Superman

by Larry Tye

  Jack got a seat on the Kinney board of directors, then on Warner’s board. Irwin Donenfeld, Harry’s son, got a lot of money, but he lost his job. So did Mort Weisinger. Jay Emmett, Jack’s nephew and the whiz kid behind the Licensing Corporation of America, made out best, at least to begin with. He became best friends with and right-hand man to Steve Ross, the ingenious dealmaker behind Kinney and Warner, although Ross later sacrificed his best friend to save himself from a federal racketeering indictment. Emmett said that Kinney’s purchase of National was a great move for everyone, but that Ross—an “imaginative genius”—never appreciated that the most important assets he was getting were Superman and Batman: “He had no idea of the worth of those characters, none. They were just two comic characters to him.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Believing a Man Can Fly

  BARELY REACHING FIVE FOOT THREE, with a mop of blue-rinsed white hair, Alexander Salkind brought to mind a mole man more than a Superman. His taste ran to white bucks, silk ascots, and jeweled lorgnettes, the elegant spectacles favored by operagoers. His suits were strictly powder blue and Savile Row, with a Légion d’honneur rosette proudly pinned to the wide lapel. He held court amid the faded opulence of luxury hotels and refused to ride an elevator or an airplane. His exotic accent, a thick blend of old-school Romance languages, left no doubt that English was not his native tongue. Indeed, his background was Russian, his homeland Germany, his citizenship Mexican, his ethnicity Jewish, and his passport that of a cultural attaché to Costa Rica. He had bankers in every capital in Europe yet had never paid a bill on time. But this son of Greta Garbo’s film producer knew how to make movies—his production credits ranged from Orson Welles’s The Trial to the blockbuster The Three Musketeers. In the spring of 1974 he was looking for the next big thing.

  “Why don’t we do Superman?” his son and protégé, Ilya, asked expectantly over dinner at the Café de la Paix in Paris.

  “What’s Superman?” Alex asked back.

  Not an auspicious beginning for the man who was about to define the Last Son of Krypton for a new generation in America and around the globe. But what he lacked in appreciation of popular culture Alex made up for with his instinct that a world disillusioned by Vietnam and Watergate might need a superman. This was the intuition of the Holocaust survivor—an understanding that it wasn’t the particular myth that mattered but our aspiring to something bigger. His own life had always been defined half by suspicions and anxieties, half by defying norms and accomplishing the impossible. That fearlessness—what was a tax problem or lawsuit to someone who had been hunted by the Gestapo?—was precisely what was needed to revive Superman more than twenty years after his last radio broadcast and fifteen after his TV show and its star died, when he was again the limited province of adolescent readers of comic books.

  “I told my father who Superman was—that he flies, that he’s as known as Jesus Christ, that we can’t do it tiny—and why it has to be a big movie,” Ilya recalls. “He said, ‘Sounds very interesting, this Superman. Flies. Powers. Stronger. Known. Ahhh, let me talk a bit with my people.”

  His people were bankers and other moneymen from Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, Britain, and Chicago. Some were reputable while others skated on the edge. It was the same combination that had worked for Harry and Jack over the years. Enough of them approved to give Alex and Ilya confidence. More than enough. Looking back, even his lawyer concedes that Alex sold or traded more than 100 percent of the production, in the style of a Ponzi schemer or of Max Bialystock, Mel Brooks’s double-dealing producer. He didn’t go to jail only because the film made enough money to pay everyone off handsomely.

  Step two was getting Warner Communications, Superman’s new owner, to hand over the keys. Warner Bros. executives were busy with their own big films—Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Night Moves, Dog Day Afternoon—and had never imagined Superman as much more than a comic book. A buoyant superhero seemed an especially poor fit at a moment when the nation was reeling from one of the deepest recessions since the 1930s along with the resignation and pardoning of its disgraced president, Richard Milhous Nixon. So whatever they thought of the elfin Alex and his slightly taller son, Warner agreed, turning over twenty-five years of moviemaking rights to the Salkinds in return for $850,000 and the promise of millions more in the unlikely event the producers cashed in. It was a golden chance for Ilya and Alex and a lack of both vision and intestinal fortitude by one of Hollywood’s biggest dream factories. “It wasn’t one of the studios” that recognized what Superman could be, concedes Terry Semel, Warner’s former president. “I’d like to take credit for it, but I think Alex Salkind saw it and he did it.”

  More than a thousand people would be involved in the production, including six writers and rewriters and three directors. Eleven separate film units shot at three studios in eight countries on three continents. More than a million feet of film were recorded, although just twelve thousand were needed. It took the largest movie budget ever to pull it all off, with more bounced or delayed paychecks than anyone could count. A director, a writer, and the biggest stars all sued the Salkinds afterward, and they all won settlements. Alex had to hijack the film to squeeze the extra money he needed from Warner, and his fear of flying—and of being arrested—kept him from the U.S. premiere.

  But what mattered to him, to Ilya, and to studio executives like Semel was that it worked. Five years after that father-son dinner in Paris, the Salkinds released Superman: The Movie. It was nominated for three Oscars and took home a Hugo Award for best dramatic presentation and a Grammy for best musical score. The box office results were even more uplifting. It was the second-highest-grossing movie of 1978, bested only by Grease, and the most profitable in Warner Bros.’ history. It was the first time a comic book hero had starred in a serious movie and it launched Superman as a film franchise, with three sequels over the next decade. For the Man of Steel, it meant a bold new adventure that would define him for Generation Xers the same way George Reeves’s Adventures of Superman had branded him for baby boomers. And it was made possible by one of the few people on the planet who had never heard of Superman.

  BEFORE THE SALKINDS COULD MAKE a movie they needed a script, and so, as they would with everything, they opened their checkbooks and went hunting for a big name. Alfred Bester qualified, having written The Phantom comics and award-winning novels like The Demolished Man, and he was hired to produce a treatment. Ilya loved what he wrote; Alex didn’t. Bester might be a celebrity in the world of science fiction, father Salkind said, but he wanted big. Bester got a generous kill fee and Mario Puzo got a call.

  Puzo’s Godfather had recently been made into two movies that earned him a pair of Academy Awards for best screenplay. An Oscar was the kind of credential Alex could relate to, and Ilya signed Puzo up for 5 percent of the film’s gross sales. His Superman was a TV anchorman at a station where Lois Lane was the weather girl and there was no competition from the Daily Planet, which had folded. Lex was there, too, or rather “Luthor Lux.” When Superman went looking for Lux he found a bald Kojak in a trench coat who, sucking a lollipop, asked, “Hey! Superman! Who loves ya, baby?” Puzo thought camp like that gave his movie pizzazz. Everyone who read it, especially the National Periodical people, was sure it would undermine the film’s credibility and Superman’s. Puzo’s opus, which stretched to more than three hundred pages, read more like a novel than a screenplay and would have cost a billion dollars to produce, says Ilya. Yet both sides found silver linings when Puzo walked away at the end of 1975: He eventually got his promised 5 percent, with $300,000 of that up front and an on-screen credit for a largely useless product, while the Salkinds got bragging rights to one of the world’s best-known writers, whose legend they used to refill their dwindling coffers.

  Next up were Robert Benton and David Newman, who had written the script for the Broadway production It’s a Bird, along with Newman’s wife and writing partner, Leslie. Ilya offered the new team a million dollar
s and simple instructions: “Fix it.” They spent their first three days tossing out big chunks of Puzo’s work, then got their own bead on the hero. “We decided that Superman is our King Arthur, he’s our legend,” says Leslie. What fascinated Benton was the Clark Kent–Superman split: “Is he Clark Kent until that emergency call happens, or is he Superman? Does he miss going full tilt or does he get used to being this guy who sits in a coffee shop and has a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch?” As for what the Salkinds wanted, “They had no idea and couldn’t have cared less,” says Benton, although they made clear they wanted screenplays for a film and a sequel. Newman says Alex often asked about what was happening with “Mr. Superman and Mrs. Lois Lane,” but “when we would start telling him he would fall asleep in about five minutes. I said to David, ‘It’s like telling bedtime stories.’ ” They did get paid—at the end of each day, in cash, with money from whatever country had the best currency exchange rate. They also got ongoing guidance from National’s E. Nelson Bridwell, who was a living encyclopedia of everything that Superman had said, done, or imagined.

  Heeding Bridwell’s advice was less a matter of choice than of law, as spelled out in a fifty-four-page agreement between National and the Salkinds. It prescribed that the films “shall not be satirical or obscene.” They had to be G-rated, or at worst PG, and had to be consistent with the way Superman spoke and acted in the comic books. National would get to vet the screenplay and be there during filming. Costumes for Superman and Superboy had to be preapproved, as did the actors who played them and Lois. Just to be sure, the publisher submitted its preferred lists for these parts. Superman and Clark, it suggested, might best be handled by any of twenty-four A-list actors, from Charlton Heston, known for his roles as Moses and Ben-Hur, to tough guy Charles Bronson. Lois’s list had twenty-three actresses, from Natalie Wood, who had gotten rave reviews as Maria in West Side Story, to sexpot Raquel Welch.

  Before they could worry about stars, the Salkinds needed a director. Tops on their list was Chinatown maestro Roman Polanski, who was still reeling from the murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, and would soon be accused of sexually abusing a thirteen-year-old girl. “Not exactly my kind of thing, Ilya,” Polanski said of Superman. Jaws director Steven Spielberg approached him, Ilya says, but Alex worried that “the shark might go down, let’s wait and see how this fish movie does.” Jaws was a smash and now Spielberg was out of reach. From there they moved on to a who’s who of top Hollywood skippers—from Francis Ford Coppola, who was busy with Apocalypse Now, to John Guillermin, whose hero of the moment was King Kong, to Sam Peckinpah, who pulled a gun on Ilya and said, “You gotta shut up, kid. What do you think you know about movies?” They finally settled on Guy Hamilton, who had made his name with Goldfinger. He looked like a gem until the production moved from Rome, where star Marlon Brando had a pending arrest warrant for sexual obscenity, to London, where Hamilton was a tax exile. Moving back to London, Hamilton decided, would cost him too much money.

  Richard Donner was a perfect fit. He had grown up in the Bronx as a “comic book man” and his first true love was Lois Lane. He had just finished directing The Omen and was ready for new work. So he listened intently when he got a call on a Sunday morning from a man with what sounded like a Hungarian accent saying, “I am a world famous producer. I am making Superman and I want you to make it.” Two hours later Alex Salkind’s messenger was at Donner’s door with a copy of the Puzo-Benton-Newman script. But the deeper he read, the more alarmed Donner became. “It was a parody on a parody. They were destroying Superman,” he recalls. To see whether it could be salvaged, he invited over Tom Mankiewicz, a friend and the screenwriter for some of the James Bond movies. By the time Mankiewicz arrived, Donner had put on a Superman costume and convinced himself that if Mankiewicz agreed to rewrite the script, and Salkind agreed to hire both of them, he would do the movie. “I took the job to protect Superman,” he says, “plus the fact that I was being paid a million dollars.”

  It actually was a million dollars as an advance against 7.5 percent of the film’s gross, which made it even more attractive to Donner but still looked like a bargain to the Salkinds. They had already agreed to pay Brando more than any film star had ever received—11.3 percent of domestic gross and 5.6 percent of foreign, with a guarantee of at least $2.7 million—to play Jor-El, who was on-screen for thirteen and a half of the movie’s 143 minutes. Two days later they signed up Gene Hackman for $2 million to play Lex Luthor. High-priced talent like that reassured anxious executives at Warner Communications and helped Alex woo his financiers. Still, with no final screenplay in hand, and without a frame of film, the Salkinds had just agreed to hand over a quarter of their profits, or 30 percent including earlier promises to Puzo. They were on the hook for another $10 million in salaries, agents’ fees, and bills for gilded suites at hotels like the Plaza in New York and the Beverly Hills in Beverly Hills. And they still had no clue who would be their Superman.

  Saturdays were “Superman test day.” By the time Donner and Mankiewicz came on board at the end of 1976, a lineup of first-rate stars had refused or been rejected for the part. Alex’s first choice was Robert Redford, who said no. So did Paul Newman, although Ilya says Newman “vomited” when he heard later how much Brando was earning. Nearly two hundred other actors were considered, including Sylvester Stallone (too Italian), Arnold Schwarzenegger (too Aryan), Muhammad Ali (too black), James Caan (too greedy), Bruce Jenner (too little talent), and Clint Eastwood (too busy). Ilya’s wife had her own favorite—her dentist in Beverly Hills—and he was flown in for a firsthand look (everyone agreed that he “looked terrific” and wasn’t worth the risk). Gossip columnists were having a field day and Alex was having a conniption. It was reminiscent of the casting calls that eventually found Kirk Alyn and George Reeves, only worse, with shooting set to start in eight weeks. Ilya says he was all for using an unknown actor who wouldn’t overshadow the role but Donner was intent on a big name; Donner says it was just the reverse. They agreed it was time to have a second look at the skinny Juilliard-trained actor whose photo the casting director, Lynn Stalmaster, kept putting back in the in-pile every time they’d toss it out.

  Christopher Reeve was an unlikely choice. It wasn’t just his honey brown hair, or that his 180 pounds did not come close to filling out his six-foot-four frame. He had asthma and he sweated so profusely that a crew member would have to blow-dry his armpits between takes. He was prep school and Ivy League, with a background in serious theater that made him more comfortable in England’s Old Vic theater than in its Pinewood movie lot. He was picked, as he acknowledged, 90 percent because he looked “like the guy in the comic book … the other 10% is acting talent.” He also was a brilliant choice. He brought to the part irony and comic timing that harked back to the best of screwball comedy. He had dramatic good looks and an instinct for melding humanism with heroism. “When he walked into a room you could see this wasn’t a conventional leading man, there was so much depth he had almost an old movie star feeling,” says Stalmaster. Alex loved the price: $250,000, or less than a tenth of what Brando would get. Donner asked Reeve to try on his horn-rimmed glasses. Squinting back at him was Clark Kent. Even his name fit: Christopher Reeve would be assuming the part made famous by George Reeves. “I didn’t find him,” Donner would say throughout the production. “God sent him to me.”

  Margot Kidder fell into her part. “She literally tripped into the door when she arrived for her test,” says Donner, “and I looked at Lynn and said, ‘That’s Lois.’ ” Growing up in Canada’s Northwest Territories, Kidder was banned from watching television, reading comic books, or doing anything else that would have put her in touch with Superman. She didn’t have to be. To play Lois Lane she just had to be herself: “I’m manic and I’m overambitious and I’m often frantic and disorganized.” When Donner told her she had the part that stars like Stockard Channing and Leslie Ann Warren wanted, she thought, “ ‘Thank God, I really need the money!’ Then I went
out and to the best lingerie boutique on Beauchamp Place in London and bought six hundred bucks’ worth of underwear!” She also went to charm school, courtesy of her director, learning how to wear high heels rather than cowboy boots and to sit in a skirt instead of blue jeans. In the end Kidder was what old fans had always imagined Lois Lane looked like, and what young ones would from 1978 on.

  With the big roles filled and the big names signed, Donner and Mankiewicz could zero in on telling their story. Their key was recognizing that, to fans, Superman was not a fantasy character but an embodiment of real hopes and ideals. “It’s as simple as that: truth, justice, and the American way. What other comic book hero could say that?” asks Donner. Over the years, Superman’s handlers had labored over whether they should aim for kids or parents, longtime fans or new ones. Donner had a less complicated calculus: “I was making it for me.… This picture is the biggest Erector Set given to the biggest kid in the world.” This was just what had driven Jerry Siegel to dream up the hero forty years before. To make sure his cast and crew understood his passion and never slipped into parody or pretension, Donner hung on his wall a plastic airborne Superman trailing a banner that read, VERISIMILITUDE.

  The movie itself was equally straightforward and came in three acts: the science fiction birth and backstory on Krypton, Clark growing into his down-to-earth values and superhero persona on the wheat fields of Kansas, and nonstop adventures in Metropolis like rescuing Lois from a crashing helicopter and saving the president from a crashing Air Force One, which were what moviegoers had paid to see. Each segment had its own cast, with limited overlap. Each was filmed at its own location. Ground zero was Pinewood Studios, just west of London, where the crew assembled a crystalline version of Krypton along with the world’s biggest soundstage. Alberta, Canada, doubled as Smallville, U.S.A. New York was the stand-in for Metropolis the way Metropolis had always been for New York. The settings and stories were truer to the spirit of the comic book Superman than anything filmed before. And it was more than Superman who benefited: Donner, Mankiewicz, and their collaborators were creating a prototype for the new genre of superhero epic, one that held old fans with an elegant rendering of nostalgic origins while it offered neophytes their first bite of the legend. It was a model that everyone from Batman to Spider-Man would follow. The Man of Tomorrow had again shown the way.