Show Business: The Caped Crusader Flies Again

Big, dark and flamboyant, the movie Batman aims to bring Gotham City's favorite cave dweller to majestic life

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It was 1939, and Vincent Sullivan, editor of Detective Comics, had a terrific idea. So what if it was someone else's? The year before, a muscle-bound man from Krypton had landed in the pages of rival Action Comics and become an instant icon of pop culture. Sullivan may not have owned Superman, but he could clone it. He called in cartoonist Bob Kane, then 18, and asked for a similar "super-duper" character. Kane went home, tossed the movies The Mark of Zorro and The Bat Whispers into an imaginary blender with Leonardo da Vinci's flying machine, and dreamed up Batman. The whole process took a few days.

Now Batman is 50. Who cares? Well, all the fans who grew up with the character in comics and in the popular mid-'60s TV series. And the younger generation, still devouring Batman comics in a new, hipper format. And, next week, moviegoers attending the opening of Batman, with Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne (alias the Caped Crusader) and Jack Nicholson as his nemesis the Joker. In a season when the other big-budget films are sequels, Batman should seem familiar yet fresh. At least Warner Bros., with $35 million riding on the film, hopes so.

Batman surely has consumer anticipation -- in Hollywoodese, "wanna-see." Last fall Fleet Street sent out helicopters to get photos from the film's closed London set. In the U.S. last winter, fans reportedly paid $6 to get into theaters where the 90-sec. trailer was being shown, then left before the main feature. The market is already clogged with Batman products -- including miniature Batmobiles, Batwings, sunshades, earrings, cloisonne pins, backpacks and boxer shorts -- as part of a huge merchandising campaign.

The film behind the hullabaloo has been a decade in gestation, beginning in 1979 when producers Peter Guber and Jon Peters obtained the movie rights. What took so long? At first the project was greeted with tremendous skepticism. "I'd say I was doing a Batman film, and people would laugh," recalls Peters. "They saw him as a guy in tights, and unlike Superman, he didn't fly." Finding a suitable script proved an additional problem. Early drafts followed Batman from the childhood trauma of seeing his parents gunned down by vicious Jack Napier. "You had to wade through 20 years," says Sam Hamm, one of the three writers who worked on the film, "just to get to the first shot of the guy in the costume that we've all come to see." His solution: Bruce Wayne is already Batman, but Jack Napier is not yet the Joker.

In Hamm's scenario, Batman interrupts a Napier heist and allows the crook to fall into a vat of toxic waste. Jack emerges as the Joker and leads a crime wave, concocting a formula to be injected into cosmetics that twists the victim's face into the Joker's awful leer. Soon Gotham is a city of the grinning dead, and only Batman can revive it, with the help of Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger), frontline photojournalist and all-time fabulous babe.

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