Our friends over at Eon Magazine (www.mothership.com) scored a major scoop this week, publishing the first-ever interview with director Sam Raimi on the subject of the wall-crawling, web-shooting “Spider-Man” movie. Of course, Raimi wouldn’t talk about plot details, but he waxed about his love of Marvel Comics’ marquee character, a pulp teen icon of the post-atomic age. “What I hope to put into the movie is what I found so attractive about the comic books,” Raimi said in the interview. “[Peter Parker, Spidey’s true identity] is not pretending to be somebody, like Superman pretends to be Clark Kent. Superman is really cool and unstoppable and he winks at us with the glasses and says, ‘I’m just pretending to be a nerd.’ But Peter really is. He never loses sight of who he is and that’s what’s great about him. He’s still us in that costume.”
The other, equally interesting “Spider-Man” news this week is selection of John Dykstra as the film’s visual-effects supervisor. Dykstra’s illustrious career includes old-school masterpieces like “Star Wars” and “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” and new-school, digital-minded stuff like “Batman Forever” and “Stuart Little,” so we can (hopefully) expect a pastiche of digital cityscapes and traditional effects. “It certainly won’t be in any way pedestrian,” Dykstra promised.
George Lucas LUCAS LAMPOONED: Go figure. The famed underground parody short, “George Lucas in Love,” just went on sale at Amazon.com, and it’s out selling copies of the real Lucas‘ own “Star Wars: Episode 1 — The Phantom Menace.”
The flick, directed by Joe Nussbaum, depicts a nerdy young Lucas (circa 1967) suffering from writer’s block during his film school days at USC. As of this afternoon, “George Lucas in Love” was Amazon’s third-best video seller; “Phantom Menace,” it’s number-four best performer.
Famous Monsters of Filmland DR. ACULA LIVES! Horror-movie guru Forrest J. Ackerman has won his battle to defend his good name. Not his real name, but his pen name, “Dr. Acula,” which Ackerman claimed that his ex-business partner, Ray Ferry, had surreptitiously stolen from him.
Ackerman, founder and former publisher of the iconic Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, was awarded $724,000 by a jury this week, ending a lawsuit in which horror and sci-fi notables like Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison and John Landis testified. The defendants, of course, say they will appeal.
(SCI-FI GEEK is a roundup of genre movie news, appearing weekly on Hollywood.com.)
