00:10It's been one of the great teams in Marvel for a reason.
00:13You know, when you start these projects, you start doing your research.
00:16And as part of that homework, we did go back and look at the Corman Fantastic Four version.
00:21We watched it. We got excited about it.
00:24And, you know, Matt came into my office one day while we were prepping.
00:27He said, you know, it'd be really great to honor them somehow.
00:29We got to get them in this movie.
00:31And then shortly thereafter, Kevin and I were chatting.
00:33I said, hey, Matt's got this idea about getting the original Fantastic Four in this movie.
00:37What do you think?
00:38And he said, oh, man, that's the coolest ever.
00:40And from that day forward, we were just honestly looking for the right opportunity.
00:43And we found it. They came in.
00:45That was one of my favorite days on set.
00:47And you just saw the light in their eyes.
00:49This is Sue Storm, and I used to meet Reed Richards, Johnny Storm, and Bette Groom.
00:56The basic backstory is there was a film producer by the name of Bernd Eichinger.
01:05And Bernd had the rights, apart from Marvel, for the Fantastic Four.
01:09And he was going to lose the rights unless he went into production by a certain date.
01:12So he goes to Roger Corman and says, hey, I want to make this movie.
01:15Can you make this movie and make it right now and make it cheap?
01:17And Roger says, sure.
01:18We put together this million-dollar movie, which for Corman was actually probably a very big budget at the time.
01:24But certainly not a budget that you need for a movie like the Fantastic Four.
01:27They did a lot of things right in that movie.
01:29And I've had a conversation with all four of them.
01:31One of the things I think they did extremely well was the character relationships.
01:35It holds up.
01:36And, you know, not every special effect on any movie holds up over time.
01:39But those were very real relationships that when we did our homework and we looked at the movie early on, we took note.
01:45The phrase happy accident can come to mind to answer the question of why was the casting so good, especially under the gun in a situation that sort of needed to fit right away.
01:57The fact that we were given these roles relatively easily because they were under the gun allowed us to either trust ourselves or not.
02:03And part of the reluctant superhero dynamic of the dysfunctional Fantastic Four are embodied in the way the four of us worked with each other.
02:12Everybody was so close to those characters.
02:14I'm the big, strong, protecting guy, right?
02:17Kind of innocent and kind of humble.
02:19And that's how Ben Grimm is.
02:21Reed Richards, Alex, is a natural leader.
02:23Johnny Storm, as you know, is just a bubbly, fiery dude.
02:27And Rebecca's always been a little shy, right?
02:30Reserved.
02:31And that's the invisible woman.
02:32So we just did ourselves.
02:33We all knew that we were working on the Fantastic Four, Marvel's flagship comic book.
02:39And so we all took it very seriously.
02:42And Ole Cecil and the director got us all together for a pep talk right before we started shooting.
02:47And he said, gang, we know what we're doing.
02:49We know what we're up against, not having enough money for the effects that it needs to have.
02:54So let's focus on what we have control over.
02:57And he says, I'm going to do my best as a director.
02:59I want you all as actors to do your best.
03:02I want you to take this seriously, develop the characters.
03:04And he said, let's work really hard at recreating the comic onto the screen.
03:09We were trying to be true to the comic book because we knew the audience.
03:13Like, we owed it to the audience.
03:15You go, they know this better than we do.
03:17So we better be accurate.
03:19And so we didn't even set out to go, oh, it's a period piece.
03:22You just go, well, it looks like this because that's what it looked like in the comic book.
03:26And so it gave it a little kind of timelessness just organically.
03:33We were filming at Roger's Studio, which is this dilapidated warehouse in Venice Beach, California.
03:39And rats and cockroaches and the place should have been condemned years before, you know.
03:44It's like being in the trenches of a war kind of thing.
03:47There was like one room where we would either hang out or change clothes if I had to change.
03:52And then when it was just bare bones, all of the wardrobe that I wearing,
03:55in the movies, my own clothes, I think everybody's wearing their own clothes.
03:59Like the only real wardrobe were the blue suits and my wedding dress.
04:03And so when we got the suits the very first time and I put them on,
04:07you can actually see the hand stitching, like where the blue and the white is.
04:11And I said to the costume designer, he's like, you can see the stitching.
04:14And he's like, that's okay, because Sue made them.
04:16That's all we had to go with.
04:18I get there. I said, so I'm in the suit, right?
04:20And they go, uh, no, it takes six months to build this suit.
04:24And this has already been done by optic nerve was who did it.
04:27So they had to hire a stunt guy named Carl Cifaglio.
04:30I was so destroyed and disappointed because that's the good part.
04:34So what I did is I was on the set every day he was on the set.
04:38And I made sure that we worked together as a good stunt guy would do it,
04:42make sure that he mimics what the actor is going to do.
04:45Then when ADR came in, I voiced everything and it's clobbering time.
04:50We knew that this could also be a calling card for all of us, right?
04:54This could put us on the maps in terms of boosting a career kind of thing.
04:58And so, uh, we took it seriously.
05:00Our whole passion with doing this was that we would get to do another one.
05:04It's like, if we do this good enough, you know,
05:06then next time we'll get the money and then we can do two.
05:09And we kind of had it all planned out.
05:10We went into production. We finished the movie.
05:13We were looking forward to it actually coming out.
05:16There was a premiere that was scheduled at the Mall of America.
05:19The comic world knew about the movie.
05:21We had done comic cons and conventions already at this point.
05:26After that trailer played at the Shrine Auditorium,
05:30Alex looks at me and he says,
05:32Michael, we've got to do something.
05:34You know, in that Alex voice.
05:36And I go, what do we do?
05:37He goes, we're going to hire a publicist.
05:38And I know somebody.
05:39And so I ended up paying for the publicist,
05:40about 15 grand in my own pocket.
05:42And we went around the country promoting this.
05:44There's an old actor's thing.
05:46You have to go out and find your audience.
05:48We would go to little comic conventions.
05:50There was no such thing as big comic conventions.
05:52I think we went to one of the original San Diego comic cons,
05:55which was in a hotel.
05:56And we would show the trailer and we would sign pictures.
05:59We were on, like, Hollywood Reporter, a film thread,
06:02all these different things.
06:03Just crazy.
06:04And then we promoted.
06:05We said, screw it.
06:06We're going to keep going.
06:07We're going to keep going.
06:08And we did.
06:09And then come, like, I think it was either end of November or December,
06:12Oli called us and said, hey, we need to stop.
06:14The rights have been sold.
06:16The plug got pulled.
06:18It disappeared.
06:19And then that's what's then become just Hollywood lore for these last 30 years.
06:25It really makes me emotional because it was a real effort of love and fun.
06:30Films get shelved every day.
06:32We all know that.
06:33But not the way ours did.
06:34You know?
06:35And that really hurt us.
06:40Maybe 10 years later, the internet magnified all of that.
06:44So we were like a little fungus that grew into a big mushroom, you know?
06:47If they had just done it by the contract and, okay, now it's January 1st,
06:50we got some stuff in the can, thanks, and go home,
06:53there never would have been a movie.
06:55And I have to say, one time we were at a Comic Con in St. Louis,
06:58and they actually showed it in one of the ballrooms.
07:02The sound is incredible.
07:05And the music, and by that time, you know, the things that were kind of cheesy
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