"I had never read a comic book in my life when I was approached to do the new Superman for ABC." "I think they came to me because they wanted a different take on it." "And I said, " All right." "Here's the thing." "I don't wanna do a new Superman series but I wouldn't mind writing a romantic comedy called Lois  Clark."" "There was a lot of hullabaloo about me calling it Lois  Clark." "But I think it's sort of a joke on the situation." "I wanted her to be the boss of Superman because I thought that was very funny." "I live by three rules." "I never get involved with my stories I never let anyone else get there first, I never sleep with anyone I work with." "Because the fact of the matter is, he's the big guy, he's got a cape, okay?" "So the joke is on everybody." "Deborah Joy really wrote a pilot that was about two characters." "And it was very, to me secondary that they were Superman and Lois Lane." "It was a much sexier, glossier, romantic action comedy." "It just had all of the elements." "Some call it a romance series with action some an action series with romance." "At different times, it'd change." "I wanted to do things that hadn't been done before." "But on the other hand, oh, my Lord, there were so many fans that wanted me to be true to it." "I wanted to make it more of a duel between good and evil and that love wins out." "Our comic book writers, Siegel and Schuster tapped into the collective unconscious that had given us the Greek gods and now are giving us a god from Krypton." "Here is this strange visitor from another planet who is blessed with more gifts, more physical ability and these gifts that no human being could have." "He could..." "If he was evil, he'd have run the world in an evil way." "Superman has always been about what you do with what you have." "And if you try to do good, you're Superman." "And if you do bad, you're Lex Luthor." "Superman has morals." "He has ethics." "He's unrelentingly good." "Because of that I will win." "He's constantly wrestling with who he is." "He never actually grew up on Krypton." "He was raised by human parents, and yet he knew that he had a greater duty to put on the suit and to save humankind." "To me, it just seemed so clear that it was about Clark." "And Clark was the character, and then he created this other person Superman, so he could go and fight for good truth, justice and the American way." "We were looking for a fresh face and someone who could do this." "We saw everybody." "We didn't discriminate." "Dean Cain was the first audition." "For the very first role, the first guy that walked in the door." "The first time I heard anything about Lois  Clark it was a script given to me." "And I went in, and I was the first person to come in and read." "He just had a magical sparkle about him." " He had a charm." " Yeah." "He was good-looking without being arrogant." "Originally everyone thought he was a little too young." "When he walked in the door, I turned to my casting person and said:" ""Excuse me, this is Superman, not Superboy."" "Because Dean Cain looked about 17 years old." "And so we continued to cast other people." "Finally, after I had seen hundreds of applicants for the part of Superman I was sitting on the floor of the casting office and saw Dean Cain's face again, and about 25 other guys." "I walked downstairs the day we were having callbacks." "There was all these girls in the hallway and I said to someone, "Why are all these girls here?"" "And they said, "They heard Dean Cain was here."" "Who's the new tight end?" "Dean Cain, at that point, had done one guest appearance on 90210 and yet he already had a fan base." "And then he walked back in, and I thought, "God, this is the guy."" "When I first got cast, my best friend looked at me and he goes, "You know, for the rest of your life you're gonna be known as Superman."" "It seemed insane to me, yet here we are, and I walk down the street today and people will say, "Hey, Superman."" "Dean Cain, especially, just overnight became this huge celebrity." "I remember when I first hired him I told him that his life was about to change in a huge way." "And I remember Dean saying to me, "Well, then maybe I'll get a girlfriend."" "And I said to him, " Sweetie, you're gonna have your pick of girlfriends."" "In the '50s, she was like the women in old Westerns that are sitting there going:" ""Oh, God, why can't I be saved?" I didn't want to do that." "I wanted her to be an astute businesswoman." "I wanted her to be smart." "I wanted to make her just a great modern woman." "She doesn't go up to him and say, " Excuse me, Mr. Kent?" "Would you mind coming with me while the building is burning down next door?"" "She goes, "No." "You." "Let's hit it!"" "She was a feisty, takes-no-B.S. character and I think that's always appealing to guys." "I also wanted her to have a lousy social life so I was sort of making a commentary that, " Well, she's worked herself up to the top, and now what does she have?" "Now she's alone in her little apartment dreaming of a man in a cape."" "There hadn't been a Lois Lane like Teri Hatcher." "I mean, she had everything going for her." "She was sexy and she was smart and she was really the modern woman." "There was lots of beautiful young women in Hollywood." "There always will be." "So more choices." "Many more choices for Lois Lane." "They made me come back to read through a bunch of Lois Lanes." "And they were gonna do one scene where Lois barges in the door kisses me on the mouth and tries to sleep with me." "Well, I had to do that scene with 12 different women." "Very interesting." "And the last of the 12 to go in was Teri Hatcher." "It was really interesting." "All the different girls would kiss me in a different way." "And Teri barged open the door, kissed me." "She was..." "I'll give it to her..." "Clearly, she was definitely the best kisser of the bunch." "I knew Teri Hatcher a little bit from features, but didn't know her that well." "She came in, she had long straggly hair, and I said, " You know what, Teri?" "Lois Lane would never have that hair." "She's a reporter, she gets up in the morning she runs a comb through her hair, she races out on the street and she doesn't worry the way her hair looks."" "When I got the role of Lois, my hair was this long and I put it all in a ponytail and just went:" "Next day, comes back with the bob." "Got it cut just like Lois Lane walked inside..." "Thank you, Teri." "Thank you." "You are Lois Lane now." "And I had that ponytail in my glove compartment of my car for a long time." "Don't fall for me, farm boy." "I don't have time for it." "You felt the attraction from square one." "You just felt like that romance was very special." "And that's what drove the series, without a doubt." "You know, he gets introduced to her in a threatening way." "It's like, " Here's your guy that's gonna work with you."" "And I think to sort of a control-freak, perfectionist personality like Lois that very first thing is like, "I don't want to work with him."" "The idea that Teri Hatcher, the Lois Lane character would be so smart and ambitious and strong that she would just have disdain for this second-rate reporter was funny because you're just waiting, waiting for her head to turn." "Part of Lois' secret identity is that she's not presenting her true self either." "She's this, " I've got it all handled, I can do everything, I'm in control."" "Where inside she's really just a lonely, needy, "I need to be loved" person." "She is someone a little bit different on the inside than she portrays on the outside." "Which is all of the same things that Clark is." "And maybe he understands her having to put on her rough exterior to protect that inside softness." "My favorites are that the boy and girl don't know they love each other yet." "We, the audience, know because that's what the deal is." "You know it's gonna happen." "I mean, he's great-looking, she's great-looking, they're both smart they both have admiration for each..." "Come on, come on, get to the party." "It's a complicated dance, the push and pull, and are they together?" "And you want to get them together." "And they should." "It's a natural, organic thing." "I was trying to have him actually never catch her." "Get very, very close to what they think will be the perfect moment in their lives, and then have it not happen for one reason or another." "And I think that was gonna be the key to the success of the series." "Everybody was writing in and saying, "Can Lois and Clark finally unite?"" "And we backed off and we held off from doing that because the sexual tension was so great between them." "You always wanted to see more and we always wanted to give just a little bit less because we knew there was so far they could go." "I think about my favorite movies are like Tootsie and An American President and that sort of "it's never gonna work out between the guy and the girl" story." "Then you root for them." "We all wanna have that magical fantasy relationship where someone loves us and we don't think it's gonna work out, and it does." "Everybody wants to find their mate, that person that makes life more fun, and who complements them." "I don't know specifically what it is about those characters but I wanted them together too." "I must confess that I love the fact that everyone in the city has to look up in order to see me." "What makes Lex Luthor so unique?" "What makes him so great?" "And what would a modern interpretation of this be?" "Clark, can't you give up this idea that Lex Luthor is the root of all evil in Metropolis?" "Why should I give it up, Lois?" "It's true." "What makes Luthor a worthy opponent to Superman is that Luthor is a man who has no conscience and who is evil personified and doesn't care who has to die or what has to happen to the world in order for him to win." "The most chilling people that I had met were people who did not appear to be evil." "But, in fact, they cloak their villainy cleverly." "Most of your Lex Luthors in the past were not romantic leads." "John is very handsome, romantic, erudite..." "So he brought something to the villainous part of Lex Luthor that hadn't been seen before." "I always felt like he just brought a lot to the party." "You know what I mean?" "There was really something going on behind there and has that very unique ability to be sexy and evil at the same time." "There's this great-looking guy with this tousle of dark hair playing Lex Luthor." "And I knew that Lex Luthor was a bald guy but there's John Shea, you know, updated for the 21 st century." "I never envisioned John Shea in a bald cap, or going up to him one day and saying, " Hey, John, guess what." "We're gonna shave you today."" "A guy who's worth countless billion dollars would have figured out how to cure his baldness." "If you couldn't figure that out how are you gonna beat Superman?" "That's, like, a minor problem." "I had written this scene where Lex Luthor liked to test himself so he would have his manservant release a poisonous snake in his room so that he could fight with it." "It was a window into his personality, that like, " I can best a cobra." "I can stare into a cobra's eyes and the cobra is gonna back off."" "I thought that was interesting." "He's driven by unconscious appetites." "And the minute those appetites are satisfied, then he needs more." "And now he's bored out of his mind until this guy in tights flies in with a cape and lands on his balcony." "And he takes one look at this guy and he's thrilled." "He feels it inside." "He knows he's got something, a purpose something to challenge himself, an adversary." ""At last," he says." ""Let the games begin."" "Lex Luthor's persona of this incredibly rich, handsome billionaire that people didn't know he was an evil man, was great because he could be someone that potentially could sweep Lois off her feet." " You haven't told me where we're going." " No." " Not even a hint?" " No, no." "All right, one." "Clothing is optional." "His subconscious armor is penetrated by her beauty." "Not just her physical beauty, there's something else about her." "And she touches something in his human side." "As a woman, I think it's a fairly honest feeling to think that you're pulled by the fantasy of someone taking care of you and the suaveness of that and the charisma of that and the glamour of that." "So it was a terrific place for Lois to go back and forth from genuinely, you know, not knowing that Lex was really a deeply bad guy." "It's the perfect pieces of a romantic puzzle." "What do you think?" "That's my boy." "I felt it was important for Clark Kent/Superman to have parents, to need guidance." "I wanted us to see the human side of him, where he came from." "And I wanted him to have parents that he could call home to." "They were very grounded and not in any way cartoonish." "And they were portrayed as these very understanding, loving parents who came from Smallville and had this simple life, always with sage advice but sort of homespun." "We tried to have children and weren't able to do it." "And out of the sky comes this wonderful creature and he was a blessing to us, and so we raised him in the American ideals and we wanted him to be perfect." "And he was." "I was hipping the whole thing up." "I wanted it to be more modern." "I wanted to have a modern take on it." "Your mother is now an artiste." "I call it Too Much, Too Soon, Tortured Heart, Waning Moon." "When we were cast on this I was in this whole turmoil about how to dress when I went in because she's not written as the traditional mother who just sits in there and bakes cookies or anything." "All of the women who came, they were, like, in little farm dresses and their little-old-lady stuff." "And K Callan, I remember, came in a pink jogging suit." "And walked in, and I thought, "That's her."" "K is a forceful, sharp, productive person." "And that's in her characterization." "The only way you're ever going to be truly safe is if you and Lois find this terrible person before he makes you do anything worse." "And Eddie, conversely, to get the opposites going is very mild and very quiet, and very easily fatherly." "There's something about the city the pace, everyone going somewhere." "Impatient." "Like you." "Well..." "I guess you finally found your niche." "They were very experienced actors, you could just feel it in their voices." "But they exuded a kind of humanity that the characters needed to come alive." "And that was their great contribution to Lois  Clark." "Where's the juicy stuff?" "Well, hello." "I love it when they play hard to get." "Sizzling hot." "Tracy Scoggins as Cat Grant." "She has the greatest body in Hollywood." "And she also has that kind of catlike, girlish way about her." "You see a cat, and I think they're some of the only mammals that will actually kill when they're not hungry." "And that's how she was." "A cat will torture a lizard and bite the tail off and then laugh." "And I think that's how she was." "She would be the perfect person for Lois Lane to look at and roll her eyes and think, " Oh, my God, I can't stand this woman because of the way she dresses and because she looks kind of cheap and bawdy, and she makes all these comments."" "I wanted to set up a sort of catfight, if you will between Cat Grant and Lois Lane." "Lois, Clark is busy right now." "Why don't you give him a few minutes to freshen up first." "There was a great contrast between Cat Grant and Lois Lane." "Cat was all sexuality, and Lois Lane heavy-duty, straight career woman, she sort of put her sexuality on hold." "And my character, Cat Grant, was meant to be a wrench in the works to always be trying to get him and cause trouble for Lois Lane." "It was great with the push and pull between those characters." "Even regarding Clark how Lois would blow him off and then Cat would be interested." "It was fun to have that back-and-forth, yet there's that twinge of jealousy." "And that's the sort of magic little pieces that Deborah Joy Le Vine would weave in there that just made it so much fun." "It was a fun, fun supporting role." "They sort of turned the cat loose and let me play." "And that's the way she did everything." "She just went 100 percent at it." "And, you know, she might be a little crazy." "Please." "Call me Jimmy." "Listen, let's cut to the chase." "What do you say, chief?" "Michael Landes, I thought, was so great as Jimmy Olsen because he was so eager to please everybody." "He was like the new kid on the block." "A certain naiveté, a certain ingenuousness." "Part of the natural enthusiasm that he was feeling from being an actor with this part was perfect because that's the way Jimmy Olsen would feel working with Lois and Clark and Perry White at the Daily Planet." "It's funny, when I cast Michael Landes in the role, who I absolutely loved I wanted to make him a little bit more fun and a lot less afraid and a lot less skittish and make him his own man." "Professional but naughty." "I like it." "The relationship between Perry White and Jimmy Olsen it was sort of a father figure to a young man." "And it was really like Perry White would just beat on him until finally Jimmy Olsen had to step up and be a man." "And it was great." "And it really worked." "Those guys had a nice little repartee back and forth." "I love the smell of fear in the newsroom." "Hard facts." "That's the name of this game." "You got it?" "This is the way I like to remember the King." "Lane Smith, he had this incredible ability to say:" "And you're listening." "No matter what it is." "If a sentence said, "Jimmy, come here."" ""Jimmy..." "When it comes to women if you wanna be the King you'd better listen to the colonel." "He was very real, with his Southern background whatever that is that we hear in his sound." "And that immediately begins to soften him slightly, make him accessible." "So with that sound and that demeanor, he can be tough he can be gritty, gutty, difficult, haughty boss." "He can do all of that and it still is not grating." "He could also be bumbling and comic." "And he added this whole dimension to the whole thing that nobody had really done before him." "I remember Lane brought a charm to the whole thing an antic disposition that made it completely unique." "Because Lane Smith was from the South I didn't want him saying "great Caesar's ghost."" "So I came up with " great shades of Elvis" and I made him an Elvis fan." "In fact, in one episode, he dresses up as Elvis and he actually sings an Elvis song." ""Great shades of Elvis."" "And he's from Memphis, I think." "He has got that Southern charm that he brought to bear on the part that nobody else could have done like that." "The Superman suit." "The suit was a really interesting thing." "We had tried to change it a little bit, but that didn't happen." "So then it became very simple:" "Lycra, Spandex and a cape." "They must have made a hundred costumes for him." "We went through a million different drawings and designs." "And even while the show was in progress we kept on saying, "Oh, that doesn't look great."" "And we kept on changing and changing and changing." "They might have gotten it right by year four." "I'm not so sure about the cape, though." "Oh, really?" "I love it." "It'll be great when you're flying." "The cape was the biggest pain in the rump and it had to change a couple of times because we couldn't find the right flow and the right fabric." "At first we had this poofy cape, and then it became a less poofy cape." "Then, would we build up his shoulders?" "Does he need shoulder building-up?" "Does the cape flow?" "I mean, it was nearly impossible." "Some of the things have legs, and some of them have less legs." "The cape has less legs, let's face it." "It was constantly being changed for various reasons." "And it was always getting in the way." "I mean, capes are, I guess, now that we see it very difficult to have on your back." "I got more air shot at me to try to make the cape flow." "And if you saw this being filmed, which some people did they were horrified, because we had this huge air-mover thing that looked like a bazooka." "And it would just blow everything except for my glued-down hair." "But it would blow that cape back, and the cape would flip over and we'd have a weird-looking cape." "And it would be silly, and it became a terminology." ""Was cape-age good on that one?" "Good cape-age?" "Okay, we can go on."" "We changed everything from the color to the size of it and finally got something that we were all happy with and worked well, and was still what everyone had come to know and like." "The wardrobe was very much kind of '20s and '40s, His Girl Friday feel of that strong woman in those pencil skirts and great jackets and great fabrics." "And that sort of colored the timelessness, I think, of it." "I wanted her outfits to be somewhat ageless and I wanted Superman's outfits to be ageless so the show didn't grow old." "And I felt that way about the sets too." "Metropolis was bright and sunny and shiny buildings and everything was modern and nice-looking." "If we can, make the set so that it could be a hundred years in the future." "But on the other hand, it could have been in the past as well." "We wanted to keep that unity between the production design the wardrobe and the photography." "To keep it really, like, high-gloss." "We always wanted, if you changed the channel and not seeing that it was a guy with a cape you'd still know you were watching Superman." "I felt like I was really lucky to be involved in this." "You know, people really loved the characters." "To me, it was always just Lois and Clark, just these two people struggling to work and figure out their relationship and how to have a life." "I think I'm most proud of the fact that I took a fable that everybody was familiar with and people loved and was able to put my own spin on it." "I look back on Lois  Clark with a smile on my face." "It's just so wonderful to have done that." "And I'm very proud of the show." "It's a great story." "It's a magical story." "And I think, as time goes on, there's always new people and new technology and new special effects that wanna bring their new angle on that same classic conflict." "I don't think it will ever go away."