I like it...I want a gnarly sinister clearly and obscenely psychotic joker...I want crappy make-up and lots of guts...I want a joker with make-up like Sig Haig in House of 1000 corpses...that kind of demented less finished...more crazy/dark/twisted kind of look.
And to prepare Heath Ledger for the role Nolan gave him a a copy of "The Killing Joke" to read. Ledger described his role as the Joker as "more nuanced and dark and more along the lines of 'a Clockwork Orange' kind of feel. Which is... what the comic book was after: less about his laugh and more about his eyes". So I can't wait to see how it comes out.
I also really like that...if Nolan has any sense he won't make this joker resemble Jack nick's at all.
While I'm still not convinced that this pic is real, I'm a big fan of the scars in the shape of a smile. It seems like something the truly psychotic Joker would do to himself. The Killing Joke is a classic, and if Ledger draws his inspiration from that, all the better.
It's real. Although I don't work at Warner Bros. so I can't have any inside knowledge of the company, I'll say it is 99.9999% certain the pic is real for a few reasons.
1) In the last couple of months there have been supposed "leaked" photos of Ledger as the Joker. In each instance, websites and people with contacts inside of Warner Bros. were able to get word from Warner Bros. within hours that those pictures were fake. This current photo of Ledger has been on the website since Saturday and the same people and websites contacting Warner Bros. haven't been able to get a response on the photo either way. Warner Bros. are playing coy. They wouldn't do that if it was fake.
2) I don't know if people know how the picture of the Joker became unveiled but this is how it happened. Warner Bros opened a site:
http://IBelieveInHarveyDent.com On the site is a campaign poster for Harvey Dent for district attorney. Three days later a site popped up IBelieveInHarveyDentToo.com. On the site was the same campaign poster but it was vandalised with black rings around his eyes and a Joker smile painted on, with the word "Too" painted over the word "Dent". Underneath that was a place to enter your e-mail address and a place to enter the verification code listed. Once you did that you got a message saying "You have 5 minutes to check your e-mail and play the game".
You receive an e-mail from tragicpast@ibelieveinharveydenttoo.com with the message "I always say, you never know what a man is truly made of until you peel the skin off his face one piece at a time. Here is your chance to help." and the e-mail gives you a link and a set of X and Y coordinates. The link goes to the vandalised Harvey Dent poster with two boxes underneath to enter your X and Y coodinates. Once you enter it a little blood spot hits the poster on that coordinate and that 3x3 pixel area is undercoved to show that spot of the Ledger Joker picture. It took 30,000+ responses to uncover the entire picture, in about 20 hours or maybe a little less.
And a few points about the sites:
-The Ibelieveinharveydent.com site went live on May 17th.
-The Ibelieveinharveydenttoo.com site was registered on May 14th. Three days before the other site went live.
-The Ibelieveinharveydenttoo.com site went live on May 20th. Only three days after the other Harvey Dent site went live, and it used the material on the site and created a very interactive flash site with lots of cool sayings and interactions, with a very detailed design down to the font used and the blood splattering designs. It was professionally done. And it also had this very realistic picture of Heath in Joker makeup. That's very hard to do in three days. Plus the site received an insane amount of traffic and it never had any glitches, or slowdowns, or had to go offline because of excessive traffic. For a site to handle that much traffic without going down I bet it would cost a lot of money, more money than a simple pranker would pay.
Right now if you go to
http://IBelieveInHarveyDentToo.com site the picture is taken down and the site says: "Page Not Found" in red letters. But if you highlight the page there is a string of "HAHAHA" throughout the entire page with an occational non-"HA" letter. When you string those letters together it says, "See you in December." The site SeeYouInDecember.com was registered a couple days ago before this "HAHA" change happened by 42 Entertainment. Here's a little blurb about them:
So who is behind all this? It looks to be 42 Entertainment, the company which previously created the "I Love Bees" promotion for Halo 2 and "Year Zero" for the Nine Inch Nails album "Year Zero." The company just registered SeeYouinDecember.com yesterday, so stay tuned.
So it seems they're doing the online promotion for the Joker and The Dark Knight.
So with all these happenings I'm very certain Warner Bros was behind all this and it is not a fake picture. With the obvious main reason being that WB hasn't rejected the picture even though it's been out for 4 days already.