314 Atkinson, Terry, “Video...What’s New: `Batman’ Buyers to Get a Diet Coke Ad Too,” The Los Angeles Times, Sept. 8, 1989, p. 18
315 —, “Batman Helps Send Warner Profit Flying,” The Globe and Mail, July 19, 1989, p. B.7
316 El Nasser, Haya, “No Joker! Batbash lures Time, Warner,” USA Today, June 23, 1989, pg. 2.B
317 Cohen, Roger, “The Creator of Time Warner, Steven J. Ross, Is Dead at 65,” The New York Times, Dec. 21, 1992
Chapter Seven: BATMAN RETURNS
“In retrospect I don’t think Warners were very happy with the movie. That’s my feeling.”
—Tim Burton1
BACK IN THE BATCAVE
As soon as it became apparent that Batman was a monster hit, producer Jon Peters began talking sequel, sort of. “We conceptualized this film as a trilogy,” said Peters. “We wouldn’t make a sequel, but we may well make a second episode.” Peters noted that neither director Tim Burton nor any of the film’s stars had signed for any more Batman films. “It’s not in their contracts and we really haven’t talked about it to anyone,” he said. Asked if the Joker would return, Peters said coyly, “He could come back. He’s the Joker.”2 A month later, Peters hinted that a sequel might be in theaters as early as the summer of 1990, with a third film in release by 1991. If Keaton and Nicholson were unable or unwilling to reprise their roles, said Peters, new actors might be used. A Warner Bros. executive said, “The sets are taking up an entire movie studio outside London. We obviously can’t leave them there forever, so it’s reasonable to expect action pretty soon.” Even Jack Nicholson was playing it close to the vest, telling Daily Variety, “They’d be fools not to do another,” though when asked if he would return, he said, “I would not discuss (the possibilities) with anybody. There is too much money involved.”3
The talk of a potential sequel to Batman had Hollywood A-listers lining up for the anticipated blockbuster. In mid-August 1989, gossip columnist Liz Smith reported that Madonna, who had just completed work on Dick Tracy, had her agents negotiating for a role for her in Batman II.4 Guber and Peters were also said to be negotiating with Danny DeVito to play a villain, which The Toronto Globe and Mail identified as the Riddler.5
As eager as Peters was to proceed, Tim Burton was reticent, having found the Batman experience a rather stressful one, and not one he was very eager to repeat. Although audiences made Batman the sixth highest-grossing film of all time, the more distance Burton had from it, the more he felt that it hadn’t lived up to his own personal expectations. “The studio wanted to make a sequel the moment they knew the first film was successful, which was right after the opening weekend,” Burton said in an interview with Starlog magazine’s Marc Shapiro. “I was in no way, shape or form to do it at that point...I would just keep looking at it and think it could have been better. I saw the first movie as being flawed. I didn’t like the tone—what I did with the elements of darkness and mood, and the character relationships. I felt like I hadn’t done 100 percent of what I wanted to do with that picture, and part of me felt that I wanted another chance at it.”6
Instead of immediately leaping into a Batman sequel, Burton sought to return to a more personal story, one that originated in his own brain and not in a decades-old comic book. His next film, Edward Scissorhands, had an almost comic-book look, and a storyline with a theme that could just as easily have applied to Batman—an emotionally wounded protagonist with unique talents becomes viewed as a threat by the community at large, even though his intentions are honorable. A much smaller and more personal film than Batman, Edward Scissorhands connected with audiences on a more emotional level, cementing Burton’s reputation as a filmmaker with a special affinity for dark, twisted fantasy tales. Released just before Christmas of 1990, the film—which was budgeted at $20 million—made over $83 million worldwide.
Tempering Burton’s joy over the warm critical reception of Edward Scissorhands was the sobering news that Warren Skaaren, who helped bring the script of Batman into focus, had died at his home in Austin, Texas. The 44-year-old screenwriter had only learned the previous summer, after he had completed the script for Beetlejuice II, that he had cancer. Three days after Christmas, on December 28, 1990, Skaaren lost his battle with the disease. “I think it was some weird sort of bone cancer,” said Burton, “something strange. It was horrible.”7
With Skaaren’s death, Burton felt even less like tackling a Batman sequel. Warner Bros., feeling that the director was an essential ingredient in the success of Batman, decided to wait him out. As for producer Michael Uslan, he viewed a years-long gap between the original film and the sequel as nothing unusual. “You’ve got to go back to the context of the times,” said Uslan. “Everyone was pretty tied in to the James Bond formula. And, if memory serves me, the Bond films were coming out at a pace of every three years. And I think that was just accepted as the standard for those few movies and sequels.”8 Uslan had little time to worry; he kept busy as executive producer of three TV series, Swamp Thing, Fish Police and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, and was already laying plans for a prime-time Batman animated series.
After a year had passed, Warner Bros. execs finally began to lose patience. They eventually contacted Burton and asked, was he going to do the sequel or not? “I felt, for the longest time, I didn’t want to do it,” said the director. “Then one day, I realized I liked this world and it’s a good canvas for different ideas and themes: politics, sexism, relationships, weird family issues.”9 It helped that Jon Peters, who had been a meddlesome presence during the making of the first Batman, was no longer actively involved in production of the sequel. A few months after the release of Batman, the Guber-Peters Entertainment Company was acquired by Japan’s Sony Corporation, which had also swallowed up Columbia Pictures. Guber and Peters accepted a deal to take charge of Columbia. As part of their deal with Sony, the pair had to give up any profit participation they might have realized from any Batman sequels.10 With Guber and Peters out, this meant that Batman II would be Burton’s baby. Unlike Batman, for which he served only as the director, he was also a producer on Batman II. As scriptwriter Sam Hamm recalled, “Finally, the way that they kind of got Tim was to say, ‘What if the second movie is really just a Tim Burton movie?’ And that kind of got his attention and got him thinking about what he could do with it again.”11
It also helped that Burton had gotten past thinking that the next Batman film had to outperform the original. “Part of me will always think Batman was a big hit because it was a wonderful movie,” said Burton. “But the reality is that Batman was a success because it was a cultural phenomenon, which had less to do with the movie than with something else that I can’t begin to put a finger on. I didn’t see a second Batman movie falling victim to the same thing that happened with the first, so I felt free to just go in and make the best Batman movie I could.”12
Burton now had his own production company, Tim Burton Productions, which he had formed after the release of Batman in 1989 with former journalist-turned- producer Denise Di Novi. The same year of Batman’s release, Di Novi produced a black comedy about teen suicide, Heathers. She then made another film, Meet the Applegates (1991), before joining with Burton to produce Edward Scissorhands. “Tim is unique in that he’s a commercially successful director who doesn’t make mainstream movies,” said Di Novi. “There’s a simplicity and underlying sweetness to his work that embraces the outcast and differences in people. I think that’s why his films are so accessible to moviegoers, and that certainly attracted me to working with him.”13 Di Novi shared Burton’s assessment that the new film would never match the success of the previous Batman. “There’s no way we can repeat Batman’s success,” said Di Novi. “The pressure’s really off and we can relax. Nobody in their wildest dreams thinks we’re going to catch lightning in a bottle a second time. But, having said that, we can just make the best movie we can—maybe even a better movie.”14
Daily Variety announced that Tim Burton had
agreed to direct the sequel to Batman on August 6, 1990.15 Now that Burton had finally agreed to do the film, the first order of business was to come up with a workable screenplay. With Warren Skaaren deceased, Burton reunited with his original Batman scribe, Sam Hamm. “Tim and I had several kind of loose conversations about where the movie would go with input from the studio,” said Hamm. “They really wanted the Penguin, because they sort of saw the Penguin as the number two Batman villain.”16 Burton wasn’t thrilled about the Penguin, a character that he felt lacked the backstory and psychological complexity of the Joker.17 “We wanted to do Catwoman,” said Hamm, “so we wound up doing Penguin and Catwoman.”18
In Burton’s mind, pitting Batman against two adversaries would help differentiate the second film from the first. “I didn’t feel having two villains was absolutely necessary,” he said, “but it added some variety by helping us avoid doing the same kind of explanation things we did with the one villain in the first film.”19
Burton felt he had a pretty good handle on the psychology of Batman and Catwoman, but the Penguin proved more elusive. “The Penguin was just this guy with the cigarette and the top hat, you know,” said Burton. “So, we then started thinking about the Catwoman, Batman, sort of these animal people, the Penguin, and started thinking about him, trying to define a profile for him. So it was fun to kind of come up with a sort of bad freak, again that duality of somebody who’s been sort of wronged and you know has that sort of split not like dark but sort of human animal, you know, and sort of using the animal motif as a strong image for the film. And then I started getting excited about it.”20
Hamm set about writing the screenplay, with ideas from his producers and the studio, who felt that Robin—since he had been absent from the first film—had to somehow be included. Hamm obliged, but in a way that veered considerably from the way the character was presented in the comic books, making Dick Grayson a feral wild child who lived in a drainage tunnel.
Hamm also toyed with Bruce Wayne’s family history, radically altering the origin of Batman that had been accepted by comic book fans for decades. In Hamm’s story, Bruce Wayne’s grandfather was one of a gang of five wealthy men who robbed the Gotham Treasury in the 1800s. After stealing the city’s money, the city fathers needed help to rescue the bankrupt city. The same five men came forward, offering to help in return for all the service contracts and public lands, which they divided among themselves. Within five years, they were wealthy beyond imagining. These “five families” of Gotham never needed to use the money they raided from the Treasury. They had five ravens made that, when placed together, revealed the secret of where the stolen money was hidden. Since they never needed to use it, they passed the secret down from father to son through the generations. When Bruce’s father, Thomas Wayne, heard the tale, he was going to expose the crime, but descendants from the other families arranged to have him murdered. Bruce then grew up in wealth without knowing the secret of its source.
Hamm’s script also introduced an idea that was eventually dropped. When Bruce Wayne, at a society party at the Flugelheim Museum, goes to kiss Selina Kyle, he sneezes in her face. He tells her that he’s allergic to cats; her cat Hecate has, coincidentally, just rubbed against his leg.
The script ended with Catwoman and Penguin invading Bruce Wayne’s mansion. Catwoman immobilizes Bruce Wayne by kissing him while wearing paralysis-inducing lipstick. He’s tied up and Alfred and Vicki Vale are taken hostage. Dick Grayson, meanwhile, having been taken in by Bruce, attempts to flee the mansion, but when he sees the intruders, he has a change of heart. He helps Bruce escape, leading to a final showdown between Batman and Catwoman in which Catwoman is killed. Batman then goes to the Batcave, where the Penguin has discovered that Bruce and Batman are one and the same, and also discovered the hidden gold from the Gotham Treasury in a stalactite. Before he can extract it, however, Batman uses a sonic device that causes bats to swarm around the Penguin, and he goes plummeting into the abyss of the cave.
Neither the studio nor Burton felt that Hamm’s script quite hit the mark. In an interview for the documentary Shadows of the Bat—The Cinematic Saga of the Dark Knight—Dark Side of the Knight, produced by Constantine Nasr for the DVD release of Batman Returns, Hamm admitted, “Most of the stuff that I had done for that movie wound up being scrapped. And the decision that came out of that was just to basically go with pretty much a whole new direction for the story.”21
It was clear that a fresh take was needed, and Burton and his co-producer, Denise Di Novi, knew just the man for the job. They put in a call to Daniel Waters, whose script for 1989’s Heathers, which Di Novi produced, had catapulted the former video store employee to the A-list rank of writers. Waters and Burton knew each other from when the director was looking for a writer to do a Beetlejuice sequel. They clicked creatively, but no script came out of it. Now, Waters was in Italy, where his Hudson Hawk script was being rewritten on a daily basis. “I was definitely in a get-me-off-this-picture kind of mood,” said Waters.22
At Burton’s urging, Waters returned to the U.S. in mid-1990 and read Hamm’s script. “Tim had the attitude of, ‘I dare you to make me want to make this movie.’ He had some ideas, but he did not have a story. He would have been very happy with five years, 20 different screenwriters and still not being satisfied. He definitely had the desire, but not the urge, to climb back up and do another Batman movie.”23
Waters read Hamm’s script and began brainstorming with the director. “Dan’s a very interesting writer with a funny point-of-view, and he proved to be just the person I needed,” said Burton. “The ideas were flying back and forth. We were attempting to piece together a story based on characters and a world that had no basis in reality...it was a matter of going through ideas to try and get a perspective, and to figure out what the hell this Batman Returns thing was all about.”24 In an interview with Starlog’s Marc Shapiro, Burton said, “Unlike Superman, Batman isn’t simply a good-vs.-evil thing. You get a lot of gray areas with Batman, and that was a major consideration in the script’s development. I wanted the villains to be these weird but interesting characters who could fill in those gray areas in Batman’s life.”25
Before writing began, Burton took the writer on several field trips. “On our first meeting, we went down to Sea World and looked at penguins, to get some idea of how the Penguin should look,” said Waters. “The story meetings themselves were kind of minimalist in nature. The only thing Tim knew was that he wanted the Penguin and Catwoman in the film. So we would sit around and just throw ideas at each other. He would be sitting on his black leather couch, and if he responded to an idea of mine favorably, I would know it immediately, because he would sort of rise out of the couch and his eyes would light up.”26
Taking Burton’s ideas into account, Waters discarded the backstory about the founding fathers of Gotham and fashioned a new plot that involved millionaire department store owner Max Shreck conspiring to take control of Gotham City by unseating the mayor with a candidate of his own choosing, Oswald Cobblepot, a/k/a the Penguin. Selina Kyle is introduced as Shreck’s secretary, who becomes Catwoman after Shreck pushes her out of a high window and she is revived by alley cats. Shreck, a character who had no antecedent in the Batman comic books, was named after Max Schreck, the actor who portrayed the Dracula-inspired Count Orlock in director F.W. Murnau’s classic 1922 horror film, Nosferatu.
Waters’ script was very close to the eventual film, though the initial draft he turned in on May 20, 1991 had some significant differences. In the prologue, which establishes how the Penguin came into being, the deformed infant has an “angelic” looking older brother, who peers into his cage in horror. The script’s finale reveals that Max Shreck is the Penguin’s brother. Waters had a difficult time getting a handle on the Penguin’s character. In the first draft, he made the villain “a rude gangster type,” said Waters. “But, as Tim and I discussed it, we agreed that for the Penguin to work he had to come across as more animalistic.�
�27 As in Hamm’s script, the Penguin and Catwoman join forces, committing crimes and framing Batman for them. Waters dropped Vicki Vale from the story, only having her mentioned in a scene where Alfred is trimming a Christmas tree while Bruce Wayne watches a newscast. “Oh look,” says the butler, holding an ornament in his hand that says “Vicki,” “do you remember...It’s from the Christmas just before Ms. Vale decided to leave Gotham City and...” “I remember,” says Bruce. “Merry Christmas, Vicki Vale, wherever the hell you are.” Bruce then “sadly throws the ornament past an alarmed Alfred, into a raging fireplace. A popping noise booms out.”
Unlike the film, where Shreck’s son Chip meets his demise in the climax, the script does away with him in a bizarre scene about a third of the way through, when Chip goes to Selina’s apartment after she’s become Catwoman. He opens her door to see that she’s dressed in a strategically placed long black scarf—and nothing else. But as he enters the apartment, he finds that the pink carpet beneath him is really pink quicksand, and he disappears out of sight.
A constant in every iteration of the script was the underlying sexual attraction between Batman and Catwoman. “I felt that Catwoman, because of her circumstances in life, would allow me to explore some of the relevant themes of female rage in modern society,” said Waters. “She is having to deal with the drive to fall in love while, at the same time, also fighting an id with the urge to kick the shit out of somebody. Catwoman gave me the opportunity to take some of those themes to the farthest possible point.”28
It’s in Waters’s script that, during the fight scene between Batman and Catwoman, the feline villainess straddles the Dark Knight and licks him. Waters tapped into another aspect of Batman’s personality—his disappointment that people see him more as a celebrity than a symbol. In Waters’s script, after Catwoman destroys Shreck’s department store, Batman pursues her up onto the rooftops, where he says to her, “People hurt each other, they lie to each other, they’re more interested in what I drive, than what I stand for. I need their intelligence, they give me their lunch boxes.” Waters also retains another idea from Hamm’s script. When Bruce Wayne meets Selina Kyle on the street, they talk and become cozier with each other, until he goes in to kiss her and sneezes. He tells her he’s allergic to cats; it turns out there’s a tomcat nearby.
Billion Dollar Batman Page 37
