If you’re a fan of the Batman movies or any non-comic translation of the
Bruce Wayne character in the past 40 years, you have one man to thank:
Producer Michael Uslan. A New Jersey native and avid comic book
fan, Uslan knew from an early age that Batman was meant for bigger and
better big screen adventures, and took matters into his own hands to
acquire the rights. After being mentored by DC Comics’ Sol Harrison and
completing law school, Uslan became a studio attorney for United
Artists, and when he felt he had enough know-how in his back pocket, he
aggressively pursued the Batman film rights. The rest is history.
In anticipation of The Dark Knight Rises, I sat down with Uslan
to discuss Batman’s history on screen, the turbulent journey to
convince Hollywood the character could be a success, and the evolution
of style and substance that’s helped Batman remain part of pop culture
for nearly 75 years.
In short: you’re the reason Batman ever became a movie.
Michael Uslan: It was one of my better ideas.
But from the sound of it, bringing the character to screen the way you envisioned it was a hard battle in the beginning.
Uslan: It
was a really tense fifteen years. By the time Ben Melniker and I bought
the rights, it was a ten-year human endurance contest.Uslan: Well, you really have to set it in the context of the times. When I was first out there pitching Batman, it was the late 1970s. And the generation that was running Hollywood, and by that I’m including executives, I’m including agents, and a lot of talent pool, were brought up in what I like to call the “seduction of the innocent” generation.
Back in the early-mid 1950s, there was a huge post-World War II rise in juvenile delinquency in America. And Dr. Fredric Wertham, a psychiatrist who had his own clinic up in Brooklyn, began speaking at garden parties, and PTAs, and churches, talking about the horror of comic books. That comic books were creating a generation of juvenile delinquents. And he proved it by interviewing some 100 juvenile delinquents at his clinic, each one admitting during questioning that they had read a comic book. Therefore, Dr. Wertham concluded that comic books cause juvenile delinquency. Now, in his book that he published, called Seduction of the Innocent, he also claimed that girls growing up reading Wonder Woman would become lesbians, boys growing up reading Batman and Robin would become homosexuals, and that comic books cause asthma, because children were staying indoors to read them instead of playing in the fresh air. His diatribe was picked up by churches and PTAs and schools, and a whole generation of parents, clergymen, teachers, administrators, and politicians who were looking for an easy witch hunt, an easy place to lay the blame for a generation of children that seemed to have gone wrong. There was a federal investigation that had just started under Senator Estes Kefauver of New York, when things changed.
Two things happened that changed everything (and I’m sorry for giving
you this background, but I just want you to appreciate it in the context
of the times): the industry decided to self-center itself, so the comic
book industry formed what they call the Comics Code Authority, which
would be a censorship board that would heavily police comic books for
themselves and keep the feds out of it. But maybe the biggest thing that
happened was the advent of rock and roll. All of the sudden there was a
new, easier, bigger target. And rather than cities like Jersey City and
St. Louis burning comic books — which they had done — they started to
burn Elvis Presley records.
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