The Pilot News - ‘Dark Knight’ producer’s journey began in Indiana

Michael Uslan, producer of the wildly successful series of “Batman” movies in the late 1980s and early 1990s as well as last year’s critically acclaimed “The Dark Knight,” described himself as “a kid who sat in a classroom at Indiana University in Bloomington with the dream of making the first serious, dark Batman film.”
The son of a brick mason father and bookkeeper mother, Uslan said his lack of money presented one challenge to making his dream come true, though he was determined to “keep putting my foot in the door.”
Uslan grew up in New Jersey, where his voracious reading of comic books led to his amassing 35,000 of them dating back to 1936 by his college years, a collection that would eventually total over 55,000 volumes. Uslan added he recently donated 45,000 comics to the Lilly Library at Indiana University for researcher access.
Uslan’s first break, he said, came in the early 1970s when he pitched an experimental curriculum to IU’s College of Arts and Sciences which focused on comic books as a matter of course study, reflecting popular culture and a uniquely American mythos. Comics, insisted Uslan, “have shown us the mores, slang, biases, and prejudices (of America) on a weekly basis since the 1930s. They’re contemporary American folklore. The ancient gods of Greece and Rome today wear spandex and capes. One character … the Greeks called him Hermes, the Romans called him Mercury. I call him The Flash. Another the Greeks called Poseidon and the Romans called Neptune. I call him Aquaman.”
The dean of the department, initially rejecting Uslan’s course idea as absurd, finally reneged when Uslan asked him to describe the respective stories of Moses and Super-man, emphasizing the un-canny parallels between the two stories and their enduring cultural legacies.
Once the course was approved, an international frenzy of press concerning his class was so fierce Uslan could recall no class session without some television or magazine cameras and reporters present. The attention netted him a job offer from the vice president of Superman and Batman publishers, DC Comics in New York.
Eventually, Uslan got a crack at writing tales of his all-time favorite hero, Batman, in the pages of DC comics, and found himself “back at IU, writing ‘Batman’ instead of studying! I made ‘Ripley’s Believe it or Not’ teaching that course (on comics). My mother was so proud!”
Uslan’s dream of a serious Batman on the big screen languished while he established himself in Holly-wood, eventually working on the early “Rocky” movies and films like “Raging Bull” and “Apocalypse Now,” among others. In spite of offers of a salary increase and medical plan – and a pregnant wife at home – Uslan said he quit his job at United Artists Pictures and bought the rights from DC for a “Batman” movie, in order to stay focused on his dream. “The worst thing I could picture was coming here to speak to all of you to say (what) ‘I could have been…I could have done,’” said Uslan.
Rejected for 10 years by Hollywood studios when he pitched the idea of his dark Batman film, Uslan in 1986 secured the cooperation of “a young genius named Tim Burton” for his project.
Burton shared Uslan’s vision and coupled it with a production designer’s innovative vision of Batman’s Gotham City, bringing aboard Jack Nicholson as the Joker and Michael Kea-ton as a “psychotic, obses-sed” Batman.
With the 1989 release of the movie “Batman,” every box office record was broken, an event repeated with last year’s “The Dark Knight.”
“Don’t believe them when they tell you how bad you are and how terrible your ideas are,” Uslan told Cul-ver students and guests. “And don’t believe them when they tell you how great you and your ideas are. Just believe in yourself and your work. Doors will slam in your face. You can cry and go home or you can pick yourself up and dust yourself off and knock again and again…until your knuckles bleed.”
Uslan described the pleasure of working with the team that created “The Dark Knight,” including the late Heath Ledger, who won an Oscar for his performance in the film, and who Uslan described as “a consummate actor and a gentleman.”
Noting his “journey started in Indiana,” Uslan told the audience he’s pleased to see appreciation of the comic book medium about which he’s so passionate has grown in leaps and bounds in popular culture.
“I believed they were literate, that they were our mythology…twice recently I’ve had the chance to speak to the Smithsonian about comic books.
“The New York Metro-politan Museum of Art put my comics on the wall (and brought) honor and respect to these creative people from the 1930s through the 1970s and recognized as valuable their contribution to American art. That’s just as important to me as making the movies.”
Quoting Robert Frost, Uslan said of his professional career, “I took the (road) less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”