Saluting the Very Super Stan Lee

It’s a sad day in the Marvel Universe. Spiderman is sobbing and the Hulk has tears running down his bright-green cheeks. Almost exactly nine months after the triumphant screen debut of his Black Panther character as a leading man, the great Stan Lee is no more. He passed away on November 12 at the ripe old age of 95.  I met Lee briefly while working on the infamous 1994 Roger Corman version of Fantastic Four. I can’t remember much except for Lee’s insistence that we remain faithful to his characters in every detail. (He seemed less concerned about the fact that, on Corman’s typically tight-fisted budgets, we couldn’t possibly come up with special effects to do justice to his characters’ complex superpowers.)

Though I never really knew Stan Lee, my former colleague Craig Nevius had the pleasure of considering him a mentor and a friend. Craig was one of the many eager young writers in the Corman stable. He wrote quickly and imaginatively, and had a special talent for wide-eyed phantasmagoria. (I well remember how he brought life to a script called Stepmonster, in which a nice young kid concludes that his dad’s new wife is a dangerous Tropopkin.) Fittingly, Craig—a longtime lover of superheroes—was assigned to turn the Fantastic Four comic books into a viable screenplay that could be shot fast and cheap.

Marvel fans know what happened next. Cast and crew turned the Corman Fantastic Four into a labor of love, only to be stymied when—just before the scheduled charity premiere—the film was sold and shelved, to make way for Fox Studios’ big-budget version released over a decade later. Craig Nevius, like everyone connected with the Corman film, was bitterly disappointed, but he managed to salvage a warm relationship with Lee. In 2001, years after the Fantastic Four debacle, the two met for lunch to discuss Craig’s idea for a cinematic version of Lee’s own life. Here’s how Craig has described the project: “A shy Jewish boy from NYC who didn't see the world as it was but rather saw it as it SHOULD be, with bright colors and heroes. Of course the story ultimately would become his creation of Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Iron Man and Marvel Comics. And his fight against censorship when comics were considered by certain advocacy groups to be ‘corrupting.’” Craig planned to call it SECRET IDENTITY: THE REAL AND NOT-SO-REAL LIVES OF STAN LEE.

When Craig finished spelling out his concept, Lee exclaimed, “Wow! I'm impressed! With me! I didn't know my life was so interesting!” But then, totally deadpan, “I want to make sure that we're on the same page in terms of casting. Obviously, Brad Pitt should play me." Craig responded in kind: “Stan, I'm sorry but I disagree. Brad Pitt is nowhere near good looking enough to play you!" They parted on friendly terms; the project was sold, but (like so much in Hollywood) was never made.

The later years of Stan Lee’s life weren’t pretty. Especially after the death of his wife of sixty-nine years in 2017, there were power struggles around him, as well as accusations of elder abuse. It’s pitiful to think of this ebullient man, the hit of so many comic book conventions, being isolated from fans and friends: Craig Nevius lost touch with him when an email bounced back, amid rumors that someone else was now controlling his social media accounts. Sad to say, even superheroes lose their powers over time.

But let’s remember all he accomplished. As Stan Lee would say, Excelsior

Doomed: Teasing Out the Story Behind Roger Corman’s Fantastic Four

 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.