The Sixth Sense: Everything You Didn't Know

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Too Much Information, the show that brings you the little known facts and secret histories behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows, and more. We are your specters of specificity. You're vomiting, tween girls of trivia. You're dead people of details. My name is Jordan run Tug, and my name is Malcolm Crow. That's a good name. That's a very u name. It is.

00:00:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's just you know, alarmingly on the nose. I guess my sixth stentance name would be Alex Podcast, but podcasts would be spelled with like a K or something.

00:00:45
Speaker 1: Alex angry podcast. Yeah, yeah, I'm Alex Higel. And today we are taking a look at the horror movie that even your grandmother likes, A terrifying treat that manages to bring a tear to my eye every time a movie it up the ante for twist endings. I'm, of course talking about the sixth sense preemptive spoiler alert.

00:01:07
Speaker 2: Nobody gets spoilers on this movie anymore.

00:01:09
Speaker 1: Shut up.

00:01:09
Speaker 2: It's Bruce Willis is dead the whole time. We'd like damn if you don't know the spoiler for six cents by this point, like, I have no pity for you turning.

00:01:17
Speaker 1: Twenty five years old. This summer m Night, Shyamalan's story about an eight year old who saw dead people became the second highest grossing movie of nineteen ninety nine, made Hala jaw Osmon into one of the biggest child stars of the era.

00:01:30
Speaker 2: For such a brief period of time.

00:01:32
Speaker 1: And made Bruce Willis like ten million bucks. Yeah, that's cool, that's good for Bruce. I remember being allowed to see this for some reason when it came out, even though I was like eleven, because I guess I don't know again, like I said, it was the scary movie that we all could agree on it was okay, and revisiting it lately, it's both more scary ends more sad than I remember. What do you think about this all? I can't imagine this being like not as scary for you as a kid as you would like, Oh no, I mean I.

00:02:01
Speaker 2: Saw one of my cousins rented it when we were all up at this like cabin that we used to go to, and she was so restrained in a way that like, I'm not where she was like, yeah, this movie was really popular when it was in theaters, and I had missed all of it, you know, because I was interesting. Yeah, I was like eleven. Again, not a lot of eleven year olds at my small school we're talking about this.

00:02:22
Speaker 1: So I missed all of it.

00:02:23
Speaker 2: And I got it like full ground zero, like bowled over by the twist, like just all that. It was great. It's obviously his best film. It's a tremendous, like perfect masterpiece. And he never scaled those heights again, and.

00:02:39
Speaker 1: No one really did except Tony Colette.

00:02:41
Speaker 2: Tony Collet's the only one who came out of those and yet it was like I have not yet begun to fight. She's like, I'm going to turn in so many more incredible performances with my career. You people have no idea what you were squandering all this time.

00:02:55
Speaker 1: She is so good in this I kind of forgot like everybody other than Bruce Willis and Osma she's amazing. Oh, she wasn't like in anything at the time.

00:03:03
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, as she wasn't as much of a known quantity, I should say, but like, yeah, I mean, in hindsight, she's the one who came out of it, like as one of the defining talents of her generation. You know, yeah, great movie, love it to death, so so sad, so so so so so sad.

00:03:23
Speaker 1: I don't remember it being that sad, and then rewatching it, I wept, oh my at several points. Dude, it's yeah. I mean it's so like.

00:03:33
Speaker 2: All this stuff between she and Haley are like apple, hjo Is We're gonna call him?

00:03:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, the car scene, which I remember being like boring as a kid and being like, all right, where's the good because you.

00:03:45
Speaker 2: Don't get that stuff when you're a kid. You're like, well, all the jump scares and stuff, and the suspense registers, and then you like, as you grow and you go back to this film, you're like, ah, yes, the like actual searing terror of adulthood, which is like processing my feelings towards my parents. You know, it's so good. Yeah, I mean what else? What else was there to say?

00:04:06
Speaker 1: Well? I gotta say it was weird for me revisiting this movie not only as an adult, but also because I became vaguely acquainted with Hala jaw Osmont in college, So that added a weird element to watching this to me, because it's like, oh, I know that guy. We were classmates at NYU together when he was in the acting department and I was in the screenwriting department. So we ran in some way social circles. And I can't say that we were buddies, but he was friends with friends of mine, and we crossed paths at various parties and stuff, and he was he was an okay guy. One of the more surreal moments of my life was being on the rooftop of the mckibbon Lofts one night, very very late at night, in like two thousand and eight with my best friend bugs Yes, yes, with my best friend and Halea jaw Osmon. I also went to school with Marl Wilson, who played Matilda and the Olsen Twins, So I really hit the nineties child star jackpot. Yes you did secondary education.

00:05:02
Speaker 2: You got any dirt on them?

00:05:05
Speaker 1: No? No, they were all They were all seemed like pretty pretty stand up people. Uh. The only time I ever obliquely referenced Haley's career to him was we were at a at a vending machine and a dorm lobby and I was reaching for change in my pocket and the moment presented itself. I say, hey, I need six cents? Does anyone have six sense? And it got a chuckle.

00:05:28
Speaker 2: I can't believe that's where you went with it. I mean it was it was there. It was there. Yeah, it was there. No, that's good, that's fine, that's fine.

00:05:37
Speaker 1: Well you were from like sort of close to Philly with this movie, has said, did you have any any personal reactions with this production? Well?

00:05:43
Speaker 2: I think that's why my cousin because she went to Villanova and that's why she was so jazzed on it was because yeah, it was like all set in Philly and everything. Yeah, I mean I do have to admire m Knight. Mister Knight's uh, you know, constantly please mister Knight's my father. Yeah, constant big upping of Philly. Of course, that's great. We don't need him though, we have gritty now, like we don't.

00:06:11
Speaker 1: Gritty. That's a point for m Night Shamalan in Philly lore. What if you took off the gritty mask and it was that would be the twist Philly twist. He's playing the long con Yeah, exactly.

00:06:25
Speaker 2: No, I mean I hate him like as a person. I you know, he has this like incredible arrogance about his like works and and himself and his like place, and thankfully he got this stuffing a little bit knocked out of him by uh, you know, the rest of his career, say all his failures, his successive failures. And there are people who will argue that like a lot of his latter day stuff is like are have like secret masterpieces in them, but they don't.

00:06:53
Speaker 1: Those people are wrong.

00:06:53
Speaker 2: He's really good with a camera and he's like you know, but his writing has gotten worse, which is so funny someone who like uh you know made his bones in Hollywood early on as a writer, as we'll talk about. But like, yeah, man, I mean there's like a there's there's a character. There's like a rapper in old whose name is like mid size Sedan, and that's like that's supposed to be funny. There's like a scene in the visit where this like kid just like raps it like raps at the camera for a while, and it's like supposed to be I think you're supposed to like laugh at him, be like ah, this dumb young kid is this is not Yeah, it never it never pans out when the joke is just supposed to be like look at this guy who thinks he it's just I don't know, it's just dumb and uh yeah, I don't know, man, I mean even up to the like his new thing is financing all of his movies himself so that they don't take a loss basically, and then he just takes it out of the back end when they do well, and like I guess repays whatever producers he he is working with. Yeah, I just I don't like him, man. I don't like arrogant people. I don't like I just something about his Like now, I don't know how really I.

00:08:03
Speaker 1: Was so sure this is gonna be a thing that you really liked, that was gonna be unadulterated positivity. No no, no, no, no, no no.

00:08:10
Speaker 2: I love this movie like he I mean, he really fucking nailed it, dude. Yeah, And like I must hand it to him. It's just everything successively I've been like, you suck. You are just so up your own ass with and like impressed with yourself all the time. And it's like his cameos, it's the Lady in the water, it's the stuff with Old when like Old was I mean he does adaptations now, right, Like I'm not like up on his filmography but I know Old and uh, Knock at the Cabin were both adaptations, and he felt like he had to like meddle with them. Like he still feels that he is like creatively better than the people whose material that he adapts, and he's like, oh, I'm going to change the ending to Old so it has a patented twist, and like, I think I believe he changed an aspect of like maybe the whole.

00:09:00
Speaker 1: Ending of Knock of the Cabin. I don't know. I mean, it just bothers me. Man.

00:09:04
Speaker 2: I don't like people who are like who do that. It's like people who can be that arrogant like Spielberg. If I found if Spielberg was like shoving himself into every movie, I'd be like, yeah, because you're like one of the greatest of all time. If Marty did that, I'd be like, yeah, because you're one of the greatest of all time.

00:09:19
Speaker 1: M Night doesn't.

00:09:20
Speaker 2: I'm like, yeah, man, you got like one good movie and then a lot of bees and b minuses like shut up anyway him great movie though, well.

00:09:31
Speaker 1: It's a movie about paranormal experiences and uh oh yeah, that whole thing about ghosts. Do you have any any paranormal experiences or ghost stories. Yeah, I mean I was not like a ghost.

00:09:41
Speaker 2: I love, you know, spooky stuff, but I never really believed in ghosts as a kid and then or as an adult really and then like you know what I did it for me is like I went down to New Orleans and oh wow, you know they have like this kitchy like vampire ghost culture where you like see like sign up that say like for reent haunted or for Ren not haunted. And I don't watch ghost Hunters. I don't watch any of that stuff. Like I'm not like a not into that. I don't believe it. But I went to Congo Square.

00:10:12
Speaker 1: I don't know what that is.

00:10:14
Speaker 2: Congo Square is like basically where jazz happened, right like it's it's because.

00:10:18
Speaker 1: It's where mistakes happened a bunch of times and then it became jazz. Thank you. That was the anchors I've ever seen you look in all of our years together.

00:10:30
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, no, because Louisiana and gave the slaves Sunday off and they weren't allowed to gather in any of the places in the South, and they were just like, okay, well you can have this area congo square to like come get together and do your drumming and like you're singing, and you know, jazz as we knew it kind of came together from the confluence of like all of these Afro Cuban, Afro Caribbean rhythmic influences that came across in the drums and you know these other influence too. There's like the whole black string band minstrel tradition and all this stuff. But the introduction of horns comes through because of all the marching bands and like that the white like European culture that like you know, saxophones don't come from Africa, Like the trombone is not an African invention, like so it's but it's those well yeah, I mean that that all came basically way like years after this, right, like because they weren't formalized into bands while they were slaves. It was just the fact that like the particular space that they weren't allowed to mingle in and like you know do all this stuff dancing and singing and playing instruments like unmolested for a time. Was like when you started getting the specific pollination of like European harmony and instruments and African uh you know, rhythms and tonalities and that's what makes jazz. Anyway, I went there like and you know, I wasn't like tripping or anything, but I was just like sitting in Congo Square and I was like, this place is haunted, you know, like this is I feel I feel something going on here.

00:12:07
Speaker 1: And that's it.

00:12:09
Speaker 2: Never again or since, never again, never again, really like I don't know, I mean, like maybe if I went to the Overlook, which I'm still like trying to do. Oh, Stanley, Stanley, It's really called the Stanley, I think.

00:12:20
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, how about you. Yeah, I've had a couple of interesting experiences. I mean, my whole family has kind of had funny little like my grandfather used to always say that my grandmother had part gypsy in her and he was a painter, and he painted this portrait of her as like a fortune teller back in like the forties, and they always hung, you know, in our family homes at this portrait of my grandmother. And she used to have these these dreams that she believed that would predict the future, and the one that she would always cite was my uh, my aunt was gonna go on some kind of like college tour trip when she was a teenager looking at colleges. And the night before she was due to leave on this trip, my grandmother had a vision of what she says, was Jesus on a horseback, like just kind of riding up and just shaking his head no. And she somehow intuited that that meant, don't let her go on this trip. And so she told her daughter like, no, I'm sorry, I just have a really bad feeling you can't go on this college trip. And of course my aunt was devastated and angry and ran off to her room and slammed the door. And the people who went off on that trip, the car they were in that went off a bridge and everybody all in the car died. Oh so yeah, there are a lot of people in my life who were connected to whatever you want to call it. And my stepmother is a reiki master and a spiritual counselor and has done drum journeys with me and things like that. And well, I'm sure I maybe you know what, maybe I never told you. As you know, my mother died when I was a kid, and about a week after she died or so a neighbor had us over for dinner, and we came back home later that night and every television in the house was on and it was all on like my mom loved like E, true Hollywood type stuff, and every television was on. I think it was E, the channel E. But yeah, it wasn't like there was a power surgeon, you know, all the lights and everything wrong. It was just the TVs in every room We're all on and it was on the same channel, and we were all convinced like, ohause to me, it makes a certain amount of sense. I was just talking with my dad about this recently. Like, we as human beings are electricity to a certain extent. So I think that when we die, that dissipates, and if we are able in some way to interact with anything, I think it would make sense that we're able to interact with sure electrical things that are around us before we you know, completely dissipate wherever it is we go. Yeah, I mean exactly.

00:14:52
Speaker 2: Well, I mean that's like the most that's the most spiritual belief that I have is that, like you know, matter is neither created nor destroyed, so like, yeah, yeah, in your head is a different form of energy or whatever is your soul or whatever. Oh no, it's a line from the movie when they're in the car and when she asked her about Grandma's be pendant, and he says like, sometimes you think things have gone, but they just moved to a different place.

00:15:14
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, pretty great.

00:15:16
Speaker 2: Thesis statement for the afterlife as far as I'm concerned. But you know, I still think you're just rotten the ground.

00:15:24
Speaker 1: Several episodes we've talked about what you want done with your physical remains after you go, And now I'm glad we're getting to the metaphysical remains.

00:15:32
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, I mean I'm gonna be so pissed if there's a heaven.

00:15:38
Speaker 1: Like Steve Martin bit, it's like, oh, man, wouldn't it be.

00:15:42
Speaker 2: Word if you died and you woke up and you were in heaven just like they always told you.

00:15:49
Speaker 1: Wouldn't you feel stupid? There were pearly Gates and Saint Peter and everybody had wings on their angels when you go no, oh no, I've got like an idiot. No. In college they said this was all bullshit.

00:16:11
Speaker 2: So like I already have to do, I've had to You want me to deal with people my entire life and then go to the where there's like every one of them from history.

00:16:18
Speaker 1: That no even worse, all the good ones. Yeah yeah, anyway about this movie.

00:16:28
Speaker 2: Set in Philly, baby.

00:16:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, from the hilarious legal kerfuffle that resulted in Bruce Willis's casting to the time we nearly had in the rest of development star Seeing Dead People, the insane lengths Donnie Wahlberg went to prep for his incredibly brief role, and the ridiculous lengths the director went to conceal the iconic twist, ending here's everything you didn't know about the sixth sense.

00:16:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you and I both I would say reasonable more first than the average person in like the travails of the Disney Company through the eighties and nineties, just by virtue doing this pod and in a way you can I mean not in a way literally, you can trace, uh, you can trace the sixth sense to one of the architects of a huge chunk of the company's time, a guy named David Vogel. And he's kind of been erased from the history of the film. Like I was actually listening to a separate podcast doing research for this, and this guy was talking about how he bought the making of the Sixth Sense book and he was like, it's awful. It's just such a hagiography. And and they don't really mention this guy, David Vogel at all, but he's really fascinating because as far as a film executive goes, he's one of the good ones. You know, this guy moved to la in nineteen seventy nine. He reached out to the one guy he knew, which is a guy named Richard Rubinstein, who was George Romero's producing partner. So he literally answered phones in a closet in their office and that was his first job in Hollywood, and then he worked his way up. He was working as a producer for spiel on Amazing Stories. And now enter Jeffrey Katzenberg.

00:18:06
Speaker 1: That is he cool on this one? Or yeah? Okay, now okay, well maybe I mean, I don't know.

00:18:11
Speaker 2: He did give Vogel a job, but anyway, So Katzenberg formed Hollywood Pictures, which is a Disney subsidiary similar to Touchstone. Is basically the way that they were going to keep putting out live action and stuff that they didn't necessarily want the Disney brand on. And one of the earliest releases was the super Barbario Brothers movie, so they just knocked it out of the park right at their first at bat. But this kept going, and Katzenberg poached Vogel for the imprint and sent him out to Disneyland for research. Seems like a weird thing to do, but fine. Vogel left with the idea that it would be hard to keep spinning out live action kids movies or adaptations from Disney rosters. But what he was struck by going to Disneyland was how many adults were there, seemingly without children. So he came back like all fired up with his pitch that he was going to give to these their executives about like we can make films that show like the best of human spirit and touch adults just as our animated division touches children's And he like mentioned Shindler's List in this pitch meeting, and and they could like ignored him or laughed him out of the room, but he basically kind of went on to kill it, you know. He did Homeward Bound, the what is this subtitle of that, The Incredible Journey or.

00:19:23
Speaker 1: Incredible Journey, the first movie I cried at in front of my father was that's the movie that just I discovered.

00:19:28
Speaker 2: Shame that movie's up, dude, Yeah it is. I so terrified when Chance gets the porcupine calls in his face.

00:19:34
Speaker 1: Oh god, forgot. I just remember it being so sad and Shadow was in the hole at the end and he thought he was gone. Yeah, oh that was so sad.

00:19:42
Speaker 2: Just kind of like the worst, just a skit that you could spin off from that movie where it's.

00:19:46
Speaker 1: Like it's cool hand Luke, but like Shadow in the box.

00:19:49
Speaker 2: I was gonna say Shadow in the pit, and then all of a sudden you just get some like redneck coming up from from Central Casting. He's like, hmm, dog in a pit. We're eating to not get the pork pills out of that at Warren's face. We can still use post of that smash cut to credits.

00:20:07
Speaker 1: Wow. So he did.

00:20:08
Speaker 2: Homeward Bound, he did the one hundred and one Dalmatian starring Glenn Close, and he did George of the Jungle Peak Brendan Fraser Physique and Comedy. And this was very necessary for m Knight because m Knight was in director jail at the time. Basically he wasn't really known as a director because he had done mostly script work since he graduated from n YU, and you and I both found this hilarious when we were discussing this episode. He co wrote Stuart Little That's amazing. I had no idea about that, and did an uncredited punch up on She's all that Whoa. But he was, like I guess, considered pretty hot coming out of NYU. He got into NYU in like a full scholarship because he was a national Merit Scholar or whatever in all of his little hoity toity private schools. Yeah yeah, makes jerking off gesture, Yeah exactly. And his script that he this script, his first grip that got picked up was called Labor of Love, which is like a guy is so bereaved after his wife's death or something that he walks across the United States, which is essentially the plot of David Lynch's The Straight Story, except the guy rides lawnmower, and that was actually picked up by Fox at one point but it never made. And then his first full length feature, Praying with Anger, which is did.

00:21:24
Speaker 1: We looked at the poster for that? Didn't we?

00:21:26
Speaker 2: Yeah?

00:21:27
Speaker 1: He's And then what was the slogan I'm finding it now?

00:21:30
Speaker 2: In a land torn apart by hate, he found the strength to love, and sure enough he stars in it and he's on the poster. Yeah, that never made it to a wide release. Then his second feature that he did though, was called Wide Awake.

00:21:48
Speaker 1: Did you hear about this movie? Did you know anything about this? No?

00:21:51
Speaker 2: It's a faith based coming of age comedy starring Rosy O'Donnell, Dennis Leary, and Julius Stiles that was shot in nineteen ninety five but came out in nineteen ninety eight. And we'll circle back around to that. But give us a little of the negotiations that good old mister Knight scored on this one.

00:22:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, considering that not exactly illustrious, CV, he had some he had some brass ones for a director whose first two movies hadn't exactly set the world on fire. He later relayed to The Hollywood Reporter that as demands for what became The Sixth Sense were as follows, I have to be attached as director, and we're going to have a one million dollar minimum bid on my script. If they want to read it, they have to know that this is going to start one million dollars. I guess Disney did not shy away from this budget. David Vogel, the aforementioned Disney executive, he was so taken with the script that he skipped his lunch plans to finish it. He couldn't tear himself away from it. He would say that it quote had more potential to be a big hit than any other movie I had ever read, and he was not wrong.

00:22:58
Speaker 2: There's some context to this, and like this was sort of a big boom era for screenwriters essentially, and I think you can kind of trace that to stuff like pulp fiction. Oh wow, but it started directors you made or just yeah, but it started even earlier than that though, because this thing I was reading turned up this crazy figure that like there was something like half a dozen to a dozen scripts purchased in nineteen ninety for seven figures.

00:23:23
Speaker 1: That's wild, yeah, especially because I mean nowadays with inflation, that's probably like five six million, I know.

00:23:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so they were just like I guess there was a big gold rush to find like the next Quentin or you know, the next Michael Simono. I don't know, like, but yeah, that's that's what went into some of these bidding wars.

00:23:43
Speaker 1: Wow. So David Vogel, this Disney executive. He loved the sixth cent script so much that, in order to kind of circumvent any potential bidding war, he shelled out two point two five million dollars, reportedly the most ever spent on a script at the time, and promised Night that he could direct for at least two weeks before he was formally installed as the film As director, he had a two week trial period, which I think is funny. Unfortunately, Vogel didn't consult with his superiors at the House of Mouse before shelling out this amount for the movie. He'd been with the company for I think eight years at that point, and he believed he earn a certain degree of creative autonomy, but he thought wrong. When Disney Brass learns what Vogel had done, they were not happy. They had such little faith in the sixth sense that they sold the production rights to another company, Spyglass, which meant that Disney would only earn twelve point five percent of the box office receipts through a distribution fee, and not one hundred percent of what would prove to be a huge hit. They asked Vogel to restructure the details of his employee contract as the president of his company, which basically would limit his powers and ensure that he would never be able to pull stunt like this again and shill out this much money without checking with his bosses first. He refused, and for this he was fired in July nineteen ninety nine, a month before The Sixth Sense was released and swept the world, becoming the most successful live action film in the history of Disney, earning just under three hundred million dollars in the United States and six Academy Award nominations. The Sixth Sense. The script started out with the image of a little boy at a funeral in m. Knight's mind. Grim Yeah, he said, that was the first image that came to mind. Then in my mind, I was wondering if he was talking to the person that had died at the funeral. That kind of stimulated the story, and he spent roughly a year developing the script, unsure exactly where it would go. In an early version is described as having been inspired by Silence of the Lambs, with Bruce Willis's character working as a crime photographer instead of a therapist, and the crime photographer had a son who experienced visions of the Victims. Around ten drafts later, the script had transformed into the psychological drama with the famous twist ending that would Earn and m Night comparisons to Hitchcock and Spielberg.

00:26:06
Speaker 2: That's why he went so crazy because he had people blown smoke up his ass after this called him Spielberg. Nobody's Spielberg. It's like Oasis and the Beatles.

00:26:14
Speaker 1: Shut up, knightwo soft Pitches. Script is a cross between the Exorcist and Ordinary People, the Ladder of which is a gripping character study about a family picking up the pieces after the drowning death of their oldest son, which is interesting. Do you ever see the movie?

00:26:32
Speaker 2: No, my dad always talked about it being like crushingly sad, but he was very taken by Pocabell's cannon.

00:26:39
Speaker 1: Oh wow, yeah, yeah, yeah, I.

00:26:41
Speaker 2: Mean, you know about Pocobell's cannon being the like chord progression for like every every wedding song. Yeah, but apparently it was like basically forgotten Johann Pocabell, you know, was forgotten until like nineteen sixty eight when it was performed by a chamber orchestra and it just caught on again as part of the repertoire. It's so close to being just completely forgotten.

00:27:07
Speaker 1: So for our band a. But the Disney executive David Vogel getting fired was not the only studio drama associated with the sixth Sense.

00:27:16
Speaker 2: Knight would later claim that he wrote the role of doctor Malcolm Crowe because crows are associated with death. You understand there's layers to this, specifically with Bruce Willis in mind. But uh, that's not true, or at least it's it might it might be true, but no, I disagree, man. What the was Bruce Willis known for when this would have been getting written, he would have been in a very He would have been in a fallow period, man, because he had done like you know, he had done.

00:27:44
Speaker 1: He's Bruce Willis.

00:27:46
Speaker 2: He would have been coming off like Diehard three because he had done Bruce Willis moonlighting.

00:27:52
Speaker 1: And I guess.

00:27:53
Speaker 2: Anyway, fine, So Knight would claim that he wrote the role of doctor Malcolm crow specifically with Bruce Willis in mind, But fewer people know that Willis took the role because he was forced to. And this all goes back down the winding memory lane of Hollywood to an incident now known as the Broadway Brawler Debacle story Gate, the Broadway Brawler Gate.

00:28:16
Speaker 1: It's pretty good.

00:28:16
Speaker 2: Jordan tell us a little bit about Broadway Brawler Gate.

00:28:19
Speaker 1: Oh, this feels like something you should do.

00:28:21
Speaker 2: This is I mean, I did take well, we talked about it before, right, what movie would be talk I think it was Armagaddy Right. So, in the mid nineties, Willis was attached to both produce and star in a rom com for Disney called Broadway Brawler. The Wikipedia summary is as follows Eddie Kapinski. Bruce Willis, a has been retired professional ice hockey player, starts up a relationship with a character played by Maratini the film Whither Maratini?

00:28:47
Speaker 1: How's she doing? Mar Tierney, Yeah, I don't know. She was from news radio. I don't know what she's now. I just liked her.

00:28:54
Speaker 2: Oh she's good to This was supposed to have been like a sort of in the vein of Jerry Maguire. You know, it's like going to do like a whole sports adjacent thing, but like a rom com. You know, had me at Hello, et cetera. Should have been a done deal, should have been easy.

00:29:07
Speaker 1: Enter Bruce.

00:29:08
Speaker 2: Twenty days into the shoot, Bruce Willis fired the director and most of the.

00:29:14
Speaker 1: Crew in his capacity as produced.

00:29:16
Speaker 2: Yes, we expand and I believe installed like a buddy of his. Yes, okay, Yes. Willis, who was producing the film, shut down the production in Delaware, firing the director Lee Grant, who had won an Oscar for acting in Shampoo, and her producer husband who supposedly brought Willis aboard, which is even funnier. Fire the cinematographer, wardrobe designer. This is twenty days into production, and Willis called his old Moonlighting director Dennis Dugan to come and take over. There's a lot of stuff in a contemporary La Times reading about this in which Bruce doesn't come out looking great. You know, I know we're not supposed to say that about him, But before the disease and they all abuse and everything, he was like one of Hollywood's most notorious, like prickly men. And so the chief of Synergy, who is the company bankrolling Broadway Brawler, canned the whole thing with Joe Roth, who was chairman of Disney. At that point. Production had already cost Synergy seventeen million twenty days into the shoot. So Roth and Disney fixed matters by paying off the seventeen million that this production company had already burned through, and then forcing heavily asking Bruce Willis to start in three movies for a hugely discounted rate, and it actually ended up working extraordinarily well for him because the three movies that he made at gunpoint were Armageddon, The Sixth Sense, and The Kid. Those three movies grossed one point three billion dollars worldwide in the mid nineties.

00:30:48
Speaker 1: Bruce only got ten million instead of his customary twenty million for these movies, So there's that anyway, He's very brave now, though.

00:31:00
Speaker 2: Apparently in a series of Reddit amas and interviews, Hailey Joe Olismont did reveal that why are you Why did you write this?

00:31:06
Speaker 1: Is this a reference to the film that I've forgotten? No?

00:31:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, Hale, I want to set this up, Jordan, what did you write in this outline?

00:31:16
Speaker 1: I wrote this inauspicious beginning would make one assume that Bruce Willis was a nightmare on the set of The Sixth Sense, but that's patently not the case. In a series of Reddit amas and interviews, his young co star Harley jo Osmond revealed that Willis was actually not unlike a mushroom.

00:31:33
Speaker 2: He was a fun guy doing in the podcast or voice is funnier, but I'm still mad at you. Willis would DJ. There were parties held by the cast and crew, and you know, he fancies himself a musical man. Remember the famous Bruno Bruno returned of Bruno, there's that whole bit where he came on to he comes out when he hosted s Naley, he came out and like jammed with the band on harmonica. So the week after Rick Moranis was hosting and came out and proceeded to quote unk, We'll play every single instrument in.

00:32:02
Speaker 1: The like to like run and like go into the director's booth, started shooting the camera man and Bruce was reportedly very upset by that.

00:32:13
Speaker 2: But you know Bruce. Also he gave mister Knight a boy Knight. I gotta figure I gottaigure out a more denigrating name for him, Little Night, Long Night, short Night.

00:32:25
Speaker 1: I'll get there.

00:32:27
Speaker 3: He gave Long Night's Journey into Oh yeah, yeah, gave our boy long Day's Journey in Tonight his first hangovers, he told Variety, Bruce definitely introduced me to the notion of partying and letting loose.

00:32:42
Speaker 2: Back in those days, he was a big DJ and the parties were super fun. He definitely gave me my first hangover. He'd always keep giving me shots that he kept calling Candy. Here's candy, here's candy. I don't like that, No, I don't Yeah, And then the next morning I just could not get off the sofa and I didn't know what this throbbing pain in my head was.

00:33:02
Speaker 1: Bruce was just laughing his butt off, and Night was twenty eight years old. He should have known why he withelt back herb. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more. Too much information in just a moment. Wow, wow, wow wow.

00:33:27
Speaker 2: Bruce Willis's character, as I mentioned earlier, is named Malcolm Crowe, although it's spelled like Cameron Crow, so that's it's clever, you know, Crow's death. Hayley Joe osmond character, meanwhile, is named Cole Sear because he's a seer, you understand, you know, he says I see dead people. That's also his last name, but he spelled it like a burn, like you know, you pan seer or something. So maybe that's another level that M. Knight has yet to reveal to us Cole Sear has gone to become Hjo's signature role, but it very nearly went to another few talent few other talented children. Don't like that sentence construction and perhaps one of the really ripping you anyone on this the weirdest fantasy casting we ever had on this show. That role almost went to Michael and Serah. He was ten, but like, could you imagine his doofy little face in all of those shots crying. Haley Joe Osmond is so chrubic and so precious you just want to protect him.

00:34:36
Speaker 1: Michael Sarah would have been like, oh it haunted though he does.

00:34:40
Speaker 2: Michael Sarah had been like, ah, you deserve this thrown part of the screen.

00:34:44
Speaker 1: Well that's kind of why he didn't get it. Yeah, yeah, he's audition scene.

00:34:47
Speaker 2: Sarah's was instead of crying like Haley Joe Osmond did in his audition, he said he's played this audition scene as quote upbeat. He don't ask whyre In two thousand and nine, I auditioned for the sixth Sense, which I didn't know was seeing dead people. They didn't mention that in the breakdown. After seeing the movie and remembering the seed they had me read. It was the scene with the penny. Bruce Willis is saying I can't be your doctor anymore, and Haley Joe Osmond starts crying and slides the penny over to him. It's a very emotional scene. And I did not do that way. I did it upbeat. I said, some Magic's real, very optimistically. Can you imagine, you imagine, like Sarah do it? Some Magic's real? George Michael in full More? Who's is Liam Aikin guy? So he related to Clay. Oh, I don't think so.

00:35:39
Speaker 1: I didn't know either, which is very sad because this kid had two chances to become the biggest child star of the late nineties and early two thousands, and he missed out narrowly on two occasions. He will let her went on the have Rolls in two thousand and two's Road to Perdition in two thousand and four's Lemonee Snickets a series of unfortunate events. But you'll notice that neither of those movies are as big as The Sixth Sense, which he passed on because his mother felt the film was too dark, and he also was passed over for Harry Potter. He was very nearly the lead in the Harry Potter film franchise, but then he was passed over at the last minute in favor of Daniel Radcliffe Bomber, but of course the role ultimately go to Haley Joel Osmon, whose biggest role to date was that of Little Forrest in Forrest Gump, which was adorable. He was primed for life on the big screen by his father, Eugene Michael Osmon, who sort of seems like one of the great stage dads of our time. He and his wife had left their native Birmingham, Alabama, to pursue his dreams of movie stardom, but unfortunately he hadn't hit yet, so he passed this verve unto his young son, delivering such stark advice as this could be the last time you ever work, so give it your best grim advice to give you a child act your kid. Hall Jah Osmond's semi mythical origin story states that he was walking through a Nikea in Burbank, California, at the age of four when he was spotted by a casting agent who took his picture and got his mom's number. The following day, he got a call to audition for a Pizza Hut commercial where he triumphed over hundreds of kids, having bagged the role of Little Forrest and Forrest Gump. The following year, age five, he spent two seasons on the sitcom thunder Alley as Ed Asner's grandson, and then a further two seasons is Jeff foxworthy Son on The Jeff Foxworthy Show, which I didn't remember, and when that was canceled, he played Murphy Brown's Born out of Wedlock Child for six episodes, so quite a formidable run of TV shows there. Before the age of ten. He also performed in I Hate This is an overused word, but it's the only word I can think of for a n iconic guest spot on Walker Texas Ranger, which was turned into a proto meam by Conan O'Brien. Say it with me, now, come on, igil, no, you have to. I probably am the most dispositionally able to do it. Walker tells me, I have aids. Hayley would later say, in high school and college people will be really cool about not talking about the movies I was in, but no one had any qualms about saying, wait, you had aids. On Walker Texas Ranger, they truly bizarre, bizarrely written, bizarrely performed. Everything about that bit is so weird. Would you want Chuck Norris delivering bad news to you? Sure?

00:38:40
Speaker 2: I guess I'd be okay with that. Not I think about it, all right, glad we covered that.

00:38:44
Speaker 1: I should probably splice in the actual quote. You know, I probably will do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. Although my performance was good too, right, it was it really was?

00:38:53
Speaker 2: You really able to do the spirit of it? Okay, we we'll do both. A three hour episode coming up.

00:39:00
Speaker 1: And how you do a little barda fine? And it's a little visitor now, Adamoyolis? How you say it in Cherokee? Oh well, pardon my French, but I'll be damned.

00:39:15
Speaker 2: Walker told me I had eat.

00:39:17
Speaker 1: Haley earned praise from his accomplished co stars for his precociousness. Kevin Spacey would uh undiplomatically describe Haley as quote a forty year old. Can we say that? Do we have to bleep that sake? They weren't a It was ai right? I think no pay forward? Oh yeah yeah, yeah right sorry. Michael Caine would offer a similar observation. He said, it's like talking to a forty five year old. I don't know what movie they.

00:39:46
Speaker 2: Were in together, The Lions of something. I know exactly what movie it is.

00:39:51
Speaker 1: Its old lions.

00:39:53
Speaker 2: There's something secondhand lions.

00:39:56
Speaker 1: God, I was so close. What the hell is that about? Uh?

00:39:59
Speaker 2: Robert Duval, Michael Caine and Haley jo Osmon are like on a farm or something.

00:40:03
Speaker 1: I don't know.

00:40:03
Speaker 2: The roller rings suspenders, hmm, sounds awful. Two thousand and three, Oh so I was going he was on his way out.

00:40:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, Hailey. We get auditioned advice from his father. Most notably, we need received the script for the Sixth Sense. Eugene advised Haley to think of it not as a horror movie, but a story about communication, which is a very good note for reading the script of the Sixth Sense. I think. He also told Haley to read through the script twice, a fact that made a big impression on M. Knight Shyamalan during the audition. You read your lines through twice, he asked the boy. No, Haley corrected, I read the whole script through twice. That is that is music to the ears of a writer. Let me tell you. M. Knight was very impressed with this child's prep work, his confidence, his precociousness, and the fact that he'd worn a tie to the audition. Ah, right, so cute. Yeah. After Haley left the audition, Night would tell the casting director, I don't know if I want to make this movie anymore if Haley Joe Osmond's not in it narrator voice, he would not. Haley was the consummate pro on the set, and Night would recall a moment when Bruce Willis brought ice cream for all the kids on the Philadelphia neighborhood where they were filming, but Haley was too occupied with his onset obligations to join in the fun. He would say, it was all precise and perfect with Hailey a very disciplined art form like ballet. Hey. Yeah, particularly troubling instance of stage dadding occurred in the scene where Bruce Willis tells Haley then he can no longer be his doctor. I think that's the scene that the audition Sarah audition for. Yeah, Haley was having trouble crying on the set, so his dad, Eugene intervened. Haley's always good at getting the tears, but that day he was having trouble getting there.

00:41:54
Speaker 2: He recalled, imagine saying that about your child, your own flesh and blood. Haley's good getting the tears.

00:42:02
Speaker 1: So I walked up to Bruce because I know it to push Haley's buttons, and he told Bruce Willis to shout his lines off camera at Haley. Bruce was uncomfortable with it. Haley's dad added, but I said, Bruce, he knows you're acting. If you yell at him like you're angry, he's going to start crying, because to this day, Haley can't stand yelling. It worked immediately.

00:42:26
Speaker 2: Holy fucking dude, let's.

00:42:29
Speaker 1: Think about that. Yeah, that's that's some Brian movie.

00:42:33
Speaker 2: My son doesn't like to be yelled at, so yell at him. Wasn't he also like hurling himself into like door frames or something to be like properly shaken before scenes exactly?

00:42:44
Speaker 1: Yes, To get into the move. For a scene where he witnesses a kid with a gunshot wounds with like dripping blood. I think it's a head wound, Haley hurled himself against the wall repeatedly to appear traumatized for a take. I believe he would say that it was about five in the after noon and we needed a wrap for the day soon, and I knew I had to get it. He was eleven. I believe, Yeah, good lord, Yeah. The role of Cole's mother, Lynn very nearly went to Marissa Tomy, but she lost out to Tony Collette. Wow, man, both very good. I was gonna say, don't maybe choose between my children? My god? Oh man. Hilariously, Tony Collette kind of couldn't care less that she got this movie at the time. She was ambivalent when she found out because she had her heart set on being cast in Martin Scorsese's upcoming film Bringing Out the Dead. But m Knight knew she was the right actress after having seen her act in the nineteen ninety four tragic comic film Muriel's Wedding in her native Australia. However, he was worried that the studio wouldn't go for her, apparently because she had a shaved head. Tony came in and her head was shaved. I forget if it was for fun or for a movie. I think it was for eight and a half women believe that was the movie it was for. She did such a beautiful job. I didn't want to show the audition video for fear that the studio would be concerned about her appearance, and I said, I want to cast the woman from Muriel's Wedding, and then Bruce backed me and said, oh, I love Muriel's Wedding. So we kind of got it without the studio seeing the audition, and I was so lucky.

00:44:18
Speaker 2: There's an interview where she's like her agent called her and was like, I have great news for you. You got the part, and she was like already started freaking out, like walking down the sidewalk, and he was like, but it's for the Sixth Sense. She said something like and I said, and I immediately turned to my friend and I was like, I was hoping for Maddie.

00:44:39
Speaker 1: Ah, what a treasure. Uh. I don't know why I love this bit, so m yes, I love the wig bit. Go ahead. Tommy Klet is actually wearing a wig throughout all of the Sixth Sense, which m Night claims was from her previous role in Velvet gold Mine, the Todd Hayes movie about glam Rock era Britten. I love that.

00:44:59
Speaker 3: Uh.

00:44:59
Speaker 1: He's interestingly and this kind of comes up again and again in cast interviews. Tony Klek didn't realize that The Sixth Sense was a horror film. She said she felt so moved by the emotional aspect of the movie that she didn't realize that it was supposed to be this dark and spooky until after its release. Despite this, though, she had some spooky occurrences I can't do it, can you do it? Spooky? Yeah, thank you, spooky occurrences while shooting the movie. She would later say, in the hotel room I was staying in Philadelphia, I started meditating a lot, and then I would wake up at night, roll over and look at the clock, and it was always a repeated number one eleven, three thirty three, four forty four. That really started to spook me. Although I have to say, I don't know if this has ever happened to you, Heigel. That used to happen to me a lot when I would look at a clock and I would see it was like twelve thirty four or something, and I assumed it was purely just biased because that's like an easily rememberable number. Yeah. I also used to wake up at the same time in the middle of the night all the time, and my dad does too. We're both convinced that this is the time that we're gonna die someday. And the fact that we both like came to this conclusion independently, I think is proof that it's gonna happen or it's meant to. Illness has just passed through genetics in my family one or the other.

00:46:16
Speaker 2: Now, then don't they think that that like midnight waking up is because uh, people actually didn't sleep as long as we did before the Industrial Age, like because you were waking up at like essentially the crack of dawn to like, yeah, farm right, it's.

00:46:28
Speaker 1: The Amish ruined everything.

00:46:32
Speaker 2: So, my Sha Barton, your thoughts, Ah, there's the worst segway we've ever I've ever felt of the show. Nuh, my Sha Barton, what do you think about it?

00:46:45
Speaker 1: Jordan? Jordan, what do you let's.

00:46:47
Speaker 2: Really get down to that. Let's really get down to brass tacks here. What do you think about old Mish? I thought I was plans Misha Barton show Misha, why you ad met to me?

00:46:56
Speaker 1: I knew of her vaguely through the O C and I had no idea that she was in the sixth sense. And then when I was at MYU, I would see her in the lobby of my dorms and she was being signed in and I didn't know why. And then all my friends would say, oh, she's probably here to see Haley, and she was, and I said, what do you mean? Oh, they were in the sixth sense together and they stayed friends, which I think is really cute. That is so at least circa two thousand and six they were still tight. That is cute. Yeah. I don't know much about her, though, well you will.

00:47:29
Speaker 2: She plays Cure Collins, the little girl whose mother is a textbook Munchausen by proxy case and is just like poisoning her with dreno gypsy Rose Blanchard case. It's like a distinct psychological phenomenon that's for the parent. There's nothing to do with the kid, but the parent like thrives off the attention being given to them as a caretaker, and so they go to increasingly extreme lengths to keep that high going.

00:47:58
Speaker 1: Man.

00:47:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, when she likes the door to his tent and just like like Jeff Goldbloom and the flies like right. So, well, you will be pleased to know she didn't.

00:48:10
Speaker 1: Actually vomit for this role. Or die or die said that, so cheerfully. Hey, not for nothing, folks, I don't know. Not many people know this, But she didn't actually die to make this movie.

00:48:24
Speaker 2: It was a breakfast cereal that she would hold in her mind. It's gotta be like cream of wheat, right, or like a watery like a watered down oatmeal.

00:48:32
Speaker 1: What do you think? Yeah, it was either granola or oatmeal. Yeah, it was probably oatmeal.

00:48:36
Speaker 2: Barton didn't tell her friends that she was in the movie, which I guess led to an incident where one of them just happened to see it and ran out of the movie theater screaming because they thought their friend had died.

00:48:47
Speaker 1: Just not how movies work.

00:48:48
Speaker 2: But yeah, it was like running from the train, like that comes you know, it's not actually coming at you.

00:48:57
Speaker 1: Kids are dumb. Micha had kind of a rough break.

00:49:02
Speaker 2: She wrote in twenty twenty one Harper's Bizarre Piece that she felt she had been sexualized in her earlier film Roles, even becoming a quote strange sex symbol at thirteen in Asia, where her movie Pups garnered significant attention.

00:49:20
Speaker 1: I don't yeah, don't look up. Don't look up that movie.

00:49:23
Speaker 2: No, I don't want I don't want to know anything about it.

00:49:24
Speaker 1: I thought it was like an animated movie. I thought, or like some. I don't know. I thought it was like a kid's movie. It's not.

00:49:30
Speaker 2: I don't want to do it. Nope, Nope, nope nope. She also revealed that she felt pressure to lose her virginity at the age of eighteen when she joined the cast of The OC so her character was sexually active in that show, and just because. In two thousand and five, she showed an interview with that a Hollywood publicist had once instructed her to sleep with Leonardo DiCaprio in an effort to help her career. She had some diys and some coke stuff, right, diy she ran a DIY punk venue. No, she's got one of those famous mug shots from her. Uh because she was driving drunk unlicensed and she's kind of like smirking in her mug shot.

00:50:09
Speaker 1: Oh, I mean this was the era of smirking mug shots.

00:50:12
Speaker 2: That's true anyway, good for her? Uh? Oh boy, Donnie Walls, My boy, Donnie Walls. Donny Wahlberg, speaking of bit characters with no segue X New Kid on the Block boy band are from Boston. Give me comm any hate crimes?

00:50:30
Speaker 1: Or is that just his brother? I thought that was just Marky Mark.

00:50:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, yeah, he'd uh go. Donnie had appeared in stuff like Ransom with Moe Gibson, nineteen ninety six movie called Bullet with Tupac.

00:50:43
Speaker 1: And Mickey Rourke. Oh to be a fly on that wall? Tupac? Was that a movie called Bullet? Ooh? Yeah, Timing, I hate Donny, I hate the Wahlbergs. Do you want to elaborate on that? Do I need to?

00:50:56
Speaker 2: Shouldn't that just be eminently obvious?

00:50:58
Speaker 1: How many Wallburgs are there? There was? Because now I'm confusing with like the ball It was like, is there a Stephen Wahlberg? No, No, it's a ball.

00:51:04
Speaker 2: No, but there's one of them that has a Burger place, because don't they have like a reality show called about it called Wallburs Yeah?

00:51:11
Speaker 1: But is that?

00:51:12
Speaker 2: And let's look, that's just like a guy from Southey that like now he's just trying.

00:51:16
Speaker 1: To Oh, there are quite a few Wahlberg.

00:51:18
Speaker 2: Of course they're Boston Irish Catholic.

00:51:19
Speaker 1: Dude, Donnie Mark, Jim Robert, Paul Wahlberg.

00:51:24
Speaker 2: Patrick, Patrick Moira. I'm running out offensively Irish names. I didn't have more prepared. I should have gone into that bib uh Yeah, Donnie was hoping that The Sixth Sense would jump start his career as a quote unquote serious actor, and as such threw himself into the part of Vincent, the disturbed former patient of Bruce Willis's with equally psychotic Gusto. Wahlberg told the Hollywood Reporter, I remember, and I'm saying, this scene really has to kickstart the movie. I tried not to think about the burden and the responsibility and just try to honor the script and stay in tune with what I needed to play this part. I thought, if I was in that room standing across from Bruce Willis and Olivia Williams and haven't suffered and really gone through some dramatic can I do in the voice I remember Nights saying this scene has really got to kickstot the movie. Sorry, no, I don't think I kickstot the movie. I tried not to think about that burden and that responsibility and just try to on of the script and stay in tune with what I needed to Kennedy when I needed to play this pot smart guy.

00:52:29
Speaker 1: The only boss at axcit work, I say, is North. No.

00:52:32
Speaker 2: No thought if I was really in that room standing across from Bruce Willis and Olivia Williams. I haven't suffered, really gone through some really dramatic situations before through this scene to take it back to a serious place. He then gives the truly traumatic, amazing kicker to this sentence, How am I going to bear my clothes, never mind bear my soul? So he starved himself. He moved to New York and stayed in a friend's apartment with no money or credit cards, and he would fast for a couple of day at times and then just eat vegetables, chew gum all day, and then quote walk the streets. Then when he got to Philadelphia, he said, I slept in a park one night and was going through this really crazy process. He lost forty three pounds in five weeks and stopped showering. He was not, however, allowed to do full frontal or full battle. I guess as he thought he was going to, So he wore his underwear to hang onto that PG. Thirteen rating and he's in it for like ten minutes, five minutes, three minutes. See, yeah, it's short, whatever it is. Yeah, but his self abuse achieved the goal. He went onto other stuff like the Band of Brothers, miniseries and Saw Saw Too.

00:53:44
Speaker 1: He's in Saw Too and Saw three.

00:53:47
Speaker 2: I think Donnie Wahlberg's performance was significantly better, however, than our buddy fly By Night's own acting chops. As is so often the case with directors, you know, Hitchcock and so forth, fly by Night makes a director and his movies.

00:54:01
Speaker 1: He means m night Chamalan, folks.

00:54:03
Speaker 2: I'm workshopping some nicknames. I like fly by Night. I had some more queued up. Let me know.

00:54:08
Speaker 1: Night moves, Oh, night moves is good night owl one night stand. That's good too, because that's kind of what he is. Oh got his ass? Uh? Oh, Ship's passing in the night. I like that. Good Night Vienna, Oh that's good. Long Day's Journey in the night.

00:54:27
Speaker 2: M Night is h M Night is Young Red Sky, m Night, Sailor's Delight, Saturday Night Special.

00:54:34
Speaker 1: Saturday Night's all right for Fighting?

00:54:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, stag Night anything there, Night on the Town, three Dog Night, three Dog Night.

00:54:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, so our boy Saturday Night Special.

00:54:46
Speaker 2: Uh, I'm liking that one actually gives him a kind of gives him.

00:54:51
Speaker 1: A pop just pops, doesn't it? Uh? Anyway, he's he does his cameo. Here's a doctor.

00:54:58
Speaker 2: He wrote the part is a quote nice little thing to honor his parents, who are both doctors, and he cut most of it because he's bad at acting, but apparently improved so much by lading the water that he felt he could cast himself as the savior of mankind.

00:55:13
Speaker 1: Herb oh Man.

00:55:15
Speaker 2: Somebody tweeted us about last week's question that we faced or the joy Division episode. We were attempting to ascertain where the north of England begins, and so we had a listener tweet at me a gentleman named Andy who drums. I think I believe he has a black metal band of some kind from what I was briefly able to glean from his Twitter profile.

00:55:39
Speaker 1: He tweeted us.

00:55:39
Speaker 2: Anything north of Sheffield is the north of England, which he said was further bolstered by a Scotsman. He knows who gave that this second opinion, And far be it for me to argue with the Scotsman. So oh, thank you, Oh yes, so there he is. Yes, mcknightride or thank you. Yeah, I consider that matter settled. TMI regrets the error.

00:55:57
Speaker 1: I think that was what I said.

00:55:59
Speaker 2: Okay, well, don't let's not be petty, Jordan. I've said plenty of things that were right too, he said lyingly. Disney quickly surrounded the inexperienced hard Day's Night with producer Kathleen Kennedy.

00:56:17
Speaker 1: Anything there. I just was really proud that after speaking about the north of England, you made a Beatles reference in reference to them Night Shauman's name, So that.

00:56:24
Speaker 2: Was good connections being made up here. Producer Kathleen Kennedy and cinematographer tak Fujimoto. This is interesting because tak Fujimoto was Demi's longtime director of photography during that hot streak in the eighties and nineties, but he actually broke through into the industry with Terrence Malex bad Lands, which is generally considered to be one of the most beautiful movies of his era. So you know, you get the guy that did that, went on to work with Demi for like five movies and then went onto sixth Cents. You're in pretty good hands. Other notables included editor Andrew Monsheine, who had come from What's Eating Gilbert Grape and Joanna Johnston who was from Spielberg and Zemic is his camp doing wardrobe. So many little details in this movie that are so great. Did you talk about how he's always wearing the same outfit but in different configurations so that it's not as obvious, and he's just so like drab and boring that you're like, yeah, I probably would wear the same suit and tie every day.

00:57:14
Speaker 1: Yeah. Anyway. The Sixth Sense was shot in and around Philadelphia, where m Knight's from, and the film features little location specific hints for ego eyed viewers, and perhaps you, as a Pennsylvania boy, picked up on some of them. There was a bottle of pen made sour cream, which is only available in the Philadelphia area, as well as new logos for the Philadelphia Eagles and the seventy six ers from nineteen ninety six and nineteen ninety seven. Many of the indoor sets were built in the Philadelphia Convention Center, which was torn down in two thousand and five. Halo Joe Alsoma would recall big empty marble hallways, kind of a shining feel around the set itself. I believe JFK did a speech there during a campaign in nineteen sixty. I was not able to turn up anything about JFK, but Martin Luther King did speak there as ad LBJ Nelson, Mandela Pope John Paul the Second, in addition to the Beatles, The Stones, and the Dead, who all performed there, as did the Jackson Five, who reportedly played their first gig there after signing to motown. All of this to say, these halls are surely haunted. It must feel crazy in there, or did before they tore it down. Yeah, he did the same thing for Unbreakable. He filmed it in there Pacific Center. Yeah, good for him. Hill Is Jewson would continue, it was very old on ornate and had these cavernous marble stairways that went really deep down. Yes, it really had a creepy feeling. Despite this, he says he wasn't afraid as he and Misha wander the darkened corners of this building. He said he was somewhat desensitized during filming, and then he never had nightmares or anything of the sort. Misha Barton said something similar about the time she spent sprinting through in her Dead Kid makeup, which is a great little detail. She said, this movie didn't really bother me that much. I've always been fascinated by gothic and dark things, so it wasn't like I was scared. It was more just really interesting subject matter. I've always felt there's a real need to do the character justice. Everybody asks, was it traumatizing doing this movie? It really wasn't. I was already thirteen and I could handle it. Poor girl. Yeah, I can only imagine that Hella jo Osma was about the biggest crush on her. He was eleven. She was so nice.

00:59:30
Speaker 2: God, dude, can you imagine the searing failings that young boy had chasing her around the convention.

00:59:36
Speaker 1: Center in the darkened court.

00:59:38
Speaker 2: You could just do a whole movie on just that relationship.

00:59:41
Speaker 1: Yeah. Even so, there were still some scenes that were deemed too troubling for the final cut. Ozma remembered shooting a scene where he looked out a window and saw an entire hospital wing of quote horribly disfigured and mutilated people, and might cut it from the movie, possibly to protect its peace rating. We touched on this earlier bit while filming. The cast wasn't totally aware of how terrifying this film would ultimately be. Most thought it was an emotional drama about characters grappling with communication issues with their loved ones dead or alive. Awesome, it would tell variety. The first time I remember seeing a lot of it. Of even Day's was at Disney's lot in Burbank in the Seven Dwarfs building, but they had some screening rooms. I went there with my whole family. A friend of mine came and I remember him getting really scared by it. That was the first time I was like, oh, wow, this is what this movie does to people.

01:00:39
Speaker 2: As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information after these messages.

01:00:52
Speaker 1: Wow. Halo Jaws recalled that the most difficult scene to film was the one in the car, where the character of Cole reveals a personal story to his mother about his grandmother, which ultimately convinces her of his supernatural abilities. His mother went to her mother's grave and asked if her late mother was proud of her, and her answer delivered through her young son every day. What's that mean? Oh God? That scene is crushing. It crushing hasn't recalled a sci fi wire. It was raining and we were in a car and I remember being kind of rushed in that scene and the tone is really delicate. But nailed it, baby.

01:01:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was gonna say, knocked it out of the park.

01:01:45
Speaker 1: Both people in that scene were nominated for oscars. That seems tough. That's really yeah. I rewatched it several times in advance of this, and I am stunned by them. And I'm not good at like recognizing good act For me, it's like pizza, Like everything above a certain very low threshold to me reads as like decent acting. And it's very hard for me, which is sad considering I went to school for film. It's very hard for me to recognize truly great acting.

01:02:13
Speaker 2: But good lord, that scene is yeah, I mean, what happened to him?

01:02:18
Speaker 1: Man? Like, we'll talk about that towards the end of the episode. I mean, I don't know. I mean, may just be a case of like you can't be that hungry twice.

01:02:27
Speaker 2: I mean, but he's so like ahead of his years in that movie. And then just I mean especially and going up against Tony Killette. You know, like anyway six we talked to We just mentioned this, but you know, this movie is actually really seriously impressive in how it adheres to its proof of concept you know, logic, Yeah, right, And it's like one of those things that once you get the twist, you watch it again and you're like, damn, they really.

01:02:53
Speaker 1: Did like flawlessly support this.

01:02:55
Speaker 2: Through the whole movie, Malcolm Crow only wears articles of clothing that he or touched the night of his death, like the overcoat, his blue rowing sweatshirt, the suit jacket. He doesn't interact with anyone other than coal. He doesn't touch any objects except for the Latin dictionary. And funnily enough, Bruce Willis actually had to learn how to write with his right hand for scenes where they were doing shots of that, because he's left handed, and they couldn't show him righting with the left because they would have spoiled the wedding ring moment.

01:03:24
Speaker 1: Isn't that cool? Yeah, that's cool. Speaking of spoiling, I added that later.

01:03:31
Speaker 2: Hugh another interesting how dare you? Another interesting clue is the use of the color red throughout the film, but used it sparingly in shots that depicted, as he said, anything that's tainted from the ghost world or has a connection to the other side.

01:03:47
Speaker 1: You if anything that's tainted from the ghost world or the other side.

01:03:50
Speaker 2: Buddy, what don't I have that's tainted from the ghost world or the other side in this economy? The doorknob that the locked basement door that Bruce tries to get open, the balloon that leads Cole up the winding staircase at the birthday party, where the ghost slash at his sweater, which is also red. The door of the church where Cole seeks church stuff, Cole's ghost tent and this scream of consciousness scrawl across his desk.

01:04:20
Speaker 1: Oh what I said. Oh, it's just as creepy.

01:04:24
Speaker 2: The dress of that horror of a mother wears at the funeral, the nerve on her, the cheek of it red at a funeral, exactly right the box holding the dead girl's videotape. Speak of color, it is interesting to note that both Osmond and Wahlberg's characters who can see you know the dead people.

01:04:43
Speaker 1: Have white hairs on their heads.

01:04:49
Speaker 2: One night only decided that all quote spirit spotters would share. This physical attribute is that when a ghost has like a light flow period.

01:04:59
Speaker 1: Oh, usually I have a pretty good sense, you may even call it a sixth sense of where you're about to go or what you're about to do. That one, that one I didn't see. I did not see that.

01:05:15
Speaker 2: According to the film's logic, the temperature drops when a ghost gets upset, right, which we've we covered in our Extorsist series.

01:05:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, I never thought about that. Hey, why to pissed off? Ghosts make things cold? You should know this, You know, I got no idea. Maybe it's to do with.

01:05:35
Speaker 2: The goo, the the the the fat fantasm, the patantasma, goria, their gool and they have goo exo exoplasm, psychoplasm something like that, right, is it the goo?

01:05:48
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's call it dan Akroyd, he'll know.

01:05:51
Speaker 2: I can't believe he slipped himself getting a ghost blowy into that.

01:05:54
Speaker 1: Movie, Jamie, can you get dan akroad online?

01:05:57
Speaker 2: So anyway, the ghosts, their goo makes it cold, right, That's what we've decided here. And so you can see Bruce Willis's wife's breath at the end of the movie, and along with the line I see dead people. M Night decided not to use CGI to facilitate the image of this breath coming out, and instead he put Haley Joe Osmon in a frozen box. I believe that he built a cold room, and he said his rationale for doing this was CGI at the time was not perfected to the place where I felt comfortable that it could do breath. So we built a cold room. Osmon wasn't acting. It was cold and you could see the physicality on his skin and the way he's shivering. And even now with CGI, I might do it the same way because of what it makes the actors do. God it sucks. Hjo explained a little bit more. He said, what they would do is drape this huge plastic sheeting over the sets and then pump in freezing cold air so that it would be below freezing and you could see our breath. There was a limited time that we could be there because it was so cold, and most of our scenes I'm in my underwear or something. It's a tough environment, but it's great when you're in scene we're supposed to be frightened and shivering, and it really is that cold. You can actually use real elements in those situations. Exorcist was done like twenty below at one point right because of the lighting in that room. They had to like get it that cold. Of course, speaking of these airtight moments, if any viewers picked up this airtight construction on the first time that they saw the movie, and the end of the film pretty much blew everyone's minds, Nighty Night and his crew went to great lengths to preserve the surprise that Bruce Willis's character has been dead throughout the entirety of the movie, and in fact, he nearly cut the legendary I See Dead People Lyne due to concerns that it gave the twist away. This was less due to the line itself, and more because the camera immediately cuts to a shot of Bruce Willis's character as soon as he says it. This was meant as a subtle signal that doctor Crowe was one of the aforementioned dead people that Cold could see. However, after watching an early cut of the film, Nighty Night was concerned that this stick with that. Nighty Night was concerned that this was all tar too obvious and reportedly ordered the exchange cut, and his editors decided to leave the scene in for test screenings in order to gauge the audience response. Predictably, no one picked up on it, and Knight decided to leave it in, giving birth to one of the most famous catchphrases in horror movie history. Another truly insane way they worked to disguise this twist was forcing Bruce Willis, who was naturally left handed, to learn to write with his right hand, because there's a scene in which his character signs his name, and they worried that if he used his left hand, audience would realize that he isn't wearing a wedding band. You'll remember at the end of the movie, he realizes he's dead because his wife is clutching his ring. And all of these efforts are made so much more hilarious by the fact that James Newton Howard's score contains a piece of music that plays whenever Bruce Willis's character is on screen, and appears on the soundtrack listed as Malcolm is dead.

01:08:54
Speaker 1: So if you bought the soundtrack CD to The Sixth Senses, a big old spoiler on the track list.

01:09:00
Speaker 2: Good job Newton, Newton Howard, loser, all right?

01:09:03
Speaker 1: Moving on? As m Night, Shyamalan readied his film for release throughout the summer of nineteen ninety nine. He worried deeply that The Sixth Sense would be a victim of timing, specifically because it was too similar to another movie that have been released sort of around the same time. Now, there have been numerous occasions over the years where film's chances of the box office were neetcapped due to other movies with a similar theme getting prominence around the same time he was finding Nemo and a Shark's Tale, Armageddon in Deep Impact, Dante's Peak and Volcano, A Bug's Life and Ants, and even Mega Mind and Despicable Me. All of these comparisons make a certain amount of sense considering they were, you know, very similar thematically and released during a very tight time period. However, m Night Shamalan's concerns are kind of ridiculous. He was reportedly worried because he feared that nineteen ninety five's ca Asper saturated the market with ghost movies, despite the fact that Casper was released four years earlier and it was for children. I've seen this sighted on numerous listicles from reputable sites, but I will admit there's a distinct possibility that it is fake news, because I just think that's absurd. However, there is another movie out there that was crushed at the box office by the Sixth Sense. I'm talking about The Stir of Echoes starring Kevin Bacon. Oh yeah, which followed me. I think was the first horror movie I ever saw it. Actually, actually, yeah, I saw that probably before the Sixth Sense. Like the Sixth Sense, this movie also set out around a child's ability to see dead people and ghosts. Fortunately for Old Bakes, his fifty summer movie barely made its budget back a faith that he blames on the Sixth Sense. And apparently Kevin Bacon has a seething hatred for the Sixth Sense to this day. That's great, it is.

01:11:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, I hope he takes it out on m Night, not anyone else in the film. She's just like been working for years to unseat shyamal On. M Knight comes back from his Bacon Brothers musical tour, seething, I'm gonna get that guy, think Bacon, think what is his weakness?

01:11:24
Speaker 1: Writing it on a whiteboard, switch bad movies and underlines it.

01:11:30
Speaker 2: Uh, are they like Shymalan stands or are gonna like come after me for this?

01:11:36
Speaker 1: I just it's become such a punchline. Yeah, I mean, Jesus Christ, I mean I just think of the Robot Chicken bit.

01:11:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, uh, marginally racist Seth Green doing an Indian accent.

01:11:50
Speaker 1: Uh oh, that was Seth Green. I assume I could almost imagine m Night like appearing in Robot Chicken. He was in Entourage.

01:11:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess that's true, all right.

01:12:02
Speaker 1: The Sixth Sense was released on August sixth Night, Get It nineteen ninety nine, which also happened to be m Night's twenty ninth birthday. Wow, he was young. Oh of course he did that.

01:12:13
Speaker 2: No, he doesn't have control over the release dates, but it is funny.

01:12:16
Speaker 1: He took that as a sign that the Sixth Sense was quote being guided. Ah, in a way, he was not wrong. Despite receiving very little fanfare upon its release, the Sixth Sense made more than eight million dollars on its opening day. To put that in perspective, his first two movies, nineteen ninety two's Praying with Anger and nineteen ninety eight Wide Awake, grossed three hundred and fifty thousand dollars combined I think total, So eight million dollars an opening day not bad. The Sixth Sense ultimately went on to make six hundred and seventy three million dollars globally on a forty million dollar budget, making it the second highest grossing movie of nineteen ninety nine behind Star Wars The Phantom Menace. It beat out Toy Story two, Austin Powers, The Spy Who Shagged Me and The Matrix. It was also the most rented VHS of the year. Two thousand, with over eighty million people checking it out, crushing the Phantom Menaces rental record. The Sixth Sense also famously surpassed Jaws to become the highest grossing horror movie of all time until twenty seventeen following the release of the It reboot worthy successor.

01:13:23
Speaker 2: No, Okay, I actually liked those movies, but it has nothing really to do with the horror of it. I just like all the They really knocked it out of the part casting both of those really clearly writing on the stranger thing stuff, but like the kids in that great chemistry and then sort of the adult cast.

01:13:40
Speaker 1: So hilariously, given the big stink that Disney made about financing the picture and the firing of the executive David Vogel, you remember, it became Disney Imprint Hollywood Picture's most successful film ever, and even more hilariously, the studio was ultimately bankrupted due to a series of poor investments after the success. This included a cinematic adaptation of Kurt Vonneget's Breakfast of Champions starring who else Bruce Willis. Yeah, I can't believe he Wasn't he.

01:14:11
Speaker 2: The sales guy who goes crazy and kills people. Yeah, but still, yeah, he was in a Kurt Vonnega adaptation.

01:14:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just weird. It is the diehard guy. It's not who I would have assumed. Yeah, you're right. And also the black comedy gun Shy starring Liam Neeson and Sandra Bullock not a real movie. Hollywood Pictures shuddered in two thousand and seven. Also Spyglass Entertainment, who purchased the rights from Disney to finance The Sixth Sense also went under in twenty twelve, despite helming Bruce Almighty, the Oscar nominated Invictus and the Star Trek reboot. So despite all the money the sixth Cents made, it could not save these two studios. Now we're into a section I call I see gold people the Sixth Sense at the Oscars, that one.

01:14:56
Speaker 2: You knocked it out of the park.

01:14:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you. I mean, I can't believe he didn't read the other subsection heading come on, baby, do the twist when we discussed the ending of the movie. But I'm glad I got that in here.

01:15:07
Speaker 2: I am glad you got it in here as well.

01:15:09
Speaker 1: The Sixth Sense also got significant recognition from the Motion Picture Academy. It received appropriately six nominations See What They Did There, including Best Picture, making it one of only six horror movies See What They Did There to receive the Best Picture nomination. The others are The Exorcist in nineteen seventy three, Jaws in nineteen seventy five, Silence of the Lambs in nineteen ninety one, Black Swan and twenty eleven, and Get Out in twenty seventeen. Of those, I think Silence of the Lambs was the only one that won you get Out noe? That was? That was Moonlight Year. Yeah. It also earned nominations for Best Editing, Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress for Tony Collette and m Night. Shyamalan became the sixth Jesus See What They Did There and as of twenty twenty three, last person nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director before the age of thirty again, he was twenty nine. He follows in the lineage of Orson Wells, who was twenty six when he directed nineteen forty one Citizen Kane, Charles Lalush, who was twenty nine when he directed nineteen sixty six As a Man and a Woman. George Lucas, who's twenty nine when he directed American Graffiti in nineteen seventy three, Sir Kenneth Branna, who directed Henry the Fifth in nineteen eighty nine, and John Singleton, who was just twenty four when he directed Boys in the Hood in nineteen ninety one. That is wild. Yeah, none of those directors won, and also, fittingly, the sixth sense one none of it's Oscar nomination.

01:16:42
Speaker 2: I mean, can you imagine how much worse he would have been had he walked out of there with a Best Director statue.

01:16:47
Speaker 1: At age twenty nine. No, we would not have survived, would not have gone well. No, this is w sad for poor Haley jaw Osmond, who was for Best Supporting Actor at the age of eleven. He was beaten by Michael Caine for Cider House Rules. I've done that, every mention of Cider House Rules. I can't believe how much mylein's that got. I even capitalized it in the script and put an exclamation mark. But Hailey Josmond was hilariously confident on the red carpet at the Oscars that night, telling an AP reporter. People like Tom Cruise obviously have a lot of name recognition, So I guess that puts a little favor in their corner, but I'd say the race is very even. He was eleven awesome. Good for him. There's also a funny, sad story that took place at the two thousand Golden Globe Awards. According to a report in New York Magazine, Hailey jaw Osmond cried inconsolably at his table for much of the evening after losing out to Tom Cruise, who won for Magnolia. He was apparently so distraught that at one point Harrison Ford came over to his table to try to cheer him up. Kid, shut up bombing the rest of us out. I snuck a j in here, and I'm pretty roasted right now. I don't need to be looking at a crying kid, and me and Nicholson are over on the corner. But in a twenty fifteen interview with details, Hala jaw Osmond denies that it went down like this. This is funny, he said, at the Golden Globes, you eat. So I was cutting my chicken and I cut my finger, and my category was the first one they announced. I looked upset, but I didn't care about the awards at all and Sigourney Weaver and everybody came over and thought I was sad because I lost? What kid cares about awards? As a kid, How do you feel like you're competing with like Tom Cruise? What do you think Do you think he was crying because he lost or because he cut his finger cutting chicken? Has anybody ever cut their finger cutting chicken? I mean, yes, I have.

01:18:55
Speaker 2: No, that's not true. I didn't cut the tip of my finger off with a meat slice or to Deli ones. Though you put it back on, you must you play it all. Oh no, it was completely just just right off. I got to sew that back on.

01:19:08
Speaker 1: Got a lot of mileage. Though.

01:19:09
Speaker 2: People would ask me, what's what happened, and I'd be like, oh, I cut my finger on the meat slicer. Let me know if you find it the chicken salad. Great joke, great joke at that Deli also traumatized and couldn't play bass for a long time.

01:19:21
Speaker 1: Really sucked. So you've had a lot of hand injuries, I know, right, all right.

01:19:29
Speaker 2: So despite the Oscar snob, Hjo got props from the Dean of Pissy Critics himself, Roger Ebert Osmond, he wrote, who was on screen in almost every scene, is one of the best actors now working. The New York Times reviews sniped and this year's Touched by an Angel Award for gaggingly mawkish supernatural Kitch goes to Bruce Willis's newest film, The Sixth Sense. Who was that Vincent Canby?

01:19:56
Speaker 1: I see I think so? Oh it seems like bitch.

01:20:00
Speaker 2: Fame did not go well for young Hgo, who you know, basically had the standard child star sort of situation. He found himself a stalker, let his father go to forbid him from hanging out in public places alone, and he would say that this was partially to blame for him going off the rails at the age of eighteen in two thousand and six, when he got drunk after seeing the band Muse Who among Us and drove home, crashing his nineteen ninety six Saturn into a concrete mailbox. I got to know what kind of car it was, SL two, SL four, the sedan? I think he said it was a station wagon. Oh yeah, yeah, my family had one of those, but I also had the Sedan SL two.

01:20:41
Speaker 1: Great car. Could have driven that thing into Helen.

01:20:43
Speaker 2: Back apparently not not if you're a non of inch shows at the wheel.

01:20:47
Speaker 1: Baby.

01:20:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, he rolled the car and wound up in the hospital, and then he got a dui possession of marijuana. His dad would say, I had been watchdogging Haley for years. Weird thing to say. I decided that summer he was going to do pretty much whatever he wanted. I didn't ask a whole lot of questions. That's the most important mistake that I made, and the result was I gave him so much freedom that he got himself in trouble. H Jo claimed at the time that he swore off alcohol at that point until he was of legal age, and Jordan.

01:21:18
Speaker 1: Can back that one up. I can kind of poke holes on that, okay.

01:21:23
Speaker 2: He enrolled at NYU, the only academic acting program that would allow him to take leaves of absence to work.

01:21:29
Speaker 1: Leaves of absence? Am I right? Oh?

01:21:33
Speaker 2: Because he the dui? No, it was good, it was good. I'm yeah, I'm with it. I'm right there with you now. Made his Broadway debut in two thousand and eight, alongside John Luisiamo and Cedric the Entertainer in David Mammott's American Buffalo.

01:21:47
Speaker 1: That was supposed really a good play, right, supposed to be.

01:21:50
Speaker 2: It's like a upper echelon Mammot upper ash Mams, as we call it in the Steppenwolf Theater fandom where Mamalkovich and Cooper heads at Sorry my Malcolvich and Gary Sineze head's.

01:22:02
Speaker 1: At you know, the Steppenwolf bro Mammot forever.

01:22:07
Speaker 2: I've rolled up my sleeve show of a heart tattoo with Mammot in it. Uh you say, Joe Osmond dated one of man It's daughters.

01:22:15
Speaker 1: Uh not the yeah, the one that wasn't Jojah from Girls, She's.

01:22:19
Speaker 2: The most forgettable to me.

01:22:21
Speaker 1: Out of the girls. There's the obnoxious one, the pretty one, the there's a hippie one, one was British, right yeah, Simon Kirk's daughter, and the cat nice that was. That was well done.

01:22:36
Speaker 2: For those of you who don't know this repeated inside joke Jordan and I keep making is that in the nicknames for Kiss, Geene Simmons is the demon, Ace Frehley is, Paul Stanley is the star child.

01:22:49
Speaker 1: I don't know. Yeah, yeah, actually like no, I thought a yeah, Ace was star child.

01:22:54
Speaker 2: Paul Stanley is like the Golden Boy, or something.

01:22:59
Speaker 1: I don't know anyway.

01:23:01
Speaker 3: Uh.

01:23:01
Speaker 2: Peter Cris, the drummer most famous for his tender ballad Beth was the Cat. We got a demon guy, we got a space guy.

01:23:13
Speaker 1: We got a guy with a like a star in his face. Uh, Peter, where do you want to be? M the cat?

01:23:23
Speaker 2: We're cutting that guy out of the royalties.

01:23:26
Speaker 1: Uh.

01:23:31
Speaker 2: The critics, for the most first time in his career were quite mean to h Jo. Oh I was wrong. It wasn't top tier Mammott. Ben Brawdley wrote The New York Times, mister Osmond's facial stubble and slumping posture failed to override the impression that he's giving a perfect School of Disney juvenile performance that.

01:23:49
Speaker 1: Seems personally that's less about Mammott more about him.

01:23:51
Speaker 2: This contributed to the reasons why the show closed after only eight performances. H Jo then enrolled in the NYU's Experimental Theater Workshop, a place I can only imagine as a very specific level of hell. They would do things like elaborate vocal drills, afro Haitian dance classes, Jersey Grotowski movement exercises that could involve students running around flapping their arms like birds. Oh God, film school Man, you're like the only good one.

01:24:20
Speaker 1: I know. That's very kind of you.

01:24:23
Speaker 2: Never once was I like, oh, I already know this, he said of the experience. It was just a totally different thing, and it broadens you as an artist. He did a Ted Bundy movie.

01:24:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, he had a bit roll in The Evil Vile and incredibly totally yeah whatever that Netflix was.

01:24:41
Speaker 2: Definitely he's been on like Robot Chicken a lot.

01:24:43
Speaker 1: Right, Oh was he or did they just make fun of him?

01:24:47
Speaker 2: No?

01:24:47
Speaker 1: I thought he was like actually on that. Oh that's cool. I mean it would make sense like he was like he had a good sense of humor about Yeah, I'm sure he has a ton of money.

01:24:58
Speaker 2: Oh he pops up on what we do in the Shadow actually yeah yeah.

01:25:02
Speaker 1: And the boys. Hey, I mean he was a good guy. I mean when I know him, he was a good guy. Yeah. I believe it. He's probably still a good guy, you know, Yeah, he's actually he seems to be. Yeah from what I've heard. Okay, alright, Hjo, it was just I wish you could know how weird it was. It's me and my best friends since we were five years old. In Hjo alone, on the roof of the mckibbon Lofts in like two thousand and eight, at someone godly hour, just like on our backs looking up at the stars, just like pontificating. It's like one of the weirder moments of my life.

01:25:42
Speaker 2: Sixth Sense as a movie has age slightly better than Haley Joel Sorry. The phrase icy dead people currently ranks in the forty fourth position on AFI's list of one hundred greatest movie quotes. However, a slightly different version of the quote exists in another movie prior, also starring Bruce Willis, nineteen ninety five's Twelve Monkeys Underrated film Boy Terry Gilliam Brad Pitt Solid flick Twelve Monkeys. In the film, Bruce Willis's character looks around and states, all I see are dead people. I think that was because he was a time traveler sent back to protect people from an epidemic, and he was like ranting that everyone was going to die in that epidemic. Fans of the children's horror anthology Are You Afraid of the Dark. Meanwhile, in Nickelodeon Classic we have done an episode on have pointed out that the nineteen ninety five episode the Tale of the Dream Girl shares a similar storyline to the sixth Sense. In the episode, a teen named Johnny and his sister Erica have a close relation to what what are you setting me up for?

01:26:43
Speaker 1: I think? No, no, no, don't worry a friendship. They have a close friendship.

01:26:47
Speaker 2: Johnny begins seeing a beautiful girl in a letter jacket who calls Who calls to him? Erica tells him that the dream girl's name is Donna. She died in a tragic accident in the recent past. Ultimately, it turns out that Johnny is also dead, having died in the at accident with Donna, and only Erica can see him. Ultimately, Johnny says goodbye to his sister and joins Donna as they head to Hell. I'm sorry the afterlife, it's because the next realm, it's because they had premarital sex. When an interviewer asked M. Knight Shyamalan about whether or not he was inspired by the episode, he adopted the familiar deny till you die strategy. He claimed to have not only never seen the episode, but that he was unfamiliar with the show as a whole. He said, that's really weird. I don't think I've ever seen that show. I don't want to ignore something that might have been an influence. But nothing rings a bell when you say that. Beads of sweat pouring out of him. For what it's worth. The cult classic horror movie Carnival of Souls was released in nineteen sixty two, widely considered to be ground zero for the they were dead the whole time, twist ending.

01:27:53
Speaker 1: And now we're at a section I like to call I see outros. Obviously, to date, m Knight has not been able to match the sixth of the film, released on his twenty ninth birthday, which in a way is sad. His addiction to overwrought twist endings has marked him as something of a punchline a hack.

01:28:12
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I mean yeah, I mean, if you charged a career, Unbreakable came out. But people really like that one. It's an interesting take. I mean I should also point out that, and I don't we don't know how much of this is tak Fujimoto, but like there's a lot of interesting camera work in sixth sense. You know, he mixes sort of long shots and general and like more formal moving the big camera techniques with a lot of handheld stuff in a way that I think was kind of apprecient and in the direction film would go. And Unbreakable, I think I find him interesting because of his thing about like American mythologies, right, Unbreakable is predicated all on like comic book stuff. It opens with a complete falsehood, which is like more Americans consume comics than food or something like that, Like it's just made up statistic, which is just so hilariously.

01:29:00
Speaker 1: Night.

01:29:00
Speaker 2: But I think it was right around Lady in the Water that people really were like enough of this guy, because Village I think was kind of a fine. And then Lady the Water came out, and then he did Avatar, right, he did the first big screen adaptation of Avatar, the Last Airbender, if memory serves Yes, and that really sealed his fate. And then he took some time off and started this new practice where he just I believe, self funds his films and then and collects makes this money back and then.

01:29:30
Speaker 1: Absurd profit on the back end.

01:29:31
Speaker 2: And I think that latter period started with the visit If I Am not Mistaken, and has continued through with stuff like Split, which I think is probably the best of his latter day stuff.

01:29:43
Speaker 1: Sorry, what were we talking about? The after career? The after birth of M Night shown along Oh God, but you know, for all of this talk about what M Night has become. He made a really interesting point in a Variety interview recently. He said, the Sixth Sense was the movie that I didn't have the lega see to deal with. It didn't have my name to deal with. It would be interesting if The Sixth Sense was the third or fourth movie. How would that have changed the audience's relationship to the film. Could you even watch the movie or from the first moment in the movie, would you go, oh, I know what's happening. It's a really interesting thing that movie created a relationship with my name, and then the name itself now is a framing for all the rest of its cousins.

01:30:24
Speaker 2: That doesn't mean anything. That's a stupid quote. It's the one movie, the Sixth Sense. The Sixth Sense is the one movie that got to live without my Name.

01:30:32
Speaker 1: I think that's interesting.

01:30:34
Speaker 2: I mean, I get what he's saying is that, like it established this template that he was going to be the twist guy. But also he established that template by doing it in every movie. So no dude, if you had made that third or fourth we would have been like, it's the twist guy who makes twists in all of his movies. This is merely the first film in which you did twists.

01:30:54
Speaker 1: But he did it so damn well for the Sixth Sense, he sure did. As the final scene Phase to Black were left with the haunting silence of unspoken truths, the relentless grip of grief, and the transformative power of acceptance. Ultimately, the Sixth Sense is more than a ghost story, but a journey into the deepest recesses of the human psyche, illuminating our collective fears and hopes by exploring the unseen and the end said, echoing the silent struggles we all face in our lives. The characters, each grappling with their own ghosts, remind us that the past lingers not as mere memories, but as entities that shape our present and future. The film success lies and its ability to touch on those universal experiences, making us confront our vulnerabilities and ultimately, our humanity. The poignancy of the Sixth Sense is not just in its shocking twist, but in its revelation that true healing comes from understanding and compassion. It teaches us that seeing true seeing goes beyond the physical. It's an emotional and spiritual awakening born through the recognition that love and forgiveness are the keys to releasing our own inner spectors. Good kicker beat that.

01:32:20
Speaker 2: Uh yeah man, good good stuff. I don't like I have anything that insightful to say about this movie.

01:32:27
Speaker 1: Uh neither is some night.

01:32:31
Speaker 2: Ha uh yeah, dude, ah man.

01:32:38
Speaker 1: And his daughter. And I'm just gonna insert I wish I had like a button, like one of those like staples that was easy buttons just but what a twist and just all through. I'm gonna go back in when I'm editing this this insert, I just gotta do this in the and the Reynolds boice it's been too much information. I'm uh Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan Runtog. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtog. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.

01:33:19
Speaker 2: The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan Runtogg and Alex Heigel.

01:33:23
Speaker 1: 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 on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.