SUPERMAN '78: THE MINI-SERIES

A Viewer's Guide

Generally speaking, I’m against bite-sizing media from another era for today’s attention spans - symphonies, broken into movements, aren’t meant to be enjoyed across multiple sittings; DVD and Blu Ray chapters aren’t meant as guides for where to break, but rather in the pre-YouTube era, the best way to jump right to, say, Neo and Morpheus’s dojo fight.

So when I see someone take a long movie and break it into episodes, I tend to bristle, first on seeing the reflection of how episodic storytelling (even binged) has absolutely shredded our concentration, but second because experiencing a new work of art in bits and pieces damages its momentum, its mood, its spirit.

Buuuuuut, as with anything covered by “generally speaking,” there are exceptions.

Superman: The Movie¹ is massive in scale - produced for $55MM (ballpark, $270MM today) by megalomaniacal father/son team Alexander and Ilya Salkind with five filming units running around the world simultaneously, racing to complete Superman and its sequel² as one massive production. Directed by Richard Donner with a deft combination of John Ford’s scope,³ and Howard Hawks’s wit⁴, and anchored by an indelible, definitive performance by Christopher Reeve as Superman/Clark Kent, it unquestionably ushered in the modern superhero era, and remains gloriously watchable to this day.

Buuuuut … it’s two and a half hours long.⁵ I was talking to a friend today who wanted to show it to his kid, but was worried that sitting them down to a movie from nearly 50 years ago that runs that long would be a dealbreaker. I pointed out to him, though, that Puzo et al’s script, while broadly following a three act structure⁶, is highly episodic, with each episode’s conclusion largely sealing off what’s come before it, then pivoting to a new sub-plot/theme within the story’s umbrella.

Knowing that his kid loves a TV binge, I pitched him an idea: show it to them as a six-part miniseries, across a number of nights, broken out like this⁷:

To today’s audiences, even the protracted title sequence might test their patience, but I’d argue that John Williams’s Superman Theme is an essential, tone-setting overture, and well worth sitting through.

What follows, then, is the origin story of the infant Kal-El, sent across the stars from his doomed home planet by his parents Jor-El and Lara (Marlon Brando, Susannah York) to crash-land in Kansas, where he’s swiftly adopted by childless salt-of-the-earth types Jonathan and Martha Kent (Glenn Ford, Phyllis Thaxter). The revelation of Kal-El’s superhuman gifts makes a perfect stopping point for night one.

We jump ahead, picking up with Clark Kent (Jeff East, in a prosthetic nose to match Reeve’s profile, and dubbed by Reeve) as a teen, kind, put-upon, and bristling at having to hide the abilities he knows would make him the star of Smallville High. After Jonathan assures Clark his gifts are meant for better things, Jonathan swiftly drops dead, leaving a grieving Clark to begrudge the limitations of his powers. Finding a glowing crystal in the family barn, Clark follows it to the Arctic, where the crystal forms the Fortress of Solitude, and connects Clark to his birth father. Jor-El teaches him his true identity, and links him to his legacy as Krypton’s last survivor. The reveal (at a distance) of the Superman suit - and his first flight - brings the chapter to a close.

With Clark’s arrival in Metropolis, we hard-pivot into rat-a-tat newsroom comedy, with the introduction of flighty, steely wiseass Lois Lane (Margot Kidder)⁸, perturbed at having to share her city beat with cornfed rookie Clark. Reeve’s first full appearance is revelatory - his Clark has shed the bristling teen angst for a self-aware incognito persona, establishing Reeve’s brilliant, bumbling comedic chops long before we see him properly suited up.

Here we also meet the villains of the piece - Otis (Ned Beatty) and Miss Teschmacher (Valerie Perrine), in their orbit of grandiloquent supervillain Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman), who frets from his spectacularly designed⁹ underground lair of not having an adversary to match his brilliance.

A whirlwind tour of Metropolis - a clear reflection of Abe Beame’s Fun City-era New York - brings us to the proper rollout for Superman, rescuing Lois in a sequence that remains one of the top instances of actual superheroism¹⁰ in a superhero movie, then having a night on the town, stopping crimes, saving the president, and fetching a kitten from a tree. Pause, night three done and dusted.

Here’s where it gets mushy - first in a gentle, paternal chastising from the ghost of Jor-El over Superman’s enjoyment of finally utilizing his abilities, and second in Lois’s flirty interview with Superman that culminates in him taking her for a flight around the world.¹¹ The scene’s coda gives us Reeve’s finest moment, literally switching personas right in front of us, showing the gulf separating his portrayals of the man and the human.

Hope you like the Hackman/Beatty/Perrine business, because you’re about to get a whole ton of it, as Luthor & co. set themselves to the task of exploiting Superman’s one weakness, and implementing Luthor’s grand plan - detonating the San Andreas Fault to turn Arizona into beachfront property, at the cost of millions of lives. The plottiest of the chapters, to be sure.

And finally …

… let’s bring it on home with the big setpiece.

(No spoilers, but Superman saves the day.)

Give it a shot, why don’t you? Lemme know how it plays!

1. Superman: The Movie - Dir: Richard Donner; W: Mario Puzo, Robert Benton, David Newman & Leslie Newman, Tom Mankiewicz (uncredited), from the DC Comics created by Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster; Prod: Pierre Spengler, Richard Lester (Uncredited), Alexander Salkind (Exec Producer), Ilya Salkind (Exec Producer); DP: Geoffrey Unsworth; Ed: Stuart Baird, Michael Ellis; Composer: John Williams; Warner Bros. Pictures (1978).

2. Superman II (Theatrical Version) - Dir: Richard Lester, Richard Donner (uncredited); W: Mario Puzo, David Newman & Leslie Newman, Tom Mankiewicz (uncredited), from the DC Comics created by Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster; Prod: Pierre Spengler, Alexander Salkind (Exec Producer, uncredited), Ilya Salkind (Exec Producer); DP: Robert Paynter, Geoffrey Unsworth (uncredited); Ed: John Victor Smith; Composer: Ken Thorne; Warner Bros. Pictures (1980).

3. Thanks to Geoffrey Unsworth’s brilliant, hazy widescreen composition and vibrant, busy duration takes.

4. I can’t say who of its five credited writers wrote Lois Lane’s immortal “You’ve got me?! Who’s got you?!” but I hope they slept great the night they wrote it.

5. And that’s before we get to the extended cut, which restores 45 minutes of deleted footage so that ABC could run it as a two-night event for its tv debut.

6. Act One: Superman Comes to Earth, Act Two: Superman Emerges as a Hero, Superman Saves the World, though each act is pretty beefy compared to today’s more by-the-numbers story beats.

7. Timecodes per the theatrical cut, as currently streaming on Max; chapter titles from orig. DVD release.

8. Donner’s lifelong care and protection for Kidder is evident nowhere half so well as with the love and care with which he and Unsworth shoot her

9. John Barry’s masterpiece

10. For my money, the other two that even come close to its league are Spider-Man 2 (2004)’s El Train rescue and Iron Man 3 (2013)’s Monkeys-In-A-Barrel sequence.

11. I will not hear one ill word against Margot Kidder’s spoken-word take on Leslie Bricusse’s ballad “Can You Read My Mind?” set to Williams’s love theme. It’s the kind of bonkers creative swing today’s movies could benefit from at least trying …