To some, Toberoff is an innovator. A few years ago, Endeavor Agency partner Ari Emanuel briefly teamed up with the lawyer, calling him “the best there is at untangling these things.” (The alliance fizzled within a year, sources say, because other Endeavor agents weren’t as eager to move into Toberoff ’s narrow niche.) But Toberoff’s penchant for biting the hand he hopes will feed him later—a rare duality that has him acting as a lawyer one minute, a movie producer the next—has made him a target for criticism. “It’s a cagey thing to do, but I don’t think admiration comes with it,” says Karen Kehela Sherwood, who, as co-chair of Imagine Films, a division of Brian Grazer and Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment, has been pitched by Toberoff. “He’s not someone who hats have to go off to.”

Even people he’s made money for agree. “Let’s face it—he has this way about him that people find extremely irritating. He’s probably the most hated man in Hollywood,” says writer-director Larry Cohen, who joined with Toberoff to reclaim the rights to his 1974 horror film It’s Alive from Warner Bros. “I’ve mentioned him a couple of times in meetings. You get an immediate reaction: ‘Oh God, him!’ ”

Time Warner’s lawyers have made his character an issue in the current case, casting him as an opportunist. Toberoff dismisses such criticism, which he sees as an effort to prejudice the court. “Having blown the deal by their own avarice, they need to blame somebody—the greedy Marc Toberoff,” he says over lunch one day. Tan and wiry, with short gray-blond hair and a toothy grimace, he defends his compensation agreements—which he says typically net him a third or less of what he wins for his clients, about the same as any lawyer working on a contingency basis—as reasonable, considering the time he invests in what he calls righteous David-and-Goliath cases.

“I’m like a pit bull with a towel in his mouth,” he says. “Movie studios take legal action against 12-year-olds for downloading content off the Web. But when it comes to creators, studios fuck ’em on an everyday basis. I like to level the playing field.”

No one disputes that Superman was born in Jerry Siegel’s head. It was 1933 when the Cleveland teenager thought up the extraterrestrial champion of the oppressed and asked his buddy Joe Shuster to draw him. Shortly after graduating from high school, Shuster conceived of the cape and tight-fitting suit with an S emblazoned on the chest. Then, to make sure he got Lois Lane just right, he hired a teenage sketch model named Joanne Kovacs.

Joanne remembers that Shuster’s mother was making chicken soup in the family’s apartment the first time she reported for work. She posed on a blanket on the floor to simulate how Lois might look in Superman’s arms. She also remembers that Jerry, whom she would marry 13 years later, greeted her for the first time by taking a flying leap across the living room like Superman. That boyish innocence, she says, would define the two men all their lives.

“Jerry and Joe didn’t have much life experience,” says Joanne, whose sculpted blond hair and bright eyes belie her 89 years, during an interview near her Marina del Rey, California, home. “They lived in a dream world. They thought that life was like the movies and everything would turn out okay in the end.”

In the Depression years, newspaper strips—not comic books—were the most popular venue for cartoonists. So Siegel and Shuster created several Superman strips and shopped them around, to no avail. Then, in 1938, Detective Comics (now DC Comics, owned by Warner Communications) bought Superman for publication in Action Comics No. 1. Siegel and Shuster were paid $130—or $10 a page—to grant their copyright to the comic-book maker. Most pop-culture historians agree that Action Comics No. 1 marked the beginning of what is now known as the golden age of comic books. Still, for several years, Siegel and Shuster eked out only a modest living creating more Superman material for Detective Comics. In the 1940s, when the duo pressed for a share of the profits, they were dumped.

Siegel and Shuster spent decades living hand to mouth. In 1951, after Siegel went on a hunger strike to draw attention to his family’s plight, Detective Comics began paying him $100 a week. In 1968, he gave up on comics and took a $7,000-a-year job as a typist. Then, in 1975, after comic-book aficionados helped mount a media campaign on Siegel and Shuster’s behalf, DC began paying each $20,000 a year, plus health insurance. In 1981, a few years after the movie Superman, with Christopher Reeve, grossed $275 million, DC raised the pair’s annual stipends to $30,000.

Shuster, who never married, died in 1992. Siegel died four years later, and since then his widow has received increased benefits—currently $135,000 a year, plus insurance.

One of the key issues before the court is whether the Superman story that appears in Action Comics No. 1 is composed entirely of strips Siegel and Shuster created on their own. Toberoff says it is, and that it establishes virtually all of Superman’s signature elements, from his history (sent to Earth as an infant aboard a spaceship from a distant planet) to his alter ego (mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent) to his powers (able to leap tall buildings, etc.). Based on those assertions, the Siegel heirs terminated their grant of copyright, effective April 16, 1999.