Whether its helming the inter-family agita of The Sopranos, staging the oversexed antics of Sex & the City or crafting the moments of death-obsessed dysfunction of Six Feet Under, director Allen Coulter has been responsible for his fair share of iconic television. And for Hollywoodland, his first foray into feature films, Coulter tackles an entirely different type of TV icon: The Adventures of Superman actor George Reeves and the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death in 1959.
The director takes a stellar cast—including Ben Affleck as the frustrated kiddie TV star Reeves; Diane Lane as Reeves’ older, richer paramour; Bob Hoskins as her Hollywood-scandal fixer husband and Adrien Brody as a down-and-out detective slowly growing obsessed with finding the truth—through a dark journey that is, like his many television credits, brimming with sex, death and hard-as-nails characters you don’t want to cross, creating the glamorous, otherworldly faced of Old Hollywood and slowly peeling back the layers to reveal the darker underbelly that quietly exists under the surface.
“I really thought that the whole movie was about me and how I played George Reeves,” said Affleck. “And then I directed my own movie and I didn’t know whether to thank Allen or apologize to him, because I realize now that the whole movie is actually about Allen. This is, in my opinion, a fine movie. I think that it’s evocative about something that is resonant and that you can’t quite put your finger on. Allen did a fabulous job and I just now learned how exquisitely difficult that is.”
Hollywood.com: What was the hook for you then when you first got approached to helm the story of the mystery behind the death of George Reeves?
Allen Coulter: It’s a great Hollywood story. I love stories like this, mysteries. It’s also a great era in Hollywood with that transition from television to movies, and it’s so cool to be able to kind of lift the curtain, look behind it and see what was really going on at that time because the veneer in Hollywood at that time was smooth and elegant and glamorous, and to find out that things were much more complex than that is just irresistible. Also, it’s a noir film in Hollywood, which is a pretty compelling idea.
HW: Did you do much research into the actual facts of the case to make sure that you knew everything you could know?
AC: Yes. We did an enormous amount. The original writer, Paul Bernbaum, did an enormous amount of research and was really very familiar with the subject, and so that saved me a lot of time. And then I did my own reading as well because you want to know what you’re talking about. Now it’s not a biography. This is not a biopic. It’s a drama. So the Louis Simo character [Adrien Brody] is a creation and it’s through his eyes that we look at the story, but to the degree that we could be accurate with George’s side of the story we were, absolutely to the tiniest detail. There are of course moments of dramatic license because it is a drama, and as [Deadwood actor and Reeves historian] Jim Beaver in his authorized biography put it “To tell the story accurately you’d have to have 45 years.” So we take some license and sometimes we simply didn’t know the truth. I mean, it’s not possible to find it out, but one of the things that I noticed is that even in the biographies that we read there are discrepancies sometimes within the same book and certainly between the books. So I would say that were no more accurate or inaccurate than some of the biographies.
HW: Did that make it easier to decide on the style that you chose for the movie, because there is no clear answer given?
AC: Precisely. That’s exactly right, and I think that started with Paul. The idea that this story doesn’t have an absolute answer or conclusion—that, for me, is the best kind of mystery, because you want people to go home saying, “I think this happened. I think that happened.” I think that this case, because it’s unresolved, is not like the Lincoln assassination or anything else. Because it’s unsolved it presents itself as a natural for that kind of Rashomon-like approach, where several solutions are presented. And although the movie suggests that one is more likely, it does not really close the door on of the other possibilities.
HW: Did you talk to people like the surviving cast members who worked with Reeves, like Jack Larson [who played Jimmy Olsen”], Phyllis Coates and Noel Neill [who both portrayed Lois Lane] and get a sense of what they thought about George and the circumstances surrounding his death?
AC: Jack. Yes. Not with Noel. Not Phyllis, who has been a sort of reluctant participant in those things and doesn’t like to go over that territory. But Jack is very, very willing, and perhaps Noel is too. I don’t know, but Jack was available and here. So Ben and I met with him and I met with him as well, and I talked to him a lot on the phone. He has his memories of these people and he has his feelings about how they behaved and he remembers, certainly, little details that are useful. I can remember that we talked about Toni took him once to the house for dinner and how she came out to the car and threw her head back and said “I can’t believe that the love of my life has ended in tragedy.” You realize that she was very sort of melodramatic woman. He talked about the way that she spoke as being slightly mannered and Eastern Seaboard, an affected accent because she was a girl from New York, which was common in those days. All actresses and actors were kind of given elocution lessons to get rid of that Georgia accent or that Bronx accent or whatever.
HW: Yes, even Ben as George put on a different speaking voice.
AC: Good ear, because that was intentional. We had discussions about that, Ben and Diane and I about the risk of that. We didn’t want it to appear that the actor themselves was affected, but that the character had a way of speaking, and you’re right. Ben has this proper elocution, and I talked to him about that, and he went and had voice lessons. He had this great, kind of deeper and very precise voice that sounds a lot like George Reeves. He constantly listened to CDs of George’s voice. Diane developed this accent that you can hear in movies with Carole Lombard. There is slightly affected Eastern Seaboard accent that kind of drops when she blows up. She doesn’t go all the way to the Bronx, but it does slip a little. That was intentional because we kept trying to be true to the flavor of the period.
HW: What were your preconceived notions of Ben Affleck before he got involved with this project, and how did that change as you got to work with him?
AC: Well, to be frank, I didn’t have any. I didn’t know him, and the only work of his that I was really familiar with was, of course, Good Will Hunting and Shakespeare in Love. I was a kind of innocent, and obviously I knew that he had done a lot of work since then. Changing Lanes I knew of because it was produced by a friend of mine, and he had always spoken very highly of Ben. So I knew those projects and I thought that he was a very solid actor, but beyond that, honestly, I was kind of innocent, and so when I met him I didn’t know what to expect, but I liked him right away, and I liked his seriousness about the role. So I was mostly struck by how serious he was as an actor and so professional in our initial meeting and that only expanded exponentially as we started the project. I would count him among the very top echelon of the most prepared actors that I’ve ever worked with.
HW: Did you see or talk to him about any empathy or parallels that he felt with George Reeves? Obviously, his career is different than George’s, but he’s played a superhero before, and he’s hit a couple potholes in some of his projects before.
AC: I didn’t. As a director I kind of trust the actors to draw on those parts of themselves like with Diane and Adrien too that I don’t intrude on. So I’m kind of going off of what I’m feeling in the room and so whatever – I always feel that wherever the source is, or what the source is that they’re drawing on whether it’s their personal life or something that happened when they were four years old—I don’t mix into that. A friend of mine once said that all actors have a secret, and I think that that’s their secret and I actually don’t want to know. So with neither Ben nor with Adrien nor with Diane, nor with Bob [Hoskins] or anyone, I didn’t enquire about their process. That’s a kind of personal thing. What I was most concerned about was these endless and very detailed conversations about who we thought these people were and that’s what I did with Ben. So there was no discussion at all about his own life, only of George’s life. I left it to him to find the source for that solution.
HW: Diane Lane had a knockout performance in this. When you see her doing so well is it tempting to come up with more things for her to do in the film?
AC: Well, it’s not so much of a question of changing the script, but you just look for every opportunity to shoot her a certain way, and to be honest there is not a lot to tell Diane because she is so consummate that you kind of feel like you can give her the reigns and just let her go. We talked a great deal about the fact that she had played a number of victims and that this woman was no victim until a certain point, but even then she doesn’t behave like a victim. She is very tough and very tenacious and she knows what she wants and she damn well gets it. So we talked about that and about avoiding some of the qualities that she’s expressed in other roles, and she was very clear and determined about that. Otherwise, you’re just along for this great ride.
HW: The Louis Simo character carries a lot of the film. Did knowing that you had Oscar-winning Adrien Brody on tap to carry the movie make it easier to pull off the fictionalized elements?
AC: Adrien brings so much depth to whatever he does, so much complexity, and he made that character as subtle and as detailed and as fascinating to watch as George Reeves and that was the challenge. It was how we were going to match the fascination of the George Reeves character. Aside from the wonderful work that was done on the script by Paul and Howard Korder—not credited but nonetheless great work—we gave dimension and detail that Adrien really brought to life in that role.
HW: Was there a legal give-and-take that you had to do with DC Comics and Warner Bros., the owner’s of the Superman character? There was a title change from the original title, “Truth, Justice and the American Way,” a longtime Superman catchphrase, and I noticed in a couple of trailers that you don’t see the “S” on the suit though it appears in the movie.
AC: Yeah. I’m not privy to all of the legal ramifications and the legal ins and outs, but we were certainly restricted in the amount of time that we could have music from the show and the titles and so on. We had to re-shoot the entire title sequence of the TV show. Entirely, from start to finish. Locomotive wheels, people pointing, all of that we had to redo, but it just becomes one of the other challenges that becomes interesting.
HW: Was it fun looking at the old stuff and trying to capture that?
AC: Yeah, exactly, even the gunshot and the old cheesy world and the stars and stuff, all of that we had to redo in the background.
HW: What kind of impact do you think Superman Returns has had on this film’s profile?
AC: I think that it’s certainly in the air now, the notion that there – there was some sort of pseudo-documentaries or something about George Reeves, or about people who have played Superman in the past, and I think that it never hurts to have some kind of interest in that subject out and about. It was certainly not anything that we planned or knew about because we didn’t know when they were going to begin much less where they were, and we didn’t know when we were going to finish and they didn’t know when we were going to finish. So it’s just a fortuitous thing—we hope—that happened.
HW: You not only recreate certain sequences from the old TV show, you have to recreate an entire era in Hollywood history.
AC: We tried to take an approach that we hoped would lend some originality to the film. There have been some great films that place in Hollywood during that period, not the least of which are the ones that we all know about like Chinatown, which is the mother-ship, and then like L.A. Confidential which is another beautiful film. And so from the very beginning I wasn’t interested in getting on the playground with those guys because they’re just so good at what they did. So one of the things that we did in the art direction, and an emphasis for me, was to try and make 1959, the period in which the film actually takes place and the world in which Louis Simo lived, the modern world. It was the beginning of the world that we live in now in many ways. The old studio system was starting to fade away and television was becoming preeminent. The way that people dressed was a sort of formal and reserved—you could maybe use the word “dignified.” There were appearances and a propriety of a certain kind, speaking superficially and not about what went on behind closed doors, was fading away. And the world that we live in now, the world of casual dressing and with things from posture to all kinds of things was coming to the foreground, and we tried to make that point by letting Louis Simo be one of the first guys without a suit. There is a comment on that and in fact he ends up wearing one in the end, but the fact is that we visually gave a look to the world of 1959 that emphasized its modernity. At the same time when we went back in time to George Reeves world we tried to make that look like an earlier era. It wasn’t just the clothes. It was the soundtrack too. You always hear recorded music on Simo’s side of the equation and it’s always live music on George’s side. Simo’s side is much, much noisier. We hear the ubiquity of noise whether that’s a record player always playing or someone shouting in the next room or dogs barking, just a cacophony. The world of George Reeves was much quieter. There was only live music, with the exception of that time that Leonore [Robin Tunney] puts a record on. But she also belongs to the new world that he’s trying to reluctantly join, or that he’s being dragged into kicking and screaming, really. So we did all kinds of things in terms of the art direction to make a point that Louis Simo lives in the modern world, the first wave of it. He sits in his crappy little apartment with his feet up on the coffee table. George would never do that. George wears suits and dresses a certain way. All of you in that world would be in some form of a suit. So we did all kinds of things to address what you asked to make clear that the world was changing and we really tried to shoot it as if we shot it in 1959. We tried to be as perfect with the art direction as we could, and then we ignored it.
HW: What do think we should learn from Reeves’ story?
AC: If I had to pick a theme for this movie, it is about the beginning of the cult of celebrity. Both of these men believe, Adrien’s character, Ben’s character – both believe that their lives are less than they could be, and if only they could attain a certain kind of stardom which they define—George Reeves’ stardom in the adult world and Louis Simo’s belief that if he could just be the top detective in Hollywood—that somehow their lives will have more meaning and more value. They are defining themselves by other people’s vision of who they are, and perhaps even more abstract by what they think other people will think of them. One of the things that Adrien and I spoke about is that Louis Simo is actually playing a role which makes him absolutely unique in my opinion in detective fiction because he is a self-conscious detective. He is a man with a wife and a child in the Valley. He couldn’t be more middle class, but what is he doing? He’s playing the role of a detective. So Adrien had the challenge of acting like a man who is acting like a detective who isn’t Humphrey Bogart who’s not self-conscious walking around with his fat brimmed hat and sleeping with Mary Astor in the afternoon. He is a guy who is thinking about being a detective, and that’s why his ex-partner, Chuck, calls him on it. He says, “It’s just a job, pal. You punch in every day.” He is driven by this thing that we’ve been talking about, which is the need to be validated by a certain kind of stardom. That is what—unfortunately, in my opinion—this world has become. Everyone wants to be a star. My grandfather never thought about it. He was a carpenter. He didn’t give a damn about Clark Gable. Now, everyone wants to be that, and that’s the world that we live in. I think that’s what the movie also sort of touches on and why it resonates with more people than just the people who want to be movie stars.
**SPOILER ALERT: One burning question students of the real-life case may be dying to know after seeing the film**
HW: You portray, in one form or another, just about every possible theory to account for the death of George Reeves, but the one scenario that wasn’t included was that maybe his jilted lover Toni Mannix pulled the trigger on him herself. Was there not enough back-up evidence to support that?
AC: Yeah, that seems the least likely of all of them. Also, there is a limit to the number of theories that one can address in a movie of this length. Even though we don’t touch on that, there is another theory that she hired someone. So you could say that for one of these versions, she could’ve done the hiring for that. So it might’ve been [her husband] Eddie, but it might have been Toni. And I think that’s what people think, that she might have got her own person to take care of this business, but there is a limit to what you can do. So we took the most prominent and the most believable of all the theories, and I wouldn’t have wanted to promote one that I didn’t think had the remotest chance of being possible.
