Written and directed by Willard Huyck, writer of “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and close collaborator with George Lucas on several other projects, “Howard the Duck” is an infamous flop, a failure to translate the social satires of Marvel Comics’ anthropomorphic funny animal. A black spot in producer Lucas’s career, the film has had something of an afterlife as a cult film, a fact that The Hollywood Reporter has explored with a new 35th-anniversary oral history.
Chief among the new things revealed about the making of the to-this-day utterly bizarre project is that Robin Williams – very understandably – quit the project within the first week of voice recordings for what was, at first, his part as Howard. Speaking to Chip Zien, who ultimately ended up playing the voice role of Howard, the piece reveals that the late and very great actor-comedian left out of frustration over being forced to change his voice performance to better synch to the duck’s animatronic beak – since Howard had not been cast before production, so the beak moved to fit the bland delivery of the puppeteers’ own line reads, so Williams’ typically high energy and improvisational style no longer, well, fit the bill.
Zien said, “what I was told was by the third day, Robin said, ‘I can’t do this. It is insane. I can’t get the rhythm of this. I am being confined. I am being handcuffed in order to match the flapping duck’s bill.’”
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Lea Thompson, who starred in the film fresh off of her role in “Back to the Future” as Beverly Switzler (a character who is Howard’s sometimes girlfriend), is said to have continued to embrace the project, even that she pitched her own version to Marvel. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Thompson said: “Joe Quinones did some of the art for the pitch because he and Chip Zdarsky did the last run of Howard the Duck comic books.” Thompson, who now mostly works behind the camera as on shows such as DC’s “Stargirl,” “The Goldbergs,” and the upcoming second season of “Star Trek: Picard,” continued: “Chip and I worked together and came up with a really great pitch. Marvel liked the pitch, but they have different plans for the different characters. I still think I could do a really good job because I feel like I am the one who really understands the fans, both of the movie and the cartoon.” When so many actors and directors happily throw embarrassing old projects under the bus, Thompson’s embrace of “Howard the Duck” is actually pretty refreshing.