The Sizzling, Scintillating Scenarios of Stan Lee!
Once upon a time, when I was between studio gigs, I briefly had the pleasure of working with the great Stan Lee. This was long before Spiderman and the Marvel Universe came to movie screens in a big way.
Stan was frustrated, because he just couldn’t get his epic visions across to movie executives, who rated the comics as material for crudely animated Saturday morning TV fare at best. He always believed the Marvel Universe should make the leap to quality, full-length, live-action feature films.
Stan decided the way to crack the resistance was to lead off with one of his favorite characters, the mighty Thor, hammer-wielding Norse god of thunder who had a human identity as Dr. Donald Blake. (He’s actually a being created by Thor’s father Odin to teach Thor lessons in humility, but let’s not get technical.)
My job was to write a series of short treatments for Stan, pitching the first movie of a Thor superhero franchise with different movie star leading men in mind. The current thinking was that an expensive and risky live action movie should be shored up by movie star casting. Stan was hoping to cast actors such as Tom Selleck, Tom Hanks, Harrison Ford, and the other hot young leading men of the day. Checking in with their agents and managers, he discovered each star had a different idea of what his next big career move should be. One action star wanted to be seen as a sophisticated, urban leading man, like Cary Grant, so I had to write scenes where Thor’s human alter ego was wearing a tuxedo in a casino and driving a sportscar. Another was eager to show he could do comedy, so I had to make Thor funny, and another wanted to branch out into Westerns, so I had to figure out how to get Thor on a horse.
When I turned in my detailed, plot-heavy treatments, I could tell something wasn’t connecting for Stan. “That’s not it,” he said, over and over. When I pressed him for more guidance, he told me something I’ll never forget: “Sell the sizzle, not the bacon.”
Patiently, he explained what he meant. The purpose of a treatment, in his universe, was to hook a star and his entourage of advisors on the alluring idea of fulfilling some fantasy for themselves and the audience. That kind of treatment should dazzle and intrigue with possibilities, but in a general way, so as not to get bogged down in details. If it’s too long and detailed and complicated, Stan said, they start asking too many questions, wondering “Why does he do that?” and “How does he get out of that one?” They might give it to a reader to condense it down, but that would inevitably drain away the delicious smell and sound of the sizzling “bacon” of your concept. Just paint them a glorious picture of what might be, tease them with it, and don’t overthink it with too much plot and too many details.
I took another run at those treatments, trying to follow Stan’s guidance, but he was running into a brick wall at that time, and went on to develop other projects like the Spiderman series before the movie business was ready for Thor and his hammer.
Stan was very entertaining to be around. He was always complaining, comically, about the cost and hassles of running his comic empire. “People don’t realize,” he’d say, “It’s very expensive to be rich!”
My one regret is that I didn’t ask him about the early books or stories that stimulated him to write a comic book hero based on Norse mythology, and to mine the myths and legends of many other cultures. We bonded about respecting the value of the old tales as source material for modern stories, but we never discussed those early influences. I assumed that he had been, like me, a nerdy kid who got excited by stories of gods and superheroes, wherever he found them, and dreamed of telling new stories about those mighty figures.
Of course, epic fantasy movies like the myth-inspired stop motion films of Ray Harryhausen must have influenced Stan as they had thrilled me. But I wonder what books came his way in his early life because he seemed very well read in myth and legendary lore.
For me, a primary inspiration was a stack of books my father selected for me from our local library, when I was out of school and immobilized for a few days by a sprained ankle. Until late in his life, my Dad wasn’t much of a reader, and he seemed a bit suspicious of my obsessive reading of comic books and science fiction, but on this occasion he had a perfect instinct for what would kindle the imagination of his son and distract him from pain. He had chosen a pile of children’s picture books about mythology, starting with the Greeks and Romans and moving on to the myths of the Celts, the Norse, the Russians, and so on, by authors such as Andrew Lang, Padraic Colum, and Edith Hamilton. I was able to compare the different systems of mythology and started discovering repeating patterns, similarities and differences, and an over-arching sense of a grand design, an epic structure that looks very much like Stan Lee’s vision of the Marvel Universe. Those books opened the doors of myth for me, and led to some of the best parts of my life. So, I wonder: What books turned on the burner of mythology in the young Stan Lee, and stirred him to create a whole universe of epic entertainment?
