Tag: Batman (Page 2 of 3)

Counter Culture: Over the past Quarter Century, a Small Specialty Shop Became a Bronx Institution

May 31, 2018 / Sean P Carlin / 24 Comments

Before the geek underground went mainstream—before the Internet exposed its numbers as legion; before corporations fully understood that superheroes were woefully underexploited billion-dollar assets—there was no better place to both talk and learn about pop culture than the neighborhood comic shop.

When it opened in 1991, Magnum Comics & Cards wasn’t the first direct-market specialty store in the northwest sector of the Bronx where I grew up, but it was inarguably the liveliest, the one with the most personality. That was owed, in no small part, to its colorful proprietor, Neil Shatzoff.

A photo of the shop I snapped on December 30, 2010

Holding court from behind the register, Neil would speak with juvenile exuberance and encyclopedic authority on pop esoterica: why Brian Dennehy would’ve made for a better Commissioner Gordon than Pat Hingle (I agree, but, hey—at least we eventually got Gary Oldman); why Joel Schumacher’s track record for dark-skewing commercial cinema (The Lost Boys, Falling Down) made him a promising candidate to take over the Batman franchise from Tim Burton (well, it seemed like a good fit on paper…); why Kevin Smith’s unproduced Superman Lives script was budgetarily impractical and narratively quixotic (turns out, it was twenty years ahead of its time). His disquisitions were all the more entertaining for his impish, whip-fast wit; reflecting on the Academy’s arbitrary predilection to honor films over movies, he once noted: “Gandhi won an Oscar for Best Costume Design, and all they did was throw a couple of towels over him.”

COMIC ESCAPADES

All throughout high school, I’d pop by the shop every Wednesday to get my weekly fix of superhero soap opera—the now-classic Death of Superman and Batman: Knightfall storylines were unfolding at the time—and, more to the point, to listen to Neil wax pop-cultural. A decade my senior, he supplemented my cinematic education—the way an older sibling’s musical tastes might rub off on you—by introducing me to genre essentials that were just a little before my time: The Thing and An American Werewolf in London and Thief (the feature-film debut of Michael Mann and spiritual precursor to Heat) and the Dirty Harry series. (Though I can’t say for certain, it’s possible the first Dirty Harry sequel, Magnum Force, influenced the name of the shop itself).

It was by way of the file cabinet–mounted TV behind the counter that I first became aware of things like aspect ratios and audio commentaries and director’s cuts; Neil was an early adopter of LaserDisc, and would dub them onto VHS and play them in the store. Imagine my surprise to learn there was a “secret” longer version of Aliens (by seventeen minutes!), or a definitive two-hour documentary on the making of Jaws. In the days before such things were standard-issue features on DVDs, there was only one guy I knew who had access to all that amazing arcana, and he delighted in sharing his zeal for it with his customers.

A Couple of Gen Xers Talk Movies, Screenwriting, and Zombie Prison Breaks

April 20, 2018 / Sean P Carlin / 17 Comments

Recently, I participated in a lively Q&A over at Bookshelf Battle about nearly every pop-cultural topic imaginable: the genesis of Escape from Rikers Island; rumors of the zombie genre’s demise; whether the hero or villain is more crucial to the conflict and meaning of a story; if, in our Era of the Endless Reboot, there are any Hollywood remakes I’d actually endorse; what aspiring screenwriters need to learn (and how they can learn it); and my exclusive, foolproof plan for breaking out of a prison full of flesh-eating undead monsters. To paraphrase Stefon from Saturday Night Live: This conversation has everything!

Rest assured, this only LOOKS hopeless…

I invite you to join in with your thoughts! Feel free to leave a comment on either post—that one or this one—and I will, as always, be delighted to respond.

Please find my discussion with Bookshelf Q. Battler here.

State of Grace: How a Movie No One Saw Heralded the Last Days of Old New York, Old Hollywood—and Even My Own Innocence

March 28, 2018 / Sean P Carlin / 40 Comments

Last month, we talked about the subject of creative inspiration: that an artist’s many influences affect his worldview and sensibilities in ways totally unique to him, and that they, along with his particular life experiences, constitute his voice. In time, those influences become so embedded in his subconscious that he is no longer necessarily aware of the sway they hold over the art he produces, and as his confidence in his craft intensifies, his intellectual capacity to identify them in his work diminishes in kind.

As it happens, a week or two after posting the treatise, I received an object lesson in its very proposition. The experience was an acutely emotional one for me, though not at all unpleasant or unwelcome, and a reminder of what storytelling at its best can do: A story can comment on its times while reflecting timeless truths. It can depict a very specific world that is nonetheless universally relatable. It has the power to preserve a moment or an episode in all its emotional complexity, serving as a time capsule that can continue to yield new insight with age. A good story changes the course of history, in some unquantifiable measure, influencing subsequent real-world events and artistic works in ways that, I think, go mostly unconsidered.

Here’s how one movie no one’s ever heard of exerted appreciably more impact on my personal and creative evolution—and even on my forthcoming novel—than I’d heretofore considered, and how it had something profoundly meaningful to say to me, both then and now.

Two years ago, I published a post with recommendations for Irish-themed movies to help celebrate St. Patrick’s Day; among them, a long-forgotten crime drama from 1990 about the Irish Mob in Hell’s Kitchen called State of Grace, which had the cosmic misfortune of opening the very same week as Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas. The latter, as I’m sure you know, was a box-office hit that deservedly claimed an immortal place in the cultural consciousness, while the former—starring no less than heavyweights Sean Penn, Ed Harris, Gary Oldman, Robin Wright, John Turturro, John C. Reilly, and Burgess Meredith—quietly disappeared from theaters within two weeks of release and promptly faded into obscurity. No one really saw it, and the bankruptcy of its studio, Orion Pictures, soon thereafter assured that it mostly remained unseen in the years to follow.

Sean Penn (as Terry Noonan) and Gary Oldman (as Jackie Flannery) in Phil Joanou’s “State of Grace”

My cousin’s husband owned a video store out in Jersey at that time, and he was always bringing by screener copies—sometimes even bootlegs—of current films, which was how I first experienced both State of Grace and GoodFellas when I was fourteen. For a kid that had up till that point subsisted on a cinematic diet of almost exclusively Spielbergian fantasy, the comedies of John Hughes and Eddie Murphy, and the action extravaganzas of Stallone and Schwarzenegger, those two movies—‘cause I hadn’t yet seen The Godfather—were nothing short of revelatory.

State of Grace was a particular favorite, and I even managed to score a copy of the promotional one-sheet from my local video shop in the Bronx when they were done with it, which hung in my bedroom throughout high school. The movie was my introduction to newly minted Oscar-winner Gary Oldman, and he delivers a searing, unsettling, heartbreaking performance that made me a fan for life. But by the mid-nineties, my secondhand VHS of Grace had gotten misplaced, and given the scarcity of the film’s availability, I haven’t had occasion—despite trying in 2016 for that best–of–St. Patty’s post—to see it since.

Until this month, when I found a wonderful Blu-ray reissue, limited to 3,000 units, and, like the story’s troubled protagonist, I ventured back into Hell’s Kitchen to reunite with some very old faces…

Artistic Originality: Is It Dead—or Was It Merely a Fallacy to Begin With?

February 27, 2018 / Sean P Carlin / 58 Comments

Over the course of the many insightful conversations generated by the recent post on Star Wars: The Last Jedi—sincerest thanks to all who shared their time and thoughts—the subject of artistic influence was discussed: what role it played in the creation of some of Gen X’s most cherished movie franchises of yore, and what part, if any, it has in our now-institutionalized praxis of remaking those films wholesale—of “turning Hollywood into a glorified fan-fiction factory where filmmakers get to make their own versions of their childhood favorites.”

Because where is the line drawn, exactly, between inspiration and imitation? If the narrative arts are a continuum in which every new entry owes, to a certain extent, a creative debt to a cinematic or literary antecedent, is originality even a thing?

If so, what is it, then? How is one to construe it concretely, beyond simply “knowing it when we see it”? And, as such, is there a way for us as artists to codify, or at very least comprehend, the concept of originality as something more than an ill-defined abstraction to perhaps consciously strive for it in our own work?

THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND INFLUENCES

Since it was Star Wars that provoked those questions, let me start with this: George Lucas is one of my eminent creative influences. When I was in high school in the early nineties, during that long respite between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace, when Star Wars was more or less placed by its creator in carbon-freezing, I became aware that the same mind had conceived two of my favorite franchises, and went to great lengths to study Lucas’ career: how he learned the art of storytelling, where his ideas came from, how he managed to innovate the way in which blockbusters were created and marketed.

“Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” mastermind George Lucas, my first creative idol

In order to more fully appreciate what Lucas created in 1977 when he made Star Wars—a work of fiction so thrilling and inspired it seemed to emerge fully realized from his singular imagination—it behooves us to consider the varied influences he drew from. The 1936 Flash Gordon film serial Lucas watched as a child provided the inciting animus—a grand-scale space opera told as a series of high-adventure cliffhangers. (It also later informed the movie’s visual vocabulary, with its reliance on old-fashioned cinematic techniques like opening crawls and optical wipes.)

In a case of east meets west, Joseph Campbell’s study of comparative mythology The Hero with a Thousand Faces provided a general mythic and archetypal blueprint to endow Lucas’ sprawling alien-world fantasy with psychological familiarity, while Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress served as a direct model for the plot he eventually settled on (after at least three start-from-scratch rewrites). Lucas ultimately patterned the series’ three-part narrative arc after Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings cycle (which later directly influenced his high-fantasy franchise-nonstarter Willow), because, prior to Star Wars, closed-ended “trilogies” weren’t really a thing in commercial cinema.

In addition to his cinematic and literary interests, Lucas is also a passionate scholar of world history (as evidenced by Indiana Jones, particularly the television series), and a direct line can be drawn from the X-wing assault on the Death Star to the aerial dogfights of World War II, to say nothing of the saga’s allusions to the Roman Republic, Nazi Germany, and the Vietnam War. As for where the Force and lightsabers and the twin suns of Tatooine came from… who knows? The sheer number of disparate interests that met, mated, and reproduced within the confines of Lucas’ brain can never be fully accounted for, even by the man himself.

Home for Christmas: (Not) a Hallmark Presentation

December 15, 2017 / Sean P Carlin / 25 Comments

I’ve spent a somewhat embarrassingly disproportionate share of my free time this holiday season watching those endless made-for-Hallmark Christmas movies. Good God—the scripts come off like bad first drafts banged out over a weekend, though somebody is probably making a handsome living writing them. (Any chance you’re hiring, Hallmark?) There are a few variations on the formula, but most play out something like this:

A work-obsessed city gal—typically a “marketing exec,” though clearly zero research has been conducted as to what precisely that entails—finds herself stranded in provincial New England, British Columbia, at the heart of the holiday season (kindly disregard the lush summer foliage in the background of every wide shot), where an earnest Bill-Pullman-in-While You Were Sleeping clone, far too manly and pragmatic to have ever participated in something as frivolous as an acting class, teaches our heroine, often with the aide of a precocious (and fortuitously motherless) child, the true meaning of Christmas—read: small-town livin’ in the real America. Twirling gape-mouthed in an obscenely production-designed town square—brought to you by Balsam Hill!—blanketed in a freshly fallen silent shroud of SnowCel, our newly enlightened protagonist declares, “This is what Christmas is supposed to look like!”

And that got me thinking: What should Christmas look like? I mean, if each of us could put the holiday season on a postcard to serve as the perfect representation of what it evokes in our hearts, what would yours depict?

Perhaps this?

“A Holiday Gathering” (1998) from Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage collection

The Man Behind the Mask: On the Creation of Batman—and Rewriting Authorship Itself

November 17, 2016 / Sean P Carlin / 17 Comments

Pop quiz: Who created Batman?

Even if you think you know the answer, it’s very possible your information is outdated.

Detective Comics no. 27, the first appearance of Batman

In 1939, illustrator Bob Kane (1915–1998) was tasked by DC Comics editor Vin Sullivan to devise a character for Detective Comics that could complement—and ideally capitalize on the success of—the costumed hero who had the year earlier made his debut in the pages of Action Comics: Superman. Inspired in equal measure by Leonardo da Vinci’s 1485 design sketches of an “ornithopter,” a 1930 mystery movie entitled The Bat Whispers, and the 1920 silent film The Mark of Zorro starring Douglas Fairbanks, the commercially savvy Kane managed in short order to assemble the Bat-Man “from an assortment of pop culture debris that together transcended the sum of its parts” (Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us about Being Human, [New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2011], 17). Part nocturnal predator, part avenging angel—with a secret identity as a millionaire playboy, to boot—Batman was the Gothic (k)night to Superman’s sunny savior of the day. An enduring icon had, against astronomical odds, been created, albeit removed from a narrative framework:

“‘When I created the Batman,’ admitted Bob Kane, ‘I wasn’t thinking of story. I was thinking, I have to come up with a character who’s different,’ and as an artist he was clearly more concerned with pictures than plot. [Writer Bill] Finger, however, was a born story man, blessed with enough pictorial sense to realize what would work in comics” (Les Daniels, Batman: The Complete History, [San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999], 23).

Finger, a friend and former high-school classmate of Kane’s, further fleshed out the character, whom he saw “as a combination of Alexandre Dumas’s swashbuckler D’Artagnan from The Three Musketeers (1844) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective Sherlock Holmes” (ibid.), and wrote countless Batman scripts in the years that followed. By even Kane’s own admission, Finger embellished and contributed to many aspects of the mythos (including rechristening what was initially New York as “Gotham City”), yet was never credited as co-creator of Batman: “Bob Kane had made his deal with DC Comics on his own, and Finger was merely Kane’s employee” (ibid., 31).

The Great Escape: What the Ascendancy of Comic-Book Culture Tells Us about Ourselves

February 22, 2016 / Sean P Carlin / 19 Comments

Lest anyone doubt the real-world superheroic capabilities of a fictional character, let me state for the record that Batman taught me how to read.

For in watching the syndicated reruns of the Adam West series in the late seventies—the kitschy opening credits, specifically—my not-yet-literate mind eventually recognized a correlation between the splashy title-card logo and repetitive choral chant that accompanied it, and “Batman” became the first word I could read and write. Absolutely true story.

“Ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba! Bat-man!”

I loved the old Batman show—the pop-art color scheme and Dutch angles (not that I took conscious note of such stylistics at the time) were like a cartoon come to life. The camp humor? Entirely lost on me: When Batman and Robin slid down the Batpoles and zoomed off in the Batmobile—staged in that glorious life-sized playset of a Batcave—the sense of adventure was kinetic. And when the villain-of-the-week left our heroes for dead in some Rube Goldbergian contraption—their fate to be determined in twenty-four agonizing hours!—the tension was excruciating.

Unlike most of my heroes at that time—Michael Knight, the Duke boys—the Dynamic Duo weren’t confined to the limited jurisdiction of their own fictional worlds, but rather popped up elsewhere, too, in animated form on The New Scooby-Doo Movies and Super Friends, and I never quite understood why no one had thought to put Adam West, Christopher Reeve, and Lynda Carter in a movie together; with no concept of copyright issues or irreconcilable aesthetics or what later came to be called “shared cinematic universes,” it seemed like a no-brainer to assemble an all-star superhero team from the preexisting talent pool.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Thirty-five years after I—along with an entire generation raised on the same pop-cultural diet, it turns out—first dreamed it, the team formerly known as the Super Friends are getting the tent-pole treatment next month with the release of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Warner Bros.’ opening-salvo attempt at the kind of license to print cash shared cinematic universe Marvel has so deftly pioneered (to the envy of every studio in Hollywood). Fanboy anticipation is at a full boil, if enthusiasm on social media is any barometer; many are counting down the days with a breadth of fanaticism ordinarily reserved for the Second Coming, others forecasting the would-be mega-franchise’s stillbirth, but all are anxiously awaiting Dawn.

Not me, though. I can say with absolute and irrevocable certainty that I’ll be sitting out Batman v Superman—in theaters, on home video, on cable. In perpetuity.

But, more on that shortly.

The Lost World: An Unusual Hollywood Cautionary Tale

July 27, 2015 / Sean P Carlin / 11 Comments

The other week, journalist Olly Richards published a heartbreaking piece in The Telegraph called “How Kerry Conran saw Hollywood’s future—then got left behind.” It’s worth reading in its entirety, but, in short, it recounts the unorthodox journey of the Conran brothers, Kerry and Kevin, the former a magazine designer and the latter a freelance ad illustrator (neither with any apparent foothold in Hollywood at the time), who set out to make a cost-efficient, feature-length, dieselpunk effects fantasy entirely via blue-screen compositing, a speculative project that ultimately came to the attention of producer Jon Avnet (The Mighty Ducks, Fried Green Tomatoes), who secured the participation of big-screen stars Angelina Jolie, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Jude Law. The resulting film, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), which Kerry wrote and directed (with Kevin serving as costume and production designer), represents a quantum leap in contemporary effects-driven filmmaking, in which immersive, world-building spectacles, once achieved strictly via painstaking practical effects and/or arduous location shooting (think the original Star Wars, with its model spaceships and exotic Tunisian locales) would forevermore be rendered digitally—and economically—from the comfort of a Hollywood studio. In the wake of their cinematic accomplishment, the Conrans were invited to participate in a summit at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch in which visionaries the likes of James Cameron, Robert Zemeckis, Brad Bird, and Robert Rodriguez were in attendance—and professed to be genuine fans of the Conrans’ groundbreaking work (as did J. J. Abrams, per Kevin, on another occasion).

Stoking the Fire: Finding Versatility in Genre Conventions

January 26, 2015 / Sean P Carlin / 0 Comments

Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy represents cinematic perfection to me: Batman Begins (2005) was the Batman movie I’d waited my whole life to see; then, much like Batman himself emerging from the cover of shadow when least expected, came The Dark Knight (2008), a gripping thriller à la Michael Mann’s Heat in which the Al Pacino and Robert De Niro roles were assumed, quite credibly somehow, by Batman and the Joker; and just as no artist before Nolan had tackled the early days of Batman’s crime-fighting career (including his apprenticeship and inspiration to go vigilante), no one had authored its concluding chapter, either, until The Dark Knight Rises (2012)—it is, if you take my meaning, the Last Batman Story. For a character that had been in continuous publication—across multiple media—for seventy years at the time these films were produced, Nolan managed to find new, vital aspects of Batman’s rich hagiography to explore.

A Profile in Superheroics: Norm Breyfogle

January 5, 2015 / Sean P Carlin / 2 Comments

In my analysis of the Joker, I made brief mention of Norm Breyfogle, the masterful comic-book illustrator whose work graced the pages of, successively, Detective Comics, Batman, and Batman: Shadow of the Bat between 1987 and 1992. Mr. Breyfogle began his tenure as resident Bat-artist at a very exciting time for the Caped Crusader: Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (1986) had just rocked the comics world, heralding a brand-new era for both the legendary character and the medium itself, and Tim Burton’s Batman would go on to become the highest-grossing film of 1989, thrusting its titular hero out of the shadows of specialty shops and into the national spotlight, irrevocably changing both the comics and movie businesses in the process (probably for the worse in both cases, but that’s a subject for another article, I suppose).

Tag: Batman (Page 2 of 3)

Counter Culture: Over the past Quarter Century, a Small Specialty Shop Became a Bronx Institution

A Couple of Gen Xers Talk Movies, Screenwriting, and Zombie Prison Breaks

State of Grace: How a Movie No One Saw Heralded the Last Days of Old New York, Old Hollywood—and Even My Own Innocence

Artistic Originality: Is It Dead—or Was It Merely a Fallacy to Begin With?

Home for Christmas: (Not) a Hallmark Presentation

The Man Behind the Mask: On the Creation of Batman—and Rewriting Authorship Itself

The Great Escape: What the Ascendancy of Comic-Book Culture Tells Us about Ourselves

The Lost World: An Unusual Hollywood Cautionary Tale

Stoking the Fire: Finding Versatility in Genre Conventions

A Profile in Superheroics: Norm Breyfogle

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