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.)

Thoughts on The Death of Superman Lives: What Happened?

The Death of Superman Lives: What Happened?

Written and Directed by John Schnepp

I've been waiting on this one for a good long time.
Launched as a Kickstarter on January 24th 2013, John Schnepp's documentary examines the genesis, pre-production and eventual implosion of Warner Bros.' aborted Superman Lives project. Through interviews with most of the major players, the film outlines how the project fell apart so dramatically just weeks before shooting was due to begin.

The screening took place on May 15th in a large conference room on the first floor of the Excel Centre in London, as part of the MCM London ComicCon. The film ran off a laptop to a digital projector, so although it wasn't exactly a cinema screen, it was definitely bigger than your average TV. There was a brief Q&A afterwards with Schnepp and producer Holly Payne.

The film
The idea for the film originated when Schnepp started seeing leaked concept art on the internet in 2001. It intrigued him because it looked completely different from the previous cinematic interpretations. He collected about 3% of the art that's shown in the movie, and they had to cut 30% of what they had to keep the running time down.
By chance, Schnepp met Steve Johnson in 2012; but when he asked him about Superman he didn't want to talk about it...
The film took two and a half years to make, and the sound mix still wasn't quite finished for this screening. At a point in the middle the sound and picture noticeably fell out of sync for about 20 seconds.

What I learned from the film:

Jon Peters

• Peters claims he secured the movie rights from the Salkinds back in the early '90s, post Jones/Bates draft. He took some delight in telling Warner Bros. they didn't have the rights they thought they had, and from that point they worked together. It's all a bit vague, and suggests that either there may have been some separated rights issues or that Peters is being economical with the truth. Regardless, at some point WB managed to lever him off, because despite being credited as Producer on Superman Returns (2006), by 2013's Man of Steel he was merely Executive Producer, which is significantly more vague. He was also allegedly forbidden on the set of Zack Snyder's movie. If he solely owned the rights to the character on film, would they have been able to sideline him that efficiently?
• Peters seems to imply HE came up with the Thanagarian Snare Beast, though it's hard to believe he would know Hawkman lore and not know who Kal-El is, as Smith claims.
• He also denies enforcing the "no flights, no tights" diktat.
• He thought Smith's script(s) were "amateurish".
• He wanted Superman's cape to be its own character (?!)
• He has the skull-ship model which mysteriously disappeared from the production office days before the project went belly-up.
• Peters wanted to make a film where the characters could "taste the blood in their mouths"!
• Peters claims to have been in around 500 street fights, and would routinely show up at the art department to (literally) wrestle the staff.

The story

• It's implied that the Batman cameo was Smith's idea, but The Dark Knight appears in the very first of Poirier's drafts.
• Lots of the participants knew their own parts of the story inside out, but not the whole. Smith has admitted in Fatman on Batman he was astonished at how little he knew, despite being on the inside.
• The recreations of key scenes aren't the strongest part; they were produced for a just a couple of thousand dollars, and the film wouldn't feel weaker without them. Interestingly, one of them is the restaurant scene where Clark taps his foot nervously, smashing every glass in the place. As presented, he's nervous because he's about to propose to Lois… but that was never the case in any of the scripts I read. He was nervous because he'd decided to reveal his secret identity to her. He does produce a diamond but he does so by squeezing a lump of coal to prove he's who he says he is.

Production design

• A lot of concept art was produced; the artists were encouraged to come up with as many crazy ideas as they could. Sylvain Despretz and Michael Jackson (not that one) feature heavily, as does Steve Johnson (whose team designed and built the fibre-optic light suit, amongst other things). Jackson had originally signed to create concepts for The Matrix just a few days before he got the call, but quit to join Superman.
• Burton drew the initial "many faces" version of Doomsday.
• In some concept art K was conceived as a hi-tech clockwork teddy bear (which wasn't in the scripts I've seen).
• At another point K was depicted as a strigine (or owl-like) machine (again, this isn't in any of the scripts I've seen).

Casting

• Before Burton came on, Peters Entertainment drew up a shortlist of actors to portray Brainiac. Christopher Walken was on the list, but top of it? Howard Stern.
• Sandra Bullock was top casting choice for Lois, but Courtney Cox was also on the list. Burton denies all knowledge of this, saying he must have been out of the office the day that was circulated.

Costume design

• The film features some costume test footage, including Cage's take on Clark Kent in a suit jacket and Mickey Mouse t-shirt. 
• Some of the Superman costumes looked great, some not so much. The costume with the low-cut neck and newly-stylised S actually looks a lot better in motion than the the infamous, bleary-eyed Cage photo indicates.
• There was also a costume with raised, armour-like shoulders which didn't look so great.
• A series of polaroids of a more toned-down costume (like the panther suit equivalent of the classic red and blue) actually looked really promising.
• Everyone is at pains to point out that the fibre-optic suit was designed specifically for the regeneration scenes; Cage wouldn't have been flying around in it the whole movie. Anyone who'd read the scripts would assume that was the case, but, you know... the internet.
• The flying effects test looked fine.

The long, slow death

• As confirmed elsewhere, the budget was slashed significantly towards the end of pre-production. This is evidenced in Gilroy's second draft, where there's no Fortress, and the Doomsday battle is confined to one floor of LexCorp.
• Batman and Robin hadn't been Warners' only recent bomb; the previous year had seen a series of poor performers, which suddenly made WB very cautious about mega-budget event pictures.
• When they finally pulled the plug, the money ended up going to Wild Wild West, on which Peters was also a Producer. And which ended up featuring a huge mechanical spider.
• Peters claims he threatened to throw Terry Semel out a window if he didn't change his mind.
• Burton refused to take Peters' calls after the project was shut down.

What I learned from the Q&A:

• Peters is edging back into front line producing and had to be persuaded by his attorney to appear, concerned that he would be portrayed in a negative light. Though he's a self-confessed hermit who wants to be "unreachable", the film-makers found him "charming, entertaining, disarming". Schnepp confessed to Peters' attorney that he's not exactly the hero of the movie, but that the goal was to present him as they found him, rather than simply looking to confirm the stories. Schnepp contends that without Peters' side of the story, the film isn't balanced or democratic.
• Wes Strick was the first major player to agree to be interviewed. Dan Gilroy was one of the last.
• It took around eighteen months to secure Kevin Smith's participation.
• It took the same amount of time (eighteen months) to get Burton on board; Schnepp basically stalked him through his contacts and approached him through his rep. Burton didn't know if he wanted to talk about it and Schnepp had to wait eight months. After that came an email asking him to wait six more. By that point the production was out of money, and Schnepp sold half his comic book collection to keep it going. Once Burton agreed to be interviewed, many others followed (mostly from the art and technical departments like Coleen Atwood, Jackson, Despretz and Johnson). 
• Although in contact with Cage's manager for over a year, the actor ultimately declined to be interviewed, but has heard good things about the film. They hope to be able to talk to him at some point but he won't be cut in; anything he contributes would be a supplement. Cage's presence is still very much part of the film because of the extensive use of test footage and old interviews.
• Asked which of the scripts he prefers, Schnepp replied that certain parts of all of them are great, and other parts are not. He referred back to the constant hiring/firing process, meaning there's no cohesive vision from a single writer.
• Schnepp has previously alluded to seeing a second Strick draft but I wasn't able to ask him about that, nor whether he'd come across the rumoured drafts by Ron Bass and Akiva Goldsman alleged to have come between Strick's and Gilroy's.

Conclusion
TDOSLWH is the most comprehensive look at this dead project we could have hoped for, and is well worth your time if you're interested in Superman and/or how franchise blockbusters are made (or not, in this case). Despite focusing primarily on visual aspects such as production design, story isn't neglected, with all three (confirmed) screenwriters of the Burton era participating.
The only reason I'm not more superlative is because I've already learned so much from researching these scripts, much of what the film showed me wasn't a surprise. There are plenty of interesting nuggets, but they'll perhaps be better appreciated by those who know nothing about the project going in.

Nontheless, it's a well-crafted, patient film made by dedicated people who are clearly in love with the very idea of Burton's Superman. If there's one weakness, it might be that very enthusiasm. Schnepp risks getting carried away with the imagined beauty of the finished film, and might have been more analytical about the crazier elements of the script and story which ultimately undermined the entire project. This tends to gloss over the fact that even Gilroy's second draft (probably the best of them to this point) was built on the fundamentally flawed foundations of previous ones.

Over-flowing with information, I've found there are things I simply haven't been able to recall, and it'll be interesting to revisit the film to see if I feel differently (not to mention dive into the extensive bonus features) when The Death of Superman Lives: What Happened? goes on sale July 9th. Pre-orders are available now.

Superman Unmade #7: Superman - The Man of Steel (Take 7)

Here there be spoilers

"We sent it to my agent and he liked it. He called some people and told them he had a completed script if they were interested.  They paid me for the draft because it did have elements they liked and if they used any of them, it clears them from a lawsuit. In this case, the script was written for kicks just to know it could be done and I was paid later for it."

"They were very nice and told us they liked parts but as a whole, it wasn't what they wanted."

"I can tell you they don't know much about comics. It is a business and what's more important, the $150 million at the box office or the $600 million in merchandising?"

"I read the Smith script and a synopsis of the Gilroy script and they do nothing for me. It's people tinkering with perfection."

Alex Ford on Superman - The Man of Steel

Who wrote it?

Alex Ford (Script)
Alex Ford and Jet Ellison (Story)

When was it written?

The draft is dated 9.4.98.  The "original" PDF widely found online is 122 pages, dated 14.9.08, and seems to have been created from an original text source. Its provenance is unclear, but it's an accurate reflection of the text versions available on the web, down to grammatical and syntactical errors. However, it's Courier font size is actually 11.96, not 12.  I used the text file available here to create another PDF that comes in at 121 pages, and on which this breakdown is based.  Without a hard copy of the script we'll never know if this more accurately reflects the original page count.

How long is it?

121 pages.

What's the broad structure?

Act 1 = 1-30

Act 2a = 31- 60

Act 2b = 61- 88

Act 3 = 89-121

What's the context?
If we looked at all the Superman fan-fic scripts on the Internet we'd be here a very long time. But this one has a place (albeit fleeting) in the development process, so it's worth dwelling on.   
We're back in a relatively dark period of development on the project. Tim Burton had departed, and though Nic Cage was still attached, there was a huge question over exactly what he was attached to. Warners had burned through at least five writers and ten drafts (not counting rumoured, never-seen drafts by Ron Bass and Akiva Goldsman), spending a big chunk of change with no end product.

Fed up with the lack of movement towards the end of 1998, Alex Ford, a twenty-two-year-old comic book fan and repped screenwriter, decided to submit his own script on spec.  Widely considered more faithful to the source material, this actually pre-dates Dan Gilroy's last draft. At least one source states that Ford's script was "accepted" at the WB production office in September 1998. Not only did he manage to get it read, he ultimately got paid for it too.  
Yet it seems Ford was never officially on board, and this illustrates how desperate things had become; the production paid a writer they'd never heard of, for a script they weren't ever likely to use, simply because they liked some of the ideas.

Why didn't it happen?
Jake Rossen's Superman Vs Hollywood notes that Lorenzo Di Bonaventura was interested enough in Ford's script to invite him to a story conference, where the writer proposed a seven-picture series, each featuring a different antagonist (and Lex Luthor as an over-arching nemesis), with Superman's death and resurrection across films six and seven.  He was then sent over to meet John Peters...
Only the two of them know what transpired, but by May 1999, Ford's script was definitely out.

What does Superman want at the start of the story? 
He doesn't really want anything. It could be argued that he's struggling to balance the demands of his heroism with the desire for a normal life, but this isn't really dramatised, merely spoken of. It isn't even addressed until he gets home to Smallville and Lana Lang, his childhood sweetheart. Up to that point there's little sense of the dichotomy Clark describes; that he's saving a city full of strangers and ignoring those he truly loves back home.

What happens next?
Superman's powers begin to wane sharply, just as a mysterious hero named Metallo appears to pick up his slack. When a power failure at a crucial moment almost kills him, the Man of Steel retreats back to Smallville and the promise of a normal life. Meanwhile Metallo, revealed to be a Kryptonite-powered cyborg created by Lex Luthor, grows tired of being on the billionaire's leash and seizes control of the ghetto known as Suicide Slum. In the final act, a weakened Superman returns to Metropolis to face down an enemy whose very proximity could kill him.

Does Superman resolve his conflict, and if so, how?
There isn't really much conflict to resolve. Lana's waiting for Clark, but only when he's ready to come home, implying that he'd have to stop being Superman... which he can't do. It's who he is. There's no more true conflict here than in Kevin Smith's drafts. Clark talks about how he spends his time saving strangers but there's never a sense that he's unhappy, tempted to walk away, or that he wants to come back permanently to the idyllic Smallville. It's embarrassment and fear that forces him back. Lana and Smallville represent the temptation of the normal, but there's really no reason Clark (able to fly from Metropolis in about thirty seconds flat) can't have both lives, and so there's never any tension between his two existences.

What works?

• Reverence - Ford clearly has an enduring love for the character and his world, essayed in his Golden Age opening. He assumes that most of the audience know Superman's origin, but quickly re-caps it in a stylish, to-the-point credit sequence.
• It isn't the "Death" storyline - and that means it's free of the constraints forced upon the previous scripts and writers. Ford ignores the foundations of years of (re)writing and production design, and the script is more refreshing for it.
• Lex Luthor is the probably strongest character. Not the bumbling, megalomaniac mob boss and comic relief of preceding scripts, but a cunning sociopath; smart, rich, and very, very jealous of Superman. Ford argues that Luthor is smarter than his nemesis; so smart that he consistently underestimates him. The boardroom scene where he's told by one of his lawyers that he "can't" sue the Man of Steel would, in previous iterations, have ended with the lackey grotesquely dispatched. Here, it deepens Luthor's character beyond that of a rich murderer with impulse control issues, whilst simultaneously throwing out some necessary exposition.
• The Kents - Previous scripts made it hard to believe Clark was raised in the kind of home that could tame an inclination to abuse his power. But these Kents are everything one might imagine a golden age couple to be; a family who raised a god not to believe he was better than us, and more than that, to sacrifice his own hopes of a normal life for the benefit of others. They aren't at all realistic; their only real purpose is to enshrine Clark's basic goodness. But in those confines they work, in a way the previous iterations never really did.
• A shared universe - When Wonder Woman shows up, it looks like the script might have nodded towards a larger continuity one time too many. Thankfully, she's used sparingly in an extended cameo as "Diana". Evoking another side of Superman's life outside Metropolis and Smallville, the pair ponder the morality and mortality of heroism. It's a fun cameo, even if it's more or less the same conversation he has with Lana, and both are ultimately reducia of the Mount Rushmore scene from Smith's script; why does he do what he does? There are other nods to the DC universe (the Justice League is alluded to) but none are heavy-handed enough to derail things.
  
• The villains' relationship - In so many comic book movies to this point, the antagonists are thrown together haphazardly, with little unifying motivation but hatred of the hero. This pairing is different; Luthor created Metallo, and so their relationship makes a lot more sense than teaming him with a god-like being such as Brainiac, which creates a power imbalance that repeatedly left Lex looking absurd.
• The post-credits "stinger" - This may well have been the first of its kind for a comic book movie.

What doesn't work?

• Style is a matter of personal taste, but there are ten line blocks of text that could be trimmed to make it leaner. The syntax and grammar are often maddening, and it's too reliant on parentheticals. When minimum words should have maximum impact, paring vital information from throwaway stuff is key. Do we really want to use a whole action line specifying the font of the newscast graphics? Points which can be communicated with one line of dialogue (e.g. the real purpose of Metallo's bimbos) are often supplemented by needless action lines performing the same function.
• Golden Age Superman - Ford said he wrote with Chris Reeve in mind, but it's hard to picture his Superman indulging in some of the casual cruelty he displays here. He crushes a bank robber's hand, and burns another's with a hot bullet. He actively avoids letting his parents know he's survived the reactor meltdown. He belts Metallo in the face while he's holding Lois. Then he tears out Metallo's heart, carves off his arm with heat vision and shoots him with a really big gun. Sure, he acknowledges this "murder" afterwards, and it turns out Metallo's brain is still alive, but does that excuse the intent?  We're not in the Golden Age anymore. Was Ford suggesting that authoritarian jerk might be needed in the '90s?
• The ladies - In preceding scripts the romantic focus has largely been on Lois, so usurping her with Lana is a potentially interesting move. Unfortunately they're both utterly one dimensional. Lois is a big-city bitch (again, Golden Age be damned) whose relationship with Superman feels perfunctory because they barely interact. Her rivalry with Clark is more substantial but still unsatisfying; she seems to actively dislike him because he's a faster writer and an all-round good guy. Lana, by contrast, is a small-town idealisation; virtuous, loving, kind and patient, except when she's passive-aggressively reminding Clark that he should have married her, and that he still can, if he abandons his calling. Diana actually works well as a counterpoint to these wildly divergent female characters.
• The tone - This isn't a period piece, so it's jarring to have a Golden Age opening in the same script as the lewd perp in the police station, cop-killer Metallo and a Lois who spits in his face. It's tough to subtly blend different tones, and these are so disparate that they end up feeling awkwardly bolted on to each other.
• The "death" of Superman - Despite excoriating the previous scripts for their mishandling of the death storyline ("To kill the character in one movie and expect people to feel anything is ridiculous"), TMOS has him apparently perish in a nuclear reactor. Except it transpires he didn't die. It's an odd, confusingly written sequence that just doesn't work.
• It isn't really ABOUT anything - A bunch of stuff happens but there's little thematic through-line and little conflict to resolve. Like Metallo, there's a structure and a brain but only a mechanical approximation of a heart.
• Logic problems - 
• Why is Metallo instantly known as... Metallo? He looks human, so why does nobody think to ask him how and why he got his name? How does Angela Chen interview him remotely? Why does nobody from his past life recognise him on national TV?
• Who gets on a monorail to flee an impending nuclear meltdown?
• If Luthor's plan is to supplant Superman, why doesn't he simply prevent Metallo saving him from the nuclear meltdown? With Superman dead, Luthor's problems are over, and that far outweighs the PR value of Metallo's rescue. (Which is negligible anyway, because nobody knows Luthor is behind Metallo.)
• Why does Metallo decide to destroy Suicide Slum? Hamilton theorises he's trying to hide his radiation signature by staying close to the nuclear plant, but he's already appeared all over Metropolis, and Hamilton has the corresponding radiation spikes to prove it.
• Would Luthor really take the time and effort to explain his grand plan to Superman after it had failed? And why use the device designed to mask a lying heartbeat if he's telling the truth? Superman now knows exactly what he did and how... It's a bluff that's not a bluff. 

Conclusion
Parts of The Man of Steel's approach are oddly prescient; in the last decade we've all become familiar with stinger scenes and cinematic shared universes. But these solid, ahead-of-their-time ideas are let down by frustrating writing and a story that doesn't actually feel like it's going anywhere or doing anything captivating enough. Where previous scripts were often too epic for their own good, The Man of Steel swings too far the other way; it could have made a half-decent double episode of Lois & Clark, but it doesn't feel big enough to be a Superman movie.
 
Man of Steel preventable death and destruction rating: 5
Suicide Slum has been more or less cleared by the time Superman and Metallo throw down. But Superman effectively murders his opponent (the intent clear despite Metallo's brain surviving) and he injures two others; a bullet burn is one thing, but shattering a man's hand? Dick move, Superman.

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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.)