Production nightmare

Producers Ilya and Alexander Salkind made the ambitious decision to film Superman and its sequel Superman II at the same time, putting enormous pressure on the cast and crew.

With seven different shooting units operating simultaneously, director Richard Donner had to oversee a production of unprecedented scale.

To keep up, Donner zipped between stages on a golf cart, coordinating with each unit and reviewing footage in real time.

He recounted: “I had a bunch of these handheld radios in my golf cart and I would get a call from production and they would say ‘Get over to stage blah blah. They’re doing the tests. We’re ready to shoot.’

“I’d go over there and go back and shoot the principals, and then get a new setup that would take hours, because it was so vast.”

Eventually, the production team decided to focus on finishing the first film, leaving the sequel only 75 per cent complete.

Donner was later dismissed from the project, and director Richard Lester stepped in to finish Superman II, re-shooting a significant portion of the film before its release in 1980.