Taking the train to Comic-Con (pictured) means avoiding traffic and mingling with fans, comic book artists and even studio execs; The Hero Initiative is a charity that helps pioneer comic book artists who didn't have salaries or benefits; “10,000 Km," the feature film debut by Carlos Marques-Marcet, is about two young people negotiating a long-distance relationship.
The train to Comic-Con: where cosplaying fans and industry types meet
Traveling by train to Comic-Con from L.A.'s Union Station to downtown San Diego provides an outsider with an unique look at the popular convention. You'll encounter everything from excited cosplaying fans to studio executives riding together in close quarters.
The Frame's Robert Garrova caught a ride to learn more about the journey to the highly anticipated event.
Trying to keep a relationship alive across '10,000 Km'
Carlos Marques-Marcet is director of the new film "10,000 Km," about a couple navigating a long distance relationship between Barcelona and Los Angeles. The couple tries to make up for distance through various technological platforms, only to discover it's not as easy as it seems.
The movie, which premiered at this year's SxSW Film Festival, is out July 10.
Marques-Marcet met with the Frame's John Horn to discuss the film.
Interview Highlights
This is a movie that is really only about two characters. It's about a separation between two people. Filmmakers tend to be separated from their families, the people they love, the people they know — was that part of its inspiration?
Yeah, of course. For filmmakers, that is the essence of their profession. You're constantly traveling. But I feel it's not just filmmakers, it's everybody. It's globalization. How economic structures work and function. It makes us move. Even all special classes from all over the world, you know? Even from Latin America to Asia to Europe to America — everywhere.
This is your feature debut, but you've made a lot of short films. You have two actors in this film. Is part of the inspiration for making this story with just these two characters to make it film-able? You can do it on a limited budget, you don't have a lot of extras, you don't have a lot of locations, and you basically just have people in their apartments.
Yes and no. The original script wasn't like that at all. It was something we arrived at in development. We have a company in Los Angeles and one in Barcelona so it wasn't that difficult to shoot exteriors. It was more in the process of writing that we realized that actually all the exteriors and secondary characters were superfluous. They were not necessary. The most interesting scenes were happening in the scenes between them.
After two years into writing we did another complete rewrite from scratch and we just focused on them. Suddenly the script was so much better. It was also mostly an aesthetic decision — much more of a touching and powerful movie.
Did you initially try to make a movie about technology, about love, or was it always about those two things at the same time?
Basically I wouldn't say it's about love. I would say it's about relationships. Of course, love is part of relationships but it's not the only thing involved in relationships. It would be very easy if not. I think the movie is obviously about relationships and about how people connect and relate to each other, but also how technology influences that. So I would say it's like relationships were the meaning, but technology was the tool I wanted to explore.
David Verdaguer stars as Sergi in Carlos Marques-Marcet's film, "10,000 Km" (photo courtesy of Broad Green Pictures)
The character played by Natalia Tena, Alex, is a photographer. In the course of the film she travels to Silicon Valley and she photographs the headquarters of companies like Twitter, Google and Yahoo. The way she photographs them makes them look almost like prisons. Was that part of your intention?
No! We just arrived there — in Silicon Valley — and it was like a Sunday and everything was empty. It just looked like that. It just looked like this place without people. It was not that important to be a prison, but a physical space. It's actually how it looks. I didn't even invent it! But to me there is something about it that is the physicality of the Internet because the Internet is kind of abstract.
Well isn't that kind of the point of the movie, right? That you can't really photograph the Internet it doesn't exist and yet you're trying to make what is intangible tangible.
To me, after thinking about it, that was one of the challenges of the movie. You cannot shoot the Internet. For me, the Internet is a mental process. At the end it has to do with what is off-screen. So when you see a Facebook page, there is somebody that has put this post in there with an intention, and that is all off-screen space. The Internet is a big off-screen space where people are doing things not necessarily with good intentions. There are symbolic worlds happening where you can construct and build narratives.
Natalia Tena stars as Alex in Carlos Marques-Marcet's new film, "10,000 Km" (photo courtesy of Broad Green Pictures)
Did you use your imagination or is it an actual experience that you base the Skype sex scene on?
Actually, I've never done it! It's funny because we didn't use [Skype] because they told us, "Nobody uses Skype for sex." They didn't want to relate their image with sex.
Did Google and Skype have approval over how they were shown in the movie?
Actually we didn't use Skype, we had to use something else because they didn't allow us or give us the permit. More than anything I was interested in the sound of Skype. You hear this sound and your skin will react to it. But we couldn't use it, they didn't let us.
Google was really funny because there was no way we could get a hold of them during the movie. That is what I learned about Google — you cannot reach Google, Google reaches you. Basically, once we had the movie edited, then we could ask for permits. They said, "Oh, it's totally fine." So we just went there and took the pictures without any permits and then they gave us the OK. They wanted control, but they didn't want to have to deal with it beforehand.
The Hero Initiative: a charity for veteran comic book artists
Superheroes seem most notable these days for their ability to generate billion-dollar blockbusters. But while studios and comic book publishers have raked in the dough, the original creators of those crime fighters almost always worked as independent contractors, paid by each page of a comic they produced, not as salaried employees.
And that meant they rarely, if ever, enjoyed benefits like health insurance and retirement plans. As those artists become older, they sometimes face crippling bills and don’t have the resources to make ends meet.
The Hero Initiative is a charity designed to help these comic book legends get through difficult times, providing tens of thousands of dollars in emergency aid every year. The charity is at Comic-Con in San Diego this week, selling off artwork to raise money for the fund.
To get more of a background on the charity and the plight of veteran comics creators, we spoke with Jim McLauchlin, the co-founder and president of the Hero Initiative. When McLauchlin joined us on The Frame, he told us about the economic history of Superman's creation, the Hero Initiative's offerings at this year's Comic Con, and how the initiative was inspired by a program started by Major League Baseball.
Interview Highlights:
These artists weren't getting rich, but the characters they were creating became worth billions of dollars down the road. Superman, Batman, Spiderman — everybody was being invented in this period, right?
Yeah, pretty much the classic story of all that is the story of Superman. You had Jerry Segal and Joe Schuster, who were a couple of guys who basically sold the character for $130, plus a 10-year contract to do the character, to the company that we now call DC Comics.
But, when you think about what has happened in the wake of Superman, everything from all the publishing to the Superman peanut butter, to Superman television shows and Superman Underoos — the whole nine yards — $130 looks like quite a bargain for DC Comics.
Moving forward from the Golden and Silver ages of comics to about the year 2000, what happened to these artists and how did Hero Initiative come to be?
Hero Initiative started in 2000 because of my sports background. I used to be a sports writer, and Major League Baseball has something called BAT, the Baseball Assistance Team. They recognized that, today, every backup middle infielder is making $1.8 million, but you don't have to go back very far, maybe the mid-1970s, and players typically were making $10,000 and they had to have a job during the winter to make ends meet.
So the MLB went back and realized that there were a whole bunch of players who built MLB into what it is, and they set up a fund to help out some of the old-time athletes. Later, when I was working in the comics field, it seemed like something should really exist like that in comics.
You're working with artists who don't have insurance? They may not have retirement plans? What are the issues that you cover — is it medical issues, housing, life emergencies?
It's all those things you mentioned. It's health, it is housing, it is emergencies, it's the walk-of-life things that we never see coming until sometimes it's too late. A perfect example is a guy named Joe Phillips. He's been a comic artist for about 20 years, he lives in San Diego, and Joe had to have a leg amputated several months ago.
Right when that happened, he was quite literally flat on his back for a while. It's very hard to get any work done or to even get around the house or prop yourself up and sit at a drawing board when you're in a situation like that. So Hero Initiative helped Joe pay the rent and keep things going for a couple months when he was in immediate recovery.
How do you go about raising your money? How does Comic-Con figure into your fundraising?
Most of what we do is in the comic market. It's fundraising that takes place at events, in the comics business, with a really dedicated audience. We have a great relationship with Marvel Comics and typically every year Marvel will do something in conjunction with us that we call the 100 Project.
There's a special issue of a comic, an anniversary issue or a new #1 issue, and Marvel will print 100 blank-covered copies of a comic. We'll send those out to 100 different artists, have them do an original drawing on the cover, and we'll auction off the originals and collect all the drawings into a book. Really, the 100 Projects have been wonderful sources of yearly institutional income for us.
If people were to stop by the booth for Hero Initiative at the Comic-Con floor, what would be going on?
We'll be at booth 5003 at Comic-Con and over the course of the weekend we'll have a variety of different creators there, signing autographs, doing sketches. Scott Koblish, the artist on "Deadpool" from Marvel Comics, will be there, as well as Dan Jurgens, who's famous as the guy who did the Death of Superman storyline several years ago.
An interesting character you'll see there is a guy named Ethan Castillo, a 10-year-old artist who started self-publishing some projects and has been hitting the convention circuit with his family when school's out of session.
We also spoke with Mike Grell, a cartoonist and writer who has worked on Iron Man, Green Arrow, X-Men, The Warlord, and John Sable (not too shabby, huh?). Grell told us about how his time working in the early days of comics left him without a safety net or a retirement fund, and how the Hero Initiative swooped in to save the day after a lengthy bout with illness.
Interview Highlights:
We know that the Golden and Silver Ages of comics were largely freelance, but what does that mean? Were you getting paid per page, per day? How did it work?
It was very much a piecework operation, per page. It was all done under "work for hire" as well, which meant that the company owned all the characters and you got your paycheck and a steady stream of income, and that was pretty much it.
But that means that when you get to be older, you realize you don't have a lot of benefits that are left over, or retirement or health insurance — the kinds of things that you would normally have from a full-time job. A lot of people of your era don't have access to those kinds of things.
There was, and is, nothing like that available. You were pretty much on your own, and a lot of us still are. Of course, when you're young and you still consider yourself to be a whippersnapper, it's no big deal — after all, you're going to live forever and you're never going to get sick.
But, as luck would have it, and life would have it, it doesn't quite work out that way. I found that out the hard way a couple years ago when I wound up flat on my back in a hospital bed and had no safety net, nothing to fall back on, no insurance, nothing. And that's where the Hero Initiative came in.
What were you suffering from, and how did they help you out?
I had a condition called cellulitis, which is a bacterial infection in one of the layers in your skin that affected my right leg. I honestly expected any day to wake up with no leg. I was 17 days in a hospital in a fairly intensive situation that just kept getting worse and worse.
When they figured out what it was, finally, they [put] me on a bunch of antibiotics, with a long recuperation period after that. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that this is a condition that can come back, and it did, about a year later. That was another nine days in the hospital.
With all of that building up, I was behind on my rent, I had medical expenses that I couldn't pay, and a friend of mine reminded me about the Hero Initiative. I knew they did good work and I knew that they helped a lot of people in trouble, but I just never expected that I would be one of those people.
What were they able to do for you?
Everything. They jumped in immediately and paid my medical expenses, paid my back-rent, provided me with living expenses to keep me going until I was back on my feet. It wasn't just the couple weeks in the hospital, but it was a six-week recovery period after that and then slowly, gradually getting back into being fully functional.
What would you imagine would have happened to you if you hadn't been bailed out by the Hero Initiative?
I would have had no other choice than bankruptcy. I mean, that's pretty much it. It's a harsh waker-upper, and it makes you think twice and it makes you count your blessings. One of the blessings that I can count in spades is the Hero Initiative.