So this is not a review of Batman V Superman. For one thing, TCM doesn’t take kindly to us Morlocks spending too much time on contemporary movies when there’s so much classic cinema yet to explore. But more importantly: why? I mean, it’s a practically Nietzschean film—beyond being good or bad. It just is. Despite near universal critical disapproval, it is a biggest box office juggernaut for the record books. So what difference would it make one way or another what I thought?
And I’m not even sure I have a coherent opinion. It’s such a mess of competing and contradictory impulses and ideas, some of which are excellent, some of which are abhorrent, and a lot of which are intriguingly off-kilter ideas that cannot help but feel wrong no matter how they were done. But in the end, I have to say I’ve spent the last several weeks obsessively turning the thing over in my head, trying to make sense of my reactions, to claw my way to a coherent opinion. I haven’t spent so much time wrestling with a movie since Primer, and before that, since The Testament of Dr. Mabuse or Playtime. And those are some of my favorite movies of all time. So while I hated a lot of this, I have to admit it provoked a deeply engaged reaction from me. I can’t easily dismiss that.
But as I said, this isn’t about Batman V Superman. Instead, I plan to hash out some of my thoughts by revisiting where this all started—the 1978 Superman The Movie, which I hope we can all agree was pretty wonderful. But if it weren’t for the one, we wouldn’t have the other.
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I remember being in that theater in 1978 when the house lights dimmed and the opening overture started to play. I was eight. Some movies had that—a musical overture, like you’d have at an opera, to get people in the mood and make sure they were seated and quiet before the thing started. Also, back in those days, they sometimes showed short films before the feature—and even though Superman was a butt-numbing 143 minutes, they still had time to screen a short called Popcorn. I only vaguely recall seeing the short—enough to remember it existed and that it was called Popcorn, but I’m hoping some of y’all have sharper memories than me to fill in the missing details.
This was a big deal—there were no superhero films before this. That’s hard to imagine, with today’s glut of superhero films. Even Steven Spielberg (who’d been considered to direct Superman back in the 1970s, for the record) has recently opined that we’re watching the superhero genre peak and sputter out, the way Westerns did. He may be right—but in 1978 this was groundbreaking stuff.
There’d been superhero media before–and I’m sure the partisans of things like the Columbia Batman serials or Superman and the Mole Men will make their voices heard in the comments, but the idea of a comic book adaptation as big budget A-list marquee fare was novel. For the most part, comic book characters seemed better suited to TV in those days. For the benefit of the younger readers who didn’t live through this reversal, there was once a time when TV was where you put all the poorly-thought-out repetitive franchise stuff, and movies where were serious writers and actors did serious drama—as opposed to today, where that’s the exact opposite. But then TVs were small and the picture was poor, and they were there to keep people entertained while they did household chores as opposed to being appointment events that demanded attention—it simply made better sense to use the TV platform to tell endless iterations of the same story. For any given show (let’s use Superman as the example) you wanted a clearly defined premise that could be easily conveyed in the opening titles (“Look! Up in the sky!”) and then spend the next half hour or hour riffing. Each episode was a perfect representative of the series—watch one and you’ve basically seen them all—a fractal narrative.
And comic books suited this aesthetic perfectly. Superman had been appearing in multiple weekly installments since the 1930s—a huge part of his appeal was the endless cornucopia of Superman stories he promised.
But a movie? That’s a one-time thing—a standalone experience, meant to encapsulate the entirety of the idea. There could be sequels, sure, but no one thought in terms of franchises then. It was madness to take Superman out of his weekly adventures and try to make a single, definitive Superman adventure.
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The first to try was Mario The Godfather Puzzo, who tackled the enormous mythos of Superman and turned it into something like 500 pages of screenplay. That’s like 3 times too much writing, and after a few stabs at rewriting he gave up trying to cut it down. So the thing passed to Robert Benton and David Newman, a pair of writers who back in 1966 had created the lunatic Superman musical–having conclusively demonstrated that they knew Superman, were willing to take crazy chances, and had terrible ideas. They inserted a camp sensibility into Puzo’s serious story… for some reason.
What they didn’t do was make it any shorter. At which point producers Ilya and Alexander Salkind decided to lean into the length. Why fight it? Years earlier they’d made The Three Musketeers only to find there was too much footage. Rather than just cut it and waste the money, they decided to keep it all and just cut it into two movies. Applying that ethic to Superman, they decided to go ahead and film the whole script and release it as Superman I and II.
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I hesitate to write “two movies for the price of one,” because this was decidedly not the price of one movie. Superman eventually ended up costing $55 million—an insane amount of movie in 1978. In those days, if you wanted to spend a ton of money on your blockbuster to show the world what an A-list important thing it was, you’d write a check for somewhere around $20-30 million. This was double that, and not all of that money was well spent at all.
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For one thing, the Salkinds spent a lot of it on some high-priced and temperamental movie stars (namely Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman, neither of whom made life easier for the production team). Then there was all the money wasted on the revolving door of creative teams—each new director discarded the work of his predecessor and started anew. Eventually Richard Lester took over Superman II from Superman director Richard Donner, reshooting nearly all of his footage and thereby undermining the whole idea of shooting two movies at once. And of course there were the many millions spent on R&D to get convincing special effects to make Superman fly.
This detail is easy to overlook, in our era of CGI, but in 1978 it wasn’t clear how you would approach this problem. Audiences started from the assumption that the special effects would be crap—to the extent that the film’s primary marketing campaign (aside from “come see all the big name movie stars”) was to announce “You’ll believe a man can fly.”
Which was a tall order. In the end, the effects technique was the same blue screen/green screen technique used by Star Wars to make spaceships zoom over alien worlds, but there’s a key difference: we know what people look like, and we know what cities look like, so even though we’ve never seen a flying man before we have a basic idea of what that should look like.
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Superman came out in the wake of Star Wars and Jaws, but it had been in production so long that both of those films arrived while it was already underway in some form. There was no opportunity to shape the production to learn from the experiences of those nascent blockbusters. Either Superman would join their ranks on its own merits, or not. There was no way to hedge the bet.
Which meant that when this very long gamble paid off so handsomely, justifying all the risky decisions the Salkinds made along the way, that success enshrined those decisions as a form of modern cinematic gospel. There would be more Superman films, and more superhero films, and eventually a superhero genre so busy that people can speculate on when it will have run its course… and all of that would owe so much to Superman that nobody would easily dare second guess any of the Salkinds’ choices. Whether they meant to or not, they established a formula:
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1. The Origin Story
It’s easy to see why Superman opted for an origin story—the idea of making a big-budget Superman movie instead of a weekly TV series was to commit to making the definitive Superman story. How else to do that but to tell the one story that underlies all the others—the one that every other Superman story needed to establish in the opening titles or on page 1?
But, this became something of an albatross to the genre when applied to other superheroes. Not every superhero has a great mythic origin story—a lot of them are just silly or stupid or derivative or boring. But with few exceptions, all superhero franchises pay tribute to this forebear by starting with the very beginning, whether it makes any sense as entertainment or not.
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(By the way, this is apropos of nothing but I thought I’d fit it in anyway–I recall in the lead-up to Superman there was a contest advertised in the comic books I read that you could enter a sweepstakes and compete to win a walk-on role in the film. I dutifully sent in my form, but naturally I didn’t win. When the movie came out, I watched rapt looking for the winner to show up–and when baby Superman steps out of the crashed Kryptonian ship in the Kansas corn field, a naked little boy, I was certain that had to be the winner, and that some poor schmuck had won a contest and been forced to appear naked in the movie. I wasn’t disabused of this idiotic idea until many years later–the actual winners were two teenagers who show up as football players at Clark Kent’s high school. This brings me to the question of casting–)
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2. Stunt Casting (Heroes and Villains)
The Salkinds signed Gene Hackman and Marlon Brando before they even had a finished script, and well before anyone even knew what roles these guys would play. But they were two of the biggest box office draws of the 1970s, so having them in the movie created buzz and established legitimacy. This was the first attempt to make a major event film out of comic books, and the prejudices against the project were a problem—having serious actors was a way of advertising that the project wasn’t just a cheap cash-in.
For a while, it was assumed that the producers would also cast a major star as the title character—like Burt Reynolds, Robert Redford, James Caan, maybe Sly Stallone. Someone like that.
Meanwhile, they hired an unknown stage actor named Christopher Reeve to do line readings for the Lois Lane auditions. And as Reeve read Superman’s lines, over and over, opposite an endless parade of Lois Lane wanna-bes, Richard Donner’s wife nudged her husband and said, “hire that guy.”
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And thus was born the practice, adhered to ever since, of casting major established stars as the villains and supporting players, while casting the lead often with newcomers or young actors just getting an early break.
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3. Stunt Casting (Cameos)
Stars of the 1940s Superman serials Kirk Alyn and Noel Neill show up briefly as the parents of Lois Lane.
This became a time-honored tradition, too, of bringing in the stars of prior versions to appear in hey-didja-see-that cameos. For example, when Lou Ferrigno (TV’s The Incredible Hulk) appears as a pizza-eating security guard in The Incredible Hulk with Edward Norton, or when Bob Kane (one of the creators of Batman) appears as a newspaper cartoonist in Tim Burton’s Batman.
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4. Long
143 minutes is a long movie by anyone’s standards, but when the Salkinds sold it to TV in 1981 they recut it to 188 minutes (because they were paid by the minute). The current version on home video clocks in at 151 minutes.
So, not only was it long and epic to start with, but for secondary markets it got even longer—a trick that apparently Zack Snyder is expecting to pull when he adds in the extra footage to turn Batman V Superman into its R rated director’s cut later this year. Oh, sorry, I wasn’t going to talk anymore about that.