Picking up with page 67 of the script, we find Perry White chewing out Clark, Lois, Jimmy, and Steve about making up the entire story about Superman’s emergence in Metropolis. Two things leap out about this sequence. First, it is Perry who comes up with the name Superman in the story. This brings to mind how the concept of discovering who Superman is would be reshaped for the final film. This essence of Perry is something that is taken all the way through into the final film.

(Interesting side note here: in Superman: The Movie, it’s not Lois Lane who gives him the iconic name at the end of the flying sequence. Rather, if you watch the scene where he deposits the getaway boat and the four tied-up robbers in front of the police precinct, listen very carefully to the scene. As he flies away, once Sgt. Dolan says, “Mooney…”, you can just make out one of the bystanders calling out, “Superman!” While it’s dialed out in the sound mix of the 1982 extended TV cut, it’s there in the original 1978 sound mix and the 2001 sound remix as well.)

Second, if you compare both scripts, you’ll see that all of Perry’s lines were originally written for Morgan Edge in the first draft, and they’re now given to Perry in the second draft. This continues through later moments in the script up to page 76 of the second draft, after the latest newscast on WGBS, as Morgan Edge’s lines have been given over to Perry. It’s as as if Puzo had realized that Edge was superfluous to the overall story and began phasing him out of the story altogether, reducing his involvement as a result and increasing Perry White’s importance to the overall story.

At this point, however, Steve Lombard still appears as a second fiddle character, continually hitting on Lois and trying to play Clark Kent for a fool. Nothing through page 81 has changed from the first draft script where Steve’s character is concerned.

Later, as the reporters are delivering their newscast, Steve Lombard mentions the upcoming Super Bowl between the New Orleans Saints and his former team, the Tucson Orphans. This is particularly interesting because it would be decades before the Saints would not only go to the Super Bowl in 2010, but also win Super Bowl XLIV.

Later, during the reporters’ encounter with the drug dealers, Superman has a most unusual encounter with a drunken man who wanders out of a nearby phone booth and into the line of fire between the Man of Steel and the drug dealers. The drunk eventually comes face to face with Superman and says, “I seen you someplace before. You were in my phone booth.”

The rest of the scene, along with all of the super feats that follow over the course of the next six months, are exactly as what Puzo had previously written. There are no changes at all to the script. Even Lex Luthor’s dream about the Phantom Zone villains, as well as his discussion about how to defeat Superman through the use of kryptonite, are exactly the same. Puzo has not changed a word.

So now we are a third of the way through the second draft, and very little has changed from the first draft to the second with the exception of a few added bits and pieces and a nearly overall character deletion. As we head into the second third of the script, I wonder if there are any substantial changes to come.

As I bring this blog to a close, I want to thank everyone who made suggestions about who to cast as Morgan Edge. There were some really great mentions, including Robert Wagner, William Devane, and James Woods. Any of them would have been perfect had the role been cast.

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