How Michael Keaton Helped Invent The Cinematic Universe Long Before The Flash
This post contains spoilers for "The Flash."
In "The Flash," Michael Keaton links three generations of Batmen, but it's not his first multiverse rodeo. Just last year, Sony's Spider-Man Universe (now featuring Kraven the Hunter) got in on the Keaton crossover action with the appearance of his "Spider-Man: Homecoming" character, Adrian Toomes, a.k.a. the Vulture, in "Morbius." Thanks to "Across the Spider-Verse" — the superior multiverse movie in theaters at present — we now have a better idea of how Toomes may have landed there in that baffling "Morbius" credits scene. However, Keaton's history of connecting movies released by different studios with the same character goes back further than that.
Two months before "Blade," two years before "X-Men," and a full decade before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, director Steven Soderbergh's 1998 adaptation of the Elmore Leonard novel, "Out of Sight," casually incorporated Keaton's character, Ray Nicolette, from "Jackie Brown." Ray is the ATF agent who intercepts Pam Grier's flight attendant as she's smuggling cash into the U.S. for L.A. gun runner Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson). Since "Jackie Brown" was an adaptation of another Leonard novel, "Rum Punch," Keaton's "Out of Sight" appearance effectively established a shared universe of Elmore Leonard characters on film (similar to what Jackson did later with Nick Fury and the MCU in "Iron Man.")
With "The Flash" in theaters and "Out of Sight" celebrating its 25th anniversary this week, it's worth looking back at how Keaton helped invent the modern cinematic universe. Granted, the movie model for shared universes goes back a long way, to at least the Universal Classic Monsters, so "Out of Sight" didn't really invent it any more than rapper P. Diddy invented the remix. In the same way, though, that Keaton pioneered the superhero summer blockbuster with "Batman" in 1989, he also led the way with cinematic universes.
Ray Nicolette in Jackie Brown
In "Jackie Brown," Ray Nicolette, as written, is sort of a nothing part, compared to other snappy characters writer-director Quentin Tarantino has brought to the big screen. Maybe that's why Michael Keaton was initially reluctant to take on the role. In 1999, Keaton told The Guardian, "At first I was disappointed, because I really wanted to be in one of [Tarantino's] movies, just not in this role."
Once Tarantino pumped some Jagermeister into Keaton on Sunset Boulevard, however, the actor began seeing things differently. Tarantino had worked a similar trick on Tim Roth when he sealed the deal for "Reservoir Dogs" with a night of drinking.
After talking it out and telling Tarantino how he wanted to play the character, Keaton was able to imbue Ray with some quirks that weren't necessarily there on the page in the "Jackie Brown" script. "It hadn't been really established how he moved and acted," Keaton said. "He was just: Get the job done."
While Ray makes it clear to Jackie Brown that he's an agent who does things by the book, there's a low-key, livewire intensity to him, which shines through in the way he comes bopping down the hall or hopping up on the back of a chair in the interrogation room. This is a guy who wears socks with sandals to the final shootout. It's not enough for him to outwit Pam Grier's streetwise protagonist, but in another life, Ray Nicolette might have been the star of his own spin-off film, much like a DC or Marvel character.
"Miramax wanted to develop a whole film based around him, but maybe they've cooled on the idea," Keaton said in 1999. "They were hot on it when 'Out of Sight' first came out."
Keaton did Out of Sight for free
Like "Jackie Brown," "Out of Sight" is a crime film tinged with romance. Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney have a different kind of chemistry than Pam Grier and Robert Forster, but the attraction is still very much there, especially when they're in tight quarters in the trunk of a car together. In this case, that smoldering attraction just happens to come at the expense of Michael Keaton's character.
About a third of the way into the movie, Keaton shows up uncredited for his one scene as Ray Nicolette. In his commentary with screenwriter Scott Frank for the "Out of Sight" DVD release, Steven Soderbergh credited producer Stacey Sher with the idea for the cameo and explained how it came about:
"We called up [Quentin] Tarantino and asked him what he thought of the idea, and he thought it was a really good idea and actually was nice enough to bring me into his editing room and show me all of Keaton's footage from 'Jackie Brown,' so I could get an idea of where Keaton was going with that part, to see if it really fit with what we were doing. And we got ahold of Keaton, and he came down and did this just as a favor, for nothing, which was really nice of him."
Miramax was the studio behind "Jackie Brown," so it owned the movie rights to the Ray Nicolette character. Yet supposedly, thanks to Tarantino's intervention, it lent Ray out to Universal Pictures for "Out of Sight" without any money changing hands between studios, either. Even before Tom Holland was cast as Spider-Man, Marvel Studios worked out a similar deal with Sony Pictures where it was free to use the character in "Captain America: Civil War" without paying anything upfront.
Karen Sisco steps out on Ray with a familiar face
With the limited screen time he has, Michael Keaton's second appearance as Ray Nicolette in "Out of Sight" is like seeing Robert Downey Jr. do a walk-on at the end of "The Incredible Hulk" back in 2008. But again, "Out of Sight" came a full decade before that movie.
In Keaton's scene, we get a glimpse of Ray's personal life as the unsuspecting boyfriend of Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez), who introduces him to her retired cop dad, Marshall (Dennis Farina). Funnily enough, Robert Forster would later play Marshall on the one-season "Karen Sisco" TV series, starring Carla Gugino. Like Samuel L. Jackson, who cameos as an escape artist (#NotOrdellRobbie) at the end of "Out of Sight," Forster wasn't the only actor who double-dipped in the Elmore Leonard world. (The MCU, too, has plenty of actors who have played more than one role.)
In "Out of Sight," Ray is seen wearing an FBI shirt and vest; Marshall gives him a hard time about it and quips, "Tell me, Ray, you ever wear one that says 'undercover?'" Sisco explains that Ray is "working with the FBI task force on the prison break" involving George Clooney's character, Jack Foley. Every time she says Foley's name, it cuts to a reaction shot with Marshall giving his daughter a disapproving look for her excessive concern over Foley's fate.
The scene, which is very layered, is interrupted by a call from Foley himself. Karen takes the phone outside, and Ray is left to sit with her father as he discusses a newspaper headline about a married Miami woman who went to bed with a prison escapee (the subtext being that Sisco, in her Dan Marino jersey, is literally "stepping out" with Foley at the moment, too).
Keaton and Clooney: Ships that pass in the night
George Clooney, of course, played the Caped Crusader after Michael Keaton in "Batman and Robin," and in "The Flash," he reprises his role as Bruce Wayne for the first time since 1997. This is the second time he and Keaton have appeared in the same movie without sharing a scene together (though they came close in "Out of Sight," and Clooney's character technically was on the phone in the same scene as Ray Nicolette, though they never exchanged dialogue).
Meanwhile, Jennifer Lopez is married to Ben Affleck in real life, meaning she and the characters she's played have a history with all three Batmen in "The Flash." If Ray could be said to have a defining trait on film, it's that he keeps getting outsmarted by women.
In his DVD commentary for "Out of Sight," Steven Soderbergh pointed to the character as the first of his kind:
"To our knowledge, this was a first: a character that appears in two completely unrelated movies, played by the same actor. As far as all of us could determine, nobody had ever done this before, which was part of its appeal."
Speaking to Empire Magazine (via Hollywood.com), Keaton himself reflected:
"Nobody had ever done it (play the same character in an unrelated film) then and that was what appealed to me when Soderbergh called. I wanted it to be like you might be in a Starbucks and see Ray Nicolette and not think anything of it."
Forget Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, Hollywood. From "Out of Sight" to "Morbius" to "The Flash," the last 25 years have proven that, in the unofficial multiverse of every movie ever made, Michael Keaton is at the center.