The more I worked with Dick Donner, the more he seemed like a fifty-year-old kid in a candy store. With his deep, booming voice and infectious laugh, you wanted to follow him anywhere. On the wall of his office was a plastic Superman in flight carrying a banner that read, “Verisimilitude.” He respected my desire to make the character as human and natural as possible.
Most of the time we had fun. Once I had to appear on Fifty-seventh Street in New York in my costume. We were filming a scene in which Superman catches a burglar climbing up a building with suction cups and brings him down to the street. The burglar and I both hung from wires below a construction crane about ten stories above the sidewalk. The live action would later be cut together with footage of the burglar attempting to break in a window, shot on a sound-stage at Pinewood Studios. As the crew prepared for the scene, I waited in a trailer on Fifty-eighth Street with a couple of enormous bodyguards. (I wondered who they worked for when they weren’t needed on a movie set. And I thought it was sort of funny that Superman would need bodyguards, but Donner was worried about my safety.) Finally they were ready to shoot, and I came out of my trailer with my two guardians. There was nobody there—absolutely no one in sight. I thought: We’re a flop. Nobody cares. We walked through a passageway to the front of the building on Fifty-seventh Street. As I came around the corner, I suddenly saw several thousand people jamming the sidewalks on both sides of the street. When the crowd spotted me in the Superman costume, a huge cheer went up. I was stunned, relieved, and suddenly quite nervous.
The wires were lowered from the construction crane. I shook hands with the burglar and was hooked up to the harness underneath my costume. Dormer called for a rehearsal. I double-checked that the hooks were closed and locked, then gave the thumbs-up to indicate that I was ready. As I was hoisted up, the crowd roared their approval. They didn’t care about the crane or the wires; they were willing to look past all of it. There was Superman, flying up the side of the building. That’s when I knew the movie would work.
The following week we shot a scene in which Superman rescues a little girl’s cat from a tree. The setting was a cul-de-sac in Brooklyn Heights with a spectacular view of the East River and the Manhattan skyline in the background. The action called for Superman to swoop down from the sky, gently pick the cat off a branch, and return it to the anxious little girl on the sidewalk below. We started rehearsing in midafternoon in order to be ready to shoot just after dark. The shot was fairly complicated: the crane had to swing in a carefully calculated arc so that I wouldn’t crash into the tree. At the same time I had to descend at the right speed in order to scoop up the cat. My flight path took me past the seventh-story windows of an apartment building. I was wearing street clothes and the flying harness with my hair done Superman style as I flew over and over again past the same windows. At around five o’clock a kid of about seven pulled up the window in his room and called out, “Hey, Superman, how ya doing?”
About an hour later we were still rehearsing, and now I was in full costume. As I flew past him again, he called out, “Hey, Superman, my mom says come on in, we’re having spaghetti!” I thanked him but said I still had work to do. At about eight I was still rehearsing the shot (one of our problems was that the cat was getting restless), when my young friend opened the window again and said, “Hey, Superman, take care, I gotta do my homework.” Finally, we started to film the scene. Take after take this kid would look up from his desk and wave as I floated by, trying to catch the elusive white cat. At eleven o’clock we were still shooting. (By this time the cat had been replaced by a dummy.) The window opened one last time. “So, Superman, I gotta go to bed. I’ll see ya!” I guess from his point of view it was just a normal day in Metropolis.
When the movie finally came out in December 1978, it was accepted by ordinary people, die-hard Superman fans, and critics alike. I think I was the right actor for the part at the time I played it, but I think the role is larger than any particular actor and should be reinterpreted from generation to generation. As Kirk Alyn was right for the ’40s and George Reeves was right for the ’50s, I was the temporary custodian of this icon of American pop culture in the ’70s and early ’80s. Now rumor has it that Nicolas Cage will be the Superman of the late ’90s.
I approached the role seriously. I’ve always felt that an actor should never judge a character but should commit fully to the process of bringing him to life. In this respect Superman and Henry James and Chekhov and a French farce are no different from the actor’s point of view. I always flatly refused any invitation to mock the Superman character or send him up.
Meeting the queen at the London premiere. Superman was welcome all over the world.
With the success of Superman came innumerable invitations for public service as the character. I wasn’t about to let Superman interfere with the progress of my career, but I was willing to make productive use of the Superman image in certain circumstances. Through the Make-a-Wish Foundation, I visited terminally ill children whose last request was to meet Superman. I joined the board of directors of Save the Children, a charity dedicated to helping needy children all over the world. In 1979 I served as a track and field coach at the Special Olympics in Brockport, New York. One of the other volunteers was a charismatic former football star named O. J. Simpson.
In 1985 I was asked to host Saturday Night Live. Although I had never poked fun at the character, I thought of a Superman sketch that seemed irresistible. I played Superman at an old-age home; Billy Crystal was an old-timer named Izzy. The two of us sat on the porch on a summer evening reminiscing about our youth. I wore a bathrobe with the Superman costume underneath. The leotard was wrinkled and baggy, but the famous red-and-yellow S was still featured prominently on my chest. Silver hair and bifocals completed the picture.
As I talked about the old days I said, “I used to be faster . . . faster than . . . uh . . .” Then Billy would finish the line. Then I’d go on, “And I could leap . . . um . . . tall . . . ,” and the sentence would trail off. Superman with Alzheimer’s may have been in poor taste, but the audience roared. At the end of the sketch the nurses and some other residents of the old-age home came out with a cake covered with candles and a big S in the middle. They sang “Happy Birthday, dear Superman,” kindly indulging an old man’s delusion. Then Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the head nurse gently suggested (with a wink to the others), “Now blow out your candles, Superman.” With a look of tremendous concentration, I drew in a breath and blasted the cake off the porch and across the studio. Blackout.
The sequels to the first two Superman movies were not up to the earlier ones. I think Superman II may be the best of the series, because it has some effective comedy (in one of my favorite scenes, Lois and Clark pose as newlyweds) but it also has Donner’s “verisimilitude” and respect for the mythology. Dick Donner didn’t receive the directing credit for Superman II, but he had set it in motion and shot much of the footage while we were filming Part I. In the scenes where the sets doubled, we went back and forth in our three-hundred-page script. But by the end of production in October 1978, Donner had had a serious falling out with Ilya Salkind and his partner, Pierre Spengler, and could not be persuaded to resume filming Part II in September 1979. Richard Lester, who had directed A Hard Day’s Night and Help! with the Beatles, as well as Petulia and The Three Musketeers, was brought in to complete the job. I liked him tremendously, but I thought it was unfair to ask such an accomplished director to imitate the tone and style of someone else’s work. Nevertheless, he succeeded in bringing his own brand of humor to it.
Superman III was to be Dick Lester’s own movie, but in my opinion he was hamstrung by a decision made by the producers. One night on the Johnny Carson show Richard Pryor raved about the Superman films and said how much he’d love to be in one. When they heard about it, Salkind and Spengler were excited by the idea that they might get Pryor to play some kind of comic villain in Superman III. They approached him and received an immediate yes. David and Lesl
ie Newman, the only writers left from the original group, were hired to write a movie that became more a Richard Pryor comedy vehicle than a proper Superman film.
In the first draft of Superman was a scene in which Superman sees a bald man walking down the street. Thinking it’s Lex Luthor he swoops down to collar him and take him away. But it’s Telly Savalas, who says, “Who loves ya, baby?” to the startled Superman and offers him a lollipop. This was the kind of inane material that Dick Donner got rid of immediately. Unfortunately, gags like this resurfaced in the script for Superman III. The Newmans wrote a scene in which Pryor, wearing skis and sporting a pink tablecloth as a Superman cape, zooms off a little ski slope on the top of a high-rise. He falls down the side of the building and lands—miraculously unhurt—in the middle of traffic on a busy street, then waddles toward the sidewalk, oblivious to all the honking horns and staring pedestrians.
I personally found all that in poor taste. I missed Donner tremendously, and what we’d created just two years earlier. I did enjoy the sequence in which Superman has become an evil version of himself and tries to kill Clark Kent in an automobile junkyard. That scene stands alone; I think the rest of Superman III was mostly a misconception.
The less said about Superman IV the better.
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After the success of Superman, one of my greatest problems as an actor was that my agents and many Hollywood producers wanted me to be an action hero, which didn’t interest me. I found most of the scripts of that genre poorly constructed, and I felt the starring roles could easily be played by anyone with a strong physique. My eyes glazed over with boredom when two producers and a studio executive once pitched the idea of my playing Eric the Red in an epic adventure about the Vikings. I could just imagine myself with an iron helmet and horns on my head. There were stories set in outer space, westerns, and futuristic fantasies, all of which struck me as formulaic. Sometimes I got the sinking feeling that I had inadvertently closed the door to my future as a legitimate actor. I made it clear to everyone who worked with me that I was still interested in the theater and that I wanted to play parts that were complex and challenging. I told them I would rather be in a good film that might not make a lot of money than a lousy film that grossed a hundred million. By the spring of ’79 there were more choices.
Over the next few years I discovered that Superman had actually opened many doors; the question was how to make the best use of these opportunities. While some producers would not cast me because I had played Superman, others cast me because I had. I was offered the lead in American Gigolo for Paramount; I passed on that because John Travolta had bailed out of the project and they wanted me to start in less than a week. An entire film unit was ready and waiting, but I wanted time to prepare. Then I was offered Roberta, the ex–football player who’d had a sex-change operation in The World According to Garp, for the esteemed director George Roy Hill. I passed on that too (an enormous stretch—for both me and the audience—after Superman), and the role made my friend John Lithgow a star. When I was offered the lead in Body Heat, I turned it down because I didn’t think I could be convincing as a seedy, small-town lawyer. My friend Bill Hurt, of course, was brilliant in the role.
In 1982 David Lean—the David Lean, director of Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and many other classics—invited me to join him and the great producer Sam Spiegel for a “chat” at their hotel one September afternoon. Without much preamble Lean announced that he was going to do a remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, with Anthony Hopkins as Captain Bligh. Would I like to play Fletcher Christian? Kate Hepburn had recommended me and persuaded him to see Superman. How this led to my being cast as the first mate aboard a British merchant ship in 1787 was beyond me. I decided that the always unpredictable Hepburn must have badgered Lean into submission on my behalf.
I agonized for more than a week about joining an all-British cast in a role that had already been played by Clark Gable and Marlon Brando, opposite the distinguished Anthony Hopkins, who I thought would probably blow me off the screen. Gae and I went to the Bahamas for a few days to try to relax, but even as I fished and scuba-dived and walked on the beach, I couldn’t reach a decision.
No sooner had I arrived back in New York than I received a call from Anthony Hopkins (whom I’d never met) urging me to stop procrastinating and accept the role. I was extremely flattered, but I finally decided I would be miscast. I thought Charles Dance or Jeremy Irons would be much better. Ultimately David Lean had a falling out with the studio and did not direct the picture. Fletcher Christian was played by a young Australian named Mel Gibson.
My first role after Superman turned out to be a delicate romantic fantasy for Universal called Somewhere in Time, based on the novel Bid Time Return by Richard Matheson. It is the story of a young playwright who falls in love with a portrait of an actress (loosely based on Maude Adams) and manages to travel back in time to meet her at the height of her fame and beauty in 1912. Jane Seymour was cast as the actress Elise McKenna, and I was Richard Collier, the lovestruck young writer. Our producer, Stephen Deutsch, and our director, Jeannot Szwarc, found a perfect location: Mackinac Island on Lake Michigan. Just to visit the visit the island is to journey into the past. The most prominent landmark is the Grand Hotel, built by railroad money in the mid–nineteenth century. It still looks brand new. No cars are allowed on the island, although we received special permission to bring our equipment trucks over on a barge. When you finish dinner at one of the restaurants, you call for a cab, and soon a horse and buggy arrive to take you to your lodgings. Over the years I’ve met hundreds of people who have the same feelings about Mackinac that I had: it is an enchanted island where time has stood still.
Richard and Elise finally meet each other in Somewhere in Time.
We began filming in late May 1979, and the location quickly cast a spell on our entire company. The real world fell away as the story and the setting took hold of us. I’ve rarely worked on a production that was so relaxed and harmonious. Even the hard-boiled Teamsters and grips from Chicago succumbed to the charms of the island and the mellow atmosphere on the set.
When the film was completed and test screenings were held a year later, audiences loved it. The finished product looked beautiful and was greatly enhanced by John Barry’s score. In addition to using a recurring piece by Rachmaninoff, he had composed a main theme that captured the essence of the story perfectly. Early reviews were extremely favorable, especially one in Daily Variety that praised everyone involved. But when the film opened in October, it bombed. Later I often joked that it left a crater on the street. Vincent Canby in The New York Times wrote, “This film does for screen romance what the Hindenburg did for dirigibles” and “Christopher Reeve looks like a helium-filled canary. One more role like this and it’s back to the cape forever.” Audiences stayed away in droves, and the film disappeared within a few weeks.
Needless to say, this was a huge blow. I had never failed so visibly before. Of course, I blamed myself entirely. In retrospect, I think that because I had worked on Superman for so long, my characterization of Clark Kent may have crept into Richard Collier. We had such a wonderful time filming Somewhere in Time, but maybe we lost our objectivity. In any case, we were devastated by the public’s rejection of our work. Cast and crew alike moved quickly into other projects.
Over the years, however, a miraculous transformation took place. Cable television spread across the country, and people began to discover our little movie. Charles Champlin, a critic for the Los Angeles Times, hosted a film series on a local station, and soon people began talking about Somewhere in Time. We became the most popular and requested offering on Z Channel and soon developed a cult following. More than ten years after the film’s release, a die-hard fan, Bill Shepherd of Covina, California, founded INSITE—the International Network of Somewhere In Time Enthusiasts. Today it has thousands of members. Bill publishes a newsletter four times a year, and every Octobe
r the Grand Hotel hosts nearly 700 members who come for a special Somewhere in Time weekend. Dana and I attended the gathering in the fall of 1994 and enjoyed an overwhelming reception. Thanks to persistent pressure from INSITE members, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce gave me a star on the Walk of Fame, seventeen years after the film’s debut.
When the filming of Somewhere in Time was completed in August 1979, I bid a fond farewell to the magic island and immediately returned to London to begin filming Superman II. Gae and I bought a house that dated back to 1850 on Redcliffe Road in Chelsea. I resumed my routine of hanging on wires in front of a blue screen at Pinewood Studios during the day, followed by two hours of weight training every evening, while Gae continued to work with Laraine Ashton’s modeling agency. We enjoyed a very active social life. Because Superman had been such a success, we were never short of invitations to parties, benefits, opening nights, and charity events all over town. Richard Lester was always cheerful and full of good suggestions, which made going to work enjoyable. He worked at a faster pace than most directors, often using two and three cameras at once to film a scene, so time passed quickly. But the real highlight of 1979—in fact, the highlight of my entire life up to that point—was the birth of my son Matthew on December 20.
He was born at the Welbeck Street Clinic in Mayfair. Gae had checked in the previous night, and I had stayed with her, expecting Matthew’s imminent arrival. But by ten o’clock the next morning, the doctors thought it might be false labor and even considered sending us home. Laraine Ashton and her father invited me to lunch. We agreed that I would check back at the clinic in the early afternoon.
We had just started the main course when the headwaiter raced to our table with the message that the baby would be born any moment. I ran out of the restaurant, and miraculously there was a cab waiting right outside the door. (Usually it’s so difficult to find a cab in London when you need one that you call to book in advance. Finding one right in front of a restaurant seemed like a sign from the gods.) I told the driver that I would pay him double the meter if he would take me to Welbeck Street as quickly as possible without getting us killed. He was more than happy to oblige, but I’ll always remember his calming remark, “Relax, Guv. When my first was born I was at the track. Much nicer place to be.” He continued to chat pleasantly about fathers and sons while driving at breakneck speed toward Mayfair, sometimes literally driving on the sidewalk.
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