Superman III 4.4: March of the Penguins

Superman III, , ,

“Given a relatively free hand,” writes Andrew Yule in The Man Who “Framed” the Beatles: A Biography of Richard Lester, “Lester decided to move the emphasis of III towards social realism, setting the first scene in an unemployment office and hiring the most naturalistic actor he could find — Richard Pryor — for a key role, all in an attempt to anchor the subject to a base of reality and reduce the mythic element he felt had already been thoroughly explored.”

Which just goes to show how wrong a person can be in a single sentence. If Yule had bothered to watch more than the first scene of Superman III before he started typing about it, he would have seen that the “social realism” of Richard Pryor in an unemployment office is immediately followed by five minutes of the most tedious fluff ever committed to celluloid.

One thing that occurs to me, as I look at this opening credits sequence, is that between the director, the writers and the executive producer, the number of successful films that they made subsequent to Superman III is zero. That seems to help, somehow.

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Superman III 4.3: Enter Gus

Superman III, ,

“Next!”

It’s an appropriate word to begin Superman III, history’s first superhero sequel. Superman II doesn’t count, of course, because the original Superman movie was planned as a two-part story. So this moment — the beginning of film #3 — is the first time the filmmakers have to skip over the origin myth, and start a brand new story from scratch.

And it begins, naturally, with a negotiation over how much money we’re going to give to Richard Pryor.

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Superman III 4.2: It Was Ilya’s Other Idea

Superman III, , ,

So, let’s say you’re a Salkind. You’ve been producing movies for your father for ten years now, including some of The Three Musketeers and a couple of Superman movies, but people still think that you’re just a money guy — specifically, your dad’s money guy.

But you’ve been working in the same building as creative people for so long, you’ve started to hallucinate that you’re a creative contributor as well. Since nobody has any idea what to do with Superman III, you sit down at the typewriter and write an eight-page treatment, which you send to the Warner Brothers and ask them for millions of dollars so you can make it.

In the years to come, you’ll tell people that Warner Bros thought it was too “sci-fi”, and too embedded in Superman lore. That is not the reason Warner Bros rejected your treatment. They rejected it because they were grown-ups who read movie treatments for a living, and yours is bugfuck insane.

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Superman III 4.1: The Sweet Smell of Shit

Superman III, ,

Richard Pryor wrote:

I went off to London, to play the villain in Superman III. And yes, the movie was a piece of shit. But even before I read the script, the producers offered me $4 million, more than any black actor had ever been paid.

“For a piece of shit,” I’d told my agent when I finally read the script, “it smells great.”

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Inhumans 70b.4: But Here We Are

Inhumans

You know, sometimes it’s important to step back and focus on the things that are truly insignificant, and that’s what Ryan and I have done with our 4-part podcast explaining and condemning the 2017 ABC-TV disaster Marvel’s Inhumans.

It’s the season finale for my series of podcasts with the Signal Watch on terrible Marvel products of the past, and we willfully squander that time discussing episodes 7 and 8 of this utterly ridiculous show.

This time, we dig into the big questions, like: How do you make a show that’s entirely about genetics when you don’t anything about how genes work? and: Why would you make a show about a race of superheroes where you don’t tell us what anybody’s powers are?

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Inhumans 70b.3: Are We the Baddies?

Inhumans

This is where we are: A family of selfish, hyper-destructive idiot moon mutants have been forced against their will to go on vacation in Hawaii, which they insist on believing is a nightmare, despite the fact that everyone is super nice to them, and they’re having a wonderful time.

Yes, Ryan and I are still watching Inhumans, and we have a whole four-part podcast to prove it. This is part three, covering episodes 5 and 6, in which the royal family of the moon continue to bumble around Oahu, wrecking everything they see.

This is the point when the writers start trashing their entire premise, taking everything that we thought we knew about the main characters’ stupid civilization, and completely contradicting it without even really noticing that they’re doing it. The smartest character on the show turns out to be the beautiful surfer dude, and both Ryan and I somehow fall completely under his spell.

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Swamp Thing 3.45: Six Million Dollars

Swamp Thing,

This is my final post for Swamp Thing, which is the traditional time for me to talk about how the movie earned the highest opening-weekend returns in history, and was the #1 box office draw for months and months. At least, that’s how it worked for Superman and Superman II. There’s a bit of a different situation with Swamp Thing.

In fact, I’m not certain how much Swamp Thing made. I typically use Box Office Mojo as my source, and Swamp Thing doesn’t appear on their 1982 domestic box office listing. Their data only goes back to 1977, and for the first six or seven years, they don’t have information on every movie. Part of the problem is that Swamp Thing wasn’t in wide release: it opened in different parts of the country any time between February and August. The other part of the problem is that nobody cares except me.

I found a site called Ultimate Movie Rankings that says Swamp Thing made $6.4 million domestic, and where they got that number I haven’t a notion. But let’s go with that.

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Swamp Thing 3.43: Wes’ Lament

Swamp Thing,

WIDE: The shaft of sunlight now falls full on Swamp Thing, rimming him with incandescent gold — and the most extraordinary thing is happening.

CLOSE SHOT reveals his feet are altering — his toes elongate until they’re no longer toes but roots, piercing between the great stones of the dungeon into the black earth beneath.

INSERT. IN CROSS SECTION, we see the roots plunge down between the stones, through the earth and into water. 

FULL SHOT — The monster’s body swells, powerful, unstoppable. And suddenly, something on his right side waves up — where his arm had been severed there now is a thin, vine-like extension of wirey green flesh and sinew — split at the ends into tendrils — expanding and growing! 

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Inhumans 70b.2: I Don’t Want to Live on the Moon

Inhumans

Dig this: a family of rich, spoiled moon mutants are the rulers of an unstable and unsustainable civilization the size of Bitter Lick, Iowa, which is based on a clearly oppressive caste system in which poor people who don’t have superpowers are forced to spend their lives underground, digging with their fingernails to find crystals that will help the wealthy 1% turn their children into supermutants.

There is an inevitable and sorely-needed military coup, and the royal family’s college-age niece, in a panic, gets her magical teleporting dog to scatter the family around Oahu for some reason, where they instantly start breaking laws and assaulting people. 

So the driving question of the series is: How do the people of Hawaii band together to contain this dangerous situation?

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