Bad Santa: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of I Heart Radio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music, and more. We are your two bad posts. I'm Alex Hegel and I'm Jordan Run Talk and Jordan's In case you couldn't tell from that scintillating intro, today we're talking about what is arguably one of the most beloved films in the past twenty years, a modern Christmas classic from the early aughts that revitalized the genre and created a whole new subgenre template. That's right, we're talking about Love actually. Oh no, was that. I'm sorry. Oh, I'm just now getting word that we're not talking about Love. Actually, we're talking about Bad Santa, which is a fake out that was entirely scripted by me and will surely enrage a segment of the listening populace, who no doubt wished we had done Love Actually, but we got some requests for Bad Santa, and it's a nice palate cleanser for the end of the year. Uh. We did some some some trickly Santa stuff and uh, Yeah, you all thought we were done with Christmas, but we're not. We're faking you out. Jordan's movie doesn't feel like your vibe. Yeah, I'll be honest. The solitary reason we are doing this is because I got a comment on Twitter. I had posted this very serious, somber thing about the real life sinking of the Titanic in preparation for our massive two part Opus dedicated to James Cameron's epic uh, and a loyal t m I listener named Craig commented, do bad Santa, you cowards? Jordan was so moved and I would laugh so much. I felt like we owed it to him. Uh, Greg, this one's for you. And honestly, that is as far as I was looking with this episode. I you know, I really liked that. I watch this when it came out. Then you know, caught it on cable every few years and in college and all that, and it just never came back to it. And then I just rewatched it today right before we were taping this. This movie is better than it. I think it's reputation suggests for various reasons that we'll get into, most of which are the creative team behind it. It's definitely not just like a fairly Brothers, like you know something about Mary's style like gross raunchy thing, and nor is it like an American pie sex comedy. And in fact, the filmmakers were incensed at the studio's attempts to kind of morph it into that. Yeah, I think it's pretty actually unique film and the fact that it's bigat so many Uh what we'll talk about the legacy of bad plus not bad legacy, the bad the bad legacy of the film later. Uh. You know, just before we get into this, I was researching real life bad Santa's. There are many listicles out there about it. They generally fall into a few categories. There's the petals, uh, which you don't really want to get into. Then there's the drunk ones who are like, you know, crash a car dressed as Santa, and then there's like the then there's the violent Santa's. Um are we ranking bad Santas right now? Is that what we're doing? No. I was going to do a whole sampling, like when you did the Twins thing for parent trap was gonna do a whole rundown of him, and then he just got so dark there. There's two that I just want to leave you with, um start you with because we still have a whole episode of tape. There was a guy, and I want to say North Carolina, who robbed a bank dressed as Santa Okay, good plan? Was that like a like a Salvation Army guy just went berserk, you know with the bell outside and the bucket. I think he was a No, he was, he was. He got away with it. That The funny coda to this is that he came back. I don't remember if it was the same bank or not, still dressed as Santa. No, No, you'll never guess. Easter Bunny closer warmer uh tooth fairy my last guest. Oh no, I'm sorry you struck out. David Christopher Cotton, aged twenty, of Brentwood, Tennessee, held up a bank three days before Christmas in two thousand nine, dressed to Santa St. Patrick's Day. No, no, did he take the money out in like a costume and then he got in a shootout with police and kills health a lepricn outfit. Yeah, so that's one. Could we get the common Brothers on the phone. We got bad leprechn They should do that. Well, there's already the leprechn movies. But but yeah, it does feel very cognish. Uh so does this next one? Um? Covina, California man Bruce Jeffrey Pardo's divorce had been finalized one week before Christmas in two thousand eight, so he subsequently showed up to a party on Christmas Eve dressed as Sam, armed with a homemade flamethrower and four semi automatic handguns. So you could probably edit all this out. I just wanted to set the move to this episode. This is a good This would be a good time to do that long beat, just like, so they're your real life bad Santa's folks. Dude, it's so bad. There was like a German Santa that was roofinging teens, like so many of them are predators, and then there's like just drunk sand It was not as whimsical as I thought it was going to be. And then there were just so many murders and murder suicides, a lot of bank robberies. You know, it's a good good costume anyway. From the film's genesis with one of the most acclaimed directing teams in modern cinematic history, to the intimidating drinking regimen that Billy Bob Thornton undertook one day on set to the director's surprising unfamiliarity with one of his female leads most prominent starring roles. Here's everything you didn't know about Bad Santa. That's right, folks, We bet you had no idea Bad Santa spraying from the same creative whale. Spring is no country for old men. No, not Cormick McCarthy, but can you imagine but the Cohen Brothers. That's kind of almost as weird though, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Joel and Ethan. The two apparently approached a writing team named John Requa and Glenn Fakara with a very simple idea. Record told The New York Times in sixteen that the Cohen said, we have this idea for a movie we want you to write. It's about a bad Santa. He drinks beer and stuff, but legally counts as an idea. The suggestion of an idea. Well, the genesis and finishing of this film is way more tortured than I actually thought it was going to be. Fakara added that the Cohens gave him in Requa the Bad News Bears as a reference point, which is funny given that Thornton would essentially play the same carrot in the Walter Map character in the subsequent Bad News Bears remake Reuen for car meant it Pratt and When. From there to Nickelodeon, where they worked on the Angry Beavers for a season and the one in an episode of The Wild Thornberry Is. The first feature they wrote was a spy spoof called Cats and Dogs that featured c g I versions of the titular animals as like spies doing like Cold War stick. Um no idea how they got in the Cohen's radar. Recoa explained to The New York Times that we wrote a really crass script and then the Cohen brothers added a bunch of crass jokes. Fakara added to that the Cohen's cut all our down syndrome jokes. They thought that was going too far. I'm thankful for that. But there's a lot of conflicting narratives about this whole thing. And one of the other big voices in here is that director Terry's Zwigov, who had just been coming off Ghost World, which is like his big mainstream hit. You know that the Steve Ashemi and Thora Birch and early role for Scar Joe. Prior to that, he had done Crumb, which is a particularly scabrous documentary about the legendary cartoonists. Are Crumb You ever seen that? Know it's really good, but it's just so funny that somehow this came to this. I think between Ghost World and crom that was how got on the Cohen's radar. But during the original promotional cycle for the film in two thou three, he told The New York Times, my agent sent me the script with a note saying, you're going to love this, but it will never get made, so don't get your hopes up. So of course I got my hopes up, and we took it to a few studios who promptly turned it down. After a couple of months of that, I got a call from Bob Weinstein saying his brother and he had just seen Ghost World and wanted to make a film with me. They read the Bad Santa script right away, and so they wanted to make the film. So I got gave us somewhat different version of events the Indie Wire in two thousand twelve. The Colons, he explained, originally sent me the script and said, we're interested in you directing this, but we think it still needs some work. And the story I had heard was the original writers who wrote about nine of what you see in any of the cuts, John Renko and Glenn Fakara, they met the Cohen brothers and said, we want to write a script that you guys direct, and the Cohen said, well, we only direct our own writing. But we've always had this crazy idea about this drunken Santa Clause and this little person Elf that he has to keep him in line. That's why I got continued. So John and Glenn wrote this script with the hopes that it would tickle the Cohen brothers enough to direct it, and the cos and the Cohen brothers read it and they told him we don't want to direct it. We think it's great, but we don't want to do it so right. Well, and Forkara asked them if they could give them some notes, and when the Cohens sat down to try to give them some notes over weekend, eventually they just thought it would be easier if they take a pass on it and rewrite it themselves. That's why I got continued. I got that script that still had problems. There were a bunch of flashbacks and the kids with babble endlessly about going to the bathroom on mommy's dishes. It went on for pages, and I agreed that stuff should go. So I edited that out and worked on maybe four or five things that I wrote. A bunch of other scenes my wife and I worked on to inject a bit of warmth into them. It was a very cold script when I got it, I believe it or not. It's much warmer after I took a pass at it. Hard to believe, although I guess if there were a bunch of down syndrome jokes in there. Good lord h Yeah. These guys career since then really lends credence to the notion that the Cohen brothers fixed this. Uh ZAGV liked it, he said, most of the scripts I've gone after to direct, there's generally just something about the dialogue told the A V Club, like Bad Santa. There was one line in the script that was so good I was desperately trying to get the job. It was something like sweet Jews for Jesus, which is spoken to the film by Bernie mac r i p One of the most inspired lines i'd ever read to The Times in two thousand three explained I thought the profanity was written very poetically, like David Mammitt writing Glen Garry Glenn Ross. That was what appealed to me, not just that there was a lot of profanity. Anybody can do that to put it away that's rhythmically and grammatically interesting, it's hard to do. It reminds me of m Billy Scottish comedian Billy Connolly. It reminds me of Billy Connolly. He has a whole thing about the rhythm of the F word, and like how he puts it into his stand up, not the prenny shock value. It just gives us the perfect rhythm to his language and he breaks it down almost like a Lenny Bruce routine. I think it's wikoff. In an interview he talks about there's a repeated line that Billy Bob Thornton says, which is thank the Christ, which is like he said in the first draft, it was just like thank God or something. The Cohen's punched it up that way and it's like just their idiosyncratic that it still sounds so natural coming out of Billy Bob Thornton's mouth, But like, when you look at that on the page, you're like, what who wrote that? The guys who wrote Raising Arizona wrote that. Funnily enough. In that Time's interview from two thousand three, Terrygoff explained that he turned down Elf, which is also from two thousand three, probably one of the yin and yang of some Christmas movies from this just that year, God, the Holy Tree, Holy I can't for I don't think I love actually Elf Santa two thousand three. Wow, Wow, Wow. Yeah. He turned down the opportunity to make Elf, saying, I don't like most Christmas movies. They're pretty bad, though they seem to make tons of money anyway, Like this movie Elf. I got the script for that and I turned it down right away, against my wife's better judgment. She said, this film is going to make a million dollars. It's got Will Ferrell in it, And I said, yeah, I like Will Ferrell, but the script is just based on this contrived silliness. How much did Elf make? Just so we can, let's compare it to Bad Santa. You do Elf, I'll do Bad Santa worldwide. Elf did two six point two mill against what against the budget Okay, bad Santa did seventy six point five million against the twenty three million dollar budgets. So to quote the guy from Indiana Jones and the last we said, he chose poorly? Or did he? He chose for art, which is often the poorer choice to make all things told, especially in Hollywood. Um recouind for Carr told The Times that the Cohen's wanted the film to be a vehicle for James Gandolfini, who they had just worked with on The Man Who Wasn't There, which also features Billy Bob Thornton, and that they wrote the character in his rhythm, but that it just didn't work out. I know, I can't imagine that some of these other names, I can I cannot imagine. Do you think it would have been a much more like Prestigee movie if Candell Foeni had gone in it? I don't know. Candalafini could play like crass, like do you ever see killing him softly? He's just like a gross He's like a gross, sad weirdo in that movie. You know, it's hard to play um Monday Morning quarterback with it because as we get later on, like the Weinstein's meddled with this, as they do with everything. So Goff says, the director's cut that's out there is he's what was shot on the page. And he says in that Indy Wire interview that at a certain point the Cohen's knew the because it was being done with the Weinsteins. They were like, this is going to be a nightmare once it gets into the edit, because they're gonna want to come in and do their Weinstein thing, Harvey scissor hands um scissors if you're lucky. Uh, they were going to come in and meddle with it. So he says that the Cohens were essentially like, all right, dude, it's yours. And so it's interesting. It's an interesting thought experiment to imagine a movie that hughes a little more closely to Terry's wageoff of Crum and Ghost World, written by the Cohen's, starring James Gaindal. That's a very interesting movie. I don't know if it's the same one, but it could have been even weirder. As you're about to tell us, Yes, director Terry's wage off, I really wanted Bill Murray for the titular bad Santa role, explaining to the times. In two thousand three, I was told, well, Bill Murray will never read your script. It will take him a year to get back to you. Actually, they heard back from him in a week saying you wanted to do it, just tell him the time and place and he chow up. Then he did this thing of disappearing. It got to the point where I left a couple of messages saying, if you wanted do this thing, great, and if you don't, just let me know because I have to move on. But he just disappeared. I can't say I blame him. If I had that kind of money, I'd be doing the same thing. This is the era where he will not the era I guess it's been decades where he doesn't. Yeah. Yeah, he just has an answering machine and you leave, you know, your pitch on the answering machine, and if he's interested, I'll call back. Well you know what he did instead, ostensibly lesson translation. Yeah, okay, he chose wise. Robert de Niro was supposedly also interested, which is funny considering he would later be in an air SAT's version of this movie with the Dirty Grandpa, Bad Old Man or whatever that garbage movie is called. When he's now, he's in his paycheck period. His house just got burgled. It's like inveterate serial burglar in New York City. In Manhattan. Yeah, this like thirty old woman who's just been breaking into houses like her whole life burgled DeNiro's place on the Upper East Side. I don't think he was there. That's a bold move. I don't think she knew it was there. I think she just was like, I mean, it's it was on like sixty three and Park, So it's like she picked a pretty Tony neighborhood debrace. She's like wenting through the basement. Do you think she scouted it? Yeah, I mean I don't know if she scouted. If you're going to rob that level of people, I feel like you got to do your homework. Production also asked Jack Nicholson, Nicolas Cage, Sean Penn. We're all supposed to be considered. I guess Sean Penn would have been coming off I am Sam, so maybe looking for a little of a palate cleanser of his own, if you will. Funnily enough, the parking lot behind the department store is the same parking lot at the del Amo Mall where DeNiro shoots Bridget Fonda spoiler alert in Jackie Brown. Friend of the Pod. Jackie Brown is an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel, and I was reading a bunch of these Terry's Way Golf interviews he was working on an unrealized um More Leonard adaptation. So little synergy there, as you meditate on that, We'll be right back with more, too much information after these messages. Universal passed on Bad Santa. Bob Weinstein told The Times. I asked the Universal executive, why did you guys pass on it? And he said it was the most foul, disgusting, misogynistic, anti Christmas, anti children thing we could imagine. And Bob Weinstein said, that's exactly why I bought it. And of course, as we alluded to earlier, the fact there was a Weinstein production meant that it has been irrevocably tainted with certain horrifying crimes. And it also this also had a bearing on the casting. So I got tweeted in twenty seventeen that he said, I was interested in casting Mirror Sorvino in Bad Santa, but every time I mentioned her over the phone to the Weinstein's they would just hang up on him. This was precipitated by Peter Jackson that week, having gone on record as saying that during pre pro for Lord of the Rings when the trilogy was originally being developed at Mirror Max with the Weinstein Harvey Weinstein started saying, like, you can't have Ashley jun in this movie. You can't have mir or Sorvino in this movie. Those were two women who both were among his earliest accusers. So disgusting. No good outcomes there. Uh. Tony Cox, who plays Thornton's sidekick Elf and spoiler his ultimate betrayer, was another sticking point in the casting. Terry kept saying, I'm having trouble finding the dwarf. Fakara told The New York Times. He read everybody from all over the world, including Mickey Rooney. That's amazing. I'm kind of kind of annoyed they didn't go with Yeah, Tony Cox is great. But still when I first read, Terry was laughing real hard. Cox told The Times, I was feeling good, and he said, well, I have good news in my bad news. I thought bad news. You just laughed until you cried. He said. The good news is that was a great reading. The bad news is this role wasn't written for an African American. Bob Weinstein told The Times that the Cohens wanted Danny Woodburn. He is the dwarf stand up comic who is probably most familiar to people from his recording role in Seinfeld for ten years. He had just played a retail storer elf in Jingle All the Way, Uh, and so that's who the Cohens wanted. They said they hated Cox his audition tape um so I got told Indie Wire that he hasn't kept in touch with the Cohen's mostly because of this Tony Cox thing. He said, we had a very strong disagreement about casting Tony Cox as the black elf. They said that they couldn't see the guy being black. I said, I don't see the guy being black. I think the fact of him being three ft six is the overriding characteristic of the guy. I don't think it matters. I just think this guy is really funny in the part, and they thought that it would ruin the film. They argued with me for a while and finally said you're the one who has to direct it, so good luck. Cox ultimately said I read for the role about nine times and Terry told me, if they don't let me have you, then I'm not going to do it. I love that loyalty. Mm hmm. Billy Bob Thornton told cinnamovie dot Tv that quote. Tony just doesn't have that part of him that wanted to beat me up because we're buddies, you know. So to get that passion, that juice into their scenes where Cox had to beat him up, Billy Bob said, I told him one day that his wife had been flirting with me. I don't know what it is about your wife. She just won't let me alone. And he started slapping me in the face and the next take was perfect. Cox also ad libbed the line you probably shouldn't be digging in your ass, she says to Billy Bob Thornton was sort of sprawled out on the Santa throne. Uh and Gov says in a making of documentary of the movie, he found that line reading so funny that he would just wake his wife up in the middle of the night spontaneously laughing over it for weeks. Brett Kelly, who played the kid you will never in all a million monkeys and a million typewriters, would never figure out what that character's name actually is, Thurman Merman, just a Coen Brothers as I've ever heard one. The actor who played that kid, Brett Kelly, was another sticking point. So I got told the Times the studio wanted a more Disney like generic cute kid, but Brett was so great I had to have him. So I got told the casting director that he wanted a kid who looked like Joe Cobb from the Little Rascals. Meanwhile, Weinstein told the paper Terry can drop dead. That's not how it happened. The Cohen's wanted Angus T. Jones from Two and a half Men, who did audition and lost to Brett Brett Kelly. Weinstein continued, Terry Billy Bob, and I said, are you kidding? While Thornton echoes WIGFS version, So that angust young kids because he doesn't he like Angut T Jones, not Angut. I kept saying anges young, because that's a c D. He got what is anglest what's angerst when he quit to and a half Man and he kind of over it, Yeah yeah, about how it was like filth and yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess he attended some fundamentalist Christian group and intimated that the show is part of the plan of the enemy, presumably Satan. I don't want to be contributing to the enemy's plan. You cannot be a true God fearing person and be on television show like that. I know I can't. I'm not okay with what I'm learning, what the Bible says, and being on that television show he was making episode at that point. Yeah, yeah, it wasn't like the highest paying like TV child Star of the time or something. What a little ship. Uh uh uh. Kelly had already filmed a couple of commercials and smaller roles in Canada when he first heard of Bad Santa. In the spring of two thousand two, the auditioned for the role of a room full of kids in Vancouver, one of several North American cities where the auditions were being held, and after being called back for another audition in Vancouver, Kelly and his mom Sue, headed to Los Angeles, where the candidates were winnowed down further. I had to go back and forth two or three times, he said. Another kid he was up against for the role apparently broke down in tears during a screen test with Thornton who started swearing at him in character. Kelly told Crack I was like, Okay, that's not gonna happen to me, because I know this is all make believe. Kelly's casting had immediate ramifications because during pre production he got chicken pox and he was sent back home to Canada because Billy, Bob Thornton never had chicken pox. That's a listical I would read famous people who never had chicken pox. That was curious how they managed to avoid this After a week, Kelly told The Times that he quote did a little shopping around and they get a doctor's note that he was no longer contagious, so he could go back on the set, probably because he's worried about getting recast. Didn't that almost happen and some other thing we were talking about recently, Maybe it was a tray you and never ending sorry when he broke his leg or something during the more stuff, and they didn't end up recasting him because they had a million other nightmare things to worry about on that production. Anyway, Kelly later said, Terry and Billy, because of the subject matter of the movie, I think they felt almost in vain and need to shelter me the whatever degree they could. This is him talking to Cracked. It was always a thing to try and make me feel as comfortable as I could, because you never really know how the kid's going to react. Lauren Graham, who played the Santa fetishist bartender Sue, was halfway through her run when Gilmore Girls when she auditioned for Bad Santa. So I got set in the DVD commentary that despite this being one of the biggest shows on network TV at the time, he had no knowledge of her or the show. Uh. She told Uncut mag I had to audition doing the scene where I first straddle Santa, so basically in front of a room full of executive I'm humping a chair. I really did love Billy Bob though, even more than the chair. And this was I didn't realize this John Ritter's final film role. He passed away unexpectedly on September eleventh, two thousand three of the Ortic to section the age of just fifty four, and the movie is decadd to his memory. Sorry, that's a that's a beautiful gesture. But having Bad Yeah, I just yeah, just there's a great there's a great uh. ZAGV tells this great anecdote and um little making up short that was on the DVD about there's this uh he it's a scene where John Ritter and Bernie Mack are having dialogue and John Rittor just kept making this face that's in the film. Um Like Bernie Max says something about like something like crass and John Ritter like squinches up his face like all squeamishly, and it take after take, it just kept making terry. So I go off, burst out laughing behind the camera, just ruining take after take. And so he finally was like, John, just keep doing what you're doing. I'm gonna go about thirty feet away. And I have watched this on the monitors back there. Uh. The police chief in the movie who shows up near the end is played by Sheriff John Bunnell. That's the name he tended to go by professionally, and he was in fact a real sheriff in Oregon, so that was not his primary claim to fame. He was the host of World's Wildest Police Videos from until two thousand and one. You remember that show, but it sounds like a show that I'm kind of shocked it must still be on that That show must have been a billion dollars. Well it was revived. It was revived, but yeah, so ran on Fox. I definitely remember that show. I have no idea how it was legal for them to show any of that stuff. Um. Meanwhile, Billy Bob Thornton got the script through his manager who called him and said, wait until you read this script. I've never seen anything like this. When he got the script, Thornton told The Dan Patrick Show in sixteen, I read maybe a third of it and called him back and said, first of all, we have to do it. And second of all, it's either the worst idea I've ever made and my career is over, or it's genius one or the other. Roger Yebert had some thoughts on this in his original review You for Bad Santa. For Billy Bob Thornton to play Hamlet would take nerve. For him to play Willie ta Soak took heroism. Thornton uh committed to this role, as Tony Cox later told The Times, I said to Billy Bob, you really look like you're high. Are you high? And he said every day? And I don't know if he was teasing. Thornton allowed to The Times that quote. A couple of times I was drunk, but not every day. I showed up with a hangover a few times. There were times when I'd be with my pals until three thirty am, and then I have to be at work at seven am. I wasn't the most pleasant guy to pee around. One of those days was when they filmed the scene in which Willie enters the frame on his way to the Santa area of the mall on an up escalator. As Billy Bob Thornton recalled The Entertainment Weekly in nineteen I drank about three glasses of red wine for breakfast. That was just an appetizer. Then I switched over to vodka and cran Perry juice, and then I had a few bud lights. By the time I got to that scene, I barely knew I was in a movie. I was supposed to be standing on the escalator. It dumps me out, and it literally woke me up, and that's what's in the movie. And I get up standing around because I thought I woke up in my house. And then I remember what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to go there and fall down and all those gifts and be horrible in front of the kids. At least it wasn't a monologue. He thought he was in his house for a brief moment until he remembered he was on a film set. I don't mind to smoke every now and again, Thornton told film four dot com. I've been known to take a drink occasionally, but I've traditionally played really extreme characters. And even in a comedy, if you're going to play a guy like this, you can't be sort of drunk, you know, And I wasn't sort of drunk. You have to go completely into it. He echoed that to The Dan Patrick Show, saying, playing a character like that, you can't play sevent a character. You've got to play are So if you're playing you know, Pat Boone, you gotta drink milk and be Pat Boone. And if you're playing Charles Manson, you gotta be Charles Manson. This came out the year that he and Angelia Jolie divorced. I wonder if he's getting in the character for this movie. Somehow played a role in that. For the record, he would not allow his own children to watch this movie. So I got told the times of working with Thornton to quote the late great Leo McCarry. I can't say I bask in the memory of it. Ultimately, I was able to get from Billy Bob what I needed, and I hope that by now he appreciates what I brought to the party. In his autobiography The Billy Bob Tapes, Thornton said that if he could go back to any time in his life and relive it, it would be this film, the filming of two thousand four's The Alamo, and when he worked for the Arkansas Highway Department in nine dudes were married six times. Yeah, yeah, you know he's he was buddies with Waren zvon fat Scans. Yeah, they were. They like lived at the same apartment complex when Zevon was on his way down and Billy was on his way up as an actor. And I guess they both had O c D. So they would like bond over their little like go into the mailbox rituals and stuff. I didn't know that. Wow, let's the one vile blood. Yes, thank you. I wasn't ever ail Intilie did that for him or whatever. The problems too. I think it was a two way. Yeah, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information and just a moment, well, without any more filming stories to regale you with. Now we must come to the semi disastrous test audience and screening process for Bad Santa. There was a certain amount of tension baked into Thornton's characters, quasi redemption arc. Requit told The Times that as far back as the very initial writing, the Cohen's only had one caveat. They said, it's a story about redemn but push it to the very end. Not too much redemption too soon. Record continued, saying of an early screening that the audience went eighte, but they gave it a terrible score. They were like, this thing needs to be buried in a hole. But I loved it. After those test scores came in, the Weinstein's freaked out and tried to make Willie a super redeemable character. Hilariously. Sagoff told The Times in two thousands three, there's two New York Times interviews. There's an oral history they did in six Team and the sequels coming out, and then they did a bunch of Sagoff did this interview when the movie came out. They're interesting to compare so in the two thousand three interview, he said one of the focus groups that we had thought that we had tacked on a Hollywood ending when Santa doesn't die at the end. It was a focus group in New York that never changed New York Greatest City and Lord bing Bog kill Santa gold Matt's uh Bob. Weinstein told The New York Times in ten that quote. I said to Terry, We're not trying to ruin your movie, but there's absolutely no heart in it. So we put in a little heart. We didn't make a vanilla. We weren't trying to make not so good Santa. Terry's wagoff. They'll refused to film the proposed editions, so the Weinstein brought in Hangover and old School director Todd Phillips for the new footage, including the scene where Thornton and Cox teach the kid how to box, as well as a sentimental sequence about an advent calendar. Weinstein told The Times, Todd Phillips did the greatest job on this movie. Thank god he came in. Terry's wagof Meanwhile, disagrees, he told Dwyer. At one point, the Weinsteins asked the Cohens to watch a cut that the wine Steins had done that made it much more mainstream. They added a bunch of scenes, some of which I refused to film, and they cut them in and the Cohen brothers watched it. They said, well, you tried to make this film into American pie. It's a piece of now, that was their response, and they got into a heated argument with the Weinsteins that ended with everyone yelling for you at each other. It didn't when any part of it after that, so I was stuck with it. It got pretty nasty. Things got even uglier, so I got continued. I went and had a Director's Guild arbitration about it, because my lawyer had originally traded off half my salary to get me final cut of the film. When these guys tried to cut it, I called her up and she said I would have to hire outside litigators at thirty five thousand dollars a day to try and fight that, that her office doesn't do that. And I said, well, the contract you got me was worthless. I felt entitled to my cut of the film, and I went to a d G a arbitration because I couldn't afford litigation. Under the terms of that arbitration, I can't tell you any more than what I've told you. A lot of what they shot they tested and it didn't work, so they got rid of it anyway. Then I got to work to push it closer to my original version. It was damage control at that point. Todd Phillips has not talked about this, so I have not been able to find out anything more about this. But yeah, the guy who directed Joker did a bunch of uncredited reshoots on Bad Santa, and it piste off the Ghost World director so much he took it to d G a arbitration. Bet you guys didn't know that about your fun little dirty Santa movie. The director's cut version that's available says he's closest to his original version. He said, that's the filming of the script. Basically, that's the script I was given. The studio wanted to mess with it and make it more mainstream and pour some fake sentiment on it for the people that stumble around the mall. He's very mean. We made Bad Santo. We expect high go I know you've got the stats for the absanities in this movie. Give us the final score count the unrated version of this film, it has the record for most swears and Christmas movie. Obviously excellent, the unrated version pushes that even further. The total tally is, per IMDb, a hundred and seventy uses of seventy four uses of thirty one uses of ass, ten uses of bitch, and one news of bastard, beating out the previous record held by It's a Wonderful Life. Yeah, I had buddy, he used to uh his He would do a drinking game of this, and you drink every time someone says Jesus Well. There's a scene where la Lauren Graham has sex with Billy Bob Thorne in a car and she's going to mean me Santa, just chug your beer. At that point I thought it was shots. Okay, that's better than no that it just killed. According to the website Film Stories, there's an even more disastrous screening of Bad Santa for Disney executives who owned to Mention Pictures, who released Bad Santa, Supposedly when the film was screamed from Michael Eisner and other House of Mouse leadership. An unnamed top source close to Eisner told the Drudge Report that quote nothing appears sacred anymore. This is just not in the spirit of Walt Disney, which is true. Yeah, this report was contested because it basically went to Drudge Report and then in like ain't it Cool News and all the British and then all the British tabloids. So take it with a grain of salt. But a lot of this is actually also covered in a book about this era of Disney which I just lost that damn title of Um they got so much traction in the press that Billy Bob Thornton addressed it in an interview with Empire and it's December two thousand four issues, saying they knew what it was. They don't give you millions of dollars to make a movie if they don't read the script, which is also true. Disney War is the movie. Have you heard about that or the book? Have you heard that? No? Yeah, it's Roy Disney versus Michael Eisner for the soul of Disney just called Disney War. Oh wow, Well, I mean guess bad Santa became part of the ammunition that was used to try to push Eisner out of Disney, even at the top of the company. For you say over a decade. I would say probably closer to two decades in early two thousand three, uh, and one of his enemies was the late Roy Disney, who used Bad Santa at one stage against Michael Eisner as an example to how Disney had apparently lost its way. And I guess the other big sticking point was Killed Bill, which went out from Mirror Max and thus also technically under the aegis of Disney. Roy Disney resigned at the end of November two thousand three and asked I user to follow him out the door, but I was never hang on for another year or two, finally exiting after twenty one years in September two five, and under pressure from the board, he resigned a year earlier than planned and handed the job over to Bob Igor And while all this was going on, Disney in the UK decided to wash their hands in Bad Santa altogether and ended up giving it to the more than grateful Sony to release. Thornton meanwhile found himself defending Bad Santa in public using a stock line. We did get a few comments this is him talking to film four dot com and my reply was always, as far as I know, Santa Claus is not in the Bible. I think you guys are talking about Jesus. Whenever people would be like, what you you've you know, you've you've the name of sanded, the name of Santa. And he's like, well, I'm a criminal who acts as Santa. Yeah, It's just it seems so quaint, you know. People were so mad about this. Well. Released on November two thousand and three, Bad Santa would go on to gross nearly, as we mentioned before, seventy six and a half million dollars worldwide on a three million dollar budget. Thornton told Mandatory dot com when it first came out, it grew slowly, but it became successful very quickly. It was the most well reviewed comedy of that year, and it made a lot of money, so it was a huge success. Ebert gave it three and a half stars. It's got a seventy eight percent rating and rotten tomatoes on Metacritic. Aided by annual broadcasts on the edgier side of cable like Spike TV and f X, albeit in a heavily edited form, the film would go on to become a cult classic and then earn a much less well received sequel in I always had faith in it, as GoF told The Times, despite a superficial interpretation that it's a film ruled by vulgarity. It has an important message consumerism can destroy us. Plus it's really funny. But he told IndieWire, I'm more surprised by its cultural impact. Every time I look at the newspaper or online, there's some sort of bad Santa happening around town. There's a Bad Santa bar crawl, there's a bad Santa party, there's bad Santa rap music. There's bad Santa porno. I can't fouch for that one, terry, but the rest of them I've I've seen and heard. As we mentioned earlier, there's been a spate of there's Bad Moms, A Bad Mom's Christmas, Bad Teacher, which start Cameron Diaz, right, yeah, I don't remember Bad Moms though. Got two sequels, Buddy or a sequel um trying to think of what the other You can't if you just search a bad Movies, you don't really get up and Kristin Bell, Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, let's see what else we got. Oh well, it was funny that someone was drawing a line between this and Bad Lieutenant, which is the able for our movie where Harvey Kitele plays like a horrifically corrupt uh you know New York City police officer and um detective and like does like full frontal nudity and like smokes crack and all of this stuff. Um, well, you could say that the there's the you know, dirty Grandpa and sexy Grandpa or whatever the Robert de Niro was you know what I'm talking about, Dirty Grandpa, bad mean Grandpa. I'm thinking of like the Jackass spin off movie. Oh no, Robert Janniro was in was in one of those. Um no, I guess that's it Bad News Bear a sequel. Yeah, that bad bad Leroy Brown. Um, I didn't write an outre for this. Merry Christmas, yes, Mary, Christmas everyone. As a Christmas gift to ourselves, we are taking the week between Christmas and New Year's off, so please enjoy time with your loved ones instead of listening to us, And we'll be back with Jordan's uh rothco chapel of of a series of episodes Familia. We're gonna kick off right with our Titanic two parter, maybe even a three partter at this stage, can't tell I've been writing it all the month of December and I'm still not done, which is part of the reason why we're taking off them. We can start well, folks. As always, thank you for listening. This has been too much Information. I'm Alex Hegel and I'm Jordan run Tug, and thank you for making our year Mary and Bright. Too Much Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk Shows. Supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtog and Alex Hegel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. 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