My Life as a Mankiewicz (38 page)

The Salkinds knew they had a big hit with
Superman II
coming up, and that Brando got a piece of the gross; a fairly small piece of the gross, but it was going to add up to a lot of money—but not if he didn't appear in
Superman II.
So what did the Salkinds do? They sideswiped it using Susannah York, a perfectly good actress, to do all the scenes, and Brando was completely cut out of the second movie. We just couldn't believe it. The Salkinds started this fiction, which was, “It was too expensive to get him back,” which they kept up until the release of
Superman II.
There was no question of getting him back: he'd shot all the scenes; they were already in the can. He'd looped, he'd done everything when he was first there. So you give Marlon 5 percent of the gross. It was Marlon Brando. The Salkinds really fucked with what the pictures were about. I don't want to say this is some great, classic novel that can't be fooled with, but that was the intent of the films. We were really angry at them for cutting him out arbitrarily even though they were going to make a lot of money. They were in the chips. The reason for the Donner Cut was to put Brando back into the movie. That was the way it was intended to be. Those scenes were so effective.

In fact, we put all of Dick's footage back in. Some sequences had been cut to give Lester more footage so he could be eligible to be called “director.” There's a sequence at the beginning of
Superman II
that was never in the movie release, but it's in the Donner Cut. Lois is alone with Clark in Perry White's office. Superman's photograph is on the front of the
Daily Planet.
She's looking at Clark and she starts to put glasses and a hat on Superman. It's Clark. They're supposed to go to Niagara Falls for a story on honeymooners. Lois says, “Well, it wouldn't be a problem, would it, Clark? We could just zoom right up and just fly right back.” And Clark says, “Oh, Lois, are you getting on to that stupid thing about me being Superman again?” She goes to the window and she opens it. He says, “Lois, we're thirty-five floors up.” She says, “Don't worry, Superman, you won't let me die,” and she jumps out the window. She flies through the air, and Clark, with his x-ray vision, pops open an awning. Lois hits the awning, bounces up, and lands in the garbage truck. She looks up at Clark Kent leaning out the window saying, “Lois, are you crazy?” And she faints. It was a great way to open
Superman II.

The actual test scene for Chris and Margot is in the Donner Cut. They're getting ready to go to dinner. Clark's standing behind Lois, and she says, “You are Superman, aren't you?” He says, “Oh, Lois.” She turns around and she's got a gun. He says, “Lois?” She goes,
bam;
she fires it at him and nothing happens. Clark sets his jaw and says, “If you'd been wrong, Clark Kent would have been killed.” And she says, “How? With a blank?” It was not live ammunition. He looks at her and she says, “Gotcha!” It was a cute scene, and they were so great together.

When
Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut
premiered at the Directors Guild, Brandon Routh, the new Superman, was there with
Superman Returns
director Bryan Singer. Margot came down from Montana, and we went together to the screening with Dick and Lauren Shuler Donner. Onstage, we had a symposium with Jack O'Halloran, Sarah Douglas, Margot and Dick, the remaining people. Ilya Salkind was there. I couldn't believe it. He said to me afterward, “Yeah, it works. It works that way, too.”

Everybody worked so hard on those movies, and it really was the arc with Brando all the way through that made the father/son thing, Jor-El and Kal-El. When Brando was putting the baby in the capsule, and he kept saying, “I send this with you and I send this,” Susannah York, a perfectly nice person, said, “What does the mother send? The mother sends dick. I'm just standing there.”

I said to her, “When you get three million dollars for fifteen days' work, you can send everything.” And there was the Salkinds'
Superman II
without fucking Jor-El in it. They just didn't want to pay the money. There would never have been a Donner Cut if Brando had been in
II.
It was Warners' mistake in the first place to go with the Salkinds. The Salkinds wanted to do it, and they were right about that, but Warners should have said, “Look, we own it”—because they owned DC Comics. “It'll be a Warners picture instead of a negative pickup.” As Warners became more invested, it gave them an excuse to reissue all four Superman films plus the Donner Cut on DVD.

The
L.A. Times
loved the Donner Cut, but they said the gem is the commentary by Donner and Mankiewicz to
Superman.
They had us do the commentary at Dick's house as they ran the movie on his TV. It was very irreverent. “That's the
Daily Planet
newsroom. See the girl in the second desk? God, she balled everybody, didn't she? Even Hackman, I think, got her.” We cut a lot of that out. “Valerie was so drunk in Calgary. She memorably said once, ‘I'm going to go out and get me a cowboy,' because it was during the Calgary Stampede.”

Superman Forever

In the early nineties, Dick was honored by the Directors' View Film Festival, which had the Joseph L. Mankiewicz Award for Excellence. Robert Benton had won it, Merchant and Ivory had won it, and it was a very eastern award, but they decided to give it to Dick for his lifetime achievement. I did a ten-minute film of Donner, clips from his movies, that is just a corker; it's the best reel you've ever seen, with music scores from his films. We flew with Jerry Moss on his Gulfstream, landing in White Plains, and went to Stamford, Connecticut, where the big celebration was. Chris attended with his wife, Dana. He was in his wheelchair, which really wasn't a wheelchair. Margot flew in. I hadn't seen Chris in years. Even Danny Glover flew in. Mel Gibson sent something from Australia. Lots of people were coming up; Lauren Bacall and people from New York.

Chris and Margot started nattering at each other just like it was back on the set. He was funnier and smarter than when they worked together. It is just a terrible thing to say, but I think that his accident made him so introspective. It sharpened everything in him. He was a better person because, instead of just being that good-looking guy who was going from picture to picture, he had really faced something incredibly dramatic in life. I was sitting across from Chris—the air was being pumped into his lungs all the time—and he said, “Hey, Mank. Look at this.” On the table, he moved his finger; one finger. It was like a miracle, and he'd been working hard so he could move a finger. He had an incredible attitude. What happened to him was a freak accident. How many people fall off horses every day and that never happens to them?

I was so moved by all of us getting back together again with everything that had happened to all of us. Margot had had some terrible episodes because she was bipolar and nobody knew it. Chris had had, obviously, a terrible thing happen to him. Dick had been through six more hit movies, but this still was the thing that kept a place in his heart. It was like a class reunion. Chris died the next year, and then, inexplicably, his wife, Dana, died a few years after at forty, lung cancer and had never smoked. I don't know where that came from. She was just wonderful. But he was a terrific guy. I'd never seen that in my life, but I thought he was so much a better person. That night, Chris's eyes danced in a different way, like he had been through hell, but he was dealing with it and was convinced he was going to get out of it.

We were just starting to shoot
Superman
, and Chris was so worried that he was going to be typecast the rest of his life. He kept saying to me, “I've got to talk to Sean Connery. You know Sean Connery, and he's not typecast as Bond.” But he was typecast as Bond. I ran into Sean somewhere. “By the way, the kid playing Superman, he wants to talk to you about being type—”

Sean said, “Oh, fuck, I don't want to talk to him about that.”

About three weeks later, we were at this big party and Sean was there. So I went over to him. “Listen, the guy's over there. You've got to talk to him.”

He said, “Oh! Okay.” So he went over and said to Chris, “Well, first of all, if boyo is right in that you're probably in trouble and it's not going to be a hit, don't worry about it. You're going to be able to start fresh. If it is a hit and you are Superman, the next two things you do: number one, find a movie that is completely opposite and do it right away”—which Chris did, a picture called
Somewhere in Time
, which was a love story—”and the second thing, because we're talking about if it's a hit, get yourself the best lawyer in the world and stick it to ‘em.” That was his advice.

The thing that made Chris work so wonderfully as Superman was his natural shyness, which meant that he could play Clark Kent almost better than Superman. I said to him, “It's really simple when you think about it. Just make it a mantra. You are Superman. You are playing Clark Kent, but you are Superman. I'm writing it that way, that everything Clark does is Superman playing that.” I said to Dick once, and I don't mean this derogatorily to Chris, “You know, you take the
S
off his chest, his balls fall off.” Meaning he's a supporting actor. He's not a leading man cut of the jib of real leading men. That's what made him so great as Superman. Here was this shy, disarming guy who was good looking, but he was a supporting actor playing a leading man. I'm sure people think of Chris as a leading man. I don't in that way.

A few years later, he was in a movie called
Monsignor
with Geneviève Bujold. I just wanted to check up on Chris. I went to the noon show in Westwood, and there were maybe twenty people in the whole audience. Geneviève Bujold's in love with him, but she thinks he's a priest so she can't sleep with him. But he's not really a priest. He turns to her and says, “I've been keeping a terrible secret.” Some guy three rows down yells, “I can fly.” All twenty of us just burst out laughing. The funniest thing I ever heard in a movie theater. It shows you what Chris was worried about. Sean knows that even if Sean is elected prime minister of Scotland and wins five Lifetime Achievement Awards, his obituary will begin with “Best known for James Bond.” It just will. And Chris was Superman.

Mank Rules

The Tom Mankiewicz rule in the Writers Guild was created because of
Superman.
I got a separate credit, creative consultant, in the main title, and Dick Donner put it
after
the writers. The Writers Guild went berserk over the placement. Everybody knew I'd rewritten both pictures,
Superman
and
Superman II.
I'd stayed on them for over a year and a half through the casting, the editing, the scoring, the location scouting, and holding Dick's hand and head sometimes, working with the Salkinds. Dick said, “You deserve a separate credit on the picture.” He invented the credit “creative consultant,” which is now very common. We went to a hearing with lawyers and a judge, and I showed them fourteen roundtrips to London after I'd finished writing, meaning working on the picture. They ruled in my favor because the movie was about to come out. But I had to agree that on
Superman II
, my name would come just before the writers in the main title. It goes today: writer, producer, director. The Writers Guild claims to own the rights to the word “creative” on the screen. I've always said, “Jesus, a lot of great cinematographers and designers and so on might disagree with you that ‘creative' only applies to writing.” When
Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut
was premiered at the Directors Guild, I was sitting with Margot right behind Dick in the audience, and here it comes, “Written by Bob Benton and Newman and Mrs. Newman,” and son of a bitch, I'm after the writers again. Dick stuck me after the writers. I said, “Oh, my God.” And I heard from in front of me, “Just shut the fuck up.”

It won the Saturn Award for the best DVD of the year from the science fiction, horror, and fantasy people. Bryan Singer was very helpful with the DVD. He was doing
Superman Returns.
He said, “I want to get this picture back to the sensibility of the first Superman film.” He would come down and visit us in the editing room. He hadn't started shooting his yet. He said he was doing
X-Men
up in Canada: “In my motor home, I had one picture,
Superman
, and I would watch it every day all day.”

Back from Krypton

In my personal life, as I've mentioned, I was always attracted to women who had tremendous psychological problems. As Natalie Wood (one of the greatest friends I ever had in the world, man or woman) said, like a pig with truffles, I just knew how to find them. They were almost always actresses. Not only did I know how to find them, but they find you, too. They know that you're receptive. I would go to a party and see somebody, and I knew right away, and they knew I knew. That would haunt me my whole life. With the exception of a couple of them, we're still friends. The one thing I miss in my life is not having children. I wish I'd had an unhappy marriage and two kids, because I think I would have been a really good father. I wish I had just absorbed the pain. At a certain point, I just gave up. I thought, if the right thing comes along, I'm still prepared to get married at seventy. But I got so exhausted in my life.

I went to Natalie Wood's analyst, who was a very good guy. I was just starting with Kate Jackson, and we were going to go to Mexico together, and then she couldn't and I was really pissed. In the analyst session, I said, “I'm really mad at her.”

The analyst said, “Let me get this straight. Three days ago, you didn't know this person. And the first night you're together, you decide to go to Mexico. And now, you're really angry, and this is based on what, the twenty-four hours' knowledge?” It sounded so silly I couldn't believe it. But it could drive me crazy because I had found a different version of Mother again. I knew there was something wrong with Katie. I don't mean wrong like she was going to kill somebody, but there was a lack of balance there, and it was wildly attractive to me.