Donner says he plans to weed out the camp elements from Lester’s “Superman II” and restore part one’s tone of “verisimilitude.” He’s especially jazzed about resurrecting his planned opening for the film: a scene at the Daily Planet in which Lois Lane realizes who Clark Kent really is. “To me, it’s the whole movie,” Donner says. “I have no idea why they took it out. I can’t speak for their lack of filmmaking intelligence.” (Lester did not respond to a request for comment; Ilya Salkind, who produced the film with his late father, Alexander, and Pierre Spengler, says he’s “ecstatic” about the DVD. “Bygones are bygones,” he says.) All told, about 70 percent of the Donner cut will be film he shot, and he has a simple method for anyone trying to distinguish his work from the other 30 percent. “The good stuff,” he says, “is mine.”
