Flying a Rocky Road : ‘Rocketeer’ Rides a Bumpy Course From Comics to the Screen

Summer movies and comic book heroes--it’s a pairing that brought you “Batman” in 1989, “Dick Tracy” in 1990 and this summer, “The Rocketeer.”

The who? Good question. Unlike Dick Tracy and Batman, who are ingrained in the public consciousness, “The Rocketeer,” the source for the Walt Disney Studios adventure yarn opening Friday, is known by a relatively small number of “comic heads” who have devoured each of the eight Rocketeer comics--or “graphic novels,” as insiders call them--that have been printed since the character was created by Los Angeles artist Dave Stevens a decade ago.

Stevens is a soft-spoken 35-year-old who bears a not-so-surprising resemblance to the comic book Rocketeer, a prototypical all-American square-jawed hero named Cliff Secord who battles evil in 1938 with the aid of a rocket-powered backpack.

“As a kid I always wanted to fly, and the Rocketeer was my wish fulfillment,” Stevens says. “Every time I would see an image of someone with something on his back that made him fly, no matter what the contraption was, I got all charged up over it.”

How that kid’s dream of flying turned into a big-budget summer film produced by a tight-budget studio was a bumpy ride for most involved, but Stevens, director Joe Johnston and David Hoberman, president of Touchstone and Walt Disney Pictures, all say they got the movie they wanted. But not, according to Johnston, before 12 weeks of “sturm und drang” that made the 41-year-old Johnston “feel 75.”

It started over the design of the Rocketeer’s bronze helmet, which became the most distinctive feature in the movie’s stylized advertising. “The helmet design was the first thing. They said, ‘We don’t like this fin . . . we think the audience is going to laugh at it,’ ” says Johnston, who made his directing debut with Disney’s 1989 sleeper hit “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.” Johnston had been a fan of the character for years and was trying to option the project when he learned Disney, with whom he had a three-picture commitment, already had it.

The Disney people wanted to shorten the helmet’s fin, which serves as the Rocketeer’s rudder. “So I said, ‘Here’s what the bottom line is . . . I don’t want to change this helmet, and I’m not going to do the project with this guy flying around without this fin on his helmet because that’s not the Rocketeer and I signed up to do “The Rocketeer.” If you want to change it bad enough, you’ve got to find a new director.’ That was the first thing and there were three or four other examples throughout the production.”

Then there was the casting of Bill Campbell in the lead role of Secord, a cocky racing pilot who accidentally discovers the rocket pack. “The studio wanted a big star, desperately,” says Johnston. “If Tom Cruise walked in the door and said, ‘I want to do “The Rocketeer,” ’ they’d have been the happiest people on Earth.”

Hoberman says that “Cruise was the first one we went to. This is one of the more expensive films (approximately $35 million) we’ve ever made. When you’re rolling dice, you would like to have a little more insurance.” Cruise, among others, turned it down.

“I knew that Bill was right when I saw him walk into the room,” Johnston says. “He was the Rocketeer. He’s Jimmy Stewart, age 25. They were very nervous about it . . . until after the first three or four weeks of filming.”

During shooting, the studio discovered that the film was running some $8 million to $10 million (Johnston’s estimate) over budget. “It went over budget because I didn’t feel I could make as good a film for the original budget. The money went into additional days (96 instead of the original shooting schedule of 76), and also in a few additional effects,” Johnston says. Industrial Light and Magic effects were used to create most of the scenes of the Rocketeer flying rather than relying on less expensive wire rigging.

He admits that he knew the film would be over budget. “But I didn’t tell them that,” he smiles. “That (fact) hit hard about halfway through production.”

Hoberman says of the budget problems, “It was a combination of two things: We thought we could do a lot more with the flying on the set, and the concept of the film became a bigger thing than anyone thought. After seeing a couple scenes, we realized how big it could be and thus everything had to come up to that level.”

Johnston is still unhappy about Disney’s involvement.

“I got notes,” the director recalls with a grimace, “pages and pages of script notes and pages and pages of dailies notes from Disney. They don’t know it, but I never read one note. I have an associate producer, Lisa Bailey, who handled everything for me. She read the notes and I told her if she thought there was anything I should hear, to tell me. Occasionally, she would say, ‘Here they might have a point.’ I told her to tell them I read the notes and I would do what I thought was necessary.”

Now Disney is looking only at the positive side. “I think it is one of the better films we have made at the studio and I think Joe Johnston is an enormously gifted filmmaker,” Hoberman says. “He’s now made two films for me that show a unique style. What comes through in this film is a wonderful performance from Timothy Dalton (who plays an Errol Flynn-type film star), a wonderful performance from Alan Arkin, playing something completely different from what he’s done, and he played Bill and Jennifer (Connelly, who plays the female lead), relative newcomers, right to the mark.”

As a child growing up in the Los Angeles suburb of Bell, Stevens was passionate about drawing. “My dad was a frustrated cartoonist who taught me how to draw. We would get up at 7 on Saturday mornings when I was 4 and 5 and watch silent cartoons--they still ran them in 1959. From early childhood, what I wanted to do was to draw--that’s all I thought about.”

And Stevens was in thrall to movie serials, which he saw at Bell’s old Alcazar Theater and which clearly inspire “The Rocketeer.” “I saw all of them--I think I saw every one ever made.”

After graduating from high school, Stevens was hired to assist the late Russ Manning in drawing the Sunday Tarzan comic strip.

After two years with Manning, Stevens decided to gamble on his present career as a free-lance illustrator. Since then he has acted as a sort of “idea” man in film advertising, creating the concepts for the advertising of movies such as “Superman II,” “Porky’s” and “Melvin and Howard” and occasionally helping to storyboard such projects as “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video.

In 1981, he created “The Rocketeer.” The character first appeared in a 12-page filler in Pacific Comics’ “Starslayer,” and the response was overwhelming. Author Harlan Ellison, in an introduction to the 1985 hard-cover edition of the “graphic novel,” sought an explanation for its popularity: “For all the hopeful attempts at doing a period comic book that have popped up in these last few years . . . only ‘The Rocketeer’ captures the feel of those days. . . . (The comics) are hip-deep in the right kind of nostalgia. They are adventure and affection, melded in just the right way to avoid the sickness of wishing for the past; they bring to the ‘80s the richness of those wild times when we believed a man could fly, if only he had a rocket pack.”

Stevens, with pals Paul De Meo and Danny Bilson, the film’s screenwriters, started shopping the project in 1986--and everyone turned them down except Disney.

“I bought this four or five years ago,” Hoberman recalls. “The story had such a clear heroic structure . . . an innocent guy stumbles on something and ends up saving the world . . . and it was a world we hadn’t seen before. What stayed in my mind was the simplicity of the story that just works; those clearly defined stories don’t come along every day.”

Still, Stevens says Disney “drove a hard bargain. I knew we weren’t going to get anywhere near what we wanted. We fought long and hard and came out as well as we could. I’ve never been able to live on the money I make from comic books.” He says he lost “months of sleep” worrying more about the studio staying true to his character than about the money.

Stevens received a figure in the low six figures, he says, for all rights to the Rocketeer (except comic book and pre-existing merchandise rights, which he retains) and a co-production credit on the film. He acted as a sort of reality check on the story and era.

“Dave had a lot of input on visual details,” says Johnston, “the art, architectural details, and signage of the period,” among which was the design of the Bulldog Cafe, based on an actual Los Angeles cafe torn down in 1955, the year Stevens was born. “I discovered it in a 1934 National Geographic magazine,” Stevens says of the lost landmark, now transmogrified into a cookie jar by a Disney licensee.

Stevens says he was somewhat disappointed that the Rocketeer’s comic book love interest, an aspiring actress and nude model named Betty, was cleaned up and changed into the relatively bland Jenny, Jennifer Connelly’s role. “The strip needed an edge,” Stevens recalls, “a character people would remember. I thought the logical thing would be to put a bad girl in there next to this sweet guy. It worked very well in the script, too, but after the change was made (a week before filming began) and I saw how it played, it was fine.”

“Betty was based on a real person and she was a nude model, and Disney wasn’t going to go for that!” Johnston adds.

In the end the various hatchets were buried. Johnston feels he got the movie he set out to make. Stevens hopes that he will be called in if the studio does a sequel; meanwhile he plans to try to get two other films under way.

Hoberman says, “I am extremely confident about the film. I love ‘The Rocketeer’ as much as anything I’ve ever done.”

And, in a perfect comic book ending, the hero, Bill Campbell, got the girl--for real.

“She’s a wonderful, wonderful girl,” Campbell says of his co-star Connelly, with whom he is happily involved in an off-screen romance.