TMI: Oops, All Digressions! A Pop Culture Anecdote Grab Bag

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Too Much Information, the show that gives you the secret histories and little known facts behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows and more. We are your Titans of Trivia. You're free wheeling friends of facts. My name is Jordan run.

00:00:28
Speaker 2: Tagg and I'm Alex Heigel.

00:00:29
Speaker 1: And folks, this is a very special episode of TMI. Today we're set to embark on a grand experiment. It's been something we've joked about for a long time, but the more we thought about it, the more we were inspired by its boldness. Now, as you probably know, we pride ourselves on our exhaustively written and researched and researched outlines and are rigided here in the structure. But today we're going out there without a safety net. They said it couldn't be done, but if you're hearing this now, that means we've actually this off. Ladies and gentlemen, friends, Welcome to TMI. Oops, all digressions.

00:01:19
Speaker 2: You crazy sound of a bitch. You really did it. We're fine like doing it. We've been planning this title based on that soule joke for like two years.

00:01:29
Speaker 1: I never really thought about it unless it was like a clip show of like going through old stuff I edited out of prior episodes, but most of that stuff was just offensive impersonations and you being angry. I'm so angry, and this episode will have fat and so much more.

00:01:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll be angry and defensive and maybe just a little sad. Jordan, How's this going to work? I, as a committed too much information listener with one hand on the one star rating on Apple Podcasts, I'm very concerned. How's this's gonna work? Again?

00:02:01
Speaker 1: Folks, We are feeling this out as we go along, but the idea is very simple.

00:02:04
Speaker 2: At least I hope it is.

00:02:05
Speaker 1: Because we have not discussed any of this in any meaningful way. Heigel and I have each pulled a series of pop cultural anecdotes that we will then share with one another. Neither of us know what the other one's gonna say, so we're gonna react in real time and see what other stories these provoke from our hoarder's basement of our respective minds. It's riffin, at least in my case. I've chosen anecdotes that I think will surprise and delight or at very least shock my dear friend Alex Heigel. Well, shall we begin?

00:02:33
Speaker 2: I believe we shall.

00:02:34
Speaker 1: Okay, I got, as I usually do. I kind of took it a little too far.

00:02:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I know. Yeah.

00:02:40
Speaker 1: It's almost like how when we did the quiz game, the Stump the Buff episodes. Yes, I kind of had categories. I sort of had anecdotes that lead into one another for like little batches. So I've got like like maybe like four or five on here, so we'll see. But interrupt me at anytime. I used to do a podcast where I was always discouraged from going off on tangents. That's the opposite of the idea here. Any stories that come to mind that these remind you of, just just gods.

00:03:07
Speaker 2: Let it all out. It'll be my problem to deal with in the edit. I'm getting I'm getting into my flow state. Okay, here we go. I have gin No, I don't this is.

00:03:19
Speaker 1: Gonna be I think really fun. I think you're really gonna like this.

00:03:22
Speaker 2: I feel like this is what the like the serial Killer says like right before you know. I think you're really going to enjoy this. Jeffrey Dahmer talking about Exorcist three to a young Filipino boy, Save it, save it. Okay, Okay, I'll sit on that. Well, that's also what Jeffrey Dahmer said.

00:03:42
Speaker 1: Oh wow, wow, Okay, I hope, I hope we were rolling on this.

00:03:47
Speaker 2: Oh Baby, I sure was, Jimmy, you get that. Welcome to t m I at Night, unchained at the end of their ropes, good men with nothing to lose.

00:04:07
Speaker 1: I wanted to start with something you mentioned on a previous episode.

00:04:10
Speaker 2: Hit me, whatever happened to Baby Jane? Oh? A classic?

00:04:14
Speaker 1: A classic.

00:04:15
Speaker 2: Maybe we should do a full episode on that, but well I think we should. I mean, did you know that they coined an entire subgenre of horror.

00:04:21
Speaker 1: After this bad I didn't know. Tell me about that.

00:04:24
Speaker 2: It's called hag exploitation. I'm not making it up. I'm not making it up. Yeah, I mean, so for whoever doesn't know whatever Happened to Baby Jane? It is a groundbreaking horror, psychological horror suspense. Like I don't really know what the original film was kind of filed under.

00:04:46
Speaker 1: But well probably I don't think it was ended as like a horror movie.

00:04:51
Speaker 2: So it famously stars Betty Davis and Joan Crawford, his sisters Betty Davis is playing this sort of character who had kind of like a Shirley temp child actress upbringing, and she has a campy, corny novelty song that went really really big, right, but her sister kind of eclipsed her and became like a very serious actor. And so the bulk of the film is them both living alone in this you know la months while Betty Davis descends deeper into alcoholism and insanity while continuing to dress like her child's self over her resentment of Joan Crawford's accolades. And then the unspoken thing is that.

00:05:38
Speaker 1: Is this supposed to be Olivia Djavelin and Joan Fontaine.

00:05:41
Speaker 2: You know, I don't. I haven't read that much into it. I've only ever heard this sighted as like the er text for this genre. Anyway, there's this whole thing where there was a car accident that crippled Joan Crawford, and so Betty Davis's character is taken care of her but also like wildly abusing her, and it just it's more and more depraved, and it is. It's a fantastic film, and so it launched what might be called, I've seen it called Psycho Biddy, which is quite hilarious, but also also what they call exploitation, which is like essentially you're making like, you know, horror movies starring old women, because as soon as women past a certain age, they become no longer exploitatable is sexual objects, and instead must become objects of loathing.

00:06:35
Speaker 1: Or just just fear. I mean, like like I was talking to somebody today about how like little kids are so spooky, like in the shining, like old women and little kids are both really really just inferently spooky.

00:06:46
Speaker 2: I think, yeah. And so one of the other big landmarks for the genre is Arsenic and Old Lace, which is a screwball kind of black comedy that was a Frank Capra film, given his weird that it's a Frank Kapra from giving his his you know, saccherin Ass, but starring Kerry Grant, of course, based on a play. But that genre has gone on to become I mean, people were tagging everything from Hereditary, which starred Tony Collette as I guess the hag because she's like the matriarch of this like sick, demented family, to you know, something like Dead Alive, which is Peter Jackson's first zombie movie that goes also by the title brain Dead, but I mean this goes into everything. Like Joan Crawford also played one of these. She did one of these from William Castle, who is the like fifties exploitation king movie called Straight Jacket that came out in nineteen sixty four. And then Betty Davis did actually a dual role in also that year because she was forever trying to outdo Joan Crawford apparently, where she played identical twins, one of whom was evil and it's just amazing that. And then there's also the Ryan Murphy series Feud that is about about the Betty Davis and Joan Crawford feud that happened on the set of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. And there's a point where the thing that I famously remember as being like a high point of this is that there's a scene where Betty Davis has to haul Joan Crawford out of her wheelchair and across like a floor and Joan Crawford went out of her way to fill all of her pockets with rocks yep, Yeah, to become heavier for that. But it is I mean, so whatever Happened to Baby Jane nineteen sixty two, that is the bomb drop, And then so you have in sixty four you have the two women also playing in Straight Jacket and Dead Ringer, and then from there it just kind of goes outward. Hush, Sweet Charlotte is the one with Betty Davis and Olivia de Haviland, you know. And some of these were just really fascinating reading about, maybe more than they are to watch to watch, because like there's one of Chelley Winters who's in this movie called Whoever Slew Auntie Roue in nineteen seventy one, and this is all according to Debbie Reynolds. They first met in that film. They were set to do another one called What's the Matter with Helen and Shelley Winters had some kind of a breakdown and like actually like scared Debbie Reynolds. And because at one point Debbie Reynolds went to check this prop knife that she was supposed to be staggered by and it was not rubber. It was a real knife, So I mean, yeah, but then it has this whole hilarious mutation up through everything from Mommy dearist Jordan tell us about Mommy dearest.

00:09:50
Speaker 1: This is based on the memoir of Joan Crawford's daughter about all the horrors, but basically how traumatizing it was being Joan Crawford's daughter.

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Speaker 2: And that's when it kind of achieves the full you know, Araboro snaking in its own mouth thing where because it's fade, Dunaway is playing joonk Craid is playing John Craft, and that's when you get the classic no wire Hangers Ever scene where she beats her daughter with a wire hanger. So you have both the big bang of exploitation with whatever starring Joan Crawford, and then, however, many years down the line.

00:10:25
Speaker 1: In eighty one, so nineteen years later, oh yeah.

00:10:28
Speaker 2: Nineteen years later, you have her character being portrayed as a villainous. I don't know. I think it's really really interesting. There's a lot to dig into there, especially when it concerns like gender studies. Well, yeah, gender studies, how we view women, how women are allowed to age. You know, that's probably enough about that, right.

00:10:48
Speaker 1: I did not realize that I would hit such a rich vein of trivia right out of the bat.

00:10:53
Speaker 2: Wow. I mean I think it. I think it's really because there's ones in like every decade, and because so many of them are focused on Hollywood, you do kind of get to see like how Hollywood's attitude towards women changing, you know, and the age that which women can be essentially discarded by society or Hollywood is really interesting and also so so so so sad. But if anyone ever invites you to, like a drag brunch showing of whatever happened to Baby Jane, you go, well, that's a really.

00:11:28
Speaker 1: Beautiful and articulate exploration of an anecdote that I brought up purely to celebrate women fighting and feuding. So now let's go on the flip side here. Are you familiar with Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando's feud on the set of Guys and Dolls?

00:11:45
Speaker 2: No, but this will tie into a Frank Sinatra bit that I actually dug up for you. Tremendous.

00:11:50
Speaker 1: Oh great, Okay, So Guys and Dolls was a Broadway musical.

00:11:54
Speaker 2: Guys and Dolls were I'll love a bunch of crazy guys and dolls. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right? Or is that just the Simpson's version.

00:12:02
Speaker 1: I think that's just the Simpsons version. It's been a minute, But when it was brought to the big screen. Frank Sinatra set his sights on the main part of sky mastersin great name thanks I saw it on a hair dry. Unfortunately that part went to Marlon Brando and Sinatra and said was cast as the also incredibly named Nathan Detroit, who's kind of the older, older second Banana. Sinatra was not happy about this. At their first meeting, Sinatra reportedly scoffed a Brando, don't give me any of that actors Studio.

00:12:40
Speaker 2: Brando, or it's ring ding ding for you, Bozo.

00:12:44
Speaker 1: Brando also had some good lines. He later said, Frank is the kind of guy when he dies, he's going to go to heaven and give God a hard time for making him bald. Tremendous for a guy who worked really hard trying to hide the fact that he was bald. Actually went to j Seabring, famous Manson family victim. J. Sebring was a pioneer and men's hair pieces. Things did not improve between Sinatra and Brando over the course of the production. Sinaptra called Brando quote the world's most overrated actor and referred to him privately and also publicly, I believe as mumbles.

00:13:22
Speaker 2: Oh, that's pretty accurate of.

00:13:26
Speaker 1: You know, come on, Frank was old school and he knew enough to try to get you know, first take, best take. Marlon famously needed many many takes, and Brando he leaned into this just to tweak Sinatra. During a scene when Frank was supposed to eat a piece of cheesecake, Brando kept intentionally flubbing his lines, making it to the Sinatra had to just eat more and more and more cheesecake, and apparently Sinatra reached the breaking point and screamed, how much damn cheesecake you think I can eat?

00:13:59
Speaker 2: Imagine that place? Yeah, I mean they have like the spit bucket for actors who are.

00:14:03
Speaker 1: Doing that, right, Yeah, it's got Come on, Sinatra.

00:14:06
Speaker 2: No, yeah, he's gonna eat cheesecake.

00:14:07
Speaker 1: No.

00:14:07
Speaker 2: But I read at one point that when they were doing Numb, I think it was a season Zari, he was talking about Chris Pratt on Parks and rec where he's like, anytime you see Chris Pratt eating food in that show, he was just eating it like he doesn't use a spit bucket, so like we would when we have like seven takes of him like eating burgers during a lunch scene. He actually ate all of those, which is why he had, I guess had to crash diet and become like, you know hot for that first Guardians of the Galaxy movies because he was just never using a spit bucket on the set of Parks and Reck.

00:14:45
Speaker 1: Apparently Sinatra was really concerned about Marlin's relationship with his then wife with Frank's then wife, Ava Gardner, and one biographer alleges that Sinatra had Brando kidnapped by his mob friends, rough up, and then basically threatening his life in order.

00:15:03
Speaker 2: To get him to behave on set.

00:15:05
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, wow, I've got some brand those stuff here.

00:15:08
Speaker 2: But if you want to let me intro my Frank story.

00:15:12
Speaker 1: That I found, Oh, tell me tell me your Frank star love Frank stares Well.

00:15:16
Speaker 2: Did you know that die Hard was originally supposed to star Frank Sinatra? No, that's right. The die Hard.

00:15:25
Speaker 1: What era like?

00:15:26
Speaker 2: Was it in development? Hell for like decades or no? So this is so, this is why this is what's wild is that the novel that die Hard is based off of and.

00:15:35
Speaker 1: Based on the novel Push by Sapphire.

00:15:37
Speaker 2: Yes, it is based on the novel Push by Sapphire. It's based on how many different bits can we do with that? No? Anyway, So it was based on a novel called Nothing Lasts Forever by the author Roderick Thorpe. And we all know Roderick Thorpe certainly he's mostly his early work, so anyway, but it was a sequel to a novel that he'd written in this series, I guess in nineteen sixty called The Detective, which was made into a movie in nineteen sixty starring Frank Sinatra. Oh sorry, yeah, that wasn't made nineteen sixty. That was made in nineteen sixty eight. So that was kind of gone to seed a little bit Frank Sinatra where he's playing a cop. And so when they went to adapt this sequel into Diehard, they approached Frank Sinatra and they were like, yeah, man, do you want to come back as a for like one more? Yeah? And I have to say that Sinatra's response is accurate and very funny. He said, I'm too old and too rich to do this. So wait a minute.

00:16:52
Speaker 1: So this would have been eighty what was Diehard eighty seven?

00:16:55
Speaker 2: Diehard is eighty eight, eighty eight.

00:17:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, he would have been like seventy one.

00:17:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's insane that they contacted him at all, but I guess they were trying to be, you know, retain some fidelity to like what he'd already done.

00:17:12
Speaker 1: Or just kissed the ring, because I feel like the last person you want is Frank Pisty. They probably knew he was gonna say no, but figure they had to go and ask him, just because he was already in the in the family of the stuff they'd done, and in the family in the other way.

00:17:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, this guy, this guy. Roderick Thorpe wrote This Detective, which was made into a movie in nineteen sixty eight, again starring Frank Sinatra, and then in Nothing Lasts Forever. The plot of that is the forty story office headquarters of the Claxon Oil Corporation, But other than that, the plot of this novel is basically just can die hard. Thorpe was inspired to write it by seeing The Twering Inferno in nineteen seventy five, of course, and so so yeah, he decided to write it after that, and then wanted it to be a follow up film, and Frank was like, no, dude, I'm very old.

00:18:08
Speaker 1: Is it a Christmas book?

00:18:09
Speaker 2: Yes, it did also take place over Christmas. And then I wanted to google what other Frank Sinatra films he turned down, And I don't think you would be able to guess what the other one was.

00:18:22
Speaker 1: This kind of rings rings, a bell, ring, a ding ding for you Bozo's Yes, I don't remember, but as soon as you say it might be like, oh.

00:18:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was Dirty Harry.

00:18:35
Speaker 1: Oh never mind, No, I didn't know that. Yeah, so Frank Sinatra was going to hunt the Zodiac Killer. I understanding, Yeah, correct.

00:18:43
Speaker 2: Yes, that is correct. A dead right, which evolved into Dirty Harry was a script by Harry Julian Fink and Rita m Think. If that's your name, man, just change it. You're not going to go places with that name. But they did. They wrote a script about Harry Callahan and this film was eventually retitled Dirty Harry. However, first the studio went to Paul Newman, but bless his heart, he turned it down because he found it too far right. And then it went to Sinatra. He thought it was too lefty. Yeah, I was gonna say no. Apparently he took it. And then and in the like a televised nineteen seventy interview, he said that he was planning on shooting this film in San Francisco, and he was very excited about it. He said it was a marvelous script and that he himself requested that it change from the setting of New York to San Francisco, which he said, I don't think has ever been photographed as well as it should be. Wow, but he backed out. He claimed that this was because he broke his wrist while filming the Manchurian Candidate, and therefore the the forty four fifty seven magnum most powerful handgun in the world, Dirty Dirty Harry's trademark weapon was simply too heavy to lift for him. But Mark Elliot, who wrote a biography of clint Eastwood, said it was more likely that as the script in part evolved, Frank Sinatra was like, I don't I don't want to like do this to my public image, and it went to Old clint Ory went.

00:20:18
Speaker 1: Down to hate Ashbury and saw what was happening there, and he decided he did not want to spend any more time in San Francisco.

00:20:23
Speaker 2: In It's Probably Fair, also supposedly supposedly Robert mitcham Bert Lancaster, Steve McQueen, John Wayne, and George C. Scott all was floated for for Dirty Harry before it came to Eastwood.

00:20:42
Speaker 1: Those all would have ruled for the most part. I mean if John Wayne, I feel like it would have been a much worse movie anybody else, Yeah, McQueen, that actually kind of would have been great.

00:20:53
Speaker 2: Well. John Milius of an Apocalypse Now was going to do a script on it, apparent back when Sinatra and Irvin Kirshner were set on it. Terrence Malik also wrote a draft for this film like is is dirty the original Dirty Harry? Like the web that connects all of Hollywood? Also here you go ties back into your original one. Bert Lancaster turned it down. Marlon Brando was considered but never formally approached, Yeah, and believing that the role was too right wing for him. It was Paul Newman who suggested it would go to Eastward.

00:21:28
Speaker 1: Wow, so that is great because I've got Brando and Newman's stories coming up.

00:21:34
Speaker 2: So this is wonderful.

00:21:35
Speaker 1: This is beautiful.

00:21:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, okay, wait, sorry, one more thing. Audie Murphy was supposed to play the serial killer Scorpio.

00:21:44
Speaker 1: Trying to tell the folks who that is.

00:21:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean Audie Murphy is like an American hero. He was the He was the most decorated combat soldier in World War Two, and possibly the most highly decorated soldier in the history of the US Army. He received every military combat award available from the Army and French and Belgian awards for heroism. I believe he single handedly held off a company of German soldiers for an hour in France. And he was just a sweet little Texan boy from Kingston, Texas born into sharecroppers. He lied about his age to get into the army. After Pearl Harbor, he's credited with killing two hundred and forty one enemy soldiers. And then he became an actor. That's quite a pipeline. Yeah, I know, yeah, I am mass murderer, but in the good War, in like the only good war, you know. So first he portrayed himself in an autobiographical film called Helen Back based on his memoirs. But then he started just doing westerns. Then he began breeding horses, and apparently he was set to play the serial killer Scorpio based on the Zodiac killer in Dirty Harry. And then he died in a plane crash. So how about that?

00:23:06
Speaker 1: That is unbelievable. Wow? After taking so many lives. He decided, you know what, I'm going to create lives, but horse lives stares off in the middle distance.

00:23:20
Speaker 2: I'm going to create lives.

00:23:22
Speaker 1: Horse lives ice clinking in his class, and I'll sell them anyway. Yeah, I just want to talk a little bit more about Marlon Brando's history of just not caring to learn his lines at a certain point in his career, and that certain point, I guess being early in his career.

00:23:42
Speaker 2: There's the scene that he was very heralded for.

00:23:46
Speaker 1: In the Last Tango in Paris, when he's standing over the dead body of his wife and delivering this monologue, and he does this incredible glance upward, and sinophiles and critics all thought that was just such an inspired moment of looking to the heavens or God to make a personal appeal to God.

00:24:06
Speaker 2: He really brings out your Boston accent.

00:24:08
Speaker 1: By the way, what God, God? But no, it was just because he had Q cards placed all around the room, and his next one was just up on the ceiling, and he just wasn't even trying to hide the fact that he was looking at it.

00:24:22
Speaker 2: If I remember correctly. In Casino, probably de Niro had already become lazy enough to start hiding his lines on index cards all around the set, non Q cards, and I think Rickles is in that movie as the pit boss. Rickles was like constantly giving him for it. He was like a big time movie star, Like, you can't even memorize his own lines. I do this like twelve nights a week in Vegas, like blah blah blah blah blah. I'm just constantly riding him about not being the all big serious actor, mister taxi driver, mister mister lamatta can't memorize his lines, like really riding him very hard for him because it's yeah, exactly like Bobbyarible. Yeah, I mean like Bobby de Niro was like, like, I guess just like laughing along with it because he was like, yeah, I don't care that much. I suck.

00:25:13
Speaker 1: On the incredibly disastrous production of the Island of Doctor Moreau.

00:25:18
Speaker 2: Yes, let's talk about Island of Doctor Moreau.

00:25:22
Speaker 1: So Brando had his lines fed to him through an earpiece or he just ad lib them altogether, which is hilarious. But it also co starred Val Kilmer, who competed with Brando for who could be the biggest freak on the set. I do not have this handy, But do you have any any moments that come to mind? I know you've been going down a deep val Kilmer rabbit hole after his death.

00:25:41
Speaker 2: I have no. I mean there's just a lot of it. Like there was one moment that Val Kilmer cited like as especially sad for him personally because he was talking about like the moment he knew that the movie was like completely doomed, and it was because Brando had said something to him like, uh, did you get at my boy? It's just a money picture, And Valko was just like, oh, like that makes me sad now. But no, most of my stories about that are from the director, Richard Stanley, who is an interesting guy. Where do you finish yours? First?

00:26:16
Speaker 1: Well, there's a great story with Brando and the director of another movie he did the score, Frank Oz, Oh, yeah, I.

00:26:24
Speaker 2: Bet you'd like to put your hand up my ass like one of umpets could told me like like miss Piggy is So. I don't know where that Brando impression is coming from. It's just kind of the James Gandal feeding like wheeze, yeah, but no that it is what he said. To him right. Yeah.

00:26:38
Speaker 1: Frank Oz was famously a close associate of Jim Henson, and he voiced a number of Muppet characters, including Miss Piggy, and Brando would derisively refer to him.

00:26:48
Speaker 2: As Miss Piggy on the set of this movie.

00:26:50
Speaker 1: Because frank Oz became a fairly big deal director, usually have like black comedies. I think he did like in and Out and forget what else he did, but Branda really resented being directed by, in his words, a muppeteer. And I did not have handy the actual quote, but it was something like can you say that again?

00:27:12
Speaker 2: What did he say? I think he said something like, I bet you wish you could stick your hand up my ass and direct me like you do that pig puppet or like miss Piggy or whatever.

00:27:23
Speaker 1: Imagining the words miss Piggy coming out of Brando's mouth.

00:27:27
Speaker 2: Miss Piggy, Miss Piggy, I bet you wish you could shove that hand of my ass and swimming like miss Piggy. I don't know, I mean, I'm in the names. Too much energy, that's too much energy for that error. Yeah, that's true. Now island to doctor Morose Wild. My dad went and I went and saw that because what Yeah, well, because he remember the old Charles Lawton one. And we were just confused and irritated, like so many others who saw that film. But it's quite a curio. It's got firu'sa balt of the Craft fame.

00:28:03
Speaker 1: Happy Gilmore Yeah with no water boy, Yes, yes, my mistake.

00:28:09
Speaker 2: How how dare you? But yeah, it was like a famously troge. This guy Richard Stanley, who is like a descendant of Richard Stanley who went like doctor Livingstone, I presume, like wow, yeah, he's like a descendant of that British explorer. But he's also a weirdo h and he's super into like Wicca and stupid shit like that. He also has a bunch of sexual abuse violage allegations, so he's not like a good guy. But he had made this one pretty cool film called Hardware that had some neat practical effects and was kind of a low budget hit, and so like what happens, as it does in Hollywood, was that he was then tapped to do this and he wanted it to be like a big passion project and he was really excited about doing it. And then they like got onto the location and it was a nightmare, and brand was a nightmare, and Kilmer was something of a nightmare. So he was like fighting with everyone all the time, and he was eventually fired and removed from the set. But in what is either straight up psychopathic behavior or genius, he like found his way into the makeup tent and asked an artist to put him like in a prosthetic mask to just like sneak back onto the set to just see what was happening with his movie. So he's like, there's and I think in this documentary about it, he still has the pig mask when it's like degrading and it's like gross because it was latex and it was rotting. But he's like, yeah, here's the only pig mask and they, you know, booted me so I can go back on the set. Yeah, really fascinating documentary about him and about that film is sort of a general nightmare, and especially for all the people that at what it costs, all the people that it attracted. I mean the David Thulis is the British actor and he's certainly no slouch now and probably wasn't as much of the time, but him and Val Kilmer and uh, Firouza balk and like that was a big cast. You know, there was money behind that cast, and yeah, just went it down into history as one of the old time flops.

00:30:20
Speaker 1: That is incredible. Why and he's done nothing else. I'm looking at his Wikipedia and I have no idea what any of these movies are.

00:30:26
Speaker 2: He literally took it like a retirement for many decades and then came back with his HP Lovecraft adaptation called Color out of Space that stars Nicholas Cage and is actually a decent film. I liked it. But yeah, like as soon as he was getting ready to mount this comeback, there were like all these you know, gross allegations that surface about him, And you know, I don't trust men who are into WICCA, right, Like, I don't know that feels I feel like I'm wading into potentially canceled territory here. But I don't trust male Wickan.

00:31:00
Speaker 1: I guess I don't either, But I really don't want mail Wickens mad at me.

00:31:03
Speaker 2: Oh what are they going to do?

00:31:05
Speaker 1: Tie some sticks together?

00:31:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, boil some herbs near you? Maybe I just want to keep my options open. Yeah, it's fair, that's fair. All right?

00:31:15
Speaker 1: Moving on, I was at the antiquarian book and Ephemera fair this weekend at the Park Avenue Armory.

00:31:23
Speaker 2: And it's this very unbrand for you.

00:31:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, it's amazing. It's like basically like a museum, but everything's for sale. Books are the big thing, and they have a lot of like you know, first editions or whatever. But then they would have like, oh, an inscribed first edition of Oliver Twist. They written dedication Charles Dickens. Oh that's half a million dollars.

00:31:43
Speaker 2: Sure.

00:31:43
Speaker 1: The most most expensive thing I saw was a two point five million dollars. It was a proof of one of Galileo's books, but with Galileo's handwritten notes in the margins. Another of one of Copernicus's books with some of his notes in the margins too. That was all around two million.

00:32:01
Speaker 2: And these ended up in New York.

00:32:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean they were for sale. I mean they just had little they were in little cases, and they had you know, it was like an expo center kind of thing.

00:32:11
Speaker 2: No, I'm sure.

00:32:12
Speaker 1: I just like they had hundreds and hundreds of dealers. Okay, yeah, but they had lovecraft handwritten letters for sale.

00:32:20
Speaker 2: Oh my god, so much. So. I'm sure they were so racist.

00:32:24
Speaker 1: I didn't see that they had They had Tolkien. They had hand drawn like family tree type chart things that Tolkien had drawn. Yeah, really interesting. Yeah, the past years I've gone, they had like Albert Einstein's childhood block set for like one hundred and sixty thousand dollars. Yeah, yeah it was. It was really cool stuff. But yeah, you mentioned Lovecraft and that made me think of it.

00:32:45
Speaker 2: But no, I mean, I can only imagine the staggering depths of racism that his letters would have contained. I mean, he's one of those he's like, he's so difficult to reckon with in modern horror because you know, he introduced one of the truly like foundational concepts of of like fear. Like I don't know if you've ever have you ever have you ever like read about him?

00:33:07
Speaker 1: Very little?

00:33:08
Speaker 2: No, So there's this like concept of what has now been termed like love crafty and madness, which is this idea that like, you know, your character or protagonist or whatever it can be driven to madness or like suffer this paralyzation of the mind and be completely lost by simply glimpsing the true vast nature of what lurks behind the veil of reality. And and in Love Cress fiction, it's often part of the Cthulhu mythos, where it's like these elder gods like Cthulhu and naralthrope tech Uh. I think I wing to that one. I don't. I don't know if it's actually narrow. Uh. They all have weird names. But the idea is that there's these enormous like horrifying beings like they're sentient or whatever, but they're they're so mind bogglingly huge and they and they defy all logic of like our natural world. That like most of the encounters with the protagonists end with them being just like driven mad by trying to like comprehend the mass and scale of these things. And and so that was one of his big contributions and which people have mined a lot as like a trope of just being like this person lost their mind because they saw something that they could not figure out, you know. And his other big thing is like cosmic horror, because he was terrified of He was like something of an agoraphobe. He lived a quite secluded life and wrote a lot of letters and a lot of fiction primarily because of his racism. He like was outright like refused to be out among like the mixed breeds of the of the city. And I mean he wrote about all this about like mixed and miscegenation and in like letters, So that's how we know how awful he was. But this idea of cosmic war, of just being like, Okay, you're not scared of like a ghost in a house, or like you're not scared of like a man who turns into a wolf, or a man who is a dracula, or a man who is made out of other dead men. You're literally scared of something that comes out of space because you have no reference for it. Nothing in your earthly experience can even properly describe or grasp what you're seeing. And so that is the basis of the fear that you're that you're feeling. And I think that's that's interesting because I mean it is like, I don't know anyone who invents like a new way of fear is like this has to be a pretty good writer. But you know, at the end of the day is still like JK. Rowling, where there's like a giant an asterisk on all of his writing was like, by the way, this guy was very some screws loose. He was also terrified of the ocean. He was a big New England guy and like a lot of his stories have like fish people, or at least one of the most famous ones that the Dune, the dumbedd Horror. I don't know, there's one of the fish people. And and he was just like this was like when people were exploring the oceans. And as soon as he like learned how big the oceans were and was like, my god, there's just so much of it. He became like transfixed and horrified by the idea of the oceans and like fish and the and the species of fish that might live down there. It's really he was a real crackpot, but you know, an occasionally good writer.

00:36:46
Speaker 1: I was watching did you ever see the Barry Levinson movie, part of his like Baltimore trilogy, Diner. It's a very strange I was watching clips from it the other day. I hadn't seen it in years. It's about all these guys in the early twenties who were just grappling with their own immaturity as some of them start to go off and get married. And I was watching an old Ebert and rope Er. It's just going Ebert clip reviewing the movie, and they're all talking about how these men are basically scared of women. Yeah, and you mentioning, Now, it's just something that there's no frame of reference for. And I was thinking about me in The Wonder Years is one of my favorite shows, just the sort of way that these preteen boys are in all but also terror of these preteen girls in their class that they don't know how to interact with or Yeah, that level of fear.

00:37:36
Speaker 2: It's interesting, No, I know, And I think there's like a lot of it. Actually that is like going away. I mean, I don't think we had the Internet by the time I was ready to use it. So I think like much of my you know, early exposure to women was like natural. But imagine being a kid base days, like how do you find put up with being blasted by like internet at porn before you're like like, well, how does no wonder everyone's mentally ill? I don't know, I don't know.

00:38:04
Speaker 1: I don't know.

00:38:05
Speaker 2: This is getting into I'm just postulating about the state of young masculinity. I was reading this review of this or listening to this podcast about this Sodaberg movie that came out last year called Presence good movie. Interesting, interesting stuff. But one of the questions that came up for these because these guys on this podcast were like they're all dads and they or two of them were dads and they had daughters. They were like, I don't know, is this like an unspoken part of like parenting where when you're like expecting and you don't know the child's sex, you're like desperately hoping it won't be a boy, because these days, like the onus of having a boy is like, well, is he going to become a serial killer or a rapist or like there's all this stuff I had or like just a garden variety like Jordan Peterson piece of like there's all this stuff that I have to like weigh into if you know that you're having a boy, and obviously there are a lot of fears that connected to having a girl, certainly, but these two guys at least were like, yeah, I was way way more scared it was going to be a boy and then I would have to like essentially like safeguard they talked about, like preventing another's a future serial killer from like taking to the streets. I was like, that is horrifying.

00:39:27
Speaker 1: I understand that, but I think that could also be read as dad's not wanting to do their job and like instill a sense of moral moral compass into their kids too.

00:39:38
Speaker 2: That's also fair. I see both sides.

00:39:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment.

00:39:54
Speaker 2: Wow, all right, where we go? What were we talking about?

00:40:03
Speaker 1: Well, from the future of masculinity, let's go circle back to force feeding.

00:40:11
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, No, we.

00:40:13
Speaker 1: Talked about how Brando would intentionally flub his lines the forest Sinatra, they eat cheesecake, but she apparently.

00:40:20
Speaker 2: Really liked I thought you were going somewhere much weirder with that, pal.

00:40:24
Speaker 1: Oh no, no, no, no. I wanted to talk about another instance of onset force feeding, but this one's.

00:40:32
Speaker 2: Slightly more charitable.

00:40:35
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, okay, So talk about the production of the film adaptation of Tennessee Williams A Cat on a hot tin roof, and filming began an early nineteen fifty eight co starred Liz Taylor and Paul Newman, but on March twenty second of that year, shortly into the film's production, Liz Taylor's husband the movie. Producer Mike Todd, produced Around the World in Eighty Days, died in a plane crash near New Mexico. He'd been riding in the couple's private jet called the Lucky Liz. Liz herself was supposed to be along for the ride, but she was homesick with a fever, and that ended up saving her life. Her marriage had lasted only four hundred and eighteen days. This would later be referred to as the Successful Marriage. Deeply grief stricken, Liz locked herself at home and refused to go to the set, understandably so, forcing director Richard Brooks to shoot around Taylor and do as much as he could without her. Then three weeks later, Liz returned to the set and announced that she was ready to work, saying, I think Mike or a late husband would have wanted me to finish this movie. But she'd been too grief stricken to eat, and she'd lost a ton of weight, and she just was refusing any offers of food. Fearing for her health, the director Richard Brooks ordered food to be brought to the set and shoot a scene that takes place over dinner, and he kept ordering take after take after take in a desperate bid to get Liz to eat something and regran it strength, which is sad but also in its own way suite and you got a feel for this guy, Richard Brooks. He'd had a very troubled production with this movie. Initially, MGM wanted James Dean in the lead role that eventually went to Paul Newman as the ex American football star that became an alcoholic after the death of his friend. But the script writing took so long for Tennessee Williams that James Dean actually died in a car accident before it could be finished. James Dean was famously driving his nineteen fifty five Portie five point fifty Spider nicknamed Little Bastard. He was hit by a man named James turnip Seed driving a truck. James Dean's last words were that guy's got to stop. He'll see us narrator voice he did not Yeah. James Dean's role went to Paul Newman, who's then an up and coming star, But this whole delay led to the replacement of Grace Kelly, who was gonna be the Loz Taylor role. She went off and got married to Prince Rainier of Monaco and became Princess Grace, much to the chagrin of everyone in Hollywood.

00:43:07
Speaker 2: And like everyone in the world. Man, every time I watched like rear Window, I am just assaulted anew by that woman's beauty. And it just makes the film set up of like old Raggedy James Jimmy Stewart out there like, no, I don't want to have sex with you because there's something going on in my apartment's backyard. It's got a.

00:43:35
Speaker 1: Little a little into Bing Crosby there, but all I mean, she's like glowing from within and he's like, well, I've got this telephoto lens that I'm really interested. Do I tell you my Grace Kelly story.

00:43:49
Speaker 2: Princess Grace or Grace.

00:43:50
Speaker 1: Kelly Grace, Well.

00:43:52
Speaker 2: It depends on when you met her. I didn't need her. Oh then you don't have a prince. Oh okay.

00:44:01
Speaker 1: My aunt used to work for Universal Studios and her boss was this guy, Lou Wasserman, who ran the studios. The book about him is called the Last Mogul, and that's kind of true. He was like one of the last big Hollywood power players and he died in like two thousand and two or something, and he would always regale my aunt, who we really looked at as like a daughter, with all these stories from that era. And he was talking about how he when he got word that Grace Kelly wanted to go marry Prince Rainier, and he went and you know, called her up or maybe even went to see her or something. It was like, because I guess he was like a really early supporter of her and really kind of sort of made her a star. It's like, Yeah, what are you doing go to this blankety blank country where they don't you know, well, where we don't know what he is, where Monico is anyway, what.

00:44:42
Speaker 2: Are you doing?

00:44:43
Speaker 1: You just want an oscar, You've you've got everything.

00:44:46
Speaker 2: Why are you doing this to me?

00:44:48
Speaker 1: Why? Yeah, exactly, And she turned and looked in dead in the eye and said, I've never been a princess.

00:44:56
Speaker 2: Yeah. He was like, they'll do it.

00:44:59
Speaker 1: And then hear the story about this almost seems like something that one of our old colleagues, that people would have written about. This might have been where I heard it. Liz McNeil was very into like the Kennedys and Grace. American Royalty basically saw something about how because Grace Kelly died in the early eighties in a car accident because the driving around those really treacherous roads in the hills of Monaco over the seaside, and her car went over one of the bends and just went over, and Grace Kelly died. And the story was that she was in the car with her daughter and the daughter survived, and the story was that the daughter was actually driving, but to kind of smooth things over afterwards, the official record is that Grace Kelly was driving herself, but there's a story out there that her daughter was actually the one at fault. Have you heard anything about this? You hear about this?

00:45:53
Speaker 2: Have you guys heard about this? I have not. That makes it funny but also still tragic. Why does it it's funny? I mean because her daughter was younger.

00:46:02
Speaker 1: Her daughter was probably like, I don't know, twenties.

00:46:06
Speaker 2: Oh, she was in there. I thought it was like a toddler. No oh oh no, So that's just very sad. Now, yeah, no, I thought if it would be funny, like.

00:46:16
Speaker 1: Talking about, hey, you want to drive to put the car, yeah, I'll run these like horrifying bendy, windy roads and the cliffs of Monaco.

00:46:25
Speaker 2: I don't know. I thought, because people did stupid back then.

00:46:28
Speaker 1: I don't know, man, Holly would be a princess. Yeah, okay, I guess her track record's not great.

00:46:33
Speaker 2: Well, I don't know. They were also drinking three martinis at lunch. I didn't think it would be that big of a stretch to have her be like, let's let this toddler take the wheel. That'll be fun, you know, right. No, okay, no, that's now, that's very sad, you know, man, children, Yeah, you give them the best years in life and then they kill you in a car God willing.

00:47:00
Speaker 1: So Liz Taylor, who ended up getting Grace Kelly's role three months after her husband's death in this fiery plane crash in the plane that bore her name, but Lucky Lise Liz Taylor fell in love with her late husband's best friend, the singer Eddie Fisher, which I guess in a way is like kind of a relatively common way of dealing with grief, because didn't Jack Kennedy and RFK have an affair in the wake of the assassination, like drawn together by grief?

00:47:27
Speaker 2: Jesus, I didn't know that that kind of pisses.

00:47:29
Speaker 1: Me off elaborate. In what way does that piss you off?

00:47:32
Speaker 2: I don't know. I expected one. Fuck Boston gonna be a little bit more fun, you know, responsible to his brother.

00:47:41
Speaker 1: I mean they shared Marylyn.

00:47:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I was gonna say. I guess they had an advanced theory, non traditional theory of relationships.

00:47:52
Speaker 1: So Liz Taylor starts to have an affair with her now dead husband's best friend, Eddie Fisher, the singer.

00:47:58
Speaker 2: I just don't love that.

00:48:00
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't love that either. You know who really didn't love that Eddie Fisher's wife at the time, Debbie Reynolds. She really didn't like that. Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds. Their union produced Carrie Fisher. Famously, this scandal of Eddie Fisher leaving his wife, the Hollywood sweetheart, Debbie Reynolds, for Liz Taylor fallout was huge. Hilariously, the public sympathies were with Liz because she just lost her husband and was very brave. So everybody turned on any Fisher.

00:48:29
Speaker 2: They were like, she she deserved this, yeah.

00:48:32
Speaker 1: Basically, and Eddie Fisher was the ones whose career was totally ruined.

00:48:36
Speaker 2: It never recovered well. That's good.

00:48:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Liz was married to Eddie Fisher when she began her affair with co star Richard Burton on the set of Cleopatra was Cleopatra just a few years later in nineteen sixty three. They were not subtle about this on set affair. During love scenes, director Joemika Witz was forced to yell cut several times to get them to stop kissing.

00:49:01
Speaker 2: Which is, yeah, that's like French Force business. Yeah's some future hour stuff like come on guys. Yeah. Uh man. Have you ever read like Richard Burton writing about diary?

00:49:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, all they're amazing. Oh his note, Liz and Dick famously split twice. They were married twice. I think the second time they were married only lasted a year. His like final goodbye letter, which is short to Liz, is amazing. I'd like to read it. It's very short. I'd like to read it right now.

00:49:35
Speaker 2: Please.

00:49:36
Speaker 1: June twenty fifth, nineteen seventy three. You're off. By God. I can barely believe it, since I'm so unaccustomed to anybody leaving me. But reflectively, I wonder why nobody did so before. All I care about, honest to God, is that you're happy, and I don't much care who you'll find happiness with, as long as he's a friendly bloke and treat you nice and kind. If he doesn't, I'll come at him with a hammer and a clinker. God's I may be on the sparrow, but my eye will always be on you. Never forget your strange virtues, Never forget the underneath that veneer of raucous language is a remarkable and puritanical lady. Lady in all caps, I am a smashing bore, And why you've stuck by me this long as an indication of your loyalty, I shall miss you with passion and wild regret. Oh I lied to you. I think the timing of that's off. I think that's actually written after the first divorce and then they did get back together, and.

00:50:27
Speaker 2: That's kind of like actually heartbreaking.

00:50:29
Speaker 1: Oh extremely, I had a hard time reading that. No, yeah, yeah, man, Yeah. I love Richard Burden. There's a great interview with him. It's either on Dick Caviot or Michael Parkinson, which is like the British equivalent of Dick Cavit. I mean, they're both great, and they're both totally worth your time and He speaks remarkably movingly about substance abuse and about how it was described to him by someone, or maybe it was his own analogy about how being an alcoholic is like having a boxer in the shadows every day, and every day you know that you put your head on your pillow and you haven't had a drink. You've evaded that boxer one more more day. But the next day, if you're not vigilant, you're not careful, you might get you on the chin. And it's like is it's delivered in like the Richard Burton dulcet Welsh tones and insane voice and so beauty. I mean, it's really it's like he's reciting Shakespeare. It's the most beautifully delivered.

00:51:29
Speaker 3: Nobody quite knows which drink it is that takes him over the edge of being merely a social or haughty, laughing drinker into a morose, hungover, wretched creature shakes and creaks and sweats and has nightmares. And it's always November and it's raining, and it's three o'clock in the morning and there's nowhere to go, and you reach out for a cigarette and smoke and think of all the horrible things you've done in your life, and all the shame you all the shames you endured and suffered, and the shame you gave other people, and the well, all the wrongs you've done other people. I don't know whether alcoholics can put it quite as eloquently as that usually they c They just say, I just stared out of a window for two years nothing and it is, I believe me. Uh, the question of uh being an alcoholic, I'm not quite sure that I am one, But if I'm not one, I'm very near, very right on the edge of being one. Duto what it is no laughing matter. It is not a laughing matter. Uh. Alcoholism is is a dreadful disease. And my sympathy for I believe that it's something like fifteen million Americans alone who are who are alcoholics, and my sympathy for them and my affection for them is profound. They come up to me, uh, you know, as ah as being a representative figure this dreadful disease. And and one of the one of the things they love to do is to tell stories about what they got up to when they were drunk. And I listened and I laugh, and they genuinely found these some of the stories. But it is a tragic disease and a a dreadful one. No, I can't say that I've beaten it, because as Jimmy Breslin, who was a dear friend of mine, wrote me a a short but very eloquent letter once some years ago, when I was in trouble with drink, and he said, don't forget the drink. And he used the an the in the analogy of a boxing match, and that you're always fighting, You're always fighting, and the other fella is booze, and you evade him, you evade him, but one of these days, unless you're careful, he's gonna nail you right on the chin, and down you go. So it's a continual fight. Every day.

00:53:59
Speaker 2: It's a fight.

00:54:00
Speaker 3: When you get through the day and you finally put your head on the pillow when you sleep, you say, I've beaten that boxer phone. And yet another day the other day. And so for the rest of your life you are stuck with that shadowy figure, always always coming at you, always coming at you.

00:54:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's incredible. I love Richard Burton. I think he's actually one of my favorite actors. I remember my my mom and dad saw Lucien Dick in the They must have retained an okay relationship because I think that they did theatrical productions together in the early eighties just before Richard died. Private Lives, I think was the play they were doing. It was Private Lives. I remember my dad said, Yeah, I saw Richard Burton in movies and I thought he was just you know, I wasn't all that impressed with him. I thought it was just one of those, you know, plumby English actors of the fifties and sixties. But then I saw him on stage and that man was a bull. He was so powerful. There was just so much energy coming off of him. Hell yeah, yeah, he said it was amazing.

00:55:00
Speaker 2: Lot of it was gin No. I mean, we both we both have read Hell Raisers, which is a book that we frequently recommend to to folks about really like five dudes, and Liz Taylor features her association hard.

00:55:17
Speaker 1: Living generally English.

00:55:20
Speaker 2: Right, it's yeah, it's Ollie Oliver Reid who Peter O'Toole, Richard Burton and Richard Harris, Richard Harris.

00:55:30
Speaker 1: And Sean Connery and Richard and Michael Kane kind of.

00:55:32
Speaker 2: Make cameos, Yes, they make appearances, but man, yeah, and I think that's when Like I think at one point someone talked about like Liz having a wooden leg because when she got she went out drinking with these guys. It was like they didn't know where she was putting it away because she was such a petite woman. But could like you know, slam them back with the best of them. Yes, yes, Oh did you what did you want to talk about? The crystallized alcohol?

00:55:59
Speaker 1: I M not sure if I remember this.

00:56:02
Speaker 2: Oh well, that was a thing with Richard Burton where they I mean, like Welsh people are built different, like they they they sustain alcohol damage in marvelous ways. He did, and he died at like fifty three. I say, well, but that's what I'm talking about. When at one point they had they did surgery on his back and they found that his body had, for whatever reason, begun crystallizing alcohol into his spine. Oh wow, So like when they went and looked at his back, the vertebrae and all of this were like coated with crystallized alcohol, which is not a thing that I I think I've ever heard before or since actually as a as a thing that can happen to you or a way to live. But yeah, I mean I guess his liver just got tired of it and just started offloading it to his spinal.

00:56:59
Speaker 1: Cal He must have been an excruciating pain, which you might have been I think actually.

00:57:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh yeah, yeah yeah, which he then drank through right, and it was a vicious cycle, you understand.

00:57:11
Speaker 1: Yes, I have a slightly happier story to get us out of this. I actually do find the story very touching. I think hit me, yeah, yeah, unless you have more about Richard Burton's alcoholism or just Dick dick in anyway.

00:57:29
Speaker 2: About dick in any way?

00:57:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, Jordan, his diaries are amazing, Yes they are.

00:57:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, but regale us. Yes.

00:57:37
Speaker 1: The other side of the of the Elizabeth Taylor, Eddie Fisher love Triangles. Debbie Reynolds. She famously said that the two hardest things she ever did were childbirth and making singing.

00:57:48
Speaker 2: In the rain. But just a great quote.

00:57:51
Speaker 1: And this is because she was cast as a dancer in a movie starring and directed by the great Gene Kelly, one of the greatest dances of all time, and she herself didn't know how to dance. Yeah, when she was cast at age nineteen. She had no experience dancing or singing, and Jean Kelly was not happy about this. But enemy of the Pod Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, insisted on casting Debbie Reynolds for reasons that I can only assume more nefarious. Yeah, she was given three months to quote, learn to dance.

00:58:24
Speaker 2: But the musical numbers in this film are hard. Yeah, They're legendarily complex and insane.

00:58:31
Speaker 1: And they were filmed in long takes, so there was really no room for any error here. And Jean Kelly was running the chute like a military campaign. Like Donald O'Connor. I forget who he plays in the movie. He's like the second banana guy. He does the solo number, make him laugh, You know that guy. He had like one hundred and four degree fever when he shot that helly and it was like taken out of bed rest to go do it and then returned to bed rest. So this was not an easy shoot. And Debbie wrote in her memoir, I was dancing eight hours a day, non stop. She was so frustrated. At one point she threw her tap shoes at the mirror in the dance studio, shattering it oh, she would spend all her studio time holding back tears, and then she wrote, one day, I was lying under the piano sobbing, when I heard a voice ask, why are you crying? She replied, I feel like I'm going to die.

00:59:26
Speaker 2: It's so hard. I can't.

00:59:28
Speaker 1: I can't. And this soothing voice gently calmed her down and kind of coaxed her out from under the piano. And she looked up and it was Fred Astare and he admitted to her, you know, her eyes got wide as soon as she saw who it was, and he admitted to her that he often got frustrated himself during rehearsals, and to prove it, he invited her to attend to one that he was about to have later that afternoon for a movie he was working on called Royal Wedding. And she saw how hard he worked and how you know, it wasn't as easy as he made it look on the screen. And she left that day feeling much less alone. And she saw how his hard work paid off and how her hard work was going to pay off too. I love that.

01:00:08
Speaker 2: Isn't that great? It is very cute? And then no one remembered her for her dancing.

01:00:15
Speaker 1: That's that's true. Actually, right, he's not known as a hoofer. Yeah, no, she did it. She did it, damn it.

01:00:24
Speaker 2: That's true, and no one can take that away from her. Yes except me, who's doing it now.

01:00:30
Speaker 1: Speaking of big stars who were reduced to hiding under things during their dark hour, Conin O'Brien talked about how his personal low when he first started his talk show. Reviews were absolutely terrible, and he went on Charlie Rose to be interviewed, and Charlie Rose insisted on reading this savage review from Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales, who was like the biggest TV critic in the country at the time, and a bad review from him could very easily spell the end of your show. And so Conan leaves Charlie Rose's studio, gets in the car back to his own office at thirty Rock. He was so depressed that he just got under his desk. He got back to his office and just hit there until somebody and his staff came in and just saw his legs poking out, and they're like, okay, It's like, yeah, I'm just gonna sit here. I'm just gonna sit here for a while.

01:01:26
Speaker 2: And he did.

01:01:27
Speaker 1: He said that was his personal low.

01:01:29
Speaker 2: Is that move. I'm just gonna just gonna sit here for a while. See what happens. Yeah, the thing.

01:01:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, Oh my god, I just did I just pull a thing reference before you did?

01:01:40
Speaker 2: You did? Yeah? Yeah, yeah. Man. All those pictures of John Carpenter getting his Hollywood Walk of Fame star, Oh my god, dude, you gotta google. No, like the most heartwarming thing. It's like it's Heath David and Kurt Russell and uh one of the effects guys from Greg Nicotero, and they're just lords.

01:02:08
Speaker 1: He's doing ones.

01:02:09
Speaker 2: But like also the other pictures in there are just like it's like Keith David and Kurt Russell like beaming at each other and they're just all, oh my god, it killed me. And I got into this whole thing about like, you know, it just sucks that Kurt Russell's a Republican because and this was like news to people. But no, I think that well, I think that John Carpenter quote that I always go off of is like he's referred to him. He's like stock quote about Kurt Is like he's to the right of Genghis Khan, which is just something I've always taken with me up up up, up up up. How about this one? How about this for you? Uh? Okay, So here's here's it. Here's something funny. We maybe obliquely mention this because we haven't done an episode on Blade Runner, but a big part of Blade Runner lore is that Got was kind of an asshole, and particularly with American crews who were not, you know, serbian as the yeah basically I mean having like unions, and they would be like, yeah, no time for union break, Like we're not doing that. Go away, you lie me, you know, And he gave some interview in the press that was that was like, well, you know, I'm just I just much prefer asking or working with British crews who I'll ask for something and they'll just say yes Governor instead of instead of giving me flack. And so the rest of the crew had t shirts made up that all said yes Governor and started wearing them on set passive aggressively, which I love. But here's I'm now reading it from the other side of the coin. James Cameron, Oh, Jimmy Cams when he was shooting aliens in England at Pinmewood Studios, like the center of British filming. They were these some of the crew members Pinewood Suitio has had a system where you basically had to use their crew members, and James Cameron was like pushing these people to twelve to fourteen hours day and they started clashing with James Cameron and his producer Gayle Ann Heard and Stan Winston both remember on the DVD commentary that actually the leader quote unquote of this quote unquote, Rebellion was the first assistant director. He apparently felt that he could, you know, direct the movie better than James Cameron, who at the time had only done like Kirana Part two and The Terminator, and so he was like outwardly to James Cameron and he would call him governor and roll his eyes. And then that guy was fired because James Cameron doesn't play. What happened to that man, I don't know he was. He's been written out of history.

01:05:06
Speaker 1: One of the bodies in Titanic.

01:05:09
Speaker 2: Yeah maybe no.

01:05:10
Speaker 1: Uh.

01:05:11
Speaker 2: You know what's funny about that movie is that that producer Gayle Anne Herd, who I think was dating Jim at the times as he has he frequently does, she was like a full on, like not a gun nut, but like a gun enthusiast, And so whenever anyone is like handling guns in that movie, that's a woman character who is not as proficient with manipulating a firearm, that's this woman, Gayle Anne Herd's hands. So like anytime there's a close up of like one of the female Space Marines or Ripley like manipulating a handgun, it's probably the producer of this movie, Gayle Ane Herd, who was actually just super into guns and went shooting all the time. La.

01:06:00
Speaker 1: You know the story about Robert Patrick because he was supposed to be a robot and James Cameron's direction was, you know, don't blink. Robots don't blink. Yeah, so Robert Patrick did all this gun training so that he could fire a gun without blinking, which is insane.

01:06:15
Speaker 2: Yeah. I remember one of the first like movie magic books I ever read was like the making of Terminator two, and it is really I mean, just I mean it's bonkers because it's a James Cameron movie, right, and they like blew up all this. They were chasing semi trucks with helicopters down like the La Freeway. But just like how scary Robert Patrick was on set, like he just kind of came on with this like conception of the of the T one thousand is this like very fluid but still kind of formal physicality. And I think he talked about like always wanting his head to move first and then his body to like follow along with it because it because it was how he'd like observed certain Birds of Prey moving, And then talking about how he got super because he knew that he had to run a lot for this movie and end up chasing cars, and he got like super into running and doing that like very distinctive like knife hands sprint that he does through this whole film, and his like walk where the arms are kind of bandied out to the side. But he had he was not really like a known actor, so just coming onto this set in character walking all weird and looking at people really weird and just like actively kind of creeping people out. But what a performance. Guy used to scare the shit out of me as a kid.

01:07:45
Speaker 1: Yes, you've just set me up in such an incredible way that it feels like we plan this well.

01:07:51
Speaker 2: I promise you folks, we didn't. No, No, I'm.

01:07:54
Speaker 1: From Birds of Prey to the birds. Ah ah, yes, we were talked about Grace Kelly earlier. She was famously off for Hitchcock's muse and when she retired from acting to go be a royal hitch needed he needed a new law. I guess Kim Novak wasn't cutting it after Virgo.

01:08:14
Speaker 2: I don't know. I'm not really sure why she.

01:08:15
Speaker 1: Didn't get that vaulted position in his life, but for whatever reason.

01:08:19
Speaker 2: She didn't Chief abuse e Yes.

01:08:22
Speaker 1: So Hitchcock was watching the Today Show one morning in nineteen sixty one when he saw a commercial for a diet soda called Sego starring a beautiful blonde woman named Tippy Hendron. Despite the fact that she had zero acting experience, hitch tracked her down and offered her a seven year exclusive contract. This was after he.

01:08:45
Speaker 2: Made Psycho, so this was he was a big deal.

01:08:47
Speaker 1: And yeah, you'd have our Benchcock Presents was on TV at this time. This would be like if you know Scorsese or somebody like just came out of like got somebody who's just done like a commercial.

01:08:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's horniness.

01:09:00
Speaker 1: Well yeah, certainly, yes, yes, yes, it was very unusual to be offered a seven year.

01:09:05
Speaker 2: Exclusive contract with no acting experience.

01:09:08
Speaker 1: According to Tippy, his mentorship became obsessive.

01:09:12
Speaker 2: He took complete control of her image.

01:09:14
Speaker 1: He dictated her wardrobe, hairstyles, and public appearances, and even had staff follow her to report on her behavior. Her first starring role was in nineteen sixty threes The Birds, and this is where things took a turn.

01:09:29
Speaker 2: I don't know how much you know about this some, but.

01:09:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, the scene where she's in the phone booth and the birds crash into it and break the glass. She got very real cuts and injuries from the shattered class. And another thing that was real the birds in the attic scene at the end of the movie where she's very nearly pecked to death.

01:09:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, she didn't know.

01:09:49
Speaker 1: That at the last minute, real birds were going to be thrown at her.

01:09:53
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:09:54
Speaker 1: So the screams of fear were real, and a lot of the cuts were real as well. Because she was signed to an clusive contract with Hitch. In other words, she was hitched to Hitch.

01:10:04
Speaker 2: Thank you.

01:10:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, she was forced to work with him again. Although maybe given her inexperience, she didn't realize how uniquely horrible this was, but a funny feeling she probably did. She made the psychological thriller Marnie along with Sean Connery. Did you ever see that?

01:10:19
Speaker 2: I've don't seen Marni Now it's good, it's good. Uh.

01:10:22
Speaker 1: While making this movie that she rebuffed Hitchcock's advances because, of course came on all sorts of stories of him being horrible to her in limos.

01:10:30
Speaker 2: I think they like.

01:10:32
Speaker 1: Shared a limo to the set together or something. No, no, don't worry, I'll pick you up. Yeah. Yeah, she turned him down one too many times, and he allegedly vowed to ruin her career. He just stopped casting her, and because she was under contract to him, she had nowhere else to go, so she was effectively blacklisted from major studio work for many, many years. This is horrifying, And we'll come back to Tippy. But speaking of actresses, and I'm pleasant situations with birds, as I so often do, Kigel. Are you familiar with Michelle Pfeiffer's role as Catwoman and Batman Returns?

01:11:08
Speaker 2: Oh? Very much so. We recently saw that in a theater as like a real reissue. Yeah, and holy man, that woman was robbed of an oscar. And I don't know if it's just like you know, Tim Burton like filming her in his like weird Dutch angles and like whatever tone of that movie he told everyone to aim for. But she is like feral in a beautiful, horrifying way. Uh. And there's parts of that movie where she just looks like absolutely out of her mind and like smiling at the camera and stuff, And I'm just like, man, she actually like did deserve more acting recognition for that role. She's just really radiating, just channeling something special. But go on, what were you gonna say?

01:11:58
Speaker 1: Well, that is true. But also there's a scene where Catwoman threatens to swallow the penguin's live bird before releasing it from her mouth.

01:12:05
Speaker 2: That is the worst scene in the movie. That is that is like a series of like awful double entauendres that make no sense. I very much hate it, but continue.

01:12:16
Speaker 1: Tim Burton, who is a totally normal guy, admitted that this scene was done for real. He said, I don't think I've ever been so impressed. She had a live burd in her mouth while the camera was rolling. It was four or five seconds and then she let it fly out. It was before CGI, it was before digital. It was so quick. It seems like it was an effect but it was not. It's is that how COVID nineteen started?

01:12:41
Speaker 2: Like?

01:12:41
Speaker 1: Maybe, Yeah, that's really horrifying.

01:12:44
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, have you ever I think we know I haven't. Have you ever put a live bird in your mouth? No?

01:12:51
Speaker 1: I Joey, you ever?

01:12:53
Speaker 2: Yeah? Do you ever hang around men's locker rooms put a live burden mouth? Have you heard about Sean Young desperately wanting the role of Catwoman? Yes?

01:13:03
Speaker 1: But I love the story and I love how you tell it.

01:13:07
Speaker 2: I love this so much. Yeah. She was so intent on playing this role of cat Woman that not only did she appear on the short lived Joan Rivers Show in character as Catwoman and literally like begged Tim Burton to cast her, but she also stormed her way onto the Warner Brothers studio lot in this homemade catwoman suit and like made her way into an office to like vamp and gyrate all over someone's couch.

01:13:43
Speaker 1: Let me, I thought it was Tim Burton's off I.

01:13:45
Speaker 2: Would Yeah, I want to find this is the exact story? Uh? Was she? Okay? I don't know.

01:13:53
Speaker 1: Something happened to her. I feel like something happened to her. A lot of legal issues. M M yeah, James Wood suit you for harassing him and his then fiance, alleging that, in ambition to other disruptive behavior, Young left a disfigured doll on his doorstep. She denied the allocations.

01:14:08
Speaker 2: Oh that's fine.

01:14:10
Speaker 1: Doing an afterparty for the Oscars. In twenty twelve, she was placed under citizens arrest. It was alleged that she was asked to leave so she didn't have a ticket to enter the Academy Awards. An argument ensued and resulted in Young slapping a security guard.

01:14:23
Speaker 2: The charges were late to drop. Okay, it was executive. It was Warner Brothers executive Mark Canton that he was. He was in his office with Michael Keaton and Sean Jung showed up in his office and like jumped over a couch in her costume, saying, I am catwoman, which you know, maybe she's a method that's unbelievable. I am cat I mean she was in that moment. Yeah, you know who among us?

01:14:58
Speaker 1: Higel, I'm about to tell you a story. I hope to god you've never heard it, because this is the thing of I have twelve pages of these and we're on page like three of everything on here. This is the thing. I'm the most excited to tell you about. I can't wait. Back to Tippy Hendron Higel.

01:15:16
Speaker 2: Are you familiar with the film roar, Yeah, oh, yeah, yes I am, but I don't think our listeners are. I know it because of like sort of the animals of like animal horror movies, like what they call like Nature groes Berserk or like Nature strikes back films. But yeah, tales on that. Yeah, a lot of animals. Yes, Ror is tell the fine folks about Ror Jordan. It is wide.

01:15:40
Speaker 1: They considered to be the most dangerous movie ever made. Conceived by Tippy Hendron and her husband, director Noel Marshall, the film features over one hundred and fifty untrained lions, tigers and other big cats interacting freely with the cast and crew, and I do mean freely. They had the idea in nineteen six nice while filming a movie called Satan's Harvest in most Nice in Mozambique. During the shoot, the couple observed a pride of lions who'd moved into an abandoned house due to rampant poaching, and they were so moved by the plight of the lions they decided to make a film sent around this. This theme of saving Saving the animals.

01:16:24
Speaker 2: Oh Boy.

01:16:28
Speaker 1: Production started when the first script was completed in nineteen seventy, and Tippy and her husband began bringing rescued big cats into their home in California and living with them, believing that living among the animals would just prove their inherently peaceful nature. That's not how it worked out. Took eleven years and resulted in the serious injury of seventy two people. Hendron's daughter Melanie Griffith, yes that one was mauled in the face and nearly lost an eye. Cinematographer Yan Dubant, later the director of Speed and Twister, needed over one hundred stitches after being scalped by a lion. Hendred herself was bitten, clawed, and at one point lifted off the ground by an elephant. I mean that seems whimsical.

01:17:15
Speaker 2: Why did they add an elephant at that point? Didn't they have enough deadly beasts?

01:17:21
Speaker 1: Crew quit repeatedly, and insurance was nearly impossible to secure. Flooding from a dam destroyed much of the set and equipment, and ultimately the budget ballooned to seventeen million dollars. Despite all of this and the extreme danger and complete lack of safety protocols. Tippy and her husband, the aforementioned Noel Marshall, pursued this project obsessively because they wanted to save these animals. Roorr was not initially released in the United States. Instead, in nineteen eighty one, it was released internationally. Despite performing well in Germany and Japan.

01:18:00
Speaker 2: Wow Yeah Say Steady.

01:18:03
Speaker 1: Rohr was a box office failure, grossing two million dollars against its seventeen million dollar budget. Despite this, Hendrid went on to found the Rore Foundation and the Shambala Preserved Sanctuary to house the animals that had appeared in this film. She also wrote a book, The Cats of Shambala in nineteen eighty five about the events that took place during the film's production. It's been described, as I said earlier, as the most dangerous movie ever made and the most expensive home movie ever made, but it's gained a cult following, and in twenty fifteen, thirty four years after the movie's original release, it was released in theaters in the United States by Draft House Films.

01:18:42
Speaker 2: I forgot well. I knew that I knew the broad strokes, but I'd forgotten that Yon Dubant was involved. In this because Yon Dubant.

01:18:51
Speaker 1: It was kind of a dick.

01:18:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, but he's also like he had such a wild career in Hollywood. You have rohor was like one of the first big Hollywood productions he did in nineteen eighty one. But then he did Kojoe Oh wow, because like I guess he wanted to work with animals again. And then he went and did a bunch of stuff for Madonna, The Jewel of the Nile, then more stuff for Madonna, and then Die Hard Baby, then Hunt for Red October basically instinct he was on tails of the Crypt for an episode. Yeah, good guy, Yehan de Bond not a good guy, except for all of the abuse he put Helen Hunt through on the set of Twister. As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information after these messages? Wow wow, all right, what do we got for music?

01:20:00
Speaker 1: How about that I have section here was specifically called things Haigel likes. Let's see, I'll be the judge of that. Hauntings. I have some hauntings. Hauntings. Did you know that while Meatloaf was recording his nineteen seventy seven breakthrough album Bad Out of Hell, go On he swore that he saw ghosts. They appeared to him at the house that was next door to the acclaimed Bearsville studio where he was recording the album with producer Todd Runggrenham songwriter Jim Steinmon. This supposed haunting led to meet Love taking too many sleeping pills one night because he was disturbed by how aggressive the ghosts were, exclaiming that they ripped his blankets off.

01:20:40
Speaker 2: No, his blankies.

01:20:41
Speaker 1: Did you know that?

01:20:42
Speaker 2: No? I didn't. Well, I feel bad for him and his blankies. No, that's embarrassing, especially since like everyone has recorded at that studio, like from British folk singer John Martin to the Replacements go on for their musical hauntings. I thought you were gonna give me something good, like you know, like those Losers and like the nine inch Nails Dorks recording.

01:21:04
Speaker 1: In Sharon Tate's house.

01:21:06
Speaker 2: I know. One was that one.

01:21:09
Speaker 1: David Bowie was recording in Chateau Douville outside of Paris to work on Low in nineteen seventy six is a Low. He wrote, recorded there and lived in the chateau, which he was certain was haunted. He refused to stay in one of the bedrooms because of cold spots and a vague strange feeling.

01:21:27
Speaker 2: You're David Bowie like you're used to that. That's kind of your whole bit, to be honest, and Brian.

01:21:34
Speaker 1: Eno, his associate during the production, swore that somebody shook his shoulders early in the morning, but no one was there, which I choose to believe was Bowie, just like sneaking behind him and then ducking. But yeah, yeah, I.

01:21:48
Speaker 2: Was gonna say it was in Tony Visconti a just desperately trying to get anyone to pay attention to him, just choosing not to see you, That's exactly it. They just like he's like right in front of them, Like, guys, I'm co producing this album. They're like, must be a ghost in here. I'm getting willies, aren't you. Brian? You know that's lame. Give me something else? What do you got?

01:22:14
Speaker 1: Black Sabbath. They're recording Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath. They record settled in the gothic Clearwell Castle, where bands like Deep Purple and Genesis had rehearsed, and when Tonyaomi was scoping out the grounds with Ozzie and Geezer, they found a cloak figure walking around, only to then disappear into thin air, and they talked to the grounds keeper. No, they talked to the groundskeeper formed the band that that was just the castle's ghost. They were clearly spooked out by this mysterious visitor, and they vacated the premises soon after, not before Tony came up with the riff for the title track.

01:22:52
Speaker 2: Oh that's a great song. What pussies though? My god, your old thing is that. It's just so funny to think that, like for all the posturing behind like Black Sabbath, they're just they're just lads. Yeah.

01:23:06
Speaker 1: Did you know the Iron Maiden story which one the Number of the Beast story?

01:23:10
Speaker 2: This is really good. I mean I've seen I've seen the classic albums on it, but what else you got?

01:23:16
Speaker 1: Iron Maiden working on the third album with new singer Bruce Dickinson. When producer Martin Birch was involved in a car accident one night after tracking some of the songs for Number of the Beast, he was mostly okay, but then when he got the bill for the car's damages he saw that the balance was six hundred and sixty six pounds. Yes, he was like, I'm not superstitious, but I asked them very nicely if they could round up to six hundred and sixty seven pounds instead.

01:23:47
Speaker 2: That's funny. Uh, you know, Bruce Dickinson can fly planes and like flies them to their shows. No. I like that, he's like a certified pilot. And also I believe he's like a fencer, like a champion bat I find sir.

01:24:03
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, he's also a gargantuan monty python nerd, to the point where he's like in almost every documentary on him made in the last twenty years.

01:24:12
Speaker 2: That's so funny. I find them so weirdly wholesome, and I like don't actually want to look into it, because I'm sure they're scumbags in different ways. But you know all those eighties videos of them on tour where they're wearing like leg warmers and high tops and they just like run around and jump like kind of feebly. Like I love when they do. Like he does his little jumps and he only gets like a foot off the ground. You're like, oh, a little buddy. But they're also playing in Brazil to like five hundred thousand people who are all screaming the words yep, maiden. I don't know. What do you say about Maiden, great Bam, great great band. Dude's really hard bass lines. You know, he never warms up for shows before playing those. Bruce No, No, Steve Harris, the base who actually who actually writes a lot of those songs.

01:24:56
Speaker 1: I never warmed up for your band.

01:24:57
Speaker 2: Well, that's not something to be proud of, uh, It's it's more of the fact that those Iron Maiden baselines are incredibly he's he's invented the gallop, which is the yeah, eighth, sixteenth and on on. Like flat wound strings, which is another weird, a weird thing for like a metal guy to do.

01:25:20
Speaker 1: But I played flat ones for you.

01:25:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, I like flat ones a lot, do you know that? Like, So, what's interesting about people who do like professional cover bands is that for most of the eras that they should be aping, they should be using flat wound strings, like the Beatles use flat wound strings. Roundbound strings were not really commercially available until the mid to late sixties, and initially there were only some basses that shipped with them, Like you know, when John in Twistle was doing My Generation, when they were recording that with the Who he broke like however many strings before they got the final takedown. But because they didn't sell strings individually, they just had to go keep buying more for the same base, like the same Dan electro bass from the or Eastwood I think it ORNs yeah, but yeah, And so like a lot of the period, like all those canonical recordings that everyone is like trying to play and they're like, well, why doesn't it sound like the Beatles, It's like yeah, because they were using completely different kind of strings. And you know, one of the first people who was like an architect of that, Chris Squire of yes, that makes sense. He was pushing to get more trouble into it and he wanted to see how they could experiment with that, and that's how we got the roundabout bass tone, which is one of the coolest bass bass intros.

01:26:48
Speaker 1: Of all time.

01:26:53
Speaker 2: Uh, that's all I have to say about that.

01:26:56
Speaker 1: He puts a rick just like me. He does in your band.

01:27:00
Speaker 2: This is now a guitar podcast.

01:27:04
Speaker 1: Oh I had speaking of spooky, unsettling things, I had hit me in Rock and Roll the Gimme Shelter session with Mary Clayton.

01:27:11
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, well that's too sad. Yeah, it's just too sad. I mean she actually Mary Clayton has a like a great solo record that I always when people talk about her, I always want to bring up that where she covers Southern Man by Neil Young and it's like devastating. So go check out Mary Clayton's you know, I mean, you can get in, you can say it, you know. She she was called out of bed in the middle of the night for a Rolling Stone session and like certainly Mick Jaggers, you know that like voice crack she hits on that one song as you hear him go.

01:27:48
Speaker 1: Whoo, it's the best part.

01:27:50
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, but she also miscarried that night.

01:28:21
Speaker 1: Wasn't that night. It was like shortly thereafter, okay, but yeah it was.

01:28:26
Speaker 2: It was not that night.

01:28:27
Speaker 1: No, Yeah, they called her up. They were doing the vocal track for Gimme Shelter, and I think it was Sunset Sound in Los Angeles and in October of sixty nine, and they just all of a sudden they thought, oh, wait a minute, it'd be really cool to have a woman sing on the chorus. Mick would say in a two thousand and three interview it would be one of those moments along the lines of I hear a girl on this track get one on the phone, Farmer. The song was being arranged by the great Jack Nietzsch, who was a longtime phil Spector all Sound collaborator, and he suggested Mary Clayton m E R R Y. I that m A R y. She was born on Christmas.

01:29:07
Speaker 2: That's cute. No, I didn't.

01:29:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the Stones would recall her showing up to the studio after midnight in curlers, having been gotten out of bed, and yeah, gets down there and good god, I don't think I've ever heard that isolated. She does a great cover version, if you could call it a cover version of Give Me Shelter or it's just her and it's really good. I used to play that when I would DJ out a lot.

01:29:32
Speaker 2: But my god, yeah, it's haunting. It's one of those I mean, there's there's definitely I'm trying to think of like other instances that I can recall in music where like the backing singer just totally steals it. No, well, I mean peg obviously stealing d Michael McDonald, but no, I was I'm thinking of like where you can hear like somebody injuring their voice, like in the take that they used, I mean twist and shout. Yeah, I you were gonna take it there, that's true.

01:30:01
Speaker 1: Yes, this is he had a cold all day. It was the first album recording session. They only want one day to do it, and John showed up with a cold and these sucking throat drops and drinking milk all day and he saved twist and shout till the very end.

01:30:15
Speaker 2: You're talking about John Fogerty of Creeden's clear Water Revival, he kind of sounds like John Lennon doing twist and shout Fogerty does.

01:30:22
Speaker 1: And then there was some I think it was Harry Nilsson in the seventies when he was in his like really coked out period hanging out with John Lennon.

01:30:29
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, and they had the like who could scream louder and they like left blood on the microphone.

01:30:36
Speaker 1: That is correct.

01:30:37
Speaker 2: Disgusting, yes, yes, yes. Going back to meat Loaf, that's like the thing where he talks about he used to be able to like blow out mixing boards with his voice, which I don't fully know is a thing that you can actually do. Maybe it was back in the day. I don't know. Meatloaf's funny.

01:30:55
Speaker 1: He was one of my first interviews at people, or at least one of the first interviews with people that I cared about. Yeah, and it was over the phone and he answered and he was sick. I think the title of the article ended up being meat loaf as a cold in honor of the Gates alse Frank Sinatra as a gold piece.

01:31:13
Speaker 2: He was like, came on.

01:31:14
Speaker 1: He was like really apologetic, So I hope he could still understand me. I've got you know, I've got to really he's a real rasp in his voice. He said, oh, man, I'm sorry. He said, why are you sorry? You didn't do it in full meat low voice? Or did you? And it was terrifying.

01:31:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, so great. Oh, it's so sad. He uh. He was a bit of a you know, he was a COVID denier and that's essentially killed him. All Right, what else we got?

01:31:43
Speaker 1: Oh, this is kind of an obscure story, but I feel like you would appreciate. I filed this under the things Heigel like section for just audacity, okay, in terms of just just sticking it to the man. The nineteen fifty five.

01:31:58
Speaker 2: Movie Marty star Ernest Borgnine.

01:32:02
Speaker 1: Ernest Borgnine showed up to set for work and nobody had even begun to build the sets. And this was apparently because, according to him, the film was never intended to be shot. The studio conceived of this movie as a tax write off, and they were planning on canceling it and attributing all kinds of miscellaneous expenses to it as a failed.

01:32:21
Speaker 2: Project for tax purposes.

01:32:23
Speaker 1: They were going to producers it basically yeah, but then somebody on staff realized that, no, you didn't. This isn't actually how that worked. The studio couldn't claim a movie as a write off and unless they actually went through with the filming and released it. So they made this movie sort of begrudgingly. This was all according to Ernest borgnine. So they went through this movie and they released it, and it won Best Picture and a Best Actor oscar for urnes borg nine.

01:32:49
Speaker 2: Good for him, I know, I trust Ernest borgnine not to leave me wrong.

01:32:54
Speaker 1: I wonder if that's where where mel Brooks got the uh the story for the producers.

01:32:58
Speaker 2: Maybe it was like an open seat grit and uh well, I mean we've talked about how Hollywood accounting before, right, how there's like all kinds of stuff that the.

01:33:08
Speaker 1: Huge movies that are technically didn't turn a profit.

01:33:11
Speaker 2: Right, so nobody like involved in them at a certain level. Ever gets to see the actual like Return of the Jedi and Spinal Tap and like all of this other stuff. So yeah, oh, it's a fun industry movie magic.

01:33:25
Speaker 1: It's a great mel Brooks story where he spent the fifties like really kind of on top of the world as a one of the main writers on Sid Seizure's really groundbreaking comedy series, Your Show of shows. In that writing room that had like Woody Allen, Neil Simon, I forget there were other Carl Reyner. Yeah, I think Carl Reiner was a too, like legendary comedy writers room. And then at the end of the decade in the late fifties and early sixties is the show ended, his marriage fell apart, and he was I think he moved back given like his family in New York. He really wasn't doing well and he had this passion project, the produce, and he wanted it to be a Broadway show. He wrote it initially as a Broadway show, and of course he took it all over town and everyone was like, are you out of your fine, and he was like having lunch at some show busy tight haunts. Maybe it was Sardi's or one of those types of places, and he was sitting there, you know, kind of just hanging over his plate, really bummed out about how his play kept getting rejected. And Ann Bancroft walked in and he told his friend, you know, in three years, I'm gonna get this thing made. I'm gonna marry her. Yeah Bancroft, I think at that point she had already won the Oscar for America Worker thing, so she was, you know, a very big name. And sure enough, within a couple of years they were married. And he retooled the script as a as a movie script and on a Broadway show, and in nineteen sixty eight it was released to great acclaim. Supposed to be Peter Sellers as the Nazi in it as the Kenneth Mars role. Oh really, Yeah, he didn't get back to him entire Peter was just such a play that he like just kind of basically forgot to say yes to it, and he was like really heartbroken that never worked out for him.

01:35:06
Speaker 2: Was it was like one of his favorite movies of all time? No, yeah, uh what else he Oh, this is crazy.

01:35:15
Speaker 1: I so if that was an instance of studio trying to stick it to the man and failing, this is a truly amazing instance of the man sticking it to the public. Did you know I'd never heard this? Maybe this is old news to everybody that TBS and surely other networks too speed up reruns of Seinfeld and other syndicated shows by seven to nine percent to fit in extra minutes of ad time. I did not know that there are all these YouTube clips of like original broadcasts versus yes broadcast.

01:35:48
Speaker 2: And it is wild how out of sync they were.

01:35:51
Speaker 1: And then there are other things like in twenty sixteen they aired a Christmas story and they sped that up by thirteen point five percent. That's crazy, seen like it would be.

01:36:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, it seems like it would be. Yeah, right, yeah, I know, Yeah it wasn't. Nobody complained.

01:36:07
Speaker 1: I don't know, I'm not I mean apparently not, yeah, because I know they used to do that with songs on the radio and especially like AM radio in the sixties to get more ads in. But yeah, I had no idea that did that with h I mean, if I were Larry David in some days, I think I am, it would really annoy me speeding up the rhythm of the.

01:36:30
Speaker 2: Double some of the jokes.

01:36:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, like that would really screw it up if it was too fast. Yeah, I just thought that was crazy.

01:36:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that well. I think about it with music because like that would just happen as a mistake of like pressing the record, which is why like you know, famous Billy joel One but like famously kind of Blue is like those original pressings were mastered at the wrong speed, so there were always like jazz musicians trying to like learn licks and trying to play along with it and just having to like two down slightly or tune out of the way slightly because it was just an error and how it was pressed. And there's different examples of that that are out there. I don't know. I don't know anyone that were like not like like that became like collector's items because of it. I feel like that's maybe more your purview is the collecting wing of it. No, yeah, nothing I know of. No what else you got?

01:37:25
Speaker 1: Did you know that Brian Cranston of Breaking Bad and Knocked on the Middle Fan was wanted for murder?

01:37:32
Speaker 2: Did not you did?

01:37:34
Speaker 1: Not notice.

01:37:34
Speaker 2: I did you know? You got me?

01:37:36
Speaker 1: So I guess. There was some summer in the seventies when he was a teenager and he and his brother were doing like an easy rider style motorcycle tour across the country, and they settled in Florida for a spell and worked at this restaurant, and the head chef was a very, very mean man. Cranston told Mark Maron in twenty eleven, no matter how nice you may have been to him, he hated and I guess because of this, not surprisingly, a lot of the White staff routinely joked about how they wanted to kill him.

01:38:07
Speaker 2: Cranston would say that was all they talked about.

01:38:10
Speaker 1: But then when this guy wound up murdered, cops had a lot of questions. And unfortunately, right before those guy got murdered, that was the time when the two Cranston brothers decided that they were going to continue on their motorcycle trip and skip down. So this guy wound up dead right after they left. They were high on the suspect list until they were eventually tracked down and cleared.

01:38:36
Speaker 2: Well did he do it?

01:38:37
Speaker 1: I mean, it would account for a lot of the intensity for Walter White.

01:38:40
Speaker 2: I was gonna say, I mean, like, come on, man, he's got to be channeling something.

01:38:44
Speaker 1: I went to see a couple weeks ago with my family at the Palace Hotel. Every weekend, they have this guy, Steve Cohen. He's a magician. They call him a millionaire's magician because he would perform for Warren Buffett and on all these like really rip business pit. He's not dead Warren Buffett, Yeah, that's Jimmy Buffett.

01:39:06
Speaker 2: I thought Warren Buffett just died.

01:39:07
Speaker 1: I mean, unless he like got freaked up by the stock market stuff. I don't think so.

01:39:13
Speaker 2: No, he's still alive, okay.

01:39:15
Speaker 1: And it's cool because it's like old parlor style magic. So this guy only sells, you know, maybe sixty tickets, Like he only has like the first three rows of this room because he wants you to get a clear view of what he's doing. And and he just he does amazing, amazing. I saw him twice, and the second time I saw him, I knew what to look for because it was like the same show. And I still couldn't figure out how he was doing stuff Like he would do things like take a bowler hat just to felt bowler hat and pass it around.

01:39:42
Speaker 2: We could all feel it, and he.

01:39:44
Speaker 1: Set it down on the table in front of him, which was like, you know, very thin legs and a thin top. There was no tablecloth on it, so there's no like hidden there's no way there could have been any kind of hidden contraptions. We handed them the bowler hat back. He set it down on the table. He didn't even remove his hand from as soon as he set it down on the table, he lifted it back up, and there's a brick under it, and.

01:40:06
Speaker 2: We looked at the brick, We looked at the table, we looked at the hat.

01:40:10
Speaker 1: Like I still, I went and saw it again and washed him the entire time because I knew what was coming and I couldn't figure out how he did it. He was absolutely amazing, and at the end of by the show, he basically just starts like freestyle riffing and pointing at people, just calling out random things. Earlier that day, when I went to see him, the front door to my apartment, like the one that leads to the street, had broken, and I was like, really, you know, I was like, oh, I hope somebody fixed that, because somebody could just come in off the street and open the door and come into our hallway. I didn't text anybody. I didn't text my super I probably should have. I didn't say a word about it. He points to me at this magic show and goes, you're worried about the front door of your apartment, and like, did you like did you do it? Like? Did you like it was really scary? Anyway? I alway. I say all this because when I went to see him the second time, Brian Cranston was there, and it was like a small room. It was like a room of like, you know, forty five fifty people. And for one of the tricks, he took Brian Creston's wedding ring and he had this whole bit where he like made it disappear, and then he cut into a lemon which.

01:41:19
Speaker 2: Had like an avocado.

01:41:20
Speaker 1: No, it was like there was a lemon, and then there's maybe like an egg within that, and like a walnut within that. It was like this whole Russian Dolls thing. And finally, in the very end, after cutting into all these items, he got Brian Cranston's wedding ring back.

01:41:34
Speaker 2: Good.

01:41:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, glad he got it back.

01:41:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, it probably wouldn't have been so great. I don't. I don't know how I feel about magic the gathering. No that I'm fine with. I mean like magicians because on one hand, because on one hand, it's like, yeah, you talk about this like when it's done well and in front of you, you're like, holy, you've seen the laws of space and time Ben did directly in front of me, Like this is magnificent. But I also question, you know, like why none of them are successful?

01:42:11
Speaker 1: Well, this guy's very successful.

01:42:13
Speaker 2: No, I mean like other than like yeah, I mean there's like a few random celebrity magicians, but like I don't know, I guess, like also like whither the celebrity music magician man? We ran out of Chris Angels, we ran out of David Blaine's. I guess Blaine's back, though he has like a new serial Blaine's back, a new series on f I think it Blaine is back. I didn't think the name David Blaine would be so comedically rich for you. It's good for what it does for the throat Blaine Blaine. Well.

01:42:43
Speaker 1: On the topic of TV shows, I didn't know this. Did you know that? Author Michael Crichton wrote the script for the hit show Er with the intention of it being made into a movie, and he set up a meeting with Steven Spielberg trying to pitch him the script, and instead all Spielberg wanted to talk to him about was his new novel, Jurassic Park. And that was how that happened.

01:43:07
Speaker 2: That's funny.

01:43:08
Speaker 1: I told you my Jurassic Park stories, right, Yes, that no, But I don't that well, how tragic are they? Oh? No, I mean I I was on the side of them as kids visiting out in Los Angeles. Yeah, And my main memory's going on to the set. It was for the sequels for Lost World, and they had a t rex that just the head and like kind of upper torso in the corner of the sound stage and its mouth was open, did I tell you this? And in the mouth of this t rex were all these styrofoam cups of coffee. It was like a big coffee tray and they're all being held in place by like the teeth. People would just go over there and help themselves to coffee.

01:43:55
Speaker 2: That is actually quite funny, good image. I like that.

01:43:58
Speaker 1: Wasn't there something we.

01:43:59
Speaker 2: Were talking about?

01:43:59
Speaker 1: I don't I it was with you, but we never Jurassic Parks. I don't know what it would have been, where somebody had climbed in like an animatronic creature to fix something and there was some kind of like like they tripped some kind of wire and the mouth of it closed with them in it.

01:44:15
Speaker 2: Oh God, yeah, I don't I can't recall that at the moment either. I don't know, dude. That stuff is like actually really scary, especially when you got back into like the wild FX days when they were just kind of inventing it whole cloth. And I mean, like, I think I talked about this in the Raiders of the Last Arc episode, but like, the guy who did the Nazi head explosion in that movie is a guy named Chris Wailis who also eventually worked on the Fly, and because he was a Cronenberg guy, he was Canadian and he just there's a famous head explosion in one of David Cronenberg's movies and Scanners that has just become like the most widely circulated gift because it's just this epically cinematic and gory head exploded. Guy's head just explodes, and they just did it by clearing the set and then shooting a shotgun at it, which was like also how they did the effect in raisal all starch. They were like, yeah, we're just gonna We're just gonna shoot it. Just like That's why I think I love all that, all that era of effects and stuff so much is because it was just these guys fully being like, yeah, we'll figure something out, and it was like, just shoot it with a gun, you know, so like yeah, like that sounds right. But the one from the one I always like is from Gremlins when he's like Zach asks the effects guy how big the explosion it'll be and the guy was like, oh, I put enough in like not an answer, but is still vaguely sinister. I know.

01:46:00
Speaker 1: I gotta say we started with a Jurassic Park.

01:46:08
Speaker 2: And you can see Dinassus Welcome to Tsic Park and Jeff for Bloomless.

01:46:23
Speaker 1: Well, I think because we came in on Jurassic Park, maybe this is a good note to end on.

01:46:27
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, okay, sure, sure, sure, sure sure?

01:46:30
Speaker 1: Did we give them value for money? Yeah that's about two hour episode.

01:46:33
Speaker 2: We'll see what the reviews say. No, what do I want to say about Jurassic Park?

01:46:38
Speaker 1: Oh? Yeah, please, I know that's one of your favorites.

01:46:40
Speaker 2: We should definitely do that. I know that's a big one for you. Yeah, there's just so much in it. I think I didn't really have much off the top of my head. I wish I had better stories about it. I mean I just kind of always am taking them back a new whenever people reveal, like whenever you learned how much of that film is actually justacticles, because it is, it's always really known as the film that like fully that in like Terminator two and the Abyss were like the ones that really broke like CGI wide and made it. You know, people realize what was possible with it. But so much of that movie is big dinosaur robots, like the one that you saw as a little boy, Jordan.

01:47:22
Speaker 1: There's great pictures of me as a little boy standing in the midst of a decaying rib cage of some large dinosaur. I have pieces of the set. I have like trisera toops, bones made of foam, and oh like weird mossy stuff and some other stuff I took from the set.

01:47:42
Speaker 2: Okay, well, let me see if I can get something from Jurassic Park three from two thousand and one. Why are you talking about SFX going haywire? There are baby Tyrannodons that attack a character at one point, and they the little animatronic robots that they use were actually capable of biting him. And did whoa Jurassic Park three? What a fun movie. That's the movie that has the famous it's like a gotcha gift. Now, It's like Sam Neil's character has a like a nightmare where he wakes up on a plane and he like turns around to the next door passenger and it's like a velociraptor.

01:48:22
Speaker 1: It's like, I just learned a fact about about what I'm so excited. I just acted that, Like literally, it just was up on my screen and I wasn't even trying to read it, but I just saw it.

01:48:37
Speaker 2: Now what you know?

01:48:38
Speaker 1: And The Godfather when when James Cohn as Sonny Corleone goes and beats up the deadbeat husband of his sister who was slapping his sister.

01:48:49
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, and he like bites him on the knuckles and like covers him in trash. Yeah. The greatest fight scenes.

01:48:57
Speaker 1: Yes, apparently in that fight scene, the guy who played was that Carlo, Yeah, Carlo Johnny Russo broke two ribs and cracked an elbow in that fight scene.

01:49:08
Speaker 2: Because James because Khan was just actually beating his ass, actually slamming a garbage can on him. That's incredible. I didn't know that until right now. Oh man, good for him, Good for James con. You know what I watched recently was Thief, the Michael Man movie that he's in. Wow. Yeah, it's funny. It's not, it's not. I don't think it's wonderful, but it's like James Belushi in it in like a serious role, which is really kind of odd to see. But but yeah, it's a good, good movie. All right, James Kahn, everyone.

01:49:44
Speaker 1: Let's get the last word.

01:49:46
Speaker 2: James conn Yeah, he's he's dead. But don't with him because he because we will actually kill you. Okay, Well, I had a really good till I thought that. Yeah, so did I. So did I. I felt like I ran out of steam there. I'm trying to think of what else I can.

01:50:04
Speaker 1: I mean, you you were you were riffing more than I more than I had, so it's it's quite all wow.

01:50:10
Speaker 2: All right, all right, well folks sound off in the comments.

01:50:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, let us know what you think. I had a blast.

01:50:16
Speaker 2: If you hated this, I you know we're going to get back to writing them and doing you know, big boy work at some point, but not this week. Because life is cruel and so meaningless and loves to kick you when you're down.

01:50:35
Speaker 1: This kind of took just as much work as as normal one did. At the end of the day.

01:50:40
Speaker 2: Well, it'll be for you, for you for editing.

01:50:42
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, this will be when all is said and done with the editing. This will take me twice, I'm sure. Well, but I had a lot of fun.

01:50:50
Speaker 2: Good.

01:50:51
Speaker 1: I think this is really and you know what, I've only gone through half my facts, so wow, more, folks, there's plenty more where this came from.

01:50:59
Speaker 2: Yeah or not? And you two can learn facts.

01:51:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, seriously, let us know. I'm interested to hear people are into this. If not, that's okay too. But please, please don't want star reviews. Please, you know what, if you don't like it, leave a five star review and tell us that and that'll we'll never do it again. And I like it, leave a five star review.

01:51:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll get to it. Play me out. I'm playing us out.

01:51:28
Speaker 4: And this has been Jordan's I'm dying here.

01:51:40
Speaker 2: Do you do your tag?

01:51:43
Speaker 1: And you started?

01:51:46
Speaker 2: No, I can't.

01:51:46
Speaker 1: I have to say, okay, well folk, thanks for well Fox, thanks for listening.

01:51:53
Speaker 2: My name is Jordan Round Talk, and I'm Alex Igo you and we'll catch you. Too. Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtogg.

01:52:13
Speaker 1: The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.

01:52:16
Speaker 2: The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtogg and Alex Heigel.

01:52:21
Speaker 1: With original music by step Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.

01:52:24
Speaker 2: If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review.

01:52:27
Speaker 1: For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.