Blade Runner (1982) vs. The Thing (1982) vs. E.T. (1982): Part 1

<v Speaker 1>This is a podcast from Minute Media. Hello everybody, and
<v Speaker 1>welcome back to the Shirley You Can't Be Serious podcast
<v Speaker 1>d I've got my Reese's pieces and I've got a
<v Speaker 1>massive flamethrower. I'm ready to go on this episode. That
<v Speaker 1>is great.
<v Speaker 2>I've got my Holy cap. Okay, I just saw some
<v Speaker 2>like glint in your eye. There's a reddish kind of Clint.
<v Speaker 2>I'm gonna need you to donate me some blood to
<v Speaker 2>hear real quick. I gotta do a little checking here,
<v Speaker 2>all right.
<v Speaker 1>Oh, it's all about the eyes. We're gonna talk about
<v Speaker 1>the eyes. We are diving into June of nineteen eighty two.
<v Speaker 1>This is a massive undertaking. We got three movies we're
<v Speaker 1>we'll be talking about.
<v Speaker 2>Let's be clear about this. We do not just have
<v Speaker 2>three movies. We have three of the greatest sci fi
<v Speaker 2>movies of all time. And they were all released within
<v Speaker 2>a week of each other.
<v Speaker 1>It's incredible.
<v Speaker 2>Like Et came out a week later, Blade Runner and
<v Speaker 2>The Thing came out on the same day. So in
<v Speaker 2>a span of eight days, you have three of the
<v Speaker 2>greatest sci fi movies of all time. Nineteen eighty two,
<v Speaker 2>forty years ago this month, before we dive in. Okay,
<v Speaker 2>let's do a quick shout out for a couple of
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<v Speaker 1>Real KD twenty twenty, thank you so much. You're awesome.
<v Speaker 1>We appreciate you. Here's what Real KD twenty twenty says,
<v Speaker 1>good podcast. I look forward to seeing the movie. Prayers
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<v Speaker 1>We appreciate you for everybody who's paying attention. Caleb is
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<v Speaker 2>Yeah, Jason, we have a new executive producer for this episode.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, this is our good friend, Sissy Johnson.
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<v Speaker 2>Okay, guys, we are ready to jump back into these
<v Speaker 2>three sci fi movies forty years ago.
<v Speaker 1>They're all turning forty And I was texting with our
<v Speaker 1>buddy Jeff Manzuoka Yes, and he was asking me, He's like,
<v Speaker 1>what's the connection between these three? And I said, well,
<v Speaker 1>they all came out in June of eighty two, and
<v Speaker 1>they're all like all time classics, which for us is enough. Right,
<v Speaker 1>But I've got some really cool connections between these movies
<v Speaker 1>I want to talk about before we dive in.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, first movie that came out was E. T. The
<v Speaker 2>Extraterrestrial by mister Steven Spielberg. Yes, then we had on
<v Speaker 2>the same day we had The Thing by mister John
<v Speaker 2>Carpenter and Blade Runner by mister Ridley Scott. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>talk about big hitting directors of the eighties. All of
<v Speaker 2>these guys were in, they're trying, and they're prime.
<v Speaker 1>The list of these connections, I'm ready to blow your
<v Speaker 1>socks off. You ready for this? Blow online, buddy?
<v Speaker 3>All right?
<v Speaker 1>So Harrison Ford was the lead actor and Blade Runner, right.
<v Speaker 1>He was also at the time married to Melissa Matheson,
<v Speaker 1>who was the writer for et. She wrote Freaking ETEP.
<v Speaker 3>All right.
<v Speaker 1>The last line of dialogue or the sentence of dialogue
<v Speaker 1>from the Thing from Another World, which the Thing is
<v Speaker 1>a remake of, is Watch the Skies. Yes, Watch the
<v Speaker 1>Skies was the working title for E T. Yes, Okay,
<v Speaker 1>I've got a few more connections for you. So The
<v Speaker 1>Thing was made in response to Ridley Scott's Alien movie. Yes,
<v Speaker 1>Alien actually revitalized the thing, gave it life. Okay. One
<v Speaker 1>of the possible choices for McCready in the Thing Peter Coyote,
<v Speaker 1>who plays keys in ET. Yeah. And then one last
<v Speaker 1>thing is gonna blow your mind. Okay, there is a
<v Speaker 1>miniature of Dark Star the ship. Okay, John Carpenter's Dark
<v Speaker 1>Star that can be seen in the background at the
<v Speaker 1>police station. And Blade Runner. Wow, how about that.
<v Speaker 2>That's awesome? All right, Okay, there's more. I'm gonna bounce
<v Speaker 2>back and forth on them. But you've got a cameo
<v Speaker 2>appearance in Et on a deleted scene by one of
<v Speaker 2>those people we've talked about. You have guys that owned
<v Speaker 2>rights to one of the scripts, that had written scripts
<v Speaker 2>for the directors. These movies are interlaced like you wouldn't believe,
<v Speaker 2>and we're gonna hit all kinds of connections as we
<v Speaker 2>go through.
<v Speaker 1>So just a refresh your memory. Movies from June of
<v Speaker 1>eighty two. June of eighty two is really strong. Okay.
<v Speaker 1>The weekend of June fourth you had Poltergeist along with
<v Speaker 1>Star Trek to the Wrath of Kahn. Then June the
<v Speaker 1>eleventh you have of course Et and Greece two. For
<v Speaker 1>you cool riders out there. Then June eighteenth you have
<v Speaker 1>the Clint Eastwood Firefox movie. I don't even remember that one,
<v Speaker 1>but I was freaking pumped up to see that one.
<v Speaker 1>I remember of it, I don't. It was boring into
<v Speaker 1>the last ten minutes, and then d the Top done
<v Speaker 1>in the last ten minutes. And then June twenty fifth
<v Speaker 1>you had Blade Runner, Mega Force and the Thing. Wow,
<v Speaker 1>June of eighty two was great month to be a
<v Speaker 1>movie watching kid. Almost as good as June of eighty one. Almost,
<v Speaker 1>not quite.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, okay, Jason, We're going to go back to nineteen
<v Speaker 2>thirty when a young eighteen year old kid going to
<v Speaker 2>his first year MIT starts writing science fiction.
<v Speaker 1>Wow, Okay.
<v Speaker 2>This guy's name is John W.
<v Speaker 1>Campbell.
<v Speaker 2>From nineteen thirty to nineteen thirty one, when he's eighteen
<v Speaker 2>years old, he wrote six short stories, six letters, and
<v Speaker 2>one novel for the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories. He
<v Speaker 2>would later become an editor of another science fiction magazine
<v Speaker 2>called Astounding. But this guy, to say that he was
<v Speaker 2>an important force in this world of science fiction is
<v Speaker 2>too much of an understatement. Let me just say this.
<v Speaker 2>The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction said, quote more than any
<v Speaker 2>other individual. He helped to shape modern science fiction. Isaac Asimov said,
<v Speaker 2>he is the most powerful force in science fiction ever.
<v Speaker 2>What this guy is huge? And he decided to start
<v Speaker 2>writing some stories in a different tone. He assumed a
<v Speaker 2>pen name of Don A.
<v Speaker 1>Stewart.
<v Speaker 2>That was the name he used when he wrote a
<v Speaker 2>little story called Who Goes There in nineteen thirty eight.
<v Speaker 2>It is the story that the thing is based on.
<v Speaker 1>Yes, okay?
<v Speaker 4>So?
<v Speaker 1>John W.
<v Speaker 2>Campbell became the editor of Astounding in nineteen thirty seven
<v Speaker 2>and stayed the editor through his death. He helped shape
<v Speaker 2>the careers of the Big three as far as science
<v Speaker 2>fiction goes. Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, remember that name, Robert
<v Speaker 2>Heinlein and Arthur C. Clark, Right, so, Isaac Asimov, I
<v Speaker 2>mean everybody knows who that is, right, sure, okay? Robert
<v Speaker 2>Heinlein Starship Troopers and a ton of other things. He
<v Speaker 2>also shaped the career of Theodore Sturgeon, who did Starship Troopers,
<v Speaker 2>and then of course Arthur C. Clark is two thousand
<v Speaker 2>and one and a million others. Right As the editor
<v Speaker 2>of this magazine. He was a guy who kind of
<v Speaker 2>imposed certain standards upon all of his writers, these guys included,
<v Speaker 2>and that's how he kind of shaped the world of
<v Speaker 2>science fiction. And he started to go in a direction
<v Speaker 2>that was kind of disturbing to these other guys, where
<v Speaker 2>he started investigating parapsychology and ParaScience and pseudoscience and some
<v Speaker 2>of these other things, and that turned off Isaac Asimov
<v Speaker 2>and these other guys. Which is interesting because when we
<v Speaker 2>talked about parapsychology and dan Ackroyd back when we did
<v Speaker 2>our Ghostbusters episode, he was like, you know, if people
<v Speaker 2>would give this sincere scientific study, maybe we could learn
<v Speaker 2>something about these other worldly type of things. And you
<v Speaker 2>also mentioned that while they were filming the movie, there
<v Speaker 2>was a certain resident of New York City who ran
<v Speaker 2>into dan Ackroyd at the time that they were filming
<v Speaker 2>the movie.
<v Speaker 1>Can you remember that. Yeah, So dan akro is like,
<v Speaker 1>holy crap, it's Isaac Asimov. And Isaac Asmov is like,
<v Speaker 1>are you the reason why all this traffic is here?
<v Speaker 1>Dan Ackroyd's like, I guess so, sir, And he's like,
<v Speaker 1>I think it's disgusting. Right.
<v Speaker 2>So Isaac Asimov doesn't like the parapsychology guys right at all?
<v Speaker 2>So what this ultimately ends up happening is John W.
<v Speaker 2>Campbell does befriend a guy who's into these kind of
<v Speaker 2>weird things, and his name is l Ron Hubbard, and.
<v Speaker 1>So John W.
<v Speaker 2>Campbell is a key in the development of what would
<v Speaker 2>become dianetics, the foundational piece of work for scientology.
<v Speaker 1>Wow, you blowing my freaking mind.
<v Speaker 2>Hi, Tom Cruise, great job on Maverick. Okay, So back
<v Speaker 2>to who goes there? So this was produced in nineteen
<v Speaker 2>thirty eight. It is very similar in story to what
<v Speaker 2>we get in the movie The Thing from nineteen eighty two.
<v Speaker 2>But there was another movie called The Thing from Another
<v Speaker 2>World that came out in nineteen fifty one that was
<v Speaker 2>directed by Howard Hawks. Okay, and that one you had
<v Speaker 2>a guy in a costume, right it was.
<v Speaker 1>I watched that movie. Yeah, I watched it. Well, tell
<v Speaker 1>me Tommy, Well, I watched it on YouTube. Okay, it's
<v Speaker 1>free on YouTube. Okay, it's you know, it's a nineteen
<v Speaker 1>fifties science fiction movie. It's a whole lot of you know,
<v Speaker 1>a couple of people grandstanding about you know, creation moving
<v Speaker 1>forward and evolving and the scientists. You know, it goes
<v Speaker 1>a little crazy, but essentially there's a they find a
<v Speaker 1>fling saucer and they accidentally blow it up, but they
<v Speaker 1>rescue one of the alien b from the ice and
<v Speaker 1>the ice melts, and then that guy wakes up and
<v Speaker 1>goes on a rampage and kills everybody, and they managed
<v Speaker 1>to take care of it because he's a plant. Like,
<v Speaker 1>it's a walking plant. Vegetable matter. There you go. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>and then the guy at the end is like, you know,
<v Speaker 1>watch the Skies. What was what was the last line?
<v Speaker 1>Watch the Skies? Well, that's important. Can you tell me
<v Speaker 1>more about why that would be important because that's the
<v Speaker 1>working title of ET? What yes, tell me more. Yeah. So,
<v Speaker 1>when Steven Spielberg was developing ET, what he was doing
<v Speaker 1>was he was actually writing a sequel to Close Encounters
<v Speaker 1>of the Third Kind, and the studio came to him
<v Speaker 1>and said, hey, listen, we like Close Encounters. We want
<v Speaker 1>to do a sequel. And Steven Spielberg's like, well, they
<v Speaker 1>asked me to do a sequel for Jaws. I didn't
<v Speaker 1>do it. They did it without me and it sucked.
<v Speaker 1>And so I want to be involved. If they're going
<v Speaker 1>to do this, I want to be involved. Yeah, And
<v Speaker 1>so when he wrote the screenplay, for Watch the Skies.
<v Speaker 1>It became it sort of evolved into et.
<v Speaker 2>So you I think we talked about this before. There's
<v Speaker 2>a guy named John Sales involved here, right, yes, And
<v Speaker 2>they didn't keep the name Watch the Skies. It ended
<v Speaker 2>up being something else.
<v Speaker 1>Do you remember this? So Watch the Skies was actually copyrighted,
<v Speaker 1>so he couldn't use Watch the Skies, right, So he
<v Speaker 1>changed it to Night Skies. Yeah, White Skies is great, yes, right,
<v Speaker 1>So he went to Lawrence Kasten and said, Hey, I've
<v Speaker 1>got this idea for this script. I want you to
<v Speaker 1>write it for me. Lawrence Casden said, well, I'm doing
<v Speaker 1>this little project called The Empire Strikes Back, so I'm
<v Speaker 1>a little bit busy right now. So he went to
<v Speaker 1>John Sales, who had written for Joe Dante the spoof
<v Speaker 1>on Jaws called Piranha, which we talked about in Jaws
<v Speaker 1>and in our Grimlins episode. Yes, sir, yes, so he
<v Speaker 1>changed the Night Skies. It's a story about a group
<v Speaker 1>of aliens who terrorize a family. And the aliens there's
<v Speaker 1>like a group of them, like, one was named Scar,
<v Speaker 1>one was named Squirt, one was named Buddy.
<v Speaker 3>Uh huh.
<v Speaker 2>Does this sound familiar to you? This sounds like Grimlins.
<v Speaker 2>So the night Skies became basically ET Grimlins and Poltergeist,
<v Speaker 2>that's right.
<v Speaker 1>Which also came out this year. It came out just
<v Speaker 1>a few weeks prior to ET. Yeah, directed by Toby Hooper,
<v Speaker 1>but really Steven Spielberg supposedly was actually the guy who
<v Speaker 1>directed it, but he was going back and forth between
<v Speaker 1>Poltergeist and ET. Poltergeist is the story of a suburban
<v Speaker 1>nightmare and ET is the story of a suburban dream.
<v Speaker 2>Yep, when we get to casting in a second, I've
<v Speaker 2>got a nice little connection on those two.
<v Speaker 1>Movies as well. Okay, cool.
<v Speaker 2>So jumping back to Who Goes There, I'm going to
<v Speaker 2>tell you something that came about just in the last
<v Speaker 2>few years. There was an expanded manuscript found in twenty
<v Speaker 2>eighteen at Harvard.
<v Speaker 1>John W.
<v Speaker 2>Campbell had donated a bunch of his manuscripts to Harvard,
<v Speaker 2>and somebody was just searching through these old manuscripts and
<v Speaker 2>found like a much larger version of Who Goes There.
<v Speaker 2>They started a Kickstarter campaign to try to get it published.
<v Speaker 2>Their goal was one thousand dollars. They raised one hundred
<v Speaker 2>and fifty five thousand dollars, and so the book was released,
<v Speaker 2>it was called Frozen Hell, the book that in sp
<v Speaker 2>fired The Thing, published twenty nineteen.
<v Speaker 1>That's fantastic. You know. That sounds very similar to the
<v Speaker 1>birth of Blade Runners. We'll get to that here in
<v Speaker 1>just a minute.
<v Speaker 2>I have so much stuff. That's so much stuff, all right,
<v Speaker 2>let's go. Okay, So after the movie The Thing from
<v Speaker 2>Another World, there were a couple of guys, a couple
<v Speaker 2>of screenwriters who had the rights to the story the
<v Speaker 2>original who goes their story right? And those guys' names
<v Speaker 2>were Hal bar Wood and Matthew Robbins. Let me give
<v Speaker 2>you a couple of movies that they wrote, Okay, Dragon's Layer,
<v Speaker 2>Whoa and The Sugarland Express. Are you serious, which, of
<v Speaker 2>course is Steven Spielberg's first movie. Yes, starring Goldie Hawn.
<v Speaker 2>There you go, another connection. Yes, all right. So those
<v Speaker 2>guys had the rights, they passed the Universe. They were like,
<v Speaker 2>we're not going to make this movie. We're not interested
<v Speaker 2>in it. So Universal bought it and David Foster, Lawrence Termann.
<v Speaker 2>We're trying to get a more faithful adaptation of the
<v Speaker 2>novel because in the novel you've got the alien's body
<v Speaker 2>mass that will change. It involves taking over people and dogs.
<v Speaker 2>The dog is killed, it's telepathic. It's all very similar
<v Speaker 2>to what we get in nineteen eighty two as opposed
<v Speaker 2>to what we got in nineteen fifty one, and they
<v Speaker 2>wanted it more like that. They approached John Carpenter in
<v Speaker 2>nineteen seventy six, but Universal chose not to go with
<v Speaker 2>him because he wasn't under contract. He was an independent guy.
<v Speaker 2>And the guy that they hit up was Toby Hooper
<v Speaker 2>because he was under contract, and Toby Hooper.
<v Speaker 1>Is the director of Poltergeist and Texas Chainsaw'm massacre. There
<v Speaker 1>you go.
<v Speaker 2>So they intempted to get others, including John Lannis, but failed,
<v Speaker 2>but it got put on hold right right until a
<v Speaker 2>couple of things happened. Okay, but before I get to
<v Speaker 2>those things, to talk about John Carpenter and Kurt Russell. Okay,
<v Speaker 2>So I'm gonna start with Kurt Russell.
<v Speaker 1>We're gonna draw a little bit everybody's blood. We're going
<v Speaker 1>to find out who's a thing.
<v Speaker 2>So Kurt Russell at fifteen, when he does his first
<v Speaker 2>Disney movie called Follow Me Boys, he's already seasoned actor.
<v Speaker 2>He's been acting for four years at that point. One
<v Speaker 2>of the movies that he was in when he was
<v Speaker 2>twelve years old, was it happened at the World's Fair.
<v Speaker 1>Do you know who's in that? No? Elvis?
<v Speaker 2>Oh yeah, And so at some point Kurt Russell shows
<v Speaker 2>up and kicks Elvis in the shin.
<v Speaker 1>Okay. So then he goes to Disney.
<v Speaker 2>Between sixty six and seventy five, he had a big
<v Speaker 2>career with Disney, Computer War, Tennis Shoes, Strongestman, with all
<v Speaker 2>these amazing Disney movies. And after nine years and nine movies,
<v Speaker 2>he was ready to be done, right, ready to be
<v Speaker 2>done with Disney. So in nineteen seventy four, the last
<v Speaker 2>movie that he does with Disney is The Strongest Man
<v Speaker 2>in the World. In the same year, he plays Charles Whitman,
<v Speaker 2>the sniper killer in the movie The Deadly Tower.
<v Speaker 1>Wow.
<v Speaker 2>I mean talk about let's burn this image to the
<v Speaker 2>ground seriously, right, So that's his objective. I am you know,
<v Speaker 2>I've been the Disney kid for nine years now, I
<v Speaker 2>want to do something completely different. Well, enter John Carpenter.
<v Speaker 2>Now John Carpenter we talked about in our Aliens episode,
<v Speaker 2>because John Carpenter went to school with this guy named
<v Speaker 2>Dan O'Bannon and they worked together on John Carpenter's student
<v Speaker 2>movie called dark.
<v Speaker 1>Star, which is also coincidentally the name of the plane
<v Speaker 1>that Tom Cruise flies and Tom gun Maverick.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, and I think that I think the movie had
<v Speaker 2>to have inspired the plane. Right, Those guys Lockheed Martin
<v Speaker 2>have to be John Carpenter fans.
<v Speaker 1>I believe it. So you can go.
<v Speaker 2>Back and listen to that episode, but you'll have to
<v Speaker 2>remember that Dan O'Bannon and John Carpenter had a falling out.
<v Speaker 2>Dan O'Bannon ended up doing a big project with a
<v Speaker 2>guy that didn't come through called Dune.
<v Speaker 1>Remember this, Yes, flew.
<v Speaker 2>Out to Europe, project fell through, he lost all his money.
<v Speaker 2>He came back and was sleeping on the couch and
<v Speaker 2>that's when he wrote the movie Alien right.
<v Speaker 1>Yep.
<v Speaker 2>The reason that he got the job was because Alejandro
<v Speaker 2>Jeordowski was making Doune. So Alejandro Hordawaski had gone to
<v Speaker 2>talk to this guy named Douglas Trumbull who was the
<v Speaker 2>special effects guy to talk to and Douglas Trumbull said, Hey,
<v Speaker 2>this is the way that we are going to do things,
<v Speaker 2>and Hordwaski was like, I don't want to do it.
<v Speaker 2>That way, and Douglas Trumble was like, well tough, that's
<v Speaker 2>the way it's going.
<v Speaker 1>To be, or I'm not going to do it.
<v Speaker 2>He's like, well then I don't want you. And then
<v Speaker 2>they went and saw this movie at the theater called
<v Speaker 2>Dark Star, and he said, who's the special effects guy
<v Speaker 2>for this movie? It was Dan O'Bannon, who, of course
<v Speaker 2>then became the guy who wrote Alien, which was directed
<v Speaker 2>by Ridley Scott worked closely with him. Ridley Scott, of
<v Speaker 2>course is the guy who directed Blade Runner, who had
<v Speaker 2>the most amazing set design that was made by Douglas Trumble.
<v Speaker 1>Wow, how about that?
<v Speaker 2>So Douglas Trumbule just passed away in February, God rest
<v Speaker 2>his soul. We had a couple of guys who are
<v Speaker 2>involved in these things who have just recently passed away.
<v Speaker 2>But Douglas Trumbull is a and icon as far as
<v Speaker 2>visual effects goes.
<v Speaker 1>But there you go.
<v Speaker 2>Another connection, hey, by the way, just a little connection, Okay?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Ridley Scott also directed Gladiator, which we paired up
<v Speaker 1>against Braveheart in one of our earliest episodes, Yes, which
<v Speaker 1>you were way wrong in whatever. That was one of
<v Speaker 1>the few episodes we really disagreed in.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, so, after John Carpenter has done Dark Star, he
<v Speaker 2>starts doing some of these other kind of low budget
<v Speaker 2>horror movies. One is called Assault on Precinct thirteen, which
<v Speaker 2>is a retelling of the Rio Bravo movie Yep. And
<v Speaker 2>he realizes that there's a lot of work and a
<v Speaker 2>lot of money to be made in TV movies at
<v Speaker 2>the time, does another couple of horror movies, and then
<v Speaker 2>he does this bio pic on Elvis. Yes, and guess
<v Speaker 2>who plays Elvis, Kurt Russell.
<v Speaker 1>You want to be able to walk around and see things,
<v Speaker 1>all the mobs of people, you know, just just be
<v Speaker 1>pre just be playing little old media instead of the inning.
<v Speaker 2>Same guy who at twelve years old kicked Elvis in
<v Speaker 2>the shin is now playing Elvis in the biopic in
<v Speaker 2>nineteen seventy nine, directed by John Carpenter, And that is
<v Speaker 2>where these two get together and fall in love.
<v Speaker 1>By the way, one of the little horror movies that
<v Speaker 1>you kind of skimmed over there, Yeah, Halloween, one of
<v Speaker 1>the most profitable movies of all time.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, so nineteen seventy nine is when this biopick came out.
<v Speaker 2>Nineteen seventy nine. Us of course, when Alien came out, yes,
<v Speaker 2>And also, of course John Carpenter had Halloween.
<v Speaker 1>Yes.
<v Speaker 2>So those are the two colossal events that wake up
<v Speaker 2>universal to say, hey, maybe we should go ahead and
<v Speaker 2>remake the thing to trust.
<v Speaker 4>I know what you mean, Blair, Trust a tough thing
<v Speaker 4>to come by these days.
<v Speaker 1>Tell you why why don't you just trust in the Lord?
<v Speaker 1>Bang on? Good job, nailed it.
<v Speaker 2>So they go back to John Carpenter, and he didn't
<v Speaker 2>think that he could do it better than Howard Hawk
<v Speaker 2>had done it. It was a movie that he had loved
<v Speaker 2>since the time he was a kid, but he hadn't
<v Speaker 2>really ever read the book. And so he reads the
<v Speaker 2>novella and he's like, you know what, this isn't the
<v Speaker 2>same as the movie. This is more like an Agatha
<v Speaker 2>Christie like and then there were none It really is
<v Speaker 2>like and then there were none. Yes, And so he's like, huh,
<v Speaker 2>I think I can do something different with this. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>just let me be clear on this. Howard Hawks was
<v Speaker 2>like a huge influence on John Carpenter. He was scared
<v Speaker 2>to do this movie. If you watch Halloween, you can
<v Speaker 2>see that it is an homage to Howard Hawks in
<v Speaker 2>the way that he did stuff and so they said,
<v Speaker 2>John Carpenter, we really want you to do this. Once
<v Speaker 2>he read it, he was like, I think I can
<v Speaker 2>do this in a different way. But they needed a script.
<v Speaker 2>They approached several different writers, one of which was Richard Matheson,
<v Speaker 2>who was, of course the father of Chris Matheson.
<v Speaker 1>Who wrote Freaking Bill and Ted Excellent Adventure.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, and Richard Matheson is the guy that said, hey,
<v Speaker 2>you should do a time travel movie based on your
<v Speaker 2>short story.
<v Speaker 1>Richard Mathson wrote, I am legend. I mean it's a
<v Speaker 1>big deal. He's a big deal.
<v Speaker 3>Right.
<v Speaker 2>He didn't do it, But there was a of a
<v Speaker 2>famous actor that was in descript writing and they approached him,
<v Speaker 2>and his name was Bill Lancaster, son of the famous
<v Speaker 2>Bert Lancaster incredible. When they approached him, he said, I
<v Speaker 2>want to keep this close to the novella, and they said,
<v Speaker 2>that's what we want.
<v Speaker 1>Now.
<v Speaker 2>In this script, you don't really see the monster. They
<v Speaker 2>played the Jaws card where they kept the monster brilliant hidden.
<v Speaker 2>But there's a guy named Rob Boteen who they had
<v Speaker 2>approached about doing the special effects in this movie, who said,
<v Speaker 2>I really think we should see the monster more often
<v Speaker 2>and that's why you got it in there as often
<v Speaker 2>as you do.
<v Speaker 1>By the way, every time you see the monster, you're
<v Speaker 1>gonna crap your pants because it's so freaking scary.
<v Speaker 2>This is one of the best special effects movies of
<v Speaker 2>all time, and one of the movies that John Carpenter
<v Speaker 2>had done in this time period between you know, hey,
<v Speaker 2>we want you to do the movie and the movie
<v Speaker 2>coming out. It was a movie called The Fog. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>And so this young I think twenty or twenty one
<v Speaker 2>year old kid is like, Oh, John Carpenter, I want
<v Speaker 2>to go meet him. He's over on the lot. He's
<v Speaker 2>doing some work with a special effects guy named Rick Baker.
<v Speaker 1>Who you might have heard of Rick Baker.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and so he's like, oh, I want to go
<v Speaker 2>meet him.
<v Speaker 1>And he's like gets in.
<v Speaker 2>He's like, okay, so the movies he you're doing is
<v Speaker 2>what the Fog?
<v Speaker 1>Oh? Can I be in it?
<v Speaker 2>And he says that John Carpenter's like stand up, and
<v Speaker 2>he's like he thinks he's going to say stand up
<v Speaker 2>and get out, and he's like, turn around, Okay, I
<v Speaker 2>got a part for you. You need to be here
<v Speaker 2>tomorrow morning. You need to wear this, you need to
<v Speaker 2>learn these lines. I mean so so Rob Botein first
<v Speaker 2>working with John Carpenter as an actor in the Fog.
<v Speaker 1>Wow.
<v Speaker 2>Now, of course we know from our American Werewolf in
<v Speaker 2>London versus The Howling that Robotein worked again with Rick
<v Speaker 2>Baker initially on the Howling. But then John Landis called
<v Speaker 2>Rick Baker and he's like, what are you doing? I've
<v Speaker 2>got a werewolf movie. Wait? Yeah, I mean John Landis
<v Speaker 2>is the reason that Rick Baker is a household name. Sure, right,
<v Speaker 2>So Rick Baker leaves to go do American Werewolf in London.
<v Speaker 2>He leaves Rob Botein in charge of the special effects
<v Speaker 2>for the Howling, which of course are monumental at time.
<v Speaker 2>And so then when we get to the thing, Robboteen
<v Speaker 2>is the man for the plan.
<v Speaker 1>The effects in the Thing are so graphic and shocking
<v Speaker 1>that the press accused John Carpenter of being a pornographer
<v Speaker 1>of violence.
<v Speaker 3>Right.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. We even did a little a little presentation a
<v Speaker 1>live show. Oh yeah, that's right last fall, and we
<v Speaker 1>presented some of the scariest movies in cinema. And one
<v Speaker 1>of those moments was when the.
<v Speaker 2>When opens up and the arms come off. Oh my gosh,
<v Speaker 2>so incredible. We'll talk about special effects in a little
<v Speaker 2>more detail a little bit later on. Okay, so we've
<v Speaker 2>got our director, we've got our script by mister Bill Lancaster,
<v Speaker 2>we've got our special effects guy.
<v Speaker 1>And it's time to start going.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, okay, okay, So that's the beginning of the thing.
<v Speaker 1>Yep. Now we've got to talk about the beginning of later.
<v Speaker 3>Wake Up, trying to die.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, all right, so once again we're going back in time.
<v Speaker 2>We are going to talk about sci fi writers. This
<v Speaker 2>guy's a little bit younger.
<v Speaker 1>His name is Philip Kindred Dick, mister phild K Dick.
<v Speaker 2>Philip K. Dick, an unfortunate name. Born a twin Oh
<v Speaker 2>really yeah, had a twin sister. She died in infancy.
<v Speaker 2>That's why you will see a lot of twinless twins
<v Speaker 2>in his works.
<v Speaker 1>Interesting. He said it had a.
<v Speaker 2>Profound effect on him, even though he's only six weeks old.
<v Speaker 2>It's a big condition, like there are organizations that are
<v Speaker 2>the twinless twins organizations. So it was profound on his life.
<v Speaker 2>But I don't need to get into all that. What
<v Speaker 2>you need to know is that he also was a
<v Speaker 2>young science fiction writer. He wrote other more mainstream stuff,
<v Speaker 2>but it was unsuccessful and he really was never truly
<v Speaker 2>appreciated during his lifetime.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, So Phil K.
<v Speaker 2>Dick started writing in nineteen fifty two and wrote for
<v Speaker 2>nearly ten years without any real success. His stuff would
<v Speaker 2>get submitted to the science fiction magazines. My guess is
<v Speaker 2>probably John W. Campbell read some of his stuff and
<v Speaker 2>rejected it. But in nineteen sixty two he came out
<v Speaker 2>with a novel called The Man in the High Castle. Yes,
<v Speaker 2>have you watched this on showtime?
<v Speaker 1>Or I have not seen a series? Okay. I read
<v Speaker 1>this book a long time ago, and it's basically what
<v Speaker 1>would have happened if Germany had won World War Two?
<v Speaker 1>And that premise alone is just fascinating.
<v Speaker 2>I haven't read the book, but as I understand that,
<v Speaker 2>there's actually a book within the book that is what
<v Speaker 2>would have happened if the Allies had won World War Two?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, which is kind of.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, that's crazy. That is some deep weird stuff.
<v Speaker 2>I can say that going down the Phillip Dick Hole,
<v Speaker 2>if you will, is a world of crazy beyond your
<v Speaker 2>normal crazy.
<v Speaker 1>It's upper level, super highly intelligent stuff. It can get
<v Speaker 1>over your head in a hurry.
<v Speaker 2>He just as a quick glim of his life. He
<v Speaker 2>didn't have a lot of financial success despite the really
<v Speaker 2>famous works that he's done. I mean, we're talking about
<v Speaker 2>a guy who was the inspiration for his stories, were
<v Speaker 2>the inspiration for mann in Height, Castle, Minority Report, Blade Runner,
<v Speaker 2>Total Recall. I mean, this is huge, right, it's huge.
<v Speaker 2>But he was a weird, kind of messed up dude.
<v Speaker 2>I sent you a video today of him talking about
<v Speaker 2>a real life experience that he had that sounded like
<v Speaker 2>the inspiration for the Matrix like where he was talking
<v Speaker 2>about how he met this woman that had delivered something
<v Speaker 2>to him after he'd had a tooth extracted and he
<v Speaker 2>was still under the effects of the sodium pentahal and
<v Speaker 2>he thought she was like some sort of angel. She
<v Speaker 2>had an Ickc's necklace that he was like, what is that?
<v Speaker 1>Fish? What is that?
<v Speaker 2>And this guy, who was never Christian in his life,
<v Speaker 2>suddenly after meeting this woman's believed he was living two
<v Speaker 2>parallel lives. One is Philip K. Dick and the other
<v Speaker 2>is a man named Thomas who was alive during the
<v Speaker 2>events of Acts in the Bible, which he said he
<v Speaker 2>had never read, and one of his books is based
<v Speaker 2>upon that experience.
<v Speaker 1>He's a strange dude.
<v Speaker 2>He's definitely a strange dude, and not being a financial success,
<v Speaker 2>so he.
<v Speaker 1>Was in trouble with the irs, right. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>In one of the dedications in his books, he dedicated
<v Speaker 2>to a guy who helped him out when he needed
<v Speaker 2>help paying off the irs, that guy who had never
<v Speaker 2>met just a guy who's liked his work and wanted
<v Speaker 2>to help him.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, Robert Heinlein, really yes, the science fiction right now?
<v Speaker 4>Yes? What?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, So there.
<v Speaker 2>You go, and again another looping connection. Ultimately, Philip K.
<v Speaker 2>Dick would win the John W. Campbell Science Fiction Award.
<v Speaker 1>It's just it's crazy, the overlap that we have in
<v Speaker 1>all of these things. Insane.
<v Speaker 2>And so you mentioned to me that while he was
<v Speaker 2>studying on The Man in the High Castle, he came
<v Speaker 2>across some stuff which led to the development of another story.
<v Speaker 1>Right. So he would he would go to the library
<v Speaker 1>at cal Berkeley and just read like the dark hallway journals,
<v Speaker 1>like the back corner stuff, right right, the stuff that
<v Speaker 1>nobody he reads. He's back there reading and he came
<v Speaker 1>across a bunch of journals from World War Two and
<v Speaker 1>it was Nazi journals, right, and so he's thinking about
<v Speaker 1>the man in the High Castle. So he's reading through
<v Speaker 1>these Nazi journals and he reads this one guy's journal
<v Speaker 1>and it says, we can't sleep because these stupid children
<v Speaker 1>who are starving keep crying. And Phil k Dick is like,
<v Speaker 1>this person who wrote these words cannot be human. It's
<v Speaker 1>not possible. You cannot listen to starving children cry and
<v Speaker 1>be upset that you can't sleep. That's not human behavior.
<v Speaker 1>There's something wrong with this person. Therefore he has to
<v Speaker 1>be an android. He legitimately believed this. Yes, he legitimately
<v Speaker 1>believed this person is not human, right, and so that
<v Speaker 1>led him to the story we know as do Android's
<v Speaker 1>Dream of Electric Sheep.
<v Speaker 2>Which of course was the inspiration for our movie Blater Runner. Yep,
<v Speaker 2>So tell you about another guy real quick. His name
<v Speaker 2>is Hampton Fancher. Hampton Fancher, at age fifteen, ran away
<v Speaker 2>to Spain to become a Flamenco dancer and renamed himself
<v Speaker 2>Mario Montejo.
<v Speaker 1>I did not know that. Why would you? Why would
<v Speaker 1>you know that?
<v Speaker 3>Right?
<v Speaker 1>So there's good job.
<v Speaker 2>There is a deep dive on Hampton Vancher.
<v Speaker 1>So, Henny Vancher's the screenwriter for Blade Run Right.
<v Speaker 2>So he had a job as an actor in westerns
<v Speaker 2>and Troy Donahue movies, The.
<v Speaker 1>Guy Who's named Jacked in Greece and in The Godfather yep.
<v Speaker 2>And by the way, he also had a couple of
<v Speaker 2>relationships with some hotties, one of which was Barbara Hershey.
<v Speaker 2>The other was Terry Garr.
<v Speaker 4>What mackers, thank you doctor, Let's go dude.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, he's he's kind of rocking and rolling it. But
<v Speaker 2>around nineteen seventy seven he's like, you know what, I
<v Speaker 2>think I'd like to do some screenwriting, and that's what
<v Speaker 2>he decides he's going to do as a full time job.
<v Speaker 2>So he starts trying to option do Android's Dream of
<v Speaker 2>Electric Sheep in nineteen seventy five. Okay, and Philip k
<v Speaker 2>is like, I don't know who you are. I'm not
<v Speaker 2>gonna let you make a movie. No, And so Fancher
<v Speaker 2>goes to his buddy named Brian Kelly. Now, Brian Kelly,
<v Speaker 2>you will know as the dad from Flipper.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, So Brian Kelly had been involved in a motorcycle
<v Speaker 2>accident before he was about to make a movie. It
<v Speaker 2>left his right arm and leg paralyzed. He sued he
<v Speaker 2>didn't get to be in the movie because he's lost
<v Speaker 2>movement on that side of his body. So he sued,
<v Speaker 2>he got a settlement, and with that he started building
<v Speaker 2>homes and producing movies really, and so Fancher' is like, hey, Brian,
<v Speaker 2>I really want to make this movie.
<v Speaker 1>Can you help me out?
<v Speaker 2>When Brian Kelly goes, Philip Dick agrees, and Frantire gets
<v Speaker 2>brought on to write the screenplay. Now, ultimately, Kelly would
<v Speaker 2>later enlist the support of Michael Deeley, who wrote The
<v Speaker 2>Deer Hunter. Yes, and they made Fancher an executive producer,
<v Speaker 2>and he was obviously still largely involved, but he is
<v Speaker 2>kind of the catalyst that brought this book into movie world, right,
<v Speaker 2>But he as executive producer ended up having a ton
<v Speaker 2>of disagreements with Ridley Scott. And Ridley Scott even brought
<v Speaker 2>on his own guy named David Peeples, who you will
<v Speaker 2>know from writing The Unforgiven and Twelve Monkeys and rework
<v Speaker 2>the script. And rework the script. Now we're going to
<v Speaker 2>talk about the big question of Blade Runner, right, the
<v Speaker 2>big the big question where Ridley Scott is on one
<v Speaker 2>side and Fancher is on the other side on this one. Right,
<v Speaker 2>So you've got the guy who wrote the original script
<v Speaker 2>and the guy who directed the movie and they say
<v Speaker 2>opposing things.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's interesting. So and Harrison Ford with Fancher as well. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>by the way, Fancher and Peoples. When Ridley Scott brought
<v Speaker 1>in Peoples to help out with the screenplay, Fancher's like, you,
<v Speaker 1>f you and f you. I don't need this fan project.
<v Speaker 1>And he really got his feelings hurt. And so when
<v Speaker 1>Will Peoples met him, he was like, Hey, we kind
<v Speaker 1>of need to talk through, you know, some stuff, and
<v Speaker 1>he's like, I really did not expect to like this
<v Speaker 1>guy at all. And they became like best. Oh that's awesome.
<v Speaker 1>You know that is awesome. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Apparently Fancher when he would try to rewrite, he was
<v Speaker 2>so slow that the production crew would call him happen faster.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, do you know where the name blade Reunner comes from?
<v Speaker 1>Tell me Okay. The title comes from a book by
<v Speaker 1>a guy named Alan Norse, and he wrote a book
<v Speaker 1>called The Blade Runner, and this is about someone who
<v Speaker 1>sells illegal surgical instruments on the black market. Yeah. Really,
<v Speaker 1>Scott's like, that's a really cool name. A whole lot
<v Speaker 1>better than Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And so
<v Speaker 1>he optioned the title from that guy and it became
<v Speaker 1>Blade Runner. Now listen to this. So here's the names
<v Speaker 1>considered for Blade Runner. Okay, so do Androids Dream of
<v Speaker 1>Electric Sheep not a great movie title. So he thought
<v Speaker 1>about Android Macanismo that sucks dangerous days? Okay, okay, how
<v Speaker 1>about this one? Really? Scott said, hey, how about we
<v Speaker 1>call it Gotham City.
<v Speaker 3>Wow.
<v Speaker 1>Bob Kane is like, nope, yeah, not happening. Yeah, right,
<v Speaker 1>So that's when he bought the title from the book
<v Speaker 1>and called it Blade Runner.
<v Speaker 2>So the name blade Runner literally has nothing to do
<v Speaker 2>with the original story. It is a completely unrelated.
<v Speaker 1>Story, right. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>And they didn't want the title do Androids Dream of
<v Speaker 2>Electric Sheet because that's way too freaking long. But not
<v Speaker 2>only did they not want it, the word android became
<v Speaker 2>a you're not allowed to say this word. On the
<v Speaker 2>set of the movie, like Ridley Scott said, we had
<v Speaker 2>a few impermissible words, and one of them is android.
<v Speaker 2>If you said that word, you get a baseball back
<v Speaker 2>to the head.
<v Speaker 1>Not literally. That's interesting. Well, I do know that the
<v Speaker 1>word that they added in his place was replicant. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I mean Star Wars was huge and r g D
<v Speaker 1>two and c threepo are droids, yep androids?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, you know, he considered the misuse of the term
<v Speaker 2>android and what had gone on with it in the past,
<v Speaker 2>and he was like, I don't want that for this
<v Speaker 2>group of people that we have, these pseudo humans that
<v Speaker 2>we have.
<v Speaker 1>We need a different name for him.
<v Speaker 2>So replicants and if you're less formal skin.
<v Speaker 1>Jobs, that's good.
<v Speaker 2>So we've got Ridley Scott who has just done Alien,
<v Speaker 2>which is what allowed the thing to be greenlit. Yes,
<v Speaker 2>we've got a script that has been worked and reworked
<v Speaker 2>based on a book by a guy whose Looney Tunes
<v Speaker 2>as can be. Yes, And so how do we get
<v Speaker 2>to et from here?
<v Speaker 1>How do we get to et from here? Good? Be
<v Speaker 1>good time?
<v Speaker 2>That too, Okay, So here's something that's interesting to me.
<v Speaker 4>Right.
<v Speaker 2>So when they cast Blade Runner, yes, Indiana Jones was
<v Speaker 2>not a name that anybody knew. Yes, isn't that crazy?
<v Speaker 2>Because when I watched this movie the first time, I
<v Speaker 2>was like, I can see how people who had just
<v Speaker 2>seen Raiders of the Lost Arc would have been extremely
<v Speaker 2>disappointed with Blade Runner because it's an entire like he's
<v Speaker 2>not He's not Indy at all, right, and he's not
<v Speaker 2>Han Solo, right. But at the time time they cast him,
<v Speaker 2>nobody knew who Indy was. Harrison Ford was just doing
<v Speaker 2>well right, yes, And so just before he had filmed
<v Speaker 2>this movie, he filmed that movie, he filmed Raiders of
<v Speaker 2>the Lost Dark. And while they were filming Raiders of
<v Speaker 2>the Lost Dark, he had his wife with him. She
<v Speaker 2>was friends with Steven Spielberg. Steven Spielberg is out in
<v Speaker 2>the desert looking at old seashells because he said it
<v Speaker 2>used to all be ocean, right, And he's talking to
<v Speaker 2>this wife of Harrison Ford named Melissa Mathieson. Yes, and
<v Speaker 2>he says, I've had this idea since I was a
<v Speaker 2>little kid, and I would love for you to help
<v Speaker 2>me out with.
<v Speaker 1>The fact alone that et is birthed in Tunisia while
<v Speaker 1>they're shooting my favorite movie of all time. Has anyone
<v Speaker 1>had two bigger movies back to back like that?
<v Speaker 2>Well, keep in mind, Alien became a movie because of
<v Speaker 2>Star Wars. Raiders of the Lost Arc became a movie
<v Speaker 2>because Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were building a sand
<v Speaker 2>castle on the beach in Hawaii, yep, just after Star
<v Speaker 2>Wars had been released, and Steven Spielberg said, I'd really
<v Speaker 2>liked to direct a James Bond movie, and George Lucas said,
<v Speaker 2>don't do that. I've got a better idea direct my
<v Speaker 2>movie instead, and that became Raiders of the Lost Ark.
<v Speaker 1>It's incredible, right, incredible. By the way, Harrison Ford when
<v Speaker 1>he auditioned for the part of Rick Deckard in Blade Runner,
<v Speaker 1>he showed up with a fedora and a leather jacket
<v Speaker 1>straight from the set of Raiders of Lost Ark. And really,
<v Speaker 1>Scott's like, huh, you're doing this little project with George
<v Speaker 1>Lucas and Steven Spielberg. I guess maybe we should take
<v Speaker 1>you seriously. So Steven Spielberg wanted to do a story
<v Speaker 1>about a boy and an alien. He also wanted to
<v Speaker 1>do a story about divorce. He had experienced divorce when
<v Speaker 1>he was fifteen. His father left the family and it
<v Speaker 1>was him and his two younger sisters, I believe, and
<v Speaker 1>it had a profound impact on his family and he
<v Speaker 1>fell alone and sad. And so it just so happened
<v Speaker 1>that these two projects coincided, and it's fascinating too, because
<v Speaker 1>he's like, I don't really care about this being commercial.
<v Speaker 1>This is a project I want to do. I don't
<v Speaker 1>know if people like it. It's kind of like a
<v Speaker 1>Disney movie. It was his small movie, like he considered
<v Speaker 1>it his small movie. And if you think about it,
<v Speaker 1>it really is. I mean it all takes place in
<v Speaker 1>the suburbs and the woods. You're not on the.
<v Speaker 2>Deck of a starship, that's right. You are not in
<v Speaker 2>deepest darkest Africa or in the deserts of the Middle East.
<v Speaker 2>I mean it's at a little kid's house, right, that's it.
<v Speaker 1>Yes.
<v Speaker 2>So we mentioned before in her Godfather episode that George
<v Speaker 2>Lucas was partners with a guy in their first production studio,
<v Speaker 2>and that guy was Francis Ford Coppola. Yes, well, Francis
<v Speaker 2>Ford Coppola. After he made The Godfather, he made a
<v Speaker 2>little movie called The Black Stallion.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>You know who helped him write that script, Melissa Matheson.
<v Speaker 2>Melissa Matheson, You've got a boy who finds an animal,
<v Speaker 2>befriends it, falls in love with it, and ultimately the
<v Speaker 2>story revolves around that relationship.
<v Speaker 1>Right. That's fascinating.
<v Speaker 2>And so when Steven Spielberg is in the desert looking
<v Speaker 2>for seashells. Talking to Melissa Matheson, He's like, I really
<v Speaker 2>loved what you did with Francis on the Black Stallion.
<v Speaker 2>I've got this idea for a story where a boy
<v Speaker 2>finds an alien.
<v Speaker 1>I will love you for you to write it. Maybe
<v Speaker 1>an el for Leprechawn.
<v Speaker 2>There's nothing like that, Penis Bla Elliot and she says no, really, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>she said no. She's like, no, I don't really, I'm
<v Speaker 2>not interested in doing that. And so Spielberg, after Raiders,
<v Speaker 2>tries to write it. He and Kathleen Kennedy worked together
<v Speaker 2>to try to write it. They're not getting anywhere with it,
<v Speaker 2>and so finally they just pressure and pressure on Alyssa Matheson,
<v Speaker 2>and finally she relents. She's like, okay, I will write
<v Speaker 2>it for you, and so she spends eight weeks eight
<v Speaker 2>weeks writing the first draft. She sends him the first draft.
<v Speaker 2>After he reads it, he runs into Kathleen Kennedy and said,
<v Speaker 2>this is it. This is the script. We don't need
<v Speaker 2>to do any rewrites. This is the script. We will shoot.
<v Speaker 2>It is shoot script ready. That never happens, That never happens.
<v Speaker 2>I mean we're talking about two months. Last than two months,
<v Speaker 2>she writes what essentially is the entire movie of ET
<v Speaker 2>the Extraterrestrial.
<v Speaker 1>That's unbelievable. I love it. That's a great story. By
<v Speaker 1>the way, we did mention this. Melissa Matheson married to
<v Speaker 1>Harrison Ford. Yeah, she's not the Hollywood glamorous woman that
<v Speaker 1>you might think, not at all.
<v Speaker 2>And I remember when I looked at her the first
<v Speaker 2>time and I was like wow. I mean, Harrison Ford
<v Speaker 2>is regarded as, you know, Hollywood handsome, you know, big
<v Speaker 2>time leading man, and she's not, like you said, not
<v Speaker 2>classically beautiful Hollywood style. But I got to watch a
<v Speaker 2>lot of them behind the scenes stuff because she was
<v Speaker 2>always on set. The rewrites that they did, they would
<v Speaker 2>do as they were shooting the movie, and she was
<v Speaker 2>there and talking to the kids the whole time. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>she grew up raising Harrison's kids and had kids of
<v Speaker 2>her own and babysat kids and said all of those
<v Speaker 2>conversations that she would overhear became a part of the script.
<v Speaker 2>But as I watched her talk to these kids, she
<v Speaker 2>has an infectious smile and personality. I can see how
<v Speaker 2>anybody could fall in love with her.
<v Speaker 1>That's great. I saw those two and after you had
<v Speaker 1>said that to me, we were talking on the phone
<v Speaker 1>and I watched them behind the scenes with ETM like, totally,
<v Speaker 1>she's wonderful. Yeah, she just she beams joy. Yeah, which
<v Speaker 1>is oddly enough, Harrison Ford does not beam joy.
<v Speaker 2>No, but that's typically the way those marriages go, right,
<v Speaker 2>you know, you get the joy for one and you
<v Speaker 2>got the old grump.
<v Speaker 1>So Steven Spielberg takes that screenplay and goes to Columbia
<v Speaker 1>and says, hey, I've got a screenplay I want to do.
<v Speaker 1>It's about a boy and an alien. You're gonna love it.
<v Speaker 1>It's great. They look at it and they're like, I
<v Speaker 1>think we're going to pass on this one. There's another
<v Speaker 1>movie we're going to do instead, called Starman by John Carpenter. Yeah. Right, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that came out in eighty four. But they said, listen,
<v Speaker 1>we're not going to stop you from making this. We'll
<v Speaker 1>give it back to you. So he goes to Sid
<v Speaker 1>Sheinberg at Universal, his mentor, the mentor, the guy who
<v Speaker 1>he did Jaws with, guy who hired him to be
<v Speaker 1>their full time director at the youngest age of any director. Yes, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>Sid Sheinberg, who also goes on to do jos for
<v Speaker 1>which we'll talk about here in just a few weeks.
<v Speaker 1>His wife is the wife the main she's the star
<v Speaker 1>of the movie. Yes, okay, can't wait to get into
<v Speaker 1>that one.
<v Speaker 2>I can't believe of all of the Sid Sinberg movies,
<v Speaker 2>you're laying Jaws four onbody. Okay, go ahead, take the good.
<v Speaker 1>With the bad. All right. Sid is like, this is great,
<v Speaker 1>we want to do this. Yeah, I believe in you.
<v Speaker 1>Let's do this. So he has to pay Columbia get
<v Speaker 1>this one million dollars and five percent at the box office.
<v Speaker 1>Oooh okay, okay. Columbia is like, we'll give to you
<v Speaker 1>for a million bucks and five percent of whatever you
<v Speaker 1>make on it, this little crappy little Disney alien thing
<v Speaker 1>that you're working on. Okay. Now, John Vetch, the president
<v Speaker 1>of Columbia, said they made more on that five percent
<v Speaker 1>of et m HM than they made on any of
<v Speaker 1>their movies that entired you. Wow. Five percent of ET
<v Speaker 1>worth more. Wow. Now. Then we'll talk about reception here
<v Speaker 1>in a minute, but basically what we know is that
<v Speaker 1>The Thing and Blade Runner and a lot of other movies,
<v Speaker 1>let's be honest, Yeah, got swallowed up in the tsunami
<v Speaker 1>that was et that summer.
<v Speaker 2>Let's be clear about this. Blade Runner and The Thing
<v Speaker 2>were considered to be failures. Yeah, drop dead fail yours,
<v Speaker 2>and both do in large part to the success of
<v Speaker 2>E t Now You've got You've got movies that spent
<v Speaker 2>tons of money on special effects and had incredible stories
<v Speaker 2>and what ultimately become highly regard art movies that got
<v Speaker 2>kicked to the curve by a little movie about a
<v Speaker 2>boy who finds an alien. Okay, we are almost at
<v Speaker 2>the end of our time for this episode, but before
<v Speaker 2>we go, we need to have our Shirley showcase.
<v Speaker 1>This week. We've got our good friend Travis Lasley and
<v Speaker 1>he must to weigh in on one of our former matchups.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, he's going to tell us his opinion on Licensed
<v Speaker 2>to Ill versus Raisin Hell. That's an episode we did
<v Speaker 2>last November with our good friend mister deaf Dave. Let's
<v Speaker 2>hear what Travis has to say.
<v Speaker 4>Hello, Shirley, you can't be serious fans. My name is
<v Speaker 4>Travis and I have on my yellow ingred Adidas, so
<v Speaker 4>it's time to get ill. I'm here to talk about
<v Speaker 4>Raising Hell versus Licensed Ill.
<v Speaker 1>Now, I don't.
<v Speaker 4>Wrap and I can't teach anyone anything they didn't learn
<v Speaker 4>from Death Dave, Jason, and d during their extensive four
<v Speaker 4>part series. But I hope to bring a unique perspective
<v Speaker 4>to the conversation. I was born in rural Indiana. My
<v Speaker 4>backyard was a cornfield and across the street was a
<v Speaker 4>Christmas tree farm, so I wasn't stepping out my front
<v Speaker 4>door to a corncopria culture. Let's just say I watched
<v Speaker 4>a lot of TV and movies. Being the youngest in
<v Speaker 4>my family, I was the TV remote control and my
<v Speaker 4>sister's video music alarm, and she would often tell me
<v Speaker 4>to watch MTV and come get her when bon Jovie
<v Speaker 4>or whatever the hottest new video her and her friends
<v Speaker 4>wanted to watch came on. During this time, I started
<v Speaker 4>to see videos for run DMC and The Beastie Boys.
<v Speaker 4>It reminded me of my favorite movies on HBO at
<v Speaker 4>the time, Breakin', Break In Two, and of course Barry
<v Speaker 4>Gordy's The Last Dragon. It was awesome and their style
<v Speaker 4>and beats just spoke to me. I was only seven
<v Speaker 4>years old at the time, and even kids in my
<v Speaker 4>school were bringing these tapes to listen to during indoor
<v Speaker 4>Recess while we traded garbage pail kids. These two albums
<v Speaker 4>mean a lot to me and bring back more memories
<v Speaker 4>than any other. I'm mentioning this because I'm not ready
<v Speaker 4>to pick apart one of these two albums, but I
<v Speaker 4>want everyone to know that I literally grew up with
<v Speaker 4>both of these albums in my life since second grade.
<v Speaker 4>These albums mirror each other in so many ways, but
<v Speaker 4>one shines just a little bit brighter than the other.
<v Speaker 4>And my vote goes for License to Ill. And here
<v Speaker 4>are three reasons why I came to this conclusion. Number one,
<v Speaker 4>DJ Double R. Yes, Rick Rubin himself got better, having
<v Speaker 4>worked with Ello, Cooljay Run, DMC, and Slayer already, it
<v Speaker 4>is clear that he evolved as a producer. The sounds
<v Speaker 4>on Licensed Dill are clean and more polished than Rick's
<v Speaker 4>previous perks. Reason number two, there is no margin for
<v Speaker 4>error in this competition, and the worst song on either
<v Speaker 4>album is Perfection. I still listen to this song every
<v Speaker 4>time I put on this tape. Yes, I did say tape,
<v Speaker 4>but it does not belong on an album the caliber
<v Speaker 4>of Raising Hell. Reason three, and this one hurts. I
<v Speaker 4>have a lot of mixed emotions about what I'm going
<v Speaker 4>to say next. I love a crossover, and Walk This
<v Speaker 4>Way is the best crossover since the Harlem glob Chotters
<v Speaker 4>went to Gilligan Viole. That being said, the fact that
<v Speaker 4>the best song on your album is essentially a cover
<v Speaker 4>and the original band that is helping you is Strike three.
<v Speaker 4>This song changed everything and I love it. But Licensed
<v Speaker 4>to ill has no covers, and it's the reason it
<v Speaker 4>rained supreme. I would like to take a minute and
<v Speaker 4>thank Jason and d The last few years have been tough.
<v Speaker 1>On a lot of people.
<v Speaker 4>During that time, I have been entertained not only by them,
<v Speaker 4>but some of their suggestions. The thirty something meter movie podcast,
<v Speaker 4>the soundtrack show, buzz In the Tatler, the Vintage Video podcast,
<v Speaker 4>and of course the podcast Full of Kryptonite, which itself
<v Speaker 4>is the best crossover since Chubby Checker and the Fat
<v Speaker 4>Boys did the Twist. Add all that up and it's
<v Speaker 4>around one thousand hours of entertainment when a lot of
<v Speaker 4>us really needed it. Thank you, and I can't wait
<v Speaker 4>to hear what comes next.
<v Speaker 2>Wow, that was the best early showcase since Mork and
<v Speaker 2>Mindy went over to Happy Day.
<v Speaker 1>I loved that. That was fantastic. Thank you, Travis.
<v Speaker 2>Travis has been a listener for a very long time
<v Speaker 2>and we truly appreciate the friendship that has developed with Travis.
<v Speaker 2>What a great showcase loved.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that was really nice, and thank you for that compliment,
<v Speaker 1>and thank you for endorsing our good friends other podcasts
<v Speaker 1>that we've made friends with.
<v Speaker 2>Yep, Okay, that does it for Part one of ET
<v Speaker 2>Versus The Thing Versus Blade Runner, be sure to join
<v Speaker 2>us next week for part two, where we will get
<v Speaker 2>into casting.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, we're going to talk about cast, we're going to
<v Speaker 1>talk about development, we'll talk about the directors. It's going
<v Speaker 1>to be great. Come back for part two next week.