Chapter Two: Superman II
By Brett Ballard-Beach
January 3, 2013
BoxOfficeProphets.com
There have been all sorts of similar (and similar-ish) scenarios in Hollywood over the decades, both in the director’s chair and as the finished product. In 1931, a Spanish language version of Dracula was shot simultaneously with the Tod Browning-Bela Lugosi classic, at night using the same costumes, sets, and props, but a completely different cast and crew. I have never had the pleasure of viewing it, although it sounds like a fascinating complementary experience, longer (by 30 minutes) and more sensual.
There have been instances where a director was replaced on a project and the new director shot enough of the finished feature that both received credit. Gunther von Fritsch, making his feature-length directorial debut with the 1944 Chapter Two, Curse of the Cat People, was replaced with editor Robert Wise, also making his directorial debut, after von Fritsch fell behind on shooting schedule and went over budget after only a few days.
There are numerous notorious instances of director/star feuds, producer/director feuds, or producer/director/star feuds in which it is acknowledged - covertly or explicitly - that the non-directorial parties ended up doing some of the filming or wrangling control of the film’s production or its vision, but not enough to petition for credit (The dustup between Kevin(s) Reynolds and Costner on the set of Waterworld immediately comes to mind).
There are cases where the director effectively disowned the project and chose the nom de plume of alienation, Alan Smithee. This allowance was in effect from 1968-2000. It was discontinued (in one of the most perverse and fitting ironies ever) after director Arthur Hiller, working on a Hollywood satire entitled An Alan Smithee Film, clashed with producer/screenwriter Joe Esterhazas, and successfully argued to have his name taken off and replaced with… Alan Smithee.
The cases that the saga of Superman II (the 1980 Richard Lester version) and Superman II (the 2006 Richard Donner cut) remind me of, oddly enough, both involve Warner Bros (the studio that also released the Superman films, and the music division respectively). In 2004, Paul Schrader stepped in for the recently deceased John Frankenheimer to direct a prequel to the 1973 horror classic The Exorcist. On a $30 million budget, Schrader gave production company Morgan Creek a psychological horror film with little to none of the bloody slasher-film violence the producers were expecting.
The production company refused to release such an “uncommercial” finished product and shelved it. With the film more or less completed, Renny Harlin was brought in to reshoot the entire thing. Cast members had to be replaced, the script was rewritten (though a lot of the same sets and costumes were used) and $50 million was spent on Exorcist: The Beginning, released in late summer 2004 to dreadful reviews and so-so box office ($41 million final domestic tally.) Several months later, Morgan Creek relented and gave Schrader $35,000 to finish post-production on his vision, titled Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist. It was given a perfunctory release in about 100 theaters for a couple of weeks and received marginally better notice.
In 2001, the band Wilco was dropped by their record label - Reprise, a subsidiary of Warner Music - after playing their completed album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot for a new, less Wilco-friendly regime that had replaced some of the band’s biggest supporters at the label, in the wake of the then-recent merger of Time Warner and AOL. In a rare (and inexplicable) move of beneficence from corporate America, Reprise gave the band the masters for the album for $50,000 and released them from their contract. Jeff Tweedy decided to stream the album on the band’s website, drawing a rush of fans and much critical acclaim. Several dozen labels became interested in releasing the album in a physical format and the band settled on Nonesuch Records, a subsidiary of Time Warner AOL. Yes, this can be taken as a comment on the creation of large supercompanies over the last three decades, but I prefer to think of it as “the man,” in some small way, getting the shaft. As for the connection that I see between all three examples? Corporate America giveth. Corporate America taketh away. And if there’s any way to salvage an investment, whether by throwing bad money after good, good money after bad, or reversing your position down the line, CA will step up to the plate.
The Superman series strikes me as the most egregious example of a film series that ran itself into the ground quite rapidly after a highly acclaimed and financially lucrative beginning. I have never been the biggest fan of the character in comic book or big-screen format. I have seen Superman: The Movie a sum total of (I think) three times now, the most recent a few days ago in its 151-minute director’s cut. Superman II is one I recall watching multiple times on cable as a six year old, but the only thing that stuck with me was the sight of powerless Superman/Clark Kent getting bloodied up by a bully in a greasy spoon diner. Superman III was viewed once, most likely in the theaters. I recall Richard Pryor on skis and a campy demise for villain Robert Vaughn. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace remains unseen to this point. However, a Warner Bros four-pack of the series is in my possession and I do plan on catching up with the latter two in the coming weeks.
Although I don’t know if I would deem it “telling,” it strikes me as highly symbolic - and more than a little amusing - that the only time Christopher Reeve got sole above the title billing was for Superman IV. For the first Superman, heavyweights Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman received top status. For Superman II, it was Hackman and Reeve. And for Superman III, Reeve finally came first and shared top billing with… Richard Pryor. More on the incongruity of that in a moment.
1978’s Superman is a film so full of good cheer, so devoid of cynicism, so earnest in its desire to be respectful to Superman’s origins and to rise above being thought of as a “comic book movie” that it almost suffocates in the early going on its grand notions. (However, given the natures of the catastrophes that bookend the film, it occurred to me that Superman could be considered, in one respect, as the only highbrow disaster movie of the 1970s.) Brando is there for the first 10 minutes, and in brief bits over the rest of the film, as if to assure audiences that this is 100% high class. (Other actors, like Hackman, Jackie Cooper and Glenn Ford serve a similar purpose. Hell, author of The Godfather Mario Puzo wrote the screen story and contributed to the screenplay! ) The origin story that occupies the first 50 minutes - or one-third of the running time - may have been thought necessary, but it simply delays the arrival of the film and the series’ greatest strength: Reeve.
The best parallel I can think of is when directors hire non-professionals or non-actors for roles because that person is the embodiment of who they are looking for in the character. Reeve is Superman and Clark Kent. He gives both characters the same calm temperament, warm personality, and inner goodness. Flying Lois around the world, nabbing bank robbers, re-directing a wayward nuclear missile, he makes being a superhero look easy, and decent, and fun. Superman was an enormous success, grossing nearly $200 million.
What happened, then, on the road to series implosion? There was the incalculably insane what-the fuckness of inserting Pryor into the mix in Superman III. (The poster art for the film perfectly captures this, as well as the film’s shift to goofy comic shenanigans, with a terrified Pryor being cradled in Superman’s arms as the latter flies up and away from the villain’s lair.) Reviews were dreadful and the installment grossed one-third the amount of the first film and half of the second film. When The Quest for Peace rolled around five years later, it was on a budget of only $19 million (about one-fifth of the combined budget for the first two films) and it couldn’t even recoup that, grossing a paltry $15 million.
The connecting link in all of this is Superman II, which also received overwhelming critical kudos and passed the $100 million mark domestically. This was despite a troubled production borne out of the fact that producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind chose to film the first two films back to back, as they had earlier in the decade with The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers. While normally this is a great cost-saving measure, budget overruns and clashes with Richard Donner led to his being sacked after a great portion of Superman II had already been filmed. The Salkinds brought in Richard Lester (their director on both Musketeers films as well as helmer of the Beatles’ films A Hard Day’s Night and Help!) who ended up reshooting scenes and shooting a host of new scenes, such that the final mix was said to be about 75/30 his work. He got sole credit.
Nearly 30 years later, with the reboot attempt Superman Returns (a film that for better and worse attempts to continue Donner’s vision while ignoring parts III and IV) slated to hit theaters, in Summer 2006, the Suits that Be decreed that a reissue of the series was in order. And with several decades of built-up interest and outcry from fans for some official document of Donner’s original vision, he was allowed to consult and advise on just such a project. All available footage that he had shot was used and scenes filmed by Lester were inserted only where the gaps in continuity and storyline would have been too noticeable. This ratio was fairly similar to Lester’s version, with an 80/20 split, this time in Donner’s favor.
Having laid all that out, what I find the most intriguing about viewing the two IIs in such close conjunction is how similar they are in small ways but how different they are in the big picture. In sum, Lester’s version feels like a Chapter Two, warts and all, encapsulating the first film in six minutes to bring the audience up to speed (with one glaring omission) and then settling in for two uninterrupted hours of Lois and Clark banter (and Lois and Superman nookie), and extended destruction and mayhem. Donner’s version is more like an appendix to the first film, in that it ties in even more closely to the events of the first film (the three villains are freed from their interdimensional floating prison by a nuclear blast from the wayward missile that Superman launched into outer space). And this is perhaps as it should be, since filming was done at the same time with the intention of making one epic story broken into two parts.
The glaring omission referenced above that plagues Lester’s film is the complete absence of Marlon Brando, who would only allow footage of him to be used with compensation of an enormous amount of the box office receipts. Thus, he is absent from the beginning recap and from any interaction with Superman later on in holographic form at The Fortress of Solitude. This robs Lester’s film of the emotions evoked and the closure allowed by Superman’s final conversation with his father in Donner’s version.
Much of the new footage shot by Lester expands upon Lois and Clark’s antagonistic relationship before she discovers his identity and in the moments after they have implied superhero/mortal sex. Their relationship takes the place of the missing Superman/Jor-El one and it becomes genuinely affecting in its arc (his rejection of his powers to be with her, his giving up of the relationship in order to regain his powers and combat Zod, Ursa, and Non, and their final scene where he wipes her memory with a kiss). The tradeoff is that in the new footage, Lois’ character has become unexplainably hostile to Clark, more combative, and generally less pleasant. It’s a complete about face from her character in Superman. In Donner’s version the footage he shot retains the “old” Lois but it also ups the speed on their relationship cycle to the point where it all clips by too quickly and any emotional heft gets sidelined.
In general, this haste is one of my two major quibbles with Donner’s cut and it may just be an irresolvable issue forged by the (understandable) determination to use all of his footage and (equally understandable) determination to use as little of Lester’s as possible. The epic destruction waged by the three villains has been severely curtailed, and in the process, rendered less campy, but those extended sequences of mayhem were exhilarating for me, particularly the one in Metropolis, because they drive home the point that since the trio have all the same powers as Superman, how can he defeat them?
But in answering that, I must confront my biggest problem with the series (and by extension the character): Superman is so . . . super, and aside from one (admittedly large) Achilles heel, he is indestructible, capable of almost anything. His doubts about his worth and about the life he must lead, in essence his humanity, are, in my opinion, the most interesting thing about him. He is not, however, as many superheroes are, fucked up, to any large extent.
“Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” There’s a reason that is the holy trinity he upholds by choice. From a dramatic angle, this limits what can be done with his character. The first two films (with some allowances made for the Superman vs. Evil Superman subplot of Superman III) effectively exhausted his repertoire. Now, there are a plethora of other villains he can fight (although I could not tell you any of them) and he can continue to have his doubts, but… what else is there? The forces behind the first two films admit as much by having Superman spin the Earth back in time to save Lois Lane, a trick so nice it is repeated at the end of Donner’s cut, to render the entire pitched battle moot (and to leave Lois clueless once again as to Clark Kent’s secret identity.)
(Side thought: I confess to being particularly confused about its use in Donner’s Superman II. It appeared to me that from a chronological standpoint, it messed with at least part of the ending of the first film. And is this actually a form of time travel, with the entire planet serving as a time machine? Have alternate realities been constructed? )
If forced to cop to a preference, I would pick Lester’s Superman II, by a slim margin. Yes, I thought of it as gaudy and campy, but the pacing was better and I felt more emotionally attached. However, Donner’s version, flaws and all, felt to me like a near perfect rendering of the comic book format and essence (in that way it reminded me of Ang Lee’s Hulk, a film I very much like). In doing a tandem viewing of them, Donner’s comes up short, though I think I would have felt the same way if I had watched it first, or by itself. Donner did shoot the best sequence in either version: the truly eerie and unsettling moon sequence where Zod, Ursa, & Non mercilessly and cruelly kill a trio of astronauts. Space has really felt darker, lonelier, or less hospitable than in those few minutes.
This week’s column is also a trinity of sorts: the first of the New Year (yay, 2013!), my birthday column (number 37, yay me!), and the last one I will write for the foreseeable future. I have been writing about films for over half my life, in a number of venues and a number of formats. And . . . it just isn’t as fun as it should be anymore. I haven’t “given up” on movies. There are enough doomsayers year in and year out to handle that task. I don’t know if I can quantify or qualify what it is I feel, except by an absence. A spark. I understand that sparks can be extinguished and reignited, but I also feel that the time is right for something else. I know not what. I have great hopes for 2013.
So this is your (whoever you may be) last chance to offer me praise or come to bury me (a little of both would be nice). If you have been holding back since May 2009, speak now or forever hold your silence. One of my favorite lines from a novel is from American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis: “In the end, this confession has meant absolutely nothing.” For me, it’s always been the opposite. All of these confessions (cinematic and otherwise) have meant the world to me. I hope some of them may have to you as well.