The movie was good, but the campaign was ingenious.
That is, the campaign to promote Batman, the top grossing movie of 1989. We are discussing it now because it will be screened on Friday night at the Warner Theatre with a live orchestral performance of Danny Elfman’s score. Elfman, a prolific film composer best known for his many collaborations with Batman director Tim Burton, has now been accused by two different women of sexual misconduct. A second, unnamed accuser came forward last October following a Rolling Stone investigation that revealed in 2018 Elfman agreed to pay $830,000 to settle a misconduct claim filed against him by composer Nomi Abadi—and then failed to pay that full sum.
The second accuser alleges that Elfman subjected her to sexual and emotional abuse between 1997 and 2002. Although Elfman and his lawyers have denied the new charges in the press and in Los Angeles County Superior Court, we must each make our own decision about what to do when someone whose work we admire is accused of being, or—as occurs with dispiriting regularity—proves themselves to be a piece of shit. The DC In Concert tour, which produces the touring film concert series, announced the 35th anniversary screening and ode to Elfman’s score at the Warner Theatre shortly after the suit was filed in October.
But back in 1989 that campaign was untainted. In the months prior to Batman’s release in that summer, the Bat-Signal was everywhere. Anton Furst—the production designer who’d win an Academy Award for Batman a couple of years before leaping to his death from the eighth floor of a Los Angeles parking garage—took the Bat-silhouette logo that Bob Kane and Bill Finger’s winged vigilante had worn on his chest for 50 years and polished it into something that suggested the hood ornament of an expensive car. The first posters released to promote the film had nothing on them save for Furst’s updated logo—what had been a little yellow oval behind the bat now replaced by a three-dimensional shield of gleaming gold—with a date beneath it: June 23.
It would be my first time seeing a movie on opening night.
Attempts to get a big-budget Bat-flick cooking had begun less than a year after Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman had proved that a comic-book movie, given A-list actors and top-tier production values, could become a massive hit, even among audiences who had no interest in comics. But progress was slow. What finally got the project over the hump was the 1986 publication of The Dark Knight Returns, writer-artist Frank Miller’s blockbuster four-issue Batman miniseries. Miller’s story about a 55-year-old Batman coaxed out of retirement to rescue a Gotham City overrun by violent gangs got covered in tastemaking publications such as Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, and was one of the pillars of an 1980s comics renaissance that also included landmarks like Watchmen and Maus, Art Spiegelman’s Pultizer-winning strip about the Holocaust.
The Dark Knight Returns was a boon to fanboys (and girls) who desperately wanted the public to forget all about the campy 1966-68 Batman TV series with a soft-bellied Adam West deadpanning bromides about pedestrian safety and such. But it brought in a lot of new readers, too, especially once Dark Knight and its Miller-penned prequel, Batman: Year One, were quickly reprinted as trade paperbacks and sold in mainstream bookstores instead of just the specialty comic-book shops that by the mid-’80s were springing up in strip malls nationwide. It all added up to a ripe market for a somber, reverent Bat-film that would take the character back to his pulpy roots.
And then Warner Brothers hired Tim Burton, the then-20-something-year-old director of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice, to make it.
Who in turn cast Michael Keaton, the slight, thinning-haired Ghost with the Most, and previously the star of archaic comedies like Mr. Mom, to play Batman.
This was before the internet, before fandom as tribal and well-organized as voting blocs, before incels threatened film critics with death for the mortal sin of disliking a superhero flick or a Star War, or of not liking it enough. But there was a fan press, and the fans sure did scream—loud enough that the mainstream press eventually picked up the story of the film’s controversial casting. Newspapers from the Los Angeles Times to even the Wall Street Journal ran pieces in 1988 fretting over the belief that putting Keaton in the cowl would tank Warners’ $30 million summer picture—an investment that would swell closer to $50 million by the time the movie was in the can.
The announcement that Jack Nicholson, the then-51-year-old two-time Academy Award winner who’d not yet descended into self-parody, would play the Joker was more warmly received, though fans had imagined a leaner, more menacing candidate like David Bowie, Willem Dafoe, or Ray Liotta. As with Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman on Superman, Nicholson would receive billing above that of the actor in the title role and lavish compensation for his work: The cut of Batman’s merchandising that Nicholson negotiated would ultimately bring him a sum greater than the film’s production budget.
For comics-obsessed kids like me, the movie, which finally arrived as the 1988-89 school year ended, was a Rorschach test: a film indistinct and noncommittal enough to any one idea of Batman that we could fill in those imaginative blanks ourselves, which we happily did. Seduced by costumer Bob Ringwood’s armored reimagining of the Batsuit (though Keaton could barely move in the damn thing), Furst’s Metropolis-inspired production design, and Elfman’s enveloping score, we convinced ourselves we were at last seeing the reverential screen translation of the character for which we’d yearned.
We must’ve been high.
To revisit Batman in 2024, after umpteen other Batman movies and TV shows, is to marvel at what a singularly weird document it is. It’s the pinnacle of high-concept 1980s studio filmmaking, a stew of synergistic corporate priorities requiring, for example, that the new Warner Bros. film feature songs by Warner Bros. recording artist Prince (who happily over-delivered, responding to producer Peter Guber’s request for two songs with nine); an influential star’s demand for more screen time be accommodated (Nicholson’s demands, not Keaton’s, naturally.) And that the Batmobiles and Batplanes toy factories were furiously cranking out would be properly advertised. Burton was free to fill in whatever art there might be room for once all those other mandates had been satisfied.
Still a lot of art, in fact. Thirty-five years later, Batman still looks and sounds great, with those Prince songs playing diegetically in the few scenes where Elfman’s score isn’t stoking the operatic emotions of the enterprise. And it needs musical stoking, because nothing about the story or the performances generates much charge beyond the kick of watching Nicholson chew Furst’s scenery.
(On the subject of the emotional effects of Elfman’s music, I’ll say that while the allegations against the composer will almost certainly color how I receive his work going forward, they don’t change the way I hear the Batman score.)
Batman strikes me now as less a movie than a pantomime, wherein the Joker vandalizes an art museum while henchmen wearing satin team jackets—silk-screened with a caricature of Nicholson’s clown-painted face—blast Prince’s written-to-order “Partyman” from a boombox. Not boring, but not grim or gritty or subversive.
The movie has three basic narrative ideas:
- Batman and the Joker are both nuts. The Joker expresses his madness by attempting to murder hundreds or thousands of Gothamites, first by poisoning cosmetics and grooming products, and once Batman foils that plot, by staging a parade that turns out to be a gas attack. (The poison cosmetics subplot does give us two funny scenes wherein TV news anchors must report the crime without the benefit of makeup or hairspray.) Batman expresses his madness by conducting what appears to be an utterly ineffectual War on Crime—at least until he finally defeats the Joker, who in the circular logic of this movie (more on that in a moment!), is a threat that Batman created himself.
- Bruce Wayne and the Joker are infatuated with the same woman, photojournalist Vicki Vale, who is on a quest to discover Batman’s secret identity. Vale is played by Kim Basinger, filling in for Sean Young, who’d already arrived in England to begin shooting Batman when she fell off a horse and had to be replaced in a matter of days. Maybe a Young-Keaton coupling would have generated some on-screen heat, but the Basinger-Keaton one sure doesn’t. Their perfunctory love story is a total bust.
- It was actually the Joker, back when he was just an ordinary hood, who shot Thomas and Martha Wayne dead in that alley all those years ago, providing young Bruce with the quest that would consume his life.
The first idea was workable, if not exactly inspiring. The second was lame. The third was sacrilege: As my friend and podcasting partner (and City Paper alumnus) Glen Weldon points out in his fine 2016 book, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture, making the Joker the killer of Batman’s parents turns this into a revenge story—one that leaves Bruce Wayne with no reason to carry on as Batman once the Joker is dead. But Batman is supposed to pursue justice, not revenge. Screenwriter Sam Hamm washed his hands of this story point; saying that Burton always wanted it, and that on-set script doctor Warren Skaaren inserted it after Hamm had left the project. Hamm also said it was Burton who decided it would be cool for butler Alfred Pennyworth—the only person who knows Batman’s secret identity—to let Vale in on the secret because she and Bruce slept together one time. Huh? Burton later admitted this plot twist, at least, had been a mistake.
One of the great joys of larger-than-life characters like Batman or Sherlock Holmes or James Bond is that so many disparate and even contradictory iterations of them can coexist. (It was true before Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and its follow-up made this irreconcilable multiplicity its very subject.) When Christopher Nolan made his trilogy of Batman movies circa 2005-2012, I realized those were the ones I’d been pining for when I was 12. But by that point I’d long since learned to love the silly-by-design mid-’60s TV show. I’d learned to love Batman Returns, Burton’s sexier, spookier sequel, which had confounded me when it was new. I still have not learned to love the pair of Joel Schumacher iterations that followed the Burton pair, but hey: We’ll always have 2017’s The LEGO Batman Movie.
I convinced my parents to drive us back to the theater to see Batman two or three more times as that summer wore on. It was a harbinger of what movies would become. The biggest hit of the previous year had been Rain Man, an R-rated drama wherein Tom Cruise didn’t even scale a skyscraper or ride a motorbike off a cliff. (Nor did he throw a fit when his co-star Dustin Hoffman took home the Best Actor Oscar that rightly belonged to Cruise.) It was a different time.
Elfman would remain Burton’s composer of choice in perpetuity, but Batman also gave the now-twice-accused musician a permanent sideline as a superhero guy. The following year, he composed the scores for Dick Tracy and Darkman, and the theme for the short-lived The Flash TV show. Later he’d go on to score three more Sam Raimi-directed superhero flicks and Avengers: Age of Ultron, too.
I can’t recall a note from any of those. But that Batman score is immortal.
Batman’s 35th anniversary screening, featuring live orchestral accompaniment conducted by James Olmstead, starts at 8 p.m. on Jan. 19 at the Warner Theatre. warnertheatredc.com. $40–$115.