How I Helped Launch Batman Forever
Remembering my time creating the first website for a big-budget Hollywood movie
By ALEC POLLAK
I relate to Michael Keaton’s character in Birdman (2014) as he is tortured by that dangerous, maddening, ugly question:
Are my greatest days long behind me?
Over twenty years ago — May 25, 1995, to be exact — I was a part of a small team that launched the website for the film Batman Forever.
A few months before that, I sat in my cubicle at Grey Entertainment, a New York City advertising agency, working on a black-and-white print ad for Dan Quayle’s soon-to-be-released book Standing Firm.
I had no love for Dan Quayle. The experimental multimedia work we were doing with Macromedia Director held much more interest for me than a newspaper ad. But at the time, the opportunities to create interactive work were scarce.
The World Wide Web was new and exciting and interesting in a way that the Dan Quayle book ad could never be.
I had recently attended a talk at the Museum of Modern Art featuring Laurie Anderson and other innovators. This is where I would get my first look at the world’s first visual web browser, Mark Andreesen’s Mosaic. I started playing around with the web as soon as I could.
My first web access was through a BBS called SenseNet. I built my first site with rudimentary HTML and hosted it on Internet Channel.
A writer I frequently worked with walked over one day to see what I was doing. When I showed him the basic hypertext site I’d cobbled together and the markup that powered it, his eyes came alive. A chuckle escaped and his first words were, “No fuckin’ way.”
I swear I can still see the absolute wonder in his eyes. He had inspired me with his brilliant copy and unique insights many times and I was really happy I’d found something to offer him. That writer, Jeffrey Zeldman, went on to become the web’s unofficial Godfather.
As I fiddled with the Dan Quayle print ad — trying desperately to do something, anything to make it interesting — the phone rang. It was Len Fogge, President of the agency, calling little-old, Junior-Art-Director me. He’d heard I was one of the few people in the agency who had an email address.
“Warner Brothers just called,” Len said. “They want to do something called a Web site for the new Batman movie. Do we want to get involved with that?”
“Yes,” I said, “Yes, we want to get involved with that.” Deliverance from Dan Quayle. Salvation. Transcendence.
The agency teamed me with one of the (if not THE) edgiest copy/art team at the agency along with Jeffrey Zeldman and art director, Steve McCarron. Together we’d partner with producer Dara Weiss and mastermind Don Buckley (both at Warner Bros.) and Doug Rice’s coders at Interactive8 to produce the first website created for a big-budget Hollywood movie. Very good times.
And then 20 years passed.
The nascent World Wide Web of Batman Forever became the modern web of Mad Max: Fury Road IMDB takeovers and pan-media promotion.
I left Grey Entertainment soon after the launch of batmanforever.com to start up my own web shop. I helped start a number of companies, worked with agencies big and small, and served brands from AT&T to Zostavax. I’ve launched more websites than I want to remember, developed and shot web video series, invented apps and imagined up and cultivated a myriad of other digital experiences.
Some of my work engaged audiences with a bang and won awards. Some of the work became so mired in politics and “groupthink” that it barely made a peep in the world. But in my heart, none of the work can ever stand up to the first. To Batman. Forever.
So should I be tortured like Michael Keaton’s character in Birdman? Or should I recognize that shiny accomplishment not as a far-gone pinnacle, but as a magic moment of transformation?
I’d like to appreciate it as a transformation, one in an endless series of transformations, not just for me but for all of us.
Let’s fly off, into the future of whatever’s next. Just like Birdman.
For more on the story of batmanforever.com read Zeldman’s account on The Great Discontent and on his own site. I’ve also posted some screens from the site and will post additional goodies soon.
If you enjoyed this, please hit the green “Recommend” button below so others might also enjoy it.
