Last time I completed my analyses of the two Mario Puzo scripts from 1975, and I noticed a comment from David Michael Petrou in his book The Making of Superman: The Movie that the Salkinds then turned to David and Leslie Newman and Robert Benton to streamline the second Puzo script and turn it into two scripts for Superman and Superman II.

But before the Newman-Benton script, another writer took a shot at writing the script. His name is Norman Enfield.

Very little is known about his writing career, but what is known is that he contributed to five of the Salkinds’ films during the 1970’s. His first film was the 1971 movie Kill! On that film, written and directed by Romain Gary, Enfield served as a dialogue coach on the film’s story about Interpol’s investigation into the freelance killings of drug and porn dealers.

Enfield would then serve as a publicity assistant on the Salkinds’ 1973 adaptation of The Three Musketeers (also known as The Queen’s Diamonds) and its ready-made 1974 sequel The Four Musketeers (also known as Milady’s Revenge).

Then, Enfield would contribute to the story for The Twist (also known as Folies Bourgeoises), a 1976 French comedy about bored aristocratic Parisian couples who who begin affairs with each other and only find trouble as a result. The film would feature Bruce Dern, Ann-Margret (one of the leading candidates for the role of Miss Teschmacher in the Superman films), and Maria Schell (who would go on to play Vond-Ah in the Krypton council scene in Superman), among others.

Then came Superman.

After Puzo departed the project in October 1975, the Salkinds brought in Enfield to begin rewrites on the script. Enfield worked quickly, adapting the first half of the Puzo script into a 115-page treatment and turning it in on December 19, 1975.

One concept that would later change would be steering Clark Kent away from being a TV reporter and returning him to his more familiar career as a newspaper reporter. In an interview conducted by Brian McKernan on February 26, 1988, to commemorate Superman’s 50th birthday, longtime DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz made this observation:

“What happened is that they decided to do sort of a ‘man on the street’ interview and they went around asking people, ‘Who is Clark Kent?’

“And everyone said, ‘He’s a reporter for the Daily Planet.’

“And so they said, ‘I think we made a mistake,’ and they rewrote the script, taking him out of the television, and putting him back as a reporter.” Given the time frame of Schwartz’s comments in the context of rewriting the Puzo script, this didn’t happen until later. Thanks to a fellow reader named Dan Kampling, we now have some interesting new information into the script. According to page 55 of the Enfield script, we find that Lois Lane is still a television news reporter and that the news van is still in play in the story. Here is the scene in question, uncut and unedited.

After that, Enfield would depart the project, and the Newmans and Benton would come in in early 1976 to begin their rewrites. And it is during the Newman-Benton script that we would see Clark Kent and Lois Lane return to being newspaper reporters.

Little is known about Enfield’s whereabouts or career after his departure from the project in 1975. Three years later, on December 10, 1978, Enfield was one of the cast and crew members who attended the Special Olympics premiere screening of Superman: The Movie at the Eisenhower Theater of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., along with Richard Donner, Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Gene Hackman, Phyllis Thaxter, and Marc McClure, among many other notable celebrities, athletes, and politicians. At one point someone managed to capture a picture of Enfield with Richard Donner that night. I clearly remember seeing the picture online somewhere, but at this time I cannot remember exactly where it was.

After the December 1978 Special Olympics premiere, Norman Enfield disappeared completely off the grid. Superman would be his last featured film contribution.

Some years ago a copy of Enfield’s script was up for auction on an auction website. I want to say that it was PropStore or Hake’s, but I cannot specifically remember which. I do recall that it was around 115 pages in length. What specific material the script contains is largely unknown at this point, but it was apparently enough to warrant the title card “Additional script material by Norman Enfield” at the end of the film. As to which portions of the script survived into the later rewrites, again nobody knows. It has been reported that some of the Enfield material that was used in the later scripts were scenes set on Krypton. Again, it is unclear.

Every attempt is being made to secure a copy of the script for archiving and investigation, and once that happens, I will break down the script and present my findings to you. We don’t know when that will be, or when it will happen, but when it does, I will let you know.