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Dustin and Natalie's Toy Story

Wed., Nov. 14, 2007 5:04 PM PST by Marc Malkin

Fox Walden

Dustin Hoffman is sportin’ a crazy 'do in his new flick, Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium.

“That’s his real hair,” first-time director Zach Helm, 32, told me earlier today. “When we were first talking about the movie, we decided we didn’t want to do any prosthetics. Except we made his eyebrows bushier.”

In the film, opening this Friday, Hoffman plays Mr. Magorium, a 243-year-old man who bequeaths his fantastical toy store to his apprentice, a young pianist played by Natalie Portman. Jason Bateman costars as a straight-laced accountant hired by Magorium to help straighten out his books.

Not only is Hoffman’s hair real but so is his voice. For Magorium, he adopted a childlike lisp, which Helm says Hoffman first discovered while telling a joke about ostriches. “One of the ostriches talked like that as he was telling the joke, [and] Dustin’s wife said, ‘That’s it. That’s Mr. Magorium,’ ” said Helm, who also wrote the script. He and Hoffman first met during the making of Stranger Than Fiction, which Helm wrote.

As for snagging Portman for his directorial debut, Helm said he had to sell it a little bit more. “I had to put on a dog and pony show, because I know she gets offered a lot of work,” Helm remembered. “So, I gift-wrapped the script and sent a CD along and wrote her a letter, sent some toys and tried to impress her as much as I could.”

And get this, Helm actually first sold the script about 10 years ago. “It was sitting at Fox for a long time. [When] the regime changed many years ago, they weren’t interested in making it anymore,” Helm said. “I wound up buying the script back. I had to write them a check.”