Independence Day

‘Independence Day’ was a runaway hit in the summer of 1996, elevating Will Smith to full blown movie star status, and cementing Roland Emmerich as a major action movie director. But Emmerich and co-writer Dean Devlin had a rocky road to alien domination. This week, Chris and Lizzie discover how Tim Burton’s competing ‘Mars Attacks’ almost canceled out ‘Independence Day’, why the studio didn’t want to cast Will Smith, and how the United States Government threw a major wrench in the works. Plus we reveal how Jeff Goldblum’s most famous line from ‘Jurassic Park’ snuck into the film, and why Bill Pullman’s speech has no business being as excellent as it is. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Winterbauer?

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• 0:31Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:15Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, full stop, that just so happens to be about movies, and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone one of the greatest American films in the history of American films. I'm talking about a movie that somehow only has a 7.0 rating on IMDb.

• 2:16Lizzie Bassett?

  That's wrong.

• 2:17Chris Winterbauer?

  We need to fix that. We need to rally the world right now and send Randy Quaid up the aliens' butts. Lizzie, what are we talking about today?

• 2:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris, I have never been more excited to talk about a movie than I am today, I think.

• 2:35Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree.

• 2:36Lizzie Bassett?

  We are talking about, truly, truly, one of my faves, Independence Day. We had to, as we have just celebrated our nation's 250th birthday with a truly spectacular cage fight on the White House lawn. We thought, maybe let's throw it back to a time when perhaps we were all more proud to be an American.

• 3:00Chris Winterbauer?

  When we weren't punching each other, we were punching aliens.

• 3:03Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. When we were finding a time to come together. All right, so Chris, what's your experience with Independence Day before? And what was it upon rewatching it for the podcast?

• 3:13Chris Winterbauer?

  I didn't see it in theaters, so probably saw it when I was like nine or 10, I'm guessing.

• 3:16Lizzie Bassett?

  We were too little. We would have been like seven years old when this came out.

• 3:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. Still remember the trailer or seeing at some point the Empire State Building exploding and thinking, holy shit.

• 3:28Lizzie Bassett?

  We're gonna talk about that. Different building, but we will talk about it.

• 3:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Long story short, when I was little, I really liked elements of this movie, but it wasn't like a constant rewatch for me for some reason. I'm not sure why. There's a mission in Star Fox and 64, any fans out there, that pulls from the final battle scene of this movie, I feel like, and I always enjoyed that, or maybe vice versa. But, all to say, Lizzie, when I threw it on, I just thought, they don't make them like this anymore.

• 3:55Lizzie Bassett?

  I know.

• 3:57Chris Winterbauer?

  This movie's amazing. It's great.

• 3:58Lizzie Bassett?

  It is.

• 3:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Five stars, no notes. It just moves along. Do we have peak Will Smith?

• 4:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 4:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Do we have peak Jeff Goldblum?

• 4:07Lizzie Bassett?

  The hottest he's ever been.

• 4:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely. Do we have peak Bill Pullman?

• 4:11Lizzie Bassett?

  We sure do.

• 4:12Chris Winterbauer?

  There's never been more male sex appeal, I'll say it, in a movie than this one.

• 4:18Lizzie Bassett?

  It's the hottest.

• 4:18Chris Winterbauer?

  And I'm including Magic Mike in this conversation. This movie really is amazing. It is so, it's actually very well-written, in my opinion. It's very tight. Everything is planted. Everything pays off. It's got such a fun tone. It moves. I mean, arguably, like, the first 15 to 20 minutes are the slowest of the whole movie, and things are still happening very rapidly. Does it entirely make sense? I don't know. Do I love every set piece so much? Absolutely. Do a lot of the effects still hold up very well?

• 4:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 4:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, in my opinion. Fantastic miniature work, great production design, great props and costumes and whatnot, especially the way that they do the alien exoskeletons and whatnot in the alien autopsy. But, I mean, they hit every kind of trope or expectation from an alien movie, including Area 51 and an alien autopsy and buildings exploding. This is the anti-war of the worlds, or, you know, Spielberg War of the Worlds. Spielberg's War of the Worlds was a response to this movie in so many ways. But, all to say, I think this is Roland Emmerich's best movie. I genuinely think this is a really good movie. I mean, I really felt like, man, these are movie stars, watching the actors in this movie. And I think it's much better than his other patriotic movie, The Patriot.

• 5:27Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 5:27Chris Winterbauer?

  And I do think this, you know, it gets me going. I'm like, this was a great country! We can still be a great country! We can save the world! We don't have to ruin it! And so, yeah, it really gave me all the feels. Got a little teared up when Randy Quaid yells, "I'm back," at the very end, as he goes up into the aliens' butts, and I absolutely loved it. It's such a fun romp of a movie. It's over two hours and it just flies by.

• 5:52Lizzie Bassett?

  I would have watched it for five hours.

• 5:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely.

• 5:55Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm with you 100%. I think I knew I liked this movie maybe more than you did.

• 5:59Chris Winterbauer?

  I know I liked it. I guess I didn't know I loved it.

• 6:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, okay, that's fair. I think I'm in the same boat. Pretty much same situation. I certainly- Did not see this in theaters because we were too young, but I saw it shortly thereafter, I would think on, you know, VHS and then eventually DVD. And, you know, it had kind of boiled down in my brain to, you know, Bill Pullman's iconic speech, which we will talk about. There's a very fun backstory behind that. And a few other images, you know, Will Smith punching the alien in the face. Welcome to Earth. But I had the exact same experience as you upon watching this. Every minute that went by, I was like, God damn, this is a really great movie. They really did it. It's so good. And you're gonna be amazed at how quickly it came together.

• 6:46Lizzie Bassett?

  So let's dive in because there is actually so, so much to talk about on this movie. And today, Chris, we're going to discover how, as we've said, quite possibly the most American movie ever made was made by a German man.

• 7:00Chris Winterbauer?

  I know.

• 7:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Actually, a lot of Germans worked on this movie.

• 7:04Chris Winterbauer?

  I do love that this movie takes the idea of we are, as Americans, not satisfied with our Independence Day being one of many in the world. So we're going to outsource it to everyone by way of an alien invasion.

• 7:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 7:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 7:17Lizzie Bassett?

  All right. The details, as always, Independence Day was released in 1996. It was directed by Roland Emmerich, written by Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich. The budget was around $75 million, maybe a little, a little under. It was released by 20th Century Fox. As always, the IMDb logline is, "The aliens are coming and their goal is to invade and destroy Earth. Fighting superior technology, mankind's best weapon is the will to survive." Yeah, it's not my favorite logline. Couple of main sources for today. We have "You Can't Actually Blow Up the White House", a really excellent oral history of Independence Day by The Hollywood Reporter. There's some fantastic reporting by a guy named Tom Seker for Spy Culture.

• 7:58Lizzie Bassett?

  We're going to talk about the things he unearthed because there's an air of conspiracy to some of this. And then some featurettes about the making of Independence Day, which you can watch on YouTube. All right, Chris, recent years have obviously brought a lot more legitimized UAP or UFO sightings and close calls than ever before. But we still, of course, do not have confirmed proof of alien life. Theoretically, we just haven't met them yet. So let's first talk a little bit about what a real-life alien meet-cute could look like. Option A: humanity has a 0% chance of survival because aliens have traveled light-years to get here and therefore they have superior technology that we could never defeat. Stephen Hawking pretty much subscribes to this option.

• 8:40Lizzie Bassett?

  He has said that he is very afraid of aliens wiping out humans the way that humans might exterminate a colony of ants, for example. It's also been suggested by others that this kind of invasion could combine standard blow'em-ups with more psychic elements, to which I say, no, thanks, just kill me. Now, option B is something called, and I may mispronounce this, but the Eskation hypothesis. This is a concept developed by David Kipping, who is a British astronomer and Columbia University professor, and he theorized that, quote, "The first confirmed detection of an extraterrestrial technological civilization is most likely to be an atypical example, one that is unusually loud, i.e. producing an anomalously strong techno-signature, and plausibly in a transitory, unstable, or even terminal phase."

• 9:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Basically, we are far more likely to discover alien life when it's on its way out. Societies that are doing well are typically quieter and less noticeable, they may have less reason to reach out across the galaxy.

• 9:34Chris Winterbauer?

  He's describing Twitter.

• 9:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 9:36Chris Winterbauer?

  That's what's happening right now.

• 9:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, so this is us.

• 9:38Chris Winterbauer?

  It's getting very loud.

• 9:39Lizzie Bassett?

  This is us.

• 9:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, exactly, this is us. And all the aliens are like, we're good, we're not gonna go over there.

• 9:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Honestly, that's what I subscribe to, is I think that we are the aliens that are gonna show up and blow up things for other people.

• 9:48Chris Winterbauer?

  All the other aliens are actually hanging out, and they're just like, don't tell those guys.

• 9:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Don't, don't make any noise. Interestingly, I think Independence Day kind of splits the difference between these two hypotheses. I would like to think that it's the latter, but I also totally agree that if aliens were able to travel light-years to get to us, that they would probably just extinguish us quite quickly, if that were the goal. Now, let's roll back the clock to 1955, Chris, in Stuttgart, West Germany, where young Roland Emmerich was just born. Emmerich was an unusual boy. He was obsessed with reading. His mom would often suggest he go outside to get some fresh air and he'd respond, "No, not today. Maybe tomorrow." Emmerich's dad owned a thriving garden machinery business and was pretty rich. So they traveled around Europe and North America a lot when he was a kid.

• 10:33Lizzie Bassett?

  And it was on his first trip to the US that he saw a film that would change his life forever. Planet of the Apes.

• 10:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm.

• 10:40Lizzie Bassett?

  1968. They were driving past a drive-in showing the film and Emmerich asked to watch it. Once they did, he was obsessed. He said, "From then on, every time they asked me what I wanted to do, I asked to go see Planet of the Apes." "It was mad. I think I saw it three times." Three times, Roland, come on. You get thrown into a world where everything is different and opposite, and at the end you realize that we did it to ourselves. So he headed off to school at the University of Television and Film in Munich, where he swiftly discovered that he was the odd man out again, because he had grown up watching American movies. In fact, he'd just seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind and he loved it. It had become his new favorite film. But his classmates didn't want to make American films. They wanted to be the next Vim Vendas.

• 11:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm, right.

• 11:24Lizzie Bassett?

  And Emmerich had really no interest in that. For his final thesis, he wrote and directed the Noah's Ark Principle about two US astronauts on a space station refusing to tamper with the weather over an enemy country far in the future, aka 1997. This was notable for a few reasons. One, it was a very American-style film. And two, unlike his colleagues who generally raised about 20,000 Deutschmark for their final projects, Roland Emmerich raised 1.2 million Deutschmark, aka $700,000.

• 11:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 11:53Lizzie Bassett?

  It was the most expensive student film in German history at the time.

• 11:58Chris Winterbauer?

  That's crazy.

• 11:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 12:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Not $700,000, but there were a few shorts done as thesis films around the time when I was graduating from USC that were well into the 100, 200-plus-thousand-dollar range.

• 12:12Lizzie Bassett?

  That is crazy.

• 12:13Chris Winterbauer?

  It was mostly, there are a number of foreign students that come from extremely wealthy international families. USC tends to court them, I think, for specific reasons. And their films were amazing, don't get me wrong, but it was just, it was shocking. You know, I think the average kid was spending, yeah, somewhere between Five and maybe five and $10,000 on their thesis film. And these were 10, 20x that.

• 12:32Lizzie Bassett?

  That's crazy. Well, it actually screened as the opening film at the Berlin International Film Festival as well.

• 12:37Chris Winterbauer?

  I hate.

• 12:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Worth it.

• 12:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. It was a short film or a feature film?

• 12:40Lizzie Bassett?

  It was a feature.

• 12:41Chris Winterbauer?

  So that makes a big difference.

• 12:42Lizzie Bassett?

  That's true. Yeah, that's a lot longer than a 20 minute short.

• 12:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. So then that actually is more reasonable because I was thinking some of the films that I saw at films were $200,000 and they were 15 minutes long.

• 12:53Lizzie Bassett?

  That's crazy.

• 12:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 12:54Lizzie Bassett?

  So one year later, he founded Centropolis Film Productions with his sister, Uta Emmerich. And this dynamic duo subsequently released three German films. Joey, a West German techno horror fantasy, a horror comedy called Hollywood Monsta, and Moon 44, a sci fi action film about a fight for mining rights in space. He loves horror. He loves space. Now, Moon 44 was particularly significant for two reasons. One, it earned him an invitation to Hollywood to direct Universal Soldier. So he and Uta packed up their office in Germany and headed west, thinking perhaps they'd be back in a year. But something else happened on Moon 44 that would change the trajectory of their careers. He met an American actor who was working in the film, who at one point turned to Emmerich during the production and said,

• 13:36Lizzie Bassett?

  "You're a really first class director. Why are you doing this piece of shit script?" To which Emmerich solely replied, "Well, when I wrote it, um..."

• 13:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 13:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Be careful who you're talking to on sets.

• 13:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 13:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Accidental insult aside, Emmerich really liked this actor. His name was Dean Devlin. And he liked what he was doing with his improvised dialogue so much that he let him rewrite all of his lines. And then a couple of days later, he came back to Devlin and said, "We have a big problem. The other actors are very upset. You have all the best lines in the movie now. Would you mind rewriting their parts as well?" And he did. And this created a symbiotic partnership. Dean Devlin was no stranger to Hollywood. His father was an actor turned producer, who was actually responsible for recommending Steven Spielberg to Sid Sheinberg, resulting in Sheinberg's seven year contract with Universal when Spielberg was only 20 years old. Devlin had been rattling around Hollywood odd jobs and small TV roles for years. He was actually Al Pacino's chauffeur seven days a week for four years straight.

• 14:33Lizzie Bassett?

  And he was pretty much ready to throw in the towel when he got cast in Moon 44, which is- Potentially why he had the balls to tell Roland Emmerich to his face that the script sucked. Now, when Emmerich came out to Los Angeles, he called Devlin because he had an idea. Back in film school, he'd seen a documentary called Chariots of the Gods. Have you ever seen this? Or read the book?

• 14:50Chris Winterbauer?

  I've never seen the documentary. I know the book. I have not read it, but I know.

• 14:53Lizzie Bassett?

  I read it when I was like 12, as you know, most 12-year-old nerds are wont to do. It was based on Erik Von Daniken's book of the same title, which is basically Ancient Aliens.

• 15:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 15:01Lizzie Bassett?

  I loved it. You know, it's fun. I understand.

• 15:04Chris Winterbauer?

  It's wild.

• 15:04Lizzie Bassett?

  By the way, like, we understand that Ancient Aliens carry some, you know, potentially nefarious slash racist tendencies. We're not going to get into it in this episode. When we say they're fun, they're just fun. Don't read into it more than that. So the idea being that aliens have already visited us long ago, and that they're responsible for many ancient technologies and religions. This would, of course, eventually become 1994's Stargate, which Devlin and Emmerich co-wrote and Emmerich directed. Have you seen Stargate?

• 15:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, of course. I saw Stargate in 1995 on LaserDisc.

• 15:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Hell, yeah.

• 15:38Chris Winterbauer?

  At my uncle's house in Los Angeles, and it is wild.

• 15:43Lizzie Bassett?

  It's fun. I watched it for the podcast and I really enjoyed it.

• 15:45Chris Winterbauer?

  It's very fun. There's a great effect in it. Actually, the water effect of the Stargate.

• 15:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it looks really good.

• 15:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Coming out is, that's like a composite of actual, like, it's a, I believe they're blowing air into water.

• 15:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, that makes sense.

• 15:58Chris Winterbauer?

  And then capturing that as it becomes a tunnel and then.

• 16:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Pushing it back out, yeah.

• 16:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Superimposing it, composing it on there. Anyway, super fun movie. James Spader, Kurt Russell. Are the aliens good? Are they bad? Are they wearing a lot of eyeshadow? Who knows?

• 16:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Are they actually just humans?

• 16:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Are they just humans? Yeah, exactly. It's very fun. But it's basically like Egyptians were inspired by aliens. That's the idea, I think, more or less.

• 16:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Or manipulated by aliens in the case of Stargate. So it starred Kurt Russell, as you said, and James Spader. It was a relatively low-budget sci-fi flick about an Egyptologist, James Spader, who winds up cracking the code to a Stargate or an alien planet, and then accompanies a team of soldiers through said gate. It was a surprisingly big hit on a budget of around $55 million. It grossed over $196 million worldwide, and it launched an entire franchise across movies and TV. It also, of course, launched Emmerich and Devlin. Now, Emmerich was. Out on the press tour for Stargate when a reporter asked him if he believed in aliens. And he, much to the supporters surprise and disappointment, said, no. So the reporter replied, well, how can you make a movie like Stargate and not believe in aliens? To which Emmerich responded, I believe in fantasy. I believe in the great what if?

• 17:02Lizzie Bassett?

  What if aliens showed up? What if tomorrow morning you walked out of your door and these enormous spaceships hovered over every single city in the world? Wouldn't that be the most exciting thing that could happen? As he left the interview, Emmerich said to Devlin, I think I've got our next movie. And Devlin was on board right away because he was pissed at all the alien movies that had showed the critters arriving in secret and sneaking around in cornfields, which of course later we would see quite a bit more of in science. He figured if you crossed oceans of time to find us, would you hide on a farm?

• 17:29Speaker 03

  I have crossed oceans of time to find you. I'm so horny.

• 17:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Still my favorite Dracula. Would you hide on a farm or would you make an entrance? And they realized that nobody had really done a jumbo sized alien invasion film like they were thinking about, at least not on the scale that they could do it at this point.

• 17:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, not since the 50s.

• 17:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Exactly.

• 17:53Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, Earth vs. the F O or War of the Worlds or, you know, pick your poison there.

• 17:57Lizzie Bassett?

  And they didn't have the scale to be able to do it at that point.

• 18:00Chris Winterbauer?

  No, it was, these were B movies using miniatures and the effects are super fun. Don't get me wrong, but they had not utilized modern technology in the way that Star Wars had, for example, or then obviously Jurassic Park and stuff like that.

• 18:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, there are a few different versions of this origin story. And one Emmerich went to a meeting at Warner Brothers where they said they wanted to do a prison escape movie starring Harrison Ford, which I would think would be The Fugitive, except the timeline doesn't add up because that came out in 1993. Anyway, whatever this movie was, they were budgeting it at $70 million. And he left the meeting in shock because $70 million for a prison escape movie? He figured, I can make my alien invasion film for that kind of money. So he went out, bought War of the Worlds, felt like it was too dated, decided to make his own. However, it happened, they had their idea and they were moving ahead at light speed. They started studying disaster movies because that's what their alien invasion film was going to be. And when you think about it, this is kind of a new take on the material. I mean, I understand that it's drawing heavily from War of the Worlds, but as we said, it is upping the scale pretty massively.

• 19:00Chris Winterbauer?

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• 20:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Today's episode is sponsored by Mars. You might not realize it, but Mars is behind so many of your favorite Halloween treats. And I'm not just talking about your candy bowl. Yes, Mars makes iconic candies like M&M's, Snickers, Starburst, my personal favorite, and Skittles. But they also have salty snacks, easy-to-make meal options, and even treats for your pets. There's something for everyone to enjoy this spooky season. David and I are too old to trick or treat, so we've been getting creative with our Halloween movie night spreads for our friends. I put together a char bootery board with some classic sweets like Rice Krispie Treats and Peanut Butter M&M's. And because I'm a salty girl, I added some Pringles and my all-time favorite snack, Cheez-It crackers. Scary delicious. For Halloween night, I'm making a spooky seven-layer dip using Ben's Original Ready Rice because there is nothing that my kid loves more than a rice and bean dip. And don't think I forgot about our dog Q. Mars knows he needs a celebration too,

• 20:50Lizzie Bassett?

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• 21:10Lizzie Bassett?

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• 21:52Lizzie Bassett?

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• 22:19Lizzie Bassett?

  So they take their idea to their agent, who says, drop this hot turd. Why? Because there was another alien invasion movie that was set to be released in 1996 and it was already underway. Do you know what it was?

• 22:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Mars Attacks?

• 22:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Mars Attacks by Tim Burton.

• 22:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 22:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 22:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Very tonally different.

• 22:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Exactly. But I watched Mars Attacks, tonally very, very different. However, setup-wise, story-wise, even character-wise, there are a lot of similarities. Which, by the way, is not to say that they stole anything from Mars Attacks. There's no way they could have.

• 22:55Chris Winterbauer?

  No, but it shows that they're both playing in a sandbox of very well-established tropes.

• 23:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Exactly. So Emmerich said, I heard through the grapevine that Tim Burton was shooting a movie very close to what I wanted to do. I called up Lorenzo Di Bonaventura, who was an executive at Warner Brothers. And I said, when is that movie coming out? He said, well, it's slated for August 1996. So I looked at my calendar and I said, Dean, pack your stuff. We are writing.

• 23:20Chris Winterbauer?

  The thing Mars Attacks, actually, I believe, has far more extensive CGI because all of the Martians are CG than Independence Day, which-

• 23:29Lizzie Bassett?

  We're gonna get into it.

• 23:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Even the explosions, most of those are miniatures with composites.

• 23:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Hold that thought.

• 23:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 23:35Lizzie Bassett?

  You're correct, but there's some surprising reasons why you're correct. So Emmerich and Devlin assumed that since it was Timmy B. at the helm, Mars Attacks is probably gonna be funny. It's probably gonna be some kind of parody, or at least it will have a sense of humor. Of course, they are correct.

• 23:49Chris Winterbauer?

  I think the studio thought that too.

• 23:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Well, by the way, it is very funny.

• 23:52Chris Winterbauer?

  No, it is. It just, it was so, I don't think people understood it at the time. I don't think anyone understood it at the time.

• 23:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, let's hold that thought, because Mars Attacks is gonna come back.

• 24:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 24:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Since their movie, they knew was going to be a lot more serious. They figured they needed to beat them to the box office, because aliens cannot be a laughing matter for Independence Day to work. Early drafts of Mars Attacks had whole sequences of Manhattan being blown up, the White House being blown up. These were later cut for budgetary reasons, but the similarities were, of course, there big time. Now, Mars Attacks would eventually face quite a few setbacks and would push much later to a December release, but Emmerich and Devlin didn't know that at the time. So they were like, okay, it's coming in August. Uh, let's just time our movie around July 4th. We'll call it Independence Day for now. We can get something better later. So in January of 1995, they hold themselves up in a hotel in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and they wrote the screenplay.

• 24:40Lizzie Bassett?

  The goal was to really show how people can come together in the face of a huge disaster or a common enemy, which I think this movie does so well without being saccharine. They wrote this thing in three weeks, and Chris, it did not change much from there.

• 24:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Good for them.

• 24:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. And there was one scene, or speech, rather, that Devlin wrote very quickly. Any guesses?

• 25:02Chris Winterbauer?

  We will not go quietly into that good night?

• 25:04Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. It's the president's speech. Devlin said, let me just kind of vomit something out really fast, and then we'll spend a lot of time on it later and really rewrite it and make it perfect. So he wrote it in five minutes. And yes, it is a total ripoff of the St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V., which Henry delivers to his troops ahead of the Battle of Agincourt. This is, of course, the famous Band of Brothers speech, and it is a ripoff of Dylan Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle into that good night, and I don't care. I love it. They made a note to come back and rewrite the speech and then they moved on. And they sent the script to their agent, who I guess was now on board and he said, let's auction it. They set the budget at $69.5 million, which is interesting because I believe Mars Attacks was originally set for around 75 million, though of course it would exceed that. Suddenly, Independence Day had sparked a bidding war.

• 25:50Lizzie Bassett?

  All of the major studios at the time were making offers and it came down to Universal versus Fox. And 20th Century Fox won. Any ideas why they won? It was not more money.

• 25:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm. They did Planet of the Apes.

• 26:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, that might have been a bonus, but they gave Emmerich and Devlin final cut.

• 26:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 26:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Because remember, Devlin, he basically handles, I think, the majority of the writing and then he's producing. Emmerich is handling the majority or all of the directing and he's also co-writing.

• 26:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 26:15Lizzie Bassett?

  So they negotiated massive, massive creative control over pretty much every element of the film, with the exception of casting, which we will get into. And they also agreed that they would continue to work on the script, but in the event of a disagreement with the studio, the script they sold would remain the one source of truth. So let's talk about the one element they did not have as much control over, which is casting. There was one actor, Chris, that they had in mind the entire time they were writing the script. In fact, Devlin would do an impression of this actor as they were writing the characters' lines. Who could this be?

• 26:45Chris Winterbauer?

  I guess it would be Goldblum if he's doing an impression.

• 26:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course, it is Jeff Goldblum. It is smokin' hot Jeff Goldblum, hottest he's ever been.

• 26:53Chris Winterbauer?

  My only beef with this movie is Goldblum referencing his own character in Jurassic Park at the very end of the movie.

• 27:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, hold that thought, too.

• 27:01Chris Winterbauer?

  That's my only beef. Like, why break the fourth wall? Why draw the comparison? Anyway.

• 27:05Lizzie Bassett?

  That's gonna come back. All right, they knew they wanted him right away and he was interested, but they hadn't locked him in immediately. But they figure, we're gonna get him. So next, they move on to Captain Stephen Hiller. They had actually written this role intending it to be a black character. And they specifically wanted Will Smith after seeing him in Six Degrees of Separation. But they had never specified the ethnicity in the script. The studio, of course, just assumed, ah, it's gonna be a white dude. So when Emmerich and Devlin brought them Will Smith, they were like, sitcom star Will Smith? No.

• 27:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Hadn't he done Bad Boys by this point, though? Because that was the movie, if I'm remembering correctly. Correctly, that really said, oh, Will Smith's also a movie star.

• 27:43Lizzie Bassett?

  This would be right before Bad Boys.

• 27:44Chris Winterbauer?

  So they're waiting on it.

• 27:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 27:46Chris Winterbauer?

  That makes sense.

• 27:47Lizzie Bassett?

  They said, no, thanks. And instead, the studio offered the role to Ethan Hawke.

• 27:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Interesting.

• 27:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 27:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Very interesting.

• 27:54Lizzie Bassett?

  It is interesting.

• 27:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm. He does make sense. I prefer Will Smith in this instance.

• 27:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Ethan Hawke's not a terrible choice.

• 27:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Ethan Hawke's great.

• 28:00Lizzie Bassett?

  He is nowhere near as funny.

• 28:02Chris Winterbauer?

  I think he can be funny. It's a different type of funny than Will Smith.

• 28:05Lizzie Bassett?

  That's true.

• 28:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Will Smith has the swaggering bravado that you need in this role. That's very funny.

• 28:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Which works well opposite Jeff Goldblum is the thing.

• 28:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. I think Hawke is actually a little closer to Goldblum. And so there's not as fun a contrast between them.

• 28:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I think that's fair. And also, Will Smith is a physically very imposing guy, which I think is also useful in certain situations here, like when he's meeting with Bill Pullman and stuff.

• 28:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 28:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Ethan Hawke, I don't think that would have been the case. But it didn't matter, because Ethan Hawke thought the script was so dumb, he threw it out the window of his car on a cross-country road trip with his friend and on to the Texas highway. Now, later, he would, of course, go to the movies in the summer of 1996 and realized he'd made a big mistakey. He apparently turned to his friend and went, okay, but it wasn't that good, right? And his friend was like, it was pretty good.

• 28:52Lizzie Bassett?

  He was like, I'm an idiot. So with Ethan Hawke out, Devlin and Emmerich came back and they were like, all right, well, it's Will Smith. This is his part. But the studio doubled down. According to Devlin, the studio said, you cast a black guy in this part, you're gonna kill foreign box office. To which Devlin and Emmerich said, uh, the movie is about space aliens. It's gonna do fine foreign. And they really stuck to their guns on this. And finally, it was getting close to go time. They had not locked in Jeff Goldblum or Will Smith. So Emmerich went to the studio and said, if you don't get me these two actors, I will go to Universal, which he acknowledges was a total bluff, because legally, he almost certainly could not do that.

• 29:26Chris Winterbauer?

  I was gonna say, yeah, exactly.

• 29:28Lizzie Bassett?

  But it didn't matter. It worked. They also had someone very specific in mind for the president when they were writing, and you may have seen this name in the credits. Do you know who it was?

• 29:38Chris Winterbauer?

  No, I didn't notice.

• 29:39Lizzie Bassett?

  It was future President of the United States, Kevin Spacey.

• 29:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, interesting.

• 29:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, Frank Underwood. Thank God they didn't cast Kevin Spacey in this. It would really ultimately end up. Sowering the film, I think.

• 29:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, now.

• 29:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, that's what I mean.

• 29:53Chris Winterbauer?

  But at the time, he was a great actor. He is a great actor and he.

• 29:56Lizzie Bassett?

  He is a great actor.

• 29:58Chris Winterbauer?

  One thing I like about Pullman in contrast to Goldblum and Smith is that he does feel a half decade or more, you know what I mean, older than them.

• 30:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 30:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Which gives him a little more gravitas as the president.

• 30:07Lizzie Bassett?

  That's true. Well, I mean, the other thing about Kevin Spacey is he certainly tends to have a dark energy.

• 30:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Sometimes.

• 30:13Lizzie Bassett?

  And they wanted that. They wanted the president to kind of feel almost like a villain until the very end, when he reveals that he's going to do the right thing and save the day. That was going to be like a big turn. Also, Devlin had known Spacey since high school.

• 30:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 30:25Lizzie Bassett?

  So they said, look, we can get Kevin for $200,000 right now. In a year from now, he's going to win an Oscar and he's going to cost $2 million. And the studio executive said, Kevin Spacey will never win an Oscar in my lifetime. Of course, he literally won for The Usual Suspects the following year.

• 30:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 30:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Again, Kevin Spacey, I think he's a great actor. My only point is, obviously, knowing what we know now, I don't think this movie would be as rewatchable if he were in the role.

• 30:48Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know if I agree with that, though, because The Usual Suspects is super rewatchable.

• 30:51Lizzie Bassett?

  But he's a villain.

• 30:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Super rewatchable. I know, but okay, so Eli Confidential, he's like one of the most redemptive heroes of that movie. I think it's perfectly rewatchable.

• 31:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, fair, fair.

• 31:01Chris Winterbauer?

  American Beauty, not so much.

• 31:03Lizzie Bassett?

  You know, I haven't watched that. I would give it another chance.

• 31:05Chris Winterbauer?

  I like that movie. It's just really weird to watch.

• 31:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 31:07Chris Winterbauer?

  In a whole bunch, for a whole bunch of reasons.

• 31:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. All right. So the studio, again, had someone else in mind for this role. And this time, I think they nailed it because they went ahead and offered the role to Bill Pullman. And Pullman was in. And this completely changed the way that Devlin and Emmerich had seen the character because he wasn't presenting as a villain. There was going to be no plot twist at the end. Instead, he was a good guy who'd spent his career trying to compromise, and he finally takes action in a time of crisis and speaks his mind. Of his role, Pullman said, I really enjoyed working with Roland. He's always aware of what would be cool. The way he uses that word with a German accent reminds me of the teenager in him. Then you look up and you see this really cool monster. I was also impressed with the presidential cufflinks. I think they got them from the gift store of Nixon's Presidential Library. They were talismans. I could touch them and remember, oh, yeah, I'm the president.

• 31:54Lizzie Bassett?

  I love Bill Paul.

• 31:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Great.

• 31:57Lizzie Bassett?

  So the role of Jimmy Wilder was also supposed to be played by someone else. This is, of course, Will Smith's buddy.

• 32:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Harry Connick Jr.

• 32:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 32:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 32:03Lizzie Bassett?

  It was offered to, and I believe initially accepted by Matthew Perry.

• 32:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, okay. Sure. I mean, wise cracking.

• 32:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, totally.

• 32:11Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, I think Harry Connick Jr. is like drawl and also size is helpful.

• 32:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, I agree.

• 32:16Chris Winterbauer?

  He does read military to me in a really nice way in this scene. And I like Harry Connick Jr. actually quite a bit.

• 32:22Lizzie Bassett?

  I do, too.

• 32:22Chris Winterbauer?

  And he's very good in this role. And I actually think Perry and Smith with their quippiness.

• 32:27Lizzie Bassett?

  It's too similar.

• 32:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Are too similar. And so it's nice to have Connick opposite him. He's a little more sincere.

• 32:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, there's a sweetness to Harry Connick Jr. that I think is very useful, especially when he dies. It's upsetting.

• 32:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. But Matthew Perry is a great actor. He was a great actor.

• 32:39Lizzie Bassett?

  He was. Yeah. Well, he dropped out and then he was pretty quickly replaced by Harry Connick Jr. shortly before filming. Obviously, Matthew Perry, along with Ethan Hawke, would come to regret this.

• 32:49Chris Winterbauer?

  As he cried into his friend's money.

• 32:51Lizzie Bassett?

  I know. I mean, he didn't need the money, but I think it's that like this was a movie star movie, to your point.

• 32:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 32:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Brent Spiner, AKA Data from Star Trek: Next Generation, was cast as Dr. Oken. And a little fun fact, his look and vibe and name are based on prolific VFX supervisor Jeffrey Oken, who had worked with Emmerich on Stargate. Would you like to see a picture, Chris?

• 33:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. I honestly didn't recognize him at first with the long hair.

• 33:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 33:15Chris Winterbauer?

  And he's also, he's taller than I thought, but he's very funny in this movie.

• 33:19Lizzie Bassett?

  I need you to look at this picture and understand how close they made this.

• 33:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 33:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Exactly.

• 33:25Chris Winterbauer?

  It's him and then Julian Assange.

• 33:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 33:28Chris Winterbauer?

  The two versions.

• 33:28Lizzie Bassett?

  He could play Julian Assange, yes.

• 33:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 33:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, Vivica A. Fox was working on The Young and the Restless when she heard that basically every black actress in town was auditioning for now Will Smith's Independence Day, which is hilarious how quickly the tides turned. I wonder, to your point, if that was due to bad boys. And she'd done an episode of Fresh Prince as Jazzy Jeff's sister, so she called her agent and was like, hey, what the hell? Why am I not auditioning for this? And they're like, you're not big enough. But two weeks later, they called back and said, guess who's looking for you? And it was indeed the folks from Will Smith's Independence Day. Now, she first showed up dressed in a white patent leather jumpsuit with heels and tons of makeup, which is fair, considering the role is. An exotic dancer, but the casting director said, the character is a stripper. I see you've got a nice little body there in that white jumpsuit, but that's just what she does for a living.

• 34:11Lizzie Bassett?

  She's a mom. She said, I want you to go and watch Speed and look at the way Sandra Bullock is dressed and how she carries herself. Viveka said, I watched Speed. I went and got a cute little dress with ruffles, some combat boots, some ankle socks. As soon as I walked in, she goes, you did your homework. So obviously Viveka got the part and fun anecdote from her about the set. This was her first big movie ever, so she did not know really any of the like on set terminology. And she thought she kept hearing Roland Emmerich saying chicken in the gate at the end of a take. And she could not figure out what the hell it meant. So finally she asked and everyone was like, no, he just has a thick German accent. He is saying checking the gate, meaning checking the aperture for anything that could potentially ruin the film before they moved on.

• 34:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Changing her hair, dust, et cetera.

• 34:52Lizzie Bassett?

  They're like, no, it means you did a good job. It means we're done with the shot. And she was like, oh, great. Chicken in the gate.

• 34:57Chris Winterbauer?

  I have shared this story before, but I'll share it once more. When I was on a movie, one of the producers was Australian, is Australian and had never been on a movie set before I realized. And, you know, they'd call up the slate and they'd say, A only, meaning a camera only, right? When they're calling out the slate, because sometimes you have an A camera, B camera, C camera, et cetera. And finally she turns and very loud, loud enough for everyone to hear at Video Village. She turns to one of the other producers and goes, why do they keep saying A only?

• 35:27Chris Winterbauer?

  And everyone just looks around and the producer's like, it's a camera only. Shut up.

• 35:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 35:34Chris Winterbauer?

  It's like, why ask it that loud? It was very funny.

• 35:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Ask it as loud as you want. I think people shouldn't be afraid because there is so much terminology that you don't understand.

• 35:43Chris Winterbauer?

  This person was disruptive for other reasons.

• 35:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, great. Fair enough. Fair enough. All I'm saying is I have been on sets before where I was like, I don't know what the fuck they're talking about. And I wish that I felt comfortable saying like, what is chicken in the gate, please?

• 35:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Of course.

• 35:57Lizzie Bassett?

  So finally they rounded out the cast with Randy Quaid as Russell, crop duster and alcoholic deadbeat father extraordinaire. And we're not going to spend a ton of time on this, but by Emmerich's account and really everyone's account, Randy Quaid was actually a pleasure to work with on set. His wife, Evie Quaid, was not. Emrick told The Hollywood Reporter in 2021, quote, "Quaid's wife was not on the set, so she only called him. So he was super great to work with when we were shooting. But when it came to ADR and all these things, you always had to deal with his wife first to get to Randy. That was the only way to do it. And then when it came to travel, she behaved so badly that Fox sent him home. Quaid denied this was the case, but it's worth noting that there's a lot of stories out about them. In 2010, they were charged with vandalism and illegal squatting in their former home.

• 36:40Lizzie Bassett?

  They fled to Canada, where Quaid requested refuge, saying he was in danger from Hollywood star whackers. It's all really sad. I just want to say, if you've never seen the last detail, you should watch it. Randy Quaid is an incredible actor. Not only is he obviously very funny, but he's genuinely very, very good. That's all we'll say about that. Devlin has called the whole thing tragic because everyone actually loved working with Randy. They just couldn't deal with the sort of craziness that surrounded hiring him. All right. Remember that Emrick and Devlin were up against the ticking clock because of Mars attacks. And at $69.5 million, they were also up against a relatively small budget for what they were trying to do, particularly when it came to all of the military equipment. So they figured, we probably need a little help from the United States government.

• 37:23Lizzie Bassett?

  They wanted access to costumes and fighter jets and military stuff for free. And this was, of course, not unheard of. The Navy famously worked hand in hand with the Top Gun franchise since the beginning. So Dean Devlin pitched Independence Day to Hollywood liaison for the Pentagon, Phil Shrub, as essentially a recruitment bonanza. Here's a memo Devlin wrote to Phil. "We're gonna make Star Wars and Top Gun look like paper airplanes. Just wait, there's never been any aerial footage like this before. If this doesn't make every boy in the country want to fly a fighter jet, I'll eat this script." I mean, you gotta go for it. But as Devlin and Emrick were about to learn, if you want to work with the US government, you gotta play by their rules. Now, Chris, what elements of this movie, if you had to guess, do you think the government probably wasn't too thrilled about?

• 38:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm, um, how ineffective their

• 38:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 38:09Chris Winterbauer?

  fighting is for most of the film?

• 38:12Lizzie Bassett?

  That's exactly right. So problem number one, the military kind of looks like ineffectual cooks in this. They mostly just stand by and either get blown up or watch other people get blown up as they're trying to take out the aliens. One internal military memo read, "The overall scenario does not leave the public with a positive impression of the military and its capabilities. We see military bases and aircraft decimated by the aliens, and ultimately, it takes a civilian to stop the alien takeover." So they didn't like that.

• 38:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm.

• 38:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Problem number two, there are no quote unquote "true military heroes" in their eyes. Will Smith drinks beer and dates a stripper. That won't do. They wanted the character rewritten, asking writers to energize and clean up Stephen's actions. Problem number three, a drunken idiot in a crop duster flew his actual crop duster into the UFO to destroy it. This is, of course, the original version. They wanted that change to be a military jet, and they also asked him to have a background serving in the armed forces. I don't think they realized that this kind of makes it look like maybe he had PTSD from NOM, but whatever.

• 39:06Chris Winterbauer?

  I think it's a great change, though.

• 39:08Lizzie Bassett?

  I think these are actually, as we'll learn, these are kind of good notes. So an actual memo read, quote, "Would not want the public to think just anyone can fly a high-tech aircraft, can't have a drunk pilot." And another read, "Increase time between last drink and flight of aircraft." Don't drink and fly, folks.

• 39:23Chris Winterbauer?

  They did do that where they're

• 39:24Lizzie Bassett?

  They do.

• 39:25Chris Winterbauer?

  having his son bring him coffee and whatnot to sober up. It's good. They actually turned his character into less of a joke, which I think is smart.

• 39:31Lizzie Bassett?

  They do. Hold that thought.

• 39:40Lizzie Bassett?

  So they also wanted Jeff Goldblum's character to have an army intelligence background. They wanted the president's background as a fighter pilot foregrounded. And Devlin and Emmerich are willing to make pretty much all of these adjustments. Because to your point, like, these are not that bad. But there was one thing standing between them and all the sweet, free military fighter jets they could possibly want: Area 51.

• 39:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm.

• 40:00Lizzie Bassett?

  One set of script notes read, quote, "Incident at Roswell, AFB is a myth. DoD would not want to support a film which perpetuates myth. DoD cannot hide info from president, i.e. aliens and ship in custody."

• 40:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, we know that's not true.

• 40:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 40:15Chris Winterbauer?

  We actually know the president doesn't know a lot of stuff over the history of the United States. Yeah.

• 40:20Lizzie Bassett?

  So briefly, let's talk about the Roswell incident. This is referring to what happened near Roswell. On June 14, 1947, a rancher named William Brazel found a big pile of wreckage about 70 miles north of Roswell, New Mexico. The debris included neoprene strips, metal foil, cardboard, tape, and sticks. He paid little attention at the time, but several weeks later, he heard reports of flying saucers. And this then, you know, changed his suspicions. The army issued a statement describing it as a flying disc. They changed their story. Anyway, this fueled decades and decades of rumors that, of course, the government had recovered and was hiding an alien spacecraft. Now, we should specify, obviously, the Roswell incident and Area 51 are two physical different locations. But I think the connection they're referring to here is that it is insinuated in the film and in the script that the incident

• 41:05Lizzie Bassett?

  at Roswell was when they captured something and brought it back to Area 51. So, the Department of Defense comes back and says, look, if you change it to like a grassroots group of civilians protecting the ship on like an abandoned base, we could maybe live with that. This doesn't make a ton of sense. It would require a lot of explaining. So Devlin and Emmerich come back with a compromise. They rewrote the script so that a fictional agency called the NIA would be in charge of the secret base. But the Department of Defense responded to this version with the following. "Area 51, no way, fictional agency or not, we are sick and tired of hearing about the US government capturing aliens." I mean, they gotta have aliens, right? I don't think you get that mad if you don't have aliens. You don't write this many memos about this if you don't got them. Now, if you're not familiar, the Groom Lake area of Nevada was

• 41:48Lizzie Bassett?

  originally used for bombing exercises during World War II. And this is, of course, Area 51. During the Cold War, it was upgraded to developing and testing nuclear weapons. Then the CIA took over. That's when they began work on the top secret U-2 spy plane to check out what Russia was doing. And it was all going great until the 60s, when that plane was captured by the Soviet Union. So the CIA needed a new super secret spy plane, and they headed back to the Nevada desert. This is when they set up a permanent base and testing facility called Project 51. That's how we get Area 51. They tested a series of stealth spy planes, at least one of which could fly at Mach 3 speed faster than a bullet. And of course, these fly- At very high altitudes to evade detection. People understandably mistook these aircrafts for UFOs, which the government initially leaned into because they were not keen on having the actual planes exposed.

• 42:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Over half of reported UFO sightings from that era were later linked to these high altitude aircraft. And the CIA reportedly even used this as a chance to study how people would react en masse and how you could manipulate rumors and spectacle. But in 1989, a guy named Bob Lazar came forward with some very hot takes, claiming to have worked on the base and that it did indeed contain an alien spacecraft that they were busy studying. His credentials, of course, very much called into question. Both MIT and Caltech were like, "We have never heard of him, even though he claimed to have attended both." But it didn't matter. Suddenly, Area 51 was synonymous with a big ol' alien cover up. It is indeed an active military base today, and its function, Chris, is top secret. The truth is, we do not know what they are doing or what they have done at Area 51, and we probably never will.

• 43:19Lizzie Bassett?

  But it's iconic. It's also a bit of a bugaboo for the Department of Defense, and this was the straw that broke the camel's back for Devlin and Emmerich. They were not gonna drop Area 51 completely, and the military were not gonna be a part of a project that depicted it. So, the Department of Defense broke up with Independence Day, which meant they now definitely had a very small budget for what they were hoping to do. But it also meant, Chris, that they had almost total creative freedom. So they said, "Fuck it. We're gonna do it all with miniatures." And in case you're wondering how we know all of this, you can thank the Freedom of Information Act. Documentary filmmaker and investigative journalist Tom Seker obtained over 4,000 pages of documents chronicling politically motivated changes that had been made to scripts by the Department of Defense.

• 44:05Lizzie Bassett?

  He wrote a book on this called "National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood", which I definitely wanna check out. And he makes a very valid point that placing basically all bad decision making in the hands of civilians grooms audiences to believe that any problems we're experiencing are the fault of the people, not the military. Anyway, with the military out, Roland Emmerich and Volker Engel, a German special effects artist, ended up really constructing a ton of Independence Day's special effects around physical models. You pointed this out, Chris, but around Four thousand different scale model elements. Sometimes I've seen that number as high as six thousand and tabletop miniatures, to be exact. According to Angle, ninety-five percent was shot using miniatures with motion-controlled cameras and combined digitally in post-production.

• 44:48Lizzie Bassett?

  The team used a former aircraft facility in L.A. to build out massive miniatures and pyrotechnics unit. The shoot just for the miniatures took nine months with up to four camera crews working at once. Now, there are four hundred VFX shots in this movie, up from two hundred and sixty in Stargate. While that's peanuts for today, in fact, Independence Day resurgence had seventeen hundred and fifty VFX shots. Remember, there were only sixty in Jurassic Park, which came out just three years earlier. So this is a massive undertaking, and I think we can both agree that they knocked this out of the park. That old alien spaceship in Area Fifty-One was actually a functional, full-size mock-up, sixty-five feet wide, that took four months to build, and yes, you could walk on it and go inside of it.

• 45:31Lizzie Bassett?

  By some sources, Independence Day may actually hold the record for the most miniatures used in a single film at the time. Obviously, Phantom Menace, we discussed, I believe, holds the Guinness World Record for the most individual miniatures used in a single scene for the grand arena, which had, what, like four hundred and fifty thousand hand-painted Q-tips in the audience? Okay, Chris, if you had to guess, what do you think the single toughest VFX shot in the whole thing was, or the most important?

• 45:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Blowing up one of the buildings, pick your poison, which one?

• 45:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Blowing up the White House. So, pyrotechnician Joe Viskasil and miniature supervisor Mike Joyce built out a fifteen-foot-wide, five-foot-tall replica of the building with individual floors and actual furniture, art, decor, everything inside to mirror the real White House. It was like a giant dollhouse, which is amazing. It cost fifty thousand dollars to make and hundreds of hours to build. And when it came time to shoot the scene, the pressure was on because they only had one chance to get it right. Also, the pressure was on because the studio set up bleachers a hundred feet away and invited fifty members of the press to come watch.

• 46:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 46:33Lizzie Bassett?

  So they set the blast charges to detonate in a way that made the explosion unfold slowly, and they filmed it at three hundred frames per second.

• 46:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 46:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris, can you explain why you would shoot it at that frame rate?

• 46:42Chris Winterbauer?

  When you are filming. Something small attempting to trick the audience into thinking it's big. You film at a high frame rate so that when you play it back, it plays at a slower speed than it actually happened. You can imagine if you watch a giant walk across the city, it looks like he's walking more slowly, right? Than if you were to watch someone small because the scale has changed. So water effects, sand effects in dune, explosions, et cetera. Whenever you do these miniatures, you always film at a high frame rate so that you can trick the audience into thinking, oh, this is life size, even though it's much smaller.

• 47:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Got it. Fortunately, it was a great success. And what they shot that day is what's in the movie. Now you mentioned this, obviously, they had to build the aliens themselves. And I think they look great. They consisted of three components. Mechanical arms, biomechanical suits worn by performers, and then puppeteers who would operate individual sections of the bodies that needed articulation, fingers, arms. Now, while special effects cinematographer Anna Forster was working hard on all the miniature shots, Carl Walter Lindonlawb served as the live action cinematographer for the film, and principal photography began in July of 1995. And they started at the very end of the movie first. This is Goldblum and Smith arriving on those salt flats. It was over 123 degrees. And it was actually a pretty weird place to start because according to Bill Pullman, we shot the end of the movie first.

• 47:58Lizzie Bassett?

  When I come up to Jeff Goldblum and we're overcoming this long history, it was absurd having these warm embraces with people we barely knew. I had to shake a little giggle out of me.

• 48:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, that's funny.

• 48:09Lizzie Bassett?

  But Will Smith did set the mood pretty early on by excusing his stand-in and standing out in the blistering sun himself. So the stand-in could go back into the tent. And one by one, the other actors followed. Now, say what you will about Will Smith, and you can obviously say a lot. We're not going to get into what he did at the Oscars, but certainly do not condone it. But you cannot say he does not work his ass off. He does. Also, Jeff Goldblum had a ton of trouble with the cigar because he doesn't smoke at all, and it made him very woozy. So he had to have the A.D. light it and start it for him. I do wonder if this is responsible for how swaggery he is. He may have been dizzy.

• 48:42Chris Winterbauer?

  He's so swaggery.

• 48:43Lizzie Bassett?

  I think he was sick.

• 48:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. He looks like the Pink Panther.

• 48:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, he does. He does.

• 48:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 48:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, Chris, as for Bill Pullman, he knew that his big speech was. Important. So he had been prepping it hard by watching some of the greatest political speeches of all time. And he honed in on one in particular. That is the speech Robert F. Kennedy gave after he learned that Martin Luther King had been shot. Pullman said, quote, "The recording of the speech just captured the incredible energy in the place." He says, "I regret to inform you that Martin Luther King has been shot." You hear this horrific gasp from the people in the crowd and you get the sense that everyone's collective heart is just beating like a rabbit's. Then his ability to frame his thoughts and cite references to Greeks and of course, get over the connection to the fact that he knows something about this. He can speak to the pain because his own brother had been shot. It is a beautiful speech. If you've never heard it, you should go listen to it. You can find it on YouTube.

• 49:33Lizzie Bassett?

  The fact that it was completely unscripted is truly mind blowing. And it's a good thing Pullman had been working on it because the speech suddenly got pulled way up in the shooting schedule. Why? Well, because the studio really wanted to change the title of the movie to Doomsday.

• 49:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh.

• 49:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 49:50Chris Winterbauer?

  That's not a good idea.

• 49:51Lizzie Bassett?

  No. Apparently Bill Mechanic, friend of the pod, showed up.

• 49:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Love me a Bill Mechanic.

• 49:57Lizzie Bassett?

  We do.

• 49:57Chris Winterbauer?

  A Bill Mechanic spotting.

• 49:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Here he is. He showed up and said that they'd tested the title Independence Day and they weren't sure it was working. So they want to call it Doomsday and just move up the release to Memorial Day, to which Emmerich and Devlin said, no. So they figured, all right, we need to scooch this scene up so we can have Pullman on tape saying Independence Day in order to lock in the title.

• 50:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 50:16Lizzie Bassett?

  And this meant, according to Pullman, that he really felt the urgency to get it right. So he was really working hard on it. And they were in the middle of a bunch of crazy night shoots at this point. According to Pullman, they didn't really get a lot of direction. Everyone was so cranky. Emmerich apparently referred to these night shoots as the tragic hour, which I like. So the time came to film the speech and suddenly Dean Devlin broke out in a cold sweat, filled with panic because he realized, what, Chris?

• 50:41Chris Winterbauer?

  He hadn't looked at it since they wrote it?

• 50:43Lizzie Bassett?

  That's correct. He had never gone back and rewritten the speech.

• 50:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 50:46Lizzie Bassett?

  So he ran to set in an absolute panic, only to discover they were already rehearsing the speech as written. But much to his surprise, it sounded fucking great.

• 50:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, totally works.

• 50:58Lizzie Bassett?

  At the end of the speech, the extras went fucking nuts, at which point Devlin termed Emmerich and said, I guess the speech is pretty great. Now, on the one hand, yes, it's a fun speech. On the other hand, I think a lot of its success is due to Bill Pullman because this could have sounded so silly and he really imbues it with a lot of gravitas while still having fun.

• 51:17Chris Winterbauer?

  And I also think the fact that it's short and to the point actually helps because we're pretty deep in the movie. We don't need a huge speech at this point.

• 51:26Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 51:26Chris Winterbauer?

  We see a few quick banger lines before Pullman gets in his jet. And like, that's all we need.

• 51:31Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. And that's all it is.

• 51:32Chris Winterbauer?

  That's it. It's great.

• 51:33Lizzie Bassett?

  And he doesn't even take all the credit. He says somehow everyone involved in that scene was on the money. That's my president, Chris. And just in case you need more reasons to love Bill Pullman, there is an incredible video of him doing a very drunk modified reenactment of the speech at Fantastic Fest at a Master Pancake Theater mocking of Independence Day screening. So he clearly has a great sense of humor.

• 51:52Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, the most unrealistic part of this movie is that his approval rating is under 40%.

• 51:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, are you kidding?

• 51:58Chris Winterbauer?

  That's absurd.

• 51:58Lizzie Bassett?

  His approval rating would be 125.

• 52:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, there's no, there's no way. Absolutely no way.

• 52:03Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 52:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Not a chance.

• 52:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, all in all, it sounds like the cast and crew had a pretty great time making this movie. Against all odds, budget constraints, time constraints, the military dropping out, it actually all went pretty right. One other quick funny anecdote. On October 3rd, 1995, they were filming the scene where Bill Pullman and Will Smith come into Area 51. It's the only real scene the two of them have together. But that day just happened to be the day that OJ Simpson's verdict was being delivered. So according to Pullman, quote, "Everybody was glued to the TV in their trailers. We got to the set and Will said, okay, I see I'm here with a lot of angry white people." It was perfect.

• 52:37Chris Winterbauer?

  That's very funny.

• 52:38Lizzie Bassett?

  All right, we're not going to spend a ton of time on post because it went pretty well. Kudos to everyone involved. But there is one fun story and you called this out. What is the line from Jurassic Park that appears in this film?

• 52:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Must go faster.

• 52:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Must go faster, must go faster. Well, that was, you may notice, happens when he is not on camera. They're flying out the door of the massive mothership and you see Jeff Goldblum and then it cuts away towards the door and you hear, must go faster, must go faster. It was added in a looping session during post.

• 53:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow. Yeah, that's interesting. It's right before he says, go, go, go, go, go. So it like tricks you, you know, into thinking it's real.

• 53:14Lizzie Bassett?

  They were looping his dialogue and apparently Emmerich was like, oh, I know what you can say here. How about one of those must go faster lines from the other movie? And Goldblum was like, really? Okay. Just did it.

• 53:27Chris Winterbauer?

  It was the one bad choice, in my opinion, that Mr. Emmerich made on this movie.

• 53:30Lizzie Bassett?

  It doesn't bother me at all. I think it's funny. I like it.

• 53:33Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know. I don't know. We're almost there. We're almost at the finish line. We don't need to reference Jurassic Park here. I don't know.

• 53:39Lizzie Bassett?

  I think it's fun. In my 90s cinematic universe, I liked it. Now, when it came time to promote the film, Emmerich had quite a pitch for the trailer. He wanted to show their money shot, the White House blowing up. He said, I had the idea that the ad is the second of July, you see the shadows. Third of July, you have the fire coming through. Fourth of July, the White House explodes. It was such a simple concept and Fox hated it. Fox pointed out that less than a year earlier, in April of 1995, the Oklahoma City bombing had taken place and killed over 150 people. So perhaps the American public might be a little sensitive to seeing a giant government building blowing up like this. To which Emmerich responded with, yeah, but that wasn't done by space aliens. Which is my favorite response. He's correct.

• 54:23Chris Winterbauer?

  He is.

• 54:24Lizzie Bassett?

  So Emmerich was like, fine, we'll just test it both ways. So they tested two versions of the trailer, one with the explosion and one without. And when the test results came back, Chris, the answer was clear. They had to blow up the White House.

• 54:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Blow it up. Blow it all up.

• 54:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Go ahead. Yeah. On January 28th, 1996, 20th Century Fox paid 1.3 million dollars to air the first teaser for Independence Day during the Dallas Cowboys versus Pittsburgh Steelers Super Bowl. Let's watch it.

• 54:53Speaker 04

  July 2nd, they arrive.

• 54:59Speaker 04

  July 3rd, they attack.

• 55:05Speaker 04

  July 4th is.

• 55:12Speaker 04

  Independence Day.

• 55:20Speaker 04

  Coming this summer.

• 55:22Chris Winterbauer?

  My favorite part is right after they blow up the White House, it says on screen, "Enjoy the Super Bowl."

• 55:25Lizzie Bassett?

  I know. It's amazing.

• 55:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 55:29Lizzie Bassett?

  All right. So how would you describe it?

• 55:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Simple.

• 55:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 55:32Chris Winterbauer?

  It's very clean. I mean, it's just setup, the aliens come, they start attacking, they rock our shit, enjoy your football.

• 55:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 55:39Chris Winterbauer?

  And it's an effective sales pitch.

• 55:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Very. And it was actually a huge deal because trailers were not a big part of Super Bowl commercials at this point. Nobody had ever done anything like this before. And this teaser trailer wasn't just a big deal because of the way that it dropped. It also changed the way action movie trailers were made. This trailer is really the reason you see a money shot in every trailer now. If you look back at trailers before this movie, even for the like the biggest action and adventure movies, like go back and look at Jurassic Park's trailer. They are not structured around the one big shot like this one is and like they are now.

• 56:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. I remember this peaking with the Sam Worthington Clash of the Titans trailer, which the trailer is very fun and it's going along and it's building, building, building. And then right at the end, they just add in what's clearly the climax of the movie with this giant kraken as he's like flying a Pegasus.

• 56:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yes.

• 56:29Chris Winterbauer?

  And it's like, why, why did we need to do this? Why did we need to reveal what the very end of this movie is going to be? And it's, yeah, it's Independence Day.

• 56:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Independence Day. That's right. Now, the movie hadn't really been on anyone's radar prior to this. And after the Super Bowl, it was all anyone could talk about.

• 56:44Chris Winterbauer?

  I definitely remember seeing that teaser at some point.

• 56:47Lizzie Bassett?

  I do too.

• 56:54Lizzie Bassett?

  As July of 1996 approached, Peter Chernin, then head of 20th Century Fox, started grumbling that the movie was too long. So Emmerich sat him down in the edit bay and said, "You tell me what to cut." And he hit play. And anytime Emmerich would suggest something they could remove, Chernin was like, "No, that part's good. It's gotta stay." So they didn't cut anything. And it went into test screenings, which resulted in a very last minute change. With only two weeks to go before the movie dropped, Emmerich and Devlin realized they needed to reshoot a few scenes around Randy Quaid's heroic death. Why? Because after the military dropped out, they had gone back to their original Plan of him flying a crop duster with a bomb taped to the wing up into the spaceship. They had basically reverted back to the original script and didn't take the military's notes around that character.

• 57:37Lizzie Bassett?

  When they screened it, it got a huge laugh, but according to Devlin and Emmerich, it was not the right laugh.

• 57:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 57:43Lizzie Bassett?

  So they reshoot the scenes required to show that he was getting into a military plane. They add in the scene where the captain comes on the, you know, speaker and asks if anybody has military experience. He explains that he has it from Vietnam. They also emphasized his redemptive arcs, that his sacrifice feels more emotional with the sun and everything. This, these are of course, all of the notes that the Department of Defense did give them.

• 58:03Chris Winterbauer?

  It's actually a lot of shots.

• 58:04Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a ton.

• 58:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Now that I'm thinking about it.

• 58:06Lizzie Bassett?

  They did it in one day.

• 58:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, that's a pretty big reshoot for two weeks out.

• 58:10Lizzie Bassett?

  It's huge. It made everybody really, really nervous, but they did it.

• 58:14Chris Winterbauer?

  It's better too, because then like when his missile jams.

• 58:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:18Chris Winterbauer?

  It adds to the dramatic tension and you know what he's gonna obviously do and it's, yeah.

• 58:23Lizzie Bassett?

  They were good notes.

• 58:24Chris Winterbauer?

  They're very good notes.

• 58:25Lizzie Bassett?

  They just came from the Department of Defense. Yeah.

• 58:27Chris Winterbauer?

  He's more competent too, if he can fly a fighter jet, obviously.

• 58:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Exactly. They were good notes. They were maybe not coming from a good place, but you know, when they went back and looked at it, they realized that they were right. So with these changes in place, they tested it again and it came in at a test score of 98.

• 58:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow. Yeah, it's crazy.

• 58:44Lizzie Bassett?

  So they said, ship it, boys.

• 58:47Chris Winterbauer?

  And 98 means 98% of the audience give it a top two score.

• 58:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 58:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Meaning they would recommend it. It's either, I think it's excellent or very good and both or above definitely recommend, you know, sort of thing.

• 58:57Lizzie Bassett?

  So four days ahead of release, they sent the prints out to the theaters. It previewed on Tuesday, July 2nd, where it earned $11 million that night alone.

• 59:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 59:07Lizzie Bassett?

  According to Devlin, the previous record for a Tuesday preview was $5 million. And as the numbers were rolling in that night, Devlin, Emmerich and the producing team were sitting around anxiously awaiting the results. When they found out how much it had made, everyone lost their minds, including Rupert Murdoch. According to Devlin, quote, Rupert Murdoch and his then-wife come into the room. He's in a tuxedo and she's in a ball gown. And they've walked out of some charity event to come to the room because they've heard about the numbers and Murdoch says, who produced this movie? I nervously raised my hand. He came over and he kissed me and then he walked away.

• 59:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Never forget it.

• 59:39Lizzie Bassett?

  The kiss of death. Now, Independence Day would eventually take in $817 million worldwide, making it the fifth highest grossing film of the 1990s behind The Lion King, The Phantom Menace, Jurassic Park, and of course, Titanic. It was the highest grossing film of 1996. Both Bill Clinton and Bob Dole loved it. They actually screened it at the White House for the Clintons with most of the cast in attendance, except not Viveka A. Fox. She was not able to attend, but she said, "Then later at an event in Washington DC, I got to introduce myself to Bill Clinton, and he was like, 'I loved you on Independence Day, Viveka,' to which I say, 'Stay away from Viveka A. Fox, please.'" Shortly after the release, Steven Spielberg, the man who had basically invented the summer blockbuster, invited Emmerich and Devlin to the set of Jurassic Park 2 because he wanted to tell them something.

• 1:00:24Lizzie Bassett?

  According to Emmerich, he said, "You guys reinvented the blockbuster. After this movie, nobody can do a normal blockbuster anymore." And Emmerich said he was right. When you look at Marvel movies today, it's always about alien invasion and a lot of stuff gets broken. Also, these films don't take themselves too seriously, but I had learned this from Back to the Future and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Critics, mostly positive on the film, though not as much as audiences, they were quick to point out the cardboard characters and all too convenient plot devices. Tom Seker, our old journalist pal who got access to all the memos, had some pretty searing criticism. He said, quote, "It's also one of those right-on-the-button movies in terms of presenting a liberal multicultural exterior, but deep down having very conservative politics." He does make a valid point that in some ways the movie does exactly what the military had asked of it.

• 1:01:07Lizzie Bassett?

  It lays almost every problem at the feet of, not civilians in this case, but aliens. Great example being Randy Quaid's character, who of course seems to be suffering from PTSD, which you initially assume is due to his stint in the Vietnam War, but of course we discover that's not the case. It was the aliens all along, and his tours in Nam are what saves the day. Now, I don't know if I 100% agree with this take on the movie, but I understand where he's coming from. And the military was directly involved with the eventual sequel, Independence Day Resurgence, not through production assistance, but via a $2 million promotional campaign. Seker's documents showed that they hired an ad agency to leverage the film's existing budget to boost recruitment and change the public's perception of the Army. In fact, Fox actually created a website about the War of 96, of course, referring to the first Independence

• 1:01:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Day to promote the film, a la The Blair Witch Project, with fake news broadcasts and images of the destruction. And on this page, there was a link that funneled visitors through a join ESD puzzle themed site, which ended up landing people squarely at goarmy.com. However, this official partnership was a flop in every sense of the word. The film bombed, as did the Army's recruitment campaign. And this was a bummer for Emmerich. He basically said, I wish I hadn't made this movie. And of course, Mars Attacks would premiere in December of 1996 and would eventually rank among Tim Burton's biggest box office bombs. Now, part of that, I think, and perhaps this will get its own episode, is, to your point, nobody really knew what to make of it. It almost seems like it's geared towards

• 1:02:33Lizzie Bassett?

  children. And then in the first 30 seconds, you see a bunch of cows on fire running down the street. And it's very clear that maybe this is not for kids.

• 1:02:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:42Lizzie Bassett?

  But Independence Day really didn't help that it came so soon before this because people were like, I've seen this and it was totally different and I don't know what to make of this.

• 1:02:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Burton spoofing the 50s.

• 1:02:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:02:55Chris Winterbauer?

  That's the whole, even from the design.

• 1:02:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:02:57Chris Winterbauer?

  The Martians and the UFOs and whatnot. So it feels so goofy in comparison to Independence Day.

• 1:03:03Lizzie Bassett?

  That's the thing is that Independence Day looks so good. And I think without the context of Independence Day, I do think Mars Attacks may have done significantly better than it did.

• 1:03:12Chris Winterbauer?

  I would assume so, but I, I definitely think that once Emmerich had presented the more modern version of this, Mars Attacks just felt like a weird throwback to people.

• 1:03:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Even though it's very fun.

• 1:03:25Lizzie Bassett?

  It is fun. It's worth rewatching. I recommend a double feature of Independence Day and Mars Attacks.

• 1:03:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 1:03:30Lizzie Bassett?

  All right, Chris. Well, that wraps up our coverage of Independence Day.

• 1:03:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, thank you, Lizzie. What a rousing, maybe jingoistic, but just incredible film at the end of the day.

• 1:03:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Definitely jingoistic.

• 1:03:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Stand by it. Can I share a couple of other thoughts I had written down?

• 1:03:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course, please.

• 1:03:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Just before I do my what went right. So I like that this movie features the not Baldwin brother Baldwin, Adam Baldwin.

• 1:03:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Of Firefly. Yes.

• 1:03:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, or Full Metal Jacket.

• 1:03:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:03:55Chris Winterbauer?

  And it was made by the not Emmerich brother, Emmerich. Because it's not Toby or Noah.

• 1:04:00Lizzie Bassett?

  True.

• 1:04:00Chris Winterbauer?

  It's Roland.

• 1:04:00Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 1:04:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Anyway, so I like that, that it's like the non-brother version of those two in this movie. I liked the part where they had to ask Los Angelinos not to shoot their guns.

• 1:04:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Love it.

• 1:04:10Chris Winterbauer?

  At the spaceships.

• 1:04:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Gets a laugh every time.

• 1:04:11Chris Winterbauer?

  One of my favorite, most accurate things in the script. I really liked that there was no score for most of the first attack, which was very effective. They just let the sound effects do their job. I thought the silver radio dildo transmitter that they put on the bottom of the ship was very funny. They put it on the bottom of the alien spaceship before they go up there. It just looks like they founded a silver dildo. We're like, wow, this will do. Oh, and also the most uses of my God in any film. Just every scene is my God. Every just pull them in every different character. My God, my God, my God. So.

• 1:04:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Keep it simple.

• 1:04:48Chris Winterbauer?

  I think you could do a supercut of my God for this movie.

• 1:04:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Maybe we should for social.

• 1:04:52Chris Winterbauer?

  And my God, what went right? I will say to the miniatures department in its entirety, just the whole special effects team. There's a very fun corridor crew episode that talks about the shot of Randy Quaid going up the

• 1:05:04Lizzie Bassett?

  The beam.

• 1:05:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Eurythra, the beam of the alien spaceship. I believe they actually take footage of, what building is it? It's not the Empire State Building. What building is it in New York that explodes?

• 1:05:14Lizzie Bassett?

  It is the Empire State Building, I think.

• 1:05:15Chris Winterbauer?

  OK, that's what I thought it was. OK, so they take that footage, I believe, of that explosion and they flipped it around. And I believe that's what superimposed on the tip of the alien's ship gun. So that explosion of the alien ship gun is actually that same footage of the Empire State Building in reverse, I think, is what Corridor Crew said, or something like that flipped, which was very cool.

• 1:05:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Amazing. Well, I mean, you would have to reuse some stuff considering their budget. That makes sense.

• 1:05:40Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, it's just great work by the miniatures department. It really holds up. Those shots really do hold up. Some of the aerial fight scenes, not quite as much, although I do think the canyon chase with the F-15 is really good.

• 1:05:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:52Chris Winterbauer?

  And then when the alien spaceship at the end pulls up and like goes over Smith and lands in the dirt, which is again, clearly a miniature shot that they're doing there. It looks great.

• 1:06:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 1:06:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Those are all fantastic. So great work by that team.

• 1:06:05Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree. Well, first of all, we didn't mention them. But the scene from this movie that is the most seared into my mind's eye is when Boomer, the dog survives the blast.

• 1:06:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, right. The composite shot where he just leaps over the cars. Did I remember that they had a dog until that moment?

• 1:06:20Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 1:06:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Not really. Yeah.

• 1:06:22Lizzie Bassett?

  So what went right is they saved the dog. I did appreciate that. I have to give it to both Emmerich and Devlin for the script.

• 1:06:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Because knowing how quickly they pulled this together and also their decision to stick to their guns, as it were, in so many ways, both in terms of choosing a deal that allowed them more creative freedom and also in saying, no, we're not getting rid of Area 51. This is fun. Like, this is the most fun part of this movie is when this is the big reveal and we'd rather lose the money and the military involvement than give that up. I just think that they made a structurally excellent movie that surprises and delights at every turn. So I just have to give them so much credit. I love this movie. I will watch it at least once a year from here on out. I can't wait until my daughter's old enough to show her. How old? Eight?

• 1:07:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I think eight or nine is probably fine.

• 1:07:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 1:07:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Fantastic, Lizzie. And then, you know, we'll have to do GeoStorm at some point, which was Dean Devlin stepping into the director's chair on that one.

• 1:07:21Lizzie Bassett?

  It's so interesting that, like, they have not, I don't know, because this movie is so good.

• 1:07:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:07:27Lizzie Bassett?

  And honestly, Stargate's really pretty fun. And The Patriot is good. Say what you will about it, but like.

• 1:07:31Chris Winterbauer?

  This was the peak, in my opinion.

• 1:07:33Lizzie Bassett?

  This is the peak. I don't really know what happened. Did you see Moonfall?

• 1:07:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:37Lizzie Bassett?

  We won't talk about that.

• 1:07:38Chris Winterbauer?

  I watched it on a plane.

• 1:07:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:39Chris Winterbauer?

  It was something.

• 1:07:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. Anyway.

• 1:07:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. I mean, it was fun for a plane movie. You know, it is what it is. All right. If folks are enjoying this podcast, I'll tell you a couple of ways that you can support us. Number one, leave us a rating and review on whatever podcatcher you're listening to us on. That really helps us with discovery. Number two, make sure you hit the subscribe button on that podcatcher so that you get new episodes every Monday and occasionally Friday. Number three, if you want even more from us, you can subscribe for bonus episodes on Spotify or Apple. For $5 a month, we get at least one bonus episode your way every month. Those are typically reviews. We've got a really fun one coming up with the. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, for example. And if you want even more from us, including an ad-free RSS feed, A, you now get the ad-free RSS feed through Spotify.

• 1:08:28Chris Winterbauer?

  We can't offer that through Apple. It's a technical limitation, but you can get it through Spotify. Or you can join our Patreon. Head to www.patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast. For five bucks, you get the ad-free feed. You get the bonus episodes. You get our fan community. You can also link that RSS feed to Apple, so you can listen to all these episodes in Apple. Sign up at patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast. And for $50 a month, you can get a Bill Pullman, Independence Day-style shout-out just like one of these.

• 1:08:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Good morning. Good morning. In less than two minutes, this episode will be done. And you, Adrian Penkaria, Angeline Renee Cook, Beatrix Erhardt, Ben Schindelman, Blaze Ambrose, will be joining the ranks of the Full Stop patrons. Patrons. JJ Rapido, John D. Wilshire, Jory Hillpiper, Jose Amelano Salto Del Giorgio, Karina Kanaba, Kate Ellington, all patrons. That word should have new meaning for all of us. We can't be consumed by our petty Patreon tears anymore. Brian Donahue, Brittany Morrisbrook, Cameron Smith, C. Grace B. We will be united in our common interest.

• 1:09:42Lizzie Bassett?

  This podcast, your favorite podcast, Full Stop, Kathleen Olson, Amy Elgashlager-Mokoy, Lena LJ, Lousy Susan, Lydia Howes. Perhaps it's fate that today is the 6th of July. And you, Chris Leal, David Friscolanti, Darren and Dale Conkling, Don Schibell, M. Zodiac, will once again be recovering from all the barbecue you ate two days ago. Or just normal food, because most of you aren't even American. I don't know where you live, Mark Bertha, Mariposa's Humans, Matthew Jacobson, Michael McGrath, Nate Ashley, but it doesn't matter, because today will no longer be known as "Two Days After an American Holiday."

• 1:10:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Today, Evan Downey, Felicia G., Film It Yourself, Frankenstein, Galen and Miguel, The Broken Glass Kids, we're fighting for our right to sit around and listen to podcasts. This podcast. Today, the cast and crew of "Win a Trip to Brown Town," Half Greyhound, I Have the Biggest Man Crash on Chris Winterbauer, James McAvoy,

• 1:10:45Speaker 05

  Jason Frankel will declare with one voice that we will not go quietly into the night. So Manchin, Andy, Steve Winterbauer, Suzanne Johnson, the Provost family, the O's sound like O's. We will not vanish without a fight. We're gonna live on. We're gonna survive. Today, we celebrate Nate the Knife, Rosemary Southward, Rural Juror, Sadie Just Sadie, Scott O'Shea, our patrons.

• 1:11:14Lizzie Bassett?

  All right. Thank you all. You're all patriots. We will see you back next week with what movie, Chris?

• 1:11:20Chris Winterbauer?

  We are going abroad.

• 1:11:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Yay.

• 1:11:23Chris Winterbauer?

  With Pan's Labyrinth, one of my favorite Guillermo del Toro films, an incredible movie, and one of the hardest films that he ever made. So I'm very excited to get into it with you guys.

• 1:11:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 1:11:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Until then, bye.

• 1:11:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Bye.

• 1:11:36Lizzie Bassett?

  What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom Podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Host production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Laura Woods and edited by Karen Krupso.