Billion Dollar Batman

by Bruce Scivally

  Warner Bros. was tempted to take a gamble on Broadway because of the potential ripple effect of a hit show. Even a mediocre show could revive DVD sales of the original movie and create a lucrative revenue stream from touring road companies, toys, T-shirts and collectibles.4 But unlike Disney, Warner Bros. did not have a division specifically dedicated to the production of musicals. However, one of their TV executives, Gregory Maday, had been a former theater director in Pittsburgh before moving on to CBS, where he oversaw shows like Murphy Brown as head of comedy and drama development. From there, he moved on to Warner Bros., where he toiled for two decades before he was tapped to head the new division, which would eventually become Warner Bros. Theatre Ventures. “I love the theater,” said Maday, “and for me, getting to do this is a way to go back to something that I never got out of my blood.”5

  With veteran Broadway producer Emanuel Azenberg—producer of Neil Simon’s plays as well as the hit Sunday in the Park With George—as an advisor, Maday began meeting with various playwrights about turning the most memorable films in the Warners’ library into musicals.6 “We’ve seen the Broadway explosion and we’re trying to see if there’s a way we can participate,” said Maday.7

  Of course, Warners subsidiary DC Comics already had some experience bringing one of their characters to the Great White Way. It’s a Bird...It’s a Plane...It’s Superman! opened at the Alvin Theatre on March 29, 1966 to generally positive reviews, but closed on July 17 after 129 performances; its camp treatment of the man from Krypton quickly turned it from a legit tuner into kiddie matinee fare.

  Warner Bros. now made plans to bring Batman, one of their most valuable assets, to the stage. The question was—who to write it? They first went to Larry Gelbart, who developed M*A*S*H for television and was the writer of both the 1982 film Tootsie and the 1990 Tony Award-winning musical City of Angels. However, Gelbart was not interested in exploring the dark streets of Gotham.8

  To compose the music, the studio approached Elliot Goldenthal, who scored Joel Schumacher’s Batman films. Goldenthal turned them down, saying he had a problem with the idea of putting Batman into a long-running musical, where the story would be the same every night. “Batman is disposable culture,” he said. “It is mythic, but you throw it away and next week Batman is doing something else. The beauty is Batman’s continued exploits.”9

  Looking for a musician with Broadway experience who would also have an affinity for the darkness of Batman’s world, Maday and Azenberg next approached Jim Steinman. A composer, lyricist and record producer best known for his collaborations with Meat Loaf (their two Bat Out of Hell albums sold more than 50 million copies), Steinman had written lyrics for the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Whistle Down the Wind and had just finished collaborating on a successful stage adaptation of the 1967 Roman Polanski film The Fearless Vampire Killers. Called Tanz der Vampire (Dance of the Vampires), it opened in Vienna, Austria on October 4, 1997 and went on to win the International Musical Award Grammy in 1998. Steinman’s rock and roll music, known for its majestic, operatic sweep, also seemed in keeping with the style of music that was then popular on Broadway. He had long wanted to do a musical based on Peter Pan, to be called Neverland, but plans for that were shelved when he began work on Batman.10

  Warners’ began negotiations with Steinman in 1998. When Entertainment Weekly asked the composer about his work habits, he said, “I’m nocturnal. My favorite thing is to go to sleep around noon, and work through the night...I listen to Wagner and the Beach Boys. And I watch Hitchcock. I once got kicked out of an apartment for playing the score from Psycho too loud.” To get ready for Batman, he said, “I’m starting to sleep upside down in a tree.”11

  To write the book for the musical, Warners again went for a proven talent. By April of 1999, they were working out a deal with David Ives, best known for his plays Ancient History, Mere Mortals and English Made Simple. Ives began his stage career with Encores!, the “musicals in concert” series presented at the New York City Center, where he retooled the texts for almost a dozen vintage musicals.12

  Around the same time that Ives came aboard, Warners approached Stephen Daldry, director of the London and Broadway productions of An Inspector Calls, to direct the show. Daldry passed. They next began courting Robin Phillips, director of the Broadway hit Jekyll and Hyde.13

  The original plan was to have the musical ready for the Broadway stage by 2000 or 2001.14 Steinman and Ives struggled to nail down a story, eventually seeking inspiration from Tim Burton’s Batman films. “David and I floundered around for a year trying to figure out how to musicalize Batman,” said Steinman. “Then we looked at Tim’s original movie and thought, that’s it.”15 The final storyline borrowed elements from both Batman and Batman Returns, pitting Batman against the Joker and Catwoman. “It’s loosely based on the Tim Burton movies,” Steinman told Entertainment Weekly. “There’s a thrilling 20-minute opening spectacle of Gotham City. It’s like Guys and Dolls on mescaline. In a good way.”16 He would later tell The New York Post that his Batman score was a mixture of “Brecht, Weill, Rodgers & Hammerstein and rock ‘n’ roll,” and the overall design concept was “Gotham City as Berlin in the 1930s.”17

  Warners hoped to get a draft of the script and score from Steinman and Ives in early November 2000.18 But that date came and went, and the musical dynamic duo were still hard at work in December. By that point, it looked like the play wouldn’t reach Broadway until 2002 or 2003.19

  The studio continued searching for a director for the musical, and in the summer of 2001, they signed a ringer. On July 27, The New York Post announced that Tim Burton, whom Warner Bros. had been courting for over a year, had finally agreed to make his Broadway directing debut with Batman: The Musical. The studio sealed the deal the previous week, after Burton had several positive meetings with Steinman and Ives. “We’re thrilled he’s going to do it,” said Steinman, adding that Burton “has already got a list of 20 designers from all over the world he wants to talk to about the production.”20 Steinman told Playbill On-Line, “It was my dream that he do this.”21

  Reportedly, Burton was keen to direct the musical because he was unhappy with the lighter tone the Batman films took after he left the series. An unnamed source said the director wanted to “redeem the soul of the Batman series.” Burton planned to begin work on the musical full-time in 2002, with the intention of opening it out of town in 2004 and on Broadway in 2005.22

  During all the years that Batman: The Musical was in development, David Ives kept busy writing the book for other musicals. After Ives accompanied Steinman to Stuttgart to see a production of Dance of the Vampires in 2002, Steinman asked him to join that project, which had had a troubled history on its way to Broadway. The musical went through several producers and directors and, according to reports, as much as $14 million.23 Ives was also toiling on Disney’s stage version of The Little Mermaid.24

  By November 2002, Ives had written a draft of the script for Batman: The Musical which Burton reportedly liked, and Steinman had completed half a dozen songs.25 Steinman told New York Newsday that the musical was about 70 percent done. “But it’s got a lot of work to do,” said Steinman. “Tim Burton’s directing it, and he’ll change a lot.” He added, “The musical is very similar to the first movie. Very dark and wild, with some very anarchic comedy.”26

  Just as it seemed the project was picking up steam, Maday put it on the back burner. In 2003, he began to concentrate on a Broadway version of The Vampire Lestat, with music by Elton John and Bernie Taupin and a book by Tim Rice. Warners was pushing the project despite the fact that Steinman’s similar Dance of the Vampires also opened in 2003 and closed after only a month. Likewise, Lestat got scathing reviews in its previews, and Warner Bros. Theatre Ventures first official Broadway production closed after only 39 performances.27

  Maday was now pushing other projects besides Batman: The Musical, including musicals based on Harry Potter and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He also developed an
interpretive dance version of Casablanca, which debuted in China in 2005.28

  Eventually, Steinman and Ives stopped work on the musical and moved on to other projects. Looking back on his own involvement, Tim Burton shrugged it off as something that never really interested him, telling a reporter that when he was first asked to do it, “I thought: ‘Oh no—Batman On Ice!’”29 Over the weekend of July 15 and 16, 2006, Steinman debuted demos of several of his songs for Batman: The Musical on his website.30 They can still be downloaded from Jim Steinman.com (http://www.jimsteinman.com/dreampol.htm), though a more complete collection of the songs is at Ryan Letizia’s website The Dark Knight of the Soul: The Unofficial Memorial to Batman: The Musical (http://www.freewebs.com/batman_themusical/home.htm).

  Listening to the demos, one can begin to get a sense of what Batman: The Musical might have been like. The music has the typical Steinman sweep, from Batman’s opening number, “The Graveyard Shift,” where the Caped Crusader sings a dirge-like tune with the repeated phrase, “I work the graveyard shift,” to Catwoman’s plaintive “I Need All the Love I Can Get,” to the Joker’s frenetic “Wonderful Toys,” whose main phrase is a line from the 1989 Batman film, “Where does he get those wonderful toys?” Two of the songs written for the musical were covered by Meat Loaf on his 2006 album The Monster is Loose: “In the Land of the Pig the Butcher is King,” a song written from the point-of-view of corrupt Gotham City executives, and “Cry to Heaven,” which is a beautiful but bleak lullaby. Steinman is currently working on a new stage production, Bat Out of Hell: The Musical, and it is believed that some of the songs originally written for Batman may appear in this new venture.

  It’s debatable whether Batman: The Musical would ever have worked. In recent films, Batman has become such a dark and brooding figure that it’s difficult to picture him singing. But, before Andrew Lloyd Webber came along, the same could have been said for the Phantom of the Opera. And a few years ago, the same would have been said of Spider-Man. From the few snatches of music that have been made public, it at least seems possible that the show would have been much more than Batman on Ice. But unless Warner Theatre Ventures decides to resurrect it, on ice it shall remain.

  Although the Steinman and Ives show bit the dust, Batman did arrive in the flesh for the Batman Live arena show. The £7.5 million extravaganza, featuring Batman, Robin, the Joker, the Riddler and Catwoman, kicked off at the Manchester Evening News Arena in Manchester, England on July 19, 2011; from there, it moved on to Paris and other European cities. The script for the show was provided by writers who had some history with the character, Stan Berkowitz and Alan Burnett. Both were comic book veterans and multiple Emmy-award winners for various Batman animated series. Sets were created by Es Devlin, designer of Take That’s Progress tour, who had also worked with Lady Gaga and the English National Opera. Rolling Stones tour veteran Patrick Woodroffe supervised the lighting, and Formula One designer Gordon Murray created the Batmobile.31

  Sam Heughan and Nick Court alternated performances playing Batman in the show. Heughan, 31, told Paul Croughton of The Times of London, “I’ve done a bit of TV, a few films and a lot of theatre, but this is totally different. Before we started rehearsals, I thought I was in pretty good shape. Then we had two weeks of Batcamp, where we’d spend the morning on different styles of fighting—capoeira, boxing, stick fighting, karate—and the afternoon on core conditioning. Which was hardcore. But it was really helpful with the flying.”32

  The Batman Live show played 87 shows in 10 major arenas around Britain and Ireland over a three-month period. In a review in which he gave it 3 out of 5 stars, The Times of London’s Dominic Wells, who saw the show on opening night, wrote, “The production’s simple plot tells how Robin came to live with the Caped Crusader; the son of circus performers killed by an extortionist, he, like Batman, was orphaned by crime. You wouldn’t think it hard to wring sympathy from the violent deaths of two sets of parents while their only sons look helplessly on, but neither killing carries a shred of pathos...Yet as the show goes on, the positives more than outweigh the negatives...The Joker makes a spectacular entrance, springing 20ft into the air from a jack-in-the-box, gleefully inquiring: ‘Tooooo subtle?’ His adoring girlfriend, Harlequin, is his match in madness, with a voice like Cyndi Lauper channeling Marilyn Monroe...By the time the new-look Batmobile skids on to the stage, the audience is equally revved up and ready to roar. In short, it’s a wildly ambitious show that more than fills an arena space.”33

  BATMAN: YEAR ONE & BEYOND

  While the Broadway show was in development, Warner Bros. contemplated how to continue their Batman film series. In August of 2000, Daily Variety reported that Boaz Yakin, director of Remember the Titans, had been hired to co-write and direct a live action adaptation of Batman Beyond, the WB Kids Network animated series that took place in a future Gotham City, where Bruce Wayne was retired from crime fighting but aiding Tim McGinnis, a high schooler who became a new, younger Batman, battling the evil corporate forces that killed his father and now controlled Wayne’s empire. The creators of the series, Paul Dini and Alan Burnett, would co-write the film’s script with Yakin, and cyberpunk sci-fi novelist Neal Stephenson, author of Cryptonomicon, was negotiating to be a consultant.34 Dini and Burnett had already written several Batman animated straight-to-video features, including Batman Beyond: The Movie, The Batman/Superman Movie and Superman: The Last Son of Krypton, as well as the 1993 Warner Bros. Animation theatrical feature Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. Burnett also wrote numerous episodes of Batman: The Animated Series, a celebrated show that ran for six seasons beginning on the Fox Network and continuing on the WB Network before spawning several successful spin-offs.35

  For industry observers, Warner Bros.’ inability to quickly re-launch Batman was a mystery, since the Burbank studio was Hollywood’s most successful when it came to launching blockbuster franchises. Their Lethal Weapon series had been going for 11 years, and Harry Potter was off with a bang; the first film in that series took in a whopping $969 million at the worldwide box office, threatening to make Batman Warner Bros.’ second biggest corporate asset.36

  At the dawn of the 21st Century, every major studio pursued films based on comic book characters. 20th Century Fox had the X-Men and Daredevil, Universal was prepping The Hulk, Sony/Columbia had Spider-Man, and Warner Bros. had Batman and Superman—two series that each ran out of steam after less than a decade.37 Movie studio executives looked for “tentpole” movies—the big megahit whose overwhelming success would cover the losses of lesser-performing films. They sought properties that would spin off two or more sequels and generate income from merchandising tie-ins. This was especially important for Warner Bros., whose parent company, Time- Warner, was plunged heavily into debt after merging with AOL in 2001.38

  The studio’s recent rocky ride with Superman began in 1993, when Warner Bros. president of theatrical production Lorenzo di Bonaventura visited Joel Silver’s ranch in South Carolina. While there, he went on a five-mile jog with another guest, former Batman producer Jon Peters, who had begun work on developing a new Superman film. After di Bonaventura returned to California, Warner Bros. bought the film rights to Superman from Alexander Salkind, producer of the Superman movies starring Christopher Reeve. Working with Peters, the studio commissioned a script from Jonathan Lemkin, writer of the fourth Lethal Weapon film, in 1995. When the studio received Lemkin’s script, they found it too dark, and hired another writer, Gregory Poirier, to take a crack at it. Still unsatisfied, they turned to Kevin Smith to write a third script. Smith clashed with Peters, and when Tim Burton was attached to direct and Nicholas Cage to star, yet another scriptwriter, Wesley Strick, was brought in. Strick’s script looked promising, but when a budget for the film came in at over $100 million, the studio shelved it.39

  Meanwhile, Warner Bros. took a two-pronged approach to reviving Batman. Besides developing the live-action Batman Beyond feature, on September 21, 2000, Daily Variety’s Dana Harris reported that D
arren Aronofsky, director of Pi (1998) and Requiem for a Dream (2000), had been tapped to direct Batman: Year One.40 Bryan Singer, director of the 2000 movie X-Men, lobbied to be the director of Batman: Year One, but the job was given to Aronofsky because Lorenzo di Bonaventura had seen an advance print of Requiem for a Dream and was impressed with Aronofsky’s style.41

  Frank Miller’s script for Batman: Year One was similar to his comic book of the same name, and included a couple of set piece scenes that were taken almost verbatim from the comic. Yet it deviated from the comic book in strange and interesting ways. The comic book tells the parallel stories of Jim Gordon, a police detective who has just arrived in Gotham City, and is immediately suspect because he’s an honest cop who, unlike all the other cops around him, won’t take graft, and 25-year-old millionaire Bruce Wayne, heir to the Wayne fortune, who returns to Gotham City after 12 years spent abroad. In the comic, after Bruce settles in at Wayne Manor, he soon begins making forays out among the criminal elements of the city, trying to clean up Gotham in his own vigilante way. His first encounters almost get him killed; he decides to adopt the persona of a bat to frighten his victims. Alfred is largely absent, but in the few panels where he does appear, he’s obviously aiding “Master Bruce.” Though suspicious of each other at first, Wayne and Gordon become allies by the end of the tale, two crusaders who both want the best for Gotham City.

  As dark and cynical as the comic book was, it presented versions of Gordon and Bruce Wayne that fit within the established canon. The film script, on the other hand, seemed intent on totally re-inventing the characters, canon be damned. It presented a Jim Gordon with suicidal tendencies; the first time he’s seen, he’s in his boxers on the toilet in his apartment with a gun in his mouth, an image repeated later in the script. He’s still a newly arrived cop, still untrusted by his associates because he’s too honest, but this Gordon is much more of a brooding depressive, particularly in the beginning of the story. Bruce Wayne received a particularly drastic makeover. According to the script, after his parents were killed, Bruce ran away and ended up in a junkyard, where he was found by a black man named Big Al who, with his son, Little Al, ran a junkyard and garage. Bruce turned up on a scrap pile, hungry and wild. Big Al took him in and raised him. After Big Al died, Bruce stayed on at the garage, helping Little Al, who once had aspirations to go to Medical School, run the repair shop of the garage. In this script, Alfred Pennyworth is nonexistent; there is only Little Al to look after Bruce, and later become his ally-in-vigilantism, putting him back together when he comes back to his squalid apartment above the garage broken and bloody. This Bruce Wayne is also a depressive, constantly writing letters to his dead father (we hear them in voice-over) that he never mails, but keeps in a cardboard box. He’s filled with rage, driven by revenge, and presented as being a grade-A delusional psychopath. Some of the big set piece scenes are preserved from the comic book, and the story still ends with Batman and Gordon becoming trusted partners in their war on crime, but it’s an unrelentingly grim and ultra-violent ride.42