TIMEOUT April 1981

 ‘Superman II’ the second episode of the blockbuster series which opens in London this week, is almost as enjoyable as its original. But behind the film’s British production lies an appalling story which involves its directors, producers and stars. Dave Pine investigating in London and Los Angeles.

‘I’ve been told not to talk about it but I don’t care. They are truly despicable people and it’s time it came out.’

When the star of a major movie begins a routine half-hour publicity interview like this, then something extraordinary is going on. But for anyone who has closely followed the ‘Superman’ production saga since Part I began shooting at Pinewood four years ago, there is little left that can surprise you. Not even that Margot Kidder, so impressive in both films as heroine Lois Lane, is taking her role as investigative reporter a little more seriously than ‘Superman’s makers might like. For, no matter which side you believe or whose account you follow, the circumstances of ‘Superman’s production certainly seem as murky and litigious as those of any movie ever made.

First there are the complaints of Kidder, screenwriter Mario Puzo-author of ‘The Godfather’- Marlon Brando and ex-director Richard Donner. Then it is a matter of public record (Los Angeles Times April 3, 1980) that around the same time ‘Superman’s producer Alexander Salkind was demanding $15 million from Warner Bros. to release the only negative of ‘Superman I’ for its December 1978 premiere, he was arrested in Switzerland and accused of stealing $20 million from a German company owned by Los Angeles magnate William Forman.

‘They tried to screw me out of $40,000 which was a huge amount of money to me...They were behaving totally illegally and it ended up costing them over a million’

-Margot Kidder

Salkind avoided a remand in jail by citing credentials as a Costa Rican diplomatic attaché and then flew to Mexico under heavy sedation despite a life-long fear of flying. Later the charges were dropped, the witnesses retracted, and Forman and Salkind came to a civil settlement.

Moviegoers may not feel too concerned by ‘Superman’s turbulent history. But, in this case, they can hardly avoid noticing because it has directly affected what is on the screen.

Despite a clear promise in the first ‘Superman’ of a reappearance by the hero’s father-a key figure played by Marlon Brando - Brando is nowhere to be seen in the sequel, except in a brief reprise of the original’s opening. His absence, like so much else in the story, appears to be connected with money. Brando had already shot several scenes for ‘Superman II’ which from all accounts were excellent. But, according to Kidder and other sources, Alexander Salkind and his son Ilya, executive producer on ‘Superman II’, would have had to pay a considerable amount of money to use them. Brando is already suing them for allegedly falling to honour certain payments in his contract for the first film and it was essential for the Salkinds to cut him out or risk a court injunction against the film.

‘They began to run into a lot of problems,’ says Margot Kidder, ‘because once they’d decided they couldn’t use Brando because they didn’t want to pay him they had to change a lot of things. They replaced him with Susannah York (Superman’s mother) but a lot got lost.’

Producer Pierre Spengler, the Salkinds’ life-long friend and close business associate, denies Brando was cut merely to save money. ‘It’s not at all the case. I hope you have other questions than these because I must leave it to the lawyers. There are various suits pending.’

Indeed there are, for Brando was not the only problem. Richard Donner, the director of ‘Superman I’ who had spent 28 months giving the film its astonishing feeling of accuracy was summarily fired from the sequel before work on it recommenced.

The charge has been made - by Alex Salkind and others - that Donner had cost the Salkinds too much money on Part I and gone way over budget. Donner retorts that since he was never allowed to see a budget how could he have gone over it? Indeed the Salkinds’ $130 million assessment of the costs is still a matter of argument.

‘You will never know,’ a Warners’ source told the LA Times ‘what Alex Salkind spent on that film.’ In Donner’s favour it might also be pointed out that, while film directors are frequently fired for going over budget during shooting, once their film becomes an all-time blockbuster hit, as ‘Superman’ did, then such considerations seem faintly irrelevant.

Steven Spielberg went way over budget on both ‘Jaws’ and ‘Close Encounters’ but, like Donner, he delivered the commercial goods and the studio were quite happy to forgive him. Yet Donner’s only word of recognition from the Salkinds after ‘Superman’s huge success was a cable telling him he bad been fired from the sequel. Donner was eventually to be replaced by Dick Lester as credited director.

‘Donner devoted so much of his heart to the movie,’ Margot Kidder says with passion, ‘and I think in the first movie that heart comes through. He worked non-stop for everyone in the crew and all the cast. I mean I could have phoned him at five in the morning and said my kid was sick and he would have come round to help. Consequently, Lester was under tremendous pressure arriving on set and he did a good job.’

Donner originally shot a considerable amount of footage for ‘Superman II’. Much of what he shot was junked but a good deal remains and opinions vary as to exactly how much of his film is left. Producer Spengler and director Lester claim categorically that only 10% is left, others estimate at least 30% and even as much as half.

Certainly some members of the cast, who are willing to discuss it, identify important footage as Donner’s. This includes one of the film’s most powerful sequences in which Superman is beaten up in a bar, as well as material shot on a fictional moonshot, in the Fortress of Solitude and in the Daily Planet office. All the material has certainly been re-scripted, re-edited, and re-voiced by Lester. Donner reckons that some of the cuts were made to deprive him of director’s credit.

Spengler is happy to admit that ‘there was nothing wrong artistically with much of the footage we cut. We would like to have used it. But it just turned out differently and we’re very happy with the way it turned out.’

Donner recalls the aftermath of making ‘Superman’ as something of a personal crisis: ‘I was fouled up by the whole experience,’ he says. ‘I had to go to my house in California and stay there for a year to try and forget these people. I was offered practically every picture that was being made but I just couldn’t bring myself, to go to work. "Superman" had been supposed to last nine months and it went on for two years and four months. I got no additional salary and I haven’t seen any of my contracted percentage of the profits.

‘Meanwhile I paid British and American tax so by the time it was over I had earned less than if I’d stayed in TV making movies of the week. Yet without me that film would never have done one hundredth of what it’s done because they would have shot the other script.’

Donner’s scathing remarks about the campness of the original script were, as it turned out, amply confirmed when a stray copy reached Time Out.

‘At the time I was even prepared to go back and do Part II and never ask for another goddamn penny or anything, just to finish it,’ he continues. ‘But the first thing I heard from the Salkinds was a cable of dismissal.’

Dick Lester sees it differently. ‘Donner had a terrible fight with the producers and he gave an interview to Variety, among other papers saying he wasn’t going to do "Superman II" unless there were considerable changes in the way the film was produced. Now, rightly or wrongly, they then said: "He’s not going to tell us how to produce a film" and they didn’t want to have any further dealings with him.’

‘I think it’s appalling when you cut out a major actor like Brando so you don’t have to pay him the gross...In my view the way "Superman II" was produced is the lowest you can go without actually cheating’

-Christopher Reeve

The various arguments are all the more bitter because Dick Lester also worked on ‘Superman I’ as a kind of intermediate producer at a time when relations between Donner and the Salkinds were at an all-time low.

‘I thought it was unfair to take a credit on that film,’ says Lester, ‘because I didn’t want anyone to get the feeling that I was involved in the direction of the film. So I didn’t even take a producer’s credit on "Superman I" although strictly speaking I was entitled to.’

According to several sources, Lester’s work as a producer on ‘Superman I’ arose partly because he thought he was still owed money by the Salkinds from their association on ‘The Three Musketeers’. They were happy with his work on that film and now hoped to pay the back-debt and speed up work on ‘Superman 1’ into the bargain.

Not unnaturally Donner was suspicious of the arrangement, fearing that Lester was being smuggled in as his replacement. But Lester reassured him, kept a low profile, and by the time of the first ‘Superman’s premiere the two were good friends.

‘They hired Dick Lester,’ said Donner around that time, ‘as an intermediary between me and Spengler. When he first came in I thought he was going to direct and so I sat down with him to get things straight.

‘But he said: "Look, these people have owed me money for a long time. This is my way of getting it back and I won’t come on your stage unless you invite me. There’s no way I would ever direct this; I don’t want to." From then on it was just a pleasure. The guy was a big help and I really like him.’

There’s no doubt however that Donner felt completely betrayed by Lester’s subsequent decision to take control of Part II, particularly since Lester never called him about it. For his part Lester is emphatic that on II he did not take over from Richard Donner but another intermediate director - Guy Hamilton - who had been hired in the meantime.

‘The circumstances were completely different by the time I came to direct II’ Lester says. ‘I had made two films, "Cuba" and "Butch and Sundance: The Early Days" and I had been nowhere near the Salkinds or "Superman". Dick was fired long before I got involved on II. Moreover a lawsuit had started between him and the Salkinds and needless to say it would have been most unwise for me to have got involved in any way.

Margot Kidder was another of the principals in the ‘Superman’ saga who faced legal entanglement with the Salkinds over money. ‘They tried to screw me out of $40,000 which was a huge amount of money to me and very little to them. I was in the middle of a divorce and I was badly in debt and I have my child to look after. But I was recommended to a lawyer who had helped all the people on "Musketeers" and as a result I renegotiated my deal and made a fortune on the second one. They were behaving totally illegally and it ended up costing them over a million.’

It’s almost unprecedented for a star to discuss the producers of a hit series in this way but Kidder obviously feels the injustice of the affair outweighs commercial considerations and personal interest. She spent most of last summer campaigning for John Anderson, the liberal leaning ‘Third Party’ candidate in the US election, and gives every impression of being as intelligent and formidable offscreen as she is as Lois Lane.

‘Donner made my career,’ she says. ‘He made Chris’s (Christopher Reeves), he made the Salkinds billions. And they turned round and stabbed him in the back. I mean I have nothing but contempt for them.’

The Salkinds’ background in film-making is most accurately described as international. Alexander Salkind was born in what was then the free city of Danzig (now Gdansk in Poland), the son of a film producer, and brought up in Paris, Cuba and Mexico where his father eventually settled. Salkind made his first film with Buster Keaton in 1945 and returned to Europe with his family, including son Ilya, in 1950.

After innumerable films in Spain, Italy, France and Hungary, Alexander Salkind teamed with his son Ilya and Ilya’s schoolfriend Pierre Spengler to bust into the bigtime with ‘The Three Musketeers’, a big international success just when the film industry needed one in 1974. It was Ilya’s idea to do ‘Superman’ as a follow-up and even the Salkinds’ bitterest critics acknowledge their tenacity and dedication in getting such an impossible project funded and rolling.

‘I will say the old man was phenomenal,’ said Donner shortly before ‘Superman I’ premiered. ‘He came up with the money when we needed it.’

Indeed the Salkinds argue that it was the near-impossible task of obtaining and placating their backers for such a costly production as ‘Superman’ that has caused some of the problems. There is, for example, the question of the $15 million payment Alex Salkind demanded from Warners in November 1978 shortly before the first film was due to be premiered. This was for the distribution rights to ‘certain additional foreign territories’ but at least one participant in the negotiations described it to the LA Times as a ‘ransom’. Warners were then in the middle of planning a major promotion for the film and if the negative was not delivered they faced the prospect of possible legal action from 750 cinemas left without a film to play over Christmas, plus the loss of $7 million already spent on publicity, not to mention the humiliating cancellation of both a Presidential and a Royal Premiere.

‘The end was inevitable.’ a Warners’ insider told the LA Times. ‘From the moment Alex said: "I’ve got the negative, if you want the print for the opening you’re gonna have to give me something" we were resigned to paying. I would have sent in the marines to get it.’

The Salkinds however say the timing was coincidental and that they merely impressed on Warners that their backers were ‘on their neck’ because they had ‘undersold’ the distribution rights to the film and therefore needed the extra money. And, ironically, although at that time the rights in question were believed to be worth only a fraction of what Warners had to pay, the American company eventually made millions out of the deal when ‘Superman’ became a huge success.

‘They are very good businessmen,’ says Pierre Spengler of the whole affair. ‘Alex has said he would be happy to switch that deal back and give them their money back in return for the territories we sold. But we wanted the money, they wanted to buy and they were very happy with the business.’

There is a certain piquancy in the picture that emerges of one of Hollywood’s shrewdest and toughest business operations being completely outsmarted by a bunch of Europeans and finally coming to like it.

One commentator compared the transaction to putting a gun at someone’s head and forcing them to buy a fast-rising stock. ‘The victim is unhappy at the time but the unexpected profit allays the pain.’

Margot Kidder also saw the humour of the affair. ‘These guys at Warners’, she said, ‘are used to dealing with all the fast-movers in the business. But they’d never seen anything like this.’

The question of Alex Salkind’s backers was also central to the dispute that could have landed him in Swiss jail. In the civil lawsuit that emerged after the original criminal charges were dropped, Los Angeles theatre magnate William Forman charged that $20 million of his German company’s money had been misappropriated for investment in Salkind movies. The matter was eventually Settled when Salkind paid Forman $23.4 million dollars to buy out his interest in ‘Superman’.

In Salkind’s favour it should be added that according to the LA Times the witnesses, whose testimony originally caused the Swiss police to act on Forman’s behalf, later repudiated their former confessions.

Spengler absolutely denies certain other damaging assertions that have been made about ‘Superman II’. It was claimed that, to avoid paying Gene Hackman to re-voice one of the scenes in the Fortress of Solitude, they hired a double who studied all of Hackman’s mannerisms and tries to mimic his voice.

‘All that happened’, says Spengler, ‘is that Hackman was not available for a couple of loops which we asked him to do. We had to arrange a voice double for that but he authorised us to do it.’

There is another more serious charge: ‘It was the only movie I’ve ever worked on,’ says Kidder ‘where the crew demanded their cash in advance every week because initially the cheques were bouncing.’

‘That is absolute bullshit,’ says Spengler ‘and you can quote me verbatim. There has never been a single bounced cheque on any of the productions I or the Salkinds have worked on. That is libellous, defamatory and I will take whoever says anything to the contrary to court.

Perhaps, like so many other ‘Superman’ personnel, Lois Lane will end up in litigation with its producers. But in that case the prospects for the already-planned ‘Superman III’ look bleak indeed. It is hard to imagine the series without her.

And what does Christopher Reeve, himself, who plays Clark Kent and Superman with such uncanny authenticity, have to say about the whole business? TO tracked him down to the Hamptons outside New York where he’s shooting a movie of Ira Levin’s play ‘Death Trap’.

‘Donner had an impossible row with the producers over quality,’ he told us. ‘On "Superman I" he was the only one who kept things from being done in a shabby way and kept our morale high and made everyone do our best. And then he was fired behind my back and they - briefly - brought in Guy Hamilton.

‘There was nothing I could have done to get him back because all the contracts were signed before I was even told. So I felt a tremendous resentment against the producers for being so devious.

‘I was also very apprehensive because suddenly there was this new script that I didn’t feel was anything near as good as what Donner had worked on for Part II. And I think it’s appalling when you cut out a major actor like Marion Brando so you don’t have to pay him the gross, when decisions are made for economic reasons rather than for artistic reasons, that kind of banking style of film. making where everything is conducted in terms of international deals.

‘Frankly I found the producers untrustworthy, devious and unfortunate as people. They just are not the sort of people you want to give much time to. and I really did try to keep out of the business side because it’s like walking through treacle.

‘In any case I learnt pretty quickly that you can’t make a good movie with hostile feeling and when I met Lester I really liked and respected him and I didn’t blame him for what had happened at all. Part of the reason that "Superman II" is such a good movie is due to Lester’s enormous skill as a director. If it hadn’t been for that and the major legacy left by Donner and his footage - which I estimate at around 25% including all the material with Gene Hackman who never came back to shoot with Lester - it would have been a joke. Because in my view the way "Superman II" was produced is the lowest you can go without actually cheating. But I’m talking about the production, not the film.

‘As it turned out "Superman II" is different from "Superman I", but not in quality. It’s a simpler film, a lighter film but neither better nor worse. And I’m only going to do "Superman III" if there’s a legitimate creative reason and it’s not just a profit-making exercise. We’ve got to rise above all this deal-making stuff if there’s gonna be a "Superman III" that’s worth anything.’

Of course it would be stupid to pretend that behind-the-scenes business activity is anything novel in the movies. True or false, in themselves they would scarcely add up to a story at all. An industry where a $1 million investment can yield 10, 20 or 50 times that amount in a space of months, is bound to attract all kinds of interesting attention.

Although one would in no way wish to suggest any similar implications in the case of ‘Superman’, Lucian K Truscott III quoted an important Hollywood figure on this little discussed subject (New York Times Magazine, February 26, 1978): ‘For the past 25 years there has been a constant flow of mob money, phoney tax shelters, public promotion of boiler-room stock, bucket shop paper, off-shore funny money. . . Every kind of money you can imagine finding its way into films.

‘I have personally sat down at a table where 22 different men representing 22 different kinds of money signed to finance a single movie... For years, the attitude has been: don’t ask questions, just sign....’

Indeed if the film business tomorrow decided to become as scrupulous about its financial sources as, say, a leading British building society, it’s doubtful whether the majority of films would be made at all. But the case of ‘Superman’ is worth pursuing because so many talented people appear to have suffered in the course of it.

One of them, Richard Donner, can realistically claim that like Spielberg or Lucas he contributed vastly to Hollywood’s lucrative rediscovery of the cinema of wonder in the 197Os.

Not that Donner enjoys discussing it. His mind is now firmly on other films and it is only with difficulty that he can be persuaded to talk about the ‘Superman’ experience at all: ‘I can feel my stomach beginning to churn when someone brings up the subject,’ Donner told us in London recently. ‘I really don’t want to think about it and I wish "Superman II" well. I think it’s going to do big business.’

Around a year ago in California more of his anger was still showing: ‘I gave two very hard years of my life to make that film happen. I knew we had to make it look right but they would have accepted anything. And the audience would have gone and laughed at it and it would have been flushed right down the toilet. But they didn’t understand it or, if they did, they didn’t seem to give a shit ...

‘Now we’re involved in all these legal proceedings. You know the sickness of these people is they think everybody’s out to kill them. Eventually, I guess everybody is.’

‘Superman II’ opens from Thursday in the West End and from Sunday all over London.

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