Superman

by Larry Tye

  Like its precursor, Superman II was partly a love story. Lois and Clark were dispatched by the Daily Planet to Niagara Falls, where he stuck his hand into a fireplace to rescue her hairbrush—and she realized that he didn’t get burned. To her, that proved he was Superman. After half a century of denying it, he inexplicably fessed up. Then he took Lois to his Fortress of Solitude and shared with her the story of his Kryptonian roots. But being with a human like her carried a cost: He must give up his special powers. He did, spending the night of his life with her and intending to spend more. He also experienced what it was like not just to fake physical weakness but to actually be a weakling, as he got throttled by a burly trucker in a seedy diner. Tasting his own blood for the first time, he said to Lois, “Maybe we ought to hire a bodyguard from now on.” Lois: “I don’t want a bodyguard. I want the man I fell in love with.” Clark: “I know that, Lois. And I wish he were here.” Humor and romance. What more could a moviegoer want?

  What kids wanted was a Superman adventure story, not a yucky love tale. They didn’t have to wait long. Three criminals who had been sentenced by Jor-El and his fellow elders to the Hades-like Phantom Zone escaped and came to Earth to exact revenge on Jor-El’s son and his adopted planet. They were vicious and single-minded, in stark contrast to the stumblebum villains of the first movie. After subduing the president of the United States they went looking for Superman, who, upon hearing of the havoc they were wreaking, managed to restore his powers. Lex Luthor joined with the murderous trio and they kidnapped Lois. What followed was the most heart-stirring on-screen battle ever for Superman, waged in the streets and into the skies of Metropolis. Weapons were anything they could find—buses, manhole lids, humans ducking for cover—and the action was worthy of Jerry and Joe’s early comics. Afraid there would soon be no city left, Superman eventually lured his adversaries to his Arctic fortress. Knowing he couldn’t beat three Kryptonians, each with strength comparable to his, he feigned defeat, then stripped them of their powers by exposing them to the same crystalline red light that had weakened him. He had won the battle but was about to lose his love—the toll for getting back his superpowers was forfeiting his dream of human romance. The next day Clark kissed Lois, which he knew would eliminate her memory of his being the Man of Steel, and Superman promised the president that he would never again falter in his primary mission to safeguard humanity.

  Director Richard Donner had started filming this story while he was working on the first movie, but he never got to finish it. “My feeling at the time was that if the first picture had been a failure, the Salkinds would have demanded that I come back for the second” just to torture him, Donner recalls thirty years later. “Since it was a success, they figured they could make the second one without me. One day I got a telegram from them saying my services no longer were needed and that my dear close friend Richard Lester would take over. To this day I have never heard from them.” Ilya Salkind has a different version: “Dick Donner said, ‘I will do the second movie on my terms and without [Pierre] Spengler,’ ” who was the producer and money manager. “Spengler was my friend since childhood and my father and I were very loyal guys. We said no, and it really boiled down to that.”

  Much of the cast sided with Donner, including Christopher Reeve, who at the time said, “The mind boggles at the prospect of doing it with someone else, because Dick was so marvelous to work with.” A doubling of Reeve’s salary to five hundred thousand dollars and a promise that it would be doubled again for a third movie helped unboggle him, as did knowing that enough of the work had been completed to ensure that shooting the sequel would take a fraction of the time he had spent on the first film. Margot Kidder, true to her Lois Lane persona, was less diplomatic and more loyal. She lashed out at the Salkinds, explaining to People magazine that “if I think someone is an amoral asshole I say so.” It earned her the admiration of Donner’s many fans—and assured that Lois would have fewer than five minutes of screen time in the third movie.

  Lester, who had directed two films with the Beatles, had been brought on near the end of the first Superman movie, supposedly to act as an intermediary between Donner and his producers but in fact, he acknowledged later, “to make [Donner] quit and walk out of it and they wouldn’t have to pay him any more.” Lester was paid twice for shepherding the second movie, first by the Salkinds and again by an anxious Warner Bros., assuring him the highest salary ever for a director. He earned it. First there was the need to substitute Lara for Jor-El in scenes that were supposed to feature the latter. The Salkinds, Lester explained, “decided not to pay Marlon Brando to be in 2, so they had to get rid of all his footage.” Gene Hackman already had shot with Donner everything he needed to, and wherever adjustments had to be made, his double stood in for him. As for Kidder, she was in “uncontrollable despair” over problems with her real-world husband and daughter but had to gear up for the scene where Superman would kiss her and make her forget the life they had planned together. “It was the only time that I’ve ever been quite so manipulative,” Lester said. “We shot that scene, and she was so out of it and so emotionally distraught that it was really a lovely performance.”

  Flying and other special effects continued to be a challenge, especially for the actors. Sarah Douglas, who played the sexy villainess Ursa, started each day by having her long hair tucked into a short-cropped wig. Her freckles needed coating in white makeup—“supervillains don’t have freckles”—while her eyebrows were pasted up with glue to make her look haughty and false nails were baked on so they wouldn’t keep falling off. The worst part of the job was hanging in the air during flying scenes, held up with just two wires on rings. Her runny nose was repeatedly wiped by a man holding a forty-foot pole with a tissue on the end. All the flying and fighting hurt so much that by the end a nurse had to be on the set to tend to the twenty-year-old Douglas. “I have injuries to that shoulder blade to this day,” she says, while fellow villain Jack O’Halloran ruptured a disc and needed an operation. Douglas also earned fans who continue to follow her and her leather-clad, lizardlike Ursa, including “a terrific gay following. Guys say, ‘I was struggling with my sexuality and I looked to you.’ ”

  With Brando gone, religion played less of a role in Superman II, although one of its most memorable lines was whispered by an elderly woman as Superman was rescuing a young boy about to topple into Niagara Falls. “What a nice man,” she says out of the blue but not out of the script. “Of course he’s Jewish.” The sets and background, meanwhile, were even more elaborate and expensive for the sequel than for the original. The Fortress of Solitude was completely rebuilt. New York was re-created in miniature in the London studio, with scores of tiny cars with working headlights. Niagara Falls was there, too, along with a look-alike Times Square that would be torn apart by Superman and the trio of villains and showed how quickly costs could mount. Simulating that slice of Manhattan at the British studio required 5,500 tons of sand, cement, and tar; 500,000 feet of scaffolding; 250,000 feet of lumber; 6,000 cubic yards of concrete; and 10,000 square feet of glass. Total cost for the re-creation: $10 million. Total cost for the film: $53 million, which was a record at the time.

  To ensure that everyone made back their money, Warner Bros. flipped on its head the conventional marketing strategy used for the first film. Instead of pumping up publicity, the studio did everything it could to avoid attention, at least at first. That was because it had reversed the usual schedule for release, opening the film overseas rather than in America, as was the tradition for blockbuster movies. The goal was to hit every country that mattered during its peak moviegoing season—Christmas in France, South Africa, Spain, Australia, and Italy, and Easter in West Germany and England—and still be ready for a premiere in the United States and Japan during the summer, when kids were out of school and ready for fun. For that to work, Warner’s marketing mavens said, it was critical that word not leak back to America about what was happening abroad. They weren’t afraid that the film would bom
b so much as that it would seem stale once it reached the United States, a concern that had never bothered moviegoers overseas. So while the publicity budget was double what it had been for the first film, and the 1,397 theaters scheduled to air it nearly tripled the first film’s bookings, all the ads in newspapers and on radio and TV were held until just three weeks before its June 1981 opening. The all-expenses-paid junket to Niagara Falls for reporters also was last-minute. It was the kind of gamble that Alex Salkind relished but that was anathema to Hollywood studios.

  It paid off better than even Alex could have conceived. Its opening day was the highest ever for an opener and for a Friday, at nearly $4.5 million. The next day it smashed the all-time one-day record with $5.6 million, besting Star Wars by more than $2 million. Its $24 million first week was a record, too, $4 million higher than The Empire Strikes Back. For the year, Superman II earned $108 million—enough to place third among all releases in 1981, trailing only Raiders of the Lost Ark and On Golden Pond and topping such favorites as Arthur, Body Heat, and James Bond’s For Your Eyes Only. That jackpot, plus more than $100 million in overseas ticket sales, dug the Salkinds out of their hole from the first film. Still, says Ilya, having spent $120 million to produce the two movies, they “barely broke even.”

  Critics were split over how good the second movie was and how it compared with the first. “It is that rarity of rarities, a sequel that readily surpasses the original,” wrote Richard Schickel of Time. “Suffice it to say Superman II is a movie no kid need be ashamed to take his parents to.” Janet Maslin of The New York Times was equally effusive: “ ‘Superman II’ is a marvelous toy. It’s funny, it’s full of tricks and it manages to be royally entertaining, which is really all it aims for.” But The Wall Street Journal’s Joy Gould Boyum called it “as loud and distracting as a carnival” and The Washington Post’s Gary Arnold wrote, “What seems to have been lost is the straightforward heroic exuberance of the original film.” Most damning of all was Gay S. Gasser, whose Los Angeles Times commentary said, “This Superman is prone to the ugliest of human faults—petulance, envy, vengefulness. He reneges on his commitment to Lois; he throws a temper tantrum when his ‘identity’ is revealed; he spews out clichés in moments when sincerity would seem vital. What can Lois possibly see in him?”

  While fans turned out in numbers unusual for a sequel, loyalists of Richard Donner, whose Superman: The Movie was becoming a classic almost on the scale of the George Reeves Adventures of Superman, were steaming about his having been dumped from Superman II. They resented the fact that Donner wasn’t listed as director of the second film, given all the work he had done on it. They argued over whether what was left was 25 percent his or 75, and whether the cuts had been made for artistic reasons or so Lester and the Salkinds could claim the work as theirs. The Donner faithful weren’t really satisfied until twenty-five years later, when, thanks to their lobbying, Warner Bros. released on DVD a re-edit called Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut. While the storyline was largely the same, half the footage had been shot by Donner decades before but never used, including fifteen minutes of Marlon Brando as Jor-El. Donner, not Lester, was credited as the director. Finally Donner fans had the film they longed for and answers to the what-ifs. Ilya took perpetual ribbing when the old Donner crew got together in Los Angeles to watch the new version, but years later he got the last word, saying, “It was mainly because I agreed with Warner’s” that the Donner cut came out. “I called Dick after that and I said, ‘I love you, man.’ And I do.”

  The Salkinds had made their own special cut of the first Superman movie in 1981. It was aimed at television, and money—not art—was the motive. They added forty-five minutes of footage, knowing that each extra minute meant more money from the ABC network. Gone was a nude baby Kal-El, along with any profanity. The 182-minute film, shown over two nights during the sweeps ratings period in 1982, finished tops in that month’s Nielsen survey.

  The Salkinds, Lester, Reeve, and the Newmans were back for a third movie in 1983, which, in the spirit of the first sequel, was titled simply Superman III. Luckily for him, Donner was long gone, and Margot Kidder was only there long enough for a cameo hello and goodbye. The romance this time was between Superman and Lana Lang, his childhood friend, played by Annette O’Toole in her first appearance in the Superman mythology that she would help redefine a generation later. The villain was an industrialist played by Robert Vaughn, TV’s Man from U.N.C.L.E. The real star was Richard Pryor, as an unemployed ne’er-do-well who discovered that his skills with a computer were just what Vaughn needed to dominate the world economy. Pryor had caught the Salkinds’ attention when he mentioned on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show that he would love to be in a Superman film, but he ended up distracting the writers and director as they looked for a way to play to the comedian’s strengths while staying true to the Superman story. It was futile. The one thing that did work was a literal junkyard brawl between a dark version of the Man of Steel, who’d been corrupted by kryptonite, and his still good-guy alter ego Clark Kent. “The whole good versus evil Superman is something we’d always wanted to fool around with,” says Leslie Newman. “Superman is a love triangle with two people in it, it’s got multiple personalities built in, and we wanted to take it one step further.”

  Superman III as a whole indulged in the sort of camp that Donner had consciously avoided in the first movie and Lester only occasionally dabbled in during the second. Its most generous review came from The New York Times, which called it “enjoyable enough.” The Washington Post branded it “a high-flying disappointment” and Reeve conceded that it “became more a Richard Pryor comedy vehicle than a proper Superman film.” The frankest appraisal came from Pryor. “The movie was a piece of shit,” he wrote in his memoir. Why did he do it? “The producers offered me $4 million, more than any black actor had ever been paid. ‘For a piece of shit,’ I’d told my agent when I finally read the script, ‘it smells great.’ ”

  Pryor wasn’t the only one the filmmakers were throwing money at. Reeve got more than $1 million this time, along with script approval. Warner added $1 million to what the Salkinds were paying Lester. The film grossed barely half what Superman II did, although the hero still had enough star power to finish eighth at the box office for 1983, ahead of classics like The Big Chill and Silkwood. The Salkinds, however, knew that sequels are all about cashing in on old sets, old scripts, and old techniques, which become cheaper each time around. So despite declining ticket sales, Ilya says this was the film where he and his father went from breaking even to “making money,” although he won’t say how much.

  This film stood out in another way: It was the first where Alex found a way around his travel phobias and legal struggles to be at the premiere, which included a reception at Ronald Reagan’s White House complete with a picnic, a Beach Boys concert, and a picture with the president. Reagan, like Jack Kennedy before him, was the upbeat kind of leader Superman could relate to, in contrast to the more glum Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. But Reagan knew he had no fan in Christopher Reeve, who had publicly branded him a cold-hearted leader who only cared about the rich, so the movie actor turned ruler of the Free World worked his charms on Reeve at the picnic dinner. “I’m just optimist enough to think he might have changed his mind,” Reagan wrote in his memoir.

  Superman IV could have been Reeve’s answer to Reagan. In it, the Man of Steel tried to do what Reeve felt the president ought to be doing but wasn’t: work to rid the world of nuclear weapons. The villain this time was Nuclear Man, a radioactive clone reminiscent of the 1940s Atom Man, although Nuclear Man had neither the flair nor the compelling Nazi backstory of his predecessor. The good news for the Salkinds was that they had no part in the 1987 film, having sold their rights to Cannon Films for $5 million. The bad news for Reeve was that he starred in the film and set its theme, which was to wake the world up to the hazards of the escalating U.S.-Soviet atomic arms race. “I thought the character could be used effectively in the real
world once again,” Christopher wrote later. “Big mistake.” He could have saved himself the embarrassment by looking back at how Superman’s handlers had dealt with World War II, when they saw that even a superhero couldn’t clean up some human messes. Worse still for Reeve, he and the producers were hit with a $45 million lawsuit from two writers who said he stole their idea for the film; he won the legal battle, but at the price of steep legal fees and a tarnished reputation.

  Reviewers already had delivered their verdict on Superman IV. “One of the cheesiest movies ever made,” slammed The Washington Post. The New York Times called the flying sequences “chintzy,” the special effects “perfunctory,” and the cinematography “so sloppy that Superman’s turquoise suit is sometimes green.” Critics’ reactions to Superman had dimmed with each new film, according to Rotten Tomatoes, the website that compiles and weighs the critiques. Ninety-four percent of reviews for Superman: The Movie were upbeat, a stunning record. The favorable score for Superman II was a still impressive 88 percent. The third film plummeted to 24 percent positive, and Superman IV scored an anemic 10 percent. That movie, which had its world premiere in Cleveland, made just shy of $16 million at the box office. That was less than a third of the disappointing result for Superman III and a signal to Warner and the world that the Reeve Superman saga had run its course.

  The Salkinds might have run out of steam for productions about Superman, but not about his youthful offshoots. In 1984, after Superman III and before IV, they released Supergirl, a movie that followed the Superman model by casting an unknown actress, Helen Slater, in the title role and saving the high-priced stars—in this case Faye Dunaway and Peter O’Toole—for the parts of the villain and the Kryptonian elder. Reeve was slated for a cameo but wisely decided against it. The plot saw Supergirl battling Dunaway’s evil witch, with a love story buried between the battles much as it was in movies featuring her superhero cousin. The numbers told the real story: Only 8 percent of critics liked Supergirl, an even lower score than for Superman IV. The film cost $35 million to make and took in just $14 million at the box office, but Ilya says that the finances were structured in a way that for him and his father, “Supergirl was huge.”