Hanks is producing his next one. With a little luck, maybe someday he’ll catch a break.
