Master Magicians and Phantoms: An Interview with Lee Falk, Part IV

Today we conclude our weeklong interview with Lee Falk (1911-1999), the creator of The Phantom and Mandrake the Magician!

 

What do you think of the recent incarnations of The Phantom, like the cartoon series Phantom 2040, or Defenders of the Earth?

First off, the animator of Defenders of the Earth concentrated on Mandrake, The Phantom, and Flash Gordon. They figured the kids would like something in a future time, with interesting technology and what not. So they grouped them with Flash in the future. I rather reluctantly agreed, thinking that maybe that was the way of the future, so let’s do it. We made The Phantom the 25th generation of the character, and the great-grandson of Mandrake. But when the animators depicted them, they just used the three, Mandrake, The Phantom, and Flash Gordon. I asked why they had excluded Lothar from it all. Here’s a hero who happens to be black, and millions of black and brown fans think of him as a role model. I argued that he had to be in the posters as well.

The show came out fairly well, in the end, I guess.

Now with Phantom 2040, they again wanted something that has futuristic technology. So I told them to set it ahead, with the 23rd Phantom. We had to set it in the future, because if there was any change in the current character, the Swedish and Scandinavian fans would be furious! They want the “classic Phantom.” So we worked around that by making this his grandson. We put some armor on his arms, and gave him futuristic weapons, but at least they didn’t change him too much. At first, they wanted to put wings on him! But it’s pretty well done.

What can you tell us about the new Phantom film?

The movie is to me, and I’m a bit prejudiced, just great. Billy Zane is the perfect Phantom, he looks wonderful. I saw the dailies everyday while I was on the set for two weeks.

Is the plot an adaptation of one of your stories?

Yes, several of them. It deals with pirates and it has all of the elements that Phantom fans expect. Jeffrey Boam did a terrific screenplay, and came up with an original gimmick for the story. I told him that in all the years where I’ve written over 1000 stories for the character, the twist he came up with was one I had never tried. It’s a good story.

Is it set in contemporary times?

It’s the 1930s, and the cities have a 30s feel. But the jungle scenes seem as if they could be any time, so it feels contemporary, too. But it is the “classic” Phantom, just as his fans like him best. Billy Zane is marvelous. They first showed me a picture he had done called Dead Calm. Do you know the film?

Yes, it’s a tight little shocker.

They did it about eight years ago, when he was 23, or 24. Billy played a psychopathic killer -- but that’s not what I saw. What I saw was a nice looking young man, slim; a very strong actor. He also had charm and strength, and this is what I wanted for The Phantom. I didn’t want just a muscle man, I wanted that charm and elegance. He had all of that, but he was slim, didn’t really look like The Phantom, but rather like a young man. I figured, though, if he were good enough an actor, they would pad him up.

When I met Billy in January, he came over to say hello. He said he wanted me to see him before he went out on the set. And there was Billy, looking like The Phantom, without padding! It turns out that when he was hired by Paramount, in 1994, he went into training with a professional trainer, and did four hours a day for two years. So he wound up with a beautiful, powerful body, along with the same charm and elegance. He’s a good strong actor. The whole cast is good. Treat Williams plays the bad guy, and he’s a fine actor. Kristy Swanson plays Diana, the girlfriend. She was in Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. She a beautiful girl. She's also in Flowers in the Attic.

Based on the V. C. Andrews novel.

I must say you’re a knowledgeable young man! I had never heard of the novel. The other woman, the bad gal with the heart of gold, is Sallah. She’s based on a character in a story of mine called “The Sky Bandit,” from the 30s. It was about a female gang of sky pirates, and that’s well before feminism. Sallah is the number two gal, and I remember her very well because I designed her to look like Louise Brooks. Do you remember her? In the film, she has long black hair, which is a change, but Cathrine Zeta Jones, a beautiful English-Welsh actress, plays her. She wears a skin tight costume, and she’s magnificent. If I were 60 years younger, I’d marry her! They’re all fine.

You know, Sergio Leone wanted to do a Phantom picture. I had met him in Mexico, and he was an enormous man. He just loved The Phantom, and he wanted to do a jungle picture with pygmies, all of that. We met again at his house in Rome, but he died and nothing came of it.

What are your future plans?

Well, after more than 60 years, I’m still writing Mandrake and The Phantom. When I write a script, it’s like film script, broken into panels. I include descriptions of characters, place, and detail, as well as dialogue and narration. So my plans are just to go on living and working.

Master Magicians and Phantoms: An Interview with Lee Falk, Part I

We dig once again into the archives for an interview I did with comic book legend Lee Falk (1911-1999), originally conducted in 1996.

Back in those days, your correspondent worked for several magazines as an interviewer and critic.  I had the great pleasure to interview some of the most significant figures of Pop Culture, but few were as enjoyable as my talk with Lee Falk.

The following interview appeared around the time the film adaptation of his comic strip The Phantom appeared, and was later, in 2011, translated into Swedish (!) for a book celebrating Falk’s centennial.  I hope you enjoy it.

Some men are touched in profound ways by the magic stuff of their boyhood.

A case in point is comic strip legend Lee Falk. He read the stuff of boys, and it stayed. He was touched by Burroughs' Tarzan and Kipling's Mowgli, and with a little world myth thrown in, created The Phantom, The Ghost Who Walks, The Man Who Cannot Die. And now, at 83, he still does it, turning out the adventures of the Phantom three generations of boys later. In fact, 1996 is the 60th Anniversary of The Phantom, and Falk still writes his daily adventures.

That is not all. In 1934, Falk, then a college student with dreams of being a writer, created the elegant Mandrake the Magician, an avenger in evening clothes and suave mustache, one of the ultimate icons of 1930s heroism. Mandrake's adventures are still widely read, and still scripted by the energetic Falk.

Lee Falk is a working legend. He has holds the world's record for writing the continuing adventures of any comic strip character, and with The Phantom, created the costumed superhero. The Phantom's 60th Anniversary will be marked with a new Phantom film from Paramount, starring Billy Zane as the masked avenger, and Treat Williams as the villain. Based on several stories penned by Falk, and set in the 1930s, this promises to be a treat comic strip lovers will not want to miss.

I caught up with the busy Mr. Falk at his home in Manhattan's Upper West Side in June 1995.

Could you give us some background on yourself?

Well, I was born in Missouri, many years ago. I started Mandrake in 1934, when I was still in University of Illinois, and started The Phantom two years later. I'm very proud that this is the 60th Anniversary of The Phantom, and Mandrake is still going strong at 62. I still write them both, always did, daily strips and Sunday papers. I haven't drawn them in many years, many, many years. It takes more than two or three men to do that much work!

When I first started, I first drew Mandrake for fun for myself. I drew up two weeks of daily strips, and took my time with it, very slow, and made changes. I had some help from an older artist. Then I sent these two weeks of daily strips for Mandrake to King Features, and, to my amazement, they optioned them! And they wanted a Sunday page, too.

So I suddenly realized that these are not cartoons, these are illustrations. Whereas old friends of mine like Al Parker and Bud Briggs, well known magazine illustrators at the time, could do one or two illustrations in one week, here I had two comic strips with about 18 panels a week, with another eight panels or so for Sunday. Each panel is an illustration. A lot of work. Eventually I got Phil Davis to take over Mandrake when I started The Phantom.

What comic strips at this time were big influences on you, or inspiration?

That's a good question. What really influenced me more were not comic strips, but novels like Tarzan, or the Jungle Book of Kipling.  As a boy, my reading was the great adventurers and detectives like Arscene Lupin. Mandrake comes out of all that. He was a crime fighter. Remember that Mandrake, started as a stage magician, but I turned him into a hypnotist, an illusionist. He creates illusion, things don't really happen, you just think they do. Incidentally, in the very first story I had introduced this African Prince, bodyguard, Lothar. The idea was teaming a big, powerful physical man and the mental giant Mandrake. And then gradually Lothar, who used to wear a leopard skin and so forth, was modernized, to sports shirts and boots, and his Pidgin English was turned to proper speech, and he became Mandrake's friend, rather than bodyguard. And these two actually were the first black and white crime fighters, as far as I know, anywhere. This was long before Cosby and Culp's I Spy; there weren't any black and white crime fighters. It wasn't my intention to do something in that area, it just happened. And then, as years passed, it became very commonplace to have a black and white team. As you know, it is a common theme in movies to this day.

What was the genesis or inspiration for Princess Narda?

Princess Narda just a beautiful, ideal young woman. There was no special influence for her.

Could you tell us a bit about your relations with Phil Davis, and does he remain your favorite Mandrake artist?

Phil was an older artist that I knew. I was about 22; he was in his early 30. He had a lot of success with his illustrations in magazines like Liberty and Colliers. He did very well, but he got tired of it. He welcomed a chance to get out of the rat race of a freelance illustrator, where he had to submit stuff to agencies and get it backed changed, and so forth. With Mandrake, he could just sit down and draw. He worked with me very early on Mandrake, and then I turned over all the drawing to him. He did very tight pencil work on it. We got Ray Moore, another artist. These guys were all older than me: Ray Moore was kind of a Bohemian artist, very interesting man. He did the inking on the strip. I continued to do some of the layout. But when The Phantom came along, I had no time. I got Ray Moore to come off of Mandrake and onto The Phantom.

Two or three years later, I stopped drawing The Phantom layouts completely. I stopped drawing over a half century ago!  But I continued, without a break, until as we speak, to write the stories.

These are adventure strips, and I think of them as illustrated stories which appear in the newspapers.

More Lee Falk tomorrow!