Bill Finger - "Batman was a combination of Douglas Fairbanks [who played Zorro] and Sherlock Holmes."
Bob Kane -"Zorros use of a mask to conceal his identity as Don Diego gave me the idea of giving Batman a secret identityBruce Wayne would be a man of means who put on a façade of being effete. Zorro rode a black horse called Tornado and would enter a cave and exit from a grandfather clock in the living room. The bat-cave was inspired by this cave in Zorro. I didn't want Batman to be a Superhero with superpowersSo I made Batman an ordinary human being; he is just an athlete who has the physical prowess of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., who was my all-time favorite hero in the movies.
Bob Kane - "As a kid, I was a movie buff. One of my favorites was The Mark of Zorro, with Douglas Fairbanks Sr. Zorro had the dual identity. By day, like Bruce Wayne, he feigned being a bored, foppish count, the son of one of the richest families.... By night, he became a vigilante. He would disguise himself, wearing a mask with the eyes slit out. He exited on a black horse from a cave underneath his home, and thats the inspiration for the Batcave and the Batmobile."
Alter Ego (Roy Thomas) - "Bill [Finger] maintained (well into the 1960’s) a file of
Douglas Fairbanks Sr. photo stills. He showed me the file and said that he would attach selected photos to finished scripts for Bob [Kane] and his assistants to use as models. I recognized pose after pose. The stills I saw (and had never seen before that date) were the familiar swinging poses that characterized the Acro-Batman…"