Warner Bros. Presents A Film by Tim Burton: Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Pierce Brosnan and Danny DeVito in "Mars Attacks!," starring Martin Short, Sarah Jessica Parker, Michael J. Fox, Rod Steiger, Tom Jones, Lukas Haas, Natalie Portman, Jim Brown, Lisa Marie and Sylvia Sidney. The music is by Danny Elfman. The film is edited by Chris Lebenzon; the production is designed by Wynn Thomas; and Peter Suschitzky is the director of photography. The screen story and screenplay are by Jonathan Gems, based upon "Mars Attacks!" by Topps. The producers are Tim Burton and Larry Franco. "Mars Attacks!" is directed by Tim Burton and distributed by Warner Bros., A Time Warner Entertainment Company.

The director of photography is Peter Suschitzky, who shot the extraplanetary realms of "The Empire Strikes Back" and the provocative drama of David Cronenberg's "Crash." The editor is double Academy Award-nominee Chris Lebenzon, who cut "Crimson Tide" and worked with Burton on "Ed Wood" and "Batman Returns." Wynn Thomas, who designed the epic "Malcolm X" and the buoyant "To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar," is the production designer. The costumes are designed by Colleen Atwood, a Burton collaborator from "Ed Wood" and "Edward Scissorhands" and an Oscar nominee for "Little Women. Grammy Award-winning composer Danny Elfman teams with Burton for the seventh time to create the score.

Also featuring a horde of swollen-brained, bug-eyed Martians, not to mention a fleet of saucers sailing through space before unleashing their attack on Earth, "Mars Attacks!" called upon special effects from two of the industry's leading production studios. Industrial Light & Magic ("Twister," "Jurassic Park") and Warner Digital Studios ("Eraser," "Batman & Robin") contributed their digital wizardry to bring the Martian invaders and the calamity they wreak to full cinematic life.

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ABOUT THE PRODUCTION

The Inspiration - Over the past decade, Tim Burton has become one of the most imaginatively daring and commercially successful filmmakers of our time. He has applied his signature style to such unforgettable visions and popular films as the contemporary Gothic myth of "Batman" and "Batman Returns," the tender fable of "Edward Scissorhands," the eye-popping comic underside of the underworld in "Beetlejuice" and the delicate fantasy of "Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas."

Now, Burton turns his characteristic deft, dark humor to a classic genre of the silver screen: the Martian invasion of Earth! Evoking the grade-B, alarmist horror "classics" of the '50s with their quaintly unsophisticated conception of advanced alien culture, "Mars Attacks!" found its genesis in a series of bold trading cards once considered too extreme for the marketplace.

After the release of his homage to the best bad director of all time, "Ed Wood," Burton was trying to determine what his next directorial effort would be. He found himself recalling the low-budget, double-feature fare of his youth. "I wanted to do something fun, the kind of movies I grew up watching," Burton explains. "I've always loved the science-fiction movies of the '50s. Growing up on all those movies about Martians with big brains sort of stays with you forever."

In conversations with Warner Bros., Burton came to encounter a trading-card series, "Dinosaur Attacks!," issued by the Topps Company in the late '70s. Warner Bros. had once owned the rights to the cards, which featured carnivorous prehistoric monsters returned from extinction to devastate contemporary cities . . . but the option had expired.

Something inside of Burton clicked: "After I saw the 'Dinosaur Attacks!' cards, I remembered, 'Wasn't there something else like it?"'

Indeed there was. Nearly two decades earlier, Topps had issued a series of cards under the title "Mars Attacks!" Created during the height of the Cold War in 1962, the trading cards depicted a War of the Worlds-style invasion of Earth by Martians. However, due to the nature of some of their images, the cards were never distributed nationally and were pulled from the market after only a few months. Over the years, the cards developed a cult status and currently bring high prices in the collectibles market.

Burton recalls, "Because the cards had come out and gone so quickly, I didn't know if it was a dream or something I made up. After rediscovering them, however, I couldn't get them out of my head."

Warner Bros., the studio where Burton made his directorial debut with "Pee-wee's Big Adventure" and where he had enjoyed some of his greatest artistic and commercial triumphs with "Batman," "Beetlejuice" and "Batman Returns," was eager to renew its relationship with this singular filmmaker. They quickly secured the rights for "Mars Attacks!" from Topps, and Burton immediately began imprinting his own inimitable creative vision onto the story of defenseless Americans facing a seemingly invincible foe.