Superman Unmade #4: Superman Lives (Take 4B)

Here there be spoilers.

"I won some battles; I lost some. We had a great time doing it. The studio loved the script."

Kevin Smith on Superman Lives

This is an incremental post, dealing with the second draft of Kevin Smith's Superman Lives. I'll try not to repeat myself, analysis of the first draft(s) are here and here. (There's still no explanation of the scenario which produced two drafts in 2 days).

Who wrote it?

Kevin Smith - Writer/Director/Actor/Podcaster and comic book nut.

When was it written?

This draft is dated 3.27.97, almost two months after the last.

How long is it?

The PDF floating around the web is 139 pages, but it's badly formatted. I went back to the original text file (which has been around for years and seems to be the source of the PDF) and ran it through Final Draft. That produced a 122 page PDF which is, I hope, a bit closer to what Smith would have produced. We'll never know for sure unless a scanned or digital copy shows up. The structure breakdown below is based on that.

What's the broad structure?

Act 1 = 1-23
Act 2a = 24-53
Act 2b = 54-100
Act 3 = 101-122

What's the context?

Smith complained that while writing the first draft, executives called him three or four times a day to check on his progress. Calling them "the most anxious group of motherfuckers I've ever met in my life" didn't endear him to anyone, though he later singled out the execs at Peters' production company. That first draft interested Nic Cage, with Variety reporting him as "seriously considering" the role on 21st February 1997. Just before Smith turned in his second draft, tentative discussions began with Tim Burton to direct (at Smith's apparent suggestion) after a number of others had turned the project down, most notably Robert Rodriguez. Variety reported on Burton's potential deal on April 4th, 1997, and he seems to have come on officially somewhere between late April and early May. Both Cage and Burton signed lucrative "pay or play" deals. As soon as Burton was on board, he rejected Smith's script and brought in Wesley Strick for a page one rewrite.

What's changed (and works better)?

• The Krypton prologue is gone. Instead of front-loading the back-stories of Brainiac and The Eradicator, Smith folds them into Act 2, in a message from Jor-El downloaded into Superman's brain as he lies in recovery. This tightens the first act up, but the flashback, whilst occasionally poignant, remains clunky, and Smith never convincingly masks the heavy exposition.

• Corto Maltese is replaced by a Metropolis-set kidnap plot involving Governor Caitlin Bree and her son. It works better, and almost certainly would have been cheaper to film than a beach-set melee with underwater photography.

• The relationship between Lois and Clark makes sense on at least one level; she knows who he is. Smith has said that anything less makes a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter look stupid, and he's probably right. Having said that, he indicates that Superman revealed his identity to her, not that she figured it out, which undermines his point somewhat.

• We see something of Superman's concern for bystanders during his battle with Doomsday. The fight now takes place mostly in the sewers, but it doesn't feel any less epic than the previous versions because they were so anaemic. This is better paced, more intense, and not the painting by numbers of the first draft.

• The Eradicator is fleshed out a little more; a sentient computer with a perpetual battery and an autonomous body. Brainiac has stolen part of this technology for himself, which explains why he's able to partially form his own body, and why he needs the rest of it to finish the job. This means his goal and rationale are also laid out much more clearly.

• The Shadowcaster is employed earlier, and its effects are suitably accumulative, making the drain on Superman's energy more believable.

• "She has trouble... having me". I really have no idea which column this should go in. Smith seems to be implying that it's difficult for Lois and Superman to have sex (harking back to the Kryptonite condom). It's more explicit when measured against the previous version, which was "I would, but she won't have me". I don't know whether to laud Smith for his semi-realistic take on the difficulties of copulating with a god or roll my eyes at him for being grubby in a kids' film.

What's changed (and still doesn't work?)

•  Lex's kidnap plot. This took six months to plan and is designed to "persuade" Governor Bree to back The Wertham Act (Smith's little in-joke for comic book geeks) which effectively bans Superman. Six months to plan a street snatch involving hired thugs and a Batman villain... in Superman's city. A city where he hears and sees almost everything unless he happens to be distracted by something. Do they lay a distraction? They do not. Does Superman respond almost immediately and deal with the situation with minimum fuss? He most certainly fucking does. SIX MONTHS. I give you Kevin Smith's Lex Luthor, who, whilst possibly being broadcast around the world by Brainiac, openly admits to his part in plotting to kill Superman.

• Hacker Jimmy is back. And to top that, he's now an expert cat burglar who can simply sneak into the billion-dollar LexCorp building at will. Not because that's his character but because the plot requires him to.

• Misty, Lex's bodyguard. She does nothing of note and has no discernible character of her own. At one point Smith even forgets she's there; she's present at the start of the elevator scene, has vanished by the middle of it (conspicuously failing to protect her boss), and is waiting upstairs in the penthouse office come the next scene.

• Superman as judge, jury and executioner. Early on, he flirts with the notion of killing Luthor, though it's never let on whether he's just trying to scare Lex or if he's really contemplating it. It's taken to an odd extreme when he arbitrarily decides that Brainiac is just a machine, and must be destroyed. This is an extension of a previous conversation with The Eradicator, who states that if a machine begins to feel, positive or negative, it must be shut down. If machines who feel must be shut down, who's the one to determine that? And assuming someone has the authority, Superman's assertion that Brainiac is "just" a machine removes him from the equation. Is Brainiac a machine or not? There's a tangle of themes here waiting to be unpicked, but they never are.

• Superman believes that he's actually saving Lois every time he saves someone else. But that not only reductively addresses his innate goodness (what about before he met her, and what exactly did Ma and Pa Kent teach him?) it makes him seem a little obsessive and creepy.

• Massive logic gaps remain. If Jor-El was routinely sending The Eradicator down to study Krypton's core, why didn't Brainiac simply ambush him there, given that he was plugged into it? How does Luthor erect Superman's memorial so quickly? Why, if The Eradicator is a living computer, does he spend 24 straight hours typing in order to transport Superman's body out of the tomb? If the mythical alien marauders don't know where Earth is, how can they possibly send Doomsday to pave their way? If Brainiac can't locate The Eradicator, why bother tasking humanity's primitive technology with helping?

• Peters gets what he wanted; a suiting up scene, because Batman. Smith probably had little choice; either he wrote it or someone else would have, and he at least makes the rationale decent enough, with each piece of the armour designed to protect a damaged part of Superman's body. Unfortunately there's no pass for the polar bears vs Brainiac moment, which is such a bat shit crazy idea that it's hard to imagine anyone making it work. We should be thankful that Smith managed to forestall Peters' cuddly dog idea.

• Superman admits that before his death, he felt like a stranger in a strange land. But we never see this, so it means nothing. It's retroactively stacking the narrative deck. It's cheating. He also says that he's come to realise what keeps him here, but being kept here wasn't his dilemma at the start of the story, so nothing's changed. This resolution would have fit with the conflict established in Poirier's drafts, but it resolves nothing in Smith's. There's nothing of consequence, no resonance, and come the finale, everything simply goes back to "normal" in Metropolis. Smith says "There's no beginning and no end in comic books. It's all middle story.' It's like a soap opera that goes on and on", and whilst this may be true of comics... this is a movie.

Conclusion

Smith claims that Jon Peters promised he'd be the on-set writer, that WB would hire "one of these MTV guys who's real in line with our vision." Interestingly, this is pretty much the blueprint for the Marvel Studios model, hiring non-superstar directors to service the material and the producers' approach to it, rather than the other way around. Smith may have been right when he called Peters "either one of the most progressive individuals in films today, or just a flat out idiot". Either way, Peters' promises evaporated when Burton signed on.

Why did Burton about-turn on Smith's script?  He declined even a perfunctory meeting with Smith to discuss if they could work together, and it's possible he was never sold to start with, seeing instead the potential in the character rather than Smith's take on him. That wouldn't be out of left-field; their sensibilities almost diametrically opposed, Smith and Burton doesn't feel like a natural marriage. (Though admittedly stranger partnerships have worked).

While there are silver linings in the Smith drafts, they're few and far between, and it's not hard to see why Burton wanted to go in another direction. The problem is summed up in the battle over the scene on Mount Rushmore. Execs wanted to trim it for running time, but Smith maintained that its character work would be the heart of the film, and almost quit twice to make his point. The trouble is that it's not strong enough character work; it essays a conflict which is thereafter largely ignored and had no hope of resolution to start with. Superman can't stop being Superman. That's who he is, but by choosing that as his conflict, Smith ensures he's never forced to grow or change, and as a result he's dull. It's Lois that has to change her mind in order for their relationship to continue, and that sells her short.

So we have a writer fighting for a scene he believes in as the heart of his story (but who doesn't use it to drive a workable central conflict) and a group of execs who want to chop it out because all they care about is toy sales. Nobody wins, and the story, thematically fractured and frustratingly illogical, still essentially belongs to The Eradicator, relegating a static Superman to second lead in his own movie.

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(All sources have been linked to except the script: if you are the creator or originator of any material you feel has been misappropriated, please let me know and I'll do my best to correct the problem.)