Gus Gorman: This says $143.80. How am I supposed to live on that?…
Webscoe Employee: …Actually, it’s probably more like $143.80 and 1/2 cent. There are always fractions left over in big corporations, but they round it down to the lowest whole number…
Gus: …Then what happens to all those half cents? The company gets it?…
Webscoe Employee: …They’re just floating around out there. The computers know where.”
– Richard Pryor as Gus Gorman
In 1978, audiences around the world were promised they would believe a man can fly. Richard Donner’s Superman was a box office success which opened to critical acclaim and introduced the world to Christopher Reeve in the role he would be best remembered for. Perhaps most importantly, at least for the superhero genre, it proved that movies about heroes in capes could be taken seriously. At the time, superheroes were still associated with the campiness of the 1960’s Batman television show and had not yet come into their own on the big screen. Superman was successfully able to break this mold, and the release of Superman II in 1980 further demonstrated that a sci-fi adventure about a space alien could carry just as much drama and emotional weight as a Martin Scorsese film.
For Superman III, the filmmakers knew they’d have to pit the man of steel against a challenge like nothing that had come before. After battling a criminal mastermind and three Kryptonian villains, obviously the next logical choice was… a supercomputer? Huh…that’s different. I guess I can go with that. But you know what, that’s not a fair comparison. It’s not about the computer, it’s about the man behind the machine. Gus Gorman (gotta love that alliteration) is a technological savant and master computer programmer who singlehandedly designs a machine which develops artificial intelligence and is capable of identifying anyone’s particular weakness. Okay movie, now you’ve got me. That sounds like a Superman-worthy adversary. So, who’s playing Mr. Gorman? Following in the footsteps of truly phenomenal casting choices like Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor and Terrance Stamp as General Zod, it’s no surprise at all that the studio decided that Gus would be brought to life by… Richard Pryor? Richard Pryor the stand-up comedian?!
Plot Summary
Gus Gorman, played by Richard Pryor, is on his 36th week of unemployment when he comes across an advertisement for a computer programmer. Gus secures a job within the Data Processing Center of Webscoe Industries, owned by millionaire tycoon Ross Webster. Following a conversation with another programmer, Gus accesses the payroll system and writes a software code to steal the fractions of a penny that result from numerous computerized transactions and funnel these half cents into an expense account. The following week, Gus receives a check for over $85,000 and is soon discovered by Webster. Webster recognizes Gus’s skills as a programmer and blackmails the man into helping him gain control over the global market on coffee. Yep, you read that right. Ross has Gus reprogram the Vulcan satellite, causing it to generate a tornado in Columbia to destroy the coffee crops. As a result, Superman (remember him?) stops the weather disaster. Anyway, back to the main plot.
Webster concludes the Superman is the only thing standing in his way to overtaking the world’s oil industry and devises a plan to manufacture Kryptonite (a mineral composed of radioactive pieces of Superman’s home planet Krypton) to kill Superman. Ross instructs Gus to use the Vulcan satellite to scan the deep space remnants of Krypton to determine its composition. Gus is forced to guess 0.57% of the extinct world’s makeup and decides tar is as good a substitute as any.
Gus puts forth his best George S. Patton and impersonates a US general to give the manufactured kryptonite to Superman. Despite the mineral having no immediate impact on the man of steel, he soon begins acting selfishly and irresponsibly. Superman fails to prevent a truck from falling off a bridge, straightens the Leaning Tower of Pisa, extinguishes the Olympic torch, causes an oil spill in exchange for some implied sex, gets drunk and trashes a tavern.
With Superman busy acting like a super asshole, Ross proceeds with his plans to create a monopoly on oil. Gus agrees to help Ross after convincing the megalomaniac to fund the building of a supercomputer which is capable of doing pretty much anything. At his lowest point, Superman has a mental breakdown in a junkyard before Clark Kent (either literally or figuratively) emerges from Superman and the two duke it out. Clark is victorious, and with his newly restored morality, Superman is reborn.
Once Superman discovers the villains are camped out in the Grand Canyon, he makes his way to the southwest. After overcoming the supercomputer’s defenses, including missiles and a kryptonite ray beam and, with a little help from Gus, Superman exposes the computer to a container of highly volatile acid, destroying the machine. Superman gives Gus a job recommendation at a local coal mine and restores the tower of Pisa to its leaning glory before taking off into space.
Financial Breakdown
The technique utilized by Gus to boost his paycheck is known as “penny shaving” or “salami slicing”. This is a real concept which has actually gotten people into hot water. The idea is to remove (or slice) fractions of a cent from a given financial transaction, and then perform this across a large number of transactions. The quantities being removed from any one exchange are so insignificant they would not be easily noticed. But across thousands, millions, or even billions of transactions, these fractions have the potential to add up to a significant payout.
Computers are susceptible to this because they need to be capable of running calculations involving numbers which extend several decimal places past the hundredth. And this makes sense. Let’s say I work on salary and bring in $40,000 a year. Divided by 52 weeks in a year, that comes to $769.230769230769… per week. For obvious reasons, that won’t work when payday rolls around, so my paycheck may only come out to $769.23. However, if I were given this amount every week, my yearly salary would be 4 cents short of $40,000. I want my money dammit! So, let’s just bump those paychecks up one more penny to $769.24. Unfortunately, this would exceed the yearly salary by about 48 cents, and most companies aren’t in the business of giving away free money. The workaround is to ensure some paychecks are $769.23 and some are $769.24. This is where those thousands of a decimal (and beyond) really come in handy. To its credit, the film does a pretty good job of explaining at a high level what’s happening from the program’s perspective. Therefore, we’ll stick with the example posed by Gus’s co-worker.
The final amount paid to Gus was $143.80. It’s speculated that Gus’s pay may have actually been calculated as $143.805. However, since there’s no such thing as $0.005 (a.k.a. half a cent) outside of a digital matrix, the final payout must include no units less than one penny. This is where he gets the idea to write a code to “CHANNEL HALF CENTS FROM ALL WEBSCOE SALARIES INTO ABOVE EXPENSES ACCOUNT”. It’s unclear exactly what Webscoe transactions were susceptible to Gus’s virus, but given that he implanted it within the company’s payroll system, it’s reasonable to assume he was able to take a slice of every employee’s paycheck. In the spirit of collaboration, I’d like to offer Mr. Gorman a bit of useful, albeit clandestine, advice. While his code would be sufficient to identify and reallocate half cents, if Gus really wanted to step up his embezzlement game, he would have the code look for any fractions of a penny, not just one half.
Okay, I hate to do this, but I have to touch on the use of computers in this movie (we’ll keep it brief). Ross Webster is informed that the identity of the thief in his company is unknown. It is insinuated that, because the fraud was committed using a computer, the attacker’s identity cannot be determined. A few lines of dialog were provided to hand wave away any ability to trace the perpetrator. It is only when Ross sees Gus driving a Ferrari that he puts two and two together. In the movie’s defense, this was before the era of the home computer. At the time the film was released (more than 40 years ago) the average moviegoer would not have had the same understanding of the capabilities and limitations of computers that audiences today are aware of. Is it inaccurate to say that Ross would have been unable to discover who was pilfering pennies from his company just because it was done with a computer? Absolutely. I mean, Gus literally uses his employee account number when writing the program to steal the money! But I don’t want to harp on this too much. I’d rather call out Webscoe Industries for having the most inept accounting department of all time.
A check for over $85,000 is generated for a single week of work and no one thinks twice about it?! Gus previously complained that he was supposed to get $225 per week. So, unless Webscoe’s finance team was under the mistaken impression that 400 employees had been hired in the last week, they should have smelled something fishy and easily been able to pinpoint Gus’s latest payment as the source.
Review
If you’ve ever wondered what a Superman movie without much of the titular character would be like, you’re in luck with this one. It could honestly be named Richard Pryor meets Superman. Actually, a more accurate renaming would be The PG-rated Richard Pryor Show with Special Guest Star Superman (featuring more Jimmy Olson than Lois Lane). It feels like a movie designed for kids. It’s noticeably more campy than either of the previous installments, but it does have the occasional sexual innuendo and scene of Superman downing whiskey like its water (to keep parents engaged, I guess?). From the opening slapstick montage to the closing scene, this movie doesn’t even try to take itself seriously. And I suppose there’s a place for that kind of entertainment. Nevertheless, there’s not much here for an adult audience, but if it’s something you want to share with a younger viewer, you could do much worse.
Closing Thoughts
Superman III wasn’t one of those movies that played in the background of my childhood. The exhaustive list of VHS tapes in my house that featured the man of steel consisted of the original 1978 and, arguably the worst one, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. So, I don’t have any feelings of nostalgia for this film. That’s honestly a shame. If this movie were tethered to memories of a more innocent time in my life, that alone would probably be just enough to carry it across that line of being recommendable. As it is, I’m left to judge this movie from the perspective of a complete newcomer, and there’s just not enough there to sustain a two-hour feature.
Final Rating: 0.57% genuine laughs and enjoyment, but mostly kryptonite.