Saturday, May 05, 2007

Jack Kirby Production Designs For New George Clooney Movie?

The upcoming George Clooney film Escape from Tehran tells the story of how the CIA used the cover of a movie shoot to get Americans out of Iran. This is, as reported, based upon true events.

In reality, the film co-opted by the CIA was Lord of Light, adapted by a Roger Zelazny novel. It had been trapped in development for a while but had already been through a lot of pre-production work. Most incredibly, a lot of the design work had been carried out by comicbook legend Jack Kirby. I would post some examples below, but that'd lose me a limb or two - the copyright notices have been laid on pretty thick.

Will Clooney's film honour this history, and use Kirby designs? Maybe they will fictionalise matters to the extent that the film-within-the-film has nothing to do with Lord of Light, but even still, they could still tip their hat to Jack.

3 comments:

Mark Kardwell said...

I've read this novel, and I've seen Kirby's designs (in THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR magazine, many moons ago), and it'd bear a decent adaptation in its own right. It's a great book that'd make a rousing space opera, with lots of regularly paced action set pieces (hey, like George Lucas!). Kirby's designs - not that feasible, really. I'll tell you who could design the hell out of this project - Brendan McCarthy (but then, me championing McCarthy is as predictable as you with Gilliam!).

Brendon said...

Doesn't mean we're not both right, though, does it, Mark?

Mark Kardwell said...

Och, aye.