|
How Hollywood had the last laugh
by Tom Shone, as featured in the September 2004 issue of Daily Telegraph
Posted by raleagh on Fri, 18th April 2008 at 5:58am
This article has been viewed 11 times
Copyright © Tom Shone 2004. Taken from 'Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer' by Tom Shone, published by Simon and Schuster UK Ltd. From the Daily Telegraph
A blockbuster's success used to depend above all on one thing: audiences had to like it. In the final extract from his enthralling new book, Tom Shone explains how 'Batman' changed all that and brought the dark shadow of merchandising to the movies
Where do movies come from? It used to be relatively easy to say. A movie started life as an idea by a director, or a script by a writer.
The script then secured funding via a producer, who submitted his budget to a studio for approval, hopefully getting a green light, and thus began the film's long journey to the screen. That journey was fraught with peril, and could get snarled up at any stage, and frequently did, but that essentially was the order: idea, money, execution.
Batman's journey to the screen was different, a three-legged race in which idea, money and execution all exerted their lopsided pull on one another, all at the same time, giving it an altogether more drunken gait. It wasn't how movies used to get made, if you were lucky, but Batman was a taste of the future: increasingly, it would be how blockbusters got made.
You could, for instance, say that the film started life as a single-spaced, nine-page memo, presented by the comic-book aficionado Michael Uslan to producers Jon Peters and Peter Guber back in 1980: "No longer portrayed as a pot-bellied caped clown, Batman has again become a vigilante who stalks criminals in the shadow of night." Peters and Guber signed a deal with Uslan, who then heard nothing back from the producers for several years, as they migrated from their film company, Casablanca, to PolyGram, and from PolyGram to Warner Brothers, where Peters and Guber signed a production deal in 1982.
And it was at Warners that the project began to pick up some heat, for Warners also owned DC Comics, and therefore all the merchandising rights to the Batman comic strip. The project thus had "synergy" that longed-for cross-pollination that occurs when the different arms of a large corporation come together to help promote a single "entertainment property".
Guber went knocking on doors, up and down the Warners lot. "We went and managed to enlist the support of people like Dan Romanelli, the then head of merchandising, and discussed how this could resuscitate the whole merchandising company." Romanelli had learnt from the release of Superman in 1978 that some films were more "toyetic" easily turned into toys than others.
"Here was the problem," said Romanelli. "Superman was a phenomenon but Superman doesn't need anything. Batman needs all his toys to get around. Batman has amazing toys. Superman just flies and he's off. It was all very frustrating for us." Batman was different: in Sam Hamm's script he was happily sprouting toys by the truckload and, although he was a hero, he looked like a villain. He was toyetic.
The film's merchandisers were given unprecedented access to the production, with faxes of the film's designs flying back and forth across the Atlantic, before the producers invited the film's licensees over to look at the real thing hundreds of them swarming over designer Anton Furst's darkly fascistic Gotham City sets.
"They were very excited," noted Furst dryly, although Tim Burton, the film's director, was aghast. "Cereal manufacturers and fast food companies, who wanted to make bat-shaped toys and hamburgers were looking over my shoulder the whole time," he complained. "It was quite horrifying."
Burton had popped into the frame in 1986, and a less-likely man to helm a big studio blockbuster would have been hard to find. With his spindly pipe-cleaner frame, topped off with an unruly crow's nest of hair, from which complete sentences would occasionally emerge only under extreme duress Burton looked like some lesser-known cousin of the Addams family.
From the time he was a kid, people had taken one look at his heavy-lidded eyes and asked if he was on drugs. Brought up in the Los Angeles suburb of Burbank, beneath the flight paths of LAX airport, he used to lie on his lawn and watch the vapour trails left by the passing jets. "Anywhere USA" he called it. Fitful and unfocused, he only seemed settled when drawing or when watching horror movies on TV King Kong, Frankenstein, Godzilla, Creature from the Black Lagoon.
advertisementHe'd be glued to the screen, without a flicker of fear: just eating them up. In many ways, it was an upbringing with broad hints of Spielberg's, but marked by a more amused distance from the images he watched. These creature features reached him through a richly developed sense of the absurd, playing to him like Rebel Without a Cause, but with the monsters in the James Dean role.
He got a job as a draftsman at Disney, but found himself unable to fake the house style ("mine looked like roadkills") before scoring a hit, in 1986, with Pee-wee's Big Adventure a cross between Jacques Tati and I Dream of Jeannie. It was this charming bit of pop surrealism that somehow convinced Peters and Guber that they'd found their man, although the studio executives at Warners took a bit more convincing. "Warners was a complete, total freak-out," said Peters, "scared to death [of] shooting a $30 million film with a third-time director whose first two films cost about a dollar and a half."
They decided to wait and see how his Pee-wee follow-up, Beetlejuice, did at the box office, before committing, and so a pattern was established: during the week, Burton would shoot Beetlejuice, and on weekends he would hole up with screenwriter Sam Hamm to sketch out Batman.
They had inherited a script by Tom Mankiewicz, which basically followed the contours of his screenplay for Superman, and told the story of how Bruce Wayne grew up, from lonely orphan into adult crime-fighter. "You had to wade through 20 years just to get to the first shot of the guy in the costume that we've all come to see," complained Hamm.
Their solution: at the start of the picture, Batman would already be Batman, but the Joker would not yet be the Joker, who now took centre stage. Critics would say that Jack Nicholson stole the movie, but you can only steal what doesn't belong to you, and the movie was his from the beginning.
Batman, meanwhile, graciously backed into the shadows a dark, tormented loner as Burton tried to find some angle on the character, some kink, through which his sympathies could find some sort of purchase.
Burton was "never a big comic book fan," he said. He also had "real trouble with vigilantism". Nor did he like action movies ("I don't like guns") or big studio productions ("I'm for anything that subverts what the studio thinks you have to do"). You have to ask, therefore, whether a big studio action movie about a comic book vigilante was ever going to be an exact match for Burton's talents.
What he didn't want, above all, was "Death Wish in a batsuit", and so cast Michael Keaton, his nervy, crackerjack star from Beetlejuice. "What's nice about Batman is that he's not strictly a physical force," agreed Keaton. "He's essentially a cerebral force. He doesn't just go out and kick ass."
There was only one problem with this: Jon Peters. "When we got into this I thought, what a great opportunity to have this guy kick some ass," said the producer, who wanted Batman "to be New York, to be street". "Death Wish in a batsuit" was almost exactly what he had in mind, although any differences between the director and producer were momentarily shelved when the grosses of Beetlejuice finally came in more than $70 million. Warners was persuaded to go with Burton and gave them the green light.
"Suddenly, we were developing the picture with a hot director," said Guber. "Once we got Jack Nicholson on to play the Joker, the film suddenly had novelty. And it had certainty: it was a presold, highly recognised property. That combination novelty and certainty generated the enthusiasm that got it made."
Jon Peters was on a roll, having embarked on an affair with the film's female star, Kim Basinger "My sweetheart hoodlum," she called him. Throughout the shoot, at Pinewood Studios, he was the very image of big-balled largesse; showing off the sets to visitors; hiring and firing so many chauffeurs that the crew kept a tally; and playing merry hell with Burton's script.
advertisement"That was the real nightmare on this picture," said Burton. "We started out with a script by Sam that everyone liked, although we all recognised there were a few little things that needed changing. Our meetings literally went like this: 'The script's great, the script's great, the script is really great, OK, the script's great, but we think it needs a total rewrite.' What made the situation worse in this instance was there was this big hubbub about making the script better and zoom we were suddenly shooting. In certain scenes the actors and myself were blocking out new lines on the day we had to shoot them. Once you start shooting, you just can't be at that stage."
Things finally came to a head at the climax of the movie, in which Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger) was to have been killed by the Joker, sending Batman into a vengeful fury. Peters decided that audiences wouldn't accept Batman beating up a 50-year-old man, and so without telling Burton, he reworked it: the Joker would take Vale captive, and drag her up to the top of Gotham cathedral's bell tower.
It would require an additional 38-foot model of the cathedral costing $100,000, when they were already well over budget. Burton hated the idea, having no clue how the scene would end: "Here were Jack Nicholson and Kim Basinger walking up this cathedral, and halfway up Jack turns around and says, 'Why am I walking up all these stairs? Where am I going?"' "We'll talk about it when you get to the top!" Burton called back.
"I had to tell him that I didn't know," Burton recalled. "The most frightening experience of my life. I knew they had to go up to the bell tower and they better do something up there. That was always a given. But what? Help me! Help me! It was one of those nightmares where you're feeling big and small at the same time. Here you've got this big production with all these people waiting around and you're supposed to be shooting this sequence that suddenly goes wrong. I thought, 'My God, why didn't I see it to begin with? How did I let this happen?"'
Nicholson was very supportive of his young director "Get what you need, get what you want, and just keep going," he told him but finally, on a rainy night that seemed to have been going on forever, Nicholson finally snapped and started ranting at Guber and Peters: life was too short for this many hours in make-up, he'd been snookered, everyone else had known how long it would take
"He was very angry and screaming, but with his face frozen in this smile," says Guber. "Jack had his full make-up on it was kind of a surreal experience and he was screaming at me and John: 'I can't believe this film is ever going to see the light of day!'"
Another argument erupted over who was going to foot the bill for the crew's black leather Batman jackets: originally Peters's responsibility, he had shucked it, causing Nicholson to snap at Basinger, "Tell that guy whose c**k you've been sucking for the past six months that he's an asshole for not paying for the jackets!"
As shooting wound down, though, Peters's sense of showmanship came into its own as he orchestrated a publicity campaign that would prove a template for blockbuster blitzes of the next decade. First up was the question of how to deal with the Batfans who had been outraged at the casting of Keaton.
Peters persuaded Warners to spend $400,000 on a trailer he cut himself that caused 400 fans to line up at the Bruin Theater in Westwood to pay their $7 to see it. The trailer was magnificently oblique showing just scenes from the movie, no music, no narration and Peters used much the same trick with the posters, showing just the bat logo, and the film's release date, June 23.
"I never thought he'd get away with no name and no writing," marvelled Anton Furst. "Jon told me, 'You'll never know the battles I had, right up to pinning people against the wall.'"
"I wanted to do, like, foreplay, to create the magic and myth of it all," said Peters. In March [1989], the foreplay began in earnest, when Warners plastered the bat logo across city billboards and movie theatres in 10 big cities across America; on May 23, they bought time for $1 million for a 90-second nationwide TV commercial.
"And then we disappeared again," said Peters. "Vanished. Like Batman." When retailers began reporting a small bump in interest in bat memorabilia, the producers started testing the waters with some merchandise just a sprinkling of T-shirts and hats only to find that the water was already seething with pirated goods.
In Britain, the previous Christmas, the news show TV-AM had been taken off the air due to labour disputes, and the broadcasters were forced to show reruns of the old Batman TV series, and it had sparked a small wave of batfashion that was now spreading west across the Atlantic. Warners' merchandising wing was delighted.
"Pirates only go after the stuff they know will sell. They can't take any risks," says Dan Romanelli. "We recognised we had a real phenomenon on our hands. It was spectacular."
In the end, 300 items would be spawned by 100 licensees, generating more than three times as much revenue as tickets for the movie. "It's really a case of the tail wagging the dog," said a spokesperson for Hecht's Metro Centre store, where 15,000 items sold in three months. By May, J C Penney in LA had sold 40,000 T-shirts, and continued to sell them at such a rate that licensees ran out of black material. "It's the biggest thing I've ever had in 19 years," said one astonished retailer.
In 1989, Batman soon became the blockbuster to see, unless you wished to announce your recent decision to join an order of Trappist monks. It opened in 2,194 theatres and took in $42.7 million its first weekend, "the biggest opening weekend in history," proclaimed Warner Brothers, and proceeded to take in $100 million in less than 10 days another record, breaking Hollywood's four-minute mile.
But it also slid from pole position faster than any movie that has ever made that much money, too, taking just $30 million in its second weekend, a drop of about 25 per cent, and the weekend after that, $19 million, a drop of 36 per cent.
Blockbusters never used to fade like this ET had stayed at the top for 10 weeks, and increased its grosses as it went along, while Back to the Future had stayed up there for 13 weeks. But Batman came and went in the blink of an eye. Far more so than Jaws, it marked the beginning of the long, slow erosion of audience word-of-mouth.
This made it the movie Hollywood had been waiting for. Peters and Guber had pulled together a great-looking package, sprinkled it with stars and synergistic tinsel dust, picked the wrong director, ridden roughshod over him, made an okay movie, and then bulldozed their way into public consciousness for long enough to make it, briefly, the fastest grossing movie ever. That got the studio's interest. The signal it sent out was as clear as the batsignal above Gotham City; to paraphrase The Voice in Field of Dreams: if you build it, they will come. |
|
|
|
|
