He saved Marvel from bankruptcy, and oversaw the move of its 5,000 comic-book characters from page to screen, and East Coast to West. But as his 'Fantastic Four' break new box-office records, Rehovot-raised Avi Arad is still aiming for the stars.
He served as a lowly grunt during the Six-Day War, attached to an infantry unit tasked with holding down hard-won positions in Jerusalem. Despite an army injury that resulted in a 15-month hospital stay, the real martial heroics - a battle with corporate raiders - came some 25 years later, after Avi Arad and his longtime business partner and fellow Israeli toymaker, Isaac "Ike" Perlmutter, had parlayed a perpetual, no-fee licensing deal with the Marvel Entertainment Group in 1993 into a minority stake in the company.
The drama ensued four years later, when Marvel landed in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, sliced, diced and bled dry by its majority shareholder, billionaire Revlon owner Ronald O. Perelman. Smelling blood, corporate raider Carl C. Icahn launched a hostile takeover. Caught in the murderous crossfire and consequent implosion of Marvel's stock value, Arad and Perlmutter made an unsolicited $ 325-million bid for the company.
With the smoke clearing 18 months later, Arad made a last-minute appeal to the company's investors, bankers and creditors. His own long-held plans to export Marvel's pantheon of 5,000 trademarked comic-book characters to Hollywood, he argued, would yield better returns than anything Perelman or Icahn - neither of whom knew Spider-Man or the Incredible Hulk from Tony the Tiger or the Jolly Green Giant - could ever hope to achieve. These guys, it could be assumed, would sell off Marvel for pennies on the dollar. Arad promised to return the company to its past glory - as in the 1960s, for example, when it introduced "Fantastic Four" and began a decade-long boom.
Marvel's abused shareholders and creditors ultimately responded to Arad's plea, and rejected Icahn's takeover effort. At this point, Marvel merged with Toy Biz, Arad and Perlmutter's company, and the two Israelis ended up with 40 percent of the new entity's stock.
By 2001, with a slew of big-budget movies in the pipeline, Marvel found itself back in the black, to the tune of $ 100 million in annual profits. And with the "Spider-Man" and "X-Men" franchises now huge box-office successes, Mighty Marvel began to make good on Arad's last-ditch assurances that his was a media powerhouse with billions of dollars yet to be squeezed from its comic-addled fans - readers and studios alike.
Today, the company brings in over half a billion dollars in revenues a year, and enjoys a half-billion revolving credit line secured through Merrill Lynch & Co. This, a cut-rate distribution deal with Viacom and a humongous stable of brand-name comic-book characters, will be used to transform Marvel, according to Business Week magazine, from a licensor into an independent film studio. This way, Arad no doubt hopes, Marvel can retain sufficient creative control over the film-making process to prevent such debacles as "Blade," "Electra" and "Daredevil" - films made without Arad's direct input or the benefit of his highly developed "Spidey Sense" for keeping them reasonably true to their comic-book roots.
"Fantastic Four" brought in $ 54 million during its opening weekend, in mid-July, even as it underwhelmed most of the critics. The New York Times called the first film by director Tim Story "dumb, trashy and inconsequential," while Chicago Sun-Times reviewer Roger Ebert proclaimed, "The really good superhero movies, like 'Superman,' 'Spider-Man 2' and 'Batman Begins,' leave 'Fantastic Four' so far behind that the movie should almost be ashamed to show itself in the same theaters." As a popcorn muncher, though, "F4" is adequate, and will no doubt keep the mostly male adolescents who comprise the mainstay of Marvel's comic-book fan base in their seats and off their cell phones for the requisite 90 minutes of on-screen exposition and mayhem. It easily beats the pulp out of Roger Corman's absurd (and as yet still commercially unreleased) 1994 feature adaptation, and fills in some of the holes left by the first issues of the comic-book series, which in 1961 began the longest run of any title.
In the first issue of the comic, we meet Reed Richards, a pipe-smoking, not yet silver-maned scientist, eager to take a rocket he has designed on a jaunt to the stars; his burly and extremely prickly co-pilot, Ben Grimm; his blond bombshell fianc?e, "society" fixture Sue Storm; and her hot rod-loving kid brother, Johnny. Though lacking in scientific credentials, Sue warns them of the possibly deleterious effects of cosmic rays they may encounter in space. But in the fashion of a justly infamous Polish joke making the rounds then, Richards decides they can escape harm by launching their rocket at night.
The rocket works like a charm… and so do the cosmic rays, which engender physical transformations in the four spacefarers. Richards it turns into a latter-day clone of Jack Cole's 1941 Plastic Man; Sue, into the first comic book female to contest the notoriously priggish Comic Book Code by sporting see-through clothing; Johnny, into a retooled version of the 1939 Human Torch; and Ben, into an even more brawny and volatile (and orange) human Inukshuk, an Inuit landmark made of slabs of rock intended to resemble the human form.
Next up on the Marvel production slate is a feature adaptation of "Captain America." The choice of that comic, the brainchild of Jewish comic-book wunderkinds Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, who launched their own struggle against the forces of darkness at the end of 1940, a year before America went to war, is a telling one for the 58-year-old Arad.
Captain America, ne Steve Rogers, began his career as the proverbial 98-pound weakling, one deemed far too frail for army service. Despite his 4-F status, the staunchly anti-Fascist Rogers persisted in his bid to fight Nazis (he was, in fact, the first comic book hero vicariously dispatched by his Jewish creators to combat Hitler). Persuaded by a sympathetic general to participate in a secret experiment called "Operation Rebirth," involving a "Super-Soldier" serum boosted by radiation treatments, the sickly Rogers emerged as Captain America, jingoistic scourge of Nazi fifth columnists in the U.S.A and their dreaded leader, Red Skull.
In a recently published essay in the 2003 book "Media Representations of September 11," called "Step Aside Superman, This is a Job for Captain America," Jarret Lovell, an assistant professor of criminal justice at California State University, Fullerton, attributed characteristics to Captain America that in wide strokes might also be said to describe Avi Arad.
Captain America, Lovell argues, served as the embodiment of the classic American "winner" archetype: Someone who "must beat everybody, get what is wanted, and come out on top. With a grin and a smile, he is invidious, competitive, and ultimately cannot be stopped."
Arad was born in a Cyprus refugee camp to Polish Jews - his mother escaped from the Lodz Ghetto - who met up in Russia. Following sojourns in Austria, Italy and other points in Europe, the Arads sailed on a refugee ship for Palestine in 1947, but were stopped by the British before they could alight on Israel's shores. They made it back in November of that year, and settled first in Rehovot and, later, Givatayim. Avi's father worked in a civilian capacity for the air force, while his mother, after learning Hebrew, became a special-education teacher.
His love of comics can be traced, he says, to his childhood exposure to Hebrew translations of the "Tarzan" comics. "And of course, to the (home-grown) 'Hasamba' books that read to me like comic books," he told The Report during a telephone interview from his Westwood offices.
Arad eventually used various imported Marvel titles to hone his English and to develop his American-style "winner" credo. A credo that proved vital to Arad's life-defining battle not against Nazis or Arabs, but, quite ironically, against a pair of Jewish junk-bond magnates every bit as disdainful of Arad's treasured comic-book superheroes as Captain Marvel's assorted enemies.
After completing his army service and recovering from his Six-Day War injuries (a subject he refuses to discuss), Arad pursued studies in industrial management at Hofstra University in Long Island, New York. A part-time job working an injection-molding machine for a plastics company led to an interest in toy making and a stint, during the 1970s, working with the team that developed air hockey. Frustrated at being denied a share of that venture's profits, he decided to go into business for himself.
An argument over royalty payments owed him by Isaac Perlmutter, the owner of a company called Toy Biz (Arad had designed a number of toys for him), which had secured a favorable licensing arrangement with Marvel, led to a lifelong partnership. It was one that, despite major differences in personal style and outlook -Perlmutter, who resides in New York, has been described as a bean counter with no interest in the comic book universe or the Hollywood setting that Arad, who claims to find business "boring," cherishes - endured any number of trials by fire. Arad, who took out American citizenship two years ago, eschews Hollywood-style limos for Harley Davidson hogs, and the Armani suits and Gucci wingtips favored by his fellow studio execs for black leather ensembles, complete with motorcycle boots, matching Tees and two-day-old stubble.
Still, with salary and bonuses that net him over $ 5 million annually, he knows how to live the good life, with a $ 20-million estate in Beverly Hills, and getaway manse in Malibu, not far from the oceanside redoubts owned by fellow Israeli entertainment tycoon Haim Saban, music mogul and Dreamworks SKG musketeer David Geffen, and various other Hollywood heavy hitters.
Arad focused his earliest efforts on the design and merchandising of Marvel action figures and the creation of animated "X-Men" and "Silver Surfer" shows for television. Today, these and other Marvel characters command a minimal $ 10-million buy-in fee from any studio intent on casting them in films. With "Spider-Man" and the "X-Men" flicks now among the best-selling DVD titles of all time, there is no shortage of buyers. Of course, if Arad succeeds in making Marvel the sole producer of films based on its characters, even the days of those studios may be numbered.
Arad, says Michael Chabon, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about fictional cousins and their travails in the comics trade, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay," as well as the screenplay of last year's "Spider-Man 2," possesses an encyclopedic grasp of Marvel minutiae. "The guy knows Spider-Man backward and forward," Chabon told the New York Times in 2004, "all the minor super-villains and their secret identities. I found myself totally able to talk to him on this ridiculous, wonderful level of, 'Who's tougher, the Lizard or the Rhino?'"
Chabon and Arad have something else in common - a penchant for infusing their creations with more than a smidgen of Yiddishkeit and, in Arad's case, a dash of Israeli edge.
It's true that the new "Fantastic Four" movie does not touch upon the Jewish origins of Benjamin Jacob Grimm, aka the Thing, a lineage that Jack Kirby - the legendary artist who, together with Stan Lee, created the character, and who kept a portrait of the gravelly Grimm on his mantle sporting tefillin and tallis, says can be traced all the way back to the Golem of Prague, the first of the truly crusty superheroes. As portrayed by actor Michael Chiklis, who plays an old-school, rough-and-ready cop in HBO's "The Shield," the aptly named Grimm is the only member of the "F4" who cannot turn his own super-power - his entire body has solidified into a rock-laden carapace that sends his nightie-clad wife screaming into the darkness - conveniently on and off.
"We ran out of screen time just to tell his story as is," explains Arad, who promises Grimm's religious proclivities can and will be explored in subsequent films.
For a clearer Jewish metaphor, though, Arad looks to the "X-Men" saga, the captivating tale of a talented but persecuted minority, and to that of their arch-nemesis, Magneto. Portrayed by actor Ian McKellen in the first two films, Magneto is a Holocaust survivor whose experiences in the death camps led him to adopt a murderous response to the tormentors of Jews and mutants alike. "X-Men 3," due out in May 2006, will introduce several new (to film) X-Men, including Angel and the Beast. Arad is now working with screenwriter Sheldon Turner ("The Longest Yard") on a Magneto spin-off that will explore the spoon-bending mutant's early years as a Nazi hunter.
"Magneto signifies the extreme right (wing) of any minority," Arad told The Report. "I would look, ideologically, more to Jabotinsky and Begin than to Ben-Gurion. Magneto to me is not a villain. But he becomes more like Kahane the more frustrated he is with the way the world is approaching the ones who are different. Kahane," he adds, referring to the late Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League and leader of an Israeli political party that advocated the expulsion of Arabs, "is where you start out with the right intentions and you end up going off the deep end. With Magneto, that was a very specific reason to push his heritage," as it formed a basis for giving the character his own starring vehicle.
"Comic books always served to capture a time and place," Arad says. "The way comic-book writers were dealing in the 40s and 50s with social issues was to create reluctant heroes who commit their life or destiny to doing the right thing. As history goes, the right thing then is still the right thing now. The technology changed, but the world remains the same.
"For me," says Arad, "comics are an art form, some of them absolutely literature. Comics are meant to capture our fears and our hopes. What do we think is wrong with the world, what do we want out of it? We are creating a mythology for our times."