KEATON: “I’M BATMAN." CASEY: “F**K, YES!!!”
When things were a BIG deal…
Apparently, there are -- not one -- but two big comicbook-related movies opening this summer. One of them is hitting theaters this very week, so this newsletter seemed mildly appropriate, timing-wise.
The following first appeared in the text backmatter of a series I created (with artist, Mike Huddleston) called BUTCHER BAKER, THE RIGHTEOUS MAKER published by Image Comics. I thought it was appropriate to pull it out, dust it off, and present it here…
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Okay… prepare yourself as we enter into some true fanboy minutiae shit, possibly the likes of which you have never experienced. Or maybe you have.
Imagine, if you will, Christmas of 1988. Now… think about that date for a moment. 1988. Before five hundred cable channels. Before cell phones. Before the Internet. Before Tivo. Before Netflix. Before much of anything other than trickles of information from a fairly spotty fan press (spotty if you lived in the back woods of Tennessee, as I did at the time). In fact, I don’t even remember how I learned that the first, fabled teaser trailer for the Tim Burton Batman film was playing in front of certain movies in multiplexes across our great nation. But somehow I had.
Much, much later I learned that producer Jon Peters had rushed this teaser trailer out in response to the growing dissent about the film and its casting choices, rumblings that made it all the way to the goddamn Wall Street Journal. Hey, kids! Comics! But at the time, I only knew three things: 1) Jack Nicholson was the Joker, 2) Michael Keaton was Batman and 3) the director was the guy who directed Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice. And now I knew something else… an actual teaser trailer existed and it became my life’s mission to see it.
My partner-in-crime for this endeavor, this cinematic scavenger hunt, was future Stumptown artist, Matthew Southworth. We’d grown up across the street from each other, bonded as cultural outsiders from an early age, and now we’d heard rumors that this infamous teaser trailer was playing in front of the Oliver Stone film, Talk Radio. Not necessarily a film I would’ve seen otherwise, no matter how much of a Stone fan I might’ve been. Maybe it was the Eric Bogosian of it all. In any case, it was suddenly the only film I could ever conceive of ever buying a ticket for. Now, Talk Radio was not a film you would consider as ever being put into “wide release”. I mean, it wasn’t exactly a blockbuster. As far as we knew, it was playing in a single theatre way across town, a multiplex I’d actually never been to in my life. My recollection is that we’d found out late in the evening, that there was possibly one showing left that night. It didn’t matter. Since Matt was as fanatical as I was about seeing this thing, we hopped into my red Toyota pickup and hit the highway. I remember racing out there through the dead of night, wondering if the information we’d received was even accurate. It would’ve been a helluva bummer to go all the way out there only to find out this goddamn thing wasn’t showing in front of this movie we had no real interest in seeing. We made it just in time. And, mere moments after we’d entered the theater, there it was. Ninety seconds long and kinda life-altering. The motherfuckin’ Batman teaser trailer…
The flames shooting out of the Batmobile exhaust. The car chase with guns blasting. Keaton as a tuxedoed Bruce Wayne. The grappling gun in action. Jack Palance! “Nice outfit.” Keaton making post-coital excuses. Batman crashing through a skylight. “Alfred, let’s go shopping.” Nicholson in his Joker whiteface emerging from the shadows. Batman and Vicki Vale sliding across an escape line. “Wait till they get a load of me…”
Sitting in that theater -- and there were maybe ten people in there with us -- those ninety seconds washed over me like maybe nothing else I’d ever experienced up to that point. And, as I later learned, there was a particular reason for that. Remember back when I said that Jon Peters rushed this thing into theaters? Well, even calling it “rushed” is a bit of an understatement. As far as I could tell, principal photography was still taking place over in England. So this cut footage was both fresh and raw. We’re talking unmixed production audio. We’re talking no Elfman score. No score at all, in fact. Not even temp shit. There was no real polish to this hastily assembled sequence of shots. In that moment, it looked like a Scorsese flick from the mid-Seventies, all dark and demented and seeped in urban decay. It was goddamn glorious. It was everything we’d hoped a Batman movie would be.
(We didn’t stay for Talk Radio, by the way. To this day, I still haven’t seen it.)
Now, everyone just hold on a second. We’re getting to the good stuff now. Y’see, in my blow-by-blow of the teaser above, I left out my favorite moment. Maybe one of my favorite moments in any superhero movie, before or since. It’s the famous bit where Batman is holding a greasy-ass mugger over a high ledge, the mugger begging like a bitch for his life.
Still pissing himself, the mugger shrieks, “What are you?!”
The answer is simple, but effective: “I’m Batman.”
It was the moment where I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Keaton -- and Burton -- was taking this shit seriously. And isn’t that all any of us ever wanted from either of them?
And, in a way, it didn’t even end up in the finished f**king movie…
Here’s the thing: this teaser trailer, put together months before any SFX were done, before any post-production sound mixing was done, before any looping was done -- “looping” being when an actor goes in after filming and, in a controlled studio environment, re-records his or her own dialogue, syncing it up with the film as it plays back on a video monitor in front of them (okay, I feel weird explaining something that I have a feeling everyone reading this already knows) -- presented Keaton’s performance that occurred on the day, including his original read of the “I’m Batman” line. That original read, the original audio, had so much more attitude, so much more bite than the looped line reading that eventually saw release in the finished film (where the now clichéd “whisper voice” was first used… hell, it was ridiculous then). If you don’t believe me -- or if you’ve never paid that close attention (imagine that!) -- look ‘em up on YouTube and compare the “late 1988” teaser trailer with the more widely seen, more polished, “official” trailer that came out three or four months later. Trust me, they’re both there. Both contain the “I’m Batman”-moment. One was, “I’m Batman, fuckface!” The other was, “Mmmah’m Baht-Mahn.” One has balls, the other doesn’t. Hey, don’t take my word for it. Go see (and hear) for yourself.
In fact, the entire film ended up lacking in the balls department. The Elfman score was distractingly overwrought (and let’s not even go near the Prince songs), the film itself was overly theatrical, operatic in a weird way, Nicholson’s Joker was way too over-the-top, Batman couldn’t turn his fucking head, Gotham City looked like a sadly under-populated backlot set, they hit the Phantom Of The Opera thang way too hard (especially in the climax), the SFX looked cheap and Kim Basinger wasn’t even close to being jerk-worthy. And don’t get me started on the Joker being the one who kills Thomas and Martha Wayne and/or Alfred letting Vicki Vale into the Batcave…!
Ironically, after all the bullshit that got stirred up when he was cast, Keaton was the absolute best thing about the film… despite the misstep of his whisper voice that only ER’s own George Clooney somehow managed to avoid in his abortion of a Batman film. To this day, Keaton remains my favorite cinematic iteration of Bruce Wayne.
Hey, don’t get me wrong… I was caught up in that summer’s Bat-Mania, just like everyone else was. Saw the flick several times in its opening weekend alone. But, goddamn, this was not the film that the teaser trailer promised. The film I wanted to see was raw and real and had genuine atmosphere. The film that was released tried way too hard to be polished and professional. Of course, the film went on to be the first modern day blockbuster with box office totals of nearly a half-billion dollars… so what do I know?
Well, I know what I like.
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Jeezus… I had a reserve of energy back then, didn’t I? I think I need to go lay down now…
Joe Casey
USA