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Surprising Facts About Christopher Reeve's Superman
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Think you know everything about the first Superman movie? Think again.
The most recent Superman movie, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice came out in 2016, but it's still a great time to look back at the first full-length theatrical film based on Superman.
Here are 10 facts you probably didn't know about Superman (1978).
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Reeve Was Almost Too Skinny to Play Superman
Casting director Lynn Stalmaster suggested Christopher Reeve play Superman but director Richard Donner and the producers Salkinds felt he was too young and skinny. But the Julliard-trained actor blew them away on his screen text.
After getting the part, Reeve went on a grueling bodybuilding session for months. He went from 170 pounds to 212 before filming.
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Brando Had a Cue Card Hidden in a Diaper
Marlon Brando refused to memorize most of his lines in advance. Some felt it was from laziness. But, early in his career, he felt memorizing lines took away from the actor's performance.
“If you don't know what the words are but you have a general idea of what they are, then you look at the cue card and it gives you the feeling to the viewer, hopefully, that the person is really searching for what he is going to say—that he doesn't know what to say,” Brando said for the documentary The Making Of Superman The Movie .
Instead, he had cue cards hidden on the set. For example, in the scene where he puts baby Kal-El into the escape pod, he was reading his lines from the baby's diaper.
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Non Almost Punched Out Superman
Actor Jack O’Halloran, who played the mute brute Non, says he almost got in a fight with Christopher Reeve behind the scenes.
O’Halloran, who’s father was a well-known organized crime boss, heard a rumor that Reeve was talking about his family behind his back. When O’Halloran confronted him they almost came to blows. Donner stopped him yelling, “Please, not in the face, Jack, not in the face!” O'Halloran was laughing so hard he dropped Reeve and the fight ended.
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Superman Saved The New York Daily News
The studio was filming the scenes in Metropolis in New York during the 1977 Blackout. The New York Daily News was able to get out the morning newspaper out because the production loaned them their generator-powered klieg lights.
The blackout happened after cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworthplugged a spotlight into a lampost and he felt responsible. It was a coincidence.
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Reeve Trained With Darth Vader
Reeve was trained by British bodybuilder David Prowse. Prowse tried out for the role of Superman but was turned down because he wasn't American.
He later went on to play Darth Vader on the set of the Star Wars films.
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There Was Almost a Musical Number in Superman
Would you believe there's a singing number in the middle of the film? When Donner was developing the film Leslie Bricusse wrote the song 'Can You Read My Mind?' for the scene where Superman takes Lois Lane flying and it was sung by Maureen McGovern. It seemed OK but Margot Kidder kept telling the director 'I can sing! I can sing!'
So they took her in the studio and she sang it against the cut of the film. 'It wasn’t bad, but it was an actress singing a song instead of a great singer,' Donner later said, 'So I said, ‘How about talking it through like you’re talking to yourself?’ She did it, and it was the best of all three, and that’s what’s in the movie. Plus, it came from her heart.'
They later released the single 'Can You Read My Mind?' sung by McGovern and it became a mid-chart hit on the Billboard Hot 100 that year.
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A Director Pulled a Gun on the Producers
Several high-profile directors were considered before Richard Donner including Steven Spielberg and Sam Peckinpah.Alex Salkind felt that Spielberg was asking for too much money and decided to wait and see how his next film Jaws did. Producer Alexander Salkind said they should wait and see how 'this fish movie turned out.' It was a hit and Spielberg's price went up.
According to the book Superman: The High-Flying History of America's Most Enduring Hero when they approached Peckinpah he pulled a gun during the meeting and said, 'You gotta shut up kid. What do you know about making movies?' They decided to get another director after that. They went with Richard Donner.
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Superman Almost Had a Cameo by Kojak
The original script for Superman: The Movie was written by Mario Puzo, who also wrote The Godfather, and given to director Richard Donner for consideration. He immediately decided to rewrite it.
It was written as a comedy and included a cameo of famous bald detective Telly Savalasmeeting Superman and saying his catchphrase, 'Who loves you, baby?'
'It was a parody of a parody. They were destroying Superman,' Donner said. He took the job on the condition he could rewrite the script with his friend TomMankiewicz.
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Brando Didn't Come up With Superman Logo
While most believe it was Marlon Brando's idea to put Superman's logo on Jor-El's chest it was actually screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz who came up with it.
Richard Donner insisted on grounding Superman in reality and they needed to figure out why he would have the 'S' on his chest. 'So we decided to give everyone [on Krypton] a family crest with a different letter, which didn't really exist in the comic books,' Mankiewicz remembered in the book Comic Book Movies.
Since then the idea that the symbol is a family crest was incorporated into the comics and the reboot film Man of Steel.
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Reeve's Flying Training Helped Him
Christopher Reeve was a trained pilot and used that experience to make the flying scenes more realistic. 'I thought it would be fun to mix acting and airplanes,' Reeve said during his press tour for The Aviator, 'Flying is something that comes naturally to me; it certainly helped me with Superman.'
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Brando Wanted to Play a Bagel
It's hard to imagine Kryptonians looking different from the humans. Marlon Brando had another idea. Brando's agent told Donner that he was probably going to suggest playing Superman's father Jor-El as a green suitcase. That way he could stay home and do voice-over work. Donner was ready for it. Or so he thought.
When the director and producer met with Brando in his home he suggested that Kryptonians should look very different from humans. He said, 'who knows what the people from Krypton look like?' He suggested that they might look like a green bagel.
Brando gave a long speech and then asked what they thought. 'Marlon, I think that people want to see Marlon Brando playing Jor-El,' Donner said thoughtfully, 'They don't want to see a green bagel.' They showed him pictures of Jor-El from the comics and Brando agreed to do the performance their way.
Those are the wild, funny and strangest facts about Superman: The Movie. The next time you watch it imagine a singing Lois Lane and a green bagel instead of Brando.
About Superman (1978)
- Synopsis: 'Follow the Man of Steel's story from Krypton to Smallville to his life in Metropolis and his alter-ego, mild-mannered Daily Planet reporter Clark Kent. Both Superman and Clark Kent must contend with the brilliant villain Lex Luthor and the tenacious, often-in-danger reporter Lois Lane.'
- Release Date: Dec 15, 1978
- Directed by Richard Donner
- Starring: Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder
Official Site: http://www2.warnerbros.com/superman/home.html
Published 10:38 AM EDT Sep 21, 2017
The latest issue of the “Superman” comic has outraged some, and inspired others.
In Action Comics #987, the iconic character steps up to defend immigrants from an armed white American who is angry over the loss of his factory job.
Though he’s been viewed as an American hero, Superman may actually have more in common with the people he’s trying to save.
“Superman is himself an immigrant,” says Dan Jurgens, the writer behind Action Comics #987. “In some ways he is the ultimate immigrant. It’s not that he’s from another country, he’s from a whole other world.”
Superman, a native of the fictional planet of “Krypton,” landed on Earth as an infant and some suggest that he would therefore be eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, DACA. President Trump recently announced that he would end the program, though he called on Congress to provide a new path for DACA holders.
While this issue has highlighted the immigration debate, Jurgens says the Superman comic is really about “the human condition” — current political tensions included.
“We have a lot of different scenes in the book, and these are things we all see outside our window on what sometimes feels like a daily basis,” he says. “(There are) many examples of how man is so cruel to one another, to his neighbor, or the animals that populate the planet, or the planet itself. It’s all these things that we seem to find ourselves sometimes mired in.”
This issue tackles xenophobia, immigration, racism, workplace violence, and global poverty, among other things, because a character in the story — Jor-El, who is Superman’s biological father from Krypton — is trying to show his son that the human race does not deserve him.
“(Jor-El is) opening his eyes to man’s cruelty and inhumanity to one another,” Jurgens says. “Part of what we’re dealing with here is [the question of], ‘At what point does it become hopeless for Superman?’”
“If Superman starts to feel that our situation here is hopeless, what does that say about us?”
Though the comic is dropping on the heels of the violent white supremacist rally that took place last month in Charlottesville, Virginia, Jurgens says the comic was actually written in May. And, he adds, the violent American in the comic is not necessarily meant to be a white supremacist.
“We don’t call him, nor did we ever refer to him as a white supremacist or a Nazi or anything like that,” he says. “It has more to deal with, I think, that angry sort of spirit that is out there among certain segments of society, where they feel like they’ve been cheated out of something that they may not be cheated out of, and that’s how we wanted to approach that scene.”
Breitbart and an opinion piece in Fox News have both railed against the new issue, with the former sayingthe character of Superman is a “leftist” who no longer represents “truth, justice and the American way.” When contacted by PRI, DC Comics, which publishes the Superman comic, declined to comment.
Fans seem split on Action Comics #987. In PRI’s Global Nation Exchange group on Facebook, some commenters said they were “fascinated” by the political points raised. Others like Hector Gonzalez Rodriguez III, the author of the El Peso Hero comic, said it felt like a “half-hearted attempt for headlines from DC Comics.”
“It feels late and contrived. There are major issues of diversity [and] representation of professionals within the major comic book publishers,” he says. “I do feel conflicted on the issue. In essence, it is part of what makes Superman a great character — he is the outsider looking in. As a Chicano comic book fan and creator, I am wary of the cultural appropriation of our struggles.”
Though some are critical of the new issue, Superman has always defended vulnerable communities and he’s always been political, says Joseph Darowski, a professor at Brigham Young University. Darowski is also a comic historian and the editor of “The Ages of Superman: Essays on the Man of Steel in Changing Times.”
“It’s an inevitable part of the comic book industry that politics is going to seep in,” Darowski says. “There’s always some reflection of what’s going on on the world stage.”
In the 1940s, Superman tried to stop World War II. He’s taken on corrupt politicians and got political during the Cold War, too.
“As America gets engaged in the space race, suddenly Superman’s enemies are coming from the stars more frequently,” Darowski says. “Kryptonite and other forms of radiation creeps into the stories after the dropping of the atomic bomb. During the Cold War and the nuclear arms race, Kryptonite becomes much more commonly used in Superman stories, and villains who get their power through radiation also become much more common. These geopolitical events end up being adapted in fantastic ways into the Superman comics.”
This article originally appeared on PRI.org. Its content was created separately to USA TODAY.
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Published 10:38 AM EDT Sep 21, 2017