THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Tuesday, September 13, 2016 |A
THEY’RE TWO OF THE MOST successful movies
of the year, grossing a combined $1.5 billion
at the global box office.
“Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice”
and “Suicide Squad” are also two of the year’s
biggest disappointments, met with viciously
negative reviews, bitter fans’ complaints and
large second-weekend sales drops that indi-
cate word-of-mouth was unkind, to say the
least. The Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgen-
stern wrote that “Suicide Squad” represented
“an all-out attack on the whole idea of enter-
tainment” due to its “exceptional cynicism
and startling ineptitude.”
Warner Bros. is responding to this paradox
by charging full-speed ahead with plans for
its DC “cinematic universe”—while conceding
the movies to date have fallen creatively
short, a rare public admission in Hollywood.
The studio has reworked the 2017-slated
“Justice League” in hopes of making it less
grim and depressing than March’s “Batman
v Superman.” And it has put fan-favorite
comic book and TV writer Geoff Johns in a
senior position overseeing the next wave of
movies, along with veteran production exec-
utive Jon Berg.
One of the duo’s main goals, they said in
their first interview since taking the jobs
this past spring, is to make DC superheroes
on the big screen more inspiring.
“Mistakenly in the past I think the studio
has said, ‘Oh, DC films are gritty and dark
and that’s what makes them different.’ That
couldn’t be more wrong,” said Mr. Johns, who
has written comic books featuring most of
the company’s top superheroes. “It’s a hope-
ful and optimistic view of life. Even Batman
has a glimmer of that in him. If he didn’t
think he’d make tomorrow better, he’d stop.”
Many have complained that such a sense
of optimism was precisely what was missing
from director Zack Snyder’s “Batman v Su-
perman” and his 2013 Superman reboot “Man
of Steel.” Neither Ben Affleck’s Batman nor
Henry Cavill’s Superman crack a smile, and
both films feature so much death and de-
struction, including killings perpetrated by
the main characters, that bloggers labeled
them the “DC cinematic murderverse.”
The shuffle that made DC movies a full-
time job for Messrs. Berg and Johns came
soon after the public reaction to “Batman v
Superman.” Previously, no Warner executives
were devoted exclusively to the studio’s su-
perhero films. Mr. Berg worked on them
along with other productions, and Mr. Johns
was a consultant with no authority.
Their appointments indicate that after giv-
ing Mr. Snyder the type of long leash ac-
corded Christopher Nolan on the hit “Dark
Knight” Batman trilogy, Warner has con-
DOCUMENTARIES
The Origins of Beatlemania
BY JOHN JURGENSENDAVID SHRIGLEY/ANTON KERN GALLERY/PUBLIC ART FUND, NYBRITISH ARTISTDavid Shrigley’s
monumental public sculpture, “Memo-
rial,” unveiled last week in the south-
east corner of New York’s Central
Park, is a 17-foot-tall grocery list ren-
dered in solid granite. On the docket
are everyday items such as milk, eggs
and sausages. “Rice wine vinegar
didn’t make the cut,” he said.
Later this month, in London’s Tra-
falgar Square, Mr. Shrigley will mount
an equally incongruous project: a 10-
foot tall “thumbs-up” sign cast in
dark bronze, titled “Really Good.”
For an artist primarily known for
darkly comic drawings of stick fig-
ures in absurdist situations, it’s a
high-stakes introduction to a
broader public. The 47-year-old Mr.
Shrigley was born in Macclesfield,
England, and trained at the Glasgow
School of Art. He lived in Glasgow
for years afterward, gaining a repu-
tation for deadpan doodles, often
underscored with wry text. (One
drawing depicts a cat and mouse
shaking paws. “I won’t kill you,” says
the cat. “Thanks,” says the mouse.)
Mr. Shrigley’s art often straddles this
line, somewhere between sincerity
and irony, profundity and nonsense.
The artist toys with this line in
“Memorial” as well. He modeled the
piece after the towering Georgia
Guidestones (1980), mysteriouslycommissioned by an anonymous
group, which rise like oversize grave-
stones in a rural part of the state.
The 19-foot-tall monument includes a
set of 10 guidelines to life inscribed in
eight languages. Mr. Shrigley says of
“Memorial,” “I liked the idea that a
shopping list and a memorial serve
the same purpose. They are both an
aid to memory.” One of them, he
added, is meant for something
grander. “But for most of us, what
are the noble deeds of our lives?”
Mr. Shrigley’s offbeat aesthetic will
appear elsewhere this fall too. For a
festival in Toulouse, France, this
month, he has designed wonky but
still functional guitars with one string
and maracas in the shape of giant
fists. At his show at the Rose Art
Museum at Brandeis University in
Waltham, Mass., which opened Sun-
day, Mr. Shrigley invites visitors to
make “life drawings” from a 9-foot,
badly proportioned sculpture of a
woman. “The better you are at draw-
ing, the less your drawing is going to
look like reality,” he said.
For “Really Good,” Mr. Shrigley
wrote his proposal to create it using
the voice of an arrogant politician. He
argued that the thumbs-up sign
would work as a self-fulfilling proph-
ecy, making London and the world a
better place. “Obviously it’s nonsense
to suggest that,” he said. “But I’ve
suddenly, in a funny sort of way,
come to believe it might be true.”ART
BY ANNA RUSSELLA Monumental
Grocery List
ELEVATING THE EVERYDAY David Shrigley’s ’Memorial’ in New York.ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
THE LEGACY OF THE BEATLESis
usually explained through their record-
ings. A new documentary film explores
the other side of their career, as per-
formers. On the road and in concert,
the four bandmates bonded, defined
their moptop image and accelerated
their creativity in the studio—until
Beatlemania forced them to retreat
from the stage.
At the center of “The Beatles: Eight
Days a Week—The Touring Years” is
the band’s meteoric run between their
Ed Sullivan appearance in 1964 and
their final public concert 50 years ago,
at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park on
Aug. 29, 1966. Before that, however,
came years of groundwork, including
hundreds of pre-fame performances
before the band released its first sin-
gle, “Love Me Do.”
“A lot of people thought we were an
overnight sensation. We weren’t. Peo-
ple didn’t realize we had all this devel-
opment,” 74-year-old Paul McCartney
says in the film.
For director Ron How-
ard, the band’s journey
formed the basis of
“an adventure
story.” As they
went from sharing
cramped quarters
in the seedy part
of Hamburg to
hiding in a bath-
room to escape the
crush of fans and
media in New York,
their tale turned into
“an ensemble survival
story,” says Mr. Howard, the
filmmaker behind movies such as
“Apollo 13” and the “The Da Vinci
Code“ trilogy (including October’s “In-
ferno”).
“Eight Days a Week” is his second
feature-length documentary. His first,
“Made In America,” was about Jay Z
and the launch of the rapper’s music
festival of the same name. “Eight Days
a Week” is set for release this week in
theaters, where showings will include a
half-hour of restored footage from the
Beatles’ 1965 concert at New York’s
Shea Stadium.
In 2014, the filmmakers put out a
request online, asking Beatles fans to
submit their personal recordings and
footage. There are some 2,000 audio,
visual and photographic clips
in the film from more
than 100 sources, in-
cluding fans, collec-
tors and archive
houses. They in-
cluded a jackpot
revealed by a
woman who used
a Super 8 camera
to shoot much of
the band’s final
concert from a good
seat in Candlestick
Park. After she devel-
oped it and watched it
once or twice, it sat under her
bed for five decades.
Editors painstakingly stitched this
source material together, synchroniz-
ing bootleg audio recordings with
footage shot by fans. The din from
screaming fans that made it difficult
for the Beatles to hear themselves on
stage also stymied the filmmakers.
Music producer Giles Martin (son of
the Beatles’ producer George Martin)
worked to filter out the screams so
the music could be heard in the audio
mix.
The film is also a snapshot of a
band that grew faster than the con-
cert technology available to them.They played their guitars through low-
wattage amplifiers, and the sound
was delivered through stadiums by
tinny public address systems used by
sports announcers. The Beatles had
three roadies and almost zero stage
spectacle, aside from their matching
suits.
The band made the decision to quit
touring while sliding around the back
of a cargo truck that was carting them
away from the stage at Candlestick
Park. Three months later they started
work on “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts
Club Band,” and released five more al-
bums before breaking up in 1970. As
Mr. Lennon says in the film, “We really
expressed ourselves through the re-
cords, because we could no longer do it
outside.”
Mr. Howard, who was experiencing
a different kind of fame then as a star
on “The Andy Griffith Show,” recalls
wearing a Beatles wig on his 10th
birthday in 1964. (His parents couldn’t
find the Beatles boots he had re-
quested.) After interviewing the two
surviving band members for the docu-
mentary, the director compared their
accounts to those of the astronauts he
talked to when making “Apollo 13.”
“They achieved something momen-
tous in the human experience,” he said,
“but they don’t really know how to ex-
plain it.”FROM TOP: APPLE CORPS LTD.; JEFF LIPSKY
COME TOGETHER Director Ron Howard, below, stitched together fan footage.cluded it needs to oversee its DC movies
more closely. A spokeswoman for Mr. Snyder
said he was unavailable to comment.
There was precedent in comics for Mr.
Snyder’s interpretations, particularly Frank
Miller’s revered 1986 comic-book miniseries
“The Dark Knight Returns,” in which Bat-
man and Superman battle. And director Da-
vid Ayer’s “Suicide Squad,” though it had
significant reshoots and last-minute editing,
was never going to be a lighthearted romp,
since its source material is about villains co-
erced into doing good.
While they knew the movies had flaws and
expected them to be controversial, Warner
executives were taken aback by the over-
whelmingly negative responses, people at the
studio said. They believed they had created
more grounded, character-based stories that,
like “The Dark Knight,” would favorably stand
out from chief rival Marvel Studios’ consis-
tently successful but fluffier fare such as
“Avengers” and “Guardians of the Galaxy.”
The negative reactions were troubling. De-
spite the box office, if people aren’t happy
and excited to see what’s next when they
come out of theaters, the long-term prospects
for DC films and consumer products are poor.
Warner plans to release at least two movies
based on DC characters every year for the
foreseeable future at a cost of several billion
dollars. CEO Kevin Tsujihara has said DC is
one of three pillars of his studio’s movie busi-
ness, along with Harry Potter and Lego.
Still, Warner executives have found rea-sons to take heart. The fact that this year’s
movies were met with strident opinions—in-
stead of a shrug like the Twentieth Century
Fox 2015 superhero flop “Fantastic Four”—
indicates that fans care about the charac-
ters. Big opening weekends mean that the
marketing and concepts resonated—a par-
ticularly impressive feat for “Suicide
Squad,” given the low profile of the comic
book on which it’s based. And even people
who didn’t like the movies latched onto
characters who proved popular, particularly
Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman and Mr. Af-
fleck’s Batman in “Batman v Superman” and
Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn and Will
Smith’s Deadshot in “Suicide Squad.”
“To have these characters be part of the
fabric of pop culture is so rewarding, though
of course we’re disappointed the movies
weren’t better reviewed,” said Mr. Berg. He
spoke from the London set of “Justice
League,” where Mr. Snyder is a few weeks
away from completing a five-month shoot.
“Justice League” was already intended to
be less depressing than “Batman v Super-
man,” but Messrs. Berg and Johns worked
with Mr. Snyder and screenwriter Chris Ter-
rio to make changes after gauging fan reac-
tions to the superhero fight. “We accelerated
the story to get to the hope and optimism a
little faster,” said Mr. Berg.
“Justice League” will also directly address
Batman’s extreme actions in the last movie,
such as torturing criminals and nearly killing
the man of steel, rather than accept them aspar for the course. And it’s expected to have
fewer of Mr. Snyder’s controversial flourishes,
like the dream sequences in “Batman v Super-
man,” in favor of focusing more tightly on the
plot, people close to the picture said.
Plans to make “Justice League” a multi-
movie story were also abandoned. Instead, a
2019 sequel will stand alone. “Justice League”
will come out in November 2017, following
next June’s “Wonder Woman.” Mr. Johns did
a rewrite of the script for the superheroine’s
origin story, working with director Patty Jen-
kins, and is co-writing a solo Batman movie
with Mr. Affleck, who will also direct. It will
feature Joe Mangianello, from “Magic Mike”
and “True Blood,” as nemesis Deathstroke
and could come as early as 2018, though War-
ner hasn’t set a release date.
As he is writing screenplays and working
with Mr. Berg to develop other coming DC
movies, including “Flash,” “Aquaman” and
“Cyborg,” Mr. Johns has pulled back from his
work on DC television shows and comic
books. In May, however, he wrote a special
called “Rebirth” that gave DC’s comic-book
line a more hopeful tone and a renewed focus
on each superhero’s core qualities—following
complaints that, like the recent movies, they
had gone astray from what fans loved about
them. Early sales numbers have been strong,
and Mr. Johns said he is applying the lessons
to his films. “We’re trying to take a really
hard look at everything to make sure we stay
true to the characters and tell stories that
celebrate them,” he said.Lightening Up a Too Dark Knight
ZAP! Warner Bros.
accentuates the positive
after bad reactions to
films like ‘Batman v
Superman.’
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