Hey folks, Kerry Gammill was the Conceptual Artist on THE INCREDIBLE HULK before it died. Here's a pic we got... quite some time ago, but I'm reminding y'all of now. Here ya go..
Hey folks, Harry here with... Junior Mintz, our local candy counter dame with the inside tasty treat on everything cool in the land of Holly and Wood. Oh how I would have loved to have seen this footage... but not in the terrible script they once had on this project. Now... I've heard that Gale Anne Hurd has hired comic book to film screenwriter du jour... Michael France, who wrote that amazing FANTASTIC FOUR script that Sam Hamm has been working from, to start in on the HULK. Universal has a tremendous amount of money invested in the character due to the R & D they spent with ILM. So, while the film no longer is working with Hensleigh's draft or directoral control, it does have this work behind it. Here's the adorable Junior to fill you in with the rest....
Yo, Harriee!
I just about flipped my little pill box hat when I saw the swanked-out coolness of that ILM Frankenstein clip! The bitter fact that the feature itself will never be produced is a crime against God, humanity and film fans everywhere. The quality of movement was perfect, and reminds me of another clip created for ILM for the oft-delayed HULK movie. Unfortunately, I was unable to secure a copy of said clip here (one day I hope, I'm workin' on it) but I do remember it pretty much shot for shot.
Two years ago I sweet-talked myself into a screening of BABE, PIG IN THE CITY on the Universal lot. Bleh. My mistake. Ten minutes into the flick, I bolted with some of the guys from Uni licensing who said they had something really fun to show me. Turns out it was the CGI test footage for the HULK picture. Like the Frankie footage it showed a lumbering, human-like character that really looked like a living being. Unlike Frankie it was in color and shot against a real exterior locale. The forty or so seconds showed the fierce-looking Hulk stomping his way down a desert road. There were moving camera shots on the Hulk from all angles, really giving him a sense of size and power. At one point he swung back his fist and smashed an electrical power pole in two, which fell to the ground with appropriate-looking explosions and sparks. All in all, a very impressive melding of computer and real SPFX. The Hulk himself looked great, his green coloring and skin just as authentic and richly textured as Disney's new CGI dinosaurs. Even the hair looked like the real green hair you'd knew Hulkie would have, not the badly-colored Beatle wig of the old TV show. I only had two minor quibbles, the first being the Hulk's face looked very generic, neith er brutish and exaggerated like the comics character, nor a slavish recreation of Lou Ferrigno's features. It was human-like, but not distinctive. The licensing boys said the ILM designers did that on purpose so they could morph the unique facial features of which ever actor was to play Bruce Banner into the creature's mush. Second quibble, they animated Hulkie wearing these teeny-tiny li'l denim shorts which look great on a tomater like me, but made him look a little too Village People, if you know what I mean. Still, it was just a test to show how ol' greenie would move and I'm sure they would have figured out how to make realistic ragged clothing look better on the second go-around.
Hopefully there will be a second go-around for I'm pretty sure that the crew that did Frankie did the Hulk as well (and probably the better-looking PHANTOM MENACE critters) and they deserve the opportunity to strut their stuff. If it can't be with FRANKENSTEIN, then here's hopin' HULK still has a chance.
Ciao for now,
Junior Mintz
