Lee says 'Excelsior!' to SPIDER-MAN rough cut

By: MICHAEL TUNISON
Date: Tuesday, March 12, 2002

Spider-Man nuts around the world still have two long months to wait before their favorite wall-crawler officially arrives on the big screen in May, but one famous fan of ol' Webhead is already giving director Sam Raimi's take on the character the thumbs-up.

"Boy,

it looked great to me," says Spidey creator Stan "The Man" Lee, who recently viewed a rough cut of Raimi's feverishly anticipated film. "It's Spider-Man all right."

At heart, the movie version of Spider-Man retains the same essence he did when Lee first introduced him to readers in AMAZING FANTASY # 15 in 1962, the Marvel Comics legend tells CINESCAPE.

"As far as his personality, it's incredibly close," Lee says. "I mean, Peter Parker is somewhat shy. He's not incredibly popular with the other kids. We have Aunt May; we have Uncle Ben, who dies. I thought the scene with J. Jonah Jameson is really funny."

Together with the blockbuster 2000 movie adaptation of Lee's X-MEN and high-profile upcoming screen versions of his THE HULK and DAREDEVIL, the SPIDER-MAN film represents the fruition of a longtime dream for the pioneering writer, editor and publisher, who tried without success for years to get the top Marvel heroes the same A-list celluloid treatment rival DC Comics' Superman and Batman have received. Now, the sudden rush of big-budget films based on his brainchildren is a bit overwhelming, the 79-year-old Lee admits.

"It's hard

for me to grasp the whole thing," he says. "First of all BLADE was quite a hit, and that felt good. I hadn't created Blade, but it was good because it was a Marvel character. Then, of course, X-MEN was a big, big hit, and that was the first one of characters I had done. That felt wonderful, and now I think SPIDER-MAN will be as big or bigger. And then we have THE HULK and DAREDEVIL and some of the others coming down the pike."

While Marvel heroes appear to be on a hot streak in Hollywood, Lee is the first to admit that previous attempts to bring characters such as Captain America and the Punisher to the big screen were disappointing.

"[The filmmakers] did their best, but they were low-budget movies, and they couldn't do much with them," he says. "But now for the first time, starting with BLADE and X-MEN and SPIDER-MAN, these are being treated like very important properties. They're big-budget movies that's why they have to be good."

The long struggle to bring his creations to the big screen makes Lee glad he started out in comics, a medium in which creative ideas tend to flow more freely than in vastly more-expensive-to-produce studio films at least if you're Stan Lee.

"I always

enjoyed doing comics, because I always had a great sense of freedom," he says. "I mean, I was in an unusual position. I was the head writer, the editor and the art director, so I could really do anything I wanted as long as the publisher approved. And once we had succeeded with THE FANTASTIC FOUR, THE X-MEN, SPIDER-MAN and THE HULK, he pretty much gave me free rein to do whatever I wanted. And then later on, in 1970, I became the publisher, so I was always in a position, pretty much, to do what I wanted. And I didn't realize then how lucky I was, because I would just come up with an idea for something, write it, get the best artist that I could find to do it, and we had ourselves a book."

In retrospect, of course, it boggles the mind to think that Lee created some of the most popular heroes in modern comics history practically one after the other. Looking back, "The Man" seems a bit amazed at the idea himself.

"I don't know what it was - something special in the air at that time but for a period in the early '60s it was like we could do nothing wrong," he says. "Everything that we turned out became a lasting hit."