'Dark Knight Rises' Producer Michael Uslan & the Epic History of Batman on Film

It's hard to believe, but there was a time in Hollywood when no one thought a Batman movie was a good idea. Flashforward to 2012,Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises is tracking to be one of the biggest opening weekends in box office history. Oh, how times of changed.
If you think back today, it almost doesn’t make sense, like today it would be an obvious thing to do. Why was it so difficult then?
Uslan: Well, you really have to set it in the context of the times. When I was first out there pitching Batman, it was the late 1970s. And the generation that was running Hollywood, and by that I’m including executives, I’m including agents, and a lot of talent pool, were brought up in what I like to call the “seduction of the innocent” generation.
Back in the early-mid 1950s, there was a huge post-World War II rise in juvenile delinquency in America. And Dr. Fredric Wertham, a psychiatrist who had his own clinic up in Brooklyn, began speaking at garden parties, and PTAs, and churches, talking about the horror of comic books. That comic books were creating a generation of juvenile delinquents. And he proved it by interviewing some 100 juvenile delinquents at his clinic, each one admitting during questioning that they had read a comic book. Therefore, Dr. Wertham concluded that comic books cause juvenile delinquency. Now, in his book that he published, called Seduction of the Innocent, he also claimed that girls growing up reading Wonder Woman would become lesbians, boys growing up reading Batman and Robin would become homosexuals, and that comic books cause asthma, because children were staying indoors to read them instead of playing in the fresh air. His diatribe was picked up by churches and PTAs and schools, and a whole generation of parents, clergymen, teachers, administrators, and politicians who were looking for an easy witch hunt, an easy place to lay the blame for a generation of children that seemed to have gone wrong. There was a federal investigation that had just started under Senator Estes Kefauver of New York, when things changed.

Two things happened that changed everything (and I’m sorry for giving you this background, but I just want you to appreciate it in the context of the times): the industry decided to self-center itself, so the comic book industry formed what they call the Comics Code Authority, which would be a censorship board that would heavily police comic books for themselves and keep the feds out of it. But maybe the biggest thing that happened was the advent of rock and roll. All of the sudden there was a new, easier, bigger target. And rather than cities like Jersey City and St. Louis burning comic books — which they had done — they started to burn Elvis Presley records.