So Ariel and I went into the city today where I did two sets of interviews. With the advent of the Hulk movie, suddenly people seem interested in talking to me.
They seated me in front of a green screen (how perfect) as I was interviewed first for a half hour documentary about the Hulk. Slated to tie in with the film, it discusses comics in general, the rising interest in comic movies and, of course, the Hulk film. Next up was a broad-ranging chat for a one-shot (which might become an ongoing series) for VH1 called something like, “The Most Awesome Show Ever.” Basically it’s designed to cover the gamut of pop culture interests and activities.
While there, I met Jennifer Connelly (Betty Ross) who was also being interviewed for the Hulk documentary. A very sweet young woman, even more striking in person than on screen, with a nicely rounded, six-and-a-half-month pregnant bun in the oven. Her second, I was told. No word on whether it’s gamma irradiated.
PAD
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So what’s next Peter, your own show?
Come to think of it, that might not be a bad idea. You could play a stay at home dad who writes for a living, but never seems to get any work done because of all the funny events and people surrounding him.
Hmmm…
On second thought, never mind. No one would ever believe the premise and in today’s ratings challenged tv media, not knowing what a good thing they have, the network would cancel the series before the pilot episode finished airing.
Oh well, I still have all your books to look forward to. Take care 🙂
Wouldn’t it be a pair of siamese twins, one gray and one caucasian?
Then young Connely (the survivor — one will die) will be kidnapped by Jennifer’s evil future counterpart from a parallel universe and taught to destroy. My god, PAD! You should have warned her!
Back up…
YOU MET JENNIFER CONNELLY???
Sigh…
Heroes in my life:
Gandhi, for leading his country to independence without the use of violence.
Martin Luther King, Jr., for taking huge steps toward equality for all people in a hostile environment.
Peter David, for meeting Jennifer Connelly and being able to write about the experience without doing what I would have done which is: “I met Jennifer Connnelly and I found hetheoha weui0e909nvantrenv0wetnvz wotetga9q to0ev894346vbzwr9b … 0eew at0ewnbt q0t34980v,e. .. I’m sorry was I saying something…?”
Great news, PAD. I just wish VH1 would actually show MUSIC VIDEOS instead of the chopped-up ‘shows’ that talk so much about them.
Hopefully your piece won’t hit the cutting room floor.
Jennifer Connelly has another “comics connection” which even she may not be aware of. Besides being the Rocketeer’s and Hulk’s girl friend, I understand she was a high school classmate of John Byrne’s stepdaughter.
I wonder if this will show up on the DVD?
David
Did you tell Miss Connelly that you killed off Betty Ross?
You lucky dog.
You have thirteen hours to go through the labyrinth and reach my castle, or your interview will end up on the cutting-room floor and be one of us…forever.
-Q.A. (after Bowie)
Just wondering what you thought of this (from Marvile 7/Online @ http://www.marvel.com/epic/rule_3.htm ):
Super-powers are just gobbledygook unless they have an underlying meaning. […] The Incredible Hulk is brutish and green ‹ “Wouldn’t it be cool if he turned intelligent and gray?” NO. We call those kinds of stories “writing a comic book about a comic book.”
What I find ironic is that Jennifer Connelly did xxx-rated lesbian sex show scene in a movie and I believe it was during Rick Jones’ bachelor party they found an old adult movie that had Betty Ross in it. Or something like that, I only read HULK sporadically back then.
But gee, talk about life imitating art. Or rather art imitating life.
Best-Chris
Actually, it was Marlo, Rick’s fiance (now wife) and not Betty who was in the skin flick.
But, it was for a school project…
Kurt
Super-powers are just gobbledygook unless they have an underlying meaning. […] The Incredible Hulk is brutish and green ‹ “Wouldn’t it be cool if he turned intelligent and gray?” NO. We call those kinds of stories “writing a comic book about a comic book.”
I understand what the writer was trying to say, but it was a spectacularly bad example. Considering the hallmark of the Hulk has always been change…and considering that when the Hulk first started out, he WAS gray and intelligent (and then morphed into green and intelligent)…I would peg this observation right up there with the DC rep comment that World’s Finest was being canceled after decades of publication because “Batman and Superman never really worked as a team.”
PAD
Man, I just checked out that link to the Marvel “rules”- what a load of crap!
Marvel characters’ long histories and evolution were what I LOVED about them as a kid. It made me scour stores for back issues and reprints like a historian researching a favourite time period.
Most ironically- these “rules” are written by the guy who wrote “Marville”!!! That’s like having Akiva Goldsman tell you how to write a Batman movie!
I just checked out those so-called ‘rules, and a bigger bunch of badly thought out nonsense I’ve never read. How could you say on the one hand that a writer is writing a comic book about a comic book (whatever the hëll that means) and then turn around and say that writers have to ignore anything that didn’t happen in the comic books? Does that make sense to anybody else? This is just my opinion of course, but some of the best comic books of the last couple of decades came from writers who were willing to think outside the box, Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing being the most notable example. Following the ‘rule’ suggests that a writer should just sit down with a stack of back issues of the book he’s about to write and merely regurgitate old ideas. Oh, and if Spider-Man got boring once Peter Parker got older and married, how do you explain Joe Straczynski’s recent success on Spider-Man? Following the logic of the ‘rule,’ JMS shouldn’t be messing around with his spider-totem storyline, because that was never part of the book in the past, so it just goes to prove the old adage that rules are made to be broken. And BTW, did teens stop buying Spider-Man because they didn’t like the story, or because they didn’t want to spend more than two bucks on it? When I was a teenager, you could pretty much buy ever Marvel book out there (with the exception of Night Nurse or Millie the Model of course) for the price it would cost to buy a couple of Spider-Man books today. If you didn’t like a particular book, you’d probably buy it anyway to maintain your collection, hoping that a new writer or artist would take over, which they inevitably did. Sorry to get off on a nostalgia trip there- I’m sure I had a point somewhere.
Considering the hallmark of the Hulk has always been change…and considering that when the Hulk first started out, he WAS gray and intelligent (and then morphed into green and intelligent)
PAD makes an interesting point here but one which I think 90% of “Hulk fans” don’t really understand. I myself didn’t until I recently went to Barnes & Noble and bought the Marvel Masterworks reprinting of Hulk 1-6.
The character as Stan and Jack created him is almost nothing like you would expect. He is indeed grey and not green. He isn’t the big mountain-sized Dale Keown monster but rather drawn more like Frankenstein, a larger than normal man with a sloping forehead and soupbowl haircut. He only changed into Hulk at night ala the wolfman. And his personality was simple but clearly intelligent…even menacing…kind of like a Jeckyl-Hyde deal…why in one of the early issues the Hulk was shown using a handgun. Think on that for a minute.
I think the problem is that most fans of the Hulk, myself included, are fans because of Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno. No matter what his current incarnation, I haven’t been able to stay with the comic more than a storyline here or there because, like I’d guess most “Hulk fans,” the vision we have of the Hulk isn’t the one we see in the comics.
Just my .02.
Best-Chris
I think it’s great that you were interviewed. If you ask me, MTV made an even better choice than they did to interview Judd Winick a few years ago. Seeing how he went way overboard with his side of the recent Green Lantern/Green Arrow crossover, well, some genius he is, hmph. It’s a good thing he didn’t try to write a thriller like the ones that Denny O’Neil, whose footsteps he was obviously trying to follow in, wrote for Hal Jordan and Ollie Queen back in the 1970’s, I’d hate to think what they’d look like under Winick’s writing. Pity I can’t say that for last year’s GL stories alone.
I read those goofy-áršë “rules.” Fitting that Bill Jemas, having deluded himself into thinking he was a writer has extrapolated that delusion to the logical end that he, a “writer,” has become an expert in the field of writing. I love how his last rule is “break the rules.” That’s some beautiful backpedaling, there, Bill. There should have been one more, though: “Never listen to the experts.”
Hope you browbeat MTV into running Clone High again like I asked you, PAD.
they were hardly XXX lesbian scenes. It was a topless kiss in The Hot Spot (rated r) and IIRC a clothed kiss in Higher Learning (shared with Kristy Swanson: The Phantom’s Girlfriend and orignal Buffy)