Superman Unmade #5: "Superman" (Take 5)

Here there be spoilers.

"I had no idea how Tim reacted... but at our first meeting he made it clear that he wanted to jettison the Smith draft.”  Wes Strick on Superman Lives

Side note: check out Jake Rossen's excellent Superman Vs. Hollywood.  It's now 6 years old and as a result of the leaks has become a little outdated in the accuracy of its information about some of the Superman Lives-era scripts (there's no Toyman in Strick's draft), but it's a page-turning account of the tales behind Hollywood's attempts to bring The Man of Steel to the big (and small) screen from his inception all the way to Superman Returns. Maybe it's time for an updated edition, post-MOS?

Who wrote it?

Wesley Strick, credited on Arachnaphobia, Cape Fear, Wolf, and A Nightmare on Elm Street (the remake) amongst others. He's also widely acknowledged to have contributed uncredited work on Batman Returns, Face/Off and Mission Impossible II.

When was it written?

The script is dated 7.7.97 and is labelled "First Draft".

How long is it?

117 pages.

What's the broad structure?

Act 1 = 1-38

Act 2a = 39-60

Act 2b = 61-90

Act 3 = 91-117

What's the context?

Burton came on to direct Smith's "Superman Lives" script in April/May of 1997, and immediately decided to go in a different direction, despite unease from Peters and Warner execs. He apparently tapped first Akiva Goldsman, then David Koepp to pen the new draft, but struck out with both before turning to Strick, who had done an uncredited production rewrite on Batman Returns. Visiting Burton's apartment to spitball ideas, Strick turned in his draft in about 2 months. It's not known if this is the only draft he completed, but it's the only one which has come to light so far. Leaked to the internet in January 2013, it's titled simply "Superman".

Why didn't it happen?

Between April 1997 and October 1998, the tortured development process on the new Superman movie actually ramped up into pre-production, and all the concept art and production design on the net seems to be largely from this period. This was a "Go", with Burton and Cage both signing pay-or-play deals (despite a late-breaking stand-off with Paramount over Cage's availability). Behind the scenes, however, Strick's script was causing consternation; Warner exec Terry Semel apparently "reacted violently" to it, and Nic Cage was uncomfortable with moves away from core parts of the mythology, telling Cinescape "I think they should stay true to the Superman costume" (ironically, they mostly do; Superman begins and ends in his classic get-up). Strick has said that he and Burton continued to work on the script until they "ran out of time" and Dan Gilroy was brought in to replace him, ostensibly to bring the cost down as Warner began to fret about the spiralling budget.

According to artist Sylvain Despretz, the production design team never even saw the Strick script. “We got the Kevin Smith script, but we were told not to read it, because they knew he wasn’t going to stay on the movie. So we used Kevin Smith’s script as a guide to the sets we might be doing, and we waited and waited for the new script to come in, but it never did.”

The script

Once again, I've tried to focus on the script and filter out the convoluted but entertaining mythology that's grown up around the pre-production...

But the stories are relevant. What happened in boardrooms, agencies and Burton's apartment had all but shaped Strick's Superman before he'd even put fingers to keyboard. From Jon Peters' giant mechanical spider obsession and Warners' pandering to merchandisers, via Burton's thematic preoccupations (all major considerations in a sea of restrictive elements) Strick's script had an almost impossible job; please everyone.  

It's fairly safe to say it pleased no one. It's a first draft, and as Hemmingway said, the first draft of everything is shit.  If there are further Strick drafts floating around, they haven't surfaced yet but it's entirely possible there's another, better one out there. Given that it took 16 years for this to emerge, don't rule it out.

What does Superman want at the start of the story?

He wants to belong. Lonely, alienated and unable to fit in, he (along with the rest of the world) believes he's simply a freak human with extraordinary abilities; an evolutionary leap which might portend what the human race will one day evolve into. A Man of Tomorrow...

What happens next?

LexCorp discovers the trail of an alien spacecraft and tracks its impacts to the Arctic circle and Smallville, Kansas, making Clark wonder if he may have been the passenger. Meanwhile, scouring the galaxy for a renewable energy source, the Kryptonian A.I. Brainiac (created by Superman's father, Jor-El) comes to Earth. Hatching a plan with Luthor to destroy the Man of Steel, Brainiac hopes to flush out the more advanced A.I. assigned to accompany and protect Superman. Upgrading a LexCorp satellite with his own technology, Brainiac creates the Shadowcaster, blocking out the sun and cutting Superman off from his energy source. Weakened and unable to recharge, Superman is killed by the creature Brainiac sends to confront him; Doomsday.

Does Superman resolve his conflict, and if so, how?

Yes. Resurrected by the second generation Kryptonian A.I. (created by his father) known as K, Superman deals with his mortality, using K's abilities to mimic his old powers and confront his twin nemeses, who have merged into a single villain calling itself "Lexiac". In the climax aboard Lexiac's orbiting skull-ship, he must decide between joining his Kryptonian "brother" or protecting Lois, the only person who makes his earthly life bearable. Given that one of those options involves being sucked into a three-way psycho-physical congress with Brainiac and Luthor, you can see why he chooses Earth.

What works?

• Clark as a lonely, alienated individual - To a point. Clark is nicely drawn as an outsider; what Cage called a "beautiful freak". His sense of loneliness is tangible. The flashbacks to his childhood provide some context as to how and why he feels this way, and has done his entire life. He doesn't know what he is and there's no joy in him at all; he's introspective and lonely, with no family or friends. He's in love with a woman who pays him no heed, whilst his other identity is celebrated. It's almost full circle back to the prototypical geek fantasy cooked up by Siegel and Shuster.
• The Eradicator - Scaled back significantly from Smith's take, he's now known as simply as "K" (which probably saves a whole page over the course of the script) and is initially visualised as a glowing orb.  Burton thought it too "tinkerbell", but as he's no longer the autistic android half of an intergalactic buddy movie, this means...
• Superman is the focus of the story. Which should be the point of a Superman movie.
• Exposition and flashbacks - There's some ingenuity to the sequences designed to lift heavy back story. K shows rather than tells Superman what happened to Krypton (much as the Kryptonian ship A.I. does in Man of Steel). Strick also structures the Kryptonian flashbacks so we don't see exactly the same thing twice; redacting Jor-El's message to Kal the first time, we hear what he says in the reprise, which at least keeps it interesting.
• Civil unrest. After Superman's death, Metropolis goes to hell.  We haven't seen this since the Poirier drafts, and it heightens the sense that Superman is all that stands between humanity and chaos, at least in this city.
• Kal-El. The idea of Superman's alien persona as the third aspect of his tri-furcated personality is an interesting one. If there's one director you can rely on to further complicate a character with identity issues, it's probably Burton. Kal-El is Superman at his most alien, all his learnt humanity burned off. He's cold, harsh and distant - like The Eradicator of the "Reign of The Supermen" storyline. He's essentially been Robocopped, inside a suit of armour, emotionally unreachable, with little or no memory of what he was, acting on instructions and unable to intuit. Dramatically, it's an effective idea. Having always thought himself human only to discover he's anything but, the question becomes whether his connection to another person can transcend genetics and bring him back. That's pretty epic; he has to recover not just his powers but his personality.
• Superman as just a super man.  It's a nice nod to one of the earliest aspects of the character and a different approach from what's gone before.
• No Kryptonite.  Yes, I'm scraping the barrel. Yes, it's entirely necessary to do so.

What doesn't work?

• Clark as a lonely, alienated individual. Up to a point, the Burton-ised Clark works... But then a line is crossed. Because this Clark isn't just a lonely, alienated and misunderstood individual; he's... well, weird. He keeps a photo of his dead parents above his bed. Imagine getting the super-lovin' on beneath those two. He's so in love with Lois that he keeps a photo of her in his dresser drawer... which he takes with him on his trip to Smallville. That's not just alienated; that's obsessive and creepy. There's no glimpse of a normality, or even a history of normality, that would enable a young Clark Kent to go out into the world and make something positive of himself. His life is bifurcated, but we don't really get a sense of that because... 
• Superman doesn't show up until page 30. In a story about dichotomy, we haven't seen the other side of his existence; up to this point, all we have is Clark. As a consequence, we never get a proper sense of Superman and Lois' relationship, because their first interaction is after the roller coaster set-piece, from where they go straight into him telling her his secret... in the middle of a crowded restaurant, in the middle of the day, by taking off his glasses and shaking his hair loose like a sexy librarian in a bad porno. Regardless of the laughable aesthetic, the scene doesn't work because we've never seen how she treats Superman differently to Clark, so there's no alternative context. She goes from utterly disdaining Clark to talking about having babies with him.
• Superman's internal conflict is resolved at the halfway point. The key difference to the Smith drafts is Superman's central conflict; belonging somewhere. But come the climax, Superman has already made his choice. His resurrection, although made physiologically possible by K, only works when K tells him to fight for what he loves; Lois. Returning from the grave is his moment of truth; choosing to live for something on this planet. The script tries to extend the conflict by having him adopt the cold Kal-El personality, but it's unclear if this is a deliberate choice (the "scam" referred to in the final act?) or a genuine side-effect of his death. The choice presented in the climax, to be one third of a weird alien hybrid or to save Lois, choose Earth, and try to fit in, is a no-brainer because his internal dilemma is already resolved.
• Lois. She's introduced here as a woman whose beauty is matched only by her ambition. Not just, courageous, intense, driven, dedicated… simply ambitious and beautiful. We have to wonder why she isn't on TV, or a politician, just two of the million better jobs to be ambitious in. She confronts three looters, and you might argue that this is typical, brave-to-the-point-of-stupid Lois...  But we don't allow her that because mostly she's an idiot, running off to snag an exclusive with Luthor at the worst possible time and effectively putting herself in harm's way. Yet again, the villains' endgame is to kidnap her, and once she's in that scenario she transcends stupid and unlikeable to just plain annoying. Which leads me to the fact that...
• Everyone is stupid.  The inability of anyone to put two and two together is breathtaking.
• • Lex announces that he's found traces of an alien spacecraft and stokes panic about the potential passenger. Yet neither the billionaire genius nor anyone else considers this might have something to do with the single inhabitant of the planet who can bend steel, fly, shoot heat from his eyes, and is generally impervious to harm. Clark is the only one who makes the connection, and only because the ship is revealed to have broken up over Smallville.
  • Having left his body in an ice-cavern just two weeks earlier, Lois fails to recognise the armoured man lurking in the shadows, fighting crime, flying, wearing an S on his chest...  I'll buy her doubting that it's actually him, but she doesn't even seem to know who he's supposed to be. Similarly, Lex demands to know "who this new super-nemesis is". In a world where Superman is the only meta-human, and his tomb is empty...
  • Having earlier figured out that Superman derives his power from the sun, Lexiac's solution to his resurrection is to... shoot him with a concentrated beam of solar energy. That's like gambling you could smother Popeye in spinach before he managed to get a bite. It doesn't even take into account that Superman is wearing K, the perpetual energy source Brainiac craves. Why risk destroying the very thing he's after? I'll tell you why, because...
• Plot dictates character… and characters start to look stupid when they do what the plot demands, because they have to get us from point A to point B.
• • Would Lois place herself in Luthor's grasp by dashing off for an exclusive just as the reborn Superman begins to make himself known? Of course not, but Lois has to be seized by Lexiac or there's no endgame.
  • Would Clark really allow himself to be seen trudging through the Arctic in nothing but a suit? Of course not, but Lois has to know what Clark means when he tells her with his dying breath to take him "home."  Astonishingly, Lois refers back to the scene later, saying that Clark said he was going home… but nowhere in the scene does Clark mention home.
  • K's death occurs not as a natural extension of his character, but because he's a deus ex machina who must be disposed of. His sacrifice is never adequately set up and so feels like a random decision; there are a hundred ways to destroy a satellite and it's never established that this was the only viable one. It's a beat which is never earned, and undermines the bitter sweetness of Clark losing the last of Krypton just as he finds it. Smith's script failed in a similar approach to the destruction of The Eradicator, but it was the character's internal logic which didn't hold up; the structure was sound enough. K's character has no such structure.
• The plot. It's dumb, and as it dictates the characters, so are they. Having mocked Smith for using the "Mr. Burns ploy" in his script, Strick sticks with the same plan, albeit with details tweaked here and there. The structure of the story is largely the same, as is the intertwining of Superman's origins with K and Brainiac. As we noted earlier, it's likely that Strick was hemmed in by the sheer amount of time and money already spent on development, demanding adherence to certain parameters; if the art department was working from Smith's script, he couldn't veer too far off without making that work worthless. And yet this version is actually dumber, because the Shadowcaster only darkens part of the American mid-west; it doesn't even extend to Chicago, where Jimmy's mother reports that it's sunny and warm. All Superman has to do is stray out of the shadow zone to regain his powers. I'll buy the fact that Clark doesn't know his gifts are derived from sunlight, but as his sickness coincides with the eclipse, it wouldn't hurt to apply a little common sense. That never happens, though, because of...
• Failures of logic and an inability to define and adhere to its own rules.
• • Brainiac "needs refined energy" but is travelling the galaxy in a big-ass skull-ship crewed by dozens of mutants. How did he get to our system? He's on Earth's doorstep but hasn't been able to detect that we use nuclear power; it takes North America coming into view before he sees it. Nobody sees him coming, nor parked in orbit, nor zipping down in his shuttle to tear open Superman's tomb.
  • Superman flies into orbit to get a good look at the Shadowcaster and somehow doesn't manage to spot the skull-ship, yet he can later pick out both from the surface.
  • Superman agrees to trade K for the Shadowcaster.  Why would Lexiac trade something which, when destroyed, would see Superman's powers restored? And if K is able to duplicate those powers, why does Superman not simply destroy the Shadowcaster rather than barter for it? "Because they have Lois!" you say. But Superman is trying to convince Lexiac that he doesn't care about Lois, and if this were true he has nothing to lose by destroying the Shadowcaster. Not destroying it using the K-suit gives the game away, and thus his bluff doesn't make any sense. And why set the swap for the stroke of midnight when Metropolis is permanently dark?
  • Once Superman is back, his powers restored, K says another shot from the sun gun would kill him. If it didn't kill him when he was powerless, why should it now?
  • After his restoration, his old suit simply appears on him, cape and all.  It wasn't sitting under the "new" suit, so where did it come from?  It's as illogical as Poirier's magic glasses.
  • Superman's cape, which has in no way been established as special (other than appearing spontaneously as part of his new ensemble) is used to block the sun gun's barrel and destroy it. It survives said blast intact. If his "new" old costume is going to be Kryptonian technology, or even part of K, that's fine... but it's never established as the case.
  • K has a perpetual battery; it's the macguffin on which half the film is built. So how exactly does one completely discharge a perpetual battery in order to destroy a Shadowcaster?
  • The "S" stands for Science. Because apparently, Krypton shares our alphabet.
• The villains are awful. Both are scenery chewing, moustache-twirling caricatures. Has anyone ever demanded we hear Luthor telling someone to "chill" like a late '90s L.A. hipster? Brainiac's dialogue is so arch it's painful; it's the kind of material a performer like Jim Carrey could make work because he's so over the top, but that doesn't mean he should have to.
• Pop-culture references. They don't just date a script, they ensure the writer looks embarrassingly out of touch.  Lex impersonates Don King; badly.  Lex riffs on Rocky; badly.  Doomsday bites Superman's ears in a draft dated 10 days after the infamous Tyson/Holyfield fight. All this is enough to make your eyes roll so hard they never come back, but then there's the holy grail; something to rival Poirier's "THRASHING ALTERNATIVE MUSIC". Strick describes Kal-El, lurking in the shadows of the burning city, as looking like a "A hip-hop Phantom of the Opera".  That this ends up not being the dumbest line in the script says a lot. How about "Fade back to my crib?" Eurgh. Let's not.
• Thematic sledgehammers. "Maybe a non-human can be as human as you or I. If we treat him that way."  Theme is fine, arguably necessary, but best when skillfully woven into a story instead of crammed down our throats.  Come the climax, theme is simply permitted to outweigh logic, and we have a nonsensical playing out of an inner conflict which has already been resolved. If Superman's great strength couldn't keep him out of Lexiac's grasp, how does Lois manage to do so? Because it fits the theme. Was the whole thing taking place on some kind of metaphysical level? Who cares? THEME. What are Brainiac's psychic powers and where did they come from? THE THEMEVILLE BRANCH OF THEMES 'R US, UNITED STATES OF THEMERICA. Why does Superman's resistance to Lexiac's psychic field cause Lexiac's self-destruction? THEMETHEMETHEME CAN'T HEAR YOU. Well, okay... but unless theme and action are married logically, this is the kind of disconnected outcome you're going to end up with.
• Confusing action. Much of the climax takes place aboard the Shadowcaster, but there's never an adequate description of the geography.  The slugline is INT./EXT., but how can the mutants be firing at Superman from inside without breaching their own hull? We're never told. How can Superman be talking if he's in the vacuum of space? We're never told. Whilst the very idea of Lexiac has drawn derision, it's a potentially workable idea if executed properly. Trouble is, we're never given a proper visualisation to hang a hat on. Having read the script three times, I still have no real idea what he's supposed to look like. Maybe they were still designing the toy.
• It's not really for kids. Strick said that “What excited Tim was that, in contrast to the two Batman films... Superman was going to be a superhero adventure set primarily in daylight; in sunlight, even." But that's a bait and switch, because more than half the script takes place during an eclipse. Regardless, night or day isn't necessarily an indicator of tone. Warners seems to have no problem with dark movies. They definitely have no problem with movies designed to sell toys.  But when those are the same movies? It's no wonder they went apeshit, recalling the huge parental backlash over Batman Returns. The toy and merchandising opportunities they were so desperate for are duly delivered, but in the company of some pretty dark stuff which arguably isn't fit for the kids the film is targeting. A row of scientists skewered like so much kebab; Brainiac dangling naked corpses by the feet; naked Superman wondering around the Fortress of Solitude; the weirdly eroticised merger of Lex and Braniac, and a pretty overt threat of rape in the final act. Sure, it's not Lemkin draft-dark, but what is?

Conclusion

Trying to figure out what didn't work here was a huge task because there's just too much. When there's so many problems you start to sub-classify, you know you're in trouble.

"Superman" quite possibly represents the nadir of Hollywood's approach to comic book properties in the 1990s. The verisimilitude* Donner and Mankiewicz strove for on the first one and a half Superman films had long been thrown to the dogs. Although it would be re-adopted in the following wave (beginning with Blade), at this point Superman was a victim of precisely the opposite approach, assuming the audience's acceptance of the fantastical premise allowed carte blanch for any old nonsense on top, regardless of character and story.  The attitude seemed to be "It's a comic book movie, what do you expect?"

The unmade Superman scripts to this point are entirely indicative of that mindset. Whilst it isn't quite mired in the ludicrous campiness of Batman and Robin, it's unquestionably all about style over substance, treating the characters with something bordering on contempt while it focuses on whizz-bang, toy options and spasms of gross-out humour.  Had this draft made it to the screen in the wake of Batman & Robin, it could have put comic book movies down for good.

Man of Steel preventable death and destruction rating (where Man Of Steel is a 10):  4

Again, much of the Doomsday brawl takes place in the sewers, and again, there's no real effort to move the battle somewhere less built-up.  Superman is cunningly absolved of any responsibility for Lexiac's destruction by the utterly unscientific psychic forcefield; he essentially ensures its destruction by his inaction. Sure, it's guilt-free, but it's also dramatically inert.

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

*Ironically, EW seemed to think all four Reeve films were "campy". What would they have made of this?