A profile of the screenwriter who launched the Dark Knight's boxoffice torpedo. The following is an article by Stephen Rebello that appeared in 1989. It provides an insight into Sam Hamm and some interesting facts about the status of several movies in production at that time, i.e The Avengers with Mel Gibson! Bear in mind it was written in 1989!

Last year, when I suggested to the genre-wise editor of this magazine an interview with screen writer Sam Hamm, he asked: "Who's Sam Hamm?" But now, the 33 year-old Virginia-born Hamm is no longer one of Hollywood's best-kept secrets. With some of the next five years' major genre projects set to ride on Hamm's screenplays, these days producers are more likely to be saying "Get me Sam Hamm!"

Tim Burton's $40 million-plus version of Hamm's BATMAN script (with alterations by Warren Skaaren) opened June 23, starring Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Kim Basinger, and Jack Palance on sets that suggest BRAZIL and BLADE RUNNER run amok. Those sets stand waiting for a highly likely BATMAN II. Hamm's script of WATCHMEN, that complex mind-bender from the DC comic book series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, has been delivered to producer Joel Silver, with Terry Gilliam set to direct in London.

Hamm is currently writing for the Weintraub Entertainment Group the big-screen blueprint for THE AVENGERS in which producer/star Mel Gibson plans to fill Patrick Macnee's patent leathers. And Warners has been given a first look at Hamm's screenplay of Phillip K. Dick's Time Out Of Joint, co-written with Michael Duncan.

"Unfortunately, sooner or later I'm going to have to turn to my adult interests - at which point, I'll be totally washed up," grinned the rangy, coolly-attired writer, who drops his baritone below sea level in moments of self-mockery.

But just who is this quirky, new gun-for-hire with a name straight off a mailbox in Toon Town? Hamm, an only child who grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia a "promiscuous reader," admitted that his first career ambition was to be a cartoonist. "One of the many things I have in common with my old pal, Hef, har-har," laughed Hamm, who now only considers himself a "doodler." He recalled, "I bought all the Marvel comics when they were coming out, but I guess I realised at about 12 or 13 that being a cartoonist wasn't quite as prestigious and remunerative as I figured it was. I stopped reading comic books when I was a teenager, as most people do. But [cartooning] got me thinking more and more about wanting to write movies, because it's a similar discipline."

Childhood marked Hamm in another way: his name. Older guys called him "Sam" because it rhymed with Hamm and, to his distress, friends picked up the nickname. Said the writer, "The reason I don't use my real name is because I was named Gay, after my favourite uncle, and my middle name is Stewart, after my father. That essentially gave me a choice between Gay Hamm, which obviously cut me out for a career as a New York actor, or Stew Hamm, which put me in a recipe." These days, admitted the writer, drawing hard on a cigarette and blowing a smoke plume, he likes his name. "I sound like a guy who smokes cigars and knows how to fight."

Hamm majored in English Literature at the University of Virginia. Although the school offered no film program, he grabbed every available film course elective and wound up programming a weekend film series for several years. After an unhappy, snowbound stint in graduate school at state University of New York, Buffalo (where "becoming a drunk," he said, was the only ambition one could productively pursue). Hamm struggled to crack the screenwriting markets in New York and Los Angeles. While Hamm was busy turning out what he called "high-toned stuff," STAR WARS and SUPERMAN had ushered in the science fiction, special effects bonanza. "At the time, I thought, 'Well, this is a kick in the butt' because I'd spent my childhood thinking, 'Wouldn't it be neat if they could do a movie of your favourite comic book characters like SUPERMAN, where you'd really see him flying around?' They began doing all the stuff that I wanted to see when I was twelve."

After six miserable months in Los Angeles, a city in which he could neither make his peace nor a living wage, Hamm returned to New York. Not finding work, he tried his luck on the JEOPARDY TV quiz show, pulling in $42,000 in change. Hamm slipped down in his seat, "I won five days in a row, won the Tournament of Champions, and retired undefeated. My shame outweighs my pride."

Having gameshow booty as a stopgap enabled Hamm to tough out unemployment a little longer. When a comedy script he co-wrote with Michael Duncan and Richard Glatzer got optioned by powerful Hollywood writer/producer Jay Presson Allen, Hamm's luck seemed to change. In 1980, Allen was weary of rewriting script drafts of NEVER CRY WOLF, the Disney movie version of the Farley Mowatt book directed by Carroll Ballard which her husband, Lewis, was producing.

Recalled Hamm, "Essentially, when it came time to make the movie, she [Allen] had no intention of leaving New York for the frozen north with Ballard and a bunch of trained wolves to do revisions. She was looking for somebody young and malleable to throw on the job and said, 'Do you want to go to Alaska and do revisions?' I asked, 'Will you buy me a parka?' She said, 'I'll buy you a parka,' and I said OK. I was watching THE FAR COUNTRY on TV when she called and I thought, 'This doesn't look so bad.' What was supposed to be just a 'quick clean-up' on the script turned into an eight-month job.

"Ballard must have the world's most flexible story mind," Hamm observed, seeming to weigh his words about the former documentarian who last year departed company with Tom Selleck and Disney over an action-prison picture, HARD RAIN. "He'd shoot scenes, come back every day and look at the rushes and start reconceiving the story on the basis of what he had gotten so far. It was a bizarre process because the story was constantly shifting." NEVER CRY WOLF, for which Hamm wrote 600 script pages, ran four hours in rough cut minus the wolf footage and was not released until 1983. Hamm observed, "I shared credit with two other scriptwriters of the seven who worked on it, and there was a credit for three writers of narration out of the eleven who worked on that. The only piece of useful advice I came away with was that if you have a few weeks of vacation time, try spending it somewhere other than Scagway, Alaska."

While awaiting the release of NEVER CRY WOLF, Hamm found himself pitching scripts unsuccessfully for over three years.

He explained, "The movie hadn't come out. Nobody had heard of it. Then it did come out, an, of course, there's no dialogue." Hamm stirred up career matters with PULITZER PRIZE, a comedy about a reporter whose bogus story lands her in a fix. Columbia outbid several other buyers in a bidding war. But the studio, producer martin Ransohoff and director Jonathan Kaplan had radically different movies in mind. Columbia insisted Hamm neuter the script by making the lead character "sympathetic." Sniped Hamm, "Every movie has to turn into an occasion to root, like a baseball game. But it's a baseball game where it's going to be real close at the end, but you already know your team's going to win."

Though unmade, PULITZER PRIZE won Hamm a fan in Warner Bros executive Bonnie Lee, who signed him to an exclusive two-year studio contract. Hamm worked on a raucously nasty basketball comedy, HANG TIME, but kept pestering studio people about the status of their eight-year-old project, BATMAN. Said Hamm, "The project was just lying around wounded and I think they were basically getting ready to unload it. There was a [Tom] Mankiewicz script, which I had read, and Tim Burton and Julie Hickson had prepared a 30-page treatment for the movie. Peter Guber and Jon Peters had taken it over as producers, but nobody could quite figure out what to do with the property, which was expensive and complicated.

One day, Hamm's and Burton's paths intersected in Bonnie Lee's Warner offices. "We talked, goofed around and hit it off," said Hamm, whose idiosyncrasies jibed with Burton's. "The next time I saw him, he said, 'Do you have time later today to stop by my office?' Of course, I knew that he'd been attached to the BATMAN project for a while. I went in, sat down and he said, 'Do you have any interest in trying to work on the script to BATMAN.' I said, 'You bet.' And that was that."

BATMAN could hardly have fallen into less conventional hands: a basically untried screenwriter and a director, whom even Hamm granted, is saddled with "a weird reputation as a vaguely frightening guy." But when eccentricity sells, Hollywood listens, and Burton was red-hot after two left-field boxoffice successes, PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE and BEETLEJUICE.

Hamm detailed the beginning stages of his job: "I think the presumption was that this was sort of the last crack at a doomed project. We basically took it as a license to do what we wanted to do, which is to write a story about a guy who is obviously extremely fucked up and what happens to him as a result of it."

Hamm's take on the BATMAN makes for a very 80's-style superhero adventure in which the derring-do is laced with hip, deadpan humor, with touches of Freud, Joseph Campbell, and Jung, by way of Dr. Ruth. Explained Hamm, "Here you have a situation where a millionaire does something absurd. I mean, here's a guy who could buy anything he wants and his only source of pleasure in life is putting on his gear, his leather boots, and going out to look for rough trade."

The dark, nasty underbelly of Hamm's script should strike a chord in readers of Frank Miller's 1985 resurrection of the Batman character in the DC comic series, The Dark Knight Returns. Viewers who only know BATMAN from its campy "Zap! Pow! Zowie!" incarnation on '60s TV may well be thrown for a hoop. According to Hamm, what qualifies BATMAN as "deadpan comedy" is his and Burton's line on the warped psyche of its hero and villain. "BATMAN is about a guy who gets himself into a stupid fix," Hamm asserted. "That's the most basic building block that a comedy's made from. One of the two huge jokes of the screenplay is that Batman is constantly finding out what a really, really bad idea it is to be costumed vigilante. I think that the basic story is about a guy who has a sick hobby that fucks up his love life. To me, that's an inherently comic premise. It's like 'Do I want to go out on a date and sleep with a woman or do I want to put on my mask and cape and apprehend a couple of evil-doers?'"

Hamm's script tackled Batman's "origin" through a dream in which young reporter Vicky Vale pieces together the backstory of the man with whom she is falling in love. "You totally destroy your credibility if you show the literal process by which Bruce Wayne becomes Batman," Hamm reasoned. "If it were psychologically or sociologically credible that a guy would put on a bat suit and go out and fight crime on his own as a vigilante, it would have happened. There's certainly enough warped kids around who have been sparked by the reading of comic books if the idea was that contagious, but it never has happened."

Hamm and Burton came to see the logic behind studio head Mark Canton's advice to play BATMAN for real. Commented Hamm, "It meant don't demand that the audience suspend too much disbelief. Try and have people [in the film and in the audience] react incredulously to what's going on. The thing we really wanted to keep in the movie is the sense that all of this stuff is downright weird. The Joker and Batman are anomalies in the lives of everyday people. Whenever you see them, it's a shock. In fact, there are only about four minutes of Batman in the first hour of the script, the better to keep him offstage and shadowy and make his brief appearance as flashy as possible so you don't notice quite as much that he's not there."

Weaving into the action the character of Robin ("that little fucker," Hamm laughed) gave Hamm and Burton their biggest structural and motivational headaches. Though Robin made it into Hamm's script, Burton later dropped the character. "Robin just about stopped us," Hamm admitted. "We had a pretty smooth story and we couldn't get that bump in there. The duality that we'd established in the character's makeup made it apparent that being Batman isn't very healthy. So, it becomes sticky having Robin joining the crime-fighting scene and having it be seen as a positive kind of act. That's the one story area Tim and I finessed. We have Robin in action, but we don't really have him in action as Robin."

Hamm and Burton had decided to jettison Robin during one of their marathon work sessions on the script one weekend at Hamm's house. After pacing the floor most of the day and talking about other things - their modus operandi when they hit a snag - they decided it was time to call the studio and tell them Robin was out, just to see what the reaction was. Instead, in a creative of energy while contemplating the dreaded call, they came up with the idea of Robin and his parents performing a trapeze act from helicopters during the Gotham City parade. In the comics, Bruce Wayne witnesses the boy's parents die during their circus act. The outlandish action sequence had the helicopters explode with Robin diving to a tree and then swinging onto the roof of a van.

Hamm turned in the final draft of BATMAN just days before the Writers' Strike began last year. He said, "We knew we had to get the script in or Warner's might not green-light the project. There was all this panic over 'Do you still think Bruce is too dark?' I thought, 'Man, we're in trouble here because the guy's an obvious nut.' Yet, it was also the first time where somebody from the studio didn't say, 'Well, the lead character's not sympathetic enough.'" (Warren Skaaren, who doctored the BEETLEJUICE script, shares credit with Hamm on BATMAN.)

One of the screenplay's most potent aspects is the doppelganger theme set-up between Batman and The Joker: young, charismatic, emotionally driven and ruthless, they make especially provocative enemies. Did the controversial casting of Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson make a hash of Hamm's schema? The writer admitted that he and Burton presumed an unknown would debut as the caped avenger, a la Christopher Reeve in SUPERMAN. Of his reaction to Keaton in the film, Hamm said, "I think Keaton is extraordinary. He gives a terrific performance. That's a wild gamble that paid off absolutely. I think Keaton gives the movie a lot of weight when Nicholson is at his most pyrotechnic."

Of The Joker, that homicidal prankster given to child-snuffing and nerve-gassing of his enemies, Hamm and Burton pondered specific casting notions. Recalled Hamm, "We thought, 'Well, Willem Dafoe looks just like The Joker. David Bowie would be kind of neat because he's very funny when he does sinister roles. James Woods would be good and wouldn't need any makeup, which would save a couple of hours' work every morning.'" Hamm said he and Burton also talked about Jack Nicholson for the role. Ironically, in 1980, BATMAN creator Bob Kane had sent Warner Bros executive Roger Birnbaum a doctored photo of Nicholson in Stanley Kubrick's film of Stephen King's THE SHINING, replete with green hair and whiteface.

"So what if I've got a 32-year -old guy in the script," said Hamm in defense of casting the 51-year-old star. "I mean Nicholson can pull off basically anything and he's going to give you shit you're not going to get if you cast somebody closer in age. If you get a star like Nicholson both for commercial and artistic reasons, it makes more sense to change the character."

During the writer's strike, trade papers reported that Nicholson, who got $6 million for his role, did in fact demand script changes before agreeing to sign. Hamm chooses not to feel violated. "Hey, I worked with Carroll Ballard," he shrugged. "It's just something I can't get cranked up about, because, I mean, shit happens. About dialogue changes, I frankly couldn't care less. If they want to substitute punch lines, jokes are basically interchangeable. The rhythm, the basic thrust of the characters, how the story fits together, all of that is more important that one localized element. When you have a movie this big and expensive, practical considerations have to weigh."

Hamm, who called his and Burton's collaboration "freakishly smooth" and the script "ridiculously easy and pleasurable to write," maintained, "A function of how good a script is going to be is how easy it was to write. The real joy came in puzzling out things like the most surprising point at which to bring on the Batmobile or the Batsignal - in a way that gives the audience a little frisson because here's what they were looking for all along, but they had stopped expecting it."

Another, happier by-product of the writers' strike was Hamm living out "a childhood fantasy" by writing for DC's 50th anniversary of Batman comics. Enthused Hamm, "I think Frank Miller and Alan Moore - all those guys - are really impressive: [Miller's] Batman: Year One was an incredible piece of work. I came in with an idea that I didn't want to do anything definitive, because it's going to be in the continuity of Detective Comics, a three-issue stretch of issues 598 to 600. I was trying to tap into and refer back to all the stuff that's been happening in this new official Batman canon in the last couple of years. Whereas, in the movie I could dispense with that stuff and bring it out fresh."

Hamm found penning comics a double-edged sword. Comparing it to screenwriting, he explained, "In some ways [comics] are easier because you don't have to lay in a lot of stuff to make an audience buy it. Before they've plunked down their buck, they've checked their disbelief. At the same time, it's phenomenally demanding. For one thing, the thought balloon is such a bizarre, corrupt device. The whole training of screenwriting or any dramatic writing is to figure out some kind of action which is going to embody the interior state. Whereas, doing a comic you spit out the interior state in the balloon. I was reluctant to use it until I quickly figured out the story wasn't going to make any sense unless I jumped in the water and did it. It's a whole different game.

"It's also tough because you've got to break everything down into discrete narrative units. Having to get the story told on the page, you have to figure out what the layout will look like, how to get your left-hand side pages, so that's what you see when you turn the page. In other words, you basically have to direct it while you're writing. I was glad when the strike was over so I could back to something easier."

Some Hamm-watchers have speculated on the impact the writer's close identification with BATMAN and other big budget, comic oriented projects might have on his career. "Hollywood dearly loves to typecast," said one studio executive. "Sam has such edge, wit, and such a broad range, it would be too bad if that's the only side we see of his talent." Argued the writer, whose tastes embrace avant-garde novelists and classics, as well as Cronenberg, DePalma, Russ Meyer, and Jerry Lewis, "What makes working in genres interesting is being able to take a set of fairly rigorous conventions and tweaking them to get something different."

But Hamm himself wondered whether he should tackle the apocalyptic WATCHMEN directly after BATMAN. "It's true I had no intention of doing another comic book project after BATMAN," Hamm explained. "I basically did WATCHMEN because it was such a wonky comic book project that once the scripts were done, there wouldn't be that much of an area of comparison. People are not going to see it and say, 'Oh, he's doing BATMAN over again,'"

Currently, Hamm is tackling a widescreen AVENGERS for star/producer Mel Gibson, a project into which, some say, he had to be coerced by gentle arm-twisting. Said former Weintraub Entertainment Group president David Kirkpatrick, who is now production president at Disney, "[Sam] didn't want to be the next David Newman. We all thought BATMAN was such an extraordinary script, we pursued him." (Rumors suggest that pursuit entailed a $500,000-plus payday for Hamm). "It's going to be fun to do," said Hamm, "because Mel is such a neat guy. AVENGERS is sort of in the same category as BATMAN, in a way, because it's big-budget action with characters sort of in the public consciousness already."

What's Hamm's secret? "This sounds incredibly pretentious, but I try and bring a book sensibility to what most people would consider fairly silly material. That's the thing I've always admired about the French in terms of their general critical thought. There's not the same kind of 'class' division of different types of stories. The mark of highbrow or intellectual is that he's not the least bit disturbed by the fact that this stuff is pulpy or genre. The idea that what you get out of something critically is just as much as you put into it."

Hamm is one of the few screenwriters who does not consider his craft slumming or a stepping stone to directing. "I've never had much aspiration toward doing plays or directing and I have less all the time. If it were a more abstract discipline, I'd be more interested. Directing kills people. Every guy I've ever worked with has always come down with horrible cases of bronchitis, depression, flu, and walking pneumonia. It's got to be the most draining thing in the world."

Although Hamm is thinking about producing, it is basically because so few movies made are the kinds he really enjoys seeing. Hamm said he hopes to bring another agenda to genre pictures. "The things I like best are anything that strikes me as being off-kilter. The kind of movie I enjoy is where there are a couple of indications fairly on that the intelligence behind the movie is sort of a kindred spirit. Like, 'Here's a guy who sees things the same way I do, in some weird variation of the way I do, or sees them in a totally different, but consistent way as I do.'"

Hamm thinks his scripts may get made easier these days when comedy-action movies rule the boxoffice. "It's easier to do an action movie with a weird protagonist because, as long as the action is sufficiently kick-ass and arouses your fascist instincts enough to allow you to enjoy it, audiences will root for THE TERMINATOR." In the meantime, many who love genre movies are rooting for Hamm.