Billion Dollar Batman

by Bruce Scivally

  “That began what ultimately would become a ten year journey to try to bring this dark and serious vision of Batman to the screen,” said Uslan. “Part of the reason that we were turned down by every single studio when we pitched Batman as a dark movie initially was because they kept coming back to me and saying, ‘You can’t do this. The only Batman everyone will remember and love is the pot-bellied funny guy,’ or they would say, ‘Michael, you’re crazy. You can’t make a movie out of some old TV series. That’s never been done.’ And it was even a struggle to make them comprehend and accept the fact this was a comic book that had been around since 1939 as opposed to an attempt to make a movie based on an old TV series. But that gives you kind of the frames of mind that we were dealing with at that time. We’d been turned down by every studio in Hollywood, the clock was ticking, and Ben said, ‘You know, when I was at MGM, there was this bright young man around 1968, ‘69 that I wanted to make president of production at MGM in a troika with Barry Beckerman and Jerry Tokofsky, and it was Peter Guber.’”19

  Peter Guber, who started his career as a lawyer in New York, became head of film production at Columbia Pictures in 1969, when he was just 26 years old. In 1976, he left to join Neil Bogart, the guiding light behind Casablanca Records (a company best known for giving the world music acts such as KISS, Parliament, and Donna Summer) in the formation of Casablanca Filmworks. While there, Guber produced The Deep (1977) and Midnight Express (1978), both of which became box-office hits. With the company on a roll, Guber and Bogart were now attracting the attention of international investors; the entertainment conglomerate PolyGram bought a half interest in Casablanca Records and Filmworks in 1977.

  Benjamin Melniker thought that Peter Guber, unlike the more entrenched Hollywood veterans, would see the promise in Batman. “Ben said Peter is younger and a lot more hip than the guys we’ve been talking to,” recalled Uslan, “and he said he may have a different perspective on this. So Ben got Peter on the phone, put me on the phone with him, I pitched it, and Peter said, ‘Wow! Okay, I see where you’re going with this. I get this. This is good. You should get out here.’ We were in New York, Peter was in L.A. He says, ‘Get out here, like, tomorrow, and let’s talk about this.’ And we couldn’t, of course, get out there in one day, but we were there maybe the second day or the third day and pitched it in person to Peter, and he said, ‘Absolutely, I get this. We will finance the development of this project and we will bring in distribution.’ And three days later we had the deal.”20 In November of 1979, Uslan and Melniker entered into an arrangement with Casablanca that promised them creative control, credit as producers, and forty percent of whatever profits Casablanca received.21

  During the next year, Neil Bogart left the company, and Guber teamed with a new partner, Jon Peters. Peters, himself a highly motivated young entrepreneur, had graduated from being a reform school roughneck to becoming a hairdresser to the stars; the Warren Beatty character in Shampoo was reputedly based on him. After he began dating Barbra Streisand, he spearheaded a successful 1976 remake of A Star is Born, and suddenly became a producer.22 He was also a pugnacious personality and a ceaseless self-promoter. Though he may have lacked Guber’s polish, he shared with his new partner a burning desire to be a major Hollywood player. They soon became the chiefs of Polygram Pictures, with $100 million of Polygram’s money backing them. Unfortunately, they got off to a rocky start when their first joint production, a film about street racing called King of the Mountain, earned only $2.1 million at the box office. However, their next film, a story of teen obsession starring Brooke Shields called Endless Love, brought in over $30 million domestically.23

  Shortly after teaming with Guber, Jon Peters met with Uslan and Melniker at New York’s Carlyle Hotel. In his hyperbolic way, Peters later intimated to an interviewer that Batman was a natural project for him. “I grew up on Batman,” he told Starlog’s Adam Pirani. “I was a Batman fanatic. One of the reasons that we took on such a thing—when I was a kid, I always used to go to parties in a Batman outfit, and jump off second stories onto people. Batman has always been the kind of superhero that I loved.”24 At this early meeting, Peters asked if Uslan and Melniker could give him a memo outlining their vision for Batman. Uslan duly prepared one. Dated November 6, 1980, the single-spaced, 9-page document said, “No longer portrayed as a pot-bellied caped clown, Batman has again become a vigilante who stalks criminals in the shadow of night.” Uslan went on to recommend that Robin should either not appear in the film or should only be a minor character, and that the villain should be the Joker—preferably played by Jack Nicholson.25 “I have to say, from the very beginning, he was the only actor I thought could really play the Joker,” said Uslan. “For me, the final straw on that happened in 1980. It was Memorial Day weekend, and The Shining and The Empire Strikes Back were both opening up, and I got on the bus in New York heading back to New Jersey and picked up The New York Post. And I open it up on the bus, and there I see for the first time the classic still from The Shining, the ‘Here’s Johnny’ shot of Jack Nicholson, and I looked at it, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I tore it out, I raced home, I sat down and I whited out Jack’s face, I took a red pen and did his lips, I took a green magic marker and did his hair, and I used that from that moment on to show everybody that this is the only guy who can play the Joker.”26

  In February of 1981, at the annual Sho-West convention of 1,500 cinema exhibitors and distributors at the Las Vegas’ MGM Grand hotel, PolyGram Pictures held a three-hour marathon of their coming attractions. Peter Guber announced that the company had “20 to 25” pictures planned, including A Chorus Line, The Deep II, Costa-Gavras’ Missing, two Dudley Moore vehicles (Dangerously and Six Weeks), and Batman.27 But by 1982, PolyGram had severed ties with Guber and Peters. Undeterred, the dynamic duo set up their own company, Guber-Peters Entertainment, at Warner Bros. Uslan and Melniker were not privy to the details of Guber and Peters’ new deal, but they assumed their original agreement with Guber was part of the package.28 It would prove to be a costly assumption.

  Under Steve Ross’s stewardship, Warner Communications had branched out into the new industries of cable television and video games, but at a considerable price, both personal and financial. In 1978, Ross and his wife, Carol, divorced. Two years later, he suffered a serious heart attack. Upon recovery, Ross married Amanda Burden, the daughter of CBS chairman William S. Paley. That marriage lasted only 16 months. During this time, Warner stock plummeted after the videogame company Atari collapsed, and Warner Communications seemed ripe for corporate raiders. In 1983, in order to stave off Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to buy Warner Bros., Ross sold 20 percent of the company to Chris-Craft Industries. For the next five years, Ross would be partnered with Chris-Craft chairman Herbert J. Siegel. The two clashed often over which assets Warner Bros. should sell to extricate itself from the Atari meltdown.29

  During this time, Uslan and Melniker, with their new partners Guber and Peters, set about coming up with a workable screenplay. The obvious template for a long-running film series was the 007 films, which had begun with 1962’s Dr. No and by early 1981 had sustained ten sequels with the eleventh, For Your Eyes Only, due out that summer. Uslan had some preliminary talks with Richard Maibaum, who had scripted the majority of the 007 film adventures, but those discussions proved unfruitful. However, as it happened, Peter Guber knew a screenwriter who had written two James Bond movies—Tom Mankiewicz. “I’d known Peter Guber before, when he was head of production at Columbia,” said Mankiewicz, “and I’d rewritten some pictures for him over there, and of course, the first picture he ever produced, which was The Deep, I rewrote down in the Caribbean. So I knew Peter very well.”30 Perhaps more importantly, Mankiewicz, a first-rate script doctor, had solid comic book credentials; he had been brought in by director Richard Donner to whip the scripts for Superman and Superman II into shape, eventually receiving a “creative consultant” credit.

  “We were very comfortable with Tom,” said Uslan. �
�He was just really, really great to work with. Tom’s script came in with a bit of a Bond flair to it, in an attempt to do it a lot more seriously. You know, we wanted a real serious approach to The Batman as opposed to Batman.”31

  To help research the character, Mankiewicz returned to the source—the comic books. “I re-read some of them, and I had several long sessions with Bob Kane, who was a very gregarious guy and he was so desperate to get it on. As a matter of fact, Bob Kane made an original drawing for me of Batman in front of the moon, the original version of Batman, like he drew him in the 30’s or the 40’s, much more angular, and that’s one of my proudest possessions. And he loved the script, but I think Bob Kane at that point was going to love just about any script because he really wanted to see it on screen.”32 Jon Peters said of Kane, “He has been helpful in going back to ideas, material and graphics from the beginning. He’s the father of Batman, so it’s like dealing with his child. We’re trying to keep some of the integrity and yet be creative in making our own vision.”33

  Mankiewicz agreed with Uslan that the way to interpret that vision for the big screen was to avoid the campiness of the Batman TV series. “One thing they did know was they were not going to do a Poof! Pow! kind of thing,” said Mankiewicz. “Batman had worked on television because they made fun of it. And a lot of it was hedging your bets, because nobody knew at that time what would happen with a comic strip character, and you had this strange desire as a writer, especially if you’re a good one, to show the audience you’re smarter than the material. And I think the trick to writing something like Batman or Superman is to not be smarter than the material, but to get inside it. “

  When Mankiewicz was brought on to Superman, director Richard Donner asked him to pare down the combined script for the two movies, which was over five hundred pages long. “Dick and I on Superman had little signs on our doors at Pinewood; each one said ‘Verisimilitude.’ So Superman landing on Lois’s balcony was like two kids on their first date, and when he takes her flying, it’s just romantic. You get inside it. And Batman was hugely successful on television, but they stayed outside it. It was Oof! Pow! Bing!, you know.”34 Mankiewicz took the dark approach to Batman literally. “I always saw 90% of it as happening at night,” he said, “and I thought that Batman was just based on revenge. I think my script starts with the murder of his parents. It’s among the first couple of scenes. And again, that happens at night.35

  “In my concept, there was such fury inside the guy at night, when he appeared,

  and a guy whose parents had been murdered, a guy who in my script, because I tried to throw the whole ball of wax in there, who adopts Robin, it’s almost like he’s the parent of a kid who had been deprived of his own parents. I saw him as a very complex fellow. And I remember saying, boy, if you ever let him go out and walk down 5th Avenue at twelve o’clock noon, he’s a guy in a funny suit, but at night, he’s terrifying.”36

  Mankiewicz finished his script in the summer of 1983. Structurally, it was much like the script for Superman, beginning with the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents, following him through his teenage years into young manhood as he trained his mind and body to perfection, then cutting to the present day story, where he assumes the black cowl and cape of The Batman. Once The Batman appears, there follows a Superman-esque montage of Batman performing good deeds for a night, while bewildered police commissioner David Gordon (not Jim Gordon) wonders about the identity of the caped avenger.

  While not as campy as the TV series, the script was still laden with Mankiewicz’s trademark witty one-liners, as when the Penguin, in his ice-cold lair, says to the Joker, “I’m heart-broken you haven’t touched your food. I had that clown fish cooked especially for you. Do you prefer codfish balls?” The Joker responds, “I don’t know. I never attended any.”37

  Mankiewicz’s script is laden with an abundance of villains, from Rupert Thorne, who orders Joe Chill to murder Thomas Wayne, his rival for a City Council seat, to the Joker, who helps Thorne make Gotham City safe for criminals. The Penguin, in his brief appearance, uses a helicopter umbrella and has three goons with 007-style jetpacks. Near the end, in the third act, we get the murder of Dick Grayson’s parents. In a nod to Bill Finger’s penchant for using giant-sized props in the comic books, the finale takes place in a museum exhibit honoring the craft of writing, with giant-sized typewriters, pencil sharpeners, erasers and inkwells employed during the inevitable melee. Dick Grayson assists Batman in his ultimate battle with the Joker, and in the final shot, Grayson appears in uniform as Robin. There’s also a romantic interest, Silver St. Cloud, who was a character created by comic book writer Steve Englehart and introduced in Detective Comics # 470 in June, 1977.

  Mankiewicz had fun writing the Joker. “My model for the Joker was Henny Youngman, the old one-line comic of just bad jokes,” said Mankiewicz. “Henny Youngman used to have an old joke saying, ‘A bum came up to me and told me he hadn’t had a bite in days, so I bit him.’ And, in my script, there’s a bum on the street, and people are walking by, and you just see the bottom half of them, and suddenly these big pair of clown shoes goes by, and he says, ‘Please, mister, I haven’t had a bite in days,’ and the Joker leans down and bites him on the hand, viciously. That was my introduction of the Joker as I recall. But he was based more on a one-line comic, with the rapid-fire delivery.”38

  Though Uslan was enthused about Mankiewicz’s work, the executives at Warner Bros. had some concerns. By that time, Steve Ross had appointed Robert Daly Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Office of Warner Bros., and Daly chose Terry Semel to be the company’s President and Chief Operating Office. Tom Mankiewicz recalled that Daly and Semel “were terrific people, and their big concern over my draft was that it was too dark. Why couldn’t it be more fun and up like Superman, with Lex Luthor and so on? And I tried to explain to them the rules. I said, ‘Guys, Batman is a dark figure. The rules about Batman are completely different than Superman. Superman comes from the planet Krypton. You can have jokes about Superman, you can have fun with Superman as well as the drama that was in that movie, but Bruce Wayne is a human being. And, in my opinion, we should never see Bruce Wayne, Batman, on the street during the day. He’s got to work at night; otherwise he becomes a guy in a silly suit because he’s a man. He’s not, you know, an alien powerful creature.’”39

  With a script completed, the filmmakers began considering possible directors. Still thinking of putting Batman in the James Bond mold, a former 007 director was approached. “We had some talks with Guy Hamilton,” said Uslan. “The best of the best of the adventure-action franchises were the Bonds, and Guy Hamilton had done Goldfinger.”40 The script also went out to Richard Rush, director of the critically acclaimed The Stunt Man (1980), and then the execs at Warner Bros. sent it to a more unlikely choice. “They thought, well, we’ve got to get more fun in it, it’s so dark,” said Mankiewicz, “and they had me meet with Ivan Reitman, who had just done Ghostbusters, and Ivan and I got along fine. And Ivan agreed with me, he thought Batman should be dark. They, I guess, thought that Ivan would add some humor, and they knew I could write the humor.”41

  When Reitman eventually passed, the script went to Joe Dante. “He had done Gremlins for them,” said Mankiewicz. “And I’d helped out on Gremlins, and then it was just clear, Jon and Peter were really anxious to get it going.” Dante, however, was less anxious. He recalled, “After Gremlins started making money, they came to me and asked ‘Would you like to do our Batman?’ So I signed on. It was a good project, I grew up with Batman—but the problem was, I didn’t really believe in Batman. I just couldn’t swallow the idea of the guy living up on a hill, dressing up as a bat, Robin and all that. I didn’t feel right about it so I went in and told them that I didn’t think I was the right guy for the movie. They, of course, said ‘You must be crazy!’ But I seriously believed, and still do, that I wasn’t the right choice for the movie.”42

  Warners also approached Richard Donner, director of Super
man. “They talked to Dick Donner about it once,” said Mankiewicz. “Dick did not want to follow Superman with Batman.”43 What Donner did want to do was Ladyhawke, a medieval romantic fantasy, and he took his favorite script doctor, Mankiewicz, with him. With that, Mankiewicz moved on from the Batman project. “I never wrote a second draft,” he said.44 “And frankly, while I was paid very handsomely for the first draft, Ladyhawke really intrigued me. It was nowhere near the hit that Batman was, but I sort of wanted to get away from comic strips. I thought I would be Mr. Comic Strip. Superman, and then Batman. In fact, I got offered a lot of comics at that time.”45

  Guber and Peters, meanwhile, also busied themselves with other projects. “We were making thirty other pictures,” said Peters, “everything from The Color Purple to Flashdance to Caddyshack to The Witches of Eastwick. We paid Tom Mankiewicz $750,000...and still came up with something that was too derivative, too much like Superman.”46

  While the project went through development, the Hollywood rumor mill began to buzz with possible names to play the Caped Crusader. For a while, Guber and Peters entertained the idea of Bill Murray playing Batman to Eddie Murphy’s Robin. “I wanted an action picture that was funny,” said Peters.47 Though he admitted Murray wasn’t a conventional choice, he thought the former Saturday Night Live comedian would be “funny, offbeat and aggressive.”48 He also admitted, “Peter and I have done 67 movies, and a lot of them began, in concept, as party jokes.”49 Murray, who had ventured into more dramatic territory with the film The Razor’s Edge (1984), later told MTV’s Shawn Adler, “I would have been a fine Batman...It’s obviously — it’s a great role.”50

  For his part, Michael Uslan didn’t have a definite actor in mind for the lead role. “I don’t know that I ever particularly focused so much on an actor to play Batman as I did the Joker,” he said. “You know, we had talked for years that we would probably get an unknown to play Batman the way that Christopher Reeve was chosen to play Superman.”51 Nonetheless, the producers prepared a list of probable Batmen. “It was the people who were doing anything action-wise at the time,” said Uslan, “and it must have been a list about ten long.”52 Over the years, the list included such names as Alec Baldwin, Tom Cruise, Daniel Day-Lewis, Pierce Brosnan, Kevin Costner, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mel Gibson, Robert Downey, Jr. and Tom Selleck.