Criterion Collection

Initially, the idea of a lauded French New Wave auteur teaming up with a Marvel comics personality seems absurd, but from its early days in the 1950s, the cinematic movement had an obsession with American pop-culture – including its directors celebrating Alfred Hitchcock films in Cahiers du Cinéma, Jean Paul Belmondo imitating Humphrey Bogart in Jean-Luc Goddard’s Breathless. Alain Resnais, who became famous for Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Last Year at Mareinbad (1961) and Je t’aime, je t’aime, loved Marvel comics so much that he wrote a fan letter to Stan Lee. They became pen pals, and eventually Resnais travelled to America to meet Lee and stay at his house on Long Island. The friendship between the two creators led to them collaborating on a pair of unrealized film projects. One of them, titled The Inmates, was described by Lee – in the 1970s, in the Marvel fan magazine FOOM – as a philosophical sci-fi meditation about humanity’s place in the universe. “It’s not a far-out science-fiction thing,” he noted. Lee wrote a treatment for the film but it never went past that stage. The other project, however, did become a screenplay. Titled The Monster Maker, it was a socially-conscious creature feature. In video interview recently posted at criterion.com, Lee delves into the project, recalling that the story revolved around a B-movie maker named Larry Morgan, who’s in love with a woman named Catherine Reynolds, but she has her sights set on a respected British auteur filmmaker named Peter Hastings; meanwhile Larry doesn’t notice that his writer, Patricia Hill, is in love with him.  “I started out by basing it on a fellow named Roger Corman, who had done many inexpensive movies that did very well st the box office,” says Lee. “They weren’t intellectual movies; they were low budget, […]