Billion Dollar Batman

by Bruce Scivally

  Hamm turned in his first draft script on October 20, 1986. Much to his surprise, everyone seemed to like it. “I’m one of those guys who is constantly being told that the main character is not sympathetic enough and that sort of thing, so I wrote a script with a lead character who to my mind is a flat-out psychotic, and it was the first thing I’ve ever written where nobody had any sympathy problems—which raises some disturbing questions.”85

  Jon Peters was one of the script’s champions. “I never liked the Batman TV series,” said Peters. “I wanted to do a real aggressive picture, and it wasn’t until we got Sam Hamm’s script that we found the rough, dark edge we wanted. There’s lots of peril in this film and humor, but it’s not Raiders of the Lost Ark or Ghostbusters.”’ In the opening scenes, Hamm’s script is very much like the eventual movie, introducing Batman as an almost mythical figure and establishing that his costume is also his body armor, an idea borrowed from Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns.86 However, in the script, newspaperman Alexander Knox and Vicki Vale have a prior history; in the film, they meet for the first time. Also, in the initial Gotham Globe newsroom scene, the artist who hands Knox a drawing of “the bat” is named Jerry (perhaps an allusion to Jerry Robinson?), and there’s another reporter in the newsroom that wears spectacles and is named “Clark,” seemingly a nod to Superman’s Clark Kent.

  After the scene where Jack Napier falls into the chemical vat, we cut to The Gotham Globe newsroom, where Knox has society editor Miranda Reitz tell Vicki about Bruce Wayne’s playboy reputation—he’s known as “Mister One-Nighter.” We then cut to Vicki’s first date with Bruce, which begins on Bruce’s 40-foot cabin cruiser, Die Fledermaus. We get some insight into Vicki Vale’s background before Bruce takes her to La Donna e Mobile at the Gotham City Opera House, and then back to Wayne Mansion where he sleeps with her.

  Soon after, we see Jack Napier reborn as the Joker. When he passes by a couple of punk rock kids outside a club, a gust of wind blows his hat off, revealing his green locks and causing one of the punks to comment, “Nice hair, dude!” Following the Joker’s killing of crime boss Grissom, we go back to Wayne Manor, where Vicki awakens and finds Bruce singing “Honeysuckle Rose” in the bathroom. She enters and he stops, embarrassed. She notices that his body is covered in bruises and abrasions. “Poor thing,” she says, “You should stay off that horse.”

  There then follows a scene at The Gotham Globe, where Knox goes through morgue files on Bruce Wayne and finds a number of articles, but only two photos—one from 1973, and another, more recent one where he’s blocking his face by waving at the camera, leading Knox to wonder, “Why don’t you like your picture taken?”

  When the Joker announces he’s now leading Grissom’s gang, and kills one gangster with his high-voltage joy buzzer, he then, on a whim, decides to kill all the other gang leaders. There follows three scenes of mob bosses being killed, the first after playing cards and drawing a hand with five Jokers, the second in the park by a clown selling balloons who roasts him with a flamethrower, and the last after an attack by machine-gun-toting mimes, a murder witnessed by Bruce Wayne and Vicki Vale. Interestingly, Bruce Wayne, in daylight, unable to find a place to change, is overwhelmed by the violence and has a momentary breakdown; this is a man who needs darkness to be in control. As Hamm puts it in his script, “Suddenly Bruce is running frantically, looking for a secluded spot, an alleyway, anything. No go. He’s out in the open, with onlookers everywhere. In his civvies, he’s just another citizen... TOTALLY IMPOTENT. He darts around a corner, backs against a wall. Women, children, grown men race past. No privacy. He’s practically quaking now, in the throes of some terrible anxiety. He looks up at the sky overhead, terrified. A brilliant sun bears down on him as machine guns chatter.”

  At the midpoint, Dick Grayson is introduced. The Joker kills the Flying Graysons, who are performing an acrobatic act with trapezes suspended from helicopters. Bruce, of course, takes the youngster under his wing. As the script proceeds, the Vicki Vale-Bruce Wayne romance is explored more thoroughly; before the end of the script, Vicki figures out who Bruce is, and so does Alexander Knox, who dies in the confusion at the finale.

  The third act ends with Batman, in the Batwing, pursing the Joker and his goons, who are in a tank. Batman fires a missile that opens up the street in front of the tank, but not before the Joker manages to shoot down the Batwing. The tank crashes into the crevice, and the Batwing crashes behind it. Batman’s leg is broken, and he’s trapped in the Batwing, but Dick Grayson arrives to pull him out of the burning wreckage. Grayson then pursues the Joker into Gotham Cathedral, until Batman appears and knocks Grayson out with a ninja star. Batman continues the pursuit, following the Joker up into a bell tower. By the time he reaches the top, Batman is so weak he’s virtually powerless, collapsing helplessly. The Joker calls for a helicopter, and then approaches Batman. Wiping blood off Batman’s face, he finally recognizes Batman as Bruce Wayne.

  Batman then sets off a device that the Joker mistakes for a ticking bomb; instead, it’s a sonar device that causes hundreds of bats to fly up through the belfry. The bats cause the Joker’s helicopter to crash, killing the criminal. The end of the script finds Bruce Wayne recuperating in the indoor pool of his mansion, with Vicki by his side, while Dick Grayson goes through a gymnastics routine in the gymnasium. The final shot echoes the ending of Mankiewicz’s script—the Batsignal lights up the night sky of Gotham, and Batman and Robin stand on a building ledge, ready to undertake new adventures.

  Initially, producer Jon Peters was satisfied with the screenplay. Nevertheless, Hamm was requested to make revisions, eventually churning out five drafts of the script. “It was a great responsibility,” said Hamm. “What you wind up doing when you’re putting an existing character in a major Hollywood film is you’re essentially defining that character for a whole generation of people; and most people have certainly heard of Batman, but they are probably not that familiar with it. So what you’re doing becomes sort of ipso facto canonical. That was something that I was very, very conscious of. The thing that I decided early on was that I wanted really to do what would be a really, really cool Batman story that would be as good as the way you remember the comics being from when you were a kid.”87

  While the script was being hammered out, Tim Burton made his second feature, Beetlejuice (1988), the tale of ghosts haunting their former home who want to drive out the new owners and hire a “bio-exorcist” named Beetlejuice to do it. The Warner Bros. film featured a bravura performance by Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice, and proved to be an even bigger hit than Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, earning over $73 million in the U.S. After just two films, Tim Burton had arrived, in spectacular fashion. Warner Bros. was now satisfied that he was just the man to shepherd Batman to the big screen; after the first weekend’s grosses from Beetlejuice came in, they officially hired Burton. “It was kind of charming in a way,” said Burton, “because Sam and I would meet on weekends to discuss the early writing stages, and we had a great script, but they kept saying there were other things involved. They were just waiting to see how Beetlejuice did. They didn’t want to give me that movie unless Beetlejuice was going to be okay. They wouldn’t say that, but that was really the way it was. So, after that first weekend, it got the magical green-light.”88 Filming was set to begin in October 1988 at London’s Pinewood Studios.

  It was around this time that Melniker and Uslan read in the industry trade papers that Batman was going before the cameras, with Guber and Peters named as the sole producers. They contacted Jim Miller, the head of business affairs at Warner Bros., protesting that the studio was breaching the contract they had originally signed with Casablanca. Miller matter-of-factly told them they could either sign an amended contract or be forced off the project. Uslan, the man who had first envisioned making a dark, moody Batman film in the first place, had worked too hard for too long to throw it all away. He and Melniker reluctantly signed the agreement, which gave them credit as executiv
e producers but little else.89

  PRE-PRODUCTION REVISIONS

  With Burton firmly on board, Jon Peters took over the day-to-day production of Batman. The script, he felt, still needed work, but in March of 1988, the Writer’s Guild went on strike, and Sam Hamm decided it was more proper to be loyal to his union than to his employers. “I had a little falling out with Warner Bros. and the production in particular when I refused to work during the writers strike, which struck those guys as the height of ingratitude,” said Hamm.90 With Hamm sidelined (he spent the strike period writing three 50th anniversary Batman stories for DC’s Detective Comics), Jon Peters began looking for other writers. He eventually brought in Warren Skaaren. Skaaren, like Hamm, was a relative newcomer; his first script sale was Fire With Fire, in 1985.91 Unlike Hamm, the Minnesota-born Skaaren, who founded the Texas Film Commission and became its first director in 1971,92 wasn’t much of a comic book fan. “I read them sort of moderately,” said Skaaren. “I wasn’t a complete fanatic. I liked them, but I was a country kid, so I was more likely trying to look at a muskrat somewhere than read a comic.”93 After doing rewrites of Beverly Hills Cop II (1987) and Beetlejuice (1988), Skaaren developed a reputation as a first-rate script doctor. He was also acquainted with Batman’s director. “Tim Burton and I had just done Beetlejuice together,” said Skaaren. “Sam Hamm was writing Batman. He’s a very good writer, and did a lot of excellent work on it, but somewhere along the way, they wanted another point-of-view, so Warners called me.”94 Skaaren was already doing research in preparation for writing the racecar film Days of Thunder. He later said that he “had no inclination to do Batman, but they called about three or four times. I finally read it, and saw some contributions I could make.”95

  One of Skaaren’s first moves was to eliminate Robin (something previous writers had been all but forbidden to do), putting more of the focus on Batman and giving more time to develop Bruce Wayne and Vicki Vale’s relationship.96 Burton agreed with the move. “Ultimately it was too much psychology to throw into one movie,” said Burton. “If there’s another movie, Robin would have to be established at the beginning, not be crammed into the third act.”97 Besides that, Burton wasn’t sure how to make Robin’s outfit work without getting laughs. “We would lift our arms up and say, ‘Let’s have them both go to Frederick’s of Hollywood to pick out that little green costume,’” said the director.98 It was a problem that had also plagued the previous screenwriter, Sam Hamm. “I always wanted to have a scene,” said Hamm, “where having established that the Batman wears his costume because ‘criminals are a cowardly, superstitious lot,’ we would then introduce Dick Grayson in his Robin costume, his little red vest and green trunks and bare legs and yellow cape, and Batman says, ‘Yeah, that’ll scare the hell out of them.’”99

  With Robin jettisoned, Skaaren had room to add other scenes. It was Skaaren who decided that the murderer of Bruce Wayne’s parents would be a young Jack Napier, later to become the Joker. “I did that because, psychologically, the Joker and Batman create each other,” said Skaaren, interviewed by Pat Jankiewicz for Comics Scene magazine. “All good hero/villain matches have some deeply personal connection, and what more permanent violence could you do to someone than kill his parents? You’ve made an enemy for life. I like that. At the same time, I wanted to deal with the real history in the comic books, that his parents were murdered in front of him. Batman has many problems because he has to operate without being caught and the fact that he falls in love with Vicki Vale exposes him in a way that makes it harder for him to function. On top of that, he begins to sense that there’s something special about this character, the Joker. He doesn’t know what it is, but it starts to affect him because his unconscious knows before his conscious does that this guy killed his parents. Batman has a much more complicated life than the Joker, because he has many obstacles in his way, where all the Joker wants to do is blast through.”100 When Sam Hamm heard that Skaaren had made Napier the murderer of Bruce Wayne’s parents, he was not pleased, to say the least, calling the change “grotesque and vulgar.” In an interview with Jeff Gelb for Comics Interview magazine, Hamm said, “It turns the story into more of a sort of Death Wish thing, where a guy goes out and gets revenge for having been wronged...My feeling is once he nails the guy who ruined his life, he can hang up the suit happily.”101

  Among the scenes that didn’t make it into the final film were some that helped provide some background for the Joker’s deadly Smilex gas, clearly showing it as a CIA experiment from the 1970s that resulted in dead soldiers with lips drawn back in chemical-induced grimaces before it was discontinued.102 Another scene had Vicki called to a photographer’s studio, where she was told that the client who’d hired her was named Joseph Kerr. Just as she realizes who Joe Kerr is, the models die laughing, with frightful, chemical-warfare-type grins on their faces.103

  Afterwards, when the Joker comes to Vicki’s apartment, he shoots Bruce Wayne, who is saved by the bullet hitting a leather bag he’s carrying with his utility belt inside (the bullet strikes the belt). The Joker and his goons leave with Vicki, and Bruce gives chase on a stolen police horse, wearing the utility belt and a black ski mask he takes from Vicki’s closet. He hits a button on the utility belt that acts as a tracer, and soon Alfred arrives in a yellow VW, handing him his Batman outfit. The Joker goes to the town square, where the Mayor is about to unveil a new statue of city founder John T. Gotham. But when the mayor pulls a cord that causes the shroud covering the statue to drop, it reveals a polychrome statue of the Joker holding two Uzis like six-shooters. Batman arrives to stop the Joker from killing the Mayor. The Joker disappears down an open sewer, and Batman fires a line up to the top of a nearby building and zips away, with Vicki snapping photos with a camera that had been handed to her by one of the Joker’s goons. Later, she learns that there was no film in the camera. The scene was one of Skaaren’s personal favorites. “The best scene that’s not in the film,” said Skaaren, “that I miss the most, that hurts the most, was after Batman comes down on a wire with Vicki. Someone calls out, ‘Look—Batman’s fallen over here!’ People run over, and the bat cape’s down on the ground. Batman’s under it, but you can’t see his face. Vicki and Commissioner Gordon come over, pull the bat-cape off, we’re gonna reveal who Batman is—when it turns out to be Alexander Knox! Batman has covered him up, and you see Batman escaping through the crowd, wearing Knox’s coat. It works because one of the themes I inserted into the movie was that no one ever sees Batman with his mask off. I guess they shot it, and there was something technically wrong with the scene in the film processing.”104

  Despite his contention that “no on would ever see Batman with his mask off,” Skaaren wrote a scene that would raise the hackles of die-hard Batfans, with faithful butler Alfred allowing Vicki Vale into the Batcave to confront Bruce Wayne. Skaaren felt the scene was justifiable if one thought of Alfred as a surrogate father for Wayne. “He tries to talk Batman into engaging in this relationship with Vicki,” said Skaaren. “He says at one point, ‘I’m getting too old to mourn the loss of old friends... or their sons.’ That line indicates Alfred is getting to be an older guy, and he’s afraid that Batman—that Bruce Wayne is going to be hurt, so he wants Bruce to become more healthy. Part of that would be to accept this relationship with Vicki. So, Alfred’s in cahoots with Vicki, as an unspoken conspirator. He brings her into the Batcave because he wants Bruce to be with her.”105

  With Dick Grayson no longer involved in the ending, Skaaren pared down the finale and put Vicki Vale in the belfry with the Joker. Unlike the previous draft, Batman is not as physically damaged as he closes in on the Joker, so that the end result was a fight that seemed perhaps too heavily weighted in the Caped Crusader’s favor. “There’s an inherent problem there,” said Skaaren. “You’re dealing with Batman and supposedly all this armor, but the way I wrote it, which didn’t quite get shot, is that Joker deals him a couple of tough blows in the beginning. I also added that ledge, so that Bat
man’s hanging off that, trying to save himself much of the time. The way I wrote it, the helicopter comes in earlier, so the Joker has the advantage of some men up there with guns and a helicopter, but the way they actually shoot something and the way it’s cut is different. The key contribution I made there is the whole gambit where it looks like Batman has fallen off the tower. What I did was just sit down with a chalkboard. I drew the tower, and all the possibilities I could think of that would be dramatic. The best I could think of is that the audience thinks Batman has fallen with Vicki.”106

  Jon Peters was enthused with Skaaren’s rewrite, saying that “ultimately, it worked out the story. It had a dark side and an aggressive, avant-garde quality that the others didn’t. We cover how he began, and then we pick the story up when he’s a grown-up, where he is in fact a man in search of his own identity, trying to deal with all of the crime and saving Gotham City. He’s powered by his own pain, the loss of his parents, and dealing with that as an adult. The Joker is the king of Gotham, dedicated to crime and to the complete control of the city by intimidation and menace. And Batman is the only thing that stands in his way.”107

  As he was writing the script, Skaaren received unsolicited guidance from Batman’s creator. “DC Comics never voiced any opinion while I was writing it, but I did get notes from Bob Kane a couple times,” said the screenwriter. “He would read the script and send me notes, which was nice.”108