Of course, it was Christopher Reeve's performance that made it happen, but it was director Richard Donner's vision and he was the one who made the call to cast Reeve. He also got Gene Hackman to play Luthor, another great choice. Superman has its seams -- it's a little long, Ned Beatty's character is pretty much completely out of place and the Marlon Brando casting proved to be a money sponge that in the end added very little to the movie.
Donner fell awry of Alexander and Ilya Salkind while the first two Superman movies were being shot simultaneously, which resulted in him being fired once Superman was released. Richard Lester directed re-shoots for Superman II, which used some of Donner's footage but not enough for him to get credit. A director's cut of Superman II was released in 2006, which combined Donner's completed scenes, some screen test footage of an important point and the Marlon Brando footage that had been tied up in litigation at the time of the sequel's initial release.
In the meantime, of course, Donner had brought out The Goonies as well as the Lethal Weapon series and cemented his place as a box-office director of zippy action movies.
Although the 1970s special effects don't even come close to measuring up to today's technology, they were some of the best available at the time and something Donner insisted on -- as far as it was possible at the time, it had to look like Superman could fly. What Superman did was show that you could tell a real story with comic book characters when you treated them like real people inside their universe of suspended disbelief, making a modern mythology real.
Donner passed today at the age of 91
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