Superman
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What wasn’t straightforward was the flying. It never is, but moviegoers in the 1970s were not as forgiving as they had been in the low-tech 1940s and 1950s. Surely a world that had just unveiled videocassette recorders, neutron bombs, and a test-tube baby named Louise Brown could give us a convincing human airliner. Donner tried having his superhero skydive into the action. He hoisted him onto a three-hundred-foot crane behind a miniaturized Golden Gate Bridge. He experimented with flying harnesses and depressurized weightless chambers. Nothing worked. The solution came from an unlikely source: special effects wizard Zoran Perisic, who had read Superman comics growing up in Serbia and had been asked, “Who is Superman?” when U.S. authorities quizzed him for his naturalization papers. He was so convinced he could make Reeve fly that he offered to pay for the tests if his idea didn’t work. He put zoom lenses on both the camera and the projector so that the projected image, as seen by the camera, never changed size. Superman, who was in front of that image, appeared to come closer or move farther away—and to be performing aerial maneuvers when the camera/projector rig rotated—when in fact he was standing still. Perisic called the technique “Zoptic.” Donner called it a lifesaver. The producers didn’t want anyone drawing attention to the invention for fear other filmmakers would use it before they did. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was impressed enough that it gave the film its Special Achievement Award for Visual Effects.
Gimmickry was just half the equation; the other half was Christopher Reeve. He wanted to do more than run and dive the way Kirk Alyn and George Reeves had done. As a licensed aviator, Christopher knew what it felt like to take wing. Even without an airplane or any movement, he banked the turns, rolled, and looped, all with the ease of a stunt pilot. Back on the ground, he studied his predecessors to see what else they did poorly or well. Like them, he performed many of his own capers. George offered critical lessons in how to play the role as if he believed it but none when it came to differentiating Superman from Clark Kent, something he had never managed to do. “How could a thick pair of glasses substitute for a believable characterization?” Christopher asked. “Lois Lane shouldn’t have to be blind or dim-witted.” His model for Clark was a young Cary Grant—shy, vulnerable, and charmingly klutzy—and his watchword was to underplay the character. By slumping his shoulders and compressing his spine, Christopher’s Clark lost a full three inches from his Superman frame. His voice became more nasal and midwestern. He slicked back his hair, flipping the part from left to right and losing the spit curl. His demeanor now suggested a guy who not only couldn’t get the girl, he couldn’t even get a taxi.
Bulking up for the role was a different kind of challenge for Reeve. “We shoved food down Chris and got him lots of protein drinks, five to six cans a day,” recalls Dave Prowse, a bodybuilder and gym owner in London who, having played Superman in a TV commercial, had hoped to land the movie role himself. When he didn’t, he agreed to train the man who did. Working out five nights a week with free weights and a trampoline, Prowse and Reeve focused first on Reeve’s pectoral muscles, thighs, and back, then on his arms, shoulders, calves, and abdominals. Teatime meant a plate of cakes, and mealtime came four times a day. In just six weeks Reeve put on more than thirty pounds, mostly muscle, adding two inches to his chest, two to his biceps, and enough overall that he could take the muscle padding out of his blue body stocking. Training him was easy at first, but when he had to leave for a week to be with another client, Prowse says, “Chris called me all the names under the sun. He said he was losing weight and strength. Donner called me over and said, ‘He really thinks he is Superman.’ ”
And so he was. Superman himself changed with every artist who filled in his features, every writer who scripted his adventures, and even the marketers and accountants who managed his finances and grew his audience. Each could claim partial ownership. Actors like Christopher Reeve did more molding and framing than anyone and could claim more proprietorship. As each scene was shot it became clearer that he was giving the hero a different face as well as a unique personality. Christopher’s Superman would be funnier and more human—if less powerful or intimidating—than any who had preceded him. He was more of a Big Blue Boy Scout now, in contrast to Kirk Alyn’s Action Ace and George Reeves’s Man of Steel. In the hands of this conservatory-trained actor, Supes was getting increasingly comfortable baring his soul.
As the filming slogged through its second year, the cast and crew were growing temperamental and the media were wondering whether it would ever be done. Ilya and Alex watched Donner spend their money all too freely. Donner says he was the first director ever who never got a budget, so he never knew whether his spending was under or over. Brando had shown up on the set with the flu and what he thought were humorous suggestions—that Jor-El the Kryptonian should look like a bagel, or perhaps a green suitcase—although he left calling the film “a fucking Valentine” to the superhero. Alex’s wife, Berta Domínguez D., who called herself the Shakespeare of Mexico, attacked Mankiewicz with a steak knife when he made a joke about Alex’s height. Alex apologized for Berta, saying Mexicans shouldn’t drink, and he apologized for his perpetual lying, saying, “I can’t help it.” Jack O’Halloran, an ex-heavyweight boxer playing a Kryptonian supervillain, was so outraged when his paychecks took months to clear that he says he dragged producer Pierre Spengler across his desk, shouting, “This is bullshit. I signed a contract to work. I worked. Now pay me.”
Thankfully, the relationship that mattered most off-screen as well as on, Lois and Clark’s, was in good shape. The two actors behaved like brother and sister. Christopher was the uptight, ambitious sibling, Margot was loosey-goosey. She reassured him about being typecast as Superman. He pushed her to read the script, not a novel, while they dangled from cranes waiting for the next scene. She couldn’t resist pinging his steel codpiece until he’d scream, “For God’s sake, stop it!” Their chemistry was most apparent in the movie’s most remembered scene, on Lois’s balcony. Superman arrived saying, “Good evening, Miss Lane,” then cuddled her in his arms for a flight over Metropolis’s skyscrapers and bridges. Mankiewicz expanded the scene from two pages to seven and says that when he first heard Chris utter his greeting, “I remember putting my hands together and pleading that he would just keep going like that.” He did. When Lois asked, “Who are you?” Superman answered sweetly: “A friend.” Margot says they were indeed friends, which made it easy to act that way. What was difficult was summoning the sexual energy the scene demanded. “I had to pretend,” she explains, “that Christopher was Harrison Ford.” It worked. She asked the man with the X-ray eyes what color underwear she was wearing and, after awkward evasions, he told the truth: “Pink.” But then, Reeve’s Superman could make even a fib sound guileless, the way he did when he looked into Lois’s eyes and promised, “I never lie.”
The scene was more a Shakespearean drama—think Romeo and Juliet—than a comic book spoof, and Donner demanded an equally elevated tone for the music. “Superman was the perfect hero to be musicalized in quasi-operatic or balletic fashion,” says John Williams, who composed the score and conducted the London Symphony’s performance of it. There was a rousing “Superman March” for the opening and closing credits, a mysterious “Krypton crystal” motif to introduce the doomed planet, an all-American melody for Smallville, and a playful “March of the Villains” for Lex and his henchman, Otis. “My challenge and opportunity,” Williams says, “was to capture musically Superman’s optimism and invincibility and athletics and heroism. The perfect fifth and the perfect octave are heroic intervals that have a strength and a core power to suggest just those qualities of heroism and heroics.”
While Donner and his team were working to assemble a movie worthy of their hero, the Salkinds were building an audience that would want to watch. In 1975, before they had a final screenplay, they hired three planes to fly over the Cannes Film Festival every hour with a banner reading, SUPERMAN, SALKIND, PUZO. The next year five planes carri
ed a slightly amended message: SUPERMAN, SALKIND, HAMILTON. By 1977 a blimp was carrying the message, along with a fleet of aircraft worthy of France’s Armée de l’Air.
That was just the drumroll. The fully orchestrated rollout was plotted by Warner Bros., which was handling the film’s distribution and was finally convinced it had real commercial potential. Super-secrecy was Warner’s watchword, with paparazzi kept clear of the studio and street sets, even when the setting was the streets of New York. Pictures of Superman on cranes and wires could undermine the illusion of him flying on his own. There were none of the standard photo handouts, either. That would shatter the intrigue that was building over this new Superman and what he looked like in tights and cape. The secrecy campaign worked so well that someone broke into Pinewood Studios to try to filch shots. The first photographs of Christopher Reeve in uniform and in the air were published just where and when Warner wanted—in the two biggest newsweeklies, just before and after the film’s release, with Newsweek’s shot consuming the full cover. As for paid advertising, the Warner team hatched a classic come-on that captured all that was new in the movie and happened to be true: “You’ll believe a man can fly!”
But there was a last-minute glitch. Alex Salkind refused to deliver the completed film unless Warner executives agreed to kick in another $15 million. He said it would buy them additional distribution rights for “certain foreign territories.” They said it was blackmail. Alex knew that 750 theaters were planning to screen the film, sight unseen, starting December 15, 1978. He also knew that his contract didn’t require delivery until December 31. “There was an element of extortion in it,” concedes Tom Pollock, Alex’s lawyer, “but he was totally legally entitled.” So Alex honored his contract, if not his word, and set a price that was $5 million more than Warner had paid for the distribution rights to all of North America and three-quarters of its international markets. The company knew it was over a barrel, and with just two weeks to spare, it agreed to pay.
Finally, five years after that dinner at a Paris café and just ten days before Christmas, the film was ready for viewing. President Jimmy Carter took his daughter, Amy, to see it at a premiere in Washington. Queen Elizabeth brought Prince Andrew to a royal unveiling in London. At the New York bash, Mario Puzo showed up in a blue Superman T-shirt and Norman Mailer wore a blue velvet tuxedo, but Marlon Brando stayed on vacation in Tahiti. A more confounding no-show was Alexander Salkind. He had been arrested by Interpol officers in Switzerland on charges of stealing $20 million from the German company that bankrolled his films and was released only after he displayed the diplomatic credentials he had secured years before courtesy of the president of Costa Rica. Rather than head to the Superman parties in the United States, where he feared another arrest, he overcame his phobia of flying by using heavy sedation and hired a jet to deliver him to the safe haven of Mexico. Had he come to the U.S. gala, Alex could have met Jerry Siegel. As the film ended, Jerry approached National’s publisher in tears, saying, “It was exactly how I had imagined it.”
Reviewers offered a mixed verdict on Alex’s production. Newsweek’s Jack Kroll proclaimed it “a mass entertainment of high class and energy,” while Roger Ebert called it “a wondrous combination of all the old-fashioned things we never really get tired of: adventure and romance, heroes and villains, earthshaking special effects, and—you know what else? Wit.” Pauline Kael of The New Yorker seemed to be writing about an entirely different movie, saying it was “cheesy looking” and gave “the impression of having been made in a panic,” by a director who “can’t seem to get the timing right,” with a score “that transcends self-parody.” Vincent Canby of The New York Times began his review hopefully, writing that Superman offered “good, clean, simple-minded fun.” Then he took his shot: “To enjoy this movie as much as one has a right to expect, one has either to be a Superman nut, the sort of trivia expert who has absorbed all there is to know about the planet Krypton, or to check one’s wits at the door, which may be more than a lot of people are prepared to do for longer than two hours.”
More people qualified than Canby might have expected. The film clocked in as the sixth highest grossing of all time, bringing in just over $300 million worldwide and appearing on screens as far away as Shanghai and Peking. With the average ticket in 1978 selling for $2.50, 120 million people watched Christopher Reeve fly across the screen—one hundred times more than were buying Superman, Superboy, and the rest of their family of comics that year. The movie won twenty-one awards, including best science fiction film of 1978 from the International Society of Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy. It was an even bigger hit in pharmacies and department stores, where merchants couldn’t stock enough thermoses, sneakers, lunch boxes, cereal bowls, cookie jars, and anything else with Christopher Reeve in blue tights. And it wasn’t just little boys and their dads who were bewitched by the movie and its star. “I took my 7-year-old son to see the picture, not expecting very much,” Penelope Hoover told readers of the Los Angeles Times. “When I emerged from the theater afterward, I felt like a 10-year-old kid who had just seen something wonderful.… It made me rediscover the little girl in myself and I’m happy to find her.”
Hoover grasped what Warner Communications hadn’t. Periodically we all need to recapture our youth and idealism, especially at a moment when America was mired in a malaise that President Jimmy Carter called a “crisis of confidence.” Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster understood that when they introduced their hero in the midst of the Depression and on the eve of a world war. The Salkinds understood it when they bought the rights to Superman and hired two grown-up kids—Donner and Mankiewicz—to make the movie. Superman, the world’s biggest optimist, understood it better than anyone, which is why Hoover and her son so adored him.
One group that wasn’t sure how to feel about the new film was scriptural literalists. They had plenty to mull over, starting with Marlon Brando as Jor-El. With a long-flowing white robe and a shock of silver hair, he looked as well as acted like God. “They can be a great people, Kal-El,” he told his only son, explaining why the boy had been dispatched to Earth. “They wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all—their capacity for good—I have sent them you. My only son.” The Almighty couldn’t have said it better. Similarly, Superman’s adoptive parents, the Kents, were written into the script as “Christian folk whose morals are as basic as the soil they till.” The movie was meant to have religious resonance, says screenwriter Mankiewicz, although the religion could as easily have been Muslim or Jewish as Christian. To many filmgoers, those references made Superman even more compelling, offering grist for editorials, Sunday school discussions, scholarly articles, and more than one book. To some, it was blasphemy. “I got major death threats,” remembers Donner. “How dare I symbolize Brando as God and Christopher as Jesus? Studio security brought them to my attention. Some of them were just nuts, fanatics. There was talk of blood running in the streets.”
Alex had his own problems. His film, he said, cost $55 million, making it the most expensive ever, although others insisted he was inflating the costs as a bragging right and to downplay his profits to his partners. Marlon Brando sued him for $50 million. Mario Puzo had Ilya served with his legal papers at the Washington premiere of the film. Richard Donner, Christopher Reeve, and Margot Kidder filed their own lawsuits with their own gripes about promises Alex had broken. But no one should have been surprised. Breaking promises had long been Alex’s modus operandi. In one of his earlier films, The Three Musketeers, he had made history: He and Ilya paid their actors for one movie but came away with enough footage for a sequel as well. They got away with it that time, but the Screen Actors Guild insisted that all future contracts with them or any other producer have a provision—labeled a “Salkind Clause”—specifying how many films were being made. The lineup of Superman claimants realized too late that they should have included their own clauses to help them sort out which of Alex’s movie production figures were
real, which hotel and country he was currently calling home, and which of his “people” were real rather than fronts set up to inflate debts and disguise profits. Even Ilya ended up suing his dad, although that wouldn’t come until later and it wouldn’t get resolved to either’s satisfaction.
Nearly all of what people alleged against Alex was true. He had few scruples and no shame. He always had one foot in his Citroën ready to leave town, and he would never say where he was calling from for fear the FBI or Interpol might be listening. He promised shares of Superman to everyone from Brando and Puzo to his German, French, and Swiss lenders. The part of his story that is seldom told is that “everyone got paid off from this movie every dollar they were entitled to,” says Tom Pollock, the former MCA/Universal president who was Alex’s lawyer when the lawsuits were percolating. “Dick Donner made millions and millions of dollars of profit, as did Marlon Brando, as did Mario Puzo. Warner Bros. made vastly more than anybody. I have no idea what Alex actually kept for himself. He walked away depleted and exhausted but not defeated. Through force of will and money, he put together the team that made a great movie, that generated and spawned other movies, and that created a huge business mostly for other people.”