For every movie that makes it to the screen, there are a thousand projects that fall to the wayside. Later this month, "The Spirit," finally, hits theaters after plenty of failed attempts. Steven Paul Leiva was a key figure in one of those failed attempts and in this guest essay for Hero Complex he talks about the film that could have been. This photo below shows Leiva, Brad Bird and the late Will Eisner at the comics icon's White Plains, N.Y., home in 1981.
Frank Miller’s film version of Will Eisner’s innovative 1940s comic book, “The Spirit” opens on Christmas Day. It will be stylistic and hyper-visual, a hoped-for perfect melding of film and “sequential art,” a term coined by Eisner. What it will not be, however, is revolutionary. Comic book movies are now the meat and potatoes -- not to mention several side vegetables -- of Hollywood. And even its green screen, scene-simulation style is just part of a Miller continuum that started with “Sin City.”
But if the world had turned a little differently, if fate had been a little kinder, a “Spirit” feature film would have debuted in the 1980s that would not only have been revolutionary but -- those of us involved in it were convinced -- a huge hit, possibly the first $100 million-grossing animated feature. And the futures of such filmmakers as Brad Bird, Gary Kurtz, John Musker and John Lasseter might have taken alternative paths.
In 1980, I was a freelance publicist specializing in animators I admired. My clients included Chuck Jones, Bill Melendez and Richard Williams. However, I was not particularly happy with the state of animation itself. Previously I had been executive secretary of the animation society ASIFA-Hollywood and an animation programmer for the Los Angeles International Film Exposition (FILMEX), and so had been exposed to a lot of great, classic American animation and exciting foreign animation. I had become frustrated that animation in Hollywood had fallen into the doldrums of sub-standard Disney, awful Saturday morning TV cartoons, and too-cute-to-stomach exploitations of brightly colored bears and other sugarcoated creatures. And I had become tired of anthropomorphic animals as the dominant fauna of American animation. Not that there was anything intrinsically wrong with them, it’s just that I was a Homo sapiens chauvinist and felt that American animation as an art form would never mature (as Japanese and European animation had) until it learned to tell human stories directly, and not through the filter of talking animals.
Given all this, I knew I had to move from publicity to producing, with an eye out for projects that could alleviate my frustration.
It didn’t take long for one to fall into my lap.
I was at a FILMEX screening at the Cinerama Dome when a fellow Filmexican, as we were called, David Konigsburg, who owned an animation camera service, told me that I just had to see an animation pencil test he had shot for two friends of his, ex-students from the animation program at Cal Arts. He said it was brilliant, but I was skeptical. Ever since I had let it be known that I was looking for projects, I had been shown a lot of proposals, all of them just variations on the same old, same old. But as David’s camera service was just a few blocks from the Dome, it was easy to go over there after the screening and take a look.
What David showed me was a black and white pencil test in the form of a movie trailer for an animated feature based on Will Eisner’s superhero noir character, “The Spirit.” At the time, “The Spirit” was as obscure as any item of pop culture could get. But I recognized it as I had read Jules Feiffer’s “The Great Comic Book Heroes,” in which he had devoted a chapter to Eisner’s creation, reprinting one of the original stories from the ‘40s. Even with having seen only this one story, it was obvious to me that Eisner was an incredible artist and draftsman, far superior to most comic book illustrators of the time. His humans were not awkward and stiff, but were fine and fluid renderings of form and personality. If any comic book humans begged to be animated, these were they. His layout of panels, his use of cinematic techniques, only added to the case that “The Spirit” was perfect for the screen.
But how had these young animators done in bringing Eisner’s characters to life? David had not misled me. The pencil test mock trailer was brilliant. Not only in its form and execution -- it quickly told the origin of The Spirit and displayed clearly the tone of the proposed film -- but it was the finest human character animation I had ever seen. Like Eisner, it was fluid and full of personality, each bit of movement communicating exactly what needed to be said about the characters and the situations they were in. It was not stiff and unreal like Saturday morning limited human character animation, nor weirdly “real” like rotoscoped human animation. It was exaggerated, pushed, caricatured movement that seemed perfectly real, or, better said, perfectly true. It was the best example I could imagine of a point I had been making to anyone who would listen, that good character animation was not a graphic art, but a performance art. It was great acting expressing a range of emotions.
“Who are these guys?” I asked David with dropped jaw. “I’ve got to meet them as soon as possible.”
The test was conceived and directed by a guy named Brad Bird, he told me, and animated by him and other ex-Cal Arts students, some of whom were now working at Disney.
David managed to set up a meeting with Brad for the next day. Brad came with Jerry Rees, who had been integral to the making of the trailer.
We talked. It was obvious we shared a philosophy about the direction we thought animation should go. I told Brad and Jerry what I thought of the trailer, that “The Spirit” was exactly the kind of project I wanted to be involved in, and asked what I could do to make it a reality.
'The Spirit' movie that could have been
SAN FRANCISCO -- No comic-book creator has seen his work brought to the screen with more reverence than Frank Miller, whose ultra-violent graphic novels "300" and "Sin City" were adapted to film practically panel by panel. "It is very strange," Miller said, "to draw something and then have it come alive in front of you. You start to feel like a low-rent god, but, in my case, one with major feet of clay."
