Holy Crime Scene! 81 Storyboards for ‘Batman’ Stolen From Studio

Eighty-one storyboards planning scenes for an upcoming Batman movie were stolen from a locked room at Warner Bros. studios, prompting an internal investigation at the Burbank lot, police said Tuesday.

The 81 pencil sketches, valued at about $4,000 because of the labor involved in producing them, were on 8 1/2-by-11-inch sheets, the size of notebook paper. They were stolen between 7:30 p.m. Aug. 18 and 8 a.m. Aug. 19 from Building 34 on the Warner Bros. lot, Burbank Police Sgt. Leonard Doran said.

A group of illustrators, he said, arrived “in the morning and discovered they were gone. There were no signs of forced entry.”

Storyboards are drawings used to plan how scenes will look in a movie, sketching the sequence of action to help a movie’s creators visualize scenes before they are filmed. Thousands of such drawings are needed for a movie, according to a Warner Bros. spokesman.

Warner Bros. representatives had asked Burbank police to keep last week’s theft secret while the studio launched its own investigation, Doran said.

But the case was included on a list of newsworthy events regularly faxed to local newspapers by the police.

Burbank police will sometimes honor a crime victim’s request for secrecy in a case, said Doran, the department’s press information officer. But there was nothing about the theft of storyboards to warrant secrecy, he added.

“From time to time, we’ve gotten (similar) requests from victims of crime or businesses,” Doran said. “If it’s something they feel is an inside job, they’ll quietly find out who is responsible.”

“Batman Forever” is scheduled to begin filming in New York on Sept. 24 in spite of the theft, said the movie’s director, Joel Schumacher.

Losing the sketches, Schumacher said, will have a minimal effect on production. “It’s not like we lost the Mona Lisa. It’s like losing the napkins you drew an idea on the night before. It’s a thumbnail rendering of a suggested shot.

“My only concern was, did we lose anything irreplaceable and is there any damage control we need to know about? No, it’s just a little extra work.”

“Batman Forever” is the third feature film about the comic book hero. The cast includes Val Kilmer as Batman, Chris O’Donnell as Robin and Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones as villains.