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Stan Berkowitz
Writer of Justice League: The New Frontier
Stan
Berkowitz, no stranger to penning tales of the Justice League, tells us
about the unique challenges that came with writing the new Justice
League: The New Frontier animated movie.
Please note this interview was performed before the release of Justice
League: The New Frontier.
Okay, let's cut to the chase - writing the movie adaptation for
New Frontier - how did you do it? A complex six issue mini-series
condensed into a 75 minute movie? How do you even fathom such a thing?
How do you decide what gets cut?
There's no question that the graphic novel was a vast epic, but there
was one key decision that was made before I came aboard that helped
immeasurably in the shaping of the movie, and that was to add the words
Justice League to the movie's title. I'm fairly certain this was
done in order to capitalize on the popularity of the TV series, and
also, perhaps, to lay some groundwork for a live-action Justice
League movie. Whatever the reason, it turned the New Frontier
movie into the story of just seven heroes, as opposed to dozens. Among
those seven, the graphic novel gave strong, emotional back-stories to
Hal Jordan and John Jones (and, to a lesser degree, Barry Allen). And
it's those three who play the key roles in the final battle against The
Center.
Once we decided to emphasize these characters, the rest wasn't that
difficult. Granted, sometimes it felt like we were trying to stuff an
octopus into a change purse, but most of the time, for me, anyway, it
was like putting together a puzzle that was challenging, but which
ultimately had an elegant solution.
How would you compare this experience to writing from Batman:
TheAnimated Series, or Superman: The Animated Series. Is the
process the same when writing a movie than a 22 minute episode?
The process isn't exactly the same, because few of the half-hour stories
were adaptations -- meaning there was seldom anything to work from. On
New Frontier, there was already a story, so a lot of what I did
was editing, as opposed to creating everything out of whole cloth. In
writing the script, whenever I came to a scene that we were importing
directly from the book, I'd re-read the scene and then use as much of it
as I possibly could in the screenplay.
The subject matter in New Frontier could be seen as very
mature at times. How did you take some of the more adult content or
subject matter when adapting the comic for the movie screen?
The movie is just as adult as the graphic novel, and that's because
Warners et al took a huge gamble and decided to go for a PG-13 rating on
the movie. It's a gamble because the traditional audience for superhero
animation has, at least until now, been predominantly very young, and
this rating cuts out most of that audience. And it's not like Warners
can change its mind at this point and re-cut this for a G rating; even
if it were trimmed to get a more child-friendly rating, New Frontier
still wouldn't be a children's movie; children want to see lots of
costumes, plenty of fights, a few jokes and no girls -- and that's not
what New Frontier is. It's written for an older audience.
How are you able to juggle writing scripts for more kid-oriented
shows, like The Batman, and then writing something with a PG-13
bent, like Justice League: The New Frontier?
Writing for a PG-13 audience seems to come more naturally to me than
writing for a very young audience. Super hero stories are usually about
matters of life and death, but when you're doing children's TV, you
can't even mention the word 'death.' There are good reasons for rules
like that, but because of all those constraints, a lot of the situations
and dialogue can seem unnatural. The first thing I wrote after New
Frontier was an episode of The Batman for Kids' WB!, and I had a
difficult time changing gears to accommodate the realities of children's
TV -- a point that my friend Alan Burnett and the Kids' WB! execs will
no doubt confirm.
With New Frontier out of the way, what does the future hold
for you? Care to let us know?
After New Frontier, I wrote a total of three episodes for The
Batman -- the second and third ones should be airing soon on the
Kids' WB!. Likewise, an episode of Legion of Superheroes that I
did for James Tucker and Michael Jelenic. There's also an upcoming
episode of Transformers that I wrote for Marty Isenberg at
Cartoon Network. And also on Cartoon Network you'll be seeing a couple
of episodes of Ben 10 that I did for Glen Murakami and Dwayne
McDuffie. I'm also working on a PG-13-rated animated series for BET
called Hannibal. It's about the North African military genius who
battled
the Romans, and Vin Diesel is the executive producer, and Matt Wayne's
the story editor. Then there's Friends and Heroes, which begins
its second season soon and will chronicle the siege of Jerusalem in 70
AD. I'm not yet sure where it's going to air.
The World's Finest would like to thank Stan Berkowitz for taking part
in this interview.
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