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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.
Justice League: The New Frontier, and related characters and indicia are property of DC Comics and WB, 2012.
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