Yeah, but shooting was long, long away from starting and finishing up. And the thing that I never forgave them for, and I think it was the old man, was cutting Brando out of the second movie just to save a small piece of the gross. I thought it was criminal, and I'm speaking as a writer, the whole thing was Brando sending his son to Earth and the scene you'll see in Superman 2 where he comes back, father I've failed and Brando is glaring at Margot Kidder who is standing there scared. The whole deal, committing suicide to give his son new life is one complete story of father and son and artistically it was a very bad thing to do. And there was plenty of money for everybody. I can only think it has greed. You've already paid Brando 3 million, you've got the 4 scenes in the can, why pay Susannah Yorke, who is a nice woman and a wonderful actress, but had nothing to do with the story.
She was joking with me when Brando put the kid in the capsule, "Wow, the father sends everything what does the mother send?" And I said, "When you're getting 3 million for 23 days work you get to send everything too." They put Susannah back in Superman 2 but it didn't make any sense, narrative wise.

Christ, we're in the movie business, guys - Marlon Brando is the biggest movie star in the world and you have him in four scenes that were already shot what the hell are you replacing him with Susannah Yorke! Come on that's the cheapest explanation I've ever heard.

Yeah, but they need the names, BRANDO, HACKMAN, PUZO. Mario Puzo was a great novelist but a very mediocre screenwriter; he got re-written all the time on screenplays, he never wrote a great screenplay. There are two types of writing, prose and screenwriting. But I'll give them credit; they got the film off the ground by signing the big names. If they offered 1.5 million or two, they wouldn't have got him. But to show how important it is to have Marlon Brando: They could fly the banners over the Cannes Film festivals to attract investors. But now you say, jeez, but artistically it's wonderful to put Susannah Yorke in the second movie even though we have Brando already shot, it's in the can, it's there, and we did it.

Yeah, but Jack Nicholson made more money on Batman than Warner Brothers did. He had 25% of the gross or something. Everybody made a lot of money, that's okay.
I wish Ilya, who I have nothing against, would be honest enough to say, we were in a lot of debt and we were trying to cut as much money as possible and this was gonna save us 20 million dollars. That's a point of view at least.
But when you say it was for artistic reasons, well you just sound like a jerk.

The Salkinds thought that Warners was trying to wrestle the film away from them.

I thought Warners, who saw more and more of the film, said, "Hey we made a big mistake by not making this in the first instance", also people are not very generous about things like that in the film business, they smelt blood in the water, they knew the Salkinds needed money and they were happy to pump some in for extra ownership. You can bet your bottom dollar that if Warners owned the film at the time, Dick would never have been fired. His offices were on the lot for 25 years. Warners got a guy called Charlie Greenlaw over to help him [Donner] production wise. I was doing something else.

I remember John was also pissed that Dick was fired, like everyone else.

I remember John Williams saying to me after seeing the rough cut, which was very long, something like 3 hours; anyway, he said to me, "What do you hear Mank when you see Superman?"
I said to him, "The picture's gonna open at the end of December, and at the end of January is the SuperBowl, and at half time the band's going to march onto the field and they're gonna be playing the theme from Superman, that's what I hear." He said, "I got it." And you know what? The band marched on and played the theme from Superman.