The Spirit Movie That Could Have Been

For a couple of years now I’ve been occasionally contributing essays to Geoff Boucher’s HERO COMPLEX blog on the LATimes.com website. Geoff’s blog has become a major source of news and info on all things of interest to fanboys or, if you prefer, connoisseurs of comics, science fiction, horror and fantasy and their manifestations on the big and small screen. It has even given birth to the Hero Complex Film Festival, which very successfully debuted last June. As a new biography on Will Eisner, the comics master and creator of The Spirit, has just appeared, here’s a sample of the first essay I did for Hero Complex that concerns Mr. Eisner, Brad Bird, Gary Kurtz and --



‘The Spirit’ movie that could have been

Dec. 12, 2008 | 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 - Geoff Boucher

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.


YOU CAN READ THE REST OF THE ESSAY HERE: 
http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2008/12/12/the-spirit-that/