Mark Interviews 1990+
Mark Hamill on 'The Black Pearl'
'It's a tale of urban madness. It's a story of the 'tabloidization' of our society. It's a story of instant celebrity and
responsibility in the media. It's about somebody who liked to watch, but finally decided he didn't like what he
saw.' That's the description veteran stage, screen, television, and voice actor Mark Hamill will give you of The
Black Pearl if you ask him to describe the five-issue miniseries that he and screenwriter Eric Johnson are
developing for Dark Horse Comics. I spoke with both writers via conference call in
mid-May.
It sounds like you speak from personal experience.
Eric Johnson:
I still remember the night Mark called me with this idea. He told me about this most
unlikely guy who, one night, inadvertently is turned into a vigilante hero by the bloodthirsty tabloid press. He was
going to try to live up to this image that the press was trying to create for him, and why he couldn't do that -- why we
can't have those kinds of vigilante heroes, why we can't have superheroes in the real world. We started hammering
out this story based on that, but as time went on, we realized that what Mark was talking about -- the 'tabloidization' of
our society and all that -- those were the things that were emerging and that's what we were writing about.
Obviously, Mark understands something about celebrity in America. I've been in an interesting position, too, because
of my friendship with Mark over the years and being right alongside him during most of his career. I've seen
what happened to him and how people reacted to him. So that's how this was born. It took us a number of years to
finally get the story that we wanted to tell, though.
Years! Then let's discuss the plot of The Black Pearl.
Eric Johnson:
A court stenographer named Luther Drake has been sitting in court for 20 years, silently absorbing the worst that
mankind has to offer. He lives a very lonely, voyeuristic life. He is obsessed with a woman that moves in across
the way from him. One night he sees her leave her apartment, he's out following her, and all of a sudden he witnesses
an attempted kidnapping of her. He's not a hero, he tries to flee, and he inadvertently gets in the middle of all of this.
Mark:
He bumps heads with fate!
Literally -- and then inadvertently kills one of the kidnappers...
Eric Johnson:
Right -- who turns out to be a wanted killer, one whom the police have been after for a long time and have been
unable to catch. Here, this guy does it in one night. The press gets hold of this, especially an irresponsible -- he's
not even a journalist, really, this guy Jerry Delman, he's sort of a shock-jock -- he turns this guy into an overnight
celebrity. There's an image of Luther going over a fence. Delman enhances the photo and puts it on the air. The
Black Pearl is born! So this guy Luther is at home witnessing this on television just like everybody else and he
decides that he will become the Black Pearl.
Whether that's remotely feasible or not...
Mark:
One thing that we like is the audience seeing things that the characters in the story don't, so that when it's reported
it seems much more heroic than what really happened. But in Luther's opinion, he feels he's been given a great
gift. He feels that this is his calling. I don't think he consciously thinks, 'This is my 15 minutes of fame.'
One of the interesting things is that he hears these cases day in, day out, year in, year out. Men's inhumanity to
men has got to have an effect. For fate to look on him in this way and give him an opportunity to make a difference, to
allow him to make a positive contribution to society, is one that he can't seem to pass up. Our character does have a
very pronounced fantasy life. He's very well read and I think he has the kind of superiority in his own mind over the
average citizen to make him feel that he can pull this off.
Eric Johnson:
From what he finds around him he builds a costume and weapons. The Black Pearl is really
a homemade superhero. He has the information he needs from a license plate to go out and try to rescue this girl
who had been kidnapped, which he does. He frees her and flees into the night, which only increases his
celebrity. The whole city's buzzing and more press comes in and everybody wants to know who this guy is, who the
girl is...
Mark:
It all happens so quickly and within 24 hours everybody wants to know who this person is. The combination of a
slow news day with a catchy moniker like The Black Pearl really sends him into orbit. The viewers watch and
the readers read as this man goes out and tries to fulfill the wildly inflated claims and conjecture that is put forward
by, in particular, this one shock-jock. But it's not one man alone who creates the Black Pearl sensation...
Eric Johnson:
As this guy's star rises, everybody wants a piece of him. Everyone wants to use him for their own means. There's
merchandising -- Black Pearl hats and Black Pearl T-shirts and Black Pearl rallies and the Pearl Patrol, who are like
the Guardian Angels...
It's not a concept without precedent...
Mark:
All along the way, there are elements of our plot which should resonate with readers -- the atmosphere of a
tabloid television show and this voracious appetite that the public seems to have for sensationalism. One dovetails
into another. If Tonya's not smashing Nancy's kneecap, we have Michael Jackson, we have O.J. Simpson... it just
seems, in the last 20 years or so, partially because of the intense competition there is to be a rating point ahead of
your rival, there's a complicity between the public's desire for sensationalism and the media's desire to supply an
unending menu of sensationalism.
It occurred to me back a ways in a combination of events. I was doing a show in New York. One of the girls in the
show lived in the same building as Bernie Getz. She was consistently late for like four days for rehearsal. We didn't
understand why until we looked at the news -- the entire building was surrounded by the media. It wasn't just the
rank-and-file, blue collar people in the streets going, "Yeah! They deserved it!" It was, you know, learned professors
and lawyers and judges -- I mean everyone, for a certain period of time before everyone sort of came off of this
cloud of euphoria. For a while it seemed as though the city had gone insane. So there were elements of Bernie Getz
that stayed with me.
Eric Johnson:
The story of the Black Pearl takes place in a short period of time -- it's like four weeks. The public is just carried
away with this whole thing.
Mark:
It's a frenzy that just could not be sustained much longer. One of the things we tried to do was make it
completely plausible to people. In a nutshell, it's why there can't be a Batman. As a child I remember making a
distinction between Superman and Batman -- I knew that people can't fly and have X-Ray vision and have all of these
powers, but in my 8-year-old mind, someone could physically perfect themselves and study and become the
greatest detective and assemble an array of gadgets that would make him into a super crimefighter. It made me
smile when, as an adult, I looked back on these Batman comic books and knew that at one point in my life I actually
thought that Batman was realistic. That's when a million dollars meant something, and I thought that if I had a
million dollars, I could build this Bat cave and get this supercharged car and go out and do these things. I was trying
to find a way to dramatize that thinking.
Mind you that it has to be set in the real world. It's not like the Gotham City of the movies which is some
Clockwork Orange, surreal, mat-painting city like no one's ever seen before. I
want this to be a guy in a costume with no mat paintings climbing the side of a building in real life. What would
happen if somebody tried to do that?
He gets a spunky sidekick and a loyal butler?
Eric Johnson:
He does manage to sustain it for a little while before it all collapses in on him. But there's a lot of fun along the
way and a lot of humor in this.
Mark:
There's a lot of dark humor throughout this thing. For some reason satire and black humor is not as easy to
sell as just an out-an-out thriller or an out-and-out adventure film. But I remind people, as tragic a story as
Bonnie and Clyde was, it had some of the biggest laughs I had ever seen.
Eric Johnson:
Dog Day Afternoon.
Mark:
A wonderful example! It is a really funny movie and yet, overall, it is a real heartbreaker because the
frailties of these characters are so pronounced. Yet, asking Sal where he wants to go when they get out
of the United States and he says, 'Wyoming'... [Laughter] What was it Mel Brooks said?
Eric Johnson:
Tragedy is if I step in a manhole cover, comedy is if you step in a manhole cover.
Mark:
[Laughter]But it's not...in other words, if you tell film people it's about a guy who puts on a costume and
goes out and fights crime, but there's humor, they immediately think it's some out-and-out, goofy kind of
thing. What we'd like it to be is a straightforward thriller with a lot of natural humor in the situation. When you think
of it, I mean, it's hard for me to maintain one identity. The idea of having to maintain a dual identity scares
the bejeezus out of me. [Laughter]
We decided that somebody who would try to do something like that couldn't be a normal human being. We told
you how this guy literally runs smack dab into an incident that will change his life forever. If it were you or I, we
might have fled, but the next morning we'd go to the police station and say, 'Look, it was me, and
blah-blah-blah.' Who knows? They might even give you a medal.
You'd be on the news that night and get on with your life. But fate just happened to pick someone who
has been building and building and building a photographic memory of his career as a court stenographer and
the things he is privy to in that position down at the courthouse. It's been inside him laying dormant all these
years. It's just the wrong guy to have had this happen to.
He's been in the habit of being a peeping tom, basically.
Mark:
He obsesses on this woman to the point where he believes he is a part of her life. He watches her, he has
found a way to listen to her, he follows her. He's got lots of information about her, and he becomes bonded
with her in a way that he believes is as legitimate as actually having a real relationship with a woman.
Eric Johnson:
And she doesn't even know he exists.
Mark:
So it's also a tale of obsessed love.
Eric Johnson:
Also, because we are sitting in the real world and are trying to deal with it in a realistic way, when there is
violence, you suffer the real consequences of violence. It's not like in the next scene your broken nose
is gone. This guy Luther, by the end of this four-week period, is a wreck! He's losing his job because he's out at
night trying to fight crime, then he's sitting in a courtroom trying to stay awake the next day during these
cases and he's falling asleep... we try to deal with the real consequences of trying to maintain a dual identity.
Mark:
That was one of the great things about Dark Horse. The few places that
we pitched The Black Pearl as a film, you could tell right away whether they
got it or not. Dark Horse completely understood, especially that point that Eric
just made about, gee, if you get punched, perhaps you'll have a swollen cheek or you'll have to go to
the dentist and get your tooth recapped. We take responsibility for the violence. The violence is not pretty to look
at. It's not cool.
It's interesting to me that you start with the end, or what is close to the end, in a scene where Luther looks
desperate, haunted, even destroyed. As I read, I had to keep reminding myself of this indication that the
Black Pearl crashes down around Luther. I mean, at the end of the first issue, this guy is charismatic, he's in
control -- he has transformed from a hermit into a vengeful power in the night.
Eric Johnson:
And this will show why you can't really do that. Over these five issues you'll see why that just doesn't work.
Mark:
It's an affectionate look, as crazy as it gets, of comic book fandom. Non-pros and people who aren't tuned in to
that world have often said to me, 'What's it like with all those weirdos and geeks?' In a way, those people are so
much more in touch with their fantasy lives compared to people who aren't into fantasy or science fiction or
comic books. They probably save themselves years and years of couch time. And couples, too. I have this
lasting image of a The Green Lantern Family. The husband in a
Green Lantern costume, the wife in a Green Lantern costume, and
pushing a stroller with a baby in a Green Lantern costume! Who is to say
who's more well adjusted? I'm sure these people come from all kinds of professions. I have an affection for them
because I'm a fan myself. I've never gone quite as far as some of these people take it, but more power to
them. Rather than making light of them, Black Pearl is my Valentine to people
who are that in touch with their fantasy lives. I was sort of sorry to see him not be successful, but again, if you
imagine this thing as not in a fantasy world at all, but in our world, there seemed to be no other way to go. You can't
do that. You can't go out and fight crime like that. Was Batman ever deputized by the police department? I guess
that's an issue I missed somewhere.
Eric Johnson:
Yeah, we don't have a Commissioner Gordon on Luther's side. In our story, Luther's wanted for murder because
people die when he goes out. This is something new. It's gonna be a series that's never really been seen
before. It's the superhero story told in a brand-new way.
Mark:
Through a fun-house mirror.
Dark Horse, October 1, 1996