Cinematical

This is a weird story full of amusing quotes by writer-director Daniel Waters. Waters spends most of his time these days doing his own thing, but at one point he was part of the Hollywood writer grind establishment and his primary claim to fame from those days is certainly Batman Returns. Although Returns was not particularly well accepted at the time, it is generally recognized as one of the better Batman sequels. Waters said working as a big-budget studio house writer was devastatingly mind-numbing. He remembered thinking ""f* these mother f*s, I'm going to write a bunch of scripts that are going to end up in a drawer, so when I kill myself, they can read these scripts and go 'he was a f* genius.'" That quote is not really relevant to this article in any way, but I practically fell off my chair laughing when I read it, so I included it anyway.

The point of this is, Returns landed Walters a chance to work on a Catwoman flick. Waters was in fact the first person to attempt the script, and he claims he actually likes the Catwoman character better than Batman himself. His story took place in an Arizona version of Gotham, and focused around three villains posing as heroes who ran the place. Burton had a different, darker vision ... and the studio flatly denied both of them. Asked about the Halle Berry project, Walters said: "there was a truck going "beep beep," backing up [at my house] and 900 scripts fell on my front lawn and [the studio was] like, 'do you want to arbitrate,' and I went to the last one and I went 'noooo, please don't give me credit. Whatever you do, anything.'" Smart man, that Daniel Waters.