By Cassidy Lee · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, July 2012
In mid-July 2012, FishbowlLA covered Harrison Cheung’s return to his Manhattan Beach stomping grounds for a Barnes & Noble appearance promoting his Christian Bale biography. Cheung had spent 1992 to 2002 working closely with Bale’s pre-Batman career.
Then
Harrison Cheung’s career had been one of the more distinctive Hollywood-publicity stories of the internet’s early years — he had started as a Christian Bale fan operating from Toronto in the early 1990s and eventually moved into working directly with Bale and his family.
The book, Christian Bale: The Inside Story of the Darkest Batman, was published in 2012 by BenBella Books.
Now
Christian Bale’s career has continued to expand — American Hustle (2013), The Big Short (2015), Vice (2018), Ford v Ferrari (2019), and others.
The 2012 piece reads now as a small documented moment of the internet-fan-to-Hollywood-insider career trajectory — a path that has become substantially more common in the social-media era.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.