Knowledge Waits is a feature where I just share some bit of comic book history that interests me.
A number of years ago, when Ben Affleck was cast as Batman, I collected six angry reactions to Michael Keaton being cast as Batman for About.com.
Now, with Robert Pattinson reportedly being cast as the next movie Batman, I figured it only right to spotlight some more angry reactions to Keaton's casting, to help put everything into perspective, because people really need to be reminded of how much people HATED the casting of Michael Keaton as Batman and how well it turned out in the end (heck, even if you weren't a fan of Keaton as Batman, you likely will concede that it didn't turn out as poorly as you were thinking it would go at the time).
1. South Florida Sun-Sentinel
In a David Altaner article titled "Holy Comics, Batman! What do Film Fans Want?" (note that within the article, the late, great Don Thompson basically dares Altaner's newspaper to be hacky enough to use "Holy" in the title of the article and they actually still do it. Ooph), Altaner explores how angry fans are about Michael Keaton's casting as Batman....
Michael Keaton as Batman! Jack Nicholson as the Joker!! Kim Basinger as Batman's hot love interest!!!
Holy ... Stop right there! Don't say it! Not unless you want to send zillions of Bat-fans into a Bat-fit!
Let's try again. For almost a year now, Batman fans have been an uproar about Batman, the new movie from Warner Bros.
"No one's excited about it. Michael Keaton? Give me a break," said Christina Renault, a Miami-Dade Community College student who has been a Batman fan for 10 of her 20 years.
"It's like Rodney Dangerfield in a Bat-suit," said DC comics writer Ralph Cabrera. "You'll laugh at it."
The fans don't like the idea of Keaton, star of Mr. Mom and Beetlejuice, as square-jawed Bruce Wayne. Not to mention the director, Tim Burton, of Beetlejuice and Pee-wee's Big Adventure.
This controversy, which raged in the fanzines for months, later hit everywhere from the front page of The Wall Street Journal to the supermarket tabloid The Star. The Star asked, "Mr. Mom plays Batman?" and featured "artists' conceptions" of Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Eddie Murphy in Bat-cowls.
This controversy comes in Batman's 50th anniversary year. It all comes even though the movie is still months away from its June 23 release date. Fans may yet like the film, however. A 90-second trailer released months in advance of the film's release is drawing rave reviews from fans and dealers.
Still, what is this dark, terrible thing in the hearts of comic book fans?
Fear, fear their hero will be laughed at. Laughed at, like the Adam West-Burt Ward TV show of the 1960s.
"That awful TV show still rankles a lot of people," said Don Thompson, co- editor of Comics Buyer's Guide. "We're sensitive about that, I'm the first to admit it."
"It's been 20 years since the show, and if your story appears without a 'Holy something-or-other,' it would be a first," Thompson said.
The show itself was a cultural landmark, and it's still watched by 40 million people to this day, according to The Economist. Batman brought camp to the mainstream -- before Batman, irony was just for connoisseurs of Andy Warhol's soup cans.
But comic fans hated the show because it was silly, according to Miami comic dealer Frank Goetz ("Like the famous guy in New York").
"They want a quality movie," Goetz said. "They want to come out saying, 'this is what Batman is."'
In fact, Batman in today's comics is more crazed than crazy. This Batman is a brooding obsessed loner. He alienated his first Robin, and fans recently voted to kill off the second one. He thinks Superman is a wimp, and he only seems happy bashing criminals. He could use a good analyst.
Batman's nemesis, the Joker, is a grinning psychopathic killer. Here's the kind of guy he is: He gets out of prison and goes on a David Letterman-like talk show. When the Joker doesn't like Dave's jokes, he releases some poison gas in the studio. Dave and the audience die with ghastly grins on their faces.
This is far from the cackling comedian played by Cesar Romero on the TV show.
The scary part is, the Joker seems to be the flip side of Batman.
"He's a vigilante; beating up criminals," said Batman artist Pat Broderick. "That's pretty psychotic, no?"
In a recent comic, the Joker points out to Batman that somebody who dresses up like a rodent to fight crime is probably almost as nuts as he is.
Fans love this new Batman and Joker. Sales of the Batman comic book zoomed from 75,000 in 1985 to 193,000 in 1987. And collectors' prices have increased, too. The issue in which Robin died, which sold for 75 cents last fall, now sells for about $25.
Into the fray leaps Batman, the movie. But Warner says fans, morbid as they are, will be pleasantly surprised.
2. New York Times
In a Hilary De Vries article titled, "FILM; 'Batman' Battles for Big Money," De Vries lays out the stakes for the film and then gets into the anger from some fans at the casting...
Yet even before shooting began at London's Pinewood Studios last fall, ''Batman'' generated more anger than anticipation among the comic book hero's fans - the hard-core audience for any film such as this. In a massive letter-writing campaign, objections were raised over the studio's emphasis on this high-concept Batman and the refusal to make a serious square-jawed film out of one of the most popular - and psychologically complex - comic book characters.
The controversy, which erupted in the front pages of The Wall Street Journal and numerous trade publications, focused on the casting of Mr. Keaton, best known as the anarchic prankster in last year's comedy hit ''Beetlejuice,'' as the vengeful vigilante, and the choice of Tim Burton, the ''Beetlejuice'' creator and former Disney animator, as the film's director. The suspicion voiced by hundreds of angry fans was that ''Batman'' would be a campy send-up similar to the self-parodying but hugely popular 1960's television series.
''Most people think of the TV show when they think of Batman,'' says Maggie Thompson, co-editor of ''The Comic Buyer's Guide,'' the industry bible. ''But that was a series Batman fans saw as ridiculing the art form. The discrepancy between the fan's idea and the average guy's image of Batman is a real problem for Warners. This is like the 'Star Trek' movies. You have to win the fans to insure the film's success.''
Jon Peter, Kim Basinger and Keaton himself later weigh in on the controversy...
''I never liked the Batman TV series,'' says Mr. Peters, sliding the mask from his mouth while keeping his eyes on Mr. Nicholson. ''I wanted to do a real aggressive picture, and it wasn't until we got Sam Hamm's script that we found the rough, dark edge we wanted. There's lots of peril in this film and humor, but it's not 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' or 'Ghostbusters.' ''
What exactly ''Batman'' will be is, ah, somewhat shrouded in mystery. The cast has been under wraps for almost the entire shoot, and Mr. Nicholson, who prefers feinting layup shots to speaking to anyone not directly connected with the film, has even refused to participate in the studio-sanctioned documentary ''The Making of Batman.'' Mr. Keaton and Ms. Basinger are only slightly less reluctant.
''I'm just along for the ride on this one,' says Ms. Basinger, shaking the smoke from her blond mane and settling on a dolly during a break. When pressed, she concedes, ''Batman is a legend, not just a cartoon. And the film is emphasizing that wonderful psychological story of three people who, I guess, live in all of us. It's a real visual movie, but Tim Burton has been real good at getting us to decide together where to go in scenes. We've all gotten to do a lot with our roles.''
Mr. Keaton, an affable and unassuming performer who hides behind the sports section during filming breaks, turns terse when asked about ''Batman'' and the controversy over his being cast in the title role. ''You know, Jack's role of The Joker is much more similar to what I did in 'Beetlejuice,' '' he says, finally. ''That role was so over the top that I just whaled on it. This is different. I keep referring to the film as a painting - Tim calls it a puzzle. I'm just sort of throwing up my hands, saying, 'Paint me in, Big Guy.' ''
3. Cinefantastique
According to a Wall Street Journal front-page story, comic fans are up in arms over the casting of Michael Keaton in the tile role of Warner Bros.' Batman, the most eagerly awaited of a recent flurry of comic book-to-film adapations. The casting of Keaton, the comedic star of Mr. Mom and Beetlejuice, is objected to by fans because the actor fails to match the stalwart, square-jawed physique of the '40s comic book crime fighter. Supporting their man, Warner Bros. publicists cite the rave reviews Keaton got for his dramatic performance in last summer's Clean and Sober. Nevertheless, fans are said to be have started a protest-letter-writing campaign. The $28 million Guber-Peters production began filming in London last October under the direction of Tim Burton, who reportedly brought in Beetlejuice script doctor Warren Skaaren to revise the noir-drenched highly acclaimed screenplay by Sam Hamm (Never Cry Wolf). Jack Nicholson co-stars as the Joker. Kim Basinger (replacing Sean Young) plays Vicki Vale, the girlfriend of Bruce Wayne, Batman's alter ego, and Pat Hingle is Police Commissioner Gordon.
4. Rolling Stone
Bill Zehme did a big spread on the film in Rolling Stone #555 (just before the movie came out), and one of the sections was titled "Bat Attack," as he tackles the Keaton casting...
At this moment, batheads everywhere are mortified. The preceding scene - the bat fluids, the acerbic japes, the waltzing - is what they most feared from a Hollywood rendering of their DC Comics idol. This is tampering, they are thinking, this is fey heresy. But alas, other than Alfred's indiscretions, none of the aforementioned whimsy (which punchily transpired in rehearsal) will be seen in Bstman, a decided bleakbuster. The film by Burton (Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice) cleaves fancifully, even exuberantly, to the hallowed and somber bat mythos of the comics. The movie's original script, by screenwriter Sam Hamm, was a work of dark art, reverentially circulated throughout Hollywood for months before filming began. It was reworked considerably by various hands during last year's writers' strike, when Hamm refused to do so himself. Still, it remains a gloomy folly that will generally please skeptical batheads, who are for the most part lifetime comic-book subscribers with dour dispositions.
But then, Batman himself is one glum customer. True, he is a good man, a noble man, a man unafraid to dress differently. But he has acute personality disorders, not the least of which is his compulsion to expunge all evil from Gotham City, preferably before sunrise tomorrow. What Batman is not is the tongue-in-cheek straight arrow essayed by the legendary Adam West on the ABC-TV series two decades ago. Batman does not wink at us when he cuffs criminals. He is no quipster, no hambone hero. Since his 1939 debut in Detective Comics, he has been mostly just plain grim.
Michael Keaton is no Batman. Or so a vast sector of the bat community has vehemently asserted. Upon learning last year that Michael Keaton would, indeed, be Batman - the definitive cinematic Batman, no less - batheads were disconsolate. In Keaton's hands, they felt, Batman would become a smirky wisenheimer. Mr. Mom in a cowl, they thought. Mr. Mammal. "Treating Batman as a comedy is like The Brady Bunch going porno," wrote a fretful fan, one of the tens of thousands who swamped comics fanzines with disapproving nerd mail. The common refrain among disbelievers: Keaton has no chin, not enough hair; he's too scrawny, too doughy, too short, too glib, too distracting.
"A huge contingent rose up against this picture being made with Michael Keation," says producer Jon Peters, who, along with his partner Peter Guber, spent nine years preparing Batman for the screen. "Fifty thousands letters of protest arrived at Warner Bros. A lot of people in the company lobbied against us. One of the most powerful men in Hollywood went as far as to call [Warners chairman] Steve Ross and tell him casting Michael was such a horrible idea it would bring Warners to its knees. That the entire studio would crash and burn as a result. Heaven's Gate revisited."
Peters chuckles when reporting these doomsday forecasts. He's seen Batman many times already, gushes unashamedly about it, believes he's sitting pretty. Just prior to Batman, Guber-Peters produced Gorillas in the Mist and Rain Man. Peters knows that movie studios don't nurture death wishes. For Warners, Keaton was a calculated risk: What makes him an unliekly choice is what also made him an intriguing one. "Bruce Wayne is a contemporary eccentric," says Warners production president Martk Canton. "Michael Really brought that to life. I always felt the concept of doing this guy as someone who people could touch was the right approach."
"Whatever happens," says Peters, "I know one thing: This movie's gonna make Michael Keaton a folk hero."
5. Actual Anti-Michael Keaton Petition
Here's an actual petition that was passed around back in the day, with mostly Canadian signatures on the first page...
There's five! I could obviously do even more! Maybe I will in the future!
If anyone has a suggestion for a future Knowledge Waits (basically, anything comic book related that you think would be interesting to see me write about), drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com