Superman: The Blog

Thomas Wolfe once wrote, “You can’t go home again.” Or can you? The first time I saw Superman on the big screen was on its opening night on December 15, 1978, at the then-brand new Metrocenter Cinema 4 in my hometown of Jackson, Mississippi. I was all of twelve years old when I went with…

As we await the forthcoming 4K UHD release of the Christopher Reeve Superman films from Warner Home Video in standalone, regular box set, and steelbook box set editions (which have been delayed a few weeks from the middle of April to early May), some of the films are going straight to 4K digital releases on…

Last time I completed my analyses of the two Mario Puzo scripts from 1975, and I noticed a comment from David Michael Petrou in his book The Making of Superman: The Movie that the Salkinds then turned to David and Leslie Newman and Robert Benton to streamline the second Puzo script and turn it into…

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.…

Can you believe that we’re now into the final thirty-plus pages of the second draft script? This has been quite a thrill ride for me to break down these scripts and share the lowdown with all of you of what Mario Puzo had written back in 1975, and how much of it would form the…

As we move onto page 251, we find that Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and Steve Lombard are participating in a news conference at a Navy Trident nuclear submarine that is scheduled to be manned by an all-female crew. Jimmy goes into a detailed description of the Trident submarine’s capabilities, when Lois spots a familiar figure…

After moving the nuclear heist and threat from the second half of the script to the first, it was up to Mario Puzo to create two new sequences for the second half of his second draft script to the Superman films. This is presumably because he may have felt that the first half of the…

Now we’re getting into the final 100 pages of Mario Puzo’s second draft script, and this time he has intentionally set the final third of the script to outline his groundwork for what he saw Superman II to be about. While it is clear that the true dividing line occurred earlier, after the action in…

Picking up where we left off, on page 191 of the second draft script, we find Lex Luthor, Eve, and his henchmen watching Perry White deliver the news story about the nuclear hijacking at the Army reservation and the miraculous recovery of Clark Kent from the nuclear radiation he suffered. From here, Luthor prepares his…

Moving forward with page 158, we find Clark and Lois heading home to their ill-fated encounter with the truck drivers who nearly beat Clark to a bloody pulp. No changes to the script. From there the script jumps to Perry White assigning Clark the story of the development of the hydrogen bomb at the Army…