The following is an excerpt, reprinted with permission, from the chapter "Stan In Hollywood"

In the wake of Spider-Man's phenomenal box-office success and the impressive screen performances of X-Men and Blade, it's hard to remember a time when Marvel's characters weren't in demand. But way back in the mid-1960s, as the Marvel Age was gathering steam, the company's heroes were a tough sell. One of the first people to buy in was Steve Krantz, a former executive with Columbia Picture Television. Krantz, who had recently started his own production company, was casting about for an animation property when he ran across some Marvel comic books. "I was knocked out by them," Krantz recalls. He immediately flew to New York and acquired the animation rights for several of the company's characters, including Captain America, Iron Man and Thor. That deal resulted in the 1966 cartoon series The Marvel Superheroes. To save time and money, the animators filmed panels from the comic books and strung them together, giving the episodes a peculiar stilted quality. Superheroes wasn't very good, but die-hard Marvel fans came to appreciate its kitschy elements, and it sold well in international syndication. Krantz also financed a series based on The Amazing Spider-Man, which ran from 1967 to 1970 and was written and directed by animation rebel Ralph Bakshi. Working with a bigger production budget, the animators graced the webbed wallcrawler's first TV adventures with a more fluid style; its heavy shadows and quirky storylines evoked the tone of Lee's run with Steve Ditko on The Amazing Spider-Man. The final Marvel TV series from the 1960s was The Fantastic Four, which ran for two seasons. Produced by animation house Hanna-Barbera (The Flintstones), the show was most notable for its character designs by renowned comic-book artist Alex Toth.

On all the cartoon shows, Stan provided editorial advice and direction, but he was clearly dissatisfied with how they turned out. "From an aesthetic point of view I think it's horrible, because we try to do Spider-Man for an older audience and on television they do it for the six-year-olds," Lee told a crowd at Vanderbilt University in 1972. He continued: "I was very interested in the television series in the beginning. I flew out to the coast and I discussed these things with Hanna-Barbera and Krantz Films and so forth, until I realized discussing it meant nothing because all they're interested in doing is pleasing the sponsor. Not the network, not us, but the sponsor." Marvel's owners, Martin Goodman and, later, Cadence Industries, were significantly more bullish about the cartoons. The company had secured a percentage of the gross revenue from the shows, which enjoyed long lives in syndication. "Marvel made a great deal of money on the basis of the shows I produced," Krantz says.

Of course, animation was an easy and natural progression for a comic-book company. The real challenge was in live action. Despite the success of the Batman TV show in the 1960s, there wasn't much interest in translating Marvel's superchampions to the celluloid world of flesh and blood. Lee's brush with Hollywood in Marvel's mid-'60s salad days was limited to a 1965 visit from Federico Fellini, which yielded a lifetime's worth of anecdotes but little else of note. Stan's big break, if it could be called that, came a few years later when another foreign director showed up at the Marvel offices. Alain Resnais, whose films included Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima, Mon Amour, was a student of American culture who had learned much of his English from comic books. He was a huge admirer of the Marvel Universe and of Lee; at their first meeting, Resnais snapped photos of Stan as the two men talked. They soon became friends, often meeting for lunches at a Third Avenue coffee shop and for dinners in Chinatown. Resnais cast Lee as a narrator in his 1973 movie L'An 01. The French director also proposed a collaboration. "I want my first movie in English to be written by you," Resnais told him. "I have dreamed that when I finally do a movie in English that you will write my first one."

Their first project was The Monster Maker, a pop-art parody about a frustrated movie producer who seeks creative and spiritual redemption by making a film about pollution. With gentle direction from Resnais, Lee wrote a full script, the first -- and last -- time he would invest so much effort in a movie project. From then on, Stan would stick with story treatments and outlines, which are quicker and easier to generate. "I'm a very fast writer," Lee told author James Monaco. "Working with Alain, I had to go against the grain. All my life I had written just for myself. Now I was trying to please somebody else as well."

The Monster Maker's protagonist, Larry Morgan, is an apparent stand-in for Lee himself. Morgan produces schlocky horror pictures that make money and are popular with kids, but he can't help but feel that he's reached a dead end. He is despondent about his life and his job, and what he craves more than anything is recognition from an adult audience. Through a series of story twists, Morgan embarks on a "serious" film project to expose the evils of pollution. There's some violence, a fire, and then a climactic montage sequence in which a monstrous wave of pollution descends upon New York City, choking the sky, the waterways and the streets. The true horror, it is revealed in less-than-subtle fashion, is the accumulation of garbage that we so callously resign to landfills, mindless of the terrible price that we might pay in the future. The movie closes with a voice-over: "We deserve no pity, for we have done this to ourselves. We were placed on this Earth, this veritable Eden, with all we could ask for, all we could desire, ours for the taking. We were warmed by the sun, nurtured by the soil, and sheltered by the trees. The life-giving waters flowed pure and clear, and the air that sustained us would sustain us forever. Or, so we thought. So we thought...."

If, as they say, all art is autobiographical, then Lee's dialogue offers insight into the inner turmoil he had experienced in an earlier stage of his career. At one point in the movie, Larry Morgan tells his ex-wife, Catherine, about his new, meaningful work. She glows with pride: "Larry, you must have known how I always felt about those shallow horror films of yours. I always wondered how you could bring yourself to keep grinding out such juvenile, unintellectual pablum. But now, to think of you tackling a worthwhile theme like pollution -- to think of you turning your back on commercialism in order to say something that must be said -- Oh, Larry -- I can't tell you how thrilled -- how proud of you I am."

Unlike Morgan, Lee wasn't exactly turning his back on commercialism. He and Resnais sold The Monster Maker in 1971 for $25,000. The script gathered dust and was never made. In 1976, they put together an outline for a film called The Inmates, a romantic comedy set against the backdrop of an imminent alien invasion of Earth. By that point, Lee was either too busy or too disconcerted to attempt a full script again. "Personally, I'd like to sell the treatment (when complete) for lots of money and a percentage, and have someone else do the screenplay, although Alain says he'd prefer me to write it," Lee wrote in a letter to Steve Krantz. The Inmates bounced from producer to producer for several years, but never went anywhere.

While Stan was dabbling with the French New Wave, he also teamed up with Lloyd Kaufman, a young filmmaker whose credits in later life would include Troma Entertainment's The Toxic Avenger and Tales from the Crapper. Kaufman had attended Yale University in the mid-1960s, where, he says, he double-majored in recreational drugs and Marvel comics. Upon graduation, he struck up a friendship with Lee that bloomed into a partnership. They worked in Lee's condo, surrounded by Joan's collection of sculptures and antiques, with Stan spouting his cinematic brainstorms and Kaufman scribbling away furiously. For 1971's Night of the Witch, about a witch in Salem who kills only evildoers, Lee dictated his vision onto a quarter-inch tape, which Kaufman dutifully converted into a script. "As a writing partner, he knew what he wanted," Kaufman recalls. "He would create the basic story and rely on me to put the sense of humor in." Among the half-dozen or so film projects that they concocted, Night of the Witch went the furthest. It was optioned for $500 and then forgotten. Lee let Kaufman keep all the money.

In what may not have been a wise move, Stan also brought Kaufman, a self-described "LSD-brain idiot," on board for a pitch to Resnais. Lee had an idea for a movie about a man who talks to God. He relayed the concept to Kaufman, who speedily turned around a first draft for a film called The Man Who Talked to God. "My guess is Resnais said, 'Merci beaucoup, I go back to France.' That was the end of that," Kaufman says. "I think Stan was too polite to tell me it sucked."

Lee took several meetings with agents and producers to pitch their projects, and sometimes he brought his young associate along. The Hollywood folks were always enthusiastic, even reverential, but the discussions would lead nowhere. "We'd keep going to these meetings, and it was always the same thing. 'We love this! Everybody loves this! The kids will love it.' And then, nobody ever called," says Kaufman, adding that he found the stream of rejections mystifying. "Stan is a saint. He's a good, talented, kind person. What idiots are they? How stupid are they? The guy is just foaming at the mouth with brilliant ideas, with mainstream inexpensive characters and plots. It's an absolute puzzlement."

During the 1970s Marvel's heroes had their own bumpy ride into showbiz. A particularly inadvisable deal struck by Chip Goodman while his father, Martin, was out of town got the company off to a bad start. In 1971, rock promoter Steve Lemberg sat down with Chip to negotiate for the radio rights to several Marvel characters. Lemberg was only interested in radio serials, but then a strange thing happened. "I just kept asking for more rights," Lemberg recalls. "Every time I asked for something, they gave it to me. I'd say, 'Does anyone have the rights to do movies?' They'd say, 'No,' because at the time no one really wanted to do movies. And I'd say, 'OK, I'll give you a few hundred dollars... for those rights too.'" Lemberg says he walked away with an exclusive option to license the majority of the company's heroes -- including Spider-Man, the Hulk and the Fantastic Four -- for motion pictures, television and radio. The total price: $2,500, plus an annual fee to renew his option. "Chip really thought this was found money," says Gerry Conway, who was then writing for Marvel.

Lemberg was young, in his late twenties, but he had big dreams for the Marvel pantheon, encompassing all of the major entertainment industries. He wanted to create an ice show with the Silver Surfer, a Thor radio program, and a film starring Spider-Man. Through his music-industry connections, he was able to set up appointments in Hollywood. And what he found mainly was resistance. "It was too expensive to make these things," Lemberg says. "The technology didn't exist. In order to produce that kind of film and try to do it as a real thing, it would have been unimaginable." In the end, Lemberg produced only the Spider-Man rock album and Lee's Carnegie Hall show, both in 1972.

From Marvel's perspective, there was another problem: Lemberg's contract didn't include a performance clause, which meant that, technically, he could renew his licensing option indefinitely without ever accomplishing anything. After some legal wrangling in 1973, the company extricated itself from the exclusivity of that agreement, forcing Lemberg to show results in order to maintain his standing. He eventually let his options lapse.

That entire ordeal set Marvel's timeline back a few years, but Lee soldiered on. He worked every angle to get his superheroes off the page and into just about anything else. "I'd like us to be involved in every form, shape, and type of media," Lee told an interviewer in 1977. "I'd love for us to do movies, television, stage shows -- everything. We ought to have a Marvel Land, like Disneyland." When Tommy hit big in 1975, Lee wrote a treatment for a Fantastic Four rock opera. Other rock operas were proposed, featuring Thor, Captain America -- even one for Spider-Man, with Elton John and Mick Jagger as possible leads. None of them were ever mounted or filmed.

In 1978, Marvel's fortunes perked up when The Incredible Hulk live-action TV show debuted on CBS. Starring Bill Bixby as David Banner -- "Bruce Banner" sounded too homosexual to network execs -- and Lou Ferrigno as his green-skinned alter ego, the weekly one-hour series caused a mild sensation and was a solid ratings performer. Eschewing the campy conventions of the 1960s Batman show in favor of a pastiche on The Fugitive series, The Incredible Hulk reflected a more serious approach. Banner wandered the country in search of a cure for his "Hulk-outs," helping the random troubled souls that he met along the way. The Hulk showed up for a few minutes each episode to knock around the bad guys and to destroy cars and property. Lee acted as a creative consultant, for which he received $1,250 per episode. The show ran for five seasons.

Another live-action series, The Amazing Spider-Man, didn't fare as well, despite Lee's more direct involvement. In preproduction, he attended several meetings with the show's executives where he felt he sold them on his fantasy-humanistic approach for making Spidey sparkle in prime time. But when the show arrived, it resembled nothing more than a run-of-the-mill action show. The boob-tube Spider-Man, played by the wooden Nicholas Hammond, didn't run or jump or swing like the comic-book Spider-Man. He was Starsky in a red-and-blue jumpsuit. The Spider-Man series became legendary in comic-book circles for its awfulness. Stan registered his complaints while the program was still in its first season. "The people doing the Spider-Man show keep writing one bad script after another," Lee lamented in a 1978 interview with SunStorm Magazine. "So we're either going to have to drop the show or go with bad scripts -- I don't know which is worse." He went on, "The writers are all a bunch of hacks -- the best of them -- used to writing TV series with interchangeable plots. The problem is, our characters need specialized plots -- they're unique."

The 1978 release of Superman: The Movie, with Marlon Brando and Christopher Reeve, accelerated the pace of Marvel's deal-making and was probably the catalyst for finally sending Lee to Los Angeles. Superman grossed $300 million worldwide, which was remarkable considering that the DC character's comic books were then languishing on newsstands. It also spawned several sequels and a host of lucrative merchandising licenses. More important, it proved the concept of a live-action superhero movie.

By 1982 Lee, firmly rooted in Los Angeles, could boast of dozens of Marvel-related projects in the works -- Broadway shows featuring Captain America and Thor, live-action TV pilots based on Daredevil and the Black Widow, and motion-picture vehicles for characters including Ghost Rider, the Dazzler, Howard the Duck, and the Sub-Mariner. Lee Kramer, Olivia Newton-John's former boyfriend and manager, was moving forward on a proposed $20-million Silver Surfer production. Paul McCartney had been approached about the score, and a levitation device was being built at the Imperial College in London. Even Kid Colt Outlaw, the 1950s-era Atlas title, had been optioned for the big screen. Marvel was on the move. And Stan was pedaling as fast as he could.

In the span of five or six years, he wrote outlines for dozens of projects that never saw the light of day. Ragnarok, starring Thor, was an off-Broadway musical in the vein of Godspell. A Silver Surfer treatment contained elements of early-'70s blaxploitation movies. In Lee's proposed storyline, the Surfer races across the Earth on his board. As he swoops down over New York, a "tall, overdressed black man" enters the picture: "It's Sweet-Daddy Wisdom, leader of New York's Black Mafia. He aims a hand gun at the Surfer. He commands the Surfer to land gently and get off the board. He says that everyone's been trying to get a line on him. And now he belongs to Sweet-Daddy Wisdom. Ol' Sweet-Daddy's gone and caught himself the world's choice prize. He's captured the ultimate honky."

Lee tailored his Marvel visions from a previous era to the tenor of the times, even if it meant taking his characters in strange directions. This was how he described Thor in one outline: "If Arnold Schwarznegger [sic] had Robert Redford's face and Richard Burton's voice! Thor is surely the handsomest, most heroic, most powerful, most dutiful son any doting super-God ever had. The poor guy doesn't lie, doesn't cheat, doesn't do drugs, and fights his fool head off for truth, justice, and the Asgardian way of life. One thing though -- he's great in the hay." In the comic books, Thor's sexual prowess had never really come up.

In a way, Lee had returned to the trend-following, scattershot sales methods of his days at Timely and Atlas, except now he was flooding the market with movie ideas. Nowhere was this more obvious than in his non-Marvel undertakings. His treatment for a Buck Rogers script was a dead ringer for Logan's Run. Decathlon 2020, about a futuristic world where a violent bloodsport reigns supreme, smacked of Roger Corman's Death Race 2000. And there were others: Shockers, The Last Unicorn, The Menace of the Mandroid, Mighty Man. When a concept exploded into his brain, he would jot it down in his large, printed handwriting. "Mafia takes over govt!" read one note. "Now what? Now they're legit -- they have to worry about crime!" In another note, he scrawled: "Pacifist gets frozen to escape death. Wakes up years later. War outlawed -- but life is terrible. He becomes warlike in order to save world." And another note, this one typewritten: "Write screen play [sic] or story re: guy on subway seeing innocent person being assaulted and afraid to help." Lee was bursting with inspiration. "People out here are starved for ideas and concepts," he said in a 1979 interview with The Ambassador. "I've always found that the easiest thing -- as long as someone else does the tiresome work of writing the actual script. It's very nice: the things I do best are the things in demand."

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