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First Look: Will Eisner’s THE SPIRIT
By Rich Drees
For movie producer Michael Uslan, it has been a decade long journey
to get Will Eisner’s classic two-fisted, crime-fighting comics
character, The Spirit, onto the big screen, but the long wait
has been of his own devising.
“I promised and
swore to Will Eisner that nobody was going to touch this project if
they didn’t get it, if we couldn’t do it the right way,” stated
Uslan. “And I’ve held to that promise.”
Uslan is
speaking to a packed room at the 2nd Annual New York
Comic Con. It’s late February and not much has been heard about the
film since it was announced last June that comic book writer and
artist turned film director Frank Miller was announced as the film’s
director. Joining Uslan was his producing partner F. J. DeSanto to
fill comic fans in on the latest news on the production.
The panel
opened with DeSanto reading an email message from Miller, who could
not attend due to an injury he suffered while slipping on ice a few
weeks earlier. Miller briefly lamented the accident, if only because
it has forced him to miss out “on all these chances to tell
everybody how much fun I get to have writing Will Eisner’s The
Spirit.”
Miller also
cautioned attendees on what tone he planned on setting for the film.
“And don’t go expecting a nostalgic, tongue-in-cheek romp here.
Remember, remember how scary Eisner got whenever he chose to. And
remember how he broke your heart with the story of Sand Saref. So
expect some hairpin turns, some dead-end, back alley madness of the
wet kind. Get set, we’re on our way to some dark places.”
Uslan admits to
being protective of the project to the point where he has turned
down more than one offer from a studio not for financial reasons but
due to what is commonly and euphemistically referred to as “creative
differences.”
“We have had
many lucrative deals put in front of us that we’ve turned down over
the years,” he explained. “We have dealt with people in Hollywood
who have said ‘Great, you want to do a Spirit movie? That’s
something we’d be interested in financing and distributing. But
let’s get him out of this tie and jacket stuff [and into some]
spandex and a cape. We’ll work on some designs. And of course we
really need super powers so he’ll really die and come back as a
ghost. It’ll be supernatural.’ I said ‘That’s a great idea and we
can call it The Specter or Deadman.’”
Uslan finally
found a collaborator who "got it" in Miller, when the two were
having a conversation after Eisner’s memorial service in New York
City.
“Sin City had come out a week or two before that and I said,
‘You know Frank, the difference between you and me, I’m trying to
make comic books into movies and what you’ve done is you’ve made a
movie into a comic book. For the first time I can really, really see
The Spirit being done, using this Sin City technology,’” related
Uslan. “Immediately, Frank had all kinds of ideas so I said ‘You
know, you’ve got to write and direct this.’”
Uslan reported
that Miller expressed some doubts about taking on the project.
“Frank’s reaction was immediately, ‘I couldn’t do that. You expect
me to do something worth of Will Eisner? I couldn’t possibly do
that. Who am I?’ But after thinking about this for some time he came
back and said ‘I can’t let anyone else do it. I’ve got to do it.’”
Miller dove
right into the story development process in a rather interesting way
according to DeSanto.
“When we first
started talking about the movie and ideas started to pour out of
Frank’s head, he would Xerox Will’s graphic novels and start
cutting and pasting them into some sort of order,” DeSanto stated.
“That’s how he mapped out the initial film. I was having lunch with
him about six months ago and all of a sudden he had a pile of papers
on his lap and he said ‘Ok., here’s the movie.’”
“It’s not an
origin story,” DeSanto continued. “When you meet the Spirit, he is
the Spirit. The Eisner elements are in there. We’ll be incorporating
the logo into the background. Central City is its own world. With
the technology they made Sin City and 300 with, we’re
at a really neat point in filmmaking where we can make that world as
Eisner-esque as possible. As [Frank] sorted of hinted, we’re going
to see some of the femme fatales that Will was so great at creating
and we’re going to see the Spirit get into a lot of trouble.”
Although Eisner
told a variety of styles of stories with the Spirit comics,
Uslan is quick to let fans know, perhaps a little too quick, that
these other tales have not been forgotten.
“When we talk
about a darker, edgier Spirit, we’re not going to do the
whimsical Spirit stories. We’re not going to do Rat-Tat The
Machine Gun or Gerhard Shtoball. However, that doesn’t mean that
when we move to some animation projects that we won’t necessarily
cover that then. But that’s a story I’m not allowed to talk about
now.”
Uslan stated that many of the familiar Spirit supporting cast
are slated to appear in the film.
“We’ve got
Commissioner Dolan and believe me you’ll understand why he is so
different from [Batman’s] Commissioner Gordon,” he promised.
“Ellen Dolan will be there. Sand Saref and that magnificent romantic
triangle will be there. There are villains and femme fatales
sprinkled throughout that will delight you and surprise you with the
way that Frank deals with them.”
One character
who will not be appearing in the film is the Spirit’s sometime
sidekick Ebony White, an African-American boy who, despite being one
of the few such recurring characters in comics at that time, was
often portrayed as a broad stereotype for Stepin Fetchit-type humor.
“It was Frank’s
choice,” DeSanto elaborated on the exclusion of the character from
the film. “I think that Frank has said that creatively everybody can
have a bad day and that that was the bad day for Will.”
“I think what
it was for Frank was less about the controversial nature of the
character than it was the story doesn’t lend itself to a little kid
being involved in the action,” added Uslan. “There’s a world that he
created for this movie where endangering a child like that did not
make sense.”
Although The
Spirit’s popularity was at its height over half a century ago,
Uslan has no intentions of making the film a period piece.
“There was
something important in our discussions with Will Eisner that he said
to us. The question that I posed to Will was this- ‘Should this be
set in the 1940s? Should this bet set in the 1950s? Should this be
set today?’ He was kind of shocked at my question and said, ‘I never
wrote The Spirit in a nostalgic sense. Whenever I wrote it
and drew it, I was always doing something that was relevant at that
time. He was in the 40s in the 40s. When I was doing it in the 50s
it was the 50s.There’s no reason that this shouldn’t be contemporary
or at least timeless',"
“That’s what
Frank is going to go for here. There’s going to be a timeless feel
to this. The only thing I can throw back to you is what Time Burton
did in our first Batman picture where a lot of people, if you asked
them, weren’t absolutely sure if that movie took place in the past,
present or future or some kind of mix thereof.”
With Miller
hard at work on what is hoped to be the final draft of the film,
Uslan is anxious to get the production rolling. However, with Miller
also involved with the Sin City sequel, he cannot guarantee
when cameras will start rolling.
“We are really
all kind-of waiting to see how all the pieces are going to fit
together, but right now if I had to guess I would say we are going
first [before Sin City 2]. Anything could change at any time. Frank’s got to get up and
around, feeling 100 percent. Just as a function of business, if we
have so-and-so as a star and he’s available on such-and-such a
date than we go. If he’s available three months later, we wait. So,
these are all factors that have to be figured out.” |
