Word: batmanic
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...Batman surely has consumer anticipation -- in Hollywoodese, "wanna-see." Last fall Fleet Street sent out helicopters to get photos from the film's closed London set. In the U.S. last winter, fans reportedly paid $6 to get into theaters where the 90-sec. trailer was being shown, then left before the main feature. The market is already clogged with Batman products -- including miniature Batmobiles, Batwings, sunshades, earrings, cloisonne pins, backpacks and boxer shorts -- as part of a huge merchandising campaign...
...film behind the hullabaloo has been a decade in gestation, beginning in 1979 when producers Peter Guber and Jon Peters obtained the movie rights. What took so long? At first the project was greeted with tremendous skepticism. "I'd say I was doing a Batman film, and people would laugh," recalls Peters. "They saw him as a guy in tights, and unlike Superman, he didn't fly." Finding a suitable script proved an additional problem. Early drafts followed Batman from the childhood trauma of seeing his parents gunned down by vicious Jack Napier. "You had to wade through 20 years...
...Hamm's scenario, Batman interrupts a Napier heist and allows the crook to fall into a vat of toxic waste. Jack emerges as the Joker and leads a crime wave, concocting a formula to be injected into cosmetics that twists the victim's face into the Joker's awful leer. Soon Gotham is a city of the grinning dead, and only Batman can revive it, with the help of Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger), frontline photojournalist and all-time fabulous babe...
That is the hope of all involved, that the character who began as a Superman clone will have inspired a daring new work. And if this summer's audiences agree, who knows? Moviegoers of the future may refer to this film as Batman...
...comedy . . . it's a psychodrama . . . it's Batman! From the director and star of Beetlejuice comes a dead-serious gloss on the cave-dwelling superhero. Its producers will be happy, in this summer of the sequels, if moviegoers of the future remember Tim Burton's movie as Batman I. -- Broken Bat: the film reviewed...