SHOW BUSINESS, Page 60The Caped Crusader Flies AgainBig, dark and flamboyant, the movie Batman aims to bringGotham City's favorite cave dweller to majestic life
BY RICHARD CORLISS Reported by Elaine Dutka/Los Angeles
It was 1939, and Vincent Sullivan, editor of Detective
Comics, had a terrific idea. So what if it was someone else's?
The year before, a muscle-bound man from Krypton had landed in
the pages of rival Action Comics and become an instant icon of
pop culture. Sullivan may not have owned Superman, but he could
clone it. He called in cartoonist Bob Kane, then 18, and asked
for a similar "super-duper" character. Kane went home, tossed
the movies The Mark of Zorro and The Bat Whispers into an
imaginary blender with Leonardo da Vinci's flying machine, and
dreamed up Batman. The whole process took a few days.
Now Batman is 50. Who cares? Well, all the fans who grew up
with the character in comics and in the popular mid-'60s TV
series. And the younger generation, still devouring Batman
comics in a new, hipper format. And, next week, moviegoers
attending the opening of Batman, with Michael Keaton as Bruce
Wayne (alias the Caped Crusader) and Jack Nicholson as his
nemesis the Joker. In a season when the other big-budget films
are sequels, Batman should seem familiar yet fresh. At least
Warner Bros., with $35 million riding on the film, hopes so.
Batman surely has consumer anticipation -- in Hollywoodese,
"wanna-see." Last fall Fleet Street sent out helicopters to get
photos from the film's closed London set. In the U.S. last
winter, fans reportedly paid $6 to get into theaters where the
90-sec. trailer was being shown, then left before the main
feature. The market is already clogged with Batman products --
including miniature Batmobiles, Batwings, sunshades, earrings,
cloisonne pins, backpacks and boxer shorts -- as part of a huge
merchandising campaign.
The film behind the hullabaloo has been a decade in
gestation, beginning in 1979 when producers Peter Guber and Jon
Peters obtained the movie rights. What took so long? At first
the project was greeted with tremendous skepticism. "I'd say I
was doing a Batman film, and people would laugh," recalls
Peters. "They saw him as a guy in tights, and unlike Superman,
he didn't fly." Finding a suitable script proved an additional
problem. Early drafts followed Batman from the childhood trauma
of seeing his parents gunned down by vicious Jack Napier. "You
had to wade through 20 years," says Sam Hamm, one of the three
writers who worked on the film, "just to get to the first shot
of the guy in the costume that we've all come to see." His
solution: Bruce Wayne is already Batman, but Jack Napier is not
yet the Joker.
In Hamm's scenario, Batman interrupts a Napier heist and
allows the crook to fall into a vat of toxic waste. Jack emerges
as the Joker and leads a crime wave, concocting a formula to be
injected into cosmetics that twists the victim's face into the
Joker's awful leer. Soon Gotham is a city of the grinning dead,
and only Batman can revive it, with the help of Vicki Vale (Kim
Basinger), frontline photojournalist and all-time fabulous babe.
Hamm's script lured director Tim Burton to the project.
Burton, 30, had only two features to his credit: Pee-Wee's Big
Adventure and Beetlejuice, both revealing an outlandishly
precise design sense and an eccentric comic touch that audiences
loved. "Warner's was a complete, total freak-out," Peters
recalls, "scared to death shooting a $30 million film with a
third-time director whose first two films cost about a dollar
and a half. But they were very supportive." Burton's background
as a Disney animator helped him with the special effects, says
Peters. "As an artist, he storyboarded every frame."
Burton was stirred by the challenge: "I got into the
operatic quality of the story -- big, wild and strong. I wanted
it psychological but flamboyant. An action comedy with a
dramatic twist. Funny but not jokey." To make a fantasy film
grounded in emotional reality, he would create a city that had
never been but had to be: believable unreality. Says designer
Anton Furst: "We imagined what New York might have become
without a planning commission. A city run by crime, with a riot
of architectural styles. An essay in ugliness. As Tim says, `It
looks like hell erupted through the pavement and kept on going.'
"
More hell would erupt when Keaton was announced as Bruce
Wayne. Fresh from his frenetic triumph in Beetlejuice but no
one's idea of a superhunk, Keaton fit Peters' demands for a
"comedian who had an insane streak -- funny, charming, with that
all-important dark side." At first Kane was apprehensive, "but
then Michael put on the mask and uniform, and he had that
swagger, that air. Suddenly he was six foot four." Batmaniacs
remained to be convinced. Fearful that Keaton and Burton might
make a derisive parody, they inundated Warner's with petitions.
Keaton says he was astonished that the "DC fundamentalists"
could take the casting of Batman so seriously. "After all, it's
only a movie. I am a little nervous, though, about the scene
where I fantasize making love to Mary Magdalene."
Basinger, who sees Batman as a modern Phantom of the Opera
-- "two men in black and a woman in white who shows them the
light" -- signed on as Vicki, replacing the injured actress Sean
Young. As for the Joker, everyone agreed it should be Nicholson.
At the outset, Kane had sent the studio a photo of him in The
Shining, coloring it in with green hair and white skin. The star
was also attracted: "Metaphysically, the Joker was dipped in
chemicals and lost his mind -- not unlike the rest of society.
He has had his identity melted into his brain. He flows with the
corrosion, so to speak." The character's extravagant evil
appealed to Nicholson: "I always try to see how far I can go,
and I've never hit my head on top. Most actors are afraid to go
as dark as they might, but I always say, `Let's really get
black.' " The Los Angeles Lakers' most famous fan even liked the
story. "Like basketball, it occurs at night."
As in all megaprojects, the Batman people were just happy
to have survived. "Tim is a pale guy," his friend Keaton says.
"Put him in England and add the demands of the shoot, and he
becomes transparent." But Burton soldiered on, and now offers
a cautious commendation of his own work: ``Given the scale, the
number of people involved and how quickly we did it, it still
has a personality, which big movies often lose. It doesn't feel
like a cardboard clone."
That is the hope of all involved, that the character who
began as a Superman clone will have inspired a daring new work.
And if this summer's audiences agree, who knows? Moviegoers of
