51: Hudsucker's Legacy Pt 1: Spider-Man
In 2001 Sam Raimi was a perfectly respectable film director. He made movies that people paid money to see and made their budgets back at the box office and took in a profit internationally and in the home video market. Critics weren’t ga-ga over him, but they didn’t hate him either. Outside of his cult classic Evil Dead trilogy, his films were enjoyable but unremarkable, the kinds of things one might catch on basic cable at 1:00 PM and watch while folding laundry. One can imagine a universe in which he continued on that path and had a career like that of, say, Michael Lehmann, a director who had a cult hit out of the gate (in Lehmann’s case the dark comedy Heathers) and used that clout to continue to make acceptable films for a decent paycheck for the remainder of his career. These directors leave the world the moderately richer for the existence of art like Airheads and A Simple Plan and whatnot, but will not be household names in the way that Martin Scorsese or Stanley Kubrick are. This, however, is not what happened to Sam Raimi as the 21st century dawned. Instead he helped create the template for what blockbuster movies became for the next twenty years, and he used his experience working on The Hudsucker Proxy to do it.
Superhero comic books have been popular for the entirety of their existence. Since May of 1938 when the first issue of Action Comics debuted with Superman lifting a car over his head, humans have loved looking at pictures of people in tights doing extraordinary things. Their popularity was immediately translated into other media, but for a long time a little bit of the shine of superheroes came off every time they were taken off the page and put onto the screen. Superman’s radio plays of the 1940s, television series of the 1950s, and films of the 1970s were popular, but they were popular because the Superman comics were popular, largely not because they were compelling art in and of themselves. Batman of course has had a notable history on the screen, but in his first 61 years of existence the majority of his film and TV appearances were more about camp than about compelling storytelling and exciting action sequences.
Marvel, the other titan of American superhero comics had an even worse track record for film adaptations in the first 60 years of its existence. Despite creating wildly popular characters such as Captain America, The Fantastic Four, and Iron Man, Marvel Comics had exactly two films with wide theatrical distribution based on its characters in the 20th century: Blade (1998) and Howard The Duck (1986). For decades, despite the fact that they sold millions of comic books and created iconic characters that loomed large in the public’s imagination, Marvel adaptations for the screen were doomed to failure and development hell. CBS had created a successful adaptation of The Incredible Hulk for television, but the showrunner Kenneth Johnson had specifically changed the main character’s name from Bruce to David in order to distance the show from the comic (he had also wished to change the Hulk’s distinctive coloration from green to red, but this was a bridge too far for the character’s creator Stan Lee). CBS also had attempted to adapt Spider-Man for television, but its attempt only lasted one 13 episode season. The most successful live-action adaptation of Marvel’s web-slinger was a 41 episode run of a Spider-Man show created by the Japanese entertainment company Toei in which motocross racer Takuya Yamashiro fights the evil alien group the Iron-Cross Army as Spider-Man in his giant robot Leopardon.
After 60 years of the company’s existence and success, Marvel had its first successful adaptation of its flagship non-duck/vampire characters to the screen with 2000’s X-Men. Bryan Singer’s adaptation of the comics was certainly a successful and quality action film, but even if it gave the world Hugh Jackman the movie star and gave Sir Patrick Stewart a second iconic role to the nerds of the world, Singer felt the need in his adaptation to provide some distance from its source material. The characters were well written and clearly based on the comics, but the visual language of the film mutes Kirby and Lee’s bright colors and distinctive costuming. For devotees of the comics, it felt like X-Men despite not looking like it.
2000’s X-Men was a success, but it remained the exception that proved the rule. Marvel properties were not safe investments in the film world. Ironically though it wasn’t for lack of trying. There had been attempts to make an X-Men movie since the 1980s. There had been attempts to make a Spider-Man film since Roger Corman had optioned it in the late 1970s. The history of one of Marvel’s most successful comics —The Fantastic Four— as a film property is so fraught that at one point in 1994 a film was made and never released explicitly so that rightsholder Bernd Eichinger could hold onto his film options for another few years as he attempted to cobble together a better film. When Sam Raimi got the gig to direct a film based on Spider-Man at the turn of the 21st century, it was in no way a guaranteed success. In fact, to all involved, it looked like it was likely going to be another Sam Raimi movie, something that would respectably make its budget back and make a modest profit based on its box office receipts in Brazil and ad revenue from stoners watching it at 2:00 PM on the USA network.
This, of course, is not what happened. Spider-Man was a massive phenomenon. It made $825 million at the box office. It was the most financially successful superhero movie of all time. Had 2002 not been a gangbuster year for popcorn movies (The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets both came out the same year and did better numbers) it likely could have been the highest grossing film that year. It did better than a Star Wars movie for Pete’s sake. It spawned two direct sequels and two reboots. More than anything else, Raimi’s Spider-Man both looked and felt like the Spider-Man comics that its fans had grown up reading but was also a compelling film on its own merits. Spider-Man’s suit was the bright red and blue it had always been. The Green Goblin was admittedly altered from his Spirit Halloween looking 60s costume to a more armored look, but Raimi was unafraid of having his helmet being unabashedly goblin-shaped and incredibly green. Spider-Man was both tragically chased by his own demons and also a friendly wise-cracker. He spins a web (any size!) and catches villains just like flies. More than that though, it was also a compelling movie. People who didn’t give a crap about the legacy of Stan Lee or the finer points of Gwen Stacy vs Mary Jane Watson could still arrive at the movie theater with $10 and walk away two hours later thoroughly entertained.
The road to getting 2002’s Spider-Man made is a long and circuitous one. Raimi did not write the script, but as the director he helped multiple writers hew the story into what it became. This could have been a recipe for disaster however, because Sam Raimi is no master of storytelling. Raimi’s The Evil Dead and its sequel Evil Dead 2 have stories that can be described in a sentence. I have seen The Quick and the Dead at least three times and enjoyed it each time but outside of the fact that Gene Hackman and Sharon Stone are gunfighters in the old west I could not tell you a single thing about what happens in the film. A Simple Plan is an atmospheric thriller that’s vaguely reminiscent of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and For the Love of the Game is definitely about baseball, but neither have anything to recommend them as far as unique or compelling plotting is concerned. Spider-Man had the beginnings of a story. It was based on a 45 page “Scriptment” containing some dialog and story beats originally written by the master of blockbuster bombast James Cameron that contained Spider-Man’s origin story. An abortive rewrite of the “scriptment” by James Fincher incorporated story beats from the comic book story arc “The Night Gwen Stacy Died”, notably incorporating Norman Osborne as the Green Goblin threatening the life of Spidey’s lady love on the George Washington Bridge, and the death of Norman Osborne by Spider-Man dodging an attack that instead impales him. Between these beats the story had a skeleton, but it didn’t have any connective tissue. This is where, I suspect, that Raimi reached into his past and thought about the last time he worked on a film about a young man in Manhattan thrust into a position of great power that he awkwardly attempts to use to make the world a better place: The Hudsucker Proxy.
Outside of being awkward young men unexpectedly thrust into positions of power in New York, Norville Barnes and Sam Raimi’s conception of Peter Parker have little in common. The closest the two ever get in their stories is a 1st act moment when they catch their future lady loves and protect them from falling at lunchtime.
However two members of the supporting cast however have undeniable connections to Raimi’s antecedents in The Hudsucker Proxy: Daily Bugle editor J. Jonah Jamison and the villainous arms dealer Norman Osborne.
J. Jonah Jamison was created as a character by Stan Lee as a strange kind of autobiographical self-insert. He was on the record as saying that Jamison was created as a much grumpier version of himself, and later Spider-Man writers agreed with the assessment. Jamison and Lee share a number of visual characteristics: a toothbrush mustache, salt and pepper hair, and a love of cigars. It’s a bit unusual for someone with as much of a reputation for self-aggrandizement as Stan Lee to admit that this character is based on himself given that J. Jonah Jamison is unquestionably an asshole. From moment one in the Spider-Man comics, Jamison is convinced that Spider-Man is a “menace” and is prepared to leverage all his power as the editor in chief of the Manhattan Daily Bugle to convince his fellow New Yorkers of this. The great irony of course being that his star photographer who’s excellent at getting those Spider-Man photos is none other than Peter Parker, the Spider-Man himself. The nature of comics however precludes there being any kind of notions of vocal tone or pacing in how any character’s dialog is to be delivered. For the film version of Jamison to be successful he needs to have a mustache and a flat top and be suspicious of Spider-Man’s motives. Everything else about the character is up for grabs. In Raimi’s Spider-Man, American treasure JK Simmons runs his newsroom almost identically to Hudsucker’s Manhattan Argus. He is simultaneously demanding the next-to-impossible of his employees and upset with them when they don’t measure up. His demeanor is as gruff as John Mahoney’s Argus chief and shares a love of pounding his desk with him.
At the same time, he’s constantly got several trains of thought going at the same time, shouting orders to multiple subordinates, the person he’s on the phone with, and poor Peter Parker all at the same time. It recalls deeply the scene in Hudsucker when Amy Archer is recounting her afternoon to Smitty, typing her story, placating her boss on the phone, and helping the crossword editor at the same time. Jamison’s frenetic pace could be attributed to a love of the same old movies that inspired Hudsucker like Mr. Deeds Goes To Town and His Girl Friday, but given that Sam Raimi was directly involved in the creative process for The Hudsucker Proxy, it’s difficult to say that his experience writing and as a second unit director on that film didn’t inform his decision making with how to direct the scenes at The Daily Bugle. Through the Daily Bugle story arc, Raimi was able to crib another story beat from Hudsucker, that of the press and thus the people of New York quickly falling in love and out of love with this new public figure. Just as with the laughter montage in Hudsucker where story beats were punctuated with headlines about Norville Barnes, Hudsucker Industries’ hot new Idea Man, there’s a montage in Spider-Man of the web-slinger catching all kinds of petty criminals, punctuated with both newspaper headlines and man-on-the-street TV news style interviews with various New Yorkers reacting positively to him*** (and, just as in Hudsucker this montage leads directly into the first newsroom scene). A short while later though the press immediately turns on him as the Bugle’s staff gets caught in the crossfire of the fight between the Goblin and Spidey, just as the Argus in Hudsucker buys Sidney Musburger’s whopper hook, line, and sinker about Norville stealing the hoop.
The whiplash-quick turnaround of the public’s opinion is an effective plot device that builds sympathy for our hero, be he Norville Barnes or Peter Parker.
The other bit of connective tissue Raimi borrowed from Hudsucker is various aspects of Sidney Musburger and the corrupt Hudsucker Industries board in the character Norman Osborn. Norman Osborn in the comics was given little reason as to why he should turn to a life of supervillainy beyond being exposed to a super-serum that drove him crazy. Willem Dafoe’s Osborn however is driven to supervillainy by his desire to protect his investments, much as with Musburger “protecting” Hudsucker Industries. Oscorp admittedly sits in a brutalist industrial park rather than an art deco skyscraper like Hudsucker Industries HQ, but the two share a kind of towering ominous unknowability in their establishing shots.
Oscorp, unlike Hudsucker Industries has an established focus of their business, they’re an arms corporation. Much like Hudsucker however, the board is in crisis mode. Despite both companies’ balance sheets looking spectacular, they face a threat from a hostile takeover. In Hudsucker’s case, it comes from the company’s by-laws allowing any smelly slob in a t-shirt to be able to buy Waring Hudsucker’s majority share, while in Oscorp’s case it’s because the company’s contract with the US government is quickly running out and the joint chiefs of staff are quite unhappy with a lack of new products coming from Oscorp’s advanced weapons division. Two scenes set in the respective company’s boardrooms are virtually identical, where both companies leaders both brag about how loaded they are and also learn about how close they are to losing their positions of power.
The corporate drama provides Norman Osborn with the motivation to take the drastic step of testing his super-serum on himself, with the unfortunate side effect of becoming a super-villain in the process. Raimi also used Osborn as a means of reusing a couple of minor moments from Hudsucker. He apparently greatly enjoys the rhetorical alliteration of the words “fail” and “fall” and the unnecessary exploding of a person in a corporate R&D setting, as they repeat in both films.
Is it a stretch then to say that Spider-Man wouldn't have been what it was without Raimi’s experience in making The Hudsucker Proxy? Yes, yes it is. Even I cannot claim that. However, what is in no way an embellishment is that the success of Spider-Man caused movie studios to sit up and take note. They realized that a film that’s unabashedly a comic book movie, one that leans into the bright colors and broad strokes of the comic book world could succeed because of how comic-book-esque it was rather than despite it. Before too long Marvel comics spun off its own film division so that it could capitalize on its own IP and gave us the extended Marvel Cinematic Universe, one of the most successful film franchises of all time. In 2000 it was difficult to get a film made based on one of Marvel’s flagship characters. By 2020 we’ve run through so much of Marvel’s catalog that we’ve had two movies where the main character is Ant-Man. Raimi’s vision of Spider-Man provided a roadmap for how to create an unabashedly comic-book-y movie. While he only grabbed a few specific aspects of it from this essay series’ subject, it's doubtless true that both Hudsucker and Spider-Man operate in a big and broad comic world that doesn’t even remotely strive for realism in its quest for entertainment. Raimi had previously made a comic-book-y movie based loosely on Batman and the radio-drama hero The Shadow called Darkman. It was okay. It obviously suffered at the box office from not having a built-in well-known hero to draw in an audience, but it also simply isn’t as good a movie as Spider-Man is. Darkman was made before The Hudsucker Proxy. Spider-Man was made after it. It might be a stretch, but some part of me believes that working on the Coens’ screwball comedy informed Raimi’s method of how he made Spider-Man and thus the template for all super-hero movies since. Love it or hate it, we might not have had Avengers: Endgame without The Hudsucker Proxy.