UPDATE: CBR is reporting that writer Dwayne McDuffie has passed away. The cause of death is still unknown. Obviously, this came as a huge shock. As you may guess from this article, he was fine and in good health when I talked to him last week. Our editorial staff are big fans of his work and we offer our condolences to his friends and family.
It was Valentine’s Day and I’d decided that I would bail on a dinner date to attend a screening of a direct-to-video animated movie. Yadda yadda I should have my virginity grow back—but it was the world premiere of All-Star Superman, the adaptation of one of my favorite mini-series and possibly one of the greatest Superman books of all time. Romance can take a number.
So it was very nice indeed to find that the movie uses the romance between Superman and Lois Lane as the throughline that ties the various subplots together, effectively turning All-Star Superman into a love story. I wish Warner Home Video had moved up the street date so couples could enjoy the movie as part of their date night.
Attending the premiere were screenwriter Dwayne McDuffie, who had the unenviable task of adapting the book; voice and casting director Andrea Romano, an Emmy Award hoarding rock star of her field; and Mad Men beauty Christina Hendricks, who stars as Lois Lane. I got to talk with them for a little bit before the screening, and sat in for the Q&A panel after.
Hendricks was late to the red carpet, but when she finally showed, her arrival was announced by the sudden silence of the Paley Center lobby and an almost comical collective breath intake. A few guys near me, by their own vocal admission, got as good as a Valentine's Day as they were going to get. Never one mind that her husband, the 500 Days of Summer actor Geoffrey Arend, was by her side at all times. Later during the panel, Hendricks let slip that during her voice recording sessions for the movie—which she had never done before—Arend kept sending her text messages like, "I love you, Lois Lane." She was met with sympathetic awws and jealous groans.
"First two movies [I ever saw] were Clash of the Titans and Superman II. It was at a drive-in movie theater and I just remember being just in awe," said Hendricks. "So to get this opportunity was incredible."
"There's a very sensitive side to this Superman..."
"I thought he captured really well, James Denton, in this piece," said Andrea Romano. "They're all actors and they all have different ways of approaching the work, different opinions as to what drives the character [from previous Superman voice actors like George Newbern and Tim Daly]."
Denton is best known for his long and still ongoing stint on Desperate Housewives, whose fans probably already regard him as a superman of sorts. Like Hendricks, this was his first time voicing an animated feature.
"I'm always surprised at the people who say yes. Often it's because they have children, or because they are fans themselves, or they always dressed as Wonder Woman when they were kids for Halloween."
Anthony LaPaglia, who plays Luthor, had the most experience, having voiced characters in both Happy Feet and Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole.
"If they haven't done voice acting before, the technique that it requires is something that can be taught very quickly. I can't teach acting very quickly, that takes a long time, but I can teach them how to use a microphone, how to boost the energy for animation," Romano said.
The Graceful Death of Superman
When writer Grant Morrison and artist Frank Quitely set out to do the All-Star Superman mini, what they did was embrace the fun and limitless imagination of the camp Silver Age comics using modern characterizations and dialogue. The result was a love letter to the character's rich history.
The premise of the book: Lex Luthor has finally figured out a way to get rid of Superman, by overexposing him to the solar radiation that gives him his power. Superman's powers tripled, his weakness to Kryptonite gone, but his deteriorating cells are slowly killing him. Accepting his impending death graciously, he decides to reveal his secret identity as Clark Kent to Lois, and does whatever he can to make his final days worthwhile to humanity. Visitors from the future tell him that before his death, Superman will perform twelve super feats that he will be remembered forever for.
There isn't a knock-down fight-to-the-death like in Superman: Doomsday. Superman's death isn't a cheap plot device or gimmick to show vulnerability in an invincible figure. The film fully embraces the theme of mortality—not just in Superman, but also through his effect on other people. How will Superman continue his legacy, when he and Lois' biology aren't compatible enough to produce a child together? How does Superman act when a ruthless enemy who showed him no mercy is dying in front of him? What about when Pa Kent, his adopted father, also dies, leaving Ma Kent all alone when he, too, will soon go? Even Luthor's evil deeds is motivated by his own mortality. Facing the death penalty for crimes against humanity with a sneer, Luthor remarks that he can die in peace because at least he's made sure that Superman will die too.
I'd already written about the specifics of the animation style, particularly its difficult screen translation of Quitely's unique artwork, and some key moments adapted from the book in my report of the scenes previewed at New York Comic-Con, so you can read that for details. Viewing the movie as a whole, I was struck by how well McDuffie streamlined a dense 12-issue mini-series, each with its own individual plot, into one 75-minute movie. Sure, at times, the movie feels erratic because characters and situations that got the full attention of a whole comic book issue have to come and go in 10 minutes or less, but McDuffie's ploy is to hook the nonchalant nature of their appearances as normal episodes in the adventurous life of a character like Superman.
Yeah, sometimes dinosaur people from the Earth's core invade Metropolis, and sometimes a prison riot breaks out when Clark Kent is interviewing someone there. These things happen.
"This is so much easier than comics!"
No one would say that screenwriting is easy, but having written for comics, television shows and movies, Dwayne McDuffie has no problem identifying one medium as the harder one to write for.
"Comics are much harder to write than any form that I've ever written. Comics call for a precise control of time. Individual panels that present a certain number of time in a panel, and the gutters inbetween, it could be a billion years or the very next instant, and you have to choose the moment within that period of time. If you see a panel and there's a couple of people talking, and there's three balloons, it might cover 30-40 seconds, or a panel could be someone throwing a punch, and that's less than a second. You always have to make those decisions in comics, and in animation or live-action or feature, you don't. You just describe what's happening, and then it's the director's problem."
The ease is relative, of course, as McDuffie had a daunting task ahead of him. How do you copy a beloved and critically-acclaimed story for what is essentially the same niche audience without having the carte blanche to keep it in its entirety?
McDuffie is no stranger to Superman. Aside from being a DC Comics writer for many years, he was also a head writer on the Justice League Unlimited series, as well as the writer of Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths. Neither of those are direct adaptations; they incorporate characters and situations from the comics into brand new stories.
"The reason we do that is because comics are serial and they never end," he explained. "In this case, there's a very definite climax to this thing; it's easier to stay close to it."
Eventually, though, some stuff will have to be cut for time, and it's hard to disagree with McDuffie's choices, such as getting rid of the whole Bizarro sequence because they rely on visual puns and wouldn't work as well spoken out loud. The one scene that McDuffie admits to having the hardest time cutting just so happens to be my favorite scene from the book.
"A teenage girl is about to commit suicide and Superman, low as he is at that point in the story, takes the time to explain to her that she has the strength to survive," McDuffie recalls. "It's a wonderful, wonderful moment that's the heart of the Superman character, and there was no place in the arc of the story as we told it that makes any sense. I tried and tried and tried and there's no place to keep it at."
It's a shame that he could not fit it in, because it also deals yet again with the relationship between our death and what we do with the life we have.
Ultimately, what All-Star Superman is about is an optimistic view of humanity where Superman exists to improve people's lives just by interacting with them. No doubt that the combination of romance and martyrdom makes it a tearjerker, and McDuffie makes no apologies.
"Well, that's what I'm here for. I want to make children cry."
