In 1990, production designer Anton Furst and set decorator Peter Young won the Academy Award for Best Art Direction for “Batman.” Furst used his experience recreating war-torn Vietnam in London for Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” and created a new hellish vision of urban decay for Gotham City in Tim Burton’s film. It remains one of the most impressively realized and transporting pieces of production design in film history, melding a kind of New York-gone-wrong aesthetic with an expressionistic sensibility that was right up Burton’s street.
The design of “Batman” was just one of the elements that made the film the triumph it was. Within Furst’s immersive metropolis, Michael Keaton, Kim Bassinger, and of course Jack Nicholson, were free to play out a darkly fanciful melodrama, propelled by Sam Hamm’s writing, which melded noir-ish cynicism with moments of playful poeticism — “Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?” It helped that many of these lines were delivered impeccably by Nicholson, who, just by agreeing to play the Joker, lent Burton’s film a level of prestige it might not have otherwise enjoyed.
But Nicholson’s job wasn’t done after filming wrapped. Not only had the veteran star helped legitimize “Batman” as a serious production and elevated the entire project with his effortlessly captivating performance, he also took it upon himself to sing the film’s praises in public. That includes one such instance where, simply by taking a bathroom break, he may have helped Furst and Young secure their Oscar.