The author of The Godfather wrote the first Superman 1978 script. In Mario Puzo’s July 1975 draft, Clark Kent anchors the television news at Galaxy Communications, Lex Luthor is in Iran stealing the Peacock Throne, and Lois Lane daydreams of trading punches with a circus strongman who wears Luthor’s face. Almost none of it reached the screen. The distance between what Puzo wrote and what Richard Donner shot is where this analysis lives.

Four drafts, one film

The film is read here against four surviving drafts, the finished picture, and the on-record accounts of the people who made it, chiefly the long interview Donner gave Cinefantastique in January 1979, weeks after release. That reading settles some claims that get repeated every year and overturns others. The time-reversal ending really was lifted from the planned Superman II. The camp the film is blamed for did not begin with Puzo. And one idea never moved across three and a half years of rewrites: Jor-El’s warning against reversing history is on Puzo’s page 25 and in Superman’s ears at 131m.

The promise before the cape

Donner’s word for the whole enterprise was “verisimilitude”, which he and Tom Mankiewicz used for absolute belief in the scenario, no mugging to camera, no wink that the material is beneath everyone. The tagline promised you would believe a man can fly. The promise was structural before it was optical: the script spends nearly fifty minutes on Kal-El and Clark before the cape appears, so that flight reads as release rather than spectacle. That patience is the engine of everything that works here.

Structure

Three movies that shouldn’t fit together

Donner described the design as three pictures joined by one thread, the Kal-El, Clark, Superman journey. Krypton is avant-garde and cold, John Barry’s crystal sets lit like an ice cathedral. Smallville is Norman Rockwell shot through with longing. Metropolis is a wisecracking cartoon of New York, alive to possibility. Each movement has its own genre, palette and tempo, and the seams are the film’s most contested feature.

The 1979 Cinefantastique review by Steven Dimeo made the case against: the Krypton trial does nothing for Part One, the Luthor material is Batman-grade parody, and the picture keeps cutting, in his phrase, from the real to the risible. That reaction is fair, and the structure invites it. What holds the three registers together is not consistency of tone but consistency of belief. The film never treats Superman himself as a joke, even when the world around him turns comic. Christopher Reeve plays the center absolutely straight, and the straightness is load-bearing.

Donner said as much in that same issue, talking about the flying effects: if the audience laughed at Superman instead of with him, the picture was dead. A multi-tonal epic survives its tonal shifts only if one element stays fixed. Here it is the hero’s sincerity. Loosen that, and the three movies fly apart.

The Mario Puzo Superman script

The prestige hire: what Puzo wrote, and what survived

Hiring Mario Puzo was a statement. The Salkinds put the author of The Godfather on a comic-book picture, and the message to the industry was plain: a man in a cape would be treated as serious material. What Puzo delivered in his 220-page first draft, dated July 8, 1975, is startling to read now, because almost none of its plot reached the screen. The seriousness survived. The story did not.

Inside Puzo’s draft

The differences are not cosmetic. Puzo’s Clark is not a print reporter but a television anchorman at Galaxy Communications, working under Morgan Edge (Puzo draft, PDF p. 40), the comics continuity of the mid-1970s. His Lois is no oblivious foil: her colleagues openly assume Clark is Superman and plan to profit from the story (PDF p. 177), and the draft hands her a stylized fantasy in which she pictures herself as a costumed “Superwoman” fending off a circus strongman who wears Luthor’s own face (PDF pp. 180-182).

Luthor’s scheme is no California land grab but a globe-trotting caper, a Peacock Throne heist staged in Iran (PDF pp. 97-102) folded into a nuclear-extortion plot that demands a hundred million dollars in gold (PDF p. 187). Puzo holds nothing in reserve. Four Phantom Zone criminals, Jax-Ur, Kru-El, General Zod and Professor Vakox, fill the screen on page 2, and the credits roll over Krypton’s destruction rather than the 1938 comic-book prologue the finished film is known for.

Two things in Puzo did last. His Luthor, saturnine and philosophical, a scientist with a worked-out argument for evil (PDF p. 53), is the menace Gene Hackman kept under the wig. And on page 25, Jor-El, speaking to the boy Clark from a wall screen, tells him never to use his powers to reverse the history of Earth and never to play God. That instruction is the moral architecture the ending finally violates, and it was in place before a single rewrite.

From draft to screen

Four columns, four stages, and beneath them one thing that held. Everything the film is remembered for was rebuilt at least once; the rule the ending breaks was never touched.

What survived Puzo is not his plot but his register: the mythic weight, the willingness to treat a comic-book hero as an epic subject, the two-film architecture, and the seed of the time-reversal ending. The prestige hire bought seriousness and scale. The writers who followed rebuilt the story inside them.

Smallville

The stakes of powerlessness

The film’s structural masterstroke arrives at 33 minutes. Jonathan Kent (Glenn Ford) drops of a heart attack at the farmhouse door, not long after telling teenage Clark that he is here for a reason (31m). Clark, who has just outrun a train and could bend the rails, can do nothing. At the grave he says, “All those things I can do, all those powers, and I couldn’t even save him” (33m).

That line is the emotional floor of the whole picture. Power has a hard limit against biology; some losses no amount of strength reverses. An overpowered hero is dramatically inert unless the audience first sees what he cannot do, and the script plants that failure before it grants a single victory. The death is not in Puzo at all; his Jonathan sees Clark off alive (PDF pp. 29-31). It arrives with the 1976 and 1977 drafts, and the staging that reached the screen, Jonathan collapsing as Martha opens the front door, is on Mankiewicz’s page 28.

The technique generalizes cleanly. Delay the full power reveal behind a sequence of what the hero can’t do, grief, restraint, secrecy, and every later victory lands with weight it would otherwise lack.

Two fathers

The dual-mentor design, and where it comes from

Two fathers give Clark two incompatible instructions. Jor-El (Marlon Brando), speaking from the crystal, warns that it is forbidden for him to interfere with human history (23m, repeated at 45m), the Kryptonian ethic of detached non-interference. Jonathan Kent teaches the opposite: active, hands-on goodness, the conviction that Clark is here for a reason (31m). The film stages a slow collision between those two ideas.

The design is not a critic’s overlay. The climax makes it literal. As Superman decides whether to reverse time, the soundtrack stacks three voices in under twenty seconds (131m): Jor-El’s prohibition, Jonathan’s “you are here for a reason,” and Clark’s own “I couldn’t even save him.” The film does not imply the dual-mentor conflict. It plays the conflict out loud, an audio montage at the decisive moment.

A rule written in 1975

The drafts add a layer the film keeps invisible. Jor-El’s prohibition is not a late invention. It appears in Puzo’s first draft, where Jor-El tells the boy Clark never to reverse Earth’s history or play God (PDF p. 25), and the sentence Brando speaks, forbidding interference with human history, is on the page from the July 1976 Newman and Benton draft (PDF p. 55) through Mankiewicz (p. 34) and the 30 March shooting script (p. 34). Two wordings, one rule. Puzo set the moral architecture the ending violates at the very start of the writing process. That is why the violation reads as a resolution rather than a stunt: the film establishes the rule it breaks roughly two hours and one screenplay lineage earlier.

Donner’s method

Verisimilitude: anchoring the fantasy

Donner told Cinefantastique he inherited a 550-page shooting script that Pierre Spengler intended to shoot in full, and that his objection was not to the writing but to the parody. The Newman and Benton pages, in his account, had compounded the joke all the way to the Batman television series, including a gag in which Superman lands on a bald man in the street who turns out to be Kojak. He brought in Mankiewicz on one understanding: bigger than life, but with reality inside the frame of the people. Eleven weeks after his hire he was shooting Brando.

That discipline is most audible in the Daily Planet at 49 minutes, overlapping dialogue, deadline pressure, a newsroom that behaves like a workplace rather than a set. The film drops a hero who cannot lie into a world of spin and cynicism, and the contrast is the point. Even the flying was held to it: Donner said he rejected flying footage for months before accepting the first shots, and that the Zoptic front-projection rig, a projector light enough to float on a crane, was chosen because the camera, not the actor, had to supply the motion.

The balcony one-shot

The most instructive example is a shot the audience never quite registers. After the night flight, Superman sets Lois on her balcony, waves, and steps off; seconds later Clark is at her door in different clothes, and the camera never cuts. Donner has described how it was done without computers. The balcony was split in two and part of it built at a separate studio. Reeve’s flight footage was front-projected behind Margot Kidder, and the live camera was freed from its rig and slid with her to the door on a dolly. By his account, no one had tried the move that way before.

The point of the difficulty was emotional as much as technical. The take could have been managed with cuts, but a cut would not have carried the same feeling. Showing Clark and Superman as one continuous person, in one shot, does work a cut cannot. The craft exists to sell the relationship, which is the film’s whole method in miniature.

The secret identity

The dramatic-irony triangle and the utility of the secret identity

The romance is a triangle drawn with two people. Lois loves Superman and overlooks Clark, never suspecting they are the same man. The audience holds the knowledge she lacks, and that gap powers the humor, the romance and the tension through the film’s slower stretches. Puzo had written a Lois whose newsroom already assumes Clark is Superman (PDF p. 177); the rewrites took that knowledge away from her and gave it to us.

Reeve is the mechanism that makes the gap believable. As Clark he channels a note of Cary Grant comedy, all stammer and downward glance; as Superman he strips personality almost entirely and plays a fact rather than a character. Roger Ebert read Clark’s performance as a sustained wink to an audience in on the secret, and the double meaning runs through most of his Clark dialogue. Dimeo, less kindly, saw a modern blend of Tracy and Hepburn with Astaire and Rogers thrown in. Either way, the secret identity is not merely protective cover. It is emotional armor, Clark is his own romantic rival, and the source of the film’s sharpest irony.

The helicopter rescue

The public debut at 69 minutes crystallizes the approach. Superman catches Lois from a falling helicopter and reassures her: “Easy, miss. I’ve got you.” She looks at the street far below and asks, “You’ve got me? Who’s got you?” (69m). The film plays the exchange for peril, comedy and wonder at once, and it resolves on a single word when she asks who he is: “A friend” (70m).

For a writer, the takeaway is that a knowledge gap between characters is a renewable engine. It sustains engagement when the action dips and layers emotional stakes across shifts in tone.

The villain

Luthor and the comedy question

Nearly every account of the film repeats the same claim: Puzo’s script was campy and later hands sobered it. The drafts say otherwise, and the picture that emerges is more layered than the legend.

Puzo’s draft: heavy and overstuffed at once

Puzo’s 1975 draft was not the source of the buffoonery, but it was not sober either. Ilya Salkind later called it a Greek tragedy, and its spine bears that out: the villain, introduced as “Luthor Lux,” is saturnine and philosophical, a scientist with a reasoned case for doing evil (PDF p. 53), and the draft closes on a downbeat meditation, Clark’s voice-over playing over news of a nuclear test, landing on the thought that not one Superman, nor a hundred, can save humanity from itself (PDF p. 224).

At the same time, the making-of accounts describe the same 220-page draft as overstuffed and self-aware: goofy dialogue, wacky imagery, the Superwoman fantasy, the globe-trotting sprawl, Clark on television. Dense enough that the producers judged it nearly unfilmable. Puzo’s draft was tonally maximalist, tragic and comic-book-excessive at once, and too much of both to shoot.

Where the camp actually came from

The comedy audiences remember is not in those pages. Otis and Miss Teschmacher, the buffoon-henchman engine, do not appear in Puzo’s draft at all. They enter with Newman and Benton in July 1976, and by Mankiewicz’s March 1977 pages Otis is named well past a hundred times. The parody peaked after Puzo, not with him. Donner’s testimony is blunt: the script he was handed parodied a parody, and the Kojak gag was the emblem of it.

Donner disliked that camp and had Mankiewicz rewrite toward sincerity, while keeping, in his words, the comic relief he needed. Mankiewicz later said barely a line of Puzo survived, which is true of dialogue and plot but not, as this piece keeps finding, of the architecture underneath. What the primary text proves is narrow and firm: the buffoon comedy is absent in Puzo and present from the second draft on. Donner’s team pulled it back rather than invented it, though the finished film keeps Otis broad enough that the comedy never fully recedes.

The blend on screen

On screen the finished Luthor holds both registers at once. Asked whether he gets his kicks planning the deaths of innocent people, Hackman corrects the premise: “No, by causing the death of innocent people” (108m). Around that menace sits the comedy of Otisburg and Miss Teschmacher’s real-estate patter (110m), and it was Otisburg, not the menace, that Dimeo held against the film: place the villain in a parody, he argued, and the hero is reduced to the villain’s level.

The evidence does not settle that argument. It clarifies its terms. The philosophical menace is Puzo’s; the broad parody is not; Puzo’s own draft ran heavier and stranger than the film that emerged; and Donner’s cut is a tempered blend of both. Whether the blend is a flaw or a deliberate tonal gamble is the reader’s to decide.

Superman 1978 ending explained

The ending: breaking time for love

The most argued-over ninety seconds in the film are the time-reversal. After Lois dies in the earthquake fissure, Superman orbits the Earth at impossible speed, spins the planet backward, undoes her death and jails Luthor. Detractors have called it a deus ex machina since 1978, and the objection is easy to state: if he can reverse time he can solve anything, and the stakes evaporate.

What the drafts show

The drafts explain why the sequence feels grafted on. It was. In Mankiewicz’s March 1977 script, which carries both films straight through, the spinning-Earth reversal sits under a header reading SUPERMAN II 31/3/77 (PDF p. 245), and it undoes the destruction the Kryptonian villains cause rather than an earthquake. The Washington Monument un-crumbles; toothpaste crawls back into the tube. The set-piece belonged to the second film’s climax.

Donner’s abandoned cliffhanger

Donner’s own account fills in the rest. He told Cinefantastique he had planned to end the first film on a cliffhanger, panning from the prison up to Luthor’s rocket cracking the Phantom Zone open, and dropped it on the reasoning that a hit earns its sequel without one and that a cliffhanger would have damaged the love scene between Lois and Superman. He does not say the Earth-spin was pulled forward; the drafts say it. The 30 March 1977 shooting script still ends the first film on that cliffhanger, followed by selected scenes from the sequel, so the transfer happened after that date. The sequel Donner described was to end with Superman defying Jor-El for the love of a woman. The first film, as released, does exactly that.

Puzo’s draft confirms the shape from the other side. It carries the theme, Jor-El’s warning against reversing Earth’s history (PDF p. 25), but the located climax of his pages is different: Superman tows a programmed aircraft away from Metropolis (PDF pp. 194-195), and the draft closes on a bleak voice-over rather than a resurrection. The staged spinning-Earth sequence belongs to the Superman II material. What Puzo did write is the rule the reversal breaks and the becoming-mortal mechanism the sequel’s love story would use (PDF p. 130). The two-film architecture was his; the set-piece was not.

Does it earn the break?

So the cheat is real as a mechanical objection, and the “it feels imported” instinct is literally correct. What the film does to earn it anyway is the dual-mentor montage at 131 minutes: the reversal is presented not as a physics trick but as Clark choosing Jonathan’s active compassion over Jor-El’s detached prohibition, with both fathers’ voices in his ears. The rule-break resolves the film’s central argument in a single act. Readers will disagree about whether that thematic payoff outweighs the logical hole. Both halves of the disagreement rest on what is on the page and in the drafts.

Structure, minute by minute

The beat sheet: loss, wonder, collapse, choice

Minute markers are timed to the movie. The four blocks follow the film’s arc, with Act II split into the Wanderer (promise and wonder) and the Warrior (complications and collapse), the seam where the tonal turn lives.

Act I: Setup (min 1-40)

The first act spends its time on loss. Two inheritances die, Krypton in cosmic spectacle and Jonathan Kent at a Kansas farmhouse door, and the second death sets the film’s emotional floor: power that cannot save the man who raised him (33m). Everything the hero later wins is measured against that failure.

Act IIa: The Wanderer (min 41-90)

The Wanderer half of Act II is ascent. The Fortress completes Clark’s education, where Jor-El names the mission: a grateful humanity that only lacks the light to show the way (47m). Superman then steps into public life through the helicopter rescue, the debut and the night flight. The register is promise and wonder, and the flight with Lois is the false peak, the romance cresting before the plot turns.

Act IIb: The Warrior (min 91-131)

The Warrior half turns that wonder against him. Luthor’s kryptonite trap finds the one weakness, the twin missiles force an impossible split, and one save costs the other: Lois dies in the earthquake despite everything strength can do (~126m). The act closes where the film began, on power useless against death.

Act III: Resolution (min 131-end)

Act III is decision. With both fathers’ voices in his ears, Clark breaks Jor-El’s prohibition and reverses time, settling the film’s central argument in a single act (131m), then jails Luthor and returns to the sky. The resolution pays off the loss the opening established: this time, strength is allowed to win.

For writers

Why it still matters for writers

Superman solves the problem every writer of near-omnipotent heroes runs into: how to make an invincible character carry stakes. It does not solve it by weakening him. It solves it with emotional grounding, moral choice and structure: the fifty-minute delay before the cape, the early irreversible failure, the secret identity that doubles as vulnerability, the two-father argument the ending finally settles.

Its sincerity is the durable lesson. “Truth, justice and the American way” plays as real aspiration, not as a punchline, in a film that arrived when cynicism was the default register of American movies. Donner told Cinefantastique that the line usually drew a laugh big enough to bury Lois’s comeback about fighting every elected politician in the country, and that this is exactly why the film had to be set in the present rather than as a period piece. The three-movie structure is a workable blueprint for multi-tonal epics, and the dramatic-irony triangle is a template for sustaining tension through quieter passages.

The one rule for audacious mechanics

The time-reversal, whatever one concludes about it, is a case study in the one rule for audacious mechanics: they survive only when they resolve a character’s arc rather than serve convenience. The drafts show the seams. The finished film shows the craft that stitched over most of them. Both are worth studying.

Reader questions

Superman 1978 script: questions readers ask

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