Superman

by Larry Tye

  Jerry also made his peace with the new bosses at DC and some of the old ones. “Mort Weisinger had visited him and he and Jerry went out to lunch together, hung out a bit, and became buddies,” says Mark Evanier, a comic book writer and historian who visited Jerry six weeks before he died. “Jerry also talked about how much he owed to Paul Levitz of DC, that Paul was responsible for him and Joe getting whatever they had, and I thought to myself, ‘Wow, when I first met Jerry if you mentioned anybody at DC Comics to him he’d put a curse on them and he’d turn orange.’ It was so pleasing to me to see that he was getting some closure.”

  Alex Salkind was the next of Superman’s intimates to go, in 1997, when he was seventy-five. Since he was ever the enigma, it is fitting that his spokeswoman refused to tell the press what killed him, although he had been hospitalized outside Paris for a stomach ailment. He spent the last years of his life the way he had earlier ones: living in hotels or on his boat, with his wife or mistress, still a fixture in Cannes and still trying to put together movie deals. Two years after Salkind’s death, the first on-screen Superman, Kirk Alyn, died at the age of eighty-eight. While he had often said that playing the superhero made it difficult for him to find other movie parts, the truth was that he relished the celebrity the role brought him and, until the last, he would talk to anyone and everyone about his glory days flying over Metropolis.

  Jack Liebowitz outlived them all and was proud of it. He survived his loquacious partner Harry Donenfeld by thirty-five years, and his silent partner Paul Sampliner by twenty-five. He mourned the deaths of Bob Maxwell and Mort Weisinger, both of whom went in the 1970s, both at the relatively young age of sixty-three. He never got over the breach with Jerry Siegel and would get livid when anyone mentioned his name. Jack wasn’t actively involved with DC when it was shepherding the Christopher Reeve movies and the new TV shows, but he kept a seat on the board with Warner Communications, then with Time Warner, until 1991, and he went into the office every day. For a man whose comic book business and Superman character had helped define twentieth-century America, it was fitting that Jack Liebowitz came into the world in 1900 and left it in 2000, at the age of one hundred.

  CHAPTER 11

  Tights and Fights

  SMALLVILLE WAS LOIS & CLARK in the throes of puberty and raging hormones. The new TV show also was just what the Time Warner doctors ordered to introduce Superman to America’s millennial generation, which didn’t know George Reeves from Christopher Reeve and in fact barely knew the Man of Steel himself. Smallville had two aims: Let young viewers see why their grandparents and parents were so smitten with Superman, and give them a version of the superhero who was theirs alone.

  The show zeroed in on Clark Kent’s high school years in the town of Smallville, Kansas, while he was discovering his powers and before he assumed the identity of Superman. It was the Superboy story that Jerry Siegel had imagined nearly sixty years before, but with the focus now on his heart, not his muscles. There would be “no tights, no flights,” the producers announced from the first, meaning their reluctant hero wouldn’t don the Superman costume, wouldn’t fly, and wouldn’t stick to the rest of the credo built up over sixty years if that got in the way of exploring his fears and longings. What they wanted was to look deep enough inside this ordinary kid to see how he handled his extraordinary possibilities. Could he have sex? Would the world let him alone if it knew what he could do? What did life have in store for an alien who wanted so badly to be normal? These were the very questions every tortured teen was asking then about his—or her—own life.

  To make the point that this was not your grandfather’s Superman, Smallville’s pilot episode offered a twist on the standard creation story. Clark’s arrival on Earth brought with it a shower of green meteors that struck and transformed the idyllic Smallville, whose previous claim to fame was as Creamed Corn Capital of the World. The damage became clear in everyone close to Clark—from the girl he loved, Lana Lang, whose parents were squashed by the falling kryptonite, to his friend Lex Luthor, who lost his hair and his innocence. A succession of others turned up with strange and evil powers in a story arc that became known as the Freak of the Week. The comic book Superman may have blamed himself for being Krypton’s sole survivor, but his TV stand-in was faced with a more proximate and disabling font of guilt: a body count that grew with each new episode. This revised backstory was half Norman Rockwell, half Stephen King. It also was 100 percent suited to kids weaned on the horrors of 9/11 and craving a hero to help them cope. The new show, debuting a month after the 2001 terrorist attacks, didn’t allow young Clark an easy coming of age, but it did explain why a fully grown Superman felt so driven to save the world.

  Knowing how the story would turn out made it more fun to imagine how it began. But being familiar with all the details of the grown-up champion wasn’t a prerequisite for enjoying Smallville. “We made no assumptions that anybody knew anything about Superman,” explains Al Gough, one of the show’s creators. “When we tested it with teenagers, the boys had to tell the girls that they were watching Superman. The girls were completely engaged in the show but they had no idea that Clark was Superman.” For old fans, Gough and his colleagues gave Superman something every hero needs to be believable: a past. For new ones, they offered teenage love, duels of good versus evil, and a gateway to the myth.

  Religion was infused in Smallville as it had been in other Superman renditions, only more so, as befit an age when public figures felt obliged to pledge allegiance to a deity along with a flag. Divinity was front and center in the first show of the first season. Football players took Clark on what they intended to be a simple hazing ritual, tying him to a scarecrow stake in a cornfield, unaware that kryptonite had made him so weak he couldn’t escape. There stood a hero descended from the heavens, stripped nearly naked, on what looked like a crucifix. The image was so powerful it was splashed on billboards and in magazines as well as at the start of each episode in the early seasons. And that wasn’t the only insinuation of faith. Clark was filmed next to the statue of an angel, its wings seeming to sprout from his shoulders. He was bathed in halos of light. There were allusions to the Holy Grail, the wise men, and the Romans. “We were very conscious of the religious tones. We also knew it was dangerous, there’s a line you don’t cross,” recalls Ken Horton, a writer and producer. “The most extreme use of religious symbols was in the pilot with the scarecrow. After that we were far more subtle.”

  Tom Welling had a lot in common with earlier on-screen Supermen. He didn’t read comic books or know much about Superman. He was an unknown, having worked in construction, modeled for Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, and played minor parts on TV. And he was a hunk, standing nearly six foot three with an oh-my-gosh innocence reminiscent of the young Christopher Reeve. That was an asset, since fans were being asked to believe that the twenty-four-year-old Welling was a student at Smallville High. Eighteen-year-old Kristin Kreuk was a closer match as Clark’s classmate Lana Lang. This wasn’t the feisty Lana we had met in the movies and comics but a subtle beauty made brittle by the loss of her parents in the meteor storm. She and Clark were two sides of the classic love triangle: He longed for her while she befriended him and dated a football star. But a triangle takes three, and without Superman in the picture the producers had to invent a new character. Chloe Sullivan, editor of the school paper, pined for Clark even as she investigated the strange doings in town and their possible connection to her wished-for boyfriend.

  No one planned for Michael Rosenbaum to steal the show, but they didn’t rein him in when he portrayed the most riveting Lex Luthor ever. His bald pate made him alluring, in a Yul Brynner sort of way, leading fans to brand him “Sexy Lexy” and the media to crown him the “hairless heartthrob.” When he went out in public it was with a toque on his head and, when he was feeling playful, with a fake mustache plastered to his lip. The same way Welling’s Clark couldn’t help but rise to heroism, Rosenbaum’s Lex didn’t try to be evil but knew that a d
escent into darkness was his destiny. Rosenbaum had “just the right mix of creepy entitlement and helpless longing” to make him “the most ambiguous character on any prime-time series,” Tom Carson wrote in Esquire. “You don’t even know if he’s lovelorn young Clark’s rival for the affections of Lana Lang … or her rival for his.” That last element—whether Lex’s longing gazes at Clark meant he was gay—was fodder for fans and pundits. “I love it,” Rosenbaum said. “In fact, if there’s a line where I look at Clark and I say, ‘If you need me, I’m there,’ we laugh our asses off. It takes us ten takes to get it out. Let the audience think what they want to think.”

  Pete Ross was Clark’s best male friend in the comic books and in Smallville. He was mad about Chloe, which added another romantic spin to the plot. And he was played by an African American actor, Sam Jones III, in a casting choice that would have been too controversial for Lois & Clark but that Smallville fans liked so much that they set up an online site lobbying for him to get more airtime. He did and was let in on Clark’s secret identity, which hadn’t been part of the plan. Jones left the show after three seasons, but he was back for a guest appearance in season seven and might have returned again if real-world DEA agents hadn’t arrested him in 2009 on drug trafficking charges.

  The first season’s Freak of the Week aura was toned down by season two, with true crimes, natural disasters, and other stories mixed in with the monster ones. The world apparently had enough real-life monsters to satisfy even the kids. Clark stayed in high school through the first four years, but after that he grew up and the show ventured into more familiar Superman settings like the Daily Planet. He explored his origins on Krypton and heard from Jor-El, even if he didn’t see him. He battled familiar villains (with new aliases) like Brainiac, General Zod, Doomsday, and a “really hot foreign exchange student” named Mikhail Mxyzptlk. Most of all, he slowly learned to live with each one of his expanding powers, from seeing through tall buildings to being able to leap over them. Lex left seven seasons in, by which time his friendship with Clark had soured, although he came back for a final face-off in season ten. By then the no-tights-and-flights rule had been lifted and Clark was out of high school, living in Metropolis, and ready to take on the full-time role he had been training for.

  The new era opened opportunities for new characters. Newspapers across the country had strong-willed women editors, so it was no surprise that Chloe Sullivan was not just popular on Smallville but was written into the mainstream Superman comic books. Lex’s father, the diabolical industrialist Lionel Luthor, was made for TV and a poster child for extreme parenting. Perry White was back, this time as a television hack and a drunk. Settings were different, too. Rural Smallville was a bulwark against the industrialization and urbanization pushed by the likes of Lionel Luthor. Violence and sex were okay now in ways that would have been inconceivable in the finger-wagging era of Dr. Fredric Wertham. Computer graphics finally made what little flying there was seem believable and a world removed from Kirk Alyn’s cartoons, George Reeves’s wires and springboard, and Christopher Reeve’s trick photography.

  For all the changes in plots and cast, and his own self-doubts, Clark/Superman was the hero he had always been. He still had an instinctive sense of what was right and acted on it. His love interests were as tangled as ever. He remained the handsomest, mightiest, most captivating super-being on TV and in the universe. No wonder a new generation of kids was smitten.

  Behind the scenes of Smallville the watchword remained product synergy, but the cooperation was now broader and deeper. Merchandise ranged from two soundtrack albums to T-shirts, hats, posters, and a monthly magazine. “Save Me,” the show’s theme song, soared on the Billboard charts, and, in a strange twist on product placement, in one scene a CD of Smallville’s songs was being sold. There were two series of Smallville-inspired young adult novels with eighteen titles. The normal pattern whereby a comic book generated spin-offs was turned on its head, with the TV show launching the bimonthly Smallville: The Comic and inspiring cartoonists to redraw Superman to look more like his televised counterpart. There also were webisodes and a tie-in with Verizon that let registered users watch plot updates. True fans could make their own digital comics in a deal worked out between the network and a chewing-gum company.

  The most lucrative of the synergies was playing out at the newly created AOL Time Warner, showing the troubled conglomerate what a merger could mean when its moving parts got in sync. The WB network broadcast the show not just across America but around the world, from San Salvador and Berlin to refugee camps in Nairobi. DC Comics safeguarded the legend, which was easier with Superman comic book writer Jeph Loeb also writing and producing for Smallville. Warner Bros.’ TV studio oversaw the project, and its film division watched for any overlap with the new Superman movie. Expertise was shared. Money was saved. And sometimes limits were set, like keeping Lois Lane off the show until season four, because DC and Warner wanted to save her for what they hoped would be a new film focused on Superman’s early years.

  Christopher Reeve was a metaphor for that sharing of Superman across divisions and generations. He watched Smallville and loved it, so much so that he agreed to be a guest star. He played Dr. Virgil Swann, a wheelchair-bound scientist who revealed to Clark that Kal-El was his real name, Krypton was his first home, and he had a mission to fulfill on Earth. The aging star who had defined Superman for baby boomers was, in effect, passing the torch to the young one who would define the hero for generation next. The nostalgia was ramped up a notch when Reeve’s Lois, Margot Kidder, came back to play Swann’s emissary. The producers also brought in Annette O’Toole, who had played Lana in the 1983 Superman movie and now was Clark’s adoptive mother, Martha. Making cameo appearances in new roles were Lois & Clark’s Lois and Clark, along with the Salkind-era actors who played Jimmy Olsen, General Zod, and Supergirl. “We were winking to the mythology,” says Gough, and it wasn’t just in casting. Smallville’s high school newspaper borrowed its name from Jerry Siegel’s high school paper, the Torch. Lana wore a kryptonite stone in a necklace, a reminder of her parents and Superman’s. In one episode, when Clark dropped a copy of a book by Nietzsche, Lana asked whether he was a “man or superman?” Clark: “I haven’t figured it out yet.”

  But he did figure it out in new ways that drew rave reviews. “ ‘Smallville’ is one of the few new shows this season to have attained breakout status,” wrote Hal Hinson of The New York Times. “ ‘Smallville’ peddles its own brand of classic all-American corn, which, when served with a pinch of teenage angst, a hint of paranormality and a fresh take on one of the most durable icons in pop culture history, makes an immensely satisfying meal.” Esquire’s Carson was even more swept away, writing, “Seeing the Superman myth in terms of innocence lost gives the material a poignancy it’s never had before.” Entertainment Weekly added that “finally, Clark Kent has an adolescence that actually makes sense,” and Smallville “is luring in those who don’t know kryptonite from crapola.”

  It happened at just the right moment. For the WB, the new show cushioned the blow of losing Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a hit that had jumped to a competing network. For the nation, Smallville’s launch in the wake of 9/11 gave America a hero it could believe in when it needed one, the same way Jerry and Joe had more than sixty years earlier.

  Smallville drew the biggest-ever audience for a debut on the WB network, 8.4 million viewers, and by its second season it was the WB’s most popular program. The show set viewership records for the age groups that AOL Time Warner executives craved: eighteen- to thirty-four year olds. It attracted young men to a network that had catered to teenage girls. Fathers watched with their daughters, the former loving Superman and the latter thinking Clark was hot. While its audience slowly declined over the years, even at the end it was drawing several million viewers, not bad for a cable network.

  This wasn’t the first Superman TV show to explore the hero’s early life. Superboy did that, although he was in coll
ege rather than high school, and he wasn’t afraid to don his uniform or take flight. The link to Lois & Clark was even clearer, with the title snubbing Superman and the program showing more interest in Clark than in his heroic alter ego. But Smallville was more interesting, maybe because it focused on a more troubled period of Clark’s (or anyone’s) life: adolescence. It was a story about family, too. Martha and Jonathan were not mere props here but down-to-Earth parents with rock-solid values, anxious to help their son. Lionel Luthor made the same point in reverse, raising Lex to be a chip off his bad-guy block. The upshot was that while Superboy and Lois & Clark died after four seasons, Smallville lived for ten years, making it not just the longest-lasting of the Superman shows but the most enduring of any TV series based on a comic book hero.

  RECASTING SUPERMAN FOR A RETURN to the big screen was harder. Warner Bros. had bought back the movie rights from Alex Salkind in 1993 after he had a falling out with his son, Ilya, and the studio trumpeted its acquisition almost as brashly as Alex had his. It should have known better. For starters, it didn’t have in hand a Superman story worth telling. Its earliest version began with the hero dying just after immaculately impregnating Lois with a child so super that he grew to adulthood within weeks. It took even less time for Warner to realize it needed a more plausible narrative. Subsequent scripts traded in Superman’s blue-and-red costume for an all-black one, sat him down with a psychologist, built him a robot named L-Ron (patterned after Scientology’s L. Ron Hubbard), gave him a third persona, pitted him against Brainiac and Batman, resuscitated not just his birth parents but his home planet, and wrote in references to 9/11 then wrote them out for fear the country wasn’t ready. Ten writers came and went over eleven years, along with countless producers, directors, and stars ready to don the cape and tights, at a cost to the studio of tens of millions of dollars and a stack of embarrassing news clippings. Even a title for the movie proved elusive, with the options including Superman Reborn, Superman: Flyboy, Batman vs. Superman, Superman V, and the unintentionally ironic Superman Lives.