Superman: The Movie (1978)

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a dummy fired out of a cannon! This week, join Chris and Lizzie as they fly 'round the world to turn back time to witness Richard Donner's herculean efforts to bring the Man of Steel to the silver screen. From shady producers and flimsy financing to Marlon Brando's bagel-based bravado and a budget that flew higher than Christopher Reeve, this DC debut defied the odds in making it to theaters at all. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Winterbauer?

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• 0:31Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:15Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, full stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone, I think, maybe kind of the cornerstone of the modern superhero movie. I am one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, as always, here with your other host, Chris Winterbauer. Chris, how are you doing and what are we talking about?

• 2:18Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm doing fantastic. Thank you for asking. We are discussing 1978 Superman, or Superman the Movie, as it was also marketed. Lizzie, had you ever seen the movie before? And what were your thoughts upon watching or re-watching it for the podcast?

• 2:35Lizzie Bassett?

  I had seen this probably more than once, but I was very little. So my memory of this was really so very different from what this movie really was. I sort of remembered like little snapshots in my head, but color me surprised to watch it as an adult. I think certain elements of it hold up really well. I think the effects look great for the most part. Although, one of the things that struck me as really funny was I remember being little and thinking that like, the Fortress of Solitude looked so amazing and was like so huge and overbearing. And then watching it this time, I'm like, okay, that's very much a model. Like, it looks great, but you know, there's some moments in this that are sort

• 3:18Lizzie Bassett?

  of like Tim Burton-esque with the models. But yeah, I will say the first like 30 to 40 minutes, real slow.

• 3:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Everything on Krypton, as we'll discuss.

• 3:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Everything on Krypton and honestly, everything on the farm.

• 3:36Chris Winterbauer?

  The Norman Rockwell interlude.

• 3:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Get him out of there. I don't need to see it. I don't care.

• 3:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Martha, ma, die. We need to move on.

• 3:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Seriously. There's some really funny moments in this. It's just a very, it reeks of the 1970s in a fun way. Like, when he asks her if her planter is lead and she's like, why, yes, it is.

• 3:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Most things are in the 1970s. Also gasoline. Crime has gone up as young men have been prone to violence due to the lead in the gasoline.

• 4:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Is that true?

• 4:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 4:09Lizzie Bassett?

  We were just putting lead in everything.

• 4:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 4:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Planters, gasoline, okay.

• 4:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Of course. So, as you said, Lizzie, this movie is kind of like a pastiche of the late 60s and 70s. You've got a 30 to 40 minute science fiction film, a little self-serious at the beginning. You've then got the boy on the farm, Norman Rockwell Americana life film for about 20 minutes. Then you've got your crime caper, you know, midsection run.

• 4:40Lizzie Bassett?

  That part's great.

• 4:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep. And then a third act disaster film, all for the price of one. They're really giving you your money's worth. And I too saw this a couple of times when I was little. Like you said, I remembered very specific moments. I agree, the Fortress of Solitude. I love the model work in this, but it is much more noticeable in retrospect, obviously, than it was when I was six or however old I was when I watched it. The shot that I remembered and looks as good actually as I remembered it looking is Superman as a little boy lifting the car.

• 5:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is a super fun shot. And I, that shot is burned into my mind and I had remembered it and I was waiting for it. And then I saw, oh, there it is. He lifted the car. It's great.

• 5:20Lizzie Bassett?

  I love that those people don't run away screaming at that point, though. They found a naked child in an asteroid in the field and they're like, it's just what the doctor ordered. And then he lifts up their car.

• 5:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. There's, there's a lot of interesting Christian symbolism and imagery and allegory that's used. And there were actually some pretty negative reactions to that from the more Christian community that, again, we will get to toward the end of this episode.

• 5:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, because he's an evil witch?

• 5:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Kind of, you know, that it was blasphemous, that Jor-El as God sending his son to earth to act as the savior for humanity. Superman being technically born of a virgin couple.

• 6:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Valid point.

• 6:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Who were unable to have children, growing up in a, in a small town.

• 6:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. All went over my head. Also, a very Lion King moment when Jor-El appears in the clouds.

• 6:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 6:13Lizzie Bassett?

  I wonder if they just directly ripped that from Superman.

• 6:16Chris Winterbauer?

  They probably did. And I thought, actually, that effect looked really wonderful as well.

• 6:19Lizzie Bassett?

  It was great.

• 6:20Chris Winterbauer?

  I really liked that. I really like this movie in a lot of ways. It feels kind of like a Bond film to me. A little bit of a Jack of all trades, master of none. It does a lot of things pretty well, and some things very well.

• 6:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, it does one thing very well, which is Christopher Reeve.

• 6:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, well, he's, he's great. Actually, I would argue Gene Hackman secretly steals this movie.

• 6:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, and Ned Beatty. I'm sorry, there's a lot of good things in this.

• 6:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, and a late hire, as we'll get to.

• 6:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 6:44Chris Winterbauer?

  So, we like to say that every movie is a miracle, Lizzie. This movie truly is a miracle. And maybe a curse. But before we get there, sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, Comic Book Movies by David Hughes, You're the Director, You Figure It Out, The Life and Films of Richard Donner by James Christie, Still Me by Christopher Reeve, Empires 2013: The Making of Superman Retrospective, The Making of Superman: The Movie by David Michael Petro, Look! Up in the Sky: The Amazing Story of Superman by Warner Brothers, and various articles, interviews, and inside looks from AFI, The Trades, Cinefantastique Magazine, and more. But first, the details. Superman is a 1978 superhero film, based on the DC Comics character of the same name, created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster.

• 7:29Chris Winterbauer?

  It was directed by Richard Donner, story by credit, Mario Puzo.

• 7:34Lizzie Bassett?

  I, I noticed that.

• 7:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Screenplay by David Newman, Leslie Newman, and Robert Benton. Creative consultations provided by Tom Mankiewicz. Produced by Alexander Salkind, Ilya Salkind, and Pierre Spengler. Starring: Margot Kidder as Lois Lane, Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor, Marlon Brando as Jor-El, and of course, Christopher Reeve as Kal-El, or Superman, or Clark Kent. It was distributed by Warner Brothers, and the IMDb logline reads, "An alien orphan is sent from his dying planet to Earth where he grows up to become his adoptive home's first and greatest superhero." Pretty good.

• 8:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:17Chris Winterbauer?

  So, Lizzie, how did a television director? Two foreign-born producers and a skinny kid from Broadway turn a comic book that Hollywood wasn't interested in into the most expensive film of all time and arguably birthed the superhero genre as it became known. And what went wrong? Almost everything. This has almost everything that we cover. You know, all the rules of things that go wrong?

• 8:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:46Chris Winterbauer?

  We have water, we have explosions, we have miniatures, we have deaths, we have a script that isn't finished, we have, you know, studio, we have everything on this movie.

• 8:55Lizzie Bassett?

  All right.

• 8:56Chris Winterbauer?

  But before we get to the film, we got to talk briefly about the origins of The Man of Steel. Back in the early 30s, Jerry Siegel and Canadian-born Joe Schuster bonded at Cleveland's Glenville High School over science fiction, adventure stories, and movies. They were both the shy sons of Jewish immigrants, and they poured their energy into an amateur magazine that they made together, or FanZine, called Science Fiction. Not the most original name, but descriptive.

• 9:23Lizzie Bassett?

  To the point.

• 9:24Chris Winterbauer?

  To the point. The third issue, published in January of 1933, featured a short story by Siegel called The Reign of Superman, and it was about a super villain.

• 9:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 9:38Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right, Lizzie. Superman was originally a superpowered megalomaniac, which I think makes sense because his near-invulnerability feels more...

• 9:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Sinister.

• 9:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. But Siegel quickly realized that the character might work better as a hero. He flipped it around.

• 9:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Which, to be fair, they play with a little bit in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

• 10:01Chris Winterbauer?

  They do.

• 10:01Lizzie Bassett?

  And I think perhaps will play with a little bit in the upcoming Superman as well.

• 10:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Unclear. Perhaps they will. I would argue, there's no good guys in Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice, and we all lose. Superman...

• 10:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Was reworked as a force for good, given an alter ego as an unassuming reporter. Siegel and Chester graduated from high school and they set out with big dreams to sell Superman to the newspaper syndicates. This is as big as it gets at the time for comics because there were not really comic books yet. Lizzie, as we discussed with Wonder Woman, comic books at this point were just strips taken from newspapers glued to pages, stuck into a book and then sold to an unsuspecting child like a dead parakeet with his head taped back on. Dumb and dumber. Yeah. The concept was viewed by the newspapers as juvenile and fantastic. There were very few examples of bulletproof heroes in spandex. So you had things like, we talked about the, the spirit and the shadow at the time, more

• 10:59Chris Winterbauer?

  pulp noir heroes. These were men with vulnerabilities who would beat up bad guys in dark alleys. Not the bright poppy man of steel that Siegel and Chester had come up with. These two were viewed as amateurs, Siegel and Chester, because they're fresh out of high school. They at one point even hired professional artists to redraw the scripts for them to try to make them look better. But they were fighting against a trend, which was newspaper syndicates are slashing budgets for art and comics. But, as we mentioned, comic books are on the rise. So these comic books started selling well enough that actually they needed more material than they could cut out of the newspapers that were publishing the comic strips. So then new material started to be commissioned.

• 11:40Chris Winterbauer?

  So Siegel and Chester had almost sold Superman to Major Malcolm Wheeler Nicholson's, that's a mouthful, New Fun Comics in 1935, but the checks always came late, so they pulled out of that deal. And so in 1938, Detective Comics, Inc., publisher Jack Leibowitz and editor Vin Sullivan needed material to fill out the debut issue of Action Comics. Cartoonist Sheldon Mayer showed them a cast aside sample of Superman from the company's slush pile. Not the last time that the slush pile will come into play. And Sullivan loved it. He told Siegel and Chester, who'd been under contract at the company since December, "Give me 13 pages." They completed the work over the weekend and Lizzie, how much do you think they were paid for the character of Superman and these 13 pages?

• 12:27Chris Winterbauer?

  It's gonna be bad. Uh, $500? $130. Yeah. $10 a page, and for the rights of the character. Oh, no. Action Comics number one was published on April 18th, 1938. It sold for 10 cents a copy, and it is now considered the origin of the superhero genre. It is also the most valuable comic book in the world. In 2014, a copy sold for over $3 million. Oh, man. These poor guys didn't see any of this, did they? They saw a little bit. So by 1939, Siegel and Chester were producing a Superman newspaper strip, which was a major success through the 1940s. And they were paid decently for the work-for-hire work that they were doing at this point. But-

• 13:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Right, but not for having created the character. They were not participating in the profit-sharing or royalties. So Superman number one, his own comic, was published in the summer of 1939. DC introduced the Superman of America Fan Club, and there were licensing agreements that ran from toys and puzzles to novels, coloring books, bubble gum, and he's not even limited to the page. In February of 1940, he made his radio debut with The Adventures of Superman. In '42, he was brought to television by cartoonists Max and Dave Fleischer, who we talked a little bit about on our Walt Disney Snow White episode. And in 1948, he came to life with the Saturday morning serial Superman.

• 13:54Chris Winterbauer?

  So if you guys are unfamiliar, these serials were 20-minute short films that would play before Saturday morning matinees, so like before a feature film, you know, cartoon, for example. So Kirk Allen played Superman in these serials, and there was a follow-up, Adam Mann vs. Superman, that featured Lex Luthor. And in 1951, we get George Reeves in The Adventures of Superman, which, Lizzie, I'm sure you're familiar with, George Reeves and his portrayal- Yes. -and mysterious and somewhat tragic, and which we'll talk about a little bit at the end of this episode. He even made it to Broadway. 1966, It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman, starring Bob Holiday and written by David Newman and Robert Benton.

• 14:37Chris Winterbauer?

  So Superman's success was astronomical, but as you pointed out, Lizzie, it was not shared. Siegel and Schuster had entered into a 10-year contract with DC in the late 1930s. They were paid well by the standards of the time. One source pegged their combined 1940 income as $75,000, which is nearly $1.7 million today, and roughly 50 times-

• 15:03Lizzie Bassett?

  What? Really?

• 15:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, what the average household earned at the time. I think it was just the volume of material that they were pumping out and the price that they could command for that material. They were among the highest-paid comic book artists of the 1940s, but that paled in comparison with the millions that DC was earning off of Superman at this point. So Siegel and Schuster took DC to court in 1947 as that 10-year agreement was coming to a close, and they settled with DC for $94,000 and permanently assigned all rights to Superman and Superboy to DC.

• 15:42Lizzie Bassett?

  That doesn't feel like enough, but at least they got something.

• 15:44Chris Winterbauer?

  They would sue again in 1966 over the renewal rights.

• 15:49Lizzie Bassett?

  They need to aim higher and just stop.

• 15:53Chris Winterbauer?

  They lost in 1966.

• 15:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 15:55Chris Winterbauer?

  And the film rights sat untouched. Enter our very interesting producers. So in the early 1970s, producers Ilya Solkind and his father Alexander were best known for three things. Number one, their 1973 adaptation of The Three Musketeers, starring Oliver Reed. Number two, their 1974 sequel to The Three Musketeers, The Four Musketeers.

• 16:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 16:22Chris Winterbauer?

  And number three, the fact that the second film was largely made from discarded footage shot for the first film.

• 16:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Great. The Salkind Clause, as the New York Times identified it, now prohibits producers from salvaging footage from the cutting room floor for a second movie without paying the cast accordingly. Basically, the Salkind said, "We got enough throwaway material here if we could have a twofer." And tried to avoid paying their actors for said material. They did end up paying them a little bit on the back end. Anyway, these movies- They just pay Oliver Reed and Pints? Yeah, "We already paid you." What? These were French productions done in collaboration with production manager and producer Pierre Spangler. Ilya Salkind, who was born and raised in Mexico, and Pierre Spangler were young. They were 26, 27 years old at this point in time. And they were childhood friends. And The Three Musketeers was Ilya's first produced film.

• 17:16Chris Winterbauer?

  He did have a cinematic lineage. According to some sources, his grandfather, Mikhail Salkind, had apparently produced silent films in Germany and cast a then unknown Greta Garbo in 1925's The Joyless Street. But take that with a grain of salt, because the Salkinds are master promoters and I think play a little fast and loose with the truth. I think it was inexperience that led Ilya to thinking that he could be the one to bring Superman to the big screen, because he didn't know what he didn't know. So in the spring of 1974, he sees a billboard for a French adaptation of Zorro, and he thinks, "There's a man wearing a mask with a secret identity who does good for the common man.

• 17:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Why couldn't I do the same thing with Superman, a comic book that he was familiar with?" So he brought the idea to his father. But Alexander had never heard of Superman. But Ilya pitched his father hard. He says, "He flies, he does good, he has powers, and, most importantly, he is extremely well-known. His Q rating is through the roof. Charlie Chaplin, Jesus Christ, Gandhi, Elvis, Superman." These are the top five names that Ilya can think of at the time. Just the top five guys. The top five guys, and nobody's making the Superman movie. So Alexander takes the idea to his international backers, and it turns out they had heard of Superman 2. So Alexander thinks, "Hmm, maybe there's an audience for this."

• 18:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Pierre Spangler, for his part, was skeptical, and he told Ilya, "We will never make him fly." Remember that. So in August or September of 1974, they meet with National Periodical Publications. These are the owners of Detective Comics, and this giant entity would change to be DC Comics in 1977. They try to hash out a deal. I've heard the negotiation lasted anywhere from two weeks to 10 weeks. And basically, because DC couldn't agree with what to do with the character, they bypassed them eventually and go straight to Warner Brothers. So Warner Communications, Inc. owns both NPP, meaning DC, and Warner Brothers at this time. They go to Warner Brothers, and they say, "We want to make a Superman movie." And Warner Brothers

• 19:25Chris Winterbauer?

  says, "Great. We will sell that to you because we don't think it can be a movie, and we're happy to take your money." So basically, Warner Brothers thinks, after Batman had its campy three-year run in 1965 to 1968 and had a ratings crash at the end, there's no way to successfully turn the tone of these comic books into a movie.

• 19:47Lizzie Bassett?

  That's the thing that's so remarkable about this movie is when you think about what came before it, it is such a massive tone shift into what we are now so much more accustomed to seeing across superhero films. Like, it has serious moments, it has real stakes, it has a hero who is, yes, still sort of winking at the camera in some ways, but in a lot of ways, he's playing it very straight. I am excited to hear about the development of this because it really is like, I feel like we don't know what we don't know. Like, we don't know what the world was like before this movie came out because no one had ever seen anything like this.

• 20:23Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a lot of trial and error, and as we'll learn, Richard Donner is the linchpin to why this movie's tone works and is the way that it is.

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• 21:17Chris Winterbauer?

  So the Salkins and Spengler pay $3 million for a 25-year license of the character rights. To be clear, Warner Brothers is putting up no money at this point.

• 21:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 21:30Chris Winterbauer?

  So they strike what's called a negative pickup deal. Basically, the Salkins and Spengler are responsible for raising the money for the project. They can take out bank loans, they can raise money through investors, but they have to raise the budget, shoot it, and then, once they have the negative, Warner Brothers agrees to pick it up to distribute it in North America, meaning to buy it off of the Salkins and Spengler, assuming it meets certain specifications, and those are defined in the contract. So basically, deliver us the finished negative by a certain date, and we will pick it up for an agreed price: negative pickup. There was also a clause that requires the Salkins to accept input from a DC liaison on production. That makes sense, they'd want to protect the property.

• 22:15Chris Winterbauer?

  But the Salkins are very confident, very confident, Lizzie. In fact, they are so confident that in May of 1974, three months before they closed the rights with Warner Brothers, was it a bird? Was it a plane? It was a plane, and it was dragging a banner over the Cannes Film Festival, announcing a new movie called Superman, brought to you by the Salkins. They were bullish.

• 22:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Ambitious.

• 22:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Very, very, very bullish. Now, they just needed somebody to write this movie, and they wanted the best. So they first approached novelist and screenwriter William Goldman.

• 22:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, interesting.

• 22:53Chris Winterbauer?

  He'd won his first Oscar for 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. And, Lizzie, as you informed us when we covered the film, he had published The Princess Bride in 1973, and the thriller Marathon Man, the book version, in 1974. They met, according to Ilya, for over two hours, but Goldman couldn't see a way to bring it to life. He wasn't feeling it. And in fact, he would instead adapt All the President's Men, which would win him another Oscar in 1976 or '77, fantastic film. The Salkins were undeterred. According to one source, they also considered Lee Brackett. She was a science fiction writer, and she'd written The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye. She'd also written an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back. And sci-fi novelist Alfred Bester, who wasn't considered famous enough, so...

• 23:38Chris Winterbauer?

  We saw his name earlier, Lizzie. In early 1975, they go after another very famous novelist and also screenwriter. Mario Puzo. Mario Puzo, writer of which American epic, Lizzie?

• 23:50Lizzie Bassett?

  The Godfather.

• 23:51Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right.

• 23:52Lizzie Bassett?

  And The Godfather Part II.

• 23:54Chris Winterbauer?

  And also 1974's Earthquake, which you may not have seen. Less known. It is a disaster B-movie starring Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner, and used a new technology called Senseuround, which was basically just extended bass to make you poop your pants while you were watching the movie. So Puzo signs on in the spring of 1975. I read a few different figures for what he was paid. I will go with the AFI number, $350,000 for his writing services and 5% on the backend. Dude, Mario Puzo made so much money, and he spent it all in casinos, but you know what? What a good run he had. Keeping Vegas Alive. So May rolls around, so May of 1975, and the Salkins need to keep the momentum going,

• 24:38Chris Winterbauer?

  so they fly three planes over Cannes, once again announcing that Superman is coming. Don't worry. Maybe just make the movie first, or start, start making it. Well, by July, Puzo had turned in his first draft of the screenplay, and things are looking good. And it's 700 pages long. Well, not far off. Yep. In August of 1975, the LA Times reported that the budget had been set at $15 million, fat chance, and the tone was gonna be 100% straight. Unlike Batman, this will be no spoof, no satire. Ilya is giving interviews with every newspaper that will interview him. Especially, it's funny, he keeps having these quotes in the Long Beach Press Telegram, and I wondered if the trades were just tired of him,

• 25:23Chris Winterbauer?

  so he just kept going down to Long Beach to give interviews there. So, basically, he just throws out comps in all of these interviews. He says that the beginning is gonna be like the beginning of The Exorcist. We're gonna establish this mythology on a foreign planet. We're gonna spend millions of dollars on the set for Krypton. Then he says it's gonna be a psychological adventure drama with elements of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Earthquake, and Romeo and Juliet. I actually think that's a pretty good set of comps in the end for the movie. Science fiction, love story, disaster film. Makes it clear they're gonna retain Superman's mythology, but starts to leak some details that might be concerning for fans of the comics, like Clark Kent will be an anchorman,

• 26:07Chris Winterbauer?

  like Walter Cronkite, which makes no sense if you're trying to hide your identity.

• 26:12Lizzie Bassett?

  That makes zero sense.

• 26:13Chris Winterbauer?

  So he claims that the best special effects men in the industry are gonna be hired to make sure he is really flying. That ends up being true, but not because of Solkind, but because of Richard Donner. So in September of 1975, the Solkinds and Spengler release their list of 10 stars with sufficient worldwide appeal to portray Superman and Lex Luthor. Two stars will be chosen from Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Paul Newman, Al Pacino,

• 26:47Lizzie Bassett?

  No, what?

• 26:48Chris Winterbauer?

  James Caan,

• 26:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 26:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Marlon Brando, Dustin Hoffman, and Gene Hackman. And Lizzie's face during that entire thing, do you know that meme of the girl that like kinda looks disgusted and then looks interested? It was just her face alternating between those on every name. Do any jump out at you, Lizzie, for either role, Superman or Lex Luthor?

• 27:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure. Look, I think Marlon Brando, Lex Luthor, that could have been fun.

• 27:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Sure.

• 27:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Maybe. Honestly, any of those for Lex Luthor, yes. I think that could be interesting and I would potentially be on board. Although I think we certainly got the best option with Gene Hackman. He is wonderful. Very hammy in a, in a great way. For Superman, they're all old.

• 27:30Chris Winterbauer?

  They are. I think Newman was kinda the only one.

• 27:34Lizzie Bassett?

  That's the only one.

• 27:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Really made sense to me.

• 27:37Lizzie Bassett?

  But he's also, he's older.

• 27:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, I think he's in his 40s at this point.

• 27:41Lizzie Bassett?

  For sure, he's in his 40s, at least at that point.

• 27:43Chris Winterbauer?

  They had been thinking of him as being slightly older. So as we'll get to, one of the issues with Reeve was he was very young. I do think he reads a little older because of his size, but he was very young. So. Ilya goes on to say that he wanted Hoffman for Lex Luthor, or Jack Nicholson, if Jack Nicholson passed on Superman. So he was also interested in.

• 28:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, what?

• 28:08Chris Winterbauer?

  I know.

• 28:09Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, I'd watch it.

• 28:10Chris Winterbauer?

  A hundred percent. So he also said that he wanted an actor from Jaws to play Jimmy Olsen, which I have to assume is Richard Dreyfuss. I don't think Roy Scheider would make sense.

• 28:22Lizzie Bassett?

  No, but also, Richard Dreyfuss is way too big a star at that point to be taking on a role that small.

• 28:26Chris Winterbauer?

  But this is part of the Saltkind strategy, is they float names, even if those names aren't considering the film, to give it us an air of legitimacy.

• 28:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Which, by the way, not an uncommon thing to happen.

• 28:37Chris Winterbauer?

  No, of course. And these are not Hollywood-based producers either. These are international producers. They're based out of Mexico and France. They also leaked a bunch of directors that they were considering. And I do believe that they had meetings with a lot of these directors, and I'll read some names. So Peter Yates, he was best known for Bullet at this point in time. Roman Polanski, Ken Russell, Maximilian Schell, he was mostly known as an actor. Erwin Allen, he made a lot of sense. He had directed The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno.

• 29:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Alan Pakula, Klute, The Parallax View. He was actually rapping All the President's Men at this point. Sam Peckenpah, William Friedkin, George Lucas. They also claimed that Steven Spielberg's agent pushed for the job. And I do believe this, because this is when Jaws had not yet been released. I think Jaws was in the can, but it hadn't been released yet, because Jaws came out in the summer of 75. And so they said, let's wait and see how Jaws does. Jaws comes out, it's a smash. They go back to Spielberg's agent, and he says he's not interested anymore.

• 29:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, 100% I buy that.

• 29:39Chris Winterbauer?

  So they land on English director Guy Hamilton, who I also think makes a lot of sense for this movie. He was best known for helming four James Bond films. Goldfinger, Live and Let Die, Diamonds Are Forever, and The Man with the Golden Gun. So the Bond films were obviously action-packed, a bit campy, funny, and they were made on very modest budgets. And so, from a cost-conscious, producerial perspective, we need action, humor, maybe a little bit of sex appeal. I do think this makes a lot of sense. So, they set a start date of February 29th, 1976. That's Superman's birthday. And they decide to announce it with an extremely bold advertisement

• 30:22Chris Winterbauer?

  in the middle of Variety in November of 1975. Please read what you see.

• 30:29Lizzie Bassett?

  These five men combined have made a total box office gross of $1 billion. And the names are Guy Hamilton, Mario Puzo, Alexander Saulkind, Ilya Saulkind, and Pierre Spengler.

• 30:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, had all five of these men made $1 billion at the box office? It's possible. So I did some rough math. Puzo's The Godfather Part I had made $250 million worldwide. Part II, just under $100 million. And Hamilton's Bonds, $125 million. Goldfinger, Live and Let Die, $160. Diamonds Are Forever, $116. Man with the Golden Gun, $100. Between the two of them, $850 to $900 million, depending on which sources you use.

• 31:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 31:12Chris Winterbauer?

  And I have no idea how they are coming up with the rest of that money.

• 31:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 31:16Chris Winterbauer?

  So I think the ad should have said, "Two of these men are responsible for $900 million at the box office." Also, these are three producers involved in the film. But the Saulkinds are very good at self-promotion. And there was one possible positive externality of this blitzkrieg marketing approach. Some attention was being paid to the Superman creators, Joe Schuster and Jerry Siegel, who had been publicly lobbying DC for some form of remuneration for the work that they had done on Superman years earlier. So in December of 1975, the LA Times reported that Warner Communications, Inc. announced that it would pay Joe Schuster and Jerry Siegel

• 32:00Chris Winterbauer?

  $20,000 a year each for life in recognition of their past services and out of concern for their present circumstances. So as the New York Times had reported the month prior, both men were nearly destitute.

• 32:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 32:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Schuster was living in a tiny apartment in Queens, Siegel in similar circumstances in Los Angeles. Siegel had sold his comic book collection to Survive. He was working as a clerk typist, making about $7,000 a year. And Schuster was living under the care of his younger brother and was blind in one eye. The comics would also carry the credit line created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster moving forward. Look, it's good that they finally did this, but it is-

• 32:40Lizzie Bassett?

  That's way too little, too late.

• 32:42Chris Winterbauer?

  It's not only too little, too late, but the way that Warner Communications Inc. presented it was as if like, we are really doing something we don't have to be doing here, and we are the good guys, and, you know, we just feel bad for these guys, and we want to make sure that they're okay. Basically, this money kept them off the street, like a stipend or a pension.

• 33:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that's not even enough. Like, that's even been the 70s, that's not enough.

• 33:05Chris Winterbauer?

  They were no longer involved in Superman, Lizzie, and they would not be involved in the film. But this may have been for the best, as Mario Puzo had really made a mess of this screenplay.

• 33:17Lizzie Bassett?

  As he is wont to do.

• 33:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, let's talk about it. So Puzo turned in his second draft in October of 1975, and then he left the project. As the New York Times would later report, he had reimagined Clark Kent as a television reporter, à la Walter Cronkite, with a crime van.

• 33:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh huh.

• 33:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Lois Lane was now a meteorologist slash weather girl.

• 33:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course.

• 33:38Chris Winterbauer?

  And Lex Luthor was Luther Lux, maybe because he likes to hang out at the Luxor? I don't know. A mastermind who hid in a headquarters protected by a mirrored maze. The script was also incredibly long. How long do you think it was, Lizzie? You guessed 700 pages earlier. You weren't that far off.

• 33:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, how about 570?

• 34:00Chris Winterbauer?

  550 is what I read from one source, so congratulations, very close.

• 34:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Thank you. Okay, here's the thing about Mario Puzo, which if you haven't listened to our Godfather episode, we did just the first Godfather. We will go on to do Godfather Part Two, and certainly Part Three, I am sure. But I do think he's a great writer. He has to be contained by someone else, especially when he's making a movie. If you listened to that episode, there's no way The Godfather would have turned out the way that it did if it weren't for Francis Ford Coppola, who, by the way, really wrote those very much alongside Mario Puzo. Also, The Godfather, he made for money. Like, that's not what he wanted to do, and I think he was kind of playing- By the rules, a little bit with that more than he had previously because he was

• 34:46Lizzie Bassett?

  kind of doing it as almost like a fuck you to be like, fine, you want me to write, you know, a mob story about this, you know, head of the family passing it along to his son? Sure, I'll do it. But it wasn't what he normally would write. I mean, he's, yeah, he needs a, he needs a bit of a cage and don't let him near the casinos.

• 35:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Right. So Ilya and Spengler bring in Norman Enfield. His name doesn't often come up, and it only did briefly in this research. It seems like he was a bit of a fixer for the Saul Kynes in Spengler, and he did some odd work on The Three Musketeers with them and a couple of other films. He kind of disappears from film after this. The one big contribution he made is that I believe he was the first person to come up with the idea of just splitting Puzo's script into two. So this isn't one movie, this is two movies. He turns in the first half as a 115-page treatment. I think he does about six weeks of work on this, and he delivers that in December of 1975. And then he's out. That's

• 35:46Chris Winterbauer?

  his only contribution. So by the end of 75, screenwriters Robert Benton, David Newman, and Leslie Newman, David and Leslie are a married couple, were brought in for the next rewrite. And so if you remember, Benton and David Newman had written the Broadway version of Superman, It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman, that we discussed back in 1966. They'd then been nominated for an Oscar for their first screenplay collaboration, Bonnie and Clyde. So they went to work restoring the basics of the Superman myth. They increased the special effects on Krypton, they make more of a spectacle of Kal-El's journey to Earth. Obviously, they're evoking 2001: A Space Odyssey in a big way. And the Saul Kynes are as bullish as ever. They start pre-production in January of 1976 without

• 36:30Chris Winterbauer?

  a completed script. They're going to shoot at the Chinachita Studios in Rome, which we discussed during our episode on Ben Hur. Now, Lizzie Chinachita means Cinema City. It's the largest film studio in Europe. A couple of fun facts that I came across. It was built, as we discussed, under Mussolini during the fascist era to compete with Hollywood. It was stripped down and used as a German army barracks during World War II. It became a displaced persons camp post-war. And it was largely rebuilt for MGM's Quo Vadis. Can't explain. Ah. Someone said Quo Vadis. I got an angry email from someone. Good old Quo Vadis. Quo Vadis. It became known as Hollywood on the Tiber. Films shot there include Roman Holiday, Cleopatra, Eight and a Half, La Dolce Vita,

• 37:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Ben-Hur, and many, many more. So that February, the Salkines pay for a laser show in Battery Park, New York, saying, "Coming soon, Superman the movie." Lizzie is just... Maybe, maybe pay people to make the movie. Less money on airplanes and lasers. That's right. So Benton and the Newmans turn in their first drafts for two movies, Superman and Superman 2. And the Salkines say, "Great, we're gonna do the Three and Four Musketeers. We are gonna shoot these things at the same time and get a two-for-one special." Oh, my God. So May of 1976 rolls around, and they fly five planes, two helicopters, one blimp, and a flotilla of eight boats, each with a different letter painted on its sail.

• 37:58Chris Winterbauer?

  S U P E R M A N. Superman. I hope they were all out of order. Well, windy conditions dragged the sign. Nearly caused a helicopter crash. So this time, Lizzie, they had something to celebrate. They did not have their Superman, but they had his dad. Enter Marlon Brando as Jor-El. Just such weird casting. Such weird casting. Variety reports, "Marlon Brando has been hired for the role of Jor-El for an unprecedented sum. He's gonna be on set for 12 working days. Any ideas, Lizzie, as to what he was paid?" $2 million. $3.75 million and 11.75% of the gross profits. No, don't pay Marlon Brando that much.

• 38:43Chris Winterbauer?

  He's probably not gonna be there. What I will say is they've raised, I believe they raised much of the budget just off of his name.

• 38:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Because of that. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense.

• 38:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Every dollar you pay him, you're probably raising 10, to be fair.

• 38:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, if he needed the money, if you remember, he sold his points on the back end of The Godfather before it came out, or his agent did.

• 39:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep. Not long after, Gene Hackman comes on for $2.25 million. So assuming a $15 million budget, it's no longer a $15 million budget. They just committed $6 million or 40% to two supporting actors, which is amazing.

• 39:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 39:21Chris Winterbauer?

  But they still didn't have their Superman, but that didn't stop them from taking out some amazing ads in Variety. Lizzie, let's take another look. We have Marlon Brando as Jor-El.

• 39:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure. Mm-hmm. And his luscious eyebrows.

• 39:36Chris Winterbauer?

  We also have here Gene Hackman as Luther, and notice the mustache.

• 39:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 39:43Chris Winterbauer?

  And we have the very bold proclamation that shooting begins this fall.

• 39:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, if you say so. I mean, you gotta cast somebody first, but whatever.

• 39:56Chris Winterbauer?

  So they were building sets, they were ready to go, they're gonna start in early 1977 at Chino Cheetah Studios. And then Marlon Brando reveals that he cannot go to Italy, literally.

• 40:10Lizzie Bassett?

  What did he do?

• 40:11Chris Winterbauer?

  He starred in Bernardo Bertolucci's 1972 French-Italian co-production Last Tango in Paris, which led to a conviction in absentia of obscenity by Italy's Supreme Court.

• 40:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm. I think some other messed up stuff happened on that movie. I'm sure we'll cover it at some point.

• 40:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. Last Tango in Paris has a very troubled legacy. It was a shoot that caused lead actress Maria Schneider tremendous pain, not just during the shoot, but it seems for years and years afterward. And trigger warning for sexual assault, and or if you're listening with small children, skip ahead 30 to 45 seconds. Basically what was revealed by Schneider in the years since, and then subsequently confirmed.

• 40:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Director Bernardo Bertolucci is that when they shot the film's infamous rape scene in which Marlon Brando's character anally rapes Maria Schneider's character using butter as lubricant, that was sprung on Maria Schneider at the time that they filmed the scene, specifically to try to surprise her, humiliate her, as Bertolucci has admitted to, quote, you know, "draw out a more real and raw and angry performance." We will discuss this and much more about the film when we get to Last Tango in Paris. So if Brando went to Italy, he might have to serve a two-month suspended sentence. So the producers say, "We can't jettison Brando. He's what we've raised money off

• 41:39Chris Winterbauer?

  of, so we will ditch all of the shit that we have built and all the money that we spent in Chinachita and move the production to England, Pinewood and Shepperton Studios." At which point Guy Hamilton says, "I can't do the movie." Because Guy Hamilton had maintained a, quote, "tax exile status" in his home country that prohibited him from remaining there for longer than 30 days. He had to choose between keeping his tax exemption or doing the movie, and he says, "I will take my tax exemption." Wow. So with millions committed to the rights, apparently they'd already spent like $2 million on flying tests alone at Chinachita, the Saltines and Spengler needed a replacement director, and they needed him fast. Enter Richard Donner.

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• 43:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Richard Donald Schwartzberg was a Bronx-born son of Russian Jewish parents whose dreams of being an actor led to a name change, Richard Donner. We talked about him on our episode on The Omen, which we will talk about shortly. He was advised by a director, Martin Ritt, to bail on the acting thing and direct. And so he started directing commercials that led to television dramas. And by the late 1950s, he was directing a lot of television. His TV career was amazingly varied. He had done westerns like the Steve McQueen serial Wanted Dead or Alive, but he'd done a lot in the science fiction and spy genre. So Get Smart, The Man from Uncle, The Wild Wild West, Gilligan's Island, Kojak, and The Twilight Zone. Which, do you remember which section, Lizzie, he directed?

• 43:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Which very famous Twilight Zone short he did? Oh, shoot. No, I can't remember. Starring William Shatner? Oh, of course. He did Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. That's right. So he had a couple stabs at feature films that didn't really lead anywhere, but everything changed in 1976 with his third feature film, The Omen. Love it. One of my favorites. Made for just $2.8 million, so less than what Marlon Brando would be paid on Superman. Not worth it. The Omen was the fifth highest grossing film of that year. It was a smash success. And Donner was exactly what the Saltines needed. They liked The Omen's tone. It was kind of a serious approach to a silly subject. It had great effects work. The performances are all good, and he proved he could work with a very established actor,

• 44:36Chris Winterbauer?

  with Gregory Peck. Gregory Peck. And children. Yeah. Yeah, true. He was hot. He was available. I think he was either considering or prepping The Omen sequel, Damien, Omen 2. Not good. No, that one didn't turn out quite as well. And he could legally work in the UK. The producers call him up. They offer him the job. Donner claims he was on the toilet when he got the phone call. And Donner said, "I have, who are you? What are we talking, the song? I have, I've never heard of you before." And they said, "We produced The Three Musketeers." And Donner says, "I've never heard of that before." And they said, "Don't worry about it. We want you to direct Superman." And he says, "Can I read the script?" And they say, "Don't worry about it. Everybody liked it." The script.

• 45:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Don't worry.

• 45:14Chris Winterbauer?

  He says, please, I'm gonna need to read the script. Hangs up. Twenty minutes later, the script is couriered to him. So they must have had it nearby somewhere, even though they were calling from either France or it was definitely from a different time zone. The script arrives, it's 500 pages long. Donner writes reads it. He calls him back and he says, okay, I'm interested, but I have to do a major rewrite. I have to bring in my own writer. And they say, no, no, no, we don't have the time. We have built all this stuff. We are ready to go. We have Marlon Brando. He said, Donner says, I'm sorry, it's just not gonna work. Donner's agent then calls him and says, Dick, they're offering you a million dollars to direct this movie. And so Donner says, oh, okay, let's, let's think about it. Flies to Paris, they hammer out a deal.

• 45:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Donner gets a million dollars. He gets approval to do a full rewrite with his writer of choice. He gets backend participation. I couldn't find a great number here. I read as high as 10%. That seems too high to me, so I would take that with a grain of salt. But there were some terms that were not negotiable. So remember, we are in like November of 1976.

• 46:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, this is coming up fast.

• 46:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, Brando's shoot days are locked for March of 1977. They cannot move. He had to shoot the sequel at the same time. So he has to shoot Superman and Superman two. At the time, I believe the movie had a June 1978 release date.

• 46:39Lizzie Bassett?

  That's insane.

• 46:40Chris Winterbauer?

  And Donner had 11 weeks to figure out how to make Superman fly, something they had not been able to do. Oh, and also Superman hadn't been cast yet. I think that was also a bit of a double edged sword. On the one hand, it's stressful, but on the other hand, it means Donner gets to pick Superman.

• 46:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 46:54Chris Winterbauer?

  So Donner signs on. I read an announcement as early as November of 1976. March 77 start date is announced and he brings with him some really key hires. One, Tom Mankiewicz, son of Joseph Mankiewicz, famously wrote All About Eve. Nephew of Herman Mankiewicz, Citizen Kane. He had co-written Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun. He also brings in British art director John Barry, A Clockwork Orange, casting director Lynn Stalmaster, Fiddler on the Roof, Harold and Maude, Deliverance, and I believe Donner is the one who brought in legendary cinematographer Jeffrey Unsworth. Unsworth had been Donner's first choice for The Omen, but had been unavailable, and Unsworth had shot 2001, Cabaret, Murder on the Orient Express, fantastic cinematographer.

• 47:39Chris Winterbauer?

  So Donner and Makeowitz have their work cut out for them. The script is incredibly long, and apparently it had just turned into a parody. It had become the like, kind of 60s Batman thing that everybody had been avoiding. So Donner gives Makeowitz a clear mandate. He goes, "Focus on the love story. If you can make the love story between Superman and Lois work, we have a movie." And so Makeowitz comes back with the scene in which Superman takes Lois flying, and Donner says, "That's it. That's the movie. That's what we need to aim for." So Donner zeroes in on one word: verisimilitude, treating something truthfully, treating it realistically. He prints this out and sends it over to the production units. As he later said, quote, "We treated it as truth, and the minute you are unfaithful

• 48:21Chris Winterbauer?

  to the truth, to the dignity of the legend, the minute you screw around with it, or make fun of it, or parody it, and make it into a spoof, then you destroy its innocence and honesty." And I think that speaks to what you said earlier, Lizzie. The tone works, not that this movie doesn't have fun, it has a great sense of humor.

• 48:36Lizzie Bassett?

  No, it does.

• 48:37Chris Winterbauer?

  But it doesn't undercut the stakes for Superman and the reality of the world that it's creating.

• 48:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, there's some genuinely like, very scary shots in this. The, you know, her almost falling out of the helicopter and that whole sequence where it really, like, you know she's gonna be okay, but it still seems like she could plummet to her death and take out 10 people on the ground who are inexplicably not getting out of the way on her way down.

• 49:01Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. They just watch. What's going on up there?

• 49:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Staring straight up at the helicopter that's teetering off the edge of the building.

• 49:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Like the, uh, security guard staring down Austin Powers as he rolls the, uh, steamroller towards him in slow motion. So Makeowitz tries to find the humanity and holiness in this alien story, and that's where we get some of the Christian symbolism. So he kind of rewrites Joel's speech as he puts his son in the capsule to evoke God sending his son, Jesus, to earth. And Donner now needs his own personal Jesus Christ. He needs a Superman. Enter Christopher Reeve.

• 49:39Chris Winterbauer?

  In January of 1977, the closest New York-based Christopher Reeve had gotten to Hollywood royalty was a working relationship and deep friendship with actress Katharine Hepburn.

• 49:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 49:48Chris Winterbauer?

  And I didn't know about this, Lizzie, but he and Hepburn had starred together on a Broadway show called A Matter of Gravity, and she had really taken a liking to him. She was very fond of him, in a maternalistic, I think, kind of mentor way.

• 50:00Lizzie Bassett?

  She did this with someone else, I think we covered as well. I think she was sort of prone to mentoring people, which is really cool.

• 50:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Wonderful person, and there were all these tabloid rumors of romance, and Reeve, in his memoir, said, "This is..."

• 50:16Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 50:16Chris Winterbauer?

  "Not only was there a 45-year age gap, but she was my teacher more than anything. She was trying to help guide me."

• 50:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:23Chris Winterbauer?

  So, casting director Lynn Stallmaster had seen Reeve in this play, A Matter of Gravity, and he had brought him in for his first bit part in a feature film, the yet-to-be-released submarine movie Gray Lady Down. Not a lot of people saw it. It was not a big hit, although Charlton Heston stars in it. So Reeve had just turned down a different inhuman borderline Superman role, a TV show called The Man from Atlantis. He would have played a fish-human hybrid, had to wear green contact lenses and webbed feet.

• 50:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Nope.

• 50:51Chris Winterbauer?

  But he would have been paid $14,000 a week.

• 50:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 50:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Which I believe, if you do the math, is more money than he was paid for Superman 1.

• 51:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 51:01Chris Winterbauer?

  So he turned down that television show. Stallmaster pushed for Reeve at least three separate times, and every time the producer said, "We don't know who this is, he looks too young," and they would take his headshot and move it back to the bottom of the pile. And so finally, after multiple, you know, screen tests and seeing multiple people, they agree to see Reeve. And the problem is Reeve was really skinny. He was 6'4" and rail thin. Apparently, he had

• 51:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 51:28Chris Winterbauer?

  lost a lot of weight when he became an actor. So he wraps himself in the thickest sweater that he has, he goes up to the Upper East Side of Manhattan to meet with the producers and Richard Donner, and they say, "You know, we think you're a little too young, we think you're too skinny," and he just dispels. He says, "Don't worry, don't worry. I used to be a jock in high school. I can gain the weight." And they say, "We don't want to put you in a muscle suit." No, no, no, no. I can gain the way I can, and he just sells them on himself and they really like him. I think they like how earnest he is, how genuine he is. So the next morning, he receives the now 300-page script for Superman's one and two. His agent calls him, they want to fly him to London for a screen test. Now, throughout all of this, a bunch of other big names were considered before they decided to go with an unknown.

• 52:11Chris Winterbauer?

  According to a number of sources, Robert Redford passed, Warren Beatty passed.

• 52:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Every movie made in the 70s, you were like legally required to call Warren Beatty and Robert Redford first.

• 52:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Huge names. Caitlyn Jenner auditioned and screen tested and apparently made it decently far based on athleticism alone. Obviously an Olympian.

• 52:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I mean Olympian, right?

• 52:32Chris Winterbauer?

  But ultimately, I think the consensus was could not act.

• 52:35Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I think that would be pretty bad.

• 52:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Sylvester Stallone, Donner met with at the behest of the Salkines, even though he's like, he's not, he's not right. It's me, Superman. Paul Newman passed on both Superman, also Jor-El and Lex Luthor. He just said, I'm not interested.

• 52:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I have Fig Newtons to make.

• 52:55Chris Winterbauer?

  And apparently Don Voyn, a practicing Beverly Hills dentist, who had Ilya Salkine's wife as a patient, had even screen tested, but at 38, he was too old. So on February 1st, 1977, Christopher Reeve tests for Superman. The screen-tested scene is when he is doing his interview with Lois Lane on her roof. And you can watch it online, his screen test. It's great, and he's great. I actually think he's better in the screen. I think the way he plays the screen test is better than the way he plays. He plays it even more confident and a little bit more tongue in cheek in the, in the screen test. And you can tell, he's Superman. He's got the frame for it. He definitely looks thin, but he worked at it. As Margot Kidder later said, he was thin and dorky, and then he went to the gym and worked like a son of a gun and became Superman.

• 53:40Chris Winterbauer?

  So he basically had a three-month window to gain a bunch of muscle.

• 53:43Lizzie Bassett?

  So he's not wearing a muscle suit in this at all?

• 53:45Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 53:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 53:47Chris Winterbauer?

  They did have to put a cup on him at one point because you could see which leg his penis was strapped to.

• 53:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 53:52Chris Winterbauer?

  And so they had to put that on, but he was not wearing a muscle suit. So David Prowse, who had just wrapped Star Wars as Darth Vader, trained him for this movie. Wow. Proust had wanted to play Superman, but was told no because he was an American. So by mid-February, it's announced Christopher Reeve, complete unknown, will play Superman. Meanwhile, for Lois Lane, Susan Sarandon, Jessica Lange, Stoker Channing, they're all in consideration for Lois Lane. I do, I did read that Stoker Channing got the furthest of everybody else considered. That would have been good. Yeah. There was even an announcement that Ann Archer had been hired. That was fake news. Hmm. That could have also been really good. Yeah. Okay. Lois Lane wouldn't be hired until May, and they still needed to shoot

• 54:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Marlon Brando first. Do you know which film Brando was arriving in London off of? Was it Apocalypse Now? Yes, it was! Oh, good. Speculation was running wild. One outlet reported that Brando was being paid $40 million for the movie, which was the entire production budget. They had him for 12 days, then they'd go on a three-week hiatus and then continue shooting. And Lizzie, as you mentioned, Richard Donner was prepared for the worst. Brando, especially by this point in his career, was known for being notoriously difficult in very odd ways. So, Yeah. For example, when Donner first met Brando at his house, the conversation came around to the movie and Brando had an idea. Why don't I play this as a bagel? How do we know what

• 55:16Chris Winterbauer?

  the people of Krypton look like? Literally, he meant a bagel. He'd also told somebody else, I should play it as a green suitcase. Now, what Brando was doing was a classic Brando move, which was to negotiate as much pay as possible for as little screen time as possible. And so he was like, if I can do it as voiceover, this would be a huge win. Why don't I do it as a bagel? Marlon, you could have maybe come up with something like a little bit more legitimate than a bagel. Well, he was probably eating a bagel. So, Donner, Donner, though, was prepared for this. And he calmly explained, you know, Marlon, kids around the world have known what Jor-El looks like since 1939. And he looks like Marlon Brando. That's why you're so perfect for this. And he's like, you know what? You're right. I should play it as Marlon

• 55:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Brando. And that was the end of the shenanigans. Oh, no. And apparently, Brando showed up to Shepperton Studios and was a total pro. Despite the set being over 100 degrees, his costume weighing in excess of 30 pounds and a wig that was scratchy as heck, He was great. He was on time. He was professional. I guess if it's 12 days, he can do it. It seems like when he likes his director, he will go to bat for them. Yeah, he's less of a pain in the ass. There were some classic Brando concessions. They put his dialogue on, you know, hidden cue cards, which he had done, and some of those lines were written on the chests of other actors. He would just turn to the other actor and read his line. And, but he delivers it wonderfully. That's the thing. It doesn't matter.

• 56:41Chris Winterbauer?

  It doesn't matter. He's great. So Brando was a pro. Donner was quickly learning that his producers were not. And a schism was erupting between him, the Salkines, and Spangler. So Donner knew he had to delegate. He broke the production down into seven shooting units. I read at one point there were actually up to eight shooting units. These are not the official names, but these are the descriptions I came up with. So you had your first unit, and that's Jeffrey Unsworth and Donner shooting the principal cast. You have at least two second units, one doing kind of big scale pickups, crowd shots, exteriors. Another one doing, you know, non dialogue inserts, driving plates, some stunt work. You had a flying unit, a miniatures unit that was headed by Derek Mettings,

• 57:23Chris Winterbauer?

  who we discussed on Golden Eye Lizzie. Think, like you mentioned, Fortress of Solitude, Krypton exteriors, collapsing dam, bridges. Right, the town that the dam is gonna destroy. You have your aerial unit, so literally aerial photography. And then you have your like optical effects, matte processing unit. And so this is anything that's going to involve blue screen or rotoscoping or anything like that. There are five second unit directors credited on this movie. Wow. Not only was Donner attempting to make a man fly, he was, as we said, shooting two movies at the same time. I don't mean shooting back to back. He was shooting them at the same time. So if you go look at the full schedule, which has been broken down online, you can see he's shooting scenes from Superman one week, and then he's shooting scenes from Superman 2 the next week. Or he's shooting Superman in the morning and Superman 2 in the afternoon.

• 58:08Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know how he kept it straight in his head. No. He has a golf cart with a radio on it that he would drive from stage to stage to editorial. His editor, Stuart Baird, who had been with him on The Omen, he had also brought on to this film. And nothing was more stressful than the flying tests, which were not going well. And you can see some images online. And again, it's the equivalent of Dwight and Michael dropping watermelons off the top of the building onto the trampoline in the office. They tried shooting a fiberglass dummy out of a cannon. What? Which every launch just made the mannequin tumble or spin. It didn't go straight and then they couldn't stop it. So every time they did it, it would destroy the prop.

• 58:52Chris Winterbauer?

  It would just explode when it hits the ground. They built a radio controlled airplane shaped to look like Superman that they could fly around for real. And you can again, see this online. It was too jittery. They had a miniature figure on piano wires. They tried hand drawn animation. So this is something that had been done in the 1948 serials. Nothing was working. It would take eight months to get this, the final version that they did to work. And by May of 1977, mere weeks into the production, they were at least a week behind. Not that you'd know from the outside looking in. And I'm not going to show this to you right now, Lizzie, because we just aren't, just not, don't have enough time. But the Salkins took out a set of 13 full page spreads in variety. Oh, my God. With every single cast member.

• 59:37Chris Winterbauer?

  And I just want to show you this one. They not only did them for all the cast members, they did them for themselves. So. Oh, of course. I can't believe they weren't the first ones in there. So they have Richard Donner on the left, directing Superman's mom. And then they have produced by Ilya Salkind and Pierre Spengler on the right. Those are some seventies men. Oh, yes, they are. Big time. So Gene Hackman, the $2 million man showed up with a thick mustache he'd grown for the role. And in all the advertisements for the movie, he has this big mustache, but Donner says, you can't have a mustache. Lex Luthor doesn't have a mustache. Hackman says, I'm not going to shave it. And Donner says, okay, Gene, I'll shave my mustache if you shave your mustache. So Hackman says, fine. He shaves his mustache and then Donner peels his off. He had put a fake mustache on just.

• 1:00:23Chris Winterbauer?

  What? Donner's. That's amazing. Donner knows what he's doing. Also in this announcement was Peter Boyle, who was going to play Otis, a role that would go to Ned Beatty. So he was big off of Young Frankenstein at this point, but there was some sort of salary dispute. He departed, he gets replaced with Ned Beatty. And I mean, fantastic casting. And obviously Lynn Stalmaster had cast Beatty in Deliverance. So I'm sure that was an easy phone call.

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• 1:01:29Chris Winterbauer?

  So Lois Lane, notably, still on cast. They even put a full-page ad spread that said Lois Lane, question mark, in this release. And her casting was a happy accident, literally, Lizzie. Marco Kitter landed the role when she tripped walking into her audition. Donner was apparently swept away. Quote, "I just fell in love with her. It was perfect, this clumsy behavior." Turns out Donner got a real thing for clumsy women, apparently. Should have directed Twilight.

• 1:01:57Chris Winterbauer?

  When it came time to shoot, Kitter scratched her eye putting in her contacts. So Donner said, "You gotta just perform the day without them." And she bumped into everything. She walked into a desk, she couldn't see right, she looked really wide-eyed. And Donner's just like, "This is fantastic. You look great, honey." And so... Fall over more. She says, "I can't see." And he says, "I don't care. You're not allowed to..." You don't need to be able to see. "You are not allowed to wear your contacts because you are wonderful without them." A couple of fun Kitter credits. If you guys haven't seen it, Brian De Palma's sisters, his indie film. And then 1974's Black Christmas. She was kind of an indie film star at this point. This is her first big, big film. Black Christmas is great. It is. So she and Reeve apparently were magic together on the screen test. And I do think they have really good chemistry.

• 1:02:41Chris Winterbauer?

  And there was also something else very magical about them, Lizzie. They were extremely affordable. So this movie had a runaway budget. Christopher Reeve was paid $250,000, roughly 1/10 what Gene Hackman was making. And Kitter, according to two secondary sources, made less than half of that, $110,000. They did renegotiate on Supernatural 2.

• 1:03:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Good.

• 1:03:01Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. Donner's relationship with the producers is deteriorating really quickly because they won't give him a budget. They just say, "You can't do this. We can't afford this." And it seems like the real tension was between Donner and Pierre Spengler. I think Donner felt, "I've made multiple movies. I've made successful movies. This kid has never done anything and does not know what he's doing."

• 1:03:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Fair criticism.

• 1:03:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And the Salkins, though, are saying, "You are doing way too much. You cannot do this many takes. This is not an intimate indie film. This is a giant spectacle. We need to move faster." But things on set started to fall apart around them. So in late May, actor Keenan Nguyen, who had been cast as Perry White, that's Lois and Clark's boss at the Daily Planet, he passes out shortly after arriving for his makeup and wardrobe tests. He's diagnosed with exhaustion and drops out. The Salkins, of course, send more planes to Cannes that May to fly a banner.

• 1:03:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:03:58Chris Winterbauer?

  But two of them are grounded due to bad weather, and the one that does show up attributes the movie to Alexander Saul King, maybe a harbinger of doom. And things reach ahead in June of 1977. Donner tells the producers, "You're not allowed on set anymore. You cannot come to set." So the Salkins hire a mediator to act as a go-between between them and Donner. Three Musketeers director, Richard Lester. You might think that it's a little unusual to bring in another director to act as a go-between between your director and yourself, but it was a bit of a two birds, one stone for the Salkins because Lester had been suing them over owed back pay on The Three and Four Musketeers.

• 1:04:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, good.

• 1:04:37Chris Winterbauer?

  And they decided, "Well, hey, if we pay you out of Superman, will you leave us alone?" And they brought him in. And he said, "Yes." Now, according to Donner and Lester, it seems like they actually worked pretty well together, and Lester ended up working as a second unit director on the movie. So I do think he was helpful. And so, not a bad thing. But one thing that he couldn't help Donner do was get Superman to fly. Now, Leslie, you said that this movie looks pretty good from an effects perspective even today. And that is, I think, because of a pretty revolutionary new technique that was developed for capturing Superman flying. That's called the Zoptik rig that we'll talk about now. They tried everything. As we mentioned, they fired dummies out of cannons. They apparently tried shooting scenes underwater, so you would have the movement of the cape

• 1:05:21Chris Winterbauer?

  in a flowing way. That didn't work. They tried motion control. They tried skydiving. Nothing was working. They needed a superhero. They needed Zoran Perisic. So Zoran Perisic is a Serbian-American visual effects artist. He would be eventually nominated for an Oscar on his work on Return to Oz. But at this point, he was focused on a technique called front-projection. So, front-projection had been used a lot on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, where Zoran had done the technique alongside Jeffrey Unsworth. So, Lizzie, you've probably heard of rear-projection. Mm-hmm. That's where you have a background. You have a projector at an angle that projects the background onto the backdrop behind the actors. The actors are then placed between the backdrop and the camera, and they are filmed.

• 1:06:06Chris Winterbauer?

  One of the problems with rear-projection is that it requires a lot of space. Right. So you have to have sufficient distance between the projector and the backdrop and the camera. Front-projection alleviates that need. Basically, you put a two-way mirror at a 45-degree angle between the actors and the camera. You then fire the projector into the mirror. It's bounced at the actors, hits a hyper-reflective, retro-reflective material behind them, which bounces that light straight back at the camera. And the light that does hit the actors is soft enough that it's not really registered by the camera. Wow. So what you can do is you have the projector right next to the camera, firing the light, so you can bring the projector much closer and condense the amount of footprint. You're cutting it in half, basically.

• 1:06:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely. So, the material that's retro-reflective in the background is called 3M Scotch Light Cloth. It can reflect- Is that what they dressed everyone on Krypton in? Yes! You nailed it! Well- They did. I got a bone to pick with them on that. My eyeballs hurt watching that. It reflects a light back at close to 1,000 times its original intensity.

• 1:07:13Chris Winterbauer?

  So that's why.

• 1:07:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Literally can't see their faces, cannot see Marlon Brando's face. All I can see is glowing costume.

• 1:07:19Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. So the problem was that front projection systems were really big. But Zoran had come up with a front projection unit that weighed only 40 pounds, which was way less than standard. So they could mount the camera and the projector onto, for example, a crane rig and move the entire thing together. Further, he had engineered a way to mount matching zoom lenses on both the camera and the projector that were geared. So that when you zoomed in with the camera, which would make the character larger, the zoom lens on the projector would zoom out to make the background smaller. They called it Zoran's Zoom Optic Flying Rig, or the Zoptik Flying Rig for short.

• 1:08:00Chris Winterbauer?

  And it looked fantastic. Donner's blown away. He goes to the producers and says, "We need $25,000 so this guy can finish building this." And they say, "We can't, we can't afford it. Go fire a dummy out of a cannon."

• 1:08:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh my god.

• 1:08:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Apparently Warner Brothers put the money up. And Donner says that when they showed it for the first time, a couple of guys that ran the flying unit were crying because it was so good. And I do think that this technology looks amazing.

• 1:08:25Lizzie Bassett?

  It looks great. Yeah.

• 1:08:27Chris Winterbauer?

  They did do some fantastic stunts. They flew Reeve on cranes from, quote, "ridiculous heights." Donner admits most of them didn't work. They also flew stuntmen from a 300-foot crane behind the Golden Gate Bridge miniature. And the flying was very painful. So they were lying on fiberglass molds of their own bodies. And Kidder said, "You know, you're hanging from the ceiling for eight hours in these fiberglass molds."

• 1:08:49Lizzie Bassett?

  That sounds awful.

• 1:08:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it was very difficult. And the cape was really hard to do as well, because the cape didn't, never looked quite right. They tried fans, bottled air, strings, wires. And it was special effects artist Les Bowie who tried wiring the cape like an umbrella from the inside, which would allow you to control it with a gear system. And apparently that worked the best, but again, only worked from certain angles. So in the end, to be clear, three methods were used for Superman's flight. One, the Zoptik Flying Rig, that was the big breakthrough technologically. Two, more traditional blue screen mats. This is done by the optical team. They had to actually make his costume a little bit more blue-green. That was a big problem with the blue-green mats was Superman's costume would blend into the blue behind him. And then they had wire rigs for landings and takeoffs, and you see those in the film, Lizzie.

• 1:09:33Chris Winterbauer?

  So in July, they moved to North America to shoot the New York and Canada sequences. I'm going to skip through some of the more minor production issues that we have here, guys, but you can see all of them online. A couple of fun notes. A lot has been said about Christopher Nolan's team planting the corn for Interstellar months in advance. That was done by Donner and his team on Superman years before.

• 1:09:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:09:56Chris Winterbauer?

  All of those wheat fields that you see were planted by the production team. I know that sequence is a little slow. I actually think that sequence looks like a Terrence Malick film. It's absolutely fantastic. So it also apparently rained every day. They had done a bunch of weather scouting. It never rains in Alberta in July, and it just poured rain the entire time. This is a little sad. Jeff East, he plays the high school age Clark Kent. He is wearing extensive prosthetics. I think it was a very difficult shoot for him. He tore multiple muscles in his thighs trying to keep up with the speed of the harness rig that he was in that's propelling him alongside the train. So that he is really moving at 40 miles an hour.

• 1:10:33Lizzie Bassett?

  What? I was wondering, because it looks bizarre. It almost looks like he's running backwards. Must be because he was like kicking so hard.

• 1:10:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep, he's on a harness rig off of a crane, off of a camera car, and he's running at 40 miles an hour. And that is a real stunt where he passes in front of the train. And Gene Hackman's brother, Richard, who is a stunt rigger on the film, saved Jeff East's life one day when the crane overshot its mark and swung him in front of the train. Hackman caught him, yanked him back just before the train passed.

• 1:11:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:11:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And one thing that I think, the only thing that really bothered Jeff East, I don't know if you noticed this, I did not. All of his dialogue is dubbed by Christopher Reeve.

• 1:11:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, I didn't notice that.

• 1:11:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. So he was not told in advance, and I think that's what upset him, was that he had not been asked or told.

• 1:11:24Lizzie Bassett?

  I will be honest, I don't know why they didn't just use Christopher Reeve in that whole sequence.

• 1:11:30Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. I actually think he looks boyish enough that if they had dressed him the right way. I think it was a size thing when you compare him to the football team. He's 6'4". He is huge.

• 1:11:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Right, he's huge.

• 1:11:40Chris Winterbauer?

  But he does a good job of hiding his size when he's in that suit in The Daily Planet. I love the way he plays Clark Kent's character physically.

• 1:11:47Lizzie Bassett?

  I love the moment where you see him shift physically from Superman to Clark Kent and then back again. It's so nice because it's just this like little tiny subtle shift in his spine, but he does, he looks, he actually looks very different. I know the whole joke of like taking off the glasses, you know, of course, you can tell it's the same person. He does, he looks different. He's holding himself very differently.

• 1:12:07Chris Winterbauer?

  He performs very differently. I like how committed he is to Clark Kent, even at the expense of seeming like a coward. Like that, I love that bullet scene where he pretends to faint. That's a wonderful scene. And as Lizzie, you know, we talked with Wonder Woman, they specifically referenced that scene when she protects Steve in the alleyway.

• 1:12:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:12:27Chris Winterbauer?

  So, couple of other quick notes here. Valerie Perrin, who plays Miss Testmacher, she's actually an Academy Award nominated actress. Lizzie, I'm not sure if you recognize her. She plays Lenny Bruce's wife in 1974 as Lenny. And she gave Donna a T-shirt of her from her Playboy spread. It's like a photo of her from her Playboy spread and it reads on the back, "Another day, another $300,000", which was the cost of filming per day. So at the end of the summer of 77, the movie is weeks behind schedule and they say, "We cannot do Superman 2 anymore, so we're gonna kick the can on Superman 2. We just have to finish Superman 1." To be clear, 75% of Superman 2 had been filmed at this point. And so they technically conclude production on October 28, 1977 at Pinewood Studios. Now, to be clear, Lizzie, they had not finished the movie. That was just the end date that

• 1:13:12Chris Winterbauer?

  they had originally set and they were out of money. So Donner takes a 30-minute sizzle reel to Warner Brothers. I believe it's most of the Krypton scenes. And Warner's then says, OK, we're going to purchase the foreign rights for the movie, not just domestic. And we'll get the television rights and we'll funnel some money to the movie to allow you guys to finish. I read that the number was initially $8 million, but I also read that it went up to $20 million just to help them finish the film. Most of what remained was limited to Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder. So I believe Hackman had mostly been shot out. Marlon Brando had obviously been shot out. And months and months of effects work, miniatures, flying, models, et cetera. So in January of 1978, production is still going.

• 1:13:54Chris Winterbauer?

  The Saw kinds release the teaser trailer for Superman 11 months before its release date in December. And tragedy strikes the set. On January 7th, 1978, stunt performer Paul Weston's wires snapped. He fell 40 feet to the stage floor at Pinewood. He survived, but had a multi-month recovery. But that same day, 29-year-old stunt performer and metalworker Terry Hill was crushed to death beneath the Air Force One mock-up wing.

• 1:14:22Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 1:14:25Chris Winterbauer?

  The film obviously had extensive sets and models, and this was a very heavy one. And the film would be dedicated in part to him, along with John Bottomed, who had worked as an electrician on set and been electrocuted and killed during production. I could not find the exact date of his death.

• 1:14:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:14:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:43Lizzie Bassett?

  OK. I mean, I guess this is what happens when you're moving a little too fast.

• 1:14:48Chris Winterbauer?

  I think this definitely in part what's going, obviously was a, no liability was ultimately found that I could discover. But it definitely seems like they are burning the candle at both ends. They are shooting at a relentless pace. They had to shut down the Air Force One set, obviously, for an inspection for safety by the film's insurers. But Donner had to continue. And just moved it to, you know, the Daily Planet set and kept going. Oh, that's awful. So John Williams joins in the summer of 1978. He was Donner's first choice, but Jerry Goldsmith was originally offered the job because Goldsmith had just won an Oscar for The Omen with Richard Donner. But Goldsmith dropped out due to a scheduling conflict.

• 1:15:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Williams gets the gig and Williams loves that the movie didn't take itself too seriously. And obviously, I think a lot of people think Superman's theme sounds a lot like Star Wars. I, I think it sounds just like a lot like a John Williams score to me. I think it's super fun. It's great. Shortly after, Warner Brothers announces December 15th. That's going to be the release date for Superman. In September, they're still shooting. Still shooting. Newspapers nationwide leak the super secret ending of the movie. Quote, "It seems that Lois does die in an atomic blast in San Francisco, but is revived at the last minute by Superman, who spins the earth around one turn, thereby pushing events back 24 hours when Lois is still living." Not how Earth works, but definitely the ending of the movie.

• 1:16:16Chris Winterbauer?

  It was actually the ending for Superman 2. Oh. So Superman 2 was going to originally end with Zod, Ursa and Non destroying the planet and Superman time traveling to reverse the damage. But they couldn't figure out a good ending for Superman 1, so Donner just stole the ending from Superman 2 and made it the ending of Superman 1. In October, less than two months from the film's release, Donner's still shooting and he shoots the baby inside the capsule, growing into a boy on its way to Earth. Now, Lizzie, can you imagine a problem of trying to shoot the baby that you shot with Marlon Brando nearly 18 months before? As he put him into the capsule? Can't shoot that baby. Babies grow pretty darn quick. Pretty fast, yeah. And Lee Quigley, who had been the baby that Brando put into the, by the way,

• 1:17:02Chris Winterbauer?

  spiky crystals everywhere. I am terrified for that baby as Marlon Brando was putting him in there. But Brando looked very, very gentle with the baby. Fun fact, the baby inside the capsule is Elizabeth Sweetman, a six month old girl. Oh. Production finally wrapped on Superman 19 months after it had begun, a full 12 months longer than the original seven months that had been scheduled.

• 1:17:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:17:26Chris Winterbauer?

  So, end of October 1978. They had wanted to wrap end of October 1977. Of course, the Curse of Superman, as it would be called, was not done. On October 28th, 1978, cinematographer Jeffrey Unsworth died in France while shooting Roman Polanski's Tess. So, Unsworth had wrapped his work on Superman, the principal photography, back in the summer of 78. He did not shoot, you know, all the FX work that was needed after that. He was only 64 years old. Both Superman and 1978's The Great Train Robbery, which he also shot, would be dedicated to him.

• 1:18:00Lizzie Bassett?

  How did he die?

• 1:18:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Heart attack. Now, Lizzie, there was still producerial drama to be had. At one point, weeks before the film opened, the Salkins literally held the negative ransom, refusing to release it to Warner Brothers until Warner's agreed to buy more foreign territories for them. They literally just needed the money and said, "We need you to buy more foreign territories."

• 1:18:24Lizzie Bassett?

  These men.

• 1:18:25Chris Winterbauer?

  I think the issue was they gave away so many points on the back end.

• 1:18:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:29Chris Winterbauer?

  That there was no way they were going to recoup their investment, even if the movie made an insane amount of money. They had just cut their margins too thin.

• 1:18:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Clearly.

• 1:18:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:46Chris Winterbauer?

  So, the WGA also refused to give Tom Mankiewicz a writing credit on the film, because you already had Mario Puzo, you had Robert Denton, you had David Newman and Leslie Newman, and they didn't like crediting more than four writers. This pissed Richard Donner off to no end. It was not dissimilar to William Wyler trying to get Christopher Frye the writing credit on Ben Hur. And so, it was actually, I believe, Richard Donner's idea. He gives, in the main titles, Tom Mankiewicz a creative consultant credit. That is not an official credit, and it caused a big brouhaha with the WGA. And so, you are not allowed to put that type of credit in anymore. And I couldn't figure out if this is an official rule, but Tom Mankiewicz says it's called the Mankiewicz Rule, that you cannot do this.

• 1:19:30Chris Winterbauer?

  So, Superman premieres December 10th, 1978, in Washington DC. And again, just look at the strategy here, Lizzie, carpet bombing the cinemas.

• 1:19:41Chris Winterbauer?

  December 10th, Washington DC, December 11th, New York, 13th, London, 14th Hollywood. They are flying all of these, you know, cast members, et cetera, to these things to launch it. Not Brando. December 15th, it opens wide in 500 theaters across America. And reviews were generally very positive with some notable exceptions. So Siskel loved it, except he didn't like the last 40 minutes, but he did really like the love story. Ebert liked it a lot, too. He also, he thought the effects work was really good. I think Siskel had some more problems with the effects work. The New York Times eviscerated it.

• 1:20:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course.

• 1:20:16Chris Winterbauer?

  And I will not read the review, but the New York Times did not like this movie. But most people agreed on a few things. One, the casting was phenomenal. Christopher Reeve in particular stands out. This is the arrival of a very funny, charismatic new young actor. The tone is very buoyant and fun. People liked that it wasn't self-serious. The special effects are very captivating overall. And Variety called it a, quote, "preposterously exciting fantasy guaranteed to challenge world box office records", which it did. Superman gave Warner Brothers their best opening day, $2.8 million, and three-day weekend, $7.5 million. After 18 days, it had grossed a record $43.7 million.

• 1:20:59Chris Winterbauer?

  And it was the second highest grossing film of 1978, behind Grease, at $134 million domestically.

• 1:21:05Lizzie Bassett?

  My god, how much money did Grease make?

• 1:21:07Chris Winterbauer?

  I think around 150. And that number may have included re-releases, to be clear. The 134, I couldn't figure out if that was its initial run. But I did read that in its initial run, over 120 million people saw Superman.

• 1:21:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:21:22Chris Winterbauer?

  It pulled in $300 million worldwide, and it needed every dollar. So Lizzie, it's very hard to come up with an exact budget for Superman 1, because so much of Superman 2 was shot at the same time.

• 1:21:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:21:34Chris Winterbauer?

  But we know that both films combined cost well over $100 million. And so we can assume safely $55 million on the low end. It then surpassed Cleopatra as the most expensive film ever made. Although I think Cleopatra still held the record, inflation-adjusted.

• 1:21:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, and also, it didn't make anywhere near as much back.

• 1:21:53Chris Winterbauer?

  No, Superman was ultimately successful. It was also nominated for three Oscars: Best Sound, Best Film Editing, Best Music, Original Score. Very well deserved. The entire special effects team also won a special achievement award for their work. Les Bowie, Colin Chilvers, Dennis N. Coop, Roy Field, Derek Mettings, and Zoran Perisic. Also, very well deserved, some really amazing special effects work and pioneering special effects work in this film.

• 1:22:20Lizzie Bassett?

  It really does look great. It's not just like an, oh, it looks great for the 70s. It's honestly, we were watching it and just thinking like, how did they do this without using CGI? It really looks great.

• 1:22:31Chris Winterbauer?

  And a lot of color, which I appreciate as well. And one of the things I'm excited about with James Gunn's Superman is that it is returning to a more colorful pop art style, which I always like, just visually. It's funny, I just saw it 28 years later.

• 1:22:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:22:46Chris Winterbauer?

  And I love that Danny Boyle has a very verdant colorful world because I get tired of the desaturated, post-apocalyptic look where everything is brown, apparently.

• 1:22:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:55Chris Winterbauer?

  In the future. Anyway, Richard Donner was extremely upset with the nominations because he felt that John Barry and Jeffrey Unsworth, that's the production designer and cinematographer, should have been nominated for their work on the film. And I think I agree, I looked at some of the other films nominated.

• 1:23:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, what was up that year?

• 1:23:17Chris Winterbauer?

  It was a, it was a great year for cinematography, but there are a couple of these, I'm not going to pick them out, but there are definitely a couple that I think Unsworth should have been nominated in lieu of. The winner was Days of Heaven, the Malick film. That makes sense to me. But the nominees were The Deer Hunter, Heaven Can Wait, Same Time Next Year, and The Wiz.

• 1:23:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm, okay.

• 1:23:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Interesting list. And then for art direction, the winner was Heaven Can Wait, which is interesting. I know it has a lot of heaven scenes, but I would not have picked that. Then The Brink's Job, California Suite, Interiors, and The Wiz. The Wiz makes a lot of sense to me.

• 1:23:56Lizzie Bassett?

  The Wiz makes a lot of sense, yeah.

• 1:23:58Chris Winterbauer?

  To me, John Barry is the obvious omission. Jeffrey Unsworth, I think this movie looks fantastic, maybe a little less so.

• 1:24:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, the production design is fantastic.

• 1:24:07Chris Winterbauer?

  It is. And I find it hard to give the special effects team an award without acknowledging how the production design and the special effects go so hand in hand in this movie.

• 1:24:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Of course, nearly everyone would move on to the sequel, except Marlon Brando and director Richard Donner. So Marlon Brando sued the producers shortly after the film's release, claiming that he had not been paid his 11.75% of the film's gross receipts. He sued them for $50 million and, according to one source, received a settlement of $15 million. But as a result, the Salkins cut him entirely from the sequel so that they wouldn't have to pay him 11.75% of that film, too. Richard Donner reportedly told Variety columnist Amy Archer that if Pierre Spangler was on the sequel, he wasn't going to do it. In March of 1979, the Salkins fired Donner,

• 1:25:00Chris Winterbauer?

  claiming that they did it out of loyalty to Spangler. Lizzie, do you have any guesses as to who they might replace him with?

• 1:25:07Lizzie Bassett?

  I should know this, but I don't.

• 1:25:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Richard Lester, director of Three Musketeers and Four Musketeers.

• 1:25:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Richard, learn your lesson. They're not going to pay you.

• 1:25:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Donner says he never heard from them again.

• 1:25:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:25:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Tom Mankiewicz declined to work on the sequel out of loyalty to Donner, as did editor Stuart Baird. Good for them. And Gene Hackman refused to do reshoots. I don't know if that was because of Donner or just Hackman was like, "I am done with this fucking movie." Reeve would, of course, star in three more Supermen to diminishing returns. And there was also 1984's spinoff, Supergirl, and 1987's Superman 4: The Quest for Peace, which was actually made by the Cannon Group, not the Salkins, was panned pretty heavily and brought the Reeve era to a close. In 1995, Reeve was thrown from a horse during an equestrian competition and was paralyzed from the neck down. He used a wheelchair and ventilator for the rest of his life and advocated for spinal research and insurance coverage for people with disabilities.

• 1:26:05Chris Winterbauer?

  There has long been speculation of a curse of Superman, which began with the death of George Reeves, who played the Man of Steel back in the 50s. As we mentioned, Terry Hill and John Bodamed died on set. Jeffrey Unsworth died during production, although not on the production of this film. John Barry passed away in 1979, within six months of the film's release. He was only 43. Again, a heart attack.

• 1:26:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:26:30Chris Winterbauer?

  And of course, Margot Kidder suffered a very public mental breakdown in 1996. She had struggled to accept treatment for years for her bipolar disorder, battled addictions, and later became a mental health advocate.

• 1:26:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, I'm gonna leave the curse alone for now, because we would like to give it its own thoughtful exploration, an exploration of the toll that Hollywood and these films can have on those who make them. Christopher Reeve passed away in 2004. Richard Donner became a very reliable box office hitmaker, action director. I would argue he really hit his stride with the Lethal Weapon series.

• 1:27:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:11Chris Winterbauer?

  But another favorite of mine is Goonies. In 2006, Superman 2: The Donner Cut was released, which restored much of Donner's originally shot footage for the sequel, as well as Marlon Brando's deleted scenes. Richard Donner passed away in 2021. Now, Ilya and Alexander Solkine milked Superman for all they could. They then sold the rights to the canon group for Superman 4, but they kept the rights to ancillary characters like Superboy, which they made into a TV show in the late 1980s. Their final film together was 1992's Christopher Columbus: The Discovery. It grossed $8 million against a $50 million budget.

• 1:27:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, dear.

• 1:27:53Chris Winterbauer?

  And it sounds like the most Solkine production you could imagine. And they were sued by their initial director, George P. Cosmatos, their initial star, Timothy Dalton, and his co-star, Isabella Rossellini. One person who stayed on the film and is top billed on the poster, Marlon Brando.

• 1:28:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, Marlon. Marlon needs the money.

• 1:28:17Chris Winterbauer?

  He was paid $5 million for his part. He asked to have his name taken off the movie, but it was not. And that concludes our coverage of Superman, or Superman the Movie. And Lizzie, I have to ask you, what went right?

• 1:28:31Lizzie Bassett?

  I will leave Richard Donner to you, because I'm guessing that that's who you would like to give the credit to and who I think very much deserves it. I have to go with Christopher Reeve and the casting director for, is it Lynn?

• 1:28:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Lynn Stalmaster. Yep.

• 1:28:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Lynn Stalmaster for really fighting for Christopher Reeve to be cast in this. I just think it is so hard to find someone for a role like this that's an existing beloved character. We've seen this happen many times before, like. You know, we saw with the Brandon Routh version of Superman, like sometimes it just doesn't work and it's not because they aren't good actors. I think he was a great actor. It just didn't quite hit the mark. And what Christopher Reeve does, there's just such a quiet confidence to him in this that he feels very safe. He feels very genuine. And at the same time, he is just sweet and funny. And I don't think you can do better than Christopher Reeve. He really is Superman. And then, of course, he would go on to be,

• 1:29:31Lizzie Bassett?

  I think, genuinely a wonderful person in real life as well. So yeah, I will say what went right here is Christopher Reeve. He is just endlessly watchable. In a movie that, yes, the special effects are great. I would argue the script is a, is a little bit of a mess. To your point, there's, you know, really four movies in one. Now I think we understand why. It just, it doesn't work without him, I don't think.

• 1:29:54Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. I think the casting in general is very good. I think Hackman's, he doesn't have a mustache, but his mustache twirling villain is really wonderful. I think Valerie Perrin and Ned Beatty as his flunkeys are very fun.

• 1:30:07Lizzie Bassett?

  I was gonna say, also, the production design of his lair is so fun. I love it.

• 1:30:11Chris Winterbauer?

  It's also very evocative of what would become-

• 1:30:14Lizzie Bassett?

  V's lair?

• 1:30:14Chris Winterbauer?

  V's lair in V for Vendetta, the shadow gallery. And Margot Kidder is a really great spunky, she reminded me a little bit of Karen Allen in Indiana Jones.

• 1:30:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Looks like her a little bit, too.

• 1:30:25Chris Winterbauer?

  I will give mine to Richard Donner. I have always, perhaps unfairly, thought of Donner more as a journeyman director than someone like a, you know, a Spielberg or a Lucas, or you know what I mean? Some of those, his contemporaries. And if you look at his body of work, maybe that's true. But he, his ability to wrestle so many disparate elements, both creatively, but also managerially with the personalities that he was tasked with handling on this project, managing both upward and downward. I'm just really impressed by his fortitude and his ability to see this through. Not only did he make a really, really

• 1:31:07Chris Winterbauer?

  fun, kind of enduring film without, for which there was no template for him to work off of.

• 1:31:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:14Chris Winterbauer?

  But he did it under some of the most difficult circumstances I could possibly imagine. So I will give my credit to my what went right to, to Richard Donner. But I want to caveat this what went right. By touching back on the fact that there were accidents on this film set, we cannot know for sure why they happened, or I'm sure we could, I just have not been able to figure out. But they point to when you're doing something dangerous, you know, or when we're doing something dangerous as an industry, we always need to make sure. And it's possible that all safety protocols were followed and this was just a freak accident. I don't know, right? To be clear.

• 1:31:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, there were two of them.

• 1:31:52Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. The circumstances suggest to me that things were happening very quickly. And there were attempts at every turn to keep the budget down. And when you're doing that, and I'm not saying I would, I have not done the same thing on projects I've been involved in, there just haven't been a lot of stunts. You know, things can get dangerous. And so I think we just always need to call out the importance of onset safety and remember, no movie is worth somebody's life at the end of the day. Thank you guys so much for sticking with us. Lizzie, can you let the wonderful people know what we have coming for them next week?

• 1:32:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure. Well, thank you, Chris. That was great. I'm glad I got to learn about this and re-watch this movie. And next week, we will be heading into potentially one of the most historically inaccurate films ever made. And that is 1995's Braveheart, which, boy, we are in for a fun one with that. Maybe not quite as, well, I won't say not quite as skilled a director. I actually think Phil Gibson is a good director among many other things. So excited to dive into that one with you. And Chris, how can people support us if they would like to?

• 1:33:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Four easy ways. Number one, hit subscribe or follow on whatever pod catcher you are listening to this podcast on. Number two, leave us a rating or review on said pod catcher. Number three, you can follow us on social media. Head to Instagram, whatwentwrongpod. On Instagram, you'll find some fun shorts. You can see what we look like. Number four, you can join our Patreon. Patreon is a platform that connects podcasters like ourselves with audience members like you. You can join for free to get occasional musings, newsletters, corrections, additional information. For a dollar, you can vote on films that we will cover in the future. For $5, you can get an ad-free RSS feed, and for $50, you can get a shout-out just like one of these.

• 1:33:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Sorry if we really got your hopes up with The Sound of Music last week. This week, I'm just gonna be reading them, but I'm gonna do it as super as I possibly can. Here we go. Slipknots9, Kay Kanaba, Eleanor, James McAvoy. James, alright, is that who I think it is? If so, you would've made a great Lex Luthor, just saying. And if not, I'm sure you also would've made a great Lex Luthor, whoever you are. Cameron Smith, Suzanne Johnson, Ben Schindelman, Scary Carrie, The Provost Family, the O's sound like O's, Zach Everton, Galen and Miguel, The Broken Glass Kids, David Friskalanti,

• 1:34:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Adam Moffett, Film It Yourself, Chris Zaka, Kate Ellington, Mzodia, C. Grace B., Jen Mastromarino, Christopher Elner, Blaze Ambrose, Jerome Wilkinson, Roja, Lance Stater, Nate the Knife, Lena, Ramon Villanueva Jr., Half Gray Hound, Brittany Morris, Darren and Dale Conkling, Jake Killen, Matthew Jacobson, Grace Potter, Ellen Singleton, JJ Rapido,

• 1:35:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Jui Sri Samant, Scott Gerwin, Sadie, Still Just Sadie, Brian Donahue, Adrian Pengkorea, Chris Liel, Kathleen Olson, Brooke.

• 1:35:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Leah Bowman, Steve Winterbauer, Don Scheible, George Kay, Rosemary Southward, Tom Kristin, Jason Frankel, Solman Chinani, Michael McGrath, Lon Relad, Lydia Howes. Thank you so much. You're all supermen and women and humans to us.

• 1:35:58Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, guys, we will see you next week in the Highlands of Scotland. Or will we? It's most of it's not in Scotland. The heart that's brave.

• 1:36:09Speaker 03

  Go to patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast to support What Went Wrong? And check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman. Research for this episode provided by Jesse Winterbauer. Outro song by David Bowman and Stephen Paul George.

• 1:36:29Speaker 04

  As it travels, my thoughts wild, my thoughts racing. I could taste it, but I couldn't see underneath. Overwhelmed, hard to tell who's with me. When it gets in your way, you never know where to go. When it comes here to stay. When do you, when do you, when do you, when do you turn? Step in my office, it's the sky. Walked a mile and chose to fly higher than the mountain. It's the sky. Do you wanna ride?

• 1:37:10Speaker 04

  Do you wanna try? Show you how to fly. Whoa, let me show you how to fly. Whoa. Now a fire, it's burning bright. Deep inside us, our eyes whack us. Where there's a need, there will be day and night. Burning bright, who's with me? When it gets in your way, you never know where to go. When it comes here to stay. When do you, when do you, when do you, when do you turn?

• 1:37:55Speaker 04

  Step in my office, it's the sky. Walked a mile and chose to fly. Higher than the mountain, it's the sky. Do you wanna ride? Do you wanna try? Show you how to fly. Whoa, let me show you how to fly. Whoa, let me show you how to fly.