After my last blog examining the Smallville scenes in the second draft of the Mario Puzo scripts, I had a number of people comment on Mr. Puzo’s note that Superman: The Movie would have not worked had the scenes been filmed in sepia format. Mind you, this was Mario Puzo’s idea according to his note on page 24 of the October 1975 script draft and continuing over the next nineteen pages to page 43, that a substantial portion of the film’s story would have been shot in sepia.

So I thought to myself, what would other moments in the film have looked like if they had been shot in a sepia tone? I’ve done a little experimenting with a selected number of screenshots from CapedWonder.com, converting them from color to sepia, to give you an idea of what the Smallville and Fortress of Solitude sequences would have looked like had they adhered to the original Puzo notation.

From there, according to the Puzo script, the film would have returned to color upon the first appearance of Superman in his full costume in the Fortress.

As you can see, color plays a key ingredient in the arrangement of shots, especially in landscapes and skylines and sunrises and visual effects and all of the exterior moments in the film. Without color, the subtleties of these shots are lost. They just wouldn’t have worked in sepia. That would have meant nearly 25 minutes of footage in the theatrical cut, 34 minutes of footage in the extended TV cut. Would such a lengthy portion of the middle of the film have worked in sepia instead of in color? In my honest opinion, no.

This is one script notation that, once the script moved to the next writer, was thankfully removed from consideration. (As for that next writer, that is something that I will discuss down the road in a future blog.)

(All screenshots in this blog are courtesy of CapedWonder.com.)