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SUPERMAN III - GENERAL/MEDIA An Interview with David and Leslie Newman. PAGE 2 Q: Were your original scenarios very different than the final results? DN: We've never had anything but wonderful experiences with the Salkinds, and that includes Santa Claus, and I'll work with them forever. LN: They treat writers wonderfully, and that includes the way they treat writer's work. DN: Not only that, but we were present on the set. I was present on the set of Santa Claus all through production, and we were present on the sets of the Superman films. They're just tops. I remember when we saw the rough cut of Superman II, I thought, "Jesus Christ, 98 percent of what was on the screen was exactly what we had written." It was a lovely experience because you don't always get that. I did a movie called Sheena, which I wish, to this day, I'd taken my name off of because I have about four lines in that movie. Another writer came in on it. It was a horrible story in which I stupidly left my name on it out of simple greed because I was protecting my points. Well it was points of nothing, as it turned out. Plus which it's embarrassing that my name is on it because it isn't my work. This was opposite to all the Superman films and Santa Claus. LN: Even during periods of the shooting when we weren't there, if Richard
felt he wanted to make some kind of changes he would call and ask what
we thought. It wasn't a case of somebody just going ahead and doing whatever
they felt. A lot of the things about making up Superman plots, is that
the dynamics is: think of a situation that is impossible, no matter what
you do, to get out of...now think of a way to get out of it. It's really
a one-two. Like, give up your powers and become mortal, and now the three
super villains have arrived. DN: Or two missiles going in opposite directions! That all came about
because Guy Hamilton, who was then going to be the director, had seen
Army documentary footage of the Cruise Missile where it goes across the
earth in thirty seconds. He was in love with that idea of seeing the Grand
Canyon turn into the Pacific Ocean from the rocket's point of view zipping
across the earth. That's how the whole notion of the XK-12, or whatever
it was, came about, and then the double bind of how is he going to stop
both of them? That's what's a lot of fun. LN: It's really tough to figure out a double bind, and then figure out
the solution to the unsolvable. DN: I'm happy in a way that Larry Konner and Mark Rosenthal are doing
Superman IV, because they're good and it's interesting to see afresh approach
to... Q: So you have no qualms about not being involved with the new one?
DN: When we finished Superman III, every one of us, starting with Chris,
said "No more Superman's." LN: There really was a moment of a lot of hugging after the premiere,
with tears in the eyes and a lot of "God it's been wonderful." DN: It turns out we meant it, but Christopher didn't (all laugh). First
of 'all he's getting five million dollars, which always helps convince
you, and also Christopher said there was really something else he wanted
to do with the character. We're written out on that character. And once
it went from the Salkinds to Cannon, it just wasn't our gang any more. Q: I hear they're bringing Gene Hackman back as Lex Luthor. DN: A different type of Luthor, from what we understand. But it'll be
a different more serious type of Luthor. Q: I don't mind that much, because I like the more serious approach. LN: I think there's a fine line. You can have humour, but you can't… DN: Apparently this Luthor is going through major personality changes.
But who knows? Q: In the first film, it's stated that it's forbidden for Superman to interfere with human history… DN: You're going to ask about the ending of one. Q: You betcha! Was that the original ending? LN: No. Q Could you tell me what it was originally supposed to be? LN: Originally it was supposed to be a cliffhanger. DN: What happened originally, is when we put the scripts together, in order to get Gene Hackman...the Salkinds got in trouble once because they made The Three Musketeers, but it was so long that they cut it in half and made two movies out of it, but they didn't pay the actors for two movies, so a lot of people hit the fan and there was a tremendous lawsuit and contracts were renegotiated and the Salkinds got a reputation for being naughty guys for a while. Well when we did one and two, and the original idea was that they would be shot back to back, they said "Instead of putting 'The End,' just write a sort of transitional scene so it will look like one movie." We said, "Look, these are professional actors, and they're going to know that something is up when they get a four hundred page script." But at that time there was a cliffhanger, because at one point, for some silly reason, we thought part one would close and a week later part two would open. LN: We were not thinking about the realistic lapse in time. DN: So the original idea was that Superman would throw one of those nuclear rockets into space, and that's what cracked open the Phantom Zone to release Zod, Ursa and Non. I loved that, too, because in order to save one thing he inadvertently created another problem for Earth. LN: It was a great idea, but unfortunately you had the time lapse of
two years. DN: Richard Lester said, "Nobody is going to remember how part one
ended." So that's when we came up with the Eiffel Tower scene and
the terrorists. The cliffhanger, which I now remember quite vividly, had
the villains being freed, with us not knowing if Superman was alive or
dead because of the nuclear explosion. The villains yelled, "Free,
free!" That later became the beginning of Superman II. Q: So in this case Lois would have still been dead? DN: The Lois death scene came afterwards. That was before the idea of
reversing time and the whole thing. There are two copouts in those movies
in terms of people saying, "How come you're not supposed to do that
and you did that?" That was the first one, and the second one was
in Superman II when we say that all is lost, and then he gets his powers
back thanks to the green crystal. LN: But I don't think of that as a cop out. I think that's "magic."
Christopher always called the green crystal the "Tube of Prell." Q: So bringing Lois back was simply just a way to end it. DN: Yes. Q: Is there anything particular about Christopher Reeve's portrayal that sticks out in your mind? DN: I think some of the best work he's done as an actor is in Superman III with the evil Superman character. It's wonderful the way that happens in degrees. I just think it's his best work. There's that tiny little scene with Lana Lang where he starts to come on to her instead of going to get the bridge. By the big fight in the auto graveyard I think he's just great. It was the first thing shot in that movie too. They started with the hardest part, but he really knows the character. Whatever happens on Superman IV, he's not going to mess around with the character. We're going to be doing a non super hero film together. Q: What's that? A: It's a romantic comedy called Letters To Michael, which I wrote and hope to direct, which is about a guy who advertises on the subway for a wife and gets eight hundred marriage proposals. It's based on a true story, and it's something Chris very much wants to do. Q: Konner and Rosenthal mentioned to me that they were trying to get back to the epic quality of number one. Do you agree with the lighter approach the films were taking as they went on? DN: I don't really believe that they were. Our favourite is Superman II. My feeling about one is... LN: We had so much back story to get out of the way. DN: I think one is three different movies. There's the Krypton part of one, which you had to tell because that's the legend, although there's something which seems pretentious about it to me. LN: On the other hand, you really don't have time to get to know the individual characters on Krypton as characters, so you can't make Krypton have any reality. DN: Then there's the Smallville stuff, and that's a kind of a John Ford
looking...there's all those landscapes, Glen Ford, farmers and all that
stuff which is another movie. And once you get to Metropolis, that's another
movie. To me there was an unavoidable clash of styles in one, although
the film works wonderfully. Two, to us, was just a dream to do because
you didn't have to go into all that stuff, and we recapped the original
under the credits. And I love those three villains. I think two works
the best. LN: The love scene even made us cry. DN: I know what these guys mean by "epic," but to me Superman II was a fairy tale. First of all it was a fairy tale about love, second of all it had the greatest threat because it was three against one with a slam bang finish. LN: The thing we love most is the intercutting, the pacing of the stories. DN: Making those villains up is something we were very proud of. What happened on three, is that it's the Gus Gorman part of it which Christopher felt didn't belong. His character he loved. LN: But let's be realistic, when you have someone like Richard Pryor
the studio wants more than you might necessarily want to do. DN: I'm not copping out for it because we're responsible but we sat around
in London with Richard Lester, and we began by saying, "How are we
going to top two?" When we were in Niagra Falls shooting Superman
II in Niagra Falls, Leslie and I were sitting in a restaurant in this
hotel, and there was something about Niagra Falls being spoken about in
terms of a place for young couples to go. I had been to my own class reunion
two years before, and we started talking about the fact that there was
no where else to go with the Superman/Lois love story. LN: We just didn't want to do the same thing again. DN: We were talking about Frank Capra movies, and about going back home
again and you can't go home again, and the whole Lana Lang/Superman going
back to Smallvllle idea began while we were doing number two. We had that
for a while. Richard Lester said, about eight months later, "I want
to do something about computers. I don't know what, but I think that's
what's happening in the world today, and Superman III ought to reflect
that." We thought about computers and what we came up with is that
they're running our lives, we don't know how and that we're somehow threatened
by them. Then one night Richard Pryor was on the Johnny Carson show, and
Carson asked him what he was doing next. Richard replied, "I'm waiting
to see the next Superman movie. Boy do I love Superman, and I'd do anything
if I could be in one of those pictures." At that point light bulbs
went off, so we created that character for him. Once you get Richard Pryor,
obviously you're getting lighter and I think Christopher feels that what
happened on three was not that Richard Pryor was in it, but that the balance
was tipped in Pryor's favour or too much towards the Gus Gorman part of
that story. One thing about that movie that's structurally strange is
that we never brought those two stories together until very close to the
end of the movie. In Superman II the three stories combined in the middle.
In this one they combined, but the Gus Gorman character didn't really
come into contact with Superman until the end of the movie, so a lot of
what Richard did was without Chris, and a lot of what Chris did was without
Richard. If you talk to Chris he'll tell you that the scene which distresses
him is Gus Gorman going off the building with the table cloth around his
neck. I still think it's funny. It's not epic, and it is lighter and it
is comedy. I don't want to apologize for it, but it did go more, in that
direction and I hope when they say they want to pull it back, they don't
pull it back too much. I think there's something devilish about Gene's
portrayal of Lex Luthor. LN: It's a fine line in how you approach it. When we did the first film,
you could not have somebody saying, "Up, up and away." We could
not have someone say, "Look, it's a bird...it's a plane..."
Or change in a phone booth. It would have been horrendous. It's a funny
kind of balance you have to pull off. " Q: When I say lighter, I'm talking about a phone booth being knocked over in the big battle of Superman II and some guy is still talking on the phone and laughing and then in Superman III when the figures in the traffic lights actually start fighting. Now that, to me, is being too light. DN: If you look at Richard's films, he loves slapstick and gags, and we wrote for the director. We had a great time doing the opening scene where one disaster leads into another one. We wrote the traffic light business, and it still makes me giggle. It is comical, and maybe some people feel it's too much. Some people have a certain amount of rigidity. We feel, probably more than most people do,...Janet Maslin's review in The New York Times said, in essence, "Why don't they leave well enough alone? Why do they try to do new things with that character?" What she's saying is that each movie should go on doing the same exact thing. LN: Then they write a review saying, "They do the same old thing.
Why don't they do something different?" DN: Then you get those Rocky IV reviews saying, "I think I've seen
this movie four times." LN: Plus which we were hitting a problem with Lois. It was silly to do
the same thing. The Lana Lang romance is not on the scale of a Lois romance,
it's on a lighter scale as well. DN: The trickiest thing about these kinds of movies is you walk on a
very thin line concerning tone. One false move and you're into camp or
you're into Saturday morning cartoons. It's very tricky, and I suppose
we haven't always been right, but it's much harder than people think.
It's not the Penguin going around saying, "Hah hah, Batman, I'll
get you and your little friend." It's a lot easier writing Ghostbusters
than a super hero movie, and I'm really curious about the Spider-Man movie
and how they're going to handle it. Q: Were the reviews for Superman III as positive as they had been
for the first two? DN: No, but I'll tell you that the best reviews we got on three were
the best reviews we've gotten, in a way. Richard Corliss from Time magazine
loved it. LN: One doesn't mind negative reviews, if they're the type that you can
learn something from. If they're constructive. DN: Sure the mixed reviews bothered me, but I've had a lot of movies
open and close with all kinds of reviews, so I think I know how to live
with that. It performed well and that's really the bottom line. People
are entitled to their opinions, and I'm not going to pass the buck. That
is our movie, and that's the way we wanted it to come out. Maybe we were
wrong... LN: What interested us may not have been what interested other people
as much. To us the notion of somebody loving Clark Kent and thinking of
Superman as just a nice person was interesting, but other people might
want to see somebody in love with Superman. DN: Again, I didn't learn anything from those critics, except that it didn't work for many of them. In any case, on Superman III the only thing that I think we all felt afterwards, and we still feel, is that we've taken it as far as we can, and now the torch will be passed to Konner and Rosenthal.
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