http://www.avclub.com/articles/jon-cryer-on-charlie-sheens-work-ethic- and-correct,97494/3/
Superman IV: The Quest For Peace (1987)—“Lenny Luthor”
JC: That was an absolutely heartbreaking experience for me, because I had loved the Richard Donner Superman like nobody’s business. I was a Comic Con-fanboy-crazy guy about that movie. I just loved it so much. So I’d always thought that if I got the opportunity to be in a Superman movie, I’d jump at it. Superman II was terrific, but then Superman III was kind of a mess, and the idea of Superman IV was to resurrect the franchise. They had new producers, and Golan-Globus had been doing all these cheesy genre movies. They had made a great deal of money with their Cannon films, and this was their bid for respectability. They were gonna reboot the franchise, and resurrect it for everybody after the debacle that was Superman III. Little did we know that we were actually going to be working on the debacle to end all debacles.
But it started very promisingly. My very first day, we were doing a huge practical effect, a flying effect. It was going to be me and Gene Hackman. Okay, first of all, that’s incredibly cool. But we were in a ’30s-style open-top roadster and, basically, Superman—played by Christopher Reeve, also amazingly cool—flies underneath the car, and he would fly away with it. Nowadays they would do that with green screen. You’d be lucky if you ever actually even got in the car. But at the time, they did it practical. So they literally got one of those huge construction cranes that are usually on the top of buildings, and lifted this convertible 40, 50 feet in the air, with Christopher Reeve wired underneath it in full Superman outfit. Did I say “outfit”? I’m apparently from the 1950s. [Laughs.] In full Superman costume. And they literally flew us away. The idea was that, at the end of the movie, he catches us and flies away with us. I just was in heaven. I mean, I’m working with Gene Hackman, I’ve gotten to meet Christopher Reeve, and here’s Superman flying me away in this car!
But what I came to realize as we kept shooting was that things kept getting… They were running out of money, but I didn’t know that. I just noticed little things, like the craft-service table got more and more meager. And they took less and less time every day. We would get props that were especially, uh, crappy. But I was still having a blast, and working with Gene Hackman was so much fun. Although it drove me crazy, too, because Lex Luthor was creating a villain called Nuclear Man, and yet Gene Hackman kept pronouncing it “nu-cue-lar.” So during one of the scenes I corrected him. In character. And to his credit, he did not go Popeye Doyle on my ass. [Laughs.] I think it made it into the movie, actually, although I haven’t seen the movie in ages.
Toward the end of the thing, they started dropping whole sequences that they were going to shoot, and I thought, “That doesn’t bode well.” But I finished my shooting and went back to the United States—we shot in England. A few months later I ran into Chris Reeve on the street, and I said, “Hey, let’s have lunch!” And he said, “Okay, sure!” We went out for lunch, and I said, “I’m so excited about the movie! When’s it coming out?” And he said [Takes a deep breath.] “You need to know: It’s an absolute mess. We had six months of flying work that we were supposed to shoot; they cut five months of it. They’ve thrown together an edit that barely makes sense.” And I was absolutely devastated, because I really wanted to be a part of bringing Superman back, you know?
The movie does not do justice to the script at all. The script was actually pretty clever. The script was basically that a kid asks Superman to get rid of all the nuclear weapons in the world, saying, “You’re Superman! Why can’t you do it?” That was a much bigger part of it than a lot of the really dumb Nuclear Man stuff that ended up being used. It ended up with Superman basically deciding that’s something Earthlings are going to have to do for themselves, which I thought was an important message at the time. When I finally did see the movie, every frame of it hurt me physically. [Laughs.] I’d had such high hopes for it that… To feel like you’re a part of the downfall of something that you had hoped to resurrect, that’s a tough thing to take.
But that it has acquired a so-bad-it’s-good sort of thing after all these years is kind of fun. And I’ve said publicly that if they ask me to be on a Superman IV panel at Comic-Con, I’ll do it! But… [Sighs.] You do get into this business because you love these stories, and if you care about them, seeing them go in a direction that you hoped they wouldn’t, it does hurt. The fullness of time has given me some perspective on it.
