Superhero Page 7

  The role of Richard Collier, the man who’d achieved material fortune in the contemporary world, “allowed me to crawl into a man’s head, to nurture what is still emotionally alive in him. It’s about a successful man who is half-dead inside—until he sees a portrait of a woman who lived nearly seventy years before. At this point the film becomes a study of how desire can affect someone. He goes to see this woman, travels back in time through a mixture of inducement and suggestion, and creates a period environment around himself so convincing that after three days of trying he just leaves. In essence, Somewhere in Time is about a man looking for one from the heart.”

  And Mackinac Island, with its very strong turn-of-the-century period flavor, was possibly the perfect place to find the film’s atmosphere. What no one had reckoned on was the fact the Chris was allergic to the island’s ubiquitous horses. He survived by using a bicycle and taking allergy pills for the duration of the shooting. Even so, there were times when his eyes would water and his nose would run, not exactly the suave qualities of a leading man.

  But then again, Chris was a very human leading man, even if he’d made his movie name playing an alien. And as such, he had all the human failings, including clumsiness. Dancing with Seymour, he found himself standing on her foot more than once, which earned him the endearing nickname of “Superfoot.”

  One of the big disadvantages of being trapped on an island was that it made Chris a sitting target for the many fans who wanted to see Superman in the flesh. Mackinac had long been something of a Michigan tourist mecca, and the rumor that Chris was there filming brought plenty of people onto the island’s ferry. All that was good for business, but very disruptive for Somewhere in Time, as the crowds ended up hampering the shooting schedule. It finally reached the point where Chris was forced to make an agreement with fans. If they’d let him work in peace, when everything was finished he’d tour the state and sign autographs.

  Really, it was a sign of just how popular Chris was—and more to the point, just how huge Superman was—that the fans would stream in to see him that way. It was a given that a movie star would receive fan mail and adulation, but for someone with only one starring role under his belt, this was quite remarkable, almost unprecedented.

  However, the times they were definitely a-changin’, and Chris represented a new breed of man. The old school had been macho and manly, always strong. They were the heroes of black and white, in more ways than one.

  But even when he was showing superhuman prowess at fighting crime, Chris’s character let his sensitive side come through. There was an innate courtliness to his behavior that seemed to go beyond any script and emanate directly from Chris himself, which was guaranteed to appeal to women.

  And it was perfectly true; he was like that in real life (which helped him bring such natural truth to Collier). Unlike so many who’d gone before, he came across in three dimensions, not just a handsome face and a set of muscles. Intelligence flickered in his eyes. He was thoughtful and articulate when interviewed, speaking in grammatical sentences. There was none of the ruggedness about him. Instead, he was decidedly clean-cut, and with his wardrobe—still big on the preppy basics—and rather earnest manner, he could have been a graduate student or a young professor.

  All of that was perfectly in tune with the times. Fashion had changed, leaving the old order standing at the roadside. People still wanted to be able to look up at their stars, but they also wanted the person on the pedestal to be an idealized reflection of themselves, rather than someone completely untouchable. And Chris filled the bill.

  He found it all faintly ridiculous, however. He didn’t think of himself as a movie star, and never would, at least in the accepted sense. He saw himself as an actor who’d had a particularly lucky break, nothing more or less. Outside of the roles he was creating, to Chris his looks and manner were irrelevant to anyone but himself or Gae.

  In his eyes, each part he played, whether great or small, had equal value. He was like other actors in that “We’re not putting value judgments on the character. We’re not saying a comic book is worse than Chekhov. It’s all the same process to get inside and believe it.”

  So that he should have become the object of screams, lust, and fantasy for doing his job was dumbfounding, even embarrassing, since he was being singled out for his looks and his style, neither of which had that much to do with his acting ability.

  His biggest concession to his new status was a new airplane—he’ d moved up from the Cherokee to a new A36 Bonanza, and now, having completed his multiengine rating, he’d added a Beech Baron to what was almost becoming (and would soon actually become) a little airline. They were his toys and his escape valve.

  And, more importantly, he had a new home. In London, he and Gae lived at her Knightsbridge apartment. But in New York they didn’t have a decent place. The old bachelor pad wasn’t exactly suitable for a couple. So now that he had the money, Chris bought a penthouse in a co-op building, still on the Upper West Side, on West Seventy-eighth Street. It was elegant, swank, and not cheap. Still, he reasoned, he had the money; he could afford the indulgence. And real estate would only rise in value.

  But those were simply the trappings that money had brought. At heart he hadn’t changed at all. For someone who viewed himself as a movie star, Somewhere in Time would have been a bad career move. For an actor, it made perfect sense to show another facet of his abilities.

  With its element of time travel it was no less fantastic than Superman, and Chris himself admitted to film critic Gene Siskel, “I’m sure there will be cynics in the audience who say, ‘Oh, come on, this is ridiculous.’ But those are the same people who think that Heidi is a little pain in the ass who is forever yodeling, and that the kids in The Sound of Music should have been drowned at the beginning of the picture.”

  It was definitely a tearjerker; but that was the whole intention. It was, in the Hollywood scheme of things, a small movie. But it came in on budget (the crew had been asked to take a pay cut so the production could afford Chris) and on time. Shooting didn’t take long (for which a highly allergic Chris was grateful).

  How would audiences react? After seeing Chris in a cape and red boots, would they be willing to accept him as a writer moved by love? For that matter, had the world moved so far from innocence that an unabashed weepie would seem stupid and totally outdated? When it opened in 1980 the verdict soon became apparent.

  It was a subject that needed a light touch to work and glide, and director Jeannot Swarcz instead applied a rather heavy hand. He’d done a good job with Jaws II; however, that was action, and this was anything but. In fact, that was a big part of the problem—it was too static.

  Chris would say later that he “overacted dreadfully,” and he certainly did, but the air of Mackinac seemed to affect the whole cast in the same manner. There wasn’t a single person who didn’t go way, way over the top.

  As the object of Richard Collier’s desire, Jane Seymour had a nice smile and plenty of hair, but that was about as far as praise could go. She was by no means a great actress, in fact not even a good one.

  Christopher Plummer, as her manager, was assured and suave, even as he hammed it up. It was almost as if everyone involved found it impossible to take the film seriously.

  But while it edged toward self-parody, it never developed a human edge. The earnestness always showed through, most of all in Chris, who was, after all, the focal point. Subtlety should have been the watchword, but it was somehow forgotten.

  Most critics hated the film—and Chris in it. The goodwill he’d built up in Superman didn’t carry over to this. In the New York Times Vincent Canby gave an honest appraisal of Chris’s performance, saying that “unfortunately, his unshadowed good looks, granite profile, bright naivete and eagerness to please—the qualities that made him such an ideal Superman—look absurd here.”

  And it was true. Chris still looked too young, as if he hadn’t lived and suffered yet. Richard Collier was supposed to be a
successful man full of Weltschmerz, but without the haggard look of worry, it was hard for Chris to put that across. At least Variety came to his defense, one of the very few publications that liked the film, praising him as “a fine actor with both star power and versatility … a first-rate and exciting romantic lead, able to handle both comedy and drama with equal skill.”

  On the heels of the reviews, Somewhere in Time didn’t do a great deal of box-office business when it was released. For a film that had been so eagerly awaited, the second big outing for the man who was such a smash hit, it more or less died on the vine. However, the irony was that it refused to go away. A core group of people loved it, and through video rentals many more continued to discover it. While never enough to make it a hit, the movie remained known and popular, to the extent that it had its own fan club and even its own Web site on the Internet. Whereas virtually every other movie from the time has been forgotten, it’s stayed alive, in a rather bizarre echo of the plot.

  For Chris it had been a mistake, really, but an honest one that could still be absorbed and corrected. He was still a desirable movie property. With Superman the pendulum had swung very much to one side, and in reaction Chris had gone to the other extreme. What he needed was to find a middle course.

  On top of that, it was really only his second movie role (discounting the bit part in Grey Lady Down), and he was still finding his feet in the medium. His time in the theater had shown that he could act, but movies were a very different beast from the stage.

  “In a movie, you’ve got the money problem, you’ve got the producer problem, you’ve got the studio,” he’d muse a few years later, “and the fact that they only keep you there for the minimum time they possibly can because they don’t want to pay the money. You do a scene and the girl who plays your wife, you met her yesterday. It’s very hard to bring out any depth. But in theater, what comes out is the collective, the group.”

  Chris might have leapt tall star ratings in a single bound, but he was still learning, and he knew it. He’d been helped by the fact that Superman, for all its problems, had been thoroughly professional in its scripting. For Somewhere in Time, Richard Matheson had written both novel and screenplay. He was experienced, but all his previous work had been in the general horror field—movies with titles like Die! Die! My Darling and Master of the World, as well as Spielberg’s debut, Duel, none of which relied heavily on emotion or subtlety to convey their points.

  Many would characterize Chris as wooden, and it was true his performance as Collier didn’t really seem to flow, but the fault wasn’t completely his. With a script that could have used a lot more work, a director who wanted to make the film but didn’t seem to understand it, and a costar with whom he seemed to share no chemistry, the deck had been largely stacked against him.

  It was unfortunate that it came when it did in his career. Later on he’d have been able to play it better, to have given it more of an edge. Instead, it proved to be a very visible bad move.

  But even though it didn’t work out, it remained typically adventurous, serving notice that as in everything else, Chris was going to go his own way and not follow the traditionally charted course. Stars didn’t do their own stunts; he did. Stars took the part which offered the biggest money; he didn’t. It was about much more than getting rich or being a poster on someone’s wall or idolized by millions. Both acting and life—and in many ways acting was life for Chris—were about challenges, always facing something new, always stretching yourself and learning from the experience. Failure was part and parcel of that, part of being human, and Chris would learn from that, too. At twenty-six there were still plenty of years ahead.

  And in the meantime, Superman was calling again.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Somewhere in Time seemed as if it might be something of an interlude in Chris’s ongoing Superman saga. Indeed, the entire first decade of his movie career would be dominated by the boots and cape, more than enough to leave him forever indelibly associated with the character.

  There was going to be a Superman II, the Salkinds insisted. While they’d been forced to abandon their original plan, to shoot both movies simultaneously, because of time and money constraints, the first film had been so globally successful that a sequel was inevitable.

  But even as they took their initial steps toward it, they found themselves in the midst of all kinds of legal wranglings. Brando was suing them, as were others; they’d made a mistake in very basic math—onering out more than 100 percent of the film—and been discovered.

  Richard Donner wouldn’t be returning, and much of the footage he’d shot for the second film was scrapped. Richard Lester, the man who’d been brought in to keep Donner on the straight and narrow with the original, was unsurprisingly named as director in his stead.

  To everyone’s surprise, for a while it looked as though Chris might not be back. His original contract had stipulated that he’d be paid a quarter of a million dollars to shoot both films together. But, because of problems well out of Chris’s control, that hadn’t happened. Now the Salkinds wanted him to commit another seven months of his valuable time for no compensation.

  That just wasn’t going to be acceptable. Chris’s agent, who’d been wringing his hands at the money his client had been turning down, went to work on the producers, pointing out that Chris’s contract had been allowed to lapse, so if they wanted him—and there was no question that they did, since his appeal had been a big part of Superman’s success—they’d better be prepared to pay. And pay quite a bit more than a quarter of a million dollars this time.

  When the Salkinds threatened legal action, Chris’s lawyers pointed out that he’d been perfectly willing to shoot both films simultaneously. He’d upheld his part of the bargain to the letter and been a perfect gentleman. Even now he was in Japan promoting the first film. What more goodwill and grace could he show?

  In the end the Salkinds had no choice but to capitulate; that much had been evident from the first. But they still didn’t end up paying a fortune for Chris, even though he’d made one for them. The five-hundred-thousand-dollar fee agreed upon was the same amount he’d made for Somewhere in Time, a much smaller film. And it was less than half the sum they were paying Gene Hackman—who also claimed that much-coveted top billing—to reprise his Lex Luthor role.

  With the new contracts signed, and preproduction quickly out of the way, work began immediately on Superman II, which meant that Chris didn’t get any kind of break. From upper Michigan he went directly to the first location shooting for this new epic.

  And this time the locations were truly many and varied: from Niagara Falls to Norway, Paris to St. Lucia. Superman had been a blockbuster, and the Salkinds wanted this to be even better; no expense would be spared in the filming, which helped calm the fears Chris had that the Salkinds simply wanted a fast, cheap sequel as a moneymaking machine.

  Margot Kidder was back, too, but Lois Lane wasn’t going to be as prominent as she had been in the first movie, partly because Kidder had accused the Salkinds of cheating her out of forty thousand dollars. Even though she did eventually receive her money, she paid for it in other ways, although she insisted she didn’t care.

  “I love Lois Lane,” she said, “I could play her till I die, but I’m not going to die if I don’t play her.”

  But Superman II was going to be the movie where Lois would finally get her man. Doing that, though, would also prove to be nearly the death of Margot Kidder. Zoran Perisic, who’d created the special effects for the first film, and won an Oscar for his work, had created a new system for the flying effects, much to Chris’s pleasure. Instead of the wires and harnesses that chafed and left calluses on his skin, Perisic had made transparent body molds for the actors. They were placed in them on top of forty-foot poles and moved along a series of runners in the studio. It was physically more comfortable, and certainly less demanding than having to keep the body still for ten minutes at a time.

  For the most part, this s
ystem worked very well, but on one occasion there was a problem.

  “I was doing a flight scene with Margot Kidder,” Chris recalled, “when the area that was supporting us started to collapse. I ran for her and grabbed her in my arms to stop her from falling. That’s what Superman would have done. Obviously, that wouldn’t have saved either of us but at that moment exactly, I really believed I was Superman.”

  And it was perhaps lucky for Kidder that he did. But it was also a perfectly natural reflex reaction for Chris. Just as in the original, Chris was a very physical presence in Superman II, performing all his own stunts, even hanging over Niagara Falls to complete filming on one flying sequence.

  Once again, although contractually he shouldn’t have been, he was flying and gliding on his own time—not with a cape, but in his plane. He kept it secret, but one incident came close to blowing it all. Gliding in England, a weather change forced him to make a quick landing. He found a three-thousand-yard runway and put down, only to be surrounded by police—not exactly what he’d expected.

  “The officers walked over to me and asked, ‘Are you aware that you’ve landed on a secret research center?’ I said, ‘No, it’s not marked on the map.’ They replied, ‘If we marked it on the map, then it wouldn’t be secret, would it?’”

  However, this was an instance where fame worked in his favor. After Superman, Chris’s face was well known, and he wasn’t held on spying or trespass charges; the police even allowed him to dismantle his glider and arrange to have it moved.