World Absolutely brilliant Tom Mankiewicz interview NEW

[echostation]

http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=91990

Most people credit the beauty and majesty of the first Superman film and what was good about Superman II to Richard Donner. But one mustn’t forget the screenplay which nigh perfectly translated everything that was good about the characters onto paper.

Much of that screenplay was done by 1970’s James Bond screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz. Now after 26 years all the fans can enjoy what Superman II was really supposed to be with the release of Superman II - The Richard Donner Cut on DVD. Editor Michael Thau collected over six tons of lost Superman II footage and along with the help of Donner and Mankiewicz have a made a film which has surpassed the original theatrical release and would have made Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster proud . I got a chance to talk with Mankiewicz from his home in California about the new release.

Spoiler Warning: if you have not heard about the changes in Superman II - The Richard Donner Cut, or have gone 26 years without seeing the movie, this interview is jam packed with spoilers

Newsarama: I read that it was Richard Donner who brought you onto the Superman movies back in the ‘70s.

Tom Mankiewicz: Yeah, it was amazing. I had done three James Bond movies with Guy Hamilton. I will say this about [Superman movie series producers] the Salkinds. They’re not really producers; they’re really more like promoters. They started the Superman movies by signing Mario Puzo who was a fabulous novelist but not a very good screenwriter. I never even read what Mario did. But they got names like Mario Puzo, Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman, both actors whom you could argue they overpaid for, although not when you see the finished product. They flew helicopters over Cannes and promoted their movie trying to raise money with those big names. Since Guy was the reigning Bond director at the time they wanted to have him. He would have been a disastrous choice because even though he’s a wonderful guy he’s also a total cynic. That’s what made him so good at Bond. You’ve got to cast your director properly and again I think they were paying him a lot of money. The reason Guy left the production was because originally they were going to shoot it in Italy and suddenly the value of the Lira went up and the pound dropped and they said, “We’re going to England, we’re going to save millions.” Guy said, “That’s great except I’m a tax exile from England. I’m only allowed to be in there 60 days a year or something.” So they said good-bye and paid him off.

Dick [Donner] had been doing The Omen and when it came out it was a big hit. Donner and I were very good friends but we had never worked together. Donner has a voice that shatters glass. I was lying in bed at five am and the phone rang. It was Donner and he said, “Get up, get up. I’m You’re going to do Superman.” I said “Oh Dick, what the hell is this?” He said, “There’s a woman on her way to your house right now with the script and I told her you’re too nice a guy not to go downstairs and let her in.” So, son of a ***** the doorbell rings and they hand me 500 pages of script. I put it down on my hall table, went back upstairs, went to bed and the phone rang again. It was Donner saying, “Are you reading? Are you reading?” I said, “No Dick, it’s too heavy to get upstairs.” The next day I read it. The script just went on forever. It was very campy. I said, “Dick I don’t want to do it. I’m not going to do it.” He said, “You got to come over.” We lived fairly close to each other and I said, “Dick, I’ll come over but I’m not going to do it. I don’t want to do it.” I walked over to his house - this is an absolutely true story and he tells it too. I rang the doorbell, no answer. I went around the side of the house and there he was standing on the lawn dressed in the Superman costume they had given him [laughs].

He turned around and started running at me with the cape flying in the wind. He said, “Put the suit on and you’ll do it. Just try it on.” I said, “I don’t have to try it on.” I was laughing so hard and then he said the magic words, “If we can make the love story work between these two kids the rest of the movie will fall into place.” Donner is such a great director when it comes to getting inside the material and to really believe in a myth. He has this wonderful childlike thing where if you give him a myth, he can get in it and really make it work. So off we went. He threw out all of the production design done so far and hired a new designer and I started to go to work. He had no producer with him in the sense of a real movie producer so I filled that role because I had been producing previously. We set about trying to do two Superman movies. I was very adamant about that because the Salkinds with their financial sense of humor had just made The Three and Four Musketeers and forgotten to tell the actors it was two movies. Actors like Charlton Heston and Faye Dunaway. The Salkinds were sued and they had to pay up. So we wanted to make very sure that everyone who was in this picture knew we were making Superman and Superman II.

NRAMA: So you wrote the majority of the pictures?

TM: Yeah, most of what you see on the screen in Superman and Superman II was written by me. What happened was I stayed on the picture for well over a year. I was with Donner through the casting and the location scouting and all those things.

When the first Superman was ready to come out, Donner said, “I think you really deserve a different credit. You’d obviously get a writing credit, maybe even first writing credit but I’d like to give you a separate card and it would be on the screen and all the paid advertising.” I said, “Thank you.” I knew that meant giving up residuals but I thought, “What the hell?” I had worked all the way through the story, with everything. But we never previewed Superman because it was being cut up to the last minute. Warner Bros said “Well it’s going to be a great picture because it was their picture. But at the very last minute the Salkinds held the negative hostage and forced Warner to buy four territories because I think they had over-promised investors and they didn’t have enough money to pay them off. I remember [former chairman and co-chief executive officer of Warner Bros] Terry Semel, who now runs Yahoo, saying to me “It was like somebody putting a gun to your head and forcing you to buy IBM in 1950.” Donner put my name after the writers, which is a no-no when you are a writer. The Writer’s Guild took me into a hearing but I finally won. They said, “Yes you deserve the credit. Please correct it because the rules are it goes writer, producer, director.” So for Superman II, I come before the writers. As far as I know the first Superman may be the only film where a writer comes after the writing credit.

NRAMA: How did Richard Lester end up on Superman II?

TM: Donner and the Salkinds just loathed each other. Donner had called them *******s in print. The old man, Alexander Salkind, had paid the government of Costa Rica money to make him the cultural attaché to Switzerland. This gave him a diplomatic passport which made him immune from arrest because he was wanted on lots of fraud charges. Alexander Salkind couldn’t even attend any of the openings in the United States because there was a warrant for his arrest. The FBI said, “I’m sorry, cultural attaché from Costa Rica to Switzerland doesn’t cut it with us. That’s not a diplomatic passport as far as we’re concerned.” So he couldn’t show up for any of the openings. In the meantime, another parallel story was going on.

Richard Lester was owed several million dollars by the Salkinds because of his share of the profits from directing The Three and Four Musketeers. Lester sued them and he won the lawsuit except he won it against a Bahamian corporation which was a company that was broke. So he couldn’t get any money. In essence the Salkinds did two things when the first Superman opened. They fired Donner immediately because they hated him and they said to Lester “If you finish Superman II we’ll pay you the money we owe you.”

Of course, their other absolutely inexcusable thing that they did was they took Brando out of the second movie. They read in the contract that he had a piece of the gross and if he didn’t appear in the film they didn’t have to pay him so they just cut him out. I hate to sound pretentious by using words like arc but when Jor-El sends his son to Earth, it’s almost God sending Christ to earth or it could be Allah sending Mohammed to Earth. Then when the son screws up in the second picture and he loses his powers and falls in love, he in essence, becomes a selfish human and has to go back to the Fortress of Solitude and apologize to his father. All those scenes with Brando were just wonderful and they were all taken out and replaced with Susannah York, who had nothing to do with anything. She is a perfectly nice woman and a very good actress but was available for, I’m guessing, $5000 a week.

I never understood that because obviously the first one was a hit and the second one was going to be a hit so there was money for everybody. Marlon may be the signature star of the 20th century so cutting him out was just inexcusable. Then Lester called Donner said, “Listen, you’ve already shot 75 or 80 percent of [Superman II] so let’s share credit.” Donner said, “No, I don’t share credit.” Then Lester and the Salkinds found out that, according to the Director’s Guild, unless Lester had directed 40 or 45 percent of the picture, he couldn’t get his name on it as director. So they started eliminating scenes and sequences that we had shot already and replacing them with other ones. Terry Semel asked me to go back and work on the film but Donner and I were friends had offices as Warners at the time. I said, “Terry I can’t do that. Dick is my friend and he brought me on the picture and it’s just inexcusable that he got fired by these people when he delivered them this huge hit movie.” Then Terry said “Well could you fly to London and arrange to accidentally run into Lester and have dinner with him?” I said, “No, I can’t do that either.” Terry said, “I understand.” So they got David and Leslie Newman to write these scenes. In the new cut of Superman II, Lois throws herself out the window because she knows Clark is Superman and that he’ll catch her. There’s also a scene where she shoots Clark. Then there are all the Brando scenes. There’s about 45 minutes to an hour worth of new stuff. In my opinion it’s a vastly better movie than the one that was released theatrically. What they did was make a really good movie for the theatrical version of Superman II when they could have had an exceptional movie.

NRAMA: So how close is this new cut to what you and Donner had envisioned?

TM: It’s very close. There were scenes we didn’t get to shoot. For instance, Donner did all the scenes with Gene Hackman, Ned Beatty and Valerie Perrine. Those guys never worked a day with Lester. I wrote the scene where Lois shoots Clark as one of the two test scenes and what’s in the movie is the actual test of Chris Reeve and Margot [Kidder]. The scene is in the new cut and it’s almost seamless. Chris is 30 pounds lighter but at least he’s standing there. It works great.

NRAMA: Why did Lester put in so much campy humor into the theatrical release of Superman II?

TM: This goes back to the Salkinds and it may seem like I’m picking on them but then again Donner and I used to call the movie Close Encounters of the Salkind. It was a terrible choice of director. Lester just happened to be the one they owed the money too. He was a very talented director but he’s a cynic. His great work like the Beatles movies [A Hard Day's Night and Help!] and The Musketeer movies are all cynical, tongue in cheek things. So of course he’s going to go camp because he doesn’t really believe in it. Donner and I each had a Superman placard in our offices at Pinewood Studios that said on it “Verisimilitude. You just got to do it like it’s really happening.” There was some humor with Gene Hackman but the new production designer, John Barry, said Krypton is one big crystal and the brilliant cinematographer, Geoffrey Unsworth, said “Well I’m going to shoot it all with fog filters” and then I said, “Well I’m going to write all the Krypton stuff in stilted English semi-Shakespearean stuff.” Then we move to Kansas in Smallville where Unsworth shoots in sepia colors and all the writing is “Gosh, Ma and Pa.” Then you get to Metropolis and there are red reds and green greens like a comic strip. Then the payoff of all of it was in the second movie and that’s what got so screwed around. Lester’s forte is sophisticated comedy but Superman is not a sophisticated comedy. You’ve got to believe that a man can fly.

Frankly, Lester put in sequences that were campy and also some scenes that were very cruel. At one point the supervillains kill a little boy but that got cut out. Now it sounds like I’m now knocking Lester and I don’t mean to but he didn’t believe and Donner believed. I’m really happy for Donner that this new cut is out because it is the movie he envisioned.

NRAMA: I was very surprised when I saw that it ends up being Luthor’s missile, that when thrown into outer space, was what freed the Phantom Zone criminals. It doesn’t make sense that they changed that.

TM: I don’t really know because I wasn’t there but in this new cut of Superman II he turns the world backwards at the end. That was always going to be part of the second movie. But it was such a spectacular effect that one day when Donner and I were driving out to the studio he said, “Is there any way to get that into one? Because we’ve got to put our best foot forward here.” We put it into one and we were always going to figure out another fantastic thing for two, which never happened. So for the new cut of Superman II we put that back where it was originally intended to be. So because of that my favorite shot is back in the movie which is when Jackie Cooper is brushing his teeth and the toothpaste goes back into the tube.

NRAMA: Do you ever think back about what you would have done for the end of Superman II?

TM: No, because it’s exhausting to think about. But with Donner, I’ve never seen a guy with more stamina. The Salkinds never showed him a budget or a schedule. They kept screaming at him, “You’re over budget.” Donner kept saying “You keep telling me I’m over budget. What is the budget?” Clearly they had promised their investors that they could make these films much cheaper than it was going to be. As Warners saw the rushes they realized that this was not going to be the biggest turkey of all time but rather it looked like it might be a good film so they started investing in it. In essence Warners really helped us and by the end a guy named Charlie Greenlaw, who was a wonderful production executive over there, came over to help Donner.

At one point I had to fly down to see the old man [Alexander Salkind]. Alex was rather charming in a rackish way. I had in my contract that wherever I went I had to have a suite and that’s because I like to write in a hotel and I get claustrophobic in one room and I was also a hot writer at the time. My agent said, “Don’t let the Salkinds not give you one thing that’s in your contract because if you give an inch they’ll take a mile.” Donner and I had both our entire salaries placed in escrow in a Swiss bank before we even came over to the shoot. A certain portion of the money was released every Monday.

 

[echostation]

NRAMA: Oh my God, like an allowance.

TM: Yeah. So I get down to Zurich and I was put in a single room in a hotel to meet with Alex Salkind. I decided I wasn’t going to say anything about room. The phone rings and it’s old man Salkind. He always called me Mr. Mankiewicz and he called Dick, Mr. Donner. He said, “Mr. Mankiewicz, you see what your friend Mr. Donner has done to us. Here I am in my single room calling you in your single room.” We were going to meet at the hotel bar at five o’clock so I thought I’d take a walk around the lake. I go down the main staircase of the hotel and I hear Alex’s voice screaming in some foreign language. I go down the hallway and there he is in this massive suite with the doors open, yelling at investors. So when we met for a drink I said to him, “Alex, let me just ask you a question even though it doesn’t matter to me, the room’s fine and all that. But why did you call me and say, here I am calling you from my single room to your single room? It’s such a silly little lie. Why did you do that?” He looked at me and said “I can’t help it.”

NRAMA: Was it the Salkinds that removed you from the production?

TM: They didn’t really remove me from the production. Alex says to me, “Is there a way you could co-produce?” I said, “Jesus Alex, I don’t know.” He said, “But here is my problem. When Mr. Donner and I have a fight, you will always agree with Mr. Donner. Isn’t that true?” I said, “Probably and it is because he knows how to make a picture and you don’t.” He said, “Well that’s why I knew this wouldn’t work.” So that was the end of that so there was never really any serious discussion about my producing.

NRAMA: In the Donner cut of Superman II, during the scene where the Phantom Zone criminals fight Superman in the city. They throw Superman into the Statue of Liberty and Superman throws Non [played by Jack O'Halloran] into the Empire State Building. Is Metropolis supposed to be New York in this version?

TM: Absolutely. The New York Daily News was The Daily Planet. It was very funny because when we got there, guys like Jimmy Breslin and all these columnists with the News, were so thrilled that it was going to be The Daily Planet. They kept writing stuff in the Daily News saying, “Ran into Perry White today. Ran into Clark Kent. Ran into Lois Lane.”

Here’s a very funny story. The night we were shooting the scene in the first Superman where he flies up and saves Lois Lane for the first time was the night of the blackout in New York [July 13 ,1977]. So before we started shooting [cinematographer] Geoffrey Unsworth needed more light. One of the cops that was with us said, “If you unscrew the plate on the lamppost, you can just hook right in to the city’s power.” So they did that and he stuck the plug in and all the lights in New York went out. Geoffrey was convinced that he had caused the blackout, which he definitely hadn’t done. But even though he’s not with us anymore, I assure you to this day Geoffrey would have been convinced that he caused the blackout of ’77.

NRAMA: [laughs] The first Superman is still very much beloved by comic book fans. But if they have to say something negative about it, they will ask why Luthor was so goofy. Even though at the time when the movie was made, in the comics Luthor was pretty goofy, but the essence of Luthor is not that way.

TM: Exactly. That was a choice that we made. We felt there wasn’t much comedy in the first Superman movie. We made a choice that Luthor, Otis and Miss Teschmacher were going to be like a traveling act. Our very first choice for Miss Teschmacher was Goldie Hawn. She agreed to play it but she wanted the same money as Hackman. The Salkinds didn’t want to pay her that much. She wanted two million just like Hackman, a million a picture. Our second choice was Ann-Margret and she agreed to play it. I remember we went up to see her at her house and she wanted half a million a picture and they wouldn’t pay it. Valerie Perrine, who’s actually wonderful, was the third choice. I’m making up this number up approximately, Valerie wanted a quarter of a million a picture so they were going to save money. We’re in Zurich at the hotel and Pierre Spengler, who was the Salkinds’ hatchet man, comes in and tells us, “We have just signed Miss Ann-Margret.” Donner and I said, “Oh thank you Alex.” Alex said, “You see Mr. Donner and Mr. Mankiewicz, the money that I spend on your behalf?” A half hour later Pierre comes in and says, “We’ve just signed Valerie Perrine.” I said, “But how’s that possible? You just made a deal with Ann-Margret.” The old man said, “She can sue.”

When we got to Calgary, which is where we shot Superman growing up in Smallville, the Salkinds announced to the crew they were only going to get half their money for all the time they shot there. The Salkinds were banking on the fact that they could save half the money and keep it in their Swiss bank, draw interest on it and that the crew wouldn’t leave and fly back to England. They were right, the crew stayed. They did that again their last picture [Christopher Columbus: The Discovery]. They stranded a crew in the Caribbean and didn’t pay them. They’re an amazing bunch of people.

NRAMA: Do you know if the Donner cut or the idea of the Donner cut was what Bryan Singer was making a sequel to?

TM: I’ve met Bryan Singer a couple of times and he said when he was doing X-Men he would go back to his trailer and just watch Superman all the time. He wanted to bring Superman Returns back to the sensibility of the first Superman. Bryan used to come down and visit us in the editing room over the summer when we were putting this new cut of Superman II together again with [film editor and preservationist] Michael Thau. Bryan was always talking about the sensibility of the first movie, that there was real emotion and real drama. Like in the scene where Superman lands on Lois Lane’s balcony, originally that was a two page scene where Superman flies flew by and they had some snappy lines. I expanded it to about six or seven pages. I felt it was two kids on their first date and then I got the idea that he takes her flying at the end and Donner was just thrilled.

NRAMA: Did you have visions for more Superman sequels?

TM: The fact that Donner got fired soured the movie actors and everybody else but most importantly they went ahead and did a third movie. Obviously the Salkinds were still heavily involved and Donner wasn’t going to work with them. Then Superman III came out and didn’t do as well as they thought it would. Donner and I were both at Warners at the time and Terry Semel came down to me one day and said, “Why didn’t Superman III work the way we wanted it to?” I said, “I think it is because you made a Richard Pryor movie. It’s not Richard Pryor’s fault, he’s a terribly talented guy. But it’s a Richard Pryor movie and not a Superman movie.” Terry said, “Well would you guys come back and make the series right? We’ll promise to keep the Salkinds out of Donner’s hair.” Donner and I sat down and we thought, “We’ve done everything already.” He had turned the world backwards, he lost his powers and he’s faced kryptonite. Let somebody else do it. So we said no in a very nice way and then Christopher Reeve, who was the nicest guy in the world and such an idealist, was about to do Superman IV: The Quest for Peace and he asked me to help him. I said to him, “Chris you’re forgetting the rules of Superman. World disarmament is a wonderful thing but Superman can’t get involved in things like that because everybody knows he could disarm the whole world in 20 minutes if he wanted to do. You can’t bring up famine in a Superman movie because Superman could feed the world if he wanted to. So don’t get into those areas because it’s not going to work. Chris understood but he went ahead and did it anyway. He’s a very idealistic guy and I think that put a lid on Superman for a while.

NRAMA: What Superman comics inspired your movie?

TM: I read Superman comics when I was growing up like everybody else but in preparation for the movie I never read one. Some press person was on the set and asked, “How are you doing Superman?” I said, “Donner is the leader and we’re doing Superman the way we think Superman ought to be done. If we’re wrong I guess it’s like flying across the Pacific Ocean and missing Hawaii.”

NRAMA: I heard that you also had a vision for two back to back Batman films.

TM: Yeah, I was the first writer on Batman and I ran into some tremendous problems at Warners. I wrote a very dark film and Bob Daly and Terry Semel kept saying, “This is so dark” because they thought this was going to be like Superman. I said, “Guys, again the rules. Superman comes from Krypton. You can do whatever you want to with him. But Bruce Wayne is a real guy and if you decide to photograph him on 5th Avenue during the day it will be like the old television series. He’s going to look silly. He’s going to look like a guy who’s a cross dresser or something. So he’s got to be a knight and he’s got to be menacing.” For Batman, they tried to get me to work with Ivan Reitman, Joe Dante and it went on for a long time then I went off to do Ladyhawke with Donner. Then Warners said to me, “We found this guy, Tim Burton, and he seems to have a good line on this.” I talked to Burton and I told Warners, “Guys, just let him do it. He’s completely into it.” They would have gone with Burton anyway and the ironic thing was, I loved the movie and Burton did a darker film than I wrote.

NRAMA: How was it reteaming with Jack O'Halloran for Dragnet which is one of my favorite silly 80’s comedies?

TM: Oh that was great. When I was doing Dragnet he played this character with this unbelievable name of Emil Muzz. As we were casting Dragnet somebody handed me a list of guys that would work for the part. They said, “You would know this guy from Superman.” I said, “Jack O’Halloran, Jeez he’d be great.” [laughs] So he became Emil Muzz.

Dan Aykroyd and I wrote the script with Alan Zweibel. One of my favorite parts is when Tom Hanks is with Emil Muzz and he says, “Well Emil, it looks like it's just you, me, your balls and this drawer. Then Tom slams the drawer shut and you hear Danny’s voice saying, “By the time I got back Muzz was singing like Beverly Sills.”

NRAMA: As someone that wrote so many Bond pictures, have you watched the ones in the past 15 years or so?

TM: Off and on. I didn’t dislike Pierce Brosnan but I didn’t think he was exceptional. I’ve seen the new one [Casino Royale] and I think Daniel Craig is just great. He’s a wonderful actor. Even though I’m a friend of Roger Moore’s and it was fun working with Roger there was something about Sean [Connery]. Sean has the face of a bastard. Sean looked dangerous and Daniel Craig is dangerous and that’s a really good thing. The difference between Sean and Roger, was that Sean could sit at a table with a girl at a nightclub and either lean across and kiss her or stick a knife in her under the table and then say, “Excuse me waiter, I have nothing to cut my meat with.” Whereas Roger could kiss the girl but if he stuck a knife in her it would look nasty because Roger looks like a nice guy.

NRAMA: What are you working on now?

TM: I’m having the time of my life. I’m teaching at USC. I have some racehorses. I am writing an autobiography. Also I think Fox is going to do a TV series based on the film Mother, Jugs & Speed which I wrote back in 1976 and Peter Yates directed. It is about ambulance drivers. Fox said to me, “If we do it, would you like to run the show?” I said, “Oh no, you’d kill me.”

 

[buggs0268]

Mank rules

 

[Catman]

AWESOME interview. In the beginning of the interview he says stuff we've heard a million times but towards the end he tells us some new things we didn't know about. Like, I had no idea he loved Tim Burton's Batman. That's good to know.

 

[Spoarz™]

Wow, that's a fantastic interview. Tom Mankiewicz is an absolute genius.

 

[Catman]

Tom Mankiewicz is an absolute genius.

Indeed he is. Too bad he isn't that productive anymore.

 

[ultimatefan]

Very interesting. We can see that the camp on Superman II was a combination of the Salkind´s greedy tactics with Lester´s sensibilities. But the thing on Lex Luthor can be considered their fault. It´s that bad mentality of "we need comedy, so let´s put it here", instead of just trying to find natural humor that makes sense in the context of the story.

 

[Kevin Roegele]

Very interesting. We can see that the camp on Superman II was a combination of the Salkind´s greedy tactics with Lester´s sensibilities. But the thing on Lex Luthor can be considered their fault. It´s that bad mentality of "we need comedy, so let´s put it here", instead of just trying to find natural humor that makes sense in the context of the story.

No, it isn't. It's called 'comic relief' - you have characters deliberately there to laugh at. Even Shakespeare used to do it. It's a classic set up, you have one smart character and a bumbling fool for him to explain the plot to. Perhaps you've seen Blackaddder. The great thing about Hackman's Luthor is that he can seem a harmless used-car dealer at times, but he's smart enough to outwit even Superman. I love that.

 

[ultimatefan]

No, it isn't. It's called 'comic relief' - you have characters deliberately there to laugh at. Even Shakespeare used to do it. It's a classic set up, you have one smart character and a bumbling fool for him to explain the plot to. Perhaps you've seen Blackaddder. The great thing about Hackman's Luthor is that he can seem a harmless used-car dealer at times, but he's smart enough to outwit even Superman. I love that.

I understand the concept, and it´s okay to me that Otis is played to comic relief to some extent, but the whole Lex as a used car dealer thing just doesn´t work for me. Lex to me has to be the cold and collected villain like he is in TAS for instance, the guy who never loses it, who´s always smooth and in control of the situation.

 

[Kevin Roegele]

I understand the concept, and it´s okay to me that Otis is played to comic relief to some extent, but the whole Lex as a used car dealer thing just doesn´t work for me. Lex to me has to be the cold and collected villain like he is in TAS for instance, the guy who never loses it, who´s always smooth and in control of the situation.

Fair enough you prefer that version of Lex, but when Superman the Movie was made, that version didn't exist. In the comics of the time, Luthor was a pretty typical criminal super-genius, although he had a Reed Richards-like talent for creating amazing technology.

My favourite version of Lex is the Hackman one, he's a classic modern Loki, a trickster figure. When he's being serious, no-one is better than Hackman. Such as when he tricks Superman with the kryptonite, or his, "causing the death of innocent people" line.

 

[ultimatefan]

Fair enough you prefer that version of Lex, but when Superman the Movie was made, that version didn't exist. In the comics of the time, Luthor was a pretty typical criminal super-genius, although he had a Reed Richards-like talent for creating amazing technology.

My favourite version of Lex is the Hackman one, he's a classic modern Loki, a trickster figure. When he's being serious, no-one is better than Hackman. Such as when he tricks Superman with the kryptonite, or his, "causing the death of innocent people" line.

Yeah, I know, what I think is actually STM was ahead in many ways of the modern reinvention of superheroes in the sense of getting rid of the cheesier elements of the comics and making the character as serious as possible - the way the comics themselves became post-Crisis. In that sense, Luthor felt like a compromise to me.

 

[Catman]

I agree with Kev.

 

[captain_jimbo]

Indeed he is. Too bad he isn't that productive anymore.

God I love Mankiewicz. He's just brilliant, and I'd go so far as to say he was just as important to Superman: The Movie's success as Donner.