The Lost Fantastic Four Movie

At the 1994 LA Comic Book Convention, the cast of the recently wrapped Fantastic Four movie thought they had a gold-framed hit on their hands. The 500-strong audience whooped and socked the air as Roger Corman’s Concorde Pictures premiered the trailer of the long-gestated movie. After all the sweat and the tears of a 21-day shoot, it looked like they’d nailed it.

That day was the only time any footage from that movie would be officially seen in public. Not long after, the cast and crew were informed their film was being shelved. “The movie was never supposed to be shown to anybody,” Stan Lee told LA Magazine in 2005. “And the tragic thing is that the people involved with the film were not aware that the movie was never supposed to be shown to anybody.”

Twenty-seven years on, it’s still frustratingly fuzzy what actually happened with that inaugural Fantastic Four film. What is undisputed is that, in 1986, German producer Bernd Eichinger purchased the rights to Marvel’s Fantastic Four for a bargain price of $250,000. The next eight years would find Eichinger shopping the property around a thunderously uninterested Hollywood. When even a Christopher Reeve-fronted Superman film could barely cobble together a workable budget, then what hope did the Fantastic Four, whose life beyond the comics was in shitty Saturday morning cartoons, have? Even Spider-Man wasn’t deemed worthy of more than the $225,000 that Marvel received from Cannon Films in 1985. The superhero-drenched noughties were a long way off in the 1980s.

Eichinger’s option on the four had a six-year expiry date. If he didn’t get a film into production by 31 December 1992, he’d lose the rights, and any renegotiation would mean more dough exchanging hands. So, in September of ‘92 he approached Roger Corman, a producer with a canny eye for thrifty filmmaking, with an eye to racing into production a $1 million movie version of The Fantastic Four. “They said I had to make a movie,” he said years later. “They didn’t say I had to make a big movie.”

Assigned to the director’s chair was Oley (son of Vidal) Sassone. Though he only had two other movies on his CV (the similarly stingily budgeted Bloodfist III: Forced To Fight and the B-flick potboiler Final Embrace), he was a weathered veteran of the music video scene and was well used to making a little look a lot. Sassone was chomping at the bit at the opportunity to direct a superhero movie with a built-in audience. “I didn’t even have to think about it,” he said later.

With Corman offering a predictably feeble $3,500 a week for his cast, stellar name actors were immediately out of the ballpark. Alex Hyde-White, son of the British film actor Wilfred Hyde-White, was Reed Richards, with former Miss Nebraska Rebecca Staab, as Sue Storm, 24-year-old Jay Underwood as Johnny Storm and Michael Bailey Smith, a former paratrooper and Dallas Cowboys star, was Ben Grimm.

Filming officially revved on 28 December 1992. Most of the shoot took place on Concorde Films’ Venice, California soundstage, which Corman had converted from a rotting lumberyard in 1980. There were no illusions of Hollywood lavishness there - the cast and crew were used to sharing their shooting space with various rats and bugs, but it was a building that hummed with the ghostly presence of those directors that Corman gave breaks to, from James Cameron to Martin Scorsese to Ron Howard. Olaf Sassone must have hoped this snuggle up with Roger Corman would propel him similarly skywards.

Despite the pocket money budget and occasional glimpse of an uninvited rodent, morale on the movie was buoyant. “We had Neue Constantin and Eichinger and Concorde Studios and Roger all there,” said Alex Hyde-White much later. “We felt like we were making a real movie.”

But why was a movie that was never meant to reach theatres completed? It was only stipulated that a movie had to have been shot, not finished, for the rights to stay with Eichinger.

"Long after we finished shooting, we kept the post production alive under the radar,” Sassone told LA Magazine. “Our producer was gone by this time and a group called Mr Film and my editor (Glenn Garland) and the post supervisor (Jan at Concorde) kept processing our elements. I was on another movie and Glenn was cutting that one as well. Everyday during the post production of the other movie, we'd use the flatbed to keep cutting in the visual effects elements of the FF. I think we finally locked the picture almost a year later. I don't think, in fact I'm quite sure, Constantin did not know this was happening. They probably, at this point, had satisfied the stipulations in their contract which was to get it into production, but not necessarily have a finished movie. I'd love to know exactly what it said but I'm sure they were all surprised to see a finished movie.”

Eichinger died in 2011, but to give him his due, he always denied canning the film. He claims that Avi Arad, now Marvel Studio’s long-serving CEO, but then a humble executive in their comics division, wanted the film buried. “He really didn't like the idea that a small movie was coming out and maybe ruining the franchise,” Eichinger alleged. “So he says to me that he wants to give me back the money that we spent on the movie and that we should not release it.”

“We bought it to burn it,” Arad admitted years later. “Some bootlegs appeared at comic book conventions just to drive us nuts. The deal was we buy it, we burn the master so we can do it right.”

Whether Eichinger ever knew about Arad’s plans went to the grave with him. But certainly when post-production had been completed, the cast embarked on a promotional tour, and a trailer was assembled to run on Corman videos. Then came the shock news that the movie wasn’t ever going to be released.

“I was pretty stunned,” reflected Joseph Culp, who played Dr Victor von Doom, “because we had been doing press junkets at comic conventions and magazine spreads and it looked like we'd get a little release.” Hyde-White says he went into denial mode, while Sassone felt it most keenly of all. “All of us that worked on the movie felt like someone stuck an ice pick in our heart,” he said.

Slowly the story began to circulate that Eichinger made the film as bargain as possible so as to keep hold of the rights and make a bigger movie sometime in the future. “I don’t know why he couldn’t have been upfront with us about it from the beginning,” said Michael Bailey Smith in 2005.

Stan Lee is adamant that Eichinger was guilty of a savage deception, and comic fans find it hard to poo-poo anything from the lips of Marvel’s 91-year-old generalissimo. But Corman strongly refutes the allegations against his co-producer, pointing towards the movie’s comparatively generous promotional budget. “We had a contract to release it, and I had to be bought out of that contract,” he told LA Magazine.

In 1994, with the movie out of Eichinger’s mitts, he managed to partner up with Home Alone director Chris Columbus, with an eye to cooking up a more heftily financed Fantastic Four movie. Columbus eventually bailed, and a revolving door of directors, including Peyton Reed, Sean Astin and Peter Segal came and went, until Tim Story joined the production. 2005’s Fantastic Four eventually went in front of the cameras with a $100 million budget, but failed to fire up its core geek audience.

Of course, Arad may have flamed the negative, but the movie survives on YouTube and as ropey DVD bootlegs. It’s possibly bigger in death than it ever would have been in life, and it certainly has its fans.

“I'll just come out and say it's a pleasure,” says Mark Millar, who had a successful run on the Fantastic Four comic and now acts as Fox’s creative consultant on their Marvel titles. “I remember it being quite a big deal in comic-stores back in the 90s, one of those under the counter things people felt they might go to prison for watching, so it amazing to actually see a copy, downstairs in the basement of a store and staff honestly watching the door to make sure nobody came in. It has a creepy VHS snuff quality about it. Like the superhero version of Evil Dead. Something you shouldn't be watching. At the time, I was just happy to watch any superhero movie. I wanted it to be better, of course, but it's actually quite sweet and fun.

And if the movie had been made under Millar’s aegis? What would have have told Eichinger?

“I'd have gotten Reed's grey hair right. I love the fact that in a movie with a flaming teenager and a stretchable scientist the least convincing part for me was the greying temples of the leading man. Grey is actually really hard to do on someone with brown hair. I know that sounds silly, but it's true. That said, these look like he's wearing silver headphones. It's mental. I really like the Doctor Doom guy though. He was great. And weirdly I ended up at a party in a stranger's room one night at a convention about ten years ago and he and I were sitting on a bath drinking beers that were lying in a big tub of ice. He was really nice, but still had that booming Latverian gravitas.”

Currently shooting is a feature-length documentary about the movie. Doomed: The Untold Story Of Roger Corman’s The Fantastic Four tells the whole grisly tale, from the perspective of Concorde Films’ Mark Sykes, who has teamed up with filmmaker Marty Langford for the movie. “Mark may not know who dug the graves,” says Langford, “but he knows where the bodies are buried.”

Because of its dog-eared reputation and its name wedded so immovably to adjectives like “cheap” and “campy” some may expect Sassone’s film to be much worse than it is. It’s certainly a heap better than some of the other Marvel movies from the pre-X-Men era, such as the dismal 1999 Punisher or Menahem Golan’s blundering 1990 version of Captain America. And while its budget is clearly ill-equipped for the needs of the story (there’s precious little “flame on”-ing from Johnny Storm, while Mr Fantastic’s stretching seems to be little more than a costumed brush arm with the glove on the end of it), there are occasional little victories - the Thing’s costume still impresses and Joseph Culp, son of Robert, makes an satisfyingly twisted Dr Doom.

Obviously Bernd Eichinger got his multi-million dollar version of the Fantastic Four in the end. Twice. But both movies - 2005’s Fantastic Four and its Silver Surfer guesting sequel - are the least loved of the noughties crop of Marvel blockbusters. Now, Fox is about to reboot the Fantastic Four again, ready for a 2015 release. What’s certain is that it’ll be big, it’ll be bold and it will cost a fuck load of bucks. But will anyone be making documentaries and writing articles about that film in 20 years? And remember that, while it’s easy to chortle at this under-moneyed curio now, this was a film that stayed a lot truer to its Marvel comic roots than other films of the time, which was one of the reasons why that 500-strong crowd in LA howled so keenly.

"Back then it was very fashionable to diss the comics, make up your own origin, scrap the costume and so on,” says Millar. “Look at almost every superhero TV show or movie from the 70s to the 90s. They didn't even stick a skull on The Punisher. So I like the fact a lot of this was lifted from the source material. It had a good heart and good intentions, but sadly it had no budget.”