Well, I had to take a brief time out from the inter­net this past week, mean­ing the site didn’t have its reg­u­lar 2 posts-a-day update. Sorry about that folks. But it is now time to get back to business.

A lit­tle late, Hol­ly­wood Chicago had the week’s street clo­sure sched­ule (and hence film­ing sched­ule?). What still may be rel­e­vant is this information:

On Sun­day, July 15
Upper Wacker (from Van Buren to Adams) 6 to 9:30 p.m.
Jack­son (from Canal to Franklin) 6 to 9:30 p.m.
Lower Wacker (from Har­ri­son to Michi­gan) from 7 p.m. to 6 a.m.

Super­Hero­Hype con­tin­ues to wade in with more and more scooper set reports, here’s their lat­est stock:

First Report:

Hey guys, I live in the sub­urbs out­side of Chicago and I decided to check out the film­ing last night due to that awe­some detailed scoop. Any­way, I made it down­town and found TDK film­ing. I came away with some really excit­ing infor­ma­tion, but was not allowed to take any pic­tures. They were film­ing a chase scene involv­ing garbage trucks and GPD, but more inter­est­ingly appar­ently they’ve been work­ing on this chase scene for about 25 days and are say­ing that it will outdo the 15 minute high­way scene in the Matrix Reloaded. Well, that’s all I got last night, I’m going back tonight to because they are appar­ently blow­ing up a fire truck and/or dump­ing a car in the river. I’ll try harder to get pic­tures this time.

Sec­ond Report:

They seem to have a whole set up over by the WGN stu­dios on Addi­son. As I walked out of the build­ing I saw a ton of white semi trail­ers with RFK all over them. I also man­aged to get a photo of the Bat­pod stored in a lit­tle white trailer with a white pick up on the front. I think they had some set build­ing in a whare­house nearby too. There was lots of guys build­ing some big wooden sec­tions. I also saw a guy rid­ing a red and white scooter that was almost child sized.

They also posted some of The Dark Knight’s tie-ins, includ­ing an animé style fea­ture set between Bat­man Begins and The Dark Knight, a video game, lots of new prod­ucts and comic book adap­ta­tion of the film by DC comics.

In other news, Chris­t­ian Bale appeared on Char­lie Rose, to pro­mote Res­cue Dawn:

It’s now the ques­tion of the bur­den and toll of what he’s doing, the ques­tion can this be a finite endeav­our. Is this some­thing that has an end? Can he quit and have an ordi­nary life? The kind of manic inten­sity some­one has to have to main­tain the pas­sion and the anger that they felt as a child, takes an effort after awhile, to keep doing that. At some point, you have to exor­cise your demons. That’s what I love about Bat­man. There’s so much that is about char­ac­ter. — News­day

The Times has an inter­est­ing inter­view with Gary Old­man, it mainly cov­ers the new Harry Pot­ter film but he does offer up some tid­bits about what it’s like to play Jim Gor­don in The Dark Knight:

‘I don’t know how it hap­pened,’ Old­man says of his pigeon­hol­ing as a nat­ural born gang­ster. He speaks slowly. Very slowly. In clipped sen­tences. ‘I really don’t. I was this… psy­cho guy. I just got into these parts. Then it… it… con­t­a­m­i­nates peo­ple. And they think that you’re Crazy-Scary-Gary. The clos­est char­ac­ter to me,’ he adds with pon­der­ous grav­ity, ‘is Jim Gordon.’

[…]

I tell Old­man that the first word that comes to mind when you think of Jim Gor­don is ‘avun­cu­lar’. ‘Yeah,’ he replies with a light shrug. ‘Got a good sense of right and wrong. Fam­ily man. Just a reg­u­lar geezer.’

In other news, Dog Cus­tard have some new Bat­pod shots from the 2007 Licens­ing show here. And a Flickr image has orig­i­nated from Lil­Ron­Gal show­ing the film­ing of a rooftop scene (with a spoi­lerific surprise).

Super­Hero­Hype also has a set report which dis­cusses some scenes that have been filmed, obvi­ously you should beware of spoilers.

Finally, here’s a video show­ing the tum­bler on set, once again, more spoil­ers ahead: YouTube
There’s also another TDK set video from 20th June, of course, there are fur­ther spoilers.

This is the big Bat­man news story of the day, Cil­lian Mur­phy has been spot­ted on the set of The Dark Knight, as the Scare­crow. There’s some footage online over at YouTube, which pretty much gives away the scene and hence has some spoil­ers. Noth­ing too supris­ing in the video so I advise just wait­ing for the movie, if you can. Super­Hero­Hype has the full story from bud­ding Paparazzi ‘type­orocks’. Here’s one of the shots:

And here’s the infa­mous Bat Sig­nal, the best can­did shot we’ve seen yet, as snapped by Jeremy Farmer: