For the inaugural issue of Socko! Magazine, I was asked to write a profile of Michael Uslan, the man who owns the movie rights to Batman and who arguably kicked off the modern superhero movie bonanza with 1989's Batman. You can read the profile in Socko!
I spoke to Uslan for about 90 minutes, and sadly a lot of what we talked about couldn't fit into the constraints of the profile. So I'm publishing some lightly edited outtakes here, along with a very, very tiny amount of commentary when needed for clarity. Enjoy!
On When and How His Love of Comics and Batman Began:
I was about four years old, and the only reason I know that is that my mom said I learned to read from comics before I was four. And earliest recollection of seeing Batman was in Bayonne — Irv's luncheonette on Avenue A. My dad had given my brother, Paul, a quarter and a nickel and told us to go down to the candy store and get some comic books or baseball cards or something. And we walked into that place and I saw an entire wall, which to me at age five, was floor to ceiling. I'm not sure if that was accurate, but that's what it was to me. And Paul me on his shoulders and up. The first comic book with Batman I saw, which I thought was scary, was a Detective Comics that had the Batmobile that looked like an assault tank. So it's like 1956. And, I was very, very comfortable with Superman because he was on TV five days a week. And, if memory serves me correctly, I bought either the first or second issue of Sugar And Spike and a Superman comic because at age five Batman was too scary for me until I was a much more mature and sophisticated seven....
On His Early Fandom:
I was 12 when I discovered comic book fandom was a thing that had started and was just starting to grow a little bit. And I became a subscriber to, Alter Ego fanzine, the Rocket’s Blast, Comic Collector…The Comic Reader. And I realized, oh my God, there's actually other human beings besides me who are so into comic books and superheroes. As a result of all of that, two great things happened for me. Number one, my parents took me to the first ever comic-con, when I was 13. It was a life changing experience where 200 of us showed up for that con. There's still a couple of us left standing, you know, what is it 60 or 61 years later? Maggie Thompson and I have not missed a year. Roy was there. I think Marv Wolfman and Len Wein were there. Stan was afraid to come. There were adults going to this comic book convention and figured they had to be, you know, complete social outcasts…. So he sent his assistant, Flo Steinberg, and an intern to show up. That's where I met Bill Finger for the first of two times. And my first mentor into the world of comic books, the golden age, was…Otto Binder, who was an amazing prolific writer of science fiction, pulps, and comics. And he kind of took me and my friend Bobby under his wing.
On His Parents’ Garage:
By the time I graduated high school, I had over 30,000 comic books dating back to 1936. And, yeah, it's a classic story. My parents never got their car in the garage. Not once.
On When He Decided He Just HAD to Own Batman:
It was a cold night in January 12, 1966. I was 14 years old. I was a fan. I had met Bill Finger twice. I had met Bob Kane. And I knew straight from the horse's mouth what their vision was when they created Batman in 1939. He was a creature of the night. He was dark. He was battling these disturbed villains in the shadows. I was so excited when the Batman TV series was coming on the air… It could have been six months in advance when the word first leaked out. Anything I could find having to do with that TV show, I would clip out and I would stand by ABC like day and night, just waiting for a commercial. And then the day came. And my reaction initially with my friends, Bobby and Barry there in the basement den of my parents' house was, “Okay. That looks like Bob Kane, Jerry Robinson kind of artwork in the opening. It's in color.” The Batcave, the sets were extravagant for the day. The Batmobile was really cool. And I went in on cloud nine and crashed 20 minutes in when it hit me that this was a comedy and that they had, in my humble opinion, made a joke out of Batman. And I thought the whole world is laughing at Batman right now. That killed me. And at the end of that, when Bobby and Barry and I were talking about it, I made a vow. Just like young Bruce Wayne once made a vow. But he made his vow over the bloody slaughter bodies of his parents in the street — mine were safe in the kitchen upstairs. I said, somehow, someday, some way I will show the world a true Batman.
On ZAP POW WHAM!
By the end of the first episode, I wanted to wipe words like pow, zap, and wham out of the vernacular of the collective consciousness of the world culture.
On Robin as a Reader-Insert:
It's bull because nobody I know ever identified with Robin. God help me. God help me. You were playing Batman on the playground. The oldest, biggest guy would be Batman. And then you'd go down the ranks and they would be villains. And whoever was left at the end got stuck playing Robin.
On Villains:
Stan Lee said to me, “You know, Michael, you always have to remember that the super villains are equally important to the superheroes because ultimately they define the superheroes.” And he was right. And Batman had the greatest rogues gallery in history and unarguably the greatest villain ever created. The only two characters for me who ever came anywhere near striking distance were Spider-Man and Flash. But Batman was in a class by himself.
On What Prepared Him to Fulfill His Vow:
My parents. My mom and my dad were incredible. They sacrificed everything for me and my brother. And whether they had a son like my brother who was a superstar in all of his sports or a strange, geeky kid with weird interests, they were always fully supportive of us.
My dad was a stonemason. And he had to drop out of high school when he was 16 in order to go to work and help his family survive the Depression. My dad worked six days a week until he was 80. And the only reason he stopped then was my mom got sick. My father loved what he did. He woke up every morning before dawn, big smile on his face, couldn't wait to get to work because he was an old world artist. He was a craftsman. When you grow up in a house like that, how could you not want that? How could you not want to wake up on a rainy Monday morning and say, “I can't wait to get to work?” My dad, he was out there every day. It didn't matter if it was 95 degrees with New Jersey humidity. If it was snowing, he'd build a fire and keep going.
So in high school, Paul and I worked summers for him on his crew. It was horrible.
And that's when my dad said to me, “You need to find your bricks and stones. Discover your passion, follow your passion.” And for me, it was very crystal clear. It was comic books. It was superheroes. It was movies, TV, animation. I'm a baby boomer of the pop culture world, of the explosion of television and going to movies every Saturday. And, you know, that really was the first part of this journey. Follow your passion. Second part was all my mom. For her, everything was about perseverance. Everything was about not giving up, trying your hardest, honor and integrity.
On His Mother:
I was eight years old and I had joined Little League. We were just all starting out. I could barely swing a bat. And this one day at a game, I struck out three times. And at the end of the game, the coach (who to me was this adult, he was probably a college kid) he pulled me aside with two other kids who had struck out during the game. And he brought us over to the side, . And he started screaming in my face. He said, “You struck out three times. You cost us the game. You look like a clown out there. Get the hell out of my sight.”
I was eight. I went , crying hysterically. And my mom, who had radar, she always knew when something was wrong. She knew about it. I'm up there crying. She goes, what's the matter? What's going on? And I told her what happened. And I said, “I'm never going back. I hate him. I hate baseball. I hate Little League.” And she said to me, “You are going back.”
I started to get hysterical. She goes, “This is never going to happen again. I'm going to talk to your coach. And I promise you, this will never, ever happen again. But Michael, you made a promise to your team that you would show up for the practices and the games.” And that's when she explained to me what integrity and honor were. And she said, in our family, honor counts for everything. And you have to fulfill your commitment that you made. You do not have to play next year. But you have to fulfill . Now, sometimes when we make a commitment and we have to fulfill it, it can be painful. But you have to learn how to accept and deal with that pain. But you have to fulfill your commitment.” Everything about perseverance and integrity was through my mom.
On Achieving His Goal: Was It Everything He Dreamed Of?
No, of course not. Case in point: Batman and Robin.
On That Batman movie…
What I learned when I got into the movie business is that a lot of times writers and creative people give their babies up for adoption. And that the way the industry is structured, the rights to characters ultimately have to be assigned to the corporations that are funding it, which becomes the collateral for the loans and all the money that goes in. And you do that subject to a contract. But in doing so, ultimately, unless your name is Steven Spielberg, or now Chris Nolan, they have final say. It's now their football and they can go with it if they want. So, Batman and Robin was the lowest point of my career. It was Batman and Robin and Catwoman. I tried my hardest to stop those movies from being made. Even though it was against my own financial interests. I was stricken when I read the script to those two movies.
And my partner in Batman, Ben Melniker, who was a legend in the business, he was my father's age. In the Tiffany days of MGM, Ben was the executive vice president who all divisions reported to. He chaired their film selection committee. He pulled together the movies, Ben-Hur, Dr. Zhivago, 2001, Gigi, and their musicals. And Ben was trying to assuage me. And he said, “Michael, if everything you've been telling them is true, they're going to get bitten on the ass by this. And if they get bitten, not so hard that it kills the franchise forever, but if they get bitten, the next time they're going to have to do it your way.”
Which leads us to…
On Chris Nolan:
When I look back now from this perspective and think of the pain that I experienced during that part of my career, was it worth it? Absolutely. Because that's what got us to Chris Nolan. So when you measure one against the other, absolutely. Ben was right.
On Annie(?):
When I bought the rights, I went out to Hollywood thinking everybody was going to line up at my doorstep, seeing the potential for animation, toys, games, sequels.
And I got turned down by every single studio in Hollywood. They said I was crazy. They said it was the worst idea they ever heard. You can't do dark superheroes. You can't do comic book movies. You can't make a movie out of an old TV series.
We've been rejected by everyone. And there was a lot of money at stake with a time clock ticking in my head. And our last pitch ultimately would be to Columbia. The guy who we pitched to had been there decades. And he was an old crony of Ben's from like the 1940s or fifties. And I pitched my heart out for my dark and serious Batman movie.
And says, “Michael, Batman will never be successful as a movie because our movie, Annie, isn't doing well."
“Are you talking about the little redhead girl who from Broadway who sings the song tomorrow?”
He goes, “Yeah.”
I go, “Well, what does that have to do with Batman?”
He said, “Oh, come on, Michael. They're both out of the funny pages. Nobody wants to see a cartoon character walking and talking in real life.”
On the Deal that Almost Happened and the Near-Return of Pow! Zap! Wham!:
And so after a little bit, he turns to Ben and says, “Look, Ben, we go back a long way. If you boys really, really are passionate about making a Batman movie, I will consider it. But it has to be that funny pot belly, pow, zap, wham guy from TV, because that's the only Batman audiences will remember and love.
And I said no. And with that, he pulls his chair right up to me, leans in and says, “Son, better to have a movie made than no movie at all.”
And I looked at him. I never even looked at Ben. I looked at him. I said no. And the meeting was over. And now on a bench on the lot. And I am at my lowest point. I knew that was our last major studio.
On Buying the Batman Rights at Age Twenty-Seven:
You can't begin to comprehend this without setting it in a historical context of the times. Anybody today would say the story is ridiculous. It's impossible. It's impossible. So let me take you back to circa 1979. I was told by the head of Warner Communications one day that the only reason they actually bought DC Comics was to get their hands on Superman because they felt Superman was the one and only comic book character capable of being turned into a blockbuster movie. They believed that the rest of the library had no value. Marvel had no value. And regarding Batman and Wonder Woman, they had both done their thing in the 60s and 70s. And that was it. They were done. They were done. So. We have that as the context.
Second part of the context of this in the 70s into the 80s: The people who were, quote unquote, running Hollywood, studio execs, agents, some directors, producers, they were of an adult generation that had grown up kind of either fearing comic books because of the scare of the 1950s, in which comic books were accused of being the cause of the post World War II rise of juvenile delinquency in America, or they were dismissive of comic books as purely kiddie fare for little kids. It was so bad. It was so bad. Stan Lee used to tell me this story. He said, “Michael, in the 50s and into the first half of the 60s, at least, I'd be invited to some cocktail party in New York. And I'd be there and all these, you know, well-to-do people were around. And somebody would say to me in a group, 'So Stan, what do you do?'"
And he said, “I would say, I'm a writer. And then I would quickly excuse myself, walk away. And then they would follow me and they would say, ‘Oh, you're a writer. How great. What do you write?’ ‘I write children's literature.’”
And then he would walk over to the hors d'oeuvre table and he said they would follow him. And they go, “That's wonderful. What books do you have you written?” And he goes, “Well, I write comic books.” And then they walked away.
So that was the atmosphere. And that was the level of the executives I had to pitch to. So it was either comic books are bad for kids or comic books are only for little kids. So why sink money into a blockbuster movie or franchise if only little kids would go to see it?
On How He Got the Rights, and Batman in Space:
I was working directly as Sol ’s assistant. He was my mentor there more than anybody else. Ultimately, Julie Schwartz and Denny O'Neill. I was also close with Murray Boltinoff, Bob Kanigher, a number of the other editors, but that was the scenario. And I remember saying to Sol at some point what I wanted to do. And he smiled. He was kind enough not to laugh.
He said, “Michael, nobody's interested . You don't have to worry , but you do need credentials. Someday when you have credentials, you'll come back and we can talk about it.” So when I finished college, I sent out 372 resumes to try to get a creative job in the industry. And I got offered two jobs, one working in the mail room at William Morris. Another one was working as a PA for a producer in L.A. They were paying $95 a week. I had just gotten married. I didn't think we could live in either LA or New York on $95 a week. So plan B, I went to law school. And I took whatever courses I could find having anything to do with entertainment or media. Happily, one of my professors sponsored me for six hours of credit and I wrote a master's thesis on copyright infringement in the comic book industry. So, out of law school, I got a job at United Artists in New York, which at that time was one of the major movie studios. And I was put in charge of legal business, financial affairs of different movies as they were being developed and produced, including the first three Rocky movies, Black Stallion, Raging Bull. And for two and a half years of my life, Apocalypse Now, which was a crisis every damn day.
I didn't want to be trapped as being a lawyer. it's graduate school; I'll do it for four years. I'll learn everything I can about how you produce and finance movies. I will network like a madman, but at the end of four years, I'm going to quit. And I will either be writing and producing movies, TV, and animation, or I'll be delivering pizza for Domino's, but I will not be trapped being a lawyer for the rest of my life. So as I hit the three and a half year mark, I went back and had a meeting with Sol. I said, “Sol, I want to buy the rights to Batman and I want to make dark and serious Batman movies and show the world.”
He looked exactly like the poster to the movie Home Alone. He said, “Michael, for God's sake, you're not really thinking of doing this, are you? Don't you understand that since Batman went off the air on TV, the brand has been dead as a dodo?”
And I'm going, “But Sol, I think this is going to be a new form of entertainment. Nobody's ever seen this before. Nobody's ever seen a serious comic book movie with dark superheroes.
He shook his head and he goes, “Michael, is there any way I can talk you out of this?”
And I said, “No, I made a vow. I made a vow.”
And then here's another direct quote. “Okay, schmoozle. Come on.”
That began a six month negotiation between them and me and Ben, and that gave us just enough time to raise money privately. Now, all the people who wound up investing in this, none of them knew a damn thing about Batman. None of them read comic books. They were investing in me. They were investing in my passion and my perseverance. So I had that responsibility on my shoulders. I had a responsibility to Batman. For the integrity of the character of Batman. And I had a personal responsibility to Bill Finger, Bob Kane, and Jerry Robinson, as the creators. To honor their integrity. And I felt it every day. It wasn't just about getting a movie made. As Ben said to me, on that day on the bench after Columbia, he said, “You just passed up a lot of money. You just said no to getting your first movie done by a major movie studio just to protect Batman.” So, you know, it sounds hokey, but but it's really been true.
On Being Laughed At:
Here's another thing I found out years later — the folks at Warner Communications were having a really good laugh. Because I had to put up the equal of the Superman money. That's what they demanded. It was like this kid’s giving us the Superman money for something that's totally worthless.
On Dick Donner and Superman: The Movie:
I am the biggest fan of Dick Donner and none of this would be happening without Dick Donner having been the trailblazer of everything. But when you look at the first Superman movie, the Krypton stuff is really serious. Darkness to it. But I'm telling you the moment he gets to Metropolis, the complete the tone of the whole thing .
