Warren Beatty attempted to answer that question with making Dick Tracy<\/em>, released 30 years ago this month in the summer of 1990. Beatty began looking into a Tracy<\/em> film in the \u201870s, and found that he was not the only one seeking to utilize the character, who hadn\u2019t been seen on movie screens since the \u201840s. The rights to the comic passed through a variety of production teams and studios– everyone from United Artists to Paramount to John Landis, Bob Fosse (!) and Steven Spielberg. The musical chairs seemed to end when Walter Hill and Joel Silver gained the rights, approaching Beatty to star, but when that fell through, Beatty acquired the rights for himself, and the production moved from Paramount to Walt Disney Studios. By that time, it was the end of the \u201880s, and Beatty made the decision to just make the film himself, taking the script Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr. had written years earlier and doing an uncredited rewrite with his partner Bo Goldman. After waiting for so long to make the movie, and having gained a reputation as an Oscar-winning director with his films Heaven Can Wait<\/em> (1978) and Reds<\/em> (1981), Beatty put all his muscle behind the picture, stuffing it with a huge name cast and crew members like cinematographer Vittorio Storaro.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While it\u2019s been said many times over that Dick Tracy<\/em> built upon the success of Tim Burton\u2019s Batman, Tracy<\/em> started shooting in February of \u201989, months before Burton\u2019s film hit cinemas. While Batman<\/em> was undeniably an influence on the film, especially in post-production (Beatty hired Batman<\/em>\u2019s composer Danny Elfman, who essentially continues the same themes and style he\u2019d begun in Burton\u2019s movie), Tracy<\/em> was initially concocted as a tribute to its source material. Beatty and Storaro chose to shoot the film in only seven colors, each color the exact same shade in every use, so as to evoke the look of the \u201830s comic strip. The restricted camera movement was not only chosen to help with this aspect, but to also make sure to not break the illusion of the dozens of matte paintings by Michael Lloyd and Harrison Ellenshaw. Pushing the unreality of the movie further are the makeup designs by John Caglione Jr. and Doug Drexler, putting characters on screen that mutate the human form so much they\u2019re almost Cronenbergian. Even more than Burton, Beatty made it his mission to translate the visual look, feel, and language of comic books to the screen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Beatty was also well aware of Dick Tracy\u2019s connection to Prohibition-era pulp fiction, and the film, like Batman<\/em>, was the next step in propagating that style\u2019s revival in the early \u201890s. The action sequences in the movie evoke not just the \u201830s Dick Tracy<\/em> Republic serials starring Ralph Byrd but also the gangster films of that period by Warner Bros. and Universal. In addition to Elfman\u2019s score, Beatty commissioned Stephen Sondheim to write original songs for the film, most of which would be sung by Breathless Mahoney (Madonna), making the movie, in part, a \u201830s-style musical. The witty banter laced with double entendres calls back to screwball comedies, and both the numerous sequences of shadowy figures lurking in the dark as well as the entirety of Breathless\u2019 character (being a consummate femme fatale) reference film noir. Such nostalgia and noir were already seeping into pop culture during the \u201880s, with films like Pennies From Heaven<\/em> (1981), Body Heat<\/em> (1981), and Once Upon a Time in America<\/em> (1984). One of the biggest influences on the look and feel of Tracy<\/em> is another kind of live action comic strip: 1988\u2019s Who Framed Roger Rabbit<\/em>, which successfully combined real actors with cel animation in a noir setting\u2014not only does Trac<\/em>y seem one brushstroke away from looking like Roger Rabbit\u2019s Toontown, but the film\u2019s theatrical release had an original Roger Rabbit<\/em> cartoon short attached to it, Roller Coaster Rabbit<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n By combining the source material with all these elements and genres, Dick Tracy<\/em> proved that the comic book movie could be more than just superheroes in capes, and could push the visual limits of the medium in spectacular and entertaining\u2014even artistic\u2014fashion. For various legal reasons, Tracy<\/em> never had a sequel, though it influenced a large number of films. Burton\u2019s Batman<\/em> sequel, 1992\u2019s Batman Returns<\/em>, had a bolder look, featuring villains both unabashedly neurotic and sexually explicit, as Al Pacino and Madonna are in Tracy<\/em>, respectively. Joel Schumacher\u2019s further Batman<\/em> films continued to push their visuals into unreality, while producers started taking chances on other second- and third-tier comic book heroes like Blade<\/em> (1998). More immediately, a whole pulp comic revival began, as characters old and new like The Shadow<\/em> (1994), The Phantom<\/em> (1996) and The Rocketeer<\/em> (1991) as well as more kid-oriented fare like Richie Rich<\/em> (1994) and Casper<\/em> (1995) attempted to gain the same level of popularity as Tracy<\/em> had. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet none of these quite made the same impact, revealing to Hollywood one of the true lessons of Tracy<\/em>\u2014Disney took a large page out of Batman<\/em>\u2019s playbook in marketing the film, which helped Dick Tracy look not like a stodgy old character but a buzzworthy and cool one. The company licensed action figures, wristwatches, lunch boxes, beach towels, comic books, magazines, and three (!) separate soundtrack albums (compared to Batman<\/em>\u2019s mere two)\u2014and that\u2019s just what was at this writer\u2019s house in 1990. It\u2019s fitting and prophetic that Dick Tracy<\/em>\u2019s end credit roll is not scored to Elfman\u2019s music nor one of the many songs about Tracy or Breathless; instead, it\u2019s Sondheim\u2019s chorus-girl tribute to greed entitled \u201cMore.\u201d For better or worse, that song pointed the way for comic book movies and Hollywood for the foreseeable future. ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/dicktracy2-1024x541.png\")
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