The Begininng

The 1966 version of Batman was in the front of my mind when I began composition upon what would have been, had life taken a different turn, the screenplay for this film.  The reason for this, I admit, is the fact that I had just recently seen the pornographic parody of that television show for the first time.  I had discovered this adult film a few years after my interest in the adult film as a genre had waned.  Certainly, I still viewed porn on the internet like any other human being, but years before it had been more than that.  I had a summer job, in the break between my junior and senior years of college, working as the clerk in a porn store.  Of course, as you'll see if you watch this movie to the end, I can be obsessive, so as a clerk in this retail business, I developed an obsession with the history and the business of adult cinema.  I collected only the films that had historical relevance for my personal collection.  While in my personal life I am not a homosexual, I did pick up a copy of John Holmes's first gay film, as it spoke to a certain moment in the medium's history.  Similarly, I of course used my employee discount to gain copies of Debbie Does Dallas and The Devil In Miss Jones, I also took in a copy of more recent films, such as Nurse Nancy, because it is the film that was playing when Pee-Wee Herman was arrested for publicly masturbating in a porno theater.

So I hadn't been numbed to porn in some kind of Clockwork Orange way, but I had put it in my mind in something of a different context.  I had also, by the chapter in my life when this story begins, befriended a pornographic actress when she and I were both in a mental hospital, she for bipolar disorder, bulimia and alcoholism, myself for deep and serious suicidal thoughts.  But that was a few years before our story begins. Everything you just heard was, really.


So, I was on the Vivid website one day, looking for the sex tape of Kendra from girls next door, when I happened upon an image.  The image was pornographic in nature of course, but was fascinating for another reason: The image was of Batman having fellacio performed upon by recognizable adult entertainer Alexis Texas.  What was especially moving in all the right ways about this image was the fact that this not mere generic pornographic adaptation of Batman, of no, dear viewers, this was an exact recreation of the Batman played by Adam West in the 1966 television series and the feature film of the same year upon which it was based.

I was born in 1986, twenty years after Adam West first put on the cape and cowl and three years before Michael Keaton did so.  So I grew up, however much I really did grow up, obsessively watching those films and that television series.  Not simply viewing them passively, creating stories in my head, occasionally even editing together the images I had seen, something I clearly never stopped doing.  To me as a child, Batman was both Adam West and Michael Keaton and, a short time later, also a cartoon character voiced by Kevin Conroy.  I didn't see the difference.  Yes there was always talk of which of these adaptations was the most serious, the most faithful, the most whatever-the-fuck, but like Neil Gaiman before me, I saw no difference.  I only saw Batman.  Just as every generation has their own James Bond or their own Bob Dylan, every generation has its own Batman.  I had three.  But I only saw one.

It was notable at the time that Batman XXX, as I discovered the film to be called, was advertised not only on porn sites, such as the one on which I had found it, but on mainstream sites as well.  I followed the news of the film closely.   I recognized the mighty Evan Stone as The Riddler, of course, as I had seen him for many years in the soft core films which aired on HBO Zone late into the night.

After some time of following the news dealing with the films creation and production, I proudly walked into my former place of employment and purchased a DVD of Batman XXX.  As did many people, as it turned out.  It sold incredibly well for a film in a genre that most people view for free these days.

The great thing, one of the great things, about Batman XXX was not only did it, for the most part, faithfully recreate the performances of the film and television show (oddly, three of the four villains from the feature film were present, but Penguin was nowhere to be seen) while also mimicking the costumes and set design, it also worked in specific lines of dialogue from various episodes.  Many pointed out what fun it was to work in a window cameo from adult legend Ron Jeremy, but nearly nobody seemed to notice that the dialogue in that scene was taken almost exactly from an actual window cameo from the series, that of Sammy Davis, Jr.  So memories of the series, which never completely went away, were brought back to the very front of my brain by this work on pornography.

So it was with this vision of Batman in that place in my mind that I started writing the script for a version of what I had foolishly at one time thought was to be the film you are currently, hopefully, enjoying.  I was kind of writing a non porn parody of Batman XXX, which was  a porn parody of the Batman TV show, which was a parody of the character in general, and the Silver Age books and 1940s  serial films in particular.  It would have been a non porn parody of a porn parody of a parody.  It's a shame the world will never seen that movie.  A real damn shame.