Well, it’s time to start working on your
superhero costume for the San Diego Comic-Con. And it’s time to support a
super-project that’s just been launched by my buddy, Mark Sikes, along with
filmmaker Marty Langford. Back when I was Roger Corman’s story editor at
Concorde-New Horizons, Mark served as Roger’s casting honcho. One of his most
challenging gigs was finding the cast, on a hurry-up basis, for a little
superhero flick called The Fantastic Four,
based on the Marvel Comics characters, that
was being co-produced on the cheap by Concorde and a German company, Neue
Constantin.
A lot of us know what
happened next. The film was shot, the cast and crew were ecstatic, and a big
publicity push was under way, much of it funded by the actors themselves. Then
came word that Constantin’s Bernd Eichinger had just paid big bucks for Roger’s
share of The Fantastic Four.
Eichinger promptly shelved the finished movie, presumably to make way for a
lavish studio version that finally appeared in 2005. The original prints of the
Concorde quickie were supposedly destroyed, but pirated copies have been
circulating ever since. Now Mark and Marty are out to satisfy our craving to
know exactly what happened. They’re planning a full-length documentary called Doomed! The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s
The Fantastic Four. To finance this
labor of love, they’re calling on the film’s many fans to cough up some dough.
(This crowdfunding idea is really taking off: I’m told that even Roger – who’s
richer than God -- is using it to help pay for a shoestring remake of Munchies. But I digress.)
Here’s
the scoop: Mark and Marty have set up an Indiegogo campaign to raise
the $52,000 they need to make their movie happen. Naturally, donors get some
very cool perks. But the deadline is June 20, so time is flying. (You might
also check out the official Doomed
Facebook site.)
What makes Doomed sound so promising is that most
of the creative forces behind Concorde’s Fantastic
Four are already on board. One of them is Carl Ciarfalio, stuntman
extraordinaire, who impersonates The Thing in the movie. Carl has been part of
some much more elaborate projects, like The
Amazing Spider Man. But he relished the chance to work with director Oley
Sassone and a talented cast, despite the privations everyone faced on set. For
instance, “The suit that they made for me was really spot-on. But they didn’t
have the budget to put a cool suit on underneath it. So I was wearing 15 pounds
of rubber every day,” without a cooling system to provide basic comfort. Ouch!
Nonetheless, Carl sees
the film’s awkward special effects (like Dr. Reed Richards’ impossibly stretchy
limbs) as part of its charm. When watching today’s big-budget superhero movies,
the audience knows it’s “just a bunch of guys on green-screen, with stuff goin’
on behind ‘em.” By contrast, Concorde’s Fantastic Four plays like an homage to
the mid-twentieth-century world of Marvel Comics. Says Carl, “That’s what makes
this film cult-like, because it’s kind of a throwback to the Fifties and
Sixties films that they used to make before special effects were a big
deal.”
Even at the time, Carl
didn’t assume The Fantastic Four would lead him to fame
and fortune. But the movie’s cast thought they were participating in something
special. “And it was. It was something special. I knew out of the gate.” That’s
why it hurts to have been part of a film that will never officially be seen. Doomed
is guaranteed to bring us a lot of great stories about that.
Thanks, Carl, for supplying me with some of
your own snapshots from the Fantastic Four shoot.