So we may not be Golden Apple or Mile High, but I have to say that Metro Entertainment gets a fair amount of celebrity customers (one of whom’s going to be writing Amazing Spider-Man soon but won’t be named until I get his permission). And while I may have shown Crispin Glover where the Daniel Clowes comics were and saw Neil Patrick Harris with who I thought was his hetero-life mate (boy, was I not surprised!) shopping for indy books, most of the real celebrities have been the little guy.
So when someone slyly pointed to a copy of Absolute Watchmen on our sheves and mouthed the words ‘I’m working on that’ to my co-worker Ish, we nearly broke out the champagne. Yep, a lovely couple (or brother and sister or good friend and good friend; after NPH, I’ve learned to be wary) from Sony came in and secretly admitted that they indeed were working on Doctor Manhattan for the upcoming film of Watchmen. The rather lovely woman had done a test print apparently and that got them in the job. On a break back home in sunny Santa Barbara, they’d be due back for work in Vancouver soon but were nice enough to stop by and totally thrill us with little to no info on the movie.
Even my ‘Blink once for yes, twice for no!’ tactic didn’t work! They did say that the movie was incredible (well… they do pay your checks) and that the comic was practically being used as storyboards for scenes in the flick. When asked about the incredible layers of complexity the book has, what with the prose, the comic within the comic and all the other things online naysayers have been touting as impossible to film, the conversation grew interesting.
Apparently, the Tales of the Black Freighter is mentioned within the script, but as to exactly how it’s incorporated into the film, he suggested that there might be different versions of the movie.
I continued to pump them for info that they simply couldn’t give out, but at least seemed to impress them with how much I knew about the book. The woman who’d made the test film of Dr. Manhattan seemed surprised and asked if I knew this much about all of the comic we sold.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes I do.”
