While they'd been forced to abandon their original plan, to shoot both movies simultaneously, because of time and money constraints, the first film had been so globally successful that a sequel was inevitable. But even as they took their initial steps toward it, they found themselves in the midst of all kinds of legal wranglings. Brando was suing them, as were others; they'd
made a "mistake" in very basic math - offering out more than 100 percent of the film - and had been discovered.

Richard Donner wouldn't be returning, and much of the footage he'd shot for the second film was scrapped. Richard Lester, the man who'd been brought in to keep Donner on the straight and narrow with the original, was unsurprisingly named as director in his stead.

To everyone's surprise, for a while it looked as though Chris might not be back. His original contract had stipulated that he'd be paid a quarter of a million dollars to shoot both films together. Now the Salkinds wanted him to commit to another seven months of his valuable time for no compensation. That just wasn't going to be acceptable. Chris' agent went to work on the
producers, pointing out that Chris' contract had been allowed to lapse, so if they wanted him - and there was no question that they did, since his appeal had been a big part of Superman's success - they'd better be prepared to pay. And pay quite a bit more than a quarter of a million dollars this time.

When the Salkinds threatened legal action, Chris' lawyers pointed out that he'd been perfectly willing to film both films simultaneously. He'd upheld his part of the bargain to the letter and been a perfect gentleman. Even now he was in Japan promoting the first film. What more goodwill and grace could he show?

In the end the Salkinds had no choice but to capitulate; that much had been evident from the first. But they still didn't end up paying a fotune for Chris, even though he'd made one for them. The $500,000 fee agreed upon was the same amount he'd made for Somewhere in Time, a much smaller film. And it was less than half the sum they were paying Gene Hackman - who also
claimed that much-coveted top billing - to reprise his Lex Luthor role.

With the new contracts signed, and preproduction quickly out of the way, work began immediately on Superman II, which meant Chris didn't get any kind of a break. From upper Michigan [where Somewhere in Time was filmed] he went directly to the first location shooting for this new epic.

And this time the locations were truly many and varied: from Niagara Falls to Norway, Paris to St. Lucia. Superman [the Movie] had been a blockbuster, and the Salkinds wanted this to be even better; no expense would be spared for the filming, which helped calm the fears Chris had that the Salkinds simply wanted a fast, cheap sequel as a moneymaking machine.

Margot Kidder was back, too, but Lois Lane wasn't going to be as prominent as she had been in the first movie, partly because Kidder had accused the Salkinds of cheating her out of $40,000. Even though she did eventually receive her money, she paid for it in other ways, although she insisted she didn't care. "I love Lois Lane," she said, "I could play her till I die, but I'm not going to die if I don't play her."

But Superman II was going to be the movie where Lois would finally get her man. Doing that, though, would also prove to be nearly the death of Margot Kidder. Zoran Perisic, who'd created the special effects for the first film, and won an Oscar for his work, had created a new system for the flying effects, much to Chris' pleasure. Instead of wires and harnesses that chafed
and left calluses on his skin, Perisic had made transparent molds for the actors. They were placed in them on top of forty-foot poles and moved along a series of runners in the studio. It was physically more comfortable, and certainly less demanding than having to keep the body still for ten minutes at a time.

For the most part, this system worked very well, but on one occasion there was a problem. "I was doing a flight scene with Margot Kidder," Chris recalled, "when the area that was supporting us started to collapse. I ran for her and grabbed her in my arms to stop her from falling. That's what Superman would have done. Obviously, that wouldn't have saved either of us but at that moment exactly, I really believed I was Superman." And it was perhaps lucky for Kidder that he did. But it was also a perfectly natural reflex reaction for Chris. Just as in the original, Chris was a very physical presence in Superman II, performing all his own stunts, even hanging over Niagara Falls to complete filming on one flying sequence.

[The next shooting] location proved to be far less hospitable than the sun and sand of St. Lucia (where cast and crew had all decamped to film a single scene), with a trip to northern Norway, where an interview Chris gave to a journalist managed to raise the ire of the country's entire population. "We're about ten minutes from the North Pole," Chris recounted to Clifford Terry, "way the hell up there, five and a half hours north of Oslo by car. We're staying at this old hotel and having a gay time getting drunk every night and playing billiards and having these incredible meals - wonderful time - and I'm doing this shot. I'm standing out in the middle of the road
and there's nothing but mountains and snow and polar bears, and this Norwegian reporter shows up, having tracked the company all the way from Oslo to get a quote from Superman."

The quote he got was that Chris "loved being in the middle of nowhere," and that didn't sit too well with the Norwegians. It was obvious that Chris loved the country, and he was enough of a gentleman never to idly disparage someone's homeland, but they didn't react pleasantly to outsiders referring to their country as tundra, even when he was talking about an area far
removed from any metropolis. Finally the brouhaha reached such proportions that the film company was forced to issue an apology on Chris' behalf, noting that what he "was really saying was that after the hustle and bustle of the big city, how refreshing it is to come to your country, with its peaceful, tranquil solitude." It was fudging, and everybody on both sides knew it, but
face was saved and it settled the ruffled feathers. The crew finished their shot and quietly returned to Pinewood.

The experience of filming Superman II was much smoother than the original. The money was there, with no worries about it running out this time, there was no directorial conflict, and there was no specter of Brando and his millions of dollars hanging over the whole thing. It had a unified, let's-pull-together feel. But Chris ultimately thought that some of the credit should go to ousted director Richard Donner.

"We missed Dick very much, all of us," he said in the Los Angeles Times. "Throughout the film we tried to preserve his style and intentions. It was very much as if he were the architect who'd done the blueprint and we were just the contractors." Architect or no, Donner's name never appeared on the film.

Chris finished all his work on the movie in late spring 1980. It had been a good time, since his dealings had been with Richard Lester, rather than directly with the Salkinds. In fact, everything had been good enough, with a warm enough afterglow, that he was willing to contemplate playing a superhero a third time. "No question. I never forget how much I owe Superman. If it
hadn't been for him, I wouldn't be talking to you. I'd probably be out there parking cars."

[Chris had been performing in the Broadway play Fifth of July] for little more than a month when Superman II opened all over the world - everywhere except America. In South Africa the film immediately set box office records. A Superman movie not opening in America? What was going on?

It seemed a backward way of working, downright ridiculous, to have an American film open abroad first - it would be the middle of 1981 before American audiences would be able to see it - but there was a method to what seemed like madness. Superman [the Movie] had done particularly well in what were now being termed the "international markets" - it was on of the
first films to alert Hollywood to how lucrative they could be. So this was an experiment of sorts, a gamble, but one that ended up paying off quite handsomely, bringing millions of dollars into the Hollywood coffers, and sending anticipation for the American release soaring through the roof.
Outside America, Superman II had done well, but hadn't quite been the blockbuster the first had been. The gamble of opening it outside the borders of the red, white and blue hadn't paid off in the way they'd hoped. What they needed in the United States was good reviews and marvelous numbers.

The reviews, at least, were everything they could have hoped for. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby seemed to encapsulate the critics' feelings when he wrote, "It's that rare film phenomenon - a movie far better than the one that prompted it." The Los Angeles Times pointed out, quite rightly, that "the film's fun comes from the character, dialogue, and performance, not
effects...although there are, of course, enough effects to fill a dozen Saturday matinee serials." Certainly the initial numbers were impressive. In the first week, Superman II took in $24 million, a new American record, and although the dollars dipped somewhat (in the end, it didn't take in as much as the original), the general consensus was that this was the better film.

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