WEIRD STUFF :: The Making of SUPERNOVA (2000)

It's been almost two years since my last WEIRD STUFF entry -- I guess things have just been too normal around here. But there's something that's been on my mind for a while now - actually since late 2024, around the time Megalopolis began its limited theatrical run on limited screens and everyone began to revisit (and sometimes reevaluate) Francis Ford Coppola's filmography. I admit I took a glance at the master filmmaker's lineup; intellectually I already knew where the strong points were as well as the weaker areas (at least by my measure) and so I sorta shamelessly (but privately) tried to weigh his worth with movies of his I liked vs. movies I didn't. And in scrolling through his resume I found something of an anomaly - at least to me. 

When I bring you "weird stuff", sometimes it's personal information that you otherwise wouldn't have known. And sometimes it's information that's already public record but is entirely new to me... Like the fact that the 2000 Science Fiction farce Supernova is credited with three different directors: Walter Hill, Jack Sholder, and Francis Ford Coppola. 

If you're already aware of this, sorry to hit you with old news, but you could've alerted me to this bizarre factoid and all its sordid details. The script was reworked and built up and torn down and molested by a parade of screenwriters before it ended up in the hands of a reluctant Jack Sholder, who was immediately replaced by Walter Hill at the insistence of star James Spader. Hill shot the entire movie and previewed a final cut (minus FX shots) to a test audience - who hated it. Based on that, MGM then rehired Jack Sholder to do the whole reshoot and recut thing, which included adding new scenes, cutting old scenes, and replacing the music score entirely. 

By the time Sholder's polish was complete, MGM was under new management, and the new bosses didn't like Sholder's version either and so they pleaded with Walter Hill to return. Hill told them he'd need $5 million to make enough changes to salvage the film, and so they declined. Instead, they brought on Francis Ford Coppola who required only $1 million to perform yet another re-edit -- one that would include a truly bizarre and ambitious change to the movie, but ultimately made no difference whatsoever. It's tough to determine who had the idea or why it needed attention, but this final edit took and existing sex scene between Peter Facinelli and Robin Tunney and CGI'd it into a sex scene between James Spader and Angela Bassett - digitally swapping out the actors' faces and, of course, skin color. 

Honestly the only reason I ever took a mild interest in this movie was the potential possibility of an exposed Robin Tunney - which, in fact, there is, both in and out of the guise of Ms. Bassett. But that doesn't save the film. Its stellar cast, which also includes Lou Diamond Phillips and Robert Forster, can't even generate enough magic to make it excusable; if anything it makes it that much more embarrassing. I'm being more than fair by pointing out that I'm not really into this genre or subject matter even when it's at its best, but I'm perceptive enough to look past the silly spaceship premise and recognize it as the truly bad movie it is; not even really "so bad it's funny" but more like "so bad it's sad". 

The final directing credit landed on Walter Hill, under the pseudonym of Thomas Lee. And it was partly because of that pseudonym that I never gave the movie much more thought beyond the goofy garbage that it is, but now with all this added context and perspective I can't help but be a little curious to revisit it, and see if I can't recognize any shades of Freddy's Revenge, Southern Comfort, or The Conversation. Maybe if I reset my standards to be as high as possible then I can prompt some sorta physiological rush as my expectations plummet back to Earth. 

- Paul