Superman Unmade #10: Superman: Destruction

Who wrote it?

Paul Attanasio. Oscar-nominated for Quiz Show and Donnie Brasco, creator of Homicide: Life on the Street, and credited on Disclosure and Sphere (ironically, one of the poorly-performing films alleged to have scared Warner off mega-budget blockbusters like Superman Lives.) Attanasio also had The Sum of All Fears in production at Paramount.

When was it written?
We don't know for sure that it was. If complete, it almost certainly wasn't dated April 2001, unless Attanasio had written it on-spec (highly unlikely for a professional screenwriter using someone else's IP) or the actual deal had been done much earlier. If the latter, why wasn't it announced at the time?

What's the context?
According to the Hollywood Reporter's April 19th, 2001 story ("Attanasio has words for two Warner films"), the writer would receive $3.4 million for two scripts; Superman, and an adaptation of Joseph Kanon's then-upcoming novel The Good German. It was not known which he would tackle first.
"Attanasio will sift through the three or four "Superman" scripts, but he will focus on his own, original take on material based on the death and rebirth of Superman."

If true, this seems to mark a sea-change in the studio's attitude to the project. Though still mired in the "death" storyline, Attanasio would be the first writer trusted to take them beyond the established paradigm in a full script for almost six years.

Variety, meanwhile, echoed the major points of the story but cautioned that the writer's Superman deal had not been closed.

What's the story?
No idea. None. Not the faintest inkling.

Why didn't it happen?
And then... silence.

Superman: Destruction (as the script was allegedly known) has never materialised online, and I've been able to find out almost nothing about it. 

Given how long WB had been trying to get a Superman film off the ground, it's not hard to imagine them prioritising a script for it over a relatively obscure (though expensively acquired) project like German (which wouldn't appear for another five years). But after April 2001, there's nothing. No word on how it was received, or even that it was received.

Five years later, The Wall Street Journal (June 23rd 2006 -  "Getting 'Superman' off the ground") would assert that Attanasio's deal was never actually done.
Glen Weldon's Superman: The Unauthorized Biography claims it was no more than a treatment.
Cashiers du Cinemart went as far as assigning the script a completion date (27th June 2001). They also floated one theory which conflates it with Keith Giffen's Superman/Lobo treatment from late 2000, and another in which it was an unconnected fifty page treatment.

I like the Attanasio-revising-Giffen theory for two reasons:
A) We know Giffen's treatment was deemed too expensive. Could Attanasio have been brought in to take it to script stage at a lower cost?
B) It might explain the not-very-Superman-but-very-Lobo title "Destruction", the origin of which is unclear. It isn't in either of the two trade stories, but it's a little detail that either lends credence to the script's existence, or was made up by someone for that very reason. It depends on your point of view.

Unfortunately, liking a theory doesn't make it right. There's no proof Attanasio revised Giffen.

Although David Hughes asserts that Joseph McGinty Nichol, AKA McG, was attached to Attanasio's script/treatment, I wasn't able to find any evidence of this. The Hollywood Reporter does note his attachment to J.J. Abrams' draft a year later.

And that's all she wrote. It's possible an Attanasio treatment exists, and that the deal to script it was never done. It may or may not have been based on Giffen's Lobo/Superman treatment. It's also possible a partial or complete script exists, either of Attanasio's sole devising or based on Giffen's treatment.
We have almost no facts about this one. Nothing of Attanasio's was included in the WB vs Siegel and Shuster deposition, which leads me to think it doesn't exist... but Giffen's treatment wasn't in the deposition either, and there's good evidence it's real.

Unless something surfaces which sheds new light on this, it looks Superman: Destruction will remain a myth. If anyone out there knows better... educate me.

Superman (Doesn't) Live

Because they couldn't call it "Superman Aborted" without offending a lot of people.

To celebrate/commiserate (depending on your point of view) the release of Man Of Steel, I finally got around to doing something I'd been promising myself for months.  I started reading Superman scripts.  It also helps that I borrowed an iPad.  If you read scripts and you don't have a tablet, get one.  It makes things so much easier.

Superman movies post-1987's Quest For Peace is one of, if not the most complicated development hell story ever to come out of Hollywood.  Given the history, the legal battles and the sheer amount of money spent on iterations that never got off the ground, it's a wonder Man Of Steel got made at all. 

You can read more about the Kryptonian convolutions over at David Hughes excellent blog. He tells it like it was, so I don't have to.  If you're into this sort of thing (and if you're not, I've gotta ask; why are you here?) I also highly recommend his book, The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made. 

For geeks there's a power to these unmade movies, an alternate universe of possibilities and never-weres that's capable of blowing our hive-mind.  But the truth is, it's also fun to read these stories; not just the fictional ones which never played out on-screen, but the true ones that prevented them from doing so.  It allows mere mortals to dabble in the (occasionally outrageous) behaviour of some of the players, to experience the turn-on-a-dime mercuriality of the film business.  These tales play to the same parts of the brain that find raw, unprocessed stimulation in gossip and rumour.  They're fun stories told about fun stories that never got to be told. 

It was David's book that first highlighted, for me, the long and torturous gestation of Superman Lives, a movie so unfortunately titled it may as well be the dictionary definition of the word "ironic".  I remember being aghast at the web of press speculation during the mid to late 90s, the cavalcade of allegedly "locked" Lois Lanes which seemed to lengthen by the week as the film geared up to production and Nic Cage cashed his cheque.
And then... nothing.
Superman did not live.  Hollywood threw the sheet over his corpse and walked away.

Scripts for various iterations of the project have been available on the web for ages.  I dabbled occasionally (sticking a toe into the murky waters of Kevin Smith's draft) but never really committing to the read in any way.

That all changed when Wes Strick's draft of Superman Lives got into the wild in early 2013. I couldn't refuse the call anymore.  In fact, I live tweeted my reactions to it.  I was kinda hooked; and that's when I had the idea to do this; read, strip down, analyse, report.  
Learn.

And I found that it goes deeper than just "Lives"; before that, Kal-El was supposed to be Reborn, and a number of scripts came to light in 2009 (as part of a deposition in the legal battle over the rights to the character) which outline exactly how this was supposed to happen.  It went beyond the 90s, too: after "Lives" died, there was still spark in old cadaver yet if someone was willing to work hard enough to nurture it.

The 12 scripts I'm reading span 21 years, from the abortive 1992 attempt by the Salkinds to rekindle the big blue boy-scout's film career to J.J. Abrams infamous and ill-fated 2003 "Flyby", the backlash to which allegedly startled him so badly that he became a one-man directing Alcatraz, locking down his scripts, his films and their secrets with a religious fervour from that point on.

Why am I doing it?  I'm a screenwriter.  The best way to learn screenwriting is to watch movies, read scripts, and write pages.  This little project fulfils one of those three criteria, and though it used to be two, ask Meatloaf now and he'll tell you that in tough times, one out of three ain't bad anymore.

I won't be linking to the scripts.  Far too many people have got into trouble for that kind of thing and I've no desire to bring that kind of heat on myself.  If you want to find them, they're out there.

The polarised reactions to Man Of Steel, not to mention the apparently revisionist view which has grown up around Superman Returns, indicate two things to me:

1. How people react to interpretations of Superman often reflects their outlook on the world.
2. For that very reason, Superman is tough to get right.

At their best, these scripts are treasure-troves of wild, often unworkable ideas with very occasional moments of genius.  A glimpse of what could have, but, for the most part, should not have been. 

At their worst?  Well, we'll get there.