SMALLVILLE: IN THE BEGINNING, PART 2
Perhaps the most fortuitous development of Smallville in its earliest days was the hiring of David Nutter to direct the pilot. A veteran of The X-Files, Nutter has become something of a pilot king, launching a number of series including Millennium, Roswell, Dark Angel, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and more.
“Peter Roth had moved over to Warner Bros. and he wanted me to become a member of the Warner Bros. television family,” recalls Nutter. “He brought me in, sat me down and talked to me about his dream of Smallville. I, of course, in my early days as a director was involved with the Adventures of Superboy for Viacom. Having kids and so forth, I don’t mind doing things geared toward a younger audience and this felt similar in tone to Roswell, which is an experience I really cherish and will cherish forever. Trying to make Clark Kent accessible, someone people can relate to and understand and seeing that he is not indestructible, is what appealed to me. Many times this guy felt like an alien and has had to keep secrets, which all kids can relate to. I wanted to make him a hero and not a superhero. Fortunately, that’s exactly what Peter Roth, Al and Miles were looking for.
“My attitude,” he adds, “was let’s not make the show what people would expect from Superman. We were all on the same page to make it as smart and timeless as possible. The big thing for me on the pilot was that you were stepping on very hollow ground, not only from the comic book perspective, but from the perspective of the Richard Donner film, which was so well made. My attitude was, and I thought the script was such, ‘If I get the teaser the right way I want to, the audience can watch color bars for the rest of the episode because I think I’ll hook them.’ I spent a lot of time on that teaser [in which Clark first arrives on earth], making it as cinematic as possible. I was very proud of how it turned out and thought it played really well. The show was a really difficult show to do because it was setting the tone and the look of everything. I brought in a lot of people I’d worked with in the past. It was a group of people who went out to make something great and special, and we did just that. It was a whole lot of fun. There was a lot of fear involved, but if you believe in what you're doing, you can’t let the fear get in the way.”
One fear that did govern the early days of the show was whether or not an audience would actually get it. For this reason, there was a very clear decision made that the first batch of episodes would follow a set formula: while we got to know the characters, guest stars would be exposed to Kryptonite, would somehow have their basic DNA altered and find themselves equipped with bizarre abilities, and Clark would have to stop them. The Kryptonite “freak of the week” may not have been the most sophisticated means of crafting stories, but they seemed to achieve the desired goal before the stories became more character-oriented.
“Kryptonite will always play a part in the show,” says Gough, “because the premise is sort of Kryptonite does strange things to this town. Truthfully, we did not approach the show with the attitude that everybody knew who Superman was and what Kryptonite was. When we were breaking the first five or six stories, we wanted to make really sure that the premise of the show – even if you had never seen Superman – was something you’d get. We did not want to go with the thought, ‘Oh, everybody’s going to know what Kryptonite is.’ In truth, a lot of people – especially because you’re on the WB and dealing with a younger audience of 12-25 – didn’t grow up with the Richard Donner movie or Lois & Clark.”
Adds Millar, “We planned on five and did seven, which was too many. Basically we kept repeating the pilot. The general theory is that the avid viewer watches one in three episodes. So to get a new viewer, you want to establish that this is the show. At the time it was a really radical reinvention of Superman. Kryptonite had never done this stuff before. The concerns were understandable, though they underestimated the intelligence of the audience in a way. We always thought people would get it, but it was amazing that young teens, particularly girls, had no idea what they were watching, but when they saw Lana’s Kryptonite necklace, they still knew that it weakened Clark, but didn’t know what it was. They were blank slates. In our mind, it takes several episodes to really find the show, and here we were mixing so many different characters and genres. It’s soap opera on one hand, but also definitely a franchise as there is a standalone storyline in each episode. We didn’t hit our stride until ‘X-Ray.’ That’s where we really thought we’d begun to find the balance between the three main characters: Lex, Lana and Clark. We found the fabric of the show.”
Finding that fabric was not cheap, though the studio was willing to absorb expenses to get it right — up to a point.
“They were very generous with us in the first seven episodes,” Millar notes. “They said, ‘Go out and make it big,’ and we did. And we had a very big visual effects budget as well. The challenge was also in doing an action adventure show of this scale in Vancouver. The X-Files began as a very small, under the radar show and it evolved into this phenomenon. It didn’t start that way, but we did. Finding a crew up there and finding the right production team was extremely challenging.”
TO BE CONTINUED