THE UNREAL TIM BURTON

By Rob Salem

From The Toronto Star, 10.30.1993, Saturday Second Edition

In Chicago he was a frightened rabbit, furtive, evasive, eyes darting about nervously, a tiny, black-clad stick figure curled up in a fetal position in the corner of a huge, floral hotel-room couch.

This Tim Burton, the scattered, fidgety, uncomfortable young man I saw at the advance press junket for Batman Returns, was not the same Tim Burton I had met a few years earlier, when he was here in Toronto to oversee the Nelvana-produced "Beetlejuice" cartoon show, a visit that had happened to coincide with a particularly fabulous party during the 1990 Toronto film festival.

He was unquestionably the centre of attention that night--confident, cocky, maybe even a little arrogant, if only playfully glibly fending off hordes of gushing well-wishers, still riding high off the back-to-back box-office success of Beetlejuice and the first Batman and eagerly anticipating the release of his entirely original and much more heartfelt Edward Scissorhands.

This Tim Burton, the one in Chicago with the Bambi-caught-in-headlights expression, was not nearly so self-assured. And with good reason--early press reaction to Batman Returns was an indication of what was to follow: It was too dark, it was too confusing . . . it just didn't work. Sure, it was probably going to make bags of money. But nothing like the first Batman film.

I couldn't help but wonder, which was the real Tim Burton--the defensive, insecure iconoclast or the confidently quirky auteur? Either? Neither? Both?

At the moment, likely, the latter. With the universal acclaim that has greeted the release of his indulgently offbeat puppet-animated musical fable, The Nightmare Before Christmas, right now Tim Burton has got to be feeling pretty good about himself.

Especially given the circumstances--Nightmare, conceived and produced by Burton under Disney's Touchstone banner, was the last thing he had submitted to that very same company back in the 1980s, when he was still just a studio apprentice, fresh out of film school on a Disney fellowship.

Except it wasn't the same company. Unlikely as it may seem in the wake of Beauty And The Beast and Aladdin, the early '80s was a very bad time to be a Disney animator.

To begin with, the entire department had been moved, from the building Uncle Walt had built for them to an anonymous industrial warehouse somewhere in Burbank. Significantly, the original animation offices were taken over by the studio's rapidly growing legal department.

Walt was long dead, and when the old-timers who had worked under him began to retire, promising newcomers like Burton and his Nightmare director, Henry Selick, were brought in. But even as they were being asked to think creatively, they were discouraged from ever actually acting on it.

Selick has described it as "a strange, schizophrenic existence" that involved a lot of smiling through clenched teeth. Burton once told me it was like living in "The Village" of Patrick McGoohan's surreal '60s series, "The Prisoner."

Disney's then-management didn't know quite what to make of the young Burton, either. Or what to do with him. Clearly, he had great potential. And a very unique vision. Which, of course, was the problem.

Even when he did manage to get his own projects made--the macabre live-action short, Frankenweenie, and Vincent, a puppet-animated tribute to his childhood hero, the late Vincent Price--they were inevitably shelved and he was sent back to the drawing board to work on uninspired pap like The Fox And The Hound.

It can be no coincidence that, immediately preceding the new, improved Disney/Burton alliance of the '90s, both Frankenweenie and Vincent finally saw the light of day, released, with great fanfare, by Disney Home Video.

The new, more aggressive management of today's Disney was not about to repeat the mistakes of that earlier, transitional regime. Even if they still did not fully understand Tim Burton, they at least understood his box-office appeal.

How else to explain the studio's backing of Burton's just-completed and most unlikely film yet, a biography of the notorious Z-grade '50s filmmaker Edward D. Wood Jr., casting Scissorhands star Johnny Depp as the alcoholic transvestite writer/director of such execrable, exploitative schlock as Glen Or Glenda and Plan 9 From Outer Space.

In fact, the new Disney really does understand Tim Burton--not only what he's worth, but why.

Not that it was any big secret. You want to find the real Tim Burton, you need look no further than his films. It's all up there on the screen, plain as day, even when it's dark as midnight (especially when it's dark as midnight).

Disney/Touchstone president David Hoberman has suggested that "the one thing that is consistent in all of Tim's films is the lead character. He is outside the world he lives in.

"If you take all these guys in a row--Batman, Beetlejuice, Pee-wee, Scissorhands, ( Christmas's) Skellington--they define Tim. The characters in his movies have an emptiness, they have soul and they have heart. They're trying to find an identity. They're trying to become accepted for their own weirdness. And they end up doing it. Just like their creator."

And that's Burton in a nutshell, the key to his anxieties and to his art.

Even if he is, by nature, a collaborative filmmaker--for example, his long-term relationships with composer Danny Elfman and scenic designer Bo Welch (husband to Beetlejuice and Nightmare star Catherine O'Hara)--the collaboration is invariably based on a shared vision. Predominantly Burton's.

For example, his first film, Pee-wee's Big Adventure. Though invented by actor Paul Reubens, the character of Pee-wee Herman proved ideally suited to Burton's sensibilities--the misfit man/child, equal parts arrogance and insecurity, naughty by nature but good at heart, wanting to find his place in the world yet adamantly unwilling to compromise his individuality.

In Beetlejuice, there were traces of Burton in both the trouble-making title character played by Michael Keaton and in Winona Ryder's withdrawn, death-obsessed problem child.

When a grateful Warner Brothers gave him the chance to bring Batman to the screen, Burton saw it as an opportunity to explore his own dichotomy. Triply so in Batman Returns, which he overloaded with not one but three schizophrenic societal outcasts--The Bat, The Cat and The Penguin--all obsessed loners whose invented identities revealed more than they concealed.

And, in between the two Batman movies, Edward Scissorhands, by far Burton's most personal work, a freakish fable about a gifted innocent who is protected from, then rejected by "normal" society. There was nothing casual about the physical resemblance between Edward and Burton, nor the casting of Burton icon Vincent Price as Edward's inventor/mentor/protector.

Strip away Edward's unruly mop of hair--and most of his flesh--and you have skeletal Jack Skellington, the earnest-if-misguided hero of The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Even Burton is unsure as to what he'll do next. Though he has definitely signed on as executive producer for Batman 3, he'll be handing over the directing duties to Joel Schumacher, who is expected to give the Dark Knight a lighter touch. Burton is also committed to direct a Michelle Pfeiffer Catwoman spin-off.

But, with Nightmare out, Ed Wood in the can and no firm story concepts yet for either of the new Batman projects, he'll do what he always does when he's not working.

"All I want to do now," he pronounced at a recent press conference, "is disappear into the middle of nowhere."