SUPERMAN IV MEDIA

The following is a except from the Files Magazines - Superheroes On Screen Three [SH-3]: Superman & Spider-Man [1986].

Superman IV A Preview.
An Interview with Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal.
Screenwriters of "Superman IV".
By Edward Gross.

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Q: That's great, but why bring back an old villain? As writers, why are you doing this, rather than bringing in a new one?

MR: I think if you look in the comic books, which we both did, that no one captures the true adversarial depth that Lex does. Whenever Lex was in a magazine, those issues were the biggest sellers. Those were the special ones. And I think Gene's performance is special too. He can make it humorous without being silly.
LK: I also think that both Lex and Gene have the size to give Superman a strong adversary, and what I think happened in number Three is that you landed up with Robert Vaughn playing a kind of villain out of James Bond.... a kind of silly, evil mastermind you didn't quite believe was a real serious problem for Superman. And Lex brings with him some kind of resonance that he can really beat him.
MR: The first one had the advantage, and necessity, of restating the essential story for everyone. We figure that something fun in the elaboration, which is what the sequel does, is seeing how Superman continues. We really haven't seen that continuation with Lex. The second one sort of threw him away very quickly, and he became quite secondary. We think that it would be fun to have Gene back and investigate that, because the relationship between the two characters in the original stories is just wonderful. Again, we think having Gene back in that role will give it the proper scale and scope. These are more than just silly James Bond or adventure rip-offs. I think Superman holds a different kind of place in our mythology than even Indiana Jones and those kind of people do. They're much more life sized and less eternal.

Q: An article in The New York Post also mentioned disarmament.

MR: I would say that the story does deal with the question: Can Superman become involved in human destiny? What's great about Superman, as well as all the other equivalent myths through history, is the question of why the God doesn't step in and make everything right. That's always been one of the real core fascinations with that character. We will investigate that in this movie.
LK: The question, simply put, is why doesn't Superman just destroy all the missiles?

Q: But is it going to be the kind of thing where Superman finally says, "I should do this, but I can't. Man has to learn on his own?"

LK: Wait and see the movie.
MR: It's a very large budget. Larger than life and we know for a fact that the flying sequence will be real special. You'll just see a lot of new and wonderful things.

Q: Is there anything in particular that inspired the story?

MR: When Larry and I met Chris in New York, we went to the Museum of Natural History, where the IMAX theatre is. Larry has a five year old son, and, to take him out of the rain, we went into the IMAX theatre where they are showing a series of films on a giant 60 foot screen. They show these films that were taken from space of the earth.
LK: It's called "The Dream is Alive," and if you haven't seen it, you should.
MR: It's proof that reality is more fantastic than science fiction. It's that moving.
LK: If you've looked at the space program for twenty years, you haven't seen it until you've seen these films.
MR: It's very moving. Larry, Chris and I were cynically wondering how great it could be. We sat down there, with a Warner Brother executive as well, and there is footage of earth in daylight that you can actually see, for instance, not only the exact outline of the boot of Italy, but you can also pick out the town from a great distance.
LK: Waiter Cronkite is narrating.
MR: That same week the lead essay in The New Yorker just happened to be about a writer who happened to wander into the IMAX the same exact way, and he wrote about how you're brought to tears with the sense of seeing the entire planet as your home as opposed to the way we're brought up with this kind of nationalism. You begin to see the earth as this small, vulnerable but tender place that you live in, with no boundaries. You just see the planet. We felt that we wanted to investigate the orphan who has come to his new home aspect of the Superman mythology, and to endow certain humanistic concepts that a tradition of science fiction movies have. In The Day the Earth Stood Still, the visitor helps us understand who we are and how we should live. I think that's sort of the feeling we want to get in this movie.

Q: That's a pretty good way of telling me something without telling me something (laughs).

MR: Isn't it.

Q: My feeling is that Superman III was filled with problems....

MR: We thought it was horrible. It was a very cynical move to throw Richard Pryor a lot of money and throwaway the budget of the movie. Everything was done very cheaply.
LK: Superman III was made for about half the price of the First one, and part of that went to Richard Pryor. The idea of opening a Superman movie, before the credits, with Richard Pryor In an unemployment line, lets you know you're in trouble. Where's Supes?

Q: Are you apprehensive at all about tackling something like Superman; having to compete with what's come before?

LK: I feel a sense of responsibility to something which has been with us for fifty years, and you want to make sure that I'm not the guy who put Richard Pryor and Robert Vaughn in and screwed it up.
MR: Something else that's interesting is that Chris, no matter what, understands that character. You could say to him, "Would Superman do this? Or Clark Kent?" His answers always seem right, in terms of tone, in terms of nuance, gesture or humour in a scene. He can say, "No, Superman wouldn't do it that way. He'd do it this way." And he's almost always right.

Q: I think that's like Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, or Sean Connery as James Bond.

LK: That's it, exactly.

Q: Were you both Superman fans?

LK: What's interesting is that I was a fan when I was a teenager and not since, and one of the things that we've learned from the DC people is that they're doing a different Superman. Part of the "New Superman" is clearing away the kind of underbrush irrelevancies that have come into the Superman myth which I never knew about because I stopped reading it twenty years ago. Apparently whenever they've needed him to do something, they've taken short cuts and did a back story to cover it. It turns out that he had super hypnotism for a while. They've done new back stories....
LK: And new survivors from Krypton. Now they're going back to what, oddly, we always thought had been there.
LK: They're telling us that the new Superman is clean and fresh, but he's exactly the guy we remember. By the way, do you know this little oddity: in the comics he didn't originally fly. He leaped, and then, apparently, the Max Fleischer animated cartoons had him flying and that's when the comics changed.

Q: Is this Superman as powerful as the previous films?

MR: I would say it's going to be closer to Superman One. We're going to try and keep it pretty straight and direct.

Q: Is there any difficulty with DC concerning the new Superman?

MR: No, they've been fine.

Q: Is it difficult at all to have an actor billed as "co-creator" of the story?

MR: No, Chris' involvement has only been helpful.

Q: If this is a success, could you see yourselves writing another one?

LK: Probably not, because we kind of like to do different things. Just as an aside, we were very excited when this opportunity came along. You just don't get that many opportunities in life to plug into things that are mythic. This is the real thing.

Q: Is there a trap in writing so many sequels?

MR: We already have several other projects set up which aren't sequels.
LK: We're hoping that, in a sense, this is not seen as a sequel. It will be a great movie with this guy named Superman, who we all know and love, and we'll find out what he's up to now.

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