Reed, Sue, Ben, Johnny & Me
An Adventure Across Time and Space
Thirty years ago–in the late summer or fall of 1995–I wangled myself a pitch meeting with a couple of development execs at director Chris Columbus’s 1492 Pictures, hoping to get myself hired to write 20th Century-Fox’s recently announced feature film adaptation of the classic Marvel Comics series, Fantastic Four.1
This would have been not long after the publication of my second novel, Wonder Boys and a few months before I started to write a book that would become The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. I had recently moved to Los Angeles with my wife, Ayelet, who worked as a criminal attorney in the Federal Public Defender’s office there. Taking pitch meetings with development executives was, suddenly, something I could (and thought I wanted to) do.
On the day I showed up for that meeting, I had written exactly one screenplay, entitled The Gentleman Host, the fruit of an intense bout of provider anxiety I had experienced the previous year as we were expecting the birth of our first child. I had written it “on spec,” which in Hollywood parlance means that nobody had asked me, let alone offered to pay me, to write it. But I knew—everyone knew—that Shane Black had recently sold a spec script, The Long Kiss Goodnight, for a reported four million dollars. I’d figured that I needed to write something only one-quarter as good and that incoming baby would be set for life.
The Long Kiss Goodnight is a loud, violent comedy-thriller about a suburban mother who has somehow forgotten that she used to be a super-assassin. I wish I could tell you why I decided that the proper approach to a Shane Black-level paycheck would be to write a melancholy romantic comedy about elderly Jews in love, equally inspired by I.B. Singer and Barry Levinson, set aboard a third-rate cruise ship. Eventually my spec script, too long and clumsily paced, found its way to an authentic Hollywood producer, Scott Rudin, who had, of all things, optioned it—for something approaching a fortieth of Shane Black’s fee. Rudin had put me to work revising and re-revising it, and I had worked hard to learn the screenwriting craft, but on the day of my meeting with the execs at 1492 The Gentleman Host remained squarely in dry dock.2
Proposing myself as the first writer on a big-budget, major-studio comic book adventure movie was, in other words, kind of a stretch. My screenwriting credits were nil. I had not, as I say, begun the novel that exposed me as one of those people, rarer at the time than they are today, who did that paradoxical thing of taking comic books seriously. My first novel had been a semi-autobiographical, ambisexual coming-of-age lark, my second a weed-fumed academic caper, both set not in a marvelous Manhattan or the Negative Zone but in good old Pittsburgh, PA. There was nothing in my track record, such as it was, to reassure even the most lark-tolerant or weed-fumed development executive that I was in any way qualified to write a massive, expensive, special-effects driven “tentpole” picture about the exploits of four amateur astronauts3 obliged to cope with a suite of improbable teratogenic aftereffects due to massive radiation exposure while, habitually, saving the Earth, the galaxy, or the universe itself from destruction.
When I showed up for my pitch meeting at 1492, on what was still known, at the time, as “the Columbia lot,” I was aware of all this—of my own sheer improbability—but somehow I really didn’t consider it germane, or take from it any sort of discouragement. I was confident that I understood the Fantastic Four: as a team, as individuals, and as a way of figuring resourcefulness and curiosity and the spirit of adventure as deeply human responses to the wonders and terrors of the world.
And, in any case, it was not as though there was anything in Hollywood’s track record (such as it was) to reassure even the most forgiving or Terrigen Mist-fumed Marvel fan that it was, in any way, qualified to produce any kind of film adaptation of any Marvel character, at all. Here, lest we forget, is a complete list of all the films starring Marvel Comics characters that by 1995 had ever managed to struggle, shapeless and raw as marsupial neonates or the Carpet Crawlers, toward some movie screen, somewhere in the world:
Howard the Duck (1986)
The Punisher (1989)
Captain America (1990)4
It turned out that one of the two 1492 development execs had heard of me—actually, I think he may have said that his wife had heard of me. He seemed extremely surprised to find me sitting in his office, asking to be allowed onto this project. Indeed, he seemed a little embarrassed, even mildly offended, on my behalf.
Verbatim dialog is tough at a distance of three decades, and my memory may have been contaminated to a certain degree by the lyrics to “Piano Man,” but I’m pretty sure that one of the execs said something awfully close to, “What are you doing here?” And that the other one said, as if he thought I could use a timely even medicinal reminder, “I mean, you’re, like, a serious writer.”
I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to tell them that in spite of whatever they might have heard, or might simply assume, about someone who had published a few short stories in The New Yorker and festooned his novels with epigraphs from J.L. Borges and Joseph Conrad, it was possible, I was certain—not commonplace, perhaps, but possible—to be a so-called serious writer and take a serious, passionate interest in comic book superheroes.
I worried that by asserting, even defending my credentials, these guys were actually questioning my credentials. So I re-affirmed my abiding love for Reed Richards, Ben Grimm, and the Storm siblings, and tried to display my erudition in the vast and mindbending FF mythos of planet-devouring colossi, and ancient spacefaring races who dabbled in human DNA, and mutant kingdoms hidden in the Blue Area of the Moon. O! Alicia Masters, soulful blind sculptress who could see into the human heart of a literally petrified man! O! Latveria, gothic Brothers Grimm kingdom ruled by a malign technosorcerer armored in loneliness and titanium alloy! O! Black Bolt, whose speech is so terribly destructive that he must live in a state of perpetual silence! That sort of thing. And then, to further assert my bonafides, I showed them my pin: a small, round, enameled pinback badge, blue “4” against a white disc, which I routinely wore—it lived—on the lapel of my denim jacket. I flipped the lapel forward, so they could get a better look at it.
Whoa! they said. Or maybe, Nice! Something to that effect. They seemed… bemused, I decided. Looking back, I understand that it simply had never occurred to them that a so-called, like, serious writer might also, in fact, be a serious dork. I thought I had better show them what I had in my satchel.
I reached for the brown leather satchel at my feet, the kind of thing some Bletchley Park boffin might have used to convey Enigma decrypts to Churchill in his War Room. I had accessorized with it that afternoon in the hope that it made me look more like whatever a veteran screenwriter looked like, but having nothing actually to put in it, apart from the three printed-out pages of my pitch document (which my then-agent had strongly cautioned me not to “leave in the room”), I had at the last minute impulsively tossed in my copy of Fantastic Four #48 (“The Coming of Galactus!”).
“Well, we’ve sure had a lot of crazy excited writers come through here recently,” one of the development executives said, with a mildly derisive chuckle. “Some of them even brought in their comic books!”
“Ha!” I said. “Crazy.”
And then I gave them my pitch, while issue number 48 languished in the darkness of my empty satchel. I tried to read aloud from the carefully prepared text while appearing to be improvising on a set of jotted bullet points, so that I could maintain the eye contact my then-agent had also described as paramount. That kind of eye contact is, of course, a simulacrum of eye contact, hollow on the inside, or at least that’s how it always feels to me.
I don’t remember anything about how the pitch played in the room, or what the execs said during the brief interval before I was shown to the door. It was the silence that followed the meeting, immense and portentous as Black Bolt’s, that told me everything I needed to know. (Also, I totally forgot about not leaving pages in the room.)
Years passed, and no Fantastic Four movie appeared, and at some point in the late nineties, I uploaded the pitch document to my old, original website where, from time to time and in particular after the publication of Kavalier & Clay, it would be discovered, linked to, and discussed by commenters on some comics or film fansite.
In 2005, 1492 Pictures and 20th Century-Fox brought out Fantastic Four, followed in 2007 by Rise of the Silver Surfer. The approach taken by these two half-hearted and lackluster adaptations—to the extent that they troubled with taking any kind of considered approach—bore no resemblance to the one I had sketched out so many, years, books, films and children ago. Both films were unloved and are now unremembered and the second, underperforming, killed the franchise until 2015. Then, twenty years after that meeting, with 1492 Pictures no longer involved as producers—Fox released Fantastic Four, a murky and incoherent act of vandalism that was less of a reboot than a Denver boot, immobilizing the film franchise for yet another ten years.
On its opening weekend this July, I saw The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Sincere, faithful, swift-paced, open-hearted, good-humored, beautiful to look at, well-written and well-made, the film genuinely and tenderly honors the comic book source material. It has clearly been made by people who love, understand, and have thought about the weird and weirdly ordinary family at its heart.
And, astonishingly: the filmmakers have breathed genuine cinematic life into a character that in 1995 I had viewed as so clearly incapable of ever being translated to the screen from the comic book page, where the most arrant and ludicrous absurdities can break your heart or punch you in the gut, that I had not for an instant considered using him: the film authentically and convincingly gives us Galactus, Devourer of Worlds.
I thought the movie was swell; it’s fair to say I loved it. I also thought: Welp, it took thirty years, but somebody finally listened to my pitch.5
This would be, technically, the second Fantastic Four feature, though the first, directed by low-budget quickmeister Roger Corman at the instigation of then-license holder, Constantin Films, in order to prevent Marvel from taking back the film rights, was never released; reputedly Marvel bought up every print and destroyed them. Shortly before my pitch meeting, at a comics show at the Shrine Auditorium, I had obtained a degraded VHS dub which, despite its unapologetically rubbery prosthetics and the $7.99 spent on special effects, displays a kooky, Early Silver Age earnestness that I had quite enjoyed.
By 1996 the option had lapsed, and the script, as venerable Hollywood custom dictates, was driven out to a vacant lot on Stocker Street, shot, and thrown into a ditch between two oil wells.
Not, in those days, a thing.
You’ve probably heard about, and may even have seen Howard the Duck, one of a very select list of massively expensive Hollywood flops that are actually even worse than everyone says they are, a film that neither cannabis, irony, nor Time the Forgiver can improve; but you may not be aware of The Punisher, a dismal 1989 Dolph Lungren vehicle that appears only to have been exhibited in theaters in a few Central European countries with long histories of dismal punishment; or of that Captain America, a reliably but alas not—unlike his 1982 The Sword and the Sorcerer—entertainingly deranged Albert Pyun film, starring Matt “Son of J.D." Salinger, in which the part of Cap’s exposed ears is played not by Salinger’s actual ears but by wobbly rubber prosthetics hot-glued (one supposes) onto the sides of the fully-enclosed blue cowl.
To be clear: I’m not accusing anyone of anything. Truly. And anyway, I’m the one who, against all advice and the conventional wisdom, left his pages in the room; and not just in some development exec’s office, but on the Internet, the biggest, most echoing room of all.
I was verbally hired three times to write treatments for Marvel movies...Doctor Strange, Iron Man, Shang-Chi. VERBALLY hired, I emphasize, after morning pitch meetings and then rejected all three times after lunch. I was also verbally hired to write the screenplay for Daredevil. I flew to LA on a studio jet that just happened to be in Seattle. By the time I got to the Sony Studios, my executive had hired Mark Steven Johnson instead. I flew back home on Southwest.
Looking forward to seeing it, even though I’m no fan of the MCU thingy, but mainly because of Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby, who both know a thing or two about lighting up a big screen.
Glad you didn’t get the gig back then, as we might have been denied Kavalier and Clay, and you would have been sequestered away in the Hollywood Hills; counting your doubloons while sipping something exotic by your infinity pool. Which, I completely understand, you yourself might well have welcomed…
A lovely piece, Michael.