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Tim Burton: Vincent Price
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Burton's ability to produce hits with low budgets impressed studio executives and he received his first big budget film Batman (1989). The mega-budget production, based in London, was plagued with problems. Burton repeatedly clashed with the film's producers, Jon Peters and Peter Guber, but the most notable debacle involved casting. Burton wanted to cast Michael Keaton from his previous role as Beetlejuice, despite Keaton's average physique, inexperience with action films, and reputation as a comic actor. Although Burton won out in the end, the furor over the casting provoked enormous fan animosity, to the extent that Warner Brothers' share price slumped. Burton had considered it ridiculous to cast a bulked-up he-man as Batman, insisting that the Caped Crusader should be an ordinary (albeit fabulously wealthy) man who dressed up in an elaborate bat costume to frighten criminals.
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In 1982, Burton made his first short film, Vincent, a six-minute film about a young boy who flashes from reality into a fantasy where he is Vincent Price, with Price himself providing narration. This was followed by the live-action short Frankenweenie, starring a young Barret Oliver (as well as Sofia Coppola in a minor part). The film, shot in black and white, was a reenactment of the story of Frankenstein where the mad scientist was replaced by a young Victor (Oliver) reanimated his dead dog after he was killed in a road accident. The film was deemed unsuitable for children due to its "gruesome" concept and was quickly shelved.
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Throughout the film, Burton mainly uses match cutting to visualize Vincent's identification with Vincent Price, which provides a series of trick transitions between Vincent-as-himself and Vincent-as-Vincent Price. Each of these cuts appear temporally continuous, but as Vincent transforms between himself and Price, the filmic space fluctuates between spatial continuity and discontinuity. In Burton's words, "the film just goes in and out of Vincent's own reality. . .It clicks in and out of reality so to speak." This style of cutting is familiar from UPA cartoons, which often matched character position while backgrounds dissolved from one location to the next. Moreover, Vincent's flat, simplified backgrounds show the influence of the stylized spaces of such UPA films as Gerald McBoing Boing. Designer Bill Hurtz once described that cartoon as a film "without walls.
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The latter two received little or no outside exposure, but Burton did get to work with his idol, Vincent Price, for the first time and they remained friends until Price's death in 1993. Frankenweenie was awarded a PG rating, which precluded its release with their G-rated animated features. It only saw theatrical release overseas, and a short release on VHS. However, it would be the film that landed him his first feature directing job.
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"He's incredible -- Christopher is like a walking encyclopedia," Burton beamed. "He's just such an amazing man. For me, I was just lucky to have me these people that have had such a major impact on me. Watching Christopher Lee and Vincent Price and all these other people, and then being able to meet them and work with them a little bit is just incredible."
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