Tales From Development Hell (33 page)

Since the collapse of
The Hot Zone,
Hart has managed to use elements of his research in at least two scripts:
Lara Croft Tomb Raider — The Cradle of Life,
which has a brief reference to the Ebola virus and is largely concerned with the potentially lethal effects of a deadly disease contained within Pandora’s Box (echoes of
Outbreak
’s original title,
Pandora),
and a draft of the as-yet-unproduced science fiction film
The Outer Limits
(detailed in later editions of my earlier book,
The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made),
in which a plague spreads across the globe in days, a precursor to an invasion by aliens.
The Hot Zone,
however, was not science fiction. “It was a new kind of thriller,” says Hart. “It was like
Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
a brilliant film about paranoia which Philip Kaufman did, based on the original directed by Don Siegel — but this wasn’t science fiction, it was real.”

With diseases back in the media thanks to outbreaks of everything from SARS to swine flu (H1N1) and avian flu — and, perhaps more importantly in Hollywood terms, films such as Steven Soderbergh’s star-studded pandemic thriller
Contagion
proving popular with audiences —
The Hot Zone
may yet survive, mutate and flourish. After all, as Preston has pointed out, “It’s not like
Alien,
where people could shrug it off as science fiction. Now they’d be seeing someone come apart before their eyes and realising that the virus could be sitting next to them in the theatre. It could be anywhere.”

“I told them I’d cast Clint Eastwood as the Dark Knight, and shoot it in Tokyo, doubling for Gotham City. That got their attention.”

—
proposed
Batman 5
director Darren Aronofsky

F
ew heroes have inspired so many stories as the costumed crime fighter known to almost every man, woman and child on Earth as Batman. The creation of cartoonist Bob Kane and his (mostly uncredited) partner Bill Finger, Batman made his first appearance in
Detective Comics
#27, published in May 1939 — a year after Superman’s début. Lacking the superpowers of his predecessor, ‘The Bat-Man’ was forced to rely on his physical prowess, and the enormous wealth of his
alter ego,
the millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne, who provided his costumed counterpart with a house (the Batcave), a car (the Batmobile), an aircraft (the Batplane) and a utility belt full of gadgets. Kane credited numerous influences for his creation, including Zorro, The Shadow and a 1930 film entitled
The Bat Whispers,
which featured a caped criminal who shines his bat insignia on the wall just prior to killing his victims. “I remember when I was twelve or thirteen... I came across a book about Leonardo da Vinci,” Kane added. “This had a picture of a flying machine with huge bat wings... It looked like a bat man to me.”

Batman first reached the silver screen as early as the 1940s, with the first of two fifteen-chapter Columbia serials:
Batman
(1943), starring Lewis Wilson as the Caped Crusader, and
Batman and Robin
(1949), with Robert Lowery. Almost two decades later, on 12 January 1966, the ABC television series
starring Adam West and Burt Ward brought the characters to an entirely new generation, running for only two seasons, but earning a quickie big-screen spin-off within the first year. Although Kane’s earliest stories had a noir-ish sensibility, over time the characters developed the more playful personae that were magnificently captured by the camp capers of the TV series. “Batman and Robin were always punning and wisecracking and so were the villains,” Kane said in 1965. “It was camp way ahead of its time.” In the 1970s, Batman continued to appear in an animated series,
Superfriends,
but the legacy of the 1960s TV series meant that it was not until Frank Miller reinvented the character for the darkly gothic comic strip series
The Dark Knight Returns
and
Batman: Year One
in the mid-1980s that the world was ready to take Batman seriously again.

Just as Batman had made his first appearance in comic strips a year after Superman, the development of the
Batman
movie — the first since the 1966 caper with Adam West — began a year after the blockbuster success of
Superman: The Movie
in 1978. Former Batman comic book writer Michael E. Uslan, together with his producing partner Benjamin Melniker, secured the film rights from DC Comics, announcing a 1981 release for the film, then budgeted at $15 million. Uslan and Melniker hired
Superman’s
(uncredited) screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz to script the story, which was set in the near future, and closely followed the
Superman
model: an extended origin story, followed by the genesis of his superhero
alter ego,
and his eventual confrontation with The Joker. It ended with the introduction of Robin. It was Uslan’s wish to make “a definitive Batman movie totally removed from the TV show, totally removed from camp; a version that went back to the original Bob Kane/Bill Finger strips.”

By 1983, the project was still languishing in Development Hell, as potential directors including Ivan Reitman
(Ghostbusters)
and Joe Dante
(Gremlins)
came and went. It was following the surprise success of Tim Burton’s slapstick comedy
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure
that Warner Bros — whose stewardship of the project resulted from a deal with Peter Guber’s Casablanca Film Works, with whom Melniker had a development deal — offered the project to lifelong Bat-fan Tim Burton, who was busy making
Beetlejuice
for the studio. “The first treatment of
Batman,
the Mankiewicz script, was basically
Superman,
only the names had been changed,” Burton told Mark Salisbury. “It had the same jokey tone, as the story followed Bruce Wayne from childhood through to his beginnings as a crime fighter. They didn’t acknowledge any of the freakish nature of it... The Mankiewicz script made it more obvious to me that you couldn’t treat
Batman
like
Superman,
or treat it like the TV series, because
it’s a guy dressing up as a bat and no matter what anyone says, that’s weird.” Although Burton had fond memories of the series, which he would run home from school to watch, he had no wish to duplicate its campy tone. Yet it would take the comic book boom of the late 1980s — notably the success of the collected edition of
The Dark Knight Returns
— to convince Warner Bros that Burton’s approach might connect with audiences. “The success of the graphic novel made our ideas far more acceptable,” he observed.

With Warner Bros’ blessing, Burton began working on a new draft with emerging screenwriting talent and fellow Bat-fan Sam Hamm, whose comedy script
Pulitzer Prize
had sparked a bidding war and landed him a two-year contract with Warner Bros. Hamm felt that the
Superman
model was wrong; that rather than dwell on Batman’s origins, the character should be presented as a
fait accompli,
with his background and motivations emerging as the story progressed, so that the unlocking of the mystery becomes part of the plot. “I tried to take the premise which had this emotionally scarred millionaire whose way of dealing with his traumas was by putting on the suit,” Hamm said. “If you look at it from this aspect, that there is no world of superheroes, no DC Universe and no real genre conventions to fall back on, you can start taking the character seriously. You can ask, ‘What if this guy actually does exist?’ And in turn, it’ll generate a lot of plot for you.” Burton liked the approach: “I’d just meet Sam on weekends to discuss the early writing stages. We knocked it into good shape while I directed
Beetlejuice,
but as a ‘go’ project it was only green-lighted by Warners when the opening figures for
Beetlejuice
surprised everybody — including myself!”

Mel Gibson, Alec Baldwin, Bill Murray, Charlie Sheen and Pierce Brosnan were all rumoured to be on Warner Bros’ shortlist for the title role, although Jack Nicholson’s casting as The Joker meant that the studio could afford to go with an unknown — after all, it had worked with Christopher Reeve for
Superman.
Burton had his doubts. “In my mind I kept reading reviews that said, ‘Jack’s terrific, but the unknown as Batman is nothing special,’” he told Mark Salisbury. Neither did he want to cast an obvious action hero — “Why would this big, macho, Arnold Schwarzenegger-type person dress up as a bat for God’s sake?” Finally, it came down to only one choice: Michael Keaton, whom he had just directed in
Beetlejuice. “That
guy you could see putting on a bat-suit; he does it because he
needs
to, because he’s not this gigantic, strapping macho man. It’s all about transformation...” observed Burton. “Taking Michael and making him Batman just underscored the whole split personality thing which is really what I think the movie’s all about.”

By this time, Hamm’s involvement had been sidelined by the writers’ strike, so Burton brought in
Beetlejuice
writer Warren Skaaren and Charles McKeown (The
Adventures of Baron Munchausen).
Their principal job was to lighten the tone — not because of Keaton’s casting, but because of studio fears that a troubled and disturbed Batman, full of self-doubt and unresolved psychological issues, might turn off audiences. “I see what they’re doing,” Hamm conceded, “in that they don’t want to have a larger-than-life, heroic character who is plagued by doubts about the validity of what he’s doing, but it’s stuff that I miss.”

Principal photography began under tight security in October 1988. Although Sean Young’s riding accident threw the schedule out at an early stage, it could have spelled disaster for the production had it occurred later in the shoot; as it was, none of her scenes had to be re-shot when Kim Basinger stepped into Vicki Vale’s shoes. In spite of this early setback, the sheer scale of the production, the complexity of the special effects, the extensive night shoots, the large number of interior and exterior locations, and the restrictive nature of Jack Nicholson’s contract — which, despite his enormous fee, meant that he could only be called for a specified number of hours per day, including time spent in the makeup chair — Burton delivered the film on schedule, and only a fraction over budget. The anticipation for
Batman
was running at fever pitch by the time the film finally hit US cinemas on 21 June 1989, swooping to a record-breaking $42.7 million opening weekend, becoming the first film to hit $100 million after just ten days on release, and grossing $413 million worldwide. ‘Bat-mania’ swept the planet, with the film becoming not only the biggest film of 1989, but perhaps more significantly the most successful in Warner Bros’ history. Thus, it came as no surprise when the studio invited Burton back up to bat for the sequel. No one was more surprised than the director, however, when he said yes.

Although Warner Bros left the Gotham City set standing at Pinewood Studios (at a cost of $20,000 per day) in the hopes that the success of
Batman
would warrant a sequel,
Batman Returns
was ultimately shot in Los Angeles, with Burton again at the helm, and Michael Keaton back in the Batsuit. This time, Burton’s dark sensibilities were given a freer reign, with The Penguin (Danny DeVito) and Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer) as the villains. Sam Hamm’s script (which also featured Catwoman) was rejected in favour of one by
Heathers
scribe Daniel Waters, which was subsequently doctored by Wesley Strick
(Cape Fear).

“When I was hired to write
Batman Returns
([called]
Batman II
at the time),
I was asked to focus on one (big) problem with the current script: Penguin’s lack of a ‘master plan’,” Strick recalls. “To be honest, this didn’t especially bother me; in fact I found it refreshing — in comic book stories, there’s nothing hoarier or (usually) hokier than an arch-villain’s ‘master plan’. But the lack of one in
Batman II
was obsessing the Warner brass.” Strick says that he was presented with “the usual boring ideas to do with warming the city, or freezing the city, that kind of stuff.” (Warner executives evidently continued to have similar ideas as the years passed: a frozen Gotham ended up as a key plot device in
Batman & Robin.)

Strick pitched an alternative approach — inspired by the ‘Moses’ parallels of Water’s prologue, in which Baby Penguin is bundled in a basket and thrown in the river where he floats, helpless, till he’s saved (and subsequently raised) by Gotham’s sewer denizens — in which Penguin’s ‘master plan’ is to kill the firstborn sons of Gotham City. Warner Bros loved it, and so did Burton. However, as Strick admits, “It turned out to be a controversial addition. The toy manufacturers were not alone in disliking it — it also did substantially less business than the first [Batman].” Indeed, although
Batman Returns
scored a bigger opening weekend ($45.6 million) than its predecessor, its worldwide gross was $282.8 million, barely two thirds of
Batman’s
score.

Joel Schumacher’s
Batman Forever
(1995) — featuring Val Kilmer as Batman, Jim Carrey as The Riddler, Nicole Kidman as love interest Dr Chase Meridian, Chris O’Donnell as Robin, and (despite the casting of Billy Dee Williams as Harvey Dent in
Batman)
Tommy Lee Jones as Harvey Dent/ Two-Face — bounced back, with a $52.7 million opening weekend and a worldwide gross of $333 million. Yet the $42.87 million opening weekend and mere $237 million worldwide gross of the same director’s
Batman & Robin
(1997) — with George Clooney and Chris O’Donnell as the titular dynamic duo, Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr Freeze, Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy and Alicia Silverstone as Batgirl — effectively put the franchise on hiatus, despite a reported $125 million in additional revenue from tie-in toys, merchandise, clothing and ancillary items.