by David Hughes
“We spitballed what the take would be, how we evolved what we did in The Hot Zone to now, and it was gonna be a global outbreak like SARS, as opposed to just being contained in Reston,” Hart continues. “That was almost going to be a main title sequence, and we were gonna do a global outbreak using the airline scenario. The problem was that if I was gonna get involved as an executive producer, it was going to have to be very clear what the credit situation was going to be.” After suffering through a tumultuous credit arbitration process — “a horrible situation which pitches writers against each other” — on Contact, he had worked on two films where the writers had agreed among themselves what the credits should be: an all too rare process, which the Writers Guild of America encourages in its governing agreements.
“I said to Lynda, ‘I can’t do this unless we agree up front on how credits are gonna be shared. I’m happy to take second position or third position, but I should be in there for screen story credit because I had pioneered the first draft,’” Hart recalls, “and she was not willing to let me have that conversation with Eric.” She did, however, subsequently let Hart know that the draft had not worked, and that the project had been abandoned once again. “I later ran across this script,” Hart says, “and again it just misses the characters of Nancy and Jerry Jaax and Karl Johnson and all the people that I was lucky enough to meet. I don’t care how many writers they put on it, if they could get something they were happy with and just do it, if it was closer to Richard Preston’s book, or even what I did with Richard Preston at the beginning with Lynda Obst... Karl Johnson has now written his own non-fiction novel about his experiences with outbreaks, and asked me if I’d be interested in adapting the screenplay — and I can’t wait to read it. He is a guy who has been at the epicentre longer than anybody else in virology, and I hope his story, which he’s going to try and get published, is as exciting and terrifying as anything that happened in The Hot Zone.”
Richard Preston, who has since published further bestsellers, the movie rights to which were sold for millions of dollars, has described his first encounter with Hollywood as akin to “watching people break and enter cars in broad daylight — it just happens and everyone shrugs,” yet insists he hasn’t come out empty-handed. “I’ve had so much fun telling the ‘Call-me-Arnold’ story,” he said, of his memorable first phone call with Kopelson, “it’s almost worth it.” He also hopes that The Hot Zone may yet be revived by Hollywood: “I don’t know that the story is completely dead. In Hollywood, it always depends on if you believe in reincarnation.”
Indeed, despite the problems which have plagued the film for almost two decades, The Hot Zone remains in ‘active development’ at 20th Century Fox. “I think they want to go back to Richard Preston’s book and try to make it work,” says Hart. “The most recent rumour was that they were going back to my script, but I hear that’s been put on the back burner.” Richard Friedenberg is among the casualties of The Hot Zone who remains optimistic that the film will eventually be made, declaring, “It’s a worthy project and a terrific book.” Nevertheless, Friedenberg does not expect to see his name on the credits of any eventual adaptation. “My paltry input has been swept away long ago, and will not be reflected in any way in some future film,” he says. Nor is the crisis that was The Hot Zone an experience on which he wishes to reflect: “It was a very bad time for me. For some reason it was more disillusioning than most of my experiences, and I took it hard.” Ridley Scott also found the film’s eleventh hour collapse frustrating. “I would have loved to work with Jodie [Foster],” the director told biographer Paul M. Sammon, shortly before the actress bowed out of another Scott-directed project, Hannibal. “I also thought [The Hot Zone] was one of those rare projects, like Thelma & Louise, that was actually about something.”
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.”
FALL AND RISE OF THE DARK KNIGHT
The long and winding road to Batman Begins
“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
Few 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 (despi
te 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.
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.