He was written of lovingly in trendy media outlets like
The Village Voice and
New York magazine. He regularly spoke to auditoriums full of rapt college students. He hadn’t quite assumed the look, speaking style, or place in mainstream culture that he eventually came to be known for, but his voice and face were ubiquitous if you were a Marvelhead — and Kaufman was very much one of those.
He’d just graduated from Yale (“The only thing I learned there, aside from drugs and a smattering of Chinese Studies, which was my major, were comic books,” he says) and wanted to make it in motion pictures. So when he had the wild idea to combine his interests and see if Lee would do a movie with him, he looked up Marvel in the phone book and rolled the dice. “I called up and then he got on the phone,” Kaufman recalled to me. “I said, ‘I’m a big fan. I wanna make movies.’” In Kaufman’s recollection, Stan’s reply was swift: “Come on over.”