a
fight scene with a stunt man dressed (green union suit with black
question marks) as The Riddler.
a good sum now in the camp trade. He thinks an ex-wife threw them
out. He does have a dozen big canvases of Batman, Robin and the
villainous Joker, rigidly drawn and wildly colored. He painted them a
couple of years ago, he says, and he is waiting for the right moment
to have a one-man show. Oddly, something seems wrong about the
pictures; they aren't" hard-edged" enough. (Pop artist Roy
Lichtenstein, mimicking draftsmen like Kane, invented deliberately
crude, "hard-edge" paint ings that look like blown-up comic
panels. Kane's Bat figures, on the other hand, are comic characters
who have somehow turned up in ordinary oil paintings.)
Batman is still in comic books, and Kane still does much of the strip's drawing. He owns a small piece of the Batman rights (a syndication company owns the rest). He likes the TV show, and thinks Semple, Dozier, Adam West and Burt Ward have done a good job. He would like to meet them someday.
Wait a minute! GREAT SCOTT! !! Adam West?? Burt Ward?? Can they still be hanging from that ($$$&& !!) hook, inches from the boiling wax?
Back to the sound stage. No time has elapsed; the scene is as before. Director Jim Clark speaks, showing no emotion: "Make it work, boys, make it all work."
And they do. For some reason the sequence now seems as easy as picking money oft the floor. Who did Gielgtid ever beat? Only one more shot now before lunch: the explosion that will blast Batn)an and Robin loose. If there is one thing Hollywood knows how to do. it is an explosion. The special-effects men move briskly. Like the rest of the crew, they are middle-aged. They are dressed in short-sleeved shirts and beat-up slacks, as if they were headed for a foremen's picnic. They sit down whenever there is nothing doing on the set, but when they work there is no waste motion.
Now they are ready. The bell rings, the red light goes on. Clark calls for action-PHOOM. No exclamation mark; a man could yell louder and not get thrown out of a good restaurant. But the white cloud is beautiful and impressive, exactly right. West and Ward are cranked down. Lunch.
A tall man walks by in a bathrobe. He has uncombed red-blond hair, black- rimmed glasses, sweat on his face; he looks, except for the glasses, like a not- quite-heavy-enough heavyweight who has just finished a workout. I have never seen him before. "Hey Adam," says one of the crew, "sign this for my dentist." It is West, all right, but it is certainly not Batman. West stops, laughs, holds his back to show how the corset felt, illustrates the sensation with an improper joke. His lack of resemblance to the Caped Crusader is extraordanary. West's face is mobile, amused. Batman has two expressions, mask on and mask off. He is so square he is cubical.
Batman is supposed to be cubical. of course, but critics had been writing as if he behaved that way because West himself could not out-act the Batmobile. (The Batmobile, as a matter of fact, is not much of a car-it is a customized '57 Lincoln that sounds like a washing machine full of rocks- but it is an expert actor. It has more flashing lights on its dash than an F-ill, two drag chutes, and a hot- line phone.)
West dressed-slacks, sunglasses, no shirt, a light cardigan sweater buttoned at the navel-in a dressing room that looked like the superintendent's office at a construction project. He explained with enormous satisfaction that 20th Century-Fox, which produces Batman in association with Dozier's outfit, had promised to build him a dandy new dressing room-"It'll be great: stereo, bar, dozens of broads, color TV.
I asked whether Fox would build a new dressing room for Burt Ward. West gave me a funny look; he didn't know, and it was clear that he was willing to let Ward take care of him self. Later I got a funny look from Ward when I asked whether he and his wife ever saw West socially. Obviously the Caped Crusaders are only business associates, and of course there is no reason to be surprised that they are not close friends. But a backstage visitor, even when he knows better, is continually getting caught up in the on stage illusion; he is foolishly surprised, for instance, to hear Ward talking like a self-assured, intelligent 20-year-old in stead of a teen-ager with bad adenoids.
West drove to lunch in a new black Cadillac convertible he had just bought. There was a ski rack on the trunk; he grew up on a ranch near Walla Walla, Wash., and did some ski-racing there at Whitman College. Weekends, he said, he had been teaching his children to ski (he is divorced, and has a boy and a girl in grammar school).
Before Batman, West's knockabout acting career had taken him to Hawaii, where he spent four years as an actor- director for a TV variety show. A series of parts in such movies as The Young Philadelphians and Mara of the Wilderness kept him eating well most of the time. The romantic lead in a TV series called The Detectives made him a solid Hollywood citizen.
By last year West's career had be gun to look promising. It was a little late in the game to be promising; he was in his mid-30's. Still. there was the possibility of a comedy film for Italian producer Dino De Laurentus, and he had once done some nightclub singing; he might try that again.
Then came Batman, and for the first time in West's life, people were turning around in restaurants to look at him. He accepts the stares cheerfullyand with remarkable balance, newly successful actors almost always say they want to direct The Brothers Karamazov , and West merely says that he would still like to do the De Laurentus comedy when he is free.
What was your reaction when vou heard about Batman? I asked West at lunch. "My reaction was Ecch!" he said. But Batman had turned out to be fun. "You have to take it seriously." he said. "I want to do it well enough that Batman buffs will watch reruns in a few years and say, 'Watch the bit he does here, isn't that great?"'
Later that afternoon he did a bit like that. The scene was in the Batcave, Batman's wonderfully nonsensical hyperatomic laboratory. Batman was working with test tubes, and he was wearing rubber gloves. When he finished he peeled off the rubber gloves, and underneath (INSANITY! !!) he was wearing his Batgloves. ("Yeah, sure, but listen, there was the time he was going to bug The Penguin's hide out, and he used-get this-a real plastic bug!" "OK, but how about when the guy told him that one of the robbers was a girl with green hair, and he said, 'Darned good observation' ?")
That afternoon the shooting was relaxed. "Hey, Adam, your seams
are crooked," someone yelled to West, who was rehearsing a
fight scene with a stunt man dressed (green union suit with black
question marks) as The Riddler.
"Takeoff my glasses, someone,"West called out as the shooting began. "Pamper me! Pamper me!" Burt Ward went by in costume, walking like a man pulling his feet out of warm tar. "His knees get wrinkled if he bends them," a press agent explained hurriedly. A few feet away, looking oddly counterfit in Batman and Robin outfits, two stunt men blocked out a brawl with several of The Riddler's thugs. One of the thugs an actor. not a stunt man- swooned before he got punched. "Dont anticipate, wait till you get hit," said a stunt man patiently.
Director Clark said they were about two hours behind schedule, but that they would make it. Producer Howie Horwitz stood by, for the moment pleased with things. "I think we have the greatest put-on in Hollywood history," he said. "My definition of high camp is all the other producers telling me this show isn't going to last."
Later I visited William Dozier, the executive producer. He produced Play house 90 years ago, and he has a high reputation for literacy. ("He's a highly literate man," I had been told several times.) Background music played softly in Dozier's office as he told me that Batman would invade England this summer and that a sale to Japan was being discussed. He went on, "Batman will fade, of course. We won't keep all the adults we have now." In the mean time, he said, they would do a Batman movie. "We'll have The Joker, The Riddler, The Catwoman and The Penguin get together to stamp out Batman, and the humor comes in when they fight about what to do." He explained, "It's an exploitation film."
Would Batman be televised next season?
"Oh yes. But we have to think ahead. We want to do something not quite so childish, something for adults."
Did Dozier have a project in mind? "Yes," he said. "We're starting work on The Green Hornet." []
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