In the mid-nineties, Tim Burton and Nicholas Cage signed on to make a new version of Superman, Superman Lives.
This is the story of that film's un-making.
One of the fun things about getting interested in filmmaking, is learning about unmade projects. Disney's collaboration with Salvador Dali. Vincent Ward's Alien 3. Paul Verhoeven's Crusade. Sean Connery's stab at a rogue Bond production, Warhead. When I was younger, Superman Lives was one of the unmade projects that I gravitated towards - I saw the concept art of Superman in a Borg-style suit and it captured my imagination.
I was one of many people fascinated by this idea. One of those people, Jon Schnepp, went ahead and made a documentary about it. I remember contributing some money when the project was being crowdfunded.
The Death of Superman Lives is an opportunity to tell the full story, from most of the people who contributed towards it, from the various screenwriters (Kevin Smith, Wesley Strick and Dan Gilroy) through the various members of the production and, most significantly, Tim Burton. Burton is one of the ingredients which makes the promise of Superman Lives so fascinating, and the documentary needed to include him to justify its existence.
While I was familiar with the broad strokes of the story - particularly the Kevin Smith era - it is hard not to get caught up in the story, and a lot of its impact is the material that has never been seen before, at least to the degree that it is here.
Alongside the Burton interview, the holy grail of the documentary is the footage of Nicholas Cage and Burton talking through the character while going through costume fittings. There is something magical about movies, and this footage captures a little of the alchemy of this collaboration that never was.
The cumulative effect of this test footage, the storyboards, design work and talking heads is intoxicating. I have not really cared that much about Superman Lives in years, but I left the documentary with a fresh sense of disappointment that some version of the story was never finished.
In his pitch for Kickstarter, Schnepp talked about Superman Lives as a missed opportunity - at the least it could have been a curiosity, a failed experiment that bucked the established conventions and expectations of the genre. Since the documentary came out, the superhero genre has calcified. It is everywhere. That context gives The Death of Superman Lives a poignancy that it did not have before.
An oddity that never was, Jon Schnepp’s documentary goes a long way to preserving Superman Lives in all its weird, unfinished glory.
No comments:
Post a Comment