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My One-Way Rivalry with Christopher Nolan
The second act of Robert Oppenheimer’s life might be the seminal American story of the postwar era. Trust me.
Christopher Nolan does not know who I am, but he has been messing with me for the better part of two decades.
The Batman Movie That Never Was
Around 2002, when Warner Bros. decided to reboot the Batman franchise, my agent at CAA put me up for the job of writing the new movie that would eventually be called Batman Begins (2004). I pitched them a take that began: “With Batman, the darker the better. He is after all, a man who turns into a bat.”
My idea was to pit our hero against a much more chilling, realistic villain — someone like a Hannibal Lecter — and make their battle a gothic, Edgar Allan Poe-style detective story with the Caped Crusader hunting this Jack the Ripper-like serial killer. The intent was to be genuinely creepy and scary, more like a smart horror film — think Seven — than a superhero movie. (I was subsequently informed that there was already a contemporary Batman graphic novel that took that approach, by Frank Miller, perhaps? It’s not really my milieu.)
In my version, (the) Batman is old and retired, having given away the Wayne fortune and decamped to a Buddhist monastery for a life of asceticism to try to put his demons to…
