Father-son producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind trailblazed the superhero blockbuster with “Superman: The Movie” in 1978. Sadly, they also pointed the way on how to most efficiently destroy what should have been a bulletproof franchise.
Greed, unscrupulous business practices, petty grievances, misplaced loyalties, and floundering morale did to Superman what Kryptonite could not. Practically everything that made the first movie great – the respectful tone, the epic scope, the loving craftsmanship, the closely-bonded cast and crew – was undermined in the making of “Superman II.”
Of course, the Salkinds had already shown their true stripes a few years earlier, with “Three Musketeers” movies. That’s when they figured out that if they could lead everyone to believe they were shooting one long movie, they could then chop it in half and not pay anyone for the sequel.
While they couldn’t exactly get away with that again with “Superman,” they did retain the business model of shooting two films at once. It hadn’t been the plan going in, but Mario Puzo’s crushingly epic screenplay led them to figure it out fairly quickly. Here, the intent was to pay everyone, but also to ruthlessly keep costs down, especially with Marlon Brando threatening to break the budget.
Brando was in process of suing the Salkinds for his cut of 11 percent of the profits of the original film, on top of his nearly $4 million paycheck. This would become a common motif, as everyone started suing everyone.
Counterintuitively, one would think, the Salkinds hired Richard Lester, director of “The Three Musketeers,” who still hadn’t been paid, to assist in the production of their second Superman movie. But what they really had in mind is something much more sinister.
The whole thing is really a crazy story, and very involved, and Roy and I will get as much into it as we possibly can tomorrow night, when we discuss “Superman II” (1980). Only, at Roy’s suggestion, we’ll give it a further twist by doing so by way of THE DONNER CUT.
More than anyone else, director Richard Donner had guided “Superman” to success. When he was summarily dismissed – and replaced by Lester – he had already shot 70 percent of the sequel. This would prove to be a heartbreaker for both director and Superman fans, as the series went downhill on banana peel faster than a speeding bullet.
Over the years, numerous petitions were submitted to Warner Brothers for a second cut of the movie. Finally, in 2006, Donner was given the opportunity to go back and recut the film to the best of his ability, drawing on all the available footage, and bring it as close as possible to his original vision.
The result is kind of rough, to be honest – what they really needed was for Superman to turn back time so that they could shoot additional material – but Donner did the best that he could with what he had, unavoidably using some of Lester’s material (but also deleting much of it), putting Brando back in the film, and even, for one scene, employing some screen test footage.
Basically, it’s a curio for the hardcore fans, but there are those who swear by it. For the rest of us, we still sigh for what might been.
I hope you’ll join us as we derive our powers from the yellow sun of Earth, on the next Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner. We’ll send Richard Lester and the Salkinds to the Phantom Zone. Kneel before Zod in the comments section, as we livestream on Facebook, this Friday evening at 7:00 EST!
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PHOTO: This cellophane “S” is NOT in the Donner cut.
