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It’s two villains had each hated a different aspect of Batman. The brilliant (and satanic) Prof. Jonathan Crane/Scarecrow had a personal vendetta against Bruce Wayne, while Harley Quinn despised Bruce’s alter ego.
Harley, a toymaker whom Protosevich describes as "sadistic in a mischievous, fun sense,” learns that her true father was The Joker. This sets her on a path of vengeance against Batman for taking him away in the 1989 film. Eventually, Crane learns Batman’s secret identity and teams up with Harley to drive him insane and have him sent to Arkham Asylum.
The script culminates with an ambitious, all-star sequence that would have seen a hallucinating Batman face the demons of his past, where he is put on trial by the franchise’s previous villains.xxxxThe studio wanted to enlist cameos from Danny DeVito (The Penguin), Michelle Pfeiffer (Catwoman), Tommy Lee Jones (Two-Face) and Jim Carrey (The Riddler), all leading up to a final confrontation with the man himself: Jack Nicholson’s Joker.
“Joel wanted to tie up all of the films. The Tim Burton films and his films, building up to this moment,” says Protosevich.
During the movie, a rift forms between Batman and Robin, who comes back during the final battle to help his mentor. After defeating his demons, Bruce travels to Bali, where Protosevich read in real life monks enter a cave full of bats to show they have conquered fear. In the script, Bruce enters the cave as bats swarm around him.
Credits roll.
“There’s a similar image in Batman Begins, where he discovers what will be the bat cave and it’s filled with bats and they are flying around him,” says Protosevich. “Not that this scene was inspired by mine, but it was a similar idea. It was a powerful image.”
The standout character of the film would have been Harley Quinn, who in the end finds redemption for her villainous ways. She was to be complex, conflicted and ultimately a good person underneath. While the casting process never got off the ground, Protosevich’s agents at CAA set him up for lunch with Courtney Love, who was also repped by the agency and was interested in getting an acting career going.
“I think she had heard about the possibility of Harley Quinn being in the new Batman and was thinking she would be good for it,” says Protosevich. “But we didn’t really talk about that. We talked about a lot of other things. It was certainly one of the better lunches I’ve ever had in my career in show business.”
Protosevich was finishing up his first draft when Batman & Robin hit theaters in June 1997. The backlash against the movie was immediate. Shortly after, Protosevich received a call from Schumacher, who asked to see his script — which was still an unpolished first draft. Schumacher shared it with Warner Bros. executive Tom Lassally, among only “a handful of people on the planet” who have ever read the script, says Protosevich, noting the script has never leaked online.
“A few days later, I’m getting a call from Joel, whose main comment was that I had written maybe the most expensive movie ever made. Then I remember I never heard from the executive at Warner Bros. I called many times, never got any kind of response,” says Protosevich. “This got into a period of weeks and then a month, and my agent pestering Warners. And the next thing I knew, they were pulling the plug on the whole project. They were going to wait and see what they were going to do with Batman. The Joel Schumacher-driven Batman train was taken off the rails.”