THE TIM BURTON

EN C Y C LOP E D IA
THE TIM BURTON
EN C Y C LOP E D IA

Samuel J. Umland

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The Tim Burton encyclopedia / Samuel J. Umland.
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CO N T E NT S

Foreword by Bo Welch
vii

Acknowledgments
ix

Introduction
xi

Entries A–Z
1

Selected Bibliography
257

Index
259

About the Author

283

  n  v
 F O RE W OR D
T
im Burton is first and foremost an
artist and a filmmaker. That’s the
young man I met in 1986. But he is
now, also, an icon and an industry. No one
has navigated the world of art and com-
merce and maintained his integrity and
singular vision to the extent that Tim Bur-
ton has. He has touched hundreds of mil-
lions of people on our planet (and probably
beyond) with his movies—a lot of movies,
in fact. Some of them have redefined mov-
ies as we know them. But all of them reflect
his deep respect for and love of the art and
craft of filmmaking. Thus, The Tim Burton
Encyclopedia.
I feel lucky to be asked to write this
foreword. But the real luck was to col-
laborate with Tim on three of his movies:
Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, and Bat-
man Returns. At the risk of geezering out,
I must say, “Those were the days.” Too
often in modern movies, you can recognize
the fingerprints of a committee or a mar-
keting concept in the DNA of a film. This
was never the case in a Tim Burton film.
Granted, on Beetlejuice, a modestly bud-
geted movie, we flew delightfully under the
radar, even though Tim’s previous movie,
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, was a bona fide
hit. But what made Beetlejuice so special
was how personal and handmade it felt. An
audience can feel that this film was made
for them.
And I think that is the case in all of
Tim’s films. He connects with audiences by
combining a unique audio-visual language
with intimate characters designed entirely
by him and, like him, that represent a char-
ismatic blend of light and dark, wit and
pathos, strength and vulnerability. As fan-
tastic and whimsical as Tim Burton’s mov-
ies feel, the characters are always grounded
in real emotions shared by real people,
especially those of heightened sensitivity.
This is why designing a Tim Burton movie
is the greatest opportunity a designer could
hope for. Strong character design, complete
with his or her own visual language and a
clear invitation to express the emotions
within that character’s world, equals design
heaven, that is, once you’ve wrapped your
head around Tim’s worldview. And the
best way to do that is to look at his draw-
ings of the characters that inhabit his films.
They are always there at the beginning of
each film to greet you as they hang from
his office wall or lay across his desk, the ink
sometimes barely dry. There’s the script,
the talk, the process, but those masterful
character drawings are always the heart and
soul of the movie and give every cast and
crew member the direction and confidence
to go “out” there. They set the tone and
tone is the hardest intangible to describe
in filmmaking. His pictures describe things
that cannot be described with words. More-
  n  vii
viii  n  FOREWORD
over, at first glance, you instantly feel the
incredible joy and adventure of a Tim Bur-
ton movie. His drawings of Beetlejuice,
Edward Scissorhands, Catwoman, the Pen-
guin, and Batman are etched in my fond
memories forever. I think this initial step
in his process, born out of his passion for
drawing and animation, distinguishes Tim
from other directors. In the end, filmmak-
ing is a visual medium and though there are
numerous talented “visual” directors, none
is Tim Burton.
Okay, so I’m a fan, clearly, of both the
product and the process of Tim Burton.
And I suspect that if you’re reading this
book, you probably are, too. I also imagine
that you’ll find, as I have, that great film-
makers cannot help but infuse their work
with their own personality, eccentricities,
and passions and that ultimately we really
like Tim’s movies because we really like
Tim and his beautiful but complex view
of our beautiful and complex world. We
love his sense of humor, his sense of the
absurd, and his respect for the audience.
I know I do, and I hope he makes enough
movies for The Tim Burton Encyclopedia,
Volume 2.
—Bo Welch, award-winning
production designer and director
 A CK N O W L E D G M ENT S
T
his book owes its existence to a con-
versation I had in St. Louis at the
Popular Culture Association Con-
ference in 2010 with the late Jim Welsh,
who at the time, along with Gene D. Phil-
lips and Rodney F. Hill, was completing the
editing of The Francis Ford Coppola Ency-
clopedia for Scarecrow Press. I’d never met
Jim personally, and I wanted to introduce
myself to him because as editor of Litera-
ture/Film Quarterly, he accepted my very
first article, eventually published in 1986
and written while I was still a graduate
student, on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
He, of course, didn’t know how momen-
tous that particular publication was to me,
so I wanted to thank him for his support
and for helping me get my scholarly career
started. We quickly struck up a friendly
conversation and soon he mentioned his
current project on Francis Ford Coppola.
Jim then suggested I meet the editor of the
encyclopedia series, Stephen Ryan, and
indicated to me that if I had an idea for a
book project, he’d be happy to recommend
it to Stephen. Moments later, Jim intro-
duced me to Stephen, to whom I pitched
the idea, and The Tim Burton Encyclopedia
was born. So I have Jim Welsh, whom I
met only one time in my life, to thank—
again—for his support of my work. He was
a friendly, garrulous, and kindly soul, and I
grieved at his passing in 2013. He played an
essential role in getting this book published,
and I’ll be forever grateful to him.
Many others, of course, helped in the
completion of this book, and I wish to
thank them as well. My wife and frequent
coauthor, Dr. Rebecca Umland, contrib-
uted several entries to this encyclopedia
and also proofread much of the manu-
script, thus donating considerable time
and energy to the project’s completion. I’d
also like to extend a big thank-you to Dr.
Susan Honeyman and Dr. Brian Ray, my
colleagues in the University of Nebraska at
Kearney Department of English, for their
contributions. A huge thank-you as well
goes to Kevin M. Flanagan, University of
Pittsburgh, for his many fine contribu-
tions. Thanks, too, to Catherine A. Fitzpat-
rick, Valen Watson, and Michael Varhol
for help with information. I am grateful for
the help of the English department secre-
tary, Ruth Behlmann. And a huge thanks to
Jessi Miller for her help proofing the man-
sucript and for her indexing expertise. I
also wish to extend a big thank-you to John
Muto for his help in putting me in touch
with Bo Welch, who kindly agreed to write
the foreword. My thanks to Bo for taking
time from his busy schedule to write for
me. Thanks to Stephen Ryan of Rowman &
Littlefield for his support (and his infinite
patience). To those individuals who may
have been omitted due to my unconscious
neglect, thanks to you all. Finally, I want to
express my gratitude toward, and admira-
tion for, Tim Burton, for enriching the lives
of so many.
  n  ix
 I N T RO D U C T ION
T
he vast popularity of Tim Burton
(1958–) is revealed by his feature
films having earned, collectively,
over $1.7 billion worldwide. That amount
could easily double if one factors in the
sales of merchandise issued in conjunc-
tion with his movies. His films have been
honored with awards by virtue of their
strong character designs and powerful
visual designs and elements, and his work
as a painter, photographer, and filmmaker
has been celebrated by major museum ret-
rospectives in the United States, Australia,
and France. Considered “a very Europe-
anised Hollywood film director, with his
intensively designed and sepulchrally atmo-
spheric Goth-type pictures,” he was named
jury president for the sixty-third Cannes
Film Festival (2010), and at the fifty-sixth
BFI London Film Festival (2012) he was
honored with the BFI Fellowship, the high-
est award bestowed by the British Film
Institute that goes to individuals in “rec-
ognition of their outstanding contribution
to film or television culture.”1 He has cre-
ated a line of toys and is a children’s book
author, and upon occasion he has appeared
as a supporting actor in various films. And
yet, despite his fame, much of what is con-
sidered common knowledge about Tim
Burton is wrong.
• First is the issue of his name: Tim Bur-
ton’s middle name is Walter, not Wil-
liam, although the latter is widely pub-
lished on the Internet and appears in
some scholarly works on Burton as well.
• He is not an only child, although his
younger brother, Daniel, is seldom men-
tioned. In his unauthorized biography
of Tim Burton, Ken Hanke observes,
“If an interviewer . . . [asks] a question
about his brother, Daniel . . . the result
is a blanket refusal [by Burton] to speak
on the topic.” Hanke goes on to state,
“The director invariably comes across as
an only child,” and accurately notes that
“the characters in Burton’s films tend to
be only children, or so at odds with their
siblings that they might as well be.”2
• Burton did not begin his career as an ani-
mator with the Walt Disney Company.
His first animation job was during a sum-
mer in high school as an in-betweener on
Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings (1978).
The claim that Walt Disney held the film
rights to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings
trilogy for a period of ten years beginning
sometime in the late 1950s is false.3
• Although Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985)
was generally well received by critics and
did well at the box office, it did not make
Burton instantly famous. Almost three
years would pass before his next feature
film, Beetlejuice (1988), was released,
and while it, too, was a financial suc-
cess, prompting an animated television
series spin-off and later a stage show still
  n  xi
xii  n  INTRODUCTION
popular at both Universal Studios Florida
and Universal Studios Japan, it was the
huge success of Batman (1989) that ele-
vated Burton to a name-above-the-title
filmmaker.
• Despite the widespread perception of
him as an inarticulate, alienated subur-
ban youth who grew up in a “benignly
dysfunctional family” and as a filmmaker
known for his “gothic and grotesque,”
as well as “dark, magical, and slightly
twisted cinematic fantasies,” Burton’s
point of view, by his own account, “has
always been humorous and high-spir-
ited.”4 While he clearly seeks to protect
his privacy, he is highly articulate and
makes numerous public appearances in
support of his work.
Very often his films represent the intersec-
tion of horror, fantasy, and the folk tale,
genres often employed in works for chil-
dren. While it is important to remember
that Tim Burton was for several years a
student of Disney and has never broken his
relationship with the company, Burton’s
sense of the macabre places him closer aes-
thetically to author and illustrator Edward
Gorey (1925–2000), whose books, as Colin
Odell and Michelle Le Blanc point out,
portray “misunderstood individuals . . .
inside a world of Edwardian angst.”5 Still,
the Disney imprimatur is discernible in
all of Burton’s films, and it is worth not-
ing that the biggest worldwide box office
success of his directorial career, Alice in
Wonderland (2010), was produced at Dis-
ney. His early, award-winning short Vin-
cent (1982) was made at Disney, as were his
first directorial efforts. Having never read
Washington Irving’s original tale, Burton
knew of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,”
the literary source for his film Sleepy Hol-
low (1999), through the “Ichabod Crane”
segment in Disney’s The Adventures of
Ichabod and Mister Toad (1949). Although
the Martians in Mars Attacks! (1996) may
share a family resemblance to malevolent
simulacra such as Chucky, the Good Guys
doll inhabited by the soul of a serial killer
in Child’s Play (1988) and subsequent
sequels, Burton’s impish Martians seem
equally inspired by the mischievous skel-
etons of Disney’s first Silly Symphony, The
Skeleton Dance (1929). One can even find
the inspiration for the Martians’ bizarre
portmanteau laboratory creations in the
fanciful creatures of the Disney Silly Sym-
phony Hell’s Bells (1929). As a result of the
films he made for Disney, Burton was able
to direct his first feature film, Pee-Wee’s
Big Adventure (1985), a project that had
been in development at Warner Bros. Bur-
ton remained at Warner Bros. for the next
few years in order to make Batman (1989),
a film in which his involvement dates to
1985. It was the financial success of Bee-
tlejuice (1988) that made it possible for
him to direct Batman. Still, it is useful to
remember that only slightly over five years
separate the live-action Frankenweenie
(completed in 1984) and the development
deal that led to Disney’s subsidiary, Touch-
stone, producing The Nightmare before
Christmas, eventually released in 1993.
Some of the projects, ideas, and sketches
that Burton made while at Disney were
later developed, including The Nightmare
before Christmas, and the initial sketches,
drawings, and watercolors that eventu-
ally were used in “The Melancholy Death
of Oyster Boy” & Other Stories (1997) were
made during this same period.
The entries in the encyclopedia discuss
the full range of Burton’s creative work,
including films produced for the cinema
as well as television (including commer-
cials), as well as photographs, drawings,
paintings, artistic inspirations, and fre-
quent collaborators. Tim Burton’s life and
film career have been the subject of sev-
eral books, most notably by Ken Hanke,

Mark Salisbury, Kristin Fraga, Jenny He
and Ron Magliozzi, and Alison McMahan.
The 2009 publication of The Art of Tim
Burton represented a major contribution
to our understanding of Burton’s work.
The Tim Burton Encyclopedia is the first
book to explore the wide range of his cre-
ative endeavors, but it does not contain an
exhaustive list of collectibles, memorabilia,
and other forms of merchandise issued in
connection with his films.
NOTES
1.  Peter Bradshaw, “Tim Burton to
Head Cannes Film Festival Jury,” Guard-
ian, January 25, 2010, www.theguardian.
com/film/2010/jan/26/tim-burton-heads-
cannes-jury; Nancy Tartaglione, “Tim
Burton & Helena Bonham Carter to Be
Honored as London Film Festival Begins,”
Deadline, October 10, 2012, www.dead-
line.com/2012/10/tim-burton-helena-bon-
INTRODUCTION  n  xiii
ham-carter-bfi-fellowship-award-london-
film-festival/.
2.  Ken Hanke, Tim Burton: An Unau-
thorized Biography of the Filmmaker (Los
Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1999), 30,
34.
3.  Jeffrey Pepper, “The Myth of Walt
Disney’s Lord of the Rings,” 2719 Hyper-
ion (blog), February 10, 2009, 2719hyper-
ion.blogspot.com/2009/02/myth-of-walt-
disneys-lord-of-rings.html.
4.  Jenny He and Ron Magliozzi, Tim
Burton (New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 2009), 9; Jessica Tiffin, “Tim Burton,”
in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folk-
tales and Fairy Tales, vol. 1, ed. Donald
Haase (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
2008), 148.
5.  Colin Odell and Michelle Le Blanc,
Tim Burton: The Pocket Essential Guide
(Harpenden, England: Pocket Essentials,
2005), 13.
 A
A113
The number of the now legendary home-
room for the Program in Character Ani-
mation at the CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE
OF THE ARTS (CalArts) in Valencia, Cali-
fornia, where so many highly successful
artists, storytellers, and directors, among
them Tim Burton, attended classes begin-
ning in the late 1970s in preparation for
careers at Disney. CalArts was the brain-
child of Walt Disney, who before his death
in 1966 sought to establish a school whose
purpose was to train young animators
through classes “taught by Disney artists,
animators, layout people . . . taught the
Disney way,” according to Tim Burton.
Two of the cofounders of the Character
Animation program were former Disney
animators Jack Hannah (1913–1994), who
taught animation at CalArts, and T. Hee
(1911–1988), who taught caricature, both
remembered by their students as great
teachers. Other former Disney animators
who taught at CalArts were Elmer Plum-
mer (1910–1986), who taught life draw-
ing, and Ken O’Connor (1908–1998), who
taught layout. The legendarily difficult and
demanding Bill Moore (ca. 1909–1983),
formerly of the Chouinard Art Institute
and a non-Disney faculty member, taught
color and design.
The first class of the Program in Char-
acter Animation was admitted in 1975, and
included JERRY REES and John Lasseter.
Tim Burton entered the Character Anima-
tion program at CalArts in its second year,
in 1976, soon after graduating from high
school. In addition to Tim Burton, alumni
of the CalArts Character Animation pro-
gram include BRAD BIRD, John Musker,
HENRY SELICK, Michael Giaimo, Gary
Trousdale, Doug Lefler, Chris Buck, Rob
Minkoff, Brenda Chapman, and Nancy Bie-
man.
The homeroom was drab white and
windowless, and its number later appeared,
as an inside joke, in several animated films
made by CalArts alumni: The Brave Little
Toaster (the Master’s apartment number);
Toy Story (license-plate number on Andy’s
mother’s car); Toy Story 2 (Lasset Air Flight
number); A Bug’s Life (prefix of a model
number stamped on a cardboard box);
Ratatouille (Git’s ear tag); Cars (head code
on Trev Diesel, the freight train); Finding
Nemo (model number on the scuba-div-
er’s camera). It also appears in the form of
Roman numerals in Brave.
Tim Burton attended CalArts from
1976 to 1979, the first two years on schol-
arship (he has stated that in his third year
his scholarship was revoked, for reasons he
does not disclose). In 1979, his animated
short produced while at CalArts, STALK
OF THE CELERY MONSTER, was con-
sidered of sufficient quality by Disney rep-
resentatives to warrant his hire at Disney,
where he worked until 1984.
  n  1
2  n  ABDALOV, VICTOR
References
Sam Kashner, “The CalArts Class Who Cre-
ated a Great Renaissance of Animation,”
Vanity Fair, March 2014, www.vanityfair.
com/culture/2014/03/calarts-animation-
1970s-tim-burton; Mark Salisbury, Burton
on Burton, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Faber and
Faber, 2006), 8.
ABDALOV, VICTOR (CA. 1950–)
Russian-born photographer who served
as the cinematographer on Tim Burton’s
first two films, VINCENT and HANSEL
AND GRETEL. Born Viktor Abdalov in
Turkmenistan, Abdalov immigrated to the
United States in early 1976, some months
after his marriage to former International
Research & Exchanges Board (IREX) stu-
dent Catherine Cosman in July 1975.
(Many sources incorrectly list former
human rights activist Catherine A. Fitz-
patrick as Abdalov’s wife. However, her
ex-husband is the former political prisoner
Alexander Shatravka.) Prior to immigrat-
ing, Abdalov was arrested along with Soviet
dissident and Gulag survivor Alexander
Ogorodnikov in July 1973 while shoot-
ing a film about young Russian Christians
titled Jesus People. Although his camera was
seized by the authorities, Abdalov managed
to hide the exposed film, which eventually
reached the United States by way of the US
embassy. Abdalov and Ogorodnikov were
subsequently interrogated by the KGB, and
Ogorodnikov (and very likely Abdalov,
although this is uncertain) was dismissed
from the VGIK, the famed Russian film
school. Three years after his immigration
to the United States, Abdalov was hired as
cameraman on the straight-to-video feature
I Go Pogo (1980). (In 1989, Walt Disney
Home Video reissued the film on VHS as
Pogo for President.) Abdalov met STEPHEN
CHIODO during the making of I Go Pogo,
which led to Abdalov being hired as the
Director of Photography (DP) on Vincent.
Abdalov also served as DP on Burton’s
next project, Hansel and Gretel. In 1989, an
exhibition featuring over one hundred of
his photographs of life in Russia opened in
Washington, DC.
References
Koenraad De Wolf, Dissident for Life: Alex-
ander Ogorodnikov and the Struggle for
Religious Freedom in Russia, trans. Nancy
Forest-Flier (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerd-
mans, 2013); “Stephen Chiodo: The Man,
The Legend,” Stop Motion Magazine 1
(August 2010): 6–15; “Victor Abdalov,”
IMDb, www.imdb.com/name/nm0008119/
?ref_=fn_al_nm_1.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE
HUNTER (US 2012)
Director: Timur Bekmambetov. Screen-
play : Seth Grahame-Smith, from the
novel by Seth Grahame-Smith. P ro -
ducers: Timur Bekmambetov, Jim Lem-
ley, Tim Burton. Executive Producers:
John J. Kelly, Simon Kinberg, Michelle
Wolkoff. C i n e m a t o g r a p h y : Caleb
Deschanel. Editor: William Hoy. Origi-
nal Music: Henry Jackman.
C ast : Benjamin Walker (Abraham Lin-
coln), Dominic Cooper (Henry Stur-
ges), Anthony Mackie (Will Johnson),
Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Mary Todd
Lincoln), Rufus Sewell (Adam), Marton
Csokas (Jack Barts), Jimmi Simpson
(Joshua Speed), Joseph Mawle (Thomas
Lincoln), Robin McLeavy (Nancy Lin-
coln), Erin Wasson (Vadoma).
Running Time: 105 minutes. Color.
Released Through: 20th Century Fox
Movie co-produced by Tim Burton based on
the book of the same title written by SETH
GRAHAME-SMITH. Grahame-Smith had a
hit novel in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
(2009), so it is little surprise that the produc-
 ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER  n  3
ing team of Jim Lemley, Tim Burton, and
TIMUR BEKMAMBETOV optioned Abra-
ham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2010) before
it was even finished. Both books tap into a
pop cultural desire to think of the familiar
in different terms. What if honest Abe had
also fought against a worldwide vampire
conspiracy? What if Jane Austen’s iconic
novel was set in a world replete with the
living dead? Over the next few years, both
Burton and Bekmambetov collaborated
with Grahame-Smith. For Abraham Lincoln:
Vampire Hunter, Bekmambetov directed
an adaptation of Grahame-Smith’s screen-
play (with Burton remaining as producer).
According to Gina McIntyre, Burton’s goal
as a producer “has largely been to help pre-
serve the project’s unique character to the
greatest extent possible.” During the mak-
ing of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,
Grahame-Smith worked with Burton on
the screenplay to Dark Shadows. Both were
released in summer 2012.
The principle conceit of Abraham Lin-
coln: Vampire Hunter, established early in
the film and explored throughout, is that
there are vampires throughout the world.
These vampires have been responsible for
some of the more unsavory practices in
history. In the United States, they are the
principle benefactors of the slave trade (it is
unclear whether the South is totally under
their thrall, but a scene between head vam-
pire Adam [Rufus Sewell] and Jefferson
Davis [John Rothman] shows that they are
colluding). In this version of the nineteenth
century, the causes of the Civil War are
not open to debate: this is a war over slav-
ery—and, by extension, vampirism—that is
not over until both are removed from the
nation. In fact, rather than grow into the
role of abolitionist gradually, our Abraham
Lincoln is ideologically righteous from the
start. He witnesses the assault on his friend
Will, a young slave boy. He vows revenge
on Jack Barts (Marton Csokas), a man who
he comes to learn is a slaver and a vam-
pire. For Lincoln, Barts is doubly guilty.
This vampire bites (and possibly rapes)
Lincoln’s mother while he watches. When
he grows up (the adult version of Abe is
played by Benjamin Walker), his desire
for vengeance leads him to Henry Sturges
(Dominic Cooper), an eccentric and seem-
ingly ageless man who advises Lincoln in a
long war against the vampires. Lincoln acts
as Sturges’s enforcer, attacking vampires
as ordered. Only later does he realize that
Sturges is himself a vampire, and is carrying
on against Adam and his cabal for personal
reasons not unlike Lincoln’s own. In this
world, vampires cannot harm other vam-
pires. Abraham Lincoln must act on Stur-
ges’s behalf.
The film roughly splits into three nar-
rative sections: Lincoln’s childhood and
initial trauma; his life as a young man in
Springfield, Illinois; and his time as presi-
dent, including his personal stake in the
Civil War. The middle section is the best
executed, despite playing like an extended
rethinking of John Ford’s Young Mr. Lin-
coln (1939). Here, Abe meets store owner
and later political confidant Joshua Speed
(Jimmi Simpson), is reunited with Will,
courts Mary Todd (Mary Elizabeth Win-
stead), debates Stephen Douglas (Alan
Tudyk), and learns about the vampires’
larger set of plans. The sections of Lincoln’s
time in office feel especially condensed,
since they cover all of the Civil War. One
of the film’s major historical liberties is that
it sets up the personal and political climax
at the battle of Gettysburg, where Union
soldiers are fighting against Confederates
and their vampire leaders. Lincoln has it
out with Adam on a train carrying a sup-
ply of silver that is en route to be fashioned
into weaponry that can actually harm these
supernatural foes.
Although at times overly generic (its
focus on some of the more well-known
4  n  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER
battles and people of the nineteenth century
feels lazy, or like a pat on the back to a basic
recognition of American history), Abraham
Lincoln: Vampire Hunter reflects Grahame-
Smith and Bekmambetov’s personal inter-
ests. Grahame-Smith’s vampire mythology
takes some well-known ideas (the transfer
of blood through a bite, the aristocratic
associations of vampires) and adds a few
different ones (these vampires are able to
function during daylight and are mainly
impervious to silver, since Judas’s betrayal
of Jesus had to do with thirty pieces of sil-
ver). The central thematic leap of the film
(that the master-slave relationship, which is
founded in the uneven exploitation of one
person by another, is analogous to vampir-
ism) is rather clever, and helps explain how
these vampires could find a ready supply of
blood. However, this alignment between sla-
vers and vampires does undercut the film’s
relation to history. As Kim Newman notes,
“Slavery was quite bad enough—indeed,
worse than it’s depicted here—when it was
an economic rather than supernatural phe-
nomenon, and giving slavers fangs and dark
glasses tends to excuse rather than underline
a real historical human evil.”
This film has a slightly more subdued
visual style than Wanted (2008), but still
plays with a number of Bekmambetov’s
favorite tricks. In particular, Bekmambetov
takes advantage of digital cinema’s ability
to augment time. During fight sequences,
Lincoln’s skill as a warrior is rendered intel-
ligible thanks to selected changes in speed,
which variously showcase his precision
with the ax and convince us of his superior
strength and agility. Bekmambetov’s cam-
era frequently moves and keeps the action
coherent—it seems to avoid the kind of
action-sequence immediacy suggested by
shaky, handheld cameras that populate
recent action films by Paul Greengrass (The
Bourne Ultimatum [2007]) and Christopher
Nolan (The Dark Knight [2008]).
The film opened in late June 2012
in the United States to roughly $16 mil-
lion and largely negative reviews. Writing
for Wired magazine’s Underwire, Hugh
Hart opined that “the alt-history lessons
and neck-chomping money shots deserve
points for originality, but Abraham Lin-
coln: Vampire Hunter could have truly
triumphed as grand entertainment if only
its anemic human characters had received
the transfusion of humor and wit that
such an outrageous concept demands.”
Peter Travers noted that the film somehow
lost the magic of the book, which “was a
fun escapist read.” The film’s overblown
action-theatrics left him saying that “the
movie deserves a stake through the heart.”
The film was defended by some critics as
an occasionally worthwhile and technically
competent action movie. For example, Ken
Hanke says that “taken on its own terms as
a po-faced presentation of goofy material,
it’s rather fun.”—Kevin M. Flanagan
References
Ken Hanke, “Abraham Lincoln: Vam-
pire Hunter,” Asheville Mountain Xpress,
June 26, 2012, www.mountainx.com/
movies/review/abraham_lincoln_vam-
pire_hunter#.Uea0B42siSo; Hugh Hart,
“Review: Bloody Serious Abraham Lincoln:
Vampire Hunter Isn’t as Fun as It Sounds,”
Underwire, June 12, 2012, www.wired.
com/underwire/2012/06/review-abraham-
lincoln-vampire-hunter/; Gina McIntyre,
“Seth Grahame-Smith Wants to Resurrect
‘Beetlejuice,’ ‘It’,” LA Times Hero Complex,
August 9, 2012, herocomplex.latimes.com/
movies/seth-grahame-smith-wants-to-res-
urrect-beetlejuice-it/#/0; Gina McIntyre,
“Tim Burton on ‘Abraham Lincoln: Vam-
pire Hunter’: ‘I Just Wanted to See That
Movie’,” LA Times Hero Complex, June 10,
2011, herocomplex.latimes.com/movies/
tim-burton-abraham-lincoln-vampire-
hunter/; Kim Newman, “Abraham Lincoln:

Vampire Hunter,” Sight & Sound 22, no. 8
(August 2012): 52; Peter Travers, “Abra-
ham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” Rolling
Stone, June 21, 2012, www.rollingstone.
com/movies/reviews/abraham-lincoln-
vampire-hunter-20120621.
ACKER, SHANE (1971–)
Award-winning director, animator, and
designer, best known as the creator of 9,
the Tim Burton– and Timur Bekmambe-
tov–produced feature film based on his
2004 Oscar-nominated short, also titled 9
(ten minutes, thirty-three seconds). Origi-
nally from Wheaton, Illinois, Acker gradu-
ated from UCLA where he received both an
M.Arch.I (1998) and an MFA in animation
(2004). His first short film, The Hangnail
(two minutes), was completed at the UCLA
Animation Workshop. While a student at
UCLA he also made the one-minute The
Astounding Talents of Mr. Grenade (2003),
as well as his short, 9, which premiered at
Sundance in 2005 and garnered numer-
ous awards, including a Student Academy
Award, the Best in Show at the 2005 SIG-
GRAPH Electronic Theater, and a student
Emmy Award. Acker has stated that his
inspirations in the field of animation are
avant-garde artists such as Jan Švankmajer
and the Brothers Quay. The Brothers Quay
film Street of Crocodiles (1986) is clearly an
influence on 9. Acker said in an interview,
“Their [the Brothers Quay] big thing is they
use detritus, old discarded things: old dolls,
old pieces of machinery, things like that.
That creates a different, off-kilter kind of
mind-set, brings about a lot of metaphor.
I found that very inspirational and in tune
with the kind of design I wanted in 9, the
experience I wanted in that world—a world
that’s destroyed and all that’s left are these
bits and pieces. But from all that, this form
is beginning to emerge that is finding ways
to negotiate a new landscape and create a
life for itself.”
ACKERMAN, THOMAS E.  n  5
Acker has also worked as an animator
on such films as Peter Jackson’s Academy
Award–winning The Lord of the Rings: The
Return of the King (2003) and Sam Raimi’s
Oz the Great and Powerful (2013).
References
Randi Schmelzer, “Cartoon Character:
Shane Acker,” UCLA Magazine, April
1, 2006, magazine.ucla.edu/depts/style/
acker/; “Shane Acker,” IMDb, www.imdb.
com/name/nm0009942/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1;
Shane Acker’s website, www.shaneacker.
com.
ACKERMAN, THOMAS
E(DWARD) (1948–)
Versatile director of photography who shot
two early films directed by Tim Burton,
FRANKENWEENIE and BEETLEJUICE.
Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Thomas Ack-
erman learned 16 mm cinematography
at the University of Iowa after Marshall
Lovrien, manager of the University of Iowa
Motion Picture Unit, hired him to shoot
Iowa Hawkeye football games as well as
training films for the School of Dentistry.
He was hired as a cameraman by Academy
Award–winning documentary filmmaker
Charles Guggenheim in 1969, who became
one of his mentors. After serving in the
United States Air Force during the Vietnam
War, he again worked for Guggenheim, in
Washington, DC, before moving to Los
Angeles in 1973 to form a production
company with ex–Air Force friend Mike
Robe. He joined IASTE (International Alli-
ance of Theatrical Stage Employees) Local
659 in 1979, becoming a camera operator,
which gave him the opportunity to work
with experienced cinematographers Joseph
Biroc, Emil Oster, and Frank Thackery; his
final job as an operator was with Vittorio
Storaro on One from the Heart (1981).
During an interview with Jennifer M.
Wood for MovieMaker magazine in 2007,
6  n  ADAMS, DORIS C.
Ackerman addressed the issue of his eclectic
filmography:
I’m proud of that. In fact, it’s really
all part of the exploration that I think
is the basis of photography. It’s not a
“dial-it-in” business. It’s important to
mix things up and see where it leads.
I can think of occasions where I had
a choice of two things and took the
project with more dubious prospects.
One was Beetlejuice. At the same time
I was offered a nice, safe back lot com-
edy, which with its cast and script
seemed more promising from a box
office point of view. Beetlejuice didn’t
even have a lead actor when I started
prep, and I doubt that some of the
people under consideration would
have created the character in the way
Michael Keaton did. Plus, it had a
smaller paycheck. What it had was the
vision of Tim Burton, for whom I’d
previously shot Frankenweenie at Dis-
ney. I was more than willing to follow
his lead. I had no doubt that wher-
ever the trip went, Tim would make
it worthwhile.
Ackerman is a member of the Ameri-
can Society of Cinematographers, the
International Cinematographers Guild, the
Directors Guild of America, and the Acad-
emy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
References
“Thomas Ackerman ASC,” Internet Ency-
clopedia of Cinematographers, www.cine-
matographers.nl/PaginasDoPh/ackerman.
htm; Jennifer M. Wood, “The Camera
Turns Inward,” MovieMaker, February 3,
2007.
ADAMS, DORIS C. (CA. 1926–)
Tim Burton’s art teacher at Burbank High
School, with whom he reconnected in 2009
while preparing for a career retrospec-
tive exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art
(MoMA) in New York (2009–2010). In
preparation for the exhibit, Burton had
a film crew go to Mrs. Adams’s home to
interview her. The footage from that inter-
view was edited into a video that was shown
on monitors that the public could see dur-
ing his art exhibits in the museums in both
New York (MoMA) and Los Angeles (Res-
nick Pavilion, Los Angeles County Museum
of Art). During the interview, Mrs. Adams
fondly remembered her former student.
Burton invited Mrs. Adams and her family
to attend the opening of his art exhibit in
Los Angeles at the County Museum of Art
in May 2011, and she later received another
invitation from Burton, inviting her and
her family to attend the premiere of FRAN-
KENWEENIE in 2012. A talented artist
herself, she lives in Aliso Viejo in Orange
County.
References
“Tim Burton’s Art Teacher,” LACMA,
lacma.org/video/tim-burton-s-art-teacher.
THE ADVENTURES OF ICHABOD
AND MR. TOAD (US 1949)
Directors: James Algar, Clyde Geronimi,
Jack Kinney. Screenplay: Erdman Penner,
Winston Hibler, Joe Rinaldi, Ted Sears,
Homer Brightman, Harry Reeves, based
on Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the
Willows, and Washington Irving, “The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Producer:
Walt Disney. M usic : Oliver Wallace.
E ditor : John O. Young. P roduction
Supervisor: Ben Sharpsteen. Assistant
D irectors : Jack Brune, Ted Sebern.
Effects Animators: Jack Boyd, George
Rowley. Special Processes: Ub Iwerks.
B ackgrounds : Dick Anthony. C olor
and Styling: Mary Blair, Claude Coats.
Layout: Tom Codrick. Backgrounds:
 THE ADVENTURES OF ICHABOD AND MR. TOAD  n  7
  Merle Cox. Directing Animators: Ollie
Johnston, Milt Kahl, Ward Kimball,
John Lounsbery, Wolfgang Reitherman,
Frank Thomas. Character Animators:
Hal Ambro, Marc Davis, Hugh Fraser,
Hal King, Don Lusk, Fred Moore, John
Sibley, Harvey Toombs. Backgrounds:
Brice Mack, Art Riley. Layout: Harold
Doughty, Don Griffith, Lance Nol-
ley, Charles Philippi, Thor Putnam, Al
Zinnen.
C ast : Bing Crosby (Narrator, story of
Ichabod Crane); Basil Rathbone (Nar-
rator, story of Mr. Toad); Eric Blore
(Mr. Toad); Pat O’Malley (Cyril Proud-
bottom); John Ployardt (Prosecutor);
Colin Campbell (Mole); Campbell
Grant (Angus MacBadger); Claud
Allister (Rat); Oliver Wallace (Gang
Leader); Pinto Colvig (Ichabod Crane
screaming); Leslie Denison (Judge/First
Weasel); Alec Harford (Mr. Winky);
Edmond Stevens (Second Weasel); The
Rhythmaires (Additional voices).
Running Time: 68 minutes. Color.
Released Through: RKO Radio Pictures.
Animated feature produced by Walt Disney
and released to theaters on October 5, 1949,
cited by Tim Burton as one of his favorite
Disney films. The Adventures of Ichabod
and Mr. Toad is one of Disney’s so-called
package films—films composed of distinct
segments, such as Make Mine Music (1946)
and Fun and Fancy Free (1947). The first
segment is based on Kenneth Grahame’s
The Wind in the Willows (1908), the sec-
ond on WASHINGTON IRVING’s “The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820). Disney
reissued the latter segment as a stand-alone
short, as The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, in
November 1958. Since Burton has never
read Irving’s tale, Disney’s version repre-
sents Burton’s only exposure to the story.
Nonetheless, the Disney version is actually
a reasonably faithful rendition of the story.
The first segment, The Wind in the
Willows, is narrated by Basil Rathbone, and
is about the devil-may-care J. Thaddeus
Toad, Esq., the proprietor of Toad Hall.
Toad often indulges in reckless behavior
along with his loyal horse, Cyril Proud-
bottom. He has gone into debt because of
his weakness for fads, one of which, as the
story begins, is the newfangled automo-
bile. Although Toad’s friends Mole, Rat,
and Angus MacBadger try to talk him out
of it, his desire to obtain a car leads him to
trade the deed to Toad Hall to an unscru-
pulous tavern keeper, Mr. Winky. He is
jailed when Mr. Winky testifies that Toad
tried to sell him a stolen car, which weasel
bandits actually stole on Winky’s orders,
but framed Toad for the theft. Toad escapes
from jail to discover that Mr. Winky and
his weasels have taken over Toad Hall.
Happily, Toad recovers the deed to Toad
Hall with help from his friends, and prom-
ises to reform. Soon, however, his friends
are chagrined to learn that Toad and Cyril
have acquired a 1908 biplane.
The second segment, the story of Icha-
bod Crane, is narrated by Bing Crosby,
who voices the various characters using
late 1940s idiomatic American English.
The unattractive, awkward Ichabod Crane
is the new schoolmaster in Sleepy Hol-
low (an aspect altered in Burton’s SLEEPY
HOLLOW). His quirky behavior makes
him the ridicule of the town bully, Brom
Bones, who becomes Ichabod Crane’s rival
when he discovers the homely schoolmas-
ter has charmed the village’s local beauty,
Katrina Van Tassel, daughter of a wealthy
farmer. Secretly, though, Crane covets the
Van Tassel wealth. Thinking he’s losing the
battle for Katrina’s affections, Brom Bones
decides to take full advantage of Ichabod’s
highly superstitious nature, telling the story
of the local legend, the Headless Horseman,
hoping the story will frighten the school-
master away. At the town’s Halloween
8  n  THE ADVENTURES OF ICHABOD AND MR. TOAD
party, he relates in detail the Headless
Horseman, the ghost of a Hessian soldier
who was decapitated by a cannonball dur-
ing the American Revolutionary War. As he
had hoped it would do, the story terrifies
Ichabod Crane.
That night, after the Halloween party,
on his way home through the woods,
Ichabod Crane’s nerves are on edge. He
is frightened by every noise he hears,
thinking he may be meeting the Headless
Horseman. Nearing the old cemetery, he
thinks he hears the sound of a galloping
horse, only to discover that it is the sound
of cattails blown by the wind, thumping
on a log. He laughs at the mistake along
with his horse. But his laughter is inter-
rupted by the appearance of the real
Headless Horseman riding a black horse
(suspiciously similar to Brom Bones’s
horse). He and his horse flee in terror, the
Headless Horseman giving close chase.
He eventually crosses a bridge near the
old cemetery, remembering that Brom
Bones had said the Headless Horseman
is incapable of crossing the bridge. Once
across the bridge, Crane assumes that he
is safe. However, before Crane can react,
the Headless Horseman throws his sev-
ered head at him, knocking Crane from
his horse and onto the ground.
The next morning, the schoolmas-
ter’s hat is found at the bridge next to a
shattered pumpkin, but Ichabod Crane
is nowhere to be found. Sometime later,
Brom Bones takes Katrina Van Tassel as his
bride. Rumors spread that Ichabod is still
alive, married to a wealthy widow in a dis-
tant county with children who all look like
him. However, the people of Sleepy Hol-
low insist that he was “spirited away” to his
doom by the Headless Horseman.
Tim Burton told Mark Salisbury that
he remembered “always liking” the Disney
cartoon about Ichabod Crane: “I remem-
ber getting excited by the chase sequence—
I still get excited by it. Actually when I
went to CalArts, one of my teachers had
worked on it as one of the layout artists on
the chase, and he brought in some layouts
from it, so that was exciting. . . . The lay-
out and the colour and the design were so
beautiful.” Burton is most likely referring
to Don Griffith [1918–1987], the head of
the layout department at Disney Studios for
many years, who worked on The Adventures
of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. During the 1970s
he taught at CalArts, sharing his extensive
knowledge with his students.
Several story and design elements from
the Disney version are retained in Burton’s
film Sleepy Hollow. The design elements
include the prominence of the covered
bridge; the unadorned, spare look of the
farming village itself; and the strangulated,
twisted appearance of the forest trees in
the dark. Story elements inspired by the
Disney version include Ichabod Crane’s
(JOHNNY DEPP’s) initial walk through
the village street, the way Katrina Van Tas-
sel is introduced with an entourage of male
admirers, the way Crane charms Katrina
despite his awkwardness and lack of social
grace, and even an explicit citation from
the Disney version, the comic bit of action
when Ichabod Crane rides his horse back-
ward. The Gothic elements of RICK HEIN-
RICHS’s Oscar-winning production design
prompted Paul Woods to observe that
Sleepy Hollow “was the first Gothic horror
movie in Tim Burton’s career,” and it was
most certainly influenced by Disney’s ani-
mated version of the tale.
References
Mark Salisbury, ed. Burton on Burton, 2nd
rev. ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 2006);
Paul A. Woods, ed., Tim Burton: A Child’s
Garden of Nightmares, rev. and updated ed.
(London: Plexus, 2007), 147.
 ALADDIN AND HIS WONDERFUL LAMP  n  9
ALADDIN AND HIS WONDERFUL
LAMP (1986)
Director: Tim Burton. Screenplay: Mark
Curtiss, Rod Ash. Executive Producer:
Shelley Duvall. P roducers : Fredric S.
Fuchs, Bridget Terry. A ssociate P ro -
ducer: Sandra Pearson. Music: Michael
Convertino, David Newman. Produc-
tion Design: Michael Erler. C ostume
D esigner : Terry Tam Soon. M akeup
Designers: Sheryl Leigh Shulman, Ron
Greenbaum. Video Effects Consultant:
Chuck Cirino. Costumer: Beth Alexan-
der. Technical Director: Jim Ralston.
Lighting Director: Mark Levin. Audio:
Ron Cronkhite. V ideo : Ros Harmon.
S pecial E ffects : Stephen Chiodo, Jeff
Jackson, Al Kidd, Ed Nunnery. Video-
tape Editor: Marco Zappia. Art Direc-
tion: Charles Chiodo, Edward Chiodo,
Stephen Chiodo, Richard Charles
Greenbaum. Visual Effects: Rick Hein-
richs. Music Recording and Mixing: Lee
Hirschberg, Chet Himes. Videotaping:
ABC Television Center.
C ast : Shelley Duvall (Series Host, Nar-
rator), Robert Carradine (Aladdin),
James Earl Jones (Genie of the Lamp/
Genie of the Ring), Leonard Nimoy
(Evil Magician), Valerie Bertinelli (Prin-
cess Sabrina), Ray Sharkey (Grand
Vizier), Rae Allen (Aladdin’s Mother),
Joseph Maher (Sultan), Jay Abramowitz
(Habibe), Martha Velez (Lady Servant),
Bonnie Jeffries, Sandy Lenz, and Marcia
Gobel (The Three Green Women),
John Salazar (Servant).
R unning T ime : 44 minutes, 22 seconds.
Color.
Released Through: Lion’s Gate Films. Pre-
miere: July 14, 1986 (Showtime Network
Faerie Tale Theatre).
Film in the Showtime series (1982–1987)
designed to provide quality television view-
ing for children that was hosted by SHEL-
LEY DUVALL, who also served as executive
producer. Burton had worked with Duvall,
who played Susan Frankenstein in FRAN-
KENWEENIE (1984), and was invited by
her to be guest director for the Aladdin epi-
sode (shot in 1984, it did not air on Show-
time until July 1986). Writers for the series
were Mark Curtiss (Get Smart, Again! 1989)
and Rod Ash (Not Necessarily the News,
1982; Get Smart, Again! 1989). For special
effects help, Burton brought along two
talents from both VINCENT and HAN-
SEL AND GRETEL: STEPHEN CHIODO
(special effects) and his most frequent col-
laborator, RICK HEINRICHS (models and
effects).
The story of Aladdin and the magic
lamp was included in the first translation
of the Arabian Nights tales, Les Mille et
Une Nuits (The Thousand and One Nights),
first translated by Antoine Galland (1646–
1715), a French orientalist and scholar who
published the stories in twelve volumes
from 1704 to 1717, the last of which was
posthumous. Galland included the tale of
Aladdin in this collection, even though it
and the Ali Baba stories are not in the origi-
nal manuscripts he translated. In the origi-
nal version of the tale, Aladdin is Chinese,
and the story is set in China, even though
there are a number of Muslim characters
in it.
In Burton’s episode, Aladdin (Robert
Carradine) is a foolish young boy more
interested in marbles and sport than any
serious endeavor in his life. One day, he is
approached by an evil Moroccan magician
(Leonard Nimoy), posing as his long-lost
uncle. When Aladdin brings the stranger
home to meet his impoverished and wid-
owed mother (Rae Allen), she is incredu-
lous, averring that her husband never
mentioned the magician, but when the lat-
ter produces a lavish meal for them, with
promises to buy Aladdin a new wardrobe
and set him up in a business of his choice,
her apprehensions are assuaged. Soon
10  n  ALADDIN AND HIS WONDERFUL LAMP
after, the magician leads Aladdin to a spot
in the desert where he uncovers a cipher
(a ring that connotes entry into a cavern)
and commands Aladdin to descend. The
magician gives specific instructions to the
boy. Once he climbs into the cavern, Alad-
din should enter a narrow tunnel, pass two
fig trees, and retrieve an antique lamp—all
without touching the walls or he will die.
Naturally, Aladdin is apprehensive, but the
magician gives him the ring that they found
on the cipher and urges the impressionable
boy to do as he commands. When Alad-
din arrives in the magic chamber where the
lamp resides, he pauses to collect gemmed
fruit from the trees; when he plucks the
lamp from a stand in the shape of a fish,
the animal markings on the wall come to
life enraged and apparently pursue him in
his hasty return to the entrance. The greedy
magician quarrels with Aladdin, who
refuses to relinquish the lamp until he is
helped out of the cavern; the angered magi-
cian then seals Aladdin inside and departs
without the lamp. Accidentally, Alad-
din rubs the ring he has been given, and
the Genie of the Ring (James Earl Jones)
appears, granting the youth his wish to
return home.
Aladdin is famished, but his destitute
mother has little food to offer, so the boy
prepares to sell the lamp for money. When
Aladdin polishes it, the Genie of the Lamp
appears (also played by Jones), and the
mother faints away. Aladdin soon learns
that he is the new master of the magical
lamp and its impetuous inhabitant, and the
power it has to grant any wish. Soon after,
when Aladdin espies the beautiful Princess
Sabrina (Valerie Bertinelli), the daughter
of the Sultan, he falls in love at first sight,
but there is a seemingly impossible class
barrier that he must overcome to possess
her. Undaunted by this, Aladdin implores
his mother to request an audience with
the Sultan (Joseph Maher), asking for the
princess’s hand in marriage. He sends the
gemmed fruit he had acquired earlier with
her to give to the Sultan as a pledge of his
love and marital intentions. The Sultan
loves beauty and wealth; he is impressed by
the fabulous jewels and is inclined to grant
Aladdin’s wish, but an ambitious court
sycophant, the Grand Vizier (Ray Sharkey),
wishes to wed the princess himself and per-
suades the Sultan to give the matter further
consideration.
When the Sultan decides to let the
Vizier marry his daughter, Aladdin is dev-
astated and turns once again to the Genie
of the Lamp; the marriage ceremony is
cancelled and the Sultan, whose court is
filled with the novel and exotic, such as an
animated Panda bear who drinks from a
cup, a “snake-in-the-box,” a phonographic
device, agrees to Aladdin’s matrimonial suit
under the condition that Aladdin provide
him with “an object of great entertainment
value.” Aladdin immediately summons the
Genie of the Lamp, who pompously, but
unimaginatively, offers gold, jewels, and
silver. When Aladdin says it must be some-
thing “more imaginative than anything that
exists on earth,” the Genie is clueless, insist-
ing that he possesses “great powers but little
imagination.” It is Aladdin himself who
invents the idea of a television: “How about
a box with a window? You look in the win-
dow and see wonderful objects: people,
places, voices, and sounds and colors,”
which does indeed win the day for Aladdin,
who further enlists the Genie’s powers to
build a palace for his princess bride.
Aladdin and Sabrina enjoy marital
bliss, and Aladdin endears himself with
the common people through his gener-
osity, but his nemesis, the Evil Magician,
returns and contrives to steal the lamp.
He absconds with it, the palace, and the
princess, and Aladdin is condemned, but
begs for time to find and return the prin-
cess. He searches in vain and is ready to

face his death, but when he rubs the ring
he has kept, the Genie of the Ring sum-
mons a magic carpet that transports Alad-
din to the location of the objects for which
he has been searching. He covertly enlists
Sabrina’s aid in tricking the Magician by
pretending to seduce him, and Aladdin
steals the lamp. Its Genie, delighted to have
his former master back, vanquishes the
magician, whom we view via the Sultan’s
television as having been transported to a
fiery place and prodded with pitchforks.
Thus, Aladdin’s good fortune is restored;
the Genie of the Lamp, also the narrator,
tells us that Aladdin lived with Sabrina hap-
pily ever after, that he himself became Sul-
tan after the death of his father-in-law and
ruled wisely. The episode concludes with
the Genie’s comment that this occurred a
thousand years ago, and that he is looking
for a new master.
Although operating within very lim-
ited budget and time constraints, this
is a quality episode, with superb acting.
Nimoy plays the villain convincingly, and
James Earl Jones, doubling as both genies
and serving as narrator, portrays the mis-
chievous Genie of the Lamp with a relish,
augmented by his incomparable voice and
infectious laugh. The sequence of animated
objects at the Sultan’s court (one of the
more delightful moments in the episode)
seems unmistakably Burton. The inclusion
of the television as a wondrous device is
also characteristic of Burton. For instance,
in DARK SHADOWS (2012), Barnabas
Collins (JOHNNY DEPP) is astonished to
see Karen Carpenter singing in a TV set
and, believing it to be dark magic (“What
sorcery is this?”) exclaims, “Show thyself,
tiny songstress!” Critics have noted also
that figures drawn on the wall in the cav-
ern are recognizably like Burton’s and note
also as particularly Burton’s the use of the
forced perspective in the cavern sequence.
This early effort shows Burton’s contin-
ALEXANDER, SCOTT  n  11
ued interest in fairy tale and his developing
directorial and artistic ability and taste.—
Rebecca A. Umland
References
Alison McMahan, The Films of Tim Burton:
Animating Live Action in Contemporary
Hollywood (New York: Continuum, 2005),
47; Colin Odell and Michelle Le Blanc,
Tim Burton: The Pocket Essential Guide
(Harpenden, England: Pocket Essentials,
2005), 35.
ALEXANDER, SCOTT (1963–)
Producer and screenwriter, coauthor of sev-
eral acclaimed motion pictures with long-
time writing partner LARRY KARASZEW-
SKI. A native of Los Angeles, Alexander
met Larry Karaszewski in the early 1980s as
a freshman at USC’s School of Cinematic
Arts, becoming on-and-off roommates over
the next few years. He began his Hollywood
career toiling on low-budget horror films as
a music editor. As a director, his work has
appeared on MTV and Nickelodeon. He
has also written for HBO’s Tales from the
Crypt and the horror anthology series Mon-
sters (1988–1991), for which he directed
two episodes as well. He and frequent coau-
thor Karaszewski began their screenwriting
career with the comedies Problem Child
(1990) and Problem Child 2 (1991), later
writing Agent Cody Banks (2003). They
first worked with Tim Burton on the highly
acclaimed biopic ED WOOD, for which
they were nominated for Best Screenplay
by the Writers Guild of America. He and
Karaszewski were later brought in as writers
on MARS ATTACKS! in an attempt to slash
the budget. Subsequently, they wrote the
biopic The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), for
which they won the Golden Globe for Best
Screenplay, and Man on the Moon (1999),
about comedian Andy Kaufman. Subse-
quently, he and Karaszewski wrote and
directed the comedy Screwed (2000), which
12  n  ALICE IN WONDERLAND
Alexander also directed, and produced
the Bob Crane biopic Auto Focus (2002).   
They also wrote the Stephen King adapta-
tion 1408 (2007). In 2014, Burton directed
BIG EYES, Alexander and Karaszewski’s
biopic of Margaret and Walter Keane. He
and Karaszewski have also written several
unproduced biopics about fringe characters
outside the mainstream, including Believe
It or Not! about the colorful cartoonist and
anthropologist of the strange, Robert Rip-
ley, which Tim Burton purportedly was at
one point interested in directing. They have
also written biopics about the Marx Broth-
ers, the Village People, children’s television
producers Sid and Marty Krofft, and Rol-
len Stewart, the “Rainbow Man,” known
for wearing a colorful rainbow Afro wig at
sporting events. Alexander is a mentor in
the USC School of Cinema and has served
on the Writers Guild’s Board of Direc-
tors for many years. He has volunteered
as a Sundance Writing Lab adviser several
times, and has taught at writing workshops
around the world. Alexander is married
with three children.
References
“Scott Alexander,” IMDb, www.imdb.
com/name/nm0018735/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1;
“Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski,”
Final Draft, www.finaldraft.com/company/
hall-of-fame/scott-alexander-larry-karasze-
wski; Scott Alexander and Larry Karasze-
wski, “Introduction,” in Ed Wood (London:
Faber and Faber, 1995), v–x.
C ast : Johnny Depp (Mad Hatter), Mia
ALICE IN WONDERLAND
(US/UK 2010)
Director: Tim Burton. Screenplay: Linda
Woolverton. Executive Producers: Chris
Lebanon, Peter Tobyansen. Producers:
Joe Roth, Jennifer Todd, Suzanne Todd,
Richard D. Zanuck. C o - producers :
Katterli Frauenfelder, Tom Peitzman.
Associate Producer: Derek Frey. Line
P roducer (UK): Mary Richards. C in -
ematography : Dariusz Wolski. M usic :
Danny Elfman. Film Editor: Chris Leb-
enzon. P roduction D esign : Robert
Stromberg. Supervising Art Director:
Stefan Dechant. Art Direction: Todd
Cherniawsky, Andrew L. Jones, Mike
Stassi, Christina Wilson. Set Decora-
tion : Karen O’Hara. C ostume D esign :
Colleen Atwood. First Assistant Direc-
tor: Katterli Frauenfelder. Third Assis-
tant D irector (UK) (crowd): Sarah
Hood. Key Second Assistant Director
(UK): Emma Horton. Second Assistant
D irector : Brandon Lambdin. S econd
A ssistant D irector (UK): Bryn Law-
rence. DGA T rainee : Rob Morrone.
S econd S econd A ssistant D irector :
Gregory J. Pawlik Jr. Co-second Assis-
tant D irectors (UK): Samar Pollitt,
Kim Whittaker. Special Effects Super-
visor (UK): Michael Dawson. A ddi -
tional Special Effects Technicians: Rob
Heggie, Andy Williams. Special Effects
Technician (UK): Mark Holdcroft. Spe-
cial E ffects S upervisor : Michael Lant-
ieri. S pecial E ffects F oreman : Roland
Loew. Special Effects Technician: Jimmy
Lorimer, Clark Templeman, Jon Thack-
ery. Visual Effects Senior Editor (SPI):
Elaine Andrianos. Visual Effects Data
Wrangler (SPI): Chris Antonini. Com-
positor (Matte World Digital): Daphne
Apellanes-Ackerson. Cloth and Hair
Technical Director (SPI): Neil Atkins.
Technical Engineer (SPI): Nick Bali.
Wasikowska (Alice Kingsleigh), Helena
Bonham Carter (Red Queen), Anne
Hathaway (White Queen), Crispin
Glover (Stayne, Knave of Hearts),
Matt Lucas (Tweedledee/Tweedledum,
Michael Sheen (voice) (White Rabbit),
Stephen Fry (voice) (Cheshire Cat),
Alan Rickman (voice) (Blue Caterpillar),
Barbara Windsor (voice) (Dormouse),

   Paul Whitehouse (voice) (March Hare),
Timothy Spall (voice) (Bayard), Marton
Csokas (Charles Kingsleigh), Tim Pigott-
Smith (Lord Ascot), John Surman (Col-
league #1), Peter Mattinson (Colleague
#2), Lindsay Duncan (Helen Kingsleigh),
Geraldine James (Lady Ascot), Leo Bill
(Hamish), Frances de la Tour (Aunt
Imogene), Jemma Powell (Margaret
Kingsleigh), John Hopkins (Lowell), Elea-
nor Gecks (Faith Chattaway), Eleanor
Tomlinson (Fiona Chattaway), Rebecca
Crookshank (Strange Woman Kisser),
Michael Gough (voice) (Dodo Bird),
Imelda Staunton (voice) (Tall Flower
Faces), Christopher Lee (voice) (Jabber-
wocky), Mairi Ella Challen (Six-Year-Old
Alice), Holly Hawkins (Woman with
Large Nose in Red Queen Court), Lucy
Davenport (Woman with Big Ears in
Red Queen Court), Joel Swetow (Man
with Large Belly in Red Queen Court),
Jessica Oyelowo (Woman with Large
Poitrine in Red Queen Court), Ethan
Cohn (Man with Large Chin in Red
Queen Court), Richard Alonzo (Man
with Big Forehead in Red Queen Court),
Harry Taylor (Ship Captain), Jim Carter
(voice) (Executioner), Frank Welker
(voice) (Additional Vocal Effects), David
“Elsewhere” Bernal (Hatter Futter-
wacken Dance Double), Chris Grabher
(Hightopp Hat Juggler), Caroline Royce
(Party Dancer), Bonnie Parker (Party
Dancer), Simone Sault (Party Dancer),
Leigh Daniels (Party Dancer), Carl
Walker (Party Dancer), Matt Dempsey
(Party Dancer), Chris Grierson (Party
Dancer), Dale Mercer (Party Dancer),
David Lale (Party Musician), John Bass
(Party Musician), Nicholas Levy (Party
Musician), Patrick Roberts (Party Musi-
cian), Phillip Granell (Party Musician),
Stephen Giles (Party Musician), Hilary
Morris (Maypole Dancer), Jacqueline
Tribble (White Queen Loyalist).
Running Time: 108 minutes, 35 seconds.
Released Through: Walt Disney Pictures.
ALICE IN WONDERLAND  n  13
Movie based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and
Through the Looking Glass (1871) that pro-
vides a cohesiveness and purpose, trans-
forming the original fantasy novels into
a rite-of-passage story, perhaps owing its
greatest debt to The Wizard of Oz (1939).
Alice in Wonderland became a massive hit
for Disney, a big and imaginative movie
that also played to two of the company’s
greatest strengths: its association with Tim
Burton and the film’s connection to the
proto-psychedelic Alice in Wonderland
animated feature from 1951. In addition
to featuring a naive heroine who must
undergo a journey in an alternate reality
in order to gain self-knowledge, Alice in
Wonderland shares the frame device and
features character doubles in both worlds.
The characters in Dorothy’s Oz have coun-
terparts in her ordinary life in Kansas, as so,
too, we see doubles Underland that match
the characters in Alice’s ordinary life.
In the film, Alice Kingsleigh (Mia
Wasikowska), now nineteen years old,
revisits the land she had dreamed of repeat-
edly at the age of six. Like many of Bur-
ton’s films that owe a debt to the fairy tale
and fantasy genres, Alice in Wonderland
employs a frame device to the main narra-
tive. The film opens with a scene between
the six-year-old Alice and her father,
Charles (Marton Csokas), who comforts
her after her nightmare about visiting a
land inhabited by animated, talking ani-
mals. Charles, an innovative Victorian busi-
nessman who prides himself in thinking of
“six impossible things before breakfast,”
bequeaths his imagination to his daughter
and assures her when she asks him that she
is indeed “bonkers,” but that “all the best
people are.” The frame then jumps ahead
thirteen years: Charles has recently died
and Alice’s mother (Lindsay Duncan) has
arranged a marriage for her with the son
of Lord Ascot (Tim Piggott-Smith). At the
14  n  ALICE IN WONDERLAND
engagement party, Alice leaves unanswered
the priggish Lord’s proposal, racing off to
chase a beckoning white rabbit in a waist-
coat, which leads her to a reprise of her
earlier adventures as a child. Once she falls
down the rabbit hole, Alice’s adventures
begin anew, even though she is persuaded
that now, as then, it was all a dream. When
the story of Alice’s adventures in wonder-
land concludes, she returns to the present
moment at the nuptial garden party, ready
to reject the unwanted marriage proposal,
along with all of the confining Victorian
mores that accompany it, and is prepared
to follow in her father’s footsteps as an
imaginative venture capitalist.
The white rabbit has been sent to the
quotidian world in which Alice lives to
bring her back to Underland, where her
destiny in that world awaits her. In her thir-
teen-year absence, civil strife has wreaked
havoc on the land; the Red Queen (HEL-
ENA BONHAM CARTER) has usurped the
throne from her sister, the White Queen
(Anne Hathaway), but her tyrannous reign,
as written in an oracular script, can only be
brought to an end in a prescribed way and
on a particular day. Alice must acquire an
ancient magical weapon, the Vorpal Sword,
in order to kill the Red Queen’s weapon, a
creature known as the Jabberwocky, on
Frabjous Day. Only Alice wielding this
sword on the given day can defeat the Red
Queen’s champion. Alice, whose memories
of Underland are somewhat vague, is ini-
tially a reluctant heroine, believing that this
is her dream and that she can control the
events in it. For this reason, some charac-
ters, including the courageous Dormouse,
assert that she must be the “wrong Alice,”
which the resident sage, a hookah-smok-
ing caterpillar named Absolem, neither
denies nor confirms, saying that she is “not
hardly” the right Alice. This is because, as
the Hatter (JOHNNY DEPP) avers, in the
time that has passed since her last visit,
Alice has lost her “muchness,” her indepen-
dent spirit and imagination that her father
had imparted to her. She insists on thinking
logically, insisting that this is a dream, and
that she can leave Underland at will. How-
ever, when the Hatter is taken prisoner by
the Red Queen, Alice begins to transform
into a heroine, becoming “almost Alice”
and then Alice “at last,” as Absolem pro-
nounces.
On the day of destiny, she chooses to
accept her role as champion for the White
Queen, gains the confidence to defeat the
Jabberwocky, and, in doing so, restores
the cosmic order to Underland. The grate-
ful White Queen then gives Alice an elixir
of Jabberwocky blood, which will take her
home when she wishes it, like the ruby
slippers of the Wicked Witch of the East,
given to Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. The
slippers and the Jabberwocky blood derive
from evil, yet their power serves a good
cause in returning the heroines home, once
they have completed their quests for matu-
rity.
The White Queen shares affinities with
Glenda, the Good Witch of the West from
The Wizard of Oz, not only in her whiteness
and general demeanor, but also in gestures
and mannerisms, such as holding her hands
in the air when she speaks. Other details
suggest the film’s indebtedness to Oz: the
monkeys at the Red Queen’s court and the
fact that her own minions, the Red Knights,
rejoice when she is defeated, as the Wicked
Witch’s hail Dorothy when she vanquishes
the Wicked Witch of the West, whom they
were compelled to serve against their will.
Alice, at the prompting of the Hatter, con-
siders the idea of remaining in Underland,
but this, of course, is an impossibility. She
has grown in confidence and responsibil-
ity, and knows she must return to settle
the question of her future life. She drinks
the elixir and returns, rejects the boorish
marriage proposal, and reassures her fam-
 ALICE IN WONDERLAND (VIDEO GAMES)  n  15
ily that her life will have purpose without
a loveless marriage. The film concludes
with Alice becoming her father: she forges
a business alliance with Lord Ascot’s father,
who had rejected Charles’s venture years
before, considering it too implausible, but
had been proven wrong. Upon Charles’s
death, the elder Lord Ascot had purchased
Charles’s company, and he welcomes Alice,
with her vision of how to expand its hori-
zons, with trade routes to China, as an
apprentice partner.
Alice in Wonderland as a rite-of-pas-
sage story gives purpose to the heroine’s
adventures in Underland. It is here that her
askesis, or training, arms her with the cour-
age and insight to reject a deadening life of
Victorian society, in favor of pursuing her
imagination. Like her father, she sees that it
is something to cultivate and cherish, even
though it makes her different from others
around her. In this way, Alice shares affini-
ties with other artist figures in Burton’s
work, such as Edward Scissorhands, yet her
story ends more happily, for her imagina-
tion, while making her independent, does
not keep her in isolation, but opens new
vistas in the real world.
The film grossed over $1.02 billion
worldwide, making it Tim Burton’s most
successful film to date. Although praised
for its visual style, special effects, and
Johnny Depp’s performance as the Mad
Hatter, the film received mixed reviews,
criticized for its lack of narrative coher-
ence, poor loyalty to the source material,
and over-dependence on CGI (computer-
generated imagery). At the eighty-third
Academy Awards (2011), the film received
Oscars for Best Achievement in Art Direc-
tion (ROBERT STROMBERG and KAREN
O’HARA) and Best Achievement in Cos-
tume Design (COLLEEN ATWOOD). The
film was also nominated for Best Achieve-
ment in Visual Effects and for Golden
Globes, BAFTA (British Academy of Film
and Television Arts) Awards, and numer-
ous other awards as well. As of May 2015, it
is the eighteenth highest-grossing film of all
time.—Rebecca A. Umland
References
“Alice in Wonderland,” IMDb, www.imdb.
com/title/tt1014759/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1; “All
Time Box Office,” Box Office Mojo. www.
boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/.
ALICE IN WONDERLAND
(VIDEO GAMES)
Video games developed in connection with
Tim Burton’s ALICE IN WONDERLAND.
The most lavish tie-in game was developed
by the French outfit Etranges Libellules and
published by Disney Interactive Studios.
This Alice in Wonderland (2010, Nintendo
Wii and PC) transfers the lavish imagery of
the film into a 3-D platformer with puz-
zle-solving elements. The player controls
a series of characters from the story (the
White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, etc.) who
protect Alice from the machinations of the
Red Queen. Reviewers seemed to enjoy the
games’ visuals, but were less enthusiastic
about other elements. Kristan Reed from
GameSpot writes that “as much as your
admiration for the more puzzle-oriented
gameplay grows as the game progresses,
your overall appreciation is held back no
end by the alarmingly dull fighting system.”
Disney also published two hand-
held titles that take relatively divergent
approaches to the Alice in Wonderland
property. Alice in Wonderland: An Adven-
ture beyond the Mirror, developed by Disney
Interactive Beijing (for play on iOS com-
patible platforms like iPhones), is a side-
scrolling platformer with puzzle and action
elements. With graphics that harken back to
the crisp, vivid colors of the 16-bit era, Alice
in Wonderland: An Adventure beyond the
Mirror has an optically convincing Won-
derland. However, Keith Andrew of Pocket
16  n  ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND
Gamer UK described it as “a composite of
the sterile and the haphazard,” criticizing it
for being a game that never really coalesced
into a coherent whole. By far the most suc-
cessful Alice in Wonderland game is the Nin-
tendo DS release. Developed by Etranges
Libellules and published by Disney Inter-
active, it is completely different from the
Wii and PC ports (moreover, it only bears a
passing narrative resemblance to the film).
A 2-D platformer with puzzle and action
elements, it has an arresting visual style that
looks like a combination of Burton’s own
drawings, a popular distillation of the ideas
of German Expressionism, and manga.
The game sports an innovative use of the
DS stylus. Players control most movement
and action with this little drawing utensil,
which adds a new kind of challenge since it
moves away from the button-mashing lit-
eracy that characterizes most games. This
Alice in Wonderland conceives of Wonder-
land as an unstable place whose locales must
be cobbled together through the discovery
of puzzle pieces (this choice fits the visual
style of the game, and also works as a nod
to readings of the Alice in Wonderland story
as a tale of recovery that operates along the
lines of psychoanalysis). The Telegraph’s
Nick Cowen praises the game as “full of
surprises,” conceding that “it may not share
too much in common with the Tim Burton
film in terms of its visual style and plot, but
its whimsical sense of wonder and charming
presentation will entice players of all ages.”
The PC, Wii, and DS ports are curi-
ously blind to the feminist message at the
heart of Burton’s film. The film of Alice
in Wonderland is explicitly about Alice’s
empowerment—the proper climax of the
movie is her slaying of the Jabberwocky—
yet these games all put the player in control
of supporting characters who have to pro-
tect Alice. Players looking to control Alice
as she encounters danger have to settle for
Alice in Wonderland: An Adventure beyond
the Mirror, or should opt for the darkly
Gothic (and occasionally Burtonesque)
chills of American McGee’s Alice (2000,
PC).—Kevin M. Flanagan
References
Keith Andrew, “Alice in Wonderland: An
Adventure beyond the Mirror,” Pocket Gamer
UK, March 4, 2010, www.pocketgamer
.co.uk/r/iPhone/Alice+in+Wonderland%
3A+An+Adventure+Beyond+the+Mirror/
review.asp?c=18859; Nick Cowen, “Alice in
Wonderland video game review for the DS,”
Telegraph, March 2, 2010, www.telegraph.
co.uk/technology/video-games/7307986/
Alice-In-Wonderland-video-game-review-
for-the-DS.html; Kristan Reed, “Alice in
Wonderland Review,” GameSpot, April 9,
2010, www.gamespot.com/alice-in-won-
derland-2010/reviews/alice-in-wonderland-
review-6257497/.
ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN
WONDERLAND
An expanded, fantastic story with a basis in
an actual trip taken by a group, including
author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (bet-
ter known by his pen name, LEWIS CAR-
ROLL) and Alice Liddell (the daughter of
Henry Liddell, the dean of Christ Church,
Oxford). Alice’s Adventures in Wonder-
land (1865) became a commercial success
and has remained a perennial favorite for
scholars and children alike. Beginning as
the handwritten manuscript Alice’s Adven-
tures Underground (1864) that was given to
Alice as a Christmas gift, Carroll expanded
and augmented his story into a published
edition featuring drawings by John Tenniel.
While something of a tribute to one little
girl, it has since become widely appreciated
outside of its initial coterie.
The setup is familiar enough: Alice
follows an anthropomorphic rabbit down
a hole, therein discovering a portal to a
world that mixes the familiar (Victorian
 ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND  n  17
proprieties and protocols, especially as they
relate to class) with the outlandish (talk-
ing animals, animated objects). Carroll,
a mathematician, Anglican deacon, and
occasional writer of fiction, is known for
his wild imagination, and is perhaps the
most famous proponent of logical puzzles
and (with Edward Lear) literary nonsense
(amphigouri) of this historical period.
While the overall effect of the book can be
read as instructive—it makes an appeal for
kindness, rational decision making, and
levelheadedness—it nonetheless showcases
a radical reordering of the world. Alice fre-
quently fluctuates in size, encounters arti-
ficial attempts at controlling nature (such
as the episode where the three card soldiers
paint white roses red in the queen’s gar-
dens), and attends a tea party populated
with substance abusers. William Empson
has read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as
a Freudian dream-story about birth trauma
(Alice escapes a river of tears and grows too
large for a room, suggesting the necessity of
emerging from the mother). The story and
its imagery are strong enough to stand up to
even the most outré of interpretations.
Because of the various film adaptations
over the years, events in Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland and Through the Looking
Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
often get folded into one another. Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland showcases a
number of the most fantastic tableaux,
including the encounters with the Che-
sire Cat, the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, and
the kangaroo court presided over by the
Queen of Hearts. Through the Looking Glass
famously uses chess imagery and the famil-
iar Humpty Dumpty, and has the memora-
ble encounter with Tweedledum and Twee-
dledee. There is a loose continuity between
the two books (Alice, the cat Dinah, the
Queen appear in both), suggesting a kind of
fantastic canonicity, yet they work equally
well as stand-alone stories.
In addition to many print and graphic
retellings aimed primarily at children, Car-
roll’s Alice has been adapted to the stage
(most famously in a pastiche by H. Savile
Clark that ran in London in 1886) and has
been filmed as early as 1903. This Alice in
Wonderland, directed by Percy Snow and
Cecil M. Hepworth was, at the time of
release, the longest British film at twelve
minutes. The most famous American ver-
sions of the story include the star-studded
Paramount film Alice in Wonderland (1933,
Norman Z. McLeod) that showcased Cary
Grant as the Mock Turtle and W. C. Fields
as Humpty Dumpty, as well as the 1951
Disney adaptation that surely ranks as that
studio’s most visible piece of proto-psy-
chedelia. Codirected by Clyde Geronimi,
Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske,
this Alice in Wonderland is a curious mix
of wonder and terror. That Disney would
later be receptive to Burton’s film certainly
has to do with the longevity of their pre-
vious version (though Burton has publicly
critiqued the film, claiming “it’s not like
the Disney cartoon was the greatest”). In
Britain, the most worthwhile adaptation is
Jonathan Miller’s television Alice in Won-
derland (1966), a conscious attempt at
making the story more odd and dreamlike,
while stripping away the cheery sentimen-
talism that had accumulated around its
telling over the course the of the previous
century. With lots of location photography,
a score by Raki Shankar, and appearances
by Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Michael Red-
grave, and Eric Idle, this version thoroughly
updates Alice to the cultural world of the
1960s, even as it remains a meticulous
period piece.—Kevin M. Flanagan
References
Simon Brown, “Alice in Wonderland
(1903),” BFI Screenonline. www.scree-
nonline.org.uk/film/id/974410/index.
html; Lewis Carrol, “Alice’s Adventures in
18  n  ATWOOD, COLLEEN
Wonderland,” in Alice in Wonderland, 2nd
ed., ed. Donald J. Gray (New York: Nor-
ton, 1992), 1–99; Lewis Carroll, Alice’s
Adventures Underground, British Library
Online Gallery, Add. MS. 46700, www.
bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/alice/accessible/
introduction.html; Lewis Carroll, “Through
the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found
There,” in Alice in Wonderland, 101–209;
Lewis Carroll, “From Alice on the Stage,”
in Gray, Alice in Wonderland, 280; Wil-
liam Empson, “The Child as Swain,” in
Gray, Alice in Wonderland, 349; Rohan
McWilliam, “Jonathan Miller’s Alice in
Wonderland (1966): A Suitable Case for
Treatment,” Historical Journal of Film,
Radio, and Television 31, no. 2 (June 2011):
229–46; Larry Rohter, “Drinking Blood:
New Wonders of Alice’s World,” New York
Times, February 28, 2010, AR 13, www.
nytimes.com/2010/02/28/movies/28alice.
html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
ATWOOD, COLLEEN (1948–)
Costume designer whose contributions
add significantly to the iconic quality of
many Tim Burton films, especially early
films such as EDWARD SCISSORHANDS,
midcareer ones such as SLEEPY HOL-
LOW, and recent ones such as ALICE
IN WONDERLAND. Altogether, she has
designed costumes for nine Burton films:
DARK SHADOWS, Alice in Wonderland,
SWEENEY TODD, BIG FISH, PLANET
OF THE APES, Sleepy Hollow, MARS
ATTACKS! ED WOOD, and Edward Scis-
sorhands. Although some costumes, such as
Edward’s, appear very similar to Burton’s
concept sketches from months or years
prior to production, Atwood’s contribu-
tions are not to be undervalued. Because
of his own artistic background, Burton is
more aesthetically demanding than other
directors when it comes to almost every
aspect of design, including his characters’
wardrobes. As Atwood says, “He has a
phenomenal eye for what’s important in a
negative space. . . . He is not a cluttery kind
of guy.”
A costume designer must think spa-
tially, must negotiate materials with desired
visual and even acoustic effects (the sound
of a dress or cape when it swishes), and not
only has to bring a director’s conceptions
to life, but also has to make the costumes
comfortable and safe for actors, all while
staying within a budget. Production crews
had significant difficulty with these issues
in other iconic Burton films such as Bat-
man, in which Burton refused to shorten
the costume’s ears so that Michael Keaton
could fit inside the Batmobile. Conse-
quently, the vehicle interior had to be rede-
signed. In Burton’s films, the costumes can
often take on distinct personalities and play
a role in helping actors develop a feel for
their parts. As Burton says about Sweeney
Todd, “Costumes are another character in
the movie. . . . Most of the great actors I’ve
worked with, when they put on the cos-
tume, they become the character. It helps
them find who the character is. It helps
their performance. . . . [Atwood] gets that.”
For Sweeney Todd, Atwood designed
costumes to create a “mid-Victorian” tone,
as she says, “without making it too pre-
cious,” in order to match a set based on
London architecture from the 1830s–1860s.
She recalls Depp finding “a starting point”
for his inspiration during wardrobe ses-
sions when he tried on a single neck rag.
This starting point led to other key aspects
of the costume, such as a holster rig for
Todd’s razors, fastened with hobnails.
The film contains a number of close-up
shots that emphasize the holster, as when
Todd reaches for his razors and slides
them out from their holding place. Many
of Mrs. Lovett’s dresses use a paisley design
adopted by Europeans from India during
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
and were constructed to show off a wide

emotional palette given that Lovett’s char-
acter runs a gamut of seductive, frazzled,
deceitful, and cheerful (as in the song, “Bye
the Sea”). Alan Rickman recounts the deci-
sion to downgrade Judge Turpin’s ward-
robe and to add “horrible stains” to the
clothes, adding his own view at the time
that “if this guy’s wandering around not
shaving properly and with dust on his coat,
let’s take this further.”
The notion of costumes becoming
their own characters is relevant to many
other films in which Atwood has collabo-
rated with Burton. In Sleepy Hollow, it
is largely the headless horseman’s eaten
uniform and molten cape that induces
terror in audiences. In Planet of the Apes,
costumes foreground the cunning and
aggressiveness of certain apes contrasted
with their human adversaries. Atwood paid
special attention to the armor, designing
a costume for General Thade that “gives
his body an almost spider-like, powerful
appearance” and a helmet “longer than the
other ape headgear, to set him apart from
the battalions of ape soldiers.” In contrast,
Atwood and her team designed human
clothes to appear simpler, and more vul-
nerable, with silk screen and animal skin
designs. To complement the other human
costumes, Atwood’s team “distressed”
Mark Wahlberg’s military uniform with
burn patterns and tears—which also added
verisimilitude to his traumatic arrival on
the planet.
The Mad Hatter’s costume in Alice and
Wonderland may be one of Atwood’s most
striking, once again created around practi-
cal aspects of the character and period, such
as a sash made from connected spools of
thread that a hatter might have used, as well
as ribbons dangling from his belt “to make
a hat at the last minute,” as Atwood has
explained. The coat is made from layers of
silk burned in places “to give it a mood ring
effect for lightning.” Other elements of the
ATWOOD, COLLEEN  n  19
costume include embroidered pants, a joke
tie that expands and contracts in response
to the hatter’s mood, bright mismatched
socks, and a waistcoat stitched from mot-
ley fabrics and given mismatched buttons.
The overall intent was to dress the Hatter
as “something like a magpie.” Interestingly,
Atwood’s design for Crispin Glover’s char-
acter in the same film was never actually
worn on set. Instead, he wore a green cast-
ing of it. Computer animators later scanned
Atwood’s costume and digitally stretched it
onto the actor’s frame.
In interviews, Atwood has stressed
the importance of having a background
in fashion and costuming as well as his-
tory, art, and architecture. Her knowl-
edge of aesthetics is apparent in her use of
Elizabethan, Georgian, Victorian, Baroque,
Gothic, Edwardian, and various modern
and postmodern styles and conventions.
Enthusiasts have identified inspiration
for Atwood’s costumes in books of dress
patterns, histories of fashion, and histori-
cal works of art. For example, inspiration
for Miranda Richardson’s knotted dress
in Sleepy Hollow may lie in a portrait of
Sidonia von Bork by Edward Burne-Jones
(1860), “Vanity” by Frank Cadogan Cow-
per, or Cowper’s “Venetian Ladies Listen-
ing to the Serenade.”
The long-standing collaboration
between Burton and Atwood began with
Edward Scissorhands, and the story is remi-
niscent of how Burton has tapped many
talented artists from unlikely places—such
as composer Danny Elfman, who was ini-
tially worried he would “fuck up” Pee-Wee’s
Big Adventure. As Atwood explains, “I was
shocked that I got the job, because I hadn’t
done that many films at the time, and I was
really excited to do it.”
In the many years since their first col-
laboration, Atwood has won several major
awards for costume design including a
2002 Academy Award for Chicago, a 2006
20  n  AUGUST, JOHN
Academy Award for Memoirs of a Geisha,
and a 2011 Academy Award for Alice in
Wonderland. Her nominations for Burton
films include Sleepy Hollow and Sweeney
Todd. Her designs have also played a major
part in the visual atmosphere of other
films such as Silence of the Lambs, A Series
of Unfortunate Events, and Snow White
and The Huntsman. Even actors who col-
laborate with Burton will sometimes wear
Atwood designs at events such as movie
premieres and award ceremonies. Helena
Bonham Carter wore a black dress designed
by Atwood at the 2011 Academy Awards,
where Atwood won Best Costume Design
for Alice in Wonderland.—Brian Ray
References
“Alice in Wonderland—Fashion and
Style,” YouTube video, www.youtube.
com/watch?v=LCiAF6fliw0; “The Costume
Designers,” Hollywood Reporter, Decem-
ber 19, 2012; Sweeney Todd Extras, DVD
Release, 2008.
AUGUST, JOHN (1970–)
Lyricist, screenwriter, and director who
has written several Tim Burton films.
Born John Meise in Boulder, Colorado,
on August 4, 1970, August earned a degree
in journalism from Drake University and
an MFA from the Peter Stark Producing
Program at USC. He established himself
as a screenwriter with the fast-paced black
comedy Go (1999), which became a modest
hit. In 1998, August persuaded Columbia
Pictures to option the film rights to Daniel
Wallace’s picaresque novel Big Fish: A Novel
of Mythic Proportions (1998), for which he
then wrote the screenplay adaptation. His
adaptation of BIG FISH earned August a
2003 BAFTA Award nomination for Best
Adapted Screenplay. He would later write
the book for the Broadway musical adapta-
tion of Big Fish (2013), as well, with music
and lyrics by Andrew Lippa. (Directed and
choreographed by Susan Stroman, Big Fish
closed after ninety-eight performances.)
While Big Fish was in development,
August coauthored the animated feature
Titan A.E. (2000), and was one of the coau-
thors of Charlie’s Angels (2000) and Char-
lie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003). He wrote
the screenplay adaptation of Roald Dahl’s
CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FAC-
TORY and also wrote the lyrics to “Won-
ka’s Welcome Song,” which was nomi-
nated for a Grammy Award for Best Song
Written for Motion Picture, Television or
Other Visual Media, which he shared with
DANNY ELFMAN. He also wrote the lyrics
to “Remains of the Day,” “Tears to Shed,”
and “According to Plan” for CORPSE
BRIDE, on which he was also a cowriter.
With SETH GRAHAME-SMITH, he coau-
thored DARK SHADOWS, and wrote the
screenplay for the feature length FRAN-
KENWEENIE.
August turned to directing with the
dark fantasy The Nines (2007), for which he
also wrote the screenplay. He’s also written
works of short fiction, including The Variant
and Snake People, both available as Kindle
editions. Through his company, Quote-
Unquote Apps, he has released several popu-
lar apps and doodads, including Highland,
Weekend Read, Bronson Watermarker, and
Less IMDb. In addition, he collaborated with
Stu Maschwitz, Nima Yousefi, and others to
develop the Fountain markup syntax for
screenwriting, which allows users to write
screenplays in any text editor.
References
“About,” JohnAugust.com; “John August,”
IMDB, www.imdb.com/name/nm0041864/;
“John August,” TCM.com, www.tcm.com/
tcmdbperson/360486%7C0/John-August/.
 B
B. BOY
Giant balloon designed by Tim Burton,
flown in New York on November 25,
2011, during Macy’s Thanksgiving Day
Parade. According to Burton, who created
B. Boy’s backstory, the balloon, having a
body with horizontal red and white stripes
and a round, big-eyed blue head covered
in stitches, was sutured together (rather
like Frankenstein’s monster) from the
leftover balloons used in children’s par-
ties at the Great Ormond Street Hospital
in London. Forbidden to play with other
children because of his pointed teeth and
scar-covered face, B. Boy spent his time
alone in the basement where he watched
over and over Albert Lamorisse’s film
The Red Balloon (1956), dreaming that he
would someday be able to float freely in
the sky. “There’s always been something
about balloons,” Burton was quoted as
saying in the New York Times. “You see
them deflated and you see them floating.
There’s something quite beautiful and
tragic and sad and buoyant and happy, all
at the same time.”
The origin of B. Boy began in the
spring of 2011, when Burton was contacted
by Bill Schermerhorn, the creative direc-
tor of the Macy’s parade, and John Piper,
the vice president of Macy’s parade studio.
They presented him with some illustrations
created by Tony Sarg, the puppeteer and
artist who designed the balloons used in the
earliest Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parades
in the 1920s and 1930s, which Burton
liked. Whether the Macy’s executives were
aware of BATMAN is uncertain, since the
film contains a sequence in which there is
a parody of a Thanksgiving parade orches-
trated by the Joker, in which giant balloons
are filled with poisonous gas. B. Boy was
unusual in that he was more macabre than
the colorful, benign balloon figures that are
most often displayed in the parade. Pictures
of B. Boy can be found on the web.
References
Dave Itzkoff, “Tim Burton Lines Up a
Spot in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade,”
ArtsBeat (blog), October 21, 2011, arts-
beat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/
tim-burton-sews-up-a-spot-in-macys-
thanksgiving-day-parade/?_r=0; “Tim
Burton Balloon, B. Boy, Debuts at Macy’s
Thanksgiving Day Parade,” Huffington Post,
November 25, 2011, www.huffingtonpost.
com/2011/11/25/tim-burton-balloon-b-
boy-thanksgiving-parade_n_1112926.html.
BATMAN (US/UK 1989)
D irector : Tim Burton. S creenplay : Sam
Hamm, Warren Skaaren. E xecutive
Producers: Benjamin Melniker, Michael
Uslan. P roducers : Jon Peters, Peter
Guber. Co-P roducer : Chris Kenny.
A ssociate P roducer : Barbara Kalish.
  n  21
22  n  BATMAN
Story: Sam Hamm. Editor: Ray Lovejoy.
Production Designer: Anton Furst. Set
Decoration: Peter Young. Supervising
Art Director: Leslie Tomkins. Music:
Danny Elfman. Cinematography: Roger
Pratt. Costumes: Bob Ringwood, Tony
Dunsterville (uncredited). First Assis-
tant D irector : Derek Cracknell. S ec -
ond A ssistant D irectors : Julian Wall,
Melvin Lind. Supervising Sound Editor:
Don Sharpe. Sound Mixer: Tony Dawe.
Cast: Michael Keaton (Bruce Wayne/Bat-
man), Jack Nicholson (Jack Napier/the
Joker), Kim Basinger (Vicki Vale), Jack
Palance (Carl Grissom), Robert Wuhl
(Alexander Knox), Michael Gough
(Alfred), Billy Dee Williams (Harvey
Dent), Pat Hingle (Police Commissioner
Gordon), Jerry Hall (Alicia Hunt), Lee
Wallace (Mayor Borg), Tracey Walter
(Bob), William Hootkins (Lieutenant
Eckhardt), John Dair (Rotelli), Steve
Plytas (Doctor), Hugo E. Black (Young
Jack Napier), Charles Roskilly (Young
Bruce Wayne), George Roth (Eddie),
Christopher Fairbank (Nick), David
Baxt (Dr. Thomas Wayne), Sharon
Holm (Mrs. Wayne), Denis Lill (Bob
Kane), Kate Harper (Anchorwoman),
Bruce McGuire (Anchorman), Richard
Durden (TV Director).
R unning T ime : 126 minutes, 9 seconds.
Color.
Released Through: Warner Bros.
One of the biggest movie hits of all time,
with worldwide receipts totaling over $411
million, surpassing even Warner Bros.’
Superman (1978), a smash success that
enabled Batman to go into development
in the first place. Batman was initiated by
Michael Uslan in 1979, inspired by Super-
man’s huge popularity. While a student at
Indiana University in the 1970s, Uslan (b.
1952), a lifelong comic-book fan and col-
lector, developed a course in that universi-
ty’s experimental curriculum on the history
of comic books that was perhaps the first
course to treat comic books as a legitimate
academic subject. Entering into a partner-
ship with Benjamin Melniker, a former
executive at MGM, the two men secured
the film rights to the Batman character
from DC Comics in 1979. After Warner
Bros. passed on the project, Uslan and Mel-
niker found an interested producer, Peter
Guber, then at Casablanca Filmworks.
In 1982, Guber and business partner Jon
Peters moved to Warner Bros., forming
the Guber-Peters Company, and the Bat-
man project thus ended up back at Warner.
Seeking to avoid camp and to restore the
Batman character to his outlaw hero ori-
gins, the producers hired screenwriter and
“script doctor” Tom Mankiewicz (Super-
man: The Movie, Live and Let Die, The Man
with the Golden Gun) to write the screen-
play. The 125-page revised first draft of
Mankiewicz’s screenplay, titled The Bat-
man, is dated 20 June 1983. “The very first
Batman treatment I read,” Tim Burton has
been recorded as saying, referring to the
Mankiewicz version, “was remarkably simi-
lar to Superman. . . . It had the same light,
jokey tone, and the story structure followed
Wayne through childhood to his genesis as
a crimefighter. I found it all rather disturb-
ing because, while that route was probably
fine in the case of Superman, there was
absolutely no exploration or acknowledge-
ment of the character’s psychological struc-
ture and why he would dress up in a bat
suit. In that respect, it was very much like
the television series.”
Despite Mankiewicz’s script, the proj-
ect languished at Warner Bros. until PEE-
WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE became a sur-
prise hit, after which Burton was assigned
to develop the project. There exists a forty-
three-page treatment written by JULIE
HICKSON, “based on ideas and concepts
by Tim Burton and Julie Hickson,” dated

October 21, 1985, or about two months
and two weeks after the theatrical release
of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. The date of
this treatment predates by several months
the publication of Frank Miller’s comic-
book series later issued as a single volume
under the title Batman: The Dark Knight
Returns (DC Comics, 1986), the sales of
which are typically cited as demonstrating
to Warner Bros. executives the marketabil-
ity of the Batman character if portrayed in
the proper—that is, serious—way. Frank
Miller’s Batman, by his own account, is
indebted to outlaw hero figures such as
Dirty Harry, who, like Batman, is a lim-
inal figure who also works outside the law,
conforming to the approach to the Batman
character taken by Uslan and Melniker. In
interviews, Burton credited Miller’s The
Dark Knight Returns “with helping sell
Warners on the psychological approach
and leap back to the original comics that he
and [screenwriter Sam] Hamm wanted to
take.” Burton also avers that Alan Moore’s
widely admired graphic novel, Batman: The
Killing Joke (1988), in which Batman and
the Joker are imagined as doubles, “made
our ideas more acceptable.”
Still, in the Burton-Hickson treatment,
certain fundamental elements of Mankie-
wicz’s material were retained: the brutal
murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne as
the defining event of Bruce Wayne’s life;
Alfred Pennyworth, the Wayne family
butler, as Bruce Wayne’s devoted friend
and mentor; and the Joker as the primary
villain. They also retained other elements,
such as Silver St. Cloud as Bruce Wayne’s
love interest, corrupt city councilman
Rupert Thorne as a secondary villain (with
the Penguin, the Riddler, and Catwoman
making brief appearances), the introduc-
tion of Batman’s younger counterpart,
Robin (Dick Grayson), and Bruce Wayne’s
training in the martial arts aikido and
judo, but also fencing, swimming, skydiv-
BATMAN  n  23
ing, archery, and other forms of strenuous
physical activity (they dispensed, however,
with Bruce Wayne learning ballet, included
in the Mankiewicz screenplay). In the
Mankiewicz version, which opens in 1960,
the young Bruce Wayne is taken by his par-
ents to see Audrey Hepburn in The Nun’s
Story (1959). Returning to the car after the
show, his parents are shot to death by Joe
Chill, a contract killing arranged by the
Joker (representing Rupert Thorne’s inter-
ests).
In the early Burton-Hickson treat-
ment, Bruce Wayne accompanies his par-
ents not to see a movie, but to the Gotham
Opera House, where there is a performance
of Johann Strauss Jr.’s Der Fledermaus
(The Bat) followed by a masquerade ball.
Thomas Wayne attends the masked ball
dressed in a bat costume, while Martha
Wayne attends dressed as a fairy queen.
Walking home after the ball while still in
their costumes, they are shot and killed
by the Joker, presumably at the behest of
Rupert Thorne, thus linking the Joker
with the origin of Batman, retained in the
eventual film. Contrary to some published
reports, the Joker was indeed the killer of
Bruce Wayne’s parents in the Burton-
Hickson version. As he grows to adulthood,
Bruce Wayne watches obsessively the home
movie footage Alfred took of him and his
parents in costume the night of the mas-
querade ball, thereby forging a strong iden-
tification with his father costumed as a bat.
The strong paternal identification is
accompanied by Oedipal fantasy. Years
later, in connection with a charity event,
Bruce Wayne returns to the Gotham Opera
House for the first time since his parents’
murder. The opera happens to be Men-
delssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
in which Silver St. Cloud is appearing as
Titania, the Fairy Queen, his mother’s char-
acter on the night of her death. “Despite
the obvious psychological underpinnings
24  n  BATMAN
(or maybe because of them),” they write,
“Bruce is intrigued.”
However, there are elements unique to
the Burton-Hickson version, not present in
the Mankiewicz version, that were kept in
later versions: the Joker preempting tele-
vision shows with his own programming,
for instance, and his use of Grimacing Gas
(Smylex in the actual film; in Sam Hamm’s
screenplay it is called Smylenol), victims of
which die in paroxysms of laughter. They
also included a moment in which the Joker,
in a fit of rage, shoots one of his hench-
men, and another in which the Joker stages
a dazzling, Macy’s-like parade in Gotham
City with giant, helium-filled balloons, at
least one of which, a teddy bear balloon
several stories high, is filled with Grimacing
Gas (Smylex). All of these story elements
were retained in Burton’s eventual film.
The third draft of Sam Hamm’s
screenplay, dated February 29, 1988—most
likely the last version to which Hamm
contributed due to the Writer’s Guild of
America strike that began soon after, on
March 7, 1988—was still an overcrowded
scenario, with one story element from both
the Mankiewicz screenplay and the Burton-
Hickson treatment still included, the char-
acter of Dick Grayson (Robin). The sec-
ondary villain, Rupert Thorne, had become
criminal kingpin Carl Grissom. Jack
Napier, Grisson’s henchman, replaces Jack
Chill, and Vicki Vale has replaced Silver
St. Cloud. Also introduced is the intrepid
reporter Alexander Knox, rather obviously
an analogue to Superman’s Jimmy Olsen,
with Vicki Vale analogous to Lois Lane.
The climactic scene at the Gotham Cathe-
dral is there, although Robin plays a crucial
role in the outcome.
The screenplay’s fifth draft, with
authorship now attributed to both Sam
Hamm and WARREN SKAAREN, is dated
October 6, 1988, with most of the changes
occurring in the final act. Apparently, there
were minor, uncredited revisions done
by writer CHARLES MCKEOWN (and a
small but important contribution by JON-
ATHAN GEMS), after shooting began, but
the Hamm-Skaaren draft is very close to the
film that was shot. In the fifth draft, Robin
has been omitted, although the climactic
scene still takes place at the Gotham Cathe-
dral. Skaaren restored the scene depicting
Bruce Wayne’s parents’ murder, as was
included in the Mankiewicz version, but
the killer became the young Jack Napier/
the Joker, as in the early Burton-Hick-
son version (contrary to some published
reports, the uncredited Charles McKeown
did not write the scene of the young Jack
Napier killing Bruce Wayne’s parents—it
was already in the Hamm-Skaaren draft).
The scene in which Bruce Wayne visits
Vicki Vale’s apartment, during which their
conversation is interrupted by the sudden
appearance of the Joker and his minions,
was substantially revised by Skaaren, who
seems to have been responsible for add-
ing the shibboleth spoken by the Joker that
allows Bruce Wayne to recognize him as
the mugger who killed his parents: “You
ever dance with the devil by the pale moon-
light?” The line prompts Bruce Wayne’s
remembrance of his parents’ murder,
shown in flashback. Charles McKeown is
likely responsible for writing several of the
memorable lines spoken by the Joker, such
as, “I am the world’s first fully functioning
homicidal artist,” and “Never rub another
man’s rhubarb.” Thus, as was Burton’s
original intention, the origins of Batman
and the Joker are linked—”I made you,”
Batman says to the Joker during their cli-
mactic showdown, “and you made me.”
In the released film, the story begins as
Gotham City’s Mayor Borg (Lee Wallace)
orders District Attorney Harvey Dent (Billy
Dee Williams) and Police Commissioner
James Gordon (Pat Hingle) to increase the
police presence on the streets in prepara-

tion for Gotham’s forthcoming bicenten-
nial celebration. On his part, Harvey Dent
aims to arrest mob boss Carl Grisson (Jack
Palance), who is behind most of the crimi-
nal activity in the city.
Meanwhile, an elusive vigilante
dressed in a bat costume has attracted the
attention of both the police and the local
media. Reporter Alexander Knox (Rob-
ert Wuhl) and photojournalist Vicki Vale
(Kim Basinger) attempt to investigate the
rumors of the “Batman,” but many of the
cops, including Lieutenant Eckhardt (Wil-
liam Hootkins), are on the take from Gris-
som, and scoff at the rumors. After evad-
ing Knox’s questions, Eckhardt is revealed
taking a payoff from Grissom’s strong arm,
Jack Napier (JACK NICHOLSON).
Carl Grissom, upon discovering his
mistress (Jerry Hall) is involved in an
affair with Jack Napier, sets up Napier to
be killed by Lieutenant Eckhardt during a
raid at the Axis Chemicals plant. Grissom’s
plan is foiled by the arrival of Commis-
sioner Gordon, who wants Napier to be
put under arrest. Unexpectedly, Batman
(MICHAEL KEATON) appears and suc-
ceeds in capturing Napier, but is forced
to release him when Bob (Tracey Walter),
Napier’s enforcer, holds Gordon hostage at
gunpoint. Batman vanishes, and during the
ensuing shootout, Napier kills Eckhardt.
Batman reappears, and Napier attempts to
shoot him. Batman deflects Napier’s shot
and, improbably, a bullet fragment strikes
Napier in the face, disorienting him and
causing him to fall into a vat of toxic chem-
icals. Despite the many police, Batman
escapes, and Napier is considered dead.
In reality, Batman is actually Bruce
Wayne (Michael Keaton), a billionaire
industrialist who lives in Wayne Manor
attended by his butler, Alfred Pennyworth
(MICHAEL GOUGH). As a child, Wayne
witnessed his parents’ murder at the hands
of a young psychopathic mugger. During a
BATMAN  n  25
fund-raiser at Wayne Manor, which both
Alexander Knox and Vicki Vale happen to
attend, Bruce meets and immediately falls
for Vicki.
It is revealed that Napier survived the
fall into the vat of chemicals, but he is hor-
ribly disfigured and has been physically
and psychically transformed by the event.
After a failed attempt at reconstructive
surgery, he has become a grotesque dis-
tortion of a clown, with chalk-white skin,
emerald-green hair, and a grotesque grin
that uncannily resembles a form of muti-
lation known as a “Glasgow smile”—cuts
made on the corners of a victim’s mouth
that extend up the cheeks to a victim’s ears.
The resulting scars resemble a smile. Napier
reinvents himself as the Joker, kills Carl
Grissom for betraying him, and takes over
Grissom’s criminal operation.
The Joker begins to spread terror in
Gotham, first by lacing hygiene prod-
ucts with a venomous chemical known as
Smylex that causes its victims to die laugh-
ing when used in certain combinations
with other products. The Joker then sets a
trap for Vicki, with whom he is suddenly
enamored, at the Gotham Museum of
Art , where he and his henchmen vandal-
ize priceless works of art. Batman arrives
and rescues Vicki, escaping in the Batmo-
bile. Later, having determined the secret of
Smylex’s toxicity, Batman gives Vicki the
information so that she can warn the city
about the poisoned products.
Bruce Wayne meets with Vicki at her
apartment, prepared to reveal to her that
he is Batman. They are interrupted by the
Joker, who asks Wayne, “Have you ever
danced with the devil by the pale moon-
light?” before shooting and apparently kill-
ing him. Wayne, who used a metal serving
tray as a shield protecting him from the
Joker’s bullet, now knows the identity of
the man who killed his parents. Later, at
the Batcave, Vicki appears, having been
26  n  BATMAN (VIDEO GAMES)
let in by Alfred. After affirming his true
identity to Vicki, Batman leaves to destroy
the Axis Chemical plant. Meanwhile, the
Joker initiates a plan to continue Gotham
City’s cancelled anniversary celebrations
with a nighttime parade, promising to
give away $20 million in cash. When the
citizens arrive at the parade however, the
Joker attacks them with Smylex gas, which
spewed from his giant parade balloons. Bat-
man arrives on the scene and saves Gotham
City from the balloon attack using the
Batwing to carry off the balloons. Subse-
quently, the Joker shoots down the Batwing
and kidnaps Vicki, carrying her off to the
top of the decaying Gotham Cathedral.
In a colossal showdown at the top
of the cathedral, Batman and the Joker
begin a duel to the death. When the Joker
attempts an escape by way of a helicopter,
Batman grapples the Joker’s leg to a heavy
stone gargoyle; the extreme weight causes
the Joker to be unable to hang on to the
copter, and he plunges to his death. In the
film’s final moments, Commissioner Gor-
don unveils the Batsignal along with a note
from Batman giving his promise to defend
Gotham whenever the police may need
him.
Given a massive promotional cam-
paign by Warner Bros., Batman became
too big to fail. It became the fifth-highest
grossing Hollywood movie in history at
the time of its release, and total revenues,
including all merchandising tie-ins, are
estimated to have surpassed $2 billion. Jack
Nicholson was nominated for the Golden
Globe Award for Best Actor, and ANTON
FURST and PETER YOUNG won an Acad-
emy Award for Best Art Direction. The
film (and its sequel, BATMAN RETURNS)
served as an inspiration for Warner Bros.
Animation’s Batman: The Animated Series
(1992–1995) and was a key work in estab-
lishing the many successful comic book
movies that followed. Nonetheless, Tim
Burton seemed keenly aware of the film’s
flaws, saying famously, “I liked parts of it,
but the movie is mainly boring to me. It’s
OK, but it was more of a cultural phenom-
enon than a great movie.”
References
Kristin Fraga, ed., Tim Burton Interviews
(Jackson: University Press of Missis-
sippi, 2005), 16–30; Sam Hamm, Batman,
first draft screenplay, October 20, 1986;
Sam Hamm, Batman, revised first draft
screenplay, March 6, 1987; Sam Hamm
and Warren Skaaren, Batman, fifth draft
screenplay, October 6, 1988; Tom Mankie-
wicz and Robert Crane, My Life as a
Mankiewicz: An Insider’s Journey through
Hollywood (Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 2012); Mark Salisbury, ed., Bur-
ton on Burton. Revised Edition (London:
Faber & Faber, 2006), 71; Emily Smith,
The Tim Burton Handbook: Everything
You Need to Know about Tim Burton (n.p.:
Tebbo, 2012), 40; Paul A. Woods, ed., Tim
Burton: A Child’s Garden of Nightmares,
rev. and updated ed. (London: Plexus,
2007); various authors, Batman, revised
fifth draft, October 10, 1988; various
authors, Batman, revised fifth draft, Octo-
ber 12, 1988.
BATMAN (VIDEO GAMES)
One of many ancillary products of every
sort imaginable issued by Warner Bros.
in connection with the release of BAT-
MAN. Warner Bros. did not put all of its
faith in Burton’s directorial skills or the
innate appeal of the franchise. Burton’s
Batman films were among the first of the
new breed of blockbuster movies to be
extensively adapted to video-game formats,
which Warner Bros. had just begun to real-
ize was crucial to keeping the burgeoning
“Batman industry” profitable. Writing in
the early 1990s, Jim Hillier notes that video
games had become the key ancillary tie-in,

but the challenge was to release titles near
the launch of a film. The Batman video
games—released throughout 1989 and
1990, as the film was leaving theaters and
transitioning to home video—were seem-
ingly designed to reach gamers of all sorts.
No console or computer format was left
untouched.
Ocean Software (a British-based com-
pany) developed most of the home com-
puter versions (Amiga, Amstrad CPC,
Commodore 64, MS DOS, MSX, ZX Spec-
trum, Atari ST). Their game used several
different genres to match the action of
each stage (side-scrolling action as Batman
seeks Jack Napier in the chemical plant
before his transition to the Joker, or a rac-
ing stage that simulates one of the film’s
car chases). While these games attempt to
match an appropriate game genre to each
activity, other games based on the film took
different routes. Batman: The Video Game
(1990), a Turbo-Grafx-16 port developed
and published by Sun Soft, translates many
of the locations from the film to top-down,
maze-like stages. While still an action-based
game—Batman spends most of the time
fighting criminals with his fists and the
Batarang—the unique perspective added
some navigational challenges. Sun Soft
also developed and published Batman: The
Video Game for the Nintendo Entertain-
ment System, Game Boy, and Sega Genesis
(all released in 1990). These are side-scroll-
ing beat-’em-up games with platforming
elements that have Batman fighting his
way through the major locations from the
film.—Kevin M. Flanagan
References
“Batman,” Moby Games, mobygames.com/
game/turbo-grafx/batman; “Batman: The
Movie,” Moby Games, mobygames.com/
game/batman-the-movie; Jim Hillier, The
New Hollywood (New York: Continuum,
1992), 31–32.
BATMAN FOREVER  n  27
BATMAN FOREVER (US 1995)
D irector : Joel Schumacher. S creenplay :
Lee Batchler, Janet Scott Batchler, Akiva
Goldsman. Story: Lee Batchler, Janet
Scott Batchler. P roducers : Tim Bur-
ton, Peter MacGregor Scott. Executive
Producers: Benjamin Melniker, Michael
E. Uslan. Associate Producer: Mitchell
E. Dauterive. Music: Elliot Goldenthal.
C inematography : Stephen Goldblatt.
Costume Designers: Ingrid Ferrin, Bob
Ringwood. Production Designer: Bar-
bara Ling. Film Editor: Dennis Virkler.
A ssistant D irectors : Alan Edmistein,
William M. Elvin, Joseph P. Lucky.
P roject C onsultant : Bob Kane. A rt
D irector : Christopher Burian Mohr.
S et D esigners : Thomas Betts, Sean
Haworth. Set Decorator: Cricket Row-
land. Set Dresser: Ari David Schwartz.
Special Makeup Effects: Rick Baker. Key
Makeup Artist: Ve Neill. Sound Design:
Lance Brown. V isual E ffects S upervi -
sors : John Dykstra, Boyd Shermis.
V isual E ffects E ditor : Kate Crossley.
Digital Visual Effects Producer: Andrea
D’Amico. S pecial E ffects S upervisor :
Thomas L. Fisher. Second Unit Direc-
tor: David Hogan. Second Unit Direc-
tor of Photography: Gary Holt. Stunt
Coordinator/Underwater Unit Direc-
tor: Conrad E. Palmiano. Director of
P hotography /U nderwater U nit : Pete
Romano. Music Supervisors: Leslie Reed,
Jolene Cherry. Music Editor: Zigmund
Gron. O rchestrations : Robert Elhai.
Sound Editors: Jay Nierenburg, Bruce
Stambler. Rerecording Mixers: Donald
O. Mitchell, Frank A. Montano, Michael
Herbick. Sound Mixer: Petur Hliddal.
F oley M ixer : Mary Jo Lang. ADR E di -
tors: Zack Davis, Josh Leveque. Special
E ffects : Pacific Data Images, Rhythm
and Hues, Effects Associates Ltd., Com-
posite Images Systems.
Cast: Val Kilmer (Batman/Bruce Wayne),
Tommy Lee Jones (Harvey Dent/Two-
Face), Jim Carrey (Edward Nygma/the
28  n  BATMAN FOREVER
Riddler), Nicole Kidman (Dr. Chase
Meridian), Chris O’Donnell (Dick Gray-
son/Robin), Michael Gough (Alfred Pen-
nyworth), Pat Hingle (Commissioner
Gordon), Drew Barrymore (Sugar), Debi
Mazar (Spice), Elizabeth Sanders (Gossip
Gerty), Rene Aubeljonois (Dr. Burton),
Joe Grifasi (Bank Guard), Philip Moon
(Newscaster), Jessica Tuck (Newscaster),
Dennis Paladino (Crime Boss Moroni),
Kimberly Scott (Margaret), Michael Paul
Chan (Executive), Jon Favreau (Assis-
tant), Greg Lauren (Aide), Ramsey Ellis
(Young Bruce Wayne), Michael Scranton
(Thomas Wayne), Eileen Seeley (Martha
Wayne), David U. Hodges (Shooter),
Jack Betts (Fisherman), Tim Jackson
(Municipal Police Guard), Daniel Reichert
(Ringmaster), Glory (Mom Grayson),
Larry A. Lee (Dad Grayson), Bruce
Roberts (Handsome Reporter), George
Wallace (Mayor), Bob Zmuda (Electronic
Store Owner), Rebecca Budig (Teenage
Girl), Don “the Dragon” Wilson (Gang
Leader), Sydney D. Minckler (Gang Mem-
ber), Maxine Jones, Terry Ellis, Cindy
Herron, Dawn Robinson (Girls Cor-
ner), Gary Kasper (Pilot), Amanda Trees
(Paparazzi Reporter), Andrea Fletcher
(Reporter) William Mesnick (Bald Guy),
Marga Gomez (Journalist), Kelly Vaughn
(Showgirl), John Fink (Deputy), Noby
Arden (Trapeze Act), Marlene Bologna
(Trapeze Act), Danny Castle (Trapeze
Act), Troy S. Wolfe (Trapeze Act); Chris
Caso, Gary Clayton, Oscar Dillon, Keith
Graham, Kevin Grevioux, Mark A. Hicks,
Corey Jacoby, Randy Lamb, Maurice
Lamont, Sidney S. Liufau, Brad Martin,
Deron McBee, Mario Mugavero, Joey
Nelson, Jim Palmer, Robert Pavell, Pee
Wee Piemonte, Peter Radon, Franvois
Rodrigue, Joe Sabatino, Mike Sabatino,
Ofer Samra, Matt Sigloch, Mike Smith
(Harvey’s Thugs).
Running Time: 121 minutes, 35 seconds.
Technicolor, Panavision.
Released Through: Warner Bros.
Sequel to BATMAN RETURNS to which
Tim Burton is connected in name only.
He is credited as producer on the film, but
his name “was little more than an effort to
keep his connection with the movie fran-
chise in the minds of Burton fans,” accord-
ing to Ken Hanke. As directed by Joel
Schumacher, Batman Forever represents a
major departure from the Burton-directed
films in the franchise, eschewing Burton’s
film noir style for a lighter, more whimsi-
cal approach. In addition to the significant
changes in the cast and production design,
DANNY ELFMAN’s theme was dropped
in preference to a score composed by
Elliot Goldenthal. The film also marked
the departure of MICHAEL KEATON and
the introduction of his replacement, Val
Kilmer, and also represented the debut of
Robin (Chris O’Donnell), a character that
Burton had assiduously avoided including
in his films. Nonetheless, the film earned
$333 million worldwide, surpassing Bat-
man Returns’s $280 million.
The film opens as Two-Face (Tommy
Lee Jones), the criminal alter ego of former
district attorney Harvey Dent, is robbing a
bank. Batman (Val Kilmer) arrives at the
scene, and consults with Dr. Chase Merid-
ian (Nicole Kidman), who is immediately
attracted to the mysterious Batman. Choos-
ing to save the hostages rather than to pre-
vent the robbery, Batman allows Two-Face
to escape. Meanwhile, Edward Nygma (Jim
Carrey), employed in research and develop-
ment at Wayne Enterprises, is engaged in
unauthorized research. He has invented a
machine that manipulates people’s brain-
waves and channels television programs
into people’s minds, which he refers to as
a “remote encephalogram stimulator box.”
When Nygma presents his invention to
Bruce Wayne, the mogul rejects the idea,
claiming that manipulating brainwaves
is dangerous and raises too many ethical
questions. Afterward, Fred Stickley (Ed

Begley Jr.) fires Edward for working on a
project without permission. Infuriated by
his work being considered useless, Nygma
captures Stickley and demonstrates his
machine’s powers on him. However, he is
really stealing Stickley’s brainwaves to raise
his own intellect. Nygma then murders
Stickley but makes it appear as if Stickley
had committed suicide. He leaves the first
of several riddles at the scene.
A bit later, Bruce Wayne receives a
second riddle and consults Dr. Meridian,
who concludes that whoever is leaving the
riddles is obsessed with Wayne. He then
invites Dr. Meridian to the Gotham Char-
ity Circus being held at the Hippodrome.
Two-Face and his goons arrive with a bomb
that Two-Face will detonate if Batman does
not reveal his identity. In the resulting
melee, the Flying Graysons, the circus acro-
bats, are all killed except the youngest, Dick
(Chris O’Donnell).
Feeling responsible for Batman’s fail-
ure to appear at the circus, Bruce Wayne
accepts legal custody for Dick Grayson.
Although at first unhappy, Grayson chooses
to stay when he learns that he and Wayne
both love motorcycles. Later, Grayson acci-
dentally finds the Batcave and discovers that
Bruce Wayne is Batman. Although Grayson
pleads with Wayne to allow him to become a
crime-stopping partner, Wayne refuses.
Inspired by Two-Face’s bold circus
raid, Edward Nygma chooses to become a
villain himself and names himself “the Rid-
dler.” He then arranges to show Two-Face
his brainwave invention. The two become
partners in crime and strike a deal: if Two-
Face helps fund his invention, the Riddler
will use his mind-reading machine, now
referred to as “the Box,” to discover Bat-
man’s identity. The resulting business is
named NygmaTech. Later, at a business
party of NygmaTech, Two-Face arrives and
begins attacking the guests, hoping Batman
will appear. Batman does appear, and Two-
BATMAN FOREVER  n  29
Face almost kills him, but he is saved by
Robin. However, unknown to Wayne/Bat-
man, Nygma had steered him toward the
Box, which absorbed his memories, reveal-
ing to Two-Face and the Riddler that Bruce
Wayne is Batman.
Armed with the information that Bruce
Wayne is actually Batman, the Riddler and
Two-Face attack Wayne Manor, destroying
the Batcave, kidnapping Dr. Meridian, and
knocking Alfred and Bruce unconscious.
Another riddle is left at Wayne Manor.
Wayne and Alfred subsequently solve the
riddles, using them to discover the Rid-
dler’s true identity (“E. Nygma,” a pun on
“enigma”). Wayne then locates the Riddler’s
island outside of Gotham City, Claw Island,
base of operations for NygmaTech. The
last riddle solved, Batman and Robin locate
Claw Island. After being split up, Robin is
captured by Two-Face.
Gaining access to the Riddler’s lair, Bat-
man discovers that Robin and Dr. Meridian
are being held hostage. The Riddler gives
Batman the choice of saving only one of
them; the other will be killed. However, Bat-
man distracts the Riddler with a riddle and
destroys the brainwave machine, driving
the Riddler insane. In the subsequent fight,
Two-Face pauses to flip his coin to decide
their fate, but Batman throws a handful of
coins in the air. Trying to reach for his own
coin amid the confusion, Two-Face loses his
balance and plummets to his death.
The Riddler is committed to Arkham
Asylum. Visiting the Riddler inside the
asylum, Dr. Meridian learns that Edward
Nygma’s brainwave machine has ruined his
mind, and now delusional, he believes that
he is Batman. The film’s final image shows
Batman and Robin running toward the
camera, the Batsignal behind them.
According to Ken Hanke, critical opin-
ion on Batman Forever was that “it was a
welcome relief from the Burton entries,
which, to a great degree, meant little more
30  n  BATMAN RETURNS
than that its lack of a real point was more
in keeping with the critic’s idea of what a
comic-book movie ought to be.” “The third
installment of the Batman series, based on
characters created by Bob Kane and pub-
lished by DC Comics, is the best to date,”
wrote BoxOffice’s Christine James, who
also observed, “the big star is the jaw-
dropping visual splendor.” Less delighted
overall was the San Francisco Chronicle’s
Mick LaSalle, who found it typical of big
summertime films. He wrote that director
Joel Schumacher “submerges his own style
and essentially creates a Tim Burton Bat-
man movie—minus the usual touches of
the fey and grotesque, which we can easily
do without.” Roger Ebert, writing in the
Chicago Sun-Times, cited the film for its
fetishistic approach, noting that the new
on-screen Batman, Val Kilmer, “would be
a sensation in any leather bar,” but found
that Schumacher “makes a generally suc-
cessful effort to lighten the material,” that
the film “is great bubble gum for the eyes”
because “it’s all flat-out spectacle,” and
wouldn’t have the same negative impact on
children as the Burton-directed predeces-
sor (“some kids were led bawling from Bat-
man Returns, where the PG-13 rating was
a joke”). From Warner Bros.’ standpoint,
however, the key issues were the film’s pop-
ularity—having earned more than Burton’s
Batman Returns—and its lack of negative
response. Hence Warner Bros. would put
into production the next Batman film, Bat-
man & Robin (1997), which was the fourth
and final installment in the series initiated
by Tim Burton. However, Burton had no
involvement with Batman & Robin.
References
Roger Ebert, “Batman Forever,” RogerE-
bert.com, June 16, 1995, www.rogerebert.
com/reviews/batman-forever-1995; Ken
Hanke, Tim Burton: An Unauthorized
Biography of the Filmmaker (Los Angeles:
Renaissance Books, 1999), 184; Christine
James, “Batman Forever,” BoxOffice, pro.
boxoffice.com/news/2008-08-batman-for-
ever; Mick LaSalle, “‘Batman Forever’ Goes
On and On,” San Francisco Chronicle, June
16, 1995, www.sfgate.com/movies/article/
FILM-REVIEW-Batman-Forever-Goes-
On-and-On-3030617.php.
BATMAN RETURNS (US 1992)
Director: Tim Burton. Screenplay: Dan-
iel Waters. Story: Daniel Waters and
Sam Hamm. Executive Producers: Peter
Guber, Benjamin Melniker, Jon Peters,
Michael E. Uslan. Producers: Tim Bur-
ton, Denise Di Novi. Co- producer :
Larry Franco. Associate Producer: Ian
Bryce. M usic : Danny Elfman. M usic
Producer/Orchestrator: Steve Bartek.
Director of Photography: Stefan Czap-
sky. F ilm E ditors : Bob Badami, Chris
Lebenzon. C asting : Marion Dough-
erty. P roduction D esign : Bo Welch.
Art Direction: Tom Duffield. Supervis-
ing A rt D irector : Rick Heinrichs. S et
Decoration: Cheryl Carasik. Costume
Design: Bob Ringwood, Mary E. Vogt.
Production Manager: Ian Bryce. Makeup
Designer (Penguin): Shane Mahan, Mark
“Crash” McCreery, John Rosengrant.
Makeup Artists: Bob Mills, Greg Nelson.
Makeup Supervisor: Ve Neill. Supervis-
ing S ound E ditor : Richard L. Ander-
son. Special Effects: Jan Aaris, Kenneth
C. Clark, Andy Evans, Scott Forbes,
Elmer Hui, Karl Nygren, Bruce Robles,
Michael Weaver. Art Department (Stan
Winston Studio): Bill Basso, Dave
Beneke, Mitch Coughlin, Richard Davi-
son, Marilyn Dozer-Chaney, Greg Figiel,
Nathalie Fratti-Rapoport, Dave Grasso,
Beth Hathaway, Rob Hinderstein,
Adam Jones, Mark Jurinko, Paul Mejias,
Jeff Periera, Joe Reader, Shannon Shea,
Christopher Swift, Michiko Tagawa,
Michael A. Trcic. Mechanical Depart-
ment (Stan Winston Studio): Larry Bol-

ster, Jon “J.D.” Dawe, Rick D. Galinson,
Rich Haugen, Richard Landon, Gregory
Manion, Brian K. Namanny, Robert
Ramsdell, J. Alan Scott. Patrick Shearn,
Alfred Sousa. S pecial E ffects F ore -
man : Mike Edmonson. S pecial E ffects
Supervisor: Chuck Gaspar. Production
Coordinators (Stan Winston Studio):
Mark Lohff, Tara Meaney-Crocitto.
Mechanical Effects Supervisor (Second
Unit): Mike Reedy. Special Effects Tech-
nician : Michael A. Tice. V isual E ffects
Supervisor (Matte World): Craig Bar-
ron. Special Effects Supervisor (Chan-
dler Group): Don Baker. Set Costumer:
Myron Baker.
C ast : Michael Keaton (Batman/Bruce
Wayne), Danny DeVito (Penguin/
Oswald Cobblepot), Michelle Pfeiffer
(Catwoman/Selina Kyle), Christopher
Walken (Max Shreck), Michael Gough
(Alfred Pennyworth), Michael Mur-
phy (the Mayor), Cristi Conaway (Ice
Princess), Andrew Bryniarski (Charles
“Chip” Shreck), Pat Hingle (Commis-
sioner James Gordon), Vincent Schia-
velli (Organ Grinder), Steve Witting
(Josh), Jan Hooks (Jen), John Strong
(Sword Swallower), Rick Zumwalt
(Tattooed Strongman), Anna Katarina
(Poodle Lady), Gregory Scott Cummins
(Acrobat Thug One), Erika Andersch
(Knife Thrower Dame), Travis Mc-
Kenna (Fat Clown), Doug Jones (Thin
Clown), Branscombe Richmond (Ter-
rifying Clown #1), Paul Reubens (Pen-
guin’s Father), Diane Salinger (Penguin’s
Mother), Stuart Lancaster (Penguin’s
Doctor), Cal Hoffman (Happy Man),
Joan Jurige (Happy Woman), Rosie
O’Connor (Adorable Little Girl), Sean
M. Whalen (Paperboy), Erik Oñate
(Aggressive Reporter), Joey DePinto
(Shreck Security Guard), Steven Brill
(Gothamite #1), Neal Lerner (Gotham-
ite #2), Ashley Tillman (Gothamite
#3), Elizabeth Sanders (Gothamite #4),
Henry Kingi (Mugger), Joan Giammarco
BATMAN RETURNS  n  31
(Female Victim), Lisa Coles (Volun-
teer Bimbo), Frank DiElsi (Security
#1), Biff Yeager (Security #2), Robert
Gossett (TV Anchorman), Adam Dre-
scher (Crowd Member), Robert N.
Bell (Emperor Penguin), Niki Botelho
(Emperor Penguin/Baby Penguin), Susan
Rossitto (Emperor Penguin), Margarita
Fernández (Emperor Penguin), Denise
Killpack (Emperor Penguin), Felix Silla
(Emperor Penguin), Debbie Lee Car-
rington (Emperor Penguin).
Running Time: 126 minutes, 28 seconds.
Color.
Released Through: Warner Bros. in asso-
ciation with PolyGram Entertainment.
Tim Burton’s lavish art film follow-up to
BATMAN. As if to suggest its ambition,
Batman Returns begins with a visual quo-
tation from Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane:
the camera slowly pans over a wrought-
iron gate adorned with the letter C and the
name Cobblepot, then reveals the mansion
beyond in which a figure is silhouetted
against a large window. As if to cement
the connection between Batman Returns
and Citizen Kane, light snow falls in the
darkening sky. Inside, we see a pensive Mr.
Cobblepot (PAUL REUBENS) staring out
at the falling snow as he listens to his wife’s
cries of pain: she is giving birth to a baby,
and he is appropriately solemn. Then, he
hears the cry of an infant, but it is a strange
cry, more animal than human. The doctor
and nurse run out of the birthing room,
apparently disturbed. Sometime later, at
Christmas, we see the infant, locked inside
a cage, grab the family cat and kill it. Like
Citizen Kane, this will be the story of an
unloved child, abandoned by his parents,
thrown off a bridge in a baby carriage into
the cold waters beneath, the bridge located
near where the stream drains into the city’s
sewers. Some time later, he is found by the
32  n  BATMAN RETURNS
members of the Red Triangle Circus and
as “Penguin Boy” joins their Freak Show.
He is given this name because of his physi-
cal resemblance to a penguin, and because
he was found in the Artic World exhibit in
Gotham’s abandoned zoo, where the pen-
guins were housed. Many years later he has
become the Penguin (DANNY DeVITO),
the crude, bile-spewing, raw-fish-eating,
leader of the Red Triangle Circus Gang. His
gang appears in Gotham City during the
annual Christmas-tree-lighting ceremony
in order to disrupt the festivities. As the
police and Batman (MICHAEL KEATON)
corral the gang members, one of the guests
at the ceremony, an industrialist named
Max Shreck (Christopher Walken), is kid-
napped and taken to the Penguin. The Pen-
guin reveals to him his desire to become a
citizen of Gotham. He blackmails Shreck
into helping him by threatening to expose
evidence of his corporate crimes.
Meanwhile, Shreck’s self-effacing,
painfully insecure secretary, Selina Kyle
(MICHELLE PFEIFFER), has learned that
her employer’s plan to build a giant capaci-
tor will actually drain Gotham of its electri-
cal power. When Shreck confronts her after
returning from his visit with the Penguin, he
shoves her out a window, and she falls several
stories to her death (so it would seem). Alley
cats surround her body, licking her face,
seemingly restoring her to life. She stumbles
home filled with self-loathing about her shy,
reserved nature, and immediately begins to
stitch together a black vinyl suit, complete
with a mask with feline ears, and is reborn
as the daunting Catwoman, Selina’s alter ego.
The Penguin sends one of his cos-
tumed henchmen to kidnap the mayor’s
baby so that he may “save” him, and
becomes an overnight hero to the citizens
of Gotham. Batman, however, is suspi-
cious of the Penguin’s true motives but is
unable to discern his true aim. After some
time in the Hall of Records, Penguin dis-
covers the identity of his parents and that
they are dead. He learns his birth name is
Oswald Cobblepot. Secretly, however, he
has been taking notes on the eldest sons
who live in Gotham City. Since Gotham’s
current mayor is opposing the building
of the giant capacitor, Shreck decides to
use the Penguin’s newfound popular-
ity to make the Penguin the new mayor.
Attracted by the idea, the Penguin has the
Red Triangle Gang instigate a riot in hopes
that it will cause Gotham’s citizens to lose
faith in the mayor. During the riot, Cat-
woman vandalizes Shrek’s Department
Store in order to avenge his attempted
murder of her. When Batman and the
Penguin confront each other, she inter-
venes just as the store goes up in a massive
explosion. The Penguin escapes, but on a
rooftop, Catwoman fights Batman, stab-
bing him, and gets punched off the roof
for her action. She plunges from the build-
ing, but by sheer luck, her life is saved by
the propitious placement of a dump truck
filled with kitty litter.
The Penguin and Catwoman meet and
collaborate on a plan to kill Batman based
on their shared hatred for him. However,
Selina finds herself developing a romantic
relationship with Bruce Wayne as the two of
them have begun dating. Later, the Ice Prin-
cess, an actress chosen to light the Gotham
City Christmas Tree, is kidnapped by the
Penguin. A Batarang (which one of the gang
acquired during a previous altercation with
Batman) is found in her dressing room,
framing Batman for the kidnapping. After
a fight with Catwoman, Batman finds the
Ice Princess on a rooftop, where the Pen-
guin releases a swarm of flying bats, causing
her to fall to her death, further incriminat-
ing Batman. As he escapes to the Batmo-
bile, Batman discovers that the Penguin has
control over it due to a device that his gang
installed while he, Batman, was distracted.
The Penguin takes the Batmobile on a joy
ride, but in the nick of time Batman regains
control of it and drives to safety.

The next day, the Penguin and Shreck
are using Batman’s apparent lawlessness
in order to push for an impeachment of
the mayor. Batman, having recorded the
Penguin’s demeaning attitude toward
Gotham’s citizens during the rampage,
plays it back during the speech, turning the
people and Shreck against him. Enraged,
the Penguin takes his notes from the Hall of
Records and orders the Red Triangle Gang
to kidnap all the eldest sons of Gotham so
that he can throw them to their deaths in
the sewer like his own parents did to him,
and he personally kidnaps Max Shreck as
revenge for being manipulated. Batman
saves the firstborn, forcing the Penguin to
adopt an alternate plan that will destroy
Gotham by setting loose a missile-toting
penguin army. However, Batman foils the
plan by using an alternate homing device
for the penguins to lock on, redirecting
the missiles to destroy the derelict Gotham
Zoo. Batman confronts the Penguin. After
they fight, the Penguin plunges a couple of
stories into the water, apparently dead.
Catwoman appears in the lair and
again tries to kill Shreck, but Batman stops
her by revealing himself to her as Bruce
Wayne. She does the same, revealing herself
to Wayne (and to Shreck) as Selina Kyle.
Her action gives Shreck the opportunity to
draw a gun and shoot her. However, Selina
survives Schreck’s gunshots. Brandishing a
Taser weapon, she holds it up to Schreck’s
chin while grabbing an electrical cable,
causing an electrical explosion that kills
Shreck. Batman finds no trace of Selina in
the resulting wreckage. As the dust settles,
Penguin rises from the water and tries one
more time to kill Batman, but fails and dies
from his internal wounds. The emperor
penguins hold a funeral for their former
master and drag his corpse into the sewer
for a water burial.
Later, Alfred (Michael Gough) drives
Bruce Wayne home through the falling
snow, but Bruce notices a shadow in the
BATMAN RETURNS  n  33
alley that he thinks might be Catwoman’s.
He asks Alfred to stop the car. He finds
nothing, although a black cat appears and
rubs against his leg. Bruce chooses to take
the cat with him. As the car drives off, the
Batsignal appears in the night sky. On a
high rooftop, Catwoman rises up in the
foreground, gazing at the Batsignal.
Batman Returns is a far better film
than its predecessor. Smith and Matthews
characterize the film as “magnificent,”
remarking on “the little things” that “make
the film what it is.” They refer to moments
such as “Batman ripping his mask off to
convince Catwoman of his sincerity; Bruce
and Selina’s dance where they’re the only
unmasked people at the costume party;
the way Max jokes with Selina just before
pushing her out of the window; Selina’s
head ducking into shot in the last frame.”
They conclude that the film is a sleight of
hand, averring it is actually an “art film”
that was promoted “as a summer block-
buster for the kids.” It’s also astonishingly
cynical. Virtually every major character in
the film engages in duplicity and deception,
and is not what they seem to be. Beyond the
rather obvious masks of Catwoman/Selina
Kyle and Batman/Bruce Wayne, the Pen-
guin’s minions all work for the seemingly
benign Red Triangle Circus, which is actu-
ally a front for a criminal operation. Even
the Poodle Lady’s winsome poodle delivers
bombs and steals a Batarang. Max Shreck’s
apparent public improvement project is
actually a power-stealing capacitor. The
seemingly benign rotating cat head atop
the Shreck Building ironically represents
Gotham’s corrupt corporate universe, and
the Penguin stages a kidnapping in order
to posture as the child’s benign rescuer in
order to improve his public image. The
Penguin peruses public records ostensi-
bly to learn his origins, when in fact he’s
recording the names of the eldest sons of
Gotham City. Selina Kyle apparently falls to
her death, but is reborn, and Max Shreck’s
34  n  BEETLEJUICE (ANIMATED SERIES MERCHANDISING)
gun has more bullets than it should have.
Even Gotham City isn’t what its officials
wish it to seem to be. It is a mélange of
different architectural styles, and has no
coherent zoning policy. Underneath it is a
nightmarish labyrinth of sewers and tunnels
and pipes, and much of it, such as the zoo,
is derelict and abandoned. In the words of
production designer Bo Welch, “The idea
was that this town [Gotham City] is so cor-
rupt it’s literally rotting—even sinking in
places. . . . There is a lot of decay—build-
ings are tipping over and being held up
by thin metal struts and chains.” At the
film’s conclusion, we think Catwoman
has killed herself along with Shreck, but in
fact her body is not found, and she reap-
pears in the final moments of the film. It
is this cynicism that perhaps led Variety’s
Todd McCarthy to conclude that Batman
Returns, a form of “fabulist dementia,” is
“full of nasty notions about societal dete-
rioration, greed and other base impulses.”
Although Batman Returns is generally
perceived as a critical failure, this is hardly
the case. For instance, the New York Times’s
Janet Maslin observed, “Mr. Burton creates
a wicked world of misfits, all of them ren-
dered with the mixture of horror, sympa-
thy and playfulness that has become this
director’s hallmark. . . . This story’s miscre-
ants have colorful clinical histories.” She
thought Michael Keaton displayed “appro-
priate earnestness,” that Danny DeVito was
“conveying verve,” Christopher Walken
was “wonderfully debonair,” and that
Michelle Pfeiffer was “captivating . . . fierce,
seductive.” She described Bo Welch’s pro-
duction design as “dazzling,” Stefan Czap-
sky’s cinematography as “crisp,” and Daniel
Waters’s screenplay as “sharp.” Writing in
Rolling Stone, Peter Travers said, “Burton
uses the summer’s most explosively enter-
taining movie to lead us back into the lib-
erating darkness of dreams.” Ty Burr, in
Entertainment Weekly claimed, “Yet for all
the wintry weirdness, there’s more going
on under the surface of this movie than in
the original. No wonder some people felt
burned by Batman Returns: Tim Burton
just may have created the first blockbuster
art film.” The film was nominated for two
Academy Awards, for Best Visual Effects,
and for Best Make-Up. VE NEILL and
Stan Winston did, however, win a Saturn
Award for Best Make-Up. The gross earn-
ings worldwide of Batman Returns were
$266,822,354 against a reported budget of
$80 million.
References
Ty Burr, “Batman Returns,” Entertainment
Weekly, October 23, 1992, www.ew.com/
article/1992/10/23/batman-returns; Janet
Maslin, “Review/Film: Batman Returns; A
Sincere Bat, a Sexy Cat, and a Bad Bird,”
New York Times, June 19, 1992, www.
nytimes.com/1992/06/19/movies/review-
film-batman-returns-a-sincere-bat-a-sexy-
cat-and-a-bad-bird.html; Todd McCarthy,
“Batman Returns,” Variety, June 15, 1992,
variety.com/1992/film/reviews/batman-
returns-1200430018/; Jim Smith and J.
Clive Matthews, Tim Burton, Virgin Film
Series (London: Virgin Books, 2007), 143,
144; Peter Travers, “Batman Returns,”
Rolling Stone, June 19, 1992, www.roll-
ingstone.com/movies/reviews/batman-
returns-19920619; Mark Cotta Vaz, “A
Knight at the Zoo,” Cinefex 51 (August
1992): 30.
BEETLEJUICE (ANIMATED SERIES
MERCHANDISING)
Various forms of merchandise were
released in connection with the Beetlejuice
animated series beginning in 1990. The
forms of merchandising included trading
cards issued by Dart Flipcards (cards and
glow-in-the-dark stickers), a sticker album
and sticker/activity book by Panini, a jig-
saw puzzle by Golden, a coloring book, a
lunchbox and thermos set, Valentines, a
party centerpiece by Party Creations, a PC
 BEETLEJUICE (ANIMATED TELEVISION SERIES)  n  35
video game by Hi-Tech Expressions called
Adventures of Beetlejuice: Skeletons in the
Closet, a video game for the Game Boy
platform, and six PVC figures available
with Burger King kids’ meals. In addition,
Harvey Comics published a Beetlejuice
miniseries comprised of six issues, 1991–
1992, featuring the adventures of Beetle-
juice and Lydia.
Several juvenile novels were published
as well, issued by Aladdin using the house
name B. J. Specter:
Beetlejuice for President (Beetlejuice 1)
(Aladdin, 1992) by B. J. Specter
Lydia’s Scream Date (Beetlejuice 2)
(Aladdin, 1992) by B. J. Specter
Rock ’N’ Roll Nightmare (Beetlejuice 3)
(Aladdin, 1992) by B. J. Specter
Twisted Tours (Beetlejuice 4) (Aladdin,
1992) by B. J. Specter
Camp Fright (Beetlejuice 5) (Aladdin,
1992) by B. J. Specter
Trial by Ghost (Beetlejuice 6) (Aladdin,
1992) by B. J. Specter
In addition, Marvel Comics issued a
hardback book titled The Beetlejuice Annual
1992: Beetlejuice’s Handy Dandy Guide to
Everything You Might Want to Know about
Beetlejuice containing stories, comic strips,
fact files and puzzles. Warner Bros. released
most of the first season of the animated
Beetlejuice on six videocassettes in 1993. In
September 2008, three episodes (“A-ha,”
“Skeletons in the Closet,” and “Spooky
Boo-Tique”) were released as bonus fea-
tures on the Beetlejuice: 20th Anniversary
Deluxe Edition DVD. In May 2013, Shout!
Factory released Beetlejuice: The Complete
Series on DVD as an Amazon exclusive. The
company also released season 1 to retail
stores.
References
“Merchandising the Ghost With the Most,”
HorrorHound, May/June 2013, 45.
BEETLEJUICE (ANIMATED
TELEVISION SERIES) (US/
CANADA 1989–1992)
Directors: Robin Budd, John Van Bruggen,
Larry Jacobs, John Halfpenny, Rick Mar-
shall, Alan Bunce. Executive Producers:
David Geffen, Tim Burton. Producers:
Michael Hirsh, Patrick Loubert, Clive A.
Smith. Line Producers: Stephen Hodgins,
Merle-Anne Ridley. Story Editors: Tedd
Anasti, Patsy Cameron. T heme M usic
(opening and closing credits): Danny
Elfman.
C ast : Stephen Ouimette (Beetlejuice),
Alyson Court (Lydia Deetz), Elizabeth
Hanna (Delia Deetz), Roger Dunn
(Charles Deetz), Len Carlson (The
Monster Across the Street).
R unning T ime : 94 episodes, 23 minutes
each. Color.
Released Through: Nelvana, in association
with the Geffen Film Company and Tim
Burton, Inc.
A Saturday morning cartoon show very
loosely based on Tim Burton’s film, pro-
duced by Nelvana, a children’s entertain-
ment company known for Babar, Care Bears,
and other children’s shows. The show aired
on ABC Television from September 9, 1989,
to October 26, 1991, and on the Fox Net-
work from September to December 1991.
Tim Burton is given executive producer
credit on the show for helping the produc-
ers make the transition to television. How-
ever, at the time the show was in the initial
development stage (1988–1989), he was
largely involved in the production of BAT-
MAN. None of the actors or writers involved
with the film were employed in the TV ver-
sion, although the show’s opening and clos-
ing theme music was specially arranged by
DANNY ELFMAN. Ninety-four episodes
were produced over the show’s four seasons,
comprised of 104 segments (some episodes
had two distinct narratives).
36  n  BEETLEJUICE
The TV series has only contingent con-
nections to the film. Only certain charac-
ters and concepts were taken from the film,
and certain liberties were taken in order
to make the program more appealing to
children. For example, the Maitlands, Bar-
bara and Adam, were eliminated, as well
as Juno, the caseworker, since the after-
life is no longer represented as a daunting
bureaucracy. However, Charles and Delia
Deetz are recurring characters. The setting
is no longer the small town of Winter River,
as in the film, but a fictional New England
town named Peaceful Pines. The character
Beetlejuice (no longer Betelgeuse as in the
film) is a far less sinister and more family
friendly ghost than in Burton’s film, hail-
ing from “the Neitherworld,” the land of
the dead, inhabited by various types of car-
toonish monsters such as ghouls and zom-
bies. Beetlejuice is largely a prankster and
trickster that no longer lusts after Lydia,
who in the series is a nice, prepubescent
twelve-year-old Goth girl, unlike the teen-
age Lydia of the film, who is sexually aware,
in one scene mistaking her stepmother’s
moaning as the sound of sexual pleasure.
One consistent story element in both the
film and the series is that Beetlejuice can be
summoned by calling his name three times.
In the series, to call forth Beetlejuice, Lydia
makes the following chant:
Though I know I should be wary,
Still I venture someplace scary,
Ghostly hauntings I turn loose—
Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice!
New characters were invented for the series,
among them Bertha and Percy, Lydia’s
friends; Claire Brewster, Lydia’s school
rival; Jacques LaLean, a French, body-
building skeleton; Ginger, a tap-dancing
spider; and Scuzzo and Fuzzo, clowns and
rivals of Beetlejuice.
In 1990, the series won a Daytime
Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated
Program. The complete series was released
on DVD by Shout! Factory in a twelve-disc
box set on 28 May 2013.
References
“Beetlejuice,” TV IV Wiki, tviv.org/Beetle-
juice.
BEETLEJUICE (US 1988)
Director: Tim Burton. Screenplay: Michael
McDowell, Warren Skaaren. S tory :
Michael McDowell, Larry Wilson. Pro-
ducers: Michael Bender, Larry Wilson,
Richard Hashimoto. Cinematography:
Thomas Ackerman. Editor: Jane Kur-
son. O riginal M usic : Danny Elfman.
P roduction D esign : Bo Welch. A rt
Direction: Tom Duffield.
C ast : Alec Baldwin (Adam Maitland),
Geena Davis (Barbara Maitland), Jef-
frey Jones (Charles Deetz), Catherine
O’Hara (Delia Deetz), Winona Ryder
(Lydia Deetz), Sylvia Sidney (Juno),
Robert Goulet (Maxie Dean), Glenn
Shadix (Otho), Annie McEnroe (Jane),
Dick Cavett (Bernard), Michael Keaton
(Betelgeuse), Patrice Martinez (Recep-
tionist), Simmy Bow (Janitor), Maurice
Page (Ernie).
R unning T ime : 92 minutes, 26 seconds.
Color.
Released Through: Warner Bros./Geffen
Pictures.
Tim Burton’s second feature film, now
a cult film. Following PEE-WEE’S BIG
ADVENTURE, Burton went through a
relatively fallow period. Although he did
direct the television episode “THE JAR”
for the new Alfred Hitchcock Presents, he
seemingly held out for projects that he con-
nected to in personal ways. The teleplay
to “The Jar” was written by MICHAEL
MCDOWELL. Burton was given McDow-
ell’s screenplay of Beetlejuice (a project that
at different times was called Betelgeuse and

Beetle Juice, all different approximations of
the film’s centerpiece, a “bio-exorcist” with
a flair for the theatrical) by film and music
mogul David Geffen as a potential project.
The screenplay was rewritten many times,
and was credited to Michael McDowell and
WARREN SKAAREN in the film, with Bur-
ton collaborating on some rewrites. Follow-
ing the success of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure,
Burton was considered a bankable young
director, but his tastes clearly steered away
from typical narrative fare. What inter-
ested Burton about McDowell’s scenario
(co-conceived by producer LARRY WIL-
SON) is that it eschews most of the logic
that comes with tidy storytelling. Accord-
ing to Burton, “it had no real story, it didn’t
make any sense, and was more like stream
of consciousness.” Burton did rewrites
with McDowell on this “most amorphous”
screenplay, a collaboration that yielded
Burton’s most polymorphous film to date.
Barbara (Geena Davis) and Adam
(Alec Baldwin) Maitland live a seemingly
idyllic life in rural Connecticut. Adam, who
owns a local hardware store and who builds
model buildings in his spare time, is about
to start a stay-at-home vacation with wife
Barbara. However, Barbara and Adam are
constantly hounded by realtor Jane, who
has tried to preemptively sell their house to
a couple from the city. Barbara and Adam
make it clear that they do not intend to sell.
After this intrusion, Adam realizes that he
needs modeling materials from his store,
prompting him and Barbara to hop in the
car for the short trip to town. On the way
home, a dog blocks the road, causing the
Maitlands to swerve and hit the side of a
covered bridge. The dog moves and they
plummet into the water. The couple return
home soaked and quickly discover that all
is not well: they have died! Adam tries to
make sense of their recent predicament
using the provided copy of the Handbook
for the Recently Deceased, but he cannot
understand its recommendations. The
BEETLEJUICE  n  37
Maitlands soon find their house under
siege. Jane has sold the property to Charles
(JEFFREY JONES) and Delia (CATHE-
RINE O’HARA) Deetz, an uber-trendy and
extremely wealthy couple from New York.
The Maitlands attempt to scare the family,
but discover that they are invisible to the
living, who remain blissfully unaware of
the spirits that surround their daily lives.
Delia is too concerned with turning the
house, once a picturesque retreat, into a
habitable art object, while Charles is too
concerned with getting some much desired
rest and relaxation. The Deetzes’ sensitive
daughter Lydia (WINONA RYDER), whose
alienation has bred awareness, notices that
something is amiss. Aided by her camera,
she quickly realizes that her family is not
alone. Meanwhile, freelance bio-exorcist
Betelgeuse (MICHAEL KEATON) catches
wind of the couple’s death and sets his
sights on using their problem to bring him
back to power: a supernatural being hav-
ing formidable abilities, he languishes in a
kind of limbo until his thrice-mentioned
name can bring him back to the scene. The
despondent Maitlands, distraught over
their failed attempt at haunting, find a way
to reach the afterlife, a dingy and claustro-
phobic space of underlit offices that slowly
tend to the concerns of the dead, in the
process prompting seemingly eternal tor-
ment in waiting rooms. Their caseworker,
Juno (Sylvia Sidney), is kind enough to
tell them that they must be noticed to
get results, but warns them to work from
their own abilities: they are to ignore the
advances of Betelgeuse (whose name must
not be said aloud) at any cost. Despite
forming an uneasy friendship with Lydia,
who dislikes her parents about as much as
the Maitlands, the couple gets impatient
and summons Betelgeuse to help scare the
couple away. Even though their antics get
them noticed during a dinner party, the
scare tactics do not trouble the Deetzes,
who can only think of how to control and
38  n  BEETLEJUICE
A dinner party surprise in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (left to right: Adelle Lutz, Glenn Shadix, and
Catherine O’Hara).
monetize their supernatural tormentors,
as part of a larger scheme of turning the
once-quaint Winter River, Connecticut,
into a destination for occult tourism and
hypermodern art. The Deetzes use interior
decorator and sometimes occultist Otho
(GLENN SHADIX) to stage a séance, which
leaves the Maitlands powerless. Lydia sum-
mons Betelgeuse, who runs amok, going
so far as to nearly kill the Maitlands. Lydia
agrees to marry him (this would restore
him to power). Even though Betelgeuse
nearly pulls off this coup, Adam and Bar-
bara manage to use enough of their super-
natural gifts to disrupt the ceremony. With
Betelgeuse banished back to the bureau-
cratic hell of the afterlife, the ghostly Mait-
lands and gracious Deetz family begin a
harmonious coexistence.
Filmed at Culver Studios in Culver
City, California, and on location in East
Corinth, Vermont (standing in for Con-
necticut), Beetlejuice is successful in part
because it was created by reconciling a
series of seeming incongruities. A film
about big concepts—the afterlife, fam-
ily, the ways in which money corrupts—it
is also relentlessly focused on the specific
case of the Maitlands, their encounters
with Betelgeuse, and the loss of their house.
Although focused on a visual style that
was planned and sketched out by Burton
before production began, it also benefited
from the improvisational skills of Catherine
O’Hara and Glenn Shadix. Even though the
film explores dark material, it has a sunny
original score by DANNY ELFMAN, and
uses calypso music by Harry Belafonte
(most memorably, “Day-O” [The Banana
Boat Song] in the now-famous haunting
sequence where the Maitlands make them-
selves fully known to the Deetzes). Further,
it establishes one of the central thematic
paradoxes that orbits around many of
Burton’s films: even though Beetlejuice is
almost entirely focused on the theoretical
and material conditions of death, dying,
and the afterlife, it ultimately emerges as a

sweet film, whose moral core encourages
harmonious living and the embrace of dif-
ference.
Despite the film’s originality—it is a
brand-new property brought to screen, that
later became its own mini-merchandising
franchise, most notably through an ani-
mated series and several video games—it
does tap into recognizable social and cul-
tural conventions outside of its self-started
quirkiness. It plays off of the tropes of the
haunted house genre of horror films, offer-
ing an anything-goes world where statues
come to life, bodies morph, and the walls
of the house itself offer a porous outlet to
the netherworld. Lydia’s obsession with
death, and her use of the camera as an ini-
tial means of mediating her world and the
spirit realm that the Maitlands inhabit,
relates to the Victorian obsession with
mediating the occult. For Tom Gunning,
this mediated attempt at fixing some per-
manence onto the ghostly is indicative of
one of the main goals of film and photog-
raphy under modernity. The phantasmatic
(a term used to describe ghostly traces
caught on film) “denotes images that oscil-
late between visibility and invisibility, pres-
ence and absence, materiality and imma-
teriality, often using transparency or some
other manipulation of visible experience
to express this paradoxical ontological sta-
tus.” The central problem in Beetlejuice—
how do the living relate to, and learn from,
the dead?—is worked out through various
attempts at rendering the supernatural as
visible phenomena.
Even though the film is so closely
focused on the battle for the Maitland’s
house, the central terms of the struggle
contrast a series of lifestyle choices that
initially seem incompatible. The Maitlands
and the Deetzes are flip sides of family val-
ues under Reaganite capitalism. The Mait-
lands represent a world of small business,
local ownership, community, and moral
values (they are also coded as a more tightly
BEETLEJUICE  n  39
knit family unit, despite not having kids of
their own). Conversely, the Deetzs conform
more closely to realtor Jane’s definition of
a family—they have a daughter—but in
other ways, they represent a more tran-
sient set of American ideals. Charles is a
real estate speculator (he literally profits
on predicting trends). Delia is a gaudy pro-
ponent of the artistic avant-garde, though
her tastes are tied more to material con-
sumption than to revolutionary aesthetics.
Lydia, the misunderstood daughter, is a
rebel in some ways (in terms of dress and
the morbidity of her interests), but a tradi-
tionalist in others: she longs to be part of a
cohesive family. The ending to the film is
all the more triumphant, not just because
it is traditionally happy—both families
end up “living” under the same roof—but
because it shows that these lifestyle choices
are largely surface level. Even more remark-
ably, the film gives the various characters
different values, but never castigates any-
one into the position of ideological carica-
ture. Even though the film is largely about
the afterlife and almost entirely about fam-
ily, it is never religious in a conventional
sense. Instead, it presents a radically origi-
nal vision of the afterlife: purgatory is a vast
bureaucracy, oddly similar to what we have
on Earth.
Beetlejuice is also a parable about
privatization. Betelgeuse, the film’s charis-
matic wild card, is most closely aligned with
Charles: both represent a sort of private
enterprise that monitors the market (for
Betelgeuse, the market in souls) and takes
advantage of opportunities. Although the
afterlife is run by an inefficient bureaucracy
(best exemplified by the elderly Juno), it
does its best to fairly serve everybody. But
when characters in Beetlejuice hire freelanc-
ers—when the Maitlands call Betelgeuse,
despite the warnings, or when the Deetzes
use Otho’s casual knowledge of occult prac-
tices—all hell literally breaks loose. The
message seems to be that patience and the
40  n  BEETLEJUICE (VIDEO GAMES)
old values of government-guaranteed well-
being are preferable to the neoliberal cul-
ture of accelerated change.
Beetlejuice ended its initial theatrical
run grossing $73 million (against its mea-
ger $13 million budget). Kim Newman
noted that the film “confirms Burton’s
promise as a combination of Frank Tashlin
and David Lynch.” Kevin Thomas praised
the film, noting that “by the time this irre-
sistible treat is over, it has created some of
the funniest moments and most inspired
visual humour and design we may expect
to experience at the movies all year.” Vin-
cent Canby was more muted in his praise,
claiming, “It’s technically sophisticated and
so amiable and well meaning that it seems
rude to point out that, like some of our
public figures, it is more of a bore to watch
than to describe.” Richard Corliss saw that
film as nothing less than the revitalization
of supernatural comedy, by then a presum-
ably dying genre: “Beetlejuice means some-
thing good: that imaginative artists can
bring a fading genre back from the dead.”
Janet Maslin found the film lamely obvious
in its presentation and visual gags, claiming
that the actors “are limited by the stupidity
of the material.”
Beetlejuice’s success further endeared
Burton to Warner Bros., which in turn
entrusted him with the long-dormant Bat-
man franchise.—Kevin M. Flanagan
References
Vincent Canby, “‘Beetlejuice’ Is Pap for
the Eyes,” New York Times, May 8, 1988,
A 19; Richard Corliss, “Funeral March to
Calypso Beat: Beetlejuice,” Time 131, no.
15 (April 11, 1988): 69; Tom Gunning, “To
Scan a Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated
Vision,” Grey Room 26 (Winter 2007): 99;
Janet Maslin, “Ghosts and Extra Eyeballs,”
New York Times, March 30, 1988, C 18;
Kim Newman, “Beetlejuice,” in Tim Bur-
ton: A Child’s Garden of Nightmares, rev.
and updated ed., ed. Paul A. Woods (Lon-
don: Plexus, 2002), 34; Edwin Page, Gothic
Fantasy: The Films of Tim Burton (London:
Marion Boyars, 2007), 40; Mark Salisbury,
ed., Burton on Burton, 2nd rev. ed. (New
York: Faber and Faber, 2006), 54–55, 59,
68; Marc Shapiro, “Explaining Beetlejuice,”
in Tim Burton: Interviews, ed. Kristian
Fraga (Jackson: University Press of Missis-
sippi, 2005), 3; Jim Smith and J. Clive Mat-
thews, Tim Burton (London: Virgin Books,
2007), 59–60, 73; Kevin Thomas, “Gleeful
Grand Guignol of Beetlejuice,” in Woods,
Tim Burton: A Child’s Garden of Night-
mares, 31.
BEETLEJUICE (VIDEO GAMES)
BEETLEJUICE tie-in video game released
after the film had become a hit. The Gef-
fen Company and Warner Bros. did not
release the game immediately; however,
once the film proved successful (and with
the Beetlejuice animated TV series keep-
ing the property in the public eye through
the latter half of 1989), three games hit the
market, all different in genre and inspira-
tion. Adventures of Beetlejuice: Skeletons in
the Closet (1990) is adapted from the TV
series, and even includes a few non-game-
play screens that approximate the look
of the show. The game was developed by
Reidel Software Productions (who special-
ized in licensed titles) and was published
by Hi-Tech Expressions for play in IBM
compatible PCs. This game takes place over
250 isometric screens (viewed from above,
like a board game), and mainly focuses on
Beetlejuice attacking bugs, skeletons, and
other critters with projectiles. Beetlejuice
was released on Nintendo Entertainment
System in 1991 (published by LJN Toys
and developed by Rare, Inc., who would
soon find fame with Super Nintendo plat-
formers like Donkey Kong Country [1994]).
This game is based on the film, and because
it was released so long after the comple-
tion of the movie, it is able to faithfully
re-create several details. The game’s world
 BEETLEJUICE GOES HAWAIIAN  n  41
map (a screen that showcases the cogni-
tive layout of the different levels, each of
which approximates a different location
featured in the film such as the exterior of
the bureaucratic space of the afterlife) is a
convincing 8-bit re-creation of the land-
scape and village immediately surrounding
the Maitlands’ house. Each level is basically
a side-scrolling platformer (although per-
spective and screen direction do change
from stage to stage). There are also inter-
titles featuring a convincing digitization of
Beetlejuice’s face that interject quirky lines
of dialogue from the film. Overall, the Nin-
tendo Entertainment System (NES) version
of Beetlejuice is a largely successful attempt
at fitting the specificity of the film into a
well-known video-game genre. Nintendo
Power magazine situated the game as typical
of a licensed title in its short and middling
review: “Bearing a striking resemblance to
LJN’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, Beetle-
juice is yet another action packed game
based on a popular movie.” There is also
a Beetlejuice game for Nintendo’s portable
Game Boy system. While also developed by
Rare and published by LJN, this is a quite
different game from its NES counterpart,
even though it is also a side-scrolling, 2-D
platformer. The Game Boy Beetlejuice is
based on the likenesses from the TV series,
and because of the limitations of the Game
Boy’s hardware, scales the action down to
large and exaggerated sprites that cramp
the screen.—Kevin M. Flanagan
References
Tomer Gabel, “Adventures of Beetlejuice:
Skeletons in the Closet,” Moby Games, Sep-
tember 25, 1999, www.mobygames.com/
game/adventures-of-beetlejuice-skeletons-
in-the-closet; “Now Playing: Beetlejuice,”
Nintendo Power 23 (April 1991): 91.
BEETLEJUICE GOES HAWAIIAN
Title of a 126-page screenplay written by
JONATHAN GEMS, based on an idea
by Tim Burton, as a proposed sequel to
BEETLEJUICE. The year is uncertain, but
likely either 1990 or 1991. The story fea-
tures several of the major characters from
the original film—Charles and Delia Deetz,
daughter Lydia, Otho, and of course the
bio-exorcist, Beetlejuice—but not Barbara
and Adam Maitland. As in the original film,
Charles and Delia Deetz are the antagonists.
Lydia is now in college and is pay-
ing her first visit to the Hawaiian tropical
island Kanooka, where Charles Deetz, still
a real estate speculator as in the first film,
is in the final stages of the construction of a
posh resort and casino. A group of environ-
mentally conscious Beatniks are protesting
against the building of the hotel, claiming
that human activity will lead to the destruc-
tion of much of the island’s rare wildlife. As
the story begins, their protests have been
repeatedly ignored. In addition, the hotel
is being built on the burial ground of an
ancient Hawaiian kahuna, whose spirit has
been disturbed.
Lydia finds herself drawn to the Beat-
niks and begins to fall in love with one of
them, a surfer named Kimo. She meets an
elderly island holy man, Mr. Maui, who
instructs her on how to use her psychic
ability to summon waves from the ocean,
a talent she is able to exploit, making her
popular with the surfers. The protestors
kidnap Charles Deetz in an effort to per-
suade him to cancel the hotel’s opening,
but rather quickly Kimo and his friends are
arrested and thrown in jail. With the help
of Mr. Maui, Lydia uses a spell enabling her
to journey to the afterlife, where she hopes
to find Beetlejuice and convince him to
frighten the hotel’s guests off the island, as
well as help free Kimo and his friends.
Lydia is able to track down Beetlejuice
in the afterlife, who agrees to frighten off
the developers if Lydia is able to obtain
for him a license to scare. She does, and
they return together to the island. After
Beetlejuice springs her Beatnik friends
42  n  BEETLEJUICE IN LOVE
from jail, Lydia agrees to allow him three
days to play on the beach before fulfill-
ing his promise to chase off the devel-
opers. During the three days, all sorts of
wild things happen, including a surfing
tournament that Beetlejuice, predictably,
wins by using magic (cheating). As in the
first film, Beetlejuice is strongly attracted
to Lydia, and once he learns that she is in
love with Kimo, he seeks to create a rift
between them. He transforms a Joshua
tree into a seductive woman whom he
names “Cactus,” introducing her to Kimo.
Subsequently, Beetlejuice drugs Lydia with
a love potion, and she becomes besotted
with him. Posing as a wealthy oil tycoon
named Monty Exxon, Beetlejuice per-
suades the Deetzes to allow him to marry
Lydia, the day of the marriage set to coin-
cide with the gala opening of the hotel and
casino. Eventually, Kimo figures out what
Beetlejuice is up to and when he tries,
unsuccessfully, to stop the wedding, Bee-
tlejuice’s benign mother, Gala, appears.
She has Lydia drink the nectar of a flower,
which reverses the love spell, and Lydia is
restored to normal—wary of Beetlejuice.
Frustrated, Beetlejuice goes into his ter-
rifying mode, becoming a creature named
Juicifer and wreaking havoc on the island,
transforming automobiles into metal
wolves, animating demonic-looking Tiki
statues, conjuring forth dinosaur skeletons
from the ground, returning life to a Nean-
derthal man, and summoning the Easter
Island heads, revealed to be buried giants.
The terrified mob seeks refuge on a
nearby volcano. Lydia comes to the rescue
by summoning an enormous tidal wave
that wipes the creatures off the island, along
with everything else, including the hotel
and casino. Enraged, Beetlejuice intends to
murder Lydia, but in the nick of time, Otho
chants “Beetlejuice” three times and sends
him back to the afterlife. At the conclusion,
Lydia and Kimo are happily reconciled,
the island is to become a nature reserve,
and Beetlejuice, after accidentally drinking
his own love potion, falls for the girl with
whom he lives in the afterlife.
According to Jonathan Gems, both
MICHAEL KEATON and WINONA
RYDER agreed to star in the film provided
Burton directed. However, Warner Bros.
offered Burton complete artistic control over
BATMAN RETURNS, making him such an
“incredible” offer, according to Gems, “that
he couldn’t turn it down.” Hence Beetlejuice
Goes Hawaiian was shelved, and in the years
since, Burton has shown little interest in
returning to it.
References
Anthony C. Ferrante, “Hidden Gems,”
Fangoria 160 (March 1997): 42; Jonathan
Gems, Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian, draft
screenplay, 126 pages.
BEETLEJUICE IN LOVE
Title of a 122-page, first draft screenplay
written by WARREN SKAAREN, dated 10
July 1990, as a proposed sequel to BEETLE-
JUICE. According to the Warren Skaaren
papers held by the Harry Ransom Center at
the University of Texas, Skaaren had com-
pleted an outline for the sequel by Decem-
ber 27, 1989, finishing the first draft of the
screenplay over the next several months.
The story concerns a young couple—Julia,
a promising soprano, and her fiancé, Leo,
a gifted composer who is in the final stages
of completing a new, operatic version of the
tale of Romeo and Juliet. On the day of their
engagement, which they are celebrating at
the top of the Eiffel Tower, Leo is killed by a
lightning bolt. Upon arriving in the afterlife,
he is greeted by the mischievous Betelgeuse,
who is immediately captivated by Julia after
seeing her picture he’s pilfered from Leo.
Subsequently, Betelgeuse tries various strat-
egies to convince Leo to allow him to return
to the world of the living and marry Julia
in order to protect her from unscrupulous
managers. When Leo learns that his opera is

going to be performed—but ruined due to
unauthorized changes—he opts for a quick
turnaround under the auspices of the after-
life’s Bureau of Reincarnation, and returns
as a rat. He infiltrates the opera house and
through complicated means manages to get
Julia to sing “Betelgeuse” three times, allow-
ing the poltergeist to appear during the trav-
estied performance of his opera and wreak
havoc on those who have betrayed him.
Although Leo (as rat) is killed, the story
ends happily with Leo being reborn as the
son of Rose, a single mother who enlists Julia
to take care for her baby while she is out of
town to be married.
Arguably, Skaaren’s proposed sequel
picks up where Beetlejuice left off, with
Betelgeuse confined in the afterlife, which
is, as in the first film, depicted as an inter-
minable purgatory. However, the after-
life is more fully realized and as a result
is slightly more sinister than the complex
bureaucracy depicted in the first film: the
River Styx Motel, for example, is advertised
as “located conveniently near the Gates of
Hell,” and at one point as punishment for
his attempt to escape the afterlife, Betel-
geuse is required to clean the kennel of the
“Dogs of Hell.” Betelgeuse is very clearly
the center of the action: he is given far more
scenes than in the first film, appearing early
in the script, on page 10, in his new role as
psychopomp, waving a Coleman lantern as
he welcomes the recently deceased to the
afterlife. His libido remains intact, how-
ever, as once he sees a photograph of Julia,
he is immediately smitten, displaying the
same lecherous behavior toward her as he
did Lydia in Beetlejuice. As in Beetlejuice, all
hell literally breaks loose when Betelgeuse is
invoked during the travestied performance
of Leo’s opera. Although he efficiently dis-
patches the villains, before he can success-
fully wed Julia, Betelgeuse is dragged back
to the afterlife by the Dogs of Hell. In the
script’s final scene, Betelgeuse, seeking to
leave the land of the dead by means of the
BEKMAMBETOV, TIMUR  n  43
“quick turnaround,” returns as a poisonous
“Burmese red toad.”
Funny and imaginative, the first draft of
Beetlejuice in Love is the last script Warren
Skaaren completed, as he died of bone can-
cer in Austin, Texas, on December 28, 1990.
References
Warren Skaaren, Beetlejuice in Love, first
draft screenplay, July 10, 1990, 122 pages.
BEKMAMBETOV, TIMUR (1961–)
One of the most successful directors in con-
temporary Russian cinema who has pro-
duced and directed a wide range of crowd-
pleasers, both at home and in the United
States. Born in Kazakhstan during the height
of the Cold War, he began directing after
the fall of the Soviet Union. His first feature
Peshawar Waltz (1994; later released in the
United States as Escape from Afghanistan) is
a gritty war movie chronicling the uprising
of captive Soviet soldiers. Like Ridley Scott,
Bekmambetov gained most of his early
experience as a director of advertisements.
After directing a popular commercial in
Bank Imperial’s World History series (nota-
bly “Tamerlane,” about the famous nomad
warrior), he founded the moving image ad
agency the Bazelevs Group.
Bekmambetov is best known for Night
Watch (2004) and Day Watch (2006), two
blockbuster action-horror films that intro-
duce a longstanding battle for supremacy
between supernatural beings called “The
Others,” who align themselves as either
forces of Light or Dark. The “Watch” films
are adapted from novels by Sergei Luky-
anenko. Despite being massively popular
at home, they have also become a kind of
calling card for a new, unabashedly com-
mercial Russian cinema abroad. Critic Vic-
tor Matizen has described Day Watch as
“the first film-myth created in Russia that
can legitimately aspire to be universal.” The
notion of a balance of competing forces
whose sparring transcends the ordinary is
44  n  BERGER, RICHARD L.
obviously resonant with Western viewers,
and is par for the course in other adapted
franchises (Harry Potter, The Lord of the
Rings, and so on). But, these films still res-
onate with recent Russian cultural experi-
ence. David MacFayden has read them as
symptomatic of Russia’s currently uncer-
tain position on the world stage: “Since
these two movies are, to some degree, a
slightly consoling response to the unbal-
anced, disastrous action of Russian lawless-
ness in the 1990s, it comes as no surprise
that the conservative politics of Putin’s
period in office produced a return to the
‘managed’ action features—to comparable
degrees of peril, held in check by some
greater force.”
Bekmambetov has since divided his
time between directing and producing films
through major Hollywood studios and
working on fare principally conceived for
Russian audiences. His belated sequel to the
popular The Irony of Fate (1971), The Irony
of Fate: The Continuation (2007), became
the most profitable film ever in Russia,
grossing over $50 million in its first month
of release (the previous record was held by
his own Day Watch). Six Degrees of Celebra-
tion (2010) is a New Year’s comedy aimed
squarely at Russian audiences and uses a
thoroughly commercial language to appeal
to youth audiences (Beach Gray suggests
that the film’s editing and sense of product
placement related directly to Bekmambe-
tov’s early advertising work). Bekmambe-
tov develops and produces projects in Rus-
sia through Bekmambetov Projects Ltd.
Bekmambetov’s first major Ameri-
can film, Wanted (2008, from the Mark
Millar/J.G. Jones comic series), further
showcased his kinetic direction of popu-
lar literature. This tendency is taken to
its apotheosis in his adaptation of SETH
GRAHAME-SMITH’s ABRAHAM LIN-
COLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER (novel, 2010;
film adaptation, 2012). Despite weighing
the historical Lincoln against the novel,
Bekmambetov realizes that the film
amounts to more of a superhero origin
story than a rigorous look at the society
and politics of the nineteenth-century
United States. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire
Hunter was produced with Tim Burton
and Jim Lemley. Burton, Bekmambetov,
and Lemley produced SHANE ACKER’s
9 (2009), a feature film expansion of
Acker’s student film short. Distributed
by Focus Features, the feature version of
9 was produced through Tim Burton Pro-
ductions and Bazelevs Animation.—Kevin
M. Flanagan
References
Ethan Alter, “Great Emancipator vs. Vam-
pires,” Film Journal International 115, no.
5 (May 2012): 41–43; Arlene Forman,
“Review: The Irony of Fate: The Continu-
ation,” Kino Kultura 22 (2008), www.
kinokultura.com/2008/22r-irony.shtml;
Beach Gray, “Review: Six Degrees of Cel-
ebration,” Kino Kultura 33 (2011), www.
kinokultura.com/2011/33r-elki.shtml;
David MacFayden, “Action/Red West-
ern,” in Directory of World Cinema: Rus-
sia, ed. Brigit Beumers (Bristol: Intellect
Books, 2010), 217; Victor Matizen, “Is a
Russian Hollywood Possible? (Review of
Day Watch),” trans. Vladimir Padunov,
Kino Kultura 13 (2006), www.kinokultura.
com/2006/13r-daywatch.shtml.
BERGER, RICHARD L(AURENCE)
(1939–2004)
Disney executive responsible approving
the production of Tim Burton’s FRAN-
KENWEENIE. Richard Laurence Berger
was born on October 25, 1939, in Hill-
sdale, New York. He briefly attended
Cornell University, but graduated from
UCLA, where he was an All-American soc-
cer player. He worked as a certified public
accountant before joining 20th Century
Fox as a vice president for programs in
1973. He would spend a decade there,

developing film and television produc-
tions. He did, however, take time out for
a stint as CBS vice president of program-
ming, helping to develop television pro-
grams such as Lou Grant and Dallas.
In March 1983, the Disney Company
created Walt Disney Pictures, a subsidiary
devoted to movie and television produc-
tion. Berger was brought in as president.
As president of Walt Disney Pictures from
1983 to 1984, Berger started Touchstone
Films (now Touchstone Pictures) in 1984
as part of an effort by Disney to appeal to
teenagers and young adults. Among Berg-
er’s successful projects for Touchstone
Films was Splash, released in 1984. While
president of Walt Disney Pictures, Berger
was approached by Tim Burton about mak-
ing a film titled Frankenweenie. In 1983,
Burton put the idea on storyboards and
pitched it to Berger, who liked the idea and
subsequently approved the production.
In 1990, Berger became president of
MGM but resigned two years later, devot-
ing himself to charitable causes. He died
in Los Angeles from complications of lung
cancer on September 29, 2004, at age sixty-
four.
References
“Disney Veteran to Manage Film, TV
Unit,” Los Angeles Times, March 4, 1983,
F2; Michael London, “‘Growing Pains’:
Walt Would Wilt,” Los Angeles Times, Sep-
tember 23, 1983, H1; “Richard L. Berger,
64; Launched Touchstone Films for Dis-
ney” (obituary), Los Angeles Times, October
4, 2004, articles.latimes.com/2004/oct/04/
local/me-berger4.
BIG EYES (US 2014)
Director: Tim Burton. Screenplay: Scott
Alexander, Larry Karaszewski. Execu-
tive P roducers : Bob Weinstein, Har-
vey Weinstein, Jamie Patricof, Katterli
BIG EYES  n  45
Frauenfelder, Derek Frey. Producers:
Lynette Howell, Scott Alexander, Larry
Karaszewski, Tim Burton. Consulting
P roducer : Tommy Harper. L ine P ro -
ducer: Brendan Ferguson. Cinematog-
raphy : Bruno Delbonnel. E ditor : J. C.
Bond. M usic : Danny Elfman. P roduc -
tion Design: Rick Heinrichs. Supervising
Art Director: Chris August. Set Deco-
ration : John Micheletos, Shane Vieau.
C ostume D esigner : Colleen Atwood.
Sound: Chris Duesterdiek. Supervising
S ound E ditors : Oliver Tarney, Bjorn
Ole Schroeder. R erecording M ixers :
Michael Semanick, Tom Johnson. Spe-
cial Effects Coordinator: Sean House.
Visual Effects Supervisors: Mark Stetson,
Ralph Maiers. Visual Effects Producer:
Lauren Weidel. Visual Effects: Zoic Stu-
dios. Stunt Coordinators: Scott Nich-
olson, Rocky Capella. Assistant Direc-
tor: Katterli Frauenfelder.
C ast : Amy Adams (Margaret Keane),
Christoph Waltz (Walter Keane)
Danny Huston (Dick Nolan), Jon Polito
(Enrico Banducci), Krysten Ritter (Dee-
Ann), Jason Schwartzman (Ruben),
Terence Stamp (John Canaday), Del-
aney Raye (Young Jane), Madeleine
Arthur (Older Jane), Elisabetta Fantone
(Marta), James Saito (Judge), Guido
Furlani (Dino Olivetti), Emily Bruhn
(Second Olivetti Girl), Alan MacFar-
lane (Society Man #1), Tony Alcantar
(Tourist), Jaden Alexander (Beatnik),
Andrew Airlie (Rich Man), Matthew
Kevin Anderson (Hipster Man), Stepha-
nie Bennett (Coed #1), Jock Armour
(Jane’s Teenage Friend), Andrea Bucko
(Young Coed), Joe Bravo (Beatnik),
David Edward (Pedestrian), Heather
Doerksen (Gossipy Woman #1), Kurt
Cotton (Pedestrian).
Running Time: 105 minutes, 10 seconds.
Technicolor.
R eleased T hrough : Weinstein Co. Pre-
sentation of a Tim Burton/Electric City
Entertainment production.
46  n  BIG EYES
Film written by SCOTT ALEXANDER and
LARRY KARASZEWSKI, the writing team
responsible for the far more eccentric (and
ultimately more personal, at least for Tim
Burton) ED WOOD. Like Ed Wood, it is
a film about outsiders, a slice of true-life
Americana that had never been told. Big
Eyes is about the intersection of high art
and low art, and about art and commerce.
It is also a feminist story, the journey of
Margaret Keane from being a meek subur-
ban fifties housewife to a woman capable of
speaking in her own voice. Big Eyes is simi-
lar to Ed Wood in that Margaret Keane’s
work symbolizes American culture’s
ambivalent attitude toward the expressions
of its own popular culture. The story begins
as Keane (Amy Adams) ends her unhappy
first marriage. With her young daughter,
Jane (Delaney Raye; the older Jane is played
by Madeleine Arthur), Margaret escapes the
suburbs and heads to the bohemian North
Beach area of San Francisco, where at art
fairs she charges a dollar to paint children’s
portraits, which characteristically depict the
youngsters with huge, round charcoal eyes.
The self-effacing Margaret is swept off her
feet by the charming Walter Keane (Chris-
toph Waltz), who regales Margaret with
tales of his days as a painter in Paris. How-
ever, he admits he’s currently a real estate
agent and not a working artist.
Soon, Keane is promoting his wife’s
work around North Beach. He is shunned
by gallery owners but convinces Enrico
Banducci (Jon Polito) to hang some of the
paintings at his nightclub, the hungry i.
Unfortunately, the only space available for
the paintings is next to the upstairs bath-
rooms. At this point, Walter freely admits
the “little hobo kids” portraits are his wife’s
work, at least until they find an audience,
at which point he claims them as his own.
His gift of salesmanship and gift for emo-
tional manipulation quickly silence Marga-
ret’s rather timid protests. But once the big
eyes pictures start selling for huge amounts
and celebrities start collecting them, any
attempt to dispel the illusion that the paint-
ings are not his could destroy the business.
By the time the Keane Gallery opens, the
paintings are presented as entirely his own
work. The big eyes paintings are despised
by New York Times art critic John Canaday
(Terence Stamp), who describes them as
“an infinity of kitsch.”
Since the paintings are not his work,
Keane has no idea how to discuss them, or
the artistic inspiration that led to their cre-
ation. An instinctive con artist, he eventually
creates an elaborate myth that the waifs with
the big eyes are inspired by the lost children
he saw in war-ravaged post–World War II
Europe. On her part, Margaret chooses to
accept her anonymity and finds comfort in
the isolation of her studio, where she pro-
digiously continues to churn out big eye
portraits, at the same time experimenting
with a Modigliani-inspired style of female
portraiture. Eventually, Margaret chooses
to end the marriage, although, remarkably,
she continues to produce paintings for Wal-
ter as part of the divorce agreement. Even-
tually, after Margaret has moved to Hawaii
and become a Jehovah’s Witness, she pub-
licly states during a radio broadcast that it
was she who created the big eye paintings,
prompting a lawsuit by Walter that ends up
being adjudicated in a court of law. Margaret
is ultimately proved to be the actual artist.
The film avoids any ultimate evalua-
tion of Keane’s work, choosing to allow that
value is finally in the eye of the beholder.
The question that remains unanswered is
whether Margaret Keane is an Ed Wood–
like artist who happened to make money
with her art. Shrewdly, Walter Keane mar-
keted the posters and prints in places such
as dime stores and hardware stores, meaning
that he clearly understood that the big eyes
paintings would appeal to a middle-class,
genteel audience that knew little about art in
the intellectual sense, but connected to art in
an emotional way, often through mawkish

sentimental appeals. In Walter Keane’s case,
he wasn’t artistically inclined, but once pre-
sented the opportunity he became a highly
successful art dealer. He also seems to have
been driven by the need to be famous.
As for the value of Margaret Keane’s
work—whose original paintings have
become highly collectible—the jury remains
divided. That she was driven to produce
cannot be questioned, and she continues to
be collected, even by Tim Burton himself,
who commissioned Keane portraits of his
former romantic companions LISA MARIE
and HELENA BONHAM CARTER. Argu-
ably, there’s a Keane influence in both the
CORPSE BRIDE characters and the ani-
mated FRANKENWEENIE characters as
well. In the film, art critic John Canaday
asserts that Keane’s paintings are nothing
but “hack work,” and for some this remains
a complete certainty. Others are not so sure,
as suggested by artists such as Mark Ryden
and Yoshitomo Nara, who have reinterpreted
what Keane’s big eyes actually represent.
In his review of the film for the Hollywood
Reporter, Todd McCarthy raised the intrigu-
ing question of the obsessive-compulsive
nature of Keane’s work, referring to Keane’s
paintings as “unremittingly repetitive.”
While praising Amy Adams’s “first-rate per-
formance,” the “creatively compulsive” side
of Keane’s personality remains unexplored in
the film, with McCarthy correctly observing,
“No one may ever know where it all came
from and why she basically painted the same
picture over and over again for years.”
Reviews of Big Eyes slanted toward the
positive. McCarthy concluded his review
by saying, “It’s good to see Burton play-
ing to his strengths again after a stretch of
uneven work.” The New York Times’s A. O.
Scott described it as “a horror movie tucked
inside a domestic drama wrapped up in a
biopic.” While Amy Adams’s performance
is “sensitive and subtle,” he thought “the
element of Margaret’s personality that
allowed her to remain under Walter’s spell
BIG EYES  n  47
for so long remains opaque.” On the nega-
tive, Ty Burr, writing in the Boston Globe,
declared, “Big Eyes may not be Burton’s
absolute worst movie” but “it’s pretty close
to the bottom. It’s also the film that reveals
his weaknesses as a director and, by their
absence, his strengths. Gaudy, shallow, shrill,
smug, the movie proves beyond a whisker
of doubt that Burton has little interest in
human beings unless they can be reduced
to cartoons.” The Washington Post’s Ann
Hornaday says it “doesn’t approach the sub-
lime or subversive heights of Ed Wood” as
it “has a much more conventionally uplift-
ing feel, which probably suits its protagonist
more than the usual Burton combination
of worship and winking playfulness. . . . As
with Keane’s beguiling, come-hither raga-
muffins, it’s impossible not to like Big Eyes,
which presents its heroine as a genuine, if
self-effacing proto-feminist pioneer.” For
her performance in Big Eyes, Amy Adams
won a Golden Globe for Best Performance
by an Actress in a Motion Picture; she was
also nominated for a BAFTA (British Acad-
emy of Film and Television Arts) Award for
Best Leading Actress. Christoph Waltz was
nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Actor
but did not win. “Big Eyes,” by Lana Del Rey
and Daniel Heath, was also nominated for a
Golden Globe for Best Original Song.
The film earned $25.4 million world-
wide against a reported budget of $10
million.
References
Ty Burr, “‘Big Eyes’ Paints Picture of a
Hijacked Life and Career,” Boston Globe,
December 24, 2014, www.bostonglobe.
com/arts/movies/2014/12/24/big-eyes-
paints-picture-hijacked-life-and-career-
kitsch/jf3fYUTRfT2LjprzzgxaLK/story.
html; Ann Hornaday, “‘Big Eyes’ Movie
Review: Tim Burton’s Portrait of Artist
Margaret Keane,” Washington Post, Decem-
ber 23, 2014, www.washingtonpost.com/
goingoutguide/movies/big-eyes-movie-
48  n  BIG FISH
review-tim-burtons-portrait-of-artist-
margaret-keane/2014/12/23/ebfd5f36-
861e-11e4-9534-f79a23c40e6c_story.html;
Todd McCarthy, “‘Big Eyes’: Film Review,”
Hollywood Reporter, November 14, 2014,
www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie/big-
eyes/review/749076; A. O. Scott, “An Art-
ist Overlooked in Plain Sight,” New York
Times, December 24, 2014, www.nytimes.
com/2014/12/25/movies/big-eyes-casts-
another-side-of-keane-art.html?_r=0.
BIG FISH (US 2003)
D irector : Tim Burton. S creenplay : John
August, based on the book Big Fish: A
Novel of Mythic Proportions by Daniel
Wallace. E xecutive P roducer : Arne
L. Schmidt. P roducers : Richard D.
Zanuck, Bruce Cohen, Dan Jinks. Asso-
ciate P roducer : Katterli Frauenfelder.
C inematography : Philippe Rousselot.
Editor: Chris Lebenzon. Music: Danny
Elfman. Orchestrators: Steve Bartek,
Jeff Atmajian, Jane Antonia Cornish.
M usic S upervisor : Bob Badami. P ro -
duction D esigner : Dennis Gassner.
Art Direction: Roy Barnes, Jean-Michel
Ducourty, Robert Fechtman, Jack John-
son, Richard L. Johnson. Set Decora-
tion : Nancy Haigh. C ostume D esign :
Colleen Atwood. Assistant Set Direc-
tor: Paige Augustine. Storyboard Artist:
Chris Baker. Sound Effects Designer:
Craig Berkey. Sound Effects Editor: Ted
Caplan. Dialogue Editor: Susan Dawes.
Sound Effects Editor: Ezra Dweck. Spe-
cial Effects Set Supervisor: Eric Allard.
Animation Production Designer: Robin
A. Linn. Effects Supervisor (Stan Win-
ston Studio): Lindsay MacGowan. Key
A rtist (Stan Winston Studio): Shane
Mahan. S pecial E ffects S upervisors :
Keith Marbory, Hans Metz. Puppeteers:
John Cherevka, Matt Heimlich, Richard
Landon, Brian Namanny. Special Effects
Director: Stan Winston. Visual Effects
Producer (MPC): Lucy Ainsworth-Tay-
lor. Visual Effects Producer: Victoria
Alonso. Lead Film Scanning: Christo-
pher Arreola. Digital Artist (SPI): Rob
Blue. D igital C ompositor : Christian
Boudman. Digital Effects Artist: Todd
Boyce. D ata O perator (MPC): Paul
Brannan, Andre Brizard. Digital Effects
Artist (SPI): Sean C. Cunningham. Digi-
tal Effects Artist: Lisa Deaner. Visual
Effects Technical Director: Colin Drob-
nis. Supervising Animator: Bill Diaz. Ani-
mator: Denis Samoilov. First Assistant
Editor: Michel Markus. Assistant Edi-
tor: Meredith Apel. Color Timer: Steve
Bowen. Digital Colorist Assistant: Ben
Estrada.
Cast: Albert Finney (Edward Bloom), Ewan
McGregor (Young Edward Bloom),
Scott Christopher McPherson Jr.
(Edward Bloom as Child), Jessica Lange
(Sandra Bloom), Alison Lohman (Sandra
Templeton Bloom), Billy Crudup (Wil-
liam “Will” Bloom), Marion Cotillard
(Josephine Bloom), Helena Bonham
Carter (Jenny Hill/Witch), Hailey Anne
Nelson (Young Jenny), Robert Guil-
laume (Dr. Bennett), Matthew McGrory
(Karl the Giant), Danny DeVito (Amos
Calloway), Steve Buscemi (Norther
Winslow), Ada and Arlene Tai (Ping
and Jing), Bevin Kaye (River Woman/
Fish), David Denman (Don Price), John
Lowell (Young Don Price), Loudon
Wainwright III (Mayor Beamen), Missi
Pyle (Mildred), Destiny [Miley] Cyrus
(Young Ruthie), Daniel Wallace (Eco-
nomics Teacher), Deep Roy (Mr. Sog-
gybottom/Amos’s Attorney), George
McArthur (Colossus).
Running Time: 122 minutes, 40 seconds.
Technicolor.
R eleased T hrough : Columbia Pictures,
Jinks/Cohen Company, the Zanuck
Company.
Film that makes extensive use of the flash-
back to explore the relationship between
fathers and sons, and between fact and
fiction (quotidian reality and a richly
imagined, mythic world). Based on a

1998 novel by Daniel Wallace, Big Fish: A
Novel of Mythic Proportions, the screenplay
was written by John August, who worked
on the Burton projects CORPSE BRIDE,
CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE
FACTORY, the stop-motion FRANKEN-
WEENIE, and DARK SHADOWS. Ele-
ments of the fairy tale and the fantastic,
which inform so much of Burton’s film
art, are also present here, in the form of
mythological characters—a giant, a dwarf,
a mermaid, a witch, and a werewolf make
appearances—and in the way it manipu-
lates both time and space.
The story revolves around the life
of a dying man, Edward Bloom (Albert
Finney) who is both famous for his gift
of spinning fantastic, entrancing yarns
that few can resist, and for his personal
charm. For the final three years of his
life, Edward has been estranged from his
son, Will (Billy Crudup), and the film is
the story of their successful reconciliation.
Edward is an enigma for Will, himself now
an expectant father; having grown up with
the same stories told by Edward over and
over, Will no longer believes them as he
did when he was a child, and he feels an
urgent need to ascertain the truth of his
father’s life before Edward’s death. The
flashbacks of the story, told primarily
by Edward himself, weave a coherent, if
mythical narrative of Edward’s life, from
birth to death.
According to Edward’s version of the
story, when he was born he slid rapidly
down the hospital hall, a fantastically slip-
pery infant. As a young child (played by
Scott Christopher McPherson Jr.), Edward
grew so rapidly that he was bedridden for
three years, at which time, reading his way
alphabetically through the encyclopedia, he
learned the fact that goldfish in a contained
space will remain small, but will grow pro-
portionately to their environment, becom-
ing big fish when they inhabit a big pond.
This, Edward applies to himself and decides
BIG FISH  n  49
that he must leave the small town of Ash-
ton, where he was raised, to become a big
fish in a big pond, a metaphor for his wild
imagination.
Also as a young boy, he discovered
the moment and method of his own death
when his indomitable spirit and courage
led him into the swamp to the abode of a
fabled swamp witch (HELENA BONHAM
CARTER), through whose glass eye he and
his friends each witness their own end.
The advantage, as the boy realizes, is that
knowing the end of his life serves as a kind
of talisman, equipping him with cour-
age, since he knows that dangers posed
to him will not cause his death before the
foreordained time. This knowledge allows
the youthful Edward (Ewan McGregor)
to pursue his big dreams, and his reck-
less risk taking that pays big dividends.
In high school, Edward is a star, both in
the classroom and at sports and, at the age
of eighteen, he saves the town of Ashton,
South Carolina, from an itinerant giant,
Karl (Matthew McGrory), who has been
ravaging the crops and stock around Ash-
ton. Edward thus becomes a local hero,
befriends Karl, and sets out with him on
his quest to become a big fish.
Karl and Edward come to a fork in the
road; he instructs Karl to take the paved
road while he will take the dangerous road
less traveled, the neglected and perilous
path that leads him to the mythic Disney-
fied town of Spectre, a pristine little village
peopled with seemingly happy barefooted
citizens. The mayor, Beaman (Loudon
Wainwright III), informs Edward that
they expected his arrival, but not this early.
Things do not seem quite right in Spectre,
where dwells the mayor’s eight-year-old
daughter, Jenny (Hailey Anne Nelson),
who becomes enamored of Edward, and
a famous poet, Norther Winslow (Steve
Buscemi). The small, static town of Spec-
tre cannot contain Edward, who departs to
resume his quest.
50  n  BIG FISH
When the two attend a circus, Karl is
inducted into it by the ringmaster, Amos
Calloway (DANNY DeVITO), who is also
a lonely werewolf in disguise, and Edward
falls in love at first sight with a girl in
attendance at one of the shows, but she
vanishes into the crowd before he can meet
her. In exchange for information about the
girl, whom the ringmaster knows, Edward
agrees to work for the circus, and even-
tually learns the identity of his beloved,
Sandra Templeton (Alison Lohman), who
attends Auburn University. She becomes
Edward’s wife, even though she has been
engaged to another resident of Ashton,
the bully, Don Price (David Denman),
who beats Edward badly but loses the girl.
Edward is drafted into the Korean War
immediately after his wedding and vol-
unteers for hazardous missions to shorten
his three-year term. As a veteran, Edward
then becomes a traveling salesman, builds
a home with a picket fence for Sandra and
their son, Will, and becomes a prolific sto-
ryteller. The young Will especially likes the
frightening stories about the swamp witch,
but Edward’s personal favorite, the defin-
ing story of his life, is how he managed to
catch a certain elusive big fish with a gold
wedding ring on the day that Will was
born, a parable of how he married the love
of his life, Sandra.
The estrangement between Edward
and Will occurs when Edward captivates
listeners with the big fish/gold ring story
at Will’s engagement party to his French
bride, Josephine (Marion Cotillard). Will,
now a successful foreign correspondent,
values facts, not fiction; he has grown tired
of the story, disbelieves it and the many
others Edward has told, and for the ensu-
ing three years after his wedding, he only
communicates with his mother (played
by Jessica Lange). “I didn’t see anything
of myself in my father, and I don’t think
he saw anything of himself in me. We
were like strangers who knew each other
well,” is Will’s mistaken perception of
how things stood between them. The film
opens with this estrangement, jumps ahead
to Edward’s impending death, and then
provides the backstory through a series of
flashbacks, many of which are recounted
by the ailing Edward to his pregnant
daughter-in-law. Will attempts to persuade
his father to tell the truth about himself,
but Edward replies that he has indeed
been doing that all along, that the stories
he has told are true. The disbelieving Will
learns that the swamp witch is the young
girl, Jenny, who had fallen in love with
the young Edward when he had visited
Spectre; yet she tells Will that Edward has
always only loved Sandra, thus dispelling
Will’s suspicions that Edward’s absences
from home, and his inability to feel that
he really knew his father, were the result of
Edward leading a double life.
When Edward has a stroke and is
hospitalized, the lifelong family physi-
cian, Dr. Bennett (Robert Guillaume),
relates to the still resentful Will the “real”
circumstances of his birth. He tells Will
that Edward was away from home and
in Wichita when Will was born. He was
born a week early, but the birth was nor-
mal. This fact alone seems to be enough
for Will, who is now ready to let go of his
hostility for his father, but Dr. Bennett
remarks that, if he were given the choice
of which version to choose from, he would
prefer the story of the big fish to that of
the uneventful fact. The cathartic moment
of reconciliation in the film occurs when
the dying Edward enlists Will’s help to
complete the story of his life; together, the
two write the end. In their joint imagina-
tive effort, Will helps Edward escape the
hospital, drives him to the Ashton River,
where a host of the people from Edward’s
stories await them, all happy and ready to
see him off on his final journey. Will car-

ries Edward to the river, where he returns
a gold ring to his beloved wife, Sandra,
and then, when he is placed in the water
by Will, transforms into the fish that
had been caught years before by the gold
ring, and swims swiftly away. When we
return to the reality of the funeral, aston-
ishingly for Will, many of the characters
he believed to be figments of his father’s
imaginative fictions attend: the giant,
Karl, and the werewolf ringmaster, Amos;
the Siamese Twins Edward had recruited
for the circus when he met them during
a dangerous service mission; the Spectre
poet–turned–bank robber–turned Wall
Street wizard, Norther Winslow; and even
the swamp witch, the elder Jenny.
Big Fish insists that the deeper truths of
life must be embodied in stories; in “real-
ity,” Edward was absent when Will made
his uneventful way into the world, but the
joy that Edward felt at his son’s birth, and
the enduring love he has for his wife, can
only be expressed through the story he fab-
ricates about catching the mythical big one
with a gold ring on that day. On the surface
it is a fiction, but encased in the fiction is
the deeper truth; stories are all we have to
express what would otherwise be elusive and
ineffable. Will’s wish for insight into the rid-
dle of his father is granted to him at last. In
the end, he can say, “A man tells the story so
many times, they become him, and they live
on after him, and in that way he becomes
immortal.” It is a particularly uplifting mes-
sage, and a strong statement about imagi-
nation: we are what we imagine we are, we
grow in accordance with the environment
we choose to inhabit, we find joy in helping
others find joy, and we defeat death by join-
ing in the chorus of voices in the continuum
of time (represented by the river). The idea
of imagination as redemptive is perhaps the
single most persistent one in Tim Burton’s
work. If these are fictions, they are also fic-
tions to live by; as Shelley said, “The secret
BIG FISH  n  51
to morals is love. And the imagination is
the instrument of moral good. A man, to
be greatly good, must imagine himself to be
others and many others.”
Daniel Wallace’s novel focuses more
on Edward Bloom than his son, Wil-
liam. In order to compensate, the film
expands the role of William (called Billy,
the name Tim Burton chose for his own
son, born the same year), a journalist liv-
ing in France, married to his pregnant
French wife, Josephine. Hence, Billy’s own
impending fatherhood serves to moti-
vate him to find out the truth about his
dying father. Yet, as his father slips closer
to death, Billy delves into his father’s past
and discovers there may be at least some
truth in his father’s tall tales. Reconcili-
ation is possible, but only partially, with
Billy learning that his father fabricated
tales to compensate for his own weak-
nesses (or limitations): what he was not in
his life, he was in his imagination.
Big Fish received positive reviews from
film critics. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone
magazine praised Burton’s direction, saying
that the film “challenges and deepens his
visionary talent” and is a touching father-
son drama. Mike Clark in USA Today com-
mented that he was most fascinated by the
casting choices, observing, “Equally delight-
ful is the [Alison] Lohman character’s evo-
lution into an older woman (Jessica Lange).
It’s a metamorphosis to equal any in screen
history.” James Berardinelli wrote, “Big
Fish is a clever, smart fantasy that targets
the child inside every adult, without insult-
ing the intelligence of either,” but hesitated
to call it a masterpiece, claiming the film is
“a little too uneven to attain the same level
as something like The Wizard of Oz or The
Princess Bride.” Roger Ebert, unmoved, in a
negative review wrote, “There is no deny-
ing that Will has a point: The old man
is a blowhard. There is a point at which
his stories stop working as entertainment
52  n  BIRD, BRAD
and segue into sadism.” Time magazine’s
Richard Corliss was disappointed, finding
the father-son reconciliation storyline to
be banal and clichéd. “You recall The Boy
Who Cried Wolf? Edward Bloom is the man
who cried fish.” Alison McMahan makes
an observation that is perhaps well to take
notice of, that the Big Fish screenplay owes
at least some inspiration to Arthur Miller’s
play Death of a Salesman, suggesting that
Edward Bloom shares a family resemblance
to Salesman’s Willie Loman.
Big Fish won no major awards,
although DANNY ELFMAN’s score was
nominated for an Academy Award. In
addition, the film was nominated for sev-
eral Golden Globe and BAFTA awards.—
Rebecca A. Umland
References
James Berardinelli, “Big Fish,” ReelViews,
www.reelviews.net/movies/b/big _fish.html;
Richard Corliss, “Seven Holiday Treats,”
Time, December 8, 2003, content.time.com/
time/magazine/article/0,9171,557084-2,00.
html; Mike Clark, “Fanciful ‘Big Fish’
Swimming in Visual Delight,” USA Today,
December 24, 2003, usatoday30.usatoday.
com/life/movies/reviews/2003-12-10-big-
fish_x.htm; Roger Ebert, “Big Fish,” Rog-
erEbert.com, December 24, 2003, www.
rogerebert.com/reviews/big-fish-2003; Ali-
son McMahan, The Films of Tim Burton:
Animating Live Action in Contemporary
Hollywood (New York: Continuum, 2005);
Peter Travers, “Big Fish,” Rolling Stone,
November 20, 2003, www.rollingstone.com/
movies/reviews/big-fish-20031120.
BIRD, BRAD (1957–)
Gifted writer, director, producer, and voice
actor, born Phillip Bradley Bird in Kalispell,
Montana, and raised in Corvallis, Oregon.
An animation enthusiast from a young
age, on a tour of the Walt Disney Studios
at age eleven, Bird claimed he would some-
day become a Disney animator. Soon after,
he became a protégé of Milt Kahl, one of
Disney’s legendary team of animators, the
Nine Old Men.
After graduating from high school in
1975, Bird enrolled in the CALIFORNIA
INSTITUTE OF THE ARTS’ Program in
Character Animation. There Bird met and
befriended other future directors, writ-
ers, and animators, including Tim Burton
and John Lasseter, and was a member of
CalArts’ famed A113 class. After graduation
from CalArts, he began working for Disney,
but like John Lasseter, he eventually left
the studio to join Steven Spielberg on his
Amazing Stories television anthology series,
which ran for two seasons, 1985–1987. Bird
wrote and directed two episodes for Amaz-
ing Stories, including the animated epi-
sode “Family Dog,” based on production
and character design by Tim Burton. (The
character design for the eponymous fam-
ily dog of this episode would later reappear
as “Sparky” in Burton’s 2012 stop-motion
animated version of FRANKENWEENIE.)
After serving as a creative consultant
on The Simpsons’ first eight seasons, Bird
turned to directing his first animated feature
film, The Iron Giant (1999). Loosely based
on Ted Hughes’s book, the film, set during
the height of the Cold War, is about a small
boy who befriends a giant amnesiac robot
from outer space. Elegant in its simplicity,
warmly nostalgic, evocative of the wonder
of childhood, The Iron Giant received glow-
ing reviews from critics and was nominated
for numerous awards, but was a commer-
cial failure. However, The Iron Giant won
the BAFTA Children’s Award for Best Fea-
ture Film in 2000, which Bird shared with
Allison Abbate, Des McAnuff, and Tim
McCanlies. Happily, the film was redis-
covered when eventually released on home
video and is now considered a classic.
Among the admirers of The Iron
Giant was John Lasseter, Bird’s for-

mer classmate at CalArts, now at Pixar.
Lasseter invited Bird to pitch a project
at Pixar, and that project became The
Incredibles (2004), written and directed
by Bird, about a family of retired super-
heroes. The film was both a critical and
commercial success, receiving four Acad-
emy Award nominations, including Best
Original Screenplay and Best Animated
Feature Film. It won the Academy Award
for Best Animated Feature Film, the first
Bird would receive in that category. Soon
after, at John Lasseter’s request, Bird took
over as director on Ratatouille (2007)
from Jan Pinkava. Bird revised the script
and brought in Mark Andrews, the story
supervisor on The Incredibles. Ratatouille
was a worldwide hit, earning a Golden
Globe for Best Animated Feature and five
Academy Award nominations, winning
for Best Animated Feature Film, Bird’s
second Academy Award for Best Ani-
mated Feature.
In 2011, Bird directed his first live-
action feature, Mission: Impossible–Ghost
Protocol, a worldwide box office hit and to
date the highest grossing of that franchise’s
four films.
References
Rick Kogan, “CBS’ Animated Family Dog
Has No Bite,” Chicago Tribune, June 23,
1993, articles.chicagotribune.com/1993-
06-23/features/9306230037_1_fam-
ily-dog-stupid-dog-dog-show; John J.
O’Connor, “Review/Television; Spiel-
berg’s New Project? It’s a Cartoon Dog’s
Life,” New York Times, June 23, 1993,
www.nytimes.com/1993/06/23/mov-
ies/review-television-spielberg-s-new-
project-it-s-a-cartoon-dog-s-life.html;
Charles Solomon, “Animated ‘Fam-
ily Dog’ Does Prime-Time Tricks,” Los
Angeles Times, February 16, 1987, articles.
latimes.com/1987-02-16/entertainment/
ca-2387_1_family-dog.
BONES  n  53
BONES (US/UK 2006)
D irector : Tim Burton. P roducer : Nikki
Penny. Cinematography: Max Goldman.
Post Production Company: MPC. Edi-
tor: Amanda James (Final Cut London).
VFX Supervisor: Chas Jarrett. VFX Pro-
ducers: Andrew Bell, Olly Money. 3-D
L ead : Dave Child. C ompositing L ead :
Paul O’Shea. Compositing: Ann Krog-
stad, Eileen Chan, Franck Lambertz,
Nick Seresin, Nico Cotta, Giuliano
Cavalli, Richard McKeand. VFX Team:
Martin Carroll, Neil Canterbury, Rob
Andrews. Roto Prep: Alasdair McNeill,
Ashley Tyas, Martin Cook, Mike Bra-
zelton, Stuart Bullen. MPC Avid Editor:
Alex Holden. T elecine : Mark Gethin.
Telecine Assistant: Kennedy Dawson.
Cast: the Killers (Brandon Flowers, Dave
Keuning, Mark Stoermer, Ronnie Van-
nucci Jr.), Michael Steger (boy), Devon
Aoki (girl).
R unning T ime : 3 minutes, 50 seconds.
Color.
Released Through: Island Records (song).
Refused TV (music video)
First music video directed by Tim Burton.
“Bones” is from the Killers’ second album,
Sam’s Town (2006). Footage from Jason
and the Argonauts (1963), Lolita (1962),
and Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)
appears on a drive-in screen behind the
Killers, who perform in the playground
area in front of the screen. The storyline
concerns a boy and a girl on a date at a
drive-in watching a film in which they
themselves become skeletons. The video
opens with the scene from Jason and
the Argonauts in which Aeetes sows the
Hydra’s teeth, producing the seven sword-
wielding skeletons. This footage appears
behind the band as the couple, in their
car, look on. The couple then appears on
the drive-in screen riding together in a car
heading to the beach. The girl hops out
54  n  BROYLES, WILLIAM, JR.
of the car and runs off through the sand
with the boy following. The girl stops,
turns, and starts to undress—but peels off
her clothing and skin instead, revealing
her skeleton. The boy pulls off his shirt to
reveal his skeleton as well. They are later
shown embracing on the beach (a reenact-
ment of the famous scene from From Here
to Eternity [1953], in which Burt Lancaster
and Deborah Kerr embrace during one of
their secret assignations). As a wave crashes
over the couple, they become embracing
skeletons. The skeletons are later seen run-
ning toward each other across the beach,
arms extended to form an embrace, only
to crash into one another and smash to
pieces—a parody of the scene in the film
10 (1979), in which Bo Derek, in a one-
piece swimsuit with her hair in cornrow
braids, is jogging on the beach while Dud-
ley Moore fantasizes she is running to him.
At the conclusion of the video, the Killers
themselves have become skeletons as well,
collapsing into piles of bones at the song’s
end. The video explores the link between
sex and death as well as illicit sex as it
relates to age, as suggested by the inclusion
of the clip from Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita set
at the drive-in.
Tim Burton’s music video debut was
shot in Los Angeles and Point Dume, Mal-
ibu, in roughly four days in August 2006.
The production was managed by the Los
Angeles–based Refused TV with 3-D com-
puter animated skeletons and postproduc-
tion carried out in London by MPC (the
Harry Potter films, among many others).
The producer was Nikki Penny, who had
been the visual effects producer for CHAR-
LIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY
(2005) and served in the same capacity for
SWEENEY TODD (2007). Other than the
few location setups, the entire film was
shot against green screen. Two days were
spent before a green screen capturing the
Killers in performance, the footage shot at
Los Angeles’s South Bay Studios. Commer-
cial cinematographer Max Goldman shot
the video using a Panavision Genesis HD
camera. Miniatures were shot of the drive-
in movie environment; these were then
composited together with the backgrounds
and the green screen band performance. A
digital matte painting was created of a sun-
set desert horizon that was also integrated
into the sequence, forming the background
behind the drive-in screen. The 3-D model
skeletons were roto-animated over the
actors and band members, adopting the
exact performance of the actual perform-
ers. For the reenactment shots, there were
a number of complicated integrations
between the waves and the skeleton couple
on the beach, also done by MPC. In order
to achieve the effect at the end of the video,
when the skeletons fall to pieces to the
ground, MPC used its existing in-house
PAPI system, created to shatter and bend
all types of material for the disaster film
Poseidon (2006).
References
“Editor Amanda James on the Killers’
Video ‘Bones,’” StudioDaily, www.studio-
daily.com/2006/11/editor-amanda-james-
on-the-killersa¢aea-video-bones/; David
Geffner, “Corpse Band: Max Goldman Has
Cinematic Vision for the Killers’ ‘Bones,’”
posted on Max Goldman’s website, max-
goldmandp.com/press/The-Killers-Bones.
jpg; “The Killers,” IMVDb, imvdb.com/n/
the-killers.
BROYLES, WILLIAM, JR. (1944–)
Highly acclaimed journalist and Academy
Award–nominated screenwriter, cowriter
of PLANET OF THE APES (2001). William
Broyles Jr. was born October 8, 1944, in
Houston, Texas, the son of an engineer and
great-grandson of a Texas newspaper pub-
lisher. He graduated from Rice University
in 1966. (In 1993 he would receive a Dis-

tinguished Alumni Award from his alma
mater.) He earned a prestigious Marshall
Scholarship and while at Oxford Univer-
sity earned a master’s degree in philosophy,
politics, and economics. Subsequently, he
joined the Peace Corps, but resigned dur-
ing his training period and in October
1968 enlisted in the Marines. Discharged
in 1971, he returned to Texas and in 1973
cofounded, with Michael R. Levy, Texas
Monthly magazine. He served as editor for
eight years, helping to establish the maga-
zine.
In 1980, Broyles, along with Levy
and other business partners, purchased
New West magazine from Rupert Mur-
doch, for which he served as editor in
chief from 1980 to 1982. His success in the
magazine publishing field led Katharine
Graham to hire him as editor in chief of
Newsweek magazine in 1982. He resigned
from that position in 1984. Returning to
Houston with his second wife, Sybil New-
man, whom he married in 1973, he wrote
regular columns for U.S. News and World
Report and also freelance pieces for Esquire
and Texas Monthly. In September of 1984,
Broyles returned to Vietnam, and subse-
quently wrote a memoir of his experience,
Brothers in Arms: A Journey from War to
Peace, published in 1987. That same year
he was interviewed about his Vietnam
experience in the PBS documentary Faces
of the Enemy.
In 1987 Broyles, with John Sacret
Young, co-created the ABC television
series China Beach, which focused on the
experiences of nurses during the Vietnam
War. He would remain producer and cre-
ative consultant throughout the show’s
four seasons (1988–1991). After China
Beach concluded its run, Broyles adapted
Nigel Hamilton’s book, JFK: Reckless
Youth (1993), for a television miniseries.
He turned to screenwriting on Apollo 13
(1995, Ron Howard), cowritten with a
BROYLES, WILLIAM, JR.  n  55
former Texas Monthly writer, Al Reinert.
Apollo 13 was both a critical and commer-
cial success, earning Broyles and Reinert
an Academy Award nomination for Best
Adapted Screenplay.
Cast Away (2000), based on an origi-
nal screenplay written by Broyles, about
a FedEx employee stranded on a remote,
uninhabited island in the South Seas, was
another critical and commercial success.
Produced by Tom Hanks and directed by
Robert Zemeckis, Cast Away features the
highly memorable inanimate character
Wilson, a volleyball that washes ashore,
the face of which is drawn from Hanks’s
character’s bloodied handprint. Wilson the
volleyball is Hanks’s sole companion dur-
ing his four years on the island. Tom Hanks
was nominated for an Academy Award as
Best Actor, losing to Russell Crowe for
Gladiator.
Broyles’s initial draft screenplay for
Planet of the Apes was neither a remake nor
a sequel to the 1968 film. It was sufficiently
original enough that Burton signed on to
direct in early 2000. Broyles was respon-
sible for setting the action on a different
planet than Earth, which he called Ashlar,
because he “wanted to remove the thought
that this is a repetition of the first movie.”
In addition, Broyles threw out the char-
acter of Taylor, the original film’s cyni-
cal hero, replacing him with the younger
astronaut, Leo Davidson, “more capable
of change.” Another of Broyles’s additions
was the eclectic choice of names drawn
from various cultures: Ari, Thade, Attar,
Daena (after a Persian goddess), Karubi,
Krull, and others. Apparently, though, the
projected budget of Broyles’s version, “very
science-fiction based,” would have been
extraordinarily expensive, so at some point,
around July 2000, Broyles left the project
and was replaced by the screenwriting team
of LAWRENCE KONNER and MARK D.
ROSENTHAL.
56  n  BURTON, TIMOTHY WALTER
Broyles’s other screenwriting cred-
its include Entrapment (1999), Unfaithful
(2002), The Polar Express (2004), Jarhead
(2005), and Flags of Our Fathers (2006).
References
Tim Burton and Mark Salisbury, Planet of
the Apes: Re-imagined by Tim Burton (New
York: Newmarket Press, 2001), 25.
BURTON, TIMOTHY (“TIM”)
WALTER (1958–)
American artist, writer, and filmmaker,
whose films often are composed of horror,
fantasy, and folktale elements. His blend
of humor and the macabre is similar to
that of author and illustrator EDWARD
GOREY. Tim Burton was born August 25,
1958, in Burbank, California, to parents
WILLIAM “BILL” BURTON and JEAN
“RICKIE” BURTON. He has a younger
brother, Daniel, about whom little is
known. His father worked for the Burbank
Parks and Recreation Department, and his
mother managed a gift shop with a feline
theme. His adolescence seems uneventful,
although Burton has described his home
life as unhappy. “Looking back on it now,
it’s pretty clear to me that my parents were
depressed, and I always felt a deep, dark
unhappiness permeating the air in their
house.” He attended the public schools in
Burbank, but by his own account, he was
not an especially good student, but he
excelled in art and loved movies, especially
horror movies. He was especially drawn to
the horror films starring VINCENT PRICE.
Although he has described himself as pain-
fully introverted, he did in fact engage in
many social activities, participating in the
school swim team and also the high school
marching band.
At age fifteen, in 1973, he entered a
graphic design competition sponsored by
the city of Burbank, winning the contest
for his “Crush Litter” sign. Used to pro-
mote an anti-litter campaign, it appeared
on the sides of city garbage trucks. Later, a
drawing he made in order to support the
football team appeared on the cover of the
Burbank City Employee Newsletter. He also
wrote and illustrated a children’s book,
THE GIANT ZLIG, modeled after the writ-
ing of his favorite author, DR. SEUSS. He
graduated from Burbank High School a
semester early, but was formally awarded
his diploma in 1976; his father had gradu-
ated from Burbank High School in 1948.
He was awarded a scholarship to attend
CalArts, established by Walt Disney as a
training school for future Disney anima-
tors, although the school was interdisci-
plinary in its approach. Burton entered
the Disney animation program at CalArts,
thinking animation might be a way he
could earn a living. He has stated he never
consciously intended to become a film
director. In 1979, after completing three
years at CalArts, he was hired by the Walt
Disney Studios.
“Disney and I were a bad mix,” he told
Mark Salisbury. The first project to which
he was assigned was THE FOX AND THE
HOUND, working primarily with gifted
animator Glen Keane. After that film was
completed, he became a conceptual artist
for a few months, designing characters for
the Disney film The Black Cauldron (1985),
although none of his character designs were
used or considered for the film. While at
Disney Burton became good friends with
RICK HEINRICHS, with whom he would
make his first films. He and Heinrichs
worked initially on a project titled TRICK
OR TREAT; during a meeting about the
project he met JULIE HICKSON, then
in the story department, who became his
champion at Disney. With her support as
well as that of TOM WILHITE, Burton
and Heinrichs made the short VINCENT
(1982), an homage to Burton’s childhood
hero, Vincent Price. Narrated by Price him-

self, the film was a critical success and won
a number of awards, including two from
the Chicago Film Festival. Burton was to
remain friends with Price until the actor’s
death in 1993. He also wrote THE NIGHT-
MARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS during this
period, a narrative poem influenced by Dr.
Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
(1957). Disney chose not to develop the
project, even though Burton and Heinrichs
had created many of the character designs
and sketches and created some maquettes.
The studio returned to the project only a
few years later, however, after Burton had
become famous.
While at Disney, Burton also made
his first foray into live action, the project
being HANSEL AND GRETEL, a retelling
of the Grimm Brothers tale, written by Julie
Hickson, which aired on the Disney Chan-
nel in October 1983, introduced by Vincent
Price. His next project while at Disney was
the live-action short FRANKENWEENIE,
Tim Burton (left) with Vincent Price in 1982 during the making of Tim Burton’s early short, Vincent.
BURTON, TIMOTHY WALTER  n  57
filmed in the summer of 1984, an inventive
twist on the Frankenstein story about a boy
who brings his dog back to life. However,
because the film was given a PG rating, it
precluded the film from being released with
any of Disney’s G-rated animated films. It
was eventually released theatrically over-
seas, in conjunction with Disney’s Baby:
Secret of the Lost Legend (1985), and later
released in truncated form on VHS in 1992.
(The uncut live-action Frankenweenie has
subsequently been issued by Disney on
DVD and Blu-ray Disc special editions of
The Nightmare Before Christmas and the
animated version of Frankenweenie.)
Following Frankenweenie, Burton
left Disney to pursue live-action filmmak-
ing. His first film was ALADDIN AND
HIS WONDERFUL LAMP (filmed 1984;
released 1986) for SHELLEY DUVALL’s
Fairie Tale Theatre, which Burton now con-
siders a failure. “It came out looking like a
Las Vegas show,” he said in 1991. However,
58  n  BURTON, TIMOTHY WALTER
on the basis of Frankenweenie’s conceptual
strength and firm direction, Burton was
able to direct his first feature-length film,
the picaresque PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVEN-
TURE (1985), starring former Ground-
lings member and CalArts student PAUL
REUBENS as Pee-Wee Herman. And yet,
the unexpected success of Pee-Wee’s Big
Adventure didn’t immediately make Bur-
ton famous. In 1985, he directed an episode
for the new Alfred Hitchcock Presents titled
“The Jar,” based on Ray Bradbury’s maca-
bre short story, but otherwise Burton didn’t
make another feature film for almost three
years. He was, however, trying to develop
BATMAN at Warner Bros.; he and Julie
Hickson wrote an early treatment for a Bat-
man feature in 1985, although their rela-
tionship ended soon after. The early treat-
ment contains many of the story elements
that were later used in the feature film. It
wasn’t until Burton was offered Michael
McDowell’s screenplay for BEETLEJUICE
(1988) that he finally found another project
suited to his taste. A supernatural comedy
about an impish and somewhat lecher-
ous bio-exorcist named Betelgeuse hired
to haunt a New England family, Beetle-
juice was a hit, and also won an Academy
Award for Best Makeup. Subsequently, Bur-
ton was offered the job at Warner Bros. of
directing the feature film about the mythic
vigilante, Batman. Although the film gen-
erated controversy early in its production
due to the casting of MICHAEL KEATON
as Batman, an actor widely known for his
performances in comedies (among them
Beetlejuice), Keaton actually acquitted him-
self well as the moral center of the story,
Batman. However, the interest center of the
film was the Joker, memorably played by
JACK NICHOLSON, simultaneously funny
and venomous. The worldwide gross of Bat-
man was over $411 million, earning the film
blockbuster status and making Tim Burton
famous. In February 1989, during postpro-
duction on Batman, Tim Burton married
artist LENA GIESEKE; this was his first and
only marriage. They were to separate shortly
after the opening of BATMAN RETURNS in
1992. In 1989, Burton also formed Tim Bur-
ton Productions, his own production com-
pany, then based at Warner Bros.
For his next film, Burton turned to a
highly personal project, EDWARD SCIS-
SORHANDS, filmed in the spring of 1990.
Although the film was released by 20th
Century Fox, it has features of a Disney
film, especially in the way the title charac-
ter is similar to Pinocchio, a puppet who
is awkward and clumsy and not yet a real
boy, and his creator is similar to Geppetto,
the old inventor who creates fanciful toys.
Yet in Burton’s film, the old inventor is
dying and leaves his creation unfinished,
with only scissors for hands. The film is as
close as Burton would come to making a
philosophical statement, about imperfect
creations made by an imperfect creator
left to suffer in an incalculably complex
world, about the incompatibility of art and
life, about the recuperative powers of the
imagination, and about the innocence of
romance. Edward Scissorhands was released
the first week of December 1990 and suc-
ceeded with both audiences and critics, and
remains one of Tim Burton’s best-loved
films. Edward Scissorhands also marked the
first film Burton made with his frequent
collaborator, JOHNNY DEPP.
Released in 1992, Batman Returns was
an art house sequel to Batman. Hugely
expensive, with Burton having complete
artistic control as well as control of the final
cut, Batman Returns has an overly busy
scenario featuring two primary villains,
Catwoman, played by MICHELLE PFIEF-
FER, and the Penguin, played by DANNY
DeVITO. Not quite as big a hit as the first
film, Batman Returns suffered a backlash
from parents who considered it too dark,
perverse, and macabre for younger viewers.

Although the film was an artistic triumph,
the drop in box office receipts and public
outcry led to Joel Schumacher directing the
next two films in the franchise for Warner
Bros., although Burton did serve as pro-
ducer on BATMAN FOREVER (1995). In
1992 Burton also found time to play a small
role in Cameron Crowe’s SINGLES and a
cameo as a corpse in Danny DeVito’s biopic
about teamster lead Jimmy Hoffa, titled
HOFFA (1992). Tim Burton also began a
romance with LISA MARIE late in 1992.
Over the next eight and a half years, she
would appear in small roles in four of Bur-
ton’s films: ED WOOD, MARS ATTACKS!
SLEEPY HOLLOW, and PLANET OF THE
APES.
Given that Tim Burton was now a
name-above-the-title director, Disney,
under the auspices of its Touchstone ban-
ner, returned to The Nightmare before
Christmas, which Burton produced but
did not direct; the director of the film was
HENRY SELICK. Released in 1993, The
Nightmare before Christmas, a musical, was
a modest commercial hit, but its reputa-
tion has grown steadily over the past two
decades and the film has become a peren-
nial Halloween favorite. Burton’s next
project, Ed Wood, released in 1994 and
starring Johnny Depp as the title charac-
ter, is an affectionate tribute to the failed
artistic figure known as “the Worst Direc-
tor of All Time.” Released by Disney, Ed
Wood was not a hit, but earned Burton the
highest critical praise of his career. The film
also won two Academy Awards, one for
MARTIN LANDAU for his performance as
Bela Lugosi. Ed Wood was followed by yet
another homage to Ed Wood’s films, Mars
Attacks! (1996), written by JONATHAN
GEMS, a box office disappointment that
was also eviscerated by the critics. How-
ever, its reputation has grown steadily, and
it is now considered a cult classic. Subse-
quently, for well over a year, Burton tried
BURTON, TIMOTHY WALTER  n  59
to develop a film titled Superman Lives for
Warner Bros. When that project was finally
abandoned, Burton published a book of
children’s nonsense verse, “THE MEL-
ANCHOLY DEATH OF OYSTER BOY”
& OTHER STORIES (1997); one of the
characters created for the book, Stain Boy,
later became the subject of a series of flash
animations published on the web in 2000,
WORLD OF STAINBOY. Burton then
made the first horror film of his career,
Sleepy Hollow (1999), with Johnny Depp in
the starring role as Ichabod Crane. In order
to acknowledge the production launch of
his first horror film, Burton agreed to host
American Movie Classic’s “horrorthon,”
called Monsterfest with Tim Burton, air-
ing over a week, October 26–November 1,
1998. He later admitted enjoying his role as
horror-movie host. Sleepy Hollow earned
Rick Heinrichs an Academy Award for Best
Art Direction-Set Decoration, which he
shared with PETER YOUNG.
Burton’s next film, Planet of the Apes,
was a reimagining of the classic science
fiction film starring Charlton Heston,
originally released in 1968. The film was
rushed into production after a long period
of development, and consequently suf-
fered for it. Visually stunning and featuring
several strong performances by the actors
in Rick Baker’s Academy Award–winning
makeup, the film did very well at the box
office but was critically maligned. Bur-
ton’s father, Bill, died at the age of seventy
shortly before filming commenced on the
picture; at the same time, his relationship
with Lisa Marie was coming to an end as
well. Shortly after the premiere of Planet
of the Apes, in late July 2001, Burton began
formally dating one of the film’s stars,
HELENA BONHAM CARTER. The next
year, in March 2002, Tim Burton’s mother,
Rickie, died. Although he and Helena Bon-
ham Carter never married, their first child,
a son, Billy Raymond, was born in October
60  n  BURTON, TIMOTHY WALTER
2003. Their second child, a daughter, Nell,
was born in December 2007. Burton’s good
friend, Johnny Depp, is the godfather of
Billy Raymond. Since 2001, Burton has pri-
marily resided in England.
Perhaps because of the recent death of
his parents, as well as his new role as father,
Tim Burton’s next project was more intro-
spective and overtly concerned with fam-
ily dynamics. Based on a novel by Daniel
Wallace, BIG FISH (2003) was about a man
trying to reconnect with his dying father
before the father’s death. Like Burton, the
film’s protagonist, Will, played by Billy
Crudup, was living in Europe, and like
Burton, the protagonist was an expectant
father. The film was one of Burton’s most
personal since Edward Scissorhands. It was a
modest success and critical reviews slanted
toward the positive. In 2005, Burton
directed back-to-back movies for the first
time. One of his projects was CHARLIE
AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, star-
ring Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka; the film
represented Burton’s return to the realm
of the blockbuster. Although critics were
mixed in their assessment of Depp’s per-
formance as Willy Wonka, technically the
film was highly praised and admired. It was
followed two months later by the release of
the stop motion animated musical fantasy,
CORPSE BRIDE, similar to Edward Scis-
sorhands in the sense that it is about the
impossible romance between a boy and a
girl from two different worlds. Since the
film is about star-crossed lovers, it could be
considered a supernatural Romeo and Juliet.
Corpse Bride was nominated for an Acad-
emy Award for Best Animated Feature.
For his next project, Burton made
another musical. SWEENEY TODD, based
on the Stephen Sondheim musical that
opened on Broadway in 1979 and which
Burton saw while on vacation in London in
1980, starred both Johnny Depp and Helena
Bonham Carter. Released in December 2007
to solid reviews, the film nonetheless was
not widely admired by those who had long
admired the Sondheim musical. A dark,
macabre film about a man seeking revenge
against those who wronged him by accusing
him of a crime he did not commit, Sweeney
Todd is an important work in that it is the
Burton film that most closely achieves the
emotional depths of classical tragedy. After
producing the animated feature 9 (2009),
a postapocalyptic sci-fi fantasy, Burton
directed ALICE IN WONDERLAND (2010),
again starring Johnny Depp, the high-
est grossing picture of Burton’s career; the
box office take was over $1 billion world-
wide. Production on Alice in Wonderland
completed, in May 2010, Burton served as
the president of the jury for the sixty-third
annual Cannes Film Festival.
Burton followed Alice in Wonderland
with the horror comedy DARK SHADOWS,
derived from the Dan Curtis–directed films
spun off the cult television series, Dark
Shadows, broadcast 1966–1971. Although
the film underperformed in domestic box
office receipts and was largely dismissed by
critics, it still earned a respectable $245 mil-
lion worldwide, suggesting Burton’s inter-
national appeal. Critics praised its visual
style and humor. As fate would have it,
Dark Shadows was the final film produced
by RICHARD D. ZANUCK, the frequent
producer of Burton’s films since Planet of
the Apes. Zanuck died two months after
its release. Burton also produced the hor-
ror fantasy ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAM-
PIRE HUNTER, released in 2012, in which
the already heavily mythologized president
Abraham Lincoln is portrayed as hav-
ing been a vampire hunter while a young
man. The film was directed by TIMUR
BEKMAMBETOV. The third project on
which Burton worked that was released in
2012 was the feature-length, stop-motion

animated version of his 1984 short FRAN-
KENWEENIE. As in the 1984 version, Vic-
tor Frankenstein’s dog, Sparky, is killed and
Victor uses electricity to resurrect him. The
significant change to the story is that one
of Victor’s friends learns his secret and is
subsequently blackmailed by others into
revealing how they, too, can reanimate
their deceased pets. It received an Acad-
emy Award nomination as Best Animated
Feature Film of the Year. After Franken-
weenie, Burton chose to return to smaller,
more personal projects with smaller bud-
gets. In late summer 2013, Burton directed
BIG EYES (2014), a biopic in the vein
of Ed Wood, written by SCOTT ALEX-
ANDEAR and LARRY KARASZEWSKI,
about artist Margaret Keane, whose paint-
ings of winsome waifs with large, round
dark eyes became immensely popular in
the late 1950s and ’60s. Burton himself is
an admirer of her work. In late December
2014, coincidentally at the time Big Eyes
was released, Helena Bonham Carter’s rep-
resentative announced that she and Burton
had amicably ended their relationship ear-
lier in the year.
Burton’s career retrospective, Tim Bur-
ton, which opened on November 22, 2009,
at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
in New York, assembled more than seven
hundred works of art, including draw-
ings, photographs, and puppets, and also
included examples of his juvenilia as well
as his music videos and commercials and
was useful in charting the evolution of
his creative career. The MoMA exhibition
confirms Bo Welch’s insight that Tim Bur-
ton began his career as an artist and film-
maker and became an icon and an indus-
try. Although now residing largely in the
United Kingdom and Europe, Tim Burton
remains a respected if idiosyncratic auteur
who works very well within the commercial
demands of the Hollywood system.
BURTON, JEAN RAE  n  61
References
Kristin Fraga, ed. Tim Burton: Interviews
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2005), 56, 167; Ken Hanke, Tim Burton: An
Unauthorized Biography of the Filmmaker
(Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1999);
Mark Salisbury, Burton on Burton, 2nd rev.
ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 2006).
BURTON, JEAN RAE (ERICKSON)
(1933–2002)
Jean “Rickie” Burton, mother of Tim Bur-
ton, was born June 8, 1933, in the state of
Illinois. Her father was Raymond Erick-
son (b. ca. 1902, South Dakota) and her
mother was Alpha Jean Erickson (b. ca.
1905, Washington). According to the 1940
US Census, the family address is listed
as Shreveport, Louisiana; the previous
address, in 1935, is listed as Cincinnati.
When she moved to the Los Angeles area
is uncertain, but she certainly had met and
married Bill Burton by 1957. Interviewed in
1992, after her son had become famous, she
said, “I don’t know where Tim got his artis-
tic talent. But it’s not from me. I flunked
art.” Rickie Burton ran a gift shop called
Cats Plus, featuring merchandise with a
feline motif, that was located near the Mag-
nolia Park United Methodist Church on the
corner of W. Magnolia Blvd. and N. Cata-
lina St. in Burbank. After she and husband
Bill retired to Incline Village, Nevada, in
the 1990s, she was a volunteer for the Wylie
Animal Rescue Foundation, and nurtured
numerous orphaned kittens. She died on
March 27, 2002, at the age of sixty-eight,
in Incline Village, and is buried at Forest
Lawn Memorial Park, Hollywood Hills,
beside her husband.
References
Tom McNichol, “Batman and His Maker,”
USA Weekend, June 12–14, 1992; Mark
62  n  BURTON, WILLIAM READ
Salisbury, ed., Burton on Burton (London:
Faber and Faber, 1995).
BURTON, WILLIAM READ
(1930–2000)
“Bill” Burton, father of Tim Burton, was
born July 12, 1930, in Los Angeles. Tim
Burton’s paternal grandfather, Russell Clem
Burton, was born in Missouri September 21,
1902 (d. July 11, 1949, Los Angeles County).
His paternal grandmother, Rose (Gibbs)
Burton Rynearson, was born December 2,
1907, in Wolfe County, Kentucky. After
her first husband’s death, Rose Burton
later remarried (d. December 11, 1997, Los
Angeles County). Bill Burton’s older sister,
Evelyn, shown at the age of twelve years old
in the 1940 US Census, was born in Ohio,
while Russell Jr., his older brother, listed as
ten years old in the 1940 census, was born in
California. Hence the paternal grandparents
of Tim Burton mostly likely moved to the
Los Angeles area in 1929.
The family moved to Burbank in 1932,
at which time the address was listed as 1827
Rowe Ave. Rowe was a short street, and as
the city built up, it went the way of prog-
ress, but ran roughly from the current N.
Lamar St. to Landis St., and the part of
it that remains has become what is now
Church St. and Morgan Ave. He attended
Washington and Lincoln Elementary
schools, later graduating from Burbank
High School in 1948 (where his son Tim
would graduate twenty-eight years later).
Bill Burton showed talent as a baseball
player, and began playing for the St. Louis
Cardinals’ minor league affiliate, the Fresno
Cardinals, in 1951. In 1953 he played part
of the season for the Columbus Cardinals,
subsequently playing for the Lynchburg Car-
dinals and finishing his minor league career
in 1957 for the Sioux City Soos. According
to Baseball-Reference.com, his career bat-
ting average for his seven seasons was .287.
After the end of his baseball career, he set-
tled in Burbank, and began working for the
Park, Recreation and Community Services
Department in 1957, where he stayed for
the next thirty-three years until his retire-
ment in 1990. Soon after he and his wife,
Jean, moved to Incline Village, Nevada (Lake
Tahoe), where he died after a long illness on
August 2, 2000, at the age of seventy. He is
buried in Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills.
During the audio commentary to BIG FISH
(2003), Tim Burton said about his father,
“My father had been ill for a while. . . . I tried
to get in touch with him, as in this film [Big
Fish], to have some sort of resolution, but
it was impossible.” However, he named his
son Billy Raymond, born in 2003, after his
and Helena Bonham Carter’s fathers.
For his many years of dedicated ser-
vice to the city of Burbank, George Izay
Park Ball Field number 2 is named after Bill
Burton, and on October 30, 2004, he was
posthumously inducted into the Burbank
Athletics Walk of Fame. According to its
website, Bill Burton “helped invent the slow
pitch softball rubber home plate extension.
He created the universally used California
tie-breaker system to avoid tie games in
fast pitch softball. He developed programs
such as boy’s bantam basketball, men’s flag
football passing league, men’s six-foot and
under basketball, and men’s senior softball
programs.” In 1991 he was recognized by
the Southern California Municipal Athletic
Federation with a Lifetime Membership
Award, and by the Associated Industrial
Recreation Council with an Outstanding
Contribution Award. In 2011, his brother
Russ was inducted into the Burbank Athlet-
ics Walk of Fame as well.
References
City of Burbank, California, “Walk of Fame
Inductees,” www.burbankca.gov/depart-
ments/parks-and-recreation/sports-pro-
grams/walk-of-fame/walk-of-fame-induct-
ees; “William Burton,” Baseball-Reference.
com, www.baseball-reference.com/minors/
player.cgi?id=burton002wil.

CABIN BOY (US 1994)
Director: Adam Resnick. Screenplay: Adam
Resnick. S tory : Chris Elliott, Adam
Resnick. E xecutive P roducers : Barry
Bernardi, Steve White. P roducers :
Denise Di Novi, Tim Burton. Cinema-
tography: Steve Yaconelli. Editor: Jon
Poll. Production Design: Steven Legler.
Art Direction: Daniel A. Lomino, Nanci
Roberts. S et D ecoration : Roberta J.
Holinko. Set Designer: Stephen Alesch.
C ostume D esign : Colleen Atwood.
M usic : Steve Bartek. S pecial M akeup
Effects Artists (Alterian Studios): Jim
Beinke, Eric Fiedler, Tony Gardner,
Loren Gitthens, Mark Goldberg, Vance
Hartwell, Brian Penikas, David Peni-
kas, Mike Smithson. Key Makeup Art-
ist : Mindy Hall. F irst A ssistant D irec -
tor : Thomas Irvine. S econd A ssistant
D irector : Seth Cirker. S econd U nit
D irector : John Engel. S ound E ditor :
Paul Berolzheimer. A ssistant S ound
Editors: David Broberg, Kurt Nicholas
Forshager. Sound Rerecording Mixer:
Rick Ash. F oley M ixer : David Gertz.
Animatronic Puppets (Alterian Studios):
Theresa Burkett, Garrett Immel, Bill
Sturgeon, Chet Zar. Foam Clavenator
(Alterian Studios): John Calpin. Special
E ffects C oordinator : Robbie Knott.
Special Effects Assistant: Tom Knott.
Project Controller (Alterian Studios):
Yvonne Morrow. D irector of P ho -
tography (The Chandler Group): Tim
C
Angulo. Visual Effects Supervisor (The
Chandler Group): Don Baker. V isual
E ffects C oordinator (Buena Vista
Visual Effects): Denise Davis. M atte
A rtists (Buena Vista Visual Effects):
Harrison Ellenshaw, Louis Lanchantin.
Visual Effects Director of Photography
(Doug Beswick Productions, Inc.): Paul
Gentry. Assistant Camera (The Chan-
dler Group): Ed Giovanni. Key Model
Maker (Stetson Visual Services): Henry
Gonzales. M iniature E ffects (Stetson
Visual Services): Robert Spurlock, Mark
Stetson.
Cast: Chris Elliott (Nathanial Mayweather),
Ritch Brinkley (Captain Greybar), Brion
James (Big Teddy), James Gammon
(Paps), Brian Doyle-Murray (Skunk),
Melora Walters (Trina), I. M. Hobson
(Headmaster Timmons), Alex Nevil
(Thomas), Bob Elliott (William May-
weather), David H. Sterry (Lance),
David Letterman (Old Salt in the Fishing
Village), Ricki Lake (Figurehead), Russ
Tamblyn (Chocki the Shark Man), Andy
Richter (Kenny), Mike Starr (Mulligan),
Ann Magnuson (Calli).
R unning T ime : 80 minutes, 8 seconds.
Color.
Released Through: Touchstone Pictures.
Film initially conceived as a writing col-
laboration between Chris Elliott (son of
Bob and Ray’s Bob Elliott, who has a cameo
in the film) and Adam Resnick that was
  n  63
64  n  CABIN BOY
composed with a specific eye for Tim Bur-
ton’s directorial talents. The general plot—
a socially inept boy escapes an arrested
adolescence, in the process becoming a
man—riffs on other Burton work like PEE-
WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE and EDWARD
SCISSORHANDS. However, when the
script was brought to producers Burton
and DENISE DI NOVI, Burton offered
it to first-timer Resnick to direct. Burton
and Di Novi remained as producers, and
consequently, some of Burton’s interests
and aspects of his visual style remained as
a residual factor.
The film is structured around an acci-
dental journey. Rich prat Nathanial May-
weather (Elliott) leaves his finishing school
and is meant to catch a ride on the luxury
ship the Queen Catherine, which will take
him across the ocean on his return voyage
home to Hawaii, where he will continue to
live a cushy existence thanks to the family
hotel business. However, his extreme arro-
gance causes his limo driver to dump him
by the side of the road. Instead of finding
his cruise liner, he wanders to a conspicu-
ously old-fashioned fishing village, where
he is pointed onto a working fishing boat
by a mischievous man (David Letterman, in
a role slightly bigger than a cameo). Natha-
nial insists to board and establishes himself
on the ship, despite the protests of acting
cabin boy Kenny (Richter). That night, still
ashore, the crew of the boat returns drunk.
The next day, now on the water, Natha-
nial wakes up and realizes his mistake. The
rest of the film has to do with Nathanial’s
adventures at sea, including his time hal-
lucinating on a life raft, the loss of his vir-
ginity to the many-armed Calli (Ann Mag-
nuson), his “rescue” and growing love for
swimmer Trina (Melora Walters), and his
acceptance by the ship’s crew. Ultimately,
the adventure and work ethic of the fish-
ing ship proves more desirable to Nathanial
than the secure life of a hotelier.
Cabin Boy is a curious film in that the
freshness of the comic voices—especially
Elliott’s and Resnick’s, who had been key
contributors to Late Night with David Let-
terman and whose Fox Network sitcom
Get a Life (1990–1992) had garnered a
devoted fan base—is sometimes lost in
the old-fashioned plot and attenuated
style. The film owes much to the largely
vanished swashbuckler genre. Elliott has
noted that his accent is based on Freddie
Bartholomew from Captains Courageous
(1937, Victor Fleming). The whole episode
with Calli and her jealous husband, Mul-
ligan (Mike Starr), is an extended nod to
the adventure films of Ray Harryhausen
in its use of trick photography to achieve
battle sequences between figures of dispa-
rate scales. Like other Burton productions
(especially BEETLEJUICE and Edward Scis-
sorhands), the film takes place in a deliber-
ately indeterminate time period. The film’s
framing sequences at the school and at the
family hotel clearly take place in a contem-
porary world, while the adventures at sea
and on the boat opt for a vague nineteenth-
century milieu. This deliberately suits the
narrative, though, since Nathanial cannot
rely on technology and instead has to focus
on physical and instinctual improvement.
The relationship between Nathanial and
Trina offers the proverbial heart of the film,
but it moves at a quick clip. Trina, a tough
woman and world-class swimmer, seems
to be vaguely based on Marina (Jenny
Seagrove) from Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero
(1983), the mysteriously beautiful woman
who may or may not be a mermaid. Over-
all, despite whatever outwardly directed
referentially, Cabin Boy is best approached
as an old-time adventure yarn coupled with
a scaled down riff on Burtonesque surreal-
ism. The special effects employ the talents
of Tony Gardner (makeup effects for the
GEICO cavemen characters), Doug Bes-
wick (Beetlejuice), Harrison Ellenshaw (Star
 CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF THE ARTS  n  65
Wars), and Bill Sturgeon (Army of Dark-
ness), among others, and are delightful.
Critics were largely unkind to the film
upon initial release. Orlando Sentinel critic
Jay Boyar’s take (“a Stupid Human Trick
that went on far too long”) is indicative of
the general critical response. Washington
Post critic David Mills saw the bright side,
noting that the film “contains about enough
laugh-out-loud sight gags and non sequiturs
to justify what it demands of a viewer’s time
and money.” The film has since developed a
cult reputation.—Kevin M. Flanagan
References
Jay Boyar, “Moronic ‘Cabin Boy’ Never
Leaves Port,” Orlando Sentinel, January 21,
1994, articles.orlandosentinel.com/1994-
01-21/entertainment/9401200120_1_cabin-
boy-bob-elliott-chris-elliott; Ken Hanke,
Tim Burton: An Unauthorized Biography
(Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1999),
147; David Mills, “Cabin Boy,” Washington
Post, January 8, 1994, www.washington-
post.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/
videos/cabinboypg13mills_a09e2c.htm;
Mike Sullivan, “Getting to Know the Guy
with the Beard: An Interview with Chris
Elliott,” Shock Cinema, no. 43 (2012): 5.
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF THE
ARTS
Located in Valencia, California, thirty miles
northeast of downtown Los Angeles, the
California Institute of the Arts is a profes-
sional school devoted to the creative and
performing arts. The school was the brain-
child of Walt Disney, who sought to estab-
lish a school, a purpose of which was to
train young animators, “taught by Disney
artists, animators, layout people . . . taught
the Disney way,” according to Tim Burton.
Its origin dates to 1961, when Walt Dis-
ney and his brother, Roy O. Disney, spear-
headed the merger of the Los Angeles Con-
servatory of Music (founded 1883) and the
Chouinard Art Institute (founded 1921).
Dubbed CalArts, the school was introduced
to the public by Walt Disney at the Holly-
wood premiere of Mary Poppins in 1964.
Although Walt Disney died in 1966, his
plans for CalArts proceeded with the help of
the Disney family and various benefactors.
In 1968, Robert W. Corrigan, dean of NYU’s
Tisch School of the Arts, was appointed the
institution’s first president. Herbert Blau,
codirector of the Lincoln Center Repertory
Company, was named provost. According
to Kathy Merlock Jackson, “Disney stipu-
lated that admission to the school be based
exclusively on talent and believed that artists
would benefit from interaction with other
creative people, both in their own discipline
and others.” The educational model installed
by Blau favored independent artistic work
over rigid curricula, collegial relationships
among a community of artists over hierar-
chies of teacher and student, and interdis-
ciplinary interaction among the different
branches of the arts.
Corrigan and Blau soon began to
recruit some of the most innovative in the
arts. Members of this new faculty included
figures such as artists Allan Kaprow, John
Baldessari, and Nam June Paik; compos-
ers Mel Powell and Morton Subotnick;
sitar master Ravi Shankar; ethnomusicolo-
gist Nicholas England; designers Peter and
Sheila DeBretteville; choreographer Bella
Lewitzky; film director Alexander Macken-
drick (Sweet Smell of Success); film scholar
Gene Youngblood; experimental filmmaker
Pat O’Neill; and animation artist Jules
Engel. In 1969, construction began on a
complex centered on a five-level, five-hun-
dred-thousand-square-foot building. The
institute’s first academic year, 1970–1971,
began at an interim campus at Villa Cabrini
in Burbank, offering degree programs in
six schools: Art, Critical Studies, Design,
Film, Music, and Theater and Dance. The
permanent campus opened in fall 1971,
66  n  CAPTAIN SPARKY VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS
with an enrollment of more than 650 stu-
dents.
The CalArts Program in Character
Animation admitted its first class in 1975.
Two of the co-founders of the Program in
Character Animation were former Disney
animators Jack Hannah (1913–1994), who
taught animation, and T. Hee (1911–1988),
who taught caricature. Other former Disney
animators who taught at CalArts were Elmer
Plummer (1910–1986), who taught life
drawing, and Ken O’Connor (1908–1998),
who taught layout. The legendarily difficult
and demanding Bill Moore (ca. 1909–1983),
formerly of the Chouinard Art Institute and
a non-Disney faculty member, taught color
and design. The aforementioned Jules Engel
taught film animation. To introduce the
school to the public, Walt Disney Produc-
tions made a short film, The CalArts Story,
about the founding vision of CalArts. The
film was first presented at the Hollywood
premiere of Mary Poppins in 1964.
References
“The CalArts Story,” CalArts, calarts.edu/
about/history; Kathy Merlock Jackson,
Walt Disney: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1993); Mark Salis-
bury, ed., Burton on Burton, 2nd rev. ed.
(London: Faber and Faber, 2006).
CAPTAIN SPARKY VS. THE FLYING
SAUCERS (UK 2013)
Director: Mark Waring. Screenplay: Derek
Frey. Producers: Allison Abbate, Tim
Burton. Music: Danny Elfman. Cinema-
tography: Malcolm Hadley. Editor: John
Addis. Third Assistant Director: Alan
Halls. S ound D esigner : Steve Brow-
ell. Sound Rerecording Mixer: Martin
Jensen. Foley Artist: Jason Swanscott.
Digital Compositor: Nic Hodgkinson.
Motion Control Assistant: Tom Piercy.
Animator: Matias Liebrecht. Production
C oordinator : Faye Robinson. C ast :
Charlie Tahan (Victor Frankenstein).
R unning T ime : 3 minutes, 20 seconds.
Black and white.
Released Through: Walt Disney Pictures.
Stop-motion animated short included
on the home video issue of FRANKEN-
WEENIE, intended to represent one of Vic-
tor Frankenstein’s home movies starring
his dog, Sparky. Mark Waring, a graduate
of the University for the Creative Arts, was
asked by Tim Burton to direct the film.
Waring had previously served as an ani-
mator on CORPSE BRIDE, Fantastic Mr.
Fox (2009), and Frankenweenie (2012). The
film consists of Victor playing one of his
home movies for Sparky, in which Sparky
in his rocket ship battles hostile flying sau-
cers from outer space. The short was made
for inclusion on the home video release of
Frankenweenie (Two-disc Blu-ray/DVD
combo) in 2013.
References
“Mark Waring,” IMDb, www.imdb.com/
name/nm1308592/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1;
Frankenweenie, two-disc Blu-ray/DVD
combo (Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Studios
Home Entertainment, 2013).
CARROLL, LEWIS (CHARLES
LUTWIDGE DODGSON) (1832–
1898)
Author born a curate’s son in Daresbury,
Cheshire, who went on to wear a great
many hats. Although best known under the
nom de plume Lewis Carroll, he achieved
early success thanks to his academic skill.
After completing his BA at Oxford, he was
hired as a tutor. A published poet in his
early twenties, he confirmed his artistic élan
by buying a camera in 1856 and indulging
his interest in photography. According to

Colin Ford, Dodgson’s “fascination with
young girls and his enthusiasm for photog-
raphy grew hand in hand.” While Dodg-
son’s principle job was as a mathematics
tutor and lecturer, his secondary career
(at least until 1870, when his production
tapered off) was as a photographer. He spe-
cialized in “wet collodion” photography, a
time- and resource-intensive process that
required glass print negatives and chemi-
cals (as well as substantial investment in
materials). Yet, his photographs—many
of which are commissioned portraits of
friends and acquaintances, as well as their
children—supplemented his income. Dur-
ing his active years, Dodgson took nearly
three thousand photographs.
Dodgson’s father eventually became an
archdeacon in the Anglican High Church.
The young Charles Dodgson followed his
father’s teachings and beliefs, and his career
was destined to maintain part of this streak
of religious conservatism. Christ Church,
Oxford, where his father once taught
mathematics and where he himself stud-
ied, was a seat of Tory Anglicanism. How-
ever, the younger Dodgson was closer in
temperament to the brand of liberal poly-
math encouraged by Dr. Arnold at Rugby.
Art, mathematics, and creative passions
outside of religion occupied much of his
time. He did not fully embrace the church’s
Thirty-Nine Articles, and instead of taking
full orders, he halted his formal religious
pursuits as a deacon. While certainly reli-
gious throughout his life, he did not readily
accept prefabricated doctrines.
Dodgson’s most famous works in
mathematics include a survey of Euclid-
ian geometry called Euclid and His Modern
Rivals (1879), as well as two books on logic
(one of which, his Symbolic Logic, part 1,
1896, was his last work published during
his lifetime). Peter Heath has downplayed
Dodgson’s centrality to the study of logic,
noting that “the one enduring legacy he has
CARROLL, LEWIS  n  67
bequeathed to logicians is a large stock of
entertaining examples, which are still regu-
larly drawn upon, or unsuccessfully imi-
tated, by writers of textbooks too modest or
unimaginative to manufacture their own.”
While Dodgson was a respected mathema-
tician in his day, his literary pursuits made
him among the most recognizable of Vic-
torian authors.
As Carroll, Dodgson proved beyond
any shadow of a doubt that he would be
remembered for his imagination. His
poems and famous stories keep his repu-
tation alive. Part of Through the Looking-
Glass, and What Alice Found There, “The
Jabberwocky” (1871) is the most famous
(and compact) piece of literary nonsense
from Britain. A short poetic account of
the battling of a terrifying beast, it was to
receive an oblique film adaptation from
Terry Gilliam (one that took the beast
out of the Alice story and exported it to a
strange version of medieval Europe) in
1977. The poem itself is a staggering work
of verbal invention, one that curiously finds
meaning in drawing a reader’s attention to
his or her familiarity with verse structures
and the contexts of poetry. Carroll achieved
personal satisfaction and monetary success
from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
(1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-
Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871).
Devised for (and based on the personality
of) Alice Liddell, the daughter of Christ
Church dean Henry Liddell, these sto-
ries imagine a young girl’s adventures in
a world based in some of the realities of
Victorian England (especially in relation
to class hierarchies), but with a maniacally
topsy-turvy sensibility. Dodgson read about
faeries, monsters, and the occult, all of
which find a home in these inventive tales.
The Alice tales have a moral core, but they
also introduce their readers to logic games,
riddles, and purely magical beings that defy
any rational explanation.
68  n  CARTER, HELENA BONHAM
Tim Burton and Lewis Carroll share
certain similarities. Both have been cri-
tiqued for the ways in which their work
revels in an extended exploration of child-
hood obsessions. Both are noted visual styl-
ists, whose genius is an ability to translate
outré material into popular and accessible
success. With ALICE IN WONDERLAND
(2010), Burton paid an askew tribute to a
kindred creator.—Kevin M. Flanagan
References
Morton N. Cohen, Lewis Carroll: A Biogra-
phy (New York: Vintage, 1996), 3, 49–51,
343, 345, 367; Charles Lutwidge Dodg-
son, Euclid and His Modern Rivals (Lon-
don: Macmillan, 1879); Charles Lutwidge
Dodgson, Symbolic Logic, 4th ed. (London:
Macmillan, 1897); Colin Ford, “Introduc-
tion,” in Lewis Carroll (Photoprofile) (Lon-
don: Thames & Hudson, 2009), 1–2; Peter
Heath, “The Philosopher’s Alice,” in Lewis
Carroll: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold
Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987),
46; Anne Higonnet, Lewis Carroll (New
York: Phaidon, 2008), 5–6.
CARTER, HELENA
BONHAM (1966–)
Award-winning, Oscar-nominated British
actress and former partner of Tim Burton
(2001–2014). Born in London on May 26,
1966, Helena Bonham Carter is the young-
est of three children, the only daughter of
Raymond Bonham Carter and Elena (née
Propper de Callejon). She has distinguished
ancestors on both her mother’s and father’s
sides. Her paternal great-grandfather was
H. H. Asquith, prime minister of Great
Britain from 1908 to 1916, and her mater-
nal great-grandfather, Eduardo Propper de
Callejon, was a Spanish diplomat who was
honored by the Righteous among Nations
organization for his efforts at saving Jewish
lives during the Holocaust. Helena Bonham
Carter attended South Hampstead High
School and Westminster School, but early
on chose to pursue an acting career instead
of continuing a formal education.
Her first major leading film role was
as the titular character, Lady Jane Grey,
in Lady Jane (1986), but Bonham Carter’s
breakthrough part, for which she received
both a Golden Globe and an Academy
Award nomination, was that of Kate Croy in
the 1997 film adaptation of Henry James’s
1902 novel, The Wings of the Dove. In her
early career, Bonham Carter was frequently
cast in period piece films, Merchant-Ivory
productions, and adaptations of literary
works. In addition to her fine performance
in The Wings of the Dove, she was cast as the
lead, Lucy Honeychurch, in the adaptation
of E. M. Forster’s novel A Room with a View
(1908) and as Olivia in a 1996 film version
of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
Helena Bonham Carter was in a rela-
tionship with actor Kenneth Branagh,
whom she met during the filming of Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), from 1994
to 1999. In late 2000, she met Tim Burton
while playing the part of Ari in PLANET OF
THE APES, which began a long and seri-
ous relationship that lasted until the official
announcement of their breakup on Decem-
ber 23, 2014. Burton and Bonham Carter
have two children, Billy Raymond Burton
(born October 4, 2003), and Nell Burton
(born December 15, 2007). Although they
never married, they lived in two adjoining
houses located in Belsize Park, London; in
2006 they purchased Mill House, which her
great-grandfather, Prime Minister Asquith,
had owned. Actor JOHNNY DEPP is Billy
Raymond Burton’s godfather.
Burton cast Bonham Carter in several of
his films: in BIG FISH (2003) as Jennifer Hill
(the Witch), as Emily in CORPSE BRIDE
and as Mrs. Bucket in CHARLIE AND THE
CHOCOLATE FACTORY (both 2005), and
as Mrs. Lovett, opposite Johnny Depp in the
film adaptation of the musical SWEENEY
 CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (NOVEL)  n  69
TODD: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
(2007), a role which earned her a great deal
of critical acclaim. She was cast as the Red
Queen in Burton’s enormous box office suc-
cess ALICE IN WONDERLAND (2010) and
in DARK SHADOWS (2012) as Dr. Julia
Hoffman. Her performances as the Witch in
Big Fish and the Red Queen in Alice in Won-
derland aptly demonstrate her admirable
capacity to portray eccentric characters.
Other memorable roles for Bonham
Carter include that of the well named Bel-
latrix Lestrange in four of the Harry Potter
films (2007–2011) and as Lady Elizabeth
Bowes-Lyon in The King’s Speech (2010),
for which she earned both BAFTA (Brit-
ish Academy of Film and Television Arts)
and Academy Award nominations for
Best Supporting Actress. She appeared as
Madame Thenardier in the film version
of the musical Les Misérables (2012) and
as a peg-legged brothel owner, Red Har-
rington, in The Lone Ranger (2013), once
again with Johnny Depp. Bonham Carter
is a versatile, prolific, and talented actress,
who has gained wide recognition for her
achievements. When given a challenging
role, she delivers an unforgettable perfor-
mance. She has been acknowledged as one
of the all-time ten best British actresses by
the Times of London, and enjoyed the honor
of being named Commander of the Order
of the British Empire, in recognition of her
acting career, an award she received from
the Queen in February of 2012.
Helena Bonham Carter has continued
to receive high visibility for her off-screen
persona and activities as well. Vanity Fair
included her on its 2010 Best Dressed List.
In 2014, she was appointed by the British
prime minister to serve on the national
Holocaust Commission. In 2015, Disney
released a live action version of Cinderella,
directed by Kenneth Branagh, in which
Bonham Carter plays Cinderella’s Fairy
Godmother. Bonham Carter is cast against
type, as is Cate Blanchett, who plays the evil
stepmother, an interesting reversal of roles
for both actresses.—Rebecca A. Umland
References
Bittersweet Bonham Carter (website),
helena-bonham-carter.org/; “Helena Bon-
ham Carter,” CelebCenter, celebcenter.us/
helena-bonham-carter/; “Helena Bonham
Carter,” IMDb, www.imdb.com/name/
nm0000307/?ref_=nv_sr_1; “Helena Bon-
ham Carter,” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Helena_Bonham_Carter; CS,
“Helena Bonham Carter as Cinderella’s
Fairy Godmother,” ComingSoon.net, Feb-
ruary 5, 2015, comingsoon.net/movies/
news/407237-cinderella-movie-helena-
bonham-carter#/slide/1.
CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE
FACTORY (NOVEL)
Children’s novel by Roald Dahl, first pub-
lished in 1964, and illustrated by Joseph
Schindelman (1964), Faith Jacques (1978),
Michael Foreman (1985), and Quentin
Blake (1995).
In his review of Tim Burton’s CHAR-
LIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY
for Sight and Sound, Roger Clarke writes,
“In many ways Burton has brought more of
[Roald] Dahl to the story than Dahl himself
put in.” Either a backhanded compliment
to Dahl or an underappreciation of Burton,
the statement acknowledges the suitabil-
ity of Burton adapting Dahl’s work—that
they share an aesthetic, a worldview, and
most importantly, a darker understand-
ing of what’s missing in much of children’s
entertainment: the uncanny, fright, and
psychological realism. In his interview with
actor Christopher Lee (who plays Wonka’s
father in the Burton film), Tim Burton says,
“If you ask a normal American family what
a fairy tale is, they’d probably go, ‘Oh, it’s
this happy story,’ but as we all know, fairy
tales are amazingly horrific, so that’s why
70  n  CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (NOVEL)
I’m always fascinated by what people think
are children’s stories, and that’s why I like
Roald Dahl’s work. . . . He knew how to
speak to children without speaking down to
them, and it’s why you can read his work as
an adult and get things from it. He always
got the dangerous aspect of childhood, the
scary parts, the funny parts.”
Burton positions his work within a
fairy tale tradition, but in his alignment
with Dahl, he is also participating in the
subversive tradition of parodying extremely
didactic cautionary tales exemplified by
Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter (1845),
Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Chil-
dren (1898, including such gems as “Jim,
who ran away from Nurse and was eaten
by a lion”), and EDWARD GOREY’s The
Gashlycrumb Tinies (1963). First, like its
fairy-tale precedents, most notably “Han-
sel and Gretel,” Dahl’s story always allows
us to see the shade of danger behind a fig-
ure who, like Willy Wonka, lures children
with sweets (a sinister side of the deal that
is fully explored in Dahl’s The Witches from
1983). The mystery that surrounds Wonka
also allows for wonder and imagination, as
also fits a larger tradition of works such as
Edward Fenton’s Penny Candy (illustrated
by Edward Gorey, 1970).
Roald Dahl and Tim Burton have
clearly recognized these larger traditions in
their own work, incorporating the influence
of fairy tale, satire, and cautionary tale. As
Susan Honeyman has pointed out, Dahl’s
character, Augustus Gloop, appears to be an
inversion and “satiric descendant of [Hoff-
mann’s] ‘Augustus who would not have any
soup,’” and Burton’s adapting the Augus-
tus character as a German would seem to
confirm the connection. Honeyman also
suggests Hoffmann’s “Slovenly Peter” as
the “early-industrial hypotext” for Burton’s
EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (1990), fur-
ther indicating Burton’s connection to this
larger tradition. But Burton’s appreciation
of Dahl might center more on Dahl’s knack
for decentering adult authority and recog-
nizing children’s own perspectives.
Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Choco-
late Factory was inspired by Dahl’s own
boyhood experience at boarding school,
where he and the other students occasion-
ally received complementary chocolate bars
from Cadbury, who asked the boys to rate
them for taste. Dahl writes, in his memoir,
Boy, “It was a clever stunt. Cadbury’s were
using some of the greatest chocolate-bar
experts in the world to test out their inven-
tions.” Dahl continued to indulge his love
of chocolate for the rest of his life, but in
his fiction, though he joins a vast tradition
of didactic tales that caution against over-
eating (especially of sweets) through show-
ing negative results, he does so to empha-
size a positive ideal in the high aesthetic
and hard-working attitude of the under-
privileged kid who only gets one chocolate
bar a year (that’s his birthday present).
The Buckets live in poverty and subsist
on cabbage soup, if they have food at all,
and their only child, Charlie, beats incred-
ible odds in winning one of only five golden
tickets in his single annual chocolate bar.
Each ticket earns the bearer a special tour
of Willy Wonka’s factory, which has been
closed from the public for ten years. The
other ticket winners are straight from the
stock of cautionary tales: Augustus Gloop
(representative of oral greed), Veruca Salt
(spoiled girl), Violet Beauregarde (chews
too much gum), and Mike Teavee (couch
potato). The children will, without know-
ing, be tested for strength and integrity
of character, and from them one will be
selected to inherit and manage the fac-
tory as Wonka’s successor. Of course each
of the children succumbs to predictable
temptations, in the fashion of didactic fic-
tion, doing precisely what they are told
not to do, and the behavioral exhortation
is emphasized in each instance by a chorus
 CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY  n  71
from the Oompa-Loompas, who reinforce
the lesson to be learned. So, for example,
when Veruca Salt is thrown in the trash
chute by angry nut-checking squirrels, the
Oompa-Loompas sing: “And this is the
price she has to pay / For going so very far
astray.” But Dahl adds his own twist to the
didactic tradition in the chorus:
But now, my dears, we think you might
Be wondering—is it really right
That every single bit of blame
And all the scolding and the shame
Should fall upon Veruca Salt?
Is she the only one at fault?
For though she’s spoiled, and dreadfully so, A
girl can’t spoil herself, you know.
Who spoiled her, then? Ah, who indeed?
Who pandered to her every need?
Who turned her into such a brat?
Who are the culprits? Who did that?
And of course they finally get to the answer:
“Her loving parents, Mum and Dad.” It is
in Dahl’s willingness to criticize children
and adults that we find another reason
for the mystification of critics who are
not quite sure where to place his work in
terms of intended audience (he, in fact,
wrote works separately marketed—some to
adults, others to children—and his cross-
ing-over baffled many readers).
Illuminating the connection of Dahl
and Burton might also help us to under-
stand the critical reception of works by each.
During the first three decades of his produc-
ing children’s texts, Dahl had the curious
distinction of being a top-selling children’s
writer whose work was rarely used in the
classroom and was somewhat ignored by
scholars (a time that also coincided with
his marriage to American actress Patricia
Neal). Like Burton, he was pushing against
assumptions of what constitutes a child
text, which resulted in frequent reactions
of shock and rejection that would not occur
had the works been marketed for adults. Of
course, these responses came from parents,
teachers, and librarians, mostly, and always
from adults, no doubt in part because Dahl
had the habit of making adult characters
look quite foolish to downright evil. Quen-
tin Blake, who retrospectively illustrated
practically everything Dahl had written for
children, captured the resulting small, social
insignificance of Dahl’s children in his illus-
trations, which made the plots of overcom-
ing the vast obstacles adults represented all
the more empowering in his works.—Susan
Honeyman
References
Roger Clarke, “An Improper Charlie” Sight
and Sound 15, no. 8 (2005), 25; Roald Dahl,
Boy: Tales of Childhood (New York: Puf-
fin, 1984), 147; Roald Dahl, Charlie and
the Chocolate Factory, illus. Quentin Blake
(New York: Puffin, 1998), 117, 118; Susan
Honeyman, Consuming Agency in Fairy
Tales, Childlore, and Folkliterature (New
York: Routledge, 2010), 66, 74, 174; Chris-
topher Lee, “What’s Up Front—Curtains
Up!” Interview, August 2005, 80.
CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE
FACTORY (US/UK 2005)
Director: Tim Burton. Cinematography:
Philippe Rousselot. Executive Producers:
Bruce Berman, Graham Burke, Felicity
Dahl, Patrick McCormick, Michael Sie-
gel. Producers: Brad Grey, Richard D.
Zanuck, Lorne Orleans. Associate Pro-
ducer : Derek Frey. M usic : Danny Elf-
man. Supervising Orchestrator: Steve
Bartek. Editor: Chris Lebenzon. First
Assistant Editors: Joseph C. Bond IV,
Emma Gaffney. Supervising Digital Col-
orist: Peter Doyle. Production Design:
Alex McDowell. Set Decoration: Peter
Young. A rt D irection : David Allday,
Francois Audouy, Matthew Gray, Sean
Haworth, James Lewis, Andrew Nichol-
72  n  CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY
son, Stuart Rose. Senior Art Director:
Kevin Phipps. S upervising A rt D irec -
tor : Leslie Tomkins. C ostume D esign :
Gabriella Pescucci. Hair Stylists/Makeup
Artists: Abi Brotherton, Cathy Burc-
zak, Karen Cohen, Julie Dartnell. First
A ssistant D irector : Katterli Frauen-
felder. Second Assistant Director: Toby
Hefferman. T hird A ssistant D irec -
tor : Bryn Lawrence. S ound D esigner :
Steve Boeddeker. Sound Effects Editor:
Martin Cantwell. Animatronic Design
Supervisor: Vince Abbott. Animatronic
D esigner : Vanessa Bastyan. S pecial
Effects: Tansy Bouttell. Special Effects
Technician: Paul Brady.
Cast: Johnny Depp (Willy Wonka), Fred-
die Highmore (Charlie Bucket), David
Kelly (Grandpa Joe), Helena Bonham
Carter (Mrs. Bucket), Noah Taylor
(Mr. Bucket), Missi Pyle (Mrs. Beaure-
garde), James Fox (Mr. Salt), Deep Roy
(Oompa-Loompas), Christopher Lee
(Dr. Wilbur Wonka), Adam Godley
(Mr. Teavee), Franziska Troegner (Mrs.
Gloop), AnnaSophia Robb (Violet Beau-
regarde), Julia Winter (Veruca Salt), Jor-
dan Fry (Mike Teavee), Philip Wiegratz
(Augustus Gloop), Blair Dunlop (Young
Willy Wonka), Liz Smith (Grandma
Georgina), Eileen Essell (Grandma Jose-
phine), David Morris (Grandpa George),
Geoffrey Holder (Narrator).
Running Time: 115 minutes, 23 seconds.
Color.
Released Through: Village Roadshow Pic-
tures, the Zanuck Company, and Plan B
Entertainment.
Charlie Bucket (Freddie Highmore) is a
kind-hearted, poor boy living in poverty
with his parents and four bedridden grand-
parents. His family is so poor that Charlie
sleeps in a garret without a roof. He and his
mother, Mrs. Bucket (HELENA BONHAM
CARTER), rely on the meager income of his
father, Mr. Bucket (Noah Taylor). Down the
street from Charlie Bucket’s home is a choc-
olate factory owned by the eccentric Willy
Wonka (JOHNNY DEPP), which reopened
after industrial espionage forced him into
seclusion and to sack his employees. Char-
lie’s Grandpa Joe (David Kelly) worked for
Willy Wonka before being terminated.
Willy Wonka holds a contest hiding
five Golden Tickets within the wrappers
of his candy bars, promising their finders
a tour of his chocolate factory and one of
the finders a chance to be presented with a
grand prize. Four tickets are quickly found:
one by the greedy and gluttonous Augustus
Gloop (Philip Wiegratz) from Düsseldorf,
another by the spoiled and rotten Veruca
Salt (Julia Winter) from London, another
by the highly competitive, gum-chewing
Violet Beauregarde (AnnaSophia Robb)
from Atlanta, and the fourth by the video-
game-crazed couch potato Mike Teavee
(Jordan Fry) from Denver. Charlie strongly
hopes to find one of the Golden Tickets, but
his chances are very small given his family
is so poor. He receives his annual birthday
present of one Wonka bar and a bar bought
by Grandpa Joe’s money. All his hopes are
dashed when the last remaining ticket is
claimed in Russia. By sheer luck, Charlie
finds some money in the street and chooses
to enjoy another chocolate bar when news
breaks that the recently claimed ticket was
fake. Serendipitously, Charlie discovers the
last Golden Ticket inside the bar he just
bought. Grandpa Joe offers to accompany
Charlie on the tour, but given his family’s
dire circumstances, Charlie announces his
intention to sell it. Grandpa George (David
Morris) reminds Charlie that money is far
more common than the tickets, and con-
vinces Charlie to hold on to the ticket.
The winning ticket holders, accompa-
nied by a parent, are admitted to the factory
and greeted by a chorus of singing pup-
pets that soon catch fire and melt, spoil-
ing Wonka’s entrance. The group finds the
pale, reclusive Willy Wonka eccentric and
strange. However, his tour of the factory
shows how wonderfully his playground/
 CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY  n  73
factory operates due to the hard work of
the knee-high creatures called Oompa-
Loompas. Slowly, four of the children
reveal themselves to be bad children, and
have to be rescued by the Oompa-Loom-
pas. The gluttonous Augustus Gloop falls
into a river of chocolate and is sucked into
a pipe before being rescued from the fudge-
processing center. Violet Beauregarde
swells into a giant blueberry when she tries
an experimental piece of chewing gum she
was warned not to try, while Veruca Salt
is judged a “bad nut” by Wonka’s trained
squirrels and tossed into the garbage chute.
Mike Teavee is shrunk down to a few
inches in height after being the first person
to transmit himself through Wonka’s new
television advertising invention, and must
be taken to the Taffy-Puller Room to be
stretched back to normal (sort of).
Charlie Bucket, as the sole remaining
child, wins the grand prize—to become the
heir of Wonka’s factory and all its riches.
However, Wonka stipulates that Charlie’s
family has to stay behind, and so Charlie is
compelled to reject Wonka’s offer—he will
not leave his family. Later, Charlie discov-
ers that Wonka had a troubled relationship
with his father, Dr. Wilbur Wonka (Chris-
topher Lee), a dentist. Charlie learns that
Wilbur Wonka forbid Willy to eat candy of
any sort. Wonka’s candies are selling poorly
and he comes to associate his unhappiness
with the sorry financial state of his com-
pany, so he makes an effort to find Charlie,
who in turn locates Wilbur Wonka. When
they eventually meet, Charlie discovers a
number of portfolios indicating Dr. Wonka
has followed his son’s success and they are
reconciled. Wonka allows Charlie’s family
to move into the factory while he and Char-
lie plan the creation of new confections.
As told by Burton, the story is about a
man, realizing he’s growing old (as revealed
by his discovery of a gray hair), who decides
to find the family he never had. In the
process, he overcomes his juvenile imma-
turity and accepts the responsibilities of
adulthood. He adopts a family and they
adopt him. The reviewer for Entertainment
Weekly found Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory to be “Burton’s finest movie since
Ed Wood.” Peter Bradshaw, writing in the
Guardian, liked the film as well, saying that
it’s Tim Burton’s “best film for years, miles
better than the woeful Big Fish or Planet of
the Apes. He cleverly serves up an authentic
Dahlian gloop, mixing a dash of sentimen-
tality with a quart of satirical grossout, to
which generations of young readers have
gleefully responded.” While observing that
“the visual invention is a wonderment,”
Robert Ebert found JOHNNY DEPP’s per-
formance of Willy Wonka to be uncomfort-
ably channeling Michael Jackson, writing,
“Consider the reclusive lifestyle, the fetishes
of wardrobe and accessories, the elaborate
playground built by an adult for the child
inside.” Ann Hornaday of the Washington
Post tended to agree with Ebert in criticiz-
ing Depp’s performance. “The cumulative
effect isn’t pretty. Nor is it kooky, funny,
eccentric or even mildly interesting. Indeed,
throughout his fey, simpering performance,
Depp seems to be straining so hard for
weirdness that the entire enterprise begins
to feel like those excruciating occasions
when your parents tried to be hip. Aside
from Burton’s usual eye-popping direction,
the film’s strenuous efforts at becoming a
camp classic eventually begin to wear thin.”
References
Peter Bradshaw, “Charlie and the Choco-
late Factory,” Guardian, www.theguard-
ian.com/theguardian/2005/jul/29/2, July
28, 2005; Roger Ebert, “Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory,” RogerEbert.com, July
14, 2005, www.rogerebert.com/reviews/
charlie-and-the-chocolate-factory-2005;
Jeff Labrecque, “Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory,” Entertainment Weekly, November
8, 2005, www.ew.com/article/2005/11/08/
charlie-and-chocolate-factory?_r=true;
74  n  CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (VIDEO GAMES)
Ann Hornaday “Sorry, Charlie,” Wash-
ington Post, July 15, 2005, www.wash-
ingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti-
cle/2005/07/14/AR2005071402083.html.
CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE
FACTORY (VIDEO GAMES)
Unlike the games centered around the
release of Tim Burton’s PLANET OF THE
APES in 2001, the games based on his film
CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FAC-
TORY (2005) are directly tied to the fin-
ished film (the Game Boy Advance port
even contains digitized still images from
the movie proper). Backbone Entertain-
ment developed Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory for PC, Nintendo GameCube, Sony
PlayStation 2, and the Microsoft Xbox.
These titles were published by Global Star
and distributed by Warner Bros. The Game
Boy Advance port was developed by Digital
Eclipse (a division of Backbone Entertain-
ment) and was also published by Global
Star and distributed by Warner Bros.
The home console and PC ports are
level-based, 3-D platformers with puzzle-
solving and adventure elements. Because of
hardware limitations, the Game Boy Advance
port is a 2-D level-based platformer (how-
ever, it retains the expressive, borderline
gaudy color palette of the other games and
the film). Each game has the player assume
the role of Charlie Bucket, whose tenure in
Willy Wonka’s factory is no longer about
passive tourism, but rather actively fixing
problems. One of the strangest things about
these games is that Charlie’s pragmatism
takes center stage: his ability to help other
people with their insecurities and shortcom-
ings (the substance of his relationship with
Willy Wonka in Burton’s film) becomes the
main charge of the player, but in more literal
terms. In the home console and PC ports,
Charlie has to fix broken machinery and col-
laborate with the Oompa-Loompas (he can
give them orders and send them to work).
This keeps the game in line with established
video-game genre conceits, but does not
really match the sources of conflict in the
film. Many of the characters from the film
are absent, though Grandpa Joe remains in
cut scenes and as a source of hints. The other
children (Augustus Gloop, Violet Beaure-
garde, Veruca Salt, Mike Teavee) prove a
constant source of aggravation. The game
basically follows the progression of locations
and set pieces from the film, but does not
necessarily follow its plotted actions.
Reviewers disliked each of these ports.
A general criticism of these Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory adaptations holds true for
most licensed properties: in an attempt at
sticking to the content of the source film,
these games forsake necessary game-play
elements like responsive controls or thor-
oughly balanced challenges. Karen Chu’s
review of the PlayStation 2 port voices the
frustrations of several reviewers who were
receptive to the idea of a game based on this
promising property. In a mainly negative
critique, she writes, “The magic of Wonka’s
factory was left in the chocolate waterfalls
of Tim Burton’s movie and the pages of
Roald Dahl’s book.”—Kevin M. Flanagan
Reference
Karen Chu, “Review: Charlie and the Choc-
olate Factory (PS2): Definitely No Golden
Ticket Here,” 1up.com, July 18, 2005,
www.1up.com/reviews/charlie-chocolate-
factory_2.
CHIODO, STEPHEN (1954–)
Film director and special effects artist with
an expertise in stop-motion animation
who worked on Tim Burton’s earliest films.
Born in the Bronx, New York, in 1954,
Stephen Chiodo moved to Los Angeles in
1980. He and his brothers, older brother
Charles and younger brother Edward,
collectively known as the Chiodo Broth-
ers, are perhaps best known for their sci-fi
horror film Killer Klowns from Outer Space
(1988), which is considered a cult classic.
 CORPSE BRIDE (MCFARLANE TOYS)  n  75
The Chiodo Brothers also created pup-
pets and effects for films such as Gremlins
(1984), Critters (1986, and subsequent
sequels) and Ernest Scared Stupid (1991).
Chiodo learned his animation and direc-
torial skills at the Rochester Institute of
Technology, and was awarded Best Young
Director at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival
for his ten-minute 16-mm short Cricket
(1975), produced by the Chiodo Broth-
ers. Cricket tells the story of a cricket who
is an outcast because he cannot jump, but
happily learns that being different is not so
bad after all. He first collaborated with Tim
Burton and RICK HEINRICHS as the tech-
nical director and animator on VINCENT.
“Rick and Tim, they were really interested
in stop motion,” said Chiodo. “But they
never really made a stop motion film like
that before. So with my experience from
coming off that I Go Pogo feature [1980]
my DP [Director of Photography] from I
Go Pogo Victor Abdalov and I kind of put
together the system. You know the stage,
the set, the lighting, and all that, all under
Tim’s direction.” Chiodo soon worked with
Burton and Heinrichs again as the special
effects supervisor/animator on HANSEL
AND GRETEL. For SHELLY DUVALL’s
Faerie Tale Theatre, the Chiodo Brothers
fabricated special mechanical props and
miniatures for eighteen shows, among
them Tim Burton’s ALADDIN AND HIS
WONDERFUL LAMP. The Chiodo Broth-
ers also fabricated and animated the Large
Marge transformation in PEE-WEE’S BIG
ADVENTURE. Chido is president and cre-
ative director of Chiodo Bros. Productions,
Inc., and also a member of the faculty at
CalArts, where he teaches stop motion.
References
“About Us,” Chido Bros.com,, www.chi-
odobros.com/about-us/; “Stephen Chi-
odo,” CalArts, directory.calarts.edu/direc-
tory/stephen-chiodo; “Stephen Chiodo,”
IMDb, www.imdb.com/name/nm0158014/
bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm; “Stephen Chi-
odo: The Man, the Legend,” Stop Motion
Magazine 1 (August 2010): 6–15.
CONVERSATIONS WITH VINCENT
(UNRELEASED)
Director: Tim Burton.
R unning T ime : 60 minutes, 26 seconds.
Black and white and color.
Unfinished documentary by Tim Burton
on the films and career of Vincent Price,
shot over three days in April 1990 at the
Vincent Price Gallery at East Los Angeles
College, during the making of EDWARD
SCISSORHANDS. Postproduction on
the documentary stopped in 1991 as a
result of BATMAN RETURNS (Septem-
ber 1991–February 1992) and irreparably
stalled following Price’s death in October
1993. According to Ken Hanke, “What
was to have been a fairly straightforward
question-and-answer documentary, how-
ever, ballooned when Burton decided to
bring his own critical faculties to bear on
Price’s entertainment work and what it had
meant to him.” Burton’s reconceptualiza-
tion of the project required the acquisition
of a great deal of archival footage. Given
the growing expense of the project and its
limited audience appeal, Burton abandoned
further production. The project remains
unfinished.
Reference
Ken Hanke, Tim Burton: An Unauthorized
Biography of the Filmmaker (Los Angeles:
Renaissance Books, 1999), 116.
CORPSE BRIDE (MCFARLANE
TOYS)
In connection with the release of CORPSE
BRIDE in 2005, McFarlane Toys licensed
a line of collectible action figures, bend-
able figures, and PVC and plush toys. The
76  n  CORPSE BRIDE
line of merchandise was geared toward
the teen to young adult market, both male
and female, and hit stores in conjunction
with the film’s launch. These Corpse Bride
products were distributed in specialty and
mid-tier retail outlets nationwide. The
top line of toys consisted of seven-inch
action figures issued in two series, the first
in 2005 and the second in 2006. Series 1
included Victor, Victoria, Skeleton Girl
and Boy, Corpse Bride, General Welling-
ton, and Dwarf General. Series 2 included
Corpse Bride 2, Victor 2, Mayhew, Albert,
Skeleton Band Leader, and Mrs. Plum.
A three-inch Mini Collectors Set was
also issued, consisting of Victoria, Elder
Gutenknacht, Zombie Gentleman, Paul
the Head Waiter, Scraps, and the Wiener
Dog.
CORPSE BRIDE (UK 2005)
D irectors : Tim Burton, Mike Johnson.
S creenplay : John August, Caroline
Thompson, Pamela Pettler. Executive
Producers: Jeffrey Auerbach, Joe Ranft.
Producers: Tim Burton, Allison Abbate.
Associate Producer: Derek Frey. Char-
acters : Tim Burton, Carlos Grangel.
Music: Danny Elfman. Song Lyrics: John
August, Danny Elfman. S upervising
Orchestrator: Steve Bartek. Cinema-
tography: Pete Kozachik. Editors: Chris
Lebenzon, Jonathan Lucas. A ssistant
E ditor : Carlos Domeque. F irst A ssis -
tant Editors: Ralph Foster, Emma Gaff-
ney, Claus Wehlisch. Second Assistant
E ditor : Claire Dodgson. P roduction
Design: Alex McDowell. Art Direction:
Nelson Lowry. Production Manager:
Harry Linden. Postproduction Supervi-
sor: Jessie Thiele. First Assistant Direc-
tor: Ezra J. Sumner. Second A ssistant
D irector : Mike Colley. T hird A ssis -
tant Director: Joe Barlow. Conceptual
Design/Illustrator: Chris Baker. Story-
board Artists: Chris Butler, Joe Ranft,
Sharon Smith, David Stoten. Additional
S toryboard A rtists : Mike Cachuela,
Alex Hillkurtz, Brenda Houghton, Matt
Jones, Kaz, Alberto Mielgo, Andreas
von Andrian. F oley S upervisor : Harry
Barnes. F oley M ixer : Phillip Barrett.
Sound Designer: Steve Boeddeker. Pro-
duction Sound Mixer: Sandy Buchanan.
Sound Designer: Martin Cantwell. Foley
Editor: Simon Chase. Supervising Sound
Editor: Eddy Joseph. Production Sound
M ixer : Paul Langwade. D ialogue E di -
tor: Colin Ritchie. Puppets (Mackinnon
and Saunders): Ian Mackinnon, Peter
Saunders. Project Supervisor (Mackin-
non and Saunders): Kat Alioshin. Lead
S culptor (Mackinnon and Saunders):
Noel Baker. A rmature L ead (Mackin-
non and Saunders): Georgina Hayns.
Foam Lead (Mackinnon and Saunders):
Bethan Jones. Fabrication Lead (Mack-
innon and Saunders): Christine Keogh.
L ead P ainter (Mackinnon and Saun-
ders): Nick Roberson. Costumes Lead
(Mackinnon and Saunders): Michelle
Scattergood. Lead Mould Maker (Mack-
innon and Saunders): Bridget Smith.
S ilicone L ead (Mackinnon and Saun-
ders): Mark Thompson. P uppet F ab -
rication S upervisor : Graham Maiden.
Visual Effects Editor: William Camp-
bell. Motion Control Supervisor: Andy
Bowman. C ompositing T eam (MPC):
Murray Barber, Judy Barr, Andre Biz-
ard, Delphine Buratti, Loraine Coo-
per, Vince Goodsell, Kim Gordon, Nic
Hodgkinson, Tom Kimberley, Kirsty
Lamb, Douglas Larmour, Natalie Mac-
Donald, Phil Man, Jolene McCaffrey,
Salima Needham, Dylan Owen, Scott
Pritchard, Norbert Ruf, Jim Russell,
David Scott, Kim Stevenson, Miguel
Ubeda. L i g h t i n g C a m e r a : Melissa
Byers, Jamie Daniels, Stuart Gallo-
way, Malcolm Hadley, Simon Jacobs,
James Lewis, Simon Paul, Graham Pet-
tit, Peter Sorg, Mark Stewart. C har -
acter D esigners : Jordi Grangel, Huy

Vu, Carlos Grangel. A nimators : Tim
Allen, Stefano Cassini, Joanne Chalkley,
Mike Cottee, Phil Dale, Brian Demos-
koff, Pete Dodd, Anthony Elworthy,
Anthony Farquhar-Smith, Tobias Foura-
cre, Jens Jonathan Gulliksen, Brian Han-
sen, Malcolm Lamont, Drew Lightfoot,
Matt Palmer, Brad Schiff, Michael Sch-
lingman, Jason Stalman, Trey Thomas,
Chris Tichborne, Chris Tootell, Mark
Waring, Tim Watts, Charlotte Wor-
saae. In memory of Joe Ranft.
Cast (Voices): Johnny Depp (Victor Van
Dort), Helena Bonham Carter (Corpse
Bride), Emily Watson (Victoria Ever-
glot), Tracey Ullman (Nell Van Dort/
Hildegarde), Paul Whitehouse (Wil-
liam Van Dort/Mayhew/Paul the Head
Waiter), Joanna Lumley (Maudeline
Everglot), Albert Finney (Finis Everglot),
Richard E. Grant (Lord Barkis Bittern),
Christopher Lee (Pastor Galswells),
Michael Gough (Elder Gutknecht), Jane
Horrocks (Black Widow Spider/Mrs.
Plum), Enn Reitel (Maggot/Town Crier),
Deep Roy (General Bonesapart), Danny
Elfman (Bonejangles), Stephen Ballantyne
(Emil), Lisa Kay (Solemn Village Boy).
R unning T ime : 77 minutes, 10 seconds.
Color, black and white.
Released Through: Warner Bros. Pictures.
Film based on the Jewish folktale “THE
FINGER” about a man who places his
wedding ring on the finger of a long-dead
bride. Tim Burton has indicated it was
JOE RANFT who told him about the folk-
tale. According to Howard Schwartz, “The
Finger” is derived from the “Venus-Ring”
tale, about a fiancé who recklessly places
his engagement ring on the hand of a statue
of Venus. The Venus statue “is thereby
brought to life, appearing on the wedding
night as a ghostly presence who tries to
supplant the real bride sleeping at her hus-
band’s side.” Ultimately, Schwartz writes,
CORPSE BRIDE  n  77
“The Finger” combines three folktale tra-
ditions: “the seductive Lilith, the theme
of marriage with demons, and the Venus-
Ring motif.” As Tim Burton explains it, his
interest in the story was because it’s about
a man caught between two women, one of
them living, the other one dead.
Although the Jewish folktale origi-
nated in the sixteenth century, Corpse Bride
is set during the Victorian period in an
unnamed English village, where the artisti-
cally inclined nineteen-year-old Victor Van
Dort (JOHNNY DEPP) is putting the fin-
ishing touches on the sketch of a butterfly.
The drawing done, he lifts a glass bell jar,
releasing the butterfly. He is preparing for
his arranged marriage to Victoria Everglot
(Emily Watson), the daughter of wealthy
but humorless aristocrats, Finis Everglot
(Albert Finney) and Maudeline Everglot
(Joanna Lumley). The marriage will improve
the class stature of Victor’s parents, William
Van Dort (Paul Whitehouse) and Nell Van
Dort (Tracey Ullman) while also restoring
the wealth of Victoria’s money-grabbing
parents. Both Victor and Victoria have hesi-
tations about marrying a person they do
not know, but they fall in love when they
first meet. Soon after the wedding rehearsal
begins, a guest arrives at the Everglot Man-
sion who identifies himself as Lord Barkis
(Richard E. Grant) and is ushered into the
drawing room. The rehearsal does not go
well. The nervously self-conscious Victor
drops the wedding ring and is scolded by
the imposing Pastor Galswells (Christopher
Lee). Humiliated, Victor leaves the mansion,
passing over the stone bridge and into the
nearby forest. There, he practices his wed-
ding vows repeatedly, getting his confidence
back, and slips the ring on a small twisted
root that extends from the ground.
The root suddenly encircles his arm,
the root turning out to be the hand of a
murdered woman in a tattered bridal
78  n  CORPSE BRIDE
gown, who rises from her shallow grave
claiming that she is now Victor’s wife. She
is the corpse bride. Victor flees but can-
not escape her, and she spirits him away
from his drab world to the surprisingly
joyful, vibrant and brightly colored Land
of the Dead, where he is treated to the
song “Remains of the Day” by Bonejan-
gles (DANNY ELFMAN), a skeleton band
leader. (“Die, die, we all pass away/But
don’t wear a frown cause it’s really okay/
You might try to hide and you might try
and pray/But we all end up the remains
of the day.”) The bewildered Victor then
learns the story of how Emily (HELENA
BONHAM CARTER), his new “bride,”
was murdered years ago by an unknown
criminal on the night of her secret elope-
ment. Emily, as a wedding gift, reunites
Victor with his long-dead dog, Scraps.
Meanwhile, Victoria’s parents hear that
Victor has been seen in another woman’s
arms and become suspicious. Wanting to
reunite with Victoria, Victor tricks Emily
into taking him back to the Land of the
Living by pretending he wants her to meet
his parents. She agrees to this and takes
him to see Elder Gutknecht (Michael
Gough), the kindly ruler of the under-
world, to send him and Emily temporar-
ily to the Land of the Living. Once back
home, Victor asks Emily to wait in the
forest while he rushes off to see Victoria
and confess his wish to marry her as soon
as possible, to which she gladly returns his
feelings. As they are about to kiss, Emily
arrives and sees the two of them together
and, feeling betrayed and hurt, angrily
drags Victor back to the Land of the Dead.
Victoria tells her parents that Victor has
been forcibly wed to a dead woman, but
they believe she has lost her mind and
lock her up in her bedroom. She escapes
her room by window and rushes to Pastor
Galswells to find a way to help Victor, but
fails. With Victor gone, Victoria’s parents
decide, against her will, to marry her off to
the presumably wealthy Lord Barkis Bit-
tern (Richard E. Grant).
Emily is heartbroken by Victor’s
deception. Victor, however, apologizes
for lying to her, and the two reconcile
while playing the piano together. Shortly
after, Victor’s family coachman appears
in the afterlife (having only just died) and
informs Victor of Victoria’s impending
marriage to Lord Barkis Bittern. At the
same time, Emily learns from Elder Gut-
knecht that there’s a complication with
her marriage. Because marriage vows are
binding only until death do you part, death
already parts her and Victor, so her mar-
riage to Victor was never valid. In order
for their marriage to become valid, Victor
must repeat his vows in the Land of the
Living and afterward willingly drink poison
(referred to as the Wine of Ages) in order
to die. In this way he will join her in death.
Overhearing this, and fretting about hav-
ing lost Victoria to another man, Victor
agrees to die for Emily. Victor announces
to the dead, “We’re moving the wedding
party upstairs.” All of the dead choose to
go upstairs to the Land of the Living to
attend the wedding ceremony for Victor
and Emily. Upon their arrival in the vil-
lage square, the townspeople erupt into
a temporary panic until they realize that
their lost loved ones have returned from the
dead, and enjoy a wonderful reunion under
bizarre circumstances.
After a quarrel with Lord Barkis—and
realizing he was only after her supposed
money—Victoria follows the procession
of dead to the village church. Emily notices
Victoria and realizes that she is denying
Victoria her chance at happiness the same
way it was stolen from her. As Victor pre-
pares to drink the Wine of Ages, Emily
stops him and reunites him with Victoria.
The villainous Lord Barkis interrupts them,
and Emily recognizes him as her former

fiancé—who is revealed to be her murderer,
having killed her for her dowry. Lord Bar-
kis tries to kidnap Victoria at sword point,
but Victor stops him and the two men duel.
Emily intercedes to save Victor and Lord
Barkis mockingly proposes a toast to Emily,
claiming she was “always the bridesmaid,
never the bride.” He unknowingly drinks
the Wine of Ages. The dead, enabled to
act now that Lord Barkis is dead, drag him
away to the Land of the Dead, where he will
be punished for his crime. Victoria, now a
widow, is once again able to marry Victor.
Emily sets Victor free of his vow to
marry her, giving the wedding ring back to
Victor and her wedding bouquet to Victo-
ria before exiting the church. As she steps
into the moonlight, she tells Victor, “You
kept your promise—you set me free,” and
is transformed into hundreds of butterflies,
presumably finding peace at last, as Victor
and Victoria look on.
In the original folktale, the decision of
whether the protagonist is actually married
to the corpse bride is to be made by the rab-
binic court. When the court asks the corpse
bride if she will relinquish her claim on the
living man, she refuses. She demands the
marriage be consummated because she had
never married during her life and wants in
death what had been denied to her in life.
Ultimately, the court decides in the man’s
favor, declaring his marriage to the corpse
bride null and void, ruling that the man
had been betrothed by his parents to his
true bride at birth, that his vow was not
made with intention, and that the dead may
make no claim on the living. Having lost her
chance to marry even in death, the corpse
screams, collapses to the floor, and dies once
more. The film’s narrative retains many of
these story elements, but changes one cru-
cial element: that the corpse bride had been
married but was murdered soon after her
wedding. Burton said he wanted to make
CORPSE BRIDE  n  79
the movie like “a romantic fairy tale, a tragic
romantic fairy tale, and I felt the seed from
that from the Jack and Sally relationship
in Nightmare, which I enjoyed and wanted
to see if it could go off, different, and even
more so in a way. There’s a melancholy to
it, but that’s what I took from the original
story. There’s a sadness to it.” Burton’s char-
acterization is accurate: it is a sad story, for
while still living the corpse bride was mar-
ried, briefly, and her motive for insisting
Victor remain married to her is as it is the
folktale: she wants in death what she did not
have in life. And yet, the dead may make no
claim on the living, and so she relinquishes
her claim on Victor, but unlike the folktale
in which she screams in agony and dies once
more (and buried very deep so such a thing
may not happen again), she’s allowed a sort
of bittersweet apotheosis—for after all, she
is the unlikely protagonist of the film. Once
the identity of her murderer is revealed, and
he dies unwittingly by his own hand, she
may die in peace. Strangely, the dead seem
to know that Emily was murdered, but not
the identity of her murderer. The lyrics to
the song, “Remains of the Day,” sung by
Bonejangles in the Land of the Dead, explain
how Emily died:
Well our girl was a beauty known for miles
around
When a mysterious stranger came into town.
He was plenty good lookin’—but down on his
cash.
And our poor little baby, she fell hard and fast.
When her daddy said no, she just couldn’t cope.
So our lovers came up with a plan to elope.
The reason those in the Land of the Dead
know about Emily’s demise is never
explained, although her story does invoke
the myth of the Grateful Dead, about a
stranger who finds a corpse and gives it
proper burial, only to be rewarded later for
his kind action.
80  n  CZAPSKY, STEFAN
Reviews were generally positive. Roger
Ebert described the film accurately as “a
sweet and visually lovely tale of love lost.”
Roger Moore, in the Orlando Sentinel
almost remarked on the film’s tone, saying,
“The sweetness, the visual flourishes and
inspired pieces of casting carry the Corpse
Bride, if not all the way down the primrose
path, then at least across the threshold.”
Kenneth Turan, however, of the Los Ange-
les Times, was a dissenting voice, asserting,
“The film does have a fairy-tale aspect, but,
like many of its characters, it is more dead
and buried than fully alive.” Peter Travers
of Rolling Stone wrote, “In the guise of a
family film, Burton evokes a darkly erotic
obsession that recalls Edgar Allan Poe and
Hitchcock’s Vertigo. It would be a test for
any filmmaker, and Burton aces it.”
According to BoxOfficeMojo.com,
the worldwide earnings of Corpse Bride
amounted to $117.1 million. The pro-
duction budget has been estimated at $40
million. Corpse Bride was filming simulta-
neously with CHARLIE AND THE CHOC-
OLATE FACTORY, with actor JOHNNY
DEPP performing Willie Wonka during
the day, and voicing Victor Van Dort in the
evenings.
References
Roger Ebert, “Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride,”
RogerEbert.com, September 22, 2005,
www.rogerebert.com/reviews/tim-burtons-
corpse-bride-2005; Roger Moore, “Not a
Rotting Corpse, but Certainly No Body
Beautiful,” Orlando Sentinel, September 23,
2005, articles.orlandosentinel.com/2005-
09-23/entertainment/CORPSE_1_corpse-
bride-tim-burton-victor; Mark Salisbury,
ed., Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride: An Invi-
tation to the Wedding (New York: New-
market Books, 2005); Peter Travers, “Tim
Burton’s Corpse Bride,” Rolling Stone,
September 8, 2005, www.rollingstone.
com/movies/reviews/tim-burtons-corpse-
bride-20050908; Kenneth Turan, “‘Corpse’
Outlives the Fun,” Los Angeles Times, Sep-
tember 16, 2005, articles.latimes.com/2005/
sep/16/entertainment/et-corpse16.
CZAPSKY, STEFAN (1950–)
Cinematographer who has shot three films
directed by Tim Burton: EDWARD SCIS-
SORHANDS, BATMAN RETURNS, and
ED WOOD. Czapsky was born in Oester-
scheppes, West Germany, and immigrated
to Cleveland, Ohio, with his Ukranian par-
ents while still an infant. He first studied
film history and criticism at Case Western
Reserve University in Cleveland, and later
Columbia University’s graduate film pro-
gram. He then began to work his way up
the ranks in the film industry, serving for
more than a decade as a key grip, gaffer,
chief electrician, and assistant cameraman
on dozens of feature films. During this
period, he worked with such notable cin-
ematographers as Michael Ballhaus, Allen
Daviau, and Haskell Wexler.
His first credit as director of photogra-
phy was On the Edge (1985), starring Bruce
Dern. His second DP credit was for the
controversial The Thin Blue Line (1988),
directed by Errol Morris, a docudrama
that combined both interview footage and
crime scene recreations, shot at different
speeds from various angles. He followed
this film with Uli Edel’s Last Exit to Brook-
lyn (1989), Franco Amurri’s Flashback
(1990), and the horror sequel Child’s Play
2 (1990), before collaborating with Tim
Burton to create the defamiliarized sub-
urban landscape of Edward Scissorhands.
Czapsky’s second collaboration with Bur-
ton was BATMAN’s lavish Gothic sequel,
Batman Returns (1992). Czapsky was to
find his greatest acclaim on a Burton film
for his black-and-white cinematography
for Ed Wood, for which he won the 1994

Award for Best Cinematography from the
Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the
Boston Society of Film Critics, the National
Society of Film Critics, and the New York
Film Critics Circle.
Czapsky is a member of the American
Society of Cinematographers, and in addi-
CZAPSKY, STEFAN  n  81
tion to feature films has shot numerous
commercials and music videos.
References
Stefan Czapsky A.S.C. (website), www.ste-
fanczapskyasc.com; Warner Bros., promo-
tion materials, Batman Returns, 1992.
 D
A
DAHL, ROALD (1916–1990)
Writer who became famous for his chil-
dren’s books, among them JAMES AND
THE GIANT PEACH (1961) and CHAR-
LIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY
(1964), both of which have been made
into films. Charlie and the Chocolate Fac-
tory was first filmed in 1971 and released
under the title of WILLY WONKA & THE
CHOCOLATE FACTORY, and again in
2005, as Charlie and the Chocolate Fac-
tory, directed by Tim Burton and starring
JOHNNY DEPP. His fiction for young
readers is often singled out for its sudden
twists and surprise endings, its dark humor,
and its honest portrayal of reality. Dahl felt
that children were very “harsh critics” who
got bored easily if a story began to lag, and
emphasized the importance of understand-
ing how they think. In a New York Times
Book Review interview, Dahl asserted that in
order to be a successful composer of chil-
dren’s stories, “You have to know what chil-
dren like.” Echoing this sentiment, director
Tim Burton cited as a reason for filming his
version of Charlie and the Chocolate Fac-
tory, his admiration for Dahl’s “mixture of
light and darkness, and not speaking down
to kids, and the kind of politically incorrect
humour that kids get.”
Dahl was born in Llandaff, South
Wales, on September 13, 1916, to Nor-
wegian parents. He had three sisters. His
father died when Dahl was four years old,
82  n 
but his mother sent him to choice private
schools, St. Peters and Repton (both with
high academic reputations), as her hus-
band had wished. Unhappy at school, he
refused his mother’s offer to send him to
Oxford and Cambridge after he graduated
from Repton in 1932. Dahl had a desire to
visit exotic places, and in 1934 he accepted
a job with the Shell Petroleum Company
that stationed him in Kenya and what is
now Tanzania, where he remained until he
joined the Royal Air Force. Dahl became a
fighter pilot during World War II. When
his plane crashed, he suffered severe inju-
ries to his spine, skull, and hip, and was
temporarily blinded.
After the war, Dahl moved to Wash-
ington, DC, as a diplomat, where he met
a writer, C. S. Forester, who encouraged
him to try his hand at fiction, and he began
by publishing adult short stories in maga-
zines (Saturday Evening Post and the New
Yorker). His first story for children The
Gremlins (1943) was one he composed for
Disney. This was not well received, so he
returned to writing adult fiction. In 1953,
Dahl married the talented actress Patricia
Neal, who won an Oscar for Best Support-
ing Actress in Hud (1963), playing the role
of Alma, opposite Paul Newman as the tit-
ular figure. Neal and Dahl, who remained
married until 1983, had five children, and
Dahl, having turned again to children’s
fantasy fiction, began inventing bedtime
DANNY ELFMAN & TIM BURTON 25TH ANNIVERSARY MUSIC BOX  n  83
stories for his own children, some of which
became his published works.
After he and Neal divorced in 1983,
Dahl married Felicity Ann Crosland, who
remained his spouse until his death on
November 23, 1990, from a blood disease,
myelodysplasia. He is buried in St. Peter
and St. Paul Church, Buckinghamshire,
England. Dahl composed a two-part auto-
biography of his early years, Boy: Tales of
Childhood (1984), which chronicles his
early life and unhappiness at school, fol-
lowed by Going Solo (1986), an account of
his life through his war experiences. Later
autobiographical reminiscences include
Memories with Food at Gipsy House (1991)
and My Year (1993).
Roald Dahl’s literary accomplishments
have been widely recognized. In 1983, Dahl
earned the World Fantasy Award for Life
Achievement, and in 1990, the British Book
Awards named him Children’s Author
of the Year. In 1996 the Roald Dahl Chil-
dren’s Gallery opened in his honor at the
Buckinghamshire County Museum. Other
tributes include the establishment in 2008
of the Roald Dahl Funny Prize, an annual
award given to authors of children’s fiction,
and the Roald Dahl’s Marvelous Children’s
Charity (2011), instituted by his widow.
The Times listed Dahl as number sixteen
on its list of the fifty greatest British writers
since 1945.—Rebecca A. Umland
References
“Roald Dahl,” Bio, www.biography.com/
people/roald-dahl-9264648; “Roald Dahl,”
Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_
Dahl; Mark Salisbury, Burton on Burton,
2nd rev. ed. (London: Faber and Faber,
2006), 223; Donald Sturrock, Storyteller:
The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010);
Jeremy Treglown, Roald Dahl: A Biogra-
phy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1994).
DANNY ELFMAN & TIM BURTON
25TH ANNIVERSARY MUSIC BOX
Lavish box set issued in 2011 as a career
overview, commemorating the then
twenty-five years of collaboration between
Tim Burton and DANNY ELFMAN. The
music box was supposed to be issued in
2010 to coincide with the twenty-fifth anni-
versary of PEE WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE,
but was not actually shipped until spring
2011. The box consists of sixteen CDs,
one DVD, a USB flash drive, a zoetrope,
and a hardcover book. The first issue was
limited to one thousand numbered boxes
designated as such by a numbered certifi-
cate. The limited edition actually sold out
in 2010. Those who had preordered the
limited edition box were sent a seventeenth
bonus disc at the end of 2010 to reward
their patience until the box arrived, auto-
graphed by Danny Elfman, titled “Collec-
tor’s Edition Bonus Disc.” The first thirteen
CDs included in the box feature expanded
editions of the films that Tim Burton and
Danny Elfman made from Pee-Wee’s Big
Adventure (1985) through ALICE IN WON-
DERLAND (2010). (Elfman did not write
the score for ED WOOD; it was written
by Howard Shore.) Discs 14–16 consist of
“Oddities and Ends 1985–2010” (disc 14),
“Curios and Curiouser: Song Demos 1985–
2010” (disc 15), and “Notes and Notations:
Orchestra-Only Versions 1985–2010”
(disc 16). These discs include previously
unreleased demos, work tapes, masters,
and assorted other rarities. The box also
includes an illustrated 250-page hardbound
book titled Danse Macabre with a foreword
by JOHNNY DEPP, an hour-long DVD
featuring interviews with both Burton and
Elfman, a “Skeleton Key” USB flash drive
stocked with all of the material on the CDs,
and liner notes written by Elfman especially
for the collection. The music box itself is a
large, ornate, tin-covered box that has an
embedded chip that plays Elfman’s “The
84  n  DARK SHADOWS
Music Box Suite” and is adorned with a
rotating, animated zoetrope that includes
animated strips of photos and artwork.
Reference
Danny Elfman & Tim Burton 25th Anni-
versary Music Box. Warner Bros./WEA,
2011.
DARK SHADOWS (US/UK 2012)
D irector : Tim Burton. S creenplay : Seth
Grahame-Smith. S tory : John August.
E xecutive P roducers : Bruce Berman,
Nigel Gostelow, Tim Headington,
Chris Lebenzon. Associate Producer:
Derek Frey. Producers: Christi Dem-
browski, Johnny Depp, David Kennedy,
Graham King, Richard D. Zanuck. Cin-
ematography: Bruno Delbonnel. Camera
Operator: Des Whelan. Editor: Chris
Lebenzon. Music: Danny Elfman. Pro-
duction D esign : Rick Heinrichs. A rt
D irection : Neal Callow, Dean Clegg,
Christian Huband, Jason Knox-John-
ston, Phil Sims. Supervising Art Direc-
tor: Chris Lowe. Set Decoration: John
Bush. Costume Design: Colleen Atwood.
Storyboard Artist: David Allcock. First
A ssistant D irector : Katterli Frauen-
felder. Second Assistant Director: Joey
Coughlin.
C ast : Johnny Depp (Barnabas Collins),
Michelle Pfeiffer (Elizabeth Collins
Stoddard), Helena Bonham Carter (Dr.
Julia Hoffman), Eva Green (Angelique
Bouchard), Jackie Earle Haley (Willie
Loomis), Jonny Lee Miller (Roger Col-
lins), Bella Heathcote (Victoria Win-
ters/Josette DuPres), Chloë Grace
Moretz (Carolyn Stoddard), Gulliver
McGrath (David Collins), Ray Shirley
(Mrs. Johnson), Christopher Lee (Clar-
ney), Alice Cooper (Alice Cooper), Ivan
Kaye (Joshua Collins), Susanna Cappel-
laro (Naomi Collins), Josephine Butler
(David’s Mother), William Hope (Sher-
iff), Shane Rimmer (Board Member #1),
Michael J. Shannon (Board Member #2),
Harry Taylor (Henchman), Glen Mexted
(Captain Rubberpants), Guy Flanagan
(Bearded Hippie), Nigel Whitmey (Hard
Hat #1), Philip Bulcock (Hard Hat #2),
Sophie Kennedy Clark (Hippie Chick
#1), Hannah Murray (Hippie Chick
#2), Victoria Bewick (Hippie Chick #3),
Sean Mahon (Collinsport Cop), Alexia
Osborne (Young Victoria), Richard
Hollis (Vicky’s Father), Felicity Bran-
gan (Vicky’s Mother), Michael Anthony
Brown (Windcliff Doctor), Charlotte
Spencer (Coat Check Girl), Gabriel
Freilich (Hippie #3), Justin Tracy (Young
Barnabus, age six), Thomas Grube
(Construction Worker #1), Jeff Mash
(Construction Worker #2), Raffey Cas-
sidy (Young Angelique), Jonathan Frid
(Guest), Kathryn Leigh Scott (Guest),
Lara Parker (Guest), David Selby
(Guest), Janine Craig (Go Go Dancer
#1), Adelle Young (Go Go Dancer #2),
Dominica Van Santen (Go Go Dancer
#3), Josephine McGrail (Go Go Dancer
#4).
R unning T ime : 113 minutes, 2 seconds.
Color.
Released Through: Warner Bros. Pictures
in association with Village Roadshow
Pictures, Infinitum Nihil, GK Films, the
Zanuck Company, Dan Curtis Produc-
tions, and Tim Burton Productions.
Burton film putatively based on the suc-
cessful Gothic daytime soap opera of the
same name that aired from 1966 to 1971
on ABC Television. Dark Shadows resur-
rects the story of the vampire, Barnabas
Collins (JOHNNY DEPP) and the town of
Collinsport, Maine, which was founded by
the Barnabas family, who were immigrants
from England in the eighteenth century. The
film opens in Liverpool, England, in the year
1760, with Barnabas and his parents depart-
ing the busy port city—famous as both a
cultural crossroads and a slave-trafficking

town—to found the fishing port of Col-
linsport, Maine, where they prosper. Years
later, Barnabas has an affair with a witch,
Angelique Bouchard (Eva Green), who is
a maid in the Collins household; Barnabas
scorns her, however, when he falls in love
with Josette DuPres (Bella Heathcote). The
scorned mistress, Angelique, casts a spell on
Josette, making her hurl herself from a cliff
to her death, and she turns Barnabas into
a vampire to prevent him from following
Josette to the grave. The vengeful Angelique
then has Barnabas buried alive in a chained
coffin, and vows to continue her revenge by
cursing the Collins family.
From this backstory, the film leaps
ahead to the year 1972. Barnabas is unwit-
tingly exhumed by construction workers,
upon whose blood he feasts. He arrives
at his ancestral home, which is currently
inhabited by a family of his dysfunctional
descendants, headed by the likable matri-
arch, Elizabeth (MICHELLE PFEIFFER);
her freeloading brother, Roger (Jonny
Lee Miller), Elizabeth’s alienated teenage
daughter, Carolyn (Chloë Grace Moretz);
and Roger’s troubled ten-year-old son,
David (Gulliver McGrath). Joining this
family nucleus is a grounds caretaker, Wil-
lie Loomis (Jackie Earle Haley); David’s
devious psychiatrist, Dr. Julia Hoffman
(HELENA BONHAM CARTER); and the
governess, Victoria Winters (Bella Heath-
coate), who is the reincarnated Josette. The
Collins family cannery is threatened by a
rival business, Angelbay Seafood, owned
and operated by the vindictive Angelique,
who has been living for 196 years pos-
ing as her descendants. Thus, the love tri-
angle of the eighteenth century is revived:
Angelique, Josette (as Victoria), and Barn-
abas arrive in the twentieth century, and
the film is largely a working out of whether
history will repeat itself.
Upon Victoria’s arrival at Collins-
port, Barnabas immediately falls in love
DARK SHADOWS  n  85
with her, especially admiring her “birth-
ing hips,” and sets about wooing her, with
some tutoring from Carolyn, who attempts
to update Barnabas’s antiquated notions of
courtship—one of many fish-out-of-water
features that provide the comic relief to the
story. Angelique’s jealousy is aroused once
again, and she sets about to both threaten
and seduce her former lover, Barnabas. She
manages to entice Barnabas into a session
of wildly imagined sex, literally bouncing
off the ceiling and walls of her office, but
Angelique fails to win his heart, as she had
before; embittered, Angelique plots to drive
the last nail into the Collins family coffin,
so to speak, by ruining their already failing
business. Barnabas, who assumes the role
of family patriarch, makes strides to set to
rights the dysfunctional family unit, eject-
ing the irresponsible Roger, who refuses to
be a father for David, and dealing with the
treachery of David’s psychiatrist, Dr. Hoff-
man, who, having learned that Barnabas
is a vampire, attempts to leach immortal-
ity from him. He tries to give the family
business a boost by throwing a ball at the
manor, with a guest appearance by Alice
Cooper (performing “The Ballad of Dwight
Fry”).
The showdown between Barnabas
and Angelique pulls the Collins family
together: David frees Barnabas from the
coffin in which Angelique has placed him
once again; Carolyn, who has been cursed
by having been bitten by a werewolf as an
infant—another of Angelique’s vengeful
machinations—takes this form and turns
it against the family’s persecutor. Elizabeth
and Barnabas also battle the formidable
witch, Angelique, until David summons
the powerful and vengeful ghost of his
dead mother, who impales Angelique on
a chandelier. As the moribund Angelique
pulls out her porcelain heart and offers it to
Barnabas, he rejects it, averring that she had
never known how to love; rather, she only
86  n  DARK SHADOWS
had a desire to possess. Barnabas discovers,
however, that Angelique had once again
placed a curse on Victoria, causing her to
jump off of Widow’s Hill, where Josette had
also met her end. Barnabas frantically pur-
sues Victoria, but she leaps before he can
stop her; he must then leap also and bite
her to avoid losing his love a second time.
Thus, Barnabas’s cursed immortality will be
a shared fate with his lost love, a bittersweet
end that reverberates with echoes of the
expulsion from Eden in Milton’s Paradise
Lost: cursed and exiled, yet bound in love
and a shared fate. History repeats, but the
unhappy end of the previous strife from the
love triangle is revised this time around by
Barnabas’s split-second decision to save his
love by the only means open to him.
Burton’s Dark Shadows is the last proj-
ect of longtime Hollywood producer Rich-
ard D. Zanuck, perhaps best known for
Jaws (1975), who died on July 13, 2012. The
original music, scored by Burton favorite
DANNY ELFMAN, is remarkable, and the
musical selections from the 1960s–1970s
(from the Moody Blues, Curtis Mayfield,
the Carpenters, Steve Miller Band, Barry
White, and T. Rex) lend a nostalgia to
the film, situating it at a precise moment
in cultural history, 1972 being only a year
after the final season of the original televi-
sion series. The story was credited, along
with SETH GRAHAME-SMITH, the film’s
screenwriter, to Burton collaborator JOHN
AUGUST, who wrote the screenplays for
BIG FISH, FRANKENWEENIE, CORPSE
BRIDE, and CHARLIE AND THE CHOC-
OLATE FACTORY. Dark Shadows did not
enjoy the success of other Burton projects,
such as the phenomenal ALICE IN WON-
DERLAND (2010), and will not achieve the
cult status of a film like EDWARD SCIS-
SORHANDS (1990). The story is, for the
most part, coherent and competently ren-
dered, with the main weaknesses being the
incredible fact that Barnabas succumbed to
Angelique’s seduction, knowing she caused
the suicide of Josette, turned him into a
vampire, and cursed his family, and the
unbalanced casting of the rather unremark-
able Heathcoate against the dynamic Green
in the love triangle. Depp’s performance
as the vampiric Barnabas, the proverbial
fish out of water suffering culture shock,
is laudable, erudite, and entertaining.
When hiding from the sun under dark sun-
glasses, a fedora, and an umbrella, Depp’s
Barnabas Collins resembles not so much a
vampire as the sinister figure on the cover
of EDWARD GOREY’s The Gashlycrumb
Tinies (1963).
Although putatively based on the TV
series, the primary intertextual sources for
Burton’s Dark Shadows are the Dan Curtis–
directed horror films House of Dark Shad-
ows (1970) and Night of Dark Shadows
(1971)—explaining, perhaps, the year in
which the film is set, 1972. Both films were
derived from Curtis’s own Dark Shadows
TV series. The first of Curtis’s feature film
expansions explores the origin of Barnabas
Collins (Jonathan Frid), who searches for
a cure for his vampirism so that he can
marry the woman who resembles his long-
lost love, his fiancée Josette (Kathryn Leigh
Scott). The second of Curtis’s film expan-
sions, Night of Dark Shadows, explains the
backstory of the witch, Angelique Collins
(Lara Parker). But Dark Shadows follows
other Hollywood films such as Austin Pow-
ers: International Man of Mystery (1997)
that have engaged in a pastiche of the
American culture of the late 1960s and early
1970s, a culture portrayed as hopelessly
déclassé, leading Manohla Dargis in the
New York Times to remark that Burton’s
film has “the feel of a pop-cultural archae-
ological dig.” She astutely observes the
linkage Dark Shadows has to previous Bur-
ton-Depp collaborations such as Edward
Scissorhands and ED WOOD, “the most
memorable characters in Mr. Burton and

Mr. Depp’s previous seven films together.”
She remarks, “Barnabas is at once recogniz-
ably human and inescapably different from
the people around him. Alienation runs in
his blood, literally.” While concluding that
the film “isn’t among Mr. Burton’s most
richly realized works . . . it’s very enjoy-
able, visually sumptuous and, despite its
lugubrious source material and a sporadic
tremor of violence, surprisingly efferves-
cent.” In the Washington Post, Ann Hor-
naday dismissed the film, saying, “Burton’s
mash-up of post-’60s kitsch and modern-
day knowingness strikes a chord that is less
self-aware than fatally self-satisfied. Dark
Shadows doesn’t know where it wants to
dwell: in the eerie, subversive penumbra
suggested by its title or in playful, go-for-
broke camp.” Peter Bradshaw, writing in
the Guardian, gave the film a mixed review,
suggesting that “the Gothy, jokey ‘dark-
ness’ of Burton’s style is now beginning to
look very familiar; he has built his brand to
perfection in the film marketplace, and it is
smarter and more distinctive than a lot of
what is on offer at the multiplex, but there
are no surprises.”
The British Society of Cinematog-
raphers nominated camera operator Des
Whelan for the GBCT Operators Award
for Dark Shadows; Whelan has served as
the A camera operator on several Burton
films, including Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory, SWEENEY TODD, BIG EYES, and
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Chil-
dren.—Rebecca A. Umland
References
Peter Bradshaw, “Dark Shadows—
Review,” Guardian, www.theguardian.com/
film/2012/may/10/dark-shadows-review;
Manohla Dargis, “A Vampire Thirsty and
Bewildered,” New York Times, May 10,
2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/05/11/mov-
ies/johnny-depp-stars-in-tim-burtons-
dark-shadows.html; Ann Hornaday, “Pale
DELBONNEL, BRUNO  n  87
Satire from Burton and Depp,” Washington
Post, May 11, 2012, www.washingtonpost.
com/gog/movies/dark-shadows-an-imax-
3d-experience,1229895.html.
DELBONNEL, BRUNO (1957–)
Award-winning French screenwriter, direc-
tor, and cinematographer; a 1978 graduate
of the École Supérieure d’Études Ciné-
matographiques Paris; and a four-time
Academy Award nominee for Best Cinema-
tography, for Amélie (2001), A Very Long
Engagement (2004), Harry Potter and the
Half-Blood Prince (2009), and Inside Llewyn
Davis (2013). Delbonnel’s first film with
Tim Burton was DARK SHADOWS (2012).
His second collaboration with Burton was
BIG EYES (2014).
Delbonnel met Tim Burton in Lon-
don at the world premiere of Harry Pot-
ter And The Half-Blood Prince (2009). “He
[Burton] told me then that he really liked
what I’d done,” which led to Delbonnel
being offered Dark Shadows. Regarding
the look of Dark Shadows, Delbonnel said
that Burton “wanted creepiness from the
first frame to the very last frame—a crisp,
colorful but twisted look, to make the
audience feel unsure and unsafe about the
place, somewhere ‘in-between,’ but totally
artificial.” Most of Dark Shadows was shot
on sets at Pinewood, where RICK HEIN-
RICHS built the interiors of the manor
house. “We also used the water tank at
Pinewood for the harbor scene,” Delbon-
nel indicated.
It’s one of the biggest and most
impressive sets I’ve ever seen, about
400 yards wide. We had fishing boats
on the water and a couple of streets,
complete with canneries, to look like
Maine. I used a massive amount of
lighting for those scenes . . . and I’m
sure they hate me because of the large
electricity bill. For the exteriors of the
88  n  DEPP, JOHNNY
manor house, Rick Heinrichs built the
ground floor at Bourne Woods, near
Farnham. We also used some of the
nearby woods for the forest scenes–it’s
the same place that John Mathieson
shot on [Ridley Scott’s] Robin Hood
[2010]. We used Beckenham Place
Park, in Kent, for a couple of scenes in
a mental institution. The main forest
scenes and the MacDonald construc-
tion site were shot in Crowthorne,
Wokingham.
Big Eyes, Delbonnel’s second col-
laboration with Burton, filmed largely in
Vancouver, British Columbia, represented
a different challenge. Although Burton
wanted to use film, Delbonnel shot for the
first time using a digital camera, the ARRI
Alexa, the choice determined by the clos-
ing of the last film lab in Vancouver. “Tim
said he wanted something very light and
slightly twisted, not a big fancy movie,”
said Delbonnel. Delbonnel’s concept was to
see things through Margaret Keane’s eyes.
But as “the drama gets darker,” Delbonnel
observed, “it gets really colorful but very
twisted.”
A member of the American Society of
Cinematographers as well as the Associa-
tion Française des directeurs de la photog-
raphie Cinématographique, Delbonnel’s
third film with Burton is Miss Peregrine’s
Home for Peculiar Children.
References
“Dark Shadows: Bruno Delbonnel AFC
ASC,” British Cinematographer, www.
britishcinematographer.co.uk/articles/217-
dark-shadows-bruno-delbonnel.html;
Jack Egan, “Contender: Cinematographer
Bruno Delbonnel, Big Eyes,” December
17, 2014, www.btlnews.com/awards/con-
tender-cinematographer-bruno-delbonnel-
big-eyes/.
DEPP, JOHNNY (JOHN
CHRISTOPHER DEPP II) (1963–)
American actor and musician, born in
Owensboro, Kentucky, on June 9, 1963.
His mother was a waitress and his father a
civil engineer. His mother, Betty Sue (née
Wells) married John Christopher Depp I
in February 1960. Their divorce was final-
ized in June 1981. She had three other chil-
dren prior to the birth of John Christopher
Depp II (Johnny): Daniel (November 14,
1953), Deborah (May 10, 1956), and Elisa
Christie (December 21, 1960). The fam-
ily relocated to Miramar, Florida, in 1970.
Johnny Depp left high school to pursue a
career in music with a garage band called
Six Gun Method, moving to Los Angeles in
the hopes of securing a record contract. In
December of 1983, Depp married the sister
of the band’s drummer, Lori Anne Allison
(b. September 6, 1957), whom he divorced
in 1985. Lori, a makeup artist, introduced
Depp to Nicolas Cage, who helped Depp
find his first agent, Tracey Jacobs. Depp
was first cast as the boyfriend, Glen Lanz,
in Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street
(1984), followed by a role as a private in
Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986). Originally
cast by the director of Thrashin’ earlier in
1986, Depp would have played opposite
Sherilyn Fenn (later of Twin Peaks fame),
to whom he subsequently became engaged,
but his part in that film did not materialize,
nor did this marriage.
In 1987, Depp signed a contract with
the Fox television series 21 Jump Street,
playing the lead, Officer Thomas Hanson
Jr. (seasons 1–4), which forced him into
the unwanted role of teen idol. As Depp
reflected, “I was not feeling good about
myself or this self-induced /out of control
jail term that an ex-agent had prescribed
as good medicine for unemployment. I
was stuck, filling up space between com-
mercials.” In 1990, Depp was featured as

the lead in John Waters’s musical fantasy,
Cry-Baby, but his biggest break with the
unwanted path that was being forged by
his role on 21 Jump Street came when he
was cast as the lead in Tim Burton’s cult hit
EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, also released
in 1990. This initiated what would become
a long and lucrative collaborative profes-
sional relationship between Burton and
Depp, as well as a lasting friendship. Depp’s
role as the freakish boy created with scis-
sors for hands by a benevolent old inventor
(VINCENT PRICE) and his later ill-fated
love for Kim (WINONA RYDER), turned
out to be both a critical and commercial
success. This role solidified Depp’s posi-
tion as a leading Hollywood actor; it also
resulted in his engagement, later termi-
nated, to Winona Ryder.
Since the making of Edward Scis-
sorhands, Depp has been featured in sev-
eral Burton films: as the B director and
filmmaker in ED WOOD (1994), as Icha-
bod Crane in SLEEPY HOLLOW (1999),
as Willy Wonka in CHARLIE AND THE
Johnny Depp as Edward Scissorhands.
DEPP, JOHNNY  n  89
CHOCOLATE FACTORY (2005), and as
the voice of Victor Van Dort in CORPSE
BRIDE. Additional Burton-Depp films
include the actor’s lead role in the musical
SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BAR-
BER OF FLEET STREET (2007), as the
Mad Hatter in the smash hit ALICE IN
WONDERLAND (2010), and as the resur-
rected vampire, Barnabas Collins, in DARK
SHADOWS (2012).
Johnny Depp has demonstrated that he
is a serious actor of considerable range. In
addition to his roles in musicals (Cry-Baby,
Sweeney Todd, which take advantage of his
considerable musical talent and aspira-
tions), Depp has been cast in psychologi-
cal thrillers such as The Ninth Gate (1999)
directed by Roman Polanski; From Hell
(2001), in which he plays a police inspec-
tor in the Jack the Ripper murders; and
the Stephen King–based film Secret Win-
dow (2004) as an author-turned-psychotic.
He has played the famed lover Don Juan,
opposite Marlon Brando and Faye Dun-
away, in Don Juan DeMarco (1995), J. M.
Barrie in Finding Neverland (2004), and the
sidekick Tonto in The Lone Ranger (2013),
but his most memorable non-Burton role
that propelled him into super-stardom is
that of the inimitable Captain Jack Spar-
row in producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s
blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean films:
The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), Dead
Man’s Chest (2006), At World’s End (2007),
and On Stranger Tides (2011). He has been
nominated for several Academy Awards
and won the Golden Globe Award for best
actor (Sweeney Todd) in 2007. On Novem-
ber 19, 1999, Depp earned a star on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame.
While filming The Ninth Gate in 1998
in France, Depp met actress, singer, and
model Vanessa Paradis, with whom he has
two children: Lily-Rose Melody Depp (b.
May 27, 1999) and John Christopher Depp
90  n  DEVITO, DANNY
III (b. April 9, 2002). In 2012, the couple
announced that they had separated, and
Depp has subsequently become engaged to
actress Amber Heard.
Depp founded his own film company,
Infinitum Nihil (2004), and has invested
in various restaurant ventures. An accom-
plished musician, he has, on occasion,
hearkened back to his early aspirations,
being featured in the music video of Tom
Petty and the Heartbreakers for “Into the
Great Wide Open” and in the projects of
several other musical artists, as songwriter,
musician, and cultural icon.
Johnny Depp has enjoyed an extraor-
dinary career as an actor. Pulchritude is
only one contributing factor in the equa-
tion (he has, after all, been voted twice as
the sexiest man alive). He is a devoted and
serious actor with remarkable success; yet
he has made films that have not enjoyed
box office or critical acclaim, but is will-
ing to take risks in his professional career.
Depp brings to the screen a certain inef-
fable quality that makes him inimitable,
unique as an actor. Scholar William Par-
rill observes, “Johnny Depp . . . has created
a body of work honoring both the silent
clowns of the early years of the century and
the beat generation of the 1960s. The ghosts
of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Hunter
S. Thompson, Marlon Brando, James Dean,
and other cultural icons haunt his films.
It would, of course, be presumptuous to
argue that Johnny Depp has changed the
age in any way, but he certainly opened an
argument for the actor as auteur, as a prime
mover of the artistic process.”—Rebecca A.
Umland
References
Johnny Depp, “Foreword,” in Burton on
Burton, 2nd rev. ed., ed. Mark Salisbury
(London: Faber and Faber, 2006), ix;
Nick Johnstone, Johnny Depp: The Illus-
trated Biography, 5th ed. (London: Carlton
Books, 2013); William B. Parrill, The Films
of Johnny Depp (Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
2009), 3–4.
DeVITO, DANNY (1944–)
Diminutive, five-foot-tall actor, director,
and producer who has appeared in three
films directed by Tim Burton, most nota-
bly as Oswald Cobblepot, the Penguin,
in BATMAN RETURNS. Daniel Michael
DeVito Jr. was born on November 17, 1944,
in Neptune, New Jersey. He attended Our
Lady of Mount Carmel Grammar School
and Oratory Prep High School in Summit,
New Jersey, where he first tried his hand
at acting, performing in high school plays.
Upon graduation in 1962, DeVito worked
for a short time as a hairdresser in his
older sister’s salon, later switching to the
cosmetics profession. He applied to take
makeup classes at the American Academy
of Dramatic Arts in New York. Applicants
must perform a monologue to get into the
school’s programs, and after his monologue
received positive feedback, DeVito decided
to take acting classes as well.
After graduating in 1966 from the
American Academy of Dramatic Arts, he
worked briefly at the Eugene O’Neill The-
ater Center in Waterford, Connecticut.
While there, he read Truman Capote’s In
Cold Blood (1965), and as a result of seeing
a call for auditions for a film adaptation of
the book, DeVito moved to Los Angeles. He
failed to land a part in that film or in any
other, and eventually moved back to New
York.
In 1971, DeVito landed the role of
Martini in an off-Broadway production
of Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s
Nest. That role led to DeVito’s big break
four years later, when Michael Doug-
las produced a film adaptation of One
Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and requested
DeVito reprise his stage role. Widely
praised by critics, One Flew over the Cuck-

oo’s Nest (1975) won five Academy Awards,
launching DeVito’s career.
Subsequently, he appeared in support-
ing roles in film and on television, choosing
to audition in 1978 for the new NBC series
Taxi. He landed the role of the tyrannical,
pugnacious cab dispatcher Louie DePalma.
The part made him famous and largely
determined the types of roles he would play
in the years after. Taxi ran for five years
(1978–1983), during which time he won a
Golden Globe in 1980 for Best TV Actor in
a Supporting Role and an Emmy Award in
1981 for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a
Comedy or Variety Series. He went on to star
in over a dozen films in the 1980s, in roles
largely designed to riff on the persona (an
obnoxious jerk) he established by playing
Louie DePalma. The films included Romanc-
ing the Stone (1984), Ruthless People (1986),
Throw Momma from the Train (1987), Twins
(1988), and The War of the Roses (1989).
Danny DeVito as the villainous Penguin in Batman Returns.
DEVITO, DANNY  n  91
His first appearance in a Tim Bur-
ton film is one of his most famous roles:
he starred as the deformed, loathsome,
bile-spewing Oswald Cobblepot, the Pen-
guin, the sympathetic monster of Batman
Returns. He would appear in two more of
Burton’s films in supporting roles, first in
MARS ATTACKS! (1996) and later as a
lonely werewolf in BIG FISH (2003).
DeVito has produced and directed
many films, including HOFFA (1992), in
which Tim Burton had a brief, uncredited
role as a corpse. DeVito returned to tele-
vision in 2005, starring in the cult hit FX
series It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
References
“Danny DeVito,” IMDb, www.imdb.com/
name/nm0000362/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1;
“Danny DeVito,” New York Times, www.
nytimes.com/movies/person/17602/Danny-
DeVito/biography.
92  n  DI NOVI, DENISE
DI NOVI, DENISE (1956–)
Producer of films in partnership with Tim
Burton, 1990–1996. Born in New York to
an Italian family, Denise Di Novi gradu-
ated from Simmons College in Boston
with a degree in journalism. Beginning as
a copy editor at the National Observer, a
Dow Jones weekly, she became a staff writer
for Canada AM in Toronto. She was also
an on-air reporter and film critic for City-
TV News in Canada. Her expertise allowed
her to enter the film business in 1980 as a
principal in the Montreal-based production
company Film Plan, acting either as co-pro-
ducer, associate producer, or executive in
charge of production on fine films, all with
major studio releases. In 1983 the company
moved to Los Angeles and merged with
Arnold Kopelson’s Film Packages. Di Novi
served as associate producer on Universal’s
Going Berserk (1983) as well as David Cron-
onberg’s Videodrome (1983). Di Novi left
that company in the mid-1980s and joined
New World Pictures as executive vice presi-
dent of production. She moved into inde-
pendent production with Heathers (1988),
distributed by New World Pictures, which
did poorly at the box office but has become
a cult favorite. In 1989 she and Burton
formed Burton/Di Novi Pictures and as a
production team made six films together:
EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, BATMAN
RETURNS, THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE
CHRISTMAS, CABIN BOY, ED WOOD,
and JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH. A
professed Christian, in a 2012 interview Di
Novi said of the films she made with Tim
Burton, “All of his stories were about try-
ing to find your place in the world and
find love, even though you’re not accepted
and you’re different from other people. I
find Edward Scissorhands a very inspiring
movie . . . about being treated unkindly for
being different.” Denise Di Novi has had a
prolific career as a successful producer in
Hollywood, in recent years making several
popular films based on novels by Nicholas
Sparks, among them A Walk to Remember
(2002), a film which strongly resonates with
Christian viewers.
References
Paula Parker, “A Conversation with Denise
Di Novi,” Examiner.com, April 20, 2012,
www.examiner.com/article/a-conversa-
tion-with-denise-di-novi; “Faith, Film and
Denise Di Novi,” PluggedIn, pluggedin.
com/upfront/2011/faithfilmanddenisedi-
novi.aspx.
DOCTOR OF DOOM (US 1980)
Short home movie, codirected by Tim Bur-
Directors: Tim Burton, Jerry Rees. Cam-
eraman : Jerry Rees. C inematography :
Jerry Rees. Editors: Tim Burton, Jerry
Rees. Sound Engineering: Randy Cart-
wright. Velvet Painting and Sculpture:
Golden Mall.
Cast: Harry Sabin (Rosita’s Father), Cyn-
thia Price (Rosita), Randy Cartwright
(Rosita’s Voice), Tim Burton (Don
Carlo), Don Carlo’s Voice (Brad
Bird), Michael Giaimo (Bob Garcia),
Jerry Rees (Bob Garcia’s Voice), Chris
Buck (Pepe), Randy Cartwright (Pepe’s
Voice), Darrell Van Citters (Monster),
Randy Cartwright (Monster’s Voice),
Darrell Van Citters (Bystander), Brad
Bird (Bystander’s Voice).
L ocations : Jerry’s apartment, Harry’s
apartment.
R unning T ime : 11 minutes, 11 seconds.
Black and white.
R eleased T hrough : Never intended for
release.
ton and JERRY REES, a parody of Mexi-
can horror films. Like LUAU, the film was
never intended for commercial release; it is
merely Burton and his colleagues at Disney
animation having fun. The satirical targets

are the kind of Mexican horror movies that
were released in the 1960s in the United
States in English dubs by K. Gordon Mur-
ray, such as El grito de la muerte (The Living
Coffin [1959]) and El vampiro sangriento
(Bloody Vampire [1963]). René Cardona,
who directed many Mexican horror films,
actually directed a film released in the
United States under the tile Doctor of Doom
(Las luchadoras contra el médico asesino,
“Wrestling Women vs. the Killer Doctor”
[1963]). However, the Burton-Rees Doc-
tor of Doom is not an attempt to remake
that earlier film. Shot on video in black
and white with deliberately poor dubbing
and nonsensical dialogue, the film features
Tim Burton as the mad doctor, Don Carlo.
He visits a wealthy man with a smoking
jacket and cigar; the mansion is Jerry Rees’s
apartment. Don Carlo doesn’t enjoy din-
ner, rambling on instead about his poor
upbringing as an organ-grinder’s monkey,
and threatens his host family with destruc-
tion as he leaves. The next day he sends a
monster from his lab to destroy all beauty,
starting with them.
The production values of the film are
deliberately amateurish. The details of Don
Carlo’s lab are quite obviously taken from
another source, not only because it was
cheaper but because of the effect. Simi-
larly, the monster is meant to be tawdry,
with a mask sporting big ears and a trunk
that may be a parodic reference to David
Lynch’s The Elephant Man (released Octo-
ber 1980). All the actors are deliberately
dubbed for comedic purposes, to the degree
that Randy Cartwright dubs both male and
female characters, as well as the monster.
Harry Sabin is suitably decadent as the rich
Mexican with the best line—“My wife died
ten years ago”—which he says at the din-
ner table and to which everyone explodes
in laughter. Both Luau and Doctor of Doom
are home video curiosities, but nonetheless
serve as a fascinating glimpse into a set of
DR. SEUSS  n  93
creative personalities, most of whom would
go on to great things.
Reference
Jim Smith and J. Clive Matthews, Tim Bur-
ton, Virgin Film Series (London: Virgin
Books, 2007).
DR. SEUSS (THEODOR SEUSS
GEISEL) (1904–1991)
Pseudonym for Theodor Seuss Geisel,
American author and cartoonist, best
known for his children’s books. In compar-
ison to his influence, Dr. Seuss, especially
before the work of scholar Philip Nel, has
been relatively undertreated in scholarship.
Yet, Kevin Shortsleeve writes, “His fame
and cultural importance cannot be over-
stated. Green Eggs and Ham [1960] was, by
the 1980s, the third best-selling book in the
English language.” Tim Burton has explic-
itly acknowledged the weight of what Nel
calls “the Seussian aesthetic (Seussism)” as
one of his major influences. This aesthetic
informs much of Burton’s work, most nota-
bly VINCENT (1982) and THE NIGHT-
MARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS (1993).
Using the anapestic rhythm common
to children’s verse, especially Edward Lear’s
nonsense and Clement Clarke Moore’s
“Twas the Night before Christmas,” Dr.
Seuss “was best known for his bouncy ana-
pestic tetrameter. His musical and origi-
nal vocabulary was rendered playfully in
dependable rhyme.” This hallmark style
would be an especially important influence
in Burton’s Vincent. Burton has said of that
short film, “I think it probably has more to
do with being inspired by Dr. Seuss. It just
happens to be shot in black and white, and
there’s a VINCENT PRICE/Gothic kind of
thing that makes it feel that way. I grew up
loving Dr. Seuss. The rhythm of his stuff
spoke to me very clearly. Dr. Seuss’s books
were perfect: right number of words, the
right rhythm, great subversive stories. He
94  n  DR. SEUSS
Reminiscent of Dr. Seuss’s Grinch, Lock, Shock, and Barrel prepare to kidnap the real Santa Claus
in The Nightmare before Christmas.
was incredible, he was the greatest, defi-
nitely. He probably saved a bunch of kids
who nobody will ever know about.” Cer-
tainly Burton’s wild line and jagged move-
ment in Vincent also visually recall the
energy of Seuss.
It is The Nightmare before Christmas,
however, that owes much of its composi-
tional and thematic focus to Seuss. Burton
explains, “The initial impulse for doing it
was the love of Dr. Seuss and those holi-
day specials that I grew up watching, like
How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Rudolf
the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Those crude stop-
motion animation holiday things that were
on year in, year out make an impact on you
early and stay with you. I had grown up
with those and had a real feeling for them,
and I think, without being too direct, the
impulse was to do something like that.”
But in the special feature called “The Mak-
ing of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare before
Christmas,” Burton credits the Seuss influ-
ence more comprehensively, calling Night-
mare “Grinch in reverse.” Phil Nel explains
that “protagonist Jack Skellington so likes
Christmas that he takes it over, whereas
the Grinch so hates Christmas that he tries
to stop it. The film’s visuals are a kind of
reverse Seuss, too. That is, Christmastown
has the feel of Seuss’s illustrations, but
Halloweentown (Skellington’s domain)
looks more like a Dr. Seuss book as drawn
by EDWARD GOREY.” Another likely
source, though not acknowledged by Bur-
ton, could be Seuss’s 5,000 Fingers of Dr.
T (1953), which Nel describes as “a live-
action musical closer in mood to Gorey
or Burton than to most of Seuss’s works.
A nightmare dreamed by reluctant piano
player Bart Collins, 5,000 Fingers has an air
of menace usually absent from Seuss’s pic-
ture books.”

Thematically, the connection between
Grinch and Nightmare makes a lot of sense.
According to Seuss biographers Judith and
Neil Morgan, as Seuss wrote the 1957 book,
he “agonized for months about how to
keep the ending from seeming trite or reli-
gious.” And in expanding and adapting it
into the short film this problem resurfaced.
Likewise, in making Vincent, Burton had
struggled against what he calls the “happy
ending syndrome.” Folklorist Thomas
Burns has explained that Seuss solved the
problem by “systematically exclud[ing] any
verbal or visual symbols that might directly
refer to the Christian religion,” keeping it
universal and secular in appeal. Burns adds
that “most of the successful popular Christ-
mas stories exhibit this same combination
of non-religious Christmas symbolism with
a statement in harmony with but not sup-
portive of the Christian religion.” Burton,
likewise, focuses on the secular rituals and
seasonal associations of the holidays he
treats—the most powerful being, perhaps,
the highly visual and emotive one of snow.
At the level of critique, both Seuss and
Burton attack the consumerism of holidays
without negating the status quo of gift giv-
ing. Knowing their audience, much conflict
surrounds the theft and restoring of proper
gifts, yet Seuss repeats there is “something
more” that the Grinch doesn’t understand,
and Burton’s Skellington also learns there is
more to the holiday than token gift giving.
If one looks at Burton’s recognition of
How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966) and
Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) in the
larger tradition of television’s holiday spe-
cials for children, another quality linking
Burton to Seuss emerges—his regard for
child viewers and refusal to threaten them
with heavy didactic messages or to infan-
tilize them with sentimentalism. In con-
trast, if one considers It’s the Great Pump-
kin, Charlie Brown (1966) or more recently
The Polar Express (2004), one can see a ten-
DUFFIELD, TOM  n  95
dency in such popular holiday productions
to romanticize expectations of unquestion-
ing belief imposed upon children. Instead,
in Seuss’s Grinch and Burton’s Nightmare,
the endings invite their audience (child or
adult) to consider the importance of com-
munity, or of interpersonal relationships,
not obedience. Like Seuss before him, Bur-
ton finds wonder without heavy moralism.
References
Thomas Burns, “Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch
Stole Christmas: Its Recent Acceptance into
the American Popular Christmas Tra-
dition,” New York Folklore Quarterly 2
(1976): 196; Judith Morgan and Neil Mor-
gan, Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel (New York:
Da Capo Press, 1996), 191; Philip Nel, Dr.
Seuss: American Icon (New York: Contin-
uum, 2014), 94–95; Mark Salisbury, ed.,
Burton on Burton, 2nd rev. ed. (London:
Faber and Faber, 2006), 17, 19, 115; Kevin
Shortsleeve, “The Cat and the Hippie: Dr.
Seuss, Nonsense, the Carnivalesque, and
the Sixties Rebel,” in The Oxford Book of
Children’s Literature, ed. Lynne Vallone
and Julia Mickenberg (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011).
DUFFIELD, TOM (CA. 1952–)
American art director and production
designer who served as art director on a
number of early Burton films and as pro-
duction designer on ED WOOD. Tom
Duffield was born in Grosse Pointe, Michi-
gan, and moved to Los Angeles in 1968.
He attended California Polytechnic in San
Luis Obispo and was a Universal Studios
tour guide from 1973 to 1976. He joined
Universal’s art department in 1976, work-
ing there for three years before becoming
a set designer on films such as Blade Run-
ner (1982), Heart Like a Wheel (1983), and
Sylvester (1985). He first teamed with pro-
duction designer BO WELCH in 1984, on
Jonathan Demme’s Swing Shift (1984), con-
96  n  DUVALL, SHELLEY
tinued with The Lost Boys (1987), and later
served as Welch’s art director on a dozen
more films, three of which were nominated
for Academy Awards in art direction: A
Little Princess (1995), The Birdcage (1996),
and Men in Black (1997). Duffield’s first
film as the production designer was Ed
Wood. While he continued to work with Bo
Welch on projects such as Wild, Wild West
(1999), he designed Gore Verbinski’s hor-
ror-thriller The Ring (2002) and the action
comedy The Rundown (2003).
References
“Tom Duffield,” IMDb, www.imdb.com/
name/nm0240468/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1; pro-
duction information (press kit), Batman
Returns, 58–59.
DUVALL, SHELLEY (ALEXIS)
(1949–)
American actress who appeared as Susan
Frankenstein in Tim Burton’s live-action
FRANKENWEENIE, later serving as execu-
tive producer and narrator of Faerie Tale
Theatre, a children’s television series fea-
turing adaptations of classic fairy tales,
for which Tim Burton directed ALADDIN
AND HIS WONDERFUL LAMP.
A native of Houston, Texas, Shelley
Duvall was discovered by director Rob-
ert Altman during the making of Brewster
McCloud (1970), filmed in the Houston
Astrodome. Subsequently, she appeared in
Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) in
a supporting role. Although perhaps most
suited for supporting roles, she earned the
starring roles in Altman’s films Thieves
Like Us (1974) and 3 Women (1977) before
starring with Jack Nicholson in Stanley
Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s
The Shining (1980). A collector of illus-
trated fairy-tale books from a young age,
Duvall collaborated with the cable televi-
sion network Showtime for a live-action
series of adaptations of classic fairy tales,
which began airing as Faerie Tale Theatre
in 1982. She served as host and executive
producer of the show during its entire
run on Showtime, 1982–1987. Duvall had
tried, unsuccessfully, to convince Disney
to produce Faerie Tale Theatre for showing
on the Disney Channel; ironically, reruns
of Faerie Tale Theatre would later be aired
on Disney’s cable network. In 1984, Dis-
ney executive JULIE HICKSON, who had
casually met Duvall during her unsuccess-
ful pitch of Faerie Tale Theatre to Disney,
approached the actress about appearing in
Frankenweenie, and Duvall agreed to take
the part of Susan Frankenstein. She would
later hire Tim Burton to direct Aladdin and
His Wonderful Lamp for Faerie Tale The-
atre.
Reference
Jim Korkis, “The Making of the Original
Frankenweenie,” MousePlanet, June 13,
2012, www.mouseplanet.com/9942/The_
Making_of_the_Original_Frankenweenie.
 E
EARLY FILMS, 1971–1972
As a teenager, Tim Burton made several
(silent) amateur films using a Super 8 mm
camera. The total amount of existing foot-
age runs approximately fourteen minutes.
In preparation for the career retrospective
exhibition, Tim Burton, the films were
transferred to digital video.
The Island of Dr. Agor (1971)
Houdini: The Untold Story (1971)
Untitled (Tim’s Dreams) (1972)
Part 1: Horror Film Creatures
Part 2: Swashbuckler Duel
Part 3: Silent Films
Part 4: Pool Room Challenge (1971–
1972)
References
Exhibition checklist, Tim Burton, the
Museum of Modern Art, New York,
November 22, 2009–April 26, 2010;
“Tim Burton’s Early Short Houdini,”
YouTube video, www.youtube.com/
watch?v=BLct8fYJ_4A.
ED WOOD (US 1994)
Director: Tim Burton. Screenplay: Scott
Alexander, Larry Karaszewski, based
on Nightmare of Ecstasy by Rudolph
Gray. E xecutive P roducer : Michael
Lehmann. P roducers : Tim Burton,
Denise Di Novi. Co-producer: Michael
Flynn. M usic : Howard Shore. T her -
emin S olos : Lydia Kavina. C inematog -
raphy : Stefan Czapsky. E ditor : Chris
Lebenzon. P roduction D esign : Tom
Duffield. Art Direction: Okowita. Set
D ecoration : Cricket Rowland. C os -
tume D esign : Colleen Atwood. K ey
Makeup Artist: Ve Neill. Makeup Art-
ist : Carrie Anglund. M akeup C reator
(Bela Lugosi): Rick Baker. Makeup Art-
ists (Bela Lugosi): James McLoughlin,
Matt Rose. D ialogue E ditor : Joan E.
Chapman. Assistant Sound Editor: Lisa
Chino. Visual Effects Photography: Allen
Blaisdell. Visual Effects Supervisor: Paul
Boyington. Key Model Builder: Joshua
Culp, Evan Jacobs. Visual Consultant:
Richard Hoover.
C ast : Johnny Depp (Ed Wood), Mar-
tin Landau (Bela Lugosi), Sarah Jes-
sica Parker (Dolores Fuller), Patricia
Arquette (Kathy O’Hara), Jeffrey Jones
(Criswell), G. D. Spradlin (Reverend
Lemon), Vincent D’Onofrio (Orson
Welles), Bill Murray (Bunny Breckin-
ridge), Mike Starr (Georgie Weiss),
Max Casella (Paul Marco), Brent Hink-
ley (Conrad Brooks), Lisa Marie (Vam-
pira), George “the Animal” Steele (Tor
Johnson), Juliet Landau (Loretta King),
Clive Rosengren (Ed Reynolds), Nor-
man Alden (Cameraman Bill), Leonard
Termo (Makeup Man Harry), Ned Bel-
lamy (Dr. Tom Mason), Danny Dayton
(Soundman), Ross Manarchy (Camera
  n  97
98  n  ED WOOD
Assistant), Bill Cusack (Tony McCoy),
Aaron Nelms (Teenage Kid), Biff Yea-
ger (Rude Boss), Joseph R. Gannascoli
(Security Guard), Carmen Filpi (Old
Crusty Man), Lisa Malkiewicz (Secre-
tary #1), Melora Walters (Secretary
#2), Conrad Brooks (Bartender), Don
Amendolia (Salesman), Reid Cruick-
shanks (Stage Guard), Stanley DeSan-
tis (Mr. Feldman), Gene LeBell (Ring
Announcer), Jesse Hernandez (Wres-
tling Opponent), Mary Portser (Back-
er’s Wife), King Cotton (Hick Backer),
Don Hood (Southern Backer), Frank
Echols (Doorman), Matthew Barry
(Valet), Gregory Walcott (Poten-
tial Backer), Charles C. Stevenson Jr.
(Another Backer), Rance Howard (Old
Man McCoy), Vasek Simek (Professor
Strowski), Alan Martin (Vampira’s Assis-
tant), Salwa Ali (Vampira’s Girlfriend),
Patti Tippo (Nurse), Ray Baker (Doc-
tor), Louis Lombardi (Rental House
Manager).
Running Time: 126 minutes, 33 seconds.
Black and white.
Released Through: Touchstone Pictures,
Burton/Di Novi Pictures.
Film released to huge critical acclaim,
proving to be one of Tim Burton’s most
admired films. Ironically, although criti-
cally praised, the film was one of Burton’s
few box office failures, earning only $5.9
million against an $18 million budget.
Ed Wood begins in 1948, during the
theatrical performance of The Casual
Company, a play that Ed Wood (JOHNNY
DEPP) wrote and directed. Although a flop,
Wood finds encouragement reading the
reviews (“‘The soldiers’ costumes are very
realistic’—that’s positive!”). Eternally opti-
mistic, Wood learns that producer George
Weiss (Mike Starr) is trying to purchase the
rights to transsexual Christine Jorgensen’s
story. Weiss explains to Wood that it is
impossible to purchase the rights to Jor-
gensen’s story. Weiss decides to fictional-
ize the film, titling it I Changed My Sex!
Wood tries to convince Weiss that he is the
perfect choice to direct I Changed My Sex!
because he is a transvestite, but Wood’s
lack of experience makes him unacceptable
to Weiss.
Later, Wood meets Bela Lugosi (MAR-
TIN LANDAU), whom Wood has long
admired, after discovering him trying out a
casket. Wood drives Lugosi home and the
two become friends. Later, Wood persuades
Weiss to let him direct I Changed My Sex!
by convincing him that having a star in the
film would sell tickets, and they could sign
Lugosi for a low price. Wood and Weiss
argue over the film’s proposed title and sub-
ject matter: Weiss has already had the poster
printed. Wood, however, changes the title
to Glen or Glenda and alters the subject of
the film to transvestism. In the end, Weiss
capitulates and allows Wood to make what-
ever movie he wants as long it meets the
appropriate length. Wood takes to film pro-
duction with an unusual approach, shoot-
ing only one or two takes per scene, offering
very little direction, and using stock footage
to fill in narrative gaps. The movie is a criti-
cal and commercial failure.
Wood’s girlfriend, Dolores Fuller
(Sarah Jessica Parker), suggests that he
should try making his next film as an inde-
pendent. Ed is unsuccessful in finding
money for Bride of the Atom, but is intro-
duced to the psychic the Amazing Criswell
(Jeffery Jones), who gives him advice on
how to sell himself better. At a bar, Ed
meets Loretta King (Juliet Landau), who
avers that she has sufficient funds to back
Bride of the Atom. Woods ends up casting
her as the lead actress in the film instead
of Dolores Fuller. Filming begins, but the
production is shut down when King reveals
that she has no money. Later, Wood con-
vinces tycoon Don McCoy (Rance How-
ard) to take over funding the film, and he

Loretta King (Juliet Landau) on the operating table in a scene from Tim Burton’s Ed Wood restaging
Wood’s Bride of the Monster.
agrees as long as the film stars his son Tony
as the leading man and the film ends with
an explosion. Production of Bride of the
Atom finishes, with the film being retitled
Bride of the Monster. Dolores breaks up
with Wood after the wrap party because of
his circle of friends and his transvestism.
To make things worse, Lugosi is revealed
to be a morphine addict and checks him-
self into the hospital. There, Wood meets
Kathy O’Hara (Patricia Arquette), who
is visiting her father at the same hospital.
Ed takes her on a date and reveals to her
his transvestism, which she accepts. Wood
begins to shoot a film with Lugosi outside
his home. When Ed and company attend
the premiere for Bride of the Monster, an
angry mob chases them out of the theater.
Subsequently, Lugosi dies, leaving Wood
without a star.
Some time later, Wood’s landlord,
J. Edward Reynolds (Clive Rosengren),
ED WOOD  n  99
learns that he, Wood, is in the film busi-
ness. Reynolds reveals that his church is
seeking to make a series of religious films
about the twelve apostles. However, they
only have the money for one film. Wood
convinces Reynolds that if he took that
money and invested it in a commercial
genre, he would make enough to make
all twelve movies. Wood proposes they
produce a script he’s written, Grave Rob-
bers from Outer Space, to star Bela Lugosi.
While Wood has the last film Lugosi did,
he will need to hire a double to complete
Lugosi’s scenes. With most of his face
covered, Dr. Tom Mason (Ned Bellamy),
Kathy’s chiropractor, is cast as Lugosi’s
stand-in. However, Wood and the Baptists
begin having conflicts over the film’s title
and content, which the latter want changed
to Plan 9 from Outer Space. They also have
concerns about Wood’s directorial style,
his casting decisions, and his transvestism.
100  n  EDWARD SCISSORHANDS
This causes a distressed Wood to leave
the set and take a taxi to the nearest bar,
where he encounters his idol Orson Welles
(Vincent D’Onofrio). Welles tells Wood
that “visions are worth fighting for,” and
filming for Plan 9 from Outer Space finishes
with Wood taking action against his pro-
ducers. The film ends with the premiere
of Plan 9—Ed Wood believes it will be the
film he “will be remembered for”—and
with Ed and Kathy taking off to Las Vegas
to get married.
One of Burton’s most admired films,
Ed Wood won two Academy Awards: Best
Actor in a Supporting Role for Martin
Landau and Best Makeup for Rick Baker,
Ve Neill, and Yolanda Toussieng. Martin
Landau also won a Golden Globe for Best
Performance by an Actor in a Support-
ing Role. The film was also nominated
for BAFTA (British Academy of Film and
Television Arts) Awards, Screen Actors
Guild Awards (for which Martin Landau
again won), Boston Society of Films Critics
Awards, Los Angeles Film Critics Associa-
tion Awards, and others. In addition, Tim
Burton was nominated for the Palme d’Or
at the Cannes Film Festival.
References
“Ed Wood (1994),” IMDb, www.imdb.com/
title/tt0109707/; Mark Salisbury, ed., Bur-
ton on Burton, 2nd ed. (London: Faber and
Faber, 2000).
EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (US 1990)
Director: Tim Burton. Screenplay: Caro-
line Thompson, from a story by Caro-
line Thompson and Tim Burton. Pro-
ducers : Denise Di Novi, Tim Burton.
E xecutive P roducer : Richard Hashi-
moto. Director of Photography: Ste-
fan Czapsky. P roduction D esign : Bo
Welch. A rt D irector : Tom Duffield.
Music: Danny Elfman. Costume Design:
Coleen Atwood. Makeup Effects: Stan
Winston.
Cast: Johnny Depp (Edward Scissorhands),
Winona Ryder (Kim Boggs), Dianne
Wiest (Peg Boggs), Alan Arkin (Bill
Boggs), Anthony Michael Hall (Jim),
Vincent Price (Inventor), Kathy Baker
(Joyce Monroe), Robert Oliveri (Kevin
Boggs), Conchata Ferrell (Helen), Car-
oline Aaron (Marge), Dick Anthony
Williams (Officer Allen), O-Lan Jones
(Esmeralda), Susan J. Blommaert
(Tinka), Linda Perri (Cissy), John David-
son (Host-TV), Biff Yeager (George),
Marti Greenberg (Suzanne), Bryan
Larkin (Max), John McMahon (Denny),
Victoria Price (TV Newswoman), Stu-
art Lancaster (Retired Man), Gina Gal-
lagher (Granddaughter), Aaron Lustig
(Psychologist), Alan Fudge (Loan Offi-
cer), Steven Brill (Dishwasher Man),
Peter Palmer (Editor), Marc Macaulay
(Reporter), Brett Rice (Reporter).
Running Time: 104 minutes, 54 seconds.
Color.
Released Through: 20th Century Fox.
Tim Burton’s fourth feature, inspired by an
image he had drawn at a young age of a man
whose hands had scissor blades instead of
fingers. This image, which exerted a repeated
power over him, became a story when he
began collaborating with writer Caroline
Thompson, who marveled that the story
for it came to her “in a flash,” based solely
on Burton’s description of the image. Both
Burton and Thompson recognized the met-
aphoric power of a figure who, because of
his unusual constitution, experienced both
alienation and isolation, but also possessed a
unique gift through his freakish hands.
Edward Scissorhands takes the form of
a modern fairy tale, with its parabolic drift
and universal truths about human nature,

being most indebted, perhaps, to the Beauty
and the Beast fairy tale, albeit with some
very important revisionary inversions. Its
autobiographical significance has been
acknowledged by Burton and recognized
by critics, representing Burton’s own ado-
lescent feelings of being “misperceived,” a
term Burton uses in the audio commentary
included on the DVD issue of the film, and
the ensuing teenage angst that results from
this, along with the alienating experiences
of growing up in a suburban setting, as
Burton himself did (Burbank, California).
In addition to its employment of the fairy-
tale genre, the film also invokes a long tra-
dition of stories that feature the mad inven-
tor (Frankenstein) and the cruelty shown to
the sensitive, misunderstood “monster,”
not only in nineteenth-century narratives
like Frankenstein, The Hunchback of Notre
Dame, and The Phantom of the Opera, but
also in its later sound film incarnations,
such as The Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Dianne Wiest as Avon lady Peg Boggs approaches the mansion where Edward Scissorhands lives.
EDWARD SCISSORHANDS  n  101
The debt Edward Scissorhands owes to
the fairy-tale genre is quite pronounced.
This is evident in its narrative frame and
the reason why the story is told. The film
opens with an old woman (WINONA
RYDER) and her granddaughter in a cozy
room with Victorian décor and a blazing
fire; the little girl is tucked in bed and her
grandmother gazes out the window at the
snow, which is falling down. When the
child asks where the snow comes from, the
grandmother recounts the story of Edward
and his scissor hands; afterward, the film
returns to this frame, and the audience
learns that the grandmother is relating the
story of her own youth and her love for
Edward Scissorhands, who, each year at
Christmas, makes the miracle of snow in a
balmy climate that would otherwise, appar-
ently, not have it. Thus, the film, like fairy
tales, operates according to its own internal
logic, creating a reality of its own. Like the
fairy tale, it also defies ordinary concepts
102  n  EDWARD SCISSORHANDS
of time: the mansion on the mountain in
which Edward dwells belongs to a Gothic
past and is juxtaposed with a suburban set-
ting of late twentieth-century America, with
uniform box houses painted in vibrant col-
ors, manicured lawns, and gaudy interiors.
Edward himself, a simulacrum, is immor-
tal, not subject to the ravages of time as is
the grandmother, the once young girl who
enchanted him.
More interesting, however, is the
film’s portrayal of the titular character’s
representation of the artist as a tortured
figure: his scissor hands are a double-edged
sword, both his special gift and the curse
that afflicts him. The concept of the art-
ist as a martyr, one doomed by his gift to
be ultimately misunderstood and scorned
by the public, is Romantic in origin, as is
the iconic status of the artist. Edward Scis-
sorhands enjoys his moment of fame, but
his adoring public turns against him, forc-
ing him back into the isolated life from
which he emerged for a brief time. The
film also asks related questions about art
and life: What are the circumstances under
which art comes into existence? What price
does the artist pay for his talent? How does
art rival and even surpass nature?
Edward Scissorhands (JOHNNY
DEPP) was created by an aged inven-
tor (VINCENT PRICE) with an apparent
propensity for the whimsical. We learn in
a flashback that his creator had made nor-
mal hands for Edward as a Christmas gift,
but had died before he was able to com-
plete and attach them, thus leaving Edward
both alone and incomplete. How much
time passes until Edward is discovered by
a kindly Avon lady, Peg Boggs (Dianne
Wiest), is uncertain because he does not
age, but it must have been considerable.
The mansion is Gothic in decor, replete
with sculptures of gargoyles and antiquated
books about the proper etiquette at formal
teas and a copy of Edward Lear’s A Book
of Nonsense, a collection of limericks first
published in 1846. When Peg sees Edward’s
plight, she takes him home and integrates
him into her family, which consists of her
equally kind husband, Bill (Alan Arkin); a
young son, Kevin (Robert Oliveri); and a
beautiful teenage daughter, Kim, the nar-
rator of the frame. At first, the community,
with the exception of the one religious
fanatic, finds Edward a novelty to adopt
and dote on, especially when they learn
of his talent for lawn sculpting, grooming
canine pets, and styling their hair. In other
words, that which makes Edward a freak,
his scissor hands, becomes the key to his
integration into the community and his
overnight celebrity status, which culmi-
nates in an appearance on a daytime TV
talk show. The emotional sting responsible
for Edward’s awakening consciousness is
his love for Kim. Although she initially has
a brutish boyfriend, Jim (Anthony Michael
Hall), Kim rejects him when she eventually
responds to Edward’s kindness, sensitivity,
and willingness to please her.
Things go awry when one member
of the community, Joyce (Kathy Baker),
tries to seduce Edward, who rebuffs her
advances. In an effort to exact revenge and
deflect her own untoward sexual aggres-
sion, she turns the other women against
Edward by averring that he had attempted
to seduce her instead. In addition, using his
affection for Kim, Kim’s manipulative boy-
friend convinces Edward to break into Jim’s
parents’ house. When he is caught, Edward
takes the blame in order to protect Kim.
The love triangle that ensues comes to a cli-
max on Christmas Eve, when Edward first
makes the miracle of snow to please Kim by
creating shards of ice from an ice sculpture
of an angel. He destroys what he has cre-
ated in order to please her, but accidentally
cuts both Kim and then her brother, Kevin,
when the jealous Jim interferes in the idyl-
lic scene Edward has created for Kim. Jim

drives Edward away, and in a rage, he begins
to destroy the yard sculptures Edward had
created. Kim, now in love with Edward’s
goodness, asks him to embrace her but,
fearing he will harm her, he replies, “I
can’t.” Kim wraps his arms around her but
urges Edward to run away when he saves
Kevin from being run down by Jim, who
is in a jealous rage. An angry mob arrives
at the mansion where Edward has taken
refuge, and a benevolent policeman tries,
unsuccessfully, to get the mob to leave.
Kim follows Edward there, but the drunken
and insanely jealous Jim arrives. He begins
to beat Edward brutally and is stopped by
Kim, but ultimately Edward stabs Jim to
death when he charges at them. The mob
arrives at this scene, but Kim, showing
a spare scissor hand she had found in the
mansion, claims that Edward died, that he
and Jim killed each other. Thus, she protects
Edward, but this is the last time she ever sees
him. In the frame, she tells her granddaugh-
ter he is still alive, or else it would not snow,
and we see a sublime cut in which Edward
is creating the shards of snow by destroy-
ing his ice sculptures, an annual symbolic
renewal of his love for Kim.
One of the few Tim Burton films
to present an explicit theory of the art-
ist, the parable of the story is reminiscent
of Tennyson’s celebrated and influential
poem about the artist, The Lady of Shalott
(1833), in which love and life are shown to
be incompatible with art. The lady must
remain in her tower, isolated from life, in
order to create her art; she can only experi-
ence life vicariously by looking at it indi-
rectly through her mirror. When she sees
the beautiful knight, Lancelot, and falls in
love with his image, she chooses to aban-
don her hermetically sealed tower of art
and join in life; yet this causes her death.
Life and art are incompatible; the art-
ist’s way is solitary; his world is of his
own making. The autonomy of art is also
ELFMAN, DANNY  n  103
emphasized: the lady weaves her tapestries
because she must, as Edward clips and
shapes and orders nature, resulting in his
breathtakingly beautiful creations. He did
not acquire his ability through formal edu-
cation; rather, it is an innate gift, his sculpt-
ing—in all of its various forms—springing
from his own imagination. The remarkable
feature of Edward Scissorhands is how will-
ingly Edward destroys the incomparable
sculptures he has carved for the sake of
love. Love, it seems, is his only connection
with the human world in which he is for-
bidden to participate, and his expression of
love is his art, both in its creation and its
destruction.
With a budget of approximately $20
million, Edward Scissorhands earned $86
million, a box office success. It moved
Johnny Depp’s career out of teen idol sta-
tus, based on his popularity from the TV
series, 21 Jump Street. Its critical acclaim is
evident from the many awards for which it
was nominated.—Rebecca A. Umland
References
Jim Smith and J. Clive Matthews, Tim Bur-
ton (London: Virgin Books, 2007), 102;
Brian Ray, “Tim Burton and the Idea of
Fairy Tales,” in Fairy Tale Films: Visions of
Ambiguity, ed. Pauline Greenhill and Sid-
ney Eve Marris (Logan: Utah State Univer-
sity Press, 2010), 198–218.
ELFMAN, DANNY (1953–)
Prolific, Academy Award–winning film
composer who has scored the majority of
Tim Burton’s movies, born Daniel Rich-
ard Elfman on May 29, 1953, in Amarillo,
Texas. His mother was Blossom Elfman
(née Bernstein), an Emmy Award–winning
writer of young adult novels. His father
was Milton Elfman, an elementary school
teacher. He is the younger brother of actor,
director, writer, and publisher Richard Elf-
man (b. 1949).
104  n  ELFMAN, DANNY
Elfman spent his childhood largely in
Los Angeles. At age eighteen, he moved
with his brother to Paris, where Richard
had joined Jérôme Savary’s musical theatre
company, Le Grand Magic Circus. “I ended
up falling into musical theater—a group
in Paris called Le Grand Magic Circus,”
Elfman said during an interview in 1993.
“I toured with them and learned various
musical instruments.” He later traveled to
Africa, where he studied percussion instru-
ments, returning to the United States after
contracting malaria. He considers his time
in Africa an important step in his musical
development.
In late 1972, no doubt influenced by
his time in Le Grand Magic Circus, Rich-
ard Elfman formed a musical performance
group called the Mystic Knights of the
Oingo Boingo. A Los Angeles Times review
of one of the band’s early shows from 1973,
the “Astro Comedy Chronicles,” charac-
terized the performance as “The Skin of
Our Teeth as it might have been written by
Jean Cocteau and performed at the Lido de
Paris, not from a script but from rumors.”
A few years later, in 1976, by which time
Danny Elfman had become a member, the
group performed on Chuck Barris’s Gong
Show, a televised amateur talent contest,
and won first prize. The spirited, if slightly
byzantine, performance featured an ornate,
colorful dragon and a man in an exhaust
gas-spewing rocket costume (Richard Elf-
man). The Richard Elfman incarnation of
the group was premised on theatrical per-
formance and not on the issuing of musical
recordings.
Danny Elfman made his film scoring
debut in 1980, for the film Forbidden Zone,
written and directed by his brother Rich-
ard. Inseparable from camp, Forbidden
Zone is about a girl who travels to another
dimension, starring Hervé Villechaize and
Susan Tyrell with appearances by actor Joe
Spinell, Warhol “superstar” Viva, Danny
Elfman (as Satan), and others, and pur-
portedly was made in order to capture on
film the live performances of the Mystic
Knights of the Oingo Boingo. In the years
since its release, Forbidden Zone has devel-
oped a cult following. Although perhaps
not intentional, the film served as a sort of
transition between the Mystic Knights of
the Oingo Boingo, led by Richard Elfman,
and its reinvention as Oingo Boingo, a new
wave rock band led by Danny Elfman. The
band featured guitarist Steve Bartek, who
would later become Elfman’s orchestrator
and a film score composer as well.
Oingo Boingo’s first recordings were
issued on I.R.S. Records and later on MCA,
and the band continued to perform live
until its dissolution in 1995. Elfman first
met Tim Burton in 1985, when Burton
asked Elfman to score the music for PEE-
WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE. The request
came as a complete surprise. “I had no con-
nection with Tim,” Elfman said in 1993.
“I had never met him before the interview
for Pee-Wee. He called me for an interview
and I didn’t know why. I don’t know how
someone could see this rock band and
think, ‘This dude could do my orchestral
film score.’ It defies logic, as far as I’m con-
cerned. It’s one of the great mysteries of
my life—I would never have had the guts
to ask someone with my background to do
that job. And when I did it, I fully expected
to screw it up.”
Burton, though, recognized in Elf-
man’s music the relationship between
music and storytelling. “Before I was in the
movies I’d go see them [Oingo Boingo] in
clubs,” Burton told Mark Salisbury. “I had
always liked their music. Of all the groups
that I went to see, which was mainly the
punk kind of stuff, which I love, I always
felt that because they had more people in
the band and used weirder instruments, the
music seemed to be more story-oriented in
some way, more filmic.”

Elfman called in his friend Steve Bartek
to orchestrate for him, and the score to
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure turned out to
be precisely what Burton wanted. How-
ever, Elfman first came to the attention of
soundtrack fans due to his score for BEE-
TLEJUICE, which also included Harry Bela-
fonte’s songs used in the film. (The score
to Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure had remained
unreleased until Varèse Sarabande issued
it with some additional cues from Back
to School, in 1988, after Beetlejuice had
become a hit.)
Elfman scored films for Tim Burton
over the next decade, with the exception of
ED WOOD, composed by Howard Shore.
Elfman won his only Grammy in 1989 for
his theme to BATMAN, the score that Elf-
man considers to be one of his very best.
However, Elfman received two Oscar nomi-
nations in 1998, for Men in Black and Good
Will Hunting. Standouts in his career include
the score to EDWARD SCISSORHANDS
(1990), which contains the cue, “The Grand
Finale,” considered one of the best cues in
film history. Elfman also wrote the songs,
composed the score, and sang the leading
role of Jack Skellington in THE NIGHT-
MARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS (1993).
Besides Tim Burton, Elfman has
worked with many other directors, includ-
ing Brian DePalma, Emilio Estevez, Warren
Beatty, and the Hughes Brothers. Danny
Elfman is one of the few artists who has
established himself as both a composer and
a rocker. He has drawn a large following
of fans who find his works to be fresh and
EVERYONE NEEDS A HOBBY  n  105
innovative, and he is one of the most popu-
lar and sought-after composers in the film
industry.
References
John C. Mahoney, “Music Propels ‘Astro
Chronicles,’” Los Angeles Times, August
3, 1973, E17; Mark Salisbury, Burton on
Burton, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Faber and
Faber, 2006); Dan Sullivan, “Going Back
to Bedlam,” Los Angeles Times, March 26,
1975, G1–G2; Andy Carvin, “An Interview
with Danny Elfman,” 1993, www.blunt-
instrument.org.uk/elfman/archive/Andy-
Carvin93.htm.
EVERYONE NEEDS A HOBBY
Short-lived (1994–1995) but informative
Tim Burton fanzine, the banner of which
said, “A Tim Burton Fanzine with a Sense
of Humor.” The editor was Emile St. Claire.
The typical length of an issue was thirty-
eight pages. The first issue was published
in summer 1994, prior to the release of
ED WOOD, but includes what was known
about the production at the time. Contri-
butions included essays by fans on Tim
Burton, poems, a career retrospective on
VINCENT PRICE, and announcements
concerning upcoming events and conven-
tions. The two subsequent issues were pub-
lished over the next year; the final issue is
dated winter 1995.
References
Everyone Needs a Hobby 1, no. 1; 1, no. 2;
and 1, no. 3.
 A
F
“FAMILY DOG” (1987)
BRAD BIRD–directed episode of Amaz-
ing Stories (1985–1987), a fantasy/sci-
ence fiction television anthology series
created by Steven Spielberg. Featuring
character designs by Tim Burton, “Fam-
ily Dog” aired on February 16, 1987. As
the title implies, the main character is a
dog (referred to only as “the dog”) and
the story is told largely through the dog’s
point of view. The episode portrays the dog
as being either ignored or ill-treated by his
family, the Binfords. In the most developed
of the episode’s three segments, intruders
break into the Binfords’ house—twice. On
both occasions, the dog fails to fend off
the robbers. As a consequence, the father,
Skip Binford, sends the dog to Gerta LaSt-
range’s Dog Obedience School, where with
the proper training it will be transformed
into a “quivering, snarling, white-hot ball
of canine terror.” Thinking it to be an easy
score, the robbers return to the Binford
home a third time, but are chased off by
the now vicious dog. Returning to their
lair, one of the crooks discovers the dog
clamped onto his arm. Days go by, and
the dog remains fastened to his arm. In a
turn of events, a policeman approaches the
hideout and bursts in to arrest the men,
but ironically, the dog attacks the police-
man, thus saving the two robbers from
certain arrest. The villains decide to turn
the canine into an accomplice, and go on
106  n 
a crime spree, becoming known as the Dog
Gang. Eventually, the dog turns on them,
causing a car accident in which the rob-
bers crash into a police car and are sub-
sequently arrested. The heroic dog is then
returned to the Binfords.
“Tim came up with this very unusual
dog that kind of looks like a cross between
a bull terrier and a large rat,” Bird said in
an interview. “I had pictured more of an
all-American Fido, but it took all of 30
seconds for me to go, ‘This is the dog!’ At
CalArts, we had always joked about sub-
urbia, because the school is an island in a
suburban sea (Valencia). Tim was totally in
touch with a sort of twisted, slightly horri-
fying, caricatured suburban aesthetic; ‘Dog’
needed that kind of edge to it.” A sketch of
the dog, titled “Sparky in Chains,” appears
on page 22 of The Art of Tim Burton.
With production design by Tim Bur-
ton, featuring music by DANNY ELF-
MAN and Steve Bartek, Bird’s “Family
Dog” episode featured the talents of several
animators who went on to have impres-
sive careers, among them Ralph Eggleston
(several productions at Pixar, including
Toy Story; Monsters, Inc.; Finding Nemo;
The Incredibles), Chris Buck (codirector
of Disney’s Tarzan and Frozen), Gregg
Vanzo (The Simpsons, Futurama), David
W. Cutler (character designs on THE
NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, The
Little Mermaid), Rob Minkoff (codirector

of The Lion King, director of Stuart Little,
Stuart Little 2), Alan Smart (SpongeBob
SquarePants), and Darrell Rooney (The
Lion King 2: Simba’s Pride, Mulan II).
References
Derek Frey, Leah Gallo, and Holly Kempf,
eds., The Art of Tim Burton (n.p.: Steeles
Publishing, 2009); Charles Solomon, “Ani-
mated ‘Family Dog’ Does Prime-time
Tricks,” Los Angeles Times, February 16,
1987, articles.latimes.com/1987-02-16/
entertainment/ca-2387_1_family-dog.
FAMILY DOG (TV SERIES, 1993)
Screenplay: Dennis Klein, Paul Dini, Sherri
Stoner. E xecutive P roducers : Steven
Spielberg, Tim Burton, Dennis Klein.
P roducer : Chuck Richardson. T heme
Music: Danny Elfman. Animation Direc-
tors: Chris Buck, Clive A. Smith. Narra-
tors: Martin Mull, Molly Cheek, Danny
Mann, Zak Huxtable Epstein, Cassie
Cole.
R unning T ime : 10 episodes, 24 minutes
each. Color.
Released Through: Amblin Television in
association with Universal Television
and Warner Bros. Television.
Prime-time animated series based on the
BRAD BIRD–directed “Family Dog” epi-
sode that originally aired several years ear-
lier as an episode of Amazing Stories. Exec-
utive produced by Steven Spielberg and
Tim Burton, but without the participation
of Brad Bird, ten episodes of Family Dog
were aired on CBS during the months of
June and July 1993. Yet despite the impri-
matur of Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton,
the show garnered negative reviews and was
quickly cancelled.
With great fanfare, CBS announced
the joint Steven Spielberg–Tim Burton
FAMILY DOG (TV SERIES)  n  107
produced prime-time television animated
series during the Grammy Awards broad-
cast in February 1991. The series was appar-
ently intended to challenge The Simpsons,
also a prime-time animated series, but was
hampered by many production problems,
rewrites, and “animation fixes.” After three
years in production, during which the cost
per episode climbed from $650,000 to $1
million, ten episodes eventually were com-
pleted by late 1992.
By defamiliarizing suburban life by
using the point of view of a neglected house-
hold pet, the show seemed to want to imitate
the cheery dysfunction of the Simpsons. It
failed, and the reviews were scathing. John
J. O’Connor, writing in the New York Times,
asserted the show was “about as much fun
as a rabies epidemic,” and described the
show as “mean, nasty and brutish.” He also
observed, “Nine-year-old [son] Billy is a
sadistic monster bearing a marked resem-
blance to the bizarre cartoon character
Beetlejuice.” Rick Kogan, in his review for
the Chicago Tribune, observed, “The anima-
tion is surprisingly simple and uninterest-
ing. Though there are a few clever drawings,
most of the work looks as if it comes from
an art class.” Ken Tucker, writing in Enter-
tainment Weekly, rated the show a “D+” and
wrote, “This once-subtle, striking creation
has been turned into . . . a crude bore.”
MCA/Universal Home Video issued all
ten episodes of Family Dog in a laser disc
box set in March 1994.
References
Daniel Cerone, “Spielberg’s ‘Dog’ Finally
Has Its Day: But Is CBS Throwing a Bone
by Unleashing the Series in Summer?”
Los Angeles Times, June 10, 1993; John
O’Connor, “Review/Television; Spiel-
berg’s New Project? It’s a Cartoon Dog’s
Life,” New York Times, June 23, 1993;
Ken Tucker, “Family Dog,” Entertainment
Weekly, June 25, 1993.
108  n  FAMILY DOG (VIDEO GAME)
FAMILY DOG (VIDEO GAME)
Game developed by Imagineering, Inc.,
and published by Malibu Interactive in
June 1993 for the Super Nintendo home
console, based on the animated television
series. Family Dog is a side-scrolling action
game in which the player assumes the
role of the titular canine, seeking to sur-
vive through three levels. The first level is
the family home and the dangers include
those devised by the ornery son of the Bin-
fords: volleys of tennis balls, a malevolent
vacuum cleaner, and an aggressive cat.
Bones must be collected for power. After
exploring the Binford home, the player
is sent to the heavily guarded Obedi-
ence School, where one finds overzealous
instructors and ferocious Dobermans. If
successful at escaping, the player reaches
a forest filled with wild animals. “You
can use flips, spins and barks to make
your way through the various obstacles.
A special ball when found will trigger a
bonus game that will also teach you how
to fetch,” reports MobyGames.com. Nin-
tendo Power ranked the game 3.05 out of
5, while Super Play ranked the game 39
out of 100.
References
“Family Dog,” GiantBomb, www.giant-
bomb.com/family-dog/3030-32152/;
“Family Dog (SNES),” Moby Games, www.
mobygames.com/game/family-dog; “Fam-
ily Dog,” GameFAQs, www.gamefaqs.com/
snes/588320-family-dog/critic.
FERRETTI, DANTE (1943–)
Highly acclaimed, award-winning Italian-
born production designer and art director,
whose best work is done frequently in con-
junction with his wife and set decorator,
Francesca Lo Schiavo (b. 1948). Together
they won an Academy Award for Best
Achievement in Art Direction for SWEE-
NEY TODD.
Ferretti is a native of Macerata, Italy.
His earliest work was as a set designer for
producer Carlo Ponti on the 1965 comedy
Oggi, domani, dopodomani (Today, Tomor-
row, and the Day after Tomorrow). Sub-
sequently, he moved to art direction and
production design with Pier Paolo Paso-
lini’s Medea (1969). Ferretti and Pasolini
collaborated on several other films, includ-
ing The Decameron (1970), The Canterbury
Tales (1971), The Arabian Nights (1974),
and Pasolini’s final film, the harrowing,
highly controversial Salò, or the 120 Days of
Sodom (1975).
His reputation growing quickly, Fer-
retti formed a partnership with the great
Federico Fellini, which resulted in such
lavish efforts as Orchestra Rehearsal (1979),
City of Women (1980), And the Ship Sails
On (1983), Ginger and Fred (1986), and The
Voice of the Moon (1989). Ferretti’s work
with Fellini brought him to the attention
of the longtime admirer of Fellini, Martin
Scorsese, who met Ferretti while visiting
the set of City of Women. Ferretti worked in
Europe as well, on prestige British produc-
tions such as The Name of the Rose (1986)
and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
(1988). After teaming with director Franco
Zeffirelli on Hamlet (1990), Ferretti and
Scorsese were finally able to collaborate
on The Age of Innocence (1993). In the
years after, Ferretti worked with Scorsese
on Casino (1995), Kundun (1997), Bring-
ing Out the Dead (1999), and Gangs of New
York (2002). Although the six-time Oscar
nominee never won the award himself, his
work nevertheless speaks for itself. Follow-
ing work on Anthony Minghella’s Cold
Mountain in 2003, Ferretti again teamed
up with Scorsese on the Howard Hughes
biopic The Aviator (2004).
References
“Dante Ferretti,” IMDb, www.imdb.com/
name/nm0274721/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_

sm; “Dante Ferretti,” New York Times,
www.nytimes.com/movies/person/89655/
Dante-Ferretti/biography; “A Life in
Design: Dante Ferretti and Francesca Lo
Schiavo,” BAFTA, April 2, 2011, www.
bafta.org/film/features/a-life-in-design-
dante-ferretti-and-francesca-lo-schiavo.
“THE FINGER”
Sixteenth-century Jewish tale of the super-
natural, about a young man on the verge of
marriage who inadvertently weds a corpse,
source text for Tim Burton’s CORPSE
BRIDE. According to Burton, it was JOE
RANFT who brought the story to his atten-
tion. The story concerns Reuven, the eldest
of three young men, who is to be married
the next day. He sets out for a night of fun
with his two friends, entering the nearby
forest, where one of them notices what
appears to be a finger sticking out of the
earth. In jest, Reuven, the groom-to-be,
removes his ring and slips it onto the fin-
ger, pronouncing, “You are betrothed to
me” three times, as the law requires. Sud-
denly, the entire hand reaches out from the
earth, followed by the body of a woman
wearing a tattered shroud who cries out,
“My husband!” Terrified, the three men
run away, hearing the wailing of the dead
woman behind them.
The next day, at Reuven’s wedding, the
corpse appears, announcing her presence
with an ear-splitting scream. The rabbi pre-
siding over the marriage remains calm and
asks the corpse why she has returned to the
world of the living. The corpse holds up her
hand, on which Reuven’s ring can be seen,
and replies, “He is wed to me.” The rabbi
then asks Reuven how it happened, and
the young man tells him the story. Since
Reuven had pronounced the marriage vow
three times before two witnesses, the rabbi
seems to think that the marriage is valid,
but adds that the rabbinic court would ulti-
mately decide the matter.
“THE FINGER”  n  109
On the day the court convenes, Reuven
pleads with the court to annul the marriage
because his vow was made in jest. When
asked if she would relinquish her claim on
Reuven, the corpse refuses. She demands
the marriage be consummated because
she had never married during her life and
wants in death what had been denied to
her in life. Ultimately, the court decides
in Reuven’s favor, declaring his marriage
to the corpse null and void, ruling that
Reuven had been betrothed by his parents
to his true bride at birth, that his vow was
not made with intention, and that the dead
may make no claim on the living. Having
lost her chance to marry even in death,
the corpse screams, collapses to the floor,
and dies once more. The rabbi orders the
corpse to be reburied more deeply to pre-
vent such an unfortunate event from hap-
pening again, and the wedding of Reuven
to his true bride finally takes place.
Howard Schwartz claims that “The
Finger” follows the pattern of other Jewish
folktales, in which a man “ends up tricked
into marriage with a demoness,” blending
features of tales about “Lilith-type demonic
figures” with the “Venus-Ring” motif,
about a fiancé who recklessly places his
engagement ring on the hand of a statue of
Venus. According to Schwartz, the Venus
statue “is thereby brought to life, appearing
on the wedding night as a ghostly presence
who tries to supplant the real bride sleep-
ing at her husband’s side.” In “The Finger,”
the demoness is identified as a corpse in
order to emphasize the story “as a tale of
terror.” Ultimately, he writes, “The Finger”
combines three folk tale traditions: “the
seductive Lilith, the theme of marriage with
demons, and the Venus-Ring motif.”
References
Howard Schwartz, Leaves from the Garden
of Eden: One Hundred Classic Jewish Tales
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009),
110  n  FLATTERY, TIM
227–29; Howard Schwartz, Lilith’s Cave:
Jewish Tales of the Supernatural (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991).
FLATTERY, TIM (CA. 1964–)
A proficient concept artist, illustrator, and
educator, and a 1987 graduate of Detroit’s
College for Creative Studies who began
working in the motion picture industry in
1988. While working as a concept artist at
Warner Bros., Flattery produced the devel-
opment sketches for BATMAN RETURNS’
rocket pack penguins fitted with mind-
control helmets. Development sketches
available on his website show that he also
made fanciful sketches of a penguin wear-
ing an executioner’s hood equipped with a
buzz saw and others carrying grenades and
extending boxing gloves. For BATMAN
FOREVER (1995) he produced models of
the Batmobile and the Batboat. In January
2011, he was named chair of the Entertain-
ment Design Department at Pasadena’s Art
Center College of Design.
References
“Batman,” TimFlattery.com, timflat-
tery.com/work/batman/; “Concept Art-
ist Tim Flattery Named Entertainment
Design Chair at Art Center College of
Design,” PRWeb, January 19, 2011, prweb.
com/releases/entertainment/design/
prweb4982354.htm
THE FOX AND THE HOUND (US
1981)
Directors: Ted Berman, Richard Rich, Art
Stevens. Story: Larry Clemmons, Ted
Berman, Peter Young, Steve Hulett,
David Michener, Burny Mattinson, Earl
Kress, Vance Gerry. E xecutive P ro -
ducer: Ron Miller. Producers: Wolfgang
Reitherman, Art Stevens. S upervising
A nimators : Randy Cartwright, Cliff
Nordberg, Frank Thomas, Glen Keane,
Ron Clemens, Ollie Johnston. M usic :
Buddy Baker. Animators: Ed Gombert,
Dale Oliver, Ron Husband, David Block,
Chris Buck, Hendel S. Butoy, Darrell
Van Citters, Phillip Young, John Mus-
ker, Jerry Rees, Dick Lucas, Jeffrey J.
Varab, Chuck Harvey, Phil Nibbelink,
Michael Cedeno, Tim Burton (uncred-
ited). Layout Artists: Dan Hansen, Syl-
via Roemer, Michael Peraza Jr., Glenn
V. Vilppu, Guy Vasilovich, Joe Hale. Film
Editors: James Koford, James Melton.
Art Direction: Don Griffith. Produc-
t i o n M a n a g e r s : Don A. Duckwall,
Edward Hansen. Assistant Directors:
Don Hahn, Mark A. Hester, Terry L.
Noss. B ackground A rtists : Daniela
Bielecka, Brian Cebern, Kathleen Swain.
Effects Animators: Jack Boyd, Ted Kier-
scey, Don C. Paul.
C ast (Voices): Mickey Rooney (Tod),
Kurt Russell (Copper), Pearl Bailey (Big
Mama), Jack Albertson (Amos Slade),
Sandy Duncan (Vixey), Jeanette Nolan
(Widow Tweed), Pat Buttram (Chief),
John Fiedler (Porcupine), John McIntire
(Badger), Richard Bakalyan (Dinky),
Paul Winchell (Boomer), Keith Coogan
(Young Tod), Corey Feldman (Young
Copper).
Running Time: 83 minutes. Color.
Released Through: Walt Disney Produc-
tions.
Disney animated feature film to which Tim
Burton was first assigned after being hired
by the Disney organization in 1979. The
film adaptation is based on the novel The
Fox and the Hound (E. P. Dutton, 1967)
by Daniel P. Mannix. Walt Disney Pro-
ductions purchased the film rights for the
novel upon publication, although initial
production on the film did not commence
until a decade later. The Disney adapta-
tion loosely adheres to the source novel,
following the life of Tod, a red fox raised
by humans early in his life, and Copper, a

bloodhound owned by a local hunter. After
Tod inadvertently causes the death of the
hunter’s favorite hound (a story element
changed in the Disney version to the hound
being badly injured, not killed), the hunter
becomes intent on hunting down the fox
and killing it. At the conclusion of the
novel, every major character is dead except
for the hunter, who seems to be descending
into alcoholism.
In the Disney version, the film opens
with a little fox being hidden by its mother
before hunters kill her. A wise owl, Big
Mama (Pearl Bailey), arranges for the little
fox to be adopted by the Widow Tweed
(Jeanette Nolan); it is the widow who gives
the fox his name, Tod. At the same time,
the widow’s neighbor, Amos Slade (Jack
Albertson), brings home a puppy he has
named Copper (Corey Feldman). Tod and
Copper become friends. However, Copper
(Kurt Russell) is taken off to be trained as
a hunting dog, and when he returns, he
explains to Tod (Mickey Rooney) they can
no longer be friends. When Chief (Pat But-
tram), Amos Slade’s hunting dog, is injured
during a chase after Tod (he falls from a
railroad trestle), Copper and Slade swear
vengeance. Once the Widow Tweed learns
that Tod is no longer safe, she takes him
to a game preserve where she believes he’ll
be safe. Soon, Big Mama arrives and plays
matchmaker, arranging for Vixey (Sandy
Duncan) to meet Tod. Meanwhile, Slade
and Copper illegally enter the preserve
hunting for Tod. The fox manages to avoid
the traps set for him by Slade; he and Vixey
flee, pursued by Slade and his dog. As Slade
and Copper close in on the two foxes, they
inadvertently disturb a grizzly bear. The
hunters become the hunted. Slade becomes
caught in one of his traps, and Copper,
fighting the bear, is soon overwhelmed.
Just as the bear is about to kill Copper, the
heroic Tod appears and distracts it, luring
it away; both fall from a log and are swept
THE FOX AND THE HOUND  n  111
down a waterfall. Tod, exhausted, crawls
onto a nearby bank as Amos Slade takes
aim. Copper, realizing that Tod has saved
his life, moves to stand in front of Tod,
protecting him from the hunter. Slade,
realizing the dog is protecting Tod, lowers
his gun and leaves with Copper. The two
former friends exchange a smile before
parting. The last image of the film reveals
Vixey and Tod living a life separate from
the world of humans and hunting dogs.
A fable about the pernicious effects
of socialization, as fate would have it,
The Fox and the Hound would be a tran-
sitional film for Walt Disney Productions,
as it was the last film featuring the work of
the legendary Disney animating team of
Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, both
of whom retired in 1978; the last film pro-
duced by longtime Disney animator Wolf-
gang Reitherman; and also the last film
on which animator Don Bluth worked as
well. According to Jerry Beck, during the
film’s production in 1979, Bluth declared
that “Disney animation had gone stale and
ventured too far from its days of glory”
and left to establish his own studio, “taking
seven other animators and four assistant
animators with him.” The film had been
scheduled for release during Christmas
1980, but largely because of Bluth’s depar-
ture it was delayed until July 1981. The
Fox and the Hound therefore became the
first film representing the work of a newer
generation of Disney animators, such as
Glen Keane (b. 1954), Tim Burton, BRAD
BIRD, JERRY REES, and HENRY SELICK.
For Tim Burton, though, the experience
of working on The Fox and the Hound was
an unhappy one. “I worked for a great ani-
mator, Glen Kean [sic],” said Burton. “He
was nice, he was good to me, he’s a really
strong animator and he helped me. But he
also kind of tortured me because I got all
the cute fox scenes to draw, and I couldn’t
draw all those four-legged Disney foxes.
112  n  FRANKENWEENIE (1984)
I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even fake
the Disney style. Mine looked like road
kills. . . . Imagine drawing a cute fox with
Sandy Duncan’s voice for three years. It’s
not something that you can relate to very
much.”
Leonard Maltin, writing in The Disney
Films, identifies the fight scene between
Copper, Tod, and the bear, drawn by Glen
Keane, as exceptionally good animation.
Nonetheless, Maltin asserted The Fox and
the Hound “is a pleasant but extremely
low-key film that relies too much on for-
mula cuteness, formula comedy relief, even
formula characterizations. Those formulas
are time worn, and time proven, too (the
public certainly responded to them—the
film was a box-office smash), but to some
observers they represented a backward
step, or at best a stagnation, for the Disney
studio.” Maltin cites Don Bluth as saying,
“‘We felt like we were animating the same
picture over and over again with just the
faces changed a little. . . . For example,
they’ve gutted all of the meaning from The
Fox and the Hound. It’s become a cute story
instead of a meaningful one.’” Nonetheless,
many of the animators Disney hired in this
period would contribute to Disney’s cre-
ative resurgence in the later 1980s, starting
with The Little Mermaid (1989).
References
Jerry Beck, The Animated Movie Guide
(Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2005), 87;
Leonard Maltin, The Disney Films, 3rd ed.
(New York: Hyperion Books, 1995), 275;
Mark Salisbury, Burton on Burton, 2nd rev.
ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 2006).
FRANKENWEENIE (US 1984)
Director: Tim Burton. Screenplay: Lenny
Ripps. Producer: Julie Hickson. Associ-
ate Producer: Rick Heinrichs. Director
of Photography: Thomas E. Ackerman.
Music: Michael Convertino, David New-
man. Editor: Ernest Milano. Art Direc-
tion: John B. Mansbridge. Set Decora-
tion: Roger Shook.
Cast: Barret Oliver (Victor Frankenstein),
Shelley Duvall (Susan Frankenstein),
Daniel Stern (Ben Frankenstein), Joseph
Maher (Mr. Chambers), Roz Braverman
(Mrs. Epstein), Paul Bartel (Mr. Walsh),
Sofia Coppola (billed as “Domino”)
(Anne Chambers), Jason Hervey (Frank
Dale), Paul C. Scott (Mike Anderson),
Helen Boll (Mrs. Curtis), Rusty James
(Raymond).
R unning T ime : 30 minutes, 2 seconds.
Black and white.
Released Through: Buena Vista Distribu-
tion Company.
Tim Burton’s second film while at Disney is
about a young boy who retrieves his beloved
dog from death. “You have a dog that you
love,” Burton observed, “and the idea of
keeping it alive was the impulse for the
film.” Victor Frankenstein (Barret Oliver) is
a young boy who loves his dog, a Bull Ter-
rier named Sparky. After Sparky is struck
and killed by a car and its body buried, the
heartbroken Victor learns from his high
school science teacher, Mr. Walsh (Paul
Bartel), about galvanization—the stimula-
tion of muscles with an electric current. He
becomes intent on bringing his dog back to
life. On a particularly stormy night, Victor
exhumes Sparky from his grave and in his
homemade laboratory harnesses lightning,
reviving the dog. In order to keep the secret
of his clandestine resurrection of the dead
dog from his parents, Victor keeps Sparky
hidden away in the attic.
Despite Victor’s best efforts, Sparky
manages to escape and is glimpsed briefly
by the neighbors, who start rumors of a
monster in the neighborhood. Victor is
forced to reveal Sparky to his parents, who,
given the rumors, decide to (re)introduce

Rare still from Tim Burton’s early short Frankenweenie (1984), showing derelict windmill and Victor
(Barret Oliver).
Sparky to the neighbors. They become
angry and terrified at the sight of the
uncanny canine and scare the dog away.
Victor traces Sparky to an aban-
doned miniature golf course, where the
dog hides in the course’s tattered wind-
mill. The neighbors, having become an
angry mob, arrive on the golf course and
accidentally set the windmill on fire. Hav-
ing been knocked unconscious, Victor is
rescued from the flames by Sparky, who
is then crushed by one of the falling sails.
Repentant, the neighbors assemble their
cars using battery jumper cables to revital-
ize Sparky. He is revived and all cheer. He
is approached by a poodle whose fur bears
a strong resemblance to the lightning bolt
hairdo seen in The Bride of Frankenstein.
FRANKENWEENIE (1984)  n  113
Burton has averred that his intention
with Frankenweenie was never to create an
homage to, or pastiche of, James Whale’s
Frankenstein (1931). Rather, the film
functions more like what Freud termed
a “screen memory”: the remembrance of
apparently trivial or insignificant details
that through the processes of condensation
and displacement actually embody every-
thing that is important about a particular
experience. “It’s very, very important to
me, even though there are feelings from
Frankenstein, that I do not make direct link-
age to it. . . . I try to make sure in my own
mind that it’s not a case of ‘Let’s copy that.’
. . . It’s more like it’s being filtered through
some sort of remembrance.” He goes on to
say, “I wanted to try to describe it the way I
114  n  FRANKENWEENIE (1984)
remembered it.” The fundamental linkage
between the two films is what Mark Salis-
bury refers to as the “strong emotive core,”
in the case of Frankenweenie, a young boy’s
desire to keep alive his beloved dog. In
broader terms, the film reflects a recurring
theme in Burton’s work, the incompatibil-
ity of art and life. Since Frankenweenie is a
children’s film, it reflects the triumph of art
and desire.
Budgeted at $1 million, Frankenweenie
was shot in fifteen days during late sum-
mer 1984, with two months allotted for
postproduction. It was originally intended
to be completed in time to be put out with
the July 1984 theatrical rerelease of The
Jungle Book, but was rescheduled to begin
shooting that month in order to be released
with the Christmas 1984 rerelease of Pin-
occhio. Completed by late September 1984,
Frankenweenie was given two test screen-
ings for mothers and young children ages
six through nine and received a PG rating.
Michael Mayo reported that the test mar-
keting results reported that “mothers were
worried about children possibly being led
to try and play with electricity” and were
concerned about the “intensity” of the film.
Studio executives determined the short was
unsuitable for pairing with Pinocchio, and
so cancelled its release. “You can’t release
a PG film with a G-rated animated film,”
said Burton. “It freaked everybody out.”
Moreover, the film’s completion in 1984
roughly coincided with a regime change at
Disney, when Michael Eisner was brought
in as CEO and chairman of the board, and
the former vice chairman of Warner Bros.,
Frank Wells, was brought in as president,
replacing Ron Miller. “It was right at the
time when the company was changing,”
explained Burton. “So it met with the same
response as Vincent in a way, which was,
‘Oh, this is great, but we have no plans to
release it. Ever.’ I remember being very
frustrated because the old regime was out,
the new one was in, and again, a thirty-
minute short is not a high priority for peo-
ple who are just coming into a studio and
trying to make something of it.”
There was some discussion of releas-
ing Frankenweenie with Touchstone Films’
My Science Project (released August 1985),
but eventually, according to Mark Salis-
bury, in 1985 Frankenweenie was released
in the United Kingdom on a double bill
with Touchstone Pictures’ Baby: Secret of
the Lost Legend. Otherwise, Frankenweenie
seemed destined to remain in the Disney
vaults and hence unseen.
After the box office success of BAT-
MAN and EDWARD SCISSORHANDS—
in other words, after Burton became
famous—in 1992 Disney issued a truncated
version (twenty-six minutes forty-nine sec-
onds) of the film on VHS shortly before
the release of BATMAN RETURNS. Several
Internet sources mistakenly indicate that
the VHS version of the film is censored—it
is not, but merely edited for length. None
of the roughly three minutes and eleven
seconds of cuts contain anything remotely
controversial. The material removed is
expositional—the breakfast scene is short-
ened, for instance, and the scene in which
Victor’s parents have gone to bed for the
night while expressing concern for their son
is omitted. Some shots within the miniature
golf course’s windmill are omitted as well,
but again, nothing that could be considered
in any way censorable was removed. The
original, complete version is now available
on the Blu-ray and DVD special edition
releases of THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE
CHRISTMAS, as well as on the Blu-ray and
DVD editions of the stop-motion animated
feature-length FRANKENWEENIE (2012).
References
Michael Mayo, “Frankenweenie,” Cine-
fantastique 15, no. 2 (May 1985): 4–5, 61;
Mark Salisbury, ed., Burton on Burton, 2nd

rev. ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 2006),
32, 33.
FRANKENWEENIE (US/UK 2012)
D irector : Tim Burton. S creenplay : John
August. S creenplay (1984): Leonard
Ripps. Original Idea: Tim Burton. Exec-
utive P roducer : Don Hahn. A ssociate
Producer: Connie Nartonis Thompson.
Producers: Allison Abbate, Tim Burton.
Co-P roducer : Derek Frey. L ine P ro -
ducer: Simon Quinn. Music: Danny Elf-
man. Cinematography: Peter Sorg. Edi-
tors: Chris Lebenzon, Mark Solomon.
P roduction D esign : Rick Heinrichs.
A rt D irection : Tim Browning, Alex-
andra Walker. F irst A ssistant D irec -
tor: Kevin Harwood. Second Assistant
D irector : Richard Lake. A rt D epart -
ment L ead M odelers : Colin Armitage,
Roy Bell, Holly Blenkins, Elaine Carr,
Jamie Carruthers, Mick Chippington,
Robin Crowley, Luke Daniels, Mark
Fisher, Charles Fletcher, Celia Ger-
rard, Mark Gunning, Maggie Haden,
Grant Humberstone. Sound Mix Tech-
nician: Dafydd Archard. Sound Effects
Editors: Dillon Bennett, Steve Browell.
S ound R erecording M ixers : Christo-
pher Boyes, Tom Johnson. Supervising
Sound Editor: Oliver Tarney. Assistant
S ound E ditor : Rachael Tate. P uppet
Crew (Mackinnon and Saunders): John
Ashton, Chris Bowden, Emma Boyson,
Fiona Bunting, Rosetta Cassini, Laura
Clempson, Tom Clempson, Jessica
Cope, Ruth Curtis, Richard Davidson,
Russell Degnan, Noel Estevez-Baker,
Paolo Goldstein, Jonathan Grimshaw,
Susan Guy, Graeme Hall, Joe Holman,
Richard Jeffers, Bethan Jones, Bethany
Jupe, Christine Keogh, Steve Levinshon,
Ian Mackinnon, Matt Milburn, Suzanne
Moulton, Sara Mullock, Sophie Phillips,
Richard Pickersgill, Michele Pouncey,
Susan Robson, Cathy Rounthwaite,
Barbara Rudolph, Peter Saunders,
Michelle Scattergood, Kevin Scillitoc,
FRANKENWEENIE (2012)  n  115
Haydn Secker, Gemma Slack, Nick
Smalley-Ramsdale, Bridget Smith, Fred
Smith, Jamie Stockley, Lucy Sturley,
Anne Sutcliffe, Neil Sutcliffe, Stuart Sut-
cliffe, Takashi Tateoka, Cherie Taylor,
Rosie Taylor, Claire Tennant, Amanda
Thomas, Mark Thompson, Caroline
Trott, John Turnbull, Scott Wakefield,
Simon White, David Whiting, Amy
Wilkinson, Hang Shuen Yeung.
Cast (Voices): Charlie Tahan (Victor Fran-
kenstein); Catherine O’Hara (Mrs. Fran-
kenstein/Weird Girl/Gym Teacher);
Martin Short (Mr. Frankenstein/Mr.
Burgemeister/Nassor); Martin Landau
(Mr. Rzykruski); Atticus Shaffer (Edgar
E. Gore); Winona Ryder (Elsa Van
Helsing); Robert Capron (Bob); James
Hiroyuki Liao (Toshiaki); Conchata Fer-
rell (Bob’s Mom); Tom Kenny (New
Holland Townsfolk).
R unning T ime : 86 minutes, 56 seconds.
Black and white.
Released Through: Walt Disney Pictures
and Tim Burton Productions.
Stop-motion, animated version of Burton’s
1984 live-action film. In fall 2007, Tim Bur-
ton entered into an agreement with Disney
to direct two films in Disney Digital 3-D—
ALICE IN WONDERLAND (2010) and a
remake of FRANKENWEENIE. However,
initial development of the Frankenweenie
remake dates to 2005, when it was reported
that a full-length screenplay had been
written by the long-standing female writ-
ing team of Josann McGibbon and Sara
Parriott, who had contributed material
to Disney’s Chicken Little (2005). Appar-
ently no further development occurred
with McGibbon and Parriott’s version,
because according to screenwriter JOHN
AUGUST, Tim Burton approached him
to write the screenplay in September 2008.
August completed most of his work on the
screenplay in 2009. Subsequent drafts were
116  n  FRANKENWEENIE (2012)
written, but it was August’s December 2010
draft that was filmed.
Like Burton’s first version of the story,
Frankenweenie is in black and white, and
like the original film, Victor’s dog, Sparky,
is killed. Similarly, Victor uses the power
of electricity to resurrect him. The twist is
that when his schoolmates discover he has
reanimated Sparky, Victor is blackmailed
into revealing to them how they, too, can
reanimate their deceased pets and creature
companions. The result is the reanimated
animals running amuck in a variation of
sorcerer’s apprentice legend.
Eleven-year-old Victor Frankenstein
(Charlie Tahan) lives with his parents,
Edward (Martin Short) and Susan (CATH-
ERINE O’HARA) Frankenstein, and his
beloved dog, Sparky, in the small town of
New Holland. Victor’s new homemade
monster movie stars his dog Sparky as
the beast that destroys Victor’s cardboard
town, populated with his toys and action
figures. Edward and Susan applaud as the
movie comes to an end, but Edward tells
Susan he wishes Victor would be more like
a normal kid, and spend less time making
monster movies.
Victor prepares for school the next
day. His next-door neighbors include Elsa
Van Helsing (WINONA RYDER), the lugu-
brious Edgar E. Gore (Atticus Shaffer), the
obese and naive Bob (Robert Capron), the
arrogant Toshiaki (James Hiroyuki Liao),
the creepy Nassor (Martin Short), and an
eccentric girl nicknamed Weird Girl (Cath-
erine O’Hara). Victor has little interaction
with them due to his close relationship with
Sparky. Concerned with what he believes is
his son’s social isolation, Edward Franken-
stein encourages his son to take up baseball.
Victor hits a home run at his first game, but
Sparky, pursuing the ball, is struck by a car
and killed. The devastated Victor buries
Sparky in the local pet cemetery.
Inspired by his science teacher’s, Mr.
Rzykruski (MARTIN LANDAU), demon-
stration of the effect of galvanization on
dead frogs, Victor exhumes Sparky and
takes him to his makeshift laboratory in
the attic. He successfully reanimates Sparky
using lightning as his source of electricity.
His old self again, the restored Sparky sees
Weird Girl’s living cat, Mr. Whiskers, and is
compelled to leave the attic and explore his
old neighborhood. Unfortunately, Sparky
is recognized by Edgar E. Gore, who sub-
sequently blackmails Victor into teaching
him how to raise the dead. The two reani-
mate a dead goldfish, which turns invisible
due to an error with the experiment. Edgar
brags about the undead fish to Toshiaki and
Bob, which, in panic of losing the upcom-
ing science fair, inspires them to make a
rocket out of soda bottles, causing Bob to
break his arm. Mr. Rzykruski is blamed for
the disastrous experiment and fired.
Later, when Edgar E. Gore chooses to
show his fish to a skeptical Nassor, it has
disappeared. When Edgar is confronted by
Toshiaki, Nassor, and Bob on the baseball
field, he accidentally reveals Victor’s secret,
inspiring them to try to reanimate deceased
pets themselves. Later, Victor’s parents are
startled when they discover Sparky in the
attic, their fright causing the dog to run
away. Victor and his parents search for
Sparky while his classmates invade the lab,
discovering Victor’s reanimation formula.
The classmates separately perform their
experiments, which go awry and turn the
dead animals into monsters: Mr. Whiskers
holds a dead bat while it is electrocuted,
turning him into a terrifying flying Vam-
pire Cat. Edgar turns a dead rat he found
into a wererat; Nassor revives his mummi-
fied hamster, Colossus; and Toshiaki’s tur-
tle, Shelley, comes back to life as a gigantic,
Gamera-like monster. Bob’s sea monkeys
are transformed into mischievous human-

oids. The frenetic sea monsters break loose
at the fair, where they wreak havoc.
After finding Sparky at the pet cem-
etery, Victor sees the monsters attacking
the fair and goes to help his classmates con-
trol them. The sea monkeys explode after
eating salt-covered popcorn; the hamster,
Colossus, is crushed by Shelley; and the
wererat and the gigantic turtle, Shelley, are
returned to their original, deceased forms
after being electrocuted. During the chaos,
Persephone, Elsa Van Helsing’s pet poodle,
is grabbed by Mr. Whiskers and carried to
the town windmill with Elsa and Victor
chasing after. The townsfolk blame Sparky
for Elsa’s disappearance and chase him
to the windmill as well, which the mayor,
Mr. Burgermeister, accidentally sets on
fire with his torch. Victor and Sparky enter
the burning windmill and rescue Elsa and
Persephone, but Victor is trapped inside.
Sparky rescues Victor, only to be dragged
back inside by Mr. Whiskers. A final con-
frontation ensues, and just as Mr. Whis-
kers has Sparky cornered, a flaming piece
of wood breaks off and impales Mr. Whis-
kers, killing him. But the burning windmill
collapses on Sparky, killing him a second
time. Upset by Sparky’s untimely death,
the townspeople assemble to revive Sparky
with their car batteries, reanimating him
once more. The poodle, Persephone, who
has a lightning bolt hairstyle similar to that
of Elsa Lanchester in The Bride of Franken-
stein (1935), is attracted to Sparky. The two
dogs touch noses and sparks fly.
Filmed at Three Mills Studios in Lon-
don, where the sets (New Holland, attic,
cemetery, high school) consumed three
sound stages, Frankenweenie is a stop-
motion, handmade animation classic, a
whimsical fantasy with a cast of eccentric
characters and highly imaginative mon-
sters. About two hundred separate puppets
were created for the film, with as many as
FRANKENWEENIE (2012)  n  117
eighteen versions of Victor. Speaking to
IGN’s Leigh Singer, Frankenweenie’s head
of puppets, Andy Gent, said, “Sparky has to
do so much in the film. . . . He has to run,
jump, lie down, move his eyebrows, snarl
his lips. We can’t make him do everything
in one puppet so there are different ver-
sions where we can make him breathe and
his ribs go in and out, or when he runs and
his spine grows. But the mechanics are so
small and delicate. We’ve even got Swiss
watchmakers to make some of the tiny
bolts and nuts for some of the parts—and
you can’t get much smaller than watch-
making technology. There are about 300-
odd parts in this puppet alone just to get
him running around.”
The critics’ reviews of Frankenweenie
were overall positive. Colin Covert of the
StarTribune observed, “The story brims
with self-parody, social satire, horror,
nostalgia, wit and emotional insight, with
Burton keeping all the plates spinning.”
Comparing the feature film version to Bur-
ton’s original short, Michael Phillips of
the Chicago Tribune observed, “The mon-
ster-movie component of Frankenweenie
stomps all over the appeal of the original
30-minute version.” Claudia Puig of USA
Today said, “Frankenweenie is enlivened
with beguiling visuals and captivating
action sequences. The science is murky at
best, but the underlying themes are pro-
found, and the story is equal parts funny
and poignant.” Peter Travers of Rolling
Stone gave the film three and a half stars out
of four, saying, “Only Tim Burton could
envision this Frankenstein-inspired tale,
and it’s a honey, a dark and dazzling spell-
binder that scares up laughs and surprising
emotion.” However, Todd McCarthy, of
the Hollywood Reporter, was less positive,
saying, “Although this nominally clever
take-off of Frankenstein . . . is distinctive as
the first black-and-white 3D stop-motion
118  n  FREY, DEREK
animated production of this new three-
dimensional era, it is nonetheless imagi-
native in a highly familiar and ultimately
tedious way.” Frankenweenie received an
Academy Award nomination for Best Ani-
mated Feature Film of the Year, and was
nominated for many other awards as well,
and made several “best of” lists. Accord-
ing to BoxOfficeMojo.com, Frankenweenie
earned a respectable $81.4 million world-
wide against a budget of about $39 million.
References
Colin Covert, “Tim Burton’s ‘Therapy’
Is a Creepy Keeper,” StarTribune, Octo-
ber 5, 2012, www.startribune.com/
tim-burton-s-therapy-is-a-creepy-
keeper/172682381/; Leigh Singer, “The
Magic of Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie,”
IGN, December 13, 2011, www.ign.com/
articles/2011/12/13/the-magic-of-tim-
burtons-frankenweenie; Todd McCarthy,
“Frankenweenie: Film Review,” Hollywood
Reporter, September 20, 2012, www.holly-
woodreporter.com/movie/frankenweenie/
review/372720; Michael Phillips, “Tim
Burton’s ‘Frankenweenie’: It’s Alive! Or
is it?” Chicago Tribune, October 4, 2012,
articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-10-04/
entertainment/sc-mov-1002-franken-
weenie-20121004_1_frankenweenie-
charlie-tahan-young-victor-frankenstein;
Claudia Puig, “‘Frankenweenie’ Revives
Burton’s Allure, Emotion,” USA Today,
October 4, 2012, www.usatoday.com/
story/life/movies/2012/10/03/franken-
weenie-review/1608451/; Peter Travers,
“Frankenweenie,” Rolling Stone, October
4, 2012, www.rollingstone.com/movies/
reviews/frankenweenie-20121004.
FREY, DEREK (1973–)
Head of Tim Burton Productions since
2001. Derek Frey was born on April 23,
1973, in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania. He
earned a bachelor of arts cum laude in
communication studies from West Chester
University. He began his career in the film
industry at Tim Burton Productions as an
assistant to Burton on MARS ATTACKS!
SLEEPY HOLLOW, PLANET OF THE
APES, and BIG FISH. He subsequently
worked for Burton on numerous feature
films including as associate producer on
ALICE IN WONDERLAND, DARK SHAD-
OWS, SWEENEY TODD, ABRAHAM LIN-
COLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER, CORPSE
BRIDE, and CHARLIE AND THE CHOCO-
LATE FACTORY. He served as co-producer
of FRANKENWEENIE (2012) and is cred-
ited as executive producer on BIG EYES.
His credits also include producer on the
documentary A Conversation with Danny
Elfman and Tim Burton (2011), writer of
the Frankenweenie-based short film Captain
Sparky vs. the Flying Saucers, and coeditor
of The Art of Tim Burton (2009).
He also runs his own independent
production company, Lazer Films, and
has directed his own films and music vid-
eos, including VAMPIRES KISS/BLOOD
INSIDE (2012), which includes appearance
by Tim Burton, and The Ballad of Sandeep
(2011) about actor Deep Roy. In 2013 he
directed the comedic short Sky Blue Collar,
which was awarded Best Director of a Short
Film at the 2013 Chicago Comedy Film
Festival.
References
“Derek Frey,” IMDb, www.imdb.com/
name/nm0294553/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1;
Derek Frey, Leah Gallo, and Holly Kempf,
eds., The Art of Tim Burton (n.p.: Steeles
Publishing, 2009).
FURST, ANTON (1944–1991)
Academy Award–winning production
designer of BATMAN who also designed
the film’s distinctive Batmobile, subse-
quently used in BATMAN RETURNS.
Anthony Francis Furst was born on May 6,

1944, in England, son of a Russian father
and a French mother. He studied fine art
and sculpture at the Royal College of Art,
where he graduated in 1969. An early
champion of holography, he helped popu-
larize the art form by participating in sev-
eral hologram exhibitions in the late sev-
enties. Holoco Limited, a company that
he cofounded along with Nick Phillips and
John Wolff, was among the first companies
to be involved in large-format display holo-
grams. In 1977, Holoco participated in the
first French hologram exhibition, Sculptures
de lumière, held at Strasbourg. Two large
hologram exhibitions in Britain followed,
both arranged at the Royal Academy of
Arts in London, the first in 1977 (Light
Fantastic I) the second (Light Fantastic II)
in 1978. Following the success of the Light
Fantastic exhibitions, with financing pro-
vided by several sources, including the Who
and Agfa, Holoco built a special effects
lab based at Shepperton Studios. Holoco
later contributed laser effects to Star Wars
(1977), Superman (1978), Alien (1979),
Moonraker (1979), The Final Countdown
(1980), and Outland (1981), among other
films.
Furst earned modest acclaim as a pro-
duction designer for his work on Neil Jor-
dan’s The Company of Wolves (1984). Hav-
ing seen The Company of Wolves and being
impressed by Furst’s work, Stanley Kubrick
hired Furst as production designer on his
Vietnam War film, Full Metal Jacket (1987).
Neil Jordan’s High Spirits (1988), a critical
and commercial failure, nonetheless served
as a showcase for Furst’s production design.
For his production design on Batman, his
FURST, ANTON  n  119
next film, Furst shared an Academy Award
for Best Art Direction with set decorator
Peter Young.
Ingeniously, for inspiration on the
design of Batman, Furst looked to the past.
Furst explained, “You’re designing visual
drama. Even the car. The Batmobile was
more like a knight in armor, an extension,
an expression of Batman’s costume—an
intimidating, furious war machine. We
didn’t spend much time looking at concept
cars of the future. We went back in time.
Tim Burton and I inevitably got together
because he is firm in his opinion that film
must have its own reality.”
Furst was unable to work with Bur-
ton again on Batman Returns due to con-
tractual obligations. However, in 1991,
he was hired by DC Comics to create an
architectural scheme for Gotham City.
These designs, which first appeared in Bat-
man: Legends of the Dark Knight (No. 27,
February 1992), became known as Old
Gotham City, and were used prominently
until 1998. Furst also designed Planet Hol-
lywood, the celebrity-owned restaurant in
Manhattan (relocated 2000).
In Los Angeles, on November 24, 1991,
Furst leapt to his death from the eighth
floor of a car park structure. He was forty-
seven years old.
References
“Anton Furst by Lynn Geller,” BOMB—
Artists in Conversation, Spring 1990, bomb-
magazine.org/article/1294/anton-furst;
John Wolff, Nick Phillips, and Anton Furst,
Light Fantastic (London: Bergström and
Boyle Books, 1977).
 G
A
GARDNER, CRAIG SHAW (1949–)
American novelist and short story writer,
author of the novelizations of Tim Burton’s
films BATMAN and BATMAN RETURNS.
Born on July 2, 1949, Craig Shaw Gardner
was raised in Rochester, New York. After
graduating high school in 1967, he moved to
Boston to attend Boston University, where
he earned a BS degree in broadcasting and
film. He sold his first short story in 1977, but
did not begin writing full time until 1987.
His first novel, A Malady of Magicks, was
published in 1986. A longtime resident of
Boston, in addition to his career as a writer
he is manager of a bookstore, the Million
Year Picnic, located on Harvard Square.
While known primarily as a fantasy novelist,
he has also published many short stories in
the horror genre, collected in A Cold Wind
in July (2011). His novelization of Batman
spent several weeks on the New York Times
bestseller list.
References
“Biography,” CraigShawGardner.com,
www.craigshawgardner.com/biography
.htm; Craig Shaw Gardner’s author
page, www.amazon.com/Craig-Shaw-
Gardner/e/B000APM99A/ref=sr_ntt_srch_
lnk_1?qid=1433130807&sr=8-1.
GASSNER, DENNIS (1948–)
Academy Award–winning production
designer, who worked in that capacity on
120  n 
Tim Burton’s BIG FISH. Dennis Gassner
was born October 22, 1948, in Vancouver,
British Columbia, but grew up in Oregon.
A lumberjack by age sixteen, he attended
the University of Oregon, where he was a
hard-hitting defensive end for the Oregon
Ducks, lettering in 1967, 1968, and 1969.
His brother Ken also played football at Ore-
gon, as a defensive back. Gassner graduated
from Oregon with a BS in 1970.
A student of architecture and graphic
design, he designed record album covers
before entering the film industry, working
on the ad campaign for Francis Ford Cop-
pola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), for which he
received credit as a production assistant.
Gassner continued working at Coppola’s
Zoetrope Studios for several years after, on
such features as Hammett (1982), One from
the Heart (1982), and Coppola’s highly styl-
ized S. E. Hinton adaptation, Rumble Fish
(1983), shot in black in white. He moved
into production design on The Hitcher
(1986), then followed with Field of Dreams
(1989), Bugsy (1991), Waterworld (1995),
and Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998).
Gassner won an Academy Award for
Best Art Direction–Set Decoration, with
Nancy Haigh, for their work on Barry
Levinson’s Bugsy. He has worked with the
Coen brothers on six films: Miller’s Crossing
(1990), Barton Fink (1991), The Hudsucker
Proxy (1994), O Brother, Where Art Thou?
(2000), The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001),

and The Ladykillers (2004). He was nomi-
nated for an Academy Award for Best Art
Direction–Set Decoration for Barton Fink,
as well as for Sam Mendes’s Road to Per-
dition (2002), The Golden Compass (2007),
and Into the Woods (2014). Bill Desowitz
suggests it was because of Gassner’s repu-
tation as “a master of quirky production
design” that led to him being involved in
Big Fish.
Gassner was nominated for an Art
Directors Guild Award for Excellence in
Production Design for a Contemporary
Film for his work on Quantum of Solace
(2008), later winning the award for his
work on Skyfall (2012).
References
“Dennis Gassner,” New York Times, www.
nytimes.com/movies/person/91126/Den-
nis-Gassner/biography; “Dennis Gassner,”
TCM.com, www.tcm.com/tcmdb/per-
son/69131|174802/Dennis-Gassner/biogra-
phy.html; Bill Desowitz, “Big Fish: Produc-
tion Designer Dennis Gassner,” Below the
Line, December 1, 2003, www.btlnews.com/
community/big-fish-production-designer-
dennis-gassner/; “Oregon Ducks Football
1969 Roster—Lost Lettermen.”
GEMS, JONATHAN (MALCOLM
FREDERICK) (1952–)
British playwright, screenwriter, and direc-
tor, and eldest son of popular British play-
wright Pam Gems (1925–2011), whose
plays were often constructed cinematically
with time shifts in a nonlinear narrativiza-
tion.
Born Jonathan Malcolm Frederick
Gems on January 7, 1952, Jonathan Gems
attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic
Art in 1970–1971, followed by the Exeter
College of Art, 1971–1972. His work began
to appear on the London stage in the late
1970s, not long after his mother’s earliest
plays also began appearing. His early works,
GEMS, JONATHAN  n  121
one-acts, include Jesus Rides Out (1978),
The Shithouse of the August Moon (1978),
The Dentist (1978), Rinni Bootsie Tutti
Frutti (1978), and The Tax Exile (1979), the
latter tracing “the destruction of a decent
middle-aged man by the venality of his
family.” Gems received some notice for his
next play, Naked Robots, directed by John
Caird and performed by the Royal Shake-
speare Company at the Donmar Ware-
house Theatre in January 1981. The play
dealt with the world of young London and
its concerns, including pop music, sex, and
abortion. The following year, The Paranor-
malist was produced at the Greenwich The-
atre. In Susan’s Breasts, produced in 1985
at the Royal Court Theatre, Gems exam-
ined the tensions produced by the con-
flicting demands of romance and career.
The drama centered on an old-fashioned
romantic named Lemon, who falls in love
with Susan, an aspiring actress who is
purportedly sterile. When Susan becomes
pregnant by Lemon, she faces the possibil-
ity of losing a movie role due to her preg-
nancy. Opting to further her movie career,
she decides on an abortion.
By this time, Gems had already begun
writing for films, cowriting the screenplay
for director Michael Radford’s 1984 adap-
tation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-
Four, starring John Hurt and Richard Bur-
ton. Gems had collaborated previously with
Radford on the documentary Van Morrison
in Ireland (1980), and his next project was
as coauthor of the screenplay for Radford’s
White Mischief (1987), about the decadent
lifestyle of affluent British colonialists in
Kenya’s Happy Valley that in 1941 culmi-
nated in murder.
Although MARS ATTACKS! was the
first official collaboration of Gems and
Burton, they first met and worked together,
briefly, on BATMAN (1989). Gems was
brought in to do a rewrite of Sam Hamm’s
script, but was forced to drop out due to
122  n  GEMS, JONATHAN
the 1988 Writer’s Guild of America strike
that began on March 7. Gems would later
aver that his biggest contribution dur-
ing his short time on the project was con-
vincing Burton to remove the character
of Robin. The two stayed in touch, and
eventually Burton proposed that Gems
write a script based on Edgar Allan Poe’s
“The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839).
That script became The House of Usher, a
111-page screenplay completed by Gems
in September 1989. Although Gems’s ver-
sion employs a contemporary setting,
the narrative has been clearly inspired by
Roger Corman’s 1960 version of Poe’s
tale starring VINCENT PRICE. In Gems’s
screenplay, Roderick has become Robert
(“Bob”) Usher, a man who lives with the
certainty that his family is cursed by incur-
able madness. The doleful, hypersensitive
recluse Bob is also an artist, and so believes
in his family’s hereditary curse that when
his pale, strange sister Leona begins dat-
ing a sensitive car mechanic named Sam,
he will stop at nothing to prevent them
from consummating their love, thus assur-
ing that the Usher bloodline will end with
him and his sister. Using a contemporary
setting, including a Bob’s Big Boy where
Leona works briefly as a waitress (the way
in which she meets Sam), the Usher home
is located in a Los Angeles suburb named
Burville, a thinly disguised Burbank. Rather
like Burton’s childhood home, the house
of Usher is located near a cemetery and,
unnervingly, near the runway of an airport.
Following The House of Usher, Gems
accepted Burton’s offer to write a sequel
to BEETLEJUICE. Seeking to avoid a mere
rehash of the story elements of the original,
Gems wrote BEETLEJUICE GOES HAWAI-
IAN, placing the action in an island para-
dise setting. However, once Warner Bros.
offered Burton complete artistic control
over BATMAN RETURNS (1992), Bur-
ton lost interest in making the Beetlejuice
sequel. Thus, Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian
remains unmade, but it is still owned by the
Geffen Film Company.
In 1993, Gems completed, at Burton’s
request, a screenplay adaptation of Rich-
ard Brautigan’s 1974 novel The Hawkline
Monster (subtitled “A Gothic Western”), a
Western parody about two old gunslingers
nearing retirement who are enlisted to kill
the monster who lives in the caves beneath
the basement of Miss Hawkline’s house.
Prior to Burton’s involvement, director Hal
Ashby (1929–1988) had been long attached
to the project and had persuaded Jack
Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman to play the
cowboys. Later versions had Jack Nicholson
and Harry Dean Stanton, and then Jeff and
Beau Bridges. Gems avers that the film was
very near being made, Burton having cast
Jack Nicholson and Clint Eastwood as the
gunslingers, but the project fell apart when
Eastwood left to do a different film. It, too,
remains unmade.
In this same time period, Gems also
wrote a campy screenplay for Burton titled
Go, Baby, Go, about three go-go dancers
“who are contaminated by a new weapon at
a military testing range and grow to be 300
feet tall. . . . When they start getting bigger,
the military is embarrassed by all this and
wants to wipe them out and sweep it under
the carpet.” However, when in December
1993 HBO aired a remake of 1958’s Attack
of the 50 Ft. Woman, further development
of the Go, Baby, Go project ceased.
Following the reissue of Topps’s noto-
rious 1962 Mars Attacks! trading cards
series in 1994, which serendipitously coin-
cided with the release of ED WOOD, Gems
and Burton explored the idea of a science-
fiction film about a Martian invasion of
Earth, made as Ed Wood might have made
it. Gems completed an early draft of the
script for Mars Attacks! in 1994. With the
budget reportedly surpassing $200 million,
Gems was replaced by SCOTT ALEXAN-

DER and LARRY KARASZEWSKI in an
attempt to slash the budget. Eventually,
with Warner Bros. threatening to cancel
the film, Gems came up with an accept-
able revision, and production on MARS
ATTACKS! began. Although Gems is cred-
ited with both the story and screenplay,
he dedicated his novelization of the movie
(Signet, 1996) to Burton, “who co-wrote
the screenplay and didn’t ask for a credit.”
Gems made his motion picture direc-
torial debut in 1998 with The Treat, which
he adapted from a 1982 play written by his
mother, Pam Gems. Set in the early 1920s,
the play is a Sadean comedy about the vio-
lence inflicted in a single day upon three
prostitutes in a French brothel.
References
Contemporary Dramatists, 6th ed. (Detroit:
St. James Press, 1999); Anthony C. Fer-
rante, “Hidden Gems,” Fangoria 160
(March 1997): 40–42; “Gems, Jonathan
(Malcolm Frederick) 1952–,” in Contem-
porary Authors, vol. 230 (Detroit: Gale,
2005), 158–60, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
id=GALE%7CCX3414400116&v=2.1&u
=unl_kearney&it=r&p=GVRL.CA-UNK
&sw=w&asid=aa9edea97f25eb97a4085
5ac1777367d; Dimple Godiwala, Queer
Mythologies: The Original Stageplays of Pam
Gems (Bristol: Intellect, 2006); “Jonathan
Gems,” Doollee Database, www.doollee.
com/PlaywrightsG/gems-jonathan.html;
“Jonathan Gems,” UK Screen, ukscreen.
com/goldhawk/; “Pam Gems Plays,” www.
pamgemsplays.com/Pam_Gems_Plays/
Pam_Gems_Plays.html; “The Rich-
ard Brautigan Archives,” www.brauti-
gan.cybernetic-meadows.net/tiki-index.
php?page=Film+Adaptations.
THE GIANT ZLIG
DR. SEUSS–inspired illustrated children’s
book written and illustrated by Tim Burton,
age seventeen. Pen and ink and marker on
GIESEKE, LENA  n  123
paper. Cover: 14" × 10" (35.6 × 25.4 cm).
Sheet: 12 1/4" × 18 3/4" (31.1 × 47.6 cm).
In early 1976, Burton submitted his
illustrated children’s book, The Giant Zlig,
to Walt Disney Productions hoping they
would publish it. The story is about a mon-
strous Zlig, a bully, who through a series of
misadventures, is transformed into a tiny
worm. To a kindly wizard, he expresses
remorse for his bullying ways and promises
to reform. The wizard assures the giant Zlig
that he will return him to his normal size.
Burton received a complimentary
rejection letter dated February 19, 1976,
from editor T. Jeanette Kroger, in which
she outlined her impressions of his book.
It is a fine, detailed letter. She said that the
story demonstrated “a grasp of the lan-
guage much better than I would expect
from one of today’s high school students,
despite occasional lapses in grammar and
spelling.” However, she felt that it might
be “too derivative of the Seuss works to
be marketable.” She praised his layout,
writing, “It shows good variety in point-
of-view,” a remarkably presageful observa-
tion about the work of a teenage boy who
would become a film director. Burton’s text
is indeed Seussian: “The giant Zlig went
walking one day; he told all the others, ‘get
out of my way! you all better move and let
me go through, you all better move or I’ll
step on you.’” Despite the rejection, Burton
continued to create.
References
“The Giant Zlig,” Letters of Note, www.
lettersofnote.com/2011/02/giant-zlig.
html; exhibition checklist, Tim Burton,
the Museum of Modern Art, New York,
November 22, 2009–April 26, 2010.
GIESEKE, LENA (1965–)
Tim Burton’s German-born first wife,
whom he married in London on Febru-
ary 24, 1989, during postproduction on
124  n  GILROY, DAN
BATMAN. Originally from Bremen, Ger-
many, Lena Gieseke was a student at Gold-
smith College of Art in London when she
met Tim Burton at a party. Her last public
appearance with Burton was the BATMAN
RETURNS premiere on June 16, 1992; the
marriage was dissolved soon after. After
her divorce from Burton, she subsequently
earned a BFA from the CALIFORNIA
INSTITUTE OF THE ARTS, mounts an
occasional exhibit (largely in New York),
and having remarried, now uses the profes-
sional name Lena Guimont.
References
“Information,” lenaguimont.com/index.
php/cv; “Lena Gieseke,” www.imdb.com/
name/nm3128912/bio.
GILROY, DAN(IEL CHRISTOPHER)
(1959–)
American screenwriter, son of Pulitzer
Prize–winning playwright and screen-
writer Frank D. Gilroy, younger brother
of director and screenwriter Tony Gil-
roy, contributor to action movies such as
Real Steel (2011) and The Bourne Legacy
(2012). Dan Gilroy grew up in New York
and attended Dartmouth College prior to
beginning his writing career. Gilroy’s first
produced screenplay was the science-fic-
tion thriller Freejack (1992). Nonetheless,
his films have ranged from comedy (Chas-
ers [1994]) to drama (Two for the Money
[2005]) to fantasy (The Fall [2006]). The
Bourne Legacy was made in collaboration
with his brothers, director Tony Gilroy and
film editor John Gilroy, who is his twin. He
made his directorial debut in 2014 with the
critically acclaimed film Nightcrawler, for
which he received a BAFTA Film Award
for Best Original Screenplay and an Acad-
emy Award nomination for Best Writing,
Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen.
Nightcrawler received many other nomina-
tions and awards as well.
Gilroy was one of several writers
hired by Warner Bros. to work on Bur-
ton’s unrealized Superman Lives project,
brought in after WESLEY STRICK’s ver-
sion was rejected. Gilroy, who worked
with Burton for about a year before the
project was abandoned in 1998, wrote a
version in which Superman’s alienation
is due to his ignorance of his origins.
According to Gilroy, in the late nineties
Warner Bros. was having “one misfire
after another. Films that were coming out
were not doing well, were not perform-
ing, and money became an issue, and at
the end of the day they just felt the budget
was too big and didn’t feel like they were
in a place where they could greenlight the
movie.” Sadly, the film was only weeks
away from shooting. “They built tens
of millions of dollars of sets. When they
pulled the plug, this was very far along.
The day they pulled the plug, I went out
to the valley where the production facility
was, and I walked through a building with
several hundred people working in it with
sketches and set designs. It was very far
along. We were weeks before shooting.”
References
“Dan Gilroy,” IMDb, www.imdb.com/
name/nm0319659/?ref_=nv_sr_1; Matt
Goldberg, “Screenwriter Dan Gilroy Talks
Tim Burton’s SUPERMAN LIVES; Says
They Were Weeks Away from Filming
before Being Shutdown,” Collider, collider.
com/superman-lives-details-dan-gilroy/.
GOREY, EDWARD (1925–2000)
Prolific illustrator, darkly humorous chil-
dren’s book author, prize-winning set and
costume designer for the theater, born
Edward St. John Gorey in Chicago in
1925. Gorey claimed to have had little for-
mal training as an artist, briefly attending
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
in 1943. He later studied French at Har-

vard, from which he graduated in 1950.
His pen-and-ink illustrations for books
such as The Doubtful Guest (1957) and
The Gashlycrumb Tinies (1963), with their
vaguely Victorian or early Edwardian set-
tings, were an influence on Tim Burton, as
was his invention of fanciful, albeit slightly
sinister, creatures depicted in books such
as The Wuggly Ump (1963). The influence
of Gorey can be seen in later films such as
DARK SHADOWS (2012), which draws
on imagery from The Fatal Lozenge: An
Alphabet (1960), in which, for instance, the
drawing of a slight female figure in Victo-
rian dress is shown falling from a steep cliff
illuminated by a full moon, accompanied
by the text, “The Suicide, as she is fall-
ing, / Illuminated by the moon, / Regrets
her act, and finds appalling / The thought
she will be dead so soon.” Although not
organized as an abecedary, Burton’s “THE
MELANCHOLY DEATH OF OYSTER
BOY” & OTHER STORIES (1997) partici-
pates in the tradition exemplified by works
such as Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies
that parody didactic, morally instructive
children’s tales in which violence or death
plays a central role, such as Hans Christian
Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl,” which
ends with the little girl freezing to death on
the street. A comparison of Gorey’s “K is
for Kate who was struck with an axe,” from
The Gashlycrumb Tinies to Burton’s “The
Pin Cushion Queen” from The Melancholy
Death of Oyster Boy suggests the linkage
between the two works: “Life isn’t easy / for
the Pin Cushion Queen. / When she sits on
her throne / pins push through her spleen.”
Like Edward Gorey, Tim Burton is fond of
amphigouri, the ancient Greek word used
to refer to nonsensical writing or verse, and
a word Gorey used to punning advantage
in the first major anthology of his works,
Amphigorey (1972). A dozen of the mor-
bid figures from “The Melancholy Death of
Oyster Boy” & Other Stories were issued as
GOUGH, MICHAEL  n  125
maquettes; see TIM BURTON’S TRAGIC
TOYS FOR BOYS AND GIRLS.
The long-running PBS series Mystery!
which began airing in 1980, used anima-
tions of some of Gorey’s drawings for its
opening and closing title sequences. Begin-
ning in 1981, VINCENT PRICE became
the series host, remaining so until 1989.
Gorey’s characteristic black-and-white style
is one of the influences on Burton’s early
short film VINCENT (1982), as is Gorey’s
use of rhyming couplets used in the short’s
voice-over narration, written by Burton,
and read by Vincent Price.
References
Michelle Ann Abate, Bloody Murder: The
Homicide Tradition in Children’s Litera-
ture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2013); Tim Burton, “The Melancholy
Death of Oyster Boy” & Other Stories (New
York: HarperCollins, 1997); Edward Gorey,
The Gashlycrumb Tinies, or, After the Out-
ing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963);
Eden Lee Lackner, “A Monstrous Child-
hood: Edward Gorey’s Influence on Tim
Burton’s ‘The Melancholy Death of Oyster
Boy,’” in Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, ed.,
The Works of Tim Burton: Margins to Main-
stream (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2013), 151–64; “Biography,” the Edward
Gorey House, www.edwardgoreyhouse.org/
biography#sthash.6bD6aHPg.dpuf.
GOUGH, MICHAEL (1916–2011)
Born in British Malaya (now Malaysia),
Gough enjoyed a long career on stage and
screen that saw him playing the most varied
of possible roles suitable to genteel English
men. Gough studied at the Old Vic and
acted on the London stage immediately
before and after World War II. His first film
appearance was as Nicholai in British Lion’s
Anna Karenina (1948, Julien Duvivier). He
alternated between substantial roles on
stage (equal parts Shakespeare as Ionesco
126  n  GRAHAME-SMITH, SETH
and Brecht) and consistent character act-
ing on screen. In film, his most consistently
fleshed-out roles are in horror and thriller
productions, many produced by Hammer
Studios. According to Peter Hutchings, “he
often showed up as an outright villain and
delivered his roles with some relish.” His
realization of Dr. Christian Storm in Horror
Hospital (1973, Antony Balch) is illustrative
of the disreputable strain of roles that mark
much of his film work of the 1960s and
1970s. Storm is a prototypical mad doctor
who regards threats with piercing severity.
Wheelchair bound, he surrounds himself
and the grounds of his estate with murder-
ous henchmen. As played by Gough, he is
sinister and campy (a preferred method of
murder is a Rolls-Royce limousine with a
blade fixed to the side, for drive-by decapi-
tations). However, Gough was a strong
enough actor to change tone and technique
as warranted by the project. His Tom Bran-
gwen (father of Gudrun and Ursula) in
Ken Russell’s adaptation of Women in Love
(1969) represents the height of aspiring
bourgeois respectability, against which the
sisters rebel in their ongoing search for love
and fulfillment.
Like VINCENT PRICE, Gough con-
nects Tim Burton’s films to a lost era of
Gothic cinema. But, as with Price, the
popularity and longevity of Burton’s films
gave Gough some of his most memorable
roles. Gough portrayed Alfred Pennyworth,
Batman’s butler and personal confidant, in
both BATMAN and BATMAN RETURNS,
as well as in the subsequent films BATMAN
FOREVER (1995) and Batman & Robin
(1997). Gough’s Alfred uses dry humor
and an ironic tone to subtly force Bruce
Wayne (MICHAEL KEATON) to think
about his choices, in the process cluing the
audience in to how he transcends his role
as mere servant. Gough later came out of
retirement to play Notary Hardenbrook in
SLEEPY HOLLOW (1999) and later voiced
characters in CORPSE BRIDE (2005) and
ALICE IN WONDERLAND (2010) before
his death at age ninety-four in 2011.—
Kevin M. Flanagan
References
“Gough, Michael,” in Contemporary
Theatre, Film and Television, vol. 55, ed.
Thomas Riggs (Detroit: Gale, 2004), 78–82;
Peter Hutchings, “Gough, Michael,” in The
A to Z of Horror Cinema (Lanham, MD:
Scarecrow Press, 2009), 150; Jim Smith and
J. Clive Matthews, Tim Burton, Virgin Film
Series (London: Virgin Books, 2007), 87.
GRAHAME-SMITH, SETH (1976–)
Nom de plume of best-selling author and
screenwriter Seth Jared Greenberg, screen-
writer of the Burton-produced pseudo-
biographical action-horror mashup ABRA-
HAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER and
Burton’s DARK SHADOWS. Grahame-
Smith grew up in Connecticut, living in
Weston and, later, Bethel, about sixty miles
northeast of New York City, where he
attended Bethel High School. After gradu-
ating in 1994, Grahame-Smith moved to
Boston to study film at Emerson College.
Completing his degree there in 1998, he
moved to Los Angeles. Working in televi-
sion, Grahame-Smith served as a producer
and writer for such shows as the History
Channel’s History’s Mysteries. But he soon
became a freelance writer.
His career breakthrough came in 2009,
when Quirk Books editor Jason Rekulak
presented Grahame-Smith with an idea for
a literary mash-up, combining the great
Jane Austen classic Pride and Prejudice
with zombies. The resulting novel, Pride
and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) became
a best seller, selling more than 1 million
copies, and was translated into twenty lan-
guages. In 2010, Grahame-Smith published
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which
also proved to be a best seller. This concept

novel revolved around the discovery of the
late president’s diary, which revealed that
Lincoln had not only fought the evils of
slavery, but vampires as well.
Reference
“Seth Grahame-Smith,” Bio, www.
biography.com/people/seth-grahame-
smith-20854373.
GRANGEL, CARLOS (1963–)
Award-winning animated feature film char-
acter designer, born Carlos Grangel Gómez
in Barcelona, Spain, on October 17, 1963.
In addition to his work as a comics illustra-
tor, he has illustrated children’s books and
greeting cards. He began his career drawing
for European comics publishers through
studios like Sanchís Bonet, Comicup, and
Comicon in Barcelona. From 1981 to 1983,
he drew for the German comics Fix und
Foxi as well as the hugely popular Ger-
man comics magazine Knax. In addition,
he worked for the Spanish publishers Dru-
ida and Bruguera on series such as Tom
and Jerry, Yogi Bear, and The Flintstones.
After completing his military service, he
illustrated Winnie the Pooh stories for the
Danish publisher Gutenberghus from 1984
to 1986, followed by Br’er Rabbit stories
for the Dutch Donald Duck weekly, Kalle
Anka & C:o, from 1986 to 1990. During
this period he also drew new Rolf Kauka
(creator of Fix und Foxi) comics for Pabel
Verlag. In addition, he drew illustrations
for children’s books and greeting cards.
GRANGEL, CARLOS  n  127
Deciding to further his knowledge,
he took a course in animation techniques,
graduating in 1989. Subsequently, he took
samples of his work to Amblimation, the
animation production arm of Steven Spiel-
berg’s Amblin Entertainment located in
London, and soon started working there
as a character designer for We’re Back! A
Dinosaur’s Story (1993) and Balto (1995).
After Amblimation was shut down in 1997,
Grangel joined DreamWorks Animation as
a character designer on projects such as The
Prince of Egypt (1998), Spirit: Stallion of the
Cimarron (2002), and Sinbad: Legend of the
Seven Seas (2003). In 2002, Grangel won an
Annie Award from the Hollywood Interna-
tional Animated Film Society (ASIFA) for
Character Design for the film Spirit: Stal-
lion of the Cimarron, and subsequently was
nominated for another ASIFA for Charac-
ter Design for the feature film Shark Tale
(2004). In 2005, he received a Reuben
Award nomination from the National Car-
toonists Society (USA) for Tim Burton’s
CORPSE BRIDE.
He has operated the Barcelona-based
Grangel Studio with his brother Jordi for
over twenty years.
References
“Carlos Grangel,” CTN Animation Expo,
www.ctnanimationexpo.com/carlos-
grangel#sthash.QQVYGoqx.dpuf; “Car-
los Grangel,” Lambiek, www.lambiek.net/
artists/g/grangel_carlos.htm; Grangel Stu-
dio’s website, www.grangelstudio.com.

HANSEL AND GRETEL (US 1982)
D irector : Tim Burton. S creenplay : Julie
Hickson. E xecutive P roducer : Julie
Hickson. A ssociate P roducer : Geoff
Bennett. P roducer : Rick Heinrichs.
Production Design: Tim Burton. Music:
Johnny Costa. Cinematography: Victor
Abdalov. Editors: Paul Dougherty, Chris
Roth, Michael Stringer. Art Direction:
Clark Hunter. Makeup: Felice Fassnacht.
Stop-Motion Animators: Stephen Chi-
odo, Rick Heinrichs. Wardrobe: Linnea
Olson. T echnical D irector : Stephen
Chiodo. P roduction C oordinator :
Clark Hunter. P roduction C onsul -
tant /P uppets : Kelly Kimball. P uppeteer :
Joe Ranft. Production Assistant: Lesley
Mallgrave. Special Thanks: Chris Miller,
Carla Fallberg, Ellerine Harding, Laurie
Kimball, Tisha Komiga, Chris Regan,
Myra Rosenthal, Harry Sabin, Henry
Selick, Kathy Zielinski.
Cast: Vincent Price (Host), Michael Yama
(Stepmother/Wicked Witch), Andy
Lee (Hansel), Alison Hong (Gretel), Jim
Ishida (Father), BamBam the Ginger-
bread Man (voice) (David Koenigsberg).
Running Time: 35 minutes. Color.
Released Through: Disney Channel.
Early live-action short directed by Tim Bur-
ton that aired on the Disney Channel twice
in late October 1983: on Saturday, Octo-
128  n 
H
A
ber 29, and on Monday, October 31 (Hal-
loween). On both occasions it was shown
in conjunction with Vincent as part of the
Disney Channel’s Disney Studio Showcase, a
program that was hosted, in this instance, by
VINCENT PRICE. According to the Disney
Channel Magazine, Vincent aired first, fol-
lowed by Price explaining “the fascination
of frightening tales and characters” before
he then introduced Hansel and Gretel. After-
ward, Hansel and Gretel remained unseen
until it was shown as part of the Museum
of Modern Art’s 2009–2010 exhibition, Tim
Burton. In 2014, the short film was finally
released on YouTube. Several sources indi-
cate a running time of forty-five minutes;
although the version of the film posted on
YouTube runs thirty-four minutes and sev-
enteen seconds, most of the end credits are
cut off, so the thirty-five-minute running
time seems more accurate. The first airing
of Hansel and Gretel was 10:30 p.m. East-
ern in a half-hour time slot—in its first year
(1983–1984) the Disney Channel signed off
at 11:00 p.m. Eastern. Given the fact that
Hansel and Gretel aired after Vincent (six
minutes, twenty-five seconds) and after a
short lecture by Vincent Price (see earlier
discussion) even before he introduced the
film, forty-five minutes therefore represents
a closer approximation of the running time
allotted to both Hansel and Gretel, Vincent,
and Vincent Price’s introduction.

Extremely rare still of Tim Burton directing Andy Lee in Hansel and Gretel (1983).
Many of Burton’s films draw inspira-
tion from fairy-tale types and motifs, and
this short piece once again demonstrates
the director’s long-standing fascination
with folklore and dark children’s stories.
This specific tale of Hansel and Gretel
is classified by folklorists under Aarne-
Thompson-Uther tale type 327, the central
theme being children escaping from an
ogre or other supernatural creature. Bur-
ton’s adaptation is largely faithful to Jacob
and Wilhem Grimm’s version, in which
a boy and girl are led into the woods and
abandoned by their parents. The father
does so reluctantly, caving to his wife’s
demands that they sacrifice their children
to avoid starvation. The children navigate
the woods to a house made of sugar, owned
by a witch who intends to eat them. The
children escape by pushing the witch into
her own stove, then ride a duck across a
river to their home. They also happen to
stumble upon a large fortune in the witch’s
lair, which frees their family from poverty.
HANSEL AND GRETEL  n  129
As it happens, the mother has died inexpli-
cably during the children’s absence, which
suggests a thematic parallel between her
and the witch. In Burton’s version, Michael
Yama plays both the Stepmother and the
Wicked Witch, cementing the parallel
between the two characters.
Burton’s most significant contribution
to the tale’s tradition lies in his portrayal
of the father as an unappreciated artist,
rather than a woodcutter as in the Brothers
Grimm version. The father works as a toy-
maker who continually comes home with
little or no income from his trips to town.
The children’s mother, consistent with the
Grimm version, is angry and abusive. Not
only does she strike the father repeatedly,
but she also berates the father’s trade and
his failure to provide. The decision to cast
the same actor, Michael Yama, as both
witch and mother or stepmother indi-
cates Burton’s awareness of the Grimms’s
subtle suggestion that they may have been
the same person. At the very least, the tale
130  n  HARTMAN, PHIL
follows a common motif in that the moth-
ers or stepmothers often compete with
their own children for male attention and
resources, often willing to sacrifice anyone
in order to ensure their own survival.
Artistically, the film is awash in the
style Burton would develop for films like
PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE and BEE-
TLEJUICE, including heavy black-and-
white contrasts, striped objects, spirals,
other odd shapes, and a generally surreal
landscape that presents warped subver-
sions of familiar childhood imagery. For
instance, Hansel is forced to devour Bam-
Bam, a menacing, talking gingerbread man,
and once Gretel has killed the witch, the
entire house begins to bleed rainbow colors
as it melts into itself.
Much like the father, Burton invested a
significant deal of his own time and energy
into the production, making a number of
props. According to the Museum of Mod-
ern Art’s (MoMA’s) description of the pro-
duction, Burton “created over 500 pieces of
concept and storyboard art, designed toys,
and got down on his hands and knees to
draw parts of the set for this mostly hand-
crafted production.” The film’s props and
artistic effects include a duck that turns
into an upright walking robot, children’s
beds that sprout candy cane claws, marsh-
mallow bedposts that turn into eyes, and
a witch who wears sunglasses and a candy
cane for a nose. Interestingly, the jazz-
inspired musical score for Hansel and Gretel
was performed by jazz great Johnny Costa
(1922–1996), the renowned pianist best
known for his work as the musical director
for the long-running PBS children’s televi-
sion program Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
Burton’s use of hand puppets in Hansel and
Gretel may have been inspired by Mister
Rogers’ Neighborhood as well.
Hansel and Gretel is significant because
it clearly shows Burton’s signature imagery
as well as a tendency throughout his works
to idealize artists and inventors. In the
November 2009 issue of Modern Painters,
published to coincide with the opening of
MoMA’s Burton exhibit, Marina Cashdan
describes it as “twisted, perverted fun—
animation come to life,” an “embryonic
Burton gem, rich with stylistic choices that
would later become his hallmark: intri-
cately textured set decoration and visu-
ally compelling, often surreal scenes that
always have an element of cynical humor.”
Although Burton may have buried this
work, it nonetheless serves as a useful snap-
shot of the director’s early professional
career and a portal into this stage in his
artistic and directorial development.
References
Marina Cashdan, “Tim Burton: Hailing
Filmdom’s Oddest Artist,” Modern Paint-
ers 21, no. 8 (November 2009): 52; Dis-
ney Channel Magazine, October 1983, 21;
Hans-Jörg Uther, The Types of International
Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography,
Parts I–III (Helsinki: Academia Scien-
tiarum Fennica, 2004).
HARTMAN, PHIL (1948–1998)
Actor, comedian, voice actor, writer, and
graphic artist, early collaborator with PAUL
REUBENS and important coauthor of PEE-
WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE. Philip Edward
Hartmann (the second n was eventually
dropped) was born in Brantford, Ontario,
Canada, on September 24, 1948. His fam-
ily moved to the United States in the late
1950s, first to Connecticut and later to
California. Hartman attended Westchester
High School (now Westchester Enriched
Sciences Magnets) and after graduation
studied art at Santa Monica City College.
After a couple of years, he dropped out
to become a roadie. In 1972, he returned
to college, enrolling at California State
University, Northridge, where he studied
graphic arts. He soon formed a graphic arts

company and created over forty album cov-
ers for various bands.
Restless, in 1975 he joined the impro-
visational comedy group the Groundlings,
remaining a member until 1986. Hartman
met Paul Reubens and the two became
friends. Hartman, along with Reubens, cre-
ated the Pee-Wee Herman character and
developed The Pee-Wee Herman Show,
a stage performance that was eventually
filmed, airing on HBO in 1981. Hartman
played Captain Carl in the original Pee-Wee
Herman Show and later reprised the role for
Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. He and Reubens also
collaborated with MICHAEL VARHOL on
the screenplay to Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.
Hartman’s production of Olympic Trials: A
Chick Hazzard Mystery, in which he starred
as detective Chick Hazzard, was chosen to
represent the Groundlings in the 1984 Los
Angeles Theatre Olympics.
Hartman became famous during his
eight years on Saturday Night Live, which
he joined as a cast member in 1986. While
he did many impressions, among them Phil
Donahue, Frank Sinatra, and Ed McMa-
hon, perhaps his best-known impression
was Bill Clinton. He also created the char-
acters Cirroc the Unfrozen Caveman Law-
yer, Eugene the Anal Retentive Chef, and
Frankenstein. After leaving Saturday Night
Live in 1994, Hartman joined the ensemble
cast on the NBC sitcom NewsRadio (1995–
1999), portraying the self-centered, ego-
centric, cowardly radio news anchor Evelyn
William “Bill” McNeal. Although the series
was critically acclaimed, it was never a hit,
but still managed to hang on for five sea-
sons. And although the show was renewed
for a fifth season, Hartman died before pro-
duction began on the show’s last year. In
addition to appearing in many films, Hart-
man was also a voice actor. He provided
the voices for numerous characters on The
Simpsons as well as other cartoons, includ-
ing The Smurfs, Challenge of the GoBots,
HEINRICHS, RICK  n  131
and The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo. He also
provided voice-overs for television com-
mercials.
Hartman’s troubled third marriage,
to former model Brynn Omdahl, ended in
tragedy when Omdahl shot and killed Hart-
man, and then herself, in the early morning
hours of May 28, 1998. The Groundlings
Theatre was dedicated to his memory in
1999.
References
“Alumni,” The Groundlings Theatre &
School, www.groundlings.com/performers/
performer-details.aspx?performerID=153;
Mike Thomas, You Might Remember Me:
The Life and Times of Phil Hartman (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014).
HEINRICHS, RICK (CA. 1953–)
Academy Award–winning production
designer, art director, and visual effects
artist, and frequent Tim Burton collabora-
tor. Born in San Rafael, California, Hein-
richs became interested in art and design
at an early age. Heinrichs attended Phil-
lips Exeter Academy, followed by Boston
University’s College of Visual Arts, where
he concentrated on sculpting. After gradu-
ating and spending some time in Europe,
Heinrichs moved to New York City,
where he studied with legendary cartoon-
ists Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner at
the School of Visual Arts. He continued
his animation studies at the California
Institute of the Arts before being hired
by the Walt Disney Company in 1979.
He spent four months at Disney’s WED
Enterprises, for whom he did sculpting
for theme park audio-animatronic fig-
ures. In 1981, he met Tim Burton, and
they began working together, first on a
project titled TRICK OR TREAT, which
was subsequently abandoned. Heinrichs
then worked with Burton on VINCENT,
serving as producer, art director, and set
132  n  HERE WITH ME
builder. Collaborations on HANSEL AND
GRETEL and FRANKENWEENIE fol-
lowed, with Heinrichs later working on
models and effects for ALADDIN AND
HIS WONDERFUL LAMP, and as ani-
mated effects supervisor on PEE-WEE’S
BIG ADVENTURE. After starting his own
company, Animotion, Heinrichs worked
on models and animated effects for Bur-
ton’s Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and directed
a number of rock videos and commercials.
He did stop-motion for The Adventures of
Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension
(1984) and did the special effects for Tim
Burton’s Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode,
“THE JAR” (1986). He later pursued his
interest in animation-aided special effects
with a visual effects consulting role on
Burton’s BEETLEJUICE.
Heinrichs made his debut as set
designer with Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters
II (1989), followed by EDWARD SCIS-
SORHANDS. He served as art director on
BATMAN RETURNS, Last Action Hero,
and Tall Tale, and his first job as produc-
tion designer was for Joel and Ethan Coen’s
Fargo (1996), which he followed with The
Big Lebowski (1998). Later collaborations
with Burton include SLEEPY HOLLOW,
PLANET OF THE APES, the feature-length
version of FRANKENWEENIE, and DARK
SHADOWS.
Heinrichs has received three Oscar
nominations for Best Achievement in Art
Direction: Sleepy Hollow (1999), Lemony
Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events
(2004), and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead
Man’s Chest (2006). He won an Academy
Award for Sleepy Hollow, which he shared
with Peter Young.
References
“Rick Heinrichs: Production Designer,”
WBI, 5dinstitute.org/people/rick-heinrichs;
“Rick Heinrichs,” Film Reference, www.
filmreference.com/film/56/Rick-Heinrichs.
html; “Rick Heinrichs,” production infor-
mation (press kit), Batman Returns.
HERE WITH ME (UK 2012)
Director: Tim Burton. Executive Produc-
ers: Hannah Cooper, Derek Frey, Tim
Burton. Music: the Killers. Cinematogra-
phy: Tom Townend. Editor: Chris Leb-
enzon. Production Manager: Alex Bed-
ford. Art Direction: David Balfour. Unit
Stills Photographer: Leah Gallo. Special
E ffects C onsultant : Joss Williams.
Stunt Coordinator: Eunice Huthart.
Cast: Craig Roberts, Winona Ryder, the
Killers (Brandon Flowers, Dave Keun-
ing, Mark Stoermer, Ronnie Vannucci
Jr.), Aiko Horiuchi, Glen Mexted,
Sabrina Lecordier, Valery Nuttall, Gina
Deuters.
R unning T ime : 4 minutes, 57 seconds.
Color.
Released Through: th2ng and Tim Burton
Productions.
Music video released in December 2012
written and directed by Burton to pro-
mote the single “Here with Me” from the
Killers’ album Battle Born (2012). Shot in
November 2012 using various locations
around Blackpool, the short features a
live performance by the Killers on stage at
the Blackpool Tower Ballroom. The video
stars Winona Ryder and the young Welsh
actor Craig Roberts, who becomes obsessed
with Ryder’s wax figure. Burton described
the origin of the video as a series of loose
associations: “When I heard the song ‘Here
With Me,’ I remembered seeing a wax fig-
ure of Winona [Ryder] in Louis Tussaud’s
Waxworks in Blackpool. The concept of
the video is inspired by the 1935 film Mad
Love, starring Peter Lorre, as well as the
works of Mario Bava.” He also explains,
“The first time I saw The Killers perform
live was in Blackpool.” The film to which

Burton alludes, Mad Love, is a story of
obsession, in which a bald Peter Lorre plays
Dr. Gogol, a physician who is obsessed
with married actress Yvonne Orlac (Fran-
ces Drake). When her piano-playing hus-
band’s, Stephen’s, hands are crushed in a
train accident, the desperate Yvonne takes
him to Dr. Gogol, who assures her he can
repair them. In a bizarre twist, Gogol surgi-
cally replaces Stephen’s hands with those of
a murderous knife thrower. The Bava influ-
ence probably determined Burton’s deci-
sion to make the Winona Ryder character
a blonde, in homage to the ghostly blonde-
haired girl in Bava’s Kill, Baby, Kill (1966).
The imagery seems inspired as well by the
myth of Pygmalion, about an artist who fell
madly in love with the statue he had cre-
ated, and which, in answer to his prayers,
comes to life. But in “Here with Me” it
remains only a vain wish, because the
statue—a wax figure in this case—comes to
life only in his protagonist’s imagination.
Burton’s narrative loosely adheres to the
song’s lyrics, in which the vocalist expresses
his desire not to have a mere reproduction
of his lover’s image, not her picture, but for
her to be “here with me.” Although obvi-
ously a promotional video for the Killers,
the video speaks to a recurring theme in
Burton’s work, the incompatibility of art
and life.
Burton had previously worked with
th1ng (pronounced “thing one”), the Soho-
based animation, graphics, and mixed media
production company, as the company had
created the title sequences for several of his
films, including FRANKENWEENIE, DARK
SHADOWS, SWEENEY TODD, and BAT-
MAN. th2ng (thing two), the live-action sis-
ter company to th1ng, opened in 2009 and is
run by Hannah Cooper.
References
“The Killers Unveil Tim Burton Directed
Video,” NME, December 14, 2012, nme.
HICKSON, JULIE  n  133
com/news/the-killers/67733#Vt6ka4pzfHv7
1yzS.99; “th2ng Produces The Killers ‘Here
With Me’ for Tim Burton and Mercury
Records,” InSocial, April 25, 2013, insocial.
pressitt.com/smnr/th2ng-produces-The-
Killers-Here-With-Me-for-Tim-Burton-
and-Mercury-Records-/17156/.
HICKSON JULIE (CA. 1950–)
Producer, screenwriter, creative collabora-
tor with Tim Burton on several early proj-
ects at Disney in the early 1980s. Hickson
had been an executive in Disney’s story
department for two years when she met
Burton in 1982, during a meeting about
TRICK OR TREAT, a film project that
was eventually abandoned. After Trick or
Treat, they continued working together,
and Burton was able to make his short film
VINCENT with assistance from Hickson,
although she did not produce it. After Vin-
cent was completed, in 1983 she and Burton
developed HANSEL AND GRETEL for the
Disney Channel, for which Hickson served
as executive producer and wrote the tele-
play. When RICHARD BERGER approved
the production of FRANKENWEENIE (at
approximately $1 million), Hickson left
the story department and became the pro-
ducer of the film. While she and Burton
both wanted to use the original Strickfad-
den equipment from Universal’s Franken-
stein (1931), Hickson was instrumental in
acquiring it for the film. Frankenweenie
would prove to be the final completed
project on which she and Burton would
collaborate. In 1985, while Tim Burton was
finishing PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE,
Hickson attempted to develop a project at
Warner Bros., titled True Love, for which
she wrote the screenplay, perhaps a project
intended for Tim Burton to direct. Also in
1985, she and Burton coauthored a treat-
ment of BATMAN, dated October 21, 1985.
It proved to be the last project on which
they worked as a team.
134  n  HOFFA
In 1993, Hickson was selected as a
directing fellow by the Sundance Film Insti-
tute for its thirteenth annual filmmakers
laboratory, where she developed her direct-
ing skills in the Directors Lab on the short
fantasy film, Memoirs of a Midget, for which
she also wrote the adaptation, from Walter
de la Mare’s 1921 novel. She followed this
film with another directorial effort, Fish-
ing with George, based on the short story
by Rebecca Rule, a thirty-minute short
produced at Disney Studios. She returned
to screenwriting with Homeward Bound II:
Lost in San Francisco (1996), and the tele-
play Snow White: The Fairest of Them All
(2001), the latter her second adaptation of
a Brothers Grimm story. Snow White was
cowritten with EDWARD SCISSORHANDS
author CAROLINE THOMPSON.
References
John Evan Frook, “Sundance Picks Fel-
lows,” Variety, May 3, 1993, variety.com/
1993/film/markets-festivals/sundance-
picks-fellows-106464/; “Julie Hick-
son,” IMDb, www.imdb.com/name/
nm0382997/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1; Michael
Mayo, “Frankenweenie,” Cinefantastique
15, no. 2 (May 1985): 4–5, 61.
HOFFA (US/FRANCE 1992)
D irector : Danny DeVito. S creenplay :
David Mamet. Producer: Joseph Isgro.
P roducers : Caldecot Chubb, Danny
DeVito, Edward R. Pressman. C o -
producer: Harold Schneider. Associate
P roducers : William Barclay Malcolm,
David Mamet. Cinematography: Stephen
H. Burum. Production Design: Ida Ran-
dom. Editors: Lynzee Klingman, Ronald
Roose. Art Direction: Gary Wissner.
Set Decoration: Brian Savegar. Costume
Design: Deborah Lynn Scott. Supervising
Make-Up Artist: Ve Neill. First Assistant
D irector : Ned Dowd. S econd A ssis -
tant Director: B. Scott Senechal. Music:
David Newman.
Cast: Jack Nicholson (James R. “Jimmy”
Hoffa; Danny DeVito (Robert “Bobby”
Ciaro), Armand Assante (Carol “Dally”
D’Allesandro, J. T. Walsh (Frank
Fitzsimmons), John C. Reilly (Peter
“Pete” Connelly), Frank Whaley
(Trucker in Diner), Kevin Anderson
(Robert F. Kennedy), John P. Ryan (Red
Bennett), Robert Prosky (Billy Flynn),
Natalia Nogulich (Josephine Hoffa),
Nicholas Pryor (Hoffa’s Attorney), Paul
Guilfoyle (Ted Harmon), Karen Young
(Young Woman at RTA), Cliff Gorman
(Solly Stein), Tim Burton (Corpse).
Running Time: 140 minutes. Color.
Released Through:20th Century Fox, Jer-
sey Films, and Canal+. Executive.
A 1992 biopic written by David Mamet
and directed by DANNY D eVITO about
Teamsters Union leader Jimmy Hoffa.
BATMAN’s JACK NICHOLSON plays
Hoffa, while BATMAN RETURNS’ DeVito
plays Hoffa’s fictional longtime associ-
ate Robert “Bobby” Ciaro. Hoffa’s story
is reconstructed primarily through flash-
backs, ending with a speculative dramati-
zation of Hoffa’s murder and still unsolved
disappearance. One flashback depicts a
Teamsters’ strike that took place in the
mid-1930s; in the ensuing violence, several
men were killed. During a funeral service
honoring the men killed in the strike, at
about the film’s forty-two-minute mark,
Tim Burton, as one of the dead, appears
lying in a coffin. Filmed after shooting on
Batman Returns had concluded, director
Danny DeVito, who had played the Pen-
guin, enlisted Burton to play the cameo
role. Behind-the-scenes footage of DeVito
directing Burton in the scene is available
on the web.
 HOLLYWOOD CHEWING GUM COMMERCIAL  n  135
References
Russ Fischer, “Trivia: See Behind the Scenes
of Tim Burton’s Brief 1992 Cameo in
‘Hoffa,’ Slashfilm (blog), October 8, 2012,
www.slashfilm.com/trivia-see-behind-the-
scenes-of-tim-burtons-brief-1992-cam-
eo-in-hoffa/; “Tim Burton Walk-On Role
(Hoffa),” YouTube video, www.youtube.
com/watch?v=1wtxpiNEjdI; “Hoffa,”
IMDb, www.imdb.com/title/tt0104427/.
HOLLYWOOD CHEWING GUM
COMMERCIAL (1998)
Tim Burton’s first television commercial,
made in France in 1998, for Hollywood
Chewing Gum. The forty-five-second TV
spot was devised by the French advertis-
ing agency BETC Euro RSCG, and features
a mischievous garden gnome escaping the
city by hitching a ride on a garbage truck,
and discovering a nude woman, highly
evocative of the Disney character Snow
White, bathing in an idyllic pond in an
enchanted forest. Delighted, the gnome
strips off his clothes and dives into the
pond with her. The commercial concludes
with Hollywood Gum’s longtime slogan,
Fraîcheur de vivre (“Freshness of life”). The
Snow White figure was played by French
chanteuse Anne Meson (born 1975), who
had been the French teen ambassador for
Disney for seven years (1989–1995). Thus,
the commercial is wonderfully polysemous,
using to punning advantage Burton’s own
history with Disney, the gnome as a kind of
wickedly revised dwarf, and an actress who,
for French viewers, had been long associ-
ated with Disney.
Reference
Robert Goldrich, “An Agency Perspec-
tive on the French Market,” Shootonline.
com, October 1, 2005, shootonline.com/
node/33151.

IN THE DIRECTOR’S CHAIR: THE
MAN WHO INVENTED EDWARD
SCISSORHANDS (US 1990)
Director: Roland Mesa. Screenplay: Mar-
shall Brutus Drazen. E xecutive P ro -
ducer : Geoffrey Ammer. P roducers :
Tom Andrews, Thomas Grane. Co-
producers : Mark Freedman, Michael
Simmons. A ssociate P roducer : Diane
Minter. C inematography : Jose Louis
Mignone. Editor: Tim Taylor. Produc-
tion Design: Robert Fox. First Assistant
Director: Eric Small. Second Assistant
Director: Ted Diamandopoulou. Sec-
ond Second Assistant Director: Scott
Paridon. P roduction C oordinator :
Richard Pomerans.
C a s t : Will Lyman (Narrator), Ben
McCreary (Young Tim), Elizabeth
MacDonald (Mom), Biff Yeager (Dad),
Patrick LaBrecque (Brother), Amy
M. Allen (Sister), Hannah Eckstein
(Aunt), Jimm Giannini (Uncle), Dawn
Eash (Girl Next Door), Glenn Shadix
(Clown), Stuart Lancaster (Neighbor),
Jim Brown (Tormented Siamese Twin),
Heather Thomas (Tormented Siamese
Twin), Tim Burton (The Director), Alan
Arkin (Himself), Geena Davis (Herself),
Johnny Depp (Himself), Danny Elf-
man (Himself), Jeffrey Jones (Himself),
Bob Kane (Himself), Michael Keaton
(Himself), Catherine O’Hara (Herself),
Vincent Price (Himself), Paul Reubens
(Himself), Joe Roth (Himself), Winona
136  n 
AI
Ryder (Herself), Dianne Wiest (Her-
self), Stan Winston (Himself).
Running Time: 26 minutes. Color.
Released Through: Extended Wings–20th
Century Fox Film Corporation.
HBO special that premiered in Novem-
ber 1990 promoting EDWARD SCIS-
SORHANDS. It is a tongue-in-cheek, mock
documentary on the life of Tim Burton,
interspersed with faux home movie foot-
age and mock interviews with parents
and neighbors as well as past and present
Burton creative associates, including those
actors and actresses appearing in Edward
Scissorhands. Released slightly over a year
after BATMAN, the film reveals the extent
to which Burton’s life already had been
largely mythologized.
Reference
“Tim Burton Mockumentary Documentary
1990—Part 1 of 3,” YouTube video, www.
youtube.com/watch?v=_6ly_-3TLYU.
IRVING, WASHINGTON
(1783–1859)
Early American writer perhaps most
famous for the tale, “The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow.” Washington Irving was a criti-
cal and commercial success in his day, and
left behind an actionable template for how
to go about a life of writing. Biographer

Charles Dudley Warner notes that “he was
the first to lift American literature into the
popular respect of Europe, so for a long
time he was the chief representative of the
American name in the world of letters.”
Irving was named after General George
Washington, the hero of the American
Revolution. The association is fitting, since
by the time of his death, Washington Irving
was as synonymous with the articulation
of American cultural sensibilities as was
George Washington.
Irving wrote in many genres and fre-
quently diminished the outward novelty
of his work by couching it with antiquated
traditions. For Michael T. Gilmore, this
meant a tempering of his popularity and
capacity for innovation with “the ‘residual’
features of eighteenth-century culture:
anonymity, collaboration, regard for factu-
ality coupled with uneasiness about origi-
nality, and an understanding of literature
as communal possession.” Despite occa-
sional writings for periodicals (undertaken
as an amateur, as a dalliance, before taking
up the study of law), Irving’s first major
success was A History of New York (1809),
a satirical send-up to the ubiquitous travel
and historical works that were increasingly
popular among readers eager to ascer-
tain the distinctions of the newly formed
United States. Irving published the book,
retained his copyright, and promoted to
newspapers, in the process securing wealth
for himself and fame for the persona of
his chosen narrator, a doting old gentle-
man called Diedrich Knickerbocker. He
never did establish himself as a lawyer and
instead focused on writing. Irving was able
to speak to a wide audience thanks to his
editorship of Analectic magazine, “a typical
miscellany [that] treated literature as pub-
lic property owing an obligation to civic
IRVING, WASHINGTON  n  137
welfare.” Such publications defined the lit-
erary culture of the day, and occasionally
expanded it.
Knickerbocker becomes the occasional
mouthpiece for stories in Irving’s greatest
work, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon,
Gent. (1820), a series of short stories/
sketches as narrated by the humorous man-
of-leisure Crayon (who makes occasional
recourse to Knickerbocker’s “papers” in
order to relate fantastic tales such as “The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow”). By the time
of his Sketch Book, Irving was a full-time
writer who could make a living from his
words. He wrote for a willing public, con-
trolled how his work was priced, and spoke
to constituencies beyond a native audience.
Yet, despite the pleasures and security that
Irving derived from writing, he maintained
civic ambitions. So, although he occasion-
ally lived abroad (he published the Sketch
Book from England, and, in the ultimate
showing of his patriotic credentials, was
U.S. minister to Spain from 1842 to 1846),
Irving was a lifelong New Yorker. He died
there in 1859 (on the brink of the next great
phase in American history, the Civil War),
not long after having completed a five-vol-
ume biography of George Washington.—
Kevin M. Flanagan
References
Michael T. Gilmore, “Washington Irving,”
in The Cambridge History of American Lit-
era1ture, vol. 1, 1590–1820, ed. Sacvan Ber-
covitch (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), 661–668; Andrew Myers,
“Irving, Washington,” in Continuum
Encyclopedia of American Literature, www.
credoreference.com/entry/amlit/irving_
washington; Charles Dudley Warner,
Washington Irving (Boston, MA: Houghton
Mifflin, 1881), 1–2.
 A
J
JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH
(NOVEL)
A 1961 children’s novel by ROALD DAHL
and illustrated by Nancy Ekholm Burkert
(1961), Michael Simeon (1961), Emma
Chichester Clark (1990), Quentin Blake
(1995), and Lane Smith (1996).
Roald Dahl’s novel James and the
Giant Peach has faced much censorship,
and in the early years of Dahl’s vast popu-
larity with child readers, his work was sur-
prisingly slow to gain appreciation among
teachers for in-class use: some adults found
the combination of dark humor, comic
violence (particularly against adults), and
nonsense wordplay too undidactic for stu-
dent’s lesson-oriented learning in the class-
room. But what all the objections seem to
boil down to is that adults don’t appreci-
ate how badly they fare as a group in Dahl’s
work. Take the opening pages alone as an
example of what provoked the most pas-
sionate indictment against James and the
Giant Peach: we are told immediately that
our child-hero, James Henry Trotter, loses
his father and mother, who “suddenly got
eaten up . . . by an enormous angry rhinoc-
eros” at the zoo. His newly orphaned state
quickly becomes even more unbearable by
his having to move in with the aptly named
Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker: “They were
selfish and lazy and cruel, and right from
the beginning they started beating poor
138  n 
James for almost no reason at all.” It comes
as no surprise, then, that when James’s
peach magically grows into the vehicle for
his upcoming adventures with newfound
friends, it will begin the journey by banally
eliminating these repressive authority fig-
ures by simply rolling right over them:
“Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spike lay ironed
out upon the grass as flat and thin and life-
less as a couple of paper dolls cut out of a
picture book.”
Often in Dahl’s work, adults meet
less gruesome ends, but if so, such char-
acters are the target for ridicule (all of the
adults in Matilda, except for teacher Miss
Honey, are portrayed as anything from
bureaucratic fools, sleazy businessmen,
hypocrites oblivious to but surrounded by
children, to even vengeful sadists). This
unsparing vilifying of adults may have
left educators feeling an affront to their
authority, but as Bill Brittain points out,
“They have to appear ridiculous so that,
to the child who’s reading the book, James
can appear wise.”
More recently, however, Dahl has
been embraced in the classroom and
library, which have come to understand
this important child-empowering func-
tion, but only now that Dahl’s popularity
among readers is waning. Charlie Cooper
writes that “his books have been cho-
sen by children in the past in the face of
 JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH  n  139
adult dissent. But as generations grow up
and culture moves on then they become
validated by figures of authority and are
perhaps less subversive.” It is in this con-
text that one can appreciate Tim Burton’s
adaptations of such works—pushing into
more contemporary resistance against
potential responses from today’s parents
who still want to see sentimentalism reign
in kids’ stories, and as far as Burton’s
reworkings can be understood, he is keep-
ing Dahl’s original subversions current for
new generations. Cooper writes that Dahl
“refus[ed] to patronize his audience.” And
certainly this same refusal underlies Bur-
ton’s youth-oriented work as well.
Dahl’s child protagonists are not prin-
cesses or flawless children, they are pitiable
everychildren—poverty-stricken (Char-
lie), orphaned and abused (James), or so
marginalized that they separate from their
parents (Matilda). While censors might
focus on the terrible adult characters who
contributed to their pitiable circumstances,
instead, young readers relate, laugh, and
learn compassion and empowerment from
them. Roger Clarke has written of a com-
mon theme in Dahl that best conveys his
usefulness to Burton: “Children are better
off not spoilt. Spoilt children end up in
Spielberg films.”—Susan Honeyman
References
Bill Brittain, “Roald Dahl’s James and the
Giant Peach,” in Censored Books II, ed.,
Nicholas J. Karolides (Lanham, MD: Scare-
crow Press, 2002), 264–68; Roger Clarke,
“An Improper Charlie” Sight and Sound 15,
no. 8 (2005): 22–25; Charlie Cooper, “The
Tale of the Unexpected Decline of Roald
Dahl,” Independent (London), February 8,
2013, 21; Roald Dahl, James and the Giant
Peach: A Children’s Story (New York: Puf-
fin, 1996), 1, 2, 42.
JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH (US
1996)
Director: Henry Selick. Screenplay: Karey
Kirkpatrick, Jonathan Roberts, Steve
Bloom, based on the book by Roald
Dahl. Executive Producer: Jake Eberts.
P roducers : Tim Burton, Denise Di
Novi. Co-producers: John Engel, Brian
Rosen, Henry Selick. M usic : Randy
Newman. M usic E ditor : Bob Badami.
Orchestrators: Chris Boardman, Ste-
ven Bramson, Don Davis. Cinematog-
raphy: Pete Kozachik (animation), Hiro
Narita (live action). Editor: Stan Webb.
Production Design: Harley Jessup. Art
Direction: Lane Smith, Bill Boes, Kendal
Cronkite, Blake Russell. S et D ecora -
tion: Kris Boxell. Costume Design: Julie
Slinger. Makeup Artists: Judith E. Dis-
brow, Leslee Newcomb, Karen Bradley.
First Assistant Director: Kat Alioshin.
S toryboard S upervisor: Kelly Asbury.
Storyboard Artist: Michael Cachuela.
S cenic A rtist : Robin Cooper. S ound
M ixer : Agamemnon Andrianos. ADR
S upervisor : Mary Andrews. A ssistant
Sound Designer: Chris Boyes. Special
Effects: Dennis D. Becker, Noah Cor-
nell. Special Effects Mechanic: Thomas
A. Barone. Mold Department Supervisor:
Chris Coehe. A nimatronic D esigner :
Kelly Lepkowsky. Character Fabrica-
tors: Amy Adamy, Michael Arbios, Jes-
sica Ritts Cadkin, Cate Cannon, Curt
Chiarelli, Sandy Clifford. A nimation
Supervisor/Animator: Paul Berry. Anima-
tor: Stephen A. Buckley.
C ast : Paul Terry (James), Simon Cal-
low (Grasshopper [voice]), Richard
Dreyfuss (Centipede [voice]), Jane
Leeves (Ladybug [voice]), Joanna Lum-
ley (Aunt Spiker), Miriam Margolyes
(Aunt Sponge/Glowworm [voice]), Pete
Postlethwaite (Old Man), Susan Saran-
don (Spider [voice]), David Thewlis
(Earthworm [voice]), J. Stephen Coyle
140  n  JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH
(Reporter #2), Steven Culp (James’
Father), Cirocco Dunlap (Girl with
Telescope), Michael Girardin (Reporter
#1), Tony Haney (Reporter #3), Kath-
rine Howell (Woman in Bathrobe),
Chae Kirby (Newsboy), Jeff Mosley
(Hard Hat Man), Al Nalbandian (Cabby),
Emily Rosen (Innocent Girl), Mike Starr
(Beat Cop), Susan Turner-Cray (James’
Mother), Mario Yedidia (Street Kid).
Running Time: 79 minutes. Color.
Released Through: Walt Disney Pictures
Presents in association with Allied Film-
makers and Skellington Productions,
Inc.
The second collaboration between pro-
ducer Tim Burton and director HENRY
SELICK, intended as a follow-up to the
hugely successful NIGHTMARE BEFORE
CHRISTMAS (1993). From the begin-
ning, however, the film was compromised
by budget concerns. It is a mixture of
live-action and stop-motion animation,
and at its inception director Henry Selick
had planned for James to be a real actor
through the entire film, then later consid-
ered doing the whole film in stop-motion,
but ultimately settled on doing entirely live-
action and entirely stop-motion sequences
due to costs.
James Henry Trotter (Paul Terry)
is a young boy who lives with his mother
(Susan Turner-Clay) and father (Steven
Culp) by the sea. On James’s birthday, they
plan to go to New York City and visit the
Empire State Building, the tallest building
in the world (at the time). However, his
parents are killed by a ghostly rhinoceros
from the sky, and James finds himself living
with his abusive Aunt Spiker (Joanna Lum-
ley) and Aunt Sponge (Miriam Margolyes).
He is forced to work all day, and they
threaten him with beatings and the myste-
rious rhino if he tries to leave. While res-
cuing a spider from being squashed by his
aunts, James meets a mysterious stranger
(Pete Postlethwaite) with a bag of magic
green “crocodile tongues,” which he gives
to James to make his life better. The old
man warns James not to lose the tongues
and disappears. When James returns to the
house, he trips, dropping the bag, and the
tongues escape and hide in the ground.
Soon after, a peach is found on a with-
ered old tree, and it grows to immense
proportions. Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge
use the giant peach as a local attraction,
making lots of money, while James is
restricted to the house. One night, James
is sent to pick up the garbage left by the
sightseers. While doing so, he grabs a
chunk of the peach to eat just as one of the
crocodile tongues jumps into it. A hole big
enough for James to crawl through appears
on the peach, and James ventures inside,
where he finds and befriends a group
of life-size anthropomorphic bugs who
also dream of an ideal home: Mr. Grass-
hopper (Simon Callow), Mr. Centipede
(Richard Dreyfuss), Earthworm (David
Thewlis), Miss Spider (Susan Sarandon),
Mrs. Ladybug (Jane Leeves), and Glow-
worm (Miriam Margolyes). As they hear
the aunts searching for James, Centipede
manages to eat through the stem holding
the giant peach to the tree. The giant peach
falls from the tree and begins to roll toward
the Atlantic Ocean, smashing Aunts Spiker
and Sponge on the way.
Remembering his dream to visit New
York City, James and the insects decide to
ride the peach across the ocean. However,
they immediately encounter a terrible
giant robotic shark. Miss Spider uses her
silk to capture and tie a hundred seagulls
to the peach stem, which lifts them to
safety, and they begin to sail over the
ocean. James and his friends eventually
find themselves hungry; they soon real-
ize that their entire ship is made out of
food and begin to gorge themselves on the
 JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH  n  141
fruit. As she tucks in James for the night,
Miss Spider reveals to him that she was the
spider he saved from Spiker and Sponge.
James then has a nightmare of him as a
caterpillar attacked by Spiker, Sponge,
and the rhino. When he wakes up, he real-
izes that the peach has been carried by the
seagulls far to the north, into the Arctic
Circle. Mr. Centipede has fallen asleep
while keeping watch, and so they are com-
pletely off course. After hearing Mr. Grass-
hopper wishing they had a compass, Mr.
Centipede jumps off the peach into the icy
water below and searches a sunken pirate
ship. He finds a compass, but is taken pris-
oner by a group of skeletal pirates that tor-
ture him on the rack. Ingenuously, James
and Miss Spider swim to his rescue, and
the journey continues.
Eventually, as the giant peach nears
New York City, a storm approaches. A
flash of lightning reveals the rhino charg-
ing them. James is terrified but faces his
fears and gets his friends to safety before
the rhino destroys the peach. They cut the
strings keeping the seagulls attached to
the peach, freeing the peach to fall to the
city below, taking James with it. Climb-
ing from the peach, James realizes he has
landed right on top of the Empire State
Building. As he is being rescued by the
police and firemen, his horrific aunts, hav-
ing apparently survived being rolled over
by the giant peach, arrive in an automo-
bile and claim possession of both James
and the peach. However, James stands
up to his aunts, who, angered by James’s
recalcitrance, try to kill him. In the nick
of time the bugs arrive and tie up Spiker
and Sponge with Miss Spider’s silk. The
aunts are arrested and taken away. James
introduces his friends to the crowd and
encourages the children of New York to
eat the peach.
Later, the peach pit is made into a
house in Central Park, where James lives
happily with his new family, the bugs. Mr.
Centipede runs for New York mayor and is
considered James’s father, Mr. Grasshop-
per becomes a professional violinist and is
James’s grandfather, Earthworm becomes a
mascot for a new cream and now is James’s
uncle, Mrs. Ladybug becomes a nurse and
is now James’s aunt, Glowworm lights up
the Statue of Liberty and is now James’s
grandmother, and Miss Spider owns a
club called Spider Club and is now James’s
mother.
Although Dahl turned down more
than one offer to make an animated film of
James and the Giant Peach during his life-
time, his widow, Felicity Dahl, consented
to let this film be made. Owen Gleiber-
man, writing in Entertainment Weekly,
gave the film a positive review, praising
the animated sections but describing the
live-action bookends as “crude . . . scenes
that effectively douse the spell.” Writing
in the New York Times, Janet Maslin called
the film “a technological marvel, arch and
innovative with a daringly offbeat visual
conception” and described it as “a strenu-
ously artful film with a macabre edge,” but
warning that it “may scare small children.”
Roger Ebert praised Selick and Burton for
bringing “stop-motion to a new plateau.
The movements of their characters are so
fluid, compared with the slight jerkiness of
older stop-motion, that I wonder if com-
puters have been used to smooth out some
of the motion. If not, then their achieve-
ment is even more amazing.” And Peter
Stack, writing in the San Francisco Chron-
icle, called the film “a stunning, delightful
image adventure like nothing done before
on the big screen.” However, the film
underachieved at the box office, earning
just under $29 million against a reported
budget of $38 million. James and the Giant
Peach was the last film Denise Di Novi and
Tim Burton made together. They dissolved
their partnership in 1995.
142  n  “THE JAR” (SHORT STORY)
References
Roger Ebert, “James and the Giant Peach,”
RogerEbert.com, April 12, 1996, www.
rogerebert.com/reviews/james-and-the-
giant-peach-1996; Owen Gleiberman,
“James and the Giant Peach,” Entertain-
ment Weekly, April 19, 1996, www.ew.com/
article/1996/04/19/james-and-giant-peach;
“James and the Giant Peach,” IMDb, www.
imdb.com/title/tt0116683/?ref_=fn_al_
tt_1; Janet Maslin, “Film Review: A Poor
Little Boy Befriended by Bugs,” New York
Times, April 12, 1996, www.nytimes.com/
movie/review?res=980DE0D81039F931A2
5757C0A960958260; Peter Stack, “‘Peach’—
Fruit of Imagination/Roald Dahl Tale
Turned into Offbeat Film Fantasy,” San
Francisco Chronicle, April 12, 1996, www.
sfgate.com/movies/article/Peach-Fruit-of-
Imagination-Roald-Dahl-tale-2985865.php.
“THE JAR” (SHORT STORY, 1944)
Macabre short story written by Ray Brad-
bury about a cuckold avenging his young
wife’s infidelity, first published in Weird
Tales in 1944 and later included in Brad-
bury’s first book, the short story collection
Dark Carnival (Arkham House, 1947). The
story was first adapted by James Bridges,
with Norman Lloyd directing, accompa-
nied by a score by Bernard Herrmann, for
the television anthology series The Alfred
Hitchcock Hour (1962–1965), airing, ironi-
cally, on February 14, 1964—Valentine’s
Day. The story was adapted for television
a second time, by LARRY WILSON and
MICHAEL MCDOWELL, with Tim Bur-
ton directing, for The New Alfred Hitch-
cock Presents (1985–1989), the episode air-
ing April 6, 1986. Subsequently, Bradbury
himself adapted the story for television a
third time, for his anthology series The Ray
Bradbury Theater (1985–1992), the episode
airing January 17, 1992.
Bradbury’s short story is set in the
Deep South, in the swamps of rural Louisi-
ana. At the sideshow of a traveling carnival,
a country rube, Charlie, purchases a glass
jar containing a bizarre, unidentifiable, but
strangely captivating object. What, precisely,
is the nebulous Thing floating in the jar?
For Charlie, the jar seems to be a means to
restore the respect he’s lost in the eyes of
his friends and neighbors, who mock him
as a consequence of his being married to a
young and unfaithful wife, Thedy. Soon after
acquiring the jar, every night, the locals visit
Charlie’s ramshackle home, sitting on chairs
and soapboxes and cross-legged on pieces
of carpet, to gaze silently at the Thing in
the Jar. They peer for hours at the obscure
shape suspended in the liquid, seeing in
it their worst fears and memories. For one
person, Juke Marmer, the Thing reminds
him of a kitten his mother forced him, while
still a small boy, to drown in a two-gallon
jar. Another, Mrs. Tridden, thinks it may be
the small child who, years before, she lost
in the swamp. His home having become
the preferred gathering spot for the local
community, Charlie’s self-esteem starts
to grow—but it is cruelly undermined by
Tom Carmody, with whom Charlie believes
Thedy is having an affair. Tom and Thedy
have taken a road trip to a nearby town,
where they happened to run into the carny-
boss from whom Charlie purchased the jar.
Thedy avers the carny-boss boasted of hav-
ing sold the jar to some ignorant “hick,”
who hadn’t realized the whole thing was a
hoax, that the Thing in the Jar was just made
of rubber, silk, cotton, and papier-mâché—
in other words, junk. She then threatens to
tell everyone the truth about the jar, about
how Charlie was duped by the carny-boss
into buying the jar. Having humiliated him
beyond the limits of endurance, Charlie kills
her, replacing the contents of the jar with
Thedy’s severed head. He explains her disap-
pearance by telling his unsuspecting friends
and neighbors that Thedy has gone off to
visit family in Tennessee.

Interestingly, at the end of the story
the fate of Charlie remains unclear. The
text suggests that Tom Carmody may know
the truth of what happened to Thedy, and
while Charlie’s visitors note some changes
in the Thing in the Jar, none of them sus-
pects foul play.
Reference
Ray Bradbury, “The Jar,” in The October
Country (New York: Ballantine, 1955),
81–96.
“THE JAR” (TV EPISODE, US 1986)
Director: Tim Burton. Teleplay: Larry Wil-
son, Michael McDowell. Supervising Pro-
ducer: Andrew Mirisch. Producer: Allan
Barnette. Executive Producer: Christo-
pher Crowe. Associate Producer: Dan-
iel Sackheim. C inematography : Mario
DiLeo. E ditor : Heather McDougall.
Music: Danny Elfman, Steve Bartek. Pro-
duction Design: Dean Edward Mitzner.
Set Decoration: Victoria Hugo. Sound:
Jim Alexander. Costume Design: Sharon
Day. Unit Production Manager: David
Livingston. F irst A ssistant D irector :
Doug Metzger. Second Assistant Direc-
tor: Lonnie Steinberg. Property Master:
Craig Binkley. Lead Man: Lance Lom-
bardo. Sound Editor: Burness J. Speak-
man. Music Editor: Dino A. Moriana.
T itles and O ptical E ffects : Universal
Title. S pecial E ffects : Rick Heinrichs.
Visual Effects: Jim Michaels.
Cast: Alfred Hitchcock (Himself, Host),
Griffin Dunne (Knoll), Fiona Lewis
(Erica), Laraine Newman (Periwinkle),
Stephen Shellen (Garson), Paul Bar-
tel (Times Art Critic), Sunshine Parker
(Texan), Eileen Barnett (Texan’s Wife),
Peter D. Risch (Happy Kaufman), Paul
Werner [Werner Pochath] (Nazi Sol-
dier), Regina Richardson (Female Art
Type), Susan Moore (Female Fashion
Victim), Nathan La Grand (Male Fashion
Victim), Roy Fegan (Person #1), Leah
“THE JAR” (TV EPISODE)  n  143
Kates (Person #2), Lori Lynn Lively
(Frail Woman), Jeffrey Steven Kramer
(Guest #1).
R unning T ime : 23 minutes, 45 seconds.
Color.
Released Through: Universal/NBC Televi-
sion.
Macabre television episode directed by
Tim Burton. James Bridges’s adaptation of
“The Jar,” for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in
1964, generally remains faithful to the Ray
Bradbury source text, but updates the time
period—Charlie’s horse-drawn wagon, for
instance, is replaced with a pick-up truck.
In addition, there is an interpolated episode
in which Thedy and Tom Carmody con-
spire to hire one of the locals to steal the
jar from Charlie. In addition, in contrast to
the source text, in which Thedy’s murder is
more subtle and implicit, the Alfred Hitch-
cock Hour version ends explicitly, with the
shocking revelation that Thedy’s severed
head has been stuffed in the jar, with the
astonished onlookers screaming in horror.
Since one of the visitors happens to be the
local sheriff (played by Slim Pickens), the
concluding action serves to reassure the
audience that Charlie will be arrested and
punished for his brutal crime.
The adaptation of “The Jar” directed
by Tim Burton reimagines the setting, but
even more importantly, the protagonist’s
motive for acquiring the jar. It does, how-
ever, restore the ambiguity of the short sto-
ry’s ending. The Burton version of “The Jar”
was made for the television anthology series
The New Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1985–
1989), and was directed some months after
finishing PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE.
The series’ concept was to remake classic
episodes from the earlier show and to edit
seamlessly this contemporized material with
newly colorized footage of Alfred Hitchcock
introducing the original episode.
144  n  “THE JAR” (TV EPISODE)
Written for a thirty-minute time slot,
the adaptation by LARRY WILSON and
MICHAEL MCDOWELL (the writers who
originated BEETLEJUICE) shifts the setting
from the country to the city, transforming
the character of Charlie from a country
hick to an Ed Wood–like conceptual artist
named Knoll (Griffin Dunne). Wilson and
McDowell dispense with the January–May
relationship of the source text (maintained
in the first adaptation), reimagining Knoll’s
wife, Erica (frequent horror film actress
Fiona Lewis), as a British snob having dis-
dain for both her husband and her hus-
band’s mediocre art. Her scorn for her hus-
band has led her to starting an affair with a
friend of Knoll’s, the artist Garson (Stephen
Shellen), some eight months before the
action begins. Cuckold Knoll’s only true
friend is Periwinkle (Laraine Newman), a
gallery owner who regularly exhibits, and is
supportive of, Knoll’s work.
The show opens with a short black-
and-white sequence set in Nazi Europe, in
which a young Jewish woman (identified as
such by virtue of the yellow badge sewn onto
her coat) attempting to avoid capture by
the Nazi authorities takes refuge in a shop.
Although she faces what would seem certain
death, her persecutor’s gaze is arrested by the
jar sitting on one of the shop’s shelves, which
seems to hypnotize him into putting down
his gun. As he turns to leave, apparently for-
getting all about his prey, the young woman
retrieves the gun and shoots him.
Many years later, conceptual art-
ist Knoll endures a poorly attended (and
reviewed) exhibition of his latest work.
Nonetheless, the gallery owner, Periwinkle,
continues to offer him encouragement.
Accompanied by her lover, Garson, Knoll’s
wife, Erica, arrives late with a bottle of
champagne, as if to celebrate not Knoll’s
successful opening, but its failure. Prom-
ising to meet her and Garson later, Knoll
heads off to see Happy Kaufman, owner of
a junkyard where Knoll acquires the raw
materials for his art. There, Happy shows
him a 1938 Mercedes-Benz (presumably
the same vehicle in the opening sequence)
that was recently involved in an accident,
and after prying up the vehicle’s hood,
Knoll discovers the glass jar tucked in next
to the engine.
He puts the jar on display in his latest
exhibition and it instantly becomes a cause
célèbre, drawing large numbers of view-
ers. It prompts varied interpretations and
reactions—laughter, wonder, nausea—and
while the jar itself is not for sale, Knoll’s
other works begin to sell. Hence, because
of the jar’s strange allure, Knoll’s artistic
career begins to turn around.
Then, after a particularly unpleasant
dinner party during which Erica reveals
that Knoll did nothing but simply buy
the jar from Happy Kaufman, Periwinkle
attempts suicide. When Knoll asks what
motivated her to do so, she says only it
was because of the jar. Soon after, during
a failed sexual assignation with Erica, Gar-
son blames his inability to perform on the
jar. The two have an argument about the
jar and Garson abruptly ends the affair,
storming out of the apartment. Enraged
that the jar has begun to dominate her life,
Erica decides to ruin it. She removes the
lid from the jar and reaches inside—but
screams and quickly withdraws her hand, as
if she has been bitten. She accidentally tips
over the jar, spilling its contents across the
white-tiled floor. At that point, Knoll enters
and recovers the Thing in the Jar from
underneath the sofa, where it has slid to a
stop. Erica tries stabbing the Thing in the
Jar with a knife, but Knoll grabs it and tries
to protect it, but a battle ensues over the
Thing, during which it is pulled apart, the
pieces splattering against the walls and over
the floor. Finally, the Thing torn into pieces
and his wife victorious, Knoll sees the knife
on the floor. His eyes move to Erica.

The final sequence depicts Knoll’s
latest exhibit at Periwinkle’s gallery. The
exhibit’s centerpiece is a tribute to Erica,
whom he says has deserted him. The glass
jar sits atop a sculpture dedicated to his
former wife, containing what the viewers
believe to be a remarkable likeness of her
head.
The dismemberment of the Thing in
the Jar is inspired by a similar moment in
the 1964 version, in which Thedy removes
the lid and begins tossing the jar’s contents
around the room in order to show Charlie
what a fool he is for buying the jar—this
has no precedent in the source text. How-
ever, Burton’s version does adhere to the
ambiguity of the source text’s conclusion,
in which it is left undetermined whether
Charlie/Knoll will be punished for his
crime. Burton himself seems not to have
been happy with the end result of “The
Jar,” telling Mark Salisbury, “That was
another tough one. I’ve learned from things
like ‘The Jar’ . . . that when I get into situa-
tions like that . . . things just don’t work out
quite as well. I need that deep connection.”
References
Ray Bradbury, “The Jar,” in The October
Country (New York: Ballantine Books,
1955), 81–96; “The Jar,” IMDb, www.imdb.
com/title/tt0508431/; Mark Salisbury, Bur-
ton on Burton, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Faber
and Faber, 2006), 52.
JOHNSON, MIKE (CA. 1968–)
Director, animator, artist, teacher, and
codirector of CORPSE BRIDE. Austin,
Texas, native Mike Johnson began his
motion picture career in 1990 after grad-
uating from the Rhode Island School of
Design, where he made several short films.
After serving as an intern with different
animation studios and puppet troupes in
JOHNSON, MIKE  n  145
the New England area, he made the tran-
sition to features on THE NIGHTMARE
BEFORE CHRISTMAS, for which he
served as the assistant animation rigger and
assistant animator under director HENRY
SELICK. Johnson also served as an anima-
tor on Selick’s next stop-motion feature
film, JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH.
Johnson soon branched out into tele-
vision, animating for two children’s pro-
grams: Bump in the Night (1994–1995),
and the Emmy Award–winning stop-
motion animated sitcom, The PJs (1999–
2001). He was promoted to episode direc-
tor on the latter series. In 1996, Johnson
established Fat Cactus Films, and dur-
ing the next few years he produced and
directed an eclectic mix of stop-motion
projects that included commercials, music
videos, and The Devil Went Down to Geor-
gia (1996), an award-winning short film.
In 2003 Johnson was selected by Tim
Burton to direct Corpse Bride. Johnson
has taught and mentored students at the
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF THE ARTS
(CalArts) Program in Experimental Ani-
mation; the CalArts Program in Character
Animation; the UCLA School of Theater,
Film and Television; and the Art Institute
of Los Angeles, Santa Monica. In addition,
he has served as a guest lecturer for the
Rhode Island School of Design, the USC
School of Cinematic Arts, and Disney Ani-
mation Studios.
References
“About,” Fat Cactus, fatcactus.com/about/;
Bill Desowitz, “‘Corpse Bride’: Stop Motion
Goes Digital,” Animation World Network,
September 16, 2005, www.awn.com/vfx-
world/corpse-bride-stop-motion-goes-dig-
ital; “Mike Johnson,” IMDb, www.imdb.
com/name/nm0425843/bio?ref_=nm_ov_
bio_sm.
 K
A
KARASZEWSKI, LARRY (1961–)
Producer and screenwriter, coauthor of
several acclaimed motion pictures with
longtime writing partner SCOTT ALEX-
ANDER. Karaszewski grew up in South
Bend, Indiana, where he worked as a film
critic for an NBC affiliate’s nightly news
program, as well as writing and directing
Beyond Our Control, a weekly half-hour
satirical television show. He met Los Ange-
les native Alexander in the early 1980s as
a freshman at USC’s School of Cinematic
Arts; the two became on-and-off room-
mates for the next few years. They began
their motion picture careers as screenwrit-
ers of the family comedies Problem Child
(1990) and Problem Child 2 (1991), later
writing Agent Cody Banks (2003). They
first worked with Tim Burton on the highly
acclaimed biopic ED WOOD, for which
they were nominated for Best Screenplay
by the Writers Guild of America. They fol-
lowed Ed Wood with the biopic The People
vs. Larry Flynt (1996), for which they won
the Golden Globe for Best Screenplay,
and Man on the Moon (1999), about the
unorthodox comedian Andy Kaufman.
Subsequently, they wrote and directed
the comedy Screwed (2000), produced the
Bob Crane biopic Auto Focus (2002), and
wrote the Stephen King adaptation 1408
(2007). In 2014, Burton directed BIG EYES,
a biopic of Margaret and Walter Keane, a
project Karaszewski and Alexander had
146  n 
in development for several years and had
intended to produce and direct themselves.
In addition to the Burton-directed biop-
ics Ed Wood and Big Eyes, Karaszewski and
Alexander have written several unproduced
biopics about fringe characters outside the
mainstream, including Believe It or Not!
about the colorful cartoonist and anthro-
pologist of the strange, Robert Ripley,
which Tim Burton reportedly was at one
point interested in directing. They have
also written biopics about the Marx Broth-
ers, the Village People, children’s television
producers Sid and Marty Krofft, and Rol-
len Stewart, the “Rainbow Man,” known
for wearing a colorful rainbow Afro wig at
sporting events. Karaszewski’s humorous
commentaries on cult movies can be seen
at TrailersFromHell.com.
References
“Larry Karaszewski,” IMDb, www.imdb.
com/name/nm0438989/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1;
“Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski,”
Final Draft, www.finaldraft.com/company/
hall-of-fame/scott-alexander-larry-karasze-
wski; ; Scott Alexander and Larry Karasze-
wski, “Introduction,” in Ed Wood (London:
Faber and Faber, 1995), v–x.
KEATON, MICHAEL (1951–)
Actor born in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania (a
borough just west of Pittsburgh), who first
made a career as a comic actor and gradu-

ally augmented his screen persona with the
serious, sinister, and off-beat characters for
which he is now equally known. Keaton
got his start acting around Pittsburgh and
working behind the camera for regional TV
station WQED. He moved to Los Angeles
in the mid-1970s, where he performed as
a standup comic and a member of Second
City LA. Although a noted early appear-
ance came thanks to the Pittsburgh-lensed
Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, it was not until
his move to Los Angeles that Keaton began
to find steady work on television. His act-
ing in sitcoms like All’s Fair (1976–1977)
and Report to Murphy (1982), as well as
his writing contributions to Mary (1978),
a short-lived Mary Tyler Moore variety
show, solidified his reputation for comedy.
Early film roles include a turn as exuberant
morgue assistant Bill Blazejowski in Night
Shift (1982), whom Janet Maslin called
“one of the screen’s more hilarious hip-
sters,” and Johnny in Johnny Dangerously
(1984), a reluctant gangster whose traits are
comically sutured from the James Cagney
and Paul Muni films of yore.
Keaton shines in BEETLEJUICE, play-
ing a bio-exorcist who specializes in tor-
menting the living. Although Burton had
originally wanted the role to go to crooner
Sammy Davis Jr., he and Keaton got along
well. In his role as a supernatural prankster,
Keaton showcases a comic sensibility unfet-
tered by the restraints of conventional real-
ist emotion. Instead, he mugs, leers, jives,
and squirms his way through this grotesque
riff on the haunted house genre. The box
office success of Beetlejuice gave Warner
Bros. faith in Burton (who had now helmed
two profitable films for the studio) and
Keaton (by now one of the premiere comic
actors of his generation), yielding them
a shot at the long-stalled BATMAN film
project. Producer Jon Peters actually sug-
gested Keaton’s possible appropriateness
for Batman/Bruce Wayne, since the project
KEATON, MICHAEL  n  147
was veering away from both the canonical
campiness of the sixties television series
and the superhuman invincibility of new
action stars of the 1980s. Keaton—a man
of medium height and build, with a reced-
ing hairline—is convincing as a wealthy
hero who has to rely on technology and
training for his battle prowess, as opposed
to the heroics of an Arnold Schwarzeneg-
ger or a Sylvester Stallone, whose evident
muscle maps directly onto their capacity
for mayhem. The possibility of Keaton-as-
Batman sent fans into a frenzy, prompting
letter writing and a petition, even yielding
a front-page article in the November 29,
1988, Wall Street Journal highlighting the
division between a fan culture that wholly
wanted to remove Batman from humor
and the creative talent for the film who
insisted that the movie would not lapse into
comic vulgarity. This panic was ultimately
unfounded, as Batman became noted for its
visual and thematic darkness, with humor
relegated to the Joker’s perversely neon the-
atrics. The film proved popular with audi-
ences and critics, earning over $475 million
in box office receipts in its initial release
(Ken Hanke estimates that video and mer-
chandising allowed it to generate over $2
billion by 1999).
Keaton reprised his role as Batman
in Burton’s bleak BATMAN RETURNS
(1992), but did not return to the role in
the Joel Schumacher–directed BATMAN
FOREVER (1995) due to a contract dis-
pute. Since his collaborations with Bur-
ton—arguably his most iconic (and prof-
itable) roles—Keaton has enjoyed a varied
career. Notable roles include bargaining
ATF agent Ray Nicolette (a central char-
acter in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown
[1997], who also makes a cameo in Steven
Soderbergh’s Elmore Leonard adaptation
Out of Sight [1998]), and annoyed police
captain Gene Marsh in The Other Guys
(2010, Adam McKay). His time as Batman
148  n  KEATON, MICHAEL
Michael Keaton as Batman.
also positioned him to specialize in psycho-
logically disturbed characters on the brink,
a sensibility he revisits in films like Game 6
(2005, Michael Hoffman) and White Noise
(2005, Geoffrey Sax). However, his any-
thing-goes capacity for comedy is perhaps
best captured in his all-too-wise turn as
janitor Tom in 30 Rock’s (2006–2012) one
hundredth episode, in which he melded
perfectly with the series’ supremely self-
aware recognition of the rules of television
sitcoms. In 2014, twenty-five years after
his appearance in 1989’s Batman, Keaton
earned critical acclaim as Riggan Thomson
in the multiple Academy Award–winning
film Birdman, about a fallen star largely
remembered as the superhero Birdman
in hit movies decades earlier, seeking to
redeem himself in the eyes of the public
and his family. For his outstanding per-
formance, Keaton earned his first Golden
Globe Award, winning for Best Actor in
a Motion Picture—Musical or Comedy.
His performance earned him nominations
for a Screen Actors Guild Award, a British
Academy Film Award, and his first Acad-
emy Award nomination for Best Actor as
well.—Kevin M. Flanagan
References
Ken Hanke, Tim Burton: An Unauthorized
Biography of the Filmmaker (Los Angeles:
Renaissance Books, 1999), 67, 96; Kathleen
A. Hughes, “Batman Fans Fear the Joke’s
on Them in Hollywood Epic—They Accuse
Warner Bros. of Plotting a Silly Spoof of
the Caped Crusader,” Wall Street Journal,
November 29, 1988; “Keaton, Michael
1951–,” in Contemporary Theatre, Film
and Television, vol. 84, ed. Thomas Riggs
(Detroit: Gale, 2008), 151–53; Audrey E.
Kupferberg, “Keaton, Michael,” in Interna-
tional Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers,
4th ed., ed. Sara Pendergast and Tom Pen-
dergast, vol. 3, Actors and Actresses (Detroit:
St. James Press, 2000), 650–52; Janet

Maslin, “Night Shift (1982): Vice Ring
Humor at Morgue,” New York Times, July
30, 1982, www.nytimes.com/1982/07/30/
movies/night-shift-vice-ring-humor-at-
morgue.html; Mark Salisbury, ed., Burton
on Burton, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Faber and
Faber, 2006), 72.
KEMPER, VICTOR J. (1927–)
Award-winning, ace cinematographer who
shot PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE for
Tim Burton. Kemper was born on April 14,
1927, in Newark, New Jersey. After he grad-
uated from Seton Hall University, Kemper
was hired by a local television station to
operate a sound boom, repair cameras, and
serve as technical director for live programs
produced in the studio. In 1964, he joined
one of the top commercial production
companies in New York, EUE, as a video
camera operator, and subsequently went
to work as an assistant cameraman and
operator on narrative features with Arthur
Ornitz. In 1966, Ornitz put Kemper in his
crew as camera operator on A Midsummer
Night’s Dream (1967), codirected by George
Balanchine and Dan Eriksen. During the
next several years, Kemper worked with
Ornitz on Arthur Hiller’s The Tiger Makes
Out (1967), Charly (1968), and Me, Nata-
lie (1969). During this time he also served
as camera operator for Michael Nebbia on
Arthur Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant (1969). In
1969, Kemper was given the opportunity to
serve as director of photography on John
Cassavetes’s Husbands (1970); it became
his first credit as cinematographer. Kem-
per was offered his second film, They Might
be Giants (1971), starring George C. Scott,
before he finished shooting Husbands.
Kemper relocated to Los Angeles in
the early 1970s, shooting The Candidate
(1972) for director Michael Ritchie and the
comedy Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1972),
starring Alan Arkin. He went on to make
KEMPER, VICTOR J.  n  149
such diverse and critically acclaimed films
as The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), The
Gambler (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975),
Slap Shot (1977), Audrey Rose (1977), Oh
God! (1977), Eyes of Laura Mars (1978),
The Jerk (1979), The Four Seasons (1981),
National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983), Mr.
Mom (1983), and The Lonely Guy (1984),
starring Steve Martin. By the early 1980s,
Kemper had become the cinematographer
of choice for high profile comedies, cer-
tainly one of the reasons he was chosen for
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. The other reason
was that his vast experience could be called
upon for help with a first time feature film
director such as Tim Burton.
Kemper became a member of the
American Society of Cinematographers
(ASC) in 1971, later serving as president of
the ASC from 1991 through 1996. In 1993,
after the Federal Communications Com-
mission (FCC) announced that it planned
to replace NTSC with a new television sys-
tem based on digital transmission, Kemper
appointed an ad hoc committee to study
the ramifications for both the public and
filmmakers. The ASC subsequently made
some strong recommendations to the FCC,
which were adopted by many other indi-
viduals and industry organizations. One of
the most important recommendations the
committee made regarding digital trans-
mission is that movies should be shown
letterboxed in their original aspect ratios.
In 1998, Kemper received the ASC Lifetime
Achievement Award from the American
Society of Cinematographers.
References
“Kemper Receives ASC Lifetime Achieve-
ment Award,” VPop.net, www.vpop.
net/~asccom/awards/history/pr/12_victor_
kemper.htm; “Victor J. Kemper,”
IMDb, www.imdb.com/name/nm0005755
/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1.
150  n  KING AND OCTOPUS
KING AND OCTOPUS (US 1978)
Drawings: Tim Burton. Creator: Tim Bur-
ton.
R unning T ime : 26 seconds. Black and
white.
Twenty-six-second pencil test fragment
of an animated scene drawn and created
by Tim Burton while a student at CalArts.
The black-and-white clip zooms in on an
octopus sitting on a throne, snacking on a
drumstick. The octopus tosses a drumstick
at a figure named Roger locked under a set
of bars embedded in the floor. The black-
and-white fragment has been widely dis-
seminated on the web, originating a short
clip excerpted from the Biography Channel
program on Tim Burton, titled Tim Burton:
Trick or Treat, originally broadcast in 2001.
Reference
“Tim Burton’s Early Short King and Octo-
pus Clip,” YouTube video, youtube.com/
watch?v=ji2EC3Ss4Gk.
KONNER, LAWRENCE (1949–)
Television and screenwriter, co-screen-
writer of Tim Burton’s PLANET OF THE
APES along with WILLIAM BROYLES
and MARK ROSENTHAL. Konner began
his career as a television writer, working
on the shows Family, Little House on the
Prairie, Cagney and Lacey, and Remington
Steele. In the early 1980s he formed a film-
writing partnership with Mark Rosenthal.
They first worked together on The Legend
of Billie Jean (1985), which did poorly at
the box office but has earned a cult follow-
ing. They followed that film with Jewel of
the Nile (1985), Superman IV: The Quest for
Peace (1987), The In Crowd (1988, directed
by Rosenthal), and Desperate Hours (1990,
directed by Michael Cimino). In 1991 they
wrote the adaptation of Stephen King’s
Sometimes They Come Back for televi-
sion. Later works with Rosenthal include
Mercury Rising (1998), Mighty Joe Young
(1998), Mona Lisa Smile (2003), and the
fantasy The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (2010),
starring Nicolas Cage.
Konner, without Rosenthal, wrote
three teleplays for the HBO series The
Sopranos. He was nominated for a Prime-
time Emmy Award for his work on the first
of those teleplays, the third season episode
titled “Second Opinion.” He has also writ-
ten for the HBO series Boardwalk Empire.
He has taught writing for films and televi-
sion at a number of institutions, includ-
ing UCLA and Vassar and was, for many
years, a creative adviser at the Sundance
Screenwriters Lab as well as a member of
the selection committee for the lab. He has
been a member of the board of directors
of the Writers Guild of America and is a
member of the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences.
References
“Lawrence Konner,” IMDb, www.imdb.
com/name/nm0465199/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1;
Lawrence Konner’s website, lawrencekon-
ner.com; “Lawrence Konner,” Wikia,
en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kon-
ner.
KOZACHIK, PETER (CA. 1950–)
Noted animator, visual effects artist, and
cinematographer whose work for Tim
Burton includes director of photography
for THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRIST-
MAS, JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH
(stop-motion sections), and CORPSE
BRIDE. Pete Kozachik was born in Michi-
gan but later moved to Tucson, Arizona.
After graduating from the University of
Arizona, he worked for the next several
years at local area television news and
variety shows. He shot and edited docu-
mentaries for a PBS affiliate and produced

One of Jack Skellington’s gifts devours a Christmas tree in The Nightmare before Christmas.
and directed commercials as well as two
low-budget animated films. He moved
to Hollywood in the late 1970s, where he
started working for Gene Warren (1916–
1997, who won an Academy Award for the
special effects on George Pal’s The Time
Machine), and later with stop-motion
master Phil Kellison (1918–2005). The lat-
ter was a director at Coast Special Effects
and became one of Kozachik’s early men-
tors in the craft. Kozachik later worked
with Phil Tippett (an earlier alumnus of
Coast) on Willow (1988) while at ILM,
and later worked for Tippett on RoboCop
2 (1990) and RoboCop 3 (1993). By chance,
HENRY SELICK had been renting space at
the Tippett Studio for his short film Slow
Bob in the Lower Dimensions (1990), shot
as a pilot for MTV. On the basis of that
film, Tim Burton asked Selick to direct The
Nightmare before Christmas. Based on the
strength of Kozachik’s work on Slow Bob
in the Lower Dimensions, Burton approved
hiring him as director of photography
KOZACHIK, PETER  n  151
on The Nightmare before Christmas. As a
member of Nightmare’s visual effects team,
Kozachik was nominated for an Academy
Award. After Nightmare, he collaborated
with Selick on other features, including
James and the Giant Peach, Monkeybone
(2001), and Coraline (2009). He served
as the cinematographer on Tim Burton’s
Corpse Bride, a stop-motion project that
was lensed with digital SLR cameras, which
had never previously been used for an ani-
mated feature.
Other work includes visual effects
cameraman on George Lucas’s Star Wars
Episode II: Attack of the Clones, and several
hundred commercials. He is a member of
the American Society of Cinematographers.
References
“Peter Kozachik,” IMDb, www.imdb.com/
name/nm0468757/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1;
“Peter Kozachik, ASC,” Focus Features,
focusfeatures.com/coraline/castncrew
?member=pete_kozachik__asc.
 A
L
LANDAU, MARTIN (1928–)
American film and television actor who
won an Academy Award as Best Supporting
Actor for his performance as Bela Lugosi in
Tim Burton’s ED WOOD. Martin Landau
was born in Brooklyn, New York, on June
20, 1928 (some sources indicate 1931),
the son of Selma and Morris Landau. He
attended James Madison High School and
the Pratt Institute before landing a job,
around the age of seventeen, with the New
York Daily News as a cartoonist and illus-
trator. In 1955, he joined the Actors Stu-
dio, where he studied with Lee Strasberg
and Elia Kazan. His first appearances were
on television, beginning with an episode of
Harbormaster in 1957. That same year, he
married actress Barbara Bain. He appeared
in two films in 1959, Pork Chop Hill and
Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.
He went on to appear in Cleopatra (1963),
The Hallelujah Trail (1965), and The Great-
est Story Ever Told (1965) before achieving
fame as master of disguises Rollin Hand in
the television spy drama Mission: Impossible
(1966–1973). With his then wife, Barbara
Bain, who was also a character in the series,
Cinnamon Carter, he appeared in the series
for the first three seasons, leaving the show,
along with Bain, in 1969. In 1967 he was
awarded a Golden Globe Award for Best
Actor in a Television Series Drama for his
performance as Rollin Hand. After leaving
Mission: Impossible, he appeared in several
152  n 
films during the period 1970–1975, eventu-
ally returning to television with Bain in the
sci-fi series Space: 1999, which ran for two
seasons, 1975–1977. He went on to appear
in Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker: The Man
and His Dream (1988), for which he won a
Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting
Actor; he was also nominated for an Acad-
emy Award for Best Supporting Actor. The
next year, he appeared in Woody Allen’s
Crimes and Misdemeanors, for which he
received a second Academy Award nomina-
tion as Best Supporting Actor. In 1994, Lan-
dau finally won an Academy Award as Best
Supporting Actor for his role as Bela Lugosi
in Ed Wood. He also won numerous other
awards for his performance in the film. In
1999, he appeared uncredited in Burton’s
SLEEPY HOLLOW as the character Peter
Van Garrett.
Landau was nominated for an Emmy
Award for his portrayal of the Alzheim-
er’s-afflicted father of FBI Special Agent
Jack Malone in the second season of
Without a Trace (2002–2009). He received
a second Emmy nomination in 2006 for
his guest appearance as a washed-up
Hollywood producer in the HBO series
Entourage (2004–2011). Three years later,
he voiced the character of #2 in the Tim
Burton–produced sci-fi film 9 (2009), and
later voiced the character of Mr. Rzyk-
ruski in Tim Burton’s animated feature
FRANKENWEENIE.

Ed Wood (Johnny Depp, right) directing Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau) in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood.
References
“Martin Landau,” IMDb, www.imdb.com/
name/nm0001445/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_
sml; “Martin Landau Biography,” Bio,
www.biography.com/people/martin-lan-
dau-212185; “Martin Landau Biography
(1931?–),” Film Reference, www.filmrefer-
ence.com/film/95/Martin-Landau.html.
LEBENZON, CHRIS (1953–)
Award-winning film editor, preferred
editor of Tim Burton since BATMAN
RETURNS. Born Christopher John Leben-
zon on October 29, 1953, in Redwood City,
California, Chris Lebenzon got his start in
motion pictures in the late 1970s, having
learned to edit film on the KEM machine
that his roommate, Michael Wadleigh,
had used to cut Woodstock (1970). Leben-
zon’s big break came when he was hired as
an assistant editor on Wadleigh’s Wolfen
(1981). He quickly moved up the ranks,
earning his first major acclaim for his
LEBENZON, CHRIS  n  153
editing of director Tony Scott’s Top Gun
(1986), for which he was nominated for
an Academy Award for Best Film Editing,
which he shared with Billy Weber (the lat-
ter had edited PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVEN-
TURE the year before). He continued to
work alongside Scott, serving as editor
on Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), Revenge
(1990), and Days of Thunder (1990). After
editing Hudson Hawk (1992) for director
Michael Lehmann, Lebenzon edited Bat-
man Returns, the first of many films for
Tim Burton. While frequently working
with Burton, he continued to work with
Scott (Enemy of the State, 1998) and direc-
tor Michael Bay (Armageddon, 1998).
In addition to having been nomi-
nated for Best Film Editing for Top Gun,
he was also nominated for an Oscar for
Best Film Editing on Tony Scott’s Crimson
Tide (1995). Lebenzon is a member of the
American Cinema Editors (ACE) and has
been nominated six times for the ACE’s
154  n  LEE, BONNI
Eddie Award, winning for Burton’s SWEE-
NEY TODD (2007) and ALICE IN WON-
DERLAND (2010). He also served as execu-
tive producer on Alice in Wonderland and
DARK SHADOWS (2012).
References
Admin, “Q & A with Planet of the Apes
Editor Chris Lebenzon,” MovieMaker,
February 3, 2007, www.moviemaker.com/
archives/moviemaking/editing/articles-
editing/q-amp-a-with-planet-of-the-apes-
editor-chris-lebenzon/; “Chris Lebenzon,”
IMDb, www.imdb.com/name/nm0495605/
bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm.
LEE, BONNI (1951–)
Hawaii-born film executive who began her
career at MGM/UA. While an executive at
Warner Bros. from 1984 to 1988, she was
instrumental in promoting Tim Burton
and bringing him to the attention of stu-
dio head Mark Canton. After PEE-WEE’S
BIG ADVENTURE, she later worked with
Burton on BEETLEJUICE and introduced
Sam Hamm to Burton, which led to Hamm
scripting BATMAN. She left Warner Bros.
at the end of 1988 in order to become
president of Robert Redford’s film com-
panies Wildwood Enterprises and North
Fork Films. When David Geffen launched
DreamWorks SKG with Steven Spielberg
and Jeffrey Katzenberg in 1994, Lee began a
production deal there under her company,
Mighty Hula Pictures. In October 2014,
Village Roadshow Pictures named Lee
senior vice president of production.
References
“Bonni Lee,” Linkedin, www.linkedin.com/
pub/bonni-lee/37/708/334; Dave McNary,
“Village Roadshow Hires Bonni Lee, For-
mer Geffen Pictures President,” Variety,
October 2, 2014, variety.com/2014/film/
news/village-roadshow-bonni-lee-gef-
fen-1201319814/.
“THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY
HOLLOW” (TALE)
First appearing in WASHINGTON
IRVING’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey
Crayon, Gent., “The Legend of Sleepy Hol-
low (Found among the Papers of the Late
Diedrich Knickerbocker),” is one of the
earliest and most prominent supernatural
fictions set in the United States. Although
the tale certainly owes something to the
English Gothic and German folklore—
Irving was relatively cosmopolitan for an
American-born author, and his Sketch Book
of Geoffrey Crayon was published while he
was living in Birmingham, England—it is
arguably one of the most influential Ameri-
can ghost stories. The conceit of The Sketch
Book of Geoffrey Crayon is that most of his
sketches come filtered through this imag-
ined gentleman’s sensibilities (or those of
Diedrich Knickerbocker), such that each of
the story’s descriptions and commentaries
comes replete with a personalized sense of
moralism.
The narrative of “The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow” is straightforward enough (this
may explain its continued popularity in all
levels of the American education system): a
Tarrytown, New York, schoolmaster called
Ichabod Crane makes his living as a kind
of pauper-scholar, teaching the area’s youth
while living off the good graces of the local
community. Although from Connecticut,
Crane has established himself as a local fix-
ture, though he is more obviously itinerant
than the locals, who descend from several
generations of Dutch settlers. Crane is a
respected member of the community, even
if he does not measure up to traditional
markers of masculinity (wealth, strength).
According to Richard V. McLamore, Crane
is “a parody of imperially ambitious Amer-
ican writers” in that he overimagines his
importance to the locale, a place driven
more by the hardscrabble life of farming
than by intellectual life. He falls in love
 “THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW”  n  155
with Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter of a
prosperous farmer, and hopes to win her
affection. Crane is doomed to fail, how-
ever, given that his competition is Brom
Bones, a massive and virile man described
as “always ready for a fight or a frolic.”
Brom is the local warrior-hero, a man
without apparent fear, who claims that he
has even stood toe-to-toe against local leg-
end “The Hessian,” a phantasmal headless
horseman who, having been killed during
mercenary service during the Revolutionary
War, haunts the roads of Tarrytown and its
surrounding environs. After Crane fails to
secure Katrina’s interest (or affection) at a
party, he leaves and encounters the head-
less horseman. Knickerbocker (the narrator
of the tale) relates that Crane is presumed
dead, although there is a possibility that he
left the community in disgrace, or in fear
of further encounters with the “Galloping
Hessian of the Hollow.” Whether or not the
Hessian is really Brom Bones in disguise is
up to the reader.
Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hol-
low” is steeped in New York locales, but it
references life outside of a purely Ameri-
can tradition. Crane is something of a Don
Quixote in that he imagines himself a righ-
teous knight:
From the moment Ichabod laid his
eyes upon these regions of delight
the peace of his mind was at an end,
and his only study was how to gain
the affections of the peerless daugh-
ter of Van Tassel. In this enterprise,
however, he had more real difficul-
ties than generally fell to the lot of a
knight-errant of yore, who seldom
had anything but giants, enchanters,
fiery dragons, and such-like easily-
conquered adversaries to contend
with, and had to make his way merely
through gates of iron and brass and
walls of adamant to the castle keep,
where the lady of his heart was con-
fined; all which he achieved as easily
as a man would carve his way to the
centre of a Christmas pie, and then
the lady gave him her hand as a mat-
ter of course.
Bones best lives up to this idea of roman-
tic medievalism, although his boastful-
ness prevents him from earning too much
reader sympathy. Katrina Van Tassel is
offered mostly as an object of desire and
less as a multidimensional character. The
Hessian, who features in surprisingly little
of the story, remains justly famous for the
unpredictability he embodies. Perhaps
the liveliest figuration in the story is the
community itself, an insular group whose
regional affiliation and superstitions clearly
forecast the traits of Stephen King’s New
England.
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is a
perennial favorite of the public domain,
and has been adapted for the stage, into
an opera, and into numerous radio and
audio podcasts. The first film adaptation,
The Headless Horseman (1922, Edward D.
Venturini), is a comic melodrama featuring
Will Rogers as Ichabod Crane. Shot largely
on location in the Hudson River Val-
ley, it is an earnest period costume drama
that boasts a rousing horse chase between
Crane and the Hessian (Bones in a black
cloak). One of the most famous film adap-
tations is in The Adventures of Ichabod and
Mr. Toad (1949), an animated feature that
offers a version of The Wind in the Willows
alongside “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”
Despite the usual penchant for exaggerated
appearances in animated movies, this take
on “Legend” stays relatively true to Irving’s
initial description of Ichabod Crane:
The cognomen of Crane was not
inapplicable to his person. He was
tall, but exceedingly lank, with nar-
156  n  LEMKIN, JONATHAN
row shoulders, long arms and legs,
hands that dangled a mile out of his
sleeves, feet that might have served
for shovels, and his whole frame most
loosely hung together. His head was
small, and flat at top, with huge ears,
large green glassy eyes, and a long snip
nose, so that it looked like a weather-
cock perched upon his spindle neck
to tell which way the wind blew. To
see him striding along the profile of a
hill on a windy day, with his clothes
bagging and fluttering about him,
one might have mistaken him for the
genius of Famine descending upon
the earth or some scarecrow eloped
from a cornfield.
JOHNNY DEPP’s turn as Crane in Tim
Burton’s Sleepy Hollow marks a radical
departure: still an eccentric, he is now a
handsome investigator played by a Holly-
wood heartthrob.—Kevin M. Flanagan
References
Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of
Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Project Gutenberg.
www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2048; Richard
V. McLamore, “The Dutchman in the Attic:
Claiming an Inheritance in The Sketch Book
of Geoffrey Crayon,” American Literature 72,
no. 1 (2000): 48.
LEMKIN, JONATHAN (1961–)
American screenwriter, the first of several
writers on the unproduced Tim Burton
project Superman Lives. Lemkin was a stu-
dent at the American Film Institute’s Cen-
ter for Advanced Film Studies beginning
in 1983. He started his career in television
in 1986 as a story editor on the series Hill
Street Blues. In 1987–1988, he worked as a
story editor for the series 21 Jump Street,
subsequently writing several episodes for
the series. Soon after, he worked as co-
writer and co-producer on the made-for-
television film Exile (1990), about a group
of teenagers who crash on an uncharted
island and must learn to survive.
In 1993, he was selected by producer
Jon Peters to write the screenplay for a film
that eventually was titled Superman Reborn.
According to Glen Weldon, Peters “had lit-
tle fondness” for the Superman character,
deciding to focus on the “Death of Super-
man” story line from 1992. He issued Lem-
kin two edicts: “(1) The red-and-blue suit,
the boots, the cape? ‘Too faggy.’ He didn’t
want to see it in his film. (2) The sight of
a man flying through the air? ‘Horseshit.’
He didn’t want to see it in his film.” Fol-
lowing the DC Comics’ Superman story
line, Superman psychically impregnates
Lois Lane after his fatal fight with Dooms-
day. Following his death, she gives birth to
a second Superman, who grows to man-
hood in three weeks and manages to save
the world. While Peters was pleased, War-
ner Bros. rejected the script. Subsequently,
GREGORY POIRIER was brought in to
revise Lemkin’s script.
Lemkin earned his first screenwrit-
ing credit on Taylor Hackford’s Devil’s
Advocate (1997). Lethal Weapon 4 (1998)
followed, then Red Planet (2000), and in
2007, he wrote the screenplay for Antoine
Fuqua’s Shooter.
References
“Jonathan Lemkin,” IMDb, www.imdb.
com/name/nm0501380/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1;
Glen Weldon, Superman: The Unauthorized
Biography (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2013),
299.
LOST IN OZ
Proposed television series, for which a pilot
was written, on which Tim Burton would
have served as executive producer. Two
drafts of a pilot episode, titled “Lost in Oz,”
were written by Trey Callaway (I Still Know
What You Did Last Summer, 1998) in 1999,

but no further development was done on
the series. The story is credited to Trey Cal-
laway, Michael Katleman, Tim Burton, and
Joel T. Smith. Executive producers for the
proposed series were the same: Tim Burton,
Trey Callaway, Michael Katleman, and Joel
T. Smith. Various websites indicate that a
pilot for the series was actually filmed, but
this claim is spurious. The IMDb (Inter-
net Movie Database) lists three cast mem-
bers, and a supporting crew in connection
with the pilot, but this material most likely
consists of test footage directed by veteran
television director Michael Katleman. In
2002, a forty-seven-minute pilot episode
was filmed for a proposed television series,
also titled Lost in Oz, directed by Mick Gar-
ris and starring Melissa George, but should
not be confused with the proposed series to
which Burton was attached.
References
“Lost in Oz,” IMDb, www.imdb.com/title/
tt0173573/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1; “Mysterio
Gives Us a Look at Tim Burton’s Lost in
Oz,” Ain’t It Cool News, November 1, 1999,
www.aintitcool.com/node/4613.
LUAU (US 1982)
Directors: Tim Burton, Jerry Rees. Screen-
play: Tim Burton, Jerry Rees. Produc-
ers : Tim Burton, Jerry Rees. C reative
Consultants: Harry Sabin, Randy Cart-
wright. Original Music: Kent Holladay,
featuring Jan and Dave. Special Thanks:
the Lanziseros, David Silverman, Sue
Mantle, Tron Trailer Girls, Ron Cle-
ments Special Process Stage.
Cast: Mike Gabriel (Bob), Susan Franken-
berger (Arlene), Terrey Hamada (Prin-
cess Yakamoshi), Joe Ranft (Surfer),
Jay Jackson (Surfer), Brian McEntee
(Surfer), Harry Sabin (Surfer), Jerry
Rees (Surfer), Cynthia Prince (Surfer),
John Musker (Businessman), Ben Bur-
LUAU  n  157
gess (Businessman), Dick Heinricks (sic)
(Businessman), “Brick” Newton (Busi-
nessman), George Sukara (Business-
man), Ed Gombert (Businessman), Gale
Musker (Businessman), Sue Kroyer
(Businessman). S pecial G uest S tars :
Ray Wonder Jr., Phil Young (Kahuna),
Randy Cartwright (IQ), Tim Burton (the
Supreme Being/Mortie), Rosalie Lanzi-
sero (Woman in Kitchen), Ray Wonder
Jr., Louis Tate, Kathleen A. Sabin, Meri-
dith Jackson, Rebecca LoDolo, Amy
Sabin, Darrell Van Citters.
R unning T ime : 31 minutes, 10 seconds.
Color.
R eleased T hrough : Student Film, not
intended for circulation (see Doctor of
Doom).
Home movie directed by Tim Burton and
JERRY REES while working at Disney
around 1979–1980, loosely inspired by
Gidget (1959), the precursor to the beach
party films about California’s surf culture.
The film is a gentle parody of the teenager
stereotypes employed in those films. The
opening scene (stock footage) establishes
the setting (beach), characters (boys and
girls), and action (the beach party, the
luau). Oahu’s iconic Diamond Head can
be seen in the background. Arlene (Susan
Frankenberger), the girlfriend of Bob the
surfer, shows up with her house guest,
Princess Yakamoshi (Terrey Hamada),
who is staying with her for the summer.
Bob is instantly attracted to the princess,
telling Arlene that he hopes “this gorgeous
new girl doesn’t disturb our great relation-
ship.” The princess removes her kimono to
reveal a skimpy bikini beneath. The surfers
go mad. One is so impressed by the bikini
that he shouts, “This calls for a celebration!
You’re all invited to my house tonight for
a big luau!” Arlene wants to tell Bob about
what a wonderful boyfriend he is, but Bob
ignores her to ask the princess for a date
158  n  LUBEZKI, EMMANUEL
to the luau. Enraged, Arlene slaps him,
screaming, “I’d rather French kiss a leper
than ever lay eyes on you again!”
That night at the luau, everyone is hav-
ing a good time. Bob attempts to seduce
the princess, while Kahuna (Phil Young,
the name inspired by the Cliff Robertson
character in Gidget), is overcome by exis-
tential dread. IQ (Randy Cartwright), a
fellow surfer dude, follows him and learns
that Kahuna is tired of the party scene
and tells IQ, “I don’t wanna be called
Kahuna. I wanna be called by my right
name: Vladimir Moonface” (another allu-
sion to Gidget—the James Darren charac-
ter is named Moondoggie). A strange light
appears in the sky, drawing IQ’s attention,
and he goes to investigate. The object seems
to be some kind of dustbin. Inside is a dis-
embodied head (Tim Burton) that claims
to be “the most powerful being in the uni-
verse,” and announces it has turned IQ into
a zombie. This is obviously not the case,
because IQ promptly tosses the head into
the piles of food laid out for the luau.
Nonsense follows. Arlene, seeing Bob
and Princess Yakamoshi returning together,
launches into a song and dance involving
the entire cast. Eventually, having attracted
the attention of the partygoers, the head—
which refers to itself as “the Supreme
Being”—challenges Bob to a surfing con-
test. If the Supreme Being wins, he will be
given Bob’s body. The contest is held the
next day; Bob wins. Meanwhile, Kahuna
vanishes, “never to be seen by his good
friends again.” Everyone congratulates Bob
on his victory, but the head remains defi-
ant. Suddenly, Bob, who has slipped on a
referee’s striped shirt, blows a whistle and a
football player emerges from nowhere and
kicks the disembodied head out of sight.
A black celebrity appears on the beach
named “Ray Wonder Jr.,” seemingly mod-
eled on Sammy Davis Jr. Wonder suggests
that they all go to his house for another
luau. Tim Burton reappears as Mortie,
who’s being given a pie by a fat woman
(Rosalie Lanzisero). Carrying the pie,
Mortie appears at the luau, dropping the
pie in a man’s face. IQ scrapes the pie from
the man’s face and begins to eat it. After the
local volcano erupts (stock footage), the
partygoers take shelter in a house, where IQ
catches a glimpse of Kahuna. IQ yells out
Kahuna’s name, but Kahuna turns to stare
out of the TV screen at IQ, saying, “I’m not
Kahuna. I’m Vladimir Moonface Junior!”
There’s a freeze-frame of Kahuna’s face as
the credits roll.
A film of inspired silliness, RICK
HEINRICHS in an interview reported, “It
was a lot of fun to work on. It was mainly
Tim’s. . . . There were a lot of very talented
people at Disney at the time, and they were
finding it very hard to deal with the day to
day requirements of producing the footage
for those films, because of the way things
were set up at Disney at the time. Luau was
a great pressure relief valve for everybody
away from the factory line. It’s a silly little
film, but it was a lot of fun, it has a very
peculiar energy to it, an entertaining thing.”
The film is now readily available on
YouTube.com, although the print quality
leaves much to be desired. Period photos
of many of the film’s cast, taken ca. 1979
at Disney Feature Animation, can be found
on Jerry Rees’s website: www.jerryrees.
com/page125/page125.html.
Reference
Jim Smith and J. Clive Matthews, Tim Bur-
ton, Virgin Film Series (London: Virgin
Books, 2007): 21.
LUBEZKI, EMMANUEL (1964–)
Award-winning cinematographer who shot
Tim Burton’s Academy Award–winning
SLEEPY HOLLOW. Emmanuel Lubezki
(aka Emmanuel Lubezki Morgenstern and
“Chivo” Lubezki) was born in Mexico City

in 1964, the son of actor Muni Lubezki.
He has been nominated for seven Acad-
emy Awards, having won back-to-back
Oscars for his cinematography on Gravity
(2013) and Birdman: Or (The Unexpected
Virtue of Ignorance) (2014). After high
school, Lubezki attended the University of
Mexico and began as a student of history,
but soon became interested in filmmak-
ing. “There was a still photography depart-
ment at the Mexican School of Cinema
at the university. I started shooting short
films and abandoned studying history.
There were maybe three kids at the school
who wanted to be cinematographers. We
shot most of the films for different direc-
tors. I met Alfonso Cuarón, Xavier Pérez
Grobet, Rodrigo Prieto, Luis Estrada, who
directed my first couple of movies, and
other friends.” Lubezki was nominated
for several cinematography awards for his
work on Sleepy Hollow (1999). He won
the Boston Society of Film Critics Award
for Best Cinematography, the Online Film
Critics Society Award for Best Cinema-
tography, and the Satellite Award for Best
LUBEZKI, EMMANUEL  n  159
Cinematography. For the same film, he was
nominated for an Academy Award for Best
Cinematography and an ASC Award for
Outstanding Achievement in Cinematog-
raphy in Theatrical Releases.
In addition to his work with Alfonso
Cuarón and Tim Burton, Lubezki has
worked with other major directors such as
Terence Malick (The New World [2005];
The Tree of Life [2011]) and the Coen
brothers (Burn after Reading [2008]).—
Rebecca A. Umland
References
“Emmanuel Lubezki,” IMDb, www.imdb.
com/name/nm0523881/?ref_=nv_sr_1; V
Renée, “Master Cinematographer Emman-
uel Lubezki Is on Instagram (And His Pho-
tos Are Incredible,” No Film School, Feb-
ruary 22, 2014, nofilmschool.com/2014/02/
master-cinematographer-emmanuel-
lubezki-is-on-instagram-his-photos-are-
incredible; “Emmanuel Lubezki,” Internet
Encyclopedia of Cinematographers, www.
cinematographers.nl/PaginasDoPh/lubezki.
htm.
 M
A
MARIE, LISA (1968–)
Professional name of model and actress
Lisa Marie Smith, at one time the fiancée
of Tim Burton. Born December 5, 1968, in
Piscataway, New Jersey, while still a teen-
ager she moved to New York City where
by 1986 she had become a frequent model
for fashion photographer Bruce Weber.
She later appeared as herself in Weber’s
film Let’s Get Lost (1988), while continu-
ing to model for Weber in advertisements
for Calvin Klein, and on one occasion
modeling for Robert Mapple-thorpe. She
landed a minor role in Woody Allen’s
Alice (1990), but appeared in no other fea-
ture films until Tim Burton’s ED WOOD
(1994), in which she was cast in the sup-
porting role of Vampira.
Tim Burton biographer Ken Hanke
acknowledges that there are two differing
accounts of how and when the relationship
between Burton and Lisa Marie began. One
account has Burton being introduced to
Lisa Marie through JONATHAN GEMS on
New Year’s Eve 1991, while the other has
them meeting at a party in New York City
sometime in the fall of 1992. Lisa Marie has
always maintained it was 1991 when her
relationship with Burton began, but most
likely 1991 marks the year they first met.
Since Burton was still appearing publicly
in the first half of 1992 with his then wife,
LENA GIESEKE, the romantic relation-
ship with Lisa Marie probably began late
160  n 
in 1992, with her and Burton’s putative
engagement taking place early in 1993.
Perhaps Lisa Marie’s most memorable
role in a Tim Burton film was as a Mar-
tian disguised as a prostitute gaining entry
to the White House in MARS ATTACKS!
Sewn into her dress and topped with an
absurdly large blonde wig precariously
perched on top of her head, Lisa Marie
resembled a character from Dr. Seuss. In
SLEEPY HOLLOW (1999) she had another
nonspeaking role, as Ichabod Crane’s
mother, about whom he has nightmares,
having witnessed as a child her horrific tor-
ture (an homage to actress Barbara Steele
in Mario Bava’s Black Sunday). In her final
role in a Tim Burton film, Lisa Marie had
the minor part of Nova, an ape, in PLANET
OF THE APES (2001).
During the filming of this latter
movie, Burton told Lisa Marie that he had
decided to end their relationship. Their
subsequent split was not an amicable one.
Under the auspices of California palimony
law, Lisa Marie sued Burton on grounds
of an express contract between them that
she was entitled to a share of the assets
accumulated during their roughly eight
and one-half years of cohabitation. In
2004, she reached a property settlement
with Burton for which she purportedly
received $2.7 million. Nonetheless, in
early 2005 she decided to auction off some
of the remaining property she and Burton

White House Press Secretary Jerry Ross (Martin Short, left) negotiates a deal with Martian Girl (Lisa
Marie) in Mars Attacks!
had acquired during their years together,
a portion of which included Burton’s per-
sonal belongings: props, memorabilia,
and costumes from several of his films, as
well as some of his drawings. Burton con-
demned it, claiming he could not vouch
for the authenticity of the items. That
seemed to be the end of it, but slightly
over a year and a half later, in December
2006, she initiated another lawsuit against
Burton, alleging he had bilked her out of
an equitable division of their assets when
they split in 2001 and that in the 2004
settlement she had been cheated, unwit-
tingly duped into accepting an inequitable
payout under coercion and false pretenses.
In September 2008, a Los Angeles Superior
Court judge dismissed the lawsuit in Bur-
ton’s favor, asserting that Lisa Marie had
not presented a valid case.
MARIE, LISA  n  161
For a short time, Lisa Marie served as
host of the Sci-Fi Channel series Exposure
(2000–2002), which showcased short sci-fi
films. Subsequently, she was absent from
the screen for a decade until she was cast in
a minor role in the Rob Zombie–directed
horror film The Lords of Salem (2012).
References
Associated Press, “Judge Ends Lawsuit by
Tim Burton’s Ex,” Today, September 23,
2008, www.today.com/id/26861258/ns/
today-today_entertainment/t/judge-ends-
lawsuit-tim-burtons-ex/#.VWzEK2Bp-
BU; Linda Lee, “A Night Out with: Lisa
Marie; A Vargas Girl in the City,” New
York Times, July 29, 2001, www.nytimes.
com/2001/07/29/style/a-night-out-with-
lisa-marie-a-vargas-girl-in-the-city.html;
Mark Salisbury, Burton on Burton, 2nd
162  n  MARS ATTACKS!
rev. ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 2006),
158; “Lisa Marie,” The Tim Burton Col-
lective, www.timburtoncollective.com/lisa.
html; Stephen M. Silverman, “Tim Burton
Riled over Sale by Ex Lisa Marie,” People,
March 3, 2005, www.people.com/people/
article/0,,1034770,00.html;
MARS ATTACKS! (US 1996)
D irector : Tim Burton. P roducers : Tim
Burton, Larry Franco. Associate Pro-
ducers : Paul Deason, Mark S. Miller.
M usic : Danny Elfman. M usic S core
Producer/Orchestrator: Steve Bartek.
C inematography : Peter Suschitzky.
Editor: Chris Lebenzon. Casting: Mat-
thew Barry, Jeanne McCarthy, Victo-
ria Thomas. Production Design: Wynn
Thomas. S upervising A rt D irector :
James Hegedus. A rt D irection : John
Dexter. Set Decoration: Nancy Haigh.
C ostume D esign : Colleen Atwood.
Makeup Artists: Julie Hewett, Barbara
Lacy, Robin Neal, Ve Neill. Hair Styl-
ists: Norma Lee, Joy Zapata. Key Hair
Stylist: Candace Neal. Key Makeup Art-
ist: Valli O’Reilly. Body Makeup Artist:
Julie Steffes. Unit Production Manager:
Paul Deason. Second Unit Directors:
C.C. Barnes, Paul Bernard, Cathy Bond.
DGA Trainee: Heather French. Second
Assistant Director: David Kelley. First
A ssistant D irector : Tom Mack. S et
Designer: Richard Berger. Set Dresser:
Kevin Considine. Assistant Art Direc-
tors : Jann Engel, Richard Fernandez.
Foley Editor: Sandina Bailo Lape. Assis-
tant Sound Designer: Steve Boeddeker.
Dialogue Editor: Sara Bolder. Assistant
Supervising Sound Editor: Lisa Chino.
S ound E ffects E ditors : Frank Eulner,
Ken Fischer. Assistant Sound Editor:
Andre Fenley. Supervising Sound Editor:
Richard Hymns. Lead Painter (Mackin-
non & Saunders LTD.): Astrig Akserlian.
Design Sculptors (Mackinnon & Saun-
ders LTD.): Noel Baker, Colin Batty.
C ostumer S upervisor (Mackinnon &
Saunders LTD.): Geraldine Corrigan.
Special Effects Foreman: Donald Elliott.
P rototype F abricators (Mackinnon &
Saunders LTD.): Lucy Gell, Christine
Keogh, Mark Thompson. M e c h a n -
ics D esigner (Mackinnon & Saunders
LTD.): Georgina Hayns. Special Effects
Technician: Thomas R. Homsher. Pro-
ducer S upervisor (Mackinnon & Saun-
ders LTD.): Barry Jones. Special Effects:
Louie Lantieri, Dan Ossello, Tom Pahk.
Special Effects Supervisor: Michael Lan-
tieri. Design Supervisors (Mackinnon &
Saunders LTD.): Ian Mackinnon, Peter
Saunders. Shop Coordinator (Mackin-
non & Saunders LTD.): Graham Maiden.
Design Sculptor (Mackinnon & Saunders
LTD.): Darren Marshall. Mold Designer
(Mackinnon & Saunders LTD.): Bridget
Smith. M echanics S upervisor (Mack-
innon & Saunders LTD.): Stuart Sut-
cliffe. S pecial E ffects : Brian Tipton,
Tom Tokunaga. Production Supervisor
(Mackinnon & Saunders LTD.): Chris-
tine Walker. Shop Coordinator (Mack-
innon & Saunders LTD.): Simon White.
2-D Roto Artist (Warner Digital Stu-
dios): Michael Adkisson. 3-D C amera
M atchmove A rtist (ILM): Alia Agha.
Video Engineering (ILM): Kipp Aldrich.
Production Staff (ILM) Adrienne Ander-
son. V isual E ffects S upervisor : David
Andrews. Lead Character Animators
(ILM): Chris Armstrong, Kyle Balda,
Lina M. Bel, Sue Campbell. Computer
G raphics S equence S upervisor (ILM):
Joel Aron. 2-D Artist (Warner Digital
Studios): Julian Backus, Bonjin Byun.
2-D T exture A rtist (Warner Digital
Studios): Darren Bedwell. Digital Effects
Artist (ILM): Jeffrey Benedict. CG Art-
ists (Warner Digital Studios): Rhett
Bennett, Jeffrey Benoit, Heather Bush-
man. Software Engineer (ILM): David
Benson. C omputer S ystems E ngineer
(ILM): Ken Beyer. Senior Visual Effects
Coordinator (ILM): Jill Brooks. Digi-

tal C amera S upervisor (Warner Digi-
tal Studios): Megan Bryant. CG Artist
(Warner Digital Studios): Film Assem-
bly Technician (Warner Digital Studios):
Diane Caliva.
C ast : Jack Nicholson (President James
Dale/Art Land), Glenn Close (First
Lady Marsha Dale), Annette Bening
(Barbara Land), Pierce Brosnan (Pro-
fessor Donald Kessler), Danny DeVito
(Rude Gambler), Martin Short (Press
Secretary Jerry Ross), Sarah Jessica
Parker (Nathalie Lake), Michael J. Fox
(Jason Stone), Rod Steiger (General
Decker), Tom Jones (Tom Jones),
Lukas Haas (Richie Norris), Nata-
lie Portman (Taffy Dale), Jim Brown
(Byron Williams), Lisa Marie (Martian
Girl), Sylvia Sidney (Grandma Flor-
ence Norris), Paul Winfield (General
Casey), Pam Grier (Louise Williams),
Jack Black (Billy Glenn Norris), Janice
Rivera (Cindy, Byron’s Coworker),
Ray J (Cedric Williams), Brandon Ham-
mond (Neville Williams), Joe Don
Baker (Richie’s Dad), O-Lan Jones
(Sue Ann Norris), Christina Applegate
(Sharona), Brian Haley (Mitch, Secret
Service Agent), Jerzy Skolimowski (Dr.
Zeigler), Timi Prulhiere (White House
Tour Guide), Barbet Schroeder (Mau-
rice, the French President), Chi Hoang
Cai (Mr. Lee), Tommy Bush (Hillbilly),
Joseph Maher (White House Decora-
tor), Gloria M. Malgarini (Nun), Betty
Bunch (Nun), Gloria Hoffmann (Nun),
Willie Garson (Corporate Guy), John
Roselius (GNN Boss), Michael Reilly
Burke (GNN Reporter), Valerie Wild-
man (GNN Reporter), Richard Irving
(GNN Reporter), Jonathan Emer-
son (Newscaster), Tamara “Gingir”
Curry (Hooker), Rebecca Broussard
(Hooker), Vinny Argiro (Mr. Brian,
Casino Manager), Steve Valentine (TV
Director), Coco Leigh (Female Journal-
ist), Jeffrey King (NASA Technician),
Enrique Castillo (Hispanic Colonel),
MARS ATTACKS!  n  163
Don Lamoth (Colonel #2), C. Wayne
Owens (Stranger), Joseph Patrick
Moynihan (Stranger), Roger Peterson
(Colonel), John Finnegan (Speaker of
the House), Ed Lambert (Morose Old
Guy), John Gray (Incredibly Old Guy),
Gregg Daniel (Lab Technician), J. Ken-
neth Campbell (Doctor), Rance How-
ard (Texan Investor), Jeanne Mori
(Doctor), Richard Assad (Saudi Inves-
tor), Velletta Carlson (Elderly Woman
Playing Slots), Kevin Mangan (Trailer
Lover), Rebeca Silva (Hispanic Woman),
Josh Weinstein (Hippie), Julian Barnes
(White House Waiter), Ken Thomas
(White House Photographer), Darelle
Porter Holden (Tom Jones Backup
Singer), Christi Black (Tom Jones
Backup Singer), Sharon Hendrix (Tom
Jones Backup Singer), Frank W. Welker
(Various Martian Voices).
Running Time: 105 minutes, 35 seconds.
Color.
Released Through: Warner Bros. and Tim
Burton Productions.
Martian invasion film inspired by the Mars
Attacks! trading card series. Tim Burton’s
Mars Attacks! is best understood as a pas-
tiche. It is an alien invasion movie as Ed
Wood might have made had he had the
financial and technical means to do it:
“Here was a chance to do something like
Plan 9 from Outer Space—with a bit more
money of course!” Burton said. As Ali-
son McMahan observes, Mars Attacks! is a
“big budget B movie” made as “Ed Wood
would have made it if he had had the
resources.” Like any pastiche, Mars Attacks!
is a mélange of artistic sources and inspira-
tions: the Topps Trading Card series from
1962 depicting an invasion from Mars from
which the movie takes its title, the cards
themselves inspired by 1950s science fic-
tion B movies and pulp fiction; the subse-
quent Topps Trading Card series Dinosaurs
164  n  MARS ATTACKS!
Attack! (1988); Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from
Outer Space; The War of the Worlds (1953,
Byron Haskin); and Ray Harryhausen’s
work on Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956,
Fred Sears) and Jason and the Argonauts
(1963, Don Chaffey). Like any pastiche,
the end result is a mixture of blindness and
insight: neither Burton nor screenwriter
JONATHAN GEMS was aware that the
text on the back of the Topps cards was in
fact a narrative linking the cards together;
according to Gems, the movie’s inspira-
tions were solely the Topps cards’ illustra-
tions, “that lurid Analog-type cover style of
pulp science-fiction.”
As a science-fiction comedy, the plot
begins predictably enough: Earth discovers
it is under attack by Martians, descending
upon Earth in what seems to be an inex-
haustible supply of flying saucers. Recog-
nizing this as a historic event, the president
of the United States, James Dale (JACK
NICHOLSON), consults his liberal advis-
ers for a course of action, which include
his favored science adviser, the smug, pipe-
smoking professor Donald Kessler (Pierce
Brosnan); his lecherous press secretary,
Jerry Ross (Martin Short); and his military
advisers, the bellicose General Decker (Rod
Steiger) and peace-loving General Casey
(Paul Winfield). Professor Kessler and Jerry
Ross assure the president that the invad-
ing Martians mean no harm. But people
across the country follow the unfolding
story: GNN reporter Jason Stone (Michael
J. Fox) and his talk show hostess girlfriend
Nathalie Lake (Sarah Jessica Parker); Byron
Williams (Jim Brown), a former heavy-
weight boxing champion reduced to work-
ing as a host at the Luxor Las Vegas hotel;
Louise Williams (Pam Grier), Williams’s
estranged wife now working as a bus driver
and raising their two sons; and the Norris
family in Kansas, including Richie (Lukas
Haas), his mom (O-Lan Jones) and his dad
(Joe Don Baker). Meanwhile, in Las Vegas,
a property mogul, Art Land (Jack Nichol-
son in a dual role), greedily anticipates the
business he can do with the influx of alien
tourists. Hence, the primary locations have
been established: Washington, DC, Las
Vegas, and the middle Midwest.
A meeting is arranged with the Mar-
tians in Pahrump, Nevada, near Las Vegas,
with General Casey representing the US
military. Using a translator to decipher his
staccato language (“Ack, Ack, Aaack, Ack,
Ack”), the Martian ambassador announces
their intention to colonize Earth. However,
the translator is reprogrammed to say that
the Martians “come in peace.” When a hip-
pie releases a dove as a symbol of peace, the
ambassador quickly draws his X-ray gun and
incinerates it in midflight. He and the other
Martians then unleash the first volley of
mayhem, slaughtering the large number of
people gathered to witness the event, among
them General Casey and reporter Jason
Stone. Richie Norris’s brother, army private
Billy Glenn Norris (Jack Black), heroically
charges the Martians with his rifle but is also
killed. The Martians abduct Nathalie Lake
and her pet Chihuahua, Poppy, to be used as
experimental subjects for grotesque Martian
experiments in hybridization.
Astonishingly, President Dale believes
that the Martians mistook the dove as a
symbol of war, and orders Professor Kessler
to restore negotiations. Professor Kessler—
who is, like Victor Frankenstein, “a literalist
lacking in imagination” as Harold Bloom
writes—arranges for the Martian ambas-
sador to address the members of Congress,
which also predictably ends in disaster, as
the Martians toast them, abducting Profes-
sor Kessler, who is taken aboard a Martian
spaceship, where, like Nathalie Lake, he
becomes the subject of a byzantine Martian
experiment. His body is dismembered, but
his disembodied head is kept alive.
General Decker tries to convince Presi-
dent Dale to retaliate with nuclear warfare,

but Dale refuses. Later, Press Secretary Jerry
Ross invites a Martian disguised as a prosti-
tute into the White House. As Jerry tries to
seduce the Martian, she bites off his finger
and bludgeons him to death. Unsuccessful
in its attempt to assassinate President Dale,
the Martian is gunned down by members of
the Secret Service. After this event the Mar-
tians begin massive apocalyptic destruc-
tion, blowing up Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower,
the Taj Mahal, the Easter Island Moai, and
Mount Rushmore, impishly replacing the
presidents’ heads on Mount Rushmore
with Martian ones.
The Martians attack the White House.
To protect them, the Secret Service rushes
the president and the first lady (Glenn
Close) to the bunker. However, the first lady
is crushed to death by a chandelier before
she makes it to safety. The Martians even-
tually blast their way into the bunker, and
when General Decker attempts to protect
the president, the Martian leader reduces
him to the size of a bug before crushing
him beneath his foot. After everyone in the
bunker is killed except for the president,
Dale makes one final plea for peace to the
Martian leader: “Can’t we all just get along?”
Seemingly moved, the Martian leader offers
President Dale his hand in friendship,
but the hand is simulacrum concealing a
weapon: it detaches from the Martian’s arm
and impales the president before unfurling a
Martian flag over his dead body.
Meanwhile, as the Martians sack Las
Vegas, Byron Williams leads a small group
of survivors to a small airport hoping to fly
to safety. They discover a large group of
Martians encamped there, among them the
Martian ambassador. Heroically, Williams
creates a diversion by challenging them to a
fistfight. He succeeds in killing the ambas-
sador but is swarmed by the Martians while
the others escape.
Meanwhile, Richie Norris (LUKAS
HAAS), his parents having been killed by
MARS ATTACKS!  n  165
a giant Martian robot when they choose
to stay and defend their home, seeks to
rescue his grandmother, Florence (Sylvia
Sidney). It is Richie who quite by chance
stumbles upon the Martians’ proverbial
Achilles’ heel: their brains explode when
they hear country and western yodeler Slim
Whitman’s version (1952) of “Indian Love
Call” (from the 1924 Broadway musical
Rose-Marie). Having discovered the means
by which to destroy them, Richie and his
grandmother drive around broadcasting
the song, killing scores of Martians. And
so, improbably, the world is saved by an
old Slim Whitman song and a marginalized
pair of Midwesterners consisting of a boy
and his grandmother.
Subsequently, the US military begins
to broadcast the song around the world,
destroying the Martians and causing the
few remaining survivors to either flee or
surrender. Nathalie and Donald, victims of
the Martians’ oddly cruel but imaginative
experiments, perish in a Martian space-
ship when it crashes into the ocean. In the
aftermath, Richie and Grandma Florence
are awarded the Congressional Medal of
Honor by the only surviving member of
the government, the president’s daughter
Taffy (Natalie Portman), at a ceremony
including a mariachi band playing “The
Star-Spangled Banner” on the steps of the
demolished United States Capitol. Hap-
pily, Byron Williams, last seen in the film
being overwhelmed by a horde of Martians,
arrives in Washington, DC, to reunite with
his family.
For Helmut Merschmann, Mars
Attacks! satirizes those ideologically liberal
science-fiction films such as Close Encoun-
ters of the Third Kind (1977), with its depic-
tion of aliens as benignly spiritual beings
(consider Professor Kessler’s declaration
that the arrival of the Martians “is the most
important thing to happen since, perhaps,
Jesus walked in Galilee”). Merschmann
166  n  MARS ATTACKS!
argues that the film “caricatures not only
the patriotic, military tradition of the alien
invasion film, but also its ‘liberal’ alterna-
tive, which approaches the aliens with paci-
fist and spiritually motivated goodwill.” He
asserts that the film “slaughters all those
who intended to profit from the encoun-
ter—television reporters chasing high rat-
ings; young soldiers fantasizing about Viet-
nam; a General thirsting for the limelight
who actually shrinks to the size of his true
significance before being trampled by the
Martians,” and a president seeking higher
public approval ratings, whom the Mar-
tians very easily put to death.
Jonathan Rosenbaum approached
Mars Attacks! as a postmodern pastiche,
observing that the film exhibits a “post-
modernist free fall through the iconogra-
phy of 50s and 60s science fiction in rela-
tion to the present: a singular sense of giddy
displacement that clearly locates the movie
in the 90s, but a 90s largely made up of
images and clichés from previous decades
that are subtly turned against themselves,
made into a form of camp, affectionately
mocked, yet still revered as if they had a
particular purchase on the truth.” In addi-
tion, Rosenbaum sees important influences
on Mars Attacks! in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr.
Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Wor-
rying and Love the Bomb (1964) and in
the Joe Dante–directed movies Gremlins
(1984), Explorers (1985), and Gremlins 2:
The New Batch (1990).
From Strangelove comes an overall
satirical impulse grounded in car-
toonish characters, a basic crosscut-
ting structure and rhythm that moves
between the president of the United
States and various other characters
and locations, the actor playing the
president reappearing in one or more
other parts (Peter Sellers in Strange-
love, Jack Nicholson in Mars), and a
central ‘war room’ where a jingois-
tic top general (George C. Scott in
Strangelove, Rod Steiger in Mars)
petitions the president to go nuclear
in the middle of a global crisis. From
the Gremlins movies comes the over-
all concept of aliens that cackle like
bratty teenagers, mock and destroy
humanity with gratuitous glee, and
bleed a gooey green substance; from
Explorers comes their propensity for
hovering in orbit over earth while
picking up TV signals and creating
garbled hybrids of human life and
culture inside their spaceships.
Mars Attacks! was neither a criti-
cal nor box office success, grossing only
$101,371,017 worldwide, barely recouping
its production costs. Roger Ebert, writing
in the Chicago Sun-Times, complained that
the director and screenwriter made an error
in assuming “it is funny simply to be doing
a parody,” noting “in fact the material has
to be funny in its own right.” Similarly,
Newsweek’s David Ansen described the film
as “a goofball alien-invasion parody that is
so defiantly inconsequential it makes Pee-
Wee’s Big Adventure look weighty,” going
on to say the film is “cheerfully heartless.”
Peter Stack, writing in the San Francisco
Chronicle, called it a “messy science fiction
comedy . . . which turns rich promise into a
tiresome parade of half-baked skits.” Jona-
than Rosenbaum, however, praised the film
for being “in love with silliness.”
Wynn Thomas’s production design
was nominated in 1997 for an Excellence in
Production Design Award by the Art Direc-
tors Guild, and the film was also nominated
for a Saturn Award for Best Film by the
Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and
Horror Films. DANNY ELFMAN did, how-
ever, win a Saturn Award for Best Music.

References
David Ansen, review of Mars Attacks! in
Newsweek, December 23, 1996, 67; Roger
Ebert, review of Mars Attacks! in Chicago
Sun-Times, December 13, 1996, 43; Harold
Bloom, ed., “Introduction,” in Franken-
stein, Bloom’s Guides (New York: Chel-
sea House, 2007), 8; Alison McMahan,
The Films of Tim Burton: Animating Live
Action in Contemporary Hollywood (New
York: Continuum, 2005), 105; Helmut
Merschmann, Tim Burton: The Life and
Films of a Visionary Director, trans. Michael
Kane (London: Titan Books, 2000); Jona-
than Rosenbaum, “Flirting with Disaster,”
Chicago Reader Online, December 1996,
www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/flirting-
with-disaster/Content?oid=892272; Peter
Stack, “Film Review—Scant Intelligent Life
in ‘Mars’/Starry Cast Can’t Save Tim Bur-
ton’s Interplanetary Gags,” San Francisco
Chronicle, December 13, 1996, www.sfgate.
com/movies/article/FILM-REVIEW-Scant-
Intelligent-Life-in-Mars-2956715.php.
MCDOWELL, ALEX (1955–)
Member of Royal Designer for Industry,
producer, and production designer whose
films with Tim Burton include CHAR-
LIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY
and CORPSE BRIDE. McDowell was born
in Borneo, Malaysia, where he spent his
first seven years. He later attended British
Quaker boarding schools. While studying
painting at the Central School of Art and
Design in London, he was drawn to Lon-
don’s punk scene and in 1975 was involved
in staging the first full concert by the Sex
Pistols. He became friends with Glen Mat-
lock, original bass guitarist for the Sex Pis-
tols, and became Matlock’s manager for a
short time. He founded the graphics design
firm Rocking Russian Design to make
record sleeves for Matlock’s short-lived
band, Rich Kids, and later designed LP
covers for Iggy Pop, Siouxsie and the Ban-
MCDOWELL, ALEX  n  167
shees, and others. Assisting former Vogue
art director Terry Jones, McDowell coed-
ited i-D magazine at its launch in 1980. An
opportunity in the mideighties landed him
in Los Angeles in order to shoot, with noted
video director Peter Care, a Bananarama
video. Although that project was cancelled,
McDowell and Care ended up working
with singer/songwriter Robbie Nevil on
“C’est La Vie,” which spent two weeks at
the number 2 spot on the US singles chart
in January 1987. For the next couple of
years (1988–1990), McDowell moved back
and forth between commercials and music
videos, working almost exclusively with
director David Fincher. With Fincher he
worked on nine AT&T commercials, where
he created full movie sets that had only sec-
onds of screen time, but they were prepara-
tion for his move into motion pictures. In
the early nineties, he formally moved into
production design, earning his first credit
as production designer on The Lawnmower
Man (1992). Subsequent films included
The Crow (1994), The Crow: City of Angels
(1996), and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
(1998). He reunited with David Fincher as
production designer on Fight Club, and fol-
lowing The Affair of the Necklace (2001),
spent the next couple of years with director
Steven Spielberg “world building” Minority
Report (2002).
In 2002 he won the San Diego Film
Critics Society award in the Best Pro-
duction Design category for his work on
Minority Report, and in 2004 he won the
Art Directors Guild Award for Excellence
in Production Design for Steven Spiel-
berg’s The Terminal (2004). In 2006 he
was nominated for a BAFTA Award for
his production design for Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory. Also in 2006, McDowell
was named Royal Designer for Industry by
the Royal Society of Arts, the United King-
dom’s most prestigious design society, and
was appointed Visiting Artist at the MIT
168  n  MCDOWELL, MICHAEL
Media Lab. Currently, McDowell is creative
director, 5D Global Studio, and professor
of practice at the USC School of Cinematic
Arts, USC World Building Media Lab.
References
Malcolm Garrett, “From Punk to Produc-
tion Design: The Widescreen Career of
Alex McDowell,” EyeMagazine.com, Sum-
mer 2006, www.eyemagazine.com/feature/
article/la-design-school; “Alex McDowell
RDI,” World Building Institute, world-
building.institute/people/alex-mcdowell.
MCDOWELL, MICHAEL
(MCEACHERN) (1950–1999)
Prolific horror, dark fantasy, detective
story novelist and screenwriter, and coau-
thor, with LARRY WILSON, of BEETLE-
JUICE and cowriter of THE NIGHTMARE
BEFORE CHRISTMAS. With Larry Wil-
son, he also coauthored the teleplay to Tim
Burton’s adaptation of “THE JAR.” Born
in Enterprise, Alabama, in 1950, McDow-
ell received a BA in English from Harvard
University, later earning a PhD in 1978
from Brandeis University. Although he’d
begun writing in college, his first novel,
The Amulet, was published in 1979. (Six of
his early novels, with titles such as Venus
Restored and Blood and Glitter, remain
unpublished.) Yet before he was able to
support himself on his book royalties,
McDowell worked as a teacher, a theater
critic, and a secretary at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. His second novel,
Cold Moon over Babylon, about a murder
victim whose spirit roams the land seek-
ing revenge on her killer, was published
in 1980, followed by a historical revenge
thriller, Golden Needles, also published in
1980. His novel The Elementals followed in
1981.
McDowell proved adept at writing
in several genres, and collaborated with
his friend Dennis Schuetz under the joint
pseudonym “Nathan Aldyne” to write four
gay detective novels between 1980 and 1986
(Vermillion, Cobalt, Slate, and Canary).
However, he preferred to work in the hor-
ror and detective genres, and was so pro-
lific he often published under pseudonyms,
including Axel Young, Mike McCray, and
Preston Macadam. From 1984 to 1987,
McDowell contributed several episodes
to the TV series Tales from the Darkside
(1983–1988), and wrote one episode for
Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996). He wrote
the first draft of Beetlejuice (then Beetle
Juice) in early 1985. By 1986 he had rented
a flat in West Hollywood, and cofounded
Pecos Productions. He went on to write
screenplays for Nightmare before Christ-
mas in 1993 and Stephen King’s Thinner in
1996.
In 1994, McDowell returned to Boston
to live with his longtime partner, Laurence
Senelick, whom he’d met in 1969. After
returning to Boston, he taught screenwrit-
ing at Boston University and Tufts Univer-
sity. Shortly after he returned to Boston,
he was diagnosed with AIDS. He died in
Boston on December 27, 1999, at the age
of forty-nine, from AIDS-related illness.
Long fascinated with Western social and
cultural attitudes toward death (the title
of his PhD dissertation was American Atti-
tudes toward Death, 1825–1865), as well as
the industry surrounding death, McDowell
had amassed a huge collection of death-
related artifacts spanning several centuries.
The Michael McDowell Death Collection,
purchased from Laurence Senelick in 2012
and currently housed in the Archival and
Manuscript Collections at Northwestern
University, consists of bills and invoices
for funeral-related services; graphic pho-
tographs of automobile and train acci-
dents, murder scenes, and suicide scenes;
tintypes, ambrotypes, and stereographs of
dead babies and children; memorial cards;
mourning brooches, pins, and ribbons;
“THE MELANCHOLY DEATH OF OYSTER BOY” & OTHER STORIES  n  169
hairwork; scrapbooks; ledgers; news clip-
pings; pamphlets and matchbook advertise-
ments from coroners and funeral homes; as
well as many other artifacts.
References
“Guide to the Michael McDowell Death
Collection,” Northwestern University
Library, findingaids.library.northwestern.
edu/catalog/inu-ead-spec-archon-1527;
“Michael McDowell,” IMDb, www.imdb.
com/name/nm0568313/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1;
Chris Morgan, “Grocer’s Gothic,” Los
Angeles Review of Books, May 17, 2004, lar-
eviewofbooks.org/essay/grocers-gothic.
MCKEOWN, CHARLES (1946–)
British actor and writer, highly regarded as a
script doctor, who did uncredited revisions
on BATMAN. Born in 1946, Charles McKe-
own began his acting career on British televi-
sion in the early 1970s. He met Terry Gilliam
in 1978 while acting several roles in Life of
Brian (1979). He later appeared as an actor in
Gilliam’s Time Bandits. He went on to cow-
rite Brazil (1985), The Adventures of Baron
Munchausen (1988), and The Imaginarium
of Doctor Parnassus (2009), all directed by
Terry Gilliam. In 1988, as shooting began on
Batman, McKeown was brought in to pro-
vide the Joker with some jokes. According to
Burton, the Joker “needed more jokes, not
for the sake of more jokes, but because that
was his character.” The Joker’s line “Never
rub another man’s rhubarb” was very likely
written by McKeown. He went on to serve as
one of the writers on Jake Scott’s Plunkett &
Macleane (1999) and Liliana Cavani’s Ripley’s
Game (2002).
References
“Charles McKeown,” IMDb, www.imdb.
com/name/nm0571650/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1;
Mark Salisbury, ed., Burton on Burton, 2nd
rev. ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 2006),
80.
“THE MELANCHOLY DEATH OF
OYSTER BOY” & OTHER STORIES
Collection of nonsensical verse written and
illustrated by Tim Burton, influenced by
the work of EDWARD GOREY, particularly
The Gashlycrumb Tinies (“R is for Rhoda
consumed by a fire”), published in 1963.
As does Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies
(1963), The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy
parodies didactic, morally instructive chil-
dren’s tales in which violence or death play
a central role, as it does, for instance, in
stories such as Hans Christian Andersen’s
“The Little Match Girl,” which ends with
the little girl freezing to death on the street.
Indeed, the first poem in Burton’s book,
“Stick Boy and Match Girl in Love,” slyly
seems to invoke Andersen’s morbid tale:
Stick Boy liked Match Girl,
he liked her a lot.
He liked her cute figure,
he thought she was hot.
But could a flame ever burn
for a match and a stick?
It did quite literally;
he burned up quick.
The following twenty-three poems are
included in the 115-page collection:
“Stick Boy and Match Girl in Love”
“Voodoo Girl”
“Robot Boy”
“Staring Girl”
“The Boy with Nails in His Eyes”
“The Girl with Many Eyes”
“Stain Boy”
“The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy”
“Stain Boy’s Special Christmas”
“The Girl Who Turned into a Bed”
“Roy, the Toxic Boy”
“James”
“Stick Boy’s Festive Season”
“Brie Boy”
“Mummy Boy”
“Junk Girl”
170  n  THE MONSTER
“The Pin Cushion Queen”
“Melonhead”
“Sue”
“Jimmy, the Hideous Penguin Boy”
“Char Boy”
“Anchor Baby”
“Oyster Boy Steps Out”
According to Stephen R. Bissette, “The
Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy” was actu-
ally written by novelist and screenwriter
MICHAEL MCDOWELL, who approached
Bissette with the story in 1988, very early
in the genesis of Bissette’s adult comics
anthology, Taboo. The story was published
in a Comics Scene (the Fangoria and Star-
log companion magazine about comics)
issue from 1988. The magazine excerpted
a panel from “Oyster Boy” as part of an
article about Taboo forthcoming. Addition-
ally, McDowell is thanked by Burton in the
acknowledgments at the end of the book.
Burton’s book has remained popular.
It was originally published in hardcover,
with no dust cover, by Rob Weisbach
Books/William Morrow and Company in
1997 and by Faber and Faber (UK) in 1998.
Faber and Faber issued a paperback edition
in 2004, and it was also republished by It
Books in 2008. A holiday edition was issued
by HarperCollins in 2008.
References
Stephen R. Bissette, email to author, Febru-
ary 18, 2015; Tim Burton, The Melancholy
Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories (New
York: William Morrow and Company,
1997); Edward Gorey, The Gashlycrumb
Tinies (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1963).
THE MONSTER
Essential figure in the films of Tim Burton
derived from the realm of myth and the
folk tale. A monster is a mythical creature
combining elements of two or more animal
forms, such as the minotaur or sphinx. In
the Greek tradition, the latter had the body
of a lion, the wings of a great bird, and the
face of a human being. Since the concept
of beauty (the antonym of monster, as in
“beauty and the beast”) implies proper
symmetry as well as proportion, monsters
are often large and frightening, explaining
why the word monster is frequently used
to mean “big” or “large” as well as “ugly.”
Mary Shelley, in her novel Frankenstein
(1818), used the term monster in its mythic
sense, since Victor Frankenstein’s creature
was assembled using the parts of many
corpses. Addressing the question of his
influences, Burton said, “Because I never
read, my fairy tales were probably those
monster movies. To me they’re fairly simi-
lar. I mean, fairy tales are extremely violent
and extremely symbolic and disturbing,
probably even more than Frankenstein and
stuff like that, which are kind of mythic and
perceived as fairy tale like. . . . So I think
I didn’t like fairy tales specifically. I liked
the idea of them more.” Hence Burton
combines elements of monster movies and
folk tales in films such as EDWARD SCIS-
SORHANDS, BEETLEJUICE, THE NIGHT-
MARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, SLEEPY
HOLLOW, PLANET OF THE APES,
CORPSE BRIDE, and FRANKENWEENIE.
The character of Edward Scissorhands, for
example, is a kind of inverted Beauty and
the Beast, in which Edward functions as the
persecuted heroine of the original tale. His
monstrousness is symbolized by his hands.
In Beetlejuice, the shape-shifting Betelgeuse
is like the monster in The Arabian Nights,
a huge demon that has been imprisoned
in a small bottle. PLANET OF THE APES
invokes the frightening image of King
Kong, the monstrous ape or ogre, the pro-
totype of which is the orangutan of Edgar
Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue,”
itself a distant precursor of The Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari (1920). The apes in Burton’s

film anthropomorphically display a wide
range of emotions and actions, from benign
empathy to psychopathic rage (murder-
ousness). Corpse Bride is derived from an
old Jewish folk tale about a demon bride,
while Sleepy Hollow takes its roots from an
old German folktale about headless ghosts.
The myth at the heart of the animated ver-
sion of Frankenweenie is that of the sor-
cerer’s apprentice. In its modern usage,
the monster or monstrous has expanded
to encompass the distortion of the human
form by either an alien organism or by a
supernatural being, both forms of “posses-
sion,” resulting in a human-animal hybrid
(the Fly) or a human-machine synthesis
(Darth Vader). Figural extensions of the
monstrous include the alien, the other, and
liminal types of figures such as the outsider,
the loner, the outcast, the misfit, the odd-
ball, the abject (contemptible), the bizarre,
the freak, and the queer, figures of which
often appear in Burton’s work. In Tim Bur-
ton’s work, stitches or sutures, for instance,
on the resurrected pet dog, Sparky; on the
characters Edward Scissorhands and Sally
(The Nightmare before Christmas); and on
the Catwoman’s (BATMAN RETURNS)
costume, all invoke the figure of the Fran-
kenstein monster, a figuration of the
abhorred creation abandoned (or scorned)
by its creator. Other monsters are amal-
gams, such as The Nightmare before Christ-
mas’s Dr. Finkelstein, that seems to be at
least part duck, the top of his skull hinged,
allowing him to scratch his brain. There’s
also the Joker and the Penguin, both exhib-
iting distortions of the human form: the
Penguin—a Frankenstein-like monster fig-
ure in the sense that he is abandoned by his
parents—is a form of mutation, while the
Joker exhibits monstrous mutilation (his
garish grin a sign of violence known in the
criminal underworld as a Glasgow smile).
Like many of the films of the clas-
sic Hollywood period, Burton’s have an
THE MONSTER  n  171
interest center, usually occupied by the
monster, that overshadows its moral cen-
ter. Shunned and despised, incapable of
being assimilated into the community,
the monster remains forever outside it.
In Beetlejuice, the miscreant monster,
Betelgeuse, is called upon to save the
Maitlands, the couple at the film’s moral
center, from being cast from their beloved
home. Although Betelgeuse is relegated
to the afterlife, his intervention saves
the Maitlands, who are able to remain in
their home and peacefully coexist with
the Deetzes. While the monster remains
barred from the home and by exten-
sion the community, he nonetheless has
secured its existence. The same pattern
can be seen in Edward Scissorhands. As the
film’s interest center, Edward’s abnormal-
ity, his hands, preclude any possibility of
touching anyone else. While he can sculpt
and style hair and groom pets, all contrib-
uting to the health of the community, his
torment is that he can never be part of
that community, viewed as a freak and an
outsider. The film turns on Edward’s deci-
sion to kill Jim, Kim’s wicked boyfriend—
Edward’s use of force is the only way to
save his own life and to rid Kim, the film’s
moral center, of Jim’s pernicious influ-
ence. At the film’s conclusion, he remains
isolated and alone in his castle. Although
Burton’s films rarely have ended as sadly
as Edward Scissorhands, the monster con-
sistently remains his films’ interest center,
as distinct from their moral center.
References
Robert B. Ray, A Certain Tendency in the
Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1980 (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985);
Mark Salisbury, Burton on Burton, 2nd rev.
ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 2006); Jef-
frey Andrew Weinstock, The Ashgate Ency-
clopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014).
172  n  THE MUPPET MOVIE
THE MUPPET MOVIE (US/UK 1979)
Director: James Frawley. Screenplay: Jerry
Juhl and Jack Burns. Executive Produc-
ers: Sir Lew Grade, Martin Starger. Pro-
ducer: Jim Henson. Co-producer: David
Lazer. Music and Lyrics: Paul Williams
and Kenny Ascher. C inematography :
Isidore Mankofsky. Editor: Christopher
Greenbury. P roduction D esign : Joel
Schiller. Art Direction: Les Gobruegge.
Set Decoration: Richard B. Goddard.
C ostume D esign : Gwen Capetanos.
M akeup : Ben Nye Jr. F irst A ssistant
D irector : Ron Wright. S econd A ssis -
tant Director: Penny Adams Flowers.
Sound: Charles Lewis. Special Effects:
Robbie Knott, Scott Forbes.
Cast: Jim Henson (Kermit the Frog/Rowlf
/Dr. Teeth/Waldorf/Swedish Chef/Link
Hogthrob/Doc Hopper’s Men [voice]),
Frank Oz (Miss Piggy/Fozzie Bear/Ani-
mal/Sam the Eagle/Doc Hopper’s Men/
Marvin Suggs/Swedish Chef [assistant]/
Motorcycle Guy [voice]), Jerry Nelson
(Floyd Pepper/Crazy Harry/Robin the
Frog/Lew Zealand/Camilla/Blue Frackle
[voice]), Richard Hunt (Scooter/Statler/
Janice/ Sweetums/Beaker/Fozzie Bear
[assistant] [voice]), Dave Goelz (The
Great Gonzo/Zoot/Dr. Bunsen Hon-
eydew/Doglion/Iraqian in El Sleezo
Café/Nigel/Pig [voice]), Charles Durn-
ing (Doc Hopper), Austin Pendleton
(Max), Edgar Bergen (Himself/Charlie
McCarthy [voice]), Milton Berle (Mad
Man Mooney), Mel Brooks (Profes-
sor Max Krassman), James Coburn
(El Sleezo Cafe Owner), Dom DeLu-
ise (Bernie the Agent), Elliott Gould
(Beauty Contest Compere), Bob Hope
(Ice Cream Vendor), Madeline Kahn
(El Sleezo Patron), Carol Kane (Myth),
Cloris Leachman (Lord’s Secretary),
Steve Martin (Insolent Waiter), Richard
Pryor (Balloon Vendor), Telly Savalas
(El Sleezo Tough), Orson Welles (Lew
Lord), Paul Williams (El Sleezo Pianist),
Scott Walker (Frog Killer), Lawrence
Gabriel Jr. (Sailor), Ira F. Grubman
(Bartender), H. B. Haggerty (Lum-
berjack), Bruce Kirby (Gate Guard),
Tommy Madden (One-Eyed Midget),
James Frawley (Waiter), Arnold Rob-
erts (Cowboy). Muppet Performers:
Eren Ozker, Caroly Wilcox, Olga Fel-
gemacher, Buz Suraci, Bruce Schwartz,
Tony Basilicato, Adam Hunt, Bob Baker
(uncredited), Melinda Dillon (uncred-
ited), Lisa Henson (uncredited), Jerry
Juhl (uncredited), Earl Kress (uncred-
ited), John Lovelady (uncredited),
John Landis (uncredited), Tim Burton
(uncredited).
R unning T ime : 97 minutes, 28 seconds.
Color.
Released Through: Associated Film Dis-
tribution (transferred to Walt Disney
Studios in 2004).
First of a series of feature films starring Jim
Henson’s Muppets, on which Tim Burton
was hired, briefly, to work as a Muppet
performer. The Muppet Show (1976–1981)
writers Jerry Juhl and Jack Burns wrote the
screenplay. Produced by Henson Associates
in late 1978, The Muppet Movie is a road
movie and a musical about the adventures
of Kermit the Frog (performed and voiced
by Jim Henson) on the road to Hollywood,
where he intends to pursue a career in show
business. On the way, Kermit encounters
several Muppets who are seeking the same
career. The villain is a Colonel Sanders–like
restaurateur named Doc Hopper (Charles
Durning), who is pursuing Kermit to be
the mascot of his fast-food frog legs restau-
rant franchise. Featuring the prolific use of
cameos by Hollywood stars, the film was
praised by the critics and earned two Acad-
emy Award nominations for Paul Williams
and Kenneth Ascher for Best Music, Origi-
nal Song Score and Best Music, Original
Song (“Rainbow Connection”).
 THE MUSEUM OF UNNATURAL HISTORY  n  173
According to Jim Henson biographer
Brian Jay Jones, for the film’s musical
finale, Henson “planned to feature more
than 250 Muppet characters, representing
nearly every puppet available in the New
York and London Muppet workshops. . . .
Jim wanted every one of his 250 puppets
moving and singing, which would require a
considerably higher number of hands than
the core group of Muppet performers could
provide.” In order to assemble enough per-
formers, in October 1978 Henson issued a
casting call through the Los Angeles Guild
of the Puppeteers of America, and amassed
about 150 performers to supplement the
core Muppet team. According to Jones, the
puppeteers reported to CBS Studio Center’s
Stage 15, and “were handed one, sometimes
two Muppets to perform, and given a num-
ber that corresponded to a chalked spot on
the floor of an enormous pit, seventeen feet
across and six feet deep, that had been con-
structed on the soundstage.” Among the
puppeteers answering Henson’s casting call
were director John Landis and Tim Burton,
at the time still a student at CALIFORNIA
INSTITUTE OF THE ARTS. Filming of the
scene took a day, perhaps two.
Reference
Brian Jay Jones, Jim Henson: The Biography
(New York: Ballantine Books, 2013), 288.
THE MUSEUM OF UNNATURAL
HISTORY (1994)
Title of the second exhibition of Tim Bur-
ton’s 20 x 24 Polaroids. Beginning in 1992,
sometime during the production of THE
NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS,
Burton began taking photographs using a
very large Polaroid 20 × 24 instant cam-
era that produces film plates measuring
twenty inches by twenty inches. Because
the camera is so large and heavy (weigh-
ing over two hundred pounds), it must
be mounted on a chassis with wheels.
The first exhibit of Tim Burton’s 20 x 24
Polaroids, titled Nightmare, took place at
the Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles in
October and November of 1993 and con-
sisted of characters such as Jack, Sally,
and Jack’s dog Zero, as well as characters
such as Corpse Boy, the Mermaid, and the
Vampires. According to Emile St. Claire,
Burton’s Polaroids were sold in extremely
limited editions ranging from $1,800 to
$2,600. One year later, in late 1994, Burton
held a second exhibit featuring his Pola-
roids, The Museum of Unnatural History,
held at Thomas Solomon’s Garage in Los
Angeles. The surreal photographs on dis-
play in this exhibit included “3 Sunflowers
in Desert,” “Black Flower,” “Cactus with
Eyes,” “Pink and Blue Deer in Desert,” all
of which were shown at the Tim Burton
retrospective exhibition at the Museum of
Modern Art in 2009–2010. A third series
of the Polaroid photographs was the Blue
series featuring “Blue Girl” (model LISA
MARIE). In all, twenty-nine of Burton’s
20 x 24 Polaroids were shown at the Tim
Burton exhibition.
References
Everyone Needs a Hobby 1, no. 3 (Winter
1995): 16; exhibition checklist, Tim Burton,
the Museum of Modern Art, New York,
November 22, 2009–April 26, 2010.
 N
A
NEILL, VE (1951–)
Academy Award–winning makeup artist,
frequent collaborator with Tim Burton.
Born Mary Flores in Riverside, Califor-
nia, Neill grew up in Granada Hills. She
began her entertainment career working as
The transformation of Danny DeVito into the
villainous Penguin in Batman Returns helped earn
Ve Neill one of her eight Oscar nominations for
Best Makeup.
174  n 
a makeup artist, hair stylist, and costume
designer for various rock bands. She broke
into motion pictures as a makeup artist
on Kingdom of the Spiders (1977), star-
ring William Shatner. She subsequently
lent her talent to dozens of television pro-
grams, television films, and commercials.
Neill later worked with Shatner again on
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). After
working as a makeup artist on The Lost
Boys (1987), she first collaborated with
Tim Burton on BEETLEJUICE (1988), for
which she won an Oscar for Best Makeup,
sharing the award with Steve LaPorte and
Robert Short. She was head makeup art-
ist on EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, BAT-
MAN RETURNS, ED WOOD, MARS
ATTACKS! and SWEENEY TODD. Neill
has been nominated for a total of eight
Oscars, winning three. In addition to win-
ning for Beetlejuice, Neill has won Acad-
emy Awards for Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) and
for Ed Wood.
For many years, Neill has served as a
judge on the Syfy original game show series
Face Off, in which makeup artists compete
against each other for prizes. In addition,
she has worked on the notable film fran-
chises Pirates of the Caribbean and The
Hunger Games.
References
“Ve Neill,” IMDb, www.imdb.com/name/
nm0624763/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1; press kit,
Batman Returns (1992).
 NICHOLSON, JOHN JOSEPH  n  175
NICHOLSON, JOHN (“JACK”)
JOSEPH (1937–)
Academy Award–winning American actor,
director, producer, and screenwriter who
played the villainous Joker in Tim Bur-
ton’s BATMAN and dual roles in MARS
ATTACKS! Born John Joseph Nicholson on
April 22, 1937, Jack Nicholson was born in
New York City to June Frances Nicholson,
a showgirl. For many years it was assumed
that his father was Donald Furcillo, who
had married June Nicholson, three months
pregnant, in October 1936. However, in
marrying her, Furcillo had committed big-
amy, as he was already married. Although
Furcillo claimed to be Nicholson’s father,
biographer Patrick McGilligan, author of
Jack’s Life (1995), has averred that Latvian-
born Eddie King, June Nicholson’s man-
ager at the time, may be his father. Hence,
Nicholson was brought up believing that
his grandparents, John Joseph and Ethel
May Rhoads Nicholson, were his parents.
He only discovered they were actually his
grandparents, and that his older sister was
in fact his mother, in 1974, by which time
his mother (1963) and grandmother (1970)
had died. Nicholson has stated he does not
know who his father is and has chosen not
to have a DNA test to identify him.
Nicholson grew up in Neptune City,
New Jersey. He attended Manasquan High
School where he was voted class clown by
the class of 1954. A theater and a drama
award at the school are named in his honor.
Upon arriving in Hollywood soon after
graduation, Nicholson’s rise to stardom
wasn’t immediate. He made his film debut
at age twenty-one in The Cry Baby Killer
(1958), produced by Roger Corman. He
subsequently appeared over the next decade
in several Roger Corman films, including
the low-budget horror comedy The Little
Shop of Horrors (1960), The Terror (1963),
The Raven (1963), and The St. Valentine’s
Day Massacre (1967). He appeared in the
midsixties in two low-budget westerns shot
back-to-back and directed by Monte Hell-
man, Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shoot-
ing, now considered art house standards.
Assuming he might not become a star,
Nicholson hedged his bets by becoming
a screenwriter. Among his first successes
was The Trip (1967, directed by Corman),
which starred Peter Fonda and Dennis
Hopper. With friend and director Bob
Rafelson, Nicholson cowrote Head (1968),
an attempt to do for the Monkees what A
Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965)
had done for the Beatles. As an actor, his
big break came with Easy Rider (1969),
directed by Dennis Hopper, in which Nich-
olson played hard-drinking lawyer George
Hanson, a role originally written for Rip
Torn. (Torn withdrew from the project fol-
lowing a disagreement with director Hop-
per.) For his performance in Easy Rider,
Nicholson received his first Oscar nomina-
tion. Nicholson followed Easy Rider with
the countercultural favorite Five Easy Pieces
(1970), directed by Bob Rafelson. After
starring in Mike Nichols’s Carnal Knowl-
edge (1971) and another film directed
by Rafelson, The King of Marvin Gar-
dens (1972), Nicholson appeared as Billy
“Badass” Buddusky in Hal Ashby’s mas-
terful The Last Detail (1973), in retrospect
a turning point in terms of Nicholson’s
acting style—he was sullen and introspec-
tive rather than clownish. Vincent Canby,
writing in the New York Times, asserted that
Nicholson’s performance in The Last Detail
was “by far the best thing he’s ever done.”
Nicholson was awarded Best Actor at the
Cannes Film Festival for his performance
in the film. He earned another Academy
Award nomination as Best Actor for his
performance in Roman Polanski’s classic
film noir, Chinatown (1974). Subsequently,
he starred in Ken Russell’s Tommy (1975)
and in Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Pas-
senger (1975). He became an international
176  n  NICHOLSON, JOHN JOSEPH
star in 1975 for his performance as Randle
Patrick McMurphy in Miloš Forman’s
highly acclaimed adaptation of Ken Kesey’s
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). The
film won all five major Academy Awards,
including Best Picture, Best Director, Best
Actress, and Best Actor—it was Nicholson’s
first Academy Award after several nomina-
tions.
Subsequently, he began to diversify in
his movie roles. He accepted a small role
in Elia Kazan’s The Last Tycoon (1976)
opposite Robert De Niro and the role as a
rustler in Arthur Penn’s failed western The
Missouri Breaks (1976). He followed this
with his second film as director (the first
being 1971’s Drive, He Said), the western
comedy Goin’ South (1978). Although the
film received mixed reviews, The Shining
(1980), directed by Stanley Kubrick, has
become one of Nicholson’s most iconic
Jack Nicholson as the Joker in one of his advertisements for Smylex (Batman).
performances, and served as a rehearsal
of sorts for his performance as the Joker
in Tim Burton’s Batman. He received his
second Academy Award for Best Support-
ing Actor as a result of his performance as
the retired astronaut Garrett Breedlove in
Terms of Endearment (1983), a sentimental
old-fashioned Hollywood melodrama that
also earned Shirley MacLaine an Academy
Award for Best Actress. Nicholson seemed
indefatigable during the 1980s, starring in
films such as the remake of The Postman
Always Rings Twice (1981), directed by
his old friend Bob Rafelson; Reds (1981);
Prizzi’s Honor (1985); Heartburn (1986);
The Witches of Eastwick (1987); and Iron-
weed (1987). For his performances in Reds,
Prizzi’s Honor, and Ironweed, he received
Academy Award nominations.
Next followed his role as the psychotic
Joker in Batman. In lieu of demanding his
 “THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS”  n  177
full salary, Nicholson signed a lucrative per-
centage deal. Given that the film became
an international hit, Nicholson reportedly
earned about $60 million. For his role as
hot-headed Col. Nathan R. Jessep in A Few
Good Men (1992), about a murder in a U.S.
Marine Corps unit, Nicholson received yet
another Academy nomination. In 1996,
Nicholson again collaborated with Burton
on Mars Attacks!, playing a dual role as
President James Dale and Las Vegas prop-
erty developer Art Land.
Jack Nicholson is perhaps the most
highly feted Hollywood actor of his gen-
eration. He has been nominated for an
Academy Award on twelve occasions,
winning twice for Best Actor and once for
Best Supporting Actor. In addition, he is
one of only two actors nominated for an
Academy Award for acting (for either lead
or supporting roles) in every decade since
the 1960s; the other is Michael Caine. He
Jack Skellington and Sally find true happiness in The Nightmare before Christmas.
has won seven Golden Globe Awards, and
received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2001.
In 1994, he became one of the youngest
actors to be awarded the American Film
Institute’s Life Achievement Award. He is
one of the few actors known for both comic
and dramatic roles, and has become one of
the most highly respected Hollywood actors
of all time.
References
Robert Crane and Christopher Fryer, Jack
Nicholson: The Early Years (Lexington: Uni-
versity Press of Kentucky, 2012); “Biogra-
phy,” Jack Nicholson Online, www.jack-
nicholson.info/biography/.
“THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE
CHRISTMAS” (POEM)
Poem written by Tim Burton in 1982
while working at Disney, for which he
drew inspiration in equal parts from
178  n  THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS
Clement Clark Moore’s “The Night before
Christmas”; his favorite children’s book
author, DR. SEUSS, especially How the
Grinch Stole Christmas! (1957); and LEWIS
CARROLL’s ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN
WONDERLAND (1865). In an interview
included on The Nightmare before Christ-
mas: 20th Anniversary Edition (Blu-ray/
DVD Combo Pack), Burton said he came
up with the idea while watching a depart-
ment store window display being changed
from a Halloween theme to a Christmas
theme. After completing the poem, he
considered adapting the poem into a tele-
vision special with the narration spoken
by VINCENT PRICE (on the aforemen-
tioned Blu-ray Disc, Christopher Lee
reads the poem). He also considered other
options, such as a children’s book. Burton
created concept art and storyboards for
the project in 1982 in collaboration with
RICK HEINRICHS, who also sculpted
character models. Burton later showed his
and Heinrichs’ initial conceptual art and
designs to HENRY SELICK, also working
at Disney at the time. However, the proj-
ect’s development stalled because Disney
had hesitations about the suitability of the
project for the company (when the film
was eventually released in 1993, it was
released under the Touchstone banner,
not Disney). The text of Burton’s original
poem, written in his preferred form using
Seussian rhyming couplets, is available at
the following URL: www.timburtoncollec-
tive.com/nmbcpoem.html.
References
Tim Burton, The Nightmare before Christ-
mas (New York: Hyperion, 1993); The
Nightmare before Christmas: 20th Anniver-
sary Edition (Blu-ray Disc/Combo Pack)
(Burbank, CA: Walt Disney, 2003).
THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE
CHRISTMAS (US 1993)
Director: Henry Selick. Screenplay: Caro-
line Thompson, based on a story and
characters by Tim Burton. Adaptation:
Michael McDowell. P roducers : Tim
Burton, Denise Di Novi. Co-producer:
Kathleen Gavin. A ssociate P roducer :
Danny Elfman. A ssociate P roducers :
Philip Lofero, Jill Jacobs, Diane Minter.
Music and Lyrics: Danny Elfman. Ani-
mation S upervisor : Eric Leighton. S to -
ryboard S upervisor : Joe Ranft. C in -
ematography: Pete Kozachik. Original
Score: Danny Elfman. Animators: Trey
Thoms, Timothy Hitde, Michael Belzer,
Anthony Scott, Owen Klatte, Angie
Glocka, Justin Kohn, Eric Leighton,
Paul Berry, Joel Fletcher, Kim Blanch-
ette, Loyd Price, Richard C. Zimmer-
man, Stephen A. Buckley. A rt D irec -
tion: Deane Taylor. Editor: Stan Webb.
V isual C onsultant : Rick Heinrichs.
Armature Supervisor: Tom St. Arnaud.
Mold Maker Supervisor: John A. Reed
III. Character Fabrication Supervisor:
Bonita De Carlo. Storyboard Artists:
Miguel Domingo Cachuala, Bob Pauley,
Jorgen Klubein, Steve Moore. A ssis -
tant A rt D irectors : Kendal Cronkh-
ite, Kelly Adam Ashbury, Bill Boss.
Artistic Coordinator: Allison Abbate.
Sculptors: Norm DeCarlo, Greg Dyk-
stra, Shelley Daniels, Randal M. Dutra.
A dditional C haracter D esign : David
Cutler, Barry Jackson, Jorgen Klubein.
Set Designer and Dressing Supervisor:
Gregg Olsson. Background Design: B.
J. Fredrickson. Production Coordina-
tor : George Young. E ffects A nima -
tors: Gordon Baker, Miguel Domingo
Cachuala, Chris Green. Digital Effects:
Walt Disney Feature Animation. Digital
Effects Supervisor: Ariel Velasco Shaw.
Postproduction Supervisor: Sara Duran.
V isual E ffects S upervisor : Pete Koza-
 THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS  n  179
chik. Additional Optical Effects: Harry
Walton/Image FX, Michael Hinton/
Interformat. Vocal and Song Arrange-
ments: Steve Bartek. Song Orchestra-
tions: Steve Bartek. Score Orchestra-
tions: Mark McKenzie. Song Conductor:
Chris Boerman. Score Conductor: J. A.
C. Redford. M usic E ditor : Bob Bad-
ami. M usic R ecording : Shawn Mur-
phy, Bobby Fernandez. S ong V ocals
Recording: Bill Jackson. Sound Editing:
Weddington Productions. Supervising
S ound E ditor : Richard L. Anderson.
S pecial S ound E ffects : John Pospisil.
Dialogue Editors: Mary Andrews, Joe
Dorn. Sound Effects Editors: Michael
Chock, James Christopher. Foley: Joan
Rowe, Hilda Hodges. Foley Mixer: Ezra
Dweck (rerecorded at Warner Hol-
lywood Studios). Rerecording Mixers:
Terry Porter, Shawn Murphy, Greg P.
Russell. Original Dialogue Recording:
Samuel Lehmer. D ubbing R ecordists :
Tim Webb, Tony Araki. ADR M ixer :
Thomas J. O’Connell. ADR R ecord -
ist : Rick Canelli. C olor T imer : Dale
E. Grahn. Titles: Buena Vista Optical.
Postproduction Administration: Jean-
nine Berger. Postproduction Assistant:
Tracy Barber.
Cast (Voices): Danny Elfman (Jack Skel-
lington [singing] and Barrel), Chris
Sarandon (Jack Skellington [speaking]),
Catherine O’Hara (Sally and Shock),
William Hickey (Dr. Finklestein), Glenn
Shadix (Mayor), Paul Reubens (Lock),
Ken Page (Oogie Boogie), Ed Ivory
(Santa), Susan McBride (Big Witch),
Debi Durst (Corpse Kid, Corpse Mom,
Small Witch), Greg Proops (Harlequin
Demon, Devil, Sax Player), Kerry Katz
(Man Under Stairs, Vampire, Corpse
Dad), Randy Crenshaw (Mr. Hyde,
Behemoth, Vampire), Sherwood Ball
(Mummy, Vampire), Carmen Twillie
(Undersea Gal, Man under the Stairs),
Glenn Walters (Wolfman). Additional
Voices: Mia Brown, Ann Fraser, L.
Peter Callender, Jesse McClurg, Robert
Olague, Jennifer Levey, Elena Praskin,
Judi M. Durand, John Morris, Daamen
J. Krall, David McCharen, Bobbi Page,
David J. Randolph, Trampas Warman,
Doris Hess, Christina MacGregor, Gary
Ratf, Gary Schwartz.
R unning T ime : 75 minutes, 58 seconds.
Color.
Released Through: Touchstone Pictures,
Skellington Productions, and Walt Dis-
ney Pictures.
The story begins in Halloweentown, whose
denizens are various types of monsters as well
as ghosts, ghouls, goblins, vampires, witches,
and werewolves. Jack Skellington, the Pump-
kin King (Chris Sarandon), leads them in
organizing the annual Halloween holiday.
However, Jack has grown tired of the same
routine year after year. Wandering dejectedly
in the forest near the cemetery, he stumbles
across the seven holiday doors and acciden-
tally opens a magical portal to Christmas-
town, whose residents are charged with orga-
nizing the annual Christmas holiday, under
the guidance of Santa Claus. Impressed by
the joy and vibrancy that Christmas rep-
resents, Jack presents his findings and his
understanding of the festivities to his fellow
residents of Halloweentown. They fail to
grasp his meaning and compare everything
he says to their idea of Halloween. Reluc-
tantly, he decides to play along, announcing
that they will take over Christmas.
Jack’s obsession with Christmas leads
him to want to become Santa Claus, to take
his place. Every resident is assigned a task,
while Sally (CATHERINE O’HARA), a rag
doll woman who is created by the town’s
mad scientist, Dr. Finklestein (William
Hickey), develops a romantic attraction
toward Jack. However, she alone fears that
his plan to take over Christmas is a bad
one, but fails to convince him. Jack assigns
180  n  THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS
Lock (PAUL REUBENS), Shock (Catherine
O’Hara), and Barrel (DANNY ELFMAN),
a trio of mischievous children, to abduct
Santa (to them, “Sandy Claws”) and bring
him back to Halloweentown. Against Jack’s
wishes and largely for their own perverse
amusement, the trio deliver Santa to Oogie
Boogie (Ken Page), a bogeyman with a
penchant for gambling, who plots to play a
game with Santa’s life at stake.
Christmas Eve arrives and Sally
attempts to stop Jack with fog, but fails to
do so thanks to Jack’s ghost dog Zero. Like
Rudolph, Zero has a glowing red nose and
the light allows Jack to embark into the
sky on a coffin-like sleigh pulled by skel-
etal reindeer, the sleigh guided by Zero.
Jack begins to deliver presents to children
around the world, but the gifts—among
them, shrunken heads, Christmas tree–eat-
ing snakes, pumpkin jack-in-the-boxes,
vampire teddy bears, toy ducks with sharp
teeth, and so on—only terrify them. The
children alert their parents, who call the
police, who call the military. The air raid
siren is activated and the searchlights are
turned on, pinpointing Jack, who is swiftly
shot down by artillery cannons. The sleigh
crashes into a cemetery, although Jack sur-
vives the crash. Shaken by the failure of his
plan, he quickly regains his old spirit, hav-
ing come up with new ideas for next Hal-
loween. He then rushes back home to res-
cue Santa and put things right.
Meanwhile, Sally attempts to free
Santa, but is captured by Oogie Boogie.
Jack slips into the lair and frees them, then
confronts Oogie. Instantly, Oogie springs a
surprise trap and is about to escape, when
Jack pulls one of Oogie’s loose threads,
unraveling his burlap sack, revealing the
bogeyman to be nothing more than a col-
lection of snakes and insects, which are all
incinerated, save for the last one—which
Santa expertly squashes with his boot. With
Oogie gone, Santa admonishes Jack before
leaving to deliver presents.
After Jack returns and Christmas is
over, snow falls over Halloweentown, sig-
naling that Santa Claus has reconciled with
Jack. The town’s denizens are at first con-
fused, but soon begin to play happily, real-
izing the joy of Christmas. In the film’s last
sequence, Jack notices Sally walking to the
graveyard and follows her. Atop the grave-
yard’s hill, Jack reveals to Sally his attrac-
tion, and they kiss.
As DR. SEUSS scholar Phil Nel
observes, Nightmare’s protagonist, Jack
Skellington, “so likes Christmas that he
takes it over, whereas the Grinch so hates
Christmas that he tries to stop it. The film’s
visuals are a kind of reverse Seuss, too. That
is, Christmastown has the feel of Seuss’s
illustrations, but Halloweentown . . . looks
more like a Dr. Seuss book as drawn by
EDWARD GOREY.” Moreover, Nel insists
that “Skellington’s motives are not all bad:
loving Christmas but unable to understand
it, he gets the idea to run it himself.” For
Nel, Skellington is utterly unlike a “mean
trickster” like Oogie Boogie. Thematically,
the connection between Grinch and Night-
mare is revealing. According to Seuss biog-
raphers Judith and Neil Morgan, the author
“agonized for months about how to keep
the ending [of How the Grinch Stole Christ-
mas!] from seeming trite or religious.”
Considered as social critique, both Seuss
and Burton attack the consumerism of hol-
idays without negating the value of gift giv-
ing. Dr. Seuss repeats there is “something
more” about Christmas the Grinch doesn’t
understand; Nightmare’s Skellington learns
the important lesson that there is more to
the holiday than mere gift giving.
As Susan Honeyman points out in her
essay in this volume on Dr. Seuss, if one
looks at Burton’s recognition of How the
Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966) and Rudolf
 THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS  n  181
the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) in the larger
tradition of television’s holiday specials for
children, both Burton and Seuss respect
their child audiences and refuse to threaten
them with heavy didactic messages or to
infantilize them with sentimentalism. In
contrast, if one considers It’s the Great
Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966) or more
recently The Polar Express (2004), one can
see a tendency in holiday productions to
romanticize expectations of unquestion-
ing belief imposed upon children. Instead,
in Seuss’s Grinch and Burton’s Nightmare,
the endings invite their audience (child or
adult) to consider the value of secular ecu-
menism and interpersonal relationships,
not obedience. As Honeyman observes,
“Like Seuss before him, Burton finds won-
der without heavy moralism.”
The Nightmare before Christmas has
proven to be one of Tim Burton’s most
beloved films—perhaps the most beloved
film—even though he did not direct it. Sales
of collectibles have remained solid for over
twenty years, and when combined with home
video sales, the film’s success is remarkable.
In 2006, Entertainment Weekly reported on
the obsessive fan base of Nightmare.
Reviews for The Nightmare before
Christmas were very positive, in stark con-
trast to Burton’s previous film, BATMAN
RETURNS (1992). For Roger Ebert, the film
was “filled with imagination that carries us
into a new world.” Peter Travers of Rolling
Stone called it a restoration of “originality
and daring to the Halloween genre. . . . It’s
74 minutes of timeless movie magic.”
On its first theatrical run, Box Office
Mojo indicates the film earned $50 million.
However, according to Smith and Mat-
thews, Nightmare was released by Touch-
stone in a mere four hundred theaters in
October 1993, while less than a year before,
Disney had released Aladdin in over two
thousand theaters—five times the num-
ber. However, Nightmare has maintained
a strong following. In 2006, Walt Disney
Pictures—it is no longer issued under the
Touchstone banner as it was initially—reis-
sued Nightmare in Disney Digital 3-D. It
earned $8.7 million in box office revenues.
Subsequently, the Disney Digital 3-D ver-
sion of the film was rereleased annually in
October 2006–2009 raising the film’s total
domestic box office earnings to $75 mil-
lion (overseas earnings have not been made
available). It was nominated for an Acad-
emy Award for Best Visual Effects (Pete
Kozachik, Eric Leighton, Ariel Velasco-
Shaw, and Gordon Baker) and nominated
for a Golden Globe for Best Original
Score—Motion Picture (Danny Elfman).
Director HENRY SELICK won an Annie
Award for Best Individual Achievement for
Creative Supervision in the Field of Ani-
mation. Additionally, it was awarded the
Favorite Movie Award by the Kids’ Choice
Awards. The film’s enormous popularity
persists.
References
Roger Ebert, “Tim Burton’s The Nightmare
before Christmas,” RogerEbert.com, Octo-
ber 22, 1993, www.rogerebert.com/reviews/
tim-burtons-the-nightmare-before-christ-
mas-1993; Judith Morgan and Neil Mor-
gan, Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel (New York:
Da Capo Press, 1996), 191; Philip Nel, Dr.
Seuss: American Icon (New York: Contin-
uum, 2014), 94, 95; Jim Smith and J. Clive
Matthews, Tim Burton, Virgin Film Series
(London: Virgin Books, 2007); “Tim Bur-
ton’s The Nightmare before Christmas,” Box
Office Mojo, www.boxofficemojo.com/
movies/?id=nightmarebeforechristmas.
htm; Peter Travers, “Tim Burton’s The
Nightmare before Christmas,” Rolling Stone,
October 29, 1993, www.rollingstone.com/
movies/reviews/tim-burtons-the-night-
mare-before-christmas-19931029.
182  n  NIGHTMARE OF ECSTASY
NIGHTMARE OF ECSTASY: THE LIFE
AND ART OF EDWARD D. WOOD, JR.
Oral biography of Ed Wood compiled by
Rudolph Grey, edited by Adam Parfrey,
first published by Feral House in 1992, and
principal source of SCOTT ALEXANDER
and LARRY KARASZWESKI’S screenplay
for Tim Burton’s ED WOOD. Accord-
ing to Parfrey, the model for Nightmare
of Ecstasy was Jean Stein’s oral history of
Andy Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick
(1943–1971), Edie: An American Biogra-
phy (Knopf, 1982), edited with George
Plimpton. The Sedgwick biography is an
assemblage of the personal testimonies
and reminiscences of the friends, relatives,
and acquaintances who knew her inti-
mately. She died at the age of twenty-eight
in November 1971 after a brief shot at
stardom, appearing in several of Warhol’s
commercially unsuccessful avant-garde
films and appearing on the covers of fash-
ion magazines for a short time in the mid-
sixties. As with Ed Wood, little was known
about her private life, and her rise—such
as it was—and fall, like Ed Wood’s, serves
as a counter-myth to the American myth
of success. Although Wood died broke and
forgotten in 1978, according to Scott Alex-
ander and Larry Karaszweski, their interest
in Wood was kindled, as it was for many
others, as a result of the publication in
1980 of Harry and Michael Medved’s The
Golden Turkey Awards, in which Wood
was given the dubious distinction of being
named “the Worst Director of All Time.”
Soon after, Rudolph Grey, a musician and
collector of Ed Wood memorabilia, began
researching Wood’s life and unorthodox
art, the latter described by Grey as a “cul-
tural mutation.”
Nightmare of Ecstasy was reissued in
1994 after the release of Ed Wood and has
sold reasonably well in the years since.
References
Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, Ed
Wood (London: Faber and Faber, 1995);
Rudolph Grey, Nightmare of Ecstasy: The
Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (Los
Angeles: Feral House, 1992); Adam Parfrey,
“Big Eyes,” Feral House, February 3, 2012,
feralhouse.com/big-eyes/.
9 (US 2009)
D irector : Shane Acker. S tory : Shane
Acker. Screenplay: Pamela Pettler. Pro-
ducers: Tim Burton, Timur Bekmambe-
tov, Jim Lemley, Dana Ginsburg. Co-
producers: Jinko Gotoh, Marci Levine.
Associate Producers: Graham Moloy,
Lilian Eche, Pierre Urbain. Cinematog-
raphy : Kevin R. Adams. P roduction
Design: Robert St. Pierre, Fred Warter.
Art Direction: Kevin R. Adams, Chris-
tophe Vacher. E ditor : Nick Kenway.
Musical Score: Deborah Lurie. Themes:
Danny Elfman. Concept Designer: Tohru
Patrick Awa. Animators: Drew Adams,
Salem Arfaoui, Marc-André Baron,
Brendan Beesley, Patrice Berube, Nev
Bezaire, Sebastion Bruneau, Mike Dhar-
ney, Rob Gennings, Patrick Giusiano,
Derek Gowland, Scott Johnston, Tom
Judd, Aaron Kirby, Mike Kitchen, Kevin
Labanowich, Alexander K. Lee, Justin
Lewis, Jesse Lickman, Jean Lin, Stephane
Mangin, Ho Moon, Guido Muzzarelli,
Praveen Nadaraju, Aurélien Predal, Alan
Rogers, Fabrice Senia, Sue Hyunsook
Shim, Rob Silvestri, Benjamin Su, Danny
Testani, Oskar Urretabizkaia, Archie
Villaverde, Ed Wou. Digital Intermedi-
ate Producer (Deluxe Toronto): Peter
Armstrong. F irst A ssistant E ditors :
Gilad Carmel, Adam Garner, Bill Stein-
berg. D igital I ntermediate P roducer
(EFilm): Hal Cohen. Digital Intermedi-
ate C olorist (EFilm): Michael Hatzer.
Assistant Editors: Mhairi Kerr, Yon Van

Kline. Additional Editor: Lynn Hobson.
Assistant Digital Intermediate Colorist
(EFilm): Marc Lulkin. Digital Intermedi-
ate A ssistant (Deluxe Toronto): Cam
McLauchlin. Color Time: Harry Muller.
Digital Intermediate Editor: Dave Mus-
cat. Digital Intermediate Assistant Pro-
ducer (EFilm); Robert E. Phillips. Post-
production C oordinator : Lorraine
Samuel.
C ast : Elijah Wood (#9), John C. Reilly
(#5), Jennifer Connelly (#7), Christo-
pher Plummer (#1), Crispin Glover
(#6), Martin Landau (#2), Fred Tatas-
ciore (#8/Radio Announcer), Alan
Oppenheimer (Scientist), Tom Kane
(Dictator), Helen Wilson (Newscaster).
R unning T ime : 79 minutes, 24 seconds.
Color.
R eleased T hrough : Focus Features and
Relativity Media.
Feature-length Expansion of SHANE ACK-
ER’s 2004 Academy Award-nominated
short film of the same name. The screen-
play for the feature film version was writ-
ten by Pamela Pettler (coauthor of CORPSE
BRIDE), based on a story by Acker. The
backstory of the feature-length 9 seems
vaguely inspired by James Cameron’s The
Terminator (1984), which posited a future
in which machines have destroyed human
civilization, and in which human survivors
battle against an enemy whose sole pur-
pose is to destroy them. Such is the world
of 9: humanity has been destroyed by an
artificial intelligence machine run amok,
referred to as the Fabrication Machine.
Invoking a Frankenstein-like scenario,
the world’s machines, reprogrammed by
the Fabrication Machine, turned on their
human creators and destroyed the human
population before being shut down.
During the last days, a mission began
to salvage the legacy of human civilization.
A benign scientist used alchemy to cre-
9 n  183
ate nine anthromorphs—puppet-like rag
dolls—giving them the spark of life with
a portion of his soul by way of a talisman.
The puppets survive in the postapocalyptic
landscape. One of them, #9 (Elijah Wood),
emerges and displays leadership qualities
that may help them survive and perhaps
thrive. In addition to #9, the group includes
#1 (Christopher Plummer), a domineer-
ing war veteran and the group’s leader;
#2 (MARTIN LANDAU), an old, kindly
inventor; #3 and #4, twins who communi-
cate nonverbally, mostly with each other;
#5 (John C. Reilly), a benign, nurturing
engineer; #6 (Crispin Glover), a disturbed
artist; #7 (Jennifer Connelly), a brave femi-
nine warrior; and #8 (Fred Tatasciore), the
bodyguard for #1.
As the story begins, the last of the
anthromorphs, #9, awakens in the Sci-
entist’s workroom. Finding the talisman,
he takes it with him, venturing out into
the ruins, where he happens to meet #2, a
benevolent inventor who gives him a voice
box taken from a discarded doll and who is
surprised when #9 reveals to him the talis-
man. Suddenly, the last surviving machine,
the predatory Cat-Beast, attacks them, tak-
ing both #2 and the talisman. (Essentially,
the first few minutes of the film represent
Shane Acker’s original short.) Knocked
unconscious, #9 awakens in the Sanctu-
ary, a cathedral that is home to the other
puppets, among them the stern leader, #1;
his strong arm, #8; an engineer, #5; and a
divinatory artist, #6. Although #1 considers
puppet #2 dead, #9 chooses to rescue him.
Number 9 and #5 head to the Cat-Beast’s
lair, where they find #2 alive. Fortuitously,
#7, a puppet with a feminine voice (the
puppets have no genitalia), arrives at the
factory and destroys the Cat-Beast. How-
ever, #9, unwisely, attaches the talisman
to the apparently moribund Fabrication
Machine, causing the interface to absorb
#2’s soul into the machine, reviving it, but
184  n  9
killing #2 as a result. The puppets flee the
factory. Inadvertently, #9 has restarted the
malevolent machine that originally started
the world-ending war.
Number 7 escorts them to the Sanctu-
ary’s library, where the mute twins, #3 and
#4, reveal to #9 the Fabrication Machine’s
origin. Number 5 recognizes that the tal-
isman’s symbols match the drawings of
#6. Already, the Fabrication Machine has
restarted manufacturing deadly machines.
The first of them is the bird-like Winged
Beast, which is sent to destroy the Sanc-
tuary. A battle ensues, with #7 joining the
fight, only to be injured. Number 5 and #6
destroy the Winged Beast by restarting the
propeller of a downed plane and knocking
the machine into the blades. Undaunted by
the loss of the Winged Beast, the Fabrica-
tion Machine attaches #2’s body (as a lure
to the others) to the tail of a formidable ser-
pentine robot known as the Seamstress, on
whose back are attached spools of thread
that are used to restrain its captured prey.
The Seamstress attacks the library and
captures #7 and #8. Number 9 rallies the
remaining puppets to go to the factory and
destroy it. Going in alone, #9 destroys the
Seamstress and rescues #7, but is too late to
rescue #8. Number 9 and #7 escape while
the remaining puppets demolish the fac-
tory.
The factory is destroyed, but the Fab-
rication Machine is not. It attacks, killing
#5 and #6, but not before #6 has convinced
#9 to go to the Scientist’s workroom to find
answers. There, #9 discovers a holograph
of his creator, who has recorded a message
explaining that the anthromorphs he cre-
ated all contain parts of himself, his person-
ality, including #9. They represent the only
hope to save humanity. He then explains to
#9 how the talisman can be used against the
Fabrication Machine that will free the souls
trapped inside. Number 9 devises a plan in
which he will sacrifice himself in order to
allow the others enough time to steal back
the talisman from the Fabrication Machine.
However, #1 sacrifices himself in his place,
giving #9 the opportunity to remove the
talisman. Number 9 activates the talis-
man and uses it to reabsorb the souls taken
by the Fabrication Machine, destroying
the machine in the process. The souls of
#1, #2, #5, #6, and #8 are freed, drifting
upward to the heavens as it begins to rain.
As a sign of life and hope, the raindrops are
shown to contain glowing bacteria, and so
will restore life to the dead world. Of the
remaining puppets, #9 and #7 figuratively
will assume the parental roles for the mute
twins, #3 and #4.
The film’s happy conclusion, the res-
toration of the symbolic order, stands in
stark contradiction to Shane Acker’s origi-
nal short, a dark, atmospheric film that
Roger Ebert appropriately characterized as
“intriguingly unwholesome.” Given that
Acker’s original short was inspired by the
films of avant-garde filmmakers such as Jan
Švankmajer and the Brothers Quay—par-
ticularly the acknowledged masterpiece by
the Quays, Street of Crocodiles (1986)—the
action-oriented adventure film expansion
of Acker’s short is disappointing. Suzanne
Buchan argues that the Quays’ interest in
puppet animation is due to the fact that
“puppet animation can create an analogous
experience for the viewer of similar so-called
miracles—nonorganic entities, machines,
and objects that are materially extant in
the phenomenal world but have qualities
on-screen (cognizance, intention, ability to
move independently, to react) that would
otherwise reside only in the imagination.”
Acker’s short version of 9 approached the
use of puppets in much the same way, which
Acker said was inspired by the Quays’ use of
“old discarded things: old dolls, old pieces
of machinery, things like that. That creates a
different, off-kilter kind of mind-set, brings
about a lot of metaphor. I found that very

inspirational and in tune with the kind of
design I wanted in 9, the experience I wanted
in that world—a world that’s destroyed and
all that’s left are these bits and pieces.” While
the influence of Tim Burton on the feature-
length version is difficult to determine, his
admiration for the short confirms a central
aesthetic principle of Burton’s—that a film
must create and inhabit its own reality. As
mentioned earlier, the backstory is deriva-
tive, inspired by postapocalyptic science fic-
tion in general, but most likely by films such
as The Terminator (1984). While 9’s preda-
tory machines such as the Cat-Beast and
the Seamstress are highly imaginative and
brilliantly executed, they seem inspired by
films such as Jan Švankmajer’s bleak short,
Dimensions of Dialogue (1982), one section
of which consists of three heads (one assem-
bled out of food, one out of utensils, and one
made out of office supplies), meet, consume
one other, and spew out new heads, over
and over, until they all are the same—preda-
tory mechanisms derived from heteroge-
neous parts.
Roger Ebert said of the film, “One
might question the purpose of devising
9 n  185
a life form in a world otherwise without
life, only to provide it with an enemy that
wishes only to destroy it. The purpose, alas,
is to create a pretext for a series of action
scenes, an apocalyptic battle that is visu-
ally more interesting than, but as relentless
as, similar all-action-all-the-time movies.
This is a disappointment.” He went on to
observe, correctly, “The dialog is mostly
simplified Action Speak, with barked warn-
ings and instructions and strategy debates
of the most rudimentary kind.”
Released on September 9, 2009
(09/09/09), in order to capitalize on the
film’s intriguing title, the film earned
roughly $48.4 million worldwide against a
reported budget of $30 million.
References
Suzanne Buchan, The Quay Brothers: Into a
Metaphysical Playroom (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2011), xx; Roger
Ebert, “9” RogerEbert.com, September 9,
2009, www.rogerebert.com/reviews/9-2009;
Randi Schmelzer, “Cartoon Character:
Shane Acker,” UCLA Magazine, April 1,
2006, magazine.ucla.edu/depts/style/acker/.
 O
A
O’HARA, CATHERINE
(ANNE) (1954–)
Award-winning, Canadian-born actress,
voice actress, writer, and gifted comedi-
enne, known for playing Delia Deetz in
Tim Burton’s BEETLEJUICE and later
voicing the character of Sally (and Shock)
in THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRIST-
MAS. Catherine O’Hara was born in
Toronto, Canada, on March 4, 1954, the
sixth of seven children in a large Catho-
lic family. She started her comedy career
waiting tables for the Toronto Second City
Theatre Company in 1973. She joined the
troupe in 1974, replacing Gilda Radner
as a regular, when Radner left for Satur-
day Night Live. In 1976, she became one
of the founding members of the sketch-
comedy series SCTV, largely known for
her celebrity impersonations. In addition
to her work on SCTV, she appeared in the
CBC Television sitcom Coming Up Rosie
(1975–1978) along with John Candy and
Dan Aykroyd, the latter appearing in the
series while also appearing on Saturday
Night Live. In 1980, she appeared in two
films produced in Canada, Deadly Com-
panion and Nothing Personal. In 1983, she
appeared in the animated music science
fiction film Rock & Rule, produced by the
Canadian children’s animation studio Nel-
vana. Her first appearance in an American
film was in the Martin Scorsese–directed
black comedy After Hours (1985), starring
186  n 
Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette, Linda
Fiorentino, Teri Garr, and John Heard.
The next year, in 1986, she appeared in
Mike Nichols’s comic melodrama, Heart-
burn, alongside Meryl Streep and JACK
NICHOLSON.
Largely because of O’Hara’s gift of
improvisation, Tim Burton cast her in Bee-
tlejuice, in which she appeared as Charles
Deetz’s neurotic and pretentious second
wife, Delia, an aspiring sculptor. During
the making of the film, she met her future
husband, the film’s production designer
BO WELCH. However, O’Hara is per-
haps best known for the hugely successful
films Home Alone (1990) and Home Alone
2: Lost in New York (1992), in which she
starred as Kevin McCallister’s (Macau-
lay Culkin’s) mother, Kate. She teamed
up with Tim Burton again for The Night-
mare before Christmas (1993), in which she
voiced the characters of Sally and Shock.
Subsequently, she became well known for
her roles in the mock documentary films
directed by Christopher Guest, Waiting
for Guffman (1996), Best in Show (2000), A
Mighty Wind (2003), and For Your Consid-
eration (2006). For her performance in Best
in Show, she received an American Comedy
Award for Funniest Supporting Actress in
a Motion Picture. Previously, she had won
a Genie Award as Best Supporting Actress
for The Life before This (1999), and later
received an Emmy Award nomination for

the made-for-television film Temple Gran-
din (2010). She reunited with Tim Burton
as a voice actress in FRANKENWEENIE, in
which she voiced several roles.
O’Hara was inducted into Canada’s
Walk of Fame in Toronto in 2007.
References
“Catherine O’Hara,” Historica Canada,
www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/arti-
cle/catherine-ohara/; “Catherine O’Hara,”
IMDb, www.imdb.com/name/nm0001573/
bio.
O’HARA, KAREN (CA. 1954–)
American art director who shared an Acad-
emy Award for Best Art Direction with
Production Designer ROBERT STROM-
BERG for Tim Burton’s ALICE IN WON-
DERLAND. A native of Morton Grove,
Illinois, O’Hara got her start in the film
business by working as an intern on com-
mercial shoots in the Chicago area in the
early 1980s. She established several Holly-
wood contacts while working in Chicago,
enabling her to move to Los Angeles in
1984. She initially worked as a set decora-
tor on films such as Code of Silence (1985),
starring Chuck Norris, and the Tom Davis–
Al Franken comedy One More Saturday
O’HARA, KAREN  n  187
Night (1986). She shared her first Academy
Award nomination for Set Decoration with
production designer Boris Leven for her
work on Martin Scorsese’s Chicago-filmed
The Color of Money (1986). She went on
to work on films such as The Silence of the
Lambs (1991), Lorenzo’s Oil (1992), Phila-
delphia (1993), Cast Away (2000), and
Spider-Man (2002), eventually returning as
the set decorator on a second film featur-
ing criminal genius Hannibal Lecter, Red
Dragon (2002). O’Hara has also worked on
a handful of animated films, including The
Polar Express (2004), Beowulf (2004), and
A Christmas Carol (2009), all for director
Robert Zemeckis. Subsequently, she has
served as a set decorator on films such as
the Adam Sandler comedy Blended (2014)
and the comedy Walk of Shame (2014).
References
“Karen O’Hara,” IMDb, www.imdb.com/
name/nm0641286/?ref_=fn_al_nm_2;
Nina Metz, “A Chicago Native Heads
Down the Rabbit Hole to the Oscars,”
Chicago Tribune, February 24, 2011, arti-
cles.chicagotribune.com/2011-02-24/
entertainment/ct-mov-0225-chicago-
closeup-20110224_1_native-heads-83rd-
academy-awards-rabbit-hole.
 P
A
PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE (US
1985)
D irector : Tim Burton. S creenplay : Phil
Hartman, Paul Reubens, Michael Var-
hol. E xecutive P roducer : William E.
McEuen. P roducers : Robert Shapiro,
Richard Abramson. C inematography :
Victor J. Kemperer. Music: Danny Elf-
man. Music Arranger: Steve Bartek. Edi-
tor : Billy Weber. P roduction D esign :
David L. Snyder. Art Direction: David
L. Snyder. Set Decoration: Thomas L.
Roysden, (uncredited) Paul Reubens.
Costume Design: Aggie Guerard Rodg-
ers. Makeup Artist: Frank Griffin. First
Assistant Director: Robert P. Cohen.
S econd A ssistant D irector : Robert
Engelman. S pecial E ffects S upervisor :
Chuck Gaspar. Special Effects Coordi-
nator: Joe Day. Animated Effects Con-
sultant : Stephen Chiodo. A nimated
Effects Supervisor: Rick Heinrichs.
Cast: Paul Reubens (Pee-Wee Herman),
Elizabeth Daily (Dottie), Mark Holton
(Francis Buxton), Diane Salinger (Sim-
one), Judd Omen (Mickey), Irving Hell-
man (Mr. Crowtray), Monte Landis
(Mario), Damon Landis (Chip), David
Glasser (BMX Kid), Gregory Brown
(BMX Kid), Mark Everett (BMX Kid),
Daryl Roach (Chuck), Bill Cable (Police-
man #1), Peter Looney (Policeman #2),
Starletta DuPois (Sgt. Hunter), Profes-
sor Toru Tanaka (Butler), Ed Herlihy
(Mr. Buxton), Ralph Seymour (Fran-
188  n 
cis’s Accomplice), Lou Cutell (Amaz-
ing Larry), Raymond Martino (Gang
Member), Erica Yohn (Madam Ruby),
Bill Richmond (Highway Patrolman ),
Alice Nunn (Large Marge), Ed Griffith
(Trucker), Simmy Bow (Man in Diner),
Jon Harris (Andy), Carmen Filpi (Hobo
Jack), Jan Hooks (Tina), John Moody
(Bus Clerk), John O’Neill (Cowboy
#1), Alex Sharp (Cowboy #2), Ches-
ter Grimes (Biker #1), Luis Contreras
(Biker #2), Lonnie Parkinson (Biker
#3), Howard Hirdler (Biker #4), Cas-
sandra Peterson (Biker Mama), Jason
Hervey (Kevin Morton), Bob McClurg
(Studio Guard), John Paragon (Movie
Lot Actor), Susan Barnes (Movie Lot
Actress), Zachary Hoffman (Direc-
tor), Lynne Stewart (Mother Superior),
George Sasaki (Japanese Director),
Richard Brose (Tarzan), Drew Seward
(Kid #1), Brett Fellman (Kid #2), Bob
Drew (Fireman), John Gilgreen (Police-
man at Pet Shop), Noreen Hennessey
(Reporter), Phil Hartman (Reporter),
Michael Varhol (Photographer), David
Rothenberg (Hobo), Pat Cranshaw
(Hobo), Sunshine Parker (Hobo), Gilles
Savard (Pierre), Milton Berle (Himself),
James Brolin (Himself, as Pee-Wee
Herman), Morgan Fairchild (Herself, as
Dottie), Tony Bill (Terry Hawthorne),
Twisted Sister (Themselves).
R unning T ime : 91 minutes, 27 seconds.
Color.
Released Through: Warner Bros.

First feature-length film directed by Tim
Burton, and it became a surprise hit. The
peculiar energy of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure
is due as much to Burton’s inspired direc-
tion as it is to the utterly original nature of
the Pee-Wee Herman character. Theoreti-
cally considered, Pee-Wee Herman exists
somewhere between personification, in
which PAUL REUBENS seems to be play-
ing himself (derived from presentational
forms of entertainment such as vaude-
ville, in which the actor doesn’t lose his
identity as an actor), and hypersemiotici-
zation, a term that describes the way film
performance creates “stars,” actors who
are invested with an exaggerated level of
meaning. On the one hand, Pee-Wee Her-
man is inseparable from Paul Reubens—no
one else could play the part. On the other,
every aspect of Pee-Wee Herman—facial
features, hand and arm gestures, body
movement—seems exaggerated and hence
overdetermined: he’s rife with contradic-
tions (a man-child), he sports a déclassé
Princeton haircut (popular in the 1950s),
he wears blush and lipstick (as do actors in
Kabuki theater), and he wears a bowtie and
a gray suit that is a bit too small (invoking
both actor-comedian Eddie Cantor and
Jerry Lewis’s Julius Kelp character in The
Nutty Professor). Indeed, his home seems
to suggest that of a nutty professor, since
it’s filled with eccentric and fanciful inven-
tions that seem gleefully noncommercial.
On the other hand, the inventions suggest
the powers of his imagination. And rather
than, say, having a prize possession that is
an automobile (e.g., an antique Corvette),
his most valued possession is a customized
cherry-red Schwinn bicycle, a vestige of a
lost, nostalgic era.
The story begins with Pee-Wee Her-
man in the midst of a dream, a bicycle race,
in which he rides to victory on his most
prized possession, his Schwinn bicycle. Pee-
Wee awakens and begins his daily routine,
PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE  n  189
making sure to say good morning to his
bicycle. Unfortunately, Pee-Wee’s bicycle
is coveted by his wealthy neighbor, Francis
Buxton (Mark Holton), who offers to buy
it. However, Pee-Wee won’t sell it, not for
“a hundred million, trillion, billion dol-
lars.” He then goes off on his bike on some
errands, first to Mario’s Magic Shop, and
then to the bicycle shop, Chuck’s Bike-
O-Rama, where he visits his love interest,
Dottie (Elizabeth Daily). Upon leaving the
shop, Pee-Wee discovers his bike has been
stolen and he immediately assumes Fran-
cis is the thief, but he lacks proof. Pee-Wee
offers a several-thousand-dollar reward for
the return of his bike.
Despondent and desperate to recover
his bicycle, Pee-Wee visits a fraudulent
medium, Madam Ruby (Erica Yohn), who
tells him that his bike is in the basement of
the Alamo. Hence the big adventure begins,
as Pee-Wee sets out on a journey to recover
his bicycle. Hitchhiking, he is offered a ride
by Mickey (Judd Omen), a fugitive. After a
near accident, Mickey boots him out of the
car, and he’s then picked up by a ghostly
truck driver, Large Marge (Alice Nunn).
Large Marge drops him off at a roadside
diner that’s located near two enormous,
sculptured dinosaurs (the Cabazon Dino-
saurs located at the Cabazon exit off Inter-
state 10 in California). When he discovers
his wallet is missing, he must pay for his
meal by washing dishes. While working in
the kitchen at the diner, Pee-Wee befriends
Simone (Diane Salinger), a waitress whose
lifelong dream is to go to Paris. However,
Pee-Wee incites the wrath of Simone’s jeal-
ous boyfriend, Andy (Jon Harris), who
misconstrues their innocent conversation
as a romantic rendezvous.
Pee-Wee escapes Andy by hopping
on a moving train, where he meets Hobo
Jack (Carmen Filpi). Eventually, he reaches
San Antonio and locates the Alamo, but
becomes upset when he learns the Alamo
190  n  PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE
has no basement. His fellow tourists ridi-
cule him with laughter, and he runs away.
Serendipitously, at a bus stop, Pee-Wee
runs into Simone as she is boarding a
bus to Paris. Simone bids him goodbye,
encouraging him not to give up his search
for his bicycle. Andy, who has been pursu-
ing Simone, stumbles into Pee-Wee and
resumes his attack. Pee-Wee evades Andy
at a rodeo by disguising himself as a com-
petitor in the bronco-busting competition.
He rides well but is thrown off, getting a
blow to the head and temporary amnesia as
a result. Fortunately, Andy’s red shirt draws
the attention of an aggressive bull, and he is
last seen running away from the bull.
Later, Pee-Wee enters a biker bar to
use the telephone, where an outlaw motor-
cycle club, the Satan’s Helpers, throw him
out. Leaving the bar, Pee-Wee accidentally
knocks over their motorcycles. Enraged by
his act of vandalism, the biker gang votes
to kill him. Pee-Wee then makes a last
request: to dance to the song “Tequila.”
He wins over the bikers, who accept him
as one of their own and give him a motor-
cycle. Unfortunately, immediately Pee-Wee
crashes it through a billboard and ends up
in hospital. Awakening with his memory
restored, Pee-Wee learns from a TV news
telecast that his bike has been purchased by
Warner Bros. and is to be used as a prop
in a forthcoming movie starring child star
Kevin Morton (Jason Hervey). Pee-Wee
heads to the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank
to retrieve his bike.
By cleverly mixing into Milton Berle’s
entourage, Pee-Wee sneaks onto the War-
ner Bros. Studio lot. After disguising him-
self as a nun, he steals back his bicycle, but
is chased by security staff through a variety
of sets, causing havoc and disrupting the
filming of a music video (“Burn in Hell”)
for Twisted Sister. Using the bike’s evasive
mechanisms, he escapes the studio. Out-
side, he finds a pet shop on fire. He bravely
rescues the animals but faints on the side-
walk just as police and firefighters arrive.
Though he’s hailed as a hero, the police
arrest him. He’s brought before Terry Haw-
thorne (Tony Bill), a Warner Bros. execu-
tive who agrees to drop all charges and
give up the bike in return for the rights to
Pee-Wee’s story. Dottie arrives at the office,
bringing with her the bike.
Later, Pee-Wee and Dottie attend the
premiere of the James Bond–like action
movie made of Pee-Wee’s life at the local
drive-in, starring James Brolin as P.W. and
Morgan Fairchild as Dottie, fighting nin-
jas. Pee-Wee has a cameo appearance as a
bellhop. At the premiere, Pee-Wee gives
refreshments to all the friends he met dur-
ing his journey, including Mickey, who has
been recaptured and temporarily released
to see the film. Pee-Wee’s nemesis, Fran-
cis, also attends the premiere, bragging
to the media about how much he knows
about Pee-Wee’s bike. Pee-Wee offers to go
bicycling with Dottie, and the two ride off
together, happily ever after.
The film’s premise, that Pee-Wee’s
fancy bike gets stolen and he sets off to
recover it, replaced an earlier one, rejected
by Warner Bros. executive Robert Shap-
iro, which involved Pee-Wee moving in
with his rich uncle and saving the town’s
local swimming hole. The picaresque nar-
rative of the revised story’s premise—a
series of adventures—was better suited to
the Pee-Wee Herman character, since in a
picaresque there is virtually no character
development, and Pee-Wee remains him-
self throughout his adventure. Like any
picaresque hero, Pee-Wee Herman survives
by his wit (imagination), by his clever use
of disguise, by determination, and by sheer
luck. And like an outlaw hero, he never
seems to need money (he loses his wallet
and must wash dishes for a time, but soon
continues on his journey in spite of hav-
ing not recovered it), and he remains an

outsider, free of romantic entanglements
as well as the pressing need for a job. Pee-
Wee lives entirely within a world of his own
making, which is an aspect of the charac-
ter that especially appealed to Tim Burton.
“He operated in his own world, and there’s
something I find very admirable about that.
He’s a character who is on his own, who is
able to operate in society, and yet he’s also
a sort of outcast. . . . In some ways there’s a
freedom to that, because you’re free to live
in your own world.”
Michael Varhol claims that the con-
tribution of PHIL HARTMAN to the
screenplay was immense. However, he
denies the claims that the script was revised
when Tim Burton was hired on as direc-
tor. “Tim shot the original 95-page script,”
says Varhol. “The one change we made at
his request was to replace one scene in the
back lot chase sequence where Pee-Wee
rides through the Warner Bros. Lighting
Department and flips a switch, blinding
his pursuers with a thousand movie lights,
with the Ishiro Honda Godzilla scene. The
Godzilla scene worked out fine, but I was
partial to the Lighting Department bit.”
He also says, “I’ve also noticed that some
Burtonians attribute the clowns, dinosaurs
and dream sequences in Big Adventure to
Tim, but they were all in the script from the
beginning. The only scene improvised was
Jan Hooks’ ‘adobe’ addition to her Alamo
tour guide scene.” Burton corroborates the
improvisations by Jan Hooks. “One thing
that was completely improvised was that
whole thing in the Alamo with the guide.
That was the first time that there was a
good chunk of improvisation and the girl
who did that, [Groundlings member] Jan
Hooks, was really good and ended up on
Saturday Night Live.”
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure received gen-
erally positive reviews at the time of its
release in August 1985. Variety compared
Paul Reubens to Charlie Chaplin and
PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE  n  191
Buster Keaton, while Empire called the film
“a one-comic masterpiece” and “a dazzling
debut” for Burton. In his review for the
New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote that
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure is “the most bar-
ren comedy I’ve seen in years, maybe ever.
. . . Like Marcel Marceau, he [Pee-Wee
Herman] appears to be physically slight
and he often wears lipstick, but, unfortu-
nately, he won’t stop talking and—worse—
laughing at his own gags. Like Jacques Tati,
he wears pants that are too short, and like
Jerry Lewis, he behaves as if he were a child
trapped inside the body of a man. Like
them all, he desperately wants to be funny
but, unlike them, he isn’t.”
In October 2011, Warner Home Video
released Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure on Blu-
ray Disc with all of the supplementary
materials from the previously issued (May
2000) DVD: the audio commentary by Tim
Burton and Paul Reubens; eleven minutes,
twenty-five seconds of production sketches
and storyboards; a music-only track with
commentary by DANNY ELFMAN; the
film’s trailer; and eleven minutes, ten sec-
onds of deleted scenes.
References
Noël Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form
and Meaning in Japanese Cinema (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1979);
Vincent Canby, “Pee-Wee’s Big Adven-
ture,” New York Times, August 9, 1985,
quoted in “Paging Mr. Herman!” New
York Times, March 9, 2010, www.nytimes.
com/2010/03/10/urbaneye/10ubn2-1.
html?_r=0; Barry King, “Articulating Star-
dom,” in Star Texts: Image and Perfor-
mance in Film and Television, ed. Jeremy
G. Butler (Detroit: Wayne State Univer-
sity Press, 1991), 125–54; Paul Reubens,
YouTube video, www.youtube.com/
watch?v=Px8O1leWMNk [Paul Reubens
introduces Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure at its
annual August screening at the Hollywood
192  n  PESCUCCI, GABRIELLA
Forever Cemetery, 2007, explaining quite
accurately how Tim Burton came to direct
the film.]; Mark Salisbury, Burton on Bur-
ton 2nd ed. (London: Faber and Faber,
2000); Michael Varhol, email to author,
February 9, 2015.
PESCUCCI, GABRIELLA (1941–)
Academy Award–winning costume
designer, BAFTA Award nominee for Best
Costume Design for her work on CHAR-
LIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY.
Gabriella Pescucci was born in Rosignano
Solvay, Tuscany, in 1941. After study-
ing art at the Accademia di Belle Arti in
Florence, she moved to Rome in 1966 in
order to become a costume designer. She
began her career as an assistant costumer
to famed designer Piero Tosi on the films
Medea (1969, Pier Paolo Pasolini) and
Death in Venice (1971, Luchino Visconti).
She quickly became a costume designer in
her own right on Giuseppe Patroni Griffi’s
’Tis a Pity She’s a Whore (1971). In 1974,
she won a Nastro d’Argento (Silver Rib-
bon) Award for her designs for Mauro
Bolognini’s Drama of the Rich, winning
the same award the next year for Giuseppe
Patroni Griffi’s The Divine Nymph (1975).
Later, she designed two films for Federico
Fellini, Orchestra Rehearsal (1978) and City
of Women (1980). Her international debut
occurred in 1984 with Sergio Leone’s Once
Upon a Time in America, for which she won
the first of her two British Academy of Film
and Television Arts (BAFTA) Awards for
Best Costume Design. She won her sec-
ond BAFTA Award for The Adventures of
Baron Munchausen (1988), for which she
was nominated for an Academy Award.
She won an Academy Award for Best Cos-
tume Design for her work on Martin Scor-
sese’s The Age of Innocence (1993). She was
nominated again for a BAFTA Award and
Academy Award for Tim Burton’s Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory; she went on to
win the Nastro d’Argento Award for the
film in 2006. She continues to work on
Hollywood films as well as European pro-
ductions, and recently moved into televi-
sion with the Showtime historical series The
Borgias (2011–2012) and Penny Dreadful
(2014–). In addition to her film work she
has designed for the opera, notably La Tra-
viata at the Archimboldi Theatre, Milan,
and A Masked Ball at the Kennedy Center
in Washington, DC.
References
Shipra Harbola Gupta, “‘Penny Dread-
ful’ Costume Designer Gabriella Pescucci
on Her Dreadfully Delicious Designs,”
Indiewire, June 28, 2014, www.indiewire.
com/article/penny-dreadful-costume-
designer-gabriella-pescucci-on-her-
dreadfully-delicious-designs-20140628;
“Gabriella Pescucci Biography ([?]–),”
Film Reference, www.filmreference.com/
film/82/Gabriella-Pescucci.html.
PETTLER, PAMELA (1952–)
American television producer and writer
and one of the screenwriters of CORPSE
BRIDE and the Burton-produced fea-
ture 9. Born in the Bay Area of California
in 1952, Pamela Susskind Pettler is the
daughter of Charles and Teresa Susskind.
Charles Susskind was a professor of elec-
trical engineering and a cofounder of bio-
engineering studies at the University of
California at Berkeley. Raised in a family
with a passion for music, Pettler pursued a
musical career, earning a PhD in the field
and becoming a college teacher. She pub-
lished a book of humor, The Joy of Stress,
with illustrations by Jack Ziegler, in 1983.
Some years later, she published a second
book, the subject of which was sexual
humor, the tongue-in-cheek The No-Sex
Handbook (1990), coauthored with writer-
director Amy Heckerling, with illustra-
tions by Jack Ziegler.

Hoping to become a feature film
writer, she took a course in screenwriting,
beginning her career in television, writ-
ing episodes for teen or preteen audiences
for shows such as ABC Weekend Specials,
Charles in Charge, and CBS Summer Play-
house (1987–1989); Clueless (1996–1999);
Saved by the Bell: The New Class (1993–
2000); and the short-lived teen comedy-
drama series All about Us (2001), which
she developed and on which she served as
co-executive producer. In 2003, Pettler was
hired to do a rewrite of the screenplay for
CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FAC-
TORY, for which she was uncredited. Her
first feature film credit was Corpse Bride
(2005), followed by Monster House (2006),
and 9 (2009).
References
Elliot V. Kotek, “In the Company of
Women,” Moving Pictures Magazine 2,
no. 7 (October 1, 2005): 24–26; “Pamela
Pettler,” IMDb, www.imdb.com/name/
nm0972040/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1; Sarah
Yang, “Charles Susskind UC Berkeley
Professor and Emeritus and Co-founder
of Campus Bioengineering Program,
Dies at 82,” UC Berkeley News, June
24, 2004, berkeley.edu/news/media/
releases/2004/06/24_susskind.shtml.
PFEIFFER, MICHELLE (1958–)
Academy Award–nominated Ameri-
can actress who has appeared in two
films directed by Tim Burton, BAT-
MAN RETURNS and DARK SHADOWS.
Michelle Pfeiffer was born in Santa Ana,
California, on April 29, 1958. She was
raised in Midway City in Orange County
and attended junior college before deciding
on an acting career. She was a student of
the late acting teacher Peggy Feury. She was
selected during a nationwide talent search
to star in the musical Grease 2 (1982).
PFEIFFER, MICHELLE  n  193
Although the film was panned by the crit-
ics, Pfeiffer’s performance was praised. She
soon became one of the most sought after
actresses in Hollywood. She was cast by
director Brian DePalma to play the moll of
drug kingpin Al Pacino in Scarface (1983),
played a medieval noblewoman in Rich-
ard Donner’s Ladyhawke (1985), and fell
under JACK NICHOLSON’s devilish spell
in The Witches of Eastwick (1987). She was
nominated for an Academy Award as Best
Supporting Actress for her performance in
Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons (1988),
winning a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in
a Supporting Role. The next year, she was
again nominated for an Academy Award,
for Best Actress, as a sultry nightclub singer
in The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989). She
did not win the Academy Award, but her
performance brought her awards from the
New York Film Critics, the National Society
of Film Critics, and the Los Angeles Film
Critics. In 1989, Pfeiffer also made her stage
debut as Olivia in Twelfth Night, a produc-
tion of the New York Shakespeare Festival.
In order to prepare for the role of
Catwoman/Selina Kyle in Batman Returns,
she underwent martial arts training as well
as kickboxing. As Selina Kyle, she is self-
effacing and submissive; as Catwoman,
wielding a whip while clothed in skin-tight
black leather, she is an eroticized domi-
natrix. Her duality is far more intriguing
and suggestive than that of Batman/Bruce
Wayne. Costumed in stitched-together
black leather and wearing spiked heels,
Catwoman is perhaps one of Pfeiffer’s
most iconic performances. Twenty years
later, she appeared in a much different
role in a Tim Burton film, as the family
matriarch, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, in
Dark Shadows. With the exception of Dark
Shadows, in recent years Pfeiffer has opted
for roles in smaller, independent produc-
tions.
194  n  PIERCE BROTHERS VALHALLA MEMORIAL PARK
Michelle Pfeiffer as the alluring Catwoman in Batman Returns.
References
“Michelle Pfeiffer,” IMDb, www.imdb.
com/name/nm0000201/?ref_=nv_sr_1;
promotional press kit, Batman Returns.
PIERCE BROTHERS VALHALLA
MEMORIAL PARK
Sixty-three-acre cemetery founded in
1923 as Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery
by two Los Angeles financiers, John R.
Osborne and C. C. Fitzpatrick, near Bob
Hope Airport (formerly the Burbank-Glen-
dale-Pasadena Airport) in Burbank, near
which Tim Burton grew up. Burton avers
he played in this cemetery, as a child, asso-
ciating it with the cemetery in Ed Wood’s
Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) as a result
of the city of Burbank being referred to in
the film. The cemetery’s rotunda, located at
what was formerly the entry to the cemetery
on Valhalla Drive, is located close to Lock-
heed Aircraft and sits directly underneath
the flight path of Bob Hope Airport’s run-
way 15/33 (aligned north-northwest). For
these reasons, the rotunda was rededicated
in 1953 as a shrine known as the Portal of
the Folded Wings, in which are interred the
remains of several famous historical figures
in the field of aviation.
The cemetery had an inauspicious
beginning. A few months after its dedica-
tion in 1925, financiers Osborne and Fitz-
patrick were convicted of fraud. According
to contemporary accounts, they had appar-
ently sold the same burial plots repeatedly
and as a consequence netted a profit in the
millions of dollars. Its owners fined and
sent to prison, the cemetery was taken over
by the state; Pierce Brothers bought it in
1950. In 1952 the rotunda entrance on the
east side was closed, and the new entrance
was moved from the Burbank side of the
cemetery to the intersection of Victory and
Cahuenga boulevards in North Hollywood,
where Pierce Brothers built an office and
mortuary.

One might conclude that since the
cemetery is bordered on the west by North
Hollywood, Tim Burton may have grown
up in the area of west Burbank bounded by
N. Clybourn Avenue to the west, W. Vic-
tory Boulevard on the south, W. Pacific
Avenue, which runs along the cemetery’s
south side, on the north, and N. Hollywood
Way to the east, a neighborhood that lies
directly south of the cemetery. However,
this is not so. The Burton home was actu-
ally a few blocks slightly north and east of
the cemetery, in the 2200 block of N. Niag-
ara Street, east of the airport. In order to
reach the cemetery, the young Tim Burton
would have had to cross the busy thor-
oughfares of Empire Avenue and Vanowen
Street to the south, and N. Hollywood Way
to the west. However, having done so, the
quickest route to the cemetery would have
been to take Valhalla Dr., which would
have led directly to the rotunda on the
cemetery’s east side.
According to Mark Salisbury, the Bur-
ton home was “situated directly under the
flight path of Burbank Airport,” which is
not quite accurate as, strictly speaking, the
flight path of runway 8/26 (aligned east-
west) would have been several blocks to the
north of the Burton home.
References
Mark Salisbury, Burton on Burton, 2nd rev.
ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 1;
Hadley Meares, “Valhalla Memorial Park
Portal of the Folded Wings: The Criminal
Beginnings of a Burbank Burial Ground,”
KCET, December 6, 2013, www.kcet.org/
socal/departures/columns/graveyards-of-la/
valhalla-memorial-park-and-the-portal-of-
the-folded-wings-the-criminal-beginnings-
of-a-burbank-buria.html.
LA PLANÈTE DES SINGES (1963)
Classic science fiction novel by French
author Pierre Boulle (1912–1994) pub-
LA PLANÈTE DES SINGES  n  195
lished by René Julliard (Paris) in 1963. The
English translation, by British journalist
and author Xan Fielding, was published
in the United States as Planet of the Apes
(Vanguard Press, 1963), and in the United
Kingdom as Monkey Planet (Secker & War-
burg, 1964). In French, singe can mean
either “ape” or “monkey,” accounting for
the variations in the English translation.
The French language does, however, have
a term for a female simian, la guenon, used
in Boulle’s novel often in conjunction with
the chimp researcher, Zira. The English
language does not have such a term, nec-
essarily employing collocations such as
“female monkey” or “she-ape.”
Boulle’s novel uses the device of a
manuscript found in a bottle, discovered
by a couple, Jinn and Phyllis, while travel-
ling together in their luxurious space ship.
The manuscript provides the novel’s core
narrative, the story of three human space
explorers who travel to an Earth-like planet
they christen Soror, a planet circling the red
giant Betelgeuse several hundred light years
from Earth: Ulysse Mérou, a journalist; a
scientist, Professor Antelle; and a physician,
Arthur Levain. The space travelers have also
brought with them a chimpanzee named
Hector as well as birds and butterflies. By
means of a shuttle launched from an orbit-
ing ship, they land on Soror. At a lake they
discover a beautiful woman whom Ulysse
christens Nova; like the other human
beings on the planet, she is naked, speech-
less, and child-like. When the chimpanzee
Hector appears, Nova quickly kills him and
runs off into the surrounding jungle.
The Earthmen soon learn that apes—
chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas—
are the dominant species on the planet,
with their own culture and rudimentary
technology. They have invented the wheel
but still travel on horseback, having not yet
invented the internal combustion engine.
Each group of apes has its prescribed social
196  n  LA PLANÈTE DES SINGES
role. In contrast, the humans forage like
beasts, have no language, and live in caves.
Soon, they are attacked by a gorilla hunt-
ing party. Many humans are killed in the
attack, among them Arthur Levain. Profes-
sor Antelle is captured and placed in a zoo,
while Ulysse and Nova are taken to a lab
where a group of simian scientists, overseen
by the chimpanzee Zira, study them and
encourage them to mate. Ulysse soon real-
izes that Zira is interested in him because
of his intelligence (but initially attributes
his intelligence to mimicry) and that she
is therefore approachable. He reveals to
her that he has language and reason. Zira
teaches him the ape language, and Ulysse
becomes something of a celebrity. Ulysse
attempts to use his new-found celebrity to
free Professor Antelle from the zoo, but to
his horror Antelle has become incapable of
speech and behaves like a caged animal.
Meanwhile, Ulysse discovers that Zira’s
fiancé, the chimpanzee Cornelius, is doing
archeological research on prehistoric Soror.
However, because of his research, Corne-
lius has made himself an enemy of the
orangutan Zaius, a representative of official
science. Zaius sees Cornelius and his fellow
chimpanzees as a danger to simian culture.
Cornelius reveals to Ulysse his belief that
Soror was previously ruled by humans, but
theorizes they declined and eventually were
replaced by apes that possibly descended
from human pets, or, alternatively, apes
that had been trained by humans. Cor-
nelius’s major discoveries supporting his
theory are a mechanical human doll that
speaks and a human graveyard that shows
signs of religious ritual.
However, Ulysse also discovers that
Cornelius is performing surgical experi-
ments on humans, including lobotomies,
epilepsy-inducing brain surgeries, and
other mutilations that cause death. These
brain experiments also uncover the exis-
tence of a race memory in the human sub-
jects, during which they speak of past lives
that tell of sadistic experiments being done
on apes until the apes finally rebelled.
Nova gives birth to Ulysse’s child, who
learns to speak. The existence of a talking
human, coupled with Cornelius’s archeo-
logical research, prompts Zaius to order
Ulysse, Nova, and their child lobotomized
or killed. Zira and Cornelius refuse to allow
this to happen, so they help Ulysse and
his family to escape. The escape is enabled
because Zaius and his assistants, all humans
look alike. Zira and Cornelius take Ulysse
and his family to the shuttle that Ulysse and
his companions had used to land on Soror,
and Ulysse steers it to the mother ship still
circling the planet.
Ulysse sets the ship on course to Earth.
During the journey, he teaches both Nova
and his son to speak. Upon their return
to Earth, landing not far from the Eiffel
Tower, they discover that Earth has been
taken over by apes. Although space travel
is still impossible to the apes, apparently
they have evolved toward dominance over
humans through parallel evolution.
Ulysse sets off again in the spaceship,
where he writes down his story and sets it
afloat in space in a bottle. He indicates he
can keep going for several years, as they can
grow vegetables and fruit, and also have
poultry. He hopes someday to come across
a friendly planet.
The novel’s final surprise reveals that
the couple who discovered the manuscript,
Jinn and Phyllis, are chimpanzees, who dis-
miss the manuscript as a fanciful work of
fiction.
Reference
Pierre Boulle, Planet of the Apes, trans. Xan
Fielding (New York: Del Rey, 2001).

PLANET OF THE APES (US 2001)
Director: Tim Burton. Screenplay: William
Broyles, Lawrence Konner, Mark D.
Rosenthal. Executive Producer: Ralph
Winter. P roducer : Richard Zanuck.
Associate Producers: Ross Fanger, Kat-
terli Frauenfelder. Music: Danny Elfman.
D irector of P hotography : Philippe
Rousselot. F ilm E ditor : Chris Leben-
zon. P roduction D esign : Rick Hein-
richs. S upervising A rt D irector : John
Dexter. Art Direction: Sean Haworth,
Philip Toolin. S et D ecoration : Rose-
mary Brandenburg. C ostume D esign :
Colleen Atwood. Special Makeup Effects
D esigner and C reator : Rick Baker.
Supervising Sound Effects Editor: Rich-
ard L. Anderson. First Assistant Direc-
tor: Katterli Frauenfelder. Second Unit
D irector : Andy Armstrong. S econd
Assistant Director: Stacy Christenson.
Cast: Mark Wahlberg (Captain Leo David-
son), Tim Roth (General Thade), Hel-
ena Bonham Carter (Ari), Michael
Clarke Duncan (Attar), Paul Giamatti
(Limbo), Estella Warren (Daena), Cary-
Hiroyuki Tagawa (Krull), David Warner
(Sandar), Kris Kristofferson (Karubi),
Erick Avari (Tival), Luke Eberl (Birn),
Evan Dexter Parke (Gunnar), Glenn
Shadix (Senator Nado), Lisa Marie
(Nova), Freda Foh Shen (Bon), Chris
Ellis (Commander Karl Vasich), Anne
Ramsay (Lt. Col. Grace Alexander),
Andrea Grano (Major Maria Cooper),
Michael Jace (Major Frank Santos),
Michael Wiseman (Specialist Hansen),
Eileen Weisinger (Leeta), Deep Roy
(Gorilla Kid; Thade’s Niece), Chad
Bannon (Red Ape Soldier; Man Hunt
Ape), Kevin Grevioux (Limbo’s 1st
Handler; Ape Commander; 2nd Ape
Soldier), Isaac C. Singleton Jr. (Limbo’s
2nd Handler; 1st Ape Soldier), Quincy
Taylor (Ape Soldier), John Alexander
(Ape Dinner Guest; Old Man Servant;
Old Ape #1), Jay Caputo (1st Ape
Teenager; 2nd Ape Soldier), Philip Tan
PLANET OF THE APES  n  197
(2nd Ape Teenager; Gossiping Male
Ape), Callie Croughwell (Little Human
Girl), Allie Habberstad (Girl Pet), Brett
Smrz (Human Kid #1), Howard Berger
(Gorilla), Rick Baker (Old Ape #2),
Cameron Croughwell (Ape Soccer
Kid), Joshua Croughwell (Ape Soccer
Kid), Hannah Peitzman (Ape Soccer
Kid), Molly Peitzman (Ape Soccer Kid),
Jesse Tipton (Ape Soccer Kid), Shane
Habberstad (Ape Soccer Kid), Chet Zar
(Fruit Vendor), Linda Harrison (Woman
In Cart), Eddie Adams (Friend at Leo’s
Party), Todd Babcock (Friend at Leo’s
Party), Lorenzo Callender (Friend at
Leo’s Party), Shonda Farr (Friend at
Leo’s Party), Kam Heskin (Friend at
Leo’s Party), Jim Holmes (Friend at
Leo’s Party), Todd Kimsey (Friend at
Leo’s Party), Candace Kroslak (Friend
at Leo’s Party), Joanna Krupa (Friend at
Leo’s Party), Elizabeth Lackey (Friend
at Leo’s Party), Mark Christopher Law-
rence (Friend at Leo’s Party), Melody
Perkins (Friend at Leo’s Party), Tate
Taylor (Friend at Leo’s Party, Jonna
Thompson (Friend at Leo’s Party).
Running Time: 119 minutes, 51 seconds.
Color.
Released Through: 20th Century Fox.
Tim Burton’s “re-imagining” of the clas-
sic science fiction film from 1968 starring
Charlton Heston. Tim Burton’s version
is perhaps best understood as what Barry
Taylor calls the “postmodern gothic,” in
which family and society “appear transi-
tory, filled with temporary alliances, groups
that unite to confront a particular issue and
then morph into something else. Com-
munity is mobile, as is family.” Changing
attitudes toward sexuality are also a feature
of the postmodern gothic: “In the gothic
imaginary, from the sexualized robots of
Bladerunner [sic] to the potential for inter-
species relations in Tim Burton’s . . . Planet
of the Apes, the possibilities of sexuality are
198  n  PLANET OF THE APES
endless.” The subsequent reinvention of the
series by 20th Century Fox with the films
Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) and
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) only
reaffirms the idea that the Planet of the Apes
series has become exemplary of the post-
modern gothic.
In the year 2029, the USAF space sta-
tion Oberon is threatened by an approach-
ing storm. A trained chimpanzee, Pericles,
is sent in an exploratory space pod to
investigate and bring back data. When
the station loses contact with Pericles’s
pod, Captain Leo Davidson (Mark Wahl-
berg) disobeys orders and goes after him.
Davidson’s pod is likewise caught in the
storm and is propelled into an indetermi-
nate reality, crash-landing on an Earth-like
planet named Ashlar in the year 5021. The
planet is ruled by talking apes who have
enslaved the human population (but in a
critical revision of Boulle’s source novel,
the human beings can talk, but seldom do
so). Captain Davidson is captured almost
immediately by the army of the brutal and
bellicose chimpanzee General Thade (Tim
Roth) and his equally vicious second in
command, Colonel Attar (Michael Clarke
Duncan).
Davidson meets a female chimpan-
zee named Ari (HELENA BONHAM
CARTER), who protests the awful treat-
ment humans receive. Ari decides to buy
him and a female slave named Daena
(Estella Warren) to have them work as ser-
vants in the house of her father, Senator
Sandar (David Warner). Soon, Davidson
escapes his cage and frees other humans.
Ari sees them, but Davidson convinces her
to join a human rebellion against the apes.
General Thade and Colonel Attar assemble
an army of ape warriors and go in pursuit
of the humans.
Davidson discovers Calima (the temple
of Semos), a forbidden but holy site for the
apes. Calima turns out to be the remains
of the space station Oberon that crashed
on the planet’s surface centuries earlier
and hence looks ancient (the name Calima
coming from the sign “CAution LIve ani-
MAls,” the relevant letters being the only
ones not covered in dust). According to the
computer logs, the station has been there
for thousands of years. Davidson surmises
that when he entered the storm he was
pushed forward in time, while the Oberon,
searching for him, was not, crashing on the
planet centuries before he did.
The Oberon ’ s log reveals that the
apes on board, led by Semos, organized
a mutiny and took control of the vessel
after it crashed. The human and ape survi-
vors of the struggle left the ship, and their
descendants inhabit the planet. During the
battle that ensues between the humans and
the apes, a familiar vehicle descends from
the sky, which Davidson recognizes as the
pod piloted by Pericles, the chimpanzee
astronaut. Pericles was pushed forward
in time just as Davidson was, and has just
now arrived. When Pericles lands, the apes
interpret his landing as the return arrival of
Semos, the first ape, their god. They bow,
and hostilities between humans and apes
cease.
Pericles then runs into the Oberon and
Davidson runs after him, followed by Gen-
eral Thade. Inside, Thade and Davidson-
wrestle, with Pericles trying to help David-
son, only to be thrown hard against a wall.
Thade gets hold of Davidson’s gun, but
initially does not understand how to use
it. Seeing that Thade is in the pilot’s deck,
Davidson closes the automatic door of the
entrance, trapping Thade as he shoots the
gun, the bullets ricocheting off the door
harmlessly. Thade thrashes around to
escape, but is unable to do so, presumably
because intellectually he is unable to adapt
to the new environment. Davidson chooses
to leave the planet, so he gives Pericles to
Ari and says goodbye to Daena. Davidson
 PLANET OF THE APES (VIDEO GAMES)  n  199
then uses Pericles’s undamaged pod to
travel back in time through the electromag-
netic storm. Davidson ends up crashing
near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington,
DC. He looks up at the memorial, and sees
it is now a monument in honor of General
Thade. A swarm of police officers, firefight-
ers, and news reporters descend on David-
son, revealing they are apes.
The critical reaction to the film was,
as Alison McMahan observed, “neither
overwhelmingly negative nor overwhelm-
ingly positive.” McMahan wrote, “Had
the film not been a reimagining of a myth
where Taylor, Leo’s model [from the origi-
nal film], at least tried to raise the level of
the humans on Soror . . . then the implied
commentary of Burton’s version, which
could be interpreted as white middle-class
culture eroding due to self-absorption and
lack of commitment to social group as well
as family, as personified by the character
of Leo, might have gotten more attention
from the critics.” Duane Dudek, writing in
the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, observed,
“The dialogue is peppered with camp
humor and phrases from the first film,
yet, like Wahlberg’s inarticulate speech to
his human army, is disappointingly plot-
driven.” Frank Gabrenya, in the Columbus
Dispatch, wrote, “True to form, Burton’s
Planet of the Apes is a visually striking con-
cept, filled with weighty darkness and the
severe trappings of a militaristic society.
Just as typically, his plot runs along pre-
dictable lines, with a glut of scenes made
up of sadly ordinary movie moments.” Bob
Graham, in the San Francisco Chronicle, was
kinder, saying, “Tim Burton has rethought
and re-energized the sci-fi classic, now
more than 30 years old, and despite its
familiarity has come up with a surprise-
punch ending that outdoes the original yet
keeps its spirit.” And Elvis Mitchell in the
New York Times commented, “When Mr.
Burton’s Planet fixes on being entertaining
as single-mindedly as the gorillas bearing
down on homo sapiens, it succeeds. But
the picture states its social points so bluntly
that it becomes slow-witted and conde-
scending, it treats the audience as pets.
There’s a faint air of absurdity in the coarse
mix of satire and show-biz cynicism.”
Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times sug-
gested, “Intellectually, it’s science fiction
for junior high school boys. . . . Ten years
from now, it will be the 1968 version that
people are still renting.”
Despite the mixed critical reception,
the film earned $359 million worldwide.
References
Duane Dudek, “With Technology, ‘Planet
of the Apes’ Evolves into Purer Version of
Original,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, July
27, 2001; Roger Ebert, “Planet of the Apes,”
RogerEbert.com, July 27, 2001, www.
rogerebert.com/reviews/planet-of-the-
apes-2001; Bob Graham, “Great ‘Apes,’”
San Francisco Chronicle, July 27, 2001; Elvis
Mitchell, “Film Review: Get Your Hands
Off, Ya Big Gorilla!” New York Times, July
27, 2001, www.nytimes.com/movie/review?
res=940DE6DB143DF934A15754C0A9679
C8B63; Alison McMahan, The Films of Tim
Burton: Animating Live Action in Contem-
porary Hollywood (New York: Continuum,
2005): 182; Barry Taylor, Entertainment
Theology: New-Edge Spirituality in a Digital
Democracy, Kindle Edition (Grand Rapids,
MI: Baker Academic, 2008).
PLANET OF THE APES
(VIDEO GAMES)
Several video games were published around
the release of Tim Burton’s PLANET OF
THE APES, yet none of them is a direct
adaptation of his film. Given the film’s long
gestation and chaotic production, it would
have been difficult to develop and com-
plete a game that followed the story and
characterizations that eventually ended up
200  n  POIRIER, GREGORY
in Burton’s movie. As such, Planet of the
Apes (PC, PlayStation) is a third-person
over-the-shoulder action/adventure game
following the story of Ulysses, an American
astronaut whose ship crashes on a planet
ruled by apes of various sorts. This game—
developed by Visiware and published by
Ubisoft—tells a pastiche of the story from
the original Planet of the Apes film and
Burton’s film, using exploration and inves-
tigation to flesh out the Apes universe. By
contrast, the handheld Planet of the Apes
games (for Game Boy Color and Game Boy
Advance, both developed by Torus Games
and published by Ubisoft) more or less
explicitly condense the stories of Planet of
the Apes (1968) and Beneath the Planet of
the Apes (1970) into straightforward side-
scrolling platformers. Writing at IGN, Hil-
ary Goldstein appreciated the Game Boy
Color/Game Boy Advance ports for their
attention to themes from the original films,
but criticized them as being “very singular”
in their adherence to the familiar formula
for side-scrolling games (dodge, fight,
jump, repeat).—Kevin Flanagan
Reference
Hilary Goldstein, “Planet of the Apes,”
IGN.com, December 14, 2001, www.ign.
com/articles/2001/12/15/planet-of-the-
apes-2.
POIRIER, GREGORY
(STEPHEN) (1961–)
Director and screenwriter, author of
screenplay on Tim Burton’s abandoned
Superman Lives project. Poirier was born
on the island of Maui and later attended
the Maui Academy of Performing Arts. He
graduated from USC with a bachelor of
fine arts in drama before attending UCLA,
where he earned an MFA in screenwriting.
In 1990, Poirier cowrote the screenplay
Danger Zone III: Steel Horse War with actor
Jason Williams (who cowrote the previous
Danger Zone and Danger Zone II). Poirier
would again join forces with Jason Wil-
liams (reprising his Wade Olsen character
from the Danger Zone films) with an action
western involving motorcycles, titled Death
Riders (1994).
Poirier was the second screenwriter
brought in by Jon Peters to work on the
Superman Lives project, writing a revi-
sion of JONATHAN LEMKIN’s Superman
Reborn. Poirier’s Superman “was moody
and introspective; one scene takes place
in his psychotherapy session. Poirier has
him return from the afterlife weakened
and don the black-and-silver ‘containment
suit’ from the comics; he resolves to fight
Doomsday without his powers.” Warner
Bros. rejected the script.
Poirier would later write Rosewood
(1997), directed by John Singleton, about
the 1923 Rosewood, Florida, massacre,
in which a white lynch mob attacked an
African American community. The film
was nominated for several awards; in 1998
Poirier received the prestigious Paul Selvin
Honorary Award from the Writers Guild of
America. Later works include the screen-
play for the thriller Gossip (2000) and the
comedy Tomcats (2001), which he also
directed. He later created the television
series Missing (2012), for which he wrote
several episodes.
References
“Gregory Poirier,” IMDb, www.imdb.
com/name/nm0201304/bio?ref_=nm_
ov_bio_sm; “Gregory Poirier Biography,”
Tribute,ca, www.tribute.ca/people/gregory-
poirier/5802/.
PRICE, VINCENT (1911–1993)
Actor most famous for his performances
in horror films, and one of Tim Burton’s
favorite actors. Born the fourth and young-
est child of an affluent St. Louis family on
May 27, 1911, Vincent Leonard Price Jr.

enjoyed a rich and varied career as a film
and television actor, eventually gaining
an iconic status few entertainers can rival.
Price’s grandfather, Vincent Clarence Price,
invented cream of tartar baking powder, a
very profitable patent, and Price’s father,
Vincent Leonard Price Sr., was the presi-
dent of National Candy Company. Price
graduated from Yale University in 1933
with a degree in art history; his knowledge
and love of art remained an enduring inter-
est in his life. In 1934, he moved to London
with the intention of pursuing a master’s
degree, but he became interested in acting
and in 1935 began his stage career with the
Orson Welles Mercury Theatre.
In his early film career, Price was a
character actor, for instance, in Otto Prem-
inger’s Laura (1944) and in Leave Her to
Heaven (1946), but he is best known for
his many memorable roles in horror mov-
ies, a direction in his career he began to
explore with the character of Nicholas van
Ryn in Dragonwyck (1946). Price became
strongly associated with the horror film
during the 1950s, with films such as House
of Wax (1953), The Fly (1958), and House
on Haunted Hill (1959). In the 1960s, Price
starred in several adaptations of and/or
inspirations from the short fiction and
poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, many of them
directed by Roger Corman, beginning
with The House of Usher (1960), followed
in succession by The Pit and the Pendulum
(1961), The Raven (1963), The Masque of
the Red Death (1964), The Tomb of Ligeia
(1965), and The Conqueror Worm (1968).
The Last Man on Earth (1964) is a scari-
fying and superb adaptation of Richard
Matheson’s novel I Am Legend, in which
Price stars as the last person on earth who
has not been infected by a plague that
turns its victims into vampires. Price was
cast as the villain, Egghead, in the original
television series of Batman, which aired for
three seasons (1966–1968), and he made
PRICE, VINCENT  n  201
occasional guest appearances in other
series, such as Get Smart and Voyage to the
Bottom of the Sea. Price continued acting,
primarily in horror films like Theatre of
Blood (1973), although his film career had
begun to wane.
Price’s distinctive voice, and his fame
as a horror actor, continued to provide him
with other professional opportunities. His
voice was in demand for animated televi-
sion series (e.g., Hanna-Barbera’s Scooby
Doo), dramatic readings (of Poe), and
music albums. For instance, Price’s voice-
over is featured on Alice Cooper’s Welcome
to My Nightmare (1975) and on the title
track of Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1982).
He also hosted the PBS series, Mystery,
from 1981 to 1989, and made appearances
on Hollywood Squares.
In 1982, Tim Burton made his short
stop-motion film VINCENT in homage to
the actor, for which Price himself provided
the narration. In it, a small boy named
Vincent possesses an endearingly maca-
bre imagination. Burton had long been
an admirer of Price, and this initiated a
friendly relationship between the two. Vin-
cent Price said of Vincent that it was “the
most gratifying thing that ever happened.
It was immortality—better than a star on
Hollywood Boulevard.” As a result of this
short, Price was cast as the inventor of the
titular character in Burton’s feature film
EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (1990), his
final appearance in a motion picture. Suf-
fering from emphysema and Parkinson’s
disease, he was in very ill health at the time.
In 1991, Burton also began a docu-
mentary, CONVERSATIONS WITH
VINCENT, which consisted of interviews
with Price in the latter’s art gallery, but
the project remained incomplete. Burton
was obviously drawn to Price’s own back-
ground, education, and interest in art, as
well as his film career. As early as 1957,
Price made large cash and item donations
202  n  PRICE, VINCENT
Tim Burton (left) and actor Vincent Price taking a break during the making of Edward Scissorhands
(1990).
to East Los Angeles College, which sub-
sequently opened the Vincent Price Art
Museum. He remained an avid art collec-
tor all of his life.
Price was married three times: to
actress Edith Barrett (1938–1948), set
designer Mary Grant (1949–1973), and
actress Coral Browne (1974–1991). He
and Barrett had one son, Vincent Barrett
Price (b. 1940). With Mary Grant he had
a daughter, Mary Victoria Price (b. 1962).
His marriage to Australian actress Coral
Browne lasted until her death in 1991.
Price succumbed to lung cancer and died
on October 26, 1993. He has two stars on
the Hollywood Walk of Fame, for film and
television.—Rebecca A. Umland
References
“Vincent Price Biography,” Bio, www.biog-
raphy.com/people/vincent-price-9446990;
“History,” Vincent Price Art Museum, vin-
centpriceartmuseum.org/about/history/;
“Vincent Price,” All Movie, www.allmovie.
com/artist/p57806; “Vincent Price Pro-
file,” TCM, www.tcm.com/this-month/
article/161098%7C0/Vincent-Price-8-10.
html; Lucy Chase Williams, The Complete
Films of Vincent Price (New York: Citadel,
2000).
 Q
QUICK, WILLIAM T(HOMAS)
(1946–)
Author of the novelization of PLANET OF
THE APES (2001). Quick began his writing
career as an author of fantasy and science
fiction, publishing in magazines such as
Analog Science Fiction and Isaac Asimov’s
Science Fiction beginning in 1979. His first
novel, Dreams of Flesh and Sand, was pub-
lished by Signet in 1988. In the late 1990s,
he coauthored several sci-fi novels with
William Shatner, and as Quentin Thomas
he published a novel based on the X-Files
television series, Ascension, in 1998. Quick
followed his novelization of Planet of the
Apes (2001) with two more novels inspired
by the Planet of the Apes universe, Planet of
the Apes: The Fall (2002) and Planet of the
Apes: The Colony (2003).
References
“William Thomas Quick,” in Contemporary
Authors Online (Detroit: Gale, 2007); “Bib-
lioViblio,” www.iw3p.com.
  n  203
 R
A
RANFT, JOE (JOSEPH HENRY)
(1960–2005)
Greatly admired American animator, voice
actor, and gifted storyteller who served
as storyboard supervisor on both THE
NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS and
JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH and
executive producer on CORPSE BRIDE.
Ranft was Pixar Animation Studios’ head
of story and was a key member of Pixar’s
creative team, contributing to the develop-
ment of several hit films, among them Toy
Story (1995), A Bug’s Life (1998), and Cars
(2006), serving as codirector of the latter.
He also performed the voices of many char-
acters in Pixar films.
While studying in the character ani-
mation department at the CALIFORNIA
INSTITUTE OF THE ARTS in the late
1970s, he met and became friends with Tim
Burton. He began his career as a storyboard
artist with Disney in 1980, and was among
the many young, highly talented animators
at Disney who appeared as cast members
in the early film codirected by Tim Bur-
ton and JERRY REES, LUAU (1982). In his
foreword to Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride: An
Invitation to the Wedding, Burton writes that
it was Ranft who told him about “THE FIN-
GER,” the basis of the story for Corpse Bride,
praising him as “a master storyteller.”
Joe Ranft died tragically in a car acci-
dent in August 2005 during the production
of Cars. The film, then in production, was
204  n 
later dedicated to him, as was Corpse Bride.
The 2010 special edition Blu-ray/DVD
combo reissue of Toy Story 2 contains a
short, thirteen-minute tribute, “Celebrating
Our Friend Joe Ranft,” about his life and
accomplishments.
References
“Joe Ranft,” IMDb, www.imdb.com/name/
nm0710020/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1; Tim Bur-
ton, “Foreword,” in Tim Burton’s Corpse
Bride: An Invitation to the Wedding, ed.
Timothy Shaner (New York: Newmarket
Press, 2005), 9; Toy Story 2: Special Edition,
Blu-ray Disc/DVD, Disney Pictures, 2010.
REES, JERRY (1956–)
Writer, producer, director, and animator,
perhaps best known for having adapted
(with JOE RANFT) and directed The
Brave Little Toaster (1987). At the begin-
ning of his career at Disney, Rees cowrote
and codirected with Tim Burton the short
films DOCTOR OF DOOM and LUAU.
Rees studied animation at the CALIFOR-
NIA INSTITUTE OF THE ARTS, and was
part of the first inaugural class in character
animation at CalArts in 1975. After joining
Disney, he worked on the 1981 Disney film
THE FOX AND THE HOUND, and the
following year served as one of the visual
effects supervisors on Disney’s Tron (1982).
While at Disney with Tim Burton, Rees and
Burton cowrote and codirected the short

films Luau (a beach movie parody) and
Doctor of Doom (a Mexican horror film
parody), now considered cult classics. In
1987, Rees directed the animated feature
The Brave Little Toaster, about a group of
five household appliances on a quest to
find their owner, whom they refer to as
the Master. The film is now considered a
classic. Rees’s directorial credits include
the feature film The Marrying Man (1991),
starring Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin,
while as a producer, his credits include the
Warner Bros. animated feature Space Jam
(1996) and the “Indiana Jones Stunt Spec-
tacular” shown in the 2,400-seat amphithe-
ater at Disney’s MGM Studios. In addition,
he has directed sixteen trans-media Dis-
ney Theme Park attractions in Anaheim,
Orlando, Hong Kong, and Paris. His proj-
ects span multiple formats, such as Shows-
can, Hi-Res Digital, and in-theater illu-
sions, and include the show “Cinemagique”
that won a THEA (Themed Entertainment
Association) Award (Outstanding Themed
Entertainment and Experience Design) for
Best Attraction. His creation “Animation
Magic” plays aboard Disney’s cruise ships
and also won a THEA Award for “most
innovative use of technology.” His seven-
teenth attraction is scheduled for EPCOT
in 2016. Rees is a member of the Directors
Guild of America and the Writers Guild of
America.
References
“Jerry Rees,” IMDb, www.imdb.com/name/
nm0715916/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm;
“Jerry Rees,” JerryRees.com, www.jerryrees.
com/page2/page2.html.
REUBENS, PAUL (1952–)
American actor, voice actor, writer, and
comedian, born Paul Rubenfeld in Peek-
skill, New York, famous as the fictional
character Pee-Wee Herman, star of PEE-
WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE. Reubens grew
REUBENS, PAUL  n  205
up in Sarasota, Florida, graduating from
Sarasota High School in 1970. He moved
to California and enrolled as a student at
CalArts. Reubens’s earliest nationally tele-
vised appearances as a comedian were on
The Gong Show (1976–1978) along with
Charlotte McGinnis, as a member of a
boy-girl duo named the Hilarious Betty
and Eddie. During this period, he joined
the Groundlings, an improvisational and
sketch comedy troupe and school based in
Los Angeles, where he remained for sev-
eral years, becoming good friends with the
late PHIL HARTMAN, who helped him
develop his material. It was while he was
a member of the Groundlings in 1977 that
Reubens first began to develop the Pee-Wee
Herman character, eventually building Pee-
Wee into a cultish live-stage comedy show
by the early 1980s. Pee-Wee Herman was
introduced nationally in a cameo role in
the comedy Cheech & Chong’s Next Movie
(1980).
Although The Pee-Wee Herman Show,
the popularly successful stage show fea-
turing the character, dates to 1981—after
Reubens failed an audition to become a cast
member on Saturday Night Live—Reubens
had previously appeared on The Dating
Game three times as the Pee-Wee charac-
ter. “That was a little test experiment I was
doing early on,” Reubens told Paul Rudd
about appearing on The Dating Game.
I went to a cattle call audition for
The Dating Game, and before I even
got home they called me back. . . . I
just went in in my full Pee-wee thing
and filled out the application as Pee-
wee Herman. They asked, “What are
your hobbies?” and I listed all Pee-
wee Herman stuff. You know, Andy
Kaufman was working at the same
time and I was very influenced by
him. . . . I always sort of felt like Pee-
wee Herman was performance art a
206  n  REUBENS, PAUL
little bit, and what I personally liked
about it was that I was the only person
who knew that. I was in art school at
CalArts . . . just prior to joining The
Groundlings and developing Pee-wee
Herman. I almost felt like Pee-wee
Herman was conceptual art because I
went to great lengths to make people
think that he was a real person.
The success of 1981’s The Pee-Wee
Herman Show made it possible for Reubens
to make an appearance as Pee-Wee on the
popular television show Mork & Mindy, in
1981, as well as to arrange for several guest
appearances on Late Night with David
Letterman. The fact that he was billed as
Pee-Wee Herman, and not Paul Reubens,
suggests his ongoing desire at the time to
approach Pee-Wee Herman as performance
art. The reception of the Late Night with
David Letterman performances enabled
Pee-Wee Herman to tour the United States
with the stage version of The Pee-Wee Her-
man Show; in 1984, Reubens/Herman sold
out New York City’s Carnegie Hall. Reu-
bens was to say that it was his appearances
as Pee-Wee Herman on David Letterman’s
show that made the character a star. Based
on the popularity of the Pee-Wee Her-
man character, Reubens and Phil Hartman
began writing a screenplay to be produced
by Warner Bros. The film that was even-
tually titled Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure was
born.
Tim Burton, ironically, was not Reu-
bens’s first choice to direct Pee-Wee’s Big
Adventure. “I turned in the script of the
movie with a list of about 200 directors I
had gotten out of a directors’ book who I
thought were good,” said Reubens.
The studio then settled on one direc-
tor who wasn’t on my list and that
I thought was absolutely wrong. I
made a stupid stink to my manager
about it, and my manager said, “Are
you crazy? You have a green-light
approved movie if you go with this
guy they are asking for.” I said, “I’m
sorry. It’s not the right guy. I spent 15
years getting to this point. I gotta have
the right director. Someone who can
put their own stamp on it.” So I went
to a party, and somebody at the party
had just seen Frankenweenie. . . . Shel-
ley Duvall was in Frankenweenie, and
I knew Shelley, and so I called Shelley
and she said, “Oh my god, Paul, you
and he are so perfect together.” When
I screened the short film the next
day, I knew in the first six shots that I
wanted him to do it. It was absolutely
incredible. It was the biggest piece of
luck early on in my career that I could
have had. We were completely simpa-
tico.
The success of Pee-Wee’s Big Adven-
ture allowed Reubens to develop a Satur-
day morning children’s television program,
Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, that became a hit,
airing on CBS for five years, 1986–1990.
Starring Pee-Wee Herman, the titular
“playhouse” featured a talking chair, a
dinosaur family, robots, puppets, and
other creatures, as well as various eccentric
friends of Pee-Wee’s. The show garnered 22
Emmy Awards during its five-year run, and
spawned Pee-Wee toys, games, and apparel
and other merchandise that reportedly
generated over $25 million in sales during
the peak of the show’s popularity in 1988.
Also in 1988, a loose sequel to Pee-Wee’s
Big Adventure was filmed, although with-
out Tim Burton as director, titled Big Top
Pee-Wee. The same year, Pee-Wee Herman
was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of
Fame.
In late July 1991, Reubens was arrested
for indecent exposure in an adult movie
theater in his hometown of Sarasota. The

Paul Reubens (right) as Pee-Wee Herman with Diane Salinger (left) as Simone in Pee-Wee’s Big
Adventure.
arrest damaged the public perception of
Reubens, although several well-known
celebrities came to his defense, among
them comedian Bill Cosby. In order to
avoid a highly publicized trial, Reubens
pled no contest to the charges on the advice
of his attorneys, while nonetheless main-
taining his innocence. Afterward, through
most of the decade, Reubens avoided the
limelight, but did begin to develop his tal-
ent as a voice actor. Tim Burton cast him in
a small role in BATMAN RETURNS as the
Penguin’s, Oswald Cobblepot’s, father. He
also voiced the character of Lock in THE
NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, and
while he did play a recurring role in a few
episodes of TV’s popular Murphy Brown in
the mid-1990s, no major roles were forth-
coming until he appeared as the character
Spleen in the superhero spoof Mystery Men
REUBENS, PAUL  n  207
(1999), a critical and commercial failure.
The more significant but uncharacteristic
role, however, was as the drug dealer Derek
Foreal in Ted Demme’s Blow (2001), a film
that received mixed critical reviews but was
a minor success.
In 2009, after a hiatus of almost twenty
years, Reubens announced the return of
Pee-Wee Herman. The redux of The Pee-
Wee Herman Show, which opened in early
2010 to sold out performances and which
featured appearances by many characters
from Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, introduced Pee-
Wee Herman to a new generation of fans.
References
Pee-Wee Herman’s website, www.pee-
weeherman.com; Paul Rudd, “Paul Reu-
bens,” Interview, interviewmagazine.com/
culture/paul-reubens/#_.
208  n  RINGWOOD, BOB
RINGWOOD, BOB (1946–)
British costume designer who has been
nominated for two Academy Awards, per-
haps best known as the one who designed
the Batsuit for Tim Burton’s BATMAN.
Trained to be a painter, Ringwood actually
began his career in theater design, spend-
ing fourteen years designing costumes for
almost two hundred ballet, opera, and stage
productions in England, Japan, Germany,
and Holland. Ringwood first worked in the
movie industry on the television movie The
Corn Is Green (1979), directed by George
Cukor. He was then hired by John Boor-
man to create the costumes for Excali-
bur (1981), followed by Dune (1984) for
David Lynch. Following Santa Claus: The
Movie (1985) and Solarbabies (1986), Ste-
ven Spielberg hired Ringwood to create
nearly ten thousand costumes for his film
adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the
Sun (1987). After serving as the costume
designer for Batman, Ringwood served in
the same capacity on BATMAN RETURNS
(1992) and BATMAN FOREVER (1995).
Ringwood has received two Academy
Award nominations for Best Costume
Design, for Empire of the Sun (1987) and
for Troy (2004).
Reference
“Bob Ringwood,” promotional press kit,
Batman Returns.
RIPPS, LEONARD (“LENNY”)
(1949–)
Television comedy writer and producer,
and screenwriter of FRANKENWEENIE
(1984). Ripps was a social worker in Balti-
more and an occasional writer for the Bal-
timore Jewish Times until a chance meeting
with Joan Rivers in 1974 led to his writ-
ing contributions to her stand-up com-
edy act. He moved to Hollywood, where
he initially worked as a researcher on a
David Steinberg pilot. He then became
a staff writer for Mac Davis, the Captain
and Tennille, Redd Foxx, and for short-
lived variety shows such as Van Dyke and
Company (1976). At this time he was also
contributing material to comedians Paul
Lynde, David Steinberg, Rodney Danger-
field, Jimmy Walker, Tom Dreesen, and
Joan Rivers. With fellow Redd Foxx (1977–
1978) staff member Pat Proft (Police Acad-
emy [1984]), he began writing screenplays.
He and Proft would become notorious
to Star Wars fans as two of the several
coauthors of the ludicrous Star Wars
Holiday Special (aired November 1978)
that attempted to deploy characters from
1977’s Star Wars within the framework of
a holiday-themed TV variety show.
Ripps created and contributed epi-
sodes to the short-lived World War II–era
sitcom Goodtime Girls (1980), and con-
tributed several episodes to Bosom Buddies
(1980–1982), a sitcom starring the young
Tom Hanks. It is very likely that Richard
Berger, then president of Walt Disney Pic-
tures, approached Ripps in 1983 to write
the screenplay for Frankenweenie, as Berger
had experience developing television series
and was familiar with television comedy
writers.
Ripps continued to write for television
sitcoms, including Full House (1987–1990)
and the Eddie Murphy–created TV series
The Royal Family (1991–1992). He was also
one of the co-creators of the short-lived Me
and the Boys (1994–1995). He is credited
on the feature-length FRANKENWEENIE
(2012) as author of the 1984 screenplay.
Reference
William Knoedelseder Jr., “Three on TV
Variety Writing: A Dying Art,” Los Angeles
Times, January 29, 1978, N92.
ROSENTHAL, MARK (1950–)
Director and screenwriter, frequent writ-
ing partner of LAWRENCE KONNER,

and coauthor of Tim Burton’s PLANET
OF THE APES. Mark Rosenthal was born
and raised in the blue-collar Germantown
section of Philadelphia. His father had
been a Flying Tiger in World War II. As an
eighteen-year-old undergraduate hippie at
Philadelphia’s Temple University, Rosen-
thal attended the Woodstock Music and
Arts Festival in 1969. In 1970, Rosenthal
transferred to St. Andrew’s University in
Scotland. After completing his study there,
he taught Freshman English and began
working on a degree in Middle English.
He completed his MA at the University
of Vermont and chose the University of
the Pacific in the California Bay Area to
complete his doctorate. After earning his
doctorate in Chaucer, he began to reevalu-
ate his career, hesitant to pursue a tenured
position in academia. He chose to move
to Los Angeles and pursue a career in the
movies and began reading scripts for Orion
Pictures.
In the early 1980s, he formed a film
writing partnership with Lawrence Konner.
They first worked together on The Legend of
Billie Jean (1985), which did poorly at the
box office but has since earned a cult fol-
lowing. They followed that film with Jewel
of the Nile (1985) for Michael Douglas,
Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987),
The In Crowd (1988, which Rosenthal also
directed), and Desperate Hours (1990). In
1991 they wrote the adaptation of Stephen
King’s Sometimes They Come Back for tele-
vision. Later works with Konner include
Mercury Rising (1998), Mighty Joe Young
(1998), Mona Lisa Smile (2003), and the
fantasy The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (2010),
starring Nicolas Cage.
In the early 2000s, Rosenthal moved
back to the East Coast, to New Hope, Penn-
sylvania. From 2006 to 2009, he returned
to his academic roots and taught advanced
screenwriting at the University of Pennsyl-
vania in Philadelphia.
ROUSSELOT, PHILIPPE  n  209
References
“Mark Rosenthal,” IMDb, www.imdb.
com/name/nm0742797/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1;
“Mark Rosenthal,” University of Pennsyl-
vania Department of English, www.english.
upenn.edu/people/mark-rosenthal; Raquel
B. Pidal, “For the Love of Movies: Mark
Rosenthal’s Summer of Love,” Wild River
Review 1, no. 2.5, www.wildriverreview.
com/2/2-profiles_rosenthal.html.
ROUSSELOT, PHILIPPE (1945–)
Award-winning, highly respected French
cinematographer and director who has
shot three films for Tim Burton, including
PLANET OF THE APES, BIG FISH, and
CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FAC-
TORY. Born in 1945 in Briey, Meurthe-et-
Moselle, France, Rousselot was educated at
the Ecole de Vaugirard in Paris. He began
his filmmaking career in the late 1960s
as an assistant to the great Spanish cin-
ematographer Nestor Almendros on three
films directed by Eric Rohmer: My Night at
Maud’s (1969), Claire’s Knee (1970), and
Love in the Afternoon (1972). He became
a director of photography in 1972 on the
film Absences répétées (Repeated Absences).
He subsequently collaborated with direc-
tors Diane Kurys (Cocktail Molotov) and
Claude Goretta (La provinciale) on sev-
eral projects before gaining notice with
Jean-Jacques Beineix’s stylish thriller Diva
(1982). Rousselot’s versatile camerawork
(especially on an amazing subway chase)
for the film won him his first César (the
French Oscar) and initiated a prestigious
international career. He received his second
César for the stylish Thérèse (1986). His
work for British and American directors
won acclaim as well. He shot John Boor-
man’s The Emerald Forest (1984) and later
earned an Oscar nomination for Boorman’s
Hope and Glory (1987). The next year he
was nominated for a BAFTA (British Acad-
emy of Film and Television Arts) Award for
210  n  RYDER, WINONA
Best Cinematography for Stephen Frears’s
Dangerous Liaisons (1988). For American
director Philip Kaufman, Rousselot earned
yet another Oscar nomination for his work
on Henry and June (1991). He later served
as cinematographer on Neil Jordan’s Inter-
view with the Vampire (1994) and Robert
Redford’s A River Runs Through It (1992),
for which he won an Academy Award for
Best Cinematography. Three years later, he
won his third César for his camera work
for La Reine Margot (Queen Margot, 1995).
In 1997, he directed his first feature, The
Serpent’s Kiss, the only film he has so far
directed in his career. In 2001, he made the
first of three films with Tim Burton, Planet
of the Apes. He followed this with Big Fish
(2003) and Charlie and the Chocolate Fac-
tory (2005).
References
“Philippe Rousselot,” IMDb, www.imdb.
com/name/nm0003542/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1;
“Philippe Rousselot,” TCM, www.tcm.
com/tcmdb/person/166267%7C125118/
Philippe-Rousselot/; “Rousselot, Philippe,”
Film Reference, www.filmreference.com/
Writers-and-Production-Artists-Ro-She/
Rousselot-Philippe.html.
RYDER, WINONA (1971–)
Golden Globe–winning, Academy Award–
nominated actress who while still a teen-
ager appeared in two early films directed by
Tim Burton, BEETLEJUICE and EDWARD
SCISSORHANDS. Born Winona Laura
Horowitz on October 29, 1971, she was
named after her hometown of Winona,
Minnesota. Although associated with the
American counterculture of the 1960s and
1970s, and owners of an online bookstore
specializing in works about psychedelic
culture, her parents, Michael Horowitz
and Cynthia Palmer, now live in Canada.
Ryder’s parents are writers and editors of
works such as Shaman Woman, Mainline
Lady: Women’s Writings on the Drug Expe-
rience (1982) and Moksha: Aldous Hux-
ley’s Classic Writings on Psychedelics and
the Visionary Experience (1999). Michael
Horowitz is also coeditor of An Anno-
tated Bibliography of Timothy Leary (1988).
(Timothy Leary is Ryder’s godfather.)
Unmarried at her birth, her parents would
eventually marry when Ryder was twelve
years old.
In the late 1970s, her family moved
to a commune in northern California,
where Ryder lived for the next three years.
As revealed in interviews published years
later, she doesn’t look back on the time
in the commune as a pleasant one. When
she was ten years old her family moved to
Petaluma, north of San Francisco, where
her time in the public schools was also an
unhappy one. Eventually, she was permit-
ted by her parents to enroll at the Ameri-
can Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco,
where she studied acting. Her success as a
film actress started during her early teen-
age years. Her first film, shot when she was
fourteen, was the teen drama Lucas (1986),
starring Corey Haim and Charlie Sheen.
Her name appeared in the film’s credits as
Winona Ryder, her stage name apparently
inspired by the name of one of her father’s
favorite rock bands, Mitch Ryder and the
Detroit Wheels.
On the strength of her performance in
Lucas, Tim Burton cast her as the sullen,
occult-dabbling teenager Lydia Deetz in
Beetlejuice, a part that largely determined
her role as an alienated outsider in subse-
quent films. She continued her swift rise to
stardom with the cult film Heathers (1988),
a dark satire of high school life authored by
BATMAN RETURNS screenwriter DANIEL
WATERS. For her performance in Heath-
ers, Ryder was nominated for an Indepen-
dent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead
as well as being nominated for a Chicago
Film Critics Association Award for Best

Actress. She was not yet eighteen years old.
She earned a Golden Globe nomination
for her appearance in Mermaids (1990),
the same year she appeared as Kim Boggs,
Edward Scissorhands’ lost tragic love, in
Burton’s Edward Scissorhands. Prior to
shooting Edward Scissorhands, she had
begun a much-publicized romance with
actor JOHNNY DEPP in late 1989; the two
became engaged in 1990, several months
prior to the release of the film. After
appearing in Francis Ford Coppola’s gothic
horror film Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992),
she went straight to The House of the Spirits,
a film adaptation of Isabel Allende’s 1982
novel. After work on that film was com-
pleted, she voluntarily checked herself into
a psychiatric hospital, claiming to be suffer-
ing from sleep deprivation and insomnia.
Her stay at the hospital was short-lived, but
earned considerable press coverage.
For her performance in her next
film, Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Inno-
cence (1993), Ryder won a Golden Globe
Award for Best Supporting Actress and
she received an Academy Award nomina-
tion in the same category. Due to the stress
of their careers as well as Johnny Depp’s
growing dependence on alcohol and drugs,
she broke her engagement in June 1993, an
event that received a good deal of coverage
in the tabloid press. The following year, she
received a second Academy Award nomi-
nation for Best Actress in Little Women
(1994). Subsequently, she appeared in
the cult comedy Reality Bites (1994), the
science fiction sequel Alien: Resurrection
(1997), and perhaps most importantly, a
drama set in a psychiatric hospital, Girl,
Interrupted (1999), on which she also
served as executive producer. Although
critical reaction to the film was mixed,
Angelina Jolie won an Academy Award
as Best Supporting Actress for her perfor-
mance in the film. Jolie was to thank Ryder
during her Oscar acceptance speech.
RYDER, WINONA  n  211
In December 2001, Ryder was charged
with shoplifting about $5,500 worth of
merchandise from Saks Fifth Avenue in
Beverly Hills, and once again she became
tabloid fodder. At the time of her arrest,
several types of prescription medication
(e.g., Vicodin) were found in her posses-
sion, none of which had valid prescriptions.
The case went to trial, and almost a year
later, in November 2002, she was convicted
of vandalism, shoplifting, and grand theft,
and the next month was sentenced to three
years’ probation and 480 hours of commu-
nity service, and was ordered to pay fines
and several thousand dollars in restitution
to the Saks Fifth Avenue store, as well as
attend psychological and drug counseling.
She remained on probation until December
2005.
During the years after her shoplift-
ing arrest, Ryder largely appeared in low-
budget and independent films, among
them Richard Linklater’s adaptation of the
science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick, A
Scanner Darkly (2006). In 2009 she made
a cameo appearance as Amanda Gray-
son (Mr. Spock’s human mother) in J. J.
Abrams’s Star Trek. In 2012, she and Tim
Burton finally reunited on two projects:
the animated feature FRANKENWEENIE,
in which she voiced the character Elsa Van
Helsing, and the Burton-directed promo-
tional music video, HERE WITH ME.
She received a star on the Hollywood
Walk of Fame in 2000.
References
Nick Johnstone, Johnny Depp: The Illus-
trated Biography, 5th ed. (London: Carlton
Books, 2013); Mark Salisbury, Burton on
Burton, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Faber and
Faber, 2006); Winona Forever (website),
winona-ryder.org/information/biography/;
“Winona Ryder,” IMDb, www.imdb.com/
name/nm0000213/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1.
 S
A
SELICK, HENRY (1952–)
American director, producer, writer,
and production designer, best known for
directing THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE
CHRISTMAS, JAMES AND THE GIANT
PEACH, and Coraline (2009). Henry Selick
was born November 30, 1952, in Glen
Ridge, New Jersey. He demonstrated a
talent for drawing at a young age, and by
the time he was twenty years old, he was
studying painting, drawing, photography,
sculpture, and printmaking at Syracuse
University. Choosing to pursue a career in
animation, he attended the CALIFORNIA
INSTITUTE OF THE ARTS (CalArts),
where his classmates included Tim Bur-
ton and RICK HEINRICHS. He com-
pleted CalArts with two Student Academy
Award–nominated short films, Phases and
Tube Tales.
He became an animator at Disney, first
working under Eric Larson—one of Dis-
ney’s “Nine Old Men”—and later under
Glen Keane, on The Fox and the Hound. He
later worked with directors John Korty and
Charles Swenson on the cut-out animation
feature film Twice Upon a Time (1983) as
sequence director. Subsequently, Selick
helped Tim Burton and Rick Heinrichs
on HANSEL AND GRETEL (1982), drew
storyboards and did design work for Wal-
ter Murch’s Return to Oz (1985), and also
won a nationwide American Film Institute
contest to make a music video of “Party
212  n 
at Ground Zero” (1985) for the ska band
Fishbone. The video won Billboard maga-
zine awards for Best Art Direction and Set
Decoration. He then storyboarded, shot
second unit on, and helped create fantasy
sequences for director Carroll Ballard’s
Maurice Sendak–designed Nutcracker: The
Motion Picture (1986).
Through his own production com-
pany, Selick created a series of defining
and award-winning MTV station IDs; rein-
vented the Pillsbury Doughboy, creating
nine commercials in one year; and directed
award-winning Ritz Bits commercials in
which hundreds of the crackers ski down
mountains of peanut butter and fly to the
moon in search of cheese. In 1990, his orig-
inal series for MTV, Slow Bob in the Lower
Dimensions, combining a live-action central
character with stop-motion and cut-out
animation, won first prize at the Ottawa
Animation Festival and a Silver Hugo at the
Chicago Film Festival.
At about this time, The Nightmare
before Christmas, originally planned as a
TV special, was evolving into a film and
Tim Burton asked him to direct it. Night-
mare before Christmas was nominated for
the Best Visual Effects Academy Award,
and Selick received the Annie Award (the
animation world’s Oscar equivalent) for
Creative Supervision.
His next film was James and the Giant
Peach, based on ROALD DAHL’s children’s

Jack ponders the secret formula for the Christmas Spirit in The Nightmare before Christmas, directed
by Henry Selick.
book. Selick merged the worlds of stop-
motion and CG (computer-generated)
imagery with stylized live-action sequences.
Released in 1996, the film won the top prize
for an animated feature at the Annecy Film
Festival. His third feature film, Monkeybone
(2001), was loosely based on Kaja Black-
ley’s graphic novel Dark Town and also
combined live-action and animation. His
stop motion feature film Coraline (2009)
received an Academy Award nomination
as Best Animated Feature Film of the Year.
References
“Henry Selick,” Focus Features, focus
features.com/coraline/castncrew?member
=henry_selick_1; “Henry Selick,” IMDb,
www.imdb.com/name/nm0783139/
?ref_=fn_al_nm_1.
SHADIX, GLENN (1952–2010)
American stage and film actor, voice actor,
best known for the pretentious interior dec-
SHADIX, GLENN  n  213
orator and dilettante of the occult, Otho, in
BEETLEJUICE. William Glenn Shadix was
born on April 15, 1952, in Bessemer, Ala-
bama, a suburb of Birmingham. At age eigh-
teen, he agreed to his stepfather’s request
that he undergo aversion therapy at the Uni-
versity of Alabama (UAB) Medical Center in
order to purge his homosexual tendencies.
Some months into the treatment, Shadix
attempted suicide, subsequently spending
several weeks in the psychiatric unit of the
UAB hospital. He recovered and would,
eventually, reconcile with his stepfather.
After graduation from high school,
Shadix worked in the summer theater pro-
gram at Florence State College (now the
University of North Alabama). In 1974,
he began attending Birmingham-Southern
College on a drama scholarship, where
he studied with avant-garde dramatist
and director Arnold Powell. Shadix then
moved to New York for a short time in
order to pursue his acting career, where he
214  n  SHORE, HOWARD
befriended playwright Tennessee Williams
while working as a production assistant on
Williams’s unsuccessful play Vieux Carré
(1977) at the St. James Theater. Serendipi-
tously, Williams’s play starred Sylvia Sid-
ney, with whom Shadix would later appear
in Beetlejuice.
Late in 1977, Shadix moved to Los
Angeles, where he spent a decade as a stage
actor and developing his skills in improvi-
sational comedy with the Groundlings. One
of his first starring roles was in drag as the
famed American writer Gertrude Stein in
Stein’s Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights, pre-
sented by the Ensemble Studio Theatre Los
Angeles in 1986. It was his performance in
this play that brought him to the attention
of Tim Burton, then preparing Beetlejuice.
After Beetlejuice, Shadix would appear
in other Burton films. As a voice actor,
he was the Mayor of Halloween Town in
The Nightmare before Christmas (1993),
and also voiced several characters in Bur-
ton’s online animated series THE WORLD
OF STAINBOY (2000). His last role in a
Tim Burton film was as Senator Nado in
PLANET OF THE APES. Throughout the
1990s and 2000s Shadix appeared in many
film and television roles, and worked as a
voice actor on many animated films and
animated television series. During this
period, he also attended science fiction and
fantasy conventions throughout the United
States.
A lifelong struggler with obesity, in
2002 Shadix underwent gastric bypass sur-
gery in order to reduce his weight. In 2008,
he returned to his birthplace, Bessemer,
Alabama, and purchased a restored Victo-
rian home. Sadly, the house was completely
destroyed by fire in December of that year,
and he was forced to move to an apartment
in Birmingham. During his last years, he
was active in gay rights organizations and
frequently spoke to student gay-straight
alliances on college campuses in the area.
An avid photographer, Shadix accumulated
a large collection of celebrity photos for his
“clock series” of photographs, in which a
snap was taken of each of his subjects hold-
ing the same antique clock.
During most of 2010, Shadix was
restricted to a wheelchair. He died at his
home on September 7, 2010, from head
injuries suffered in a fall. He was fifty-eight.
References
Sylvie Drake, “Stage Review : Stein ‘Lights’
Lights Up Ensemble,” Los Angeles Times,
May 9, 1986, articles.latimes.com/1986-05-
09/entertainment/ca-4144_1_light-bulbs;
Claire M. Wilson, “Glenn Shadix,” Encyclo-
pedia of Alabama, encyclopediaofalabama.
org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-2615.
SHORE, HOWARD (1946–)
Composer and musical conductor who
scored ED WOOD, the only film directed
by Tim Burton that does not have the
music written by DANNY ELFMAN. How-
ard Shore was born on October 18, 1946, in
Toronto, Canada. He attended Forest Hill
Collegiate Institute, a public high school
in Toronto, and later studied music at the
Berklee College of Music in Boston, from
which he would later be awarded an honor-
ary doctorate. From 1969 to 1972, he was a
member of Lighthouse, a jazz-fusion band,
and later became the musical director for
NBC’s Saturday Night Live (1975–1980).
With his score for The Brood (1979), Shore
began a long collaboration with director
David Cronenberg, subsequently scor-
ing most of the director’s films. For Ed
Wood, Shore composed, orchestrated, and
conducted the score inspired by sci-fi and
B-movies from the 1950s.
Shore is perhaps most famous for his
music for Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the
Rings trilogy: The Fellowship of the Ring
(2001), The Two Towers (2002), and The
Return of the King (2003). For his work

on these films, he earned three Acad-
emy Awards and was honored with four
Grammy and three Golden Globe Awards.
In 2003, Shore conducted the New Zealand
Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in the
world premiere of The Lord of the Rings
Symphony in Wellington. Subsequently,
Shore’s The Lord of the Rings Symphony
has had over 285 performances in live-
to-projection concerts during which the
soundtrack is performed live, synchronized
to the film. In 2008, Shore’s opera The Fly
premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet in
Paris and at the Los Angeles Opera. Shore
later scored the films of The Hobbit tril-
ogy, again for director Peter Jackson, An
Unexpected Journey (2012), The Desolation
of Smaug (2013), and The Battle of the Five
Armies (2014).
Shore has received numerous hon-
ors, including the Career Achievement
for Music Composition Award from the
National Board of Review of Motion Pic-
tures, New York Chapter’s Recording
Academy Honors, ASCAP’s (American
Society of Composers, Authors and Pub-
lishers’) Henry Mancini Award, the Fred-
erick Loewe Award and the Max Steiner
Award from the city of Vienna. He is also
a recipient of the Governor General’s Per-
forming Arts Award in Canada.
References
“Biography,” HowardShore.com, www.
howardshore.com/biography/; Aaron
Green, “Howard Shore,” About Enter-
tainment, classicalmusic.about.com/od/
classicalcomposers/p/howardshore.htm.
SINGLES (US 1992)
Director: Cameron Crowe. Screenplay:
Cameron Crowe. Producers: Cameron
Crowe, Richard Chew, Richard Hashi-
moto. Executive Producer: Art Linson.
C inematography : Tak Fujimoto, Ueli
SINGLES  n  215
Steiger. Editor: Richard Chew. Original
Music: Paul Westerberg.
C ast : Bridget Fonda (Janet Livermore),
Campbell Scott (Steve Dunne), Kyra
Sedgwick (Linda Powell), Sheila Kelley
(Linda Hunt), Jim True-Frost (David
Bailey), Matt Dillon (Cliff Poncier), Bill
Pullman (Dr. Jeffrey Jamison), Tim Bur-
ton (Brian).
Running Time: 99 minutes. Color.
Released Through: Warner Bros.
A story of love and relationships set in
Seattle during the commercial height of the
grunge music scene in which Tim Burton
had his first acting role in a major motion
picture. At director Cameron Crowe’s
request, Burton appears as a heightened
and slightly parodic version of himself.
Playing like a thematic update to Fast
Times at Ridgemont High (1982) ten years
down the road, Singles follows the inti-
mately connected lives of several twenty-
somethings who live and work near one
another. The bulk of the film follows the
on-again-off-again relationships of Steve
(Campbell Scott) and Linda (Kyra Sedg-
wick) and Cliff (Matt Dillon) and Janet
(Bridget Fonda). Like Friends (1994–2004),
the sitcom that was to define urban living
for the white middle class in the 1990s,
Singles charts its relationships amidst meet-
ings in a coffee shop and frequent nights
out. Bands like Soundgarden and Alice in
Chains (both of whom were on the cusp of
major label fame) feature prominently in
the soundtrack and make appearances in
the film.
In one of the films’ four chapters,
advertising executive Sheila (Linda Hunt)
puts her hopes in a video dating service
called Expect the Best. She arrives at their
offices with some ideas for her video,
including versions of herself dressed as
Edie Sedgwick, Brigitte Bardot, and as a
216  n  SKAAREN, WARREN
“depressed millionairess.” The agent for
the dating service throws those ideas out
the window and suggests that Brian (Tim
Burton) direct her video, referring to him
as “the next Martin Scorsese.” Sheila agrees,
and the sequence ends with the footage
of Brian’s promo film Debbie Country.
A pastiche of the shower scene from Psy-
cho (1960), the scenes of simulated flying
from Superman (1977), and late-eighties
Madonna, it showcases Sheila’s desires for
the dating scene but makes Brian look like
a bit of a hack.
Burton plays Brian like a disaffected
slacker. He sizes Sheila up as she enters the
room and only occasionally glances at her
after that, preferring instead to look down
at his book. This role—a slightly extended
cameo—becomes an in-joke for viewers
who recognize Burton. As a prominent
young director increasingly known for his
imaginative worlds and bankability, the
choice to slum as a laconic, unamused cre-
ator of dating videos makes a knowing nod
to his current status as a recognizable tal-
ent.—Kevin M. Flanagan
Reference
Edwin Page, Gothic Fantasy: The Films of
Tim Burton (New York: Marion Boyars,
2007), 28.
SKAAREN, WARREN (EDWARD)
(1946–1990)
Co-screenwriter of BEETLEJUICE and
BATMAN and writer of the unproduced
sequel BEETLEJUICE IN LOVE who was
considered one of Hollywood’s top script
doctors in the 1980s, known for taking over
a troubled script and rewriting it. Born
March 9, 1946, in Rochester, Minnesota,
Skaaren first attended Rochester Commu-
nity College, transferring to Rice Univer-
sity in Houston in 1967, where he became
student body president, attracting the
attention of then Texas governor Preston
Smith. Soon after Skaaren graduated from
Rice with a degree in art, Governor Smith
accepted his proposal to create the Texas
Film Commission, established in 1971 to
lure film production to Texas. Serving as
its first film commissioner, from 1971 to
1974, Skaaren assisted visiting producers
and directors, in the process learning the
film business.
The success of The Texas Chain Saw
Massacre (1974), a film in which he had
financial interest, enabled Skaaren to leave
the Film Commission and formally begin
his career in the film business. He became
chairman of FPS, Inc., of Dallas, a pro-
duction service, later serving on its board
of directors. For more than a decade, FPS
provided equipment, personnel, and pro-
duction services for the CBS-TV series
Dallas, as well as dozens of other features,
among them Tender Mercies (1983). He
also worked on documentaries, commer-
cials, and various other projects.
Skaaren’s first feature-length screen-
play was titled Of East and West, about
the Brigade of Gurkhas, the unit of fierce
Nepalese soldiers who serve in the British
Army. Although it was never produced, the
script nonetheless served to bring Skaaren
to the attention of William Morris agent
Mike Simpson. Soon after, Skaaren was
hired by Paramount to rewrite the screen-
play of Fire with Fire (1986). He then did
an uncredited rewrite on the Tom Cruise–
starring vehicle Top Gun (1986), which
became a box-office hit. Subsequently, he
worked on Beverly Hills Cop II (1987) for
Paramount, and then Tim Burton’s Beetle-
juice. He began working on his second film
with Tom Cruise, Days of Thunder (1990),
before resigning from that project to work
on Batman.
Skaaren avoided Hollywood, choosing
never to leave his adopted state of Texas.
He had only recently completed the first
draft of Beetlejuice in Love in July 1990

when he was diagnosed with bone cancer,
and he died in Austin on December 28,
1990, at age forty-four.
References
Jeff Millar, “Warren Skaaren, Movie
Mogul,” Texas Monthly, July 1973, www.
texasmonthly.com/story/warren-skaaren-
movie-mogul; “Skaaren, Warren Edward,”
Texas State Historical Association, tshaon-
line.org/handbook/online/articles/fskpa;
“Warren Skaaren, 44; Fixed Movie Scripts,”
New York Times, December 31, 1990, www.
nytimes.com/1990/12/31/obituaries/war-
ren-skaaren-44-fixed-movie-scripts.html.
SLEEPY HOLLOW (UK 1999)
Director: Tim Burton. Screenplay: Andrew
Kevin Walker [uncredited, Tom Stop-
pard]. S creen S tory : Andrew Kevin
Walker, Kevin Yagher, from the story
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by
Washington Irving. E xecutive P ro -
ducers : Francis Ford Coppola, Larry
Franco. Producers: Scott Rudin, Adam
Schroeder. Cinematography: Emmanuel
Lubezki. Editor: Chris Lebenzon, Joel
Negron. Original Music: Danny Elfman.
Production Design: Rick Heinrichs.
C ast : Johnny Depp (Ichabod Crane),
Christina Ricci (Katrina Van Tassel),
Michael Gambon (Baltus Van Tassel),
Miranda Richardson (Lady Van Tassel/
Crone), Casper Van Dien (Brom Van
Brunt), Jeffrey Jones (Reverend Steen-
wyck), Richard Griffiths (Magistrate
Philipse), Ian McDiarmid (Dr. Lan-
caster), Michael Gough (Notary Hard-
enbrook), Lisa Marie (Lady Crane),
Christopher Lee (the Burgomaster),
Christopher Walken (the Hessian
Horseman), Marc Pickering (Young
Masbath), Steven Waddington (Killian),
Claire Skinner (Beth Killian), Alun Arm-
strong (High Constable), Mark Spalding
(Jonathan Masbath), Jessica Oyelowo
(Sarah), Tony Maudsley (Van Ripper),
SLEEPY HOLLOW  n  217
Peter Guinness (Lord Crane), Nicholas
Hewetson (Glenn), Orlando Seale (The-
odore), Sean Stephens (Thomas Killian),
Robert Sella (Dirk Van Garrett), Sam
Fior (Young Ichabod), Tessa Allen-Ridge
(Young Lady Van Tassel), Martin Landau
(Peter Van Garrett) (uncredited).
Running Time: 105 minutes, 10 seconds.
Color.
Released Through: Paramount Pictures and
American Zoetrope.
Tim Burton’s first overt horror film. Sleepy
Hollow was initially conceived as a proj-
ect to be directed by Kevin Yagher, with
a script by Andrew Kevin Walker. It was
stuck in development for several years.
Burton became involved after the collapse
of the Superman Lives project. He was able
to add a number of personal touches—his
time spent in upstate New York around the
time of ED WOOD endeared him to the
Gothic provincialism of the Hudson Val-
ley, and the script outlined a classic Burton
outlier in Ichabod Crane, whose physical
and mental wounds marked him as misun-
derstood—and likewise infused the char-
acterizations with numerous references
to his favorite horror movies. Particularly
relevant to Burton were Mario Bava’s Black
Sunday (1960) and the atmospherics of
Roger Corman’s Poe cycle. Depp’s Crane
married the actor’s usually eccentric chops
to the detective persona of Basil Rathbone’s
Sherlock Holmes and the steely profes-
sionalism of Peter Cushing’s Hammer and
Amicus protagonists. The movie is both an
homage to old horror concepts and a visu-
alization of new ways to shock. In short,
this is a loose adaptation that is stuffed with
Burton’s sensibilities and influences.
Burton’s Sleepy Hollow takes basic cues
from Irving’s story (the principle characters
have the same names, and the film stays
grounded in the titular town in New York’s
218  n  SLEEPY HOLLOW
Hudson River Valley), but morphs the
central narrative arch into a violent, super-
natural detective story. No longer a teacher,
Burton’s Ichabod Crane (JOHNNY DEPP)
is an impassioned New York City detective
whose eagerness to use reason and success
with solving crimes makes him come across
as a nuisance to city law enforcement. The
Burgomaster (CHRISTOPHER LEE) sug-
gests that Crane might investigate a series
of murders in the small village of Sleepy
Hollow, both as a means of getting him
out of their hair and of potentially apply-
ing Crane’s skill set to their peculiar situ-
ation. Flashbacks and dreams throughout
the film tell us that Crane’s obsession with
rational detective work is borne of child-
hood trauma: his mother was accused of
witchcraft and killed by his religious and
misguidedly pious father. The central the-
matic conflict of the film is thus the battle
between Crane’s rationality and the super-
natural goings-on in Sleepy Hollow. Upon
Johnny Depp as Ichabod Crane in Sleepy Hollow.
arrival in Sleepy Hollow—a small village
overseen by a group of local dignitaries (the
doctor, magistrate, notary, and reverend),
as well as the town’s largest landowner, Bal-
tus Van Tassel (Michael Gambon)—Crane
learns that there has been a series of mur-
ders in which the victims are decapitated.
The locals are convinced that this is the
work of the “Hessian Horseman” (Christo-
pher Walken), a Revolutionary War mer-
cenary who was known for his bloodlust
throughout the region, and who was finally
killed and decapitated (fitting, given that
his own preferred method of dispatching
foes was decapitation).
Heads continue to fly, and Crane sets
to work, regarding the deaths as crimes that
can be solved through careful observation
and forensic analysis (his detective’s tool-
kit, especially his large magnifying glasses,
preempt a steampunk aesthetic, where
old technologies are fused to approximate
more advanced gadgets). Crane encoun-

ters resistance to his work. Local hero
Brom Van Brunt (Casper Van Dien), the
presumed suitor to Crane’s budding love
interest, Baltus’s daughter, Katrina Van
Tassel (Christina Ricci), does not appre-
ciate the detective’s methods and stages
a fake sighting of the headless horseman
that is designed to scare (this is the “solu-
tion” to Irving’s headless horseman, who
is probably Van Brunt in disguise). This
sequence provides a bit of comic relief in
an otherwise tense part of the film and
allows Burton to visualize the flaming Jack-
O’-Lantern that has since become so syn-
onymous with the story. However, Burton’s
Sleepy Hollow does not write off the legend
of the headless horseman as a ruse devised
by a disgruntled Alpha Male. Rather, Crane
decidedly comes around to believing the
threat after witnessing the death of the
magistrate, paying a visit to a witch (who
is temporarily possessed by a demon), and
discovering the cache of preserved heads
in the Tree of the Dead, a pulsating portal
that houses the Hessian, who emerges from
hell in a kind of amniotic birth in order
to pursue his earthly victims. Crane’s fail-
ure to solve the mystery on his own terms
opens up a larger debate about the place of
scientific rationality during this period. As
Helena Bassil-Morozow notes, “The film
directly echoes the Romantic idea of the
invincibility and mystery of nature,” even
going so far as to suggest that the natural
world remains suffused with supernatural
and magical meanings that technologies
cannot unravel.
Someone is controlling, or at least in
league with, the Hessian. Crane’s initial
thought is that the town is enveloped in a
conspiracy staged by the ruling elite—the
problems started with the death of Peter
Van Garrett (MARTIN LANDAU, uncred-
ited), the chief financial rival to the Van
Tassel family. Crane suspects Baltus and
even uncovers a rune drawn by Katrina
SLEEPY HOLLOW  n  219
that confirms her penchant for witchcraft.
During a tense siege in which most of the
town is holed up in the local church—a site
the Hessian cannot enter because of its holy
dedication—the initial conspiracy is unrav-
eled as false: Baltus and the remaining elite
kill one another, with Baltus spectacularly
gutted by the Hessian from afar (confirm-
ing that he was the horseman’s latest tar-
get). Only during the film’s climax—appro-
priately set at a disused windmill, in a nod
to the conflagration from James Whale’s
Frankenstein (1931)—does the truth come
to light: the Hessian is under the control
of Lady Van Tassel (Miranda Richardson),
Baltus’s second wife. Lady Van Tassel and
her sister were raised as outcasts by their
witch mother. Both witnessed the Hessian’s
death (it is implied that Lady Van Tas-
sel was even responsible for it). She sum-
moned the Hessian in order to consolidate
power for herself and exact revenge on the
town that shunned her family. The film
ends with a confrontation in which Crane
manages to return the Hessian’s skull,
thereby giving him back his autonomy. The
Hessian returns to hell (Lady Van Tassel in
his arms), while Crane and Katrina, now a
couple, move to New York City.
Although set in New York, the vil-
lage of Sleepy Hollow was constructed at
Hambleden Estate in rural Buckingham-
shire. Interiors were filmed at Leaves-
den Studios in Hertfordshire. This choice
makes sense beyond the stated reason of
there being no suitable locations in New
York as of late 1998 (this, combined with
a lack of available studio space, meant
filming in England). Since the film is set
less than two decades after the end of the
American Revolutionary War, it stands to
reason that New York was still residually
British in many of its customs and speak-
ing mannerisms. While the film makes a
point to expand on the story’s singling out
of the area’s Dutch heritage, this remains
220  n  SLEEPY HOLLOW
one of only a handful of Hollywood films
to convincingly house American and Brit-
ish actors in one aesthetic and culturally
intelligible locale. Moreover, the proxim-
ity to London probably appealed to aging
actors like Christopher Lee and MICHAEL
GOUGH (who temporarily came out
of retirement to act as Sleepy Hollow’s
notary).
Sleepy Hollow offers a relatively con-
voluted plot that occasionally veers closer
to the conspiracy thriller genre of the
1970s (the seemingly anonymous, unset-
tling threats in films like The Parallax View
[1974, Alan J. Pakula] and Three Days of the
Condor [1975, Sydney Pollack]) than the
slasher movie or the quality literary adap-
tation. Sleepy Hollow’s pacing is slightly
inconsistent, with slow sequences dedi-
cated to atmosphere and characterization
punctuated by fast sequences that gallop
through the narrative intrigues and unravel
the mystery. Lady Van Tassel’s confession
of guilt retroactively explains most of the
loose ends, but does so in a way that could
have been handled with certainty at earlier
points in the movie.
That said, Sleepy Hollow is one of Tim
Burton’s most fully realized films. The
washed-out, nearly black and white color
palate affords the movie with an instant
grimness, and the visual transformation
to color after the retreat of the Hessian
feels like a proverbial breath of fresh air
(and a literal sight for sore eyes). Burton
gets a chance to work with one of his most
accomplished ensembles (the ruling elite of
the village alone are a handful of the most
eccentric character actors of recent Brit-
ish and American films), and leads Johnny
Depp and Christina Ricci play their roles
with enough somnambulistic detachment
to substantiate the movie’s otherworldly
setting. Sleepy Hollow is Tim Burton’s
most graphically violent film to date. The
on-screen decapitations feature a gener-
ous helping of gore, and the first glimpses
of the bleeding Tree of Death strike an
elusive horror-comic balance (the tone
temporarily approximates some of the less
manic moments of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead
II [1987]).
Budgeted at $100 million, the film
made $30 million on its opening weekend
and went on to gross over $206 million
internationally. This is especially impres-
sive given the film’s R rating and advertised
violence. Reviews skewed to the positive.
Writing for Time, Richard Corliss raved,
“Burton’s richest, prettiest, and weird-
est since Batman Returns.” In USA Today,
Mike Clark praised the film on several lev-
els: “Depp is as good here as he was in Ed
Wood and Donnie Brasco, which means
the movie has a lot more going for it than
special effects, as sizzling as they are. This
is a very bloody fantasy (reds do eke their
way into the black-and-blues), but it’s hard
to think of another film with as many sev-
ered heads whose overall tone is so sweet.”
Todd McCarthy gave the film one of its
most unqualified reviews, claiming, “View-
ers who relish the sort of seamlessly fabri-
cated experience that the greatest cinema
can produce will love every minute of this
dazzling display of virtuosity, while gore-
hounds will have a tasty treat as well.” One
of the film’s most hostile reviews came
from Andrew O’Hehir, who disliked Bur-
ton’s choices and openness to pastiche.
Reviewing the movie in Sight & Sound,
he sounded off that “even with an almost
mythic story at its foundation, Sleepy Hol-
low doesn’t seem like the work of an eccen-
tric visionary, as Burton has long been
labeled. It’s more like the good natured
mess produced by a shallow sentimental-
ist, an undisciplined imitator with a keen
sense of style.” Sleepy Hollow’s approach to
its source text and to the history of horror
cinema in general may be a bit cavalier, but
nearly every critic and commentator agreed

that the movie offers an assuredly stylized
experience. RICK HEINRICHS won an
Academy Award for Best Art Direction.—
Kevin M. Flanagan
References
Helena Bassil-Morozow, Tim Burton: The
Monster and the Crowd: A Post-Jungian
Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2010),
103; Mike Clark, “A Heady ‘Sleepy Hol-
low’: Tim Burton’s Vision Enhances
Creepiness of Irving’s Nightmare,” USA
Today, November 19, 1999, 7E; Rich-
ard Corliss, “Tim Burton’s Tricky Treat,”
Time 154, no. 21 (November 22, 1999):
98; Aurélien Ferenczi, Tim Burton, Mas-
ters of Cinema (Paris: Cahiers du Cinema,
2010), 74; Todd McCarthy, “Sleepy Hol-
low,” Variety 377, no. 1 (November 1999):
87, 94; Andrew O’Hehir, “Sleepy Hollow,”
Sight & Sound 10, no. 2 (February 2000):
54–55; Jim Smith and J. Clive Matthews,
Tim Burton (London: Virgin Books, 2007),
224–25; Mark Salisbury, ed., Burton on
Burton, 2nd rev. ed (London: Faber and
Faber, 2006), 164, 169; “Sleepy Hollow,”
Box Office Mojo, boxofficemojo.com/
movies/?id=sleepyhollow.htm; Matt Wolf,
“‘Sleepy Hollow,’ on the Thames,” New
York Times, April 11, 1999, AR15.
SMITH, KEVIN (1970–)
American film director, screenwriter, actor,
film producer, and comic book writer and
fan; author of a version of a screenplay for
Tim Burton’s failed Superman Lives proj-
ect. While Tim Burton carries himself as a
product of Burbank through and through
(his awkward childhood and its suburban
proximity to Hollywood are as much a
part of his public persona as is his love of
monsters), Kevin Smith is his generation’s
champion of suburban Highlands, New Jer-
sey, a blue-collar town just over the water
from New York City. Despite their differ-
ences—including some very public name-
SMITH, KEVIN  n  221
calling and creative disagreements—Burton
and Smith have curiously parallel careers.
Both prefer to work on personal projects
and are known for their ability to engage
with and revitalize popular culture.
Smith burst onto the indie film scene
thanks to Clerks (1994), a gritty black-and-
white comedy set during a typically crazy
day at a convenience store and adjoining
video store in New Jersey. The film—a
mix of banter inspired by boredom, jabs at
the job, fantastic experiments (including
a game of street hockey on the roof of the
store), and a candid attitude toward sex—
hit a nerve with moviegoers of Generation
X, the Richard Linklater set who looked
to Smith as an honest chronicler of their
problems and passions. Thanks to their
marketing acumen and an upped music
budget, Miramax pushed the film through
to success, especially on video. Joe Dante’s
Matinee (1993) proved an inspired movie
about movies for an older generation of
cinemagoers whose experiences came from
the cinema, but Smith’s Clerks showcased
the arrival of video store culture. Smith’s
is a universe of superhero comics, the Star
Wars movies, a personalized mythology of
friends and enemies inspired by his youth,
and persistent heartache.
Despite helming occasional critical and
commercial flops like the cult curio Mall-
rats (1995, a film set in the same “world”
as Clerks, soon dubbed the View Askewni-
verse after the name of Smith’s production
company) and Jersey Girl (2003, a con-
scious attempt at moving away from his
View Askew associations), Smith wrote and
directed two of the most assured American
independent films of the 1990s. Chasing
Amy (1997) is a tragicomedy about comic
book artist Holden McNeil (Ben Affleck),
who falls in love with an irresistible woman
named Amy (Joey Lauren Adams) who
happens to be a lesbian. The film balances
some of its more adolescent impulses with
222  n  SMITH, KEVIN
a nuanced look at social constructions of
gender and sexuality, all while fitting into
established aspects of the View Askewni-
verse. Smith’s other great work of social
commentary is Dogma (1999), a lapsed
Catholic’s fantasy about two fallen angels
(Affleck and Matt Damon, newly popular
for their turn in Gus Van Sant’s Good Will
Hunting [1998]) who attempt to return
themselves to heaven. Deemed sacrilegious
by the easily outraged (the same type that
boycotted Monty Python’s Life of Brian
[1979, Terry Jones] without even seeing it),
it still stands as his most serious and ethi-
cally motivated movie.
Although prompted (whether by nos-
talgia or a rabid fan base) to constantly
revisit his previous characters and scenar-
ios—Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001),
Clerks: The Animated Series (2002), and
Clerks II (2004) all revel in past glories, to
varying degrees—Smith tried to move away
from his earlier work with Zack and Miri
Make a Porno (2008) and Cop Out (2010),
both of which were box office disappoint-
ments. More recently, Smith has partially
retired from filmmaking and works as
something of a beloved emcee, touring
incessantly as a speaker. He is the owner of
the podcast network SmodCo, named after
his SmodCast, a longstanding podcast col-
laboration between himself and producer
Scott Mosier, and is the host of Comic Book
Men (2012–), a reality show set at the Jay
and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash comic book
store.
Producer Jon Peters bought the screen
rights to Superman from Alexander Sal-
kind in 1993 and began the long process
of developing a new franchise at Warner
Bros. The first draft of Superman Lives
was written by JONATHAN LEMKIN,
but when Smith was brought on board as
a consultant, he advocated against what
had been written and tried a version of his
own. Smith’s screenplay for Superman Lives
(which eventually went through two formal
drafts) was brought to the attention of Tim
Burton, who entered the development pro-
cess at this stage, roughly around the time
of the completion of MARS ATTACKS!
However, as Ken Hanke notes, “the preva-
lent notion that Burton undertook the epic
project because of Kevin Smith’s screenplay
is open to question and is hardly supported
by subsequent events.” At this point, actor
Nicolas Cage was attached to play Super-
man. Once Burton became involved in the
project, he decided to move away from
Smith’s screenplay and commissioned
screenwriters WESLEY STRICK and Dan
Gilroy to try their hands at the material.
Burton usually mentions his interest in
Cage’s ability to play Superman as an alien
acclimating himself to a foreign world as
the main source of his interest in the mate-
rial. Burton was involved in the project for
over a year, during which time he scouted
locations, urged a change in title back to
just Superman, and collaborated with art
director RICK HEINRICHS. However, the
project was to ultimately be put on hold.
Creative disagreements between Burton
and Peters are largely to blame.
Smith’s feeling slighted by the usually
nonconfrontational Burton is possibly the
source of a longstanding series of snipes
between the two men. Burton’s PLANET
OF THE APES used an ending (an image
of an augmented Lincoln Memorial that
has an ape head instead of Lincoln’s) that
bore a similarity to an image from one of
Smith’s Chasing Dogma (1998–1999) com-
ics. This sequence was adapted for Jay and
Silent Bob Strike Back (though without
that particular image). Upon realizing the
similarity, Smith half-halfheartedly men-
tioned suing Burton and Fox for the per-
ceived plagiarism. Lou Lumenick reported
the story in the New York Post, which
prompted Burton’s oft-quoted response:
“I have not seen the image, and anybody

that knows me knows that I do not read
comic books. And I especially wouldn’t
read anything that was created by Kevin
Smith.” Smith never did sue Burton. But,
in another oft-quoted retort, Smith took
Burton’s reply to task: “Which, to me,
fucking explains BATMAN.”
In season 2, episode 6 of Comic Book
Men, Smith is prompted to discuss the
Burton Batman after a customer brings a
sealed box of Batman-branded cereal into
the store. Smith notes that he liked the
movie on initial release—it foregrounded
the broodier interpretation of the Dark
Knight—but then adds that the film
“doesn’t hold up, I’m sorry to say.”—Kevin
M. Flanagan
References
Keith Giles, “Kevin Smith Clears the
Air Over ‘Planet of the Apes’ Law-
suit,” Comic Book Resources, August
9, 2001, www.comicbookresources.
com/?page=article&id=249; Ken Hanke,
Tim Burton: An Unauthorized Biography
of the Filmmaker (Los Angeles: Renais-
sance Books, 1999), 214–18; Lou Lumen-
ick, “Kevin Smith, Tim Burton, and Me,”
New York Post, February 22, 2010, nypost.
com/2010/02/22/kevin-smith-tim-burton-
and-me/; John Kenneth Muir, An Askew
View: The Films of Kevin Smith (New York:
Applause Books, 2002); Carrie Rickey, “My
Movie Is Better Than Yours: Tim Burton
Harshes Kevin Smith and Other Film-
maker Takedowns,” Philly.Com, August
16, 2001, www.philly.com/philly/blogs/
flickgrrl/My-movie-is-better-than-yours-
Tim-Burton-harshes-Kevin-Smith-and-
other-filmmaker-take-downs.html; Mark
Salisbury, ed, Burton on Burton, 2nd rev.
ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 2006),
154–55; Mark Salisbury, “Graveyard Shift,”
in Tim Burton: A Child’s Garden of Night-
mares, ed. Paul A. Woods (London: Plexus,
2002), 152.
STRICK, WESLEY  n  223
STALK OF THE CELERY MONSTER
(US 1979)
Designer: Tim Burton. Creator: Tim Bur-
ton.
Running Time: 1 minute, 36 seconds. Black
and white, color.
Animation pencil test of a brief scene cre-
ated by Tim Burton while a student at
CalArts. The scene depicts what appears to
be a mad scientist conducting an experi-
ment on a female victim strapped to a table.
His assistant is a large, hulking beast (the
celery monster?) who helps in the opera-
tion. In reality, the mad scientist figure
is a family dentist by the name of Max-
well Payne. At the film’s conclusion, he
addresses his patients in the waiting room,
saying, “Next, Please.” RICK HEINRICHS
explained the purpose of the film: “Every
year at CalArts they have a screening of all
the films students have made throughout
the year: Stalk of the Celery Monster was
Tim’s, it was kind of his final thesis there—
and the film that got him into Disney. Most
people at CalArts just used their short films
to perfect various animation techniques,
but Tim went for producing something
entertaining.” On the strength of this short,
Burton was hired on at Disney.
References
Jim Smith and J. Clive Matthews, Tim Bur-
ton, Virgin Film Series (London: Virgin
Books, 2007), 11; “Stalk of the Celery Mon-
ster,” YouTube video, www.youtube.com/
watch?v=x4JJBqI_yls.
STRICK, WESLEY (1954–)
Screenwriter, novelist, and film director,
uncredited script doctor on BATMAN
RETURNS and one of several screenwriters
on Tim Burton’s unproduced Superman
Lives project in the late 1990s.
224  n  STROMBERG, ROBERT
Wesley Strick was born February 11,
1954, in New York City. He grew up in
New York in the sixties, graduating in the
midseventies from the University of Cali-
fornia, Berkeley, where he studied creative
writing with the poet Thom Gunn. After
graduation, he returned to New York and
worked as a rock journalist, writing articles
for Circus, Creem, and Rolling Stone, turn-
ing to screenplays in the early 1980s. Strick
gained prominence as the screenwriter of
several major film productions of the late
1980s and early 1990s, among them True
Believer (1989), Arachnophobia (1990), and
the Martin Scorsese–directed remake of
Cape Fear (1991), and he coauthored such
films as Wolf (1994) and The Saint (1997).
With The Tie That Binds (1995), Strick was
given the opportunity to direct.
Upon Burton’s involvement in Super-
man Lives, Strick was hired to completely
revise KEVIN SMITH’s version of the
screenplay. Strick’s first draft screenplay,
dated July 7, 1997, titled simply Superman,
long remained unavailable until the Super-
man home page made it available in early
2013, which features a spider-legged Brai-
niac as the main villain. However, Strick
was ultimately removed as the writer due to
the script being over budget, allowing DAN
GILROY to take over.
Since 1995, Strick has served as a cre-
ative adviser at the Sundance Institute’s
Screenwriters Lab. In addition to his career
as a screenwriter, Strick is also a novelist.
His first novel, Out There in the Dark, set
in World War II–era Hollywood, was pub-
lished in 2006. His second novel, Whirly-
bird, was published in 2009 as a Kindle edi-
tion.
References
Wesley Strick’s author page, Amazon.
com. www.amazon.com/Wesley-Strick/e/
B001HMTKF6/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0.;
“Wesley Strick’s ‘Superman Lives’ Script
Hits the Web,” ComicBookMovie.com,
January 30, 2013, www.comicbookmovie.
com/fansites/Jolt17/news/?a=73490#oTxsX
uQEfYQJUSjI.99; “Wesley Strick Biography
(1954–),” Film Reference, www.filmrefer-
ence.com/film/16/Wesley-Strick.html.
STROMBERG, ROBERT
(“ROB”) (1970–)
Highly feted, Academy Award–winning
visual effects artist, visual effects supervisor,
and matte artist who served as production
designer on Tim Burton’s hugely successful
ALICE IN WONDERLAND. Born in 1970,
Robert Stromberg is the son of filmmaker
William R. Stromberg (The Crater Lake
Monster [1977]) and brother to composer
William T. Stromberg. He started his career
in the late 1980s working as a matte art-
ist on films such as Meet the Hollowheads
(1989), Journey to the Center of the Earth
(1989), and A Nightmare on Elm Street 5:
The Dream Child (1989). Subsequently, he
worked as matte artist/digital matte artist
on projects such as Tremors (1990), Cape
Fear (1991), Addams Family Values (1993),
From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), Dragonheart
(1996), Daylight (1996), Battlefield Earth
(2000), Cast Away (2000), Catch Me If
You Can (2002), and the fantasy film The
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003).
Stromberg earned an Emmy Award
nomination for Outstanding Individual
Achievement—Special Visual Effects in
1995 for his work on the television drama
Fatherland (shared with Richard Patter-
son and David S. Williams Jr.). In 2008 he
won another Emmy Award for Outstand-
ing Special Visual Effects for a Miniseries,
Movie or Special, for the John Adams epi-
sode “Join or Die,” for which he also won
two Visual Effects Society Awards for
Outstanding Created Environment in a
Broadcast Program or Commercial and

for Outstanding Visual Effects in a Broad-
cast Miniseries, Movie or Special. His work
on Peter Weir’s Master and Commander:
The Far Side of the World (2004) earned
Stromberg three more nominations and
one win: an Academy Award nomination
for Best Visual Effects, a BAFTA (British
Academy of Film and Television Arts) Film
Award nomination for Best Achievement
in Special Visual Effects, a Visual Effects
Society Award nomination for Outstand-
ing Supporting Visual Effects in a Motion
Picture (with Brooke Breton), and the win
of a Golden Satellite Award for Best Visual
Effects. In addition, Stromberg is credited
as visual effects supervisor on films such as
The Chronicles of Riddick (2004), The Avia-
tor (2004), Ghost Rider (2007), There Will
Be Blood (2007), Tropic Thunder (2008),
and the pilot for the HBO television series
Games of Thrones (2011).
As production designer, he has worked
on the highly acclaimed features Avatar
(2009), for which he was awarded an Oscar,
and on Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland
(2010), for which he received a second
Oscar. In 2011, he received a Primetime
Emmy Award nomination for Outstand-
ing Special Visual Effects for a Series for
his work as visual effects supervisor on
the crime drama series Boardwalk Empire
(2010–2014). In 2014, he made his direc-
torial debut with the film Maleficent, writ-
ten by Alice in Wonderland scribe LINDA
WOOLVERTON.
References
“Robert Stromberg,” IMDb, www.imdb.
com/name/nm0834902/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1;
Don Kaye, “Maleficent Director Robert
Stromberg Talks Bringing Sleeping Beauty
to Life,” Den of Geek! www.denofgeek.us/
movies/maleficent/236007/maleficent-
director-robert-stromberg-talks-bringing-
sleeping-beauty-to-life.
SUSCHITZKY, PETER  n  225
SUSCHITZKY, PETER (1941–)
Noted cinematographer who shot Tim
Burton’s MARS ATTACKS! Peter Sus-
chitzky was born July 25, 1941, in London,
the son of cinematographer Wolfgang
Suschitzky (Get Carter [1971]). He stud-
ied cinematography at Paris’s L’Institut
des hautes études cinématographiques
(IDHEC; the Institute for Advanced Cin-
ematographic Studies), where one of
his teachers was Jean-Pierre Mundviller
(1886–1967), a cinematographer in pre-
revolution Russia who had been one of the
cinematographers on Abel Gance’s Napo-
leon (1927) and on Raymond Bernard’s
The Chess Player (1927).
Suschitzky began shooting features in
Britain in his early twenties. After getting
his start on Kevin Brownlow and Andrew
Mollo’s groundbreaking feature It Hap-
pened Here (1962–1965) at age twenty-
two, Suschitzky went on to become one
of the most in-demand British-based cin-
ematographers of the 1960s and 1970s. His
frequent collaborators from this period
included Peter Watkins (The War Game
[1965], Privilege [1967], The Gladiators
[1969]), Waris Hussein (A Touch of Love
[1969], Melody [1971], Henry VIII and His
Six Wives [1972]), and Ken Russell (Liszto-
mania [1975], Valentino [1977]). Although
he shoots films in a range of genres, his col-
laborations with Russell display his knack
for memorably framing actors within out-
landish sets, never losing or diminishing
them amidst the exaggerated shapes and
gaudy colors. Suschitzky’s two most widely
seen features are The Rocky Horror Picture
Show (1975) and Star Wars: The Empire
Strikes Back (1980), movies that respec-
tively define “cult” and “mainstream” suc-
cess. Suschitzky has long collaborated with
David Cronenberg, starting with Dead
Ringers (1988). Recently, he has served as
cinematographer on each of the director’s
226  n  SWEENEY TODD
features between Spider (2002) and Cos-
mopolis (2012).
Suschitzky’s work on Mars Attacks!
merges Burton’s penchant for the visual
grotesque with a brighter, zanier sen-
sibility, one seemingly held over from
sequences of Lisztomania and The Rocky
Horror Picture Show. In amplifying what
Jonathan Romney refers to as the “Comic
Unrealism” of Burton’s style, Suschitz-
ky’s camera captures silly, overblown set
pieces like the in-progress interior to the
Galaxy Casino with heightened flair befit-
ting the film’s trading card origins. Mars
Attacks! combines live-action and exten-
sive CGI work (the Martians and their
gadgets are largely digital), so Suschitzky’s
choices were probably dictated in part by
the visual effects team. Although Burton
and Suschitzky have only worked together
on the one film, their sensibilities seem
compatible.
A member of the British Society of
Cinematographers and the American Soci-
ety of Cinematographers, Suschitzky has
earned the National Society of Film Critics
Award for Best Cinematography for Where
the Heart Is (1990, John Boorman) as well
as four Academy of Canadian Cinema and
Television Genie Awards for Best Achieve-
ment in Cinematography for Dead Ringers,
Naked Lunch (1991), Crash (2004), and
Eastern Promises (2007).—Kevin M. Fla-
nagan
References
Kevin Brownlow, How It Happened Here
(London: UKA Press, 2007); Duncan Pet-
rie, The British Cinematographer (London:
BFI Publishing, 1996), 141–42; Jonathan
Romney, “Dick Tracy and the Aesthetics
of Prosthetics,” Short Orders: Film Writing
(London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997), 2.
SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON
BARBER OF FLEET STREET (US/UK
2007)
Director: Tim Burton. Screenplay: John Logan,
Hugh Wheeler (musical), Christopher Bond
(musical adaptation). Producers: John Logan,
Laurie MacDonald, Richard D. Zanuck. Pho-
tography: Dariusz Wolski. Editor: Chris Leb-
enzon. Music: Stephen Sondheim. Production
Design: Dante Ferretti. Art Direction: Gary
Freeman, David Warren. Costume Design:
Colleen Atwood. Second Unit Director: Kat-
terli Frauenfelder. Visual Effects Supervisor:
Gary Brozenich.
C ast : Johnny Depp (Sweeney Todd),
Helena Bonham Carter (Mrs. Lovett),
Alan Rickman (Judge Turpin), Timo-
thy Spall (Beadle), Jamie Campbell
Bower (Anthony), Laura Michelle Kelly
(Lucy/Beggar Woman), Jayne Wisener
(Johanna), Ed Sanders (Toby), Sacha
Baron Cohen (Pirelli).
Running Time: 116 minutes, 22 seconds.
Color.
Released Through: DreamWorks Pictures
(USA); Warner Bros. Pictures (Interna-
tional).
Peter Mack’s history of Sweeney Todd
traces the character back to urban legends
that may have been circulating in London
as early as the late eighteenth century, as a
manifestation of growing fears about the
anonymity of urban life versus the pasto-
ral, family-oriented culture of rural Brit-
ain. The idea of visiting a barber shop and
simply disappearing, then being consumed
in pies, makes acute a larger anxiety about
losing one’s identity and being swallowed
up by London’s swelling population. The
first published version of the Todd story
appeared in a “penny dreadful” serial that

ran weekly in Edward Lloyd’s The People’s
Periodical, from 1846 to 1847. Playwright
George Didbin-Pitt (1799–1855) immedi-
ately adapted the serial novel for stage, and
the drama premiered in 1847, even before
the serial had concluded its run. According
to Mack’s detailed timeline, various plays
and novelizations appeared for several
decades, but were derivative (if not outright
plagiarisms) of these two original sources.
George Didbin-Pitt’s Victorian-era
melodrama was staged on Broadway in 1924,
quickly followed by a number of film adap-
tations, beginning with George Dewhurt’s
in 1926 (now lost), followed by Walter West
in 1928, George King in 1936, and a par-
ticularly bloody version by Andy Milligan,
Bloodthirsty Butchers, in 1970. These stage
and film versions bear little resemblance to
Sondheim’s widely known 1979 musical,
aside from the pact between Todd and Mrs.
Lovett to kill clients and use their flesh in
pies. There is no revenge plot, and not much
explains or rationalizes the barber’s blood-
lust other than greed; Todd is portrayed as
a one-dimensional villain. In this sense, he
was more an embodiment of evil, and the
story itself was little more than a vehicle for
grotesque entertainment. Although there is a
Johanna character in the original serial, she
is not Todd’s daughter (and she has black
hair, not blond). Instead, Johanna is a young
woman who becomes involved in a compli-
cated plot to catch Todd in order to save her
fiancé, who has been lured into captivity by
Todd and Mrs. Lovett.
Mack credits playwright Christopher
G. Bond with humanizing Todd and pro-
viding him with a just motive for murder,
and for providing the basic material in
Sondheim’s musical, which further estab-
lished the barber as a more sympathetic
anti-hero. It is in Bond’s play, which pre-
miered at the Theatre Royal in 1973, that
Todd is portrayed as the victim of a cor-
rupt judge, searching for justice. Sond-
SWEENEY TODD  n  227
heim adapted the play for a musical that
opened on Broadway in March 1979. In
turn, Sondheim’s interpretation was the
key source for Burton—who kept most of
the character, dialogue, and plot elements,
streamlining them for the screen.
Burton’s film centers on a barber’s
revenge after a prominent judge exiles him
to Botany Bay, Australia, in an effort to
appropriate his family. The opening scene
shows Benjamin Barker, now going by the
name of Sweeney Todd (JOHNNY DEPP),
upon his return to London fifteen years
after his trial for an undisclosed, trumped
up charge. It is implied that Todd escaped
prison and was rescued from a stranded
boat by an adventurer named Anthony
(Campbell Bower), who tries to befriend
Todd. After taking his old quarters above a
pie shop operated by Mrs. Lovett (HELENA
BONHAM CARTER), Todd makes plans to
kill Turpin (Alan Rickman) and rescue his
daughter but quickly abandons them when
Anthony accidentally foils his plot.
Out of rage and despair, Todd makes
a pact with Mrs. Lovett to get revenge on
all of humanity by killing his clients, drop-
ping their bodies down a trap door, and
using their flesh in meat pies. Meanwhile
the sailor, Anthony, crafts his own plot to
rescue Todd’s daughter, Johanna (Jayne
Wisener), from Turpin—who is attempting
to coerce Johanna into marriage. Todd’s
murderous streak succeeds until a young
boy, whom Mrs. Lovett adopts after Todd
kills his master to avoid discovery, stumbles
upon body parts in the cellar. At the film’s
climax, Todd turns on Lovett after learn-
ing that she has concealed the truth of what
happened to his wife, out of desire to have
Todd for herself. Todd throws Mrs. Lovett
into the same oven where she cooks their
victims, and the boy kills Todd with one of
his own razors.
One could describe Burton’s adapta-
tion of Sweeney Todd (following Bond and
228  n  SWEENEY TODD
Sondheim) as one part Jacobean revenge
drama and two parts Shakespearian trag-
edy. Although Todd has his revenge on
Turpin, it ultimately becomes tangential to
his own downfall caused by his inability to
act or function within society in the wake
of so much misfortune. Much like Hamlet,
Todd has more than one opportunity to kill
his adversary, and a critical viewer might
wonder why Todd never simply sneaks into
Turpin’s house one night to kill him while
he sleeps. Todd desires more than simple
revenge; he wants a full reckoning with the
judge. Moreover, Todd has become disil-
lusioned with humanity to such an extent
that it seems unlikely, despite his frequent
laments, that he could ever enjoy a normal
life with his family again. This obsession
with corruption and evil may explain why
Todd fails to recognize his wife on more
than one occasion, before ultimately kill-
ing her by mistake, and even threatens to
kill his own daughter (failing to recognize
her in disguise). A question haunts audi-
ences: if Todd had managed to overcome
his rage and regain his trust in others, then
he may have been able to save his wife and
daughter without bringing about his own
destruction.
On the one hand, Burton’s film per-
forms a savage satire of societal norms and
customs, namely, the abuse of authority. On
the other, it mediates on the depths and lim-
its of an individual’s capacity for enduring
grief, misfortune, and injustice. Although
Burton maintained the plot and characters,
his version differs dramatically in terms of
its visual conception and mood. Burton and
his team lend the story a decidedly Gothic
quality, much darker than a conventional
imagining of Victorian England. It could be
argued that the set design, cinematography,
and costumes all do more justice to these
ghostly tones and misanthropic themes of
Sweeney Todd than previous versions. As
reviewer A. O. Scott observed, “Dante Fer-
retti’s production design . . . can make even
daylight look sinister,” which is appropriate
since Todd feels shadows and dread every-
where he walks. Burton’s Todd is ultimately
a man ravaged by darkness, living largely
inside his head as he paces back and forth in
the drab, barren remains of his barber shop
while fantasizing about revenge one moment
and reuniting with his daughter Johanna
the next. Compared to the 1979 Broadway
performance, the central characters as rei-
magined by Burton are far more haunted,
despite their moments of humor. Perhaps
the most poignant example: Judge Turpin,
portrayed by Rickman, takes on a more dis-
turbing shade in many scenes—as when he
sentences a young boy to death for theft. (In
the Sondheim musical, the thief is a grown
man who is guilty of multiple offenses.)
Above all, Burton’s Todd is not merely
a victim or murderer but a misunderstood
artist. The interpretation of Todd as a per-
secuted artist echoes many of Burton’s
other films, which elevate artist figures
above a society largely responsible for their
corruption or destruction. Like Edward
Scissorhands, Todd is artistically gifted with
razors and knives but also naive, as both
he and Mrs. Lovett admit. It is worth not-
ing that Edward, also portrayed by Depp,
endures rejection from society because of
his differences, ultimately going on a kind
of dangerous rampage, and chooses to sac-
rifice communal acceptance for a life of
solitude. Interestingly, in two scenes Todd
has to artistically ritualize his revenge on
Turpin by giving him a shave first and sign-
ing about pretty women. The revenge plot
itself becomes a work of art, as suggested
by Mrs. Lovett’s lyrics in “Wait,” where she
describes vengeance in terms of culinary,
or artistic, inspiration and anticipation. In
fact, the idea of Sweeney Todd as a mis-
understood, tormented artist may at least
partly explain Burton’s attraction to the
project in the first place.—Brian Ray

References
Peter Mack, Sweeney Todd: The Classic
Tale That Became a Legend (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2007); A. O. Scott,
“Murder Most Musical,” New York Times,
December 21, 2007.
SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON
BARBER OF FLEET STREET
(MUSICAL)
Highly successful 1979 Broadway musical
with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
and book by Hugh Wheeler, seen by Tim
Burton in the West End in London while on
vacation in 1980. Sondheim’s musical was
based on the melodrama Sweeney Todd: The
Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1973) by Brit-
ish playwright Christopher Bond. In turn,
Bond’s version was inspired by the Victo-
rian-era penny dreadful The String of Pearls,
this novel based on a popular piece of Brit-
ish legerdemain that possibly originated in
the late eighteenth century. The musical
won the Tony Award for Best Musical and,
in the United Kingdom, was awarded the
Olivier Award for Best New Musical.
Sondheim’s musical, set in 1846, tells
the tale of Benjamin Barker, alias Sweeney
Todd, who returns to London after fif-
teen years of prison and exile, in order to
exact revenge on Judge Turpin, who sen-
tenced him to life imprisonment on false
charges. Assuming the disguise of Sweeney
Todd, Barker resumes his career as a bar-
ber in order to serve “a dark and hungry
god,” revenge. His partner in crime, Mrs.
Nellie Lovett, is a baker who disposes of
his victims by baking them into her pies.
Meanwhile, Anthony Hope, the sailor who
saved Todd’s life, falls in love with Todd’s
estranged daughter, Johanna, who has been
brought up as the ward of Judge Turpin.
Burton’s film version omits the musi-
cal’s prologue in which the cast sings
“The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” in order to
summon Sweeney Todd from the grave;
SWEENEY TODD (MUSICAL)  n  229
hence, the theatrical version is staged as a
reenactment of events that occurred long
before, re-created with the cooperation
of Benjamin Barker/Sweeney Todd, with
the citizens of London functioning like a
Greek chorus, commenting on the action
throughout. As played by George Hearn
in the first American tour in 1980–1981
(filmed and later broadcast on PBS in
1982, the version of the stage musical most
widely available on DVD), Sweeney Todd
is motivated by the “dark and hungry
god” of revenge, while JOHNNY DEPP’s
Sweeney Todd, upon his return to Lon-
don, seems thoroughly mad. Hence, the
lyrics sung by Todd in “The Barber & His
Wife”—“There’s a hole in the world like a
great black pit/And the vermin of the world
inhabit it/And its morals aren’t worth what
a pig could spit/And it goes by the name of
London”—resonate with his deep hatred of
those who’ve wronged him, while in Bur-
ton’s version the lyrics contribute to the
film’s unrelieved cynicism. The film ver-
sion also contains flashbacks to the events
leading to Benjamin Barker’s arrest, includ-
ing scenes showing Judge Turpin being
smitten by Barker’s/Todd’s wife, Lucy;
Turpin’s machinations to have Barker/
Todd arrested; and his subsequent rape of
her, followed by her suicide. Another sig-
nificant change is the identity of Barker’s/
Todd’s one-time boy apprentice in dis-
guise, Adolfo Pirelli, played by Sacha Baron
Cohen in the film version, who reveals
himself to be a cockney named Davy Col-
lins rather than Daniel O’Higgins, an Irish-
man, as in the musical. Collins is strangled
by Todd in Sondheim’s version, whereas in
Burton’s version, Todd beats him uncon-
scious with a heavy teapot before slitting
his throat. In general, Burton’s film version
is far bloodier than the musical, approach-
ing what might be considered a “slasher” or
horror film. Indeed, Burton seems to have
approached Sondheim’s musical as more of
230  n  SWEENEY TODD (MUSICAL)
a horror film than a tale of revenge. Bur-
ton said in an interview, “Most musicals
are camp by their very nature but the dif-
ference here was the melodrama of it, that
sense of really extreme obsessive behaviour
which made it feel to me much more like a
silent movie with music. The material has a
strong horror-movie vein to it.”
Finally, the running time of Burton’s
film version is shorter than that of the
musical. The length of the George Hearn/
Angela Lansbury version available on DVD
is approximately 137 minutes (minus the
curtain call), while Burton’s version, absent
the end credits scroll, is about 109 minutes,
making the Sondheim version almost a half
hour longer.
References
Trevor Johnston, “Tim Burton: Interview,”
TimeOut London, www.timeout.com/lon-
don/film/tim-burton-interview-2; Sweeney
Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, dir.
Harold Prince, perf. George Hearn, Angela
Lansbury, Cris Groenendaal, Sara Woods,
Edmund Lyndeck (Burbank, CA: Warner
Home Video, 2008), DVD.
 T
TAI, ADA AND ARLENE
(CA. 1969–)
The identical twins who appear briefly in
ED WOOD as friends of Vampira and as
Ping (Ada) and Jing (Arlene) in BIG FISH.
Born in San Francisco but raised in Hong
Kong, Ada and Arlene were discovered by a
talent manager while attending USC. They
began their creative endeavor by modeling
for various fashion magazines including
the Asian editions of Marie Claire, Cosmo-
politan, Mademoiselle, and Elle. They were
featured in print campaigns for Goldman
Sachs, Compaq Computers, Sprint, Home
Depot, Mercedes Benz, and the New York
Times. They have also appeared in many
television commercials in both the United
States and Asia for companies such as Jag-
uar, Nintendo, Nestea, Sprint Long Dis-
tance, and Tetley Beer. In Asia, the sisters
acted for Ericsson Cellular and Guinness
Beer.
In 2000, the Tai twins premiered their
first film production, “Rock, Paper, Scis-
sors” at the Directors’ Guild of America in
Los Angeles, California, at the Asian Ameri-
can Pacific Film and Video Festival.
Reference
The Tai twins’ website, www.taitwins.com.
THOMAS, WYNN (1948–)
New York–based production designer for
MARS ATTACKS! for which he was nomi-
nated by the Art Directors Guild for the
Excellence in Production Design Award
in 1997, shared with James Hegedus (art
director), John Dexter (art director), Jann
K. Engel (assistant art director), and Rich-
ard Fernandez (assistant art director). Born
and raised in Philadelphia, after graduating
from Boston University, Thomas moved
to New York where he served as a produc-
tion designer for the Public Theatre and the
Negro Ensemble Company before moving
into film production. Thomas appren-
ticed under Patrizia von Brandenstein
before designing several films for Spike
Lee, among them Lee’s feature debut, She’s
Gotta Have It (1986); Do the Right Thing
(1989); Mo’ Better Blues (1990); Jungle
Fever (1991); and Malcolm X (1992).
Although Burton had given Thomas
the set of Mars Attacks! trading cards to
begin with, Thomas also studied 1950s
films such as The Day the Earth Stood
Still (1951), This Island Earth (1955), and
Forbidden Planet (1956), as well as some
smaller, lesser known films. “Tim didn’t
want a lot of fuzziness or set decoration,”
explained Thomas. “If you look at Mars
Attacks! I think there’s something you’ll
begin to see throughout. Normally, you
dress the sets to make a statement about
who that character is. We had to do that
with very broad strokes in this film, as
opposed to small, accumulating detail—we
were reducing each set to the appropriate
  n  231
232  n  THOMPSON, CAROLINE
graphic image.” In addition, the film was
to look retro. “He [Tim] didn’t want the
props to be contemporary—he wanted
them to have a sort of non-period. We
were making a kind of period film with-
out emphasizing that we were making a
period film.” Thomas therefore found
inspiration in pulp science fiction novels
from the 1920s and 1930s. In those earlier
eras, Thomas explained, “the approach
was to take realistic objects and just exag-
gerate them,” he explained. “For example,
a gigantic light tower would be based on
the shape of a screw. You exaggerate it and
put a bulb on top, and it becomes some-
thing else. . . . So when you see the Martian
spaceship, it’s a version of what someone
from another time thought a spaceship
looked like. . . . It’s a low-concept approach
to designing a spaceship.”
Reference
Karen Jones, Mars Attacks! The Art of the
Movie (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996),
99–100.
THOMPSON, CAROLINE (1956–)
Novelist, producer, director, and screen-
writer of EDWARD SCISSORHANDS and
THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS.
Caroline Thompson was born on April 23,
1956, in Washington, DC. She graduated
in 1978 with a BA in English from Amherst
College. Soon after, she settled in Los Ange-
les, where she supported herself as a free-
lance story analyst and as substitute music
supervisor on the soap opera Capitol. She
published a horror novel, First Born, in
1983. The novel, a riff on the Frankenstein
myth, tells the story of Claire Nash, who
is pursued by her own aborted fetus that
has somehow survived and grown into a
monstrously deformed child. Tim Bur-
ton apparently read First Born and very
much liked it, so he approached her with
his idea of a boy thrown imperfectly into
the world, with scissors for hands. Edward
Scissorhands became a hit and provided
Thompson with the break she needed to
enter the film industry. She subsequently
collaborated on The Addams Family
(1991), Homeward Bound: The Incredible
Journey (1993), The Secret Garden (1993),
and eventually Tim Burton’s The Night-
mare before Christmas. Her motion picture
directorial debut, Black Beauty, for which
she wrote the adaptation, was released in
1994. Thompson next directed the fam-
ily comedy Buddy (1997), about a rich
girl who unwisely adopts a gorilla. Only a
minor commercial success, it was excori-
ated by the critics. Snow White: The Fairest
of Them All (2001), a made-for-television
film produced by Hallmark Entertainment
and which Thompson cowrote with JULIE
HICKSON, was her next directorial effort.
This film was followed by CORPSE BRIDE,
for which she received coauthor credit with
PAMELA PETTLER and JOHN AUGUST,
and City of Ember (2008), a box office
flop, which she adapted from the novel by
Jeanne DuPrau.
References
“Caroline Thompson,” IMDb, www.imdb.
com/name/nm0003031/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1;
“Caroline Thompson Biography (1956–),”
Film Reference, www.filmreference.com/
film/9/Caroline-Thompson.html; Richie
Solomon, “A Storyteller’s Journey: Caroline
Thompson,” StoryLink, August 7, 2006,
www.storylink.com/article/167.
TIM BURTON AND THE LURID
BEAUTY OF MONSTERS
Film series organized by Jenny He at the
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), held in
conjunction with the exhibition Tim Bur-
ton, December 2, 2009–April 26, 2010. The
films shown in this series represent the films
that influenced and served as inspirations for
Tim Burton’s work in terms of their themes,
 TIM BURTON AND THE LURID BEAUTY OF MONSTERS  n  233
motifs, and sensibilities. Although there is
only one Hammer film on the list (When
Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth [1970]), Bur-
ton originally employed the phrase “lurid
beauty” to describe the attraction he had to
Hammer horror films such as The Curse of
Frankenstein (1957), the “beautiful atmo-
sphere” of which he tried to reproduce in
SLEEPY HOLLOW. Burton told Mark Salis-
bury, “They’re very lurid, and very gutsy.
. . . The funny thing is when you look at
Hammer films now, they’re all over the
place. It’s like Disney movies—in your
memory they are far more intense than
when you look at them. They all have great
moments, and the feeling of a certain kind
of lurid beauty—that kind of gore and the
color of the blood.” While Mario Bava’s
Black Sunday (1960) was not shown in the
MoMA series, Burton cited it as a major sty-
listic influence on Sleepy Hollow. The eclectic
list of films shown includes a good number
of Universal horrors, a couple famous exam-
ples of German expressionism, three films by
Ed Wood, a few stop-motion classics, and
some surprises—three Irwin Allen disas-
ter pictures: The Towering Inferno (1974),
Earthquake (1974), and The Swarm (1978).
Several Tex Avery cartoons were screened,
apparently among Burton’s favorites, but
only one Disney film. The following list of
films is presented as they were listed in the
Tim Burton exhibition brochure, screened at
the Museum of Modern Art in conjunction
with the Burton retrospective.
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr.
Toad (1949)
The Omega Man (1971, Boris Sagal)
Jason and the Argonauts (1963, Don
Chaffey)
Mad Monster Party (1967, Jules Bass)
Frankenstein (1931, James Whale)
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabi-
net of Dr. Caligari) (Germany, 1920,
Robert Weine)
Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932,
Robert Florey)
Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959, Edward
D. Wood Jr.)
Dracula (1931, Tod Browning)
The Raven (1935, Lew Landers)
Glen or Glenda (1953, Edward D.
Wood Jr.)
Bride of the Monster (1955, Edward D.
Wood Jr.)
Pit and the Pendulum (1961, Roger
Corman)
The Mummy’s Hand (1940, Christy
Cabanne)
The Creature from the Black Lagoon
(1954, Jack Arnold)
The Mummy’s Tomb (1942, Harold
Young)
When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970,
Val Guest)
Revenge of the Creature (1955, Jack
Arnold)
The Towering Inferno (1974, John
Guillermin)
Nosferatu (1922, F. W. Marnau)
The Swarm (1978, Irwin Allen)
Earthquake (1974, Mark Robson)
The Brain from Planet Arous (1957,
Nathan Juran)
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr.
Toad (1949, James Algar, Clyde
Geronimi, and Jack Kinney)
Scream Blacula Scream (1973, Bob Kell-
jan)
The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962,
Joseph Green)
Tex Avery Cartoons:
Swing Shift Cinderella (1945, Tex
Avery, seven minutes)
Red Hot Riding Hood (1943, Tex
Avery, seven minutes)
Little Rural Riding Hood (1949, Tex
Avery, six minutes)
The Cat That Hated People (1948,
Tex Avery, seven minutes)
234  n  TIME BURTON’S TRAGIC TOYS FOR BOYS AND GIRLS
The Three Little Pups (1952, Tex
Avery, seven minutes)
Field and Scream (1954, Tex Avery,
seven minutes)
Invaders from Mars (1953, William
Cameron Menzies)
20 Million Miles to Earth (1957,
Nathan Juran)
References
Exhibition brochure, Tim Burton, the
Museum of Modern Art, New York,
November 22, 2009–April 26, 2010; Mark
Salisbury, Burton on Burton, 2nd ed. (Lon-
don: Faber and Faber, 2000), 170.
TIM BURTON’S TRAGIC TOYS
FOR BOYS AND GIRLS
Line of toys launched by Dark Horse to
coincide with the filmmaker’s career ret-
rospective at the Museum of Modern Art
in New York City in 2009, the characters
in the four sets of PVC toys all come from
his book of EDWARD GOREY–inspired
children’s verse, “THE MELANCHOLY
DEATH OF OYSTER BOY” & OTHER
STORIES (1997). The twelve maquettes
consist of the Boy with Nails in His Eyes,
Oyster Boy, Junk Girl, Stain Boy, Toxic
Boy, Robot Boy, Mummy Boy, the Girl
with Many Eyes, Jimmy the Hideous Pen-
guin Boy, Brie Boy, Staring Girl, and the
Pin Cushion Queen. The toys were issued
in four sets consisting of three figures each
about 3 inches tall, but were later issued
individually in taller versions, ranging from
5.5 inches to 7.5 inches tall. At the same
time, Dark Horse also issued a set of play-
ing cards with the characters drawn on the
individual cards.
Reference
“Tim Burton,” Dark Horse, www.dark-
horse.com/Search/TIm+Burton.
TIMEX I-CONTROL
WRISTWATCH COMMERCIALS
Two television commercials created by
the Fallon advertising agency and directed
by Tim Burton in March 2000 promot-
ing Timex i-Control wristwatches. The
one-minute commercials were filmed in
Prague. “Mannequin,” featuring actress
LISA MARIE, employed a noir-like setting
of menacing urban streets culminating in a
showdown in a warehouse filled with man-
nequins, with Lisa Marie vanquishing the
thug pursuing her. The second commercial,
“Kung Fu,” employed an action-packed,
Matrix-inspired combat sequence, with
an actor similar in appearance to Keanu
Reeves dispatching a trio of menacing vil-
lains seemingly inspired by the Strangers
of 1998’s Dark City. Certain wristwatch
models Timex issued in 2000 had a rotating
crown known as the Timex i-Control, as
well as a quartz analog alarm, and included
a countdown timer and an elapsed-time
counter, both of which are used to clever
advantage in the commercials. The purpose
of designing the wristwatch advertisements
around fast action is to demonstrate how
easy the i-Control is to operate.
References
“Timex Commercial Directed by Tim
Burton: Behind the Scene,” YouTube
video, www.youtube.com/watch?v=
AhW6B0U805o; Sarah Woodward, “Tim
Burton Fashions Narrow Escape with
Timex,” Shoot Magazine 41, no. 23 (June
2000): 16.
TRICK OR TREAT (1981)
Unproduced film project on which Bur-
ton and RICK HEINRICHS worked while
employees at Disney in the early 1980s.
The project was based on a screenplay by
Delia Ephron (sister of the late Nora Eph-

ron). According to Ms. Ephron, “It was
about siblings going trick or treating on
Halloween, and the house turning out to
be haunted. Tim did illustrations of char-
acters in the house. Very whimsical, and
the idea was that we never saw the adults at
all, everything was kid’s eye view.” Burton’s
conceptual drawings for the project can be
found in Burton on Burton on pages 14–15
and in color in The Art of Tim Burton on
pages 147, 168 (Alien with Woman Hat),
195, 313, 354–55, 358–61, 377, and 396. It
was during a meeting on Trick or Treat that
TRICK OR TREAT  n  235
Burton first met JULIE HICKSON, then in
the story department at Disney, who would
subsequently serve as producer on both
HANSEL AND GRETEL and FRANKEN-
WEENIE.
References
Delia Ephron, email to author, January 28,
2015; Derek Frey, Leah Gallo, and Holly
Kempf, eds., The Art of Tim Burton (n.p.:
Steeles Publishing, 2009); Mark Salisbury,
Burton on Burton, 2nd ed. (London: Faber
and Faber, 2000), 14–15.

VAMPIRES KISS/BLOOD INSIDE
(UK 2012)
Director: Derek Frey. Producer: Derek
Frey. Editor: Derek Frey. Cinematogra-
phy: Derek Frey. Music: Witching Hour.
Special Makeup Effects and Prosthetics:
Malwina Suwinska. Visual Effects: Holly
Gosnell. Costumes: Valery Nuttall, Holly
Kempf.
Cast: Tim Burton (Van Helsing), Oliver
Driscoll (Orville Rowe), Leah Gallo
(Lydia Blackstone), Aiko Horiuchi
(Agnes Ashmore), Gary Keller (Gideon
Gunn), Holly Kempf (Hattie Dosett),
Sabrina Lecordier (Selina Goodwin),
Glex Mexted (Morrow the Doorman),
Boinoit Moranne (Benjamin Reppir),
Valery Nuttall (Vivian Wykkelif) Kirsty
Squibb (Katherine Hayword), Malwina
Suwinska (Chastity Seymour), Trevor
Barnes (band member, Witching Hour),
Alys Sterling (band member, Witching
Hour), Dave Dore (extra), Olly Driscoll
(extra), Jack Taylor (extra), Davina
Divine (extra), Ross Nelson (extra),
Yasura Bush Watcher (extra).
Running Time: 10 minutes. Black and white.
Released Through: Lazer Film Productions.
Low-budget music video/short film pro-
duced and directed by DEREK FREY in
which Tim Burton has a supporting role,
accompanied by the music of UK Goth
rockers Witching Hour. The film employs
236  n 
V
A
an indeterminate Victorian-era setting and
involves three young women who visit a
cemetery in order to conjure up a vampire
queen. Each slices the palm of her hand and
allows the blood to drain into a chalice, lur-
ing the female vampire from her grave. The
vampire bites each of the women in turn,
who become vampires themselves. A hor-
rific series of events follows until the towns-
people (Tim Burton among them) rise up
and kill the women. The action is intercut
with the members of the metal band Witch-
ing Hour strolling through a cemetery. The
short is perhaps best understood as a pro-
motional music video for the band Witch-
ing Hour. Tim Burton’s character is identi-
fied as Van Helsing.
References
“Vampires Kiss/Blood Inside,” IMDb,
www.imdb.com/title/tt2383014/?ref_=fn_
al_tt_1; “Vampires Kiss/Blood Inside,”
YouTube video, youtube.com/watch?v=
jTGrfk1lGDQ.
VARHOL, MICHAEL (1948–)
Producer and screenwriter, coauthor of PEE-
WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE. Varhol attended
the University of Dayton where he received
a degree in fine arts and began making pho-
tographs and short films. Upon graduation,
he was commissioned as a lieutenant and
assigned to the US Army Photo Agency in
the Pentagon where he met Lt. Richard

Abramson. Upon discharge, they formed a
film production company and made local
commercials in Washington, DC. In January
1973, they filmed a concert held at Kansas
State University to honor banjo great Earl
Scruggs that included performances by Joan
Baez, the Byrds, Doc and Merle Watson,
and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. It became
the concert film Banjoman, which pre-
miered at the Kennedy Center in 1975, with
a soundtrack album released by Sire Records
in 1977. The concert was emceed by a then
unknown comedian named Steve Martin,
whose manager, Bill McEuen, also managed
the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. To facilitate the
completion of the film and find a distribu-
tor, Varhol and Abramson moved their pro-
duction company to Hollywood.
In 1978 they produced The Last Word,
starring Richard Harris and Karen Black,
directed by noted British film director Roy
Boulting (1913–2001). Boulting mentored
Varhol on the screenplay, which became
his first writing credit. In the winter of
1982, Bill McEuen and Abramson were
in Denver doing radio station promo-
tions for Steve Martin’s The Man with
Two Brains, when they happened to see
Pee-Wee Herman on Late Night with
David Letterman and eventually became
PAUL REUBENS’s managers. Varhol was
brought in to help Reubens develop a
pitch for the Showtime network and was
later joined by Reubens’s friend and fellow
Groundling PHIL HARTMAN to write
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. Varhol went on
to become one of the writers for the first
season of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, the award-
winning children’s show. He subsequently
produced The Big Picture (1989), which
he cowrote with Christopher Guest, who
made his directorial debut on the film.
Michael Varhol has an avid interest in
photography and his work can be seen at
VINCENT (NARRATION)  n  237
MichaelVarhol.com. He is writing a book
about the writing and making of Pee-Wee’s
Big Adventure.—Michael Varhol
Reference
Michael Varhol Photography (website),
www.michaelvarhol.com.
VINCENT (NARRATION)
Basis of Tim Burton’s first film, which
began as a children’s book but changed
when he was given the opportunity to
make a short film. His narration to Vincent
uses the anapestic rhythm (two unstressed
syllables followed by a stressed syllable, as
“Vincent MALloy is SEVen years OLD”)
common to children’s verse, especially
Edward Lear’s nonsense and Clement
Clarke Moore’s “The Night before Christ-
mas.” Burton stated explicitly that the
rhyming couplets used in the narration of
Vincent were inspired by the work of DR.
SEUSS: “I think it probably has more to
do with being inspired by Dr. Seuss. It just
happens to be shot in black and white, and
there’s a VINCENT PRICE/Gothic kind of
thing that makes it feel that way. I grew up
loving Dr. Seuss. The rhythm of his stuff
spoke to me very clearly. Dr. Seuss’s books
were perfect: right number of words, the
right rhythm, great subversive stories.” The
Seussian rhyming couplets juxtapose a set
of oppositions between Vincent’s active (if
morbid) imagination and the dreary real-
ity of his quotidian existence. “It clicks in
and out of reality so to speak, and it ends
with a quote from ‘The Raven.’” The text
to Vincent can be found at the following
URL: www.timburtoncollective.com/vin-
cent.html.
Reference
Mark Salisbury, Burton on Burton, 2nd ed.
(London: Faber and Faber, 2000), 19.
238  n  VINCENT (1982)
VINCENT (US 1982)
D irector : Tim Burton. S creenplay : Tim
Burton. P roducer : Rick Heinrichs.
Technical Director: Stephen Chiodo.
D i r e c t o r o f P h o t o g r a p h y : Victor
Abdalov. Music: Ken Hinton. Sculpture
and Additional Design: Rick Heinrichs.
A nimation : Stephen Chiodo. W ith
Gratitude To: Julie Hickson, Chris Roth,
Dave Allen, Eric Brevig, Chas Smith,
New Hollywood, Inc.
Cast: Vincent Price (narrator).
R unning T ime : 6 minutes, 25 seconds.
Black and white.
Released Through: Buena Vista Distribut-
ing Company
Short movie Tim Burton made with RICK
HEINRICHS when they both were Disney
employees. The film is a combination of
traditional cel animation and stop-motion
animation using a high contrast (or expres-
sionistic) black-and-white style. At the
time Burton and Heinrichs made Vincent,
Disney studio executives were considering
shifting from traditional cel animation to
a completely different style—Vincent was
completed in 1982, the year Tron, with
computer-animated visuals, was released.
Burton and Heinrichs felt that they “could
convince the hierarchy that a feature-
length, model-animated film with the Dis-
ney logo on it could be commercially via-
ble, and Vincent was [their] way of showing
them.” While certain story elements are
drawn from the work of Edgar Allan Poe
(“The Fall of the House of Usher” as well
as “The Premature Burial”) as well as from
VINCENT PRICE films such as House of
Wax (1953), Alison McMahan argues that
Vincent’s “high-collared coat in the mad
scientist scenes and the electrical equip-
ment in the lab” seem inspired by imagery
from James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931).
The narrative’s initial exposition con-
trasts the active mental life of Vincent with
the mundane, imaginatively impoverished
middle-class existence in which he feels
himself trapped. The film’s climax occurs
when his mother orders him to go out-
side: “If you want to you can go outside
and play. / It’s sunny outside and a beauti-
ful day.” Her demand precipitates his final
morbid fantasy, likely inspired by Vincent
Price’s character in Roger Corman’s The
House of Usher: “I am possessed by this
house/I can never leave it again.” Follow-
ing his histrionic speech, he collapses on
the floor, fantasizing his own death, as the
camera pulls back to allow him to be sub-
merged in a pool of darkness as he quotes
the final lines of Poe’s “The Raven”: “And
my soul from out that shadow that lies
floating on the floor / Shall be lifted—nev-
ermore.”
“The people at Disney thought he
died, but he’s just lying there,” said Bur-
ton. “Who’s to say whether he’s really dead
or beautiful in his own little dream world?
They wanted it to have more of an upbeat
ending, but I never saw it as being down-
beat in any way.” Although Vincent did well
at film festivals in Chicago, Seattle, and Los
Angeles, and was awarded the Critics’ Prize
at the Annecy Film Festival in France, Dis-
ney released Vincent theatrically for a mere
two weeks in only one Los Angeles theater
as an opener for Tim Hunter’s film Tex,
released on July 30, 1982. Roughly three
months later, Vincent was screened on the
Disney Channel in conjunction with HAN-
SEL AND GRETEL. Vincent was then con-
signed to the Disney vaults until the DVD
release of THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE
CHRISTMAS: Special Edition (October
2000). It is also available on the two-disc,
Blu-ray/DVD Combo of the feature-length
FRANKENWEENIE, issued in January
2013.

References
Allison MacMahan, The Films of Tim Bur-
ton: Animating Live Action in Contemporary
Hollywood (New York: Continuum, 2005),
84; Mark Salisbury, Burton on Burton (Lon-
don: Faber and Faber, 1995), 17.
VOGT, MARY E. (CA. 1950–)
Costume designer on BATMAN RETURNS,
responsible for the Catwoman costume.
Mary Vogt was born in Long Beach, Long
Island, and attended the New York Fash-
ion Institute of Technology and the Art
Center College of Design in Pasadena. She
began her motion picture career work-
ing as a design assistant on Zorro: The Gay
Blade (1981) and Diner (1982). She assisted
BOB RINGWOOD on Dune (1984) before
becoming a full costume designer on John
Badham’s Short Circuit (1986) and Stakeout
(1987). Teaming again with Bob Ringwood,
Vogt was primarily responsible for Cat-
woman’s costume in Batman Returns. “We
knew we wanted it to be black and sexy and
tight and shiny,” she explained. “Latex is
as black and sexy and tight as you can get.
Danny DeVito as the Penguin and Michelle Pfeiffer as the Catwoman, the latter in the costume
designed by Mary Vogt (Batman Returns).
VOGT, MARY E.  n  239
When Bob Ringwood and I first designed
the costume, it was for another actress. She
had to drop out and Michelle came in, at
the last minute. . . . It was difficult to wear–
we had to cover Michelle with baby pow-
der before she got into the suit. We made a
body cast of her, and the costume was made
on the body cast. We were afraid that it
would rip, because she had these cat claws,
and because it’s latex, once it ripped it’s
over, you can’t repair it. So we had to make
about 40 cat-suits, but actually it never
ripped, it was very strong.”
Other notable films Vogt has worked
on include Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in
Black films: Men in Black (1997), Men in
Black II (2002), and Men in Black 3 (2012).
References
“Costume Designer Mary Vogt on Michelle
Pfeiffer’s Catsuit,” AnOther, www.
anothermag.com/art-photography/2072/
costume-designer-mary-vogt-on-michelle-
pfeiffer-s-catsuit, July 20, 2012; “Mary
E. Vogt,” IMDb, www.imdb.com/name/
nm0901095/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1.
 W
A
WALLACE, DANIEL (1959–)
Author of the novel Big Fish: A Novel of
Mythic Proportions (1998), source text for
Tim Burton’s BIG FISH. Daniel Wallace
was born in Birmingham, Alabama, where
he grew up and where he graduated from
the Altamont School in 1977. After gradu-
ation, he attended Emory University and
the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, although he did not formally gradu-
ate from Chapel Hill until some years
later. After working for two years with a
trading company in Nagoya, Japan, he
returned to Chapel Hill, where he worked
for thirteen years in a bookstore and as
an illustrator, purportedly also designing
greeting cards and refrigerator magnets;
his illustrations have appeared in the Los
Angeles Times, Italian Vanity Fair, and
many other magazines and books. In addi-
tion to Big Fish, Wallace is author of Ray
in Reverse (2000), The Watermelon King
(2003), Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magi-
cian (2007), O Great Rosenfeld! (2007),
Elynora (2008, published in Italy), and
The Kings and Queens of Roam (2013). In
2014 he published a children’s book, The
Cat’s Pajamas, which he also illustrated. A
Broadway musical based on Big Fish pre-
miered in 2013. Wallace is currently the J.
Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor
of English at the University of North Car-
olina at Chapel Hill, where he directs the
Creative Writing Program. In Tim Bur-
240  n 
ton’s film adaptation of Big Fish, Wallace,
appropriately, plays the part of a professor
at Auburn University.
References
Daniel Wallace (website), www.danielwal-
lace.org; “Daniel Wallace,” UNC English
and Comparative Literature, englishcom-
plit.unc.edu/people/wallaced.
WATERS, DANIEL (BRUCE)
(1962–)
Screenwriter of BATMAN RETURNS who
was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and raised
in South Bend, Indiana. In the early 1980s,
Waters wrote, directed, and starred in a local
sketch comedy series titled Beyond Our Con-
trol along with future screenwriter LARRY
KARASZEWSKI. When Karaszewski left to
enroll in film school at USC, Waters moved
to Montreal and graduated from McGill
University before moving to Los Angeles in
1985, where he managed a video store.
Waters won widespread recognition
for writing the controversial dark comedy
Heathers (1989). Produced by DENISE DI
NOVI and directed by Michael Lehmann,
the film was inspired by Waters’s classmates
at James Whitcomb Riley High School in
South Bend and is about a clique of popu-
lar—but cruel—high school girls. Although
Heathers was a theatrical box office failure,
Denise Di Novi and Michael Lehman won
the 1990 Independent Spirit Award for Best

First Feature, and Waters’s screenplay won
the 1990 Edgar Award for Best Motion Pic-
ture Screenplay, presented by the Mystery
Writers of America. In the years since its
release it has acquired considerable cultural
cachet and is now considered a cult clas-
sic. Subsequently, for producer Joel Silver,
Waters cowrote The Adventures of Ford
Fairlane (1990) and Hudson Hawk (1991).
Although the latter film teamed Waters a
second time with Heathers director Michael
Lehmann, it was a critical and commercial
failure.
The story for Batman Returns is cred-
ited to both Sam Hamm and Waters, but
Waters is given sole credit for the screen-
play. With the character of Batman having
been established in the first film, Waters
sought to explore it in greater depth.
Waters observed that Batman Returns has
two stories that function well together:
“There’s Batman versus The Penguin, and
then there’s the whole Batman/Catwoman/
Bruce/Selina story. The subplot approaches
issues of sex and desire and love and
romance—as well as humor—in ways that
I think are very rich.”
Following Batman Returns, Waters
then cowrote the science fiction action film,
Demolition Man (1993), starring Sylvester
Stallone and Wesley Snipes, which received
mixed reviews but was a box office success.
His feature directorial debut was the teen
comedy, Happy Campers (2001), followed
by the science fiction comedy Sex and
Death 101 (2007), which reunited him with
Heathers star WINONA RYDER.
References
“Heathers: Light Look at a Dark Topic,”
New York Times, March 26, 1989, nytimes.
com/1989/03/26/movies/film-heathers-
light-look-at-a-dark-topic.html; pro-
duction information, Batman Returns
(Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Studios,
1992), 57.
WELCH, ROBERT “BO”  n  241
WELCH, ROBERT
“BO” (1951–)
Highly acclaimed, Academy Award–nomi-
nated production designer and film direc-
tor, born in Yardley, Pennsylvania, in 1951.
After earning a bachelor of architecture
degree from the University of Arizona,
he moved to Los Angeles for an architec-
ture job but quickly fell under the spell
of movies and worked as a set designer at
Universal Studios, the last of the big stu-
dio art departments, for slightly over a
year before going freelance. He served as
assistant art director on Joan Micklin Sil-
ver’s Head over Heels, a film that was first
released by United Artists in 1979 and then
subsequently reedited and rereleased in
1982 under the title Chilly Scenes of Win-
ter, which has since earned cult film status.
Welch then worked as a set designer on
Michael Crichton’s Looker (1981) before
becoming the art director on the 1983 mys-
tery-thriller The Star Chamber. That same
year, he served as production designer on
the critically praised made-for-television
film Heart of Steel. He soon became one
of the top production designers in Holly-
wood, receiving his first Academy Award
nomination, for Best Art Direction–Set
Decoration, for The Color Purple (1985),
shared with Linda DeScenna and J. Michael
Riva. Subsequently, he worked as produc-
tion designer on the cult horror film The
Lost Boys (1987) before serving in the same
capacity on Tim Burton’s BEETLEJUICE
(1988). In this first film collaboration
with Burton, Welch imagined the Mait-
lands’ home as a vestige of an old-fash-
ioned, slightly dilapidated, Rockwell-era
America being displaced by what Kevin
Thomas describes as “a post-modern par-
ody inside and out, complete with spray-
speckled interiors, faux marble paneling
and . . . monstrous sculptures.” Perhaps
the film’s highlight from a design perspec-
tive is the postmortem waiting room, for
242  n  WELCH, ROBERT “BO”
which Welch sought to create “something
vague and evasive enough to defy catego-
rizing and invite disorientation, yet specific
enough to invoke the fear that the afterlife
might not be much different than real life.”
In his next collaboration with Bur-
ton, EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (1990),
he again sought to create a defamiliarized
image of America that was both “funny
and strange,” in the words of Tim Bur-
ton. Welch characterized the suburbia of
Edward Scissorhands as “a kind of generic,
plain-wrap suburb, which we made even
more characterless by painting all the
houses in faded pastels, and reducing the
window sizes to make it look a little more
paranoid.” In order to emphasize the drab
homogeneity of the suburban neighbor-
hood, Welch repainted the existing houses
(located in Lutz, Florida) using only four
colors: “sea-foam green, dirty flesh, but-
ter, and dirty blue.” Ken Hanke observes
that the use of only four colors subtly sug-
gests “the vague and somewhat pathetic
suburban notion of a halfhearted attempt
at individuality.” His work on Edward Scis-
sorhands won a BAFTA (British Academy
of Film and Television Arts) Film Award
for Best Production Design in 1992.
In the brilliant conception of Gotham
City he later imagined for Batman Returns,
the shabby remnants of a forgotten
America sit precariously beside imposing,
totalitarian architecture, the political ide-
als of power and virility embodied in two
huge, muscular, masculine figures pulling
mechanical levers, which Welch character-
ized as fascist. He explained, “The idea was
that this town [Gotham City] is so corrupt
it’s literally rotting—even sinking in places.
. . . There is a lot of decay—buildings are
tipping over and being held up by thin
metal struts and chains.” The rotating cat
head atop the Shreck Building was meant
to symbolize “the evil corporate universe
in Gotham and all the activity in the movie
revolves around him.” Commenting on his
designs for Batman Returns as opposed to
those for BATMAN, he said, “What they
built for the first movie was formal and
serious. . . . This set is a little more Ameri-
can—it has a lot more wit and irony. The
look of the city is influenced by [a] sort
of Fascist World’s Fair architecture mixed
with generic American urban decay and a
sprinkling of our more contemporary, pro-
fane mixed zoning.”
Since working with Tim Burton on
these three films, Welch frequently has col-
laborated with director Barry Sonnenfeld.
He was nominated for an Academy Award
for Best Art Direction–Set Decoration,
along with Cheryl Carasik, for Sonnenfeld’s
Men in Black (1997). He was also nomi-
nated for an Academy Award in the same
category for Alfonso Cuarón’s A Little Prin-
cess (1995), again with Cheryl Carasik. He
and Carasik were also nominated for Best
Art Direction–Set Decoration on The Bird-
cage (1996), a film for which he was also
nominated for an Excellence in Production
Design Award by the Art Directors Guild.
He made his feature film directorial debut
in 2003 with The Cat in the Hat.
During production of Beetlejuice, he
met actress CATHERINE O’HARA, whom
he married in 1992 and with whom he has
two sons.
References
Laurie Halpern, “Look, Ma, No Hands,
or Tim Burton’s Latest Feat,” New York
Times, August 26, 1990, www.nytimes.
com/1990/08/26/movies/film-look-ma-
no-hands-or-tim-burton-s-latest-feat.html;
Ken Hanke, Tim Burton: An Unauthorized
Biography of the Filmmaker (Los Angeles:
Renaissance Books, 1999), 101; Jody Dun-
can Shannon, “Cheap and Cheesy and Off-
the-Cuff: The Effects of Beetlejuice,” Cine-
fex 34 (May 1988): 4–46; Kevin Thomas,
“Gleeful Grand Guignol of ‘Beetlejuice,’”
 WILLY WONKA & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY  n  243
Los Angeles Times, March 30, 1988, articles.
latimes.com/1988-03-30/entertainment/
ca-55_1_grand-guignol; Mark Cotta Vaz,
“A Knight at the Zoo,” Cinefex 51 (August
1992): 30.
WILHITE, THOMAS L. (1952–)
Disney executive who first recognized Tim
Burton’s talent and approved the produc-
tion of his early short, VINCENT. Born
September 18, 1952, in the small town of
Keswick, Iowa, Thomas L. Wilhite attended
Iowa State University where he received a
BA in journalism and mass communica-
tion. After serving briefly as an account
executive at the Rogers & Cowan public
relations firm, he joined the Walt Disney
Company in 1977 as director of publicity.
In December 1979, Wilhite was appointed
the new vice president in charge of produc-
tion, motion pictures, and television.
In 1980, Steven Lisberger and Donald
Kushner approached Wilhite about the idea
for Tron, which would become the first
live-action film to use computer-generated
imagery (CGI) in a significant way (about
twenty minutes). The production cost of
Tron, released in July 1982, would eventu-
ally reach $21 million, but for a short time,
it established Disney as the industry leader
in computer animation. Wilhite also was
responsible for setting up the Who Framed
Roger Rabbit (1988) development unit at
Disney in 1981. In 1984, Wilhite established
Hyperion Pictures (sometimes referred to
as Hyperion Studios) with writer-director
Willard Carroll. He has remained at Hyper-
ion Pictures since.
Tim Burton joined the Walt Disney
Company a few months before Thomas
Wilhite was appointed vice president of
production. The Fox and the Hound (1981)
was already in production. The film has the
distinction of being the last film worked on
by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, two
of Walt Disney’s original “Nine Old Men.”
But The Fox and the Hound also featured
the work of master animator Glen Keane,
whom Burton, an “in-betweener” on the
film, said taught him a great deal. However,
when Thomas Wilhite put The Black Caul-
dron into production in 1980, Burton was
appointed to work on the film as a concep-
tual artist. That same year, though, Wilhite
initiated production on Tron. “I remember
when they were doing that movie Tron,”
Burton told Mark Salisbury. “It seemed like
a company in puberty really, that awkward
age where you’re still stuck in the past. . . .
They realized they needed to come into the
twenty-first century but they didn’t know
how to do that.”
According to Mark Salisbury, it was
Tom Wilhite who saw in Burton’s draw-
ings a “unique talent” and one that he felt
“deserved to be nurtured.” After working
for a short time with RICK HEINRICHS
on an abandoned project titled TRICK OR
TREAT, in 1982 Wilhite gave Burton and
Heinrichs sixty thousand dollars to pro-
duce Vincent.
References
Mark Salisbury, Burton on Burton, 2nd rev.
ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 13,
15; “Tom Wilhite,” Hyperion, hyperionpic-
tures.com/user_files/about/tom.php.
WILLY WONKA & THE CHOCOLATE
FACTORY (US 1971)
D irector : Mel Stuart. S creenplay : Roald
Dahl, David Seltzer (uncredited), based
on the novel by Roald Dahl. Producers:
David L. Wolper, Stan Margulies, for
the Quaker Oats Company. Cinematog-
raphy: Arthur Ibbetson. Editor: David
Saxon. Associate Editor: Melvin Shap-
iro. Lyrics and Music: Leslie Bricusse,
Anthony Newley. Choreography: How-
ard Jeffrey. Art Direction: Harper Goff.
244  n  WILLY WONKA & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY
Costume Design: Helen Colvig. Makeup:
Susi Krause, Raimund Stangl. Assistant
Directors: Wolfgang Glattes, Jack Roe.
S ound E ditor : Charles L. Campbell.
Special Effects: Logan R. Frazee. Model
Animator (Wonkavator): Jim Danforth
(uncredited). Optical Effects: Richard
Kuhn (uncredited). Effects Assistant :
Dennis Muren (uncredited). O ptical
Effects: Albert Whitlock (uncredited).
Cast: Gene Wilder (Willy Wonka), Jack
Albertson (Grandpa Joe), Peter Ostrum
(Charlie Bucket), Roy Kinnear (Mr.
Salt), Julie Dawn Cole (Veruca Salt),
Denise Nickerson (Violet Beauregarde),
Leonard Stone (Mr. Beauregarde), Paris
Themmen (Mike Teevee), Nora Denney
(Mrs. Teevee), Michael Bollner (Augus-
tus Gloop), Ursula Reit (Mrs. Gloop),
Gunter Meisner (Mr. Slugworth), Diana
Sowle (Mrs. Bucket), Dora Altman
(Grandma Georgina), Aubrey Woods
(Bill), David Battley (Mr. Turkentine),
Günter Meisner (Mr. Slugworth), Peter
Capell (The Tinker), Werner Heyking
(Mr. Jopeck), Peter Stuart (Winkel-
mann).
R unning T ime : 99 minutes, 45 seconds.
Color.
Released Through: Paramount.
Beloved first film adaptation of ROALD
DAHL’s novel CHARLIE AND THE
CHOCOLATE FACTORY. Whether
viewed as a failed children’s film (it barely
made $4 million in its initial theatrical
release against its $3 million-or-so budget)
or a runaway cult success (its reputation
rests largely on its ubiquity on television
screens, as well as thirty years of VHS,
DVD, and Blu-ray releases), Willy Wonka
& the Chocolate Factory is a movie that
engenders vocal responses. At the release
of Tim Burton’s CHARLIE AND THE
CHOCOLATE FACTORY in 2005, fans
and critics took to the ramparts, revisiting
Mel Stuart’s mostly beloved classic, a sly
marriage of coming-of-age moralism and
pop-psychedelia.
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Fac-
tory is based on Roald Dahl’s Charlie and
the Chocolate Factory (1964) and concerns
confectioner Willy Wonka’s (Gene Wilder)
attempt to reenter the world after a long
absence from public view. His factory has
mysteriously been producing and distrib-
uting chocolate for years, despite having
no employees and no public presence. A
contest is announced in which five golden
tickets are placed into random candy bars
at various points around the globe. This
sends the citizens of the world (mainly,
though not exclusively, children) into a
feeding frenzy. The first four valid tick-
ets are found by textbook overconsum-
ers: Augustus Gloop (Michael Bollner), a
Falstaffian German boy; rich and spoiled
Veruca Salt (Julie Dawn Cole); the bubble-
gum obsessive Violet Beauregarde (Denise
Nickerson); and moving image addict Mike
Teevee (Paris Themmen). After a falsely
announced fifth ticket, the final prize is
found by Charlie Bucket (Peter Ostrum),
a kind and morally upright boy who hap-
pens to be living in abject poverty. The
children and a relative of their choice are
invited into Wonka’s domain, a fantastic
place that features a miniature candy eco-
system (complete with mixing waterfall and
river), everlasting sweets, the world’s first
teleportation machine, drinks that enable
people to fly, and little orange-and-green
men called Oompa-Loompas, a lost tribe
of supposedly helpless creatures rescued by
Wonka in a gesture of charity (a gesture, of
course, that also gave him a free and reliable
supply of labor). Most of the children are
horrible twerps and are dispatched from the
tour due to their inability to follow direc-
tions. Charlie and his grandfather (Jack Alb-
ertson), despite their illicit consumption of
one of the factory’s drinks, prove forthright,
thus revealing Wonka’s test: whichever child
 WILLY WONKA & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY  n  245
exhibited good qualities would be invited to
take over the factory from Wonka. Charlie
becomes Wonka’s new heir.
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Fac-
tory looks like nothing else from its era,
mainly because of its production history.
Completely financed by the Quaker Oats
Company, it was shot in West Germany
(interiors were built at Bavaria Film Stu-
dios, with locations shot around the greater
Munich area) and sold to Paramount after
completion for theatrical distribution.
In some senses, this is a great example of
major film production in a post–World
War II world: the film’s cast is mainly
American and British, many of the major
technicians are British (cinematographer
Arthur Ibbetson directed many notable
postwar British films, including The Horse’s
Mouth [1958] and Die! Die! My Darling!
[1965]), and the primary market for the
film was English speaking. That said, the
look of the film is quite German (there
are German phrases and ads throughout
the film’s first third), but the story world
of the film, according to a brief television
broadcast, seems to suggest that Wonka’s
factory is located in America! This creates
a sense of cognitive dissonance, but also
adds to the film’s aggressive appeal to the
fantastic. Charlie Bucket’s world, even if it
is meant to be relatable to many viewers,
is also meant to be strange and unfamiliar
to most of them. This pervasive strange-
ness explains the movie’s later cult appeal:
freak-out moments like the ill-fated trip
aboard the S.S. Wonkatania (a precisely
edited sequence that uses colored lights,
strobe-effects, and intense sounds, much
like Roger Corman’s The Trip [1967]) or
the cool minimalism of the television stu-
dio where Mike Teevee is beamed out of
this world were the bread and butter of
the late 1960s drug sensibility. Curiously,
Ken Hanke has noted that this appeal to
an older counterculture was kept in Tim
Burton’s take on the material, where “the
script’s references to ‘grass’ and ‘flashbacks’
are hardly accidental.”
The real debate between fans of this
film and Tim Burton’s remake has to do
with how each handles the performance of
Willy Wonka. In Mel Stuart’s Willy Wonka
& the Chocolate Factory, Gene Wilder plays
the role without the benefit of an exten-
sive backstory. What an audience knows
about his character mainly comes from the
rumors of what others say about him, as
well as how he gets to define himself dur-
ing the final two-thirds of the film (one of
the movie’s structural “problems” is that
Wonka is not introduced until a long time
into the film. Burton’s version “solves”
this by having several flashback sequences
that show young Mr. Wonka explaining
how he came to be a recluse). Wilder-as-
Wonka comes across as a mature business-
man with a flair for the theatric. His insis-
tence on legal protection—via a large and
unreadable contract that each child signs
at the beginning of his or her visit—and
his apparent anger at Charlie’s temptation,
showcase his regard for the law. Wilder’s
Wonka is mature and world-weary. His
reclusiveness appears self-imposed, and
his sense of humor has a dry sincerity that
can only be picked up after years of inter-
action and observation (one gets the sense
that Wilder’s Wonka left the public eye
because it was more boring and less amus-
ing than himself). As a rule of thumb, his
interactions are played as if he is one step
ahead in every conversation. By contrast,
JOHNNY DEPP’s Wonka from Burton’s
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a
child in arrested development. His obvi-
ous daddy issues—his father, played by
CHRISTOPHER LEE, is a dentist—lead
him down a singular path of candy, cre-
ating a fissure that is only bridged after
Charlie’s (Freddie Highmore) interven-
tion. Depp’s Wonka has his own sense of
246  n  WILSON, LARRY
humor, but it does not seem to be based
on acutely observed human interaction.
Rather, it is presented as the self-directed
mythology, one formed through years of
seemingly one-sided interaction with the
Oompa-Loompas (a one-sidedness that
is illustrated during the sequence where
Wonka is on the psychologist’s couch, as a
Freudian Oompa-Loompa silently listens to
his neuroses). Generally, Depp’s Wonka is
played not as if he is ahead of the conver-
sation, but rather as if he is almost having
different conversations entirely from those
going on around him (in his interactions,
Wonka fails to understand the children and
their parents, just as they fail to understand
him). Thus, the Wilder/Depp comparison
seems to come down to a matter of pref-
erence: Wilder’s adult, hot-tempered, sar-
castic, vaguely threatening, and knowing
Wonka, or Depp’s childish, inadvertently
petulant, sincere, and oblivious Wonka.
In June 2013, Gene Wilder made a rare
public appearance in support of his novel
Something to Remember You By. During a
discussion of his career, he lamented Tim
Burton’s film, claiming that he thought that
it felt forced, and that despite his respect for
Depp and Burton (in other contexts), their
film was an “insult” to what the previous
film had done. Whether one film is bet-
ter or more true to Dahl’s book is almost
beside the point, as both films illustrate the
nuanced possibilities of performance types
in film adaptation, a game that changes with
history and with different production con-
texts.—Kevin M. Flanagan
References
Ken Hanke, “Movie Review: Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory,” Mountain Xpress, July
20, 2005, www.mountainx.com/movies/
review/charlieandchocolatefactory.php; Jeff
Labrecque, “Gene Wilder Still Upset over
Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory,” PopWatch (blog), June 14, 2013,
popwatch.ew.com/2013/06/14/gene-wilder-
tim-burton-charlie- and-the-chocolate-
factory/; Chris Nashawaty, “How Johnny
Depp Brought a New Flavor to ‘Charlie,’”
Entertainment Weekly, July 1, 2005, www.
ew.com/article/2005/07/01/how-johnny-
depp-brought-new-flavor-charlie; Mel
Stuart, with Josh Young, Pure Imagination:
The Making of Willy Wonka and the Choc-
olate Factory (New York: St. Martin’s/L.A.
Weekly Books, 2002), 8, 10, 40.
WILSON, LARRY (1949–)
American film producer, director, and
screenwriter, and coauthor of BEETLE-
JUICE and “THE JAR.” From 1978 to 1982,
Larry Wilson worked as a story analyst for
Columbia, Warner Bros., Paramount, and
Universal. As an executive at Paramount
from 1982 to 1985, he worked under Jeffrey
Katzenberg and Michael Eisner, where he
did initial development of Young Sherlock
Holmes (1985), directed by Barry Levinson.
From 1985 to 1988, he served as director of
development for Walter Hill’s the Phoenix
Company and was instrumental in bring-
ing James Cameron on board to write and
direct Aliens. After Tim Burton became
interested in directing Beetlejuice, Wilson
was brought in to help revise the script with
MICHAEL MCDOWELL; the two had pre-
viously worked together on the adaptation
of “The Jar” (1985), directed by Burton,
for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Wilson later
cowrote The Addams Family (1991) with
CAROLINE THOMPSON and later cow-
rote and served as executive producer on
The Little Vampire (2000). Other work by
Wilson includes the made-for-television
movie Aliens for Breakfast (ABC, 1994) and
coauthorship of the teleplay The Year with-
out a Santa Claus (NBC, 2006).
References
Simon Brew, “Larry Wilson Interview:
Cindy, Beetlejuice, Sequels, Aliens,” Den

of Geek! www.denofgeek.us/movies/larry-
wilson/240561/larry-wilson-interview-
cindy-beetlejuice-sequels-aliens; “Larry
Wilson,” IMDb, www.imdb.com/name/
nm0933733/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1.
WOLSKI, DARIUSZ (1956–)
Cinematographer who has shot two hugely
successful films for Tim Burton, SWEENEY
TODD and ALICE IN WONDERLAND.
Dariusz Adam Wolski was born in Warsaw,
Poland, in 1956. He attended the national
film school in Lódz: “We were taught a lot
of theory at school, but I was lucky, because
Witold Sobocinski, a great Polish cinema-
tographer, taught a couple of classes. One
of his classes was a workshop, where he had
us set up for a complicated shot that he lit
and we filmed. In his next class, we watched
a couple of his movies with no sound. He
commented on every shot.” Wolski moved
to New York City in 1979 and began to
make documentaries for the BBC. A few
years later he moved to Los Angeles, where
he started to shoot music videos: “My
friend Martin Schaer, who is still my opera-
tor, and I worked on a very low budget
movie in Death Valley, California. I was a
camera assistant. He convinced me to move
to Los Angeles in 1986 just when MTV was
catching on. I shot two music videos with a
band that wasn’t very well known, but they
were for Virgin Records and the images
looked great. Someone at Virgin liked my
work, and showed the videos to other peo-
ple, and all of a sudden I was shooting a lot
of music videos.” Wolski enjoyed consider-
able success filming music videos, eventu-
ally filming over one hundred of them, and
has three nominations for the MTV Video
Music Award for Best Cinematography: for
“Luka,” by Suzanne Vega (1988), Aeros-
mith’s “Janie’s Got a Gun” (1990), and
“Stan” (2001) by Eminem. He was nomi-
nated for the American Society of Cinema-
tographers Awards for his work on Crim-
WOOD, EDWARD D., JR.  n  247
son Tide (1995). In addition to shooting
two films for Tim Burton, he has shot three
films for Ridley Scott: Prometheus (2012),
The Counselor (2012), and Exodus: Gods
and Kings (2014). He has been a member of
the American Society of Cinematographers
since 1996.—Rebecca A. Umland
References
“Dariusz Wolski,” IMDb, www.imdb.com/
name/nm0003011/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1;
“Dariusz Wolski,” Internet Encyclopedia
of Cinematographers, www.cinematogra-
phers.nl/PaginasDoPh/wolski.htm; “MGU
Interview: Cinematographer Dariusz Wol-
ski,” YouTube video, www.youtube.com/
watch?v=mrf3ZVDvXUU.
WOOD, EDWARD (“ED”) D., JR.
(1924–1978)
American film director, producer, edi-
tor, actor, screenwriter, and novelist, who
achieved posthumous fame as the sub-
ject of the Tim Burton–directed biopic,
ED WOOD. A cult figure for the past four
decades, Ed Wood is a highly charged sym-
bol of American culture’s ambivalent atti-
tude toward its own popular culture. Fol-
lowing the publication in 1980 of Harry
and Michael Medved’s The Golden Turkey
Awards—published two years after Wood’s
death—in which Wood was given a Life
Achievement Award as the Worst Direc-
tor of All Time, Wood became symbolic of
everything that is vapid and tawdry about
Hollywood, from the dubious artistic value
of his films, to his life as a transvestite and
pornographer. Although he is character-
ized in Burton’s biopic as resilient and opti-
mistic, blithely unaware of his own artistic
limitations, his actual life seems one of pro-
gressive dissipation and disillusionment.
While Hollywood is a symbol of the Ameri-
can myth of success and material reward,
Wood’s life embodies a counter-myth of
poverty and failure. His transvestism, which
248  n  WOOD, EDWARD D., JR.
he performed under a pseudonym in his
film Glen or Glenda (1953), made him an
outsider to middle-class, genteel culture,
while his taste for exploitation and the outré
prevented him from mastering the preferred
form of Hollywood filmmaking known as
the classic Hollywood style. Wood’s cult
fame as a Hollywood director parodies (per-
haps intentionally) the dominant paradigm
of the auteur theory in film studies.
Born Edward Davis Wood Jr. on Octo-
ber 10, 1924, in Poughkeepsie, New York,
Wood joined the Marine Corps in May
1942, not yet age eighteen. As a Marine
in the Pacific during World War II, he
reportedly was cited for bravery in com-
bat. An undated news clipping reproduced
in Rudolph Grey’s definitive biography
NIGHTMARE OF ECSTASY indicates that
Wood was in a “naval hospital somewhere
in the South Pacific,” and at that time he
had served overseas “for 13 months.”
Whether the date is late 1943 (the Battle of
Tarawa, in which Wood reportedly partici-
pated, was fought November 20–23, 1943)
or early 1944 is uncertain. Tradition asserts
that Wood was a transvestite at the time he
joined the Marine Corps, but whether he
was able to hide women’s underclothing
from his fellow soldiers and commanders
while in the barracks is doubtful. As his
friend Joe Robertson points out during his
interview recorded in Nightmare of Ecstasy,
“In the Marine Corps, you don’t do that
stuff, you get 20 years. You go to Ports-
mouth, you know what I mean?”
The precise date of Wood’s discharge
from the military is uncertain. According to
his second wife, Kathy Wood, after Wood
was discharged from the Marine Corps he
attended Northwestern University where
he appears to have studied writing and act-
ing. At some point, he purportedly traveled
with a carnival as the half man/half woman
attraction, but the source of this story is
Wood himself. Others who knew him aver
he attended the King-Smith School of Cre-
ative Arts in Washington, DC, although
there’s no definitive proof of his attendance.
Whatever time he spent at the latter insti-
tution must have been brief, because the
King-Smith School of Creative Arts opened
in 1947 and was redesigned and renamed
the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1948.
Whatever the case, according to
Rudolph Grey, Wood was in Hollywood
by sometime in 1947. He had worked as
a stage actor and had made his first film,
a western, unreleased during his lifetime,
titled Crossroads of Laredo by August 1948.
In October 1948 his play based on his war
experiences, The Casual Company, opened
at the Village Playhouse in Hollywood
to poor reviews; Wood later adapted the
play into a novel (unpublished). In 1949
he became a one-quarter owner of a com-
pany, Story-Ad Films, for which he wrote
and directed commercials for the next few
years. For a time, around 1949 or 1950,
he worked at Universal Studios. In 1951,
Wood joined the Screen Actors Guild. The
first work for which he was hired as a direc-
tor was a short, half-hour television drama
titled The Sun Was Setting, shot in Decem-
ber 1951, with Angela Stevens, Tom Keene,
and Phyllis Coates.
Beginning in 1953, Wood wrote and
directed a series of exploitation films that
are largely responsible for his celebrity
today. The first was Glen or Glenda (1953)
in which Wood, under a pseudonym, plays
a transvestite named Glen, also known as
Glenda. The film starred Bela Lugosi, whom
Wood met early in 1953, and Wood’s then
romantic companion, Dolores Fuller. Some
aficionados point to the scene in Glen or
Glenda in which Glen dons his sister’s dress
for a Halloween party as a cloaked refer-
ence to the origin of Wood’s transvestism,
but in Burton’s Ed Wood, Wood avers that
his mother used to dress him in “girlie
clothing” because she always wanted a girl

and so wearing women’s clothes became
a habit with him. (It should be noted that
Lugosi was not thrilled to appear in Glen
or Glenda as Burton’s biopic suggests, but
was persuaded to do so by his wife because
they needed the money Wood was offer-
ing.) Later that year, Wood directed a color
TV pilot titled Crossroads Avenger, which
failed to be optioned as a series. According
to Rudolph Grey, late in 1953 Wood pro-
duced, wrote, and directed the sixty-min-
ute burlesque of Dracula, titled “The Bela
Lugosi Review,” starring Bela Lugosi, that
opened at the Silver Slipper in Las Vegas in
February 1954. According to Lugosi biog-
rapher Arthur Lenning, the show received
good reviews. Later in 1954, Wood filmed a
second exploitation film, The Hidden Face,
starring Dolores Fuller, Lyle Talbot, and
Steve Reeves, later released under the title
Jailbait. The film was cowritten by Wood’s
friend, producer Alex Gordon, who would
also coauthor Wood’s next feature, the sci-
fi/horror hybrid Bride of the Monster (1955).
The film starred Bela Lugosi, Tor Johnson,
and Loretta King. It was during postproduc-
tion on Bride of the Monster, in April 1955,
that Bela Lugosi checked himself into the
psychopathic ward at Los Angeles General
Hospital, seeking help for his drug addic-
tion; this event was dramatized in Burton’s
biopic.
The next year, in 1956, Wood wrote
(but did not direct) perhaps his biggest
success in the exploitation market, The
Violent Years, about a gang of delinquent
high school girls who commit various
crimes, including rape, while disguised in
men’s clothing. The film starred former
Playboy model Jean Moorhead. Later that
year, Wood began production on what
is perhaps his most famous film, Plan 9
from Outer Space (originally titled Grave
Robbers from Outer Space), which starred
Bela Lugosi (in his last film), Tor Johnson,
Vampira (Maila Nurmi), Tom Mason (who
WOOD, EDWARD D., JR.  n  249
doubled for Lugosi), and Criswell as the
narrator. The film previewed as Grave Rob-
bers from Outer Space at the Carlton The-
ater in Los Angeles in 1957, but did not go
into general release under its better-known
title until July 1959. In 1957 Wood directed
a series of films under the Atomic Produc-
tions banner, Final Curtain (reportedly the
script Bela Lugosi was reading when he
died), and The Night the Banshee Cried. The
next year, Wood directed the feature length
Night of the Ghouls (a.k.a. Revenge of the
Dead), a loose sequel to Bride of the Mon-
ster, starring Kenne Duncan (as Dr. Acula),
Duke Moore, Paul Marco, Tor Johnson,
Valda Hansen, and Criswell. The film even-
tually received a perfunctory release in 1959
and remained largely unseen before being
issued for the home video market in 1984.
Released in 1960, The Sinister Urge,
loosely inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s
Psycho (released a month before filming
on The Sinister Urge began), was the last
feature-length film that Wood himself
directed before he turned to writing more
explicit erotica and pornographic novels
and films. In 1960 and 1961, Wood wrote
and directed some industrial films for
Autonetics (a division of North American
Aviation, now part of Boeing), eventually
writing Shotgun Wedding (1963) for direc-
tor Boris Petroff, starring J. Pat O’Malley,
William Schallert, and Jenny Maxwell
(Blue Hawaii). The film was advertised as
being about “child brides of the Ozarks,”
and filmed in “flaming hillbilly color.” In
1965, Wood began a partnership with sex-
ploitation director Stephen C. Apostolof
that continued well into the 1970s. Their
first collaboration was Orgy of the Dead,
written by Wood, a mashup of horror and
erotica, featuring a cast including Criswell
(as Lord of the Dead), burlesque queen Pat
Barrington, and numerous topless danc-
ers. According to Apostolof (as reported
by Rudolph Grey), Orgy of the Dead
250  n  WOOLVERTON, LINDA
incorporates material from Wood’s 1957
shorts Final Curtain and The Night the
Banshee Cried, as well as material from
Wood’s story “The Day the Mummy
Returned.” Around this time Wood also
began writing numerous adult novels
under his own name as well as pseud-
onyms. His output was prodigious; some
estimates are as high as eighty books writ-
ten from 1963 (the date of the sale of his
first novel, Black Lace Drag) to the year
of his death, 1978. The books range from
carnival horror novels such as Side-Show
Siren (1966) to lurid exposés (Confessions
of a Hollywood Starlet [1967]), to pseudo-
scientific psychological case histories
(Bloodiest Sex Crimes of History [1967]), to
explicit pornography (The Oralists [1969]).
In addition to the many books, Wood also
published hundreds of short stories and
articles for adult magazines such as Pen-
dulum, Calga, and Gallery Press during
the decade 1968–1978. During this period
he also managed to direct several porno-
graphic films, and beginning in the 1970s,
according to Rudolph Grey, an unspecified
number of twelve-minute “porn loops” for
Swedish Erotica.
Despite the colossal number of films
and publications, Wood’s final few years
were often desperate. Destitute, starving,
depressed, and an alcoholic, a few days
before he died Wood and his wife, Kathy,
were evicted from their apartment on the
corner of Yucca and Cahuenga in Holly-
wood. As a consequence, many of his per-
sonal belongings, now of historic interest,
were lost. Homeless, he and Kathy moved
into the North Hollywood apartment of
their friend, actor Peter Coe. Drinking
heavily, Wood died in Coe’s apartment
on December 10, 1978. As stated ear-
lier, Wood’s cult reputation began with
the publication of Harry and Michael
Medved’s The Golden Turkey Awards in
1980. Ironically, his dubious designation
as “the Worst Director of All Time” seems
to have been the first step in the rehabilita-
tion of Ed Wood’s reputation; coupled with
Rudolph Grey’s 1992 biography Nightmare
of Ecstasy, the rise of home video (which
made accessible Wood’s films to a larger
audience), and Burton’s 1994 biopic,
Wood’s rehabilitation seems complete.
After Wood’s death, his widow, Kathy
Wood (1922–2006), helped get his unpro-
duced script I Woke Up Early the Day I Died
filmed in 1998. (Certainly Burton’s biopic
helped as well.) As is much of Wood’s out-
put, the film is a mélange of story elements
and themes, including graveyards, death,
burlesque, and transvestism (the protago-
nist, played by Billy Zane, escapes from an
asylum by donning a nurse’s uniform). The
film has since developed a cult following.
Wood’s dubious memoir, Hollywood Rat
Race, written in 1965, was published post-
humously in 1998.
References
Michael Daley and Johan Kugelberg, Ed
Wood’s Sleaze Paperbacks (New York: Boo-
Hooray Gallery, 2011); Rudolph Grey, Night-
mare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D.
Wood, Jr. (Los Angeles: Feral House, 1992);
Arthur Lenning, The Immortal Count: The
Life and Films of Bela Lugosi (Lexington: Uni-
versity Press of Kentucky, 2003).
WOOLVERTON, LINDA (1952–)
American screenwriter, playwright, and
novelist, whose works include the screen-
plays and books of several Disney films and
stage musicals. She was the screenwriter of
the Tim Burton–directed ALICE IN WON-
DERLAND. Linda Woolverton was born in
Long Beach, California, in 1952. After gradu-
ating from high school in 1969, she attended
the California State University, Long Beach,
graduating with a BFA in theater arts in
1973. She then attended the California State
University, Fullerton, where she received

a master’s degree in theater for children in
1976. She subsequently formed a children’s
theater company and began to mentor child
acting in commercials in 1979.
She began working for CBS in 1980,
eventually becoming a programming
executive while also working on her first
novel for young adult readers, Star Wind
(1986). She published her second novel,
also for young adults, Running before the
Wind, in 1987. From 1986 to 1989, she
wrote episodes for animated children’s
shows such as Star Wars: Ewoks, Dennis the
Menace, The Real Ghostbusters, and Chip ’n
Dale Rescue Rangers. On the strength of
her novel Running before the Wind, she
was hired by Disney to write the script for
Beauty and the Beast (1991). The critically
acclaimed film became the first animated
film ever to be nominated for Best Pic-
ture at the Academy Awards, winning the
Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Pic-
ture—Musical or Comedy.
After Beauty and the Beast, Woolver-
ton worked on several projects for Disney,
including the live-action film Homeward
Bound: The Incredible Journey (1993), and
cowrote the screenplay of The Lion King
(1994). She also adapted her own Beauty
and the Beast screenplay as a Broadway
musical, which opened to critical acclaim
in 1994. She was nominated for a Tony
Award for Best Book in a Musical and won
an Olivier Award for Best New Musical. She
later assisted the staging of the Broadway
adaptation of The Lion King, preimered in
1997. She also provided additional story
material for Mulan (1998), and cowrote
the book of the Disney musical Aida, which
opened on Broadway in 2000.
In 2007, she developed the idea for
“a freestyle reimagination and expan-
sion” of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
and Through the Looking-Glass, in which
a mature Alice, about to become an adult,
returns to Wonderland. Producers Suzanne
WORLD OF STAINBOY  n  251
Todd, Jennifer Todd, and Joe Roth took her
screenplay to Disney, and Tim Burton was
attached to direct. After the success of Alice
in Wonderland, Woolverton was invited
to reinvent the screenplay to Maleficent,
a retelling of the story of Sleeping Beauty
from the point of view of the villainess,
Maleficent. The latter film was released in
2014 to great success.
References
“Linda Woolverton,” IMDb, www.imdb.
com/name/nm0941314/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1;
Dylan Callaghan, “Wonder Woman,” Writ-
ers Guild of America, www.wga.org/con-
tent/default.aspx?id=4004.
WORLD OF STAINBOY (2000)
Director: Tim Burton. Writer: Tim Bur-
ton. Executive Producers: Tony Grillo,
Chris Takami, Michael Yanover. Pro-
ducers : Michael Vinver, Miles Horst,
Eric Oldrin. T heme M usic : Danny Elf-
man. Music: Jason Wells. Production
Coordinators: Derek Frey, Gene Doh.
Creative Direction: Tony Grillo, Chris
Takami, Will Amato. A rt D irection :
Will Amato. S upervising A nimators :
Sean Shimoda, Martin Cho. A nima -
tors : David Ing, Will Amato, Jeremy
Berstein, Sean Shimoda, Martin Cho.
S ound D esign : Martin Cho. P roduc -
tion A ssistants : Scott Lowe, Rebecca
Marko, Fahren Feingold. A nimation :
Flinch Studio.
Cast (Voices): Glenn Shadix (Sgt. Glenn
Dale/Bowling Ball Head/Orphanage
Matron/TV Announcer), Lisa Marie
(Match Girl/Stainboy’s Mother/Cracker
Girl), Will Amato (Stainboy’s Father/TV
Announcer), Michael R. Viner (Boy with
Nails in His Eyes).
R unning T ime : 6 episodes, 24 minutes
total. Black and white.
R eleased T hrough : Flinch Studio and
Shockwave.com.
252  n  WORLD OF STAINBOY
A series of six short flash animations writ-
ten and directed by Tim Burton for Macro-
media’s spin-off business, Shockwave.com,
in 2000. The character of Stain Boy (com-
pressed into one word for the flash anima-
tions) is taken from Burton’s book “The
Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy” & Other
Stories (1997). “For some stories you have
to wait for the right medium,” Burton said
at the time. “I think it’s [the Internet] the
perfect forum to tell a sad little story like
this one. Stainboy is a character that doesn’t
do much. . . . He’s a very minimal super-
hero—he’s not saving the city or anything.
He’s just perfect for four-minute anima-
tions.” A few other preadolescent outsid-
ers from Burton’s book appeared in the
cartoons, including Stare Girl, Toxic Boy,
Robot Boy, Match Girl, and the Boy with
Nails in His Eyes. The premise is that Stain-
boy works for Sgt. Glen Dale (voiced by
GLENN SHADIX) of the Burbank Police
Department, with each episode beginning
with the sergeant ordering him to investi-
gate and bring in some figure engaged in
an asocial, disruptive activity. The episodes
vary in length from two minutes, forty-
three seconds (the “Match Girl” episode,
in which Match Girl is voiced by LISA
MARIE) to five minutes, twenty-one sec-
onds (the final episode, in which Stainboy
relives his abandonment as a child and his
early childhood at an orphanage). The six
episodes total approximately twenty-four
minutes.
Burton created a series of drawings,
sketches, and watercolors and brought
them, along with scripts and storyboards,
to Georgia’s Flinch Studio (now Mighty-
pants Media) for translation into the short
Macromedia Flash animations. Originally,
twenty-six episodes were planned, but
only six were ever completed. The motive
behind creating the flash animations was
to develop revenue streams specifically
derived from the web. The hope was to
attract several million Flash plug-in enabled
viewers to the made-for-the-Internet proj-
ect. “It did not succeed,” observes Alison
McMahan, “at least not financially.”
However, several years later, in late
2010, Burton returned to the character as
the basis to create a work of Twitterature,
inviting fans to participate in the creation
of a new Stainboy adventure via Twitter
(@BurtonStory). Burton then developed a
story from the fans’ tweets.
The original six World of Stainboy car-
toons are still available and have continued
to attract a following. The six episodes are
available in HD on YouTube.com and at
TimBurtonCollective.com.
Reference
Scott Smith, “Tim Burton: Dark Prince of
the Web,” RES: The Future of Filmmaking
3, no. 2 (2000): 44–47.
 Y
YOUNG, PETER (CA. 1947–)
Academy Award–winning set decorator
who has won two Academy Awards for
Best Art Direction–Set Decoration for his
work on two films directed by Tim Burton,
BATMAN and SLEEPY HOLLOW. British-
born Peter Young began his career as a set
dresser on the legendary film Performance
(filmed 1968, released 1970), codirected by
Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg. Sub-
sequently, he served in the same capacity
on two films directed by Stephen Weeks, I,
Monster (1971) and Gawain and the Green
Knight (1973). Early films on which he
served as set decorator include John Boor-
man’s Leo the Last (1970) and the contro-
versial Games That Lovers Play (1971). Over
the next decade, he alternated between roles
as set dresser and set decorator on films
such as Russian Roulette (1975), Dracula
(1979), and Out of the Blue (1980). His first
major film as set decorator was Superman II
(1980), followed by The Dark Crystal (1982),
Superman III (1983), and Supergirl (1984).
He served as set decorator for Steve Bar-
ron’s Electric Dreams (1984), about a rivalry
between a man, a woman, and a personal
computer, and Harold Ramis’s Club Para-
dise (1986), starring Robin Williams. He
shared an Academy Award with ANTON
FURST for Best Art Direction–Set Decora-
tion for Batman, and shared a second Acad-
emy Award with RICK HEINRICHS in the
same category for Sleepy Hollow. After serv-
ing as set decorator on Wolfgang Peterson’s
Troy (2004), he again worked with Tim Bur-
ton on CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE
FACTORY (2005).
Reference
“Peter Young,” IMDb, www.imdb.com/
name/nm0949952/?ref_=fn_al_nm_2.
  n  253
 A
Z
ZANUCK, RICHARD (DARRYL)
(1934–2012)
Producer of six films directed by Tim Bur-
ton, beginning with PLANET OF THE APES
(2001). Richard Darryl Zanuck was born in
Los Angeles on December 13, 1934, the son
of the powerful Hollywood mogul Darryl F.
Zanuck (1902–1979), then the production
head of 20th Century Fox. His mother was
the silent film star Virginia Fox (1902–1982).
Richard Zanuck excelled in sports in high
school, later attending Stanford University.
He served in the army as a lieutenant after
his graduation from Stanford. He began his
career in the film industry working for the
20th Century-Fox story department in the
1950s. Zanuck’s first production for Fox was
Compulsion (1959), a fictionalized version
of the infamous Leopold and Loeb murders,
previously dramatized by Alfred Hitchcock
in Rope (1948). In 1962, despite charges of
nepotism, his father named him production
head of 20th Century-Fox. While Richard
Zanuck was production head, the studio
earned 159 Oscar nominations, and three
films—The Sound of Music (1965), Patton
(1970), and The French Connection (1971)—
won Academy Awards for Best Picture.
Nonetheless, Darryl Zanuck fired his son in
1970 after a studio shake-up.
After his firing, he, along with his
friend David Brown, then executive vice
president of creative operations at Fox,
briefly joined Warner Bros. as executives.
254  n 
But the following year, he and Brown
formed their own company, Zanuck/Brown
Productions. The Sting (1973), a caper film
starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford,
was among their first productions, win-
ning the Academy Award for Best Picture
(though they were not listed as its produc-
ers). They then went on to produce Steven
Spielberg’s first theatrical feature film, The
Sugarland Express (1974), and the Spiel-
berg-directed blockbuster, Jaws (1975).
Thereafter, Zanuck and Brown were cred-
ited as producers or executive producers
on more than a dozen films, among them
Sidney Lumet’s The Verdict (1982) and
Ron Howard’s Cocoon (1985). After he and
Brown split up in 1988, Zanuck started the
Zanuck Company and made the hit Driv-
ing Miss Daisy (1989), which was nomi-
nated for nine Academy Awards and won
four, including Best Picture. By winning the
Academy Award for Best Picture, Zanuck
became the only son to duplicate a father’s
Oscar for Best Picture.
Richard Zanuck produced six movies
directed by Tim Burton, beginning with
Planet of the Apes in 2001. Other films were
BIG FISH (2003), CHARLIE AND THE
CHOCOLATE FACTORY (2005), SWEE-
NEY TODD (2007), ALICE IN WONDER-
LAND (2010), and DARK SHADOWS
(2012). Richard Zanuck died of heart
attack at his home in Beverly Hills on July
13, 2012, two months after the release of his

final film with Tim Burton, Dark Shadows.
He was seventy-seven.
References
Steve Chagollan, “Oscar-Winning Pro-
ducer Richard Zanuck Dies at 77,” Variety,
July 13, 2012, variety.com/2012/film/news/
oscar-winning-producer-richard-zanuck-
dies-at-77-1118056567/; Douglas Martin,
ZANUCK, RICHARD  n  255
“Richard Zanuck, Producer of Blockbust-
ers, Dies at 77,” New York Times, July 13,
2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/07/14/
business/media/richard-zanuck-producer-
of-blockbusters-dies-at-77.html?_r=0;
“Richard D. Zanuck,” IMDb, www.imdb.
com/name/nm0005573/; “Richard Zanuck
Obituary,” Guardian, www.theguardian.
com/film/2012/jul/15/richard-zanuck.
 S E L E CT E D BIB L IOG R A PHY
Baecque, Antoine de. Cahiers du Cinema: Tim
Burton. London: Phaidon Press. Rev
updated ed., 2011.
Bassil-Morozow, Helena. Tim Burton: The Mon-
ster and the Crowd: A Post-Jungian Perspec-
tive. New York: Routledge, 2010.
Ferenczi, Aurélien. Masters of Cinema: Tim Bur-
ton. London: Phaidon Press, 2010.
Fraga, Kristin, ed. Tim Burton: Interviews.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2005.
Frey, Derek, Leah Gallo, and Holly Kempf, eds.
The Art of Tim Burton. N.p.: Steeles Pub-
lishing, 2009.
Hanke, Ken. Tim Burton: An Unauthorized
Biography of the Filmmaker. Los Angeles:
Renaissance Books, 1999.
He, Jenny and Ron Magliozzi. Tim Burton. New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009.
Lammers, Tim. Direct Conversations: The Ani-
mated Films of Tim Burton. Kindle edition,
2013.
Lee, Sun Hee Teresa. How to Analyze the Films
of Tim Burton. Edina, MN: Abdo Group,
2011.
McMahan, Alison. The Films of Tim Burton:
Animating Live Action in Contemporary
Hollywood. New York: Continuum, 2005.
McMahon, Jennifer L. The Philosophy of Tim
Burton. The Philosophy of Popular Culture
Series. Lexington: University Press of Ken-
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Odell, Colin and Michelle Le Blanc. Tim Bur-
ton: The Pocket Essential Guide. Harpenden,
England: Pocket Essentials, 2005.
Page, Edwin. Gothic Fantasy: The Films of Tim
Burton. London: Marion Boyars, 2007.
Salisbury, Mark. Burton on Burton. London:
Faber and Faber, 1995.
———. Burton on Burton. 2nd ed. London: Faber
and Faber, 2000.
———. Burton on Burton. 2nd rev. ed. London:
Faber and Faber, 2006.
Smith, Emily. The Tim Burton Handbook: Every-
thing You Need to Know about Tim Burton.
Tebbo, 2012.
Smith, Jim and J. Clive Matthews. Tim Burton.
Virgin Film Series. London: Virgin Books,
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Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, ed. The Works of
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Weishaar, Schuy R. Masters of the Grotesque: The
Cinema of Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, the
Coen Brothers and David Lynch. Jefferson,
NC: McFarland, 2012.
Woods, Paul A. Tim Burton: A Child’s Garden of
Nightmares. Rev. and updated ed. London:
Plexus, 2007.
BY TIM BURTON
Books
The Nightmare before Christmas. New York:
Hyperion, 1993.
“The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy” & Other
Stories. New York: Rob Weisbach Books,
1997.
The Nightmare before Christmas: 20th Anniver-
sary Edition. New York: Disney Press, 2013.
  n  257
258  n  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Forewords, Prefaces, and Introductions
“Artist’s Statement.” In Jenny He and Ron
Magliozzi, Tim Burton. New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 2009, 6.
“Foreword.” In Frank Thompson, Tim Burton’s
Nightmare before Christmas: The Film, The
Art, The Vision. New York: Hyperion, 1993,
8–9.
“Foreword: There’s Going to Be a Wedding.” In
Mark Salisbury, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride:
An Invitation to the Wedding. New York:
Newmarket Press, 2005, 7–9.
“Foreword.” In Mark Salisbury, Sweeney Todd:
The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. London:
Titan Books, 2007, 6.
“Foreword.” In Mark Salisbury, Alice in Won-
derland: A Visual Companion. New York:
Disney Editions, 2010, 7–9.
“Foreword.” In Mark Salisbury, Frankenweenie:
The Visual Companion. New York: Disney
Editions, 2013, 6.
“Foreword.” In Tim Lammers, Direct Conversa-
tions: The Animated Films of Tim Burton.
Kindle Edition, 2013, 1.
“Foreword.” In Leah Gallo, Big Eyes: The Film,
The Art. London: Titan Books, 2015, 5.
“Introduction: What Makes It Big.” In Mat-
thew Rolston, Big Pictures: A Book of Pho-
tographs. New York: Little, Brown, 1991,
11–13.
“Introduction.” In Andrew Kevin Walker, The
Art of Sleepy Hollow. New York: Pocket
Books, 1999, vii–viii.
“Introduction.” In Mark Salisbury, Planet of
the Apes: Re-imagined by Tim Burton. New
York: Newmarket Press, 2001, 9.
“Introduction.” In Mark Salisbury, Dark Shad-
ows: The Visual Companion. London: Titan
Books, 2012, 7.
“Preface.” In Derek Frey, Leah Gallo, and Holly
Kempf, eds. The Art of Tim Burton. N.p.:
Steeles Publishing, 2009, 1.
 I N D EX

3 Women (1977 film), 96
9: 2009 film, 5, 44, 60, 152, 182–85, 192–93;
short film, 183–84
10 (1979 film), 54
The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo (TV), 131
21 Jump Street (TV), 88–89, 103, 156
30 Rock (TV), 148
1408 (2007 film), 12, 146
5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953 musical), 94
A113, 1, 2, 52
Abbate, Allison, 52
ABC Weekend Specials (TV), 193
Abdalov, Victor, 2, 75
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter: 2010 novel,
126; 2012 film, 2–4, 44, 60, 118, 126
Abrams, J. J., 211 video games, 15–16
Abramson, Richard, 237
Absences répétées (Repeated Absences) (film), 209
Acker, Shane, 5, 44, 183–84
Ackerman, Thomas Edward, 5, 6
Adams, Amy, 45–47
Adams, Doris C., 6
Adams, Joey Lauren, 221
The Addams Family (1991 film), 232, 246
Addams Family Values (1993 film), 224
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988
film), 108, 169, 192
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the
8th Dimension (1984), 132
The Adventures of Ford Fairlane (1990 film), 241
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949
film), xii, 6– 8, 155
The Affair of the Necklace (2001 film), 167
Affleck, Ben, 221–22
After Hours (1985 film), 186
The Age of Innocence (1993 film), 108, 192, 211
Agent Cody Banks (2003 film), 11, 146
Aida (Broadway musical), 251
Aladdin (film), 181
Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (1986 film),
9–11, 57, 75, 96, 132
Albertson, Jack, 111, 244
Alexander, Scott, 11–12, 45, 61, 122–23, 146,
182
The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (TV), 142–43
Alfred Hitchcock Presents (TV), 36, 58, 132, 142–
43, 246
Alice (1990 film), 160
Alice in Wonderland: 1903 film, 17; 1933 film,
17; 1951 film, 17; 1966 TV, 17; 2010 film,
xii, 12–16, 18–20, 60, 68–69, 83, 86, 89, 115,
118, 126, 154, 187, 224–25, 247, 250–51, 254;
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865 novel),
13, 16–18, 67, 178, 251
Alice’s Adventures Underground (1864 novel), 16
Alice’s Restaurant (1969 film), 149
Alien (1979 film), 119
Alien: Resurrection (1997 film), 211
Aliens (film), 246
Aliens for Breakfast (1994 film), 246
All about Us (TV), 193
Allen, Irwin, 233
Allen, Rae, 9
Allen, Woody, 152, 160
Allende, Isabel, 211
Allison, Lori Anne, 88
All’s Fair (TV), 147
Altman, Robert, 96
Amazing Stories (TV), 52, 106–7
Amélie (2001 film), 87
Amphigorey (1972 anthology), 125
The Amulet (1979 novel), 168

  n  259
260  n  INDEX

Amurri, Franco, 80 Baker, Rick, 59, 100

And the Ship Sails On (1983 film), 108 Bakshi, Ralph, xi
Andersen, Hans Christian, 125, 169 Balanchine, George, 149
Andrews, Mark, 53 Balch, Antony, 126
Anna Karenina (1948 film), 125 Baldessari, John, 65
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 175 Baldwin, Alec, 37, 205
Apocalypse Now (1979 film), 120 The Ballad of Sandeep (2011 film), 118
Apollo 13 (1995 film), 55 Ballard, Carroll, 212
Apostolof, Stephen C., 249 Ballard, J. G., 208
The Arabian Nights (1974 film), 108, 170 Ballhaus, Michael, 80
Arachnophobia (199 film), 224 Balto (1995 film), 127
Arkin, Alan, 102, 149 Banjoman (film), 237
Armageddon (1998 film), 153 Bardot, Brigitte, 215
Army of Darkness (film), 65 Barrett, Edith, 202
Arquette, Patricia, 99 Barrington, Pat, 249
Arquette, Rosanna, 186 Barris, Chuck, 104
The Art of Tim Burton (book), xiii, 106, 118, 235 Barron, Steve, 253
Arthur, Madeleine, 46 Bartek, Steve, 104–6
Ascension (1998 novel), 203 Bartel, Paul, 112
Ascher, Kenneth, 172 Bartholomew, Freddie, 64
Ash, Rod, 9 Barton Fink (1991 film), 120–21
Ashby, Hal, 122, 175 Basinger, Kim, 25, 205
Asquith, H. H., 68 Batman: 1989 film, xii, 18, 21–26, 30–31, 35, 40,
The Astounding Talents of Mr. Grenade (short 58, 80, 105, 114, 118–21, 124, 126, 133–34,
film), 5 136, 147–48, 154, 169, 175–76, 208, 216, 223,
Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (film), 122 242, 253; TV series, 201; video games, 26–27
Atwood, Colleen, 15, 18–20 Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight (DC Com-
Audrey Rose (1977 film), 149 ics, 1992), 119
August, John (John Meise), 20–21, 48, 86, 115, Batman: The Animated Series (TV), 26
232 Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (DC Comics,
Austen, Jane, 126 1986), 23
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery Batman: The Killing Joke (1988 graphic novel),
(1997 film), 86 23
Auto Focus (2002 film), 12, 146 Batman & Robin (1997 film), 30, 126
Avatar (2009 film), 225 Batman Forever (1995 film), 27–30, 110, 126,
Avery, Tex, 233 147, 208
The Aviator (2004 film), 108, 225 Batman Returns (1992 film), 26, 28, 30–34, 42,
Aykroyd, Dan, 186 58–59, 75, 80, 90–92, 110, 114, 118–20, 122,
124, 126, 132, 134, 147, 153, 171, 174, 181,
B. Boy, 21 193–94, 207–8, 210, 220, 223, 239–42
Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend (1985 film), 57, Battle Born (2012 album), 132
114 Battlefield Earth (2000 film), 224
Back to School (1988 film), 105 Bava, Mario, 132–33, 160, 217, 233
Badham, John, 239 Bay, Michael, 153
Baez, Joan, 237 Beatty, Warren, 105
Bailey, Pearl, 111 Beauty and the Beast: 1991 film, 251; 1994
Bain, Barbara, 152 Broadway musical, 251; fairy tale, 101
Baker, Gordon, 181 Beetlejuice: 1988 film, xi–xii, 5–6, 36–43, 58, 64,
Baker, Joe Don, 164 105, 122, 130, 132, 144, 147, 154, 168, 170–
Baker, Kathy, 102 71, 174, 186, 210, 213–14, 216, 241–42, 246;
 INDEX  n  261

animated series merchandising, 34–35; TV Blanchett, Cate, 69

series, 34–36, 107; video games, 40–41 Blau, Herbert, 65
Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian (screenplay), 41–43, Blended (2014 film), 187
122 Blood and Glitter (unpublished novel), 168
Beetlejuice in Love (screenplay), 42–43, 216 Bloodiest Sex Crimes of History, 250
Begley, Ed, Jr., 29 Bloodthirsty Butchers (1970 film), 227
Beineix, Jean-Jacques, 209 Blow (2001 film), 207
Bekmambetov, Timur, 3–5, 43–44, 60 Blue Hawaii, 249
Belafonte, Harry, 38, 105 Bluth, Don, 111–12
Believe It or Not!, 12, 146 Boardwalk Empire (TV), 150, 225
Bellamy, Ned, 99 Bolognini, Mauro, 192
Belloc, Hilaire, 70 Bollner, Michael, 244
Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970 film), 200 Bond, Christopher G., 227, 229
Bennett, Alan, 17 “Bones” (2006 music video), 53
Beowulf (2004 film), 187 A Book of Nonsense (1846 collection), 102
Berger, Richard Laurence, 44–45, 133, 208 Boorman, John, 208–9, 226, 253
Bernard, Raymond, 225 The Borgias (TV), 192
Bertinelli, Valerie, 10 Bosom Buddies (TV), 208
Best in Show (2000 film), 186 Boulle, Pierre, 195, 198
Beswick, Doug, 64 Boulting, Roy, 237
Beverly Hills Cop II (1987 film), 153, 216 The Bourne Legacy (2012 film), 124
Beyond Our Control (TV), 146 The Bourne Ultimatum (2007 film), 4
Big Eyes (2014 film), 12, 45–48, 61, 87–88, 118, Bower, Campbell, 227
146 Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984 autobiography),
Big Fish: 2003 film, 18, 20, 48–52, 60, 62, 68–69, 70
73, 86, 91, 118, 120–21, 209–10, 231, 240, Bradbury, Ray, 58, 142–43
254; 2013 Broadway musical, 20, 240 Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992 film), 211
Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions (1998 Branagh, Kenneth, 68–69
novel), 20, 49, 240 Brando, Marlon, 89–90
The Big Lebowski (1998 film), 132 Brautigan, Richard, 122
The Big Picture (1989 film), 237 Brave (film), 1
Big Top Pee-Wee (1988 film), 206 The Brave Little Toaster (1987 film), 1, 204–5
Bieman, Nancy, 1 Brazil (1985 film), 169
Bill, Tony, 190 Br’er Rabbit (stories), 127
Bird, Brad (Phillip Bradley Bird), 1, 52–53, Breton, Brooke, 225
106–7, 111 Brewster McCloud (1970 film), 96
The Birdcage (1996 film), 96, 242 The Bride of Frankenstein (1935 film), 113, 117
Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Igno- Bride of the Monster (1955 film), 99, 249
rance) (2014 film), 148, 159 Bridges, Beau, 122,
Biroc, Joseph, 5 Bridges, James, 142–43
Bissette, Stephen, 170 Bridges, Jeff, 122
Black, Jack, 164 Bringing Out the Dead (1999 film), 108
Black, Karen, 237 Brolin, James, 190
Black Beauty (1994 film), 232 The Brood (1979 film), 214
The Black Cauldron (1985 film), 56, 243 Brosnan, Pierce, 164
Black Lace Drag (novel), 250 Brothers in Arms; A Journey from War to Peace
Black Sunday (1960 film), 160, 217, 233 (1987 memoir), 55
Blackley, Kaja, 213 The Brothers Quay, 5, 184
Blade Runner (1982 film), 95, 197 Brown, David, 254
Blake, Quentin, 69, 138 Brown, Jim, 164
262  n  INDEX

Browne, Coral, 202 Captain Sparky vs. the Flying Saucers (2013
Brownlow, Kevin, 225 short), 66, 118
Broyles, William Jr., 54–56, 150 Captains Courageous (1937 film), 64
Bruckheimer, Jerry, 89 Carasik, Cheryl, 242
Buck, Chris, 1, 106 Cardona, René, 93
Buddy (1997 film), 232 Care, Peter, 167
A Bug’s Life (1998 film), 1, 204 Carnal Knowledge (1971 film), 175
Bugsy (1991 film), 120 Carradine, Robert, 9
Bump in the Night (TV), 145 Carrey, Jim, 28
Burkert, Nancy Ekholm, 138 Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), 13,
Burn after Reading (2008 film), 159 16–17, 66–68, 178
Burne-Jones, Edward, 19 Carroll, Willard, 243
Burns, Jack, 172 Cars (2006 film), 1, 204
Burton, Billy Raymond, 68 Carter, Elena Bonham (née Propper de Calle-
Burton, Daniel, xi, 56 jon), 68
Burton, Jean Rae “Rickie” (Erickson), 56, 59, 61 Carter, Helena Bonham, 14, 20, 47, 49, 59–62,
Burton, Nell, 60, 68 68–69, 72, 78, 85, 198, 227
Burton, Richard, 121 Carter, Raymond Bonham, 68
Burton, Russell Clem, 62 Cartwright, Randy, 93, 158
Burton, William Read, 56, 59, 62 Casino (1995 film), 108
Burton on Burton (book), 235 Cassavete, John, 149
Burton Rynearson, Rose (Gibs), 62 Cast Away (2000 film), 55, 187, 224
Buscemi, Steve, 49 The Casual Company (play), 248
Buttram, Pat, 111 The Cat in the Hat (2003 film), 242
Byrds, 237 Catch Me If You Can (2002 film), 224
Cautionary Tales for Children (1898), 70
Cabin Boy (1994 film), 63–65, 92 Cavani, Liliana, 169
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), 170 CBS Summer Playhouse (TV), 193
Cage, Nicolas, 88, 150, 209, 222 Chaffey, Don, 164
Cagney, James, 147 Challenge of the GoBots (TV), 131
Cagney and Lacey (TV), 150 Charles in Charge (TV), 193
Caine, Michael, 177 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: 1964 novel,
Caird, John, 121 69–71, 82, 244; 2005 film, 20, 49, 54, 60,
The CalArts Story (short film), 66 68–69, 71–74, 80, 82, 86–87, 89, 118, 167,
California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), 1, 8, 192–93, 209–10, 244–45, 253–54; video
52, 65–66, 75, 106, 124, 131, 145, 150, 173, games, 74
204–6, 212, 223 Charlie’s Angels (2000 film), 20
Callaway, Trey, 156, 157 Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003 film), 20
Callow, Simon, 140 Charly (1968 film), 149
Cameron, James, 183, 246 Chaplin, Charlie, 90, 191
Cammell, Donald, 253 Chapman, Brenda, 1
Canary (novel), 168 Chasers (1994 film), 124
The Candidate (1972 film), 149 Chasing Amy (1997 film), 221
Candy, John, 186 Chasing Dogma, 222
The Canterbury Tales (1971 film), 108 Cheech & Chong’s Next Movie (1980 film), 205
Canton, Mark, 154 The Chess Player (1927 film), 225
Cantor, Eddie, 189 Chicago (film), 19
Cape Fear (1991 film), 224 Chicken Little (2005 film), 115
Capote, Truman, 90 Child’s Play (1988 film), xxi
Capron, Robert, 116 Child’s Play 2 (1990 film), 80
 INDEX  n  263

Chinatown (1974 film), 175 Conversations with Vincent (unreleased), 75, 201
Chiodo, Edward, 74 Cook, Peter, 17
Chiodo, Stephen, 2, 9, 74–75 Cooper, Alice, 201
Chiodo Brothers, 74–75 Cooper, Dominic, 3
China Beach (TV), 55 Cooper, Hannah, 133
A Christmas Carol (2009 film), 187 Cop Out (2010 film), 222
The Chronicles of Riddick (2004 film), 225 Coppola, Francis Ford, 120, 152, 211
Cimino, Michael, 150 Coraline (2009 film), 151, 212–13
Cinderella (2015 film), 69 Corman, Roger, 122, 175, 201, 217, 238, 245
Citizen Kane (film), 31 The Corn Is Green (1979 film), 2018
City of Ember (2008 film), 232 Corrigan, Robert W., 65
City of Women (1980 film), 108, 192 Corpse Bride: 2005 film, 20, 47, 49, 60, 66, 68,
Claire’s Knee (1970 film), 209 75–80, 86, 89, 109, 118, 126–27, 145, 150–51,
Clark, Emma Chichester, 138 167, 170–71, 183, 192–93, 204, 232; McFar-
Clark, H. Savile, 17 lane Toys, 75–76
Cleopatra (1963 film), 152 Cosby, Bill, 207
Clerks (1994 film), 221 Cosman, Catherine, 2
Clerks: The Animated Series (2002), 222 Cosmopolis (2012 film), 226
Clerks II (2004 film), 222 Costa, Johnny, 130
Clinton, Bill, 131 Cotillard, Marion, 50
Close, Glenn, 165 The Counselor (2012 film), 247
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977 film), Cowper, Frank Cadogan, 19
165 Crane, Bob, 146
Club Paradise (1986 film), 253 Crash (2004 film), 226
Clueless (TV), 193 The Crater Lake Monster (1977 film), 224
Coates, Phyllis, 248 The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954 film),
Cobalt (novel), 168 53, 101
Cocktail Molotov (film), 209 Crichton, Michael, 241
Cocoon (1985 film), 254 Cricket (1975 film), 75
Cocteau, Jean, 104 Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989 film), 152
Code of Silence (1985 film), 187 Crimson Tide (1995 film), 153, 247
Coe, Peter, 250 Criswell, 249
Coen brothers, 120, 132, 159 Critters (1986 films), 75
Cohen, Sacha Baron, 229 Cronenberg, David, 92, 214, 225
Cold Moon over Babylon (1980 novel), 168 Crosby, Bing, 7
Cold Mountain (2003 film), 108 Crosland, Felicity Ann, 83
A Cold Wind in July (2011 story collection), 120 Crossroads Avenger, 249
Cole, Julie Dawn, 244 Crossroads of Laredo (film), 248
Collins, Bart, 94, The Crow (1994 film), 167
The Color of Money (1986 film), 187 The Crow: City of Angels (1996 film), 167
The Color Purple (1985 film), 241 Crowe, Cameron, 59, 215
Comic Book Men (TV), 222–23 Crowe, Russell, 55
Coming Up Rosie (TV), 186 Crudup, Billy, 49, 60
The Company of Wolves (1984 film), 119 Cruise, Tom, 216
Compulsion (1959 film), 254 The Cry Baby Killer (1958 film), 175
Confessions of a Hollywood Starlet, 250 Cry-Baby (1990 film), 89
Connelly, Jennifer, 183 Csokas, Marton, 3, 13
The Conqueror Worm (1968 film), 201 Cuarón, Alfonso, 159, 242
A Conversation with Danny Elfman and Tim Cukor, George, 208
Burton (2011 documentary), 118 Culkin, Macaulay, 186
264  n  INDEX

Culp, Steven, 140 DeBretteville, Peter, 65

The Curse of Frankenstein (1957 film), 233 DeBretteville, Sheila, 65
Curtis, Dan, 60, 86 The Decameron (1970 film), 108
Curtiss, Mark, 9 Del Rey, Lana, 47
Cushing, Peter, 217 Delbonnel, Bruno, 87
Cutler, David W., 106 Demme, Jonathan, 95
Czapsky, Stefan, 34, 80–81 Demme, Ted, 207
Demolition Man (1993 film), 241
Dahl, Felicity, 141 Denman, David, 50
Dahl, Roald, 20, 69–70, 74, 82, 138–39, 141, 212, Dennis the Menace, 251
244, 246 The Dentist (1978 one-act), 121
Daily, Elizabeth, 189 DePalma, Brian, 105, 193
Dallas (TV), 45, 216 Depp, Betty Sue (née Wells), 88
Damon, Matt, 222 Depp, Daniel, 88
Danger Zone (film), 200 Depp, Deborah, 88
Danger Zone II (film), 200 Depp, Elisa Christie, 88
Danger Zone III: Steel Horse War (film), 200 Depp, Lily-Rose Melody, 89
Dangerfield, Rodney, 208 Depp, John Christopher I, 88
Dangerous Liaisons (1988 film), 193, 210 Depp, John Christopher III, 89–90
Danny Elfman & Tim Burton 25th Anniversary Depp, Johnny (John Christopher Depp II),
Music Box, 83–84 8, 11, 14–15, 18, 58– 60, 68–69, 72–73, 77,
Danse Macabre (book), 83 80, 82–84, 86, 88–90, 98, 102, 153, 156, 211,
Dante, Joe, 166, 221 217–18, 220, 227–29, 245–46
Dark Carnival (1947 collection), 142 Der Fledermaus (The Bat), 23
Dark City (1998), 234 Derek, Bo, 54
The Dark Crystal (1982 film), 253 Dern, Bruce, 80
The Dark Knight (2008 film), 4 DeScenna, Linda, 241
Dark Shadows: 2012 film, 3, 11, 18, 20, 49, 60, Desperate Hours (1990 film), 150, 209
69, 84–89, 118, 125–26, 132–33, 154, 193, The Devil Went Down to Georgia (1996 short
254; TV series, 60, 86 film), 145
Dark Town, 213 Devil’s Advocate (1997 film), 156
Darren, James, 158 DeVito, Danny (Daniel Michael DeVito Jr.),
The Dating Game (TV), 205 32–34, 50, 58–59, 90–91, 134, 174, 239
Daviau, Allen, 80 Dewhurt, George, 227
Davis, Geena, 37 Dexter, John, 231
Davis, Sammy, Jr., 147, 158 Di Novi, Denise, 64, 92, 141, 240
Davis, Tom, 187 Dick, Philip K., 211
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014 film), 198 Didbin-Pitt, George, 227
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951 film), 231 Die! Die! My Darling! (1965 film), 245
Day Watch (2006 film), 43–44 Dillon, Matt, 215
Daylight (1996 film), 224 Dimensions of Dialogue (1982 short), 185
Days of Thunder (1990 film), 153, 216 Diner (1982 film), 239
de la Mare, Walter, 134 Disney, xii, 1, 6– 8, 13, 15, 17, 51, 57, 59, 66,
De Niro, Robert, 176 69, 82, 92, 96, 110, 112, 114–15, 128, 133,
Dead Ringers (1988 film), 225–26 135, 157–58, 177–78, 181, 204–5, 212, 223,
Deadly Companion (1980 film), 186 233–35, 238, 243, 250–51
Dean, James, 90 Disney, Roy O., 65
Death in Venice (1971 film), 192 Disney, Walt, 1, 2, 7, 56, 65
Death of a Salesman (play), 51 Disney Animation Studios, 145
Death Riders (1994 film), 200 Disney Company, 52
 INDEX  n  265

Disney Interactive Beijing, 1 Earthquake (1974 film), 233

Disney Interactive Studios, 15–16 Eastwood, Clint, 122
Disney Studios, 8 Eastern Promises (2007 film), 226
Disney Studio Showcase, 128 Easy Rider (1969 film), 175
Diva (1982 film), 209 Ebert, Roger, 30, 51, 73, 80, 141, 166, 181, 184–
The Divine Nymph (1975 film), 192 85, 199
Do the Right Thing (1989 film), 231 Ed Wood (1994 film), 11, 18, 46, 47, 59, 61, 73,
Doc and Merle Watson, 237 80, 83, 86, 89, 92, 95–100, 105, 122, 146,
Doctor of Doom: 1963 film (Las luchadoras contra 152–53, 160, 174, 182, 214, 217, 220, 231,
el médico asesino, “Wrestling Women vs. the 247–48
Killer Doctor”), 93; 1980 short film, 92–93, Edel, Uli, 80
204–5 Edie: An American Biography (1982 oral biogra-
Dog Day Afternoon (1975 film), 149 phy), 182
Dogma (1999 film), 222 Edward Scissorhands (1990 film), 18–19, 58, 60,
Don Juan DeMarco (1995 film), 89 64, 70, 75, 80, 86, 89, 92, 100–103, 105, 114,
Donahue, Phil, 131 132, 134, 136, 170–71, 174, 201–2, 210–11,
Donner, Richard, 193 232, 242
Donnie Brasco (film), 220 Eggleston, Ralph, 106
D’Onofrio, Vincent, 100 Eisner, Michael, 114, 246
The Doubtful Guest (1957 book), 125 Eisner, Will, 131
Douglas, Michael, 90, 209 El grito de la muerte (The Living Coffin) (1959
Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel), 56–57, 93–95, film), 93
123, 160, 178, 180–81, 237 El vampiro sangriento (Bloody Vampire) (1963
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worry- film), 93
ing and Love the Bomb (1964 film), 166 Electric Dreams (1984 film), 253
Dracula (1979 film), 253 The Elementals (1981 novel), 168
Dragonheart (1996 film), 224 The Elephant Man (1980 film), 93
Dragonwyck (1946 film), 201 Elfman, Blossom (née Bernstein), 103
Drake, Frances, 133, Elfman, Danny (Daniel Richard Elfman), 19–20,
Drama of the Rich (1974 film), 192 28, 35, 38, 52, 78, 83, 86, 103–6, 166, 180–81,
Dreams of Flesh and Sand (1988 novel), 203 191, 214
Dreesen, Tom, 208 Elfman, Milton, 103
Dreyfuss, Richard, 140 Elfman, Richard, 103–4
Drive, He Said (1971 film), 176 Ellenshaw, Harrison, 64
Driving Miss Daisy (1989 film), 254 Elliott, Bob, 63
Duffield, Tom, 95–96 Elliott, Chris, 63–64
Dunaway, Faye, 89 The Emerald Forest (1984 film), 209
Duncan, Kenne, 249 Empire of the Sun (1987 film), 208
Duncan, Lindsay, 13 Empson, William, 17
Duncan, Michael Clarke, 198 Enemy of the State (1998 film), 153
Duncan, Sandy, 111–12 Engel, Jann K., 231
Dune (1984 film), 208, 239 Engel, Jules, 65–66
Dunne, Griffin, 144, 186 England, Nicholas, 65
DuPrau, Jeanne, 232 Entourage (TV), 152
Durning, Charles, 172 Entrapment (1999 film), 56
Duvall, Shelley, 9, 57, 75, 96, 206 Ephron, Delia, 234–35
Duvivier, Julien, 125 Ephron, Nora, 235
Erickson, Alpha Jean, 61
early films, 97 Erickson, Raymond, 61
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956 film), 164 Eriksen, Dan, 149
266  n  INDEX
Ernest Scared Stupid (1991 film), 75
Estevez, Emilio, 105
Estrada, Luis, 159
Etranges Libellules, 15–16
Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879), 67
Everyone Needs a Hobby (fanzine), 105
Evil Dead II (1987 film), 220
Excalibur (1981 film), 208
Exile (1990 film), 156
Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014 film), 247
Explorers (1985 film), 166
Exposure (TV), 161
Eyes of Laura Mars (1978 film), 149
The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989 film), 193
Face Off (TV series), 174
Faces of the Enemy (1987 documentary), 55
Faerie Tale Theatre, 75, 96
Fairchild, Morgan, 190
The Fall (2006 film), 124
Family (TV), 150
“Family Dog”: TV episode, 52, 106–7; TV series,
107; video game, 108
Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009 film), 66
Fargo (1996 film), 132
Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982 film), 215
The Fatal Lozenge: An Alphabet (1960 book), 125
Fatherland (TV), 224
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998 film), 167
Feldman, Corey, 111
Fellini, Federico, 108, 192
Fenn, Sherilyn, 88
Fenton, Edward, 70
Fernandez, Richard, 231
Ferretti, Dante, 108, 228
Feury, Peggy, 193
A Few Good Men (1992 film), 177
Field of Dreams (1989 film), 120
Fielding, Xan, 195
Fields, W. C., 17
Fight Club (film), 167
Filpi, Carmen, 189
The Final Countdown (1980 film), 119
Final Curtain, 249–50
Fincher, David, 167
Finding Nemo (film), 1, 106
Finding Neverland (2004 film), 89
“The Finger” (folktale), 77, 109, 204
Finney, Albert, 49, 77
Fiorentino, Linda, 186
Fire with Fire (1986 film), 216
First Born (1983 film), 232
Fishing with George (film), 134
Fitzpatrick, C. C., 194
Fitzpatrick, Catherine A., 2
Five Easy Pieces (1970 film), 175
Flags of Our Fathers (2006 film), 56
Flashback (1990 film), 80
Flattery, Tim, 110
Fleming, Victor, 64
The Flintstones (TV), 127
The Fly: 1958 film, 201; opera, 215
Fonda, Bridget, 215
Fonda, Peter, 175
For Your Consideration (2006 film), 186
Forbidden Planet (1956 film), 231
Forbidden Zone (1980 film), 104
Ford, John, 3
Foreman, Michael, 69
Forman, Miloš, 176
Forrester, C. S., 82
Forster, E. M., 68
Forsyth, Bill, 64
The Four Seasons (1981 film), 149
Fox, Michael J., 164
Fox, Virginia, 254
The Fox and the Hound: 1967 novel, 110; 1981
film, 56, 110–12, 204, 212, 243
Franken, Al, 187
Frankenberger, Susan, 157
Frankenstein: 1818 novel, 101, 170, 183; 1931
film, 113, 133, 219, 238
Frankenweenie: 1984 film, xii, 57–58, 96, 112–
14, 132–33, 206, 208, 235; 2012 film, 5–6, 9,
20, 44–45, 47, 49, 57, 60–61, 66, 86, 114–18,
132–33, 152, 170–71, 187, 208, 211, 238
Frears, Stephen, 193, 210
Freejack (1992 film), 124
The French Connection (1971 film), 254
Frey, Derek, 118, 236
Frid, Jonathan, 86
Friends (TV), 215
The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973 film), 149
From Dusk Till Dawn (1996 film), 224
From Hell (2001 film), 89
From Here to Eternity (1953 film), 54
Frozen (film), 106
Fry, Jordan, 72
Full House (TV), 208
Full Metal Jacket (1987 film), 119
 INDEX  n  267

Fuller, Dolores, 248–49 Glover, Crispin, 19, 183

Fun and Fancy Free (1947), 7 Go (1999 film), 20
Fuqua, Antoine, 156 Go, Baby, Go (screenplay), 122
Furcillo, Donald, 175 Goin’ South (1978 film), 176
Furst, Anton (Anthony Francis Furst), 26, 118– Going Berserk (1983 film), 92
19, 253 Going Solo (1986 autobiography), 83
Futurama (TV), 106 The Golden Compass (2007 film), 121
Golden Needles (1980 novel), 168
Galland, Antoine, 9 The Golden Turkey Awards, 182, 247, 250
The Gamber (1974 film), 149 Goldenthal, Elliot, 28
Gambon, Michael, 218 Goldman, Max, 54
Game 6 (2005 film), 148 The Gong Show (TV), 205
Game of Thrones (TV), 225 Good Will Hunting (1998 film), 105, 222
Games That Lovers Play (1971 film), 253 Goodtime Girls (TV), 208
Gance, Abel, 225 Gordon, Alex, 249
Gangs of New York (2002 film), 108 Goretta, Claude, 209
Gardner, Craig Shaw, 120 Gorey, Edward (Edward St. John Gorey), xii, 56,
Gardner, Tony, 64 70, 86, 94, 124–25, 169, 180, 234
Garr, Teri, 186 Gossip (2000 film), 200
Garris, Mick, 157 Gough, Michael, 25, 33, 78, 125–26, 220
The Gashlycrumb Tinies (1963), 70, 86, 125, 169 Graham, Katharine, 55
Gassner, Dennis, 120–21 Grahame, Kenneth, 7
Gassner, Ken, 120 Grahame-Smith, Seth (Seth Jared Greenberg),
Gawain and the Green Knight (1973 film), 253 2– 4, 20, 44, 86, 126, 127
Geffen, David, 37, 154 Grangel, Carlos (Carlos Grangel Gómez),
Gems, Jonathan (Malcolm Frederick), 24, 41, 127
59, 121–23, 160, 164 Grant, Cary, 17
Gems, Pam, 121 Grant, Mary, 202
Gent, Andy, 117 Grant, Richard E., 77–78
George, Melissa, 157 Gravity (2013 film), 159
Geronimi, Clyde, 17 Grease 2 (1982 film), 193
Get a Life (TV), 64 The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965 film), 152
Get Carter (1971 film), 225 Green, Eva, 85–86
Get Smart (TV), 201 Green Eggs and Ham (1960 book), 93
Ghost Rider (2007 film), 225 Greengrass, Paul, 4
Ghostbusters II (1989 film), 132 The Gremlins (1943 story), 82
Giaimo, Michael, 1 Gremlins (1984 film), 75, 166
The Giant Zlig (children’s book), 56, 123 Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990 film), 166
Gidget (1959 film), 157–58 Grey, Rudolph, 182, 248–50
Gieseke, Lena (Lena Guimont), 58, 123–24, 160 Grier, Pam, 164
Gilliam, Terry, 67, 169 Griffi, Giuseppe Patroni, 192
Gilroy, Dan(iel Christopher), 124, 222, 224 Griffith, Don, 8
Gilroy, Frank D., 124 Grimm Brothers, 57, 129, 134
Gilroy, John, 124 Grobet, Xavier Pérez, 159
Gilroy, Tony, 124 Guber, Peter, 22
Ginger and Fred (1986 film), 108 Guest, Christopher, 186, 237
Girl, Interrupted (1999 film), 211 Guggenheim, Charles, 5
Gladiator (film), 55 Guillaume, Robert, 50
The Gladiators (1969 film), 225 Gunn, Thom, 224
Glen or Glenda (1953 film), 247–48 Gunning, Tom, 39
268  n  INDEX

Haas, Lukas, 164–65 Hegedus, James, 231

Hackford, Taylor, 156 Heinrichs, Rick, 8–9, 56–57, 59, 75, 87–88, 131–
Haigh, Nancy, 120 32, 158, 178, 212, 221–23, 234, 238, 243, 253
Haim, Corey, 210 Hell’s Bells (1929), xii
Haley, Jackie Earle, 85 Hellman, Monte, 175
Hall, Anthony Michael, 102 Help! (1965 film), 175
Hall, Jerry, 25 Henry and June (1991 film), 210
The Hallelujah Trail (1965 film), 152 Henry VIII and His Six Wives (1972 film), 225
Hamada, Terrey, 157 Henson, Jim, 172–73
Hamilton, Nigel, 55 Hepburn, Audrey, 23
Hamlet (1990 film), 108 Hepworth, Cecil M., 17
Hamm, Sam, 23–24, 121, 154, 241 “Here with Me” (2012 music video), 132–33,
Hammett (1982 film), 120 211
Hanke, Ken, xi–xii, 4, 28–29, 75, 147, 160, 222, Herrmann, Bernard, 142
242, 245 Hervey, Jason, 190
Hanks, Tom, 55, 208 Heston, Charlton, 59, 197
Hansel and Gretel (1982 film), 2, 9, 57, 75, 128– Hickey, William, 179
30, 132–33, 212, 235, 238 Hickson, Julie, 22, 56–58, 96, 133–34, 232, 235
Hansen, Valda, 249 The Hidden Face (Jailbait) (1954 film), 249
Hannah, Jack, 1, 66 High Spirits (1988 film), 119
Happy Campers (2001 film), 241 Highmore, Freddie, 72, 245
Harbormaster (TV series), 152 Hill Street Blues (TV), 156
A Hard Day’s Night (1964 film), 175 Hiller, Arthur, 149
Harris, Jon, 189 Hillier, Jim, 26
Harris, Richard, 237 Hingle, Pat, 24
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009 Hinton, S. E., 120
film), 87 A History of New York (1809 book), 137
Harry Potter films, 54, 69 History’s Mysteries (TV), 126
Harryhausen, Ray, 64, 164 Hitchcock, Alfred, 80, 143, 152, 249, 254
Hartman, Phil (Philip Edward Hartmann), 130– The Hitcher (1986 film), 120
31, 191, 205, 206, 237 The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012 film),
Haskin, Byron, 164 214
Hathaway, Anne, 14 The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014
The Hawkline Monster (1974 novel), 122 film), 215
He, Jenny, xiii, 232 The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013
Head (1968 film), 175 film), 215
Head Over Heels (Chilly Scenes of Winter) Hoffa (1992 film), 59, 91, 134–35
(1979/1982 film), 241 Hoffman, Dustin, 122
The Headless Horseman (1922 film), 155 Hoffman, Michael, 148
Heard, Amber, 90 Hoffmann, Heinrich, 70
Heard, John, 186 Hollywood Chewing Gum commercial, 135
Hearn, George, 229–30 Hollywood Rat Race (memoir), 250
Heart like a Wheel (1983 film) Hollywood Squares (TV), 201
Heart of Steel (film), 241 Holton, Mark, 189
Heartburn (1986 film), 176, 186 Home Alone (1990 film), 186
Heath, Daniel, 47 Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992 film), 186
Heathcote, Bella, 85–86 Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey (1993
Heathers (1988 film), 92, 210, 240–41 film), 232, 251
Heckering, Amy, 192 Homeward Bound II: Lost in San Francisco (1996
Hee, T., 1, 66 film), 134

Hooks, Jan, 191
Hootkins, William, 25
Hope and Glory (1987 film), 209
Hopper, Dennis, 175
Horowitz, Michael, 210
Horror Hospital (1973 film), 126
The Horse’s Mouth (1958 film), 245
House of Dark Shadows (1970 film), 86
House of Haunted Hill (1959 film), 201
The House of the Spirits (film), 211
The House of Usher: 1960 film, 122, 238; 1989
film, 122, 201
House of Wax (1953 film), 201, 238
Howard, Rance, 98
Howard, Ron, 55
How the Grinch Stole Christmas!: 1957 poem, 57,
95, 178, 180–81; 1966 film, 94–95, 180
Howard, Ron, 254
Hud (1963 film), 82
Hudson Hawk (1992 film), 153, 241
The Hudsucker Proxy (1994 film), 120
Hughes, Howard, 108
Hughes, Ted, 52
Hughes Brothers, 105
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (novel), 101
The Hunger Games film franchise, 174
Hunt, Linda, 215
Hunter, Tim, 238
Hurt, John, 121
Husbands (1970 film), 149
Hussein, Waris, 225
hypersemioticization, 189
I, Monster (1971 film), 253
I Am Legend (novel), 201
I Go Pogo (Pogo for President) (film), 2, 75
I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998
film), 156
I Woke Up Early the Day I Died (film), 250
Ibbetson, Arthur, 245
Idle, Eric, 17
Iggy Pop, 167
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009
film), 169
In Cold Blood (1965 film), 90,
The In Crowd (1988 film), 150, 209
In the Director’s Chair: The Man Who Invented
Edward Scissorhands (1990 TV special), 136
The Incredibles (2004 film), 53, 106
Inside Llewyn Davis (2013 film), 87
INDEX  n  269
intertexual, 86
Interview with the Vampire (1994 film), 210
Into the Woods (2014 film), 121
The Iron Giant (1999 film), 52
Ironweed (1987 film), 176
The Irony of Fate (1971 film), 44
The Irony of Fate: The Continuation (2007 film),
44
Irving, Washington, xii, 7, 136–37, 154, 217
It Happened Here, 225
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (TV series), 91
It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966
film), 95, 181
“The Jabberwocky” (1871 poem), 67
Jack’s Life (1995 biography), 175
Jackie Brown (1997 film), 147
Jackson, Michael, 73
Jackson, Peter, 5, 214–15
Jackson, Wilfred, 17
Jacobs, Tracey, 88
Jacques, Faith, 69
James, Henry, 68
James and the Giant Peach: 1961 novel, 82,
138–39, 141, 212; 1996 film, 92, 139–42, 145,
150–51, 204
“The Jar”: 1944 short story, 142–43; TV episode,
36, 58, 132, 142, 168, 246
Jarhead (2005 film), 56
Jason and the Argonauts (1963 film), 53, 164
Jaws (1975 film), 86, 254
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001 film), 222
The Jerk (1979 film), 149
Jersey Girl (2003 film), 221
Jesus People (film), 2
Jesus Rides Out (1978 one-act), 121
Jewel of the Nile (1985 film), 150, 209
JFK: Reckless Youth (1993 book), 55
John Adams (TV), 224
Johnny Dangerously (1984 film), 147
Johnson, Mike, 145
Johnson, Tor, 249
Johnston, Ollie, 111, 243
Jolie, Angelina, 211
Jones, Brian Jay, 173
Jones, James Earl, 10–11
Jones, Jeffrey, 37, 98
Jones, O-Lan, 164
Jones, Terry, 167, 222
Jones, Tommy Lee, 28
270  n  INDEX

Jordan, Neil, 119, 210 Kroger, T. Jeanette, 123

Journey to the Center of the Earth (1989 film), Kubrick, Stanley, 54, 96, 119, 166, 176
224 Kundun (1997 film), 108
The Joy of Stress (1983 book), 192 Kurtzman, Harvey, 131
Juhl, Jerry, 172 Kurys, Diane, 209
The Jungle Book (film), 114 Kushner, Donald, 243
Jungle Fever (1991 film), 231
La Planète des Singes (1963 novel), 195–96
Kahl, Milt, 52 La provinciale (film), 209
Kane, Bob, 30 La Reine Margot (Queen Margot) (1995 film),
Kaprow, Allan, 65 210
Karaszewski, Larry, 11–12, 45, 61, 123, 146, 182, La Traviata (opera), 192
240 Lady Jane (1986 film), 68
Katleman, Michael, 157 The Lady of Shalott (1833 poem), 103
Katzenberg, Jeffrey, 154, 246 Ladyhawke (1985 film), 193
Kaufman, Andy, 11, 205 The Ladykillers (2004 film), 121
Kaufman, Philip, 210 Lamorisse, Albert, 21
Kazan, Elia, 152, 176 Lancaster, Burt, 54,
Keane, Glen, 56, 111–12, 212, 243 Landau, Juliet, 98–99
Keane, Margaret, 12, 45–46, 61, 88, 146 Landau, Martin, 59, 98, 100, 152–53, 183,
Keane, Walter, 12, 45–46, 146 219
Keaton, Buster, 90, 191 Landis, John, 173
Keaton, Michael, 6, 18, 25, 28, 32, 34, 37, 42, 58, Lange, Jessica, 50
126, 146–49 Lansbury, Angela, 230
Keene, Tom, 248 Lanzisero, Rosalie, 158
Kellison, Phil, 151 LaPorte, Steve, 174
Kelly, David, 72 Larson, Eric, 212
Kemper, Victor J., 149 Lasseter, John, 1, 52–53
Kerr, Deborah, 54 Last Action Hero (film), 132
Kesey, Ken, 90, 176 The Last Detail (1973 film), 175
Kidman, Nicole, 28 Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989 film), 80
Kill, Baby, Kill (1966 film), 133 The Last Man on Earth (1964 film), 201
Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988 film), 75 Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1972 film), 149
Killers, 53–54, 132–133 The Last Tycoon (1976 film), 176
Kilmer, Val, 28, 30 The Last Word (film), 237
King, Eddie, 175 Late Night with David Letterman, 64, 206, 237
King, George, 227 Laura (1944 film), 201
King, Loretta, 249 The Lawnmower Man (1992 film), 167
King, Stephen, 12, 89, 96, 146, 150, 155, 168, 209 The League of Extraordinary Gentleman (2003
“King and Octopus” (1978 test fragment), 150 film), 224
The King of Marvin Gardens (1972 film), 175 Lear, Edward, 17, 93, 102, 237
Kingdom of the Spiders (1977 film), 174 Leary, Timothy, 210
The King’s Speech (2010 film), 69 Leave Her to Heaven (1946 film), 201
Klein, Calvin, 160 Lebenzon, Chris, 153–54
Knickerbacher, Diedrich, 137 Lee, Bonni, 154
Konner, Lawrence, 55, 150, 208–9 Lee, Christopher, 69, 73, 77, 178, 218, 220, 245
Korty, John, 212 Lee, Spike, 231
Kozachik, Peter, 150–51, 181 Leeves, Jane, 140
Krofft, Marty, 12, 146 Lefler, Doug, 1
Krofft, Sid, 12, 146 The Legend of Billie Jean (1985 film), 150, 209

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: short film, 7–8;
tale, xii, 7, 136–37, 154–56
Lehmann, Michael, 153, 240–41
Leighton, Eric, 181
Lemkin, Jonathan, 156, 200, 222
Lemley, Jim, 2, 44
Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events
(2004 film), 132
Leo the Last (1970 film), 253
Leonard, Elmore, 147
Leone, Sergio, 192
Les Mille et Une Nuits (The Thousand and One
Nights), 9
Les Misérables (2012 film), 69
Let’s Get Lost (1988 film), 160
Lethal Weapon 4 (1998 film), 156
Letterman, David, 64
Leven, Boris, 187
Levinson, Barry, 120, 246
Levy, Michael R., 55
Lewis, Fiona, 144
Lewis, Jerry, 189, 191
Lewitzky, Bella, 65
Liao, James Hiroyuki, 116
Liddell, Alice, 16, 67
Liddell, Henry, 16, 67
The Life before This (1999 film), 186
Life of Brian (1979 film), 169, 222
liminal, 23, 171
Linklater, Richard, 211
The Lion King: 1997 Broadway musical, 251;
film, 107, 251
The Lion King 2: Simba’s Pride (film), 107
Lippa, Andrew, 20
Lisberger, Steven, 243
Lisztomania (1975 film), 225–26
Little House on the Prairie (TV), 150
“The Little Match Girl” (story), 125
The Little Mermaid (film), 106, 112
A Little Princess (1995 film), 96, 242
The Little Shop of Horrors (1960 film), 175
The Little Vampire (2000 film), 246
Little Women (1994 film), 211
Live and Let Die (film), 22
Lloyd, Edward, 227
Lloyd, Norman, 142
Lo Schiavo, Francesca, 108
Local Hero (1983 film), 64
Lohman, Alison, 50
Lolita (1962 film), 53–54
INDEX  n  271
The Lone Ranger (2013 film), 69, 89
The Lonely Guy (1984 film), 149
Looker (1981 film), 241
Lord of the Rings (1978), xi
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
(2001 film), 214
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
(2003 film), 5, 214
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002
film), 214
The Lord of the Rings Symphony, 215
The Lords of Salem (2012 film), 161
Lorenzo’s Oil (1992 film), 187
Lorre, Peter, 132–33
The Lost Boys (1987 film), 96, 174, 241
Lost in Oz (proposed TV series), 156–57
Lou Grant (TV), 45
Love in the Afternoon (1972 film), 209
Lovrien, Marshall, 5
Luau (1982 film), 92–93, 157–58, 204–5
Lubezki, Emmanuel (Emmanuel Lubezki Mor-
genstern, “Chivo” Lubezki), 158–59
Lubezki, Muni, 159
Lucas (1986 film), 210
Lucas, George, 151
Lugosi, Bela, 248–49
Lukyanenko, Sergei, 43
Lumet, Sidney, 254
Lumley, Joanna, 77, 140
Luske, Hamilton, 17
Lutz, Adelle, 38
Lynch, David, 40, 93, 208
Lynde, Paul, 208
Mackendrick, Alexander, 65,
MacLaine, Shirley, 176
Mad Love (1935 film), 132–33
Magnuson, Ann, 64
Maher, Joseph, 10
Make Mine Music (1946 film), 7
A Malady of Magicks (1986 novel), 120
Malcolm X (1992 film), 231
Maleficent (2014 film), 225, 251
Malick, Terence, 159
Mallrats (1995 film), 221
Man on the Moon (1999 film), 11, 146
The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001 film), 121
The Man with the Golden Gun (film), 22
The Man with Two Brains (film), 237
Manet, David, 134
272  n  INDEX

Mankiewicz, Tom, 22 Medea (1969 film), 108, 192,

Mannix, Daniel P., 110 Medved, Harry, 182, 247, 250
Mapplethorpe, Robert, 160 Medved, Michael, 182, 247, 250
Marceau, Marcel, 191 Meet the Hollowheads (1989 film), 224
Marco, Paul, 249 “The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy” & Other
Marie, Lisa (Lisa Marie Smith), 47, 59, 160–61, Stories (1997 children’s book), xii, 59, 125,
173, 234, 252 169–70, 234, 252
Margolyes, Miriam, 140 Melniker, Benjamin, 22–23
The Marrying Man (1991 film), 205 Melody (1971 film), 225
Mars Attacks!: 1996 film, xii, 11, 18, 59, 91, 118, Memoirs of a Geisha (film), 20
121–23, 160–67, 174–75, 177, 222, 225–26, Memoirs of a Midget (film), 134
231; trading cards, 122, 163, 231 Memories with Food at Gipsy House (1991 auto-
Martin, Steve, 149, 237 biography), 83
Marx Brothers, 12, 146 Men in Black (1997 film), 96, 105, 239, 242
Mary (TV), 147 Men in Black II (2002 film), 239
Mary Poppins (1964 film), 65–66 Men in Black 3 (2012 film), 239
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994 film), 68 Mendes, Sam, 121
Maschwitz, Stu, 20 Mercury Rising (1998 film), 150, 209
A Masked Ball (opera), 192 Mermaids (1990 film), 211
Mason, Tom, 249 Meson, Anne, 135
The Masque of the Red Death (1964 film), 201 A Midsummer Night’s Dream: 1967 film, 149;
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the opera, 23
World (2004 film), 225 Mighty Joe Young (1998 film), 150, 209
Matheson, Richard, 201 A Mighty Wind (2003 film), 186
Mathieson, John, 88 Miller, Arthur, 51
Matilda (novel), 138 Miller, Frank, 23
Matinee (1993 film), 221 Miller, Jonathan, 17
Matlock, Glen, 167 Miller, Jonny Lee, 85
Maxwell, Jenny, 249 Miller, Ron, 114
McAnuff, Des, 52 Miller’s Crossing (1990 film), 120
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971 film), 96 Milligan, Andy, 227
McCanlies, Tim, 52 Milton, John, 86
McDowell, Alex, 167–68 Minghella, Anthony, 108
McDowell, Michael (McEachern), 36–37, 58, Minkoff, Rob, 1, 106
142–43, 168–70, 246 Minority Report (2002 film), 167
McEuen, Bill, 237 Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
McGibbon, Josann, 115 (film), 87–88
McGilligan, Patrick, 175 Missing (2012 film), 200
McGinnis, Charlotte, 205 Mission: Impossible (TV), 152
McGory, Matthew, 49 Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol (film), 53
McGrath, Gulliver, 85 The Missouri Breaks (1976 film), 176
McGregor, Ewan, 49 Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (TV), 130, 147
McKay, Adam, 147 Mo’ Better Blues (1990 film), 231
McKeown, Charles, 24, 169 Mollo, Andrew, 225
McLeod, Norman Z., 17 Mona Lisa Smile (2003 film), 150, 209
McMahan, Alison, xiii, 163, 199, 238, 252 Monkeybone (2001 film), 151, 213
McMahon, Ed, 131 the monster, 170–71
McPherson, Scott Christopher, Jr., 49 Monster House (2006 film), 193
Me, Natalie (1969 film), 149 Monsterfest with Tim Burton, 59
Me and the Boys (TV), 208 Monsters, 11
 INDEX  n  273

Monsters, Inc. (film), 106 Newman, Sybil, 55

Moonraker (1979 film), 119 NewsRadio (TV), 131
Moore, Alan, 23 Nichols, Mike, 175, 186
Moore, Bill, 1, 66 Nicholson, Ethel May Rhoads, 175
Moore, Clement Clarke, 93, 178, 237 Nicholson, John (“Jack”) Joseph, 25–26, 58, 96,
Moore, Dudley, 54 122, 134, 164, 166, 175–77, 186, 193
Moore, Duke, 249 Nicholson, June Frances, 175
Moorhead, Jean, 249 Nickerson, Denise, 244
Moretz, Chloë Grace, 85 “The Night before Christmas” (poem), 178, 237
Morgan, Judith, 180 Night of Dark Shadows (1971 film), 86
Morgan, Neil, 180 Night of the Ghouls (a.k.a. Revenge of the Dead),
Mork & Mindy (TV), 206 249
Morris, David, 72 Night Shift (1982 film), 147
Morris, Errol, 80 The Night the Banshee Cried, 249–50
Mosier, Scott, 222 Night Watch (2004 film), 43
Mr. Mom (1983 film), 149 Nightcrawler (2014 film), 124
Mrs. Doubtfire (1993 film), 174 Nightmare (1993 exhibition), 173
Mulan (1998 film), 251 The Nightmare before Christmas: 1982 poem,
Mulan II (film), 107 177–78; 1993 film, xii, 57, 59, 79, 92–95,
Mundviller, Jean-Pierre, 225 105–6, 114, 140, 145, 150–51, 168, 170–71,
Muni, Paul, 147 173, 177–81, 186, 204, 207, 212–14, 232, 238
The Muppet Movie (1979 film), 172–73 Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward
The Muppet Show (TV), 172 D. Wood, Jr. (oral biography), 182, 248, 250
Murch, Walter, 212 A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984 film), 88
Murdoch, Rupert, 55, A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child
Murphy Brown (TV), 207 (1989 film), 224
Murray, K. Gordon, 93 Nimoy, Leonard, 9, 11
The Museum of Unnatural History (1994 exhibi- The Nines (2007 film), 20
tion), 173 Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984 film), 121
Musker, John, 1 The Ninth Gate (1999 film), 89
My Night at Maud’s (1969 film), 209 Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, 237
My Science Project (1985 film), 114 Nolan, Christopher, 4
My Year (1993 autobiography), 83 Nolan, Jeanette, 111
Mystery! (TV), 125, 201 Norris, Chuck, 187
Mystery Men (1999 film), 207 North by Northwest (1959 film), 152
The No-Sex Handbook (1990 book), 192
Naked Lunch (1991 film), 226 Nothing Personal (1980 film), 186
Naked Robots (play), 121 The Nun’s Story (1959 film), 23
The Name of the Rose (1986 film), 108 Nunn, Alice, 189
Napoleon (1927 film), 225 Nurmi, Maila, 249
National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983 film), 149 Nutcracker: The Motion Picture (1986 film), 212
Neal, Patricia, 71, 82 The Nutty Professor (film), 189
Nebbia, Michael, 149
Neill, Ve (Mary Flores), 34, 100, 174 O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000 film), 120
Nel, Philip, 93–94, 180 O’Connor, Ken, 1, 66
Nelson, Hailey Anne, 49 O’Donnell, Chris, 28–29
Nevil, Robbie, 167 Of East and West, 216
The New World (2005 film), 159 Oggi, domani, dopodomani (Today, Tomorrow,
Newman, Laraine, 144 and the Day after Tomorrow) (1965 film), 108
Newman, Paul, 82, 254 Ogorodnikov, Alexander, 2
274  n  INDEX

Oh God! (1977 film), 149 Patton (1970 film), 254

O’Hara, Catherine, 37–38, 116, 179–80, 186–87, The Pee-Wee Herman Show (TV), 131, 205–7
242 Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985 film), xi–xii, 19,
O’Hara, Karen, 15, 187 22–23, 36–37, 58, 64, 75, 83, 104–5, 130–
Oliver, Barret, 112–13 33, 143, 149, 153–54, 166, 188–92, 205–7,
Oliveri, Robert, 102 236–37
Olympic Trials: A Chick Hazzard Mystery, 131 Pee-Wee’s Playhouse (TV), 131, 206–7, 237
O’Malley, J. Pat, 249 Penn, Arthur, 149, 176
Omdahl, Brynn, 131 Penny, Nikki, 54
Omen, Judd, 189 Penny Candy (1970), 70
On the Edge (1985 film), 80 Penny Dreadful (TV), 192
Once Upon a Time in America (1984 film), The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996 film), 11, 146
192 Performance (1970 film), 253
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest: off-Broadway personification, 189
production, 90; 1975 film, 90–91, 176 Pescucci, Gabriella, 192
One from the Heart (1981 film), 5, 120 Peshawar Waltz (Escape from Afghanistan) (1994
One More Saturday Night (1986 film), 187 film), 43
O’Neill, Pat, 65 Peters, Jon, 22, 147, 156, 200, 222
The Oralists, 250 Peterson, Wolfgang, 253
Orchestra Rehearsal (1979 film), 108, 192 Petroff, Boris, 249
Orgy of the Dead (film), 249 Pettler, Pamela, 183, 192–93, 232
Ornitz, Arthur, 149 Pfeiffer, Michelle, 32, 34, 58, 85, 193–94, 239
Orwell, George, 121 The Phantom of the Opera, 101
Osborne, John R., 194 Philadelphia (1993 film), 187
Oster, Emil, 5 Phillips, Nick, 119
Ostrum, Peter, 244 Pickens, Slim, 143
The Other Guys (2010 film), 147 Pierce Brothers Valhalla Memorial Park,
Out of Sight (1998 film), 147 194–95
Out of the Blue (1980 film), 253 Piggott-Smith, Tim, 13
Out There in the Dark (novel), 224 Pinkava, Jan, 53
Outland (1981 film), 119 Pinocchio (film), 114
Oz the Great and Powerful (2013 film), 5 Piper, John, 21
Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise, 174
Page, Ken, 180 Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007
Paik, Nam June, 65 film), 89
Pakula, Alan J., 220 Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006
Pal, George, 151 film), 89, 132
Palance, Jack, 25 Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011
Palmer, Cynthia, 210 film), 89
Paradis, Vanessa, 89 Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black
Paradise Lost (novel), 86 Pearl (2003 film), 89
The Parallax View (1974 film), 220 The Pit and the Pendulum (1961 film), 201
The Paranormalist (1982 play), 121 The PJs (TV), 145
Parfrey, Adam, 182 Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959 film), 99–100,
Parker, Lara, 86 163–64, 194, 249
Parker, Sarah Jessica, 98, 164 Planet of the Apes: 1963 novel, 195; 1968 film,
Parriott, Sara, 115 200; 2000 novel, 203; 2001 film, 18–19,
The Passenger (1975 film), 175 54–55, 59–60, 68, 73–74, 118, 132, 150, 160,
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 108, 192 170, 197–99, 203, 209–10, 214, 222, 254;
Patterson, Richard, 224 video games, 199–200
 INDEX  n  275

Planet of the Apes: The Colony (2003 novel), Radford, Michael, 121
203 Radner, Gilda, 186
Planet of the Apes: The Fall (2002 novel), 203 Rafelson, Bob, 175–76
Platoon (1986 film), 88 Raimi, Sam, 5, 220
Plimpton, George, 182 Ramis, Harold, 253
Plummer, Christopher, 183 Ranft, Joe, 77, 109, 204
Plummer, Elmer, 1, 66 Ratatouille (2007 film), 1, 53
Plunkett & Macleane (1999 film), 169 Rathbone, Basil, 7, 217
Poe, Edgar Allen, 80, 122, 170, 201, 238 The Raven: 1963 film, 175, 201; poem, 237
Poirier, Gregory, 156, 200 The Ray Bradbury Theater (TV), 142
Polanski, Roman, 89, 175 Raye, Delaney, 46
The Polar Express (2004 film), 56, 95, 181, 187 Raymond, Billy, 59
Police Academy (1984 film), 208 The Real Ghostbusters (TV), 251
Polito, Jon, 46 Real Steel (2011 film), 124
Pollack, Sydney, 220 Reality Bites (1994 film), 211
Ponti, Carlo, 108 The Red Balloon (1956 film), 21
Pork Chop Hill (1959 film), 152 Red Dragon (2002 film), 187
Portman, Natalie, 165 Red Planet (2000 film), 156
Poseidon (2006 film), 54 Redd Foxx (TV), 208
Postlethwaite, Pete, 140 Redford, Robert, 154, 210, 254
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981 film), Redgrave, Michael, 17
176 Reds (1981 film), 176
Powell, Arnold, 213 Rees, Jerry, 1, 92–93, 111, 157–58, 204–5
Powell, Mel, 65 Reeves, Keanu, 234
Preminger, Otto, 201 Reeves, Steve, 249
Price, Mary Victoria, 202 Reilly, John C., 183
Price, Vincent Barrett, 202 Reinert, Al, 55
Price, Vincent Clarence, 201 Reitman, Ivan, 132
Price, Vincent (Vincent Leonard Price Jr.), Reitherman, Wolfgang, 111
56–57, 75, 89, 93, 102, 105, 122, 125–26, 128, Rekulak, Jason, 126
178, 200–202, 237–38 Remington Steele (TV), 150
Price, Vincent Leonard, Sr., 201 Report to Murphy (TV), 147
Pride and Prejudice (novel), 126 Resnick, Adam, 64
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009 novel), Return to Oz (1985 film), 212
2, 126 Reubens, Paul (Paul Rubenfeld), 31, 58, 130–31,
Prieto, Rodrigo, 159 180, 189, 191, 205–7, 237
The Prince of Egypt (1998 film), 127 Revenge (1990 film), 153
The Princess Bride (1987 film), 51 Ricci, Christina, 219, 220
Privilege (1967 film), 225 Richardson, Miranda, 19, 219
Prizzi’s Honor (1985 film), 176 Richter, Andy, 64
Problem Child (1990 film), 11, 146 Rickman, Alan, 18, 227–28
Problem Child 2 (1991 film), 11, 146 Ride in the Whirlwind (film), 175
Proft, Pat, 208 The Ring (2002 film), 96
Prometheus (2012 film), 247 Ringwood, Bob, 208, 239
Propper de Callejon, Eduardo, 68 Rinni Bootsie Tutti Frutti (1978 one-act), 121
Psycho (1960 film), 216, 249 Ripley, Robert, 12, 146
Python, Monty, 222 Ripley’s Game (2002 film), 169
Ripps, Leonard, 208
Quantum of Solace (2008 film), 121 Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011 film), 198
Quick, William Thomas, 203 Ritchie, Michael, 149
276  n  INDEX

Riva, J. Michael, 241 Salisbury, Mark, xii, 8, 233, 243

A River Runs through It (1992 film), 210 Salkind, Alexander, 222
Rivers, Joan, 208 Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975 film),
Road to Perdition (2002 film), 121 108
Robb, AnnaSophia, 72 Sandler, Adam, 187
Robe, Mike, 5 Santa Claus: The Movie (1985 film), 208
Roberts, Craig, 132 Sarabande, Varèse, 105
Robertson, Cliff, 158 Sarandon, Chris, 179
Robertson, Joe, 248 Sarandon, Susan, 140
Robin Hood (2010 film), 88 Sarg, Tony, 21
RoboCop 2 (1990 film), 151 Saturday Night Live (TV), 131, 186, 191, 205,
RoboCop 3 (1993 film), 151 214
Rock & Rule (1983 film), 186 Savary, Jérôme, 104
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975 film), Saved by the Bell: The New Class (TV), 193
225–26 Sax, Geoffrey, 148
Roeg, Nicolas, 253 A Scanner Darkly (2006 film), 211
Rogers, Will, 155 Scarface (1983 film), 193
Rohmer, Eric, 209 Schaer, Martin, 247
Romancing the Stone (1984 film), 91 Schallert, William, 249
Romeo and Juliet (play), 60 Schermerhorn, Bill, 21
A Room with a View (1908 novel), 68 Schindelman, Joseph, 69
Rooney, Darrell, 107 Schuetz, Dennis, 168
Rooney, Mickey, 111 Schumacher, Joel, 28, 30, 59, 147
Rope (1948 film), 254 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 147
Rose-Maria (1924 Broadway musical), 165 Scooby Doo (TV), 201
Rosewood (1997 film), 200 Scorsese, Martin, 108, 186–87, 192, 211, 216,
Rosengren, Clive, 99 224
Rosenthal, Mark D., 55, 150, 208 Scott, Campbell, 215
Roth, Joe, 251 Scott, George C., 149, 166
Roth, Tim, 198 Scott, Jake, 169
Rothman, John, 3 Scott, Kathryn Leigh, 86
Rousselot, Philippe, 209–10 Scott, Ridley, 43, 88, 247
Roy, Deep, 118 Scott, Tony, 153
The Royal Family (TV), 208 Screwed (2000 film), 11, 146
Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964 film), Scruggs, Earl, 237
94–95, 180–81 Seagrove, Jenny, 64
Rule, Rebecca, 134 Sears, Fred, 164
Rumble Fish (1983 film), 120 The Secret Garden (1993 film), 232
The Rundown (2003 film), 96 Secret Window (2004 film), 89
Running before the Wind (novel), 251 Sedgwick, Edie, 182, 215
Russell, Ken, 126, 175, 225 Sedgwick, Kyra, 215
Russell, Kurt, 111 Selick, Henry, 1, 59, 111, 140–41, 145, 151, 178,
Russian Roulette (1975 film), 253 181, 212–13
Ruthless People (1986 film), 91 Sellers, Peter, 166
Ryder, Winona (Winona Laura Horowitz), 37, Sendak, Maurice, 212
42, 89, 101, 116, 132, 210–11, 241 Senelick, Laurence, 168
A Series of Unfortunate Events (film), 20
Sabin, Harry, 93 The Serpent’s Kiss (1997 film), 210
The Saint (1997 film), 224 Sewell, Rufus, 3
Salinger, Diane, 189 Sex and Death 101 (2007 film), 241
 INDEX  n  277

Sex Pistols, 167 Sleepy Hollow (1999 film), xii, 8, 18–20, 59, 89,
Shadix, Glenn (William Glenn Shadix), 38, 118, 126, 132, 152, 156, 158–60, 170–71,
213–14, 252 217–21, 233, 253
Shaffer, Atticus, 116 Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions (1990 short
Shankar, Raki, 17, 65 film), 151, 212
Shapiro, Robert, 190 Smart, Alan, 107
Shark Tale (2004 film), 127 Smith, Joel T., 157
Sharkey, Ray, 10 Smith, Kevin, 221–24
Shatner, William, 174, 203 Smith, Lane, 138
Shatravka, Alexander, 2 Smith, Preston, 216
She’s Gotta Have It (1986 film), 231 The Smurfs (TV), 131
Sheen, Charlie, 210 Snake People (novel), 20
Shellen, Stephen, 144 Snipes, Wesley, 241
Shelley, Mary, 170 Snow, Percy, 17
The Shining (1980 film), 96, 176 Snow White: The Fairest of Them All (2001 film),
The Shithouse of the August Moon (1978 one- 134, 232
act), 121 Snow White and the Huntsman (film), 20
Shooter (film), 156 Sobocinski, Witold, 247
The Shooting (film), 175 Soderbergh, Steven, 147
Shore, Howard, 83, 105, 214 Solarbabies (1986 film), 208
Short, Martin, 116, 161, 164 Something to Remember You By (novel), 246
Short, Robert, 174 Sometimes They Come Back (film), 150, 209
Short Circuit (1986 film), 239 Sondheim, Stephen, 60, 227, 229
Shotgun Wedding (1963 film), 249 Sonnenfeld, Barry, 239, 242
Side-Show Siren (novel), 250 The Sopranos (TV), 150
Sidney, Sylvia, 37, 165, 214 The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (2010 film), 150, 209
Silence of the Lambs (1991 film), 20, 187 The Sound of Music (1965 film), 254
Silver, Joan Micklin, 241 Space: 1999 (TV), 152
Silver, Joel, 241 Space Jam (1996 film), 205
Simeon, Michael, 138 Sparks, Nicholas, 92
Simpson, Jimmi, 3 Spider (2002 film), 226
Simpson, Mike, 216 Spider-Man (2002 film), 187
The Simpsons (TV), 52, 106–7, 131 Spielberg, Steven, 52, 106–7, 127, 139, 154, 167,
Sinatra, Frank, 131 208, 254
Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003 film), Spinell, Joe, 104
127 Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002 film), 127
Singles (1992 film), 59, 215–16 Splash (1984 film), 45
Singleton, John, 200 SpongeBob SquarePants (TV), 107
The Sinister Urge (1960 film), 249 St. Claire, Emile, 105
Siouxsie and the Banshees, 167 The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967 film),
Six Degrees of Celebration (2010 film), 44 175
Skaaren, Warren, 24, 37, 42–43, 216–17 Stakeout (1987 film), 239
The Skeleton Dance (1929), xii Stalk of the Celery Monster, 1, 223
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1820 Stallone, Sylvester, 147, 241
book), 137, 154 Stamp, Terence, 46–47
Sky Blue Collar (2013 short), 118 Stanton, Harry Dean, 122
Skyfall (2012 film), 121 The Star Chamber (1983 film), 241
Slap Shot (1977 film), 149 Star Trek (2009 film), 211
Slate (novel), 168 Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979 film), 174
Sleeping Beauty, 251 Star Wars (1977 film), 64, 119, 208, 221
278  n  INDEX

Star Wars: Ewoks (film), 251 Susskind, Teresa, 192

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980 film), Švankmajer, Jan, 5, 184–85
225 The Swarm (1978 film), 233
Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (film), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street:
151 1973 melodrama, 229; 1979 musical, 229–30;
Star Wars Holiday Special (TV), 208 2007 film, 18, 20, 54, 60, 69, 87, 89, 108, 133,
Star Wind (novel), 251 154, 174, 226–29, 247, 254
Starr, Mike, 64, 98 Sweet Smell of Success (film), 65
Steele, Barbara, 160 Swenson, Charles, 212
Steiger, Rod, 164, 166 Swing Shift (1984 film), 95
Stein, Gertrude, 214 Sylvester (1985 film), 95
Stein, Jean, 182 Symbolic Logic (1986 book), 67
Sternberg, David, 208
Stevens, Angela, 248 Taboo (comics anthology), 170
Stewart, Rollen, 146 Tahan, Charlie, 116
The Sting (1973 film), 254 Tai, Ada, 231
Stone, Oliver, 88 Tai, Arlene, 231
Storaro, Vittorio, 5 Talbot, Lyle, 249
Strasberg, Lee, 152 Tales from the Crypt (TV), 11, 168
Strauss, Johann, Jr., 23 Tales from the Darkside (TV), 168
Streep, Meryl, 186 Tall Tale (film), 132
Street of Crocodiles (1986 film), 5, 184 Tarzan (film), 106
Strick, Wesley, 124, 222–24 Tashlin, Frank, 40
The String of Pearls (novel), 229 Tatasciore, Fred, 183
Stroman, Susan, 20 Tati, Jacques, 191
Stromberg, Robert, 15, 187, 224–25 The Tax Exile (1979 one-act), 121
Stromberg, William R., 224 Taxi (TV), 91
Stromberg, William T., 224 Taylor, Noah, 72
Struwwelpeter (1845), 70 Temple Grandin (2010 film), 187
Stuart Little (film), 107 Tender Mercies, 216
Stuart Little 2 (film), 107 Tenniel, John, 16
Stuart, Mel, 244–45 Tennyson, 103
Sturgeon, Bill, 65 The Terminal (2004 film), 167
Subotnick, Morton, 65 The Terminator (1984 film), 183, 185
The Sugarland Express (1974 film), 254 Terms of Endearment (1983 film), 176
The Sun Was Setting, 248 The Terror (1963 film), 175
Supergirl (1984 film), 253 Terry, Paul, 140,
Superman (1978 film), 22, 24, 119, 216, Tex (1982 film), 238
222 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974 film), 216
Superman II (1980 film), 253 Thackery, Frank, 5
Superman III (1983 film), 253 Theatre of Blood (1973 film), 201
Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987 film), Themmen, Paris, 244
150, 209 There Will Be Blood (2007 film), 225
Superman Lives (abandoned film project), 59, Thérèse (1986 film), 209
124, 156, 200, 217, 221–24 Thewlis, David, 140
Superman Reborn (film), 156, 200 They Might Be Giants (1971 film), 149
Susan’s Breasts (1985 play), 121 Thieves Like Us (1974 film), 96
Suschitzky, Peter, 225–26 The Thin Blue Line (1988 film), 80
Suschitzky, Wolfgang, 225 Thinner (1996 film), 168
Susskind, Charles, 192 This Island Earth (1955 film), 231
 INDEX  n  279

Thomas, Frank, 111, 243 True Believer (1989 film), 224

Thomas, Wynn, 166, 231 True Love (screenplay), 133
Thompson, Caroline, 100, 134, 232, 246 The Truman Show (1998 film), 120
Thompson, Hunter S., 90 Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988 film),
Thrashin’ (1986 film), 88 152
Three Days of the Condor (1975 film), 220 Tudyk, Alan, 3
Thriller (1982 album), 201 Turner-Clay, Susan, 140
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Twelfth Night: 1996 film, 68; play, 193
Found There (1871 novel), 13, 17, 67, 251 Twice Upon a Time (1983 film), 212
Throw Momma from the Train (1987 film), 91 Twin Peaks (film), 88
The Tie That Binds (1995 film), 224 Twins (1988 fim), 91
The Tiger Makes Out (1967 film), 149 Two for the Money (2005 film), 124
Tim Burton (exhibition), 61, 128, 173, 232 Tyrell, Susan, 104
Tim Burton and the Lurid Beauty of Monsters
(film series), 232–34 Ullman, Tracey, 77
Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride: An Invitation to the Unfaithful (2002 film), 56
Wedding, 204 Uslan, Michael, 22–23
Tim Burton’s Tragic Toys for Boys and Girls,
125, 234 Valentino (1977 film), 225
Time Bandits (film), 169 Vampires Kiss/Blood Inside (2012 film), 118,
The Time Machine (film), 151 236
Timex I-Control Wristwatch commercials, 234 Van Dien, Casper, 219
Tippett, Phil, 151 Van Dyke and Company (TV), 208
’Tis a Pity She’s a Whore (1971 film), 192 Van Morrison in Ireland (1980 documentary),
Titan A.E. (2000 film), 20 121
Todd, Jennifer, 251 Van Sant, Gus, 222
Todd, Suzanne, 251 Vanzo, Gregg, 106
Tolkien, J. R. R., xi Varhol, Michael, 131, 191, 236–37
Tom and Jerry (TV), 127 The Variant (fiction), 20
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, 90 Velasco-Shaw, Ariel, 181
The Tomb of Ligeia (1965 film), 201 Venturini, Edward D., 155
Tomcats (2001 film), 200 Venus Restored (unpublished novel), 168
Tommy (1975 film), 175 Verbinski, Gore, 96
Top Gun (1986 film), 153, 216 The Verdict (1982 film), 254
Torn, Rip, 175 Verlag, Pabel, 127
Tosi, Piero, 192 Vermillion (novel), 168
A Touch of Love (1969 film), 225 Vertigo (film), 80
Toussieng, Yolanda, 100 A Very Long Engagement (2004 film), 87
The Towering Inferno (1974 film), 233 Videodrome (1983 film), 92
Toy Story (1995 film), 1, 106, 204 Village People, 12, 146
Toy Story 2 (film), 1, 204 Villechaize, Hervé, 104
The Treat (1998 film), 123 Vincent: 1982 film, xii, 2, 9, 56, 75, 93–95, 114,
The Tree of Life (2011 film), 159 125, 128, 131, 133, 201, 238–39, 243; narra-
Tremors (1990 film), 224 tion, 237
Trick or Treat, 56, 131, 133, 150, 234–35, 243 The Violent Years (1956 film), 249
The Trip (1967 film), 175, 245 Visconti, Luchino, 192
Tron (1982 film), 204, 238, 243 Viva, 104
Tropic Thunder (2008 film), 225 The Voice of the Moon (1989 film), 108
Trousdale, Gary, 1 Vogt, Mary E., 239
Troy (2004 film), 208, 253 von Bork, Sidonia, 19
280  n  INDEX

von Brandenstein, Patrizia, 231 Wheeler, Hugh, 229

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (TV), 201 Whelan, Des, 87
When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970 film), 233
Wadleigh, Michael, 153 Where the Heart Is (1990 film), 226
Wahlberg, Mark, 19, 198–99 Whirlybird (novel), 224
Wainwright, Loudon III, 49 White Mischief (1987 film), 121
Waiting for Guffman (1996 film), 186 White Noise (2005 film), 148
Walk of Shame (2014 film), 187 Whitehouse, Paul, 77
A Walk to Remember (2002 film), 92 Whitman, Slim, 165
Walken, Christopher, 32, 34, 218 Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988 film), 243
Walker, Andrew Kevin, 217 Wiegratz, Philip, 72
Walker, Benjamin, 3 Wiest, Dianne, 101–2
Walker, Jimmy, 208 Wild, Wild West (1999 movie), 96
Wallace, Daniel, 20, 48, 50, 60, 240 Wilder, Gene, 244–46
Wallace, Lee, 24 Wilhite, Tom, 56, 243
Walt Disney Company, xi, 131, 243 Williams, Billy Dee, 24
Walt Disney Pictures, 52, 181, 208 Williams, David S., Jr., 224
Walt Disney Productions, 66, 111, 123 Williams, Jason, 200
Walt Disney Studios, 52, 56, 134 Williams, Paul, 172
Walter, Tracey, 25 Williams, Robin, 253
Walters, Melora, 64 Williams, Tennessee, 214
Waltz, Christoph, 46, 47 Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971
Wanted (2008 film), 4, 44 film), 82, 243–46
The War Game (1965 film), 225 Willow (1988 film), 151
The War of the Roses (1989 film), 91 Wilson, Larry, 37, 142, 144, 168, 246–47
The War of the Worlds (1953 film), 164 The Wind in the Willows (novel), 7, 155
Warhol, Andy, 104, 182 Winfield, Paul, 164
Waring, Mark, 66 Wings of a Dove (1902 novel), 68
Warner, David, 198 Winnie the Pooh (stories), 127
Warren, Estella, 198 Winstead, Mary Elizabeth, 3
Warren, Gene, 151 Winston, Stan, 34
Washington, George, 137 Winter, Julia, 72
Wasikowska, Mia, 13 Wisener, Jayne, 227
Waterworld (1995 film), 120 The Witches (1983 novel), 70
Waters, Daniel, 34, 210, 240–41 The Witches of Eastwick (1987 film), 176, 193
Waters, John, 89 Without a Trace (TV), 152
Watkins, Peter, 225 The Wizard of Oz (1939 film), 13–14, 51
Watson, Emily, 77 Wolf (1994 film), 224
We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story (1993 film), 127 Wolfen (1981 film), 153
Weber, Billy, 153 Wolff, John, 119
Weber, Bruce, 160 Wolski, Dariusz, 247
Weeks, Stephen, 253 Women in Love (1969 film), 126
Weir, Peter, 120 Wood, Edward “Ed” D., Jr., 46, 59, 98, 122, 144,
Weird Tales, 142 163–64, 182, 194, 233, 247–50
Welch, Robert “Bo,” 34, 61, 95–96, 186, 241–43 Wood, Elijah, 183
Welcome to My Nightmare (1975 album), 201 Wood, Jennifer M., 5
Welles, Orson, 31 Wood, Kathy, 248, 250
West, Walter, 227 Woodstock (1970 film), 153
Wexler, Haskell, 80 Woolverton, Linda, 225, 250–51
Whale, James, 113, 219, 238 World History (TV), 43
 INDEX  n  281

World of Stainboy (flash animation), 59, 214, Young Mr. Lincoln (film), 3
251–52 Young Sherlock Holmes (1985 film), 246
Wuhl, Robert, 25 Youngblood, Gene, 65
The Wuggly Ump (1963 book), 125 Yousefi, Nima, 20

X-Files (TV), 203 Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008 film),
222
Yagher, Kevin, 217 Zane, Billy, 250
Yama, Michael, 129 Zanuck, Darryl F., 254
The Year without a Santa Claus (2006), 246 Zanuck, Richard D., 60, 86, 254–55
Yogi Bear (TV), 127 Zeffirelli, Franco, 108
Yohn, Erica, 189 Zemeckis, Robert, 55, 187
Young, John Sacret, 55 Ziegler, Jack, 192
Young, Peter, 26, 59, 119, 132, 253 Zombie, Rob, 161
Young, Phil, 158 Zorro: The Gay Blade (1981 film), 239
 A BO UT T HE AU T HOR
Samuel J. Umland is a professor and chair
of the English department at the Univer-
sity of Nebraska at Kearney, where he has
taught film and media since 1988. With
Rebecca A. Umland, he has coauthored the
award-winning critical biography Donald
Cammell: A Life on the Wild Side (2006),
and also the study From Connecticut Yan-
kees to Fisher Kings: The Use of Arthurian
Legend in Hollywood Film (1995), a book
that a reviewer for Choice said “should be
in every library in the world.” He served as
editor on the collection Philip K. Dick: Con-
temporary Critical Interpretations (1995), to
which he also contributed an essay. He has
also published numerous book chapters
and articles on topics ranging from world
cinema to postmodernism to cyberculture,
and has published articles on the films of
directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Lars
von Trier, Fritz Lang, and David Lynch.
  n  283