‘Batman’ Paints the Town : The Caped Crusaders Are Hipper, Sleeker and Suited Up With Sex Appeal. A Colorful Comic-Book Look Replaces Gotham’s Dark Past.

No one’s asked Bob Dole’s opinion yet, but fans of the “Batman” film series have been busily taking pro and con stances about the new, sexy Batman and Robin outfits, complete with anatomical enhancements.

“I can’t believe all this fuss over nipples,” designer Bob Ringwood says of his costumes for “Batman Forever,” which opens Friday. “Men have nipples, too.”

The body-molded, muscularly pumped crime-fighting uniforms in the third “Batman” movie are a bold departure from the first two films--sleek and sensually suggestive.

And they’re the least of the changes in “Batman Forever.”

Unlike Tim Burton’s pugnacious Dark Knight, this Batman lives in a color-wheel world. Sure, he still broods about his dual identity, but he also smiles and falls in love with a Vargas-girl beauty.

Lest we miss the point that “Batman Forever” is a new, improved thrill ride, Warner Bros. is spelling it out for us on public transportation and in movie lobbies all over town with vivid, comic-book color art. The ads push pizazz and a sense of fun to renew audience interest in the “Batman” movie.

And with good reason. The studio is eager to extend its franchise and has spent a reported $100 million on “Batman Forever.” After all, the first two films reaped almost $700 million in worldwide revenues plus more than $1 billion in merchandising. But grosses on the second film, 1992’s “Batman Returns” ($160 million domestic, $120 million overseas), were down significantly from the first, 1989’s “Batman” ($250 million and $162 million). The second installment was criticized by parents who believed it was too dark for children.

“The first one set the standard, while the second was dark in tone. It went about as far as we could go,” says Rob Friedman, worldwide marketing and publicity executive at Warner Bros. “We knew that people were looking for a new Batman who was lighter and more fun than the last one.”

Also, in trying to keep “Batman”-related merchandise moving off the shelves, Warner wanted to give the film a hipper feel. One of its villains, Harvey Two-Face, for instance, has two girlfriends, one for each personality. In the movie they are called Sugar and Spice, but they look like their original monikers: Leather and Lace. (You were expecting McDonald’s to promote a character named Leather on drinking mugs?)

Still, the new Batman doesn’t go too far out on a limb. The trick here was to give the wheel a new spin, not reinvent it.

When Tim Burton decided not to direct “Batman Forever,” the studio chose Joel Schumacher, a self-admitted “pop culture sponge.” His 10 films include such recent successes as “Falling Down” and “The Client.” But only “Flatliners” and “The Lost Boys” reveal and revel in Schumacher’s roots as a production and costume designer, with their extravagantly offbeat sets.

Still, Schumacher had to rein in some of his more grandiose impulses on those. Two years ago he was offered “Phantom of the Opera,” a film in which there would be “no reality police at all,” only to have it fall apart over creative differences. “Batman Forever” thus became the vehicle for Schumacher’s fantasies for an overscale, baroque “pop opera.”

And when Michael Keaton, star of the first two “Batman” movies, chose not to come aboard “Batman Forever,” Schumacher was even able to reinterpret the title character in a more romantic stripe.

Keaton reportedly departed over money and the fact that the “Batman” villains overshadowed the hero. Such is the nature of the beast, says Schumacher. “Who do you remember most from ‘Silence of the Lambs’? As in all myths, the ‘Batman’ villains are more interesting because they don’t have to be nice to anyone. They get to say and do all the terrible things.”

Since hyperbolic bad guys were the one aspect of the machine that needed no oiling, Schumacher entrusted the task to “two of the best scene-stealers in the business”: Oscar winner Tommy Lee Jones is Harvey Two-Face, and hotter-than-hot Jim Carrey is the Riddler. Both were given free rein, he says. “The only way to direct them was to get out of their way.”

As a counterbalance, Schumacher chose a hero with a more noble countenance, Val Kilmer, of the bee-stung lips: “When Val came on board, I knew I would have the opportunity to make my own comic book.”

What Kilmer brings to the mix, says Ringwood, is sex. “Val is sleek, pantherlike. He plays Batman in a more sensual way, whereas Michael, because he’s not such a big guy, played him as very tough, aggressive.”

Kilmer’s Batman is less Hamlet and more Romeo. His Juliet is criminologist Dr. Chase Meridian, played by Nicole Kidman. “I know what you’re going to say. But it’s my city, and that’s the way criminologists look in my city,” Schumacher says.

This Batman even has friends. Our hero is finally reunited with his comic-book sidekick, Robin (Chris O’Donnell). “Batman and Robin are mirrors of one another,” Schumacher explains. “Both their parents were murdered. Both strike back with vengeance and vigilantism.”

The physical production, which took more than a year to devise and more than 100 days to shoot, expanded the city of Gotham. “The biggest thing we’ve done is open up the city,” explains production designer Barbara Ling, who succeeds the late Anton Furst, and Bo Welch, the men who realized the look of the first two “Batman” films. “We show the waterfront, a Pan-Asian town. We even show Gotham in light. The first time we see Gotham is an aerial shot by day. It was important to get a sense of day, since Batman only travels at night.”

To suggest the scale of a megalopolis, the “Batman” crew traveled to the original inspiration for Gotham City, Manhattan.

For two weeks last fall “Batman Forever” was shot in the narrow corridors of Exchange Place in the Wall Street area. The closed-off streets were festooned with huge 50-foot sculptures, and new facades and signs were applied to storefronts. The result is what Schumacher describes as “Manhattan on steroids.”

“It certainly perked up the stockbrokers on their way to work,” Ling says.

Other scenes were shot in downtown Manhattan, Glen Cove, Long Island (the Webb Institute of Naval Architecture is the film’s Wayne Manor), downtown Los Angeles, Hollywood and Long Beach.

The biggest difference in the new “Batman” is in the film’s use of color, the director says.

“This is, after all, a comic book,” says Schumacher, who pored through hundreds of “Batman” comics from as far back as the 1939 original.

“What amazed me is how many different looks there are and how the colors popped out at me.”

Each actor was assigned his own colors. The Riddler is cyber-punk green. Harvey Two-Face is surrounded by reds, blacks, whites and magentas. Chase Meridian is all warm colors, ambers and dark ivories. Batman is in blues and purples. And, of course, your basic black.

Costumer Ringwood was the only design constant in the three films. His delicate balancing act was to complement Schumacher and Ling’s vision while preserving the appeal of the “Batman” merchandising characters for the studio. “I tried to blank my mind out and only refer to the other films in technical terms, not in the design. Fortunately there’s been three years between each film.”

“Batman Forever” turned out to be much harder work than he’d imagined, requiring a 62-person design crew (as opposed to about 10 on most films) employed for a full year.

The challenges in distinctively presenting the villains “was to nail those characters so that people can’t imagine them any other way,” Ringwood says. “If people compare them to past incarnations, then you’ve failed.”

He was helped in his cause by Carrey, who came up with an electrifying concept for his Riddler costumes. “It was Jim’s idea that his suits light up. Of course then we had only eight days to make it. Nearly killed us.”

The new Batman and Robin muscle suits were the most time-consuming undertaking. Each original suit for Batman and Robin took three months to make, and 40 duplicates of each were made.

In order to maintain their tension and stretch over the actor’s form, the elastic Batsuits were deliberately designed too short. “Only an inch short,” Ringwood explains, “but it’s like wearing a large rubber band from head to toe. It wasn’t easy to walk around in that all day and then have to act. It was very tiring for Val.”

Similarly, Robin was shorn of his original “yellow and green thing with the skirt,” Ringwood says, “and brought into the modern world.”

The controversy about Batman and Robin’s nipples and codpieces amazes the British-born Ringwood.

“Americans are obsessed about these things. In advertising they brush out all the bumps. They make everyone look sort of sterile and non-sensual. If you’re going to have a bump, it should be in scale with the rest of the body. After all, Batman flies through the night and seduces people.”