About a quarter of the way through Mario Puzo's first draft of the Superman Movie. It's wierd....

The opening of the movie goes directly to the scene on Krypton where Jor-El is explaining that Krypton is going to explode. The four villains (General Zod, Jax-Ur, Kru-El and Professor Vakox) are already in the Phantom Zone, described as a black void where all you can see are their faces.

Krypton is more of a regular planet than the crystal world we see in the movie, but that's kind of how it's described in all drafts including the shooting script. It's more of a regular looking city with buildings, just covered in glass to keep the air in. Jor-El lives in a house.

The movie quickly moves to Earth, where there's just no time wasted on the Kents. They take Kal-El in and raise him, but seem to leave him be for the most part. This is where it starts to diverge a little, where the high school coaches want him on sports teams, and he refuses. Once he gets back to the farm, he's already talking with holograms of Jor-El and Lara in the barn.

He decides on his own to go North, based on advice from Jor-El to hide himself away in the arctic, where he will read all the info he got from Krypton, and then read all the info on earth(!).

It then switches to Metropolis, where there's no Daily Planet! It's Galaxy Communications, a TV station where Lois is an off-screen reporter and an on-screen weather girl! Clark's been hired to anchor the news.

"Luthor Lux" is working with Eve Tessmacher and his henchmen (no Otis here yet) to pull off a money laundering crime (We put the counterfit money in the bank, and take the real cash, and when the crime is found out, the bank takes the fall). The news reporting team finds them and interferes, and Superman interferes with the plot. Luthor gets away, and Lois is already suspicious that he's Clark.

The story feels very fast, everyone speaks in a very concise way with little extraneous dialogue. The Movie's Kryptonians speak almost biblically...here it's just straight up info-dump. The Kents spend little time "Teaching" Kent. They're just kind of there. Superman himself comes across as a an obediant little boy, who does what he is told and parrots it back.

There's still 75% more coming, and seeing how quickly the plot veered off what comes in later drafts, I'm looking forward to seeing it....