Crew
Director – David Gelb, Producers – David Gelb, Brian McGinn & Jason Sterman, Photography – Ernesto Lomeli, Music – Michael Dean Parsons & Scott Michael Smith, Miniatures – Fonco Studios, Production Design – T. Hunter McCann. Production Company – Supper Club/Marvel Studios.
With
Stan Lee
Stan Lee needs no introduction as the most influential figure on the 20th Century comic-book and the creator of Marvel Comics and figures like Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk and others. This is a Documentary about Lee’s life. With Lee having passed away in 2018, it is made up of archival film footage of interviews with Lee and occasional audio interviews with other key figures such as Jack Kirby and Joe Simon. In a peculiar move, for the sections where no photographic material exists, such as Lee’s childhood or some of the scenes at the Marvel offices, these have been imagined using static model dioramas.
The film takes us through the life of Lee, who was born as Stanley Lieber in Manhattan in 1922. From there we go to his gaining a job as a general gofer at Timely Comics at the age of seventeen, before quickly being drafted as a writer and then taking over as editor when Kirby and Simon left. Lee proudly talks about how with the coming of World War II, he enlisted and was placed in a division where he was given the assignment of making the courses to train payroll accountants simpler in order to solve a shortage a personnel, which he did by employing comic-books to teach the basics. He tells the amusing story of meeting his wife Joan Booncock and marrying her in 1947 – there is a reasonable amount of film footage of their married life throughout.
The bulk of the show takes us through the creation of iconic Marvel characters like Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, Thor, Iron Man and the X-Men with sections where Lee explains the genesis of each of the characters and his ideas for them. One of the more interesting sections is where he takes us through what he called The Marvel Method where he was being swamped with work and so resorted to story conferences, where his artists went away and drew the story panels and he later went through and filled in the dialogue balloons.
The film is produced by Marvel Studios, the same people behind the MCU, so understandably this is a rosy portrait of Lee. There are never any points it veers away from Lee the man and legend to view him critically. There are other who have done so such as this Vulture article The Stan Lee Myth is Safe – For Now. Certainly, there are some fascinating sections of Lee’s life that the film omits – the battle to take control of his estate and properties towards the end of his life would make a fascinating film in its own right some day.
Perhaps the nearest that Stan Lee comes to being critical of its subject is when it talks about artists like Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby not feeling they received adequate credit for the creation of key characters, but this is brushed over in a way that Lee shrugs and apologises and still comes out looking like an all-round decent guy. This makes interesting contrast to the documentary Batman & Bill (2017) that dealt with the way that artist Bill Finger struggled for years to ensure that he received adequate recognition as the co-creator of Batman after all the credit was claimed by Bob Kane. Given the film’s backing by Marvel Studios, it welcomely does not become a big commercial for MCU films and these are only discussed in a small section near the end.
Director David Gelb had previously made the acclaimed documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011) and then broached fiction with the Blumhouse horror film The Lazarus Effect (2015). He has also made the documentaries A Faster Horse (2015), Wolfgang (2021) and Obi-Wan Kenobi: A Jedi’s Return (2022).
Trailer here