Ben Fritz, who covers the business of Hollywood for the Los Angeles Times, caught up with Larry Hama, the creator of the "G.I. Joe" commando team mythology, and put together this interesting Hero Complex report on "the real American hero" as a film property....  

 

On Friday, "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra" opens and fanboys have some reason to be nervous. Though Aint-It-Cool's Harry Knowles gave it a good review, Paramounthasn't exactly embraced devotees of the toys and '80s cartoon.

Fred Meyer, owner of the website JoeBattleLines.com, said he was one of several fan community leaders invited to a meeting by Paramount and Hasbro at a G.I. Joe fan convention two years ago to discuss what they wanted to see in the film.

“That was the last time we had any involvement,” he noted. “They’re not taking advantage of the fact that they have this free army of PR people out there.”

Perhaps more notably, Paramount didn't bring the movie to Comic-Con International, even though there was a panel for Hasbro's new toy line based on the movie. The movie's producer was rather blunt when asked about the decision.

“You can never win with those guys,” Lorenzo Di Bonaventura, producer of both “Transformers” films and “G.I. Joe,” said of the San Diego convention. “They feel they’re the keepers of the fanboys flag and have a deep childhood association with many of these properties. And we know the hard-core fans are already coming to see the movie.”

As my story in The Times business section explained, Paramount has a different agenda with the new "G.I. Joe" film. It's aggressively marketing the film to military, blue collar and red state audiences. In fact, the movie's premiere on Friday wasn't in Hollywood or New York, but at Andrews Air Force Base, the home of Air Force One.

All hope isn't lost for old school G.I. Joe fans, however. The studio hired as a consultant a man who's very familiar to them: Larry Hama, the writer of the comic books that originated the "Real American Hero" revival of the brand in the 1980s. Hama also wrote the file cards that came with the '80s toy line and gave shape to the characters who populated the after-school cartoon and, in somewhat different form, the new movie.

I interviewed Hama for the story and, while we managed to fit only one quote in the piece, saved the best of the rest for Hero Complex readers.

BF: Tell me about the role you played in creating the G.I. Joe characters.

LH: I wrote the stuff. What they did was they sent me a design spec sheet before they even made the toy showing what the figure looked like. It would say something like “infantry guy” or "bazooka guy" on it. I would have to come up with who he was and what he did and how he fit in the universe. I came up with the idea of doing file cards because I was doing these dossiers for myself. I knew there would be so many characters down the pike and I needed a methodology to keep track of who was who. A guy at Hasbro saw these file cards and said we should put those on the back of the package. It became an industry standard.

BF: You started doing that because of your work on the comics, right? How did you start doing that?

LH: Doing a toy book at a big company like Marvel is like the ghetto. None of the A-list people wanted to soil their hands doing it. I was literally the last person they asked. I was having trouble getting writing work because I started out drawing. So if they were offering me Barbie, I would have done it. Once I got the gig I gave it my best shot, probably because I wasn’t the A-list guy shrugging it off. I ended up writing the entire run at Marvel.

BF: And you've done more since then at other companies, right?

LH: At Devil’s Due I did a line. I'm doing some of the IDW stuff. I have no idea how many issues I've written. I did 105 for Marvel, so probably close to 250 total.

BF: So how did you get involved in the film?

LH: Lorenzo Di Bonaventura contacted me and asked me to come on as a consultant.

BF: And what role did you play? Were there things that changed as a result of your input?

LH: There were a few things along the way.

I know the ins and outs of all this stuff having worked in development hell and other aspects of the business. I figured there are fights you win and fights where you don’t even try. I just picked the ones I thought were really important and stuck to my guns on them.

BF: What are some examples?

LH: I signed a [non-disclosure agreement] so I can't really say. There is one I can talk about though: I insisted that Snake Eyes can't speak. He was going to say something at the end. Marketing people think things like that really cool. I said, "Well no, you can’t have that happen. Don’t do that." But they kept fiddling with it. "What if he just says one word?"  Even fights like that can be difficult and long and protracted. I won that fight but who knows how it ended up? They were still doing revisions a month ago."

BF: Who did you make your case to? Did you have to get aggressive at all?

LH: I spoke to Lorenzo, I was never combative. I just stated my case. I said I thought the fan base might find that really off-putting. You can mess with certain things, but certain core things you should not poke.

BF: When were you involved? How early?

LH: I was on board when pre-production started about two years ago. I was in L.A. to do a cameo on the first day of shooting.

BF: So have you seen the movie? What did you think? Do you think fans will like it?

LH: I saw a version about two and a half weeks ago [the interview was conducted July 17]. The day I saw it they were still re-shooting some stuff. The version I saw was 15-20 minutes shorter than a version I saw previously. Over 95% of the effects were done. I thought that last version was really tight and excited. I was very pleased. As for the fans, I think it's the same thing that happened with "Transformers." The fan base anticipates it’s going to suck. That’s what they did with "Transformers" right up until day it opened. I always tell the fans, "How can you be so anal retentive about continuity and a universe that was pretty much done on the fly as it went along?" If something didn’t work in the comics I just changed it. I created the universe and I’m OK with it.

--Ben Fritz

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CREDITS: "G.I. Joe" film photo -- Paramount. Photo of Sienna Miller and military personnel -- Getty Images.

Major studios usually turn to New York and Los Angeles for high-glitz American premieres and press events, especially for their huge summer popcorn films. But for its new "G.I. Joe" project, Paramount Pictures retreated from the coasts and set its sights on an audience with a  fashion sense defined by blue collars, NASCAR ballcaps and camouflage pants. Claudia Eller and Ben Fritz have the story on the cover of the Los Angeles Times Business section today.

Nearly 1,000 service members and their families at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland got to see something Friday night that very few people in Hollywood have seen -- "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra," the last big-budget action movie of the summer.

Paramount Pictures gave the movie its homeland premiere at the base for Air Force One, flying out its stars Channing Tatum, Sienna Miller and Marlon Wayans for a helicopter tour, meetings with the base commander and airmen, and a red carpet replete with paparazzi and billowing American flags.

Launching the film to a military audience is just one part of a highly atypical marketing and publicity campaign for "G.I. Joe," which opens nationwide and in most foreign markets this Friday. Paramount is sidestepping the traditional Hollywood showcase and courting of the national print media in favor of taking the picture directly to America's heartland."G.I. Joe" is embedded in the Kid Rock and Lynyrd Skynyrd concert tour, advertised at the Country Music Television Awards and excerpted on giant video screens at Minnesota's Mall of America. It is bombarding Kansas City, Charlotte, Columbus and Grand Rapids on new digital billboards.

The subtext is none too subtle: Critics are likely to roast the film, and fanboys of the original toy line and comic book may be indifferent, but if you're a flag-waving, NASCAR-loving American, it's practically your patriotic duty to see this movie.

Paramount's decision to focus so heavily on just one segment of the audience illustrates -- in a market increasingly fragmented by demographics and swayed by word of mouth via Twitter, text messages and Facebook updates -- the lengths to which studios will go to maximize early exposure among audiences most likely to embrace a film and minimize it for everyone else.

"Our starting point for this movie is not Hollywood and Manhattan but rather mid-America," Paramount Vice Chairman Rob Moore said. "There are a group of people we think are going to respond to the movie who are normally not the first priority. But we're making them a priority."

Yet overseas, where big action films often earn 60% or more of their ticket sales, rah-rah American sentiment doesn't play well. So those references have vanished from the advertising ...

THERE'S MORE, READ THE REST

-- Claudia Eller and Ben Fritz

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CREDITS: Top, Actors Rachel Nichols and Marlon Wayans ride on a Humvee during the homeland movie premiere Friday for "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra" at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, home of Air Force One. Bottom: "G.I. Joe" star Sienna Miller arrives on a Royal Marine inflatable boat July 22 to promote the movie in London. Both photos from Getty Images. "Team America" photo -- Paramount Pictures.

This is a longer version of my story that is running Monday on the cover of the Los Angeles Times Calendar section.

Even when the movies ended up bad — and they usually did — crime novelist Donald E. Westlake never had a problem taking Hollywood money for his ideas. But with his signature creation, the ruthless career criminal known simply as Parker, Westlake insisted that the names be changed to protect the guilty.

Westlake, who died at age 75 this past New Year’s Eve, saw seven movies made from his Parker novels (which were all published under his pseudonym Richard Stark), but in each film the main character’s name was changed; even when Lee Marvin, Robert Duvall or Mel Gibson was in the role, Westlake wouldn’t entrust his favorite brand name to anyone else. That changed, though, in the final months of Westlake’s life in an unexpected way that had nothing to do with Hollywood.

A Nova Scotia-based illustrator named Darwyn Cooke and an San Diego book editor named Scott Dunbier persuaded the aging author that the ideal visual medium for his terse, bare-knuckled tales of mayhem was the graphic novel. And, after Westlake saw Cooke’s spare and stylized artwork (think somewhere between the vintage-cool of “Mad Men” and the storytelling flair of Milton Caniff’s “Steve Canyon” comic strips), he enthusiastically agreed. The result hit shelves last week, the 144-page graphic novel “The Hunter” (IDW Publishing, $24.99 hardcover), a meticulously faithful adaptation of the 1962 novel of the same name that introduced the scowling Parker.

The Cooke adaptation is already being hailed as a masterpiece by key tastemakers in the comics world and next week it will meet the public in a major way as Cooke and Dunbier take it to Comic-Con International in San Diego, the massive pop-culture expo that is a sort of Cannes for capes or a Sundance for sci-fi. Cooke will be on two panels, one of them a Thursday program entitled “A Darker Shade of Ink: Crime and Noir in Comics.” That might conjure up memories of the infamously lurid EC Comics of the 1950s, but hard-boiled crime is heating up in the word-balloon medium.

Superheroes still dominate comics but “The Hunter” is part of a surge in noir-minded projects that owe far more to the bloodied pulp of Westlake, James M.Cain and Jim Thompson than they do the cosmic melodramas of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee.

Next month, DC Comics, publisher of the bright-hued Superman, is launching a new imprint called Vertigo Crime that will be populated by bloodthirsty lovers and mob enforcers. The first releases are the sexed-up murder tale “Filthy Rich” by Brian Azzarello and Victor Santos and “Dark Entries,” a locked-room mystery written by Scottish crime novelist Ian Rankin.

Vertigo Crime hopes to match the high standards and low morals established by “Criminal,” the series written by Ed Brubaker for Marvel Comics imprint icon that created a tapestry of interwoven underworld tales that had a body count and multi-generational ruination that rivals “GoodFellas.” There’s also the horror-noir of Steve Niles, whose Cal MacDonald is a drug-addled version of Lew Archer roaming a (literally) haunted L.A. in the Dark Horse series “Criminal Macabre.”

Hollywood has been watching with interest. “History of Violence” and “Road to Perdition,” both well-regarded films, were adaptations of crime comics, and this September comes “Whiteout,” a blood-in-the-snow serial killer story based on the 1999 Oni Press series by Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber. There are at least half a dozen more in the pipeline, perhaps most interesting among them is David Fincher’s long-discussed adaptation of the true-crime series “Torso.”

Cooke’s pen-and-ink Parker may well lead to a new round of Westlake curiosity in Hollywood. (In a coincidence, there’s a stir of film interest in another 1960s tough-guy, author John McDonald’s Travis McGee.) If Cooke puts Parker back on screen it would be poetic justice; the artist became a Westlake fan after watching a late-night rerun of John Boorman’s 1967 classic “Point Blank,” regarded as Hollywood’s best take on the cruel charisma of the novels.

“The movie just blew my head apart,” Cooke said chuckling. “There’s only been a few movies that really rocked me. When I watched ‘Point Blank’ I felt like I was seeing a whole new way to do a movie. Lee Marvin was so brilliant in it and the story was very simple — a crime story, a genre story – but it was so compelling.”

“The Hunter” graphic novel (the first of four Parker adaptations planned by Cooke) is rigidly faithful to its 1962 namesake. It tells the tale of a battered and betrayed professional criminal named Parker who methodically seeks vengeance and dismantles anything (and anyone) in his way.

Westlake once told an interviewer that Parker was an “unreconstructed guy from a much harder age” and cited as compass point his own father, who once responded to an oncoming heart attack by reaching for a bottle of rye.

Cooke treasured his correspondence with Westlake and says now that it left a huge impression on him not just as a fan, but as a creator.

“One of the most valuable things in my professional life, one of the big gifts in my career, was the time I got to spend chatting with him through e-mail,” said the 47-year-old Cooke. “What I tried to do more than anything was to impress upon him my interest in one question: Where did other adaptations fail and what did they miss in the character. How can we get these things on the page?”

A big challenge: Parker's visage.

"Yes, it was a lot of struggle finding Parker’s actual appearance," Cooke said. "I had to wean myself off of that Lee Marvin prototype. We went through several evolutions. At one point he looked a lot like Jack Palance. That’s what Donald had said, ‘I always pictured him as a young Palance from ‘Panic in the Streets.’ Then I had that in my head. A big raw-boned guy. That led the way."

At one point, Cooke's "The Hunter” had art in three colors: black, white and something that might be called “drowning-victim” blue. But it was too jolting and the artist kept searching for the proper final color key and found it in a grim teal. “My wife,” Cooke said, “calls it gun-metal green.” (Note: The art in this blog post is from various stages so the color scheme varies.) The panels are shape-based with distracting details drained away.

“There’s very little line work and very little detail that isn’t just implied by a color plane or shape,” he said. “The idea was to subtract everything flowery or extraneous. The color is muted and I also had the pages antiqued with the very faintest amount of yellow.”

As Cooke circled in on the art, he also was finding the hues of Westlake beyond his public persona. “What came through all the e-mails was a really funny, affable guy, a man who at the age of 75 still had all the time in the world for these new things and ideas. When he granted us permission to use the name Parker – which is a really touchy issue – that’s when we knew he had confidence in this whole thing.”

Cooke said the lean Westlake prose is ideal for the graphic novel medium.

“The original novel was really an experiment to see if he could tell a story without any real emotional content,” Cooke said. “You’re only clue to the protagonist — if you want to call Parker that — and his emotional state would be physical action that might betray it. All of his emotions were internalized and that led him into an area where he was stripping things out. The clean, direct prose style brilliantly leaves things for the reader to fill in for themselves. I needed art that matched that.”

Cooke came to the project as an established star in comics. The Toronto native worked in magazines and graphic design in the 1980s before moving into animation where he was part of the team behind the Emmy-winning “Batman: The Animated Series.”

He moved to comics where his biggest success was “DC: The New Frontier,” the 2004 series that won Eisner and Harvey awards by reworking Justice League lore for a period piece that played out like “The Right Stuff” with masks. Cooke also revived Will Eisner’s “The Spirit” for DC with a sly verve missing from the recent film.

While most artists today have Kirby, the great Neal Adams or later stars such as George Pérez or Todd McFarlane as their north star, Cooke was more beholden to the graceful, dynamic realism of Caniff, Alex Toth and Al Williamson. Cooke, certainly, was strongly inspired by the photo-realistic work by Adams on Batman ("Neal Adams was the guy, the one that got me into the idea of drawing comics"), but his eventual style was shaped by commercial illustrations, such as the paintings used in old G.I. Joe toy packaging and advertisements.

"As much as I like comics and lot of things," Cooke said, "it was the paintings on these boxes that really made me want to draw stuff. They could put a whole story on a painting on box but also leave it open-ended enough that you could take it where you want."

Cooke has an impressive collection of unopened G.I. Joe artifacts and recently installed a horseshoe-shaped display area with glass shelves for them at his home. The lanky Cooke and his wife, Marsha, live in “a wilderness place in Nova Scotia,” as he calls it, a coastal acre hemmed in by a creek and a ravine. It backs up against a 600 acres of Crown Land (the local term for government-protected preserves).

Cooke is a student of comics history and spoke at length about his influences on this particular project. Among them was "His Name is Savage," the great Gil Kane's über-violent, magazine-sized comic from 1968 that is often overlooked when histories of the graphic novel are compiled. "When it comes to what I'm doing, that book by Kane was the first long-form stab at it. I was always a fan of Gil Kane inking his own work. But I also have to tell you that even back then, when I didn’t mind a little blood and thunder, I thought it went too far, with the gun barrels jammed through teeth.”

Despite his comics success with masked men, Cooke said he rues the spandex domination of comics. He said crime, romance, westerns, war and horror are still woefully overlooked by DC and Marvel, the dominant publishers. “If people want to go see Quentin Tarantino movies, why wouldn’t they want those comics? The scene is ripe for newcomers to come in with different ideas.”

Cooke's ideas for Westlake and Parker have quickly seized attention. Douglas Wolk, writing in the Washington Post, hailed Cooke’s "space-age designs and stripped-down chiaroscuro…his loose, ragged slashes of black and cobalt blue evoke the ascendancy of Hugh Hefner so powerfully you can almost hear a walking jazz bass.”

Richard Burton, writing for Forbidden Planet, wondered if anything this year will be able to match up to "The Hunter." "It's July," he wrote, "and this may well be the book of the year." 

Peers and elders are hailing it as well. This week, animation icon Bruce Timm said Cooke's new work is "practically pitch-perfect." Howard Chaykin of "American Flagg" fame said "The Hunter" "demonstrates uncategorically that all it takes is a brilliant talent to take material I've known and loved for over 35 years and make it brand new." Brubaker, perhaps the top writer in comics at the moment, said the book is "Darwyn's best work and the best version of 'Parker' outside of the novels."  

Cooke never met Westlake, and the author never saw the finished Parker adaptation. Last December, Cooke mailed Westlake a batch of finished pages but the parcel arrived at the novelist’s home in Ancram, N.Y., while he was away on vacation in Mexico. The writer suffered a fatal heart attack during the trip. The news left Cooke in a deep funk. He walked away from the project for a time. “I had been doing it,” he realized, “for an audience of one.” Eventually, he returned to the drawing table for a reason the straightforward Parker would respect. “He wanted this done and now it is.”

-- Geoff Boucher

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Images: "The Hunter"  in various stages. Credit: IDW Publishing and Darwyn Cooke; "New Frontier." Credit: DC Comics.

Congrats to the Pittsburgh Steelers and welcome to a special postgame, all-video edition of the Hero Complex, your roundup of handpicked headlines from across the fanboy universe.

MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE ... AGAIN: Does anybody blow it up bigger (or more often) than Michael Bay? (Just check out his truly awesome self-spoofing Verizon commercial.) Anyway, during the Super Bowl on Sunday there was a brief but, er, energetic preview of "Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen." How did it look? Well, I don't think it will be ushering in a new era in cerebral cinema BUT it did have giant alien robots on skates! Here you go ...

UNDER THE GUN ... AGAIN: I kind of forgot there was a "G.I. Joe" movie coming this year. Seriously. But there it was, a trailer for "G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra" during the biggest U.S. sports broadcast of the year, with slow-motion hot chicks and dour military men making hard decisions in a hard world. The move is directed by Stephen Sommers ("The Mummy," "Van Helsing"), which is not necessarily a great thing, but it does have Dennis Quaid as Gen. Hawk, one-time "Doctor Who" star Christopher Eccleston as Destro and Ray Park as Snake Eyes.  Lock and load ...

Hmmm. I know this is not the intended effect, but as I watched that "G.I. Joe" trailer all I could think about was this ...

BEHIND THE WHEEL ... AGAIN: Action star Jason Statham, who has a flair for laconic exasperation, drives more sweet rides than a valet at the Four Seasons. The actor (who told the Hero Complex he wants to portray a certain Marvel superhero) has made a specialty of gas-pedal films ("Transporter," "Transporter 2," "Transporter 3," "Death Race.") and he's in a great new Audi commercial that aired during the game Sunday. Here's a look; it's really fun ...

ON THIS DATE: Today is the 60th birthday of actor Brent Spiner, who has appeared in major films such "The Aviator," "Independence Day" and, uh, "Dude Where's My Car? but will be forever remembered as Mr. Data, the earnest android from "Star Trek: The Next Generation." The mechanical man with the positronic brain is one of the great characters on a great series (and in four films) and with his relentless logic and sweet naivete he was a sort of yellow-eyed hybrid of "Mr. Spock" and "Pinocchio." You Southern California readers have a chance to see Spiner on stage soon -- he will be starring in "Man of La Mancha" at the Freud Playhouse at UCLA beginning on Valentine's Day and continuing through March 1. Also, the Houston native has a tricked-out personal website. Check it out. In honor of Spiner's birthday, let's treat our friends to a surprise rendition of "Blue Skies" today ...

Thanks for reading, have a great day.

-- Geoff Boucher