Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [145]
Signing his art in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1987. (Courtesy of Denis Kitchen)
Some of those interested in The Spirit were worthy of consideration.
In the early sixties, Anthony Perkins, still flush from his breakthrough role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, contacted Eisner with the hope of optioning The Spirit for the movies. There was a fair amount of money involved, but after talking to Perkins, Eisner had to decline.
“I asked him what his idea was for a movie,” Eisner recalled, “and he said, ‘Well, I see the Spirit as a sort of a mystic, as a magician of some kind.’ That’s clearly not what I had in mind. The deal never went anywhere, of course, because I wasn’t interested in a Spirit movie where he was a supernatural figure, even if it would be a successful movie. It’s not that I dislike making money, but I am very loyal to the ideas I hold about my characters.”
William Friedkin, director of The French Connection and The Exorcist, succeeded in optioning the motion picture rights to The Spirit, but bringing the character to the big screen proved to be elusive. Harlan Ellison, the award-winning writer and screenwriter whose work touched upon every type of fiction imaginable, worked on a screenplay, as did Jules Feiffer, who had successfully adapted Popeye for Robert Altman’s film. Even Eisner gave it a shot. None of the scripts met Friedkin’s approval, and the project died in development.
There had also been an attempt to launch an animated version of The Spirit in the early 1980s, and when Eisner agreed to option the film rights to the character, he was confident that he had a good team working on the feature. Gary Kurtz, producer of American Graffiti, Star Wars, and The Dark Crystal, was on board in a similar capacity, while relative newcomers Jerry Rees and Brad Bird were hired to write the screenplay. Bird, who would eventually make his name as director of such films as The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille, had created a rough pencil trailer of a possible Spirit project with Rees and several Cal Arts students, and Eisner was impressed when he was shown the work.
“I will be interested to see it,” Eisner told an assembly of reporters covering the Tenth Annual International Salon of Comic Books in Angoulême, France, where he was the 1984 convention’s guest of honor. Although he’d tried to distance himself from comparisons of comics and the movies after he began producing graphic novels, Eisner still saw a connection between the two media. “In the beginning were the comics, then the movies,” he stated. “Cinema came from comics; I regard film as an extension of comics.”
Unfortunately for Eisner and the others, the timing for finding backing for such a project was bad, and Eisner’s original hopes of aiming the Spirit newspaper feature at adults worked against him in the movie project. These were times before animated films were geared for adults, and Walt Disney Studios, the standard-bearer for movies marketed to children, was financially troubled and in a state of flux. Development on the movie was shelved, and the option eventually expired.
When a made-for-television movie was finally produced in 1986 and broadcast a year later, it was an unqualified disaster, not for a lack of effort on the part of those making the film, but for reasons no one could have predicted when the project was in the planning stages. The deal with ABC and Warner Brothers Television called for a ninety-minute movie, which would be used as a pilot for a television series—which, in theory, sounded like a good idea. After the Spirit and his origins were introduced to television viewers in the pilot, the ensuing programs could follow Eisner’s old episodic structure. Rather than try to set the movie in the past, which the budget wouldn’t permit, or update