Mark Interviews 2000+
The 'Spinal Tap' of Comic Books
Mark Hamill directs Comic Book: The Movie
It's a sight that attendees at Comic-Con International in San Diego probably didn't bat an eye over: Mark
Hamill, Luke Skywalker of Star Wars, prowling the convention floor, camera crew in his wake.
He is, after all, a regular guest of comic conventions and a self-proclaimed comic nerd.
But this time, Hamill was up to something different. When he and his film crew attended the world's largest comic
convention in the summer of 2002, he was in the process of directing his first film, Comic Book:
The Movie". The film premiers on a two-DVD set at the end of this month.
"I think of it as a movie about fans, by a fan, for fans," Hamill told
CBR News on Wednesday. "In other words, I've been on
the inside of the hobby as a fan as long as I can remember. It seems to me that whenever we were portrayed on the
screen, it was always as outsiders."
The largely improvised "mockumentary" stars Hamill as comic shop owner and fan Donald Swan, who is out to stop the
disastrous film adaptation of his favorite comic book series, Commander Courage. Comic readers don't have to squint
very hard to see the parallels to real world film adaptations.
"It's about people being true to what they believe in, and going up against forces much larger
than they are, and prevailing because of what they believe in."
In contrast to Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons, Donald Swan is a more realistic
and sympathetic character, Hamill said.
"The tone of it I thought was interesting because one of the things the comic book con was
nervous about was that we were somehow going to be putting people on or taking an ironic view that would somehow
hurt their enjoyment of the con," he said. "That's been done to death, and doesn't interest me."
The featured guest of many a comic book convention and the voice of the Joker in the 1990s Batman cartoon
series Hamill describes himself as a lifelong comic fan, and, in the 1990s, created The Black Pearl, published by
Dark Horse Comics.
"Well, I've always loved them. I was one of seven children of a career naval officer, and he
wasn't someone who welcomed them into his house, which I think made me love them even more," he said.
"Peer pressure and various other factors made me give up comic books completely, and I
didn't really rediscover them until I was in college."
"They reflect history in a way that's interesting to me … whether it's the patriotic comics of
World War II or the slightly paranoid comics of the 1950s and Cold War, I think they reflect the sensibilities of the
period in which they were made."
Which brings us back to Comic Book: The Movie and the character created for the film,
Commander Courage. A fictional patriotic superhero in the Captain America mold, he fills niches occupied in the real
world by both Captain America and Superman. And that provided a convenient jumping-off point for the real world
entertainment industry types and fans to improvise their dialogue.
"A lot of the people who are interviewed are talking about their own real life experiences, but
they translate it into the Commander Courage universe. So when Kevin Smith is talking about writing the Superman
film, that's a real story, but he just inserts the name 'Commander Courage' into it instead." And thus Smith's
real stories of the bruising process he went through becomes the process of writing a "Commander Courage" movie.
But given that many of those interviewed are telling real stories about their own lives, Hamill found it hard to know how
to edit things down for the movie.
"I don't know what to cut out of Hugh Hefner's interview, or Bruce Campbell's or
Kevin Smith's." The full-length interviews find a home on the DVD's second disk.
All films shoot more footage than they end up using, but working in an unscripted environment just exacerbated things
for Comic Book: The Movie.
"I heard it was slightly over 100 hours. I know, wow. That would include guys who forgot their
cameras were on, and we got six hours of wall. We had a blueprint for what we wanted to shoot, but without knowing
where we wanted to end up."
"We came away from the Con with an enormous amount of footage," Hamill said.
"After assembling a rough really rough cut of the footage we had so far, we were able to
figure out what we still needed to shoot to make it all work."
Even so, the mostly unscripted nature of the film was akin to walking a tightrope mostly without a net.
"It was very exciting. I'm not used to working like this. I'm part of the business where
everything is signed off on, and a committee has approved everything," he said.
"To do it this way, it was really kind of exciting and dangerous. You're on a toboggan
careening down the mountain, gathering speed."
Comic Book: The Movie is Hamill's first time in the director's chair, but like many actors, it's
something he's been interested in doing for a while.
"I've been trying to make that leap for the longest time, but it's all a matter of, I think, all the
stars being in alignment. I at one point had a deal to make The Black Pearl with me as the
director all set up," with Aaron Spelling Productions' film division.
"A big investor came in and shuttered their film department. That was the end of that. It was
very frustrating."
"You're at the whim of circumstances and your relative position on the entertainment food chain.
Creative Light was the first company that stepped up and showed confidence in
me." Hamill originally approached them about doing The Black Pearl, which they
ended up deciding was beyond the scope of what they could do at that time.
"It just sort of transmogrified into this project. I wanted to keep it in the realm of what I know
and the fan world, as one of them."
"I think it's fun in the sense that you have the historical pedigree, but it's not real. In a facetious way, I once said that
I wanted to make a documentary unencumbered by reality … someone called it Spinal Tap for comic book nerds," a
label that Hamill emphatically applies to himself.
Hamill says fans have been after him for years to do his memoirs or an autobiography, something he feels he isn't
ready for, personally or professionally. But in the meantime, Comic Book: The Movie covers
some of those bases.
"They can look at this project, and it's riddled with autobiographical material. All the details
are filled with allusions of either projects I've done or things that are a part of my life. When you look at the credits
of those who contributed to the film, if you could see annotated credits, you could see how much of my history is in
there," he said. For instance, "the person who does the Don Swan hair is the
person who created my Trickster hair on The Flash."
Comic Book: The Movie is filled with Hamill's friends, people he's worked with and people he
knows, all coming together in a labor of love about the community that they are all a part of.
"It's like one of those old MGM movies, 'Hey, let's put on a show!'"
Comic Book: The Movie will be available on DVD on January 27.