Category Archives: Superman II

Superman II 2.6: Gone Out the Window

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And then she goes ahead and throws herself out of the goddamn window just to prove a point, and that is what I love about specifically Richard Donner’s version of specifically Margot Kidder as Lois Lane.

At the end of last week, I told you about the Donner Cut, a 2006 effort to reclaim the Superman II footage that Richard Donner shot during the production of the first movie. He’d finished about 80% of the film before the Salkinds fired him, and while some of that footage remains in the theatrical cut, there was a lot that was reshot by the new director, so the Donner Cut assembles the material in an approximation of what the film could have been like, if he’d completed it.

For the most part, it’s not that different from the theatrical release, unless you watch them side by side. There are only three scenes in the Donner Cut that I think are really essential to understanding the development of the film: the beginning, the ending, and the honeymoon hotel discovery sequence. Not coincidentally, all of them are about Lois.

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Superman II 2.5: The Donner Party

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Or, there’s the option where Lois is smart and figures things out right away, which I personally prefer.

In this version of Superman II, the action begins on the day after the previous movie ended. Yesterday, Superman saved the West Coast and put Lex Luthor in jail, and now the main characters in the Daily Planet newsroom are all busily congratulating each other on how well they covered the story.

And then Lois, sitting at her desk, suddenly realizes the obvious truth: that Clark Kent is Superman.

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Superman II 2.4: Fight the Tower

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Well, speaking of foreign distribution rights, here’s girl reporter Lois Lane let loose in a foreign country, and she’s about to be distributed widely across a sizeable stretch of western Europe, if the hydrogen bomb she’s inadvertently strapped to her back hits the pavement at the base of the Eiffel Tower.

The bomb — if it actually is a bomb — has been assembled by a group of inconclusive terrorists demanding nothing in particular from probably the government of France. The terrorists take the elevator up to the top of the tower, where they have the bomb (if it is a bomb) primed to explode in sixty seconds, which they don’t want to do, while the police use their own explosives to set off the bomb, which they don’t want to do either.

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Superman II 2.3: Let’s Twist Again

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Well, here we go again. We’re back on Krypton, which I’d figured was pretty conclusively in the rearview mirror.

But it’s here, on the cusp of this new dawn, that we find out what the three Kryptonians did to deserve being locked up in a revolving parallelogram, and set adrift in the void. At the beginning of the last movie, all we saw was the sentencing; we didn’t see the actual crime that they committed.

Well, now we know. They broke a crystal!

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Superman II 2.1: Things That Richard Donner Probably Shouldn’t Have Said

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So here’s how to torpedo your own film in six words, courtesy of Army Archerd’s Hollywood gossip colum in Variety:

Producer Pierre Spengler allows that he and Superman director Dick Donner differed during filming, but he says all’s now well, and Spengler expects to return to complete Superman II. Donner, however, declares, “If he’s on it — I’m not.“

It’s late December 1978, and Superman: The Movie has just opened in theaters to, if you’ll pardon the expression, boffo box office. Everybody who worked on the film is feeling that Christmas spirit — except for Richard Donner, who fucking hates Pierre Spengler, and is not shy about letting people know his truth.

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