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From what I saw, they seemed to have taken a lot of cues from the coffee table book called Gotham 1919-1939.

Some of the more interesting points I found talking with him... it seems that Kim Basinger & Jon Peters (or possibly Nicholson!) were probably the ones responsible for Alfred "letting Vicki into the cave." (My thoughts on that were that Alfred didn't let her in, that she had figured it out, but I digress).

The way I understood it with my research on the subject was that the scene was written to take place in Wayne Manor's study. I believe they went over schedule when it came to location shooting and they simply decided to pick it up in the Batcave.

Also it was surprising to hear that Tom Cruise had the part of Edward Scissorhands in the bag... then turned his back on it when Tim Burton said Edward was gay. 

That definitely seems the lot more frank than the usual excuse which was that Cruise simply asked too many questions about the character that didn't pertain to the movie, including how he goes to the bathroom and how he wanted him to be more assertive. Sometimes actors and directors don't want want to just say no to a project so they come up with difficult excuses why they don't want to do it so that the other person dismisses them.

Thank you very much for sharing this interview with us! I listened to the audiobook version of the interview Gems partook about the making of Mars Attacks and hoped we would have gotten some tidbits on his involvement with Batman, but there wasn't much on that subject. Glad you took the initiative to ask him about it.

I did notice a few discrepancies with his recollections. Gems criticized Hamm's script for being too much like Superman. That was the same criticism for Tom Mankiewicz's initial draft of Batman that Burton based his initial treatment on that he wrote with Julie Hickson. Also, Hamm stated that his initial pitch to Burton was to make Bruce Wayne just as insane as The Joker. It may be just a matter of misremembering details, like how Gems is under the impression that Edward Scissorhands was a Paramount movie instead of 20th Century Fox, but it is worth pointing out.

Thank you for being very thorough in asking these questions as we look forward to your conclusion!

It's funny. I've seen the SNL Superman's 50th Anniversary special a few times. But until now, I guess I didn't realize that the bald guy was always supposed to be Lex Luthor.

Strange.

In the credits of the special itself, Robert Smigel is listed as The Brainwave, not Lex Luthor. This was just a case of misidentification.

To answer the question posed in the title of the videos, Jeffrey Katzenberg'a infamous 1991 memo details that the reason Dick Tracy was concerned as a disappointment was that they spent just as much money marketing it as they did making it, severally narrowing the profits. Meanwhile, Pretty Woman only cost a faction of the budget of Dick Tracy and ended up outgrossing Batman worldwide, which was their goal with Dick Tracy. Beatty was pissed about being singled out for this and has sat on the property all of these decades out of spite it seems.

It's always been a bit of shame to me that Cage was more interested in being an "unusual" interpretation of Superman instead of embracing a more traditional depiction. There's some great fan art out there of him looking like the spitting image of Joe Shuster's drawings. Going by the available test footage, you can see Cage being more enthusiastic over details like his longer hair length and sporting a Mickey Mouse t-shirt and the more traditional the costume started to look, the less enthused Cage becomes. He could have served the character as well as Keaton did and it would have been quite a sight to have seen those two on screen together. I'd rather picture Keaton with Cage than with Reeve.

Ever since I first saw these character designs in the Superman: The Complete History book, I marveled at how much more comparable the series could have been with the initial run of Batman: The Animated Series. I'm sure they would have gone fully with it if they were given high budgets like those episodes got. Everything was noticeably streamlined in the later seasons of Batman due to reduced budgets and Superman got no special treatment.

I have no idea how this was acquired, but here's an alternate take on the scene in Vicki's apartment using Prince's scandalous. There's a couple snippets of Basinger and Keaton that aren't in the final film.

This just might prove once and for all that Prince did an entire score for the movie. This poster hopefully can share more from this workprint. This might be more valuable than the Schumacher cut. Hope Kevin Smith doesn't get his hands on it and tote it around as The Prince Cut.

The long hair and shiny detailed musculature evoke a strong Superman Lives vibe. I wonder if it influenced the look of the Cage Superman.

Cage's long hair for the Superman costume tests was coincidental as it was during the time period when he was making Con Air. Cage briefly mentions to Burton keeping his hair length for Superman but it obviously didn't stick as later costume tests display his hair at a shorter length.

Some interesting trivia I just discovered about the 1989 Punisher is that the producers' first choice to play Frank was Christopher Lambert. I remember back in the 2000s people online would constantly remark on the physical likeness between Thomas Jane and Lambert. Jane doesn't resemble Lambert as much these days, but back when he was younger he could've passed for his clone.

I wish they would have cast Ray Wise as Frank Castle.