Travolta/Cage Extra: The Death of "Superman Lives": What Happened? (2015)

On judgment day, Michael Moore will have much to answer for. For starters, he’s going to hell because he does not share my far right wing political beliefs. But he’s also going to hell because the extraordinary, ground-breaking, breakout success of Roger & Me and his own celebrity as the most famous documentarian of all time convinced way too many documentarians that what their labors of love really needed was their onscreen presence. 

There is, of course, a noble tradition of personal documentaries that would not make sense without their creators being in front of the screen as well as behind it. Too often, however, a documentarian giving themself a lead role in their own film ends up adding nothing. 

That unfortunately is the case with the late Jon Schnepp’s presence in his otherwise riveting 2015 documentary The Death of "Superman Lives": What Happened? 

Schnepp was an accomplished director of live action and animation and voiceover artist during his eventful and accomplished lifetime. But my stupid brain never stopped being distracted and annoyed by his constant onscreen presence, nodding approvingly at the words of interviewees like Kevin Smith and Tim Burton and asking questions.

At one point deep into the film eccentric movie mogul and all-around Hollywood character Jon Peters (Kevin Smith has been eating off his Jon Peters anecdotes for decades!) briefly takes a call while being interviewed by Schnepp. Like so much in the wildly entertaining, sometimes moving documentary movie, it’s a brief sequence absolutely begging to be left on the cutting room floor. 

By that point Peters has already established himself as the most morbidly fascinating kind of lunatic, a crazed, oblivious exercise in self-parody who comes off like a wild burlesque of the ultimate egomaniacal Hollywood mogul. 

Peters has already talked about getting into literally hundreds of physical altercations in his life and stated, without an ounce of self-awareness or irony, that he wanted his three hundred million dollar blockbuster about our most famously wholesome superhero to be “something for the street!” 

Peters apparently wanted to make a Superman movie whose ideal audience would be an angry greaser in a leather jacket hopped up on speed and cheap booze, with a switchblade in his back pocket and a head full of anger and bad chemicals. You know, something for street dudes like himself. 

Peters answering a phone call on camera is colorless and boring compared to what we’ve already seen of him and his fascinating eccentricities. 

All Schnepp has to do is stay the hell out of the way of his story. He only needs to trust that the making and unmaking of Tim Burton’s late 1990s Superman reboot is captivating and dramatic and ultimately sad and inspirational enough in its own right, without him being onscreen or crude animation or low-budget recreations of what Superman Lives might have looked like if it had not become one of the most famous victims of development hell. 

Yet The Death of "Superman Lives": What Happened? is nevertheless full of stylistic choices that individually and collectively add nothing to the film or our understanding of the universe it otherwise documents with real empathy and insight and detract considerably from what should be a home run. 

Schnepp has an unmistakable agenda in making The Death of "Superman Lives": What Happened? but it is a righteous one. The writer-director-star with the Kevin Smith build and unmistakable Comic Book Store Guy vibe wants his documentary to act as a powerful corrective/counter-narrative to the conventional wisdom that the late 1990s Superman movie Tim Burton was going to make with Nicolas Cage in the lead role and a script by Kevin Smith was wildly, hilariously misconceived and would have been terrible and a spectacular flop had the plug not been pulled very late in the development process. 

There are a whole bunch of things wrong with that conception of the project. For starters, the unlikely collaboration between Tim Burton, masterful visual stylist, and Kevin Smith, dude who writes low-budget comedies about people talking, never really happened. 

A very young Smith was, in fact, the first screenwriter to work on the ill-fated project but Burton didn’t care for his screenplay and almost immediately kicked the shorts, marijuana and hockey jersey enthusiast to the curb and brought in his own man, Batman Returns co-screenwriter Wesley Strick, to work up a new script. 

Kevin Smith stayed on long enough to get a lifetime worth of great stories about the experience, most of them centering on Peters, an outsized figure of charismatic craziness out of a Coen Brothers movie. 

According to Smith, Peters big demands for HIS Superman movie were threefold. Peters didn’t want Superman to fly. The hairdresser turned super-producer also didn’t want Superman to be in his traditional suit. Finally, he wanted Superman to fight a giant spider. 

That’s a little like asking someone to write a story about Jesus’ life and death, only to take a few liberties and depict him as a lady’s man who was kind of a jerk and died of old age, rich and disliked. Peters wanted to seemingly change everything that made Superman Superman in a way that would render the most recognizable hero in all of pop culture borderline unrecognizable.

The widespread perception that Burton’s Superman would be a disaster for the ages is built largely, if not exclusively, on a single mortifying image of Nicolas Cage in a skin-tight blue Superman suit with long, jet-black hair and a weird expression that makes him look more than a little like Tommy Wiseau in a superhero costume. 

According to Hollywood legend, when he was making Superman Returns, Bryan Singer seized upon this image as representative of everything he did NOT want to do with his Superman movie. 

Singer meant that he did not want to make a Superman movie that took too many wild chances, was excessively contemporary and deviated deliberately from canon and our collective idea of who Superman is and what he looks and acts like, ideas rooted indelibly in Christopher Reeve’s iconic portrayal of the character in Richard Donner’s 1978 blockbuster, the big bang of superhero movies.

The disgraced X-Men auteur was ultimately a little too successful in that regard. Instead of making an audacious, unique and progressive Superman movie unlike any other Singer created something safe, retro and oppressively conventional. 

That, needless to say, was NOT Burton’s vision for Superman. He was, after all, a man whose last superhero blockbuster was Batman Returns, which was as unconventional, dark and personal as superhero movies get, and whose last movie was the even more gleefully subversive, non-commercial Mars Attacks. 

True to form, Burton’s conception of Superman was much more alien-focused, in that it leaned in heavily on the idea of Superman as an alien both in a literal and existential sense. That’s a theme that obviously resonated with legendary weirdoes and outsiders Burton and Cage. 

But Burton’s Superman was alien as well in that it was clearly deeply influenced by H.R Giger’s work on Alien as well as his work on Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune. Burton’s Superman was organic and freaky, skeletal and overflowing with ideas and imagination. 

Cage finally got to be Superman in a pretty terrific, gleefully subversive superhero movie, Teen Titans Go! To the Movies!

The Death of "Superman Lives": What Happened? resembles Jodorowsky’s Dune in other ways as well. I came into it expecting to laugh at a world-class disaster narrowly averted. I ended up mourning the film that wasn’t made, which could have been an epic boondoggle but also could have been utterly original, groundbreaking and unique. 

Schnepp’s film offers a fascinating glimpse into the weirdness and wonder of the collaborative process as it relates to big-budget tentpole filmmaking. More than once Peters will proudly insist on an idea that feels like an over-the-top parody of idiotic meddling but that turns out to be weirdly inspired once filtered through the prism of Burton and his gifted collaborators’ fertile imaginations. 

Insisting that Superman face off against his most legendary enemy, a giant spider, might seem off-the-charts stupid but the production sketches of Brainiac with the body of a steam-punk spider look pretty damn badass.

Likewise, when Peters insists on a space ship that looks like a cool skull he saw on the cover of National Geographic it seems like a laughably terrible idea from a dude with awful instincts and an insanely inflated ego but once again the craftsmen working on Burton’s never-to-be-realized Superman re-imagination (to cite a horrible, horrible term I vaguely recall hearing in regards to Burton’s terrible Planet of the Apes) transform a rich guy’s wonky idea into something visually dynamic and cool, albeit in a way that might be impossible to realize onscreen without a billion dollar budget. 

Schepp makes nearly a strong as strong a case for the potential greatness of Burton’s Superman film as Jodorowsky’s Dune does for the bottomless potential of its subject. I can’t help but wonder if part of the reason Burton’s post 1990s output has been so predictable and safe is because he learned all the wrong lessons from the unraveling of his Superman movie. 

Sure enough, when given properties like Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Alice in Wonderland, Burton made safe, predictable movies that are exactly what you would expect and a whole lot less. 

Alice in Wonderland also literally grossed a billion dollars while Burton’s wild ideas for Superman led to the movie never getting made. 

The Death of "Superman Lives": What Happened? Is a fun, revelatory and insightful crowd-pleaser that suggests that Nicolas Cage would have made for an oddly inspired, as well as just plain odd Superman and Clark Kent. 

Unfortunately it’s not quite as strong as it would have been if the director had remained offscreen where he belonged. 

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