FRED Entertainment

 

  

The following events took place on Friday, July 21, between 2:30 PM and 5:30 PM.

Attending Comic-Con International in San Diego means having to decide among a wealth of choices of things to do and see. The next panel on my must-see list was the Paramount Pictures presentation in Hall H at 2:30 PM, and I didn’t want to take the chance of being stuck in one of the infamous long lines outside. As it turned out, once again I was able to walk right into Hall H. So what’s the big deal?

FRIDAY 2:30 PM
The “Paramount Pictures” panel was entirely devoted to Stardust, the film adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s fantasy novel, which is currently being shot by director Matthew Vaughn.

Jeff Walker, who was once again acting as emcee, told the audience, “Guess you can see who we’re bringing out.” Indeed, there was Neil Gaiman, dressed, as always, as a Man in Black: he is the Johnny Cash of the graphic novel. He had been flown in just to appear on this panel and would be spirited away from Comic-Con immediately afterwards, sort of like President George W. Bush making one of his whirlwind visits to Iraq.

Also present onstage were Charles Vess, who had created the illustrations for the Stardust novel; writer Jane Goldman, a very pretty Englishwoman with long, bright red hair, who collaborated with Vaughn on the film’s screenplay; and the movie’s producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura.

Gaiman informed the audience that “People have been trying to make a Stardust movie since 1998.” He said that he finally let Matthew Vaughn have the movie rights “because I trust him.” Gaiman added that Vaughn and Jane Goldman “let me look over their shoulder and occasionally kibitz.”

The movie industry’s low regard for screenwriters is legendary: they may be highly paid, but their work is nearly always rewritten by other screenwriters, directors and even actors. Writers of the books from which screenplays are adapted are even lower on the proverbial totem pole, with no power to control how their stories are translated to the screen. So it was heartening to see Gaiman take such a prominent role on the Stardust movie panel, as it was to see Frank Miller in a similar role on the 300 movie panel the following day. It certainly makes sense for the studios to parade Gaiman and Miller before a Comic-Con audience, but the respect that the movie people showed to Gaiman and Miller on these panels seemed persuasively genuine. For that matter, it’s a happy surprise to see writers–Miller and Gaiman–so pleased with the translation of their work to the screen.

Nonetheless, the filmmakers rightfully put their own mark on the material. Introducing the first of the clips from the film, Gaiman observed that “some bits we’ll show are very faithful” to the book, but “some bits are new.”

In the initial clip, the young protagonist, Tristan Thorn, played by Charlie Cox, stands beneath the window of Victoria, who is the wrong woman for him but he doesn’t realize that yet. Tristan’s attempts to court her are interrupted by his rival Humphrey, who easily defeats him in a duel. There was a long pause after the clip before the audience gave it muted applause. (Were they taken aback by seeing the hero defeated? But it is, after all, only the beginning of this hero’s journey.)

“So. . .” continued Gaiman, who explained that Tristan plans to win Victoria’s heart by promising to bring her back a fallen star. In order to find it, he must cross the Wall which separates his village in the everyday world from the magical world beyond. In the second clip Tristan attempts to cross the Wall only to be thwarted by what Joseph Campbell would call a threshold guardian: an unusually agile old man who fights Tristan with his long staff and easily overpowers him. It struck me as the reverse of Siegfried’s confrontation with the Wanderer–the disguised god Wotan, his grandfather–in Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung: the young Siegfried slashes Wotan’s staff of power in two with his sword. (Hmm, Tristan is also a name associated with Wagner.)

You see a pattern of defeat emerging for Stardust‘s nascent hero, but he will eventually break it. As Goldman observed, “people don’t break out of the prescribed route they’re supposed to follow. Tristan is the exception.” He does get across the Wall to begin his adventure.

Gaiman cautioned us that “Matthew really wanted us to stress that nothing has been done to the footage you’re seeing,” meaning the addition of special effects. “He’s currently back in England shooting green screen stuff and worrying.”

This warning applied to the third clip, in which the lead witch, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, casts a spell on another character. The camera shook as Pfeiffer uttered her curse, and presumably CGI will be added later. Even so, the shaking of the image, as if an earthquake had been conjured up, together with Pfeiffer’s sinister performance, already created an unusual effect. We don’t see Pfeiffer much in new movies since she turned forty (at which point Hollywood believes they cease to exist), yet she has grown not one iota less beautiful.

Introducing the next clip, Gaiman said, “This is a character who’s not in the book. In fact, it’s one and a half characters who are not in the book.” The “half” is a character from Gaiman’s book who has been renamed Captain Shakespeare in the movie, has been given an expanded role, and is played by Robert DeNiro. The Captain is a “fearsome pirate” who commands a flying ship with which he captures bolts of lightning. (Whether the Captain’s new name of Shakespeare has any significance beyond sounding cool, I as yet have no idea.)

In this fourth clip Captain Shakespeare negotiates the sale of some lightning bolts to the whole “character who’s not in the book,” Ferdy the Fence, played by Ricky Gervais, the co-creator and star of the original BBC version of The Office.

In that series Gervais created a specific variation on a comedy archetype, the incompetent impostor who nonetheless brazens it out. The difference between Gervais and, say, Bob Hope or Woody Allen in their comedies is that Gervais’s characters have partly or wholly deluded themselves as well. It’s as if the world had unknowingly been waiting for Gervais to discover this character type, since now he turns up in so many different places, including the fantasy world of Stardust. Though it took a while for the audience to warm up to this clip, it finally, deservedly, got a big laugh.

(Gervais also turned up as a voice actor in last year’s British computer-animated feature Valiant, about homing pigeons during World War II. Though I agree that the title hero had a vacuum where his personality should have been, I found Valiant entertaining, and certainly not the disaster that reviews claimed. Perhaps as a Turner Classic Movies aficionado, I’m more kindly disposed to period war movie parodies. But I certainly agree with critics that Gervais’s performance as a proudly cowardly pigeon was the best thing in the movie.)

Goldman hailed the film’s “incredible cast,” which also includes Claire Danes as the fallen star herself, Peter O’Toole, Rupert Everett, and Sienna Miller. The one lesser-known actor in a major role is Charlie Cox as Tristan. “Lots of actors could do the nerdy side of Tristan,” Gaiman said. “Lots could do the later cool side of Tristan once he grows up. Charlie can do both.”

In the fifth clip Danes and Cox converse as they walk beneath cliffs; unmoved by the remarkable scenery, the audience again responded with only muted applause. (What’s wrong with them?)

Gervais returned in the final two excerpts. In the sixth clip Pfeiffer’s witch puts a spell on Fergy, so he cannot talk; instead all he can do is make strangulated sounds, to nonetheless humorous effect. In the seventh clip the villain Septimus interrogates Ferdy, who cannot answer due to the spell, so Septimus stabs him. I can understand why this received very low applause: no one wants to see a character who makes us laugh get (seemingly) killed.

But then we were shown a montage of excerpts from the film, and finally the audience got it and erupted into big applause.

Charles Vess praised the “beautiful visualization that they had done.” Then an audience member asked, “Neil, is it how you pictured it in your mind?” Gaiman responded, “No, it’s how Matthew and his set designers saw it in their minds.” He said that “The inn the witch magics up in the mountains was just like having walked into the thing that I had imagined,” but that’s an exception. But Gaiman obviously was content to let the filmmakers interpret the material their own way. He said he likes the way the movie looks, and that “It’s cooler” than what he imagined. “It doesn’t look like a fantasy movie. It looks like itself, whatever that means.”

Well, I agree that it doesn’t look like a fantasy movie, although perhaps that’s in part because the CGI are still missing. I think its visual charm, from what I saw, comes from looking like an enchantingly well-designed period piece. Goldman said it was set in Victorian England, and the clips convey a handsome, persuasive reality in which the fantasy elements are grounded.

Next Gaiman was asked about The Eternals series he is currently writing for Marvel, based on Jack Kirby’s 1970s creations. Gaiman said he was “currently writing issue 4,” but that he had “more plot and things I have in my head than I can fit in by the last page of issue 6,” when this miniseries is scheduled to end. Gaiman reported that artist John Romita, Jr. says he’s willing to keep going after issue 6, so “It’s going to be a matter of finding time” amidst Gaiman’s packed work schedule. (In case you’re wondering, yes, indeed, I have been reading Gaiman’s Eternals–and rereading Kirby’s Eternals–with interest, and I will have much to say about them in this column later this year.)

Gaiman then returned to the story of how Matthew Vaughn got to do Stardust. He said he first met Vaughn when Vaughn sought the film rights to Gaiman’s short story “Snow Glass Apples.” Later Vaughn produced the first film that Gaiman has directed, A Short Film about John Bolton. (That’s the artist, not the U. S. Ambassador to the United Nations, who is even scarier. See “Comics in Context” #5.)

Vaughn and Gaiman had lunch with Terry Gilliam to try to convince him to direct a movie of Stardust. But, Gaiman recounted, this was right after Gilliam had directed The Brothers Grimm (2005), and he didn’t want to do another fantasy film right away. Here Gaiman noted, “As I’m sure everyone here knows, Terry Gilliam is back on Good Omens,” the projected film version of Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s comedy fantasy novel. Well, I didn’t know that, but I was glad to hear it. Gaiman added that Gilliam had not yet paid him or Pratchett the “option fee, which is one groat each, or about five pence.” The cheapskate!

After directing Layer Cake, Gaiman continued, Vaughn wanted to direct Stardust, and Gaiman put him in touch with Goldman, whom Gaiman had known for a long time.

As for other film projects based on his work, Gaiman first mentioned Coraline (see “Comics in Context” #67), which Henry Selick (The Nightmare before Christmas) is making as a stop-motion animated film, with Dakota Fanning as the voice of the title character, and the British comedy duo of Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders voicing the two old ladies. This, Gaiman said, will probably come out in 2008.

As for a movie of his novel American Gods, Gaiman said that “lots of producers and directors have approached me, and I tend to say, “˜Sure, sounds good,’ and then they look at me and say, “˜How would you make that into a movie?’ And I say, “˜I have no idea,’ and that’s usually how it ends.”

So what about a Sandman movie? Keep in mind that Sandman is a property owned by DC, that Gaiman doesn’t control. “Sandman is just floating in a void,” Gaiman said, asserting that “I’d rather no Sandman movie got made than a bad Sandman movie got made.” Gaiman voiced the hope that “sometime during our lifetimes” a director will come along who loves Sandman the way that Sam Raimi loves Spider-Man and Peter Jackson loves The Lord of the Rings, and who will make the Sandman movie.

On the other hand Gaiman himself has long been committed to writing and directing a film adaptation of his own Vertigo miniseries Death: The High Cost of Living. Gaiman told us there is a “script everyone likes” and “people would like to be in it” and that the project was “slowly moving through the system.” He summed up, “It doesn’t seem to be dead yet, which is the best thing you can say about Death, I suppose.”

Then there is the Beowulf movie that Gaiman and Roger Avary co-wrote for director Robert Zemeckis, which will be released on November 22, 2007. Gaiman announced that “Next year I will probably be a guest of Comic-Con for the whole four days” and will do a Beowulf panel with Roger Avary, actors Angelina Jolie, Crispin Glover, “maybe Anthony Hopkins,” but probably not Zemeckis, who “hates” doing panels. Zemeckis is doing the film using an advanced version of the techniques he employed for The Polar Express (see “Comics in Context” #66). Gaiman characterized the forthcoming movie as “a cheerfully violent, very, very strange take on the Beowulf legend which manages to be remarkably faithful while being deeply weird.”

Then, before the panel ended, Lorenzo di Bonaventura brought up another future film on which he is a producer: the Transformers movie. At the very mention of its name the audience broke into loud applause. We were informed that a new addition to the cast would speak to us via cellphone (the second guest I heard do this so far at this Comic-Con). Then the voice of actor Peter Cullen addressed the audience in his role as Optimus Prime, which he had played on the Transformers animated TV show, and Hall H resounded to the loudest, biggest applause I’d heard during the entire panel. I was puzzled: do Gaiman readers really get even more excited over the Transformers?

Not until I started writing these reports on the 2006 Comic-Con did I realize the answer. These Transformers fans were the “campers,” the people who sit in Hall H all day to watch all the panels about action-adventure movies. This wasn’t your typical Gaimancentric audience at all. Well, I hope the Stardust preview inspired some of them to try a movie that’s robot-free.

FRIDAY 3:30 PM
I decided to get over to Room 20 early for its 4 PM panel, arriving while the panel about the Fox television series Bones was still going on. Onstage was one of its stars, David Boreanaz, who previously played the heroic vampire Angel on Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Angel TV series. (And hey, this was the first Comic-Con I’d attended in years in which Whedon didn’t appear!)

The conventional wisdom is that Comic-Con and similar events are attended almost entirely by men. I offer the Bones panel as proof that this is not true; there was a large, vocal contingent of Boreanaz’s female fans there. One woman from the audience began her question to Boreanaz thus: “I admire your body of work.” She clearly intended the double entendre, and everyone, including Boreanaz, reacted to it.

Boreanaz chuckled appreciatively at that remark, but another fan presented him with a conundrum, asking him who he had “better chemistry” with: his Buffy co-star Sarah Michelle Gellar or his Bones co-star Emily Deschanel. Diplomatically, he said he couldn’t answer.

When Boreanaz’s panel ended, the audience was cautioned, “Do not rush the stage.” As much of the audience filed out, I noticed that among them was a young woman in that Princess Leia slave girl costume. No one seemed to pay attention. At Comic-Con one gets accustomed to such things.

FRIDAY 4:15 PM
Finally, starting fifteen minutes late in Room 20, was the next panel: Warner Brothers Animation’s presentation “Bruce Timm Retrospective/Legion of Super-Heroes.” It’s the first part that interested me: a salute to the man who did the principal character designs and was one of the producers for Warners Animation’s 1990s Batman, Superman, Batman Beyond and recent Justice League Unlimited series.

First Sander Schwartz, the president of Warner Brothers Animation, came onstage to introduce “This very special presentation we have for you.”

One guy in the audience shouted, “Cancel The Batman!” That, of course, is the current subpar successor to Timm’s great 1990s animated Batman. But I doubt that anyone onstage could have heard him.

Schwartz stated that Timm had been working at Warner Brothers Animation since 1979 with Tiny Toon Adventures. “He’s just a great soft-spoken, talented guy who is just as nice as he is talented.” Schwartz pronounced Timm “a great producer, a great filmmaker, and a great human being.”

Then Timm himself appeared, looking very much like the toy collector he voiced in the Batman episode “Beware the Grey Ghost.” Some members of the audience gave him a standing ovation.

Timm said, “This is really kind of weirding me out a bit because normally career retrospectives come at the end of a career. I still have twenty years to go on my mortgage.”

Timm said “I have to share credit” with Alan Burnett, Eric Radomski, Paul Dini, Dwayne McDuffie and others with whom he collaborated on these series. Then he concluded, “We’re talking about the end of my career today.”

Is it? Not really, although so far it did seem as if Timm was present to hear his own eulogy. I should observe that Justice League Unlimited concluded its final season earlier this year whereupon Cartoon Network dropped it without rerunning the new episodes. Moreover, Warners’ forthcoming Legion show, like Teen Titans, is done in an anime-influenced style (not to my taste), and Timm isn’t working on any new television series. I know that all good things must come to an end, but I don’t have to like it.

Timm introduced his friend Jason Hillhouse, who served as interviewer, and they started by discussing how Timm’s career with superheroes began. Tim Burton’s Batman movie came out in 1989. “My boss at the time, Jean MacCurdy, took a huge gamble,” Timm said. She chose him and Eric Radomski to produce a new Batman animated series. “Eric Radomski and I had never produced a show,” Timm said, although they both “had long animation careers.” “I don’t know if she was brave or under medication or something.”

“I’m a born and bred comic book geek,” Timm confessed, whereas Radomski “came from a non-geek background.” (I hate this sort of self-deprecation; when will comics aficionados unhesitatingly admit to taking pride in this artform?) However, Radomski “loved Batman” as a result of Burton’s movie, and wanted to recapture its “mood.”

“There are any number of ways the Batman show could’ve been really bad,” Timm asserted. Nevertheless, he continued, “Batman’s got all this great stuff. He’s got the best costume, the best rogues gallery, the best setting. You’d have to really try hard to mess that show up.” Timm recalled that MacCurdy instructed him and Radomski, “I’ll just tell you one thing: don’t screw it up.”

Casting Kevin Conroy as the voice of Batman “right out of the gate,” Timm asserted, set the mold for “how many amazing people we’ve had on all the different shows” over “fifteen years.” Timm told us, “We can’t watch TV for more than an hour without someone I’ve worked with” turning up onscreen. (What about on CNN? Oh, never mind.)

After production on this first run of Batman: The Animated Series ended, “we got off on a tangent with Freakazoid,” an animated superhero comedy show. Then, “years before Superman Returns,” there was talk at Warners about doing a new Superman movie, and MacCurdy asked Timm if he wanted to do a Superman animated series.

Whereas Timm described his Batman series as “grounded in a kind of reality,” he said that “Superman opened the floodgates to a more science-fictiony environment.” Timm stated that they “hadn’t thought of creating a universe” when they were doing Batman, but using the Flash and Green Lantern as guest stars on Superman “ultimately paved the way for Justice League.”

Timm admitted that he did not have “as clear a vision on how to handle Superman” as he had with Batman. The “tricky thing about Superman,” Timm explained, is “like Miss Teschmacher says [in Richard Donner’s Superman movie]: he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke, he’s too good to be true.” Timm continued, “Batman’s conflicted, broody,” whereas “Superman’s a good guy. How do you make that dramatically compelling? You want to keep him pure, keep him the Boy Scout.”

Superman had “more action-adventure fantasy than Batman,” and Timm declared that “It was a fun show to do.”

But then when “finally we felt we had a handle on Superman,” then Warners “said let’s do some more Batman.” Timm didn’t want to return to Batman at first, but then he devised new “graphic designs” for the characters. As a result, he declared, “I like that show [the new Batman episodes] visually more than Batman: The Animated Series,” quickly adding, “but I liked that, too.”

At this point we were shown a clip reel from Batman, Superman, Batman Beyond, and Justice League Unlimited. I was surprised by the tremendous response from the audience to the Batman Beyond clips, and Timm said he found that reaction “interesting” as well.

Timm revealed that when Jamie Kellner, the head of the WB Network, proposed doing a series about a teenage Batman for the “6-to-11 year old” demographic, “we hated the idea, too!” (It does seem like a stereotypical wrongheaded corporate idea. I suppose we should be grateful he didn’t suggest Batman Babies.) But Timm said he and his collaborators found ways “to make it fun.”

“There were aspects of the show that were obvious demographic bait,” Timm conceded, “especially in the second season,” pointing to the “high school” and “sidekick.” But Timm said “That’s okay” because their goal was to “find ways” they would like “of doing what the network wanted to do.”

Timm pointed out that although the network intended Batman Beyond to be “a kid-oriented show,” “it’s the edgiest, nastiest show we did.” (Later during the panel Timm mentioned that Justice League Unlimited was “supposed to be a 6-to-11 year olds’ show, but everyone knows it’s a PG show.”)

Timm regards the direct-to-video feature Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker (2000) as “one of the highlights” of his career. “Lots say Mask of the Phantasm [1993] is the best Batman movie ever made,” he observed. “I like it, but I like Return of the Joker better.” Timm believes they “tried to hard to make Phantasm adult” and “it’s a downer,” whereas “Return of the Joker is effortlessly adult.”

Timm said he originally didn’t want to do the Justice League series, either, but “I was out of a job.” (Should Timm ever be out of work?) Timm recalled that Warners executive “Linda Steiner came to me and said we’re thinking of doing Justice League now” and he “bowed to the inevitable.”

Timm admitted “It took a while for it to get good” and claimed “It’s a tough concept to work with.” He said he was “reading Silver Age comics for inspiration” and stated they had “a lot of charm” but complained that “all the characters have the same voice, the same personality.”

Moreover, Timm maintained that “when we did Batman through Batman Beyond, we were used to being the class act in superhero TV.” But then, Timm noted, X-Men: Evolution came along, “and Samurai Jack kicked ass in art direction. So we realized the bar has been raised.”

After two seasons of featuring a team of seven members, Justice League morphed into Justice League Unlimited, and “now we give you fifty more characters.” Timm asserted that “Justice League Unlimited right now is ny favorite show of all I’ve worked on. . .probably because it’s more recent.” He described it as “almost an anthology show” which could move back and forth between “small stories” with “just a few characters” and “big stories.”

The first questioner from the audience asked if Timm, Dini and their other collaborators would ever do another animated series with DC Comics characters. Choosing his words carefully, Timm responded, “Never say never. I don’t really anticipate going back to that established version of the DC Universe” seen in his previous animated series. (And that, I realized, meant that he wasn’t ruling out working on some other version of the DC universe.)

Timm then said, “Nobody wants a repeat of the Brainiac Attacks experience,” referring to the recent direct-to-video Superman animated feature (see “Comics in Context” #139). Then he added, “I kid,” adding further, “Kind of.” Cautiously he told us, “There’s something I’m not allowed to talk about.” Finally, he said, “I tease [the guys] who did Brainiac Attacks a lot. They did the best they could.” There’s a mystery here, but I can’t figure it out.

Asked about influences on his art, Timm revealed he was a fan of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959), which he said “has the most spectacular art direction of any Disney movie.” He said he “picked up things from Alex Toth.” (Here there was only a smattering of applause, suggesting that most of the audience didn’t know the work of this great comics artist, who died earlier this year.) Oddly, Timm said that he was influenced “after the fact” by the late Archie artist Dan De Carlo: he explained that he was “influenced by artists who were inspired by him,” specifically in “drawing cute, pretty girls,” before he discovered De Carlo’s own work.

Were there characters that he wanted to use on Justice League Unlimited but didn’t? Timm named the Blue Beetle and the Spectre, said he couldn’t use the Phantom Stranger, and said they had the rights to use Plastic Man (only once), Firestorm and Adam Strange, but never got around to them.

Timm mentioned the “rumor” that Warners is doing an animated adaptation of Darwyn Cooke’s comics series The New Frontier. “That’s miscommunication,” Timm insisted, and he claimed that they were actually doing a show called The New Fondue for the Food Channel. “It’s cheesy!” he said. No laughter ensued, and Timm buried his head in his hands.

So what is Timm really going to do next? “I am still at Warner Brothers,” he informed us, and “still working with DC characters.” He stated that there “should be an official announcement tomorrow at the DC panel.”

Just then a Superman insignia, dripping blood, appeared on the Room 20 video screen. It was an obvious reference to the 1990s “Death of Superman” story arc in the comics. Seemingly taken aback by this, Timm asked the audience if they had signed “confidentiality agreements.”

I did not attend the aforementioned DC panel, but later learned that during that presentation Paul Levitz announced a new series of direct-to-video animated films that would adapt stories from the comics. The first film will indeed be The New Frontier, with a story written by Cooke. Timm will direct Superman/Doomsday, an adaptation of the “Death of Superman” arc, and Marv Wolfman will co-write the film version of his The New Teen Titans: The Judas Contract. It was declared that the art style of the films will resemble the comics, rather than being in the style of the Timm animated series or the anime-like Titans and Legion shows.

I find myself in two minds about this. It seems like a dream come true for comics enthusiasts. Have you seen the Dark Knight Returns excerpt, executed in Frank Miller’s art style, in the animated Batman episode “Legends of the Dark Knight”? What if DC and Warners did an animated adaptation of the entire Dark Knight Returns in Miller’s style? Wouldn’t animation be the proper medium for adapting Watchmen?

On the other hand, doesn’t much of the appeal of the Timm animated series lie in the handsomeness of Timm’s character designs? And it seems that even when he directs one of these new films, he’ll be using character designs from the comics instead?

More importantly, doesn’t much of the rest of the appeal of the shows that Timm and his collaborators did lie in providing a positive alternative to the Grim and Gritty, Dark, Dismal and Depressing superhero comics of the 1990s and early 2000s? I always believed that the 1990s Batman and Superman animated series captured the spirit of the superhero genre better than the Batman and Superman comics of that time. At least The New Frontier is a leading entry in the Neo-Silver movement of restoring a positive outlook to the genre. I expect the film version won’t be cheesy at all.

Bruce Timm left the stage, and the other half of the presentation, previewing the new Legion of Super-Heroes animated series, commenced. But I took off for one of the most underattended panels at this year’s Comic-Con, but one which may prove to be the most historically significant, as you shall learn next week.

–Copyright 2006 Peter Sanderson