Twenty years ago, Allan Coulter made viewers believe that Ben Affleck could fly… kind of. On Sept. 8, 2006, the director of such storied TV programs as The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire, released his second feature film, Hollywoodland. Written by Paul Bernbaum, the movie offers a fictionalized true crime examination of the life and death of George Reeves, who played a flesh-and-blood version of DC Comics‘s Man of Steel on the vintage (and very low-tech) 1950s series, Adventures of Superman.
Made a decade before Affleck donned the Batsuit for Zack Snyder’s Superman v. Batman: Dawn of Justice, Hollywoodland garnered solid reviews and a Golden Globe nomination for the star’s performance as both Reeves and Superman. Released just three months after Warner Bros. unveiled their revamped take on Superman — Bryan Singer’s divisive Superman Returns, starring Brandon Routh — Hollywoodland shows a different side to the character, one that illustrates the struggles of performers to embrace, and eventually dissociate, from a larger-than-life character like the Last Son of Krypton.
In a new interview with Gold Derby to mark the film’s 20th anniversary, Coulter says that he was less aware of the Superman mythos and more intrigued by the noir elements of the story. “The Superman thing came along, kind of, I think I missed it a little bit,” he says now.
In fact, many associated with the project had a vague awareness of Reeves playing Superman, but little else about his fate. “I grew up on Superman, but didn’t know anything about his death until I read Hollywood Kryptonite [by Nancy Schoenberger and Sam Kashner],” says production designer Leslie McDonald. “He was a perfect Superman to me, and a great Clark Kent.”
Coulter says that Affleck was eager to play Reeves. “He was, I think, anxious to prove that he was an actor, not just a movie star, not just a pop hero,” the director says, acknowledging Affleck’s career struggles at the time, including a highly public break-up with actress Jennifer Lopez. “We caught Ben at an interesting moment. He was coming off of the J. Lo fiasco… and I was a little gun shy at that moment because he just had that baggage.”
“But then I ended up coming out to California and met with him over lunch, and I was really impressed,” Coulter continues. “He was clearly very intelligent, and very serious, and sincere. We had a couple of meetings, and I just took a shine to him and thought this guy has got something.”
That shine manifests most poignantly in the sequences where Affleck is playing Reeves on the Adventures of Superman set. In one moment, Affleck’s Reeves-as-Superman looks at the camera and winks to the audience. According Jim Beaver — an actor and Reeves’s biographer — that’s what made the late performer connect so strongly with his audience.
“There’s something about [Reeves] that leaps through the camera to the audience that I have not seen anywhere else in his career, and I haven’t really seen it in anybody else playing the role,” Beaver says. “We’re talking about a certain kind of communication of persona. Christopher Reeve certainly had it, in a different way. It doesn’t appear to have been scripted, but once in a blue moon George Reeves would turn to the camera and wink.
“Of all the people who played Superman as far as I know, he alone told the audience, ‘You and I are in on a secret,'” Beaver adds.
Affleck also went on a devoted regime of trying to get as close to Reeves’s persona — both as Superman and as a person — as he could. “He was very devoted to the role,” Coulter recalls. “I remember he always had a cassette player in those days, and he was listening to Reeves’s voice constantly on the set so he could get the rhythms and timbre, that kind of odd inflection. All that was very much inspired by his listening to George Reeves.”
Coulter does find it ironic that Affleck would play both a version of Superman here and later go on to play Batman for Snyder’s grimdark take on Batman for Warner Bros. The director says that the studio, which owns DC Comics, wasn’t a direct conflict for Hollywoodland, but the creative team certainly knew they had to tread lightly with the Superman iconography.
“Warners was very protective,” he says. “It wasn’t like we were hearing from them, but when it came to actually using film they had a line in the sand we just couldn’t go over.” This meant that everything involving the Superman character had to get special clearance from Warners.
In fact, even the film’s original title, “Truth, Justice and the American Way” had to be changed, as Warner Bros. felt particularly defensive about the fact that Hollywoodland focused on Reeves’s death. Additionally, the promotional material couldn’t feature Affleck’s Reeves wearing the “S” on his costume.
Coulter says that he had hoped to license clips from the original Adventures of Superman television series as well as recreate the original show’s opening sequence, but the WB refused both requests. “The thing that you see on TV we created based on the real thing,” he says. “We did it as close to [the original] as we could. I can’t remember if they said you can’t reproduce that. We may have made some changes, but it’s essentially the same.”
Reeves’s death in 1959 at the age of 45 from what is presumed to be suicide traumatized a generation of children who grew up watching his Superman series. “For children, it was kind of their version of JFK,” Coulter says. “Kids were really devastated. It didn’t compute because how can Superman die from a bullet?”
That’s also the thought process that’s subsequently led to all manner of theories for Reeves’s death, with some claiming it was murder. The movie ends up positing three possible demises for the actor, including the latter explanation. Over the years, theories have also spread about a “Superman curse” with people drawing connections between George Reeves’s untimely end and the Christopher Reeve’s paralysis decades later.
Beaver, for one, considers that myth ridiculous. “I’ve seen articles about the ‘Superman curse’ and they say Kirk Alyn, who first played Superman on the screen died,” he says. “Well, he was 88! How is that part of a curse?
“A certain number of people want there to be a curse,” Beaver continues. “They want there to be a murder; they want there to be nefarious doings;t hey want there to be something supernatural. They want this stuff, and they’re not going to be satisfied if you say no.”
Audiences proved to be a little less enamored of Hollywoodland than critics, as the film finished under the $15 million marek at the U.S. box office. Though contemporaneous press reports claimed that its commercial prospects were harmed by underwhelming release of Superman Returns, Coulter doesn’t believe that. If anything, he thinks the release of other noirs like Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential and Brian De Palma’s Black Dahlia made audiences think the movie was something different.
“The issue was it wasn’t a traditional noir murder mystery,” he says. “It’s easy to second guess a publicity decision, but I just felt like it was touted as a murder mystery and I think that didn’t help it because people went expecting L.A. Confidential and they didn’t get it.”
What they ended up with instead was a thought-provoking Hollywood story about the fleeting success of fame. “It’s not like if Reeves hadn’t gotten Superman than he would have been Spencer Tracy,” Beaver notes. “The epigram at the beginning of my book is the Oscar Wilde quote: ‘There are two tragedies in life. One is not getting one wants and the other is getting it.’ It’s be careful what you ask for; he certainly looked for stardom, but he got it and it didn’t pay much, and it kept him from doing anything else that he enjoyed doing.”
