Men In Black: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of My Heart Radio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows and more. We are your two ministers of Minutia. I'm Alex Hegel and I'm Jordan. Run talk. That's very good. That's a good one. I'm glad you're running out of I'm glad more in the tank. Baby got my second win. Um and Jordan, Today we're talking about one of my favorite movies when I was a kid. At the movie that really cemented my love of Tommy Lee Jones if nothing else. Um, that's right. We are talking about Men in Black, the Tommy Lee Jones starring Will Smith, co starring Barry Son and Felt directed weird little movie with all the great gadgets, awesome practical effect aliens, and of course my boy Vinny din Afrio's amazing ten thousand chefs kiffs turn as the giant cockroach stuffed in a skin suit Edgar. Um, I almost said that was too real for me, but that's that's not the right phrase there. It was too too unreal for me too. Terrifying for me. Tonight mais for me. It is so good I can't wait to dive into it. Um. I almost airbrushed will Smith out of that entire description, and then I threw them a bone. This movie came out when I was ten, and I saw it in the theaters, and therefore that created the perfect conditions for me to think that it was the coolest thing that had ever happened or ever would and I held onto that belief firmly. I rewatched it not long ago. And despite the sequels, which we will not be talking about, and despite the long, slow, excruciating the public decline of Will Smith which we will also not be talking about, the first one has really really help up. And I just still love it so much. And it's one of those few movies that could just sack me back to being a kid again, you know, which is like just the best thing in the world. It's crazy to turn twenty five years old this month. It doesn't really, I mean, it does not seem except for this stuff with a go at the end. All those effects are still top notch. You know, it's weird. I actually pretty much totally missed this movie as a kid. Um. Interesting. I kind of only a room in my heart for one Will Smith alien related movie, and since Independence they was released the year before, that had kind of gotten to me first, kind of like how the who got to me first? Before Independence they got to me first. So my allegiance was with that, and so as a result, this was kind of a big blind spot for me. I think I've seen like pieces of it at you know, different kids parties and stuff grown up, but I yeah, this is really something that was new to me. Independence Day is like the jock version of Like this is like the Apen Club kid. Like this is the indoor kid version of an alien movie. It makes a lot of sense. It's like Douglas Adams versus uh, I don't know, James Patterson. Well yeah, I mean, but yeah, I was making it was grasping for literary comparison there. Um yeah, I mean I love Independence Day as well obviously, but this one is just so it feels so it feels so much more human too, all this stuff like we don't really we're not going to cover the plot, but like Tommy Lee Jones character is like a whole little melancholy arc and the way that it ends with the girlfriend. No, the way that it ends with him, like it has like the button where he's like, you know, he neutralizes his old partner who's getting too old at the beginning, and then at the end, Will Smith does that to him so that he can retire. It's so like there's a real heart to this movie. Ye. Yeah, there's a real heart to this movie that I think is sorely missing from you know, Will Smith punching aliens in the face and saying welcome to Earth in Independence Day. But you're also a ginormous alien buff. Yeah. I, um, you know, I was going to actually debate that, but I actually I was at Area fifty one the day of the alleged storming. I was covering it for work, but I also insisted on covering it for work. So yeah, I guess given that one fact alone, I probably can't can't deny that. No. Um, it's interesting to me that, according to a survey, more than a third of Americans believe that aliens have visited Earth. I wanted to ask you how you feel about that. Honestly, I would say, if they have, it's been in like prehistory. Um, yeah, and they like nudged, they maybe did something to Caveman or just at a different point in our revolution, because I think any alien race with a capacity for like, you know, what do they whatever they say like in like to get across the distances, they would have to scan our society and be like, what the nothing there? Turn it around right back the way you came there, gliber Bops. It's not an analogy where if the history of this planet were condensed into a year where we're at right now, would be like I something like thirty seconds before midnight on New Year's Eve or something. You know, so we think of, why have the alien's been here yet? There really hasn't been a hell of a lot of time for that to have occurred in you know, in the grand scheme of things. Wealth folks from the quote unquote real figures that inspired this film, to the awkward contortions that Vincent and Afrio put himself through in the name of his art, to which scene Will Smith ripped a disgusting fart in Wells while shooting I'm sorry, I had to go with that one. Here's everything you didn't know about Men in Black. So the real Men in Black just goes back to, yeah, exactly, can you imagine Johnny Cash showing up to your house after an alienence. Hello, I'm Johnny Kesh just neutralizes you and walks away. Um, I mean hurt neutralizes me enough. Yeah, for sure, I'm just going to play you the video to hurt and leave and you'll never feel again. Um So. On June, a private pilot by the name of Kenneth Arnold claimed that he saw a string of nine shiny, unidentified flying objects flying past Mount Rainier in Washington State, at speeds that Arnold estimated must have been at a minimum of twelve miles an hour. This report made the national news and may have been ground zero for the phrase flying saucer in the popular consciousness. Based on the way that he described them. Is that would you describe that as broadly accurate? Yeah, was a big year for flying saucer sightings, which we can talk more about in a minute. But yeah, there are a whole the whole spate of these sightings, which you know, and as much as I, as much as I want to believe all of moll there the fact that it all sort of started happening at once in the aftermath of World War Two, when we had access to a lot of German scientists who were basically tasked with building all sorts of insane machines for the Nazis. It does kind of lend a lot of creedence to the idea that these were you know, secret government programs uh and they were just developing these new uh, these new crafts and they didn't want people to know about it. But anyway, um, So, after this story is publicized, Arnold was contacted by a game him, Raymond Palmer, who's editor of the sci fi fringe culture magazine Amazing Stories, who told him the story of two harbor patrolmen in Tacoma, Washington, supposedly in possession fragments of applying saucer. Palmer asked Arnold to check it out wired U two hundred bucks and sent him on his mary away. I think he was l Ron Hubbard's editor for a while. I think elm used to write for Amazing Stories back when he was cranking out you know. I think it's twenty thousand words or whatever it was. Everybody did um Isaac Asimov? I think yep, Isaac Asimov, Ursua Ka La Gwin another big one. Okay. So, according to history dot Com on June seven, so just a few days after Arnold's sighting, a guy named Harold Doll was gathering logs on the Puget Sound, near the eastern shore of Washington's Maria Island, when he saw six donut shaped objects hovering about a half mile in the air. Before long, one of them fell nearly feet followed by reigning metallic debris, some of which hit Doll's son, Charles on his arm, as well as the family dog who died uh Doll was able to take some pictures and took them to his supervisor, guy named Fred Krisman, who subsequently showed up on the scene, took a look round of things, and Doll claims that he was visited by a man in a black suit the next day, where at a local diner, the man was able to basically recount the incident to him in extraordinarily an extraordinary detail, and he said, what I have said, He allegedly said, what I have said is proof to you that I know a great deal more about this experience of yours than you will want to believe, he said. According to a guy named Gray Barker who wrote a book in nine called They Knew Too Much about Flying saucers, which a little on the nose there. Greg uh Doll was told not to speak of the incident and warned that if he did, bad things would happen. So Arnold recruits a guy named Captain E. J. Smith of United Airlines. Is that seriously his name? Because Captain E. J. Smith was the captain of the title. Wouldn't I saw that you wrote that. I double trouble checked it. That's what's written. So air air Captain Smith not see Captain Smith Um, along with a guy named Lieutenant Frank Brown of Military Intelligence and Captain William L. Davidson go and conduct interviews in the area and collect evidence, and then they mysteriously die a few days later on August one, when the B twenty five that they were piloting crashes out side of Kelso, Washington on their way back to California. I guess that's not mysterious, but I'm trying to, you know, the story up a little. So now the FBI is really understandably interested, and they put the screws to Doll and Christman, concluding that this whole story was a hoax and that the pair themselves contacted a bunch of magazines and we're basically attempting to play these magazines against each other to get the best price they could for the story. So a bit of a sad trompone there. A few years later, one of the most famous men in black accounts comes from Albert K. Bender, who created in two the International Flying Saucer Bureau. He said he was subsequently visited by three men in dark suits who threatened him with imprisonment if he continued his work. This accounts featured in the aforementioned They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers the Gray Barker book, who mentioned it frequently in his magazine The sauce Arium, which sounds like a culinary term. He's the guy who comes to your table with a bunch of sauces and was like, I believe this would pair nicely with the chicken or the dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets. Here's where it gets into taxonomy. Distinctions are made in UFO circles between men and black lowercase and men and black capitalized. The former are supposedly human government agents FBI, CIA, whatever, while the latter, at least as depicted by UFO ologist John A. Keel, author of the famous book Turned into film the Mothman prophecies as demonic supernaturals who behave in distinctly non human ways. Meanwhile, in an article from a guy named John C. Sherwood claimed that in the late sixties, when he was eighteen, he corroberated with Gray Barker and urged him to develop a hoax which Barker subsequently published about what Barker called Black Men, three mysterious UFO inhabitants who silenced. Sherwood's pen name Dr Richard H. Pratt. So you've got all these seeds of this kind of evolving um notion of these silencer fixer characters. That's moved you throw all these fringe circles and um. You know, this stuff was really popular at the time, and they did get circulated, people did read them, and so that's how you start seeing it trickle into other areas of pop culture, including Blue Oyster Cult who I Love their n song E t I Extraterretirical Intelligence. British punk band The Stranglers have a nineteen seventy nine song called Men in Black, which is then followed two years later by a concept album called The Gossipel. According to the Men in Black, Um. And then in the big screen there's a ninety film called The Alien Encounters by James T. Flocker that features the Men in Black and the Night four is The Brother from Another Planet features two men in Black who try to capture the alien hero. They also pop up in X files interchangeably as actual threats and comic relief, and there's a famous episode where one is played by former Governor Jesse the Body Ventura, and another by Alex Trebek. God bless Alex Trebek. We truly didn't deserve him. I'm gonna I'm gonna riff on this baby. One of the few times that I actually riff on this show. Um. One of the few flying saucer incidents that we haven't spoken about so far is the Roswell incident, and that's kind of like, you know, the granddaddy of all these stories. So I want to touch a little bit on that because it's something that I found really interesting. I said earlier, I went to Area fifty one for the alleged storming, you know, that whole Facebook event thing that went viral in nineteen and this story kind of turned into a whole cultural history of Area fifty one, Like when it became public knowledge at this place existed, what we knew about it, what's officially been released about it, And as with most things in regard to the government and aliens and conspiracy theories, the story spiraled into like a it maybe is the longest thing that people dot com has ever published. Um, it's pretty insane. Check it out if you're so inclined. But I spoke to a really fascinating investigation a reporter named Annie Jacobson, and she researches all sorts of formally top secret government programs, stuff like you know, Project paper Clip MK, ultra government mind control stuff. Uh. And she wrote a book called Every fifty one and Uncentered History of America's top secret military base. And I mean I read the book several times and it's incredible. You know, if you're into this kind of stuff, definitely check it out. And speaking to her, she got into a little more detail with me. Her theory is basically that the famous flying saucer crash in or Oswell, New Mexico, in ninety seven was actually from Russia. After the Second World War, the United States and the Russians kind of divided up. The former Nazi scientists who were metaphorically and quite possibly literally light years ahead of the American naviation technology, and so they had all sorts of crazy stuff that they're working on them. If you look at some unproduced possibly unbuilt if you believe official stories, uh, they look like flying saucers. And there they look like the stealth bombers, like forty years early the kind of stuff they're working on. So her story is that Joseph Stalin, the Russian dictator, built this flying saucer and had it flown over to the United States with what she called grotesque child size aviators that were basically the result of human experimentation, uh, to cause mass hysteria in the United States because a decade earlier, Orson Wells had done his famous War the World's Radio broadcast where he told H. G. Wells sci fi story about an alien invasion on the radio, but he did it as if it were a live news broadcast, and people tuning in, you know, after the opening credits, thought that they were real alien invasions, and it created this, you know, mass hysteria for a day or so in the United States. Stalin wanted to basically do that on a mass scale and flew this flying saucer allegedly, as is the story goes, had these um child sized, grotesque child sized aviators. I'm just gonna keep leaning on that phrase. Fly this craft into in the United States, and it's unclear if it was meant to just kind of crash anywhere, or or if they were supposed to fly over. I believe it was supposed to fly over like urban centers, and something went wrong and it crashed in the middle of New Mexico, in the small town. And supposedly, according to Annie Jacobson, the person who wrote this book sources, there were like Russian language cyrillic symbols found and inside the curst the Russians I'm reading now from her book. These grotesque child size aviators were aged around ten each under five feet tall, with large heads and abnormally shaped, oversized eyes. They were neither aliens nor consenting airman, but human guinea pigs, she claims, gross tragic. Yeah, So onto a either subject that of comic books. The movie Men in Black has its roots in a three issue run of comics created and written by Lowell Cunningham and illustrated by Sandy Carruthers, published by air Cell Comics. Who are originally a manufacturer foam installation if you can believe that. Cunningham was working as a security guard when the series finished. He has since continued working in the sci five aim while Caruthers was a college professor for decade. Air Cell was sold to another smaller comic company called Malibu, who were in turn sold to Marvel, which is I believe why we have seventeen sequels to that because the rights would have reverted to Disney. I could be wrong about that anyway. So this really came from extremely humble origins. I mean, nobody read this thing when it came out. This company was tiny, but somehow husband and wife producers Walter F. Parks and Larry McDonald did and they optioned the rights, which is just crazy turnaround. Parks co wrote war Games in which is a big claim to fame, picked up the Best Original Screenplay Oscar Nod, and then he co produced several films with Lawrence Lasker, including Awakenings, and he was named president of Steven Spielberg's Ambulance Entertainment in and that same year went on to found Dream Works. So this guy is a huge heavy hitter in Hollywood and produced a bunch of stuff with his wife Larry McDonald, and their track record is bananas. They oversaw development of three consecutive Best Oscar winners, American Beauty, Gladiator, and A Beautiful Mine, along with almost famous Anchorman and saving Private Ryan for people whose names I had never read before researching this. They are responsible for an enormous swath of nineties pop culture. Um Ed Solomon, who is the guy who wrote the screenplay to this, was still in college and got a job as a staff writer for your beloved Laverne and Shirley Uh, making him, at the time the youngest member of the Writer's Guild of America. He wrote the first bill and ted he had um co writes on the next ones. He co wrote the absolute screaming piece of Super Mario Brothers movie, starring friend of the Pod Bob Hoskins, and one point he was married to John Cleese's daughter. Wow, you got Monty Python and Lavernon Shirley in there, and you feel like I needed to track him down an aliens and aliens. It's a real trifector. Solomon did not have fun making this movie. Sorry for that, he told Inverse. He was fired four times and then hired five times, calling the making of the film very stressful for me and alluding to multiple, multiple, multiple drafts of the script. Parkson McDonald wanted Verry Sonny Felt to direct, based on the Two Adams Families that he did, which he thought this. They thought he's kind of, you know, weirdo but still comedic sensibility would work well for this, but he was attached to get Shorty, so instead they approached a guy named Les Mayfield, who is best known for the Miracle on thirty four Street remake. And oh, that's right. I guess I remember it more fondly than it went down at the time because I guess producers backed off using Les Mayfield because the reviews for his Miracle and thirty four Street remake were really bad. As they are wont to do so after he fell through, John Landis Uh and Quentin Tarantino were asked to direct, which declined. Can you imagine Quentin Tarantino doing this and there's like all this be pop culture riffing raditate dialogue while they're driving around well and like how many gallons of fake blood? Blood? Yeah? Yeah, um yeah, and then it bounce back to Snafield Landis note was one of his notes was apparently that the character's black suits were too close to the Blues Brothers, which I think is funny, just like a weird reason to turn down a movie is like the wardrobe is too similar. I feel like he would have done a good job on that too, I mean considering him Werewolf in London and all the kind of genre blending that he did for that. Um. He reportedly deeply regret it's passing on this movie. UM. I had no idea until researching this episode that Barry Sonefeld got his start as a Cohen Brothers DP doing Raising Arizona and Miller's Crossing and taking a back to Lavern and Shirley. He worked with Penny Marshall on Big and Rob Reiner and when Harry met Sally and Misery starting the recently departed James con Oh yeah, big ups to James con So. One of the early drifts of the script kind of ping ponged around the country from Washington, d C. To Kansas, but Sono Feld made the I think crucial genius tweak too, just narrow the scope too, with the exception of the farmer scene to New York City making the French connection with Aliens, which is his quote which rules. And he you know, he picked a bunch of places in the city's architecture that looked weirdly alien, like the ventilation structure for the Brooklyn Battery tunnel, which is where the m IB headquarters are. And now Jordan's talked to us about casting. Yes, Sono Feld in the Oral History with inverse, said that he was sent two copies of the script because he and his wife read them together, which I find adorable. And he said that we finished at the same time. And I turned to her and said Tommy Lee Jones and she turned to me and said will Smith. So according to him, as soon as they put down the script, they knew exactly who they wanted to star, but the studio really wanted Clint Eastwood for the Tommy Lee Jones character, which I can kind of see um. But ironically the choice of Tommy Lee Jones almost backfired on him because I guess Tommy had director approval, so they basically had to like ask Tommy if it was okay for the director who wanted him to direct this movie, which kind of sets the tone for Tommy Lee Jones involvement in does um Jones sort of begrudgingly accepted the script after assurances from Steven Spielberg that it would be better because, according to Jones, this first draft stand, I'm getting a lot of Gene Hackman energy here. He's so cranky. But I guess for the the younger agent Agent JA they instead of Will Smith, they were approaching sort of more Zeitgeist actors at the time, like Batman, Forever's Chris o'donald and friends David Schwimmer. I can't imagine how truly would have been. I can't. Yeah, that's so bizarre. Um, but SnO Felt's wife was a big fresh Prince fan, and uh, it's important to remember the Independence Day and Bad Boys hadn't happened yet. So Will Smith was really just kind of a TV star at that point. I think the big one he had just done was Bad Boys. Yeah. Yeah. Spoberg even forced Son and Fell to sit down with Chris o'donald to discuss the role. So they went out to dinner, and he was so set on having Will Smith in this movie that he basically sabotaged to dinner. He told, he told Chris o'donald you know, I'm not a very good director, and I don't think the script is very good. So if you've got other options, you should probably really ache them. Which how could Chris O'Donnell not interpret that as we don't want you go away? Such ham handed reverse psychology? Is the reverse psychology? Or is it just a way of really telegraphing like, look, we don't want you, move on, I'm here under duress. I but anyway, Chris got the message and moved on, And Uh, I guess Barry sonfl went back to Spielberg and the very next day said, oh, yeah, he's not interested. Sorry, Yes, we gotta go with Will Smith. And as part of his push to get Will Smith, he arranged for a helicopter to take Smith from a wedding in Philadelphia to East Hampton, New York, where Spielberg was summering. Uh, and I guess thankfully Spielberg and Smith hit it off. Smithberg, I've read various things about Will Smith's casting. Supposedly he thought he was being pranked the first time Steven Spielberg talked to him on the phone about the role, and he almost turned it down, which is adorable. And he also almost turned it down because he's just done Independence Day, which famously, as I mentioned, is also about Aliens, and he, I guess didn't want to become the alien guy Aliens. Yeah, why am I always the alien guy? Um? And it came out and was a huge hit right before Men and Black wrapped. His wife, Jada Pinkett Smith of yea, of let's not do that. Let's not gonna do that, We're not going to do that. She was the one who convinced Will to take the part of Men and Black. I have this that just reminds me of one of my favorite jazz anecdotes, which is when Herbie Hancock talks about this in this um It's called Miles Electric A Different Kind of Blue. It's this beautiful, beautifully shot version of his performance at UM I Love White, and they interview all the band members and Herbie Hancock says, the first time he got the call to be in Miles Davis his band, he thought someone was playing with him because they all used to imitate Miles Davis behind his back, just doing like the whisper like Herbie, and so he like picked up the phone and he's like, here's like, Herbie, I got a gig for you, and he's like, get the catty here, you know whoever this is like quit trolling me and hangs up the phone and yeah, man, hanging up on Miles, making Miles call you back. It's a quick way to um piss him off. Similar thing happened to the producer Glenn John's when Paul McCartney called to ask him to produce the Get Back sessions. He's like, quit taking the piss. Yeah, he was tight with Mick Jagger because he produced a bunch of Rolling Stone sessions and he thought it was Mick just calling to imitative and he told him to go to hell and long up on. That's hilarious. I feel like there's there's a list school that needs to be written of people hanging up on their big break because they think they're being pranked. Because there's a long list of that. Yeah, for sure. Sonna Fell talking about Will Smith, had a really interesting comparison. Uh. He compared him to John Travolta. He said they both have that movie star thing going on. That's an interesting comparison. Yeah, I will just gonna leave that one there. We'll let that hang there. Yeah, imagine if it was Will Smith and John Travolta in this can you get John Travolta as uh as well, we gotta give rid of these aliens. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. Uh, much like this episode. The tone of this movie was something that they really struggled to get down. And it seems like Tommy Lee Jones, God love him, was really he didn't understand that when you're doing a buddy comedy, you can't have two comedians. You gotta have the straight person and the funny person. And uh, he thought that Barry Sona Felt was trying to make him not funny, and he was very not happy about that. And Barry Sonna felt rem bird Tommy Lee Jones is being quote very intimidating as a result. These quoted are saying Tommy just hadn't been in comedies and just didn't know that you just need to play the same reality as you do in dramas. Calls from his agent at the time saying, you only want Will Smith to be funny, you don't want Tommy to be funny. It's just hilarious. Yeah, I just love the idea that Jones, who was just this soulful text and hard ass just wanted to like played to the cheap seats and do like broad comedy. It's so good. I um, I just want to shoe horn this in there. This is the moment when I want to bring up the fact that Tommy Lee Jones was I guess college roommates with Al Gore at Harvard. Maybe it was kicking around in my skull somewhere, but yeah, Tommy Lee Jones is stony countenance is pretty legendary. There's the famous anecdote about him and Jim Carrey on the set of Batman Forever. I guess Jim Carrey was sort of picking up on kind of the frosty nous from Tommy Lee Jones on the set and a pro him off the set at a restaurant and asked him, you know, what's up? What's what's with the problem, And Tommy Lee Jones responded by saying, I can no longer sanction your buffoonery. One of the all time put downs. Um yeah, Rolling On production designer bow Welch referred to Jones as kind of a pain in the ass. Sullivan said it was my experience that if he knew it was a comedy. He certainly didn't think it was funny, and he let me know on quite a few occasions, sometimess funny. Though. Yeah, it's like when you it's like when you put a hat on a cat. Now it's just like they they're they're not. This is not funny to me. This is like you know, hence it makes it even funnier. Um, yeah, he said, Uh, sometimes I'd write a whole paragraph and I would just see him exit out with his pen and then just do it and look during the scene, which is pretty badass. I was gonna say, you had to be able to do a whole graph on a look. That's called good acting. Yeah. The guy who plays Mikey in the opening scene is an act named Sergio Calderon. And uh, he said, of Tommy, he is a little bit difficult. But I do like how easy going Tommy was with the goo in the movie being covered with the google in the slime. Apparently that was fine with him, whereas with Will Smith not so much. He really hated that um stunt coordinator Brian Smurrs no vowels in that name. I hope, I said that right. My first meeting with him. I said, with Tommy, I said hey, hello and put my hand out to shake his hand. He didn't even put his hand out. He just said, my doubles, Cliff happy, use him and we'll get along fine. And then he turns around and walks away. And that guy was His first credit was Animal House, which is another Landis appearance. Ding Um, I love this. It's very pure to me. Tommy's favorite aliens on the set with the worm guys who were in the break room just shooting about coffee, and he would just take pictures of them to show his son. Um. We'll talk about Rick Baker in a second. Who is want just one of the all time practical effects guys, just truly an artist. And Sanenfeld recalled that Baker told him, you always want to work with puppeteers because puppet tears are sad guys, and therefore they are usually able to add lib and kind of banter with actors in real time while they're working, which leads to a much more organic relationship than a board twenty two year old p a holding up tennis ball on a stick. This is the way they do everything these days. Um, And so he would he talks about the you know the line where he's like, oh, that's not decaf, is it? And that was an ad lib and uh and then the puppeteers, says Vienna Cinnamon. I love that scene, and so just the tone of this movie that they immediately hit where they're just like, yeah, aliens are just hanging out in the brake room and you know, they just they have this easy, owing relationship. It's so good. It's kind of in a weird way, reminds me of Roger Rabbit, where the cartoons are just like, you know, you have just fully integrated exactly. So good. Um. But you know, despite all that, Tommy did not quibble with the results. Sanfeld has a sweet anecdote that when he was doing the press for this and someone would ask like, you know, you're funny, like how did you get that? And Jones said, the secret to being funny is to stand next to Will Smith and do whatever Barry Sonnenfeld tells you to do, which may have sarcastic, may have been oh yeah, that's okay, fair, Um, not too much about wille Smith on the set that I was able to turn up. Art director Thomas Duffield just said Will was always great. I never saw him even get mad, and he gave everybody a bottle of dom perignon at the end. Um But yeah, maybe a track. It was a different story. Son and Field said, Will has really nasty farts. There's a scene where he and Tommy Lee are driving through the Midtown Tunnel. He's playing Elvis on the radio. No, son, Elvis is not dead. He just went home. Uh, and the car turns upside down. They're driving on the ceiling. He says. So we had a rig to put Will and Tommy into the car body, and then we had to seal that and turn the rig upside down on a green screen stage. By the time you'd seal it, turn it upside down, make sure it was safe, it was about ten minutes of work. We finally got upside down. We're ready to shoot, and then we hear Will say, oh Jesus, I'm so sorry, Tommy. Guys, get out of here, get us out. And we panicked and started to turn it around, and you hear Tommy say, no, Will, it's okay, and Will it was like, no, it's not, get us out. He had farted so bad in this enclosed space. Tommy is a manly man. So he played it cool, but man, as soon as we opened it up, Tommy was out of there, he said, for all of his disgruntled nous. Both the material, yeah, the goo being locked in as soon as the camera starts rolling, and t LJ is there for results. Baby, Um Tommy Jones so much kind of like calling just Tommy Jones. Uh Snefeld told Insider I think this year that the first time they shot the two of them in scene together was the pawn shop scene with Tony shall ub Um and Smith ad libs the last line where he goes, yeah, I'm gonna come back about those role xes and like that was the lightbulb moment with Son and Fold was like, yeah, we did the right thing. These guys have good chemistry together. This is really gonna work. Uh. Smith also came up with the classic I make this look good scene during rehearsals. Are you agent K or Agent J in our in our dynamic? I don't think either of us are. Yeah, yeah, we're not cool enough to be Will Smith and we're not. I'm probably I'm angry enough, but so you're basically saying I'm not too which I'll take us a badge of honor. Um. You know, I do not want to feed into the narrative about difficult women in Hollywood, But good luck finding anyone who has anything nice to say about Linda Fiorentino. She went around telling people that she won the role of deputy medical Examiner Laurel Weaver in a game of poker with Sonenfield, and he flatly denied this, saying, that's Linda's legend. Um brag about that. Yeah, I didn't. I didn't hear in this role. I wanted in a poke. I mean so in a way it almost works against her. Yeah, And he just said that, Yeah, we played poker together at one point, and or she was sat down at a table where I was already playing poker, and I that's where I thought of her. Um. The inverse oral history does not even mention her at all. And there has been a persistent rumor that Jones would only return for the film's sequel if she didn't, which she has obviously denied. Yeah, a lot of people have said not nice things about her. Kevin Smith, who worked with her on Dogma, did not mince words about her, telling TV Guide in two thousand, Linda created crisis and trauma and anguish. She created drama while we were making a comedy. She was ticked off that there were other people in the movie who were more famous than she was. Um yeah, yeah, scorched earth that her career has certainly suffered. But there's an interesting note about her offstage life. In two thousand nine, she was involved in a real life, actual FBI case involving her boyfriend at the time FBI agent Mark t Rassini and her X who is a very famous private eye and I'm Anthony Pelicano, big wire tapper p A in l A and Linda. I guess was feeding confidential FBI documents to her ex boyfriend, this wire tapper guy, and she got caught. So she said she wanted these FBI documents because she was working on a movie and needed, you know, be helpful for her research. This was not true. She just wanted to help her ex boyfriend, the wire tapper. She was actually put on probation and find over this. Yeah. I love the fact that she caused the decline of an FBI agent to protect an X makes me like her more. Now we arrive at a little section I like to call vincent ing Dinofrio baby. Yes, um, the real star of the film obviously. Ah, he's absolute that turn. I mean talk about committing to the bit. He is obviously a giant cocker stuffed inside of a skin suit. Um. An we all, John to Turo and Bruce Campbell were both off of the role. I could see t Turo, I can't really see. Campbell would have been amminate too much. Roger Ebert compared Vincent n Ferro's performance or the character at least two orson Wells in a Suit of Armor, which I love. Um. Twenty nineteen, Vulture did an entire oral history of just the sugar in water scene, which is just so perfect. Edgar your skin, his hair off her face. Uh, that seems so good anyway, So they talked to son Fel, they talked to Vincent for it, and Sonnfield says, Donofrio's name came up early with the casting director and I thought he was great. And then he segues into an amazing Stanley Kuberck story. Um, because he had directed Vincent in full metal jacket. Uh. Kuper apparently made Vincent come to London and drive out to his like a baronial estate once a week. For months and just like force feed him like a patte goose. Uh. He would look at he would look at Vincent and say, you need to weigh more, come back in a week. Finally Vincent said, okay, now can I ask you some character questions? And Kubrick said, that's your job, not mine. So Vinnie meets up with makeup artist Rick Baker, Uh, the aforementioned uh, one of this geniuses of practicals, and started getting a concept for the character Sonevild's only direction to him was always be frustrated, which is much more than Cooper gave him exactly. So Baker just put out a book recently. This is enormous coffee table book. That is, I haven't showed out for it. I probably will after writing this. It is incredible. I mean, the man was like Michelangelo with rubbers and Google. He has this insane line about Vincent did Apria, which edges into Buffalo Bill territory. He says, after losing all of that, after gaining all the weight for for full metal jacket and then losing it, quote, Vincent's skin never came back as tight. Yeah, he had this incredibly loose skin. It was great. Baker did apparently did not enjoy working on, or at least did not enjoy the aspect of this where he was working with both Spielberg and Son and Folcus Spielberg was a producer. Uh. He had to get all his designs approved by both of them, and it was a pain in the ask. They would just right back, like, oh, can you put this guy's head on? This is this guy's torso, and he was like, no, I can't. These were designed to be like interlocking pieces of like elaborately crafted rubber. You can't just play like lego heads with them. But he had a relationship with Vinnie. They had worked together on Tim Burton's ed Wood, which might have snuck up as my favorite Tim Burton movie non Nightmare Before Christmas category. Uh yeah, players plays Orson Wells in that and his voice is dubbed though right by the guy who did the brand from Picking in the Brain, Maurice La Marsh. Yes, um Rick Baker's move for this was trying to do these old school lawn Cheney junior kind of effects, like our lawn Cheney sr famously for Phantom of the Opera launch. I mean, for everything, lawn Chaney juniors are one of the early masters of weird practical effects and makeup stuff, really groundbreaking work in stuff like Phantom of the Opera and London After Midnight. I think he is the other one, um, but he would do like spirit gum or paste pieces of fish skin, I believe is what he used for Family Opera to distort his facial features. And then where these like sort of these appliances all day for these shoots. Anyway, Rick Baker said to Vincent Detafre, like, that's what I want to do for this. I'd like to pull your eyelid and glue it down, and it's going to be pulled down for the whole day. Is that all right? And so they tested it and Vincent goes, can you pull it down further? He said, Vincent was up for anything I wanted to do to him, as long as it made the character more interesting. Subsequently, that makeup took six hours a day to apply. Uh San and Field said Rick did an amazing job of making various levels of deconstruction, which is something I forgot. I went back and was looking at this. He gets so gross as the skin suit starts to fall apart, and that they thought that through because the collagen from the skid would start to dry out, and uh, you know, by the end, one of his teeth is just like falling out. Um. So there's like three or four versions of this makeup that Rick did for the film, and he said that he thinks Peter Jackson has one of the farmer overalls and shirt, which is I don't know, just funny to me. And now we arrive at the voice, which is, this is just such a class I love this, this little image that Vincent din Afrial sketches. Nobody except for Rick saw the actual character or heard the character's voice until the first day of shooting. We went to the set and did a take and he cleared this set. After that he said, so, uh, is this what you're gonna do? That's the voice, Vincent. Joffrey goes, yeah, that's what I got, Harry sound and felt. He says, he said something like it's gonna be great or it's going to be a complete and utter failure. Can you demonstrate I'm trying to think of some of the lines that he says, Well, I mean the sugar water one. Uh, cot, it was a little cot. I'll roll with him, very small cot. That's the one. I remember, Um, I'm consistently amazed with your ability to do these impressions on demand. Uh So those voices Vincent, George C. Scott, and John Houston's, which is probably most famous son has heard in Chinatown, and we keep coming back to Chinatown in this podcast. George C. Scott had this particular raspy voice he had his whole career, even when he was young. He got more and more pronounced and scratchy as he got older. Vincent he had this cadence he spoke with, which is kind of staccato. He put very weird pauses in and then fly out with a bit of dialogue, sort of the Nick Cage approach or or Chris Walking. I was also really interested in Houston's pronunciation of things. It was pedestrian in an elegant way. He sounds out every letter. But I didn't want it to be that slow, So I combined George C. Scott's raspiness and cadence with John Houston's enunciation, So you go. Vincent Afrael went on to use this voice in the Men in Black cartoon series from two thousand one. He went on to voice all of the bugs in that show. So even though his character may have died spoiler alerts. The GEORGEI Scott thing you can really hear because he just kind of like locks his jaw. Yeah, whenever he speaks. I mean, the patent performance he gives like Dr Strange Love, which we'll talk about in the moment um, is something that, yeah, I mean, you can definitely really hear that. So to get sort of the physical movement of this character down, Vicidenofrio watched hours upon hours of bug documentaries, which is this thought of him like aviator style, just in a private home cinema. I imagine him as the as the guy he plays in full metal jacket, just like sitting on a toilet like a thousands of yards staring in a bunch of bug documentaries. And I guess he also watched Peter Seller's performance as Doctor Strange Love, the wheelchair bound professor whose body is inhabited half by nazis actually a Nazi scientists, not unlike the ones that we thing um not the last time we'll talk about Dr Strange Love in this episode. So he reasons after this intense research that folded up bug would have very awkward limb movements that scans so he went out and bought two basketball knee races that locked off his knees and ankles so that they couldn't move up or down to the side. So for the first week or so of shooting, he had these basketball knee braces under his costume to kind of give him those herkey jerky movements. It's so upsetting. Yes, And to the sugar water scene, yeahs On and Phil said, we did seven or eight different takes from several angles, and in each one of those he downed an entire glass of sugar water. Because there's a wide shot, and so you see him drink the entire glass. There's no cutaway. It wasn't an opportunity for him to stop. By the end of the night, he had such a sugar rush because he drunk eleven or twelve glasses of sugar water. He was a real trooper. Yeah, that's that's insane. I sort of shocked that there wasn't any easier way to do that, or to make it so they didn't have to drink actual sugar. I don't mean just this. This got me thinking basically about how much sugar could potentially kill a person. So I turned to an article in the l a times with the truly tremendous headline can too much Halloween candy kill you? Which I take offense to. According to the American Chemical Society, in order to give yourself a fifty fifty chance of consuming a lethal amount of sugar, you need to ingest thirteen point five grams of sugar for every pound of your body weight. So the average American man weighs around d pounds. At that way, he would need to have eat or drank two thousand, six hundred and forty grams of sugar to have equal odds of living or dying. To roll the dice there, that translates to a hundred and fifty five fun sized snicker bars, a hundred and two fun sized packages of playing M and m's, or more appropriately for our purposes, eleven cups of sugar. So he must have gotten within a coin toss of deaths exactly. That's my point, um. Makeup artist David Leroy Anderson were called the Beau as he had to do this six hours and makeup. He was on set at like you know whatever, two or three in the morning. Um, and so he needed to pick me up. Yeah, he said about the time the sun was coming up. We'd step out of the trailer for a cigarette, and Edgar Vinson is in full character and people are walking around the streets of the meatpacking district bumming cigarettes from him and not even looking twice at the fact he's got nails growing out of his knuckles. His whole face is all up. He's got big bald spots. Didn't matter at all, which just gives Son and Fell's point. Aliens were here in New York could be the perfect place for them to be because no one would even look twice. Love incredible speaking of famous people as aliens in this movie, in addition to the many celebrity cameos that we'll talk about later. The spiny headed alien with its parent. That's Fern Troyer Mini me from Austin Powers. Did you know that I did not? We cannot forget Frank the Pug, the Ramullian alien disguised as a dog. He was played by a professional who named Mushu, who was given the star treatment. His owner. Gave an interview to the National Enquirer for some reason in two thousand two. He said he travels by crate in business class. Uh goes under the seat the trainer stays in the hotel room with this dog, sleeps on her bed, orders meals from room service steak and chicken. He drinks only bald water when he's on the road. He's a v I P. Hollywood Frank. The pug is voiced by a guy named Tim Blarney, who also provided the voice for robot Johnny five from one of my favorite movies as a kid, Short Circuit. I love Short Circuit. We should do Short Circuit. I've never seen it. I'd have to have to watch it. Yeah, well, I don't know if you would love it. I loved it. A military defense robot gets struck by lightning and gained sentience and doesn't want to be a Robotics like the robot they've made self aware and then drowned itself. As you meditate on at we'll be right back with more too much information after these messages. One of the famous New York City landmarks in the film gave him a particular headache, the scene in which Will Smith chases the alien um. I think he also added of the line just be braining black men in New York today. That was supposed to be shot at Lincoln Center, but the New York Philharmonic suddenly decided to charge them for that, so Sanenfeld switched it over to the Guggenheim. Clearly, ticket sales from Madam Bovary that year weren't great got him face. New York Philharmonic production designer bow Wout said on The Men in Black Headquarters, it was totally constructed on a sound stage at Sony happens to be tremendously long. His reasoning was the Men in Black had money because in policing aliens, they stumbled across inventions like vel crow uh, and subsequently they were able to afford this sixties looking airport terminal. He said, it was specifically fascinated with the incredible, very famous tw A terminal Kennedy Airport and Queens, which looks like I forgot I was supposed to look like a bird, and that was the whole idea. That kind of mimic the whole flight of a bird. But it's just very weird looking piece of incredible piece of architecture, which is featured in movies like Catch Me if you Can. And it's now a hotel the way New York City has been trending, or like it's not like a Starbucks. Um. For the aforementioned Will Smith farting scene in the Queen's Tunnel, they built a nineties six ft replica of the Midtown Tunnel, which is one eighth the size of the real one. It was ludicrously accurate, right down to the graffiti, and it took him four months to build that thing. Um, there's a bunch of neat space stuff in here this sphere when he's you know, Will Smith is first in the amout of Black Headquarters and he picks up like the murderous bouncy ball thing that King pongs all around the HQ. Great Ripped torn said to be a practical joke from the Great Attractor. I always thought that was just a tossed offline. The Great Attractor is a real thing. It is a gravitational anomaly about two hundred and fifty million light years from Earth that is so strong it affects the motion of every galaxy within hundreds of millions of light years, presumably Ius UH, first detected by astronomers in nineteen seventy three. There's a website called Bad Astronomy that was sort of a before Neil deGrasse Tyson on Twitter was like their whole thing was just being on movies for inaccurate astronomy stuff. But they actually praised Men of Black for its accuracy. And there's a joke in there too that this great attractor was what actually caused the nineteen seventy seven blackout in New York City, uh speaking, even saying technical devices within this movie the neuralizer, which racist memories. Apparently the prop couldn't open and flash at the same time, which created lots of headaches for the production team. I just thought that was interesting. Yeah, that sounds just the sound of a strobe flash reloading, which I think is just funny. They're like and just make it sound like a camera. Um as is now famous. The American Humane Society monitored every aspect of this, especially the cockroaches. They're also famous for doing this on Joe's apartment. Um wow. Yeah, I think every time I read about a movie that has bugs in it, they talked about the Humane Society shows up and literally counts the roaches at the end of the day to make sure that none of them have are famous. So that scene where Will's pissing off edgar By like squish, I'm sorry, I was that your Auntie Runch. Those were condiment packets like mustard um. I guess the costume designer Mary eo Vot heard that. Maybe I don't know if she heard or whatever, but she consciously wanted to avoid the Blues Brothers the kind of baggy ear cut of suit. Um, so she tailored all the suits in the film to be these more slim cut. The nineteen sixties silhouettes carried grants in north By Northwest was a big inspiration. Will Smith said, the last time I wore a suit was my eighth grade graduation. The sunglasses used in Men in Black are Rayband Predator two glasses, supposedly at will Smith's request. I guess he really liked them, and after the film's released, Rayband reported that sales of these glasses tripled from one point six million annually to five million UM and I guess there was some minor drama about this. There was a special coding applied to the lenses to reduce glare and limit the reflection from all the lights on the set, but this removed the logo that's famously on all the ray Band lenses, and ray Band tried to convince the studio to reinstate the logo, but they refused, and after some coursing, I guess Will Smith compromised and name dropped the brand in the Men in Black theme song black Tie with the Black Attitude New style black ray bands. I'm stunned, man, I want you to read more rap lyrics. I want you to read rap rics in a dead on a tone for the rest of my life. Um. The watch worn by Agent J in these movies is a Hamilton's Ventura, which was a style made famous by Elvis Presley in the movie Blue Hawaii. And I think they just did a reissue of it earlier this year. It's really cool. It's like this weird triangular shape very uh, you know, mid century futuristic watch. How much does it cost? The cheapest one I saw was like eight. I know, I wanted so bad, becoming a watch guy would be so bad coveted. Um. But man, for all of this care and thought that they put into it, they were really scrambling at different parts of this. There were a bunch of changes that they made of the plot. Well, I guess there were two changes that they made costly and big ones, yes, huge ones. Uh. Five months into production, the original ending to the film was scrapped. They were originally going to have this kind of comedic philosophical existential debate between will Smith and Edgar, which thank god, they changed that and they decided to British. Yeah, yeah, Douglas atoms again. Uh. And then so they decided to rework it into the action scene. This directly affected Rick Baker, who, at the cost of one million dollars, had built almost twenty foot tall animatronic cockroach and they were like, yeah, we're not doing that anymore. So to do all the c g I that's in their extra four point five mill to the budget, they sent it over to Industrial Light and Magic again with like two weeks left in shooting for this. Another post production change was they decided the whole plot about the smuggled alien galaxy was getting very complicated because as part of the lower and backstory to that, there was another alien race and they're called the Baltians. Um. I don't even understand what I was reading about that. It got very confusing to me. So they wisely thought this cluttered this up, so in post production they changed some of the readoubts and the men in black computers. They changed some of the subtitles in the diner scenes, all very crafty ways of doing this. And then they just redubbed some of Frank's dialog because like, obviously you don't need to reshoot a dog to get the dialogue to line up. UM, And they cut all of the mentions of that race with UM again like two weeks left in post um and and so some of the bonus making of materials for the home releases. The Satton Field jokingly advised all directors to put talking dogs in their films as an easy, I guess, sort of escape hatch for correcting plot points later. Just have a talking dog to all the exposition so you can change it on the fly. I love that. Um. There are other winks to famous alien sci fi stuff in the film. UM. The driver smuggling the illegal aliens in the opening scene is driving along a road marked three five, and he claims to have been fishing in Cuernavaca is Nevada State road, also known as the Extraterrestrial Highway because it goes near ever aft one road you have driven h and Cornavaca is the Mexican city in which British UFO olive UFO. All that's that's an impossible word to say, I'm gonna do in the Edgar voice. Cornavaca there's a Mexican studium which British rawfa. Just Cornavaca is the Mexican city in which British UFO ologist Gordon Creighton claimed flying saucer crashed near in n The explanation that Tommy Jones gives Edgar's wife sort of throws four of the most infamous explanations for UFO sightings into a blender. Uh. Those include swamp gas, which was Dr J. Allen Heinecks explanation of a Michigan sighting weather balloon, which is the original explanation for the Roswell incident, a thermo pocket which is uh Washington d c UFO sighting two, and light from Venus, which is one of the most famously used explanations for UFOs. We mentioned Douglas Adams earlier. There are nods to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The question about cab drivers being aliens could be seen as a reference to a line in So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, in which the guide suggests the dry having a cab is a good way to make a living for aliens visiting New York City and the whole That beautiful ending shot just such a tremendous concept where they zoom out of our galaxy in the universe and go even further than that. It's revealed to be a set of marbles that aliens are playing with. That could also be a reference to a line in the book where Ford Prefect tells Arthur Dent that he knew of a planet that got used in a game of intergalactic bar billiards and was potted into a black pole, and he just says, only scored thirty points too. I love Hitchhiker's Guy. It's so good. I read a theory. I don't know how realistic this is that that end shot of pulling out was sort of a nod to the finale the TV show, saying elsewhere where the kids staring at the snow globe, He's imagined it all. The whole series was just in this kid's mind as he's staring in in the snow globe. Um, I don't know, I think that could be. It's not like a famously hated conclusion, Yes, very much so. It's basically like a giant It's like those jokes that don't have a punch line and just go on and on and on and on and on. I think that's how people like kind of like, wait, that was just a giant waste of of time that there was the Yeah. Interestingly, the same year this came out, Contact also came out, and that opens with a similar shot where they start with something being broadcast on Earth and they go out now and now and now and now into space, past the Van Allen Belt, past all the planets, out of the galaxy, and then it ends in uh young whatever. Jodie Foster's character's name is uh air Away somebody air away her I her iris, right, which is really cool to watch that for the first time last year. Oh that was your first time? Would you think so? Just so, it's incredible, No words should have sent a poet. Yes, it was a great oral history, I think on Vulture that just came out like earlier this week. Um, such a good movie. Yeah, the book is amazing. Yeah, yeah, it's so good. It's beautiful. Um. Moving from the end credits to the opening credits. The fault in the opening credits was designed by a guy named Pablo Faro, and they're very distinctive looking, kind of walky handwritten. Um, there're a nod to the work that he did in Stanley Kubrick's classic apocalyptic comedy Doctor Strange Love or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb um, which I think you know, in addition to just being a stylistic choice, probably was done to kind of telegraph like this movie will be equally sort of off kilter, government absurdist. So Danny Elfman did the score for this truly. Um, I've kind of soured on Danny Elfman. I get too much for his Yeah, his whole like carnival ride. But he made the score to Batman, so you know he's forever grandfathered into being for that. Uh nominated for an Oscar for the score, which, um, sure, and then his anecdote about getting this is so funny. Actually was talking to people TV about it. Elfman was on the set of Uh, I think what is a great movie sort of a misbegotten one, The Frighteners starring Michael J. Fox, directed by Peter Jackson UM, and they guess they were shooting next to each other, and so Vincent Dinofrio invites him over to the men in black set. He's like, oh, yeah, we're doing this. I'm playing this gross monster like clean check it out and uh. On Danny Elephant's way back home, his agent calls him. He was like, they want you to do the score for a movie called Men and Black. Like what did you say? And he just goes I don't know. So somehow the presence of Danny Elfin was enough to convince Vincent Dinofria to lobby for him to do the score for this movie. Uh Sano Feld has a medium funny anecdote about working on it with Elfman. They gave him some scenes to write for and he goes out to check his progress and uh quote, he had a place in Malibu that was so dark and so scary. I go into this bunker that he had on his Alibu property. It's pitch black. He's got skeletons, taxidermy. I'm pretty freaked out. And the initial stuff Danny played for me was totally wrong. So not only is he in this bizarre, pitch black Tim Burton esque world, he has to tell Danny like, no, that's not what we want. Um. But he did say a week later, I drove back to that horrible place of his again and loved what he had done. Since. Unfortunately, all anyone remembers from this film is that King Will Smith's song. I hate Will Smith's run in the nineties, the laziest thing samples since that Puff Daddy thing. He literally just steals like there's nothing clever about. I took a break from this, and I took a baseline from that, and I took a piano or vocal hook from this. I chopped him up. Nope, he just takes songs and rewrites them. The Men and Black one is forget Me, not by Patrise, Russian Will to k or will any mean whever that piece it is is just the rock the Kasba just con stole rock the Kasba. The Wild Wild West one Wicked Wicked Wild Bob West is a Stevie Wonder song. I hate all of them. Um, they didn't even ask them to do the song until they're in post production, which may account for why it's so being half asked. And then in the video they even ripped. They steal the electric slide. They couldn't be arsed to come up with an original dance for this, but what do I know? Because it topped the charts in Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the UK, but not the US because it was not released as a commercial single. You want to best rap performance Grammy for this? Oh is? If that means anything? Yeah? But still um. I think this Theme was Will's first solo song without DJ Jazzy Jeff. Poor Jazzy Jeff is robbed of a Grammy. I don't know. I will always have a soft spot for Will Smith's rapping because of the line and freaking it I read in the rap page if they refer to me as soft Yeah, more like Microsoft Will Gates of the rap game in Malibu and he touched about I just in Malibu and he's He's like Cuban cigar. I don't like it. It's just for the look, like you're such a nerd and I would just forever remember the You know eminem is not aged well, But Will Smith don't have to curse in his rap sell records Well, I do so him, you too, just one of the great all time wrap This is the music video for the Men of Black. Theme was one of the highest budgeted in history at the time. I cost around a million dollars and much of this budget went towards executing Will's idea that he danced with an animated alien creature, uh Mikey from the film's opening scene. He wanted to have that character dance in the video alongside of him, and so they employed a really early form of motion capture technology to pull this off. The post production process took three weeks and ultimately gave him an alien dance partner, which looks medium convincing for the time, the same thing with Triple Platinum and has a very early prefame songs from Alicia Keys and Destiny's Child, which just fun I think it was one of the first Destiny's Child songs that came out with them when there were four of them. Yeah, you know, it's funny that the production piste off ray Band earlier because they were over thirty promotional tie ins marketing tie ins for this film, which is ray Ban. As we mentioned, Hamilton's watch watches, and my favorite one, Head and Shoulders, who did a tie in with the line keeping the men in black In Black For any of you who don't know, Head and Shoulders is the famous anti dandruff shampoo. Oh that's good. I didn't get it because they were off their black suits. Yeah, it's very that's actually like some ad guy made triple all of our salaries for that song. Felt told Insider this year that we had a family and friends screening near the end of editing where we didn't have the VFS in, which is fairly common, and it was a disaster. After the movie Who was released, people who were at the screening quote my agent, my lawyer, Ethan Cohen. After the movie was released and was a hit, they all said, we lied to you when we said it was going to be good. After the friends and family showing, we didn't think it would be I love hearing that after the fact, we thought that sucked. The film comes out breaks a bunch of financial records, but none that really stuck around. They're all subsequently broken pretty quickly. But it is interesting to me to note that this film was knocked out of its number one slot at the box office by your beloved large plane movie Air Force one. Um and Baker's work justifiably one the Academy Award for Best Makeup. Holy He's got seven Amy, All right, Well, I'm is what I know. Uh. The film supposedly gross five eighty nine million worldwide off a reported ninety million budget, but as recently as ed Solomon claimed that the film was somehow still in the red. A few other filmmakers chimed in about this on Twitter, leading to a fun thread about Hollywood bookkeeping. Um. Apparently one of the examples of which and what Solomon is talking about, is that they officially claim a film has never made a profit. They say it's always just in the red to keep anyone from having a cut of the gross rather than the net. So if you negotiate for a gross or a percentage point of the film's gross, the studio will forever claim that the movie has not actually turned a profit to keep you from making any money for it. But how can they claim that when we can google the fact that it made you know, over half a billion dollars? I don't know, man um famous one of this is David One of the many famous ones of this David Prouts, who was the actor inside the Darth Vaders suit for the original Star Wars trilogy. He said he never received residuals from Return of the Jedi. Um As lucasfilm claimed it never made a profit despite making five seventy two million dollars worldwide. Truly the greatest industry Wow. Well, in real honest math, Men in Black was the second highest grossing movie of after my beloved Titanic. Um. Titanic came out in December too. I should probably double check that because that well, although I could see it make in half a billion dollars in one month, so maybe that's accurate. Um. It's supposed to be the highest grossing action buddy comedy of all time in the United States, which is a pretty niche category, but trailed closely by Rush Hour too, And I just thought this was really funny. During the film's theatrical run, there was I guess a lab error that caused problems for the film prints. And these film prints were sent out to movie theaters and they weren't formatted correctly for wide screen, so if the projectionists didn't frame it correctly, the audience would be able to see things that it will not supposed to see, like boom mix and lens shades and other technical gear. Wasn't a huge, huge phenomenon, but it happened enough. Man. I love that despite all the millions of the millions and millions of dollars in the in Hollywood, this like that happens. Like do you remember when they put out The Mummy that's seen from the Mummy trailer without any of the music. Oh, this is Oh, you gotta google. This is so funny. They put out the I think it was an early trailer, early teaser for the Tom Cruise Mummy, which a film that so famously bad and flopped that it scuttled Universal's plans for an entire rebooted quote Dark Universe, where they were going to take all their old Universal Monsters properties and make them like an m c U style overlapping world and the Mummy. Yeah, I mean in theory and but but all the promotional materials are still up and out there, Like there's a tweet that says announcing the start of a new Dark Universe and has all of the actors in it together. Um and Mummy flopped so hard that they scuttled it and have never spoken of it since. Anyway, they release a teaser trailer from me that has Tom Cruise bouncing around the inside of an airplane in free fall, but there's no music in it, so it's just you just here, Tom, just air. It's so good. Uh. Men and Black is currently sitting in critical seventy nine percent audience rating Rotten Tomatoes. Getting back to what we said at the top of the episode, USA Today described Men in Black as quote Independence Day for smart people, which is pretty much your take. I didn't read that till the end. Oh man. I am appreciant or at the very least share of sensibility with USA Today. Uh. We're not going to talk about the sequels at all, as we mentioned earlier, except for one last bit um. At the end of the first film, agent j reveals to agent l Linda Fiorentino that Dennis Rodden is an alien easy joke to make. This reference was changed to Michael Jackson for the European dubbings of the film because Dennis Robin was not widely known in Europe, so that joke would have gone over their heads. But oddly, Michael Jackson does make a cameo appearance and Men in Black two, and Seville said that he actually approached them because he loved the first movie and they wanted to make him an alien, but he said, no, I want to wear the Men in Black suit. I can't believe this is like I think episode we've taped, and I don't think i've heard your your Michael Jackson voice. It's all stolen from it's all stolen from those Well, that and the one VH one thing where Paul McCartney starts talking about I'm gonna get your songs, your songs, Paul. It's so cruel and it's just the basis for my entire and Paulcarney, who has never been publicly cruel and as a sore point for him, um run us down. Jordan's The cameos that are in this film, Yes, a bunch of celebrities make cameos as alien ends on a TV monitor. There's Danny de Vito, Al Roker, Sylvester Stallone, Dion Warwick, Anthony Robbins, Newt gang Rich and Scans, Barry Son Fel, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg. And I think that they were actually like, I don't think it was like footage from them. On IMDb it says that they have an uncredited role, so I assume they, like, you know, showed up and did something for this. Well, I think some of them are in the background, but I think they might be in some of the monitor, Like, yeah, but yeah, I don't think that was like previously filmed footage. I think it was specifically for this, at least that's what IMDb says. Uh. There are also tentative plans to do I know you said we were going to talk about any sequels, but this was just so weird to me. There were also tentative plans to do a twenty one Jump Street Men in Black crossover movie with Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum. It was actually announced at the Comic Con in Las Vegas, but it seems like that idea is still in development hell where it is likely to stay. The Hemsworth one flopped pretty bad, right, Yeah, yeah, but the film then in Black has an even bigger cinematic influence. After the massive success of Men in Black, Marvel, who owned the Men in Black comic, began to shop their stories to other studios more actively, and this led to the X Men films from Fox and the Spider Man films from Sony. So in a way, Men in Black pave the way for the Marvel cinematic universe. It's this in Blade, yeah, which is incredible. I love it so much that, um, you know these two niche comic book properties that both happened to star like you know, Black Men, which was now such a rarity in these all these whitewashed comic films launched the m c U. Man, it's uh, that's so cool for me. Got a love blade. I don't know what else I have to say about Men and Black Man. Such a perfect little gem of a niche film. UM can't hold the sins of the sequels really against it. Um. I urge everyone to go and watch it, perfect little summer film. Just sit down and uh taking the wonders of the Reverse and Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith's farts for you. I shall after you sat through American Pie and Margarita Ville back to back. I will do this well. Folks. Thank you for listening. We will see you next time. On Too Much Information, I'm Alex Hegel. I'm Jordan runt Talk. Thanks so much for listening. Too Much Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan runt Talk. The supervising producer is Mike John's. The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan Runt Talk and Alex Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts and I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.