Billion Dollar Batman

by Bruce Scivally

  184 Gleiberman, Owen, “Movie Reviews: Batman Forever,” Entertainment Weekly, Jun 23, 1995

  185 Curtis, Quentin, “Cinema: Wholly boring, Batman!” The (London) Independent, Jul 16, 1995, p. 26

  186 Maslin, Janet, “Film Review: Batman Forever: New Challenges for the Caped Crusader,” The New York Times, June 16, 1995, http://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/16/movies/film-review-batman- forever-new-challenges-for-the-caped-crusader.html?scp=70&sq=batman&st=nyt, accessed May 22, 2011

  187 Travers, Peter, “Batman Forever: Review,” Rolling Stone, June 16, 1995

  188 Carr, Jay, “Wholly Hollywood, Batman! Stepping Out of the Stylish Shadows, Caped Crusader Goes Commercial,” The Boston Globe, Jun 16, 1995, p. 59

  189 Murray, Steve, “Caped Crusader Gets a Facelift,” The Atlanta Constitution, Nov. 2, 1995, p. G.9

  190 French, Philip, “Cinema: Flash! Crash! Splash! Cash! `Holy hi-tech cash-ins, Batman. They’ve made another sequel.’ `Fear not, Boy Wonder. I’ll get Philip French to review it,’” The Manchester (UK) Guardian, Jul 16, 1995, p. 7

  191 —, “’Batman’ Busts B.O. Records,” Daily Variety, June 20, 1995, p. 10

  192 Peers, Martin, “TW Stock Gets Pic up: Street Digs ‘Batman’s’ Big B.O.,” Daily Variety, June 20, 1995, p. 1

  193 Cling, Carol, “Holy merchandising, Batman!,” Las Vegas Review, Jun 15, 1995, p. 1E

  194 Cagle, Jess, “Gotham City’s New Boss: Joel Schumacher Has Come a Long Way—The ‘’Batman Forever’’ Director Has Made a Name for Himself,” Entertainment Weekly, July 21, 1995

  195 Fabrikant, Geraldine, “Why Studios Bet On the Summer Blockbuster; With Big Debts and Big Budgets, Hits are More Critical Than Ever,” The New York Times, July 3, 1995, p. A.37

  196 Popkin, Helen A.S., “Batman Unmasked Series: Xpress,” St. Petersburg Times, Jun 26, 1995, p. 1.D

  197 Cling, Carol, “Holy merchandising, Batman!,” Las Vegas Review, Jun 15, 1995, p. 1E

  198 Popkin, Helen A.S., “Batman Unmasked Series: Xpress,” St. Petersburg Times, Jun 26, 1995, p. 1.D

  199 Lippman, John, “Movies: `Batman Forever’ Is Seen as Cash Cow,” The Wall Street Journal, Jun 27, 1995, p. 4

  200 Popkin, Helen A.S., “Batman Unmasked Series: Xpress,” St. Petersburg Times, Jun 26, 1995, p. 1.D

  201 Lippman, John, “Movies: `Batman Forever’ Is Seen as Cash Cow,” The Wall Street Journal, Jun 27, 1995, p. 4

  202 Popkin, Helen A.S., “Batman Unmasked Series: Xpress,” St. Petersburg Times, Jun 26, 1995, p. 1.D

  203 Cling, Carol, “Holy merchandising, Batman!,” Las Vegas Review, Jun 15, 1995, p. 1E

  204 Lippman, John, “Movies: `Batman Forever’ Is Seen as Cash Cow,” The Wall Street Journal, Jun 27, 1995, p. 4

  205 Groves, Don, “U.S. Films Sizzling at O’Seas B.O.,” Daily Variety, Aug. 14, 1995, p. 1

  206 Carlson, Scott, “`Holy Copyright Infringement, Batman!’” The Salt Lake Tribune, Jul 14, 1995, p. Z.3 v 207 —, “Batman Forever and the Water Vampire,” KerrKellerMediaStudies, http://kerrkellermediastudies.blogspot.com/2010/10/batman-forever-and-water-vampire.html, accessed April 30, 2011

  208 Shprintz, Janet, “Judge Dismisses Case of ‘Batman’ Sculptures,” Daily Variety, June 4, 1998, p. 35

  209 Whittell, Giles, “Batman’s Wife Seeks an Amicable Divorce; Joanne Whalley Kilmer and Val Kilmer,” The Times (London), Jul 25, 1995, p. 1

  210 Silberg, Jon, “Lensers Bask in Spotlight,” Daily Variety, Jan. 22, 1997, p. 34

  211 Spelling, Ian, “Bat to the Past: Director Hopes to Take ‘Batman Forever’ Back to the Source,” The Sacramento (CA) Bee, Jun 11, 1995, p. EN 20

  Chapter Nine: BATMAN & ARNOLD

  “Batman is more than a movie—it’s an industry.”

  - Warner Bros. co-chairman Robert A. Daly1

  IVY LEAGUE

  After completing Batman Forever, Joel Schumacher went to work on A Time to Kill, another adaptation of a best-selling John Grisham novel, for Warner Bros. and New Regency Pictures. While Schumacher was scouting locations in Mississippi with his screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman, Batman Forever had its first screenings for film critics. The advance press screening results, said Goldsman, “were very positive, and industry people were excited. Joel got this kind of elfin gleam in his eye and said, ‘I think they’re going to ask us for another one.’ I was very flattered to be part of ‘us’ at that moment.”

  Knowing that Warner Bros. was pleased with his take on the Dark Knight in Batman Foreverwas a relief to Schumacher. “I was finding my way on that film and so did most of my colleagues, because it was the first Batman film we had worked on,” he said. “I don’t think any of us expected or even dreamed that Batman Forever would be so accepted. So when Bob Daly and Terry Semel asked me to direct another Batman film, I called Barbara Ling, our great production designer, and asked if she wanted to do another one. She said, ‘Joel...we haven’t even scratched the surface!’ I think I had that feeling too, because I felt that what we were able to bring to Batman Forever was a lot of humor, color and action, and if audiences liked that, we could bring them even more fun and games.”2

  Schumacher immediately began thinking about which villains would menace Batman and Robin the next time out. “Whenever I start to prepare a Batman movie, I always go right to the source,” he said. “I just get piles and piles of Batman comic books, and really get inspired.”3 By the time the director and writer boarded a plane back to Los Angeles, the ideas were already percolating. “Joel started throwing out some ideas,” said Goldsman, “and I started throwing back some ideas, and by the end of the plane trip we had the skeleton of our story.”4

  For the new film, Schumacher and Goldsman decided to focus on one of the classic baddies from the 1960s TV series and one that had never been portrayed in live action before: Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy. Created by Robert Kanigher and Sheldon Moldoff, Poison Ivy was a relatively new villainess in the Batman canon, having made her debut in Batman # 181 in June 1966. She was Pamela Isley, a botanist who became Poison Ivy after a lab accident. A female eco-terrorist who could control plants and cloud men’s minds with pheromones, her kiss was lethal. “Poison Ivy started out with a comics influence, and then I resurrected her from the ground up,” said Goldsman. But rather than look to the Adam West TV series for inspiration on Mr. Freeze, Goldsman said, “The model for Freeze was actually the Batman animated series.”5

  In August of 1995, while Batman Forever was still in theaters, Variety reported that Demi Moore was in the running to play Poison Ivy, with Patrick Stewart, star of the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation, under consideration for Mr. Freeze.6 “Maybe in the future, there will be a Batman movie that is just about Batman,” said Goldsman. “But right now, Batman movies, to a large extent, are about the colorful villains that inhabit Gotham City.”7

  Another colorful villain from the comic books was also written into the script: Bane. Created by Chuck Dixon, Doug Moench and Graham Nolan, Bane first appeared in Batman: Vengeance of Bane # 1 in January 1993. Bane was an inmate of the Peña Dura prison in the Caribbean Republic of Santa Prisca who developed his mind and body while incarcerated. When a doctor at the prison pumped him full of a serum called Venom, he became unnaturally strong. In a later comic book series, he came to Gotham City, released all the criminals from Arkham Asylum, deduced Batman’s secret identity, confronted Batman in the Batcave and broke the hero’s back, leaving him a paraplegic (Batman # 497, July 1993). Treated correctly, he would have been a formidable screen nemesis for the Dark Knight; in Goldsman’s script, he becomes merely Poison Ivy’s super-strong but dimwitted henchman.

  While production began on A Time to Kill, Akiva Goldsman started hammering out the next Batman script, which he expected to complete by January 1996.8 “We talked about it all the way through the shooting of A Time to Kill, until together we came up with the rhythm of the piece, what was happening where, when, and to whom,” said Goldsman.9 “During the last month of shooting, I went back to L.A
. and did a first draft of the Batman & Robin script.”10 Meanwhile, Batman Forever went into general release, and was soon on its way to raking in a worldwide box-office take of $300 million.11 “I really didn’t know that Batman Forever was going to be as successful as it turned out,” said Schumacher. “I think sometimes it’s easier to analyze failure, because you can look at the mistakes you made. But the kind of success at the box office and with audiences that we had with Batman Forever is like catching lightning in a bottle.”12

  “Joel and I felt that, by doing such a good job on Batman Forever, we had earned the right to do it again and had learned how to do it right,” said Goldsman.13 However, the writer did have to switch styles from the Grisham adaptation to Batman. “In a reality-based picture like A Time to Kill, you can end a scene on a poignant look, or someone walking through a door and closing it behind them,” said Goldsman. “On a Batman movie, there’d better be the flapping of a cape as somebody leaps out a window, or a giant building exploding before the sequence is over. It’s really fun to switch gears, although sometimes there’s grinding as you hit the clutch!”14

  As sole screenwriter on the new film, Goldsman was able to chart a new course for the Caped Crusader. “Essentially, Batman is about how we as individuals reckon with loss,” said Goldsman. “I assume that was Bob Kane’s conscious or unconscious intention when he developed the character’s origins. And so, I think for the Batman stories to be rooted in any kind of emotional authenticity, they have to start there.”15

  In an interview with Marc Shapiro of Starlog magazine, Goldsman said, “The emotional engine of this story is Bruce’s relationship with and potential loss of Alfred. So, when it came to creating the villains, we felt it was important to develop characters who resonated with love, devotion and obsession. You’ll find that every character in this film has those qualities.”16

  Director Joel Schumacher hoped to add a character with which young girls could identify. “I didn’t realize that there were so many young girls who were Batman fans, and as I looked around I noticed that there weren’t any teenage super heroines in our culture,” said Schumacher. “Fortunately, Batgirl did exist.”17

  As reimagined by Schumacher and Goldsman, Batgirl became not the thrill-seeking daughter of Commissioner Gordon but another character suffering loss. “We re-conceptualized Batgirl for a few reasons,” said Goldsman. “When you have a lot of characters, you need to create relationships so that they can be brought together. We tied Barbara to Alfred as his niece rather than retain her as Commissioner Gordon’s daughter, because Alfred is a more central character in our story. And by re-creating her as an orphan, we echo both Bruce and Dick’s plight.”18

  Given that he remained the sole writer throughout the process, Goldsman’s screenplay, not surprisingly, is almost identical to the finished film, with only a few scenes that either weren’t filmed or were cut. One surprise is that although the script is called Batman & Robin, Robin initially calls himself Nightwing, apparently to the chagrin of Batman. In their first dialogue exchange, Batman says, “Nice suit. And today you are?”

  “Nightwing,” responds Robin. “Scourge of darkest evil.” “This is all about fashion for you, isn’t it?” asks Batman. “It’s the gear,” says Robin. “Chicks love the gear.” In the final film, that exchange would be changed to Robin’s line, “I want a car. Chicks dig the car,” and Batman’s riposte, “This is why Superman works alone”—the first time any of the Warner Bros. Batman films made reference to another superhero’s existence.

  From it’s first major set-piece scene—the fight in the Gotham Museum—the Goldsman script devolves into the kind of puns that sucked the fun out of the movie. In the script, Mr. Freeze turns his freezing ray on a museum guard, then says, “Cop-sicle.” Later, when policemen rush him during the fight, he quickly dispatches them with deft blows, and says, “Cop-suey.” Later, when Freeze goes to look at his deceased wife in her glacier-like sarcophagus, he says, “Nothing frustrates a man like a frigid wife.”

  In a scene not in the film, after we see Freeze in his lair, we cut to Batman and Robin again battling Mr. Freeze in the museum. But when it looks like Freeze is about to get the best of Robin and Batman intervenes, we discover that it’s all a virtual reality simulation.

  In another scene absent from the final film, after Barbara Wilson is introduced, we cut to Gotham Airport, where Pamela Isley, dressed as a grieving widow, disembarks from a vintage DC-3. Luggage handlers carry off an immense coffin. Pamela says to them, “Be gentle. He’s always been touchy.” As they walk away, Bane bursts out of the coffin, picks one of the handlers up like a baseball bat and swings him into the others, sending the handlers sprawling. Meanwhile, a businessman approaches a limousine at the edge of the tarmac. As he opens the door, he sees Pamela lying on the back seat, showing some leg. She grabs the businessman’s face and kisses him passionately, and the man falls dead. A hand then reaches into the car, snaps the driver’s neck, and pulls him out. Bane then climbs into the driver’s seat, thus explaining how he becomes Ivy’s chauffeur.

  Yet another missing scene has Bruce at a function with Julie Madison when he sees Pamela Isley and is inextricably attracted to her. Next, he’s in the Batcave, where he finds that Alfred’s “brain algorithms” have been put into the Batcomputer to create a virtual Alfred, who helps him see that Pamela and Ivy are one and the same, prompting Bruce to remark, “Amazing what a good wig and contact lenses can do. And I thought Clark Kent got away with murder just wearing those glasses.”

  During the climax, Goldsman describes the Batblade, Batsled and Bathammer shooting up the wall of snow covering the Gotham Observatory as Batgirl sings “to the old 60’s Batman theme, ‘Batgirl, Baatgirl, Baatgirl.’” A further nod to the TV show comes a couple of pages later, when Robin and Batgirl are fighting Freeze’s thugs. Batgirl kicks a thug, and says, “Pow!” She punches another, and says, “Whap!” Then she backhands a third, exclaiming, “Kazow!” Robin, while fighting, asks, “What exactly are you doing?” She responds, “I don’t know. It just feels right.” A final TV show reference comes near the end of the sequence, when Batman goes to the computer console of the telescope and begins working the keyboard, saying, “Who ever thought Aunt Harriet’s typing lessons would lead to this?”19

  In the end, Goldsman wrote three drafts of the script, though the changes from one draft to the next were minimal. “These things always start longer,” said Goldsman. “There was a lot of condensing and streamlining. The individual characters’ plot arcs pretty much stayed intact. In fact, I feel that Freeze’s plot arc really improved over the three drafts, in terms of depth. By the third draft, we were taking more seriously the notion that everything was propelled by the loss of his wife. Generally, having already written one Batman script, I kind of wrote this one with a final shooting script in mind from the beginning. Going in, I had a better idea of what worked and what didn’t.”20

  The allusions to the old TV series, even though they did not survive in the final film, underscore how Schumacher and Goldsman were, from the outset, trying to make a family-friendly Batman film, one that even small children could go see without having nightmares afterwards. “Some of the scenes between Freeze and Ivy are deliciously funny,” said Schumacher. “It’s hard to top Jim Carrey, but this is definitely a comic-book movie. If you don’t have humor, then you have something deadly serious, and I can assure you that this is not The Dark Knight.”21 Akiva Goldsman claimed he was trying to present an evolution in the characters of Batman, with a “less damaged” Bruce Wayne. “I think that’s appropriate for the character at this point,” said Goldsman. “Yes, there’s a profound trauma in his past that drives him, but he’s also a very rich guy with a very successful life. We’re steering away from the self-obsession, and Batman is less internal than he has been. But I think that you’ll find that he’s far from being carefree.”22

  THE TROUBLE WITH VAL

  As the new Batman script was taking shape and A
Time to Kill was winding down, Schumacher began to think about casting. He expected to have Val Kilmer and Chris O’Donnell back in the leads, telling Daily Variety’s Michael Fleming, “Even though ours was the third Batman film, it was the first for myself, Val, Chris and Akiva, and we were excited about what we were making. On a personal level, not only did the studio take a big chance on me, but the cast did as well, since I’d never done that kind of movie before. Val and Chris especially took a big leap off the high diving board, because if the movie had not been successful, it could have hurt their careers. I’d hate to say to them, ‘Thanks for helping me, but now you’re on your own.’”23

  By October of 1995, Demi Moore was out of the running for Poison Ivy, but another high-profile actress was rumored to be considering the role—Julia Roberts.24 The script, however, was still unfinished and evolving. “I make it a rule to never write with actors in mind,” Goldsman told Starlog magazine’s Marc Shapiro. “I think you underestimate actors if you do that. I wrote this script with the idea that whoever was cast would find a way to effectively inhabit the character.”25

  While the script was coalescing, Schumacher brought back much of his Batman Forever crew, beginning with production designer Barbara Ling and producer Peter Macgregor-Scott, who described his response to the invitation as, “The first reaction is ‘Oh, God.’ The second reaction is ‘Thank you, God.’ And the third reaction is ‘God Almighty!’”26 Ling set to work just a mere five months after finishing Batman Forever.27 In the end, about 60 percent of the Batman Forever crew returned to work on Batman & Robin,28 including cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt and composer Elliot Goldenthal.

  Val Kilmer had been busy since completing Batman Forever, having starred alongside Marlon Brando in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) and opposite Michael Douglas in The Ghost and the Darkness (1996).29 By the middle of November, he had signed on to play the lead in a new film version of The Saint, a crusading avenger created by novelist Leslie Charteris in 1928 that had been played in films by George Sanders, and on TV by Roger Moore, among others.30The Saint had been in development at Paramount Pictures for six years. Kilmer became involved in 1994, before he was tapped to play Batman. Originally, it was thought that if The Saint became its own franchise, Kilmer would be able to headline both that and Batman, alternating from one series to the next.31 “Not to take anything away from Bob Kane, but you have a choice between a comic book and, with The Saint, a literary figure that has inspired this whole espionage genre, this notion of the gentleman thief, surviving by his wits, not brawn,” said Kilmer. “Another thing about taking on the role that was very appealing to act is that it’s a real journey—he goes from sinner to saint. Those opportunities don’t happen very often and they’re very fun to do.”32