Superman Unmade #8: Superman Lives! (Take 8)

Here there be spoilers

Who wrote it?

William Wisher Jr., at that point credited on The Terminator (additional dialogue), Terminator 2, Judge Dredd and The 13th Warrior. Wisher is also noted for uncredited contributions to Die Hard: With A Vengeance.

When was it written?

The draft is dated 3.2.00, 17 months after both Dan Gilroy's last draft and WB's purchase of Alex Ford's spec.

How long is it?

116 pages

What's the broad structure?

Act 1  = 1-32

Act 2a = 33-59

Act 2b = 60-91

Act 3 = 92-116

What's the context?
We're back in a deathly quiet period for the Superman project after Tim Burton's departure. Warner Bros. had hit genre paydirt in the spring of '99 with The Matrix, and hired Wisher in June of that year to turn out a new script that would "Matrix-up" the Man of Steel. Superman Vs. Hollywood's contention is that this meant using bullet-time to make his flight patterns more viscerally thrilling. Wisher's script, with input from the still-sort-of-possibly-attached Nic Cage, allegedly attracted the attention of Oliver Stone.

Why didn't it happen?
We don't really know. Wisher's draft came and went without much fanfare outside of scuttlebutt in the Hollywood Reporter (February 17th 2000) that Cage and WB were "very happy" with it. Variety reported talks with Dinosaur co-director Ralph Zondag (June 22nd 2000) that never went anywhere. Wisher never seems to have gone on the record about his time on the project.

What does Superman want at the start of the story? 
Firmly established in Metropolis, and in a no-secrets relationship with Lois Lane, he's having an existential crisis; he doesn't know who or what he is, or why he's here.This creates a rift with Lois, who wants to settle down and get married.

What happens next?
Brainiac, the energy-hungry AI responsible for Krypton's destruction, teams up with Lex Luthor to destroy the Man of Steel by unleashing the creature known as Doomsday. Weakened by their titanic battle, Superman is finished off by Brainiac with a Kryptonite spear through the heart.

Does Superman resolve his conflict, and if so, how?
Yes. Revived by the Kryptonian knight Mal-Ar, to whom he was entrusted as a baby, Superman discovers that he is heir to the throne of Krypton, and that only he can unite its survivors. Stripped of his powers, he uses Mal-Ar's high-tech armour to confront his nemeses, who are busy double-crossing each other over the fate of the planet.

The script
Why Wisher? Perhaps because he had genre "previous". In truth, he was probably less out of left field than Dan Gilroy, and at a relatively lean 116 pages, this draft maintained the promise of a manageable budget. Wisher strips out some of the broader elements from previous drafts, but with input from Cage and the other remaining players presumably consistent, how much had actually changed?

What works?

• Wisher's sparse style is almost like poetry. It's not Walter Hill, but sentences rarely run to more than one line, and it's easy to imagine each as a shot. Each block of text looks more like a stanza than a paragraph so it's a "vertical" read.
• Kryptonite does more than just kill Superman. It amplifies energy and becomes the source of power for all Luthor's gadgets.
• Streamlined exposition. The script makes a decent fist of catching Superman up on his origin late in the second act. Because we've seen it happen already we don't linger, but we know he gets it.
• Second act complications. In previous drafts, K/Eradicator tries to persuade Superman to leave Earth and save himself. Superman declines, provoking much debate about the nature of sacrifice and heroism. Wisher tries the same thing, but with one key difference; the revelation that other Kryptonians survive, and are waiting for Kal to come back and lead them, makes this more than just about saving himself and leaving Earth to his enemies. Kal has always pondered his purpose. Now he has one. It means the script ends with...
• Scope for more. Superman resolves to go out and find the remains of his race. Lois is intent on going with him. Everything doesn't just go back to normal; there's the potential for lasting change. It's almost the jumping on point for the idea behind Superman Returns. There's a little overlap with J.J. Abrams' Flyby too.

What doesn't work?

• "Edgy" Superman. By edgy, once again we mean "a bit of a douche". He's passive aggressive, a little sweary, tries (and fails) to get drunk, and threatens to kill the Lexmen (who are essentially under Brainiac's mind control). If you want to make Superman less of a boyscout, there has to be a reason beyond the vague notion that modern kids think he's uncool.
• Brainiac. Jeez, am I tired of talking about, writing about, thinking about Brainiac. It's never entirely clear why Jor-El decides to shut him down; perhaps he was bored of him too. I think it's something to do with him coming over all Skynet and evolving his own sub-programs. Where previous scripts set him up as Superman's rejected older "brother", here his motivations are tweaked so he's more akin to Jor-El; a father who wants to take care of his "children". Unfortunately, it makes almost no difference. He's just... so... dull.
• Metaphysical claptrap. Once more, Superman wakes up without his powers, and once more he's told they won't return straight away. Not because he's been dead, and had no opportunity to collect sunlight, but because his mind is full of hate for Brainiac... Sigh. It's The Force by another name again. Look, Superman's powers are grounded in a fictional "science" that exists in his world, so why on earth would his feelings hamper them? Why do they suddenly return when Lois is thrown off a building by Brainiac? Does that make him hate the guy less?! Maybe we're to believe that his love for Lois overwhelmed his hate, but I just don't buy it. For a start, how would Mal-Ar know any of this? He's a Knight, not an astrophysicist, or even a metaphysicist. Superman is the first Kryptonian to come to Earth young enough to gain powers; there's no precedent for his diagnosis.
• Superman's "want". There's a hole in Superman's life. He has a feeling that he's here to do something else, but this feels manufactured rather than organic. It always felt odd that he wouldn't marry Lois simply because he didn't know where he came from. Most people go their whole lives without ever knowing why they're here.
• Luthor. After the (mostly) intelligent, ruthless and erudite Luthor of Alex Ford's draft, Wisher's Luthor swings back towards previous iterations; rich, successful, pathetic. A figure of fun, he doesn't even function as comic relief; he's too much of an insufferable whiner. It's unclear whether he's truly behind all his fabulous creations, or if he uses theft and subterfuge to fool the world. The script tries to contextualise him by name-checking Steve Jobs, Ted Turner and Bill Gates but all this serves to do is date it. Despite being fabulously wealthy, he constantly complains about his lot, and is generally treated with disdain by everyone. He's a loser, and it's hard to imagine him ever being a capable foe. He shoots for a redemption of sorts in the final act, trying to stop Brainiac's energy draining mechanism, but that's just self-preservation. He disappears after this, and his fate is never explored. If he had any smarts, he'd have tried to turn Brainiac's machine off earlier rather than confronting him. And what's his ultimate plan? To dominate the internet; a conceit which is so '90s it's almost painful. This Luthor may be the worst yet.
• Superprince. Lois & Clark toyed with the idea of Superman as a potential ruler of a new Krypton, and the idea would be reused in J.J. Abrams' aborted take, but... Superman is generally supposed to be the last of his kind. Sure, other Kryptonians have popped up, and you could argue that if anyone were chosen to survive the destruction of a planet it would be the wealthy elite, but Jor-El is not only benevolent King of the entire planet, he's a scientific genius. Kal-El is thus so special that it makes him less special. It smacks too much of the "chosen one" narrative popularised by Star Wars and reinvigorated by the script's new target...
• The Matrix. The Wachowskis' sophomore effort won hearts and wallets in the spring of '99, so it's not a shock to stumble across several "nods" to it; every other action movie was doing the same. The problem isn't that WB looked at The Matrix. The problem is what they saw, or what they chose to focus on. Not compelling, diverse characters battling through a dramatic story, built on the same kind of timeless, epic framework as Star Wars. No. They looked at The Matrix and saw an aesthetic; revolutionary effects and black leather. They saw the idea of "cyber", which is such a vague concept it doesn't even qualify as a theme. Wisher never uses the term "bullet time", and the assertion that WB intended to use it is all hearsay. But what we do have is a black-suited Superman in a lone assault on an impregnable building, taking on hordes of inter-connected "Lexmen" in suits and dark glasses, running up walls and generally using hitherto unseen martial skills in the pursuit of his goal. Draw your own conclusions.
• Mal-Ar. Although he makes more thematic sense than Cadmus, and would be cheaper to realise than K/Eradicator, he performs much the same function. He arrives at the same time as Brainiac, stalks Superman and mutters dark prophecies at a distance about the time being near. Perhaps if he'd made some effort to engage, Superman could have avoided death altogether? Like Cadmus and K/Eradicator, Mal-Ar, too, ultimately has to go to that great Kryptonian mentor club in the sky. He has no place; all he has is a function.
• The Doomsday throwdown still feels too scaled back, probably for cost. Much of it takes place off-screen, underground. It simply isn't epic enough for what's supposed to be the death of a god.
• Random nitpicks:
• If Brainiac wants Superman's body so badly, why doesn't he just take it? If he's offended by the funeral, why leave a body to bury?
• Why did nobody remove the Kryptonite spear tip from Superman's chest?
• Mayors don't get to outlaw things just like that.
• Is burying an alien Knight in a clearly marked grave a terribly good idea?

Conclusion
Christ, this one was depressing.
17 months had passed with no discernible movement since Gilroy's second draft. WB had bought Alex Ford's spec, but had they used the time to re-examine their options, think about what had gone wrong with the project, and correct course by giving Wisher a clean slate to work from?

Not a bit of it.

Wisher, too is forced to kneel before Zod (or Jon Peters and WB) by adhering to the same basic structure as every writer since Lemkin was handed his P45:

Superman dies.
Superman comes back.
Superman wins.

In fact, they should probably have called the project Superman Wins.

It's almost like the writers didn't matter; plunk any old word-monkey in a chair, give him the (unchanged) beats and wait for the money to come rolling in.

The problem is that this approach produces fundamentally the same story they decided not to make two years previously, when cast, crew, production design and locations were more or less in place. When they were weeks away from shooting. If you don't come back with something different from what you opted not to shoot because it wasn't working, what's the point? It's highly unlikely that the movie would have become significantly cheaper to make in the interim.

So why, WB? Why?

Perhaps because the studio was under new leadership. In July 1999, co-Chairmen/CEOs Bob Daly and Terry Semel stepped down, replaced in August (though not like-for-like) by Barry Meyer and Alan Horn. Given how much time and money had already been invested in the project, could it hurt to try one more time?

It's not that the writing is bad (though some of the dialogue is awfully clunky). It's that there's NOTHING new here. Parts of older drafts are bolted back on, and that means it's just another hybrid of hybrids.

I had high(ish) hopes for this, but it proved a huge let-down.

Man of Steel preventable death and destruction rating: 5
Once again Superman detonates Brainiac's ship over a major metropolitan area. Once again he throws down with Doomsday in the centre of the city (even if much of the battle takes place underground), and he more or less murders Brainiac in a suicide run at his ship.

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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.)

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

Here there be spoilers

"Tim had a handle on it... understood everything about it. Tim would have created a Superman for the ages. I really feel that."  Dan Gilroy on Superman Lives

"I don't think those people realize how much of your heart and soul you pour into something. I was pretty shell-shocked by the whole situation."  Tim Burton on Superman Lives

"I think, and this is only my opinion, of course, that it wasn't filmed because it was going to be an expensive movie, and they were a little sensitive because they were getting a lot of bad press that they had screwed up the Batman franchise. Because of the corporate environment, all of the decisions are basically fear-based.

'If they'd just allowed us to make the film... I think that we could have done something interesting... They made a choice. I like to be positive, but I really feel that I wasted a year of my life. That's a terrible feeling. You never want to feel that in anything you do."  Tim Burton on Superman Lives

"We didn't have a script we loved, and the budget was too high. When the budget started getting out of control, that's when we decided to pull the plug."  Warner Co-chairman Bob Daly

This is an incremental post, dealing with Dan Gilroy's 2nd draft of Superman Lives. Analysis of the first draft is here.

Who wrote it?

Dan Gilroy.

When was it written?

The draft is dated 20.9.98, seven months after Gilroy's previous.

How long is it?

111 pages.

What's the broad structure?

Act 1 = 1-30

Act 2a = 31-61

Act 2b = 62-98

Act 3 = 99-111

What's the context?

It's hard to know exactly. Here's what we know: the Superman Lives production office shut in May 1998, with a scheduled mock funeral/party for the crew cancelled at the last minute. You know you've got problems when your cancellation party gets cancelled.

At the time of this draft, Superman Lives was not going to be Tim Burton's next movie. He'd signed to direct Sleepy Hollow for Paramount, with principal photography scheduled for October 1998 (eventually starting in November). If Burton were to direct Superman Lives, the wait would be at least a year, so unless Warners was prepared to wait, it seems likely (though not certain) he was out.

Cage allegedly heard of the May '98 production shutdown second-hand, pleasing him not a jot. It's unclear if he was officially off the film at this point, though in an interview to promote Snake Eyes (released in August 1998) he stated he'd "moved on to other things". (Note: I can't verify the source of this quote, though the interview is definitely in relation to Snake Eyes, so it can't have been too much later than August 1998).

In other interviews from August '98 onwards, Cage seems undecided, stating that the movie could still happen with him if the budget problems were addressed. He also claimed not to have collected his $20 million pay-or-play cheque because "there are only five (actually six) studios in this town and I don't want to create a problem for any of them."  However, elsewhere his agent confirmed that he would be required to make another movie for WB in order to earn the money, so perhaps he wasn't being altruistic after all. Cage's exodus wouldn't be officially confirmed until June 2000, when he announced definitively that he was done.

Despite the hoopla over the shutdown of pre-production, the project staggered on, and this draft supposedly got Cage excited again. Gilroy was originally brought in to trim the budget (guesstimated at anywhere between $140-$190 million), but there was little evidence of that in the February '98 draft. THIS is the draft that does it. With 11 pages trimmed, it's leaner, meaner, and was probably the closest Superman Lives would get to an affordable, streamlined, ready-to-go script. Gilroy says they got as far as camera tests before WB pulled the plug.

What's changed (and works better)?

• The first act back story. Like many origin stories, Superman Lives is mythology-heavy. We've seen this addressed at different points in previous drafts. It has to go somewhere, and rather than dump it en masse in the 2nd/3rd act, slowing things down when they should be accelerating, Gilroy has brought it back to the start. It works better, and it's only 4 pages.

• Brainiac's motivation is streamlined and clear, and it's character- rather than plot-driven. His power needs are no longer an issue. Despite being created first, he is clearly Jor-El's second son, so it's jealousy and spite that power his hatred of Superman. This means there's a smaller story going on under the larger one, which is always a good sign; Brainiac wants to be loved, and that makes him more nuanced than before. He's the polar opposite of Kal-El; he knows who and what he is, what his purpose is, and is egotistical to the point of delusion. He would sooner destroy his toys in a fit of pique than let anyone else play with them. With Superman dead he could take over the planet easily, but that's not the point. He wants to be revered the way Superman was, but can't understand that having power doesn't create adulation; people love Superman not because of his power but how he uses it. Only after Superman's death does he come to realise that he's effectively made his enemy immortal.

• Clark's childhood flashbacks establish a more loving environment. This time five year old Clark lands on his feet when Jonathan kicks the trampoline away, which makes his actions feels less cruel even if they really aren't. There's also a scene where Jonathan and Martha put Clark to bed and we actually feel he's loved by these people, even if they fear for him and encourage him to hide what he is. Clark's realisation that HE was the occupant of the craft is better laid out with a voice over flashback between he and Martha recalling how he was found. Even if she lied to keep him from the truth, there's at least a glimpse of the kind of nurturing home environment which could encourage a living god to dedicate his life to helping people rather than lashing out at humanity's innate cruelty.

• Extraneous scenes and sub-plots are cut. Brainiac possesses Luthor almost as soon as they meet. This excises Luthor's stupid plot to kill him and the bizarre, cameo-heavy nightclub scene. Brainiac's introduction is tightened up considerably. In previous drafts we see him slaughtering aliens in deep space, but now he wakes from sleep when his systems pick up the energy signature of Clark's escape pod. It's left to his arrival on Earth for us to see what his MO is. That saves duplicating information and cuts the Star Wars homage of his previous intro. Brainiac's nameless, under-realised minions have also vanished. Expensive to realise and largely inconsequential, they aren't missed a jot.

• Superman's visions. In the previous draft Superman kept having visions of his own death which were never satisfactorily explained; the concept was so thin it wasn't even a sub-plot. These are gone, though Gilroy still likes the visual of an image reflected in someone's eyes.

• Lois the reporter is much sharper. She starts working the angles of the spacecraft story and trying to figure out who lived in and around the crash site. This makes it far more feasible that she'd eventually trace the land back to Clark's family and put two and two together.

• K, in the guise of a small cube stored in his escape craft, has stayed with Superman throughout his life. This means locations and set building for the Fortress of Solitude are no longer an issue. Instead of the arctic wastes, Superman regenerates inside his own tomb. This allows him to get straight back into the thick of things when he wakes up. K's approximation of Superman's powers is also reduced from previous drafts; there's no flying. The best Superman can do after his resurrection is jump across rooftops. K's restriction of Superman through the suit is also better realised in this draft.

• Structure. The elevator juggling scene now segues almost straight into the showdown with Doomsday, which cuts a lot of extraneous back and forth. It's still hugely complicated and expensive, but the quick transition means less locations. It also means, however, that the two set-pieces sit almost on top of one another, which isn't ideal pacing. Looking at them as two halves of the same sequence just about helps get away with it.

• Morris doesn't simply disappear. With Luthor subsumed much earlier, Morris picks up most of his old role; kowtowing to an alien overlord. Established as a snivelling coward early on, this suits him far better than it did a billionaire entrepreneur/mob-boss.

• No spiders. Peters seems to have finally given up his arachnid obsession, because there's no obvious Thanagarian Snare Beast/Giant Spider. Although Brainiac's true form does seem to vaguely resemble one...

• Show, don't tell; Brainiac keeps Jor-El's bloodied S shield. This is later used as shorthand and works much better than convoluted expository dialogue.

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

• Luthor as an organised crime boss. Although he masquerades as a legitimate businessman, I don't buy Luthor as a Godfather. Lois' expose of his business deals is a sub-plot that goes nowhere. Lex is never in danger of being arrested and her story is never tied in to the one person we know can turn on him: the tanker driver from the opening sequence. When Superman forces the driver to admit Lex is behind the dumping, there's an opportunity to show how scary Lex is (a suicide doesn't have to be any more horrific than a Piranha eating a guy's hand). Instead the driver folds. After that, Superman tells Luthor that one day he'll have something on him… but that day was today!

• K is a double-edged sword. And this is where an element which works for production causes problems for story. If K has always been at Kal-El's side… why the silence?  It could have helped him solve the mystery of who he is and his place in the universe. Was K really only a contingency in the event of Kal-El's death? Was he never to reveal himself otherwise? That seems a waste of such a powerful AI and the last vestiges of Kryptonian technology.

• Clark's confession. This scene has never really worked since its first appearance in the Strick draft. Here it's retooled so that Clark, thinking Lois will eventually put two and two together, decides to preempt her by revealing his secret. But even if Lois discovers that the land around the Smallville crash site belonged to the Kents, she still has no reason to connect Clark to Superman. Since everyone thinks the Man of Steel is a super-evolved human, the evidence would be circumstantial at best. Clark doesn't need to give up his secret so easily. Had Lois discovered the land belonged to his family, reassessed her idea of Superman and examined the fact that Clark and Superman never appear at the same time (something she's clearly given some thought), the scene's through line could have been HER calling Clark out, strengthening the idea of her as a reporter and legitimising his fear of discovery.

• Lois' niece finally gets a name, Amy, but not until she's being kidnapped at the end of the second act. Her presence is also better thought out; instead of staying with Lois indefinitely, she comes to visit for a few weeks each summer. This causes time line problems though… If Lois and Superman have been seeing each other for a year, it's logical to assume that Clark has been in Metropolis for at least that length of time. If Amy comes to stay each Summer, wouldn't he have met her already? Unfortunately she still feels like a plot device masquerading as a character, an object of pathos for the elevator sequence who sticks around with little to do, drifting in and out of the story arbitrarily.

• Doomsday makes his first appearance as a pair of glowing green eyes, which is weirdly low-key and at odds with the destruction he wreaks later on. He's introduced as a genetic remnant of Krypton's past, and Gilroy tries to tie up the loose ends once he's dead; he still disappears, but a throwaway line indicates that his body has been retrieved.

• Rapeyness. It's not a particularly nice word but it's really quite apt in some circumstances, because there's still something off about the way these scripts approach physical violation, regardless of gender. The scene where Brainiac appropriates Luthor's body is played for laughs, which doesn't feel terribly appropriate. The idea of bodily possession itself isn't exactly kid-friendly, and maybe the humour is meant to deflect that, but it just feels… icky. Later on, there's a scene where a gang chase down an innocent couple, only to be interrupted by the reborn Superman. We've seen before how easy it is to use the threat of rape as a means of generating drama, but this whole scene is off. Implicitly black antagonists; a weedy, disposable boyfriend; Superman's intervention; Superman getting his ass kicked… and the inevitable swing in his favour once K asserts himself. We've read or seen a hundred variations on this, and they generally feel like the prologue to a nerdy, pornographic comic book fantasy. Fortunately, comic book movies seem to have largely moved on from this paradigm.

• Logic still doesn't apply. 

• If K's attitude to Earth is that it should be left behind, and it wants to convince Superman to leave, why approximate his old powers? It's clear that if it wants to, it can make Superman leave; so why not just do it? Why indulge him?

• If Brainiac can detect the energy surge from the Kryptonian escape ship halfway across the galaxy, why hasn't he been able to detect the presumably huge surge which would have accompanied K's resuscitation of Superman?

• Superman wastes a ton of time. Why stay the night with Lois before trying to destroy Lexiac's machine? The sooner he gets to it, the better! He then spends the next day knocking around the Metropolis docks sulking and frightening the homeless.

• Why are none of the militaries who own the ICBMs Lexiac is threatening the Earth with even remotely concerned that their missiles are powering up?

• If deactivation of Brainiac's doomsday machine is as simple as removing its power source, why did nobody try that on Krypton?

• Why does Brainiac's ship still mysteriously fall out of the sky once he dies?

• The third act. At only 12 pages, it feels like this is where most of the cutting has been done. With the climax at LexCorp, there's no exploration of the Skull-Ship and Thanagarian Snare Beast, which cleaves a chunk out. There's still an awful lot going on, but it's all sound and fury, quantity over quality. Reversal after reversal punctuated by dumb ass wisecrackery masks the fact that the finale is not inherently dramatic. All the bits are present, but there doesn't seem to be any sense of what belongs where or how it works, and so extra mechanisms are thrown in for good measure even though they don't improve the function.
• The powers problem. Gilroy better explains that Superman's feelings have a connection with his physiology, but the idea is fundamentally flawed. If the loss of his powers springs from his feelings, he would surely have faced issues all the years he's spent isolated, lonely and unsure of himself. Here's a solution; if Doomsday's Kryptonite stinger had retarded his ability to collect and store yellow sunlight, the K suit could then serve as both armour and a means of collection/amplification. When his system has recovered enough to do this by itself (say, the end of the 2nd act), the suit drops away. The powers problem is solved in a few lines without recourse to techno babble.
• Too much is happening. Two kidnappings in three pages, the revelation and death of K, and the return of Superman's powers are all piled on top of one another. Then, like the cherry on the top of this teetering pile of goo, we get-

• Lois is pregnant. It's not a natural direction for the character; it's a plot device lumped in to strengthen an inherently weak climax. Sure, it's more personal, but when the overarching stake is the safety of the entire world, it doesn't work to draw us back into caring about the characters on a personal level. The benchmark; if we take it out, do the story and characters change? Not a jot. Superman still has to save Lois, he still has to save the world... the baby doesn't mean a thing.

• Save the world or save the girl. The eternally frustrating dilemma, because there is no dilemma. If Superman doesn't save the world there will be no girl. If he saves the girl there'll be no world to live with her in. Drama can come from difficult choices, but it fails here because the choice is simple; save the world.

• Reversals are all well and good, but these, again, mask the fact that there's nothing else of dramatic value happening. Brainiac's robot double is never set up and yet somehow manages to look exactly like Lex, and his sudden display of mind projection abilities have never even been hinted at. We can buy him taking over Luthor's body physically, but if he can do that, why not just repeat the trick on Superman?

Conclusion
After sixteen years, Dan Gilroy has gone on the record about Superman Lives!  There's no earth-shattering revelation, but it's significant because he doesn't ever seem to have spoken about it before.

It's tempting to suggest that the problem with these scripts is structural. Superman's death and resurrection by the middle of the movie leaves him with nowhere to go in the second half. We know he's virtually indestructible, and that if Brainiac could kill him he'd have done it himself rather than employ Doomsday. If the threat of death has been exorcised by page 60, the remainder can only play out as an exercise in inevitability; Superman wins. Sure, there are other ways to generate tension, but the death of a god trumps them all in terms of sheer scale. 

There are also two huge and conflicting considerations with this second draft; story vs production.

While they needn't be mutually exclusive, we see here how a script needs to serve both masters. It's tighter and cheaper than the previous, but there are still some key aspects of the story which haven't improved, and have arguably suffered further from the emphasis on getting this thing on its feet and ready to shoot. Though it's a marked improvement on previous efforts, there's nothing organic here. It remains a slapped-together monster trying to reconcile the major beats of all the previous drafts; it's just wearing better make-up and a decent haircut. 

Having gone through five writers and ten drafts by this point, notes had taken their toll on everything but the fundamentals; those elements which remained unchanged because of the money already spent on production design. Did anyone stop to think that they might actually have become inadequate foundations on which to build an evolving story? 

Perhaps somebody finally did, and that's why WB decided not to push ahead.

This draft really, formally, marks the end of Burton's time on the movie, and serves as a breaking point of sorts. From here, the Man of Steel's odyssey through development hell would take a decidedly different turn. 

Man of Steel preventable death and destruction rating: 7 
Why does Superman think that blowing up the (admittedly free-falling) skull-ship directly over Metropolis is a safe thing to do? It plays like a riff on the ID4 ending but is, let's face it, spectacularly stupid and dangerous. 

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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.)

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.)