CLEVELAND, Ohio — Filmmakers recently left Cleveland after shooting necessary scenes for a Superman movie. And for a time, our town became Metropolis, Superman's fictional city.
Hollywood has it right, but not all right. Cleveland is wearing the makeup of another city.
In the minds of the originators of the superhero, Cleveland had a starring role.
Along the way, Cleveland got upstaged, and Metropolis got the role.
In a Glenville neighborhood house, the first idea of Superman took root. A couple of brainstorming Glenville High School students penciled in the story and sketches on notebook paper.
1933 — Cleveland had tumbled into Great Depression when schoolboys Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster dreamed of superhero powers to save the city and world.
From their scribbles and sketches, a few years later a comic book publisher paid Siegel and Shuster a small amount, and Superman went into a comic book.
From there, the story took flight.
Fifty years later, long after the two boys had moved away, Jefferson Gray bought the house unaware Superman once lived there.
When he found out, he fashioned his own kind of tribute.
References to Superman are everywhere.
"After I found out this was the Superman house we started collecting stuff," Gray explaind. "Everywhere we went around the stores, they had a lot of Superman stuff. So we bought it and we put it all in the house."
Glenville relishes the Superman story. Nearby where Joe Shuster's apartment building once stood is a tribute to Siegel and Shuster's first published Superman comic book.
In 1938, from these pages, the story rocketed worldwide, traveling "faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings with a single bound. Look up in the sky — It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Superman!"
Generations later, when I was a Glenville High School student, we kids knew the Cleveland story.
Superman — disguised as reporter Clark Kent — worked for the Daily Planet newspaper, modeled after The Cleveland Plain Dealer. Rearranged, almost the same letters spell Plain Dealer and Daily Planet.
Downtown, filmmakers transformed real-life Cleveland into fictional Metropolis generations after Siegel and Shuster initially envisioned Cleveland in the starring role.
Both men died in the 1990s, having made some money for their genius, but never the super sums created in the still-growing Superman franchise.
Tragically, in 1932, there came a strange and hurtful twist to the boys' story: Jerry Siegel's father was killed in a still-unsolved robbery at his clothing store. It happened just a few weeks before the boys created a bulletproof man.
Generations later, filmmakers are standing in real Cleveland for Hollywood's Metropolis. But in their very first creation, Siegal and Shuster envisioned Cleveland. After all, it was in this Cleveland house where Superman was created, eventually leaping to worldwide fame.