Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
Speaker 2: that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating
Speaker 2: facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music,
Speaker 2: and more. We are your two disturbingly obsessed divas of
Speaker 2: data dissemination. I'm Alex Heigel.
Speaker 3: And I'm Jordan Ron Talk. Hello, Heigel.
Speaker 2: I was just about to say, like, do you want
Speaker 2: did you want me to do?
Speaker 3: Like what's your favorite podcast? That's good, that's real good.
Speaker 2: It's not, it's not. It's not one of my disagree
Speaker 2: he's I mean no, because, as we'll cover later, that
Speaker 2: man is weird. Yeah, and I don't think I have
Speaker 2: the depth of grossness in my soul to adequately capture him.
Speaker 2: Maybe I do, Maybe I do. Let's not sell myself short.
Speaker 2: Once again, we put the proverbial car before the horse,
Speaker 2: because Jordan, late though we may be, we are finishing
Speaker 2: out Spooky Month at TMI. It's kind of an educase,
Speaker 2: right because we can get it in under like Day
Speaker 2: of the.
Speaker 3: Dead, yeah, or like Daylight Savings time, and everything gets
Speaker 3: darker and sad. Sure, spooky, it's a different kind of spooky.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's an inside spooky.
Speaker 3: That's a heart spooky, it's a spooky mind.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're finishing out Spooky Month at TMI with an
Speaker 2: all time classic that revitalized the slasher genre and its
Speaker 2: director's semi morribond career launched a thousand at least probably
Speaker 2: a million at this point film school lectures on metatextualism
Speaker 2: and coined an annoying new voice for people to imitate.
Speaker 2: Present Company included that's right, we were talking about nineteen ninety.
Speaker 3: Six is scream God. Yes.
Speaker 2: I was first made away of this film by the
Speaker 2: trailers and like movie standees everywhere, like this is one
Speaker 2: of the first movies that I distinctly remember being in
Speaker 2: theaters and being like, what's that? And then it wasn't
Speaker 2: until because this movie came out December of ninety six,
Speaker 2: it wasn't until ninety seven that I saw hordes of
Speaker 2: ghost faces of all sizes and shapes trick or treating.
Speaker 2: So this was just like one of those movies that
Speaker 2: I was like, I think too scared for maybe a
Speaker 2: little bit.
Speaker 3: Really.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I didn't really get into like properly watching whrror
Speaker 2: until like middle school, or at least like seeking it out,
Speaker 2: which otherwise foisted on me in a few different opportunities,
Speaker 2: as I think we covered extensively here the kid down
Speaker 2: the street with the Michael Myers obsession and my dad
Speaker 2: showing me Alien.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that'll do it, brother.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So yeah, I think I got to this at
Speaker 2: like eleven or twelve, and it got me, got me
Speaker 2: real good.
Speaker 3: As it should have.
Speaker 2: I mean it is rooted in like the who Done It?
Speaker 2: You know, so as that wonderful row of like hitchcocky
Speaker 2: in or almost noir like subterfuge and suspicion of everyone.
Speaker 3: I think that's why I like it. It feels less
Speaker 3: horror to me and more in like the Hitchcock realm.
Speaker 3: Like Psycho doesn't feel like horrid to me either. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and that's probably why exactly because I don't do Gore
Speaker 3: and I don't do like monsters and things like that.
Speaker 3: But yeah, this I really.
Speaker 2: Except for when I made you watch The Thing and
Speaker 2: you were like that dog just exploded.
Speaker 3: Oh I love the Thing though. That was another one.
Speaker 2: It's another one.
Speaker 3: It's a suspicion of everyone. Yeah, yeah, so good people,
Speaker 3: Good that you love the s tier of horror films
Speaker 3: at least.
Speaker 2: Assessing Scream looking at it through like twenty twenty four
Speaker 2: eyes is frankly difficult because Meta is now just one
Speaker 2: of the giant tech companies that's slowly poisoning all of
Speaker 2: our brands. And also, like the Kevin Williamson and I
Speaker 2: will lump Joss Whedon into him, the Kevin Williamson Joss
Speaker 2: Whedon like school of dialogue became such a defacto tone
Speaker 2: for cinema, and it got extra legs out of it
Speaker 2: because Joss Whedon did The Avengers. So not only did
Speaker 2: we have like a solid ten year span where Dawson's
Speaker 2: Creek and Scream or like Kevin Williamson's dialogue was everywhere,
Speaker 2: it was this sort of met textual hyper quippi, you know,
Speaker 2: teens who have every single pop culture reference of a
Speaker 2: much older man at their fingertips. And then in twenty twelve,
Speaker 2: Just Whedon did The Avengers, so all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: everybody had to be like all.
Speaker 3: The superheroes had to talk about other superheroes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or just being like not fourth wall breaking, or
Speaker 2: at least like winking at the fourth wall, like you know,
Speaker 2: the classic joke on film Twitter is like when someone
Speaker 2: like rolls their eyes and goes, He's right behind me,
Speaker 2: isn't he? And then like you know, like like that,
Speaker 2: so the movie had a long tail.
Speaker 3: Oh my question for you, how much do youah that
Speaker 3: Tarantino had to do with that kind of medica? I mean,
Speaker 3: I guess that's they weren't really discussing movies. They were
Speaker 3: more discussing pop cultural points.
Speaker 2: I mean, inasmuch as Quentin Tarantino had an influence on
Speaker 2: everything from the mid nineties to the mid two thousands,
Speaker 2: you know, and still but like yeah, I mean, I'm
Speaker 2: sure anyone who is a struggling filmmaker in the early
Speaker 2: nineties saw Reservoir Dogs and then pulp fiction and was like,
Speaker 2: oh and especially for this movie, I think because as
Speaker 2: we're getting into later, Quentin Tarantina was like mier Max's
Speaker 2: golden boy and literally the only person that the Weinsteins
Speaker 2: would not work with. So I'm sure some of the
Speaker 2: notes were like dial this into the Quentin territory, Quentin territory.
Speaker 2: But so yeah, it's really hard to remember what had
Speaker 2: bomb this was into the horror psyche, not financially, but
Speaker 2: just like it just rewrote I mean, not only did
Speaker 2: it rewrite the rules as it openly discussed them. But look,
Speaker 2: you know the rules. Yeah it but it also just
Speaker 2: like revolutionized that. I can't think of another horror film
Speaker 2: that changed the way people like discussed the grammar of
Speaker 2: horror as a genre, because every other one had just
Speaker 2: been kind of an iteration on a mold. And A
Speaker 2: great read for this is also the book Men, Women
Speaker 2: and Chainsaws, which is incredible, an all time title, and
Speaker 2: it is like an actual scholarly work done by I
Speaker 2: think a woman at you See Berkeley, Carol J. Clover. Yeah,
Speaker 2: this was written in nineteen ninety two and it's the
Speaker 2: book that coined the term final.
Speaker 3: Girl for starters, oh seriously.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and sort of laid down a lot of the
Speaker 2: rules that people are talking about with this, like Slasher's
Speaker 2: never use a gun. Slasher's always used not like it's
Speaker 2: always like a phallic extension or was one of her
Speaker 2: big things. So there's a lot of like that book has.
Speaker 2: It's dense because it's like you see Berkeley, I don't
Speaker 2: know if it's I think it was printed through Princeton,
Speaker 2: but it's like postgrad level of writing. So it's dense,
Speaker 2: but it does like lay out a lot of the
Speaker 2: track work for this movie's exploration. Anyway, I've talked about
Speaker 2: for long enough? Do you what do you think about
Speaker 2: Scream Jordan?
Speaker 3: It's so good. It's just so good. I don't have
Speaker 3: anything smart to say about it. I mean just the
Speaker 3: opening alone.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, is his Yeah.
Speaker 3: I would cement it in, you know, in the pantheon
Speaker 3: of incredible scary movies.
Speaker 2: I am mad that I didn't get to see this
Speaker 2: in theaters because I cannot imagine what it would have
Speaker 2: been like in a pre internet, pre phone, pre spoiler era.
Speaker 2: When you walk in there and you see one of
Speaker 2: America's sweethearts, Drew Barrymore, who is then summarily terrified and
Speaker 2: grossly murdered.
Speaker 3: Just what do you want? I want to see what
Speaker 3: your insides look like? God, this is what this movie
Speaker 3: did for phones, what Psycho did for showers. I have
Speaker 3: to say I heard the phone to this day.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'll put the I'll put the I'll put
Speaker 2: a note in that I had at the end, but
Speaker 2: the use of color I d jumped up three hundred
Speaker 2: after this movie was filmed. It did this movie? Is?
Speaker 3: Is this what inspired you to like bone up on
Speaker 3: scary movie trivia in case you got a phone call
Speaker 3: and somebody was like, you know, riddle me.
Speaker 2: This, or else your girlfriend died. Well I didn't have
Speaker 2: a girlfriend, so there's no worrying about that. But that's good.
Speaker 2: Or else your fretless bass happened, neck chat. I don't
Speaker 2: know you at age fifteen. Yeah, no, I would have.
Speaker 2: I would have lost a valuable time obsessing over Bay
Speaker 2: Area punk, Scott punk if you will. Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2: It's what would it have been like to see in
Speaker 2: real time? We cannot We literally can't know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know. Did you ever notice? In the opening?
Speaker 3: And maybe this is just me reading too much into it.
Speaker 3: The music is like a weird mix of the psycho
Speaker 3: theme and the et theme, and it has like the
Speaker 3: the like staccato string hits, but also there's like a
Speaker 3: little dude in the background.
Speaker 2: It's really interesting. I mean, as as we'll get to.
Speaker 2: The composer had like never seen a horror movie, so
Speaker 2: he was unbound by the various conventions of unshackled by
Speaker 2: the conventions of the genre.
Speaker 3: I love a misanthropic. This entire movie is I mean,
Speaker 3: there are so many great one liners. She used to
Speaker 3: sit next to me in English class. Not anymore.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it walks such a great line of it's the
Speaker 2: it's in the Heather's mold, but it's not. It doesn't
Speaker 2: push it quite so far, and it really does walk
Speaker 2: that wonderful line of like these are all quasi unlikable
Speaker 2: characters to various degrees, excepting maybe sweet Jamie Kennedy and
Speaker 2: you know Nev campbell Is is like whiny but understandably.
Speaker 3: So I'm sorry if my traumatized life is an inconvenience
Speaker 3: to you in your perfect existence. Yes, I'm the one
Speaker 3: who's been self absorbed with all this post traumatic stress.
Speaker 3: This it's so funny. I mean it almost seems like
Speaker 3: it like prefigures the like over use of like oh
Speaker 3: I'm so traumatized, Like yeah, it's funny. How early that seems.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And like I like, like I was saying,
Speaker 2: it's like it does walk this line of having everyone
Speaker 2: be like in these quasi unlikable archetypes of like you know,
Speaker 2: the hot slut, the dirt bag boyfriend, and yet they're
Speaker 2: still so magnetic by part of it's just being young
Speaker 2: and hot. But it's like I don't find it that though,
Speaker 2: no walk that back, cut that out. I don't want
Speaker 2: people coming to me for Nev Campbell. She's as sweet,
Speaker 2: although I am pissed at her about the reboots, which
Speaker 2: we will get to. Okay, well, Jordan, from the roots
Speaker 2: of this film, from the pen of a failed actor
Speaker 2: and a Barbara Walter special, to the violence that the
Speaker 2: Weinsteins inflicted on the production process, to the absolute revolution
Speaker 2: it's spurred in its genre. Here is everything you didn't
Speaker 2: know about Scream. The story of Screen begins with a
Speaker 2: man named Kevin Williamson, the aforementioned failed actor. After graduating
Speaker 2: from college in North Carolina, Like so many idealistic dumbasses
Speaker 2: before him, a young Williamson moved to New York to
Speaker 2: pursue an acting career. This didn't go very well on
Speaker 2: either coast. He got a small part in the soap
Speaker 2: opera Another World in nineteen ninety, then moved to la
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety one, picked up small roles in things
Speaker 2: like in Living Color music videos and films like nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety four is Dirty Money and the previous Year's Hot Ticket,
Speaker 2: a film which concerns two kidnapped strippers who must perform
Speaker 2: erotic routines for their captors after their plane crashes near
Speaker 2: a mountain hideaway.
Speaker 3: That concerns me too.
Speaker 2: It was well hitting this all time low and taking
Speaker 2: screenwriting classes at UCLA.
Speaker 3: Can't confirm taking screenwriting classes is an all time low.
Speaker 2: That Williamson had his first success in Hollywood. He'd written
Speaker 2: a script called Killing Missus Tingle, which was later retitled
Speaker 2: Teaching Missus Tingle, that was picked up in nineteen ninety
Speaker 2: five and then sat in development hell until after the
Speaker 2: successive Scream. Missus Tingle was based on a teacher of
Speaker 2: Williamson's in high school who repeatedly told him he had
Speaker 2: no hope of ever becoming a writer. Once she interrupted
Speaker 2: him while he was reading a short story aloud to
Speaker 2: the class, saying, you have a voice that shouldn't be
Speaker 2: heard and that's disgusting and sit down.
Speaker 3: Did I ever tell you about my last day in
Speaker 3: screenwriting school? No, it's literally the last time I set
Speaker 3: foot in the screenwriting apartment floor of NYU for what
Speaker 3: they called was a crypt panel where you had your
Speaker 3: final project, your thesis project evaluated. And I had a
Speaker 3: habit of being overly wordy as it were, which I've
Speaker 3: then parlayed into speaking about Bewitched in the Brady Bunch
Speaker 3: for hours at a clip on podcasts, so it ended
Speaker 3: up working out for me. But so there's dialogue in scripts,
Speaker 3: and then there's what's called across the page, which is
Speaker 3: like description and of scenes and stuff like that. And
Speaker 3: one of the educators on my panel just took my
Speaker 3: script and like closed their eyes and flipped through it
Speaker 3: and then just opened that a page at random and
Speaker 3: put their finger down and hit a big old block
Speaker 3: of text and read it out in this like flowery
Speaker 3: voice and was like, now, that's beautiful, but that has
Speaker 3: absolutely no business in a screenplay. Have you ever just
Speaker 3: considered becoming a novelist? And that was my exit interview
Speaker 3: from U Screenwriting was, let me just do a thing
Speaker 3: that we didn't just spend the last four years too
Speaker 3: China do and you kind of just came to it naturally.
Speaker 3: And I haven't completed a screenplay since. Actually that's not
Speaker 3: trure I have.
Speaker 2: I mean, you wouldn't make an excellent novelist.
Speaker 3: He's dead now, though I won that one. I didn't
Speaker 3: do it.
Speaker 2: Yes I did, ultimately, and not really the point here,
Speaker 2: but Williams had made a deal with one of Hollywood's
Speaker 2: literal devils to get this beloved script off the ground.
Speaker 2: He was a hot name in horror after Scream and Mirror.
Speaker 2: Max was then attempting its unteenth at bat at the
Speaker 2: Halloween franchise, casting about for a writer for what would
Speaker 2: eventually become Halloween H two oh. Williamson told Ain't It
Speaker 2: Cool News in nineteen ninety seven Love citing them that
Speaker 2: he wrote a treatment for H two oh as a
Speaker 2: favor to Bob Weinstein. It was a little trade off.
Speaker 2: He'd let me direct Killing Missus Tingle if I wrote
Speaker 2: the Halloween treatment. My first script was at another studio,
Speaker 2: and I told Bob, if you can get that movie
Speaker 2: for me to direct, I'll bear your children phrasing Yeah
Speaker 2: that am Kevin. That didn't age well.
Speaker 3: No. As part of this deal, the film was eventually
Speaker 3: released as Teaching Missus Tingle for two reasons. One, the
Speaker 3: column by massacre happened in April nineteen ninety nine, and
Speaker 3: anything conflating killing in the schools became an instant no go.
Speaker 3: And two, there was the nineteen seventy eight thriller by
Speaker 3: author Lois Duncan that had a suspiciously similar plot called
Speaker 3: killing Mister Griffin, and Duncan's camp prompt legal action when
Speaker 3: they were made aware. Williamson told the Happy Horror Time
Speaker 3: podcast in twenty twenty three, they stopped everything in its tracks,
Speaker 3: and they went through the book, and they went through
Speaker 3: the script. Williamson maintained that his script was based on
Speaker 3: his aforementioned evil teacher and a real, incredibly mundane incident
Speaker 3: from his high school years where he and some pals
Speaker 3: were cut drinking in an attic above the school gym
Speaker 3: like idiots. No, no, not on the premises, literally in
Speaker 3: the attic. Yeah, the school. What kind of gym as
Speaker 3: an addic? I've never I now, I'm like thinking, fact,
Speaker 3: they could buy high school gym of an attic? And
Speaker 3: if so, what kind of horrifying things are out there?
Speaker 3: What was in there?
Speaker 2: What did I miss out on?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I mean kind of anyway, this would have scotched
Speaker 3: their entire graduation. So he and his palace contemplated driving
Speaker 3: to the teacher's house presumably the teacher that caught them
Speaker 3: and quote bagging her and saying like, please please don't
Speaker 3: do this to us. You're gonna ruin it. We're not
Speaker 3: going to be able to graduate. Please don't do that now,
Speaker 3: he says, bagging her. I mean I assume it means
Speaker 3: like like literally in a sad head. Yeah all right.
Speaker 3: I no word on whether or not he actually did that,
Speaker 3: but you're right, teaching missus Tingle isn't very good. I
Speaker 3: remember really liking it when while I was watching with
Speaker 3: my older cousins, like soon after it came out.
Speaker 2: Fine, Katie Holmes, you think she's good and things.
Speaker 3: It's good than that.
Speaker 2: She's she's a sweet lady.
Speaker 3: I look her as like a slightly evil student. She
Speaker 3: kind of plays that that role in in Wonder Boys
Speaker 3: with Michael Douglas.
Speaker 2: Oh you would like wonder Boy.
Speaker 3: I love wonder Boys. Yeah, it's about a stressed out writer.
Speaker 3: We can't finish anything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I don't know. I mean I think Helen
Speaker 2: Mirren was like someone was like, why did you do
Speaker 2: that movie? And she gave the classic like Michael Kaine
Speaker 2: answered and she said something because they gave me a
Speaker 2: big check pay for my mother's hospice. Yeah, So I
Speaker 2: don't know. It's it's it's fine, it's quirky. He's not
Speaker 2: a director, and has he done anything since he's about
Speaker 2: to do the next one.
Speaker 3: There's going to be a teaching missus Tingleer.
Speaker 2: Oh sorry, there's gonna be a seven cream for seven.
Speaker 3: A seven cream for the new reboots.
Speaker 2: They've just been calling them. They're they're ostensibly they're Scream five,
Speaker 2: six and seven, but they've been working the Roman numerals
Speaker 2: into the title or like typographically, so it didn't it's not.
Speaker 2: For a while everyone was hoping it was going to
Speaker 2: be five cream and then scrimmix because of the Roman.
Speaker 3: Like the you know, it's the cream, the cream, it's
Speaker 3: it's the vit from the makers of the Vivich comes. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's dumb. I hate that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is.
Speaker 3: It is. It's like too fast to scream.
Speaker 2: Well, you know the funny thing about it?
Speaker 3: Have you?
Speaker 2: I told you what the funny thing about the Fast
Speaker 2: the Furious franchises, it was something like copyrights, right, Roger
Speaker 2: Corman owes the title fast and Fast and Furious or did,
Speaker 2: and so subsequently every time they had a new Fast
Speaker 2: and Furious movie, rather than paying him again, they just
Speaker 2: iterated a new form of it, and it's too fast,
Speaker 2: too furious, fast five fast X the Fast and the
Speaker 2: Furious or no Fast and Furious Tokyo Drift.
Speaker 3: Well, I thought Tokyo Drift was flying fast and furious
Speaker 3: Tokyo Drift.
Speaker 2: I think, I don't know.
Speaker 3: They skirted it with drifting, so the oldest trick in
Speaker 3: the book.
Speaker 2: They drifted right past.
Speaker 3: A one hundred year old Roger Coran on his death
Speaker 3: bed earlier this year, still cursing the producers fast the
Speaker 3: Furious franchise.
Speaker 2: Roger, One last question? Do you want to let them
Speaker 2: have it? No rose food?
Speaker 3: This is an episode for the nerds. This is our
Speaker 3: usually we're in for the music nerds. This is for
Speaker 3: the film nerds. This is gonna good way.
Speaker 2: Where do I get into focus? Pulling you people? Have
Speaker 2: no idea? What's in store for you?
Speaker 3: Dutch angles, zipzabs hop. We're having gone to film school.
Speaker 3: I know surprisingly little about like the technical terms for
Speaker 3: any of like the film composition.
Speaker 2: I think zipzabzop is a drama game. Yeah yeah, yes,
Speaker 2: and a right go ahead?
Speaker 3: Oh it's me still who's literally whose lines it? Anyway?
Speaker 3: Though we'd sold his first script teaching Missus Tingle, Williamson
Speaker 3: told The Hollywood Reporter that quote, I was still struggling
Speaker 3: a lot and eating my oodles of noodles. He was
Speaker 3: house sitting in Palm Springs when he watched the March ninth,
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety four episode of Turning Point focusing on Daniel Rolling,
Speaker 3: known as the Gainesville Ripper, who murdered five college students
Speaker 3: in Florida over four days in August nineteen ninety Williamson
Speaker 3: told CNN in nineteen ninety eight, during the commercial break,
Speaker 3: I heard a noise and I had to go search
Speaker 3: the house. And I went into the living room and
Speaker 3: the window was open. And I've been in the house
Speaker 3: for two days. I'd never noticed a window open. So
Speaker 3: I got really scared. So I went to the kitchen,
Speaker 3: got a butcher knife, got the mobile phone. I called
Speaker 3: a buddy of mine. That buddy, David Blanchard, was in
Speaker 3: Hot ticket with Williamson and told CNN Kevin was looking
Speaker 3: under the beds. He was going out to the garage
Speaker 3: and looking in the garage and I'm like, don't go outside.
Speaker 3: If you go outside, You're gonna go outside and the
Speaker 3: killer will sneak in the door while you're outside. And
Speaker 3: Williamson was like, what do you mean, what do you
Speaker 3: mean the killer. It's like Seinfeld meets serial killers. Yeah,
Speaker 3: the Paris conversation drifted to the iconic slasher stars of
Speaker 3: their youth, but Williamson told CNN, I went to bed
Speaker 3: that night so spooked. I was having nightmares, and I
Speaker 3: woke up at like three or four in the morning,
Speaker 3: and I started writing the opening scene to scream.
Speaker 2: Dude, how funny does this movie? If you just read
Speaker 2: it in the side Feld voice, I'm sorry if my
Speaker 2: dramatic life is an inconvenience for you. So you have
Speaker 2: a few animacy issues. So there was all of your
Speaker 2: mothers on timely that.
Speaker 3: Jerry, Jerry, It's all a movie. It's all one great
Speaker 3: big movie. Only you can't pick your genre. No, that
Speaker 3: was I could have done a better Cramer.
Speaker 2: I don't care. I'm not a Sidefeld guy. But it
Speaker 2: is funny.
Speaker 3: But you do play the bass.
Speaker 2: That would have been a great soundtrack addition to this,
Speaker 2: Like they fade out the nick cave and it's just
Speaker 2: like the obnoxious keyboard synth slab bass.
Speaker 3: Forgot how good the soundtrack is this?
Speaker 2: Yeah, horror movies weren't a big slump back then. Kevin
Speaker 2: Williamson told The Ringer, they have an amazing oral history
Speaker 2: of this as does Hollywood Reporter that will be sighting
Speaker 2: the slasher films of the late seventies and eighties had
Speaker 2: sort of petered out. No one was really making great
Speaker 2: horror films. Well, the second part of that sentence, he
Speaker 2: is stupid. Williamson was correct that most of the major
Speaker 2: slasher franchises were in Faulo periods at this point. I mean, dude,
Speaker 2: Candyman came out like, uh, it's one of the that's
Speaker 2: another str horror movie, you dumb idiot. You couldn't touch
Speaker 2: Candy Man. Kevin Williamson, you hack, you put I hate that.
Speaker 2: I hate that, And no good horror movies.
Speaker 3: That come out. You have no good horror movie ideas.
Speaker 2: Uh. He was right about the first part, though. Michael
Speaker 2: Myers had been off screen since nineteen eighty nine after
Speaker 2: the wildly mismanaged fifth installment in his franchise, Jason Vorhes
Speaker 2: was literally dragged to hell by Freddy Krueger in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety two. Is Jason Goes to Hell the Final Friday?
Speaker 2: Did you know that, Jordan?
Speaker 3: No? I did not.
Speaker 2: Yeah. At one point Newline had the rights to Jason,
Speaker 2: Evil Dead and Freddy, and they were planning for Jason
Speaker 2: versus Freddy versus Ash three way crossover, and it fell apart,
Speaker 2: and then all we eventually got out of it was
Speaker 2: Freddy Versus Jason, which is a fun movie. But prior
Speaker 2: to that, Freddy's Last Bow had been in the year prior,
Speaker 2: in ninet ninety one in Freddy's Dead The Final Nightmare.
Speaker 2: The nineteen ninety the third movie in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
Speaker 2: would set a record as the lowest grossing film in
Speaker 2: the franchise until the next one in nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 2: The point is that while there were a lot of
Speaker 2: excellent films being made around this time, like the aforementioned
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety twos Candy Man, it was easy to
Speaker 2: feel like the slasher genre had quick voice led out.
Speaker 2: So Williams had set to writing the kind of horror
Speaker 2: slasher that he'd want to see. I thought, if a
Speaker 2: killer was actually using the cliche of a horror film,
Speaker 2: perhaps that would spin them around, he told Entertainment Weekly.
Speaker 2: I thought, if you could just expose the rules and
Speaker 2: play with them, then the audience doesn't know what they're
Speaker 2: going to get. Suddenly they're on edge. I started playing
Speaker 2: with the tropes Williamson didn't even have a full length
Speaker 2: feature in mind when he started writing in the middle
Speaker 2: of the night. What people don't know is that the
Speaker 2: opening I wrote it as a one act play. That's
Speaker 2: great Comic book dot Com in twenty twenty one. It
Speaker 2: was just a young character on the phone talking to us,
Speaker 2: but it could be a killer outside that morphed into
Speaker 2: the opening scene into Williamson worked quickly and banged out
Speaker 2: the rest of the script in three days, ultimately titling
Speaker 2: it hilariously What would follow Scary movie every time?
Speaker 3: About my friends when I play no I just saw recently.
Speaker 3: My friend is an incredible actor. She's and she leans
Speaker 3: more towards like the horror movie genre kind of things.
Speaker 3: I mean, she's kind of your classic scream queen basically.
Speaker 3: And she was followed home to her apartment one night,
Speaker 3: and this guy attacked her in the lobby of her
Speaker 3: her apartment and like fractured her skull. It really beat
Speaker 3: her badly, and apparently this guy had been like stalking
Speaker 3: her for weeks and she had no idea and it
Speaker 3: was really really really horrific. I mean, she had she
Speaker 3: had to move and kept changing places where she was
Speaker 3: living for you know, every couple of weeks because she
Speaker 3: was just so you know, just just traumatized by it
Speaker 3: all and it took a year to physically recover and
Speaker 3: she didn't work in that time. And one of the
Speaker 3: first things she auditioned for was as a victim and
Speaker 3: an SVU type show, and during the audition the casting
Speaker 3: director said, I'm sorry, I think we're gonna go a
Speaker 3: different direction. Your screams don't sound lived in. It was
Speaker 3: the phrase. And so she wrote this incredible one act
Speaker 3: play called pretty Good Not Bad that just It went
Speaker 3: to the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh at the end of
Speaker 3: the summer, which is just her at this audition. It's
Speaker 3: just a monologue talking to you know, an unseen casting
Speaker 3: director having given that that note, and it is it
Speaker 3: is unbelievable. Ellen toldend, does her name, look her up,
Speaker 3: check her out, let's cast her. If you're in a
Speaker 3: position to say, she is absolutely amazing. It's an incredible
Speaker 3: piece of work. I don't know when and where it's
Speaker 3: being performed next, but it was really really stunning.
Speaker 2: That's crazy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was pretty It was really crazy.
Speaker 2: I can't imagine doing that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I know. It was a really unbelievable way
Speaker 3: to process something that I mean is not terribly dissimilar
Speaker 3: to what we're discussing that went on in Scream, but
Speaker 3: she made something incredible out of it. Super proud of
Speaker 3: her anyway, Well, now we're gonna talk about the Weinstein's
Speaker 3: after that. Jesus, I was hoping to be something a
Speaker 3: little brighter. Christ Williamson sent a specscript around and it
Speaker 3: pretty quickly attracted attention. A Dimension Films executive told the
Speaker 3: Hollywood Reporter that he was given the script by a
Speaker 3: Mirramax executive and was immediately hooked. Bob Weinstein told me
Speaker 3: that I've ever read a script that blew me away.
Speaker 3: Let him know immediately. So I called him at home
Speaker 3: and said, I just read a script, and if you
Speaker 3: don't want to make this, I don't know what you're
Speaker 3: looking for. Producer Kathy Conrad added, we got into the
Speaker 3: game on it fairly early, and we were used as
Speaker 3: a stalking horse for several of the other places that
Speaker 3: bid on, and afterwards we won and got the script.
Speaker 3: What is a stalking horse?
Speaker 2: I actually love that and also this woman, keep her
Speaker 2: in mind, Kathy Conrad is incredible. Stalking horse is used
Speaker 2: in either politics or bankruptcy or criminal investigation.
Speaker 3: What a trifecta? What a riddled rich term.
Speaker 2: It's basically the idea of testing a concept on behalf
Speaker 2: of a third party. For example, in politics, it's used
Speaker 2: when like a sham candidate is put forward to hide
Speaker 2: another more serious candidate.
Speaker 3: Interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, So I think the idea is that people
Speaker 2: were waiting to see or hear what Dimension would bid
Speaker 2: on it in order to calculate their own bids.
Speaker 3: Greatly, okay, Williamson recalled to the Ringer In twenty twenty one.
Speaker 3: There were a lot of different companies bidding for it.
Speaker 3: The price started going up. It being the script, the
Speaker 3: price started going up. Oliver Stone's production company had a
Speaker 3: discretionary fund and they were bidding on it. I got
Speaker 3: nervous because the price went up to a degree where
Speaker 3: one of the studios was like, Wow, we don't pay
Speaker 3: this kind of money for a horror movie. We're out,
Speaker 3: And I went, okay, well this is over. Williamson ultimately
Speaker 3: wound up going with Dimension, who bought the script for
Speaker 3: four hundred thousand dollars in the summer of nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 3: Medium Level. There was also a Vanity Fair article in
Speaker 3: two thousand and four that suggested Drew Bahrem read the
Speaker 3: script and once she signed on Merrimax, Green led.
Speaker 2: It, Yeah, that article is really interesting. It's all about
Speaker 2: the Weinsteins and but it has a ton about screaming
Speaker 2: it and as we'll get to the frankly unconscionable I
Speaker 2: mean at a long list of their unconscionable acts, but
Speaker 2: the horrible way they treated Wes Craven so Dimension funnily
Speaker 2: enough immediately pitched it to its eventual director, Wes Craven,
Speaker 2: who turned it down. The studio then went to their
Speaker 2: roster of directors connected to Dimension, like Robert Rodriguez and
Speaker 2: Quentin Tarantino, before also talking to the likes of Sam Raimi,
Speaker 2: Danny Boyle, who would have just been coming off Trainspotting
Speaker 2: I believe, and George Rameiro.
Speaker 3: Tarantino would have been interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think he would have been doing at this point.
Speaker 2: It would have been mired in either one of his
Speaker 2: unrealized projects between pulp fiction and Jackie Brown or just
Speaker 2: Jackie Brown. And you know, he's a he's a I
Speaker 2: don't think he would have wanted to do something.
Speaker 3: Oliver Stone doing that.
Speaker 2: Would have been incredible because he would just he was
Speaker 2: just off natural ble one killers.
Speaker 3: Uh okay with you. I thought he was just.
Speaker 2: That's the thing about Hollywood, is they just they just
Speaker 2: immediately go like, oh, that guy did something similar, Let's
Speaker 2: have him do it again.
Speaker 3: I thought he was just off of doors, off the doors.
Speaker 2: That would have been hilarious. But the film seemed tailor
Speaker 2: made for Craven, who had taken a stab at reinventing
Speaker 2: the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise with nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 2: Is a New Nightmare. This was the first time he'd
Speaker 2: come back to the franchise since nineteen eighty seven.
Speaker 3: Is it too late to hold for applause?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: Craven signed a very naive early contract that essentially gave
Speaker 2: away his rights for the Nightmare and Elm Street franchise
Speaker 2: after the first one, so New Nightmare could seem as
Speaker 2: a much more humorless dry run for Scream's entire self
Speaker 2: aware meta approach to the genre. This is going to
Speaker 2: get a little weird. Craven, Freddie, actor Robert England, and
Speaker 2: the original film star Heather Langencamp all star as themselves
Speaker 2: in a world which the Nightmare and Elm Street franchise
Speaker 2: is a real film franchise. We are all playing themselves
Speaker 2: in a world like our own, until the lines between
Speaker 2: fiction and reality are blurred because Heather begins to be
Speaker 2: stalked by a new indifferent guy who also just looks
Speaker 2: exactly like Freddy Krueger. It doesn't really quite come off.
Speaker 2: It's very interesting and creative and like a bold effort,
Speaker 2: but it gets a little mired. There's a scene in
Speaker 2: which it literally grinds to the halt in Wes Craven's
Speaker 2: office so that he himself can deliver a speech about
Speaker 2: maybe the stories that we tell are actually legends, and
Speaker 2: maybe those legends are based in real things that can
Speaker 2: surface again once we give them enough power. It's a
Speaker 2: bold swing and it was become a real called hit,
Speaker 2: but I don't think it did it particularly well in
Speaker 2: the time.
Speaker 3: It sounds like the horror equivalent of It's Gary Shanling show.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it really does prefigure like I mean,
Speaker 2: I don't want to say like Eric Andre that's like
Speaker 2: actually just it's deranged absurdism, but like it really for
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety four, like taking your established franchise and taking
Speaker 2: that big of an intellectual philosophical swing at it is
Speaker 2: really it was really something, and it really just gets
Speaker 2: at the heart of Wes Craven. He is one of
Speaker 2: the most conflicting personalities who has contributed indelibly to the genre.
Speaker 2: You cannot find a bad word about Wes Craven. He was,
Speaker 2: by all accounts an incredibly gentle kind, intellectual guy. He
Speaker 2: studied English and psychology and undergrad and then got a
Speaker 2: master's in philosophy and writing from Johns Hopkins, and he
Speaker 2: was teaching full time in New York when he bought
Speaker 2: a used sixteen millimeters camera and started making short films
Speaker 2: From there. He basically leveled up through the film industry
Speaker 2: from sound editing and then under pseudonyms, he started working
Speaker 2: in porn. He supposedly worked on Deep Throat under a pseudonym,
Speaker 2: and it was actually through the porn industry that he
Speaker 2: met Future Friday the Thirteenth creator producer Sean Cunningham, and
Speaker 2: he raised enough cash for his first feature, nineteen seventy
Speaker 2: two's Last House on the Left. Last House on the
Speaker 2: Left is one of those appalling grindhouse classics that Rob
Speaker 2: Zombie saw and made it. Half of his artistic vision,
Speaker 2: the other half being Texas Chainsaw. It is so gross
Speaker 2: and so mean. It's ostensibly a homage to Ingmar Bergmann's
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty nine Oscar winning film The Virgin Spring, Dragged
Speaker 2: through many layers of dirt. It's shot in seven days.
Speaker 2: It's like a it's like ostensibly it's I guess, putting
Speaker 2: it as bluntly as possible as a rape revenge film.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm on the Wikipedia page, and there's a Wikipedia
Speaker 3: page for rape and revenge film as a genre, which
Speaker 3: I am not familiar with.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, straw Dogs I think is probably in there maybe.
Speaker 2: But Last House the Left was shot in a week,
Speaker 2: and Craven deliberately pushed the boundaries of what he could
Speaker 2: get away with with violence on screen. And he did
Speaker 2: this as a way of reconciling what he felt was
Speaker 2: the unrealistic depiction of violence on screen. Henceforth or hence heretofore.
Speaker 2: He did this purposely as a way of reconciling what
Speaker 2: he felt was the unrealistic depiction of film violence and
Speaker 2: the photos and film footage of the very real carnage
Speaker 2: of the Vietnam War that were trickling in Last House
Speaker 2: on the Left became a touchstone of the exploitation and
Speaker 2: grindhouse genre and attracted all kinds of protests, censorship, and coverage,
Speaker 2: and expanded beyond the limited rum regional releases that Craven
Speaker 2: had envisioned for. And it also has one of the
Speaker 2: most famous horror taglines of all time. To avoid fainting,
Speaker 2: keep repeating, it's only a movie, It's only a movie.
Speaker 2: It's only a movie. Done in like fading down descending script.
Speaker 2: Classic was reused for like four other films in the decade,
Speaker 2: but despite Last House in the Left's success, it grossed
Speaker 2: three million on a ninety thousand dollars budget, Craven had
Speaker 2: trouble getting his other non horror films made and he
Speaker 2: did not want to be pigeonholed as a horror guy.
Speaker 2: He told Newsday in nineteen ninety four that he had
Speaker 2: written a comedy about the beauty pageants circuit and an
Speaker 2: ambitious biopic of Kerrent Anthony Herbert, the Inspector General of
Speaker 2: the Army who is demoded for refusing to cover up
Speaker 2: American atrocities in Vietnam, but under financial duress and also
Speaker 2: informed by a friend of how cheap it was to
Speaker 2: film in the Nevada Desert. Craven wrote and directed another
Speaker 2: cult classic, The Hills Have Eyes in nineteen seventy seven,
Speaker 2: about an inbred cannibal family of feral killers hiding out
Speaker 2: in the irradiated Nevada Desert and preying on tourists. Though
Speaker 2: ostensibly just another revenge film, Craven viewed The Hills Have
Speaker 2: Eyes as a treatise on how, for quote unquote, normal
Speaker 2: people can be pushed into savage violence. By the end
Speaker 2: of the film, the mild mannered tourist is indistinguishable from
Speaker 2: the villain whose head he's crushing in with a rock
Speaker 2: while screaming. It's a hefty film. The remake is actually
Speaker 2: far crazier. It's a great remake as far as these
Speaker 2: things go. But it has a lot going on, not
Speaker 2: just as like post nuclear kind of stuff, because the
Speaker 2: implication is that, like, aside from inbreeding, these people were
Speaker 2: messed up by the bomb test deserts of America. So,
Speaker 2: as he'd feared, Craven became trapped in the in genre.
Speaker 2: Fair He made two more horror films before nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: two's disastrous Swamp Thing adaptation, which is just a real
Speaker 2: piece of and you have to understand how much I
Speaker 2: love swamp Thing as a character. God that movie sucks anyway.
Speaker 2: His next film was A Night Merre at Elm Street
Speaker 2: in nineteen eighty four, another film that literally turned the
Speaker 2: horror genre on its head. Ress Craven was a big reader.
Speaker 2: He read like newspapers voraciously and this was based Did
Speaker 2: you ever hear about what this was based on?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: So, Wes had read several newspaper articles in the La
Speaker 2: Times about long refugees who had fled to the United
Speaker 2: States because of war and genocide in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.
Speaker 2: They were having these horrible nightmares and were literally refusing
Speaker 2: to sleep, and some of these men ended up dying
Speaker 2: in their sleep soon after. And this was actually called
Speaker 2: Asian death syndrome and affected people from ages nineteen to
Speaker 2: fifty seven. Wes later said that there were all of
Speaker 2: these articles and the paper never really dragged them together.
Speaker 2: And then do you know what else? He was inspired by?
Speaker 3: No gem We've found no the Gary Wrights, see we.
Speaker 2: Can make it Oooh yes, yes, indeed, yeah, So that's
Speaker 2: just nuts man. And so he had this idea of
Speaker 2: a slasher who pursued people in their dreams, and his
Speaker 2: next few years continued to expand the horror genre that
Speaker 2: he was now at least semi comfortably resigned to. Nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty six Is Deadly Friend was an adaptation of a
Speaker 2: sci fi novel about a teenage computer prodigy who implants
Speaker 2: a processor chip into the brain of a comatose neighbor,
Speaker 2: with the titular deadly results. Nineteen eighty eight Is the
Speaker 2: Serpent in the Rainbow, starring Bill Pullman, is an incredibly
Speaker 2: fascinating film. I really love this film. He goes back
Speaker 2: to the roots of the zombie genre and is based
Speaker 2: on a real life account of an ethnobotanist was in
Speaker 2: Haiti studying the botanical roots of zombies and voodoo and
Speaker 2: the idea that you can combine certain plant elements and
Speaker 2: vegetable elements into powders and like blow it in somebody's
Speaker 2: face and put them into this state of living death
Speaker 2: where they would act under your control and do your bidding.
Speaker 2: And before, like I mentioned in the last episode, before
Speaker 2: Georgiamhera came along with the Knight of the Living Dead,
Speaker 2: positing the zombies were actually going to rise from the
Speaker 2: dead The first time that Americans had really heard about
Speaker 2: this was in I Walked with a Zombie in the forties,
Speaker 2: which is actually about Haitian voodoo. So he goes and
Speaker 2: adapts this novel and filmed it in Haiti after the
Speaker 2: overthrow of the Duvaliers, and they literally had to flee
Speaker 2: because they were like, it's not safe for you here anymore.
Speaker 2: And so the film is just, I mean, it is
Speaker 2: insane because it has a very relatively faithful depiction of
Speaker 2: the Tantan mccoot, who were the paramilitary secret police that
Speaker 2: were basically the death squads of the Devalier's Papa Doc
Speaker 2: and Baby Doc. And this was not that covered in
Speaker 2: Western media, and certainly not that I mean it was covered.
Speaker 2: This was certainly covered in Western media, but not in
Speaker 2: like mainstream genre fair filmmaking, and certainly not on location
Speaker 2: in Haiti. Then nineteen eighty nine Shocker comes along. It's good.
Speaker 2: It's a fine movie. It's a fine horror movie starring
Speaker 2: Mitch Peleggy. Mitch Peleggi. Mitch Peleggy is he's an X
Speaker 2: Files guy. He's best known as one of their FBI
Speaker 2: handlers and X Files anyway, that presupposes what if a
Speaker 2: serial killer became electric after he was executd anyway, bomb water,
Speaker 2: bubbles grave, and ever smoked weed. So it's oh yeah,
Speaker 2: but yeah, it's a first bom ripe idea.
Speaker 3: I didn't realize, I mean, that's a totally derail you,
Speaker 3: but that the concept of zombies and popular culture is
Speaker 3: relatively new as opposed to like mummies and yeah things
Speaker 3: like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm not that big of a nerd
Speaker 2: to have read into where Romero was purposely diverting from
Speaker 2: the established canon of like, I wa, I mean that
Speaker 2: movie is really groundbreaking. It's first of all, I think
Speaker 2: it's like the first time zombie appears as a in
Speaker 2: a Hollywood title. But I don't know when he was
Speaker 2: writing or directing Not a Living Dead how much he
Speaker 2: was purposely like I'm going to take this away from that.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I mean it's really interesting. You know, Haitian
Speaker 2: culture is extremely fascinating, and also the way that the
Speaker 2: US decimated that country. It's also the first successful slaver
Speaker 2: vault on countrywide level. So yeah, read about Haiti cool culture. Anyway.
Speaker 2: Craven came Roaring Back in nineteen ninety one with The
Speaker 2: People Under the Stairs, which is an absolutely bad film.
Speaker 2: I'm going to describe it to you now. It stars
Speaker 2: twin peaks Everett McGill and Wendy Robie big Ed and
Speaker 2: Nadine as a pair of inbred husband and wife costs
Speaker 2: playing slum lords who have this enormous house that they
Speaker 2: have accrued all of their ill gotten wealth into, but
Speaker 2: they have also secretly been capturing children and mutilating them
Speaker 2: and stashing them in the basement when they failed to
Speaker 2: live up to their insane conservative religious standards. The two
Speaker 2: were very pointedly a character of Nancy and Ronald Reagan,
Speaker 2: which is oh deeply wild, and at one point Everett
Speaker 2: McGill shows up in a gimp suit wielding a shotgun
Speaker 2: with zero explanation. He just comes out in a gimbsuit.
Speaker 2: But so they're not they're not even the antagonists, or
Speaker 2: they are not the anti heroes of the film. The
Speaker 2: protagonist in this movie are all black. There's like an
Speaker 2: elementary middle school age kid who is the star of it.
Speaker 2: And what happens is is that he basically the accompanies
Speaker 2: two older guys on a break in and they're trying
Speaker 2: to rob them and uncovers this whole macabre world that's
Speaker 2: going on in there, and it just deliberately is like
Speaker 2: just a deliberate, pointed barb into the ratio dynamics of
Speaker 2: the US at the time, because not only do you
Speaker 2: have this idea that's playing on white fears of you know,
Speaker 2: black crime and home invasion seeping into the rich suburbs
Speaker 2: and et cetera, but the whole film becomes about how
Speaker 2: these people are the actual true disgusting monsters. It grows
Speaker 2: thirty one million on a six million dollar budget and
Speaker 2: is just now a legitimate classic of the genre. But
Speaker 2: then Craven went into this whole ambitious reboot New Nightmare
Speaker 2: in nineteen eighty four, and then he did Vampire in Brooklyn.
Speaker 2: Do you ever see Vampire in Brooklyn? Jordan? No, not
Speaker 2: a great movie.
Speaker 3: Was that what started Eddie Murphy's downturn.
Speaker 2: Or that Boomerang? I think? But well Boomerang came first.
Speaker 2: But yeah, this is the film.
Speaker 3: That life This isn't a holy Man holy Man.
Speaker 2: No, this is holy Man was later. This is the
Speaker 2: film that prompted Dennis Dennis at faced, little Guy Oh Miller,
Speaker 2: now the Blonde One, Tommy Boy Spade, not Dennis Spade,
Speaker 2: Dennis Spade, David Quaid, David Quaid, Dennis Spade, Dennis Spade.
Speaker 2: This is the film Vampire Brooklyn. Sorry, Vampire Brooklyn is
Speaker 2: the film just having a stroke.
Speaker 3: It's like a laser with a mirror.
Speaker 2: It's just watching it go back and forth. This is
Speaker 2: the film that prompt is Dennis Spade on his Hollywood
Speaker 2: Minute and.
Speaker 4: David No, no, I didn't got me doing it. This
Speaker 4: is David film Bade, Dennis Quay, the film that prompted Burns.
Speaker 4: This is a film that prompted.
Speaker 3: Dave son of a Whore.
Speaker 2: This is the film that prompt This is the film
Speaker 2: that prompted David Spade in SNL's Hollywood Minute to show
Speaker 2: sure of Eddie Murphy in Vampire and Brooklyn and say,
Speaker 2: look kids, a falling star. That then spurred Eddie Murphy
Speaker 2: to never return to said L until the twenty oughts. Anyway,
Speaker 2: that brings us to pitching scream.
Speaker 3: The anecdote was totally worthy. Julie Pleck, Wes Craven's assistant
Speaker 3: at the time, told the Ringer Vampire and Brooklyn came
Speaker 3: out and it was kind of a disaster, and that
Speaker 3: made him sad. Oh, so he wasn't in any hurry
Speaker 3: to jump back into it into his own genre. Producer
Speaker 3: Mary Anne Madelena said that Craven told her that he
Speaker 3: quote wanted to get out of the horror ghetto, but
Speaker 3: quote a couple months later he read it again maading
Speaker 3: the script for Scream, and they had attached Drew Barrymore,
Speaker 3: and he just felt like, well why not. He really
Speaker 3: enjoyed that work and he knew he was good at it,
Speaker 3: so he never thought twice about it once he accepted
Speaker 3: the job. Writer Kevin Williamson went over to Craven's house
Speaker 3: to go over the script and told the ringer, I
Speaker 3: get lost driving up into the Hollywood Hills and I'm
Speaker 3: already late. And then I show up and he has
Speaker 3: all these pages of notes on my script. I just
Speaker 3: see them sitting there on the table, and I'm like,
Speaker 3: oh no, this is gonna be horrible. He's gonna want
Speaker 3: to change everything. I've heard these horror stories. I know
Speaker 3: what happens now, this is the moment I get kicked
Speaker 3: to the curb. I always lived in fear of that.
Speaker 3: And then it turned out he was like, well, most
Speaker 3: of these are typos. There were a bunch of typos.
Speaker 3: He goes, we should just fix everything. Don't you think
Speaker 3: has he said he used to be a teacher.
Speaker 2: That's an English teacher, don't you think? Yeah? All the feedback,
Speaker 2: I mean, god, I just you know, he's like not
Speaker 2: I think. I mean. John Harper is my all time
Speaker 2: favorite horror director. But the depth of Wes's like generosity
Speaker 2: to younger people is really something that truly touched me
Speaker 2: in this episode, even just the way that he gave
Speaker 2: feedback to actors and talk to.
Speaker 3: People, which we'll talk about Jamie Kennedy thing this goal. Yeah,
Speaker 3: the only time I'll ever say that Jamie Caning was cool.
Speaker 2: He empowered Jamie Kennedy to make Miami's Most Wanted anyway, Sorry,
Speaker 2: keep going.
Speaker 3: The Weinsteins were both predictably bullish. You say about the
Speaker 3: tone of the film. Bob Weinstein told Vanity Fair, I
Speaker 3: didn't want it to be a parody. He met with
Speaker 3: the writer Kevin Williamson and said, Kevin, I want to
Speaker 3: make sure I bought the script. I think I bought.
Speaker 3: Is it a funny movie with scares or is it
Speaker 3: a scary movie with humor? Very good point Williamson responded,
Speaker 3: it's a scary movie with humor, to which Bob responded, good,
Speaker 3: that's the way I saw it, but you've got the
Speaker 3: wrong title. He'll remember that the title was originally scary movie,
Speaker 3: which is a little on the nose and also hilarious
Speaker 3: given the scary movie that we know about today. According
Speaker 3: to Bob Weinstein, it was actually his brother, the actual
Speaker 3: living monster, Harvey Weinstein, who came up with the new
Speaker 3: title from a Michael Jackson song out that year. Kind
Speaker 3: of surprised that MJ's team didn't sue.
Speaker 2: Was the Michael Jackson Janet Jackson song that was like
Speaker 2: one of the most expensive music videos of all the
Speaker 2: time because they were I think it's still all this
Speaker 2: crazy early CGI with it. Song sucks, but still yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, song sucked. Then I'm surprised that one of the
Speaker 3: Jackson's didn't sue.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, other things on his mind too soon
Speaker 2: as you meditate on that, we'll be right back with
Speaker 2: more too much information after these messages.
Speaker 3: Once the movie moved into official production, though, Drew Barrymore
Speaker 3: changed her mind and told Williamson that she only wanted
Speaker 3: to be in the opening scene. This actually delighted Williamson, though,
Speaker 3: because he'd been influenced by Psycho, in which Janet Lee,
Speaker 3: introduced as the obstensible star of the film, is killed
Speaker 3: off early on spoiler.
Speaker 2: Give her a thirty year old movie, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Psycho, sixty five year old movie.
Speaker 2: Well yeah.
Speaker 3: Producer Mary and Madelena suggested that Barrymore wanted to leave
Speaker 3: the production altogether, but was afraid of running a foul
Speaker 3: of the Weinstein's Ooh, yeah, I told you my my
Speaker 3: Weinstein story. Right, well, let me rephrase that. Yeah, buddy,
Speaker 3: I knew something. It was like a friend of a
Speaker 3: friend who worked at the Weinstein office, and apparently there
Speaker 3: was like an edict that you couldn't have like bowls
Speaker 3: of candy on your desk because Harvey just had no
Speaker 3: self control, as we've since discovered, and would just just
Speaker 3: eat it all, to the point where he would just
Speaker 3: like regularly vomit in his office from eating too much candy.
Speaker 2: Oh do that's foul? Ugh God, there is no way
Speaker 2: in which that gloop. There's no way in which that
Speaker 2: man will get worse.
Speaker 3: With the lead role of Sidney Prescott vacated, production began
Speaker 3: casting about for a new cast.
Speaker 2: I wrote that. Well.
Speaker 3: Yes, Vanessa Shaw of hocus Pocus and Reese Witherspoon were
Speaker 3: looked at, but Witherspoon, who was to be fair at nineteen,
Speaker 3: looked much younger than the rest of the cast. Well,
Speaker 3: Kevin Williamson's first choice of Molly Ringwald turned it down
Speaker 3: because she said she was too old to play a
Speaker 3: high schooler. How old would she have been. She would
Speaker 3: have been like twenty, she would have been like pushing thirty.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I like so with the rest of them, probably,
Speaker 2: but uh, you know, like there's that whole Hollywood grace period,
Speaker 2: I guess before now when everybody just looks like an
Speaker 2: airbrushed in Instagram model. But you know, you used to
Speaker 2: get away with casting twenty five year olds as teens.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, well, I mean in Greece, wore don't we
Speaker 3: talking about how like Stuckard Channing was pushing. I want
Speaker 3: to say she was pushing like forty yeah, yeah, something like.
Speaker 2: I mean the film the medium of film was more
Speaker 2: forgiving back then, you know, like actually literally than digital.
Speaker 2: So but I just I mean, that seems like the
Speaker 2: kind of thing Molly Ringwold would do because she is
Speaker 2: self aware and like by all accounts a relatively lovely person.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh wait, I take that back, Stuckard Channing was
Speaker 3: like thirty four, okay, so younger than we are now
Speaker 3: a really bad news huggle.
Speaker 2: We can't start in Greece anymore.
Speaker 3: We've aged out of height, aged out of high school roles.
Speaker 3: When I was in high school, I was cast as
Speaker 3: all the I used to get stopped and shown hall
Speaker 3: passes by the underclassmen. In high school, I was always
Speaker 3: I always had roles in drama because I was always
Speaker 3: cast as the adult. I remember we did I Love
Speaker 3: Lucy and I was Fred, which was a bummer. It
Speaker 3: was Vince Fontaine and Greece. Speaking of Greece, any anytime
Speaker 3: they needed a lecherous older man, or like grumpy or stooped,
Speaker 3: I was always cast I just get grumpy. Yeah, well
Speaker 3: you were like King Lear, weren't you.
Speaker 2: Oh stop bringing that up, all right?
Speaker 3: Were so? Okay? Who else would I looked at? For
Speaker 3: Sydney Prescott. The final choices came down to Alicia Witt
Speaker 3: then of the sitcom Sybil. I Love Alicia Witch. She
Speaker 3: was in mister Holland's Opus. She was the clarinet player
Speaker 3: that he's trying to teach how to play the Redhead.
Speaker 3: She was dating or married to Ben Folds for a while.
Speaker 3: She's great. Okay, she's from near my hometown. She's from Worcester, Massachusetts.
Speaker 3: I think both of her parents died in a carbon
Speaker 3: monoxide leak not too long ago. Google that. Google that.
Speaker 3: Check me see if I have my my local hometown.
Speaker 3: Girl makes good loar.
Speaker 2: That makes good lore.
Speaker 3: When her parents died, oh, Brittany Murphy, oh, also is considered.
Speaker 3: Who do we ever forget how she died? Because then
Speaker 3: her like husband died similarly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Jesus christ dude, Well yeah, her parents were found
Speaker 2: frozen to death.
Speaker 3: Oh that was it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because they were like hoarders and refused to let
Speaker 2: anyone into the into their home for repairs or anything.
Speaker 3: And it was in Worcester. More importantly, it was in
Speaker 3: driving distance in my father's house. It was in It
Speaker 3: was in worcesters near the Polar Beverage factory. My favorite Seltzer.
Speaker 3: Jesus christy. Yeah, that's a bummer. But she's great. And
Speaker 3: ned Campbell was the third that made the final cut,
Speaker 3: and Nev Campbell as herself.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure if there was a starring nev Campbell
Speaker 2: as herself. She was a professional ballerina before this Campbell.
Speaker 2: If Campbell, I think Alicia Whitt was too check me
Speaker 2: on that. Stop bringing up Alicia Witt, Jamie. Can we
Speaker 2: pull up Alicia WIT's dead parents?
Speaker 3: Man?
Speaker 2: What happened to? Was there a thing with Brittany Murphy?
Speaker 3: I forget Uh, there was a theory that there was
Speaker 3: like some kind of weird mold in the house or something.
Speaker 3: That is, they both died of like weird respiratory things
Speaker 3: within like a couple months of each other.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because her husband was found dead in their home later. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you're right about that, Dan.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm kind of surprised that there hasn't been like
Speaker 3: a one of those like TMZ ABC News specials.
Speaker 2: I think everyone just loved her too much and it
Speaker 2: was so sad Brittany Murphy. Yeah, I know, yeah really was.
Speaker 3: Today's the eighteenth anniversary of Back to Black coming up.
Speaker 2: Just bringing in tragic young women.
Speaker 3: Huh. Yeah. Keiths breast Specialty.
Speaker 2: Campbell, who is a beautiful, chestnut mare of a woman,
Speaker 2: started in the Craft within May of ninety six, and
Speaker 2: he is now obviously indelibly linked with the Scream franchise
Speaker 2: and the character of Sidney Prescott, but after the casting
Speaker 2: Kerfluffel in the recent reboots, I sort of hate her.
Speaker 2: To briefly sum that up, they relaunched, they relaunched Scream
Speaker 2: in twenty one, and she has a cameo where David
Speaker 2: Arquette like calls her character and is like, don't come
Speaker 2: back to Woodsboro. There's another ghost Face and she was like, Okay,
Speaker 2: I won't. That's it. And she didn't come back for
Speaker 2: six because even though Courtney Cox and David Arquette came
Speaker 2: back for five, Courtney Cox was also in six, but
Speaker 2: Nev Campbell kept holding out. She was like quoting too
Speaker 2: high a price, and the lead actress, Melissa Barrera, who
Speaker 2: is in The Heights, basically got a little too real
Speaker 2: about Israeli and Palestine and production canned her and brought
Speaker 2: back Nev Campbell, and Nev Campbell has not addressed that.
Speaker 3: Oh man, dude, I just got it. I finally just
Speaker 3: got it. Ghost Face Killer. It's a Scream reference.
Speaker 2: No, no, I.
Speaker 3: Actually don't think it is. Wu Tang predated Scream. See
Speaker 3: you were correct, Yeah, yeah, because they did well.
Speaker 2: It's funny because Wu Tang did a whole thing.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: They were so into the grindhouse stuff, like not just
Speaker 2: the The Shaw Brothers seventy stuff, but also horror movie
Speaker 2: and there's a there's a a Wu Tang side project
Speaker 2: called Grave Diggas. It's like horror rap. So anyway, think
Speaker 2: of that what you will. Uh Yeah, so that sucks
Speaker 2: and five Cream is good. Scream six Cream I didn't
Speaker 2: like as much, and I will just not be seeing
Speaker 2: the seventh one anyway. Matthew Lillard auditioned for the male lead,
Speaker 2: eventually played by Skeet Ulrich, whose actual name is Brian
Speaker 2: ray Trout, but he went with Skeet Ulrich so low
Speaker 2: and I had this conversation last night. Ulrick was his
Speaker 2: stepfather's name, who actually raised him. And there's actually a
Speaker 2: horrific trauma at the base of this joke because Ulrick's
Speaker 2: birth father actually kidnapped him and his brother in like
Speaker 2: a deranged custody move and just traveled around with them
Speaker 2: for like three years across three different states before finally
Speaker 2: giving up the ghost and returning them to their mother
Speaker 2: and stepfather. And Skeat is a derivation of Skeeter, which
Speaker 2: was just a Little league baseball name from his coach.
Speaker 2: But yes, it's very stupid as far as a screen name.
Speaker 3: Wow wow wow wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah. We'll also get to the We'll get to another
Speaker 2: traumatic childhood incident for young Skeet later. Anyway, Matthew Lillard
Speaker 2: auditioned for the lead and was told you're not the
Speaker 2: right guy to make out with Nev Campbell the entire time.
Speaker 2: Why don't you come back in for the best friend? Ulrick,
Speaker 2: who was then quoted next in Entertainment Weekly's Oral History, said,
Speaker 2: with possible malice, I'll have a with Matt about that.
Speaker 2: I think you should let that go by now. This
Speaker 2: is all made funnier by the fact that Lillard and
Speaker 2: Campbell started dating during the production of Scream and stayed
Speaker 2: together for two years. Also hilarious. In a twenty two
Speaker 2: interview with Vulture, Matthew Lillard said of the movie, it's
Speaker 2: not a perfect movie. I think the opening sequence is incredible,
Speaker 2: and the middle of the movie sort of gets bogged down.
Speaker 2: Then the end sequence, the last twenty minutes is incredible.
Speaker 3: Apparently, Matthew Lillard was accompanying his girlfriend to auditions somewhere
Speaker 3: else in the building, and the casting director for Scream
Speaker 3: saw him and encouraged him audition another one of those
Speaker 3: I mean salt grain No, I just I guess it's
Speaker 3: worse if you if someone looked at him and was like.
Speaker 2: You'd be a good second banana as a deraanded serial killer.
Speaker 2: Production was iing Vince Vaughn for the role that went
Speaker 2: to Alrich.
Speaker 5: I guess because singers swingers come out too, But like,
Speaker 5: I don't know where that would have been in the
Speaker 5: production release cycle of of Scream, So I don't know.
Speaker 3: Alrighty Brunette was soulful ozz.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's how they went with Ulrich. Or we have
Speaker 2: Johnny Depp at home.
Speaker 3: He does. He is good in that though, and he's
Speaker 3: going as good as it gets too as the troubled
Speaker 3: like guy that you want to believe is good but
Speaker 3: you know that there's something bad.
Speaker 2: He's great in this movie. He is obviously a QTE
Speaker 2: and it just becomes so menacing. Yeah. And he'd started
Speaker 2: with Nef Campbell in the Craft, so that contributed to
Speaker 2: their chemistry. He, however, did not realize that the film
Speaker 2: had any comedic overtones. He went deep into his role,
Speaker 2: researching famous teen killers like Leopold and Loeb and the
Speaker 2: Menendez Brothers, and therefore, on the first day of shooting,
Speaker 2: he was somewhat taken aback by Jamie Kennedy and Matthew
Speaker 2: Lillard's let's say, broad performances.
Speaker 3: That makes it work so well?
Speaker 2: Yeah, he told it Entertainment Weekly. I remember thinking, what
Speaker 2: are they doing? Don't they know? This isn't funny, This
Speaker 2: isn't supposed to be funny. And man, I was wrong.
Speaker 3: I was on skeetz Wikipedia page. Apparently he enjoys woodworking
Speaker 3: and gardening. Sweet boy lovely.
Speaker 2: I know, I regret. I regret taking that stray. Yeah,
Speaker 2: taking a potshot at Skeet.
Speaker 3: To be fair, even Matthew Lillard admits that the pair
Speaker 3: his on Jamie Kennedy's maniacal performance at the film's end
Speaker 3: is one hundred percent scenery chewing, as you describe. And
Speaker 3: I second, he told Vulture, we were crazy. If I
Speaker 3: ever saw somebody do that on a set, I'd be like, dude,
Speaker 3: bring it down fifty eight percent. Lillard has one of
Speaker 3: the film's most hilarious ad libs when Alrich throws a
Speaker 3: cordless pone at him, which wasn't in the script. Lillard
Speaker 3: genuinely reacts you mean with the phone, Dick.
Speaker 2: My hehole performance is incredible. I mean everyone cited this.
Speaker 2: My Mom's gonna be so mad at me. But he's
Speaker 2: like covered in blood, like drooling. It's really nuts.
Speaker 3: All our colleges that Wes Craven told him to throw
Speaker 3: the phone at Matthew just to see what he would do,
Speaker 3: blaming the director. One of the other oldest traits of
Speaker 3: the book.
Speaker 2: I do like his funny like Wes craved like thoughtfully
Speaker 2: puts like the frame of his eyeglass in his mouth,
Speaker 2: and he's like, Matthew, throw the phone at him. Let's
Speaker 2: see what happens.
Speaker 3: Let's see what happens again, A very professorial yeah thing
Speaker 3: to say.
Speaker 2: The precise stature of Lillard and Rick's character's relationship was
Speaker 2: almost immediately questioned, especially by queer fans of the movie,
Speaker 2: but it took a little while for the principles involved
Speaker 2: to admit the seemingly obvious subtexts. And this movie was
Speaker 2: influenced by the Leopold Loeb case, and of course, anyone
Speaker 2: who has seen Alfred Hitchcock's movie Rope, which is a
Speaker 2: take on that case, will recognize the mid century closeted
Speaker 2: overtones of that relationship. Leopold and Loeb never caught to
Speaker 2: it themselves, but it was a widely speculated situation in
Speaker 2: which one of them was like kind of the alpha
Speaker 2: and the other one was in love with him and
Speaker 2: just kind of went along with it. But while Kevin
Speaker 2: Williamson came out to his friends and family in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety two, he gave an interview with ps dot Com
Speaker 2: into twenty twenty two, and he told them that he
Speaker 2: was very hesitant to present the gay side of me
Speaker 2: in my work at the time, resulting in the queerness
Speaker 2: of characters Billy and Stu being quote a little codd
Speaker 2: and maybe accidental. Looking back, he told the site, now
Speaker 2: maybe I'd be braver, Maybe I wouldn't be that shy
Speaker 2: little gay writer who felt like he couldn't get away
Speaker 2: with it. Williamson then elaborated on the queer readings that
Speaker 2: are inherent into the coore genre. It's always the survival
Speaker 2: tales that connect us. I think that's one of the
Speaker 2: reasons Final Girls are so important to us as a
Speaker 2: gay audience. Prior to Scream, he said, he related to
Speaker 2: Jamie Lee Curtis and Halloween because I know what It's like,
Speaker 2: I think gay kids everywhere understand that survival element that
Speaker 2: we have to sort of create in ourselves, and then
Speaker 2: when we're watching the final girl have to prove herself
Speaker 2: and rise to the challenge and save her life. I
Speaker 2: think that's something gay kids everywhere can relate to. Lillard,
Speaker 2: with much less subtlety, addressed the rumors at Seattle Comic
Speaker 2: Con in twenty twenty three. Stu and Billy were definitely
Speaker 2: gay and like Ski Orick is like, uh what. But
Speaker 2: then Lillard continues and he says, I said it to
Speaker 2: the twentieth anniversary with Kevin. Somebody asked, are they gay?
Speaker 2: I was like, they're definitely gay, right Kevin? And Kevin
Speaker 2: was like probably. So there's all that.
Speaker 3: Matthew Lillard doesn't strike me as terribly intelligent.
Speaker 2: He's I have such a soft spot for him though,
Speaker 2: because of this and Thirteen Ghosts.
Speaker 3: Which she's all that too.
Speaker 2: M I was listening to comedy around the comedies around
Speaker 2: this time, but also SLC Punk, which is like such
Speaker 2: a fantastic under the radar movie that was so huge
Speaker 2: for me and my high school buddies.
Speaker 3: Just could we do the movie? No? It was a
Speaker 3: really good shaggy Courtney Cox was off of the part
Speaker 3: of these scheming journalists. Gail Weathers by think of Carl Weathers.
Speaker 3: Gail Weathers by one of the film's producers in her
Speaker 3: manager's office, and she jumped at the chance to play
Speaker 3: a character that was a little against type. She was
Speaker 3: well into her friend's role at this time, she told
Speaker 3: the Hollywood Reporter, But I had to convince Wez, so
Speaker 3: I wrote him a letter and assured him that being
Speaker 3: a bitch wouldn't be a stretch at all, leaving that
Speaker 3: one there anything to say about that. Okay, Brookshields and
Speaker 3: Janine Garofflo were also considered, who both would have been good.
Speaker 3: The other principal female lead, Rose McGowan, had to audition
Speaker 3: for the film twice when her agent demanded two hundred
Speaker 3: and fifty thousand dollars instead of the offered fifty thousand.
Speaker 3: That's insanely low.
Speaker 2: Well, and it's up too. I mean this has been
Speaker 2: cast as like her being difficult, and she's even an
Speaker 2: interview seid, like my agent was too aggressive and like
Speaker 2: fed it up. But everyone else was offered one hundred
Speaker 2: k and she was offered fifty, So there was already
Speaker 2: some disparity there. I also think Rose McGowan has been
Speaker 2: was like one of Harvey's victims, so that's like, oh, oh,
Speaker 2: she was one of the I mean she launched me. Yeah,
Speaker 2: she was behind it a lot of me too stuff,
Speaker 2: but like, I don't know that it was. Oh so
Speaker 2: she said he actually didn't assault her until nineteen ninety seven,
Speaker 2: which cool that it wasn't in this movie.
Speaker 3: Well for this movie, making matters a little sadder. She
Speaker 3: ended up just backtracking and taking the fifty grand. Yeah,
Speaker 3: which makes me sad because she's my favorite character in
Speaker 3: this movie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she's a treat.
Speaker 3: She deliberately dyed her hair blonde to contrast with Nev Campbell's.
Speaker 3: She said, I hated that color she was talking to
Speaker 3: e W, but it was perfect for the film. Her
Speaker 3: character's death scene, which is kind of the moment when
Speaker 3: I check out of the movie.
Speaker 2: We go back to the stuff you're saying about her
Speaker 2: wardrobe and yeah.
Speaker 3: So I guess the wardrobe department wanted her to be
Speaker 3: like more of a tomboy and gave her all these
Speaker 3: like overalls and things that she was like, no, I'm
Speaker 3: not going to do that, And she apparently got into
Speaker 3: a cab and went out shopping and came back with
Speaker 3: the stuff that we see her in, which we're all
Speaker 3: very like extremely nineties hot slut.
Speaker 2: Sure, I probably can't keep saying that. No, okay, cool,
Speaker 2: you know more about the rules of horror than I do.
Speaker 2: That is that a is that an archetype? Thirty rock reftords.
Speaker 2: At one point, someone walks into Jack's office and Liz goes, now,
Speaker 2: who's this hot slut? Anyway? Yeah, and then she also
Speaker 2: like one of the other things she talked about is
Speaker 2: that like the set decorator had given her like Indigo
Speaker 2: Girls posters and stuff.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she went and like ripped them down. She was like,
Speaker 2: that is not what this character would listen to. I
Speaker 2: love that. There's definitely well there's I think there's some.
Speaker 2: But she was just like she was like really took
Speaker 2: ownership of like the character as it appears in the film.
Speaker 2: It was not how it was written or intended by production.
Speaker 2: Bless Indeed. I love a spunky, spitfire. Yeah, sharp tongued.
Speaker 2: Everything I just said sounds bad, Yeah, it does. It's
Speaker 2: got to be a better way. It's gotta be a
Speaker 2: better way to say, fix it. And post brassy.
Speaker 3: Maybe call her brassy woman just just takes no guff yeah, yeah, witty, hilarious,
Speaker 3: no guff yeah, sticks up her sauce. What oh the
Speaker 3: garage scene. Oh yeah, the garage scene. Thank you. Her
Speaker 3: character's death scene was a big piece of the set's climax,
Speaker 3: but it occasionally veered into chaos. Well, Pelton goes face
Speaker 3: with beer bottles, but she didn't have to do. She
Speaker 3: reached the door and couldn't turned the doorknob and made
Speaker 3: it out, but she stopped wet back, picked up beer
Speaker 3: bottles on the ground that she dropped and threw them
Speaker 3: at the killer, which I mean, again is what I
Speaker 3: love about her. She was not gonna just run from him.
Speaker 3: She was going to attack him. She was just fighter.
Speaker 2: But it's oh oh, that was her fatal flaw. And
Speaker 2: also not wearing a bra, would you sub you? She
Speaker 2: accidentally It sounds so creepy. It was northern California in
Speaker 2: an unheated garage, but it is like, obviously the thing
Speaker 2: that everyone notices about that scene.
Speaker 3: She accidentally hit a camera with a beer bottle and
Speaker 3: shattered a lens, which I can't imagine was cheap.
Speaker 2: Yeah right, they were shooting an anamorphic too, oh, which
Speaker 2: we'll get to.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Rose McGowan was so small that she actually had
Speaker 3: to be nailed to the garage door by her shirt
Speaker 3: because she kept slipping through the doggie door.
Speaker 2: That she was wedged in.
Speaker 3: It's a dumb death, it is.
Speaker 2: It is funny because when she was talking to e
Speaker 2: W she was like, I've gotten into my house when
Speaker 2: being locked out multiple times that way.
Speaker 3: I actually my aunt's elderly neighbor was killed by a
Speaker 3: garage door that malfunctioned and closed on him.
Speaker 2: Jesus did it just like drop heavily?
Speaker 3: I don't. I don't know. It's very final destination. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 3: I don't. I don't know if he was just old
Speaker 3: and like the Austin power is seen when the thing
Speaker 3: is slowly moving towards the guard, it just screams for
Speaker 3: like ninety seconds.
Speaker 2: Oh sure, yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 3: I shouldn't joke about that. But I didn't know him,
Speaker 3: so he's an abstraction to me. Good this really, this
Speaker 3: episode's bringing out my worst good. Oh where am i? Oh?
Speaker 3: The role of Randy, the guy who knows all the
Speaker 3: rules about surviving horror films Seth Green, Jason Lee, and
Speaker 3: Breck and Meyer all auditioned for the role. All of them.
Speaker 3: They would have been gone, Well, Jason Lee is a
Speaker 3: little too alpha, but Seth Y and Breck Andmeira they work.
Speaker 2: They have beta energy.
Speaker 3: Yeah right, I'm not wrong, right, Yeah, you're right. As
Speaker 3: I ask for your approval as to whether or not
Speaker 3: someone is a beta, as my voice gets higher and higher,
Speaker 3: my voice cracks. Oh. Jamie Kennedy ultimately won the role
Speaker 3: and has a really sweet story about Wes Craven shooting
Speaker 3: that scene. Oh you should take this. I know I
Speaker 3: love how much you love this.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, this is one of the aforementioned Durable West
Speaker 2: creator and anecdotes. Kennedy was talking to Entertainment Weekly. They
Speaker 2: did a big oral history and a bunch of interviews casts.
Speaker 2: We're gonna be citing them along, but he was saying
Speaker 2: Craven liked his first take. He was like, I think
Speaker 2: that's good. But Kennedy was like, I can do better.
Speaker 2: So he did a second and then a third, and
Speaker 2: then he said afterward, Wes said cut print great and
Speaker 2: said how do you feel? And I said I feel good.
Speaker 2: He said, well, I want to tell you I'm probably
Speaker 2: going to use the third take. Never be scared to
Speaker 2: ask for another take. Always trust your instincts. That was
Speaker 2: a big lesson for me, not to be scared. That
Speaker 2: scene really helped me for my whole career, which is
Speaker 2: sweet like that. But again, Miami's Most Wanted Will he
Speaker 2: helped me when I was making Miami's Most Wanted. And
Speaker 2: the masked son of Mask?
Speaker 3: Was he the son of Masque?
Speaker 2: He was in some dog Mask sequel.
Speaker 3: Well, you'll be pleased to know that Matthew Lillard and
Speaker 3: Nev Campbell weren't the only couple that came out of Scream.
Speaker 3: David Arquette cast says the good natured, if ineffectual Deputy
Speaker 3: Dewey met Courtney Cox at the first read. The Dewey
Speaker 3: was written as more of a dumb jock. Arquette decided
Speaker 3: to play the character. It was a frustrated John Wayne
Speaker 3: want to be whose authority is constantly being undercut. David
Speaker 3: Arquette was said to be very excited to act with
Speaker 3: Courtney Cox. She was less enthused. Initially we all got
Speaker 3: cast Wes had had us out at his house our
Speaker 3: Kat's talking to the ringer. I saw Courtney and was like, hey,
Speaker 3: I'm playing Dewey and she's like yeah, I heard about
Speaker 3: you or something like that. She gave me some real attitude.
Speaker 3: I love him in this movie. I normally hate David Arquette,
Speaker 3: but he's so good in this movie. Like I love
Speaker 3: how when when the ghost Face calls Sydney at their
Speaker 3: house and he's like long off the phone, but then
Speaker 3: he like grabs the phone. It's like hello, yeah, yeah, it's.
Speaker 2: A great it's it's a great role for him, and
Speaker 2: it is so I mean, he comes back in the
Speaker 2: fifth one and has this unbelievably heartbreaking scene where he's
Speaker 2: like it's actually short, but he like wordlessly wakes up
Speaker 2: in his trailer and like goes and pours himself his
Speaker 2: morning coffee and whiskey and then like sits down and
Speaker 2: watches Gail on her new anchor show, like on the
Speaker 2: National News, and he's like does a lot of great
Speaker 2: wordless acting in that scene. And it's just so fraught because, like,
Speaker 2: you know, they got together on this movie and had
Speaker 2: a child and divorced. So he plays that whole dynamic
Speaker 2: like there's so much real life history in there, and
Speaker 2: he's talked about how they co parent their kids, so
Speaker 2: they have like a good friendship and relationship as parents.
Speaker 2: But like man, he brings a ton of pathos to
Speaker 2: that fifth movie. It's like, honestly, one of my favorite
Speaker 2: things about it their dimension where they like, you know,
Speaker 2: he says like at one point, he says, like I
Speaker 2: left in the middle of the night, like a coward,
Speaker 2: something like that, and she says, You're many things, but
Speaker 2: you are not a coward. And it's like one of
Speaker 2: the sweetest moments I've seen in a horror movie.
Speaker 3: Did he bring any of that to Eight Legged Freaks.
Speaker 2: Or as many wrestling movies?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 2: The Archets are just so sad, man, I mean, they
Speaker 2: had their Alexis had such a sad life and death.
Speaker 3: And anyway, I don't know much about Roseann Arquet, No
Speaker 3: one does.
Speaker 2: They are related, right, No, I think Patricia's widely considered
Speaker 2: the best one.
Speaker 3: She's got an Academy Award for what Boyhood? Yeah, all right, So,
Speaker 3: the as.
Speaker 2: We mentioned, the pair got together over the course filming.
Speaker 2: Jamie Kennedy told Entertainment Weekly we had a table read
Speaker 2: and their characters just had a lot of interaction. I said, Jesus,
Speaker 2: that's really good chemistry. Afterwards, we were going home to
Speaker 2: the airport. We all shared a limo and I was
Speaker 2: literally like, Okay, that wasn't acting. They were just getting
Speaker 2: along so well in the limousine. I was like, I'll
Speaker 2: just sit on this side of the partition. It was
Speaker 2: actually very beautiful. It was very nice to see people
Speaker 2: fall in love. Cox and Arquette got married in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety nine and have a daughter together, Although I as mentioned,
Speaker 2: they ultimately split in twenty thirteen. He's talked openly about
Speaker 2: how her one million dollar per episode's success on Friends
Speaker 2: affected their relationship. Random Casting notes Leev Schreiber got twenty
Speaker 2: thousand dollars for a role given to him by Bob
Speaker 2: Weinstein in an unrelated meeting.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 2: Bully for him. One of the franchise's best jokes is
Speaker 2: that the wrongfully arrested character Schreiber plays is named Cotton Weary,
Speaker 2: and then he later parlays his notoriety into a news
Speaker 2: show called one hundred percent Cotton God. Yeah, I waited
Speaker 2: for that one to hit. Henry Wrinkler is the school principal.
Speaker 2: Westbraven also stuck Suck in Linda Blair as a reporter
Speaker 2: he'd worked with her on the TV movie Stranger in
Speaker 2: My House in nineteen seventy eight. He also makes a
Speaker 2: cameo himself, dresses in Freddy Krueger's outfit as the high
Speaker 2: school janitor, staring right at the camera I believe. And
Speaker 2: he also cast a guy in the original Nightmare on
Speaker 2: Elmstreet who played a cop as the Woodsboro Sheriff, which
Speaker 2: I just love. So now onto the voice of the
Speaker 2: film's Killer Killers spoiler the movie is almost thirty years old,
Speaker 2: Roger L. Jackson. Sensibly the characters throughout this entire franchise
Speaker 2: have used the same model of voice modulator to disguise
Speaker 2: their voices, but it's always been Roger L. Jackson in
Speaker 2: every single Scream. He was also the voice of Mojo
Speaker 2: Jojo on Powerpuff Girls, which is funny Ojo Jojo. The
Speaker 2: role that led Jackson to Scream was actually Tim Burton's
Speaker 2: Mars Attacks, which he provided the voice of the alien
Speaker 2: translator device, So I guess something about that guy's voice
Speaker 2: just screams mechanically modulated. He auditioned for Scream with Drew
Speaker 2: Barrymore because she wanted a real actor to play against,
Speaker 2: not some pa blankly reading lines, He told the ringer
Speaker 2: I was working as a voice actor living in San
Speaker 2: Francisco and went in for the audition with a lot
Speaker 2: of other people. The audition script was the first scene
Speaker 2: from the film The Opener. I heard some of the
Speaker 2: other people in the waiting room saying, my agent says,
Speaker 2: they're looking for new Freddy Krueger because this was Dimension
Speaker 2: and Wes Craven. But in reading over the scene, I thought,
Speaker 2: this is not Freddy Krueger. This is subtle, he would
Speaker 2: continue device. I knew it had to be a sexy
Speaker 2: voice and something interesting enough to keep the girl on
Speaker 2: the phone, even though she clearly.
Speaker 3: Wants to hang up. He sounds interesting. There's this texture
Speaker 3: and erotic color to his voice. It's like a cat
Speaker 3: that seems sweet and playful, and then all of a sudden,
Speaker 3: the Paul comes down onto the mouse's tail. I wanted
Speaker 3: the voice to change color as ghost Face goes in
Speaker 3: for the kill, sort of like a cat does. Okay,
Speaker 3: he thought.
Speaker 2: A lot about it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, and it gets even more troubling. Jackson was
Speaker 3: kept isolated from the cast, but he always did his
Speaker 3: scenes live, which meant that the actors literally knew someone
Speaker 3: was watching them as they talked, but they didn't know
Speaker 3: who or presumably where. Jackson said that Craven gave him
Speaker 3: some room to adapt the lines, something that he remembers
Speaker 3: with alarming relish. He would say, he'd let me improvise
Speaker 3: so I could be really creative. I remember I said
Speaker 3: something not in the script, like have you ever felt
Speaker 3: a knife cut through human flesh and scraped the bone underneath?
Speaker 3: I read that like the guy from Airplane. You ever
Speaker 3: been in a Turkish bath? Johnny? Have you ever felt
Speaker 3: a knife cut through human flesh and scrape the bone
Speaker 3: underneath Johnny? Like Gladiator movies? Yeah. Another one I was
Speaker 3: proud of was when I told nev that I would
Speaker 3: cut out her eyelids so she couldn't blink while I stabbed.
Speaker 2: Her to death.
Speaker 3: Wow. Okay uh. Later, Jackson tells the vice interviewer, if
Speaker 3: I ever kill someone, I just want to kill them
Speaker 3: as me, not ghost face. Let's let's pick that apart.
Speaker 3: I just want to be seen as as the killer
Speaker 3: inside me.
Speaker 2: Now. He was prompted this. They were like, do you
Speaker 2: ever call anyone up and randomly with the like prank
Speaker 2: call people with a ghost face voice? He was like no,
Speaker 2: and then he said that creepy thing. I mean, I
Speaker 2: guess he's doing a bit, but like, I don't know. Man,
Speaker 2: he's like, just look at not the judge of book
Speaker 2: byites cover.
Speaker 3: But you know, let's see, I was not what I
Speaker 3: expected this man to look like. Wow, okay, yeah, yeah yeah. Well.
Speaker 2: Production for production for Scream was largely set the quaint
Speaker 2: little wine country town of Santa Rosa. Our former coworker
Speaker 2: Ben Trivett, who does listened to this podcast, also lives there.
Speaker 2: It's a harrow fifty miles from San Francisco. The town
Speaker 2: was not unacquainted with Hollywood movies like Peggy Sue Got
Speaker 2: Married and Inventing the Abbots were shot at its high school,
Speaker 2: while the city itself has served as a backdrop for
Speaker 2: everything from Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt to Stop
Speaker 2: or my moum will Shoot Hitchcook Love Northern California. Yeah,
Speaker 2: wonder why it's gorgeous?
Speaker 3: I mean I didn't mean it like that.
Speaker 2: No, Birds is uh, Birds's Bodega Bay and budget and
Speaker 2: you know, obviously offerdigo of San Francisco, so oh it's cool.
Speaker 2: Scream production wanted to use Santa Ros's High School as well,
Speaker 2: and claimed that they got a verbal agreement from the
Speaker 2: principal which they based their shooting schedule around, but they
Speaker 2: never actually made it there. First, the city claimed that
Speaker 2: the crew hadn't fired the proper paperwork, and even after
Speaker 2: that had been resolved, the school reneged on its supposed offer,
Speaker 2: saying it conflicted with final exams. In the film's DVD commentary,
Speaker 2: Wes Craven says, there was actually Rose McGown and Nev
Speaker 2: Campbell's dialogue about twenty minutes in that caused the district
Speaker 2: to bulk And.
Speaker 3: What was that? Was? I just all about life.
Speaker 2: It's like their interest scene where they're bantering back and
Speaker 2: forth about good.
Speaker 3: Stand next to me in English class? Well, she did
Speaker 3: not in the.
Speaker 2: Mood yeah, I guts and stuff. The movie was really
Speaker 2: how do you gut someone? The movie was relocated to
Speaker 2: the Sonoma Community Center and entire scenes, huge swaths of
Speaker 2: the movie, because this was set in high school, were
Speaker 2: rewritten to accommodate the switch. As we get to later,
Speaker 2: Craven was already at odds with the Weinstein's about budget
Speaker 2: and production matters, so the extra expenses were deeply unappreciated.
Speaker 2: On the DVD commentary, he estimates that the move cost
Speaker 2: production about three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, so in
Speaker 2: the end credits of the film you can see a
Speaker 2: very pointed message no thanks whatsoever to the Santa Rosa
Speaker 2: City School District governing board. Supposedly, Craven took this grudge
Speaker 2: further off screen and started a never confirmed publicly boycott
Speaker 2: of Santa Rosa and Sonoma County. I was a producer
Speaker 2: named Daniel Ferrins who is actually a graduate of Santa
Speaker 2: Rosa High told Horror dot Com in twenty eleven, Santa
Speaker 2: Rosa is very high in the Hollywood Blacklist of places
Speaker 2: not to take your productions, But Hollywood Reporter journalist Dana
Speaker 2: Harris contradicted that to the Sonoma County Independent in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety nine, saying the idea of there being a blacklist
Speaker 2: against a particular county is ridiculous. It's a complex industry
Speaker 2: and annoying things happen all the time. When a community
Speaker 2: does something unfriendly. There may be some gossip or something
Speaker 2: for the short term, and it might stop some people
Speaker 2: from filming there. But believe me, there isn't some master
Speaker 2: puppeteer distributing blacklists and dictating where people can go to
Speaker 2: make their films, which I say not true, and if true,
Speaker 2: a bummer.
Speaker 3: Anyway. Because of the relative isolation of northern California from Hollywood,
Speaker 3: the cast bonded easily during the shoot. They had fond
Speaker 3: memories of staying at the Double Tree Hotel, mostly because
Speaker 3: they had fresh baked cookies daily. This whole anecdote's very
Speaker 3: meee code. Every day they give you a fresh cookie,
Speaker 3: Jamie Kennedy said, And I know it sounds stupid, but
Speaker 3: it was just so good. Every day. I felt like
Speaker 3: I had a little treat. If I did a good scene,
Speaker 3: I'd eat my cookie. Presumably if he did a bad scene,
Speaker 3: he would also eat his cookie. Cookies were eating. Shooting
Speaker 3: mostly at night. The cast blacked out their windows because
Speaker 3: they'd come back at six am and quote unwined, which
Speaker 3: you speculate mostly meant drinking. David Arquette had a bar
Speaker 3: installed in his room, which I'm very impressed by. The
Speaker 3: setup included black lights and lava lamps. He seems like
Speaker 3: he just bought out the entire contents of a spencer gifts.
Speaker 2: No, he said, I didn't put this in, but he
Speaker 2: said he went to every local headshop. Nah to a
Speaker 2: mass this collection nev Campbell. Remember, David is nuts, so
Speaker 2: he bought every toy possible that you can buy in
Speaker 2: Santa Rosa and they were all hanging from his ceiling.
Speaker 2: I think it was called David's Bar, David's Club or something.
Speaker 2: The cast and crew also had lots of parking lot
Speaker 2: party and even bonfire at one point. Skeet Ulrich told Vulture,
Speaker 2: we did feel like a group of outcasts that came together,
Speaker 2: you know, six am, getting off work and we're rolling
Speaker 2: into the hotel half caked and sticky syrup and blood
Speaker 2: as people are rolling out to go to their wine
Speaker 2: tours and Napa Valley. We must have looked like the
Speaker 2: most insane group of people in this hotel complex. It's
Speaker 2: not every film that you get to do that. Less
Speaker 2: and less now as we get distracted by so many things.
Speaker 2: It was really an incredible time. He made this very
Speaker 2: interesting comment that like pre smartphones and pre eternal Internet,
Speaker 2: like people bonded on film shoots so much more because
Speaker 2: you were there was downtime where you would hang out
Speaker 2: and you didn't just he said. He said, nowadays everybody
Speaker 2: just everyone just disappears into their phone. That's sad.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it reminds me of the story of the Robie
Speaker 3: Williams Crinkly eyed school movie The Cider House Dead Poets Society.
Speaker 3: There is, writes to me, the story from the Dead
Speaker 3: Poets Society where all the boys were getting up to
Speaker 3: high jinks in the hotel.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what everyone says. One of the other things
Speaker 2: quotes about this was like people talk about, like I
Speaker 2: hate shooting in La because in La you just everyone
Speaker 2: goes back to the formats, But shooting on location, you're
Speaker 2: usually all in one hotel or together, he said. They also,
Speaker 2: the thing that comes up constantly is it's like summer camp.
Speaker 3: They can stand by me. They said that too. They
Speaker 3: would do like theater, games and the rooms and stuff.
Speaker 2: I mean same with Karate Kid, all the all the gang,
Speaker 2: all the bullies were like ripping dirt bikes around like
Speaker 2: a ripro in time.
Speaker 1: We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right
Speaker 1: back with more. Too much information and just a moment.
Speaker 2: I wanted to do a roundup of quotes about how
Speaker 2: nice Wes Craven was, but they're there are too many,
Speaker 2: and we would be here for days. Jamie Kenned who
Speaker 2: described him as a tenured Berkeley professor, But he had
Speaker 2: a sense of humor about what he was doing. He
Speaker 2: once told Courtney Cox, who asked him for direction, Courtney,
Speaker 2: what do you think that I've been there? I don't
Speaker 2: know what it feels like to be chased by a knife.
Speaker 2: Apparently he was a bird watcher as well. Kevin Williamson
Speaker 2: said he would sit in his chair, he would be
Speaker 2: doing a crossword puzzle and reading about birds, and then
Speaker 2: he would just go action and become somebody else. Virtually
Speaker 2: every actor has multiple quotes about how safe and comfortable
Speaker 2: he made them feel in the set shooting this harrowing stuff.
Speaker 2: Arquette it did have one hilarious quote in the Hollywood
Speaker 2: Reporter Oral History. When you do a take and it
Speaker 2: wasn't what Wes wanted, he'd say, well, David, that's terrible.
Speaker 2: That was absolutely unusable. He laughs. But he says he
Speaker 2: had a way of giving direction to an actor that
Speaker 2: doesn't make them feel like they failed, and it almost
Speaker 2: lifts their spirit up so that in the next take
Speaker 2: you can do it again and have more fun with it,
Speaker 2: faster better and more blood. He'd say it like that.
Speaker 3: Speaking of harrowing the film's opening scene, My God, Kevin
Speaker 3: Williamson described the house as out in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 3: What was interesting is that there were just two houses
Speaker 3: in these huge fields, and our base camp was at
Speaker 3: the other house where they shot Kujo. That's so great,
Speaker 3: Drew Barrymore said. The scene took five days of night
Speaker 3: shoots to capture. We started on a Monday night and
Speaker 3: we ended on a Friday night at like five in
Speaker 3: the morning. So Saturday morning, okay, is a feeding and
Speaker 3: gremlin after me tonight, I've gun cross that it was
Speaker 3: more or less shot in sequence. And when Barrymore and
Speaker 3: Craven sat down and plotted out, they came up with
Speaker 3: an interesting strategy to coax real tears out of Barrymore.
Speaker 3: She told ew we couldn't have been more on the
Speaker 3: same page. I was like, I never want faked tears.
Speaker 3: I will come up with a mechanism that will actually
Speaker 3: make me cry. I will run around until I'm hyperventilating.
Speaker 3: He and I had this secret story. We would just
Speaker 3: talk about it every time because it made me cry
Speaker 3: every time I thought about it. That worked for tears.
Speaker 3: It didn't work for hyperventilating. I would still have to
Speaker 3: run around a lot. Craven narrowed down this allegedly secret
Speaker 3: story for the DVD commentary. He said, the night before
Speaker 3: we started shooting the scene, she told me a horrible
Speaker 3: story about a newspaper article of a dog being burned
Speaker 3: by its owner set on fire. And he started crying
Speaker 3: as she was telling this to me. So every time
Speaker 3: I needed to get her over that edge into complete tears,
Speaker 3: I would just say, Drew, I'm lighting the lighter God,
Speaker 3: and then she would burst into tears.
Speaker 2: It was like the most Drew Berry Moore. Yeah, yes
Speaker 2: it is.
Speaker 3: For the scene. Roger L. Jackson, the voice of ghost Face,
Speaker 3: explained that he was outside one of the windows, crouching
Speaker 3: in the shadows and taking shelter into a canopy because
Speaker 3: it was raining outside. I was watching Drew through the
Speaker 3: window while I was on the cell phone, and I
Speaker 3: was completely miked up. It was a live conversation. My
Speaker 3: view is what the killer would have seen. It was
Speaker 3: genius and pretty horrifying.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: Craven is apparently in the killer's custum at one point,
Speaker 3: specifically when Barrymore throws the phone at him? Is that
Speaker 3: his territorial forest?
Speaker 2: Think about phone throws in this movie. Man. The other
Speaker 2: thing that's funny is he talked about how they like
Speaker 2: the whole running bit in these movies is whoever is
Speaker 2: in the assumes the ghost face Mantle becomes like an
Speaker 2: immediate klutz and it's like tripping and falling all the time.
Speaker 2: And they said that that was like so precisely choreographed
Speaker 2: because they had to walk this fine line of like,
Speaker 2: he's obviously a guy with a knife trying to kill
Speaker 2: teenage girls, but also it is funny when you throw
Speaker 2: a lamp or something at him and he does a pratfall.
Speaker 2: There's also an incredible deep cut pause for applause Halloween reference.
Speaker 2: In that opening scene, the character's father tells her mother
Speaker 2: to drive down to the Mackenzies, which is what Jamie
Speaker 2: Lee Curtis tells the kids that she's babysitting in the
Speaker 2: original film. She doesn't tell them drive, she says, go
Speaker 2: down to the Mackenzie's. But man, that is a deep cut.
Speaker 2: I got a deep cut too.
Speaker 3: Ready. When Henry Winkler opens his closet in his office
Speaker 3: to try on the screen mask, before the ghost face mask,
Speaker 3: before he gets killed. You see his black leather fawnsie
Speaker 3: jacket from Happy Days Hang in the closet. Well, it's beautiful.
Speaker 2: Despite the good vibes on the set, this being a
Speaker 2: Weinstein production, they were predictably being giant soles. This was
Speaker 2: largely a Bob move, So we don't have as much
Speaker 2: horrific sexual violence, but we just have the ordinary cruelty
Speaker 2: of men with money towards artists. Bob hated the early
Speaker 2: rushes that he was seeing and started calling supervising producer
Speaker 2: Kathy Conrad, who, as I mentioned earlier, I love nitpicking
Speaker 2: details like barrymore sweater grossly saying things like shouldn't it
Speaker 2: be racier? And her Wig. Much of the cast and
Speaker 2: crew also recall an incident where Bob called Kathy Conrad
Speaker 2: and asked for Wes Craven, literally interrupting a shot. As
Speaker 2: she told Vanity Fair, Bob told him he thought Wes
Speaker 2: could do better. Wes said to me, what kind of
Speaker 2: a studio head calls a filmmaker in the middle of
Speaker 2: shooting and kicks him in the balls and expects him
Speaker 2: to work the rest of the day and do good
Speaker 2: work and researching this. It was so much meaner than that,
Speaker 2: The film's editor Patrick Lucier told the Ringer. Wes was
Speaker 2: very despondent a few days in when he was just like, Oh,
Speaker 2: the studio called up. They're very upset. They don't think
Speaker 2: it's going to be good, he said. They told him
Speaker 2: he was a TV journeyman and a hack. Executive producer
Speaker 2: Mary and Matdelena told THHR Bob actually said the shooting
Speaker 2: was workmanlike at best.
Speaker 3: Wow, wasn't it kind of a legend at this point?
Speaker 2: Like yes, he was, dude.
Speaker 3: Ah.
Speaker 2: Twenty minutes after that phone call, Bob called again, complaining
Speaker 2: about the killer's mask. Conrad called him on it, this
Speaker 2: time saying, you're the president of the studio. We sent
Speaker 2: you sketches of the mask. Then a few hours later
Speaker 2: she got another phone call. Bob wants Wes to continue filming,
Speaker 2: shooting each scene with four different masks until he can
Speaker 2: decide which one he wants.
Speaker 3: That's the most studio executive thing, most like higher level
Speaker 3: boss like thing i've ever heard monsters. More work for
Speaker 3: you until I make a decision that I could make
Speaker 3: right now but won't. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Dimension Studios head Carrie grinnat yes said his name, and
Speaker 2: not a typo of carry. Grant did in fact come
Speaker 2: out there and held a midnight meeting in Craven's hotel room.
Speaker 2: This is where Mike I just loved this woman. Thinking
Speaker 2: that they were about to fire Craven, Kathy Conrad unloaded
Speaker 2: on the head of the studio. Who the first do
Speaker 2: you think you're talking to? You hired a guy who
Speaker 2: created the genre, basically, and you're telling him how to
Speaker 2: make the movie. This guy's made thirty some odd movies.
Speaker 2: This is the most insulting thing I've ever seen in
Speaker 2: my entire life. Love it. Essentially, they reached a bargain
Speaker 2: where production would cut together just the opening scene and
Speaker 2: send it to New York for the Weinsteins. When this happened,
Speaker 2: Conrad monitored the situation in real time on a call
Speaker 2: with an assistant to the Weinsteins. The footage is in
Speaker 2: the office. The footage is on its way down to
Speaker 2: the screening room. The footage has reached the projection booth.
Speaker 2: The footage is being threaded. Bob is on his way down.
Speaker 2: Harvey is now with Bob. They're both seated. The lights
Speaker 2: have gone out. They're starting, I'll call you back anyway.
Speaker 2: Bob called her ten minutes later. It was over the moon.
Speaker 2: I think he said. Harvey was levitating for the theater,
Speaker 2: which may have been to drugs.
Speaker 3: May have been the Flay show he received during the screening.
Speaker 3: But I guess to his credit that too far for you?
Speaker 3: How was that too far for you?
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, it's gross when other people would
Speaker 2: be Bob is just a person, but it's gross with
Speaker 2: the knowledge that that probably happened at some point or
Speaker 2: Bob knew about it and was like, yeah, okay. So
Speaker 2: Bob called Conrad back ten minutes later, just over the moon.
Speaker 2: He apologized, and he said production told them you can
Speaker 2: do whatever you want. There's a quote that was like
Speaker 2: the only person that could do what they wanted at
Speaker 2: Merrimx was Quentin Tarantino because of pulp fiction. But it
Speaker 2: is really gross how everyone at that studio was just like,
Speaker 2: these men are unabashed monsters, Like who's that Broadway producer
Speaker 2: who like Scott Scot a.
Speaker 3: Friend who were for Scott Rudin And then yeah, it
Speaker 3: was known at the time.
Speaker 2: These are terrible, terrible human beings like and then and
Speaker 2: then and then it was just an open secret that
Speaker 2: one of them was a horrifying sexual predator. What a
Speaker 2: nightmare industry movie magic.
Speaker 3: It is weird, and I don't know how much of
Speaker 3: this I'll keep, but like, yeah, I mean I had
Speaker 3: a really good friend who who worked for him and
Speaker 3: was like, yeah, when that ex was a came It
Speaker 3: wasn't like all of a sudden like wait, you two
Speaker 3: you too know this on It was like yeah, everybody knew.
Speaker 3: It was just it was even thirty Rocks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was another thirty Rock joke where Jenna Moroney
Speaker 2: says something like she says something you remain the person
Speaker 2: who you were in certain situations. In many ways, I'm
Speaker 2: still trapped under passed out Harvey Weinstein at a Meer
Speaker 2: Max Christmas party. Oh god, that was a line in
Speaker 2: network television. Everyone was just like, who, well, it's funny,
Speaker 2: creepy Harvey, It's funny.
Speaker 3: It is the whole like notion of open secrets, you know.
Speaker 3: I mean, I remember hearing stuff about the Louis c
Speaker 3: k thing for years, and you know, and now there's
Speaker 3: this one comedian who's become a very big deal with
Speaker 3: a a show that's like basically like a like a
Speaker 3: one man show kind of deal that's supposed to be
Speaker 3: you know, first person. And I'm hearing from all kinds
Speaker 3: of multiple sources that he made it all up. It's
Speaker 3: presented as like a first person like an authentic thing,
Speaker 3: and it's a very deeply emotional forum. And it's of
Speaker 3: course widely believe that it's been completely made up. And
Speaker 3: he's won like all these awards for it and stuff,
Speaker 3: and now he's getting cast in like extremely high profile. Like, Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's weird. It's weird when there's just like too much
Speaker 3: money riding on stuff for people to speak out. It's
Speaker 3: bizarre sad anyway, speaking of masks, ooh right.
Speaker 2: And the ones we wear.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, the ghost face mask truly horrifying, like really
Speaker 3: deeply unsettling.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was great. Like I said, I remember seeing
Speaker 2: it just on the streets of New Cumberland, Pennsylvania and
Speaker 2: just being like, ah.
Speaker 3: I think that's what's so Like if you see it
Speaker 3: in New York, it's kind of not that scary, but
Speaker 3: seeing it in like the suburbs, there is a creepiness
Speaker 3: to it. I can't explain why.
Speaker 2: I mean, it gets at the clown thing yess like
Speaker 2: deranged in the sort of clown way. And obviously everyone's
Speaker 2: seen the Edward Moons painting at some point in their life.
Speaker 2: But you know, it just kind of goes back to
Speaker 2: the Michael Myers thing, which is like, what is the
Speaker 2: scariest thing in the world A white man, you know,
Speaker 2: just a white face that signals danger for a whole
Speaker 2: gender and several races.
Speaker 3: You know, I read somewhere on some listical thing and
Speaker 3: I couldn't like totally source it, but they wanted his
Speaker 3: like cape drapy thing to be white, but it looked
Speaker 3: a little too clanny, Yeah, so they changed that. The
Speaker 3: mask is not explicitly described in the script, and much
Speaker 3: like the iconically terrible William Shatner mask that they gave
Speaker 3: Michael Myers, this was just a standard Halloween mask that,
Speaker 3: as you mentioned, was inspired by Edward Munch's painting The
Speaker 3: Scream and a whole lineage of cartoonishly distorted faces that
Speaker 3: took its cues from it cover of King Crimsons in
Speaker 3: the Court of the Crimson King and Pink Floyd's The
Speaker 3: Wall for Starters. The ghost Face mask was designed in
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety one as part of the Fun World company's
Speaker 3: Fantastic Faces product line and was found by Kevin Williamson
Speaker 3: and executive producer Mary and Madelena while location scouting.
Speaker 2: Just in a room, just in a kid's room. They said,
Speaker 2: we took.
Speaker 3: That to production and said, riff on this, make something
Speaker 3: like this, And they must have done twenty different designs.
Speaker 3: But while fun World legally owned the design, it was
Speaker 3: a team effort from a group of talented artists. Lauren
Speaker 3: Griffins was a special effects makeup artist working in Los
Speaker 3: Angeles Tony Gardner's Altyrian Studios and recall the fangoria, the
Speaker 3: Halloween tradition amongst the special effects community, which was to
Speaker 3: throw a party to show off their stuff. I love that.
Speaker 3: That's really cute, Griffith said. My costume idea was an
Speaker 3: advanced take on the classic Halloween costume of a bed
Speaker 3: sheet with eyeholes for a ghost, which integrated a formed
Speaker 3: buckram ghost face mask with a long jaw. Buckram is
Speaker 3: a kind of stiff fabric. Tony Gardner told the magazine
Speaker 3: that during the slow period for movie work, the company
Speaker 3: decided to make a collection of Halloween masks and self
Speaker 3: market them, buying an ad in the back of Fangoria magazine.
Speaker 2: It is really amazing, like this article, like you can
Speaker 2: go in line because Fangoria has these tremendous arcads that
Speaker 2: were literally just all in fiocabinets in like New York,
Speaker 2: in one office, so they have so much of it,
Speaker 2: all of it digitized. That's but you can go back
Speaker 2: and see like these one ads and it is just
Speaker 2: a ghost face mask. It's like literally the goddamn ghost
Speaker 2: face mask. And this is why this next wort pisses
Speaker 2: me off.
Speaker 3: Oh here you you do this them.
Speaker 2: So in nineteen ninety one, Gitterns and this fellow artist
Speaker 2: at this company, Altierian Jim Usterman, drove cross country to
Speaker 2: the annual Halloween Trade Show in Chicago, which is the
Speaker 2: largest event of its kind in the US, to promote
Speaker 2: their line of masks. Within months of that show, this
Speaker 2: company called fun World had a brand new in house designer.
Speaker 2: Her name is Brigitte Slairton Leeden. Slairton Leiden, her name
Speaker 2: is Brigitte Slairton Leiden, and they just told her to
Speaker 2: copy the Altyrian designs. She explicitly told Fangoria I was
Speaker 2: given a picture of something similar to what the finished
Speaker 2: masks would eventually look like, and was asked if I
Speaker 2: thought these could be made as masks and do some
Speaker 2: drawings with a similar look and feel. So I did
Speaker 2: a bunch of sketches of different faces with that same
Speaker 2: white melty face with simplistic black facial feature shapes, and
Speaker 2: in a surprise to no one familiar with Corporate America,
Speaker 2: fun World's line of Fantastic faces, which included six masks,
Speaker 2: are all riffs on that original kind of design that
Speaker 2: was done by Aultrian. A year or two later, Gieterns
Speaker 2: told Fangoria, I was in a drug store and I
Speaker 2: saw fun World's mass produced knockoff versions of my whaler mask.
Speaker 2: Clearly it appeared to be a direct rendering of my
Speaker 2: original creation. I was a bit amused, but didn't pursue
Speaker 2: looking into it any further, as I had left that
Speaker 2: part of my life behind and was on too a
Speaker 2: new one.
Speaker 3: Years after that, one of the masks was found and
Speaker 3: picked for the movie, though Dementia Studios wanted to own
Speaker 3: the rights for their own design for merchandising purposes, which
Speaker 3: was smart and Special Facts House kN BFx was churning
Speaker 3: out designs left and right that weren't quite what they
Speaker 3: wanted Wes Craven stuck to his guns, and eventually they
Speaker 3: had to reach out the Fun World to license the
Speaker 3: rights for the mask. But the drama over credit for
Speaker 3: the masks design, though literally, played out in the pages
Speaker 3: of Fangoria magazine. Fangoria issue number one eighty nine from
Speaker 3: January two thousand interviewed the original fund World designer, writing
Speaker 3: the mask was actually designed by fun World employee Brigitte
Speaker 3: Swedish chef Sounds, prior to the movie's conception. Brigitte stated
Speaker 3: the idea was something I worked on with Alan Geller,
Speaker 3: the vice president of the company. Of the entire assortment,
Speaker 3: that face was the strongest one. A reader wrote in
Speaker 3: to bring up the original designers, and from then on,
Speaker 3: fun World literally wrote sleeve and Linder out of the
Speaker 3: story of the mask design. She no longer is mentioned
Speaker 3: on the site, and fun World now credits VP Alan
Speaker 3: Geller as the creator of the design.
Speaker 2: So to recap, yeah, she claimed credit in Fangoria, and
Speaker 2: a reader in Fangoria wrote in to correct the record
Speaker 2: and fun World Reddit someone at that company read it
Speaker 2: and when she's a loose cannon, we are taking her
Speaker 2: out of this narrative and they don't, so now it's
Speaker 2: just credit to the VP.
Speaker 3: That's sad.
Speaker 2: And then and all these original artists are cut out.
Speaker 2: This is the most popular Halloween costume in the US
Speaker 2: period for like decades, I'm sure, and all of these
Speaker 2: artists have been cut out of these massive profits. The
Speaker 2: owner of Vultarian Studios, Tony Gardner, said that when he
Speaker 2: first saw the movie, he was genuinely flattered that they
Speaker 2: had used our mass design. I really enjoyed the movie
Speaker 2: and thought it was a great compliment that the Whaler
Speaker 2: was up there on the big screen and such a
Speaker 2: great film. I was a bit naive at the time
Speaker 2: and assumed that since it had been years since we
Speaker 2: created the mask, there would be no way to fight
Speaker 2: for it. I also assumed that the movie was a
Speaker 2: one time deal and the ship had already sailed. But
Speaker 2: here's the thing. Fun World didn't register that or the
Speaker 2: phrase ghostface as a trademark until nineteen ninety six, so
Speaker 2: they had stolen these designs, failed to copyright them, and
Speaker 2: then filed the paperwork just as the movie was being made.
Speaker 2: Before these original artists had any notion that this was
Speaker 2: going to become one of the biggest horror movies of
Speaker 2: all time, and hilariously enough, the top banner of on
Speaker 2: World's website currently reads over fifty years of seasonal product fun,
Speaker 2: honesty and integrity.
Speaker 3: Wow eh, this has been the Heigel's moral stand of
Speaker 3: this episode.
Speaker 2: Yeah, gob on my soapbox. I take my seasonal ephemera
Speaker 2: very seriously, all right?
Speaker 3: Yes, you do you love spooky season? Also?
Speaker 2: Yes, and and the sanctity of it as a pagan
Speaker 2: Celtic right.
Speaker 3: I don't think you get this up in arms about
Speaker 3: like nutcrackers or like oflf on the shelf.
Speaker 2: No, absolutely, yeah, but I will paint Celtic roots in
Speaker 2: blood in the Fun World offices.
Speaker 3: I continue going ham on Easter just because of the
Speaker 3: pagan Yeah. Yeah, still Halloween though, Yeah, oh of course. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Your birthdays, everybody, Higel's birthdays coming up?
Speaker 6: Shut up?
Speaker 2: That means Jordan's birthdays coming up? No, my birthday is
Speaker 2: until Christmas. Yeah, well your birthday is next week or two.
Speaker 3: Shut up.
Speaker 2: I'm just trying to deflect. Also read.
Speaker 3: The film's third act takes place entirely in an essentially
Speaker 3: abandoned house in Tomalas in Morin County. Population as of
Speaker 3: the twenty twenty Census one hundred and eighty seven. That's
Speaker 3: up there with the Buffalo Bill House right. The house
Speaker 3: they found had been built by a couple in nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety on thirty acres of land, and when they died
Speaker 3: within a month of each other, their children wanted nothing
Speaker 3: to do with it. That house was like five years
Speaker 3: old when they filmed that. That's terrifying. Production designer they died,
Speaker 3: They died real quick.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they built their dream house and then Super died
Speaker 2: In America.
Speaker 3: Production designer Bruce Miller explained, it just doesn't make sense
Speaker 3: that in a normal American home, murders could be happening
Speaker 3: in the upstairs bedrooms and people watching television downstairs would
Speaker 3: know about it. So the house had to be big
Speaker 3: enough and the rooms had to be separated by enough
Speaker 3: distance to convince the audience that these things could really
Speaker 3: be happening without the other people knowing about it. This
Speaker 3: particular house was perfect for that because it was very
Speaker 3: convoluted and kind of Victorian on the inside. It's like
Speaker 3: the Manson murders. There was one guy in the property
Speaker 3: who was in the little guest cottage just just away
Speaker 3: from the main house, and he lived and everyone's like,
Speaker 3: you didn't you didn't hear that. You didn't hear the
Speaker 3: screaming on the lawn and and the guns, and you
Speaker 3: hear any of that? And he said no, And then
Speaker 3: they checked like the stereo. He was like, listen, I
Speaker 3: think he was listening to the doors. Actually they checked
Speaker 3: his like stereo levels. And yeah, there's all sorts of
Speaker 3: stories about whether or not he actually heard nothing or
Speaker 3: if he just hid under his bed.
Speaker 2: For those of you who are keeping track at home,
Speaker 2: that is our Manson family tie in. Jordan has yet
Speaker 2: to work in the Beatles or the Beach Boys. Yeah
Speaker 2: that's true. Huh, I'll figure out something. I haven't done
Speaker 2: a Manson tian in a while. It's true, it's true.
Speaker 3: So this house production got it cheap and it was
Speaker 3: Craven said that the art department went in there and
Speaker 3: did an enormous number on the house. We put all
Speaker 3: sorts of beams and stained glass windows, darkened all the colors,
Speaker 3: brought out all the set dressings. It was done in
Speaker 3: a sort of farmhouse style and we changed it into
Speaker 3: a gothic farmhouse. Production also made a bunch of fake
Speaker 3: barn fronts to hide the trailers. I like that these
Speaker 3: were obviously all taken out after production the house was sold.
Speaker 3: The house was sold in twenty fourteen for whoa two
Speaker 3: point eight million dollars, although I guess it's outside of
Speaker 3: San Francisco and Zillo now estimates its value at three
Speaker 3: point five million, and you believe it currently is a
Speaker 3: wedding venue and event rental property called spring Hill Estate
Speaker 3: and does offer Scream tours for two hundred bucks a pop.
Speaker 2: So they don't call it the Scream House like they
Speaker 2: they It's called spring Hill State and I think they
Speaker 2: do just like weddings there, but there is also like
Speaker 2: a subcontracted company that does Scream tours there. And I
Speaker 2: think when they launched the movie, Airbnb did some kind
Speaker 2: of a like when they rebooted the movie, Airbnb did
Speaker 2: some kind of a tie in. I was like, come
Speaker 2: stay Stew's house from Scream. I don't have dollars two
Speaker 2: hundred dollars to drive into the middle of nowhere and
Speaker 2: like trapes around a house. I'm sorry that surprises me.
Speaker 2: I spend that money on boutique guitar pedals. Jordan Streyman,
Speaker 2: give me some free sh ah. Anyway, that final forty
Speaker 2: two minute sequence. Like fully a third of the film
Speaker 2: takes place in that house. It was hell to shoot.
Speaker 2: They did it over the course of three weeks, and
Speaker 2: to start with, the place was because of the remote location.
Speaker 2: It made lighting it with a traditional overhead rig called
Speaker 2: a condor impossible. A condor is one of those things
Speaker 2: that it's one of those things that it has like
Speaker 2: a base and that it has the extending legs out
Speaker 2: to stabilize it, and then you mount different isolated arrangements
Speaker 2: of lights on it. And the ground was simply too
Speaker 2: steep and weird to do that. So they essentially had
Speaker 2: to mount a lot of the lighting that was used
Speaker 2: for the exteriors and to get the kind of atmosphere
Speaker 2: stuff for interiors on the side of the garage. And
Speaker 2: this was costly, took time, It was less than perfect
Speaker 2: because it showed up in some shots, and so this
Speaker 2: is sad. Cinematographer Mark Irwin had worked with Craven on
Speaker 2: four films before, and he had vociferously opposed the location
Speaker 2: from the start, but this is where it gets weird.
Speaker 2: He also pushed to shoot Scream with an anamorphic lens.
Speaker 2: Anamorphic lenses as I mentioned earlier our favorite of John
Speaker 2: John carpetel anamorphic lenses are a favorite of John Carpenter.
Speaker 2: It basically distorts the image into a wider frame, and
Speaker 2: Carpenter and a lot of the Western guys that were
Speaker 2: inspired by love it because it gives you this beautiful, large, scenic,
Speaker 2: widescreen image to work with. But because it is actually
Speaker 2: distorting the image that's printed on the film, you get
Speaker 2: things like lens flares, and you get a little distortion
Speaker 2: at the ends of the sides of the screens, and
Speaker 2: some of that in the hands of a really talented
Speaker 2: cinematographer like Dean Kundy on those Carpenter films, looks really
Speaker 2: really beautiful, like you can make lens flair and do
Speaker 2: weird things with the distortion inherent in the format. But
Speaker 2: this guy, Mark Orwin and Wes Craven hadn't shot an
Speaker 2: anamorphic before. It was just something that was like, I'm
Speaker 2: gonna shoot this one an anamorphic. So this created a
Speaker 2: problem with what they call focus pulling. And feel free
Speaker 2: to skip ahead fifteen or thirty seconds if you are
Speaker 2: not interested in the most granular bit of filmmaking I
Speaker 2: have ever talked about. On this show, focus pulling is
Speaker 2: a specific part of camera operation, which doesn't mean keeping
Speaker 2: the entire shot in focus. It means keeping a specific
Speaker 2: focal point on an actor or in a location consistent
Speaker 2: as those things move within the frame. So, for example,
Speaker 2: a puller might hone in on an actor's eye during
Speaker 2: a shot, and bad focus pulling is when they would
Speaker 2: not track that as the actor moves, and then you
Speaker 2: end up with a focus point that goes from their
Speaker 2: eye to their ear or to a point in the background.
Speaker 2: That is focus pulling. And so with about three weeks
Speaker 2: to go, editor Patrick Lucier voiced concerns with the particular
Speaker 2: focus puller on Mark Irwin's team that he said had
Speaker 2: been quote.
Speaker 3: Accumulating for three films.
Speaker 2: So I remember these guys had worked Craven's team had
Speaker 2: worked together for a while, and they took the cinematographer
Speaker 2: into one of the rooms and was like, look, man,
Speaker 2: all this stuff is unusable because with bad focus pulling,
Speaker 2: that eliminates the consistency of footage that you need to
Speaker 2: edit a film together. Right, You can't edit shots together
Speaker 2: that have different focal points ostensibly within the same scene.
Speaker 2: This all track My explaining this well, yeah, okay, cool.
Speaker 2: And so one of the most famous examples of this
Speaker 2: that I think I haven't delved into whether or not
Speaker 2: it was the specific focus pooler or just the cinematographer
Speaker 2: who did this, But there's a really famous one in
Speaker 2: Requiem for a Dream is during the unbroken shot of
Speaker 2: Ellen Burston's like horrifyingly sad monologue, and there's a second
Speaker 2: where the focus pool changes, and it was because the
Speaker 2: guy working it had started crying and his tears fogged
Speaker 2: up the lens so that he couldn't see what was
Speaker 2: the lost focus for a second. Anyway, So that's your
Speaker 2: that's Hegel's nitty gritty digression.
Speaker 3: I'm wearing nasal strips right now because, as you can hear,
Speaker 3: I have a cold. But if I wasn't, you would
Speaker 3: have heard me snoring. Okay, cool, I'm saw. I'm kidding.
Speaker 3: You know, I love all this technical stuff that I
Speaker 3: don't have a magic. I love how much you love
Speaker 3: movie magic. No, I did, and that was very well
Speaker 3: told and very fast. I'm kidding.
Speaker 2: You should keep the story bitten, though it's funny.
Speaker 3: Keep it all in I always do. I never edit
Speaker 3: you for time. Well, I edit you for a fence
Speaker 3: and humor. Anyway, After screening some of the final footage,
Speaker 3: Irwin said Craven after conferring with editor Patrick Lucier, Lucier
Speaker 3: informed Erwin that all the filmed footage was unusable and
Speaker 3: that thirty five days of scenes needed to be reshot.
Speaker 3: He must have wanted to walk into the ocean. That
Speaker 3: is so bad and it all began with a scream,
Speaker 3: A wonderful making of book. Irwin alleged that he was
Speaker 3: being scapegoated for the film running behind scheduled due to
Speaker 3: an agreement Craven had at the studio that he would
Speaker 3: forfeit his salary after a certain amount of delay. Producer
Speaker 3: Kathy Conrad denies that she will defend Red Craven to
Speaker 3: the death, but either way. Erwin was replaced on the
Speaker 3: spot after the screening by Peter Deming for the final
Speaker 3: three weeks of shooting thirty five days over Oh my god. Anyway,
Speaker 3: This is all contributed to what is now referred to
Speaker 3: as quote the longest night in horror history, scene one
Speaker 3: hundred and eighteen, which had over twenty parts. Hi, I
Speaker 3: goel tell us about seeing one eighteen. This seems like
Speaker 3: something that is more you well.
Speaker 2: Cast and crew printed up T shirts that read I
Speaker 2: survived seeing one eighteen after they wrapped. So there's about
Speaker 2: That's about the scope of it. To keep blood consistent
Speaker 2: from shot to shot, they were not allowed to wash
Speaker 2: their costumes, so Nev Campbell said, I would take it
Speaker 2: off in the morning and then in the evening when
Speaker 2: I went back to work, because the continuity of the
Speaker 2: blood had to be the same. They would just wet it.
Speaker 2: They would just dampen the whole thing. I wanted to
Speaker 2: burn that costume at the end of the movie. The
Speaker 2: call sheets for these for all these days of shooting
Speaker 2: had a much more prosaic name for the scene, People Live,
Speaker 2: People Die. The final confrontation between Campbell, Lillard, and Ulrich
Speaker 2: took five days on its own. One particular moment made
Speaker 2: production literally question Wes Craven's sanity. Mary and Matdeleena said,
Speaker 2: we thought Wes went nuts because we didn't know the
Speaker 2: sofa had feathers in it, and we thought Wes was
Speaker 2: crazy to carry on with everyone covered in blood, which
Speaker 2: is really corn syrup as the feathers fall over them.
Speaker 2: Skeet Olrick told Vulture, We've got Nev pinned in the
Speaker 2: corner of the kitchen. I'm trying to hit that little
Speaker 2: heartfelt moment of my character having lost his mom and
Speaker 2: Sydney disappears and we can't find her, and I run
Speaker 2: into the living room with my knife and cut the
Speaker 2: couch open. I had so many damn feathers stuck to
Speaker 2: all that blood around the neck. We do the first
Speaker 2: take and all I can hear is Wes laughing. I
Speaker 2: look down and it looks like I have a duck
Speaker 2: on my hand. Also, that finale had a very real
Speaker 2: scare for skeet Ulric.
Speaker 3: His dad came out.
Speaker 2: Here is this on the coll sheetr McDonald.
Speaker 3: Where he was talking with like Bob Einsteiner or if
Speaker 3: he's talking with somebody who's like, yeah, I used to
Speaker 3: walk into uh, Dean Martin Street.
Speaker 7: Dean Martin at Hamburger hamlet you know everything. That's what
Speaker 7: I meant. That's where I saw him.
Speaker 6: Was it was it Hamberd, Yeah, that's where I also,
Speaker 6: we must have talked about it.
Speaker 3: I don't know, well, you know it was me at
Speaker 3: Hamberg and I.
Speaker 6: Walked in there and he had lost his son and
Speaker 6: he was my He was one of the guys that
Speaker 6: just did it like that was the guy. I looked
Speaker 6: at it and he was sitting there and he was
Speaker 6: having a martini, and I just walked over and I
Speaker 6: was twenty two, twenty three, and I just kind of
Speaker 6: stood there. I didn't want to bother him because I
Speaker 6: or maybe I was twenty four and he was just
Speaker 6: sitting there and he looked up and it was it
Speaker 6: was nice, and I just went, I found your.
Speaker 7: Son, that' said Bob Sage's better a guest.
Speaker 2: Something should do an edit where they find an old
Speaker 2: picture of Skilk's biological dad and just like put him
Speaker 2: in as a force ghost in the background like the
Speaker 2: blue Anakin Skywalker. I'm proud of you some Oh, anyway,
Speaker 2: making more fun of Sketric's childhood drama, the guy had
Speaker 2: open heart surgery when he was a kid. Oh, and
Speaker 2: he was left with a scarred area where the skin
Speaker 2: was thinner, and there was a bunch like stainless steel
Speaker 2: wire because they had to reconstruct like part of his heart.
Speaker 2: So there's stainless steel wire like under this, under this
Speaker 2: scarred area, this thinner skin that was very sensitive to
Speaker 2: the touch. And turns out havev Campbell hit him in
Speaker 2: that exact spot with an umbrella when she jumps out
Speaker 2: of the closet at him, and so his reaction to
Speaker 2: that pain is very real.
Speaker 3: Cambell recalled the difficulty of maintaining an intense level of
Speaker 3: terror for that long. How long were they shooting this
Speaker 3: five days? God? But that was helped along by Wes Craven,
Speaker 3: and the scene was skeeton. Matt went up against the
Speaker 3: counter and there to kill me. I'm about to get
Speaker 3: my strength. Wes came up and he just whispered in
Speaker 3: my ear. He said, imagine you've got a thousand bullets
Speaker 3: ricocheting through your body, and he walked away. Your fear
Speaker 3: might have been helped by how intense Alrick and Lillard were.
Speaker 3: Lillard told Vulture, we were amped, were fully torn. Bro,
Speaker 3: he really is that way. Wow. There was no doubt
Speaker 3: that we were on a fever pitch for the five
Speaker 3: days we shot the last killing sequence, we were screaming,
Speaker 3: don't see what he did there. We were in between,
Speaker 3: we were in between takes, trying to maintain that energy.
Speaker 3: Aulrick added, Courtney came to the set getting ready to
Speaker 3: shoot it, and Matt and I are like caged animals
Speaker 3: in that zone. Just pacing the set. Courtney comes in
Speaker 3: and we make eye contact, and Wes was like, Okay,
Speaker 3: all right, all right, she's freaked out and we're not
Speaker 3: even filming yet. And I distinctly remember Wes being like,
Speaker 3: all right, guys, just calm down for a second.
Speaker 2: Just like Faroly covered in blood. I can see how
Speaker 2: Crinny Cox looks at and makes eye contact with one
Speaker 2: of them was like, what the fuck did I sign
Speaker 2: up for again?
Speaker 3: These fifty gallons of fake blood on this movie? It
Speaker 3: almost sounds low and I.
Speaker 2: Say that, yeah.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: Random note about composer Marco Beltrami from his CHR part.
Speaker 2: He said Wes was looking for a composer for the movie,
Speaker 2: and I send over a demo tape. I had not
Speaker 2: seen any horror movies up to that point. I had
Speaker 2: never been affair and of the genre. When I went
Speaker 2: into meet with Wes, I remember him saying, it's funny
Speaker 2: all the demo tapes we get, everyone sounds like John Williams.
Speaker 2: You're the first one that sounds like your original Bell
Speaker 2: Trommy took the opening scene home and scored it over
Speaker 2: the weekend to secure the gig. Speaking of music, you
Speaker 2: gotta talk about my beloved Nick Cave, whose song Red
Speaker 2: Right Hand off his nineteen ninety four album with the
Speaker 2: Bad Seeds Let Love In, was used in the film
Speaker 2: alongside a host of other tunes, but it edged them
Speaker 2: all out and became the franchise's de facto theme song. Unsurprisingly,
Speaker 2: this story starts out with a long time Wes Craven collaborator,
Speaker 2: Grammy and Peabody Award winning music supervisor Ed Gerard. Gerard
Speaker 2: told Bloody Disgusting dot Com that he'd actually pitched a
Speaker 2: different Nickcave song, lover Man also Let Off Let Love
Speaker 2: In for Vampire in Brooklyn, albeit unsuccessfully. However, Scream's eventual editor,
Speaker 2: Patrick Lucier liked the album so much that he asked
Speaker 2: Gerard if he could keep it. Gerard wasn't even hired
Speaker 2: on Scream until about halfway through, and he came in
Speaker 2: and pitched Red Right Hand, which is the sort of
Speaker 2: narrative ramble of a song about this mysterious badass with
Speaker 2: the titular limb, which is a reference to John Milton's
Speaker 2: Paradise Lost, and Gerard actually gives Lucier all the credit
Speaker 2: for the song's effective use in the film. Lucier explains
Speaker 2: how the song was present basically from his very first edits.
Speaker 2: He said the two sequences where it appears the instrumental
Speaker 2: early on and the lyric into the chorus for the
Speaker 2: town shutting down, were cut in during the initial edit
Speaker 2: on both scenes. Never once was any other music present
Speaker 2: for either scene, and neither of those scenes were shown
Speaker 2: to Wes without that song present. It was serendipitous timing
Speaker 2: because Cave had released Murder Ballads, which contains his chart
Speaker 2: topping Kylie Minogue duet where the Wild Roses Grow, in
Speaker 2: February of nineteen ninety six, so his team was looking
Speaker 2: for any opportunity to prolong the exposure. When it came
Speaker 2: time to use the song again and Scream two, music
Speaker 2: supervisor Ed Gerard met with Cave. He looks at me
Speaker 2: and goes, were you the one that put that song
Speaker 2: in there? And I said yeah. He said, you know,
Speaker 2: I sat with my kids and we watched Scream, and
Speaker 2: they were impressed that my song was in that movie.
Speaker 2: They loved that movie. However, Cave felt about its continued
Speaker 2: use in Scream, he just stopped being opposed to its
Speaker 2: licensing in general, as it is also the theme song
Speaker 2: for the prestige crime. I've never watched it. Peaky Blinders.
Speaker 2: Then later Nickckave's son would take a dangerous dose of
Speaker 2: acid and fall.
Speaker 3: Off a cliff. Oh is that? How was that went down?
Speaker 3: That happened in twenty fourteen. I didn't know the acid part.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, he was super tripping, very sad, very sad.
Speaker 3: Production predictably had the battle the MPAA over certain gory
Speaker 3: aspects of the film. Apparently it got sent back nine
Speaker 3: times as NC seventeen for the NPA allowed it to
Speaker 3: go out with an R. Weirdly, one of the biggest
Speaker 3: points of contention was the line movies don't create psychos,
Speaker 3: Movies make psychos more creative. Kevin Williamson told The Hollywood
Speaker 3: Reporter that was the line I had written on a
Speaker 3: note card and taped to my wall, and the whole
Speaker 3: movie was written towards that line. It came out of
Speaker 3: me watching Bob Dole, who at that time is screaming
Speaker 3: about the violence and cinema, and he was going after
Speaker 3: Quentin Tarantino for that whitty Harrelson Juliet Lewis movie Natural
Speaker 3: Born Killers editor Patrick Lucier said it's certainly the line
Speaker 3: of dialogue the NPA went after and wanted to remove
Speaker 3: from the film. It was like, you can't speak that
Speaker 3: kind of truth, that particular line of dialogue. They wanted
Speaker 3: to censor, but they don't word it that way. They
Speaker 3: just say, look at these areas, this is a problem,
Speaker 3: this and this and this and this. The film was
Speaker 3: still titled Scary Movie until late in production when the
Speaker 3: Wine Scenes insisted on rechristening it to scream which prompted
Speaker 3: a quickly settled lawsuit Sony Pictures claiming it infringed on
Speaker 3: the copyright of their nineteen ninety five movie Screamer. Most
Speaker 3: people actually hated the title, though a few did begrudgingly
Speaker 3: admit that it tied in with the Edward Munch painting
Speaker 3: the Mask resembled quite well. One maybe problem was that
Speaker 3: Bob Weinstein insisted on releasing the film on December twentieth,
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety six, two days before my ninth birthday. Bob
Speaker 3: was outam and about it, and he'd done his tracking.
Speaker 3: Producer Kathy Conrad told Vanity Fair that guy knew everything
Speaker 3: about every movie. He looked at all the competition. He
Speaker 3: did analyze those numbers. His office was like the new
Speaker 3: York Stock Exchange. He said, everyone's going to see all
Speaker 3: these other things, but there's this group of people who
Speaker 3: are being ignored. They're going to go see this movie, Scream,
Speaker 3: because it's the only one counterprogramming a horror movie. No
Speaker 3: one was thinking like that at Christmas. Bob just decided
Speaker 3: he was going to do it differently. One other brilliant
Speaker 3: part of the marketing was that the studio highly promoted
Speaker 3: Drew Barrymore as the star, priming audiences for the bait
Speaker 3: and switch when she was killed ten minutes in. Scream
Speaker 3: opened against Beavis and Butt Heead Do America, which did
Speaker 3: twenty million on its first weekend, while Scream did a
Speaker 3: mere six point three million. But the film had a
Speaker 3: slow burn, becoming more and more popular in nineteen ninety seven,
Speaker 3: eventually picking up one hundred and three million domestically against
Speaker 3: his fifteen million dollar budget, and it was something of
Speaker 3: a win for Bob Weinstein. Dimension, with five films and
Speaker 3: release that year, were responsible for about thirty seven percent
Speaker 3: of the studio's total grosses, whereas Harvey had put out
Speaker 3: thirty two pictures through Mirrimax. Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it kind of made Bob, which is interesting because
Speaker 2: there was this whole like Harvey was obviously hot for
Speaker 2: pulp fiction, but like this one was such a big
Speaker 2: win for dimension within the mier Max umbrella that it
Speaker 2: I mean, I hope he dies still, but you know.
Speaker 2: Critics were mostly positive about the film's striking tone and
Speaker 2: takes in the horror genre. Roger Ebert and Janet Maslin
Speaker 2: both raised the point though that the film's gore might
Speaker 2: have diffused its satirical points. Ebert merely posed this as
Speaker 2: an open ended musing in an otherwise positive review, though
Speaker 2: Maslin wrote with scream Craven wants things both ways, capitalizing
Speaker 2: on lurid material while undermining it with mocking humor. Not
Speaker 2: even horror fans who can answer all this film's knowing
Speaker 2: trivia questions may be fully comfortable with such an exploitative mix.
Speaker 2: This is really interesting because the Substance is a wonderful
Speaker 2: horror movie that just came out this year that is
Speaker 2: like truly a mind boggling film. It is extraordinarily beautiful,
Speaker 2: beautifully shot. Demi Moore puts in like maybe a career
Speaker 2: best performance, but it is so intensely stylized and so
Speaker 2: sledgehammering with its themes that I have been having hot
Speaker 2: conversations with people about this movie about whether or not
Speaker 2: it crosses the pose law territory. Pose law is the
Speaker 2: Internet adage that you cannot successfully produce a parody or
Speaker 2: a satire of political or religious extremism without simply making
Speaker 2: a copy of that thing.
Speaker 3: Explain.
Speaker 2: So, the idea being that certain forms of political and
Speaker 2: religious extremism are so caricatured. It's like, how do you
Speaker 2: parody Donald Trump? He's already like a singular force of
Speaker 2: comedic idiocy, right, So the idea of pose law is that, like,
Speaker 2: when you are trying taking aim at something that is
Speaker 2: so extreme and doing your parody in an extreme way,
Speaker 2: you have just produced the thing that you are parroting. Okay,
Speaker 2: does that make sense?
Speaker 3: Yeah? So, I mean it's like, well, one of the.
Speaker 2: Debates one of the things that it was most frequently
Speaker 2: brought up with this on like film Twitter is Starship Troopers,
Speaker 2: where every six months someone brings up the fact that
Speaker 2: there are people out there who just fully read Starship
Speaker 2: Troopers as like a rock and movie about guns and
Speaker 2: bugs and like, yeah, America, despite the fact that it
Speaker 2: was made by a Dutch guy who has very clear
Speaker 2: memories of the Nazis and purposely dressed all of these
Speaker 2: square jawed, hot American people in SSUNI forms, and that
Speaker 2: just goes right over a lot of people's heads. And
Speaker 2: my thing with the substance is that, like, this movie
Speaker 2: takes such aim, broad aim at how women are treated
Speaker 2: in Hollywood, women's body standards, all this really pointed stuff,
Speaker 2: but it does it in a way that is so
Speaker 2: leering and on the nose that it I feel like
Speaker 2: there are people out there who would just straightforwardly read
Speaker 2: it as like a great morality tale about what happens
Speaker 2: to women if they're too obsessed with their appearance, you know.
Speaker 2: So I don't know, I've been I've been reading a
Speaker 2: lot about it, and many people are just saying, like,
Speaker 2: you are literally missing the point that is it is
Speaker 2: what it is, you know, it's that blunt in these
Speaker 2: points that it's making and these things that it's tackling,
Speaker 2: because it's forcing you to confront them in not even
Speaker 2: a particularly subtle way. So I just think it's a
Speaker 2: really interesting conversation about how you can pare it these
Speaker 2: In this case, what Maslyn and Eber brought up of,
Speaker 2: like when you're parodying something, and when you're satiring something
Speaker 2: like you know, if you look too hard at the monster,
Speaker 2: you've become monsters also, or whatever the Nietzsche quote is,
Speaker 2: but you know, you know saying.
Speaker 3: Look too far into the abyss. The aby stare too
Speaker 3: far into the abyss the abyss stairs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just like, how do you parody something that is
Speaker 2: so like how would you make a parody of Last
Speaker 2: House on the Left, How would you make a parody
Speaker 2: of like Devil's Rejects of like these really extreme examples
Speaker 2: of gore and stuff. It's it's without just making another
Speaker 2: gorror film, you know.
Speaker 3: I mean Sean of the Dead's a good example. I
Speaker 3: think of that too.
Speaker 2: Yes, Sean the Dead is amazing for that. Yeah, I
Speaker 2: don't know, man, maybe the British are just more onto
Speaker 2: it than us. Anyway, it would be its own episode
Speaker 2: to discuss the impact that Scream had for starters. It
Speaker 2: launched Kevin Williamson in an enormous way. He was essentially
Speaker 2: worried that the film was going to flop, so he
Speaker 2: told the ringer, I said yes to a lot of
Speaker 2: stuff before Scream even came out. Dawson's creek was happening.
Speaker 2: I know what you did last summer was happening, and
Speaker 2: they sent me this script for the faculty, like on
Speaker 2: the set of Scream. So right away you have one
Speaker 2: of the biggest teen dramas of the nineties, and then
Speaker 2: just two more of the biggest teen horror movies of
Speaker 2: the nineties and late two.
Speaker 3: Thousands created Dawson's Creek and Vampire Diaries. I didn't know that. Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so like the shadow of that Kevin Williamson's particular
Speaker 2: style of dialogue, as I mentioned along with Joss Whedon
Speaker 2: because Buffy the Vampire Slayer was also huge at this
Speaker 2: time and lauded as an example of how you can
Speaker 2: make compelling genre fair focused on teens. Those two men
Speaker 2: in their dialogue of like pop culture heavy, quasi meta
Speaker 2: reference y quippie dialogue is just something we are we
Speaker 2: still feel in Hollywood. And more importantly, though it launched
Speaker 2: Wes Craven back to the top of the Elder Statesman
Speaker 2: horror director pile, Scream did make an impact in negative
Speaker 2: ways too, though. In the two thousand and six murder
Speaker 2: of Cassie, Joe Stoddard, the perpetrator dressed as ghost Face
Speaker 2: and following the Columbine High School masacre. In nineteen ninety nine,
Speaker 2: the United States Senate Commerce Committee reviewed the marketing of
Speaker 2: films to youths, with Screams Opening shown as an example
Speaker 2: of negative media that could possibly have been viewed by children. Kehole,
Speaker 2: I cannot stress how much this film has also been
Speaker 2: analyzed with people with more prosgraduate degrees and impressive bylines
Speaker 2: than the two of us. So I'm going to avoid
Speaker 2: all that. It's out there, you can read it. It's
Speaker 2: tremendously ripe text. And then, obviously, the success of the
Speaker 2: original launched three more direct sequels and two recent reboots,
Speaker 2: with a third on the way. But the og is
Speaker 2: still the highest grossing and still the best. And also
Speaker 2: we don't even have time to get into all of that.
Speaker 2: I would like to pull focus there back on to
Speaker 2: Wes Craven, whose twenty fifteen death was a huge loss
Speaker 2: to both the horror community and seemingly anyone he ever
Speaker 2: worked with except the Santa Rosa School District. There's two
Speaker 2: great quotes that his editor, Patrick Lucier, gave to Hollywood reporters.
Speaker 2: Is very serious and very touching. Wes made very unique
Speaker 2: films that had a lot of integrity. He understood that
Speaker 2: these were primal stories that were important to tell, that
Speaker 2: you were offering people something scary yet letting them survive
Speaker 2: the experience. There's something about surviving on screen whoares that
Speaker 2: makes the hordes of your own life or the charals
Speaker 2: and tribulations feel less So for those couple hours you
Speaker 2: get to escape that. And the second great quote that
Speaker 2: he gave was Wes's memorial service, was that the Director's
Speaker 2: Guild of America and there's all these different people who'd
Speaker 2: worked with him over the years and family. There were
Speaker 2: all these directors who showed up for it. Michael Apdad
Speaker 2: who used to be the head of the Director's Guild,
Speaker 2: Christopher Nolan, John Landis, and Toby Hooper and all these
Speaker 2: different people spoke. But one of the best speeches was
Speaker 2: one of Wes's friends from the Audubon Society who played
Speaker 2: bird Calls. Wes would have loved it. Whoh John Lennis killed.
Speaker 3: A couple kids.
Speaker 2: And Rick Morrill. Folks, thank you for listening. This has
Speaker 2: been two terrors much stab formation, close out, Spooky Mom.
Speaker 2: I hope you had a great Halloween everyone. I'm Alex
Speaker 2: Heigel and I'm Jordan Runtalg.
Speaker 3: We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a
Speaker 3: production of iHeart Radio.
Speaker 2: The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk.
Speaker 3: The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.
Speaker 2: The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan run
Speaker 2: Talk and Alex.
Speaker 3: Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost
Speaker 3: Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe
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