Show Business: The Caped Crusader Flies Again

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 the future may refer to this film as Batman I.