Word: batmans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That could have been the mood on the Batman Returns set. It was chilly enough: 38 degrees F for the 12-hr. working days. Annette Bening, set to star as Catwoman, ducked out when she got pregnant, and Burton scurried to hire Michelle Pfeiffer. Anton Furst, who designed Batman but was not working on the sequel, died jumping off a roof and plunged the crew into melancholy...
...Burton felt these burdens -- or the onus of topping himself after four films (Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands), all of them critical and popular hits -- he didn't show it. No screaming, no broken crockery. "He's the most un-Hollywood person I've ever met," says his co-producer, Denise Di Novi, who believes Burton's breakthrough came with Scissorhands, another Christmas phantasmagoria about lonely creatures making sad magic in the snow. "He connected with himself," she says, "and his art became much more intimate." Now, without Batman producers Peter Guber and Jon Peters hovering...
...outsiders -- the dead couple reclaiming their home in Beetlejuice, the deformed snow sculptor Edward Scissorhands, even the childlike Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens plays the Penguin's father here). Burton inverts pictures and fictions, and makes it seem as if he has just turned them right side up. In Batman Returns, everything is familiarly topsy-turvy. Black is good -- Batman, of course -- and white or bright is bad. Max, the rapacious industrialist, has a Stokowskian white mane that helps Gothamites think of him as Santa Claus, though Selina derisively calls him "Anti Claus." The Penguin's sewer-level lair, Arctic...
There's wit aplenty in Danny Elfman's discordantly lush score, with its sugarplum fairy exploding over meowing violins. And imposing performances from Walken, as a master builder who out-Trumps himself, and Keaton, sturdily imploding from Batman's unresolved, not quite explicable nobility. But the flashy turns are from DeVito and Pfeiffer...
...Batman TV series, Burgess Meredith played Penguin as a kind of deranged F.D.R. This was not for DeVito. "I didn't see myself playing a weird Nick Charles with a martini glass and a tuxedo," he says. "It just didn't tickle my fancy." Then Burton showed him a painting he had done of "a toddler with a big round head and big eyes and a protrusion in the nose and mouth and a bulbous body with little appendages. And there was a caption that said, 'My name is Jimmy, but they call me the hideous penguin...