Idea for a Superman origin movie
built around two solid points:
1) Lois Lane is the lead character; and
2) The audience dose not know who is playing Superman going into the movie.
So the movie centers around a young Lois, who’s desperately trying to get a job as a reporter at the Daily Planet, despite a hiring freeze as the printed journalism business struggles to keep up, and despite the fact she has no prior journalism experience (at least, not outside of an expensive degree that has yet to start paying for itself). Even though no one at the Planet will even return her calls, she barges in in the middle of a work day, trying to get an interview. She bounces off a lot of people (a number of them tall guys with dark hair and nice eyes who she barely notices) until she tracks down Perry White, who tells her, sarcastically, that he’ll hire her on the spot if she can bring him a properly sourced article revealing the story Metropolis’s new hero, who just yesterday stopped a runaway train with his bare hands.
She gets to work. Her friends tell her she’s crazy. Her sister bails her out of jail at least once (maybe a montage of times). Her father, General Lane, threatens disownment and/or military arrest. This “menace” broke a muggers arm last week, and is wanted for vigilantism. If she really does find out the identity of this man (who’s been gaining notoriety with every feat) and brings it to a newspaper before the military, her father would have to take action. (This country is his family, after all.)
But the more Lois looks into this ‘super man’, the more she likes what she sees. It’s hard without credentials, but she’s been collecting eye-witness reports for months trying to find the pattern to track; the pattern that everyone’s been looking for. She has dozens of interviews with police, and store owners, and caught criminals, but it’s in the interviews of the regular folk that she finds the pattern:
Every headline is about a larger-than-life figure who catches falling statues, wins chases with cars, and stops bullets with his pecs. In the words of the innocent people of Metropolis though, is someone else. Someone who flies broken cars to the shop from the highway during rush hour. Someone who takes a sobbing child from the scene of a bike accident and drops off a smiling one with their parents. Someone who’s been spotted leaving flowers by the headstones of the ones who didn’t make it out of that train crash. Someone who sits in a secluded corner of the park and plays chess with the old woman who’s husband can no longer leave the house. Someone who literally pulled a dog out of a river and a cat from a tree.
So, to find the Man of Steel, Lois searches for kindness - and she finds it everywhere. She finds all the coats freely shed for someone cold. She finds all the grocery carts paid for by the previous customer. She finds lonely veterans offered a seat at the family table in restaurants. She finds hate symbols painted over with cute cartoons and symbols of love. She finds dozens and dozens of volunteers who help clean up and serve food and rebuild after train crashes and car wrecks and robberies.
And then she finds a man in the park.
He’s not doing much, just sitting on a bench with his head in his hands. The copy of the Daily Planet on the bench next to him speculates on the dangers of super humans, as it has every day for the last two weeks. Some have even suggested that the Man of Steel is an alien, though those theories have only barely broken into mainstream. Whatever this man is worrying over, whatever weight is on his shoulders, seems much heavier than a newspaper, though. Lois hasn’t worried herself with the same issue’s as her prospective employer, either. Thoughts still on the group of teens she’s just passed, each promising to beat up on some boy for their friend, are still fresh on her mind, and she takes the spot next to the stranger on the bench.
He’s not a stranger, though. Lois recognizes him. She doesn’t know his name, but she saw him that day at the Daily Planet months ago, and she’s seen him across the police tape at scenes she’s investigated. He wrote today’s front page article: “Man of Steel, or Menace of Steel?”
He’s politely flustered when she sits down, and she promptly tells him that everything about his article - she’s already read it, of course - is absurd. She doesn’t care who “made him write it”, the entire thing is just plain wrong. She finds herself repeating stories she’s read and re-read at all hours of the morning. Stories of regular people who’d told her how they’d been inspired by Superman. How they’d taken leaps of faith toward recovery and new lives thanks to Superman. Teenagers have chosen to live because of Superman. She quotes sources, and sources of people, including herself, who have said that the city of Metropolis - maybe even the world - was so much better because of Superman.
“Superman?” the reporter asks.
“It’s just something I’ve been calling him. He’s got that big S on his chest, right?”
The reporter laughs. He hasn’t smiled the whole time, only looked at her with wide eyes. His smile is… nice. His glasses are dumb though.
“Yeah,” she admits, “it’s a dumb name.”
“No,” he says. A weight has fallen off his shoulders while she was flipping through her notebooks. He sniffles a bit. Lois had just torn into his article with all the fury she could muster, is he crying about it? No, he’s smiling, still. “I really like it. Have you written all this down?”
Lois Lane writes it all down. Her new friend (who proofread the hell out of it because Lois is driven as hell but can’t spell) Clark Kent turned it in to his boss. The newest headline reads:
The Story of Superman -by Lois Lane
She’s getting paid more than Clark in under a year. He just seems to be so distracted all the time. Maybe she should look into that…
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