3:55 - Kicking the fans while they’re down:
Well, that’s all the time they have.
The poor folks who waited in line to ask questions got nada.
The end.
3:54 - The Spirit clip #3:
They’re introducing yet another clip. Wow, I feel like we’ll get to see the whole movie in bits and pieces.
Still talking… please just roll ‘em.
Miller: “Folks, here you go. When Titans clash.”
The Octopus and The Spirit duking it out in an extremely muddy and watery set. The Spirit gets clocked in the head with a cinder block and quips “You’re giving me a headache, Octopus.”
Jackson then gives The Spirit a crotchshot with a massive steel wrench.
The Spirit then pounds The Octopus deep into the mud with punch after punch after punch. Literally, like 20 punches.
Then The Octopus appears behind The Spirit and crashes a toilet down on The Spirit’s head, pinning his arms in place with the toilet seat. He laughs his ass off (whoops, bad pun) and yells “Come on! Toilets are always funny!”
I think that clip just provided all the shark jumping I needed. My hopes for this movie just got drowned in mud and toilet humor.
3:49 - The Spirit setting: a “nevertime” filled with Jews:
Del Prete: “This movie is set in a time we call ‘nevertime’. There are things from the 40s in the there, the 50s, but there are also cell phones.”
Miller says “I’ve gotta say there are more Jewish characters in two hours of The Spirit movie than there are in one year of The Spirit comic book.”
3:48 - The Spirit clip #2:
Another clip is rolling, The Spirit with the love of his life.
I just noticed that his mask is painted on.
The Spirit and his lady love are making out somwhere in the police station.
Wait, I take that back, it looks like his mask is real, and painted on.
They make out, and she tells him that he falls in love with everyone he meets.
Sure enough, a gruff detective comes in and introduces The Spirit to a rookie cop he’ll be working with, who also happens to be hot. They leave the room, and Girl #1 hurls a scalpel at the closed door and calls him a bastard.
Girl #1 was Sarah Paulson as Ellen Dolan, the police commissioner’s daughter.
Del Prete says “There’s nothing campy about the movie. You’ll notice that when you see it. It’s just an organic kind of humor.”
When asked what Will Eisner would have thought about the scene, Miller said “Well, he probably would have said ‘It was good, but Ellen probably wouldn’t have thrown the scalpel, because it would bend the end of it and she’d have to use it later in surgery.’ He was a picky man.”
3:43 - The Spirit arrives:
Here comes Gabriel Macht, The Spirit, from… The Spirit.
Jeff “What’s your take on the Spirit? Is he funny? Is he a tough guy?”
Gabriel “I think he has a lot of different colors. He can laugh at himself, he can be tough while he’s beating the snot out of Sam Jackson, he loves women… every one woman he meets he just falls in love with.”
He’s recapping the origin of The Spirit. For those of you who don’t know, Denny Colt was a young detective who got shot, and later awoke from a sort of “suspended animation” in the graveyard. He contacted his friend, police commisioner Dolan, and became a secret masked vigilante. The “eyes and ears” of the City.
3:39 - The Spirit clip #1:
Finally, here we go.
Okay, I’m hoping this footage will get out onto the web, because it looks terrible.
I mean, really, really, really bad.
Remember that James Bond movie where they filmed the underwater scenes dry, and just using a blow dryer to move hair around? Well, this footage makes that amazing.
It doesn’t look like they’re underwater at all, and Eva just squints while her hair whips around.
They’re about to introduce a new panel member, but I’m still reeling from how bad that footage was.
Ouch.
Miller is talking about the challenge of finding a “real man” in Hollywood.
3:36 - Introducing The Spirit clip:
They’re going to show us a bit more from the movie, and Frank actually wants to introduce this clip.
“Sans Saref is a lover of jewelry, and she has a lead on the most unspeakable fantastic treasure of all time. In order to get this, she has to do a lot of swimming, and she’s played by the very gorgeous Eva Mendes. And she’s wearing a very tight swimsuit.”
Miller: “We have a technical term for filming underwater, and we call it “A fucking nightmare.”
They’ve filmed all of this dry, with Eva in a very tight wetsuit, using a camera that “films slower than death,” according to Miller.
They’re speaking a lot about how technically cool this footage will be. So let’s see it already.
In fact, they’re still talking about it.
Sam Jackson: “By now you know there’s actually no clip, right?”
3:33 - The ladies of The Spirit:
Now they’re talking about the women in the trailer, who all look hot in that noirish sort of way.
Del Prete “So while Frank was wiring guns together, I was picking out jewelry for all the ladies.”
Now they’ve brought out Jamie King onstage, and she plays Lorelei, who Frank Miller told her is like “The Spirit of Death”
She goes from extreme love to extreme rage and anger in regards to The Spirit.
Miller “One of the ways you realize The Spirit is a noble hero, just take a look at what he’s willing to give up.”
3:28 - Samuel L. Jackson on The Octopus:
Jackson talks about the evolution of The Octopus, and how in his mind he’s a man who’s been experimenting with drugs and different concoctions and has lost his mind.
Jackson: “I’d come in and show Miller some ideas and I’d be like… okay, here’s The Octopus as a black Nazi, and Miller would go ‘Okay, cool.’ So I’m like, wow, I’m a Nazi!”
Miller “Ain’t it a great country?”
3:25 - So many Samuel L. Jackson action figures:
Jeff is asking Sam Jackson “what’s the favorite action figure of you?”
Jackson: “I think probably Mace Windu, because I have so many different versions of him. There’s small, big, medium, and one that walks across my desk. But, I also have some cool Afro Samurai figures coming out. I remember the first action figure I should have had was Jurassic Park. Everyone except Wayne Knight and me had action figures.”
“Now I have action figures everywhere, all over my office. Every now and then I catch The Shaft glaring and Mace Windu, I got Frozone sledding through, laughing at everyone…”
Someone yells out “What about Nick Fury?”
“Well, you know when I was a kid… Nick Fury was a white dude.” *laughter* “Now I’m glad that he’s evolved into something I can understand! See? You too can grow up to be a black man.”
3:20 - Samuel L. Jackson as The Octopus:
Frank Miller wanted the villain to be someone that “Wasn’t very scary… like Herbie.” Does he mean The Love Bug?
“So… who’d I pick? Mr. Sam Jackson.”
Sam bounds up on the stage, wearing his official costume of glasses and a Kangol hat turned backwards. And he’s wearing a “Badmofokos” t-shirt.
Sam is talking about the challenging of auditioning to play The Octopus, since he was only a pair of white gloves in the comic book.
They had to try and find a huge gun for The Octopus to handle, and Jackson says “We started with the Desert Eagle, and then we went to these .40 caliber pistols that were just huge. Then we started wiring guns together…”
Miller: “Remember that scene in 2001 with the monkeys and bone? At one point I started stacking one gun on top of another, on top of another, on top of another, and I finally just told the props department to wire them together like that. And when Sam wields them, he looks like a Transformer.”
Jackson: “Yeah, so I had to work out just to hold these things. Then we had to have wires holding the guns up because they were so heavy. I think I lost some weight that day.:”
Jackson: “Miller is totally open and without ego, which is a lot different than most directors.”
3:15 -The Spirit trailer:
Jeff asks Frank Miller to introduce the trailer, and Miller retorts “Well the whole purpose of a trailer is not to have an introduction…”
It’s rolling.
“From writer director Frank Miller, creator of 300 and Sin City.”
Okay. I am officially freaked out.
This trailer is extremely strange.
A tiny man sliding out of a woman’s mouth.
A collection of female heads, lined up as if they were on a shelf…
It’s mostly all about the femme fatales.
Sam Jackson appears on screen and says “What is it with you and women?”
It looks very comic booky and over the top, but there are guns galore all over the place.
This isn’t your father’s The Spirit, and definitely isn’t the campy fun comic book that Will Eisner used to write and draw.
3:11 - More on getting the movie made:
Deborah Del Prete said she’s “been waiting her entire life” to make this make, which makes me think about a two year old toddler, poring over script notes. She says she’s a major comic book fan, and she speaks a million miles an hour. She’s very excited for this movie.
Frank and Deborah have both “tried to make this film the way Will would have wanted it made.”
Deborah: “We got Eisner, and we got Miller. Those are the only two people I wanted working on this movie.”
Now we’re about to get a trailer for the movie, which I hope is better than the lackluster “My city screams” version that ran recently.
3:05 - Frank Miller meets Will Eisner:
Frank Miller tells us how he was introduced to The Spirit, and how he finally got to meet Will Eisner at a party thrown by Neal Adams.
“Neal Adams used to keep a lot of us comic book artists alive by getting us commercial work while the comic book studios paid us slave wages.”
Frank Miller is doing an impersonation of Will Eisner, and I can’t quite tell if it’s touching, or vaguely insulting.
Frank said “He was my mentor, and my friend.” So, okay. Let’s go with touching.
Frank literally “dropped everything else” to get to work on bringing The Spirit to the screen.
3:02 - The panel begins:
I’ve got two names for you…
Will Eisner and Frank Miller.
There’s no way you can tell the history of graphic novels without those two names.
This Christmas, they’ll have an important milestone in that history, on Christmas Day: The Spirit.
This is Jeff Boucher from the LA Times, “Sorry, I forgot to introduce myself.”
He’s moderating the panel.
Frank Miller and producer Deborah Del Prete come out.
Originally posted on:
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