Billion Dollar Batman

by Bruce Scivally

  387 Jankiewicz, Pat, “Recalling Batgirl,” www.YvonneCraig.com, http://yvonnecraig.com/up_close_interview.html, accessed Oct. 19, 2009

  388 —, “Miss Blake; TV Batman’s Aunt Harriet,” The Los Angeles Times, Feb. 20, 1969, p. D8

  389 —, “’Batman’ To Have ‘Love’ Reunion,” Daily Variety, Sept. 21, 1972, p. 1

  390 Deborah Dozier Potter Interview, conducted March 29, 2010

  391 Semple, Jr., Lorenzo, “Requiem for a cheeky ‘Batman’: TV series creator speaks up for irreverent take,” Variety.com, http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117988712. html?categoryId=3184&cs=1, accessed 7/29/09

  392 Ibid.

  393 Archerd, Army, “1967: Problems plague ‘King Gun’”, Variety, http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117979560.html?categoryid=1237&cs=1&query=dozier, accessed 8/29/09

  394 Deborah Dozier Potter Interview, conducted March 29, 2010

  395 Hughes, Kathleen A., “Batman Fans Fear The Joke’s on Them In Hollywood Epic—They Accuse Warner Bros. Of Plotting a Silly Spoof Of the Caped Crusader,’ Wall Street Journal, Nov 29, 1988, p. 1

  396 Boyer, Peter J., “Film Clips: As Batman, West is Out of Movie Lineup,” The Los Angeles Times, Aug. 5, 1981, p. H1

  397 Richmond, Ray, “20 Years Later, Adam West Just Can’t Get Away From His TV Role,” The Hawk Eye, Burlington, Iowa, June 22, 1989, p. 6A

  398 Lyle Waggoner Interview, conducted Aug. 8, 2009

  399 Jankiewicz, Pat, “Recalling Batgirl,” www.YvonneCraig.com, http://yvonnecraig.com/up_close_interview.html, accessed Oct. 19, 2009

  400 Gates, Anita, “Vacuous Villainy, Batman! Is This How It Used to Be?,” The New York Times, Mar 8, 2003, p. B.21

  401 Swires, Steve, “Holy Sidekick! Burt Ward,” Starlog, Nov. 1987, p. 79

  402 Ward, Burt, Boy Wonder: My Life in Tights, © 1995 Logical Figments Books, Los Angeles, p. 247

  403 Ibid., p. 265

  404 Swires, Steve, “Holy Sidekick! Burt Ward,” Starlog, Nov. 1987, p. 79

  405 Boucher, Geoff, “The Hero Complex,” The Los Angeles Times, Mar 21, 2009. pg. D.13

  406 Ibid.

  407 Ibid.

  408 Lambert, David, “Batman - Who Watches the Batman (1966)? Sorry, Nobody Just Yet!” TV Shows on DVD.com, http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/news/Batman-Watchmen- Batman-Deal-Reported/10573, Posted Sept. 23, 2008, accessed July 22, 2009

  409 Van Hise, James, Batmania, © 1989 Pioneer Books, Las Vegas, NV, p. 84

  410 Gelb, Jeff, “Bob Kane: ‘I Never Talk About Batman. Actually, I’m Bruce Wayne,” Comics Interview Super Special: Batman—Real Origins of the Dark Knight, © 1989 Fictioneer Books Ltd., p. 115

  411 Semple, Jr., Lorenzo, “Requiem for a cheeky ‘Batman’: TV series creator speaks up for irreverent take,” Variety.com, http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117988712. html?categoryId=3184&cs=1, accessed 7/29/09

  412 Rees, Brenda, “With the Kids: Heroic Efforts; Caped Crusaders Keep Watch -- and Are Being Watched -- at the TV and Radio Museum,” The Los Angeles Times, Jul 1, 2004, p. E 30

  413 Boucher, Geoff, “The Hero Complex,” The Los Angeles Times, Mar 21, 2009. pg. D.13

  414 Johnson, Pat, “Krunch! There goes Batman,” The Toronto Telegram, http://www.1966batfan.com/dozier.htm, accessed July 28, 2009

  Chapter Six: BURTON’S BATMAN

  “I don’t know if I would go so far as to say that Batman is my alter-ego, but I certainly do respond to his split personality and obsessions in wanting things done a certain way. He’s just a weird guy who does strange things. I wonder what that makes me?”

  - Tim Burton1

  HOLLYWOOD EXECUTIVES ARE A COWARDLY, SUPERSTITIOUS LOT...

  Bob Kane wasn’t the only young Jewish kid whose rise to riches from the Jewish quarters of New York was effected through a name change and a ruthless attitude about business. In 1927, a dozen years after Kane’s birth, Steven Jay Rechnitz was born to immigrant parents in Brooklyn. Over the next six decades, he would gain control of the largest media conglomerate on the planet, one of whose biggest assets was the Dark Knight.

  A few years after the birth of his son, and after losing all his money in the Great Depression, Jewish immigrant Max Rechnitz changed the family name to Ross, thinking that it would be easier to find work with a name that wasn’t so obviously Jewish. By the time his son, now christened Steve Ross, was 8, he was doing his bit to help earn the family’s keep. He made money by carrying people’s food home from the supermarkets or collecting their laundry for a nickel. He also learned that if he bought cigarettes by the carton, he could sell them to his father a pack at a time and make a profit.2 At age 11, he sold magazines—including comic books like Batman—on the streets of Brooklyn.3

  When Steve was a teenager, he was summoned to his father’s deathbed. His father had no inheritance to give him, save for a sage piece of advice: There are those who work all day; those who dream all day, and those who spend an hour dreaming before setting to work to fulfill those dreams. “Go into the third category,” his father said, “because there’s virtually no competition.”4

  Ross attended Paul Smith’s College and served for a while in the Army before landing his first job at an uncle’s store in Manhattan’s garment district. But his rise to prominence really began when, at age 26, he married Carol Rosenthal. Edward Rosenthal, his bride’s father, owned the Riverside funeral home in Manhattan. His wife’s uncle, who was a business partner of Edward Rosenthal’s, provided limousines for funeral services. When Ross saw that the vehicles were only used during the day,

  he arranged for a limousine service to hire the cars in the evening. The arrangement was an immediate moneymaker. In the late 1950s, Ross took out a bank loan and started Abbey Rent-a-Car. He then merged his rental car company with a parking lot and garage company named Kinney. Kinney snapped up Rosenthal’s funeral parlor, as well as an office-cleaning business owned by Rosenthal’s cousin. In 1962, the hodge-podge of companies went public as Kinney National Services, Inc., with a market valuation of $12.5 million, and with Steve Ross in charge.5

  In 1967, Ross ventured into entertainment, with Kinney National Services, Inc. purchasing Panavision (makers of movie cameras), the Hollywood talent agency Ashley-Famous, and National Periodical Publications, also known as DC Comics; the comic book company cost $60 million.6

  Around that same time, Warner Bros.-Seven Arts expanded by buying Atlantic Records, a deal that left them cash-strapped. Ted Ashley, of Ashley-Famous, urged Ross to buy out the ailing film production company, which Elliot Hyman had purchased from founder Jack Warner. Now Hyman was ready to sell. However, a part owner of Warner-Reprise Records had veto power over any sale; Ross would have to convince him separately. That owner’s name was Frank Sinatra. Ross made his pitch and the $400 million deal was signed over dinner with Sinatra at the home of the singer’s mother.7

  With Sinatra’s signature, DC Comics became a part of Steve Ross’s Warner conglomerate. The acquisition was finalized in 1969. Because federal anti-trust laws prohibited a movie studio from owning a talent agency, Ross sold Ashley-Famous, but he kept the agency’s Ted Ashley, putting him in charge of Warner Bros.-Seven Arts. Though Warner Bros. had been faltering in the 1960s, soon after Ross and Ashley took over, the company scored an unexpected hit with the concert documentary Woodstock (1970). It was the beginning of a long string of box-office hits that reestablished Warner Bros. as a major player. Broadening his empire, Ross then bought Elektra Records and Nonesuch Records in 1970, putting them all together under the new Warner Communications banner.8

  With DC’s acquisition by Kinney National and later Warner Communications, a lot of the old guard who had presided over Batman’s descent from noir-ish vigilante to space-age camp icon retired. Harry Donenfeld and Mort Weisinger left the company with lucrative golden parachutes. Sol Harrison became DC’s publisher, with Julius Schwartz promoted to editor and artist Carmine Infantino raised to editorial director. Schwartz decided it was time to take Batman back to his roots as an ave
nging detective of the night. Working with writer Denny O’Neil and artist Neal Adams, Schwartz sent Dick Grayson off to college and moved Bruce Wayne out of his mansion and into a luxury apartment, with a Batmobile that was more sleek sports car than gaudy war wagon. The stories veered away from the bright, strictly-for-children tales of the 1960s, becoming darker and more adult. Batman’s costume was also transformed— the ears on his cowl became longer, and his cape more flowing; in some of the comic book panels, when Batman perched on a rooftop, his cape billowed out on the night gales as though it were twelve feet long. The overall effect was to emphasize the vampiric, mysterious “creature of the night” aspect of Batman. The quipping punster Batman was no longer seen in the comics.

  Fans responded positively to the changes, though sales of the comic book went into a predictable slump once the TV show went off of network TV and into syndication. This new take on the Caped Crusader seemed tailor-made for a film adaptation, but the overwhelming success of the Batman TV show had a lasting impact—no producer in Hollywood could envision making a movie based on a comic book, any comic book, and taking the material seriously. But while no producer in Hollywood could envision it, a producer in Europe did.

  After co-producing a crowd-pleasing 1973 adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, Ilya Salkind was in Paris preparing for a meeting with his father, film financier Alexander Salkind, to discuss ideas for their next project. Walking around the city, he saw a billboard for a French film production of Zorro, and it inspired him to think of making a film about the greatest hero of all—Superman. Salkind approached DC Comics, and found them surprisingly willing to give up the film rights to their flagship character. Having acquired the rights, he put together a mammoth production. With director Richard Donner and creative consultant Tom Mankiewicz, a screenwriter who had contributed scripts to the James Bond series, Salkind produced a movie that took a reverential approach to the Man of Steel. Upon its release in the winter of 1978, the film became a critical and financial hit.

  After the success of Superman, one would have thought that producing a film based on the other superstar in the DC Comics line-up would be a slam-dunk, but a young comic book enthusiast who dreamed of doing just that found it instead to be a Sisyphean task. Michael Uslan began collecting comic books when he was a child, and had dreams of becoming a film producer. “The only way you can figure out how to make a transition like that,” said Uslan, “is to stay goal-directed and take small steps all in one direction, and try to get your foot in the door wherever you can.”9 While he was a law student at Indiana University, Uslan proposed an idea for a class within the university’s Experimental Curriculum program. The class, initially called The Comic Book in Society, was a fully accredited course on the history of comic books, and received attention both from the news media and the comics industry. “It was the publicity that came about from the comic book course I was teaching at IU that really made things happen for me,” said Uslan. “I never taught a class at IU in comics that the classroom wasn’t filled with TV cameras and reporters from all over. As a result of the massive amount of publicity, I was invited on radio and TV talk shows. And about three or so weeks into it, I got a call from [Marvel Comics publisher] Stan Lee, and just a couple hours later from [editor] Sol Harrison at DC Comics, and the calls were very similar. They said, ‘Everywhere we look we’re seeing you on TV, we’re reading about you in the papers and magazines. What you’re doing is great for the entire comic book industry; how can we help you?’ And Sol Harrison went a step further. Sol said, ‘I think someone who is this innovative and that knows comics so well and loves comics so much is the kind of person we’d like to be working with. And [DC publisher] Carmine Infantino and I would like to fly you into New York and discuss ways we might be able to work together.’ And that’s exactly what happened.10

  “The next thing I knew, I was leaving Bloomington and heading into New York for my first grown-up meetings ever, and they offered me a job that would be a summer job. This was long before there was a word ‘internship;’ they called us ‘junior

  woodchucks’ they were assembling, fans who could become the next generation of execs and editors and creative people in the comic book industry for DC Comics. And he agreed they would put me on retainer when I went back to school in Indiana, which was a godsend because I was making really no money at that time. So when I joined the woodchucks, there was a young kid who was there about six months before I started; Paul Levitz was his name. I don’t know whatever happened to the kid, but there’s a rumor that he grew up to become the president and publisher of DC Comics.11

  “Working at DC led me to meet so many of the editors, the creators, the executives, people who had been working in the business since the 1930s—it was a real education. And that led to an opportunity for me to start writing comics for Denny O’Neil. I started writing The Shadow, and then after my Shadow script had come out, [editor] Julie Schwartz offered me an opportunity to write Batman, which was the dream I had since I was 8 years old. And Bob Rozakis was becoming at that point Julie’s assistant, so it turned out Bob and I wrote Batman comics and Detective Comics. And that was just phenomenal.12

  “So, you can see how the steps were beginning to fall into place. And finally, at one point, ‘round about the time I was finishing college, I talked to Sol Harrison and said, ‘Well, my dream since I was 8 was to write Batman comics, and I’ve managed to do that.’ I said ‘My dream now is to make the definitive dark, serious version of Batman as a movie.’ My goal in life, which kind of crystallized in seventh grade, was to try to wipe those words Pow, Zap and Wham out of the collective consciousness of the world. And Sol was very fatherly towards me. He really was an amazing guy. He put his arm around me, he says, ‘Michael, please, save your money. Since Batman went off the air on TV he’s been as dead as a dodo. Nobody’s been interested in Batman in the media. Don’t do it.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but I think if we do it in a dark and serious way, the way it was originally created, it’s an opportunity to do something like nobody’s ever seen before, a whole new type of movie, a whole new type of hero.’ And he said, ‘Look, go get credentials. Get some credentials in the business, then come back and see me about it. In the meantime, I’ll let you know if anyone’s interested in the rights to Batman, but I’m sure nobody’s gonna be interested.’’

  “And that’s what I did. I wound up going to law school, and taking every course I could take having anything to do with communication and entertainment. I got out of law school, went to work for United Artists, which at that time was one of the major motion picture studios, they had just done One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And I got there just in time for Rocky and Annie Hall and Manhattan and The Spy Who Loved Me. We had Bound for Glory, Network, and then Apocalypse Now, The Black Stallion, Raging Bull. It was an amazing, amazing time to be there.13

  “And it was while working at UA for about three and a half years that I learned how you finance and produce movies. And I networked like mad and met so many people in the motion picture business. And finally after doing that for three and a half years, I said, ‘Okay, I’ve done my thing, I’ve gotten my credentials.’ I went back and talked to Sol, and he said, ‘Okay. Come on in. If I can’t talk you out of it, come on in.’”

  To show DC what he had in mind, and to help Hollywood executives understand his vision of a Dark Knight detective, Uslan decided to write a screenplay. He registered the copyright for his treatment Return of the Batman on April 1, 1979; less than three weeks later, on April 20, he registered the screenplay. “Going into it, a friend of mine, Michael Bourne, and myself had written a script called Return of the Batman that we were using not to sell it as a basis for the movies, but I had almost an impossible time making execs in the industry understand what a dark and serious Batman could be,” said Uslan. “They were so completely into the pot-bellied funny Batman from the TV show and could not even begin to grasp how Batman could work as a dark and serious project, so we wrot
e Return of the Batman.”14 The script featured an embittered, 50-ish Batman coming out of retirement for one last hurrah.

  Uslan knew that DC was unlikely to take a gamble with an inexperienced producer. “I knew I couldn’t come in by myself,” said Uslan. “I needed a partner, someone who knew how to mount a production, somebody who knew how to negotiate a deal that I felt I was too emotionally involved in to successfully negotiate.” Uslan set up a meeting with an industry veteran, Benjamin Melniker. “I met Ben’s son Charles at UA and Charles introduced me to Ben,” said Uslan. “Ben was a legend at MGM in its Tiffany days. Ben was executive vice-president; all divisions reported to him. He was with MGM since 1940, until ‘72. And he put together Ben-Hur, Doctor Zhivago, 2001, all the musicals like Gigi, and was really truly a legend in the business.”15

  “And after a six month negotiation,” said Uslan, “Ben Melniker and I acquired the rights to Batman on October 3, 1979.” That same day, the duo officially formed a company, Batfilm Productions, Inc.16 When Bob Kane got wind of Uslan’s activities, he was pleased with the young producer’s take on Batman. “Don’t expect camp or Adam West in a reprise,” Kane told The Chicago Tribune’s Elaine Markoutsas. “It’ll be more like James Bond, high adventure all over the world with lots of special effects like Star Wars. It will recapture the first year of mysterioso with fog-laden backgrounds, moors, the cape around Batman’s face, none of the old villains and ‘Holy this’ and ‘Holy that.’ Robin will not clown it up with ‘Holy frustrations.’”17

  With the film rights to Batman secured, Michael Uslan was on top of the world—or so he thought. “I put it in my pocket and I quit and I thought Hollywood was going to line up at my door,” he said, “and what then happened was I was turned down by every single studio in Hollywood. Everyone.” Even United Artists, Uslan’s former employer, rejected Batman, giving as their reason the fact that their aging Robin Hood drama, Robin and Marian (1976), had been a box office flop.18