I told Dick later, “If I was the producer, this thing would cost eighty million dollars and I'd let you get away with everything.” The final budget for the two pictures—and this is really expensive in the late seventies—was between $30 million and $40 million. But the costs are so different now. For instance, to open with a big picture costs $40 million or $50 million. You keep seeing the trailers on television and the ads in the newspapers, not only in the New York Times and the L.A. Times, but in the Cedar Rapids Gazette as well, and the one-sheets in every theater. The costs have just spiraled like crazy.
Superman and Superman II were shot at the same time. So if we were shooting in Lois's apartment, scenes from both pictures would be shot. Warners was very explicit: make sure the actors know it's two pictures. This wasn't going to be one extremely long Superman where the Salkinds were going to pay everybody once like they tried to pull off on Three Musketeers and Four Musketeers. Warners was looking at the rushes and got increasingly interested. They said, “Wait a minute, instead of a negative pickup, we'd like to have a piece of this.” So they kept putting in more and more money. It was becoming a Warner Brothers picture, even though the Salkinds had control like Cubby with the Bonds. But the Salkinds needed their money. Before the first picture came out, they held Warners for some ransom. We were going to open at Christmastime. In November, they refused to release the negative for prints unless Warners bought four territories, including South Africa and Germany, from them. It was clear the Salkinds owed a lot of people a lot of money.
It came time for the score, and John Williams. One of the nicest men in the world, a friend of my close friend Leslie Bricusse's. He came over to London and saw the rough cut of Superman, which was almost three hours. We were sitting in the screening room afterward and John asked, “Okay, so, what do you hear when you hear the theme from Superman?”
Dick said, “I don't know, that's why you're here.”
I said, “I'll tell you what I hear. We're opening around Christmas, and about a month later is the Super Bowl. It's halftime at the Super Bowl, the band comes out of the tunnel, they're playing the theme from Superman.”
Then John said, “I got you.” He wrote such a beautiful score; a beautiful love theme. When we first heard the score, it just sent us through the roof. He helped that movie a great deal. Such a joy to be able to work with talents like that.
We opened in Washington, D.C., for the Congress when Jimmy Carter was president. Lois says to Superman in the scene where he visits her on her terrace, “Why are you here?” And—I had to put it in—he says, “For truth, justice, and the American way.” It went down big with Congress. They loved it. Then we had New York and California openings. It went very well. Old man Salkind was not allowed in the country for those openings because there was a warrant out for his arrest for fraud.
The Salkinds fired Dick as soon as the picture opened. There was about 30 percent left to shoot for Superman II. I've always said if Superman had been a flop, the Salkinds would have made Donner finish Superman II as a punishment. But the picture was a big hit, and the Salkinds figured anybody can finish Superman II now. They had 70 percent of the movie already in the can. Hackman was wrapped. Ned Beatty was wrapped. Valerie Perrine was wrapped. They'd all done their work. Dick Lester, who'd done the Three and Four Musketeers for the Salkinds, had a big piece of the profit of those films and never got any money from the Salkinds, so he sued them. He won in court, but he won against a Lichtenstein company that was part of a holding corporation that was broke, and he couldn't get any money. He was pursuing it, and the Salkinds said to him, “If you'll finish Superman II, we'll give you the money we owe you.” So Lester finished it. Again, terrible casting for it because Lester's a cynic. He was not like Dick Donner.
Lester called Dick and said, “We should split credit on the second movie.”
Dick said, “I don't split credit, so you take the credit.”
The cast was devastated. Terry Semel, who ran Warners distribution then, met with me and said, “Dick Lester would like you to go on and finish Superman II with him.”
And I said, “Terry, I can't do that. Dick is my friend and he brought me on, and I'm completely loyal to him.”
Terry said, “I understand. Could you go to London and accidentally run into Lester and talk to him about it?”
I said, “No, I couldn't do that either.” So they got David and Leslie Newman to come back. Benton was not interested.
I got a phone call from David Newman saying, “My God, we saw the picture yesterday. You made a silk purse out of a sow's ear. My God, you did a great job. Thank you so much. I'm so proud to have my name on it.”
I said, “Thank you, David. Really appreciate the phone call, because you guys are terrific.” Benton was my friend, actually.
Then that Sunday in the New York Times there were interviews with lots of people, including David Newman, who said, “Well, basically it's just our script. They just cut it.” And they went on and wrote the screenplay for a little classic called Sheena, Queen of the Jungle with Tanya Roberts, and I thought, okay, serves you right!
The Directors Guild said that Lester couldn't get sole credit on the picture unless he shot 40 percent. So they started writing scenes that were not necessary and arbitrarily changing scenes that had been shot. Superman II came out and it was fine. There were some phony reviews because Dick Lester was very much the critics' darling. David Denby, who was a critic for New York magazine at the time, wrote, “You can tell the difference between Richard Lester and Richard Donner because in Superman II, Gene Hackman has a fine edge, and he's funny.” I wrote a letter to New York magazine saying, “Just for the record, Gene Hackman did 100 percent of his work with Dick Donner, and it was all written by me.” Never printed the letter.
Superman III, which had Richard Pryor in it, was made. Terry Semel came down to my studio bungalow one day. I always knew when they wanted a big favor. If the mountain was coming to Mohammed…He asked, “What's wrong with Superman III?”
I said, “Terry, there's nothing really wrong with it, but it's a Richard Pryor movie. It's not a Superman movie, and that's not Richard Pryor's fault.”
Semel said, “What would it take to get you and Donner back to do the next one? Price is no object.” By this time, Warners had invested in Superman heavily and could call the shots. Ilya was still listed as producer, though.
I said, “Let me talk to Dick.”
We went out and had dinner, and we decided we didn't want to do it anymore. We did the first two. We'd gone to Krypton, Smallville. Kryptonite had destroyed his power. He'd become a human being in Superman II and gotten beaten up, then regained it. We thought, there's nothing else to do. At the time, Chris Reeve was dead set on Superman IV: The (Quest for Peace. He gave the script to me and said, “I need your help.” In this one, Superman goes to the United Nations.
I said, “Chris, here are the rules. You can't deal with anything that Superman could take care of. Superman could disarm this whole planet in half an hour. You can't have a tsunami in Superman, because with his super breath, he'd blow back the waves. You can't allow tens of thousands of people to be killed. You can't show anybody starving to death in a Superman movie because he could grow crops that would feed the entire planet. You don't get into that because somebody's going to say, ‘Well, why doesn't he just fuckin' do it?'” Whereas with Batman, which I wrote the first draft of, I said, “Batman, completely different, because he's a human being and he dresses up at night. Batman can do all kinds of things. But Bruce Wayne as Batman is powerless to do anything about nuclear weapons or hunger or the tsunami. But Superman has got super powers, so stay out of that. You can't come to the UN. If I were an ambassador to the UN, I would say, ‘Well, why don't you do it, flyboy?'”
The Donner Cut
The reason for Superman II: The Donner Cut, which was released on DVD, was there was an arc—I hate to use a pretentious word like that—that ran through the two pictures, which was in
the relationship with his father. In the beginning, the father sends him to Earth; it's God sending Christ, Allah sending Mohammed. When Lois is trapped in the earthquake in the first one, she's being crushed to death, and Superman's got to do something about it. Brando appears in the sky and says, “It is forbidden for you to interfere with human history.” Superman screams, flies up in the air, and turns the world backward to before there was an earthquake, and Lois is alive. He's disobeying his father. Jor-El would always visit his son in the Fortress of Solitude, the vision of Brando. When Superman decides to become a human being for the love of Lois in the second film and he gets beat up for the first time and realizes what a mistake he's made, that he's betrayed his father, he comes back to the fortress and says, “Father, forgive me.” This is not in the Superman II that was released. This is a scene that's only in the Donner Cut. When Superman sleeps with Lois in the Fortress of Solitude, Brando appears. Chris says, “Father, I have sinned. I have disobeyed you.” Margot is watching, they've slept together, and she's wearing the Superman tunic like a little nightgown. She's scared, peeking around the corner, and Brando's eyes flash at her like, you bitch. It's really dramatic. As Jor-El commits suicide to give his son new life as Superman, he says, “You'll never see me again.” He reaches out and touches his son like God touching the hand of Adam in the Sistine Chapel. And Superman becomes Superman again.
The Salkinds knew they had a big hit with Superman II coming up, and that Brando got a piece of the gross; a fairly small piece of the gross, but it was going to add up to a lot of money—but not if he didn't appear in Superman II. So what did the Salkinds do? They sideswiped it using Susannah York, a perfectly good actress, to do all the scenes, and Brando was completely cut out of the second movie. We just couldn't believe it. The Salkinds started this fiction, which was, “It was too expensive to get him back,” which they kept up until the release of Superman II. There was no question of getting him back: he'd shot all the scenes; they were already in the can. He'd looped, he'd done everything when he was first there. So you give Marlon 5 percent of the gross. It was Marlon Brando. The Salkinds really fucked with what the pictures were about. I don't want to say this is some great, classic novel that can't be fooled with, but that was the intent of the films. We were really angry at them for cutting him out arbitrarily even though they were going to make a lot of money. They were in the chips. The reason for the Donner Cut was to put Brando back into the movie. That was the way it was intended to be. Those scenes were so effective.
In fact, we put all of Dick's footage back in. Some sequences had been cut to give Lester more footage so he could be eligible to be called “director.” There's a sequence at the beginning of Superman II that was never in the movie release, but it's in the Donner Cut. Lois is alone with Clark in Perry White's office. Superman's photograph is on the front of the Daily Planet. She's looking at Clark and she starts to put glasses and a hat on Superman. It's Clark. They're supposed to go to Niagara Falls for a story on honeymooners. Lois says, “Well, it wouldn't be a problem, would it, Clark? We could just zoom right up and just fly right back.” And Clark says, “Oh, Lois, are you getting on to that stupid thing about me being Superman again?” She goes to the window and she opens it. He says, “Lois, we're thirty-five floors up.” She says, “Don't worry, Superman, you won't let me die,” and she jumps out the window. She flies through the air, and Clark, with his x-ray vision, pops open an awning. Lois hits the awning, bounces up, and lands in the garbage truck. She looks up at Clark Kent leaning out the window saying, “Lois, are you crazy?” And she faints. It was a great way to open Superman II.
The actual test scene for Chris and Margot is in the Donner Cut. They're getting ready to go to dinner. Clark's standing behind Lois, and she says, “You are Superman, aren't you?” He says, “Oh, Lois.” She turns around and she's got a gun. He says, “Lois?” She goes, bam; she fires it at him and nothing happens. Clark sets his jaw and says, “If you'd been wrong, Clark Kent would have been killed.” And she says, “How? With a blank?” It was not live ammunition. He looks at her and she says, “Gotcha!” It was a cute scene, and they were so great together.
When Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut premiered at the Directors Guild, Brandon Routh, the new Superman, was there with Superman Returns director Bryan Singer. Margot came down from Montana, and we went together to the screening with Dick and Lauren Shuler Donner. Onstage, we had a symposium with Jack O'Halloran, Sarah Douglas, Margot and Dick, the remaining people. Ilya Salkind was there. I couldn't believe it. He said to me afterward, “Yeah, it works. It works that way, too.”
Everybody worked so hard on those movies, and it really was the arc with Brando all the way through that made the father/son thing, Jor-El and Kal-El. When Brando was putting the baby in the capsule, and he kept saying, “I send this with you and I send this,” Susannah York, a perfectly nice person, said, “What does the mother send? The mother sends dick. I'm just standing there.”
I said to her, “When you get three million dollars for fifteen days' work, you can send everything.” And there was the Salkinds' Superman II without fucking Jor-El in it. They just didn't want to pay the money. There would never have been a Donner Cut if Brando had been in II. It was Warners' mistake in the first place to go with the Salkinds. The Salkinds wanted to do it, and they were right about that, but Warners should have said, “Look, we own it”—because they owned DC Comics. “It'll be a Warners picture instead of a negative pickup.” As Warners became more invested, it gave them an excuse to reissue all four Superman films plus the Donner Cut on DVD.
The L.A. Times loved the Donner Cut, but they said the gem is the commentary by Donner and Mankiewicz to Superman. They had us do the commentary at Dick's house as they ran the movie on his TV. It was very irreverent. “That's the Daily Planet newsroom. See the girl in the second desk? God, she balled everybody, didn't she? Even Hackman, I think, got her.” We cut a lot of that out. “Valerie was so drunk in Calgary. She memorably said once, ‘I'm going to go out and get me a cowboy,' because it was during the Calgary Stampede.”
Superman Forever
In the early nineties, Dick was honored by the Directors' View Film Festival, which had the Joseph L. Mankiewicz Award for Excellence. Robert Benton had won it, Merchant and Ivory had won it, and it was a very eastern award, but they decided to give it to Dick for his lifetime achievement. I did a ten-minute film of Donner, clips from his movies, that is just a corker; it's the best reel you've ever seen, with music scores from his films. We flew with Jerry Moss on his Gulfstream, landing in White Plains, and went to Stamford, Connecticut, where the big celebration was. Chris attended with his wife, Dana. He was in his wheelchair, which really wasn't a wheelchair. Margot flew in. I hadn't seen Chris in years. Even Danny Glover flew in. Mel Gibson sent something from Australia. Lots of people were coming up; Lauren Bacall and people from New York.
Chris and Margot started nattering at each other just like it was back on the set. He was funnier and smarter than when they worked together. It is just a terrible thing to say, but I think that his accident made him so introspective. It sharpened everything in him. He was a better person because, instead of just being that good-looking guy who was going from picture to picture, he had really faced something incredibly dramatic in life. I was sitting across from Chris—the air was being pumped into his lungs all the time—and he said, “Hey, Mank. Look at this.” On the table, he moved his finger; one finger. It was like a miracle, and he'd been working hard so he could move a finger. He had an incredible attitude. What happened to him was a freak accident. How many people fall off horses every day and that never happens to them?
I was so moved by all of us getting back together again with everything that had happened to all of us. Margot had had some terrible episodes because she was bipolar and nobody knew it. Chris had had, obviously, a terrible thing happen to him. Dick had been through six more hit movies, but this still was the thing that kept a place in his heart. It
was like a class reunion. Chris died the next year, and then, inexplicably, his wife, Dana, died a few years after at forty, lung cancer and had never smoked. I don't know where that came from. She was just wonderful. But he was a terrific guy. I'd never seen that in my life, but I thought he was so much a better person. That night, Chris's eyes danced in a different way, like he had been through hell, but he was dealing with it and was convinced he was going to get out of it.
We were just starting to shoot Superman, and Chris was so worried that he was going to be typecast the rest of his life. He kept saying to me, “I've got to talk to Sean Connery. You know Sean Connery, and he's not typecast as Bond.” But he was typecast as Bond. I ran into Sean somewhere. “By the way, the kid playing Superman, he wants to talk to you about being type—”
Sean said, “Oh, fuck, I don't want to talk to him about that.”
About three weeks later, we were at this big party and Sean was there. So I went over to him. “Listen, the guy's over there. You've got to talk to him.”
He said, “Oh! Okay.” So he went over and said to Chris, “Well, first of all, if boyo is right in that you're probably in trouble and it's not going to be a hit, don't worry about it. You're going to be able to start fresh. If it is a hit and you are Superman, the next two things you do: number one, find a movie that is completely opposite and do it right away”—which Chris did, a picture called Somewhere in Time, which was a love story—”and the second thing, because we're talking about if it's a hit, get yourself the best lawyer in the world and stick it to ‘em.” That was his advice.
The thing that made Chris work so wonderfully as Superman was his natural shyness, which meant that he could play Clark Kent almost better than Superman. I said to him, “It's really simple when you think about it. Just make it a mantra. You are Superman. You are playing Clark Kent, but you are Superman. I'm writing it that way, that everything Clark does is Superman playing that.” I said to Dick once, and I don't mean this derogatorily to Chris, “You know, you take the S off his chest, his balls fall off.” Meaning he's a supporting actor. He's not a leading man cut of the jib of real leading men. That's what made him so great as Superman. Here was this shy, disarming guy who was good looking, but he was a supporting actor playing a leading man. I'm sure people think of Chris as a leading man. I don't in that way.
My Life as a Mankiewicz Page 29