How a Scrap of Newspaper Spawned the Modern Comic Book Movie

Gotham High's Cutest Couple 1989

Does the name Michael Uslan ring any bells for you?  If you are not a major film buff this name probably means nothing to you.  And yet this man is the reason comic book fans can finally see their childhood heroes on the big screen in serious, high quality films.  You see Uslan was the man who worked tirelessly for nearly a decade to bring the masses a serious depiction of Batman on the big screen.  The success of Batman paved the way for the serious, darker takes on comic book characters in movies, despite Joel Schumacher's best bat-nippled efforts.  More importantly, the film set the standard for telling engaging, character driven blockbusters.

Uslan acquired the rights to Batman in 1979 and immediately began the uphill battle of convincing Hollywood to make a dark, serious film about a man who dresses up as a bat and battles a clown, an obsessive compulsive man who focuses on riddles, and a cat woman.  He couldn't get any studio to bite.

Shortly after Uslan acquired the rights to Batman Stanley Kubrick gave the world the paragon of psychological horrors that is The Shining.  The keystone of Kubrick's masterpiece was the incredibly talented Jack Nicholson, who delivered an iconic, legendary performance.  While reading an article about The Shining, Uslan was struck with inspiration.  He realized that Jack Nicholson would be the perfect Joker, and immediately went to work drawing a Joker face on a picture of Nicholson featured in the article.  This was the result:

The actual article Uslan drew on. Source: http://comicbook.com

Uslan began taking the drawing with him wherever he went to pitch a Batman movie, and eventually Warner Brothers green lit the project.  Nicholson's performance of the Joker became the standard for comic book villains in movies for the next two decades.  Hard to believe a simple sketch, drawn on top of a photo which was cut out from the newspaper, was the seed from which the incredibly lucrative modern blockbuster formula germinated.



Source: http://comicbook.com/blog/2012/11/17/jack-nicholson-joker-inspiration-art-up-for-auction/

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