Tales From Development Hell (34 page)

Despite the fact that, as far as Warner Bros was concerned, the future of the franchise remained in doubt, a plethora of rumours, lies and/or wishful thinking circulated about a fifth Batman film. Madonna had been cast as The Joker’s twisted love interest, Harley Quinn. The adversary in
Batman 5
was to be The Sacrecrow — a second rank villain first introduced in the comics in 1940 — played by John Travolta, Howard Stern or Jeff Goldblum (depending on which source you believed). Jack Nicholson was returning as The Joker,
possibly in flashback or as hallucinations invoked by The Scarecrow. “The Joker is coming, and it’s no laughing matter,” Nicholson himself reportedly teased journalists when asked about upcoming projects at a press conference for
As Good As It Gets.
In fact such was the level of scuttlebutt in the months following the release of
Batman & Robin
that several of the most prominent Internet rumour-mills — including Dark Horizons and Coming Attractions — took the unusual step of placing a moratorium on
Batman 5
rumours. Yet from all this sound and fury a few tales of the Bat did emerge which appeared to have an element of truth. One was that Mark Protosevich — who scripted
The Cell
and Ridley Scott’s unproduced adaptation of
I Am Legend
for Warner Bros — had written a script, entitled either
Batman Triumphant
or
DarkKnight,
which featured Arkham Asylum, The Scarecrow and Harley Quinn, as well as numerous nightmarish hallucinations of Batman’s past.

One of the biggest rumours centred on the casting of Batman himself. Despite the fact that George Clooney was contracted to make at least one more film in the series, Kurt Russell — then starring for Warner Bros in Paul Anderson’s ill-fated
Soldier
— was widely reported to be in line for the role, although producer Jon Peters was dismissive. “He’s not Batman,” he told
Cinescape.
“Forget it. How could he be Batman? He’s my age. He could be Batman’s father, but not Batman.” The studio, apparently hoping to break the ‘revolving door’ casting of the Batman role, publicly stood by Clooney, who appeared willing to fulfil his contract. “If there is another, I’d do it,” he told
E! News
in September 1997. “I have a contract to do it. It’d be interesting to get another crack at it to make it different or better. I’ll take a look at
[Batman & Robin]
again in a couple of months,” he added. “I got the sense that it fell short, so I need to go back and look at it, see what I could have done better.”

Although Clooney believed he had “killed the franchise”, it was director Joel Schumacher, who had wrenched the series almost all the way back to the campy style of the sixties TV show, who bore the brunt of the blame for the relatively poor performance of
Batman & Robin.
“I felt I had disappointed a lot of older fans by being too conscious of the family aspect,” he told
Variety
in early 1998. “I’d gotten tens of thousands of letters from parents asking for a film their children could go to. Now, I owe the hardcore fans the Batman movie they would love me to give them.” The implication was that he would be asked to make another
Batman,
and on 1 July 1998 he went further, telling
E! Online
that he had talked with Warner Bros production chief Lorenzo di Bonaventura about the possibility of doing another one. “I would only do it on a much smaller scale, with less villains and truer in nature to the comic books,” he said.

Schumacher’s chief inspiration was Frank Miller’s
Batman: Year One,
illustrated by Miller’s
Daredevil: Born Again
collaborator David Mazzucchelli, using a heavily-inked, high-contrast style which recalled newspaper strips like
Dick Tracy,
and coloured with earthy tones by Richmond Lewis. In just four twenty-four-page issues, Miller rewrote the first year of Batman mythology from the point of view of James Gordon, a young police lieutenant still years away from his promotion to the more familiar rank of Commissioner. As Miller wrote in his introduction to the collected edition, “If your only memory of Batman is that of Adam West and Burt Ward exchanging camped-out quips while clobbering slumming guest stars Vincent Price and Cesar Romero, I hope this book will come as a surprise.”

Year One
begins as Gordon arrives in Gotham with his pregnant wife Ann, just as Bruce Wayne returns to the city where his parents were shot dead before his eyes eighteen years earlier. After twelve years of self-imposed exile, Wayne begins training himself for the double life he is soon to lead: layabout playboy by day, masked vigilante by night. However, while Bruce is discovering the difficulties inherent in trying to clean up streets that want to stay dirty, Lieutenant Gordon is finding that the corruption he encounters among street cops is endemic, and goes all the way to the top. Although Gordon initially endangers himself by exercising zero tolerance towards his corrupt colleagues, he also earns a reputation for heroics, making him as untouchable as he is incorruptible — until he slips into an affair with a beautiful colleague, Detective Essen, forcing him to admit his infidelity rather than give in to blackmail.

Meanwhile, just as a freak encounter with a bat has inspired Bruce Wayne to adopt an
alter ego
to strike fear into the dark hearts of the Gotham underworld — not to mention the same corrupt cops Gordon is fighting from the inside — so the ‘Batman’ inspires a cat-loving prostitute named Selina to switch careers, leaving the ‘cathouse’ (brothel) to become a costumed cat burglar. Finally, Batman narrowly escapes after being cornered in a tenement building and fire-bombed by Gordon’s superiors — just in time to save Gordon’s newborn baby from thugs, and thereby create an unofficial alliance between the two idealistic crime fighters, one in plain clothes, one in costume.

Despite Schumacher’s interest in using
Year One
as the basis for a darker, grittier adaptation, in the summer of 1999 Warner Bros asked New York filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, fresh from his breakthrough feature,
Pi,
how he might approach the Batman franchise. “I told them I’d cast Clint Eastwood as the Dark Knight, and shoot it in Tokyo, doubling for Gotham City,” he says, only half-joking. “That got their attention.” Whether inspired or undeterred, the studio was brave enough to open a dialogue with the avowed Bat-fan, who became interested in the idea of an adaptation of
Year One.

“The Batman franchise had just gone more and more back towards the TV show, so it became tongue-in-cheek, a grand farce, camp,” says Aronofsky. “I pitched the complete opposite, which was totally bring-it-back-to-the-streets raw, trying to set it in a kind of real reality — no stages, no sets, shooting it all in inner cities across America, creating a very real feeling. My pitch was
Death Wish
or
The French Connection
meets
Batman.
In
Year One,
Gordon was kind of like Serpico, and Batman was kind of like Travis Bickle,” he adds, referring to police corruption whistle-blower Frank Serpico, played by Al Pacino in the eponymous 1973 film, and Robert De Niro’s vigilante in Martin Scorsese’s
Taxi Driver.
Aronofsky had already noted how Frank Miller’s acclaimed
Sin City
series had influenced his first film,
Pi;
in addition, the director already had a good working relationship with the writer/artist, since they had collaborated on an unproduced feature adaptation of Miller’s earlier graphic novel,
Ronin.
“Our take was to infuse the [Batman] movie franchise with a dose of reality,” Aronofsky says. “We tried to ask that eternal question: ‘What does it take for a real man to put on tights and fight crime?’”

The studio was intrigued enough to commission a screenplay, in which Aronofsky and Miller took a great many liberties, not only with the
Year One
comic book, but with Batman mythology in general. For a start, the script strips Bruce Wayne of his status as heir apparent to the Wayne Industries billions, proposing instead that the young Bruce is found in the street after his parents’ murder, and taken in by ‘Big Al’, who runs an auto repair shop with his son, ‘Little Al’. Driven by a desire for vengeance towards a manifest destiny of which he is only dimly aware, young Bruce (of deliberately indeterminate age) toils day and night in the shop, watching the comings and goings of hookers, johns, pimps and corrupt cops at a sleazy East End cathouse across the street, while chain-smoking detective James Gordon struggles with the corruption he finds endemic among Gotham City police officers of all ranks.

Bruce’s first act as a vigilante is to confront a dirty cop named Campbell as he accosts ‘Mistress Selina’ in the cathouse, but Campbell ends up dead and Bruce narrowly escapes being blamed. Realising that he needs to operate with more methodology, he initially dons a cape and hockey mask — deliberately suggestive of the costume of Jason Voorhees in the
Friday the 13th
films. However, Bruce soon evolves a more stylised ‘costume’ with both form and function, acquires a variety of makeshift gadgets and weapons, and re-configures a black Lincoln Continental into a makeshift ‘Bat-mobile’ — complete with blacked-out windows, night vision driving goggles, armoured bumpers and a super-charged school bus engine. In his new guise as ‘The Bat-Man’, Bruce Wayne wages war on criminals from street level to the highest echelons, working his way up the food chain to Police Commissioner Loeb and Mayor Noone, even as the executors of the Wayne estate search for their missing heir. In the end, Bruce accepts his dual destiny as heir to the Wayne fortune and the city’s saviour, and Gordon comes to accept that, while he may not agree with The Bat-Man’s methods, he cannot argue with his results. “In the comic book, the reinvention of Gordon was inspired,” says Aronofsky, “because for the first time he wasn’t a wimp, he was a bad-ass guy. Gordon’s opening scene for us was [him] sitting on a toilet with the gun barrel in his mouth and six bullets in his hand, thinking about blowing his head off — and that to me is the character.”

The comic and the script have many scenes in common — including Bruce Wayne’s nihilistic narration (part Travis Bickle from
Taxi Driver,
part Rorschach from that other great late 80s graphic novel,
Watchmen),
a heroic Gordon saving a baby during a hostage crisis, Selina as proto-Catwoman, the beating Gordon receives from fellow cops as a warning to give up his war on corruption, his suspicion that Harvey Dent is The Bat-Man, and the climactic battle in the tenement building. But it acts as a jumping-off point for a much grander narrative. Although the script removes the subplot of Gordon’s adultery, it goes further towards blurring the boundaries between accepted notions of good and evil: Gordon decries The Bat-Man’s vigilantism as the work of a terrorist whose actions put him outside the law, not above it, unaware that it was as much his own televised declaration of war on crime and corruption which inspired Bruce to vigilantism as the senseless and random murder of Bruce’s parents.

The script contains numerous references for Bat-fans, including a brief scene with a giggling green-haired inmate of Arkham Asylum, and goes a long way towards setting up a sequel, as Selina/Catwoman discovers the true identity of The Bat-Man. Interestingly, neither the comic book nor the script provide an entirely convincing argument for Bruce Wayne’s transformation into Batman: while
Year One
takes a more traditional approach — a bat smashes through the window of Bruce’s study — the script has Bruce take inspiration from the Bat-shaped mark produced by his signet ring (shades of Lee Falk’s superhero The Phantom) which leads the tabloids to dub him ‘The Bat-Man’.

In a rare interview, Miller told
The Onion
about working with Aronofsky.
“He’s a ball,” he said. “Ideas just pour out of his ears. We tend to have a lot of fun together. It’s funny, because in many ways I think I’m the lighter one of the team, and I’m not used to that.” Although he would not talk about the content of the film “because I think Warner Brothers would have somebody beat me up,” he observed that asking a screenwriter what the movie would be like “is like asking a doorman whether a building is going to be condemned.” Nevertheless, Aronofsky believes that his and Miller’s approach would have made Tim Burton’s
Batman
look like a cartoon. “I think Tim did it very well,” he says, “especially on his second film, which I think is the masterpiece of the series. But it’s not reality. It’s totally Tim Burton’s world; a brilliant, well-polished Gothic perfection concoction. The first one did have a certain amount of reality, but there were still over-the-top fight sequences, and I wanted to have real fights, [explore] what happens when two men actually fight, which you just don’t see. Because once you start romanticising it and fantasising it into super-heroics, in the sense of good guys versus bad guys, and you’re not playing with the ambiguity of what is good and what is bad... I just could not find a way in for myself to tell that story.”

Of his own approach, Aronofsky admits, “I think Warners always knew it would never be something they could make. I think rightfully so, because four year-olds buy Batman stuff, so if you release a film like that, every four year-old’s going to be screaming at their mother to take them to see it, so they really need a PG property. But there was a hope at one point that, in the same way that DC Comics puts out different types of Batman titles for different ages, there might be a way of doing [the movies] at different levels. So I was pitching to make an R-rated adult fan-based
Batman
— a hardcore version that we’d do for not that much money. You wouldn’t get any breaks from anyone because it’s Warner Bros and it’s Batman, but you could do it for a smart price, raw and edgy, and make it more for fans and adults. Maybe shoot it on Super-16 [mm film format], and maybe release it after you release the PG one, and say ‘That’s for kids, and this one’s for adults.’” Nevertheless, he adds, “Warner Bros was very brave in allowing us to develop it, and Frank and I were both really happy with the script.”