I was happy to have an interview with Marty Langford, a Springfield Massachusetts native who has directed DOOMED: The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s The Fantastic Four. Along with that, Langford has had years of experience in film, as well as being a professor at AIC.
What made you want to make this movie? I know from your background you were a huge superhero fan, but what made you want to get this story out to the public?
Well I’ve known about the story for forever. I had a friend (Mark Sipes) who I worked with in a Comic Book store back in Springfield Massachusetts in the 1980s. He moved out to LA in the 90s and ended up working for Roger Corman. He was involved in the production of The Fantastic Four. We always had talked about what happened, he didn’t know the whole story, nobody knew the whole story. Days and weeks and months and years went by and I was waiting for someone to tell the story. It kind of dawned on us twenty years past that maybe we were the guys to do it.
How did you locate and find all the actors, as well as the people involved behind the scenes with the film?
Yeah that was all Mark, my producer. He is a casting director in LA so it was relatively easy for him. When a casting director in Hollywood calls you, you will pick up the phone, so we were able to land everybody relatively easily. They wanted to tell the story with them throughout their lives having to answer questions about what happened to this movie and why it never came out. They couldn’t wait to tell the story.
How did you originally see the movie?
Gosh, it was probably in the late 90’s. I was at a film convention in New York, the ones that typical focus on horror and genre films. They had a lot of bootlegs and alternate prints. The bootleg for The Fantastic Four leaked, and once it did it was everywhere. The copies that are out there look horrible, and it’s a shame that no one has seen the movie like it was intended.
As a comic book fan, what were your thoughts when promotional material for the The Fantastic Four was being released?
Yeah at the time it was 1993 they were actively marketing the movie. They made movie posters, they released trailers, and they had little promotional items like autographed materials. So it was coming out and we were all anticipating it as comic book fans and then it just ceased as we stopped hearing about it. That’s why the actors and the people involved with the making of it wanted this story to be told because when a movie doesn’t get released the expectation is it’s not very good. That just was not the case with this movie, the movie was fine, it was all the other legal issues surrounding it.
Typically, documentarians will learn something about their material that they did not know beforehand. What did you learn while making the film?
I would say that the fact they still harbored, maybe not anger, but at least bitterness. There is a feeling that this hurt their careers and I found that almost everybody involved saw The Fantastic Four as a stepping stone for their career. When it didn’t happen, they had a period where it negatively impacted their careers, especially the director (Oley Sassone). People thought it was a bad movie, and that it was his fault. He had to spend years overcoming that impression.
Do you want the original copy to be released, or would you rather a remastered copy with all the new CGI involved?
Absolutely, I understand why it wasn’t. From a legal perspective and a corporate perspective, it made sense for them to put in on a shelf. They wanted a bigger and better representation of their property. I got that it would confuse audiences if this little million-dollar movie was hanging out there while 20th Century Fox was making their own grand version. Now, we have so many different universes for comic properties that people get there is different representations of these characters. A little movie like this has a spot and would find an audience.
There has been three major Fantastic Four releases that have come into theaters, with all three disappointing fans. What do you think is the struggling point that the studio and filmmakers are having with the property?
I think what Roger Corman’s film did right was nailing the family dynamic of the Fantastic Four. It is a family story, with those characters being the first family of the Marvel Universe. I think the subsequent movies dealt more with the effects and the large scale of the story, with global catastrophe and special effects moving away from the very smallness of this little family unit. I think that is the strength of where this property lies, is this brother and sister, and they tight little family unit they have.
I agree with that, with the first two in particular always felt like a sitcom with dumb jokes. The new one at least took a different route, trying to focus more on the family aspect but in a darker tone.
I agree, of the three I liked the last one the most. It was the most ambitious, as it tried something different, which I always appreciate. I’d rather a film fail aiming really high then aim low and succeed as a middling type of mainstream effort.
DOOMED: The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s The Fantastic Four is now available on ITunes and VOD outlets. It will be released on DVD and Blu-Ray on December 20th. Here’s our review of the film.