Chương 104: Chapter 103: The Twelfth Take (09/28/1993)

DATE: Tuesday, September 28, 1993 LOCATION: Mogadishu International Airport | The Hangar LOCAL TIME: 03: 00 PM EAT Downtime in a combat zone is a specific kind of purgatory. You spend ninety percent of your deployment sitting on a canvas cot in a sweltering, tin-roofed hangar, sweating through your undershirt and waiting for the other ten percent to try and kill you.

I was sitting on my footlocker, meticulously running a patch soaked in CLP through the barrel of my carbine, when Sergeant Matt Eversmann walked into our section of the hangar holding a battered cardboard care package.

"Mail call, gentlemen," Eversmann announced, tossing a few letters onto the surrounding cots before pulling a black VHS tape out of the bottom of the box. He held it up like a trophy.

"My brother is a saint. He recorded it off HBO before he shipped the box." Private Dominick Pilla sat up from his cot, tossing his Sports Illustrated aside.

"Recorded what, Sergeant?" Eversmann grinned, walking over to the small, dust-covered CRT television and VCR combo unit perched on a stack of MRE boxes.

"The holy grail, Pilla. The Twelfth Take." Specialist Jamie Smith leaned forward, suddenly entirely invested.

"Wait. The behind-the-scenes doc for Shadow of the Bat? The one about the pilot episode?"

"The very same," Eversmann said, slamming the tape into the VCR and hitting play.

"Supposedly it shows all the outtakes from the warehouse 'oner.' My brother said it's like watching a car crash." I didn't stop cleaning my rifle, but my lips twitched into a faint, deeply guarded smile. I reached into my assault pack, pulled out my compact Sony Hi8 camcorder, and quietly set it on an ammo crate, angling the lens toward the TV and the group of Rangers gathering around it. I pressed the record button, the tiny red light blinking to life. The Twelfth Take wasn't a real documentary.

It was an elaborate, deadpan mockumentary Christian Bale and I had pitched to HBO after the first season wrapped. If it had been a legitimate behind-the-scenes doc, union rules would have required my name to be plastered all over the stunt credits. Instead, we deliberately cut the footage to make Christian look like a deranged, superhuman method actor who insisted on taking every single catastrophic hit himself. The television flickered, the tracking lines rolling for a second before the HBO intro began to play.

The familiar, dark, brooding synth score of the show filled our little corner of the hangar. A half-dozen Rangers dragged their footlockers closer to the TV, their eyes glued to the screen, completely oblivious to the joke.

"Man, that pilot is still the best hour of TV ever made," Pilla said, pointing at the screen.

"The best part of that whole warehouse sequence is when Robin uses the grapple gun to swing-kick that giant Russian dude."

"He didn't use a grapple gun, idiot," Smith argued, shaking his head.

"He bounced off the forklift." I vaulted the catwalk guardrail, I corrected silently, scraping carbon off the firing pin, because the stunt guy missed his mark and I had to improvise the trajectory so I didn't break his neck. On the TV screen, the mockumentary shifted to the blooper reel. A clapperboard snapped. Scene 1. Take 2. The camera followed "Robin" sprinting across a catwalk. He vaulted over the railing, aiming for a suspended cargo net. But the timing on the wire-pull was off.

The kid in the red and green armor missed the net entirely, dropping fifteen feet and launching face-first into an open prop dumpster filled with breakaway crates. The Rangers collectively winced at the sickening crash. On the TV, the voice of the legendary director, Michael Mann, boomed over a megaphone, sounding absolutely terrified.

"CUT! CUT! MEDIC! GET A MEDIC IN THERE! DON'T MOVE HIM!" The camera rushed toward the dumpster. For three agonizing seconds, nothing happened. Then, slowly rising from the wreckage of the splintered wood and garbage, a single, trembling arm reached up, giving the camera a resolute thumbs-up. The Rangers busted out laughing.

"Oh, man!" Pilla groaned, shaking his head.

"That is brutal. But he just brushes it off!"

"It became a running joke on the set," the deep, aristocratic, unmistakably theatrical baritone of Christopher Lee intoned dramatically over the footage.

"Whenever young Christian took a catastrophic blow, the entire crew would hold their collective breath... until we saw the thumbs-up. The boy has the constitution of a Spartan." The screen cut to black for a dramatic beat. Christopher Lee's voice returned, dropping to a grave, cautionary whisper.

"Many have asked... why does this film focus solely on the Boy Wonder? Where are the outtakes of the Bat?" The screen faded up on a talking-head interview with the star of the show, James Spader. He was sitting in a dimly lit room, staring dead-eyed into the camera with that signature unnerving, soft-spoken sincerity that made his version of Batman so utterly terrifying. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

"We tried to cut a reel of my stunt work," Spader said, his voice a quiet, intense purr.

"We really did. But the raw kinetic violence of my choreography was simply too awe-inspiring. During a private screening, two HBO executives experienced spontaneous ocular hemorrhaging. The footage was deemed a public health hazard. If we broadcast it on television... your head would quite literally explode."

"Thus," Christopher Lee intoned majestically over a slow-motion shot of Robin taking a header into a brick wall, "for the safety of the viewing public, all Batman outtakes were incinerated. Leaving only... the boy." The screen went to static for three seconds. Then, Lee's voice returned, dropping into a conspiratorial whisper.

"However... one fragmented cassette survived the purge. A bootleg. A terrifying glimpse... into the madness of the Bat." The Rangers all leaned forward on their footlockers, completely captivated. Grainy, black-and-white VHS footage flashed onto the screen. It was the warehouse set. Standing in the center of the room was a man in the full, heavy, tactical Batsuit. But he wasn't brooding in the shadows. Three stuntmen charged him.

The Batman immediately scrambled backward up a vertical stack of wooden pallets, did a blind backflip over the attacking thugs, grabbed a six-foot aluminum rolling ladder, spun it around his neck like a helicopter blade to knock all three of them out, accidentally knocked a prop Ming vase off a table, kicked it back into the air with his heel, caught it perfectly, and then gave a goofy, wide-eyed shrug to the camera. The hangar went dead silent.

"Holy crap," Pilla whispered, his jaw practically on the floor.

"Spader is a freaking ninja."

"Did you see what he did with that ladder?" Smith asked, his eyes wide.

"That defies physics. The guy's a psychopath." I had to bite the inside of my cheek so hard I tasted copper to keep from bursting into laughter. I glanced at my Sony camcorder, making sure the red light was still blinking, capturing every second of their utterly stunned faces. The real reason Batman's screen time was so limited in the show was a deliberate stylistic choice I had pushed for: the "Jaws effect."

Spader's brilliant, unnerving psychological performance worked best when he was a shadow, leaving Robin to handle the chaotic, extended brawls in the light. But the other reason we couldn't show any legitimate Batman outtakes was because there were none. Spader didn't do stunts. But Christian and I had thought it would be hysterical to add this "lost tape" to the mockumentary.

We had secretly snuck Jackie Chan onto the set, strapped the poor guy into the heavy, suffocating rubber Batsuit, and told him to just go completely crazy with the props. Jackie had the time of his life. But anyone with half a brain who watched that footage should have instantly recognized Jackie's signature, hyper-kinetic, slapstick martial arts style, and realized the brooding James Spader hadn't thrown a single punch.

Instead, a room full of the most lethal infantrymen on the planet were sitting in the Horn of Africa, completely convinced that the guy from Sex, Lies, and Videotape was secretly a lethal martial arts master. When I got out of here, I was going to mail this camcorder tape straight to Christian and Jackie. They were going to lose their minds.

"Dude, Bale's reflexes are insane though," Eversmann said, steering the conversation back to reality as the footage cut back to Robin seamlessly tossing an off-balance stuntman into a stack of oil drums.

"He didn't even hesitate. You can't teach that."

"Yeah, Bale is tough," Pilla admitted, leaning back on his cot.

"But he's not the best Robin. Edward Furlong is the best Robin."

"Furlong?" Smith scoffed.

"Are you kidding me? Jason Todd was a psycho. The kid was literally beating criminals half to death with a tire iron in season three."

"Exactly!" Pilla argued.

"He brought that street-rat edge. Bale's Dick Grayson was too noble. Furlong looked like a kid who would actually survive in Gotham. Too bad they killed him off in the warehouse explosion."

"Macaulay Culkin is better," Eversmann chimed in, pointing a finger at Pilla.

"Tim Drake actually uses his brain. He figured out Batman's identity. Culkin plays him like a genius kid who's always three steps ahead." I snapped the retaining pin into my bolt carrier group, listening to them debate. The "Battle of the Robins" was a pop-culture phenomenon back home. But none of these guys knew why the casting had played out that way. In the original timeline, Edward Furlong had been cast as John Connor in Terminator 2, and Macaulay Culkin had become the biggest child star on earth in Home Alone.

The sudden, astronomical weight of that blockbuster fame had crushed them both. The Hollywood machine had chewed them up and spit them out. So, I had stolen their futures to save them. I used Meridian Studios to aggressively push Neil for the role of Kevin McCallister in Home Alone, and I personally shot the role of John Connor in Terminator 2 when I was ten. I waived an upfront paycheck in lieu of a cut of the box office gross.

This enabled James Cameron to have the exact ten-year-old John Connor he wanted, freeing up his budget to just bank the footage and wait for the CGI to catch up. My little brother Neil became the biggest child star of the 1990s, but Neil had Evelyn acting as an impenetrable shield, and our family's billions to ensure the studios never took advantage of him. With those mega-roles gone, Furlong and Culkin needed work. Meridian Studios swooped in and cast them on Shadow of the Bat.

Instead of being thrust into the chaotic meat grinder of international movie stardom, they were placed on a highly structured television set with strict child-labor hours, steady paychecks, and no paparazzi. I had robbed them of their biggest movies, and in exchange, I had bought them long, stable, healthy careers.

"Hey, Tillman," Pilla called out, looking over at me.

"You're from California. You ever run into any of these Hollywood types before you enlisted? Who's your favorite Robin?" I looked up at the TV. The mockumentary was showing Take 12—the final, perfect run. I watched myself sprint, vault, strike, and fly across the screen, a ghost hidden behind a domino mask. I looked back at Pilla, my expression completely deadpan.

"I've met a few of them," I said softly.

"Most of them are pretty normal guys just doing a joke of a job. But if you're asking me... you can't beat the original. However, watching Jim Carrey beat Edward Furlong to death was unbelievable to watch on TV." Eversmann chuckled, turning his attention back to the screen as Christian Bale sat in a director's chair.

"The emotional toll of the choreography is far more exhausting than the physical strikes," Bale said on the screen, looking dead into the camera with absolute, pretentious solemnity.

"You have to truly become the vengeance." I had to look down at my rifle to hide my smile. I knew for a fact that the second the director yelled cut on that interview, Christian had burst into hysterical laughter, and James Spader had clapped him on the back.

"Well, you gotta respect Bale's pain tolerance," Eversmann said, totally buying the performance.

"He took an absolute beating for that paycheck."

"Yeah," I said genuinely, racking the charging handle of my carbine with a sharp, metallic clack.

"Kid's incredibly tough." I went back to cleaning my rifle, the little red light on my camcorder still blinking away, preserving the moment forever.