It all started in the fall of 1992, with a German film producer and an American B-movie legend. That producer, Bernd Eichinger, held the film rights to the comic book superheroes the Fantastic Four and hoped to bring them to the big screen. But it needed to be done fast and cheap — his rights to the characters would expire at the end of the year unless he had a movie in production, and his budget was only $1 million.
He found a partner in Roger Corman, perhaps the foremost filmmaker when it came to making cult movies with minimal budgets. The duo tapped Oley Sassone — whose credits included music videos for John Lee Hooker and Gloria Estefan and the Corman feature “Bloodfist III: First to Fight” — to direct a story focusing on the origins of the Fantastic Four. The movie would track how the brilliant scientist Reed Richards (played by Alex Hyde-White), former pilot Ben Grimm (Michael Bailey Smith) and siblings Susan (Rebecca Staab) and Johnny Storm (Jay Underwood) came back from a space mission that transformed them into a superhuman team.
“I knew what I was getting into, but it didn’t matter, because it was the Fantastic Four,” Sassone said in a recent phone interview. The opportunity to make a movie about the characters he loved was worth whatever frustrations potentially awaited him due to financial constraints.
As “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” arrives in theaters this weekend with a $200 million budget and starry cast led by Pedro Pascal, it’s hard to imagine the situation Sassone found himself in. The current landscape for superhero movies couldn’t be more different than it was some 30 years ago. If it wasn’t Batman or Superman, movies based on comic-book characters were then mostly dismissed as cheesy and juvenile and not worth a big investment.
Joseph Culp landed the role of Doctor Doom, the film’s primary antagonist, and has fond memories of the film’s beginnings. “We don’t have the money, but what we have is the story and character,” he remembered thinking. “And at the end of the day, that is what we as fans or audience members are really going to gravitate to.”
Culp recalled marching into his audition wearing an ankle-length oilskin duster from Australia before he “took it to the rafters” in a performance inspired by Frank Langella’s downright Shakespearean Skeletor in the 1987 movie “Masters of the Universe.” Sassone’s response, Culp gleefully remembers, encouraged him to go even bigger with Doom. This level of grandiosity matched the scope of Sassone’s vision for the film. But, Culp says, there was an “ongoing friction, I would say, between what we wanted to achieve and what we had the resources to achieve.”