MEN OF STEEL #1 OF 3

NOTE: This issue has been delayed. Stay tuned for details.

#1 of Men of Steel provides a comprehensive look at the making of the four Christopher Reeve Superman films. Below is one of those articles, looking at Richard Donner’s original take on "Superman II" before he was replaced on the project by Richard Lester as director.

SUPERMAN II

"Let me put it to you this way," laughs Richard Donner, "all the good parts are mine. Everything with Hackman, Brando -- well, they cut Brando out because he wanted more money -- Beatty and Perrine was shot by me."

Donner, of course, is talking about his version of Superman II, footage for which he shot simultaneously with that of Superman: The Movie prior to Richard Lester replacing him as director of the sequel.

"It's been a long time," he says of his intentions for that film, "but I remember that it was going to be more in the tradition of the first one. The villains were going to be much more believable. I hated that stuff they did with the villains in the small town. It looked like an Englishman's point of view of what America would look like, with the army, the jeeps, the people.... there was no sense of size to it. It lost its sense of importance."

As fans are aware, Superman II focuses dually on the romantic relationship between Superman and Lois Lane, who discovers the truth about Clark Kent, and three villains from Krypton who come to Earth and essentially attempt to take over -- aided somewhat by Lex Luthor. Donner recalls several significant differences between what was actually shot by him and what ended up in the film under Lester's direction.

"My Superman II opens at the Daily Planet on the front page of a newspaper, 'Superman Saves So and So.' Lois is looking at the newspaper and her byline, and there is a photo of Superman in the newspaper, arms folded across his chest, in his typical pose. She's all elated as she's reading her byline, and then on the other side of the office, talking to Jimmy Olsen, is Clark Kent, sitting there with his arms folded in exactly the same pose. She looks at the newspaper, then at Clark and says, 'Oh my God.' She takes a pen and starts drawing, but we don't know what she's drawing. We cut back and we see that she's drawn a hat on Superman, a jacket and tie and glasses, and it's Clark Kent.

"Just then," he relates enthusiastically, "Perry White calls Clark and Lois into his office and says, 'I'm sending the two of you on a honeymoon scam at Niagra Falls. You're going to pose as a married couple.' Perry leaves and she goes over to Clark, gives him a nudge and says, 'That'll be terrific, Clark. We can fly up there,' and she gives him the eye. He doesn't know what she's talking about. Then she says, 'You're Superman, aren't you?' And he tells her that that's ridiculous. So she gives him the newspaper, which he looks at and recognizes as himself. Then she says, 'Before you say anything, I'll bet my life that you're Superman.' He lowers the newspaper and sees that she's moved to an open window and onto the ledge, thirty floors up. Then she jumps out the window, and in a millennium of a second everyone freezes, he shoots through the office, because he can't change, downstairs as a blur, with every loose piece of paper being caught behind him. He appears as a blur on the street. There's an awning and he uses his vision to pop it out. Then he blows up as she's coming down, causing her to kind of float like a leaf. She hits the awning, rolls off of it and onto a fruit stand, which we established in front of the building. Then he's back upstairs in this second, looks down and calls out after her, 'Lois, are you alright? What did you do?' She looks up at him and faints deadaway. This was shot, but they chose to do that stupid opening scene with the terrorists in the Eiffel Tower.

"Another change took place at Niagra Falls. Superman saves the kid and that night in the hotel room Clark's talking to Lois, who says, 'It's amazing that Superman showed up the way he did to save that kid.' 'Yes it is, isn't it?' 'I think it's too much of a coincidence, don't you?' 'I don't know. What do you mean by that?' 'I think you're really Superman.' 'Oh, Lois, isn't that silly,' you know, typical Clark. 'We went through this before and you almost killed yourself. Thank God you hit that awning. You jeopardized your own life.' Lois says, 'This time, Clark, I'm going to jeopardize yours.' She reaches into a drawer and pulls out a gun. She says, 'Clark, I believe that you're Superman so much, that I'm going to take that chance.' 'Lois, put that gun down....Lois, it could be loaded.' She pulls the trigger, we hear the gun go off and he stands there. Clark stands up to his full height, takes his glasses off, his chest is practically ripping through the jacket and his voice goes from Clark Kent's to Superman's. 'Lois Lane, don't you realize what a stupid thing you just did? If I had not been Superman, you would have just killed Clark Kent.' And she says, 'What? With a blank?' He falls down in his seat and moans, 'Oh my God,' looking like he's about to throw up. And that's how she found out he was Superman. It's really sickening, because all of that was shot and they just cut it out."

Tom Mankiewicz relates a lost scene between Superman (Christopher Reeve) and his father, Jor-El (Marlon Brando) taking place after Kal-El has been stripped of his powers, been beaten to a pulp and barely manages to make it back to the Fortress.

"We had a scene where Jor-El basically commits suicide," says Mankiewicz. "It's God touching the hand of Adam as Jor-El touches his son and rejuvenates him, and 'kills' himself by expelling the last of his energy. That scene was as chilling as anything you'll ever see on the screen. It was shot with Brando and was wonderful, but because they [the Salkinds] would have had to pay him money, Superman says, 'Mother, mother' as opposed to 'Father, father,' which is what he should have done and did do in the script. Brando appeared and said, 'Even though this will extinguish what is left of my life -- I warned you, I told you....' And he reached out through the void. Clark is unconscious on the ground and it's essentially God touching the hand of Adam. It's a motif I had done at the beginning when Brando sent Chris to Earth and said, 'I send them my only son.' It was God sending Christ to Earth. Brando was just wonderful."

Mankiewicz finds one of the most humorous aspects of the entire situation to have come from New York magazine's David Denby, who, upon viewing Superman II, wrote, "Well, you can tell the difference between Dick Donner and Richard Lester in terms of sophistication. Because in this picture, Superman II, Gene Hackman really had something to do, he's really wonderful, arch and so on as opposed to his performance in the first one."

"Well," smiles Mankiewicz, "I wrote a letter to David Denby and said, 'Just for your information, and this is not to denigrate Richard Lester who's a very nice man and a good director, every foot of film of Gene Hackman was shot by Dick Donner and written by me. So much for your being able to tell the difference between Richard Lester and Dick Donner.' They never printed the letter."

Volume 1 of RetroVision’s Men of Steel features an indepth look at the history of Superman in the comics. What follows is an interview with DC editor Mike Carlin – not featured in the issue – who discusses the death and rebirth of the Man of Steel.

The skepticism was so thick that you could cut through it like heat vision through steel.

It was perfectly understandable, considering that film companies have spent the last few years warning us that the latest entry in a series would be the last, when nothing could be further from the truth. Remember Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare? Don't fret, he's coming back. How about Paramount Pictures announcing "The Final Voyage of the Starship Enterprise"? Kill that cash cow? Me don'ts think so. Not so long ago it was D.C. Comics announcing the fact that Superman would finally be meeting his match in combat and losing his life as a result. Superman, dead? Puhlease!

"A lot of people criticized us for doing something commercial," explains Mike Carlin, Executive Editor of DC comics, but, at the time, Editor-in-Chief of the four Superman titles published each month. "They thought we only did it for commercial reasons. But every single story that we've plotted over the last five years -- and I guarantee you it was the same with every editor and writer before us -- was designed to hook a new reader. The problem, as time goes on and we're living in the '80s and '90s, is that a lot of people have decided that Superman is corny. They've decided that they saw a movie or a cartoon and it wasn't what they expected. It was our intention to get them to read the comic. If they didn't like it, that's cool, but at least try -- literally -- what we're doing as opposed to being influenced by an old movie or serial. At the same time, the extent we had to go to try and get people to read the comics seemed very drastic and calculated.

"The bottom line," Carlin explains, "is that we just wanted to tell the story of the world that took Superman for granted. After 50 years, a lot of kids didn't want their father's super hero. They were on to their own, like Ninja Turtles. We wanted to illustrate that Superman offered something pertinent for the world of the '90s and beyond. To do that, we had to show how cruddy it would be if he wasn't alive; that you don't know what you have until it's gone. That was the whole motivation of the story."

The trick, according to Carlin, was to get people to read the storyline dealing with the actual death of the Man of Steel, which can be boiled down to a fatal slugfest between Superman and an alien being known as Doomsday.

"It was a battle that hooked the people who didn't think Superman was cool. Then we tricked them into reading the story by having it go right in to the funeral, in which, I dare say, there was one or two punches thrown out of eight issues. After that, we just stirred up the mix even more by adding the four Supermen. As a result, a lot of people saw that we had interesting stories to tell, even if they seemed outrageous and disrespectful at the time."

One of the biggest problems regarding Superman for those who haven't read the title in years, is the perception that he is all-powerful and that nothing in the universe can threaten him.

"There was no question after page one whether or not he was going to win," says Carlin, "but that element's been pulled back for quite some time. In recent years he's made mistakes, he's lost battles, but ultimately he learned and grew from each adventure. Obviously dying and coming back was his biggest triumph, though it didn't look like it when he died."

Perhaps the most stunning aspect of the entire situation was the national attention the storyline got in newspapers and television broadcasts around the country.

"I cannot believe how big the world's reaction to this story was, and I feel that way for several reasons," Carlin reveals. "If this had been the first time Superman had ever died and come back, I would have been nervous about it. But this story has happened to Superman several times during the course of his history. All we did was explore it for a longer period of time. In the old days he would have died and 12 pages later he was alright again. Now it's 12 issues or 12 months later. We have a slight advantage in the weekly pacing of our books in that it really does move faster than if there was just one title and you had to wait until next month to see what happens. It feels urgent, even if sometimes it isn't."

A popular belief is that the character was killed off to help boost the sales of a fading title. Carlin says it isn't true.

"In the '40s," he points out, "Superman was probably at his peak and they were selling close to a million copies regularly. But there wasn't a lot of competition. As time went by, the audience for comics just naturally shrank because of television, video games and movies. Now you're in the '80s and '90s and we've revamped Superman and started from scratch. He didn't have four titles the whole time. He went up and down from three to four to two. You don't have four titles a month with a character who's doing poorly. It just doesn't wash. At the same time, he wasn't top of the field and he certainly had room for improvement. But he was nowhere near being canceled or anything like that. A lot of people wanted to think the worse, that we were doing it because it was going to be gone otherwise.

"Honestly," he emphasizes, "it was myself, all of the writers and the artists in one room, and we came up with a story. A lot of people said Warner Bros.' marketing department came in and told us to do this. Sorry, no marketing guys involved. When we told our marketing guys what we were planning, they said, 'Oh, Superman's going to die. That's happened before. Hopefully you guys will do a good job.' We told all the retailers and distributors and nobody batted an eye. It was just a comic book story. But when Advance Comics came out with the announcement and a real, official newspaper noticed it, that's when things got out of hand. It must have been a slow news day. Maybe if a war had broken out that day we wouldn't have had the success we had. It was just that the timing was right and we were lucky that people cared about it. Where it wasn't luck, and I think the talent of the writers and artists saved the day, was when people didn't say, 'Oh, this stinks.' They said, 'Oh, this is better than I thought it was going to be.' That's the only part that we had total control over, what was inside the books."

And yet commercial underpinnings seem apparent when one takes into consideration the fact that the death and life of Superman has given birth to a variety of spin-offs, including Superboy, Steel and Supergirl regular titles, a hardcover novelization of the entire storyline and a Warner Audio version entitled Superman Lives.

"Supergirl is a mini-series that was planned even before all of this," Carlin differs, "and we actually held off a little bit so that it would fit more logically with the outcome of the 'Reign of the Supermen.' The Superboy and Steel series will stand or fall on their own. A lot of people have asked, 'Is this going to dilute the Super-franchise?' I don't think that it will, because unlike the old days, this Superboy is different from Superman. All he's using is the logo. He's a totally different personality. Back then, Superboy was Superman and Supergirl was a girl Superman. Now she's different. Her powers are different, her personality is different. Steel, especially, will bring his own take on things and he never claimed to be a Superman in the first place. I think they all have something to say that is different than what Superman says, and they can be just as entertaining. The way I feel about the novel and audio version is that it's great that people who aren't comfortable with, or used to or able to, read a comic book are able to get the story we made up that day. Blind people can get the story, and that's a great thing. That doesn't happen to every comic book and I'm proud of that."

And with Superman's ressurection -- first from his death and, then, from his transformation in terms of costume and new powers -- seeming to have had a whole new audience discover, or rediscover, him, Carlin is confident that the character will stand for the same things he always has.

"The message is the same, and it's not wrong," he enthuses. "It's truth and justice. Maybe it's not the American way. We like to think of it as truth, justice and the good of all mankind. While there are Punisher-type characters who are considered heroes and Beavis and Butthead-type role models, I think there is still room for the Superman message. People who need it will hear it when they need to."