Broken Frontier

The American Way, screenwriter John Ridley’s thought-provoking look at race relations among a group of superheroes in the 1960s, was released earlier this year in collected edition by DC Comics/Wildstorm. Broken Frontier sat down with the author to talk about the story and its themes.

BROKEN FRONTIER: What was the inspiration for The American Way ? Can it be traced back to a particular moment or incident in your life?

JOHN RIDLEY: Well, The American Way actually started as about three, four, or five fragmented ideas, things that were kind of interesting on their own but not a whole story. I wanted to do a period piece, something set in the 60s. I wanted to do something with a black hero. That was very important to me. I wanted to do a slightly different take on superheroes, something other than the upfront representation of them. A story that’s more behind the scenes where you get more insight into them as people rather than as purely heroic icons. So there were all these different ideas and I thought why not take A, B, C, and D and put them together?

And that’s where The American Way came from. What happens in the 1960s when you have a superhero group that’s not exactly what they seem and the government decides to try and change the course of history and how America views itself at that time? What if they bring a black hero into this group? How would these individuals react? How would America react? The story kind of took off from there. So I couldn’t say it was one thing. I wasn’t driving down the highway and suddenly went “Aha!” I took something good here, something good here, and put them all together into something that was pretty great.

BF: Having worked in both film and comics, what do you feel are the strengths and weaknesses of each medium?

JR: The strength of working in film is that you really get the strong visual representation of whatever story you’re trying to tell, whether it’s a big fantastic science fiction story or a small romantic comedy. You can really use the visual medium, the sound, the sights, the dialogue, all these things together. The difficulty lies in getting a movie made.

I don’t think most people understand how hard it is to get a movie made in Hollywood. Six major studios and they all have about twelve to fifteen movies in production a year. Not a lot of films. And you have all these people out there trying to make these movies and they’re very costly. The average cost of a major film is around $80,000,000. Now obviously there are films that are made for a lot less but to try and get this kind of money together, it’s really prohibitive for a lot of people to get into the business and even for people who are in the business to get their work done.

In comic books, you’re afforded different benefits such as incredible creative freedom. It’s not about budget. In The American Way for example, it opens with an alien invasion in midtown Manhattan and a super-group, these heroes with incredible powers, flying and racing in to save the day. So if it were a movie, that’s $120,000,000 right there. In comics, you don’t have to worry about that. [To an extent], you’re only limited by your own imagination. But you’re also limited in comic books by page count. You’ve got to get everything within 22 pages. You have to be very judicious in how you tell the story and also in dialogue.

It’s a different style of writing, an economy of writing to get to your point and say what you want to say. So they’re both very different, they both offer different things, and they both have their downsides.

BF: Is there one that you prefer over the other?

JR: No. I enjoy both and both are frustrating in some ways and rewarding in some ways. You make a movie, even not a very good or well-received movie, and millions of people can see it. It’s out there and you get to see your words on the big screen and that’s very gratifying.

With comic books, most people in the populace don’t read them or know about them. But at the same time, the people who really like graphic novels and sequential art, if they take to you, as someone who’s loved this stuff all my life, that’s very rewarding and gratifying to know that you’ve really reached your audience.

BF:  If the opportunity presented itself, could you see The American Way working as a feature film?

JR: That’s the operative phrase there, “if the opportunity presented itself.” [Laughs] Absolutely. You look at comic book films and the ones that worked, worked brilliantly. And the ones that were maybe not brilliant can still work well. Look at something like Ghost Rider, certainly not the most well-reviewed comic book movie ever but entertaining. People liked it, people wanted to see it. It’s going to make some good money.

The idea of taking something from the page to the screen certainly appeals to me. A lot of people think “You’re writing movies and you just wrote this to turn it into a movie.” Well, no. I love comic books. I wrote this to be a comic book. But like you said, if the opportunity presented itself, if I could take it to a wider audience and could make it strongly visual and three-dimensional, absolutely.

BF: What sort of research went into creating The American Way ?

JR: A lot of research about the 1960s. There are things that are obvious when we think about the 60s—the Kennedy administration, the Vietnam War, the Mercury space program, the Bay of Pigs—but there are other things as well. Robert Williams, a black individual in the 60s, was very much about the black armed struggle and resistance.

I think that most people, black or white, would know Martin Luther King or Malcolm X but they don’t know someone like Robert Williams. They don’t know his contribution to that era of America. That was something that I wanted to bring in. Now, it’s not a textbook. We don’t spend pages and pages talking about it. But for me, trying to have a representation of what was going on is going to be different from what people necessarily remember. That was very important to me.

I had actually, before I even thought about writing The American Way , came across a big reference book, just stumbled upon it in a bookstore, called The 60s Chronicles. And it was amazing. It was basically a day by day chronicle of everything that happened in the 1960s. It was just one of those books where you see it and go “I’ve got to get this because at some point I’m going to use it.”

So, when I sat down to write The American Way , I remembered I had this book. Georges Jeanty, the artist, whom I had never met before, did an amazing job capturing the era. I told him, “You know, there’s this book, The 60s Chronicles, that would be a great reference for your art.” And he said “Oh, I already have that.” So that was just a marriage made in heaven. Two people who had never met are working on the same project and both have this book.

BF: On that note, what was your experience like working with Georges Jeanty?

JR: He was fantastic. I can say so many good things about him as a person and an artist but also as a collaborator. He’s very smart about his work and he’s very open and challenging. Some people, they want to take over a project (and I don’t say this about anyone in particular). When you have creative people working together, sometimes you have someone who wants to take over and sometimes you have people who just want to follow your lead. It’s nice to have someone who will voice their opinion and make it known how they felt or say “Did you think about this?” or “It might be kind of cool to try this.”

With Georges, you have an objective individual who’s still invested in your project but is not afraid to say “Well, what do you think about this?” It’s nice to have an extra set of eyeballs. With Georges and also my editor, Ben Abernathy, it was a really great experience and I think that comes through in The American Way itself.

Continued tomorrow...