Leahy's Batman Earnings Again Will Go to Vermont Library
Jennifer Pinkowski -- Library Journal, 09/06/2007
Lifelong Batman fan Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) makes his second Hollywood cameo in next summer’s The Dark Knight and is once again donating his earnings to the Montpelier library where he got his first library card. So far, the Kellogg-Hubbard Library, in Vermont’s capital city, has received $2000 for Leahy's speaking role in The Dark Knight in a scene opposite Christian Bale (Batman) and Heath Ledger (The Joker) and expects to receive residuals once the movie is released in July 2008. “We’re all really excited about it,” said library director Hilari Farrington. “We’ve been buying Batman books like crazy.”The library already receives a royalty check from Leahy’s previous Batman movie venture, 1997’s Batman & Robin. He was just an extra, so residuals are tiny—about $12 a year, according to Farrington. Both donations support the children’s wing; Leahy began borrowing books from Kellogg-Hubbard at age 4. A huge Batman fan since childhood, he has also done voice work for an animated Batman cartoon series and wrote the preface to a Batman graphic novel. Leahy, declared Farrington, is “our superhero.”
