God alone knows why, because even in that black-is-beautiful era, the idea of a black Superman was, on the face of it, crazy. Fans of the comics would have been outraged, and there was no evidence that Ali, fine showman though he was, could act his way out of a paper bag.*
If this kind of discussion sounds lunatic, it isn’t; indeed, it’s par for the course. The front runner for the part at that time was, believe it or not, a New York dentist who was said to be physically perfect, but I never saw him. Paul Newman was mentioned, and I think Redford also, but it was agreed that the hunt would be a long one. They eventually landed right on their feet with Reeve, who could not have been bettered.
I don’t know how many times I was in Paris for conferences with the Salkinds, but it was at one of them that Brando came into the picture, at a reported $3 million, which was thought excessive at the time, although when I think of the $10 million contracted for but never paid to Steve McQueen for Taipan a couple of years later, it seems quite modest. Since then, of course, fees for the top names have become astronomical, if you believe the figures, which frankly I don’t, knowing the press agents’ talent for hyperbole. But if some of them are true, I doubt if they turn out to be justified at the box office.
Anyway, Brando was coming aboard, and his part, that of Superman’s father, was going to have to be expanded, said Alex, looking at me meaningly. How could we make the most of his remarkable talent? As it stood, Superman senior, Jor-El, wasn’t much of a part; he was out of the movie for long stretches, and what he had to do was nothing out of the ordinary, looking solemn in a toga, mostly. No one wanted to alter the structure of the pictures just to accommodate Brando, so it was a question of improving the scenes Jor-El had already, and beefing up his dialogue accordingly.
Could Brando, Alex wondered, play Jor-El in different guises? I said Brando was good at accents … and the next thing I remember Alex saying (this is God’s truth) was: “You know, maybe we could see him coming in from golf.” Golf? On the planet Krypton? How the talk went after that I don’t recall, but I came away from that meeting with a vision of Brando in a kilt with a set of clubs slung over his shoulder. Quite seriously, I know that various possible changes of costume for Jor-El were mentioned – Roman tunic, Louis Quattorze, armour, just about every dam’ thing except paint and feathers. But that is how such conferences sometimes go, to the lunatic fringe and back.
In any event, I expanded Jor-El’s part – and when I saw the movie his role was, indeed, larger than it had been, but did not include a philosophic moment in which I had him quoting from Wordsworth’s “Daffodils”, I can’t think why. I can’t lay claim to any of his other dialogue because what I wrote has simply faded from my mind – it wasn’t memorable, that’s for sure, but neither were the words which came out of Brando on screen, so it may have been my stuff, for all I know. Or the tea-lady’s.
A curious and rather worrying thing resulted from one of our talks. Alex wondered how the trial of the super-villains would be shown on screen. Possibly with a sub-conscious memory of A Matter of Life and Death, I said it would have to take place in a huge stadium in outer space – bags of milky way and wide blue yonder, with this tribunal blending into the vastness of the firmament, blah-blah. Alex asked what it would look like, and I had a vision of a pale blue bowl in the great up-yonder, its upper rim fading vaguely into nothing, and the judges seated in soft dimple-niches in its sides, with the Super-villains down in the bottom of the bowl in a solid glass cube, or cubes. There were to be millions of eyes, too.
Alex got very excited, and asked me to say it again.
“An enormous bowl,” I said.
“A bowel!” cried Alex, enthusiastic, and sounding very Russian. “Great idea! A great big bowel in the sky!”
I elaborated, and thought no more about it, but Alex must have passed it on, and somewhere along the way his “bowel” was picked up by some unfortunate as “ball”. Whether they actually began to build an enormous ball at Pinewood, I can’t say, but I was told that it at least got to the drawing-board stage. In the end the Super-villains finished up trapped in a one-dimensional piece of glass, which was very effective, and the judges (Harry Andrews, Trevor Howard, et al.) appeared in a disembodied way, but I don’t recall whether they were seated in a bowl or not.
Somewhere along the line Guy Hamilton dropped out, and various directors were discussed – Lester, Fleischer, Donner, and several others. This, of course, was not my business, but when you find yourself at one of these discussions you just sit back and listen, making what observations seem appropriate. I supported the idea of Lester and Fleischer both, they being buddies with whom I’d worked happily – I was thinking all the time of the script, of which I had come to think of myself as the guardian, although I hadn’t written it. I wanted to see the Newmans – Benton screenplay faithfully translated to the screen, because it was first-rate as it stood, and I knew that either Richard could be relied on to do that.
My doubt was whether Lester would take the job. I’d gathered that he’d not been altogether happy with the way his deal on the Musketeers had worked out. I’d had my own much smaller disappointment, but I’m not sure that legally speaking I was entitled to anything beyond my fee except in special circumstances – if the films were shown on the planet Jupiter, probably. As everyone knows, getting a cut of the profits (to which you may be entitled if your agent is sharp enough) is next to impossible if the producers are determined to freeze you out; heart-rending stories are told of creative accounting denying worthy actors, writers, and directors their just deserts. My own policy has always been: get it up front, and the only regular residuals I’ve ever collected have been from Red Sonja, a Schwarzenegger sword-and-sorcery epic, which continues to provide small dollar cheques now and then, thank you, Dino De Laurentiis.
It soon became evident that whoever was going to direct, the Salkinds wanted Dick on the picture in some capacity, and I can only assume that they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse, and he finished up on the picture with some kind of production title, I think.
Richard Donner is the credited director on Superman I, and Lester on Superman II, and it was Lester who phoned me after the completion of I, inviting me to meet him at Pinewood to discuss what remained to be done for Superman II. As in the Musketeers, where the two films were shot as one, so on Superman much of II had already been shot when I was completed.
“I’ve used the ending of Superman II, on Superman I,” he told me.
“You mean Superman flying through the earth’s core, etc?” I said. “What the hell did you do that for?”
He said it had seemed like a good way to finish I, and I asked how did he now propose to end II.
“I was hoping,” said he blithely, “that you could tell me.”
This is why I love the film business, incidentally. Ex Hollywood (or Pinewood) semper aliquid novi. I was rather excited at the prospect – not that I supposed I could tell him anything. We would talk about it, and I would make suggestions, and he would make other suggestions, and by God’s grace something would emerge, and I would go away and write it. In this case, it didn’t quite work out that way, because there were other factors that we knew not of (at least I didn’t).
I asked what had happened to the volcano scene which had been at the end of I in the script. He said they hadn’t done it; changes had been made to the script. I cursed a bit, because that volcano scene had been the Newmans and Benton on top form – Gene Hackman at the bottom of the Vesuvius crater with some Heath Robinson machine which would fake an eruption (in furtherance of some dastardly Lex Luthor ploy to blackmail the Italian
