by Nancy Jundi as originally published by CinemaEditor Magazine
Being a fan-girl is, to many, a branding best avoided. Images of campouts in front of a movie theater, and nerds lined up every Wednesday for new comics, jump to mind for most non-believers. I bear no shame. I wear my fan-girl badge with pride. Hold no doubt that I am the hardest of hard core – I saw the first Spider-Man 18 times in the theater. To say my love runs deep is an understatement. Today it’s almost difficult to imagine a time when comics were on their way out, but there was a time when sales had dropped and they simply weren’t a part of Americana anymore. Prices went through the roof and I was devastated by the cancellations of “WHAT IF?” and “THE WEST COAST AVENGERS”. There was a sincere departure from the romance I knew growing up – where baseball players, politicians and comic book heroes all rested on the same untouchable plateau as Indiana Jones and Chief Brody. The baseball strike left fans angry at greedy players, the Gulf War consumed us… and Christopher Reeve had long forgotten his blue tights. Comic books weren’t anything anyone cared about anymore. Some may argue that Tim Burton gave us a good Batman run and pushed a mini spike in the sales, but that came crashing down a few short years later with his and Michael Keaton’s departure from the franchise. In what felt like the blink of the eye, it came to be that twenty and thirty-something men were the target market for web slingers and building leapers. The kids got left behind in the wake of price spikes and ever changing times – it was the grown men that had spent decades investing in the “hobby,” financially and emotionally, which kept the dwindling market alive. Lucky for you and me, one of those men was Sam Raimi.
Bob Murawski, who has edited all three Spider-Man films, was kind enough to indulge my never ending battery of questions. He and Raimi have been working non-stop to finish the film for its May 4th release, so there was a part of me that didn’t want him to sacrifice any time away from the film for this article, but I’m delighted that he did. If for no other reason, I needed to thank two men who went out of their way to not only bring the romance of comics back, but to widen the audience and show that these characters can be done justice on the big screen. “There was a huge responsibility to keep things as true to the original series as possible” said Murawski. “As a fan of the original comics, it was always Sam’s goal to do right by the fans and the early writers. He was very conscious of that at every phase of each film.” With that being said, Murawski still steers clear of the fan rumblings. “The work is so intense and nonstop that there isn’t any time to look at the internet or magazine buzz. I’d probably just get mad if I did, anyway.” After two wildly successful films, you’d think some of the pressure would go away, but it isn’t so. “There is more pressure than ever” he said. “We have such high expectations from the fans. The first two movies were so loved that there is the added pressure of surpassing those expectations with each film, making it better than the one before.” He’s right. My affection for the first two films is so sincere that I’m half expecting to receive a gold brick on my way into the theater as a bribe. That doesn’t much trouble Bob, though. “Being aware of it still never affects my work. I always work as hard as I can and fight to make the project the best it can be. It’s terribly important for me to finish every job knowing that I’ve done everything I could to make something as close to perfect as possible, right down to the smallest detail. Sam has the same attitude, as do most of the people who have worked on these films.”
Editing since he was a kid in Michigan, Murawski was already splicing together his own home movies on 8mm by age twelve. “I always liked the process of cutting the roll into shots and making a story out of what was there. I had to ‘get rid of the bad stuff.’” Growing up, he was a bigger fan of horror comics like “TALES FROM THE TOMB” and “HOUSE OF MYSTERY.” “I think the only time I bought a Spider-Man comic is when he fought Marvel’s Dracula.” However, he did prepare for the films by picking up a number of the comics. “I felt it was really important to read the original comics, so I bought the “AMAZING SPIDER-MAN” comic book compilations by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Those were the classic first issues that I knew Sam was basing the characters on. I really wanted to get a clear understanding of the character of Peter Parker, as well as the villains like Green Goblin, Doc Ock and Sandman. Sam’s goal was always to stay as close as possible to the original comics so it was important for me to know what those characters were all about.”
Murawski signed on to edit all three pictures in large part to his familiarity with Raimi. “Doing a movie this size is such an overwhelmingly nightmarish commitment that my decision to do all three was definitely based on knowing Sam as a director. Being aware of his dedication to perfection at every level, I was comfortable that each film would be great, or at least everyone would work as hard as they could to try to make it so.” His pairing with director Sam Raimi, which audiences first benefited from in 1992, was with Evil Dead, part of the Army of Darkness series. There’s an overwhelming respect that information brings. Two men with the ‘street cred’ of such incredibly low budget, independent features now working on a trilogy with gargantuan budgets inspires a bit of faith. For fans like me, that was a key piece of the puzzle. We could rest assured that these people would take their time to get it right – throwing around money just because you can often leads to disaster. “Money is always an issue, even on a picture as big as this” said Murawski.
In addition to his work during production and post, Murawski is brought in during pre-production to aid in the budgeting process. “I actually start work months before the movie starts. Sam storyboards most of the scenes and does comprehensive animatics for all the action sequences. We officially started principal photography in January of 2006, but I began 4 months earlier in August of 2005. At that point, Sam already had a staff of artists and animators working for almost a year, blocking out shots for a handful of big action sequences. I started working with that material, cutting them into continuous scenes like I would with film dailies, adding sound effects and music to make them flow like a real scene. Sam could then look at these cuts and decide if we needed other shots to make the story flow better. The artists would come up with these new shots and I’d incorporate them. The edited animatics were important in figuring out a budget well before a scene was shot. Usually we were way over budget with the first incarnation of any given scene. Sam would challenge me to figure out a way to cut the sequence down, bringing it down from 140 effects shots to 90 since that’s all we could afford, while still preserving the essence of the scene. Once the animatics were complete, they were used as templates for pre-production planning and then shooting. I would continue to use these cuts all through the shoot, updating them with live action elements when they were shot. In this way, we always had an evolving version of the scene that became more and more complete as the shoot progressed. I also read early drafts of the script and tried to get my opinion in whenever I could.”
On the first picture, Murawski teamed with Arthur Coburn, A.C.E., to handle the enormous amount of footage, but flew solo on the second and third pictures. “Of course there is a large amount of material on a movie like this, but for me, having a good deal of coverage makes my job easier since I am more likely to have exactly what I need to build the performances of the actors and to make the action flow perfectly. It’s much tougher to cut a scene when there is not enough coverage. Being the sole editor on a feature has its benefits. I can work through all the material myself and hopefully unify it into a complete movie. There can be creative conflicts in a multiple editor situation and sometimes the movie suffers for it.”
The intricacies of this franchise escape most fans. Raimi’s perfectionism extends to a multitude of degrees. He always wears a suit to the set – Murawski has never seen him in anything else. Another detail was having the cast and stunt men study poses from the early comics. Having so many characters masked was a huge obstacle to overcome, but entirely necessary to the story. “The stunt guys did a great job with the Spidey poses. It was always our goal to do as much of the action with real stuntmen as possible. There is nothing better than the real thing. However, some things were just too complex to achieve with a guy on a wire rig no matter how hard they tried. An important part of the job has been to create a seamless blend between the live action and CGI characters. As with the stunts, we try to shoot as much as possible with the actual actors. It’s so incredibly important to get any part of the actor’s faces, even if it is only their eyes. In the case of an impossible stunt where the character needs to be CGI’d, we still try to shoot elements of the actors, at least their faces, with motion control to track onto the CGI character. We always struggle to bring at least some small element of the real actor into a CGI character to bring it to life, even if it’s just effort sounds and breaths from the actor inserted into the soundtrack; anything to inject humanity into that image.
“There’s only so much emotion you can get out of a blank mask. Therefore, I tend to keep Spider-Man’s shots short and play most of it on the other characters. As I’m sure everyone knows, Sam takes every possible opportunity to get the mask off of Spidey to get more of Tobey’s face back into the action. By the end of each movie at least part of the mask gets torn off in the course of the action. I know it drives the fans crazy, but we desperately need the face of Tobey Maguire to wring the maximum amount of drama out of the scene. It’s hard to get anything out of a blank dummy head. When cutting a scene with Peter Parker, I’m more likely to stay on his face. The scene is usually about him, so I am more interested in seeing him and his reactions to the other characters. My tendency is to stay on him more even during another character’s dialogue, since to me it’s more important to see how things are affecting him. Having an actor as expressive as Tobey Maguire makes this an even more desirable approach. The guy is really great at portraying the most subtle of emotions. I am always the most interested in watching him.”
Maguire’s portrayal of Parker was equally as important, if not more so, than when he was suited. He needed to be as relatable on screen as the character had always been in the comics. The beauty of Peter Parker is that he was an average kid…who became an average man. He wasn’t born with these powers like Superman. He didn’t have a team to count on like the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, or the Avengers. He wasn’t like Batman who could take off the suit and be a normal citizen at any time. He wasn’t Dick Tracy who was paid to do a job. He didn’t derive his powers from anger like the Hulk or seek vengeance to fill a void like The Punisher. Peter Parker was given powers he never asked for, powers that implored him to fight for those who couldn’t fight for themselves. In the first film, Peter explores his new powers and is genuinely excited to have them. In the second installment, he has grown to resent them and eventually walks away from the life of fighting crime that has over taken his personal life. In this third installment, Spider-Man has a far more sinister enemy. It’s a much darker film than its predecessors. “It’s tricky making this big of a change in a character that so many people are familiar with after two pictures (and decades of comics), especially a character as beloved as Peter Parker. However, I think this kind of thing is mandatory to make this movie unique and not just a re-hash of the first two movies. Tobey and Sam did a great job designing the bad Peter persona, both in and out of the black suit. In addition, Spencer Cook, our animation supervisor, really worked hard at creating more extreme and reckless moves for Spidey when he was black suit. The tricky part was making the transition back to good Peter once he freed himself of the black suit. I think we were successful, thanks to Tobey’s performance, Sam’s direction and Alvin Sergeant’s writing. Of all the complex elements in the movie, trying to make this work was one of the biggest challenges. I hope it works for the audience.”
With such an immense undertaking, one has to wonder where Murawski begins to tackle the material. “I make a point of screening all of the dailies on film on the big screen. It is very important for me to get an overall first impression of the scene and the performances. Of course I prefer to watch them with Sam and get his notes, but unfortunately on a picture this complicated, most days he was unable to attend dailies since he usually had other production meetings to deal with. Fortunately, we usually agree on what is best in terms of the takes and performances. If not, he has a pretty good memory of what he shot so we can deal with it once the shoot is over. So during production I am usually working on my own, putting together the scenes and building them into a rough cut. I would try to give Sam cuts as often as possible, sometimes showing them to him on the set that day, especially if there was a question about the coverage that had shot or was about to shoot. Sometimes I’d get stuck editing a scene as it was being shot using the murky video assist footage. This was miserable, but it was sometimes important so Sam could see where he was as he was shooting to determine what other shots were needed (or there were some things we could cut if we were running out of time). Every couple of weeks I’d try to give him assemblies of whatever scenes we had so he could see how the picture was coming together. Usually he didn’t get a chance to watch them, but he had them if he needed them.
“In addition, because it was a big effects picture with almost a thousand visual effects shots, we got stuck having VFX meetings with our visual effects supervisor, Scott Stokdyk, and the effects crew on most shooting days. Staying on track with completing the effects necessitated us turning over elements for visual effects shots even before the scene was finished. It was a nightmare because we were often forced to make selects on shots in a vacuum, even though the rest of the material surrounding the shot hadn’t yet been filmed. Once production ended I’d have a week or so to get the movie together for an editor’s cut screening. Obviously, because it is an effects picture, a lot of shots were still missing or in various states of completions. However, I’d try to have something representative for every shot in the sequence, even if it was just a storyboard panel. After this, we split our time between working on refining the cut and dealing with visual effects. Because of the sheer number of effects, it felt like we were always in production on these movies, having to look at dozens of effects shots in various states of completion each day, cut them into the scenes and give immediate detailed feedback.”
Taking on the challenge of creating a Spider-sense was a VFX feat of its own. “It took a lot of work figuring out how to illustrate the notion of time slowing down and Peter keying in on sources of possible threats in 3-D space. VFX designer John Dykstra came up with a variety of concepts and shot a large number of tests that we put together in different configurations to arrive on a look that seemed most appropriate. We then shot many passes of motion-control elements which were composited with CGI elements to create the effect. It was complicated and took a lot of shooting days and many months of digital manipulation to perfect. We had planned on having more Spider-sense incidents in the second Spider-Man film, but needed to cut most of them due to time and budget constraints. The couple that we were left with was simple versions, but still pretty effective. We planned on having a cool, psychedelic ‘Black Spidey-Sense’ in the third movie, but we ended up not having the opportunity to do it as a result of a scene restructure. The sound that triggers Spidey’s sense is based on a cool dissonant sound I heard in an Italian horror movie soundtrack.”
There’s a certain magic that comics and movies share – they’re both fantastically collaborative mediums. With comic books you have a creator, a writer, a penciller, an inker, a colorist, and a letterer all coming together for the end result. In film you have a never ending cornucopia of contributors for the final product – that very ideal manages to shine through in every scene of Spider-Man. There are few moments in the films that aren’t a bustle with people. It’s fairly symbolic of the efforts that went into the movie’s creation. Sound and music are two of the largest joint efforts on this project. “They’re definitely giant undertakings” says Murawski. “Sam is into sound, very precise and detailed. Even if you go back to ‘Evil Dead’, his very first movie, you will hear a quality of sound design that you don’t normally hear in a low-budget exploitation film. Therefore, the sound mix is always a big part of these pictures. We have the great Swedish sound supervisor, Paul Ottosson, building the tracks, and the dynamite team of Kevin O’Connell and Greg Russell mixing the dialogue, music and effects to perfection. On a picture this size we are fortunate enough to have enough time on the mixing stage to really craft the sound and tune every moment in the movie to its maximum dramatic effect. It’s a great situation to be in.
“For the music, we always wanted a traditional classic approach fighting off the placement of pop songs in the movie in favor of a conventional symphonic score. I build my own temp score out of cues from great film composers like Bernard Herrmann, Jerry Goldsmith, John Williams and Ennio Morricone to give the feeling. After the first two movies we now have a lot of great original Danny Elfman music, as well. We have used songs in the montage sequences. I try to find something that has the perfect energy and feeling for what the scene is trying to convey. I used RAINDROPS KEEP FALLING ON MY HEAD for the happy montage in the second movie where Peter decides to give up being Spider-Man. At first I stuck it in as a joke, but then everyone saw it as the ideal accompaniment to the scene, providing it with a light and carefree feeling which perfectly reflected Peter’s attitude. We tried dozens of other songs, but never came up with anything better. This time I needed a something for another Peter Parker montage. I used a James Brown song that I always loved called PEOPLE GET UP AND DRIVE YOUR FUNKY SOUL. It’s a great song perfectly suited to the scene and I’m glad it made it into the final movie.”
One of the most obvious collaborators is New York City itself. Having begun production on the first film prior to the attacks of September 11th, I had to wonder how they dealt with the tone of the film after those events. “Obviously, since the city and its people are so integral to the film, working on a movie that is set in New York City made us all feel the tragedy of this horrible incident even more strongly, both during production and afterward” said Murawski. “I love New York, so the best part of the production, for me, is shooting there; it’s a great city to work in. We had a fantastic editing room in the Brill Building right in Times Square. We shoot most of the exteriors in NYC. After three movies we have an extensive library of New York background plates, and we use them constantly throughout the movie. It is incredibly important to have as many real elements as possible in every shot to make it seem real. In the first film, we really didn’t have any scenes with the Twin Towers. The marketing department shot their own teaser trailer of bank robbers escaping in a helicopter that is then caught in a giant spider web stretching between the towers of the World Trade Center. It was such a cool image that we were going to include it in the movie as part of first Spider-Man crime fighting montage. However, after 9/11 we decided not to use it. I believe that marketing pulled the teaser trailer from release out of respect for the victims of the tragedy. Otherwise, we made no other cuts. There was a shot of the twin towers reflected in the lenses of Spidey’s eyes in one shot, but we decided to keep this in the movie.
So how will we get to bid farewell to one of our most beloved film heroes? Coming in at 136 minutes, Murawski said “The story is more complex, with characters that all require adequate screen time to develop and resolve. Therefore it unfortunately demanded a longer running time. We’re still a lot shorter than most of the big movies which are often over two hours, but if I had my way, it would be my preference to keep all three films under two hours.” Being such a genre bender, mixing a love story, action, horror, comedy and tragedy, Spider-Man is easily afforded the few extra minutes. “That’s what makes the ‘Spider-Man’ movies such great projects. The wide variety of tones keeps it interesting and makes it easier to be on for the incredibly long period that it takes. The drama is sincere and serious. Even being a comic book movie, nothing is played as camp even though there are infinite opportunities to do so. We try to keep the emotions honest, which I like. There is humor, but it’s organic to the characters. In addition, the movies have the thrills of a big action movie and the chills of a cheap horror picture. We’re often worried about the shifts in tone, but I think staying true to the characters anchors everything into their reality.”
Even though there are rumors of possible sequels to come, I’ve made my peace with this probably being the last Spider-Man film. Tobey Maguire has confirmed that he is ready to turn over his webbing. Murawski agrees, “After eight years and three pictures, I think all of us are ready to move on. These pictures are so complicated and such overwhelmingly hard work that it would be really difficult for me to face another one. The comics have been around for over 40 years, so I’m sure there are plenty of other stories to tell. Just count me out!” With good reason – Murawski runs a company called Grindhouse Releasing that restores and distributes classic exploitation films like Cannibal Hollocaust and I Drink Your Blood that he would like to focus on. “I take a couple of months between each movie to work on some of my own projects. I try to get at least one of my movies out on DVD between Spidey movies, but due to the intense schedule of the Spidey movies, I still have four or five of movies that I’ve owned that I still haven’t gotten out since beginning the first Spider-Man.”
So with the end of the franchise here, at least I have my DVD’s to cling to and a slew of comics dear to my heart. For the past several years, Raimi and Murawski have held the power of captivating an audience that spans so many generations. As Peter’s Uncle Ben Parker said to him in the very first film “With great power comes great responsibility”… I can’t thank Sam, Bob and everyone involved with these pictures enough for having used that power so wisely and taken their responsibility so seriously. From this fan-girl and many others, we’ll miss you.
