The Light’s On At Signpost. George Fraser MacDonald
“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 Government, if I remember rightly). Anyway, the point was that in the middle of all this, Vesuvius would erupt in fact, and Luthor would be embarrassed. Well, that was out – and so, if I remember rightly, was a sequence in which Superman penetrated a vault which was guarded by 1) a zone a jillion degrees below zero, 2) a zone a jillion degrees above zero, and 3) a belt of super-radioactivity, through all of which the Man of Steel would pass unscathed. There was another sequence in which Superman lost his power, and went out and bought a Superman suit at a pawnshop, trying to kid Luthor that he still had his power intact, but it was changed, to remove the comic element.
Which reminds me, I did contribute a scene, adapted from the N – B script, in which Luthor stole Kryptonite from a museum; I had him, the ultra-technological villain, smashing a glass case with a brick, brown paper, and treacle, but it vanished along the way.
Incidentally, while I and II were exceptionally successful films, on every level, I maintain they would have been better still if the N – B script had been left entirely alone. That’s a personal opinion, and an objective one, since my contribution was minimal, and wasn’t affected by the changes.
Anyway, I set off for Pinewood, and encountered a hazard that we have to face on the Isle of Man occasionally: fog had descended, the aircraft that would have taken me to Heathrow couldn’t get in, and all that was available was the flight to Blackpool, which I shared with an eccentric peer who had to get to the House of Lords for some vital vote or other. We got a taxi at Blackpool and drove at speed to Runcorn, where my companion, who I think had been a big wheel in the LMS or something in the old days, used his influence to get a southbound train halted, and we climbed aboard. There wasn’t a taxi to be had at Euston, and his lordship was in despair, but fortunately I was being met by a studio car, and got him to Westminster in the nick of time. So not only did he manage to vote; he excited the admiration and envy of his fellow peers by drawing up at the Lords entrance in a limousine emblazoned in psychedelic colours with the legend: SUPERMAN! and the Man of Steel hurtling across the windscreen.
It was a bit of an anti-climax to get to Pinewood, where Dick and I sat in the viewing theatre watching a good two hours of material which had either already been shot for Superman II or left over from Superman I. I have no coherent memory of it, but I know there seemed to be endless shots of Gene Hackman and Valerie Perrine floating around in a hot-air balloon, and Reeve jumping off boxes, and the whole escape sequence which I remember only because it featured Angus MacInnes, with whom I’d worked on Force Ten from Navarone. My one thought as we left the theatre was: how the hell do we make sense out of that lot?
We conferred with the Salkinds and Pierre, and my first questions were: can you get Brando and Hackman back for the remainder of the shooting? They couldn’t, of course, which caused me some concern, since I couldn’t see how they were going to complete II without Hackman; Brando could be got round by using, in place of one Jor-El, a group of starry Kryptonian elders (Andrews, Howard, Susannah York, et al.). Dick was fairly quiet at our little conference, which took place in the lobby outside the theatre; when I asked him privately what he thought he sighed and spoke with feeling about discouraging shots of E. G. Marshall kneeling in the ruins of the Oval Office – I don’t know what he didn’t like about them; they were used in the film. Mind you, all that we had seen was fairly discouraging; I had a list of all the takes, and it struck me that an awful lot of it was going to prove superfluous.
Alex obviously assumed that we would now start sorting it all out; Dick was non-committal, and said he would phone me next day. What else was said, I don’t remember, but I have a memory of Dick standing, saying very little, looking extremely formal in a very nice tweed suit (which wasn’t like his usual casual style at all), and for some reason I thought, this is as far as we go.
Which proved to be true, in a way. Dick rang me next day and said he wasn’t going on with the project. So that was that, and I prepared to turn my attention to whatever other work I was doing at the time. I wasn’t all that interested in the project myself by this time, and when Pierre called me and asked if I would go to Paris to confer with Guy Hamilton, who was to come back on to the picture, I wasn’t enthusiastic, and if it had been anyone but Guy I think I might have bowed out.
But, let’s face it, I would be getting paid, and I can stand a couple of nights in the George V or Prince de Galles any time. I met Guy and his wife in London and we flew over. Come to think of it, I don’t recall why we were working in Paris; possibly because we had to confer with Alex. Anyway, for two days we worked on the thing employing 1) my list of the material already shot; 2) the unshot material from the script of II; 3) our own ideas. These last we kept to a minimum, because the less new material, the better; the job was to link what was shot with what was unshot into a coherent story with as little fuss as possible. New stuff obviously had to go in for the Kryptonian elders, but Hackman’s part was a real problem, since at first sight it didn’t seem to be complete, and would take careful rearrangement.
I covered sheets of foolscap with notes in red, green, blue, and various other colours, denoting filmed material, unshot material, possible plot links, new material, etc., etc.; we cut and spliced and arranged and rearranged and somehow arrived at a synopsis which satisfied us both. Neither of us got a credit on the finished film, but we didn’t expect it – there is no such credit as “script cobbler” or “script fixer” or “plot arranger”, and the writing credit went to Puzo and the Newmans – why Benton was left off, I’ve no idea. By this time I just wanted to get home, and insisted on catching an early plane; I packed in haste, with Pierre helping, and as I was about to close my case he suddenly produced a book and asked me to read it on the flight. It was called The Ice People, of which more anon.
That was the end of my connection with Superman. Dick came back on to the picture, and although I was summoned in haste to Pinewood during the shooting, it was simply to do a very minor tinker on one part of the plot which could easily have been accomplished without me. I watched one daytime scene being shot – an announcer talking to camera, and a couple of cars being wrecked – and one night scene involving the enormous New York street which had been built on the back-lot – life-size at one end, and dwindling down in size at the other to give a sense of perspective. It was a smashing set; I heard it was eventually demolished by a high wind, much to the annoyance of a later production which had hoped to use it. Pierre and I stood in the dark eating endless hot dogs and watching them rehearse and then shoot the bit in which a woman with a pram doesn’t get hit by a falling girder.
There was a royal premiere attended by the Queen, followed by a dinner, but I confess that my chief interest was in recognising little bits and thinking “I did that” or “I was responsible for that,” or “Well, I sort of influenced that”, which is the only personal satisfaction you can get from a movie in which your participation has been limited to tinkering little things, script-snipping