Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [170]
The Cookes shot and edited the film over a five-year period, conducting interviews at conventions, where they were guaranteed to find a number of comic book artists gathered in one place at one time. Like others before them, they found Eisner to be a gracious but elusive subject, willing to talk about his work but reluctant to discuss his private life. Early in the project, they decided that the theme of their documentary would be how Eisner had spent his life trying to legitimize comics and how he’d done so by telling personal stories. Eisner, they discovered early in their research, was fully aware of his historical standing in comics, but he somehow managed to keep his modesty and perspective.
“This is an industry of both monstrous low self-esteem and incredible egomania,” Jon Cooke remarked, “but he had his feet planted on the ground. You might not get that from a number of veterans. I was surprised by the amount of professional jealousy that took place. There was enormous jealousy for his success.”
The finished product, Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist was a tightly edited, quickly paced examination of Eisner’s life, covering all the essentials of more than eighty years, complete with footage of Depression-era New York, rare photos of Eisner and his family, clips from Eisner’s own home movies, sound bites from Eisner’s Shop Talk tapes, interviews with the Eisners and numerous industry notables, and lots of art, including paintings from Eisner’s youth.
The film debuted, to enthusiastic response, at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival in New York. Sadly, Eisner, who had passed away two years earlier, wasn’t around to see it.
One day, while researching a potential new project on the Internet, Eisner came across an English translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a work of anti-Semitic propaganda long discredited and proven to be a fraud of hatred and literary thievery. Originally published in Russia as a means of implicating Jews as agitators in times of political turmoil and denying Jews their basic human, social, and political rights, The Protocols was a cooked-up account of a Jewish plot to take over and dominate the world. Eisner had heard of the book but had never read it, and he was under the impression that it had no current global influence. He read the translation, and aside from being angered by what he read, he was shocked to learn that The Protocols was still very much in print all around the world and that it was being used as propaganda in Middle Eastern countries to incite hatred and violence toward the Israelis.
“I was amazed that there were people who still believed The Protocols were real,” he said, “and I was disturbed to learn later that this site was just one of many that promoted these lies in the Muslim world. I decided something had to be done.”
Anger had moved Eisner to action in the past, but after reading The Protocols, he became obsessed with learning everything possible about the book’s origins, its publishing history, the efforts to use it as a tool to promote anti-Semitism, its exposure as a fraud, and where and why it was still in print. Hitler had cited The Protocols in Mein Kampf, making it one of his rallying points against the European Jews, and it had been effective enough to set into motion the fear and hatred that made the Holocaust possible. Three decades before that, in Russia, the document had been influential in launching the pogroms. It was the inaction and misguided beliefs of the masses that made possible such horrific actions against the Jews. Eisner had even seen signs of it at home when he was a boy, dealing with anti-Semitism in the streets and resignation to it at home. “I remember being angry at the shtetl attitude of my parents, who advised that we should be ‘quiet and not offend the goyim,’” he recalled. “To them the Holocaust was another, only much bigger, pogrom.”
Page from The Plot, a nonfiction