Word: spenglerism
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Rescuing cats-a sign of his humanity, says Director Richard Donner-is the least of Superman's good deeds. Producers Ilya Salkind, 29, and Pierre Spengler, 30, are determined to outdo the special effects of Star Wars-and reap its profits. "At one time it was exciting to see Superman hold up the end of a truck," says Tom Mankiewicz, the last of five scriptwriters brought in to turn comic strip into film strip. "Now you see Lindsay Wagner do things like that every week on TV for free. So we had a problem, and Superman's feats...
...money is going for such stunts. As insurance for the picture-as well as a lure for investors-Salkind and Spengler have hired some of the biggest stars in Hollywood. It sometimes seems as if the only ones who are not getting any of the producers' largesse are Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who created the man of steel...
Mankiewicz ought to embroider that message on a sampler and nail it on the wall, because there is little love between Donner and Producer Spengler. Already Richard Lester, who directed both Musketeers, has been brought in as "consultant," a move that can only give pause to Donner, whose one major credit is The Omen. Donner further frets that Superman's superhype may backfire. "Look what happened to King Kong and The Great Gatsby," he moans. "I keep telling the producers to just let the picture open with only normal advertising. It'll sell itself...
...lively, mordant intelligence is at its best improvising on political ideas - quarreling with Spengler, hallucinating a Socratic dialogue with an Exxon executive. In the end, the author pays a visit of homage to the aging Arnold Toynbee - and plays his own complicated sense of disintegration and renewal against Toynbee's. Toynbee seems to listen with courtly regard as Mee excitedly spins out his vision of a new Renaissance based upon "a truly profound exploration led by neurophysicists and psychologists, structural linguists and anthropologists, into the structure of the mind." Mee demands to know what Toynbee thinks. The great historian...
...seems to me that Spengler's distinction between primitive and historical existence is the real basis of Yeats's distinction between "primary" cultures and the "antithetical" ones which rise out of them, but the spirits who supplied Yeats with his vision did not know much history...