Alex Biese

@ABieseAPP

Twenty-five years ago, a Jersey boy and the Caped Crusader teamed up to change cinema history.

Michael Uslan, an Ocean Township native, served as executive producer on Tim Burton’s highly influential 1989 hit “Batman,” and he’s continued in that role for every Bat-picture since.

As detailed in his 2011 memoir “The Boy Who Loved Batman,” Uslan fought long and hard to bring a dark, gritty depiction of the Dark Knight to the silver screen. The film ultimately sent shock waves throughout the industry, and its influence can be felt in pretty much every superhero film that’s followed in the quarter century since the summer of ’89.

“From the time I acquired the rights to Batman, it took us 10 years to get the film made,” recalled Uslan. “That was an eternity. It’s an eternity when everyone’s telling you you’re crazy, your idea sucks, you’re insane, it can’t work. And everybody’s telling you that, and you’re just getting nothing but rejection for the longest time. That was an eternity.

“The 25 years since the opening of ‘Batman’ seem to have gone by in the blink of an eye. I know for sure it was a game changer for me in my personal and business life, I believe it was a game changer for the comic book industry. I know it was a game changer for the motion picture industry.”

In particular, Uslan praised the work of Burton, in partnership with that of Oscar-winning production designer Anton Furst and composer Danny Elfman, when describing the film’s profound legacy.

“I give all the credit in the world to Tim and Anton Furst, whose design of Gotham City and the costume, the Batmobile, the whole look of the picture, has influenced every single genre picture that has come out since,” said Uslan. “You can see the influence of Anton in everything. You can see the influence of Tim, of his vision, in everything. You can hear the influence of Danny Elfman’s music in every superhero, comic book or genre score ever since. Unquestionably, that’s the case.”

Uslan also reflected on how the film’s success impacted his life both personally and professionally.

“Instead of me picking up the phone and calling companies and studios and networks and agents, my phone started ringing,” Uslan said. “When people then saw there was a market for serious comic books, my phone started ringing. And, all of a sudden, I began to understand there was this new potential for what has come to be known now as branded franchises, and that the best of that would lie in the comic book world.”

Fortunately, that was a world that Uslan, a member of Ocean Township High School’s class of 1969, had grown up in.

“I was lucky enough to grow up in Ocean Township, an hour away from New York City, where my parents would take me on weekends to visit the (comic book) creators, artists and writers from the 1930s to the 1960s. who all lived either in New York City, Long Island or North Jersey,” Uslan said.

“I got to know them, interviewed them, heard all the old stories firsthand. I used to hang out, starting when I was 13, at the offices of a lot of the comic book companies and interview them for these new things we were doing called fanzines as we were organizing the first days of comic book fandom.”

Casting conundrums

Uslan said he’d wanted Neptune native Jack Nicholson as classic villain the Joker since seeing the iconic “Here’s Johnny” shot in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 shocker “The Shining.”

“He gave us credibility, first of all, in the marketplace, and it was an incredible performance,” Uslan said of Nicholson’s work in the film.

However, things went less smoothly regarding Michael Keaton’s casting as the title character. Looking back, Uslan said he was “apoplectic” when a Warner Bros. executive floated Burton’s idea of casting Keaton past him, and Uslan realized he wasn’t joking.

“I’d just assumed he was pulling my leg,” Uslan said. “So I go: ‘Oh, that’s a great idea. I’ve spent the last almost eight years now trying to bring a dark and serious Batman to the screen, so let’s have a comedian play him. I can see the poster now, ‘Mr. Mom is Batman.’ And, it took him 20, 30 minutes to convince me that this was no joke, that Tim was being serious, and I was absolutely beside myself.”

Ultimately, Burton had to convince Uslan that Keaton could create a performance of Batman’s alter-ego, Bruce Wayne, as a man obsessed to the point of, yes, dressing up like a bat and going out at night to fight crime.

“(Burton) said, ‘If you give me any of the major actors today’ — and I’m talking ’87, ’86, it would have been people like Dennis Quaid, Harrison Ford, Kevin Costner, the list goes on — ‘I don’t know how to show any of them getting into a bat costume without getting unintentional laughs from the audience.’

“And, I said: ‘But, Batman’s got a square jaw. Michael doesn’t have a square jaw, and he’s my height, and he doesn’t have the musculature.’ And, he said: ‘I can carve musculature into a costume, I can cheat height, but a square jaw does not a Batman make when you’re trying to take it from one medium to another. Forget the jaw, forget Batman. It’s about Bruce Wayne.’ And, he was genius in his perception and his understanding of that and his ability to execute the vision was remarkable.”

Uslan will be one of the executive producers on 2016’s “Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice,” and he said he’s seen a similar type of skepticism meet that film’s casting of Ben Affleck as Batman.

“We’ve been through this I don’t know how many times already,” Uslan said. “Every time a director makes a creative, out-of-the-box-thinking decision on casting, it tends to get this. I remember even the ‘Iron Man’ (2008) guys got it on Robert Downey Jr. initially.

“Of course, we got it intensely when another genius, Chris Nolan, chose Heath Ledger to play the Joker (in 2008’s ‘The Dark Knight’). And it was a huge outcry: ‘How can a guy who just played a gay cowboy (in 2005’s ‘Brokeback Mountain’) play the Joker? You’re going to destroy the greatest villain ever, this is going to be a laugh.’

“So, this has happened time and again, and it happened with Affleck. To go back to the original thought of Bruce Wayne in his mid-40s, I think he’s going to be extraordinary.”