After I was however a humble Warner Bros. Studio tour information in 2012, the whole division was gifted a uncommon deal with: A visit to the studio archives. Shuttled to a nondescript airport hangar, we toured essentially the most valuable of WB artifacts, an elite few of which rotate on show on the lot’s museum.
The constructing resembled the warehouse on the finish of “Raiders of the Misplaced Ark,” with rows and rows of boxed and filed treasures. My eyes darted furiously as if trying to find the covenant. Drawers have been labeled with legendary names: “Bette Davis” and “Errol Flynn.” A refrigerated room held a trove of “Gremlins.” We have been instructed a bundle of partitions was Monica’s condominium from “Pals.” A room was devoted simply to automobiles (“image automobiles”), from Batmobiles to the Argo vessel — no, not that “Argo” — the one from the 1979 Jack the Ripper time journey journey “Time After Time.”
Essentially the most intriguing merchandise was stored in a crate, which to our luck was open, with its contents standing tall. On a model was a barely worn pink and blue outfit, leading edge in that ’90s punk model. Our information knowledgeable us that it was prototype Nicolas Cage swimsuit from the 1998 Tim Burton “Superman Lives” film… a movie, after all, that by no means occurred.
A couple of years later in 2015, I had an opportunity to see a screening of “The Dying of Superman Lives: What Occurred?” on the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. This glorious documentary, directed by the late Jon Schnepp, was a real fan expertise — not that I’m a rabid fan, however when one thing is made with the sort of love that individual doc was, it’s powerful to not catch the keenness.
It’s a film about an aborted film that’s value revisiting, or visiting for the primary time, and it’s presently accessible on YouTube. By idea artwork, exhaustive interviews with the entire main gamers (minus Cage, however together with Burton, costume designer Colleen Atwood, and the primary draft script author Kevin Smith), and behind-the-scenes take a look at footage, Schnepp was in a position to craft a reasonably stellar illustration of what a Burton-directed Superman may need felt like. On the finish, too, it manages to make even essentially the most skeptical of viewers go, “Effectively… perhaps…” because it flashes a quite putting photograph of Cage in what’s (I imagine) the swimsuit I noticed withering contained in the archives. His final costume exams, by the best way, have been shot the day they pulled the plug on the film. It was that near getting into entrance of the cameras.
Cage would finally have a really fast cameo as considered one of a multiverse of Supermen in 2023’s “The Flash.” In a later interview, he stated he solely spent three hours on set for that movie, starring Ezra Miller because the title character. “After I went to [see] the image, it was me combating a large spider. I didn’t try this. That was not what I did,” he defined to Yahoo! Leisure. “I don’t assume it was [created by] AI. I do know Tim [Burton] is upset about AI, as I’m. It was CGI, OK, in order that they may de-age me, and I’m combating a spider. I didn’t do any of that, so I don’t know what occurred there.”
Burton has by no means had an opportunity to even briefly revisit the character, one thing he stated he had regrets over in a 2023 BFI interview. “While you work that lengthy on a challenge and it doesn’t occur, it impacts you for the remainder of your life,” he stated. “Since you get obsessed with issues, and every factor is an unknown journey, and it wasn’t there but. Nevertheless it’s a type of experiences that by no means leaves you, somewhat bit.”
Whereas I can’t relate the behind-the-scenes drama to the extent that “The Dying of Superman Lives” is ready, suffice to say that anybody curious sufficient to look at or do a deep dive on the assorted scripts and smattering of artifacts that stay from the manufacturing (one idea even ended up within the film “Wild Wild West“) will stroll away with a powerful impression — notably of producer Jon Peters, who would finally wind up producing “Superman Returns.”
Among the many would-be movie’s stranger points — or at the very least issues that sound unusual looking back — are large Brainiac spiders, proposed “Superman” basketball shorts, and a power-regenerating swimsuit. Not all of this is able to’ve occurred, however geez wouldn’t it have been one thing.
I couldn’t take images on the fateful day I noticed the Nicolas Cage swimsuit, but it surely lives on in my reminiscence. And one way or the other that reminiscence — faint and vague — may surpass something Tim Burton may need been in a position to craft.
Take a watch of the doc in case you have some free time.