Nicole Kidman responded to Schumacher’s earnestness. “He tells you what he likes in an honest and blunt way. And he makes it comfortable for you to take risks. Besides that, he’ll tell you anything about his life, anything. I admire him for that.”135 Kidman threw herself into the role of Batman-bewitched Chase Meridian. “She’s constantly trying to seduce him,” she told Entertainment Weekly’s Benjamin Svetkey. “She wears black slinky dresses, has perfect hair, perfect red lips, and talks in a deep, husky voice. It’s definitely a heightened reality. Really over-the-top.” Schumacher joked, “I know, I know, she doesn’t look anything like a criminal psychiatrist. But it’s my Gotham City and I can do what I want.”136
One of the things Schumacher wanted was to make his Gotham look like a living comic book. To achieve that, he worked closely with cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt, who had previous event-movie experience photographing Steven Spielberg’s Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) and the first two Lethal Weapon films (1987 and 1989). Goldblatt said that Batman Forever “was very different from anything else I’d ever done before. It’s an extravagant opera. It borders on excess, which inevitably causes problems...I scared myself to death on this film.”137
Despite the discomfort he felt inside the Batman costume, Kilmer worked to give as believable a performance as one could while dressed in black rubber. “He’s very courtly,” said Schumacher,138 who also said of his star, “I hate metaphysical mumbo jumbo, but you know when people say other people are old souls? There’s just something about Val...”’
Val Kilmer becomes Batman in Batman Forever. In a 2011 interview, Joel Schumacher remarked that he felt Kilmer was the best Batman of all (Warner Bros./ Photofest, © Warner Bros.).
Kilmer’s equanimity was put to the test filming the scene where Batman and Two-Face struggle with each other inside a cramped helicopter. As cameras rolled, one of the carefully choreographed blows accidentally connected. “At one point we were on a gimbals that was swerving and dipping in the air, and I was supposed to kick him in the face,” said Tommy Lee Jones. “I think on the third or fourth take, the helicopter zigged when it should have zagged, and I popped him on the nose. I was mortified, but he was a perfect gentleman.” It helped that Kilmer and Jones had already bonded off-camera, talking about their ranches and trading tips on raising cattle.
Chris O’Donnell also had an embarrassing mishap when at the end of a day’s filming, he decided to take the Batmobile out for a spin. When it went out of control, he crunched its fender on a curb.139 Schumacher didn’t seem to mind. The director kept a loose mood on the set by playing practical jokes, often at O’Donnell’s expense. As he was about to begin one scene, O’Donnell got a shock when he discovered a photo that Schumacher had enhanced. “It was my head on a naked body with this enormous, you know, male part,” says O’Donnell, “and Joel put it on the Batscreen in the Batcave just before I entered for a scene. Of course, they got it all on film.” Schumacher also enhanced O’Donnell’s convertible, filling it to the rim with popcorn.140
Ed Begley, Jr. spent his first couple of days working with Val Kilmer, for the scenes early in the movie when Bruce Wayne visits his factory. “I’d known Val for a while,” said Begley. “He was very happy to play Batman. It’s a James Bond kind of a thing, you know. Who’s the new Batman? Who’s the new James Bond? To play that part is quite an honor.”141
Playing his scenes opposite Jim Carrey, Ed Begley Jr. went big. “You know, this was not Remains of the Day,” said Begley. “It was not a Merchant-Ivory movie, clearly. Everybody knew that. So in a bold gesture, certainly the first rehearsal, I don’t know that Joel or anyone knew what I was going to do, and I came out of the gate with ‘Mister Waaaaaaayne.’ You know, playing one of those very large characters that you might see in a ‘40s movie. And Joel liked it a lot. And that is the challenge as an actor, to do things that, hopefully, have a resonance to something real but also spike out from that carpet of reality that you lay down and then have very large things that grab people that occur within those parameters. And Jim Carrey certainly is good at that.”142
Kilmer, O’Donnell and the other actors feared that Carrey’s manic energy, with which he infused every atom of the Riddler, might upstage them. Schumacher, however, was unconcerned, describing Carrey as “one of the most courageous, inventive humans in our business. In playing the Riddler, Jim had several difficult tasks—the biggest having to be wearing the green unitard that showed every little thing he ate.”143
As the Riddler’s plans—and his outfits—became more outrageous, Carrey looked to a surprising source for inspiration: Elvis Presley. “I wanted to go to Elvis,” said Carrey. “Elvis in Vegas with the eagle on his back. In Vegas, the art wasn’t coming from inside Elvis any more. It was on the outside. ‘Look at my diamond rings. Look at my eagle and my glasses.’ You start adorning the outside. That’s what I wanted the Riddler to do. He needed that because he had no identity.”144
As filming progressed, Schumacher and the rest of the crew bonded with Carrey, who was then at the height of his fame. “You certainly get to know someone when you work with him,” said Schumacher, “and I have to tell you Jim is handling success beautifully. When he finished work and left to promote The Mask in Tokyo, everyone he worked with on Batman felt very sad.”145
By the end of February, with filming nearing completion, Schumacher was feeling upbeat. “I thought shooting would be more arduous,” he told columnist Marilyn Beck. “There are so many gimmicks, toys and special effects. It’s much more complicated to do than The Client, where I had great actors doing six pages of dialogue at a time. Here it’s jokes and gags and cars flying and special effects.”146 Despite the pressures, he remained upbeat, sometimes joking, “I hope all of you have your next jobs, because if they let me direct again after this, it’s a miracle.”147
While Schumacher worked with the actors, Pacific Data Images was toiling to marry live actions shots with models, miniatures and matte paintings. In the end, they completed over thirty computer animated effects sequences for the film, including shots of a computer-generated Batman for scenes such as the one where the Caped Crusader does a 600-foot plunge off a building.148 Asked if he was worried that the visual effects and action would outweigh the actors, Schumacher replied, “If you know these actors, it’s pretty hard for anything to steal a scene from any of them. I think the visuals are there only to support the story and the characters. We really tried to blend it all together, so that the film looks great without taking away from anything or anyone.”149
Of more concern to the director was Warner Bros.’ decision to move the release date from the end of June to June 16, effectively cutting two weeks out of the post-production schedule. The move put added pressure on Schumacher. When he was asked when the final print would be ready, he quipped, “June 15—at midnight.”150Starlog’s Marc Shapiro interviewed the director on the final day of filming, and found him feeling confident. Schumacher told Shapiro, “When I was driving over to have lunch with Tim Burton to do Batman Forever, I was wondering, ‘Is anybody even interested in a new Batman movie?’ And now here I am on the last day of shooting and there’s already this rumor that I’ll be doing the fourth one. I guess that means there is still interest.”151 Schumacher already had a title in mind for the next installment. Impressed with Chris O’Donnell’s work, he said, “I suggested that when they do the next one, they call it Batman and Robin.”
When filming came to a close, Schumacher said, “It was kind of like climbing Mount Everest, and when it was over I thought, ‘Wow, I could have died,’ There’s a kind of reckless feeling to filmmaking anyway. It’s like building a 747 while you’re flying it. You have absolutely no idea if it’s going to land safely.”152 Looking at the bottom-line numbers, the studio was ecstatic. Warner Bros. co-chairman Robert Daly said, “I’ve never seen a movie as big as this one that went so smoothly. It stayed on schedule and actually came in under budget. That’s the way Joel operates.”153
&
nbsp; Elliot B. Goldenthal provided the score of Batman Forever, creating his own Batman theme rather than recycling the one created by Danny Elfman for the first two films. “I saw the first two Batman movies, liked the music, but never referred to them again,” said Goldenthal. “I thought that Danny [Elfman] did fantastic work with Burton, but for Batman Forever, I needed to create a brand-new theme and a different approach. The thing that’s been established about this new Batman world, which was created for the last film, is that the music is large and orchestral. And because Batman wears a black cape, lives in a cave and has a double life, you take it for granted that the music has a bit of darkness to it too. Then you also have the hero versus the villain, and you have a certain genre that’s built in right there. Large, orchestral, dark, heroic, good versus evil.”154
The soundtrack was adorned with cuts from current pop performers, such as the Flaming Lips, whose “Bad Days” is heard while Jim Carrey’s Riddler makes mischief. When Dick Grayson races off in the Batmobile, the Damned’s “Smash It Up” is heard, and the end titles crawl over U2’s “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me” and Seal’s “Kiss From a Rose.” The soundtrack that was released for the film included even more pop cuts, including Nick Cave’s “There Is a Light” and Method Man’s “The Riddler.” Those songs, commissioned for the film but ultimately dropped from the final cut, were retained on the CD soundtrack.155 Soon after the soundtrack’s release, the U2 song climbed to #33 on the Top 40 Singles Chart.156
When the soundtrack album was released, Seal was outspoken in his opinion of the video for his song “Kiss From a Rose,” saying, “As far as I’m concerned, it’s kind of like a promotional movie for the Batman movie and for Seal. But it’s creatively nothing to do with what I want.” But he couldn’t deny that having his song in the film’s end credits helped it to gain exposure. “It’s not a hard decision to make when your album was out of the Top 200 and it’s now 130 with a bullet,” Seal said. “It’s not a hard decision at all.” In mid-September of 1995, the song broke all records for the number of times a song was played on the radio in a given week (those records, however, had only been kept since 1991). The single eventually made it to Number 1 on the charts. “You have to make concessions here and there,” said Seal.157
Throughout shooting, Schumacher had been conscious of making a Batman film that was less violent than the previous one. “I have a 6-year-old godson who’s the most important person in my life,” said Schumacher. “If I could make a movie that he thought was cool and I thought was cool, then we could get some of the people in between. Then I screened the film for him on the Warners lot, and he wasn’t frightened.”158 For Schumacher, this meant he had met his mark. “The juggling game was to make it dark enough to be Batman, but light enough to be a living comic book,” said Schumacher. “I’ve achieved that for me, but I really hope that I achieved that for the people who come to see this.”159
By the time filming concluded, Batman Forever cost nearly $80 million to make. Warner Bros. was now poised to spend another $20 million to promote it.160 The first ads for the new film hit the streets on Presidents Day weekend in February 1995, when one-sheets began appearing showing the Batman logo encircled with a neon green Riddler question mark. The poster was created by Christopher Wagner and Maseeh Rafani at the Idea Place, an in-house advertising unit of Warner Bros. No teaser trailers were prepared. Instead, as filming was nearing completion, Warner Bros. created a 3-minute and 15-second trailer that showed audiences enough footage to demonstrate the new film’s brighter tone. “We wanted to introduce the characters,” said Warner Bros. president of worldwide advertising and publicity Rob Friedman. “We wanted to show that the movie was different from Batman Returns, and that tone is consistent throughout all elements of the marketing campaign.” Warners’ executive VP of creative projects Joel Wayne added, “I thought that because this was the third one, people might be sitting with crossed arms feeling that they weren’t going to be seduced. So I wanted to show more of the movie.”161
The promotional partners were also pleased that the new film was more family-friendly. By the time the film was ready to be released, Warner Bros. had commitments of between $45 million and $50 million from Six Flags amusement parks (which they owned), Kenner Toys, Kellogg’s, Acclaim Entertainment and, significantly, McDonald’s.162
The publicity blitz got under way in April 1995, when posters of the film’s main characters began appearing on bus stops and subways. Famed photographer Herb Ritts, a friend of Schumacher’s, took the photos for the campaign, which featured colorful individual posters of Batman, Robin, The Riddler, Two-Face and Dr. Chase Meridian. It was reported that about 20% of the posters were stolen from their bus shelter display cases. A poster featuring a composite of all the characters hit the streets on Memorial Day.163
McDonald’s began running their promotional spots on May 25.164 The fast food retailer pushed Batman Forever with special “hero” sandwiches (on a hero bread bun), drink cups and packaging aimed at adults. They refrained, however, from promoting the film with Happy Meals. “This is an adult promotion,” McDonald’s spokesman Steve Bender told St. Petersburg Times reporter Steve Persall. “We think the adventure and excitement of Batman Forever will appeal to our older audience.”165 Predictably, shots from the film’s opening scene—where Alfred says, “Can I persuade you to take a sandwich with you, Sir?” and Batman responds, “I’ll get drive- through”—were used in a McDonald’s commercial.166
Throughout May, just prior to the film’s opening, magazine racks were filled with images of Batman Forever’s stars. Chris O’Donnell graced the cover of YM magazine, and got an 8-page spread in the June issue of GQ. Val Kilmer was on the cover of Movieline and Details magazines, and was profiled in Harper’s Bazaar, whose reporter wrote, “Val Kilmer is a gorgeous human being in a way that filmed representations only begin to indicate; he has beautiful hands, he has a beautiful mouth, he has a beautiful voice...not to put too fine a point on it, but he is a major, major fox...”167 Kilmer shrugged off the attention, saying, “It’s been easy to promote because [reporters] laugh if they have any serious questions. There’s no angle on it. Sometimes it’s harder if you really care about the project, because there’s something you want to make sure gets across, but there isn’t with this. It is what it is. It’s done. It’s big.”168
Warner Bros. began airing spots for the film the first week of June.169 They also turned to more innovative ways to promote Batman Forever, creating a website, www.batmanforever.com, where computer-savvy Batfans could view clips from the film, hear cuts from the soundtrack, and read promotional material. It was believed to be the first time a website had been devoted to a single film,170 as well as the most expensive and elaborate home page a studio had ever devised. Don Buckley, a spokesman for Warner Brothers, said, “It’s smart business to stay in touch with the technology.” According to Warner Bros., the Batman Forever home page received 1.8 million “hits” weekly.171
As the film’s release date neared, plans were made to hold the press junket not in Los Angeles but in Atlanta, nearer to North Carolina, where Jim Carrey was filming a sequel to Ace Ventura, Pet Detective.172 Nicole Kidman, Tommy Lee Jones, Jim Carrey, Chris O’Donnell and Joel Schumacher were on hand to greet about 150 members of the foreign and domestic press at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Val Kilmer did not attend; he was in Santa Fe, New Mexico awaiting a more important event, the birth of his child. His wife, actress, Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, was expected to go into labor around the same time as the Atlanta screening.173
Batman Forever had its official world premiere in Los Angeles on Friday, June 9, 1995. The film screened at two theatres simultaneously, Mann’s Village and the Mann Bruin. Westwood Village was blocked off, with bleachers situated around the theatres for hundreds of photo-snapping Batfans. Afterwards, Batsignals guided guests to the nearby Armand Hammer Museum and Cultural Center for a reception. Among the more than 1,000 guests were the film’s Joel Schumacher, Val Ki
lmer, Nicole Kidman and husband Tom Cruise, Chris O’Donnell, Tommy Lee Jones, Jim Carrey, Drew Barrymore, and Debi Mazar, as well as celebrities like George Clooney, Cindy Crawford, Geena Davis, Anthony Edwards, David Hasselhoff, director John Singleton, Faye Dunaway, Lauren Holly, Rosie O’Donnell, Steven Seagal, Wesley Snipes and Aaron Spelling with wife Candy and daughter Tori. Dinner was a hors d’oeuvres buffet served by waiters dressed as multicolored henchmen.174 When asked his opinion of Kilmer’s Dark Knight, Dean Cain, the star of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman said, “I envy Val Kilmer all the way. I think he’s got a better costume, better gadgets, better special effects and he makes a heck of a lot more money than I do.”175 Kilmer, asked about the secret of playing Batman, said, “I wish I had an interesting answer for you, but it was really show up and get dressed. When your foyer is 480 feet wide, it’s kind of easy to make-believe.”176
Less than a week later, on Wednesday, June 14, 1995, Batman Forever had a $100 per person benefit premiere at the Warner Theater in Washington D.C., benefiting the Children’s Inn at the National Institutes of Health. Nearly 2,000 fans, including Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, attended the screening and party; Gingrich’s wife Marianne was chair of the Children’s Inn, which provided a home away from home for children with critical illnesses. Among the approximately 400 children in attendance were many from the Children’s Inn,177 as well as politicians including Representative John Dingell of Michigan, Labor Secretary Robert Reich, and Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala.178
The screening came just a couple of weeks after Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole had excoriated the entertainment industry for peddling “nightmares of depravity.” Among the entertainment companies Dole blamed for the plague of violence and sex in the entertainment industry was Warner Bros. The chairman and chief executive officer of Time-Warner, Gerald Levin, took the opportunity at the Washington screening to defend his company to reporters, saying that Dole “was sadly misinformed because this is a great company that does things that are highly beneficial to this society.” Dole did not attend the benefit screening, and neither did President Clinton, who had also been critical of the entertainment industry.179
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