Billion Dollar Batman

by Bruce Scivally

  “I met with Tim and I found him very unusual and interesting,” said Pfeiffer, “and he explained the part to me and I thought it would be a couple of scenes and probably not a fully-developed character. Then, to my surprise, I read the script and I found she was just very actually more complicated than I could have even imagined, sort of psychologically.”62 Mark Canton said the role was a “creative turn-on” for Pfeiffer. “Michelle’s a chameleon,” he said. “Just as Batman has two personalities, so does Catwoman.”’

  Pfeiffer was dating actor Fisher Stevens when she won the role of Catwoman. Stevens noted her enthusiasm, as Pfeiffer recalled to reporter Larry Hackett. “My boyfriend said at the time, ‘I’ve never seen you so excited,’” said Pfeiffer. “I was sort of giddy, like a kid.” Pfeiffer remembered the Catwoman character from the 1960s Batman TV series, which she watched when she was a young girl. “I was a fan of Catwoman as a child because I think she broke a lot of social taboos,” said Pfeiffer. “I think I was about eight when I started watching the television series and I think in those days little girls were brought up to be good and behave and certainly not act in a physically aggressive way. And here was this character, this woman dressed as a black cat, and you were never sure whether she was good or bad. I think I had a fascination with the fact that she was bad but that you were allowed to love her at the same time.”63 Speaking to reporter Jamie Portman, Michael Keaton said, “I’m sure Michelle was salivating when she got this role.”64 Pfeiffer signed her contract at the end of July 1991.65

  Having remained one of the few people on the planet who hadn’t seen the original Batman movie, Pfeiffer made a point of watching it once she was cast. “I thought I’d better see what I got myself into,” she said.66 Speaking later to newspaper reporter Joe Pollack, Pfeiffer said that Catwoman was “a positive role model if you see it metaphorically,” and said that in the mutual attraction between Batman and Catwoman, “there were elements of sexuality, but I don’t see it as dealing with S&M.”67 Instead, her Catwoman role, she said, was “a statement about women and their empowerment. There’s been a change in the character from its kittenish, voluptuous quality of the 1950s to something leaner and meaner today. Catwoman has beauty, elegance and grace but can explode into violence and sexuality at any moment.”68

  Like Michael Keaton, Pfeiffer began a fitness regimen to get her in shape for the physical demands of her role. She began kickboxing at trainer Stephanie Steele’s Venice, California gym,69 and started working with whip trainer and choreographer Anthony DeLongis, whom she called her “whip master.”70 “I never realized how difficult it was, or how much power the whip has,” said Pfeiffer. “I took some skin off DeLongis’ hand one day, and the blood scared me.”71

  To play evil department store magnate Max Shreck, Burton chose Christopher Walken, an actor who had spent his whole life in show business, first as a child dancer, then as an actor. After small parts in several movies, he won acclaim as the suicidal brother of Diane Keaton’s character in Annie Hall (1977), soon followed by an Academy Award-winning performance in The Deer Hunter (1978). But in most of his film roles, the tall, gaunt actor played icy bad men, as he had in the 1985 James Bond adventure A View to a Kill. “I tend to play mostly villains and twisted people,” said Walken. “Unsavory guys. I think it’s my face, the way I look. If you do something effective, producers want you to do it again and again...I mean I don’t play lovers. I wish I did. At least once I’d like to have a crack at one of those guys. A heartbreaker. Some people are born to it. I’m not.”72 Walken’s casting was announced in Daily Variety on September 3, 1991.

  Aside from Michael Keaton, only two actors from the previous film reprised their roles in Batman Returns, Pat Hingle as Commissioner Gordon and Michael Gough as Alfred. Michael Murphy, who had played a Congressional candidate for president in the 1988 HBO series Tanner ‘88, signed on as the mayor of Gotham City. Murphy told Daily Variety columnist Army Archerd that his mayor of Gotham City was “Kennedy inspired. Maybe more of a John Lindsay. But I remind myself of Mayor Dinkins—someone in slightly over his head. But, I’m not a buffoon-type mayor.”73

  A more surprising casting choice was announced in the October 2, 1991 issue of Daily Variety, when it was revealed that Paul Reubens, a/k/a Pee-wee Herman, would appear in the film as the father of the Penguin.74 Since starring in Burton’s first film, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Reubens had starred in the 1988 sequel Big Top Pee-wee and taken his signature character to television as the star of the CBS kiddie program Pee-wee’s Playhouse. After a five-year run that garnered 15 Emmy Awards, Reubens was feeling burned out, and decided to take a sabbatical. While visiting relatives in Sarasota, Florida in July 1991, he was arrested for indecent exposure after being caught masturbating in an adult theater. Though he was ridiculed in the press, his close friends and fans rallied around him; besides the small role in Batman Returns, he was also seen as a vampire in 1992’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

  Burton said casting, aside from re-casting Annette Bening with Michelle Pfeiffer, “went pretty easy. It wasn’t the typical casting situation; everybody knew they would be spending much of their time in costumes and make-up. In that sense, the whole casting process came down to choice. We knew who we wanted and hoped they would be interested. We were very lucky in that we got exactly who we went after.”75

  Early on, it was decided that Batman Returns would not, like its predecessor, be filmed at London’s Pinewood Studios. “We never considered shooting this movie in London,” said Denise Di Novi. “The studio had that on their minds because some of the sets from the first film were there and it seemed so logical. What we discovered was that the only sets left in London were parts of Wayne Manor and the Batcave. We knew we were going to use a small part of Wayne Manor and that we were going to expand our use of the Batcave beyond the existing sets, so it didn’t make sense to go all the way to England to use bits of two sets. Mexico was considered for a very short time, but the logistics—trucking in equipment long distances—ruled that out. Once we realized we were making a completely new movie requiring all-new sets, we figured we might as well shoot it in L.A.”76

  Production designer Bo Welch, who had worked with Tim Burton on Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, set to work building sets for Gotham City at Warner Bros. Burbank studio. The challenge for Welch was to give the new film a unique look while at the same time retaining enough of the flavor of the first film to keep its fans from being alienated. “In a way, I would like to think I tweaked a lot of what appeared in the first movie, but in the process I think the designs have given Gotham City a whole new personality,” said Welch. “The feeling is of a city that’s huge, dehumanizing and falling in on itself. That always felt appropriate for me; the idea of immense corruption and decay. I tried to give the impression, whenever possible, of a city and a world in a very tenuous position, a city whose world is falling apart and which is in dire need of Batman to save them.”77

  Warner’s biggest soundstage was used for Gotham Plaza, which was meant to evoke what Welch called a “demented caricature” of Rockefeller Center, decorated with giant-sized statuary inspired by Fascist art. The sets were built in forced perspective to give them added depth, and augmented with clever model work to evoke a sense of immense size. “There were hundreds of carpenters scurrying all over,” said Welch. “At quitting time, they’d pour out like guys from some ‘40s aircraft plant.”’

  To keep the sets secure from prying eyes, crewmembers were required to wear photo ID badges to gain access. The badges were issued with a bogus movie title, Dictel, a name Burton and Welch made up when they worked together on Edward Scissorhands. “It’s Dictel as in dictatorial,” said Welch. “It was our word to represent a kind of faithless, huge corporation that makes some useless little product and bullies people.” Getting into the spirit, the crew christened one particularly fascist-looking skyscraper on the set the Dictel Building.78

  One special guest who was granted access to the set was
Bob Kane, who was impressed by the massive sets. “Some of the sets are like Cecil B. DeMille or D.W. Griffith,” said Kane. “Wayne Manor has what must be 500-foot-high ceilings—it’s like a set that Griffith would have built for Babylon in Intolerance. They must have spent an awful lot of money on this one.”79

  After filling up seven soundstages and two backlot exterior spaces, Welch looked for a space on the Warner Bros. lot to construct the Penguin’s lair, but felt the standard 35-foot-high stages remaining were inadequate for what he envisioned. “The space just lacked majesty,” said Welch. “It didn’t contrast enough with this evil, filthy little bug of a man.” The solution was to go a short distance away to Universal Studios, where the Batman Returns production rented Stage 12, a 50-foot-high soundstage with a water tank. Welch added a vaulted ceiling, saying “The ceiling really sells it. It gives you a sense of enclosure that says, ‘Not a set.’” The set was chilled to 38 degrees for the sake of the real penguins that would be used in the scenes.

  Welch was also tasked with developing some new Bat-gadgets, including a new and improved Batarang and a Bat-ski boat. “One of the things I like about Batman’s technology is that the more specific you make things, the stranger they seem. The real excitement has been in designing things that do one odd little task. Everything is consistent with the bat motif—webby, wingy and always in motion. And, because the time frame isn’t specific, we’re able to go all over the place in terms of the design. Some things are hi tech, others are low tech and some things are a combination of the two. There’s a lot of the machine-age industrial revolution in what we’re doing here. Gotham City is a great playground for us.”80

  Bob Ringwood returned to design the costumes, this time aided by Mary Vogt, who had worked with him on Dune (1984). The costumers had input from Tim Burton, who said, “Sometimes I do little weird sketches that could not be really applied to anything real. But when you work with artists and people you know, they can take what you do and get the idea of it.”81 Ringwood and Vogt began with the Batsuit, which was redesigned. “The first Batsuit was more muscular,” said Vogt. “This takes it further with a rounded, sculpted, streamlined design. We looked at the Zephyr train, Rockefeller Center, the Electrolux vacuum cleaner and cars from the 1930s for visual cues.” Batman’s black bodysuit was made of Lycra, with body armor sections attached that were created from surgical-grade latex. Worsted wool was used for Batman’s cape, with ten identical segments stitched together; as columnist Hal Lipper noted, twelve would have made a perfect circle. To create Batman’s mask, the costumers began by taking laser images of Michael Keaton’s head, since the claustrophobic actor wouldn’t allow them to take a plaster cast. In the end, forty-six masks were created. Formed on collapsible molds, the masks were seamless, but so fragile that each one would only last a few days before it would stretch or tear.82 Keaton’s specially-designed boots were created by Nike, modeled after Air Jordans. Altogether, the outfit—including mask, cape, belt, Lycra bodysuit with foam rubber armor, gloves and boots—weighed 25 pounds.83 Keaton later joked that he returned to the role because “they promised me the costume would be lighter, and it was. About four ounces lighter.”84

  Keaton felt that despite how stifling hot and uncomfortable it was, wearing the form-fitting Batman costume heightened his performance. “The Batman suit is so powerful as an image,” said Keaton. “I enjoy being powerful like that. I like the idea of being on a big Hollywood movie like this, which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with reality, and being this guy wearing black rubber and kicking ass. At moments, it’s tremendous fun. I wanted to lighten up Batman a little more this time. I didn’t want to fall back into that contemplative, morose, really deep character.”85

  As heavy as Batman’s costume was, the Penguin’s outfit weighed twice as much. Burton sketched a conception of the character that looked more like a Charles Dickens character than Bob Kane’s original idea, which Burton dismissed as “just some fat guy in a top hat and a tuxedo—it didn’t make sense.”86 As Danny DeVito recalled, “Tim did a painting that he gave me. It was very colorful kind of circus tents, and there was a boy sitting in front of it that was Oswald as a toddler. He didn’t have hands, he had flippers, and he was kind of rotund and small and he had kind of weird, pointed features, and the caption read, ‘My name is Jimmy, but they call me the hideous penguin boy.’ And it was a great image to start from.”87

  Turning Burton’s Penguin sketch into reality required a three-hour make-up session.88 Stan Winston Studios, creators of the creatures for Alien and Predator and the androids of The Terminator, not to mention Edward Scissorhands, was hired to bring Burton’s vision of the Penguin to life. Said Winston, “For me, the Penguin was something that had to work for Danny DeVito and ultimately work for Tim Burton and his vision of the character. Tim Burton has a very specific look, a very cartoony, over-the-edge feeling. On the first makeup test at our studio, we went over the top, with Tim Burton-esque dark eyes and white skin. For the second test, our makeup artist, Ve Neill, did a beautiful job that looked extremely real. The problem was that it was so real, it was no longer Tim Burton-esque. I told Ve to go back to the more extreme look. It was good that as a makeup artist she had initially put that element of reality to it, but we had to fit into the color, texture and feeling of a Tim Burton movie.”89

  An initial design was sketched by Winston illustrator Mark “Crash” McCreery, and makeup artists Shane Mahan and John Rosengrant were tasked with creating the prosthetics. Prototypes were sculpted onto plastic shells of DeVito’s face made from a life cast of the actor. “The initial concept was a pointy nose,” said Winston, “but I wasn’t really happy with that. The pointy nose just reminded me of a witch. So I got my hands back in the clay, which I love, and started playing with one myself. I felt the nose should have a beaklike quality. Yeas ago, for the Michael Jackson film The Wiz, I did some makeup for these crow characters that had enormous beak faces. I just loved that design, which involved the whole forehead and brow that went into this beak. Of course, that had nothing to do with penguins; but I felt I could use that concept with Danny and that turned out to be the look that was ultimately selected.”90 The makeup also included dental appliances to give the Penguin pointed teeth that looked decayed and neglected.

  The makeup was accentuated by the Penguin’s costume, designed by Bob Ringwood and Mary Vogt and executed by Vin Burnham. In a discussion with Danny DeVito, Ringwood learned that the actor dreamed of one day playing Shakespeare’s Richard III. That influenced Ringwood’s design for the Penguin. “If you look at it, the costume is a version of Richard III with a Dickensian twist, like Scrooge meets Richard III,” said Ringwood.91 The costume filled out DeVito’s form with an air bag, a zip-on silicone tummy, and a skin-colored foam upper torso. The make-up and costume accessories added a hefty 50 pounds to the actor. It was so heavy that in the beginning of the shoot, an orthopedic doctor was brought in to make a brace so DeVito could wear it, but the actor refused to use it. “Danny didn’t want it,” said Vogt. “He said the Penguin was a mean, miserable character, so the costume had to add to that.”92

  Though it veered from the traditional depiction, Bob Kane gave his blessing to the new-look Penguin. “Danny DeVito has a big following, and he is a very fine actor, and he looks horrendous in his makeup as the Penguin—you would never know who’s under that makeup,” said Kane. “And he plays it straight and angry: he’s not the clown that Burgess Meredith played on the TV show. He’ll be well-accepted, because it’s a different kind of Penguin.”93 In DeVito’s Penguin, Kane saw echoes of a mystery thriller film he’d seen as a child. “There was a movie many years ago, a silent movie, London After Midnight, with Lon Chaney,” said Kane. “He looked somewhat like the Penguin does in Batman Returns, a white face with dark circles around his eyes. His hair was straggly, with craggy teeth, and he wore a high hat.”94

  Catwoman’s outfit posed its own particular challenges, since it had to be skin- tight and look like
it was hand-made by Selina Kyle. “Tim Burton had a great deal of influence on the way that Catwoman’s costume looked,” said costume designer Bob Ringwood. “He wanted it to be unexpected, strange and offbeat. I showed Tim a photograph of a sculpture of a woman’s head that looked like she’d had her skin sewn on. It was a strong image, and Tim, costumer designer Mary Vogt and I decided her costume would be black with white stitching, and it would look homemade. Tim invented a scene where Catwoman makes her costume from her patent leather slicker- style raincoat to justify the costume.”95

  In reality, the catsuit was sculpted by Andy Wilkes, who owned a Los Angeles latex clothing boutique that specialized in fetish wear.96 “We wanted it to be tight to the body and sexy and that’s an obvious area to go into,” said Ringwood. “I mean, especially with someone like Michelle Pfeiffer who’s got legs for days. You know, you want to expose all those wonderful limbs and everything.”97 Wilkes began by making a body cast of Michelle Pfeiffer to ensure that her costume would fit like a layer of skin, or as Vogt put it, as though “she had been dipped in black glass.”98 The stitches were sculpted into the design; in the end, the black paper-thin latex sections of the outfit were glued together, then waxed with silicone to produce a glossy sheen. Sixty-four form-fitting Catwoman costumes were created for Pfeiffer and her stunt doubles, in three different stages of deterioration.99 In the beginning, Pfeiffer found the costume very restricting. “The first time I put the outfit on, I thought, I can’t walk, I can’t breathe, I can’t hear, I can’t act like this,” said Pfeiffer. “And that’s how I felt. It took me a long time to get used to all of the elements.”100