I don't often write on the blog, and I generally prefer to keep it to art and possibly just pointing people towards a few choice items, but I have found a topic that I have rather strong views about.
It would seem that in the early nineties the rights to Will Eisner's The Spirit were purchased for the purpose of adapting it to screen. Eisner was promised that the film would not be touched by anyone who "didn't get it". I guess promises only last as long as you're alive.
Although, I guess we can be happy in knowing that the script and direction was left to a writer who hasn't has a great story since around the time I was born. I mean, going from groundbreaking work that is The Dark Knight Returns in the 80's, to Sin City's celebration of mindless violence and sexism in the 90's and then to the gibberish that is DK2 in the 00's- clearly, now that we are nearing the next decade, Miller is ready to take another giant leap in that same direction.
Although, to be fair, as much as I dislike the Sin City comics, the film is one of merely a handful that makes a perfect literature to screen transition. I'm certain that the stylization took forever to figure out and perfect, but that's no reason to use the technique again. George Lucas went in and put an unnecessary polish on his masterpieces and guess what? It was the beginning of the end.
And really, if they didn't want to use a Eisner feel/look (I found out just this year that there are many people who dislike his work because his people are "ugly") what the hell is wrong with taking from the Darwyn Cooke and Jeph Loeb version?
Anyway, Some Notes:
-The Spirit will now be wearing a black suit as opposed to his iconic blue one.
-As those of you who know the comic have probably guessed, Ebony White will not be in the film. Without a doubt it is due to the fact that the look of the character is similar to blackface caricatures and nobody wanted to deal with the controversy. However, while Eisner has received criticism for creating the character, it never came from groups who fought for black rights. In fact several of them commended him for using a black character who is sympathetic and can fend for himself.
-There will be a love triangle between The Spirit, Ellen Dolan and Sand Saref. Fine, whatever, they're obviously changing shit anyway. What's really offensive here is how they chose to depict Sand Saref. She used to be a pretty classy broad- WITH HIPS. I'm going to segue for a bit into another point of contention that Claire and I have bitterly complained about. Period films never contain people who look like they're from that period. They'll go to great lengths to imitate costume and sets, hair and makeup, but the people themselves are CLEARLY from the wrong era. In fact, the only production that I can honestly say feels the part is the television series Jeeves and Wooster. Anyway- going back, she's too Kate Moss, not enough Cyd Charisse (not that any woman can ever hope to be Cyd Charisse).
-The Octopus is VISIBLE.
-Scarlett Johansson is playing Silken Floss. I have no love of her acting or her constant blank, vapid stare.
-They're seriously pushing the whole back from the dead thing a LOT more.
and finally:
THE TRAILER
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20 comments:
It's not too late... we can still kill Frank Miller and destroy the existing footage.
Anyway, everyone I know knew it was going to be an abortion the moment we heard he was directing.
Christ, it's like the studios thought that the reason that Sin City was good was because Robert Rodriguez let Miller have some input. No one should've let the dude ever touch a camera.
Seek out the Sam Jones starred "Spirit" TV movie that was done in the 1990's, then come back to this discussion.
Erica: Now you know why I told Dave Elliott that if we get the Wicca Girl movie project done, we both must be on the script team and have some input for director choice...and have a couple of good entertainment lawyers. Of course if SIN CITY and other crap didn't have a paying audience they might stop making this junk...someone is buying it out there.Scary.
Um, your photo of Sand is of a man from Lost, and I gathered you were speaking about a woman.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm confused.
That being said, I don't even know the comic you're talking about and I think the preview looks stupid. But you're going to end up with every moron who thought Sin City was brilliant come out and root for it anyway.
That's really weird. I tested all of the links before I went to bed. Anyway- it's been fixed,
Oh Christ, that looks terrible.
And I loved The Spirit, too.
It was always very understated. Why did they need to turn it into Sin City Mk II?
I don't think I've ever even heard of The Spirit, so I'll stick to the two things I do know about:
1. The curves. I agree that it's sad that planks are in these days, but there are films out there that do make the effort. Gretchen Mol certainly had womanly curves in The Notorious Bettie Page, but beyond that the only instance I can think of on my DVD shelf is Miss Piggy.
2. The blue suit. Back in the day, the four-color printing process wasn't as clean as it is today, and the art style was looser. Black outfits didn't translate well to the page, and they would use another dark color as shading/highlights, or they'd substitute it entirely. A perfect example of this is Batman. People typically think of his costume as being blue/grey because that's how it originally appeared...except that's not true. In Detective #27, his costume was black/grey with blue shading. The blue didn't take over the black until Detective #35. From then through until Burton's 1989 movie, he pretty much always appeared in a blue/grey outfit, usually with a solid black forehead, but his appearance in the Justice League animated series is probably the closest anyone has come to the original look since 1939.
Well, there's a big difference between shades of grey and flat blue and flat black. There has never been question about the color of The Spirit's suit.
Are you sure? I grew up knowing with absolute certainty that Batman's costume had blue shorts/gloves/boots/cape/cowl, and believed that B:TAS introduced the black-and-grey costume for the first time, only to find out that as far as Bob Kane was concerned, his costume was black-and-grey the entire Golden Age run (not sure what he'd say about the Silver Age version, and by the time the Modern Age started it was clearly blue by concensus). Heck, if you check out the first Joker stories, there's about as much blue in Bruce Wayne's hair as there is green in Joker's. Given the conventions of the early Golden Age artists, I'd believe his suit was never intended to be black if Eisner was quoted to that effect, or if his artwork clearly depicted a difference between The Spirit's suit and anyone wearing what would appear to be black suits.
I'm not saying you're wrong (you know the character better than I do), but from where I stand, with the knowledge I have available, it seems ambiguous.
I got into the Spirit when I bought a comic compilation and in the intro it clearly stated that Denny Colt became the Spirit after waking up in his tomb (having been presumed killed by Doctor Cobra) and then put on a blue suit and mask.
So maybe the choice of making the suit blue was because of printing reasons, but even Will Eisner referred to it as a 'blue' suit from day one.
Johannsen + makeup = better Sand Saref, IMO. But I have this bias towards Scarlett anyway.
About the blue/black thing, I guess you would have to ask the artist? In some manga/anime they would use purple for black because charcoal+black+white highlight doesn't stand out. Purple reflection makes it look better AFAIK.
Also, I suppose, the medium is part of the story no matter what. For instance the lack of inclusion of Tom Bombadill in LOTR was a wise choice due to the movie medium. I know The Spirit but not well enough to make a judgment.
I would however appreciate characters who have the style and atmosphere of the era instead of waifs and johns who have a number of flicks to their name, if you know what I mean.
I think if Eisner wanted a black suit, he would have drawn a black suit. He is, after all, a master of the medium and not at all afraid of playing with bold contrast. Besides, I doubt it would have been a printing issue if he wanted black, it's not like black ink was a rarity at an point.
@ Roland Hulme:
Okay, that sounds like definitive proof to me. Looking at all the promotional stuff that's posted so far, it kinda looks like they intend to do it in Black/White/Red. Not true B&W, but not full color either. I haven't seen Sin City, but that appears to be how that was filmed, as 300 was after that. If that's the case, the suit might still _technically_ be blue, even though we don't get to see it (maybe it would have worked better to let the suit stay blue and do the rest in B&W?).
@River Cocytus:
Can't ask him, as he died in 2005.
And Tom Bombadil was best left out of LotR on the basis that he should never have been included in the book to begin with. He was nothing more than a personal indulgence of Tolkein's, being that the character was created as someone for his kids to enjoy through poetry long before he showed up in LotR.
@Zelik:
It's not that black ink was rare (to the contrary, it was probably cheaper than the other three colors), but that the old printing processes weren't as sharp and clear as modern ones, and using black ink to represent black usually resulted in a complete loss of definition. You'd see stuff like fleshtone created by mixing lots of red dots with a touch of yellow (but still noticably made up of red dots). You'd see all sorts of shades of the six basic rainbow colors. Grey, on the other hand, was uncommonly used. Batman is one of the few instances I can think of where it was used, and even then it was generally restricted to his costume. In the first Batman comic, Gordon's hair was powder blue, and his suit was white with densely-packed black zig-zags. Line art was thicker than it is now, and the colors always filled the space uniformly, where now you'll regular see color-shading that's not bounded by black lines. Any use of black besides lines tended to look like spilled ink, no matter who the artist was. Now, it sounds like Eisner stated the color of the suit in the first issue, but that doesn't mean he didn't pick it based on the limitations of the 4-color printing process of the time.
As for Miller's selection as director, I imagine it has something to do with the fact that they were close friends for about half Miller's life. I'd say he probably has deep respect for his colleague's work, though that doesn't necessarily mean he'd be the right person for the job. Tolkien, after all, picked Christopher Lee to play Gandalf if a live-action version of LotR ever got produced (in part because of their long friendship), but clearly he was more appropriate for a different role.
anonymous: Here is an Eisner Spirit pages. This is a very clear, clean, well defined black. I know that grey and other colors were harder to do, but we're talking straight-up black and white comics. Hell, if Winsor McCay's comics could be printed in beautiful color in newspapers, there's nothing saying that the process was too shabby for when Eisner rolled around. Eisner wasn't even born until 3 years after Little Nemo was done with it's run and it was one of the most beautiful comics ever made.
http://www.comixconnection.com/uploaded_images/eisner002spirit.gif
An
The problem with the old 4-color comics and the reason B&W is still a popular budget format was that getting the four color plates to line up neatly was improbable at best. Looking at that image, I can see that he kept the suit white, which is more believable for a blue suit than a black one, and a black suit would have been tough to draw in old-style B&W, and I'd guess even moreso for his ghost-artists. A modern comic book artist would be able to do it on computer, so leaving precise white lines in a field of black is less of a challenge, but not in those days. And a modern reprint would be able to benefit from the many advancements that have been made in color printing over the last few decades. Heck, simply not putting it on coarse newsprint should help quite a bit as it'll reduce how much the ink bleeds into the page.
But getting back to the point, Roland says it was identified in text format as a blue suit from the first story, but that doesn't mean the choice in suit color wasn't affected by the limits of the 4-color printing process of that day and age. And it doesn't mean that it isn't still a blue suit under Miller's distinctive 2-color imagery. The only things I saw that weren't stark B&W in that preview were the red tie and the pinkish skin. I saw no blues, greens, or any other color outside of a strict red spectrum.
The newsprint paper had nothing to do with color, because the comic itself was never in color. It was only after the stories were later compiled into comic book form that the covers to them were colored.
It would seem, from these covers, that they had a wide variety of colors to work with.
http://www.coverbrowser.com/covers/spirit
Newsprint and the printing process itself did have something to do with the choice to not use color, or it wouldn't have taken so long to embrace the use of color. Eisner and others were brought in to help newspapers compete with comic books at the newsstands, yet they stuck to B&W printing instead of competing on equal footing with the vibrant colors of comic books.
As for the color of the suit, drawing white clothing shows detail better than black, but you can't very well put him in a white suit and say it's black. He could have used grey, except that would have taken much longer to ink.
Anyways, those covers are from 1980's reprints, so I'm not sure what the wide variety of colors (or the fact that they use color-shading) have to do with the nature of the original artwork. These were from a point when they were on the verge of expanding the 4-color printing process to include metallic silver, and when colors could be added digitally instead of by notation.
I know next to nothing about The Spirit, but I have to comment... Eva Mendes doesn't have hips? Wha? The woman has awesome hips.
http://www.evamendes.com/images/movies/f2f/eva_mendes_com41.jpg
Please forgive me if I'm misunderstanding you, but are you under the impression that The Spirit comics were printed in black & white? Because they definitely were not. The later Kitchen Sink reprints were in black & white, but the original comics were definitely color (as are the current DC reprints).
(Sorry for the late post. Couldn't help myself.)
Michael: What constitutes "awesome" is a matter of taste, and I agree she is an attractive woman, but she has skinny hips. You want to see hips? Try this (NSFW) or this (even more NSFW). Or Google for images of Rachel Welsh, Sophia Loren, Bettie Page.
One of my biggest disappointments about the Scooby Do movie was the actress they used for Thelma. You don't get Thelma by putting a skinny girl with breasts into a pleated skirt and fuzzy sweater. Thelma had some meat on her, and she was smart. Now THAT is a sexy woman in my book.
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