Apparently, 25 year old Christopher Reeve Looked way too old to play teenaged Clerk Kent in Superman: The Movie so they cast Jeff East who was 20 years old but looked like he was about 30.
All of his dialog was dubbed by Reeve and according to Wiki, “He applied 3 to 4 hours of prosthetic makeup daily to facially resemble Reeve.” Wiki doesn’t mention it but he also wore a really stupid wig- I don’t have a cite for that, but if that wasn’t a wig then the man had really stupid hair.
How about instead of 3 to 4 hours of makeup to make East look like Reeve (which they didn’t achieve), they apply 3 to 4 hours of makeup to Reeve to make him look younger?
How about this: Reeve gained 40 pounds of muscle for the role. Film his teenage Smallville scenes before his workout/weight gain then have him beef up after the Smallville scenes wrapped.
An alternate actor to play the teen Clark could have been o.k. if they had an actor who looked like a teenager but, again, at age 20 Jeff East looked about 30.
TLDR version: Jeff East looks dumb in Superman: The Movie
For what it’s worth, 30+ years ago when I first watched it on HBO I was very confused by this, because I kept thinking, “Is that Chris Reeve or not?!” Back then finding cast info about a film wasn’t easy. I think I only finally found out it wasn’t when it premiered on network TV and TV Guide had one of those ‘Close Up’ boxes about it listing “Jeff East as Young Clark” or something. To compete with cable outlets like HBO which always got to show movies first & uncut the network (ABC I believe) compensated by including tons of mostly really stupid scenes that were originally (and deservedly) left on the cutting room floor.
Anyway, while I agree there was something a little ‘off’ with his performance, I don’t think it ruined the movie or anything. The idiot producers, the Salkinds, did that with II, III and IV (and if not for Richard Donner would done it to the first one too!)
Hey, don’t piss off a 4 year old. He’ll cling to it the rest of his life.
There’s an Avengers page going on right now with a couple people citing Superman: The Movie as the best superhero movie ever. So, I was inspired to take the DVD off the shelf and stick it in the player after not watching for a while.
It still stands up as a great film, if for no other reason, because when the little girl tells her mom that a man flew down from the sky to rescue her kitten from the tree . . .
. . . her mom clocks her in the face. Today’s brat-coddling parents would marvel at the “wondrous imagination” of their special little snowflake. Because this was the golden 1970s, the (justifiably presumed) lying little beast got exactly what she (presumably) deserved.
Wow, I didn’t realize people were saying that. It’s neat and a very cool attempt at taking it seriously, but it is not the best superhero movie of all time. It is, though, the best Superman movie yet.
Don’t blame the Salkinds for Superman IV. They felt the franchise had run its course after Superman III and sold the rights to Manahem Golan and Yoram Globus’ Cannon Productions. They had about 30 projects going at the same time, so their money was spread too thinly to provide Superman IV with a decent budget and director Sidney J. Furie had to cut corners everywhere he could. Christopher Reeve said if that had been a scene in Superman I, and Richard Donner had been the director, the scene of Superman walking towards the United Nations, for example, would have actually been shot on 42nd Street in New York and Donner would have choreographed hundreds of pedestrians and vehicles and cut to people gawking out of office windows at the sight of Superman walking down the street instead of being shot in some industrial park in England.
The story of the cut-rate U.N. scene on the wiki page is straight from Christopher Reeve’s book Still Me. I read that book years ago, and in addition to criticizing the low budget and lack of support from the studio Reeve takes blame himself for the lame story. He was allowed story input and the whole disarmament thing was his idea of “saying something”, making an “important” statement. In his book, with the benefit of hindsight, he admits it was preachy and heavy-handed.
Ahh! Golan Globus! Probably one of the few production companies that could make the Salkinds look like geniuses! They’d of had better luck selling it to Roger Corman!
This interview talks about the wig Jeff East had to wear. I’m watching Superman atm. I’ve always noticed Jeff’s nose seemed dark and very unattractive. Like there was something wrong. Well after reading this article, it turns out that they put on a prosthetic nose. Bad makeup for sure. Even as a kid when I watched this movie, that bugged me a lot.
I was just the other day talking about Jeff East’s performance as Clark, and saying how I thought for the longest time how amazing it was that they had found someone who could mimic Reeve’s voice so perfectly. Then, of course, years later I found out that Reeve had overdubbed all East’s lines.
You know, I’ve watched Superman many times, and I’ve never stopped to think about the actor playing teen Clark not being Christopher Reeves. Not that I actively thought it was him, I just never thought about it one way or the other. I guess the narrative successfully drew me in.
