Superman | 1978
- Locations |
- New York;
- Alberta;
- California;
- New Mexico
- DIRECTOR |
- Richard Donner
The wheatfields of ‘Smallville’, Clark Kent’s childhood home, are around Calgary in Alberta, Canada, as is the beautiful lakeside setting where Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) and his cohorts commandeer missiles.
The ‘Daily Planet’ building, out of which Clark Kent (Christopher Reeve) works, is the splendid art-deco News Building, 220 East 42nd Street between Second and Third Avenues, New York, formerly the New York Daily News Building (the fifties TV series of Superman famously used Los Angeles City Hall, 200 North Spring Street, downtown Los Angeles).
The roof, from which Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) is rescued from the ’copter crash, is the US Post Office Building, 450 Lexington Avenue at 45th Street (though, in 1992, a 32-story office tower was added to the historic eight-story building).
Lois’s apartment is 240 Central Park South, from which she and Supes go for a night-time spin around the Statue of Liberty.
The lair of Lex Luthor is supposedly beneath Grand Central Station, and that is the real concourse, where Otis (Ned Beatty) is tailed to the rail lines beneath, though the hideout itself is an imaginative set built at Pinewood Studios in the UK.
Superman’s feats involve saving a school bus on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge and rescuing Jimmie Olsen from the collapsing Boulder Dam, Nevada.
The ‘San Andreas Fault’, which opens up to swallow Lois, was filmed at at Red Rock State Park near Gallup, New Mexico (the area has been renamed Superman Canyon).
