The Screengrab

This Watchmen obsession of ours!  When will it ever end?  Well, March 6th of next years, at which we'll hitch our irrationally high hopes to some other wagon.  But in the meantime, that still leaves us six more months to slavishly pore over every detail that comes down the pike!  (By the way, we won't say this is a Screengrab exclusive or anything, but has anyone noticed the Full Cast and Crew notes for the movie?  Apparently, John McLaughlin, Eleanor Clift, Andy Warhol and Annie Liebowitz are in the movie as characters (thankfully not playing themselves).  Will Rorschach party at the Factory?  Will the Comedian be grilled on his foreign policy expertise on The McLaughlin Group?  We certainly hope so... 

Meanwhile, in the wake of the San Diego ComicCon, almost everyone involved in the movie has been doing publicity interviews.  Collider managed to speak to actors Billy Crudup (who's playing Dr. Manhattan) and Matthew Goode (who's appearing as Ozymandias), and Good is -- surprisingly and pleasingly -- very circumspect about the whole thing.  "We haven't seen the scenes yet," he cautions fans who are going buggy about the trailer; "We haven't seen how people interact, we haven't seen the full flesh of their characters.  And obviously we saw them on set, because of the interations that we had, but I want to see that world; I want to see if it all totally makes sense.  Because sometimes things can get left a little flat.  So let's not start sucking each other off just yet."  Wise words, and the interview also drops hints that the film will remain very true to the book's original ending -- but in the bad news department, Goode also claims his character's outfit has nipples on the suit as part of Zack Snyder's 'homage' to Joel Schumacher's Batman and Robin movie.  This, combined with the use in the trailer for Watchmen of a song from the same film, makes us very nervous; if you want to make the best superhero movie ever made, you want to do as little as possible to remind viewers of the worst.

Collider likewise gets a chance to sit down with Carla Gugino (Silk Spectre), Malin Akerman (Silk Spectre II) and Patrick Wilson (Night Owl), all of whom mention how closely the script adheres to the comic (a situation which is certainly a double-edged sword; stray too far from the original, and fans will eat you alive, but stick to it too closely and many will wonder why you bothered to make a movie).  Akerman notes that when the movie comes out, it will take fans a long time to come to terms with its complexity and density, just as is the case with the book.  "Someone else who's read the novel for 10 years straight now has so many different views and insights.  It'll take me another 10 years to figure out because you have to read it about 20 times to get every single piece, and every single moment because it's so dense.  But I think we can all come out of it and just give you our opinion about how it feels for us and how we can relate to it."

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Frank Miller, writes Kevin Scanlon in The New York Times, "exudes comics cred." This week, Miller will be at the opening of the San Diego Comic-Con International, where comics professionals will be honored with the presentation of the annual Eisner Awards, named for the legendary writer-artist Will Eisner. According to Scanlan, "few outside fandom have any idea" who Eisner-- who died three years ago at the age of 87, though he seemed to have been around for much longer than that and to have been active in his field for most of that time--was, and I will take his word for it, since I've spent most of my life in the company of people, myself not excepted, who were more likely to be able to recite Eisner's bibliography chapter and verse than to know how to add fractions. As the creator of the urban detective strip The Spirit (and, later, one of the first producers of a "graphic novel"), Eisner was always hailed for his "cinematic" style, his way of bringing the mood and feel of an action-packed film noir to the four-color page. So was Miller, when he first made a splash with his own take on the crime comic disguised as a superhero comic, Daredevil. (It was to humor those publishers who thought that a comics hero had to be a costumed crimefighter that Eisner drew two horizontal lines across the Spirit's face and called that a mask.)

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