The Last of the Mohicans

Michael Mann meets his match in one of the most dedicated method actors of all time: Daniel Day-Lewis. Join Chris and Lizzie as they chronicle Mann’s obsessively detail-oriented 1992 historical epic ‘The Last of the Mohicans’. Find out how on-set strikes and last-minute firings caused turmoil behind the scenes, and why ‘Dances with Wolves’ inspired Russell Means (Chingachgook) to join the cast… but not for the reasons you might think. 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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• 1:15Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a sweeping, sprawling, 18th century set American romance that is, I would argue, somewhat more nuanced, perhaps much more nuanced than its more, arguably more popular counterpart from the early 1990s.

• 2:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, we're gonna talk about that, too.

• 2:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, as always, I am Chris Winterbauer, joined by my intrepid co-host, Lizzie Bassett. Lizzie, what do you have for us this evening?

• 2:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, Chris, we have The Last of the Mohicans, but we don't just have The Last of the Mohicans because we're doing a double dose of Michael Mann this month. We're doing mono a mono, if you will. This week, we are covering The Last of the Mohicans. Next week, we will be covering Heat. So you're gonna get a lot of Michael Mann, and I, for one, am happy about it. I love Michael Mann. And I actually love this movie. It was interesting to re-watch it, but Chris, I'm curious to hear from you. Did you grow up with this movie? Had you seen it before? And what was it like watching it again for this episode?

• 3:10Chris Winterbauer?

  I'd seen it. I did not grow up with it. Again, I'd seen it at some point in high school, I think. It's a poster that I was very familiar with, or a movie box cover that I was very familiar with.

• 3:23Lizzie Bassett?

  DDL running towards the camera.

• 3:26Chris Winterbauer?

  And it doesn't even look that much like DDL in that particular photo. Like, it could be a stunt double running towards the camera.

• 3:33Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a little blurry.

• 3:34Chris Winterbauer?

  It is a little blurry. There are certain images from the film, specifically the third act, on the cliffs, that remained with me for the 20 years between when I had last seen this movie and watching it this time. And they really made an impression because I thought, wow, that is the exact image of Wes Studi and Chingat Cook standing on the cliff, looking at one another in silhouette, or Alice, spoilers, taking a tumble.

• 3:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 4:00Chris Winterbauer?

  So there was a lot of, there's a lot of poetic imagery in this movie that had stuck with me and made an impression. Here's what I will say, and I've watched a couple other Michael Mann films this month, including Heat and his first film Thief. What I really love about this movie, and I think it's true of movie making of the time, as well as Michael Mann in general, is that They don't slow down. They don't really spend a lot of time explaining things to you. They drop you in a situation. They say, "Things are a little politically messy here. Things are complicated. It's not as straightforward as you might imagine. There are complicated allegiances and motivations." And they trust that the audience will keep up. And the audience does keep up. And it's really fun to watch. And it is not like so many movies made today, which I think executives are afraid that because folks are on their phones,

• 4:45Chris Winterbauer?

  you know, they might miss something and therefore we need to spell it out. And this movie does not do that. And as a result, I think it has a somewhat of a maturity to it that maybe other films set in this time period lack. I also think it does some really interesting things. Yes, DDL, as we will call him.

• 5:03Lizzie Bassett?

  His name's too long.

• 5:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Brazilian Dretliff. Daniel Day-Lewis is the main character, but I think the movie moves him away from the center of focus at really interesting moments.

• 5:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 5:13Chris Winterbauer?

  And, you know, compare it to something like The Last Samurai, where it's really implied that Tom Cruise is the last Samurai in that movie. And this movie specifically, DDL is not the last of the Mohicans.

• 5:25Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 5:26Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, his father is. And so I think this movie is actually like very sweeping, very poetic. I thoroughly enjoyed the rewatch. And I will beg whoever owns the rights to this, for the love of God, please restore it and do like a high-definition 4K release, because that's-

• 5:47Lizzie Bassett?

  It's gorgeous. Yeah.

• 5:49Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a beautiful film, and the transfer is terrible.

• 5:51Lizzie Bassett?

  It's bad.

• 5:53Chris Winterbauer?

  It looks terrible.

• 5:53Lizzie Bassett?

  There's so many shots that are like, that looks like strange, slow motion. And that has to be something, yeah, it definitely deserves a restoration, because it's gorgeous and it-

• 6:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I watched Heat, I watched the 4K Blu-ray of Heat, and I watched the 4K Blu-ray of Thief. And those movies look incredible in their restoration. I mean Thief made 13 years, 12, 13 years before this. They look incredible. This movie's locations and cinematography and production design are all incredible. And the transfer, this version does a disservice to all involved, in my opinion.

• 6:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Especially because the colors in this are so beautiful and the cinematography is just insane. And I would love to see it a little bit more clearly.

• 6:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Also, Badeline Stowe, one of my faves of the 90s. I forgot about her.

• 6:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 6:43Chris Winterbauer?

  She was also 12 Monkeys. She's great in 12 Monkeys. And also, whatever they style her in this movie, great job. She looks amazing. She's beautiful.

• 6:53Lizzie Bassett?

  She's very beautiful.

• 6:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Stunning.

• 6:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, we're not even gonna have a lot of time to get to this, but she really appreciated the way that Michael Mann shot her. And he spent a ton of time just like staring at her face. Like, she would just have to stand there for three hours while Michael Mann like...

• 7:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 7:08Lizzie Bassett?

  She's gorgeous.

• 7:09Chris Winterbauer?

  It really, I think it's some of the best she's ever looked on screen. He does such a good job.

• 7:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, she's very, very beautiful. Well, I have a bit of a different experience than you with this movie, which is that I did grow up with it. My parents loved this movie. I watched it many times and I always really, really enjoyed it. I always had the feeling that it was a more mature, more advanced point of view on this period of history. I'm pleased to say upon re-watch, I think that's true. I think it very much holds up, and we will get into all of the reasons why today. It was an extremely troubled production. The thing that has really sort of disturbed me a bit about researching

• 7:52Lizzie Bassett?

  this is that what's in front of the camera is so nuanced and beautiful and truly stunning and very human. And then I think the experience behind the camera was something far more negative for a lot of the people that were involved in this film. So also, Chris, I did not intentionally position this episode at the top of November, of course, Thanksgiving month, but I'm actually very, very glad that we are covering it because we're gonna get a chance to talk about Native American representation in film in general. We're gonna talk about some truly fantastic Native actors, and you've already alluded to it, but another landmark film of the early 90s that set the stage for this one.

• 8:33Lizzie Bassett?

  And I think we're also gonna discover how even the best intentions can miss the forest for the trees, and why what's happening behind the camera matters just as much, if not more, than the story that you're capturing on film. So, Chris, you've watched some Michael Mann this month, as you mentioned. There's, there's one major outlier in Michael Mann's filmography. What would you say it is?

• 8:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, I would say it's The Keep.

• 8:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, okay.

• 8:58Chris Winterbauer?

  From 1983.

• 8:59Lizzie Bassett?

  I go more with this.

• 9:01Chris Winterbauer?

  So The Keep is supernatural. So everything else he does is based in our world. The Keep is the only supernatural films.

• 9:07Lizzie Bassett?

  It's horror.

• 9:08Chris Winterbauer?

  It's horror. Yeah, it's Nazi supernatural.

• 9:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Outside of Nazi supernatural.

• 9:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Outside of that, it would be The Last of the Mohicans. Like, if you think about Michael Mann, you think sweeping crime.

• 9:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 9:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Epics, everything from Thief, Manhunter, Heat, Miami Vice, Collateral.

• 9:25Lizzie Bassett?

  The Insider.

• 9:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Public Enemies. Yes, The Insider does have a criminal element to it, even though it's a whistleblower story.

• 9:30Lizzie Bassett?

  I actually love that movie, but yes.

• 9:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's a beautiful movie. But yeah, definitely, Last of the Mohicans, had I not known about The Keep, definitely would be The Outlier. But when you watch it, I think there's this verisimilitude and attention to detail that feels very in keeping with Michael Mann's other movies. So I think upon watching it, it feels very much like a Michael Mann movie.

• 9:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Man, oh, man, does he love details, as we're gonna get into. So, as always, here are the basics. The Last of the Mohicans is directed by Michael Mann. It is written by Michael Mann and Christopher Crowe, however, based on the novel by James Fenimore Cooper and the 1936 screenplay by Philip Dunn. I also watched the 1936 version. It stars Daniel Day Lewis, Russell Means, Wes Studi, Madeline Stowe, Jodie May, Stephen Waddington, Eric Schweig, and many, many more, including a very fun cameo early on. Did you notice who the super bitchy British officer?

• 10:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Jerry Harris.

• 10:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 10:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 10:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Just.

• 10:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Jerry Harris.

• 10:33Lizzie Bassett?

  That's one other thing I have to call out about this movie. I love how bitchy all the British people are. They are just.

• 10:39Chris Winterbauer?

  So bitchy.

• 10:39Lizzie Bassett?

  They're so bitchy.

• 10:41Chris Winterbauer?

  And the French are so dastardly. It's like, everything's... I will say, such nuance taken, well, perhaps relative to other films, to the colonists and the Native Americans, but then the British and the French are just the biggest stereotypes.

• 10:55Lizzie Bassett?

  I know. The British, "Never have I seen the crown bound."

• 10:59Chris Winterbauer?

  And the French is like, "Oh, it should something happen to them."

• 11:03Lizzie Bassett?

  "I cannot trust that they will not fight the same men again."

• 11:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 11:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, the French general is very funny, very mustache-twirly, even with a lack of mustache. All right. As always, the IMDb logline is, "Three Mohican trappers agree to protect the daughters of a British Colonel in the midst of the French and Indian War." Okay, let's get into it. So since this is our first time covering Michael Mann, and again, we are covering Heat next week, let's talk a little bit about Michael Mann's upbringing. So he was born in 1943 in Chicago to, I believe, a Ukrainian, although a lot of places will list, Russian father who fled the Russian Revolution as a child and a local Chicago mom. He grew up on the pretty rough streets of Chicago.

• 11:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Eventually, his father was forced out of business. They had kind of a tough upbringing. And when he was a little kid, maybe three or four years old, he watched the 1936 version of The Last of the Mohicans in a church basement. And he says that's one of the first films that really made a deep impression on him. In Projections, a forum for filmmakers, he explained that, quote, "I couldn't identify what was so fascinating then, but I can now. It's the combination of three discreet and very exciting cultures in the same motion picture, which happens to be a tightly plotted war movie." What do you think those three cultures are?

• 12:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Native American, English, and the nascent, not yet known as American, American culture?

• 12:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Exactly. You've got the settlers, you've got the Native Americans, who've obviously been there forever, and you've got the Brits, who just don't understand any of it.

• 12:44Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right.

• 12:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Not a thing, who are marching into the woods in bright red coats.

• 12:50Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. I just, look, I am not an innovative person, and I am not suggesting that I would have figured out that perhaps transposing that fighting style wouldn't work.

• 13:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, how many times are you all gonna get murdered before you stop doing it?

• 13:05Chris Winterbauer?

  It's just, oh my goodness, the guerrilla war fighting tactics. It would seem obvious after the ninth ambush, in which you're like, we look like bullseyes, walking through.

• 13:15Lizzie Bassett?

  You look like bullseyes, and they're all like waiting to fire. But I have to say, the battle sequences in this, I think, are fantastic. They're some of the things that hold up the best about this movie, to me.

• 13:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, especially the midpoint Fort Siege is really pretty grand.

• 13:29Lizzie Bassett?

  The Fort Siege is great, and I love, I think it's the second ambush.

• 13:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, the second ambush, towards the end of Act Two.

• 13:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. It's really disturbing. What I love about it is like, he does not go in the Braveheart direction of like, everything being very grand and epic and exciting. Instead, it's like... Kind of weird the way it starts and you almost can't tell what's happening.

• 13:52Chris Winterbauer?

  It's confusing.

• 13:52Lizzie Bassett?

  It's confusing, which I think is exactly what it would have been like and it makes it so much scarier as a viewer to watch that. So he goes to the University of Wisconsin Madison in the 60s and he sees Doctor Strangelove. And he is absolutely blown away by the ability to make what he considers a very artistic film that also has mass appeal to audiences. In the late 60s, he moved to London and he earned an Emmy from the London Film School. So he began his career very early on, working in commercials and advertising. He moved back to Chicago in the early 70s and then he moves to Los Angeles and he starts churning out scripts for massive TV series like Starsky and Hutch and Police Story.

• 14:35Lizzie Bassett?

  So in the late 70s, he was approached by ABC to co-write a made-for-TV movie called The Jericho Mile. And this is about a prison inmate who starts training for the Olympics. But Michael Mann is like, I will only write this if I can also direct it. So it essentially becomes his directorial debut. It was shot on location at Folsom Prison. It used real inmates as extras and in speaking roles and it was so good that within three days of airing, he had received 22 offers to make his next feature. It also earned him an Emmy. So that helps him secure funding for his first theatrical feature, which you've already mentioned. What is it, Chris?

• 15:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Thief starring James Caan.

• 15:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Which I believe was a pretty decent commercial and critical success.

• 15:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, and it was, um, it was based on a book called The Home Invaders by John Seabolder. I think he wrote it under a pseudonym, Frank Hoheimer. And even at the time, I think it was really noted for being a really grounded, somewhat plausible, realistic approach to portraying what it is like to be one of these cat burglars. James Caan is basically a diamond thief in Chicago, operating out of Chicago back in the 1960s, you know, 1970s. Certainly not like a, a sort of exaggerated Ocean's Eleven-style heist film, much more contained.

• 15:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. So he followed that up with, you've already mentioned it, a brief supernatural horror detour, The Keep, which was not a commercial success at all. It was a pretty big bomb. So he returned to TV and then from 84 to 89, he produced what, Chris?

• 16:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Miami Vice.

• 16:14Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 16:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Starring half the cast of The Sopranos. Well, interested, you can watch the Sopranos version of their credits with the credits from Miami Vice.

• 16:26Lizzie Bassett?

  That's so funny. Well, Miami Vice, obviously huge hit, absolutely shot a lightning bolt through primetime TV and Michael Mann is now, you know, a massive small screen superstar. 1986, he directed Manhunter, which I love.

• 16:42Chris Winterbauer?

  It's great.

• 16:43Lizzie Bassett?

  We talked about it a little bit, I believe in our Silence of the Lambs episode. If anybody doesn't know, this is the first Hannibal Lecter movie. It's also pretty strongly recognized now as a precursor to most of our modern serial killer movies and the way that they're made. Not a huge, huge hit, but I think critically it was, you know, people really enjoyed it and it has become a big hit over time. So by the early 90s, he also, however, had a reputation as a pretty uncompromising perfectionist, not unlike the man who had inspired him, Stanley Kubrick. So here's a fun example from Miami Vice. Michael Mann insisted on approving every single T-shirt color.

• 17:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Every episode required at least 75 costumes, including multiple for stuntmen and to account for the action, weather and sweat. And he wanted to see every single one. And I know we'll get to more in Heat.

• 17:38Chris Winterbauer?

  And you know what? That's how you get moments like in Heat, when that first bomb goes off on the armored car and all of the glass shatters on all of the cars nearby from the concussive impact. Like, it sounds like it would be miserable

• 17:55Chris Winterbauer?

  counting out the T-shirts. As an audience member, I am grateful.

• 17:59Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. Okay. So we just talked about this at the top, but Last of the Mohicans does not really feel like a natural follow-up to any of the movies or TV shows that we just mentioned. So when asked about this in an interview, the interviewer is like, he says, This is obviously a very different kind of film for you. Apart from The Keep, which is set in the Second World War, you've made a crime melodrama, a highly stylized serial killer thriller, and been responsible for an entire subgenre of intensely modern drug-related TV police dramas. Has Last of the Mohicans required you to make a major adjustment in terms of your aesthetic as a filmmaker? What do you think Michael Mann said?

• 18:38Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 18:39Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 18:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 18:42Lizzie Bassett?

  No. He said, "It's just an accident that most of the other films I've done have been in that genre." Okay, Mike.

• 18:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, you know, or I'm sure it's also opportunity. I have no, I don't know the circumstances under which Red Dragon came across his desk, but it might make sense that that was brought to him based on Thief and Miami Vice, et cetera.

• 19:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course.

• 19:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Miami Vice led to Crime Story, et cetera. So a snowball going downhill gathers speed and mass.

• 19:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Doesn't necessarily hit the French and Indian War.

• 19:13Chris Winterbauer?

  It does not.

• 19:18Lizzie Bassett?

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• 20:27Lizzie Bassett?

  So in 1989, though, he goes ahead and acquires the rights to Philip Dunn's 1936 Last of the Mohicans screenplay. So why do you think he would acquire the rights to the 1936 screenplay versus the novel?

• 20:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, if he likes the structure of the original screenplay, just option the screenplay and then remake it.

• 20:50Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. It's because everyone pretty much agrees that the novel just kinda sucks.

• 20:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 20:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Everyone's like, it's pretty bad.

• 20:58Chris Winterbauer?

  And even if it doesn't suck, if somebody already took the time to trim a novel down to size for you and it works, why reinvent the wheel?

• 21:07Lizzie Bassett?

  I think that's what he figured. And I watched it, by the way, for this. You know, it does put into perspective what a massive breakthrough both Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz were just three years later in 1939. There's-

• 21:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, that's interesting. Just from even like a technical perspective?

• 21:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, big time. It feels very dated. I can understand why, as a little kid, it would be very exciting. There are some pretty funny shots of wildlife where it's like, you know, everything is on a soundstage except for they cut to the only shot they could get of a beaver and the beaver's like half submerged and splashing around. But it is pretty beautiful. There were some interesting things about it. I actually thought that the women in it had more agency than I think you would expect for the time. There's a lot of holdovers from silent movies where they're still, you know, putting up the cards. You're having to read a lot of information. They definitely think their audience knows history a hell of a lot more than I did. Because there was one card at the beginning

• 22:04Lizzie Bassett?

  that was like, "Here in the Crown's royal court, the great commoner William something something visits the ca-" I was like, "Who? Somebody's gonna need to explain this." And they don't. It immediately starts from the British perspective. It stays very heavily in the British perspective. In fact, Hawkeye at the end actually joins the British Army. So definitely a different, different experience.

• 22:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, interesting.

• 22:30Lizzie Bassett?

  So, let's talk a little bit about the novel. It was written in 1826 by James Fenimore Cooper as part of his Leather Stocking Tales series. And this series of novels forms a saga of 18th century life on the New York frontier, describing interactions between Native Americans and white pioneers through the adventures of the main character. And Chris, here's where we get to one of the first problems with the novel. The main character's name is Nathaniel, yes, but he goes by Natty Bumpo.

• 23:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, Natty Bumpo. Cause he's got that Natty Bumpo.

• 23:07Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know why. I don't know why. I'm gonna have to change that. So he does take on other names throughout the series, including Hawkeye, which I think for obvious reasons is what they choose for both the 1936 version and this.

• 23:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Michael Mann just flipped a coin and it was Hawkeye.

• 23:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Not anything but Natty Bumpo. So Cooper was one of the first authors to really write like this about frontier life. And he is in the process heavily romanticizing and even advocating for early American colonialism. The books were a big success commercially, but critically, they drew some pretty big complaints, in particular from professional insult comic Mark Twain, who had some choice words for Cooper in his essay titled Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses. He wrote a whole paper on how much James Fenimore Cooper sucks at writing. So here's what Mark Twain had to say. Cooper's word sense was singularly dull. In the restricted space

• 24:06Lizzie Bassett?

  of two thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. If Cooper had any real knowledge of nature's ways of doing things, he had a most delicate art in concealing the fact. And a work of art, it has no invention, it has no order, system, sequence, or result. It has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality. Its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words, they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are. Its humor is pathetic, its pathos is funny, its conversations are, oh, indescribable.

• 24:39Chris Winterbauer?

  So basically, he's 19th century Dan Brown, is what we're starting to.

• 24:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Except not as fun. He's like boring.

• 24:45Chris Winterbauer?

  No, well, Dan Brown's very fun, but wildly commercially successful.

• 24:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 24:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Critically, people like to pile on.

• 24:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 24:53Chris Winterbauer?

  But, you know, we're chasing down, what is he trying to find? The spear that, I don't remember.

• 24:58Lizzie Bassett?

  It's the Holy Grail. Is it the Holy Grail? Or like the shroud, like a shroud of Turin or something?

• 25:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Ron Howard made at least two of those movies.

• 25:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:07Chris Winterbauer?

  I can't remember if he made a third. That is wild.

• 25:10Lizzie Bassett?

  All right. So Michael Mann essentially agreed with Mark Twain and acknowledged that, quote, "It's not a very good book." But one of his biggest issues with it, other than it being dull, poorly written, and clumsy, is how it had contributed to some pretty damaging misconceptions about Native Americans. So Michael Mann said, quote, "One of the first big realizations I had in my research was the extent to which James Fenimore Cooper, to add insult to injury, appropriated and discarded the entire history of the northeastern woodlands of American Indians. What he took away was their power. If you're living on the frontier in 1757, the Mohawks were your rich neighbors. They were not a group of man servants."

• 25:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Which is a really, that's something I think that this movie does so well that I had not seen prior to this, and maybe even since, is that it truly shows the Native Americans, and particularly the settlers, as kind of economic equals, if not the settlers in a lower position in many scenarios.

• 26:05Chris Winterbauer?

  I was gonna say, it may be lower and economically more interdependent.

• 26:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 26:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Too, in an important way.

• 26:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Which would have been the case, for sure.

• 26:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 26:16Lizzie Bassett?

  So there's a pretty obvious reason for Fenimore Cooper wanting to paint this picture. According to Mann, it's because Fenimore Cooper had massive real estate holdings when he wrote the book, and the novel is basically a justification for a massive land grab. There's also no romance in it, so there's no, like, sexy DDL running towards the camera with his shirt on sometimes and shirt off sometimes. Some of the cuts in this movie are crazy. That's fine. One other interesting difference is that Cora is actually mixed race in the books and is illegitimate.

• 26:49Chris Winterbauer?

  That is a big difference.

• 26:50Lizzie Bassett?

  I know. And I wonder why neither of them wanted to deal with that. Maybe it's because it would make the romance angle more complicated? I don't know. The romance angle already doesn't make a ton of sense.

• 27:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Here's my pitch as to why. So I think that man is very focused on drawing a contrast between West Studi's Magua and Hawkeye.

• 27:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Magua, as the British officers would say.

• 27:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, but Magua is the inverse, right? He's the foil. His family was murdered and then he was taken into slavery. De Lewis's family was murdered and then he was adopted. One is defined by the hatred and to be fair to Magua's character, it happened much later and it included the death of his children.

• 27:37Lizzie Bassett?

  And his wife remarriings. Yeah.

• 27:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, and one is not defined by the hatred and said kind of has this almost Buddhist like quality of letting it pass through him as, you know, when DDL explains this to Stowe and she kind of falls in love with him. And I just think that man is so focused on pitting these two orphans, like philosophically against each other, that I do think that if Stowe's character Cora had been mixed race, she would, that would have been a third element of like kind of an orphan child. And maybe he just didn't want to deal with that thematically.

• 28:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, and I think also like realistically, I don't know how much he's reading the book. I think he's going pretty heavily off of the 1936.

• 28:15Chris Winterbauer?

  It's Paul Verhoeven, Starship Troopers. This is bad. I'm not gonna finish it.

• 28:20Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know if anybody finished it. There were a couple of actors who were like, yeah, I put it down. It was not good. It was not good. So as we said, he's pulling much more generously from Philip Dunn's 1936 adaptation. And couple of quick things about that movie that are different. Again, Chingotchgook and Uncas and Natty Bumpo, if you will, all still rescue Cora, Alice and Major Hayward and accompany them to the fort and their father. Nathaniel still helps the settlers escape. All of that is pretty much the same. The big difference is that Uncas actually falls for Cora and Nathaniel for Alice. And Alice is much more the lead than Cora is. It's also Cora that leaps to her death after Uncas dies. And there's a little bit more of a convoluted plot around Hayward offering to be burned at the stake,

• 29:03Lizzie Bassett?

  where I believe neither he nor Nathaniel actually end up dying.

• 29:07Chris Winterbauer?

  So they kind of just reverse the sisters.

• 29:09Lizzie Bassett?

  They do. They almost completely reverse the sisters. I'm not really sure why. And of course Nathaniel does the right thing for King and Country at the end and joins the British Army.

• 29:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Does not make any sense. So Mann's biggest goal in tackling this script was to fix what he felt Cooper had broken. He wanted to be as historically accurate as possible and to portray Native Americans as sympathetic and also as actual human beings.

• 29:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, I think also complex and also different.

• 29:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 29:39Chris Winterbauer?

  They were not a monolith, right?

• 29:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Exactly.

• 29:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Some of them were allied with the French, some were allied with the British, some were not allied with anyone like.

• 29:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 29:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Again, these are different groups of people with different motives.

• 29:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. And I think this is one of very few movies that does a pretty good job of exploring that. So he started working on the screenplay with Christopher Crow, who would go on to write one of my favorite 90s thrillers, Fear.

• 30:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Starring William Peterson of Manhunter.

• 30:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, of Manhunter, that's right. But immediately they had some major challenges in front of them. First of all, they have to please historians while also making fans of the very historically inaccurate book happy. They have to weave in a love story that's central to the plot between Nathaniel and Cora, even though it's not in the book. Also not really in the 1936 movie, as we discussed, the sisters are switched in that and it's a very different dynamic. And they have to come up with historically accurate dialogue in historically accurate languages. So this is probably the hardest challenge that they had because many of the languages spoken at this time, I believe it's 1757 is the beginning of the movie. They were either gone by 1992 or had very few native speakers.

• 30:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Some of them are the way that you would think of Latin, like they may be getting still taught in schools, but almost no one is actually speaking them. And according to Wendy Murray, Mann's assistant, the actors playing Mohicans were actually speaking Muncie Delaware, which was one of the closest remaining dialects with many other extras just speaking their own languages. Wes Studi actually ends up speaking mostly Mohawk, but did eventually revert to Cherokee, which is his native language. So Mann did extensive research while co-writing the script, including watching the French and Indian War film Northwest Passage and John Ford's Drums Along the Mohawk. He studied Depression era photographs by Dorothea Lange. Those are very famous. If you've ever seen photos of, you know, people in the Dust Bowl, she took those, they're very beautiful.

• 31:27Lizzie Bassett?

  He wanted to understand sort of the struggles and determination of regular people during a time of hardship and also see what it looked like. And also a lot of 19th century landscape painters like Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Cole. And I have to say, there are so many shots in this movie that look like a painting, particularly that one where the carriage is going across the bridge. It's just stunning. Andy wanted to really meticulously research the look of the various tribes to make sure that, to your point, they are differentiating between the different tribes of Native Americans and that they're as accurate as they possibly can be. So he'd put in the work. He had a pretty great script, who's very happy with, and he's ready to take it to what went wrong

• 32:09Lizzie Bassett?

  alum and live show star Joe Roth at 20th Century Fox.

• 32:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, that's fun.

• 32:17Lizzie Bassett?

  He's back. He's back to cause some problems. So, all right. Mann's put together this great pitch where he emphasizes the contemporary relevance of the film. There's early feminism, there's class struggles, you know, the commercial motivation for the war. He's like, it's not unlike the Gulf War. You know, this war was being fought over the fur trade. The Gulf War is being fought over oil. And he tells Roth and his co VP Roger Bernbaum that this is going to be vivid, it's going to be realistic, and it's going to be historically accurate because he feels an enormous responsibility to get this right. Now, knowing what you know about Joe Roth, what do you think he and Roger Bernbaum said?

• 32:56Chris Winterbauer?

  He says, do we care about that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Uh huh. Sure, Mike. Whatever you say. Take your green light. Yeah, okay. Like, I care about historical accuracy, you know?

• 33:06Lizzie Bassett?

  So why do you think he greenlit this so fast for something that sounds very, very expensive with a director who is notoriously difficult and detail attentive?

• 33:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, because if I'm getting my timeline correct, one of Hollywood's most difficult, prickly, leading men slash directors just turned in a movie that everybody thought would fail, no studio backed, and so was financed independently for $22 million and made $400 million? I can't even remember. It was crazy.

• 33:39Lizzie Bassett?

  It's $425 million worldwide. What was it?

• 33:42Chris Winterbauer?

  And that would be Bailar con Lobos, Dances with Wolves.

• 33:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Kevin Costner, of course, and it was not just a runaway commercial success. This movie cleaned up at the Oscars.

• 33:55Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 33:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Costner was already an A-list superstar as an actor. All of the sudden, he was one of the most in-demand prestige directors in Hollywood as well.

• 34:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. So this movie, to your point, was an absolute anomaly. It is a pretty slow-moving, historical, three-hour-long blockbuster that, to your point, no one wanted to make. It won seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, came out in 1990, and it grossed, as we said, almost $425 million worldwide. So I rewatched Dances with Wolves for this episode, and I don't want to spend too much time on it because we will absolutely cover it because there's a lot, and I'm excited to do that. But we do need to talk about it a little bit because it's going to come up a couple of times across this episode. So before we get into Dances with Wolves a little bit more,

• 34:47Lizzie Bassett?

  let's really roll the clock back and talk about how Hollywood had, up to this point, portrayed Native Americans on film. Chris, any ideas of Native American portrayal? Was it, was it great? Was it super accurate? Was it?

• 35:02Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm going to assume, I'm going to assume Hollywood patted itself on the back every time they cast a Native American in the movie, but I'm assuming it wasn't great. I'm assuming, you know, I'm just thinking back to a movie my daughter just watched recently, Peter Pan.

• 35:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 35:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Cartoon.

• 35:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 35:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Not a great representation of Native Americans. No, so I'm assuming it wasn't great. One thing that's interesting is I did read that very, very, very, very early on, I'm talking late 19th century, early 20th century, in New York, when film was just starting, the original westerns, which were shot in upstate and western New York, actually did not, it's not like they were trying to be sensitive to Native Americans, but they were trying to go for a more documentary style in presenting Native Americans. And I've actually heard that those movies were better done. And then it, things slowly got worse and worse until John Wayne.

• 35:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 35:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Things get real bad.

• 35:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. So the early sort of big commercial westerns like Stagecoach offered essentially zero native perspective. I think what happens is they just stop even bothering trying to include them as characters at all. They're kind of just set pieces. They're usually like set pieces for the action or you know, something terrible happening to the white characters. They were also almost always not played by actual Native Americans. That is true of the 1936 Last of the Mohicans. Those are some very white Italian men in makeup.

• 36:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Right, or like Italian or Hispanic or you know, there's any number of-

• 36:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Or just straight up the waspiest man you've ever seen.

• 36:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. Jared Harris.

• 36:38Lizzie Bassett?

  They would, yeah, they don't, they didn't care. Movies like John Ford's The Searchers, which of course did star John Wayne, really solidified natives on film as basically just very scary antagonists and not a whole lot more. In the 50s and early 60s, you do start to see some effort being made to portray natives as more than just savages. There's films like Jimmy Stewart's Broken Arrow. Actually, John Ford made a film as sort of an apology for the movies he'd made earlier. It's called Cheyenne Autumn. It did not do very well. But the indigenous people in these movies are still almost exclusively played by non-native actors. Across the 70s, you do start to see a bigger shift where there are some actual native actors appearing in more complex roles. But the progress is pretty uneven.

• 37:22Lizzie Bassett?

  And again, pretty much all of these movies are anchored by the white characters. So like an example of that would be like Little Big Man starring Dustin Hoffman.

• 37:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm, right.

• 37:30Lizzie Bassett?

  You also, very famously in 1973, Chris, what happened at the Oscars?

• 37:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, that's when Marlon Brando sent Sachin Littlefeather to collect his Oscar. And John Wayne said, uh, I'm gonna knock her out.

• 37:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, this is nuts. This is nuts. So we talked about this a little bit in the episode on The Godfather. Marlon Brando sent Sashin Littlefeather to the Oscars to collect his Oscar, as Chris said. And she was there to speak about specifically the portrayal of Native Americans on film. That was Marlon Brando's goal with this. John Wayne lost his goddamn mind. He was backstage and he tried to physically remove her from the stage. He had to be held back by six security guards. This is confirmed by multiple people who were back there. He was literally gonna go out there and physically assault this woman for receiving the Oscar and speaking very briefly about Native American representation on film.

• 38:29Lizzie Bassett?

  So in case you don't know, John Wayne was an out and out racist towards both black people and Native Americans. And this is not conjecture. This is not like, you know, revisionist, snowflake history. This is the stuff that came out of his own damn mouth, particularly in a 1971 Playboy interview. He saw nothing wrong with the way that America was settled and he chalked it up to, quote, "There were great numbers of people who needed new land and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves." So that's John Wayne.

• 38:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Now they're trying to take our Oscars.

• 38:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Literally what he was mad about.

• 39:03Chris Winterbauer?

  We're gonna cover this movie at some point. There's this movie called The Conqueror. John Wayne plays Genghis Khan.

• 39:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh god, no.

• 39:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, well, we gotta cover it because it's crazy. That movie was shot in a nuclear testing zone. And it's surmised that many involved developed cancer as a result of the hubris of deciding to shoot that movie, terrible movie, there.

• 39:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Somehow John Wayne just got angrier.

• 39:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, it turned him into the Hulk.

• 39:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I guess. So in the eighties, we talked about this a little bit, but you basically have the commercial death of the Western.

• 39:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Outside of Clint Eastwood, there's not, not much going on.

• 39:41Lizzie Bassett?

  No, and even then, those were not his most popular Westerns. So when Dances with Wolves came out in 1990, it was, for many, a watershed moment. Couple of big things about this. Almost all of the leads outside of Coster are native actors. And there's some wonderful actors in this. Graham Greene is fantastic, Tantin Cardinal, Rodney Grant. They're all really great. And they're also speaking Lakota with subtitles, which was kind of unheard of for the amount of this movie that's not in English. It also reverts the original stereotypes and casts almost all of the antagonists as white men, except for one, which we'll get to a little later because he appears in both movies. And most importantly to Joe Roth and Roger Bernbaum, it made an absolute crap ton of money. So that is why they greenlit it.

• 40:26Lizzie Bassett?

  And that's not going to be the end of Dances with Wolves. We're going to come back to it for a little bit more of a critical conversation.

• 40:39Lizzie Bassett?

  All right. So Michael Mann has the green light and he needs his natty bumpo, thankfully now Nathaniel Hawkeye.

• 40:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 40:45Lizzie Bassett?

  And Chris, he only had one person in mind and it was Daniel Day-Lewis, to which the studio said, who?

• 40:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Right, yeah.

• 40:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Say, hmm, what? According to Michael Mann, they actually said, quote, "You mean that skinny guy? That short, skinny guy in a wheelchair?" Now, Chris, what role are they referring to?

• 41:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Was that My Left Foot from 1989?

• 41:05Lizzie Bassett?

  That is right. That's Daniel Day-Lewis's breakthrough and Oscar-winning role as Christie Brown in My Left Foot.

• 41:12Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right.

• 41:12Lizzie Bassett?

  But even though he'd won an Oscar, he was considered a critical draw, but not a commercial box office draw, especially because he doesn't look like himself.

• 41:21Chris Winterbauer?

  No, he doesn't yet. It's, and it's like A Room with a View.

• 41:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, My Beautiful Landrat.

• 41:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, My Left Foot. Yeah. And he was so committed to these performances, he did a lot of stage work, you know what I mean? But he would disappear into the roles.

• 41:37Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 41:38Chris Winterbauer?

  This is not...

• 41:38Lizzie Bassett?

  He's hard to recognize as himself, for sure, especially across the early roles.

• 41:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. This, candidly, and I love Harrison Ford, but Harrison Ford brings Harrison Ford to the movie.

• 41:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's like George Clooney.

• 41:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Daniel Day-Lewis embodies the character more.

• 41:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 41:52Chris Winterbauer?

  And it's easier to market Harrison Ford if you're a studio.

• 41:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. But there was another problem, which is that Daniel Day-Lewis was emotionally and physically exhausted after My Left Foot, because it was during this film that he discovered the way that he really liked to work, which was-

• 42:07Chris Winterbauer?

  He decided to be a foot for the whole movie.

• 42:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Hard, really hard.

• 42:11Chris Winterbauer?

  I know, yeah.

• 42:12Lizzie Bassett?

  So he refused to do anything the character wouldn't do during filming, and the character had severe cerebral palsy, which meant production staff had to carry him around, feed him, and lift him across the lighting cables every day in order to reach the set.

• 42:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Sounds like someone didn't want to work. Just saying. I'm just kidding. Bad joke.

• 42:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, so, you know, people are like, oh, my God, that sounds exhausting. It sounds so restrictive. And Daniel Day Lewis is like, no, it's actually the opposite. He said that the reason he does this is because he wants to be so immersed in the character and it would be so much harder for him to be jumping in and out of the character that that would drain him more than just staying in it. Not for me, but you do you, Daniel. I get it.

• 42:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I think it's person, you know, the, the famous example in contrast, Edie Falco has said, with The Sopranos, she could show up to set, get in hair and makeup. They would hand her a script. She could, I mean, I don't think she did this all the time, but she could learn her dialogue while in hair and makeup, go perform the scene, go home and not think about it anymore. I mean, she's

• 43:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 43:10Chris Winterbauer?

  ridiculously talented. And James Gandolfini had to live in Tony Soprano.

• 43:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 43:16Chris Winterbauer?

  And, you know, there was a darkness to that.

• 43:19Lizzie Bassett?

  I think it does. It, it takes a toll on you when you're doing that.

• 43:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:23Lizzie Bassett?

  So a little bit about Daniel Day Lewis. He was born in London to a British mother and Irish father, but they were not exactly regular peasants, Chris. His maternal grandfather was Sir Michael Balkin, who headed up Ealing Studios. And his father became the UK poet laureate when Lewis was 11 years old. But when he was young, his father insisted that he attend a working class Southeast London school with some rough and tumble kids. So he got, he got a taste of a different life, although he would later attend some prep schools. His father sadly died when he was 15, leaving Lewis with some serious regret about the fact that, quote, "When he died, I hadn't achieved anything at that time to give him any pleasure. When things go well for me, I often think about that." He joined the National Youth Theatre and seemed to be heading towards a career in

• 44:08Lizzie Bassett?

  acting, except there was one other thing that he loved just as much as acting. Do you know what it was, Chris?

• 44:14Chris Winterbauer?

  I know he became a shoemaker at some point, but I don't know.

• 44:17Lizzie Bassett?

  But it is.

• 44:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 44:18Lizzie Bassett?

  It's cabinet making.

• 44:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, so he's Harrison Ford. So the same person, because that's what Ford did, you know, before.

• 44:26Lizzie Bassett?

  He was a carpenter.

• 44:27Chris Winterbauer?

  He was a carpenter, yeah.

• 44:28Lizzie Bassett?

  But did he love it as much as Daniel J. Lewis loved it? I don't know, because Daniel J. Lewis wants to be the best at everything he does. So he applied for an apprenticeship with a cabinetmaker, but he was actually turned down for it. And instead, he was accepted at the Bristol Old Vic Theater School, and the rest is history. So as you said, he broke out in the UK in the mid 80s with A Room with a View and My Beautiful Laundrette, which like, I don't know how big an impact those made in the US.

• 44:53Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't think they made a big impact at all in the US. From a studio perspective, critically, I'm sure they did well.

• 45:00Lizzie Bassett?

  He also played Hamlet onstage in 1989 at the National Theater, and he famously left the run early due to a bit of a breakdown. At the time, he said it was due to seeing the ghost of his father. He's since backed off that a little bit and said that he meant it metaphorically. But regardless, the experience was so traumatic that he has actually never returned to the stage, Chris, since 1989.

• 45:22Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, he also said he retired from acting, but when his son made his first movie.

• 45:27Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 45:27Chris Winterbauer?

  He unretired, and then he said.

• 45:29Lizzie Bassett?

  He's coming back.

• 45:30Chris Winterbauer?

  To his credit, he said, I shouldn't have said anything.

• 45:34Chris Winterbauer?

  I shouldn't have announced it. That was silly.

• 45:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, I love him.

• 45:37Chris Winterbauer?

  He's great.

• 45:38Lizzie Bassett?

  So all of this taken together paints a picture of a pretty intense guy and a potential liability in the studio's mind. And also, he was skeptical of the project. He said, "In rereading the script, I kept thinking, I cannot afford to be interested in this." But part of the attraction was that the first human sign you find in the script is a foot.

• 45:58Lizzie Bassett?

  So he's like, it's a sign.

• 46:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Michael, which foot is this exactly?

• 46:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh, it's definitely your left foot. Okay.

• 46:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 46:06Lizzie Bassett?

  So he eventually agreed, particularly because of the physicality required, and he really liked the opening elk hunt sequence. He was very into that. Now, there's another person that Michael Mann pursued for a lead role in the film right away. I notice I said person and not actor, because prior to this film, this person had never acted before. Chris, do you have any guesses as to who it is?

• 46:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Could you tell me which role?

• 46:27Lizzie Bassett?

  It is one of the leads.

• 46:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Had Eric Schreig never acted before?

• 46:31Lizzie Bassett?

  No, he had.

• 46:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 46:32Lizzie Bassett?

  But you're very close.

• 46:34Chris Winterbauer?

  It was Russell Means?

• 46:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, it was Russell Means, who plays Chingotchkuk.

• 46:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Very good.

• 46:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, Uncle Nathaniel's father. Now, Means was a very well-known Ogallala Lakota activist. He was not an actor at all. In 1968, he joined the American Indian Movement, right as it was being founded, and he ended up becoming one of the organization's national and most prominent leaders. He was extremely influential, both for Native rights and also civil rights.

• 47:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:01Lizzie Bassett?

  He was present at a lot of protests, including the occupation of Alcatraz. Probably most famously, he was a spokesman and leader during the American Indian Movement's occupation of the town of Wounded Knee, opposite the FBI in 1973. Admittedly, I don't know enough about that. In researching it, I was like, they never taught me about this in school. I should probably look into this a little bit more.

• 47:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh.

• 47:21Lizzie Bassett?

  So Means was an early political hero to Michael Mann, and Mann felt like the qualities that he naturally embodied made him perfect for Chingotchkuk, despite literally zero acting experience. Unlike Daniel Day-Lewis, Russell Means did not take a whole lot of convincing, although he did actually have to audition a bunch, because everybody was like, I am not sure this man can act.

• 47:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm. I mean, it is a major character who has the final showdown with your antagonists, you know, in the end.

• 47:49Lizzie Bassett?

  I think it's actually really impressive, the performance that he turns in. It feels very natural and beautiful.

• 47:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 47:56Lizzie Bassett?

  So here's the thing. When he read the script, he was very, very happy with it, and he felt like the Native American characters were way more fully developed than he was used to seeing. But really, Chris, it seems like he took the role because of a movie we just talked about that came out in 1990. What was it?

• 48:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Dances with Wolves?

• 48:14Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. And Russell Means hated it.

• 48:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, interesting. Yeah, really didn't like it.

• 48:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Really didn't like it. So he referred to it as Lawrence of the Plains, which is a pretty intelligent play on Lawrence of Arabia.

• 48:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 48:28Lizzie Bassett?

  So he said, despite his good intentions, actor-director Kevin Costner utilized almost every known stereotype except the drunken Indian, even though the white man he plays eventually throws in his lot with the Indians, because they're so much more spiritual and decent. He said it was factually and historically inaccurate. There wasn't any character development of the Indian people. The Indians were interchangeable cardboard figures. I found it personally insulting. Also, I'm quoting him directly. You know, if I'm going to use the words that he uses, I know they may not be politically correct today, but just saying that now, I have no problem quoting him directly. So this is why I rewatched it. And I'm conflicted because I will say on the one hand, I actually really enjoyed it. As much shit as I've given Kevin Costner in this movie in the past, it's an incredibly

• 49:13Lizzie Bassett?

  well-made movie. And at three hours long, it's not boring at all. Made me cry a couple of times. However, I completely understand what Russell means is saying here. What do you remember about Dances with Wolves?

• 49:28Chris Winterbauer?

  To me, it feels a little closer to a Braveheart.

• 49:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 49:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Than this movie does. I think it's better than Braveheart.

• 49:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 49:35Chris Winterbauer?

  It's closer to Braveheart is my point. I think it's very entertaining, but it's also, you know, easy for me to say, yeah, I can project myself into that Kevin Costner.

• 49:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 49:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Protagonist roles because we share a couple of qualities and

• 49:52Chris Winterbauer?

  and I also, I agree, I think it's an incredible accomplishment. I think that movie for what it was made for, I mean,

• 49:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, it's insane.

• 49:59Chris Winterbauer?

  For like $20 million.

• 50:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 50:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. I think my guess, I don't know, I don't want to let Costner off the hook. When I watch it, it feels like a classic Costner movie in the sense that everything in the movie exists to serve Costner's character at the end of the day. And that includes the Native Americans, that includes the women, that includes the white antagonists, that includes everybody. And so it reminds me a little bit of when you discussed in Braveheart, how you felt how it was a bit of an equal opportunity caricature across the board, you know? Dances with Wolves feels similar to that to me.

• 50:36Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree. As wonderful as those native actors are, and they are, Graham Greene is particularly wonderful in this, and I think Rodney Grant is too. They don't have a lot of complexity. They don't have a lot of development. They have almost none. And also the way that the two white leads end up taking on the Sioux culture is handled by pretty ham-fistedly. Their haircuts are insane, but it was 1990, so I guess it's fine for them to have hairspray windswept mullets. I don't know. But yeah, it's an interesting movie that I think we should cover and we should talk about in more detail because, you know, Russell Means is right. At the same time, it's a good movie. So

• 51:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's really well made. It's very entertaining, but I completely understand why he would think this is so much better. And I do prefer this movie.

• 51:28Lizzie Bassett?

  I think I do, too. So when he read Michael Mann's screenplay, he felt like it was really showing Native Americans as intellectual, social, and importantly, economic equals of the colonial settlers. He said, "What am I doing in the movies? I have been asked whether my decision to act in The Last of the Mohicans means that I've abandoned my role as an activist. On the contrary, I see film as an extension of the path I've been on for the past 25 years, another avenue to eliminating racism." Now, he particularly called out that Magua, the villain, was a very fully developed character who was frequently portrayed as smarter than his British and white counterparts. So let's talk a little bit about Magua, who is played by Wes Studi. I think he is one

• 52:09Lizzie Bassett?

  of the most underrated actors ever. I think this performance is unbelievable. I think he deserved a Supporting Actor nomination for this, which he did not get. He's so scary. And at the same time, when he explains why, you're like, "Yeah, I get it. I get it."

• 52:29Chris Winterbauer?

  The whole, you know, justified villain trope, this plays really well.

• 52:34Lizzie Bassett?

  It's very well done. Yeah. It does not feel like it's being shoehorned in at all. So Studi is Cherokee. He was born in rural Oklahoma, and he actually only spoke Cherokee at home until he went to school. He served in the Vietnam War, and when he made it back to the States, he went to school for acting. He also was very involved in Native American activism, and he was there alongside Russell Means at Wounded Knee. I'm not sure about this. I don't think they knew each other at that point. So his first feature film role was in 1989, but he broke out as the leader of the Pawnee Warriors in what film, Chris?

• 53:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Dances with Wolves.

• 53:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Dances with Wolves, that's right. That's right. He is technically the villain in Dances with Wolves, even though I don't even think he has a name in that movie. There's one line that hints at some of his motivation, but this is a big problem that Russell Means had with Dances with Wolves was that he is not explored in any way, really.

• 53:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 53:29Lizzie Bassett?

  And I think that his two performances across these two films kind of best explains the dichotomy between the two and the different approach to the two movies. You said it earlier, but Native Americans are different people. There is a tendency to paint them all very similarly, and I think that Dances with Wolves is guilty of that, particularly in the case of West Dooty's character.

• 53:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's like the British and the French, like they're from the same continent, and yet they're warring and they're very different culturally.

• 53:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Exactly.

• 53:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Same thing.

• 53:58Lizzie Bassett?

  So Michael Mann also pursued Madeline Stowe for Cora. She'd broken out a few years earlier in the stakeout opposite Richard Dreyfuss and had actually starred with the wolf dance man himself, Kevin Costner, in Revenge.

• 54:10Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. And then Ed Harris in China Moon.

• 54:13Lizzie Bassett?

  She did the two jakes.

• 54:15Chris Winterbauer?

  The China sound. And the two jakes, that's right. Yep, 1990.

• 54:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Wah wah. Yeah, but she was pretty tired of being handed action movies that were disguised as period pieces at this point, and she didn't even want to read the script. She was also fed up with how women were portrayed in action movies. But her agent and Michael Mann were like, no, no, please read this. Like, we promise this is not the same thing. And Michael Mann in particular was like, Cora is an early feminist. She has, you know, her own agency. She's entering the new world. She doesn't understand the dynamics. Like, this is a very complex character.

• 54:47Chris Winterbauer?

  She headshots a motherfucker with a musket.

• 54:50Lizzie Bassett?

  She sure does. She sure does. I actually, I really love her character in this movie. I think the way that she plays those scenes opposite Duncan is pretty great. I love that early scene when they're having tea outside and, you know, he's like, David pointed this out, but she's like, my answer is no. And Duncan's like, well, you know, you're being awfully indecisive about this. Maybe you should trust me and your father. And David was like, she's not being decisive.

• 55:17Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right.

• 55:17Lizzie Bassett?

  And it's just like the quiet frustration that she has during that of having to continue to be like, sure Duncan, yes, okay.

• 55:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, Stephen Waddington, very good performance.

• 55:29Lizzie Bassett?

  He's so good in this. He's so good in this.

• 55:32Chris Winterbauer?

  He makes a character that's pretty insufferable, not only redeemable, but

• 55:36Lizzie Bassett?

  A hero.

• 55:37Chris Winterbauer?

  She says she has that moment where she says, like, your few admirable qualities, basically the sum of the parts doesn't exceed the whole. And yet you can see his admirable qualities. I like that they, even though he's a bit of a presumptuous bastard at the beginning with her, he's also very brave. He's competent in battle. You know what I mean? They don't do this thing where they just make him a giant asshole across the board to get you to root against him.

• 55:59Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I think he is one of my favorite performances in this movie, to be honest.

• 56:04Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a really good performance.

• 56:05Lizzie Bassett?

  And it like absolutely breaks my heart when, spoiler alert, he sacrifices himself at the very end.

• 56:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 56:12Lizzie Bassett?

  So they round out the rest of the cast with, as we just mentioned, Stephen Waddington as Major Duncan Hayward. Jodie May as Alice, she was only 16 during the filming of this. Her mom was on set with her the whole time. I think she's also really, really good in this.

• 56:25Chris Winterbauer?

  She has almost no dialogue. Yeah, it's mostly just looks.

• 56:28Lizzie Bassett?

  I know, but she's very, which we'll actually get to, she had more dialogue.

• 56:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Got it.

• 56:33Lizzie Bassett?

  And Eric Schweig as Uncas, who we did mention in our one battle after another episode. He's also in that as the bounty hunter. I love him. I think he's so good in this. Obviously physically, he's very beautiful, but he also has a great screen presence. But according to Schweig, one of the reasons he may have been cast was his height. Despite what the execs originally thought about Daniel Day-Lewis, he is not short. He is six foot two and actually a pretty big dude. So they needed Uncas to match him in size and Eric Schweig is almost the exact same size as him. Russell Means is also very tall. I think he was six two as well. So they needed the family.

• 57:07Chris Winterbauer?

  No, they must be because there's the scene where they're putting Day-Lewis in shackles and he stands up and he's shirtless. And all of those native actors are around him. Day-Lewis doesn't look big compared to those guys. And so you're like, wow, this must be a pretty big cast.

• 57:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I think they cast for his height.

• 57:23Chris Winterbauer?

  And Stephen Waddington also seems pretty big.

• 57:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, he's a huge dude.

• 57:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 57:28Lizzie Bassett?

  So Schweig and Day-Lewis were sent to a month of training at an anti-terrorist camp that absolutely whipped their butts into shape. They were shooting firearms, running five to eight miles a day, lifting weights for several hours, downing protein shakes. And Schweig was like, this was the best time I had in the whole process and it was downhill from here.

• 57:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 57:47Lizzie Bassett?

  So do you know where this movie was shot? Cause it's obviously set in upstate New York. It is not shot there.

• 57:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Is it shot in the United States?

• 57:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 57:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Uh, Vermont?

• 57:56Lizzie Bassett?

  It's North Carolina where a lot was shot. Yes.

• 58:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, cool.

• 58:01Lizzie Bassett?

  I will tell you, as someone who grew up in this area, it looks like North Carolina.

• 58:05Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know. I'm from the West Coast. I have no conception of anything east of Denver.

• 58:09Lizzie Bassett?

  It's very beautiful. There were a couple of big reasons why they did this. First of all, it's a lot more rugged and wild than what you can find in upstate New York, which is far more developed at this point. And as we're going to get to, it allowed an awful lot of tax breaks and some other things they were able to do financially. So Daniel Day Lewis and Michael Mann spent a lot of one-on-one time together foraging, did that a lot? And Daniel Day Lewis remained in character the whole time, and these two loved each other.

• 58:37Chris Winterbauer?

  I was gonna say, a match made in hell.

• 58:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. So his prep included immersing himself in freezing cold water for up to 15 minutes at a time. He worked with a fitness trainer five times a week for six months to develop the physicality. He looks great in this. He spent a month in the North Carolina woods, sometimes joined by Michael Mann. But essentially just living out in the wild to understand the skills that Native Americans would have needed at the time. He underwent an intense crash course with a survivalist to teach him, you know, trapping, fire building, skinning animals, cooking. He also trained with historical reenactor Mark A. Baker on probably the most difficult thing he does in the entire movie.

• 59:20Lizzie Bassett?

  What do you think, Chris, is the hardest thing that Daniel Day Lewis has to do physically in this whole movie? I'll give you a hint. It's in the opening sequence.

• 59:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Either load or fire the musket?

• 59:31Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. Handling loading and firing a 12-pound flintlock rifle while running.

• 59:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 59:38Lizzie Bassett?

  And yes, he really is doing that. According to Michael Mann, Daniel Day Lewis became one of about four men in America who could actually do that and hit the target while running.

• 59:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 59:49Lizzie Bassett?

  That's insane.

• 59:50Chris Winterbauer?

  I will say this movie, it feels very grounded, very realistic until the final sequence when he is hip firing muskets. As he's sprinting along the cliff like Sylvester Stallone.

• 1:00:03Lizzie Bassett?

  And he hits.

• 1:00:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, he's just nailing bolt guns akimbo, grabbing muskets, blasting mofos down.

• 1:00:11Lizzie Bassett?

  At that point, I'm fine with it, but yes.

• 1:00:12Chris Winterbauer?

  It's fine. Yeah.

• 1:00:13Lizzie Bassett?

  The rifle was custom made by Wayne Watson, who's known for reproducing exact copies of colonial era firearms, and it was named Killdeer. And Daniel Day Lewis became so attached to Killdeer that he took it everywhere, including famously to a Christmas dinner with family and friends. No word on how thrilled they were with him showing up with a musket. He probably had live ammunition.

• 1:00:34Chris Winterbauer?

  They're probably like, at least we don't have to like, carry him inside like when he was doing my left foot.

• 1:00:38Lizzie Bassett?

  At least he's carrying his own 12 pound musket. Yeah.

• 1:00:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:49Lizzie Bassett?

  He also trained with Colonel David Webster, a special forces soldier who taught survival skills to downed pilots. And interestingly, they use the same methods that colonial settlers would have acquired from Native Americans. To do that makes sense. By the end of his training, Michael Mann said, Daniel will be walking three feet behind you, and you'd never know he was there.

• 1:01:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Great.

• 1:01:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, cool. So Mann also went to insane lengths to make sure the production design was as accurate as possible. They built that 20 acre farm from scratch, as well as the Huron Village. Also, one breech cloth, which all the native actors are wearing, took months to make because they did it by hand. They did it accurately. Russell Means was not stoked on how small the size of the breech cloths were, by the way. He asked them to please, please make them bigger. This is an interesting conversation because Michael Mann was like, uh, but I, I saw them in a museum and this is historically accurate. And Russell Means was like, that is a museum built by white people. Like, I'm telling you, this is not quite right. And it's also just too small.

• 1:01:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Also, people were smaller back then.

• 1:01:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:01:55Chris Winterbauer?

  For a whole host of reasons.

• 1:01:56Lizzie Bassett?

  They're not six foot two sized Eric Swag and Daniel Day Lewis.

• 1:02:00Chris Winterbauer?

  They were not getting protein shakes every day.

• 1:02:03Lizzie Bassett?

  No, no, they were not. Although neither was Daniel Day Lewis at this point, as we will learn.

• 1:02:08Chris Winterbauer?

  That's fair. Yeah.

• 1:02:09Lizzie Bassett?

  I believe they did make Russell Means's bigger so it didn't show his butt so much, but they sure didn't for the other ones. Because if you're looking, those are small. You can see a lot of man thigh. I'm not complaining about that, but I understand his point. As Lee Teeter, a visual consultant on the movie, told Entertainment Weekly, quote, "It wasn't good enough that the moccasins looked as though they would have back then. We had to wear them out to see how they looked after 60 miles." And they're doing that.

• 1:02:34Chris Winterbauer?

  This movie, like The African Queen, does a really good job in making everything seem lived in.

• 1:02:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, but at a massive scale.

• 1:02:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, down to every extra. I think it looks, it really looks dirty and it looks, and it looks great. And even Madeline Stowe, even though she looks wonderful, she does look a little disheveled, which I think is really nice and important. And I do think that sometimes, even when the costuming is really, really excellent, it is let down by the fact that, you know, it doesn't have that layer of grime or dirt on top of it.

• 1:03:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, they do a remarkable job in this movie. And by the way, Chris, even though a replica of Fort William Henry already existed, Michael Mann was like, not good enough, so he built his own. It took 11 weeks to build. The chosen site near Lake James in North Carolina was so remote that a road had to be built just to access it. It cost $6 million. And after filming, it was dismantled and the land was reseeded. This really tested everyone in the crew who was like, Michael, they already have this.

• 1:03:37Chris Winterbauer?

  But because he built it, he can blow it up.

• 1:03:41Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. He can blow it up and it looks perfect. Historians agree. Everything in that sequence looks right. Well, Chris, before filming started, there was already trouble. Academy Award winning costume designer James Acheson walked off the set with a case of nervous exhaustion after overseeing the outfitting for 800 cast members and extras in Asheville, North Carolina. Other sources say he was fired because he could not handle Mann's man paws getting into every single detail of his work. He was replaced by Elsa Zamparelli, who took over as costume designer and received on-screen credit. By the way, James Acheson, three-time Academy Award winner at that point for The Last Emperor, Dangerous Liaisons, and Restoration. So, not exactly a slouch.

• 1:04:24Chris Winterbauer?

  And The Last Emperor has some pretty big scenes as well.

• 1:04:27Lizzie Bassett?

  And it's gorgeous.

• 1:04:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, so it's not, it's not as if he has been only costuming a dozen players.

• 1:04:33Lizzie Bassett?

  No, no, no. He's just not used to Michael Mann. All the wigs were human hair wigs. They were handmade. In terms of the costuming, the people who had it the worst were the Brits because their costumes were pure wool and they were filming in the spring and summer in North Carolina. And fun fact, the moccasins that the actors are wearing are actually mounted on hidden running shoes for the leads so that they're able to maneuver.

• 1:04:56Chris Winterbauer?

  I was wondering, because they do run at basically full speed through those woods and

• 1:05:01Lizzie Bassett?

  You would hurt yourself. Yeah.

• 1:05:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, that would be brutal.

• 1:05:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. A hairstylist named Vera Mitchell also walked off set and there was some drama around Russell Means and Eric Schweig's beautiful hair. According to Schweig, there was an early dispute about whether or not Uncas and Ching Gachkuk should shave their heads, but Russell Means was basically like, go fuck yourself. I'm not doing that. And Eric Schweig pointed out that if Nathaniel was going to have long flowing hair, that should probably match the hair of his family. So it didn't make sense for them to shave it. So they let that one slide. All right. June of 1991, principal photography began near Asheville, North Carolina and the Blue Ridge Mountains. The shoot involved 250 crew members and hundreds of extras who were hired from all over the country, anywhere from 300 to 900. There's some differing on

• 1:05:46Lizzie Bassett?

  the sources here. And it wasn't long before things really started to go pretty wrong. Madeline Stowe told the Mohican Press, quote, "The extras and crew were courageous with very little given back. They weren't fed well, and the fact always bothered me. I hated seeing them in those heavy red coats and sweltering in the heat, and I remembered complaining to Hunt Lowry, who's a producer. It didn't seem just to me, but they were spirited and they gave their all." Eric Schweig said the problem started with the producers. He told Trail Dust Magazine, quote, "They were doing illegal tampering with time cards, skimming hours off the time cards, and the makeup artists went on strike. They worked everybody like dogs. So that was the only beef anyone had." Filming also was happening from magic hour late into and throughout the night with meals often coming around 1 a.m.

• 1:06:30Chris Winterbauer?

  There's a lot of night photography in this movie. I mean,

• 1:06:33Lizzie Bassett?

  It's almost all night.

• 1:06:35Chris Winterbauer?

  There's like a 45 minute stretch in the middle of the movie that's just one night, basically.

• 1:06:41Lizzie Bassett?

  And they're also, there's like one thing that's shot on a soundstage and I believe it's when they're in the caves behind the waterfall. Everything else is outside in natural light.

• 1:06:49Chris Winterbauer?

  And I think there's one day for night sequence that I really noticed out by the river and everything else is actual night for night. Throughout this movie, which if you remember in Deliverance, a lot of the time in wilderness environments, you gotta shoot day for night. It's just too difficult to light. It's too hard on the crew.

• 1:07:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, it's dangerous too, to be doing some of that in darkness. Yeah.

• 1:07:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Michael Mann is pushing what you could do on film and I think he would perfect it in heat in terms of night shooting.

• 1:07:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, so you might be wondering, how are they getting away with some of this? It was supposed to be a non-union shoot for all of the crew except for the team's core production crew. Now your face is like, how are they possibly getting away with that?

• 1:07:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I don't understand how 20th Century Fox, Michael Mann, DGA director, I'm certain there, I don't,

• 1:07:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:07:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Do not understand how they could do that.

• 1:07:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, part of the appeal was North Carolina. It had less restrictive laws around that.

• 1:07:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, right. New York would force you to do a union shoot for sure.

• 1:07:47Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. North Carolina did not, but also despite the film's initial $35 million budget, the producers said, oh, no, no, no, it's being made independently as part of a negative pickup deal.

• 1:07:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:07:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris, can you explain what that means?

• 1:08:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Basically, you find the financing, you get a, it's almost like a promissory note from a studio saying, upon completion of the film, we will pick up the negative, right? We will buy the negative, meaning your shot and completed film. There are some stipulations. It has to be between, you know, these running times and it has to be finished, you know, blah, blah, blah, you know, within this window. And there's a set agreed upon price point. And then you can take that promissory note to a bank or another financing entity and get a loan to finance your film. And therefore technically, the movie is not financed by the studio. The movie is financed by, again, that bank. Or, you know, whatever entity is going to give you the money to make your movie.

• 1:08:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. So they're arguing that this means it's technically a lower budget and therefore a non-union crew. IATSE was not buying this and within one week of filming, they successfully organized and unionized the crew. And apparently some of the producers were trying to intimidate people not to join, but they smartly realized they were probably going to need protection on a job like this. And so they all stuck together.

• 1:09:06Chris Winterbauer?

  The good news is, as a result, I mean, maybe a lot of people were working off card, but they probably hired a lot of non-union people who had the opportunity then to flip, if they wanted to, and then get union membership, which could be a really good thing.

• 1:09:19Lizzie Bassett?

  I think it ended up being a good thing. It certainly was not their intention from the beginning.

• 1:09:22Chris Winterbauer?

  No. Yeah. At the end, they're like, and we flipped all these people to the union and we're the good guys.

• 1:09:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Yeah. IATSE is like, no. Shortly after this, the Native American actors also went on strike demanding better pay and better lodging conditions because they were terrible. They were being housed at an abandoned Boy Scout camp, which Russell Means said looked like a concentration camp. They had six to eight people jammed into rooms designed for maybe two boys. It also was not air conditioned and it was 30 miles outside of town. And as you pointed out, these shoots are night shoots, so they're stuck in this place during the hottest part of the day and they can't leave. And the worst part, according to Eric Schwieg, they had something like 400 people assigned to one bathroom. That may be hyperbole, but also maybe not.

• 1:10:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Even if it's 40 people assigned to a bathroom.

• 1:10:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:12Chris Winterbauer?

  It's still not enough.

• 1:10:13Lizzie Bassett?

  No, it's bad. Daniel Day-Lewis, Eric Schwieg and Russell Means all joined the picket line with these actors. And apparently the strike was over in about four hours and thankfully they got better pay, they got better accommodations. But Russell Means didn't blame Michael Mann for any of this. He was like, Michael Mann was so heads down that he had no idea what his ADs were doing.

• 1:10:34Chris Winterbauer?

  And he has to rely on those people to do those things.

• 1:10:38Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, I think you should be paying a little bit of attention to this, but yes.

• 1:10:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, if it's brought to your attention, and I don't know, you can tell me, but you should certainly, I think, jump to the side of, let's pay our people and get them the right accommodations.

• 1:10:51Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know how he was responding to this. The way that Russell Means describes it is basically he had no idea what was going on. And I think probably when he did, I don't think he was fighting them on anything, but he doesn't have a great handle over the rest of the production. Sadly, Russell Means also experienced racism on set at the hands of the ADs and some other crew members. He was frequently called chief and redskin. He was jokingly accused of doing a rain dance when the weather turned bad and had his traditional choker referred to as a dog collar. Also, on a daily basis, he experienced the ADs yelling things like Indians over here when they needed to move a large group of people. He finally lost it and said, do not refer to us by race. If you do, then say Indians over here, white

• 1:11:32Lizzie Bassett?

  guys over there, and the Jews behind the camera. Thanks, Russell. So he asked that they at least bare minimum distinguish between the French allied and English allied native extras rather than lumping them all together. That's a pretty fair request.

• 1:11:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, just do as the script does.

• 1:11:49Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. So about five weeks into the shoot in August of 1991, Michael Mann also fired his original DP Doug Millsom and replaced him with his long-term collaborator, Dante Spinotti. Now, Michael Mann said, if someone wants a country club shoot, they're in the wrong movie. Because I reserve the right to involve myself in every department, I need self-confident people with strong egos around me. Spinotti had been off doing another film, was finally available, and Michael Mann just said, come on over. And this decision will maybe come back around later to haunt them. So the shoot, as we said, is almost entirely outside, which called for a rain insurance policy and a local meteorologist on staff to measure rainfall so that they could get every cent of that insurance policy

• 1:12:34Lizzie Bassett?

  back. And even though Michael Mann was driving his crew insane, Daniel Day-Lewis, Madeline Stowe, and Russell Means ended up really enjoying working with him and his work ethic. But that work ethic was driving up the budget on an already expensive movie. 20th Century Fox sent a representative to the set whose only job was to tell Michael Mann, that's enough, Michael, move on. Each scene was taking at least 20 takes. There was a closing sequence that they later had to cut that required upwards of 60 takes. And according to IMDb, we couldn't confirm this anywhere else, but it is a very funny story. In the early hours of the morning, after a long night shoot, Michael Mann is yelling out over the speakers, "What's that orange light? Turn out that orange light." And someone's like, "It's the sun, Michael."

• 1:13:19Chris Winterbauer?

  And he's like, "Excuses are for losers."

• 1:13:22Lizzie Bassett?

  So while everyone is getting exhausted, Daniel Day-Lewis stayed pretty strong in his stayed method, including, according to Mann, refusing to eat anything he didn't shoot himself. According to Madeline Stowe, he never complained, despite being the most, probably the most in-demand actor on the set. He's in almost every scene. In fact, Chris, he and Madeline Stowe lightened the mood by playing jokes on each other in their car rides home at night. And this started with some light, high-speed food fights. But because Daniel Day-Lewis doesn't do anything halfway, he escalated this to a car crash.

• 1:13:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Great.

• 1:13:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Just snipped her brakes, made sure she, you know.

• 1:13:59Lizzie Bassett?

  No, he and his driver staged a bloody car accident, complete with a moaning victim for Madeline Stowe to happen upon on her drive home.

• 1:14:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Very, very consistent with what Hawkeye would do. This is definitely.

• 1:14:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Very much.

• 1:14:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Definitely him staying in character. Hawkeye, noted prankster in this movie.

• 1:14:17Lizzie Bassett?

  A little bit of a sense of humor. He's got some funny lines in this.

• 1:14:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Uh huh.

• 1:14:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Of this event, Daniel Day-Lewis told The New York Times, "Simply, the location drove us to it." Madeline Stowe loved it, by the way.

• 1:14:28Chris Winterbauer?

  It's entertaining.

• 1:14:28Lizzie Bassett?

  I think she was happy to see sort of a sense of humor coming out of him.

• 1:14:32Chris Winterbauer?

  That's not like a mean-spirited prank either. Yeah, exactly. It's not like it was at her expense.

• 1:14:37Lizzie Bassett?

  It's crazy, but.

• 1:14:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, it's crazy, but at least it's not, you know, Jared Leto sending you gross things on set.

• 1:14:44Lizzie Bassett?

  So Roger Bernbaum said Michael Mann was, quote, "tough, and he had to be." Was he incredibly demanding? Yes. Was he a pain in the ass? Yes. Would I work with him again? Yes. According to Russell Means, also, Michael Mann didn't really yell. When offering pointers, he almost always did it in private. And Means had only two disputes with him. One, as we mentioned, was the breach cloths, but the other. One was that he was very unhappy with the way the scene was told in the Huron village. And we'll get to this again a little bit later, but he did not appreciate that he felt was perpetuating stereotypes that were not necessarily accurate. You've got the two white women coming, they're trying to sacrifice them in the fires.

• 1:15:25Lizzie Bassett?

  You know, you've got Hawkeye walking through, being attacked for essentially no reason, especially because he is a recognized member of another tribe. Eric Schwag pointed out that would not have happened. The way that the chief is positioned, sort of on the throne, all of this stuff. Russell Means was like, this is not, this is not right. But Michael Mann apparently told him, when he becomes a producer and buys a script, he can make his own movie. And that was the only thing, he did not listen to them on. Michael Mann openly acknowledged and defended his directorial style. He said, I am obsessed with telling the story powerfully and as such, I, the director, know what counts and doesn't count. And Daniel Day Lewis, after this movie, had a little bit of trouble being inside because he'd been outside for such a long period of time.

• 1:16:09Lizzie Bassett?

  He started getting very claustrophobic and suffering slight hallucinations, but he shook it off. All right, let's talk about post-production a little bit. So Arthur Schmidt and Dove Hanig were credited as editors, but of course, Michael Mann was heavily, heavily involved. Now, it was originally scheduled for release in July of 1992, but 20th Century Fox came out and said, oh, it's so good, it's so good, it's amazing. You know, we actually think it deserves to be an Oscar contender. So that's why we're going to move it to the end of September. It's totally not because the edit's a mess. They were also concerned about it getting lost next to big summer blockbusters. But of course, there were some sources on the inside saying it had a lot more to do with the massive fight that was happening over the edit.

• 1:16:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Good old fix it in post Joe Roth felt that the cut was unevenly paced and at about three hours long. They were concerned about how many screenings they could get in per day. I'm sure we hear that all the time.

• 1:17:05Chris Winterbauer?

  So this is my actual major complaint about this movie.

• 1:17:07Lizzie Bassett?

  It's too short.

• 1:17:09Chris Winterbauer?

  It's too, it's weirdly short.

• 1:17:10Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 1:17:12Chris Winterbauer?

  There are so many underdeveloped, it's not actually the main storyline. I feel like actually we get enough Daniel Day Lewis, we get enough Madeleine Stowe, so many underdeveloped secondary plotlines.

• 1:17:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 1:17:24Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, Eric Schreig and Alice is the big one.

• 1:17:27Lizzie Bassett?

  That's the main one. It was cut almost entirely.

• 1:17:31Chris Winterbauer?

  And you get like, I think you get just enough Magua. I think we could have used maybe a little bit more.

• 1:17:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Love him.

• 1:17:37Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. Again, I'm not talking, I don't think this is a three hour movie necessarily.

• 1:17:42Lizzie Bassett?

  At least two and a half.

• 1:17:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Two twenty, two twenty, like it's under two right now.

• 1:17:46Lizzie Bassett?

  It's really short.

• 1:17:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Think about adding 20 minutes and you're just getting the, you know, the Uncas Alice storyline, for example. I mean, yeah, I really noticed it when we were watching it. I just felt, oh, wow, we're really, we're careening towards the end now. This is it.

• 1:18:02Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree with you. I think that that is the only real downfall of this movie. And it's fricking Joe Roth's fault. He was insisting that Michael Mann cut a third of the movie. I would love to know it was in the additional hour. I mean, we know some of it. You just mentioned a lot of it. But I think this is also really interesting because Dances with Wolves is three hours long. And there's like 20 minute segments of that where he's straight up just trying to feed a wolf a piece of beef jerky. And it made 425 million dollars. Like you don't need to cut just for the sake of cutting. If it is actually important to the story, don't cut it.

• 1:18:37Chris Winterbauer?

  But I do think that Dances with Wolves was a true independent film.

• 1:18:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. If that had been made by a studio, it would not have been the same thing at all.

• 1:18:45Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, well, not yet. Costner eventually would make movies with studios that he would refuse to cut down. And then they would flop, you know, Waterworld and The Postman. But yes, I do think.

• 1:18:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Horizon.

• 1:18:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Although that's independent, but yes.

• 1:18:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's in the wild now. Yeah, he, he, I think was able to say, no, this is it. And this is how it's going to be and prove it. Whereas again, and especially if you have a producer that's not 100% confident.

• 1:19:09Lizzie Bassett?

  They're not.

• 1:19:09Chris Winterbauer?

  In that three hour cut. Exactly.

• 1:19:12Lizzie Bassett?

  They're not. And Michael Mann did everything that he could to push back. According to Madeline Stowe, it was reaching a point where the disagreement was really pretty disturbing to him. And I don't know this for a fact, but I have to imagine it's disturbing because Joe Roth was almost certainly asking him to cut an awful lot of the native plotlines and character development. To your point, the biggest thing we're missing is the love story between Onkis and Alice to the point where it doesn't even really make a ton of sense when she throws herself off the cliff at the end after him. It's still beautiful. I mean, it's like, very affecting.

• 1:19:45Chris Winterbauer?

  It feels more like she's doing it to flee Magua, not

• 1:19:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:19:49Chris Winterbauer?

  It's, she doesn't want to resign herself to a fate worse than death, as opposed to, I'm joining my lover on the rocks.

• 1:19:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. Which, like, I think, in reality, it's both. Yeah.

• 1:20:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. It doesn't bump necessarily, but it doesn't have the impact outside of being very gorgeously shot that it could have had.

• 1:20:06Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 1:20:14Lizzie Bassett?

  And also, I mean, I could have done with more interactions between Onkis and Shing Gochuk and Nathaniel. It's such an interesting dynamic. And when you watch it, you don't actually get a ton. You get

• 1:20:24Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 1:20:24Lizzie Bassett?

  just barely enough.

• 1:20:26Chris Winterbauer?

  I wanted more of him saying, referring to DDL as my white, my white son, which is, I don't know why this made me laugh every time.

• 1:20:34Lizzie Bassett?

  So Madeline Stowe actually called Joe Roth personally to try to advocate for Michael Mann's vision. And apparently, they reached some kind of compromise. But as you pointed out, the final runtime is an hour and 52 minutes. So he did force him to cut more than a third of his movie.

• 1:20:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:50Lizzie Bassett?

  And I agree with you. I think that this really suffers because of that. I think minimum 30 more minutes. I also think this could have made a fantastic mini-series. There's just a lot to explore here.

• 1:21:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. I don't know if you even need that, though. I do think that the whole movie is there. It just feels a little truncated.

• 1:21:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:06Chris Winterbauer?

  I think the music does a lot of work in papering over some of the narrative gaps that might have been excised. And we just kind of go with the feel. The music's amazing in this movie.

• 1:21:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, let's talk about the music a little bit. So the score actually suffered a bit in post as well. I think the end result is great. You'll notice there's two composers credited, Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman. Trevor Jones was brought on initially to do a more electronic score.

• 1:21:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:21:35Lizzie Bassett?

  But it really didn't work, so.

• 1:21:37Chris Winterbauer?

  I was gonna say, yeah.

• 1:21:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, they had to kind of pivot pretty last minute. They bring in Randy Edelman, sort of tag team, finish the final. I don't know how much Trevor Jones was a part of it at that time. I don't think he was like fired fired, but it was a bit messy, which may be why that main theme, which is so good, that plays throughout the whole movie. So it is not original to the film.

• 1:21:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, really?

• 1:22:00Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 1:22:00Chris Winterbauer?

  I didn't know that.

• 1:22:01Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 1:22:01Chris Winterbauer?

  I love that main theme.

• 1:22:03Lizzie Bassett?

  It's amazing. And as you point out, it does pretty much all the heavy lifting. It's actually a song called The Gale or The Gaell, written by Scottish folk musician Dougie McLean.

• 1:22:12Chris Winterbauer?

  I was wondering.

• 1:22:12Lizzie Bassett?

  It was out prior to this movie. Yeah.

• 1:22:15Chris Winterbauer?

  It reminds me, so so many of scenes of them traversing the landscape remind me so much of Braveheart when they're, you know, going through the Highlands and whatnot. And so, yeah, that's interesting. Man, that song does humans work in this movie.

• 1:22:29Lizzie Bassett?

  I know. And I went and listened to it because I was like, oh, is it just the fiddle part that's pulled? And no, it's the whole thing. It like, it's, you know, orchestrated very differently. It's orchestrated beautifully in the film, much more epic and grand, but that whole thing is pulled from.

• 1:22:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Whole melody.

• 1:22:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, from something else. So that did, I believe, render it ineligible for the Oscars because it was not original.

• 1:22:49Chris Winterbauer?

  That would make sense.

• 1:22:51Lizzie Bassett?

  So The Last of the Mohicans was released on September 25th, 1992. It grossed about $11 million opening weekend. In total, and I have seen conflicting numbers on this, but I believe it grossed about $75 million domestically and about $140 million worldwide on somewhere around a $40 million budget. So.

• 1:23:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Break even.

• 1:23:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Not bad by any means. Minimum break even, probably more. But also probably not what Moneybags Joe had in mind when he saw those Dances with Wolves dollars. It was still considered a financial success. It was a very popular film that year, which surprised a lot of executives who did not think Daniel Day Lewis could pull in audiences, to which I say, have you seen his hair? It's beautiful.

• 1:23:32Chris Winterbauer?

  It's long.

• 1:23:33Lizzie Bassett?

  It's waving. Part of the reason this may not have hit quite as hard as it could have is that 20th Century Fox marketed and branded the film heavily as a love story in a war zone, which is interesting. Michael Mann was like, yeah, that's great. I think that's spot on. Russell Means did not agree, and I have to go with Russell Means on this one. His point was they marketed it so heavily to the over 35 crowd, but it's really violent. And it's a lot more epic, sort of war epic film than it is necessarily just a love story. And again, they didn't market Dances with Wolves as a love story, even though that is also centered heavily around his relationship with a woman. This also could be due to the edit trimming

• 1:24:17Lizzie Bassett?

  an hour off the film. They may have been focusing it even more heavily on the love story at that point as well. So Means pointed out that boiling it down to just the love story really diminishes what the film was doing for its Native American characters, which was the focus and original purpose of the film. So I think they lose the plot a little bit here. Means told the Mohican Press, quote, "20th Century Fox shot themselves in the foot over that film. It really burns me. A classic like that, and they messed around with it. It just goes to point out in Hollywood, they don't know anything about Indians, nor the audience, that they purport to know everything about. The audience wants more about American Indians." So it did win the Academy Award for Best Sound, awarded to Chris Jenkins, Doug Hemphill,

• 1:24:58Lizzie Bassett?

  and Mark Smith and Simon Kay. But Michael Mann received zero Oscar nominations, and Russell Means has a theory about that as well. Remember the firing of the original cinematographer, Doug Millsom? Means publicly theorized that this may have pissed off the Academy and that Michael Mann may have paid for it with no Oscars. I don't know, especially because I looked up what the Best Picture nominees were that year. It's pretty stacked. It's Unforgiven, A Few Good Men, Howard's End, The Crying Game, and Scent of a Woman. Unforgiven won. I think this deserves to be in there.

• 1:25:34Chris Winterbauer?

  I would have put it in over Scent of a Woman, and I love Martin Brest.

• 1:25:37Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree. Out of those, I think that's the weakest of those movies.

• 1:25:41Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know, though. I mean, no disrespect to our cinematographer friends, but you know, we've covered movies and cinematographers get let go, you know, all the time.

• 1:25:50Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree with you. I'm not sure if I buy that.

• 1:25:52Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, and it's not like Man was some junior director usurping, you know, a veteran in this industry. He's been working for a long time. So, I don't know. That doesn't...

• 1:26:02Lizzie Bassett?

  It is a bit strange that it's completely shut out of all of the other categories, because I, it's pretty amazing.

• 1:26:08Chris Winterbauer?

  But that could be 20th Century Fox decided not to push for it. I mean, as we know, it's, it's who campaigns and how effectively do they campaign? And how much money, you know, what was it, Coda recently? They spent more money on marketing it for the Oscars to, you know, success than they did on actually making the film.

• 1:26:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, that makes sense. It was an independent film picked up at Sundance, but yeah.

• 1:26:30Chris Winterbauer?

  It was still a 12 or 15 million dollar movie, and they spent more than that marketing it for the Oscars. So it wasn't like it was a $2 million movie. My point is just, it could have been that 20th Century Fox decided, you know what? This movie's, ah, it's a little, it's unclear where it fits in genre-wise. We didn't know how to market it to the audience. I don't know if we're gonna know how to market it, you know, to Academy members. Let's keep our gunpowder dry. It'd also be interesting to look at if 20th Century Fox had any other films.

• 1:26:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Ah, that's a good point.

• 1:26:58Chris Winterbauer?

  That were nominated for Oscars that year, that they were going for.

• 1:27:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Good point. So, critics' reviews, I think, were surprisingly mixed. Roger Ebert said The Last Mohicans is not as authentic and uncompromised as it claims to be. More of a matinee fantasy than it wants to admit, but it's probably more entertaining as a result. Janet Maslin at the New York Times really criticized the source material and basically was like, "I don't know why you wanted to do this," saying, "The filmmakers may have done a better job of making their own tomahawks and rebuilding Fort William Henry than a breathing sense into their material, but the results are still riveting." So, Chris, how did Last Mohicans fare in the eye of historians? Does it win the Braveheart Award for complete historical disregard? No. I think most people agree that for the early 90s, it's pretty damn good.

• 1:27:46Lizzie Bassett?

  There's some very small nitpicks. The relationship between Cora and Hawkeye would have been extremely unlikely, nigh on impossible. And also, the whole idea that there was one living member of the Mohicans at that time is just simply not true.

• 1:28:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep.

• 1:28:02Lizzie Bassett?

  There were somewhere around 1,200 Mohicans living in Jesuit villages in Massachusetts and with Moravians in Pennsylvania. This is an issue with the source material, though, and Michael Mann justified it by saying he felt Chingajcuk represented the last to live a traditional Mohican life, and that's what they were saying. By the way, thousands of Mohicans still alive today across the Hudson River Valley, Wisconsin, and more. As we mentioned, Russell Means took issue both during production and after with that scene in the Huron Village where Hawkeye enters. And one other issue some people had was that Magua may have been perpetuating a stereotype that Hurons were bloodthirsty savages. I don't know. As far as villains go, I don't want to diminish those concerns, but I think he's pretty complex.

• 1:28:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Overall, Means was happy with the film, and for the first time, he felt that it really showed natives and non-natives interacting socially as they might have at the time as regular human beings. So that wraps up the coverage of our first Michael Mann film. Chris, what went right?

• 1:29:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, many, many things, but I will give mine. You know what? I'm not going to give it to Michael Mann because I think I'm going to give it to him on the next one.

• 1:29:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 1:29:12Chris Winterbauer?

  I think the cast is amazing, but we often give these to the cast. I agree. I think West Studio is fantastic. West Studio also in Heat.

• 1:29:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:29:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Michael Mann brings them along for that, although a smaller role. I will give my what went right to the costume team.

• 1:29:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 1:29:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Both the fired costume designer, because I'm sure he did a lot before he was fired.

• 1:29:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, he did.

• 1:29:36Chris Winterbauer?

  As well as his replacement.

• 1:29:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Elsa Zamparelli.

• 1:29:39Chris Winterbauer?

  James Atchison and Elsa Zamparelli. I don't think we give this department enough love on this show. And the costumes in this movie are fantastic, and they had to dress so many people. Also, I can't speak to this production, but generally speaking, I know that costumes and hair and makeup do a really nice job of taking care of the performers, extras, and speaking roles and above the line cast in productions. And so I'd imagine on a show where it sounds like the producers and the A Ds were not doing a good job of taking care of the cast.

• 1:30:13Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 1:30:14Chris Winterbauer?

  I wouldn't be surprised, although I can't say this for certain, if some of these other departments were. And so I will give my what went right to the costumes, five stars, five stars. They look dirty. It looks great. I appreciate that attention to detail.

• 1:30:29Lizzie Bassett?

  They are dirty. They're living in a boy scout camp.

• 1:30:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:30:32Lizzie Bassett?

  All right. Well, I think I am going to give it to Michael Mann, but not just Michael Mann. I'll give it to Michael Mann and Christopher Crowe because I think, given how garbage the novel is, and there's quite a few problems with the 1936 version of this as well, I think that their adaptation of this screenplay is pretty fantastic. And I would love to read what they had before Joe Roth trimmed an hour out of it, too. But I think he achieved what he was trying to do in terms of showing much more human complexity and just the cultural complexity of living in this place in this time. It was a weird time. And this is one of the few movies that I feel like really shows that. It's a very like liminal space.

• 1:31:17Lizzie Bassett?

  You know, you've got obviously settlers who have established themselves to a certain degree, but they've done so in an area that obviously was established a very long time ago by Native Americans who have a whole different culture. And then you still have the British Empire coming in on top of that. So I agree with Michael Mann that what's so fascinating about this story is the layers of culture that you see at play in this and how some of them understand each other, some of them really, really don't, and how that's working to certain people's advantage and other people's great disadvantage. And it sort of sets up, you know, the American Revolution in a bit of a fun way as well, although I don't know how historically accurate that was since this was, you know, 20 plus years prior to that taking place. But I will give it to them for the screenplay. I think

• 1:32:02Lizzie Bassett?

  it's great. I agree with you. I also have to give it to the native actors across this, and particularly Russell Means. For him to take on this role, having never acted before, I think he gives such a beautiful performance. That scream he lets out at the end when he realizes that Uncas has fallen is one of the most haunting moments in this entire movie. He's very understated and also the fact that he was still speaking up for people on set and using this as an extension of his activism and would continue to do so across some other films and TV appearances as well. So I will give it to Russell Means, Eric Schweig, Wes Studi, and so many other fantastic Native actors in this as well. Well, that wraps up our coverage of The Last of the Mohicans. I really enjoyed doing

• 1:32:45Lizzie Bassett?

  this one, although I was bummed out to hear that they did not treat people well behind the scenes, but we'll have to see how it goes on Heat next week.

• 1:32:53Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a good crew, but did they treat that crew well?

• 1:32:56Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know.

• 1:32:58Chris Winterbauer?

  That's a big question, so we'll find out. Guys, if you're enjoying this podcast, there are a few easy ways to support us. Number one, give us a rating and review on whatever platform you're listening on. Number two, tell a family member or friend, hey, check out what went wrong. Pretty good. Number three, you can subscribe for bonus content through Apple Podcasts. If you're listening on Apple Podcasts, just go on up to our page, hit subscribe, and for $4.99 a month, you can get access to all of our bonus episodes. We now do reviews of recent releases. We just did One Battle After Another earlier this month, and we will be doing Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein shortly, as well as, I think we got the new Avatar coming up in December, for better or worse.

• 1:33:44Chris Winterbauer?

  And if you want even more from us, you can join our Patreon. That's www.patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast. You can join for free, get updates, musings, corrections from us. For $5, you get access to an ad-free RSS feed, all of our bonus episodes, and you can watch the recording of our first live show, which just happened at the Cheerful Earful Podcast Festival in Manhattan. We covered not one, but two movies, our first versus twin films experience, Armageddon and Deep Impact. So if you missed that show and you missed the live stream, you can still watch it on our Patreon. Of course, for $50, you can get a shout out, just like one of

• 1:34:25Chris Winterbauer?

  these, which Lizzie will be doing in the traditional Mohican language.

• 1:34:30Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I sure won't.

• 1:34:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Which Lizzie will do as the wide-eyed Madeline Stowe. I don't know what Lizzie's gonna do, but you're gonna get a great shout out.

• 1:34:38Speaker 02

  I'm probably just gonna read them for this one as Natty Bumpo would.

• 1:34:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Just like one of these.

• 1:34:44Lizzie Bassett?

  You stay alive. I will find you.

• 1:34:47Speaker 02

  Alright, that's the end of my Daniel Day-Lewis impersonation, which sounded more like Keanu Reeves. So, here we go. Thank you, Full Stops, Adam Moffett, Adrian Pengkaria, Angeline Renee Cook, Ben Schindelman, Blaze Ambrose, Brian Donahue, Brittany Morris, Brooke, Cameron Smith, C. Grace B., Chris Liel, Chris Zaka, D.B. Smith, David Friskelanti, Darren and Dale Conklin, Don Scheible, Ellen Singleton, Emzodia, Evan Downey, Felicia G., Film It Yourself, Galen and Miguel the Broken Glass Kids, Grace Potter, Half Grayhound, Jake Killen,

• 1:35:30Speaker 02

  James McAvoy, Jason Frankel, Jen Master Marino, J.J. Rapido, Jory Hill Piper, Jose Salto, Kay Kanaba, Kate Ellington, Kathleen Olson, Amy Elgashlager McCoy, Frankenstein, Lonrelad, Lena LJ, Lydia Howes, Matthew Jacobson, Michael McGrath, Nate the Knife, Nathan Santeno, Rosemary Southward, Ro-Jer, Sadie Just Sadie, Scott Oshida, Solman Chinani, Steve Winterbauer, Suzanne Johnson,

• 1:36:07Speaker 02

  and the Provost Family. The Os sound like Os. Thank you all so much for your continued support.

• 1:36:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Alright guys, thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of What Went Wrong. We will see you next week as you feel that heat coming around the corner.

• 1:36:26Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:36:26Chris Winterbauer?

  And abandon everything you thought you loved. Four heats.

• 1:36:30Speaker 02

  Can't wait. Mono a mono.

• 1:36:34Speaker 03

  Go to patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast to support What Went Wrong, and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman, with research from Laura Woods and additional editing from Karen Krupso.