#sam hamm

Final shots from Tim Burton's Batman and Batman Returns

DC Finest: Batman - Blind Justice by Sam Hamm, Jim Aparo, Denys Cowan, Alan Grant and others. Cover by Cowan and Noelle Giddings. Out in July.

Now, far be it from me to defend studio executives, but Henry Selick and the film's writer, Sam Hamm, are not free of fault. Most if not all of the things about the film that made it so bad were their decisions.

Believe me, I entertained the idea that Henry Selick originally wanted the film to be closer to the original Dark Town comic book only for some studio executive to say at some point early on, "Hey, why don't you add a monkey? People like monkeys." and then things went downhill from there. But nope, then I found a magazine interview with Sam Hamm where he admits that he and Henry Selick created Monkeybone, who isn't in the original comic book, themselves - AND that it was their idea to make the film a comedy instead of the dark fantasy horror that everyone seems to think Henry originally wanted it to be:

"Monkeybone is a brand new creation. The guy in the comic book didn't have a sidekick, and our concept was nightmarish at first because Henry and I thought this could be a great, suspenseful HORROR story. But the more we discussed it to flesh out a plot, the more we cracked each other up. We finally realized… we should just go with the impulse and see what we could get out of it in terms of comedy."

"We debated a long time what the character should be - a bird? A mythical animal. At one point, we were calling him 'a shmole', half shrew, half mole. We just wanted some kind of cartoony animal sidekick. It wound up being a monkey because monkeys lend themselves best to parodying human behavior. And monkeys are funny!"

I did not make that up. Sam Hamm admitted that the entire reason their desperate attempt at creating a new Roger Rabbit (except that Roger is funny and likeable whereas Monkeybone is just obnoxious) is a monkey is because "monkeys are funny".

It's also worth noting that in this and other interviews with Henry Selick from around the same time, both of them seem pretty proud of how the film came out. They talk about how funny the film supposedly is and stuff like that. From what I've heard, the executives might have only started meddling after they saw a rough cut of the film, and discovered how awful it was, at which point they started cutting scenes (I'm not even sure how much of the cut stuff was rejected by the executives - like, did THEY put the bizarre cartoon ending in there?). Henry and his fans seem to believe that this was just them not understanding the film or whatever, but honestly, I think their mindset was just "Well, if it's gonna be this bad, it should at least be short...". If anything, they probably gave Henry and Sam too much creative freedom at first and this was the result.

And yes, it was Chris Columbus who suggested having the film be entirely live-action instead of having the "Down Town" scenes be stop-motion. But if those scenes HAD been top-motion, the film would've still been crap because they still would've had horrible jokes, ugly and annoying characters, and nothing of substance.

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