Superman Watch Continues

In honor of my desperately awaiting Superman Returns to come out (this summer, you'll believe a man can fly.....again), here are some interesting facts about Superman, or, more specifically, the Superman movies.

*Christopher Reeve took some criticism for his portrayal of Clark Kent (Superman's alter ego) as a weak, bumbling nerd. This characterization (which he said was based on a younger Cary Grant), in Reeve's opinion, was necessary because he felt that there had to be some kind of a difference between Superman and Clark Kent, otherwise "it's just the same guy in glasses".

* Superman 4: The failure of this film at the box office prompted the Cannon Group Inc, to cancel a planned production of "Spiderman".

*The development of the best method to show Superman flying was a long period of experimentation. The methods attempted included simply catapulting a dummy into the air, a remote control model airplane painted as the character and simply animating the flying sequences. The producers settled for a combination of back projection and specially designed zoom lenses that could create the illusion of movement by zooming in on Christopher Reeve while making the back projection appear to recede.

*Clark Kent's and Superman's hair part on opposite sides.

*Marlon Brando received $4 million for his ten minutes on screen. After suing the production company for trying to use footage of him in Superman II, the footage was cut out. But, Because of the nature of the lawsuit, he still received royalties for his performance in Superman II (which never took place).

*Christopher Reeve dubbed all of Jeff East's dialogue as young Clark Kent due to the perceived discrepancy in their voices so as to maintain on-screen continuity. East himself is never heard during the film.

*Numerous actors tested for the part of Superman/Clark Kent: Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charles Bronson, 'Kris Kristofferson' , and even Ilya Salkind's wife's dentist (footage of the dentist testing for the part of Superman can, in fact, be seen in the supplemental section of the DVD). Eventually, the Salkinds cast an almost unknown actor they kept coming back to from earlier in their search - Christopher Reeve (who had only one other film and a TV soap opera to his credit).

*Marlon Brando refused to memorize most of his lines in advance. In the scene where he puts infant Kal-El into the escape pod, he was actually reading his lines from the diaper of the baby.

*Marlon Brando reputedly suggested that his cameo role as Jor-El be done by him in voice over only, with the character's image onscreen being a glowing, levitating green bagel. Unsure if Brando was joking or not, the film's producers formally rejected the suggestion.

*Marlon Brando had evidently gone crazy at this point.

*Initially, Gene Hackman refused to cut off his mustache to play Lex Luthor. In early one-sheets of the movie his face is featured with a mustache. Before Richard Donner and Hackman met face-to-face, Donner proposed to Hackman that if he would cut his mustache, Donner would cut his too, and Hackman agreed. It turned out later that Donner did not have a mustache at all.

*Apparently, really great classic actors are all assholes.

*The technique Richard Pryor's character uses in Superman III to steal money from his company, where he collects very little money (in this case decimals of a cent) from other accounts and aggregates them in his personal account, is called "salami technique" in computer crime terminology.

* Superman III marked the first time Christopher Reeve was given top billing in a Superman movie. For the first film he was behind Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman; for the second he was only behind Hackman.