Summer 2019 gets a little more packed
By Andrew Liptak Sep 27, 2017, 3:26pm EDT
The Terminator franchise is officially coming back. According to Variety, Deadpool’s Tim Miller will direct the film, with Terminator 2 director James Cameron returning as a producer. The untitled sequel will hit theaters on July 26th, 2019.
Cameron’s return to the franchise is certainly a move aimed at revitalizing it after a series of ill-advised sequels such as 2009’s Terminator: Salvation and 2015’s nostalgia-driven Terminator Genisys. Both films were attempts to reboot the series, which ultimately fizzled with critics and audiences.
Rumors of the “reboot and conclusion” to the franchise surfaced earlier this year, with word that Cameron would be returning, with Miller attached to direct. It remains to be seen what the timing will mean for another one of Miller’s announced projects about artificial intelligence, an adaptation of William Gibson’s Neuromancer.
Cameron was convinced to return to the franchise by Skydance Media CEO David Ellison, who pointed to a new era of “Amazon drones, Facebook news bots, and artificial intelligence-fueled anxiety,” according to a report in The Hollywood Reporter. Cameron goes on to note that the films are more important than ever, because “the machines have already won,” judging from the amount of time people spend on their phones. Both Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton will return for the film, which will be used as an opportunity to hand the story off to a new generation of stars.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because the same model was used by Lucasfilm and Disney to reboot the entire Star Wars franchise with 2015’s The Force Awakens. Cameron says that the new Terminator story will be a continuation of the first two films — which he directed — and that they’re “pretending that the other films were a bad dream.”
That would make the film a sort of cinematic reset button, similar to what Neill Blomkamp’s proposed Alien 5 project had intended to do, that would allow Paramount to jump in on the extended cinematic universe trend that has been driving so much major studio business as of late. Indeed, the film’s 2019 release date brings yet another enormous blockbuster sequel to an already crowded summer schedule. While Star Wars: Episode IX has since been moved to December, Toy Story 4, Spiderman: Homecoming 2, The Lion King, Captain Marvel, and the fourth, untitled Avengers movie are all scheduled to arrive in theaters that summer.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/27/16374734/terminator-sequel-release-date-2019-james-cameron-tim-miller-movie
Friday, March 9, 2018
15 Things You Never Knew About Joel Schumacher’s Failed Third Batman Movie
By Padraig Cotter 07.03.2017
It might be hard to believe now, but once upon a time, Warner Bros was so excited about Batman And Robin that they greenlit a third Joel Schumacher Batman movie while the second was still being shot. The director has since admitted his ill-fated Batman sequel was mostly made so the studio could sell toys, and he’s since apologized to fans who were upset by it.
Schumacher was still gung-ho about making a third movie, which he wanted to be much darker than this previous entries. The script was titled Batman Unchained – though fans also know the project as Batman Triumphant – and it was developed while Schumacher worked on Batman And Robin, with the intention of having it ready to go for summer 1999.
The project was coming along well until the famously toxic reaction to Batman And Robin hit, with the shocked studio halting any future sequels while they decided what to do next. Over the years, various stories have come out about this abandoned script, including story details, potential castings, and surprise cameos.
Here are 15 Things You Didn’t Know About Joel Schumacher’s Batman Unchained, and how the movie might have offered the director the chance to redeem himself in the eyes of the fanbase. Losing the bat nipples might have been a good start.
15. HARLEY QUINN WOULD HAVE BEEN THE JOKER’S DAUGHTER
Harley Quinn started life as a henchwoman to The Joker in an episode of Batman: The Animated Series, but a cult fandom quickly grew around the character. Over the years, she’s headed various spin-off comics and other titles, and her popularity was recently cemented thanks to Margot Robbie’s scene-stealing turn in Suicide Squad.
Harley would have been one of two villains Batman faced in Unchained, and she was retconned to become the Joker’s daughter instead of his girlfriend. Harley would have been a toymaker in this version, and she teams up with the Scarecrow in order to take revenge on Bruce Wayne/Batman for her father’s death.
She wouldn’t have been quite as nasty as her dad, though, with the script reportedly redeeming her by the end. While the daughter retcon angered some fans, the change was a necessary one for this continuity, since Harley was nowhere to be seen in the original Batman movie — since the character didn’t exist at that point.
14. CLASSIC VILLAINS WOULD HAVE RETURNED VIA HALLUCINATION
The original Batman series made a habit of hiring A-list stars to play the villains, from Jack Nicholson’s Joker to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Mr Freeze. None of them returned for a sequel, but a major setpiece planned for Unchained would have united them all for one scene.
A big part of Unchained’s plot would have found Bruce Wayne grappling with his psychological demons, especially coming to terms with the villains he’s killed. During the story, he would have been dosed with a large quantity of the Scarecrow’s fear toxin and hallucinated himself on trial, with The Joker, Penguin, Catwoman, The Riddler, and Two-Face all present for the affair.
It sounds like an epic scene, and it probably would have been teased heavily in the marketing, but issues with cost and availability might have been an issue. Nicholson apparently had a sequel clause in his original contract, but Jim Carrey is notorious sequel-shy, and Tommy Lee Jones would likely only have been tempted by a big check. It never came to pass anyway, but it no doubt would have been the highlight of the film.
13. COOLIO WAS PROMISED THE SCARECROW ROLE
There’s no clearer sign that Batman And Robin was made in the nineties than the novelty casting of Coolio, who appears as the leader of a motorcycle gang midway through. There’s not much to the role, but according to the man himself, his part was due for a major expansion in the next film.
Coolio has stated that his character was due to morph into The Scarecrow in the next installment, which is the only reason he accepted the role to begin with. This is obviously a major departure from the source material, since Jonathan Crane has never been shown to have a motorcycle racing hobby outside of his Arkham day job.
Schumacher was never totally faithful to the comics during his tenure, so it’s very possible that this casting choice was considered. Coolio himself has stated that he didn’t get along with Schumacher during the filming of his cameo, so it’s probably better all round that this one didn’t work out.
12. BRUCE WAYNE WOULD HAVE BEEN COMMITTED TO ARKHAM
The Scarecrow would have apparently had a personal beef with Bruce Wayne in the film, which motivates his quest for vengeance. The villain would have used his fear gas on Bruce to drive him insane, which leads to the defender of Gotham being locked up in Arkham Asylum during the story.
By this point, Schumacher had felt he’d gone a little too fluffy with the series, so he wanted to bring it back to the darker edge of the Tim Burton movies, which motivated the Arkham setting. During his time in the Asylum, Bruce would have worked out his innermost fears while under the influence of the gas, which then would have led to the villain trial scene.
This storyline was also meant to tie all the movies together and give a greater insight into the Caped Crusader’s psychology. It also would have given a closer look into Arkham itself, which saw little use in the original film series.
11. THE CONCEPT INSPIRED BATMAN: ARKHAM KNIGHT
While Joel Schumacher’s two Batman entries are far from beloved, the unused script for Unchained has since become famous in fan circles. It’s one of the more intriguing unmade superhero movies, and even if it didn’t work out, it sounds like it would have been a fascinating mess at least, on par with the similarly unmade Superman Lives.
The plot of Unchained had a big influence on the video game Batman: Arkham Knight too, which features The Scarecrow as the main villain. When he threatens Gotham City with a new strain of his fear gas, the entire population is evacuated, leaving Batman to face a city full of villains. Batman is also exposed to the toxin early in the story, which leads to vivid hallucinations of the deceased Joker.
The leads to a final showdown between the two in Batman’s mind, with the villain taunting him with the suffering he’s caused. Bruce eventually triumphs over this vision of The Joker, just like he would have in Unchained during the trial sequence.
10. COURTNEY LOVE WAS UP FOR HARLEY QUINN
The fandom surrounding Harley Quinn has only grown over the years, but she was one of the lesser known baddies in Batman’s rogues gallery when the script for Unchained was being written. Schumacher has since admitted he was “running out of villains” when it came to the fifth movie, but he felt Harley and Scarecrow could make for a good team.
The role was never officially cast, but it appears that Courtney Love was the main contender. The musician actively pursued the role while the film was being developed, and even met with screenwriter Mark Protosevich about it. Protosevich planned to make Harley sympathetic, and someone who was more confused than truly villainous.
Despite Love’s enthusiasm, Batman Unchained fell apart soon after this meeting, so it never came to pass. Apparently, Madonna was also in consideration for the role, but it’s unknown if she was actually approached for it.
9. THE HALLUCINATION TRIAL WAS INSPIRED BY BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES
It seems that Batman: The Animated Series was a major source of inspiration for Unchained, since not only would Harley Quinn have been a major character, but the all important trial scene was inspired by a popular episode of the show.
The aptly named “Trial” episode finds Batman being captured by his some of his famous adversaries — including Joker, Scarecrow and Harley Quinn — who put him on trial for the crime of “creating” them. If he’s found guilty, he’ll be executed, but his lawyer is so good that she manages to convince them they would have existed even without Batman, and in a way, they created him.
It’s a cool episode, and one that explored the strange link between Batman and his rogues gallery. It adds a unique psychological element to their relationship, and it’s an excellent excuse to get all the major bad guys together for an episode. If Unchained was going to take inspiration from anything, The Animated Series was certainly a good place to start.
8. BATMAN AND ROBIN SPLIT UP DURING THE STORY
Batman And Robin featured several arguments between the Caped Crusader and the Boy Wonder, with the latter angry about being in his mentor’s shadow and feeling that he doesn’t get enough respect. It makes Robin come off like a mopey teenager, and George Clooney’s general lack of enthusiasm and commitment to the cape and cowl make these scenes more irritating than dramatic.
Their differences would have come to a head in Unchained, where Robin breaks away on his own following another explosive argument. After this, Bruce Wayne would have been sent to Arkham and exposed to the fear toxin, but once he breaks out, the Boy Wonder would have returned to help fight the villains during the climax.
Chris O’Donnell was signed to reappear, though the studio apparently considered introducing the character of Tim Drake as a replacement, so that O’Donnell could pursue a Dick Grayson solo movie. While the two splitting up their partnership makes sense for the plot, another movie where the two are having tedious fights doesn’t sound like much fun either.
7. BATGIRL WASN’T INCLUDED IN THE SCRIPT
Fan reaction to Alicia Silverstone’s Batgirl was quite negative for the most part, with many criticizing her performance and the retcon making her Alfred’s niece instead of Commissioner Gordon’s daughter. There was also the questionable logic of Alfred designing a skintight leather outfit for her, but we’ll let that one slide for now.
In Silverstone’s defense, it would have been hard for any actress to salvage a great performance from that script. As George Clooney himself has stated, “It was a difficult film to be good in.”
Despite Batman And Robin suggesting that Batgirl would be joining the dynamic duo, the character was noticeably absent from the Unchained script. It’s not known why she was excluded, but since the first draft was already loaded with characters, perhaps Protosevich felt she was a surplus to the story’s requirements. There wouldn’t have been much for a third hero to do during the story anyway, so perhaps she was being saved for another sequel or potential spin-off.
6. THE FIRST DRAFT WAS 150 PAGES
Mark Protosevich was handed script duties for Unchained after Akiva Goldsman – who penned both of Schumacher’s Batman movies – decided to step down. Protosevich intended it to be an epic that tied together the whole series and explored Bruce Wayne in a little more depth.
With the wealth of characters, set pieces, and plotlines in place, the first draft came to an eye-watering 150 pages. (Average Hollywood scripts come in between 110 and 120.) Reportedly, Schumacher’s initial reaction was to phone the writer to tell him he’d written the most expensive movie in history, and that a rewrite was needed to refine things.
The instant negative reaction to Batman And Robin saw the brakes being applied to the project, stalling plans for a 1999 release date. Warner Bros wanted to take some time to figure out the next move for the series, so they pulled the plug on Unchained, with Joel Schumacher parting ways with the franchise shortly afterwards.
5. GEORGE CLOONEY VOWED NOT TO RETURN
George Clooney was still best known as a TV actor when he made Batman And Robin, though he was branching out into movies with From Dusk Till Dawn and One Fine Day. The story goes that when Val Kilmer passed on Batman And Robin, Schumacher saw a print ad for From Dusk Till Dawn, and was inspired to draw Batman ears on Clooney.
The actor was soon approached, which felt like great casting at the time. The actor has since made no secret of his embarrassment over his involvement with the film, and he’s even been known to offer refunds to people if they mention having seen it in theaters. He also admits he was never entirely comfortable playing the character or with the script, which he feels affected his performance.
Despite being signed on for further movies, Clooney vowed to never play the role again following the response to the film, which is said to be another reason Unchained was soon abandoned. Four different actors in four movies playing the same role (all within the span of a single decade) would have been a tough pill for fans to swallow.
4. AN ALTERNATE SCRIPT FEATURING MAN-BAT WAS PITCHED
During this period, an alternate script dubbed Batman: DarKnight was proposed to the studio that still would have featured Scarecrow as the main villain, but with Dr. Kirk Langstrom – aka Man-Bat — as the secondary antagonist. Instead of teaming up, the two villains would have been sworn enemies, with Crane being responsible for Langstrom’s transformation.
The story – penned by writers Lee Shapiro and Stephen Wise – would have found Man-Bat going on a bloodthirsty rampage, and Batman being blamed for it. The Caped Crusader tries to track the creature down, while Scarecrow plots revenge against Gotham.
Sadly, Man-Bat has yet to make his debut in a live-action Batman, and his appearance would have made DarKnight feel like more of a monster movie, with Langstrom struggling to keep his monstrous side under control. While the script was briefly considered, Warner Bros soon focused on developing Batman Beyond and a take on Year One instead of pursuing a direct sequel.
3. SCHUMACHER WANTED REDEMPTION FOR BATMAN AND ROBIN
Joel Schumacher’s Batman films have become infamous for their campy tone, hammy overacting, and…putting nipples on the Batsuit. The director has since become a whipping boy in fan circles, and was widely accused of killing the franchise following the reaction to his second entry.
While experiencing the intense vitriol that greeted Batman And Robin, Schumacher decided he’d gone way too far in the family-friendly direction, and that he owed fans a darker take on the Caped Crusader. When Unchained fell apart, he decided it best to take the character back to basics and pitched the studio a feature version of Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One as a way to give the series a soft reboot.
He wanted the film to be as gritty as the source material, but Warner Bros was also developing a rival project with a potential Batman Beyond movie, and Schumacher soon became disillusioned, deciding that it was best to step aside. To the director’s credit, he makes no excuses for the mistakes he made with the franchise, and has accepted that he’ll always be remembered as the director who gave Batman nipples.
2. BATMAN BEGINS BORROWED THE ENDING TO UNCHAINED
One of the most stirring and iconic images in Batman Begins is when Bruce rediscovers the Batcave beneath Wayne Manor and decides to conquer his childhood fears by allowing himself to be swarmed by bats. Various Batman scripts were developed following the response to Schumacher’s final movie, with various bits and pieces finding their way into Batman Begins.
This includes the aforementioned Batcave sequence, which was originally the ending to Batman Unchained. Having beaten the villains and conquered most of his inner demons, Bruce would have travelled to Bali to face one last fear.
Reportedly, out hero would have come across a bat cave, and upon entering, they would have quickly swarmed him, and he would have stood there, embracing his fear. It would have been a poetic note to end on, but considering how good the sequence is in Batman Begins, it’s probably best that it was tackled by Christopher Nolan instead of Schumacher.
1. NIC CAGE WAS THE FIRST CHOICE FOR THE SCARECROW
While Coolio appears to think he was the frontrunner for the role, the actor most commonly associated with playing The Scarecrow in Unchained is Nicholas Cage. The actor was on a hot streak at this point in his career, having won an Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas and scored a big hit with The Rock.
Schumacher visited the actor on the set of Face/Off to discuss the role, and Cage – a lifelong comic fan – was said to be very interested. Interestingly, the actor was also involved with Superman Lives at this point, which was set to be directed by Tim Burton. If Cage didn’t work out, other names that were thrown around include Jeff Goldblum and – quite bizarrely – Howard Stern.
Since the project soon fell apart after Batman And Robin, Cage was never officially offered the role, and Superman Lives also collapsed shortly after. Schumacher went on to work with Cage in the dark thriller 8MM, and the actor finally got to scratch that comic book movie itch with his two Ghost Rider movies.
—
Would Batman Unchained have proven to be a tale of redemption for Joel Schumacher and the title character, or would it have bombed as hard as the previous two films? Let us know what you think in the comments.
https://screenrant.com/batman-unchained-joel-schumacher-failed-third-movie-triumphant-canceled/
It might be hard to believe now, but once upon a time, Warner Bros was so excited about Batman And Robin that they greenlit a third Joel Schumacher Batman movie while the second was still being shot. The director has since admitted his ill-fated Batman sequel was mostly made so the studio could sell toys, and he’s since apologized to fans who were upset by it.
Schumacher was still gung-ho about making a third movie, which he wanted to be much darker than this previous entries. The script was titled Batman Unchained – though fans also know the project as Batman Triumphant – and it was developed while Schumacher worked on Batman And Robin, with the intention of having it ready to go for summer 1999.
The project was coming along well until the famously toxic reaction to Batman And Robin hit, with the shocked studio halting any future sequels while they decided what to do next. Over the years, various stories have come out about this abandoned script, including story details, potential castings, and surprise cameos.
Here are 15 Things You Didn’t Know About Joel Schumacher’s Batman Unchained, and how the movie might have offered the director the chance to redeem himself in the eyes of the fanbase. Losing the bat nipples might have been a good start.
15. HARLEY QUINN WOULD HAVE BEEN THE JOKER’S DAUGHTER
Harley Quinn started life as a henchwoman to The Joker in an episode of Batman: The Animated Series, but a cult fandom quickly grew around the character. Over the years, she’s headed various spin-off comics and other titles, and her popularity was recently cemented thanks to Margot Robbie’s scene-stealing turn in Suicide Squad.
Harley would have been one of two villains Batman faced in Unchained, and she was retconned to become the Joker’s daughter instead of his girlfriend. Harley would have been a toymaker in this version, and she teams up with the Scarecrow in order to take revenge on Bruce Wayne/Batman for her father’s death.
She wouldn’t have been quite as nasty as her dad, though, with the script reportedly redeeming her by the end. While the daughter retcon angered some fans, the change was a necessary one for this continuity, since Harley was nowhere to be seen in the original Batman movie — since the character didn’t exist at that point.
14. CLASSIC VILLAINS WOULD HAVE RETURNED VIA HALLUCINATION
The original Batman series made a habit of hiring A-list stars to play the villains, from Jack Nicholson’s Joker to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Mr Freeze. None of them returned for a sequel, but a major setpiece planned for Unchained would have united them all for one scene.
A big part of Unchained’s plot would have found Bruce Wayne grappling with his psychological demons, especially coming to terms with the villains he’s killed. During the story, he would have been dosed with a large quantity of the Scarecrow’s fear toxin and hallucinated himself on trial, with The Joker, Penguin, Catwoman, The Riddler, and Two-Face all present for the affair.
It sounds like an epic scene, and it probably would have been teased heavily in the marketing, but issues with cost and availability might have been an issue. Nicholson apparently had a sequel clause in his original contract, but Jim Carrey is notorious sequel-shy, and Tommy Lee Jones would likely only have been tempted by a big check. It never came to pass anyway, but it no doubt would have been the highlight of the film.
13. COOLIO WAS PROMISED THE SCARECROW ROLE
There’s no clearer sign that Batman And Robin was made in the nineties than the novelty casting of Coolio, who appears as the leader of a motorcycle gang midway through. There’s not much to the role, but according to the man himself, his part was due for a major expansion in the next film.
Coolio has stated that his character was due to morph into The Scarecrow in the next installment, which is the only reason he accepted the role to begin with. This is obviously a major departure from the source material, since Jonathan Crane has never been shown to have a motorcycle racing hobby outside of his Arkham day job.
Schumacher was never totally faithful to the comics during his tenure, so it’s very possible that this casting choice was considered. Coolio himself has stated that he didn’t get along with Schumacher during the filming of his cameo, so it’s probably better all round that this one didn’t work out.
12. BRUCE WAYNE WOULD HAVE BEEN COMMITTED TO ARKHAM
The Scarecrow would have apparently had a personal beef with Bruce Wayne in the film, which motivates his quest for vengeance. The villain would have used his fear gas on Bruce to drive him insane, which leads to the defender of Gotham being locked up in Arkham Asylum during the story.
By this point, Schumacher had felt he’d gone a little too fluffy with the series, so he wanted to bring it back to the darker edge of the Tim Burton movies, which motivated the Arkham setting. During his time in the Asylum, Bruce would have worked out his innermost fears while under the influence of the gas, which then would have led to the villain trial scene.
This storyline was also meant to tie all the movies together and give a greater insight into the Caped Crusader’s psychology. It also would have given a closer look into Arkham itself, which saw little use in the original film series.
11. THE CONCEPT INSPIRED BATMAN: ARKHAM KNIGHT
While Joel Schumacher’s two Batman entries are far from beloved, the unused script for Unchained has since become famous in fan circles. It’s one of the more intriguing unmade superhero movies, and even if it didn’t work out, it sounds like it would have been a fascinating mess at least, on par with the similarly unmade Superman Lives.
The plot of Unchained had a big influence on the video game Batman: Arkham Knight too, which features The Scarecrow as the main villain. When he threatens Gotham City with a new strain of his fear gas, the entire population is evacuated, leaving Batman to face a city full of villains. Batman is also exposed to the toxin early in the story, which leads to vivid hallucinations of the deceased Joker.
The leads to a final showdown between the two in Batman’s mind, with the villain taunting him with the suffering he’s caused. Bruce eventually triumphs over this vision of The Joker, just like he would have in Unchained during the trial sequence.
10. COURTNEY LOVE WAS UP FOR HARLEY QUINN
The fandom surrounding Harley Quinn has only grown over the years, but she was one of the lesser known baddies in Batman’s rogues gallery when the script for Unchained was being written. Schumacher has since admitted he was “running out of villains” when it came to the fifth movie, but he felt Harley and Scarecrow could make for a good team.
The role was never officially cast, but it appears that Courtney Love was the main contender. The musician actively pursued the role while the film was being developed, and even met with screenwriter Mark Protosevich about it. Protosevich planned to make Harley sympathetic, and someone who was more confused than truly villainous.
Despite Love’s enthusiasm, Batman Unchained fell apart soon after this meeting, so it never came to pass. Apparently, Madonna was also in consideration for the role, but it’s unknown if she was actually approached for it.
9. THE HALLUCINATION TRIAL WAS INSPIRED BY BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES
It seems that Batman: The Animated Series was a major source of inspiration for Unchained, since not only would Harley Quinn have been a major character, but the all important trial scene was inspired by a popular episode of the show.
The aptly named “Trial” episode finds Batman being captured by his some of his famous adversaries — including Joker, Scarecrow and Harley Quinn — who put him on trial for the crime of “creating” them. If he’s found guilty, he’ll be executed, but his lawyer is so good that she manages to convince them they would have existed even without Batman, and in a way, they created him.
It’s a cool episode, and one that explored the strange link between Batman and his rogues gallery. It adds a unique psychological element to their relationship, and it’s an excellent excuse to get all the major bad guys together for an episode. If Unchained was going to take inspiration from anything, The Animated Series was certainly a good place to start.
8. BATMAN AND ROBIN SPLIT UP DURING THE STORY
Batman And Robin featured several arguments between the Caped Crusader and the Boy Wonder, with the latter angry about being in his mentor’s shadow and feeling that he doesn’t get enough respect. It makes Robin come off like a mopey teenager, and George Clooney’s general lack of enthusiasm and commitment to the cape and cowl make these scenes more irritating than dramatic.
Their differences would have come to a head in Unchained, where Robin breaks away on his own following another explosive argument. After this, Bruce Wayne would have been sent to Arkham and exposed to the fear toxin, but once he breaks out, the Boy Wonder would have returned to help fight the villains during the climax.
Chris O’Donnell was signed to reappear, though the studio apparently considered introducing the character of Tim Drake as a replacement, so that O’Donnell could pursue a Dick Grayson solo movie. While the two splitting up their partnership makes sense for the plot, another movie where the two are having tedious fights doesn’t sound like much fun either.
7. BATGIRL WASN’T INCLUDED IN THE SCRIPT
Fan reaction to Alicia Silverstone’s Batgirl was quite negative for the most part, with many criticizing her performance and the retcon making her Alfred’s niece instead of Commissioner Gordon’s daughter. There was also the questionable logic of Alfred designing a skintight leather outfit for her, but we’ll let that one slide for now.
In Silverstone’s defense, it would have been hard for any actress to salvage a great performance from that script. As George Clooney himself has stated, “It was a difficult film to be good in.”
Despite Batman And Robin suggesting that Batgirl would be joining the dynamic duo, the character was noticeably absent from the Unchained script. It’s not known why she was excluded, but since the first draft was already loaded with characters, perhaps Protosevich felt she was a surplus to the story’s requirements. There wouldn’t have been much for a third hero to do during the story anyway, so perhaps she was being saved for another sequel or potential spin-off.
6. THE FIRST DRAFT WAS 150 PAGES
Mark Protosevich was handed script duties for Unchained after Akiva Goldsman – who penned both of Schumacher’s Batman movies – decided to step down. Protosevich intended it to be an epic that tied together the whole series and explored Bruce Wayne in a little more depth.
With the wealth of characters, set pieces, and plotlines in place, the first draft came to an eye-watering 150 pages. (Average Hollywood scripts come in between 110 and 120.) Reportedly, Schumacher’s initial reaction was to phone the writer to tell him he’d written the most expensive movie in history, and that a rewrite was needed to refine things.
The instant negative reaction to Batman And Robin saw the brakes being applied to the project, stalling plans for a 1999 release date. Warner Bros wanted to take some time to figure out the next move for the series, so they pulled the plug on Unchained, with Joel Schumacher parting ways with the franchise shortly afterwards.
5. GEORGE CLOONEY VOWED NOT TO RETURN
George Clooney was still best known as a TV actor when he made Batman And Robin, though he was branching out into movies with From Dusk Till Dawn and One Fine Day. The story goes that when Val Kilmer passed on Batman And Robin, Schumacher saw a print ad for From Dusk Till Dawn, and was inspired to draw Batman ears on Clooney.
The actor was soon approached, which felt like great casting at the time. The actor has since made no secret of his embarrassment over his involvement with the film, and he’s even been known to offer refunds to people if they mention having seen it in theaters. He also admits he was never entirely comfortable playing the character or with the script, which he feels affected his performance.
Despite being signed on for further movies, Clooney vowed to never play the role again following the response to the film, which is said to be another reason Unchained was soon abandoned. Four different actors in four movies playing the same role (all within the span of a single decade) would have been a tough pill for fans to swallow.
4. AN ALTERNATE SCRIPT FEATURING MAN-BAT WAS PITCHED
During this period, an alternate script dubbed Batman: DarKnight was proposed to the studio that still would have featured Scarecrow as the main villain, but with Dr. Kirk Langstrom – aka Man-Bat — as the secondary antagonist. Instead of teaming up, the two villains would have been sworn enemies, with Crane being responsible for Langstrom’s transformation.
The story – penned by writers Lee Shapiro and Stephen Wise – would have found Man-Bat going on a bloodthirsty rampage, and Batman being blamed for it. The Caped Crusader tries to track the creature down, while Scarecrow plots revenge against Gotham.
Sadly, Man-Bat has yet to make his debut in a live-action Batman, and his appearance would have made DarKnight feel like more of a monster movie, with Langstrom struggling to keep his monstrous side under control. While the script was briefly considered, Warner Bros soon focused on developing Batman Beyond and a take on Year One instead of pursuing a direct sequel.
3. SCHUMACHER WANTED REDEMPTION FOR BATMAN AND ROBIN
Joel Schumacher’s Batman films have become infamous for their campy tone, hammy overacting, and…putting nipples on the Batsuit. The director has since become a whipping boy in fan circles, and was widely accused of killing the franchise following the reaction to his second entry.
While experiencing the intense vitriol that greeted Batman And Robin, Schumacher decided he’d gone way too far in the family-friendly direction, and that he owed fans a darker take on the Caped Crusader. When Unchained fell apart, he decided it best to take the character back to basics and pitched the studio a feature version of Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One as a way to give the series a soft reboot.
He wanted the film to be as gritty as the source material, but Warner Bros was also developing a rival project with a potential Batman Beyond movie, and Schumacher soon became disillusioned, deciding that it was best to step aside. To the director’s credit, he makes no excuses for the mistakes he made with the franchise, and has accepted that he’ll always be remembered as the director who gave Batman nipples.
2. BATMAN BEGINS BORROWED THE ENDING TO UNCHAINED
One of the most stirring and iconic images in Batman Begins is when Bruce rediscovers the Batcave beneath Wayne Manor and decides to conquer his childhood fears by allowing himself to be swarmed by bats. Various Batman scripts were developed following the response to Schumacher’s final movie, with various bits and pieces finding their way into Batman Begins.
This includes the aforementioned Batcave sequence, which was originally the ending to Batman Unchained. Having beaten the villains and conquered most of his inner demons, Bruce would have travelled to Bali to face one last fear.
Reportedly, out hero would have come across a bat cave, and upon entering, they would have quickly swarmed him, and he would have stood there, embracing his fear. It would have been a poetic note to end on, but considering how good the sequence is in Batman Begins, it’s probably best that it was tackled by Christopher Nolan instead of Schumacher.
1. NIC CAGE WAS THE FIRST CHOICE FOR THE SCARECROW
While Coolio appears to think he was the frontrunner for the role, the actor most commonly associated with playing The Scarecrow in Unchained is Nicholas Cage. The actor was on a hot streak at this point in his career, having won an Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas and scored a big hit with The Rock.
Schumacher visited the actor on the set of Face/Off to discuss the role, and Cage – a lifelong comic fan – was said to be very interested. Interestingly, the actor was also involved with Superman Lives at this point, which was set to be directed by Tim Burton. If Cage didn’t work out, other names that were thrown around include Jeff Goldblum and – quite bizarrely – Howard Stern.
Since the project soon fell apart after Batman And Robin, Cage was never officially offered the role, and Superman Lives also collapsed shortly after. Schumacher went on to work with Cage in the dark thriller 8MM, and the actor finally got to scratch that comic book movie itch with his two Ghost Rider movies.
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Would Batman Unchained have proven to be a tale of redemption for Joel Schumacher and the title character, or would it have bombed as hard as the previous two films? Let us know what you think in the comments.
https://screenrant.com/batman-unchained-joel-schumacher-failed-third-movie-triumphant-canceled/
Batman Triumphant: examining the sequel that never happened
Joel Schumacher was attached to make Batman Triumphant after Batman & Robin. What went wrong? And what would the movie have been like?
Rob Leane
Mar 21, 2016
With the double bill of 1995's Batman Forever and 1997's Batman & Robin, Joel Schumacher completely rewrote the rulebook of what a Batman movie could be, following on from the gothic brilliance of Tim Burton. In line with Warner Bros’ wishes, Schumacher veered the franchise into family friendly, toy-selling fare and earned a fair wad of box office dollar as a result.
Before Batman & Robin had even been released, Warner Bros was hoping that Schumacher would come back and direct his third Batman movie (the fifth one in the franchise overall). They had planned to get the film in cinemas during 1999.
With Akiva Goldsman – who’d worked on Batman Forever and Batman & Robin – opting not to return, Mark Protosevich (who’s since gone on to work on Thor, I Am Legend and the Oldboy remake) was brought in to pen a script. His draft was entitled Batman Unchained, although some sectors of the internet believe that Batman Triumphant was being banded around as a potential moniker as well.
Here’s everything we know about the movie, from its villains to the reasons that it ultimately didn’t get made…
Who would have come back?
According to a 1997 interview archived on Variety’s website, published after the release of Batman & Robin, Joel Schumacher had intended to return to Batman after squeezing in three other films. "I feel I’m doing this for my sanity", he said, while discussing a slate of projects that included the 'gritty' 8MM, 'his own relationship script' Flawless and Ben Elton adaptation Popcorn. Of those, only Popcorn ultimately went unproduced.
"I never planned to be the summer blockbuster guy," Schumacher explained of this indie-flavoured sabbatical. "I began small, and all of these things just started happening and before you knew it, I’m up to my neck in John Grishams and Batman films. I’m grateful for all of it, but felt, especially on Batman & Robin, that the box office had become more important than the movie. I wanted to return to filmmaking, not blockbustermaking.
"I’d like to do one more [Batman], but I think we need to wait," he added. "I felt I disappointed a lot of older fans by being too conscious of the family aspect. I’d gotten tens of thousands of letters from parents asking for a film their children could go to. Now, I owe the hardcore fans the Batman movie they would love me to give them."
Schumacher continued: "[Producers] Bob Daly and Terry Semel would like me to do another, and I have an idea of a way to go that would be far less expensive. But this is my own idea, and they may kick me onto Barham Boulevard after they hear it."
Interesting... So, the idea seems to have been that Schumacher would have gone off and made his non-blockbusters during 1998 while Protosevich got the Batman Triumphant script together. Then, he’d return to the franchise for what he hoped would be a smaller-budget, fan-pleasing movie. We doubt, at this stage, that the 1999 release date was looking all the plausible anymore.
On the actor side of things, George Clooney, Chris O’Donnell and Michael Gough would all return for Batman Triumphant, but Alicia Silverstone's inclusion was less certain (her Batgirl character didn't appear in Protosevich's script draft).
Who were the villains?
"I remember going to the set of Face/Off and asking Nic Cage to play the Scarecrow," Joel Schumacher recalled in a June 2015 interview with The Hollywood Reporter. The character of Scarecrow, of course, is a psychiatrist called Dr Jonathan Crane who thrives on fear and often conducts evil experiments.
After this meeting between Schumacher and Cage - which must have taken place in 1997 at the very latest - Protosevich started work on the script for the sequel that he was calling Batman Unchained (he’s apparently not sure where 'Triumphant' came from, although it’s become the more popular online name for the movie in recent years).
A 150-page script outline was hashed out, with the intended-to-be-played-by-Nic-Cage Scarecrow at centre stage. "It would have been very dark", Schumacher recalls, and the film would apparently have focused on George Clooney's Batman 'learning to conquer fear and to confront the demons of his past'.
These demons would have included the legacy of the Joker, as personified by the film’s secondary villain, Harley Quinn. Here, the popular comic book character would have been reimagined as a toymaker who finds out that the Joker is her father. Protosevich described his take on Harley as "sadistic in a mischievous, fun sense". (Potential castings that were considered for Harley included Madonna and Courtney Love.)
Thus, Harley would develop a vengeful desire to bring down Batman, which would have contrasted with Scarecrow’s evil motivation. Scarecrow, apparently, would have had a personal vendetta against Bruce Wayne, not Batman. Eventually, upon working out that their targets are actually one and the same, Harley and Scarecrow would have teamed up in the third act.
Scarecrow would develop a fear toxin, with his plan being to use it on Bruce/Batman, turn him insane and get him locked up in Arkham Asylum. Batman’s time under the influence of the toxin was intended to culminate in a show-stopping cameo-filled hallucination sequence.
Warner Bros wanted to bring back Danny DeVito’s Penguin, Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman, Tommy Lee Jones’ Two-Face and Jim Carrey’s Riddler for this Batman freak-out scene, leading to a final confrontation with – who else? – Jack Nicholson’s Joker. Whether you like Schumacher's Bat-films or not, it’s hard not to think that this villain-stuffed sequence would have been headline-gobbling.
What was the story?
As well as the villains, a few other titbits from the story of Batman Unchained/Batman Triumphant were revealed in that aforementioned Hollywood Reporter interview. For one, we would have seen a rift forming between Batman and Robin in the film. The boy wonder would have abandoned Gotham’s caped crusader at one stage, before coming back to assist him in the final fight.
On top of this, Bruce Wayne's fear of bats would have been a central theme. At the end of the movie, Bruce would have flown to Bali and found a cave full of bats. By standing up in the cave and allowing the bats to swarm around him, Bruce would prove that he had conquered his fears following his showdown with Scarecrow.
"There's a similar image in Batman Begins, where he discovers what will be the bat cave and it's filled with bats and they are flying around him," Protosevich noted to THR. "Not that this scene was inspired by mine, but it was a similar idea. It was a powerful image."
The sins of Batman’s past would have been important to the plot too, and some of his hallucinations would apparetly have featured a trial format. It’s easy to assume that there might have been some guilt on his conscience about the deaths of Joker, Penguin and Two-Face from the previous movies. Batman may not have murdered them in cold blood, per se, but they all died as a result of fighting him.
"Joel wanted to tie up all of the films. The Tim Burton films and his films, building up to this moment," Protosevich said of this decision to bring back the old villains in the third act. There’s a chance, if this tying-together went well, that Schumacher could have redeemed himself in the eyes of the Batman fanbase. But, of course, we’ll never know for sure.
What happened?
Ultimately, Batman & Robin is what caused Batman Unchained/Triumphant to get binned. Following the release of Schumacher’s second Bat-movie and the subsequent backlash, Warner Bros executive Tom Lassally ended up with Protosevich first draft for the next movie on his desk.
"A few days later, I'm getting a call from Joel,” Protosevich recalled to THR, “whose main comment was that I had written maybe the most expensive movie ever made. Then I remember I never heard from the executive at Warner Bros. I called many times, never got any kind of response.
"This got into a period of weeks and then a month, and my agent pestering Warners. And the next thing I knew, they were pulling the plug on the whole project. They were going to wait and see what they were going to do with Batman. The Joel Schumacher-driven Batman train was taken off the rails."
And from there, the rest is history.
Schumacher’s franchise was never continued with, and – after a few more scripts came and went – cinemagoers eventually got to see another live-action Batman in the shape of Christopher Nolan’s 2005 effort Batman Begins. As well as some similar-to-Triumphant Bat-imagery that we mentioned earlier, Begins also kept the Scarecrow as the main villain, Bruce’s fear of Bats as an important theme and hallucination scenes as recurrent plot events.
It’s also been pointed out that the Arkham Knight videogame features Scarecrow as the main villain, features hallucinations of previous baddies throughout, and Harley Quinn vowing revenge over the Joker’s death. These similar ideas are probably the closest thing to Batman Triumphant that we’ll ever get to experience, especially since Schumacher has played down rumours in recent years that Protosevich’s script could yet find life a comic book.
It’s a shame, really, as this script sounds like it could have melded together the darker ideas of Tim Burton’s vision and the colourful pomp of Schumacher’s movies. Maybe, just maybe, it would’ve been a Batman film for absolutely everyone to enjoy. You never know...
http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/batman-triumphant/39336/batman-triumphant-examining-the-sequel-that-never-happened
Rob Leane
Mar 21, 2016
With the double bill of 1995's Batman Forever and 1997's Batman & Robin, Joel Schumacher completely rewrote the rulebook of what a Batman movie could be, following on from the gothic brilliance of Tim Burton. In line with Warner Bros’ wishes, Schumacher veered the franchise into family friendly, toy-selling fare and earned a fair wad of box office dollar as a result.
Before Batman & Robin had even been released, Warner Bros was hoping that Schumacher would come back and direct his third Batman movie (the fifth one in the franchise overall). They had planned to get the film in cinemas during 1999.
With Akiva Goldsman – who’d worked on Batman Forever and Batman & Robin – opting not to return, Mark Protosevich (who’s since gone on to work on Thor, I Am Legend and the Oldboy remake) was brought in to pen a script. His draft was entitled Batman Unchained, although some sectors of the internet believe that Batman Triumphant was being banded around as a potential moniker as well.
Here’s everything we know about the movie, from its villains to the reasons that it ultimately didn’t get made…
Who would have come back?
According to a 1997 interview archived on Variety’s website, published after the release of Batman & Robin, Joel Schumacher had intended to return to Batman after squeezing in three other films. "I feel I’m doing this for my sanity", he said, while discussing a slate of projects that included the 'gritty' 8MM, 'his own relationship script' Flawless and Ben Elton adaptation Popcorn. Of those, only Popcorn ultimately went unproduced.
"I never planned to be the summer blockbuster guy," Schumacher explained of this indie-flavoured sabbatical. "I began small, and all of these things just started happening and before you knew it, I’m up to my neck in John Grishams and Batman films. I’m grateful for all of it, but felt, especially on Batman & Robin, that the box office had become more important than the movie. I wanted to return to filmmaking, not blockbustermaking.
"I’d like to do one more [Batman], but I think we need to wait," he added. "I felt I disappointed a lot of older fans by being too conscious of the family aspect. I’d gotten tens of thousands of letters from parents asking for a film their children could go to. Now, I owe the hardcore fans the Batman movie they would love me to give them."
Schumacher continued: "[Producers] Bob Daly and Terry Semel would like me to do another, and I have an idea of a way to go that would be far less expensive. But this is my own idea, and they may kick me onto Barham Boulevard after they hear it."
Interesting... So, the idea seems to have been that Schumacher would have gone off and made his non-blockbusters during 1998 while Protosevich got the Batman Triumphant script together. Then, he’d return to the franchise for what he hoped would be a smaller-budget, fan-pleasing movie. We doubt, at this stage, that the 1999 release date was looking all the plausible anymore.
On the actor side of things, George Clooney, Chris O’Donnell and Michael Gough would all return for Batman Triumphant, but Alicia Silverstone's inclusion was less certain (her Batgirl character didn't appear in Protosevich's script draft).
Who were the villains?
"I remember going to the set of Face/Off and asking Nic Cage to play the Scarecrow," Joel Schumacher recalled in a June 2015 interview with The Hollywood Reporter. The character of Scarecrow, of course, is a psychiatrist called Dr Jonathan Crane who thrives on fear and often conducts evil experiments.
After this meeting between Schumacher and Cage - which must have taken place in 1997 at the very latest - Protosevich started work on the script for the sequel that he was calling Batman Unchained (he’s apparently not sure where 'Triumphant' came from, although it’s become the more popular online name for the movie in recent years).
A 150-page script outline was hashed out, with the intended-to-be-played-by-Nic-Cage Scarecrow at centre stage. "It would have been very dark", Schumacher recalls, and the film would apparently have focused on George Clooney's Batman 'learning to conquer fear and to confront the demons of his past'.
These demons would have included the legacy of the Joker, as personified by the film’s secondary villain, Harley Quinn. Here, the popular comic book character would have been reimagined as a toymaker who finds out that the Joker is her father. Protosevich described his take on Harley as "sadistic in a mischievous, fun sense". (Potential castings that were considered for Harley included Madonna and Courtney Love.)
Thus, Harley would develop a vengeful desire to bring down Batman, which would have contrasted with Scarecrow’s evil motivation. Scarecrow, apparently, would have had a personal vendetta against Bruce Wayne, not Batman. Eventually, upon working out that their targets are actually one and the same, Harley and Scarecrow would have teamed up in the third act.
Scarecrow would develop a fear toxin, with his plan being to use it on Bruce/Batman, turn him insane and get him locked up in Arkham Asylum. Batman’s time under the influence of the toxin was intended to culminate in a show-stopping cameo-filled hallucination sequence.
Warner Bros wanted to bring back Danny DeVito’s Penguin, Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman, Tommy Lee Jones’ Two-Face and Jim Carrey’s Riddler for this Batman freak-out scene, leading to a final confrontation with – who else? – Jack Nicholson’s Joker. Whether you like Schumacher's Bat-films or not, it’s hard not to think that this villain-stuffed sequence would have been headline-gobbling.
What was the story?
As well as the villains, a few other titbits from the story of Batman Unchained/Batman Triumphant were revealed in that aforementioned Hollywood Reporter interview. For one, we would have seen a rift forming between Batman and Robin in the film. The boy wonder would have abandoned Gotham’s caped crusader at one stage, before coming back to assist him in the final fight.
On top of this, Bruce Wayne's fear of bats would have been a central theme. At the end of the movie, Bruce would have flown to Bali and found a cave full of bats. By standing up in the cave and allowing the bats to swarm around him, Bruce would prove that he had conquered his fears following his showdown with Scarecrow.
"There's a similar image in Batman Begins, where he discovers what will be the bat cave and it's filled with bats and they are flying around him," Protosevich noted to THR. "Not that this scene was inspired by mine, but it was a similar idea. It was a powerful image."
The sins of Batman’s past would have been important to the plot too, and some of his hallucinations would apparetly have featured a trial format. It’s easy to assume that there might have been some guilt on his conscience about the deaths of Joker, Penguin and Two-Face from the previous movies. Batman may not have murdered them in cold blood, per se, but they all died as a result of fighting him.
"Joel wanted to tie up all of the films. The Tim Burton films and his films, building up to this moment," Protosevich said of this decision to bring back the old villains in the third act. There’s a chance, if this tying-together went well, that Schumacher could have redeemed himself in the eyes of the Batman fanbase. But, of course, we’ll never know for sure.
What happened?
Ultimately, Batman & Robin is what caused Batman Unchained/Triumphant to get binned. Following the release of Schumacher’s second Bat-movie and the subsequent backlash, Warner Bros executive Tom Lassally ended up with Protosevich first draft for the next movie on his desk.
"A few days later, I'm getting a call from Joel,” Protosevich recalled to THR, “whose main comment was that I had written maybe the most expensive movie ever made. Then I remember I never heard from the executive at Warner Bros. I called many times, never got any kind of response.
"This got into a period of weeks and then a month, and my agent pestering Warners. And the next thing I knew, they were pulling the plug on the whole project. They were going to wait and see what they were going to do with Batman. The Joel Schumacher-driven Batman train was taken off the rails."
And from there, the rest is history.
Schumacher’s franchise was never continued with, and – after a few more scripts came and went – cinemagoers eventually got to see another live-action Batman in the shape of Christopher Nolan’s 2005 effort Batman Begins. As well as some similar-to-Triumphant Bat-imagery that we mentioned earlier, Begins also kept the Scarecrow as the main villain, Bruce’s fear of Bats as an important theme and hallucination scenes as recurrent plot events.
It’s also been pointed out that the Arkham Knight videogame features Scarecrow as the main villain, features hallucinations of previous baddies throughout, and Harley Quinn vowing revenge over the Joker’s death. These similar ideas are probably the closest thing to Batman Triumphant that we’ll ever get to experience, especially since Schumacher has played down rumours in recent years that Protosevich’s script could yet find life a comic book.
It’s a shame, really, as this script sounds like it could have melded together the darker ideas of Tim Burton’s vision and the colourful pomp of Schumacher’s movies. Maybe, just maybe, it would’ve been a Batman film for absolutely everyone to enjoy. You never know...
http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/batman-triumphant/39336/batman-triumphant-examining-the-sequel-that-never-happened
Why Michael Keaton Turned Down An Insane Amount Of Money For Batman 3
BY ADAM HOLMES 39 COMMENTS 3 YEARS AGO
Even though his 75th anniversary is winding down, Batman is still a hot topic around the comic book community and movie fans, especially regarding Ben Affleck donning the cape and cowl for Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice in 2016. Of course, Affleck isn’t the first person to play Batman in live-action. Michael Keaton is currently doing press for his film Birdman, and has been answering a fair amount of questions about his time playing Gotham’s Dark Knight in Batman and Batman Returns. However, although he had a fun time doing those two flicks, it wasn’t enough to make this Batman return a third time.
Keaton told CBS Sunday Morning that despite being offered $15 million to do Batman 3, he turned it down for one simple reason: it "sucked." When asked to elaborate, he stated, "Yeah, it just was awful!" Keaton also pointed out that Affleck isn’t the only actor who’s faced fan outcry from being cast as the Caped Crusader. He compared the petitions that people sent to Warner Bros. to "villagers with torches, coming to get me!"
As we all know, Val Kilmer succeeded Keaton on Batman Forever, but presumably Keaton got a look at the script when production first started. Clearly he didn’t like what he read. Although the third installment doesn’t rank nearly as low critically as its sequel Batman and Robin, Forever had its fair share of issues, primarily due to the creative overhaul. Although Batman Returns was critically and financially successful, Warner Bros. felt that it didn’t earn quite as much money as it should have, which they attributed to its dark tone. For the third film, they opted for a "lighter" approach and asked Tim Burton to stay on only as a producer so that Joel Schumacher could direct. The rest is history. Forever had neon colors, a Batmobile that looked like it was ripped out of a toy commercial, a Robin in his early 20s, a Harvey Dent that had inexplicably changed skin color, and Jim Carrey's wacky Riddler... okay, that last one did work in its own way.
It was probably a good idea that Michael Keaton jumped ship when he did. If he had stayed on for a third film, they might have also contracted him for a fourth Batman film. Can you imagine it? Michael Keaton in Batman & Robin? Granted, his performance would have been significantly better than George Clooney’s, but even that wouldn’t have saved that 1997 train wreck. There is probably a parallel universe out there where Tim Burton and Michael Keaton stayed on for Batman 3, and the audience got a tonally worthy successor to the previous films. Maybe Billy Dee Williams even got to play Two-Face!
https://www.cinemablend.com/new/Why-Michael-Keaton-Turned-Down-An-Insane-Amount-Money-Batman-3-67667.html
Even though his 75th anniversary is winding down, Batman is still a hot topic around the comic book community and movie fans, especially regarding Ben Affleck donning the cape and cowl for Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice in 2016. Of course, Affleck isn’t the first person to play Batman in live-action. Michael Keaton is currently doing press for his film Birdman, and has been answering a fair amount of questions about his time playing Gotham’s Dark Knight in Batman and Batman Returns. However, although he had a fun time doing those two flicks, it wasn’t enough to make this Batman return a third time.
Keaton told CBS Sunday Morning that despite being offered $15 million to do Batman 3, he turned it down for one simple reason: it "sucked." When asked to elaborate, he stated, "Yeah, it just was awful!" Keaton also pointed out that Affleck isn’t the only actor who’s faced fan outcry from being cast as the Caped Crusader. He compared the petitions that people sent to Warner Bros. to "villagers with torches, coming to get me!"
As we all know, Val Kilmer succeeded Keaton on Batman Forever, but presumably Keaton got a look at the script when production first started. Clearly he didn’t like what he read. Although the third installment doesn’t rank nearly as low critically as its sequel Batman and Robin, Forever had its fair share of issues, primarily due to the creative overhaul. Although Batman Returns was critically and financially successful, Warner Bros. felt that it didn’t earn quite as much money as it should have, which they attributed to its dark tone. For the third film, they opted for a "lighter" approach and asked Tim Burton to stay on only as a producer so that Joel Schumacher could direct. The rest is history. Forever had neon colors, a Batmobile that looked like it was ripped out of a toy commercial, a Robin in his early 20s, a Harvey Dent that had inexplicably changed skin color, and Jim Carrey's wacky Riddler... okay, that last one did work in its own way.
It was probably a good idea that Michael Keaton jumped ship when he did. If he had stayed on for a third film, they might have also contracted him for a fourth Batman film. Can you imagine it? Michael Keaton in Batman & Robin? Granted, his performance would have been significantly better than George Clooney’s, but even that wouldn’t have saved that 1997 train wreck. There is probably a parallel universe out there where Tim Burton and Michael Keaton stayed on for Batman 3, and the audience got a tonally worthy successor to the previous films. Maybe Billy Dee Williams even got to play Two-Face!
https://www.cinemablend.com/new/Why-Michael-Keaton-Turned-Down-An-Insane-Amount-Money-Batman-3-67667.html
Why Tim Burton's Batman 3 Never Happened
What should have been Batman 3 became Batman Forever, and it happened without Tim Burton and Michael Keaton. Here's why.
David Crow
Aug 25, 2017
Nowadays with no shortage of cape-and-cowl movies being released each year, it’s easy to take for granted what filmmakers like Richard Donner and Tim Burton did for the superhero genre. Prior to their decade-apart DC superhero epics, the form was largely viewed by the mainstream as stuff meant to distract the little ones and shut-ins. This seemed especially true for Batman.
But if Donner made people believe a man could fly, Burton made them believe he could also be psychotic enough to dress up like a bat and beat up crazed clowns. Batman was more than a hit movie in 1989; it was a pop culture phenomenon that could be felt on every T-shirt, poster, and trading card being hawked that summer. As the film that buried the Adam West image of the Caped Crusader, Batman proved to a global audience that the story of Bruce Wayne could be one filled with brooding trauma and fanciful daydreams that crept into our nightmares. It out-grossed Ghostbusters II and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade that summer, and went on to be the highest grossing film of all-time up to that point with over $400 million worldwide.
It's no surprise then that Warner Bros. fast-tracked a sequel (putting Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian on permanent vacation), and the dream team of Tim Burton and Michael Keaton were back for more with 1992’s Batman Returns. That movie was a saturating force in pop culture as well, appearing on lunchboxes, backpacks, and, of course, McDonald’s Happy Meals. It also grossed an undeniably profitable $266 million in worldwide box office receipts. Nevertheless, the hue of Batman’s signal in the sky experienced substantial and immediate changes.
Within the relatively short span of three years, which marked the distance between Batman Returns and Batman Forever, the series not only underwent a facelift, but had a full-on reboot before the word even existed in Hollywood lexicon. Michael Keaton became Val Kilmer, the Art Deco hellscape that was Anton Furst and Bo Welch’s Gotham City became an Andy Warhol inspired Las Vegas party on steroids, and Tim Burton’s tearful angst for the mythology’s rotating cast of freaks turned into Joel Schumacher‘s “toyetic” Happy Meal generator.
In fact, if it weren’t for the inclusions of Michael Gough as Alfred Pennyworth and Pat Hingle as the perpetually underused Commissioner Gordon, there would be nothing to connect Batman Forever with the two films that came before it. And that is exactly the way Warner Bros. wanted it.
Tim Burton’s Batman 3 never happened because of the reaction to Batman Returns, which was swift and brutal throughout the press.
The screenwriter of Batman Returns, Daniel Waters said he was aware of the potential backlash immediately. As a subversive voice who made his bones on the cult classic dark comedy about teen murder and suicide, Heathers, Waters was one of the driving forces that turned the sequel into a near fable about the sameness of freaks, be they cats or bats. And when recalling the first time he saw the movie with an average audience (for the 2005 documentary Shadow of the Bat – Part 4: Dark Side of the Knight), Waters said, “It’s great. The lights are coming up after Batman Returns, and it’s like kids crying, people acting like they’ve been punched in the stomach, and like they’ve been mugged. Part of me relished that reaction, and part of me to this day is like, ‘Oops.’”
For the same documentary, director Burton also seemed bemused and baffled by the mixed reactions 13 years later. Says Burton, “One person would come in and go, ‘This is so much lighter than the first movie.’ And then the next person would come in and go, ‘Oh, this is so much darker than the first movie.’ And it’s like, light and dark are opposites! But it was 50 percent passionately one way and 50 percent the other.”
The most infamous fallout from this bitter buzz came on the merchandizing side of Batman Returns, which like the box office took a noticeable hit. But the financials were the least of it when the PR for WB’s bat-shaped golden calf became factored in. And it started with those damn Happy Meals.
Batman Returns opened on June 19, 1992 and before the Fourth of July weekend, The Los Angeles Times was famously publishing angry letters over the content of the film and its connection to McDonald’s. One angry letter dated June 27, 1992 said, “Violence-loving adults may enjoy this film. But why on Earth is McDonald’s pushing this exploitative movie through the sales of its so-called ‘Happy Meals?’ Has McDonald’s no conscience?”
Putting such irony over faith in an international corporate conglomerate responsible for the McNugget aside for a moment, the backlash to the Happy Meals soon spanned all major media outlets.
An Entertainment Weekly article published in July of that year quoted the Dove Foundation, a Michigan-based nonsectarian Christian organization, as saying, “Parents…trust McDonald’s. So why is McDonald’s promoting a movie to little kids that’s filled with gratuitous graphic violence?”
The most humorous thing about this public relations nightmare was how both McDonald’s and Warner Bros. attempted to downplay the fiasco.
McDonald’s spokeswoman Rebecca Caruso said, “The objective of the [Happy Meal] program was to allow young people to experience the fun of Batman the character. It was not designed to promote attendance at the movie. It was certainly not our intent to confuse parents or disappoint children.”
Riiiight.
A Warner Bros. press release one-upped that by stating that the promotion is tied to the then-53-year-old character and not Batman Returns. “We were careful not to provide actual toys from the movie,” the statement read.
Judge for yourself by watching some of the vintage 1992 McDonald’s commercials for Batman Returns by clicking right here. Also, savor the following line for the Batman Returns themed cups: “With five Frisbee Bat-disc lids straight from the movie.”
For whatever it’s worth, McDonald’s did not pull the Happy Meal line early despite recent internet rumors, and maintained them until Sept. 7, 1992. However, discomfort over this reaction may have led to McDonald’s reportedly asking Steven Spielberg to tone down the most violent sequences of the following summer’s Jurassic Park in time for fast food tie-in deals.
Many years later for the aforementioned 2005 Shadows of the Bat documentary, scripter Sam Hamm, whose own screenplay for Batman Returns got thrown out for Waters’ work, graciously defended the movie from aggrieved parents. “The movie itself, apart from being a merchandizing machine, apart from all the toys sales it was supposed to generate, the movie itself was never presented as a child-friendly movie. And so, I just think it’s a mistake of perception. I think the parents who complained just got it wrong, but there was no attempt to deceive anyone.”
Be that as it may, it did not mean heads weren’t ready to roll at Warner Bros. As early as late July 1992, WB executives were allowing themselves to be anonymously quoted as unhappy with the diminished box office performance of Batman Returns, which cost $45 million more to make than the 1989 film (that cost $35 million unto itself).
“It’s too dark [and] it’s not a lot of fun,” one WB suit lamented to Entertainment Weekly. Meanwhile, smelling blood in the water, a rival studio chief said to the magazine, “If you bring back Burton and Keaton, you’re stuck with their vision. You can’t expect Honey, I Shrunk the Batman.”
Obviously, for any Batman fan over eight-years-old, it’s fabulous to hear what the industry perception of the character was even after Tim Burton’s two brooding flirtations with German Expressionism in gaudy costumes.
Initially Tim Burton was still expected to return to what was being called “Batman III” in the trades. There were even reports that Robin Williams was expected to play the Riddler for Burton’s third Batman film (more on that in a moment), as well as a return for Michelle Pfeiffer in her iconic role as Catwoman. However, all of these rumors should be taken with a grain of salt since Burton never made it to the scripting stage for Batman 3.
In the Shadows of the Bat documentary, Burton recollected his exit from the franchise.
“I remember toying with the idea of doing another one. And I remember going into Warner Bros. and having a meeting. And I’m going, ‘I could do this or we could do that.’ And they go like, ‘Tim, don’t you want to do a smaller movie now? Just something that’s more [you]?’ About half an hour into the meeting, I go, ‘You don’t want me to make another one, do you?’ And they go, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no, no!’ And I just said, ‘No, I know you!’ So, we just stopped it right there.”
And with Tim Burton out, Warner Bros. was free to tap Joel Schumacher to helm the next Batman movie with the understanding that it would be much more toy (and Happy Meal) friendly. For the children and their parents. Of course.
However, Michael Keaton did not leave immediately with Tim Burton. Indeed, he was slated to return to what became Batman Forever rather late into its 1994 production. And yes, Robin Williams, who was famously shafted by WB when they used him as a negotiating chip against Jack Nicholson for the role of the Joker in the 1989 film, was in line to play the Riddler going into 1994. According to a 1995 Variety article, Williams dithered too long after the role was offered, and rising star Jim Carrey (coming off Ace Ventura and The Mask) “stepped into the role.” It has never been clarified if Williams disliked the script and direction Schumacher was developing or if Carrey and his agent pulled one over on the legendary actor, but quite honestly, Mr. Williams’ legacy probably benefitted from it.
Also of note for not appearing in Batman Forever were actors Billy Dee Williams and Marlon Wayans. Williams had famously been cast as Harvey Dent in the original 1989 Batman film with the expectation to play Dent’s twisted and tragic alter-ego, Two-Face, in a later installment. On the 2005 DVD edition of Batman, Williams said, “I really wanted desperately to obviously do Two-Face… I wanted to see what I could do with it. It would have been different from Tommy Lee’s. I’ve got my own kind of madness.”
This led to an internet rumor that Williams was paid for the part in Batman Forever due to his 1988 contract. Williams has recently denied this. Comicbook.com quoted Williams from a Nashville Comic Con in 2013 as saying, “You only get paid if you do the movie. I had a two-picture deal with Star Wars. They paid me for that. But I only had a one-picture deal for Batman.”
However, Wayans did get paid for not appearing in Batman Forever. Having originally been cast by Burton to appear as Robin in Batman Returns, Wayans was cut from an already crowded film. However, when Schumacher came in for the third Batman movie, the decision came down for Robin to be played by Chris O’Donnell, despite Wayans already having a two-picture deal. In 2009, Wayans told io9, “I still get residual checks. Tim Burton didn’t wind up doing three, Joel Schumacher did it and he had a different vision for who Robin was. So, he hired Chris O’Donnell.” And like that, there coincidentally were no more major parts played by African Americans in the Batman franchise.
Keaton, meanwhile, famously threw the movie into upheaval when he departed Batman Forever less than a year before its release. In a July 1994 Entertainment Weekly article, an “insider” said, “He wanted $15 million. He wanted a chunk of the gross, he wanted a chunk of merchandizing.” While possible, this seems like typical studio tactics of throwing shade on an individual during a messy break-up. Keaton’s producing partner, Harry Colomby, countered, “Money was never the issue. Not doing this movie means he probably gave up $30 million based on his back-end deal.”
According to EW, Keaton was unhappy that Schumacher replaced his pal Tim Burton. Further, “[After one meeting with Schumacher] Michael was not feeling confident.” He reportedly disliked that his input about making it more of Batman’s story (as opposed to the villains’) had been ignored, and that he was not consulted once during the script writing.
During his appearance on a 2013 WTF Podcast with comedian Marc Maron, Keaton maintained his position nearly 20 years later. “The guy who’s doing them now, Chris Nolan, he’s so talented, it’s crazy,” Keaton said. “[Christian Bale] is so talented. It’s so good….You look at where he went, which is exactly what I wanted to do when I was having meetings about the third one. I said, ‘You want to see how this guy started. We’ve got a chance here to fix whatever we kind of maybe went off. This could be brilliant!’” Keaton added that after Burton left and Schumacher came aboard, “I could see that was going south.”
After Keaton departed, Rene Russo, who was cast only one week prior to Keaton’s exit, was replaced with Nicole Kidman in the role of Dr. Chase Meridian, because she was perceived as too old to be Val Kilmer’s love interest.
The rest, as they say, is history. But perhaps it was for the best? A third Tim Burton Batman movie could, in theory, have starred Robin Williams in a role just as depraved as Jack Nicholson’s Joker and Danny DeVito’s Penguin, and opposite a returning Pfeiffer who’s so puuurfect for the part of Catwoman that I couldn’t resist the pun. Maybe Keaton would have had more to do, as well.
Then again, if not for Batman Forever’s successor, the infamous Batman & Robin mega-flop, the series would not have so embarrassingly and spectacularly imploded. Ergo, there might not have been something brilliant but dormant for Christopher Nolan to reboot in 2005 into the masterful The Dark Knight Trilogy. In that sense, it may have been for the best. But it never hurts to wonder in lieu of a neon-backlit Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones doing a Benny Hill routine.
Read and download the full Den of Geek Special Edition magazine here!
This article first ran in September of 2014.
http://www.denofgeek.com/us/movies/batman/239632/why-tim-burtons-batman-3-never-happened
David Crow
Aug 25, 2017
Nowadays with no shortage of cape-and-cowl movies being released each year, it’s easy to take for granted what filmmakers like Richard Donner and Tim Burton did for the superhero genre. Prior to their decade-apart DC superhero epics, the form was largely viewed by the mainstream as stuff meant to distract the little ones and shut-ins. This seemed especially true for Batman.
But if Donner made people believe a man could fly, Burton made them believe he could also be psychotic enough to dress up like a bat and beat up crazed clowns. Batman was more than a hit movie in 1989; it was a pop culture phenomenon that could be felt on every T-shirt, poster, and trading card being hawked that summer. As the film that buried the Adam West image of the Caped Crusader, Batman proved to a global audience that the story of Bruce Wayne could be one filled with brooding trauma and fanciful daydreams that crept into our nightmares. It out-grossed Ghostbusters II and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade that summer, and went on to be the highest grossing film of all-time up to that point with over $400 million worldwide.
It's no surprise then that Warner Bros. fast-tracked a sequel (putting Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian on permanent vacation), and the dream team of Tim Burton and Michael Keaton were back for more with 1992’s Batman Returns. That movie was a saturating force in pop culture as well, appearing on lunchboxes, backpacks, and, of course, McDonald’s Happy Meals. It also grossed an undeniably profitable $266 million in worldwide box office receipts. Nevertheless, the hue of Batman’s signal in the sky experienced substantial and immediate changes.
Within the relatively short span of three years, which marked the distance between Batman Returns and Batman Forever, the series not only underwent a facelift, but had a full-on reboot before the word even existed in Hollywood lexicon. Michael Keaton became Val Kilmer, the Art Deco hellscape that was Anton Furst and Bo Welch’s Gotham City became an Andy Warhol inspired Las Vegas party on steroids, and Tim Burton’s tearful angst for the mythology’s rotating cast of freaks turned into Joel Schumacher‘s “toyetic” Happy Meal generator.
In fact, if it weren’t for the inclusions of Michael Gough as Alfred Pennyworth and Pat Hingle as the perpetually underused Commissioner Gordon, there would be nothing to connect Batman Forever with the two films that came before it. And that is exactly the way Warner Bros. wanted it.
Tim Burton’s Batman 3 never happened because of the reaction to Batman Returns, which was swift and brutal throughout the press.
The screenwriter of Batman Returns, Daniel Waters said he was aware of the potential backlash immediately. As a subversive voice who made his bones on the cult classic dark comedy about teen murder and suicide, Heathers, Waters was one of the driving forces that turned the sequel into a near fable about the sameness of freaks, be they cats or bats. And when recalling the first time he saw the movie with an average audience (for the 2005 documentary Shadow of the Bat – Part 4: Dark Side of the Knight), Waters said, “It’s great. The lights are coming up after Batman Returns, and it’s like kids crying, people acting like they’ve been punched in the stomach, and like they’ve been mugged. Part of me relished that reaction, and part of me to this day is like, ‘Oops.’”
For the same documentary, director Burton also seemed bemused and baffled by the mixed reactions 13 years later. Says Burton, “One person would come in and go, ‘This is so much lighter than the first movie.’ And then the next person would come in and go, ‘Oh, this is so much darker than the first movie.’ And it’s like, light and dark are opposites! But it was 50 percent passionately one way and 50 percent the other.”
The most infamous fallout from this bitter buzz came on the merchandizing side of Batman Returns, which like the box office took a noticeable hit. But the financials were the least of it when the PR for WB’s bat-shaped golden calf became factored in. And it started with those damn Happy Meals.
Batman Returns opened on June 19, 1992 and before the Fourth of July weekend, The Los Angeles Times was famously publishing angry letters over the content of the film and its connection to McDonald’s. One angry letter dated June 27, 1992 said, “Violence-loving adults may enjoy this film. But why on Earth is McDonald’s pushing this exploitative movie through the sales of its so-called ‘Happy Meals?’ Has McDonald’s no conscience?”
Putting such irony over faith in an international corporate conglomerate responsible for the McNugget aside for a moment, the backlash to the Happy Meals soon spanned all major media outlets.
An Entertainment Weekly article published in July of that year quoted the Dove Foundation, a Michigan-based nonsectarian Christian organization, as saying, “Parents…trust McDonald’s. So why is McDonald’s promoting a movie to little kids that’s filled with gratuitous graphic violence?”
The most humorous thing about this public relations nightmare was how both McDonald’s and Warner Bros. attempted to downplay the fiasco.
McDonald’s spokeswoman Rebecca Caruso said, “The objective of the [Happy Meal] program was to allow young people to experience the fun of Batman the character. It was not designed to promote attendance at the movie. It was certainly not our intent to confuse parents or disappoint children.”
Riiiight.
A Warner Bros. press release one-upped that by stating that the promotion is tied to the then-53-year-old character and not Batman Returns. “We were careful not to provide actual toys from the movie,” the statement read.
Judge for yourself by watching some of the vintage 1992 McDonald’s commercials for Batman Returns by clicking right here. Also, savor the following line for the Batman Returns themed cups: “With five Frisbee Bat-disc lids straight from the movie.”
For whatever it’s worth, McDonald’s did not pull the Happy Meal line early despite recent internet rumors, and maintained them until Sept. 7, 1992. However, discomfort over this reaction may have led to McDonald’s reportedly asking Steven Spielberg to tone down the most violent sequences of the following summer’s Jurassic Park in time for fast food tie-in deals.
Many years later for the aforementioned 2005 Shadows of the Bat documentary, scripter Sam Hamm, whose own screenplay for Batman Returns got thrown out for Waters’ work, graciously defended the movie from aggrieved parents. “The movie itself, apart from being a merchandizing machine, apart from all the toys sales it was supposed to generate, the movie itself was never presented as a child-friendly movie. And so, I just think it’s a mistake of perception. I think the parents who complained just got it wrong, but there was no attempt to deceive anyone.”
Be that as it may, it did not mean heads weren’t ready to roll at Warner Bros. As early as late July 1992, WB executives were allowing themselves to be anonymously quoted as unhappy with the diminished box office performance of Batman Returns, which cost $45 million more to make than the 1989 film (that cost $35 million unto itself).
“It’s too dark [and] it’s not a lot of fun,” one WB suit lamented to Entertainment Weekly. Meanwhile, smelling blood in the water, a rival studio chief said to the magazine, “If you bring back Burton and Keaton, you’re stuck with their vision. You can’t expect Honey, I Shrunk the Batman.”
Obviously, for any Batman fan over eight-years-old, it’s fabulous to hear what the industry perception of the character was even after Tim Burton’s two brooding flirtations with German Expressionism in gaudy costumes.
Initially Tim Burton was still expected to return to what was being called “Batman III” in the trades. There were even reports that Robin Williams was expected to play the Riddler for Burton’s third Batman film (more on that in a moment), as well as a return for Michelle Pfeiffer in her iconic role as Catwoman. However, all of these rumors should be taken with a grain of salt since Burton never made it to the scripting stage for Batman 3.
In the Shadows of the Bat documentary, Burton recollected his exit from the franchise.
“I remember toying with the idea of doing another one. And I remember going into Warner Bros. and having a meeting. And I’m going, ‘I could do this or we could do that.’ And they go like, ‘Tim, don’t you want to do a smaller movie now? Just something that’s more [you]?’ About half an hour into the meeting, I go, ‘You don’t want me to make another one, do you?’ And they go, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no, no!’ And I just said, ‘No, I know you!’ So, we just stopped it right there.”
And with Tim Burton out, Warner Bros. was free to tap Joel Schumacher to helm the next Batman movie with the understanding that it would be much more toy (and Happy Meal) friendly. For the children and their parents. Of course.
However, Michael Keaton did not leave immediately with Tim Burton. Indeed, he was slated to return to what became Batman Forever rather late into its 1994 production. And yes, Robin Williams, who was famously shafted by WB when they used him as a negotiating chip against Jack Nicholson for the role of the Joker in the 1989 film, was in line to play the Riddler going into 1994. According to a 1995 Variety article, Williams dithered too long after the role was offered, and rising star Jim Carrey (coming off Ace Ventura and The Mask) “stepped into the role.” It has never been clarified if Williams disliked the script and direction Schumacher was developing or if Carrey and his agent pulled one over on the legendary actor, but quite honestly, Mr. Williams’ legacy probably benefitted from it.
Also of note for not appearing in Batman Forever were actors Billy Dee Williams and Marlon Wayans. Williams had famously been cast as Harvey Dent in the original 1989 Batman film with the expectation to play Dent’s twisted and tragic alter-ego, Two-Face, in a later installment. On the 2005 DVD edition of Batman, Williams said, “I really wanted desperately to obviously do Two-Face… I wanted to see what I could do with it. It would have been different from Tommy Lee’s. I’ve got my own kind of madness.”
This led to an internet rumor that Williams was paid for the part in Batman Forever due to his 1988 contract. Williams has recently denied this. Comicbook.com quoted Williams from a Nashville Comic Con in 2013 as saying, “You only get paid if you do the movie. I had a two-picture deal with Star Wars. They paid me for that. But I only had a one-picture deal for Batman.”
However, Wayans did get paid for not appearing in Batman Forever. Having originally been cast by Burton to appear as Robin in Batman Returns, Wayans was cut from an already crowded film. However, when Schumacher came in for the third Batman movie, the decision came down for Robin to be played by Chris O’Donnell, despite Wayans already having a two-picture deal. In 2009, Wayans told io9, “I still get residual checks. Tim Burton didn’t wind up doing three, Joel Schumacher did it and he had a different vision for who Robin was. So, he hired Chris O’Donnell.” And like that, there coincidentally were no more major parts played by African Americans in the Batman franchise.
Keaton, meanwhile, famously threw the movie into upheaval when he departed Batman Forever less than a year before its release. In a July 1994 Entertainment Weekly article, an “insider” said, “He wanted $15 million. He wanted a chunk of the gross, he wanted a chunk of merchandizing.” While possible, this seems like typical studio tactics of throwing shade on an individual during a messy break-up. Keaton’s producing partner, Harry Colomby, countered, “Money was never the issue. Not doing this movie means he probably gave up $30 million based on his back-end deal.”
According to EW, Keaton was unhappy that Schumacher replaced his pal Tim Burton. Further, “[After one meeting with Schumacher] Michael was not feeling confident.” He reportedly disliked that his input about making it more of Batman’s story (as opposed to the villains’) had been ignored, and that he was not consulted once during the script writing.
During his appearance on a 2013 WTF Podcast with comedian Marc Maron, Keaton maintained his position nearly 20 years later. “The guy who’s doing them now, Chris Nolan, he’s so talented, it’s crazy,” Keaton said. “[Christian Bale] is so talented. It’s so good….You look at where he went, which is exactly what I wanted to do when I was having meetings about the third one. I said, ‘You want to see how this guy started. We’ve got a chance here to fix whatever we kind of maybe went off. This could be brilliant!’” Keaton added that after Burton left and Schumacher came aboard, “I could see that was going south.”
After Keaton departed, Rene Russo, who was cast only one week prior to Keaton’s exit, was replaced with Nicole Kidman in the role of Dr. Chase Meridian, because she was perceived as too old to be Val Kilmer’s love interest.
The rest, as they say, is history. But perhaps it was for the best? A third Tim Burton Batman movie could, in theory, have starred Robin Williams in a role just as depraved as Jack Nicholson’s Joker and Danny DeVito’s Penguin, and opposite a returning Pfeiffer who’s so puuurfect for the part of Catwoman that I couldn’t resist the pun. Maybe Keaton would have had more to do, as well.
Then again, if not for Batman Forever’s successor, the infamous Batman & Robin mega-flop, the series would not have so embarrassingly and spectacularly imploded. Ergo, there might not have been something brilliant but dormant for Christopher Nolan to reboot in 2005 into the masterful The Dark Knight Trilogy. In that sense, it may have been for the best. But it never hurts to wonder in lieu of a neon-backlit Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones doing a Benny Hill routine.
Read and download the full Den of Geek Special Edition magazine here!
This article first ran in September of 2014.
http://www.denofgeek.com/us/movies/batman/239632/why-tim-burtons-batman-3-never-happened
Did Andrew Lloyd Webber Ruin the Musical or Rescue It?
A new memoir shows how the composer brought back the masses by returning the musical to an earlier form.
By Adam Gopnik
American lovers of musical theatre who blame Andrew Lloyd Webber for pretty much everything that went wrong on its stages, starting in the early seventies, will be chagrined to discover that he has written an autobiography that has all the virtues his music always seemed to lack: wit, surprise, contemporaneity, audacity, and an appealingly shrewd sense of the occasion. There is nothing pompous or pallid about his prose, which makes it all the odder that so much of the music that he wrote seems to have no other qualities. Given his reputation as the guy who dragged the Broadway musical from its vitality and idiomatic urgency back to its melodramatic roots in European operetta—while also degrading rock music to a mere rhythm track—is it possible that, as his memoir indicates, his work might be more varied and interesting than we had known? Could we, terrible thought, have been unfair to Andrew Lloyd Webber? The answer turns out, on inspection, to be a complicated and qualified Yes. Certainly, no artist as hugely successful as he has been can have struck a chord without owning a piece of his time.
Lloyd Webber, as his memoir, “Unmasked” (HarperCollins), reveals, was caught in a wrinkle within that time. Though his music may often sound as if it were written by a man locked in the basement of the Paris opera—hearing late-nineteenth-century music, muffled, from a couple of floors down—he turns out to be very much a boy of the Monty Python generation, his ears full of rock and British comedy. Born in 1948, Lloyd Webber as a child was an Elvis nut who played “Jailhouse Rock” until his parents were numbed by it, and later led a school celebration for the duo Peter and Gordon, recent alumni who had had a pop hit. He knows his instruments, ready to whip out a twelve-string Rickenbacker for the right effect in a recording session.
But he also had, from early on, a Betjemanian love of Englishness: he tells, touchingly, of schoolboy trips to see old churches and abbeys and of a keen love for Pre-Raphaelite art, that wistful-whimsical mode of nineteenth-century British painting. (He later amassed one of the world’s best private collections of the school.) He loved pantomime, a distinctly English holiday entertainment that mixed spectacle, parody, nostalgia, and pastiche. As a child, he operated a toy musical theatre with his brother, in which they put on full-scale shows, Andrew pulling all the strings and arranging all the music. You have a sense that this is still the theatre where he puts on shows; one of those infant musicals was billed as “A Musical of Gigantic Importance,” and several well-known later tunes emerged from them. You get good at this stuff early, or probably not at all.
Rising from the English upper crust—that school he shared with Peter and Gordon was Westminster, a famous London one—he absorbed many of its attitudes, although, the English crust having as many layers as a mille-feuille, one has the sense that he comes from somewhere in the more insecure upper middle, rather than from the very creamy top. He emerged with, among other things, a passion for P. G. Wodehouse (one of his rare flops was a Wodehouse musical). Indeed, his memoir is written in a sort of Bertie Wooster pastiche, a little disconcertingly given that its material is the very un-Woosterish one of drive and success. At one point, Lloyd Webber even recycles a Wodehouse joke in a way that may puzzle outsiders to the Wodehouse cult, calling people “gruntled.” (It’s from “The Code of the Woosters”: “If not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”)
His father, perhaps most significant of all, was a composer of a distinctly English variety—happily obscure, making a living writing old-fashioned organ and choral music for amateur church choirs. He was one of a group of British composers for whom it was still possible to write straight, melodic music that wasn’t pop and somehow make a living. It was his parents who introduced him to Puccini, and then one day his father played “Some Enchanted Evening,” the ballad from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific,” saying, “If you ever write a tune half as good as this, I shall be very, very proud of you.” Ah! If only Dad had played “The Lady Is a Tramp” or “Where or When” or another angular and elegant Rodgers and Hart ballad, the history of musical theatre might have been different, and better. (To be fair, whenever Lloyd Webber does write at his best, he writes at Rodgers’s best; the influence flows in and then out, as in the genuinely beautiful “All I Ask of You,” from “The Phantom of the Opera.”)
A kind of admirably defensive attitude got embedded in him from his youth: old things could be nice things, and the tastes of awkward schoolboys might be made into entertainment. Those tastes were always what the Brits call “naff”—lame, tacky, uncool. But he knew that naff could be beautiful. The basic formula that lit up the pop cantatas that first made him famous was apparent early on: something old, something new, something borrowed, nothing blue. “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” (1968), which in some ways remains the most vivid thing Lloyd Webber ever wrote, was pushed along by a music master at a prestigious junior school who wanted “something for the whole school to sing.” Using Tim Rice’s words, which had, instead of sixties piety, a jaunty Python playfulness, he managed to write a school play from Scripture which no one had to take too seriously. Its famous follow-up, “Jesus Christ Superstar” (1970), was a rock album, played on progressive FM before it was a show. Those of us with snobby tastes in Hendrix and the Dead thought it was a terrible rock album, but a rock album is what it was.
So, though his music isn’t often grouped with the “prog rock” of the early seventies—the highly tutored, self-consciously arty music of Yes and early Genesis and Procol Harum and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and so on—the spirit is very much the same: educated British musicians with classical training, inherited rock rhythm sections, minimal blues feeling, and a taste for the grandiose and bombastic. The famous “Phantom of the Opera” theme, with the organ’s quaver accompanied by funereal electric bass and foreboding percussion, is pure prog rock, almost to the point of “Spinal Tap”-style parody. What Lloyd Webber added to the mix was a feeling for pathos and melody—putting Puccini rather than Bach into the prog-rock cauldron. (These connections prove to be fairly direct: the first Jesus in “Jesus Christ Superstar” was the lead singer of Deep Purple, and a subsequent Jesus tried out for Black Sabbath, both groups slightly demented children of prog rock.)
Every biography or memoir set in the world of popular music turns out to be a book about music publishing. You wince as you read the opening chapters, knowing that, with the fateful inevitability of Greek tragedy, the composer-songwriter-singer is going to sign a deal with a rapacious music publisher as a dewy-eyed youngster and then spend the rest of his life regretting it. Springsteen, the Beatles, most notoriously John Fogerty—the story varies only in the details.
Lloyd Webber reverses the rules. Even before he had written a single hit song, he had spotted in the publisher’s contracts something called Grand Rights, meaning the ongoing financial control over theatrical productions. No one in the sixties much cared about these—who was going to mount a theatrical production of a pop cantata?—but Lloyd Webber did, and miraculously managed to hold on to his, or, at least, to eighty per cent of them. (Having to give up twenty per cent “rankles with me to this day,” he confides.) Lloyd Webber is ferociously smart about everything to do with money and marketing; every small real-estate transaction he has ever taken part in is recounted in detail and its value offered both in the original sum and, in parenthesis, in the equivalent now—e.g., “£2,000 per year was a lot of money in those days (today approximately £32,000).” Cynics know the price of everything and the value of nothing; a smart popular artist like Lloyd Webber knows the price of everything and the value of everything and can never decide which matters more.
Or, rather, he made the decision, long ago, while still knowing the alternative. For him, calculation and composition go hand in hand—as they did, let it be said, for Irving Berlin and for Richard Rodgers, too. You learn how Lloyd Webber composed “Cats” and “Chess” and the rest; you also learn about the composition of the licensing and merchandising choices. Selecting posters and crafting ads get as much attention as making music. There’s even a fascinating digression on how the grooves on the “Evita” LP had to be widened so that when “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” appeared on the radio it would have sufficient volume to compete with the other pop songs.
In truth, Lloyd Webber’s genius was always more theatrical than musical—more about putting on a big show than about writing startling or original music. That’s not to say he doesn’t care about the music: he talks, fairly, about his pride in the orchestration of the second verse of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.” But the value of the music is determined exclusively by how many people choose to listen to it, and by the “Wow!” factor it presents to a seated audience. The ill-natured regularly insist that Lloyd Webber “stole” music from the classics. Online, one can find fiendishly self-satisfied chat boards detailing the supposed lifts. But if someone can find a pop song (“I Don’t Know How to Love Him”) in a Mendelssohn violin concerto, more power, and royalties, to him. Lloyd Webber was working his marionettes, with anything that he could find to move them.
At a deeper level, Lloyd Webber’s memoir exposes a central fault line in the history of popular music. In the late fifties, not only was the “My Fair Lady” cast album the biggest seller of its time but spinoff jazz albums with musicians playing “My Fair Lady” material were huge sellers, too. Sinatra’s great albums of the mid-fifties were heavy with theatre songs. By 1964, all that had altered for good; a successful original-cast album went from the place where hits always happened to a place where they rarely did. When the Beatles and the rest arrived, the line between pop music and theatre music became almost absolute; the circumstance in which a Broadway musical was the natural home of a hit tune began to break up more rapidly than anyone had thought possible, even though the previous connection had been so long-lasting that the Beatles felt obliged to play, as their second song before the American public, “Till There Was You,” from Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man.” An ironic sign of obeisance to a dying order.
When the plates move and shake in a genre of entertainment, you survive by getting either smarter or more spectacular. This was true of the early-seventeenth-century theatre, when, as playgoing moved indoors, away from the giant popular amphitheatres, the special effects got more elaborate and the drama got more daring. It was true of Hollywood after the arrival of television, where some went for Cinerama and others went for a more pointedly adult and arty direction. And it was true of musical theatre after rock. Sondheim became the god of smart, Lloyd Webber of spectacular.
You could also, Lloyd Webber sensed instinctively, undertake what rock couldn’t do, or did only fitfully: a unified piece of classic storytelling. The Who’s “Tommy” is a wonderful rock album, but a very rickety piece of narrative. Lloyd Webber stumbled onto the truth that there was a range of stylized storytelling that lent itself to his music—that if you couldn’t tell street tales you could find old fables. All his successful shows have been fables and fairy tales and pageants and pantomimes. Rock having taken the street, the salon was left vacant. With ordinary emotion sung in idiomatic English having been reclaimed by the singer-songwriters, theatrical music could borrow rock style but move backward in form, toward operetta and melodrama. Lloyd Webber and Sondheim both wrote their best work around the subject of “night music”—what it might sound like and what it might mean. Sondheim’s night music occupied a single house in wry waltz time; Lloyd Webber’s the operatic basement in melodramatic swellings—musicals, still, of Gigantic Importance.
The return to operetta is a surprising but not unnatural development. The history of musical theatre can be seen as a race—like Eliza across the ice—against the bloodhounds of operetta, with the European formula always lying in wait to recapture the runaway, twirling a mustache and wearing a top hat. The Princess Theatre musicals of Kern, Wodehouse, and Bolton are usually thought to have been the first to make a real break with the European model, offering casual interchange, light-footed melody, and contemporary romance in place of the old Viennese pastry.
The odd thing is that, while the “book shows” that sprang from this transformation produced the greatest body of songs since the German Romantics, and more varied than those, the shows that produced those songs were so slight as to be unrevivable, except as nostalgia pieces. The songs have depth and surprise; the shows don’t. Of the Rodgers and Hart productions, only one or two stand up, and of the Cole Porter shows hardly more: you have to go right from Rodgers and Hart’s “On Your Toes” to Porter’s “High Society,” with a brief summer-stock stop at “Kiss Me, Kate.” (Lloyd Webber, to his credit, produced a revival of “On Your Toes,” in London, in the nineteen-eighties, but, he says ruefully, it “cost me my shirt.” Though one knows that there was a shirt beneath the shirt, and one beneath that.)
Better shows with lesser music have become more familiar than the shows with the very best stuff, which is mostly hived off to jazz and cabaret. The Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, which are unified and theatrical, are still in constant circulation, even though they don’t contain Rodgers’s best work. The Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals have been revived so successfully in the past two decades, in impeccably posh corners like the National Theatre in London and Lincoln Center Theatre here, that it’s hard to recall that not so long ago they were considered very déclassé—taken for granted by an earlier generation to have been part of the suburban middlebrow descent of Broadway theatre in the nineteen-fifties, especially when it came to the quality of the music. Alec Wilder, in “American Popular Song: The Great Innovators,” still the best book on the topic, could hardly find six Rodgers and Hammerstein songs that he thought were equal to Rodgers’s work with Hart, calling “Some Enchanted Evening,” which so enchanted the Lloyd Webbers, “pale and pompous and bland.” Yet the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows survive because they keep intact the crucial discovery of the American form, the thing that really separated it from the opera tradition and its dependencies: extraordinary emotion sung by ordinary people, rather than extraordinary emotion sung by extraordinary people.
Lloyd Webber’s musicals are all operetta in that simple sense. They are filled with extraordinary people—whether Evita or Jesus—singing big stuff; the excitement gained by the spectacle is paid for by the loss of soul, pious aspiration replacing spice and street savvy. (Today, one listens to a now forgotten show like Phil Silvers and Johnny Mercer’s 1951 “Top Banana” with astonishment at its energy and its urban moxie.) A good book holds up even bathetic music—a lesson not lost on Lloyd Webber. The closest thing he has achieved to the older style of musical is “Cats,” from 1981, a show that had street wisdoms within its Eliotian measures. (The often maligned “Cats” is doubtless in part a victim of an ugly kind of reverse snobbery: had it appeared for a month at the National Theatre, instead of for all our lifetimes in the West End and on Broadway, it would have had a choicer reputation.)
Theatricality is the key to Lloyd Webber’s success, and theatre is conflict. Not surprisingly, he tells many fine theatre stories, most of them, as is the way in the history of the musical, tales of rage, resentment, and growing mutual mistrust, all in the cause of making two and a half hours of middlebrow entertainment. The stories are good, and sometimes violent. He tells of the time that the actor Michael Crawford and the producer Cameron Mackintosh got out of a London car and started a fistfight on the street because Crawford wanted to use a recording of one of his “Phantom” songs in performance. We learn that Lloyd Webber’s longtime partner Tim Rice once became so enraged that he threatened a lawsuit to have his words removed from “Memory”—to be sure, something any honest man would want to do. (Rice and Lloyd Webber have only recently seemed to reconcile.) Given the scale of Lloyd Webber’s successes, one is startled by the vitriol that accompanies his productions. He even reproduces catty letters that he wrote to Patti LuPone during the run of “Evita,” despairing of her ability to sing the words clearly enough for them to be understood by the audience. (She never really did, and it never really mattered.)
“Understand some of my lyrics still in show despite your assurances to the contrary,” Rice telexed to his partner, in good Wodehousian telegraphic form. “Demand removal by tonight or legal action follows.” How, one wonders, could people have nearly come to blows, with lawsuits and friendships ripped apart, over “Cats”? If the rule in the movie industry is that nobody knows anything, the rule in musical theatre is more fiendish: everybody does know something, but nobody knows what bit of what’s known will count, and everybody hates the next person for thinking he or she does. That’s one theory for why the history of the musical is a history of men and women shouting at one another. The incomparable composer and lyricist Frank Loesser once ordered a director to tell an actor not to sing a song the wrong way, and, after the director obligingly did so, Loesser yelled at him anyway: “You didn’t hit him, you son of a bitch!” The producer Cy Feuer tells of how, during a Philadelphia tryout of a harmless musical called “Little Me,” the wonderful lyricist Carolyn Leigh actually went outside and asked a police officer to arrest him for cutting one of her songs.
But my own theory for why musical comedies make people miserable, richly borne out by Lloyd Webber’s memoir, is that there is no natural author of a musical—that is, no one who assumes authority, more or less inevitably, owing to the nature of the form. The director, by contrast, is the natural author of a movie. He coaxes out the performances, allows the improvs, and makes the cuts. A choreographer, similarly, is the natural author of the dance. Most of the time, the natural author is the actual author, and the exceptions leave us grumbling. Authors write books, even if editors mightily assist.
But a musical has no natural author. It has five or six or seven. The composer is the actual author of the most powerful emotional beats in the piece—we remember Richard Rodgers’s music in “Carousel” far better than any other element—but composers tend to be inarticulate and are often outtalked. The book writer, as he is archaically still called—elsewhere, simply, the playwright—is the most important maker; but though he provides the structure in which the songs may take place, no one recalls the structure, only the songs. The director is often powerful to the point of omnipotence, but no one except special groups of insiders will ever think of the show as his. The lyricist, meanwhile, has a reasonable claim to being the true author of the show—the music’s emotional force takes on specific meaning only through the words it accompanies—but he often ends up the most invisible of all. Meanwhile, the choreographer believes himself to be the natural author of all the things the director is doing badly, but is also sure that the director will get the credit even if the choreographer fixes them. Add to this the truth that songs that delighted salons of backers bore audiences silly, and that the things that worked perfectly in rehearsal die a dog’s death onstage, and you have a natural abyss of authority. You need only bring in the panic of pure ignorance to produce an atmosphere like that of a third-world country after the President has left the palace and the mobs are surging in the streets.
So it shouldn’t be surprising to discover that, even after Lloyd Webber had become a theatrical Godzilla, he was still entangled in the whims and the will of others. The stage design of “Phantom of the Opera” proposed by Trevor Nunn, Lloyd Webber thinks, would have damaged the show, and he’s probably right, but to fight off Nunn in favor of Hal Prince was brutal, friendship-ending work, wounding both would-be directors at once. It was quite a typical tangle: “I feared that both Trevor and Cameron would think it was the reviews”—for “Les Mis,” at that point, amazingly, was considered a failure—“that were the reason for my insisting that the director must be Hal. Cameron seemed curiously disturbed when I stood my ground. Years later, I discovered the reason. Although I still presumed that Hal was to be our director, in fact he had been stood down. I also learned that Hal blamed me for this and was appalled.” He concludes, “It’s best left at that,” unintentionally echoing the famous words of the Spinal Tap guitarist about one of the group’s dying drummers. Lloyd Webber’s stories, far from being tales of aims accomplished, remain tales of aims gone wrong and of mountains not quite climbed. Even the most powerful auteur of musicals can never quite become their author.
“Phantom of the Opera” is probably the closest thing we will have to a complete expression of Lloyd Webber’s vision, and here it is on Broadway, still playing thirty years on, likely, as he says himself, the single most successful piece of theatrical entertainment ever engineered. As a recent visit confirms, it remains today, for the audience of tourists and kids who flock to it, as impressive as it was when it débuted. The show manages to be both absolutely terrible and sort of great. The action makes no sense, it takes forever for the story to get going, the characters are made of cardboard, and the music is made of bits and pieces. But theatre is brutally binary; it either works or it doesn’t, and no one with a fair mind and a taste for the theatrical can deny that this show works.
It is pure, unadulterated operetta: the entire first twenty minutes of the show are given over to a bit of self-amused nineteenth-century pastiche, and then twenty minutes later we get an extended Mozart parody that must be lost on nine-tenths of the audience. But its theatricality, both of the showy, expensive kind (rising and falling chandeliers, mysterious mirrors and underground lagoons) and of the more potent, elemental kind (obsessive love and beautiful sopranos and virtuous aristocrats), remains intact.
Spectacular is, in the end, a species of smart. Popular artists find solutions to problems presented by the circumstances of their time which no one else was aware of until the artist solved them. Lloyd Webber solved the problem of how to make a credible spectacle from recycled material. Using fresher material to make something spectacular on its own terms remains the job that needs doing. Every good art form needs a phantom or two in the basement to haunt it. They just shouldn’t be allowed the run of the house.
This article appears in the print edition of the March 12, 2018, issue, with the headline “Night Music.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/12/did-andrew-lloyd-webber-ruin-the-musical-or-rescue-it
By Adam Gopnik
American lovers of musical theatre who blame Andrew Lloyd Webber for pretty much everything that went wrong on its stages, starting in the early seventies, will be chagrined to discover that he has written an autobiography that has all the virtues his music always seemed to lack: wit, surprise, contemporaneity, audacity, and an appealingly shrewd sense of the occasion. There is nothing pompous or pallid about his prose, which makes it all the odder that so much of the music that he wrote seems to have no other qualities. Given his reputation as the guy who dragged the Broadway musical from its vitality and idiomatic urgency back to its melodramatic roots in European operetta—while also degrading rock music to a mere rhythm track—is it possible that, as his memoir indicates, his work might be more varied and interesting than we had known? Could we, terrible thought, have been unfair to Andrew Lloyd Webber? The answer turns out, on inspection, to be a complicated and qualified Yes. Certainly, no artist as hugely successful as he has been can have struck a chord without owning a piece of his time.
Lloyd Webber, as his memoir, “Unmasked” (HarperCollins), reveals, was caught in a wrinkle within that time. Though his music may often sound as if it were written by a man locked in the basement of the Paris opera—hearing late-nineteenth-century music, muffled, from a couple of floors down—he turns out to be very much a boy of the Monty Python generation, his ears full of rock and British comedy. Born in 1948, Lloyd Webber as a child was an Elvis nut who played “Jailhouse Rock” until his parents were numbed by it, and later led a school celebration for the duo Peter and Gordon, recent alumni who had had a pop hit. He knows his instruments, ready to whip out a twelve-string Rickenbacker for the right effect in a recording session.
But he also had, from early on, a Betjemanian love of Englishness: he tells, touchingly, of schoolboy trips to see old churches and abbeys and of a keen love for Pre-Raphaelite art, that wistful-whimsical mode of nineteenth-century British painting. (He later amassed one of the world’s best private collections of the school.) He loved pantomime, a distinctly English holiday entertainment that mixed spectacle, parody, nostalgia, and pastiche. As a child, he operated a toy musical theatre with his brother, in which they put on full-scale shows, Andrew pulling all the strings and arranging all the music. You have a sense that this is still the theatre where he puts on shows; one of those infant musicals was billed as “A Musical of Gigantic Importance,” and several well-known later tunes emerged from them. You get good at this stuff early, or probably not at all.
Rising from the English upper crust—that school he shared with Peter and Gordon was Westminster, a famous London one—he absorbed many of its attitudes, although, the English crust having as many layers as a mille-feuille, one has the sense that he comes from somewhere in the more insecure upper middle, rather than from the very creamy top. He emerged with, among other things, a passion for P. G. Wodehouse (one of his rare flops was a Wodehouse musical). Indeed, his memoir is written in a sort of Bertie Wooster pastiche, a little disconcertingly given that its material is the very un-Woosterish one of drive and success. At one point, Lloyd Webber even recycles a Wodehouse joke in a way that may puzzle outsiders to the Wodehouse cult, calling people “gruntled.” (It’s from “The Code of the Woosters”: “If not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”)
His father, perhaps most significant of all, was a composer of a distinctly English variety—happily obscure, making a living writing old-fashioned organ and choral music for amateur church choirs. He was one of a group of British composers for whom it was still possible to write straight, melodic music that wasn’t pop and somehow make a living. It was his parents who introduced him to Puccini, and then one day his father played “Some Enchanted Evening,” the ballad from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific,” saying, “If you ever write a tune half as good as this, I shall be very, very proud of you.” Ah! If only Dad had played “The Lady Is a Tramp” or “Where or When” or another angular and elegant Rodgers and Hart ballad, the history of musical theatre might have been different, and better. (To be fair, whenever Lloyd Webber does write at his best, he writes at Rodgers’s best; the influence flows in and then out, as in the genuinely beautiful “All I Ask of You,” from “The Phantom of the Opera.”)
A kind of admirably defensive attitude got embedded in him from his youth: old things could be nice things, and the tastes of awkward schoolboys might be made into entertainment. Those tastes were always what the Brits call “naff”—lame, tacky, uncool. But he knew that naff could be beautiful. The basic formula that lit up the pop cantatas that first made him famous was apparent early on: something old, something new, something borrowed, nothing blue. “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” (1968), which in some ways remains the most vivid thing Lloyd Webber ever wrote, was pushed along by a music master at a prestigious junior school who wanted “something for the whole school to sing.” Using Tim Rice’s words, which had, instead of sixties piety, a jaunty Python playfulness, he managed to write a school play from Scripture which no one had to take too seriously. Its famous follow-up, “Jesus Christ Superstar” (1970), was a rock album, played on progressive FM before it was a show. Those of us with snobby tastes in Hendrix and the Dead thought it was a terrible rock album, but a rock album is what it was.
So, though his music isn’t often grouped with the “prog rock” of the early seventies—the highly tutored, self-consciously arty music of Yes and early Genesis and Procol Harum and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and so on—the spirit is very much the same: educated British musicians with classical training, inherited rock rhythm sections, minimal blues feeling, and a taste for the grandiose and bombastic. The famous “Phantom of the Opera” theme, with the organ’s quaver accompanied by funereal electric bass and foreboding percussion, is pure prog rock, almost to the point of “Spinal Tap”-style parody. What Lloyd Webber added to the mix was a feeling for pathos and melody—putting Puccini rather than Bach into the prog-rock cauldron. (These connections prove to be fairly direct: the first Jesus in “Jesus Christ Superstar” was the lead singer of Deep Purple, and a subsequent Jesus tried out for Black Sabbath, both groups slightly demented children of prog rock.)
Every biography or memoir set in the world of popular music turns out to be a book about music publishing. You wince as you read the opening chapters, knowing that, with the fateful inevitability of Greek tragedy, the composer-songwriter-singer is going to sign a deal with a rapacious music publisher as a dewy-eyed youngster and then spend the rest of his life regretting it. Springsteen, the Beatles, most notoriously John Fogerty—the story varies only in the details.
Lloyd Webber reverses the rules. Even before he had written a single hit song, he had spotted in the publisher’s contracts something called Grand Rights, meaning the ongoing financial control over theatrical productions. No one in the sixties much cared about these—who was going to mount a theatrical production of a pop cantata?—but Lloyd Webber did, and miraculously managed to hold on to his, or, at least, to eighty per cent of them. (Having to give up twenty per cent “rankles with me to this day,” he confides.) Lloyd Webber is ferociously smart about everything to do with money and marketing; every small real-estate transaction he has ever taken part in is recounted in detail and its value offered both in the original sum and, in parenthesis, in the equivalent now—e.g., “£2,000 per year was a lot of money in those days (today approximately £32,000).” Cynics know the price of everything and the value of nothing; a smart popular artist like Lloyd Webber knows the price of everything and the value of everything and can never decide which matters more.
Or, rather, he made the decision, long ago, while still knowing the alternative. For him, calculation and composition go hand in hand—as they did, let it be said, for Irving Berlin and for Richard Rodgers, too. You learn how Lloyd Webber composed “Cats” and “Chess” and the rest; you also learn about the composition of the licensing and merchandising choices. Selecting posters and crafting ads get as much attention as making music. There’s even a fascinating digression on how the grooves on the “Evita” LP had to be widened so that when “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” appeared on the radio it would have sufficient volume to compete with the other pop songs.
In truth, Lloyd Webber’s genius was always more theatrical than musical—more about putting on a big show than about writing startling or original music. That’s not to say he doesn’t care about the music: he talks, fairly, about his pride in the orchestration of the second verse of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.” But the value of the music is determined exclusively by how many people choose to listen to it, and by the “Wow!” factor it presents to a seated audience. The ill-natured regularly insist that Lloyd Webber “stole” music from the classics. Online, one can find fiendishly self-satisfied chat boards detailing the supposed lifts. But if someone can find a pop song (“I Don’t Know How to Love Him”) in a Mendelssohn violin concerto, more power, and royalties, to him. Lloyd Webber was working his marionettes, with anything that he could find to move them.
At a deeper level, Lloyd Webber’s memoir exposes a central fault line in the history of popular music. In the late fifties, not only was the “My Fair Lady” cast album the biggest seller of its time but spinoff jazz albums with musicians playing “My Fair Lady” material were huge sellers, too. Sinatra’s great albums of the mid-fifties were heavy with theatre songs. By 1964, all that had altered for good; a successful original-cast album went from the place where hits always happened to a place where they rarely did. When the Beatles and the rest arrived, the line between pop music and theatre music became almost absolute; the circumstance in which a Broadway musical was the natural home of a hit tune began to break up more rapidly than anyone had thought possible, even though the previous connection had been so long-lasting that the Beatles felt obliged to play, as their second song before the American public, “Till There Was You,” from Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man.” An ironic sign of obeisance to a dying order.
When the plates move and shake in a genre of entertainment, you survive by getting either smarter or more spectacular. This was true of the early-seventeenth-century theatre, when, as playgoing moved indoors, away from the giant popular amphitheatres, the special effects got more elaborate and the drama got more daring. It was true of Hollywood after the arrival of television, where some went for Cinerama and others went for a more pointedly adult and arty direction. And it was true of musical theatre after rock. Sondheim became the god of smart, Lloyd Webber of spectacular.
You could also, Lloyd Webber sensed instinctively, undertake what rock couldn’t do, or did only fitfully: a unified piece of classic storytelling. The Who’s “Tommy” is a wonderful rock album, but a very rickety piece of narrative. Lloyd Webber stumbled onto the truth that there was a range of stylized storytelling that lent itself to his music—that if you couldn’t tell street tales you could find old fables. All his successful shows have been fables and fairy tales and pageants and pantomimes. Rock having taken the street, the salon was left vacant. With ordinary emotion sung in idiomatic English having been reclaimed by the singer-songwriters, theatrical music could borrow rock style but move backward in form, toward operetta and melodrama. Lloyd Webber and Sondheim both wrote their best work around the subject of “night music”—what it might sound like and what it might mean. Sondheim’s night music occupied a single house in wry waltz time; Lloyd Webber’s the operatic basement in melodramatic swellings—musicals, still, of Gigantic Importance.
The return to operetta is a surprising but not unnatural development. The history of musical theatre can be seen as a race—like Eliza across the ice—against the bloodhounds of operetta, with the European formula always lying in wait to recapture the runaway, twirling a mustache and wearing a top hat. The Princess Theatre musicals of Kern, Wodehouse, and Bolton are usually thought to have been the first to make a real break with the European model, offering casual interchange, light-footed melody, and contemporary romance in place of the old Viennese pastry.
The odd thing is that, while the “book shows” that sprang from this transformation produced the greatest body of songs since the German Romantics, and more varied than those, the shows that produced those songs were so slight as to be unrevivable, except as nostalgia pieces. The songs have depth and surprise; the shows don’t. Of the Rodgers and Hart productions, only one or two stand up, and of the Cole Porter shows hardly more: you have to go right from Rodgers and Hart’s “On Your Toes” to Porter’s “High Society,” with a brief summer-stock stop at “Kiss Me, Kate.” (Lloyd Webber, to his credit, produced a revival of “On Your Toes,” in London, in the nineteen-eighties, but, he says ruefully, it “cost me my shirt.” Though one knows that there was a shirt beneath the shirt, and one beneath that.)
Better shows with lesser music have become more familiar than the shows with the very best stuff, which is mostly hived off to jazz and cabaret. The Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, which are unified and theatrical, are still in constant circulation, even though they don’t contain Rodgers’s best work. The Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals have been revived so successfully in the past two decades, in impeccably posh corners like the National Theatre in London and Lincoln Center Theatre here, that it’s hard to recall that not so long ago they were considered very déclassé—taken for granted by an earlier generation to have been part of the suburban middlebrow descent of Broadway theatre in the nineteen-fifties, especially when it came to the quality of the music. Alec Wilder, in “American Popular Song: The Great Innovators,” still the best book on the topic, could hardly find six Rodgers and Hammerstein songs that he thought were equal to Rodgers’s work with Hart, calling “Some Enchanted Evening,” which so enchanted the Lloyd Webbers, “pale and pompous and bland.” Yet the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows survive because they keep intact the crucial discovery of the American form, the thing that really separated it from the opera tradition and its dependencies: extraordinary emotion sung by ordinary people, rather than extraordinary emotion sung by extraordinary people.
Lloyd Webber’s musicals are all operetta in that simple sense. They are filled with extraordinary people—whether Evita or Jesus—singing big stuff; the excitement gained by the spectacle is paid for by the loss of soul, pious aspiration replacing spice and street savvy. (Today, one listens to a now forgotten show like Phil Silvers and Johnny Mercer’s 1951 “Top Banana” with astonishment at its energy and its urban moxie.) A good book holds up even bathetic music—a lesson not lost on Lloyd Webber. The closest thing he has achieved to the older style of musical is “Cats,” from 1981, a show that had street wisdoms within its Eliotian measures. (The often maligned “Cats” is doubtless in part a victim of an ugly kind of reverse snobbery: had it appeared for a month at the National Theatre, instead of for all our lifetimes in the West End and on Broadway, it would have had a choicer reputation.)
Theatricality is the key to Lloyd Webber’s success, and theatre is conflict. Not surprisingly, he tells many fine theatre stories, most of them, as is the way in the history of the musical, tales of rage, resentment, and growing mutual mistrust, all in the cause of making two and a half hours of middlebrow entertainment. The stories are good, and sometimes violent. He tells of the time that the actor Michael Crawford and the producer Cameron Mackintosh got out of a London car and started a fistfight on the street because Crawford wanted to use a recording of one of his “Phantom” songs in performance. We learn that Lloyd Webber’s longtime partner Tim Rice once became so enraged that he threatened a lawsuit to have his words removed from “Memory”—to be sure, something any honest man would want to do. (Rice and Lloyd Webber have only recently seemed to reconcile.) Given the scale of Lloyd Webber’s successes, one is startled by the vitriol that accompanies his productions. He even reproduces catty letters that he wrote to Patti LuPone during the run of “Evita,” despairing of her ability to sing the words clearly enough for them to be understood by the audience. (She never really did, and it never really mattered.)
“Understand some of my lyrics still in show despite your assurances to the contrary,” Rice telexed to his partner, in good Wodehousian telegraphic form. “Demand removal by tonight or legal action follows.” How, one wonders, could people have nearly come to blows, with lawsuits and friendships ripped apart, over “Cats”? If the rule in the movie industry is that nobody knows anything, the rule in musical theatre is more fiendish: everybody does know something, but nobody knows what bit of what’s known will count, and everybody hates the next person for thinking he or she does. That’s one theory for why the history of the musical is a history of men and women shouting at one another. The incomparable composer and lyricist Frank Loesser once ordered a director to tell an actor not to sing a song the wrong way, and, after the director obligingly did so, Loesser yelled at him anyway: “You didn’t hit him, you son of a bitch!” The producer Cy Feuer tells of how, during a Philadelphia tryout of a harmless musical called “Little Me,” the wonderful lyricist Carolyn Leigh actually went outside and asked a police officer to arrest him for cutting one of her songs.
But my own theory for why musical comedies make people miserable, richly borne out by Lloyd Webber’s memoir, is that there is no natural author of a musical—that is, no one who assumes authority, more or less inevitably, owing to the nature of the form. The director, by contrast, is the natural author of a movie. He coaxes out the performances, allows the improvs, and makes the cuts. A choreographer, similarly, is the natural author of the dance. Most of the time, the natural author is the actual author, and the exceptions leave us grumbling. Authors write books, even if editors mightily assist.
But a musical has no natural author. It has five or six or seven. The composer is the actual author of the most powerful emotional beats in the piece—we remember Richard Rodgers’s music in “Carousel” far better than any other element—but composers tend to be inarticulate and are often outtalked. The book writer, as he is archaically still called—elsewhere, simply, the playwright—is the most important maker; but though he provides the structure in which the songs may take place, no one recalls the structure, only the songs. The director is often powerful to the point of omnipotence, but no one except special groups of insiders will ever think of the show as his. The lyricist, meanwhile, has a reasonable claim to being the true author of the show—the music’s emotional force takes on specific meaning only through the words it accompanies—but he often ends up the most invisible of all. Meanwhile, the choreographer believes himself to be the natural author of all the things the director is doing badly, but is also sure that the director will get the credit even if the choreographer fixes them. Add to this the truth that songs that delighted salons of backers bore audiences silly, and that the things that worked perfectly in rehearsal die a dog’s death onstage, and you have a natural abyss of authority. You need only bring in the panic of pure ignorance to produce an atmosphere like that of a third-world country after the President has left the palace and the mobs are surging in the streets.
So it shouldn’t be surprising to discover that, even after Lloyd Webber had become a theatrical Godzilla, he was still entangled in the whims and the will of others. The stage design of “Phantom of the Opera” proposed by Trevor Nunn, Lloyd Webber thinks, would have damaged the show, and he’s probably right, but to fight off Nunn in favor of Hal Prince was brutal, friendship-ending work, wounding both would-be directors at once. It was quite a typical tangle: “I feared that both Trevor and Cameron would think it was the reviews”—for “Les Mis,” at that point, amazingly, was considered a failure—“that were the reason for my insisting that the director must be Hal. Cameron seemed curiously disturbed when I stood my ground. Years later, I discovered the reason. Although I still presumed that Hal was to be our director, in fact he had been stood down. I also learned that Hal blamed me for this and was appalled.” He concludes, “It’s best left at that,” unintentionally echoing the famous words of the Spinal Tap guitarist about one of the group’s dying drummers. Lloyd Webber’s stories, far from being tales of aims accomplished, remain tales of aims gone wrong and of mountains not quite climbed. Even the most powerful auteur of musicals can never quite become their author.
“Phantom of the Opera” is probably the closest thing we will have to a complete expression of Lloyd Webber’s vision, and here it is on Broadway, still playing thirty years on, likely, as he says himself, the single most successful piece of theatrical entertainment ever engineered. As a recent visit confirms, it remains today, for the audience of tourists and kids who flock to it, as impressive as it was when it débuted. The show manages to be both absolutely terrible and sort of great. The action makes no sense, it takes forever for the story to get going, the characters are made of cardboard, and the music is made of bits and pieces. But theatre is brutally binary; it either works or it doesn’t, and no one with a fair mind and a taste for the theatrical can deny that this show works.
It is pure, unadulterated operetta: the entire first twenty minutes of the show are given over to a bit of self-amused nineteenth-century pastiche, and then twenty minutes later we get an extended Mozart parody that must be lost on nine-tenths of the audience. But its theatricality, both of the showy, expensive kind (rising and falling chandeliers, mysterious mirrors and underground lagoons) and of the more potent, elemental kind (obsessive love and beautiful sopranos and virtuous aristocrats), remains intact.
Spectacular is, in the end, a species of smart. Popular artists find solutions to problems presented by the circumstances of their time which no one else was aware of until the artist solved them. Lloyd Webber solved the problem of how to make a credible spectacle from recycled material. Using fresher material to make something spectacular on its own terms remains the job that needs doing. Every good art form needs a phantom or two in the basement to haunt it. They just shouldn’t be allowed the run of the house.
This article appears in the print edition of the March 12, 2018, issue, with the headline “Night Music.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/12/did-andrew-lloyd-webber-ruin-the-musical-or-rescue-it
The sweet girl who made my heart sing until I strayed with a beauty from Cats: Three marriages to three VERY different women - and a lot of drama along the way. Andrew Lloyd Webber lifts the curtain on his OWN Aspects of Love
By Andrew Lloyd Webber
PUBLISHED: 09:46 AEDT, 25 February 2018 | UPDATED: 12:26 AEDT, 25 February 2018
Last week, Britain’s most famous composer recounted his dazzling rise to the musical stratosphere and, in moving detail, the dark moments which pulled him to the brink of suicide. Today, in the second and final extract of a gripping autobiography, he reveals his heartfelt regret at leaving his young family – and recounts the explosive romance with stage star Sarah Brightman which changed his world for ever.
The 1980s had dawned, Cats was on its way to becoming the kind of global hit you can only dream of. Yet what happened next in my private life would lead to a musical that not only eclipsed Cats but changed the path of my life – and the fortunes of the vast battalion of theatre-owners and producers, City financiers, shysters, lawyers and executives who have profited handsomely out of The Phantom Of The Opera. Quite simply, I fell in love with a member of the cast of Cats.
Some friends counselled that I was an incurable romantic who poured affairs of the heart in double measures. Almost everyone was appalled by what I did next – publicly confirming that, after nearly 12 years of marriage, I was leaving my wife and my children, then aged five and three.
This is one of the parts of my life that I have been dreading writing about the most. What you are reading is the umpteenth rewrite. That is the best I can say.
I had met my first wife, Sarah Hugill, at a party thrown by a friend in Christ Church, Oxford – I was only 21 and she was even younger, a slip of a 16-year-old schoolgirl.
Sarah’s father Tony had individually won the Croix de Guerre for bluffing a German commander into surrendering an entire French village. He had served in the 30 Assault Unit set up by James Bond author Ian Fleming. Tony wasn’t over-keen on Fleming. Nonetheless he gets a big name-check in Casino Royale and is supposed to be one of the role models for James Bond himself.
Falling in love with Sarah didn’t take long. I asked her to dinner at a bistro. I thought she was ordering ludicrously small, simple things. She didn’t know whether she was supposed to pay her share of the bill. That did it. I had to see her again.
I had bought an Earls Court flat and – just a few hundred yards from Sarah’s school – it came in very handy. Since she was supposed to be revising for her summer exams, she had loads of free time, and most days she would clock into school and promptly come round to me. Fairly soon I gave her a spare key. There are worse things when you’re 21 than a pretty schoolgirl waking you up in the morning.
Come March, it was time to meet her parents. Thanks to the manners Auntie Vi drilled into me, I got on well with my elders and Tony and Fanny Hugill were no exception.
Love may well change everything but in my case it had me writing fast and even more furiously. Superstar’s structure was advanced enough for me to break the score down into record sides. I proposed to Sarah in late 1970, which was a stupid formality; we had long presumed we would get hitched as soon as she legally could.
I had the cash to buy a smart BMW 2002 so, as an unofficial engagement present to Sarah, I gave her my old Mini, which she promptly drove into the back of a lorry on Earls Court Road.
Our wedding service was simple and beautiful. Despite the fact I managed to spill champagne all over her wedding dress, Sarah glowed with incandescent triumph. We were insanely in love, and we drove away from the reception to great cheers from the guests. It was only halfway to our honeymoon hotel that I noticed Sarah was crying. I pulled the car over and took her in my arms as the reality of what I had done hit me. I had taken a girl aged barely 18, straight out of school, and propelled her away from her family into a new life that happened to include being the wife of the composer of the first British musical to premiere on Broadway – a debut that was now just weeks away.
Sarah had never even been to America. All I could think of to say was how much I loved her. For the first time in my life I felt responsible for something whose outcome I could not control. Despite this, the first years of marriage were joyful. Sarah proved a supermum to the two children we had together, allowing me to grasp every career opportunity thrown at me. Unfortunately it wasn’t the only opportunity I grasped. Whatever else money can’t buy, it can buy you freedom and with freedom comes the chance to play. By 1981 and aged 33 I found myself feted for the smash-hit musical Cats – which happened to feature some of the most attractive girls in London.
I loved having fun with our gorgeous-looking singers, but it wasn’t with them that I strayed. During the summer I began an affair with a girl who was teaching at, of all places, Westminster School. She was a distinct improvement on the master who had taken a shine to me years ago. I wasn’t in love and I truly hope she wasn’t with me.
It never crossed my mind that I would leave Sarah, but she found out about it and I was devastated, not so much for myself, as for what I had done.
Looking back, I suppose it was inevitable that I was going to have a serious affair at some point.
Sarah and I were so young when we married and, with all that was happening, it was as if I was going through my adolescence in my early 30s.
It was choreographer Arlene Phillips who, four years earlier, prophesied that Sarah Brightman would have an impact my life. Arlene – who also directed the dance troupe Hot Gossip – had eyeballed me and said: ‘There’s a girl in Hot Gossip who’s going to change your life. She has a voice from heaven. Her name is Sarah Brightman.’
Sarah was cast in Cats yet it was almost four years before I realised just how incredible her singing was when I went to see a children’s opera she was starring in.
I was poleaxed by a captivating soprano voice and magnetic stage presence, gifts that would see her cast as the star of Phantom Of The Opera just a few years later.
Afterwards, I aimed for her dressing room, which she was sharing with both a hamster she was looking after for some sibling or other and with Mike Moran, a sought-after keyboard player. They were clearly an item and were going back into town to the Zanzibar club. Sarah suggested I joined them – and I did, a split-second decision that changed my life.
At the Zanzibar I discovered that Sarah’s real ambition was not to dance but sing. She told me she was married to the son of an eminent brain surgeon. However, marriage hadn’t stopped her having an affair with one of the Cats keyboard players. Sarah was fondling Mike’s hand; clearly she liked keyboard players with flying digits.
Our relationship was sealed on a brief trip together to northern Italy, where Cupid beckoned on an autostrada in the sheeting rain. We were driving from Milan to the coast at Portofino and I planned to stop off for a decent lunch en route. But the rain was so gruesome that the autostrada was virtually closed and there was nothing for it but to stop in a motorway cafe for congealed chicken cacciatore. It would be 4pm before we left, but neither of us noticed time pass. We talked and talked about music, and about each other. Her father Gren was a property developer. Her family was not rich but well off enough that she and her two younger brothers and three sisters were educated privately.
Sarah’s mum Paula had been a dancer who once graced the stage (properly clothed, I stress) of Murray’s Club, today remembered as the Soho haunt where Stephen Ward met Christine Keeler. Apparently she kept baby Sarah in a carrycot backstage. By the time we got to Portofino, I knew there was no alternative: I was in love. We stayed at the empty Splendido Hotel, where Sarah wore a white miniskirt that elicited whistles from windows of houses that I swore were uninhabited. I was a little embarrassed but I loved talking music and I loved the looks I got from the waiters in our deserted hotel. And of course I loved the sex.
By the time we left, I had proposed. Well, in truth it wasn’t so much a proposal as a ‘we’re in love, we’re both married, what the f*** do we do about it?’ We decided Sarah would meet my mother, I would meet her parents and if we survived that test I would break the news to my wife. I don’t think my mother was surprised. Ever the bohemian, I suspect she thought homespun family life had overtaken me too young and that a bit of turmoil would do me good. Most importantly, Sarah liked cats which meant she had to be all right. Sarah B’s parents were a bit nonplussed but I guess resigned to the fact that their eldest daughter might get up to anything.
It took two false starts before I told my wife I was leaving her. If someone can be both devastated yet resigned, that’s what she was. There were moments when I wavered. My wife even suggested she turned a blind eye and let me lead a double life to keep the marriage intact. But I couldn’t lead my life like that. I’m not the sort of person who can duck and dive. Besides, I was head over heels in love with Sarah B, as my friends now called her.
I decided against everyone’s advice to come clean publicly, openly taking Sarah B to the post-opening party of Daisy Pulls It Off – a play I’d seen, bought and revamped that ran for 1,180 performances, toured for two years and is still staged all over Britain – and letting a press statement hit the fan.
Sarah 1 (as my ex became known) stayed with the children at our home in Sydmonton, Hampshire, while Sarah B moved into the flat in London. A good divorce lawyer should be firm but sympathetic. Mine turned out to be a right pig. But by mid-March 1984, our respective divorces were finalised and on March 22, my 36th birthday, Sarah and I quietly married at the register office in Kingsclere, the village next to Sydmonton.
Our plan was to get through the first night of Starlight Express a week later and then break the news.
There was a particular reason for keeping schtum. That night the Queen, Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Princess Diana were all coming to a charity gala of Starlight Express in aid of the Centre for World Development Education. To have both the Queen and the heir to the throne come to the theatre was virtually unprecedented, and we didn’t want anything to overshadow that.
Over the coming years, our careers continued to thrive but our marriage was not without its problems, and it was while it was going through a rocky patch that friends introduced me to Madeleine Gurdon. Madeleine is the daughter of an Army brigadier and was coming to the end of a career as a professional equestrian when I met her. She had – still has – a mind like a razor, and I adored spending time with her. There had been publicity about Sarah’s affair with the original Phantom keyboard player, and hugely fond of her as I still am, things weren’t the same for me after that. Sarah was shattered when I said I was leaving her but we continued to work together.
As for Madeleine, she and I have been married now for 27 years and counting. She has stood by me like a rock through some grisly career moments and four missing years thanks to health problems that took me to a pretty dark place. It is no secret that most people assumed I would not compose again. Then I turned the corner. I decided to give up alcohol and went back to my roots with a new work, School Of Rock, based on the Jack Black/Mike White movie. It is the first of my musicals to premiere on Broadway since Jesus Christ Superstar.
As I approach my 70th birthday, I look back and think again how lucky I have been. You are very lucky if you know what you want to do in life. I am doubly lucky that I not only have made a living out of my passion but a hugely rewarding one.
As I write this, I haven’t found a subject for a new show. But I’ll find it. I have to get back to workshops and rewrites, out-of-tune rehearsal pianos and sweaty rehearsal rooms, dodgy previews and the blind panic of opening nights.
I am having dire withdrawal symptoms. Even if I haven’t got near to writing Some Enchanted Evening, I hope I’ve given a few people some reasonably OK ones. I’d like to give them some more.
Unmasked is published by HarperCollins on March 8 at £20. Offer price £16 until March 25. Pre-order at mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640; p&p is free on orders over £15.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5431243/Andrew-Lloyd-Webber-Aspects-Love.html
PUBLISHED: 09:46 AEDT, 25 February 2018 | UPDATED: 12:26 AEDT, 25 February 2018
Last week, Britain’s most famous composer recounted his dazzling rise to the musical stratosphere and, in moving detail, the dark moments which pulled him to the brink of suicide. Today, in the second and final extract of a gripping autobiography, he reveals his heartfelt regret at leaving his young family – and recounts the explosive romance with stage star Sarah Brightman which changed his world for ever.
The 1980s had dawned, Cats was on its way to becoming the kind of global hit you can only dream of. Yet what happened next in my private life would lead to a musical that not only eclipsed Cats but changed the path of my life – and the fortunes of the vast battalion of theatre-owners and producers, City financiers, shysters, lawyers and executives who have profited handsomely out of The Phantom Of The Opera. Quite simply, I fell in love with a member of the cast of Cats.
Some friends counselled that I was an incurable romantic who poured affairs of the heart in double measures. Almost everyone was appalled by what I did next – publicly confirming that, after nearly 12 years of marriage, I was leaving my wife and my children, then aged five and three.
This is one of the parts of my life that I have been dreading writing about the most. What you are reading is the umpteenth rewrite. That is the best I can say.
I had met my first wife, Sarah Hugill, at a party thrown by a friend in Christ Church, Oxford – I was only 21 and she was even younger, a slip of a 16-year-old schoolgirl.
Sarah’s father Tony had individually won the Croix de Guerre for bluffing a German commander into surrendering an entire French village. He had served in the 30 Assault Unit set up by James Bond author Ian Fleming. Tony wasn’t over-keen on Fleming. Nonetheless he gets a big name-check in Casino Royale and is supposed to be one of the role models for James Bond himself.
Falling in love with Sarah didn’t take long. I asked her to dinner at a bistro. I thought she was ordering ludicrously small, simple things. She didn’t know whether she was supposed to pay her share of the bill. That did it. I had to see her again.
I had bought an Earls Court flat and – just a few hundred yards from Sarah’s school – it came in very handy. Since she was supposed to be revising for her summer exams, she had loads of free time, and most days she would clock into school and promptly come round to me. Fairly soon I gave her a spare key. There are worse things when you’re 21 than a pretty schoolgirl waking you up in the morning.
Come March, it was time to meet her parents. Thanks to the manners Auntie Vi drilled into me, I got on well with my elders and Tony and Fanny Hugill were no exception.
Love may well change everything but in my case it had me writing fast and even more furiously. Superstar’s structure was advanced enough for me to break the score down into record sides. I proposed to Sarah in late 1970, which was a stupid formality; we had long presumed we would get hitched as soon as she legally could.
I had the cash to buy a smart BMW 2002 so, as an unofficial engagement present to Sarah, I gave her my old Mini, which she promptly drove into the back of a lorry on Earls Court Road.
Our wedding service was simple and beautiful. Despite the fact I managed to spill champagne all over her wedding dress, Sarah glowed with incandescent triumph. We were insanely in love, and we drove away from the reception to great cheers from the guests. It was only halfway to our honeymoon hotel that I noticed Sarah was crying. I pulled the car over and took her in my arms as the reality of what I had done hit me. I had taken a girl aged barely 18, straight out of school, and propelled her away from her family into a new life that happened to include being the wife of the composer of the first British musical to premiere on Broadway – a debut that was now just weeks away.
Sarah had never even been to America. All I could think of to say was how much I loved her. For the first time in my life I felt responsible for something whose outcome I could not control. Despite this, the first years of marriage were joyful. Sarah proved a supermum to the two children we had together, allowing me to grasp every career opportunity thrown at me. Unfortunately it wasn’t the only opportunity I grasped. Whatever else money can’t buy, it can buy you freedom and with freedom comes the chance to play. By 1981 and aged 33 I found myself feted for the smash-hit musical Cats – which happened to feature some of the most attractive girls in London.
I loved having fun with our gorgeous-looking singers, but it wasn’t with them that I strayed. During the summer I began an affair with a girl who was teaching at, of all places, Westminster School. She was a distinct improvement on the master who had taken a shine to me years ago. I wasn’t in love and I truly hope she wasn’t with me.
It never crossed my mind that I would leave Sarah, but she found out about it and I was devastated, not so much for myself, as for what I had done.
Looking back, I suppose it was inevitable that I was going to have a serious affair at some point.
Sarah and I were so young when we married and, with all that was happening, it was as if I was going through my adolescence in my early 30s.
It was choreographer Arlene Phillips who, four years earlier, prophesied that Sarah Brightman would have an impact my life. Arlene – who also directed the dance troupe Hot Gossip – had eyeballed me and said: ‘There’s a girl in Hot Gossip who’s going to change your life. She has a voice from heaven. Her name is Sarah Brightman.’
Sarah was cast in Cats yet it was almost four years before I realised just how incredible her singing was when I went to see a children’s opera she was starring in.
I was poleaxed by a captivating soprano voice and magnetic stage presence, gifts that would see her cast as the star of Phantom Of The Opera just a few years later.
Afterwards, I aimed for her dressing room, which she was sharing with both a hamster she was looking after for some sibling or other and with Mike Moran, a sought-after keyboard player. They were clearly an item and were going back into town to the Zanzibar club. Sarah suggested I joined them – and I did, a split-second decision that changed my life.
At the Zanzibar I discovered that Sarah’s real ambition was not to dance but sing. She told me she was married to the son of an eminent brain surgeon. However, marriage hadn’t stopped her having an affair with one of the Cats keyboard players. Sarah was fondling Mike’s hand; clearly she liked keyboard players with flying digits.
Our relationship was sealed on a brief trip together to northern Italy, where Cupid beckoned on an autostrada in the sheeting rain. We were driving from Milan to the coast at Portofino and I planned to stop off for a decent lunch en route. But the rain was so gruesome that the autostrada was virtually closed and there was nothing for it but to stop in a motorway cafe for congealed chicken cacciatore. It would be 4pm before we left, but neither of us noticed time pass. We talked and talked about music, and about each other. Her father Gren was a property developer. Her family was not rich but well off enough that she and her two younger brothers and three sisters were educated privately.
Sarah’s mum Paula had been a dancer who once graced the stage (properly clothed, I stress) of Murray’s Club, today remembered as the Soho haunt where Stephen Ward met Christine Keeler. Apparently she kept baby Sarah in a carrycot backstage. By the time we got to Portofino, I knew there was no alternative: I was in love. We stayed at the empty Splendido Hotel, where Sarah wore a white miniskirt that elicited whistles from windows of houses that I swore were uninhabited. I was a little embarrassed but I loved talking music and I loved the looks I got from the waiters in our deserted hotel. And of course I loved the sex.
By the time we left, I had proposed. Well, in truth it wasn’t so much a proposal as a ‘we’re in love, we’re both married, what the f*** do we do about it?’ We decided Sarah would meet my mother, I would meet her parents and if we survived that test I would break the news to my wife. I don’t think my mother was surprised. Ever the bohemian, I suspect she thought homespun family life had overtaken me too young and that a bit of turmoil would do me good. Most importantly, Sarah liked cats which meant she had to be all right. Sarah B’s parents were a bit nonplussed but I guess resigned to the fact that their eldest daughter might get up to anything.
It took two false starts before I told my wife I was leaving her. If someone can be both devastated yet resigned, that’s what she was. There were moments when I wavered. My wife even suggested she turned a blind eye and let me lead a double life to keep the marriage intact. But I couldn’t lead my life like that. I’m not the sort of person who can duck and dive. Besides, I was head over heels in love with Sarah B, as my friends now called her.
I decided against everyone’s advice to come clean publicly, openly taking Sarah B to the post-opening party of Daisy Pulls It Off – a play I’d seen, bought and revamped that ran for 1,180 performances, toured for two years and is still staged all over Britain – and letting a press statement hit the fan.
Sarah 1 (as my ex became known) stayed with the children at our home in Sydmonton, Hampshire, while Sarah B moved into the flat in London. A good divorce lawyer should be firm but sympathetic. Mine turned out to be a right pig. But by mid-March 1984, our respective divorces were finalised and on March 22, my 36th birthday, Sarah and I quietly married at the register office in Kingsclere, the village next to Sydmonton.
Our plan was to get through the first night of Starlight Express a week later and then break the news.
There was a particular reason for keeping schtum. That night the Queen, Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Princess Diana were all coming to a charity gala of Starlight Express in aid of the Centre for World Development Education. To have both the Queen and the heir to the throne come to the theatre was virtually unprecedented, and we didn’t want anything to overshadow that.
Over the coming years, our careers continued to thrive but our marriage was not without its problems, and it was while it was going through a rocky patch that friends introduced me to Madeleine Gurdon. Madeleine is the daughter of an Army brigadier and was coming to the end of a career as a professional equestrian when I met her. She had – still has – a mind like a razor, and I adored spending time with her. There had been publicity about Sarah’s affair with the original Phantom keyboard player, and hugely fond of her as I still am, things weren’t the same for me after that. Sarah was shattered when I said I was leaving her but we continued to work together.
As for Madeleine, she and I have been married now for 27 years and counting. She has stood by me like a rock through some grisly career moments and four missing years thanks to health problems that took me to a pretty dark place. It is no secret that most people assumed I would not compose again. Then I turned the corner. I decided to give up alcohol and went back to my roots with a new work, School Of Rock, based on the Jack Black/Mike White movie. It is the first of my musicals to premiere on Broadway since Jesus Christ Superstar.
As I approach my 70th birthday, I look back and think again how lucky I have been. You are very lucky if you know what you want to do in life. I am doubly lucky that I not only have made a living out of my passion but a hugely rewarding one.
As I write this, I haven’t found a subject for a new show. But I’ll find it. I have to get back to workshops and rewrites, out-of-tune rehearsal pianos and sweaty rehearsal rooms, dodgy previews and the blind panic of opening nights.
I am having dire withdrawal symptoms. Even if I haven’t got near to writing Some Enchanted Evening, I hope I’ve given a few people some reasonably OK ones. I’d like to give them some more.
Unmasked is published by HarperCollins on March 8 at £20. Offer price £16 until March 25. Pre-order at mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640; p&p is free on orders over £15.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5431243/Andrew-Lloyd-Webber-Aspects-Love.html
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