Billion Dollar Batman Read online

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Chapter One: BOB KANES GHOSTS

  Chapter Two: BATMAN COMES ALIVE

  Chapter Three: BATMAN ON THE AIR

  Radio Reborn

  Chapter Four: BATMAN AND BOSSMAN

  Chapter Five: KNIGHT LITE

  Camping

  Origin of the Series

  Enter Laughing

  The Pilot

  The Rogue's Gallery

  Batmania

  Batman—The Movie

  Into the Second Season

  Disquiet on the Set

  Enter Batgirl

  Season Three

  After Batman

  Chapter Six: BURTON’S BATMAN

  Hollywood Executives are a Cowardly, Superstitious Lot...

  The Dark Knight Returns

  A Surreal, Bright Depression

  Pre-Production Revisions

  Supporting Players

  Batman Begins

  Sounds of Success

  Chapter Seven: BATMAN RETURNS

  Back in the Batcave

  Starting From Scratch

  Lights, Camera...Action!

  Batman Return$

  Brickbats

  Chapter Eight: BATMAN FOREVER

  Bat to the Drawing Board

  Battening the Hatches

  Miracle Man

  Batman Revived

  Chapter Nine: BATMAN & ARNOLD

  Ivy League

  The Trouble With Val

  The Hardest Working Man in Show Business

  Feeding the Monster

  Climbing Everest

  The Most Fun Job in the World

  Chapter Ten: FALSE STARTS

  Batman: The Musical, or Guys & Dolls on Mescaline

  Batman: Year One & Beyond

  Catwoman

  Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson & Birds of Prey

  Chapter Eleven: BATMAN BEGINS

  Bonding Batman

  A Christian Approach

  Intimidating Circumstances

  Reinvention

  Chapter Twelve: A DARK DARK KNIGHT

  Back at Bat

  The Justice League

  Batman Begins, Again

  Hot Wheels

  Knight, Camera, Action

  Dark Days

  The Dark Knight Opens

  The Dark Knight Soars

  Award Knight

  Aftermath

  AFTERWORD

  About the Author

  BILLION DOLLAR BATMAN

  A HISTORY OF THE CAPED CRUSADER ON FILM AND TELEVISION FROM 10¢ COMIC BOOK TO GLOBAL ICON

  by BRUCE SCIVALLY

  Contents copyright © 2011 Bruce Scivally. All rights reserved.

  First Publishing Date December, 2011

  To my brother, Rock Scivally, a lifelong Batfan, and my mother, Aileen Scivally, who indulged our battiness.

  ALSO BY BRUCE SCIVALLY

  Superman on Film, Television, Radio & Broadway

  James Bond: The Legacy

  The Special Effects & Stunts Guide

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Chapter One: BOB KANES GHOSTS

  Chapter Two: BATMAN COMES ALIVE

  Chapter Three: BATMAN ON THE AIR

  Radio Reborn

  Chapter Four: BATMAN AND BOSSMAN

  Chapter Five: KNIGHT LITE

  Camping

  Origin of the Series

  Enter Laughing

  The Pilot

  The Rogue's Gallery

  Batmania

  Batman—The Movie

  Into the Second Season

  Disquiet on the Set

  Enter Batgirl

  Season Three

  After Batman

  Chapter Six: BURTON’S BATMAN

  Hollywood Executives are a Cowardly, Superstitious Lot...

  The Dark Knight Returns

  A Surreal, Bright Depression

  Pre-Production Revisions

  Supporting Players

  Batman Begins

  Sounds of Success

  Chapter Seven: BATMAN RETURNS

  Back in the Batcave

  Starting From Scratch

  Lights, Camera...Action!

  Batman Return$

  Brickbats

  Chapter Eight: BATMAN FOREVER

  Bat to the Drawing Board

  Battening the Hatches

  Miracle Man

  Batman Revived

  Chapter Nine: BATMAN & ARNOLD

  Ivy League

  The Trouble With Val

  The Hardest Working Man in Show Business

  Feeding the Monster

  Climbing Everest

  The Most Fun Job in the World

  Chapter Ten: FALSE STARTS

  Batman: The Musical, or Guys & Dolls on Mescaline

  Batman: Year One & Beyond

  Catwoman

  Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson & Birds of Prey

  Chapter Eleven: BATMAN BEGINS

  Bonding Batman

  A Christian Approach

  Intimidating Circumstances

  Reinvention

  Chapter Twelve: A DARK DARK KNIGHT

  Back at Bat

  The Justice League

  Batman Begins, Again

  Hot Wheels

  Knight, Camera, Action

  Dark Days

  The Dark Knight Opens

  The Dark Knight Soars

  Award Knight

  Aftermath

  AFTERWORD

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Just as Batman wouldn’t be as effective without his support network—Alfred, Lucius Fox, Commissioner Gordon, Barbara Gordon, Robin, etc.—I wouldn’t have been able to write this book without mine. I must first thank the people who took time out of their busy schedules to grant me interviews, including Michael Uslan, Michael G. Wilson, Lorenzo Semple, Jr., Bob Hanks, Deborah Dozier Potter, Ed Begley, Jr., Sharmagne Leland-St. John, and Jane Adams. I also want to give a special thanks to Tom Mankiewicz, who gave me a lengthy interview about his tenure with the Batman movie, and then sadly passed away before I was able to complete the book.

  Next, I want to thank those who helped with research, including Boyd and Donna Magers of Serial World, Tim Gardner, Dana Lucas Timmerman, Scott McIsaac, and a big shout out to Andy Mangels, who provided a treasure trove of rare magazine articles.

  I also must give a tip of the cowl to my volunteer proofreaders—Marc Tyler Nobleman, whose own book on comic book writer Bill Finger will soon be published, and Bill Ramey of the Batman-On-Film website, which is an invaluable resource on all things Batman. John Cork not only proofread the book, but also provided insightful editorial assistance.

  For helping with the design of the book, I must thank Siena Esposito for her typography expertise, and Photofest, Deborah Dozier Potter, Fred Wostbrock and Adam West for providing photos. Also, a huge thanks to Laurie Eastman for her advice in converting the book to Kindle.

  Thanks also go to Anagnostis Karras, Tony Radick and Paul Scrabo, for “coming to the aid of the party,” as Ian Fleming once wrote. Also, I want to thank all the researchers and reporters who laid the groundwork on which this book is based. It was their trailblazing that made my journey possible.

  And lastly, a huge thank you to Sandra Bogan. Now that the book is finished, it’s time for me to emerge from my Batcave and repay her for two-and-a-half years of postponed social obligations. With the patience she’s shown during the writing of this book, she is, undoubtedly, the real superhero.

  Bruce Scivally November 2011

  Introduction

  A young boy leaves a movi
e theater with his parents. As they pass through an alley, they’re accosted by a gunman. The boy’s father leaps to defend his family, but a shot rings out, and the father falls dead. The mother screams; another shot and she, too, is silenced forever. The gunman runs away, leaving the boy kneeling between his dead parents. This boy, whose life is irrevocably shattered, will grow up possessed by a burning desire for vengeance, a desire that will motivate him to devote his life to becoming a crime fighter, a masked avenger whose name strikes fear into the hearts of the city’s criminals—Batman.

  In the superhero universe, Batman is often portrayed as a polar opposite of his literary predecessor, Superman. Superman came to earth from the planet Krypton with powers and abilities far beyond those of earthlings, was raised in humble rural surroundings and chose to use his god-like powers to fight a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American way. We associate Superman with daylight; his powers are renewed by the sun, and he is such an all-American boy scout that he stands as an unswerving symbol of hope and goodness. Superman speaks to the best in all of us.

  Batman was created from a tragedy, an urban character who grew up in great wealth but was driven by dark impulses. His wealth, as much as his drive and intellect, was his superpower; he used it to create the array of gadgets and vehicles he needs to carry on his mission. We associate Batman with night- time; he moves in darkness, a denizen of the shadows, in a film noir city where the moon seems always to be full and sliced by clouds. Though he fights for justice, he is motivated by vengeance. Batman speaks to our darker impulses, our wish to be powerful enough to beat our enemies, if not our demons, into submission.

  In short, Superman is who we aspire to be; Batman is who we are.

  Like Superman, Batman captured the imaginations not only of comic book readers but also of film and television producers who saw the character’s moneymaking potential. Through the years, he evolved in the comic books from dark avenger to wisecracking father-figure and back. In film and TV, he progressed from kiddie matinee hero to camp cult figure to Dark Knight. Over the course of seven decades, he graduated from the pulp pages of comic books—thought to be cheap, disposable entertainment—to become one of the largest assets of a multinational conglomerate.

  In a 1947 World’s Finest comic book, Batman faced an adversary named Joe Coyne, a/k/a the Penny Plunderer. Coyne once sold newspapers for a penny on street corners, but he began keeping pennies from the distributor. He eventually created a vast criminal empire centered on pennies; he was obsessed with keeping every cent. After defeating Coyne, Batman kept a trophy of the encounter in the Batcave—a giant penny.

  Like Coyne, many people connected with bringing Batman to life in film and television were obsessed with keeping every possible penny. As the money generated by the character grew into the millions and eventually into the billions, the real-life penny plunderers fought for their slice of the giant coin. Some became millionaires themselves; some were corrupted and consumed. Herein are their stories.

  Now a brief word about this book. When I set out to write it, I had originally intended to cover not only the live-action interpretations of Batman but also the animated versions. Once I began writing about the Batman animated series and feature films, however, I realized that if I continued, my book would balloon to the size of a Tolstoy novel. Consequently, I decided to drop coverage of the animated Batman and concentrate solely on the live- action versions.

  Also, though I briefly recount the plots of the screenplays on which the films were based, I chose to forego recitations of the plots of the films themselves. After all, the Batman films, including the 1943 and 1949 serials, are available for purchase from Warner Bros. Home Video, Sony Home Entertainment and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, so I am assuming that anyone reading this book has probably seen the movies, and if not, can easily find them for rent or purchase. The focus of this book, therefore, is how the character developed as he journeyed from comic books to TV to films, and the histories of the individual productions and key figures involved.

  So atomic batteries to power, turbines to speed—and off we go!

  Chapter One: BOB KANE’S GHOSTS

  “Batman is what I always wanted to be but never could.”

  —Bob Kane1

  It all began with Zorro.

  In their August 9, 1919 issue, All Story Weekly, the same pulp magazine that had published Tarzan of the Apes seven years earlier, ran the first installment of Johnston McCulley’s serialized novel, The Curse of Capistrano. The main character was wealthy Don Diego Vega, “a fair youth of excellent blood and twenty-four years” who, unlike other young men, abhorred action, was polite to women, and who generally seemed bored with the world. In the end, it is revealed that Don Diego Vega is secretly Zorro, a dashing hero regarded as a bandit by the corrupt government against which he fights. The following year, the story became a film starring, co-written and executive produced by Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., the pre-eminent action film star of the silent era. As Zorro, Fairbanks was clad in black from head to toe, with a flowing black cape and a mask that covered the top half of his face and head. The movie scored a hit with audiences, but it held a special resonance for a Jewish kid from the Bronx named Robbie Kahn, who was all of five years old when it was released.

  As he matured, Robbie Kahn would develop an alter-ego of his own, a character as dashing as Don Diego Vega, whose public feats would mask his private secrets, and whose actions would call his private ethics into question. The alter-ego Kahn created was not Batman, but rather Bob Kane, whose life and morals laid the groundwork for the empire that Batman would spawn. To fully understand the darkness of the Dark Knight, one must explore Robert Kahn’s journey to becoming Bob Kane, one of the most ruthlessly successful entrepreneurs of the Golden Age of comic books.

  The son of Herman Kahn, a Jewish engraver and printer for The New York Daily News, and his wife, Augusta, also known as Gussie, Robert Kahn was born on October 24, 1915. As young Robbie grew up in the tough East Bronx neighborhood at Freeman Street and Westchester Avenue, he discovered that he had a talent for drawing. He doodled constantly, and his father encouraged him, bringing home newspaper comic strips hot off the presses. Robbie would sit down with them and reproduce them exactly. “I used to be a copycat,” he said in an interview years later. “I’d copy everything. And I doodled on the sidewalks of New York since I was about 8 years old. I drew on everything— schoolbooks, school walls, buses. I’d black out the teeth of girls on subway posters. Luckily it was with chalk and you could wipe it away.”2

  In the evenings, after dinner, Robbie would get together with other kids in his neighborhood. They formed a gang that met in a vacant lot near a lumberyard, in a shack made of stolen lumber. At Robbie’s suggestion, the gang was called the Zorros, after Robbie’s idol, but instead of fighting a corrupt government, they fought turf wars with other local gangs.

  At age 15, Robbie won a second-place prize for replicating the newspaper comic strip Just Kids. He took it as an omen that he was destined to become a comic strip artist, but his aspirations seemed doomed when, a short time later, he was beaten up by neighborhood bullies from a rival gang. Separated from the rest of the Zorros, Robbie was cornered by the young toughs. They broke his drawing arm and stepped on his hand, crushing it. His parents paid for physical therapy, and in time Robbie regained use of his hand, but for the rest of his life he was unable to twist his arm around to show his palm. Unnerved by the incident, his parents decided to move to the safer environs of the Grand Concourse in the West Bronx.

  By the time he attended DeWitt Clinton High School, the skinny, handsome, dark-eyed boy who now called himself Bob Kahn had a reputation as a lady-killer. He sometimes double-dated with classmate Will Eisner, whom he met when both were competing to have their cartoons published in the school newspaper, The Clinton News. Kahn’s teachers, noting his interest in drawing, arranged a scholarship that allowed him to take a two-year course at the Commercial Illustration
Studio’s School of Art in Manhattan’s Flatiron Building. The seventeen-year-old became an eager student, especially enjoying the life drawing classes, where pupils made sketches of nude female models. “It was better than Playboy,” he would say years later.3 Kane later attended the Cooper Union School of Art, graduating in 1933, and then followed his old high school friend Will Eisner to the Art Students League in Times Square.

  Once out of school, Kahn and Eisner often ran into each other as they made the rounds of publishers, hawking their drawings and cartoons. Knowing that it would be tough for Jewish kids from the Bronx to break into the slick magazines, they set their sights lower, on the just-beginning comic book business. Kahn also decided he’d have more success with a less Jewish- sounding name, and legally changed his name to Bob Kane. He soon sold a few strips featuring his character Hiram Hick, a country bumpkin sheriff who goes to New York to fight crime, to publisher Jerry Iger’s comic book Wow, What a Magazine! Eisner also sold some strips to Iger, and when Wow, What a Magazine! ceased publication, Eisner teamed with Iger to produce the magazine Jumbo Comics.

  While waiting for his big break, Bob Kane took a job in his uncle’s garment factory. In his autobiography, he wrote, “It’s difficult to put into words the loathing I felt for this type of operation, for I knew in my heart that it was not to be my destiny. I received ten dollars a week for working in a sweatshop where the factory squalor and the din of the sewing machines was enough to drive me to a psychiatrist, if I could have afforded one.”4 He eventually quit the job, and pounded the pavement for six months before landing a job at the Max Fleischer Studios, home of the popular Betty Boop cartoon series. He now earned more than twice as much as he had at his uncle’s garment factory, but he still found the work—mostly “in-betweening,” doing the drawings that would come between one pose and another to give the illusion of movement when projected—routine and boring. More determined than ever, he again tried to sell his work to comic books. But while Kane’s skills as an artist were improving, he realized he had a deficit—he wasn’t a storyteller. Not one to let that drawback stand in the way of his success, he began searching for a collaborator. He found one at a party where he ran into another DeWitt Clinton High School alumnus named Bill Finger.