Billion Dollar Batman

by Bruce Scivally

  Batman’s creator, Bob Kane, traveled to London with his wife, Elizabeth Sanders, to keep an eye on the proceedings. He appeared in a short featurette, walking around the thirty-foot high sets of Gotham City and talking about how they reminded him of the New York of his youth, and he was scheduled to do some other work in front of the cameras. “I was supposed to be in the film,” said Kane, “in a newsroom as Bob the cartoonist, drawing a bat in a suit. When I first read the scene, it said Jerry the cartoonist, and I told Tim they’d spelled Jerry wrong, ‘It’s not J-E-R-R-Y, it’s B-O-B.’ So I was in it; I went to London in November, but they had to put my scene back to the middle of January. I had an engagement in New York so we flew back across.”234 Kane and his wife returned to New York in mid-December, just a week before Pan Am Flight 103, bound from London to New York, was destroyed by a bomb in mid-air over Lockerbie, Scotland. “We left on that same plane a week earlier,” said Kane. “So I was a little apprehensive, obviously...So, I wouldn’t fly back in the winter just to do my scene.”235

  As filming progressed on the massive sets, the biggest problem Burton encountered was not his actors but his producer, Jon Peters, whose quest to improve the film threatened to make it implode. Besides constantly firing and hiring crewmembers, Peters was forever pushing Skaaren to rewrite scenes, and eventually brought in Charles McKeown, scriptwriter of Brazil (1985) and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), to make yet more revisions. The tension of dealing with the mammoth production and ever-changing script began to get to Burton. “I was probably as sick as I’ve ever been on a movie, all the time,” said the director. “I was out of it. I was sick. See, the problem is, it was my first big movie. There’s all these people around. There’s a different energy. There’s no way to prepare. No way to prepare. More money. More tension. More fear. Everything: more, more, more. More. And I just let something happen, which I’ll try to never let happen again, which is to let the script unravel...Here we started out with a script that everybody said...’Oh, it’s a great script, it’s a great script.’ But at the end of the day, they basically shred it. So it went from being the greatest script in the world to basically unraveling. And once it unravels, it unravels...And a lot of it had to do with dealing with the energies of the studio and the producers and everybody just being there and doing it—there was no one thing; it was a big animal.”236

  Burton was also worn down by the long hours. On his previous, smaller- budgeted films, he’d had a five-day work week. On Batman, it was a six-day week. “Usually, if you have the weekend, you can regroup a little bit. There was absolutely no time to regroup,” said Burton.237 “I’ll never do six days a week again. It’s counter- productive. It looks good on paper, but when people are working that hard on this kind of movie, myself included, Saturday rolls around and you’re working in negative space. You’re so scatterbrained, and then the problems just build up. You don’t have a second to think about it and resolve it, and step back and say, ‘Well, see, let’s cut this out,’ because you are blindly going through it. Plus, we had a full second unit which I had never had or dealt with before, so I felt like there was no time to think on this film. By the end, I was taking it almost a day at a time. It got to be very frightening. It just stems from the problems on the script. Things change anyway, but usually, you have Saturday.”238

  There was drama off the set as well as on. After Kim Basinger arrived in London with her husband, Ron Snyder, Jon Peters took them to dinner. Before the meal ended, Snyder and Peters were at each other’s throats. Snyder returned to America soon after, and Peters, whose own marriage had ended, began romancing Basinger. Before long, they had begun an affair which lasted throughout filming; Basinger called Peters her “sweetheart hoodlum.”239 Burton, meanwhile, embarked on a romance of his own, with a German artist he met at a party named Lena Gieseke.240

  Burton later admitted that while Peters’ micro-managing could be maddening, it was sometimes beneficial. “Before I met Jon, people said, ‘Watch out—Jon’s this, Jon’s that, he’s not creative,’” said Burton. “And I definitely argue that point. He is creative, and he did have some good ideas...I was not seduced by Jon. What I responded to in Jon was just the insanity, the nuts quality. I loved that somebody just said whatever they thought. You don’t hear people doing that.”241

  When it came time to film a scene where the Joker and his goons interrupt Bruce Wayne in Vicki Vale’s apartment just as he’s about to reveal his identity to her, the producer felt the script as written didn’t show enough of Wayne’s attraction for Vale. He also felt that Wayne’s face-off with the Joker lacked drama. “We ran into troubles because, by the shoot’s end, there were sequences that weren’t quite solidified,” said Burton. “I figure if I ever had it to do over again, I would want to make the script better. But there’s no point in freaking out. You must stick by what you’re doing, and I think it got a little bit out of hand.”242

  One day after filming had ended, Peters asked Burton to come to his hotel suite, where the producer and director improvised dialogue for the scene, with Peters playing Bruce Wayne and Burton as Vicki Vale. The following morning, they continued working out the scene on the apartment set at Pinewood, along with Warren Skaaren. Burton then brought in the actors, who had their own ideas.243 “Especially near the end of the shooting, between the actors and myself, we sort of wrote the movie,” Burton said. “Part of the rationale for the creation of new dialogue was to bring cinematic reality to a previously two-dimensional world. You’re taking something which is very absurd and you want to make it as real as possible, and then it has to do with the actors, too. Some actors can say lines fine, other actors will come in and say, ‘This is shit, I can’t do this,’ and I listen to them. If I feel that they’re right, then I let them—with me—tune it to their individual selves, because otherwise, you shouldn’t have had that person in the role.”244 The apartment scene was filmed the next day, and although Burton found the process unsettling, he later admitted, “It’s one of my favorite scenes.”245

  One of Anton Furst’s most impressive sets was the mammoth Batcave set. “I transformed it into the foundation of Gotham City, a bit like Phantom of the Opera,” said Furst. “There’s something amorphous and boring to me about cave structure, but if you start having piles of the bottoms of skyscrapers coming down through this great chasm in the ground, you can end up with an extraordinarily interesting set.”246 While filming on the set, however, Michael Keaton noticed there were sexual shenanigans going on as the cameras rolled. In the fake stalactites up above him, the live fruit bats brought in to lend a creepy atmosphere were gettin’ busy. Between takes, Keaton would look up at them and yell, “Hey, you two! Don’t make me have to come up there and separate you!” The set began to seem even more authentic as the days rolled by and it took on the heady aroma of fruit bat urine.247

  Thanks to the last-minute rewrites, there was one scene filmed on the Batcave set that eventually offended die-hard Batfans. As Bruce Wayne sits pensively at the Batcomputer, Alfred enters, with Vicki Vale. Bruce looks up but doesn’t question what she’s doing there. “Obviously, that was the one thing I got killed for,” Burton later told David Breskin of Rolling Stone. “It was rough...My impulse was, I said to myself, ‘Fuck this bullshit!’ This is comic-book material. I thought, you know, who really cares? But it was a mistake. It went too far...This is the trouble that I have. This is where sometimes there will be big gaps in something that I do. I try very hard to create my own environment. And so far it’s worked out. But sometimes there will be a leap that people don’t buy, they don’t buy, they don’t buy. They go, ‘Whoa!’ and it takes them out of it. I don’t want to take people out of something. I spend a large time trying to not have that happen.”248

  Not all of the filming was done within the confines of Pinewood. For exteriors of Wayne Manor, as well as the dining scene between Vicki Vale and Bruce Wayne, the crew trekked out to Knebworth House in Hertfordshire, thirty miles outside London. On
ce the home of Victorian author Edward Bulwer-Lytton (author of the infamous line, “It was a dark and stormy night...”), the Tudor Gothic manor house had once hosted such esteemed visitors as Charles Dickens and Winston Churchill. “I see places like these,” said Keaton, “and I get the urge to run down to Pier 1 Exports to pick out some wicker chairs and throw pillows. Kinda makes you appreciate a nice studio apartment, you know?”249

  More location filming occurred at the Acton Lane Power Station in West London. Commissioned in 1899, the station generated electricity until October 31, 1983, when it was closed down. The 75,000 square foot space had been used as a film set in Aliens (1986) before the Batman crew came and dressed it as Axis Chemical, the site of Jack Napier’s transformation into the Joker. At the end of the scene, stunt double Gerry Crampton took over for Jack Nicholson for Napier’s fall into the vat of toxic chemicals.250

  After filming the scene where Batman first confronts Napier and escapes from the Gotham police, the crew returned to film shots of the Batmobile speeding through the facility as explosions erupt around it. Though the shots would only last a minute on screen, they took two and a half weeks to prepare.251 “Tim Burton wanted to go for full-size, 100-feet flames,” said special effects supervisor John Evans. “You couldn’t get within 50 feet of them. We wired up thousands of sandbags, pumped gas through galvanized piping and safely set the explosives in steel cases. The trick was to drive the car through all this before it melted!”252 Michael Keaton’s double for the scene was stuntman Sean McCabe, who drove the Batmobile through the flames wearing a safety helmet and fire suit. Even with the precautions, the stunt posed a risk. “When working in corridors of fire, an engine can die due to lack of oxygen,” said stunt coordinator Eddie Stacey. “You see, fire burns up oxygen, so timing is crucial. Motorbike riders who weren’t aware of this have perished in tunnel-of-fire stunts.”253 Forty-five tons of liquid gas was used for the shot, an amount that, according to Evans, “would heat a 20-30 house village for a whole year!”254

  The exterior shots of the plant exploding were filmed at Little Barford Power Station in Bedfordshire, a coal-fired power station that had shut down on October 26, 1981. For the shot of the Batmobile barreling out of the factory as it explodes, visual effects supervisor Derek Meddings resorted to the kind of seamless model work he had employed on several James Bond films and Superman. After filming the car exiting the building, Meddings then built a model back at Pinewood that matched the top of the power station. The two shots were then combined, the lower half being the live-action shot of the Batmobile, and the upper half being the shot of the model exploding. Filming the model, Meddings said, “We were shooting at high speed, 120 frames per second. Because it is quite hard to make a building collapse in just the way you want, it was necessary to have breakaway plaster sections so that the right chunks of the building exploded.”

  Meddings also employed his considerable skill for scenes of the Batwing in flight and crashing onto the steps of Gotham Cathedral. The crash was filmed at a speed of 120 frames per second on a miniature set that was an exact replica of the Gotham main street set, built in 1/12 scale. “They had positioned a large section of the wrecked Batwing on the Cathedral steps,” said Meddings. “We had to place our model in precisely the same position. To ensure it broke up, we made it out of pewter which is a nice, soft metal...You only really know what you’ve got when you see the rushes the following day. A mixture of clever cutting and spot-on camera angles means that you really can’t see the joins.”255

  To capture a shot of Batman’s point-of-view as the Dark Knight pilots the Batwing between Gotham City skyscrapers, catching the Joker’s poison gas balloons as he goes, Meddings also had to construct a miniature of the city center. The buildings on the miniature set were only 18 feet high and the street 10 inches wide, so a special overhead motion-control camera had to be built that could duck and dive through the clutter of buildings and over the miniature trucks, cars, floats and searchlights.256 “When we first shot the city center, it just didn’t look right and I couldn’t work out why,” said Meddings. “I soon realized that even though they were varnished, the streets looked dull. The answer was to spray them with oil, which we also used to highlight sections of the vehicles.”257

  As the Christmas holidays approached, reports were still filtering in from American newspapers about the wrath of Batfans incensed over the casting of Michael Keaton. But by now, Warner Bros. had something more powerful than a public relations expert and Bob Kane to mollify the doubters—they had dailies. Cobbling together footage fresh from Pinewood, they put together a trailer that gave a tantalizing glimpse of the Batwing, the Batmobile, Nicholson’s Joker, and—most importantly—Keaton as Batman.258 And not just Keaton as Batman, but Keaton as Batman punching bad guys and kicking ass. The trailer was not artfully done, but it served its purpose. The protests died down almost overnight. In December, the crew began a week of night shoots on the Gotham City main street set at Pinewood, filming the Joker’s parade.259 It was now the height of the British winter, and the actors and extras could see their breath hang in the chill air. After a three-week Christmas break—during which time producer Jon Peters angered the British crew by refusing to give them holiday pay260—the cast and crew reassembled to film the movie’s climax.

  The ending of the film had always been problematic, despite rewrite after rewrite. Peters decided to fix it by making it grander. The ending wouldn’t simply occur in a cathedral bell tower, it would be in the highest bell tower imaginable. By the time Batman reached the top, he would have gone through a gauntlet of the Joker’s goons, leaving him tired and barely able to fight (much as it had been in Hamm’s original script, where Batman emerged from the Batwing with broken bones). “Towards the end of the film Jon realized you couldn’t just have Batman beating up the fifty-year- old Joker,” said production designer Anton Furst.261 Furst listened to Peters’s idea, then told him that the miniature effects involved would require a 38-foot high model of the cathedral. “Just the model alone cost $100,000. Jon said, ‘Fine.’ He observed that it was worth it,” said Furst. “I think Jon has a pretty good sense of the broad stroke, whereas other producers would say ‘$100,000?’” Though the film was already well over budget, Warner Bros. liked the footage they had seen and quickly approved the overage.262

  Once again working without a script, Burton largely improvised the ending. It was as confusing for the director as it was for his actors. Burton said, “Here were Jack Nicholson and Kim Basinger walking up this cathedral, and halfway up Jack turns round and says, ‘Why am I walking up all these stairs? Where am I going?’ And I had to tell him that I didn’t know. The most frightening experience of my life. I knew they had to go up to the bell tower and they better do something up there. That was always a given. But what? Help me! Help me!”263

  When it came to filming the final showdown between the Joker and Batman, there was a moment of levity as Keaton and Nicholson, both in full costume and make-up, suddenly became aware that they looked like a couple of overage trick-or- treaters. Said Keaton, “We were just about to do a take and I leaned over and said to him, ‘We’re both grown men.’ He died at that.”264

  In the end, Burton pulled it off, despite producer Jon Peters’s meddling. “There was just no time for me to work on it. I was basically reacting to other people’s ideas and then trying to come up with stuff of my own,” said Burton. “Hollywood is a very control-oriented place, and if people want to feel in control, a very easy way to bring control back to yourself is to create chaos. Because if you’re the one creating chaos, then you’re the one who has to fix it. And on some level, that may be true with Jon.”265

  Michael Keaton wound up his work on the film at the end of January 1989.266 He had spent four months in the Batsuit, and was now ready for a break. “I’m still not totally sure I know exactly what I did in this movie,” he said. “It all happened real fast. This thing was bigger than me.”267 Speaking to Marc Shapiro of Com
ics Scene magazine, Keaton said, “I’m usually a lot of fun to work with, but I’ve got to be totally honest—I was not a lot of fun to work with on this movie. I was exhausted, tired and pretty burned out going into Batman, and I was a real pain in the ass during a good part of filming. But, it never got to the point where it got personal or I told Jack Nicholson or Tim to [screw] off. I would get angry for a while, then I would calm down and we would go ahead and get the next shot.”268

  Tim Burton summed up his own experience on the film saying, “Torture. The worst period of my life.”269 After celebrating the end of filming, he had something happier to celebrate a month later—his marriage to Lena Gieseke.270

  SOUNDS OF SUCCESS

  When it came time to think about scoring the film, Tim Burton knew exactly whom he wanted. His previous two films had been scored by Danny Elfman, a young composer who first gained attention as a member of the rock group Oingo Boingo, which was formed to create the music for his brother Richard’s film debut, The Forbidden Zone (1982). “I always wanted to work on films,” Elfman said in an interview for the TV program Movie Time, speaking about film scoring, “but I never thought I had any musical talent, so this is the area that I would’ve guessed that I had the least amount of chances of being involved in, if I’d have listed all the different areas of filmmaking...In many ways, I completely owe it to Tim, the fact that I have a film composing career. He took a major gamble on me when we did Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. I had no orchestral experience at all, and I think at that point he probably had more faith in me than I did. So I owe him quite a lot. I owe him the fact that I have a career at all. I can’t see that anybody else would’ve taken a chance on me in the orchestral sense. And I really wasn’t interested in getting involved doing a synthesizer or contemporary score at that point.”271