SUPERMAN III - GENERAL/MEDIA

An Interview with David and Leslie Newman.
Screenwriters of the first three Superman films.
By Edward Gross.

David and Leslie Newman own the fattest cat I have ever seen in my life. It's cute as hell, but fat nonetheless.

Amazing what things come to mind when you're writing the introduction to an interview.
Actually, sipping Diet Coke with the Newman's is quite an experience. I mean this is the couple who touched millions of people with the screenplays for Superman one thru three. In essence, they played a more significant part in revitalizing the Man of Steel for modern audiences than people usually realize. It was the Newman's who let us believe that Superman could fall in love and sacrifice his powers for the woman he loved, as well as letting us believe that a man in red and blue tights could be accepted as "real" (obviously Christopher Reeve had quite a bit to do with that as well)
No matter what happens with Superman IV, it was they who helped lay down the groundwork for what's to follow.
Once invited into their Manhattan apartment, one is instantly put at ease by their candor and good humour. These are people who have not been spoiled by success and have remained very down to earth. The conversation flows smoothly from their beginnings as a romantic and professional team, to such anecdotes as the fact that for a brief moment Muhammad Ali was considered to play Superman.
Departing from their home two hours later, I feel as though I've made two new friends, certainly no mean accomplishment for a Saturday afternoon. And in New York yet!

Q: To start off, how did the two of you get together in both a professional and personal sense?

DN: One of them proceeded the other by decades.

LN: We collaborated on two children first (all laugh).

DN: We met in college. I was a junior and Leslie was a sophomore at the University of Michigan, and at that time a friend of mine said, "There's this girl coming up from Chicago, and you've got to meet her." We met, and the rest is family history. Then we got married two years later, when I graduated, and our first child, Nathan, was born when I was in grad school we finished there, and came here when I went to work at Esquire. We had another child, Kathryn, our daughter, and many years went by in which Leslie was raising children...

LN: In the fifties it wasn't a question of what you were going to be, but rather that you were going to marry someone and what were they going to be?

DN: It's her theory on the changing concepts of Lois Lane.

LN: Yes (laughs), I wasn't going to have anything to do with that woman and her dippy hats who wanted to give it all up for the picket fence and five kids.

DN: Anyway, I started working with Esquire and got involved with a guy named Bob Benton. We became partners and wrote a lot of magazine things, books and then we started writing movies. We wrote Bonnie and Clyde, that was our first film, and then we did It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman; Oh! Calcutta! and a lot of movies. During the twelve years I worked with Bob, Leslie had written a novel which was published by Simon and Shuster in the early seventies. At one point Benton and I did a film called Bad Company, which was the first film he ever directed, and after he finished shooting it he was editing forever. He never likes to let go of the movie, and I had time on my hands. Leslie and I had been talking for years about an idea we thought would make a great movie, which was based on a lot of the people we knew because we used to spend time in the south of France in the summers and we'd seen a certain kind of crazy girl who would wander all over Europe. So we wrote a movie called The Crazy American Girl, which was about a girl in the south of France, and I directed it in France. That was the first thing we had ever done together. Benton and I did some other things, but by then our careers began to go in different directions because Bob got involved with The Late Show, and then somewhere in there the Superman movies began. The original deal on Superman was that we were supposed to do One and Two back to back (they were going to shoot it all at once) for a lot of financial reasons, which made a lot of sense on paper but wasn't feasible at all.
The original idea was, and I can't remember how this got worked out, Benton and I were going to write Superman I, and Leslie and I were going to write Superman II simultaneously. But since we were going to write these two movies with all the same characters, we all had to begin making up the stories and the characters together, so we went to Europe where the producers were based. The guy who was supposed to direct at the time was Guy Hamilton, who did some of the best James Bond movies. Bob Benton and I started working on one, while at the same time Leslie started making notes for number Two. What happened was we wrote the first draft of one, and Bob got his next picture, which was Kramer vs. Kramer, so after the first draft he couldn't be involved on Superman. At that point Leslie shifted over to one, then the two of us did that one. We also did Superman II, only about a tenth of which was shot by Richard Donner, and then they ran out of money. Then when Richard Lester came on to do Two, which was about two years later, he said, "You've got a great opportunity to make something better," which is something writers don't usually get. So working with Richard Lester we did two, and then we did three. And that's the basic chronology of how that all happened.

LN: The making of those films was a wonderful experience. There were so many friendships made, and it was a very good time.

DN: The interesting thing is that the Salkinds had no idea that I had anything to do with the Superman musical.

Q: To be honest, I really know very little about that one.

DN: That's very simple. Benton and I were freelancing magazine articles, and two guys, Lee Adams and Charles Strauss, the composers who had written Bye Bye Birdie and a lot of great shows, went to lunch with us and they suggested we write a musical. That didn't happen, but we had a wonderful time. Our son Nathan was eight years old at the time and he was reading comic books, and Leslie came out of his room and said, "You know what would make a great musical?" And she held up a Superman comic book. And I thought, "Wow, what a great idea." Benton liked it, and then Adams and Strauss liked it, so we wrote this musical called Superman, which Hal Prince produced and directed. It was a wonderful show, which took a year to get on as Broadway shows do. We were in trouble in Philadelphia, we got it whipped into shape and opened in New York in March of 1966, and got the greatest reviews you've ever seen in your life. We thought we had a smash hit...there was a line at the Alvin Theatre, now the Neil Simon Theatre, which went around the block, and we thought, "Here it comes guys. Get me that house in San Jose." We went off for a week thinking we had made it big, but what happened...well we had our own theories as to what happened. Benton called it "Cape lash," as opposed to backlash. The Batman television show had come out on television at the same time, and one of the things that happened, I think with some hindsight....

LN: It was a very different approach to the subject than we took in the films.

DN: It was a musical. It was fun, but it wasn't camp. We took the, character very seriously, though it was playful. He sang and danced...we're not talking about the Bible here anyway, but it was a lot of fun. Jack Cassidy played the villain, a guy named Bob Holliday played Superman. But then one or two things happened. One, I think, was the Batman show, just because it was a time for pop art, a lot of magazine coverage had Batman, Superman and Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup as though it was all part of the same phenomenon, and I think people said, "Why should I pay twelve bucks a ticket when I can watch Batman for nothing?" The other thing, despite the reviews and everything like that, people kept coming up to the box office and saying, "I want fifteen tickets for my son's birthday party on a Saturday matinee."

LN: Nobody wanted tickets at night because they thought it was a kid's show. It was a very sophisticated kind of humour in which the attempt to destroy Superman was done through psycho-analysis.

DN: There was this wonderful sequence we call the brainwashing scene, where the evil scientist asks why he dresses up like that. Is it a need to be noticed? (all laugh).

LN: But this was hardly stuff for five year olds. People just had this notion that it was for kids. It really was ahead of its time.

DN: We were selling out matinees and going empty at night. They changed the advertising and used sexy girls, but nothing worked. After three months, one day in July, it just closed and that was the end of that. Then I forgot about super heroes and many years later the Salkinds came to us, and they had no idea that I had done this show. I began to think that there was something in fate that this red caped creature would fly into my life every ten years and save my life, which he did.

Q: Was the character of Superman himself something that has appealed to you?

DN: Oh yes, endlessly. It still does.

LN: It's one of the basic American legends. David's always said that it was our King Arthur. People asked why we were doing a movie about a comic book hero, but nobody thinks it's odd to do a movie or musical about King Arthur or Robin Hood. Superman isn't just a comic, it's a myth, and it contains elements of so many of the basic myths...the God who walks among men.

DN: The notion of a God who walks among men disguised as a man occurs in every mythology, and there are biblical connotations in this legend as well: a father who says, "I will send my only son to earth to save mankind!" We all know where we've heard that story before, but it has such resonance.

LN: The loneliness of the God-like figure.

DN: All the notions of flying and super powers appear time and time again in all kinds of mythology, plus for us there's always been the endlessly fascinating modern psychological Freudian ramifications of that character, which is this totally schizoid personality.

LN: It's a triangle.

DN: One of our favourite things about that character is, and always has been, the classic split personality. There's Jekyll and Hyde, and Clark Kent and Superman. The thing that never occurred to anybody, as much as it occurred to us and we finally dealt with it in Superman III, was that it always seems to us that they didn't like each other. The Id and the Superego battled each other all the time. Then there's the Lois aspect. She loves Superman, but doesn't like Clark. Clark loves her and is jealous of Superman, so he doesn't like Superman.

LN: In the love scene, which is one of our favourites, she says, "But if it wasn't for him, I wouldn't have met you," and It's all so confusing because she's just found out the truth.

DN: We did three of those movies without ever losing our fascination with that myth and character. Part of the fun, also, is taking that myth and plunking it into the world we live in today. What if we lived in a world where Superman could fly by our window right now? It's the same world, except there's this guy who can fly and walk up the side of a building.

LN: What would it be like for him? But in today's world, which is why you have him looking at a phone booth and having to go into an alley because the phone booths have changed.

DN: There are a lot of super heroes who are going to have a lot of lasting meaning to people, but I don't think any of them comes close to Superman. Siegel and Shuster did that, and we were the happy recipients to take that ball and run with it a little bit more, and now somebody's doing Superman IV and we feel very curious as to what that's going to be about.

LN: We have done basically what we wanted to do. I was fascinated by Lois and her relationship to both Clark and Superman, and the nature of Lois. She reflects changing attitudes towards women. I couldn't bear the Lois of the fifties, but then it was pretty unbearable being a woman in the fifties.

DN: When Lois started in the comics in the forties, she really was tough...basically Roselyn Russell.

LN: When you write film, it helps to have somebody to write for. It doesn't matter if they're alive or dead. It's just a notion in your mind, although it's not likely to be that person in all probability, but it's who gives you the germ. So in this case; she didn't want to give it all up and settle down. She was spunky.

DN: Where as this Lois Lane of the fifties thought, "If he'd only marry me I could settle down."

LN: And she always got herself into dumb scrapes, not because of ambition but because of stupidity.

DN: The Lois in our Broadway show was more like that. She actually sang a song "What I've always wanted," including a picket fence. Well that's not what Margot Kidder's always wanted. That Lois is the Lois of the 70's.

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