The Hulk: The Illustrated Screenplay

Although Ang Lee's film version of the classic Marvel comic book series has been getting less than stellar reviews, it features some wildly ambitious special effects. However, readers hoping to get a glimpse of how those effects were produced might be disappointed in this effort, since the bulk of the book consists of the rather dry screenplay (and lines like ""Hulk sniffs the air. His eyes narrow. A snarl"" don't exactly make for riveting reading). In his foreword, Lee admits the shooting script ""is only a shadow of the adventures we had along the way."" This work shows a few of those adventures, such as how the film's producers used real-time storyboards with motion to come up with shots, and how they projected a ""sense of soul"" onto the Hulk. Sidebars on creating the Hulk's facial expressions, designing the scientists' costumes (no lab coats, so they appeared ""as realistically as possible"") and building sets that were meant to be ""obliterated"" by the Hulk enliven the somewhat dull text. (July 23)