It’s been nearly a quarter century since producer Roger Corman and director Oley Sasson assembled a team of young actors to make a Fantastic Four movie — fast and cheap, to keep the rights in the hands of Constantin Films, who had licensed them from Marvel with the caveat that a movie had to be put into production every so often, or the rights would revert.
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The story has been told and retold over the years, but a definitive narrative of just what happened, who knew, and when in regard to the planned 1995 Fantastic Four movie were never fully explored until last year, when filmmaker Marty Langford put together Doomed!: The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s Fantastic Four, a documentary that brought most of the creative talent from the film back together to share their recollections and marvel (no pun intended) at the film’s long-term impact on fan culture, their careers, and more.
Langford recently joined ComicBook.com for a Q&A about the film, which you can get on DVD and Blu-ray now, or grab a digital copy at most major streaming sites and digital movie retailers. Amazon Prime currently offers the film to members to watch for free.
Something that comes through in this film, that I think was maybe not widely known among fans, is just how much love and passion the cast and crew put into this project. Was it nice to be able to kind of put that part of the story out into the universe?
Marty Langford: Yeah. It’s immensely gratifying. Part of the reason I really wanted to do this was that I did have affection for the movie. I never intended, on any level, to want to bash it, to want to expose people, to necessarily get into kind of the ugly part of the story –although we do.
For the people who were involved in the production of it, they put their hearts and souls into this, and really got shit on. They were robbed of their residuals, they were unable to capitalize on whatever heat that the movie would have given them back then.
As it kind of wasted away, they all recognized that they had lost this opportunity that had been given them, and years later, in 2016, all these guys were still around, and with the exception of Jay Underwood, they’re all still in the industry. They’re all still actively acting, and in the case of Oley, still directing, in the case of Glen, he’s still editing. He’s got a new movie coming out. He has worked on a bunch of Rob Zombie stuff, which is really cool.
To be able to possibly pique interest in them again, and give them this kind of second chance with this documentary, oh my God, it’s incredibly gratifying. The fact that Joseph and Carl, and Rebecca, and Alex are all doing press for this movie, and they’re Q-rating is going up, and I suspect their IMDB star meter or whatever it’s called is also going up. To be able to give that to them is, yeah, gratifying is certainly the word.
Corman’s is the name that’s typically been associated with this film, but Oley in particular is the person who stands out here. Hearing the stories of these clandestine attempts to finish the movie, it seems like like really anybody who watches this movie and doesn’t come away saying they want to support his future work is not getting it.
Langford: Yeah. Absolutely. Oley had, arguably, the most to gain. He’d only done a couple of features that he’d done one for Roger before, Bloodfist I think, with Don the Dragon Wilson, and he had seen these guys he’d kind of grown up with — David Fincher and Michael Bay and these kind of music video director generation — blow up and this was going to be his chance to prove to the world that he could take a million dollars and make maybe not an effects driven movie, but at least a genre movie and kind of pull it off and make it look good.
The tragedy of the whole thing is that nobody really has ever seen what the movie looks like and what Oley was able to do with it. All that exists is the original trailer that was actually a really good transfer was done from the 35mm film, color correct and tweaked, and the movie is amazing to look at in the context of what that trailer shows could have been, but the movie never made it that far.
It kind of died before they were able to strike those prints and go through that final color correction and have a copy of it. It only exists in 3/4″ telesync layoff that doesn’t look like it should.
You kind of touch on this in the documentary, in some ways it seems the film almost has more of an audience now than it would have had had it gotten like a standard Roger Corman-size release.
Langford: Yeah, absolutely. All you have to do is to look at the Albert Pyun Captain America movie or the Mark Goldblatt/Boaz Yakin Punisher movie. It would exist exactly where those are now. They would have this beloved little cult and it would be a novelty, but the principals may have made a little more money, but it would not exist kind of like it does now in the pantheon of geek culture.
There are elements of this that feel very much like Lundgren’s Punisher — which is that whatever else is wrong with it, there are fleeting moments where it feels like the truest adaptation of the character we’ve seen yet. Fantastic Four has elements of that.
Langford: It does, it has a bunch of those moments, it has a number of those moments that just felt like … I mean, literally like it was lifted off a panel of a Stan Lee and Kirby comic. That was wholly intentional. Glen, the editor, and Oley, the director, they studied these books. You do these interviews with people nowadays who talk about familiarizing themselves with the comic, but I don’t think they really do, quite frankly, because they don’t have that correlation, it doesn’t seem like they have much to do with the original comics.
It is this idealized version of it, or this stylized, I guess is a better word, version of it, but not an accurate portrayal of the comic book panels. I mean the result is that there is a level of camp and there is a level of lack of sophistication maybe, but that is what a comic book is, at least that is what a comic book was. I think.
Other than cutting back to footage and showing some cool documents, it is very much just interviews, what was the hardest part of kind of wrangling Doomed! together?
Langford: The hardest part, I mean without a doubt, was getting legal clearance for the use of the movie. One of the biggest hurdles that we had was like the music cues that David and Eric Wurst, orchestral score that was featured, and because there is something called the fair use doctrine that allows documentary filmmakers to use clips from movies and TV and things that are not in the public domain, there are still restrictions placed upon them, but we are in this unique position of this movie never having been legally released, so there was this kind of overriding question of what is the legal precedent for using parts of this movie?
The legal process was probably close to a year of just me outputting every image and every frame from every clip and giving them to the lawyers and having the lawyers kind of tick them off one by one saying what is the attribute for this, where did you get this, how was this originated? Did you have permission?
Every single one I had to say, yeah, permission of this person or possession of that person. We were able to get a lot of stuff Carl [Ciarfalio, a stuntman who played The Thing], God bless him, had videotaped with his little camcorder back in ’93, some behind the scenes stuff of the suit that we used, which was nice to have. Chris Gore gave us copies of the storyboards which we used, and Jay and Rebecca saved all of their call sheets and contracts, so to have access to that stuff was just so invaluable.
Yeah, that legal process was awful and it extended the whole post-production of this movie for an extra year, which was already kind of an eighteen-month process. I mean I cut this thing all by myself, like 90 hours of interview footage to go through, and it was just…it was traumatic.
The rallying cry at the end of this movie was this idea that this film deserves a release. Do you think that there is a practical way to release it? Do you believe, yourself, that the prints were actually destroyed, or do you think that somehow there is a version of this out there that is in releasable quality?
Langford: Yeah, I absolutely believe that the negative exists. I don’t believe Avi Arad’s claims that he burned it. There is a question as to who ultimately owns the rights because you have so many possible claimants. Corman is kind of out of the picture; Corman had, through his own statements and through the legal contracts, signed away everything when he accepted a check from Constantin films that was part of their kind of escape clause in the contract. But you have 20th Century Fox, who were the ones that Constantin was courting as the time was running out on the option.
You have Marvel studios, as they are called now, and then ultimately you have Constantin Films, which is kind of, in my opinion, the biggest player in this, and as to the kind of possibility of then kind of agreeing and helping to facilitate a release of the original film? I doubt it.
I mean, we had a trailer that we originally posted about a year ago put up, and it was so frustrating because we had close to a half a million views on it, we had four hundred and seventy-two thousand views in one day. I woke up to go check the total and it had been removed through a copyright violation through Constantin films.
I mean they are clearly aware of it, and we reached out to them countless times during production for even just a “no comment,” but we just had nothing but silence. At least when we reached out to Stan Lee, at least he acknowledged us and said no, Marvel acknowledged us and said no, but Constantin, I just see them holed up in this little evil dark part of Germany, biding their time and trying to sink us, but they haven’t been able to yet.
That is something, you talked about how you don’t really get into the dark underbelly of it so much, but you do … I mean there are certainly folks who don’t come off looking great in this film. Certain fans even take umbrage to the way Stan looks just in the trailer.
Langford: Yes. Stan … there was a short period of time, days or maybe a week, where we were setting up to interview him. We were arranging to meet him at Denver Comic Con and arrangements were being made. At the last minute he pulled out, and it was awful and it was unfortunate, but ultimately quite frankly, Stan Lee had so little to do with any of this. Stan Lee is, at this point he is just kind of this figurehead and even at the time, it is not as though he was an active player in negotiations.
He is a brand, and the thing about Stan is that he decided shortly after production to short of distance himself from it, because I think he recognized that this isn’t going to help the brand. He, like Constantin, wanted this 20th Century Fox version to come out. It took them over ten years to finally get it out, and when they finally got it out it was no great shakes, but Stan, you know, at the time he was very happy when he visited the set, as we say, thrilled that another movie was coming out, another Marvel product that he co-created.
Once he recognized that this movie could stand in the way of bigger, better version of it, he just turned his back on it and started dissing it. We have a clip on the movie of him at a comic convention talking about it and like Michael Bailey Smith said [in the film], it hurt these guys when he did that.
It is not like I intended to portray him badly, That is just the role he played in the narrative. I wasn’t trying to make him look like a dick, he just kind of, you know, looks like one.
It is pretty clear that Oley and anyone below him had no idea that this whole thing was going to be tanked from the get go, but from watching the film and listening to the interviews, it’s still hard to one hundred percent tell at what point Roger became aware of that.
Langford: Right. Part of that was the interview with Roger that we had…he was this grandfatherly, kindly, guy. The interview was wonderful, but he wouldn’t answer a lot of the hard questions.
Part of it I think was just that he still has a relationship with Constantin films, Bernd Eichinger — the guy who used to run it who had passed away — but he still has a relationship I think with his wife, and Roger has just written this off years and years ago and just didn’t want to become involved or say anything that would at all come off as revealing or incendiary.
With the lack of communication that we had with Constantin, the one company that would be able to give us these firm answers, and of course we didn’t get that, and the one guy who would be able to give us definitively these answers, Bernd Eichinger wasn’t around to do so, it is just that the sources who either we did talk to or that we were unable to talk to where the ones that would have to give us those answers. We just had to come away with some speculation.
