Christine Aylward:

                        So, Michael, thank you so much for sitting down with us at Minetta Tavern here in New York.

Michael Uslan: Oh my God. It's, like, the only place in the world. Really. Don't tell anyone I said that.

CA:                 I won't tell anyone you said that. So, I met you in California and I remember when you were speaking at the summit dinner, you got up and told your life story, and you talked about your dad and your family and growing up in New Jersey. I would just love for you to share with us again how it was that you became connected to "Batman" and your story. 

MU:                Wow. My connection to Batman started when I was eight, and like every comic book theme growing up, you kind of have this connection to Batman, I think, that you really don't have to any other superhero. Superman has super powers. Spiderman has super powers. Hulk has super powers. With Batman, he has no super powers. His greatest super power I've always maintained is his humanity.

                        When you're a kid growing up, my god, how easy is it to really identify with his character? When you read his adventures, to believe in your heart of hearts that if you worked out real hard and if you studied real hard and if your dad bought you a cool car, you could be this guy.

So, I identified with Batman, and he had the greatest super villains in the history of comics, really, the greatest villains. Stan Lee who is the co-creator of the whole Marvel pantheon of super heroes has always maintained that "Unless you've got great super villains a superhero will never sustain over the decades." I think it's really true.

That began my connection to Batman, and I collected every Batman comic book that I could get my hands on; old issues, new issues... Finally, the day came, which was one of the most exciting days of my life, it was January 1966 and the Batman TV show was about to come on the air. I was so excited because it was really the first superhero to come on TV since George Reeves and "The Adventures of Superman", and that was cool. It was in color. They were spending a lot of money. The car was cool. Then, when it came on the air, Christine, I was simultaneously thrilled and horrified by what I was seeing.

I was thrilled that it was Batman and it was the car and it was the villains, but I was horrified that the whole world was laughing at Batman. He was a laughing stock and that just killed me. So, when young Bruce Wayne was about 10 or 12 years old he saw his parents murdered in front of his eyes, and he made a vow that night over the bodies of his parents, and Bruce Wayne vowed, sacrificing his childhood at that moment, that he would spend the rest of his life committed to getting the guy who did this and to getting all the bad guys even if it meant having to walk through hell for the rest of his life in order to do it.

Well, this night in January 1966 I had my own little Bruce Wayne vow moment, and I kind of vowed to myself that somehow, some day, some way I would find the means to show the world the original Batman from 1939, the creature of the night who stalked criminals from the shadows, a dark, serious, gritty Batman. And, somehow, my mission was to erase three little words from the collective consciousness of the world culture: Pow, Zap and Wham. That's really what set me on my mission in life.

CA:                 What was your first memory of reading Batman as a child?

MU:                First memory was being on the back of my brother, my older brother, Paul, who brought me into Irv's Candy Store in Bayonne on Avenue A, and we went in there and, Christine, it was a wall of comic books from floor to ceiling. I had never seen anything like that in my young life. My brother said that he had five dimes that my dad had given us, so he was going to pick out three comic books and I could pick out two. I remember him boosting me all the way up to the top and I picked out a comic book called Sugar and Spike #2. Sugar and Spike was kind of like "Look Who's Talking". Remember that movie?   

CA:                 Yeah.

MU:                It was "Look Who's Talking" before "Look Who's Talking" was "Look Who's Talking". The other one I picked out was an issue of Detective Comics starring Batman that showed him in a car that was not a regular old Batmobile but an urban assault tank. I was just mesmerized by the car on that scary looking Batman comic when I was five and I picked that.

Coincidence of coincidences, in "Batman Begins" and "Dark Knight": "Dark Knight" rises and there's a Batmobile that looks like an urban assault tank. Amazing. One of the coincidences of life. It's really incredible. That's the first Batman comic book that I actually remember buying and then it was a habit. I was an addict, and I collected every Batman comic book from then on.

CA:                 What were your parents thinking? My daughter reads all the time Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, "A Series of Unfortunate Events", everything, and I think it's great. But, what were your parents thinking when you were five, six, seven, eight and you were obsessed with Batman?

MU:                Well, I have to set the stage. The stage is that in the mid 1950's and around '54, '55, '56 there was a psychiatrist attached to the Lefevre Clinic in Brooklyn who wrote a book called "Seduction of the Innocent", and he claimed that the post World War II rise in juvenile delinquency was due specifically to comic books. They were turning America's youth into juvenile delinquents.

                        Worse than that, he claimed that if they read Batman and Robin comic books they could become homosexuals, if girls read Wonder Woman comics books they could become lesbians, and, finally, if kids read comic books, they would develop asthma because they would be staying inside to read instead of playing in the fresh air.

A lot of my friends' moms and dads bought it, hook, line, and sinker. Comic book collections were getting burned, given away to post World War II paper drives, disappearing, siblings were ratting out other siblings, it was really something and my mom was great. My mom said to me, "OK. I think these things have helped you learn to read. You started reading before you were four and I think it's from the comics, and I think they spark your imagination and I think they increase your vocabulary, so here's the deal."

She said to me, "If you agree to read other things, books, magazines, and newspapers specifically, you can read your comics, and you can keep them provided you keep them neat in your room." It was the greatest deal any kid could ever on Earth make with his mom.

So, as a result I got to keep all my comic books. We moved into our bigger house going into sixth grade. Never once did my dad get his car into the garage. Instead, what he did was built me wall-to-wall-to-wall, floor to ceiling shelves to house my comic book collection, and before too long it filled up all the shelves, and I started piling them up on the floor of the garage until the time I graduated high school and had over 30,000 comic books dating back to 1936.    

CA:                 Wow. Okay. Where is that collection now?

MU:                Today, I have now donated 45,000 comic books from my collection to Indiana University's Lilly Library. It's their rare book library. I've kept about 5,000 of my favorites which my son has threatened. If I give these away he's going to take action, so I'm going to preserve them for him.

CA:                 I don't blame him.

MU:                I don't blame him either. It's the like the first issue of every Marvel comic book and the first issue every DC superhero comic book practically, so it's a pretty good collection.

CA:                 Wow, it's worth a lot of money, also.

MU:                It's worth a few bucks. Thank god I didn't invest in real state when I was a kid. I bought comic books.

CA:                 Exactly. I'm so curious, you're a boy and you're reading comic books and then magazines. What were you thinking when you were reading those magazines and what kinds of magazines were you reading?

MU:                I started with "Children's Digest" and "Boy's Life" and graduated to "Newsweek" and later "Time Magazine", so they put me on kind of the right path. "Popular Science" I loved. So, it was a lot of things kind of tangentially having to do with comics in a way. A lot of the stories I read had to do with fantasy or science. That was great, and that was definitely part of the deal. I became an avid book reader. So, I read everything starting with Howdy Doody books and "Winnie the Pooh" and then graduating to whatever the new series was that came out at the time. I remember "Tom Swift Jr.", "The Hardy Boys". I just ate it all up. 

CA:                 What was your favorite book?

MU:                My favorite book is probably, actually, "Winnie the Pooh". I thought it was brilliantly written. Even as a kid I knew there was something magical about the way that was written, and I really identified with Christopher Robin and now all the secrets are coming out. But, I really loved that. I loved an adventure series called the "Box Car Children" that I remember reading.

So, it starts there, and it starts with your parents, I think, who set you on a road, who set certain guide lines for you, and point you in a direction that for me was so weird compared to all the other kids.

But, my folks were always supportive of it and always willing to fuel the fire and ultimately drive me on weekends to take me to meet comic book creators or to go on the tours of the comic book companies and eventually go to the very, very first comic book convention ever held in the world in a flea bag hotel in the Bowery in July 1964.

It was there that 200 of us met and it was incredible. I did not know there was anyone else like me in the universe who was so into comic books. It was a very isolating hobby. These were the days before the Internet and before all these comic book conventions. I didn't know anyone else was into superheroes. 

CA:                 Your friends weren't?

MU:                One friend in fifth grade, Bobby Klein. He came to our school. We wound up sharing a locker. I opened up the locker so he could put his stuff in, and he saw a pinup of Superman hanging there and we've been blood brothers ever since.

CA:                 What's Bobby Klein doing now? Is he as involved with comics as you are?

MU:                Bobby Klein, first of all, was the genius of our class growing up. He's the kid that got perfect scores on his SAT's, went to MIT and got a double major in nuclear physics and quantum something or another, went to work for Intel where he became an instantaneous "muckamuck". They would give him a chip with six hundred bits or bytes or other forms of breakfast cereal and he would wind up putting six-million of them in the same chip.

                        So, Bobby's always used that brain of his and has continued to collect comics. We now actually work as comic book historians together. We've written a lot of introductions and histories of comics for DC comics, Marvel and some of the other ones as well. 

CA:                 So, when you're producing and developing the Batman movies, do you consult with him? Do you call him and say, "What do you think about this director?"

MU:                Oh yeah. I talk to Bobby about everything. Everything comic book related, absolutely. We're still in touch. When we speak to each other it's, "How are the kids? How is the family? How's everything going? Now, what did you buy this week? What did you get last week? What do you think of what they're doing to Flash? What do you think of what's going on in Fantastic Four?".

                        So, we have those ongoing conversations, a little bit less these days because we're not quite as interested in some of the new things that they're doing with some of the characters out there. On the other hand, there are a lot more archival collections coming out of stuff that's just as classic as you can get and we talk about that a lot. We make sure that our collections are both filled to the brim with the good stuff.

CA:                 Why is it that you're less interested in what they're doing to the characters today?

MU:                Well, I think there's been a generational shift. Graphic story telling is a little different today than it was when I was growing up back then and even 10 or 20 years ago. There are a lot fewer words on a page, generally speaking, now. They rely more on the artist's story telling ability to bring the action to life with far less emphasis on the written word.

To me, comic book is half art and half book and was a 50/50 collaboration between writers and artists. Today it's heavily, heavily favoring the artist the way I see it. So, if I get a comic book and there's five words, ten words, 20 words on a page and I've read it in three minutes it doesn't quite hold the entertainment value for me that they used to. That is part of the reason. I think I can speak for Bobby as well. We would rather get our hands on a graphic novel or on a collection of five or six comic books in a row that we can digest and enjoy ourselves at a sitting rather than reading one pamphlet in three minutes.

CA:                 And, when you think about the movies today, do you see that more as an equal collaboration between writer, director and producer like comic books used to be? 

MU:                I think you still need the auteur. You still need the film maker. You need the director with a vision. It's got to start with a director who has a clear vision and hopefully knows how to execute which is the producer's job to help him accomplish that.

                        But, one of the things that are missing most in movies today is simply a great story with a beginning, a middle, and an end where every set up has a payoff, where every pay off has a set up, where there are character arcs successfully created during the course of that. And you care about a character or you care about characters and want to follow them through and even bonus, might have some kind of thematic importance to that story. I find that too many studio pictures today don't have all of those things attached to them.

CA:                 So, how do you as a producer make sure all of those things are attached?

MU:                Well, you do your best. You're working in collaboration with a studio, a financier, and/or a distributor. When it's their money, they get to call all the shots. It's like when I was playing football with Harvey Sivens when we were growing up. It was important to play with Harvey because he was the only one in the whole neighborhood who owned a football. But, every day when his dad came home from Newark on the train, his mom would whistle for Harvey and the game was over. Harvey left to go to dinner and took his ball with him. Studios are kind of like Harvey, his mom and the ball.

So, you do the best you can. Again, the greatest insurance for that is, A, to have that film maker with a vision, and, B, not to go out and make the movie until you really have your script nailed, where you really have a screen play that's ready to go. Sometimes, there are pressures to push a movie into production before that is ready. As a result, today I go to see a lot more foreign films and independent films than I do studio pictures. I just do.

I would rather see "Midnight in Paris" than "Nutty Professor 5". It's just me. I would rather see a character that I'm vested in rather than cars and buildings blowing up, but I'm also not the kid I once was. I'd like to think inside I am, but things have changed.

CA:                 So, who are some of your favorite movie characters, not specific to Batman, they can be, but just in general, favorite movie characters?

MU:                Favorite movie characters. I think we start with Rick Blaine, "Casablanca." One of the most enigmatic, interesting protagonists I have ever seen in my life. An anti-hero if ever there was one. Errol Flynn was my hero for so many years, the ultimate swashbuckler. Superheroes could all take a great lesson from Errol Flynn from watching him in "Robin Hood" or "Captain Blood". That's amazing, amazing stuff.

                        So, as you probably can tell, Turner Classic Movies is on in my house 24/7, and I advocate that everyone, young and old, really watch the essentials. Watch the movies from the film makers that really count and gave us the industry that we have today and the art form that we have today.

Dorothy Gale is one of my favorite female protagonists of all time from "The Wizard of Oz". "The Godfather", I think, is an interesting anti-hero. Indian Jones is one of my favorite heroes because he emulates the world of Errol Flynn and Ronald Coleman and all the great swashbucklers, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. I love, love, love Katharine Hepburn and will watch any Katharine Hepburn movie that comes along.

On director's side, probably, David Lean and Alfred Hitchcock, a wide variety of directors that I really, really have loved over the years, and it's even true today. Jack Nicholson, his character in "China Town" is one of the most intriguing characters I've ever seen on screen. A lot of great answers to that and I could probably keep going for an hour or two just on that question alone.

CA:                 On a Batman note, who was your favorite Batman villain in the Batman movies?

MU:                There's no question that the greatest villain ever created in the history of comics is the Joker. He's the greatest villain. Nobody comes close to him. Doctor Doom's great. The Red Skull's wonderful. Darkside and Thanos are terrific villains. Nobody comes close to the Joker.

When you look at Batman and the Joker, they are two creatures who are actually very similar in a way and walk a very thin line between good and evil. I mean, think about it. Bruce Wayne was really screwed up as a kid, watching his parents get murdered in front of his eyes he could have fallen over to the dark side. He could have become the Joker, instead he became the Batman.

Batman and the Joker to me evoke Edgar Allen Poe's "Cask of Amontillado". The Joker has the face of the carnival masking the horror lurking beneath the surface, just like Poe's "Cask of Amontillado" did. Batman is this great hero, but he's in the guise of a demonic, monstrous looking, dark creature. So, the dance they do, or, I should say, the way Tim Burton interpreted it in the first one, the opera that they appear in together is really quite interesting. I love the whole concept of "I made you, you made me" that ties them together like that in the first picture.

CA:                 So, let's talk a little bit about the directors and the selection process around directors for each of the different movies. Do you think "This is the tone I want" and then you go and you seek the director that you think has that tone? How does it all come together?

MU:                For the boy who loved Batman, me, growing up and trying to make my dreams into reality, I was determined that either the world would see the dark and serious Batman or no Batman at all. I did not want the decent back into camp. I did not want those pows, zaps and whams following me around, and I was adamant about that. It became part of my crusade through life, so that was very, very important to me.

Tim Burton got it. I remember they set up a screening of the rough cut of "Pee Wee's Big Adventure" for us to take a look at, and I remember seeing it and thinking, "I've never seen such a marriage between direction and art direction in my life." This guy is so incredibly inventive, and I knew he was the guy who had the ability to bring a comic book to life in a way we had never seen before.

Then when I met with Tim we had three lunches, and it was my job at that moment to introduce him to the world of Batman, make sure we saw the comic books that we wanted him to see and not the comic books that were in any way silly or campy, and that was a great process, too. That's when I knew he really did get it and understand what I was looking for in this dark, serious Batman. It wasn't just me it was my partner, Ben Melniker. It was Peter Guber from Casablanca Records and Film Works.

Eventually, as the years passed, it was the execs at Warner Brothers who became the distributor/financier of the picture. There were so many people over the years who contributed who were important, who were integral and deserved all the credit for what transpired. Roger Birnbaum, another hero of mine. 

Tim showed that he had it, and he understood that he needed to create Gotham City as the third most important character in the first movie because if he didn't create a Gotham City, a world, a universe that fans could really, and when I say "fans" I mean general audiences all over the world could really believe in. They would never suspend their disbelief and believe that a guy could get dressed up in a bat costume and fight a guy like the Joker. So, it was essential to Tim that we sold them first on Gotham City and I think that's what he did.

Tim is a genius, and he worked with another genius, Anton Furst, a dear friend of mine no longer with us. Anton was our production designer. He won the Oscar that year for Batman. Anton read in the script the one line that described Gotham City and it said, "Gotham City: As if hell has erupted from under the Earth."

So, Anton said to Tim, "Well, what does this mean?" Tim thought about it and said, "I think this means New York City had there never been any planning and zoning." Anton said, "I get it". And, he went off and researched conflicting types of architecture, came back with the designs for Gotham City, the Batmobile, the Bat Wing, the whole picture.

I'll tell you something. If you look at virtually every genre picture that has come since Batman 1989, you will hear and see the echoes of Tim Burton's vision still permeating these films. You will feel Anton Furst's design work affecting and influencing all of these films. You can almost hear Danny Elfman's musical notes still resonating through other genre films even today. It was revolutionary. Nothing like this had been done before. Nobody had done that dark, serious, comic book hero before.

They told me for ten years it couldn't be done, terrible idea, "worst idea they ever heard". Of course, my favorite rejection came from Columbia Pictures. They said, "Michael, oh Michael, you're crazy. Batman will never be successful as a movie because our movie "Annie" didn't do well." The look on your face is perfect. That's exactly the look I had.

CA:                 Who at Columbia? You don't need to name names.

MU:                Let me just say that this gentleman said to me when I said, "Are you talking about the little red-headed girl who sings Tomorrow?" He said, "Yeah." I said, "What does she have to do with Batman." He said, "Oh, come on, Michael. They're both out of the funny pages." And that was my dismissal from Columbia.   

CA:                 Wow. So, great lead to my next question. How do you remain resilient when it took ten years for you to convince the studio to develop "Batman". How do you keep committed? How do you not get beaten down?

MU:                A lot of people said I should have been committed. It starts with my mom. My mom raised my brother Paul and I in a way that was if you make a commitment you honor it. That's your responsibility whether it's Little League or extra curricular activities or doing a book report or doing something for a neighbor or a friend or a relative, you honor it. Even if you have to go through hell in order to do it, you honor your commitments. So, this was a commitment.

Number two. From my dad I learned that you must follow your heart. You must take your passion in life, and you must make that your work. You need to love what you do or else you're going to sentence yourself to life imprisonment until you retire. I so much wanted to bring this dark, serious version of Batman to the screen. I so wanted to make movies, TV and animation based on my favorite comic book characters my work. So, that was guiding me.

I had two great, great teachers. My seventh and eighth grade English teachers, Mrs. Stiller and Mrs. Freidman. Mrs. Stiller discovered in me a creative abilityand a creative writing ability and nurtured it and convinced me that I had an ability that I could use for the rest of my life. She then turned me over to her sister-in-law, Mrs. Freidman, for eighth grade who virtually beat me over the head with her red marking pen and taught me that writing was a craft and that writing is a discipline and that you don't just write the first thing you write and let it go at that. You have to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. You have to know the craft of it all.

So, they all made me believe in my creative ability. As the years turned into more years and more years and what I thought would be a short journey turned into a ten year human endurance contest for me. From the time I bought the rights to Batman to the time that we made it into that first movie, there were plenty of times my back was against the wall. I did not know where my next dollar was coming from. I did not know where I could turn. You really learn a lot about your mettle. You test your mettle.

I think the gifts that I was given in life from my parents and teachers really helped me get through that. I never doubted myself. I had times when I said, "OK. It's time to think. Am I being committed or am I being stubborn? Is everybody else in the world right or am I wrong?" And, when I could look myself in the mirror and say, "No, I'm not wrong" then we just toughed it out for that ten year period.

You'd better have a high threshold for frustration whether it's the movie business or really any kind of dream or passion that you might pursue because it's the only way you can hang on long enough and knock on enough doors until you can get your foot in one to see your dreams come true. It really is the magic.

I guess, Christine, the magic is that there is no magic. You talk about timing and luck, but the magic is how many times can you knock on doors, have them slammed in your face, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, go back and knock again and not be deterred until you create your own timing and you create your own luck. I really believe that. That's my journey.

CA:                 You got Warner Brothers to bite.

MU:                I got Casablanca Records and Film Works to bite.

CA:                 Oh. They were the first.

MU:                They were the first. Warners had already turned us down. All the majors had turned us down.

CA:                 Wow. How did you get them to bite?

MU:                I had and have the greatest partner in the world on "Batman". His name is Ben Melniker, and Ben is a legend in the movie business. Ben began his career in 1940 at MGM when it was the Tiffany of all movie studios. He quickly became the head of their antitrust division and personally negotiated the paramount consent decree of 1947 with the Attorney General of the United States whereby the movie studios had to divest themselves of their theater ownerships.

Ben rose through the ranks at MGM and became the executive vice president. All divisions reported to him. Ben became chairman of the film selection committee and a member of the parent board. So, it was Ben Melniker who put together the deals for Ben Hur", "Doctor Zhivago", "2001 Space Odyssey", their musicals of the 50s and 60s. Ben was with MGM until 1972. It was Ben who negotiated Elvis's deal to come to MGM with Colonel Tom Parker. It was Ben who negotiated with Grace Kelly's dad, a lawyer in Philadelphia, to have her come to MGM.

CA:                 How did you get to Ben?

MU:                His son, Charles, was working with me at United Artist at the time. I worked at United Artist when I got out of law school, and I became a motion picture production attorney. Why? Because I could not get my foot in the door creatively in the industry. Every door slammed in my face. I could not get a foot hold in. I didn't know anyone in Hollywood. I had no relatives in Hollywood. I had no money to buy my way into Hollywood. I was stuck.

                        I had to come up with plan B. Plan B was go to law school, take every course I could take having anything to do with communications or entertainment, get a job on the legal, business, and financial side of a movie studio. And then when nobody was looking, after I've networked like mad and learned how you finance and produce movies, sneak in a back window. That's what I did. That's plan B. And, amazingly, plan B worked. 

CA:                 Wow. Talk about focus.

MU:                It was no choice. When one door slams you need a plan B. Every time I talk to a young person, if I'm lecturing at colleges or universities, I tell them, "Always have a plan B, a plan C, and a plan D if you can because life is filled with twists and turns and you've got to be ready to move and change and twist with the wind to get where you want to go."

Well, at United Artists in the legal department was this bright, young lawyer named Charles Melniker. It was Charles who said to me when he heard about my grandiose ideas for Batman, "Would you like to meet my dad?" We all knew, everyone in the legal department at that studio knew Ben Melniker was a legend. I said, "Oh my god. Sure. I'd love to meet him."

So, he set it up and I went to the MGM building, and I met Ben and I pitched my little heart out on my dark and serious Batman and he studied it all and thought about it for a day and said, "Michael, this is a pre-sold property. This is a property that people around the world will know and recognize even before the first ad ever appears. There's a pre-sold audience for this and I love the story. I love the character, the way you present it, so let's try to make this happen."

So, Ben and I became partners. We went back to DC Comics whom I had worked for during college in law school, and after a six month negotiation, on October 3rd, 1979 Ben and I formed Bat Film Productions, signed the agreement, paid them money, bought the rights to Batman, and I quit my job because I thought Hollywood would line up at my doorstep. How could you not? How could you not see the sequels and the animation and the games and the toys and the merchandising?

Yes, I was then thrown out of offices. I was turned down by every single studio in Hollywood and told my idea stunk, and it was the worst thing they've ever heard. Every single studio turned me away.

CA:                 Now you're with Warner Brothers. What do you say to them? I hope you give them a little grief or something.

MU:                No. I'm not an "I told you so" kind of guy. But what happened was Ben said, "You know, Michael, when I was running MGM since back in 1969 I interviewed a young guy that I wanted to be one of three, a troika, that would head up production at MGM and his name is Peter Guber." He said, "Peter is partnered with Neil Bogart at Casablanca Records, and I understand that they're going to get a cash infusion from Polygram to start making films. Peter's younger. He's more hip than the guys you've been talking to. Let me pick up a phone. Let me call Peter and let's see what Peter has to say."

So, he got Peter on the phone. I pitched it to him over the phone and he said, "This sounds really cool. Can you be in my office tomorrow so we can talk about this?" I said, "No, I'm in New York, but I can be there the day after tomorrow." He said, "Come on out." So, Ben and I flew out there. I pitched the whole thing to Peter and his head of production, Barry Beckerman, and he says, "I get this. Let's do it." That was how we got our start developing the dark, serious "Batman". Finally. From that moment it took ten years for the first picture to come out.

CA:                 So, "The Boy Who Loved Batman", tell us about "The Boy Who Loved Batman", your memoir that just came out.

MU:                After the "Dark Knight" opened and became, at that time, the second biggest grossing movie in the history of cinema, now it's the third, I tried to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I decided what I really wanted to do was to talk to kids, talk to young people, tell them about my journey, tell them about what I found out. That if you have a dream that you want to come true, if you have a passion in life, you can make your dreams come true.

                        And all you need to do is get up off your butt to make it happen, not feel entitled, not feel that the world owed you anything, it should come to you. But, if you're willing to get up to make it happen, persevere, have a high threshold for frustration, knock on doors until your knuckles bleed, you too can make your dreams happen. 

They don't have to be glitzy and glamorous. My dad's whole thing was his masonry. The buildings, the fireplaces my pop made out of marble and brick and stone are going to last for hundreds of years. He loved what he did. He was an artist. He was an old world craftsman, and he worked six days a week his entire life from age 16 to 80 and every morning before dawn popped out of bed with a big smile on his face. He couldn't wait to get to work. When my brother Paul and I grow up in that house with a guy like that, how can you not want that for yourself?

So, Paul and I went to work for my dad, and it was awful. Tarring foundations in 90 degree New Jersey humidity and carrying bricks and bags of cement. I've got to find out what my bricks and stones were. Clearly, for me, they were comic books and movies. For someone else it might be painting a house, fixing a stereo, whatever it is. I want people to believe "Yes, this is about Batman. Yes, it's about Batman comic books. Yes, it's about Batman movies. Yes, it's about Batman."

But, that's the window dressing. The heart of this book is a motivational book, hopefully, in terms of what it takes for anyone under any circumstances to make his or her dream come true and that it is possible. That's really what my journey's been about, and this book is going to help me validate that journey by reaching out to people.