The Book Was Better: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Neil Gaiman To Produce Sandman Movie

I love comic book movies, but it is a love like John Hinckley Jr.’s for Jodie Foster: just because a feeling borders on obsession doesn’t mean that the object of that affection will ever love you back.

It is a hard-fought love, as I am 42 years old, and therefore lived in a dark time when genre fans hoping for a movie to their tastes would have to bite the bullet and pretend to be excited about things like Harley Davidson And The Marlboro Man and then find a way to convince ourselves that we were worthy of sucking breath in the morning. And if you wanted a comic book movie? Well, there was the first Batman movie that opened just after my 18th birthday, sure, but before that? Well, in the five years before Batman, the only comic book flicks that were released were The Return of The Swamp Thing, Superman IV: The Quest For Peace, Supergirl, and Howard The fucking Duck. That’s a real murderer’s row of movies. In the sense that I want to line them up and shoot them.

So we comic book fans truly live in an amazing time, in the sense that there are many movies based on comic books, and most of them are pretty damn good. Sure, there’s the odd X-Men 3 and Spider-Man 3 out there, but there are very few real stinkers. Sure, there are still arguments about Watchmen (which I rewatched recently and still like a lot), but that comic was so dense that it would have been well-nigh impossible to do a really killer adaptation of the thing. So while I like it, I can understand the argument that everyone involved should have left well enough alone. After all: some comics should just stay comics.

Which is one hell of a long way to go to report that Joseph Gordon-Levitt has announced via Twitter that he has signed on to produce a movie adaptation of Sandman with Neil Gaiman and David Goyer.

So I’ll start with the positive: Gordon-Levitt has the right look to put Morpheus’s cloak on. Just grow out the hair like he had it in Third Rock From The Sun, slap some Dippity-Doo up in that bitch, blast him in the face with some matte white Rust-O-Leum, and he’d be the spitting image of either the Lord of Dreams or the Lead Singer of The Cure.

But here’s the negative, as far as I can tell: I don’t have the slightest fucking idea how you would ever start to turn Sandman into a two-hour movie.

Seriously: Sandman is defined by how it weaves mythology and history and the DC Universe (Yes, the DC Universe. Morpheus met John Constantine and Martian Manhunter in an early issue, Doctor Destiny was a player in one of the first ten issues, and The Family Man, the missing serial killer from the classic Cereal Convention issue, was missing because Constantine killed him in the pages of Hellblazer). Sure, you could start with Morpheus’s capture from the first issue, but even that namechecks the original Golden Age Sandman, for God’s sake.

Sandman is a story that is greater than the sum of its parts. Seriously: how do you do a Sandman story and leave our Hob Gadling? And if you leave him in, how do you do it? After all, most of his interactions with Morpheus are simple conversations in bars, which would be a momentum killer and a distraction in a linear movie. And how do you deal with classic one-and-dones like Calliope, which are killer stories but which really don’t advance any particular core storyline beyond being part of an excellent series? Movie people don’t think that way; it would be like cutting away in a porno movie to spend 20 minutes watching the pizza delivery boy gas up the Tercel.

Let’s remember that even DC Comics didn’t know how to distill Sandman into a coherent single story to start with. Sure, these days you can walk into a comic store and get Sandman one volume at a time, but the very first Sandman trade paperback in the early 90s started with issue 8 and went through The Dolls House storyline, meaning that new readers would have believed that Morpheus appeared, fully formed, next to the Thames River, feeding pigeons with his goth princess sister. Which is a hell of a way to start a movie provided you’re going after that lucrative goth teen dollar and that it is 1992.

This is literally the first time in my life where I do not want to see a movie adaptation of a comic series. Not because I don’t want Gordon-Levitt to succeed, but because I don’t know how in the hell you can even film the Goddamned thing. It has so many interconnected and yet interdependent stories that I don’t see how you just do a piece of it. It’s like The Bible: sure, they’ve made movies of it, but only of individual pieces… and they all rely on the fact that you already know who the hell God is. You ain’t gonna get that with Sandman; if you ask a random person on the street who Morpheus, King of Dreams, and his six brothers and sisters of The Endless are, and they know? You snap that person up and bang them before some other geek does! Hell, it worked for me…

Anyway. I hope I’m wrong and these guys put together one hell of a Sandman movie. But I cannot foresee any live action adaptation that will get the full experience that the comic can give you. So not even Joseph Gordon-Levitt can replace my Sandman volumes on my bookshelf… the same way not even George Lucas could replace my copy of Essential Howard The Duck.

It can, however, feel free to replace my DVD of Harley Davidson And The Marlboro Man.

(via The Verge)