Batman and Bill

It’s no secret that nerd culture sits at the center of much of our larger pop culture right now. Superhero movies are the biggest tentpoles in the cinematic industry, and actors who play big comic book roles are among the highest paid in the world. But even beyond that, you see everyone from suburban dads to five year olds wearing Star Wars t-shirts and discussing which version of the Joker is their favorite. While there are certainly downsides to this cultural development, one advantage is a new interest in the little-known, behind-the-scenes stories surrounding sci fi, fantasy, and superheroes. 

One of the latest additions to the growing body of nerd studies is the 2017 documentary, Batman and Bill. Of course, everyone knows Batman. He’s the dark, broody hero with dead parents who dresses like a bat to scare criminals who are a “superstitious and cowardly lot.” But who created this figure that is an internationally known icon and a billion-dollar enterprise? Even the freshest noob to the comic book world can probably tell you that it was a guy named Bob Kane. Kane supposedly invented Batman over a weekend in 1939 after he saw how much money Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were making. He was a rare early creator who had it written into his contract that he would get name credit every time Batman appeared. This is the standard story, but according to Batman and Bill, there is another, entirely different version to be told. 

 

Batman and Bill primarily follows author Marc Tyler Nobleman who wrote a children’s non-fiction book about the Caped Crusader’s other, perhaps more important creator, a guy named Bill Finger. Finger was Bob Kane’s silent partner who, according to Nobleman’s research, not only wrote most of the stories and invented most of Batman’s indelible gallery of villains but also designed the main components of the costume we all recognize today – complete with the pointy bat ears, scalloped black cape, and bat symbol on the chest. Kane, apparently a slick salesman and self-promoter, did all the talking and was the public face of Batman while Finger was the uncredited idea man who shaped much of the mythology the world knows, loves, and pays millions of dollars to read and see every year. Kane died a wealthy, prominent man with millions of fans while Finger died penniless and alone in a New York apartment that was behind on rent.

Nobleman spends the documentary detailing his efforts to track down a biological heir of Finger’s in order to get him credit on Batman products. The story is a fascinating one, complete with unexpected discoveries, entirely new versions of established creation myth, and a surprising ending. While the story is compelling and the cause is just, Nobleman definitely seems to love himself and be a self-promoter in a vein more similar to Bob Kane than Bill Finger. The documentary clearly positions him as the hero and his book about Finger as required reading, and Nobleman clearly doesn’t have a problem with that.

But his self-congratulation aside, the story of Bill Finger and his family and their efforts to get his name on Batman after nearly eighty years is touching. Knowing that they were up against Warner Brothers, one of the largest and most powerful media companies in the world makes the stakes even higher.

The most affecting moments of the film are one-on-one interviews with Finger’s granddaughter. According to her, the Finger family felt cursed to obscurity and neglect. She makes a much more satisfying and authentic protagonist to the story than Nobleman’s faux humble researcher.

There are a few spots that drag and seem a little redundant, but overall, Batman and Bill is a compelling documentary that is worth seeing. As nerd culture becomes more and more central to the things we read, watch, and listen to, it’s interesting and worthwhile to hear the stories behind the stories.

Sandy Wexler

You know how you’re sometimes tempted to pick a scab? You know you shouldn’t – it will hurt, it will bleed, it will leave a scar. And yet, perversely, you do it anyway? That essentially sums up my relationship with watching Adam Sandler movies. I know I’m going to hate it and that nothing good will come of it. And yet, perversely, every so often, I’m tempted to pick the scab that is his latest offering.

Sandler has made a career of playing lazy, misanthropic losers who somehow fall backwards into success, often not in spite of their reprobate nature but rather because of it. His movies aren’t stories so much as they are wish fulfillment fantasies for failure-to-launch man-children who are still living in their parents’ basement, still hoping for the day that they get that gig as a professional online game player or taste tester for all the new flavors of Doritos. If movie stars really do serve as role models for some people, it’s a safe bet that Adam Sandler is a threat to the very fabric of world culture. 

 Sandler’s latest is Sandy Wexler which was just released on Netflix. The title character is a deluded, annoying, compulsive liar who serves as a personal manager in Hollywood to a ridiculous stable of has beens and never-weres. Wexler gives them bad advice, ruins opportunities for them, and generally irritates everyone who comes within a ten foot radius of him. The story begins when he discovers Courtney Clark, a young singer with genuine talent. Played by Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson, Courtney is sweet, naïve, and tremendously gifted. Sandy manages to connect her with actual power players and her career takes off. As he is busy damaging his career as he’s trying to build it, Sandy falls in love with Courtney – despite the fact that she is young, talented, smart, and beautiful whereas he seems to have stumbled out of a fifty year old cartoon about the world’s most annoying old man.

Eventually, Sandy quits as Courtney’s manager because he realizes he’s out of his depth and his life and career spiral down from there. However, because this is an Adam Sandler movie and not anything that resembles real life, one conversation with a former client of his magically changes Sandy and he becomes this whole other person who is suddenly capable of triumph. Everything ends happily except for the fact that the film ends with Sandler singing in a funny voice. Of course.

The creative team on the film is the same that Sandler has worked with his whole career, the same bunch of conspirators and hangers on who encourage his worst tendencies. Both in front of and behind the camera, Sandler surrounds himself with loyal but apparently blind collaborators.

Interestingly, it’s one of those collaborators that’s most responsible for Sandy Wexler and that’s Sandler’s real life personal manager, Sandy Wernick. Wernick signed Sandler at age 22 and has been with him ever since. Apparently, everything from Wexler’s voice to his tendency to always have food stuck in his teeth is based on Wernick – which makes one wonder – what’s it like to be Adam Sandler’s friend? Yes, he’ll probably make you rich, but he also may make a two-plus hour film about what an annoying idiot you are.

Sandy Wexler is part of what is now an eight picture deal with Netflix that began with the execrable Ridiculous Six and will probably end with the apocalypse when Adam Sandler’s garbagy, low-brow humor eventually tears a hole in the space time continuum. I have decided the quality control guy at Netflix is a scarecrow in a suit that’s got a sign propped up reading, “Sounds great, Adam.”

Like Ridiculous Six and The Do-Over, a lot of people are going to see Sandy Wexler. It is as unavoidable as it is unfortunate. The only real question is will you see it? Lots of people pick scabs, but I did so you don’t have to, my friends. Spend that 131 minutes elsewhere.

George Lucas: A Life

This week’s show isn’t about a film so much as it is about a filmmaker, specifically about a book written about that filmmaker. Not to steal John Augustine’s book review thunder from the very good Lifelines, but this week I want to talk about the excellent biography by Brian Jay Jones called George Lucas: A Life. Everyone knows George Lucas as the creator of Star Wars and co-creator of Indiana Jones, the guy responsible for the joy of the original Star Wars trilogy and the agony of the prequel trilogy. In this zippy but comprehensive telling of the man’s life, Brian Jay Jones lays out the familial, financial, creative, and personal circumstances that led George Lucas to become arguably one of the single-most influential figures in modern film history.

Clocking in at nearly five hundred pages, the book tracks Lucas’s entire life, from his parents establishing their family in pleasant, little Modesto, California before George was ever born all the way to Lucas as a billionaire in his seventies, retired and living the life of a philanthropist.

George Lucas: A Life, is not a hatchet job, by any means. On the contrary, it acknowledges Lucas’s many industry-defining choices that have shaped how movies are shot, distributed, displayed, and marketed. Jones obviously admires Lucas’s work and has respect for the empire (pardon the pun) the man has created. But Jones is also clear-eyed about his subject and isn’t afraid to draw out the themes he sees at work throughout Lucas’s life – specifically, his dissatisfaction with basically everything and his profound need for control.

Jones connects the dots between Lucas adamantly refusing to be part of his dad’s stationary business as a young man, his obsessive work ethic once he found his calling as a filmmaker at USC in the 1960s, his fury and disgust at having his early films altered by bottom-line driven studio executives, and Lucas’s lifelong quest to be completely independent of Hollywood studios or really any kind of restriction from anyone when it came to his films. Lucas was furious when studios removed four minutes apiece from his first two films, THX1138 and American Graffiti. He was just a newbie director and studios had all the power. But later when Star Wars became a worldwide phenomenon, rather than use his newfound fame to bargain for more money up front, George Lucas asked for and got control – most significantly, final editing decisions on his films and control over marketing and merchandising. That early foresight are part of why we have Lucasfilm LTD still producing Star Wars movies forty years later, digital projectors and THX Sound systems in theaters, and Industrial Light and Magic as the foremost special effects company in the world. Lucas’s stubborn insistence that his way, his preferences, his control were superior made him wealthy and remarkably influential.

The book covers many of the events that most Lucas fans already know: his catastrophic car crash as a young man, his student days at USC making “experimental” films, the long series of disasters that accompanied the production of the first Star Wars movie, his partnerships with Coppola and Spielberg, and the financial success but critical failure of the prequel trilogy – and does so in fascinating detail. But the book also covers smaller, lesser known but equally interesting parts of the filmmaker’s life: the acrimony of his divorce from his first wife, the completely unconventional way he chose to produce and sell The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles tv show and how its successful use of digital backgrounds led to making the little seen Radioland Murders. That film was the first in which only partially constructed sets were filled in with digital imagery. It was that early success that eventually convinced Lucas the technology was where it needed to be in order for him to return to the world of Star Wars.

The book concludes with details about the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney, Lucas’s marriage to businesswoman Mellody Hobson, and the birth of their first child together, just as Lucas turned 69 years old.

Jones’s prose is clean and his research is impeccable. His book, George Lucas: A Life, is an excellent read for anyone with even a passing interest in the development of modern Hollywood filmmaking as we know it.