The Planet of the Apes (1968): Everything You Didn't Know

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret history is a little alone, fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows and apes. We are your evolved chumps of esoteric charm. I'm Alex Heigelber and I'm Jordan Roun talking. I'm not going to be able to make it through this episode, and Jordan, today we are celebrating the end of April. Oh my god, upon that doesn't make any sense until you see it spelled out. We share listeners never will Anyway. We're doing the original Planet of the Apes from nineteen sixty eight because there's a new entry in the actually really good rebooted chronology that's coming out this summer. It's really good. Everyone should check it out. You can probably skip the first one actually because Franko's in it and it's not as good. But I think it's three now, two or three now that have come after that are super good. Anyway, you know, I don't know. This episode might get delayed, it might drop next week, in which case, welcome to May. Anyway, Planet of the Apes Whips. It's a hilarious movie, just one of the weirdest and best things to stumble across on cable as a kid. I don't think I ever actually sat down and watched this movie in its entire really until like college, and it was hilarious. But we're watching it this week. I was like, no, this is a good movie. Like it's really well shot and the makeup is still pretty good, which must have really, I mean, I can't stress how much it must have blown people's minds in the sixties. If it like we're looking at it today and we're like, that's not bad. I mean it is, but it's like it's uncanny and accurate enough to achieve the really intended effects anyway, Yeah, I mean I just I my dad or the Simpsons had pretty much already explained everything about this movie to me, from take your stinking pot off me, you damn dirty ape or you maniacs, you blew it up. But it is a foundational and really interesting piece of sci fi, and an equal masterclass in the art of spinning crap off. Even though I still don't understand how it's possible to be beneath the planet of the Apes. Is that a subterranean thing. Yeah, I assumed it was subter apian anyway, Jordan talking about your relationship with Planet of the Apes, Uh, similar to yours.

00:02:29
Speaker 2: But my mom was really into all the Twilight Zone type stuff and all the kind of creepy, weird sci fi things, and so she kind of, if I recall correctly, I think she definitely spoiled the ending of this for me before I actually saw it. But I actually sat down to watch it as a little kid, and my mind was absolutely blown. I thought it was one of the most just deep, incredible cereble works of fiction I'd ever seen. And then over the next couple of years, the humor started to reveal itself to me, probably having watched the Tim Burton movie and being like, oh wait that that wasn't that good? And then The Simpsons of course with Doctor sayis the musical.

00:03:11
Speaker 1: Peak era Simpsons writers loved this movie, Yes, because not just there's obviously like the musical in the one episode, but like they just keep throwing it in. Why do I remember the phrase apes of popping? Yeah, like that rings a bell for some reason. Apes of Wrath too, I think is a Simpsons puns. I'm just like.

00:03:35
Speaker 2: And then I feel like the phrase get your hands off me, damn dirty apes was like one of the things that kids in my playground used to say a lot at recess, and so it sort of took on this hokey kitchy which is fair, But revisiting it for this episode, I feel like I did when I was a kid again, like wait, you're right, this is amazing.

00:03:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it is kind of the bell curve you come around when when you're like in the sixth or if you're a child, you were like, holy shit, this is the best movie I've ever seen, and then you come around to it being hilarious and overblown in all the ways that it is, and then you come back around and be like, this is actually really well shot, and like, you know, Charlton Heston's doing something in it, as is Roddy McDowell and Kim Hunter and doctors Ais.

00:04:22
Speaker 2: But the problem is just the word apes. As we talked about, it's a hilarious word. Oh my god, I was gonna say, there's gonna be a lot of me just laughing at nothing in this episode, because well, the monkeys monkey and Monkey Planet is monkeys plural, isn't funny? Monkey singular is funny to me, Apes, Apes is hilarious.

00:04:44
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, it's gonna be just me giggling an idiot in this episode. So now, I mean, you know what's funny, and I'm just thinking now Simeon isn't really as funny to me. No, truly a mystery. She got a linguist on that you woke up this morning with h much like Paul McCartney I woke up with yesterday in his head. Yeah, from a dream. You woke up with a song today. It's not true.

00:05:04
Speaker 3: I did, I did.

00:05:05
Speaker 1: I woke up this morning, was stuck in the middle with you in my head, and I've been unable to stop singing. Jim's left me. Gorilla is too my right here, I am stucky in the middle with Apes. I don't know what the actually lyrics are. And your apes they all come crawling. Throw you in a net and say chimpanzee, chimpanzee, and there you go. Folks. Well, from the original author's time in one of World War two's less famous atrocities, to the groundbreaking makeup that made all of them go so ape, to the role that Sammy Davis Junior played in queueing the film's producers into a whole new take on their film. Here's everything you didn't know about nineteen sixty eight's Planet of the Apes. It turns out that I was wrong about the French not contributing anything to society beyond w C and possibly as an ede case, the fifth element the cinematic empire, that is apes, and we will probably be referring to it as just apes because it's funnier, was launched by a nineteen sixty three novel called La planet de SiGe or, as it was translated to the UK, Monkey Planet. This franchise would have bombed planet. Yes, it's such a case study in like a correct linguistic foibles, you know, because like, yeah, Monkey Planet, hilarious, Planet of the Apes, gratas.

00:06:50
Speaker 3: That book.

00:06:51
Speaker 1: Monkey Planet was written by Pierre Boule, who also wrote The Bridge over the River Quhi. That's incredible. Which if you paid me one million dollars to guess that the man responsible for Bridge over the River Kuai was also responsible for Monkey Planet, never could have gotten him. Yeah, that just blew my mind. Man Bridge of the River Kui for like zoomers, or we don't have any zoomers who listen to the show is like, you know, one of the more famous World War two movies. That's where you get the dent dent d d d d dun Denton and also like a gripping performance by Sir Alec Guinness a pre obi Wan m HM. Anyway, Bull was a He was trained as an engineer and he worked for the Luxembourg based petrochemical concern sock Finn in what was then known as British Malay collection of states on the Malayan Pleninsula and Singapore. He was like scraping rubber out of trees, and Sockfinn I looked up has their roots in the Belgian Congo, which means they are monsters and their empire is built on blood.

00:07:58
Speaker 2: If there's a country that has another country's name as the prefix, it's probably built French Guiana.

00:08:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, and Belgian and Belgian especially King Leopold's Ghost was a book that I read about that of just like the extensive atrocities they committed.

00:08:13
Speaker 3: In the Name of Rubber.

00:08:16
Speaker 2: One of the less successful U two songs. Come on, give us guess a little bit of it. Come on, I can't sing that high In the name of Rubber.

00:08:27
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, what about it's a beautiful aide. Okay. When WWII A big one broke out, boull enlisted with the French army in Indo, China, and after the German troops occupied France and the French surrendered, he joined the Free French Mission in Singapore. He wrote that he was trained at a place called the Convent, where as he wrote, serious gentlemen taught us the art of blowing up a bridge, attaching exposos to the side of a ship, derailing a train, as well as that of dispatching to the next world as silently as possible. A nighttime guard dispatching to the next world. That's the most French way to describe killing someone that I've ever heard, not a serious people. As a secret agent under the assumed name Peter John Rule Bull helped the resistance movement in China, Burma and French Indo China until in nineteen forty three, So basically two years later he was captured by Vichy Frants loyalists on the Mekon River. Because as a true Frenchman, he caved under interrogation, that's not entirely accurate. His mission was to make contact with. You know, France at the time was split between the VC government who were Nazi loyalists, and the French resistance, and as a member of the resistance, he was hoping to make contact with a resistance sympathetic VCH official and he bet on the wrong one. He was being in terror and he was like, okay, guys, actually here's my thing. I'm a spy and I'm hoping that you are sympathetic to my cause. And they were like, we are not, and sentenced him to a lifetime of work. Aren't we all sentenced to a lifetime of work? Well, not as bad as the Burma railway where Bull worked, because it is perhaps best known by its more whimsical name, the Death River. It was built from nineteen forty to nineteen forty three by Southeast Asians and a smaller group of captured Allied soldiers, and the brutal conditions there resulted in the debts of over ninety thousand civilians along with twelve thousand Allied soldiers. That's horrible and that's what bridgeram Require is about. But Booll's novel and the subsequent film about his experience, was a worldwide hit. Cleaned up at the Oscars, won seven in nineteen fifty seven, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Alec Guinness. Sir Alec Guinness, please excuse me. Boole himself won the award for Best Adapted Screenplay, despite not having written the screenplay and by his own admission, not even speaking English, because the film's actual screenwriters, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era, which is a theme we will return to. This all brings us back, of course, to The Apes. Writing.

00:11:16
Speaker 2: High off the success of River Qui, Boule kept writing, publishing five other novels along with essays and non fiction before he got started.

00:11:24
Speaker 1: On what would become known as Planet of the Apes.

00:11:27
Speaker 2: At least one person has suggested that Boule brought his experience in World War Two into Apes. But from what you've read, Bull, who gave very few interviews in his life which he basically ended as a semi recluse, didn't consider Planet of the Apes a work of pure fiction. Rather, he preferred the term quote social fantasy, another very French term, which placed him on a lineage of satirists like Jonathan Swift, who wrote honest proposal about the.

00:11:55
Speaker 1: Rich eating they're young. Yeah, I mean it was it was about eating. It was about eating Irish children, yeah, oh that was it. Yeah, and making them into handbags and gloves right, and also was not received well. Gulliver's Travels too is kind of a similar. Yeah. I think that that kind of stuff was the was the impetus for Bull doing this, And I've heard multiple people refer to this as like a Gulliver's Travels analog. That's interesting. I never would have made that connection. Huh. Yeah, I mede neither.

00:12:24
Speaker 2: He told a French television program that sought him out and somehow was successful in getting an interview in nineteen seventy. I regard the absurd as an extremely powerful poll of attraction and human activity. Whenever I look around me, I am plunged into an ocean of absurdity. Should get that embroidered on a thrill pillow, Jesus.

00:12:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's not wrong. You know.

00:12:48
Speaker 2: Bull would say that he was inspired to write monkey Planet by watching gorillas at the zoo.

00:12:53
Speaker 1: That is the official translated name. I was impressed by the human like expressions, he said. It led me to dwell upon and imagine the relationships between humans and apes. Boule's novel doesn't actually take place on Earth, however, it's setting is a planet in the system of Beetlejuice, where two travelers find a literal message in a bottle floating in space. They read the manuscript within by a French journalist named Ulysses Moreau, and much of the memorable bits of the film are included here. It's just so funny to me. It's a pistolary, like he went with like the oldest framing device of all time. The characters found someone else's diary. That's really cool.

00:13:34
Speaker 2: There's character plot points with Zerra, Cornelius, doctor Zayas, as well as an archaeological dig in which traces of an earlier human society are discovered, including a human doll that cries Papa, oh oh.

00:13:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, you don't remember that? Oh now I do. Oh that's part of the archaeological dig. Although when I when I when I heard it, I was like, they didn't really get the best toy doll to do that, because it literally just sounds like that's pretty scary though. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a great gotcha moment in the film. Oh doctor.

00:14:14
Speaker 2: It makes me think of about when the guy had discovered the Titanic went diving down there, and at the time they didn't know whether or not there would be human remains down there or not. And so he's in the sub going across you know, featureless sand, and suddenly he sees this face staring back at him through the porthole, and it's a child's porcelain doll, but just like perfectly preserved.

00:14:36
Speaker 1: Oh god, yeah, you told me that. Yeah, yeah, dolls when you don't expect dolls are the scariest kind of dolls. We'll shout out to front of the pod alley. He's frending a broken dolls, eagerly anticipated by Stephen King, friend of the podtya, give it to Stevie. We'll give it to Stephen Stevie King or Steve King. That's what his like campus paper called him, with that famous picture of him looking absolutely like unhinged with the full beard and long hair Steve King. Anyway, at the end of the account, in Boole's original Planet of the Apes book memorably titled Monkey Planet, the man writes that upon his eventual return to Earth, he's greeted at the airport by an ape driving a truck, leading to the horrified twist you have to read it lake Zoribird or you use on Earth on Earth in the future maybe. And then the final twist is that the people reading the letter are chimps themselves, so we hear the chimps. The readers of the book are chimps. Well, no, the couple reading the letter are chimps. Oh okay. The novel ends with the double twist of the guy in the who wrote the account ending up on Ape Earth, and then the people reading his account in a spaceship are also apes, so it's like a double ape Jeopardy kind of situation.

00:16:04
Speaker 2: That's like might Shyamalan would like go walk into the ocean? If you heard that, that was like, that's that's too many twists.

00:16:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a little too many, and.

00:16:13
Speaker 2: So many twists that it doesn't register as a twist. That's what happens. If you twist too many times, you're right back where you started. It's like going three sixty. This is the largest difference between the book and the nineteen sixty eight movie. Ironically, though Tim Burton's adaptation was closer to the books ending than the one Charlton Heston started, how does that one end?

00:16:34
Speaker 1: I forget Abraham Lincoln, your love Jesus of course at the Lincoln Memorial. Oh my god, that's right, that's right, that's right. God, that movie is so bad. They really thought they had something, they thought they were cooking. But on the other hand, could it be good? I mean, everybody who's an ape is amazing. It's just that it hangs on Wahlberg, you know, and he can't summon the manic energy of Heston in that movie. His like a version of intensity is to just look like sleepier and a little bit more angry. Just so funny because he literally blinded a man in his youth. Oh yeah, that's a PSA and everyone h and he is trying to get that expunge from his record so that he can become a sheriff's deputy in the Greater Boston area. Yeah, in market market. Yeah, it's funny because that movie has a stacked apes cast. It's like Helena Bonham, Carter is Zerra, Michael Clarke Duncan is the Gorilla General, Tim Roth is the chimp bad guy, and they're all so good just hanging it on, uh, hanging it on market. Mark was a bad idea anyway, I do you think it could have been saved?

00:17:48
Speaker 2: Who would you have cast in the the Tim Burton Planet of the Apes to make it.

00:17:52
Speaker 1: Not suck as the man you know who? I instantly thought Kanu was Nick Cage, but also good. Oh yeah, Cage would have been good. He would have brought the requisite level of insanity. Yeah. Yeah, two thousand and one era Burton. I could have seen if he'd gone back to the world with Johnny Depp. Oh yeah. My problem with Marky Mark is that I around the same time he had that movie rock Star that came out, and I've like blended the two in my head. So I just think that he's an ape singing hair metal.

00:18:28
Speaker 2: Singing hair metal like kind of like slouching around with like a guitar strap to his back on Planet of the Apes and which is kind of a much better movie in my head.

00:18:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like he goes there and teaches them to rock. Yeah, it's like School of Rock meets Planet of the Apes verbal contract. There's a brilliant idea, and we're gonna make it. I'm not sure where Boole's stock was. Six years after River Kwai came out, but it was apparently high enough that Monkey Planet was optioned before publication by producer and former Hollywood power publicist Arthur P. Jacobs. He was actually Marilyn Monroe's publicist right before she died.

00:19:05
Speaker 2: I mean, for our purposes, he's going to talk like the cigar shopping executive.

00:19:08
Speaker 1: Oh he will, He very much will. Funnily enough, Jacobs was so focused on family friendly movies that he'd made Doctor Doolittle prior to this with Rex Harrison, that he sold the rights to Midnight Cowboy because he didn't want to make a Let's just say he uses the worst term for gay people in the one book or the one interview I read, let's say flick about Urban Decake. Give me more animals, give me more apes. I want another movie where the guy talks to the animals. Well, this next graph is even more funny than that voice. He said. It started in Paris in nineteen sixty three. Two primary sources for this is The Wonderful Planet of the Apes Revisited and the Behind the Planet of the Apes documentary, which you can find on Internet archive, hosted by Roddy McDowell. Jacob said, I was looking from A and I would meet with various literary agents. Asked what he was looking for, he mentioned something like King Kong, which is again the cigar shopping executive meeting like a Parisian bistro, being like, I need a King Kong pick? What do you beget? It has gotten me a slush pile. One agent, while pitching a different client, told Jacobs, speaking of King Kong, I've got a thing here and it's so far out. I don't think you can make it. It can't be filmed. How can you make talking apes believable? Who actually didn't like his own novel very much. He called it second tier. But I guess when you're ranking your own work behind Bridge on the River Khy, that's fair. Jacobs immediately embarked on getting the film rolling. He passed copies of the novel version of Monkey Planet to MGM, Paramount Pictures, and Marlon Brando, offering him the role that Charlton Heston would eventually land with a groveling letter that Brando never answered. Jacobs, even with the X mile of having a Warner Brothers studio artist, draft up some concept art and send it to Brando. After the initial letter and Brando was so like, no, I'm very invested in this high calorie diet of mine.

00:21:16
Speaker 3: It was really bad.

00:21:18
Speaker 1: That was a good brand though, simply something he would have done. The I mean, what was that island of Doctor Moreau? Like maybe it was later.

00:21:25
Speaker 2: I guess that was later enough that he was like, all right, fine, yeah, what was he doing?

00:21:30
Speaker 1: I mean this was this is fat Brando era, right, because that's why they have to shoot around him in Apocalypse Now.

00:21:36
Speaker 2: Paclos Now was seventy nine. This was like the weird mid period between On the Waterfront and The Godfather when he was doing like, wasn't he like Julius Caesar.

00:21:47
Speaker 1: Or something in the sixties? He was in like a bunch.

00:21:49
Speaker 2: Of what I believe to be bad sixties movies.

00:21:54
Speaker 1: Well, Paul Newman was another early candidate for the lead, and aside from those two, they were also thinking of Steve Queen, who would have been good, Rob Taylor, and George Peppard who I don't know who that is.

00:22:06
Speaker 2: George Papard He is the male lead in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Did you know that Marlon Brando was Zappatta the Mexican Resistance.

00:22:16
Speaker 1: In a horrifying fake nose in brown face and brown face, and they did something to his eyes. I don't know what they did to his eyes? What have you done to his eyes? Rosner's baby?

00:22:28
Speaker 3: Uh?

00:22:29
Speaker 1: What was I gonna say?

00:22:30
Speaker 3: Oh?

00:22:30
Speaker 1: He has that in common with Charlton Heston, because Charlton Heston made a touch of evil with Orson Wells where they put him in brown face. Oh yeah, Anyway, I've also heard that insanely they were courting Jack Lemon, which I guess he has like a scrawny kind of everyman appealed to him, but.

00:22:47
Speaker 2: Hey, get your goddamn hands off me, damn daddy as Yeah, that's.

00:22:52
Speaker 1: How Yeah, and Rock Hudson. They also suggested Ursula Andress as Lady Ape. The most unsettling thing about this movie to me is like being attracted to the ape. Yeah, like the sexual tension between Taylor and Zero, which is amplified dramatically in the Tim Burton one. One of the ideas for the sequels Treatments was that they were going to have like a half a half human thing, and then they were like, wait, that implies beast reality directly. We scrapped it. Well, is that the same.

00:23:23
Speaker 2: Deal with Avatar? Let's go down like movies that have like interspecies.

00:23:28
Speaker 1: Uh, well, Avatar, I'm not sure that it counts because their human consciousness projected into like lab grown beings. I think I think they're cloned or vet grown movies with you're talking inner species. Yeah, oh god, the fly. Oh okay, that's certainly a union of sorts. Uh. I'm not going to keep talking about this. This is weird Superman Superman. I mean, I guess none of the studios wanted this movie. Jacobs did. Yeah, okay, that one I would accept. Yeah, what would their love child be? Half fish half man? But which half roll of dice?

00:24:12
Speaker 3: Baby?

00:24:13
Speaker 1: I guess that's my question is like, how does it work when you with mermaids, Like are they locked into fish bottom human half? Or could you end up with fish top human bottom? It's hustle Miss Piggy and Kermit the frog. Oh yeah, man, what is it? But they have kids, right? Yeah, well at least in in uh muppets Christmas Carol. Yeah, and they're frogs. Tiny Tim is a frog. He's not a horrific They just split the difference like some of them, some of them frogs. Yeah, I'm about to write a letter. I mean there's Shrek too. Oh yeah, the donkey dragon abominations. Yeah, those actually are horrifying and accurate. Uh. Anyway, none of the studios wanted it, and Jacobs did get as far as negotiations with but they bulked at the budget and put the project and turn around. Paramount also stalled out on the money end of things, and United Artists felt that the novel was impossible to translate. They were talking to Fritz Lang, who famously directed Metropolis, about this, but he was deemed a hard sell for the studios. Eventually they attached Pink Panther director Blake Edwards' names to it, and with that Warner Brothers was on board. I mean, were they going to try to play it for laughs?

00:25:28
Speaker 2: Would they have had like a Peter Seller's ulf who just like bubbles his way through an ape civilization.

00:25:33
Speaker 1: Or I don't think so. I think like an early concern for all of them was that this would just be laughed at. So they were like trying to play it as po faced as possible, like at every stretch like they initially if you see the old initial like the test footage that they shot of it with Edward G. Robinson as doctor zais he's like dressed in a suit, and they were quickly like no, no, no, give them like Roman togas or whatever, like neighbor suits or whatever they're actually wearing. They were like, we cannot have them wearing actual human clothes. Arthur Jacobs sent a letter to his French lit agent buddy because this guy had been getting antsy, and was like, I can't hold the rights I can't have to give you this exclusivity for much longer, and told him that Shirley McClain was going to star because she had been in one of Jacob's previous films, and ultimately she would not star in Planet of the Apes, but Jacobs had already secured a crucial presence for the film by that time. Rod Serling, baby, I always forget that he was a WWII paratrooper.

00:26:35
Speaker 2: Whoa can you imagine like him and Kurt Vonnegut like at some officers bar swapping human horror stories that yeah, chain smoking.

00:26:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh god, that would be so depressing actually, because Vonnie was deeply haunted by it. I assume Surling may have been when he was sober well.

00:26:56
Speaker 2: I don't know if Surling was a pow like Vonnagut was because it wasn't Slater based on his own like being caught in Dressden during the fire bombs.

00:27:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, Serling parlayed a bunch of disparate TV and film writing gigs into his own show, The Twilight Zone, which you may have heard of. It was launched in nineteen fifty nine and became a hit. Scooped up a Peabody Award and fort Writer's Guild Awards during its run. Shortly before his death in nineteen seventy five. According to Planet of the Apes Revisited, Serling explained, I first became involved with Planet of the Apes about ten years ago, so sixty five, although he funnily enough said it was through a production company called King Brothers and Curling Ads. They mostly did Indian elephant pictures shot for about a dollar eighty. I have no idea what that phrase means, so he must have gotten confused. I just thought that was funny. I don't know what Indian elephant pictures were. I guess that's a film where you just get an Indian elephant and go from there. But regardless of who he was approached by, and he did a whole treatment for it, he was called by Blake Edwards, who said not to worry about the money, as the film was going to be a big one.

00:28:10
Speaker 2: Serling honed in on the fact that Bull had not written a sci fi book per se. Serling said in nineteen seventy two, as talented and creative a man as Boll is, he does not have the deafness of a science fiction writer. Boull's book was prolonged allegory about morality more than it was a stunning science fiction piece, but it contained within its structure a walloping science fiction idea.

00:28:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was interesting to me to learn that one of Serling's early episodes of The Twilight Zone, called I Shot an Arrow into the Air, is based around a group of astronauts who turn on each other after crash landing on a planet that in the end is revealed to be Earth. Oh yeah, that's right. They're just like outside Vegas, Like they literally see like a highway sign that says Vegas or Vegas. I think at the end that's like the big horrifying moment. But I don't know, Maybe it was self plagiarism gone on there.

00:29:02
Speaker 2: But in his initial version of the adaptation, Serling went a little too far. He would later admit as much, saying, my earliest version of the script featured an ape city much like New York. Of course that was much too expensive to do, he continued. The script was very long, and I think the estimate of the production people was that if they had to shoot that script, it would have cost no less than one hundred million dollars by the time they created an eight population, clothed it, and build a city for them to live in. That's like between a quarter and a half a billion dollars today.

00:29:35
Speaker 1: Yeah. Soling was also concerned about.

00:29:37
Speaker 2: Adapting the tone of bulls essentially satirical novel into a serious sci fi film. Now, as soon as you put a shirt and tie on an orangutang, he says, you invite laughter. This is true, but our story is serious satire. Soling would eventually produce thirty drafts of the Planet of the Ape screenplay. This is according to the documentary behind the Planet of the Ape thirty drafts. Wow, would you classify Planet of the Apes as satire?

00:30:06
Speaker 1: You know, I personally wouldn't see why it kind of I mean, you know, we'll touch later on Sammy Davis Junior's interpretation but I think maybe unintentionally, like most of the creatives in it are people who were products of the fifties system, and it just took so long to get made that they accidentally dropped something into nineteen sixty eight, the most turbulent year of a famously turbulent decade. But like Bull wrote it in he was like a you know, greatest generation. Arthur P. Jacobs was like coming I mentioned earlier, he was like a Marilyn Monroe era publicist. Heston was certainly more famous, I think, as a leading man through their early part of the decade, and then they just wound up by sort of coincidence, making this thing that was a great allegory about class differences and class structures, which they even not within the apes, because there's a point where like Cornelius and Zero are talking and they're like, oh, you know how orangutanks hate chimps or whatever, so like, there is a bit of that that is textual. But I think just by virtue of taking so long to get this thing made, it transcended the generation that created it and achieved unintentional resonance with the people who actually saw it.

00:31:23
Speaker 2: That makes sense, Well said, yeah, I mean, I wonder if it's almost like George Romira doing another Living Dead, which became an allegory for racism as well, and somebody although I guess he probably intentionally made some of those scenes look like the you know, the he.

00:31:36
Speaker 1: Did He did not. He did not. The character was not black in the screenplay, and he just cast for the best actor he was able to find. And then later he started saying, oh yeah, oh yeah, it was a civil rights thing because George, if anything, knew what he was savvy about what that would do.

00:31:57
Speaker 4: We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. The plan of the Apes movie, as you said, part of the long gestation period, was Warner Brothers, after years of development, killed the whole thing in January nineteen sixty five. After taking a long hard look at the projected budget, which was nearly seven point five million, which is i'd say about close to like seventy five million today. Blake Edwards departed and producer Arthur Jacobs was back at square one.

00:32:39
Speaker 1: But Jacobs, he was a tenacious bastard.

00:32:41
Speaker 2: He never gave up, and one of his first moves was to send Rod Serlings draft to the book's author Pierre Boole. Bill did not like the It was Earth All Along ending, also known as one of the greatest film twists of all time.

00:32:57
Speaker 1: The man who couldn't keep his twist straight in the book version hated one of the best twist endings ever. Okay, French Yeah Mule felt that it cheapened the story, saying that it served as quote temptation from the devil. What does it even mean? I have no idea?

00:33:19
Speaker 2: French Man producer Arthur Jacobs, however, didn't care and didn't ask Boule.

00:33:25
Speaker 1: To write a new version of the script to his own novel. And he's just funny. Charlton Heston talks about like the tremendous hustle that Jacobs had as a producer. He was just like, they don't want it. I'm taking it over here, Like Bull doesn't want a new screenplay, Great, I'm gonna go lock down. Heston like he was just constant. He really believed in this thing, and he was right.

00:33:45
Speaker 2: He took the script over to Charleston Heston and attempted to woo him to star as the astronaut initially called Thomas and later renamed Taylor and Charlton. Heston me, what where do you start with him? I mean, he started as a stage actor. You'd become a huge name in splashy period dramas like ben Her, The Ten Commandments, and The Warlord, where he eventually worked with the eventual director of Planet of the Apes Franklin J.

00:34:09
Speaker 1: Schnaffner Schafnaffner shaff Schnaffer. Yeah, you know, I kind of had a negative opinion of Chuck Heston before this. I kind of thought he was like a because I only ever knew him from being an NRA advocate. But he's like quite delightful in the documentary and the book. He kept extensive journals which are written in very erudite, funny ways, and he really took care of the other people on the set, as we'll talk about. But so I'm like, yeah, good on you, Chuck.

00:34:42
Speaker 2: And yeah, like you said, he speaks very admirably of producer Arthur Jacobs. He says in the book Planet of the Apes Revisited.

00:34:48
Speaker 1: That he didn't even know how Jacobs found him quote, because I usually didn't accept submissions other than those accompanied by firm fully funded offers, which of course.

00:34:58
Speaker 2: He was not in the position to make at that point. Hessen would eventually inc a deal for a quarter of a million dollars, which again in nineteen sixty seven was nothing to sneeze at, and ten percent of the box office. There it is, is that for just this movie or for the whole franchise.

00:35:15
Speaker 1: I don't think it could be in the franchise because he he only came back for two on the condition that he would it would be his last one, but still ten percent of the gross of this movie and sixty sixty eight would have been a chunk of change. It's like coming back to alec Innes. It's funny because he thought Star Wars was gonna be nothing, so he didn't. He like just took He took like a lower scale in exchange for I think merchandise rather than back end, and just like lived out the rest of his life on the strength of that decision.

00:35:44
Speaker 2: So all of this was still taking place over months without any real development in terms of actually getting this thing made at a studio. Charlton Hesson developed a running gag with Jacobs, who would call and say that the project had been killed at MGM, but he was taking it back to Warner who'd previously killed it, because they have people over there. This has been taking so long that the turnover rate of executives at all these studios was total.

00:36:06
Speaker 1: Hessen has he writes about it in the or he I think he writes about in his journal what he's like. Jacobs had calls me up and he's like, well, it's killed in Fox, but I'm going to take it over to you United Artists, and Heston would finish his sentence because they have new people over there. Director Franklin J.

00:36:27
Speaker 2: Schaffner would say, it seemed to me a fascinating project which would never get made, So when Arthur said would you do it, it was easy to say yes. Two years later, Arthur called me up and said, we have enough money to do a makeup test.

00:36:40
Speaker 1: It took him two years to get enough money to just do a makeup test. Yeah, I mean this was true. Fox executive Richard Zanek had wisely honed in on the fact that the movie would be made or broken by the makeup or ape up situation, and eventually Jacobs and the rest of his crew. Associate producer Mort Abrahams, which is such a funny Hollywood guy name, which is constantly begging for money from him, and they eventually got together around seventy five hundred for a makeup screen test shot on thirty five millimeter in Fox's lot in early nineteen sixty four. This featured an more elaborate and therefore ultimately unused EPE makeup, starring Edward G. Robinson as Zayas, along with James Brolin as Cornelius and Kim Taylor, who would play Zero Edwige. Robinson was so taken aback by the makeup process and also being half dead, that he was like, I don't want to do this, and he was replaced later in production by Maurice Evans Ebrogie.

00:37:44
Speaker 2: Robinson's best known to me for Looney Tunes, basically because he was he in the original scarface or something. He was like an ottle gangster movie actor in the thirties and forties.

00:37:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I don't know much about him, but he was basically like mar Heart will not take it. It's probably fair. Actually. The screen test did reveal some shortcomings with the initial makeup design, but it did show that the makeup would hold up under film lights and that the actors' voices would be unaffected. Fox's response was once again to back out, and Jacobs resumed his grind. He hired another writer, Charles Eastman, to punch up some scenes, and the forty pages that he's been produced were deemed unusable, and then they turned back to writer Michael Wilson, who, as I mentioned earlier, had been blacklisted as a communist during Joseph McCarthy's Red Scare campaign and brought that experience into like the trial scenes for example, oh wow, it was his way of commenting on that. Yeah, He'd done uncredited rewrites on Bridge over the Requi Lawrence of Arabia and born an Oscar for a Place in the Sun. So then Jacob's associated producer, the aforementioned mort Abrahams explained that production continued to eke money out of Fox like a couple grand at a time to keep refining the makeup design Jacob's associate producer, the afore mentioned mort Abrahams, explained that production continued to eke money out of Fox like a grand at a time to keep refining the makeup designs, and ultimately they made one last Hail Mary pitch. They went back to Dick Xanik at Fox, who immediately forbade them from bringing up Apes, and then undeterred, they bluffed their way into a meeting with a presentation of how well these different sci fi films have been doing at the box office, and Xanik said, come back in four weeks to see if this is still like a trend that's continuing at the box office. He actually said in their meeting, I give you three minutes, and this is the last time, because I'm really bored with it. So they came back and with the box office trend continuing apace, and he finally greenlit the film at Fox with a provision that they could bring it to around five million dollars as its budget.

00:39:48
Speaker 2: Production designer William Kreeber was tasked with creating the literal titular planet.

00:39:53
Speaker 1: Which planet was that Haigo monkey planet.

00:39:57
Speaker 2: He've worked on a number of sci fi properties on Tea like Lost in Space, Voys to the Bottom of the Sea, and The Time Tunnel.

00:40:05
Speaker 1: It would eventually go on to the big.

00:40:06
Speaker 2: Screen with The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno Incredible Movies both. His biggest task was to whittle the sets down from Serling's proposed.

00:40:17
Speaker 1: Ape City to the film's eventual look. He and associate producer More Abraham poured through architectural books and stumbled on the Spanish architect Gouty and his churches, which had nature inspired forms a sensibility. They combined with.

00:40:33
Speaker 2: The real life rock cut architecture of Cappadocia in central Turkey that dated back to the first century AD.

00:40:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really crazy. Like if you look up pictures of this region of Turkey and it's like it looks like the planet of the Apes. They're just these kind of like I don't want to say crude because they were building, like they had like full buildings and churches and stuff, but they're just hewn out of rock.

00:40:54
Speaker 2: I mean for a production that's trying to keep an eye on its budget, using as a design of inspiration Goudy, the guy who designed the church that took something like one hundred and something years to build in Barcelona. That's the grout A Familia.

00:41:09
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe isn't the ones you gold to go? Well, where do you explain how they got around that? Jordan? Okay, all right.

00:41:18
Speaker 2: Having arrived at a design theme, they decided to speck it out. Wood was initially considered, but that was costly, so they decided on polyarthane foam, which was cheaper and lighter. Head of studio construction Ivan Martin explained to American Cinematographer magazine in nineteen sixty eight the material is NKC coorophoam, a combination of resin and a catalyst. When these are fired under pressure from a gun, the mix rises like bread dough. Then the heat quickly dissipates, and within ten minutes it's cold and solid. Using Creeper's designs, they designed the city with thin iron rods, which they'd cover with cardboard and craft paper. They'd spray the whole thing and peel off the paper, leave them with structures to paint and dress. Not unlike I'm getting paper mache vibes here.

00:42:05
Speaker 1: Basically, yeah, like crude children structures which then they'd paint and they go ye and make look like rock. The opening sequence of the movie was filmed near Lake Powell, Arizona, and cut together with a man made pool that was actually reused from Arthur Jacob's previous production Doctor Doolittle. All I wonder if they used any like animals or anything from Doctor Doolittle. Maybe some horses, oh maybe, Yeah, And they also filmed at the waterfall at the Fox Studio a lot for the sand in which Charlton Heston is being chased by mounted apes. That's correct.

00:42:45
Speaker 2: They literally just grew a field of corn on the Fox Ranch studios.

00:42:48
Speaker 1: It's so funny. In the movie they talk about like, yeah, we needed to be like about six feet high, and they like they grew a field of corn with like fertilizer and water, and it actually went up to eight feet tall. And they're like, uh, what do we do? And I forget if it was the director or the or zanak, but he was like, cut it down to six feet. So they grew and trimmed an entire field of corn on the Fox back lot for this.

00:43:17
Speaker 2: To me, the Fox back lot, which was this huge expanse of land I think out by Malibu, was to me best known as the where they shot some of the exteriors for mash and I'm sure many other things, which casting a Sundance Kid, some old Tarzan movies from the thirties. Yeah, I guess those are the big ones. And of course this brings us to the film's final beach scene, which was filmed on a stretch of California Sea coast between Malibu and Axnard, with one hundred and thirty foot cliffs. It was so inaccessible that the cast crew, film equipment, and yes, even the horses had to be lowered in by.

00:43:58
Speaker 1: Helicopter and mules. They took a lot of mules out there. The remains of the Statue of Liberty were shot in a secluded cove on the far eastern end of Westward Beach in Malibu, between Zuma Beaches and Point Doom. And that's also where the end of Barton Fink and whatever happened to Baby Jane was filmed, as well as bits of airplane. I believe that's a storied location. Yeah, weird energy.

00:44:23
Speaker 2: In that location, costumes were coming together thanks to the awesomely named Morton Hawk, who quickly abandoned the idea of having the apes dressed in suits or dresses because that just would have been hilarious. He suggested grouping the apes by clothing color instead, chimps and green orangutangs in brownish orange, and gorillas and black. Associate producer Morton Abraham were called Bill. Must have submitted fifty to seventy five drawings. Thankfully, he was working on these designs as the set was still coming together, which helped him kind of craft the colors of the outfits to the colors and textures of the set.

00:45:03
Speaker 1: Yes, the real star of this department was John Chambers, ultimately the first person ever awarded a special Oscar just for makeup. Chambers was a jewelry designer and carpenter before he joined the army and wound up as a dental technician. While enlisted, he developed a new line of adhesives and rubber compounds, which ultimately ended up in the service of creating prosthetic devices for those wounded in war. Haunted by the cost of dealing so intimately with another person's tragedy, he turned to the television industry for a respite, which was an error. It was in this capacity that he first worked with Heston, transforming him into the Beast for a Shirley Temple production of Beauty and the Beast. Just imagine craggy like, lantern jawed Chuck Heston romancing sort of Shirley Temple gives me a deep chill. Chambers also worked in a huge swath of the fifties and sixties sci fi boom on TV Outer Limit. He crafted Spock's ears on Star Trek, whoa worked on The Munsters, Lost in Space, The Invaders, and Rod Serling's Night Gallery. My favorite quote in this piece is that he was set to go to London and research the ape makeup that Stanley Kubrick was using to film two thousand and one, A Space Odyssey. Though Kubrick backed out of the arrangement, he was famously weird and secretive and concerned that this might have been a conflict of interest. Chambers, for his part, responded thusly, I backed out of the whole idea as a personal affront. I'm an Irishman, and I said, anytime an Englishman can teach me anything, it's going to be a cold day in hell. Chambers was tackling the ape makeup from an unusual if iconic source, Jack Dawn's Cowardly Lion makeup for Bert Lair and Wizard of Oz, which allowed Lair to still make his trademark comical facial expression based on how the appliance was mounted to his face. Chambers said, to arrive at our final concept, we turned to sculpturing. We would take a base human head in plast and then in clay model. On this head are ape variations. We came up with how things looked like the Neanderthal man and so forth, which we discarded. The concepts were too ambiguous. We needed the pleasantness yet the strength of the animal without being too grotesque. The set designer in the documentary says that one day he came into the makeup department and they had just a live chimp there hanging out to model it on. Chambers' practical concerns for the makeup were twofold. One that the mask wouldn't muffle the actors' voices, which meant using material light enough to let it escape from under the makeup, and two that the makeup's lips were synchronized with the actors, so they had to glue the inside of the processes directly to their lips and jaw muscles so that the outside of the mask would wrinkle and crease realistically. And then they had to make the whole thing visually appealing as well. Chambers said that they had to modify the sort of wrinkle structure that go into apes faces to make them not just look like horrifying the age humans, and the fact that their nostril, their nose structure looked like giant slits in the middle of their face, so seeing that enlarged to a talking human scale would have been similarly horrifying. So they small and smallish. They smallish to them down Jesus.

00:48:15
Speaker 3: I mean, I.

00:48:15
Speaker 2: Wonder if there was any considerations to the fact that, you know, you were paying top dollar for decent level stars, you didn't want to completely obscure their faces entirely.

00:48:27
Speaker 1: Yeah. One of the funniest bits in the documentary was them talking about how like they quickly learned that you couldn't keep your face still in a scene, like if the camera was on you. They would kind of have to be using constantly, like moving their face around in these like weird over exaggerated contortions so that that would translate through the makeup and the makeup wouldn't just look like a still static mask. So like Roddy McDowell and Kim Hunter talk about just like making these comical faces under eth all the makeup and then when it translates through the makeup, it just happens to look like expressions of interest or what have you. And they eventually landed on a multi piece latex appliance for the forehead nose, mouth, and chin, and then they coated with they plastered the whole thing together. They made individual molds of the various parts of each lead actor's face and built multiple latex appliances from them. And this is really the big revolution that was taking place in makeup around this time. It Dick Smith was doing this with Little Big Man, where instead of just doing these big, one piece appliances, the solution was to do many small pieces that were individually placed according to like facial muscles, so that you could get as much individual movement out of it. And now they just do it in a computer. They couldn't use the same ones twice because the liquid latex bonded to the foam rubber underside of it, and that tore easily and was damaged easily. And the groups of apes in the film, each group of apes in the film's makeup was designed to highlight character traits. The chimps were supposed to look sympathetic and kind of cherubic. The gorilla's makeup was actually they made the gorillas look meaner than they do in real life. And the orangutangs had this naturally, as in the real animal have this kind of aristocratic bearing actors came to the makeup trailer before dawn and had the makeup appliances placed over their faces, covered in a cream inside to protect them from the spirit gum that glued these things to the actors. Because the spirit gum was so concentrated at this point, was like both abrasive to sensitive skin and would like the fumes would like get them, you know, somewhat high as they were working on it. Once the appliance was in place, Chambers used grease paint to blend the mask with the actor's skin and applied the wig, which was a set of side burns on the face and a bald cap with a wig glued to it over their natural hair. They then got rubber ears and false teeth, and then their natural teeth were painted black so they wouldn't show up on camera. Given the amount of apes on the film, which included like up to two hundred for some group scenes, Chambers whittled down the total amount of time to apply the makeup from six hours to a slightly more reasonable three three and a half. Frequently, in the run up to this movie was crowed that they spent like a million dollars on makeup alone, but Abraham said it was closer to half that. So it's like five million today. Yeah, I was gonna say, still an egregious amount of money for monkey makeup. At this point in the production, they only had Charlton heston lockdown. Jeez. So all this time developing this makeup and they had no idea who they were going to put it on. Essentially, yeah, great.

00:51:45
Speaker 2: They filled the role of Zira with Kim Hunter, who'd had a promising career in Hollywood starring opposite Marlon Brando in the Broadway and feature film version of a street car name Desire before being.

00:51:56
Speaker 1: Blacklisted by McCarthy running theme.

00:51:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, producer Arthur Jacobs actually helped get her off the blacklist through some weird back channels.

00:52:05
Speaker 1: Do you have any further info on that. She has this long anecdote in the book about the films where she basically says like Jacobs got a call from someone that was like, if you cast Kim Hunter, you'll never work in this industry again, like trying to threaten him out of casting her and keep her on the blacklist, And they eventually got into some kind of like pseudo extortion scheme where they like found the master keeper of the Blacklist, and the guy was like, you have to pay me two hundred dollars to find out the reason you're on this And it just turned into this whole like byzantine. This is like a page long story in the book. It's like the most Kim Hunter talks. And it was this whole byzantine thing that took place over like phone calls and letters and this whole like shadowy, weird thing where this guy was trying to get money out of them to like pull her off the Blacklist or even reveal the reason that she'd been blacklisted in the first place. And she wound up off it and acting in this movie. And what a hell of a career. You go from freaking opposite Brando in Streetcar to Monkey Makeup. You got a claw your way back from the Blacklist somehow.

00:53:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't think I realized it was an actual literal list that was kept by a presumably a guy.

00:53:18
Speaker 1: I mean, it has to be locked in McCarthy's, Like it was like locked in McCarthy's cupboard somewhere, and this guy just found it and was like, I can squeeze two hundred dollars out of these Hollywood roots got.

00:53:30
Speaker 2: Kim Hunter had not read Bull's original book when she was cast, and ultimately did not, hoping to avoid picking up anything in the book that wouldn't appear on screen, which, as we discussed earlier, it was a lot.

00:53:42
Speaker 1: Roddy McDowell was cast next. Everybody loves Roddy McDowell.

00:53:45
Speaker 2: Good friend of Elizabeth Taylor and certain circle of Hollywood women. He was famous for throwing dinner parties, and after he died, his very famous bathroom in his home was placed in a museum.

00:54:00
Speaker 1: Yeah. I just remember him from Fright Night, the eighties movie where he plays like he plays like a horror movie presenter who mass grades is a vampire hunter, and then they enlist him to be an actual vampire hunter. He's great in it anyway.

00:54:14
Speaker 2: Yes, the Hollywood History Museum at the Max Factor Studio is preserved for future generations to enjoy. You can use Roddy McDowell's bathroom.

00:54:26
Speaker 1: I enjoyed this. I went, I paid money to go there. I was gonna say, you've got I try, Yes, I have. It's very good anyway.

00:54:34
Speaker 2: Roddy McDowell was cast as Zero's fiance Cornelius.

00:54:38
Speaker 1: Incidentally no one in production cared.

00:54:41
Speaker 2: Whether the apes would have consistent accents or not. It was just so burnt out on the makeup. But like a talk over, you want, I don't. Just let's just get this gone. Ask me about the accents now. Frank Schaffner and I talked about it an ape with an English accent for about thirty seconds. This is Roddy McDowell talking, and we thought, no, no, this is more. Abraham's associate producer, Martin Abraham, said, Frank Schafter and I talked about an ape with an English accent for about thirty seconds, and we thought, no, Roddy McDowell would be so good, and nobody's going to pay any attention to the accent.

00:55:21
Speaker 1: An ape with an English accent is pretty hilarious. It is naturally funny. It seems like it should have been like a bigger cornerstone of British comedy. Like their whole thing was cross dressing. But they really could have gotten so much more mileage out of species dressing. Species dressing, yeah, ape dressing. I was trying to make a drag ape thing but it didn't really work, so just move on. Oh yeah, I don't know who they went who they were looking for. After Edward g. Robinson was like, I will literally die if you put me in this makeup for an entire film shooting. Oh god. And then he clung on for like another twenty years. But they landed Maurice Evans, another British guy who became an American citizen right as World War Two was hopping up, and then he started appearing in plays and TV roles throughout the fifties. I don't know anything else about this guy. I mean, this is making me think of in the Wizard of Oz the Tin Man, when they almost killed Buddy EPs and the original tin Man. Oh yeah, by just painting him with actual silver paint. Yeah, that just like coated his lungs and he was like, oh, I'm gonna die, I will die. Put me in an oxygen tent. Yeah. And then not only did they almost kill him, they took his role away and learned from their mistake and gave Ray Bulger I think no he was yah, Yeah, gave the new guy a less deadly makeup treatment. I actually I did Maurice Evans dirty here. He Oh he wasn't bewitched, playing a character named Maurice. Uh. But he had done a bunch of stuff in the old vic. He was like peers with Olivier. Oh he's in Rosemary's Baby. Oh yeah, he's like one of the neighbor he's one of the good neighbors. No good for you, Mary Sevans, I was not familiar with your game.

00:57:07
Speaker 2: Getting back to the tin Man for a minute, the part actually went to Jack Haley, not Roy Bulger. And that's interesting to me because Jack Hayley's son, Jack Hayley Junior, married Liza Minnelli, who's Judy Garland's daughter. So the daughter of Dorothy and the daughter of the tin Man got married in real life for like ninety days in the studio fifty four era.

00:57:28
Speaker 1: Is that weird? Interesting? I think it's smacks of like arranged marriage, which I sort of hate. But sure, trauma bonding, Yeah, that's more likely explanation.

00:57:40
Speaker 2: Oh sorry, they lasted from seventy four to seventy nine. I take it back in Liza and Liza realm. That's a long marriage.

00:57:48
Speaker 1: Oh well, hell are Oh?

00:57:50
Speaker 2: The ape actors, that's another inherently funny term, found themselves in these similar straits of not being able to figure out how to play a humanoid ape. McDowell said he based some of his eight Movements on Groucho Marx and took it to Kim Hunter. They also took a trip to the Zoo, which they found very quickly was not that helpful.

00:58:14
Speaker 1: Mcdalell said, the characters we were playing were much more evolved than the ones you see in the zoo. Yeah, they talk. That's why I hit upon the idea of the sort of crouch and using the knees. It's very, very tiring to stand that way. This next part kills me because, oh you take this well. Poor Kim Hunter did not have a good time making this movie. McDowell thought he would be affected because he was slightly laustrophobic. He said he didn't even like the idea of having a pillow over his face, so he was unsure of how you cope with the makeup. But he got to the point where you could just sleep through the whole thing, while Kim Hunter had to take a valium to sit through it. And similarly, they had different reactions the first time they appeared on set in makeup. Mort Abraham said that McDowell came onto set and just acted like a chin for fifteen minutes, letting his arms dangle at his sides and scratching his armpits. He put his tongue underneath his upper lip and started making jabbering noises while jumping with two feet. Meanwhile, Kim Hunter approached mort Abraham's on the set and broke down in tears in his arms for ten minutes.

00:59:16
Speaker 3: Which.

00:59:19
Speaker 1: Which Abraham said, pretty much ruined the makeup. Yeah, poor Kim Hunter is just like she talks about like having like ego death because in this specific moment, she was walking with another actress and when Abraham's greeted her, he was like, hey, I'm sorry, I don't know which one of you is Kim Hunter, and she just like broke down into tears at the enormity of that statement. And then later would have the like she would like go to her trailer and have these like horrifying existential moments where she was like starting to she would dream that she was an ape. It's just like, come on, lady. The making of this seems like a French existentialist novel, especially the outside parts where they were just like out in the middle of Arizona. It is like one hundred and ten degrees, not much interesting about Linda Harrison, who plays the human Lady Nova. Might not be surprising for you to learn that she was Richard Zane's then girlfriend, and he was the head of Fox at the time, and she was cast at his suggestion. They shot and subsequently cut a scene though, in which she was revealed to be pregnant by Taylor, and then they cut that out of fear that they were pushing things too far. They were like, wow, we've already got an eight movie. That'll be you know, thinly veiled allegory for racism in class in America. Let's keep abortion out of it. Kim Hunter remembers the following about Harrison. I remember her in relation to the valume I used to take to relax because of the makeup. She asked what my strength was. It was five milligrams or whatever, and she said, oh my god, that little I never go to sleep without ten at least, I guess when you're sleeping next to Dick xannit. They got married. Good for them? How long? Nine years? Oh it's okay, okay, what else? Did she even do something about Batman? Okay? Oh?

01:01:09
Speaker 2: She was a cheer She was cheerleader number two on the Batman series. So yes, technically something with Batman.

01:01:18
Speaker 1: Man banging Dick Xanik only gets you two roles in Fox movies.

01:01:22
Speaker 2: Oh, she was woman in cart in Tim Burton's remake of Planet of the Apes.

01:01:26
Speaker 1: Okay, okay. Oh she was in Cocoon and Cocoon, the return Cocoon harder, A good day to Cocoon, Back in the Cocoon, back in the Cocuon. Yeah, I feel like we should start using beneath the as the secret construction Sister Act two, beneath the habit, beneath the Planet of the Sister Act, anyway, beneath the Immediately, the film immediately got behind beneath the Diety. As you meditate on that, We'll be right back with more too much information.

01:02:11
Speaker 3: After these messages, the.

01:02:23
Speaker 1: Film immediately got behind schedule on its first day of shooting, which was at the Grand Canyon and the desert surrounding Page Arizona, because a Heston was the only person quite sensibly pushing for beards on the Astronaut and they're woken up to indicate the passage of time, and they had not packed beards, even though he drew his own and b all the ape makeup had been left in Phoenix, where they landed before taking a puddle jumper to Page, so then they had to charter a separate plane to take them from Page to Phoenix to pick up the makeup that they had left behind and then go back to Page. The makeup became like an army that they had to feed throughout the entire shoot. I mentioned earlier that they were up to two hundred apes that needed makeup in some of these different group scenes, and there was an eighty person strong team dedicated to maintaining the makeup, appliances, hair and wardrobe, which actually caused a rippled delay through Hollywood as other productions couldn't hire qualified makeup artists because everyone else was working on apes. The makeup was put above virtually everything else, including the actors. Actors had to use cigarette holders and subsisted on liquid diets through a straw, and when they did eat solid food, they had to eat staring at themselves in a mirror so they could guide the food past the appliance and into their mouth.

01:03:42
Speaker 2: That's the most horrifying part of this entire ordeal that you've described as this watching yourself intently eat.

01:03:48
Speaker 1: Yeah. As an Ape. Yeah, as an ape. Yeah, the other Kim Hunter had Ego death. The early Astronaut sequences were shot around Lake Polo on the Colorado River in Utah and Arizona, a spot that NASA, along with nearby Glen Canyon, as the closest representation of the lunar surface that could be found on Earth, which should interest you as a space guy. I was gonna say very much so, although I mean, yeah, there's a lot of rocks here. Eh oh works like yeah, I mean it's either this or the what's the famous one in Utah. It's like a red red rocks thing that always stands in for Mars. Oh yeah, I forget what it's called. I know what you mean. Apes was also the first time that the government allowed anything to be shot near Glen Canyon Dam, which supplied power to most of the Southwest. It was desolate and extremely hot. Jeff Burton, who played the astronaut Dodge, fainted at one point, and given these circumstances, it may shock you to learn that the mummified corpse of the dead astronaut that they find in stasis was a real woman and not a model. Heston later quipped, it has to be the only seventy year old woman who ever played an astronaut. Paus for applause. Yeah. Uh. They got into an early stalemate with Fox over the amount of time time that director Franklin J. Shaffner was spending shooting the landscape there. Like basically Zanak was like, I will not give you another day to shoot this landscape, and they just kept begging, we need more shots of the landscape because they just wanted to showcase that and really build up to the discovery of the apes. And that opening scene is incredible. There's this amazing moment where they're hiking over a horizon and they get the lens flare from the setting sun is actually like a halo effect around one of the actors, and the camera follows him in such a way that the Lenz flair also follows with him and he remains enclosed in it. Whether it was luck or intentional, it's one of the more incredible shots I've seen because you can also do lens flares digitally now as really fail Sun what's his name, Oh J. J. Abrams eagerly reminds us every time he gets behind a camera. He's a fail Sun. He's a famous Coal was like an exec or something, and he's not a fail siun. He's made tremendously financially successful properties. I just think is a hack. They also ran into, let's say, a cultural issue with rounding up extras from Page. The problem was that all of the women of the nearby town were concerned about leaving their homes to act in the movie while their Native American housekeepers were in their houses. One of them finally said, you don't understand, mister Abraham's because you've never been around Indians. You just can't trust these people as far as you can throw them. This woman went into an explanation of Indians, and I thought to myself, I'm in Mississippi. In nineteen thirty five, Producer MORET. Abrahams remembered, you can't walk around Page without seeing Indians. They live all over the place. It was originally Indian Land, but the people of Page had this terribly racist attitude. Great grim, Yeah, I thought we did escape it fitting for that production, I guess, though I know right now. Yeah.

01:06:54
Speaker 2: Eventually getting over that with some creative scheduling, they moved on to battling the oppressive heat faced by the actors in makeup was Charlton Heston helped by requesting a helicopter for the cast to get back and forth from the Fox Ranch to Arizona as ahead of the Screen Actors Guild at the time.

01:07:12
Speaker 1: Wow.

01:07:13
Speaker 2: Charlton Heston was also able to push the studio to pay the actors for time they spent in the makeup chair, not just for shooting hours.

01:07:21
Speaker 1: Why is it interesting that they used to like they would consider your day that start and end in front of the camera, and even if you were doing three hours in a makeup chair, they were or an hour and a half to remove it afterwards, they were like nope. And I mean Chuck is also he's pretty self aggrandizing, as you would expect from someone who played Moses, but he suggests that it was the first time that this that he was like, this film was instrumental in getting that changed, So good on him.

01:07:50
Speaker 2: I mean, that's just gotta be wild being an actor on the set with the head of the Screen Actors Guild, Like.

01:07:55
Speaker 1: I know, right, like nice, yeah, kick back, hang.

01:08:00
Speaker 2: Out craft surfaces a little longer than I maybe ordinarily would have. They're also constantly revising the actor's technique under the makeup. Kim Hunter remembers director Frank Schaffner after seeing some dailies, telling them, You've really got to keep those facial muscles moving. Otherwise, whenever the camera's on you and you're absolutely immobile or at ease listening as people do without moving a muscle, it looks like a mask when the camera is on you. You've got to be conscious of keeping it moving. Roddy McDowell would, when the shoot moved to the Fox Studios, sometimes get driven home with this full makeup on, obviously scaring the other drivers out of their minds.

01:08:39
Speaker 1: I think Abraham says in the documentary that a bunch of the Gorilla actors did that once too, where they were just like they were literally driving, and there was four of them in like an Oldsmobile driving down Pch. It must have been really one of the joys of being on this movie, just tripping out people in your ape makeup. Roddy McDowell also snuck onto the stage where jew Andrews was shooting The movie Star and crawled into her dressing room on all fours, dressed as an ape, scaring the hell out of her. That's amazing. Only Rody McDow cal pulled that off. Yeah, can you Oh my god, I would have lost my If it was like a mid sixties and a chimp crawled into my dressing room, I probably would have shot him. Maybe that was why Charlton Heston got involved in the NRA A protection against apes. He glimpsed the future and was deeply worried by what glimpsed back. I gotta do something about these apes. Do you remember the VH one, like one hundred and eight shocking Moments of Rock and Roll when it was like the body Count cop Killer coming out and they just kept running that clip of Heston reading the lyrics out loud, it being like, die die Die, Die, Die, Die Die pig die. I was trying to remember, like why I had that in my head. It was absolutely from that yep yep yep.

01:09:58
Speaker 3: Uh.

01:09:58
Speaker 1: As you note, somewhat creepily, the actors on the set began flocking to their own respective ape groups age groups. I don't know if that was an intentional pun or an actual typo Charlton Heston said, in a sort of unfortunate choice of words, it was an instinctive segregation on set. Not only would the apes eat together, but the chimpanzees ate with the chimpanzees, and the gorillas ate with the gorillas. The orangutanks also ate with the orangutangs, and the humans we'd eat off by themselves. It was quite spooky. A contested bit of the film.

01:10:37
Speaker 2: Is shot at Taylor's trial, where the orangutanks make the see here Speak No Evil signs, which was a spur of the moment bit of onset improv Some people felt that it derailed the otherwise serious tone of the film, but Dick Xanik and Arthur Jacobs, also known as the Guys who held the purse strings for this movie, both battled for its inclusion. Kim Hunt and Roddy McDowell, however, hated it, and Charlton Heston also wasn't a fan, but he caved to the test audiences who loved the bit.

01:11:07
Speaker 1: What do you think. I think it's funny. I mean, they might linger on it for a beat or two too long, but it is funny. It's like probably the purest moment of comedy, intentional comedy. It is the most the purest moment of intentional comedy in the film. I think it's fine.

01:11:26
Speaker 2: No m you disagree, considering this whole movie is veering way too close to you know, comedy at all times.

01:11:35
Speaker 1: I think you got to really commit to the bit and keep it straight faced. Yeah, I see that. I do see that. A test audience has loved it, though, so you know, what are you gonna do? The people have spoken, spoken like a true cigar chopping executive apes was important to remember that it was a total inversion of Heston's image at the time he's playing these you know, with that jaw in that barrel chest. He was always playing leaders and heroes, and in this movie he's just absolutely bodied by ape after ape after ape. He would later remember, I didn't realize until we got into it that almost throughout the whole picture people were chasing me or throwing things at me, or hitting me with sticks, or hosing me with water, or pushing me around or tying me up. I was constantly being mistreated. I had done a lot of pictures on horses driven chariots, part of the Red Sea, a horse or a chariot, and you're an important person here I'm being chased by monkeys, for God's sakes, And believe me, even rubber rocks hurt Tah. In his journal, he notes his stunt double on the film, guy named Joe Cannet, after a long day of this treatment, quipped to him, you know, Chuck, I remember when we used to win these fights.

01:12:47
Speaker 2: Oh man, that's les like a cut line from Once upon a Time in Hollywood.

01:12:52
Speaker 1: That's good. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. And in the ultimate indignity, they made little flesh looking booties for Heston to wear while running around the set and dirt paths because his character was ostensibly barefoot. And he actually got the flu from the sort of what we mentioned on the thing of the kind of constant yin yang of being outside and boiling heat and then like in an air condition setting, and he got the flu right before he was supposed to film the damn dirty ape line. And that's why his voice sounds absolutely like shot. And it's not just that he's like putting his full chest of like disgust and bile into it. It's that his voice was like physically run ragged. He also what's also really funny to me, what this film historian points out in the documentary is that this was like the first serious film that had apes in it since like King Kong and Mighty Joe Young because like, once they had developed the gorilla suit, it quickly became just an object of comedy, like Benny Hill running around a gorilla suit, and like all these b movies that were made, like Gorilla at Large, which weirdly enough starred Raymond Burr Ann Bancroft. So this movie was really, you know, quintessential in restoring cinematic dignity to the mighty ape.

01:14:12
Speaker 2: Raymond Burr as in Perry Mason, I guess he kind of seems.

01:14:16
Speaker 1: Like seems like he track down an ape.

01:14:20
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm incapable of determining whether or not a movie with a gorilla and it is supposed to be a comedy.

01:14:25
Speaker 1: Slee Arvin was in it, so was Lee Cobb who Lee J. Cobb was in on the Waterfront, And oh he originated the role of Willie Lowman. That's why I know that name the.

01:14:40
Speaker 2: Prestige drama to gorilla movie pipeline, I know.

01:14:43
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, And Cameron Mitchell had appeared in the movie adaptation of Death of a Salesman and Bancroft, of course, went on to win an Academy Award for Miracle Worker. The Gorilla was played by George Barrows, who was acting a gorilla suit specialist. You can believe it or not. He often is this is this This is the first draft of his wiki article. He often wore a gorilla suit for his film roles. Excluding his gorilla roles, Barrows usually played bit parts in films and was rarely credited for his work. Oh, he built his own gorilla suit for Gorilla at Large.

01:15:21
Speaker 2: That's how to make sure. That's how to future proof yourself. Build your own gorilla suit.

01:15:28
Speaker 1: He also played a gorilla in an episode of The Incredible Hulk. Yeah, Oh my God. Gorilla in the movie Hillbillys in a Haunted Place, Baby gorilla in a Baby, the gorilla in The Man from Uncle Hill, Gorilla in the Beverly Hills I'm Not Done. A gorilla in The Beverly Hills Billies, a gorilla in The Adams Family something, a character called Monstro, the godzilla in the nineteen sixty six film The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini.

01:15:55
Speaker 2: Oh, that's a classic beach party movie. Yeah, that's the last of the Aipe beach party films. Yeah, it seems like that's when he really doubled down on the gorilla thing.

01:16:03
Speaker 1: I mean, wouldn't you. I sure would. You're known as the gorilla guys. Get me, the gorilla guy. I've had enough with your cheap, second string non union gorillas.

01:16:17
Speaker 3: Get me.

01:16:17
Speaker 1: George Barrows. A gorilla shaped phone lights up in his house where he's been sitting. He's been sitting motionless, like like Puddy and Seinfeld, just like alone and motionless in his apartment. The ape phone lights up, and he turns toward it, and he's like, at last a reason.

01:16:34
Speaker 2: He's in the entire gorilla suit except for the head. Yeah, pulls the loaded gun out of his mouth. I'm sure he was a lovely man.

01:16:43
Speaker 1: Ah, what sound does the gorilla phone make? You're not going to get me to do a monkey impression on this, although it is well. I'll talk about that later. There were a few different versions of the Statue of Liberty scene being bandied around. Apparently quite a few people involved in production thought that Taylor should have been wounded by the Apes in a final confrontation and just die in front of the Statue of Liberty after his big moment, which I think would have enhanced the film like a peta. Yeah, yeah, just it'd be better if he was cradled by an ape in front of the statue liberty zero. Yeah, yes, actually that kind of I agree with you. That's a better ending. Come on. It's funny because Heston refers to the He refers to it as the speech that I wrote and actually had to battle for the use of God to stay in there. He made an edge case that it wasn't being used as the profanity damn, but as his character Taylor literally imploring God to damn all of humanity to hell. I mentioned Heston's journal earlier and it is so hilarious. He describes the weather one morning thusly, the fog didn't creep in on little cat feet. It squatted sullenly on the sand all morning. That sounds like something out of a good day for banana fish or something like aw. Yeah. In the documentary Behind the Planet of the Apes, we see how the shot of the half buried statue was achieved. They basically just blended a matte painting with the existing rock structures for the far shots, but they also wanted to have an anticipatory shot that would be seen from the POV of the statue, essentially as Taylor and Nova approach on horseback. So what they did there was just build a seventy foot scaffold. Again, this is over the beach and the cliffs and the ocean, and then they built a half scale paper mache model of the statue of Liberty's head and just shot the camera angled downwards above it. I think it was Jacobs who said in the documentary he was like, we built this whole thing in my first ad. Or the cematography guy was like, I'm nearing seventy I'm not getting up on that thing. And then like three other people refused to do it, so it was just came down to Frank Schaffner and I think Dick Jacob's on top of this seventy foot scaffold. Our man Jerry gold Smith turned into Score planned into the Apes. Score is pretty standard orchestral stuff, big orchestral things inspired by like Stravinsky and bar Talk, but it's notable for its use of bizarre percussion instruments. They used like metal mixing bowls and lots of different ethnic percussion liberally treated with echoplex. You can hear this best during the chase scenes. The chase scene early on where it's like peak bomb, like all these different, very weird percussions stuff. And that was because they had a guy named Emil Richards who is like one of the most legendary percussionists of time. I guess he played with Charles Mingus and George Shearing. He toured with George Harrison, recorded with Frank Sinatra, Frank Zappa, Doris Day, Judy Garland, Steely Dan, and Sarah Vaughan. And this is what's really interesting. He was interested in pitched percussion, and so he subsequently spent time with Harry Parch, who is this insane outsider figure in twentieth century music. Parts was concerned with working outside of the Western tempered scale, which music theory wont. Alex's music theory wont corner. The way that there are standard eight tone scale works is by squashing the frequency ratios that naturally occur with certain frequencies, right, like they're in non tempered tuning, they're even ratios, right, And then going back to Pythagoras, he invented this tuning system where the intervals between the frequencies are made uneven, they're like three to two instead of So what that essentially does is cram too many notes into the seven tones. Of the major scale, the route through seven and then the octave, and so a bunch of different guys from Harry parts on were like, no, that's not the way they should sound. And that's what just intonation is is a tuning system in which you get an instrument and adjust its mechanisms to be able to play outside of this tempered scale. And on the guitar you have to move the frets around. On a piano, you have to retune it. You can technically do it on a fretless instrument, like you could technically play with just intonation on a fretless instrument, but you Harry Partsch and early experiments with this just had to build their own instruments. Parch had this one thing build out of like trash and tuned bits of metal that could play a scale of forty three tones. And he was also homeless for most of his life. He would literally hobo around America with his collection of instructions for how to build his instruments and how to maintain these systems, and Emil Richards just hung out with this guy. Richard's other credits include the bongos on the theme song for Mission Impossible. He finger snapped on the Adams Family theme, and that is him playing xylophone in the theme to The Simpsons. I just love that. I love how much work and varied experience that these session guys could get in their careers. Some of the ape sounds that you hear in the score are played by a Brazilian instrument called a kuka, which is a pitch drum that has like a rod basically inserted through the bottom and up into the backside of the drumhead. And by pushing on this rod and rubbing the drumhead, you can create these weird pitch variances in the tone of the drum. And the way it's used in Brazilian music is to as percussively, and you can hear it American is just can best hear it in Me and Julio down by the schoolyard. So all of the little in the background of me and Julio are this instrument, the kuika, and they used it in Planet of the Apes to make like ape pooting sound effects that they mix into the chase scene. Anyway, Alex's sound theory corner over.

01:22:43
Speaker 2: Your interpretation of a Quico is so much better than Me and Julio down by the school yard.

01:22:49
Speaker 1: I probably just gonna leave it with that. There's a really funny there's a great live Miles set at Isle of Wight. It was filmed really beautifully and it's with like a combination of the Bitches Brew and some of the other bands that Miles had around the time. It's chick Corea, Jack Johnett, Keith Jarrett, Dave Holland is on bass. Gary Bart is playing soprano sax an airto Morieira, who is a percussionist with Return to Forever actually his wife saying on the return of the Forever some of the Return to Forever stuff. Is playing a kuika at one point and it looks it's like you kind of have to like fist it because like the drum is, it's hollow on its bottom, and that's where this rod gets inserted, so you have like a wet rag to or something to like scrape along the drumhead as you're like rhythmically sort of penetrating this thing. It's deeply bizarre and he is heavily on acid in that performance. It's really a funny thing to watch. There's different close up of him where he's clearly like watching things that are not actually there. Great performance, everyone look up Miles Live at the Isle of Wight.

01:24:06
Speaker 2: As the actors prepared for the tedious task of looping, which is re recording dialogue filmed live that was deemed unsuitable in the final print, they were all surprised to learn that the ape makeup actually hadn't stifled that much of their dialogue after all, though the few lines they did have to redom meant they had to partially reape up again in order to make sure their voice would sound consistent. Actually, Charlton Hessen and the astronauts were the ones who had to do the most post production dubbing, because, as Hesson himself contends, Apes was the first movie to use radio mics, and the quality of the new technology wasn't good enough. One other dubbing story, the actor who played Julius Buck Cartillian actually wound up having the dub his entire role over again, which sucks.

01:24:50
Speaker 1: He the ape who's smoking a cigar? Oh oh yeah, yeah.

01:24:53
Speaker 2: He had the dubb his entire role over again because the studio had over dubbed him with five or six other actors, decided none of them worked and went back to Buck.

01:25:02
Speaker 1: Why did they do that. I guess they found him but intelligible or like something. I mean, they wanted to redub his whole performance, which happens, like Mee. Gibson's whole performance in the first Mad Max is overdubbed by an American guy. I didn't know that. It's just funny to me that they did this like four or five times, and they were like, yeah, we can't find anything better. Get Buck to go it and redo his entire part that we surely had to race by this time. When the film was released in the spring of nineteen sixty eight, it immediately became a hit. Pauline Kale called it quote one of the most entertaining science fiction fantasies to ever come out of Hollywood in her New Yorker review.

01:25:38
Speaker 2: And Roger Ebert gave it three out of four stars, calling it very understated review much better than I expected it to be. It is quickly paced, completely entertaining, and the philosophical pretensions don't get in the way.

01:25:52
Speaker 1: That was what an early review sixty eight. If you get along he's been when he was at that, he was at the Sun Times, then wow.

01:25:58
Speaker 2: Audiences agreed with Rout. The film was a box office hit, earning a lifetime domestic gross of thirty three point three million dollars, and was nominated for two Oscars Best Costume and Best Score, aside it from John Chambers Special one for Makeup.

01:26:14
Speaker 1: It lost to both competitive Oscars. So that's that's sad. But due to its release in the most turbulent year of a very turbulent era, it gained the level of allegory that baffled its creators, who were clued in by none other than Sammy Davis Junior. Sammy Davis Juniors like the nineteen sixty eight equivalent of what's jaw thin? Well, I mean, yes, I understand the bit that you're referencing, but they didn't go to him. They read the No I know, I know the story producers, you short, cell, sweet Sammy Davis ja jaw Rule. Have you ever seen Sammy Davis drum or sing or dance or do anything? Yeah, jaw Rule looks like a US compared to him, I mean a Pots compared to him. Was the Putts probably period, But yeah, it wasn't detigrading Sammy. It was just not the person I would have thought for pop cultural criticism. You just watch how you how Sammy Davis Junior's name comes out of your bitch ass mouth. Produce keeps sucking it? You want to keep sucking eggs through that eye hole when when Frank's and I just say or else it's it's curtains for you guys.

01:27:27
Speaker 2: It's a ring a ding ding for you bozos. You'd about to knock it with that Sammy Punk.

01:27:35
Speaker 1: Only I get to say bad things about Sammy Friend of the Pods, Sammy Davis Jr.

01:27:41
Speaker 2: We bestow upon you a posthumous honor of Friend of the Pod.

01:27:44
Speaker 1: He wins the greatest posthumous honor anyone ever. Could we see you, Sammy, and we wish better for you? Okay, anyway, getting how Sammy Davis Junior clued in the producers to the deeper meaning of Planet of the Apes. Produce, there's Arthur P.

01:28:01
Speaker 2: Jacobs and mort Abrams were at a restaurant in London where Sammy was already eating. He knew Arthur Jacobs, and he came over to the parent too enthusiastically seeing the film's praises, ending with and it's the best statement film of the relationship between blacks and whites that I've ever seen on film. Jacob's immediate reaction, he recalled, was I didn't know what the hell he was talking about. He assumed that we were conscious of this as an allegorical treatment of the relationship between blacks and whites.

01:28:28
Speaker 1: It never occurred to any of us, really, I mean, I don't think they had the astronaut. I'm not sure if they had a single black person on the set. Wow. Yeah, good work, guys. That's one of the stronger arguments for diversity in the workplace I've ever heard. Yeah, yeah, there's a really I took out this really awful thing from Chambers where he was like the makeup guy. Yeah. At some point was mentioned that all of his makeup tests were done on Asian people. Uh, and he was like, I mean I just did it that way because they have such small noses and big eyes and and apparently he said that the head of the NAACP came to who was an actor like, came to him at one point and was like, you know, why don't you, like, why aren't you hiring more black people for this film? Or or had heard that there's this big budget thing that black people were not being hired for. And Chambers was like, I just need guys with small noses, and then he phrases it's something. There's a quote from him in the book where he's like, and I made a promise to the guy. I just wanted to say, if there's any black out there who has a problem with this, you know, he can come right to me. And I don't want to offend blacks at all. It's just kept digging himself deeper.

01:29:47
Speaker 2: And I don't get that they used to I'll do that thing they used to measure phenology, and I'll measure it.

01:29:52
Speaker 1: He's like the skull, I just used skull calipers. I took that all out. But this is really funny when you think of the racial implications of this movie that the makeup artist was just so tenered about that. Thanks to its end the succession of sequels, the film lodged in the pop consciousness for long enough to become a permanent cultural touchstone, and in two thousand, of course, two thousand and one, the same year of Tim Burton's Misbegotten reboot, it was selected. The original was selected for preservation in the Mother Trucking United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being quote culturally, historically, or esthetically significant. I just get so hyped on the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. Have you ever gone the Library of Congress. I feel like we should make a field trip. No, I haven't. I'm an avid user of its rights free photo collections and design things. They have an incredible archive online that's just like free to and some of the photos are so fascinating. Anyway, our album for our band, one of our album covers was from there, right, if not several, yeah, yeah, at least two of them. Yeah. Anyway, Obviously Hollywood and couldn't leave this thing simply there having made all this money, and talk of a sequel quickly picked up. Eventually. They also made a TV show, Unanimated series, plus the four theatrical sequels, Total comic books Tim Burton's Remake, and the reboot series that are currently running, which will be four strong by this summer. A lot of apes out there. The TV series, though, at least gave us Fox's merchandising an ad campaign, which is twentieth century Fox wants you to go Ape with an ape doing the classic Uncle Sam point. It's one of the best ad campaigns I've ever seen. It was a coincide with the TV show, and they also had like sixty different companies licensed to crank out three hundred different kinds of Planet of the Apes merch which the film historian who's quoted in the documentary says like pre dates the Star Wars merchandising blitz and maybe even paved the way for it.

01:32:05
Speaker 2: Only fourteen episodes, though, yeah, I did not do well.

01:32:10
Speaker 1: So that's all insane.

01:32:12
Speaker 2: But of course why would we cover any of those because none of them are as good as the original. But the lead up for the first sequel, the Planet of the Apes does have one interesting bit, which is that they went back to Rod Serling for it and also the French author of the original book.

01:32:26
Speaker 1: Pierre Buell.

01:32:27
Speaker 2: Producer Arthur Jacobs told Cinema Fantastique, we didn't plan any sequels in the first one, but it became so successful that Fox said you must do.

01:32:36
Speaker 1: A sequel if he can come up with one.

01:32:38
Speaker 2: First, I went to Pierre Boull to write the screenplay, and he did write a treatment for a sequel titled Planet of the Men, but it wasn't cinematic Bull's treatment, which you recall was titled Planet of the Men, featured Tailor leading and uprising against the Apes, fourteen years after the events of the first So he would have he was like, it was middle aged in the first film. He would have been like sixty yeah, Booll told sin a fantastic They accepted the treatment that I worked on, but they have made so many changes that very few of my ideas were left. It was completely different from what they finally used on the screen. He didn't particularly like writing a screenplay and ultimately said, in his French way, I played the game, but my film was never made and I don't even want to publish it and it will never be.

01:33:33
Speaker 1: Spoke a cigarette and glasses, staring at a window, rain splattered Parisian window, shirt unbuttoned to his waist, an underage child in bed next to him. No, sorry, I am not in tarring all of the French's pediasques, just many of their most important cultural figures and politicians. Rod Serling then heard from the producers, have you ever seen the lemon incest video? Of course, want to tell our listeners what that's all about. It depends how much is French slandering. You'd keep in the final edit of this but Serge Gainsburg in bed with his real life then twelve year old daughter, Oh yeah, I forgot about the age thing too. Yeah yeah, And they're underpants and like top shirts.

01:34:18
Speaker 2: Set to the melody of Friedrich Chapone's twoed up ten number three Incredible. As an adult, Charlotte Gainsberg routinely defended the song. It's lyrics, written by Serge Gainsburg, describes an incestuous relationship between him and his daughter Charlotte, the latter of whom sings in French the love we will never make together is the most beautiful, the most violent, of the purest.

01:34:44
Speaker 1: I should have a meme of that video and then like send it to the French social account. That's like from black Panther, like is.

01:34:53
Speaker 3: This your King.

01:34:55
Speaker 2: Charlotte denied claims that the song was actually about insets, saying that although the song uses the word incest, her father was quote just talking about the infinite love of a father for his daughter and of a daughter for her father.

01:35:08
Speaker 1: Weird people, man. So back to the Planet of the Ape sequel. Rod Serling then heard from the producers he called an interview printed in the pages of Marvel's Planet of the Apes comics, which I have seen. There is a fool PDF scan of this issue out there.

01:35:25
Speaker 3: Well.

01:35:26
Speaker 2: Serling told Planet of the Apes comics producer Arthur Jacobs offered it to me the sequel job from London, and I remember spending two or there dollars on a phone conversation about what we do with it. The sequel, we literally got into the hydrogen bomb and the resurgence of civilization over the Apes, and we very much plugged the concept of the apes desperate fear of the humans because the humans repeated what they'd done before, which essentially was direct the Earth. As it turned out, I couldn't do the script when Arthur wanted it done. I was on another assignment, so I didn't have the remotest connection with the approach. Jacobs eventually went with what did what he was doing? That's a shame?

01:36:02
Speaker 1: Uh, let's tick a look um? He was doing television commercials in the seventies, probably paid better. Yeah, now, he wrote. He was back on radio by nineteen seventy three, and his final hit Dude, his final do you know this about Rod Serling? His final radio performance was a forty eight hour long rock concert with who It reunited the Beatles among one and it was completely imaginary, uh, but it was like it used live records, crowd noise, interviews, other sound effects as like a hoax. Whoa, that's cool, and Serling hosted it and did like the radio bumpers. WHOA.

01:36:49
Speaker 2: God he was only fifty when he died in nineteen seventy five. Cheesus w Jaane Smoker baby oh man Wow, three to.

01:36:55
Speaker 1: Four packs of cigarettes a day. Wow. So unfortunately we never go out a Rod Serling Penn's Planet of the Ape sequel instead.

01:37:03
Speaker 2: It was written by associate producer mart Abrams. Never good idea when the producer writes he's the ideas man, He's the ideas guy. And a guy by the name of Paul den Dan, you say, is a British writer who is no slouch. He'd written Goldfinger, Okay, all right, and two John mccarr adaptations, and his last script was an adaptation of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express for Sidney Lumet, which was nominated for an Oscar. It lost, but it lost to Godfather too, so it's okay, but damn he loved these apes. He would go on to get a credit on every Abe sequel.

01:37:43
Speaker 1: The sort of world weariness like flat affect you put into that. But damn did he love these apes? That was my favorite line reading I've ever done on the show Boogaloo until we puke. Well, Jordan, do you have anything to have anything to add to the to the Apes buddy? We still don't know why that's such a funny word. No, never, never, some linguist can. We'll VEMOI your five bucks. Some linguist wants to write in and tell us why it's so inherently hilarious. Uh oh wow, folks, We've gone as far as we can at the original plan of the Apes, and we are unwilling to go further down the madness inducing sprawl of its legacy, which means we're at something of a stale mape hold for applause. We can only hope that this episode spurs you to go on your own exploratory mission into the world of the Apes, where in the end you'll at least be armed with the knowledge to tell them authoritatively to finally get their stinking pause off. You folks. This has been too much information, too much inform Mapes shun the real apes were the friends we made along the way. And I'm Alex Heigel and I help and I'm Jordan run Talk. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.