Superman Unmade #6: Superman Lives (Take 6A)

Here there be spoilers.

"We know we’re getting close, but we’re not there yet. The creative process is imprecise at best, but over the last two or three months we’ve accelerated in a good way. But we had hoped to accelerate that way six months ago.”  Lorenzo di Bonaventura on Superman Lives

Who wrote it?

Dan Gilroy. Yes, that Dan Gilroy. Brother of Tony, and back then best known for Freejack, but since credited on Real Steel, The Bourne Legacy and the upcoming Nightcrawler.

When was it written?

The script is dated 24.2.98, seven months after Wesley Strick's only apparent draft.

How long is it?

122 pages.

What's the broad structure?

Act 1 = 1-31

Act 2a = 32-66

Act 2b = 67-102

Act 3 = 102-122

What's the context?

With Wes Strick's July '97 draft promoting unbridled rage at high levels within Warners, and the budget nudging unacceptable, it was jettisoned in October of that year, and pre-production pushed back to Spring 1998. Studios don't spend upwards of $30 million on a project for nothing, and there comes a point when it's better business to keep spending in order to get the movie made rather than writing the whole thing off. So in came Gilroy, screenwriter number five of the Jon Peters era, for his first crack at the big blue boy scout.  Some have claimed Akiva Goldsman and Ron Bass were successively brought in to rewrite Strick, but if they were, these drafts have never leaked, and frankly it's hard to see where two more drafts would fit in the evolution of the story. Gilroy's first draft is different, but it's not that different. Don't rule that story out, but until these drafts are seen in the wild, take it with a pinch of salt.

Why didn't it happen?

The exact sequence of events around this time is unclear. Several reasons for the failure to move forward have been floated in the years since, most acknowledging (or assuming) sheer corporate terror at the spiralling production costs, exacerbated by several big-budget flops, and the vicious critical and fan backlash from Batman & Robin. Superman Lives does not sound like a happy ship. Burton was allegedly miserable under the stewardship of Jon Peters, who involved toy companies to an excessive degree in crafting the look and feel of the film.  

With a summer '98 opening out of the question, efforts were still being made to get the movie back on its feet whilst simultaneously streamlining the budget. Enter Gilroy. Burton was still attached at the time of this draft, and apparently scouted matching locations (Pittsburgh's Glass Castle for LexCorp and the City-County Building for The Daily Planet) as late as March 1998.

In April 1998, Lorenzo di Bonaventura told Variety that production had been delayed again. He separately confided to the L.A. Times that the script "wasn't good enough".

On May 1st 1998, the Superman Lives production office quietly closed.  

Burton would push on for a while before signing to direct Sleepy Hollow, scheduled for an Autumn '98 shoot, effectively delaying his participation by at least a year. That decision more or less called time on his involvement with the project.

The script

Now reverted to "Superman Lives", it's not inititally clear why Warners thought Gilroy was the right guy to rein in the Kryptonian freight train. He had only two credits to his name; Freejack and Chasers, neither of which was a hit. He never seems to have spoken about his time on the project, but once again it's obvious that this is a writer trying to find a story in the air pockets between the preoccupations of the major players.

If Warners' idea was to get the budget down, nobody told Gilroy. The elevator-juggling scene alone would have been mind-bogglingly expensive, and there's no reduction in the number or nature of the set-pieces.

This scanned draft is littered with (often barely legible) hand-written comments by an unknown author. A few influential candidates spring to mind: Cage, Burton, Peters, Semel, and Di Bonaventura. Given that the scan comes from Warners' legal deposition against the heirs of Siegel and Schuster, it seems unlikely the notes were written by Cage, Burton, or Peters, who surely would have kept their own copies. Ultimately, we'll probably never know who the phantom scribbler was, but he/she provides some telling insight into the mind of a senior creative on the project.

What does Superman want at the start of the story?

He wants to discover who and what he is, and belong somewhere. 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?

Stop me if you've heard this one...

LexCorp discovers the trail of an alien spacecraft and tracks its impact to Smallville, Kansas, making Clark wonder if he may have been the passenger. Meanwhile Brainiac, an energy-consuming artificial intelligence from outer space, comes to Earth seeking revenge on the Man of Steel. Teaming up with Lex Luthor, the pair conspire to unleash the creature Doomsday, who kills Superman in a titanic underground battle.

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

Yes. Revived by the Kryptonian AI known as K, which has lain dormant since his arrival on Earth, Superman utilises K's abilities to mimic his old powers and confront his twin nemeses, who have merged into a single villain calling itself "Lexiac" and plans to plunge the planet into nuclear holocaust. In doing so he discovers who he is and where he's from, and decides his purpose is not to keep Krypton alive but to make the best of life on Earth.

What works?

• Clark isn't a weirdo.  He's a rule-abiding boy scout who drives at the speed limit. Straight as an arrow, but also unhappy and alone.  He's in denial about his true nature, but has long suspected he isn't from Earth and doesn't belong here. His hidden man-cave (it's better if you just go with it) is a window onto his neurosis. In many ways we're back to the angst of the Poirier draft which Kevin Smith so disdained.

• Lois is spunky, spiky and likeable. Gilroy tells us all he needs to about her in one scene, where Luthor's goons let the hapless Jimmy, teeming with potential security breaches, into a press conference rather than delay any longer and allow Lois in too. 

• Lois AND Superman/Clark - The relationship that makes everything tick, according to Smith. Lois and Superman are sort of together, but she's upset that he's evasive and won't share more with her. (Interestingly, this was one of the aspects explored in the animated movie Superman: Doomsday, which for my money is the best adaptation of the death story). Superman reasons that he has nothing to share because he doesn't know who he is, conveniently bracketing Clark off. The important thing is that it's not dramatically inert (unlike Smith's draft) because his journey is about discovering who he is. The scene in which he reveals his secret identity to Lois remains far too close to Strick's, but Gilroy reverses the dynamic by making Clark the one to walk away, which at least keeps it interesting.  Clark then quits the Planet in an effort to go find himself.  When he's side-tracked by Doomsday's appearance at the last minute, his and Lois' goodbye has a real poignancy to it because there's subtext; both of them know he isn't going down there as a reporter.  Lois' eulogy is actually heartfelt and moving, and when she discovers his secret room, she truly understands his loneliness and identity quest for the first time; that it's only after he's gone adds to the pathos.

• Doomsday isn't the mindless hulk of earlier iterations but a "horrendous" nightmare of a creature with a Kryptonite stinger.  The description of him is almost deliberately vague, either to heighten the tension or because Peters hadn't decided on which design would sell the most toys yet.  Regardless, he's a mostly hidden menace; fast, strong and cunning, hiding in the blackness of the sewers. 

• The visuals - There's some really striking stuff here:
  
  • The moment a frustrated Clark blasts away at such speed that he burns his street-clothes off never feels as ridiculous as Strick's version of the same idea. 
  • Clark sat on a rooftop "throne" is also a powerful image, if a little on the nose. 
  • The Fortress of Solitude now has a sense of scale, even majesty. 
  • Superman's post-Doomsday climb up through mud and water, which slowly reveals the true extent of his wounds.
  • Clark's comatose flashback to his first meeting with Lois ends with him realising he's in a memory as the layers of the encounter crumble away around him (the Robocop remake also used this visual device to good effect).

What doesn't?

• Superman. Okay, Clark's not a weirdo, but that doesn't mean all's well.  All indications are that both his parents are dead, but in flashbacks we meet a prototype of Man Of Steel's Jonathan Kent; a harsh but loving father who's determined to stop his son showing off lest he be feared, alienated and ultimately picked over. Telling him to be afraid of himself as well as others leaves us wondering what motivates Clark to become the man he is. According to these flashbacks he's assailed on all sides by the cruelty of other kids, and his father keeps reminding him of our infinite capacity for it, and how it can never permit him to be who he is. So how does Clark become the saviour of a race he's been raised with no faith in? It's true that this is what makes his ascent so noble and dramatic, but we're shown none of the growth into that.  For all its faults, at least Man Of Steel tried to show us the journey.
  

• Superman reborn. We start with a Superman who has somehow found his purpose (if not his place) in the world despite its treatment of him. But when he heads back out for the first time after his death, newly equipped by K, it feels like it's happening because it has to, not because this is who he is. He makes no attempt to persuade K that humanity is worth saving, even though it's through this that we examine his heroism and his character. Smith took it too far, and the second half of his drafts became simplistic meditations on the nature of heroism, but this one doesn't do enough.  There are shadows of unexplored thematic beats as Superman confesses that he would rather die than live like this; it's harder to stick to principles when you're unable to enforce them. Yet even with reduced powers, the reborn Superman becomes almost casually brutal; he flips a car full of thugs far enough to seriously injure them, pins a goon's neck to the wall using his new S-blade, and pulls Brainiac's head clean off. By that point the tone of his character, even his voice, feels all over the place as the script tries to grunge him up. I'd buy him as pissed off, even traumatised, (Strick's attempt at a tri-furcated Clark/Superman/Kal-El could have worked in another context) but that's never really established outside of his initial anger and frustration at the loss of his powers. If there'd been a throughline of Clark finally having had enough of the world's brutality, of his frustration at having died for this race of idiots, his attitude change might have worked.

• The villains

• Luthor works best when he's ruthless, murderous and incredibly smart. Here, once again he's a buffoon, played mostly for laughs. How does someone this dumb become a billionaire? Would the smartest man in the world go anywhere near his own nuclear power plant as it seems about to melt down? Wouldn't he triple insulate himself against being caught waste-dumping? When he meets Brainiac the shock of encountering an alien life form is minimal; his instantaneous reaction is to wonder how he can spin it. As the anonymous scribbler writes: this reaction is "too abrupt". The scribbler also wants to know "why?" and I can't say there's any kind of answer.

• Brainiac starts with a goal (revenge) a mystery (revenge on who?) and an M.O. (he sucks energy).  He's merciless, malicious and he plays with his food. But as soon as he arrives on Earth he becomes energy-hungry to the exclusion of all else; so what is his primary motivation? The nightclub party is a perfect illustration; instead of simply trying to kill Brainiac, Lex invites him to a party populated by gangsters and a series of increasingly odd cameos, topped off by Elton John. At this point, Brainiac has already set Doomsday in motion, so he has nothing to gain from attending. Our phantom scribbler feels the same, writing "Brainiac's agenda is to kill Superman, nothing else."  I'll buy him as a Kryptonian Skynet which grew too big for its boots, but his abilities are once again ill-defined, seeming to grow out of what the plot requires. At the start he's able to drain people and technology of their energy, but then he graduates to physically possessing Luthor, and proceeds on to mind control.  If he can control minds, why not enslave Luthor on his arrival?  There's little context for his relationship with K, and even as late as the showdown in the alley, we never really know why he hates Superman and has travelled all this way to kill him. As the phantom scribbler notes: "We don't tell the audience enough why these two hate each other."  It's only later that we find out Brainiac was supplanted in Jor-El's affections by Kal-El, that this set off the chain of events which led to Krypton's destruction, but by this point the revelation is not only too late to be effective, it's almost completely lost amidst everything else that's happening.

• Their plan. A key weakness in the vast majority of dual-villain superhero movies.  There's almost never any need for them to work together, and when they contrive to, the resulting plot is usually inept.  Having split Brainiac's focus between killing Superman and gorging on energy, the script struggles to reconcile the two; how exactly does Superman's death speed up Brainiac's syphoning? How does the energy drain precipitate global nuclear meltdown? Yes, it equips the second half of the story with a ticking time bomb, but why would Brainiac need Lex's body to accomplish his goal?  Somebody clearly liked the idea of "Lexiac", and at least this time he's better defined as looking exactly like Luthor with Brainiac bubbling away underneath, but Lexiac would make more sense if Brainiac were to possess Luthor as soon as they meet, skipping the ridiculous meet-cute. As it is, we wonder why Brainiac goes through all this nonsense when he's able to drain the world's nuclear energy and has something in his menagerie that can kill Superman; he doesn't need Luthor at all.

• K - K actually seems like he could be an alien intelligence, even if he is described as looking like a toy. There's a genuine sense of Krypton about him at first; it's hard not to read his lines in Brando's voice. There's also a much better sense of cause and effect to his awakening; when LexCorp scientists unearth Clark's ship, K is activated half a world away. Unfortunately, a solid set-up is wasted as K once again becomes a slave to theme and plot. He changes his mind on a whim, one minute insisting on safeguarding Kal-El and the next offering to replicate his powers. Later he refuses to allow Superman to engage Lexiac only to then encourage him to pull his finger out, despite the fact that almost nothing has changed about Kal-El's situation in the interim. He isn't able to offer a single useful suggestion on how to stop Brainiac draining the world's nuclear energy, and he gives up the ghost for no apparent reason. This is an advanced AI which has crossed galaxies, lain dormant for decades, resuscitated Superman and been able to duplicate his powers; the pay-off is pathetic battery life for which there's little to no setup; his death just happens because the plot and theme call for Kal-El to push on alone.

• Lois' niece isn't awful in principle, but she doesn't even have a name because she's not a character; she's a plot contrivance who comes and goes from the story arbitrarily.  The most interesting thing about her is how she changes the context of Lois' character, making her look irresponsible at best, downright negligent at worst.  She puts her niece to work at The Planet (which is funny until you begin to wonder if the kid is supposed to be at school), and then goes on to abandon her at the LexCorp kids day, abandon her at the hospital (without even calling her mother), drag her to the scene of the Doomsday battle (with an apparent stop-off for balloons), and cart her around a riot-scarred Metropolis at night. It's difficult to imagine the kind of tough times her real mother could endure that would possibly be more dangerous.

• Disappearing characters - While we're on the subject, let's look at some more AWOLs.  Doomsday (or his body, we're never sure) washes away without a trace after the throw-down with Superman. Morris, Luthor's PR guy and the first act's comic relief, similarly vanishes without trace. The irony is that nobody notices.  Even after Superman's death, nobody notices Clark has vanished. Sure, there's been a super death, power outages and general chaos, but not one of his friends wonders about him until he shows up alive and well at the end of the second act, whereupon they all profess to have been worried sick about him.

• Page 111 might be the single worst page in the entire script, and possibly in any of the unmade scripts so far.  Three revelations which fundamentally change the entire story are crammed in here: 

1. Superman hasn't lost his powers after all; it was all in his head.  Which is, frankly, bullshit.  At least Poirier's drafts tried to examine the notion that his powers could be manifested through a spiritual/mental discipline, even if it all felt far too Star Wars.  Here, the notion that Superman's powers disappear because of some kind of mental block is never set up and never explained, which means it makes no sense.
2. K contains the essence of Superman's parents.  There's nothing inherently outrageous about this; the Donner Superman's crystals contain representations of Jor-El and Lara ( a trick repeated in Man of Steel).  But why reveal this only at the end?  Well, because...
3. K is dying.  And it's like Superman's parents dying all over again, see?  HEAVY THEMATIC SLEDGEHAMMER.  But wouldn't that death have aroused even more empathy if he'd known that K was a representation of his parents earlier?  Wouldn't it have had even more weight if there'd been any kind of set-up for K's eventual expiry?  Even Strick's draft tried to essay K's death as a noble sacrifice, whereas here, he just... conks out.

• There's an argument that instances 1 and 2 are intended to be twists, but true twists change the context of a story whilst maintaining the structure. Apply just revelation #1 and the whole falls apart: if Superman's powers never vanished, he could have fixed everything immediately after waking up; so why did K lie to him?  Because otherwise there'd be no second half of the story. But that second half is now built on nothing; it's very underpinning has just been dynamited. One of these revelations could work; a throw-away line about the effects of Kryptonite poisoning would have solved 95% of the problems with revelation #1. Two is a push, but could still fly if you set them both up properly. Three is insulting overkill.

• Pilfering.  By this point the Superman scripts weren't just borrowing from other sources, they were borrowing from themselves borrowing from other sources. The X-Files was still huge and there's a whiff of Mulder about Clark's quest for knowledge about E.T.s. Star Wars had just been re-released and there's still way too much Darth Vader in Brainiac's introduction. The climax recalls Independence Day, with K's tiny craft swallowed by the huge Skull Ship. There's even echoes of Alien in Superman's encounter with the Thanagarian Snare Beast in the innards of the labyrinthine ship. It's like someone had a checklist of science fictions' greatest (or most recent) hits and was determined to tick them all off.

• Logic is still an alien concept, and that means questions abound. Why is Superman having premonitions of his own death? How does S still stand for Science? What exactly is Jimmy supposed to be "playing" on stage when he hides in the band? How does a super-computer alter a planet's axis, and why would that mean collision with a comet? How does a hull-breach completely destabilise the Skull-ship to the point it loses power? How does Lois' love enable Superman to resist Brainiac's draining beam? How is it easier for Superman to weld the survivors into a metal column rather than simply stabilise the ship around him?

Conclusion

By this point, Superman scripts had become the definition of the Hollywood development process. Reading them is exhausting; writing them must have been ten times worse.

There's things to like about Gilroy's first attempt. For the first half it really does look like he's onto something, but even on a first read, the story starts to come off the rails at the mid-point. By the third act, it's forgotten what rails are. 

The problem is the structural constraints; every beat, nod, and cool little thing added through the drafts from Poirier onwards. It's hard to believe a new writer wouldn't have started from scratch, which implies that these things had to be kept because somebody liked them. Pre-production art continued to be churned out between the Strick and Gilroy drafts, indicating that a number of key aspects of the story were set in stone. When a writer has to hit marks established by three predecessors which don't necessarily form a cogent whole, the script becomes a monster, accruing story matter like some kind of creative black hole. In many ways it's like Brainiac himself, constantly adding to itself by feeding off other sources, but never more than a pale, autonomous imitation of life.

Man of Steel preventable death and destruction rating: 5

Once again, much of the Doomsday brawl takes place in the sewers, but Superman makes no real effort to move the battle somewhere less built-up. Again, he's absolved of any responsibility for Lexiac's ultimate destruction. But a couple of key things have changed; early on he's happy letting tanker trucks smash into walls without a care, and the reborn Superman starts dishing out a little extra vicious. That he only pulls the head off a Brainiac decoy is a cheat; he didn't know it wasn't the real thing. 

(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.)