Kevin Feige, producer of Marvel movies and mastermind of the Marvel Cinematic Universe started out as a production assistant and during this time taught a movie cast how to use a computer.
Kevin Feige is undoubtedly the boss of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the connected Marvel universe owned by Disney, and in which the Avengers and soon the Fantastic Four or the X-Men evolve.
This man turned one-off, unrelated movies from the early 2000s into a one-off saga that grossed $28.6 billion worldwide by 2023. But did you know that this comic book-loving visionary started while bottom of the cinema ladder?
Twentieth Century Fox Kevin Feige in 2000, images from a making of “X-Men”
In 1998, Kevin Feige worked as a production assistant on the movie You’ve Got Mail starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. If you’ve never seen this classic romantic comedy, it tells how two booksellers with diametrically opposed methods and hating each other, exchange a romantic correspondence anonymously on the internet.
It is suitable from the room Perfumery by Miklós László, as had been the films Rendez-vous (1940) and Amour Porte Restante (1949) before him.
Warner Bros.
Meg Ryan
On the set, it was Kevin Feige, familiar with the internet which was then in its infancy for the general public, who taught the cast how to use this new tool. For the equivalent of three days, he was the one who trained Hanks, Ryan and writer-director Nora Ephron to email and master America Online (AOL). Before filming, Meg Ryan had never touched a computer.
Feige would remember years later the enormous satisfaction he felt when Ryan, who had spent some time with him on this computer story, greeted him on set: “I thought : ‘she remembers my name’.”
Feige would also work on Volcano, still at the bottom of the scale, before Lauren Shuler Donner and Richard Donner made him producer on the X-Men franchise in 2000. The sequel went down in history.