My Life as a Mankiewicz (37 page)

Close Encounters of the Salkind

Dick and I were told, if you're going to work for the Salkinds, get your money in escrow in a Swiss bank before you begin to work, and a certain amount is released to you every week. When we were shooting in Canada—Clark Kent growing up was shot in Canada because we had a British crew and it was easier to work in Canada—the Salkinds announced to the crew they were only going to get half their salary for the time they were there, which was going to be six weeks, judging correctly that they'd rather have half the salary and get the other half when they got back than try to go back to London and be unemployed. They would pay people a check on a Swiss bank. You deposited it in your bank in England, but it had to go back to Switzerland to be cleared before it came back to your bank, so it was always three weeks late. Jack O'Halloran, one of the villains, two weeks into shooting said to Pierre Spengler, “I want my money. I need money to live on. I've got to go paycheck to paycheck. I can't wait a month for the first check to clear.”

Pierre said, “Well, that's the way it is.”

This was on the stage. Jack put Pierre Spengler up against the wall and said, “I want my money by five o'clock tonight. I want the money for the two weeks' work I've done. And if I don't get it, I know where you live.” And that night, he got paid.

Dick and Ilya Salkind were the ones who completely didn't get along. The old man steered clear of Dick. He knew Dick was doing a good job and that Ilya hated him and Dick was a pain in the ass with him. The quality of what Dick was shooting helped them raise more money.

At one point, I was asked to go to Zurich to see the old man. Dick and I were told the Salkinds have to abide by everything in your contract. If you give them an inch, they'll take a mile. We had money released to us from the Swiss bank every week, and in my contract, it said that wherever I went on the picture, I had to have a suite in a hotel. That was not out of grandiosity, but I always wound up writing in the hotel. The maid comes in to clean, I'm trying to write, I could always go to another room, and that was very important to me. So, I go to the Grand Dolder Hotel in Zurich. There's a message for me to meet Alexander Salkind in the bar at five. I get into my room, and it's a single room. It doesn't matter. I'm just there for the night. I'm not writing. The phone rings, and it's Salkind. He says, “Mr. Mankiewicz, you see what your friend, Mr. Donner, has done to us. Here I am calling you in your single room from my single room. See you at five o'clock.”

So I take a walk along the lake, and later, as I'm walking up the main staircase of the hotel, I hear Alex's voice yelling. I go down the hall, and there he is in this beautiful suite, talking to investors in French or German or something. I peek in and keep walking.

We met at five o'clock. We sat down for a drink, and I said to him, “Before we even start talking, why did you say, ‘Here I am calling you in your single room from my single room'? I've seen your suite. Why did you do that? It's such a tiny little lie; why would I care whether you were in a big suite or a single room? You just lied.”

He said, “I can't help it.” And that was so honest. That was his hallmark. He was a hondler through and through. A promoter who made a lot of money. At that meeting, he asked, “What if I put you on as a producer? Would this make the production go faster? Would we have more cooperation from Mr. Donner?”

And I said, “Alex, that would sentence me to be on this picture for another year or more than the year I've been on it.”

He quickly said, “Besides, every time there was a disagreement with me and Mr. Donner, you would side with Mr. Donner, wouldn't you?”

I said, “Probably, Alex, because let me be very honest with you. He knows how to make a picture, and I'm not sure if you or Ilya know how to.”

He said, “All right, let's not talk about it anymore.” That was that.

I told Dick later, “If I was the producer, this thing would cost eighty million dollars and I'd let you get away with everything.” The final budget for the two pictures—and this is really expensive in the late seventies—was between $30 million and $40 million. But the costs are so different now. For instance, to open with a big picture costs $40 million or $50 million. You keep seeing the trailers on television and the ads in the newspapers, not only in the
New York Times
and the
L.A. Times
, but in the
Cedar Rapids
Gazette
as well, and the one-sheets in every theater. The costs have just spiraled like crazy.

Superman
and
Superman II
were shot at the same time. So if we were shooting in Lois's apartment, scenes from both pictures would be shot. Warners was very explicit: make sure the actors know it's two pictures. This wasn't going to be one extremely long
Superman
where the Salkinds were going to pay everybody once like they tried to pull off on
Three Musketeers
and
Four Musketeers.
Warners was looking at the rushes and got increasingly interested. They said, “Wait a minute, instead of a negative pickup, we'd like to have a piece of this.” So they kept putting in more and more money. It was becoming a Warner Brothers picture, even though the Salkinds had control like Cubby with the Bonds. But the Salkinds needed their money. Before the first picture came out, they held Warners for some ransom. We were going to open at Christmastime. In November, they refused to release the negative for prints unless Warners bought four territories, including South Africa and Germany, from them. It was clear the Salkinds owed a lot of people a lot of money.

It came time for the score, and John Williams. One of the nicest men in the world, a friend of my close friend Leslie Bricusse's. He came over to London and saw the rough cut of
Superman
, which was almost three hours. We were sitting in the screening room afterward and John asked, “Okay, so, what do you hear when you hear the theme from
Superman?”

Dick said, “I don't know, that's why you're here.”

I said, “I'll tell you what I hear. We're opening around Christmas, and about a month later is the Super Bowl. It's halftime at the Super Bowl, the band comes out of the tunnel, they're playing the theme from
Superman.”

Then John said, “I got you.” He wrote such a beautiful score; a beautiful love theme. When we first heard the score, it just sent us through the roof. He helped that movie a great deal. Such a joy to be able to work with talents like that.

We opened in Washington, D.C., for the Congress when Jimmy Carter was president. Lois says to Superman in the scene where he visits her on her terrace, “Why are you here?” And—I had to put it in—he says, “For truth, justice, and the American way.” It went down big with Congress. They loved it. Then we had New York and California openings. It went very well. Old man Salkind was not allowed in the country for those openings because there was a warrant out for his arrest for fraud.

The Salkinds fired Dick as soon as the picture opened. There was about 30 percent left to shoot for
Superman II.
I've always said if
Superman
had been a flop, the Salkinds would have made Donner finish
Superman II
as a punishment. But the picture was a big hit, and the Salkinds figured anybody can finish
Superman II
now. They had 70 percent of the movie already in the can. Hackman was wrapped. Ned Beatty was wrapped. Valerie Perrine was wrapped. They'd all done their work. Dick Lester, who'd done the
Three
and
Four Musketeers
for the Salkinds, had a big piece of the profit of those films and never got any money from the Salkinds, so he sued them. He won in court, but he won against a Lichtenstein company that was part of a holding corporation that was broke, and he couldn't get any money. He was pursuing it, and the Salkinds said to him, “If you'll finish
Superman II
, we'll give you the money we owe you.” So Lester finished it. Again, terrible casting for it because Lester's a cynic. He was not like Dick Donner.

Lester called Dick and said, “We should split credit on the second movie.”

Dick said, “I don't split credit, so you take the credit.”

The cast was devastated. Terry Semel, who ran Warners distribution then, met with me and said, “Dick Lester would like you to go on and finish
Superman II
with him.”

And I said, “Terry, I can't do that. Dick is my friend and he brought me on, and I'm completely loyal to him.”

Terry said, “I understand. Could you go to London and accidentally run into Lester and talk to him about it?”

I said, “No, I couldn't do that either.” So they got David and Leslie Newman to come back. Benton was not interested.

I got a phone call from David Newman saying, “My God, we saw the picture yesterday. You made a silk purse out of a sow's ear. My God, you did a great job. Thank you so much. I'm so proud to have my name on it.”

I said, “Thank you, David. Really appreciate the phone call, because you guys are terrific.” Benton was my friend, actually.

Then that Sunday in the
New York Times
there were interviews with lots of people, including David Newman, who said, “Well, basically it's just our script. They just cut it.” And they went on and wrote the screenplay for a little classic called
Sheena, Queen of the Jungle
with Tanya Roberts, and I thought, okay, serves you right!

The Directors Guild said that Lester couldn't get sole credit on the picture unless he shot 40 percent. So they started writing scenes that were not necessary and arbitrarily changing scenes that had been shot.
Superman II
came out and it was fine. There were some phony reviews because Dick Lester was very much the critics' darling. David Denby, who was a critic for
New York
magazine at the time, wrote, “You can tell the difference between Richard Lester and Richard Donner because in
Superman II
, Gene Hackman has a fine edge, and he's funny.” I wrote a letter to
New York
magazine saying, “Just for the record, Gene Hackman did 100 percent of his work with Dick Donner, and it was all written by me.” Never printed the letter.

Superman III
, which had Richard Pryor in it, was made. Terry Semel came down to my studio bungalow one day. I always knew when they wanted a big favor. If the mountain was coming to Mohammed…He asked, “What's wrong with
Superman III?”

I said, “Terry, there's nothing really wrong with it, but it's a Richard Pryor movie. It's not a Superman movie, and that's not Richard Pryor's fault.”

Semel said, “What would it take to get you and Donner back to do the next one? Price is no object.” By this time, Warners had invested in
Superman
heavily and could call the shots. Ilya was still listed as producer, though.

I said, “Let me talk to Dick.”

We went out and had dinner, and we decided we didn't want to do it anymore. We did the first two. We'd gone to Krypton, Smallville. Kryptonite had destroyed his power. He'd become a human being in
Superman II
and gotten beaten up, then regained it. We thought, there's nothing else to do. At the time, Chris Reeve was dead set on
Superman IV: The (Quest for Peace.
He gave the script to me and said, “I need your help.” In this one, Superman goes to the United Nations.

I said, “Chris, here are the rules. You can't deal with anything that Superman could take care of. Superman could disarm this whole planet in half an hour. You can't have a tsunami in
Superman
, because with his super breath, he'd blow back the waves. You can't allow tens of thousands of people to be killed. You can't show anybody starving to death in a Superman movie because he could grow crops that would feed the entire planet. You don't get into that because somebody's going to say, ‘Well, why doesn't he just fuckin' do it?'” Whereas with
Batman
, which I wrote the first draft of, I said, “Batman, completely different, because he's a human being and he dresses up at night. Batman can do all kinds of things. But Bruce Wayne as Batman is powerless to do anything about nuclear weapons or hunger or the tsunami. But Superman has got super powers, so stay out of that. You can't come to the UN. If I were an ambassador to the UN, I would say, ‘Well, why don't you do it, flyboy?'”

The Donner Cut

The reason for
Superman II: The Donner Cut
, which was released on DVD, was there was an arc—I hate to use a pretentious word like that—that ran through the two pictures, which was in the relationship with his father. In the beginning, the father sends him to Earth; it's God sending Christ, Allah sending Mohammed. When Lois is trapped in the earthquake in the first one, she's being crushed to death, and Superman's got to do something about it. Brando appears in the sky and says, “It is forbidden for you to interfere with human history.” Superman screams, flies up in the air, and turns the world backward to before there was an earthquake, and Lois is alive. He's disobeying his father. Jor-El would always visit his son in the Fortress of Solitude, the vision of Brando. When Superman decides to become a human being for the love of Lois in the second film and he gets beat up for the first time and realizes what a mistake he's made, that he's betrayed his father, he comes back to the fortress and says, “Father, forgive me.” This is not in the
Superman II
that was released. This is a scene that's only in the Donner Cut. When Superman sleeps with Lois in the Fortress of Solitude, Brando appears. Chris says, “Father, I have sinned. I have disobeyed you.” Margot is watching, they've slept together, and she's wearing the Superman tunic like a little nightgown. She's scared, peeking around the corner, and Brando's eyes flash at her like, you bitch. It's really dramatic. As Jor-El commits suicide to give his son new life as Superman, he says, “You'll never see me again.” He reaches out and touches his son like God touching the hand of Adam in the Sistine Chapel. And Superman becomes Superman again.