Book review: ‘Superman vs. Hollywood’

“Superman vs. Hollywood” by Jake Rossen

“Superman vs. Hollywood: How Fiendish Producers, Devious Directors, and Warring Writers Grounded an American Icon” is as compelling as that full title sounds, as Superman is a property that has been around since 1938, and make no mistake, this book goes to great lengths to show that Superman has often been handled as just that very thing – property.

Starting with his modest roots in the comic books of the late 1930s, this is a thorough accounting of all the projects that this character inspired, from radio to television to film and back again, and more interesting than the actual projects made are all the different projects that almost got made but never happened; much money was spent on Tim Burton’s 1990s take on Superman, with Nic Cage signed on to wear the tights and cape, but that plug got pulled after much craziness, much like the Kevin Smith commissioned Superman script and the J.J. Abrams’ script that got killed by a scathing review on the geek-centric website Ain’t It Cool News and scared off executives from committing to his weird version of this very well known story.

There’s even the Lois Lane television series that got a little bit of traction before going nowhere, and in introducing the roots of the successful television series “Smallville,” there is a lot of time spent on a never produced pilot for a proposed show called “Bruce Wayne,” which would have been a series about the character of Bruce Wayne in the years leading up to his becoming Batman. As the pilot script called for a cameo from a young Clark Kent, someone took that idea and turned it into “Smallville.” Cray.

That’s what makes “Superman vs. Hollywood” so great, the fact that this character is so incredibly well known, everyone knows what he does, everyone knows about Krypton and Smallville and Lois Lane and all that jazz, but with this book we get to see where these elements came into place, and which characters were introduced in different mediums and then dumped for whatever reasons. For example, the character of Jimmy Olsen, now very much associated with Superman, was not part of the original Superman landscape in comic book form but instead was created for the purposes of the Superman theatrically released 15-minute serials of the 1940s and 1950s, and by the time the character showed up on the hit television show starring George Reeves, the Olsen character for awhile there was pretty much just as popular as Superman himself.

Obviously my favorite section of the book deals specifically with the Christopher Reeve movies of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the recounting of all the starts and stops of the various film productions that could have happened over the years. It is incredibly fascinating how Warner Brothers had possession of the property in the 1970s but by that point felt everyone was burned out on Superman and didn’t know what to do with the character, so they went ahead and sold the rights to some random family in the business, and for the next couple of decades the Salkinds showed everyone that a great Superman movie was possible, and then promptly ran the franchise into the ground with successively worse sequels. And let us not forget the offshoot movie “Supergirl,” which itself was a bit of a failure and helped bury the Man of Steel for a little while, left to flounder in television and comic books for the 90s.

Being published in 2008, this book does get to cover “Superman Returns” and the lukewarm response it received from everyone upon release back in 2006, and obviously has no mention of the upcoming “Man of Steel,” as this current production coming out this summer wasn’t even a thing back in 2008. So it gets everything from 1938 to 2006, and that is a lot of Superman-related history to go through, but it is presented here in an infectiously readable way, just loaded with great details and fascinating reveals about the many people who have put their hands in this particular pot. It is a great look at both Superman the character and Superman the financial asset, as well as the entertainment business as a whole throughout the years. Thanks to the versatility of the character, the entire industry can be examined, and after reading this book it is very difficult to see anyone coming up with anything more definitive. Jake Rossen will just need to release updated versions of the book every ten years or so, adding new chapters, keeping everything updated, adding to the best historical record there is of this comic book property being turned into other pieces of entertainment.