Donner v. Lester
This essay was originally posted to Twitter between April 15, 2021 and April 17, 2021. It was composed of 686 words across 15 tweets.
SUPERMAN and SUPERMAN II were planned to be made simultaneously, as one continuous movie shoot. Partway through, the producers chose to halt work on SUPERMAN II in order to complete the first movie. As the first movie was released, SUPERMAN II sat unfinished.
After the first SUPERMAN movie proved to be a hit, the producers sent director Richard Donner a telegram advising him that his services were no longer needed. Director Richard Lester took over. At the time, 75% of SUPERMAN II had already been shot with Donner at the helm.
In the intervening time, cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth and production designer John Barry passed away. Marlon Brando had been written out of the sequel--per the producers, he was demanding an exhorbitant amount of money. At any rate, more than they were willing to pay.
Composer John Williams resigned after an ill-fated attempt to get along with Lester. Gene Hackman, uncredited screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz, and editor Stuart Baird all quit when Donner was fired. Margot Kidder stayed on, but publicly expressed unhappiness with the situation.
SUPERMAN II, once intended to be contiguous in every way with the original, resumed production with a starkly different crew. Rather than complete the remaining 25% of the movie, Lester and the producers elected to reshoot as much of the finished footage as they could manage.
But they couldn't reshoot it in its entirety. Hackman's scenes from Donner's production remain in SUPERMAN II, though some of his footage was augmented with a body double and a voice impressionist. By informal estimates, 83% of the screentime in the finished movie is Lester's.
It's difficult to untwist how much of SUPERMAN II belongs to Donner and how much to Lester. While a majority of the movie was shot with Lester at the helm, it makes use of preproduction work, story elements, and general screenplay structure that were in place before his arrival.
(If you want to know how Richard Lester would make a Superman movie from the ground up, with no contributions from Donner's production other than the pre-existing special effects, musical themes, and core cast, look no further than Lester's very own SUPERMAN III. Or don't.)
I won't rehash the reasons why Richard Donner and the producers ended up at loggerheads. I'm not interested in assigning blame or determining which side was in the right.
At least, not right now. I'm prepared to get extremely petty about this subject when the time is right.
People often group the Donner and Lester movies into a single aesthetic, or they pinpoint SUPERMAN III as the movie where the quality of the series began to slip. I wonder if this is due to viewer inattentiveness, or if time and memory have blurred the distinction in their minds.
Despite its holdover contributions from Donner's cast and crew, SUPERMAN II is a significant step down from the original. The texture, tone, lavishness of production values, and respect to the story material, all feel horribly cheapened, a stark contrast in artistic priorities.
Out goes the "apple pie" of Donner's vision; in comes Lester's view of the superhero as a gutter genre, prefiguring the trashy, parodic SUPERMAN III. It's clear that Donner's team was responsible for the high standard of quality of the first movie by its absence in the second.
Compare the visuals of the two movies--the sparkle, depth, and richness of first versus the flatness of the second. Compare the original score by John Williams versus that of Ken Thorne, comprised entirely of recycled cues and performed by an audibly smaller orchestra.
Both movies have their moments of tongue-in-cheek humor, but the increased emphasis on gags in II feels unmotivated and faintly disrespectful. There is a gentleness to the self-referential humor in the first movie, a respect for the lightly coded kitsch aspect of the character.
This isn't to say that SUPERMAN II is a bad movie. Just that the difference between the two is far greater than popular consensus seems to recognize, and not for the better.
I don't cringe much during the first SUPERMAN. Maybe during Kidder's poetry reading, but that's it.
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Published 3/9/2024
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