Batman, screen adaptation and chaos – what the archive tells us

Warner Brothers’ efforts to launch the Caped Crusader into his own blockbuster movie franchise were infamously fraught and turbulent. It took more than ten years of screenplay development, involving numerous writers, producers and executives, before Batman (1989) was green lit with Tim Burton in the director’s chair. Even then, battles continued to rage over the material, and redrafting carried on throughout the shoot. Warren Skaaren was the script doctor brought in by the studio to rescue the project. His role has been a matter of conjecture and controversy. This article explores Skaaren’s personal archive stored at the University of Texas at Austin to shed new light on what transpired in the final phases of pre-production and the tussles that went on even as the cameras rolled. It analyses the contribution of Skaaren and others in shaping the screenplay, questions some of the myths that have grown up about the script and argues for the importance of the production to screenplay studies as a particularly well-documented example of a highly complex, even chaotic adaptation, which nevertheless resulted in a commercially and critically successful film.