As we pick up on page 23 of the second Mario Puzo script, we find that the story has not changed all that much where the majority of the Smallville sequences are concerned. However, Puzo had added a few things that seem… interesting.

When the infant Kal-El’s starship journeys to Earth, Puzo makes the following notation: “The screen is filled with sepia color. This special color will be used until we see Clark Kent as Superman in (the) Fortress of Solitude.” This means that from page 23 until page 43, had the script been filmed as is, and given the approximate ratio that a script page is roughly equivalent to a minute of screen time, we would have seen the next twenty minutes of Superman presented in sepia tone.

Look at the following images from Superman: The Movie, which I converted from color to sepia. Do you think this portion of the film would have worked in sepia tone for quite a length of time?

It reminds me of the “real world” portions of The Wizard of Oz, with all of the Kansas scenes presented in sepia tone and the fantasy sequences with Dorothy and her companions in the land of Oz presented in glorious Technicolor.

After being used to watching Superman for the past 45 years in full Technicolor, to watch this portion of the film in sepia in the middle of the film would seem almost jarring to me. It may work with all of the Kansas scenes in Oz, but not with a modern, colorful adventure the nature of Superman. And yet this is what Mario Puzo had noted here.

Once the Kents promise to each other to keep their discovery of the baby a secret, Puzo added a montage of three new scenes to show the young Clark Kent growing up. These three new moments are included on page 27 of the script and are presented as follows:

If that first sequence sounds a little familiar to you, it’s because it is very similar to what we would see in the final film, with a few changes made to the sequence of a teenage Clark Kent racing alongside the Kansas Star much to the surprise of a little girl inside the train who spots him.

The other two scenes, of young Clark saving the dog from being attacked, and Clark saving Jonathan Kent from a near fatal tractor accident, would not survive beyond this draft of the script.

The sequence then continues unchanged until page 34, when Puzo adds a game changer to the story. Martha Kent tells Clark that his father has to go to the hospital for a needed operation. The scene then changes to the hospital, where Jonathan Kent’s condition is extremely critical to the point of death, and Clark quietly says, “I’m the most powerful man in the world, and there is nothing I can do.” This key line would be later rewritten and used in the final film in one of the most emotional and heartbreaking moments of the entire film:

From there the remainder of the Smallville scenes have been rewritten to focus solely on Clark and his mother, continuing through page 37 as he prepares to leave her, the Kent farm, and Smallville behind so he can begin his journey into adulthood and becoming Superman.

What do you think of the entire sepia aspect as Puzo intended in this draft of the script? Let me know your thoughts!

(Some of the screenshots in this blog are used courtesy of CapedWonder.com.)