Caped Crusader Gets the Last Bat-Laugh

In Hollywood, grossing well is the best revenge. It is the great silencer of complaints that a movie may have been less than perfect.

When Michael Keaton was cast as Bruce Wayne in “Batman,” there were cries of outrage from what Keaton calls “the DC Comics fundamentalists.” A cover line on Rolling Stone magazine asked, “Can Michael Keaton Fill the Cape?” but gave no clear answer. Thousands of letters, it was said, poured in to Warner Bros. protesting the choice of Keaton to play the Caped Crusader. It was the “Star Trek” syndrome in reverse.

Ah, but that was long ago, and now his consolation is in the grosses as they rise. No feat in Batman’s half-century career quite matches the speed with which “Batman” zipped past $200 million at the box office, invading the list of the all-time 10 top-grossing films.

For Keaton, pacing barefoot around his Pacific Palisades house, chomping gum to soothe his nerves (he dislikes interviews), all this is sweetness itself.

“Amazing, amazing, amazing,” he said a few days ago. “I feel like a spectator and a participant at the same time. I tell myself this is just plain silly, and then I think, ‘Let’s just enjoy it, OK?’ And I am. But, I mean, ‘E.T.’s’ grosses in half the time? Wow.”

Even in the Bat trappings, Keaton played Bruce Wayne at a level of reality that seemed at odds with the leering flamboyance of Jack Nicholson’s Joker. It was also an interpretation at considerable variance with the cheerful invulnerability of Adam West’s Wayne on television. But it was a reading, Keaton says, that he and director Tim Burton quite agreed on.

“Batman was easily the least-developed character in the script. When I went to meet Tim, I said, ‘This is what I’m going to do. I hope you agree.’ I wanted to play him real. I’d done three pictures back to back and I was pretty tired; I guess I didn’t want an argument. But Tim said he felt exactly as I did about the part.”

Why “Batman” should have taken off as it did is not entirely clear. “A groundswell of Batman interest collided with the movie,” Keaton says, but he adds, “It’s a perfect contemporary myth coming at a perfect time.

“He’s the only super-hero who’s a real human being. When he’s hit hard, he goes down. You can invest more sympathy in him. You say, ‘Hey, he’s Bruce Wayne, not a Superman.’ It’s much more interesting.”

Burton, Keaton says, tried to avoid using the word innocent to describe Wayne. “But there’s something like innocence about him.”

Actually Keaton feels that what he did with Wayne is what he has done in his other films.

“You take a realistic character and then push it a little. The challenge was heavy going in, with all those attacks and complaints. But I think having my back to the wall worked for me.

“To put it in sports talk, I feel as if I got my bat on the ball, no pun intended, in a real way. Now I’m beginning to feel like I hit for the cycle.

“The movie must work on some level, to explain those grosses.”

Keaton, who is 37, was born in Pittsburgh, the youngest child in a family of four boys and three girls. He did some early work with the Pittsburgh Poor Players, headquartered in a Lutheran church in the Oakland section of town. For a brief time he worked as a crew man at WQED, that fine public television station in Pittsburgh. Then he made his way via stand-up comedy into episodic television and then into “Night Shift,” the movie that established his career and that led to “Mr. Mom,” his co-starring hit with Teri Garr.

He has been intrigued by the West since his boyhood days. When he was 9, Keaton says, he saw a photograph of a Western landscape and the memory of it stayed with him. Years later, although by sublime coincidence rather than intent, he was able to buy an 800-acre ranch (location undisclosed) that turned out to include the landscape he had admired as a child.

He was off last weekend to spend some time at the ranch with his 6-year-old son, Sean. Keaton and his wife, actress Caroline McWilliams, are separated but close.

Meanwhile, having done four movies in 20 months--”Dream Team,” “Clean and Sober,” “Beetlejuice” and “Batman”--Keaton says he plans to do nothing until something choice comes by.

There is always the prospect of a “Batman II,” of course. In the present sequel-obsessed climate of Hollywood, it would appear inescapable. Sticks and stones will break your bones, but grosses never hurt you.