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Show Business: Onward and Upward with the New Superman

7 minute read
TIME

“You will be picked up at 7 p.m. and taken to a spot 25 minutes away by car. Where? We can’t tell you that. We will say only that it is not on the island of Manhattan.” Mission: Impossible! No, just a reporter being escorted last week to the set of Superman, possibly the most supersecret, superpublicized movie ever to be shot—at least within 25 minutes of midtown Manhattan.

The spot turns out to be a street in Brooklyn Heights overlooking New York harbor, with Manhattan as a cinemascopic background. Superman, after a hard day’s work going faster than a speeding bullet and leaping tall buildings at a single bound, spots a cat caught in a tree and swoops down to the rescue. How does he swoop? How, in fact, does he fly? Ah, that is the reason for the cloaks and the daggers: the producers are terrified a photographer will follow the reporter and show Superman being held up by a 100-ft. crane and wires. Says a spokesman, “We don’t want anyone to destroy the illusion of flight.”

Even with the crane and wires, flying is not easy. Christopher Reeve, 24, who plays Superman, has to make a dozen or so passes 50 ft. in the air before he bags his cat, made suitably cooperative by the taxidermist. Every once in a while Superman is brought down for an adjustment of his ailerons. He has 25 different costumes and perhaps six different kinds of capes—for standing, sitting, flying and coming in for a landing. He is now wearing his flying cape, which is stretched out with wires so that it appears to billow in the wind. The changes made, he goes back into the air, accompanied by cheers from local residents who are hanging out of windows. “Hey, Supraman, why cantcha get the cat?” someone shouts in that rich blend of gravel and adenoids known as Brooklynese. “Thattaboy, Supraman!” yells another when he actually touches the dusty beast.

Rescuing cats—a sign of his humanity, says Director Richard Donner—is the least of Superman’s good deeds. Producers Ilya Salkind, 29, and Pierre Spengler, 30, are determined to outdo the special effects of Star Wars—and reap its profits. “At one time it was exciting to see Superman hold up the end of a truck,” says Tom Mankiewicz, the last of five scriptwriters brought in to turn comic strip into film strip. “Now you see Lindsay Wagner do things like that every week on TV for free. So we had a problem, and Superman’s feats had to be very, very spectacular. We had to go whole hog.”

X-Ray Soufflé. Frying those pork chops may cost upwards of $33 million —without apple sauce. The budget is already well over the target of $25 million. Before the movie is finished. Superman will have 1) soldered together the Golden Gate Bridge, which has been cut in half by an earthquake, 2) rescued the President’s airplane from a thunderstorm, 3) tamed the waters from a collapsing dam, 4) plucked a speedboat full of criminals from the East River and set it down, still dripping, on Wall Street, 5) caught a crashing helicopter in midair, 6) flown round the world in 90 seconds with Lois Lane in his arms, and 7) cooked a soufflé for Lois with his X-ray eyes.

Not all the money is going for such stunts. As insurance for the picture—as well as a lure for investors—Salkind and Spengler have hired some of the biggest stars in Hollywood. It sometimes seems as if the only ones who are not getting any of the producers’ largesse are Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who created the man of steel in 1938.

For twelve days’ work as the father who sends Superbaby to Earth from the doomed planet Krypton, Marlon Brando has received $2¼ million. A similar sum is going to Gene Hackman, who plays Lothar, the archvillain, for three months’ work. To make sure that Superman will stay around for sequels, Reeve, who was plucked from the obscurity of a TV soap opera for the role, is getting $250,000. But then, of course, there is more of Reeve than there was when he was signed. In London, where the interiors are being shot, he trained on weights with a former Mr. Universe and added 20 lbs. to his 6 ft. 4 in., including 2 in. to his chest and another 2 in. to his biceps.

The salaries seem somewhat less monumental, given the fact that, to save money, some of the scenes for Superman II are being shot at the same time as those for Superman I. The young producers followed the same cost-cutting measure when they shot the Three and Four Musketeers—though they neglected to tell the actors that time. This time the principals know. Reeve and Margot Kidder, who gives Lois Lane the sex appeal that schoolboys always knew she had, are already looking forward to Superman II, III and IV. Reeve was afraid of being typecast, but Sean Connery, who played James Bond six times, put his fears to rest. Said Connery: “You had better be good in the first Superman or you won’t have to worry about the second and third.”

One thing Superman does not have—so far as anyone with plain old 20-20 can see, anyway—is many laughs. Director Donner. convinced that it was campiness that brought down King Kong, is avoiding even the possibility of untoward giggles. Says he: “I was brought up on Superman, and I believe this myth. There is a little bit of God Bless America in it. There is a purity and a fantasy in it that is right for our times.” Adds Mankiewicz: “Whatever Jimmy Carter is asking us to be, Superman is already. What we are really giving people is the Christian message: that we should all be honest, love each other and be for the underdog.”

Mankiewicz ought to embroider that message on a sampler and nail it on the wall, because there is little love between Donner and Producer Spengler. Already Richard Lester, who directed both Musketeers, has been brought in as “consultant,” a move that can only give pause to Donner, whose one major credit is The Omen. Donner further frets that Superman’s superhype may backfire. “Look what happened to King Kong and The Great Gatsby,” he moans. “I keep telling the producers to just let the picture open with only normal advertising. It’ll sell itself.”

Mr. Donner, meet Mr. Salkind, who promises that before the film opens in December 1978, promotion efforts will be the biggest of all time. Two books are already in the writing. Mock phone booths—the kind that protects Superman’s modesty when he changes from Clark Kent—will be put into bookstores to promote sales. A special film crew has followed the five other film crews for a 90-minute TV special, complete with Brando and Hackman. And records, gimmicks, toys, T shirts! You can hear the cash register ringing with every word. “What is working for us,” Salkind gloats, “is fantasy and escapism. People do not want to see their own problems on the screen.” And who ever said there was no such thing as X-ray vision?

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