Before I get started with the newest blog, I would like to apologize for its delay. This week has been a stressful one for me on the home front, as I have been dealing with some personal issues. But I am determined not to let them stop me from bringing you the newest content possible.

Now I come to the conclusion of the analyses of the two Mario Puzo scripts for Superman. This has been a fascinating journey into the development of the story that would lay the groundwork for the two Superman films, and there have been some interesting plot points and details that have astounded a number of you as they have me. And what about that revelation from last time? (If you haven’t read my previous blog, stop and do so now before going any further.)

Beginning on page 286, we find Superman confronting the four villains from Krypton along the streets of Metropolis. Never mind that they were just in Australia. It seems like every new threat that comes along, it always heads straight for Metropolis.

From Metropolis to Lex Luthor’s lair to the Fortress of Solitude, everything in these last 20-25 pages is exactly the same as in the previous script. There are no changes in the story at all. Superman enlists Luthor’s help to defeat the four villains.

Luthor convinces them to take him to the Fortress of Solitude, where Superman pulls the ultimate double cross and the villains wind up powerless in the process.

Afterwards, Superman pulls the same drugged drink on the powerless criminals that he used on Lois, Jimmy, and Steve to make them forget everything that happened in the Fortress.

The script then continues with the same concluding sequence of Clark Kent delivering the final news report of the film. But then Puzo adds a final two-page sequence of Luthor and Eve talking a new plot with the powerless Kryptonian criminals. “Gentlemen, I have a proposition for you. I have conceived a plan that will make us all rich. In all fairness I must warn you that there is some element of risk.”

The criminals soon ignore Eve and listen as Luthor discusses his new plan. Eve has the last word in the script as she says to herself, “Criminals will be criminals.”

So now we have come to the end of Mario Puzo’s scripts for Superman. Once Puzo completed his second draft on October 1, 1975, he was thoroughly drained and couldn’t be convinced of contributing anything more to the project. As Ilya Salkind stated in David Michael Petrou’s book The Making of Superman: The Movie, “We took the second draft, read it carefully, and though we were basically thrilled with the ideas, we felt it needed a few changes and a great deal of editing. We went back to Puzo. By this time, he had thoroughly drained himself on Superman and was already involved in other projects, so he suggested that it might be wiser to get someone else to do the rewrites.”

One plot point, however, that never got addressed properly was the idea that Superman had come up with the secret identity of Morgan Edge. Why did Superman do so? Was it to shape the way that media should be properly represented? Was it to throw both the reporters and the viewers off? We will never know the reasons behind such a decision. We can only come up with our own conclusions.

Ilya Salkind continued, “We then went to one of the top teams in Hollywood, Robert Benton and David and Leslie Newman,… They basically streamlined the Puzo script and introduced new elements too. But it was still far too long. And there were certain campy features to the script that just didn’t fit if we were going to play it a hundred percent straight.”

The three writers would make further additions and revisions to the scripts, with Benton working only on the script for the first Superman film and the Newmans writing and rewriting the scripts for the first, second, and third films in the series.

But there is another writer who is overlooked by and large in the production of Superman and was completely overlooked by David Petrou in his book.

Enter Norman Enfield.

And that’s what I will discuss next time.

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