The Transformer: From Fan Boy to Producer

Tom DeSanto turned his passion for comics into a producing career. His summer film, Transformers, is generating the kind of buzz Hollywood dreams about

by Ronald Grover

Sitting in an Italian restaurant in West Hollywood, surrounded by starlet wannabes, Tom DeSanto flashes the giant S on his Superman T-shirt as testimony to his well-earned status as a "fan boy." The 38-year-old DeSanto loves comics—he has 35,000 of them, neatly arranged in boxes, some at his nearby home, others at his dad's place in New Jersey. He got the first when he was a toddler, his mom told him, and as he browses through Meltdown Comics across Sunset he rattles off story lines about Superman, Batman, the Flash, and even the fiercely patriotic Captain America, as well as the names of the artists who brought them to life.

A comic book nut? Sure. But that's what has put DeSanto, the son of a New Jersey policeman, on the fast track in Hollywood. His résumé includes helping to write the story line for Fox's (NWS) first X-Men flick and producing the second. He helped get Battlestar Galactica back on the air.

His latest movie, Transformers, which DeSanto is producing along with some guy named Spielberg (as in Steven), is set for release on July 3 and just may be one of this summer's biggest hits—right up there with that hooded guy swinging from webs, and a swaggering, half-drunk pirate.

According to the online measurement service Hitwise, the number of searches Transformers is getting on the Net is blowing away Bruce Willis' Live Free or Die Hard, which opens four days before DeSanto, Spielberg, and director Michael Bay unleash their form-changing machines who come to earth to continue their intergalactic battle. The studio tracking numbers put a likely opening weekend right about where Pirates of the Caribbean opened in 2003—which was $46 million back then on its way to $305 million— numbers that will make a lot of folks in Hollywood giddy.

Big-Screen Potential

But Transformers is a fan boy's idea of nirvana. DeSanto says he used to scribble comic book drawings on the back of his science notebooks and would rush home after school in the '80s to catch afternoon comics on the tube, including Transformers, which ran from 1984 to 1987. Weaned on the boob tube fight between the heroic Autobots and the evil Decepticons, DeSanto saw big-screen potential in machines that can transform themselves into robot-like warriors—even when the rest of Hollywood had long forgotten the animated TV show.

DeSanto's biggest coup was working a deal with Hasbro (HAS), the company that makes Transformers and continued to control its movie rights. Hasbro must have liked the smooth-talking, sunny-faced DeSanto. At the time, Hasbro was coming out of a financial dry spell and was wowed by the new life a movie had given to Spiderman, says Hasbro Chief Operating Officer Brian Goldner. After De Santo talked up the brand, his fascination with the characters, and where he figured he could take them, the toy company gave him an option to go out and find a Hollywood deal.

"I came in there with a character outline for what could be a franchise," says DeSanto. "And I told them that I would be true to the integrity of the characters."

Of course, it didn't hurt that Hasbro saw megabuck license fees and toy royalties provided DeSanto could bring Transformers to the big screen. But Hollywood didn't share their enthusiasm. Every studio passed when DeSanto along with fellow producer Don Murphy, another comic book lover who DeSanto brought into the project, made the pitch.