Twister: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known facts behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows, and more. We are your maestros of meteorology movies. You're wizards of wind related wise words, your hosts who prove it's possible to both suck and blow at the same time.

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Speaker 2: My name is Jordan Runtagg. That last one was a Simpsons reference.

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Speaker 1: But is it?

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Speaker 2: I think it is. I think it is. But my question is how did you not get anything in there about hot air? Oh you really left that one on the table? Oh wait, you sense your sense is of spiraling scentileae gonna be a great one in the edit, folks. And I'm Alex Heigel.

00:00:52
Speaker 1: Now, folks, something very special happened recently. We had a little bit of TMI kismet. Last episode we taped Van Hayle nineteen eighty four, and Heigel mentioned wanting to do the nineteen ninety six disaster drama Twister because Van Halen had done a song for the soundtrack, and I mentioned wanting to tackle a topic that involved a Dutch person because the van Halen's are Dutch and they have a.

00:01:16
Speaker 2: Lot to answer for.

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Speaker 1: So I put this idea out of my mind until I saw a trailer for the upcoming Twister sequel, Twisters, during the Super Bowl, and I thought, this is a sign we gotta do Twister. And then I realized that Twister was directed by a Dutchman named Jan de BoNT. So all in all, we have no choice. This was the universe telling us it was time to do Twisters, So here we are.

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Speaker 2: I loved this movie as a kid.

00:01:42
Speaker 1: It's just one of those perfect, well made nineties action movies. Lots of practical effects, great performances. It's like a sturdy truck. It's like a sturdy truck in the movie that gets picked up and thrown around by the wind. That's how I see this movie. Haiga, What do you think of Twister?

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Speaker 2: It's good. I mean, you're right about that. Yon Dubont is a very wonderfully I don't want to say workman like, but he builds things that stand well you know speed, I mean speed, speed dude. He was He's really just speed. No, because he was a he was a cinematographer on a lot of stuff. He worked on die Hard, So anybody in October, Yeah, anybody, Joe, Yeah, yeah, anybody who anybody who had a handed die Hard is you know, it's okay by friend of yours. Yeah, any yon, any yan who worked on die Hard is a yawn of mine. You know, I actually like meteorological phenomenon are not like a pet project of mine. So I think I saw this, and you know, I saw the cow and I went, yeah, Okay, it's a good one. I mean, it broke up Van Halen and it got Fleetwood Mac back together, so again, can't be all bad.

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Speaker 1: How are you feeling about the sequel? You're excited? Do you think you'll see it?

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Speaker 2: I think it's priceless. Hollywood is so bankrupt that they finally just literally did the Jim Cameron writing an s over Alien but making him the ship the dollar sign, like how I mean they already did it with Predator, they did Predators, but my god, like just stunningly. Uh yeah, this is where we are happy twenty for twenty four, Baby, follow an empire. Let's do this.

00:03:22
Speaker 1: Both former cast members wanted to do this and take an active interest in it. Both Bill Paxson and Helen Hunt wanted to write and direct a sequel, and neither of them could make it happen for themselves. So that's what I find so infuriating. And then they went with option three somebody and I. We'll talk about who it is later.

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Speaker 2: I don't know.

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Speaker 1: I'm not very excited about it. I like the original so much. I'm worried that the sequel is going to be a disappointment. So this is a rare pessimistic take from me. Dude, did you ever see Frailty, the Bill Paxson movie that he directed. Yeah, No, it's pretty good.

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Speaker 2: Actually, Like it's not like, you know, it's not The Exorcist, but it's like for Bill, and he's great in it, so I'm like, shim' too. Yeah, he's like a end to that man's town. I love Bill. We're gonna talk about this more. I love Bill PAxx. Yeah, man, I mean we didn't deserve him, No we didn't. And uh yeah, I really truly think that like he could have. We should have given him Twisters too. Who like watching that?

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Speaker 1: You know?

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Speaker 2: Well, also to talk about let's dive in.

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Speaker 1: From the nightmarish, injury filled set to the time Bill Packson won over an entire town, the insane Dutch director who had physical altercations with his crew, and the bizarre animal noise is recorded to make that horrific wind sound. And I'm not talking about Sammy Hagar heo. And of course, lest we forget the secret history of Philip Seymour Hoffman's balls, here's everything you didn't know about the film Twister. Hilariously, this movie was green lit without a script, which I mean, I guess kind of makes sense because I just I remember snapshots of it people being chased by a storm and that's kind of it.

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Speaker 2: So that makes all the sense in the world. Respect to the woman whose name is about to come up, because she's been in the target of a lot of misogynous stuff for her involvement in Star Wars. But Ohtain King Kennedy.

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Speaker 1: Yes, she works with the legendary special effects company Industrial Light and Magic. Who I mean that was George Lucas's company. Did he found that or did he just work with them? I think so, yeah, it wasn't. He didn't he found it to explicitly to make Star Wars the stuff stars, That's what I thought. Yeah, So the folks at Industrial Light and Magic put together a proof of concept visual effects clip to show the folks at Warner Brothers featuring early computer generated imagery of a pickup truck driving towards a tornado, which was at that very moment spinning around a tractor with one of the tractors tires snapping off and smashing through the truck's windshield, which I think was later used for a scene in the film Twister. As industriallyton Magic producer Kathleen Kennedy told Wired in a twenty fifteen roundtable discussion, the minute we took that shot.

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Speaker 2: Into the studio and they saw it, they said.

00:06:08
Speaker 1: Done, we want to make it. We didn't even have a script yet.

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Speaker 2: Which for a guy who studied four years of screenwriting at NYU is like a dagger to my heart. I mean, ILM just quick shout out to them. They are like, literally it is a perfect name. First of all, what a great name, good good, Yeah, one of the I mean George lucas Man when he was when he had when he was on he was on Yeah, God bless him. You know. The just the number of firsts that they notched, and like obviously up until like the nineties, there's a lot of you know, there is a lot of stuff that's just like first use of emotion controlled camera, which is in a New Hope actually, and oh, you know, first fully computer generated character in Young Sherlock Holmes in nineteen eighty five, they did the first morphine sequence in Willow. A lot of it is compositing, a lot of it is stuff like that's less less interesting, but like the way that they've actually been there at every step of how we render animals and humans on screen, and you could literally see them do it in like ten years of real time. Like the first thing that they did was the thing in James Cameron's The Abyss, like the the pseudopod creature that later became the T one thousand and then you know, Death becomes Her Actually is also a huge milestone in that because that was the first one where they attempted just the texture of human skin rather than just have it be like a sort of matte a matt thing. And then they kept racking up different ways of using their technology. Jumanji was the first computer generated CGI hare and fur for the digital lions and monkeys. Dragon Heart was like the first fully computer generated main character that was before Star Wars that was ninety six. The Mummy was the first time that they had done a computer character that had a full anatomy by layers so you could see him rot. And I remember when I was we did The Mummy, I was watching some of the the scenes stuff and they were like, this was not a fudge. Like we didn't we didn't half ask this where we would just like we figured out how, you know, guts would look through someone's skin falling off. We like built a human layer by layer and then made them rot, which is sociopathic, but you know, incredible, all this, you know, all this mocap stuff. So yeah, big shout out to ilm baby. I don't know how new effects you are.

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Speaker 1: That's a whole film research that I never really see myself.

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Speaker 2: Movie. I just love movie magic, you know.

00:08:34
Speaker 1: Well, now we're going to get into the words, which is more my my my realm, my area of expertise. The idea for what would become Twister made its way to Steven Spielberg, of course, who hired Michael Crichton, the man who had written the novel behind Spielberg's recent blockbuster Jurassic Park.

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Speaker 2: Did he write the script for Jurassic Park? Two or just the novel. I know he wrote the novel and Lost World, but I think he might have been adapted because the guy who did Jurassic Park is just back for something else. David kemp ah Okay helped with Crichton, but Michael Crichton man.

00:09:06
Speaker 1: He also wrote the book that Westworld's based on. He also created the show Er.

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Speaker 2: Which I don't think I realized. Hm, that's insane.

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Speaker 1: But Michael Crichton came as a package deal with his wife.

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Speaker 2: When it came to writing the Twister screenplay.

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Speaker 1: Her name is Anne Marie Martin, and together they were paid a reported two point five million dollars and that's nineteen ninety six money, so that's closer to four million dollars today, which made Twister the most expensive screenplay ever written at the time. And Crichton said that the two basises for the script were a PBS documentary about Stormchasers, which we'll talk about in a moment, and also the plot of the romantic comedy His Girl Friday, where our newspaper editor and his ex who is engaged to another man, do one last job together, and that has been a wife duo. They were the only credited screenwriters on Twister, but the script was heavily reworked by a number of Hollywood script doctors, including Joss Whedon, friend of the Pod Joss Whedon.

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Speaker 2: No, he's not, take that back. I know, I know he's not.

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Speaker 1: He was paid a one hundred thousand dollars to work on the script for a few weeks until he came down with bronchitis and had to take a break, or so he said. So they brought in Steven Zallion, who'd written the Oscar winning Shindler's List and also a clear and present danger, who was also paid one hundred thousand dollars to tinker with it, and hilariously exactly none of his contributions made it into the finished film. He would later say, for three weeks, I wrote scenes and fax them to Oklahoma. Well, the film was being shot unbeknownst to me until much later. Every page I sent was completely ignored because the director was perfectly happy with the script he already had. The production company was not. Anyway, The point is, there isn't a word I wrote for Twister that actually made it into that film. Cash that check, buddy, nicely done. Joss Whedon would return, but then he left the production to leave for his honeymoon. He'd say, I turned to my last pay on June twenty fourth, nineteen ninety five. That's the data got married. I had to say, I hope you like this because I'm leaving the country now for my honeymoon. And he would take a tepid view of Twister in later years, saying there are things that worked and things that weren't the way I intended them.

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Speaker 2: Wo wo. Let me ask you a question, what's that? Because we also talked about wasn't Armageddon that had like nineteen credited twelve credited writers on it something like that. I think so. Yeah, that was like the most that we had had on a movie that we've done. As you mentioned, you wasted a portion of your life studying art. What generally is the separating line for something to go to for it to be taken into like WGA arbitration versus like a punch up versus just like a paycheck job. Is it come down to the individual being like I'm comfortable with just taking the check and walking away, or is it them being like, no, I have a stake in this, I'd like to escalate it. And that's when the WGA gets involved. You know, I think it's the former. I don't really remember. I think that we were I mean, in my program, I think we're mostly focused on just you know, I mean, you know, it's like just the art. Yeah, well yeah that turned out for you, buddy.

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Speaker 1: And nobody teaches you how to pay taxes or anything like that. It's like, yeah, we were focused on storytelling and not like, yeah, how to get an agent, or how to sell things or how to not get ripped off. So yeah, we didn't really spend a lot of time discussing those finer points of the business. So I bet I'm pretty sure it's more of a case by case like I feel good about this, this is what I think should happen. Okay, interesting, can I claim things? Do you want to claim that you co wrote someone Twister?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, go for it. Knock my stulf.

00:12:42
Speaker 1: Out putting that in a Twitter buyer co co render Twister.

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Speaker 2: I'm just start telling people I do uncredited punch ups on things. That's actually kind of a funny bit. Anytime somebody mentioned something, you're like, oh, yeah, I did an uncredited punch up on that, Like anytime one of these like people were like oh.

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Speaker 1: What's your favorite movie of all time? In one of these, you know, a fi jerk offs, just like probably City Lights. You're like, oh, I did an uncredited punch up on that. That's like the cinematic equivalent of getting one of those like Universal Life Church doctorates. Yeah right, and then goung around and saying that you're a doctor. He gus, what doctor Hunter s Thompson did.

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Speaker 2: I know definitely several people who have done that. You can also become a necromancer, which is much cooler. That's someone who raises corpses from the dead. Oh, I thought it was people who have sex with corpses. I was like, yeah, you could do that, and you should. Golf swing great for commercial how we're trying to get who were trying to get paid for this People magazine? We have some notes, guys, chemistry is great. Love the topics. She jokes about necro necrophilia, but also fewer jokes about necromancy. And I walk because I got my principles, nothing else, he said, shaking a prescription drug bottle. There's one adamant left in it, nothing else. Petty, I got my prince. What are you talking about? Oh? This is actually this is my favorite part.

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Speaker 1: They got a script doctor who was I think chiefly responsible for punching up what they termed the car dialogue.

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Speaker 2: This guy Jeff Nathanson. He would later explain, I had to write dialogue for the cars like look out and Bill comes and get out of the way, which is a class I missed in the NYU screenwriting department. Oh what a magnificent industry.

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Speaker 1: I'm sure he got six figures for that too. However, after Twister was released, screenwriter Stephen Kessler declared that he'd written a screenplay called Catch the Winds years earlier, and Twister had stolen his work without permission or payment. Kessel took Steven Spielberg, Michael Crichton, and the studios Waterer Brothers Ain't Universal to court over the matter, demanding profits from Twister. The makers of Twister denied Cressler's charges, and he ultimately lost the case. But he wasn't the only screenwriter to claim that Twister plagiarized his work. Another writer, Daniel Perkins, sued over claims that his script Tornado Chasers Little on the Nose had been ripped off get his matter was.

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Speaker 2: The matter was.

00:15:11
Speaker 1: Settled out of court, with both parties agreeing to keep the details of the settlement confidential.

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Speaker 2: Why do they do that? Here's not a business question for you, okay. Is it like an industry settlement where they like the classic fight club thing, where they do like calculate the cost of a recall versus the cost of a claim like civil action or lawsuits, so they like, you know, let's just go without craft services for like a week and throw this guy fifty grand to get away from us. Is that literally, like, is there an accountant whose job it is to just crunch that has to be right? Oh? Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, I think that.

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Speaker 1: And I think a lot of the like we don't speak about this is probably just like look, I hate you, but just go away. Yeah, And like, I think it's literally the legal equivalent of let's never speak of this again.

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Speaker 2: Oh yeah, oh dude, NDA's or nuts. I mean, I'm probably violating one right now several. But let's talk for a moment about the real non disclosure agreements, Segway. Let's talk about the real life Stormchasers that this movie is based on. We mentioned that the script take some of its inspiration from a PBS documentary Your Tax dollars at work, and I'm not saying that sarcastically. No. Yeah, and the writers consulted with actual scientists to make sure this film was as accurate as possible. In the movie, Intripid heroes have a machine they called Dorothy, which is designed to get sucked up into a cyclone wind tunnel to release a number of sensors which help measure what's occurring within the storm, which would aid in advanced detection techniques and save more lives. Dorothy is based on a real machine called TOTO I see what they did there, or Totable Tornado Observatory. It looks again surprisingly similar to the mechanism that you see in the movie, with a unique barrel shape. Toto required two researchers to use it, placed in the back of a truck bed and a special apparatus just like what we see in the film. There was a ton of potential risk with these researchers lugging around Toto. It was decide that it was a metal barrel and they were dragging it into windstorms. It could have been struck by lightning and uh. They could have also just been picked up and thrown around like that poor cow. Because of how close they had to get to the tornado to actually launch it. The closest the researchers ever got to really using it as it was intended was in April of nineteen eighty four. Oh man, they heard they heard jump, and they heard you know what, might as well jump? That was it? That's cannon now?

00:17:29
Speaker 3: Uh.

00:17:29
Speaker 2: You know the way that the internet works. I truly hope some like poor fingers to the bone in turn who works for like I don't know, the AI division of BuzzFeed dot com is doing like thirty things you didn't know about twisters and that that fact gets picked up like ten years from now in the in the post apocalyptic nucleus land, we're all getting content feeds into our neuralink and it's just like according to the podcast TMI, the people who invented the technology depicted and Twister were inspired by Van Hanlan's for a single jump, I will be a happy, happy, irradiated corpse. Where was that? Yes, Steve Smith and Lou Wicker of NSSL Jordan. What's that? National Storm? Severe severe storms.

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Speaker 1: Laboratory Steve Smith, Steve Smith and Low Wicker of the Okay, I just like thought I had Steve Smith and Low Wicker of the National Severe Storms Laboratory attempted to deploy TOTO in Ardmore, Oklahoma, but the machine didn't have the right center of gravity to withstand the extreme winds. Sounds like this, does any of us? That was my first one, And then I was gonna say, like, sounds like a cracker barrel.

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Speaker 2: I went to an Oklahoma r my one with my right folks like, hey, neither of us are working at our best. Here the TOTAL homepage shows pictures of the device lying comfortably on its side after the last failed attempt. Total's retirement occurred because of how large and potentially dangerous it was he used so close to a deadly tornado. It was apparently never successfully deployed, and was retired in nineteen eighty seven, nearly a full decade before the release of the film, which sort of bore its name.

00:19:11
Speaker 1: Per Wikipedia, theay we all be retired without ever accomplishing any film or accomplishing anything useful.

00:19:19
Speaker 2: Initially, Steven Spielberg had planned to direct this movie himself. Instead, he busied himself on pre production for another Michael Crichton joint Jurassic Park two, The Lost World. But even so Spielberg remained on as executive producer. Among the other directors considered for Twister were his good pal Robert Simchis of Back to the Future Forrest Gump, who framed Roger Rabbit death becomes her contact cast away. Wow, that's amaze. But he had a great.

00:19:49
Speaker 1: A sin against God, Press press that god awful CGI.

00:19:55
Speaker 2: There was John Badham or is that's probably his British name here we call him John Badham Adam United. Next up for Badam United? Uh, John Badam, director of your beloved Robots Struck by Lightning and gaining sentience movie short circuit, great movie. Here's our boy Jimmy Cameron, who instead opted for a pretty good investment called Titanic. Could call him that one, Jim, You're my boy. I mean sorry, so is the guy who ultimately wound up directing Twister. But we'll talk about that. Yeah. There were some reports that Tim Burton was in talks to do this, which I absolutely cannot see. Dude. The Danny Elfman score for Twister would have been so obnoxious. What would it sound like?

00:20:47
Speaker 3: Boom boom boom, boom, bom boom boom boom new bombs.

00:21:01
Speaker 2: But Ultimately, the man who won out was our boy Yondbant, the recent director of Speed, Jan Dubont, whose name said he said the entire time much like a track call quest and who's the director? Wolf King Peterson of of uh never antarge boat, never ending story and a large playing one large plane for us one. Yeah, God, we've got a size thing here? What kind of size queens here? At TM I lose another sponsor, just going down the list. Jan Debant had been working as a cinematographer for twenty five years before he directed his first feature. As we mentioned earlier, he was the DP director photography on blockbusters like Die Friggin Hard, The Hunt for Red, October Kujo before Speed put him on the map, top of the shortlist for Hollywood action directors The Bus that Couldn't Slow Down. He got the job on Twister after he left Hollywood's first attempt to make an American version of the iconic Japanese monster, the Only One Godzilla, My boy man. PSA to anyone who listened to this who has any interest in Godzilla stuff. If you haven't seen Godzilla, mine is one, go out and fix that, you dummy. It's an incredible movie and Man. Did Yon avoid a bullet because that American Godzilla. I watched that in movie theater with my dad. I think it was like back to back, like we'd like a year after each other. We did that, and like Batman and Robin and those really crystallized my bit my they robbed me of my boyhood notion that movies could be not good.

00:22:33
Speaker 1: When Star Wars too, was the Star Wars around the same time the new Star Wars.

00:22:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I was twelve, so I was like fine with Phantom Menace, like Godzilla and like Batman and Robin as like a ten year old. I was like, is this legal, Like you can make a movie that's that's bad? Popa, was this a bad movie? Yes, We've done this bit before and yes, and he was like yes. That was to his credit, he was like, don't ever do this to me again, because when we saw Godzilla, but Yon signed on, he helped develop a script that would have cost two hundred million dollars in nineteen ninety two money he signed on to do Godzilla, that was what that would have cost. Oh yeah, So the initial script for Godzilla was projected when Yon signed on at two hundred million dollars or four hundred and forty million dollars today, or roughly what they paid for that last Indiana Jones movie. The studio TriStar decided that this was not going to happen, and when they failed to agree to Yon's budget, he walked and said, if I can't do Big Lizard, I'll do Big Storm. I'll do Big Wind. No Large Wizard for Yon, Large Wind instead. Godzilla would eventually ask me, all know it got made by Independence Day director Roland Emeric in nineteen ninety eight, and we will never speak of it again. One of the funniest bits about that movie is that the next time Toho did a Godzilla movie, they made a point of having the American Godzilla get killed in like a laughing like like a version of that character, like just like it's like swatted off screen and like die embarrassingly. It's just like, no, we're gonna spend the extra couple million, yeh, just to just to make our statement here.

00:24:07
Speaker 1: Uh.

00:24:07
Speaker 2: Spielberg pitched the idea to dubond as a grim fairy tale where the monster comes out of dark clouds.

00:24:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, Spielberg, That's that's why, that's why he's Spielberg that's why he's the goat.

00:24:19
Speaker 2: Help tall is.

00:24:20
Speaker 1: Yandbon prices right Roules, I must say five foot seven. He shoved the camera assistant like into a mud puddle, so I'm assuming that he's he's gotta be.

00:24:30
Speaker 2: I've seen five to ten. But you know he's Dutch, so we'll take off a couple of inches. But blut clutched his tiny little fists. I'm sorry. Just go ahead, have anything, and now let's move on to casting.

00:24:46
Speaker 1: Among those up for consideration of the role of the female lead in Twister, no Doctor Twister. No one remembers the names of the characters in this movie. It's just it's Twisterrette, It's hell On Hunts and Christina.

00:25:00
Speaker 2: No, no is that close. It's doctor Agent. Joe Harding is doctor Agent Twister, Doctor Clarice Twister, Doctor Agent Clarice, Twister, Twister Starling. Eh.

00:25:14
Speaker 1: Clearly, clearly movies have been greenlit on lest someone get me into Get me into McGee's.

00:25:21
Speaker 2: I don't know. I'm so far out of the loop. Who even makes this garbage? Get me into Kevin Figey's boardroom, and I'm just gonna write on his dry risk board. Twister meets silence of the Lambs. It's gonna be like, good little Hunting. You're just gonna like leave an incredible pitch on somebody's blackboard and they're gonna try to like track down who it was, Get me that drunk janitor.

00:25:45
Speaker 1: What else you got. It's like the Other Sister meets Air Force Wan, there's a whole idea of like what if we just did like prestige things meets like night He's like absolute, it is idiocy, Like the Other Sisters really good, I mean fine is like, uh, you know that one of the few truly excellent jokes Kevin Smith has made is good will hunting to Hunting Season. Yeah, yeah, that's good stuff. As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information after these messages. So, the lead character in Twister, for anyone who doesn't know this is probably most people, doctor Joe Harding. They were considering casting Laura Dern, who'd been in Spielberg's Jurassic Park, which would have been great, but I guess coming so soon after Jurassic Park. Yeah, they considered Bridget Fonda and Kate Mulgrew.

00:26:53
Speaker 2: I don't know Kate Mulgrew Oh my god, it's Captain Janeway from uh cutric Voyager. Kate mulgrew would have been right, man, Jane Way. Yeah yeah, that would have been cool.

00:27:03
Speaker 1: Oh yeah yeah, but Helen Hunt is also cool. She was Yon Deband's first choice for the role, apparently because he wanted a serious actor rather than a movie star. He was drawn to the fact that Helen Hunt had done a great deal of stage work, including a role in a nineteen ninety production of The Taming of the Shrew done in Central Park alongside Tracy Ullman and Morgan Freeman. I had no idea about No one thought it was a good idea to have a TV actress with some Shakespeare background to anchor an action flick.

00:27:35
Speaker 2: But yeah, because her TV thing was mad about you, I feel like you just omitted that in any of Was that just to be assumed? Yeah? Ok, sorry, my mistake, my mistake, Helen Hunt would later tell Entertainment Weekly. Everyone was telling him you can't put an eighty million dollar movie in the line because Helen has to go back to her TV show in August Yalan was like, I'm doing it.

00:27:55
Speaker 1: Dubont actually liked the fact that she wasn't well known for her film work.

00:27:58
Speaker 2: He would later tell The Morning Hall big stars get in the way of the movie.

00:28:03
Speaker 1: Also, he felt that Helen Hunt had a certain stormy quality. I wanted Helen because she reminds me of a whirlwind. Yon dubonn added she can boss people around. She has a strong persona, which I like. Hilariously, Helen Hunt wasn't interested in the part at first, saying I just didn't know what I could really contribute acting wise, but she changed her mind when Debaunt and Spielberg took her to lunch at the Ambulance Entertainment Offices to do Twister. Helen Hunt ultimately passed up working with John Travolta in John Wu's Broken Arrow, which I assume was quite the sacrifice.

00:28:42
Speaker 2: Was that a good movie?

00:28:43
Speaker 1: No?

00:28:44
Speaker 2: But John Who's cool? Okay okay man.

00:28:49
Speaker 1: Hilariously, Hunt would claimed that one of the people doing rewrites on the Twister script was also a story editor on That About You, and together they both worked on rat tat Ram Commie dialogue between her and Bill Paxton's character and her trailer, which is why I would say that the relationship in this movie is a cut above nineties disaster movie for sure.

00:29:09
Speaker 2: They have a good good chemistry, good dialogue. It works.

00:29:12
Speaker 1: And speaking of Mad About You, production on the fourth season of the show was delayed two and a half weeks when the Twister shoot ran long, and I realized that Paul Riser like created that show and I assume like own a stake in it. So he was the one getting a call being like, helln's gonna be late. Sorry, but he was gracious about it. What's his appeal?

00:29:31
Speaker 2: Couldn't tell you.

00:29:32
Speaker 1: He's like Billy Crystal with like the less likability. I was gonna say, just like somehow more palatable towards women. But hmmm maybe threatening, Yeah yeah, no, edge less smugging.

00:29:49
Speaker 2: H well, yeah, you know that's a check in my column.

00:29:55
Speaker 1: And now to the undistinguished man in Twister, doctor William Bill, the extreme hearting who's Joe's estranged husband who is seeking her signature on the divorce papers. The original choice for the role was who else? Tom Hanks, who has a near perfect record when it comes to nineties movies, fantasy casting, every movie we've talked about on here, When Harry met SAALLYO that's eighties hook, I believe I just so many movies he's his first call for like twenty five years.

00:30:24
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.

00:30:25
Speaker 1: Also considered were your beloved Kurt Russell. Hell yeah, how do you feel about that?

00:30:29
Speaker 2: It would have been amazing? Are you kidding me? Just like dude, he's good in anything if you just put him up against an unbeatable, unidentifiable odd and have him just set that jaw withd had done five hundred mili foreign and domestic great highest grossing film of all time. How do you feel about Michael Keaton, who was also considered. I love Keaton.

00:30:51
Speaker 1: Keaton's good at Batman because he's squirrely and weird and they don't actually make him fight at all.

00:30:55
Speaker 2: But like a, here's nothing about that man's screams action to me?

00:31:01
Speaker 1: I mean, nope, Well I guess what Bill Paxon, Now you're right, I guess Bill Paxton.

00:31:08
Speaker 2: Come on, man to that day. At this point, he had been killed by an alien, a predator, and a terminator. That's a great trivia question. Yeah, that's like a pub trivia like typeated question. Right, Yeah, that's really good. That's really good. Well, he actually speaking of which got the gig? Bill Paxon? That is got the gig on the recommendation of James.

00:31:25
Speaker 1: Cameron, who, as you mentioned, worked with him on Aliens and True Lies. And this is where I'm legally obligated to remind listeners that Bill Paxon both waived at JFK's Motor Kae the day he was assassinated in Texas and dove on Titanic with James Cameron. And this pretty much makes him my hero. This makes you my new best friend.

00:31:47
Speaker 2: If you want to one up anyone who thinks they got you with that Paxton question, if you're like, hey, do you know the only actor who's been killed by you know, an alien, predator and a Terminator, and they're like, du Bill Paxson, do you want how to flex them? And be like, do you know the makeup artist that links all of those? Oh, Stan Winston, Baby, Predator and Terminatory? Do something else we did? I mean almost everything was on book. Yeah he was.

00:32:15
Speaker 1: Paxton had just started alongside Tom Hanks and Apollo thirteen, and the clothes that he wears in Twister are supposedly the same ones that Hanks selected for his wardrobe when I guess he was doing tests for Twister. I'm quite sure how that works, I guess Hanks went further along in the uh in the process than a boy be imagined.

00:32:36
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:32:37
Speaker 1: Paxson would later recall his brief from director Jan Debond. He kept asking, how close can I put you to one of these tornadoes? That's all he wanted to talk about. I'm thinking, oh boy, we'll all be killed. He was not wrong.

00:32:53
Speaker 2: We'll get more about the incredible danger the actors were in when making this movie. In a little bit but still casting. The production initially wanted Mira Servino, who.

00:33:04
Speaker 1: Was fresh off her Oscar wind to play the part of Bill's fiance, the high strung therapist Melissa Reeves. Or maybe she's normally strung and being put in an insane situation being dumped in the middle of a tornado zone, so.

00:33:18
Speaker 2: I scratch that.

00:33:20
Speaker 1: But unfortunately, Jan Dubant wanted Mira Servino to dye her hair brown, presumably to telegraph the differences between her and Helen Hunt's character, who was blonde, but Servina refused, and so she was out in favor of the brunette actress Jamie Gertz. I don't know much about her. Helen Hult would later say that the original version of the script, she was given had much more sniping between her character and this girlfriend character, which, as we all know, is an old, tired trope. Helen Hunt told Vulture for the twenty twenty piece Helen Hunt Answers every question we have about Twister. There was a draft that I saw where the women were sort of catty with each other. I didn't at that point know that I had a feminist agenda, which I do. I just knew that it wouldn't be fun to watch and I didn't want to play it.

00:34:07
Speaker 2: The technical term would be yucky.

00:34:09
Speaker 1: I just raised my hand and said there's a better way, and nobody said, no, you have to do it that way. Good for her, that's funny. I didn't know at that point that I had a feminist agenda.

00:34:21
Speaker 2: Here quotes are great.

00:34:22
Speaker 1: Her quotes could like almost be read in like a Gratcho Marx, like, yeah, no, she's really funny. So they narrowly avoided one old screenplay trope, but they did not avoid the stereotype of having a rich British jerk as the villain. We were talking about doctor Jonas Miller, the storm chasing rival of Joe and Bill, and if I recall, they had all worked together at some point, and then he went and got corporate sponsors or some kind of dirty money that he used to build a knockoff version of Bill Paxton's Dorothy Idea.

00:34:55
Speaker 2: I think that was how that went.

00:34:56
Speaker 1: Anyway, The part was offered to a pre House Hugh Laurie, which I that would.

00:35:02
Speaker 2: Have been cool. I would have liked that. Yeah, especially if you got to play piano at one point in the Twisters.

00:35:07
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's been funny. He's a great piano player. Man, he's an incredible piano player. I know him play piano and everything.

00:35:14
Speaker 2: It's you or I love Hugh Laurie, But no, you're actually he's English. You know that right. I'm I'm worried that. I'm shocked. I love you.

00:35:20
Speaker 1: A couple of bits of Frian Laurie when I was at home my parents. Oh it's a real good bit of Frian Laurie's incredible. The Jeeves and Wooster might be too English for you, but I loved Uh.

00:35:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, this wasn't an invite.

00:35:35
Speaker 1: Incredible episode of House where Dave Matthews is the guest and uh and he plays her.

00:35:44
Speaker 2: Awful.

00:35:45
Speaker 1: Dave Matthews is like some kind of savant who can immediately play on the piano whatever he hears, and so he starts like playing all this complex stuff and yeah, it's a great episode. Anyway, Hugh Laurie did not get the part of a bad guy in Twister.

00:35:57
Speaker 2: Neither did Alec.

00:35:58
Speaker 1: Baldwin, who would have been an it's ridible, the very different choice. Ultimately, they went with Carrie. I still can never say his name. Carrie elw was the guy from The Princess Bride and Robin Hood Mennon tights.

00:36:09
Speaker 2: We just watch Liar Liar. Oh yeah, that's right.

00:36:11
Speaker 1: Wow, he was the bad guy and a lot of they just needed someone who is like a rogue.

00:36:15
Speaker 2: They just needed someone who is like just handsome enough, because he's like not he's like not Brad Pitt Hansom where you're like, my god, put it away, man. But like you look at him, I mean he's obviously beautiful as Wesley, but like in Liar Liar, he just like looks like a vaguely handsome dude who they just make him like the most annoying guy in the world. But yeah, he looks a lot like who's the schwashbuckling actor Eron that's why Aeron fly, that's why he was casting Princess Bride. Right. Oh, yeah, you're right.

00:36:43
Speaker 1: He's also like a British nepo baby too, is he? His parents are richer fantous one of the two.

00:36:48
Speaker 2: Are you just saying that because he's English?

00:36:50
Speaker 1: I mean, it's more more statistically likely than not. Over there, let's see, it's.

00:36:54
Speaker 2: On his Wikipedia page. I remember looking this up at one point. Oh yeah, portrait painter dominic ELA's father an interior designer and socialite Tessa Kennedy.

00:37:03
Speaker 1: Whenever they put your profession as socialite, yes, that's usually a pretty big red flag.

00:37:08
Speaker 2: Oh wow.

00:37:09
Speaker 1: One of his relatives is the British minor John Elws, who is the inspiration for Ebenezer Scrooge and a Christmas Carol.

00:37:17
Speaker 2: Wow, that's a great thing to have in your family tree. Yeah, I'm related to the biggest literary prick of all time. So that's the bad guy.

00:37:28
Speaker 1: And now we're gonna go to the goodest guy of this whole movie, Dusty. I didn't know his name, but you definitely know Philip seymour Hoff.

00:37:36
Speaker 2: Have a drink. Wow, the lovable.

00:37:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, the lovable slacker of the storm Chasers, apparently Garth Brooks was potentially offered. He was offered a role in Twister. Some sources have said it was Dusty.

00:37:54
Speaker 2: The part that I ultimately went to Phillip Seymore Hoffmann.

00:37:57
Speaker 1: I've also seen reports that the role that Garth Brooks was offered may have been the Bill Paxton character, which makes a lot of sense. I can kind of see that they both Bill Paxson's text and I don't know where Garth book's from, but could very well be Texas. I could see him playing the lead in Twister.

00:38:13
Speaker 2: Also, I've seen.

00:38:14
Speaker 1: Reports that Garth Brooks was offered the role of the villain in this movie. I'm not sure specifics on the roll are vague, but there's not years later in a well.

00:38:22
Speaker 2: No, it gets better. The fact that Garth.

00:38:25
Speaker 1: Brooks was offered a role in Twister at all came out years later in a lawsuit filed against Garth by his longtime business partner, and in the suit, his ex business partner claimed that Steven Spielberg had spent Garth Brooks the script for Twister, but quote Brooks passed on that film, saying the star of the film was the Tornado and Brooks wanted to be the star.

00:38:45
Speaker 2: God that's so funny.

00:38:47
Speaker 1: He also, allegedly, according to the suit, turned down a role in saving Private Ryan, supposedly for a similar reason the war is the star. At any event, the role of Dusty went to Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and then later asked about his reasons for taking the role, Phillip seymore Hoffman told Esquire, I was living in la at the time, and I knew that if I took that job, I'd be able to move back to New York. Don't know why that is, but so it was. This is probably more of a me thing, but my brain accidentally swaps him and the Harry Stoner dude from Titanic. I guess I'm getting my rough around the edges, Bill Paxon adjacent technician characters confused.

00:39:29
Speaker 2: Well with or without the presence of one Garth Brooks. Shooting began in nineteen ninety five. The original plan was to film Twister in the United Kingdom in California, two areas not usually known for the tornadoes or ones that resemble the American Midwest in really any way, shape or form, but director Yan debonn insisted on shooting on location in Oklahoma, boasting that this could be the last great action movie not shot on a sound stage. Yeah, not not far off. They filmed all over the state, but the main location that they chose was the small town of Kita, population three hundred and forty four. Serves as the hotewn It's Hotown, Hotown. It serves as the hometown of Lois Smith's character Meg, which gets leveled by an F four tornado. The town was chosen because there had been a hailstorm two years earlier that destroyed many of the homes. Many remained simply unfixed, and there was still debris laying everywhere. Producers purchased and then leveled eight blocks of existing houses, as well as flattening thirty homes that had been built for the shoot. Greatest industry in the world Baby. Apparently the destruction of the town was so convincing that an unrelated video crew flying overhead landed their helicopter down to investigate. That's like in coolhan Luke, when they created a prison camp so unappealing that it was the state took notice of it. I was like, guys, that's right.

00:40:50
Speaker 1: Uh.

00:40:52
Speaker 2: Given the size of Wikita, production became a town wide affair. Bill Paxton fostered goodwill, as he did everywhere, by busting out football soon after arrived and tossing it around with the locals. Many of the residents signed up to be extras, earning the princely sum of one hundred dollars a day. The town was tiny, but mighty and filled with civic pride. The resident's main concerns that the film would have featured a sex scene, which they thought would reflect poorly on their town. To sit the town from footlots, yeah, we don't have sex here in Wikita. The locals insisted on the town's name being used, and one citizen even requested that they include a shot of the water tower with the word Wakda painted on the side. Despite the wanton acts of emotional terrorism that the director inflicted on his actors, which will cover in a moment, relations were warm between the production and the citizens of Wakita. Locals interviewed by the Oklahoman noted that the crew did an excellent job of clearing up the rubble and even planted new trees in appreciation. The town later opened a Twister Movie museum staffed by volunteers. It's free to visit and features props including one of the Dorothy machines, bricks from the wrecked buildings, and a Twister branded pinball machine donated by Paxton himself. The actor reportedly donated numerous hand just the pinball machine. That's what did it for you? Huh? It to us? It's so good the action. The actor reportedly donated numerous objects over the years, including the football mentioned earlier, each with a handwritten note. But that's not even the most heartwarming aspect of the film's Oklahoma based production. They were shooting when the Oklahoma City bombing occurred, and when they received word, they suspended production so that the cast and crew could assist with recovery efforts.

00:42:34
Speaker 1: I'd just like to add that the Twister Museum also has a five block walking tour included of different sites where they shot around town.

00:42:41
Speaker 2: Have you been never in Wikida? Check it out? Have you been there? No? Just this is the best sponsor I could get, Wakita, when you're here, your family literally. Production moved to Iowa's the season's changed and these shoots were not easy due in large part to the weather. Recalling the experience of The New York Times nineteen ninety six, director Yan Debamt said that he and the three hundred and fifty person crew were up against the floods and the actual tornadoes that beset the state. It was like nothing I've encountered in my life, he said. We kept getting stuck in mud. The whole thing was like a moving circus around dirt roads. This coupled with what have been described as the battalion of wind machines artificially generating two hundred mile per hour gusts of winds, made life less than pleasant for the actors in the film. As Yandeman onomously added during an interview with The Morning Call, when they added rain to the mix, he said they didn't have to act anymore. Stunt doubles were rarely used, and though the actors used earplugs, they did not use eye protection. After every shot, someone would come around with the viazine. Hunt later explained general dryness, redness, and irritability. Clear eyes. That was their tagline, right, I think so We're not the only eye injuries that occurred on set. Both Hunt and Paxton were temporarily black, and when giant set lights burned their retinas, Paxton Tody w those lights were like sunballs. They had to pump light into the cab to get exposure down to make the sky look behind us look dark and stormy because it was too bright outside. And these things literally sunburned our eyeballs. I got back to my room, I couldn't see for two days. They needed to use eye drops and wear spoke glasses, and still there were more eye injuries. Hunt and Paxxton spent several hours shooting a scene in an irrigation ditch, which they soon dubbed the irritation Ditch got their asses. The wind in the rain blew mud and dirt and filth into their eyes, requiring them to get hepatitis shots just to be on the safe side. Bill Paxson had just wrapped filming on Apollo thirteen, which required that he be flown in the zero G, creating KC one three five weightless Trainer, also known as the Vomit Comet. But according to him, Twister was even more of a slog as he asked readers of the Morning Call, I mean, what would you rather do? Throw up or be hit in the head real hard but a piece of ice. Well, let's ask our listeners, hago would you rather do? How BIG's the ice.

00:45:05
Speaker 1: Hmm, I'm gonna say like softball, softball, Yeah.

00:45:11
Speaker 2: Probably throw up. I really hate throwing up. Yeah, it means you can get another meal. Jesus Christ. Hunt had an even worse time due to the repeated head injuries she suffered on the set. During the mud scene, she hit her head on the bridge while they were hiding under it and the seemer she opened the car door while driving through a cornfield. The door simply swung back on her and domed her in the head. She would describe the shoot to Entertainment Weekly as brutal. Director Jan Dubant was unsympathetic when asked about Hunt's frequent injuries, one of which reportedly led to a concussion. He had this to say of his leading lady, I love Helen to death, but you know she can also be a little bit clumsy. Hunt had some choice words for him when she heard this. The guy burned my retinas, but I'm clumsy, perhaps needless to say, they did not work together again. Her quotes is too It's good.

00:45:58
Speaker 1: It's like you read them like ratcha Mark's guy Bury Rat doesn't I'm clumsy like that.

00:46:02
Speaker 2: Guess what's the matter about you? Thing?

00:46:05
Speaker 1: Uh?

00:46:06
Speaker 2: Yen bon as really too earlier. It was kind of a not guy nice. He was in the great piece of in the set. A member of the crew, remember what's the was it? No, I can't say that because Jim when when Jim Cameron gets mad, Midge comes out and when gets mad Nadge, it's cutting it close. Members of the crew felt the director was quote out of control. Matters came to a head five weeks into the shoot when he struck a camera operator in anger for blocking a complicated shot involving wind machines and pushed him into the mud. His relationship with the director of photography, Don Burgis also deteriorated, with the director angrily calling them all incompetent. As a result, Burgus and the tire twenty person camera crew quit in protest, like in the Midnut, Like the casts were shocked, like they just walk off the set. Burgus would later claim that Dubaun didn't know what he wanted till he saw it. He would shoot one direction with all the equipment behind the view of the camera, and then he wanted to shoot the other direction right away, and we'd have to move everything, and he'd get angry that we took too long, and it was always everybody else's fault, never his Debont, for his part, denied calling the team incompetent and explained to Entertainment Weekly that he pushed the assistant in about to frustration with the wind machines. It was very loud, he said, so the crew had to watch my hand signals a cute action, and he walked right in the middle of the scene. We kept losing good performances because of stupid things like that. I don't think I'm a hothead, but I do believe you have to be passionate. These crews get paid well, and when they screw up, I'm going to call them on it. Cinematographer Jack and Green and his crew took over, but then Green was hospitalized with an injury from an onset accident when a hydraulic house set used in the scene in which Joe and Bill rescued Meg and her dog from her tornado destroyed home in Wakita. The house designed to collapse on cue was mistakenly activated with Jack Green inside of it. A rigged ceiling hit him in the head and injured his back, requiring him to be hospitalized. I feel like I've had a dream about my house eating me before, so that sucks for him. At that point, Devaunt, a former cinematographer, took over his own director of photography for the rest of the shoot, which I think was at least closer to the end of it than the beginning. The environment became so hostile that, according to sources, crew members considered printing T shirts emblazed with the director's favorite expletive fing hell shit. That's almost as good as on when Ridley Scott was making Blade Runner and he gave an interview saying complaining about American cruise and how they were upperty and British crews would simply say yes, Governor and get it done, where American crews wanted to argue with you. So the American crews all got T shirts that said yes Governor, like a whole cottage industry.

00:48:46
Speaker 1: Wasn't this something on Titanic too, of like disgruntled cruise passive aggressively making T shirts for sure?

00:48:52
Speaker 2: So good.

00:48:54
Speaker 1: And now for a different kind of violence. Philip Seymour Hoffman's balls. Yes, there was this scene where Phillip Seymour Hoffins's character claud and Shorts and other slacker attire laughs heartily. Unfortunately, when he does so, he lifts a leg and one of his testicles pops out of his shorts.

00:49:11
Speaker 2: This shot was included and early cuts the film until someone mercifully.

00:49:15
Speaker 1: Caught it, and as a result, the CGI team, who already had their hands full with you know, all the tornado stuff, was called into digitally erase psh's offending balls, thus avoiding on our rating to this otherwise PG thirteen movie release the ball cut. I wonder if I mean everybody's got their turning point right? Who do you think that was? That ended a career? Some guys like real jazz working ILM.

00:49:43
Speaker 2: And John Debond storms in like we got you, we need you to a digitally erase H Philip Seymour Hoffman's balls. I think the guy went home and rethought his life, went to work on an oil rig.

00:49:58
Speaker 1: Is a cigar chopping executive reading the line items for all the CGI work.

00:50:03
Speaker 2: What's this one? Five grand to erase Simo Hoffin's balls. I paid for those balls. Balls are gonna win him an oscar someday. We didn't get Garth Brooks, we keep Hoffman's balls.

00:50:21
Speaker 1: It's one of the best uses of the cigar shopping executive we've had in a while.

00:50:26
Speaker 2: That was not the only last minute change to the film.

00:50:29
Speaker 1: The prologue scene, in which Joe witnesses her father getting sucked up into a cyclone as he desperately tries to hold the door to their storm shelter, was added at the very last minute. It's a classic filmmaking technique to provide backstory and motivation for the main character, allow Jodie Foster losing her astronomy loving dad in contact. Initially, they shot a nightmare sequence which was going to be intercut throughout the film in order to give insight into the haunted state of mind of Helen Hunt's character, but they realized during editing that this didn't really work, so they hastily wrote an introductory scene and shot it during last minute reshoots. The young version of Helen Hunt's character in these scenes is played by Alexa Vega, who went on to appear in Spy Kids Millennial Childhood Favorite Spy Kids.

00:51:17
Speaker 2: Did you know that I love this?

00:51:19
Speaker 1: Alexa Vega married a guy named Pina Vega, so she's now Alexa Pina Vega.

00:51:26
Speaker 2: I thought that, but wouldn't it be Alexa Pina Vega Vega. I know, I think she that's what I thought. I thought maybe the guy's name was Pina, and so she just like had an irrational phobia of hyphens, so she just smashed the two names together. But no, that's like, that's like you if you changed your name to like Alex Sakhaigel or something, who's a Sack. I don't know, somebody if he married somebody that had the last name of Sack, and you were you Echi Sakamoto deceased Japanese minimalist composer Reuichi Sacramoto. It was this is not really an It was a bad comparison, But isn't that weird?

00:52:01
Speaker 1: Like somebody had a really specific last name and then they married somebody who Okay, it's.

00:52:07
Speaker 2: Like Julia Gulia and wedding singer, right, oh yeah, yeah, okay, okay, wonder if i'll leave that. I thought we'd get more mileage out of that. I'm gonna be honest. I thought that one would pop more.

00:52:27
Speaker 1: One of the most striking moments in Twister, aside from the Cow, which I assume we'll talk about at some point, is the scene at the drive in movie where Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is Playing and.

00:52:38
Speaker 2: The Ringers retrospective on effects used in Twister, which you should really read.

00:52:42
Speaker 1: You would love that piece Igel Industrial Light in Magic's Ben Snow said that he was desperate to work on this specific scene. He said, we wanted to project the image of the film onto the tornado itself.

00:52:54
Speaker 2: And it's so great. It's of course the here's Johnny scene and you've got Shelley Duvall freaking out.

00:53:00
Speaker 1: I get the knife being plunged in. It's so wonderful, and Yon de BoNT said, let's use the shining. It was a dream come true scene. You had to take the film footage, it converted into little texture maps and then project that, which was quite an accomplishment back in nineteen ninety six. Bizarrely, I love this. In nineteen ninety six, the year Twister came out, an Ontario drive in theater was destroyed by a tornado mere hours before a scheduled screening of Twister. This incident later evolved into a myth that the Twister actually came when the movie Twister was being screened, which sadly was just an urban legend. But it gets weirder on May tenth, twenty ten, the fourteenth anniversary of Twister's release in the United States, a tornado destroyed a farmhouse in Fairfax, Oklahoma, where numerous scenes of the film were shot. The house that was used in the movie Twister was destroyed by a twister on the anniversary of its release. I think that's crazy of the hall. A former Oklahoma state senator named Jay Barry Harrison commented that the tornado appeared eerily similar to the fictitious one in the film.

00:54:09
Speaker 2: That was a deep state hit and I actually did that. I killed that guy. He's alive. He gave a quote that joke, didn't lurk um. Where were on the topic of classic Hollywood films that were helmed by abusive directors who made life hell for their actors, All all the shining and Twister itself. There are several other references to movies with nightmarish productions slipped into Twister. For example, the oil truck scene flying around the tornado bears the same name ben Thic Petroleum, which is the company in James Cameron's underwater epic The Abyss, where Ed Harris has taken a blood oath to never speak of the making of that film again because it was so horrendous, Like didn't he kill someone doing that production? Someone was? Yeah, like someone was like clinically dead. God, Jim Cameron man the greatest of all time. You're talking about a Nietzsche and uber Mensch in the Pursuit of Art.

00:55:07
Speaker 1: Director in the world Baby, the name of the instrument package Dorothy is Did you really feel it was necessary to put this in, Jordan? Do you really feel necessary to call attention to the fact that Dorothy is a character of The Wizard of Oz, a film that revolves promably around tornadoes.

00:55:22
Speaker 2: Folks? Hey, everyone, everyone listen to too much information. Jordan wants you to know this really specific and obscure fact the fuck out of my podcast. You're sicken me. Aunt Maggie's watching the movie at the time the tornado hits her house because that wasn't on the nose enough. And Young Joe's Cairen terrier is the same breed as Toto in the Judy Garland movie classic whimsical production of Golden Age Hollywood, where Judy Garland was fed more pills than nineteen fifties British housewife and sexually assaulted by little people let's talk about something more uplifting. Cows ly uplifted? Okay, Hey, arguably the funniest scene in the movies when the cows come flying through the air and a stunned Helen Haunt can only offer a play by play cow another cow, and then Bill Paxton with one of the all time great grips. I think that's the same cow. The effect was obviously achieved through CGI. I do you remember the movie theater SETI Stand Ease that came out in the lobby that had the cow like jutting out of the of the post. Oh, I remember seeing those. Funnily enough, that cow is actually based on a zebra from nineteen ninety five's Jumanji.

00:56:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was like in the way CGI works, they have like a standard shape or something gets alted.

00:56:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, hoofed model to base it on us. But the cow was inspired by real events. During an interview with VFX Blog in twenty sixteen, visual effects supervisor Stefan Foungmir said it was based on actual real occurrences. Farmers after a tornado had gone through were reporting finding their cows miles and miles away from the field where they had last seen them alive. They lived. I guess, well, he didn't specify.

00:57:16
Speaker 1: I'm choosing to believe no, because I don't want Peter to pant our podcast read.

00:57:20
Speaker 2: So I'm gonna say that they survived. If Peter painted a pod of pickled pepper podcast pink, how much wood would that would? Chuck? Chuck.

00:57:33
Speaker 1: We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information.

00:57:37
Speaker 2: In just a moment. On the topic of special effects, we should talk about the wind. No, not Warren Zvon's elegaic last record, a devastating monument to slowly dying and putting one last stamp on the world before your exited, but the actual wind. In Twister, we already talked about the wind machines and the jet engines that blue gusts of more than two hundred miles an hour that provided the look for the wind, But the sound of the wind was achieved by using the unorthodox method of manipulating a recording of a camel's moan and mixing it with a lion's growl and a tiger's snarl. I love that stuff, man. The second silence of the lambs, where they're like mixing whale sounds and stuff into the submix just to be like, this is going to sound like hell. According to author K. Davidson's book Twister, The Science of Tornadoes and the Making of a Natural Disaster Movie. To make new and different wind sounds, they constructed a box filled with chicken wire, stuck a microphone inside, and placed it on top of a car. Then they rolled the car downhill, turning the engine off so that it wouldn't interfere with the sound recording. That rules. That's like David Lynch's buddy Alan Splett oscar punchline, Alan Splett trailblazing sound designer Alan Splett being like off grid because he was in the remote highlands of Scotland recording wind. That's freight. We used to be a proper country.

00:59:03
Speaker 1: And speaking of going downhill, we must talk about the soundtrack of this movie, which features less than stellar work from two gargantuans selling bands of the seventies and eighties, Van Halen and Fleetwood Mac.

00:59:17
Speaker 2: Most of Fleetwood Mac that wasn't technically Fleetwood Mac.

00:59:20
Speaker 1: Hilariously, the Twister soundtrack reunited one of these musical partnerships and destroyed the other. Oh Hi, you got to talk about van Halen This is this is so you well, as we mentioned in the just episode of the episode we just did about van Halen's nineteen eighty four, van Halen was on their second front man, Sammy Hagar at the time, and they contributed the song humans Being is I can't say that humans being Yeah, it's like a it's a wordplay, right, but it's.

00:59:50
Speaker 2: Really stupid wordplay. The band had just gotten a new manager who happened to be Alex van Halen's brother in law. Family in business, never a losing combination. Sammy Hagar didn't get along with him very well, and especially didn't appreciate his suggestion that the band cut into their badly needed post tour break to record this song for a Bill Paxton movie about the Wind. Eddie and Alex were eager to do it, but Sammy wanted to take some time off to recuperate and spend time with his wife, who was just about to give birth. Eddie and al went right into the studio, Hagar claimed in nineteen ninety seven. They said they had to make money, but I said, WHOA, were you crazy? We're not hurting for money. I wanted to spend two months with my new baby, then make another record. But Eddie said, I'm frustrated because you never do what I ask you to do. To be fair, that was the same reason he was frustrated with David Lee Roth. Sammy claims that they pressured him into recording the new song human Being Humans Being. What theck is the name of this song, Jordan Humans Being? Okay? Sammy claims that they pressured him into recording the new song humans Being for the soundtrack, but the sessions were painful all the way through. He wanted to record the vocals in Hawaii, where he and his wife were staying as she prepared to give birth to their baby, but the band wanted him to record the vocals at their fifty one to fifty studios in LA and it took him three separate trips to La to nail it down. I was a reminder, fifty one to fifty studios is in Eddie Van Halen's backyard, making matters worse. At the last minute, Eddie scrapped another song that he and Sammy had been writing together, a ballad called Between Us Two. These are just worse and worse huh yeah, yeah, requiring Sammy to come back once again and extend humans being to make it longer with a paid by the man. I know, I was trying to figure that out. Yeah, I don't really understand. Maybe it was I don't know, I don't know. Well, he came in an hour and a half before his flight, wrote two new verses, banged out the additional recordings, and left. Then it turned out the band required an additional song after all, and Eddie tried to get him back to finish between Us two again. Sam He refused, and the Van Halen brothers recorded an instrumental instead, a chain of events that would ultimately lead to Sammy's departure from the band. Details of the final split are with anything in the Van Halen mythos disputed, but it apparently ended up with a phone call on Father's Day nineteen ninety six. In Eddie's version, he called Sammy and read him the Riot Act. If you want to make another record or do another tour, you've got to be a team player. Van Halen is a band, not the Sammy Hagar show, Not the Eddie van Halen, Alex van Halen or Michael Anthony show, he recalled an interview with Guitar World Sammy apparently responded by saying, I'm fing frustrated. I want to go back to being a solo artist. Eddie thanked him for his honesty, and with minimal fury, supposedly said, well, you can't be in a band and do that too, so see you, and so Sammy quittna huff to go back to being Sammy Hagar. Sammy, though, disputes this version and said that he was fired and adding insult to injury, he said he was horrified by how quickly that they brought David Lee Roth back into the band to complete the two new songs for the nineteen ninety six Greatest Hits compilation, which was, if I recall correctly, in and of itself, a giant sticking point because when they renegotiated the creation of that, they like everybody got a higher royalty rate than David Lee Roth. Yeah, what a hilarious what a hilarious band, Hagar said of this man, that's worse than sleeping with the enemy. We bumped heads, and the next thing I know, Eddie calls and David Lee Roth is back. Roth or Hagar, whichever one of them was in the band at this point, would soon be replaced by Gary Charon of Extreme But that's another story. There's a Gary Sharon soundboard.

01:03:48
Speaker 1: Other artists featured on the Twister soundtrack include Torry Amos, Katie Lang, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Shania Twain, and Buckingham Nicks, who, although in nineteen ninety six it was more Nick Buckingham, this was the pair's first time back together since reuniting someone under Duress at Bill Clinton's request for his inauguration in nineteen ninety three.

01:04:10
Speaker 2: More of the point.

01:04:11
Speaker 1: This was Stevie Nickson, Lindsay Buckingham's first time reuniting on records since nineteen eighty seven's Tango in the Night with sessions that ended with Lindsay quitting the band, feuding with Stevie and tossing her over the hood of his car I believe with his hands around her neck.

01:04:28
Speaker 2: May maybe not.

01:04:29
Speaker 1: That might have been the time he tried to strangle the engineer during the recording of Rumors I Forget But what a great Guyah yeah, yeah yeah. Stevie was asked to provide a song for the soundtrack to Twister, and she decided to call in Buckingham to produce it, and also Mick Fleetwood to play drums. Buckingham ultimately shared vocals with Stevie, which went a long way towards thawing their relations and leading to their nineteen ninety seven reunion concert and live album, The Dance with that incredible version of Silver Springs. And I didn't realize that this would lead to a twenty one year reunion between Buckingham and Nicks, which is their longest unbroken time together.

01:05:12
Speaker 2: Did you know that? Yeah?

01:05:15
Speaker 1: It all came to a crashing end in twenty eighteen when Nix ousted him from the band in favor of Check's Notes, the Guys from Crowded House and the Heartbreakers. The release date for Twister was pushed up a week in order to avoid competition with Paramount's Mission Impossible two weeks later, and this caused even more headaches for the visual effects folks at Industrial Light and Magic, who were already working over time to try to see Gi out all of the blue skies that have been in the background during filming, since that sort of spoils the whole Tornado effect and the aforementioned phillipsy Moore Hoffman's balls. Industrial Light and Magic had originally been on the hook to do digital sky replacements on one hundred and fifty shots, but Yondbon ultimately needed them to double that number. This increased workload put everybody under a time crunch to meet the delivery date set by Warner Brothers. Visual effects producer Kim Bromley Carson described it to Entertainment Weekly as as close to drop dead as it gets, but ultimately they made it in time for the premiere, which was adorably held at a theater.

01:06:19
Speaker 2: At an Oklahoma City mall. The film would go on to receive a PG thirteen rating from the Motion Picture Association of America due to quote intense depiction of very bad weather. That's gotta be that's gotta be one of the best ones I've ever heard. Yep, very very bad weather, speaking of great speaking of great phrases. Producers apparently originally intended to release Twister with the tagline it sucks. I've checked this Apparently that's for real, but sadly they weresuaded from doing so when it occurred to them that this would merely provide AMMO for critics who weren't especially positive about the movie. Instead, they opted for the Dark Side of Nature, which is nowhere near as good.

01:07:14
Speaker 1: All the topic of marketing. Snafhoo's Jamie Gertz, who's Bill Paxson's girlfriend in the movie, recalled a hilarious incident that occurred during interviews to promote the movie. She told the av Club, the biggest thing I remember from when we were doing press for the film was that we went on Oprah. We came on individually. We were talking about how tough it was to shoot. We'd get to breathe in our eyes and the wind machines and we have to use eyew wash, and sometimes when we were in the makeup trailer, we'd have to turn off the electricity because we were so close to an electrical storm and they didn't want.

01:07:44
Speaker 2: To get electrocuted. Blah blah blah.

01:07:46
Speaker 1: And then Oprah breaks for commercials, and then she comes back and says, and now for survivors of real twisters. So here are all these actors, these dopey actors on stage, and now you have all these people who were like, I was burns, lightning hit me, and we're like, oh no, that.

01:08:02
Speaker 2: Didn't happen to us. Oh it was just humiliating.

01:08:06
Speaker 1: Here are these real survivors of twisters and We're just the pretend movie version. Helen Hunt also had a funny moment during the press stour. She said that when they were doing some show might have even been Oprah. They took questions from the audience, and one woman asked Hunt why her character wouldn't put her hair up on a ponytail when she was a little of a tornado.

01:08:24
Speaker 2: Apparently the whole movie her hair is down.

01:08:27
Speaker 1: To which Hunt was apparently replied, screw you don't get technical with me.

01:08:31
Speaker 2: I'm Helen Hunt. Bitch. Twister was a gargantuan success at the box office, sucking in nearly half a billion worldwide.

01:08:40
Speaker 1: This wasn't bad. Concerning the budget, this wasn't bad. Contindering blowing in. I know, this wasn't bad.

01:08:47
Speaker 2: Concerning the budget was ninety million, making one of the most expensive movies in the nineties, as Perianderbon's wishes. Only Independence Day made more money in nineteen tenety six at eight hundred and seventeen point four million. Yeah you figure what marketing's twice that, so you know, one hundred and eighty mil all told, maybe call it two fifty just for laughs, making almost half a bill. Good for them. Roger Ebert, as was his wont was something of a savage in his review of this well made, generally well meaning, if a slightly dumb movie. He gave Twister two and a half stars out of four and wrote, you want loud, dumb, skillful, escapist entertainment. Twister works that should have just been there Pool quote you want to think think twice about seeing it. Janet Maslin of The New York Times, though, has what is surely one of the most puzzling reviews. She writes, somehow Twister stays as up tempo and exuberant as a rollercoaster ride, neatly avoiding the idea of real danger, does it, Janet? I don't know. I thought it was pretty scary. Lisa Schwartz Bom Entertainment Weekly is more aligned with your thinking, you write in her review, she said, giving the film a B. She write, the images that linger longest in my memory are those of windswept livestock in a teacup. Sums up everything that's right and wrong about this appealingly noisy, but ultimately flyaway first blockbuster of summer. The reviews took a serious, almost existentialist view of the Violet Wins questioning whether the film did enough to illustrate the extent of the horrores. Writing in Time Magazine, Richard Schickel said, when action is never shown to have deadly or pitable consequences, it tends towards abstraction. Pretty soon, you're not tornado watching your special effects watching. Yeah, you know, this movie is really irresponsible in the way that inspired all those school tornadoes. In his review for The Washington Post, Desson Howe, I'm wanna bully that guy wrote, it's a triumph of technology. It's a triumph of technology over storytelling, and the actress craft characters merely exist to tell a couple of jokes, cower in fear of downdrafts, and otherwise killed time between tornadoes. Yeah, what do you just want one giant? It's the whole time. It's not the Seventh Seal, dude. The reviews for this are really harsh. Yeah, oh, man, I don't know. Do you think film criticism got no, I mean that's an interesting point. I do think film criticism has actually gotten nicer as a whole because we need access, Yeah exactly. Yeah. Yeah, and the people who used to have access and write this kind of stuff have been replaced by people who will just write nice garbage in exchange for perks. Despite all this criticism, Twister was up for two Oscars, Perhaps unsurprisingly, they were of the technical variety. Movie was nominated for Best Sound and Best Visual Effects by the Oscars, but it did not win either award. On the other end of the award show spectrum, Twister earned some Razzie knoms for Jamie Gertz aka the Girlfriend, for Worst supporting writers Michael An Crichton and Anne Marie Martin, winning in the probably limited category of worst written film that grossed over one hundred mil. Never forget that the Razzies have written by we're creating a bunch of bitter Hollywood journalists. But once again, you know, history has proven the winner because Twister would go on to be an important footnote in the history of cinema. It is the first movie to be released on DVD for home viewing in October of nineteen ninety seven, another good pub trivia question. The film's legacy could also be felt in tourism. Following the release of Twister, there was an uptick in Tornado tourism, with adventurous souls traveling to twister prone areas and trying their hand at being amateur storm chasers a dumb thing to do. Tami does not endorse this behavior unless you have money for us, in which case I'll do literally anything. And speaking of dumb, what of our directorial tyrant Yon Debont whatever became of him? Given the success of Twister, he seemed poised to take over Hollywood, but unfortunately karma is real. His next films, Speed to Cruise Control and The Haunting flipped flopped. They flipped and flopped at the box office and torn apart by critics. As a result, his reputation suffered, something that apparently failed to happen in the after effects of Twister, when he was beating his crew and taking shots at his lead actress in the press. Anyway, he has not directed a movie since two thousand and threes. Laura Croft tomb Raider colon The Cradle of Life. I have no memory of this film, do you no? I mean it was a sequel, I remember the first one. But yeah, what does he I mean? He's Dutch, right, they get free healthcare. He's probably just back there from sticking his finger in dykes again. Low hanging fruit people I'm sorry, but if you want your country to be more accurately and hilariously made fun of, be more interesting. The only thing I haven't touched is shots of Pete because it's just weird.

01:13:46
Speaker 1: Well, speaking of woefully misbegotten sequels, naturally, given the huge success of Twister, there was lots of talk of a sequel. Surprisingly, the only project to materialize for decades at least, was a direct to video sequel called Twister Warp Speed, a film I can find literally nothing about online. No Wikipedia page, no IMDb page, which leads me to believe listical sites are lying to me. If you were a loved one have seen this movie, please get in touch. So instead, let's talk about one of the great near misses in the cannon of great cinema, a sequel to Twister, directed by its original star Bill Paxton. I didn't know this until starting researching this episode. I didn't know that Bill Paxson got into directing at the dawn of the millennium. I would assume maybe from all that time hanging out with James Cameron. As you mentioned earlier, he was behind the acclaimed question Mark two thousand and one horror movie Frailty.

01:14:42
Speaker 2: It's definitely like an A minus film. Oh wow, Okay, got a great crazy Matthew McConaughey performance. Oh yeah, we.

01:14:52
Speaker 1: Haven't had an impression this episode yet. You got mcnaughey, You got to McConaughey seeing a cow.

01:14:58
Speaker 2: Now moon Man, that's more. Owen Wilson.

01:15:02
Speaker 1: No, I just watched rewatch the first season A True Detective, So I'm just I'm stuck in that horrible, nihilistic McConaughey. Let's get back to Bill Packson, who has all the earnestness that we need right now. He hoped to revisit Twister with himself behind the lens. He told the AV Club in twenty twelve, I'd love the direct a sequel to that movie. I always felt like there was a Jaws version of that movie. I always felt like we did the pepsi light version of that movie. There was a tougher version of that movie. I think now I've kind of designed it so that me and Helen Hunt would have a daughter, a junior in high school, but she's already dating a guy in college, and we kind of hand it off to them. I just like the idea of the Jaws of this where it's like the Twister sneaks up on them. The Twister doesn't work for nine of the movie, and you just never see it. I guess you don't see a twister really, it's just the wind.

01:16:02
Speaker 2: Also, just like I don't know, just just seemed pretty tough, but alright, whatever, whatever Paston. I wonder if it's I think it's it's kind of funny that you're like, this movie scared the shit.

01:16:11
Speaker 1: I mean, for the past ten minutes, we've been hearing people being about this movie is for WIMPs.

01:16:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. I was also like nine, well, sure, yeah, yeah.

01:16:22
Speaker 1: Paxon apparently hoped to use the three D technology that was being pioneered for the film Avatar by his buddy JC James Cameron Mauge, not John Carpenter or Jesus Christ, but apparently Paxon couldn't get studios interested in a Twister sequel, which I just I don't know if the technology scared them off.

01:16:45
Speaker 2: I mean, I guess this was like ten years after the fact of the original Twister.

01:16:48
Speaker 1: It's like long enough that it's weird, but not long enough that it's like a classic thing that revisits. I don't know, I still find that strange. Unfortunately, Bill Paxson was not able to realize this stream before his untimely death at the age of sixty one.

01:17:04
Speaker 2: This is very sweet.

01:17:05
Speaker 1: His passing was marked by real life storm chasers, much like Top Gun did for the Air Force, Twister went a long way and helping popularize the profession of meteorology and storm chasers specifically. A lot of this was thanks to Universal Studios, who made a grant to the University of Oklahoma, who acted as advisors on the film and funded meteorologists to go on a mobile tour of the eastern half of the country, staging safety presentations at science museums and a dozen major cities about what to do in the event of a tornado. And then, of course, following the release of the film, the number of meteorological majors in the United States universities increased by about ten percent, and a lot of the glory of this triumph reflected onto our beloved Bill Paxson, who later narrated a storm chaser documentary twenty eleven's Tornado Alley. Hence why the stormchaser community loved him, and shortly after Packson's death, a group of two hundred storm trackers arranged themselves to spell out his initials using their GPS trackers, which was seen by a Spotter Network weather report system designed to respond to extreme weather emergencies. I don't fully get how it works, but there's a YouTube equip of the moment, and it basically looks like a bunch of radar blips on a map of the country that formed the.

01:18:20
Speaker 2: Letters BP, and it's huge.

01:18:22
Speaker 1: The whole tribute it covered regions of Oklahoma and I think parts of Texas which were also where they filmed in the movie too, including the real town of Wikita. So I thought that was very sweet. Spotted Network president John Wedder said of Bill Packson, his character in Twister helped to make meteorology and the hobby of storm chasing cool.

01:18:42
Speaker 2: Stormchasing a hobby. I guess, man, can you imagine doing that for free? Yeah? Yeah.

01:18:48
Speaker 1: So Sadly, Bill Packson never got to make his Twister reboot or sequel or remake or whatever it was going to be, and for a time there were rumors that Helen Hunt would pick up the mantle from her fallen co star and develop a sequel herself.

01:19:01
Speaker 2: In June twenty twenty, in the midst of.

01:19:03
Speaker 1: The protests that erupted following the murder of George Floyd, she reportedly met with the studio to discuss directing and starring in a Twister sequel she had in mind, which would feature people of color. She was fairly blunt about the experience in a recent appearance on Watch What Happens Live, saying I tried to get it made with Davd Diggs and Rafael Cassal and me writing it. I think all three of them writing it and all black and brown storm Chasers, and they wouldn't do it. I was going to direct it. We could barely get a meeting. And this was June of twenty twenty, when it was all about diversity. It would have been so cool. There was an HBCU historically Black College University near Nashville where we wanted it to take place in a rocket science club, and in this one, they would shoot the rockets into the tornado.

01:19:47
Speaker 2: It was going to be so cool. Davd Diggs elaborated, there.

01:19:51
Speaker 1: Was an opportunity that we were talking about, but it didn't happen, and the reasons that it didn't happen are potentially shady, but shady in the way that we.

01:19:59
Speaker 2: Know the industry is shady. That's really wild man. Good for Helen Hunt. Yeah yeah.

01:20:05
Speaker 1: Hilariously, the version of the sequel that is coming out this summer actually took the step of killing off Helen Hunt's character, which is the official explanation why she will not be featured in Twisters. Great, great, great oral history work. Putting those two right next to each other.

01:20:23
Speaker 2: Thank you.

01:20:27
Speaker 1: Twisters features a script by Mark L. Smith, who'd previously written the Academy Award winning film The Revenant. Do we think this film will win an Academy Award?

01:20:36
Speaker 2: I mean The Revenant is like, I mean, it's been whiles as I see that movie, but it isn't like sixty percent of it, just like sweeping shots of vistas. Yeah, and Leonardo DiCaprio like grunting on his belly through the Dirk like okay, okay, bud okay. Man. Yeah, Mark L. Smith, It'd be really funny if it was Mark E. Smith, the famously cantankerous frontman of post punk pioneers The Fall, who is just like hated everything and everyone, who was like the world's worst person to work with. He died recently, didn't he a couple of years back.

01:21:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, I hit so many people in his band that like when people kept like alienating so many people. When people caught him out on it, and his quote was, if it's me and you're Granny on bongos, it's still the fall. Ah. The plot of Twisters centers on the child of Helen Hunt and Bill Paxson's respective characters, who's become a stormchaser like her parents the most just softball way that could have gone, Okay.

01:21:34
Speaker 2: Oh wait, we gotta spend some time pitching this. Do you think she's gonna go up to a tornado and say give me back my mom? Will Cats in the Cradle be played? But not the original version of Cats in the Cradle but like a Billie Eilish like slowed down reverb, haunting minor key, single note in the low register of the piano version. That's not bad. Yeah? Will the tornado be revealed to be like just trauma? Was the real tornado just within us? All the real storms that we need to fear are the ones within?

01:22:14
Speaker 3: Yeah?

01:22:14
Speaker 2: Does the storm? Does she call the storm by telling it it's not their fault? We could get Van Halen back together and break him up again for this, the surviving members of Van Halen reunite. No, no, no, no, it's Stevie Nixon, Sammy Haycar. Oh yeah, that's the pitch. I mean that's the yeah. Oh man, we have such good ideas, not even not even for the soundtrack, like as the stars of the movie. Wait, who is starring in it? Glad you asked?

01:22:47
Speaker 1: It is the where the Crawl Dads Sing? Starred Daisy Edgar Jones.

01:22:51
Speaker 2: In the lead.

01:22:51
Speaker 3: Ah.

01:22:52
Speaker 2: Yes, did she ever find out where?

01:22:54
Speaker 1: They do?

01:22:54
Speaker 2: In fact? Sing? Amsterdam gulfs Wing And that's a wrap. Oh t oh, you had you had more.

01:23:07
Speaker 1: The film was st to be released on July nineteenth, twenty twenty four, but I cannot imagine it will hold a candle to this cinematic classic. Did you already say a bunch of stuff about Joseph Kasinski and I just glazed over it.

01:23:19
Speaker 2: No, I didn't say it because I didn't care. Yeah, none of those words are in the Bible. No, this is this is funny.

01:23:25
Speaker 1: Though he was the guy who did Top Gun, Maverick was initially slated to direct, but this was such a the possibility.

01:23:31
Speaker 2: Of twisters, dude, they should have put his z on it. Man Zoomers are obsessed with the late nineties and early two thousands, right now, put his z on it. Yeah, yeah, idiots, Why are we such good Hollywood executives? Jordan and just alone talking about David Lee, Roth.

01:23:51
Speaker 1: Smashes Beard Can throws it into his empty, hot, empty room.

01:23:57
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:23:58
Speaker 1: Imagine the prospect of this movie being so depressing that the guy who directed Top Gun Maverick opted out of this to commit to a Brad Pitt movie about Formula one.

01:24:09
Speaker 2: Actually that sounds pretty cool. Actually that sounds but it's at Apple TV. Oh man, Hollywood screwed up follow of an empire baby.

01:24:19
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I'd like to leave you all with the words, actually my favorite line from this movie, which I do know from heart, thank you for listening.

01:24:40
Speaker 2: I'm Alex Hagel and.

01:24:42
Speaker 1: I'm Jordan run Tag. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive.

01:24:54
Speaker 2: Producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk.

01:24:56
Speaker 1: The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan Brundagg and Alex Heigel with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.

01:25:07
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01:25:10
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