Biography for
Michael E. Uslan More at IMDbPro »

Date of Birth

Trivia

Noted authority on comic book history and instructor of the first ever accredited college course on comic books. (Indiana University)

Got his first movie launched at age 28 by asking Warner Publishing for the rights (at no charge) to an old DC comic book Swamp Thing (1982).

Personal Quotes

When we first brought the studios the idea of making Batman as a feature, they all turned it down. Back then no one could accept the idea an old television show would make a great film franchise. It was exciting to finally break that ground in cinema history; Batman (1989) was memorable for me.

For me, the highlight came later that summer, when I was watching the Berlin Wall come down, about 1:30 in the morning on CNN, and some kid is coming through the wall into freedom for the first time, wearing a Batman hat. It was a real indicator of what that movie had done, how many people worldwide it had been reaching. It was really pretty incredible. -- on the cultural impact of "Batman"

They're different media. Yet, in a sense, comic books are frozen movies. If you look at a comic book, you are generally seeing the storyboard for a film. The great advantage of comic books, over the years, has been that, if they are frozen movies, they are not limited by budget. They are only limited by imagination. So the planet Mogo, or empires under the sea, or parallel universes, can easily be portrayed without worrying about it looking cheesy. So that's always been an advantage. They're also different [media], in a number of ways, because in comics you traditionally have got to read the word balloons and know what a character is thinking, as well as what a character is doing. That leads to something quite unique to comics. -- on the strengths of film adapting comic books.

Well I reject the concept that comic books in movies are a genre. I have been fighting that for 33 years, with the powers-that-be in Hollywood. All I used to hear for the first 20-plus years of battle was, "Oh, Michael, comic books are hot this summer at the box office, but they'll cool at the box office next year." My answer to that has always been that they are not a genre, they are not something to get hot and cold from one year to the next, they're the exact same thing as books and plays: they are a source of great stories and colorful characters. If you talk about genres - I don't care if you're talking about war, Westerns, science fiction, horror, fantasy, humor, romance - anything you can find, strolling the aisles of a Borders or a Barnes & Noble, I can bring you many comic books representing each genre. Part of that battle has been getting Hollywood to recognize that comic books and superheroes are not synonymous. That's been a huge breakthrough, just in recent years really, and as a result of that recent breakthrough, we've had movies like 300, Road to Perdition, and A History of Violence, that very few people realize were based on comic books and graphic novels. It's very important to make that differentiation.

I think he's the greatest supervillain ever created. I don't think any other villain can touch him. I love the way Tim Burton explored the operatic values to it. I'm always intrigued by the fact that, as you had this battle portrayed between them, over the decades, at times representing good vs. evil, at times representing order vs. chaos, that you have a force of good that is cloaked in the guise of a terrifying monstrous bat, and then you have this force of evil that is garbed in the visage of the carnival. It kind of reminds me of Edgar Allan Poe's "Cask of Amontillado." -- on the character the Joker

The best way I can answer that is probably to talk generally about the industry, as opposed to talking specifically about Batman. There are times when you need to step back and realize that movie studios today are not necessarily the same things that they were many years ago. Many movie studios are international conglomerates now. They own everything from theme parks to toy companies to T-shirt companies to video companies. There's a lot of different wheels to be greased. Sometimes, over the decades, the tail started wagging the dog. In some cases, decisions were being guided more by toys and Happy Meals than by creative filmmaking. The danger there is that the entertainment you're making starts to feel like an infomercial for toys, as opposed to great film. Rather than being in a position where a studio dictates that a movie should be light, bright, and kiddie-friendly and family-friendly, with three or four heroes and three or four villains, and each one having two costume changes and two vehicles, to satisfy the toy and merchandising requirement, I think just letting filmmakers-great filmmakers-just go out and make great films, with a belief that if they make great films, you're going to sell merchandising and video games and things anyway, is the best way to do it. -- on the audience and critic response to "Batman Forever" and "Batman & Robin"

When I was in University I'd go to the library and they had a magazine section -- with Variety -- in the trades section. I used to collect addresses and telephone numbers of producers and the industry.

Salary

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